Rundown (9 page)

This sort of nervousness was what had made my mother quit music school, this painful anticipation. Maybe I had inherited both my father's headaches and my mother's nerves. I twisted my blouse front in my hands, stylish navy blue shorts, cotton top, American-girl styling, made in Milan. I let the door open, made my entrance, my hair feeling light around my head.

I could hardly bear to sit across from him at a table set with Bernice's idea of late lunch, fresh peaches, a bowl of pears, fresh crusty bread, and a wedge of a yellow cheese with tiny pinhead bubbles. Salmon flesh, boned and formed to a picture-book fish shape, sweated oil on a platter beside tufts of fennel and corkscrews of lemon.

We made a show of eating, Quinn taller and darker haired, which surprised me. You wouldn't think hair could change color in a half a year. His face broke into all the familiar angles when he laughed. He took pleasure the way a dog does, no deceit or disguise in his emotions.

I caught a view of my head in the side mirror behind the row of goblets, if I stood up a little. Perky, shorter, and more full-bodied, somehow this hairstyle made me look wide awake.

He agreed that my family finally had enough room, and that all we needed in the garden was an airport. “Is your mom going to quit work?” he asked.

“What for?”

“Your dad must be oozing money,” said Quinn. “You touch him and dollars squirt.”

You couldn't eat the just-baked whole wheat without two-handing it, breaking bread, literally, crumbs all over the table. I finally decided to put on a wrestling-league performance, grunting theatrically, giving a cheer of self-congratulations when a chunk of the loaf tore free. Bernice stepped into the lunch nook, peering and asking if we needed anything.

“It's delicious,” said Quinn. Then he added, “We're just happy.”

Bernice didn't say a thing for a long moment, and then she lifted the corners of her mouth in a smile like nothing I had seen from her before.

I said the car looked good, and Quinn said, “Dad leased it.”

The car was red-carpet red, a shade that looked flashy and courtly all at once, a BMW that seemed to vibrate with power even before you stuck in the key. It was a show-off auto, the kind a junior exec buys with his first raise even if he could never dine out again. I could hear Dad's voice saying that Andy, Quinn's dad, had always been the hottest dog in the West.

“Your dad is surviving,” I offered, really just making conversation.

“He keeps ahead of the avalanche,” said Quinn, shifting gears, not eager to discuss his father.

Andy McGowan designed the smiling deck, the playing cards that I gather are standard now in Tahoe and Reno. It looks like a traditional deck of playing cards, but the face cards are smiling pleasantly, the king benign, the queen glad, the jack just as jolly as can be. I play solitaire and eights, leaving games to other people. But I knew it was a startling innovation when Andy ordered these cards for the North Bay casino where pai-gow and lo-ball poker were the only type of legal gambling. It ignited Andy's success, and now he ran a casino in Nevada and had his picture taken with singers and lieutenant governors.

“I guess he'll never change,” I said. It was my attempt at changing the subject, sounding merely politely interested.

“He's going to drop dead one of these days,” said Quinn, after considering for a moment.

“You mean—he has enemies.”

“Enemies?”

“People who want to take him for a ride out into the desert.”

Quinn shook his head, laughing quietly, coming to a careful stop at a crosswalk, a man with an aluminum walker fording the street. “You always want life to be more exciting than it really is,” said Quinn.

He was wearing sharp-creased chinos and dark brown loafers, but I had known him when he was lucky to have frayed jeans and a polo shirt. His father had hungry ex-wives, including Quinn's mom, drifting in and out of travels with a string of broad-shouldered men in their twenties. Quinn's dad gave away envelopes of money for Christmas, ordinary Woolworth white envelopes with brand new hundred dollar bills.

The BMW leaped up the hill and down the dirt road, coming to a stop in the eucalyptus shade.

I told Tommy Dixon I wasn't ready to take Flower for a “spot of exercise,” we just wanted to look.

“Jennifer, when you feel ready, we're ready,” said Tommy. He meant we the wranglers, we the horses, as though he could speak for Flower, the animal excited, practically tap-dancing on the hoof-powdered earth. He could even speak for the bearded goat tethered beside the stables.

