Last Chance Llama Ranch (22 page)

“So, dude, what're we s'posed to do without our shit?” Thad said, forcing his voice into its lowest register. “You want we should cuddle together for warmth?” He grabbed Zelda around the waist and made humping motions while the other boys howled with laughter. Merry started forward, but Zel was way ahead of her. She snatched hold of Thaddeus's ear and gave it a twist that had him yelping and crying uncle.

“Thaddeus, we talked about this,” Sam said sternly. “We do not dry hump our fellow survivalists.”

Bernie fell out laughing, his snorts and giggles contagious.

“Except Bernie. You can dry hump him.”

“Hey!”

“Alright, enough, you reprobates. Daylight's burning, and we've got miles to cover before we make camp.”

“What's a reprobate?”

“Look it up in the dictionary, Thaddy-puss,” Mikey advised. “You'll see your ugly face staring back.”

“I'll show you ugly face, you little…”

Zelda snapped her fingers in Thad's face and said one word. “Chill.”

Thad chilled.

Merry hid a smile.
She has that boy wrapped around her little finger, and hoo-boy-howdy does she know it
.

“If you're finished clowning around, Survivors, circle round and I'll give you the equipment that's gonna save your life tonight.” Sam grabbed a box that had been on the ground beside his bare feet. A box…
of lawn and leaf bags
. He whipped one out with a flourish and handed the slippery black plastic to Merry, who accepted it with all the enthusiasm of someone receiving a dead fish. Then he proffered the box to each of the teens in turn. “Here's your gear, guys.”

“What're we supposed to do with this? Tidy up the forest like Yogi Bear?” Bernie flapped his trash bag open, looking hopefully inside as if he might find a nice propane stove and some hot dogs.

“I'd never ask you to clean anything, Beebs,” Sam said on a smile. “Badass you may be, but every man has his limits, and tidiness is clearly beyond you.” His gaze rested on Bernie's wild-and-woolly hair, and the boy grinned and shook his head to send the mass even higher.

Merry noticed Sam hadn't subjected Mikey to the same teasing, and her estimation of him rose, for clearly Mikey's dishevelment had more to do with his home life than his personal habits.

Sam scraped his own hair back under his hat and settled it more firmly on his head, obviously eager to get the show on the road. “We're learning the art of self-reliance here. With just this one tool, and the skills I'm going to teach you, you'll come through in great shape. So stow those bags in your pockets, tighten those shoelaces, and hit the bathroom if you need it. It's the last chance before it's all leaves and squatting in the bush for the next twenty-four hours.”

Zelda looked faint. Merry didn't blame her.

Sam wasn't concerned for their tender sensibilities. “Merry, would you please go fetch Snape from the pen over yonder?” Merry gave him a goggle-eyed glance for this unaccustomed politeness, but he just waved out past the vegetable patch, up a dirt track, where, now that she put her ears to it, Merry could hear the unmistakable hum that was Severus's morning warm-up song.
Glad he's treating me with a bit of respect in front of the kids, at least.
“He's already haltered up and waiting,” Sam informed her. “Just don't be drawing any fire this time, you hear me? We haven't got time to hose you off again.” He flashed a grin at the kids. “You wouldn't believe how much the llamas love to lob loogies at our friend Merry here.”

“It's true,” Merry had to admit. “I'm a loog-magnet.” The boys made “ew, gross” faces that made them look, suddenly, very young and sweet. Zelda just shuddered.

“Zel, why don't you help Merry load up Snape's panniers with the picnic basket Dolly sent over, and make sure you secure those four-gallon water canisters too. Don't forget to distribute the weight equally or our lunch is gonna get mighty dusty dragging on the ground. Once we're loaded up, we'll get moving on up the mountain. Oh, and Merry, make sure the tincture of iodine's still in the small pouch at the front, okay? We'll probably be sucking stream water by morning.”

Ew, gross
indeed.

“Can Snape carry that much?” Merry asked as Zel took off up the path, towing the picnic basket and leaving the far heavier water jugs for Merry. Her new friend was doughty, but that was a heck of a lot of food and water…

“He's a
llama
. He could probably hump half those kids up the mountain and not break a sweat.”

“Oh.” Suddenly, Merry remembered. “Um, in that case, is there room for one more?” She held up Cleese's travel terrarium.

Sam's lip twitched. “You brought your turtle?”

“What? He gets separation anxiety. I didn't want him to languish in my cabin while I got to have some fabulous adventure. And I can't leave him at your place now. He might get in a race with your rabbit, and who knows what sort of tesseract of bad literary metaphors they could create in there without supervision.”

