Eating Gravel
A Novel by Patti Hudson
Chapter One
Rusty Ranahan imagined her father waiting at the Truck Corral. She imagined him standing under the neon eighteen-wheeler in his summer straw, wearing line-dried Wranglers and the crisp white shirt with pearl snaps he always wore to town. She saw him smiling, ready to embrace her in forgiveness, even though he rarely smiled and had never hugged her that she could remember.
But the scene she had been playing in her mind for nearly four years failed to materialize when she stepped off the bus. The sign still sputtered its promise of 24-hour service, only no one waited under it for her. Red Ranahan had never been big on forgive and forget and as Rusty moved to let the other passengers by she wondered why she had expected to find him any different this time.
She brushed the hair from her eyes, took a long breath and thought what to do. Through diesel fumes and hamburger grease she caught a drift of sage coming down off the foothills. Sharp and sweet, the scent was as familiar to her as the distant pine-blued mountains and the jagged horizon line they formed.
She was home; running from one past right into another. In the planning, back in a federal prison camp, it had seemed her best option for an early release. Come home to the ranch and work at what she knew. Fix fences, daylight to dark. Keep the parole people happy, her body too tired to find new trouble and hope her father was too in need of cheap labor to give her much grief. It had been convict thinking, looking for the easiest out, not trusting herself with anything too demanding.
Now Rusty doubted whether she had made the easier choice. She considered turning around and climbing back on the bus, riding it out of Eastern Oregon and into a sure parole violation. But she knew what another three years of incarceration would do to her. She knew too that there would be plenty of other opportunities to screw up her conditional release. In that way, the decision to stay seemed of only passing importance. Later, Rusty would think otherwise and know that walking away from the bus was one of those moments in which a definite outcome rested.
As she headed to find a pay phone, a cowboy stepped out of the coffee shop and into the slanting afternoon sun. Rusty recognized the walk before the face. Tink Vega still moved with the same easy stride she had noticed the first day she spotted him coming down the gravel road toward the big house. There were whole chapters of her childhood she couldn't remember, particularly the first eight years when her mother and brother were still alive, but she was old enough when Tink arrived to have a clear memory of him making his way from the highway where a truck driver had let him off. Saddle slung over his shoulder, young and rangy, he came looking for horseback work only to get stuck riding a swather those first weeks; Rusty's grandfather having just switched the farming operations from horse to diesel power. “I was born in the wrong century,” she heard the new hand say to the cook one afternoon, as they watched the last pair of Belgiums graze the retirement pasture behind the big house where the hay crew took lunch every day.
Twenty-five years later, he pushed up his hat to greet her, revealing the gray around his temples. His skin had long ago turned worn as his saddle leather; his lankiness worked into mature muscle. The draft horses were all dead, but Tink had stayed, working off and on for her father so long he seemed as predictable as the seasons. A typical Great Basin cowboy; silk scarf wound around his neck, Richard Farnsworth mustache, Gus McCrae hat, horsehair stampede strings. He could have been Basque or Mexican or Nez Perce, having claimed each at one time or another, depending on what was fashionable. His most distinguishing feature, and what Rusty had always enjoyed about Tink Vega, were his soft brown eyes. They seemed to smile completely independent of his other features and seeing them again helped steady her a little.
“You haven't changed much,” she said.
“And you still ain't hard to pick out of a herd,” he said, looking at Rusty as if she were a stray calf he had just spotted and was trying to decide what to do with her.
Taller than most men, hair the color of a bright chestnut horse, she did tend to stand out in a crowd. It had always been a nuisance, but never so much as in the last few years. Anonymity was the thing you most desired in the federal prison system; to be the sort of person the hacks didn't notice and whose name wasn't the one to register in their minds at the first sign of trouble. There had been times it seemed Rusty Ranahan was the only name they knew. One hack in particular took an interest in her, ordering searches and drug tests and extra work details, then denying commissary or television privileges, for no other reason than her conspicuousness.
“Sorry I don't have any jailhouse tattoos to show you,” she said when Tink continued to eye her.
