Lone Creek

10

By the end of the summer that Celia was living here, she'd succeeded in getting Pete Pettyjohn's attention in a big way. Gary Varna had been a young deputy then, and Celia was the reason that he and I first got acquainted. Seeing him always jogged my memory back to those times.

But oddly, the association that tended to hit me first was of an incident from before I'd met him. Some superstitious part of me had come to believe that I'd seen an eerie hint of what was coming-that it was the moment when the wheels had started turning in that direction.

It happened on one of my last afternoons working at the ranch that summer. The older hands were sitting around the shop drinking beer like they always did on Fridays. I'd become sort of a mascot, the tall skinny kid who both exasperated and amused them. But I'd gotten to where I could handle eighty-pound hay bales all day and be reasonably useful doing other chores, and to those men, that kind of help was worth a lot. They pretended not to notice when I sneaked a beer out of their cooler.

I walked off by myself to one of the other buildings, a small house where family members stayed when they came to visit, and sat on the steps. I hung out there quite a bit when the place wasn't being used. The view was long and clear, good for watching what was going on around the ranch, or staring at the mountains beyond.

The only person moving around just then was Reuben Pettyjohn, the ranch's owner, and father of Pete and Kirk. He was doing something I'd seen him do a lot-taking a slow walk that seemed aimless, but really he was checking things out. He'd stroll through the used equipment yard and stop to tap an old engine block with his boot toe, then he'd hook his thumbs in his belt and move on, pausing again to scan some cattle waiting to be shipped off. He was always looking for ways to use or improve things, and probably he was thinking about much more than that.

Reuben was in his mid-forties, bull-shouldered and physically formidable. His beak nose and clipped mustache added to the effect. When I started taking college literature classes years later and saw a photo of William Faulkner, Reuben's face came immediately to my mind. His presence was striking, too, a dense aura that you could feel. He was genial, but tough and shrewd-the epitome of a cowboy businessman, and a state legislator for several terms. You'd see him downtown or at the capitol, carrying a briefcase and wearing a big white Stetson and a western-cut suit with that rolled piping that looked like it was made of Naugahyde. But he was just as likely to be on the ranch, working cattle with the hands.

I sat there on the steps for a few minutes, slipping into daydreams. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. I went through my beer pretty fast and started working up my nerve to go score another one.

Then Celia and Pete appeared, walking from the stables toward his pickup truck, probably on their way to town to party. She was striding along playfully, almost skipping, bumping her hip against him. Everybody knew they were an item by now, but they seemed to be having one of those boy-girl wars about public affection. She wanted to advertise it, and she was always trying to hold his hand or drape herself over him. He still tried to act like there wasn't really anything going on, but you'd have had to be blind not to see them up against a fence or shed, groping and dry-humping. I suspected that they'd also been going swimming at the waterfall, and that Pete had gotten treated to repeat performances of the show she'd put on for me. I'd been staying away from there, and from him in general.

Celia looked electric, wearing a halter top and cutoffs, with her auburn hair gleaming and tossing as she danced along. They passed within plain sight of Reuben, but they were too wrapped up in each other to notice him. He watched them go by, with that same thoughtful attention he paid to the other things that caught his eye.

Then behind me, I heard the door of the guesthouse open. I jumped up, trying to hide the beer behind my back.

Reuben's wife, Beatrice, was standing there with her arms folded and her eyes narrowed. Beatrice was another person I tried to avoid, even when I wasn't caught red-handed drinking pilfered beer. It hadn't occurred to me that she'd be inside the house. She must have been cleaning up or getting ready for some visitors, although with her, you never knew. Years later, she would be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and she was already starting to act in ways that didn't add up.

But back then she was a handsome, accomplished woman who came from another landed family and considered herself aristocracy. By her lights, Pete was destined for much bigger things than poor-girl Celia, and she seemed to blame me for bringing that bad influence into his life. She was also oddly sexless, even prudish-one of the camp who'd have much preferred it if children never found out that roughly half the people on the planet were anatomically different from the other half. I had the feeling that she'd borne her first son out of a sense of duty, and then Kirk because having only one didn't look socially proper. Otherwise, she'd wanted nothing to do with that undignified business. Besides her other quirky behavior, she'd taken on an accusing air, especially toward young people-maybe because she figured, correctly, that they were obsessed with getting their hands on each other.

My worries about the beer vaporized with her first words.

"Don't you sit there oogling that little slut, too," she said coldly.

I mumbled, "Sorry, ma'am," and retreated down the porch steps, too skewered by her spear of guilt to defend myself.

Then she spoke again, but this time it was like I wasn't there-she was gazing past me at Celia.

"If you think you're getting into this family on your back, you're in for a big surprise." Her tone was calm, definite, not so much challenging as pronouncing judgment.

It turned out to be accurate and swift. Several weeks later, on October 27, Celia was killed on the Pettyjohn Ranch. She'd been alone and tried to ride a young, still half-wild stallion that she'd been warned against. He'd thrown her into the corral fence, and she'd fractured her skull against a post.

The investigation was a rubber-stamp formality, and there was never any autopsy. The sheriff at the time, Burt Simms, was a crony of Reuben's. The Pettyjohn family quietly made their condolences to Celia's parents in the form of a generous check. Officially, that was as far as it went.

Gary Varna was one of the deputies involved in the case, and while he never really questioned me, I could tell he sensed that I knew something I wasn't letting on. After things settled down, I started running into him a lot, just by chance, it seemed. We'd chat and the talk would always get around to Celia. Eventually, I came to realize that he was already on the path to what he would become, and he wanted to know what was under all the rocks-not to make waves, but because that kind of knowledge gave him satisfaction and power.

Gary was a cop right down to his bones, but he treated me well-never forgot that I was a kid who'd lost somebody dear, never tried to bully me, and presented a genuine friendliness. I'd grown to respect him and, moreover, to like him, and I still did. But I never gave up my secret.

What I knew was this: a few weeks before she died, Celia had stayed out late on a Saturday night date with Pete. All the rest of us in the family went to sleep before she got home. She must have come in quietly-nobody else woke up. I did only because she sat down on my bed.

I was half dopey with sleep, but startled. She'd never done anything like that before. The only thing I could think was that she was going to tell me some news that was too exciting to keep till morning.

In a way, she did, and my surprise jumped to amazement. She lay down with her back to me, took my hand, and slid it inside her blouse, pressing it against her bare belly.

There was a slight but definite swell to it that hadn't been there when I'd seen her naked at the creek. Naive as I was, I knew what that meant.

After a minute or so, she got up and left. She hadn't said a word and she never gave any sign afterward that it had even happened.

The reason I'd kept that to myself through the years since then wasn't anything noble like wanting to keep her memory pure. On the contrary, my motives were outright selfish. For that one minute, she had entrusted me with the deepest part of her. It erased all the times and ways she'd hurt me, and still remained the most intense intimacy I'd ever felt.

I was goddamned if I was going to share it with anyone else.

But there were probably others who'd known or suspected that she was pregnant. Her boyfriend, Pete Pettyjohn, for one. The mental unbalance he already had-maybe inherited from his mother-got worse over the next couple of months, and so did his drinking, to the point where his old man started locking the liquor cabinet.

That Christmas eve, Pete broke into it, holed up alone with the bottles he took, and ended up shooting himself in the head.