Dodge the Bullet (17 page)

“I know you don’t.” Dodge carried his plate
to the stove for seconds. “But if you did, I’d never have known.
I’m sorry about that.” He set his plate down and tried to avoid his
father’s stare.

“You were busy becoming a man. Wouldn’t be
the one you are today if you’d been around here looking after me.”
Donnie moved the food around his plate with his fork, shuffled his
feet under the table. “I’m proud of the man you are.” He looked up
into Dodge’s eyes. “Never said that before and for that
I’m
sorry.”

In less than a minute the weight of twenty
years dissolved like an effervescent cloud in the air. And the
conversation was over.

“How’s the set-up over at the Woodward
place?” Donnie asked, digging back into his plate of food.

“Good. Better than good, actually. With the
barns and corral at the front of the property, it’s an even better
set up than I had at McGills’.”

“How’s the woman. Sarah?”

Dodge looked up. “What do you mean?”

“I may be old, boy, but I’m no fool. I know
you well enough to know you’re interested. You tell her
everything?”

“Yeah, I told her.” He thought about Sarah
throwing herself in his arms. He was more than interested. She’d
gotten to him and it bothered him more than he could admit.

“You tell her the truth?”

“Yeah, I told her the truth.”

Donnie moved his chair back, carried his
dish to the sink and turned on the water. “You don’t get much sleep
for someone who works as hard as you do.” Donnie filled the sink
with suds and turned to face his son. “Thought maybe getting some
stuff off your chest would help. I hear you at night.”

Dodge carried his plate to the sink and
shooed his dad away. “I’ll clean up. Don’t mean to keep you up at
night.”

“Hell, you’re not keeping me up.” Donnie
reached into his shirt pocket for the cigar he liked to chew on.
“Old body like mine doesn’t need much sleep. If I’d been asleep I
wouldn’t have heard you.”

###

Dodge lay awake that night under the thin
sheet of the double bed in his old room. Things there hadn’t
changed much since he’d been in high school. His trophies still
lined the bookshelf and the red and blue quilt covered the bed with
a weight that was too heavy for the stale air in the small room. He
sat up and raised the window, let the cool night air brush over his
skin.

One of his sisters had lived in the house a
couple years before when her husband had lost his job and they were
getting back on their feet. Their son, his nephew, had stayed in
the room and a few of his toys remained neatly stacked in the
corner. If it weren’t for those toys and his aching back, it’d be
easy to close his eyes and feel like he was young and free
again.

He wanted to sleep, his body craved it. But
every time he drifted off, he saw Wendy Hawkins’ face. He’d jolt
awake and roam around only to disturb his father. He glanced at the
clock when he thought about rifling through the medicine cabinet
for something to help him sleep. He dismissed the idea when he saw
it was one in the morning. Whatever good a sleep aid would do for
the night wouldn’t be worth it when he couldn’t function the next
day. The vibration of his cell phone caused a different kind of
jolt.

“Sus vacas están fuera y fuera yo no puedo
recuperar en.” Miguel was talking fast and Dodge’s brain was too
sleep-deprived for him to realize what Miguel was explaining.

“My cows are out?” he said before
remembering Miguel’s English wasn’t so good. “Cómo? Cuántos y cuán
son lejos ellos?” He needed to know how it happened and how many
had escaped.

“Necesito ayuda,” the man pleaded for
help.

“I’ll be right there.” Dodge reached for his
clothes.

The drive from his dad’s took only a few
minutes, but in that time his cattle had wandered so far down the
Seven North that Dodge had to swerve to miss a heifer and her calf
just as he turned off the Rifle Range. “Damn it,” he swore and
swung the truck around to try to head off the pair and several
others whose eyes he saw reflected in his headlights. If they’d
gotten as far as the main road, there was no telling how many were
out and how far the others had gone. Big rigs and cars traveled
along the Rifle Range at all hours of the night. An eight hundred
pound cow could do a lot of damage to a car or even cause a semi to
wreck, not to mention the dent it would put in his bank account. He
needed to get the herd back to the fences and fast.

