Buren was wrong. There wasn't a tin roof nailed over the top of his life. Hell yes, he was sixty-four years old and somewhat bad in the back and constantly plagued by arthritis in the feet he'd frozen in Korea. And there were other weaknesses, like how his belly was bulldogging the steak and scotch he'd had for dinner. Things didn't go down easy like they once had. But whatever future he had was still going to be a future he chose-not one that C.D. Hobbs or Buren chose for him. The rest of his days weren't going to be about sniffing the thin smoke of a purpose he'd given up somewhere along the line. He was going to put sheep back in his corrals. They might be merinos, the delicate boutique kind of animal he used to laugh about, but they would still be sheep. He understood their limits. He should never have given up on sheep in the first place. They were the only safe thing he had ever wanted.
He opened the barn door and slipped into the cocoon of snow and darkness. Hobbs was cleaning up after their meal. Adams could see his jerky, deliberate movements through the yellow square of the kitchen window. He looked like he was swatting flies. Hobbs's dishwashing was generally all puddles and chipped plates, but it got the job done. He had enjoyed the dinner with Buren. He would, Adams knew, enjoy the news about the sheep even more. So why wasn't he hustling into the house to share their good fortune? Why did he feel more comfortable in his silence and isolation? The machine shed, large and white-capped and dented, suddenly seemed more inviting.
He pried at the shed's roll doors with trembling fingers. He'd come outside with Buren without putting on gloves or a coat, but he hadn't felt the arrows of winter until now. The chill spiked into his kidneys. The shed did not feel deserted, even though he knew Hobbs was still in the house. The air he eased into his lungs was dense and strangely dry, the kind of air he associated with packed linens. Slowly, cautiously, he worked his way from the shed door to Hobbs's workbench in nearly total darkness. He smelled the clumped grease and mud of his tractors. He tasted the sour hone of iron and steel. He moved in silence, believing the silence was in honor of Hobbs and the work he did in that place. Yet he didn't hesitate to take the thing he wanted. He made his claim. She was in a lidless green coffee can, one he'd seen Hobbs wash and polish with a torn clump of bath towel. Charlotte in miniature-alone in a dry cistern of memory. He grasped her gently with his thumb and finger; she was the size of a three-inch bolt. The rim of the coffee can was decorated with small shreds of cloth he recognized all too well. He'd seen them on the plundered hills near Chosin. Flags for the dead. Prayers for the spirits of the lost. He swaddled the tiny Charlotte with his right hand. Hobbs might not even miss her. The workbench currently imprisoned a dozen more exactly like her.
The ranch yard was an estuary of snow. He churned across its quiet surface, bisecting the ribbons left by Buren's spinning car tires. He saw no sign of Hobbs or the dogs. The house, which was warm with the scents of beef fat and detergent, seemed empty. He called for Hobbs once, then walked through the kitchen and parlor, flipping off light switches before he ascended the steep cordon of stairs, which creaked as they had creaked for sixty-four years. He went down the hall to the door of Charlotte's room and opened it.
The room was cold because he kept it closed off to save money. A sliver of him expected to see Hobbs there, curled on the mattress with his dogs, though he couldn't say why he expected that. Winter kept the room smelling fresh, the way the root cellar under the house smelled fresh when it was empty. He turned on the light. The space was still entirely Charlotte's. The ivory-colored bureau. The clover-pink walls that matched the dust ruffle on the bed. The dozens of faded 4-H ribbons-reds and purples and greens and yellows-that hung on a clothesline strung above the bed. There was the Viennese music box that had belonged to their mother's mother. And the family pictures tucked along the edges of a mirror frame. Rows of porcelain horses, their legs cracked from rough play, stood on a pair of painted shelves mounted on one wall. The sateen comforter on the bed looked cheap and faded beneath the illumination of the single lightbulb screwed into the ceiling, but it was all hers, maintained as if she'd died as a child.
The figurine had grown warm in the clutch of his hand. It wasn't easy to see her against his skin: Hobbs's princess in a coffee-can tower. His sister as amulet. He thought of her walking the slushy spring streets of Denver, having an entire life he knew nothing about among the brick warehouses and glass towers of the city. He thought about how she wasn't a schoolteacher anymore, and he wondered what her eyes looked like. Her sculpted shape was subtle and smooth, as easy to palm as a worn river stone. He touched her head once with the tip of his left thumb. Then he laid her on top of the ivory-painted bureau. There. Hobbs was wrong. They hadn't lost all of Charlotte. Part of her was here and would always be here. He had never let that part go.
