Her right hand began trembling, quivering at first and then fluttering like a barn swallow trapped in a chimney. She flinched when her cell began playing this week’s ring tone, Natalie Merchant’s Not In This Life. The ID said Buzz Brothers.
“Hey, boys,” Izzy answered. “What’s up?”
“Ms. Sain, some cattle got in the knapweed.” Izzy didn’t know if this was Max or Rawlings. On the phone the brothers sounded identical, although they didn’t look anything alike. “Okay, give me fifteen. Is the fence down?”
The answer was white noise. This kind of hit-or-miss cell reception was chronic at the Circle Ten. She was thirty miles from the nearest tower, whose ghostly connection to her phone was intermittently blocked by the cottonwoods and high bluffs flanking the house. With a sweep of her hand she ordered Fritter to bring in the horses. Three of them were hers and the fourth, Sally, was Mark’s long, tall sorrel mare. By the time they arrived at a trot her hand had stopped dancing and she managed to get her grip on the day again.
Fritter brought up the rear, carrying a stick in her mouth so she wouldn’t be tempted to bite at their heels. Izzy bridled the buckskin gelding she had named Dagwood the morning he was born here— because his mother had been named Blondie. She cleaned the gunk from his hooves with a hoof pick and jumped up. Fritter sat watching, ears on high alert, waiting to hear the
They loped a worn path winding from the barn along the floor of the Sag, the deep, serpentine channel carved into the prairie by an ancient river draining an inland sea full of melting glaciers. Upstream from the house lay Lost Lake, a brackish remnant of this Ice Age river. It had pooled at the bottom of 300-foot cliffs over which a mammoth waterfall once roared. The path climbed the wall of the Sag at an angle and brought them up onto a flat bench, where she was slammed with a burst of heat and a clean, toasted odor like that of the deserts she had hiked around in Baja. She liked the smell, but it was a reminder that because of the drought her hay crop this year was going to be less than what she harvested last year, which was less than the year before. Staring across the Sag to the bench on the other side she was pleased to see her bison wandering around their thousand-acre pasture, happily living their bison lives. Absent of malice.
The boys were lounging on the bed of their vintage Chevy farm truck parked in thirty acres of little purple flowers. The doors were painted with their logo, BUZZ BROZ, in psychedelic DayGlo type under an enormous yellow bumble bee. Behind them the bed was piled twelve feet high with hives, the painted wood sun-scorched into a rainbow of pastels. A dozen of Izzy’s black Angus were milling around, heifers
Blushing, Max offered her the joint he was smoking. She waved it away. “Thanks, but I gotta ride.” In fact, she hated the skunky smell and taste of marijuana. Plus, it gave her vertigo. Rawlings offered her a can of Coors Lite from their cooler, but she waved that away, as well. She would rather drink her own piss.
“Miss Sain,” Rawlings said. “What should we do?”
“It’s Izzy,” she reminded him again. She didn’t know if she intimidated him because she was ten years older or a cop or a woman. “Go open the gate and come back to the truck. When the beeves are out head back to the gate and shut it.”
“Do you want us to help you put back the fence?”
“I don’t do fences. I’ll get a couple of hands up here.”
copyright©2024 Bill Vaughn