Blind Your Ponies (67 page)

“You’re so drunk you’re hearing things,” Tom said.

George lashed out with his boot, sending Grandma’s wooden rocker crashing across the room.

“You’re coming home with me now, by God, or I’ll break your arm.”

“You’re full of shit!” Parrot said.

In the shadowed room, George spotted the cage hanging immediately to his left. He jabbed it as though it were a punching bag, sending it careening to the floor with Parrot cackling bloody murder. In the confusion and without warning, George kicked at Tom’s right knee with his heavy boot. Tom danced back, narrowly avoiding the blow, only to bump into Grandma, who slid beside him clutching her double-barreled shotgun.

“There’s two more of us here, George,” she said evenly, raising the barrels to chest level, “and if the right one don’t get you, the left one will.”

George froze in his tracks, not so drunk he didn’t recognize the deadly persuasion in Grandma’s hands.

“Hold on there, you old coot.” He held a hand up in front of him.

“You ease on out of here and don’t take too long at it because my trigger finger is mighty unstable.”

George didn’t move. He glared at Grandma. “You’ll be sorry, old woman. I’ll get you.”

“Try that on someone else, I’ve dealt with drunks all my life.”

He turned his glare to the boys, who were still crouched in a fighting stance.

“You’re not going to win any championship, hell, you’ll get the shit kicked out of you and come dragging your losing asses home like always.”

“Move!” Grandma poked the muzzle toward him.

George turned sideways and shuffled out onto the porch, keeping one eye on Grandma. Teetering, he stopped at the far edge of the porch and faced them through the open door.

“You boys are a joke… couldn’t whip your own—”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Grandma said in a softened tone. “Your boy is playing his heart out to win the state championship and you don’t even have the decency to come and watch. Why—”

“His basketball got nuthing to do with me.”

“Well, for land’s sake,
who
in tarnation do you think he’s trying so hard to win it for?”

The night went utterly silent; no one moved. George Stonebreaker’s hands gave up their fists. Tom swallowed hard and looked at the floor. Grandma lowered the shotgun. They stood motionless for aching moments that were stretching into lifetimes.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a grown man like you carryin’ on like that, treatin’ your boy like trash.” Grandma lowered her voice and spoke with a note of sadness. “You ought to be ashamed.”

George Stonebreaker turned abruptly and broke for cover as if he were.

Still in his damp sweats from running, Sam picked up the phone with inklings of dread, tabulating time somewhere in his head to make it to eight-thirty that night without losing another of his stallions. Mentally he cocked an ear, knowing there were such things as backing beer trucks, and he kept hearing his father at the state fair repeating helplessly, “Things happen.”

“Were you sleeping?” Diana’s voice slid into his brain.

“Are you kidding? This will be the longest day of my life.”

“Let’s go see the dinosaurs.”

“Dinosaurs?”

“Yeah. Want me to pick you up?”

“No, no, I’ll be out as soon as I shower. Are we going to dig up some bones?”

“No. They’re still in them.”

They drove west toward the Jefferson gorge with the unsullied spring sky stretched on tiptoe above them in its morning blue, tempting Sam to toss his anxiety into the ditch as useless baggage. The day caressed him with a crisp and stimulating freshness that encouraged him to inhale it like bliss. The mountains rolled color down on them, brindled earth-tones out of creation’s morn. Turning off a gravel road onto rocky grassland and sage, she pointed out a faint two-track that a coyote couldn’t follow. After a half mile she directed him to swing onto cropland, where she opened the sagging barbed-wire gate.

They drove across an alfalfa field, through a small cottonwood and juniper grove, and parked at the edge of a field of stubble. Far out in the center stood an old abandoned two-story house that had long ago seen the last of its paint, glass, and shingles. Diana, in jeans and her bulky jacket, paused at the edge of the field, gazing intently at the former homestead, and he remembered how much he loved her. The Jefferson carved its way through
gnarled limestone a half mile to the west, and sagebrush had taken over the land beyond the field south, spreading up to the bedrock cliffs like migrating lemmings.

“I’ve never shown them to anyone,” she said.

