Tawny Coulten held her breath and pushed as hard as her upper back and shoulders would allow.
Her knees dug into ice and snow-covered sand, but it didn’t help her. Her small hand was buried between the hot contracting insides of a cow and the crowded body of a Hereford calf. It would be a bull, she guessed by the size of its head. The calf’s right foot, which should have been alongside his left, was obviously still somewhere inside the straining cow. The old cow heaved and groaned again, sending little, painful spasms through her forearm and shoulder.
“Come on mamma. Give me one more chance.” She grunted and breathed in tiny, fast bursts as her hand roved inside the cow like an inexperienced teen on a first date.
With her right arm still buried up to her shoulder, Tawny leaned to her right side and rested her head on her shoulder for a few seconds. Her left arm pulled and tugged at her coat, which had ridden chest high. Although insufficient, it was once again, at least a bit of a barrier between her body and the biting cold.
One more time, she bunched up her knees and forced her arm deeply inside the cow.
She grunted and strained, her fingers finally touching the shoulder of the calf. Walking her fingers down that shoulder, she managed to hook them behind the upper leg of the calf.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch!” The young woman cried out, as a muscle cramp assaulted her hand and forearm. She refused though, to give up the leg she had struggled so hard to locate.
Tawny grasped the area just behind the calf’s knee and pulled steadily, sliding her hand, inch-by-inch as she went along the back of the calf’s front leg. She pulled the leg steadily until both feet were visible, side-by-side and sticking out of the cow like a diver.
It wasn’t anything she hadn’t done hundreds of times before, but it still amazed her. Most times, after all that tugging and pulling on a calf, they always seemed fine.
Sensing things had been made right for her, the old cow strained mightily, lifting her head with her effort and bellowing in her pain. In a gush of yellow and blood-tinged fluid, the bull calf slid the rest of the way out and a few moments later, the afterbirth.
Slowly, Tawny stood to her feet, massaging her aching arm.
Her belly burned from the abrasion of the sand and snow, after helping the cow deliver the large calf. Wet, cold dirt slid down her jeans and into her boots. In another hour, it’d be light, and she looked forward to it.
The sun wouldn’t warm things up too much, but anything beat the bitter eight degrees that had registered on her pickup truck thermometer when she’d pulled up out here.
She was just glad she’d been able to make it out in time to save the cow and calf. The cows in this pasture were older and experienced. Most of the time, these cows didn’t need help. She couldn’t help feeling frustrated that her repeated suggestions to move to a more planned calving schedule had been ignored by her boss.
But it wouldn’t change. She’d been down that road before with her boss. Now she just found herself grateful that she had been able to save this calf and that she still had a job out here, in the country she loved.
She knew it was partly a credit to people like Curtis Barnes and other ranchers in the area who liked her.
You just can’t survive here and get anything accomplished without other folk, no matter how odd and nutty they seem. The thought danced through her mind and as quickly was met with the other truths about certain characters.
But that is how it was out here. Connecting with others was a double-edged sword, Tawny knew the community could be the warmest blanket of healing she had found and at the same time had shown itself willing to “kill” with its biting gossip and hateful judgment.
But today? Well, today I was on its good side.
Curtis was a strange old bird, but a good rancher. He paid close attention to his neighbor’s cattle as well as his own.
Mostly because he’s always checkin’ to make sure none of us have any of his cows.
The thought made her smile, thinking of times she had spotted him watching her with field glasses from the road when she gathered calves. She knew his glasses were focused on the brands of each calf.
But this morning, when he called, he had spotted the struggling cow on his way home from, she couldn’t remember where, at 2:00 in the morning. He had called Tawny’s cell phone, startling her awake.
It was nothing short of a miracle that she’d even had enough cell phone signal to get the call. Tawny glanced at her grimy watch now. If she hurried, she could catch a few winks before the workday began. She looked down at the cow. Muted light sprinkled the well-bred Hereford with a wisp of morning light, which eased politely over the edge of the Gloss Mountains. She nudged the white-faced cow with a well-worn boot.
