Читать книгу Improbable Fortunes - Jeffrey Price - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

Adopted by the Dominguez Family

Buster’s mother was buried on a sunny January day at the Lone Cone Cemetery. The storm that caused her death was long gone. In fact, all the roadside snow had already melted, and it now looked as if the storm had never happened. Mrs. Poult brought Buster to say a final goodbye before showing him off to local prospects for adoption. Serving as Official Breast Feeder was beginning to show its wear and tear on poor Mrs. Poult. It was virtually impossible to get Buster to give up a sore nipple once he had clamped on. Mrs. Poult would be forced to pinch Buster’s nostrils together making him gag for air while she switched him off to the auxiliary. Once, when she had fallen asleep while nursing, she awoke to discover the breast that Buster had been suckling had been reduced to the size of a zucchini, while the other one was still the size of a 4-H winning eggplant.

After the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on his mother’s coffin, Buster was passed around to interested parties. Everyone agreed that he was a nicely behaved baby of sanguine temperament. Jimmy Morgan looked on grumpily as Edita Dominguez held Buster over her head and jiggled him until a long strand of drool ran from his mouth down onto the head of her eldest son, ten-year-old Cookie. From the expression on his face, one could gather that he was none too happy to acquire a new brother, although perhaps it was too soon—it had been only three months since his last baby brother suffocated mysteriously in his crib. Mrs. Dominguez, on the other hand, was thrilled to tears as she hugged Buster and looked entreatingly to the Vanadium Women’s League for approval. They gave it.

Mrs. Dominguez was a Cantante. The Cantantes were a famous Hispanic family who, some people said, lived in Vanadium before the Indians used the area as a respite from the brain-cooking heat of Sleeping Ute Mountain. When the whites came, the Cantantes were able to coexist peaceably with them because they had nothing the whites wanted. The Cantantes did not compete with them for grazing land, for they raised no cattle. Nor were they involved in the early contretemps between the cattlemen and the sheep men, for they herded no sheep. They already had a trade—one that had been passed down through generations. They were tile makers. Their work could still be found on every countertop and in every restroom in Vanadium. They manufactured their products at their ten-acre homestead and were particularly famous in tile circles for their “Negrita,” a small black octagon which received its distinctive lustrous ebony patina by way of a long-held family secret: the tiles were kilned under layers of sheep manure.

The Cantantes were the first Vanadians to keep books and have a bank account. During the Great Depression, they were the first to supply food and clothes to the needy, even to the Indians. The Cantantes were the first to use a lawyer instead of arson and firearms to resolve a business conflict, the first to suggest a tax to provide schooling for Vanadian children, and the first to suggest having a lawman who was responsible for keeping the peace in the town.

Edita Cantante was the first woman to be elected President of the Vanadian Rotary. She was also the head of the PTA and the Library Association. To their faces, the Cantantes were respected. But to their backs, Vanadians distrusted them. They were suspicious of their success and their ability to handle money. Some people said the Cantantes were Maranos—secret Jews hiding from the Spanish Inquisition—in spite of the fact that they wore conspicuous crucifixes and attended Catholic mass three times a week. That’s why the family always felt they had to try a little harder. They drew the line, however, with the first serious man to court their eldest daughter, Edita Theresa, Buster’s new mother.

Carlito Dominguez had been a drifter and a small town Romeo when he met the zaftig and serious-minded Edita. He was quick to size up her family’s influence in the area. Likewise, her father, Jorge and his brother, Guillermo, were quick to size him up as a loser devalued further by the mestizo cast to his features. Needless to say, they disapproved of the match.

“Edita,” they said. “You don’t have to marry the first man you meet.”

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed? After all, who was she to meet in this county of Anglos and Indians? Dominguez was the first Hispanic to come to Vanadium in a long time. There was no telling when the next one would breeze through in an emerald AMC Gremlin. In the end, her family would be worn down by her mopiness and her silence around the dinner table. They agreed to let them marry. Despite their nagging reservations, they took Dominguez in and taught him the family business. Then he was found, soon after the nuptials, drunk at the High Grade, Vanadium’s only café and bar, bragging about how much money his new family had. Guillermo Cantante, Edita’s uncle, dosed Dominguez’ tequila with a maggot he had harvested from a two week-old road kill. That night, Dominguez ran a fever of one hundred and seven degrees and dry-vomited and shat for eleven hours straight. When the concerned Edita stepped out of the room to empty his chamber pot, Carlito was given some friendly advice. He was told he was never to drink and talk about the family’s money again. After that, he didn’t. And when Carlito was found having an affair at the Geiger Motel with a divorcée who worked at the cooling and heating store, once again, Uncle Guillermo stepped in. A large and powerfully built man, he grabbed Dominguez through the window of his truck before he could pull out of the parking lot and drove him to a far out location on Lame Horse Mesa. There, Guillermo staked him five feet from a red ants’ nest and painted his genitalia with clover honey. When Guillermo returned three hours later after meeting friends in town for coffee, Dominguez’s bitten member had already swollen to the size and color of a Chinese Emperor’s coy. Once again, Uncle Guillermo gave him some friendly advice. Don’t be unfaithful to Edita. After that, he wasn’t. Years passed, and the old Cantantes eventually died off leaving Dominguez as head of the family. His ascension to the tile throne was soured by a daily reminder of his treatment at the hands of the Cantantes. His son Cookie, by some cruel genetic twist of fate, had grown into the spitting image of his old nemesis, Guillermo Cantante.

