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Chapter Twenty-three 12 page

'Who said I had a problem? I don't have a problem.' She stomped past him out onto the landing and scooped up a pile of towels she'd left there. 'I just hope the woman knows how to cook, that's all.' And she went off down the stairs.

Diane wasn't around later when Annie and Grace arrived. Tom helped them unload the Lariat and took their bags upstairs for them. He was relieved to see they'd brought two big boxes of groceries. The sun was streaming in through the big front window in the living room and made the place seem light and airy. Annie said how pretty it was. She asked if it would be okay to move the long dining table over to the window so that she could use it as her desk and look out on the creek and the corrals while she worked. Tom took one end and she took the other and when they'd moved it he helped her bring in all her computers and fax machines and some other electronic gadgetry whose purpose he couldn't begin to guess.

It had struck him as odd that the first thing Annie should want to do in this new place, before unpacking, before even seeing where she was to sleep, was to set up somewhere to work. He could tell from the look on Grace's face as she watched that to her it wasn't odd at all. It had always been like this.

Last night before he turned in, he'd walked out, as he always did, to check on the horses and on the way back he'd looked up at the creek house and seen the lights on and wondered what they were doing, this woman and her child, and of what if anything they spoke. Seeing the house standing there against the clear night sky, he'd thought of Rachel and the pain those walls had encased so many years ago. Now pain was encased there again, pain of the highest order, finely wrought by mutual guilt and used by wounded souls to punish those they love the most.

Tom made his way past the corrals, the frosted grass scrunching under the soles of his boots. The branches of the cottonwoods along the creek were laced with silver and over their heads he could see the eastern sky starting to glow pink where soon the sun would show. The dogs were waiting for him outside the barn door, all eager. They knew he never let them go in with him but they always thought it worth a try. He shooed them away and went in to see to the horses.

An hour later, when the sun had melted black patches on the barn's frost-veneered roof, Tom led out one of the colts he'd started the previous week and swung himself up into the saddle. The horse, like all the others he'd raised, had a good soft feel and they rode an easy walk up the dirt road toward the meadows.

As they passed below the creek house, Tom saw the blinds of Annie's bedroom were now open. Farther on he found footprints in the frost beside the road and he followed them until they were lost among the willows where the road crossed the creek in a shallow ford. There were rocks you could use as stepping-stones and he could see from the wet criss-cross marks on them that whoever it was had done just that.



The colt saw her before he did and, prompted by the pricking of its ears, Tom looked up and saw Annie running back down from the meadow. She was wearing a pale gray sweatshirt, black leggings and a pair of those hundred-dollar shoes they advertised on TV. She hadn't yet seen him and he brought the colt to a stop at the water's edge and watched her come nearer. Through the low rush of the water, he could just make out the sound of her breathing. She had her hair tied back and her face was pink from the cold air and the effort of her running. She was looking down, concentrating so hard on where she was putting her feet that if the colt hadn't softly snorted she might have run right into them. But the sound made her look up and she stopped in her tracks, some ten yards away.

'Hi!'

Tom touched the brim of his hat.

'A jogger, huh?'

She made a mock haughty face. 'I don't jog, Mr Booker. I run.'

'That's lucky, the grizzlies around here only go for the joggers.'

Her eyes went wide. 'Grizzly bears? Are you serious?'

'Well, you know, we keep 'em pretty well fed and all.' He could see she was worried and grinned. 'I'm kidding. Oh, they're around but they like to stay higher. You're safe enough.' He thought about adding, except for the mountain lions, but if she'd heard about that woman in California she might not think it too funny.

She gave him a narrow-eyed look for teasing her, then grinned and came closer so that the sun fell full on her face and she had to shield her eyes with one hand to look up at him. Her breasts and shoulders rose and fell to the rhythm of her breathing and a slow steam curled off her and melted in the air.

'Did you sleep okay up there?' he said.

'I don't sleep okay anywhere.'

'Is the heating okay? It's been a while since—'

'It's fine. Everything's fine. It's really very kind of you to let us stay out here.'

