Love, Like Water (14 page)

The voice stopped, and Joshua looked up from his soup to see Eli blinking at him. “Tuck’s? Jesse? Oh, hell no. Sarafina’s got a husband. Works for the casino, the Hard Rock, up outside of Albuquerque. They’re Isleta Pueblo. She lived there ’til Jesse was three or four, then decided she missed the ranch and came here.” He thought a moment, then added, “I think Tuck thinks of Jesse as his, though. Goes to all his school stuff and all.”

“I like Jesse,” Joshua said, and went back to eating.

Eli talked about Jesse for a while, then moved on to some of the trainers they’d worked with in the past, then on to… something else. After a while, his voice stopped, and Joshua looked up. He was staring at the place setting in front of Joshua.

“What?” Joshua asked, then looked. Both plate and bowl were empty. When he glanced at Eli, the man was grinning.

“You et it all, son,” Eli said. “Betcha didn’t even realize it.”

“I… I didn’t. It was good,” Joshua said lamely, then pushed the dishes away.

“I’ll tell Sarafina you liked it. I liked it too—maybe she’ll put it on the menu.”

“That would be good.” Joshua watched as Eli carefully wrapped the dirty dishes and put them in the carrier.

“You want Tuck to bring you dessert with supper tonight?”

“Are you guys going to be bringing all my meals?”

“Nah. You gotta live through breakfast. But breakfast won’t kill ya. What they serve for lunch and dinner might.” Again the grin.

“Okay. Thanks.” Joshua thought, then added, “Tell Sarafina thanks, too.”

Eli touched his forehead, then picked up the cooler bag, put his hat on, and left.

H
IS
uncle brought supper—this time red beans and rice. Joshua had slept most of the afternoon, and didn’t think he’d be hungry, but the minute Tucker opened the insulated dish and he smelled the onion and peppers, his stomach growled. Tucker laughed. “Sounds like a part of you is feeling better, anyway. Eli says you ate all your lunch and woulda ate his too, if he hadn’t scarfed it down before you could.”

“I’m surprised he ate at all. He never stopped talking.”

“Eli?” Tucker’s bushy eyebrows went up. “Eli Kelly?”

“I think he thought he was entertaining me.”

“Was he?”

Joshua thought a moment. “Yeah, I guess he was.”

“He’s a good man, Eli.”

“Saved my life, I guess.”

“You guess right.” Tucker dished out the beans and rice and handed Joshua a spoon. “Couldn’t run the ranch without him. If I expand like I want to, I’m gonna need him. Gonna need you, too, to run the business end. When you come home, we’re gonna have to start working on that.”

“Why do you want to expand the ranch?” Joshua asked. He scooped a big spoonful of the beans and rice into his mouth and closed his eyes in bliss.

Tucker snorted. “Well, don’t know that I do, really. But I got more work than I can handle, and with some of the other ranchers getting out of the mustang roundups, I’ll have even more than that. And the movie companies are doing more fantasy films, and need horses that do more than just stop and start on command.” He sighed. “And then there’s the rodeo stuff. And frankly, there are a lot more people buying horses that they can’t handle, and then when they’ve ruined ’em, they want me to fix ’em. Or they dump them somewhere and the ASPCA comes to me. So yeah, I got more work.” Tuck stuck a second spoon in the bowl and took a mouthful. “Hm. Good. I’m thinking of moving the higher end training—the film stuff and the private training—to the Rocking J, under a manager, and keeping the mustangs and the rescue operation here. Anyway, the Rocking J still has some decent buildings I can use, and more importantly, water. There’s a good spring-fed pond on the property. So even if the worst happens, and the Galiano dries up, there’s still a source of water.” Tucker shook his head. “It’s never happened before since the river comes from runoff in the mountains, and so far there’s been enough snow—but the Triple C relies on the creeks from the Galiano, and I don’t care what people say, the climate’s changing and we’re getting longer and longer droughts. Might not get a lot of snow someday. Might come a time when the whole operation depends on that pond.”

Joshua ate slowly, thinking. He’d grown up in urban areas close to water, first Chicago, then Cincinnati. There’d never been any question about the ready availability of water, not when you had lakes and rivers practically outside your door. It hadn’t been ’til he’d been out in the desert that he’d realized what it meant to be really thirsty.