He wouldn't try to call her again. Calling would do no good. He'd leave her to a kind of peace in Denver. You're afraid of love, of everything that matters. He turned off the light and went to the north window that faced Bell Butte. He parted the heavy curtains and breathed the unsettling of their dust. A fine gauze of falling snow obscured his view of the butte, but he could see the heavy black scrawl of his fence lines running away from the house. Demarcation. That's what he'd always been about, and it had cost him. You hate everything that's different from you. He didn't. Not really. He had tried to accept things that were awkward and different into his life. But he was cautious, and he'd too often been slow to act. The result was a man as taut and insubstantial as his fences.
He left the curtains parted, allowing the phosphorus light of winter to probe his sister's room, then he closed the door and crossed the hall to the cluttered, carpeted square where he slept when sleep could find him. Rain was there for the first time in weeks, stretched across the pad of yellow foam that was his bed. Hobbs must have carried him up the stairs. The dog raised his head blindly, his nose working to take in Adams's scent before he lowered his jaw onto his forelegs and closed his eyes once again. Adams said a word for the dog, but he didn't lean over to caress him. He waited, instead, for the sounds of the house to settle over them. How often had he stood in that chipped doorway waiting for his sister to hustle her ass out of the bathroom while they were both getting ready for school? Charlotte had taken plenty of his time in those days, hadn't she? And plenty of his space. He could almost hear it now, the rustle of her importance, her haste, as she passed him in that narrow pioneer hall. Her presence came back to him in a sweet, rising cloud of girl soap and the twin intake of their breaths. They had slipped by each other often in those days, brother and sister. Quickly. Passing familiarly and without touch.
He slept later than he should have, grinding a long dream about Charlotte and her horse, Redrock, between his teeth. Redrock had finally died of old age in the early 1980s. But in his dream the horse had crippled himself while racing at full gallop under the prick of Charlotte's spurs. Redrock jammed a foreleg into a gopher hole, broke it, and fell. But Charlotte did not fall with him, not in the dream. Charlotte rose upward on the pink carpet of her own dust, still spurring, as if she were a thick-husked seed in the wind.
Hobbs was not in the kitchen. There was no breakfast, no coffee, only a greasy plate of leftover mushrooms from the night before. Seven o'clock. Adams could not remember the last time he'd stayed in bed so late. And the sleep hadn't come from whisky, either. It had come from an exhaustion beyond his bones.
He found Hobbs in the shed. But Hobbs wasn't adding new members to his circus; he was hammering at some freshly sawn lengths of 2 4, instead. His boots were sprinkled with wood shavings. They resembled a pair of decorated rye cakes.
"What you're making there looks like a piece of feeder gate." Adams rubbed his eyes with the back of a hand. Sawdust always made him itchy.
"S-smart," Hobbs said. "I thought it's what y-you'd want. We need to spruce up them corrals."
"We do, do we?" Adams felt a drill bit of apprehension bore into his ribs.
"Y-yes. For the sheep. The new ones. I was guessing you'd go for yearlings, but I wasn't sure how many. Buren d-didn't say nothing to me. I just...." Hobbs paused, the hammer dangling from his good hand, a pleased dimple to his smile. "I just knew how it should go, Fremont. You've always been a good boss, e-easy to figure, easy to read."
"That so? You enjoy Buren's visit that much?"
Hobbs hung the hammer from his belt. "Buren is like a single note of music to m-m-me. I don't ... I'd rather not explain how it works when it comes to Buren. He was nice last night. It's nicer that you're buying sheep."
Adams rubbed at his eyes again. He wished he was able to keep himself prepared for Hobbs's surprises. "And how can you tell that without talking to me or looking in a crystal ball, one or the other?"
Hobbs rubbed a fond thumb along the red welt of his recent injury. "It's wrote like a book on your f-face, Fremont. And it's pretty much made a kind of light all around you, just the thoughts you been h-having. It's a thing I learned to see, th-that kind of light."
"Jesus." Adams held back an onrushing sneeze. "You got me, C.D. You're way ahead of me again. You're always ahead of me." He told himself that Hobbs's strangeness was only as strange as he allowed it be. "I reckon I better retire and give up right now."
"N-no," Hobbs said, pulling a handful of nails from somewhere inside his jeans. "That can't be said about you on good days or bad, Fremont. It's what there is to like about you. You're one who never gives up."