He expected a
Tyrannosaurus rex
to come blasting out of a cave along the river.

“C’mon,” she said and set off across the barley stubble. “Watch for arrowheads.”

Sam found no evidence of those earlier inhabitants along the rows of stubble and sandy loam, and in a few minutes they reached the wood-frame house. It was larger than it had seemed from a distance. Several pieces of rusted horse-drawn farm equipment squatted randomly around. Scars on the land like shadows delineated where two outbuildings once stood. Diana held a finger to her lips and stealthily crept to one of the glassless windows. The sun-bleached sill pressed against Sam’s chest as he peered in.

The house was littered with old plaster and lath and wind-blown dirt. From where he stood, Sam could see all of the ransacked four rooms on the first floor. Bricks were strewn around the floor from a chimney that teetered against a wall, making it hard to tell which was holding up the other. Snatches of faded wallpaper decorated the few patches of plaster that still clung to the walls, flowered patterns undoubtedly selected out of some ancient mail-order catalog that, page by page, most likely found its greatest use in the outhouse.

Diana pointed up toward an inside corner of the house. Much of the second-story floor had collapsed and he could see out through the roof in a few places. Sunlight splintered through the shadowed interior. Sam searched where she directed but could only distinguish rafters and rough roofing boards hung with the webs and deposits of creeping, crawling things. He shook his head.

She tiptoed around the side of the house, over fallen siding and shingles, and stepped up into what appeared to be the back door, a small porch and steps collapsed beneath it. Sam followed her carefully onto the uncertain floor, seeing that there were spaces where the decaying boards had broken through. No matter how hard they tried, their shoes crunched plaster, lath, and a variety of debris from someone else’s life.

Without sound, it cannonballed out of the shadows, through the streams
of daylight, and vanished out a second-story window like a phantom. Completely surprised, Sam only caught a glimpse of the plummeting creature. Diana froze where she stood, turning to him quickly with a finger over her lips, pointing up toward the corner from where the shadow had come. Sam’s heart quickened. He had no idea what he had seen. Diana took another cautious step, cringing at her own noise. Sam followed, trying to find a place on the cluttered floor that wouldn’t broadcast his approach.

Suddenly it came—a huge, grayish blur, swooping through the dappled air and out into the bright March sky. Diana grabbed Sam’s arm and dragged him without caution across the rubble to a window.

“Quick!” she shouted. “There!” She pointed.

Gliding out across the stubble, with only a few powerful strokes of its enormous wings, the large bird flew, swiftly, over the sage at the end of the field and down into a draw to disappear.

“Did you
see
him? Did you
see
him?”

“Yeah. It was big. What was it?”

“The dinosaurs that are still with us.”

She turned her gaze from the spot where they last saw its image.

“I hate to disturb them,” she said. “They’re great horned owls.”

She pointed out the little dry piles of fur, feathers, and bones the owls had regurgitated, remnants from the raptor’s menu. They would nest in the rAfters in May and raise young dinosaurs to continue their habitation in the old homestead, having a lineage in this valley that watched the first natives learn to survive more than ten thousand years ago.

Sam and Diana settled out on the front porch of the weather-ravaged house. The serenity of the old homestead encompassed the land, and the natural rhythms of the day seemed no different from what they would have been a thousand years ago.

Sam sat with his back against the house, his knees pulled up, and she sat in the same pose between his legs, leaning back against his chest with her head against his shoulder and cheek. He enfolded her in his arms. They remained there without speaking for what seemed like hours, Sam nuzzling her long, fragrant hair that reflected reddish strands in the play of light. Then he broke the spell.

“I wonder who the people were who lived here?”

“Homesteaders, a man and woman who were wondrously in love and
who never left each other,” she said without hesitation. “They raised their children here and died of old age in each other’s arms.”

“You’ve thought about it before.”

“Every time I come here,” she said, “Ellie and Randolph Butterworth.”

“
This
is the family you visit?”

“Yes, I found their names on the abstract at the county courthouse.” Sam kept his utter amazement to himself.

