Blood Land (5 page)

I’ve never cared for you much.

There are times when hearing what you already know to be true is the most unbearable accusation of all. Even as situations change, such words remain lodged in the back of the heart like splinters. They fester. Infect the better times with accusatory concerns.

Was it possible?

Did Wendy Steele come to his bed in order to garner his services? Could her motives be so tactical?

“Back to your uncle Ty,” Hanson said, breaking a palpable yet comfortable silence. “You came here to ask me if I would defend him.”

Wendy avoided his eyes, measuring her response. She kissed his cheek.

“I think so. I’ve never really been one to use subterfuge. The whole idea of asking it now feels pretty unseemly.”

“I suppose it’s only subterfuge when you’ve not been candid regarding your motives,” he said.

“My motives aren’t as clear as they once were.”

“Just like that?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I am just rethinking the whole ‘get involved’ option. Me, I mean. With my family. Not with you.”

“In matters of family,” Hanson said, “we’re always involved. Whether to engage.
That
, my lady, is the dilemma.”

Wendy nodded solemnly. Her dark eyes conveyed caution. And what else?

A defeated admiration?

“What would you say if I
did
ask?”

Sitting there, mesmerized by the reawakening this young woman had produced in him—deserted to an extent by his own conscience and principles—Hanson wasn’t sure there was anything he would not be willing to give her. He stroked her cheek and kissed her on the top of her head.

“I’d say no.”

“And those people in Black Mountain

are mean as they can be.

Now they uses gun powder

just to sweeten up their tea.”

Janis Joplin,

Black Mountain

PRUETT STOOD outside Ty McIntyre's jail cell with a plate of hot food from Casa de Zenda. Proprietor Zenda Martinez served the food and took care of the books. Her husband, Roberto, set the authentic Mexican menu and cooked the food.

Ty lay on his back, knees up, boots flat on the mattress.

“Lunch,” said Pruett.

Ty looked over with his eyes only.

“Brung in from where?”

Pruett opened the slat in the door and set down the tray of steaming refried beans, crispy flour quesadillas, and sweet rice.

“From next door.”

“Pruett,” Ty said and got up from his bed. He walked to the bars, leaned against them. He extended a thick, callused hand.

Sheriff Pruett stared for a moment, finally accepting Ty's meaty, sandpaper paw. It was just something you did.

“Ain't much in this world I'm sorry for,” Ty said, “but this is one time. I loved her too, though I never said so.”

Pruett felt the barbaric strength in McIntyre's grip. A nervous flutter ran across his backside. He’d let his guard down. Miscalculated. The gun was holstered on his right side. If anything went down, he'd never be able to cross-reach for it with his left hand. Not in time.

Ty smiled, as if he knew the chess game going on inside the sheriff’s brain. His lips peeled back in a hangman’s smile, exposing battered, wood-colored teeth. He released Pruett’s hand, picked up the tray of food, took it back to his bunk, and started eating hungrily.

The sheriff walked the hallway back to the office. He again felt cowardly. It was not a feeling he planned on befriending. Maybe it
was
too soon to be back. Baptiste and Munney argued against his returning so soon, and only with what candor they could muster. It was clear that he was pushing the line, but that was how he lived and worked; he wasn’t planning on changing that. And Pruett prided himself in his ability to detach from the personal. He knew how to work; how to put the job first and be a sheriff.

But after the stupid mistake back in lockdown, he now wondered if he’d misjudged the place of his heart in all of it. No one would blame him, but that wasn’t the point. He would not be able to stand the look of his own mug in the mirror.

Back in his chair, shame and fury swirled in his head like a chimney fire. Fueled by the self-embarrassment of his failure back at the Willow Saloon, he returned to Ty’s cell.

“I'd kill you if duty didn’t say otherwise,” Pruett said.

Ty did not look up from his plate.

“Guess I have it coming,” he said.

“You do,” Pruett said. “But my
job
is to treat you like any other. Let the jury decide and the State hang you.”

“Don’t hang ‘em in Wyoming anymore, Sheriff. You know that. It’s been a few years at least.”

“You and I never cared much for one another, Ty. But I’m guessin’ we both loved Bethy.”

“I always thought highly of you, Sheriff. Really I did, no matter what me or some of the fellas mighta said on a drunk occasion or two. You’re a good man, sir, and over the years, I became grateful you found Bethy and did right by her. You always treated me fair, too, every damn time I was in the poke.”

Ty was a brawler and a drunk and had spent many nights cooling off in the very cell that he now occupied. “Is that all you come back to say?” Ty said.

“No,” said Pruett.

Ty looked up at him with coal-colored, scurrilous eyes.

“Then say it.”

“I don't know what happened on the ranch for sure,” the sheriff said. “I know what you already said. Your pa and brother aren't saying anything else. Neither is Honey. I would advise you to get a lawyer and follow suit.”

“Already happenin’,” said Ty. “Niece in Laramie is tryin’ to gather one up. Some professor.”

“A professor?”

“Like that'll help, I says to her. But she said to shut my trap just the same.”

“Give a shout when the food’s done,” Pruett said. “I’ll send a deputy.”

“I meant what I said about sorry,” Ty said, returning to his plate. “But just so we’re clear…I won't be sayin’ it again.”

“I meant it, too,” Pruett said. “All of it.”

As the sheriff walked away, a cold line of sweat ran down his spine. The gun on his right hip felt dense; as heavy as the world atop his shoulders.

McIntyre boys stacked hard time. Life in many ranch households left few choices for the sons—or sometimes even the daughters. Fathers wore the ranching mentality into a boy, long and relentless. A rancher's son would unlikely ever choose any other type of life. Psychologists called such conditioning institutionalization. Ranchers passed it forward decade by decade, century by century. Not a rite of passage but rather an inheritance of duty, burned hotly and deeply into a child; as permanent as any brand.