“Come on old girl, get up now ‘n feed yer baby.”
The cow struggled to her feet.
Then, faster than Tawny expected, the cow spun around and faced her. The horned Hereford wore a look Tawny knew all too well and instinctively the young woman darted toward her pickup with the hot breath of a pissed-off mamma cow on her back.
She dove under the flatbed, kicking snow and sand into a frosty work of art, as she slithered as far as possible away from the menacing reach of the snorting beast.
The red, white-faced cow thrust her horns against the side of the truck. A wobbling T-post driver clinked and chimed on the back of the truck, as she hit the edge of the flatbed again, threatening to roll it. Tawny wondered for a split second if she might wind up like ole Charles York. York had been killed not even two years ago, by an enraged cow whose calf he had dared to touch.
But Tawny was lucky today. For some unknown reason, the cow turned and trotted away, as if she had lost interest.
For a moment, Tawny lay beneath the frigid undercarriage of her truck and thanked whatever gods may be for this latest twist of luck.
Scooting on her belly, she inched toward the edge of the pickup, ready to dart back under if the cow returned. Peeking around the front tire, she found herself face to face with the front legs of a large bay horse.
A man, bundled so well she couldn’t see his face sat atop the big bay gelding and almost casually, he pointed his Marlin 30-30 at her and wiggled it as he used his hands to talk.
“Thought I might have to shoot her,” Landry said and then laughed.
“Of course I didn’t see the bank robber.”
What a stupid question. How do these people get into these positions of power?
The young woman sat frozen across from the detective and wished she could express her true thoughts.
“I was looking at the floor, because I had a gun pointed at my head.” She sighed and shook her head of straight, blond hair as she made the explanation.
That kind of fear would pretty much make anyone look at the floor, Tippi Townsend guessed.
Tippi didn’t understand why this particular bit of information seemed to be suspicious to the cops now.
It’s funny, she thought, as she sat in Detective Charles Wheelen’s badly decorated office. The things that go through your mind when you think you might die. Not funny, ha-ha but just funny in that weird way.
“Have you ever noticed the tile on the floor of the bank?” She looked up at Wheelen from her uncomfortable position in the much-too-low chair on the other side of his desk. “It’s really horrible and cracked. I never realized that until now.”
The reality was, that sitting on the floor of the Cattleman’s Exchange Bank of Cheyenne with a gun pointed at her, was unimaginable to the new college graduate and journalist.
This was God’s country, the most peaceful part of the United States she knew. Now, in the police department being questioned as a witness to a crime, was in some ways even worse than those few terrifying moments.
“Can we get back to what happened?” Wheelen shook his head and let his eyes sweep the floor of his own office for a moment.
“That is what happened. While I was forced to look at the floor, because he said he’d shoot me if I looked at him, I noticed how shoddy the tile floor of the bank is getting.” Tippi folded her arms. “And that’s why I didn’t have much of an opportunity to see the man. Does that explain it any better?”
God, I can tell they are new at this. Tippi hoped her thoughts were not readable on her face. She felt herself resisting the temptation to roll her eyes at each of his ridiculous questions.
She doubted there had ever been a bank robbery or anything else exciting in this small town.
Though, the truth was, she was also new at this kind of thing.
She was only 25 years old and hoping to survive at least one more day when this all went down. So she hadn’t even thought about doing anything heroic at the time.
I mean, who thinks of that? Besides, heroics had never been her strong suit.
And who the Hell ever thought anyone would rob the damn bank way out here? Does it even have any money? I know they don’t get much from me.
Tippi mulled through her thoughts, while Wheelen walked silently over and seemed to study a framed photo of his family hanging on the cheap paneling of the otherwise empty wall.
“Are you sure you didn’t see his face? Maybe even a small part of it?” The Lieutenant, in his new uniform and big black boots that looked a little too military for community policing, asked the question without turning from the photo. He reminded Tippi of the SS officers she’d seen in movies about the Holocaust. For some reason, he felt menacing to her.
