Sweet Return (9 page)

With highway frontage, maybe she could put up a small stand and sell eggs and fresh fruits and vegetables. She would go organic on the fruits and vegetables, too, following the latest hot trend. She envisioned baskets of plump, golden Parker County peaches and vivid Texas Rio and Ruby Red grapefruit; stacks of fragrant, sweet Pecos cantaloupes. And a parade of people stopping off to buy from her.

She meant it when she said she didn’t need six hundred forty acres. She truly did not need so much, and she wasn’t a greedy person.

But how could she take land for free from Clova or anyone else? It just wasn’t right. The land belonged to the Parker family. With West Texas landowners, the children inherited. It had always been that way.

In the midst of that maze of thought, she drifted to sleep.

By the end of the week, Joanna had spent so much time at the Parker ranch, she was beginning to feel as if she had become a resident. So that Clova was free to make trips to Lubbock to spend time with Lane and do other chores away from the ranch, Joanna and Alicia had been feeding the Lazy P cattle every day. Alicia was on the Joanna’s Salon & Supplies payroll. What task she performed didn’t matter so long as it was something the teenager was willing to do.

A few times Clova’s neighbors had pitched in, but their help came in sporadic bursts. Thus, every morning at daylight, Joanna had put on her most ragged jeans, her most worn boots and a long-sleeve shirt, picked up Alicia and driven to the Parker ranch. After taking care of the chickens and the eggs, they heaved bales of hay four stacks high into the bed of the old beat-up ranch truck. Then they bumped and crept across the pastures, pushing the dusty, scratchy bales off the bed’s tailgate, with the cattle bellowing and following behind. They traded off driving. Alicia had never driven a pickup and thought it fun.

Joanna had girded herself for a long haul, but that didn’t keep her from collapsing at night, nostrils filled with dust, made worse by the drought, skin and hair caked with sweat and dirt. She went to bed with muscles stiff and aching and rose before daylight in the same state. In just a week’s time, she had lost five pounds. In the past, when Lane wasn’t around for whatever reason, Clova herself had somehow done this work alone every day, rain or shine. No wonder she was thin as a reed. No wonder she looked so worn.

Alicia loved the cattle. She had begun to recognize them individually and was now giving them long Spanish names, all of which included the Spanish word
“dulce.”

Joanna was fascinated by how quickly she, herself, learned to pick an individual white-faced cow from a sea of white-faced cows that basically all looked alike. Like her hens, the cattle had personalities.

This morning, she found herself alone at the ranch doing chores of her own in the chicken yard. The back neighbor, the elderly August Hulsey, had called and reported a fence being down and Lazy P cattle roaming into his pasture. Clova and Alicia had taken the work pickup to do the feeding and at the same time investigate and possibly work on the downed fence.

Compared to taking care of the cattle, tending the hens felt like a walk in a park. Joanna was exhausted. For all of her good intentions, she wondered just how long this could go on. But she couldn’t throw in the towel. Clova was a friend. If Joanna didn’t help her without expecting pay, she could think of few who would.

Chapter 6

Dalton Parker shoved on his sunglasses and left the Lubbock airport in a rented car the size of a roller skate. He hated cars. Had never owned one. He lumbered around LA in a seven-year-old three-quarter-ton Chevy pickup truck with a camper canopy mounted on the bed.

He had spent the week putting his life in good enough order to be able to leave LA. As it was, his agent and his editor were worried about him meeting his deadline on the new book. He had assured them he was almost finished.

He had been forced to leave his house in the care of Candace, though they had mutually agreed their affair was over. Once she clearly understood that a wedding ring wasn’t in their future, she had been eager to move on to more promising pastures. Since she was homeless for the time being, he had made a deal with her to stay in the house in exchange for looking after it. But for all he knew, in his absence, she might set the place afire.

He bitched and swore at the traffic all the way to Lubbock Memorial Hospital. He didn’t recall heavy traffic being a problem in Lubbock before he left this part of the country, but then, except for a few short visits, he had been away nearly twenty years.

