Only Flesh and Bones (11 page)

Read Only Flesh and Bones Online

Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Only Flesh and Bones
2.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
B
OOMER Oil? That was Fred Howard’s company! As I recall, I said something stupid to Po, like “Oh, Boomer? Sure, I heard of Boomer,” then kind of hurried the rest of the way to my truck and gave him a cheery wave and started driving. Fast. I just didn’t like the way things seemed to be so close and familylike. But then, perhaps Miriam had known about Po’s sister’s ranch for rent because Boomer was working in the area, or Boomer had known about Po because of Miriam, or—
But it still didn’t make sense. Why drill a wildcat south of the Platte River when no one was making a nickel in more likely places?
I told myself I’d ask J. C. Menken. Maybe. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know if they were all mixed up in a doomed-to-be-duster rank wildcat project. It was unseemly. It stank of tax dodging and money laundering.
Back in Douglas, I stopped at the McDonald’s for a burger and use of the telephone, and called information. I asked for the number for an old friend of mine named Nick, who lived in Casper and knew the mud business. Second generation. If it was a driving location this side of the Tetons, Nick would know it. I found him in. Which was not unusual, considering how slow the oil business had been of late. “Emmy! What can I do you for?” he drawled in his soft little voice.
“You know anything about a wildcat location Boomer Oil’s got going southwest of Douglas?”
“
Southwest
?” he said, appalled. “No, can’t say as I do. You’re kidding me, right?”
“Nope. Not according to what the landowner says. I figured you’d know about it. They already brought in the mud, according to him.”
“Didn’t buy it from us,” Nick replied. “You sure? Whose ranch?”
“Po Bradley’s. Broken Spoke.”
“Oh, I heard about that daydream.”
“Daydream?”
“Yeah. He talks that up to everyone, big show-off. But that well was never even permitted.”
“Not permitted? They bladed a location.”
“The hell.”
“Yeah, they did. Well, the whole thing’s screwy, so why am I surprised it was never permitted?”
“Got me there. Yeah, we all figured it had to do with that murder out there on the ranch.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, well, ol’ Po was talking the well up real big up to the time that lady was killed, and then alla sudden that was the last we heard.”
I thought about this. Why would a murder on the ranch scare off a drilling deal?
Nick was talking. “You say they got mud stored in a shed?”
“Well, no,” I replied, realizing I was spouting Po’s line rather than what I’d observed with my own eyes. “But there’s a shed.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, well …” Nick said, letting his voice rise and trail off to express with tone what words can only approximate.
I thanked him and got back on the road to Denver, telling myself I’d stop by my, er … mother’s ranch to see if she maybe needed a hand with things, as long as I was passing by. Better to think and identify with the ranching side of the equation rather than the oily side. At the moment, it had more dignity.
 