“Oh right, yeah, I forgot. I shook his hand, and we have a date later this week.”
“Damn Tippi, there’s no reason to be like that, we’re just doing our job,” Wheelen said, as he turned abruptly and faced her.
“No, you’re not. You’re treating me like I know something that I don’t. I just want to remind you, hey, it’s me, the reporter who has worked right beside you, covering every crime in this area for two years, and suddenly you’re treating me like I’m one of ‘em?”
“I’m not saying you’re one of them,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air, letting them slap the sides of his thighs.
“I’m just wondering if there was anything that might have caught your attention.”
“There was nothing,” she said, flatly.
She needed to be convincing. There had, indeed, been something. It was a niggling in the back of her mind she wasn’t talking about because she couldn’t really put her finger on it.
It’s that kind of knowledge hidden somewhere in your head, like a familiar scent that wafts past you and you remember it from somewhere, but you can’t identify it.
It bothered her even now.
She tilted her head as if she could herd the hint to a part of her brain that could decipher it.
It was true, she had not seen the man. But something did seem vaguely familiar about him. Yet, she wasn’t sure about anything at that moment.
The robbery had all been hours ago and she had now, officially, been to work, shot, terrified and awake for 24 hours. These were things that she never thought she’d be doing when she graduated from Columbia University.
“Look, I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told the sergeant. All I saw, was this man come in the bank with a hat and a wool scarf all the way around his face.”
Tippi paused for a second and looked off into space, as if taking cues from some unseen movie director. “But it was like 100 degrees below zero and if you will recall, everyone was dressed that way.”
She went on. “I didn’t really pay attention to him, because I was filling out my deposit slip and then the next thing I know, he’s screaming in that funny voice for us to all lay down.”
“Why were you in the bank?” Wheelen shot the question at her quickly.
“Well, as hard as it is to believe, the newspaper does pay me to be a reporter and I was there, as I said, putting my check in the bank.” Tippi rolled her eyes without trying to hide it this time.
“It’s my bank Wheelen. For that matter, it’s your bank. Perhaps I should ask you, why weren’t you there?”
Van rolled his eyes back at her.
The phone rang in Wheelen’s office.
Both jumped in concert with the noise, which seemed louder than normal at this time of the early morning. Everyone, including Tippi had been up all night after the robbery.
Tippi had spent the remainder of the evening and night in the remarkably over-familiar and perhaps somewhat unprofessional emergency room of the Cheyenne County Community Hospital. The police and other witnesses also had a long night. The police had spent the whole night interviewing everyone. They needed all the information they could get, while it was fresh in everyone’s mind.
At any rate, it has all been too much and I am exhausted.
Now, coffee pots all over town were probably sputtering and somewhere, someone would be poking at some frying bacon.
Ladies in the community would be up early, before light, simmering onions and celery for stuffing their Thanksgiving turkeys.
The thought of sizzling bacon made Tippi’s mouth water. She just wanted to go home and sleep for a little while. But Wheelen seemed wide awake. He talked on the phone to someone whose car obviously would not start in the cold weather. He began offering tips on how to get the engine started.
Tippi thought she would explode with impatience. She wasn’t even sure why it was he and not the Sheriff or the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation who was asking these questions.
Tippi stared into space and prayed for the needed strength not to strangle Wheelen.
Great, now were gonna spend another 15 minutes jawing about a car that won’t start on a day when everyone should be at home anyway. It’s Thanksgiving!
She played the events of the previous day again in her mind, but her thoughts were interrupted by a quiet knock on the door. It was the president of Cattleman’s Exchange Bank, Skip Hall.
Wheelen looked and waved the banker into the office and motioned him into the chair beside Tippi.
Skip glanced, with a pleasant but surprised look on his face.
“I thought everyone would have gone home by now. I didn’t think he’d have anyone in here now, especially you.”
Skip leaned his head into his hand and pulled off his hat, loosened the wool scarf around his neck and then leaned toward her to speak quietly.
“You doin’ okay?”
