The Last Ranch (32 page)

Matt yanked the pistol from Conway's holster, checked to make sure it was unloaded, and waved it in his face. “And you got this from a pawnshop, I suppose.”

“What's bugging you?” Conway pleaded. “It's just part of the costume.”

“Be glad this horse pistol isn't loaded, or I might just shoot you. You stole it and the uniform from my old ranch.”

Conway shook his head. “No, no, not me, I swear.” His voice quivered.

“Prove it.”

“I got it from a guy who served with me in the army. He said he found it in an abandoned homestead on the base.”

“Aren't you forgetting the secondhand-store story?”

“I swear I'm not lying.”

Matt grabbed the pistol by the barrel. “Strip down to your skivvies.”

“What?”

“Do it or I'll beat you bloody.”

“Are you serious?”

“Try me,” Matt replied.

“Okay, look, I took it and I'm sorry. It was just a lark. Can't we leave it at that? I'll give the uniform back to you tomorrow, promise.”

“One more time: take off the uniform,” Matt growled.

Defeated, Conway removed the uniform. With his keys and wallet in his hand, he asked if he could just leave.

Matt motioned with the horse pistol at the back door. “Yeah, but you have to go through the house.”

“That's ridiculous,” Conway said.

“Either you leave through the house in your skivvies or I file a police report with the sheriff on Monday. I'll tell everybody here you lost a friendly bet to me. That will help you save face.”

“A bet about what?”

“I'll make something up,” Matt answered.

“Promise?”

Matt opened the back door to the sounds of party merriment. “I promise. Now, go.”

Conway nodded, put on his boots, and stepped inside.

Kevin burst out of his room and reached the bottom of the stairs in time to see Conway's skivvy-covered backside darting for the front door past stunned partygoers.

For the first time since Friday he didn't even remotely mind missing the school dance. Not at all.

For Kevin, the holiday season of joy and happiness lost some of its cheer. Just before Christmas, Eunice's dad resigned from the sheriff's department to become the Socorro police chief. He started his new job right away, and left Eunice and her mother behind in T or C to prepare for their move back home after the first of the year.

Eunice was overjoyed to be returning to Socorro, and while Kevin was devastated to be losing a friend, he tried hard not to show it. But it bothered him that in all the time he knew her she had never explained why her parents had moved to T or C. When he asked, she blithely told him when her father had been passed over for chief, he retired in disgust, and moved the family to T or C to take a deputy sheriff position. She never in a million years thought he'd be offered the chief's job.

While it all made sense, Kevin couldn't shake off a feeling that she hadn't been completely up-front with him from the start. He wondered what else she wasn't sharing. Maybe, in the end, it wasn't his business.

About the only good thing Christmas brought was the watch his parents gave him that he'd spotted in the Las Cruces jewelry-store window. What a surprise that had been. For the first week he had it, he couldn't stop admiring it on his wrist.

He saw Eunice once the weekend before she moved. She was still flushed with excitement about leaving T or C and returning home. She promised to write him, but he sensed a growing detachment that dimmed his hope they'd continue to remain in contact. Although he couldn't put his feelings into words, he felt a sense of loss about her leaving until he realized she had considerably brightened his life.

He heard from her once about a month after she left in a chatty letter about how happy she was to be back in Socorro with her old friends. No longer glum about her departure, he wrote back not expecting a reply and didn't get one. He was too busy to worry about it. He'd thrown himself into the pursuit of the all-around title at the next year's Willow Creek Ranch rodeo, and when he wasn't doing homework or weekend ranch chores, he worked on his calf roping and honed his steer-wrestling and bronc-riding skills. As a junior he'd be eligible to compete in the annual all-state high school rodeo, and he had his eye on winning that championship as well.

He continued working with Dale on team roping, who had no interest in entering any other event now that he'd made the football team as a starting tackle. They were the same age, but Kevin had passed him in height. Where Dale was thick in the chest with legs like huge lodge poles, Kevin was square in the shoulders, lean, and quick on his feet.

Several of the boys he practiced rodeoing with at the county fairgrounds also played football, and as winter turned to spring, they started encouraging him to try out for the team. The
previous year they'd taken the district title but lost the state championship, and they wanted another crack at it in their senior year. Even Dale got into the act by encouraging him to speak to their coach, Mr. Bradley, the science teacher.

“You'd make a good running back, and we need more speed,” he added.

Not interested, Kevin continued to decline their invitations. One day during lunch recess, the team captain, Joey Stewart, caught up with him in the cafeteria.

“You need to try out for the team,” he ordered. A burly two-hundred-pounder wearing his letterman's jacket, the thinly veiled threat was clearly visible in his eyes.

