Ghost Medicine (15 page)

“I was scared. I told him I had an accident,” I said. “That I fell off Reno.”

“Pretty soon everyone is going to think I gave you a bad horse,” Mr. Benavidez said and smiled a little. “But I want you to know that Clayton did come by here to explain what happened with the truck. And I have to tell you that his son's story and yours do not agree. So it is your word against his, and in this town that means you will lose.”

“But what about the money?”

“That's another matter. Carl has made mistakes before, although none quite so expensive. Clayton explained that anyone could have taken the money. Even Carl, although I know this is not true. So I don't know what I'll do about that, other than forget about it and try to make it up by selling two horses tomorrow. You see, this is how ranchers think. And Clayton said that there is little that can be done officially. Now as for your injury…”

“And you're just going to take it like that?” I said. I wasn't so scared of Mr. Benavidez as I was mad at his putting up with Clayton Rutledge and his son, but I tried my hardest to not sound disrespectful after what he'd just said about Tom Buller's dad.

“The sheriff says there is really nothing that can be done. He said if charges were pressed, they would also be pressed against you. So it's better left alone. Things will work out, I'm sure.”

“I'm sure.” I felt myself almost choking. I wanted to cuss so bad, and that's something I never did.

“I'll make that call in the morning.”

“Thank you.” And I moved past him toward the door. “Good night.”

Luz was waiting in the hall. I know she could see the disappointment in my swollen eyes as I walked past her to the staircase.

“Good night, Luz,” I said, and left that big house.

Tommy was waiting for me on the walkway to the main house, by the side of the dirt road. He had a heavy brown jacket on, collar turned up so it almost touched the brim of his hat.

“Been waiting long?”

“Just got here, Stotts,” he said. “Here.” And he pulled a tall can of beer from each of his pockets. “Thought you might like one.”

“I might.”

We popped open those beers and they sprayed us a little, after being jostled in Tommy's pockets. I took a long swig. It tasted bad, but felt cool and tingly and calming as it went down. A wind was blowing steady from the northwest, so we walked with our heads down and hats pulled low, sometimes tipping back to drink.

“You don't have to tell me that Benavidez doesn't really care about the money and stuff, ‘cause I figured it would be like that.”

“He said he was going to call the sheriff in the morning,” I said.

“Yeah, but he won't really try to do anything,” Tom said. “Because they're like kings, Benavidez and Rutledge. And they're totally in control of their own share of just about everything you see around here. Neither one of them wants to go to war with the other ‘cause there's too much to lose. So I could've told you that.”

“I'm quitting.”

“No you're not, Stottsy. I won't let you do that.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“I don't know. Let's get in and have some more beer. I don't think CB'll be awake till Wednesday, anyway.”

We took our dusty shoes off on the porch and went into the Foreman's house. I could hear Carl snoring from a back bedroom. We threw our coats and hats on the long wooden bench inside the front door, like we always do. I followed Tommy into the kitchen.

“You hungry?” Tom asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I hope you know how to fix food, ‘cause so am I.”

“Let's see if there's anything that just needs opening,” I said.

We sat on the couch in the living room and ate pretzels and bologna sandwiches, talking while we drank beer. I fell right to sleep on that couch before I finished my second beer. Tommy threw a blanket over me and left me there.

The angel is sleeping in the woods.

No. I don't really know about you, Stottsy. You're scary smart.

We were sitting around the fire: me, Gabey, Tommy, and my dad was there, too. I remember Gabey was dressed all in white. Dad was smoking a cigarette. I looked into the flames and there were flames on the hills, streaking up to the mountains, circling the bottom of those two granite fingers, gray-white against the starlit sky. I was holding my Dawson folder, but I knew somehow I had broken it; the blade wouldn't open. I felt blood in my hand.

And my father waved his arm through the tongues of the lapping fire at Tommy. Snakes crawled out of the tops of Tommy's boots and he just kept brushing them off his legs, laughing, as more and more came out.