“Damn, that's a disappointment,” he said, patting her shoulder. Even at an arm's length she could smell the ranch on him, an unmistakable blend of cattle, hydraulic fluids, dust and strain. “Anyway, it's good to have you back.”
“Least someone on the Double R's glad to see me.”
“He would've come himself,” Tink said. “It's just that we had this bull with a broken dingus needed to go to the saleyard.”
“So Red hauls him off to Hermiston and leaves you here to do his dirty work.”
“You know how a fella hates to have something like that standing around in his corral where he's got to look at it every day.”
“Absofuckinglutely,” Rusty said, knowing a bull with a deviated penis wasn't the reason but the excuse for Red not showing. Tink's attempt to put her father in a good light was amusing and she smiled as she started across the parking lot toward a mud and manure splattered pickup. A blue-eyed Queensland heeler waited in the back and Rusty assumed the truck belonged to the ranch and the dog to Tink.
“No luggage?”
“This is it,” Rusty said. In a plastic grocery bag she carried a change of clothes and a paperback she had picked up at the Oakland bus station a few days before. “I'm trying to simplify my life. Maybe it'll help keep me out of jail this time around.”
“I'll be interested to see how that works.”
“Me too,” Rusty said.
The heeler greeted them at the pickup, balancing himself on a stack of tamarack fence posts piled in the back. Tink spoke to the dog, patted him, then got in and started the engine. As Rusty walked around to the passenger side, a Border Collie pup eyed her from under the utility box. She offered it her hand and tried to coax it out, but couldn't get the little thing to expose itself. It wasn't more than four or five months old.
“Don't take it personal. She's just shy,” Tink said when Rusty opened the cab door and began scratching behind the seat for a safety belt attachment.
From under a mat of dirt and dog hair she pulled out a plastic balling gun loaded with a green scour pill. “Guess you come across more sick calves than you do safety conscious passengers.” She tossed the gun to Tink and kept digging.
He shrugged and said, “We aren't going far. Need to stop at the store and pick you up some groceries.”
“Can't Red do his own shopping anymore?” Rusty asked, retrieving an ear tag with a clump of red Hereford hair still attached to it.
Tink wrinkled his brow and gave her a puzzled look. “We finally got the water running again and the LP hooked up. Hauled in some dishes and bedding, a few canned goods. But there's not much up there to sustain a person and it doesn't look to me like you can afford to skip many meals.”
Rusty pitched the tag and thought. “Red's sending me to the bunkhouse?” Other than a few elk hunters, no one had spent much time there since her grandfather's death in her sophomore year of high school. No phone, no power and miles from any other housing on the ranch, it sat in the timber near the National Forest boundary. The road was passable only during the dry summer months, or in early winter when the ground was hard frozen and the snow not yet deep enough to stop a four-wheel drive.
“Well, hell,” Tink said. “Red gave me the impression it was your idea.”
“When would I have said anything to him?” Rusty asked. Red refused to use a telephone. It was Tink she had called to work out some sort of arrangement for a supervised release. She hadn't spoken directly to her father in over four years, not since the last time she came home to help with the fall gather. The indictments were about to be handed down and she had come to tell him, but never got around to it. Later, she sent him some news clippings and a note that said they were sending her to a camp in California, FPC Dublin. “This is something he came up with on his own.”
Tink shook his head. “I hate getting stuck as the go-between in Red's dealings.”
“That's what it means to work for the man,” Rusty said. “And it's probably only going to get worse for you with me around.”
“I kinda thought it might get better.”
“Yeah,” Rusty said, “and someday you're going to have health insurance and a 401K.”
She finally found the seat belt attachment, got in the truck and buckled up. The sun was just slipping behind the 9000-foot granite peaks of the Elkhorn Range and starting to pink up the sky when they pulled away from the Truck Corral. A mile ahead of them, in a cluster of trees and downtown buildings, the seven-story Tower Hotel was still the most prominent structure in the valley. But between it and the truck stop, Rusty saw change. Motels, fast-food franchises and drive-through espresso stands had turned an empty stretch of farmland into a cluttered commercial strip resembling every other small Western town in the final days of the twentieth century. In that way, the new was not unfamiliar.
