Stars Always Shine (20 page)

The winter rains continued to soak StarRidge Ranch as the new year broke quickly and the short days offered only brief intervals of opportunity to repair what the water had damaged. In the sloping pastures, rising waters flooded and receded, and when the sun broke through, Salvador, Mitch, and Place moved quickly to stabilize a fence post or move livestock to drier stalls and pens. Thick, impersonal fog moved in on some days and lounged like an annoying house guest, bringing with it its own dispiriting attitude.

A
fter weeks of hard rains that rose to form impromptu ponds and flashing rivulets, a blanketing fog hid the land or smothered it like a firm hand over a muted mouth. Occasional appearances by the now stunted sun were ineffectual, and StarRidge Ranch sat like a tired mother.

Salvador puckered his lips as he studied the ranch. Looking closely at sleepy bushes, he pointed out to Place that some of the plants were starting to offer springtime buds. He sniffed the air the way Rosa and Coquette were used to doing and concluded that there would be an early and prolific spring.

“La primavera va a llegar con un gran besote,” he said assuredly as he described how the change in climate would greet them and the ranch with a loving kiss. Flowers would bloom, babies would be born, and that was an indication and an invitation that the land would tolerate them for another cycle.

Place relayed Salvador’s forecast to Mitch and she smiled cautiously as she watched horses react to the changing weather by dipping their heads playfully and kicking out at nothing in celebration of the coming season. Courting pairs teased one another with flirtatious, coy movements, the male of the pair offering a frolicsome love bite and then prancing away in a garish gavotte. He, his movements indicated, was a strutting and swaggering swain, a young man of a horse ready for a more mature man’s world. Mitch smiled shyly as she studied the female of the couple responding with a marish squeal that indicated both pleasure and dispassion, a not-quite-ready yearning that warned her to be cautious of her would-be suitor. Mitch thought about the relationship between herself and Place. Place really was more like the mare, and she, Mitch, was more like the uncut yearling, or at least one that might be proud cut, who initiated the action, the motion, the sense and exuberance of living in a world that was always alive—and always dying.

“Jacqueline and Mickey will be arriving along with the spring,” Mitch said, her tone affecting one of succulent gossip. “She just called, and they want to move in as soon as possible.”

Place wasn’t sure how to react. He looked at Salvador to see if he understood, perhaps better than Place himself now did. Asking as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, he said “Well, how soon’s as soon as possible?”

“As soon as things are dry and there’s no mud and the grass is green and the smells die down, and angels hover overhead singing of a joyous day of salvation,” Mitch answered with a scoffing tone aimed at a distant and dense Jacqueline and Mickey.

“So what are we going to do?” Place asked.

“What do you want to do?” Mitch asked back. “We can tough it out with them hanging around and see how much we can take. It’s up to you, Place. We can leave when we want to. We can find us a place, and one for Salvador too. We’re doing okay. We don’t need this ranch with them on it if we don’t want to do that. Although, you never know, they might have changed, and for the better.”

“You mean kind of like two old and obnoxious dogs that might have learned new tricks?” Place asked, his voice definitely skeptical and sharp.

“Well, yeah,” Mitch said and offered, “You know, you
can
teach an old dog new tricks. I’ve done it. I always wondered where that saying comes from. But I trained an old, scruffy, dumb dog I picked up on a lonely highway to be a good house companion, so now I don’t believe in all those supposedly wise tales and bits of sage advice.”

“Are you talking about me?” Place jokingly asked and then looked over at Salvador, who laughed along with the couple, not really knowing what he was laughing at. Place had asked Salvador about that—how he could laugh when others laughed but not understand fully what the joke was. Salvador explained to Place that laughing was the same for all people. “Somos diferentes perros de la misma raza,” he explained. Place liked that, and felt good that Salvador included him as one of the different dogs of the same breed. So they could all laugh together even if only two of them fully understood the reason for laughing.

“So think about what you want to do, Place,” Mitch advised. “Let’s just make sure we have our ducks in a row and we’ll be ready when those two come up.”

“But what about Salvador?” Place asked as he pointed to his coworker.

