Stars Always Shine (17 page)

“I think so,” Place answered. “¿Cómo está la Gatita?”

“She is very fine, thank you,” Salvador answered and laughed at his own language.

Place dumped a final load of manure into the compost pit as Mitch walked out to the deck. She could feel that the unusual warmth would invite itself for another summerlike day, resisting the cool advances of a maturing autumn. With a silent stare, she focused on the overpacked hay barn. Wavy rays of heat filtered upward as if summoned by their source.

Mitch surveyed the land around her, not just of StarRidge Ranch, but of all the land she could see beyond and the land she could imagine beyond that. The countryside was unique to her because in spite of peopled growth and other questionable progress, there was an innocence and simplicity that she felt brought humans back to their real selves. When she thought about her relationship with animals, she realized too how the relationship between humans and animals was always a selfish but necessary one that fed the sybaritic impulses of the well-groomed and fashionably discriminating.

“What’s up?” Place asked as Mitch approached.

“I’m going out to check on Joker. Want to come with?”

“Sure,” Place answered. “Where are our faithful mutts?”

Mitch pointed a thumb over her shoulder and said as if she was confused, “They don’t want to come.”

“They’re spoiled and lazy,” Place said as he looked back at the deck where the two dogs maintained a unified Cerberean pose.

The couple walked up the dirt road and talked about the ranch. With Salvador’s help, it was developing into a solid earthly citizen. The whiteness of the fences declared its sheer boundaries, and the landscape blushed with childlike nurturance. The bloated hay barn and the reconstructed milk barn showed signs of juvenescent life. The little help house that Salvador and Gatita shared and the ranch house that Mitch, Place, and the dogs occupied seemed to take on a deeper color just by the living contact.

From the distance, Mitch and Place could see Joker waiting for them as he extended his neck and head through the gate. His long ears pointed to the azure heaven, and his eyes probed their minds.

“Hi, Joker!” Mitch said excitedly. “You feeling better, boy?”

She offered the burro a carrot, and he chewed it with emphasis. He devoured the next carrot, and Mitch entered the corral to scratch his neck and sides while she examined him.

Place scratched at the animal’s forehead and said, “Back to your old self, hey, Joker?” And as Place spoke, he knew that what he said assured him in some odd way.

Mitch looked down at Miwok Creek and walked along the fence of Joker’s corral. Place stood at the corral entrance, hanging onto the fence. “He must have been drinking his water,” he said. “His trough has little waves in it.”

The soft breeze spread the heat of the sun along the land. Rosa and Coquette stood to greet their owners as they walked back from the other side of the ranch. Place scratched Rosa vigorously while Coquette nudged closer for her measure of attention. Mitch looked at the hay barn for a moment and then leaned back as she grabbed the railing of the deck. “Place,” she started as her eyes widened.

Place felt a rumbling in his stomach and dizziness in his head. For a fleeting moment he thought about sunstroke, but realized it was only unusually warm and not the intensity of valley heat as he had known it. Salvador came running from one of the pastures, and without acknowledging Mitch or Place, he ran into his little house.

The hay barn swayed in a sleepy, swerving motion; the waves of heat floating and fluttering from the roof draped it in a bizarre and strange way. The ground rolled with the slow movement of a dream and thrust its pelvic pastures in an aching arc. The barns and houses cracked with loud pops as nails divorced wood and fence posts separated from the embracing wire.

Place tried to straighten, and when he did, he vomited. Mitch crouched low, still holding the railing as the dogs barked at the moving earth and ran under the deck. In a pasture, a swollen erection of metal burst up from the ground as a ruptured pipe ejaculated water wildly. Bales of hay crunched to the ground with gravitational thuds.

In his house, Salvador looked frantically for Gatita, and when he didn’t find her, he pulled his mattress over his body as the earth continued to push up at him. The railing to which Mitch clung gave way, and she tumbled into the bushes. Place crawled to where she lay, and they held onto each other as the quake slid and jerked and shook their senses.

