Fine Open Space, by H. Lee Barnes

Fine Open Space a story

H. Lee Barnes

Fine Open Space a story

H. Lee Barnes

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Nonfiction Editor

Dennis Covington Poetry Editor

Carrie Jerrell Fiction Editor

Literary Review

Katie Cortese Managing Editors

Fiction Trifecta

June 2014

Chase Dearinger Michael Palmer

Associate Editors: Kathleen Blackburn, Erin Castle, Allison Donahue, Joseph Dornich, Rachel Furey, Jo Anna Gaona, Micah Heatwole, Christine Kitano, Beth McKinney, Scott Morris, Brent Newsom, Dominic Russ, Jerry Staley, Robby Taylor, and Sarah Viren.

Copyright © 2014 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is published six times a year at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

Fine Open Space

N

evada stepped out on the porch of her double-wide to see what all the commotion was with Grady. He rarely barked unless he spotted a coyote or one of the emus had gotten free from its pen. She called to her dog. He started in her direction, but stopped and sat for no apparent reason. To the west, dust billowed up behind the tail of a rambling pickup she recognized as Stoney’s. She’d not expected him for another week, but here he was, with the saddle—and a bill.

Grady stood still and sniffed the air. She called him to her side. He sat a moment, tail wagging, before racing off to the stall where Pablo was repairing the gate latch, one more unanticipated problem in a string of such problems. With all that hung over her—a corroding water pump, a backlog of feed bills, and a hundred dollars due for the repair of a saddle—she didn’t need the additional worry of a runaway horse.

Somehow the gelding had slipped free the day before and covered a half-mile before Pablo managed to rope it.

Today, at least the air was still, a blessing. She often had to remind herself that this life she’d taken on came with some small joys—mountains to see in the morning, the freedom to tie her hair in a ponytail and begin work—no makeup, no face cream, no lipstick, and no pretensions. Those were the daily benefits. Sometimes, the downside seemed like everything else.

Since buying the ranch, she’d been frugal, sticking to a swamp cooler for the double-wide, eating oatmeal for breakfast and pasta or beans for dinner. Now, she wondered if it would have been wiser to delay repairing the saddle. A hundred dollars could well be spent on any of a half-dozen other needs. Somehow Mr. Pender had scratched out a living off the obstinate land. She was doing the same, only less so. For seven years, she’d managed to fatten and auction off enough steers to pay taxes, keep the ranch afloat, and employ Pablo. Still, the unanticipated invariably came along to drain her savings.

Adding to her problems, this year’s winter had brought only scatterings of snow.

When spring arrived, April winds blew cold and unrelenting from the northwest. In May, they came from the southwest, warm and dry. Her cattle had a tough go finding bunch grass, and she had to feed them hay months early.

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1

When the truck stopped, Grady, tail wagging, came barking from the stall and headed straight to the driver’s door. The emus, now numbering three dozen, perked their heads. Necks rocking, they congregated at the fence, all but the old male, the surviving half of her seed pair. Him she kept separated from the hens, who fought incessantly for his attention during mating season.

The diesel engine clattered and died. Stoney threw open the driver’s door, planted a boot on the hard pack, and swung down. He gripped Grady’s head in both hands and wrestled the dog’s head back and forth. Grady broke free, barked, and instantly charged back into Stoney’s open hands. The ritual play went on a minute or so. Until Stoney patted the dog’s head and headed to Nevada, the dog at his side.

“Ever want to rid yourself of this worthless mutt, I’d consider taking him.”

“He’s not worthless,” she said.

Stoney stopped short of the porch. “Mornin’, ma’am.”

“Same to you.”

“I got ’er done. Hope you like it.” He pointed to the truck bed where her saddle rested atop a sawhorse. “Come see.” Favoring his right leg, he ambled to the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate. She and the dog followed.

Stoney gripped the wall of the truck bed, mounted the running board, and grimaced as he climbed up. “Time was I could climb up the back of a pickup when it was movin’.

Nowadays, I near need a ladder just to get in my own bed at night.”

He freed the saddle from its ties and brought it to the tailgate for inspection. It almost appeared new. As had the gelding, the saddle came as part of the package when she purchased the 270 acres. Well-used when she’d inherited it, the saddle seat had frayed. Stoney had not only replaced the seat, but he’d also replaced the saddle skirt and fenders with a finely tooled basket weave. Fix it, she’d told him, good leather, but keep it cheap. Fancy tooling was an indulgence she could ill afford.

As she did with all men, she eyed him suspiciously. “Didn’t want carving.”

“It kinda makes the saddle, don’t you think?”

“You said you’d turn the stirrup, put in a new tread and new leather on the seat.

Nothing about fancy tooling. I’m not paying for it. One hundred to repair it. That’s what we agreed on.”

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Stoney eased himself down from the truck bed. “Yes, ma’am. One hundred’s right. I did the other just because. No charge. You like it?”

“I’m liking it better now.”

“Well then, lemme get over to the porch so’s you can take a good look. You been ridin’ bareback.”