When they got to Safeway Rusty went in and picked up what she hoped would hold her for a week or so. She was careful to make it out with enough release money left in her pocket to stop at the liquor store. It had been moved from downtown out to the strip and now sat in a nest of hastily constructed establishments that included a mobile home sales office and a cappuccino bar. Rusty bought a fifth of Jack Daniels at the State-run store and told Tink she was ready to head for the hills.
As he turned onto Main and started through downtown, the Italianate homes and volcanic tuff commercial buildings, built by Baker City's pioneer merchants, were such contrast to the new rural sprawl they left behind Rusty felt two different towns were evolving. She gazed at the stone storefronts with their bright canvas awnings, surprised at how many of the old buildings had been restored in the last few years. In her time away, a multimillion dollar interpretive center had gone up on Flagstaff Hill, a few miles east of town where the ruts of the Oregon trail could still be seen. A hundred and fifty years after the three-foot deep scars had been gouged, people were again cashing in on the trail.
Many of the businesses Rusty remembered had not survived to see prosperity return. The Red, White and Blue Cafe remained, but Hermann and David's Apparel Store had closed. Founded by frontier Jewish merchants, it had kept loggers, ranchers and miners clothed for more than a hundred years. Every fall, in preparation for another harsh winter, Rusty had been taken there for a new coat, gloves and replacement liners for her pac boots. Now the building with its squeaky wood floors and embossed tin ceiling housed an Oregon Trail souvenir shop, a Western art gallery and yet another espresso bar. Palmers' Drugstore, where Rusty and Alice Ann Dilsey used to sip root beer floats and read horse magazines, had become some sort of outlet store. There was a fitness center next door where the hardware store used to be. Down the street, the clock tower on the Grand Devine Hotel caught the last rays of sunlight. Fully restored and respectable once more, its transformation appeared to have eliminated the Stirrup Room, an establishment in which Rusty had spent more than a few evenings.
It had been the kind of place where cowboys and loggers came to drink up their paychecks, to forget for a night that all the rules they knew were changing. A dark bar with only local faces, where men drank their liquor straight and women mixed it with beer. Rusty wondered where the displaced spent their Saturday nights now. But she kept the question to herself, knowing with the Stirrup Room gone there was at least one less potential spot for a parole violation to occur. Discovering what had replaced it would only create new opportunities.
They caught a green light at Main and Auburn, hit Dewey Street and headed south out of town, where a scattering of small acreages hadn't yet sold out to subdivision developers. As they passed the turnoff to a distant white farmhouse, Rusty asked how Alice Ann was doing.
“You know her, always got a full plate,” Tink said. “Still taking care of her brother, nursing stray dogs, wounded birds and whatever else gets dropped on her doorstep.”
“She wrote me, but I never answered.”
“Yep,” Tink said, nodding. “Came to Red for the address. Stayed quite a little while. Showed up again when she didn't hear back from you.”
“She never mentioned seeing him in any of her letters,” Rusty said. Even though they had drifted apart over the years, she still considered Alice Ann her closest friend. “Makes me feel like she's been consorting with the enemy.”
“Got you paroled.”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“Doubt it was me alone convinced Red.”
“That make me a stray dog or a wounded bird?”
“Makes you pretty lucky, I'd say.”
Makes me fucking uncomfortable, Rusty thought, her mind still working like a convict's, looking for the ulterior motives behind every action, wondering what sort of schemes Red had been working on and how Alice Ann would play into them. It was a worry that would keep working on Rusty. She knew she should stop and have it out with Alice Ann, but she let the thought pass with the house. As it faded behind them, Rusty turned to the road ahead and waited for her first glimpse at the valley three generations of Ranahans before her had called theirs.
Tink steered into a rocky, narrow canyon and followed the Powder River through a series of twists and turns until it straightened and broke out of the dark basalt cliffs. Suddenly, Cottonwood Valley spread before them, a green strip of meadowland bound on the east by dry sagebrush hills and on the west by a mountain range where snow could still be found in August. A grassland, whorled and cowlicked by opposing weather forces, it was the middle ground between forest and desert. Through it ran a calm stretch of the Powder, like a seam binding the two halves, stitched by the cottonwoods and willow thickets that lined its banks. Rusty rolled down her window and breathed deeply. She wasn't sure she belonged back in this windswept place, but for the first time in three and a half years it felt like she was actually taking in air.
