New snow and mud tires crunched over icy gravel lining the drive of the log mansion. Tawny studied the massive dwelling, still amazed by its beauty even though she had visited it so many times in the last four years.
She strode, in long meaningful steps toward the back door. A panting, ugly Catahoula dog curled up on the porch next to the fireplace. It peered out intently from behind the porch stove with ice blue eyes.
Tawny walked to the door and knocked, keeping her eye on the dog, which simply smiled back with a crooked doggy smile and thumped its tail.
She glanced at her reflection in the glass door and re-tucked the gray flannel, realizing she had missed a snap on her shirt in her zeal to redress moments earlier.
She pulled the snaps open, baring again goose-pimply skin and a sadly worn bra that was missing an underwire, something she figured happened when she took her clothes to Bab’s Laundromat in town.
For a second, she cupped her hand and lifted her left breast to the same level as the right and shook her head. She needed to make it to town and do some shopping, but when would she ever get time?
Pulling the shirt back together, she fought with stubborn, rusty snaps as the door jerked opened with a bark.
“Well, good morning, Tawny. I’ll just let you get dressed then come on in when yer ready,” her boss said with a snort.
“I was just…oh… never mind dammit, it doesn’t matter.” She dropped her arms to her sides and her head down in a defeated gesture. “I’m sorry”
“Well, it sure ain’t the first time I’ve seen you undress. He laughed and went on. “Remember that? You had spent the whole night downing vodka shots at Roy’s Place then tried to drive my ranch truck home on back roads. Ended up in the Deer Trail Cemetery.”
“Uh, yeah. Do we have to go there right now,” Tawny asked. She was puzzled by Dwight already seeming a little like he was in the jar.
“Yeah, let’s do go there because I think it’s funny,” Dwight said with an ornery twinkle in his eye.
He looked over at his desk and spoke to someone Tawny had not noticed in the room.
She moved to the left and leaned to get a better view of the person.
“Zeke, when she called me and I got out there, she was high centered on ol’ Charles York’s grave-And by God, they just buried ‘im the day before.”
Morris leaned over and let out a belly laugh.
Tawny’s face was hot, and her skin pricked as if a million needles were just under it.
“Really?” Tawny made a face at her boss. “Do we need to talk about this?”
“I’m sorry for my boss, he likes to make jokes,” she said to whomever this man was.
Wide plank, oak flooring reflected the flames in the fireplace on the north wall of the office. A rough sawn liquor cabinet sat, partially open and Tawny knew her boss usually had a little whiskey in his coffee this morning. But this seemed to be more like full on cocktail hour. It had become his ritual since his wife, Marilyn had died four years earlier.
“Yes, we do need to do this. Lighten up Tawny.” His eyes glassy and sharp.
“I tell you Zeke,” he continued despite her growing irritation, “She was so drunk that when I got there and started trying to get the truck off-a-ol’ Charles, she didn’t know she was standing on a red ant pile and all of a sudden,” he laughed even harder and slapped Zeke-whoever-he-was, on the shoulder before continuing, “She starts yanking off her jeans and shirt, right there in the cemetery. Thank God ol’ York was dead already, cause it would’a plumb killed ‘im.”
Morris snorted and chortled all the way back to his seat behind his desk.
“God, I bet York would be sorry about missing that show though.”
Morris gripped the coffee cup and poured yet, another bourbon.
Zeke, smiled in a relaxed, confident way, as if drinking at this hour was perfectly normal. Fine lines fanned out from his eyes, seeming to meet the well-worn, black 100X perched on his head.
He took his own coffee cup and sipped, hiding a smirk behind it.
“We’ve all been there lady.” His voice was deep and slow.
Tawny stood angrily with her arms folded, staring silently into the fire, and waiting for the “fun” to end.
“Tawny,” Morris said her name almost officially, changing the subject abruptly, “This is Zeke Shepherd.”
She turned toward the man, not understanding who he was, other than his name.
God I hate meeting people and now this man has a vision of me jumping around on the graves of others, taking my clothes off in a drunken stupor; Lovely.
He looked at her, stood slowly, took off his hat, and shook her hand.
A salt and pepper mustache hid his upper lip. His head, from the forehead up was white, revealing the clear outline of a hat protecting his head from years of sun. His hair was salt and pepper as well.