At the hospital, when he told a receptionist why he came, she summoned a nurse’s aide, who whisked him to the far end of a long hallway, her shoes squeaking in quick rhythm against the shiny tile floor. At the ICU, a nurse with a military bearing, if he had ever seen one, brusquely asked his name and checked to see whether it was on some list. To his astonishment, it was, and he wondered who had put it there. Who had been so certain he would show up?

Inside the brightly lit ICU, Dalton realized he hadn’t prepared himself for how severely injured his little brother was. Seeing the kid’s pale face, the sunken eyes, his broken body bandaged and hooked up to monster machines by a web of tubes, Dalton was reminded of the horrors he had photographed and left behind on the other side of the world. His pulse rate quickened.

Lane was semiconscious and recognized him. When Dalton touched his hand, Lane attempted to grip his finger. Memories flew into Dalton’s mind. In a way, he had been like a father to Lane. Earl Cherry had been drunk all of his only child’s life and paid him little attention. As a little boy, eight years younger than Dalton and afraid of his shadow, Lane had looked up to his big brother as if he were a hero.

As Dalton remembered that Lane had always wanted to hold his hand, a lump sprang to his throat. He took his little brother’s weak hand, gently squeezed and continued to hold it. “Hey, buddy,” he said quietly, “they don’t make those power poles out of rubber, you know.”

An expression Dalton took to be a smile passed through Lane’s drugged brown eyes, but words didn’t follow.

Only minutes later, a nurse came to Dalton’s side and urged him away. Reluctantly he left the bedside, unable to take his eyes off his brother as he went. He stopped at the nurses’ station. “What’s going on with him? Is he gonna be okay?”

“He’s doing well, considering,” the nurse answered. “His doctor’s already been here today, but he’ll be back tomorrow morning. You can discuss it with him.”

Dalton looked around at the array of machines and monitors stuffed in every nook and cranny of the large room.

The nurse smiled as if she sensed his trepidation. “Don’t let all of this worry you. It looks scary, but it’s really life-saving equipment.”

“I know.” And he did know. He had seen and photographed wilder-looking technical stuff and more of it at the Camp Ramadi hospital in Iraq. The battlefield itself hadn’t shaken him nearly as deeply as what he had witnessed in those brightly lit operating rooms. “How long will he be in here?” he asked her.

“That’s for his doctor to say.”

“Who is he? And where is he?”

“Dr. Naran. As I said, he’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

“What time? I’ll be here.”

“Try to come around ten,” she said.

He left the hospital with his emotions in turmoil. He felt light-headed. His heart was beating a tattoo. He had presumed he knew what to expect when he reached Texas, but he had been wrong.

He had navigated out of the Lubbock city limits and hit the highway south before his insides began to settle. At least Lane wasn’t dead. A week had passed since the accident. Dalton thought of the words he had heard often in Iraq: “the golden hour,” the precious span of time that immediately followed a potentially mortal injury. If a soldier could survive the golden hour, he had a chance. If Lane had been able to stay alive a week, surely he would recover.

Hatlow was an hour and a half from Lubbock. Dalton hadn’t eaten a meal all day, and the coffee and pretzels they served on the plane were long gone. He stopped off at a convenience store and bought a Coke and a rubber sandwich, then continued on his way, munching as he drove.

A sense of home and history washed over him, reminding him that his Comanche ancestors had ruled, roamed and hunted this part of Texas for hundreds of years. In their time, this plain had been covered by wild grass and a sea of buffalo, and his great-great-grandfather’s people had hunted for survival, lived off the land and defended their way of life against encroachment.

His genetic connection might be far removed from the fierce warriors of long ago, but he still took pride in knowing he was a part of something greater than himself. In all of his life, lacking a cohesive family, he had clung to his Native American heritage. Until the Marine Corps, his ancestry was the only thing he had ever felt he belonged to.

Bringing his thoughts more down to earth, he observed that, just as they had in his childhood, endless fields of cotton stretched to the horizon on either side of the highway. He had no trouble seeing through an imaginary camera lens the bolls bursting with white fluff, clinging to thigh-high stalks against a backdrop of a brilliant blue sky.
Fall.
The best time of year in West Texas. Cotton harvest was just around the corner.