'It's good to have the old place lived in.'

'Well, anyway. Thank you.'

For a moment, neither of them seemed to know what to say. Annie reached out to touch the horse, but did it a little too suddenly so that the animal tossed his head away and took a couple of steps back.

'I'm sorry,' Annie said. Tom reached down and rubbed the colt's neck.

'Just hold your hand out. A little lower, there, so he can get the smell of you.' The colt lowered his muzzle to Annie's hand and explored it with the tips of his whiskers, snuffling it now. Annie watched, a slow smile starting, and Tom noticed again how the corners of her mouth seemed to have some mysterious life of their own, qualifying each smile for its occasion.

'He's beautiful,' she said.

'Yeah, he's doing pretty good. Do you ride?'

'Oh. A long time ago. When I was Grace's age.'

Something in her face changed and at once he regretted asking the question. And he felt dumb because it was clear that in some way she blamed herself for what had happened to her daughter.

'I'd better get back, I'm getting cold.' She moved off, giving the horse space as she passed, squinting up at Tom. 'I thought it was supposed to be spring!'

'Oh well, you know what they say, if you don't like the weather in Montana, wait five minutes.'

He turned in the saddle and watched her make her way back across the stepping-stones of the ford. She slipped and cursed to herself as one shoe went briefly under the icy water.

'Need a lift?'

'No, I'm fine.'

'Ill come by around two o'clock and collect Grace,' he called.

'Okay!'

She reached the far side of the creek and turned to give him a little wave. He touched his hat and watched her turn away again and break into a run, still not looking at what lay around her or ahead of her, but only where she placed her feet.

Pilgrim burst into the arena as though fired from a cannon. He ran straight to the far end and stopped there, sending up a splash of red sand. His tail was clenched and it twitched and his ears moved back and forward. His eyes were wild and fixed on the open gate through which he'd come and through which he knew the man would now follow him.

Tom was on foot and had in his hands an orange flagstick and a coiled rope. He came in and shut the gate and walked to the middle of the arena.

The sky above him rushed with small white clouds so that the light shifted constantly from gloom to glare.

For almost a minute they stood there, quite still, the horse and the man, assessing each other. It was Pilgrim who moved first. He snorted and lowered his head and took some small steps back. Tom stayed like a statue, with the tip of his flag resting on the sand. Then at last he took a step toward Pilgrim and at the same time lifted the flag in his right hand and made it crack. Immediately the horse launched off to the left and ran.

Round and round the arena he went, kicking up the sand, snorting loudly and tossing his head. His cocked and tangled tail splayed out behind him, flicking and swishing in the wind. He ran with his rear skewed in and his head skewed out and every ounce of every muscle in his body was clenched and focused only on the man. Such was the angle of his head, he had to strain his left eye backward to see him. But it never strayed, held there by a line of fear so enthralling that, in his other eye, the world was but a circling blur of nothingness.

Soon his flanks began to shine with sweat and flecks of foam flew from the corners of his mouth. But still the man drove him ever on and every time he slowed, up the flag would go and crack, forcing him forward and forward again.

All this Grace watched from the bench Tom had set up for her outside the rails of the arena. It was the first time she'd seen him work like this on foot and there was an intensity about him today that she'd noticed right away when he came by in the Chevy on the stroke of two to drive her down to the barn. For today, they both knew, was when the real work with Pilgrim was to start.

The horse's leg muscles had grown strong again with all the swimming he'd been doing and the scars on his chest and face were looking better by the day. It was the scars inside his head that now needed seeing to. Tom had parked outside the barn and let Grace lead the way down the avenue of stalls to the big one at the end where Pilgrim now lived. There were bars on the top half of the door and they could see him watching them all the way. When they reached the door, he always backed away into the far corner, lowering his head and flattening his ears. But he no longer charged when they came in and lately Tom had let Grace take in his feed and water. His coat was matted and his mane and tail filthy and tangled and Grace longed to get a brush on him.