“It's not something I have time to do,” Kevin replied.

“Show some school pride,” Joey replied gruffly. “I'm asking you nice.”

“It's not that I don't care about our school,” Kevin answered. “I'm just not interested in football.”

Joey snorted. “That's stupid. Nobody gives a damn about rodeo. Hell, we don't even have a rodeo club, let alone an official team.”

“That's true, but it's the sport I like.”

Kevin walked away and heard no more about it until Coach Bradley posted a team-tryout announcement on the school bulletin boards. Joey Stewart showed up again during lunch recess.

“Either you agree to try out for the team or meet me after school behind the gym.” The sneer on his face was pure ugly meanness.

Kevin laughed. “The threat of fighting you isn't going to make me change my mind. Don't wait for me.”

“Coward,” Joey spat as Kevin walked away.

***

A
fter school, Dale intercepted Kevin on his way home. “One way or another, Joey will make you fight him,” he predicted sourly.

“That's plain dumb,” Kevin replied. “I'm not going out for the team.”

“Look, he's a bully—that's all he knows how to do. He wants you on the team. So do a lot of the guys. Plus, we need depth if we're gonna win state.”

“I bet he makes a great team captain.”

Dale winced in agreement at Kevin's sarcasm.

“Did he send you to come and get me?”

“Yeah, sort of,” Dale replied sheepishly.

Kevin stopped in his tracks and gave Dale a disapproving look for being Joey's messenger boy.

Dale grimaced. “I ain't afraid of him.”

“I didn't say you were.” Kevin pondered his options. True, Joey outweighed him by more than fifty pounds and had bigger muscles, but he wasn't the brightest kid in town. “Tell him if he wants to fight to meet me at the county fairgrounds arena in an hour.”

Dale raised an eyebrow. “What are you going to do?”

“Just give him the message.”

Dale nodded. “Okay, I'll see you there.”

He hurried off trying to decipher what the mischievous look in Kevin's eyes meant. He didn't know for sure, but he wasn't going to miss what his pal had planned for Joey at the fairgrounds.

***

K
evin got to the arena early, tied Two-Bits out of sight at the rear of the stock corral, unlatched the gate to the calf-roping chute, hunkered down behind a fencepost, and waited. In a few minutes a line of cars appeared on the dirt road to the fairgrounds. He
backtracked to Two-Bits, got his lasso, and did a quick head count of the students who spilled out of the vehicles and tromped behind Joey into the arena. It looked like the entire team, the water boy, the student manager, and half of the cheerleaders had come to watch the fight. They formed a loose, noisy semicircle behind Joey and waited for the show to begin.

Joey didn't keep them waiting. He walked to the center of the arena, put his clenched hands on his hips, took an aggressive stance, scanned for his intended victim, and boomed out Kevin's name.

Kevin took his cue, threw a leg over Two-Bits, broke the pony into a fast lope, bent low to push open the unlatched gate, and bore down on Joey, his lasso in the air. The crowd behind Joey began to scatter, but he stood his ground just long enough for Kevin's perfect loop to settle over his shoulders. He quick-wrapped the lasso on the saddle horn, and Two-Bits skidded to a perfect dime stop that jerked Joey off his feet.

It knocked the wind out of him and he lay still for a minute before struggling upright, a murderous look on his face, his arms bound tightly at his sides by Kevin's rope.

Kevin gave Two-Bits a little jig and the pony fast-stepped backward, pulling Joey facedown in the dirt. Joey's teammates and the others stood in stunned silence, although Dale and a few of his football pals were smiling.

“Do you want more?” Kevin asked as Two-Bits snorted impatiently.

Red-faced with anger, Joey struggled to his knees.

“I could drag you around the arena a few times,” Kevin suggested as Joey continued to glare at him. “It would skin some of the hide off you and probably hurt a bit.”

“Let me go,” Joey demanded after considering his options, his husky voice no longer filled with bravado.

“If I do, it ends here,” Kevin said, with a firm tug on the lasso that made Joey freeze. “That's the deal, otherwise you're gonna eat a lot of dirt.”

Joey stiffened and the color drained from his face. “Okay.”

“You all heard that,” Kevin said to the watching crowd as he jigged Two-Bits forward. Everyone nodded in agreement.

“Are we square, Joey?”

Joey answered through clenched teeth. “Yeah, we're square.”

Kevin reached down, freed Joey, and trotted Two-Bits toward the gate, holding in check a growing need to smile. It wouldn't do to openly gloat about his victory, but it sure felt good nonetheless.