“The bunkhouse is just cause Red needs you working the fences on that upper end,” Tink said as the first ranch buildings, two empty hay sheds, came into view.
Tink Vega had always been one for putting a good slant on things, but Rusty knew her father never did anything out of convenience. “He's got something else planned for me,” she said.
“No, it's that doctor I told you about. Bought the old Dewlap place,” Tink said, lifting a finger from the steering wheel, pointing to the juniper hills where the doctor's property bordered the Double R. “Man's got mad cow disease. Calls and curses me out every time one of ours wanders onto his ground. It's an environmental catastrophe if a cow shits within a hundred feet of his trout stream. I'm not exagerating, he actually gets out there and takes measurements.”
“Bet Red just loves that.”
“Well, it was laughable at first, but now with that Clean Stream Initiative on the ballot it's losing its humor. That thing passes, we'll have to fence off every creek in the country.”
“Where'd you get that?”
“It's all tied to stream temperatures,” Tink said. “They think they can lower them and save the salmon by making it illegal for cattle to step foot in any moving body of water. I personally think they'd be better off breeching a few hydroelectric dams, but people will give up beef and salmon both before they'll give up their hair dryers.”
“So that's why Red's finally decided to fix his fences.”
“If we don't start doing a little better job of keeping our cows off the doctor's ground there's no telling what else he and his vegetarian comrades will come up with.”
“If he eats those trout, he's not a vegetarian,” Rusty said, knowing how in cattle country the doctor's eating habits alone would make him suspect. But if he was one of those trying to save the salmon by breeching dams, halting logging or restricting cattle grazing, then he might need to be more concerned about personal safety than popularity. “Guess I should thank the guy for giving me work.”
“Well, there's plenty of it up there,” Tink said. “But you might be more comfortable staying down at the big house with Red. Least it's got a toilet.”
“Living with Red was never my idea of comfort,” Rusty said, “What sort of woman does he have hanging around?”
“Nobody just now. But even if there was, you wouldn't exactly be living like sardines in that rambling ole place.”
“I'm okay with this, really Tink. I'd rather live off by myself anyway,” Rusty said, bending toward him to make her point. “Just so we're clear, I'm not doing anything horseback, right?”
“No horses,” Tink said. “Charlie was supposed to haul the four-wheeler up there for you, but you know how things can slip with him.”
Charlie Taylor, Tink's coworker, wasn't what you would call good help. But he never let an animal go without water or salt, never put ranch gas in his personal pickup and never filed a workman's compensation claim, even though he was frequently injured on the job. These things were important to Red. More important than Charlie's forgetfulness or lack of expertise.
“I think he's been knocked in the head a few too many times,” Tink said, turning off the two-lane onto gravel. The truck lurched over a cattle guard and entered the boundaries of the Double R.
“Let's swing by and remind him then,” Rusty said, leaning her head out the window. They were driving through meadows that had never known a plow, where native grasses still grew wild, and when cut, cured and baled properly made the finest hay Rusty had ever seen. Crested and full of seed, horses loved it, sometimes choosing it over fresh grass.
In the time between leaving the ranch and entering the Federal Prison System, Rusty had spent ten years on a California horse farm, where pastures and hay production were managed as carefully as the surrounding vineyards. The wines might have rivaled even the French, but the hay could not compare to what came naturally on the Double R. She took a deep breath, smelled the grass, felt its moisture. In the twilight she could see the fields moving with the breeze. They would begin haying soon, but the country seemed in need of rain and she wondered what sort of crop her father would get this year and whether it would be enough to feed his herd through the winter.
They missed the big house and the main corrals; came in the back way over a series of low, juniper-dotted hills to Charlie's small trailer. When they didn't see his pickup parked out front they drove on, passing the turnoff to the lower corrals and the old Theodore place where Tink and his wife lived. Gravel gave way to dirt as they followed Elk Creek upstream, turning onto a jeep trail that took them through several miles of ponderosa and fir before reaching the aspen grove that sheltered the bunkhouse.
