reached the point they did, because it doesn"t really matter—
even if it mattered to me at the time. Frank caught hold of
me later that evening, as I stumbled, tired and filthy, back
toward the house. Nobody had told me when things began
and ended around here, but the slow roll of people away
from the fields was like a tide, determined, strong, pulling
with it everyone who fell into its path. I, exhausted, let
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Louise Blaydon
22
myself be pulled. Frank met me ten feet from the door, teeth
flashing white in a grin.
“Hey,
grissino
! I hear you"ve been working hard for Oro?”
Oh, man, did I want to work hard for Oro.
I shook away the flush of warmth that caught at my
spine at the sound of Oro"s name, and grinned. “Sure have.
Your stables have never been so clean.”
Christ, even the muscles of my face hurt when I spoke.
Everything hurt, from my aching shoulders right down to my
taut hamstrings. Even my hair
felt like it might be aching
slightly, and this was only my first day
.
If Oro did this for a
regular living, he had to be in
incredibly
good shape.
Frank, moving forward to meet me, was laughing. “I"m
glad to hear it! I"ll tell your mother. She"ll be relieved.” He
tipped me a wink and slipped his arm through mine, lending
me his solid support, if I wanted it. “I"ve put Oro in charge of
you,” he went on, as we entered the house by the kitchen
door and he gestured at my boots, an unmistakable
get ’em
gone.
“So you just do as he tells you, and you won"t go far
wrong. That okay?”
“Huh?” I was crouching, by this point; scraping dry dirt
off my shoelaces with a thumbnail, preparatory to
disentangling the damn things. And, more than that, I was
playing for time, really; trying to work out what would be the
most apt response, when what I wanted
to do was break out
in a grin and thank my uncle rapturously. I would have so
happily done anything at all
Oro told me to, was God"s own
truth—and not only because he was six feet of solid sex,
either. I"m no idiot, and no pushover, and I need to feel safe
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Louise Blaydon
23
before I"ll let anything go. There was something about Oro
that absolutely radiated trustworthiness; something in his
smile and his clean-cut face that told me he was good
people, and he could be relied upon. I would have done
anything Oro told me, in any arena, because I trusted him
not to tell me wrong. Not something that usually happened
to me in quite so short a space of time, and not something I
could easily tell Frank, either. Nevertheless, once I"d shoved
off one boot, I managed to make an attempt.
“Absolutely a-okay, sir,” I said, smiling up at Frank as I
fumbled with my remaining boot. “I like Oro. He seems like
he knows what he"s talking about. And he"s patient, too, I
guess.”
“He"s a good kid,” Frank agreed, and I could tell by the
way his smile softened that he was pleased. I"d done well.
And I liked that. “So you just report to him, while you"re
here. I can see you"ll do fine.”
Later that night, when we"d eaten, Frank broke out a
pair of his own work boots and insisted that I try them on for
size while he watched. They were, more or less, perfect,
uncle and nephew matching up in this one particular, more
neatly than I"d expected. Frank was more pleased than he
should have been about this development, too. The smile he
smothered behind his palm was more than a little endearing,
and I can"t pretend that the gifting of his own boots wasn"t,
in and of itself. There was something undoubtedly symbolic
about it, when he could just as easily have dug me a pair out
of the supply closet where he kept things for ranch back-up
and emergencies. He didn"t want to give me something out of
storage. He wanted to give me something of his, something
he maybe would have given a son. I"d always known that I
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Louise Blaydon
24
was the closest thing Frank had to that, but it was only in
snatches—in moments like this—that I realized how much I
wanted to live up to that for him.
“Go sleep it out, Alex,” Frank said, clapping me between
the shoulder blades. “Let your muscles unclench. More hard
work tomorrow.”
I hugged him tight, curtailing it with a back slap of my
own. “Will do. Thanks for the boots, Uncle Frank.”
I didn"t have to look back to know he was smiling at me
as I made my way back to my room.
A LOT of guys these days have no idea at all what ranch
hands
do.
I don"t mean to sound superior, or anything,
saying this, but I"m pretty sure it"s true. I know for a fact
that my friends in California would never have assumed I"d
be spending my first day shoveling horse dung into a pile to
be carted off for fertilizer. In California, you only have to say
the word “ranch” and everyone"s immediate thoughts are of
cowboys, lone rangers roaming the hills, all big hats and
fancy boots and pistols shoved into their belts. Ask them
what they think these sensitive riders
do
, exactly, and they
find it a little harder to respond. It"s guys from California,
and from Boston, and from up-state New York, who pitch in
obscene amounts of money for “dude ranch” vacations,
where they spend a weekend in a ridiculous shirt, singing
“Kum Ba Ya” around a camp fire thinking it makes "em a
cowboy.
Well, like I said, the Southwest is in my blood, however
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Louise Blaydon
25
much at home I may feel in San Diego. I always knew what
ranches were, and just what ranch work entailed, and I
knew that wasn"t it. Uncle Frank"s ranch hands would never
be caught dead wandering out on the hills alone. That"s the
whole point of a ranch, right there: everybody stays together
on it. Frank still has horses, because it"s his opinion that
cattle respond with greater trust to a herdsman riding
behind them than to one chivvying them down the hill in a
tractor. He may be right; on the other hand, he may just be
kind of old-fashioned. The jury"s still out. The point is that
ranch hands do actually have
jobs.
