Ground Money (20 page)

Henry shook his head, lank white hair combed back to swing just above his shirt collar. “Not me. I ain’t been on that spread since before Tyler McGraw sold it. Don’t want to, neither.”

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t like the people he sold it to.”

That was all the old man was going to say. Wager glanced at Joaquin, a Mexican national in his mid-twenties whose smooth, hairless face had a lot of Indian in it. “Do you know them?”

“No,
señor
. They pretty much stay over there. I don’t even see nobody when I ride fence.”

Wager glanced at the map again and at the wide area traced off by Henry’s finger. “How many cows does he have to run to pay the overhead on that place?”

“That many acres? Hell, that’s about three times my spread—four hundred, at least.”

Henry sipped his beer and shook his head. “And that’s cutting it damn close. Prices drop a few cents, and he’d lose money.”

“Does he have any other cash crops?”

Snorting a laugh, Henry shoved his teeth back with his thumb. “Rafters—he gets a good crop of rafters every spring at that camp in Andy’s Gulch.”

“He might be raising fodder in the bottomlands off the river—the ones he can get machinery into.” Rusty shook his head. “But there’s not much money in that. McGraw had to buy hay when he owned the place. And he’s not irrigating any cropland. We’d sure as hell know if anybody was irrigating any cropland.”

Wager had some experience with water laws and jealousies during an earlier case; both groundwater and surface water needed a use permit, and everyone guarded his shares closely.

“Besides.” Henry drained his beer and crushed the can. “This here’s cow country.”

“Why are you so wound up about that place, Gabe?”

“I’m just trying to make sense of why someone would spend all that money for nothing.”

“I see. Well, I reckon making sense of things is your business. I only wish you could make sense of what those sonsabitches in Washington are trying to do.”

Wager listened through that drink and one more about the squeeze put on ranchers by high interest rates and low market prices—compounded by trade restrictions and imports, an unfavorable dollar, price supports for the steel industry which pushed equipment sky-high, chicanery in the oil markets, and reduced federal support to agencies that still had to be supported by local tax dollars. Rusty had graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in agricultural economics. Wager had the feeling that he was still applying his classroom theories to the ranch—and when they didn’t work there, to national policies. And even to political philosophy: “It’s those arrogant bastards in Washington, Gabe—that’s what happens when you let those people take as much tax money as they want. They start to think you’re their goddam slave!”

Joaquin and Henry finished their second beers and excused themselves to go out and look at the meat; Wager figured they’d heard it all before. But he, guest and virgin ear, stood with drink in hand as Rusty spilled all the ideas that had built up over the long days of silent labor and the nights with a wife who must have learned by now to nod and answer without hearing. Because that’s what Wager was already doing. When finally the iron clang of the dinner bell broke into Rusty’s monologue, Wager—stomach growling with hunger—followed with relief as the younger man led him around to the flagstone patio.

The meal was worth waiting for. Henry had basted the meat with his own secret sauce splashed out of a large pickle jar—“it ain’t so much a secret as a mystery”—and Dee presented a tray heaped with fresh vegetables as well as loaves of newly baked bread. Rusty kept pouring bourbon, surprised each time he found Wager’s glass still full, and Joaquin’s contribution came after the dishes had been cleared and rinsed by Jo and Dee and shoved into an oversized dishwasher. A couple of quiet words from Henry and some gentle urging from Dee—“
por favor, Joaquin, por favor
”—and the young Mexican came back with his guitar to self-consciously strum it into tune. Wager’s role again was audience—the excuse for others to perform in front of someone new.

“That was wonderful.” Jo, her arm around Wager’s waist, matched her stride to his as they walked slowly down the moonlit dirt road to the cabin. The bulky shadows of piñons crowded the road and made ragged holes in a sky that glowed from the brilliance of a high half-moon and the clear, wide band of the Milky Way that swept from one horizon to another.

“It was good.” Wager massaged her neck, and she stretched against his hand with pleasure.

“There goes one—a big one!”

