1
A long cloud of dust trailed the black sedan racing down a caliche road toward the Walter Dunne spread. The horizon was dark and the mesquite trees bent in the north wind, waving at Mexico. A few idle pump jacks were rusting amid the creosote bushes. A slight rise lay just ahead, revealing a low-slung adobe wall encompassing the graveyard.
The land was hard, dry, used up. The people who lived in these parts were also hard. Their ancestors settled on giant claims back when there was grass enough for cattle, but generation after generation had seen it wither away. Those who remained on the land were marooned by history. There were no cities within hundreds of miles. The remaining towns were little more than hamlets with half the buildings evacuated like old movie sets. An occasional gas station marked the intersection of county roads, but it was likely abandoned so long ago that the company it represented was extinct as well. You could go for days without seeing another human being, or even hearing your own voice until you had reason to speak. Airliners streaked across the high sky, and from that distant vantage passengers enjoying their cocktails might look down and think, Jeez, what a huge, empty, totally worthless country. And they’d go back to their crossword. You could almost hear the shades snapping shut as they jetted by.
The service was already under way when L. D. Sparks parked his Lincoln at the end of a line of pickups and slipped into the crowd of mourners—a respectable turnout, befitting the prominence of the decedent. Some men were in suits but most wore dress jeans and shirts with pearl snap buttons, the women in somber dresses, purchased from catalogs, that reached to their Sunday boots. Their faces were lean and leathery and strongly formed, marked by the sun, faces you rarely saw in the soft suburbs, more like old family photographs, ancestral in nature, plain and unprettified and not to be trifled with. It was the hands that you finally noticed, chapped and red and laced with veins like braided rope, palms as hard as oak, some men could barely make a fist, and when you shook it was like grasping a brick. They were scarred from accidents and animal bites, knuckles broken by obstreperous equipment, some were missing digits. You couldn’t live in these parts without getting hurt. Compared to a lot of folks, Walter Dunne passed into the next world with enviable ease, his heart having failed to keep the beat.
The tent over the grave bucked and billowed in the wind. Anywhere else you’d think it was about to rain, but there was no water in the approaching storm, a blue norther, bringing nothing but cold and trouble. The pastor, gray-bearded with the eyes of a benevolent fanatic, was leading a hymn, and because nearly everybody went to the same Church of Christ in Fort Davis, they joined expertly in the a cappella singing:
Yonder, yonder! Yonder in the great beyond
Peace and love await
Beyond the pearly gate
Over yonder in the great beyond!
L.D. hadn’t been to church since the Nixon administration, but the song found its way back into his mouth as easily as if he had been singing it that very morning. The familiar harmonies awakened memories, not altogether unpleasant, of his long-forsaken youthful piety, enforced by family and community and really everyone he knew. But look at him now, the silver-haired cynic in a gray western-cut suit and handmade boots, tall, slender, suave, part of the scene and apart from it, a man who knew exactly where he ought to be, on top of the world and in control.
Governor Abbott was there and said a few kind words of the sort that might be said of anyone not convicted of a felony. The deceased and the governor represented different parties, but L.D. thought it a smart move on Abbott’s part to plant a flag in the district, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War, but after Trump the chickens were out of the coop. At least, L.D. hoped so. The governor slyly called Walter a “friend and occasional ally,” overlooking votes that might be inconvenient to recall in the face of the fierce widow in the front row with the folded flag of Texas in her lap. Walter might be dead, but his influence lingered.
After the eulogies—there must have been seven or eight of them, all on the same themes, good family man, selfless public servant, little truth in any of it—L.D. got in line to toss a few desiccated clods into Walter’s grave. He noticed old Ben Fortson hobbling in his direction so he moved off a bit to avoid him, but Ben would not be dodged.
“My oh my oh my, looky who’s here,” Ben said, his eyes alight with deviltry.
“Good day to you, Judge.”
“You come all this way for Walter Dunne?”
“He was a good man.”
“True or not, he’s no use to you now,” Ben observed.
“You’re a harsh old bastard, Ben.”
Ben’s laugh detoured into a dry cough. “I seen you casting your eyes over this lot,” he said when he recovered.
“I mighta been,” L.D. allowed. “What’s it to you?”
“Walter’s not even in the ground and you’re shopping for his replacement.”
“Not shopping. Poking around, like.”
“Waste of your time.” Ben spat into the dust, the only moisture the soil had experienced in months. “You oughter run over to Alpine, talk to the mayor, he’s got an appetite for higher office, they tell me. Sees hisself as governor one day.”
“He’s about as likely to get a blow job from the Queen of England.” L.D. indicated a portly man with slicked-back hair, dyed black, and jowls like a Great Dane. “What about Morales? Big family, Chamber of Commerce…”
“Cartel money,” Ben said under his breath.