Jobs, plural; a whole lot
of different things they have to be able to do with ease and
expertise. A good ranch hand is a jack-of-all-trades, from
seeding, fencing, mowing, irrigation, basic mechanics, to all
kinds of animal husbandry. A lot of the traditional gear of
the cowboy can still be seen on Uncle Frank"s workmen, but
that"s because a lot of it is eminently practical. “Cowboy”
boots are shaped like that so they"ll fit well into stirrups; the
hat"s like that because it"s made to keep the sun off your face
and the back of your neck all at the same time. Denim jeans
were
made
to be durable and perennially appropriate. Shirts
with tassels rarely feature into the equation. Lots of guys
frequently wear T-shirts under open shirts, although long
sleeves are the norm, even so, since they shield you from
everything from blazing sun to pesticides. Working on a
ranch is far from a walk in the park. Most ranchers are guys
who"ve been brought up in the trade, and those who weren"t
have to put in a lot of hard work to get themselves up to
speed.
When I woke up for my second day of work at Frank"s, I
wasn"t under any illusions. I didn"t expect to be a fully
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Louise Blaydon
26
trained
vaquero
by the end of eight weeks" work. Nobody else
expected that from me either. But even if I"d never be able,
like Oro, to fix anything that needed fixing at the drop of a
hat, there"d always be
something
I could probably manage.
That morning, what needed managing was the back fence.
There"d been kind of an unexpected summer storm a couple
nights previously, and the fence had suffered under the
onslaught. Oro had all the necessaries stowed in a bag on
the back of my saddle before I even got out of the house:
hammer and nails; wood; chicken wire. He grinned at me
when he saw me, and tipped his hat. I steeled myself in my
new-old boots, ignored the prickle in the small of my back,
and returned the grin.
“Tasks already?”
He had two horses with him, both of them chestnut and
gleaming. The one to his right, its reins in his hands, was
his, a fact he made quite evident by the angling of his body.
The other, the one with the bag on its saddle, must then, I
reasoned, be for me. Oro reached out as I spoke, and
smacked its flank affectionately.
“I always have tasks, Young Grasshopper,” he informed
me good-naturedly, his Rs rolling throaty and rich in his
mouth. “Frank told me you could ride. That true?”
He was wearing a soft white shirt, worn thin with
washing. Against it, his skin was like caramel, burnt-sugar-
brown. I swallowed, and pointedly thrust one boot into the
horse"s stirrup, letting him see how easily I did it, how
familiar the motion was for me. “I can ride.”
“Good.” He let go of the horse, relinquishing power.
Letting me know, in some small way, that he trusted me.
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Louise Blaydon
27
“You"re riding Sasha. Frank wants the fence repaired up on
the east boundary. I"ll ride over there with you, make sure
you know what needs doing, and then leave you to it. Sound
okay?”
“Okay,” I said, swinging my leg over Sasha"s back. She
was perfectly docile, patient, and leaned into my palm when I
stroked her mane. Oro"s horse let out a soft breathy sound
through his nose, tossing his head a little to fend off a fly. I
smiled slightly, and looked up from the horse to its rider.
“You always ride that one?”
“He"s mine,” Oro nodded, patting the animal fondly.
“Reuben. And he"s a beautiful specimen, too, aren"t you,
Reuben?” He leaned forward, face almost touching Reuben"s
mane as he scratched long fingers behind his ears.
“Gorgeous boy, huh? Oh, yeah, you sure are.”
Goddamn, I was jealous of the freaking horse.
He straightened up after a minute, and grinned across
at me. “I get over-affectionate,” he apologized, a little
shamefaced.
“Hey, no problem,” I told him, meaning it
wholeheartedly. “He"s a good horse. You have every right to
be in love with him.”
Oro laughed outright at that remark, the sound of it
heady and clear in the scarlet early morning. “I do, don"t I?”
He shook his head. “Screw it. I do.”
We rode out around the ranch"s perimeter together, the
first sounds of the day"s work just beginning to break the
dewy after-dawn quiet. We didn"t speak much, because it
didn"t feel like a time, really, for speaking, with the sky still
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Louise Blaydon
28
stained from sunrise, and the silence hung comfortable
between us. Half way there, he told me I had a really good
seat, and I glowed a little with pleasure. A little further on, I
asked him if that was a different hat, and he laughingly
congratulated me on my observational skills. Other than
this, there wasn"t any conversation. I rode just slightly
behind him over the dried out grass, and watched his back
as he moved, the shift and sway of him as he straddled the
horse. The sun cast the shadow of his hat in a dark puddle
over his shirt, right down to where it clung to him lightly,
sticking to the beginnings of sweat in the dip of his spine. I
turned away; focused my eyes on the horizon. Any more of
that, and I"d be imagining that sweat on my tongue, the salt-
sharp tang of his skin as I licked down his back. Oro was a
workman, a professional; he didn"t deserve that. I watched
the colors changing on the backdrop of sky, and rode on
smooth behind him.
It doesn"t take too much expert knowledge to fix a fence.
When we arrived at the gap the wind had created in the neat
brown line of the fence, the two of us swiftly dismounted,
and Oro unhitched the bag of equipment from Sasha"s