The Cattleman (Sons of Texas Book 2) (20 page)

“
I had to wear these pink shoes,” she grumbled. “They don’t match my clothes. I really hate wearing things that don’t match.”

Pic gave her a look.
He hadn’t noticed her shoes. Dressed as she was, he doubted there was a man alive who would notice the color of her shoes.

With the day more than half gone, instead of going to the mesa, Pic chose to drive a shorter distance to a narrow canyon that had been dammed and turned into a
small reservoir for drinking water for the cattle. “Who are you taking pictures for?” he asked her.

“It’s a magazine.
Texas, Our Texas!
”

“Ah,” Pic said, tilting his chin. “Don’t think I know that one.”

“It’s a small magazine.”

“How many other ranches have you taken pictures of?”

“Actually, this is my first one. If I do well with this one, maybe it’ll be enough. Perhaps I won’t try to photograph more.”

T
hat answer was a definite maybe and left him puzzled. Hadn’t she said she was doing a piece on old Texas ranches?
Plural?

This seemed like the perfect op
portunity to address her going to the bunkhouse. “Zoshi, you’re welcome to take pictures just about anywhere on the ranch, but I need to ask you not to go into the bunkhouse. That’s home to the ranch hands who live there and some of them don’t want to be photographed.”

“Oh. Well,
no one said I couldn’t go there. Besides, it was just something to do. How far do we have to drive?”

His admonishment apparently had made no impression. He wasn’t even sure if she had understood what he meant. “Not too far,” he said, still waiting for some kind of defense against  his reprimand.
“Since we got a late start, I figure we’ll go over to this tank that’s kind of pretty. Some cattle are usually lazing around the edge of it and there are some big and real old live oak trees.”

“What’s a tank.”

Pic’s eyes widened. The word “tank” was common vernacular in Texas. “It’s a watering hole. Some people might call it a pond. Austin is surrounded by ranches. I imagine all of them refer to their watering holes as tanks.”

“I’ve never been to a ranch.”

End of conversation. No point in talking about how he and Smoky had found a spring in the bottom of a dry arroyo and developed it and created a small oasis. A lot of the tanks depended on rain for water, but this one had a constant water level even late in the summer. He presumed underground springs fed into it. It was a good source of drinking water for the stock and a good place for them to rest. At the edge of it, the temperature felt a little cooler. He could hardly wait to get there.

As they crept alongside a copse of ancient live oaks and thick cedar, Pic couldn’t keep from stealing glances at her bare skin, covered with a sheen of
perspiration. Johnnie Sue’s remark about her top barely holding her ample breasts was right on. He couldn’t keep his mind from wandering to her coming to the guesthouse door naked except for a sheet, then getting into the shower with him still standing in the doorway.

All at once, rustling and movement of the brush interrupted his aberrant thoughts. He spotted two huge hogs rooting in the underbrush. He slammed on the brake, causing Zoshi to lurch forward. “Oh. Sorry,” he said,
grabbing his rifle from the gun rack.

He clambered out of the Jeep, took a rest on the roof and fired.
Blam!

A shrill scream came from inside the Jeep.

His heart slammed against his ribcage. He ducked his head back inside. Zoshi was sitting with her shoulders scrunched up, her eyes squeezed shut and her fingers in her ears, the pounding of her heart obvious in her chest.

Oh, shit!
“Ma’am, are you all right?”

She yanked off her sunglasses and glowered, her deep brown eyes shiny with tears
, her mascara smudged. “I didn’t know you were going to shoot something.”

“I said I was back at the house.
It’s why I brought the rifle.”

“But I didn’t think it would really happen.” She broke into tears and buried her face in her hands.

Shit!

He looked toward where he had hit one of the hogs. The second hog was nowhere to be seen. Dammit, if she hadn’t screamed, he could have gotten both of them. He cussed under his breath
, blaming himself. If he had told her what was going on, maybe she wouldn’t have screamed and maybe he could have gotten the second shot off. He pulled his bandana from his back pocket and handed it to her. “Here.”

