I looked up and saw Jeanette coming toward us. The meeting had broken up with most of the attendees crowding toward the bar.
“Hello, Edith,” Jeanette said. “You after my cowboy?”
“I sure am,” Edith replied. “You finished reading My Dream of Stars?”
Jeanette and Edith were in a book club that had as its members most of the women in the county. They met once a month at the library a block down from the bar, theoretically to talk about the book they’d picked to read. Actually, it was mostly to gossip and drink wine and not a man begrudged them that little bit of time together. Some of the women had to drive over fifty miles just to get there.
“I read it,” Jeanette said. “How about you?”
“Working on it.”
Jeanette regarded the mayor for a short second. “Edith, don’t you ever bring a couple of jackasses like that near us again. I don’t care what that fool Claggers says. Do you understand?”
Edith opened her mouth, perhaps to argue, but then she shrugged and said, “You bet.”
Jeanette was done with the mayor. “You ready, Mike?”
I wasn’t but I guessed I’d better be. I put my hat on and tipped it to Edith, paid Joe for the beers, then drove Jeanette back to the Square C. About twenty minutes into our drive, I said, “I don’t think you should treat Edith like that.” Thirty minutes later, Jeanette said, “I treated her better than you did, Mike.”
I shut up. That’s what you do when somebody has just drilled you between the eyes with the truth.
6
It was nearly two in the afternoon when we got back and Ray and Amelia had not returned which meant they’d been out there alone for over five hours. Jeanette and I carried in the groceries, then I looked in on the little C-sectioned heifer and her calf for a while and Jeanette fed an orphan calf in a separate pen. Jeanette loved that little bum. She’d gone out in a deep March snow to bring him back alive after his mother had died giving birth. Once the calf was fed, she sought me out and said, “I guess we’d better go out there.” I could tell she was worried about Ray and Amelia.
First thing I did was to go to my trailer to retrieve my trusty Glock 9 mm, left over from my L.A. days. I packed it into a small backpack, then climbed behind Bob’s steering wheel so Jeanette would have to open and close all the gates. She knew what I was doing and said, “Let’s take the four-wheelers.” We did and she let me take the lead, which meant I opened and closed the first gate. Somehow, even though Jeanette was fearless on an ATV, it worked out she kept dropping back enough I had to open and close all the rest of them, too.
Before we got to the BLM gate, she said, “Show me the bull,” and I did.
The dead bull lay in front of a small stand of twisted little juniper trees, one of the few trees that can live out there. The bull’s body was swollen, its legs rigid as posts, and it was covered with flies, their excited buzzing like little chainsaws. I made a mental note to bring the tractor out to haul the corpse away and bury it. There was no good reason to let the coyotes get a taste of cow meat even if it’s rotten.
Jeanette climbed off her four-wheeler and walked up next to the corpse. The flies clustered on the bull’s wounds were too happy to notice. While I held my nose, Jeanette carefully circled the bull, stopping for a while near the junipers. Then she came back and, without another word, climbed on her vehicle and took off. I followed and after we’d gotten some distance away, she stopped and I pulled up alongside her. “It wasn’t a sledgehammer that knocked that bull out,” she said. “It was a shovel.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I spotted the working end of one inside those junipers. It wasn’t rusty. It also had blood on it.”
This made me angry, entirely at myself. If it was there, I should have found that shovel. Why hadn’t I poked around in those trees? My experience as a detective had decidedly faded.
We motored on up and over the rolling pastureland. If I hadn’t been worried for Ray, Amelia, and Pick, and mad at myself about missing that shovel, I might have enjoyed it more. We found the BLM gate closed but there were fairly fresh tire tracks and hoof prints on both sides of it, which meant to me that Pick likely had made it this far and so had Ray and Amelia. I got off, opened the gate, let Jeanette go through, then got back on my four-wheeler, drove it through, then got out and closed the gate and got back on my vehicle. You see what trouble this is? Even worse, you have to do it all over again on your way back. I’ve heard of automatic gates but Jeanette, like every rancher in Fillmore County, thought they were too expensive. It’s cheaper to let your cowboy do it. That’s the attitude.