The Women’s League of Vanadium was quickly running out of good Christian homes for Buster. Sheriff Dudival, who until now had worked behind the scenes on Buster’s behalf with no less cunning and resourcefulness than a Vatican cardinal-prefect, begged the League to give him one more chance to place Buster before they sent him off to the county orphanage.
He had one last good idea, the Stumplehorst family. The Sheriff would have to bring to bear all of his powers as a salesman, for this was not an easy sell. What he had in his favor was that it was round-up time, and the Stumplehorst Ranch usually paid for temporary hands. With Buster’s adoption, all it would cost them to have another able-bodied wrangler would be room and board. Sheriff Dudival scribbled that thought down on a napkin as he waited to meet Skylar Stumplehorst for breakfast at the High Grade.
“Can he ride a horse?” It was obvious that Stumplehorst knew very little about Buster.
“He’s probably the best rider and roper in this county now that Bob’s dead.”
“We have some strange hands in the bunkhouse, but I don’t think there’s a killer among ’em.”
“No one’s been able to prove he’s killed anybody.”
“I don’t want to die. Is that so unreasonable?”
“Stumplehorst, you’re not afraid of that boy; you’re afraid of what your wife is going to say if you make a decision without consulting her.” This was a sore point with Skylar Stumplehorst. Skylar Anderson had been a two-bit cowboy until he impregnated Calvina Stumplehorst in the back of his truck at the conclusion of “Rattlesnake Round-Up.” She was from a ranching family that only produced women—which was why her father, Calvin, insisted that Skylar change his surname to Stumplehorst. After Calvina’s mother and father passed, Skylar was sitting pretty. Calvina bore him four daughters, who, like their mother, treated him like the uncouth yokel he was.
“I call the shots out there.”
“Prove it.”
“All right, I’ll take him.” Stumplehorst regretted that statement immediately, but before he could say another word, Sheriff Dudival threw down three bits for his coffee and walked out.
That afternoon, Sheriff Dudival drove Buster up to the ranch before Skylar could change his mind. Rearing up above the massive timber gates were twin wrought iron rampant colts. They had been copied from the handles of the famous pistols—between them were the letters S-T-U-M-P-L-E-H-O-R-S-T.
“Cain’t ah just stay with you at the jail, Sheriff?”
“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for that later.”
As they pulled up the road to the house, Buster could see three of the Stumplehorst daughters hanging laundry in the front yard. Hope, Faith, and Charity were fine examples of sturdy Lame Horse Mesa girls, but it was Destiny Stumplehorst, Buster recognized from the rodeo, who had him in her enthrall. She was in the corral brushing out her mare, Maple, who was named after the syrup and not the tree. Both Maple’s and Destiny’s ponytails had the same tight braid. Destiny had a constellation of freckles across her face as if she had held the wrong end of a can of Rustoleum. Buster had become, since living with the Svendergards, quite adept at imagining what people looked like without their clothing, and he imagined Destiny might just have the best figure of any girl in town, but there was more to his admiration than merely the physical. He liked the meticulous way she combed out her horse’s mane and tail. He liked the way she wore a red bandana in her hair to keep it clean. He liked the way she chewed gum in little inconspicuous movements like she was biting the inside of her cheek thinking about something important. Then, without warning, she turned and looked right at him. Their eyes met, and Buster quickly slumped down in his seat.
“What is wrong with you?” the sheriff said.
“Nothin’.”
“Come on now. Sit up. This is no way for a gentleman to make a first impression.”
At the head of the driveway stood Skylar and Calvina. Calvina’s father, Calvin Stumplehorst, was one of the most admired men in Vanadium. At nearly 450 pounds, he had to have extra-large saddles custom made by the Botero Leather Company in Valencia, Spain. In a bar fight, he would use his stomach to knock his opponent to the floor and then lay on them—like the famed Flat Rock in Arches National Park. Calvin Stumplehorst was the one who had put money into the refurbishing of the IOOF, the International Order of Odd Fellows. He was the one who had organized the building of a rodeo arena. He had three mistresses, one Chinese, one Mexican, and one albino. He had an extensive collection of Red Skelton records that he would listen to in the tack room and laugh and laugh until tears rolled down his florid face. It was said that Calvin Stumplehorst, until he got himself a bellyful of cancer, could eat a whole mule deer by himself in one sitting. After they removed his stomach and reattached it to his small intestine, his oncologist told him that if he ever ate anything larger than a Le Sueur pea, it would be the end of him. He followed his doctor’s instructions and lost 250 pounds. No longer the imposing figure that he had once been, he adapted to the person he now was. He took up the writing of poetry and chronicled in verse every aspect of the ranch and the land he loved. Some of his stuff made it into the local newspaper because he owned it. One poem was submitted to The Paris Review along with a contribution for $2,500. It was published in the fall edition of 1961. It went like this:
This is my damn house / This is my damn broke-down tractor / This is my damn dog / This is my damn horse / This is my damn rock / This is my damn ranch
But in the end, even being the poet laureate of Vanadium was not satisfying for a man of such Herculean appetites. And so, one Saturday night, he put four pounds of short ribs in his personal crock-pot with a bottle of red wine, a can of tomato paste, three onions, fresh thyme, and two bay leaves from his garden. In the morning, he saddled his favorite swayback pony, took one last ride around his property, and went to International Order of Odd Fellows where he hung an oil painting of himself that he had commissioned. Then he returned home, ate all the short ribs, retired to the tack room, put on a Red Skelton record and, unlike Socrates, died an exquisite death.