Enter Buster. He went from being an orphan to the center of attention with his three brothers and two sisters. Cookie, the eldest, did not take part in the joy of having a new baby in the family. Instead, he observed from the shadows. While technically still a child, Cookie already had the personality of a dyspeptic adult soured on the world. He was scary-looking to begin with. Even before he got diabetes, even before he was on his own and became bloated and puffy from alcohol, cheese sticks, and TV trays of Banquet fried chicken, his eyes—two malevolent drips of Bosco—looked swollen shut in a wince of unspeakable pain; pain that, when the time was right, Cookie Dominguez would make sure the world came up with the balance due.

One day, completely out of the blue, Cookie asked sweetly if he could feed the baby. Edita was heartened by his, request—pleased that Cookie had finally accepted his new little brother. Patiently, she instructed Cookie on how to lift Buster into his high chair, how to tie the bib around his neck, and make up his little food tray with a little dab of mashed peas, apple sauce, and pureed carrots, and how much food he should put on the spoon. Then she put the spoon in Cookie’s hand and stood back with her hands on her hips waiting for Cookie to begin. He put the spoon down.

“What’s wrong?” She said.

“I want to feed him by myself.”

“Can’t I stand here and watch, bollito?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I want to be alone with him.”

Edita hesitated. Her initial reflex was to say no, the loss of her last baby still haunting her.

“Well, what’s it gonna be?” Cookie said, “I don’t have all day.”

But then, she thought, perhaps it was time to lay her fears to rest.

“All right, Cookie. If you think you can do it by yourself. I’ll be in the next room.”

He waited with his hands at his sides until she left. Edita stood and listened before setting to work at the ironing board where a three-foot pile of Dominguez’s shirts awaited. She turned off the iron’s steam function to better hear. It was quiet in the next room, so she began to iron. A few minutes had passed when she thought she heard a choking sound. Or was it a baby chortling? She stopped and cocked an ear. No, that was choking! She threw the iron down and ran to the kitchen where she saw Buster, red-faced and desperate, trying to put his fingers in his mouth to clear his throat. His brother, meanwhile, sat impassively across from him, doing nothing. Edita pushed Cookie out of the way and quickly yanked Buster from his highchair, laid his stomach across her knees and began pounding his back. No good. She sat him up and performed what she could remember of the Heimlich maneuver that she had seen in a restaurant. Two violent contractions of her fists in Buster’s solar plexus sent the obstruction flying from his windpipe across the room where it smacked against the wall. Now being able to breathe, Buster managed a laugh and playfully reached lovingly for his brother’s face, but Edita held him tightly to her hip. At first glance, the object that Edita found near the wall, looked to be a Hershey’s Kiss. In that scenario, Cookie, out of affection for his brother, imprudently gave him a piece of hard-to-swallow candy. On closer examination, however, the object in question turned out to be a moving piece from the family’s popular board game.

“Sorry,” Cookie taunted as if playing the game.

“How did he get this?” Edita demanded.

“How the fuck should I know?”

Edita, slapped him so hard she turned his face sideways like a movie stuntman’s.

“Can I give him a bath?”

“Go to your room!”

How was it possible? All of her children were raised the same way, given the same amount of attention and yet, while the others were thoughtful and obedient, helpful around the house—even talking about the colleges they wanted to attend some day—Cookie was pen pals with a man by the name of Richard Ramirez—who, Edita later learned, was a serial killer on San Quentin’s death row.

She expressed her misgivings regarding Cookie’s moral turpitude to her husband, since he spent more time alone with Cookie than anyone else.

“Entender algo. I am not his father. His father is the Devil.”

It was clear that Buster’s security would rest solely on Edita’s shoulders. To her husband’s growing frustration, she moved the baby’s crib into their bedroom where it stayed for four years. During the day, while she cooked, did the laundry and the vacuuming, Edita carried Buster in a sling on her back. She bore him in this fashion until he weighed nearly sixty pounds—it having the welcome side effect of correcting her congenital scoliosis a doctor in Denver told her would never improve without surgery.

When Buster was finally placed on the ground, he was only allowed to play with his sisters. They fussed over him—cornrowing his red hair and dressing him in their clothes. This went on until he was eight—despite a constant barrage of sissy name calling by Cookie. Buster’s sequestration with his sisters came to an end when he was ten and already a foot taller than Cookie—who was a paddle-footed, squat and corpulent nineteen. Still somewhat fearful, Edita felt Buster was now physically capable of protecting himself.

“I’m thinking of letting you play with your brothers.”

“O-kay!!!”

“But you have to be very careful around your brother, Cookie.”

“Why, Mommy?”

“Something is wrong with him…up here,” she said, tapping her temple with a finger.

“Ah’m awful sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just careful.”

Her warning delivered, Buster was released into the company of his brothers. The younger ones were delighted. Maybe they would no longer be on the receiving end of the games Cookie invented for them to play. In those games, the younger boys played the role of Hapless Law Enforcement to Cookie’s Sadistic Criminal Mastermind. No matter how hard Hapless Law Enforcement tried, they always wound up crying.

“You know how to play DEA Man?” Cookie inquired of Buster.

“Nope, ah shor don’t.”

“Well, you’re gonna be the DEA Man. He’s the man with the badge.”

“Gosh, thanks!”