The far wall of the stall had a sliding door which opened onto a bare concrete lobby where there were doors both to the pool and the arena. Getting him to and from either one was a matter of opening the appropriate door and crowding him so that he bolted through. Today, as if sensing some new plot, he hadn't wanted to go and Tom had had to get in close and slap his hindquarters.

Now, as Pilgrim went by, for maybe the hundredth time, Grace saw him turn his head to look square at Tom, wondering why all of a sudden he was being allowed to slow without the flag being raised. Tom let him come right down to a walk and then stop. The horse stood there, looking about, blowing. Wondering what was going on. After a few moments Tom started to walk toward him. Pilgrim's ears went forward, then back, then forward again.

His muscles quivered in wavelike spasms down his sides.

'You see that, Grace? See those muscles all knotted up there? You've got yourself one hell of a determined horse here. Gonna need a whole lot of cooking, old fella, ain't you?'

She knew what he meant. He'd told her the other day about an old man called Dorrance from Wallowa County, Oregon, the best horseman Tom had ever met, and how, when he was trying to get a horse to unwind, he'd poke his finger into its muscles and say he wanted to check if the potatoes were cooked yet. But Grace could see Pilgrim wasn't going to allow any such thing. He was moving his head to one side, assessing the man's approach with one fearful eye and when Tom was about five yards away, he broke away in the same direction as before. Only now Tom stepped in and blocked him with the flag. The horse braked hard in the sand and swerved to the right. He turned outward, away from Tom, and as his rear end swung past, Tom stepped smartly in and whacked it with the flag. Pilgrim lunged away forward. And now he was circling clockwise and the process began all over again.

'He wants to be alright,' Tom said. 'He just doesn't know what alright is.'

And if he ever gets to be alright, Grace thought, what then? Tom had said nothing about where all this was leading. He was taking each day as it came, not forcing things, just letting Pilgrim take his time and make his choices. But what then? If Pilgrim got better, was it she who was expected to ride him?

Grace knew quite well that people rode with worse disabilities than hers. Some even started from scratch that way. She'd seen them at events and once she'd even taken part in a sponsored show-jump where all the money went to the local Riding for the Disabled group. She'd thought how brave these people were and felt sorry for them. Now she couldn't bear the idea that people might feel the same about her. She wouldn't give them the chance. She'd said she would never ride again and that was that.

Some two hours later, after Joe and the twins had come back from school, Tom opened the arena gate and let Pilgrim run back into his stall. Grace had already cleaned the place out and put new shavings down and Tom stood guard and watched her bring in the bucket of feed and hang up a fresh net of hay.

As he drove her back up the valley to the creek house, the sun was low and the rocks and limber pine on the slopes above them cast long shadows on the pale grass. They didn't speak and Grace wondered why silence with this man she'd known so short a time never seemed uncomfortable. She could tell that he now had something on his mind. He circled the Chevy to the back of the house and pulled up by the back porch. Then he cut the engine off, sat back and turned to look her right in the eye.

'Grace, I've got a problem.'

He paused and she didn't know whether she was supposed to say something, but he went on.

'You see, when I'm working with a horse, I like to know the history. Now most times the horse can tell you pretty much the whole deal just by himself. In fact a sight better than his owner might tell it. But sometimes he can be so messed up in his head that you need more to go on. You need to know what went wrong. And often it's not the obvious thing but something that went wrong just before that, maybe even some little thing.'

Grace didn't understand and he saw her frown.

'It's like if I was driving this old Chevy and I hit a tree and someone asks me what happened, well, I wouldn't say, "Well, you know, I hit a tree." I'd say maybe I'd had too many beers or there was oil on the road or maybe the sun was in my eyes or something. See what I mean?'

She nodded.

'Well, I don't know how you feel about talking about it and I can sure understand you might not want to. But if I'm going to figure out what's going on in Pilgrim's head, it'd help me a whole lot if I knew something about the accident and what exactly happened that day.'

Grace heard herself take a breath. She looked away from him to the house and noticed you could see right through the kitchen to the living room. She could see the blue-gray glow of the computer screen and her mother sitting there, on the phone, framed in the fading light of the big front window.

