The Divide (14 page)

The colts they were now going to see had been turned loose in the last of the linked meadows that fringed the river. There were a dozen of them, and they lifted their heads and pricked their ears and watched while the three riders came closer. When he was still a hundred yards away, Ray stopped and left his horse to graze and went on foot toward them. The colts lowered their heads and shambled to meet him like a gang of blissed-out teenagers.

Ray stopped and let them come and when they reached him they circled around and nuzzled him and he stroked their necks and muzzles and rubbed their backs and spoke to them. He called to Abbie to come and both she and Ty got off their horses and joined him. And though a little shier with her than with Ty and his father, they let her put her hands on them and blow into their noses and savor their warm, sweet breath.

Back at the house over lunch, another sumptuous spread of cold meats and salad and home-baked bread, Abbie declared that she had never seen such a heavenly place in all her life. Ty’s father smiled and nodded but his wife, pouring Abbie some more water, sighed and shrugged.

“It is now,” she said. “How long it’ll stay that way is another matter.”

“What do you mean?” Abbie said.

Martha looked at Ray, as if asking his permission to go on. He didn’t seem too keen. Ty looked as puzzled as Abbie was.

“What is it?” he said.

“Your mom’s just talking about the drilling, that’s all.”

“Why, what’s happened?”

“It’s nothing. It won’t happen.”

“For heaven’s sake, Ray. Tell him about the letter.”

“What letter?” Ty said.

Abbie felt that she was intruding on some private family matter and wondered if she ought to excuse herself and pretend she wanted to go to the bathroom. Ty’s father sighed and when he spoke it was to Abbie.

“There’s a lot of drilling going on around here.”

“For oil?”

“Gas. Coalbed methane. The land around here is full of it, all across the Powder River Basin. The gas gets trapped in the coal seams. Nobody bothered too much with it until fairly recently. But now they’ve found this real cheap way of drilling for it.”

“You’re not going to drill for it here?” Abbie said.

Ray gave a rueful laugh.

“No, Abbie, we’re not. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. Like most ranchers around these parts, when my granddaddy bought this land, the government only sold him the surface rights. They kept the mineral rights themselves and lately they’ve been leasing them off. We just found out somebody leased our land.”

“Show Ty the letter,” Martha said.

“Not now.”

“Ray, he’s got a right to—”

“Mom, it’s okay. I’ll read it later. Who bought the lease?”

“Some little outfit in Denver.”

“And what do they plan on doing?”

Ty’s father shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out next week. They’re sending a team to check things out.”

“Don’t let them.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Ty’s mother said.

Ray smiled. “You can’t stop them. The law’s on their side. They can drive around, dig, drill, do whatever they like. They give you a so-called ‘surface damage agreement, ’ which everybody around here knows isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. But if we don’t sign it, they can just go ahead anyhow.”

“That’s terrible,” Abbie said.

“It probably won’t come to much. A lot of these folks just buy the lease then just sit on it and don’t do a thing.”

He didn’t sound as if he’d even convinced himself of this but he changed the subject and asked Abbie what it was like living in New York. She said it was okay and that she used to like it more than she did now. The problem was, the more time she spent out West, where there was so much space, the harder it was to go home.

“Ty says you want to go to college out here,” Martha said.

“Definitely.”

“That’s great. How do your mom and dad feel about that?”

“I haven’t told them yet. I think my dad’ll be okay with it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something, young lady,” Ray said. “The way you handle a horse, I’d say it’s where you belong.”

It was the middle of the afternoon when they set off back to The Divide. As they drove out of Sheridan, Ty said he wanted to show her something and turned off the highway onto a winding gravel road. Ahead of them a great cloud of red dust rose into the sky and as they came around a bend they saw two giant yellow excavators hacking a crater into the hillside.

“They’re digging a pit for the water,” Ty said. “When they drill into the coal seam, it releases this huge amount of water. Which you’d think, in a place as dry as this, would be a good thing. But it’s salt water and where it floods onto the land nothing can grow. Kills everything. See down yonder?”

