Blue Heaven (4 page)

“I’m pleased to meet you, finally,” Ballard said, nodding toward Jess. “This is a pretty place, all right.”

Jess didn’t move.

“I saw Herbert Cooper in town this morning. He said you had to lay him off at the ranch.”

Herbert Cooper had worked for Jess for thirteen years. The day before, Jess had to tell his longtime foreman that he couldn’t pay his wages anymore, that there was not enough income for both bank loan payments and an employee. It was one of the hardest things Jess had ever had to do, and he hadn’t slept well. Plus, it was calving season, and he was now on his own.

Jess noticed Ballard looking at Chile. Jess could tell what he was thinking, and it made him angry.

“This horse came to me as payment for leasing out a quarter section
for grazing,” Jess said, wishing he hadn’t said it. There was no need to justify himself, certainly not to this man.

“Oh.”

Jess nodded toward the Lexus. “I see Karen in there. She put you up to this?”

Ballard looked back as if confirming it was Karen in his car, even though he knew it was. It took a moment for Ballard to turn back to Jess.

“Let’s leave her out of this, if you don’t mind. There’s no reason you and I can’t be gentlemen about this.”

Jess said, “There are plenty of reasons. So why don’t you get back in your car and get the hell off of my ranch?”

“That’s not necessary,” Ballard said, his eyes almost pleading. Jess felt sorry for him for a moment. Then it passed.

“You can get out the same way you came in,” Jess said. “Remember to close the gate.”

“Look,” Ballard said, showing Jess the palms of his hands. “Everybody knows the situation out here. It’s a struggle, a real hard struggle. You had to let Herbert go, and everybody else is”—he searched for the right word and came up with a wrong one—“
gone.
I’ve been sending you offers for months now, and you know my reputation. I’m a fair man, and in this case more than generous. I was hoping we could have a discussion man-to-man, feelings aside.”

Jess paused, felt his chest tighten. He looked down at his hand and saw that his fingers were white from gripping the lunging rope so tightly that it hurt.

“To have a man-to-man discussion,” Jess said, “you need two men. So we’re out of luck in your department. I’ve asked you twice to leave. If I have to say it a third time, it’ll be from behind the sights of my Winchester.”

Ballard’s mouth opened as if to speak, but nothing came out. Jess glared at him, heat rising. Then he took a step forward in order to tie Chile up to the rail. When he moved, Ballard flinched and took his foot off the rail.

“You don’t need to threaten me. I can buy this place from you or I can wait and buy it from the bank.”

“Git,” Jess said.

Brian Ballard backed up, then turned. He said over his shoulder,

“You’re making a mistake, Jess. I’ll be more than fair, I told you that.”

Jess tied up Chile and watched Ballard walk toward his Lexus. He saw Karen turn in her seat toward Ballard as he opened the door. Jess could tell what she was saying by the tilt of her head. He heard Ballard say, “No. You tell him if that’s what you want.”

Ballard swung into the vehicle and made a U-turn in the gravel, and Jess watched the car drive away for a while up the hill on the access road. It took him a few minutes before his hands stopped trembling.

“We need to get a saddle on you,” he told Chile, running his hand along her stout neck.

JESS WATCHED them go over the back of the horse. The afterimage of Karen’s profile seemed to hang in the dust whorls left by the tires.

So that was Brian Ballard, the man she left him for. The man she married after him.

He had not fought back when she announced she was leaving, said she had outgrown him and that he not only hadn’t kept up but had regressed. Said that just being on the ranch with him made her claustrophobic. That he had to get past what had happened to their son. That he was an anachronism. How could he fight that?

Karen got their savings and the feed store in town, which she promptly sold. And she got the Lincoln and his horse. Sold them, too.

Jess kept the ranch.

THE TREK up the hill and through the timber to the mailbox seemed longer than it ever had, he thought, and his legs felt heavier. For years, Jess never got the mail. Herbert or Margie did it, or another ranch hand, or his wife Karen did it. She used to love to get the mail. Later, he found out why.