It was full dark by the time they got there and discovered Charlie had remembered to deliver the four-wheeler. “I'll be damn,” Tink said, parking with his headlights angled so Rusty could find her way to the door. “With you back on the ranch and Charlie's brain functioning, I might not be needed anymore.”
“You have to stick around and be Red's go-between,” Rusty said. She grabbed the groceries and headed inside, leaving Tink to unload the tools and fencing materials he had brought for her.
The miner's cabin her grandfather had added to and converted into a bunkhouse was smaller and shabbier than the image of it she carried in her mind. The first course of logs had sunk further in the ground, giving the impression the earth was trying to reclaim it one tree at a time. The porch slumped forward, like a drunk about to fall over. The steps creaked and sagged as she climbed them and made her way to the door.
Inside, she smelled a building left too long to nature. The scent of damp cedar, animal nests and pack rat urine was strong, but she felt a breeze and knew Tink had thought to open the windows. It might eventually air out. In the dark, more than the odor, she was struck by the quiet of the place. She wondered what it was going to be like to sleep without the muffled sounds of restless inmates. The irritable voices of sleep-deprived guards. The sudden slamming of doors, lock bolts falling in place. A night on the bus and a night in a downtown Portland hotel had not prepared her for such silence.
A single pilot light behind the propane refrigerator guided Rusty through the kitchen. She found matches and a kerosene lamp on the long wooden table where a half-dozen men had shared meals during her grandfather's reign. In the flickering light she saw the table had been wiped clean and the plank floor recently swept. Several jars and cans were neatly stacked on a rough-sawn shelf above the porcelain drain board. She could tell Tink had put quite a lot of effort into making the bunkhouse livable. Daylight would expose the deeper filth of neglect and decay, but she knew he had done all he could, given the time and resources Red allotted him.
“This oughta feel pretty good to you, being alone,” Tink said when he finished outside and came in the kitchen to sit. “Don't imagine you get much time to yourself in a penitentiary.”
“No, you don't,” Rusty said, poking through the groceries for the bottle of Jack Daniels. “You don't get much of this either.”
“You always did like your whiskey,” Tink said. “Remember that one branding when Red was laid up after that old Longhorn bull tried to give him a new belly button?”
“Hard to forget the only branding he ever missed.”
Tink nodded. “Kept making us put it off, thinking he'd get better. Those calves got so big we could hardly drag 'em to the fire. Your grandpa was still alive, so naturally he passed a bottle when we finished. You matched us all, drink for drink. Don't believe you were even out of school yet.”
Rusty got two jelly jars from the dish rack and poured them each a shot. “What the hell am I doing back on the Double R?”
“Can't be as bad as what you just went through.”
“I was in a work camp,” Rusty said. “It wasn't exactly Club Med, but it wasn't any maximum security prison either. More like I was locked in an overcrowded federal office compound, forced to wear polyester khakis, tow the bureaucratic line, speak in acronyms for three years.”
Not that the low level of security had made her feel any less trapped, any less confined or able to make choices. Not that the walls hadn't closed in on her every night when she lay in her bunk, staring at the ceiling inches above her head, trying to sleep, trying to breathe the same air as seven other women in a tight, stuffy cubicle that contained not a single person she could trust. Granted, they were mostly white-collar criminals, more likely to set you up and snitch on you, than rape or stab you. Still, like all desperate people, they were ruled by their own self-interests and Rusty had to be on constant guard against the lies and schemes of creative criminal minds with too much time to fill.
But if her fellow inmates kept her on edge, the hacks were worse. She couldn't count the times she had finally fallen asleep only be rousted for a piss test or thrown out of bed for a room search in the Bureau of Prisons' constant and futile effort to stop the flow of drugs into a facility where nearly half the inmates were there on drug trafficking charges. Any kind of contraband - cash money passed by a generous visitor, food slipped out of the cafeteria, a pint of whiskey smuggled in from an outside work detail - could land you in the Hole, or worse, get you shipped to a higher security prison, where you were far less likely to feel sun on your face or ever breathe fresh air. A place where Rusty knew both inmates and guards would do more than make her edgy.