Place looked up at the three pine trees. They wavered unnaturally, making extreme arcs from side to side. He closed his eyes tightly, opening them again and hoping his vision would be more true. He held Mitch even more tightly, increasing his hug as the movement of the earth’s magnitude seemed to intensify. In the distance, Mitch and Place could hear sirens that screamed from all directions. In the propinquity of bushes and splintered railings, they could feel the deep rumblings of land that was alive. After heart-throbbing minutes, Mitch pushed at Place and squirmed to release his grip, and they rose cautiously, hesitating on all fours as if feeling for the earth to move some more.

“Are you okay, honey?” Place asked, his voice parched with fear.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” Mitch answered slowly and barely loud enough for Place to hear. “We better check on the animals and see if Salvador is all right.”

Salvador emerged from his house almost crouching and stepping sensitively. He looked around suspiciously, and for a reason he did not understand, whispered forcefully in an attempt to call out to Mitch and Place. The couple approached from around the deck, and motioned to Salvador to follow them.

With a reciprocal whisper, Place said, “Come here. Ven pa’cá.” Salvador stood low and frozen as he waited for the earth to shift and shake some more. “¡Ven pa’cá, hombre!” Place ordered, this time his voice more demanding although cracking in its disguised fear.

The three of them stood out in the middle of the lawn, away from structures and overhead wires. Salvador looked back at his little help house, and Place pointed out to him that a house, a home, a shelter, was the most dangerous place to be right now. Salvador responded that that was where his Gatita was. As he held back tears, he convinced himself that it was good that she should die where he spent many days bringing her to life.

They stared at each other like strangers as sirens wailed in the distance with intensity and desperation. Horizons became funneled with light and dark shades of smoke. Place looked at Mitch deeply, and his eyes asked confused questions. Mitch’s attention was on the land. She methodically scanned the ranch as if her surveying was measured in quadrants. With each mental picture, her brain prioritized tasks, triaged sections of the ranch and situations of animals. Before fully acknowledging Place or Salvador, she prayed an apology to the earth of StarRidge Ranch.

Place looked at Mitch closely and wondered if she knew he was there. As he studied her he came to feel the calm strength she possessed, a strength that strangely made him jealous. There was a sense of respect she had for the land and what it could do, but there was also a piercing look that spoke of regeneration, of regrouping, of realizing they could do what they needed to do to help StarRidge Ranch.

Mitch finally broke the sweaty silence as she instructed Salvador and Place to turn off the water and gas while she checked on the animals. She rubbed her hands over her face as if to clean the fatigue and fear from it. “That long-eared prognosticator knew,” she said, “and he tried to tell us.”

Salvador and Place hurried to the water pump and propane tanks, turning spigots off as they took in the real damage to the ranch. The hay barn leaned drunkenly to the west; rafters and bales of hay were tangled in sprawled splashes. The once-proud fence lay flat in some areas, while other parts of it were bent upward and off the ground, forming an accordion of wooden posts and wire. From the middle of a pasture, the rigid pipe pointed accusingly at the sky. The two men walked to various pastures and corrals to check for gates that still worked and fences that still kept livestock in or predators out. Salvador swung a gate aggressively to show Place that some things still worked as they should. And as he swung the gate closed, it screeched with a plaintive meow. Salvador stared at the seemingly animate gate and then at the post that supported it. Crouched and cautious, Gatita meowed to him again.

“¡Mira, Plácido!” Salvador shouted, “¡Es mi Gatita!” And he reached down, picking his resurrected cat up by the nape of the neck just as her mother would have done had she known one. But like a proud father, he cradled her protectively and thanked God for saving her. The sunlight of a smile lit up the dark shadow of his moon-shaped face.

The smoke of faraway misfortune darkened the once-blue sky as Mitch walked to the other side of the ranch. Each step solidly announced to the ground below it that she, Place, and Salvador would mend the ranch, and they would only leave if human nature asked them to. Heading up the dirt road toward Joker’s corral, she could see his antennalike ears and his wizardly expression.

He brayed hard and long with his nose pointed skyward, finishing with a humming, chanting trumpet of a blast for a god that only he knew. Then he looked at Mitch with sincere, wise eyes. She offered a carrot, and he continued to look at her as he crunched on the sweetness of the treat.

