Wild Horses (30 page)

“Dwight doesn’t do cars.” Tom went for his door handle. “I’m going to go look for a key now. Maybe he’s left one under a mat or someplace.”

He was halfway to the house when she decided he had the right idea — stretch the legs, breathe fresh air. Spend most of the day in the van and you stepped out smelling like a tannery. The night was starry and immense, filled with a buzz of insects, while from some unseen pond came the solemn drone of bullfrogs.

Movement, then, and the sound of paws thumping swiftly across the ground. She saw something streak out of the darkness ahead, flank Tom, and hit him from the side, but all he did was stagger. With eager yelps the dog began pogoing off its hind legs — a large German shepherd. It dropped back to the ground and turned its wary attention to her, deciding friend or foe.

“This is Dirtball,” Tom said. “Give him a good long sniff off the back of your hand and let him make the first move after that.”

“Hey there, Dirtball.” The snuffling dog concluded that her hands could remain attached. “Why’d you ever stand for anybody sticking you with a name like that?”

Tom shushed her. “Don’t hurt his feelings. Dwight told him it was the name of many warrior kings and Egyptian pharaohs.”

“And a fine, noble name it is,” Allison told the dog, and scruffed his large head between her hands.

“Dirtball’d be close to seventy now, as dog years go. Hasn’t slowed him down any, though. He’s like Dwight that way.”

“You mean somewhere out there tonight there’s a seventy-year-old repo man running around?”

“More like sixty-four, sixty-five, actually,” Tom said. “Kind of inspiring, isn’t it?”

While he searched the front porch for a key, Allison wandered the grounds, Dirtball trotting along as though deciding she needed supervision. Maybe to keep her from getting lost in all the junk. Stacks of tires sat beside dismantled farm equipment, harrow blades gleaming with moonlight. Lawn ornaments composed a small forest, from Romanesque birdbaths, to a tacky flock of plastic flamingos, to an assortment of ugly garden statuary, most of the peasant-and-burro variety. An old army field artillery gun.

Allison detoured beneath a flat roof extending from the back porch. Atop sawhorses, over a litter of wood shavings, lay what looked to be an unfinished coffin, four feet long. Closer up, it better resembled a rounded sarcophagus, with engraved symbols.

Tom had found no key, so they settled in to wait. More than an hour passed, and Dirtball heard it first; jumped to his feet and raced barking toward the road. The night filled with a rumble of approaching engines. Headlights swung up the drive and a pair of full-size pickups came barreling along. Dirtball paced beside the second so closely that Allison feared he would slip beneath its wheels, and then she realized that it was pulling a twin-size horse trailer. As it passed by on the way back to the pastures, she could see that the trailer wasn’t empty, two wispy tails draped down the outside of the gate.

“That was his repo job?” she asked.

“Told you he doesn’t do cars.”

They followed around back as the trucks idled before the stable and outside lights winked on. The trailer gate was dropped with a clang and four men clustered behind it, the tallest giving orders with a passionate waving of his arms before he turned and came striding up the gentle slope toward the house. He whipped a broad-brimmed hat from his head and slapped it against his thigh.

“Oughta see the sides of those animals, looks like stretched shammy over a couple of whiskey barrels,” he called out, furious. “I can see as how a man might get behind in what he owes, no sin there, but if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s some cheap son of a bitch thinking he’ll save his last dollars letting a horse graze a meadow already been picked clean. No oats, no hay, no nothing, I’ll be
damned
if I look on a thing like that one more time without putting somebody in the hospital.”

“Good to see you too,” said Tom.

If Dwight was sixty-four, he’d been blessed with either good genes or the will to turn away the years as sternly as he might a trespasser. He had the ropy build of a born ranch hand and moved with the loose stride of a man half his age. While he’d lost his head of hair, the remaining fringe along the sides combed back past his ears, his mustache grew thick and peppery. Around his waist he wore a gunbelt, the heavy revolver clunking against his thigh, nearly to his knee.

