She gave in. “A woman you met.”
“On the street. She was carrying a box of puppies. It’s a long story. I suppose it was an act of charity—the puppy, I mean.”
“To the woman or the dog?” said Greenie, unable to hide her irritation.
“Good question.”
“It’s late, Alan. I think we’re both tired. I think we should talk tomorrow.”
“Don’t you want to know anything about the dog?”
“Okay. What kind of a dog is your dog?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Greenie. She’s a funny, mixed-up kind of dog. Just the way she looks, I mean. Part corgi, I’m told, but smaller. You know, the kind of dog the Queen Mother has. But not that color. White with brown spots, almost tiger spots. Brindle, that’s what it’s called.”
Greenie marveled at his tone. It was so…lively.
“Is she house-trained?” This was the wrong question.
“No, Greenie, I’ll be instructing her to pee all over everything here that belongs to you. For God’s sake, you act like I’m letting another woman move in.”
“What’s her name? Does she have a name?”
“I want George to name her. She’s called Molly, but she’s still very small, so we can change it.”
“Are you bringing the dog with you? Out here?”
“I am,” said Alan. “The airline lets one pet travel in the main cabin of the plane. I made a reservation for her, too.”
Greenie wondered how much it cost to fly a dog cross-country, then hated herself for wondering. “So you’ll…take her along with you and George?”
“I already found a couple hotels that take pets.”
“A dog,” she said. “We own a dog.” She waited for him to correct the “we,” but he didn’t.
“Have you hidden from me that secretly you hate dogs?” he asked.
“Of course not. We had a dog when I was in grade school. Hero. You’ve seen him in pictures.”
“So is it that you’re now in charge of all the big decisions? Because something about this is pissing you off.”
“I’m not pissed off. I’m…I don’t know, ‘thrown for a loop’ is what my dad used to say. You know, I’ve already told George we can’t have a dog here. It’s too much responsibility, I told him. Because, of course, the responsibility would be mine. Or Consuelo’s.”
“Well, there’s the beauty of it,” said Alan. “I bought the dog a round-trip ticket, just like me, Greenie. The dog will be my responsibility.”
“So now George can miss you and a dog back in New York.”
“Jesus, Greenie, this isn’t some calculated move to screw up your…big promotion, or whatever it is you consider that job.”
“This job is good,” said Greenie. “This job is actually great, as a matter of fact. This job could pay for all of us to live here for a while. Which it could never do back there. Which, it seems to me now, very few jobs could do back there.”
The silence that followed was not an artful silence. Greenie knew she had succeeded, cleverly and stupidly all at once, in making her husband even angrier at her than he had already been.
“You want me to drop all my patients just like that and move out there next week? It’s doable,” said Alan. “That way, George could get the dog he’s been wishing for, and you—you could have a dog of your own, a human lapdog! How’s that for an idea?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, Alan.”
“You’d save the money you’re spending on that…nanny you’ve gone and hired, and it sounds like we could be filthy rich. Maybe get to sit on the other side of the door you work behind. Drink expensive California wines and discuss the evils of unionized labor and state parks too darn big for the public good.”
“Fuck you,” Greenie whispered viciously, mindful of George.
“You will not get me to hang up,” said Alan.
Greenie began to cry. “You’ll say I’m not acting like it, I know, but I love you. Why are we like this? Why can’t we talk anymore?”
“Because there’s this pretty big decision we didn’t make together. That’s my best educated guess.”
She heard him breathing; she imagined he could hear her breathing, too. She would not speak until she felt calmer. At last she said, “We’re nothing if not educated. We’re smart enough to work this out. We simply will. So tell George about the dog tomorrow. Whether or not I’m here. And send a picture; he’ll want that as soon as he can have it.”
“You’re right,” said Alan.
“About something. Thank heaven.” What was she doing? She softened her voice and said, “I’m right about this, too: we do belong together.”
“I hope so.”