“Stoney, do I strike you as a woman who rides bareback?” She was trim, and though two and a half years away from turning fifty, she looked more like a woman of forty.

“Look like you might be determined enough for it.”

He carried the saddle to the porch. She looked at his hands as they balanced the saddle on the fence rail, knuckles swollen, a few fingers disfigured. She wondered if they were painful. She reached for the saddle.

“You like it, I’ll tote it to the tack room for you. Pablo around? I brought him some magazines I come across in Beatty. Mexican magazines.”

“That’s nice of you. I’ll pour you some iced tea if you got time.”

“Nothing hangin’ over me.”

“Grady, come,” she said.

The dog merely wagged his tail and stationed himself beside Stoney, who propped the saddle against his hip. Nevada shrugged and went inside and took two glasses from the cupboard, then opened the freezer. Grady began barking. How, she wondered, can a dog turn a walk to the tack room into a carnival?

She dropped ice in the glasses and set them on the table, then looked out the window in time to see Stoney reach inside the truck cab and hand some magazines to Pablo.

Pablo, who seemed pleased to receive them, headed back to the stall, Grady, tail at full wag, leading the way.

Stoney stood in the threshold, a magazine in hand. He extended it to her. “Latest American Horseman. Thought you might like somethin’ to read. You don’t seem the kind who reads Better House and Garden.”

“Guess that’s one way of judging a person. Well, come in.”

They sat, sipping cold tea. He didn’t talk much, and she appreciated that. She figured she’d heard most everything a man had to say. She knew him through Mr. Pender’s niece, who’d given her Stoney’s phone number and recommended him as a jack of all trades, “ranch trades, that is, farrier, saddle maker, and horse trainer.” He’d been a

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working cowboy. The niece had added that Stoney was the one who’d found her uncle dead.

Stoney swirled the ice in his empty glass. Nevada asked if he wanted more.

He shook his head. “How’s business with those ostriches goin’?”

“They’re emus. Shorter and more feathered.”

“Yes, ma’am. I s’pose I should be going. How’s that Dodge doin’?”

“It’s running rough again.”

“Want me to take a look?”

“Pablo doesn’t seem to have a handle on it.”

“I’ll take that as a maybe.”

“No, go ahead. I need to keep it running. Friday, I have to deliver two females to a buyer. I gotta meet him in Hawthorne.”

“Emus?”

“What else?”

“Well, cattle. And you got cats all over the place. Guess no one buys cats these days.”

“I don’t have mice, and the dog needs the excitement of chasing a cat or two. Why’d you fancy up the saddle?”

“Ah, I had that tooled leather hangin’ around the shop. Workin’ on leather takes my mind off my hip. Beats dullin’ it with Jack D. I’ll go look at that truck.”

She handed him the keys to the Dodge and walked him to the door. She had chores that needed attending and a gelding that needed riding. She set the glasses in the sink and began her day, starting with feeding the birds.

When she read about the ranch in a sales brochure, she’d been excited. Though she knew nothing about ranching, she figured she’d learn. Then she’d driven out to the parched alkaline land some twenty miles east of the Kawich Range, and seeing it left her dismayed. It was infested with cheat grass, the bungalow Mr. Pender had lived and died in had fallen into disrepair, the roof of the stall had collapsed, the few cattle still ranging on the property were mostly bone, and her closest neighbors would be jackrabbits and coyotes. But it came at a price she could afford.

The former owner, a widower with no children, had two heirs: a niece, a dealer in Reno, and a nephew, a car salesman in Las Vegas. Neither had any inclination to occupy the spread or pay taxes on the land. They sold all but fifty head of the cattle, paid back

H. Lee Barnes

5

taxes, and put the ranch up for sale at two hundred an acre. The $54,000 price fit her budget. She’d torn down the bungalow, replaced that with the double-wide, then sunk an additional $42,000 into birds and pens. She’d shifted her hopes from raising cattle to raising emus, but discovered she was competing with farmers in India, who exported emu products at cut rates.

She was still feeding birds an hour later when Stoney approached her.

“Your fuel line’s fouled. And you got a crack in your exhaust manifold.”

“Can you fix it now?”

“The fuel line, but—” “I need that truck running.”

“If it can’t be welded good, I’ll do what I can to get you a manifold cheap.”

Again, she thought, everyone, the banker, the vet, thinks I’ve got money to throw away. She had to sell the two female birds right away. Phil Redmond, the buyer, lived in Lemon Valley, north of Reno, and, after negotiating a price of two thousand dollars, insisted on making the exchange in Hawthorne, roughly halfway between Reno and Beatty. She needed the sale and what was left of her nest egg just to keep herself solvent until she could turn a profit off some eggs. Already she’d forgotten how at times her new life pleased her.

“Let me know how much.”

“Well, I can fix the fuel line in exchange for another glass of tea.”

A

t eight, Friday morning, Stoney called with news that the manifold hadn’t arrived. She rubbed her eyes and stood. After hanging up the receiver, Nevada sat at the table, her head in her hands, wondering how she was going to handle the delay. The news capped off a night of little sleep. As she often did, she’d stewed on the past, imposing the faceless image of a man who’d beaten her for pleasure with the cold face of Raja, who employed the occasional beating as one of his tools of discipline. Seven years into her new life and still the old one overtook her, fresh as a new sun, and woke her from her sleep.