In the game of DEA Man, Cookie and his younger brothers had to move several five-pound bags of tile glaze around the compound and keep it hidden from Buster who was the green agent sent to the West from Washington, DC. There wasn’t much more to the game than that. The fun part for Cookie was when Buster discovered the drug cache. He would then jump him or descend from a rope somewhere and employ different faux martial arts moves. Unfortunately, the bullets in Buster’s imaginary government-issued sidearm had no effect on Cookie. Buster endured being karate chopped and flipped on his head too many times to count, but he never complained nor tattled on him.

When Fridays rolled around, the Dominguezes would load all the kids into the back of the truck for a drive into town. Buster liked to sit above the rear fender of the pickup with his nose in the wind like a dog. All the kids had a few bucks in their pockets from chores and an idea of how they wanted to spend it—even though it always came down to the same things, candy for the boys, teen fashion magazines for the girls.

Vanadium’s Main Street had resisted paving for over one hundred years—almost as if the town was holding out for the return of horse-drawn carriages. People passing through on their way to Utah drove slowly, not to enjoy Vanadium’s down-on-its-heels Victorian architecture, or raised wooden sidewalks, but rather to avoid potholes that were deep enough to conceal a man on horseback wearing a stovepipe hat.

Dominguez guided his Dodge Power Wagon into an empty space in front of the Buttered Roll, the town’s only restaurant without a bar. In those days, before Mr. Mallomar came to town, Vanadium hadn’t any need for more than one restaurant. The prevailing attitude was that paying for a meal outside the home was a useless extravagance. Buster could see Sheriff Dudival in the window booth having a cup of coffee and a cigarette with a crusty-looking cowboy. They both took notice of him. In fact, they seemed to be talking about him.

“Have your asses back here in forty-five minutes,” Dominguez said.

The kids all jumped off the truck and left on their predetermined missions. Cookie lumbered out the back with the difficulty of a fat kid. It didn’t help that he insisted on wearing a big woolen overcoat whenever he went to town—even in the broiling heat of summer. No one talked about it, assuming it was his sad way of concealing his weight problem.

The pockets of Cookie’s coat were slit on the inside to allow his hands to reach all the way through. To the proprietor of a shop, it looked like he was just standing by the merchandise with his coat open, but inside the coat, his hands were grabbing whatever he desired. Cookie, alone, was responsible for 75 percent of Vanadium’s retail “shrinkage.”

It was time to get going. He only had forty-five minutes. His parents insisted they be back at the house on Fridays by sunset. He started walking off by himself, then noticed Buster.

“Hey, fuckwad. Come with me.”

Happy to be included, Buster followed his brother into the hardware store. Cookie made a cursory inspection of plumbing supplies, power sanders, fuse boxes, rattraps, and poison. He was not really interested in any of that. He knew the owner of the store was watching him and that diddling around long enough would tax the proprietor’s attention span. When he saw him go back to reading his paper, Cookie headed to the real object of his desire—a pyramid of .22 caliber ammunition in the gun department. Dominguez had, ill advisedly, given Cookie a single shot J. C. Higgins rifle without ever bothering to ask why it seemed he always had an unlimited supply of ammo for it. Cookie opened his coat and slipped a few boxes into his shirt, then hissed at Buster.

“Get over here, moron.”

Buster came over and stood next to him.

“Unbutton your shirt.”

“Gosh, why?”

“Just do it, numbnuts.”

Cookie stuffed two more boxes of .22s into Buster’s shirt.

“Okay, follow me. Not too fast. Stop and look at some shit like you’re shoppin’.” Buster took him literally, and on the way out, stopped to stare at some bags of steer manure. Cookie looked at him sangfroid. “¡Si no eres el idiota más idiota que he conocido!”

When the forty-five minutes were up, everyone returned to the truck that was already loaded with groceries. On the way out of town, a truck that had the logo of a contractor’s company on the door panel, pulled up beside the Dominguez’s. The person on the passenger side of the moving truck rolled down his window.

“Hey, Dominguez, the boss wants to redo the floor of the Vanadium Hotel lobby.”

“Tell them to call you at the office,” Edita said nervously. She didn’t like this kind of communicating on the highway. Dominguez ignored her.

“How many square feet?” He yelled back to the men, further aggravating her.

While this mobile business meeting was being conducted, in the back of the truck, Cookie cornered Buster.

“Let’s have ’em.”

“Have what?”

“The shells we boosted, gringo.”

“Ah put ’em back.”

“You what?”

“If ah’da kep’m that woulda been stealin’.”

Cookie wanted to throw him off the truck, but he knew he couldn’t lift him. Instead, he grabbed Buster’s cowboy hat from his head and angrily Frisbeed it into the back of the truck conducting the business conference at forty miles an hour alongside them.

“Hey…!”

His other brothers pretended not to see it, but Buster’s sisters immediately came to his defense.

“That was mean!” they both said.

“Mommy gave me that hat for cleanin’ the house.”

“So go get it, if you want it so fuckin’ bad!”

Buster looked at his hat fluttering around in the back of the adjacent pick up truck.

“Better get it now while you still have a chance,” Cookie taunted. “Chickie, chickie, bruck-bruck!”

Buster’s brow furrowed. Feebly, he tried to calculate the physics of this. Could he do it? Could he jump from the back of one moving truck to another?

“Don’t do it!” his sisters pleaded.

“Shut up, you little cunts! If he wants it so bad, let him jump for it!”

Buster did not want to see his hat ride away. He put one foot on the side of the truck and braced one hand on the top of the cab—where inside his foster parents sat, unaware.

“All right,” the passenger of the other truck said to Dominguez. “See you tomorrow at ten-thirty.” The contractor’s truck started to accelerate away.

