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  9

  TWO DAYS after the concert Tessa invited Castle to ride with her and a day hand; they were going to move a bull to a new pasture. As he knew nothing about herding cattle and could be of no help whatsoever, might even be a hindrance, he assumed she’d extended the invitation because she wanted his company, which pleased and scared him at the same time. Actually, what scared him was the undeniable fact that he enjoyed her company, an enjoyment that struck him as inappropriate and possibly dangerous, threatening the stability of his solitude.

  When he arrived at Tessa’s corral, he found that the hand, whose name was Tim McIntyre, had already saddled and bridled a horse for him. Though he was grateful to be spared the embarrassment of demonstrating his incompetence at tacking up, it was a greater embarrassment to have someone else do the job. McIntyre, a young, central-casting cowboy wearing spurs and thorn-scarred butterfly chaps, didn’t help matters, greeting him with the slightly disdainful look a wrangler would bestow on a dude ranch guest. Some of his masculine pride was restored when Tessa, who’d wrenched a knee yesterday, asked him to help her mount up. She wedged her left boot in the stirrup, he grasped her waist with both hands, and as he boosted her into the saddle, her thighs and hips brushed his chest, sending a thrill through him. He hadn’t felt anything like it for a very long time.

  They rode out three abreast. It was a brilliant morning. A warm breeze out of Mexico whispered that spring was on the way, and in it the tall yellow grass on a nearby hill rippled like the fur of some great blond beast.

  “I was more mad than sad,” Tessa said abruptly, as if she were picking up the thread of an earlier conversation. “Night before last,” she added into his perplexed silence, and he realized she was talking about the swift change in her mood at the end of the concert. “I couldn’t say anything to Blaine and Monica, so I just … withdrew.”

  “No explanation required.”

  Her baseball cap—more practical headgear on a windy day than a cowboy hat—was tilted back, and the sun fell full on her face as she turned to speak to him, igniting a sparkle of tiny gold flecks in her brown eyes. “If I thought it was required, I wouldn’t give it.”

  “Okay, what were you mad at?”

  “All those kids having such a great time. Rick having such a great time getting adored by his fans. Me having a good time.”

  “And Beth over there,” Castle said.

  “It didn’t feel right. And Blaine … the way he clapped at that protest song, after all that chest-thumping he did at dinner, all that bumper-sticker bullshit patriotism. Because it was his celebrity son singing it. It just pissed me off.”

  She would have gone on, but just then McIntyre interrupted her. “He’ll be in there, saw him there yesterday,” he said, pointing at a canyon ahead, where a windmill’s blades fanned above a parklike stand of low oaks.

  They rode single file into the canyon. The shadows of the trees so camouflaged the Angus that Castle didn’t see them until they stirred at the riders’ approach. The young bull, amid a herd of cows and calves, eyed them balefully.

  “Hold up here,” Tessa said to Castle. “Tim and I will cut him out.” She paused for a beat and said, “If he runs in your direction, head him off.” This was a gesture on her part, and a kind one—she wanted him to feel he had a role to play.

  She and McIntyre nudged their horses into the herd. The scene was bewitching—the black cattle milling in the dappled sunlight, the ballet of the two riders, weaving through the trees, the lightsome swing of Tessa’s chestnut hair as she turned her horse this way and that, deftly maneuvering the bull until he stood all alone. She kept an eye on him while McIntyre separated a cow from its calf, then pushed it toward the bull.

  “Ready to go,” Tessa called.

  Castle trotted up to her. The calf was bleating piteously for its mother.

  “Why the cow?” he asked.

  “A traveling companion. Cattle are herd animals. If he”—indicating the bull with a twitch of her head—“was alone, he’d be harder to move. One of these days I’ll join the modern age and buy some bull in a bottle.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Sperm. Artificial insemination. But for now my girls will have to get pregnant the old-fashioned way.”

