CHAPTER

16

DINNER WAS BOURBON and they dined on the front steps in the cool evening air. Sixbury buttoned her heavy sweater, poured. David took his glass and the old woman cleared her throat, preparing to make a toast.

“To my son,” she said. “May he know enough to die well.”

David wanted to tell her that Patrick would return, for he truly believed this. He touched his glass to hers and drank. “You know,” he said, “a person meets a lot of people in a lifetime. Most times it’s nothing important or special, but other times, well, you know.” He took a swallow of whiskey. “Thanks for letting me stay here.”

“You pay your rent.” She looked at him. “I know what you’re trying to say. I’m glad you’re here.” Some sheep bleated out in the pasture. “Sheep are stupid,” she said. “They make awful mothers. Just walk right away from a newborn.”

“She goes back, doesn’t she?”

Sixbury looked at him. “If you grab her and drag her back. What you do is take the lamb and stick it under the ewe till it starts nursing. Problem is sometimes you don’t know who the mama is.”

“If you like, I’ll quit my job and help you around here.”

“No, we’ll manage.”

“It’s not as if I need the money.” With the check from the sale of his parents’ house he had plenty, but he didn’t want to quit, after the way Hraboy had hired him. Anyway, with the winter, his job would be reduced to visiting the area a couple times weekly to clean the restrooms and bag the trash. He emptied his glass and poured another.

“My God, I love the flavor of bourbon,” Sixbury said.

David leaned back and rested on his elbows. “So why am I here?” Sixbury just looked at him. “From Indochina to Slut’s Hole, Wyoming. Two places that as a child I didn’t know existed. It must be fate. It’s odd.”

“Well, I suppose it is odd,” she said, “but just odd.” She pushed to her feet and stepped out into the yard. She placed her fist in the small of her back and stretched. “I tried six times to have children before Patrick came. It was frustrating, but Frank would hold my hand each time and tell me we could stop trying if I wanted. Four miscarriages and stillborn twin girls. It was rough on Frank, as well.” She emptied her glass and let her hand drop to her thigh. “Then Patrick was born. Frank wasn’t even here. He was overseas. He came home to a little boy twenty months old, a boy who seemed healthy and normal, just a little sluggish. He didn’t walk till he was three.” She looked up, then threw her glass out into the darkness.

David put his glass down, walked over to her, and embraced her. Her arms circled about him and held tightly. He put a hand behind her head and pulled her so that his chin rested on her hair. He shut his eyes.

David had let things drift, but he hadn’t lost his perspective; instead, he had supplanted one for another. He’d misplaced memories of his sister, had rearranged his experience in Nam, and had come to think of this ranch on the Belle Fourche as home. He held on, as if for dear life, to the feeling he’d had while hugging Sixbury that cool evening. He loved her. Perhaps the war had affected him more than he realized. His family had never been a close one, and during his tour he’d not found himself missing them. News of his parents’ deaths had barely touched him; they were so far away. He had wondered then if he had ever been capable of loving anyone. He had wondered this during a night battle near Tam Ky when he’d imagined himself wounded and dying, and again after he had brutally fucked a young prostitute in Binh Dinh; he had wrapped his arms around her bony, eighty-pound frame, had felt her spine about to snap, only to thrust more violently. Afterward, she had been up quickly, counting her money, ignoring him while he dressed. He then had roamed the streets feeling weak, ashamed, inadequate.

But he loved Sixbury.

The week passed and no one reported having seen Patrick. Quinn Rutland, the big deputy, came to tell Sixbury that the sheriff department’s helicopter had made several sweeps over the basin without luck. The old woman took it all without a note of despair or frustration, saying at one point, while she and David were administering worm medicine to the sheep, “This old woman is tired, too tired even to kneel down and offer gentle supplication to God.” David straddled the back of a sheep and held its mouth open. Sixbury placed a pill in the tip of the long plastic applicator and shoved it down the animal’s throat. She then marked the sheep with blue dye and David let it go.

David stood straight, twisted at his waist, cracked his back. “There we go.” He watched as the old woman counted the remaining pills. “Thought I’d ride down to Laramie with Howard tomorrow after work.”

“Sounds good,” she said.

“Well, I’m not sure I’m going.”

She looked at him. “I’ll be fine, David. Go on; you need to get out.”

David decided then that he would follow Howard in his own car. Then he would be able to return early to Sixbury and he would also have a means to escape any particularly ugly situation with Sarah.