“I’ll ride him. There’s not much else to do.”
Barney rode confidently but without grace of any kind. Moon’s long trot produced a lurching sway in Barney’s torso, exaggerated by the suspenders he always wore, that was hard for Szabo to watch. And it was clear from Moon’s sidelong glances that he, too, was wondering what kind of burden he was carrying. But the sight of Barney’s lurching exercise rides seemed a small price to pay for the skilled work he provided: repairing fences, servicing stock waterers, pruning the orchard, and even doing some painting on the outbuildings. One day, as he rode Moon down the driveway, Barney said to Szabo, who had just pulled up, “By the time you get the sling off, I’ll have your horse safe for you to ride.” From the window of his car, Szabo said, resisting the impulse to raise his voice, “As I recall, he’s been safe for me to ride since he was a three-year-old colt.” Barney just looked down and smiled.
When Barney restacked the woodpile, Szabo decided to treat it as an absolute surprise. He stood before the remarkable lattice of firewood and, while his mind wandered, praised it lavishly. He was reluctant to admit to himself that he was trying to get on Barney’s good side. “It’s one of a kind,” he said.
Szabo’s mother lived in a ground-floor apartment across the street from a pleasant assisted-living facility. She had stayed in her own apartment because she smoked cigarettes, which was also what seemed to have preserved her vitality over her many years. Further, she didn’t want to risk the family silver in an institution, or her real treasure: a painting that had come down through her family for nearly a century, a night stampede by the cowboy artist Charlie Russell, one of very few Russell night pictures in existence, which would likely fetch a couple of million dollars at auction. The old people across the street would just take it down and spill food on it, she said. When Szabo was growing up as an only child, his mother’s strong opinions, her decisive nature, had made him feel oppressed; now those qualities were what he most liked, even loved, about her. He recognized that when he was irresolute it was in response to his upbringing, but caution, in general, paid off for him.
Barney enjoyed tobacco, too, smoke and smokeless. One afternoon, Szabo sent a shoebox of pictures and two much-annotated family cookbooks to his mother by way of Barney, who was heading into town to pick up a fuel filter for the tractor. Later, Szabo cried out more than once, “I have only myself to blame!”
In a matter of weeks, Szabo was able to discard the sling and to exercise his shoulder with light weights and elastic strips that he held with one foot while feebly pulling and releasing, sweat pouring down his face. The next morning, three bird-watchers entered the property without stopping at the house for permission and were all but assaulted by Barney, who chased them to their car, hurling vulgar epithets until they disappeared down the road with their life lists and binoculars.
“But, Barney, I don’t mind them coming around,” Szabo said.
“Did they have permission, yes or no?”
There was no time for Szabo to explain that this didn’t matter to him, as Barney had gone back to work. At what, Szabo was unsure, but he seemed busy.
Szabo had to be in Denver by the afternoon. He took an overnight bag and drove to town, past Barney, lurching from side to side on Moon, who bore, Szabo thought, a fresh look of resignation. He stopped on the way to the airport to see his mother, who sat in her living room doing sudoku in front of a muted television, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. On a stand next to her chair, her cockatiel, Toni, hunched in the drifting smoke.
“I’m off to Denver till tomorrow, Ma. I’ll have my cell if you need anything.” She looked up, put down her stub of pencil, and moved the cigarette from her mouth to the ashtray.
“Nothing to worry about here. I’ve got a million things to do.”
“Well, in case you think of something while I’m—”
“Lunch with Barney, maybe drive around.”
“Okay!” Luckily his mother couldn’t see his face.
Melinda had things well in hand, had even reduced some of the piles on his desk by thoughtful intervention where his specific attention was less than necessary. She was a vigorous mother of four, barely forty years old, happily married to a highway patrolman she’d grown up with. They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda’s family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures. And yet she was not just an employee but a cherished friend.
It was a tested friendship with a peculiar intimacy: Szabo’s former wife, Karen, an accomplished ironist, had made several stays at the Rimrock Foundation for what ended up as a successful treatment for alcoholism — successful in that she had given up alcohol altogether. Unfortunately, she had replaced it with other compulsions, including an online-trading habit that had bankrupted Szabo for a time. Once it was clear that Szabo was broke, she had divorced him, sold the house, remarried, and moved to San Diego, where she was, by the reports of their grown son, David, happy and not at all compulsive. What does this say about me? Szabo wondered obsessively. Maybe she was now on a short leash. Szabo had met her husband, Cliff: stocky, bald, and authoritarian — a forensic accountant, busy and prosperous in the SoCal free-for-all. His dour affect seemed to subdue Karen. In any case, Szabo had loved her, hadn’t wanted a divorce, and had felt disgraced at undergoing bankruptcy in a town of this size. He’d sunk into depression and discovered that there was no other illness so brutal, so profound, so inescapable, that made an enemy of consciousness itself. Nevertheless, he had plodded to the office, day after day, an alarming, ashen figure, and there he had fallen into the hands of Melinda, who dragged him to family picnics and to the dentist, forged his signature whenever necessary, placed him between her and her husband at high-school basketball games as though he might otherwise tip over, taught him to cheer for her children, and occasionally fed him at her house in the uproar of family life. When, once, as she stood by his desk in the office, he raised a hand to her breast, she amiably removed it and redirected his attention to his work. By inches, she had restored his old self, and solvency seemed to follow. He began to see himself as someone who had returned from the brink. He liked making money. He liked visiting his little group of suppliers in faraway places. He liked having Melinda as a friend, and her husband, Mike, the highway patrolman, too. Mike was the same straight-ahead type as his wife: he once gave Szabo a well-deserved speeding ticket. Now Szabo’s only argument with his ex-wife’s contentment in San Diego was that it seemed to prove to David that it had been Szabo who drove her crazy.
As Szabo headed away from the Denver airport, he could see its marvelous shape at the edge of the prairie, like a great nomads’ camp — a gathering of the tents of chieftains, more expressive of a world on the move than anything Szabo had ever seen. You flew into one of these tents, got food, a car, something to read, then headed out on your own smaller journey to the rapture of traffic, a rented room with a TV and a “continental” breakfast. It was an ectoplasmic world of circulating souls.
On a sunny day, with satellite radio and an efficient midsize Korean sedan, the two-hour drive to the prison that had held his son for the past couple of years flew by. Szabo was able to think about his projects for the ranch — a new snow fence for the driveway, a mouseproof tin liner for Moon’s grain bin, a rain gauge that wouldn’t freeze and crack, a bird feeder that excluded grackles and jays — nearly the whole trip. But toward the end of the drive his head filled with the disquieting static of remorse, self-blame, and sadness, and a short-lived defiant absolution. In the years that had turned out to be critical for David, all he had given him was a failing marriage and a bankrupt home. I should have just shot Karen and done the time, Szabo thought with a shameful laugh. The comic relief was brief. Mom in California, Dad in Montana, David in prison in Colorado: could they have foreseen this dispersion?