Where Mercy Flows (12 page)

“Nevada. I was in Nevada, and it wasn’t so much that I didn’t like horses. Your horses didn’t like me.”

He chuckled. “Maybe they never forgave ya for startin’ that stampede. Horses have great memories. They never forget smart-aleck
kids with firecrackers.”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’m sorry about that.” The bee crawled up his short sleeve.

“Um . . . Mr. Duncan . . .” I pointed toward his arm and at that instant he flinched. He reached up, pinched the bee hard
and flung it to the ground.

Donnie pulled up a chair. “Did he get ya?”

“Dang yellow jackets. They don’t usually get ornery till August.” Chester surveyed the yard, where TJ spun in circles making
bubbles until he got dizzy, falling and spilling his bottle of soap on the grass. “Where’s your boy?” he asked.

“That’s him,” I said.

“That little Indian kid?” Chester recoiled almost imperceptibly. Like when he got stung.

“He’s Norwegian and Mexican.” I called to him and he came running, holding the empty soap bottle out to me. “It’s okay, Teej.
I know how to make more.” I pulled him onto my lap. “TJ, this is Donnie’s dad, Mr. Duncan.” Donnie had dropped by on several
occasions, so he and TJ were already friends.

Chester asked what TJ stands for, at which TJ said, “It stands for my name. Mommy, why do people always ask me that?”

I played with his hair. “Maybe they think your name should be longer or something. Maybe we should change it. You wanna be
Thaddeus Bigglewiggle?”

He considered it. “No.”

Donnie suggested Alexander Wimbledon Waddlesworth, but TJ didn’t warm up to that either. He lay back against me and fiddled
with his shoelace. Suddenly, he brightened. “How ’bout Blake?”

I kissed his head and put him down. “That one’s taken. How ’bout we stick with TJ?”

The Judge and Matthew manned the barbecues, producing platters mounded with juicy steaks and chicken. A table was set up on
the lawn, and we piled our plates with everything but the lime gelatin with peaches I had made, which didn’t set up. Donnie
called it pond water and said all the goldfish had died and sunk to the bottom. Some of David and Lindsey’s friends arrived
carrying a bare-legged baby, with a little boy about TJ’s age in tow. TJ ran to him. Minutes later the two new best friends
scampered off to the barn to see the worms.

The only adults who didn’t join the rowdy volleyball game were Donnie’s mother, Gladys (who I swear wore a bib apron every
day of her life and would rather putter in the kitchen than take a trip to Tahiti), the nursing mother and me. Even Chester,
bad leg and all, got in there and fought for a while. I hated sitting there watching like an old lady. When I told Donnie
I had a bad knee, my mother gave me a sideways look. I shot a look back that said
I’ll tell him when I’m ready—which isn’t now.
Mom rarely touched the ball at first because Kevin the linebacker was on her team, playing every position. I yelled at him
but he ignored me. Finally, he and David collided in midair and went down in a heap of hairy legs and elbows. Mom sprang with
all her pent-up energy and spiked the ball over. It bounced on the ground between Matt’s legs. The Judge, her opponent, high-fived
her through the net.

When the sky turned to steel, we loaded every available chair onto pickup trucks and set up theater seating in the big field
by the barn. A cool breeze came off the river. Mom sent out blankets and quilts to bundle in while we sat around the bonfire,
waiting for the sky to become the perfect backdrop of black felt. Donnie pulled his chair up next to mine. I had hoped he
would, but when he reached for my hand I pulled it away, pretending I hadn’t noticed his attempt. Better not start something
I couldn’t finish. “Where are the sticks for marshmallows?” I asked. Someone passed me a whittled alder branch. I smiled at
Donnie. “I’m going to make you the best s’more you ever had.” I put a marshmallow on the end of the stick and turned it slowly
over glowing coals until it was golden brown on the outside and hot and gooey inside. “Chocolate!” I held out my hand.

“Chocolate!” Lindsey repeated like a surgical nurse as she slapped a small square into my palm. I pressed it carefully into
the hot marshmallow and returned it to the oven.

“Uh-oh, Mom. It’s on fire!” shouted TJ, who had settled on the foot of Donnie’s lounge chair.

“Yup.” I removed it from the fire, still blazing. “Cracker!”

“Cracker.” Lindsey closed two halves of graham cracker around the ball of flames and slid the sandwich off the stick. “Voilà.”
She held it out to Donnie.