Tawny thought he looked younger than his hair seemed to indicate, but she wasn’t sure why she thought that, because otherwise he looked bent and slightly injured.
He wore a wrinkled but expensive cotton blue western shirt with snaps-a Wrangler.
She wondered if he were an oilman who did business with Mr. Morris. However, she dismissed that thought, since she didn’t sense the hoity-toity, “I don’t give a shit about landowners” attitude from this man that was always present with oil company executives.
Yet the hat was so expensive, no cowpuncher could afford it. Nevertheless, his hands belied years of work, the kind leaving fingers thick and rough. His nails were as scarred tree branches, bumpy and damaged. Faded Wranglers bunched a bit and hid a somewhat slender frame. Tawny guessed he knew the back of a horse.
“Welcome to the Bar-G Ranch,” she stepped forward to shake his hand.
She knew she sounded too formal. But with his new visual of her jumping on someone’s grave, drunk and undressed, she had to regain some dignity.
Tawny puzzled for a second, not hiding the question in her face.
She sat in the rawhide chair to the man’s left. The slightest scent of leather and cigarette smoke tickled her nose.
What can I do for you, Mr. Morris?
“I have just hired Zeke here to help you with the heifer herd.”
She screwed her face into frown. She felt the skin on the bridge of her nose wrinkle and she did not care.
“Huh? Is there some reason I need help? I mean, have I let something fall down?” Morris rolled his eyes. He knew she would react this way.
Like every split tail, he had ever known or worked with. They thought everything you did had to mean something.
“Nope, the herd is gettin’ bigger, just like I planned it would and you can’t calve-out all those first-calf heifers alone out there. It gets dangerous and I knew you could use the help at times. Besides, I don’t like to see any of my hands working seven days a week. That’s what you been doin’.”
Tawny sat frozen, as if she’d just walked up on a coiled rattlesnake, not wanting to say too much or, for that matter, too little. She struggled to control the movements of her face. People always told her she was easy to read. Now, she could feel and knew he could see all the emotions creeping into her brow.
She knew, as soon as she left, she would have all the right things to say, all the sharp and intelligent responses would come to her and mean nothing because they were too late. It was the one ability she lost when she left the world of law to come here. Seemed like when she came to the ranch, she had begun reacting the way she had when she was a young girl working with her father-quiet, pensive, and not at all confident.
“Okay, I guess then you just need to know I start at 5:30 in the morning.”
She turned to Zeke when she said it but did not look at him. Instead, she looked over his head and added, “Don’t be late.”
Leaning forward in the rawhide chair, hoping to signal her desire to get back outside, she looked at Morris in hopes this meeting, whatever it was, was over with for now.
He saw her face and with a knowing grin waved his hand at her.
“Go on Tawny that will be all I need. Just help him learn the lay of the ranch and introduce him to the other hands.”
The whole time, she heard Zeke speak very little. Otherwise, he seemed content where he was with little concern and no reaction to her obvious dislike for the fact he was there and was now privy to one of her most humiliating moments.
Morris’s blue eyes captured hers before she left.
“Make it work,” he said in a quiet tone, tinted with warning and ushered her outside to the porch.
His snow-white hair, cropped close, looked thin to her.
For the first time, Tawny noticed she could see Morris’s scalp under his hair. It struck her suddenly, in the time she had been there, he had really aged. It was like she was seeing him for the first time in a year and yet, had she been that busy?
“You feelin’ okay?” she said absentmindedly.
She walked over and scratched the head of the dog she now knew must belong to the man she’d just met. She was more relaxed now that they’d left the stranger inside.
The dog lifted its head and smiled at her. The fur on his back was warm from lying almost directly under the wood stove.
“I’m fine Tawny,” he said. “Just not gettin’ any younger is all. But what I want to know is what’s eatin’ at you?”
“Oh, crap, I don’t know, I just know I have gotten along real fine on my own out there and I like being alone while I work.”
“Yep, I noticed that.” He took a log from a neatly stacked pile and placed it cautiously on the fire. “But you gotta live and git off this ranch girl. You can’t hide out here forever. I know your dad is mad as hell. I know that. But you gotta move on.”
“Dwight, it’s kinda hard to move on from one’s parents.”
He sat back down on the wood bench near the stove.
“He’s a dad. He’ll come round. And you need to be makin’ those hairy-legged boys take you out and wine you and dine you. I won’t go fer you wastin’ yourself out here. I won’t let it be my fault.”