To make matters worse, it seemed that more often than not he ran into Fiona Pritzle, the woman who had the rural mail route, at his mailbox. She was a vicious gossip, he thought, the woman who had spread the word when his wife left, and for whom. Fiona would feign concern for his health and well-being, and try to pump him for news and information. Had he heard from his ex-wife? Did he know she had moved back to
town? Was it true the ranch was in trouble? So when he heard a vehicle coming up the road, he stopped in the wet foliage. There had been a time when there was little traffic on the road, and Jess knew everyone on it.

In fact, there was a time, in Pend Oreille County, when everybody knew Jess Rawlins and Jess knew everyone else. That was when the lumber mills were running and the silver mines were hiring. It was rough, isolated, fiercely rugged country then, and the people who lived there were subjugated by the mountains, the weather, the deep forests, the isolation, and the unenlightened corporations who came there to extract everything they could, including the goodwill and civility of their employees. The profligate, rough-and-tumble wildness of the environment and atmosphere beat people down. The exception were people like Jess, families like the Rawlinses, who had come from poor stock themselves but managed to build an enterprise—the Rawlins Ranch— rather than simply remove commodities to be shipped elsewhere. They built their own legacy, and by doing it moved up in status and respectability. Unlike the logging company managers and mining executives who were sent to the Idaho panhandle from places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia to do their time and to take as much as they could as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible so they could put in for a transfer to a more hospitable post, the Rawlinses built a bulwark and established a heritage that was shared and celebrated.

Jess grew up feeling like a local hero. His grandfather and father had bequeathed the mantle of exceptionalism; that he was of the people, not better than them, but he had a special
something
because his name was Rawlins. The exceptionalism was a result of hard work, honest but tough business dealings, and high moral character.

The Rawlins Ranch was all the more admirable because North Idaho was not optimal cattle country. There were too many trees, not enough prairie and pasture. It rained too much. Unlike the vast ranches to the south or in bordering states Montana, Wyoming, and eastern Oregon, the Rawlins Ranch had to be carved out of the forest and managed carefully like a temperamental machine. They couldn’t just let cattle go to forage for themselves for months, like ranchers could do in more wide-open country. If they did, the cattle got lost in the timber. So they moved their herds from park to park, plateau to plateau, keeping careful count. The rain and lushness of the terrain invited hoof-rot and
disease born of moisture, so the cattle needed to be inspected and handled more than usual. Jess’s grandfather had established the procedure for counting, moving, and inspecting his cattle. From Washington State he’d bought seed bulls who were bred for wet ground and heavy snow. The quality of Rawlins beef became widely praised, and the ranch prospered due to its management. The high price of beef helped, too.

Jess, like his father and grandfather, felt proprietary toward the valley, the community, and the ranch. After serving in the Army, he had no doubt, ever, that he would return. Which he did.

Jess often wondered if he had made the right choice, knowing what he knew now. He also wondered if he’d been the catalyst for things to come, for the decline. Had the spark of exceptionalism died in him? He’d been unable to pass along the sense of eminence he had always felt.

Maybe, he thought, it had just played out.

FIONA PRITZLE, behind the wheel of her little yellow Datsun pickup, had a stern, pinched look on her face until she saw him. The change in her demeanor was instantaneous, though for Jess her self-focused scowl remained as an afterimage, even when she stopped at his mailbox and climbed out and grinned at him. How did she know when he would be there, he wondered?
He
didn’t even know from day to day. Fiona had a wide, pockmarked face obscured by heavy makeup. A cloud of perfume was released into the air when she climbed out, and she leaned over the top of the hood, fanning his mail across it as if laying down a winning hand of cards, smiling at him with nice teeth, her best feature. He had, of course, noticed that in the last few months she had been dressing better, putting her hair up, adding lipstick to her mouth. Apparently, she now felt the need not just to deliver his mail but to oversee it.