I used to come up here when I was twelve and thirteen, drape my arms on the corral rails, and watch hour after hour while Tommy or his wife put a new filly through its paces, the jump barrier a little higher each time, until the world had another horse that could fly over the candy-stripe-painted pole, hover in midair. Tommy looks like a cowhand, but about half the owners prefer English style riding, jodhpurs and riding crops, and Tommy boarded some of the race horses for Golden Gate Fields. Tommy could wear a business suit, a top hat, a caveman outfit, and he would be the same jaunty guy, horses cocking their ears toward his step.

Tommy made me feel a little embarrassed, squinting at me from under his good-guy Stetson, ivory-gray, shading his eyes. The squint was fake, or habit. He could see me fine, a young woman with a new hairdo, standing next to the only person in the world she had ever had sex with.

I felt that Tommy, with his kind, knowing eye for animals could see all of this. I was standing right next to Quinn, but we weren't touching, Quinn offering polite, offhand comments, “These sure are beautiful animals.”

“What are you going to do with Desert Flower?” Quinn was asking, one leg up on the corral. It must be in the genes, when a man approaches a railed fence, one leg goes up. I tend to put both arms over one of the top slats, and lean or hang.

“Teach her to read a wine list. What do you mean
do
?”

“She's just—” He had to finish the thought silently, eyebrows, eyes, his entire face saying, She's too lively, too wonderful, too expensive.

“It's taking some getting used to,” I said.

He laughed.

We strolled around the stables. The goat looked but didn't touch at first, wary of us with its keyhole eyes. Quinn gave it a pat, and the goat nuzzled upward, the crook of his arm, the fly of his pants.

“Horses like goats,” I said.

“Goats are nice,” said Quinn, absently.

“I bet you're the only person in world history who ever said that.”

“I guess the horses feel calm around goats,” said Quinn, a little defensively. He was great with household animals, Scotties and kittens. He sounded like a westerner, but he knew vastly more about fuel injection motors than saddles.

“But nice means—nice. Polite and nonthreatening.”

“You felt threatened by that goat?”

I conceded with a laugh—we had just paid a call on a goat trained to the point of niceness.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets. I could tell Quinn was getting ready to say something. I could live without hearing it.

Chapter 16

“A skunk print,” said Quinn, indicating a henlike scratch on the path.

“Maybe one of those rabid animals you hear about,” I said. I was going to forestall Quinn forever.

We had walked up-slope, and looked back down on Sandalwood Ranch, corrals and spirited horses, the goat a tiny figure.

He said, “My dad hates Reno.”

“I thought he was Mr. Wonderful in Reno, all those poker games you said went night and day.”

“Everyone is so grumpy in Nevada.”

I laughed.

“It's true. They get wrinkled faces by the time they're twenty-five from walking around with bad expressions.”

“People are supposed to be the same everywhere,” I said, knowing it wasn't true.

“When I heard about the thing that happened to you—” He reached up and swiped at an overhanging oak branch, hit it hard, acorns too green to fall off.

Guys will stand together silently, watching an empty street. Quinn is like that, too, but you know he's thinking something.

“I'm going to get Dad to move back here,” he said.

That's the trouble with Quinn—he makes these simple statements, and you know he means them.

He continued, “I'll tell Dad it isn't working out. He already figures as much.”

“He has a career.”

“He hates the people he sees every day. Pit bosses and dealers, and this greeter the casino has who used to be a sparring partner to some famous heavyweight. The greeter walks out to cars and says how good it is to see people again, come on in.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“This boxer touches women. I mean, he touches them on purpose, like it's an accident. I think he messes with underage girls, and the casino buys off the parents. Dad says he's never seen such phony stupid people in his life. He says the phony smart ones in California were bad enough.” Quinn's father and mine had been pleasant to each other, but I suspect Mr. McGowan considered Dad a food snob.

“You could go live with your mother.”

“She's in London. We're moving back here in six months, at the latest. I'll talk Dad into it. I realized something.”