The lip twitched some more. Then he sighed. “Fine, pop him in there. The kids will love him. But if he gets llama-sick,
you're
cleaning it up.”

Sam gathered the flock to him and off we trooped, Von Trapp–style, into the pristine wilderness for our overnight adventure. Now, Sam's charges—whom he calls the Survivors—are no children of privilege like the adorable Austrian warblers. In fact, these kids are a lot hardier—and harder up. For the truth is, charming as Aguas Milagros is, New Mexico can be a tough place to grow up. Poverty is pervasive, the education system sucks (at forty-ninth in the country in terms of success, I'm told the state motto is, “Hey, at least we're not Mississippi!”), and alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant as well. Tight-knit as this community is, some of the kids fall through the cracks.

Sam catches 'em.

Sam walked alongside Merry and Snape, the kids ranging ahead of them up the trail with an energy Merry envied. Her leg seemed to be holding up better as the days at the Last Chance went on, but she was still struggling not to limp in front of Llama Boy. He might show a softer side around the kids—and Merry wasn't going to argue he was awesome with them—but she had no such faith he'd stay Mr. Mush when they were alone.

She eyed him warily.

He eyed her back.

Merry increased her stride, but he kept pace with her effortlessly on those bare feet of his.

He said nothing.

He said it a lot.

“
What
,” she finally snapped.

“What, what?”

“I know you're dying to ask, so just get it over with.”

“Alright then,” he said. “So, you weren't just blowing smoke up my ass with that whole ‘I've already been famous' thing?” He gave her a searching look. “Like, really famous?”

“Well, I'm no Kardashian, but yeah, if you think of athletes as famous, I wasn't exactly hiding under a rock.”

“You're under one now,” he pointed out, gesturing to the dusty track that wound up into the mountains. “No cameras here, no adoring fans.”

“Yeah, well, your fans stop adoring you pretty fast once you stop spreading butter on the mashed potatoes and start spreading your guts across the finish line.”

“Butter on the mashed potatoes?” His face was a mask of incomprehension.

“Yeah, you know. Carving the gnar pow. Thrashing the sickey poo. Shredding the cheddar.”

“Either you're hungry, suffering intestinal distress, or you're teaching me ski slang.”

Merry allowed a smile to escape. “The latter. Well, and the first one too. Not so much with the intestinal distress, but if you're going to be forcing me to drink water that needs iodine to make it safe, I can't promise that won't come later.”

Sam studied her face, then ran his gaze down her body to rest on her left leg. The one he'd seen the night of the centipede attack and knew was covered in scar tissue. “So what happened?”

“I crashed.”

He sucked on his teeth meditatively, nodded. “Bad?”

“Yeah. Bad.”

He let that sit awhile as they hiked up the track, Severus pacing between them. “I'm sorry, Wookiee,” he said at last.

Her throat tightened. How many times had she heard the same, from how many well-meaning people? Yet somehow, coming from Cassidy, the words felt both simpler and more sincere. “I'm fine now,” she said gruffly. “Long as it's cool if I co-opt your llamas for crutches once in a while.” She patted Snape's neck, and the beast responded by whuffling her neck…and then attempting to steal her well-monched hat. “How did you get involved with the fabulous five over there?” she asked, changing the subject. “It's obvious you mean the world to those kids.”

Sam shrugged uncomfortably, reaching into the pocket of his overalls for a carrot to feed Snape. He wiped the resulting drool off on the denim, ignoring Merry's wince. “It started with Joey,” he said, nodding to the littlest of the bunch, who was fending off a Star Wars–style stick incursion by Bernie and Mikey with a stick lightsaber of his own. “I noticed this scrawny slip of a kid was hanging round the ranch a lot, at odd times of the day, when he should have been at school. He was so skittish I could barely get him to say hello, but he loved the animals, and honestly he didn't seem to have anywhere else to go. Came to find out, Dolly had been feeding him on the side, like a stray cat. His mom didn't seem to notice, or care, and his father…” Sam shook his head, eyes gone stormy. “Better that asshole stays gone.”

“Mm,” Merry said. Her eyes softened as she watched the boy try to keep up with the others. “Poor muffin.”

“He holds his own surprisingly well,” Sam said. “Sometimes I worry more about Thad, to tell you the truth.”

“Really?” Merry examined the tall, well-built boy, but he seemed without a care in the world, trotting backward up the trail so he could talk with Zelda, who was just behind him.
Kid like that's probably the most popular boy in his class
, she thought. “Why?”