“He’ll be okay,” Mitch assured. “I can find him a place where he’ll be treated just fine. Remember, he has letters of recommendation. I’ll make it so that his Gatita will be able to go with him. Tell him what’s going on.”

As Place and Salvador walked toward the hay barn to prepare the irrigation hoses for another season, Place explained the impending gloom of Jacqueline and Mickey’s move to the ranch. They talked about Jacqueline and Mickey’s ways. They tried to figure out the pair and they did this by attempting to assign to their personalities qualities and quirks that they had seen in some animals they knew. Salvador began the analogy with a simple suggestion that they were like chickens. They weren’t very smart, he reasoned, and their ideas for running the ranch were limited, like a chicken’s ability to fly. They weren’t deep thinkers, just as a chicken isn’t a high flyer.

Yes, but they were like unbroken colts, Place countered. They needed schooling and training, and a young horse doesn’t just naturally ask for it. They’re fine being horses that don’t know any better. As long as they have food and water, they don’t particularly care if they’re ever shod or their teeth are floated. They don’t want to be ridden, anyway. That’s all stuff humans have a need or want to do. Salvador nodded his head in agreement, persuaded by Place’s logic. He then amended his profile by claiming that they were really two different animals. Mickey was really kind of harmless, Salvador observed, and he knew a lot. That new milk barn apartment was evidence of that. But in front of other people, especially Jacqueline, something happened to him. To show what he meant, Salvador stopped from unraveling the hoses and motioned to Place with his right hand holding onto an imaginary handle and turning it toward and away from his body. “Yes, you’re right!” Place exclaimed. Mickey was the monkey and Jacqueline was the organ grinder. They laughed aloud as they inspected the hoses for needed patches, each thinking up more animal analogies for a conversation that had become a spirited sort of competition and a horse race of ideas.

That evening, as Place, Mitch, and Salvador sat on the deck sipping ginger ale, Place relayed to Mitch what he and Salvador had developed in their earlier conversation as a way of understanding Jacqueline and Mickey.

“But why would you try to compare them to animals?” Mitch asked with a puzzled sincerity. “It’s funny how we try to characterize people with animal-like qualities. I think that’s called anthropomorphizing. But it’s really not fair to the animal. Animals aren’t necessarily like what we think they are. That’s just us giving them our labels because that’s how we see things. And it’s too bad we see things like that in animals. Although many times we’re right to see those things in people.”

Place was interested and wanted Mitch to continue. Salvador scanned the land as if in the reflective process of inventing more beastly analogies of Jacqueline and Mickey.

Mitch lectured while she stood leaning against the rail of the deck. She offered examples of the vulturous lawyers she had come across in her practice. Then she showed that even though she often referred to her colleagues in that manner, the comparison was a false one. “Real vultures,” she explained, “feed on carrion. Things have to be dead, even decaying for them to want it. But litigious vultures don’t wait for death; instead they initiate it in many forms. And then they still eat from it—dead and alive.” Mitch offered more evidence and cited snakes in this example.

Mitch liked snakes. They were good and necessary creatures, and could be especially effective on a ranch. She explicated the flaws in calling someone a snake in the grass, and talked about how a snake has no choice but to be a snake in the grass or anywhere else on the ground. As she talked, she slithered an open hand through the cool night air. “So a snake in the grass isn’t necessarily predatory without reason to be, you know. But people are, and many times, without reason to be. Just to be.” She paused to let Place think about what she had said. She continued by asking, “I’ve told you about that gopher snake I’ve seen in the hay barn?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about it,” Place said, not really as interested in or enthused about snakes as Mitch was. “I haven’t seen him yet, and I don’t want to.”

“Ah, but he’s a good fellow,” Mitch said. “He knows you don’t want to see him. He’s the one who gets all those mice and gophers you don’t like. Which would you rather have?”

“Neither,” Place answered quickly.