I was supposed to ask, so I did.

“About you,” he said.

I stepped to one side to avoid a tossing branch. I asked, “What are you doing?”

“Climbing.”

The oak tree swayed and complained, Quinn elbowing up through the branches, higher. He grinned down at me and made a show of peering out at the view, whaler fashion. “I see your horse,” he said.

“What's she doing?”

“She's saying, ‘Damn, Jennifer's afraid of me.'”

Desert Flower was saddled, bridled, shaking her head, her mane a blur. Tommy made a little bow: She's all yours.

Quinn leaned against the stable, arms folded, under the shade of an eave to avoid the full afternoon sun.

I put my foot in the stirrup and wrapped my hands around the pommel. My running shoe looked puny and technological, white-and-black nylon contrasting with the dark, honest leather of the stirrup. I took a breath, gave myself a mental run-through, all the things I had learned and forgotten about riding.

I swung my leg up, and I was in the saddle.

Desert Flower turned to observe me, her copper-yellow eye looking me up and down, at my bare legs, and the white tape I wrap around my shoelaces. Her skin jumped and twitched, and she shifted her hooves from position to position, heaving, blowing out a huge breath. I gripped the reins hard, my fingers white around the leather.

“Looking good,” called Quinn.

It's hard to look devil-may-care when you're trembling.

Desert Flower lifted a hoof, snuffled around, doglike, blasting flecks of golden straw with her exhaled breath, and then she skimmed forward, trotting, but not like any horse I had ever handled before. She traveled sideways, angling to the right, she jigged a little, and trotted sideways to the left. She stopped. I wasn't doing anything to direct the horse, just sitting in the saddle, Quinn giving me one of his wise, reassuring half smiles.

Tommy Dixon was tucking his head, so I couldn't see his grin, if that's what it was. He looked like an aw-shucks movie cowboy, looping a rope into tighter circles. I gave a toss of my head, and Tommy, perceiving through some form of ESP, made his move to the gate, swung it open.

And we were out.

The horse did what she wanted, kicked, sneezed, sneezed again, and then I made the mistake of urging her, with the
click, click
between my teeth the way I used to on that faraway summer when I was an eighth grader, Marta pounding ahead on a horse she was working into a lather.

With most horses you go from a trot to a stiff-legged pace to a happy canter, and then, if you aren't heading uphill, the horse rocks into a gallop, grunting and panting, saddle girth creaking.

Desert Flower skimmed along the ground, my shadow rippling over blurred roots and stones, a dry creek, a scatter of leaves like coins, a field of white-yellow oat weeds. I hung on.

And I began to think, Time to slow.

Time to slow down. We were rushing onward toward a tangle of low-hanging oaks, and I pressed my face into the horse's mane and said, “Slow down.”

Maybe the words sounded enough like
whoa
. The mare didn't slow, exactly, but she did cant her body sideways, like someone turning back while they keep running, trying to hear what a friend is calling.

I fell off.

Once. Desert Flower was loping down a rocky creekbed, and I slid forward and out of the saddle. I hopped one-footed along the creek gravel. The horse was curious—maybe the skittering of the stones caught her eye. Maybe she was being patient, but I think she didn't care either way, whether I was off or on.

Quinn ran through the brush, stopping to catch his breath. He couldn't talk when he saw me, only lift his arm and bend over, breathing too hard.

I was back in the saddle by then, ducking under a branch. Flower found something about Quinn's arrival interesting, stretching her head out in his direction although he was still a stone's throw away.

Quinn reached, reached again. The horse shied from his touch, then allowed him to caress her at last.

Chapter 17

“I like it,” said Mom, meaning my hair.

“Functional,” I said.

“Cute,” she said.

I expected her to continue, selecting the right compliments, that it had bounce. Mom gets into these moods, when she needs small talk like a drug. There was dust between my teeth, in my ears.

Quinn had asked if there was some place we could go, but I said I had to hurry back. I was surprised at how I felt, unable to tell him that I had deceived everyone. I knew Quinn would not be here except for my lie.