“Catalogs,” she said, “three of ’em today. Two for women’s clothing, so you’re still on their list even though they don’t know …”

He looked at her grimly.

“And a property tax notice, again,” she said in her little-girl voice, eyeing him suspiciously. “I know I’ve delivered a couple of these to you already.”

He nodded, nothing more.

“Jess, I saw Herbert in town.”

“He moved to town,” Jess said.

“He waved, but he didn’t stop. Is something wrong?”

Damn
, he thought. But he repeated, “Just moved to town.”

She looked at him suspiciously, then gathered up his mail in a stack and handed it to him.

“This road is getting busy,” she said. “I almost rear-ended a vehicle back there when I came around the corner.”

He raised his eyebrows, hoping his lack of response would signal her to go away. She had designs on him, he knew. He was over women, though.

“A Cadillac Escalade with three men in it. They were barely crawling down the road, looking into the trees.”

He shrugged.

“Brand-new Idaho plates. Probably more transplants.”

“There’s a lot of them moving up here,” he said.

“Most of them are retired cops from L.A.,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “I’ve heard that there’s more than two hundred of them overall, and about a dozen on my route alone.”

“How do you know that?”

She puffed up. “I put the pension checks in their mailboxes, and police newsletters, things like that. Some of them meet me every day, like you. A couple of real nice guys, real personable. But some of them are just like hermits or something. Like they don’t want to mix with somebody like me. If it wasn’t for their mail, I don’t know if they’d ever come out of their houses. They call North Idaho ‘Blue Heaven’ at the LAPD. Did you know that?”

Herbert had told him that, but he didn’t want to bring it up. Jess didn’t object to the idea of ex-policemen moving in. In fact, if he had to choose the kind of people to move into the valley—not that he
had
a choice—he would have opted for retired police officers. It seemed to him that ex-cops were similar to the original settlers, men like his grandfather. They had been workingmen in crowded cities with blue-collar backgrounds. After years of dealing with the dark underbelly of crowded conditions and the worst of civilization, they’d opted to move to fresh, green country where they could be left alone.
Better ex-cops than actors or dot-com heirs
, he thought. The kind who came in, took over, and transformed the place. There were some of them, for sure. Too many for Jess’s taste.

“Hundreds,” she said. “Buying up everything. But it sort of makes you feel safer, doesn’t it?”

Jess said nothing. She went on, “But I don’t like the way some of them keep to themselves, you know? Like they think they’re better than everybody else. Why did they move here if they just wanted to keep to themselves? They could have moved anywhere for that. You’d think they’d want to be friendlier, you know, since a lot of them are divorced and all. I mean:
Here I am!
” She did a clumsy little twirl that made Jess cringe. “One of them might steal me away from you, Jess Rawlins, if they pulled their heads out of their butts long enough to, you know, look around….”

Enough
, he thought. Seeing Karen had filled him with darkness. He didn’t want to talk with Fiona Pritzle, but he didn’t want to be rude, either.

“I better get back,” he said, gesturing toward his mail as if he couldn’t wait to read through it.

“You wouldn’t believe how many retirement checks and LAPD newsletters I deliver these days,” she said, repeating herself. “They’re all up and down this road.”

“Then you better get after it,” he said cheerfully.

She reacted as if he’d slapped her. “Just being neighborly,” she huffed. “I guess I caught you in one of your moods, Jess.”

He didn’t like it when she used his first name, or that she studied his mail before she gave it to him. She was too familiar with him, he thought. She should be more professional.

Her back tires spit gravel as she roared away.
Maybe if I pick up my mail at night?
he wondered.

He had turned back to his road when he heard another vehicle coming. She was right about the traffic. He looked over his shoulder and saw a red pickup with a male driver. Jess didn’t know him. As he passed, the driver appeared to be talking to someone or something in the passenger seat or on the floor, but Jess saw no passengers, and no dog. He waved at the driver, but the driver didn’t wave back. These new ones didn’t wave back.