“Thad was the second of my strays,” Sam told her. “A lot smarter than he looks, but he's dyslexic, and no one intervened early on. Or pretty much at all. He's basically illiterate, though he hides it well. His folks are migrant fruit pickers, so he stays with his grandmother out here a lot of the year, and she doesn't speak English, so she hasn't been able to help much. She has some health issues too. Thad takes care of her as best he can, but he doesn't have a lot of prospects and he knows it. Makes him a mite prickly, but underneath it he's sweet as they come. He just needs someone to give him a chance.”

Merry looked at the stiff way the tall teen held himself, the branch he held out of the way for Zelda to walk under. The fact that Sam had seen through the boy's façade made her look at Sam's own façade a little more closely.

Where there is anger, there's pain underneath.

Bob was wise. Maybe someday she'd learn what made Sam so prickly around her too.

“And the others?”

“Mikey and Bernie are local kids who come from generations of government assistance. Good kids, but they don't get much example of what it's like to work hard for what you want. There's a lot of malaise and hardscrabble living round here—and to tell you the truth, there aren't a lot of jobs for those who want 'em. When they heard I was starting up a program for at-risk youth, their folks sent them to me for a chance to learn something new.”

“And Zelda?”

Sam's lip twisted. “She's one tough nut I've yet to crack. Showed up one morning and told me ‘no more sausage fests, Mr. Cassidy. I want in.' She doesn't attend the local school with the other kids. Lives somewhere near Taos, but I've never seen her parents. They either homeschool her or…well, I'm honestly not sure. She doesn't like to talk about herself, that much I know. She usually hitches a ride out here, gets dropped off over by Bob's. Maybe you'll get more out of her than I can,” he said. “She seems to look up to you.”

“Everybody does,” Merry said wryly. “I wouldn't put much stock in it.”

Sam laughed—a good, honest laugh, with no mockery in it.

“Listen, Sam,” Merry said, “I can see what you're doing here is important for these kids. I just want you to know that no matter what, I won't slow you down or ruin their experience today.”

Sam's blue eyes were keen as he looked her over again. “I've no doubt. Seems to me a woman who climbed a mountain on a bum leg can probably handle herself.”

Merry found herself warming all over, despite her resolve to keep him at arm's length. “Why, Sam Cassidy, are you telling me I'm not ‘hopeless' after all?”

His cheeks flushed darker than his perma-tan could cover. But his tone was light. “There may be hope for you yet, Ms. Manning.”

T
he outing with Sam and his teen-tastic charges turned out to be a big, fat nothing.

“What?!”

I can hear your disbelief from here. “How can anything Studly Sam does turn out to be a dud?” Well, I didn't say dud, now did I? I said, “nothing.”

Which was exactly all Sam Cassidy allowed us to bring on our overnight adventure.

Okay, I hyperbolize. We were each allowed one huge-ass garbage bag.

Like, whoopee.

Now, I don't know if you know anything about the mountains of Northern New Mexico, but there's one thing they ain't, and that's warm at night. So when I tell you that the aforementioned waste receptacle was intended to serve as duvet, pillow, and mattress to boot, you may infer that there were a number of pouts round the campfire last night. Some of them even came from the teenagers.

But let me start from the beginning. Which in this case was the Stone Age. For, once we arrived at our campsite, a lovely little spot among the aspen and scrub oak by a babbling brook, what followed was a great deal of bashing of rocks against other rocks, a vast whacking and smacking engaged upon with a fair degree of zeal by our young charges, and a deal less enthusiasm by yours truly, who has rather more regard for her thumbs.

“Ow! Fu— uh, fudge!” Merry hissed, casting a sheepish glance at the kids, who were smacking rocks together as Sam had taught them. “Making discoidal knives,” he'd said. Discordant, more like, if the banging was anything to go by.

Most of the teens seemed to have caught the hang of the exercise. Flakes of sharp stone piled up at their knees where they knelt in the shade of the rustling aspens—primitive knives formed from nothing but force and physics, and a little of Sam's expertise. But not everyone had caught the knack—or knap—of it.

“How you doing over there, Mikey?” Sam, who was kneeling near Merry, called to the boy. The towheaded kid looked up, tongue wedged between his teeth. In his pudgy hands he held two rocks he'd salvaged from the streambed, one big and rounded, the other a wedge shape, as Sam had taught them.

“I can't get it to flake like you showed me,” he said. His cheeks were red, and Merry could see moisture in his eyes that told her it was more than just the noonday heat that had him flushed. Frustration oozed from every pore, and shame hung like a cloud around his head.
I feel ya, kid
, she thought. Her own inadequacies—especially since she'd hired on to be the worst ranch hand in the world—often made her want to curl up under a rock and hide. But somehow, seeing Mikey struggle, the only thing Merry felt was compassion.

