Strange Country (13 page)

He parked in the yard next to a tan and blue pickup he didn’t recognize. On the other side was Hallie’s little pickup, a newer truck he thought might belong to Hallie’s dad, and an old squarish Chevy Malibu with primer spots on the trunk and rear passenger door. He wasn’t sure how he felt about a big group, had been thinking it would just be the two of them. Wanted that desperately, to relax, to spend a few minutes or hours not thinking about Prue Stalking Horse, about who shot her, about the sound of the bullet as it hit or the infinitely slow way that she’d fallen.

But maybe this was all right too.

Maybe this was better.

He reached across to the glove compartment and took out a flashlight. The porch light was on and it cast shadows across the yard, intersecting with the big yard light by the horse barn. Boyd walked down both sides of his SUV, looking for scratches or dents, ran the flashlight quick underneath, but figured he’d have to wait until daylight to look for damage there. When he was satisfied that there was nothing that couldn’t be cleaned or touched up, he turned off the light, replaced it in the glove compartment, and went inside.

When he opened the front door, there was a rush of warm air, the smell of meat and potatoes, garlic and butter, underlaid with the smell of horses and wheat and old dirt.

Hallie came out of the kitchen. “Sorry I’m late. It’s been a busy day,” he said.

“Yeah,” Hallie said dryly. “Here too.”

*   *   *

There were six of them at the table. Laddie Kennedy had showed up around six thirty and Hallie’d invited him to stay. So, it was Hallie, Boyd, Hallie’s father, Laddie, Brett, and Sally, whom Hallie had met, sort of, at a car wreck in November. It wasn’t quite like being back in the army, where you were always eating with someone and sometimes with everyone, but it was the most people Hallie’d fixed dinner for since she came home.

It was kind of a big deal. Or it would have been a big deal, if there hadn’t been so much else going on.

There was an almost-awkward moment when they all sat down because although Hallie knew everyone at the table, and some of the others had known each other for years, the rest had never met. After an odd quiet moment, Boyd reached across the table to Hallie’s father, to Laddie, to Brett, and to Brett’s friend Sally. “I’m Boyd. Boyd Davies,” he said, shaking each one’s hand by turns. He sat back down and started talking to Vance about rebuilding his big equipment shed while Hallie looked at him. Apparently he had social skills.

Brett sat next to Hallie with Sally across the table. As the food was passed around, Brett began to talk about Hallie’s horses, which she’d finally gotten the chance to look at when she and Sally arrived earlier. Of the horses Pabby had left, two were at least fifteen years old, one was lame, and two—a two-year-old gelding and a six-year-old mare that threatened to bite anything that came near, including Hallie—hadn’t had any training at all.

“So, it’s like a horse retirement home,” Hallie said.

“Well—” Brett paused to cut herself a bite of steak. “—the black has potential.”

“The biter?”

Brett waved that off. “She wants something to do.”

“Like bite me.”

“Did you look at the way she moves?” Brett said, ignoring Hallie’s objection. “She could be awesome. And the gelding, the young one, you can tell he wants to please. He just needs some training.”

“But the others? They’re basically hay-eaters, right?”

“The pinto could do easy rides if you get her back in condition. But the Appy needs a lot of rehab for that leg, and even then…” Her voice trailed off. Then, she said, “And the bay, uhm, I think she’s got to be twenty years old.”

“So, hay-eaters. Jesus.”

Brett gave her a look, her head tipped sideways, like she was looking over the top of a pair of glasses. “If you were going to sell them,” she said, “you would have sold them without asking me to look at them. So, you know you’re not going to sell them.”

“So, what? So don’t bitch about it?” Hallie grinned at her. “You know me, first I bitch about it, then I fix it.”

“Right,” Brett said dryly. “You bitch about it the whole time.”

Hallie wondered how long it had been since she and Brett had sat at a table and talked like this. They’d both changed in the meantime. Hallie had four years in the army, Afghanistan, and ghosts. Brett had most of a master’s in psychology and was going off somewhere next year to get her doctorate. Different paths, but they still had ranching and the West River, horses and a past.