The sheep arrived in a welter of bleating and mud, whether they were ready for them or not. The driver of the tri-level stayed long enough to have a cigarette while Adams studied the invoices. Fifty ewes: all registered, all puny. Their shorn flanks heaved above their frail black legs, and their slit eyes-which looked goaty to Adams-were dull with exhaustion. The bucks, which he and Hobbs chuted into the horse pen for close inspection, were worse. There were only two of them. The ewes had already been bred, they didn't even need the bucks, but here they were fat and slack and awkward in their long, untended bodies. The bucks' curled horns were pitted from poor nutrition. "I hate to give them up, but my youngest son's gone for the computers in Seattle." That's what the east Oregon farmer had said. He had made Adams sit through the story of his family's rise and fall in the highlands above the Owyhee River. It was a good story, inflated by improbable luck and honest partnerships that never disappointed. Adams was familiar with it, chapter and verse. It was the ballad a man had to sing when he was left with nothing but overgrazed land and dogs.
Adams told the farmer he'd gotten moldy in retirement and wanted the company of some breeding stock. When the farmer responded with a diatribe against hippies and organic apple orchards in a voice that whistled through its consonants, Adams knew the farmer believed he had the kind of money and leisure time the farmer had only dreamed about. He tried, and failed, to cut off the farmer as the man recited, by tag number, exactly how each ewe liked to be handled before she dropped her lambs. Hearing the farmer evaporate his ranching history into a loose skein of words made Adams's skin pucker.
The ewes were mostly quiet until Hobbs drove the tractor and a wagon filled with seed cake into the front field. Adams closed the gate behind Hobbs and hefted an axe onto his shoulder. As he trailed the tractor, the stunned ewes began to rally and trail it, too. At first, they moved alone or in small groups linked jaw to flank to jaw. They didn't stop to nibble at the clumps of bunchgrass as the spring sun spread like water across their backs. They stumbled directly toward the feed troughs, the one destination they recognized. A few plaintive bleats gathered and harmonized above the shallow contours of the field, and Adams listened to the sound blend with the local uproar of his magpies. He saw the more vigorous ewes butt the submissive ones aside as Hobbs began to shovel feed. While Adams watched, a luscious, unreined panic lunged through him. There was so much for them to do: feed, doctor, tag, brand, record weights and births. He had spent Buren's money as lavishly as a first-time bride. And now he had the chance to know the animals again. Which were boss and which were rogue and which too stupid to make good decisions on the open range. It felt so right, so deeply familiar. A new purpose was within his grasp, and its momentum came from the loud, begging, needful cries of these sheep. Those cries had once stapled his days to his nights as tightly as a saddle tree was stapled to its leathers.
He made his way to the troughs, loosening the scarf he'd wrapped around his throat and feeling his fingers warm to a sweat inside his gloves. Long, layered terraces of cloud marbled the field with shadows that swirled across the banks of Muddy Creek. He saw Rain circle a portion of the herd, the black mask of the dog's face raised as he, too, memorized the possibilities before him. The small band of dark-legged ewes flowed around the feed wagon as balanced and heedless as a flood. Their underfed shanks were still blotched with the purple paint of their Owyhee River brands. The day those brands were replaced with the of the Trumpet Bell would be a fine day.
"They don't look like m-much," Hobbs said. He was smiling. He had been a smiler ever since they'd first talked about the sheep.
"They never do," Adams said. "Cows make a man feel richer."
Hobbs thrust his shovel into the dusty bank of seed cake and hauled. "Cows make their own kind of trouble. I'm glad you and Buren didn't go for cows."
"Should I ask what would've happened if we had?" Adams gripped the axe so he could lay into the thick ice that covered the watering trough.
"N-no lambs," Hobbs said. "Calves ain't the same, and I'm not ready to take you through a spring season without lambs."
Adams laughed. Then he thought about what Hobbs had really said. "You think this wormy bunch can do the trick?"
He heard Hobbs and his shovel pause, so he raised the axe and broke through the ice in the trough with one swing. The blow soaked his arms and chest with water. After he pulled off his gloves, he began to fish sour chunks of ice from the trough and throw them to the ground.
"We'll l-lose a few," Hobbs said, finally, and Adams knew he was assessing the ewes as he stood on the wagon, looking at their eyes and bellies. He was good at that. He always had been. "Enough'll make it. For what we want."