As big a life as Calvin lived, his eldest child and inheritor of his lands, Calvina, lived a small one. You could see it in her face, which was pale and indistinct. It was less a face than it was a grave rubbing. When she was a teenager, Calvina had been sent off to Uncle Hebron in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He was a General in the Salvation Army. There, she was indoctrinated in the ways of sobriety, piety, and parsimony. She saw firsthand what a profligate lifestyle could lead to—drunkenness, venereal disease, illegitimacy, and hopeless destitution. Now, as the baroness of the Stumplehorst Outfit, many of the Army’s principles were embedded in everyday Stumplehorst life. They prayed twice a day in the outbuilding once used to house the Red Skelton collection, now a house of God. No music or television was allowed. The girls were given a dollar a week of spending money. Skylar was given $4.75. Everyone in the family had to carry the traditional Salvation Army Little Black Book—and account for every penny spent. Calvina inspected each and every one for discrepancies on Friday nights before Evensong. And lastly, the children were not sent to the public school. Calvina taught them at home from a curriculum sent by mail from the Thessalonians Home Study Course of Oxford, Mississippi.
The Stumplehorst family had twelve hundred irrigated acres bordered by a worm fence that was laid out by old man Stumplehorst in the 1940s. Four hundred head of Angus meandered across the wavy grass like black holes; quarter horses raised for hobby, neat rows of chicken coops and swine pens, and twenty acres of planted vegetables. Not even the fashion designer Ralph Lauren in Ridgway, Colorado, had a ranch like this. And he had money. The Stumplehorsts didn’t have money. They had the US Government.
When Calvina’s father died, so died his distracted way of managing the ranch. She immediately sought out the government programs that had always been available, but never utilized by her father whose interests, as previously noted, were elsewhere. In short order, she cobbled together a dizzying network of subsidies that increased the Stumplehorst Ranch’s financial wherewithal six-fold. A rancher needs land to graze cattle. By enlisting in the Federal Land Lease Program, she was able to add four thousand acres to the ranch—allowing them to build a bigger herd. And while she was at it, she might as well avail herself of the government’s Risk Management Insurance Program that made it possible to hedge volatility in the beef market. She also helped herself to a USDA Rural Development Subsidy, which paid for the irrigation and soil preparation of their new organic squash and lettuce business. Her husband, Skylar, who was no Andrew Mellon, but a reduce-the-size-of-the-government Republican nonetheless, was uneasy with her high finance shenanigans and told her so.
“Tell me something, Skylar,” she’d said, when he balked. “If you saw a dollar laying there in the middle of the road, would you, or would you not, pick it up?”
b
Calvina Stumplehorst took one look at the patrol cruiser coming up the driveway and saw the boy in the front seat. It was obvious that Skylar had not told her about his conversation with the sheriff.
“What’s this about?”
“It’s nothing,” Skylar said, trying to cast it off. “It’s a kid I said I’d let work here for six months.” The tumble of that deviated syntax set off alarm bells for Calvina. Her eyes narrowed. A partial truth, or worse, a lie, was being told.
“Is that Buster McCaffrey, the murderer?”
“Nobody’s ever proved that.”
“That’s what the sheriff told you.” Calvina was always one step ahead of him.
“It’s just for six months. We can use him for round up.”
“You haven’t adopted him.”
“Of course, not. You think I’m an idiot?”
Buster got out of the police cruiser and took off his hat. Long, tangled, dirty hair spilled out.
“Uh, ’lo, Mommy. ’Lo there, Daddy.”
Faith, Hope, Charity, and Destiny Stumplehorst giggled. Mrs. Stumplehorst turned purple and hissed something in her husband’s ear and stormed back to the house.
In the barn, Skylar put on his leather sheep shearing chaps and took an electric cutter to Buster’s hair. Unbeknownst to Buster, he had an audience peeking in through the workshop window—Destiny Stumplehorst and her three sisters.
“The missus doesn’t want you to call her ‘Mommy,’ unnerstan?”
“Yessir.”
“You can call me Pop if you want, though.”
“Okay, Pop.”
“But don’t call me Pop around the missus.”
“Whatever you say, Pop.”
After Skylar had buzzed Buster all the way down to the scalp, Buster reached up, touched the top of his head and whistled.
“Jiminy Christmas!”
Skylar then instructed Buster to take off his clothes and stand against the cinder block wall. Skylar let him have it with the fire hose. The girls outside watching had to cover their mouths as they squealed with laughter at the sight of their newly adopted naked brother. Destiny had to pull Charity’s hair to get her out of the way so she could get a good look. The girls were all dumbstruck by the size of Buster’s johnson—which, even under the duress of freezing cold water, gave the impression of a Slinky making its way down a flight of stairs.
Satisfied he’d loosened all the grime and vermin from Buster, Skylar proceeded to burn his clothes, hat, and boots. Buster was given a new pair of Carthart workman’s pants, a shirt, two pairs of skivvies, two pairs of socks, and a pair of White’s Packers.
“You’ll sleep with the other fellers in the bunkhouse.”
As they walked outside, the Stumplehorst girls scrambled out of the way.
“People in town tell ya we’re rich?”
“The Dominguezes always tole me not to listen to what people said in town.”
“Well, we’re not rich. So get that outta your head right now.”
“Yessir.”
“And be don’t be goin’ around here losin’ tools or throwin’ em on the ground. And don’t take a whole handful of toilet paper when you wipe your ass. It’s a waste of money and it clogs up the septic.”