She wondered about the girls, if any had built a life. She rarely thought of johns. It was the others, those who, starting with Raja, passed her from one to another like

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chattel, a half-dozen times in all. Each time, she took a new name. In her late twenties, she’d called home and said, using her birth name, “Hi, it’s Jeanie. I’m alive.” Her father had said, “Not to us,” and hung up.

Such thoughts visited her whenever she was idle. She shook off the memory and started to call Redmond’s number to postpone the deal for a week or convince him to make the drive down to the ranch. Before she could dial, the phone rang again.

“Hello,” Stoney said at the other end of the line.

“Hello, yourself. Did you call to say the manifold came in?” she asked.

“No.” “Then why in the hell would you call to tell me you still don’t have a manifold?”

“Huh? I, I just, I. . . .”

She heard him breathing heavily as if calming himself. She started to apologize, but he spoke up first.

“I called to say I got nothin’ pressin’ to do. I’ll be pleased to drive you and them birds to Hawthorne. I mean, if that’s okay.”

“Okay? Hell, Stoney, that’s good. When can you come?”

“I’m leaving now. How’s that?”

“Perfect. Sorry I snapped at you.”

She added her goodbye to his, laid the receiver down, a sense of relief flowing through her. Moments like these, moments that were too few, reminded her of what she had escaped.

She looked at her dog. “Let’s go get the birds ready.”

Grady wagged his tail and bolted for the door as if right away was too late to get started. She wasn’t sure what stirred his near-perpetual joy, but at the moment, it was medicine to her.

She and Pablo caged the emus, rigged the pulleys on the hoist, and threaded rope through the top of each cage. Pablo asked several times if she was all right. The way his suspendered trousers sagged over his butt, his slow response to questions, and everything about his appearance said he was old—except for his dark, intense eyes.

“You okay, señora?”

“Couldn’t be better if I was rich,” she said, taking on the tone of a boss. She felt it wise to keep their relationship distant, just as it seemed best to keep all relationships distant.

H. Lee Barnes

7

He asked again if she was all right.

“I’m fine. Stop asking.”

When all was set for Stoney’s arrival, she sat on the porch, drinking coffee and stroking Grady’s neck.

Stoney drove in a little past nine. He stepped out of the pickup and stood in the sunlight. He wore a fine wool Stetson, a neatly pressed shirt, and jeans so new they shined.

He waved, then sauntered over to the porch.

She looked at his boots, freshly shined. “What’s the occasion?” she asked.

“Occasion?”

“Yeah, you’re dressed to go dancing.”

He seemed embarrassed as he looked down at boots. “Haven’t done that for a while.”

“Coffee?” she asked.

“That’d be appreciated. I’ll take it outside and leave you to dress.”

But she was dressed. Suddenly, she felt self-conscious. Being attractive had once been her currency, but that was when what a man wanted mattered. Since leaving Lyon County, she’d worn a dress only to sign contracts. Nevada went to her closet and took a spring dress with spaghetti straps from its hanger. She held the dress to her breasts. It would fit loosely. Since she’d last worn it, she’d shed pounds. How many, she had no idea. She slipped off her jeans, unbuttoned her dungaree shirt, and pulled the dress over her head. She gazed at her image in the mirror, her bruised calves, scratched arms, pale shoulders, and the V-shaped suntan line on her throat left by the open collar of her work shirts. She yanked the straps off her shoulders, let the dress fall to the floor, then flung it on her bed. She put her jeans back on.

Before leaving the trailer, she selected a blue blouse, which she tucked into the jeans, then she untied her ponytail and let her hair cascade over her shoulders. As a last touch, she crowned her head with a white Stetson she’d worn only once before.

The birds were loaded on the truck bed.

Stoney waited at the truck. “Ready?”

“No,” she said, “I just came out to see if the day was still here.”

He smiled, opened her door, and stepped aside.

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W

orried the bird cages might loosen and fall on the highway, she sat with her fingers entwined on her lap, occasionally looking back.

Stoney, his eyes on the highway, remained silent until they passed through Tonopah, then, as if some wellspring of words had been released inside him, he began talking, first about his boyhood. He’d been reared on a small ranch in east central Nevada and had worked for ranches ever since.

“Did work on ranches before you bought one?” he asked.

What was he asking with that question? She felt her stomach tighten and answered it in her head. Yeah, she, too, had been on ranches all over Nevada: The Chicken Ranch, The Bunny Ranch, ranches that didn’t fit into small talk. “You were doing just fine talking about yourself.”

He nodded. “Just fillin’ up time.”

“Okay.”

“My mother said I rode alone when I was two. I don’t know if there’s truth in it, but that’s what she said. Sometimes I wonder if it would’ve all been different if I’d finished school. But I had other ambitions, which really wasn’t much ambition, being raised on a ranch and all. How about you?”