"And what's that?" Adams asked, his hips and back hot from working. He'd been making a list in his head of all the familiar things he and Hobbs would get to do once the sheep were fed. "I know you like good animals, but what, exactly, do you think we want? Since you're talking about it."
Hobbs peered down at him, then up into the sky that seemed too huge for the one small sun it held. He pushed his orange hunting cap off his sweat-slick head. They hadn't spoken seriously about anything but sheep since Buren's visit. "You remember that fellow B-big Mike from up around Billings, used to herd some for your uncle Gene?"
Adams thought he could conjure up an attitude, if not a face, to go with that name. The Trumpet Bell had seen dozens of men come and go. Big Mike, as he recalled, had been some sort of distant cousin to Old Etchepare. "I believe so. A little."
"Big Mike weren't no good with sheep, or horses n-neither, but he did tell me this story about a wolf that hunted this territory long ago. I believe he w-wanted to scare me. He thought I was the kind who could be scared."
Adams plunged both hands into the slushy water of the trough. He scooped ice onto the ground as noisily as he could. Hobbs hadn't tried to tell him a story of this kind in quite a while. The warning buzz in his head suggested he should pay attention to the details of this one.
"There was this wolf, see, a big lone male that come down from Montana before the ranchers were all in here. He ate all the b-buffalo he could get. He ate all the elk. It got so the Crow people and the Sioux was afraid of him and glad when he left their country. Big Mike said it was a giant wolf and bright as silver by the time it got to the Ferris Mountains because of all the miners it had swallowed for its meals. That wolf glowed with the glow of their riches. I don't remember all the parts of how he told it. Big Mike was mean and unfriendly in his speaking, s-so if you don't remember him, I'm glad you don't. The ending had to do with a Indian girl who lived along a deep stretch of the Platte River. She somehow fooled that wolf into drowning himself in that water, she saved herself with some kind of special trick, and that's why they say the Platte Canyon runs so pretty and silver in the spring."
Adams wagged his head, wanting Hobbs to see he was amused. "I'm glad to say those damn dogs the government plans to restock in Yellowstone Park will never be allowed to get down this far again. Wolves won't bother us. They are one thing us hard-working sheep men don't have to worry about."
"Th-that's not why I'm saying what I'm saying, Fremont."
Adams glanced upward again. Some of the bolder ewes were butting at his knees now, thirsty for a drink. There were sheep scratching their backs against the wagon axles and tires. He could smell the dispensing scent of their long, desperate journey from Oregon, the piss and shit of animals that have been trapped. "Then why'd you bring it up?"
"I don't know for sure. They just come out of my mouth sometimes, the s-stories. They make these shapes in my m-mind. You're the man who likes a goal he can see and touch."
Adams shook his head. A strange, hard pressure in his skull made it seem as though his ears were about to pop. "What's that mean? That mean you got a prediction, some kind of sensation, about a big wolf bearing down on us now that we got something to protect?"
"N-no," said Hobbs, closing his eyes. "It ain't that complicated. It's not about seeing one danger, or even two. Danger's always there. Y-you can't get rid of it. She says it's about living with what makes you happy until the day you die."
Adams didn't have to ask who she was. He felt a clutching at his spine, as if distant fingers were digging toward his heart. "Jesus, C.D. I don't know how you manage to make all these connections, but you do. Is it all right if we don't talk about my sister? I can't do Charlotte right now, I really can't. This is a big day for me-for us. I'd rather talk about wolves and these brand-new merinos. I might still have a chance to get things right with them."
Hobbs drove his shovel into the load of seed cake. He lifted a bladeful and added it to the trough, careful not to dump it on the desperate heads of the ewes. "See, that's your story, Fremont. And you tell it p-pretty good. I like it. These merino gals like it. You got c-confidence. The confidence has come back. You don't give away no sense of how there might some day be a finish to things. Y-you don't go for the end. That's what you leave for everybody else, ain't it? H-how it all ends."
"You keep him away from me, that's what you need to do. Right now."
Adams unclamped his teeth, thinking that might improve his hearing. His wristwatch said it was one in the morning. The television was a cold beacon beyond his feet. He'd fallen asleep in his recliner, or that's what the magazine on his lap seemed to indicate. He was holding the receiver of the phone to his ear, though he didn't remember picking it up.
