“Uh oh,” Landry’s voice trailed off into the wind and snow.
He couldn’t even hear it himself. All he could hear was the wind whistling over the brim of his black, felt cowboy hat and the snow hitting his left ear.
He walked his horse back and forth around the spot where he had buried the money. Here he was, just as he had worried – messin’ around tryin’ to find that damn spot, it all looked the same.
Add to it the storm now; and he was not sure he would ever figure it out in time to get this thing done.
His horse danced and turned his rear to wet flakes. It pelted him and made him hump up.
“Don’t you buck me off you ol’ bronc.”
Landry petted the old horse. He was solid but had shown he could break in two and buck hard – like all four feet on a postage stamp hard.
Brownie pawed at the snow and suddenly made Landry think and remember.
That night, when he was burying the money, the horse had pawed the ground near the fence post he’d been tied to. He had pawed it so much that he’d dug a hole near two feet deep.
He loped the horse now, forcing him to take big leaping steps to get through the snow, which was now nearly in two-foot drifts. He urged him to the fence and began looking for what he hoped to find, and there it was, a hole lower than the rest of the ground.
He jumped off the old horse and kicked the snow out of the hole and sure enough, it was where the horse had been tied. On the post were marks where the impatient cow horse had chewed while tied up. From there, Landry knew just where he had buried the money.
That night, he’d stepped it off from where he’d buried the money to the post where horse was tied.
Now, trying to take normal steps, he walked to the spot and pulled out a small trenching tool left over from his Army days, which he’d shoved in his saddlebag.
He scraped the snow away from the spot and hoped he’d find a place looking more freshly dug.
Hoping the snow hadn’t turned it all to mush he scraped the heavy snow away here and there. In the distance, a humming sound drew away his attention.
He stood for a moment and listened. Must be that ancient oil-pumping unit grinding along the way it always had. He scraped more snow, gingerly now, and found the ground where he thought he’d been digging two nights ago and started up again.
The shovel went in easily. He sighed with relief and began digging furiously. Dropping to his knees, he scooped mud and wet snow out of the hole, his fingers probing-feeling for the dark blue bank bag made of canvas. Instead, he winced and moaned, pulling his hand back quickly to reveal two fang marks on the heel of his hand.
His heart surged in fright, knowing what had just happened. He squeezed the two holes that oozed blood and serum, trying to reduce what went into his blood stream.
On a small ridge above him, a single pair of eyes peered down at him.
Tippi sat, nearly frozen now, to the seat of the snow mobile. The craft had indeed been just as good as Clancy said it would be. It was fun even. That is, if she hadn’t been chasing a lover, who she knew well enough to know, acting out of character.
Now he was busy digging and that made her make an obvious assumption – he was digging up the money from the heist, and she guessed he was planning to leave town – pretty much all he could do wasn’t it?
The reporter in her winced with this new knowledge. She had wanted to write about it and yet, now, she had become the news. She was a part of all of it, from the violence of the robbery and the shooting and now she’d just spent a long morning in the man’s bed.
I might as well have driven the getaway car.
She turned the key to start the engine on the snow mobile. She considered just riding back to town, riding back and acting as if she knew nothing.
Yes, that is what I will do. I will ride back, go to my apartment and forget this nightmare. I will go back to the nothing life I have and pretend none of this happened. I’m good at that. It’s boring but comfortable. Denial works! Yes, Just like I pretend that I am happy and that I don’t resent my mother.
The thoughts spun in Tippi’s mind and woke her again to the reality of what she had just admitted to herself.
She hated her life, and it was time she began acting instead of living in default mode.
The snow mobile coughed, sputtered and whined and Tippi again, twisted the key in the ignition switch. Again, the engine coughed but refused to turn over. Snow blew cold and relentless on her glasses.
“Oh, what now?”
She tried again. Same ol’ dull sound, turning over but not starting. She looked around helplessly and noticed the gas cap was within her reach. Leaning to her left, she cranked it open and peered inside the empty tank.
“You have got to be effing kidding me! This is just friggin great,” she screamed into the snowstorm.
She dismounted the snow machine. She hated it but knew her only choice in this storm was to let Landry know she was there.
Thornton wiped snow from his face. The skin on his forehead felt thick and numb as he pulled his snow mobile to a halt.
He could not see his partner now but could hear him winding the engine of his snowmobile nearby. He shouted at him, but a growing wind abducted the sound.