 
Two hours later, I rolled to a stop in the familiar ruts of the dooryard of the ranch, climbed out of the truck, and wandered inside. I found Mother writing out the bills. She looked up over her glasses and before I even said anything, she growled, “Everything’s under control, thank you.”
“Well, I was just passing through, and—”
Mother snatched her glasses off her face and dropped them onto the desktop. “Damn it, Emily, you’re always just passing through this way or that. When are you going to quit that wandering and start living your damned life?”
I just stood there, staring at her, my heart turning to dust. As cruel as she had sometimes been to me while she was drinking, I’d always been able to write it off to just that, drinking.
She turned her head and stared out the window, took a deep breath, clenched her teeth, and said, “I’m sorry.”
I decided that she didn’t mean her apology, that she was just running through the ritual of her Alcoholics Anonymous form. I said nothing. She could damned well live with what she had said.
Still staring out the window, she said, “You’ll find sandwich makings and some mail in the kitchen,” and bent back over her checkbook.
I suppose most people would have left, but so much of me was so used to this kind of parley with her that I went out to that kitchen, made a cheese toasty sandwich, and sat down to consume it and some milk that I soon discovered had gone sour. Replacing the milk with cold coffee from that morning’s pot, I settled in to read my mail. Which amounted to an alumni begging letter from my college, two pieces of junk trying to look like something I’d want to open right away, a credit-card bill, and a letter from Jim Erikson.
Jim. A welcome distraction. I glanced back out at my mother to make sure she wasn’t watching. What would this be, another of his shy notes asking when I was coming to California again? Why couldn’t he just phone me, and we could maybe get to know each other a little more, and then … but then, I hadn’t exactly phoned him either, had I?
I ran a thumb over the plain, practical little stamp he had selected to carry his missive on its way. Jim was a genuinely nice guy, the kind you dream of taking home and showing off, if you don’t have a mother that might bite him; polite, a team player, tall, good-looking, employed. And it had been a while. Why wasn’t I more interested?
I opened up the note to find yes, a very short note and a photograph of the sun setting over the Pacific. Very dreamy surf with dark angular rocks offshore. I remembered the scene: it was Goat Rock State Beach, a place he’d taken me on our one honest-to-gosh date. A hint, right? I gazed at the photograph for a while, trying to catch the allure of endless ocean, trying to believe I could make it substitute for the vastness of the prairie I loved.
The note was short and sweet:
Dear Em,
Seems I have to be in Denver next week Friday on family business, closing my great-aunt Joline’s estate. So unless I hear otherwise from you, I’m going to come and see you.
Jim
He’d written his phone number across the bottom, just in case I’d lost it.
Friday? I looked at the postmark. This
coming
Friday, just seven days hence? I was surprised to find that my pulse had quickened. Was it that Jim had just shown a little grit to go with his dogged persistence? Or was it the thought that he was going to appear in my scenery, instead of requiring that I melt into his? I smiled, suddenly glad at the thought of looking into those bright blue eyes of his. And maybe running a hand through his mane of golden curls. Hmmm.
I hopped up and grabbed the phone off its cradle on the wall and dialed. After four rings, I got his answering machine. “Ah, this is Jim Erikson, ah, please leave a message,” it began shyly, and then, as always, revving up at
the shift from private to public self, his voice continued quite strongly: “If this is an emergency, please dial nine-one-one or call the firehouse directly at …”
That’s my boy,
I thought,
once a volunteer fireman, always a volunteer fireman.
I was surprised to find myself wondering if he could be as happy in a firehouse right here in Wyoming. My mother wanted me to get a life? I’d show her what a life could truly be.
Laughing scornfully at the direction my mind was taking, I left a message saying where I was staying, gave Betty Bloom’s number in Boulder, pocketed the credit-card bill, shuffled my remaining mail into the circular file, and nodded good-bye to my mother’s back. Outside, I headed into the barn, pulled my dad’s old spin casting rod off its hooks on the wall in the tack room, and headed south to the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, where the spring runoff was farther progressed and the fish might just be turning their crafty minds toward food.
A
FTE R a good half hour’s consideration of what to wear to my meeting with Julia Richards, I decided to go as myself, and put on jeans. Which was part of why I felt so out of place as I hiked from the parking lot down Seventeenth Street, passing all the young slicks in their well-tailored suits and tight shoes. I shoved my hands into my pockets and trudged onward down the bottom of that canyon made of office buildings, turned right at Champa, and soon hove onto Eighteenth.
The Rocky Mountain Diner is a nice, trendy little joint stuffed into an ornate three-story Victorian office block that has miraculously escaped the hungry wrecker’s ball of Denver’s skyscraper-happy 1980s. The legend GET IN HERE graces its genteel front door, and its menu admonishes patrons to “Check your guns at the bar,” and suggests that you “Don’t squat with your spurs on.” Its interior designers managed to maintain an anachronistic atmosphere while satisfying the modern taste in seating, and its cooks know their ways around buffalo meat loaf and Rocky Mountain oysters. I was in the middle of scowling at the menu, wondering why I was in such a lousy mood if my near future held a ration of their wonderful mashed potatoes with brown onion gravy, when I heard my name spoken.
I looked up, to find myself eyeball-to-eyeball with a very electric woman.
Julia Richards. She didn’t top my five foot five, but she tallied in mentally as a very tall person. Present. Erect. Assertive. In charge. She had an attractive face with wide cheekbones and a tousle of dark curls that left her neck
naked but tagged the tops of a pair of those large-framed glasses that seem to say,
I’m fine with wearing glasses, what’s your problem?