To get transported further down in the prison system, to be punished first with Diesel Therapy and spend weeks shackled in a bus, sleeping in county jails and state penitentiaries, to finally arrive at a far darker place had been Rusty's greatest fear. It kept her a loner and out of anyone's debt, though there were many times she wished for a friend and was tempted to take the liquor offered her, even if it meant getting lended up and owing favors. But always there was that hack watching her, waiting for her to do something that might give him an excuse to ship her. “I don't want to go back there, Tink.”
“Can't say that I blame you.”
“I was assigned to R&G,” Rusty said. “Roads and grounds. Didn't pay shit, but it got me outdoors and helped keep me halfway sane.” Jobs in the kitchen or clothing room were much more desirable - easier on the back, plus there was a lot of money to be made selling goods and services. But the BOP frowned on prison entrepreneurs, so Rusty took some advice from one of the more sympathetic federal prosecutors and picked a job with little opportunity to stray. It gave her a few hours of sunlight each day, kept her in reasonably good physical shape and helped her get through the nights.
“Well, you'll get plenty of the outdoors up here,” Tink said. He took a sip of his drink and surveyed the room. “This old shack needs some work though, don't it.”
“It's not the housing I'm going to have trouble with,” Rusty said, tossing back the whiskey. It still tasted good to her, burning and soothing at the same time. She poured herself another, then started chopping onions to fry with the steak she had bought. “You staying to eat?”
“If that's an invite.”
“Wouldn't mind a little company,” Rusty said. “It's so quiet and empty up here. Might take me some getting used to.”
Tink nodded and leaned back in his chair. “At one time this was a busy little abode. Just think of all the hired men that passed through here, working awhile and riding on,” he said. “All that's left of them now are their fences.”
That was his legacy too. It seemed so obvious Rusty didn't bother pointing it out. Tink was nothing more than a hired hand himself. He came and went like so many others who worked for her father, stayed a year or so, then moved on to another ranch. Most were never heard from again. Tink had at least remained constant. Even though he might pick up and leave at anytime, it was expected he would eventually return and that Red would always take him back. He was a good hand, smarter than most. Rusty had more than once seen him reading the poetry of Yeats and knew he had earned a degree in range management during one of his absences. Still, he would leave only fences behind.
She knocked back another shot, set the glass down and looked at Tink. Though he stood out among the many hired men Rusty had known, she had never thought of him as anything more than a sentimental cowboy with smiling eyes. But tonight in the yellow lantern light there was something seductive about him. Maybe it was the whiskey making him appear to her like a man out of time - a hundred years out of time, as he had once said. Maybe it was that she hadn't seen a lot of men, particularly cowboys, in the last thirty-six months. Maybe it was nothing more than the cant of his hat, partially shading his face, so it wasn't actually Tink Vega anymore but some other dark cowboy who could take her mind somewhere else for the evening.
Whatever it was, Rusty stood there gawking at him so long the onions started to burn. By the time she found something to stir them with, they were welded to the pan. She had never been any good in the kitchen. “Motherfucker,” she said, scraping the skillet.
“Looks like things are getting away from you,” Tink said coming over to the stove. He took the fork from her and pointed it at the table. “Go on and sit down. I can get this.”
Rusty moved aside, dropped into the nearest chair and poured herself another drink. Halfway through it she remembered Tink's wife. “Isn't Jenny waiting at home for you?”
Tink stabbed a piece of steak, laid it in the hot skillet and said, “Nope.”
“Touchy subject?”
“We're estranged.”
“Isn't that what people say when there's no way in hell they'll ever get back together?”
Tink stepped away from the stove, cocked his head and gave her a thoughtful look. Not like he was trying to compose an answer; more like he was trying to figure why she was being so pointed. She didn't know herself, except that it was fun to watch his eyes keep smiling through the lost look on his face. Blame it on Jack Daniels.
“She took off with the cattle buyer last fall while we were shipping,” he said finally.
“That's pretty fucked,” Rusty said, sipping now, trying to pace herself a little better. She was out of practice. Mr. Daniels had slipped up on her.