She ignored the second comment.
“You don’t know my dad.”
The smell of the fire reached Tawny’s cold, red nose and she felt suddenly sleepy. A large yawn escaped.
“See, yer not gettin’ enough rest.”
Tawny scanned the horizon to the wild beyond the porch.
The Gloss Mountains were her boss’s view. They were jagged, painted red, yellow, and purple by the fickle hand of wind and water. Nothing friendly here she fancied and yet as striking and emotional as any work of art she’d ever seen.
Looking at her boss now, she realized this place must have struck him as any beautiful woman, risky enough to avoid but too tempting to pass up. For that matter, he hadn’t passed on either one. He’d come out here to this ranch with Marilyn because she loved it so much and her love had become his again.
The ranch was beyond where most would travel and so most missed the beauty hidden within the Gloss Mountains. Those jagged draws, and crevices cropped out of an otherwise unremarkable pasture. The freedom, exhaustion and total surrender you felt when you and your horse both breathed hard to climb through the rugged ground there, was hard to explain to an outsider.
Tawny sighed deeply, knowing another winter was only starting. Morris groaned as he stood and moved to the door.
“A storm’s a coming in. I meant to tell you. Oh, and keep an eye out. I guess there was a bank robbery yesterday and the law thinks the guy is still hidin’ out in the area.”
“I thought so,” she said and looked east at the sun as it struggled to be noticed behind a bank of growing clouds.
“I noticed the clouds this morning. When is it supposed to hit?”
“Not until tomorrow night. It’s a storm coming down from Colorado and it has already dumped 12 inches of snow out there. It’s stalling out wherever it goes.”
“Great. The cattle market is takin’ a crap on us and now so is the weather?”
“Yep,” Morris said, engrossed in a letter he had plucked from the wooden mail box near the door and was opening while he talked with her.
“I already heard ‘bout the robbery. Heard he got away on a horse. You’d think that’d be easy to spot-a horse chuggin’ down the road with a guy holding a huge bag o’ money.” Tawny rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, they think he had a trailer nearby, that’s not so easy to spot. Any given day in Cheyenne, well you know. Bout everyone here is driving through town with a trailer.”
“Yeah, probably 20 or 30 trailers with horses and cattle. You’d have to stop every one of em I guess. But surely this guy is gone from this area?” Tawny settled on the bench by the fire. “By the way, I ran into Landry Minor early this morning when I was out calving one of those cows on the west river pasture. Said he was looking for some cows that got out from his place,” Tawny added.
“Don’t know. Odd he would be looking on our place? His dad’s place is several miles from ours. Anyway, just keep an eye out and let’s get ready for this storm. I don’t want either one of you out calving a heifer in this storm and you know how they like to start calving when the weather changes.” He turned back toward the polished oak door.
“Try to bring the first-calf heifers in closer if you can move ‘em today.”
“Yep. I’ve already got most of the heifers that are calving in the near pasture, but I will make sure I bring in anything else that might be close to calving, hay everything else and just leave water runnin’ a little bit.”
The sun peeked over the horizon. Light from a muted sun twinkled and shimmered off a thin layer of snow fallen in the night. It filtered into the window like glitter from a child’s art project and dusted the sleeping woman’s face.
Tawny sat upright in her small feather bed, thickening the air with frost. She had not stoked her fire all night, choosing again, in the twilight of the earliest hours, the warmth of the bed.
She glanced, panic stricken at the clock on her bedside table.
The blue digital read 6:03.
“Oh no!” Frost rode bareback on the words.
She galloped around the room jumping into the same jeans she had on the day before, despite the mud that caked the hem. They were stiff at the bottoms, where they had dried in front of the fireplace, but no one would notice. No one really noticed her at all anyway.
Hopping on one foot and struggling with a boot, she tried to brush her teeth.
Tiny flecks of toothpaste shot this way and that as she repeated the word she used at times like this. Her mom hated it. She told her once that “the F-bomb” offended her. Someday, she would attempt to work it out of her vocabulary. For now, it seemed a good fit.
Still dressing, she hopped to the window. What? Hardly any snow; where was the storm, they had all talked about?
“Geez,” she said aloud in a sleepy voice.
That damn weatherman. All that work yesterday movin’ those heifers and now he was probably wrong all along. What else is new about that?
