Montana Blue

What a thought! She didn’t know one thing about the big, blue-eyed Native American with the braid and the muscular shoulders. He could be an axe murderer for all she knew. Truly, she was desperate.

Micah’s instinct for trustworthiness in human beings was usually faultless. Even though he’d been hiring a horse wrangler, not a friend or counselor for Shane, when he brought Blue to the ranch, he wouldn’t want a bad man living in his house or working with his horses.

He had a power, Blue did. She’d felt it this morning, sitting beside him, even with her whole concentration on Shane.

THE ROAN WAS both disrespectful and scared all over again. Whoever said that a horse, like a person, is different every day and therein lies his charm, sure knew what he was talking about. However, at the moment, nothing about Roanie brought the word charm to mind. He was thoroughly pissed after his trip to the fairgrounds.

When Blue walked up to the fence, the horse gave him that “Go to hell” look of his. Then he turned his hindquarters to him and stood all sulled up, looking out across the valley.

He’d been hauled way more than he liked, so he’d kicked all the way back to the ranch and fought the leadrope coming out of the trailer. Blue had left him alone in the tree-shaded pasture to relax for a while. But Blue hadn’t been able to relax, either.

Even while he was riding some of the other horses, all he’d wanted was to get back to the roan. That was a bad sign. It was less dangerous to get attached to a horse than to people, that was for sure, but Blue needed to keep his emotions clear and his mind clear so he could truly be free and focused. An attachment to anything would get in his way.

Probably, though, it wasn’t attachment that drew him to the colt. It was the fact that he owned him now. And the fact that he was the most challenging horse he’d ever known.

He couldn’t let himself get attached to Shane, either. He’d only given in to Micah’s pleas about the boy because if, on some off chance he could help him, it’d be doing something positive in memory of Dannah. If. So what if the boy did offer Blue some slight respect as compared to none at all for anyone else? That wasn’t much to build on in a fight with an enemy as strong as addiction.

He wouldn’t let the boy get him any more tangled up with Micah, or with Andie Lee or Gordon, either. One thing always led to another.

The aggravating thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone. They were still buzzing in him right now, after they’d stirred him up so much that he skipped lunch and the break and kept working. They’d made him feel just as sour as the colt looked.

Blue waited a little while to clear his mind and his mood, then he opened the gate and went in. As he closed it again, Roanie kicked out, so Blue took his time. The colt knew him, yes, but he didn’t fully trust him and he might not for a long time. He had a suspicious attitude that was partly natural to him and partly manufactured by the boys over at Little Creek.

Rhythmically, slowly, Blue moved to approach and then retreat, approach and retreat so the prey animal instincts in the horse wouldn’t signal alarm. From a horse’s point of view, anything that comes at him in a straight line is behaving as a predator would.

Roanie was making it perfectly clear that he didn’t intend to be touched again. Blue started thinking of something to use as an extension of his arm. He found a thin tree limb about three feet long and, holding it down by his side, started working his way to Roanie again. When he finally got close, he stood back the full length of it so the horse wouldn’t feel crowded.

“I’ll just scratch your back a little,” he told him as he took hold of the leadrope with his free hand. “Remember how you like that? Remember how you like for me to rub you with the halter? With my rope?”

He began to scratch him with the limb. Slowly, gently, along his back, over his croup, down to the hock, then up again and along the base of his mane.

Blue watched the horse carefully and concentrated on the best spots again and again. Soon, Roanie admitted that Blue meant no harm. He let his head drop lower and allowed Blue to touch him everywhere he wanted.

Blue replaced the stick with his hand. He could feel through his palm and through every one of his fingers that the colt was really beginning to relax, so he rubbed him all over several times.

Then he concentrated on massaging his legs. He moved the touch on down below the knees and caressed the tendons where the legs were the most sensitive, too sensitive for the stick.

“All I want to do today is pick up your feet,” he told the horse. “That’s all. Then I’ll let you be.”

Gradually, finally, Blue closed everything else out of his mind and they both relaxed into the companionship they were beginning to build. He didn’t know how much time passed but, at last, the roan let him pick up all four of his feet.

Blue whistled as he patted the sleek, warm neck again and again, then he moved to the horse’s head, unfastened the halter he’d left on him all day, and slipped it off.