Sam obviously felt it too. “Come over here and I'll help you.” Sam patted the bare earth between himself and Merry. The kid knee-walked over to them and plopped down in jeans that were nearly as dirty as the earth beneath them.
Someone has not been doing this kid's laundry
, Merry thought, aching for him all the more. Whatever struggles she'd faced over the years, she'd never had to worry about the fundamentals the way Mikey and the others did. Even now, deep in debt and facing an uncertain career, she knew she'd never starve so long as she could swallow her pride. These kids had no such safety net—and yet they were out here, trying their best. It was humbling. As was the quiet love and guidance Sam gave the teens.

“See now, all you have to do is find the sweet spot, that little acute angle.” Sam's callused paws engulfed the boy's littler ones, adjusting his grip gently. “Relax your arms, let the swing come naturally, and allow the stone to tell you where it wants to flake.”

Mikey took a halfhearted swipe, but the rocks just rang dully together, the bottom one developing a scratch but refusing to give up the goods. Mikey's lip trembled, and his face reddened even further. “I suck at this. I don't want to do this anymore.” He threw the bigger rock into the trees, scrunching into himself miserably.

Wow, that sounds familiar
, Merry thought, feeling as if the stone had hit her square in the forehead. How many times had she said the same?
But it sounds so harsh when
he
says it
. She wanted to comfort the boy, but it didn't seem like her place to do so, just an hour after meeting him.

Thankfully, Sam had the situation in hand. He gave Mikey a minute, and then handed him his own striker rock to use, curling the boy's hand around the stone. “Don't sweat it, Mike. You got this. Just do exactly what Merry
isn't
doing, and it's in the bag.”

Mike cracked a reluctant smile, and, the moment he relaxed, he cracked the
rock
in exactly the right place. A perfect oval of stone flaked off, sharp as could be. “I did it!” he cried.

Yes!
Merry thought. She exchanged a grin with Sam, who sat back on his bare heels, beaming with quiet pride.
Like a proud papa
. Her cheeks went rosy for no reason she could fathom, and she looked away quickly.

The others looked up at Mikey's yell. “Give Pig-Pen a medal,” Thaddeus snorted, scooching closer to Zelda and looking to her for approval. But she just curled her pierced lip at him and tossed her ponytail huffily. “Rock on, Mikey,” she called over to the sandy-haired boy.

Hm. Maybe Zelda's not just the pack leader. She's a bit of a den mother too
. Merry's heart warmed to the girl.

Bernie dissolved in giggles that made Merry revise his age down to perhaps thirteen, but his humor wasn't at his compatriot's expense. “Rock on? Get it,
rock
on?”

Zelda allowed a smile to replace her sneer. “You laugh like that, people are gonna think you're
stoned
.”

Even Thad smiled at that.

Mikey just pocketed his blade with care, looking about two feet taller than he had before the exercise.

“Alright, Survivors. I think we've got enough knives. Now let's start getting our fire and shelter sorted out. Gather up the best flakes and let's head for the stream banks for those dogbane reeds I showed you earlier.”

About making hand drills and reverse-wrap dual-ply cordage, I will say only this, dear friends: extremely useful skills, very hard to describe on paper. Check out my photos for the exemplary results of our intrepid team's efforts!

Within hours, we had chosen a lovely little spot close enough to a stream to provide water, but not so close as to add wind chill and “convection”—the dangers of which Sam was adamant about, along with a whole host of other things to avoid. (Wiping keisters with poisonous plants being high on my personal list.) Suffice it to say the selection of our campsite took the best part of an hour, and the grooming thereof another. This, we only knew after Sam showed us how to count time by measuring our fingers against the sky, for our cell phones and watches had been packed away as contraband. (I was allowed to keep an old camera only because of my reportorial duty to you, my friends.) Lean-to built, fire pit dug, and kindling kindled (we pretty much reenacted Tom Hanks's performance in
Cast Away,
screaming “I…have made…fire!!!” when we'd made fire), we stuffed our trash bags and our shirts full of roughage in preparation for the drastic shift in temperature that was to come.

By the time all was in readiness for the night, the Survivors were glowing with pride at their accomplishments, and Sam was looking over them like an indulgent (and hot-as-hell) papa.

Me?

Well, hell. Not to get too maudlin here, gentle readers, but the honest truth is, I was totally humbled by the gumption of these kids today. They have spirit, they've got stick-to-itiveness, and they're funny, smart, and brave as all get-out. And most of all, they remind me that it's not where you come from but what you make of yourself that really matters.