The cows had worked themselves into a
frenzy, scared by the headlights and the horn Dodge used to herd
the cows back toward the ranch. He saw the lights of Miguel’s
pickup and together they managed to get the dozen or so cows headed
in the right direction. They led the cattle to the corrals and
locked them in tight. Dodge doubled back to the Rifle Range to see
if he could find any stragglers. He came back to the barn for his
four-by-four to scour the property for the remaining sixty pair
that were still missing.

With only a sliver of moon and full galaxy
of stars overhead, he’d be lucky to find any more cows tonight,
luckier still if he didn’t kill himself looking. The small
headlight of the four-by-four barely reached a few feet in front of
him. He found more cows, twenty or so, down by the river in the
deep sector where they weren’t tempted to cross. It took some time
and a fair amount of cussing, but Dodge eventually got them back to
the corral.

He met up with Miguel on the other side of
the property where Miguel had spied tracks leading across the river
to the newly fenced pasture he hadn’t planned to graze for awhile.
They jimmied a fence with some wire and a fallen tree log to hold
the cows on the property if they decided to cross back over and
then headed back to the original pasture from where they’d escaped.
They found the spot where the wire had come lose and secured it
back to the rod with fresh wire. Dodge passed out on Miguel’s couch
for the remainder of the night. He could have driven home, but he
wanted to check the fence and get a head count on his cows come
first light. He wouldn’t have seen the first break of daylight if
his cell hadn’t started vibrating in the hand that held it firmly
even in the throws of sleep.

“Hello?” Dodge tried to sit up and let his
eyes focus enough to find a clock.

“There’re cows in my flower beds.” Sarah’s
irritation came through loud and clear. “What the hell is going
on?”

“Shit.” Dodge flipped the phone closed to
find his shoes and rustle up the remainder of his cattle.

###

“There’re going to town on your plants,
mom,” Lyle called up from the driveway when he spotted Sarah
peering through the window in her nightshirt. “What’d Dodge
say?”

Sarah held her head out the window and tried
to angle her body to see around the side of the house to appraise
the damage herself. “He said a lovely cuss word and hung up on me.”
Her voice drifted off as she saw the dust from his approaching
truck careening toward the cabin. “Well that was fast.” She grabbed
her robe and slippers to join him outside.

Dodge quickly skirted the front of his truck
and came to a stop by Lyle. Sarah saw at least fifteen cows eating
away at the pansies and wildflowers she’d planted.

Dodge slapped a hand on Lyle’s shoulder.
“Can you fire up the four wheelers and give me a hand getting these
guys back in the pasture? And grab your brother,” he called to
Lyle’s back as he ran inside the garage. “I need all the help I can
get.”

Lyle side-stepped around Sarah as she
stomped her way through the vehicles toward Dodge. “You’re supposed
to keep the cows off my little section of the property.” She’d
worked her butt off the past few days on her flower beds and potted
plants. Ever since she’d heard the cows less than half an hour ago
they’d put enough of a dent in her work to force her to start
over.

“Sorry,” he said. He raised an eyebrow as he
took a long, slow study of her attire. She tightened the sash on
her robe. “How long have they been here?”

“It’s been about twenty minutes since I
heard mooing and took a look. That’s twenty minutes too long.” She
set her anger aside long enough to take a good look at Dodge. His
heavy eyes and slumped shoulders made him look older. “You look
like hell. What happened?”

“The fence wire must have broken loose from
the metal post. We did our best to get the ones we could find back
in last night, or early this morning.” He ran his hands down his
face. “I need to get these guys in the corral and do a count to see
who’s missing.”

Kevin and Lyle bounded down the stairs and
suited up in their protective gear for cow wrangling.

“You two listen to Dodge and do what he
says.” It was almost worth the destruction of her flowers to see
them so happy. She turned to Dodge as he tossed Kevin and Lyle
their helmets and started the engines on the four wheelers. “I’ve
got coffee brewing upstairs,” she shouted to him over the whine of
the engines. “I’ll get dressed and bring a thermos to the
pasture.”

He nodded his head at her. “Kevin, you take
the white one and Lyle, if you can do the gears on your mom’s,
we’ll take hers. It’ll do better in all this mud.”

“Let’s go,” Kevin said.

