Montana Blue

CHAPTER TWO

MICAH DROVE ON.

“Yes sir,” he said, “this here’s the Splendid Sky Ranch. Gordon Campbell’s place is famous all over the West.”

He cocked his head and shot a sharp glance at Blue from under the brim of his hat.

“You ever heard of it?”

Blue met his gaze. He had to do it to prove he could conceal his shock and he did.

“Sure, everybody’s heard of the Wagontracks horses,” Micah said, “and I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t a line of ranch horses anywhere, including them famous ones in Oklahoma and Texas that can measure up to ours.”

Blue couldn’t even listen to him. How, in the name of all that was holy, had he ended up here so soon? He didn’t have his balance yet—hell, he wasn’t even used to trying to see in the sunshine.

“I started every horse in the Wagontracks cavvy for fifty year,” Micah said. “For the main ranch. How many head you reckon that amounts to?”

Blue’s gut clenched as he looked out his window at the main ranch. Gordon could be down there in the big headquarters house right now. Or out there in that pickup zipping down the paved, black road that led away from it. Or he could be that tiny man on top of the tiny horse way off riding across the pasture.

Micah answered his own question. “More’n a thousand head, and that guess is a little on the low side,” he said, pride lacing his voice. “Yessir, Blue, back then, I could ride ’em.”

The sound of his own name, a voice calling him Blue instead of Bowman, felt almost as warm as a friendly hand on his shoulder. He turned to look at the old man, who was staring through the windshield into the long distance.

“I was always limber as a cat and I could ride them sunfishin’ sumbitches all day long.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Blue said.

Either the words or the sincerity in them drew a flash of a glance from Micah, with some bright light in it that Blue couldn’t read.

“You got a good eye if you can see it now,” Micah said.

He used both hands to crank the wheel. The truck veered across the road and onto the gravel trail that followed the low ridge above the floor of the valley.

“Long time ago, when he seen he couldn’t run me off, Gordon gimme this cabin and barn. Said they was mine as long as I live.”

Blue looked at Micah’s place as they rattled up into the spot at the edge of the yard where the grass was worn away from years of parking the pickup. Everything there was made of logs a long time ago. Trees sheltered it all and the hill kept it from the north wind. In front of it, the whole West beckoned.

He tasted bitterness on his tongue.

Gordon could give a house and a barn to his wrangler but nothing to his family.

While Micah ground the gears and threw them into reverse, Blue looked again at the Splendid Sky—as much as a man could see of it at one time. There was the headquarters with the house his great-grandfather had built and all its many fine outbuildings dotted here and there, including plenty more nice houses provided for the help. Beneath it all was the land, rolling green and glittering down through the valley like a flung treasure.

This entire ranch should be theirs. His.

He had been robbed of his birthright.

If Gordon had married Tanasi Rose, if he had given his name to her and his children and raised them here, they would be here still. Dannah would never have become a junkie, Rose would never have killed herself, and Blue would not be a murderer.

His mother and Dannie would be alive.

His father had robbed him of them, too.

“You’ve heard of the Splendid Sky, then you’ve heard of Gordon Campbell,” the old man said.

The name spoken aloud rang strange in Blue’s ears, it had been so long silent in his mind.

“He ain’t well-liked, that’s nothing but the honest truth,” Micah said, “and I have to admit that he can be one high-handed son of a bitch. But I’ll say somethin’ for ol’ Gordon. He stands by his friends.”

Oh, yeah. And family. Don’t forget family.

Blue didn’t even want to hear the name again, it made him so bitter. But he said it anyway.

“Maybe you’re the only friend of Gordon Campbell.”

Micah chuckled.

“I reckon not,” he said, “there’s a few more, here and there.”

Blue found himself waiting for Micah to say who they might be, but he didn’t. Instead, he cranked the wheel around and started backing up to the gate of the round pen.

“We’ll run Roanie in there,” he said. “In a good mood, he’ll lead some but we ain’t takin’ no chances. I nearly got mashed to death in a trailer one time.”