“Yessir.”
The bunkhouse was a drafty old wooden building that leaned over on its hip as if it had been waiting a long time for a bus. Buster adjusted his clothes in his arms so he could offer his hand to Skylar and say what Sheriff Dudival had told him to say when the time was right.
“Mr. Stumplehorst…wanna say ah ’ppreciate the op-por-too-nit-ty.”
Skylar looked at him and didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He shook his hand without saying anything. It was his wife’s idea to put him in the bunkhouse. If it had been up to him, he would have put him in the house. But it wasn’t up to him. He just hoped that Buster wasn’t going to resent the accommodations.
The men awoke at four thirty in the morning. They washed and dressed in the dark. They were then made to stand outside in the corral and hold hands while Mrs. Stumplehorst administered the Morning Prayer. Anyone who overslept or dodged the prayers was not eligible for breakfast. Every couple of weeks or so, a man from Delta came down and randomly tested their urine. Any man caught playing a musical instrument, drinking, playing cards, reading an X-rated magazine, or talking to her daughters was summarily fired. The men, of course, hated her, but like her own husband, they had no other place to go.
Buster opened the bunkhouse door and stepped inside. There was only one electric light bulb hanging from the apex of the rafters. The board and batten structure was heated by a potbelly stove in the corner. Either everyone was too lazy or too tired to stoke it. There were ten men in their cots, ages twenty-five to forty-five. The air was blue from tobacco smoke and stunk from clothes, body crevices, and feet that may not have been washed in months. The men turned to look at Buster then looked away, disinterested. They were doing a variety of things—one cowboy was stitching a torn bridle, another man was sitting on another’s back squeezing a cyst that the other man couldn’t reach himself. Some were just laying there with their eyes open looking at nothing. Buster wandered around the room until he found the only bunk available. It was situated next to a cracked window. The bed was unfortunately missing half of its slats. The mattress showed the tale of its long use with pastel splotches of yellows, ochres, and reds. Buster took the bedding that the old man had given him and patiently fixed things up as best as he could.
There was a mandatory lights-out at 9:30. Buster had chewed bits of newspaper into pulp and caulked the cracks in the wall that were blowing a steady stream of chilled air into his left eardrum. He tried to go to sleep, but he was too excited about the prospect of being a real working cowboy. As disjointed as his life had been, he felt that there was a direction, an unseen hand guiding him to where he was now—even if he was sleeping on a putrid mattress. Quietly, he slipped out the side of his bed so the other men couldn’t see him and got on his knees and prayed. He prayed for the people who had raised him, living and dead.
That night, Buster had a dream. He was the boss man on a wagon train that was heading out west to start a new life. It was a heavy responsibility—being the boss man. Some of the people he led were folks he knew—like the Dominguezes, Svendergards, and the Boyles. In each valley they came to, he had to judge the soil, the quantity and quality of the water, whether there was enough timber to build homes, churches, and schools. Each place, so far, had fallen short, and they kept moving—a train of twenty prairie schooners creaking across the slickrock and dry soil. Buster opened his eyes. He was awake, but he could still hear the creaking of the prairie schooners. Then he realized that it was the bunk beds in the room that were creaking from the men masturbating.
At four thirty the next morning, the cowboys reported outside for prayers in the corral, then shuffled into the dining hall—heavily, as if their feet were shackled. Single file, they stopped to grab coffee from an urn by the door and sat down at a long wood-planked table. Skylar was already seated at the head with his cup of black coffee. The men all said perfunctory g’mornin’s and stared down expectantly at their empty plates. Jared Yankapeed, Stumplehorst’s top hand, sat next to him on his left. Mrs. Stumplehorst sat on his right.
Spirits lightened when the Stumplehorst daughters appeared from the kitchen with platters heaped with flapjacks. Mrs. Stumplehorst, always on message, had the girls make Jesus cakes—pancake batter that had been poured in the shape of a crucifix. Destiny Stumplehorst, primly and properly, never once making eye contact with the any of the hired hands, finally made her way to Buster’s left and placed his plate in front of him. Unlike the others, his pancake was not in the shape of the cross, but rather, in the shape of a heart. Buster turned and looked at her. Her face was inscrutable. Their eyes met for a brief instant, and then she returned to the kitchen. Destiny, like most teenage girls the same age as boys, was clearly running a furlough ahead of Buster in the sexual education department. He could feel his blood evacuate his extremities and take cover in his cheeks. Suddenly self-conscious, Buster raised his eyes to see if Mrs. Stumplehorst was watching him. Her nostrils dilated slightly as if she was trying to sniff impropriety in the air. Buster took fork to Bisquick and mashed it until it was unrecognizable. There was a quick prayer over the food followed by the distraction of twelve men eating with their mouths open. Buster, on his first day, had so far escaped being fired.
Now the door opened and two new men dressed in old-fashioned khaki workman’s clothes entered. It was no coincidence that their entrance had been timed with the completion of prayers. It wasn’t as though they didn’t believe in a greater power. They just didn’t believe that greater power to be Calvina Stumplehorst. Ned Gigglehorn was in his mid-sixties. He was the more squat and muscular of the two. His neck was thick and wide at the shoulders and shaped like the base of a stalk of celery. However, there was no ignoring his most salient characteristic—that being the blackened band of skin around his eyes. He’d been shot directly in the face with snakeshot. This was referred to as a “raccoon face” or in the vernacular of the older locals, a “’coon face.” Miraculously, the shot didn’t blind him, but the particles, deeply imbedded in his skin, were there for life—a punishment by the local constabulary and Mine Management for a speech he gave in 1969 at the Odd Fellows Hall calling for a wildcat strike. His disfigurement would have made an ordinary man shy from showing his face in public, but not Ned Gigglehorn. He stared at people aggressively—daring people to look at him and see for themselves how capital regarded labor.
