From Here to There (13 page)

 Curly sneered. "If even half of it was so, it'd be enough to make a man wish he'd been there. Man could make his fortune in those days." He looked slyly at Phillip. "Shoot men who got uppity with him."

 "Or end up on boot hill himself," Phillip said under his breath.

 "What'd you say?"

 "Not much." He smiled. A wisely unspoken question was how cowboys got any work done if they were constantly reading stories of the old West. Instead he commented, "I wonder if the Indians around here like those Western books so much as you cowboys."

 "I've seen plenty of them reading 'em. Like take old John Eagle. He can answer most any question about anything Zane Grey ever wrote. He knows all the books, the characters. You ask it and he's got the answer practically afore you got the question out of your mouth."

 "Why?" Phillip's question didn't pertain so much to why the man might read Zane Grey, whoever he was, but more as to why he'd take the time to learn so much about it.

 Curly shook his head. "I'll tell you this. Men were men in those days."

 "What are they today?" Phillip asked with a humorless grin. This was one question to which he already knew Curly's answer.

 "Soft. Don't know how to hammer in a nail straight, ain't never broke a horse, can't work more'n an hour without getting blisters on their soft hands." He sneered derogatorily toward Phillip's own long fingered hands. "I'll tell you this. My pap, he could've still worked rings around any young whippersnapper twenty or thirty years old." He looked derogatorily up at Phillip as he added, "Even when he was seventy."

 "Interesting. How'd he ever get work done, if he was always talking about the West?" Phillip asked sardonically.

 Curly glared at him. "You makin' fun of me?" he snapped.

 Phillip shook his head. "No, just if I'm going to get done before dark, you better tell me about this fencing business." He wasn't interested in trying to change Curly's low opinion of him--which was fortunate because he doubted it would be possible anyway.

 Curly gave him a quick demonstration on fastening up wire, then was off to his own chores, whistling
Home on the Range.

 Already happy, Phillip thought wryly, at the thought of the botched job he expected from the fence repair. Probably already had the jokes thought up.

 Phillip took a last long pull on the cigarette as he considered the materials in front of him. He'd not only never used any of them, the only thing that looked remotely familiar was the sledgehammer. Groaning to himself for his stupidity at getting himself into this fix, he looked longingly toward the house. What he really wanted was a cup of hot coffee and maybe some breakfast, but he'd have to face Helene's wrath to get that, and he didn't feel up to that this early in the morning. He threw the cigarette down and ground it into the dirt with his boot.

 Restarting the truck took several minutes as the stubborn vehicle appeared to suspect it had a rank amateur behind the wheel. Before Phillip could pull out of the yard, Amos and Hobo were ambling toward him. Phillip waited, the clank of the engine loud enough to drown out any possibility of extended conversation.

 "Want a bite of breakfast?" Amos said when he was close enough.

 "No thanks," Phillip lied. "I'll catch something later. I want to get on this. Wouldn't want more of your stock out." He smiled crookedly, wondering if the older man knew his real reason for going hungry.

 "Curly explain the work?"

 "Yeah." Or close enough.

 Amos smiled, his wrinkled face about the only friendly one Phillip had seen at the Rocking H, unless he counted the dog, Hobo. "I know Curly's being a little hard on you," Amos said, "but you know, that's the way of a cowpuncher."

 "What do you mean?" Phillip turned off the noisy engine.

 "Well, cowpunchers are kind of like little kids. They like to play jokes on each other, and the newest waddy working the outfit takes the brunt of the humor and the work. Curly's just having a little fun with you. Put up with it, and he'll back you against anybody."

 "I'm trying."

 "I know you are." Amos chuckled. "Curly's the last of a breed. Been a cowboy all his life. Worked for some of the biggest spreads around when he was younger, but you know being a puncher gets tougher as a man gets long in the tooth. Can't do the work the way you once could."

 Phillip pulled a fresh cigarette from his pocket and striking a match with his thumbnail, lit it as he waited for the older man to finish his thought. He was rapidly learning that these Western men were slow in getting to their points. If a man rushed in to finish out a sentence, he was apt to miss the gist of what the old-timer was going to say.

 "I reckon you know I'm talking about more than Curly here," Amos said after a moment.

 Phillip nodded, smoking and waiting for the rest of what he was certain Amos wanted to say. Maybe here would be a clue as to why he'd actually invited Phillip to the ranch.

 Smiling and shaking his head, Amos's eyes met Phillip's. "It's a funny thing, out here. I mean, this business of being a man. You spend your life learning how to do things, developing the muscles that let you do your work, then... you get old. And it seems like it happens overnight. Something you could always do--you can't." He stopped and then added sheepishly, "Reckon it sounds to you like I'm whining here."

 "No. It doesn't," Phillip said. "I think this business of being a man confuses the hell out of me whether old or young."

 Amos laughed. "When you put it that way, I reckon maybe you're right. It used to seem simple when I was a kid. Work for the brand. That's what a man did. It's what made him worth something. Me and Curly both, we worked hard. We never stopped to think beyond the next load of hay or the next round-up. I never hardly read a book 'til I was almost fifty and got laid up with a bum knee."

 Phillip blew out a puff of smoke. Amos cleared his throat noisily. "About Curly. He'll ride you for awhile, but he'll come around."