O
ver the phone, Mitch tried to convince, cajole, and persuade Jacqueline that everything at the ranch was fine. Of course they had felt a few tremors from the quake that had spasmodically sent the Richter scale into frightening motion, but really there was only a mild wave of movement felt in the neighborhood of StarRidge Ranch, and any damage could easily be fixed by Salvador and Place.

“Then why was your phone out for a few days?” Jacqueline asked, not feeling convinced, as she had witnessed the damage in her own home a hundred miles away.

Mitch ducked and darted into easy avenues of lies as she told Jacqueline that the county had been hit hard. The main highway into the county was passable in only one lane. Many other roads were closed and buildings declared off-limits because of their new instability. All of what happened in the urban areas, Mitch prevaricated, had a residual effect on the outlying areas and one of those products was phone lines that were temporarily down. “I don’t think you can make it into the county, anyway,” Mitch concluded. “The roads are locked up with rescue and repair vehicles and equipment, and the highway patrol is caravaning all vehicles because the Redwood Highway has only one lane open. It’s been severed and sheared!” Mitch offered to keep Jacqueline apprised of new developments as they occurred, and for rhetorical effect added, “If any substantial aftershocks hit us, I’ll call you the minute I can.”

Salvador and Place had worked like Noah in their attempt at righting the listing hay barn. With the truck and rope, they pulled on leaning beams, and once straightened, they buttressed and reinforced precarious fractures and shored up debilitated rafters. Where the damage and remedial repairs looked too obvious, they stacked bricks, lumber, and other excess building material that Mickey had left. They hammered in the corrugated metal sheets of the roof using extra long nails. And when they had completed their task, they restacked the hay in a less ambitious configuration, keeping it closer to the ground.

Salvador and Place stood back from the hay barn and critiqued their efforts. Place tilted his head one way and then another as he tried to look to see how much the barn was slanting.

“Está parejo, hombre,” Salvador assured him. “No te preocupes, mexicanito.”

Mitch, Place, and Salvador worked steadily and patiently throughout the short days as they repaired fences, pasture sheds, deck railings, and wrenched gates. Salvador replaced the sprung pipe with material Mitch received from Sweet Wine Dairy in exchange for a day’s labor. As soon as all immediate repairs had been tended to, coats of paint were applied to cover up any telling clues.

They welcomed evenings. They appreciated being able to rest and get ready for the following day. Each evening they sat outside and anxiously waited for the land to slide, collide, pinch, and punch. Under the desperation of their persistent labor, and concerned that Jacqueline and Mickey could show up at any moment, the trio sat in spent silence as they sipped on beers and gazed out at the sleeping ranch.

Place looked up into the viscera of the night sky. Cells of glinting stars hung in a noiseless broadcast of sempiternity. “A miner once told me that you can see the stars during the daytime,” Place said as he continued with his face pointing skyward. “She said when you go down in a vertical mine shaft and you look up, the stars are there. They’re always there. Stars always shine. And you can see them behind the blue sky.” Salvador and Mitch did not respond, as he had expected, and he wondered about the name given to the ranch. The name didn’t fit the property. The ranch was not situated on a ridge, or even a hill. It was a supine square of land that received more than it returned. Place followed a line of bright stars as they crested directly overhead. Along each side of the glistening line, dots of less luminous stars were scattered and Place could see invertible slopes of deep black marked by the less distinct dots of light. He focused more clearly on the ridge of stars as it pointed back at him.

In the following days, Place checked and rechecked the repairs they had made following the earthquake. He felt that he and Salvador had made the fences, barns, sheds, and gates as fit for ranch life as they had ever been. But he was not confident about the work they had done, and only time and nature would tell.

“It’ll start raining soon,” Mitch said, looking at Place’s nervous face. “The rains will be a good test of the work we’ve done. I think everything will hold up nicely.”

Mitch did not wait until the first of December to start providing feed for the animals, and she did not feed only the insufficient flake of hay that Jacqueline had measured with close hands. Coastal fog sauntered inland each night and remained for most of the morning, and now the animals needed fuel for those long, cold stands.