“Yeah, they took me to the hospital right afterward, and I never got a chance to see you, or anyone else after the police came.”
“What did they say about your shoulder?” Skip still whispered, politely avoiding Wheelen’s animated phone conversation.
“It was just a flesh wound,” Tippi said, touching it lightly. “I’m fine.”
Skip patted Tippi on the hand. It was the type of physical offering that Tippi had discovered in small towns was given when there is nothing left to say. She looked at him, questions looming in her mind.
“Did you notice…?” Tippi paused and then changed her mind. “Is everyone else okay?”
“Oh, my secretary Dana, you know her. She’s pretty upset. But I can understand that. She came to this job here because she thought it would be less stressful than the bank she worked for in California and now look what happened.” He laughed a bit at the irony of it all.
Skip was silent for a moment. He leaned forward in the cheap metal chair and it moaned and squeaked in protest.
His elbows perched on his knees and his chin rested in his hands.
“I gotta get outta here.” He signed deeply after he said it.
Tippi’s brow furrowed and for the first time that night, she stopped thinking about herself. He had her full attention. She somehow knew he wasn’t talking about getting out of this office, which was an obvious desire for everyone who had ever likely been forced to sit in it.
“What are you talking about?” Tippi tilted her head toward him.
He sat up, as if he had come to from a dream.
“Now, this is off the record Tippi,” he said and then there was a pregnant pause.
Tippi inwardly cringed. People seemed to think that if they were talking to a reporter, even if it was family, they had to remind her that it was off the record.
As if I report every moment of my life. Tippi ruefully ran through her mind what that autobiographical journal might be like.
Tippi shaves her legs, Tippi takes a slice out of her ankle with razor and all for what? So Tippi can have smooth legs for the cat to rub against. She inwardly cringed at her lack of a love life – or at least one she could talk about.
Now she felt even more irritated, but in this instance, she feigned understanding instead of revealing her frustration. Skip had always been a nice man to her and really to everyone. He was known in the community for his colorful running shorts and he even allowed people to good-naturedly poke fun at him about his running style.
“Of course, Skip. But I’m shocked you would say that. You have been part of this community your whole life.” Tippi said.
“I guess I was just thinking out loud.”
“Yeah, but it meant something.” Tippi whispered and glanced at the look of growing frustration on Wheelen’s face as he walked out of the office, still on his phone with whoever remained stranded with a stalled car.
“I guess, after all the time I have served here at the bank giving out loans, in some cases, loans I probably shouldn’t have allowed, just to keep people afloat and through it all, putting up with more excuses than a first-grade teacher, well, you’d think people would respect the bank enough not to rob it.” Skip shook his head. “I take it personally.”
“You can’t take a random crime personally,” Tippi said, pointing to her arm. “I’m not.”
Skip looked into her eyes in a way that seemed probing for a split second. She could tell, he was intentionally reining in his response.
“I’m not so sure it was random.”
Tippi sat back a bit and widened her eyes at Skip.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I think this was personal.” Tippi leaned closer to Skip and glanced furtively at the office door Wheelen had stepped out of while on the phone.
“Are you saying you know who it was?” Tippi whispered and leaned even closer to the banker.
“I’m saying, I don’t think it was random. That’s all I can say at this point.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because, when he first came in the bank, before he held it up, he did something unique that I think I maybe recognized.”
Tippi was quiet and studied the man, who seemed to wrestle with his own decision to discuss the small detail that seemed to have him so upset.
Then, as if he flipped a switch, he stood and placed his hat on his head.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said and went toward the door.
“Never mind.” Skip waved his hand dismissively at Wheelen, who was coming back into the office and stopped talking for a second and held his hands up in a questioning gesture to Skip.
“It’s nothing important,” he murmured and rushed to pull open the door to the slushy, dark street outside.
“I gotta go home, it’s Thanksgiving and my wife needs me at the house.” The door swung closed behind him and he was gone in a way that made it seem like his being there had all been a dream.
Wheelen looked accusingly at Tippi, his expression questioning her, while simultaneously ending his phone conversation.