“How about me, what?”

“Where were you raised? I mean, you come from somewhere.”

“You said you’d drive me to Hawthorne. I appreciate it, but I don’t talk about myself.”

He glanced at her, then faced the road, his jaw tense. It wasn’t until they were ten miles north of Tonopah that he spoke again. “I apologize. It’s just people on the road usually talk more freely. You know, to pass time.”

She nodded.

“I don’t mean no harm,” he said. “Just curious. Hell, I’ve picked up hitchhikers who told me their life stories in an hour, some of which might even have been true.

Heard some good lies.”

She thought of the men who’d spilled deep feelings to her, strangers who’d wanted someone to talk to about their lives as much as they’d wanted sex. She’d pretended sympathy as she’d listened. Some shared lives with spouses that were

H. Lee Barnes

9

lies. Some lived lonely lives in the midst of their families. Some lived alone by choice.

Some because of being cast out.

“Not everyone’s a liar,” she said. “Some people just talk to strangers.”

“True. Thought you might want to talk yourself, but maybe you don’t have a story.”

“Why would you say that? Because I don’t babble on and on?”

“Some babble in their heads.” He grinned and looked in the rearview mirror. “Pender, he was good man. We called him Buck. Did you know that?”

Long drives made her think too much. At least the talk took her mind off. . . . Well, off a lot. “I think I heard his niece call him that,” she said to encourage him. If he wanted to talk, fine. Just get there by eleven. She gazed at the roadside, where the wind pressed against the sage and rabbit brush.

“Not much carin’ there. I saw the niece maybe twice in a dozen years. Met the nephew at the funeral. Families. Hell, I was more family than them. He treated me like a son sometimes but told me that if he’d sired me—his words—he would’ve felt obligated to cut his privates off for fear of duplicatin’ the mistake. Always had more work for me than he had money to pay. Kept his copper real close to his yarn, he did. I liked him enough. Didn’t matter his habits with a dollar. He was a good cook, too. He’d have us beans and steaks cooked on an open fire when we’d brand the calves and castrate ’em.

Miss that ol’ man sometimes. Do you cook?”

She’d never cooked before buying the ranch. Restaurants, coffee shops, take-out, and, later, in the houses, food and house-cleaning were provided. “I’m learning.”

“Always thought Ol’ Buck was stingy, but look.” He turned to her and stretched his mouth open wide, exposing his teeth and gums for an instant before returning his eyes to the road. “Buck did it for me. A toothbrush ain’t the first thing a man reaches for when he’s ridin’ fence or bent over coals, heatin’ a brandin’ iron. Eight implants. Didn’t even know what they were until he put it in his will for me to get ’em. Twenty-two thousand it cost. Damn near wiped out all the money he left behind. Course, the niece and nephew got the land, the cattle, some cash.

You got some scrawny four-legged leftover heifers and a chunk of alkali flats.”

As they passed a Greyhound Bus, she looked in the window. A young woman looked out at her. She could have been any young woman on any bus, could have once been Nevada herself.

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“Don’t see many of them these days,” Stoney said. “People fly everywhere.”

“I guess.”

She remembered her ride to Las Vegas and the terminal next to the Union Plaza, where she was supposed to transfer buses. She pictured herself, not yet seventeen, six dollars in her clutch purse, sitting on a plastic chair, on her lap an overnight bag with two pairs of jeans, two tank tops, her dirty underwear, and a bus ticket to Orange County in her hand. He stepped in the terminal, scanned the room, and zeroed in on her immediately. Pimp radar. He sat next to her as if he was going on a bus trip himself, pretending, at first, not to notice her, then asking where she was headed. She was a runaway actually on her way home. She’d wondered ever since what life might have offered if she hadn’t answered, “Nowhere.” A prophetic word.

She pictured the white Bible in Raja’s hand, him instructing her and Sonya to lay their hands on his. Sonya and she would be sisters. It was now sanctified, and he’d be one in spirit with them. He tore up her unused bus ticket and scattered the pieces on the floor, then he traced the word love on the back of her hand with a fingernail, said her name was now Mara, like the moon. Three years later, Raja passed her on to Alonso to settle a debt.

Stoney glanced at her. “You okay. Did I offend you?”

“No. I’m okay. Tell me more. Go ahead.”

“Buck, he made good money drilling water wells as a side business. Never ran more than two hundred head. That’s how I come to work for him.”

Her thoughts drifted between his story and hers, Stoney sitting in the tack room, sharing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with Buck, herself lying in bed with Sonya, who pulled her close and assured her she would be cared for, that they were like sisters now.

“Can I ask you somethin’?”

Her hands tensed. “Sure.”

“You have family anywhere?”

She recalled the argument over her wrecking the family car that sent her drifting, first San Francisco, then Portland, then Reno, sometimes panhandling, sometimes busing tables.

“Everyone has family,” she said.

“Buck said that if we don’t have one, we find one. You think that’s true?”