“Duuuuuuude,” Bernie groaned. “These leaves are crunching all up in my crack. How'm I supposed to sleep in a bed of raisin bran, brah?”

“At least you
got
leaves,” Mikey said. “All I could find was some straw. At least I think it was straw. It feels like shish kebab skewers.”

“It's not so bad,” Joey said softly. “I slept in worse places.”

“That's because your daddy drank away your double-wide, dorkus.” Thad, huddled in his threadbare jean jacket across the fire pit from Joey, tossed a twig at the smaller boy. He'd been getting progressively more irritable as the day went on. Though he'd excelled at all the primitive skills Sam had shown them, easily outshining the other kids with his instinctive knack for woodcraft, even his successes only seemed to make him angrier and more withdrawn. Now he had Cleese's terrarium out and was fiddling with the catch at the top. He reached in and extracted the turtle with hands that, to Merry's eyes, seemed just a bit too rough, and set Cleese closer to the fire than Merry liked. “You don't know from real beds, Joey,” he jeered. “But I bet your mama does.”

The camp went dead silent, except for the collective sucking in of breath.

Even in the fading light of dusk, Merry could see Joey had gone pale.

Sam caught Merry's arm before she could intervene—either for the sake of her turtle or her young admirer. “Give them a minute,” he said softly at her ear. Merry's lizard brain couldn't help noticing the strength of the hand that gripped her biceps, and the warmth of his breath against her nape. But then again, it was a lizard, and couldn't be expected to have good taste. “Part of this experience is to give them space to let them work everyday conflicts out on their own,” Sam continued.

“But—” She didn't want roast turtle for dessert. Yet even less did she want to see little Joey bullied by the bigger boy.

“Trust me, Wookiee. I know these kids.”

Merry subsided reluctantly.

Joey had jumped to his feet, his slight frame vibrating with fury. “You take that back!”

“You gonna make me?” Thad rose too, dwarfing the younger boy, and stripped off his jacket to reveal his bulging muscles.

Out of the corner of her eye, Merry saw Zelda's hands reach out and quietly retrieve the turtle from the fireside, settling him in her lap and zipping her purple windbreaker around them both. The girl snicked a bit of lettuce from the sandwich at her side and fed it to Cleese.

Joey paused, swallowed audibly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I am.” His fists were clenched, and his chin trembled in the twilight and the wavering light of the fire.

Merry's heart clenched at his bravery. “Sam,” she whispered, “are you sure…?”

“I'm sure.” Squatting next to Merry, he rested his hands loosely at his sides, eyes unwavering on the two boys who were squaring off.

He wasn't the only one riveted by the confrontation. Mikey had drawn up his knees under his ratty tee shirt, squinching into himself and watching nervously. Bernie's sweet brown eyes were filled with worry as he looked on. “Ultimate fighting cage match is that way, boys,” he said, pointing down the mountain. “This here is a low-T zone. Well, as low-T as a bunch of badasses like us can manage, ha, ha.”

The two ignored him, eyes locked on each other's. The space between them crackled in a way that had nothing to do with the fire they'd built to keep the night at bay.

“You know I could kick your ass from here to next Sunday, right, dweeb?” Thad's eyes had narrowed with something akin to puzzlement, as if he could not comprehend the idea of someone as small as Joey standing up to him. “You really want me to do that in front of everyone?”

“I don't care,” Joey said resolutely. “You're gonna take it back, or we're gonna get into it, right here and now.”

“Why you wanna defend that drugged-out whore anyhow?” Thad demanded, shifting his feet a bit. “She never did shit for you—except leave you out in the cold while she bones some meth dealer for her next hit.”

“At least my mom's
around
,” Joey said. A single tear spilled over his cheeks, but he held his reedy voice steady. “She didn't just dump me with some old lady and take off like
your
folks did.”

“They're
working
,” Thad said hotly. “You know, that thing your daddy never figured out how to do?”

Joey looked at the bigger boy in silence, clearly measuring more than his muscles. For a minute, to Merry, he seemed the taller of the two. His stance changed from scared puppy to something almost…confident. Like he'd figured something out about his foe, and suddenly…well, maybe he wasn't an enemy after all. “Yeah, they're working,” he said. “Same as a lot of folks around here. But do
you
really want to pick fruit all your life too?” To Merry's ears, the question sounded less like an insult and more like a challenge. “'Cause that's where you're headed if you keep blowing off school and getting in trouble, Thaddeus. I know it, you know it. Everybody here knows it.”