He pulled forward, turned the wheel some more, and backed into exactly the right spot.

“Well, now, let’s get this roan ridgerunner unloaded ’fore he climbs the wall again and breaks his neck or one of them dainty legs of his,” he said, throwing open his door. “Then I’ll show you around the place.”

Blue wasn’t sure he wanted that. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to see except for this raunchy colt in all his glory. Anything else was questionable. He wanted to see how the colt moved, wanted to know his natural way of going, and beyond that, he couldn’t think.

He stepped down. Dainty was a good word for the way his own legs felt. They didn’t quite want to hold him up and he held on to the seat just for a minute. Feelings were his enemies—that had been so for ten years—and he couldn’t give in to them now.

Maybe he should’ve kept his paints. He’d poured his rage and loneliness into them and slapped it onto the canvas while he held himself completely separate from every person in the prison. That was how he had survived.

He needed to keep separate from Micah, too. It was a pity the old man had passed his prime but feeling sorry about Micah’s arthritis was what had brought him to the Splendid Sky on this first day out, and now here he was.

Of course, coming here was giving him a chance at a good horse—and it was putting Gordon in his sights. He had left prison wanting both those things, hadn’t he?

Both sides of the coin, that was what this world paid human beings for all the blood and sweat that they put into living. Turn over the good and a man could find the bad; turn over the bad and find the good.

He had already known that when he killed the pond-scum drug pusher who had led Dannah straight to her death. Or had he? Had he just now realized it, which meant it was the good side of the bad ten years in the pen?

He walked on back to the trailer, keeping step with Micah who was on the other side of it. Hell of a note. End up here at the Splendid Sky, first crack out of the box, when he’d imagined it all his life long.

Right now, he’d think about the horse. Nothing else.

He waited on the ground below the horse’s head until Micah had the gate open and had jammed the rusty pin of the trailer door up with his fist. The colt bared his teeth looking down at him.

Get up here. I’ll take a chunk out of you.

“Ready?” Micah said.

“Ready.”

Blue stepped onto the fender, pulled up on the strap of the halter, freed the tongue of the buckle from its hole and, therefore, the horse from the trailer. Roanie jerked his head away, clattered to the door and leapt out onto the ground of the round pen. Micah pushed the gate shut behind him and then the trailer door.

The two of them stood together and looked in between the logs of the old-time round pen. The colt reared high, came down with a snort and a fart and went ripping off around the circle again, pausing only to buck and rear some more when the notion struck him. After two of those circles, he settled down into a run and tore around the pen so fast he was a blur.

“How’d you get the halter on him?” Blue said.

“I got ’im halter broke,” Micah said. “Sort of. But I never could stay on him.”

He shook his head, took off his hat and put it back on again. Blue caught the smell of old felt and leather soaked with sweat.

“He’s a whole lot worse since I sent him over to the Little Creek Division boys,” Micah said. “Gordon oughtta fire every one of them out on his ass. But I found out I’d never be able to stay on him and I was hoping they could get him broke enough for me.”

Micah shook his head again, turned it, and spat on the ground.

“Gittin’ old is a hoary bitch,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

Blue gave a harsh laugh.

“I won’t,” he said.

And he probably wouldn’t, one way or the other.

He kept looking at the horse and feeling the old, mostly forgotten tug at his gut. The roan thundered by them again.

“Leave him,” Micah called over the noise. “You kin start on him tomorry.”

Tomorrow. Would he stay here? On the Splendid Sky?

Surely not. But maybe so. Hadn’t he been headed here anyhow?

He didn’t want to think about it. He turned away, went back to the trailer, stepped up onto the fender, and jerked the halter loose from the rail where it was tied.

He stepped down.

“I’m gonna have to try him now,” he said. “Open the gate for me.”

Micah did.

“This here pen’s built like all the old-time ones—with room for a man to roll out under the bottom log,” he said. “Git out if he takes after you. He never done that ’til he’d been to Little Creek.”