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“Maybe.” She imagines Raja riding in the truck bed, framed in the rear window, reading her mind. He told her his name, Raja, and said he knew her every thought and her fears. His name sounded exotic, and his dark hand was warm as he laid it atop hers. She felt helpless to resist. He fed her in the dining room of the Union Plaza. She weighed ninety pounds then. Ninety pounds and sixteen years old. A child.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you have family?”

“Parents dead. Got a brother and sister. He’s gone crazy. She’s gone Mormon. Same thing, some people might say.”

She smiled and thought that Stoney would make good company. For someone.

“We’re almost there.”

“Good. Did I thank you for this?”

“What?”

“Thank you for taking me and the birds. Did I thank you?”

“I’m sure you did.”

She studied his profile, the sunbaked lines at the corner of his eyes and mouth, his forehead shadowed by the brim of his Stetson. “Really. I’m not so sure I did.”

“Well, then. You know, it’s never too late.”

“Okay. I’ll thank you by buying a meal at El Capitan.”

“Call it even.”

“What happened to your hands.”

“Just about everything that can happen to hands, short of losin’ fingers.” He changed grips on the steering wheel and extended his right hand toward her. “Old Buck’s will was a million short of havin’ enough money to fix them up.” He extended the baby finger.

“Roped a bull. Big bastard went in one direction; horse went in another. Something had to give. This finger snapped and bent back almost to my wrist.”

“That must have been a trip to the emergency room.”

“Naw, I pulled it straight as I could and had Bud Hickum fix me up a splint. Next day, I was workin’, but didn’t rope nothin’ for a time.” He let his free hand rest palm-up on the seat.

Nevada had seen hands as weathered and beaten—carpenters missing fingers, mechanics with broken nails, cooks bearing burn scars, all their hands blurring into one.

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13

And the others, the ones with soft hands—bankers, accountants, executives. She couldn’t imagine the hard life a man like Stoney endured. Scars from her labor were less conspicuous. She looked at her own hands, calloused now that she’d learned the use of a hammer, saw, and shovel.

The highway faded in the sideview mirror. She considered that she’d be seeing the same land again on the return trip. Stretch after stretch of tar cutting across empty desert. It was like looking at the past through the present. She found the thought disquieting, and for the next several minutes, the whistling tires and the sound of wind skirting the truck cab lulled her into a daze.

His voice broke the spell. “If you want, I can get us some music.”

“I’m fine. If you want to turn on the radio, go ahead.”

“You never answered the question. About family. Way I see it, we get a certain age, the past and family are most of what we got to talk about.”

To her, the past meant—in addition to the johns—pimps and bartenders and bouncers who thought they were entitled to a free one now and then. “Really, it’s something I don’t discuss.” She reached in her purse, pulled out a packet of chewing gum, and offered him a stick. He shook his head and said gum stuck to his implants.

“Hell.” He tapped the brake, slowed the truck, and aimed one of his mangled fingers at the highway ahead. “Accident.”

Ahead lay a string of taillights and vehicles, their chrome and glass reflecting the mid-morning sun. Nevada looked at her watch and shook her head. Hawthorne was forty miles away, and eleven o’clock was forty-two minutes away. Her life seemed in rebellion again.

“I hope it’s not going to make us late.” She looked back at the emus.

Two highway patrol cars, a tow truck, and a crushed car crowded into the northbound lane, and no one was directing traffic around the accident. Stoney pulled the truck to a stop at the rear of some fifteen vehicles.

“Even more cars tryin’ to get south,” he said. “Wait here.” He reached under his seat and came up with a two-foot long flashlight. “I’ll be back.” He shut the door gently, walked to the shoulder, and headed toward the accident, the heels of his boots sinking into the sand. As he limped farther along, she noted that he was slightly bow-legged.

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For a time, she lost sight of him. Soon, one at a time, cars heading south began to pass by the truck. Then, gradually, the vehicles in front of the truck advanced.

She saw Stoney standing on the crown of the highway, directing them forward as he held the southbound vehicles at bay with a smile and an open hand. It made her smile.

Fifteen minutes later, he opened the door and climbed up behind the wheel. “Ambulance come and left already. No one was killed.”

“You just walked up there and volunteered?”

“Yeah, might be a bit longer yet. They towed the truck that hit it already. Said I’d help out till that car’s gone to the graveyard. Maybe a half hour. That okay?”

Where did someone like him come from? she wondered. She wanted to tell him to forget helping, that he’d done his share and earned the right to go on, but she figured that he wouldn’t agree even if he went along with her.

“I guess.”

“I told them you wouldn’t mind.” He drove just north of the accident site and parked the truck. “This way, we can just take off.”

“Where’d you get the ostriches?” one of the troopers hollered as Stoney walked to the center of the pavement.

“Emus, not ostriches. They’re shorter and got more feathers. Don’t they teach you cops nothin’ at all?”

A semi rolled up to the scene, and Stoney motioned for it to wait as one of the troopers stepped out onto the asphalt with a measuring device.

T

hey arrived twenty minutes late. Phil Redmond was waiting in the east parking lot of El Capitan, with a helper named Lou and two empty cages. Stoney backed his truck close enough to Redmond’s to drop the tailgate, and the three men lifted the empty cages to the back of the truck.