“Don’t do it!” Buster’s sisters screamed.

Buster had already waited too long when he jumped. He missed the side of the passing truck, but managed to get his hands on the tailgate. Unfortunately, his long legs reached the road—the tips of his cowboy boots burning from the friction.

Inside the Dominguezes’ truck, Edita and Dominguez were too busy arguing to notice Buster being dragged past them.

“Do you have any idea how dangerous that was—what you just did? There is such a thing as a telephone, you know.”

“Shut up.”

“You have children in the truck,” she said, wanting to have the last word.

Now smoke began to billow into their windshield from the truck in front of them.

“I think he blew his rings. I better catch up and tell him.”

Dominguez sped up and as they drove through the smoke, he and Edita were able to see Buster hanging by his fingertips, his boots on fire.

“How the hell…?”

“¡Dios mío!” Edita cried.

Dominguez sped up and began honking his horn. In the meantime, Buster’s higher mammalian instinct for self-preservation overcame his fool’s insubordination and commanded all the strength of his tall, skinny frame to pull himself up. Slowly, his feet came off the pavement where the friction had already erased the points on his cowboy boots and the tips of his socks. Shaking and trembling at every juncture of muscle and tendon, Buster managed to get himself up on the rear bumper. He waited a moment to catch his breath then flipped himself over the back tailgate. Gone from view momentarily, he suddenly sprang to his feet—triumphantly waving his hat. All of this took place without the knowledge of the driver and passenger of Buster’s current vehicle—loudly singing along with Reba McEntire’s “Is There Life Out There?” on the radio.

After they recovered their wayward passenger, Dominguez pulled over and interrogated the children in the back of the truck.

“Who let him do that?”

Dominguez stood waiting for an answer. Cookie remained silent. The younger brothers cast their eyes to their laps. Finally, Dominguez looked to his little daughters. Surreptitiously, one of them pointed a teensy-weensy finger in the direction of Cookie.

“You little coc—” Dominguez said to Cookie, cutting off the obscenity.

Cookie just smirked at him. There it was—the dismissive expression of Guillermo Cantante. Dominguez balled his fist. He wanted to slam it into that insolent, fat face of his, but he could wait.

This being the Sabbath, Mrs. Dominguez prepared fish balls, boiled chicken, beef brisket served with little potato pancakes, and crepes filled with ricotta cheese and topped with applesauce. Dominguez, at his wife’s direction, was not allowed to kiln tiles on the Sabbath. In fact, the Cantantes had inculcated him with the notion that he was not to lift a finger until Sunday morning.

There were other strict observances in the Dominguez household—the most draconian being no television. Mrs. Dominguez, trying to identify the causes of Cookie’s nascent criminal pathology, had determined that television inspired violence and took the Emerson down to be sold at the This ’n’ That Shop. Instead, the children spent their typical evenings cleaning the house, reading, and doing their homework. When those tasks were completed, they were expected to work on their respective art projects.

Buster’s project had been the creation of frescoes made on the bedroom wall next to his bunk. There was no denying Buster’s eye for anatomy and composition. His subjects, always horses and cowboys, were applied to the wall in a classic seven-layer Flemish style. The problem, to Mrs. Dominguez’s chagrin, was that Buster used boogers and not paints to create these naïve masterpieces. The removal of this dried and hardened medium was impossible to achieve without the removal of the underlying paint as well. Patiently, Mrs. Dominguez redirected Buster’s artistic talent to the age-old Kasbah art form—where awl and ball peen hammer were employed to tap intricate bas-reliefs on metal plates—in Buster’s case, discarded pie tins from the Buttered Roll.

After dinner, Cookie was busy in the tool room where he had constructed a Red Grooms–like model of the Vanadium jail to the smallest detail—fabricating the steel bars for the cells from a shopping cart he boosted from the grocery store.

“Cookie Dominguez!”

It was his father bellowing. It was time to pay the piper for encouraging Buster’s truck hopping. Cookie turned off the soldering gun and stoically walked outside. His father was already standing there. He silently gestured to the kiln room, which was, in the Dominguez family, akin to “the woodshed.”

Cookie stepped into the outbuilding. Along the sides of the room were racks supporting sheets of tiles ready for boxing. But the centerpiece was the propane-fired, fifty-three-cubic-foot, front-loading Delphi kiln—the largest in the state of Colorado—capable of 2,350 degrees Fahrenheit. Without speaking, for they had been through this routine before, Dominguez gestured for Cookie to bend over a stack of boxes.

b

It was now Labor Day and the annual Vanadium Rodeo. The rodeo was a big deal in town. Everyone participated in some way. The girls, who weren’t riding in an event, baked pies and made lemonade for the refreshment booth, which donated its proceeds to 4H and Future Ranchers of Tomorrow. All the boys, if they didn’t want to be teased, competed in the junior rodeo events.

If there was one thing in Cookie’s life that he could point to with pride, it was his collection of blue ribbons for saddle bronc riding. He had been champion in the kids’ division five years running. While the other boys rode sheep in the kiddy events, Cookie rode the real thing—wild-eyed broncos. This year, however, he faced an unlikely competitor in his adopted brother. Buster, by the end of the summer, had reached the preternatural height of six-one, and while no one had ever shown him how to ride a horse, there was some innate quality in his undocumented DNA that gave him what they call in cowboy parlance “a leg up.” There was no other way to explain his aptitude—other than what life had taught him so far—to hang on.