“I know so,” she said, and after they hung up, she knew how it would be. As if they were together in bed, they would each lie awake a long time, imagining conversations with the other, ones they’d had in the past, ones they might have in the future. Greenie saw this as clearly as she could see the Milky Way above the trees once she had turned out the light. She still did not understand how you could be a part of something that looked so unbelievably far away.
TO VISIT THE RANCH was to see Ray turned inside out, his childhood worn on his sleeve. Greenie and George had made the drive following Ray’s entourage, pulling up in time to watch Ray greet his three dogs, all big hairy herding dogs who would have been miserable in town, all mottled brown and dusty, just like most of the landscape around them. He lay down full length on the gravel drive so they could trample him with their bearlike paws and lick his face.
“I can’t wait to meet Treehorn,” said George when he saw this display.
“You will, honey, very soon,” said Greenie. When Alan had given George the news, George had named the puppy in an instant. No, he did not need time to think about it, Greenie heard him say to his father. He chose the name of the character in a book Consuelo had checked out of the library for him that week. Never mind that the character was a boy, the dog a girl.
Ray’s ranch occupied a plain of scant grass and scrub juniper that stretched north toward a wide mesa and, beyond it, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Up close, the cows were massive creatures, with an almost industrial rather than animal weight.
The silvery glinting Greenie had seen from a distance revealed itself now as the corrugated metal roofing of three adobe barns; away to one side stood a great square house built of stone. Three black-and-white goats sauntered in the shade of a dozen cottonwoods, which surrounded the hacienda like a council of dignified elders. The trees were in full leaf but so dusty that they resembled trees in a sepia photograph from long in the past. Greenie thought she noticed birdhouses high on some of the trunks; once she was out of the car, peering up into the branches, she realized that they were cameras.
“I want to see the horses,” George said.
“Let’s go inside first,” said Greenie.
The house was just as she had imagined it would be: a place of almost genuine rustic charm. The furniture was dark, blunt, and stolid. The native rugs and blankets that gave the rooms their only color were beautiful, an ancient geometry of reds and browns, but they were also worn and tired, scuffed paper thin by generations of steel-toed boots. Except for one large, murky landscape over the fireplace, most of the pictures were documentary: photographs of Ray with family, of Ray with other powerful men, but, more frequently, of livestock. One wall of the living room was covered entirely with prizewinning Angus and Hereford cows. Each one stood in perfect profile, hooves primly together, like a cookie-cutter cow. In every picture, the cow’s handler stood squashed against the margin, holding aloft the lead rope attached to the halter. A ribbon draped the animal’s neck, or the handler (always a man) held a trophy in his free hand. Along an adjacent wall stood a long glass case lit from within. Greenie was reminded of her high school gymnasium—except that the prizes on display here had been won not by teenage athletes but by cows.
Yet everywhere amid the tarnished trophy urns and the heavy furn
iture gleamed the sleekest of stereo systems, laptop computers, and telephones. A tangled sheaf of electrical cords passed under a table supporting a lamp made from a stuffed porcupine.
“Mommy, is he real?” gasped George.
“Well, honey, he was.”
“Do you think he was shooted? Diego says people shoot animals because they don’t like them. Or actually for fun.” George looked up at her with concern and disapproval.
The porcupine, posed on its hind legs, was a creature of enormous girth, the size of a well-fed raccoon. “It’s a shame when people do that,” she said. “I don’t know about this guy, but he looks like he was pretty old when he died, so maybe he just died fat and happy.”
“How old do porcupines get?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that either, sweetie.”
A maid waved timidly from the doorway. She took their suitcase and, without a word, led them upstairs to the room they would share.
George knelt on one of the beds so he could look out the window. “Hey, a weather vane!” he cried out, pointing.
Oh my New York City child, thought Greenie, touched by how exotic he found such ordinary things. As for the ordinary things he found disturbing—well, many of them ought to seem disturbing.
“Do the horses get their own barn?”
“We’ll ask,” said Greenie, tired of telling him how much she didn’t know.
“Mom, what does it mean when you break a horse?”
“It means taming a horse. Teaching a horse to wear a saddle and let people ride it.”
