The Scent of Rain and Lightning

7

LAURIE AND JODY accompanied Hugh-Jay onto the back porch after lunch. He set his suitcase-a battered old leather one that his grandfather had used-on the porch floor beside his feet.

“I’ll be driving into rain tonight,” he predicted, observing the western sky.

The clouds looked taller, darker, and closer now.

Laurie squinted at his truck, which he’d parked under cottonwood trees at the rear of their driveway. The dogs came running over. When they pressed against her, she shoved them with her knee and said, irritably, “Go on! Get down from here, you hot, smelly things! Hugh-Jay, is there somebody in your truck?”

“Billy Crosby, probably.” He took hold of the dogs’ collars and tugged the Labs down onto the gravel, away from her. “Didn’t you hear me call him on the telephone? I told him to walk on over.”

Laurie saw Billy turn his face in their direction as if he knew they were talking about him. He lifted a hand and waved in a halfhearted way. Laurie didn’t return the gesture.

“I can’t believe your dad would hire him for anything again.”

She wasn’t trying very hard to keep Billy from hearing her.

“A man gets to have a second chance, doesn’t he?”

“But not a fifth and sixth,” she retorted sarcastically.

“I didn’t know you disliked him so much.”

“I don’t.” It sounded more defiant than convincing. “I don’t care about him.”

Hugh-Jay bent over to kiss the top of her head, but she moved at that moment, so his affection only grazed her. He stood up straight again. “It’s hard for a man to support his family when he’s got a suspended driver’s license.”

“Well, and whose fault is that?”

“Okay. You’re right.”

She looked up at him. “When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. I might come home tomorrow, or I might have to stay a while longer. I won’t know till I get there.”

“Well, call me and let me know what you’re going to do.”

“All right.”

Her expression turned fierce. “Swear.”

“I do, I will!” He bent way down to kiss his daughter’s tiny nose. “’Bye, baby girl.”

She took the opportunity of her father being down at her own level to throw her arms around his neck. “Don’t leave, Daddy.”

He put his hands on her waist and stood up with her clinging to him. Her breath smelled of tuna fish, and her hair, dark like her mother’s, flew into his face, and both sensations made him smile as he hugged her to his chest and picked long strands of her hair out of his mouth. “Got to, baby girl.” After a moment he gently unwound her from around him and set her down and pushed her arms back down to her sides, as if she were a tiny bellows. “But I’ll bring you back a surprise.”

“A horse?”

“Not this time.” She desperately wanted her own pony, and yet she still adored to ride in front of him while he kept one arm around her and one hand on the reins. “You still need to grow some.”

The excitement on her face fell away in disappointment.

“But it’ll be a good surprise anyway,” he promised her, which earned him a brave little smile accompanied by eyes still moist at the loss of the horse and his impending absence.

“Hugh-Jay, you spoil her.”

“I like to spoil my girls.”

“No,” his wife said in a hard voice. “You don’t.”

Without looking into her eyes, he grabbed his overnight bag and started down the porch stairs, a big man moving with athletic grace. The dogs labored up and joined him. Laurie expected to see him get into his truck with Billy, but he didn’t do that; instead, he set down the suitcase, walked toward one side of their detached garage and disappeared around to the back of it.

“Where’d Daddy go?”

“There’s no telling.”

In a few moments he appeared again, and this time he did get into his pickup.

“’Bye, Daddy!” Jody hollered in her loudest three-year-old voice. “I love you!”

Her next-to-last sight of him, which would fade from her memory, was of his face framed in his truck window with his left elbow propped on the edge. He had changed into a cowboy hat, and underneath it he was smiling at her out of his plain, pale, wide face, his gaze returning all the love she’d yelled at him.

AT THE RANCH HOUSE, Bobby ambled in past noon, looking for a meal his mother might provide. Instead, he found his parents talking together in the kitchen, where the overhead fan was turning and nothing was cooking. Hungry, hot, and disappointed, he said, “Don’t you two ever leave this house?” If Chase had said it, it would have come across as a good-natured joke, but Bobby had little talent for humor, and so it came out sounding aggressive.

His father gave him a sour look. “Sit down. I have something to tell you.”

“Yes, sir.” It sounded more as if he were glad to sit than to obey his father. Bobby collapsed into a kitchen chair, stuck his long legs out and slouched there, his big hands loosely grasping the top rungs. “You’re not sending me to some junior college, Dad.”

“I’ll send you where you deserve to be sent!”

“Hugh,” Annabelle said, in a tone that reminded him he had other problems to discuss with their youngest. Without giving him another chance to argue, she told her son, “Bobby, we have some fences down. Somebody cut them and mixed up the weaned calves back with their mothers.”

“You’re kidding.” Bobby’s jaw dropped and he sat up. “Cut them?”

“That’s not all,” his father said, “they killed a cow, one of the pregnant mamas-slit her throat.”

He didn’t say which cow.

“Holy shit!” Bobby exclaimed.

“And nearly set fire to the pasture,” his mother chimed in, shaking her head at both the event and his choice of words.

Bobby shot to his feet. “Goddamn him!”

“It wasn’t Billy,” Hugh Senior said, understanding immediately whom Bobby meant. “And watch your mouth in this house.”

“Of course it was Billy, Dad! What are you talking about? There’s nobody else it could be! He’s pissed at you. He was already pissed at you over that stupid thing yesterday, and now he’s probably really pissed about his truck. Who else would do something like that?”

“Somebody we don’t know, Bobby.”

“I’ll slit the throat of whoever did this!”

When he left to go wash up, Hugh said to his wife, “And that is why I don’t want Bobby knowing ahead of time, before the arrest. If he knew it was Billy who did it, it would be our son who’d end up in jail for murder.”

