Hard Twisted (17 page)

Hyah! Keep him movin, he called to Lottie, who walked at the horse's hindquarters with a willow switch. Hyah! That's it. Shit, wait!

The blade had detached where the joist had tipped, and it stood impaled like a shark's fin at the head of the furrow. Palmer bent and tugged, stumbling backward as the blade dislodged.

He mopped his brow with a bare forearm and stooped to the task of repair. The horse quivering, stamping the flies from its forelegs.

Shit! Palmer cut himself on the bale wire, and he stood now sucking his finger. All right, let's give it another go. Get in front this time, and keep to a steady pace.

Lottie gripped Henry's cheekpiece as Palmer stepped up and nodded and she walked the horse forward. Twenty feet later, the blade detached again.

Wait, goddamnit!

Palmer stood glowering at the buried spade head. He kicked it, and the blade clanged, and he hopped a little circle, his maledictions ebbing only at the sound of a car horn.

Who's that?

I don't know. You wait here.

He limped to where his shirt hung, then crossed to the back door. She heard the screen door bang in front, and the sound of voices raised in greeting.

She walked the horse forward, to a point where she could see Palmer with his foot on the running board of a black Ford coupe, fanning himself with his hat. There was laughter, and another toot of the horn, and then the passenger door opened.

The car was already moving as the door closed behind him. And though his voice called out to her, his words were lost in the engine sound and the spinning of tires as the car carved a wide circle through the weeds.

The horse stamped.

Well, she told him, I reckon that's enough plowin for one day.

Three weeks later Lottie sat in the castle tower of her cabin, behind the shark moat of her unplowed field, searching the horizon for the handsome prince whose steed stood hobbled in the weedy yard out back.

She sat with one hand on her belly and both feet propped bare and dirty on the peeling porch railing. With her washing luff on the line. With her face blank and wondering, as the leaf must wonder at the wind, in which direction her future lay.

The boys from Blanding appeared at the house like coyotes each dusk, lean and red-eyed in their loud jalopy, their teeth flashing white from behind the dusty windows. Palmer rising and gripping his satchel. To work, he told her, since gambling was the pretext for these nocturnal forays, as for the roof unmended, and the wood uncut, and the field so conspicuously unplowed.

She rode Henry on some days, slipping out the back while Palmer slept, leading the bay horse down into the trees and following the irrigation ditch and the red willows that marked it like the drag-trail of something wounded. Past the old fort, whose cabins lay in ruin against the rocky palisade. Past the stone houses
that stood as monuments to a pioneer spirit twice lost, to antiquity and modernity. Then to the post office, where no letter from her father, or any other letter, ever waited.

Some days they rode bareback in Cottonwood Wash, or down to the cool San Juan, walking doves out of the long grass and avoiding any farms or cars or other horsemen who might intrude upon their solitude.

On one such morning in middle August, as she and Henry recrossed the ditch and rode up into the tree shade, the sound of slamming car doors stopped them in their tracks. Men were afoot around the cabin; several men whose dark shapes hunched and scuttled, and all of them had rifles.

She lay whispering on the horse's neck. Quiet boy. Nice and quiet. Then she silently dismounted.

Voices called, and a dog barked. Sounds echoed from inside the cabin; crash and bang. Then doors slammed again, and engines started, and the cars moved off in a slow and dusty caravan.

She waited in the shadows for her heart to quiet. Then she led the horse forward, into the clearing, and left him with the reins trailing as she hurried to the door.

Their bedrolls had been tossed, and their clothes lay scattered at sixes and sevens. Palmer's satchel was open and his papers were strewn on the table. The front door was ajar and creaking, and when it banged open behind her, she screamed.

Palmer was barefoot and shirtless, the pistol grip peeking from his waistband. He scratched at his belly as he surveyed the wreckage. He bent and lifted his hat and punched the shape back into the crown.

You'd best gather your things, he told her. This farm life is wearin me out.

THE COURT
: Back on the record. All jurors are present and the defendant is present. Miss Garrett is on the stand.