“Sorry, got ahead of myself.” He shined a flashlight at them. “What happened to your face? Looks like you been in a tussle with a steam iron.”

“That’ll take some explaining.”

Dwight nodded. “Hungry, then? I sure am.” To Allison: “I hate to eat before I go out after a horse. All I wanna do’s stretch out for a nap instead. Who are you, anyway?”

Tom introduced them and she shook Dwight’s callused hand. He shooed them toward the house with promises of food and drink.

“You first,” he told Allison. “Them horses ain’t the only things too skinny back here,” and she did not know what to say to that, but if he asked, she’d probably kill for him, too, now.

*

Dwight Lee Judson, she learned, was the father of one of Tom’s best friends during his stint in the Marines. Tom would visit whenever passing through, even after Dwight’s son had left for San Diego, and the friendship seemed to transfer naturally from the younger Judson to the elder.

From the dining-room table, Allison watched the rhythms of easy familiarity between them as Dwight sliced and fried bacon and Tom gathered eggs from the refrigerator, then chopped onion and green and red peppers. He moved around Dwight in ways so subtly deferential that she doubted he was even aware of it. She recalled him telling her how his own father had walked out on the family when he was barely old enough to remember. It didn’t take much insight to understand what he saw in Dwight.

They cooked enough for six, and were joined by the three men from the stable — two Mexicans and a skinny Vietnamese who worked for Dwight as all-around hired hands. While eating, they recounted for Tom and Allison tonight’s repossession of the underfed horses.

“You take a man’s horse, it tends to aggravate him,” Dwight said. “So I like to get the sneaky part done with everybody asleep and in bed. Doesn’t always work out that neat, though, so whenever we need a diversion, what I do is, I send Nguyen up to the front door with a bunch of legal papers. You get him talking faster than an auctioneer, in his native tongue, it tends to befuddle most people. They can’t understand him
or
the papers.”

“Then sometimes I get this guy like tonight,” Nguyen said. “He look at me, and he say I look too damn familiar to him from the war, so I say, ‘Hey, I nine years old when that war over, didn’t shoot nobody, but you push me too far now, I give it a try, see what I missed, only difference, now this time I got your law on
my
side, deadbeat.’”

“That tends to befuddle them too,” Dwight said.

“Does it ever come to that?” Allison asked. “That gunbelt…”

“Which I made for him after some not very subtle hints,” Tom said.

“Don’t interrupt the lady. What I do, I load the gun with two blanks and four live rounds, and in the event of belligerence, I hope like hell the sound of those two blanks discourages them from whatever else they got in mind. That’s done the trick, so far.”

“Of course,” said Hector, one of the Mexicans, “he won’t tell you about the time he fired that gun and spooked all eight horses we were supposed to be after. How long did it take us, three hours to get them all rounded up again?”

“Thereabouts.” Dwight stared glumly at his bacon and eggs and black beans. “That was a mess.”

“‘S’okay, Dwight,” said Carlos. “You just forgot those horses hadn’t seen as many John Wayne movies as you.”

After supper, Hector and Carlos and Nguyen went home. Dwight piled the dirty dishes in the sink to soak, then Allison left him and Tom alone at the table with a bottle of sour mash and time to catch up on each other’s days. She was by now getting the idea that there was no Mrs. Judson, not anymore.

As she ran a hot bath in a clawfoot porcelain tub and did some soaking of her own, their voices carried in to her, if not their words; light at first, with laughter, turning serious after a while — Tom, giving an account of their afternoon, she supposed. Accounting for her presence as well.

They were still at it long after the tub drained, and Allison wandered the house with wet hair and bare feet, intrigued by the peculiar collisions of decor. In the TV room, a wall with shelves full of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour faced an opposite wall devoted to a sweet and unexpected fascination with ancient Egypt. Framed prints of the pyramids and Sphinx; bright paintings on papyrus of Egyptian gods. He owned no few trinkets, as well, often chipped or worn smooth of detail. A few fragmented jars, paint still visible. Small statues; amulets carved from crystal, ivory, stone.

