You get the impression, coming over the ridge, that the Bar None goes on forever, but when I ask Mr. Jessup how big the ranch is, he says, “Big enough,” and leaves it at that.
We been out on the trail for a mile or more before the sun comes up and turns everything the color of pink cotton candy, the kind will make your teeth hurt with sweetness. Mr. Jessup stops his rodeo horse and takes a deep breath, like he wants to inhale that pretty pink color, which before long starts to turn into that shade of orange you get when you crack open a fresh cantaloupe.
Maybe I’m thinking about candy and melons because we ain’t had breakfast yet. The way it works, you have to get up early in the morning if you want to ride the back country at the Bar None. I figure Lady was so easy to saddle because she was still asleep, and here she is following along behind Pit Stop and Marzy Doats like it’s the most natural thing in the world. You already heard about Pit Stop, and Rick’s horse is called Marzy Doats, from some dumb old song I never heard before. He’s this old, toffee-colored gelding with a star blaze on his forehead and white stockings, and Rick says he’s a real gentleman with manners better than most people.
After Mr. Jessup gets a sniff of the sunrise, he giddyaps his horse and says, “Let’s get a move on, I smell coffee.”
I take a deep breath, but all I smell is green grass and morning dew and a couple of fresh horse buns old Marzy Doats left steaming on a rock. But pretty soon I figure out that’s just the way Mr. Jessup talks about things, because what he means about smelling the coffee is that it’s time to make some. There’s this spot further on down the trail, just where it starts to level out at the bottom of the valley, where stones have been laid out in a circle, and you can see the black and soot from a lot of campfires.
We stop there and tie off the horses while Rick unpacks all this cooking gear from his saddlebags.
“I bet you worked up an appetite,” Mr. Jessup says. “What’d we bring for grub? Hardtack and beans?”
“Cold beans,” says Rick. “And moldy biscuits.”
You’d never know they’re fooling to hear them talk, but they are, because before you know it Rick is brewing up a pot of boiled coffee over an open fire and he’s got a big iron skillet spattering with slabs of bacon and fresh eggs and brown bread from a can. Rick puts evaporated milk in his tin mug of coffee, but I take mine black just like Mr. Jessup, and I like it fine.
Nothing ever smelled so good as that thick bacon sizzling away, and like Mr. Jessup says, we’re about ready to chew the saddles off the horses before Rick heaps it all in these dented tin plates he carries around in his saddlebags. “What you do is mush up the eggs on the brown bread and pick your teeth with the bacon,” he says. “Go on and try it.”
He don’t have to tell me twice. We set ourselves down around the campfire and just dive into that food and I’m wishing Joe Dilly would have come along, because he sure would get a kick out of this. How clear and right and simple everything seems when you’re outside under a big sky, and you’re hungry, and there’s plenty of good food to eat.
“You notice how sure-footed that pony was, coming down the steep part of the trail?” Rick says to Mr. Jessup.
Mr. Jessup sips his coffee and nods. “I noticed,” he says.
“You can’t teach an animal to be sure-footed,” Rick says to me. “They have it or they don’t.”
“Lady’s the best pony in the world,” I say.
Rick and Mr. Jessup look at each other and smile. Rick says, “I remember my first horse, Serita. She was a broodmare that couldn’t foal no more, so she wasn’t worth but a few dollars. I sure did love her though.”
“Mine was Bart,” Mr. Jessup says. “A mustang stallion. I never did break him. He broke me.”
“More coffee?” asks Rick.
“Don’t mind if I do,” says Mr. Jessup.
“Fill ’er up,” I say, holding out my mug, too, and for some reason that makes them both laugh. They give me the coffee, though, and another helping of bacon, and by the time we climb back up on the horses I’m about ready to burst.
We go along slow until the food shakes out and settles, like Rick says, and all I have to do is keep my balance and look around to see Lady don’t step in a gopher hole. She sees ’em before I do, though, and picks her way around.
Mr. Jessup rides on ahead a little ways, and that’s when I notice he’s got his own personal way of riding. He sits up real straight in the saddle and his feet kind of pedal in the stirrups, like he’s walking. I try to do it, but it won’t work for me, so I go back to my own way.
It’s just starting to really warm up so you can see the heat making the ground blurry when Mr. Jessup points up to a bluff and says, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to pay my respects.”
Rick stops his horse while Mr. Jessup rides on up to the bluff on his own. When he’s most of the way up there Rick says to me, “That’s where he and Sadie and little Nick used to picnic.”
When I don’t say nothing, Rick takes off his hat and goes, “I guess maybe you didn’t know that Mr. Jessup had a wife and child that died. Road accident. Hit by a drunk cowboy.”
I don’t know what to say about that, because it seems so awful. But maybe that’s why Mr. Jessup sometimes looks like he’s listening real hard when there’s nothing to hear.
“Little Nick would be about your age now,” Rick says. “Don’t mention I told you unless he brings it up himself.”
“I won’t,” I say.
The funny thing is, when Mr. Jessup comes back down from the bluff he don’t look sad at all. He looks exactly the same, except he’s even more quiet than usual.