He pointed down into the valley.

“Those white patches there, down by the creek? That’s salt. Those were prime hay meadows, about a hundred acres. Friend of my daddy owns them. Now they’re good for nothing. Used to be good trout fishing there too, but now there’s not a single fish. All died. The gas companies line these big holes with plastic, like they’re doing here. But they leak and spill, and they don’t fix them because, basically, they don’t give a damn.”

They drove on and every so often Ty would point things out to her—wellheads, compressor stations, power-and pipelines, dirt roads gashed across the virgin landscape. They crossed over and down into another valley and stopped by a low wooden bridge where the water of another creek bubbled with methane released by the drilling. Ty told her how a friend of his had put a match to it one day and set the whole creek ablaze.

In other places, like the deserted ranch house he showed her on the way back to the highway, artesian wells that had functioned happily for forty years had suddenly started to bubble gas or run dry because some idiot gas drillers had ruptured the aquifer five miles away.

“Can’t anyone stop these people doing this?”

“No. There’s a pretty good protest group, but the problem is a lot of people think the drilling benefits the town. Creates jobs, brings business to the stores, that kind of deal. And that’s bullshit. Often as not the companies ship in their own cheap labor and all the town gets is a whole lot of problems.”

“Is this going on in Montana too?”

“Not yet. But it won’t be long.”

They didn’t talk much after that. They headed north and west along I-90, while Steve Earle sang sorrowful songs on the stereo and a pale sun slid down ahead of them into its own coalbed of cloud. Ty said the weather looked set to change. Abbie had never seen him so heavy and forlorn. He switched on the headlights and she reached out and stroked the back of his neck.

“Two more days,” he said. “And then you’ll be gone.”

A first few drops of rain spattered the windshield.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

 

 

 

It rained all of Friday and most of Saturday, and only a stalwart, slickered few—Abbie inevitably among them—ventured out on the last rides. Of the guests who didn’t, the hardiest still plodded in their Gore-Tex down to the creek to cast a fly or hiked up the sodden trails through the woods, but mostly people simply sat around and read or played long games of Monopoly and Scrabble in the ranch-house lounge.

While Abbie went riding or hung around the stables “helping” Ty, Josh hung with the Delstock kids. This mainly involved lolling in one of their cabins (usually Lane and Ryan Delroy’s because their parents didn’t get uptight about the mess), listening to music and having sprawling, sardonic discussions on topics that segued surreally from world peace to thrash metal to nose rings and nail polish. Specifically, Josh lolled as often and as close as he could to Katie Bradstock. Which was what he was doing right now.

Over the course of the past twelve days, he had stirred himself up into a fever of yearning. There wasn’t a moment of the day when his head wasn’t full of her. She hummed and jangled through every nerve and vein of his body. The sight, the smell, even the thought of her gave him a strange, hollowing ache. He was an open walking wound from head to toe. A walking wound with a constant hard-on. So constant he worried it might be doing him damage.

Part of the problem was that he’d been waiting too long for something like this to happen. At school it seemed like every other kid his age (and younger) was getting laid, except him. He knew he was nobody’s idea of a pinup but since last fall when he’d gotten rid of his glasses and started wearing contacts and shed a few pounds and gotten a little cooler with his clothes, he didn’t think he looked so nerdy. And, thank God, he didn’t get too many zits—though, come to think of it, that didn’t seem to stop guys like Kevin Simpson, a complete duh-brain in tenth grade, from getting laid.

Of course, Josh wasn’t so dumb as to believe all the stories that jerks like Kevin put out. A lot of kids pretended they’d done it when they hadn’t. Whatever. This thing with Katie was doing his head in. The vacation was about to end and they still hadn’t even kissed. He was pretty sure she wanted things to happen as much as he did. And a couple of times it almost had. Like the other night at his dad’s birthday party, when they were dancing together and Ty’s band started playing a slow number and she locked her arms around the back of his neck and smiled at him in a way that made him go all fluttery inside. And then Lane and Abbie came butting in and ruined things by dancing with them.

