wrote this episode of the continuing story. Enjoy: Wes was the Wrangler until he got run off and the job fell to me. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t ever done it before. Wes was gone and the horses needed to be wrangled. Albert started me out on a horse, named Jack, which was short for Jackpot. He was big and gentle and had been a hell of a horse in his day. He worked cattle until younger horses came along. They weren’t any better, just younger. He worked less and less until now we just used him to wrangle the other horses and then we’d put him out to pasture. Anyway, like I said, he was a hell of a horse. One time a hired man was riding him when he roped a steer. As the rope landed on the steer, old Jackpot slammed on the brakes. The cinch happened to be loose, the steer was big, and moving fast, so when the cowboy dallied on the saddle horn and Jack planted his front feet, the saddle shot right on out over his head. The cinch pulled his front legs out from under him and he went right down on his belly. The steer was still making tracks and the hired man didn’t even come out of the stirrups until the saddle hit the ground about ten feet in front of old Jack. But those days were over now. I was just starting out and Jack was winding down. There were about sixty head in the remuda. Young and old, some were good for trail rides with guests or packing hunters in the fall. Others were best suited for working cattle. Most days and nights they were out grazing on the open range, but on days when we needed them for work, we gathered them into a pasture behind the tack shed and fed them hay. The range was on the other side of the two-lane highway. It had three ridges separated by three draws or canyons. There was a drift fence above timberline on the third ridge to keep them from wandering off into the forest. The horses could graze anywhere on this side of the fence, but they generally went where the feed was best. It was more likely you were going to find them in a draw with decent grass than up on some steep or rocky slope. Once they were all gathered into a single herd they would usually head to the corral over by the tack shed. They didn’t really need to be driven. They knew what to do. The guests were all rich and they lived back East. They were doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers; guys like that, with money coming out of their ass. When school was out they brought their families out West, for a vacation. Nobody like them lived in my neighborhood back home. Men where I came from worked for living. They worked at the railroad, the stockyards, the slaughterhouse, or at one of the oil refineries. They were laborers, masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, steel workers, truck drivers, and equipment operators, but nobody was rich and nobody had smooth hands with long thin fingers. If they had all ten fingers they for sure weren’t long and thin and smooth. Shaking hands with guests was like nothing you wanted to do too often. When a man shakes your hand you need to feel like he knows what’s up, not like he doesn’t have a clue. The daughters of the rich guys were all good looking and mostly in college. Money must make you good looking, because they all had clean straight hair, long legs, clear skin, and thin smooth hands. None of them worked. The sons were like their dads except they were pimply-faced. They were soft-handed, like they sat around reading books and doing homework. Their hands were soft and sweaty. Their arms were skinny. They probably never had a blister or a callous in their life. None of them knew anything about me and I didn’t know anything about them. They lived in another world. Nobody knows you and you don’t know them unless your paths crossed. Maybe everybody is just trying to figure it out, but what they have to figure out is different than you. Figuring out how to be rich or soft or good looking would be different than trying to figure out how to be a wrangler or a ranch hand. Sometimes it had to do with the roll of the dice or the hand you got dealt. It didn’t seem like there was any rhyme or reason to why somebody had the high cards in the hand and somebody else might as well fold before the betting even began. My life was nothing like the life of any of the guests or anybody else for that matter. Everybody was just floating downstream, living their life, and trying to figure it out. Playing the hand they’d been dealt. They were still lying in bed with a warm quilt tucked up under their chin and I was saddled up and headed out in the dark morning to get the horses. The difference between me and them was that they were paying and I was getting paid, and when I got back with the horses we would be doing the same thing, breathing the same air, and seeing the same view. There’s a lot of bluff and bullshit in the world. Sometimes that just comes with the territory. You needed to keep your cards pretty close to your chest and keep an eye out. You never know what might be coming your way. The water was trickling quietly as I rode across the heavy wooden bridge over the creek that ran past the big house. There was hardly any moon as I crossed the highway. A mama coyote and a litter of pups were yipping on this side of the first ridge. Everything else was still and dark. The two-lane highway ran right through the middle of a ranch that was up the valley a few miles. The main house and most of the out buildings were up on a little rise on the south side of the road that was mostly surrounded by hay fields. Beyond