Lou, a young Shoshone with a broad forehead and muscular shoulders, harnessed the birds one at a time and pulled them into the waiting cages. Stoney and Lou chatted as they muscled the heavy cages to the head of the truck bed. Phil handed Nevada an envelope. Without opening it, she tucked the envelope in her purse.

H. Lee Barnes

15

“You aren’t going to count it?”

“I trust there’s two thousand in it.” From her experience, she knew any man was likely to cheat a woman when selling something, but only the worst kind cheated a woman when buying.

He said, “This Stoney, nice guy. He a boyfriend or an employee?”

“Just a guy with a pickup.”

“Mr. Redmond, we’re ready,” the ranch hand called out.

“Well, he’s a nice guy all the same.” Mr. Redmond opened his wallet and thumbed out a hundred-dollar bill. “Here, give it to him.” He stuffed the bill in the side pocket of her purse.

“I’m curious. Do you intend to breed them? I’ve got a couple of males for sale or stud.”

“No, I just wanted them for my kids to ride.”

It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. “Really?”

“It’ll be an adventure for them. I figure they’ll love it. Have a nice day.” He touched the brim of his hat and nodded as he backpedaled.

“Mr. Redmond?”

“Phil, call me Phil.”

“I thought you were a rancher.”

“I’ve got two hats, three, no four if you count being a husband and father. I’m mostly an attorney—wills, probate, taxes. You ever need a good one, call.”

T

he lunch crowd filled the booths and most of the tables in El Capitan. Stoney removed his hat. Nevada kept hers on. She’d bought the ranch as much to hide from people as to build a business, but sometimes, she missed such human activity. They waited at the podium to be seated. She was hungry now, and Stoney seemed finally to have run out of words. The sound of slot machines and the piped-in music took her back to that first walk through the slot aisles at Caesars Palace. She was a tall, full-breasted girl who could pass as a woman. Any man would’ve done. Sonya pointed one out. Nevada remembered him being neither old nor young, just a guy away from home.

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What she did remember was the smell of him as he lay naked on top of her, sweat and an aftershave balm that seemed too sweet for a man to wear. Before then, she’d never held a hundred-dollar bill.

The hostess seated them at a table near the counter.

Stoney, his face locked in contemplation, studied the menu, then looked at her over the top of it. “A three-egg omelet and wheat toast’ll suit me. And coffee.”

“Sounds fine.”

“Maybe it’s not my business,” he said.

Nevada waited, but Stoney let the comment hang. The waitress came, poured them coffee, and took their order. Nevada noticed a man at the counter looking over his shoulder in their direction. He looked away when she made eye contact. Stoney sipped from his cup and said the coffee was just brown water.

“What’s not your business?”

“It’s peculiar to me is all. That boy with Mr. Redmond said his boss bought his kids some kind of buggy to have the birds pull ’em around. That seem strange?”

“No stranger than selling emu oil as a cure for arthritis or the FDA telling me I can’t render my own birds to meat and sell it.”

“What I mean is kids havin’ them big birds as toys. Why not horses?”

She started to say she didn’t have an answer, that maybe there was no answer, but the man at the counter was staring now. She found it disconcerting. He was her age, perhaps a few years older, well over two hundred pounds, his forearms sunburned. He wore construction boots and Levi’s, could’ve been a working man anywhere in the outreaches of the state.

“What’s wrong? Did I say somethin’ again?” Stoney said.

“No. I’m just hungry.”

“Kids like that probably already have horses. Maybe they got bored with ’em. Kids get bored real easy now. All them electronics keepin’ their thumbs busy.”

She recalled the hundred-dollar bill intended for Stoney. She reached for her purse on the chair beside her and noticed the staring man stand from his stool. He opened his wallet and laid a bill on the counter. He walked slowly to their table, all the while his gaze on her. He stopped behind Stoney.

Stoney looked over his shoulder. “Can we help you?”

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“Just wanted to say hello to Chartreuse here. Remember me?”

Blood rushed to her face. Chartreuse was the last in a string of fictitious names, names meant to be feminine, meant to create illusion—Chastity, Emerald, Leandra, and, the first, Mara.

She choked out the words. “I don’t know you.”

“Her name’s Nevada. You got the wrong gal.”

“No. Got the right one,” he said, his voice rising. “She got me thrown out of a house.”

“Mister, we’re just tryin’ to have a meal,” Stoney said.

“What’s the matter, Chartreuse? You can’t talk?”

Others in the coffee shop were staring now. The hostess stepped over to the table and asked if there was a problem.

The man smiled. “No. Just stopped by to say hello to the whore.”

Stoney stood and faced the man. Nevada was amazed at how quickly he did it.

“You apologize,” Stoney said.

“Or what, old man?”

Save for the music, the restaurant had gone silent.

The hostess said to the man, “You better go before I call security.”

“Good enough,” the man said. Smiling, he backpedaled, turned, and headed to the exit.

“Some people!” the hostess said.

