Bax wedged himself through the doorway and she followed him to the head of the stairs, the kitchen opening up beneath them, the long table, the boar’s head Bax had had stuffed presiding over the room with its meshed tusks and lopsided grin, as if death were a rare joke. “He didn’t”—handing her the crutches so he could take hold of the rail and begin easing himself down the stairs, one step at a time—“have blond hair by any chance?”
“He did, yeah,” she said, stepping down to him and forcing her shoulder up under his arm for support.
“Big guy? Forties?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why, you know him?”
“Shit, yes. That’s Thatch.” Another step down and then another, the room looming beneath them, opening up like a chasm, the stove, the oven, the dull glow of the battered pots and pans, a pit of domesticity and daily strife. She could hear Anise’s voice at the radio—“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”—and the screech of static on the other end. Who’s Thatch? was what she was about to say, but he was already spinning out the answer. “Doesn’t he know the rules? They told me he was strictly to stay off the ranch and just hunt the hills.”
“Who told you?”
He was breathing hard, sweating, though it couldn’t have been more than fifty-five degrees in the house, and when they reached the bottom of the stairs he winced as she ducked out from under his arm and handed him the crutches. His eyes pulled away from hers. “The owners,” he said.
“What do you mean? They didn’t—?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice gone to the very bottom of the register, more a snort or growl than a human vocalization, “and I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for a couple of weeks now, but with the accident and all I just—”
She was furious, burning. “Just what? Lied to me? Kept me in the dark? Treated me like a hired hand, like a cook, instead of what I am, or what I thought I was anyway. You son of a bitch. You’re worse than they are.”
He dragged himself across the room to the door before he responded, and when he did, he was already reaching behind it for the.22 rifle, as if that would do any good against a band of pig killers with high-powered rifles and a longbow with a fifty-five-pound pull. “They gave them the hunting concession, all right? And I didn’t want to get you all pissed off and raving because it’s the owners’ decision and there’s nothing we can do about it except the deal was they’d stay off the property and up in the hills and now the deal’s off.” He swung his head round angrily and shouted down the length of the room to where Anise sat at the big Steelcase desk where they did their paperwork, crying “Mayday!” into the radio microphone. “Shut that goddamn thing off, will you? Anise! Shut it!”
Rita had a hand on his arm. He was grimacing, tottering, trying with his two hands, two armpits and two shellacked and shining crutches to maneuver the rifle so he could hold on to it and throw open the door at the same time. “What are you going to do? Shoot them? You can hardly stand up.”
He was outside, on the landing, and then he eased down the front step and into the wet, the rubber-tipped struts of the crutches sucking at the mud and already blackened. In the absence of the Jeep, their only vehicle was the geriatric Ford pickup one of their unnamed predecessors had left behind. He and Francisco had resurrected it, but it was balky in the extreme, and they spent as much time fooling with it as racecar mechanics. Shoulders hunched to the level of the crutches, his head dipping and rising with each labored step and the cast swinging wildly, he made straight for it. She was right behind him, outraged, as furious over this exclusionary secret he’d been harboring as she was over the slaughter of the lambs. He fumbled with the passenger door of the pickup, unequal to the task, then slammed the flat of his hand against the rusted sheet metal and jerked his head round, savage suddenly. “Open the goddamn door, will you. And then get in behind the wheel.”
She pulled back the door and he clattered and groped his way in, cursing under his breath, the leg in its cast like a timber he was trying to fit in place, the rifle careening across the floorboards and the crutches tangled and banging, wood to metal. When she tried to help, he shrugged her off, jerking at the crutches as if he were trying to break them in two, and so she gave it up, ducked round the hood and slid into the driver’s seat. She watched him strain and heave and jerk at the unyielding wooden struts, wanting to say something but fighting down the urge because he was going to do what he was going to do and no amount of advice or sympathy or sense was going to change that, then shifted into neutral, put one foot on the clutch and the other on the accelerator, turned the key and listened to the engine crank and then catch with a mufflerless farting blast of exhaust. He was in now, the crutches flung into the truckbed, the door slammed shut. She goosed the accelerator, dropped the stick into low and the truck lurched forward, shimmying over the ruts. “Where to?” she said, her tone low and nasty, and she was ready to lay into him, she was, but he forestalled her.
“Smugglers’,” he said.
She pictured the ranch house there, run-down, uninhabitable, a kind of spook house she sometimes sat in to get out of the rain or just to listen to the phantom tread of the sheepmen who’d tromped the floorboards in a day gone by. That was where they’d be, she’d known that much herself — even Anise had known it. But what she hadn’t known — what he hadn’t told her — was that they had the owners’ blessings. That the owners were branching out because the sheep operation was bringing in practically nothing and they wanted a return on their investment like anybody else. They lived on the coast, in nice warm houses, they ate out in restaurants and went to the movies and the yacht club or the symphony or whatever it was, and they had no idea of the kind of work and dedication she and Bax had put into the place. No idea. Not an inkling.
Suddenly she felt scared. Just three hours ago she was secure, serene, her every thought focused on the lambing, on life and giving and increase, and now she was trapped in a burning house and all the windows were nailed shut. She jerked the wheel, hammered the brake, pounded the accelerator. There was a moment of weightlessness succeeded by a grinding thump and a cascade of piss-colored water as they plunged into the Scorpion River and ricocheted up the far bank. The gear shift throbbed in her hand, the engine wheezed and ratcheted. Dropping down to first, she hit the ridge road at speed and they began to climb. Up they went, past the spot where Bax had flipped the Jeep, the road winding back on itself, higher and higher, till Scorpion Bay opened up beneath them and the ranch caught hold of the web of dirt roads that radiated out from it as if it were the center of all the world and the trees wove their fringe around it and the ewes, in the distance, were specks of non-color, licking their lambs. The rifle lay on the floorboards at their feet, sliding first to her, then to him, as she took the turns and beat in and out of the potholes. “So what are you going to do?” she asked him through her gritted teeth, her shoulders jerking, the seat bucking under her and Bax holding on to the door handle for his life.
He gave her a strained look. The ribs were killing him, she could see that, but at the moment she had no sympathy for him, not the smallest, fractured particle of it. “I don’t know,” he said, and the rifle slid all the way across the cab, barrel first, till she had to nudge it away from the accelerator with her foot. “I’m just going to go have a little talk with them, is all.”
By the time they got to the top of the ridge the sky had begun to clear, the black clouds rolling off to obscure the coast to the north and a continuous thread of silver running along in their wake. The going was easier here, the terrain ironed flat across the mesa that separated the two ranches, but the road was soupy and there were displaced rocks and mudslides of one degree or another round every turning. Half a dozen times she had to climb down and roll stones out of the way or ply the shovel they kept in back for just such a happy occasion and all the while Bax sat there fuming. Even in the best of times the road wasn’t much — every spring, after the rains, Bax and Francisco would take turns coaxing the old John Deere bulldozer to life and scrape it smooth of ruts, rocks and brush — but it seemed especially bad now that the Jeep, with its four-wheel traction, was out of commission and she had to negotiate it in the pickup. All the while, fishtailing across the mesa, she dreaded the prospect of winding her way down through the stacked-up switchbacks on the other side. That would be a trial, the sodden earth giving way, the wheels skewing toward the shoulder that wasn’t a shoulder anymore but an edge, a precipice, a drop.