“Why do you have to tame a horse?” said George. “You don’t tame a cow or a sheep or a chicken. They’re not like lions.”
“No, they’re not. Maybe it’s just teaching them to wear a saddle and be ridden. The way you learned to ride a tricycle or walk in snow boots.”
“Actually, it’s not like that,” said George. “No one’s riding me.”
Greenie was struggling to find a better analogy when she heard Ray calling her from below. She led George down a staircase to the kitchen, the only room that did not smell aggressively of sawdust, leather, and mothballs. The ranch cook, McNally, had a body as dense as a stump and nearly as short. He looked as if he’d been sustained for his sixty-some years on a diet of jerky and buckshot. He was clean-shaven, his gray hair combed neatly back, but his cheeks blazed with broken veins and acne scars. Two of his fingernails were black right down to the cuticle. Greenie had spoken with McNally on the phone, but this was the first time they’d met.
“Cake Lady!” he exclaimed. “Come to sweeten our lives.”
“That’s me. Sweetener of lives,” she said.
“Ray says you’re going to teach me a thing or two about pies.”
“I can do that,” said Greenie. “Pies are just know-how and practice. The only secret’s a light touch.”
McNally squinted. “I look like a light touch to you?”
George, still standing beside her, said, “I want to see the horses now. Can I please?”
McNally yelled toward the living room, “George! Tall George!”
Small George shrank against Greenie’s leg at the force of McNally’s voice. Clearly, this was not a sedate household of intercoms, like the mansion in Santa Fe. It was a house of men shouting from room to room.
Ray’s driver appeared in the doorway. “Yo there, Small, my wish is your command. Nowhere else I got to drive today. Hey, we forgot!” He held his hands up and the boy slapped them hard, laughing.
“Five up, five down, five twist around!” the two Georges chanted in unison, performing the ritual greeting they had devised.
“I want to see the horses, Tall,” said Small, and out the door they went, hand in hand, without a backward glance at Ray’s two cooks.
“When does the buyer get here?” Greenie asked McNally.
“Tomorrow lunch. I got that squared away. For tonight, I got ribs, I got potatoes in foil, I got three-bean salad. You just conjure those pies and I’ll look on. About the fanciest dessert I make in this kitchen is whiskey poured over coffee ice cream.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Greenie. She asked McNally if he stocked lard.
“More flavors than Baskin-Robbins.” He pointed to a freezer the size of a toolshed.
Greenie made enough pastry for five pies. She showed McNally how to divide it into flattened cakes, wrap them, and put them away to chill. Using fruit she had brought from the city, they filled two shells with apricots, two with cherries, and one—for Small—with butterscotch custard.
At dinner that night, Greenie was the only woman. It was an easy, inclusive meal. Everyone ate at the wooden table in the kitchen, a table about as long as a stretch limousine—still only half the length of the dining table at the mansion. The maid had left, but five cowhands remained, along with Small George, Tall George, McNally, two security men, and Ray. The cowhands said grace in Spanish and then talked mostly among themselves; one security guard (jacket discarded, holster and gun fully exposed) punched away at a GameBoy; Ray talked intermittently on a cordless phone; and the Georges colluded like playmates, their bantering inaudible from where Greenie sat. McNally grilled Greenie about New York City. When he told her that he subscribed to Gourmet, she had such a hard time not laughing that a green bean nearly lodged itself in the back of her nose. He told her that he read the restaurant reviews and kept a list of the places in other cities where he’d like to eat if he were to travel.
After three and a half pies had been demolished, Tall took Small to see the horses again. “We’ll watch ’em do bed check,” said Tall. When McNally insisted on washing the dishes, Greenie caught up with them.
The center aisle of the horse barn was floodlit, its glazed brick floor shinier than the floor in Ray’s Santa Fe kitchen. The order and cleanliness of the place—the martialed hay bales, the detailed feeding schedule chalked on a blackboard, the racks of harnessings and silver-pommeled saddles—took her by surprise. At the far end, she saw Tall lifting Small so he could stroke the nose of a speckled gray horse.