And then my father picked up Gabey, all small and bundled up like a sack of ice cubes, and he dropped him into the fire. Tommy and I got up and looked down into the fire, which was sucking down into the earth as though it had been turned upside down. I reached in after Gabey, bent forward at the waist, plunging my arms down into the fire, but it had become foaming icy water and all I could see was the swirling foam in front of my eyes and I know I stopped breathing, too, and I
knew
I was dreaming, but I screamed anyway.

Gabe. Gabe!

It was light. I heard Tommy running down the hallway from his bedroom. I was soaked in sweat.

“Stottsy, you okay? I heard you screaming for Gabe or something.”

“Oh man,” I said and touched my eyes, then jerked my hand back at the shock of pain from the bridge of my nose.

“I had a really bad dream. I must've got hit pretty hard yesterday.”

“Naw. I think that baloney was rotten.”

I sat up on the couch and yawned. “I can make some coffee if you got it.”

I tossed the blanket aside and went with Tom into the kitchen. They had one of those coffee pots that cooks on a stove, like you'd use for camping. It took us a while to find the coffee can, but we finally did, and I managed to put it all together.

“So?” Tommy said. “What was that scary dream about?”

“I don't know. It was too weird. I was trying to pull Gabe out of a fire but it was sucking me in.”

“I'm not going to say it, Stotts. You know. What you think I'll say.”

“Yeah. I'm crazy.”

The coffee was starting to boil. Tommy stretched and rubbed his eyes.

“So are we going to work today even if CB doesn't get out of bed?”

I took a breath. I wanted desperately to forget about the day and night before, the dream that woke me.

“I want to,” I said.

The fires came early that year, the summer my mom died.

The winter before had carried so much rain and snow on its gray shoulders, then the summer of the mountain lion, the ghost medicine that promised to make us vanish, to cure our ghosts, brought so much growth in the underbrush; and that growth, in turn, withered and dried under the heat of a particularly fierce July.

Tommy and I were out by the fence line, at the temporary corrals we had built for those horses we'd finally gotten from Rose. They were tame and calm now, and we were happy for that. The big roan had gotten to the point where he would smell Tommy, and Tom was touching him just about every day, so he was close to being ready for the halter. He looked to be about three years old, so we figured he hadn't been wild for so long that there was nothing we could do with him, and he wasn't too old to geld, either.

“It just hurts to think about,” Tommy said.

“You wouldn't want to keep him if you didn't geld him,” I said.

“It's the thought of it, I guess.”

“He's had his way enough, though. I'm sure it's his foal mine's carrying,” I said. “It kind of makes you wonder, huh, when you see a horse like him, though. I mean, look at his legs, how fine they are. And look at how big he is. He could easily kill you, he practically did that time we finally got a rope on him. But now he lets you get in there with him and he smells up against you and he even lets you touch him.”

“I want to get on him.”

“He's going to let you do that, too. And he doesn't have to, you know that, ‘cause you know he could just as easy kill you. But he's going to
let
you do all this to him, and it's no humiliation to him. It's a bargain.”

“Man, you're weird about horses. I think that Reno's messed up your head.”

“By landing me on it too many times, I bet.”

That mare of mine was doing well, too. I had her on the halter and could take her out on walks, ponying with Reno. But like horses can be sometimes, he was jealous of her, and I saw that. Sometimes she followed us off the halter. And she was getting real big and wide, like she was getting ready to foal. I named her Ghost Medicine, for the lion we took that day. Tommy named that stallion Duke.

Duke could be pretty mean, so we separated the corral with pipe down the middle, running right over the big trough we kept filled by hauling water out of one of Benavidez' water trucks. The horses were standing along the rail, head to tail, flicking each others' faces with their tails, in the shade of one of those big umbrella-shaped oaks, when I noticed a column of pale smoke off in the woods, a few miles to the south of us.

“There's a fire over there,” I said, pointing.

Tommy squinted his black eyes at the smoke. “It looks like it's probly down by the highway, maybe three or four miles.”

“Think we should go back in and tell ‘em at the ranch?”

“Let's watch it a while. Could just be the Forest Service burning something on purpose.”