It wasn’t just the thirst. Even in the predawn hours, stumbling out over the dusty, rocky terrain, he’d felt the perspiration drying as soon as it formed, felt his face and lips tightening as the moisture was sucked out. He’d felt the dust settling on his skin as his feet stirred it up. The farther he got from the ranch and its water, the more desiccated he felt, and with every step the dryness leached the energy from his muscles. By the time he’d stumbled into that gully, he’d felt barely more than a husk, and wondered why the dry desert wind hadn’t blown him away.

Tucker had been talking, and Joshua zeroed in on something he had said while Joshua was thinking. “So if you’re going to spend more time with the high-end training, what about the mustangs and the rescue animals?”

His uncle paused in his diatribe about bank finance practices. “Oh. Right. Well, that’ll be Eli’s bailiwick. He’s got more patience with animals than people, and half of the commissioned stuff is dealing with people. It’s why he’s better at training animals, and I’m better with training the trainers. There are a couple of guys on staff that are like that—the others I’ll use on the Rocking J.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out.”

“I do, if it happens. But if it does happen—tomorrow or two years from now—I’m gonna need someone I trust to manage the books and scheduling and stuff. Not just an office manager. Hell, I can get one of those anywhere. But someone who’ll be able to do projections and estimates, and see the future of the ranch, the way I do. I need you, Joshua. I need someone who’ll be as committed to the Triple C as I am. Can you be that?”

There was a cold knot in the middle of Joshua’s chest. “I don’t know, Uncle Tuck. Maybe someday I’d decide to go back into law enforcement. Or, or something else. Maybe I’ll hate working on the ranch. Maybe….”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe the Mayans just got the date wrong and we’ll all go up in smoke next Tuesday. Maybe I won’t be able to buy the property ’cause the Department of Buying Property They Ain’t Never Gonna Use buys it first. I ain’t asking you to decide right this second. I’m asking if you can be the kinda guy I need. Are you willing to give it a try?”

The knot eased a little, and for the first time in a long time, Joshua saw a future. Not the future, but a future. Possibilities. Nothing too demanding, nothing that would require his soul, that dry, shriveled thing, but a job, a future, a something to keep the dark at bay.

“I’m willing,” he heard himself say, and the dark, cold, heavy weight of the knot vanished.

Chapter 12

“W
E
’
VE
got four trucks that belong to the ranch, my Silverado, two F-450s and the F-150 Elian drives,” Tucker said. “The Forester is Sarafina’s, but we cover the insurance on that, too.” He clicked open the spreadsheet he’d been using to track payments. “We been paying the premiums monthly, but I’m thinking you might be able to negotiate a better rate if we paid ’em quarterly or twice a year instead. Been meaning to get to that, but something always comes up.”

“Something outdoors, working with the horses, you mean,” Joshua asked dryly.

Tucker didn’t even try to hide his grin. “I hate this shit,” he admitted. “But I figured with your book learnin’….”

“Jesus, Uncle Tuck, you sound like every stereotypical cowboy in every movie I’ve ever seen. Do you practice talking like that?”

Laughing, Tuck shook his head. “Your granddad
was
the stereotypical cowboy—guess I picked up a lot of that from him. ’Course in his day, that was how everyone talked. You still get a lot of us old coots out here slinging that lingo.”

“Eli’s practically my age and he talks like it too. Maybe not so much, but still.”

“Eli’s been working on ranches since he was old enough to walk. He can’t help it. Though he did go to college and likes to throw big words into the conversation every now and again.”

“What did he study?”

“Animal husbandry, like me. Which sounds kinda kinky, but ain’t. He thought about vet school, but it was a lot more school than he wanted to deal with. He got a certificate, though.” Tucker shook his head. “Gotta have a degree or certificate for everything these days, seems like. At any rate, it comes in handy when dealing with government stuff. He’s a smart boy, Eli. People think that cuz he’s slow moving he’s stupid. Nothing stupid about him.”

“I don’t think he’s stupid,” Joshua said.

The look his uncle gave him was thoughtful. Joshua thought maybe he saw more than Joshua wanted him to, but he only said, “We pay the insurance on Ramon’s and Manolo’s trucks too—they live here in the bunkhouse and use the trucks for ranch business. Those are these two, here. Everyone else, both the guys who live on-site and the ones who live in Miller, pays for their own expenses. So don’t ask them to use their own vehicles for ranch business—they can use ours. We’re insured for it. So that’s seven vehicles we insure and four we own….”