The taller man, who sat down opposite Buster, was Doc Solitcz. He and Ned shared a cabin together—separate from the others. He was in his seventies, rail-thin with a shock of white hair that he combed across his forehead like John F. Kennedy. He conveyed a certain curiosity in the twinkle of his eye—a curiosity that cost him his medical license when he thought to remove his own appendix to test the efficacy of the new method of spinal anesthesia. Calvina Stumplehorst gave the de-frocked doctor free room and board in exchange for veterinarian care for their line of quarter horses and cattle and, more importantly, science lessons for their daughter’s home school courses—if he agreed to feather in creationism. He reconciled his principles by shrugging off religion as nothing more than the Enlightenment’s lazy eye—somewhat crossed and out of focus—but not fatal to the patient.
Breakfast would be the only meal the two men deigned to share with the others. Dr. Solitcz looked across the table at Buster, a slightly humored expression at the corners of his mouth.
“You the McCaffrey boy?”
“Yessir.”
“We’ve followed your career with keen interest. Haven’t we, Ned?”
“You’re the one who killed his foster fathers.”
“That ain’t true,” Buster said, coming to his own defense.
“No?”
“They never proved it!” Skylar Stumplehorst said, repeating what Sheriff Dudival had told him.
“Well, if you’re wrong…” Gigglehorn sipped at his coffee, “…you’re next.”
Some of the other hands at the table laughed, but Gigglehorn wasn’t joking. Despite the light-hearted sound of his name, he never went for a joke if there was a throat available.
Mrs. Stumplehorst gave a little snort. ‘That would serve him right for bringing this heathen under our roof!”
“Gigglehorn…” Mr. Stumplehorst protested, “…you take the cake! Why would this young man here wanna kill me of all people?”
Gigglehorn calmly tapped a verboten cigarette out of his pack of Luckies, lit it, and blew smoke across the table at Mr. Stumplehorst. Buster looked to Mrs. Stumplehorst for her reaction, but funnily enough, she said nothing—only stiffening ever so slightly.
“Mr. McCaffrey here is going to kill you because you’ve exploited him. Plain and simple.”
“I will not have you make trouble under my own roof, you big-mouthed bastard!” bellowed Mr. Stumplehorst.
“Mr. Gigglehorn…” Mrs. Stumplehorst said, mildly interceding on behalf of her husband, “…if this young man is to murder my husband, I sincerely doubt he will be motivated by your dusty socialist principles.” Calvina nodded with self-satisfaction to her daughters who, except for Destiny, were watching the breakfast debate with slack-jawed disinterest.
“Ma’am, I believe that, in this young man’s short time here, he has already been given justification for killing your husband.”
“And what would that be, Mr. Molotov?”
Gigglehorn stood to his feet and bellowed at Skylar Stumplehorst.
“You gave the poor sonofabitch a bed that wasn’t fit for a dog!”
Ned was always monitoring the working conditions at the ranch on behalf of his fellow workers, and a detail like Buster’s bed had not escaped his attention. Buster looked nervously to Mrs. Stumplehorst for her reaction. Surprisingly, she seemed unperturbed—more concerned with the sticky handle on the maple syrup pourer than Gigglehorn’s outrages.
“Uh, is there a problem with your bed, son?” Mr. Stumplehorst asked, finding himself alone in all of this.
Buster just looked down at his plate.
“What’s he gonna say? The kid’s only got two gears—Shy and Murder,” said Gigglehorn.
“It ain’t exactly first rate, truth be tole, sir,” Buster said, quietly.
“Well, if that’s true, there’s nothin’ to get homicidal about, son. I’ll tell you what…seein’ as you’re unhappy with the sleeping arrangements from now on you can sleep with the Doc and Foghorn Leghorn here. How’s that?”
“That’d be jes fine with me,” Buster said turning to Doc and Gigglehorn to see if it was okay with them. Gigglehorn stared at him blankly—his mouth, once again, his undoing.
Stumplehorst, pleased with his Solomonic judgment, got up from the table. “Then we’ll have no more talk about this murdering business from now on. Will we, McCaffrey?”
“No, sir.”
Then, Mrs. Stumplehorst clapped her hands twice, and the hired hands stood and marched from the table in single file, passing her at the doorway.
“Thank you for breakfast, ma’am,” it was compulsory for them to say, as they all shuffled out. Buster wanted to look back at Destiny, but he dared not.
At the corral, the other hands had already saddled up before breakfast. Buster had yet to be assigned a horse.
“That’s your cayuse…over there,” someone said.
There was a lone, unsaddled stallion in the corner of the corral and he was a sad sight, indeed. He was filthy and hadn’t been brushed or seen to all winter. The other fellows were watching Buster’s reaction, straight-faced. A joke was being played out on the new guy or possibly Mr. Stumplehorst—if pushing Buster to his limit could lead to his murder. Buster slowly approached him.
“’Lo there, old clomper. How ya doin’?”
“…Name’s Stinker,” Jared Yankapeed said. “You’ll see why any minute now.”