His mind drifted to the Parker ranch. Since hearing of his mother’s troubles last Saturday—and at the end of the day, his mother’s troubles were the ranch’s troubles—he had been considering what obligation he had to help bail her out with his own money. She had never asked and had never discussed the ranch’s financial situation with him. He wasn’t filthy rich, but he had done well enough. He could afford to help her a little if she needed it.

Thinking of money took his mind to his younger brother again. He could already see that if the kid really had no hospitalization insurance, as the phone message had said, somebody was going to be called on to pay his hospital bill, which could climb to six digits in a hurry.

Soon Dalton began to see pump jacks seesawing against the sky, sucking crude oil from the bowels of the earth. He recalled that in his youth, Parker land had been under a drilling lease constantly, though only one oil well had ever been sunk. The production from the well was never developed, and his family never became oil rich.

He spotted a new drilling rig not far off the highway, its tower thrusting in a straight line toward the sky. The last time he had passed this way, most of the existing wells were static and no drilling rigs existed. But why wouldn’t drilling activity be starting up again? Jesus, with the price of a barrel of oil more than doubling, wildcatters and big oil producers should be turning cartwheels and falling all over themselves to get moving again.

Oil. Black gold. Dalton could almost smell it in the air, and it smelled like money. From his experience and observations in the world, he had concluded that most of the world’s great wealth came from two commodities: crude oil and narcotic drugs. And it was a toss-up which was the greater source of most of the world’s problems.

Reaching a familiar crossroad, he made a right turn, as he had done a thousand times in the past. Now the fenced Parker ranch lay on either side of him and white-faced cattle marked with a Lazy P brand leisurely grazed. The sight salved his soul in a way nothing else ever had. He had traveled all over the world but had never found a place that touched him this deeply.

He had left it behind when he wasn’t much more than a boy because blind hatred for his mother’s husband had overridden every other emotion in his life. He had rarely come back even to visit for the same reason. On his few return trips, his stays had been marred by the rebirth of his antipathy for Cherry’s very presence.

But his stepfather had been dead for ten years. Why hadn’t Dalton returned and tried to revive some kind of relationship with his mother? He didn’t know the answer. He supposed he simply got used to having no ties or feeling of obligation to family. And at the deepest level, a part of him resented his mother. In his youth when he was at his most vulnerable, she hadn’t defended him against Earl Cherry.

The house shimmered in the distance, and he could see the silhouette of the windmill nearby. A sense of elation filled his chest. Soon he would reach the twenty-acre pasture where new calves or heifers that might have trouble delivering had always been kept. He could hardly wait to see what animals were penned in the small pasture. He had always loved the cattle. A baby calf with its fresh black or russet coat, curly-haired white face and white eyelashes was his favorite animal. Once when his granddad had tried to give him a puppy, he had opted for a calf.

Arriving at the corner of the pasture he saw…

Chickens?

He slammed on the brakes, pulled to the shoulder and stared into the pasture. He had never seen so goddamn many chickens all in one place. He couldn’t even count them all.

And
chicken houses.

And
jackasses.

His mother was raising chickens and jackasses?

The Lazy P was a cattle ranch. Had she lost her friggin’ mind?

Walking toward the ranch house’s front door, Joanna saw a gallon jar of tea bags and water sitting in the sun on the stone pathway that led from the driveway to the rickety wooden porch. The tea had brewed, so she took it into the cavernous kitchen to pour it into glass pitchers like Clova always did.

As she poured, she heard tires on the gravel driveway. She wiped her hands on her apron and walked to the front door to look through the old wooden screen door’s haze.

A white car had parked in the driveway at the end of the stone path, and a man was climbing out. He closed the door with a clack that resounded in the morning’s stillness. He stood a moment and planted his hands on his hips, looking around. He had on sunglasses and a white T-shirt with an unidentifiable logo on the chest. The tail fell loosely over faded jeans.

He lifted his hand and adjusted the sunglasses. Even from thirty feet away, Joanna could see his tanned biceps knot against the shirt’s short sleeves. He seemed to dwarf the midsize Ford, but not because he was such a huge man. There was something else about him. And just like that, she knew who he was. And in that same millisecond of recognition, she also knew he was trouble. Her stomach dropped like a rock. “Oh, hell.”