No one moved. No one said a word. Movie images flickered through her head, shootouts and quick draw, Technicolor irreality, playacting, and who were those people lying there in the dirt with the fake blood spurting? Extras, stuntmen, bad guys. Not Bax, not her. But where was the reality, exactly, where the restraint? The law? Normalcy, even?
Ultimately — and it happened before she could draw her next breath — there was only a single shot fired, and it was Bax who squeezed it off, a sudden sharp snap like the crack of a whip that kicked up a puff of dirt all the way on the far side of the house, and Bax wasn’t aiming, maybe didn’t even mean to pull the trigger, but it had its effect. The two fat-faces staggered back as if their knees had buckled and she watched the color drain out of Thatch’s face.
Bax — she couldn’t read him, couldn’t tell if his own stone-cold look was the result of the pain of his ribs or a flare of anger or even surprise at what he’d done, what it had all come to — dropped his voice down to its fiercest pitch and said, “You cocky son of a bitch — who the hell do you think you are?”
And Thatch, white still, white as Gold Medal flour, his blood drained as neatly as if somebody had pulled out the stopper, fought to master his voice. “You think you can intimidate me?”
And Bax, check and checkmate: “You’re damn right.”
She could see it was going to be difficult getting back into the truck, Bax fumbling and exposed for the fatal space of one long moment while she twisted the key in the ignition and Thatch and his sheep killers did whatever it was they meant to do to get their own back, and so she started round the truck to the driver’s side, saying loud enough for all to hear, “The hell with it. Let’s just leave. Let’s just get out of here.”
Thatch made no move to stop them, though the look he gave her was death delivered. She had the truck up and running and blasting its exhaust, and the noise and her motions, the briskness with which she sprang into the seat, squared herself and jerked at the gear shift, gave Bax cover enough to juggle gun and crutches and heave himself into the truck, and she never gave Thatch a second glance as she pinned the accelerator to the floor and slashed away up the road until the ranch and the bonfire with the three puny figures in front of it was just a speck in the rearview mirror.
She’d never been so torn up in her life. Her hands were trembling, her feet were like dead things, and she could feel her stomach, the very bottom of it, as if it had been pinned to her with a tack. Bax roared out his rage all the way up the snaking muddy road to the mesa and she roared it right back at him. They made all sorts of resolutions, what they were going to do, what Bax was going to say to the owners and to the police and the Coast Guard and anybody else who would listen, but none of it did the least bit of good, because when they wound down the other side of the mesa and Scorpion Ranch appeared beneath them and grew larger and larger till the view out the windshield was filled to surfeit with it, they saw the helicopter there, inert in the yard, and the pilot and a man in suit and tie — the Gherinis’ agent or lawyer or whoever he was — standing beside it and Anise and Francisco with them, looking grim.
Yes. That’s right. Pull the plug and let it all wash down the drain, the blisters, the backbreak, the stock and the improvements, the gas-fired water pump and the saddle horses and all the rest, the taste of the dirt between your teeth when the sundowners are clipping over the hills and the deepest requited love of a place that was like the love of the soul of God, let it go. Because Mr. Gherini’s agent, stepping delicately through the mud in his city shoes, said, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Russell, but I have instructions to inform you that you’ve got two weeks to vacate.”
Bax had thrown it back at him: “What are you talking about?”
The agent — erect, in command, though he couldn’t have stood more than five feet five and his eyes were mortised with disgust — gave a little speech then, peppered with figures torn from a ledger sheet, forty thousand dollars total profit to the Gherinis in the business year just concluded versus the promise of some hundred and fifty thousand in annual revenues from sport hunting alone, and all that with the Park Service breathing down their necks and threatening a public taking of the property that had been in his clients’ family from their grandfather’s time for a compensation too mean even to mention. “Let’s face it, Mr. Russell,” he said, lifting one foot from the ooze and then, thinking better of it, setting it down again, “the world’s moving on. Sheeping’s something out of the old west and the old west is dead.”
Bax, strung tight, trying to gesticulate and hold on to the crutches at the same time, tried to reason with him, but the man kept shaking his head and interrupting him. “Two weeks,” he kept saying. “I’m very sorry. My clients are sorry. Everybody’s sorry.” He moved forward then, very carefully, like a man wading through cake batter, removed an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it over. “Two weeks. You’ve been duly served.”
It was as if the breath had been knocked out of her. She felt like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a scrap of rock as the seas rose and crashed. She was drowning on dry land. “What about the lambs?” she asked, angling toward him, her palms held out in extenuation. “We can’t just—”
He looked at her now for the first time. His eyes were black, his hair close-cropped. He was a very little man in a very expensive suit and a pair of ruined shoes who’d come from another world on an urgent errand and that errand had been completed. “Leave them.”
“For what? For those, those”—she couldn’t find the word—“people to shoot them?”
“I’m not here to argue,” he said.
Francisco was staring at the withered cracked upturned toes of his boots. Anise brought a hand to her face. From the distance came the long withering bleat of the lambs.
“But that’s our profit,” she protested. “Our increase.”
And now, as if things weren’t black enough, Bax turned on her. “You keep out of this,” he said.
The man stared through her as if she didn’t exist, his eyes on Bax.
“What about the lease?” Bax demanded. “You can’t break the lease just like that. We could sue. Anybody could.”
“No visitors,” the man said.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Your lease. It states, quite clearly, that you’re to have no visitors here without express permission of the owners.”
Bax did a little dance inside the cage of his crutches, every hope he had dying right there in the mud in front of him. “Visitors? We never had any visitors here—”
The agent had turned to wade his way back to the helicopter, the pilot — a pair of arms and legs, two eyes and a face as bland as the Los Angeles white pages — standing there looking on as if he were already gone, whirling overhead in his thunder machine, goodbye, so long, and this has nothing to do with me.
“Mr. Hazeltine?” Bax was stumping after him, a pleading tone come into his voice, an oiliness she’d never imagined in him, a begging, a soul-selling, and what was he doing? Who was he to plead? He should have been roaring, should have thrown down the crutches and wrung the little shit like a rag. “Mr. Hazeltine, we never—”
But the agent, on his high horse now, with all the lawyers and contracts and lease-breakers in his pocket, just swung round on them, and with a long slow rising gesture, pointed to Anise. It took her a moment — she was rinsed clean, blown clear of words, and so was Bax — before she could say, or no, bleat, because that was what she was doing, bleating, “But that’s my daughter.”