  Despite the cow’s presence, the bull proved difficult, lumbering off into clumps of trees, where he would stand stubbornly until McIntyre, ducking under low branches, got him moving again. A couple of times the cow tried to run back to her calf. On one of these occasions, Castle was closest to her, and he rode after her and turned her, earning approving nods from Tessa and McIntyre. Finally both animals settled down, and they proceeded at a slow walk along a fenceline atop a long ridge crowded with juniper and manzanita. The ridge sloped off gradually into open grasslands. The snows on the Huachucas, several miles eastward, had retreated with the warmer, drier weather; all that remained was a thin, broken white line at the very top.

  “This is what we want, an easy pace,” Tessa said. “Don’t want the bull to get overheated. Hot bulls are hard to handle.”

  “So it is said,” drawled McIntyre with a grin. Tessa laughed at her unintentional double entendre, and Castle laughed with her. It had been so long since he’d heard himself laugh that he almost didn’t recognize the sound of it.

  They pushed down the ridge and into the open country, following another trail toward a fenced trough and windmill. A drug runners’ trail, McIntyre pointed out. “You can tell by the footprints and how straight it is,” he said. “Those mules don’t wander like cattle, make a beeline to their drop point. Reckon I would, too, humpin’ fifty pounds on my back.” Having imparted this bit of modern western fieldcraft, he motioned at a small herd of Angus that made dark spots on a hillside about a quarter of a mile away. “Cows’re yonder,” he said.

  “All right, you gather them,” Tessa said. “Gil and I will pen the groom-to-be.”

  As McIntyre struck off, Castle and Tessa drove the bull and his traveling companion toward the fence enclosing the windmill. To spare her stiff knee, he swung out of the saddle to open the gate, a typical Texas gate, with three strands of barbed wire stretched taut between the fence posts and locked by two wire loops, one around the top of the gatepost, one at the bottom. The tension was such that he could not pull the top loop free one-handed, so he dropped the reins to unfasten it with both hands. Just as he did, his horse turned and bolted. When Tessa shouted, “You son of a bitch!” he wasn’t sure if she was referring to him or his horse.

  With a jab of her spurs, she took off after the runaway, which vanished for a second as it fled into a draw, then reappeared, lunging up the other side. Feeling more than ever the bungling tenderfoot, Castle watched the chase, his breath held. Pitched slightly forward in the saddle, her hair flying back from under her cap, Tessa raced alongside Castle’s horse until, winded from its gallop, it fell into a fast walk. Tessa slowed down, to avoid panicking him into another sprint for freedom, then leaned over, grabbed the loose reins, and jerked him to a halt. She led him back at an easy jog.

  “Well, that was stimulating,” she said, looking at Castle reproachfully. “Next time …”

  “I know. Hand the reins to you.” He gazed up at her. Her bosom heaved under her denim jacket, and there was a high color in her cheeks. “You were …” He hesitated. This was some woman. “You were a sight to see.”

  He opened the gate while she held his horse; then they moved the bull into the pen with the cow.

  “Keep an eye on them,” Tessa said, passing the reins back to him. “I’m going to give Tim a hand.”

  She loped away through the wind-teased grass. Castle watched her for a moment or two, then made himself turn away, as if he’d stolen a glimpse of her while she undressed. Something like that. It wasn’t desire he felt, but the memory of desire, no, the possibility of desire. And that was what shamed him—Mandy hadn’t been dead two years.

  After the bull was introduced to his new harem, they drove the cow back to
her calf and returned to the house. Castle and Tessa unsaddled their horses and turned them out to graze. McIntyre loaded his into his trailer, declining an invitation to lunch—he had more work to do that afternoon at another ranch.

  “I hope you’re not going to turn me down,” Tessa said to Castle.