Finally, Adler skidded to a halt beside him.
“I think we need to give it up and go back. It’s getting bad out here.” He pulled a clean, white, and pressed handkerchief from his black woolen coat and blew his reddening nose.
“It’s just going to be dark soon and I’m getting spooked,” he said and then coughed a hacking, long cough.
Ignoring him, Thornton peered through the blizzard.
“No, I still see what’s left of their tracks, so shuddup and just follow.”
A weathered hand rested on a scarred-up radio transmitter.
“One to Nine, Tawny? Come in dammit.” Ronnie sat at the table that held the ancient radio. His shocking white-blue eyes narrowed as he watched his boss became more and more worried. The two had been there all day trying to reach Tawny by radio.
“Ya think we ought to call the Sheriff and tell them we got someone out there,” Dwight asked, finally breaking the silence between them.
“Where’d they head this morning, Dwight?”
“The West River pasture.”
Ronnie grimaced but hid the look from his boss.
“That pasture would be driftin’ bad, if they was there, they’d be stuck there and I hate to think about how they will get through it,” he said. Seeing the more worried look crease his boss’s face, he changed his comment. “They’ll hole up somewhere. She knows how to get along down there. They’ll be fine.”
Ronnie hoped his true feelings didn’t show through.
“There’s nothing the Sheriff can do out there in this anyway,” he added.
“I hope yer right and that they will be okay Ronnie. I just hope yer right.”
Black soot shot out of the old fireplace and filled the small cabin.
“That’s damned pitiful,” Zeke said, looking sideways at Tawny’s now blacked face, while she tried to start a fire.
Snow was now water running from the woman’s drenched ponytail and down the back of her Carhartt. The water dripped through tiny valleys in the back of her coat and formed a puddle at her feet. She went to her knees and shoved her head inside the fireplace to find the handle to the flue.
“Well, aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” she said, her voice trailed off into the chimney. “Can I get some help instead of smart-ass comments?”
Zeke didn’t respond but chuckled lightly.
“You sound like Darth Vader when you talk into that thing.”
“Ha ha ha. That’s not helping.” Tawny pulled her head out of the fireplace and sucked in some cleaner air.
“Don’t think there’s enough room for both of us up there, honey and besides, maybe I’m just a scaredy-cat but I always shy away from stickin’ my head in an already lit fireplace.”
“Probably right. Ah, there it is.”
Tawny crawled backward out of the fireplace, struggled to her feet and plopped into a shaky, old wooden chair. The black smoke now trailed up into the chimney.
“Did you move that cow to the shed?”
“Really? You think she’s gonna just lead over there? Hell no, I left her on the south side of the house outta the wind. She’ll be fine. She’s a cow.”
Tawny scooted her chair closer to the fireplace as the flame took hold. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.
“My poor dog. I left her outside at the ranch.”
“She’ll be fine. She’ll get into one of the sheds there. She’s a dog.”
“What, is it with you and your sarcastic responses?”
“I’m sorry, just the sick way my mind works. So, what is this place? I mean, whose is it and why is it out here? Is it someone’s huntin’ cabin or what?”
Zeke found a place on a seat made of polished cedar and leaned his elbows on the dusty table then cradled his head in his hands.
“It’s Mr. Morris’s, you know, Dwight’s.” But it really wasn’t somethin’ he’da built by himself. It was his wife’s idea.”
“I didn’t know he was married.”
“He’s not, she, Marilyn, died about four years ago of cancer. But when she was still alive, it was nothing for them to spend two or three nights a week in the summer or even sometimes in the winter out here instead of the main house.”
“In this little place?”
“Yes. She was just that way, a real country girl. She worked the ranch side by side with him and frankly, he has never gotten over it, her death I mean”.
Tawny leaned forward, holding her hands nearer the yellow flame.
“I didn’t understand it when I originally came to work. Now I know he has aged ten years in like the last five just going through cancer with her and watching her die. I cannot imagine that kind of love. I never had it. Probably never will, ‘cept fer this place out here. I got it for this, how ‘bout you?”
Zeke said nothing but glanced at the window. The wind whipped, stronger and more determined now as the day’s light, what you could see of it, moved overhead and inched into the western sky.
A cedar tree spanked the glass of a small window facing north. Other than the popping cedar wood in the now blazing fireplace, and wind whipping through cracks under the shrunken back door of the cabin, it was the only noise.