In the saddle bronc riding event, Cookie drew the horse The Hell You Say. The Hell’s gimmick was to put his nose down as soon as he cleared the gate and kick his back legs straight up over his head. Most riders slid off this steep incline in the first second, but Cookie dug his spurs in hard above the horse’s shoulder and made it easily past the eight-second buzzer. Sheriff Dudival, who volunteered every year as a rodeo clown, helped him off and shooed the aggravated horse away. The Judges scored Cookie the full twenty-five points on the animal, twenty-one on the rider’s performance and a combined forty-nine other points, bringing his total to a hard-to-beat ninety-five out of one hundred. Jared Yankapeed, an older cowboy, offered Cookie a congratulatory pull of Crazy Crow bourbon—which Cookie promptly drained as he glowered in the direction of his competition. Cookie, ever the good sportsman, had only moments before, found a bumblebee and shoved it up the rectum of his adopted brother’s horse.

“Next up, from Vanadium, Colorado…let’s hear it for the orphan, Buster McCaffrey!”

Buster climbed into the chute and eased himself into the saddle of Never Inoculated. He got a good grip of the single rein attached to the halter, then nodded to the official that he was ready. The gate flew open. Suddenly Never Inoculated’s eyes widened, and his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie doing Caravan. He sprung out on all four hooves like a deer—three spine-jarring times toward the center of the arena, then sat down and dragged his ass like a dog with worms. Then, bee-bitten, he launched straight up in the air, then came down hard on his front legs and kicked with everything he had. Buster started to lose his seat. Never recoiled off his back legs to his front, cracking Buster’s nose into his mane. Buster, nose gushing blood and on the verge of passing out, lay back on the horse’s rump. Never Inoculated recoiled off his back legs and spanked Buster on his way out of the saddle—propelling him ten feet, fifteen feet, twenty feet. Some people who were there that day insist that Buster was sent fifty feet into the air! High above the arena, Buster could see all the way to Lone Cone peak. He took a deep breath and savored the smell of Vanadium—the manure of the feedlot all the way to the diesel and oil of the salvage yard on the other side of town. And just over there was his cinder-blocked school, the First Church of Thessalonians, the back of Main Street’s Victorian façade—above that, Lame Horse Mesa. In that moment, he loved this town. The crowd gazed up at him, incredulous. There were his sisters standing by their post at the lemonade stand—afraid for him. And there was a pretty girl, about his age, all decked out in fringed rodeo regalia with blonde Annie Oakley pigtails. Why, if that wasn’t the prettiest girl he’d ever seen!

I’m going marry that gal, he thought.

But then he suddenly realized he was on his way down. Where was that horse, anyway? Oh, there he was, down there. Buster scrambled with his legs to regain his balance, adjusted his feet just so—and then to everyone’s utter astonishment, landed squarely on Never Inoculated’s saddle. The horse was so shocked, looking back at the bloody-nosed Buster, that he just stood there and peed. Then the eight-second buzzer went off.

The Judges took a good fifteen minutes to figure out exactly how to score this rodeo miracle. Had the horse done his best to vanquish the rider? Yes, since the horse actually tried to kill the rider. Did the time the rider was out of the saddle count against the clock? Yes, since the rider’s feet never touched the ground. The Judges therefore concluded that since a maneuver like Buster’s had never been done before, he was to be awarded a ninety-nine. They held back a perfect score on principle. Everyone in the Dominguez family was delighted when the blue ribbon was presented—except Cookie, of course. He would have received a second place ribbon but was disqualified for bad sportsmanship when the winners were announced. He had been seen making a defiant humping motion behind an unwitting sheep, which the judges didn’t appreciate—this being a family event. Dominguez was even more unappreciative. The ride home from the rodeo was quiet and tense.

The Dominguez boys were asleep when Dominguez came to the bunkhouse and shook Cookie awake, then left for the kiln house. Cookie sat on the edge of the bed for a long time before he stuck his feet into his slippers and went outside. Buster, pretending to be asleep, went to the window and watched as Cookie walked the seventy-five yards to the kiln house, slid open the heavy steel door and went inside—momentarily lit by the red glow of the kiln’s ignition button. After that, he couldn’t see what happened. After half an hour, Cookie returned to his bed. Buster leaned over his bunk to see him, but Cookie had the covers pulled over his head, even though it had been a very hot night. Buster thought he heard Cookie crying.

b

That was how summer ended. The sheepherders were now taking their flocks to lower elevations for winter in the Dolores Canyon, and Dominguez needed to bank enough manure for his black tiles until spring. He rented a large dump truck and set off with the whole family for a Sheep Shit Round-up. They collected sheep droppings at three of the largest outfits on Lame Horse Mesa—the Pusters’, the Stumplehorsts’, and the rim rock acres of the Morgan property, in exchange for a meager royalty for manure rights. One by one, Dominguez dropped off each of the children to shovel dung into mounds from the different sections. At the end of the day, the old man stopped by each pile, which they uploaded to the truck.

Buster’s area was defined by the Lame Horse Escarpment on one side and the Hail Mary, a defunct silver mine that had been boarded up for almost twenty years, on the other. Buster shoveled until his hands were raw with blisters. By sunset, he had gathered a dung pile ten feet high. Exhausted, he walked to the canyon rim where an outcropping of rocks formed the entrance to the Hail Mary. Ordinarily, he would have jumped at the chance to squeeze through the wooden slats of the boarded-up mine entrance and explore, but he was too tired. He laid down, instead, on the red rock mine tailings—which still held their warmth from a day in the sun. In the canyon below, the Dolores River shimmered like a hot ribbon of solder. The wind was picking up, and aromas of sage and juniper brought welcome therapy to Buster’s senses. He sat and stared at a stand of hundred-year-old firs that had somehow escaped the lumberman’s axe. In the middle of them, a dead pine leaned against a healthy young tree—perhaps its own progeny. How long, Buster wondered, would the young tree have to hold his deceased ancestor before the wind or rot set him free? Suddenly Buster heard someone whispering behind him. It was coming from the mine.

