Seeing YouChapter One
Turning onto the private road that would lead me to the ranch buildings, I took a deep breath. It had been two weeks since that phone call from Erin. I didn’t exactly drag my feet, but I probably could have made it back last week.
The dread ate at me on the drive back to Montana, through big cities offering nothing but traffic and problems, through the small abandoned towns that offered a skeleton of the past, through mountains and rolling hills and flat plains. Over the river and through the woods, to Wade’s house I go.
My smile faded as I pulled my beat-up blue Chevy to the front of the bunkhouse. I hopped out of the truck and stood still as I tried to figure out why this place felt so… off. Not even the day after Simon’s funeral had felt like this.
I walked around a pick-up truck, mouth gaping open and its intestines abandoned on a blanket on the ground, and made my way over to the corral, hooking my boot on the bottom rung of the fence. And then it hit me.
Where was all the life?
I did a three-sixty, scouring the meadow and the foothills, the ranch house, the bunkhouse, the pond, the road winding out of sight leading back to civilization, the stables and the barn, the clumps of trees lining Sweet Grass creek, the trails leading into the mountains. Nothing.
Where the hell was everyone? The hands? Mack? Wade? More puzzling, where the hell were the animals?
A breeze brushed past my neck and rustled the leaves on the aspen trees, which until that moment had stood silently at attention around the outbuildings. I stood still for a moment and listened, but I didn’t hear anything other than the occasional songbird and the gurgle of creek water.
Shaking my head, I made my way over to the stables. Opening the sagging door, I walked inside and couldn’t help wrinkling my nose. The stalls needed to be mucked out, despite most of them standing empty.
Walking down the aisle, I paused when I realized Simon’s horse, Donner, wasn’t there. I stood looking at the empty stall for a moment, but forced myself to keep looking for the other horses. I didn’t see Rudy, Wade’s horse, either, but my heart clenched when I spotted my Blitzen. Man, it had been hard leaving my girl behind when I left the Lazy G.
“Hey, girl. How’s my pretty lady been?” I rubbed her nose, fiercely glad all of sudden that I had come home. It was too long since I had been on a horse. The unconditional love didn’t hurt either.
I gave into the little boy inside of me and hugged Blitzen’s neck tight until she nudged my head and I let go, laughing. “Alright. I was getting sappy, huh? Missed you though.” She lipped my pocket and looked at me with what I would have assumed was a desperate eye if I didn’t know any better. Had anybody been bringing my baby any treats?
“I’ll see if I can scare up an apple or two later, but first I need to find out where everyone is. And where the rest of the horses are.” Blitzen whickered softly, and I gave her one good rub before heading out of the barn and over to the bunkhouse. Stepping onto the sagging front step, I knocked on the door before walking in.
“Hello? Anybody here?” It was the middle of the day, so I didn’t really expect anyone to answer.
“Yeah? Who’s that?” The voice bellowing from the belly of the house had to be Mack, the foreman of the Lazy G since before I started working here back in high school.
“It’s Dylan,” I said, walking down the hallway and meeting up with Mack coming out of his bedroom wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt, hair rumpled as if he had been asleep, his bushy gray eyebrows climbing in surprise toward what used to be his hairline.
“Dylan! I didn’t know you were coming back. Wade didn’t mention it. Sure am glad to see you.” Mack pulled me into a bruising back-slapping hug, and I was ashamed to feel my eyes burning. I had a good excuse for it a second later, though, when Mack pulled back and smacked me on the side of my head.
“Ow, what was that for?” Guess they weren’t going to slaughter the fatted calf for me.
“Boy, we’re gonna talk ‘bout this whole keepin’ in touch thing. Twice in fourteen months don’t count, and I oughta take you outside and teach you a lesson that will have you checkin’ in at least monthly next time you leave.”
Rubbing the side of my head, I said, “Sorry, Mack. I meant to call more, but… I just needed time.”
I didn’t need to say any more, we both knew why. Mack looked at me, ran his hand through what was left of his gray hair, and it struck me that Mack might have been napping. In the middle of the afternoon. That was odd. I couldn’t remember Mack taking a nap in the seventeen years I’d known him.
I caught a flash of an unmade bed and bedside table sporting an array of pill bottles before Mack shut the bedroom door and turned toward the kitchen. Accepting the cold beer he offered me, I joined him at the kitchen table and tried to tell myself there was no reason to be nervous.
“So why’d you come back? You talk to Wade?”