A prosperous-looking figure was shaking hands with everybody in reach. “That would be who?” L.D. asked.
“Charlie Ford. Owns the bank in Marfa. Beats his wife.”
L.D. sighed. He had never expected this to be easy, especially out here in ground zero of nowhere. These people didn’t seem entirely real to him, more like actors with strong features, rounded up and dressed appropriately for a scene in which L.D. discovers the next Ronald Reagan. How likely was that? And they certainly felt the same about him, a stock character from the Big City in a gray Italian suit who happens to drop in, a visit to the zoo. He even had the pocket square, a true dude.
“A female would be nice,” he said. “Keep up with the times.”
“Valerie Nightingale!” Ben said, practically dancing a jig. “County commissioner. Veteran. Helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. Tough, smart, everything you dream of.”
“You’re making me hard,” said L.D.
“Only one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s not of your tribe. And she’s gonna announce next week.”
L.D. nodded as if he knew all about Valerie Nightingale. He didn’t like to lag behind the rumor mill, especially when it was bad news. He didn’t like it at all. “Nobody’s unbeatable,” he said irritably. “Just need the right candidate. Someone young, popular, and smart.”
“Smart enough to let you do his thinking for him.”
“Merely helping the democratic process along,” said L.D., studying his nails, which were perfect.
“Raping virgins, more like it,” said Ben. “And at a funeral to boot.”
Just then the norther hit with a wallop of wind, blowing hats off half the men, who chased through the gravestones after their tumbling Stetsons.
The same wind coursed through the parking lot of the auction house in Fort Stockton as Sonny Lamb unloaded fifteen heifers into the livestock pens. They were polled Herefords, a breed valued for its toughness, fertility, and ability to survive on native grasses. But they were also, in Sonny’s opinion, supremely handsome animals, with immense, soulful eyes and sweet dispositions, slow moving and unrufflable, as if the minute hand and the hour hand had changed places on their inner timepieces—a calming influence, in other words. The truth is Sonny didn’t have the emotional distance to be a cowman. He named all his animals and could easily distinguish them. Sometimes when he walked the pasture he felt like a teacher entering the classroom and saying hello to the children. He might have fared better in a less intimate profession. At least the teacher didn’t have to sell off his students to make a buck.
He looked the part of a cowboy, though—tall and broad shouldered, with a tan line on his forehead where his hat came to a stop. When he smiled, a network of sunbaked wrinkles went to work, crinkling his eyes and dimpling his cheeks. His nose inclined a bit toward his left shoulder, the result of a foul ball on the high school baseball field. His stance was a little swaybacked, and his Adam’s apple raced up and down, especially when he sang. He was a darn good singer. If you were next to him in church, you’d notice him harmonizing. But his speaking voice was subdued, like a lot of folks out here, contrary to what you might think of a country so unbounded that you’d want to shout for attention. No. Their voices echoed the hush of the place, distant bird calls, whispers, hums, mumbled confessions, rustling leaves, the creaking of the windmill, all so subdued that a forceful sneeze would startle the dead.
In this underpopulated part of the world, where everybody knew everybody, reputations formed in grade school shadowed a person all the way to the grave. Sonny was widely known as a good-hearted loser, friendly, never met a stranger, fun to chew the fat with, smart enough but you wouldn’t mistake him for Einstein. He’d had a rough go of it, the war and all, but he married above himself and settled into the modest life that was offered out here.
He knew what they thought. Now, with the drought, Sonny was bumping close to the bottom, facing a diminishing future in the ranching business, but hardly alone in that. The prospect of failure sharpened his ambition to do something, be somebody, but those blanks had yet to be filled in. Life hadn’t turned out the way he had hoped. Like a lot of wounded people in this part of the world he parked his failed dreams in a mental corral.
The auction manager tallied the cattle emerging from the trailer. “Fifteen heifers,” he noted. He pasted tags on each.
“And the bull,” Sonny remarked.
The auction manager recognized Sonny. They had played ball together at Sul Ross State University. Joe Frank Schotz. His father owned the sale house. “Splendid animal. Sure you want to sell?”
“Want has nothing to do with it.”
“I hear that.” Joe Frank took a closer look at the bull: reddish-brown saddle and pure white face with curls from his nose to his horns. You’d want to kiss him, but you’d have to respect the raw power in the animal, the mass of muscle that makes a man feel mouse-like by comparison. “He’s a beast,” Joe Frank said. “Awful pretty. Got nuts like soccer balls. Registered, I’ll bet.”
“I brought the papers.”
“Sonny, I gotta tell you this ain’t the best time to go to market with an animal like this. What’s his name?”
“Joaquin.”