“Who’s there?” Buster said.

Now nervous to be out there by himself, he got to his feet and warily looked around, but his investigation was interrupted by the sound of a horse’s hooves approaching. A cowboy, on a paint horse, was riding his way—faster than he’d ever seen, over rocks and marmot holes, spewing curse words all the way. Just when Buster was sure he was going to be trampled, the rider yanked the reins and put the horse into a skid—its front legs rearing up and pawing the air inches from his head. Then the cowboy jumped off and, with spurs clanking, stomped towards him.

“What the fuckin’ hell you doin’ up here?”

“Nuthin,” Buster said.

“You high-gradin’ my mine?”

“No, sir, ah ain’t,” Buster said, his mouth dry. The cowboy stared at him dubiously.

“Don’t fuck with me, boy.”

“Ah’m jes out here workin’. ”

The cowboy took a bag of tobacco out of his pocket and some rolling papers.

“Ah serpose yor one of them Messican shit shovelers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t be so fuckin’ proud ’bout it! You jes’ wanna throw in the sponge and shovel shit all yer lahf?”

“Uh, uh, uh…” Buster stammered.

“Well, shoot, Luke or give up the gun!”

“No sir. Ah ain’t gonna shovel shit all mah lahf!”

“That raht? Then what’re you fixin’ to do?”

“Ah’m a fixin’ to, uh…” Buster’s voice trailed off, realizing that he really didn’t know. The other Dominguez children, with the exception of Cookie, would quickly say that they were considering law and medicine. Buster had no such aspirations—only that he wanted no job that required staying indoors. His foster mother told him not to worry—that one day his calling would come to him. Here, standing cocky and bowlegged before him, armored in sage-lashed leather chaps, a rope, and a sweat-stained four-ply beaver hat, with a powerful, loyal beast saddled at his side impatiently pawing the ground wanting to get going—anywhere—was what he suddenly decided was all he ever wanted.

“Ah’m fixin’ to be lahk you…a cowboy.”

“That’s very interestin’. Very interestin’, indeed. Pay ain’t ver’ good ’n yood be kickin’ ’round in the comp’ny of scum mostly.”

“Heck, ah’d be havin’ my own place here.”

“And jes’ how do you plan pullin’ that off?”

“Sheriff says anythin’s posserble if a feller puts a mind to it.”

“Oh, he said that, did he? Anythin’s posserbull. You jes…” The cowboy snapped his fingers. “And ya got yorself a ranch!” The cowboy laughed and laughed then bent over coughing until he expectorated a wad of yellow phlegm on the ground that was variegated with blood like the yolk of a quail’s egg.

Buster almost gagged. “Well, ah’m sure it aint gonna be that easy…”

“No, pard,” the cowboy said, wiping his mouth. “It ain’t goner be easy. Some folks out here kilt for their land. But anythin’s fuckin’ posserble! ’Fact jes last year, ah seen a heifer born with two heads!” The cowboy pulled at his crotch making an adjustment. “Quirley?”

“Uh, sure.” Buster said, not knowing that he was agreeing to a hand-rolled cigarette.

He looked on with horror as the cowboy tapped the tobacco into the rolling paper, licked the gummed end, then put the whole thing in his mouth to wet it. Buster didn’t want it anymore, but didn’t want to incite him. He could see the notched grip of a Colt peeking out from a shoulder rig under his coat.

“There you go, cowboy.” He lit it for him and lit another one for himself. ”You lahk it out here?”

“Yes, sir, ah do.”

“It ain’t fer ever’body,” he said, casting his squint around the mesa. “Takes a lot of seein’ to.” The real meaning of that understatement would not become clear to Buster for another ten years.

Buster went over and rubbed his horse’s nose.

“What’s his name?” Buster said puffing his first cigarette.

“Name’s Nicker,” the cowboy said disingenuously, not quite pronouncing it that way.

“That ain’t a very nice name,” Buster said.

The cowboy’s eyes flashed and he snatched the butt from Buster’s hand, pitched the ember and stuck it back behind his own ear.

“Nicker’s the sound a horse makes, for yor goddamn infermashun! Do you know who the hell yor speakin’ to?”

“No sir, ah don’t.”

“Ah’m Jimmy Bayles Morgan!” he said angrily. “Don’t you go to the school?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Don’t they teach ya who the goddamn founders of this town was?”

“Ah thought the people who found it were the Indians.”

“No! The folks who kep’ it.”

“Kep’ it from what?”

“From the socialists with the labor unions and what not, you nitwit!”

“Ah don’t know nothin’ ’bout all that.”

“Are you a cretin or a moron?”

Buster only knew what a moron was.

“Ah’m a cretin, sir.”

“Bro-ther, you take the fuckin’ cake!” The cowboy laughed, shaking his head. “All right, jes tell me one fuckin’ thing you do know with all the damn taxes ah pay in this damn county to ed-u-cate you.”

“January fifteenth is Martin Luther King Day.”

That caused another spell of coughing from the cowboy.