“Oh, fer me it’s just life on its own terms. No love, nothing holding me in one place.”
“What brought you here to Cheyenne?” Tawny asked the question tentatively hoping she had not crossed his boundary. “I mean, how do you know my boss, Dwight?”
“Just saw his advertisement in the High Plains Journal.”
“What?” Tawny stood suddenly and shouted.
“The High Plains Journal? No, he did not!”
“Yes, he did. What’s wrong with that?”
“I had no idea he thought I was doing such a lousy job.”
Zeke pulled his head out of his hands and stared at the woman in front of him.
“You do know that you really are certifiably nuts, don’t you?” Zeke meant it in the most positive sense, he thought to himself.
Zeke walked briskly to the fire, signaling the end of that quickly spiraling conversation.
He pulled the now wobbling and shaking baby calf closer to the fire. He hated keeping it inside, but for now, with the heifer still down, she could not care for it anyway.
“It’s gonna be a long night. I’m going to milk that heifer and use an old syringe I’ve got to feed this calf a little somethin’ then I’ll grab some more wood from that pile on the porch.”
Zeke grabbed the door handle.
“You know about any more wood he might have had here?”
“Just in the shed maybe,” Tawny said and tried to remember when she was in this cabin last. “Wish we had something to give the horses.”
“There was some old, dry, shitty hay in there they were nibblin’ on but nothing else. Besides…” Zeke paused.
“I know, they’ll be fine, they’re horses.” Tawny finished his sentence and smiled, proud that she had beat him at his own game.
“Yer catchin’ on.”
“I’m not catchin’ on to you though. You seem, I don’t know, lost somehow. Seems like you belong on a ranch, but not this one. It also seems sorta like you are runnin’.
“Lady, there ain’t nothin’ to catch, and that’s awful high-browed talk from someone who ran out on her law degree and her own dad to come to this Hell.”
She tilted her head and stared at him with narrowed hazel eyes.
“How did you know that?” She didn’t pause long enough to let him answer. “You just shut up. You don’t know anything about my father or me, so don’t bring him into it.”
“Dwight was pretty shitted when I got here. He’s that-a-way obviously. Likes to talk after a few.” Zeke grabbed the Jack bottle and sucked more of the brown liquid down his throat as if to illustrate his point.
“Yep, he told me all about you after about four shots of Gentleman Jack. Said you were going to be a pretty good lawyer but came out here instead. Said yer dad still don’t talk to ya at all. Say’s yer perty broke up ‘bout that.”
Zeke paused by the door with his gloved hand still on the handle.
“So, don’t get all knotted up bout me, and why I’m here, you got yer own problems little lady. But it don’t matter. We’re all broken n’ tied up with somethin’.”
It was the most words he had said in two years and he reckoned as to how they even sounded a little bit smart.
Tawny shook with rage. Tears threatened to spill over the rim of her lids, and she willed them back. How had he, in a matter of seconds drilled to the most tender and raw part of her.
He studied her, surprised a little bit that he’d hit such a spot on this woman who’d made it her life to be hard. He looked down at the floor, for a second. He was slightly regretful he had been such a brilliant success at being a prick.
“Like I said, life can build its own set of hobbles for all of us. Don’t think yer any different. You just gotta accept it or change it. It’s that simple. You gotta make a choice and then stick it out to the end.”
He jerked at the wooden slatted door, making it bark like a seal with it opened. He stepped into the blizzard, then stuck his head back into the cabin.
“Looks like you made yer’s already. So stop being so defensive about it. Stop apologizing for it if it makes you happy.”
Tawny slumped in the wooden chair, exhausted suddenly and not just from the long day in the blizzard. It was a kind of exhaustion, which overcomes one after years of struggle. Was that it? Was that insufferable cowboy, right? Had I not really committed to my choice to leave law and coming out here? Had I indeed been running from my future instead of running to my future? Am I being my own victim; or even worse, acting like my own victim? Is this why my father doesn’t talk to me…because he never believed me to begin with when I said it was what I really wanted?
Tawny looked frightened and the fire reflected in her eyes.
Outside, Zeke tromped through the drifting snow toward his horse, intent on finding the 60 cc syringe he knew was buried in his saddlebag somewhere. He shook his head when he thought of his words.
“Man, I can give good advice, too bad I can’t follow any of it,” he muttered to himself.