Buster stood a few feet away having a reconnoiter. The nag’s chest leaned noticeably over his front hooves. Bob Boyle had taught him that when a horse did that, it meant it was trying to get the weight off his caudal hoof, or heel, because it was in pain. Buster lightly touched his side and the hay burner shuddered. He waited, letting the horse get used to him, then smoothed a hand over Stinker’s sides. When Stinker relaxed, Buster gently lifted his front leg and placed it between his knees. The sole of his hoof was packed with hardened mud and debris, but the culprit was the hoof wall. It was raised—creating painful pressure against the shoe all the way up to his navicular bone.
“Well, that ain’t good…” Buster said quietly. “Any a you fellers know where they keep the far-yers tools ’round here?”
“Stumplehorst’s gonna be out here presently. He don’t wait on nobody.”
“Won’t taker but a minute,” Buster said.
“Yor funeral…”
Yankapeed gestured to one of the other cowboys. Sourly, he got down from his horse and went into the shed. He brought back a toolbox with the farriers’ tools—pincers, hammer, rasp, and hoof knife. He tossed it at Buster’s feet then got back on his own horse.
Buster laid the horse’s leg across his knee. He pried off the shoe, scraped the inside of the hoof removing all debris and impediments, clipped the hoof wall all the way around with the pincers, drew the rasp across it until it was nice and level, replaced the shoe, hammered in the nails, bending them over then rasping that surface smooth, then dropped the leg back to the ground. He accomplished all of this in one minute and forty-five seconds. Now, having his rhythm, he completed the other three legs in a total time of four minutes and thirty seconds. None of the other cowboys had ever seen anything like it. As for Stinker, he looked ready to tap down a crystal staircase in a Busby Berkeley musical. Buster threw a blanket on his back, then his saddle and bridle and gave him a comforting chuck to the jowls.
The boys in the corral could hear the door slam shut at the house. The old man was coming. Buster calmly walked the toolbox back to the shed. As Mr. Stumplehorst opened the gate, Buster took three great strides—leaping into the air and landing squarely on Stinker’s back without ever touching the stirrups. One of the boys, though he would never admit this to Jared Yankapeed, even wrote his mother about it.
“Ever’body ready?” said Mr. Stumplehorst.
“Yep,” said Buster eagerly.
No one else answered. Unlike the cattle round up scene in Red River, there was no yipping or yahooing, no horse rearing, no hat waving. Such was the apathy at the Stumplehorst ranch, which was understandable. The day’s work of a cowboy was often monotonous and mundane and this was going to be another one of those days.
Being the beginning of May, there was grass coming in, but the herd had to be moved several times a day so they didn’t wear out any one spot. As soon as they moved the cattle, the Stumplehorst daughters would enter the area with a chicken coop on wheels and let the chickens feed and defecate their particularly nitrogen-rich effluent, stimulating the regrowth of grass. This progressive system, by the way, was another program paid for, on the Stumplehorsts’ behalf, by a subsidy from the US Department of Agriculture. In the afternoon, some of the cowboys were released from cattle moving to ditch burning. Buster was given a torch connected to a BBQ-sized propane tank and sent off to burn the irrigation ditches that had clogged with weeds and grass impeding the flow of water to the alfalfa fields. After that, Buster chopped firewood—another job without an end. Each of these tasks Buster took on with unbridled enthusiasm—much to the annoyance of his colleagues. Some people spend their whole lives unhappily searching, while others are fortunate to find the one thing they were born to do. And Buster was the latter.
After ditch burning, Mr. Stumplehorst instructed Buster in the milking of cows. Buster, being the newest hand, would now have the job of rising an hour earlier for that chore.
“Why cain’t ah jes milk ’em in the affernoon?”
“Cows’re allus milked in the mornin’! It’s allus been so. Their teats’d be draggin’ on the damn ground if we milked’em in the affernoon! Got any more dumb queshuns?”
“No, sir!”
Next, Buster was assigned to the woodpile. There, he called upon every fiber of being so as not to let his attention slip and chunk the axe into his shin—for the woodpile was next to the house where Destiny and her sisters were hanging laundry and weeding the vegetable garden. At one point, Buster looked up to see Destiny watching him from behind a laundry line of women’s undergarments. She puppet-wiggled the hook-end of her mother’s brassiere as a gesture of hello. His heart raced as it did when he got a snoot-full of milkweed. Buster wiggled a finger back at her and scrambled through the left side of his brain for something to say.
“Saw your horse get kicked in the corral today,” he said.
“Is that right, smooth talker?”
Before Buster could improve his repartee, Mrs. Stumplehorst came outside and gesturing to the sky, issued new orders to her daughters. They immediately took the laundry down from the lines and hurried inside just as it started to rain.
That night, Buster gathered his gear from the bunkhouse and dragged it across the lawn to Doc Solitcz and Gigglehorn’s cabin. Calvin Stumplehorst had assembled it himself from a Sears Roebuck catalogue kit in 1943. It had a nice front porch, two bedrooms, and a loft. Buster knocked on the door.
“Who’s that?” That was Doc Solitcz’s voice.
“Buster.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Doc Solitcz, followed with a sigh of resignation, “come in.”