Annabelle stepped into his arms.

“I hate this,” she murmured against his chest.

Every time she remembered the poor old cow, so docile, so defenseless, so reliably productive for so many years, she wanted to kill Billy Crosby with her own bare hands.

AS HE BACKED DOWN the driveway with Billy in the passenger seat, Hugh-Jay watched his wife and daughter go back inside. When the sunlight shone through Laurie’s dress, it revealed the curve of her hips and her slim legs, and the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything else to cover them.

He looked to his right, and caught his passenger staring at her, too.

Billy looked as if he was going to say something admiring, but then he seemed to think better of it, closed his mouth, turned his face, and stared out the windshield. He tipped his cap down to shield his eyes from the white sunshine coming through the glass.

Hugh-Jay, watching him, thought that was a wise move.

He was accustomed to other men admiring his wife, but that didn’t mean he liked the fact that Billy now had a mental image of Laurie naked under her thin dress. He wanted to scrape that picture from Billy’s mind. He wanted to erase it from any other man’s mind, but especially from the imagination of a man like Billy. Billy had the kind of bad-boy appeal that baffled Hugh-Jay, because he didn’t understand why women ever went for guys who promised nothing but heartache.

He smelled beer again.

“You already drinking today, Billy?”

“That’s any of your business, Hugh-Jay?”

“If you’re working for my family, yes, it is. Did you?”

Billy let out a martyred sigh. “A beer with dinner, that’s all.” In the country, they called lunch “dinner,” and the later meal was “supper.” He shifted in the seat. “What kind of work you gonna put me on today, Hugh-Jay?”

“We’ve got to mend some fence lines.”

“Really. I thought we was all caught up with that for a while.”

“We had some vandalism. Somebody cut some wire, mixed up some herds.” He refrained from mentioning the dead cattle.

“No shit? Who’d do a thing like that?”

“Dad doesn’t know.” Hugh-Jay glanced at him. “Sure it wasn’t you?”

Billy laughed bitterly. “Yeah, I walked all the way out there. You forgot you took my truck?”

“I’m going to need to get that second pair of keys from you, Billy.”

There was a sudden tense silence from the passenger. “Val tell you that?”

“What? That you’ve got extra keys? No, I just assumed. Who doesn’t have extra keys?”

“Me. I don’t. Never have. You can ask her.”

“Maybe you forgot. Maybe she’s got them in her purse.”

“She never had any. I never gave her any. I had the only pair. Now you’ve got them.”

Hugh-Jay sensed the unspoken curse words: goddamn you.

Billy said, “Does your dad know you hired me today?”

“I told you, this was his idea.”

Out of the corner of his eye Hugh-Jay saw Billy relax a little and even smile, close to a smirk.

“Don’t make him regret it,” he advised.

“Who you think did it?”

“Cut the fences? I told you, Dad doesn’t know.”

“How you gonna catch somebody like that?”

“Might be hard to do.”

“Prob’ly never will catch ’em.”

Billy slumped down in the seat, pulled his cap fully over his face, and either napped or pretended to.

Hugh-Jay turned the radio on.

The sweet voice of Dolly Parton singing about a coat of many colors filled the cab with haunting melody.

As Hugh-Jay drove and listened to the music, he thought about how some things are easy to prove: like the amount of mileage that got put on a truck between the last time it was driven and now, and how that mileage matched the distance to the ranch. He’d made a note of Billy’s mileage last night after Chase walked off to Bailey’s Bar & Grill. It had occurred to Hugh-Jay as he watched his brother stroll down the broken sidewalk that although you took a man’s truck, you might not keep him from driving it. In his right jeans pocket he now had a note with two numbers on it: one was the mileage he’d written down last night, and the second number was what he’d written down a few minutes earlier behind his garage where the truck was parked. Now he was going to have to break the news to his father that Billy didn’t deserve any more chances, and that the only thing he deserved was jail.

He glanced over at the supposedly sleeping man.

Billy didn’t have a clue, Hugh-Jay marveled, that he was now in the worst trouble of his worthless life. He thought he was getting away with it. Billy didn’t even sense how deeply offensive it was even to have to sit in the same truck with him. Billy Crosby. Drunk. Wife beater. Fence cutter. Cattle abuser, and now cattle killer.

Or, as Bobby might say in crude summation: Billy Crosby, asshole.

Hugh-Jay’s jaw locked, holding in his outrage.

He hadn’t lied to Billy. He’d only said, “Dad doesn’t know.”

That was true; his father didn’t know that Billy did the damage.

Hugh-Jay recalled how he’d nearly pulled four strangers out of their car over a tossed cigarette, and how he had threatened to pitch Billy out of the truck for throwing a beer can out the window. That sin was nothing compared to cutting fence lines and killing cattle as an act of cruel revenge. For that, Billy deserved to be thrown out and run over a few times.

And yet, Hugh-Jay was nearly grateful to Billy for distracting him.

Nothing Billy did could hurt as much as what was happening at home.

“Home,” Hugh-Jay murmured, moving his lips over the bittersweet word.

Billy stirred a little, as if he’d heard, but then he snored.

Tired? Hugh-Jay thought, glancing at him. You had a busy night, Billy.

The cemetery and the bison herd rolled by.

Hugh-Jay fought to keep his feelings of despair, loneliness, and anger bottled up inside of him so he wouldn’t slam his hand against the steering wheel, or beat up on Billy, or worst of all-cry. It was awful when people you helped and people you loved betrayed you and let you down. It made him feel like doing things he never wanted to do, hurtful, violent, shameful things. Hugh-Jay turned into the main gate of the ranch and prayed that the hours of hard work ahead of him would cleanse him and turn him back into the man he wanted to be.