“What was that all about?” he asked while he plopped into his squeaking chair behind his desk.
Tippi stood, looking at the door Skip practically ran out of. She turned back to Wheelen and bared her teeth in a fake smile.
“Nothing. He just saw my car here and was checking on me,” she lied. “You know how he is, always helping someone in this town.”
She would probe Skip’s hints later. Right now, Skip seemed bothered and she was afraid if she pushed further, she would spook him, and he’d never say what he was thinking.
What everyone needed now was rest.
Tippi especially needed some sleep to get over this headache that was crawling up her shoulders and kneading its mean fingers into the back of her skull. She was anxious to get Wheelen’s questioning finished and be on her way.
It was early in the morning. Already last night she had missed “Grey’s Anatomy”.
Odd, she thought. After all she had gone through the night before, with the pain throbbing in her shoulder, that missing a television show would matter. But for some reason, the idea of sitting, curled on the couch in front of the familiar television program felt comforting. She was glad she had DVR’d the series.
At any rate, she wanted to be home, not sitting here in the police department with a throbbing shoulder and head that felt like a badly handled bowling ball. She reached around and fingered the tear again in her favorite purple sweater.
“You feel okay?” Wheelen stepped to the other side of his desk again, pulled his big yellow pad toward him and began writing.
A shock of his dark hair fell in the slightest movement to his forehead and for the first time, Tippi realized the man wasn’t too bad looking. Exceptionally tall and in his late 40s, she had never noticed him that way before.
“I’m good,” she said and rested her hands on her lap again. “I am just really tired, and I haven’t eaten.”
Out of nowhere, an overwhelming feeling of grief washed over her. She just wished anyone, Wheelen even, would wrap his arms around her and hold her.
The emptiness of the last two years spent mostly alone, compounded by the events of the day, clawed at her insides like an angry bear. She was incredibly tired-tired of beginning and ending each day talking to herself or Peanut, her cat.
Were it not for the recent secret romance in which she had stupidly become involved, there would have been no one in her life, since she had left Columbia University.
For two years now, her only conversations outside work were with her mother, a successful New York Times journalist, who thought her daughter a failure for taking a job in “Cow Snout, Oklahoma”. It was what her mother called Cheyenne. Those conversations were anything but inspiring.
A tear pooled at the rim of her eye and spilled onto her ivory cheek. But Wheelen didn’t notice.
“One more thing,” he said, dropping the softness that had seeped into his tone just seconds before. “Why do you think he was so focused on you for that few seconds?”
“I guess, because he caught me trying to look at him.” Tippi fiddled with the bullet tear and the bandage covering the wound. She wiped away the hint of emotion overtaking her for a second. “I really don’t know.”
“You know, you were the only one injured in the robbery,” Wheelen continued.
“No shit?” Tippi felt irritable again. “I was there, remember? But I don’t think he meant to shoot anyone. What I saw him do was just shoot into the ceiling, the next thing I knew, I had this stinging in my arm.”
“So, you’re defending him?”
“No, no. What I’m trying to tell you is, while he was in fact, robbing the bank, I just think he intended to scare everyone, not shoot anyone.” Tippi wondered herself, why she felt that the robber was not really a dangerous man. She couldn’t put a finger on it. She just had a feeling.
She suspected Skip had the same feeling. Maybe his was even more than a feeling.
“Why do you think that?”
“Yeah, see, I just really don’t know why I think that. It’s a gut feeling.”
“A gut feeling, huh?”
“Yep”
Tippi rose stiffly from her chair in front of Wheelen’s desk. She was mad at herself for thinking, just a split second earlier, he was at all attractive. He was an asshole. The same unfeeling, festered asshole he’d always been.
“I’m really done now and I’m leaving.” The firmness in her voice surprised even her. She gathered her purple leather bag with her right arm. “If you need anything else, you know where I work.”
“I’ll be in touch.” He leaned back in his chair behind his desk, his fingers interlocked behind his head. Wheelen eyed her as she walked out the door.