The warning pricked at Blue’s brain, but instead of thinking of himself facing the danger of a charging stud horse, he imagined Micah. The old guy had guts, crippled up as he was, to even try the colt.

Blue walked through the gate and toward the center of the pen. The roan colt blew by behind him, sticking close to the wall. He circled the pen twice more, then half again, slowing, slowing. He started trotting back and forth on the west side, his dappled hide shining in flashes as he went in and out of the sun. Then he came down to a walk.

He knew Blue was there but he wouldn’t even glance in his direction.

Blue walked toward him. His fingers tightened around the halter strap as he coiled the rope. Sweat broke out across his back. How could he have sense or skill enough to connect with a terrified horse on this day?

In this place?

But he knew how to go about trying it, and that was all he did know.

The roan stood still and turned his hindquarters to Blue.

On the outside of the pen, Micah was pacing Blue.

“What all has this horse gone through?” Blue called.

“I ain’t sure. Them Little Creek bastards say sell ’im to the rodeo.”

“So,” Blue said, watching the colt refuse to look at him, “how come you still have him?”

“I know different,” Micah said, and the swift certainty in his tone made Blue smile a little. “That bunch of no-counts couldn’t tell a good horse from a mountain goat in the bright light of the Judgment Morning.”

Blue glanced at him, then back at the roan. The old man was something else. You had to hand it to him.

“So you’re hell-bent on dragging somebody in here that can ride him?”

“I reckon you’re that somebody,” Micah said, with a satisfied chuckle.

A troubled horse would spend a great deal of energy avoiding even eye contact with a human being, and this one was surely troubled. Much more so, without a doubt, than if he’d never been tried by anyone but Micah.

Micah read that thought in Blue’s head from outside the pen.

“I hate I ever sent him over there,” he said.

“Water under the bridge,” Blue said.

He bit his tongue. What was this? Keep it up and he’d be as big a chatterbox as Micah. Although, truth to tell, he probably needed to learn to talk again he’d been silent so long.

The prick of pity he’d felt for Micah being too old to ride this colt wasn’t excuse enough to try to please him by fixing the horse. He would help this horse for the horse’s sake. He was trying to see if he wanted to buy him, that was all.

When he got close enough, still holding on to the end of the rope, he threw the halter onto the ground behind the horse. Instead of shifting his feet away from it and moving forward as Blue hoped, the roan kicked at it.

Blue took in a deep breath and then another, forcing them out through his mouth, trying to blow the tension out of him so the horse wouldn’t feel it. He reeled the halter back in and threw it again.

The roan started backing up, fast as thought, straight toward Blue, kicking, kicking higher as he came. Blue got out of his way and he kicked the fence with a blow that rang through the air. That settled him down a little bit. He whirled to put his head to the fence again and his butt to Blue.

Blue threw the halter. The colt kicked at it again.

Blue pulled the halter to him and threw it again. The colt kicked.

They did that over and over, until Blue lost track of time and of everything except the fact that this horse was so troubled and so defensive that he did not make one forward movement. Until he did, Blue was not going to quit.

Life narrowed down to that one fact and the sun on his back. Time vanished.

Horses knew no time. All they knew was rhythm, the rhythm of the days, and the waxing and waning of the moon. All Blue knew was the look of this horse and the motion of his own arm, the twist of his wrist.

Throw, reel in, throw, reel in.

The breeze picked up and blew on his skin through the sweat in his shirt. The horse’s shadow shifted to a different angle. A hawk flew over and tilted its wings into the wind. Blue and the roan colt kept at it.

It took a long time. Dimly, Blue realized that the afternoon was passing faster and later he saw that Micah was perched on the top log of the pen, over by the gate, but he and the roan didn’t let that bother them. The colt quit kicking but he didn’t move forward.

Blue changed to his left arm to spell the right one, but he did not let up. Finally, the colt took one forward step. One. And that was all.

At first, Blue wondered if he had imagined it, but no. The kicking had stopped. He switched back to his right arm and threw the halter. Reeled it in. Threw it again.