"He's been up here twice this week, and friends of mine saw him at the bar in Sinclair. Maybe you don't know that. Maybe you think it's not your beeswax." The voice was female, fast and toothy. He didn't ... he couldn't think who it might be. He remembered eating calf liver and onions for dinner. He could taste those on his breath. And there had been some sort of dream, a physical pursuit that was hungry and troubling. He hadn't slept well since he'd gotten the merinos. Grogginess still had him nailed flat.
"Wake up," the voice shrieked. "I ain't kidding. He's following me all over the place and it's getting outta hand. There's them'll do something if you won't. It don't matter how brave he thinks he is. How he thinks there's something to hisself when he drinks."
Hobbs? Was she talking ... could it be Sugar? Was it Sugar on the phone? He tried to unkink his neck to see if the Ford truck was in the yard, but he was laid out stiff in the recliner, couldn't see a damn thing from there.
"He.... Is this ... jail?" It was all he could put together on short notice. The woman and her voice were way ahead of him.
"No, this ain't no jail or snitch. This is a Good God Damn Citizen telling you somebody you should be taking care of is off the rails." She paused to suck in some breath, and Adams decided she was no drunker than he was. She didn't breathe like a drunk. "Tell him what I said. Tell him to leave me the hell alone." And she hung up.
He held onto the phone long after he needed to. It kept talking at him-errrrr, errrrr, errrrr. He rubbed his face and stared at the haft of moonlight that stood guard between the imperfectly closed window curtains and tried to assemble what he knew. It was April. Close to lambing time. There were inoculations to give. Bills to pay. He'd sent Hobbs to the bank in Rawlins that afternoon, but Hobbs had been back by sundown. They'd been together every day since the sheep arrived, utterly busy except at night, and who knew how either of them made it through one of those.
Could Hobbs be tomcatting at night?
Tell him.... Tell him. ... This was a new responsibility. It had been decades since he'd had to protect C.D. Hobbs from anybody outside his own family. He didn't know what he was supposed to say, how something like this got addressed. But address it he would. He rubbed the distant mask of his face again, then studied the dissolved edges of the room and all its furniture. He knew what the room would tell him. The room would tell him what it had told him before: he had to take care of C.D. Hobbs. Without Hobbs, this was it right here, all there ever was day after day after day-a box and him inside it.
He fed the horses well before dawn, then turned them out into the hoof-chewed paddock that smelled of frost and stone. He could just make out the shape of Bell Butte as it rose above the roofline of the house. It looked like a black-handled reef awash in the light of the fading stars. He made himself go into the machine shed, and he made himself knock on Hobbs's door. There was no answer. When he pushed open the door, the dogs Zeke and Dan unfurled themselves from the camp bed and came to nudge at his boots. There was no sign of Hobbs, or Rain, although the Mexican blanket on the bed had been carefully folded across the foot of Hobbs's sleeping bag. The harder part came when he discovered that the old flatbed International that had once been their ditching truck was no longer parked on the east side of the barn.
So, that was it. Hobbs had gone off into the night after Sugar and her friends, whether he was welcome or not. The knowledge of Hobbs's capering and drinking dried itself like rawhide around his gullet and jaw.
He wasn't given much time to suffer in his worries. He took his shepherd's crook and the two ignorant dogs and moved into the cold cave of the day, hoping that motion, a walk to survey his modest holdings, would ease his thoughts. The pasture that held the merinos was still white with a few crusts of snow, but it didn't take him long to see the dead ewe for what she was. Her body was pressed against a stretch of woven-wire fence. Her belly was bloated, and her tongue was thick and gray between her lips. Her hooves had cut sharp crescents in the ground as they spasmed. There was no blood, so Adams knew she hadn't been taken down by coyotes. It was likely she'd gone septic from a dead lamb. Her loss was unfortunate, but not unusual. That was how he was thinking before he found the second one.
She was on a slope east of the feed troughs. She wasn't bloated. Instead, she appeared desiccated, her hide furrowed with signs of dehydration. Birds had eaten at her upward facing eye while she was still alive, leaving ants a hole into the ripe skull beneath. Adams glanced overhead for the soaring scrap of a raven, then back at a carcass the dogs wouldn't even sniff. The remaining ewes seemed unperturbed. They migrated into the golden bays of sunlight that began to pool across his mottled field, grazing with their usual single-minded efficiency. Adams put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. When he had both dogs at his feet, he had to keep himself from etching the hour and the date in his calamitous memory. For more than two weeks, he and Hobbs had had a ranch operation that was right and lucky. He was not ready to mark this moment as the beginning of its inevitable demise. He just wasn't.
