At Social Hour the residents could have drinks and crackers smeared with cheese paste from the Super Wal-Mart where Cook shopped. They were all lushes, homing in on the whiskey bottle. Chauncey Mellowhorn, who had built the Mellowhorn Retirement Home and set all policy, believed that the last feeble years should be enjoyed, and promoted smoking, drinking, lascivious television programs and plenty of cheap food. Neither teetotalers nor bible thumpers signed up for the Mellowhorn Retirement Home.
Ray Forkenbrock said nothing. Berenice thought he looked sad and she wanted to cheer him up in some way.
“What did you used to do, Mr. Forkenbrock? Were you a rancher?”
The old man glared up at her. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t no goddamn rancher. I was a hand,” he said.
“I worked for them sonsabitches. Cowboyed, ran wild horses, rodeoed, worked in the oil patch, sheared sheep, drove trucks, did whatever,” he said. “Ended up broke.
“Now my granddaughter’s husband pays the bills that keep me here in this nest of old women,” he said. He often wished he had died out in the weather, alone and no trouble to anyone.
Berenice continued, making her voice cheery. “I had a lot a different jobs too since I graduated high school,” she said. “Waitress, day care, housecleaning, Seven-Eleven store clerk, like that.” She was engaged to Chad Grills; they were to be married in the spring and she planned to keep working only for a little while to supplement Chad’s paycheck from Red Bank Power. But before the old man could say anything more Deb Slaver came pushing in, carrying a glass. Berenice could smell the dark whiskey. Deb’s vigorous voice pumped out of her ample chest in jets.
“Here you go, honey-boy! A nice little drinkie for Ray!” she said. “Turn around from that dark old winder and have some fun!” She said, “Don’t you want a watch Cops with Powder Face?” (Powder Face was Deb’s nickname for a painted harridan with hazelnut knuckles and a set of tawny teeth.) “Or is it just one a them days when you want a look out the winder and feel blue? Think of some troubles? You retired folks don’t know what trouble is, just setting here having a nice glass of whiskey and watching teevee,” she said.
She punched the pillows on the settee. “We’re the ones with troubles—bills, cheating husbands, sassy kids, tired feet,” she said. “Trying to scrape up the money for winter tires! My husband says the witch with the green teeth is plaguing us,” she said. “Come on, I’ll set with you and Powder Face awhile,” and she pulled Mr. Forkenbrock by his sweater, threw him onto the settee and sat beside him.
Berenice left the room and went to help in the kitchen, where the cook was smacking out turkey patties. A radio on the windowsill murmured.
“Looks like it is clearing up,” Berenice said. She was a little afraid of the cook.
“Oh good, you’re here. Get them French fry packages out of the freezer,” she said. “Thought I was going to have to do everthing myself. Deb was supposed to help, but she rather tangle up with them old boys. She hopes they’ll put her in their will. Some of them’s got a little property or a mineral-rights check coming in,” she said. “You ever meet her husband, Duck Slaver?” Now she was grating a cabbage into a stainless steel bowl.
Berenice knew only that Duck Slaver drove a tow truck for Ricochet Towing. The radio suddenly caught the cook’s attention and she turned up the volume, hearing that it would be cloudy the next day with gradual clearing, the following day high winds and snow showers.
“We ought to be grateful for the rain in this drought. Know what Bench says?” Bench was the UPS driver, the source of Cook’s information on everything from road conditions to family squabbles.
“No.”
“Says we are in the beginning of turning into a desert. It’s all going to blow away,” she said.
When Berenice went to announce dinner—turkey patties, French fries (Mr. Mellowhorn still called them “freedom fries”) with turkey patty gravy, cranberry relish, creamed corn and homemade rolls—she saw that Deb had worked Mr. Forkenbrock into the corner of the settee, and Powder Face was in the chair with the bad leg watching cops squash the faces of black men onto sidewalks. Mr. Forkenbrock was staring at the dark window, the coursing raindrops catching the blue television flicker. He gave off an aura of separateness. Deb and Powder Face might have been two more of Mellowhorn’s stuffed dogs.
After dinner, on her way back to the kitchen to help the cook clean up, Berenice opened the door for a breath of fresh air. The eastern half of the sky was starry, the west a slab of basalt.
In the early morning darkness the rain began again. He did not know but would have understood the poet’s line “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” Nothing in nature seemed more malign to Ray Forkenbrock than this invisible crawl of weather, the blunt-nosed cloud advancing under the lid of darkness. As the dim morning emerged, like a photograph in developing solution, the sound of the rain sharpened. That’s sleet, he thought, remembering a long October ride in such weather when he was young, his denim jacket soaked through and sparkling with ice, remembered meeting up with that old horse catcher who lived out in the desert, must have been in his eighties, out there in the rattling precip limping along, heading for the nearest ranch bunkhouse, he said, to get out of the weather.
“That’d be Flying A,” said Ray, squinting against the slanting ice.
“Ain’t that Hawkins’s place?”
“Naw. Hawkins sold out couple years ago. A fella named Fox owns it now,” he said.
“Hell, I lose touch out here. Had a pretty good shack up until day before yesterday,” the horse catcher said between clicking teeth and went on to tell that his place had burned down and he’d slept out in the sage for two nights but now his bedroll was soaked and he was out of food. Ray felt bad for him and at the same time wanted to get away. It seemed awkward to be mounted while the man was afoot, but then he always had that same uncomfortable, guilty itch when he rode past a pedestrian. Was it his fault the old man didn’t have a horse? If he was any good at horse catching he should have had a hundred of them. He foraged through his pockets and found three or four stale peanuts mixed with lint.
“It ain’t much but it’s all I got,” he said, holding them out.
The old boy had never made it to the Flying A. He was discovered days later sitting with his back against a rock. Roy remembered the uncomfortable feeling he’d had exchanging a few words with him, thinking how old he was. Now he was the same age, and he had reached the Flying A—the warmth and dry shelter of the Mellowhorn Home. But the old horse catcher’s death, braced against a rock, seemed more honorable.
It was six-thirty and there was nothing to get up for, but he put on his jeans and shirt, added an old man’s sweater as the dining room could be chilly in the morning before the heat got going, left his boots in the closet and shuffled down the hall in red felt slippers, too soft to deliver a kick to stuffed Bugs with the googly eyes at the foot of the stairs. The slippers were a gift from his only granddaughter, Beth, married to Kevin Bead. Beth was important to him. He had made up his mind to tell her the ugly family secret. He would not leave his descendants to grapple with shameful uncertainties. He was going to clear the air. Beth was coming on Saturday afternoon with her tape recorder to help him get it said. During the week she would type it into her computer and bring him the crisp printed pages. He might have been nothing more than a ranch hand in his life, but he knew a few things.
Beth was dark-haired with very red cheeks that looked freshly slapped. It was the Irish in her he supposed. She bit her fingernails, an unsightly habit in a grown woman. Her husband, Kevin, worked in the loan department of the High Plains Bank. He complained that his job was stupid, tossing money and credit cards to people who could never pay up.
“Used to be to get a card you had to work hard and have good credit. Now the worse your credit the easier it is to get