 Phillip shook his head, not convinced.  "I guess I better get to work, or he'll figure me for a loafer."

 "I'm taking Helene into town. She wants to apply for a job at the newspaper, and I got to go to the bank. You need anything from the store?"

 Maybe a coffee maker if the situation didn't warm up at the house, but he decided not to mention that yet. "No, nothing."

 "All right then. Don't forget supper's at the house tonight."

 "Helene didn't think much of that idea last night."

 Amos grinned. "You don't always give a woman everything she wants. Gets 'em to thinking they're running the show."

 Phillip nodded, returning the cigarette to his lips. "I got
that
lesson the hard way."

 "You want to take Hobo with you? He can't go to town with Helene and me, and he sure does love going into the hills."

 Phillip looked down at the hopeful face of the dog. When he nodded, Amos lifted his arm, signaling to the big dog that he should jump into the truck through the permanently open door. Hobo quickly established himself on the seat beside Phillip, ears erect and pointed in the direction they were to go. Phillip grinned and turned on the ignition, more than half surprised when it started immediately.

 The ranch land was easier to appreciate with a truck than it had been with the horse who'd required his attention to keep in line. Fields stretched up the hill almost to the pine forest. The pasture in question was back behind the first ridge, not visible from the house, and Phillip drove the old truck along the dirt road until he came to the right gate.

 He left the truck running while he pulled open the wire gate. Hobo never moved from his seat as Phillip drove through, nor did he budge when Phillip had to get back out to close the gate.

 "At least you could close the gate," Phillip admonished the dog as he stepped back into the truck. "That'd be a useful skill for a dog to have." Hobo looked at him thoughtfully, and Phillip wondered, not for the first time, exactly how much the big animal understood.

 Driving across the grassy meadow, Helene's face loomed before him. She was more beautiful and desirable to him out here, jeans clinging to her rounded hips, breasts thrust out with quick angry breaths, arms akimbo with her arrogant demands, than he'd ever remembered her looking in Boston. The crisp mountain air brought out a luster in her skin, a shine to her auburn hair, a vibrancy to her personality that he didn't remember in Massachusetts. He even liked it better cut off as it was, kind of freer. He wondered not for the first time if he’d ever known her.

 Back East he had known she was lovely, but in a sort of abstract way, the way he might have admired a beautiful painting. Then came the wedding and since then she’d infuriated him, at times even amused him, and he'd been unable to control his own reaction to her. That thought didn't make him happy. He had chosen to marry Helene because she had the right pedigree, because she would make a proper wife, and because he wasn't madly in love with her.

Falling deeply in love with any woman wasn't part of his life plan. He could see it causing nothing but trouble. Except, if that was how he really thought, what was he doing out here?

 When he came to the break in the fence, he stopped the truck. "This look like the place, big boy?" he asked as they got out. Hobo headed out across the sage and pine on the scent of something Phillip couldn't possibly discern but that had the big dog enthused.

 Phillip pulled his supplies from the truck bed, then went to look at the fence. The posts were a mixture of wood and rusted metal, some bent nearly into a right angle. He looked at one of the wooden posts, silvered with age, its sides gnarled and splintered and guessed it might have stood there a hundred years. From the looks of it, it might stand another hundred. Most of the rusty wire was barbed with twists and barbs such as he'd never seen.

 The stretch that had been blown or walked down was about fifty feet long. Behind it was a mostly pine forest that reached further into the hills than Phillip could see. The heavy wooden posts on either side of the blow-down looked relatively stable to Phillip's inexperienced eye. Looking at the clips, He tried them on the metal and peeled wooden poles Curly had sent with him and got the general idea of how they were be hung.

 Setting the posts was hard work and soon, even in the crisp morning air, Phillip had worked up a sweat. Leaning against a post, he stared into the sky, wondering if he'd ever seen it so crystalline blue. No pollution out here, nothing but crisp, mountain air, the sounds of birds chattering the trees and the low moos from the cattle across the pasture, arguing and communicating in their way one to another. Now and then Hobo checked in with him before he raced off in a new direction.

 With the line of posts in place, Phillip carried the heavy roll of wire from the truck to where he'd set his first post, holding the reel by its pipe ends, careful he didn't impale himself on the murderously sharp barbs.

 He studied the wire for a moment until he found the end. Instead of attaching it to his first post, he moved back to one of the original wooden posts and stapled it in place.

 Picking the roll back up, he jammed the pipe back into the core, and began backing down the line of posts. The wire unrolled freely for the first couple of turns, until a barb snagged under another barb, slamming the full reel over his right thumb.

 Cursing, Phillip raised the end nearest his hand, wiggled his speared appendage free and continued backing watching the lethal wire roll down toward his left hand. He hesitated, unsure how to avoid smashing his other hand. As if a benevolent god had suddenly decided to smile down on him, the wire began unraveling smoothly again.

 Phillip kept moving backward until he reached his last post. Setting down the reel just beyond the post, he tried to decide where to cut it. Better too much than too little. He pulled the strange fencing pliers from his back pocket.

 Smiling almost a little smugly, he decided this fencing business might not be so bad even if he did now have three bleeding fingers and a torn thumb. After all, he was out in the clear, open air. His muscles were getting a good work-out, and there was an odd kind of satisfaction at looking down that line of posts and seeing the wire stretched out.