They paused to watch the scratch of cold light streak down the eastern sky. Tiny fragments broke from the tail, sparked briefly, then died alone as the meteor kept falling. Then it, too, winked out into blackness, and Wager half expected a sonic boom to follow. But there was only silence, and on the steady, warm breeze that slid down from the high country behind the ranch came the distant wavering yip of a coyote.

“Could you understand Joaquin’s songs?”

“Parts of them. The singing runs words together, so it’s hard.”

“He has a nice voice.”

And a wife and two children living with his parents in Sinaloa; he saw them for three winter months out of the year, and spent the rest of the time working in the States to feed them. Eventually, he wanted to send his kids to school in America. Henry, born in Spearfish, South Dakota, had drifted from ranch to ranch “seeing new country” until one morning he woke up and was sixty years old, “more or less.” Then he decided to settle in this valley—“close enough to the desert to be warm, close enough to the mountains to have some green. I like it. I plan to die here.”

Where the road curved around the old corral, Jo tugged Wager over to the worn rails. From the darkness, a looming mass plodded toward them and snorted its quiet greeting. Jo held out her hand, and the soft lips nibbled at the sugar cube in her palm. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so at peace,” she said, as much to the horse and the night as to Wager.

He had to agree. In time—and perhaps he already felt the first abrasive edge of it—boredom would come. But Jo was right. It was peaceful, and as Wager let himself surrender to it, the last clutch of tight flesh drained from his neck and shoulders to leave his body with that satisfying looseness that follows good exercise.

Their boots thudded softly on the earth as they neared the boxy shadow of the cabin. Wager made a detour around to the outhouse and came back toward the glow from small, low windows. He found Jo standing by the fireplace, frowning across the hooded lamp at the empty room.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think someone’s been in here,” she said.

Wager looked around. “Why?”

“The bed.” She gestured at the two cots they had pushed together and anchored with sheets and blankets to make a double. “It’s been messed up.”

“We messed it up this afternoon.”

“But I made it again. I remember. Somebody’s lifted up the mattresses.”

Wager pulled open the dresser drawers and gazed at the clothes folded there. A clumsy hand had gone through and then tried to smooth out its traces. “Wait here.”

He went out to his car and flipped on the dome light; the glove compartment, unlocked, was filled with maps and papers and loose items tossed there in such a way that no one could tell if it had been rifled. In the side pocket of his door he found the extra clip for his Star PD and checked the bullets; none were missing, and he dropped it into his pocket. He tried the trunk, relieved to find it still locked. Opening it, he felt under the deck lid for his weapon. His fingers brushed the holster, and he debated whether to bring it into the cabin; but if he had, it would have been found—it was safer out here. He slid the extra clip into the holster and closed the lid. Then he ran his fingertips over the paint around the lock, checking for scratch marks.

“They went through the cupboards, too. They tried to put things back the way they were, but they couldn’t.” She stared at him, eyes large in the shadowy light of the lamp. “It wasn’t anyone from the ranch.”

“Henry and Joaquin were out of sight at different times.”

“Oh, Gabe, it’s not them and you know it!”

He agreed with her; he was only fencing off the other possibilities before saying what he really believed. “I guess I worried him, all right.”

“What was he after?”

“It wasn’t money.” He fished in one of the elastic pockets of his suitcase and held up his checkbook. The spare cash was still pinched between the covers.

“He couldn’t have driven over. We’d have seen or heard him on the ranch road.”

“He probably came the way we went over there—by horse.”

She went to the door and gazed out at the night. “How did he know we wouldn’t be here?” Then she answered her own question. “He didn’t, did he? Gabe, what if we’d been here?”

“He wouldn’t have come in. He’s not after trouble. He’s looking for something.”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. We don’t have anything.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“He does now,” said Wager. Though they had not gone through his pockets yet, not the way they went through Tom’s. Perhaps that would come next.

“The one in Leadville was after something, too, wasn’t he? But what?”

Neither could answer that. They gave a final look through the cabin to see if anything at all was missing, then lay together in the dark, aware that their sheets and blankets had been probed by alien hands, aware of the spread of darkness beyond the screened windows, aware of the steady rustling of leaves and of grass that grew close to the cabin walls.