BY MR. HARTWELL
: You understand that you're still under oath?

A
: Yes, sir.

Q
: We were talking before the break about your father's letter and about your travels in Utah. It occurred to me over lunch that perhaps there was another reason you stayed with Mr. Palmer all that time, other than searching for your missing father, and that maybe, just maybe—

BY MR. PHARR
: Your Honor, is there a question anywhere in our future?

THE COURT
: Yes, a question, by all means.

BY MR. HARTWELL
: My question for the witness is this. We know you had many opportunities to leave Mr. Palmer if you wanted to. We know you were pregnant with his child. You must have known that the chances of finding your father would be better if you stayed in larger towns or cities. And yet you rode off into the wild with the man you now claim was your captor—

BY MR. PHARR
: Same objection.

Q: Isn't it true, Miss Garrett, that you stayed with the man whom you now claim to be both your captor and your father's murderer for the simple reason that you loved him? Miss Garrett?

THE COURT
: The witness will please answer.

BY MR. HARTWELL
: We're waiting.

BY MR. PHARR
: Are you all right, Lucile?

THE COURT
: The court will stand in a brief recess.

They'd avoided the roadway, or any sight of the roadway, steering southward by the blistering sun through a maze of boulderstudded canyons and red-sand washes, and at dusk they'd camped in the long shadow of Lime Mesa.

They'd made no fire and left no traces, and in the morning they'd rode out before sunrise and rejoined the San Juan River, following it westward over a rolling and eerily volcanic landscape until it met the road again some ten miles distant at a bridge.

A trading post stood by the roadside. The squat mud building had a rusted truck out front, and above it loomed the rock formation giving name to the windswept patch of desolation known as Mexican Hat.

Henry would not cross the bridge, stamping and rolling his eyes at the whitewashed wooden towers, and no amount of urging or cussing or quirting on Palmer's part would move him. So they dismounted, and Palmer blindfolded the horse, and they led it high-stepping on the creosote planking until midspan, where they stopped with the wind in their hair to lean and watch the green-brown water slide quietly through the canyon below them.

Has he got any last words?

They both turned to the voice. The old man cackled and his
feet shuffled in a sort of hillbilly jig. He was a gaunt and weathered leprechaun with a mottled face and hair the color of corn silk. In his waffled union shirt, yellowed at the underarms, and in the peeled braces that dangled to his knees, he gave the appearance of some mad marionette escaped from its handler.

Ain't you gonna offer him a cigarette at least?

The man's face caved as he laughed, and Lottie could see that he had no teeth.

Palmer drew the pack from his pocket and shook out a smoke. It ain't as dire as that. He lit the cigarette and offered it to the old man. I expect this here is the first bridge he ever crossed.

Much obliged, the man said. Philip Morris, I'll be damned.

Palmer nodded to the other side. Would that be Arizona yonder?

No, sir, not Arizona. And not Utah nor Colorado nor New Mexico neither.

What do you mean?

The man puffed and studied the cigarette, as though preparing to render some judgment.

Navajo reservation is what I mean. Paiute land before that. Injuns claim it ain't even America.

The blinded horse, smelling the cigarette, lifted its nose.

Would I find a man name of Goulding if I stick to this road?

The old man eyed him closely. Could be.

Fella in Bluff told me that Harry Goulding had some sheep might need tending.

The man smoked, his slitted eyes drifting to the end of the bridge.

It's a good thirty mile, he finally said. Give or take. No water
to speak of. Hard country on horseback. He nodded at Lottie. Specially for a woman in the family way.

Palmer's head snapped to the girl, who stood with her eyes averted.

I was you, the old man continued, I'd backtrack to the post and get myself another canteen. Maybe better two. There's a spot further down you can water the horse.

Palmer shook out two more cigarettes. He handed one to the man and he bent to light the other, cupping the match flame in his palm.

Don't worry, mister. Them Navvies is plenty strange, but they're friendly enough.