“Long-term,” she said, “I’d like to put the older horses in a back pasture, build them shelter and water. There’s a windmill back there, so there must be water. But the gelding and the biter, yeah, I’d like to work with them.”

“It might help if you stopped calling her ‘the biter,’” Brett said.

“Yeah, well, maybe she should stop trying to bite me.”

Sally, who looked around the table, not like she wasn’t enjoying herself or she wasn’t comfortable, more like she didn’t entirely understand how she’d gotten there, said, “I don’t know very much about horses. I’m learning—” She smiled at Brett, then looked back at Hallie. “—but, here’s something to think about, her situation has changed recently. Her owner is gone and she doesn’t trust you, her new owner. She might be afraid. And though I don’t know horses, I do know what it’s like to be afraid, to be afraid of change. Sometimes it makes us retreat or hide, but sometimes it makes us aggressive.”

Hallie wished she could say she didn’t know what it was like to be afraid. And it was true that she wasn’t afraid in lots of situations that terrified other people. If she could act, if there were something to do, then she did it, didn’t think much about whether it was stupid or whether she should do it or even if it might end badly. She did. It was situations where there was nothing to do or she was prevented from doing something or, worst of all, when she didn’t know that whatever was happening was even happening, when she couldn’t do or couldn’t have done anything even if she’d wanted to. Those situations scared her to death.

Sally—and Hallie didn’t know her last name, though Brett may have told her, had probably told her—was wearing a denim shirt that looked brand-new, or at least ironed within an inch of its life, a pair of jeans that even Hallie, who didn’t notice things like that, figured cost more than the entire pile of jeans she had in her dresser upstairs. She wore two plain silver bracelets on her left hand, a silver ring with an intricate design Hallie didn’t recognize, and a thin silver chain around her neck. Her hair was short and sharply angled to the chin; Hallie couldn’t tell if it had been colored, but its honey brown shade seemed almost too perfect to be real. She was wearing just enough makeup to look like she wasn’t wearing any.

She didn’t look precise in the particular way Boyd did, but she did look as if she knew what looked good and how to achieve it. She had a friendly smile and she had seemed game earlier when Brett took her out to see the horses in her brand-new hiking boots and brand-new jeans. Hallie appreciated that, that willingness to try.

And she had a point. Hallie had seen it in Afghanistan, soldiers who’d been so scared, they did stupid-brave things. There hadn’t been anything she could do about them. Couldn’t tell someone not to be afraid of random mortar fire or stupid ways to die. Those things were still going to happen; Hallie couldn’t stop them. And one thing Hallie did know, had learned it from Dell a long time ago—you could ruin a horse by being mean to it, but you couldn’t ruin one by being too kind. Spoil it, maybe, but you could both recover from that.

“Sure,” she said to Sally. “That makes some sense.”

Sally sort of flinched, more like a flicker in her eyes, an anticipated flinch, like she’d expected Hallie to say something else. Then she smiled, a tight smile that still might have actually been genuine, and took a tiny bite of steak, which she chewed hard on before she swallowed.

“Sally doesn’t eat meat very often,” Brett said in a low aside.

“Huh,” Hallie said, because meat was pretty much a big deal around Taylor County, something you could raise or shoot or barter for and lay up extra for winter. Fruit and vegetables were expensive, things that had to be shipped in. The climate and soil made for a short growing season that often failed, so vegetables were mostly potatoes and several kinds of squash and at the brief end of the season a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini.

“You want to help with the training?” she asked Brett.

“Sure,” Brett said. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t have my own place to take care of or classes to study for or anything.”

“It’s not like you don’t want to do it anyway,” Hallie replied.

It felt good to talk about something normal, like other people on other ranches probably talked about all the time. Felt good to pretend that even here, life could sometimes be normal. Despite mysterious notes that might or might not be threats. Despite Beth’s reappearance. Despite Prue’s death.

Despite Prue.

Voices at the other end of the table made Hallie looked toward her father, who was talking to Boyd about … “Are you talking about
tractors
?” she asked.

Her father poked a finger at Boyd. “Farmalls,” he said, like it was the worst thing he’d ever heard about the Boy Deputy.

“What?”

“I’m telling you,” her father said. “Biggest piece of shit that was ever on the market.”