the house there were some soft rolling hills of sagebrush that led up to a rocky plateau and then on to the mountains beyond. The land on the north side of the road was more hay fields that slowly turned into bottom ground and then met the river as it made a wide sweeping bend on that side of the valley. The old man who had owned the place had died a few years ago and left it to his wife and two boys. He had left them more than a thousand head of pure bred Black Angus cattle and you could tell at one time it had been a hell of a place. They had good water, plenty of feed, winter pastures and summer range, decent equipment, well-built barns, sheds and shops, access to timber, and acres and acres of land, but it was all falling down. If the widow was anything like my mom, she had her hands full with a broken heart, and who could blame the boys for not being able to step in and do what their dad had done? It’s not like you can just step in and fill a man’s shoes just because he steps aside. People said they were as worthless at “teats on a boar,” which must be pretty damn worthless or they would have compared them to something else. That’s the hand they got dealt. My mom thought she was just like Jackie Kennedy because they were both widows. She might have thought she was like the widow woman that lived up the highway with the two worthless boys, except we never got a ranch with a thousand head of Black Angus cattle, and my dad damn sure hadn’t been President of the United States. Some of the reasons people said the boys were worthless was because the fences were falling down, the irrigation ditches needed to be burned clear of last years grass, the hay fields had dry spots where they didn’t get water, and sometimes the hay that was down got rained on and wasted. Then there was that time a couple of years ago when they had been moving cattle on the highway too late in the afternoon. They had been out raising hell the night before and slept late. Daylight got away from them and some woman, driving down the canyon, plowed into the herd just after dusk. She broke her back and got paralyzed from the waist down. She might have been driving like a bat out of hell, but the boys got stuck with being worthless. Shit runs downhill, and with their dad dying an all, they were at the bottom of the hill. They got lucky to have a ranch to care for, but it was too damn big to get their arms around. Sometimes getting nothing might be easier than getting something. If you got nothing, nobody is going to be saying you’re worthless. All they can say is that you got nothing. After old Jackpot got warmed up, and the morning started to brighten up a bit, I reined him up to a cantor so we could get the horses gathered. Luckily they were in two places instead of scattered all over hell, so in no time we were moving back toward the ranch. The horses turned to their heads toward the house and started off on a lope, kicking up a tail of dust. The guests were anxious to go on a trail ride, so they were all standing along the south side of the house as the herd crossed the highway. They galloped across the wooden bridge that spanned the little stream and headed toward the corral. Sixty head of galloping horses sounds like a thunderstorm coming down on your head. It’s so loud you can damn near see the lightning. The hair on the back of your neck stands up and you get chills all over to hear that kind of weight and strength and power. The horses moved easily into the round corral by the tack shed. I reined up, dismounted, and slapped Jack on the ass as I closed the gate behind us. Wading through the dusty swirling sea of horseflesh, you could smell the sweat, adding your smell and heat to theirs, Panting, Hearts beating, Eyes flashing, Hooves pacing, Heads reaching, Long tails brushing, Shoulders and hind quarters pressing, Muscles flexing, Crowding, Moving, Settling, Standing, Stopping, Waiting. The guests climbed on the corral poles, gathered, and gawked. Sixty horses slowly moved out of the way as I led my horse from the gate to the tack shed. I took off Jackpot’s bridle and saddle and got another bridle. He was done for the day. I picked Dusty for the afternoon ride. We made eye contact and he stopped where our eyes met. Everyone stared as I walked up to him, brushed his sides and stroked his neck; put the bit in his mouth, and the bridle over his head. I wrapped the reins around a pole and went into the tack shed for his saddle. When I finished with Dusty, I turned to the guests. I asked a golden haired girl with eyes the color of the sky which horse she wanted to ride. Three or four years older than me, she blushed, and pointed at a similarly colored Palomino with a blonde tail and long blonde mane. I went back to the tack shed and got the bridle and saddle of a little mare named Sally. When I was finished, I handed her the reins, helped her mount, and adjusted the stirrups. One after another, they picked the horse they wanted to ride. The boys stared. The men wanted to be young again. They wanted a different life. They would have traded all that they had accumulated, over a lifetime, to be a wrangler in a sea of horses, but they had wanted ease and comfort more than life; they were weak. They had always been weak. Their fingers were thin. Their skin was pale. They liked to read. They were rich. They were soft. They knew it and they knew that I knew it. Their daughters wanted to have my children.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 04:42:23 +0000
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