Palmer pitched the match into the river. Do I look worried to you?

No, I wouldn't say worried exactly. The old man sniffed at the gifted cigarette and tucked it behind his ear. More like scared shitless is how I'd describe it.

They rode until dusk, through a vast red barrens and thence into a panoramic dreamscape of stone buttes rising massive and iodide from the desert floor below them. The buttes appeared as ships, or as the petrified stumps of some mythic forest felled by storybook giants, their shadows stretching for unbroken miles in the last, low light of sunset.

Holy shit.

These were the first words Palmer had spoken since they'd left the old man on the bridge, and now he reined the horse and turned his profile west toward the glass-blown sunset. He paused for a moment, drinking in the view, then put the horse forward again.

They made a dry camp, watering Henry from Palmer's hat and leaving him to browse among the stunted saltbush. While Lottie gathered the scarce kindling of their surroundings, Palmer hauled the saddle and dropped it heavily in the dust and prized from his soogan the canned beans and tortillas from the trading post.

Not until an hour more had passed, after the food had been warmed and eaten and the embers had dimmed in a feeble parody of the sun descended, did Palmer light a cigarette and finally speak.

So when was you plannin on tellin me?

She looked away, into the night.

Don't suppose you might know who the father is?

Lottie stood and walked from the firelight. She sought out the horse hobbled nearby and rested a hand on its haunch, on its neck, and it lifted its head to her touch.

She didn't see him rise, but she knew Palmer must have stood to kick at the fire coals that exploded, the orange embers swirling and racing.

When she returned at last to the fire, she found him reclined on the bare ground with his hat over his eyes and his arms folded and his boots crossed at the ankle. She took her same seat opposite and watched the dimming shape of him vanish with the last of the fireglow. There were no crickets where they'd camped, and no other nightsound save the rustling movements of the horse.

I'll say this but the one time, Palmer spoke into his hat crown, so listen real close. You want a baby, that's your business. But that don't make it my business, understand?

He lifted his hat to look at her, and he replaced it again.

Christ all fuckin mighty.

They saw the dust cloud long before they smelled the sheep, and they smelled the sheep long before they actually saw them.

There must have been over a thousand head. They spilled from the makeshift corrals and flooded the desert floor around them; a boundless, churning sea of ewes and bucks and wethers clustered tightly in bands of tens and twenties, the bleating and the tinkling of bells and the whoops of the men afoot and on horseback rising and echoing among the ocher cliffs like some hellish swarm descended.

Tents had been pitched alongside the corrals, and above their white canvas peaks, on a low rise hard by an enormous cliff-face, a two-story building stood. And though its walls were of a piece with the surrounding rockfall, its appearance in that vast and empty country was as startling as a lighthouse adrift on the open ocean.

The horse quickened its pace. The riders circled upwind, skirting the sheep and the corrals and raising a hand to the drovers they passed. They reined in at the stone building, and they sat the horse for a while longer, taking in the spectacle.

The downstairs room was dim and cool, with trowel-plaster walls and a raftered ceiling. A bench sat inside the door, and a raised wooden counter ran in a long L along both walls opposite. Behind the counter, shelves were stocked with canned goods and tins and yard goods and sundries. An old Indian man who may have been sleeping was slumped on the bench, while a ravenhaired woman and a young girl on tiptoes, each identically dressed in calico skirts and loose velvet blouses, examined the shoes that were arrayed in pairs along the counter, their voices hushed in a rhythmic vocal cadence that was as strange to Lottie's ear as the bleating of the sheep outside.

Welcome, said a woman who'd emerged from somewhere behind the counter. Didn't see you come in. I'm afraid we're a little busy today.

She was beautiful—tall and slender, with blondish hair and an air of easy confidence, and her appearance was doubly startling for its spare and rustic setting.

Palmer removed his hat. Beggin your pardon, ma'am. We was lookin for Mr. Goulding.

The woman looked at Palmer, and at Lottie. She sidestepped to an open doorway and called, Harry!