“Am I supposed to eat this? It’s burned.”

“It’s perfect. Taste it.”

He bit into it suspiciously at first and then popped the rest of it into his mouth. “Not bad.”

“That’s the way we make ’em,” Lindsey said proudly. “It’s the only way to get the chocolate to melt.” We exchanged wry smiles.
She remembered.

My sister passed crackers and sticks around the campfire and poured coffee from a big insulated bottle. She wouldn’t let Mom
get up from the old love seat that had been hauled out from the garage, where she sat with her feet up, hugging her knees
and chatting with Mrs. Duncan. When Lindsey asked if anyone needed a jacket or anything, I made her sit down and quit fussing
over everyone. “This is not the Hilton,” I announced. “If anyone needs anything, they can get it themselves.”

Matt and my father laid a sheet of plywood out in the field as a launching pad. Fireworks were unloaded from several car trunks,
including a huge box of goodies from the local tribal reservation, which we knew would be saved for the grand finale. At this
point, every grown man regressed to adolescence. It was too dark to see whether they had sprouted acne, but their voices intermittently
shot into higher octaves as they discussed which rocket to fire and how. Eventually the boys tired of conventional methods.
A mass missile attack was staged by arranging bottle rockets all along one edge of the platform. Matthew was the self-appointed
general. Five brave missile launchers were poised and ready. “Five, four, three, two, one, blastoff!” At his command ten fuses
were lit simultaneously and the launchers dashed to safety, laughing and squealing like pigs. The darkness was instantly pierced
with screaming projectiles that burst into fountains of colored light punctuated with loud bangs. The crowd clapped and cheered.

This was all new to TJ. He didn’t even ask to light a sparkler. He snuggled with me inside a quilt cocoon, his dark eyes wide
with wonder, reflecting brilliant showers of light. His hair smelled of smoke and sweat. Before the grand finale, he was gone.
He slept through the oohs and aahhs and loud cheering and hardly stirred when Donnie carried him across the field and into
the house, where we tucked him into his bed. I think it aroused some kind of paternal instinct in Donnie. He touched TJ’s
hair and smiled down at him and then looked up at me like we were in some Norman Rockwell painting. What was I supposed to
do? Clasp my hands at my chest and smile lovingly back?

After Donnie and the other guests had gone, Lindsey popped her head in my bedroom doorway. “Got room for one more in that
big bed?”

“That depends on who it is.”

“Me. I sent David home. I’m staying over so I can help with cleanup in the morning.”

“Oh. Are you a thrasher?”

“No. I lie perfectly still, flat on my back like a princess. See?” She plopped onto the bed to demonstrate. “And I don’t snore.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Mom peeked in. “Lindsey, do you need a nightgown?”

“No, thanks. I sleep naked.”

I passed her a long flannel shirt. “No, you don’t.” We dressed for bed and shared the hall bathroom.

The Judge came by on his way to bed. “Okay, girls.” He tried to sound stern. “I want lights out in fifteen minutes and no
giggling.”

Lindsey tossed a pillow at him when he turned to leave. She sprawled across the foot of the bed on her belly with her toes
pointed to the ceiling. “Donnie turned out nice, didn’t he? I’ve hardly seen him in the past few years. I thought he would
have gone off to law school by now.”

I told her about how old Chester caught a pitchfork in the leg and had been using it to his advantage ever since. “It’s too
bad,” I said. “Donnie has a brilliant mind. He could be a great trial lawyer and he knows it. If I were him, I’d just take
off. Chester would survive. He could hire someone to do what Donnie does.”

“So, what’s going on between you two?”

I shrugged. “Same as usual. We’re friends.”

“Well, you better tell him that. He wants more. You do see the signals, don’t you?”

I sighed.

“He’s a babe, Sam. You could do a lot worse. He’s funny and—”

“Lindsey,” I interrupted, “do you know I’m married?”

She seemed taken aback. “Well, I knew you and Tim . . . You mean to tell me you and Tim never got a divorce? I just assumed
. . .”

“Nope. We’re not even legally separated. He’s just gone.”

“Have you tried to find him?”

I fell back on my pillow in exasperation.

“Sam. Talk to me. It’s me, Lindsey, your almost-twin. I’m on your side. Whatever it is, you need to talk about it. You can’t
keep holding all these secrets inside of you. It’s not healthy.” She had that pouty look. “I always tell you everything about
me.”

