‘Beats surgery,’ said Gallen, climbing onto the top rail and looking down on Winter, who sat on a black mare almost sixteen hands.
‘This one’s Peaches,’ said Winter. ‘She’s going over basic rails. I can have her over five-footers inside two weeks.’
‘The other?’
‘Name’s Dandy. Haven’t rode him yet, but Peaches is the money.’
After walking the horses to the stock trailer where Winter had spent the night in the living quarters, Gallen approached the house, wanting to handle this right. He’d driven down on a look-see basis and now he wanted those horses back at the farm, bringing in real cash. If it meant making horse-promises, he’d become a horse-bullshitter and promise them the world.
Knocking on the door of the two-storey Territory-status house, Gallen tried to scrape the mud from his boots and wondered if he reeked of cigarettes.
The door opened and a child of nine or ten stood there. ‘Yes?’ she said, friendly.
‘Howdy, ma’am. Name’s Gerry Gallen. I’m here to see Mr Robinson about the horses? Peaches and—’
The girl turned away. ‘Mom!’
Gallen shifted his weight as the girl walked away, waving without looking at him. A woman came into the hallway and Gallen smelled baking, felt hungry.
‘Hi — Yvonne Robinson,’ said the woman, brown eyes and spilling dark hair which she pushed aside with her wrist as she put out her hand. ‘And you’re…?’
Feeling his jaw drop, Gallen flushed red. Before he could speak, the woman was beaming.
‘Gerry Gallen!’ she said, chuckling. ‘How you doin’, Gerry?’
‘Yvonne McKenzie,’ said Gallen, now realising which Robinsons this farm belonged to.
‘Robinson for twelve years,’ she said, rolling her eyes.
‘Oh, well, congratulations,’ said Gerry, not seeing a ring.
‘I was expecting Roy. I’m sorry,’ she said, as if remembering her manners. ‘Lunch is on. You want to grab that Mr Kenny and eat with us?’
‘Sure,’ said Gallen, his face flushing again as surely as it was senior prom night 1992, when Gallen was in the back of a car with Yvonne McKenzie while Tessa White and Butch Droman tried to get beer from a Clearmont liquor store. Both of them dating someone else, a little tipsy on sly whisky and the smell of that Opium perfume, all coming together in one long kiss. Nothing ever said about it, and then Yvonne was gone to the University of Nebraska and Gallen was joining the US Marine Corps, hoping for a shot at officer candidate school.
And then there was now. And Yvonne still looked like she did in the early nineties — only now she wasn’t a pretty cheerleader with athlete’s legs. Now she had some curves.
Gallen spent the next hour worrying that his socks stank, that Winter would hawk or light up a smoke. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to lose Yvonne Robinson as a client, but he was looking at her far too much for it to be just that.
‘Dad says Dandy is lame; plain and simple, lame,’ said Lyndall— the child — as Yvonne cleared the plates from a formal dining table and offered coffee. ‘And he don’t like Peaches neither — says Mom is wasting her time with that glue-bag.’
‘Well Dandy ain’t lame now,’ said Winter, his drawl so slow that it sounded like a slur. ‘Just a hoof abscess. He’ll be jumping in a couple of weeks.’
‘I asked the vet to check that,’ said Yvonne, making a face. ‘He kept doing X-rays of the shoulder.’
‘Gotta pay those student loans somehow,’ laughed Winter, grabbing at a biscuit as the plate was removed.
Lyndall asked Winter to play Wii and he obliged, following her into the next room.
‘What’s your friend’s story?’ said Yvonne, pouring coffee.
‘Used to play pro hockey in Alberta,’ said Gallen, catching a flash of her slender neck. ‘After Afghanistan, he was approached by a bunch of Clearmont businessmen to bolster our team.’
‘And?’ said Yvonne, with the smirk of a woman who’d grown up hearing hockey stories.
‘He went into the car park to settle a dispute with another player. Turned out the guy was a deputy sheriff from Gillette, and Kenny was expelled from the league. Roy gave him a job with the horses.’
“Cos he’s good at it?’
‘The best I’ve seen,’ said Gallen. ‘If Kenny says that Peaches is the money, then tell those folks in Douglas County to start engraving your name on that cup.’
‘How’s a thousand a month, all in?’ said Yvonne. ‘That gives me feed, shoes and meds — and it gives me a jumper. Kenny can decide which one.’
‘You got it.’ Gallen took her outstretched hand. ‘But it don’t include no fancy vet from Shell.’
A door slammed and boots stomped down the wooden boards of the hallway. Gallen noticed Yvonne wince and realised this was a shoe-free household for all but one person.
A man appeared in the dining room, ash-grey hat, turquoise rodeo buckle in his Wranglers and a set of Texan dress boots. There was a cold greeting between the man and Yvonne and then Gallen was being introduced to Brandon Robinson.
Gallen knew the name; Brandon Robinson was a one-time quarterback for the University of Nebraska Huskers. Then he’d gone on to law school at UCLA and become a developer of strip malls in Wyoming and Montana. It stood to reason that he’d marry someone like Yvonne.
Brandon Robinson puffed out his footballer’s chest, his blond moustache twitching. ‘So. Gerry Gallen, huh?’
‘That’s me,’ said Gallen.
‘Hockey star and war hero, right?’ Brandon swung back to Yvonne as if sharing a joke.
‘No,’ said Gallen, as Winter silently appeared in the doorway behind Yvonne’s husband. ‘Wasn’t like that.’
‘You sure?’ said Brandon, like he was teasing a child. ‘Way Yvonne told it, you were black missions, special ops. All that spooky shit.’
‘I drove a truck,’ said Gallen. ‘It was nice meeting you.’
CHAPTER 4
The engine pinged as it cooled and Gallen gave their location for the third time: County Road 42, the extension of 195 along from the old Fenton place. Roy grumbled and growled and Gallen still wasn’t sure if he was coming to get them when his father hung up the phone.
They were west of Clearmont, in the boonies of northern Wyoming, the transmission having quit and the horses getting moody in the trailer as the sun dipped behind the Bighorns, bringing the temperature down in a hurry.
‘Thought Roy was fixing that thing’ Winter nodded at the hood as he lit a cigarette.
‘I was,’ said Gallen, leaning back in the driver’s seat and sighing. ‘Had the money and all.’
Gallen liked that Winter didn’t ask him what happened. When Gallen had arrived back on the farm three weeks earlier, Winter had been there working for Roy and they’d avoided one another. Gallen liked that Winter didn’t push and pick about the tranny like Marcia would have when they were married. Truth was, Gallen had had a reconditioned tranny on order with the local Ford mechanics, but the fundraiser for Richards had come along and by the time he’d made the drive south he’d put more into that envelope than he could afford.
‘Give the tranny money to that boy in the chair?’ asked Winter, staring out the windscreen.
‘Something like that,’ said Gallen.
‘Least it went to a good place.’
‘Hope you’re right, Kenny.’ Gallen exhaled smoke out the cracked window. ‘Richards was a good soldier once.’
‘Can’t always be a good soldier in civvie life,’ said Winter.
‘No. But you don’t have to get drunk and drive off a bridge when your wife’s expectin’.’
They sat smoking, the truck cab cooling in the silence.
‘So, you been away?’ said Winter.
Gallen exhaled. He’d come out of the Marines, taken his cheque and drifted around for almost six months: saw people who served with him in the Ghan and Mindanao; met relatives of young men who’d lost their lives; saw other lives, other ways of living, and he liked them. But not enough to stop him drifting back to Wyoming and to Sweet Clover. The farm wasn’t much, as far as lives go. But it was his.