He waited until he was loping along halfway home before letting out a victory hoot.

***

O
utside the high school principal's office, Mary Kerney waited with her unrepentant son on the uncomfortable seat of a wooden bench, worn smooth over the years by the bottoms of mischief-makers due for a scolding or reprimand. Across the hallway on an identical, equally worn bench, sat a sullen Joey Stewart, Kevin's opponent in the fairgrounds fight that didn't happen. With him was his father, Owen Stewart, the owner of a local car dealership and a big booster of the high school football team. He paid for the game-day programs and the
GO TIGERS
banners strung at the top of the stands, made up the shortfall in the team equipment budget, and sponsored all the newspaper ads announcing the team's home and away games. Heavy in the jowls, he had the look of a man ready to pounce.

According to the school secretary, who'd called Mary at home to bring Kevin to the principal's office immediately, the incident between the two alleged miscreants was already being talked
about as a rumble of mythic proportions in which the school's most notorious bully had been laid low. From what Kevin told Mary about the episode, it was a one-sided fracas with her son coming out on top over a rather dimwitted opponent. And while she'd never admit to it, she would have loved to have seen it.

A two-minute wait brought Principal Lloyd Becker to the door. With a serious look at the boys and a polite nod to Mary and to Joey's father, he ushered everyone into his office, sat them in front of his desk, and launched into the reason for the meeting—namely the violation of the school rule prohibiting students from fighting on or off campus.

“We simply can't tolerate such behavior,” he said.

Livid, Owen Stewart pointed a finger at Kevin. “I want him expelled!”

“For refusing to fistfight?” Mary asked sweetly.

Stewart curled his upper lip. “Just because you're a teacher at the elementary school, Mrs. Kerney, doesn't mean you or your son have special privileges here. He tried to run my boy down on horseback.”

Mary studied Joey. “Your boy looks none the worse for wear.”

“He assaulted him,” Owen Stewart thundered. “That's against the law.”

“I'd hardly call it an assault; more a creative way to avoid a fight. And it worked, as I understand it. Joey and Kevin have agreed to peacefully and permanently settle their differences.”

Mary smiled warmly at Joey, who sneered at her defiantly. She kept smiling.

Owen Stewart snorted in disgust and turned to Principal Becker. “Do something,” he commanded.

Becker faced Owen Stewart directly. “Yes, of course.” He paused and then turned to look seriously at Kevin. “There is no
question you violated school policy. However, since this is your first disciplinary infraction of any kind, I'm giving you a warning. Next time, the consequences will be greater. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Kevin replied solemnly.

Becker switched to Joey. “There is no question you also violated school policy. In addition, this is the third time this year you have been sent to me for aggressive behavior. For that reason, I'm suspending you for three days.”

Owen Stewart shot to his feet. “You don't want to do that.”

Becker rose. “Yes, I do,” he replied patiently. “And the next time I see Joey in my office for any school infraction, no matter how minor, he'll no longer be on the football team.”

Owen Stewart's eyes narrowed to thin slits. “The school board will hear about this.”

Principal Becker nodded. “I'm sure they will, and I'll continue to tell them how much we appreciate your strong civic support of our athletic programs.” He smiled genially at his guests and gestured at his closed office door. “Thank you for coming, and good day to you all.”

Mary waited to giggle until she got in the car with Kevin for the short drive home.

“You're not mad?” Kevin asked.

Mary shook her head. “I've been trying to think of a reason to give you a good dressing-down, but I can't.” She reached over and patted his knee. “Just go easy on the hijinks from here on out.”

Kevin smiled in relief.

***

A
t the end of the school year Kevin brought home a report card with lower letter grades than usual in both math and science.

“My grades are still better than most,” he argued as Matt grimly inspected the report card over dinner.

“Is that what you want to be when you grow up, just a little better than most?” his father replied, staring Kevin down.

Kevin dropped his gaze to the table. “No, sir.”

“We expect more from you,” Mary added. “Right now high school may be easy, but college won't be. You've gotten lazy.”

“I may not go to college,” Kevin said impulsively, without thinking. The announcement vibrated like a noiseless explosion in the room. “At least not right away,” he modified.

“What?” Matt demanded.

Kevin shrugged. “A lot of kids don't go. Dale says he's enlisting in the air force when he graduates. Maybe I'll do the same.”

“That's not being very smart,” Matt countered.

“Why not?” He glanced from his father to his mother. “You both enlisted and served, and you're proud of it. Anyway, I'll probably get drafted when I turn eighteen, so why not get it over with?”

“You'll just be turning seventeen when you graduate,” Mary said. “And we won't sign the papers for you to go in early.”