“Your little girl don’t like me much,” Troy said.
“She doesn’t like anything,” Kate said.
“She’d like me if I had money to throw around.” He rolled from underneath Kate’s Dodge Power Wagon and shaded his eyes from the sun.
“Ruby doesn’t give a damn about money,” Kate retorted.
Troy whistled. “Spoiled all the same,” he said, taking his time like a windup pitcher. “You got a piece of top-grade filet mignon you left out the fridge. You left it so long it turned gray and stinky. Spoiled so bad, it rotted.” In his opinion, spoiled from the get-go by a nigger dad.
“Shut up, Troy!” Kate said.
“Spoiled don’t mean what people think. People think you give too much to a kid like toys and shit, it spoils them. That ain’t what happens. What happens is the kid don’t get taken care of like put in the fridge until it’s time to eat. It don’t get disciplined or told right from wrong. That’s spoiled. What’s sad is the kid was born okay.” He paused to make his consummate point. “But the parents went and spoiled it.”
Kate walked to the cottonwood. It was almost cool under the parasol of leaves.
“Time to go, Troy,” she said decisively.
“Spoiled is when people believe they owed. Like deserve to go to heaven because they believe in God. You know what I think? I don’t think anybody is owed nothing.”
“Meaning everyone is owed something,” Kate laughed nastily. “Or no one is owed anything.”
“You acting prissy?” Troy skipped a lug wrench across the ground. “Cause it don’t take a real high IQ to live in a dirt house, Kate. You live up here doing nothing and think somebody owes you for doing such a good job. You left your fancy family, your fancy college, and slummed it up. You fucked some rednecks and niggers.”
Kate flinched.
“You had a little bastard girl and bought a piece of dirt in a dirty dirt town in the middle of goddamn nowhere. But like everybody else, you ain’t owed a goddamn thing. Everything I got I had to work for it.”
“What you got?”
“You talking to me?” he spat.
“I asked what you got.”
“I got my condo on Maui. I got my silver Porsche 550 Spyder, same year as James Dean. I got a mahogany sailboat in San Francisco, sleeps eight. I got beautiful kids, you seen them. I got it all, but I’m just hard up right now. I ain’t been on this side of the fence since the war.”
“I heard,” she said.
Halfway up the mountain from Shorty’s, Kate stopped believing Troy after he took out his wrinkled photos of cars, houses, yachts, a few blond kids and smoothed them on her dashboard.
“You doubting me?” he asked.
There was no answer. Out of confusion, guilt, cowardice, compassion, Kate didn’t want to confront the man with the fact he was a liar. Maybe born that way, maybe not.
Ruby emerged from the house.
“Hey!” she said.
It was the friendliest sign Kate had had in days.
Ruby wanted a ride to town. She wanted to go swimming.
“Car ain’t ready,” Troy said, pleased to disappoint her.
Ruby stared at him. She hated Troy more than anything.
“Not doubting but you still have to go,” Kate said.
“After Iraq I wanted to get to Libya, Syria, Egypt, all those rag-head places.” Troy’s voice swelled.
“And what?” Ruby sniggered. “They wouldn’t send you?”
“By the time your daddy made it there, they were fucking desperate.”
Ruby jumped on Troy’s back. She hooked her arm around his throat and squeezed his ribs with her thighs. “You piece of white ignorant scum!”
“Get off before he kills you!” Kate yelled.
Troy cursed and bucked Ruby to the ground, spun around, and planted his foot on her throat. Kate lifted the shovel and charged. The shovel he seized and threw across the yard. Then, twisting both women’s arms, he marched them into the house, one small and sprightly like an Arabian, the other unbroken and brown.
Across the road, the Spanish farmers watched the fight. They knew Kate Ryan was a woman who kept to herself when a man was around. They appreciated that. They also knew she wasn’t a drunk or a crazy. Their wives liked her homemade jams and homemade bread. Almost daily, they recalled she stanched an artery at the scene of an accident and saved one of their own. They knew her daughter to be out of control like their own teenagers. Uniformly, they did not trust the newcomer, Troy.
“We’re making a few rules here and now!” Troy raised his fist and banged it on the wall.
“Like your rules?” Ruby’s eyes rolled.
“Shut up!” he roared.
“My house! My rules!” Kate declared.
“Shut up!”
Kate tried to move, but Troy grabbed her neck and threw her into a chair.
“I ain’t saying you can leave,” he said.
“He’s crazy,” Ruby whispered.
“No telling what I’ll do,” Troy snarled.
“What do you want?” Kate asked coolly.
Ruby had never seen her mother so cool.
“Take me to the bank. That’s what I want.”
“Don’t give him our money, Mom! Please don’t give it to him!”
Troy swatted Ruby’s cheek, leaving a trickle of blood.
“Don’t you dare touch her!” Kate lunged for Troy’s wrist. “Or I’ll call the sheriff!”
A laugh rushed from the pit of his abdomen as he ripped the phone from the wall. “Call him, Kate. Tell him I hit your little girl. And then,” Troy doubled over, “tell him I’m taking money you got growing plants with your bare hands.”