“Yeah, in a perfect world, huh?” Mitch responded, her voice indicating she was a reasonable person who understood the way things were. “Anyway, my point is that animals don’t have the characteristics that humans do. Ma Nature is good and she knows what she’s doing. Humans are so varied, so strange, so perverse, so disorderly in a world where we want order. It’s not our eyes that play tricks on us, it’s our brains. Animals don’t do that. They don’t abuse their young. They don’t kill for trivial reasons. They aren’t necessarily mean, unless we’ve had a hand in their development. Actually, we’re a lot like them because we’re just trying to survive, although I don’t think we know how to do that as well as they do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Place answered as he mocked Mitch’s passion for the subject she had delivered in the tradition of great orators. He instructed the ruminating Salvador to say the same but only in his language, and Salvador respectfully responded with “Sí, señora.” The two men laughed a brotherly laugh like boys who sit at the back of a classroom and make fun of the teacher.

“Well, you two jokers can think about what you want to do,” Mitch said, smiling slightly at their little teasing game. “We have some time to think about Miss Jacqueline and Monsieur Mickey. Her call was like a falcon, towering in her pride of place. And I’ll let you guess whose line that is,” Mitch concluded as she teased Place with his own passion for Shakespeare and the strangeness of human nature. Then, talking rapidly so Salvador would not catch her words or her meaning, she said to Place, “There are a couple of other things I want to talk to you about that relate to him. And don’t give away anything by looking over at him. Just wait.”

They retired for the night, weary from the day, each anxious to enjoy a deep sleep like hibernating bears.

P
lace’s abrupt manner confused Salvador, and at Place’s urging, the two men worked fast at measuring out lengths of hoses and deciding which pastures they belonged in. Occasionally Place flashed mysterious, sneaky, even seductive glances at Salvador, glances made more enigmatic by the surreptitious smile that accompanied and adorned the forecasting yet foggy face. Salvador worked quickly and quietly as he wondered what Place was up to.

Finally, when Salvador could wonder no more, he asked Place if everything was all right.

“Todo está bien, americanito,” Place assured him and then added in mocking English, “To-morr-ow, we no worky. You comprende?”

Salvador considered Place’s message and question carefully. Something about the tone seemed mean-spirited, taunting, and not fully clear. Why Place was acting strangely was a question that wound its way through the undulating canyons of Salvador’s brain. Each time, the question backed out of one gray crevice and tried another, only to yield to dead ends that revealed nothing significant, the answer securely garaged in Place’s occult thoughts and behavior. The effect caused Salvador to take his cap off and scratch his head, digging into his skull to dredge up a clue.

“¿Pues qué te pasa contigo, Plácido?” Salvador finally asked, feeling left out of a private joke that Place shared with only himself.

“I’m happy. Estoy contento,” Place answered as he raised a flirtatious eyebrow and teasingly blew a kiss toward his friend.

Salvador ducked as if to avoid a boxer’s jab and shied away from his suddenly peculiar partner. He thought about the changing weather and how the springtime caused people and animals to behave in different ways from what their natures usually dictated. As Salvador searched for a meaningful explanation, he realized how little he knew about Place. He knew factual things like where Place was from, what he had done, and where he had been, but these things revealed nothing more than strangers do when conversing at a bar or a bus depot. Salvador had only a superficial knowledge of his friend and he compared it to the basic things a young wife might know about her new husband.

What further confused Salvador about Place and what he might be was the ineffective discussion they had one evening when Salvador had asked Place what a Chicano was.

“A Chicano?” Place asked, answering Salvador’s question with his own question, surprised that Salvador did not know what a Chicano was. He started cautiously, making up a definition as he went along. “A Chicano es como un mexicano americano.”

“¿Y cómo son diferentes?” Salvador asked.

Place, stumbling on his own ideas as he tried to recall what he had once read years earlier, asked, “¿No sabes qué es un chicano?”

“¿Pues cómo voy a saber?” Salvador asked and then added, “En México no tenemos chicanos.”

“What?” Place asked, surprised at the news. “What do you mean you don’t have Chicanos in Mexico?”

“No, mexicanito. No tenemos chicanos en México,” Salvador repeated. “No más mexicanos. Pero aquí tienen chicanos y también tienen mexicano americanos. Y creo que son diferentes. ¿Cómo lo ves?”

Place wasn’t sure how he saw things now because he had never thought about Chicanos, Mexican Americans, and the differences that Salvador thought there must be in the two. “Well,” Place started, distinctly confused by Salvador’s inquiry, “Un chicano tiene una causa.”