That was the real problem. They were all such a gang and always did everything together. Which was really cool and a lot of fun. But the downside was that there was hardly ever a moment when it was just he and Katie, just the two of them alone, when they might get to switch from being just friends into something more exciting. They had laughed and teased and talked and chased each other around and even tickled each other. But that was where it had gotten stuck. Like a scratched record. And neither of them seemed to know which button to press to move it on.

It was Saturday afternoon and all six brothers and sisters—including Abbie, back from the stables with straw in her hair—were sprawled on the shunted-together beds of Lane and Ryan’s cabin. They were listening to the new Radiohead album, which Ryan said was “ultimate.” Josh secretly felt that if he heard it one more time he might have to go out and hang himself. The room smelled of stale socks and cigarette smoke, which they did their best to eliminate by keeping the back windows open and releasing periodic blasts of Lane’s Calvin Klein body spray for which they had promised to reimburse her, though probably wouldn’t. Will Bradstock said it made the place smell like a Turkish brothel and seemed disappointed when nobody bothered to ask how he might know. They were all either too bored or too wasted from the night before when they’d snuck up behind the pool changing rooms and smoked the weed Ryan had stolen from his father’s stash.

All except Josh. He was neither bored nor wasted. He was too busy thinking about his right thigh which for the last ten blissful minutes had been pressed against Katie. She was lying curled on her side with her back to him, raised on one elbow, her gorgeous butt nestled into him and a bare shoulder leaning gently against his chest. She was reading an old copy of
People
magazine that was propped against Ryan who had fallen asleep across Abbie. Or maybe she was just pretending to read it because she hadn’t yet turned a page.

Katie was wearing that sexy little yellow crop top and a denim miniskirt cut low around her hips to reveal six inches of tanned flesh. Sometimes, when she wiggled, you could also see the top of her panties, which were pink and lacy. Josh was pretending to read the magazine over her shoulder while in fact peering furtively down his nose into the gaping neck of her top where he could see her right breast bulge a little as it got cupped by her bra (which was also pink but seemed to be made of satin rather than lace). Her nearness, the pressure of her butt against his thigh, the sweet, warm, animal smell of her had given him a mega-boner, which, with a discreetly placed right hand, he was managing to flatten to his stomach.

The place where his thigh touched her butt was getting hot. She could have moved away but she hadn’t. There was no way she could be unaware of it. She was probably enjoying it as much as he was. Man, he thought. Maybe this was the moment. The moment to show her how he really felt.

His heart began to pound. He hoped to God she couldn’t hear or feel it. Go on, he told himself. It’s the guy who has to make the first move. She’s probably been waiting for it, dying for you to let her know how much you want her. And there was an obvious and simple way that would leave her no room for doubt. He took a long, deep breath and slowly slid the restraining hand from his stomach so that his hard-on pronged against her.

Katie Bradstock jumped as if she’d been jabbed by a cattle prod. She lifted a clear six inches from the bed.

“Josh!” she yelped. “Jesus!”

Everybody was staring at him. He felt his face starting to burn.

“What?” he said, trying for a tone of innocent shock and failing.

“What’s the matter?” Abbie said, for all of them.

Katie was scrambling away across the bed, on her hands and knees over the tangle of startled bodies.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just gotta go somewhere.” She was off the bed now and hurrying to the door and a few seconds later she was gone. There followed a long and bemused silence. Everyone was awake and alert now and looking at each other for some clue as to what had happened. Josh tried to look mystified, while his brain scrolled furiously for some half-plausible excuse.

Bugs, he thought.

“Maybe she got bitten.”

He got to his knees, stupidly forgetting about his erection which was wilting fast but still tenting his shorts. He instantly and no doubt comically adopted a weird hunched posture to hide it, while he pretended to hunt for bugs among the rumpled bedclothes. On the stereo Radiohead were coming to a suicidal crescendo. Abbie and Lane were already on their way out of the door in pursuit of Katie. Will and Ryan just sat there staring at him.