The roan rolled his eye at him and moved away at a brisk trot. Blue backed up against the fence, hooked one heel in it and leaned back to watch him as he lifted into a lope. He moved so smoothly through the shade and the sunlight that he reminded Blue of water flowing, turning his speckled hide to one liquid color. Red.

In Cherokee lore, red was the color of victory, of success.

The color blue meant failure, disappointment, or unsatisfied desire.

He’d had ten unsatisfied and lonely years to wonder if his mother knew that he would fail her and disappoint her when she named him Blue.

What made him think there was even a chance that he would help Shane after he’d failed Rose and Dannah so completely?

FOR THE SAKE OF positive thinking, Andie Lee went for a long, hard run late that afternoon, trying to clear her head of the negative thoughts that had lived there for so long. While she ran, she reviewed the whole day in her mind, hoping to banish those images forever once she got back to the house.

She hadn’t realized, through these last weeks, that she’d fallen into such a habit of despair until she and Gordon drove into the yard at the main house and he said, “I’ll take care of the Center. And of Shane. Forget him for a week and go find something that’ll make you smile.”

Surprised, she’d leaned back against her door and watched him as he parked and turned off the motor.

“What’s different, Gordon?”

He looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You never cared if I smiled before now. You never insisted on helping me with anything until now. What’s the deal?”

He shrugged. “Things change.”

As he threw open his door and got out, he said, “I’ve got a truckload of money sunk in that drug rehab center. Why wouldn’t I want it to produce results?”

She got out and they walked toward the house.

“The question is why did you build it? It’s not something you’d do.”

He shot her a look.

“How do you know? You don’t know squat about me.”

“I know some,” she said. “Or I should say, I did know some about who you used to be. Any kid who wants a parent’s love knows more about that parent than either of them realizes.”

He shook his head.

“You always did read too much,” he said. “You’ve let your imagination run wild.”

With that, he went straight to his office and closed the door.

She went up to her old room and looked at herself in the mirror. It hurt her to look at herself. She looked horrid. She looked exhausted and haggard and old and wrinkled and sad, sad, sad.

She forced a smile. It hurt her muscles. It looked fake. It looked so false that it still hurt her to look at herself.

How could she help Shane to believe in hope for recovery if she looked so hopeless?

She felt like crawling into bed, pulling the covers over her head, and never coming out to be seen again. The thought was scarily tempting.

She stared at her image.

“You’ve never given up,” she told it. “Don’t start now.”

Gordon was in control of Shane. Gordon was talking to her—a little—and listening to her. A little. She wanted some influence over what Gordon did to Shane.

The work, for example. He was finally going to take Micah’s advice and find a director who’d put the inmates to work. She wanted Shane to be with horses because they had great healing power.

Certainly more than hauling hay or digging ditches would have.

So she’d put on her shorts and running shoes and hit the road that ran across the valley to the river. Once there, she walked for a while and then sat for a while and made herself think, for once, about something besides Shane. It was an exercise in will that made her brain feel as stiff as her face had done when she forced a smile.

She looked into the water and tried to see her plans for the future, the ones she’d had two years ago when the nightmare began. Before her every thought had been fixed on Shane and his problems.

Right now, her dreams of buying a cabin in Wyoming where she would go to rest and read and think and learn to paint landscapes—in other words, to actually discover who she was and what she wanted for the rest of her life, since she’d never had a minute free to figure that out since she was seventeen—were hopeless.

Her profession was one she loved, but other than that, what did she want to do? Gordon was right. Someday Shane would be gone. What would be the most important thing to her then?

Her savings had vanished like snow in the sun, along with all the money she’d raised by selling the few luxuries in her life: her show horse and saddle and her sporty little car. Gordon was right about that, too. She couldn’t recover financially if she sold her practice.

She couldn’t let Shane’s troubles take everything else away from her because the stronger she was for herself, the greater the chances she could help him. She’d made the right decision. She’d hang on to her practice, stay here and deal with Gordon the best way she could.

He really was different toward her, and she thought about that. In the past, he would’ve exploded and then chewed her up and spit her out for questioning him and arguing with him on the way back from the jail.

He would’ve been furious at her asking him why he built the Center.