Tippi argued with herself. She lay, covered by three blankets in the ash of a cold late morning and thought about what to do next. She had talked to no one after her time with the detective. It was an interview that had run into the wee hours of the morning.
Now she had only gotten two hours of sleep but found herself wide awake.
Usually she talked to her mother and a friend who lived in Oklahoma City about the things that seemed newsworthy here. Most times though, when she heard her own voice trying to explain to her mother the latest news that happened in Cheyenne, her stories fell flat.
Usually it was news like; the Knights of Columbus were having a benefit dance for someone or there had been tornadoes in the area.
Her mother always laughed at the stories.
“Oh, Tippi, that is so quaint. But that isn’t news.”
Tippi’s mother had been terribly successful in her own journalism career. Growing up with a mother who wrote a column for the New York Times had been difficult at best. Now it was the standard by which she judged herself every minute of every day.
“When are you going to apply at a real newspaper,” her mother would say and then invariably, their phone conversation would be interrupted.
“Oh, honey, I really must go. I have to prepare for my interview with the Prime Minister of Nepal.”
Tippi always laughed on the phone when her mother said those things. She did not want her mother to know that her comments were hitting pay-dirt.
She invariably followed up with excuses for why she was living and working here, at this blip on the map. Still, inside, the comments stung and even worse, frightened her. Would she end up a single old woman in this one-horse town? Would she report ice cream socials the rest of her life? Underneath her fake smile, it had been a fear that drove her.
Now, she had a real story, with all the appeal of a great article. Something stopped her from calling her mother to gloat despite the obvious opportunity. She wasn’t sure how to tell anyone, especially her mother, a story like this. She was even surer she didn’t want her mother’s controlling “help” while she wrote this one.
“Nope, mom, you’ll just have to read this one after I write it.” The sound of her own voice surprised her and Peanut.
This was no benefit supper. This was not something a community would whisper about, like some of the scandalous improprieties people brought her and called “fact” from time to time, asking her to write a story.
No, this was a hot news story that people would talk about in the open. It would be the event that caused excited chatter in coffee shops all over town and they would get their information from stories written by her. The thought made her blood boil.
She knew it was a chance to write a news story only she could write. It would be from a perspective not often found in the news about violent events. It would be from someone who was there.
She sat up and put her feet on the carpeting of her bedroom. She leaned to stand. Pain cut a jagged path from her shoulder into her lower arm and made her stop short for a moment.
She didn’t care that it was Thanksgiving. She had no one, nothing to stop her from what she needed to do and so she pushed past the pain and shuffled to her bathroom.
Tippi’s cell phone chirped, vibrated and danced off the bedside table. It found a resting place on the wadded-up sweater she had thrown on the floor, before crawling into bed. She reached for it with her right hand and awkwardly held it to her face.
“Hello?”
“Tippi, this is Lt. Wheelen. I was wondering if you would come back in today. I had a couple more questions to ask you.”
“You’re kidding right? It’s Thanksgiving. Why aren’t you waking up to the scent of turkey basting or something like that?”
“I was just putting all of the interviews together in my mind and needed to fill in the gaps that seem to be there about what happened yesterday.”
A knot formed in the pit of Tippi’s stomach. She wondered if Skip had gone back to talk to the detective. She had wanted to get to him first and now silently cussed herself for needing to sleep.
“Well, okay. I got a couple hours of sleep, and I was heading into the newspaper this morning anyway.” Tippi was more comfortable now that she had a plan. She found herself less irritated and certainly less intimidated by the cop.
“But I am working on a story about this and so, frankly, I have some questions for you too.”
“It’s a deal,” he said in an uncharacteristically upbeat way. She frowned at her phone as she hit the tiny red button. He was not typically a deal maker.
Tippi hopped out of bed, slipped into a long sleeved, fitted cotton dress and some pink ballet slippers.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and no one would be at the paper except the editor, Hank.
Hank was always at the paper. Like many older news men, the newspaper was his life. He would be putting the paper together for Black Friday. It wouldn’t matter what she wore.
