“This is it,” the old man said, and he must still have had a bit of food at the side of his mouth because he started chewing again. “That’s all there is. I don’t work the cattle much now, just rent the land to the fellow down the road and hang on to these few horses to keep my hand in.”
“That’s what he told me. He said you might not mind parting with some of them.”
“Maybe. You know much about horses?” The old man was leaning against the fence now, looking out at them.
“A bit.”
“Which three are the best?”
So that was it, he thought. The old man didn’t mind selling, but not to just anyone. You had to qualify. You had to have credentials.
The horses had looked up from nosing the ground when the two of them approached, three bays, a sorrel, a buckskin, and a pinto. They were all mares, all short, compact, and trim, with the big solid haunches of quarter horses. Except for the pinto, which was even shorter and thin in the legs and small-headed, like the runt in a litter.
He climbed up over the boards of the fence and dropped down into the corral, letting them size him up before he walked over, his hand out to the buckskin’s nose.
The buckskin didn’t respond for a moment, then dipped its nose down sniffing, nuzzling the hand, looking for sugar likely or maybe an apple.
He glanced at the others. Two of them, one bay and the sorrel, were circling slowly to his left. The rest were standing nearby, curious.
He brushed his hand across the buckskin’s face, patting its neck. Then stepping to the back, drawing his hand along the buckskin’s side, he swatted it firmly on the haunch, getting it in motion.
The other two just stood there, and then swatting the pinto as well, he had them moving too, one of the bays and the sorrel joining in. As they circled the corral, he walked back over to the old man. Leaning against the inside of the fence, he studied them.
He hadn’t been lying to the old man when he said that he knew a bit about horses, but then he hadn’t exactly been telling the truth either. He should have said more than a little but less than a lot. His only experience with them was from when he had taken riding lessons as research for a book and from the manuals he had read to learn about the different breeds and how they behaved and what you needed to feed them. But if it had all worked out right in his book, it had been mostly from theory and little practice, and now, he told himself, now we’re going to see just how well you learned it.
“The buckskin is blind in one eye,” he said. “I can’t tell from just looking at her, though, whether it’s from an accident or whether it’s something like cataracts that’ll turn up in the other eye.”
“She was born that way, but I couldn’t bring myself to shoot her. I used to have grandchildren coming here, and they got some use from her.”
“One of the bays has a broken shoe on the right front hoof, but that’s no problem if you see to it soon enough. The other two bays look pretty good, although they’re getting old and I don’t think there’s more than a year or two of heavy work left in them. The sorrel’s another matter. She’s got a swelling on the upper part of the cannon bone that I don’t like at all.”
“Calcium build-up.”
“I don’t think so. What did the vet say?”
“Calcium build-up.”
“Sure. It looks to me like that’s where she’s been kicking herself when she runs, though, and if she keeps doing it, she’s going to cripple herself. The only one I can’t decide on is the pinto. I can’t tell if she’s sickly or just naturally that slight. I’d have to be suspicious though.”
“So what’s your judgment?”
“No question, your three bays are the best. The other three are workable if you handle them right, but that sorrel, I doubt you’ll see her this time next year, and the pinto, you’d have to go awful easy on her. I take it that if you decide to sell the last three are the ones.”
“If I decide to sell. Two horses for packing. You must be taking up a lot of gear.”
He shook his head no. “One horse for packing gear, the other for grain and oats and bringing back what I shoot.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I’d do it too. Why not just rent them? As soon as the season’s over or the snow’s too deep, they won’t be any use to you then anyhow. Why not just rent them and save yourself the extra money?”
He shook his head no again. “If I get up there and something happens to one of them, I want to be sure it’s my own horse I’m shooting, not somebody else’s. I don’t want to have to feel that you’re looking over my shoulder at your property. When the time comes that I’m done with them, I’ll sell them back to you. For a lower price I assume. But the difference will be the same as the rent, and this way they’ll still be my horses.”