Joshua listened to his uncle explain his new job—managing the ranch office. He’d been surprised when this morning, the first morning he’d been home after six days in the hospital, his uncle had woken him up at 6:00 a.m. and dragged him out into the kitchen to eat breakfast with the six live-in ranch hands, Jesse, Eli, and Tucker himself. Then he’d sat Joshua down in the office in front of the computer and had been working with him for the last three hours.

Joshua’s stomach growled and his uncle looked at the clock on the computer screen. “Eleven thirty,” he said. “Think you can hang on until noon for dinner?”

“I guess,” Joshua said. The fact that he was hungry still surprised him. It had been a long time since he had actually been hungry. Even before his walk in the desert, he hadn’t had much of an appetite. The lunch and supper Tuck and Eli had smuggled into the hospital while the nurses and doctors turned a blind eye had been so incredibly good after the hospital dreck that Joshua had found his appetite again.

He’d talked with the hospital’s psychiatrist, too, and while he didn’t admit that his “getting lost” was deliberate, he did finally admit to himself at least that it was probably a good idea to have someone to talk to occasionally—who wasn’t a family member, or fellow ranch employee, or…. Or what? What was Elian Kelly, anyway? Object of unrequited lust? Or was it just a mild attraction that Joshua’s mental state, and three years without sex, had inflated to a larger desire?

He wasn’t sure at this point if he knew what to do anymore, even if there was the vaguest possibility that a dyed-in-the-wool cowboy like Elian was the slightest bit gay.

He certainly didn’t ping on Joshua’s radar. Joshua had had boyfriends in high school (covert), and college (overt), and the academy (back to being covert), not to mention the pickups that were part and parcel of any gay man’s social life, but there had never been any question as to the other man’s interest. Usually, they picked
him
up. Even before his undercover assignment, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to make the first move, and he couldn’t remember
ever
being attracted to someone he didn’t know for sure was interested. He couldn’t read Eli at all.

But he was attracted to him. There was no question about that.

In his brief conversations with the shrink, he’d come to realize that his fear of being rejected—of being hurt, traumatized, damaged the way ’Chete had damaged him—had triggered that last, horrible nightmare, and the resultant “escape plan,” as he’d described it to the shrink. It was an escape plan, of sorts, an escape from the nightmares, from the endless emotional, if not physical (and it was terribly physical too), desire for the heroin, from the feelings of worthlessness and despair. From the fear of being outed in this macho environment, from the fear of being rejected by his uncle, from the fear of being rejected, despised, maybe even physically assaulted, by Eli. He shook his head at the thought. Maybe by one of the other ranch hands—or by all of them—but he couldn’t see slow-moving, soft-spoken, gentle Eli being the one to do it.

“… follow?” Tucker had kept talking while Joshua was thinking.

It only took a quick mental rewind for Joshua to catch up. “Yeah. The plates are all registered at the same time every year. Does the ranch pay for Manolo’s and Ramon’s registrations too?”

“Nope.” Tuck went on talking, and Joshua went on thinking.

The stay in the hospital had done him some good, he thought. He might have kept his intentions secret from the shrink—though he wondered if he’d really hid as much as he thought he had—but the rest of the staff had taken his condition in stride. He’d expected to get sideways glances about the needle marks in his arms or the obvious malnutrition, or the gang tats he wore, but nobody seemed bothered by any of it. The nutritionist had stopped by to quiz him about his eating habits (or the lack thereof), and to recommend various vitamins and supplements; the phlebotomist came by again to do more blood tests, probably to confirm that he didn’t have HIV or AIDS from the needles; the shrink gave him a list of recommended psychologists in Albuquerque and Roswell, the two biggest cities near the ranch; and Dr. Castellano talked to him about follow-ups to confirm that he didn’t have any lingering damage to his kidneys or liver from the heatstroke and dehydration. The headache eased up after a couple of days, for which he was grateful, but the doctors didn’t let him leave for nearly a week, until his vision cleared up, the sporadic dizziness disappeared, and he’d been able to walk easily across the room. He still had to go in for checkups weekly until everyone was positive he was okay, and Castellano had given him an ultimatum about gaining weight. Everyone was friendly and easy with him. It was so different from what he’d experienced in rehab—everyone tense and obsessive and anal, watching him and the other addicts like hawks. It had been the best rehab facility that the Bureau could find. Robinson was grateful enough for Joshua’s achievements that he’d pulled every string he could reach to get him where he had the best chance of recovery. Yeah, they’d done the physical detox to get the chemical out of his system, and he’d refused any programs that involved other drugs like methadone. He was determined to be done with the drugs. But they’d still watched him.