Lee nodded.“Parole board didn’t much like my record. I’m beholden for this job at the ranch, Jake.”
Ellson shook his head.“Except for you, I’d have bought it when that guard shot at me, if you hadn’t led them off they’d have grabbed me. I worried a long time, hoping you got away. The two thousand dollars you got to me, I did a lot of thinking, after that.”
“And you took a lot of flack from Lucita.”
Jake grinned.“That was a long time ago.”
“More years than I like to count,” Lee said. “I’m sorry about Ramon, about losing your boy in the war. I’d like to have known him.” He wondered how that must feel, to raise a fine son, and then see him die so young, so brutally. When he thought about how that must have been for Lucita, pain twisted his belly and he felt a warm longing to comfort her. Though he had never made a play for Lucita, once she and Jake were engaged and then married, he’d never been near her without being tempted, without the heat rising.
“She’s up in Redlands,” Jake said. “Her sister just had gall bladder surgery, Lucita’s taking care of her. She’ll be home next week. She’s sure looking forward to seeing you, planning on cooking up a big dinner.” Jake motioned to the waiter for another bowl of salsa. “Both our girls are married. Carmella’s in San Francisco, her husband’s a fireman. Susanne’s in Reno.” He grinned. “Married to a sheep rancher.”
“Sheep?” Lee said.
Jake smiled.“He’s a good man. Basque. Good people.”
Lee watched Jake quietly. Jake’s family had lived a whole lifetime, the girls grown up into their own lives, Ramon shot down by a German sniper, buried and mourned, while Lee had gone on year after year pulling a few jobs, getting older, getting slower, and then back in the pen scrubbing prison latrines, sanding prison-made furniture, eating prison slop, and then finally out working on the McNeil farm. He’d had no ties at all on the outside except Jake and Lucita, no one else who cared, no family of his own that he’d ever kept track of. Only the thought of his little sister, as if Mae were still out there somewhere,as if she were still alive. But if Maewas still alive, and grown old, where was she? What kind of life was she living? And why had she never tried to get in touch? But how could she have done that when he was always on the move, leaving as few tracks as he could, ever traveling on, aimless as a tumbleweed? And why hadn’the tried to get in touch?
Well, hell, he’d stayed in touch for a while. He’d write or make a phone call to the rancher, Sam Gerrard, who owned the land adjoining them, because Lee’s family had no phone. Years ago he’d called Gerrard when he read in the newspaper that his grandpappy was killed. He couldn’t believe it, shot to death during a train robbery, though Russell had taken three Pinkerton men with him. His grandpappy’s death had set Lee back some, he’d been a long time getting over the demise of Russell Dobbs—as if a whole stretch of history had collapsed, as if the whole shape of the world he knew had shiftedand changed.
He’d given Gerrard a number where he might be reached now and then, a hotel in Billings where he had a lady friend. That was how he found out when his daddy died, had a stroke, they thought. Died out on the range alone. Must have been a bad one, to make him tumble off his horse. Horse came back to the ranch, and they’d gone looking. They found his daddy two days later lying among the boulders at the edge of a stony draw. After that, Gerrard said, Lee’s ma had left the ranch, sold it for what she could get, took Mae and their two older sisters back to North Carolina, to live withher sister. That was when he lost touch, didn’t try to contact them. He knew Mae would be all right if she was with family. But he thought about her a lot, he hoped she had horses as she’d always wanted, and he’d carried her picture and would look at it, at that bold little girl who wanted to learn everything herself, wanted to do everything her way.
Mae and her older sisters were allowed to ride but only decorously, at a walk or slow trot, and they were kept as far as possible from the cattle and the cowhands. When Lee and Mae could sneak off alone, when he saddled a real horse for her and not the poky pony, she wanted to do everything, she wanted to learn to rope, she wanted to work cattle, she wasn’t afraid and in a short time she handled a horse real well. Their mother didn’t know half of what went on, working in the kitchen or around back in the garden, trusting Lee to take care of his little sister, thinking he was carefully chaperoning Mae on the pony when, in fact, they were off beyond the nearby hills, Mae learning to rein and work a good cowpony, to spin and back him, to chase a calf and learning to handle a rope.
What he didn’t understand was, why did he still dream of her? Dreams so real, as if she were still alive, as if she were still a little child as he’d last seen her. In his recent dreams, she was in a house he’d never seen, or in a flower garden unlike any place where they’d grown up, and she was dressed in a way she wouldn’t have been, back on the ranch, back in their own time. He was still wondering about those dreams as they moved out into the shabby street, both men full of the good Mexican dinner, the street darkening around them as evening fell. Along the row of little shacks, faint lightsglowed behind curtained windows. They slipped into the truck fast, dodging crickets, tossing crickets out the windows. Moving on through the small town, they headed out a dirt road, its pale surface caught in the light of a rising half-moon, the long straight rows of bean plants polished by the faint glow. Now when they were moving fast and no crickets swarming in, Lee cracked open his window, letting in the musky wet smell of the river, of the tamarisk and willows silvered along the steep, silt banks.
Twelve miles out of town they turned onto a dirt lane, cutting through a cantaloupe field, the smell of the fruit sweet and cloying. Half a mile up, they turned into the ranch yard under bright security lights, their dust rising white against a row of packing sheds, long bunkhouses, and small frame bungalows. Jake drove on past the big mess hall with its long screened windows and deep porch, past rows of assorted tractors and field trucks. He parked in front of a cement-block house with a white picket fence. A statue of the Blessed Virgin stood in the sandy yard, the little, two-foot-high figure carefully outlined by a circle of miniature cactus. Near the house was a paddock and a small stable, and he could see a couple of horses. Beyond were more packing sheds, then more ranch trucks and some old cars. They got out beside the picket fence, but Jake didn’t head into the house. No lights burned there, with Lucita gone. They moved across the dusty yard toward the cabins, where Jake turned up the steps of the first one, the porch creaking under their weight.
The cabin door complained as Jake pushed it open, reached in and flipped a switch so a sudden light flared from an overhead bulb. The cabin held an iron bed, a brown metal nightstand, a small battered desk, a small wooden chest of drawers, and a straight-backed chair, painted purple. An ornate wooden crucifix hung above the bed, hand carved and gilded. There was a bathroom with a little precast shower, and spotless white tile around the sink. A new bar of soap still in its wrapper, two clean towels and a washcloth, clean white shower curtain, all touches that spoke of Lucita, as did the little pitcher of wildflowers she had placed on the old, shabby dresser.
“Not elegant,” Jake said. “You’ll find a new razor and shaving cream in the cabinet.”
Lee sat down on the bed to pull off his boots.“It’s elegant to me. Clean. Private. Even flowers,” he said, grinning. “No prison bars, and a real door I can shut. No screw coming to lock me in.” He dropped a boot. “Bathroom all to myself, private shower without some jock elbowing me or reaching to feel me up, a razor I don’t have to account for every day.” He grinned up at Jake, as he dropped the other boot.