C Box: Blue Heaven

The Lexus crawled down the access road, the afternoon sun gleaming off the windshield and the chrome grille, the car slowing even more as it neared a cow and calf in the meadow, as if the driver expected the cattle to bolt across the road. There was only one way into the Rawlins Ranch from the state highway, and the road ended at the ranch house.

Jess Rawlins was tall, stiff, all sharp angles: bony elbows and knees, prominent hawklike nose, pronounced cheekbones. The only thing soft about him, his wife Karen told him once, were his eyes and his heart, but not in a good way.

When the Lexus parked between his house and the barn and the driver’s side door opened, Jess shot his first glance over while Chile circled. The man who climbed out was slim, well built, with thick blond hair and a bristly mustache. He was wearing khakis and a purple polo shirt that draped well on his frame. He looked like a golfer, Jess thought. No, worse. A Realtor.

Jess brought the coil of rope down sharply, and Chile stopped. Like all horses, it didn’t take much to convince her to stop working. Jess liked the way she looked at him, though, waiting for the next command. Sometimes, horses could stare with contempt. Chile, though, respected him. He respected her back. He thought, We are going to have a long relationship, Chile and me.

Jess waited for the man to approach the round pen. Then he heard it again, two distinct pops from far up the valley. Gunshots. Not an unusual sound at all in North Idaho, where everyone had guns.

The man-his name was Brian Ballard, Jess recognized him from his photo in the real estate pages of the newspaper-appeared not to hear the gunshots. Instead, he stopped on the other side of the railing and put a tasseled loafer on the lower rail and draped his arms over the top rail. As he did it, Jess’s eyes slid from Brian Ballard to the Lexus and saw the profile of the passenger inside for the first time. It was her, all right.

“How’s it going, Mr. Rawlins?” Ballard asked with false good cheer. “I see you’re training a horse there.”

“Groundwork,” Jess said. “I have to hand it to the new breed of horse trainers out there who stress groundwork above all. They know their stuff, and they’re right.” He looked over at Brian Ballard: “What do you want?”

Ballard smiled and his eyebrows arched and his mouth pursed. He was uncomfortable, despite the smile. “I don’t know much about horses. I’m allergic to them.”

“Too bad.”

“I’m Brian Ballard, but I guess you know that.”

“I do.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, finally,” Ballard said, nodding toward Jess. “This is a pretty place, all right.”

Jess didn’t move.

“I saw Herbert Cooper in town this morning. He said you had to lay him off at the ranch.”

Herbert Cooper had worked for Jess for thirteen years. The day before, Jess had to tell his longtime foreman that he couldn’t pay his wages anymore, that there was not enough income for both bank loan payments and an employee. It was one of the hardest things Jess had ever had to do, and he hadn’t slept well. Plus, it was calving season, and he was now on his own.

Jess noticed Ballard looking at Chile. Jess could tell what he was thinking, and it made him angry.

“This horse came to me as payment for leasing out a quarter section for grazing,” Jess said, wishing he hadn’t said it. There was no need to justify himself, certainly not to this man.

“Oh.”

Jess nodded toward the Lexus. “I see Karen in there. She put you up to this?”

Ballard looked back as if confirming it was Karen in his car, even though he knew it was. It took a moment for Ballard to turn back to Jess.

“Let’s leave her out of this, if you don’t mind. There’s no reason you and I can’t be gentlemen about this.”

Jess said, “There are plenty of reasons. So why don’t you get back in your car and get the hell off of my ranch?”

“That’s not necessary,” Ballard said, his eyes almost pleading. Jess felt sorry for him for a moment. Then it passed.

“You can get out the same way you came in,” Jess said. “Remember to close the gate.”

“Look,” Ballard said, showing Jess the palms of his hands. “Everybody knows the situation out here. It’s a struggle, a real hard struggle. You had to let Herbert go, and everybody else is”-he searched for the right word and came up with a wrong one-“ gone. I’ve been sending you offers for months now, and you know my reputation. I’m a fair man, and in this case more than generous. I was hoping we could have a discussion man-to-man, feelings aside.”

Jess paused, felt his chest tighten. He looked down at his hand and saw that his fingers were white from gripping the lunging rope so tightly that it hurt.

“To have a man-to-man discussion,” Jess said, “you need two men. So we’re out of luck in your department. I’ve asked you twice to leave. If I have to say it a third time, it’ll be from behind the sights of my Winchester.”

Ballard’s mouth opened as if to speak, but nothing came out. Jess glared at him, heat rising. Then he took a step forward in order to tie Chile up to the rail. When he moved, Ballard flinched and took his foot off the rail.

“You don’t need to threaten me. I can buy this place from you or I can wait and buy it from the bank.”

“Git,” Jess said.

Brian Ballard backed up, then turned. He said over his shoulder,

“You’re making a mistake, Jess. I’ll be more than fair, I told you that.”

Jess tied up Chile and watched Ballard walk toward his Lexus. He saw Karen turn in her seat toward Ballard as he opened the door. Jess could tell what she was saying by the tilt of her head. He heard Ballard say, “No. You tell him if that’s what you want.”

Ballard swung into the vehicle and made a U-turn in the gravel, and Jess watched the car drive away for a while up the hill on the access road. It took him a few minutes before his hands stopped trembling.

“We need to get a saddle on you,” he told Chile, running his hand along her stout neck.

JESS WATCHED them go over the back of the horse. The afterimage of Karen’s profile seemed to hang in the dust whorls left by the tires.

So that was Brian Ballard, the man she left him for. The man she married after him.

He had not fought back when she announced she was leaving, said she had outgrown him and that he not only hadn’t kept up but had regressed. Said that just being on the ranch with him made her claustrophobic. That he had to get past what had happened to their son. That he was an anachronism. How could he fight that?

Karen got their savings and the feed store in town, which she promptly sold. And she got the Lincoln and his horse. Sold them, too.

Jess kept the ranch.

THE TREK up the hill and through the timber to the mailbox seemed longer than it ever had, he thought, and his legs felt heavier. For years, Jess never got the mail. Herbert or Margie did it, or another ranch hand, or his wife Karen did it. She used to love to get the mail. Later, he found out why.

To make matters worse, it seemed that more often than not he ran into Fiona Pritzle, the woman who had the rural mail route, at his mailbox. She was a vicious gossip, he thought, the woman who had spread the word when his wife left, and for whom. Fiona would feign concern for his health and well-being, and try to pump him for news and information. Had he heard from his ex-wife? Did he know she had moved back to town? Was it true the ranch was in trouble? So when he heard a vehicle coming up the road, he stopped in the wet foliage. There had been a time when there was little traffic on the road, and Jess knew everyone on it.

In fact, there was a time, in Pend Oreille County, when everybody knew Jess Rawlins and Jess knew everyone else. That was when the lumber mills were running and the silver mines were hiring. It was rough, isolated, fiercely rugged country then, and the people who lived there were subjugated by the mountains, the weather, the deep forests, the isolation, and the unenlightened corporations who came there to extract everything they could, including the goodwill and civility of their employees. The profligate, rough-and-tumble wildness of the environment and atmosphere beat people down. The exception were people like Jess, families like the Rawlinses, who had come from poor stock themselves but managed to build an enterprise-the Rawlins Ranch- rather than simply remove commodities to be shipped elsewhere. They built their own legacy, and by doing it moved up in status and respectability. Unlike the logging company managers and mining executives who were sent to the Idaho panhandle from places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia to do their time and to take as much as they could as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible so they could put in for a transfer to a more hospitable post, the Rawlinses built a bulwark and established a heritage that was shared and celebrated.