Sarah watched them peel out of the drive and
around the front of the house by the river. Dodge shouted
directions for them to fan out around him, the effect of which
would push the cows back along the road toward the pasture. What
little of her lawn that remained was churned to bits by their
tires. The smiles on their faces were worth a few stems of grass;
her sons were rustling cattle and loving every minute of it. She
went inside to get dressed and watch the show from the comfort of
her kitchen with the much needed zing of caffeine.

###

The first spray of mist began to fall from
the overcast sky on a day that was quickly going from bad to worse.
Cows of all sizes packed the corral, mooing noisily after their
night on the loose and frantic capture. Lyle and Kevin put out hay
in the narrow troughs that lined the outside of the corral while
the cows pushed and shoved their way to reach the golden meal.

Dodge and Miguel huddled around the post
speaking conspiratorially in Spanish as Sarah approached from the
cabin. She’d pulled on some old jeans and a sweatshirt and had
poured the coffee into the only thermos she could find. Dodge
looked like he needed to inject the caffeine directly into his
veins. He leaned against the post, his Stetson high on his head and
his boots and jeans covered with mud.

“Did you get them all back?” She handed
Dodge a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee and screwed the lid on when
Miguel politely declined and walked away toward the boys.

Dodge took a long sip from the small cup
that looked like a shot glass in his large hand. “I’ve got ten or
so over at the Winslow’s. They’ve got them cornered and are waiting
for me to come get them. That should be it.” He looked over at the
corral and shook his head. “I’m damn lucky.”

“Do you need the boys to help you get them
from the Winslow’s? I’m sure they’d love to.” She watched him
absently rub the back of his neck. He looked exhausted and she
wished she had more to offer than coffee.

“Yeah, with the four of us it shouldn’t take
long.” He took his hat off, ran a hand through his thick hair, the
ends of which were beginning to curl in the light mist. When he
placed the hat back on his head he looked Sarah in the eye and took
a deep breath. “The fence didn’t break.” He picked up the sheared
edges of a wire that hung from a post. “This wire was cut.
Deliberately.”

“Are you sure?” She moved in to examine the
ends of the wire.

“The wire isn’t frayed, as you’d expect if
it’d pulled loose. It’s a clean cut. And all the cattle escaped,
like someone pushed them out the opening.” He dropped the wire and
lightly grabbed her arm, pulled her toward his truck when the boys
made their way around the corral within listening distance. “I
don’t want to frighten you, but I thought you should know someone
cut the wire on purpose.”

“Why should I be frightened? Seems to me
whoever did this, did it to you. I’m more than a little relieved I
didn’t pay thousands of dollars for fences that are going to break
after one week.”

“It’s your property.” He kneaded his neck.
“Damn it. I don’t like you being out here all alone.”

Why would he think of her safety when he’d
spent all night getting his cows back? “Dodge, I didn’t hear a
thing until the cows starting singing this morning. I don’t think
anyone came near the cabin. Did Miguel hear or see anything?”

Dodge sighed and leaned his body against the
truck. “No, he just heard the cows moving out toward the road and
called me.” He pushed himself upright. “Guys, that’s money you’re
throwing around there,” he said when Kevin and Lyle started
throwing hay at one another. “Fire up the four wheelers. We’ve got
a few more to bring in.” He looked back at Sarah, reached down to
run his hand over her hair. “You need a hat.”

“And you need some sleep. I’ll start on
breakfast for you and the boys. Come on around the cabin when
you’re done.”

###

“Kevin, can I talk to you a minute?” Dodge
asked the teenager who was all but rubbing up against the Winslow’s
daughter.

“What is it?” Kevin asked.

Dodge led him to the four wheelers after
he’d briefly spoken to Bob Winslow. Son of a bitch could hardly
look him in the eye. The cows were tucked inside the Winslow’s
small corral and he wanted to talk to Kevin before they got back to
the ranch. “Like it or not, you’re the man of the house and I need
you to know what happened.” When Kevin straightened Dodge realized
he was right to tell the boy. “The fence didn’t break, it was
cut.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I don’t know who’d do it or
why, but I want you to tell me if you see anything unusual at your
place or if you see anyone lurking around where they shouldn’t.”
Dodge kicked a tire in a futile attempt to loosen some of the caked
on mud from his boot. “I’ve got Miguel doing the same, but I don’t
want anyone messing with you boys or your mom.”