“No, not yet. I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d get in so I thought I’d… surprise him.” I smiled but Mack leveled a look at me and I knew he wasn’t fooled.
“Actually, I talked to Erin and she thought I should come home. Now that I’m here, I can see why. Where is everyone? The horses? Wade? The hands?”
Mack fiddled with the label on the bottle, not looking at me anymore. “You talk to Wade at all since… well, since you left?”
“Not exactly.” I forced myself to keep my expression blank.
Mack looked up at me and sighed, and I realized that somewhere along the way, the man who had always seemed larger than life to me had gotten old. Old and tired. How did that happen?
I was afraid I knew.
“What does not exactly mean?”
“It means… well, no.”
“Shit. Shit. What the hell is wrong with you, Dylan?”
“I just needed time.” Damn, that sounded lame. “And Wade didn’t call me either.” Oh, that was better. Damn.
“Christ.” Mack just shook his head. “Shit.”
“I’m sure He did. Funny, gives new meaning to the term ‘holy shit.’” I knew as soon as the words left my mouth that this was not the time for jokes. Mack looked at me like he had the time he found Simon and me drunk behind a couple bales of hay in the barn when we were sixteen, and I was supposed to be mucking stalls. I tried to brazen it out, asking Mack to join us, and he stared at me with a mix of anger and disappointment. Then he hauled me up and tossed me in the freezing cold pond not five minutes later. It had been… sobering. “Sorry, Mack. Will you tell me what’s going on?”
Mack sighed and said, “Wade ain’t been around much since… well, I rarely see him, so he don’t talk to me. I try to hunt him down to remind him to pay stuff, but he… shit, I don’t know where he goes. Just out riding with Rudy I think.”
“Pay stuff? Why would you need to remind him? And where are all the horses?”
“Yeah, Wade ain’t been very timely with the bills lately. The feed store needs a payment before they’ll fill the next order. Had to sell most of the stock.”
“What? Why? What’s everybody riding? How’re you moving cattle? Riding fence?” Why did it feel like pulling teeth trying to get answers out of Mack?
“There ain’t no ‘everybody,’ boy. Just two hands left ’sides myself. Can’t take care of an outfit the size of the Lazy G with just three people. Had to do somethin’. And if Wade don’t pay the two hands we got left this Friday, Billy and Joe aren’t goin’ to stick around any longer either.”
“What the hell is Wade thinking?” I tried to swallow down my disbelief, but it was a funny taste.
“Don’t think he is.”
“He drinking?” He hadn’t been, not when I’d left, but I couldn’t say as I’d be surprised if he was taking some comfort from staring at the bottom of a fifth of JD every now and again.
“Not that I can tell,” Mack said, sounding certain. I forced my fingers to unclench from around my sweating bottle.
“Well then what the fuck is he doing?”“Grieving. Hiding. S’my guess anyways.” Mack’s faded hazel eyes looked just about as sad as I felt.
“You talk to him?” That wouldn’t have been easy for Mack, forcing Wade to talk about his grief, but Mack had been there for Wade since his father died, and whatever needed doing, Mack always stepped up to the plate.
“Won’t stand still to listen to me. That is, if I can smoke him out to begin with.”
“Shit.” I sat back in the chair, ignoring the creaking sound, and thought about this. I should have come home months ago. “Why didn’t you call me? I would have come home.”
“Figured if you needed the reminder, be best if no one forced you back before you were ready to quit your wanderin’. I wasn’t goin’ to call you ’til things got desperate.” Funny, Mack didn’t look like he was kidding. I barked out a laugh anyways.
“When did this start? He seemed to be taking care of everything the first month after Simon died.” Fact was, the ranch had looked like all Wade had to hold on to then, throwing himself into running it every minute of the day.
“Oh, ’bout the time you left.” Mack just looked at me for a moment, and I dropped my eyes, afraid of what he might see. “You left, and what little life he seemed to have just drained right out, far as I could tell.”
And just like that, I could feel the guilt pressing down on my shoulders. I mumbled some excuse to Mack and bolted outside, gulping fresh air as fast as my lungs could take it.
Instead of coming home months ago, I never should have left in the first place.
The Author At Work.
Pacuare River Lodge
How we got there/left there.
Arenal Volcano over teh smimmin' pool.
View from the hotel room in Tamarindo at sunset.
s with tender loving care.
ngle experience transformed my lovely little bookstore into a shop of horrors. I refused to work for a company that would make me suffer such a grievous indignity!