Buster entered and dropped his kit. The room smelled of tobacco, oil paint and old man’s clothes. A seventy-eight of the forties singer Jo Stafford played “Haunted Heart” on the Philco. There was a small fire going. Doc Solitcz ignored him, quietly attending to his hobby. He was an amateur botanist. In the corner of the room was a press where he dried and flattened botanical specimens on archival paper. On the other side of the room, at the foot of Gigglehorn’s bed was an easel with an unfinished painting of a little bird. There were over forty more oils hung all the way up to the rafters. Gigglehorn’s avian subjects all bore the same distinction of being painted with enraged expressions, even the tiniest bluebirds and sparrows. Buster stood there waiting for the old man to say something.
“Upstairs,” Doc Solitcz finally said, examining an oreocarya longiflora through his magnifying glass.
Buster shouldered his gear and ascended a narrow staircase that swayed precariously as he climbed. At the top, the height of the loft was a mere five-foot-five. Buster was unable to stand straight when up there and was forced to walk around bent at the waist—as if receiving a Japanese ambassador for the first time. There was nothing up there except a single bed. Buster sat on it. He wondered what he should do next. He didn’t want to intrude and pacing was awkward.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Nothin’.”
“Come down here, then.” Doc Solitcz said.
Buster slowly descended the stairs, gradually straightening his frame.
“Look, McCaffrey, I’ll be honest with you: if it weren’t for my friend’s big yap, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, sir. And don’t think ah ain’t ah-ap-preesh-yi-atin’ him talkin’ up fer me.”
“Nothing against you, personally, but as you can see, this cabin’s less than nine hundred square feet and you’re taking up four hundred and fifty of it just standing there.”
“Well, sir, ah’m sorry ’bout that. Cain’t hep how big ah yam. Ah’ll try to stay outta yor way.”
“Well I appreciate that. Thank you.”
Buster just stood there.
“What is it?”
“Ah don’t want you ta think ah’m nosey, but ah were jes wunnerin…”
“Wunnerin’ what?”
“Ah were jes wunnerin’ how Mr. Gigglehorn here’s the only one who’s allowed to smoke at the breakfast table and talk back at Missus Stumplehorst.”
Doc Solitcz chuckled to himself and considered whether to tell him or not.
“Well, I don’t suppose I’d be telling tales out of school…” Doc Solitcz pushed a fresh plug of tobacco in his pipe. “Ever been to Nucla?”
“It’s ’bout ten miles from here, ain’t it?”
“Mr. Gigglehorn grew up out there…in a socialist commune.”
“Ah hear tell of it.”
“Well, Ned’s parents and about a hundred of them belonged to the International Workers of the World, Wobblies, they were called. And he was brought up with this cockeyed notion that it was one’s sole duty to promote the cause of the Workers…”
The doctor went on to say that as a grown man, Ned was a famous orator in these parts—always looking for a soapbox to stand on to address a crowd. Some of these speeches had been made at the Atomic Mine before they fired him in 1963. He was a regular speaker at the International Order of Odd Fellows on Main Street, but he wasn’t shy to exhort the drunks at the High Grade Bar—even interrupt people’s dinners at the Buttered Roll. One might think it would be hard to raise a crowd in an ignorant mining town to hear a speaker extol the virtues of Marx, Engels, and Mao Zedong or to be punished by Ned’s off-key rendition of “There is Power in a Union,” but Ned could always fill a house. Before cable and satellite made it possible to raise a television signal in Vanadium, going to see Gigglehorn was big entertainment; not to hear him speak, mind you, but to see him fight. The Atomic Mines Corporation, when notified Gigglehorn was holding forth, invariably sent their stooges to shut his trap. When this happened, the town was treated to an epic battle.
Gigglehorn had worked a pick and shovel since childhood. The muscles in his back piled all the way up to his shoulders to the back of his ears leaving little room for his neck. His forearms were as big as fire extinguishers—his fists, hard and knotty as the handles of a shillelagh. When he threw a punch, it wasn’t just his angry one hundred and eighty pounds he put behind it, but the power one only possesses from standing on the moral high ground. Sometimes it would take ten men to send him to the hospital—most of them joining him there with broken noses, jaws, ribs, and ruptured spleens. Eventually, Atomic Mines ran out of men who were willing to interfere with his First Amendment Rights and sent Sheriff Morgan.
Morgan carried two WWI-era Officer’s revolvers in .455 Eley. The revolver in his right holster was loaded with deadly dumdums. The cylinders in his left were loaded with bespoke cartridges filled with graphite, granite dust, and metal shavings. This was what Sheriff Morgan used on poor Gigglehorn. However, his ’coon face was not enough to deter Gigglehorn from maintaining his speaking schedule. He was only quiet when the sheriff and his deputies escalated the violence and cracked his skull open—putting him in a coma.
Gigglehorn was never “quite right” after he was discharged from the hospital two months later. He could be walking or riding in a pasture when suddenly he would be gripped by—what he would describe as—a magnetic force that wanted to pull his head to the earth. He would be forced to lay there—anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes—popping and jerking on the ground like a drop of water on a hot oiled pan. During one of these attacks, an associate noticed that Gigglehorn was having a seizure twenty feet from where a hydrology company recently drilled a dry well for the Stumplehorsts.
After someone removed the rag from Gigglehorn’s mouth and he could finally speak, he insisted they drill on the very spot where he had fallen. When they did, they hit water twenty feet down, and Ned Gigglehorn started a new career as a Paranormal Douser. That’s why Calvina Stumplehorst was compelled to put up with his big mouth—no matter how rude or insulting he was.
“Mrs. Stumplehorst thinks that Ned, even if he doesn’t believe it himself, has been touched by the very hand of God. That’s why he can do or say anything he likes.” Doc Solitcz relit his pipe. “Out here, water’s more important than principles.”