It took a while. The sun was definitely dropping lower in the west when he reeled the halter in again, threw it again, and the horse took three or four steps forward, one more, a few more and then, like held water flowing over a dam, Blue was driving him around the corral.

The roan let himself be driven but he didn’t acknowledge Blue in any other way.

Blue didn’t care. If they did nothing but this today, it would be a great victory. He let the rising excitement inside him come a little higher and he stayed with the colt.

The roan chose a deliberate pace and stayed with it, and the energy driving the world became the lub-dub, lub-dub sounds of his hooves on the ground. Blue’s heart fell into that same beat.

The smell of the horse, the fragrance of manure and stirring dirt, the faraway cry of a bird he couldn’t name all filled the old round pen. Still, Blue could see nothing but the horse. The horse and the hope for him to leave his fear behind.

Finally, he let him stop.

He tried to walk up to him, but the roan would have none of that. He reared and offered to strike.

Don’t come any closer, man. Keep your distance.

Blue drove him some more. He caused the horse to move and then set his own movements in harmony with him. Slowly, finally, their lone dances began to form a bond between them. Both of them relaxed into the rhythm. They stayed the same distance apart—the roan seemed comfortable with exactly that amount of space—and they moved together.

At last, the roan began to acknowledge Blue with his ears, his eyes, and his arched rib cage curving away from him. Blue smiled so wide it felt like he hadn’t used those muscles for years. He took a deep breath and moved, this time farther away from the roan.

The colt followed him. The skin on Blue’s arms turned to gooseflesh, as if the animal had already come close enough to blow his breath down the back of his neck.

The farther he went, the more the horse closed the gap between them. He had hooked on. Blue made himself take another deep breath. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

He walked toward the middle of the pen. The roan stayed with him. He stopped. The horse came closer, then he stopped, too, ears pricked, watching Blue.

The colt stood still and let him walk up to him.

The old thrill rose in Blue’s blood and, with it, memories of other days, other places, other horses. They galloped back to him, flooding through his mind. So many horses and so many days and weeks and months and years without any of them in the flesh.

He still had trouble believing that this was real. It was.

And now was the test of this invisible connection. Now was the time to make it physical, to make it so it would be true and lasting.

Murmuring to the colt, Blue laid a hand on him. He started rubbing him along the top of his neck. He watched both ends of the horse at once and he knew that he could keep touching this colt only if he did it in a way that was fitting to the roan.

That way was going to be very, very carefully. A wrong move could get him a kick in the belly or a hoof upside his head, but if he listened to what the horse had to say to him, that wouldn’t happen. He pinched along the roots of the colt’s mane as another horse would nibble him, and used the coiled lead rope to rub him, too.

The roan said it felt good. Very, very good. He let his head drop and his eyelids droop. Blue rubbed his back and his flanks and went back to his neck again.

One more time, then he let the halter and rope fall to the ground. He laid his hand on the sweaty withers and let his weight lean on the colt while he held his other hand out for the horse to take in his scent. Slowly, the colt swung his muzzle around, snorting lightly, scattering drops of moisture into Blue’s palm like fresh rain.

They settled there. Their breathing fell into an identical, untroubled pattern, in and out. With their warm flesh and blood pressed together, the thunder power living under the hide of the horse flowed through Blue—into his arm and through his heart down into the Mother Earth beneath his feet.

MICAH HELD to the old cowboy custom of eating in silence and that was a relief to Blue. He was able to pick at his food and drink the hot coffee but he couldn’t think about anything except the colt and he sure as hell didn’t know what to say. He really didn’t want to ever talk about it, even if he knew how.

He’d held himself apart, kept himself isolated, breathed and thought and eaten and stayed alone for ten long years, and an outlaw horse had breached the wall. Being connected to another living being, human or horse or dog, was something so new now that he could barely recall how to deal with it.

As soon as they pushed back from the table and started clearing away, Micah’s flood of words started again just like somebody had turned on a faucet.