He cast the dogs in wide, sweeping arcs and limped his way to the gate that led toward the corrals. He pressed his feet hard against the rolls of flannel he used to fill out the ends of his boots where he no longer had toes. He would need all of his quickness, all of his balance, to pen the herd on his own. But he could do it. He had done it before many, many times, even in storms that left him deaf and blind. As the ewes began to bellow and bunch and turn in response to the prodding of the dogs, he unlatched the field gate and let it swing wide. He gripped his crook in both hands. The morning wind swept toward him, and into him, from the mallow crest of Powder Rim, and he let the wind fill him like a sail. He closed his eyes so hard he could feel his pulse thrum against their lids. He could do it again, he could, he could. He needed no soul other than his own, no friend, no partner, to work this perfect thing.
But the dogs had been unevenly trained, and the merinos didn't yet know the layout of his ranch. They came at the gate like they didn't see it. Zeke moved off the heels of a lagging ewe and thrust himself in front of her, nipping at her tender chin. This corked the movement of the herd, so Adams waded into the confusion with his crook held high. He shouted encouragement, he cajoled, he spooked Zeke back into position with a swing of his crook, and it all worked well enough until he tried to high-step free of the chaos. He'd just hooked the haunch of a blundering ewe from behind when he fell. And though she wasn't big enough to drag him, she was strong enough, and frightened enough, to yank hard on his shoulder. The tear went through his right side like the tearing of fine cloth. The pain came right after.
He lay on the ground as his livestock bucked and farted its way past his aching head. The dogs were good enough to finish the job he had started; they pressed all forty-eight remaining ewes into the corral. He got to his feet, careful to pin his arm against his side as if it were a broken wing. He latched the gate with his left hand. In better days, younger days, he would have been ready to joke about his clumsiness, if not his frailty. He'd been hurt plenty of times. But he could find no joke in his spinning mind. A real rancher never minded when his stock got the better of him-not as long as it only happened once in a while. All right, he told himself, you are a real rancher. This is not for pretend. Nothing that really matters has gotten the jump on you.
He hung onto the swaying gate for a moment, catching his breath. He watched the black blade of a scavenging raven slice across the carnation petals of a high-flying cloud. It was headed for his dead ewes, damn bird. It hadn't been slowed down or undermined by its instincts. It knew what job it was supposed to do. And so did he.
Once he'd swallowed some of his embarrassment, Adams examined the gathered herd and decided that some of his merinos looked good and some appeared as dazed and starved as the day they had shipped in. The fine spice-colored dust of the corrals clumped at their tear ducts and nostrils, making them all seem weepy, but he tried to make distinctions. He tried to think through the most pressing problem he had-the death of the ewes. Was there poisonweed in the pasture or some kind of fungus in the seed cake? Had the sheep carried in a bug from Oregon? He had so many questions-and no one to ask them to. Where the hell was Hobbs? Why would he stay away in the morning? He spent a short, throbbing moment appraising the two bucks that had roused themselves in response to the arrival of the ewes. Both had forage-green slobber matted on their muzzles and chests, and their blatting calls wavered with uncertainty. What ugly luxuries they were. They had no good reason to be in the world.
Hoping the situation might be one that had a simple solution, Adams gimped his way into the dry vacancy of the machine shed.
"C.D.," he shouted. "I god damn need you, you know. I need you right now." His voice roused only the sparrows that nested in the building's eaves. They fled from his echoing voice like a handful of hurled stones.
The veterinarian was new to Baggs, one in a long line of doctors who served the area on rotation and never stayed for long. But she knew her sheep, and she was smart enough not to make promises. She took samples from the two bodies Adams had kicked onto the front loader of the big tractor and left elevated, like a raised dish of meat, in the ranch yard. She helped the injured Adams chute a pair of healthy-looking ewes so she could collect their blood and urine. She didn't seem convinced the deaths were caused by a single ailment, some kind of epidemic barreling down on him out of nowhere.
"I've read...." The new vet paused, dampening her student impulse. "A Colorado fellow told me it's hard for some breeds to adapt to the harsh conditions up here. Have you raised merinos for long?"