The old man thought about it. “Not bad,” he said and started chewing again. “That’s as neat as I’ve ever heard it put. Not bad at all.”
“Then it’s a deal?”
“Not quite. There’s still that other matter we’ve got to talk about.”
“What’s that?”
“How much cash you’ve got to spend. Do you like pure grain liquor?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
“Oh you’ll like it fine. Just fine. Why don’t we go on in the house and sit a spell and have a glass or two?”
3
He spotted them about the same time they spotted him, just as he was coming out of the hardware store, shouldering his knapsack. He’d been in there buying a gun belt for his revolver, a three-inch-wide strap of smooth flat-brown leather with loops for ammunition and a small buckled strap around the middle of the holster and a leather thong for tying the holster to his leg. He bought an extra box of ammunition, tucking the gun and the belt and the box into his knapsack just before he opened the door and went outside, and he was never sure what made him look across the street just then.
They were walking along the sidewalk directly opposite him, two of them, wearing jeans the same as everybody else, but their shirts were different, red-checked wool hunting shirts with khaki army field jackets unbuttoned over them, and one nudged the other, looking over at him. He didn’t let on, just stood there long enough to hitch the straps of his knapsack up over one shoulder, and then letting his eyes slip past them toward the post-office truck going by, he started walking slowly down the sidewalk.
It was a warm bright Friday. The big clock hanging up over the corner a half block away indicated a little after three. There were cars and trucks parked all along the street, people come to town to cash their paychecks and buy supplies and have some fun to start the weekend. A woman was walking toward him, pushing a little boy in a stroller as a man carrying two sacks from a feed and grain store nearly bumped into her.
Take it easy, he told himself.
But he started speeding anyhow and had to force himself to slow.
Just take it easy. This might be nothing. Maybe it’s just some girl over here that caught their eye. Maybe they think you’re somebody they used to know.
Maybe nothing.
He wanted to turn around and see if they were still watching him, but he couldn’t let himself, and he finally stopped in front of a drugstore, pretending to look at the razors and shaving soaps displayed in the window, glancing at the reflection in the window of them farther along the street, directly opposite him now, standing, staring at him.
He was going into the drugstore before he knew it.
How had they found him this soon?
Never mind this soon. How had they found him at all?
“I need the largest first aid kit you’ve got,” he told the girl in white behind the counter. “And some heavy-grain aspirin and some multiple vitamin tablets.” And what else? he thought. What else were they going to need that he had not thought of? And the strain must have showed in his voice because the girl behind the counter looked strangely at him a moment before she went and got what she was told.
The place smelled of disinfectant.
A knife, he thought. When I was in the hardware store I should have bought a knife.
He stood half-hidden behind a counter of hair sprays and bath salts, looking out the window, and they were coming across the street now, waiting for a motorcycle to pass before they kept coming and stopped between two cars parked at the curb.
“Here you are, sir,” the girl said behind him. He turned, and she was standing there at the counter, putting everything in a large brown paper bag. “That’ll be eight dollars and seventy-six cents.”
He gave her a ten and took the bag.
“Your change, sir,” she said.
But he was already going out the front door.
They were standing between the two cars, watching him. Twins, he saw, as he turned to the left toward the hardware store. Tall, thin-faced, thin-lipped. Short blond hair, sideburns trimmed to the middle of their ears. As soon as his back was to them, he looked at the reflection in a window that was angled their way, and they were following him.
“Hello again,” the guy in the hardware store said as he came in.
“I need a skinning knife.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t care.”
The door opened, bell tinkling. One of the men came in, pausing to look at him, then walking over to a rack of fishing poles, touching them.
“I don’t mean what brand,” the guy from the hardware store said. “I mean what kind. Short blade, long blade.”
“Five inches long with a double cutting edge. A thick metal guard between the handle and the blade.”
“Just the thing,” the guy said, reaching under the counter.
There were specks of sawdust on the wooden floor.