Boyd laughed. “My dad has a Farmall my grandfather bought used in 1965. It’s worked every day on our farm for the last forty years.”

“On a dairy farm,” her father said, implying somehow in just those few words that dairy farming, unlike ranching, was done by soft men with soft hands who mostly sat on porches and drank lemonade.

“Nah, come on, Vance.” Laddie joined the conversation, reaching across the table for the potatoes. “We had a Farmall once. An H, I think. Pretty good little tractor. I almost bid on it at auction when we lost the ranch. But we were living in an apartment above the old Laundromat in Prairie City at the time and I didn’t have any place to keep it. Or any land to use it on,” he added.

Hallie’s father looked at him, like he couldn’t understand a fellow South Dakotan choosing to side with an upstart Iowan. But Hallie could see he was relaxed, that this was the kind of conversation he liked, and she could see a taste of normal was important to him right now.

“Maybe you should get a Farmall, Dad,” Hallie said. “Fix it up.” He’d lost his old Allis, the tractor he worked on all the time, but which had never actually run as long as Hallie could remember, in the equipment shed fire in September. He’d bought another Kubota and a small Ford, but he hadn’t yet picked up anything to work on in the evenings when everything else was done.

“Nope,” he said definitely. “Got my eye on a 1947 Ford pickup over to Lead. Been sitting out back of some guy’s barn for fifty years. Going to give him two hundred bucks for it as soon as I can talk Tom into going over with me and towing it home.”

13

Hallie made coffee in Pabby’s old stovetop percolator, and as the smell drifted from the kitchen into the dining room, people began to rise from the table. Brett insisted that she and Sally would clean up, though she spent a few quiet minutes talking to Boyd first, who nodded and put a hand on her shoulder. Hallie’s father took a steaming mug of coffee, put on his coat, and went out on the front porch, something he’d done after any big supper with lots of people since Hallie could remember.

Laddie followed Hallie to the kitchen, then back into the dining room. Boyd watched him and started to approach, but Hallie touched him on the arm and held up a finger—wait. He put his hand over hers and stepped out of the room, like they’d just had an entire conversation.

Hallie watched Laddie walk around the dining room, pick up a small metal figure—a cowboy on a bucking bronco—turn it over in his hands, then put it back down. He ran his hand along the edge of a small side table, straightened a chair, and then stopped, his hand still gripping the chair, not looking at Hallie or much of anything.

Hallie couldn’t read him. He seemed to be wound just a little less tight than he’d been that morning, but there was still something there. She could see it in the way he fingered the third button on his denim shirt and every once in a while when he’d stick his hand in the watch pocket of his jeans like he was checking something was there.

After a long stretch of silence, he said, “You know Martin Weber, you know the kind of magic he did. Prue never did that, never messed with blood or sacrifice, and you gotta appreciate that, because it’s always there, that way of getting power. But she studied it, everything about it. She was convinced that there was another path. Convinced she was going to find it. She could be pretty persuasive. Back when I first knew her.”

“She’s the one, isn’t she?” Hallie asked. “The one you talked to about the stone, way back?”

Laddie pulled out the chair he’d been gripping the back of and sat down at the table. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cards. He shuffled them, flipped the top card over, stuck it back in the pack, and said, looking at the cards more than at Hallie, “Yeah. She came from a family that had their own magical traditions and she definitely had an affinity. But still, you know, she could maybe start a fire with damp wood or unlock a padlock or something. Nothing big, nothing complicated. And it took a lot of effort, more effort than making a key from scratch or hunting up dry wood. That’s the way small magics are a lot of times, a way to stay in touch with the land or with a way of life, but not big enough to make a difference in how things work. She came here, originally, because of the reservation, wanted to study another magic tradition, learn everything there was to know and how to use it.

“I come back from the army not long after she’d moved here, had the stone, and I did a lot of—well, I did a lot of drinking. We were in Cleary’s one night and I showed it to her, or she asked me about it, like she could tell I had it before she’d even seen it.”

Hallie remembered that Prue had been able to see a mark on her, had seen Maker or not actually seen, but seen the spot where Maker was sitting, like a dark smudge.