She stopped crying, glared at the bandana, then up at him, sniffling.

“It’s clean,” he said, unable to suppress his irritation. “The woman who does the laundry even starched and ironed it.”

She took it and dabbed at her eyes. “I’ve never been around shooting.”

This was rural Texas, where varmints thrived and hunting was excellent, especially for hogs. Pic could think of not one living soul he knew who had never been around shooting. He didn’t know what to say. So he chose to deal with the more pressing requirement of the moment. “Hot as it is, I gotta get that hog outta that brush.”

He climbed behind the wheel, jerked the Jeep into gear and bumped across the uneven pasture toward the hog carcass. When they reached it, he said, “This
’ll take just a few minutes.” He stepped out of the Jeep, walked over and inspected his kill.

“Is it—is it dead?” she called to him from the passenger seat, a quiver in her voice.

He looked up and saw her head poked out the window. “Dead as a doornail. Damn good shot, too, even if I say so myself. Right through the heart.”

He walked back to the jeep, opened the backend, dragged out a length of rope and his hunting knife. Returning to the hog carcass, he unhooked his phone from his belt and called the foreman. “Smoky, I shot a hog out here in that little bunch of juniper brush close to the spring tank. Get somebody to come out here and pick it up. If anybody wants it to eat, y’all oughtta get out here quick ’cause this temperature would make Hell seem cold.”

“We’re on it,” the foreman said.

“I’m giving a tour of the ranch, so I’ve got a guest with me. We need to get moving, but I’ll stay here ’til you get here.”

Pic disconnected, thankful for the cell phone service at this location. A cell phone was useless at many spots on the ranch. He hooked his phone back on his belt, bent forward, grabbed the hog’s hind feet and struggled to drag the dead weight out of the brush into a clearing.

“
Did you say ‘wants it to eat’?” Zoshi called from the passenger seat. “What does that mean? Someone is going to eat that?”

“No point in wasting it.”

Certain Zoshi had never seen an animal carcass butchered, he positioned his body between her line of sight and the hog while he dealt with it. All through the process, he felt guilty for making her cry.

After he had the carcass hanging from a limb and bleeding out, he walked back over to the Jeep. Blood stained his jeans and T-shirt. Zoshi’s face was a frozen mask of horror. “Please take me back to the cabin,” she said in a small voice.

“I will, ma’am. I will. Just as soon as Smoky gets here. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t let that hog lay out in this heat. I don’t want the meat to spoil.”

He walked to the back of the Jeep, opened the back door and dug a rag out of the toolbox. While he wiped his bloody knife clean, she sat in the passenger seat weeping. “You shouldn’t have killed it,” she said between sobs.

He walked around to the passenger door, placed his hands on the windowsill and bent down to look at her. “Look, it’s okay. It won’t go to waste. The hands in the bunkhouse will cook it up and enjoy it. It’s good meat. Healthier than domestic pigs. It’s real lean. Cooked right, it’s fork-tender. What do you think we had for dinner?”

An even more horrified expression contorted her face. “That stew?
Oh, my God!
”

Her hands flew to cover her mouth and nose. The door latch popped, the door hit him and she scrambled out. She stumbled a few steps, then fell onto her knees and lost her dinner on the ground.

“Oh, shit.” Pic hurried over and dropped to a crouch beside her. “Ma’am. Are you okay, ma’am?”

She shook her head, bawling and coughing and spitting up. He grabbed the bandana off the ground, quickstepped to the rear door of the Jeep, pulled out the cooler of ice water Johnnie had fixed for them and soaked the bandana. He returned to where she was still on her hands and knees crying. He squatted beside her and tried to help her mop her face.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried, jerking the bandana away from him. “Just leave me alone.” She wailed into the bandanna.

Panic seized Pic.
Jesus!
Other than his mother, he had been around very few wailing women. “Ma’am, listen to me.” He gently put an arm around Zoshi’s shoulders and tried to urge her to her feet. “You need to stand up. You’ll get full of grassburrs and you might get ant bit.”