The twin over by the fishing poles wasn’t touching them any more, just standing, watching him.
“How about this one?” the guy from the hardware store said, showing it: a dark wooden handle with a smooth shiny blade and a thick rounded tip that wouldn’t break.
“I need a case for it.”
“They come as a package. I’ll be with you in a moment, sir.”
“I’m just looking,” the twin over by the fishing poles said.
The twin followed him when he paid and left. This time there wasn’t just his double out there but another guy, dressed the same, hair cut the same, but taller, heavier, square-faced with a mustache and a high-powered rifle complete with scope. They were following him so close now that he turned into the next place he came to, a restaurant, drab metal coffee maker behind the horseshoe counter, meringue-topped slabs of pie behind the glass doors of a cooler, hamburgers sizzling greasy on the grill. There were men in cowboy hats sitting at the counter and in some of the booths. An old lady in a hairnet was working the grill.
“A hamburger,” he said and sat at the counter.
“Three coffees.” The three men sat next to him.
“Listen, you’ve got to stop,” he said,
“I don’t know what you mean,” the guy with the mustache told him. He had his rifle propped barrel up against his leg.
“Sure you do. You know damn well what I mean, and you’ve got to stop.”
The guy was frowning at him now. He looked over at the twins. “You know what he’s talking about?”
“No, I don’t know what he’s talking about,” the one twin said.
“No, I don’t know either,” the other twin said.
“You’ve been following me. You’ve been hard on my back ever since I came out of the hardware store the first time.”
“The hardware store!” the one twin said. “Now that I think of it, you were in that hardware store while I was checking out the fishing poles.”
“Jesus, stop it!”
Everybody was looking at him now. The old lady was stopped in mid-motion reaching to flip over a hamburger on the grill. Except for the sizzling of the hamburgers, there wasn’t a sound.
“Hey listen, buddy, you better take it easy,” the guy with the mustache said. “I mean I know it’s been hot lately and I can guess what kind of trouble you maybe have at home, but you’ve got to take things more easy. I mean this kind of commotion isn’t good for anybody. I tell you what. If you’re so sure that we’ve been following you, why don’t we go outside and leave these people to their food and talk about it?”
“No!” he said. He was stumbling back, holding his stomach, clutching the side of a table. “No!” and he hoped it looked believable because this was the only chance he was going to get and he needed to convince them he was really sick. He leaned over, retching dryly, looked up at a sign pointing through a swinging door toward the men’s room, and lurched toward it as if he needed to get there fast, shouldering through the door, knapsack clunking, and his fear now was that this hall would be a dead end, that there’d only be the men’s room, but there it was, the exit at the far end, and he was straightening, the door flapping behind him as he hurried down the hallway, praying the exit wouldn’t be locked, twisting the knob and the door opened and he was racing down the narrow garbage can–littered alley toward the sidewalk.
4
“Claire!” He shouted, stumbling out of breath up the slope toward the cabin. He tripped and fell, his hands out, his palms scraping on the hard sun-baked dirt of the wagon road. His face struck the mound of grass between the ruts, sweat smearing across his chin, lips tasting of dust as he staggered to his feet and swayed there a moment before he lurched up the hill.
He didn’t have much time. He was sure they hadn’t seen him as he crisscrossed through town and then out through the fields on the other side. They obviously didn’t know where he lived. Otherwise they would have come straight here instead of checking out the town. So they had only two choices: either get in their car and drive around until they maybe spotted him, or ask around town, the hardware store guy or the real-estate man, for anybody who might have a line on him. The first was too slow and chancy, the second more sure. Fifteen minutes, a half hour at the most, and they’d be here.
He shouted for Claire again, lunging toward the top, and he had the taste of salt mixed in with the dust in his mouth now, and he knew it was from where his lips must have cracked open when he hit the ground back there.
Sarah was waiting for him at the top.
“Where’s your mother?” He was breathing so hard he could hardly get the words out.