I pondered for a moment and then sat up with a sigh. “Okay. You want it from the top?”

She nodded. “From the top.”

“Tim is not TJ’s daddy.”

She rolled her eyes. “I figured that part out all by myself.”

“Well, you know the part about Tim and me working at the ranch. I wrote to Mom about that, right?”

“Sam, you’ve got to tell me everything. We’ve had less than a dozen notes from you in seven years and four of those were Mother’s
Day cards.”

“Sorry. I lumped you in with the Judge for a while there. I figured you and Mom were on his side. I also pictured him reading
anything I wrote. I couldn’t get too personal.”

She shook her head with a disapproving frown. “Why do you call him that?”

“Anyway, when I ran away from home, I went to a clinic in Seattle for the . . . well, you know, abortion. We stayed with a
friend of Tim’s down there for a few days until I was feeling better, and then we drove straight down to Elko because Tim’s
uncle Rich told him if he ever needed a job, just show up and he’d put him to work as a mechanic. We found Uncle Rich drunk
on his butt barbecuing hot dogs outside a ratty single-wide trailer. He didn’t even own a garage. We slept on his hide-a-bed
couch for two weeks before we found work at the Wilders’ ranch. Tim was put in charge of maintaining all the vehicles, and
he did odd jobs like fixing fences and building cabins for the tourists to stay in. It was a functioning horse ranch with
a dude ranch on the side.”

“What did you do?”

“Housekeeping for Mrs. Wilder. Babysitting. In the summer I was like a maid for the dude cabins. Tim and I both helped with
the horses sometimes, but we were no good at it. Anyway, they gave us our own little cabin to live in. The Wilders were good
people.”

“What happened between you and Tim?”

I fiddled with my toes and took a deep breath. “Well, we had a fight. It was no big deal, really. We were both tired from
working all day and I guess we both wanted someone to dote on us. I loved that little cabin, but sometimes it was too small.
No place to get away and think, you know? Anyway, I got mad and stormed out; took one of the horses and rode off into the
sunset. Not for good. I didn’t even take a toothbrush.”

When I got to that part I had to think for a minute. Despite my bent for shocking my sister, I felt uncomfortable. Was there
a version of this story that was suitable for Pollyanna? “It was dry out there, so barren. Just a lot of scrubby grass and
bushes. After a while I got cold and hungry and wanted to go home, but it was too soon. My exit had been so dramatic; I couldn’t
just stroll in an hour later and stick my head in the fridge. So I rode around singing the blues to my horse, until I saw
a campfire down in this dry creek bed.”

I remembered the first time I saw Tijuana out in the corral, breaking a chestnut stallion. He was shirtless and as brown and
sinewy as the horse. The stack of clean bedding I was delivering to a cabin ended up on the rusty tailgate of a pickup truck
while I observed from the rail fence. The horse was beautiful, wild and defiant, his ears flicking back and then forward,
every muscle tensed. But it was the man who captured my attention. It wasn’t just that he was tall, or that every muscle seemed
sculpted in smooth clay, or even the way his powerful back and shoulders glistened with sweat. It was the way he moved—his
dark head held high as he wielded the rope to direct the dance of the stallion, each move calm and confident. Sometimes only
the brawn of his chest and arms and back would flinch ever so slightly while he and the horse calculated each other’s next
move, and then he would flash a grin like the white light of an opened door on a moonless night and say, “Okay,
caballo. Venga. Venga
.”

I was mesmerized. No one at the ranch knew much about him. He had walked out of the desert one day with a bedroll on his back
and approached Mr. Wilder for a job. Hank Wilder didn’t speak Spanish and became frustrated when he couldn’t get answers to
his questions. He finally shook his head, said, “No. No job here,” and walked away. When he glanced back over his shoulder,
Tijuana (which was the nickname the ranch hands gave him) stood silently in the corral, staring down a wild horse that had
been brought in just that morning. The horse’s head was down, nostrils flared. In an instant he wheeled. His powerful flank
swept within inches of the man. When the dust cleared, Tijuana stood in the same position, as cool as an ice statue. Hank
and a couple of hands sauntered over to the rail. After an hour-long performance, the men watched in awe as the Mexican walked
up to the rather subdued stallion, ran his hand along the sweat-streaked neck and slid a rope over its head.