There would be no coffee this morning and she’d be worthless without it, groggy all day. There would be a headache, the one that ached all the way down her back when she was riding her horse. It happened every time she skipped the brew. She had always claimed to be drug free, but she knew if coffee were outlawed, she’d be doin’ time.
She hopped down the steps of the bunkhouse, sniffed her armpits, threw on her Carhartt and hat, and trotted to the pens.
Arriving at the door of the loafing shed, she stopped for a moment, pointlessly smoothed her clothing, and thought up a lie to tell.
The warmth of the shed enveloped her as she pulled the wooden door shut behind her.
The smell of alfalfa swirled around her as inquisitive heads popped up from eating to see who had interrupted their breakfast.
A rustling sound over her head captured her attention. She glanced up just in time to see a bale of hay coming toward her. She jumped sideways to get out of the way, but the bale caught her and shoved her to the ground.
She sat in shock for a moment, not even sure if she had fully awakened yet.
Looking up, she saw Zeke squatting near the edge of the small hayloft, peering at her with his freaky cat yellow eyes while he tried to hide an amused grin.
“Well mornin’ Tawny.” Not a hint of regret for almost killing her.
His skin was the most curious olive tone, with an average sized nose that curved, in the slightest way, downward. His mustache was full but well-trimmed. It followed a line into what she recognized was what anyone else would call a Fu-man-chu. She thought it curious for a cowboy to wear, since she had always associated that type of facial hair with prisoners and bikers. And yet, when she thought about it, yes, several of the guys in town working for other outfits wore the style.
Typical, some worthless cowboy she’d have to share time with. That’s just great.
Again, she wrinkled her brow into a question mark; an expression those who knew her would say preceded all her questions. This time though, it was about why this guy was here in the first place.
The day had been so hectic yesterday; she’d had little time to consider his presence. She was sick and tired of men who came along to the ranch wanting to be a cowboy, finding out later, that here everyone actually works every day.
Many of them came and went before a month’s time. Oh, they would be good for a couple of weeks, but then, they’d start calling in with a litany of excuses.
But most of the time, Tawny knew they were just laid up, drunk somewhere with whoever they could get to go home with them that night from Roy’s Place in town.
Zeke hopped to the ground and thrust his thick, labor-roughened hand toward her in a silent offer to help her up.
She reached out, slapped his hand away and got up on her own. She silently brushed the specks of hay from her coat.
“You might just, oh…I don’t know…look before you toss hay from up there.
She walked away and pretended to look at her gelding, a small, rangy gray of indeterminate breeding and bad feet.
“Well, I guess, lookin’ at the hour, I thought you might have died last night.” He chuckled at his own joke.
“I was up.” she talked into the gray’s neck. “I was…at Lexi’s Cafe in town.”
Zeke raised his eyebrows a bit, amused by her obvious lie.
Was that a pillow crease on the side of her cheek?
He began saddling for the day and thought about how he could get done here and get to town to listen around for the information he was there to gather. He sensed she would make it hard for him to do his real job.
He peered over the whither of his mare at her as she silently ran a brush over her gray.
This was gonna be just as bad as he thought it was.
You’d think if some gal was runnin’ the place, she’d be more like a guy. I wonder if she even likes guys?
He ran his hand over the back of his ole’ piebald mare. He’d been dragging her from place to place. She was as tired as he was and needed a break in a pasture somewhere.
Hell, I need a break in a pasture somewhere too.
“Oh, we’ll saddle them today, but I won’t ride to all the pastures like I usually do. There’s a storm comin’ and I need to take out an extra load of hay to each pasture today.” Tawny spoke the words but never looked at the man. “We’ll have them if we need to rope one, doctor it or go lookin’ for any. I don’t want to lose any time with this storm comin.”
Tawny grabbed a brush and ran it over her gelding while he munched his hay. With a flick of her wrist, she snatched the bridle, and a side pull she had always used on him since breaking him. She glanced over at Zeke as he saddled the huge, piebald with a work-darkened, rough-out saddle. It looked like it had seen more than its fair share of rain, snow and maybe even some time in the mud.
The saddle made her wonder about him again-about where he had come from. She wanted to know how he had shown up and seemed to have so much familiarity with her boss, with whom she had spent the last four years. Why didn’t she know this person if he was close to the family?
Was that what Morris had said though? Hell, I can’t even remember how and why Morris said this guy got here.