“Tell you the truth,” he said, as he limped to the sink with his plate and the skillet, “I ain’t never seen nobody git his hands on a horse by throwing a halter at him all day.”

He cackled in delight, shaking his head.

“Them boys over at Little Creek wouldn’t believe it if they seen it with their own eyes. I’m near eighty years old and I never seen nothing like it.”

“I can’t take credit for the horsemanship,” Blue said. “Buck Brannaman gave a demonstration in Tulsa one time when I was a teenaged kid. He worked ’em horseback, too.”

He set his plate on the counter by the sink and carried the remains of the loaf of bread in its plastic sack to the battered cupboard where Micah got it. It all felt strange. A kitchen was a foreign country to him now.

“I heard that name,” Micah said. “They say he’s a hell of a hand with a horse.”

“He is.”

Blue glanced around the room after he closed the antique cupboard. He slid his fingertips over its punched tin door as if he were reading Braille.

Any part of a home was unknown to him now. This one smelled rich and ripe with age, with the ghosts of long-dead wood fires drifting out of the chimney and the gleam of low lamplight in the front room.

It recalled Auntie Cheyosie’s cabin way back in the woods in Oklahoma. Way back in another life. Way back when Tanasi Rose was alive. She had taken him with her to see the wise old woman many times during his childhood.

Rose wouldn’t have killed herself, maybe, if Auntie Cheyosie had still been alive. Or if Dannie had been.

But he had been.

Yeah, Bowman, but you might as well have been dead. What comfort were you to her, locked up in a cage a thousand miles away?

“I’m gonna wrangle these here dishes,” Micah said suddenly, “you go on in yonder and clean up.”

Blue glanced at him. The old man’s sharp gaze met his. What had Micah seen on his face?

Micah set the skillet down with a thump.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you the room and what’s in it. There’s duds you can wear instead of them sweaty ones.”

He limped past Blue and gestured for him to follow.

“We’ve had ever’ size of hired hand in the world pass through here one time or another and I reckon half of ’em left somethin’ behind. Boots, hats, coats, warbags, you name it, we got it.”

Blue crossed the hallway behind him and Micah led the way into a room with two windows, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a closet with the door standing open. Assorted clothes hung on hangers and a jumble of boots covered the floor.

“Help yourself,” Micah said. “Gordon’s known for running ’em off pronto if they give any lip or if they ain’t up to working fourteen hours a day seven days a week with a smile on their face for a wetback’s wage. If they leave somethin’ behind, ain’t no way they come back after it when he told ’em never set foot on the ranch again.”

“Nice guy,” Blue said.

Micah chuckled.

“Oncet in a great while,” he said. “Oncet in a high lonesome blue moon, you might say.”

He limped to one of the windows and banged on the sides of it with his fists to loosen it in the frame.

“You ain’t workin’ for Gordon, remember that,” he said. “I got my own operation here.”

He wrenched at the bottom of the window with both hands and then slid it up. The fresh, cold night poured in.

“Air this room out a little bit,” the old man said.

Two windows. One open. Doors open all the way to the front porch.

If he couldn’t sleep inside the walls, he could sleep outside—blankets were piled on the bed. He was tired. Tireder physically than he had been for years. It felt good.

But before sleep he needed the feel of hot water sluicing down his back and the smell of clean clothes—not prison clothes—in his nostrils.

“Bathroom down the hall,” Micah said, and limped past him to the door. “Holler if you need anything.”

“Right. Thanks.”

The old man stopped and made a quick turn of his stiff body so he could see Blue.

“You’ve got him now and he’s gonna make you a mount that won’t quit,” he said. “You done a helluva job today.”

His voice held traces of envy and regret. But mostly happiness, satisfaction.

“Thanks,” Blue said. “It took a while. You didn’t have to stay out there all that time.”

The old man’s bushy eyebrows lifted.

“Never know when I might could lend a hand,” he said, with a shrug.

That touched Blue. Nobody had been concerned about his safety for a long, long time.

Micah hesitated, then he said, “Whenever you want, we can get horseback and take him to a bigger pen.”