“Sometimes I sit here like this and I can hear them calling to each other across the land, laughing, talking in their work, hauling water from the river, putting up hay. I hear the children playing and screaming happily at twilight, I hear them singing songs and hymns together, and sometimes, when I’m very still for a long time, I can hear them making love.”

Sam listened. The wind gently exhaled, and he imagined he could hear a distant child’s voice calling. Was it from his past or from this sacred ground where others lived out their lives? He gazed off to where the great horned owls flew out of sight.

“Will they come back, the owls?”

“I’ve waited hours, but they seem to know. They’ll probably come back at dawn tomorrow.”

“Dawn tomorrow,” Sam said.

“Are you afraid?”

“Only for the boys, they’ve come so far. I can’t bear to see how much they’ll hurt if they lose tonight.”

“They would say exactly the same about you. They want to win for a lot of reasons, but mostly they want to win it for you.”

Sam glanced at his watch, the sublime present torn from his grasp.

She asked, “We need to go?”

“Pretty soon.”

They stood and brushed off their jeans, about to go back to what faced them in the championship game. As though she’d assessed that the land had not healed the terrible fear in him, she took his hands in hers and smiled calmly into his face.

“They’ll be here tomorrow, the owls, all this will be.”

He swallowed. “Will
you
be?”

“Yes.”

Grandma slipped off to Three Forks to pick up a few groceries. She knew she’d need another half-dozen eggs with Tom there for breakfast and that the boys would probably sleep until noon. She chuckled when she remembered the flabbergasted look on both of their faces the night before. After she had shut the door on George Stonebreaker, she had opened the breech of the double-barreled shotgun, revealing the two empty chambers.

“The gun wasn’t loaded?” Tom had asked.

“Never invite a drunk and a loaded gun to the same party,” she had told them.

When she came out of the D & D grocery store with an armload, Sally Cutter was parked beside Trilobite in her red rattletrap of a pickup. Grandma slipped the groceries onto her bus seat and stepped back to the sidewalk to visit. She waved at Denise, who was strapped in beside her mother. Sally said something to Denise and then climbed out and closed the door. In a faded green scarf and what looked like one of her husband’s work jackets, Sally joined Grandma in front of the store.

“Land sakes,” Grandma said, “did you ever think you’d breathe again after last night?”

“That was something,” Sally said with a flicker of enthusiasm.

“Denise must have been proud as a peach the way the boys ran up to her like that. It made me bawl, and that basket Dean made, you must be mighty proud.”

“I’m happy for the kids. It’s been—”

Both of them glanced up to see George Stonebreaker coming along the sidewalk. Grandma puffed up her chest and gritted her teeth, preparing for the assault. But when George looked up and saw them standing there, he spun on a dime and headed the other direction as though he’d spotted someone he owed money to.

“Huh! I guess I put a dent in his fender last night. Look at him skedaddle.” Sally watched George hurry away and spoke without turning to Grandma. “Did you have trouble with him?”

“Came to the house, pounding on the door, wanted to drag poor Tom home, wasn’t going to let him play today, drunk as a skunk. I got out old Salt and Pepper and put the run on him.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Sally said, still tracking his retreat.

“Why, I won’t allow that big bully to—”

“It wasn’t you that turned him around,” Sally said softly.

“Well something sure did.”

“It was the girl.” Sally glanced into Grandma’s face.

“Denise?” Grandma said.

“He’s her father!”

“What?”

Grandma exhaled as though she’d been kicked in the stomach.

“She’s his daughter, Tom’s half-sister,” Sally said, gazing down at her fidgety hands as she spoke. “We were in love seventeen, eighteen years ago. He was married a couple years and knew he’d made a bad mistake. We were together every chance we got—where nobody would see us. He was different then, gentle, kind, full of life. Then I got pregnant. I went to him and told him.” Sally sighed and gathered herself. “He said he loved me dearly, always would. But he was Catholic and he could never get a divorce.”

Grandma took hold of one of Sally’s hands.

“I nearly died with the heartache.” Sally rushed on as if she stopped she’d never be able to muster the courage again. “But I told him good-bye. The next night I was out with Delbert Cutter. He always took a shine to me. In three weeks I convinced him to run off and get married. Seven months later Denise was born with the palsy.”