“Are you fuckin’ with me? That’s what they teach you in school…about a goddamn womanizin’ communist? What grade you in…fourth?”

“Seventh.”

“Christ Almighty, seventh grade!” The cowboy turned and looked down into the valley, seeming to focus on the Vanadium Elementary School. “Ah got a good mind to ride down there Monday mornin’ and pay that school a visit!”

“Please don’t do that!” Buster blurted.

The cowboy narrowed his eyes and slowly approached Buster until they were nose to nose and he could see the dark brown nicotine stains on the cowboy’s teeth and the smell of his consumptive breath.

“Why the hell shoont ah?”

Buster had no idea who Jimmy Bayles Morgan was, but one thing was certain, he would say anything right then to keep this character from embarrassing him at school.

“Because we’re fixin’ to learn ’bout the town founders in the eighth grade.”

“About how my granddaddy, Sheriff Morgan, saved this damn town from damn Swedes and wop anarchists?”

“Yessir. We’re gonna be gettin’ that.”

Jimmy Bayles Morgan studied his face for a moment longer and spit. “You ain’t really, are ya?” Buster’s eyes started to fill with tears. “You just didn’t want ol’ Jimmy ridin’ down there raisin’ sand. Ain’t that the truth of it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lemme tell you somethin’, bub,” he said, jabbing Buster in the chest with a crooked, rheumatoid finger. “Ah don’t abide with a lahr.” Fortunately, the pair was interrupted by the sound of Dominguez’s dump truck. The cowboy turned and regarded its broad form breaking the horizon.

“That the big bug?”

“That’d be Mr. Dominguez, my foster daddy.”

“Uh huh… What’s that greezy frijole like?”

“He’s all right, ah guess.”

“Nothin’…funny ’bout him?”

“He ain’t funny at all.”

“Is that raht?”

Jimmy Bayles Morgan hocked up another goober and spit. Buster’s heart sank. He wasn’t intending to leave. Dominguez climbed down from the truck.

“Morgan.”

“Do-ming-gez,” Jimmy greeted him, accenting his ethnicity.

“My boy causing you trouble?”

“Trouble?” Morgan looked at Buster coolly. “How could he give me trouble? He’s jes’ b’tween hay and grass. Why, matter a fact, sir…Ah’d say, from all the shit ah seen shoveled, you got yerself a mighty fine worker here.”

Dominguez stepped up from behind Buster, put his hands on his shoulders, massaging and sort of pinching the muscles running up to his neck.

“He ain’t my own, but he’s a good boy.”

Jimmy Bayles took in the Walmart Studio portrait and nodded appreciatively.

“Ah’m a big believer in family, mahself.”

Dominguez did not extend the repartee. They stood there in silence. Finally…

“You got my check?”

“Yes, indeedy, ah did.”

“Okay then.”

“Ah reckon ah best be puttin’ a wiggle on.”

And with that, Morgan sauntered back to his horse and made a clicking sound. The horse dropped his front legs on command and Morgan just stepped on without even having to put a boot in the stirrup. The horse then stood up on all fours—horse and rider casually loping down a game trail into the canyon. Jimmy Bayles stopped for a moment and looked back at Buster, then continued out of sight.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Ah really coont tell ya,” Buster said.

Dominguez let it go, turning attention to more important things.

“That’s a nice pile of guano you got there. Biggest one in the family.” He motioned for the other children to get out of the truck and help load it.

“We’ll use this load for the firing tonight,” said Dominguez. “Maybe I’ll even show you our family secret—that is, if you’re interested.”

“Sure,” Buster said, taking Dominguez’s offer as a sign of commendation. Cookie, overhearing the compliment from the truck, took it with a sigh of relief.

After dinner had been eaten, the plates washed, the carpet vacuumed, and the kitchen floor had been mopped with Spic ’n’ Span, the children were bid to bed. As the boys walked to the bunkhouse, Cookie Dominguez was suspiciously friendly to Buster. It wasn’t that he had stopped hating him, he still hated him. It was just that now he pitied him. He knew better than anyone what Buster was in for.

It was around 11:30 when Dominguez opened the door to the bunkhouse. He came and shook Buster awake.

“I’m doing a run of black octagonals. Come on.”

“Be raht there,” Buster said.

Dominguez left him to rub the sleep from his eyes. Ever so carefully, he shimmied down the side of the bunk bed so as not to wake his temperamental brother, but Cookie was only pretending to be asleep. He watched Buster go out the door and cross the garden, thankful that it wasn’t him that was being shown the family secret tonight. A few moments later, a huge explosion blew the windows out of the bunkhouse.

Sheriff Dudival arrived at the scene with a fire truck. The heat from the explosion of the giant propane tank turned the cinder block building into a pile of white ash—still pulsating with enough heat to melt the windshield of Dominguez’s truck. The children were huddled around their mother who was, understandably, in shock. Cookie was now the psychotic head man of the family. His first act was to keep Buster away from the real Dominguezes. Somehow, Buster got the feeling that he was being blamed for this.

Dudival approached the family.

“Mrs. Dominguez, I’m very sorry about your loss.”

Mrs. Dominguez burst into tears and held her children coveyed up around her.

“Anybody have an idea how this happened?” The Dominguez family responded en masse in the direction of Buster who was sitting alone in singed pajamas on the other side of the yard.

“Why don’t you ask him?” Cookie spat. “He was the last one to see him alive.”

Sheriff Dudival nodded that he’d take that under advisement and approached Buster. Dudival sat down next to him. Together they watched the hook-and-ladder boys ratchet a good forty-five feet up the front yard’s cottonwood tree to retrieve Carlito Dominguez’s smoldering right haunch.