“We were working the lower corrals and he kept running up to my house to use the phone,” Tink said, turning back to the stove. “I thought cattle prices were jumping around and he was trying to stay on top of things. Just went on sorting beef, ignorant cowboy that I am. Didn't realize it was my wife he was trying to stay on top of until the two of them drove off with the cattle trucks. Later, somebody told me the son of a bitch had a cell phone he could've used.”
Rusty knew about betrayal; how it felt to have someone you love turn around and bite you on the ass. She had reluctantly revealed enough personal butt-chewing experiences to the prying minds in her prison therapy group that they called it her pattern. Some even said it was what had turned Rusty into felon fodder. Yet she too had been unfaithful, and in far worse ways. She couldn't use the rationale of cocaine traffickers, who called themselves POWs in the War on Drugs, to elevate her opinion of herself. Nor could she find anything in their logic that might help Tink make sense of his wife's sudden defection.
She took another sip of whiskey and shifted to a less sensitive topic. “Hope Red got a good price for his steers at least.”
Tink poked a steak and made it sizzle. “He'd do a lot better if he bought a few decent bulls and started worming some of the sorry things he's got eating his grass.”
“Quality has never been a priority with him,” Rusty said. “Good thing too, or he wouldn't have hired me to fix his fences.”
Tink smiled. “I've seen some of your handiwork here and there. Fences aren't exactly your forte.”
“It's hereditary,” Rusty said, feeling the numbness of a mild drunk come over her. “But I'll do my damnedest to build ‛em straight and tight and pretty, just for you Tink Vega.”
“So long as it gets the vegetarians off my back, I'll be happy with whatever you do,” he said, setting a plate in front of her.
Rusty didn't have much interest in solid food by then and continued to drink her supper. She picked a little, but mostly she watched Tink eat. If he minded, he didn't show it.
When he pushed his plate away and leaned back full, Rusty decided to go ahead and do what she had been wanting to do since he first sat across from her. She stood, teetered a moment, then stepped toward him and threw her leg over his lap as if mounting a horse.
He didn't stop her, but seemed circumspect as she dropped into his lap. “This you or the whiskey talking?” The lantern light was caught in his eyes. He looked at her sticky-eyed, like a cow dog reluctant to move into a herd.
“What does it matter? I like your eyes.”
“It matters.”
“Why?”
“Cause I'm fond of you, Rusty.”
“Good. Then let's go roll around in one of those bunks,” she said, tilting her head toward the back room.
“This ain't really you,” Tink said.
“I've had a little whiskey, but this is me, right here, right now,” she said.
Tink smiled, took off his hat and set it on the table. “I'm happy just sitting here like this. It doesn't have to be anything more.” He brushed the hair from her face, ran his fingers through it; as he might the mane of a horse he was trying to gentle.
“I had something more athletic in mind,” Rusty said.
“Could be the kind of something you'll regret once you sober up.”
“I'll worry about that later.”
“I'm worrying about it now,” Tink said.
Rusty sighed. “I see your cowboy honor is still intact. John Wayne would be proud,” she said, reaching for her drink. “If I can't seduce you, I might as well go ahead and get completely shit-faced.”
“Don't imagine anybody could stop you.”
Rusty laughed and knocked back a shot, poured another, and soon lost track of the evening. She stayed in his lap and drank, though she wasn't certain how long or how much. They talked and it seemed a lot was said, but it also seemed a lot got lost in the whiskey. At some point Tink hoisted her over his shoulder and packed her off to one of the bunks in a room with an odd assortment of bunks used by an odd assortment of cowboys through the years.
“You won't even help me out of my clothes, will you?”
“Nope.”
“Wonder if all those old cowboys rode your moral high ground?” Rusty asked, but Tink had already left the room.
She fell asleep thinking of their fences. The rockjacks and figure-fours they had left behind. The abandoned lines with discarded barbwire coiled like concertina waiting to entangle cows and horses alike. You rode with your eyes open on the Double R. Luckily, Rusty didn't have to worry about getting caught in old wire and crippling a horse. She wouldn't be doing any riding. That was the deal she had trusted Tink to make.
-End of Chapter One-
