Percival Everett - Half an Inch of Water - Stories

She approached the acre of water and observed the wind riffling the surface. She sat on her favorite flat rock, imagined that years of her visits had molded the stone to fit her wide bottom. The breeze was bothering the water, but not enough to hide the trout swimming near her. The trout up here, where there was so little pressure, were cagey, but they were accustomed to this figure perched by the bank every morning. Her husband had loved and cursed the difficult-to-catch fish. His voice used to come back to her more often, sharing his thoughts about horses and fishing. But now he did not speak that much. For nearly eight years she had been alone with her horse and her thoughts. She liked that they were her thoughts. They came like a glacier, moving slowly, and like any glacier they were a tsunami of ice, surging, unstoppable. She had completed a catalog of the bird life on her place, with notes of songs and seasonal habits. She had finally read Proust and decided she did not like him, had decided the same about Henry James, had decided that Eudora Welty would have been her friend, and had come to think that Hemingway was not all that bad. Recently she had painted an acrylic on canvas of the hind end of an elk. When her nurse, Braden, saw it, he said, “Why’d you paint a deer’s ass?”

Norma sipped her tea and leaned back in her chair. “First of all, it’s an elk. I painted his butt because that all I ever see of him.”

She hadn’t hired Braden because he was smart but because he was just what he was, a big wall of meat with a box of blond hair for a head, strong enough to lift her off the floor if need be and capable of stabbing 9-1-1 with one of those kielbasas he called fingers. Braden lived in a double-wide trailer on the southern edge of Laramie and not too far away from Norma’s place, so weather was never much of an issue for him getting there.

Norma watched the trout rise to take an ant that had fallen from a blade of grass. Her eyes came back to the bank and followed it to a place were animals would come to drink. The muddy ground there was a little more chewed up than usual. She walked over to look at the tracks. She found the cloven hoofprints of deer and elk and another set, a set of horse tracks. The tracks were clearly from a horse and an unshod horse at that. She kneeled down and traced the indentation with a finger. The tracks were the freshest of the sets, having fallen on top of the others. All the trails up here were steep and rocky, so even the horses with the sturdiest feet wore at least hind shoes. She hadn’t heard of anyone turning out horses in years. Even her husband had stopped. It seemed a little early to do it anyway. She tried to follow the tracks, lost them on the carpet of grass, then found them again on a deer path. She couldn’t read much into the tracks, but she imagined a horse about the size of her Zed.

She climbed back into the saddle and followed the trail. She followed the sign off the worn path and south down toward a narrow arroyo that she rarely visited. The tracks were easy to see, clear and clean. She even noted that the animal dragged its left forefoot slightly and that it had a sizable chunk missing from the outside wall of the hind foot on the same side. As she reached the bottom of the drainage she realized that she had seen no droppings. She’d followed the sign for at least four miles and had not seen one apple of horseshit.

She looked at her watch. It was nine thirty. Braden would be at her house about now, pacing and worried more about what to do than about her. She headed back in a slow canter that felt good. She slowed Zed to a walk at the edge of the clearing and then dismounted, loosening the girth, to lead him the last hundred yards.

She came up to the stable across the yard from her back door. Braden was in fact there. He came out of the kitchen waving his arms like a fool.

“I was worried,” he said in an admonishing tone.

“Thought you might be. That’s why I didn’t rush back.”

“What happened?”

“I was riding.”

“You okay?”

Norma nodded.

“Next time could you leave a note?”

Norma released the cinch and put the stirrup up over the horn. “Let’s try this: you learn not to worry?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You can see I’m still standing, so you might as well go on home.”

She watched as he walked back to his Nissan Sentra with the unpainted quarter panel. His big blond head hung.

“Braden,” she called.

He stopped and turned to face her.

“Thanks for worrying.”

“Yes ma’am.”

A couple of hours later, Norma sat down at her table to have lunch. Egg salad. Pat Hilton, from a neighboring ranch, knocked as she entered through the kitchen’s Dutch door. The large woman did that a couple of times a week and Norma didn’t much mind. She was a plump fifty-year-old with blond hair that resisted graying. As an attempt at humor, the woman would point out not infrequently that her husband was not a hotel Hilton.

“Hey, lady,” Pat said.

“Sit down and have some egg salad with me.” Norma nodded to the chair across from her.

“Don’t mind if I do. Don’t mind if I do.” The woman made herself a plate and sat. “So, where’s Braden?”

“Sent him home.”

“You pay that man to come up here every day, for what? Forty minutes? Twenty minutes?”

“Less than that, if possible. Hell, if he sees me standing in the yard and waves, he can keep on going as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s crazy.”

“He does what I pay him to do. He’s only knitting with one needle, but he does what I ask him to do.”

“I still say it’s crazy.”

“It would be crazy having to make conversation with him for hours, having him traipse around here trying to help and getting in the way.”

“I could use some help.”

“I take help when I need it,” Norma said. Norma took a bite, looked out the window. “You folks missing a horse? Turn any out early?”

Pat shook her head, her big mouth full. “We had a mare colic last week. She almost died. Dan had to get up all through the night to make sure she didn’t lay down and get all twisted up.”

Lie down, Norma corrected the woman in her head.

“I see your step is fixed. Braden do that?”

“I can measure and cut a board and drive nails as well as anybody.” Norma took a deep breath and again peered out the window at the ridge far off. “So, how’s your daughter?”

“She hates me. At least, this week. Because I won’t drive her down to Denver and I won’t let her go with her friends. Fort Collins isn’t good enough. Has to be Denver.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“Shopping. Movies, I guess. The fact that it’s not here.”

Norma nodded. “It’s tough being a ranch kid.”

“Being a ranch mom ain’t no picnic either.”

Norma gave up a solidarity nod that wasn’t completely sincere. Norma had loved the ranch and the ranch life. She’d loved it when her husband had been alive and after. They’d lost their twelve-year-old daughter to leukemia. And she still loved the place. They almost lost the ranch when they lost most of their cattle to a blizzard. That was after their daughter’s death and they refused to give up. They couldn’t leave it. Both her daughter and her husband were buried on the ranch. She would be as well, but she had no idea who would be there to watch the weeds grow over their graves. She had no family left to whom to leave the land.

“You would think she’d be happy to go to Fort Collins,” Pat said about her daughter.

“She’ll be off to college soon,” Norma offered as a salve.

“It won’t be too soon, I can tell you that,” Pat said. She shook her head, perhaps recognizing her own lie. “Listen to me railing on so.” She stopped talking and ate her lunch.