"Sixty-nine years," he blurted. Then he had to correct himself and repeat the brief history of the Trumpet Bell he'd given her when she arrived. "It's my first shot at merinos, I admit that. I can't see what Colorado has to do with anything." He knew he sounded like a maidenish old man who hadn't eaten breakfast and who'd just had his shoulder torn loose, but god damn it, he respected the fact this child vet had gone to school way over at Iowa State, she ought to respect him.
Hobbs finally showed up behind the wheel of the backfiring International truck just before the vet departed. He was wearing a brand-new hat and shirt. He had another necklace around his neck. This one looked like it had started its life as a bicycle chain. The vet went over her assessment again, for Hobbs's benefit-what they should watch for and how some culling, followed by injections of medicine they could get from her office might be their best option. Hobbs didn't ask any questions. He suspended his wide mouth in an open, fluted shape while the doctor spoke. Adams stared at Hobbs, trying to smell liquor on him or at least the sweat of late-night dancing and its aftermaths, but he couldn't detect what he wanted to detect-hints of guilt or ruin. Hobbs also didn't seem particularly upset about the dead ewes. He was polite to the vet, cautious with Adams, but he appeared oddly calm.
"She's nice," Hobbs said as they watched the vet's customized Dodge fishtail onto the highway.
"For what she's selling, sure. Nice and smart and expensive as all get out. How's the ditch truck run?" It was Adams's way of asking Hobbs where the hell he had been all night. He did it with a shaved voice.
"Stops every few miles. Thirsty as a c-camel for water. Oil, too." Hobbs squatted to look at the two lolling bucks through the warped slats of the horse pen.
"This herd doesn't have to be a job for both of us," Adams said, "in case you've got more important things to do."
Hobbs answered with words as flat as the ground they stood on. "Nothing's more important."
"Then why is the telephone waking me up at night, filling my ears with news of your adventures? I can see how the partying might be fun for you, but I thought we'd agreed on something here. We got a business to run."
"We have b-business," Hobbs muttered, squinting at the dirty, placid bucks. "We have business. We have business."
Adams felt the blood rush to his face. "Could you at least stay home at night? I don't want somebody to hurt ... I worry that ... Jesus, I just want to say that I could use your help and attention with this sick bunch of ewes."
Hobbs removed the new, unhandled straw hat from his head. His eyes were like split shot. "You don't look so good this morning, F-fremont. You're hearing all this news as bad. Has anybody ever t-told you that you see too many things as s-sick or bad? These sheep ain't sick. I wouldn't let them bring you any kind of disease."
"What are you-" Adams stopped and held his breath hot behind his teeth. Listening to this version of Hobbs talk was like listening to somebody read from a torn and plundered book. Too many pages were missing. Too much failed to make sense.
"The t-t-telephone's not about me," Hobbs continued. "I don't know what you mean by that. Where I go is not a place that's got t-telephones. I can't g-go very fast in that truck, but there's a lot to see when I get up toward the sky. G-galaxies, p-planets, all that sort of thing. Th-there's lots of nice parts in the sky a person can see if he knows how to ask."
"Would you please-" But Adams couldn't continue the scolding. Hobbs was obviously lying to him. He'd been gone the same time somebody was stalking Sugar. There had to be a connection. And the way he talked. Planets? Galaxies? Christ almighty, maybe there was just no hope. Maybe insanity was as inevitable as the arrival of summer. Adams dropped his eyes. He didn't want Hobbs to see the belief that was fracturing inside him.
"Don't w-worry, Fremont." Hobbs stood, serenading Adams with his hingeless smile. "You look so worried. It'll happen like it h-has to happen. You're running sheep like you love to do, and you're mad I wasn't here. Y-you're telling me you need more help. All right. I c-can fix that. I got a idea for that."
Hobbs sauntered long-legged into the machine shed and soon sauntered out again. He held a black barrel lid in front of himself like a tray, and he began to circle the sheep corrals, pausing every few feet to touch the low wooden fences with his fingers. The sullen ewes barely reacted to his presence, but the young dogs yipped and whined and leaped at Hobbs's flashing hands. He progressed deliberately, like a man laying out survey stakes. Adams knew what it all meant even before Hobbs ducked back into the machine shed to resupply. Hobbs was bringing his little friends out to play. He was setting them up as guards around their indefensible world.
