Mondy, rifle slung in the crook of his elbow, stood at the passenger door of Monahan’s truck and waited as the girl slid out, smiled up at him bright and quick, then headed for the king cab. She swung open the passenger’s side door and greeted Kevin with a nonchalant “Hi,” and enough of a smile to raise a dimple in her right cheek, then tossed her braided rope of honey-colored hair and deftly scooted her slight rear end behind the front seat and between rifles.
The thirty-minute drive to the Escrobarra was uncomfortable, the two teenagers silent and squeezed as far as possible into their respective corners.
“You hear that, Tom?” O.D. said suddenly.
“Hear what?”
“Why, them smooching noises coming from the back seat.”
Hallot’s mocking tone was lost on Kevin’s father. “What the hell noises are you talking about?”
“That kissing.” Hallot was delighted, reveling in the stew of confusion and discomfort he’d created. “I think them two kids is making out in the back seat.”
“Oh, okay,” Tom said, getting it.
“For Christ’s sake O.D.” Kevin said, his face ablaze. “Quit it.”
But Hallot was unable to resist. “Don’t worry, Kev, I won’t look.”
Kevin saw his father’s eyes sweep him in the rearview mirror. And he knew well the smile he couldn’t quite see—the one that came when his old man was finally enlightened and included.
“Please, Dad, make him stop.”
A look, not even a glance, really, from Tom to O.D., mouth turned down and a slight wag of the head. It was a code between them Kevin had learned to read, and now understood he would be hectored no more. Still the humiliation of it stood thick as cedar smoke between him and the girl. This was one of many of O.D. Hallot’s capers that Kevin would find, even after three decades, hard to forgive.
They took the Starvation road south through Three-Mile Flat then made the winding climb up the first bald ridge on the southwest side of the Escrobarra, parking the trucks and trailers at an ancient and dilapidated corrals and loading shoot, hewn of rough-cut lumber. Monahan climbed out of his Chevy and clanked open the tailgate. The dogs jumped in pairs from their pens and scooted around the horse trailer, greedily taking in their freedom. They milled about, licking at themselves and one another and whining as they snuffed the morning ground. All were Blue Tick but for one heeler mix, a house pet named Bonny whose nose was reputedly as good or better than any of the full-breed hounds.
The party mounted up and broke trail, moving some five hundred yards along a fence line, then cut a good game path and began the long climb up the ridge to the cat track. Kevin was unsettled as he rode an unfamiliar and belligerent roan mule named Sally. The less experienced Mondy rode Turk, Kevin’s gentle one-eyed gelding he’d had since childhood. Sally’s rough, jaunting gait made him feel like a sack of rocks in the saddle, and he muttered and cussed under his breath.
The dogs had scattered, some of them fanning out and flanking the group, others trotting along some fifty yards ahead, snouts low and working to pick up a scent in the brush and grama grass. Out on point now, as the trail had gone gentle after the first steep climb, Monahan raised his bay mule to a molly trot, and Amanda, just behind him, followed course.
When they crested the first rise to a narrow brush-choked canyon, Monahan stopped his mule and raised his binoculars, only looking a moment before turning to his daughter and motioning her to halt. He raised the glasses again, and again only glanced, then signaled Amanda off her mule. Kevin, closest to them, dismounted, pulling his rifle from the saddle scabbard and creeping up quietly to sit beside John.
“That little clearing,” the rancher whispered, pointing down canyon some two hundred yards at a grassy patch in the chaparral.
The two bucks, both respectable, stood dead still, their shiny nostrils curling out steam into the dawn light. Amanda, having already chambered a shell, had slung off her fanny pack and bunched it into a rifle rest and now lay prone, aiming at the deer. The muzzle blast from her 6-millimeter caught Kevin full force, like a wave on the side of his body. The larger buck dropped from the field of Kevin’s scope, attempted vainly to stand, then crumpled into death throes.
“That took care of him,” the rancher said, his voice, though quiet, rife with pride and excitement. “Good shot, Mandi.”
Kevin had framed the other deer, now at a dead run, in his scope, and pressed his finger down on the trigger when John spoke up.
“Don’t shoot,” he said.
And now he could hear his father behind him, just above a whisper. “Hold fire, Kevin, don’t shoot.”
And now he was conscious, lifted from primal impulse into something like reason: not being able to recover a wounded animal was the most shameful of errors, and Kevin, even at his age, had already a profound sense of this code. He was to remember, many years later, even beyond the imprinted images of high desert landscape, even beyond the smells and sounds—of gun oil, and the metallic snick of a chambered shell—this code: you cannot call a bullet back, the trajectory fixed and damage done with the pulling of the trigger.
Kevin offered to drop down canyon with the girl and help recover the buck while the rest continued up ridge to the track site. Normally, the entire hunting party would have gone to inspect Amanda’s kill, but today old Pete’s trail was cooling fast. John had expressed some worry about leaving his daughter alone, and Kevin told him he would see her to the vehicles.
“Why don’t you two just unhitch the trailer, drive that deer back to the house, then come back with the truck.”
Kevin agreed. They would meet up later that day, two miles higher at a designated horse gate. John knew they had started far enough north to be out of the way of any recent smuggling activity. The teenagers stood more in danger of being thrown by one of those cantankerous mules than anything else.
It took the two little time to find the fallen animal. Amanda, excited and proud, pushing her red mule, Dunk, through brush and over rocks which Sally seemed reluctant to negotiate. The little heeler mix, Bonny, bounced along happily at Dunk’s heels.
“Slow down,” Kevin said. “Sally doesn’t love me like Dunk loves you.”
This earned him a sweet, green-eyed glance and quick smile over the girl’s shoulder. Amanda’s beauty, in large measure, could be credited to the genes of her stunning Hispanic mother, Yolanda. The woman’s pairing with the fair-skinned John had resulted in a lovely combination of blonde hair and Latin features. Both Kevin and the girl spoke fluent Spanish, but for some reason felt comfortable—in the limited exchanges they had had, at least—speaking only English.
When they’d reached the clearing where the deer lay, Amanda lifted her right leg over the saddle horn and hopped from the mule with no more thought than a cat. She picked up the buck’s head by the antlers for general appraisal and looked up at Kevin as he sat on Sally. Kevin noticed the dimple on her left cheek was more pronounced than that on the right.
“Good buck,” he said. “Hell of a shot, too. I’m damn jealous. I wish I’d have done it, but I didn’t.” This was true, as this three-by-three buck was bigger and more mature than the one he had taken the year before.
“You’ll get your chance,” the girl said. Another smile.
Kevin had offered to help field dress, hang, skin, and bone out the deer, but by the time he’d mentioned it, the girl had already snapped open her buck knife, made the long incision in the belly, pulled out the stomach and liver, and was elbow deep in the opened animal. Kevin was even more envious and painfully attracted, his turmoil made worse by the girl’s ambiguous signals. She told him, and he believed her, that she could take care of the animal by herself and that he should catch up with the men, but Kevin lingered, watching her field dress the deer. “I told your dad I’d stay with you.”
Bonny