“Lovely morning,” he says. “Let’s ride on.”
So that’s what we do, we ride on, away from the ridge and the bluffs and the steep parts of the trail, and all around us the country starts to change, real gradual. Where before it was all wild grass and rolling fields of alfalfa, and here and there stands of low piney trees, now you can’t find but a few blades of grass. There’s mostly just rusty-looking dirt and a few scraggly cactus, and once in a while an old mesquite tree so thick with knuckles and twigs it looks like somebody throwed it away.
Rick calls this place the back country, and he says it’s pretty close to the high desert except not quite so dry. It ain’t lush or green, but there’s something about it I like. The way you can see where the wind blows by the way it squiggles up the dirt in long furrows, and the quiet in your ears, and the feeling of how big the sky gets, and how far away it looks to the edge of the world.
I guess some folks think all that emptiness looks plain ugly, but I feel right at home even though I’ve never been to this spot before. It just seems right, like I already know this place in my bones and under my skin.
“We’re in high cactus now,” Rick says. “Once in a blue moon it rains out here. Then all the flowers bloom.”
I figure they’re pulling my leg except nobody laughs, so I guess it really does happen sometimes, even if you can’t see anything like a flower in all that red dirt.
Lady seems to like it, too. She keeps snorting and checking out the high desert smells, and sometimes she skitters sideways if a gust of wind licks her. I keep the reins in my left hand like you’re supposed to, but it don’t really matter about the reins because Lady just follows along behind Rick’s horse, and walks where he walks. She knows more about it than I do.
We must have come a couple or three miles into the back country, following this trail that looks like it might have been a creek bed once upon a time, when all of a sudden Lady stops dead in her tracks. She puts her head up and flicks her ears forward and makes this whinny sound deep in her throat.
I’m about ready to give her a giddyap and put her mind back on her business when suddenly I hear this dry, ratchety noise, sounds like somebody winding on a broken music box.
“Rattlesnake,” says Rick.
That’s the last thing he says to me for a while because right about then Lady takes off like a bolt of lightning.
It happens so fast I can’t tell how it started. One second she’s standing there, sort of frozen and scared, and the next she’s going about a hundred miles an hour, straight at this patch of sorrel cactus, and I’m hanging on for dear life.
The only reason I don’t fall off and break my neck is I’m too surprised to think. There’s nothing in my head but this bright yellow noise, and it’s all I can do to wrap my arms around her neck and hold on tight. The reins are flying over my head and there’s no way Lady can miss this bunch of cactus that are coming up faster than a rocket. I figure I’ll look like a pincushion, or worse.
Then suddenly she leans to the other side, dodging around, and the cactus are flying by so close I can feel the wind they make, and she’s turning so hard and fast the red dirt is exploding under her hooves like hand grenades or something.
For a second I get a look behind me and there’s Mr. Jessup riding hell-bent for leather, trying to catch up. He’s smacking his hat on Pit Stop’s rump, and that rodeo horse is flat out, but he’s not gaining much.
Then I can’t look back because Lady is scrabbling sideways to get around another cactus, and the way she lunges ahead, stretching her neck out and picking up speed, it makes me think she’s got over being scared and now she’s having fun.
I ain’t having much fun, though. Bent over like I am with my arms around her neck, that saddle horn is banging right into my gut, and finally I just give up and sit back and expect the worst.
I figure the only reason I don’t fall off is I worked up such a sweat that I’m stuck on that saddle like a suction cup. Right about then the reins bounce up near to hand and I try pulling back, not that Lady’s in a mind to pay attention — she’s having a wild time of it going fast and seeing if she can run backward and upside-down all at the same time.
What happens in the end is she tires herself out and finally slows down and puts on the brakes on her own, without any help from me. She’s standing there shaking her head and sneezing on all the dust she raised, and that’s when Mr. Jessup catches up.
Both he and his horse look the same rusty color, all lathered up with the dirt and dust, and his eyes are squinted almost shut. I can tell he’s looking at me, though. He shakes his head and coughs and after he gets his breath back he says, “Holy cow, that was a run, wasn’t it? How’d you manage to stay on, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I tell him my theory about the sweat making my butt into a suction cup and he gets to laughing so hard he starts to cough again. Then Rick catches up to us on old Marzy Doats, and he gets down and rummages around in his saddlebag and gives us each a rag to clean up with, and he passes around a water canteen, which really hits the spot.
“What do you think?” Rick says to Mr. Jessup. “Aside from the fact that this boy is a natural-born rider, I mean.”
Mr. Jessup takes a swig out of the canteen and screws the lid back on, real careful. “I think I never saw a pony so fast out of the gate,” he says. “And did you see the way she cut around that sorrel cactus and then took off?”
“I saw it,” says Rick.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” says Mr. Jessup.
“I expect so,” says Rick.
“Yep,” says Mr. Jessup, nodding to himself. “This little filly might have the makings of a quarter-mile racer.”
Soon as he says that I get this sick feeling inside, because I figure that means he’ll want her back. So at first it don’t sink in when he says, “What do you think, Roy? You want to race your pony in the rodeo?”