Palomino

39

“Sam?… Sam?” It was six o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day and she was dressed and in her kitchen, making coffee for the first time in three days, when she heard Josh pounding on the door. She smiled to herself. One by one they would all break her door down if she didn't come out now. She still felt the terrible emptiness of Timmie's loss, but she knew that she couldn't let herself go. She owed more than that to the other kids. Slowly she wheeled her chair to the front door and opened it, looking out into the gray light before dawn as Josh stood in his heavy jacket on the front porch.

“Hi, Josh. Happy New Year.”

He stood there, saying nothing, and she wondered what was wrong. He looked as though he had been crying. “You okay?” He shook his head and walked slowly into the room. “Come and sit down.” She had thought that he had come to offer her solace and now she knew that he was in trouble. “What is it?” She eyed him, her own brow furrowed with worry, and he gazed at her as he fell heavily into a chair and then dropped his head into his hands.

“The kids. Jeff and Mary Jo. They went out to some party last night”-he stopped and swallowed hard-“and they got drunk as skunks, and then drove home.” Sam felt her heart begin to race. She was afraid to ask the next question but he answered it for her. He looked up with an air of great pain and she saw two great big tears creep down his face. “They ran into a tree and bounced off into a ravine… Mary Jo broke both her arms and legs, and tore up her face pretty bad… Jeff's dead.” Sam closed her eyes and reached for his hand, thinking of the boy who had held her only the night before and wondering if she had asked him to stay with her after all, that none of it would ever have happened. But it would have been wrong for her to seduce a boy of twenty-four, she told herself as she thought back over the night before. Wrong? She questioned herself. Wrong? Was it better for him to be dead?

“Oh, God… “She opened her eyes and looked at Josh, and then she reached out and held him. “Will Mary Jo be okay, Josh?” He nodded and then sobbed into Sam's arms.

“But I loved that boy too.” He had only been with them for a year but it felt like half a lifetime, and now she understood the references he'd had from other ranchers, still wanting him to come back.

“Does he have folks we should call?”

“I don't know.” He blew his nose on a red handkerchief from his pocket and then replaced it with a sigh. “I guess we should go through his things. I know his mom was dead, because he said something about it once or twice, but I don't know if he has sisters or brothers or a dad. He never talked about his life much, just about the kids here, and you, and how happy he was around the kids and the horses.”

Sam closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. “We'd better go through his stuff. Where is he now?”

Josh sighed and stood up. “I told them to keep him at the hospital, and we'd call and tell them what to do. If his folks are somewhere else, they may want him sent back.”

“I just hope we find something in his things that tells us who they are. What do we do if he doesn't have anything like that, Josh?” This was a new problem for her.

“Bury him with Bill and Miss Caro, I guess, or in town.”

“We can bury him here.” He was one of her people now, and he had loved the ranch. It was mad to be talking of burying that boy though, only a few hours before he had been standing in her bedroom doorway, and sitting on a corner of her bed, and holding her in his arms. She forced the memories from her mind, reached for her own jacket on a low peg near the front door, and turned her wheelchair slowly out the door.

Josh looked at the broken window in surprise then and turned to Sam. “What happened?”

“Jeff. He wanted to be sure I was okay last night. He came to see me before they went out.”

“I had a feeling he'd do that, Sam. He looked at this house for two days and I knew all he could think about was you.” Sam nodded and said nothing more until they reached his cabin. For her it was bumpy going, because the paths to the men's cabins didn't need the smoothly paved walks that were everywhere else to allow for the wheelchairs. But Josh pushed her over the bumps and ruts and eased her wheelchair into the comfortable little cabin. She looked around at the unmade bed and moderate chaos that the boy had left, and felt that if they looked hard enough, they would find him. Maybe he would come staggering out of the bathroom with a grin, or poke his head out of the covers, or come wandering in singing a song… He couldn't be dead… not Jeff… not that young boy. Josh looked at her with his own look of pain and sat down at the small maple desk and began to pull out papers. There were photographs and letters from friends, souvenirs from old jobs, pictures of girls, programs from rodeos, and everything except what they needed to find now.

Finally Josh came up with something that looked like a little leather billfold and in it he found a card with Jeff's social security number on it, some insurance papers, a couple of lottery tickets, and a slip of paper. On the paper it said, “In case I get hurt, please contact my father: Tate Jordan, Grady Ranch,” and there was a post-office-box number in Montana.

As Josh looked at it his mouth dropped open and he stared, and then suddenly he remembered… the Bar Three… why hadn't he thought to ask? Sure, Tate had had a boy over there. He looked up at Sam in disbelief and she frowned at him.

“What is it?”

There was nothing he could say to her now. He only handed her the slip of paper and walked slowly outside for a breath of air.