Behind them, her eyes were sharply blue. Her lips were wide, her cheeks a well-scrubbed pink. She wore a dark suit of a soft wool and a crisp white blouse open wide at the collar. Beyond that, it was no makeup, no jewelry, and definitely no bullshit.
I extended a hand. “Hi, you must be Julia.”
She pumped my hand and looked deep into my eyes. “Let’s sit.”
She commandeered a booth for us at the far end of the room, ordered a green salad and herb tea without opening the menu, told me which soups and salads were worth having, and folded her hands on the tabletop to indicate to me and to the waiter that the clock was ticking. I muttered something about having the same, then called the waiter back and added a cheeseburger deluxe, medium rare. And black coffee.
None of this lily-livered tea stuff for old ironguts Hansen.
I had about a second and a half to wish I could get past being a reactionary dip before Julia called the meeting to order. “You want to know about Miriam Menken.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Oh my God, the third degree.
I truly wasn’t up to this. Not now, not here, in downtown Denver, where my mind was riled by the raw stench of business maneuverings. If confronted when in such a mood, I was sure to pull a sulk and sound as shallow as the suit-encased businessheads all around us sounded to me. I took a breath and let it out in a long sigh. And I reached for the truth, wondering what it might be. “I’m not sure,” I said.
Julia Richards relaxed a notch. “At least you’re honest.”
“I try to be.”
“You sound like Miriam, you know that?”
“How? What was she like, I mean to talk to?” I tried to keep the note of longing out of my voice, but failed.
“You never met her?”
“No.”
For a moment, Julia looked away, the activities of the street reflecting on the lenses of her glasses. “She was a very vulnerable person.”
I was just opening my mouth to ask,
In what way,
when Julia looked back at me and asserted, “That’s a compliment, in case you don’t know.”
I closed my mouth. The conversation was going to go wherever Julia wanted to take it, and that was that. I waited until she spoke again, watching her, trying to divine from her posture, her gestures, and her tone of voice how she felt about her departed friend. At the time, I thought: impatient. Now, I think: sad and lonesome.
“You’re young yet,” she said. “Early thirties? Yes? And I’m guessing you’ve never married.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s not a matter of clairvoyance; you don’t wear a ring on the third finger of your left hand, and while you don’t seem very confident, you don’t look like you’ve been rendered that way by a man. There are signs. I could list them, but I won’t. I don’t have time, and you’re young enough to deny it even if you understood.”
Defending myself against I knew not what, I said, “I haven’t had children, either, but I care about Cecelia.”
Julia closed her eyes and opened them again, very slowly. “Point to you. It’s an unpopular decision not to have children. But they do deserve our love,” she said, her voice a few decibels quieter. “Well. Suffice it to say that Miriam was a rather naïve woman who gave up a lot of her power to her husband. You don’t know what that means, because you haven’t made that mistake yet. It means you’re always frustrated, waiting for this man to be the prince charming you’ve read about, wondering what you’ve done wrong that you’ve got a mate but still aren’t happy. With Miriam, it took on the character of making her pout. It wasn’t attractive, not to men and not to women. It made her seem remote and uninterested in other people, so needless to say she spent a lot of time alone.”
“‘Alone,’” I repeated, evaluating the word. It seemed to fit that the woman who had entrusted so much of herself to her journals might have been too solitary, at least on an emotional level, for her own happiness.
“Yes, too much time alone. Not a good thing when you’re as ignorant as Miriam was.”
“Ah,” I said, politely agreeing rather than be caught denying her declaration of reality. I mentally compared the woman sitting across from me to the portrait Miriam had painted of her in her journal. Hadn’t she described Julia as being lusciously at ease, dancing from room to room in her new home and her new freedom? I wondered what had happened over the intervening years to leave her so abrupt and—I reached into my heart for the resonance I was picking up from her, trying to place it—disappointed?
“Yes, Miriam was bright, but not smart.” Julia crunched onward through her indictment of her departed friend, laying out her judgments as an impatient gardener turns over last year’s soil and weed stalks with a spade. “Or perhaps the word is
shrewd.
She was not shrewd. I often wondered why I spent so much time with her, but I’d known her forever, and there’s a lot of value in being around someone you’ve known that long. She was a touchstone, a link to the past. Let me know how far I’d come. And she had a good heart,” she added, almost as a consolation prize.
No, not disappointed. Despairing?
I stared at Julia’s hard blue eyes, trying to plumb their depths as she had mine. And yes, found that small despair that eats at people who expect more of themselves. With a jolt, I realized that her crushing judgments were an attempt to assign her pain to Miriam.
As if reading my thoughts, Julia stiffened. The little muscles along the lower lids of her eyes tightened, telegraphing a warning.
I slouched down submissively and stared into my water glass. “I guess you’re right. I’ve never been married, not even lived with a guy for very long. I—”
Julia interrupted. “Did you have any substantive questions to ask me, or are you just fishing?”
I smiled bleakly. “Just fishing.”
Our salads arrived.
Julia picked up her fork and put it down again. “You know, I really am on a tight schedule today. I’m going to take my salad to go. If you insist on looking through Miriam’s rather sophomoric attempt at immortality, you can come back to my office and read it there. But you must understand that what you read stays with you and doesn’t go any farther. Miriam’s wish was that Joe never see her writings, ever. As custodian of her journal, I insist that you use the information only in your efforts to help Cecelia, and never repeat any of it to anyone. And you must promise to keep an open mind. And an open heart.” Having delivered this edict, she added in a smaller voice, “There are things waiting for you down the road of life you can’t see from where you’re sitting.”

Other books

Treasured by Candace Camp
Stirred by Lucia Jordan
Dangerous Alterations by Casey, Elizabeth Lynn
The Tapestries by Kien Nguyen
Iron Gray Sea: Destroyermen by Taylor Anderson