Stoney eased back into his seat. The hostess apologized for the incident and said their food would be coming shortly. A few customers still stared at Nevada while others appeared to pretend the incident away.

“Let’s leave,” Nevada said.

“I gotta go to the bathroom first,” Stoney said.

“Okay. Then let’s leave.”

She felt as if the past was squeezing hard against her sides. No end to it, except for loose ones. She had a difficult time recalling any one encounter. There had been too many. Stoney seemed to be taking his time in the restroom. She stared at her hands and waited for the room to return to normal. Gradually, the sounds of voices and utensils scraping plates, along with the piped-in music and the slot buzzers, filled the room.

The other patrons soon lost interest in her.

H. Lee Barnes

19

Minutes passed by, seven, eight, then Nevada saw a woman approach the hostess and point in her direction. Then the hostess nodded and came over just as the waitress brought the coffee pot.

The waitress said, “Sorry for the delay. I think your food’s up next.”

“Thanks, but we’re leaving,” Nevada said.

“Wait,” the hostess said. “That woman says your friend’s outside on the sidewalk hurt.”

The news registered slowly. When it dawned on her what the hostess was saying, Nevada fumbled in her purse, pulled out the hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to the hostess. She left without waiting for her change.

A man and a woman stood over Stoney. He lay on his back, blood trickling from the side of his head where he’d struck the concrete. A strawberry-colored lump had sprouted on his left cheek below the eye.

“He came to for a bit, then. . . .” the man said.

“You stupid, stupid man.” Nevada sat on the curb and lifted his head.

“That guy was a lot bigger than him,” the man said.

“It’s ugly the way he just left him,” the woman said.

Stoney blinked. He looked at Nevada, then the others. He sat up and felt the side of his head. His fingers came away with blood. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

“We called the police,” the woman said.

“My hat,” Stoney said. “I left it inside.”

T

he treatment center was a converted house near the military base.

A nurse told Nevada to sign Stoney in, then hurried him to a treatment room. A clerk behind the counter set some papers on a clipboard, handed it and a pen to Nevada, and told her to fill in the blank spaces and sign wherever she saw an X. Nevada sat on a bench and started filling out the forms. She realized how little she knew about Stoney, knew neither his last name nor his age, not even an address, just his phone number. She used her address and guessed him to be close enough to sixty to put that down. She signed her name in the appropriate boxes and handed the clipboard back to the clerk.

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The nurse returned and walked Nevada to the treatment room, where Nevada watched the doctor apply four stitches to Stoney’s wound.

“We get our share of these,” the doctor said. “Sometimes, I feel more like a veterinarian treating mules.”

Finished with his needlework, the doctor cautioned her not to let Stoney sleep for at least twelve hours, saying that indications were he’d suffered a mild concussion. He said the nurse would bandage the wound. Before leaving, he added that the police had called and were on their way. Stoney sat on the edge of the treatment table, his head bowed.

Nevada was at a loss as to what to do. Men had fought over her in the past, men who wanted control of her, who wanted her as property to generate money for them, men who needed control. The last thing she needed was a busted up cowboy on her hands.

“Hope you’re proud,” she said.

He nodded, but didn’t look up.

A few minutes later, the nurse reentered and bandaged Stoney’s head.

When the bandage was in place, the nurse walked Stoney to a counter, where she handed a file to a clerk. The woman behind the counter entered some data in a computer and handed a bill to Nevada. The charges came to nearly four hundred dollars. Nevada asked Stoney if he had any money.

“Eight dollars and a gasoline credit card. Checkbook’s at home.”

Though it pained her, Nevada reached in her purse and paid the bill out of the proceeds from the sale of her birds.

Stoney declined to sign a complaint, saying he couldn’t remember what had happened and couldn’t identify the man the police referred to as the assailant. Then the police questioned her. Who was the man? Why’d he beat Stoney so badly? Nevada said she hadn’t witnessed the fight. Stoney walked to the truck on his own, apologizing as he did and thanking her for paying the doctor. “Don’t you worry about that manifold or payin’ me to install it. We’ll call it even.”

“Even? Don’t you see what you did?”

“Got myself hurt.” He opened the passenger door and motioned for her to get in.

She said, “No, you get in. I’m driving.”

“My hat,” he reminded her.

H. Lee Barnes

21

The manager back at the coffee shop in El Capitan handed over Stoney’s hat and change from the bill for the uneaten lunch. They ate a quick dinner and headed home.

On the drive, she had to nudge him awake from time to time. For periods, he was alert.

Other times, he drifted away. When he did, she honked the horn or turned up the volume on the radio until the speakers vibrated. When it was obvious neither of these devices would work because he was snoring, she pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the highway and walked him into the desert.

He touched his bare head and asked where his hat was.

“It won’t fit over the bandage,” she said. “What you did, I know why. I’m not worth it.”

He stopped and squinted at her. “Maybe I saw it different.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

Twice more, she pulled over and walked him to keep him from dozing off. It was a little past nine when she drove the truck up the road to her place. The light in Pablo’s window was a welcome sight. She came to a stop by the porch and honked. Pablo hurried out, straightening his suspenders, Grady at his heels.