As far as she’d observed, he was still his old hair-trigger self with everybody else. Did he pity her so much that he was trying to be kind to her? Act like a father to her twenty years too late because she was such a lousy mother?

No. Negative thoughts. She was doing, and had done, the best she knew how. That was all anyone could do.

She got up and started slowly jogging back toward the house. No negativity. It was self-fulfilling.

Only positive thoughts. This was the turning point. Shane had hit rock bottom this morning and his only direction now was up.

She would hold that thought.

The houses, barns, pens, arenas, all passed by in a blur. For the first time in what seemed a lifetime, she was comfortable in her body and her mind. For these few minutes. Her blood was pumping warm in her veins and hope was growing in her heart.

When she got back to the house, Gordon’s truck was gone. Andie Lee pounded up the stairs, pretending she had more energy left than she had thought. In her childhood room, she stripped and stood in the shower for the longest time, willing the hot water to wash away the traces of tension left in her muscles and her mind.

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, she’d have a chance of getting some sleep.

She was standing at the window drying her hair when the big white truck came rolling into the glow of the dusk-activated yard light. Gordon got out and slammed the door behind him, but she never heard him come into the house.

When her hair was only damp, she pulled on some soft pants and a T-shirt, stuck her feet into some flip-flops and went down the stairs. All the rooms were still dark except for the lamps they always left on in the huge old living area. She walked out onto the porch. He was standing down on the north end of it, one foot propped on the railing, staring out into the night, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t turn around.

“I guess you know that stuff’ll kill you,” she said.

After a heartbeat he answered. “Somethin’ will.”

She walked halfway to him and sat down in the swing.

“Hmm,” she said, “I thought you considered yourself immortal, Gordon.”

He gave his little bark of a laugh, set his foot on the floor, and turned around.

He looked at her. In the faint lamp glow that came through the window she couldn’t see his eyes.

“That was before the doc said cancer.”

She gasped. “What? You have…”

“Turns out he was wrong,” he said. “Even the experts can’t win ’em all.”

He walked to one of the leather rocking chairs, turned it to face her, and sat. He rocked it slowly back and forth.

“Made me think, though,” he said. “What’ll happen to the Wagontracks when I’m gone?”

The question stunned her. Gordon had never talked to her about anything personal before. He never talked to anyone like this. Not even Micah, as far as she knew.

“I’m thinking that would depend on your choice of an heir,” she said.

He gave a bitter chuckle.

“Just think, Andie. I’m the sixth generation Campbell in Montana, counting the first one who came directly from Scotland. Six generations. We’ve kept this ranch together through droughts and blizzards, Indian wars and rock-bottom cattle markets. Kept it together and added to it, Andie Lee.”

“You’re a famous breeder who believes the bloodline is everything,” she said, “and there’s no seventh-generation Campbell to carry it on.”

He grunted and took another drag on the cigarette.

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“The bloodline is everything,” he said. “Besides, a woman could never manage this ranch in a million years of trying.”

Anger flashed through her amazement to flare in her voice.

“That’s not what I meant. I don’t want anything from you,” she said. “I wish I’d never asked you to help us this time, but here we are.”

“That’s why I’m helping you now,” he said. “You put yourself through college and took care of a baby and graduated veterinary school and wouldn’t take money when your mother offered it. I respect that kind of guts.”

“Then respect my need to see Shane in the morning.”

“No. A week with nobody fawning over him will work wonders.”

“A week! You said overnight! I never thought you’d leave him so long! That’s way too long…”

“It’ll help make a man out of him. Every boy needs a time as a kid when he’s scared shitless and has nobody to depend on but himself.”

“You justify everything you do,” she snapped. “You could justify torture or rustling or murder for your own purposes. You’ve always done that!”

He shrugged and deliberately crossed one leg over his knee to put out his cigarette on the sole of his boot.

He had said a week when they first got back. When he’d told her to forget Shane for a week and find something to make her smile. She just hadn’t really heard it then.

“So. You can’t resist being the great dictator. I ought to leave here.”

“I thought we settled that, Andie.”

“I never said so. You always assume that when you make a decree everybody else agrees.”

“Because I’m always right,” he said. “Now calm down and go on up to bed. Get some sleep. The week’ll be gone before you know it.”

She wanted nothing more than to leave him, but she sat stubbornly in her place and pushed the swing into motion with her toe.

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