Adams moved closer to the fence and grabbed one of the figures. It was a marine, barefoot, unarmed, distinguished by a face that was all eyes. It was all he could do not to hurl the figure to the ground. Oh, he'd been a damn fool to believe in normal deeds like tractor repair and kitchen floors and merinos. He dug the rough points of his fingernails into his callused palms. Normal never won out at the Trumpet Bell. There was no such thing as an undisturbed, healing life on his ranch-and he was no healer. There was truly nothing left of his home place except its name and its ability to skin men out like pelts.
Hobbs gamboled his way up the loading chute, the young dogs on his heels. Rain, meanwhile, curled himself into a dark comma at Adams's feet. Adams watched Hobbs drive one of his larger figurines into the soft wood of the chute with the heel of his hand as if he were driving a nail. He felt each blow in the floor of his belly. He watched Hobbs hang what looked like a strand of shiny beads around the figurine's tiny neck. "You don't got to w-worry, Fremont. We all need a little more help from t-time to time." Hobbs plucked two more shapes from his barrel lid and slipped them into his shirt pocket as a pair. Adams tried to see who made up the pair: himself and Hobbs, Charlotte and Hobbs, Devlin and Hobbs. Each possibility riddled him with a different brand of guilt. He set the silvery, barefoot marine back on its fence post, its pained eyes aimed toward the setting sun. Hobbs balanced himself on the front edge of the loading chute and began to flap his old-man arms as if they were feathered wings. "It's good, ain't it, Fremont? Th-this is how it gathers. Things won't be like they used to be. This is all the h-h-help we'll ever need."
"Been awhile," the voice said. "I don't get down there no more. It don't feel right to come even when I miss it like a missing leg."
"Steve?" he asked. "Steve Barnheisel?" Adams hadn't wanted to answer the phone. He had let it ring itself out twice because Hobbs was gone again, had been gone since he'd cleared off his workbench, so Adams believed the phone could only bring him bad news. Plus, his shoulder hurt like hell whenever he reached for anything. Then he'd gotten mad at himself for being afraid of what the phone might tell him. Jesus god, he was tougher than that, hurt shoulder or no hurt shoulder. He'd lost another ewe that afternoon and had burned her where she died, watching her smoke like an untended skillet. His hands still smelled of gasoline. If Hobbs was already on his way to cuckoo, what did he have to be afraid of?
"Yeah, it's me, the old fart who quit on you. Right now I'm living in a house the size of a wool sack. Mexicans to the right of me, Mexicans to the left of me, there's a lot of Mexicans in Casper even when it's winter. How you doing, Fremont?"
"I'm doing." He produced words that rang with the conviction he knew Steve Barnheisel, neighbor and former hand, expected.
"Don't know if you've heard, I guess you haven't or you'd be saying something about it, but Buren is in the hospital up here. He wanted me to let you know."
Adams stopped breathing.
"Buren," Steve repeated. "Your brother? He told me to call."
Adams tried to loosen the tentacles clenched around his spine. "Did he wreck his car?"
"No. You really hadn't heard, have you? I guess it helps that my granddaughter nurses at the medical center, so I'm in that loop. Sammi, she's Trina's girl. Nice kid. It weren't a car accident. He come into the emergency yesterday morning, after midnight. Sammi was on a twelve-hour shift. Police brought Buren in, she says, and he was smashed up bad. He had enough eyesight to read Sammi's name tag, I don't know how that happened but it did. Sammi's got my name just like Trina does because Trina and her boyfriend never managed to get married. Buren made a joke about it, her name-this was when he was still talking-and Sammi put two and two together. So I went up there this morning to see what I could do, we've known each other for so long. Buren wrote your name down on a pad since he can't-Well, hell, he's beat bad. Somebody took it to him."
"How bad?" He made himself say it, thinking all the time about the bones of the burned ewe that lay in a scorched halo on the open page of his field.
"He's gonna make it. I shoulda said that first. I'm not used to being the ... talking like this isn't what I know how to do. He's not dying, nothing like that. But he's got the jaws wired, bruises all over his face. Lot a stitches. I think Sammi said one of his knees is about smashed to pudding. In a parking lot near the Safeway is where they found him, and there'd been drinking. They found broke bottles on the pavement. What he writes on paper to the police makes it sound like he don't know what happened to him, but there's been a lawyer to his room, more than one as a matter of fact. Lawyers he knows, I guess. And Sammi says the talk is it was over a woman. I'm not sure I get that. I remember you being a cat for women, not Buren, but there's plenty I don't know, I suppose. He was staying at the Parkway. His car's still there."
"I better make the trip."