“Let’s get him inside,” she said.

They walked on either side of Stoney, steadying him if he wavered. He was as compliant as a child. She fixed a pot of coffee. When it was ready, she filled his cup and coaxed him to sip until it was gone, then she and Pablo took turns walking him outside, around the pens and back. On one tour around the pens, a female emu stretched her head over the fence and released a chilling rattle. In the adjacent pen, a male sat on the egg she’d laid. Nevada began explaining the behaviors of the birds, how males mind the eggs and females fight for the attention of males. Stoney didn’t seem to hear her at the time but later said that maybe people should learn from it.

Between walks, she and Pablo napped in shifts. At four in the morning, Stoney seemed to make a turn. “You can take me home,” he said. “That manifold’s probably in by now. I’ll fix your truck up and bring it back. You can use mine till then.”

Now that he seemed coherent, she said, “Was it worth it?”

He thought a moment. “Guess it’s in what you value.”

“Chartreuse was just one name,” she said. “There were others.”

“Only name I know is Nevada.”

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“I paid an attorney to give me that name. You still think it was worth it?”

He smiled. “Didn’t lose any teeth, did I? New teeth. New name. Don’t seem so different.”

“Maybe you need more coffee and another walk.” It struck her as odd that she wasn’t angry with him. Four hundred dollars gone, she should’ve been. “Your head’s more than injured. Did you at least manage to hit him?”

“Maybe once. Didn’t faze him much.”

I

t was nearing dawn when she dropped him off. His house, a small wooden bungalow, the kind slapped together to accommodate miners and their families in Beatty’s gold mining heyday, was on two acres, surrounded by cottonwoods. Behind it, a horse hung its head over a corral fence. Unlike most in the town, Stoney’s place was in good repair, no abandoned cars or old stoves in the yard, front or back.

He thanked her for her kindness and said he’d be needing his truck when she got a chance to return it. He stood with the truck door open, his face shining like copper in the glow of the dome light.

“Ain’t none of us perfect,” he said. “Woke up a few times in county lock-up, Fallon and Elko and some others, too, not knowin’ how I got there. Sheriff in Elko told me once more and I’d do six months in his keep, scrubbin’ toilets and moppin’ floors. Well, that’s behind me. You want to come in and see my place?”

She declined.

“Some day?” he asked. “I can Dutch oven a fine meal. Ever taste cornbread from a Dutch oven?”

“Never tasted anything from a Dutch oven.”

“Well, now, there it is.”

“Where what is?”

“It. Thanks for the nice time.” He shut the door.

It, she thought, what’s it? She considered what he’d said and what he’d done on her behalf, foolish as it was. She watched him walk to the porch, where he mounted

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the steps, looked back, and waved. She waved and pulled away, adjusting the mirror as she did, so that she could see him disappear inside.

She drove to the ranch, her mind filtering through the previous day’s events and Stoney’s cryptic reference to “it.” Her thoughts circled back to the day she should have used that bus ticket to go home. Raja had taken her to a motel on East Fremont Street but didn’t touch her that first night. In the morning, he gave her a pill he claimed would give color to the day, and he introduced her to Sonya, saying God had willed her to him and this was a new beginning for her. Words trick people, seduce them. Make them doubt. Aren’t all beginnings new, she wondered? Don’t they mark the end of what preceded them?

A girl subject to the influence of words, she’d lain in what Raja called “a pasture of delight” with him and Sonya. She’d cried and bled on the sheets, and he’d ordered her to take them to a laundry and wash them before she could eat or sleep again. The following night, she and Sonya returned from Caesars Palace with the night’s take. Raja had slapped her because she’d cried and because someone as “pure” as she was should bring “home a little more bacon.”

The sun rose over the peaks. She put on her sunglasses. She considered Stoney limping along on his bowed legs, a wiry, aging man, determined to clear traffic around an accident and get her to her destination. Could she see herself in another way if she could forget? Could she see herself as Stoney did? She decided she was too tired to get her thoughts in order.

Exhausted, she climbed into bed and set the alarm for ten a.m. A few hours of sleep, then the tasks of the day. But she couldn’t sleep right away. She’d forgotten to tell him what a fine job he’d done on her saddle, something he might want to hear. More importantly, it was something she should say while, at the same time, also telling him that her paying the doctor bill was a small reward for his helping her. She might cook dinner for him. Or take up his invitation. She was considering those possibilities when the ceiling blurred and slid away, and she fell into an untroubled sleep.

H. Lee Barnes

25

H.

Lee Barnes has published some forty short stories and essays as well as numerous books, including two collections of short fiction, Minimal Damage and Talk to Me, James Dean, and, most recently, his memoir, When We Walked Above the Clouds, based upon his experiences as a Special Forces A-Team member. His ongoing projects include a novel set on the home front during the last year of WWII and a nonfiction account of the 2003 shootout between the Hells Angels and Mongols motorcycle clubs at Harrah’s Casino in Laughlin. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he teaches English and creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. Visit his website at http://www.hleebarnes.net/.