She hated that she was sharing her time with someone who would always be at her side. She would never again be able to do the things she normally did when alone working the ranch.
Tawny struggled in a bent backwards position and fought a battle with the mud caked zipper of her chaps. She cringed when she thought of that moment, when she had flung her clothes away the day before and yet was sad that kind of freedom was gone.
Later, as the two made their way to the first pasture, the warmth of the pickup made Tawny feel pleasantly sleepy. With no caffeine pricking her senses, the gentle growling diesel, and the smell of that lavender hanging-thingy she put on the rear-view mirror to keep the normal stink of the pickup to a tolerable level, it all worked together to lure her into a cozy nap time.
“Uh, hello?” Zeke’s deep voice seemed to explode out of the silence.
Tawny jerked awake and righted the pickup before it ran through the neighbor’s brand new, five-strand, barbed wire fence.
The horses scrambled on the wood floor of the trailer.
“Dammit!”
Zeke shook his head a bit and laughed that odd, very annoying, understated laugh she noticed the day before when she met him.
Tawny was beginning to let this guy get under her skin. She didn’t know what it was about him. Maybe he was just not fitting with her independence.
Tawny felt a burning sensation in the back of her neck and her eyes shot open. Her anger at him had woken her up.
She turned off into the drive to the first pasture. It was the largest-a full four sections and she hoped they did not have any cows missing from this herd. It would be a long day if they did. The pickup jerked to a halt in front of the gate.
“Get the gate,” she ordered through gritted teeth.
“Get it yourself.”
Anger played in her face like cloud shadows on the side of a hill.
“Look, I did not ask for you to be here. It was my understanding you were just working here, and I was supposed to be in charge, and you need to understand that.”
Just then, like it always did, it all poured out. God, she had no control when she got wound up.
“I mean, uh, I don’t even know who the hell you are and here I am, drivin’ off into the ranch with you. You could be an ax murderer, or for all I know, the bank robber.”
Zeke looked out the window of the Ford and chewed on a piece of hay that he had been nibbling on since they left the ranch and said nothing.
She stared at him, realizing he had not said anything to discount her stupid statements. She felt herself become even more tense but willed herself to act just as irritated as before. She did not want him to realize the extent of her irritation; but she was a little wiggy he might.
After all, this was someone she had not ever met in town. Who was he?
“Ok, really?” She jerked the door of the pickup forcefully.
“I’ll get the gate since, I have already been the one gettin’ the gates all along, by myself! I bet you do this everywhere you go – let women do your work for you. That’s why you’re here now and not where…ever…wherever the hell you were before you were here.”
Suddenly and without warning, Zeke reached out and grabbed her shoulders firmly and made her face him.
She hadn’t faced him since they began work all day and it bugged him, the way she looked out across his shoulder when they talked and not at him.
His action even surprised him.
I’m losin’ it. How long can I keep this up? How long can I lie about who I am?
She was inches from his face and could smell the faint scent of alcohol, stale and yellow from the night before, and too many Camels, too much everything long-term she guessed.
His weird golden eyes, flecked with brown bits bore into hers with a mixture, she thought of pain and frustration. Odd, she thought, for a bank robber.
He loosened his grip a bit and sighed, more calmly now, and spoke quietly, in a way that even made her more cautious of him.
“Look, you don’t know anything about me,” he said. “You and I’ll get along just fine if you stop acting like the bitch yer actin’ like and start sayin’ please and being polite. Truth is, I don’t want to be here anymore n you want me here.”
Huh? What was that? Why was he here then?
She was suddenly sorry and didn’t know why, or which irritated her more, his attitude or her tension.
What did that mean, him not wantin’ to be here? What was it that changed in a second?
Why did he, just for that second, seem desperate to her, she wondered.
“Could you get the gate?” She asked much more politely, still facing him.
Zeke nodded, released her, brushed his fingerprints off her shoulders, then stepped out of the truck to open the gate.
He left the gate open, and jumped back into the warmth of the pickup, carrying a blast of frigid air with him.
“Wow, it is already getting colder,” she said, trying to return to some normal kind of conversation. She put the truck into gear and eased down the hill to the waiting cows.
The two said nothing and instead watched as large snowflakes, like the ones that tend to fall in the early spring, hit the windshield. A strong wind gently rocked the pickup.