“What? Oh, my God
!” She sprang to an upright posture and stamped her feet up and down. “Oh! Oh! Oh, my God! What kind of ants?”

He grasped her arm, bent and began to brush the grassburrs and dirt off her knees. “Calm down, okay?
You’re okay. Fire ants mostly nowadays. They mostly ate up the good ants. Their stings are harmless unless you’re allergic, but they’re painful.”

She broke into another high-pitched wail. “I
hate ants. I hate insects. Can I just go back to the cabin?”

Now annoyance mixed with Pic’s panic and he could hardly wait to escape from what had become a huge pain in the ass. “Ma’am, I’ll take you back in just a little bit.” He walked her the few steps back to the Jeep. “Just sit down in the Jeep and rest a minute.” He opened the passenger door. “You want a cool drink of water?”

“I just want to go back to the cabin,” she sobbed.

“I’ve got to wait here for
our foreman to come get that hog. Then I’ll take you back, okay?” He helped her seat herself in the Jeep’s passenger seat.

“What difference does it make?” she whined, still crying. “Why do we have to wait? Why can’t we go now?”

“Because, darlin’. If nobody’s here to protect a dead animal, the buzzards and the coyotes will show up. Or maybe even another hog or two.”

She dissolved into a new spate of tears. He released a sigh.
Smoky, where are you?

“Look,” he said. “You’re not in any danger. If you think you are, lock your door. It won’t take Smoky long to get here.”

He had no sooner said it than Smoky and a ranch hand showed up on ATVs, one pulling a flatbed trailer. They would gut the hog before loading it onto the trailer. No telling how Zoshi would react to that. Pic had to get her away before they started.

Smoky walked over and inspected the hog and Pic joined him.
“Hey, good shot, boss,” Laughing, Smoky raised his palm for a high five and Pic complied. “That sucker must weigh about six hundred pounds That with the new BAR?”

Pic laughed, too. “
Damn straight. I didn’t like that rifle at first, but I’m starting to love it. There were two of ’em, but I didn’t get a shot at the second one.”

“Too bad,” Smokey said, taking his knife out of its holder on his belt. “We could’ve put it in the freezer.”

“Listen, my passenger is feeling a little sick,” Pic said hurriedly. “I’ve gotta leave this up to you.”

He returned to the Jeep and climbed behind the wheel. Zoshi was no longer crying. She appeared to be calmer. In fact, she appeared to be in a trance.

He fired the engine and started back toward the guesthouse. A grinding hour later, he came to a stop in front of it. She had said not one word since they left the tank. Not wanting to agitate her further, he hadn’t spoken either. He turned off the engine, pulled on the door latch and started to step out.

“I’ve never been around killing things,” she said, stuffy-nosed.”

“I should’ve thought of that,” he said. “I guess I should apologize. And I do. But maybe you should look at in a different way. These feral hogs are a blight to farmers and ranchers. It’d be nice to wave a magic wand and get rid of them, but that ain’t happening. So we’ve got no choice but to kill ’em. Maybe that’s something you could put into the story you’re doing.”

The glare she leveled at him would have roasted that whole pig. “But you don’t have to eat it,” she snapped
.

Flummoxed, he stared at her. “What, you think it would’ve been better to just let it lay and invite every damn carnivorous varmint from miles around?”

“What I think is that you shouldn’t have killed it in the first place.”

Now his frustration grew to
the size of a mountain. He couldn’t get away from her fast enough. He scooted out of his seat and rounded the Jeep’s backend to open her door, but she was already out when he reached her. “Look, I feel bad we didn’t get any pictures today. Guess we can try it again tomorrow, huh? We’ll go up on the mesa. I’ll get my chores done early in the morning and we can leave a little earlier, before it gets so hot.”

She nodded, looking down.

He walked to the Jeep’s backend and dragged out her tripod and backpack, carried it into the guesthouse living room and set it on the floor near the front door. She stood in the middle of the room, looking at the floor, not removing her sunglasses.