Ranch country made for a hard living. The land was unkind to those who worked it, so families sometimes became commensurately unkind to their own. Few, however, were as unkind to their own as the McIntyres.

Ty’s father, Rory, inherited the entirety of the McIntyre property when his own father died of a weak heart. Two-thousand upper acres of rough terrain and hayfields; a lower four-thousand acre parcel. The ranch house, a barn, a stable, two corrals, and all the heavy equipment were on the lower piece. Rory's two brothers had died early in life; young, in their twenties. Rory’s father found the pair, trapped and frozen in a surprise fall blizzard while moving the last of the cattle down from the upper McIntyre place.

Rory married and Honey gave him four sons in a row before he drew a daughter. Ty was the youngest of the boys and a year older than Bethy. Still, he was the best ranch hand, as well as the toughest and the meanest. Ty easily wrestled calves for branding when he was eight and could buck a bale of hay faster than some adult men could when he was ten or eleven.

When he was thirteen, a man named Sketch Borland made a wisecrack about Ty's cereal bowl haircut. The boy lit into Borland like a small bobcat tearing into a grizzly ten times its size. Borland was no fighter, and a bit of a drunkard, but he had at least a hundred pounds on the young boy. The rest of the crew had to pull little Ty off the older man.

Ty's brothers—Rance, Cort, and Dirk—were tough too, in that order and according to age. But Ty could handle them all. One at a time or together.

Like Ty, Rance and Cort had parcels of the ranch. The two of them rode saddle bronc and bareback almost every summer weekend at the rodeo grounds in Wind River. Dirk did not ranch. He worked as a crack rider for an outfitting business that caravanned tourists and hunters in and out of the Wind River Mountains.

Ty considered them all pussies. Dirk because he rode soft horses for a living and never did rodeo. The other two because Ty had never really considered it rodeo to ride any animal less angry or dangerous than a bull.

Bulls bloodied and broke Ty into pieces throughout his life. Doctors pinned together and replaced parts of him so many times that against the gloaming light you could see his spine make two distinct turns, like an S-curve on a mountain road. His face had been stomped so magnificently one Friday night that his head swelled to double its size, his face grape-colored and horrifying. It healed mostly, but stayed as cratered and uneven as the surface of the moon.

Over the years, hardship took several inches off Ty’s stature, but those same years added twenty pounds of mass, too. A thin layer of wintering fat hid fresh, sinewy muscle, and more than a few pounds of angst.

Ty McIntyre was getting old, but he was still a man most would rather see on the other side of the street.

Returning to Rory McIntyre’s ranch was something Pruett had been putting off. There were many reasons. He wanted to think that the fear of seeing the spot where his wife died wasn’t one of them, but the old sheriff knew better.

As Pruett stepped down from the truck, Rory opened the screen on the front door and stepped out, a cup of coffee in his left hand.

“James,” Rory said.

“Rory. How’re you holdin’ up?”

“Life don’t allow for men to spend much time mournin’. Work needs to git done.”

“One way to look at it,” the sheriff said.

“Ain’t no two ways about it. You comin’ in or can we do this while I git the wagon rigged up to the tractor?”

“Wagon is fine,” Pruett said.

He followed the old bowlegged cowboy toward the barn where Rory started throwing spools of baling wire and boxes of staples onto the hay wagon.

“Shoulda offered you a coffee,” Rory said. “Honey’s in the house. I can yell for her.”

“I’m good. Not planning to stay here long.”

“Looks like you wintered okay,” Rory said, gesturing to the sheriff’s stomach.

“I did all right.”

“I was rememberin’ all the times you and your family came out here for brandins.”

“Never missed one that I can recall,” said Pruett.

“You got knocked on your ass more than a few times,” Rory said.

“Sure did.”

“You liked my little Bethy, even back then. Always lookin’ after her more ’n yourself.”

“Been fond of her long as I’ve lived and breathed, I reckon,” Pruett said.

“You’ve always knowed my mind on the subject.”

“I know you never liked me,” the sheriff said.

“Liked you just fine. Thought you were lazy, is all.”

“Someone put cow shit in your cereal bowl this morning, Rory?”

“Just conversation.”

Pruett tried to understand. Believe it wasn’t personal. Most ranchers he knew didn’t have much respect for any other way of life. They might tolerate you, even befriend you—but it was a closed society.

“My family’s been working the land as long as any McIntyre,” the sheriff said.

“Not ranchin’, though. You wouldn’t claim that.”

“Not by your definitions, no.”

“Dirt farmers,” Rory said.

“You got a hornet you want to put under my bonnet this morning,” said Pruett. “I’ll tell you now, old man: you don’t quit on the idea, you’re gonna find your huckleberry.”

“Fair enough,” Rory said.

He’d never once looked Pruett directly in the eyes.

“I did all right by your daughter,” Pruett told him. “Best leave it at that.”

“Not sayin’ you didn’t. Not tryin’ to cling to the past, neither. Doesn’t mean I won’t jaw on it from time to time.”

“Bethy was wearing your coat and hat when she was killed,” Pruett said.

“Yep. So?”

“Well, she brought her own coat, didn’t she?”

“Mine was closer.”

“And you were all playing cards.”

“Euchre.”

“What?”

“We was playin’ euchre.”

“So you’re saying she grabbed your coat because it was closer to the door?”

“Yep.”

“And hat.”

“Say again,” Rory said.

“Your hat. She was wearing your hat, too.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m just trying to make sense of all this,” Pruett said.

“Are you? I’m glad for that,” Rory said, and opened a can of chew. “Dip?”