Suddenly, the door shuddered with the weight of a body slammed against it.
“That will be Mr. Gigglehorn. Clear a path for him. He was speaking tonight at the Grange Hall.”
The latch on the door was fumbled with then Gigglehorn stumbled in and fell to his knees. Slowly, he rose back up to his feet and propelled himself on booze fumes across the room to his bed—where he collapsed face down.
“How many showed up, Ned?”
“Two. But two’s better than nothing. Who’s that other person in the room?” he said, face planted deep into his pillow.
“The kid who killed the foster fathers. He’s staying with us.”
“Okay,” he said and then passed out.
b
The outfit saddled up at daybreak. A storm had moved in from the LaSalles putting a few inches of snow on the ground over night. It would burn off by ten, but Stumplehorst wanted to check on the calves, anyway. Buster and his colleagues were told to grab a sinker and a cup of coffee and hit the trail. For a few hours, the boys had searched every nook and cranny looking for strays that had gotten separated from their mothers. Not finding any slowly enervated them. Buster found Jared Yankapeed and a half-dozen hands having a smoke on a south-facing draw while they warmed themselves in the morning sun.
“Any a you fellers been down to the river?”
“No need. All present and ’counted for,” said Jared Yankapeed.
“I’m pretty shor ah sawr a mom and her calf come down there from the ridge.”
“Well, why don’t you jes head on down there? ‘In-vestergate the sichee-ashun.’”
Some of the cowboys laughed when he said that. Evidently, his move out of the bunkhouse had not enhanced his popularity. But no matter, Buster was actually working as a cowboy; his horse liked him and the air smelled like grass. As he worked his way down the draw, he came upon two sets of tracks in the mud and dismounted. Poking his finger at them to see how fresh they were, he noticed a lone buttercup, trying to work its way through the ground, had been trampled. Thinking this might be a nice present for Destiny, if he ever gathered the courage to talk to her again, he gently lifted the buttercup from the mud, cleaned it and placed it in his wallet.
Buster continued following the tracks. No more than one hundred yards down the trail, he encountered a lone calf bellowing for his mother. He leaned over and saw another set of tracks continuing on to the river. He rode on, the calf following willingly. The closer he came to the river, the muddier the lowland became. Now he could hear the bellowing of the mama cow and he urged Stinker in that direction. As he came around the bend, he could see the longhorn mother cow half-submerged, lying on her side in a muddy slough.
“Don’t you fret, ma’am. Ah’ll get you outta there in two shakes.”
“Fergit her fat ass, get me out of here!”
Now that was something. The voice sounded exactly like Mr. Stumplehorst’s. Buster twisted around in his saddle to look for him.
“I’m down here!”
And there he was, indeed. Skylar Stumplehorst was trapped beneath the cow, his head barely visible above the water line.
“Hey, Mr. Stumplehorst…what’re you doin’ down there?” Buster kind of guffawed at the absurdity of it all, not realizing how this was aggravating the old man.
“What do you think I’m doing, ya da…?” The “damn idiot” part was garbled as the cow moved and Stumplehorst was momentarily pulled under the water. He fought his way back up and gasped for air.
“What was that, Mr. Stumplehorst?” Stumplehorst was going to repeat what he had said, but thought better of it. Was this how Carlito Dominguez, Gil Svendergard, and Bob Boyle saw their last moments on earth—the kid getting them all alone, with no one around as a witness?
“I said, I was trying to get this cow outta here and then she plumb fell over on me.”
“Ah can see that now,” Buster said, leaning forward in his saddle. Buster gestured a thumb in the direction of the calf.
“Found her calf up yonder.”
“Oh did ya?”
“Yep. Where’s yor horse?”
“She run off.”
“Well, ah s’pect she’ll turn up at feedin’ time.”
“S’pose so.” I’m dead, Stumplehorst thought to himself. “So, uh…how you likin’ yor new bed?” he said, trying to present himself as a caring human being that didn’t deserve to die so young.
“Oh, ah’m likin’ it real fahn. Those two gennelmen’re a coupla characters, ah’ll tell you that!”
“That they are. That they are.” There was a long pause. Then Stumplehorst couldn’t wait any longer. The black water was rising up his nostrils as he and the cow sunk lower into the mud. “Say, son…I was jes wonderin’…” he asked, choking.
“Yes, sir?”
“Could you be so obliged as to throw me a loop?”
“Why, Mr. Stumplehorst…if you needed hep, why dint ya jes say so? Watch this!” Buster proceeded to take his lariat and spin a small loop on one side of his horse, roll it over his shoulders to the other side. “Whatcha thinka that?”
“Em-pressive,” Stumplehorst burbled, the water now up to his eyeballs.
“Shucks, that was nuthin’.”
Buster widened his loop and spun it over his head until he and Stinker were completely under it, then stood up on the saddle and jumped, skipping the rope beneath his boots—once, twice, three times and then once on one foot. When he checked for Stumplehorst’s approval, he was chagrined to find the old man had completely disappeared under the water, missing the big finale! Deflated at having lost his audience, Buster tossed a ham and eggs loop over the cow’s horns and sat back down in the saddle. He tied off the lariat and chirked for Stinker to back up.
Stumplehorst weakly held onto the cow’s head as it was released from the mud’s suction. He was on all fours, coughing up bog water. Buster jumped from his horse, slung him over his shoulder then placed him in the saddle.
“Where’re those other coffee boilers?” Stumplehorst croaked.