  He did not. The morning’s work had given him an appetite, and the fact was, the prospect of eating alone in his cabin depressed him. He followed her into a screened-in porch, where Klaus rose from his bed to greet his mistress. Inside the house, living room, dining room, and kitchen were combined under a gently peaked ceiling with log beams. Three high plank doors, bleached with age, led off a corridor, presumably to the bedrooms. Like Blaine and Monica’s, Tessa’s place was a mess, which she begged him to excuse. She hadn’t had a chance to straighten up and made a show of it, picking a sofa pillow from off the floor, tidying a Navaho blanket balled up on a chair. He suspected that she would not have straightened up even if she’d had the chance. When he’d come out to live on the San Ignacio, Blaine had noticed him looking askance at the general sloppiness of the place, and to set him straight, informed him that “you can tell a good rancher from a bad one by the condition of his fences and cattle, not by how pretty his house is.” Still, he hadn’t quite gotten used to the rural dweller’s carelessness about appearances, the cluttered living spaces, the junked automobiles and trailers and appliances littering the yards of even prosperous ranchers. He could not help but compare Tessa’s domestic disarray with Mandy’s fastidious housekeeping. Curiously, though, the comparison was not unfavorable. Now that he thought of it, there had been something a little sterile about the tidiness of the white-frame colonial on Oenoke Ridge, each room possessing the unlived-in look of a photograph in an interior decoration magazine. Thinking further, he recalled that Mandy’s rigid orderliness—a result of her spending so much of her life on sailboats, where every line had to be coiled just so—at times got on his nerves.

  He gazed around while Tessa brewed coffee and reheated a chili she’d made the day before. Over the fireplace hung a large oil painting, done in photo-realist style. Brown tract houses as identical as army barracks crowded beneath a vast, flat, barren mound resembling a mesa. What appeared to be buzzards specked a dirty sky above the mound; a yellow bulldozer crawled up its face. Mountains shimmered in the background, barely visible. Looking more closely at the foreground, he made out a banner draped over a wall running the whole length of the painting. On the banner were the words “Vista Montaña—2&3 BR homes—Starting at 150K.”

  “This is one of yours?”

  Tessa came away from the stove and leaned her elbows on the counter dividing the kitchen from the rest of the room. “Yup. My masterpiece. Ugly as hell, isn’t it?”

  “First time I ever heard an artist ask if her masterpiece is ugly.”

  “That’s what makes it beautiful. That’s a real place, on the freeway going into Tucson. As you can see, there’s not much of a vista of the montañas. That hill in the middle distance is the Tucson landfill. But you couldn’t very well call a housing development Vista Landfill, could you?”

  “One of your unsentimental landscapes.”

  “I like to think I’ve invented a whole new subgenre. Subdivisionscape.”

  She turned to the stove, ladled the chili into bowls, and set them with a plate of warm tortillas on a long table made of massive oak planks bound with cast iron bands. They sat across from each other and began to eat.

  “How’s the chili?” she asked.

  “You can ride, you can shoot, you can cook,” Castle replied.

  Her cheeks flushed at the enumeration of her virtues; then, noticing him studying the family photos that stood on a bookshelf in easel frames, she volunteered that the older couple in one were her parents, the two towering young men who flanked her in another were her brothers—taken years ago, she said—and the smiling blond girl in cap and gown was Beth at her high school graduation.

  “That other one is her after she finished basic training,” Tessa said. “Doesn’t look like the same girl, does it?”

  No, it didn’t, and he supposed she wasn’t the same girl, staring sternly from under a black beret.

  “You’re looking at the outcome of a mistake in judgment,” Tessa said. “The lovely outcome of an unlovely story.”

  He paused and asked awkwardly, “Out of wedlock, you mean? That’s not so unlovely these days.”

  “It is if you never wanted to have sex with the guy.”

  He couldn’t think how to respond to that declaration and mumbled that it was none of his business.

  But she chose to make it his business. It had happened in Scottsdale. She’d had too much to drink at a party after the Arabian horse show. The owner of the winning horse drove her back to her apartment. An older man, around forty, an eastern European immigrant with a string of expensive horses, a trophy wife, and three sports cars. Some Romanian or Ukrainian … rumored to be mixed up with the Russian mob in L.A.

