Cal knew that grin well because he’d seen it many times, just before Preston would explode. But he couldn’t explode with witnesses, and currently there were two. The guard and the driver. And while they might be fooled by that smile, they had protocols to follow, and schedules to keep, and they were very well trained, very experienced, in suppressing violence.
As Cal clambered into the van, he could feel Preston’s fingers pulling on the edge of his t-shirt, but he kept going.
He slid into the front row of seats and waved from the shadowy interior of the van. Waved in the direction of the sun hitting those golden curls and only took a deep breath—the deepest—when the driver slid the van door shut with a loud, metallic thump.
As the driver lumbered into the driver’s seat, and did drivery things like buckle himself in and start the engine, Cal knew thathe didn’t care where the van was headed. They could have been off the edge of a cliff for all he cared.
He didn’t even look over his shoulder at Preston as the van trundled around the courtyard of Wyoming Correctional, spun a little gravel over Preston’s nice white paint job, and sped off along a two-lane blacktopped road toward a blank space in Cal’s future. Blank enough to figure out what to do next.
Chapter 3
Zeke
When sweet-faced Galen Parnell had propositioned him the summer before, Zeke had been a tad surprised. But not shocked. After all, Galen had just lost his dad. His heart must have been aching with loneliness, though why he’d decided to fetch up to Zeke, of all people, was a mystery.
Zeke was not gay. Plus, he knew he’d mentioned his ex-fiance Betty Lou from time to time, though surely the memory of trying on rings with her wasn’t anything he’d ever talked about out loud.
While standing at the jewelry counter, the weight of that gold ring had felt satisfying and full of promise. Maybe by the time he and Betty Lou had gotten married, an uncertain date in the future, he’d have been ready to settle down.
Maybe if he still had someone like Betty Lou to love, he’d be ready to give up his rambling, no-moss-on-his-boots kind of lifestyle, build a frame house with his own two hands in the bend of the river where the cottonwoods grew, to quote John Wayne, and make babies. Lots of babies. Cute, cherry-cheeked babies,who would play in the dust in front of his wooden porch. Maybe there would have been a hound or two under that porch, waiting for handouts from a home-cooked farm supper.
Would it be a farm, then? Or a ranch? And what kind, cattle or horse or mule? And where would that ranch be? Wyoming, where everything was wide, wide open, or New Mexico, where his people were from? The questions made his head spin. Made him rub that area on his left thigh where he sometimes felt the skin was thin enough to let the bone break through.
His skin wasn’t that thin, and the bone hadn’t broken through, even though he could still hear the ring of the crack in his ears when the bone snapped as the bronc he’d been riding had fallen on him.
Rather,halfthe bronc had fallen on him. Had the whole bronc fallen on him, he would have been busted in too many places for even all the king’s men to mend.
As it was, the angle of the horse’s body had been just right to break his left thigh bone and leave him with a gathering of bruises big enough to twist him into a map of hurt.
He sometimes had dreams about that horse falling on top of him, though when he stiffened his spine enough to watch a video of his last ride, he could easily see that it could have gone a lot worse for him. He’d easily seen that it had been bad enough for the horse, a rangy bay with a long black mane and tail that made for a dashing eight-second ride.
He’d also seen that the horse, when it struggled to its feet, was shook. Trembling. Covered in sweat. Wide-eyed and startled.
From the vantage of his hospital bed, on the eve of his release back into the real world, as he watched that video, rewinding it two times more, Zeke realized that maybe it was a good thing that his bronc riding days were over.
His doctor had told him his leg wouldn’t take it, not even once. There had been hints he was too old anyhow.
More importantly, he was starting to see that the practice of bronc riding seemed rather cruel and outdated. Horses were a wondrous creation, and given modern techniques of horse training, bronc riding was a horrible thing and didn’t actually do anything constructive or helpful. Maybe in the old days, it was a quick way to get a rideable horse. But nowadays?
It had taken the rest of that rodeo season and then some to heal. Physical therapy. Weaning himself off the meds.
By the time he’d been able to get his legs into blue jeans and pull on his cowboy boots, Betty Lou had decided that Zeke’s buckle winning days were over.
If there’d been anything Betty Lou had been clear about was that she wanted to marry abuckle man, as she called it. A ro-de-oh champ-EE-on. And since Zeke was no longer in the running to be such a man, and sometimes he walked with a limp, Betty Lou made it quite clear that she did not want to live in a house that Zeke would make with his hands.
Betty Lou wanted more. She wanted high-tech, remote-controlled, whisper-quiet AC. She wanted white tile floors and fancy Navajo-made hanging rugs. She wanted a fridge with an ice maker that made three different shapes of ice. All of this was more than Zeke could give her.
His own wants were simple. He wanted land that was his and armfuls of babies to raise and love. But most of all, he wanted someone to share the sunset with after cleaning up after that delicious farm supper.
If he’d been surprised at how fast Betty Lou had left him, his own moving on from the rodeo world surprised him as well. Sure, at the start, he’d struggled to figure out how to train himself up for his next eight-second ride. But eventually, herealized that was a mountain too hard to climb and, not only that, he no longer wanted to.
One of the first things he did when he was out of the hospital was to find the horse that had fallen on him. Feller was the horse’s name, and Zeke found him languishing in a kill pen.
He was told that Feller’s spirit was gone, and there wasn’t any point to him except for dog food. Zeke paid the fifty bucks for Feller, then found a lovely woman named Mrs. Tate who took in horses that nobody wanted, and let them live out their days on her spread of ten acres.
Which was how he met Leland Tate, Mrs. Tate’s son. Leland was the firm-handed manager of Farthingdale Guest Ranch, and right after they met, Leland had offered Zeke a place as a ranch hand.
Knowing it was the best offer ever was likely to get, Zeke bid Betty Lou and pretty much everyone in his old life a cheerful goodbye and took the job.