“They paddled back to lunch,” Buster said, climbing on the back of the horse.
“Oh they did, did they?”
Buster giddy-yapped and Stinker, not thrilled with the extra freight, gave a world-weary moan and began trudging up to the three-mile ridge that splintered in four sections like the food dividers on a camp plate. On the bottom left of the plate was the Puster’s ranch, then the Stumplehorst’s in the middle, and Jimmy Bayles Morgan’s pony outfit on the right, at the top of the plate the pockmarked Gil Svendergard property. Buster slowed to read a sign posted at the Puster gate. It was a notification that the ranch had been taken over by the First National Bank of Vanadium.“What’s this mean?”
“Ol’ man Puster gone and went belly up…” Stumplehorst said.
“Huh?”
“Threw his cards in.”
“That’s too bad, ain’t it?”
“Well, he weren’t much of a bidnis man, truth be tole.”
“Why don’t the folks ’round here give him the money so he can keep the place?” Stumplehorst turned around in the saddle and just looked at him.
“That’s a good one.”
They rode on. Buster was thinking.
“Think the bank would let a feller like me take it on?”
“And there’d be unicorns…and dear old pappy’d rise from the grave and we’d all go fishin’. No, son, that there would be highly unlikely. A little thang called eco-nomics comes into play. Know what that is?”
“No, sir. What issit?”
Stumplehorst went to answer, but realized when it came right down to it, he didn’t know what economics was, either.
“All I can tell ya is this. You could study it yor whole damn life and still not unnerstan it.” He could see the perplexed expression on Buster’s face. “Look, son, I ain’t tryin’ to be an asshole. But the way thangs er set up, a hard workin’ cowboy like you’s never next in the chute for a place like this. Never. Ever. That’s jes the God’s honest truth.”
Buster nodded, but didn’t believe it. He just figured Mr. Stumplehorst was still rattled from almost being drowned by the cow.
“Mind if I ask you a somethin’, since we’re still chewin’ on this eco-nomics issue?”
“Sure, Pop.”
“That Svendergard woman. How much she git for that old place of hers after you…uh, after her old man, uh…how much did she get per acre from that golf course feller?”
“She tole me not to tell nobody.”
“Well, I’m your Pops. You can tell your Pops anythin’.”
“But she was my mama.”
“Well, she ain’t your mama no more, son. She run off to a nudie camp.”
Buster was still reticent.
“Haven’t you ever played poker? Kings beat Queens.” Buster considered the wisdom of that. He had a point.
“Four thousand an acre.”
“Four thousand an acre! Holy Christ Almighty! Four thousand an acre for the ugliest piece of land on Lame Horse Mesa?” The news made Stumplehorst wiggle his legs like a little girl. “Are you sure you didn’t hear fourteen hundred an acre?”
“Ah heard what ah heard, Pops. Four thousand.”
“Hmm,” was all Stumplehorst said. He was quiet after that.
b
Mrs. Stumplehorst and her daughters were serving the hands lunch at the outdoor picnic table when Buster rode up with the old man. By now, Stumplehorst had recovered enough to make a grand entrance and got off the horse by himself. Bowleggedly—and with boots still filled with water—he squished his way to the table, giving every man the stink eye and causing each one of their forks to freeze in various proximities to their mouths. His wife looked at him quizzically as he sat soggily next to her. Getting a whiff of him, she grimaced and clasped a hankie over her nose and mouth.
“Gracious, Skylar, why do you smell so?”
“That there is a very good question, mother.” He paused to blow some black gunk out of his nose into a napkin and look at it disdainfully. “I SMELL, cause jes one hour ago, I had one foot in the very sulphurs of HELL!” He now pointed to Buster. “And this boy, here, who you were all quick to con-dem, goddamn SAVED me!” He waited for this pronouncement to sink in to everyone at the table.
“Whoop-dee-doodle,” his wife finally said. Undeterred, he moved on to Jared Yankapeed, seated on the other side of him. He put his face up to his, LBJ-style. “Question is…where was you, top hand?”
“I were…”
“Porch perchin’!” Stumplehorst said, finishing his sentence. “That’s where you was!” He then grabbed Yankapeed’s plate of food from under his nose and walked it to the end of the table and threw it down. Then he picked up Buster’s plate and carried it back with him. “Son, from now on, yor eatin’ next to me.”
Every eye at the table was on Buster as he made the Pomp and Circumstance March to the head of the table. Destiny, pleased as she was with Buster’s coup, was smart enough to indicate nothing to her mother and sisters. She watched as Buster sat down next to her father then, poker-faced, served the latecomers their lunch. Buster smiled up at her, smiled at her father. Could it be that in two short days Buster had climbed out of the slough of questionable provenance to be accepted as suitable company for their daughter? Mrs. Stumplehorst, who was watching Buster’s moment in the sun, redirected her attention to Destiny—the mother’s kestrel’s eye detecting a damning blush on her suprasternal notch.
“Keep him away from our daughter,” she hissed to her oblivious husband.
Stumplehorst harrumphed. He was alive and not about to let his wife ruin the triumph of his resurrection.
“Take a powder,” he said. Then turning to Buster, the new apple of his eye, “How’s the beef, son?”
“Top shelf,” Buster said, but it was the heap of mashed potatoes that he found more interesting. Beneath, was a folded piece of notebook paper. He was careful to slip the note into his hand without the old lady seeing him read it under the table. It said, Get them to take you to the Puster Auction.