So we watched the smoke, sitting there with our legs inside the corral and our arms draped over the top rail. When I first saw it, the smoke was translucent and sand-colored. A few minutes later, it thickened up to a solid white; and then finally it began mushrooming up in big round pillows of dark gray and black; thick and ominous. It wasn't good. And it was heading north, towards the Benavidez ranch, and us.

“It's gonna be a bad one,” I said.

“What do you say we do, Stotts?”

We fixed our stares at the distant smoke, over the tops of the trees.

“We gotta go tell Rose ‘cause she might have to get out. If it gets bad we might try to run some of her horses this way.”

“Okay. What about these two, then?”

“Well, if it gets bad then we'll have to let ‘em out. If they're smart enough they'll head for the lake. It's not that far.”

“I could go get the trailer.”

“Yours isn't going in no trailer today,” I said.

“Okay. Let's get over to Rose's.”

I jumped Reno over the fence and opened the chute gate for Tom and Arrow. The smoke was nearly filling all the southern sky now and our shadows fell dim on the ground; the daylight had gone orange. I heard the rumble of the propellers of the first water-dropping plane overhead.

I saw Rose's windmill over the rise of the hill before her house. It was turning, facing south. The wind, hot and dry, was picking up. Rose was standing out in front of her house, hands on her hips, wearing that dirty flowered dress of hers, staring up at the smoke like she was mad at it. The sky was nearly gone now, and smoke was low to the ground. The air stunk of burning brush and tree.

“Ha! My two young cowboys are back to see the fire,” she said. “Well, I been here for the last fire, more than twenty years ago. But a steel house don't burn!”

“I bet it makes a good oven, though,” Tom said.

She had an old Ford Falcon station wagon with fake wood paneling on the sides, all faded and flaking away. She drove it a few times each year to pick up supplies and visit her lawyer, so I knew it could run if she needed it.

“Do you need us to help you get anything loaded into your car?” I asked. The problem, I knew, was that the easement through Benavidez land that gave her access to the highway was south, toward the fire.

“I'm not going anywhere just yet,” she said. “But I guess I'd take that cat.”

“It looks pretty bad,” I said. Ashes were falling from the sky, soft like snowflakes. Some were black and curled. Some were smoking. Our shadows were gone, but it was still afternoon.

Tom got down from Arrow and handed his reins to me.

“I'm going to get some stuff out of the house for her in case she decides to go.”

I tied both of the horses up at the post by the goat trough. Tommy was already coming out the front door carrying two jugs of wine.

“I got her tobacco in my pockets. This is all she'd want anyway.”

“Ha! You got some tobacco? See, you boys is good ones,” Rose said.

“Did you see that cat in there?” I asked.

Tom kept walking around the side of the house to the station wagon. “If I did, I wouldn't say.”

I went into her house and turned toward the back wall. I walked right into a thick, sticky spider's web. I felt my stomach rise up and I took my hat off and shook it, certain there would be a big black widow on it somewhere. I gave a quick look toward Rose's “living room”—the seats around her stove. No cat. That was good enough for me.

“I can't find him in there,” I said as I came out the door.

But Tom was holding Rose's little brown cat, its paws straight up on the front of his shoulder like he was aiming to use Tommy's face as a scratching post. I grimaced, still feeling spiderwebs on me.

“What's wrong with you?” Tom asked.

“Nothing. Put him in her car and let's see if we can move some of those horses over.”

We left Rose there, standing by the Falcon with an open jug of wine, which she was drinking straight from the mouth, arm chicken-winged under the weight of the green bottle like it was moonshine. I'm glad she didn't offer any, because Tom Buller would have taken it, and that meant I would, too, and then we'd burn to death for sure. I guess she knew we were determined to try to move some of the horses over to the safer ground near the lake, so she just smiled and watched us, that cat with its paws up on the metal-trimmed steering wheel of the station wagon like it was getting ready to go even if Rose wasn't.

“You're going to have to go pretty soon, Rose,” I said.

“You just take care of yourself, Tennis Shoes. Ha! I've lived a long time by not being in a hurry.”

Tom and I rode out toward the foothills and trees at the western end of Rose's land. We could see those horses right away, circling around one another nervously, older foals sandwiched between mares, colts mimicking the stallions who'd raise their heads up and sniff the air. They were jittery, and the sky was angry and orange-brown like it was the end of the world.