  “He was a big guy, but didn’t look or behave like a gangster,” Tessa went on, her jaw tightening. “Courtly, in a European way, you know? Walked me to the door, and then I did a dumb thing. Invited him inside. Don’t know what the hell I was thinking—the guy’s wife was at the party. I realized my mistake and asked him to leave, and he said, ‘You are going to offer me a drink and then you will say you are going to change into something more comfortable.’ Exactly like that. Like dialogue out of some old movie he’d seen. I told him I was going to do nothing of the kind and that he’d better get out, and that’s when he stopped being courtly.” She looked at Castle defiantly, as if challenging him to believe her. The golden flecks in her irises flashed. “I wanted to kill that son of a bitch,” she said, mercifully omitting a graphic description but with a ferocity accentuated by her wolfish eyeteeth. “My dad was a lawyer, and I knew how it would go if I went to the cops. When I found out I was pregnant, I made my own arrangements. If I’d been less well brought up, I probably would have blackmailed the bastard into paying for the abortion. Well, the time came, I went to the clinic, and I found out that I couldn’t go through with it. Could not do it. Quit my job, went home to California. My brothers wanted to shoot him, my dad was incensed, wanted me to file a complaint and take the bastard to court, but I begged him to drop it. All I wanted to do was forget it had happened. Not that I ever have. So I had Beth and got another job. Truth is, if it hadn’t been for Dad’s money, I probably would have wound up in a trailer park.”

  Castle was stunned. “So you didn’t come out here because you were crowded in Scottsdale.”

  “No,” she said, still with her defiant look. “I lied. The part I told the truth about is that I don’t like people, in large numbers anyway.”

  “And Beth …?” he started to ask.

  Tessa grimaced. “For a while I was sorry I didn’t get the abortion. She reminded me of him and that night. I got past that, but … the lies I told her when she was little! I gave her the truth when she was old enough, but you can imagine how it hit her. She didn’t know what to think, how to fit the whole thing into her way of understanding. And you know, it’s weird, how something like what happened to me can make you feel guilty. Maybe I even blamed myself. If hadn’t asked him in …”

  “Oh, Tess, that’s just—”

  “Sure. Crazy to think that way. It’s not something a man can grasp, how utterly, utterly filthy something like that can make you feel.”

  “I can grasp it well enough,” he said, a little offended by the suggestion that his sex rendered him incapable of empathy.

  “Gil, nobody around here has heard this. You will keep it to yourself, won’t you?”

  He had no idea why she’d chosen to share this confidence with him. It tied them into a kind of conspiratorial bond, one he hadn’t sought, but he assured her he would tell no one.

  “Well, there you have my soap opera,” Tessa said.

  The way she accented my invited him to tell her so
mething about himself, and eager to get off the subject of her rape, he took her up on it. His first marriage, the half-comic, half-horrifying night Eileen admitted to her lesbian affair, the dreadful child custody hearings. Tessa listened to his tale with an attentiveness that was not mere courtesy. It seemed absurdly tame, somewhat Cheeveresque, compared with her saga. While he spoke, he kept picturing the brute slamming the door behind him, throwing her to the floor, and tearing at her clothes. He steered the conversation off the reefs of their respective disasters into quieter waters. They spoke of their children, Castle boasting of Morgan’s achievements in the publishing world, of Justine’s three-point-four average at Columbia Law, Tessa admitting that she’d been glad when Beth joined the army, thought the discipline and training would be good for her, give her some focus—she’d enlisted a couple of months before 9/11, so the furthest thought from Tessa’s mind, and Beth’s, was the chance that she would go to war.

  “I keep hoping this war won’t happen, but I know it will. It’s a rotten feeling, waiting for the inevitable. Enough? Enough soul baring?”