“Mom!” he called when he saw her, “Ray’s favorite horse! Mica. It’s a she. She’s the mayor of the barn, like the mayor of New York City.”
Tall George smiled at Greenie. “Hey, Small, a mare is what you call a lady horse. But you’re right. She probably is the boss of this place. She be the queen.”
The barn contained twelve stalls, all occupied. The horses looked up as Greenie passed, yet they were clearly used to strangers. It was odd that people could control these enormous animals, “break” them. She thought of the circus, of elephants made just as docile. Greenie had ridden horseback one summer, at a camp, but never since. She knew much more about controlling a sailboat. Perhaps the sea could be said to have a mind of its own, but never the boat.
“Pet her!” Small George commanded.
“She’s very soft.” Greenie smiled at her son, held in the arms of a man who was not his father, who looked nothing like his father yet with whom he seemed completely happy.
She looked into a room beside Mica’s stall. She saw a locked glass-front medicine chest holding pharmaceutical vials and boxes; a rack supporting two long guns; and, stopping her for a moment, a crucifix—small and dark but gruesomely detailed—hanging alone on a white wall. One of Ray’s men, passing by with a bale of hay, must have seen her staring. He paused and, assuming she’d focused on the guns, said, “Do not be alarmed if you hear shots in the night. Coyotes.”
“Coyotes would kill a cow?”
“Cows, no. But when we have calves…and dogs, goats. Cats—ah, cats are very tasty.” He grinned like a hungry predator.
“Oh,” said Greenie, aware how dumb she must have seemed to these men. The night, she realized when they left the barn, was noisy and filled with unseen activity of so many kinds.
On the way out, she heard Small George whisper loudly to Tall, “Look at that bit. That is a horrible kind of bit.” She looked back and saw them standing before a pegboard hung
with bridles.
“Hey, Small, I bet that’s an antique, up for show,” said Tall.
Small shook his head. “Look how it’s pointed. That goes on the tongue of the horse.”
Tall swung the boy’s arm. “You are some kind of sharp-eyed guy, but don’t let that imagination go nuts.” He led Small away from the bridles.
As Greenie tucked George into bed that night, he said, “Actually, I saw a horse in a blindfold.”
“Here?” said Greenie.
“No. At Diego’s dad’s farm. I think he was being punished.”
Greenie did not know how to answer. She kissed George on the forehead. “Ray’s horse is beautiful, don’t you think?”
George smiled. “She’s like silver.”
Greenie climbed into her own bed. When George fell asleep, she turned out the light. She listened. No coyotes (and no gunshots), but she heard relentless crickets, the mild complaint of a cow, the jingling of a dog’s tags as it was called into the house long after she’d thought the rest of the household asleep.
Next morning, McNally took care of breakfast. Ray liked to go for a long ride at dawn; before setting out, he would eat a platter of steak and eggs. It was Ray’s voice, after his return, that woke Greenie and George. He stood by the nearest barn, calling orders to his men. Cattle were being paraded in and out, soaped up, scrubbed, hosed down, brushed. Some of them protested loudly.
“That doesn’t sound like mooing,” said George. “That’s like yelling. Is Ray being mean to the cows?”
“Once upon a time you hated baths, too,” said Greenie. “You should’ve heard how loud you yelled.”
An hour later, she and George were standing under the cottonwoods—the only cool place out of doors—feeding handfuls of grain to the goats, when a pickup cruised down the drive, a truck larger and more macho than those she’d seen coming and going, driven by the hired hands. It pulled up at the house.
As a tall woman got out of the cab, Ray came running from the barns.
“Claudia, Claudia!” He pronounced her name Cloudia and bent to kiss her hand.
Claudia pulled her hand from his, but she looked pleased. “None of your chauvinistic nonsense. And none of your Wal-Mart Italian.” When Ray straightened up, Greenie saw that this woman stood an inch or two taller than he did. They hugged in a slapping, comradely way, a hug between men.