“You hold ‘em on this side,” I said to Tom and then Reno and I cut around the herd, between the horses and the trees, Reno running fast and straight like he knew more about what we were going to do than I did.

We started to nudge the horses forward from the back of the pack, yearlings, colts, and fillies, all were scared of a horse carrying a rider. Then the whole herd started to move and I saw Tom and Arrow across their undulating backs, pushing them north and letting me cut them east from my side. It was a beautiful thing, and it made me feel proud to see my friend across that small sea of horses, knowing what we would do without saying anything to me, just spitting his tobacco and calling out “Haw!” like that laugh of Rose's, to get them moving the right way.

It was like riding through a dream. The light was all but gone now and smoke and dust hung low against the ground. I was sure the fire would be right on us soon.

We headed the horses over the rise down towards Rose's steel house, scattering nervous and bleating goats as we did. The Ford Falcon was gone, and I was relieved that Rose had decided to go away, at least for now. I caught sight of Tom looking over at me as we ran the horses by. He had noticed it, too.

Once in a while, one or two of the horses would cut away and either Reno or Arrow would widen out their path to lead them back in, so when we got to the fence line we hadn't lost a single horse that I could see. I sprinted Reno up ahead of the pack now so I could get down and open that chute gate we had cut into the fence. Then I got back on Reno and helped Tommy get the leaders through the gate.

There must have been as many as fifty horses, and I knew our holding corral wouldn't be big enough, especially if some of them started to push against the rails or try to jump them, so once we had gotten them through the chute I jumped Reno over the fence and came around to set them all loose on Benavidez land without setting free the two horses Tom and I had been working on. There was nothing else we could do for Rose's herd; we had to hope they would be able to get away from the fire and the Benavidez ranch had enough running room for them, as well as the safety of the lake.

I opened the gate and swung it back, riding on the middle rail and watching all those horses run, thundering past me and Reno, and off toward the north. I looked back at Tom, on the other side of the fence at the chute gate, and I could barely see him through the fog of smoke. He waved his hat at me.

“We did it, Stotts.”

“We better get out of here quick, Tom. It's coming this way.”

Through the smoky haze I could see an eruption of orange flames pulsing from the canopy of one of the oaks on Rose's land.

The fire burned for three days. That first night was the worst; we all thought we'd have to leave. I always associated those nighttime brush fires, the orange lines twisting and writhing like snakes on the hills, with dying; and I thought about those horses we set loose, and all the burning. I stayed at Tom's house throughout those days, just moping quietly beside him as we worked; I had told my dad that they'd need me at the ranch in case we had to move out some of the stock, and that was the truth.

“Okay with me if you don't want to talk, Stotts.”

I looked over at Tommy. We rode out to the main pasture fence the morning after the fire started, watching the Benavidez stock, and keeping our eyes on the walls of tumbling smoke that rose in great orange pillows across the sun. Ashes peppered our hat brims, and we both had bandanas tied across our faces to block out the stink, but it didn't help much.

It was such a terrible thing, but it was impossible to ignore.

“ ‘Cause I'm worried, too,” he continued. “So if you want me to shut up, I will, but it's pretty hard for me to be out here with you and not talk about anything. You want me to shut up?”

“No.”

Tommy spit.

“Then tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me about it, Stotts.”

Tommy nudged Arrow right beside Reno so we were practically touching. I just kept my eyes on the smoke. I was so tired. I hadn't slept, couldn't stop my head all night long from picturing things that had been.

I remembered my mother.

You disappear in those clothes that big, Troy.

She had driven me to the dance at the community center, that first high school dance in ninth grade in September, before she got so sick. I sat in the car, afraid to go out, watching as Chase Rutledge, laughing, walked past us toward the doors, a girl drunkly swinging along at his arm.

I want to look different, Mom. I wish I was good-looking. I'm the smallest boy here.

I see all the other boys going in there, Troy. You're the handsomest one here.

I sighed and looked out the window.

Who are you going to dance with?

No one. I don't even know any girls.