Two signs heralded Rimrock, the first a sun-worn square of red and yellow that offered rafting trips on the colorful and historic Dolores River; the second was a bullet-pocked highway sign: Rimrock, Elev. 5,402. Which, Jo said, was about 5,300 more feet than people.

The other businesses strung along the highway were content to advertise on the buildings themselves, and at twenty-five miles an hour, there was plenty of time to see them all: a gas station, Vern’s Place, which sold hunting and fishing gear, three restaurants with bars attached, a liquor store, a new brick building that said “Post Office” and held a sign for Adventure in the U.S. Army. Beyond the cluster of businesses, a scattering of homes baked in the sun or clung to ridges among piñons; and past the town, the highway picked up speed once more and bit its way up the bluff to disappear against the sky outlining the next mesa.

Wager turned the Trans-Am into the gravel lot of Hall’s Grocery, a large building with plate-glass windows bearing the prices of today’s specials. The curving roofline seemed vaguely familiar, and then Wager recognized it as a supermarket design popular thirty years ago and probably a remnant of the time when uranium mining brought populations into the barren hills surrounding the town. The uranium went and so did the chain store. Rusty brackets still marked the supermarket’s old sign, though the new owner’s name, once a bright blue, now hid the middle ones.

“Do you have the list?”

Wager nodded. The week’s supplies filled a page in his small notebook and included a few things for Dee, too. It took them some time to find it all as they pushed a wobbling cart up and down the narrow aisles past shelves jammed with a little bit of everything. One corner held fishing tackle, and Wager loitered there while Jo went in search of paper towels. Another red-and-yellow sign offered rafting trips, and a hand-drawn sketch showed tourists how to find the Foamy Rapids Rafting Company.

“I think that’s it—anything more you can think of?”

“Not here,” said Wager. “But I want to look around town.”

It didn’t take long to walk both sides of the two-block business district. Wager stopped at the small liquor store whose shelves carried a wide range of beers and bourbons and little of anything else, and he bought a quart of Wild Turkey as a thank you gift for Rusty. They hesitated before the Bonnie Lass Dress Shoppe so Jo could look at a dress pinned stiffly against some cardboard. On a dirt side street, a large farm home had been converted into an office for a doctor and a lawyer, and a little further down they found a cinder-block box set in the middle of a gravel turnaround and labeled “Sheriff’s Office.” Wager noted the white four-wheel-drive vehicle with its official star parked a quick step from the open door.

“Want to visit?” Jo smiled.

“I’m not homesick yet.”

But he did turn in at a large, unpainted barn sheltered by broken-limbed cottonwoods and marked “Farrier.” A short, stocky woman in Levi’s and a leather apron came out briskly through the dusty gloom of a stall to nod hello. “You folks need something?”

“Just a little information, if you’ve got the time.”

“I’ve got plenty of one—have to see about the other.” She dragged an orange bandanna under her chin and glanced at Jo, at her hair and clothes and boots, and then back to Wager. “Hot enough for you?”

“Plenty. Do you know where the Watkins ranch is? The T Bar M?”

“The old McGraw place, sure. You go south on 141 for about seven miles. It’s a mailbox on the east side—can’t miss it. Seven miles, then three miles east on the ranch road. It takes you down near the river.”

“Are you the farrier? Or your husband?”

“Me. I got tired of keeping men in shoes, so I turned to horses.” She invited Jo to laugh with her. “And a horse is a lot cleaner animal, ain’t it, honey?”

“Have you done much work for Watkins?”

“The new fella? No. I ain’t been out there since he bought the place.”

“That’s a couple years ago?”

“About that. Tyler sold off two Octobers ago. He had his place up for a long time before Watkins bought it. I remember he came in here just as pleased, said a real estate agent over in Delta had a buyer for him, and it wasn’t a week later Tyler came by to say goodbye. I think he was kind of sorry he sold out and was leaving, but it was too late then, of course.”

“McGraw moved away?”

“California. Around San Fernando, I think. Somewhere in the valley. Took his money and run.”

“Do you know any of the people who work for Watkins? John or James Sanchez?”