Fumbling fingers argued with a thick zipper on a pair of chaps.
“Why can’t things just work,” the man asked himself.
Giving that up for a second, the man turned his attention to untangling his clothes, wrinkled and stuffed into a black leather bag, scarred by abuse.
He wondered how long this job would take.
Grabbing a wadded-up handful of shirts, he gave them a yank and pulled them out of the black bag in a colorful mass. He marveled that he could have fit so many into the small luggage.
“Hmmm? They look like they are breeding.”
Unceremoniously, he stuffed them into the little wooden drawer sitting next to the wood stove in this tiny bunkhouse.
He straightened, looking around the room and then reached for an opened Miller Light and sucked down the last of it. Absently, he crushed the can with his thumb and forefinger and put the empty can on the dresser, opened the tiny fridge and snatched another out of the cardboard case. He popped the top and it hissed at him. He liked the sound of it. It was something he knew in yet another new place he didn’t know.
He’d driven all night to get there.
It was early. Only about 7 a.m. if that ole’ clock there on the cedar dresser was right, Early, to be drinking so hard.
But he needed it, he reasoned with himself when the thought raced through his mind.
In fact, he’d come to find he needed it more and more these days and for that matter, earlier and earlier.
It’s what he chose though, this life of moving around, doing these jobs. It’s fucked up, the way they count on me for these things.
He liked the money though.
And there was no way I could have kept cowboyin’ like I was after my last wreck. Even with these short jobs, I hurt all the time.
He remembered how it had all started, two years ago when the two FBI agents had investigated the cattle operation he worked on and finally how he had been used by those two agents to bring his own boss down.
To be sure, he thought now, they had been right to investigate the guy. I didn’t have no gripe with that.
Zeke Shepherd knew when he signed onto that New Mexico ranch back then, that something wasn’t right.
There was just sumthin’ about the cattle coming in and then disappearing just days later – not dying, just disappearing. I shudda known from the start.
He’d never loaded those cattle, like on all the other operations he had worked. He never saw anyone else load them to sell. He’d just get there in the morning and the boss would just say he’d sold the ugly things the night before.
The cattle her aways the worst looking cattle that came out of Mexico that he’d ever seen. They were sick, gaunt and potbellied. He wondered who would purchase such poor looking cattle in the first place.
But just after two or three days there, he started knowing – or thinking he knew the game.
He would never have become involved in any of it though and he had already begun to know he would have to make a plan to get out of it now that he had.
Like all the times before, he would have packed his saddle and his shitty little black bag into his battered white Ford pickup and struck out again.
There wasn’t anything he didn’t know how to do, and starving had never scared him. Indeed, he had planned to do that very thing – to leave when he started feeling suspicious about that ranch owner.
But the day before he was planning to leave, it happened.
That roan mare he was riding stumbled and the two of them went down.
Zeke absently reached to the back of his neck and massaged himself, as if even remembering the event hurt him.
He had lain there after the roan had kicked free of him. The other hands had run to him with those looks on their faces.
“My back’s broke,” he had managed to say between gritted teeth.
It was days later, still naked and complaining in the hospital, when those two agents came to him. They knew he was thousands of dollars into the hospital, not to mention the air ambulance ride for which he’d never asked and was now paying thousands on each several months.
Hell, like I needed another problem.
He thought of it now and snorted, shaking his head and taking another swallow of the beer.
He wasn’t amazed when the agents informed him, while he was still in the hospital, that he just happened to be working for one of the most wanted drug smugglers at that time.
“Yeahhhhh,” he said that day. “I was beginnin’ to wonder about this dude.”
“Your boss has been smuggling dope inside those calves’ bellies,” Agent Thornton had told him.
He thought of it now and it still sickened him.
Some guys’ll do anything for a buck.
Now, he fancied darkly, he was one of those guys that would do anything for a buck.
That was when the deal was made.
Zeke wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to it. He figured now it was because he needed the money.
Hell, they paid my hospital bill and for the air ride before they ever came to me. What could I do? I couldn’t say no.
Even now, Zeke still spent a lot of time justifying it. Still, he knew his decision had not been in keeping with who he knew he was. He had always shunned money for freedom. He still found himself searching for the answer to that question. Why had he agreed to it? It didn’t matter though. He was here now, two years later on this ranch just outside Cheyenne, Oklahoma.
Zeke had taken his job as a fixer-a hack-so rough around the edges that he could fit into any small community, undetected and unfettered by things like the law.
After two years of it, the things he did, pressuring, even threatening witnesses and sometimes just roughing them up a little, seemed almost normal. He had justified it, at least to himself. He was not doing this to average citizens. These weren’t your average people.
Most were up to their asses in crime already. So what if I helped fudge their convictions a little. They were already bad guys and needed to be taken out.
Lately though, his association with the two agents bothered him somewhere deep in his gut.
They amazed him, really. How did they know when things would happen? How could they set him up somewhere – almost before it would happen? It frightened him more than the baddest bronc he’d ever ridden.
He amazed them too though. It amazed them how he could saunter into a community like this and wriggle into the most closed criminal elements without effort. He could fit in and leave with no one being the wiser he was ever involved in bringing them down or even remembering that he was there at all.
He knew why they dogged him. He knew if he was not so good at this, they’d have let him go a year ago.
Once, he had tried to leave. Found a ranch on the “high-line” in Montana. They tracked him down.
He thought of it now and cursed.
Just when I started dreamin’ bout a little spread somewhere with some cows and shit, nuthin’ but that hard ass prairie around me, they’d show up and remind me of what I was. It had all been fer them, but that don’t matter. They got me, dead-to-rights.