She hadn't told anyone what she really remembered about that day. To the police, lawyers, doctors, even to her parents, she'd gone on pretending that much of what had happened was a blank. The problem was Judith. She still didn't know if she could handle talking about Judith. Or even about Gulliver. She looked back at Tom Booker and he smiled. In his eyes there was not a trace of pity and she knew in that instant that she was accepted, not judged. Perhaps it was because he only knew the person she now was, the disfigured, partial one, not the whole she once had been.

'I don't mean now,' he said gently. 'When you're ready. And only if you want to.' Something beyond her caught his eye and she followed his glance and saw her mother coming out onto the porch. Grace turned back to him and nodded.

'I'll think about it,' she said.

Robert propped his glasses up on the top of his forehead, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes for a long time. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie lay crumpled among the layers of papers and law books that covered his desk. Along the corridor he could hear the cleaners moving systematically through the other offices, talking to each other now and then in Spanish. Everyone else had gone home four or five hours ago. Bill Sachs, one of the younger partners, had tried to persuade him to come with him and his wife to see some new Gerard Depardieu movie everyone was talking about. Robert said thanks but he had too much work to get through and anyway he always found something faintly disturbing about Depardieu's nose.

'It looks, you know, kind of penile,' he said.

Bill, who could have passed as a psychiatrist anyway, had peered at him over his hornrims and asked in a comic Freudian accent, why Robert should find such an association disturbing. Then he got Robert laughing about two women he'd heard talking the other day on the subway.

'One of them had been reading this book that tells you what your dreams mean and she was telling the other girl how it had said if you dreamed about snakes it meant you were really obsessed by penises and the other one said, phew, that was a relief, 'cause all she ever dreamed about was penises.'

Bill wasn't the only one who seemed to be making a special effort to cheer him up at the moment. Robert was touched but on the whole he wished they wouldn't. Being on your own for a few weeks didn't justify this level of sympathy and so he suspected his colleagues sensed in him some deeper loss. One had even offered to take over the Dunford Securities case. God, that was about the only thing that kept him going.

Every night for nearly three weeks now he'd been up till way past midnight working on it. The hard disk on his laptop was almost bursting with it. It was one of the most complicated cases he'd ever worked on, involving bonds worth billions of dollars being shuffled endlessly through a maze of companies across three continents. Today he'd had a two-hour conference call with lawyers and clients in Hong Kong, Geneva, London and Sydney. The time differences were a nightmare. But curiously it kept him sane and, more important, too busy to dwell too much on how he missed Grace and Annie.

He opened his sore eyes and leaned across to press the redial button on one of his phones. Then he settled back, staring out of the window at the illuminated coronets on the spire of the Chrysler Building. The number Annie had given him, for this new place they'd moved into, was still busy.

He'd walked to the corner of Fifth and Fifty-ninth before he flagged a cab. The cold night air felt good and he'd toyed with the idea of walking all the way home across the park. He'd done it before at night though only once did he make the mistake of telling Annie. She'd yelled at him for a full ten minutes and told him he was insane going in there at night, did he want to get himself disemboweled? He wondered if he'd missed something in the newspapers about this particular hazard, but it didn't seem the right time to ask.

From the name posted on the dashboard of the cab, he could tell the driver was Senegalese. There were quite a few of them nowadays and Robert always enjoyed blowing their minds by casually addressing them in Wolof or Jola. This young man was so amazed he almost drove smack into a bus. They talked about Dakar and places they both knew and the driving got so bad that Robert began to think the park might have been a safer bet after all. When they pulled up outside the apartment building, Ramon came down and opened the cab door and the driver said how grateful he was for the tip and that he would pray that Allah bless Robert with many strong sons.

After Ramon had given him an apparently white-hot piece of news about a star player just signed by the Mets, Robert took the elevator and let himself into the apartment. The place was dark and the clunk of the door as he shut it echoed through the lifeless labyrinth of rooms.