Later, Dwight came out to explain sleeping arrangements, if she was ready to turn in. He had one guest room, and it would be hers. Tom would sleep out back, in the small bunkhouse that Hector and Carlos and Nguyen sometimes used, as well as the migrants hired on when the melon crops were in.

As she lay down, Allison listened to the murmur of voices and the clink of the bottle and glasses. Listened to the myriad sounds of their being alive and taking a comfort in them that peeled away years, decades. Like a child again, needing all those small sounds of a house that lived and laughed and protected those inside.

The way it was supposed to be.

*

The next morning Tom left the bunkhouse and trudged up to the house, lured by the scent of coffee wafting from open windows. His face felt better, the cut cheek held together since last night with a butterfly bandage made from tape, the powder burns treated with salve. The red blotches had faded, but it would be a few days before all the gray-black speckles worked themselves out.

With Florida time an hour ahead, and St. John’s Apocalypse open for business, he found Dwight’s phone and called in. When Lianna Murphy answered, Tom asked if anyone there had given out details of his itinerary. Silence, then a hesitant admission that, yes, she had given out yesterday’s schedule, but only to Teddy Serafino, of Coyote’s Paw Harley-Davidson, when he’d called about some papers that Tom had left behind.

Coyote Ridge again. It all kept pointing back there.

“I did something wrong, didn’t I?” Lianna said. Tom told her to let it go, that everything was fine … but if anyone else should call trying to track him, please keep those details confidential.

It shouldn’t be a problem. Those two from yesterday would be cooling their heels. It was no guarantee that they didn’t have partners running loose, but if they were the brains of the outfit, he would take his chances with the rest.

Next, Tom called Coyote’s Paw Harley and asked Teddy if, by chance, he’d left any papers behind on Friday. Teddy knew nothing about them, said he would keep his eyes open. That clinched it.

Gunther and Madeline had known enough about him to track him across three states, to impersonate one of his retailers, to lie to one of his employees. Tenacious work, but nothing that any competent skip tracer couldn’t have managed. A little information and a knack for lying went a long way.

After breakfast, he went for a walk along the roads around Dwight’s, ignoring the horizons of pines and power lines. Eyes downcast in thought, sun beating on his head and tender face as he tried to piece the rest together.

What had Gunther and Madeline wanted, anyway? Something they thought they could get from Allison. Something she claimed not to know about. He was inclined to believe her. When it wasn’t done for love or revenge, the only other reason people like that killed was for money. And a woman in Allison’s position had nothing worth killing for, much less crossing four states to do it.

Somebody else, then, must have put them onto her. Let her take the heat, a sacrificial lamb. But yesterday should’ve ended it, with Gunther and Madeline in jail and Allison’s trail lost.

She was up and around when he got back, with Dwight at the stable. Area lenders paid Dwight to board some of the horses he repossessed, but it was one of his own that he was starting to saddle, smoothing a blanket over the back of a gentle roan gelding. It wasn’t a horse Dwight ordinarily rode; rather, one whose mellow temperament made it ideal for his grandchildren.

Dwight had the girthstrap cinched and was fitting the bit and bridle into place by the time Tom finished digging for what he wanted in the van and brought it down to Allison. She was sitting on the top rail of the corral, enraptured by the proceedings, one boot tapping impatiently.

“As long as you’re doing this,” Tom called to her, “might as well do it right,” and he sailed the hat to her like a Frisbee. She caught it, tried it on, and while it sat a little low on her forehead, she wore it well. Brown leather, aged and weathered in-shop; flat-brimmed and a little floppy, with a thin metallic band woven into slits circling the base of a boxy, flat-topped crown.

“I love it.” She adjusted the angle, her wheat-colored hair spilling from beneath. “Know something? You do good work.”

“Stole the design from a Clint Eastwood movie, though,” he admitted. “
Two Mules for Sister Sarah
.”