Zeke conversed with himself silently. And now, a growing dread filled his gut when he thought of them.
They’ll hurt me if I try to break away.
He was a tough cowboy, one of the toughest. Part of what made him good at his job was his sense of people. His sense of the two agents these days prickled the skin on the back of his head.
Now his life had become nothing but moving, trying to fit in to his surroundings and suck up any information he could for them to catch their mark. Later, he’d hear about it sitting in a bar somewhere alone in another town. It would be a town where he would allow himself, for just a moment, to dream about settling and becoming a part of. He’d look into the eyes of some pretty café waitress just a second longer than necessary. But he would ultimately leave the possibility of her and her warmth in the rear-view mirror like dozens of other towns and other women.
Hell, don’t even have time for a woman, hadn’t known one for three years and who’d want me now anyway.
He was nothing like he was before.
He glanced on the wall. A calendar, made up of bad western art, hung there. It was turned to the month of November. He walked over to it and rested his finger on it.
“Hmm,” he said quietly. “It’s Thanksgiving Day. Who knew?”
He gazed out the window at two people, a woman and a man, talking near what must be the feed mill.
He stepped back to the small bed, let his whole weight fall onto the bed, and then stared up at the gnarled wood slats in the ceiling.
Zeke Shepherd put away another Miller Light and reached in the box for a replacement.
He needed to sleep. He had a long day ahead of him later and his work, both on the ranch and for the agents, had already begun when he got to know the owner of the operation, a man named Dwight Morris, who had reluctantly agreed to “hire” him. Later he’d been scheduled to meet some gal who ran the ranch where he’d set up as a hand-his cover for this op.
It’d be a good cover, ‘cept, I never had to work for no woman before. Who lets a woman run his ranch? His laugh sounded like a snort.
Zeke gulped again on the beer and wished it were a Crown and water. Like he had been doing for a while now, he’d dull the pain in his neck and back with alcohol and drift into a sleep, the kind that closes the door to dreaming.
The espresso machine gurgled and sputtered, drawing Tawny back from her memories. She filled a ceramic cup she had picked up at an estate sale and stared out the window again. She raised the cup to no one and toasted herself.
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
She walked over to Maggie and petted the dog’s head.
“Another Thanksgiving bites the dust ole girl.”
But then again, that was the way out here. No one on this operation ever expected to have the day off. Ranches don’t stop for the holidays. Everyone knew that and just worked harder and faster so those who had family could cram in a little holiday meal, maybe some family time.
Tawny plopped onto her bed, set the cup on the side table and sighed. She could take as long as she wanted today and every holiday.
No one is waitin’ on me for dinner.
It was these days she thought most of her past. She knew things would have been different if she had just stayed at the firm.
All that stuff had been so long ago, it seemed, and yet on days like this, it could have been yesterday.
She bent now and looked at her reflection in the old Depression-glass mirror. The mirror glass seemed to actually grow out of the gnarled, cedar dresser. She reached out and touched the wood lightly with her index finger. She wondered for a moment how old the piece was and who it really belonged to before it ended up in the bunkhouse of this ranch. She liked it for its imperfections-knots and rings that raised the wood slightly and the discoloration in places.
She pulled her chestnut hair into a ponytail and glanced at the clock that ticked audibly on the bedside table. Looking out the window, the early light of morning spilled over an ominous looking group of clouds in the eastern sky, angering the sunrise into a naughty shade of red.
It wouldn’t be easy today-Snow was melting from the last storm that had dumped ice and snow over terribly dry fields. The roads to the pastures would be crap. It would be a pain in the ass, those roads to the north of the ranch. Even in her four-wheel-drive, flatbed Ford it would mean getting stuck a few times. Of course, she would have to get herself out, since she could never get a cell phone signal out there.
She looked at her cell now-mute of course.
For the love of God, when would they ever put a tower out here?
She almost dreaded counting heifers this morning.
With the storm coming, she knew she would be short one or two and then would have to go find them.
With a twist and a jerk she opened the warped wood door of her bunkhouse and stepped out on her small wooden deck.
“Git out here Maggie,” she said to her dog. The dog opened her eyes, stood halfway, and froze, as if to say “really?”
“Come on you, git up.”
With a deep sigh, the dog stretched, yawned, and then trotted to the door and outside.
Sighing deeply, Tawny stared across the horizon.
With a flick of her wrist, her lukewarm coffee found a snow pile from the last storm and burrowed, brown and grainy into it.
Tawny grabbed her blood and mud stained Carhartt and slipped it on over her gray flannel shirt, tucked haphazardly into faded Wranglers. She slammed a felt liner over her head and then a leather hat.
The radio crackled to life when she started the diesel engine. The ranch hands were already up and talking. She glanced at her watch. It was late for them.
“Yeah, they don’t have a suspect yet.” It was Ronnie’s voice.
She wrinkled her brow. A suspect for what, she wondered? She’d ask him later, when she loaded her horse for the day.
Ronnie was the maintenance manager for the entire operation.
Hard bitten, thin and worn from a life he’d chosen despite its effect on him, Ronnie was energetic and always up on the latest gossip.
Tawny counted on him to keep her informed, since she had all but withdrawn from any kind of social life. Unlike her, he was intensely social and always knew what was going on in town.
Of course, he knows, because everything that happens gets told and retold and reinvented at Roy’s Place in town where he likes to spend all of his off time.
Yes, she would corner him later and ask him what was up. He would know.
Someone probably stole the county tractor and parked it in the middle of town. Tawny giggled.
“Load up Maggie, let’s go.”