“Joaquin. Goddamn. What a sweetheart.” Joe Frank tore off the tally sheet and handed it to Sonny. “Hope you get what you came for.”
Sonny hosed down Joaquin and gave him a thorough shampoo, followed by a blow dry and a light buzz with a beard trimmer to even out the pelt. Normally, Joaquin liked primping for a show, he was quite the vain creature, but Sonny felt him trembling. “Settle down, buddy,” he whispered as Joaquin’s ear bent toward him. “You’ll have a whole new harem. One day you’re gonna thank me.”
The auctioneer stood on a podium over the sawdust arena, spitting out numbers in a cascade of sixteenth notes as the ring manager paraded an emaciated steer in front of a couple dozen ranchers, who were more likely to be sellers than buyers. The animal and the audience shared a sleepy acceptance regarding their destiny, accounting for the submerged quality of the proceedings. Too many folks like Sonny had made the mistake of waiting for rain that never came. Now they were unloading their herds in a hurry, capsizing the market. The land wasn’t the only thing that had dried up; money had moved on, followed by hope. West Texas waged eternal war on optimists.
Powdery motes swam in the air. Sonny spotted Doris at the top of the bleachers, so he hiked himself up the stairs. She had lines in her face that would do the Marlboro Man proud. Used to being the object of gossip just short of scandal, Doris surrounded herself with a harsh sense of humor like an electric fence, which kept the critics at a respectful distance. She ran the café in Alpine. She was a character. She was also Sonny’s mother.
“What are you doing here?” Doris asked as Sonny sat down.
“I might ask the same of you.”
“I just came to ogle the boys,” Doris said, flicking the ash off her cigarette. “Look at the ass on that one.”
Sonny didn’t respond to that. It could be a joke or she could be dead serious.
“You got any stock left?” Doris asked.
“We’re hanging on to the calves. Hope for better next year.”
“Ed put down three heifers,” Doris said. “Right out in the field. Too weak to get in the trailer.”
“Really, Mom, why are you here?”
“I’m seeing Bud Schotz,” she said, indicating the auctioneer, Joe Frank’s dad. Buddy Holly glasses and a jaw like a doorknob.
“Is that really true?”
“We’re an item,” she declared. “We’ve been seen together.”
“Well, I guess that’s good news.”
“You guess right. He’s a man of means, and, you know, still functioning below the belt buckle.”
“Mom, stop.”
“Tender little ears you got.”
Sonny had a kid sister, Marlene, who had long since packed up and moved off to Bangor, Maine, which if you look at the map is about the farthest point in the continental United States from Presidio County. So the parenting duties, in the sense of taking care of Doris, not the other way around, rested entirely on Sonny.
“Any buyers here?”
“Mostly the slaughterhouse. Fatso in the flat-brim buckaroo.” Doris indicated a corpulent individual down front.
“Keep your voice down, Mom. He’s looking at you.”
“Horrors.”
Bud Schotz slammed his gavel down as the slaughterhouse man took a pencil off his ear and made another mark on his tablet. It was painful to watch. Even Doris was respectfully silent as, one by one, the slaughterhouse man with his scarcely perceptible nod bought the entire lot. There was an air of stultifying indifference about him that wafted through the auditorium like anesthesia.
Half an hour later, the first of Sonny’s heifers came up. They were all fine breeding stock, but that didn’t matter now, they were destined for hamburger. In an hour or so they would crowd into a semi and journey to a feedlot in the Panhandle, camp out there about five months, but more likely seven or eight months considering the shape these cows were in, until they reached their ideal weight, around 1,200 to 1,400 pounds. Eat and shit, it wasn’t much different from life on the ranch, except rudely concentrated, just a trough of water and bins of grain, no wandering around the pasture looking for Mom or nosing about with siblings. The smell is worse than anything you’ve ever encountered, which is why the feedlots are set as far as possible from human habitation, God help anyone within a mile of the place. Then it’s off to the packing plant, a polite term for the execution chamber. The cows arrive already washed, as if they’re going on a date, and unfed, to minimize contamination. They smell death ahead as they’re goaded into the chute, which curves to blind them from seeing what’s about to happen, but they know. They moan and weep. And then blackness as a bolt slams square in the middle of the forehead and interrupts their consciousness, a humane gesture that is also thought to enhance the flavor of the meat. A chain grabs hold of the left hind leg, and up they go onto the rail. Throat quickly cut, the bleeding begins, followed by skinning, splitting of the carcass, cooling, then the butcher gets to work. Today a cow; tomorrow, a T-bone. Civilization is built on such.
Suddenly the atmosphere in the auction house quickened. “Sonny, is that Joaquin?” Doris asked when the bull charged into the arena as if it belonged to him. It was like seeing a heavyweight champ burst into a club gym. The crowd sat up, abuzz, studying Joaquin’s stats on a screen above the auctioneer’s podium.