He walked through to the kitchen and found the supper Elsa had cooked for him and the usual note saying what it was and how long it needed in the microwave. He did what he always did and scooped it guiltily into the garbage. He'd left her notes thanking her but saying please not to bother cooking for him, he could get takeout or cook something himself. But there it still was every night, bless her.

The truth was, the aching emptiness of the apartment made him morose and he avoided being here as much as he could. He felt it most acutely at weekends. He'd tried going up to Chatham but the loneliness there had been even worse. It hadn't been helped by arriving to find that the thermostat on Grace's tropical fish tank had failed and all the fish had died of cold. The sight of their tiny, faded corpses floating in the tank had upset him profoundly. He hadn't told Grace, nor even Annie, but had pulled himself together, made careful notes and ordered identical impostors from the pet store.

Since Annie and Grace had left, talking to them on the phone had become the high point of Robert's day. And tonight, having tried for hours and failed to reach them, he felt a sharper need than ever for the sound of their voices.

He sealed the garbage bag so that Elsa wouldn't discover the shameful destiny of the supper she'd cooked. As he was dumping the bag outside the service door, he heard the phone and he ran back down the corridor as fast as he could. The answering machine had already clicked in by the time he got there and he had to speak loudly to compete with his own recorded voice.

'Hold on, I'm here.' He found the off-button. 'Hi. I just got in.'

'You're all out of breath. Where were you?'

'Oh, out partying. You know, doing the bars and clubs and things. God, it's tiring.'

'Don't tell me.'

'I wasn't going to. So how're things where the deer and the antelope play? I tried calling all day.'

'I'm sorry. There's just the one line here and the office has been trying to bury me in fax paper.'

She said Grace had tried calling him half an hour ago at the office, probably just after he'd left for home. She'd gone to bed now but sent him her love.

As Annie told him about her day, Robert walked through to the sitting room and, without turning the lights on, settled himself on the sofa by the window. Annie sounded weary and downcast and he tried, without much success, to cheer her up.

'And how's Gracie?'

There was a pause and he heard Annie sigh.

'Oh. I don't know.' Her voice was low now, presumably so that Grace wouldn't hear. 'I see how she is with Tom Booker and Joe, you know, the twelve-year-old? They get on really well. And with them, she seems fine. But when it's just the two of us, I don't know. It's gotten so bad she won't even look at me.' She sighed again. 'Anyway.'

They were silent for a while and in the distance he heard a wail of sirens out in the street, on their way to another nameless tragedy.

'I miss you, Annie.'

'I know,' she said. 'We miss you too.'

 

Chapter Nineteen

 

Annie dropped Grace at the clinic a little before nine and wove her way back to the gas station in Choteau center. She filled up alongside a little man with a face like leather and a hat brimmed wide enough to shelter a horse. He was checking the oil of a Dodge pickup which was hitched to a trailerload of cattle. They were Black Angus like the herd at the Double Divide and Annie had to fight the urge to confide some knowing remark about them based on the little she'd gleaned from Tom and Frank on branding day. She rehearsed it in her head. Good lookin' cattle. No, you wouldn't say cattle. Healthy-lookin' beasts? Fellas? She gave up. In all truth she had no idea if they were good, bad or flea-bitten, so she kept her mouth shut and just gave the man a nod and a smile instead.

As she came out from paying, someone called her name and she looked around and saw Diane getting out of her Toyota at the other row of pumps. Annie waved and walked over.

'So you do sometimes give yourself a break from that telephone after all,' Diane said. 'We were beginning to wonder.'

Annie smiled and told her she had to bring Grace into town three mornings a week for physical therapy. She was going back to the ranch now to do some work and would come back in at midday to pick her up.

'Heck, well I can do that for you,' Diane said. 'I've got a bunch of things to do in town. Is she up at the Bellview Medical Center?'

'Yes, but honestly, you don't want—' 'Don't be silly. It's crazy you driving all that way.' Annie demurred but Diane would have none of it, it was no problem she said, and in the end Annie gave way and thanked her. They chatted for a few more minutes about how things were going up at the creek house and whether Annie and Grace had everything they needed, then Diane said she'd better get going.