“All right, all right, very fine bull, two years old, got his papers right here,” Bud said, waving the registration certificate in the air. “This is a foundation animal. Put him in your front pasture and folks will take notice. Start the bidding at ten thousand. TEN-TEN-TEN GIMME TEN-TEN-ten-ten…”
Some sales start slow. Bud knew the proper value of every animal that came into the ring. Even with a modest opening bid, you sometimes got a little resistance. Still, he was puzzled by the immobilized bidders before him, given the charismatic animal in the ring. “TEN-TEN-TEN.” Bud never liked to drop a bid because it reflected on his own estimation of the bottom line, but there was no reserve on the sale, so he forged ahead. “NINE-NINE-NINE DO I HEAR NINE-NINE-NINE-nine…EIGHT!” Again Bud paused, which he never did, and surveyed the sparse crowd imploringly. An auctioneer can sense when the audience digs in its heels. He knows that the sellers have placed their trust in his ability to charm the dollars out of those pockets, and if he fails, mortgages don’t get paid, hay doesn’t get bought, careers end. So do marriages. In a good year—back when there were good years—ranchers would bring stock to auction and walk away with what might be the only check they got until the following spring. Many were now living month to month. It was a heavy load to carry, and Bud did so nobly. “You wanna improve your breeding program, this bull is for you!” Bud said. “C’mon folks, don’t let this opportunity pass you by. I know there’s hard times out there but this is a once-in-a-lifetime bargain. Let’s start again, at SEVEN-SEVEN-SEVEN…”
People were dead still, some actually sitting on their hands, fighting the urge. Sonny could see they were embarrassed for him. Meantime, Joaquin pranced around and pawed the sawdust, like the only living creature on the planet, his hot breath clouding the chill air.
“FIVE!” Bud cried. “Folks, I’ve never done this before, but if I don’t hear five I’m gonna stop the auction. There’s no way this fine animal should sell for less than half his worth. So there you have it. Five or we bring in the next animal.”
Bud’s gavel was in midair when the slaughterhouse man tipped his buckaroo.
“FIVE-FIVE GIMME SIX, NOW FIVE, GIMME SIX-SIX-SIX,” pause, then less forcefully, “Six, six, I have five, do I hear five and a half?” Bud’s eyes scanned the crowd, pleadingly, looking for anyone who would spare Joaquin the indignity of the slaughterhouse. Surely, as cattlemen, they must perceive the absence of justice, the offense against nature.
Doris raised her hand. Bud gave her a look and pointedly ignored her bid. “FIVE-FIVE, GOING ONCE, GOING—.”
“SIX!” Doris called out so the whole world could hear. Bud rolled his eyes. “Six from the cowgirl in back,” he said, “who ain’t got her head screwed on today.”
“Mom, what are you doing?” Sonny demanded.
“I need a new pet,” she said. “I’m lonely.”
“What are you gonna do, sell the café?”
Fortunately, the slaughterhouse man bid six and a half.
“Seven!” said Doris.
“Mom, you don’t have seven thousand dollars,” Sonny said under his breath. “Please stop.”
“Let’s get some other bidders in here,” Bud pleaded. “This is the finest animal we’ve had in here all week. SEVEN, I GOT SEVEN, NOW HALF, GIMME HALF—”
The slaughterhouse man nodded. You could see he was feeling competitive, perhaps a little jealous of his privilege to buy any damn animal he wanted. Maybe he had also heard Doris’s remark about his portliness and thought he’d give her something to think about. By now everyone in the bleachers was watching Doris. Bud also looked reluctantly in her direction. “Who’ll give me eight?” he said.
Doris was very still, then said, “I’m sorry, Sonny.”
“I know. Thanks, that meant a lot to me.”
“SEVEN AND A HALF, GOING ONCE, GOING TWICE—”
Sonny tipped his hat.
“EIGHT THOUSAND in back,” Bud said. “I’VE GOT EIGHT, GIMME NINE, EIGHT NOW NINE-NINE-NINE…”
Doris squeezed Sonny’s hand. Then the slaughterhouse man upped the bid, who knows why, maybe out of spite. It was far beyond a bargain for the purposes he had in mind.
“Nine thousand! Nine from the gentleman in front,” Bud cried. “Now we’re talking folks. This is one splendid animal, certainly worth more than that. Who’ll give me ten? TEN-TEN-TEN.”
Sonny nodded.
“Ten thousand dollars! Someone make it eleven, do I hear eleven?” Bud said, looking at the slaughterhouse man. But the slaughterhouse man shook his head, having made his point, and awarded Sonny a pitying smile.
“Sold!” Bud said, “to Sonny Lamb, his own damn bull!”
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