On her way back to the ranch Annie puzzled over the encounter. The substance of Diane's offer had been friendly enough, but the manner in which it had been made was something less. There had been just the faintest hint of accusation, almost as though she were saying that Annie was much too busy to bother herself with being a mother. Or maybe Annie was just being paranoid.

She traveled north and looked out over the plains to her right where the black shapes of the cattle stood out against the pale grass like the ghosts of buffalo from another age. Ahead on the blacktop, the sun was already making pools of mirage and she lowered the window and let the wind blow her hair back. It was the second week in May and at last it felt as if spring had really come and wasn't just kidding. When she swung left off 89, the Rocky Mountain Front loomed before her, topped with cloud that seemed squeezed from some galactic can of chantilly. All that was missing, she thought, was a cherry and one of those little paper umbrellas. Then she remembered all the faxes and phone messages that would be waiting for her when she got back to the ranch and realized a moment or two later that the thought had eased her foot on the gas pedal.

She'd already used up much of the month's leave she'd asked Crawford Gates to give her. She would have to ask him for more and she wasn't looking forward to it. For despite all his talk about how she should feel free to take off as much time as she needed, Annie was under no illusion. In the last few days there had been clear signs that Gates was getting restless. There had been a series of small interferences, not one of them on its own enough for her to make a real fuss about, but which, when viewed collectively, signaled danger.

He had criticized Lucy Friedman's lounge lizard piece which Annie considered quite brilliant; he'd queried the design team over two front covers -not in a heavy-handed way but enough to make an impression; and he'd sent Annie a long memo about how he thought their coverage of Wall Street was slipping behind the competition. That would have been okay, except that he'd copied it to four other directors before even speaking to her. But if the old bastard wanted a fight, so be it. She hadn't phoned him. Instead she wrote an immediate and robust reply, full of facts and figures, and copied it to the same people plus, for good measure, a couple of others she knew to be her allies. Touche. But God, it took such a lot of effort.

When she drove over the hill and down past the corrals, she saw Tom's yearlings running in the arena, but there was no sign of Tom and she felt disappointed, then amused that she should feel so. As she came around the back of the creek house she saw there was a phone company truck parked there and as she got out, a man in blue coveralls came out of the house onto the porch. He wished her good-day and said he'd fitted the new lines.

Inside, she found two new phones beside her computer. The answering machine showed four messages and there were three faxes, one of them from Lucy Friedman. As she began to read it, one of the new phones rang.

'Hi.' It was a man's voice and for a moment she didn't recognize it. 'Just wanted to see if it worked.'

'Who is this?' Annie said.

'I'm sorry. It's Tom, Tom Booker. I just saw the phone guy leaving and I wanted to see if the new lines worked.'

Annie laughed.

'I can hear they do, one of them anyway. I hope you don't mind him letting himself in.'

'Of course not. Thank you. You really needn't have.'

'It's no big deal. Grace said her dad sometimes had trouble getting through.'

'Well, it's very kind of you.'

There was a pause and then, just for something to say, Annie told him how she'd bumped into Diane in Choteau and how she'd kindly offered to bring Grace back.

'She could have taken her in too if we'd known.'

Annie thanked him again for the phones and offered to pay for them but he brushed it aside and said he'd leave her to get on with using them and hung up. She started to read Lucy's fax again but for some reason found it hard to concentrate and went off to the kitchen to make some coffee.

Twenty minutes later she was back at her table and had one of the new lines rigged up for the modem and the other exclusively for the fax. She was just about to call Lucy who was in a new fury about Gates, when she heard footsteps on the back porch and a light tapping on the screen door.

Through the haze of the screen she could see Tom Booker standing there and he started to smile as he caught sight of her. He stepped back when Annie opened the door and she saw he had with him two saddled horses, Rimrock and another of the colts. She folded her arms, leaned against the door frame and gave him a skeptical smile.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 561


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