The sheriff lit a cigarette.

“Hurt?”

“Don’t think so.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think fuckin’ happened?” Cookie shrieked, eavesdropping. “He killed him!” Sheriff Dudival looked back at Cookie, his face puffy from crying and made a mental note for his journal that, despite his gigantism, Cookie was something of an emotional weakling. Mrs. Dominguez put a gentle hand over her son’s mouth to quiet him.

“You get along with him…Cookie, is it?”

“He don’t cotton to me fer some reason only he knows hissef.”

“Okay, let’s leave that for a moment. Were you out here when the explosion happened?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What were you doing out here at this hour?”

“Mr. Dominguez wanted to show me somethin’.”

“Show you what?”

“How he makes them black tiles a his.”

“Uh huh,” said the sheriff. He’d heard the rumors about Dominguez and Cookie, but Social Services was never called in, so he wrote it off as racially inspired gossip.

“But ah couldn’t get the door open.”

“Why was that?”

“Ah guess it were locked.”

“And then what happened?

“All hell broke loose.”

“You ever have any bad feelings with Mr. Dominguez? Like maybe he wasn’t treating you as well as his real kids, something of that nature?”

“No, sir. Ah lahked him.”

“You liked him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dudival just looked at him. “Will you excuse me for a moment? I’m going to have a look around.”

“Sure thang.”

Dudival got out his flashlight and began to pace the debris field. He stooped to look at something stuck on a sagebrush, then fumbled around in his shirt pocket for his reading glasses. It was a little scrap of paper with the letter V printed on it. He held it up to his nose and sniffed it, then put it in his pocket and kept walking. Something else had caught the beam of his flashlight. On the ground, one hundred yards directly in front of the kiln, was the cylinder from the workings of a lock. It was still hot to the touch. Dudival figured that it was from the kiln door. Someone had hammered a brad into the keyhole preventing the handle from being turned. Dudival put that in a Ziploc snack bag, then stood up, brushed the dirt off his pants and looked at Buster who quickly pulled his finger out of his nose. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, then Dudival turned and walked away.

Dudival would enter the evening’s events in his journal this way: The death of Carlito Dominguez was due to a faulty exchange valve in his kiln that prevented the build-up of kiln gas from being released thus resulting in a lethal explosion.

When Dudival got back to his cruiser he immediately gagged. The inside of the car was filled with the smell of Dominguez’s burning flesh. He managed to suppress the urge to vomit—grabbing an Ol’ Piney car deodorizer from his glove compartment and holding it to his nose. He drove with it held there, all the way home.

Three blocks above Main was Hemlock, which led to his trailer subdivision. Hemlock was a workingman’s street with its lawn displays of defunct clothes washers, hot water heaters, rusted manual lawn mowers, and blown car engines. Dudival, now approaching his own place, turned off his headlights, slowed to a crawl and pulled over to the curb. He was very proud of his house. It was as old as the others, but looked brand new. Two years ago, he freshened the exterior with a coat of “Regimental” from the “Sea and Sky” paint collection at Home Depot. He also sprayed gallons of Round Up on the perimeter to abate the weeds threatening the civilization of his crushed green gravel lawn. But he wasn’t studying his house to admire his industry. He was looking for a sign that someone was waiting inside to kill him. As benign a force to serve and protect that Dudival was, his predecessor, Sheriff Morgan, employed a style of law enforcement that inspired revenge—so he couldn’t be too careful.

Dudival zigzagged from tree to tree until he was next to the house. He would take nothing for granted—no matter how silly this may have seen to his onlooking neighbor, Mrs. Doser, who’d gotten up in the middle of the night to take her anti-seizure medicine. Her husband, Mr. Doser, believed, when he was alive, that the uranium market would one day rebound and high-graded (stole) chunks of yellowcake from the mine in his Jetsons lunchbox. By the time Atomic Mines closed its operations, Mr. Doser had accumulated three hundred pounds of the stuff, which he kept for thirty years in barrels in the spare room next to where he and his wife slept. Back in the day, the mine officials actually extolled the health benefits associated with radiation. That’s why it came as a total surprise to the Dosers when the mister came down with leukemia. And even though Mrs. Doser had to have her bladder and 80 percent of lower bowel removed a few years later, she was still spry and nosy. She took a chair to her window and watched Sheriff Dudival, pistol drawn, crouched for action, sneaking up to his own house—like he always did—and wondered how a person could live like that.

Dudival stood at the right side of his living room window and peeked in. He was looking for the telltale glow of a cigarette, the clearing of a throat, or the sniffling of a tweaker’s runny nose. Then, he unlocked the door and crept inside using a combat position to “cut the pie” at every doorway. When he was finally satisfied no one was lurking, he closed the curtains and turned on one small lamp that he’d redeemed with coupons from the generic brand of cigarettes that he smoked. As for his house, it was obvious at first glance that it belonged to a bachelor. Dudival’s stock answer when the subject of marriage came up was that he never got around to it, like a forgotten item on a grocery list. When pressed, he would tell people he never found the right girl, but they would have to be from out-of-town to believe that. Folks from Vanadium knew that, long ago, he had actually found the right girl—the most unlikely of girls. To everyone’s understanding, but Shep Dudival’s, the romance was doomed from the start. But that didn’t stop him from trying—just as newcomers to Vanadium find it hard to accept that tomatoes don’t grow well at this altitude.

The décor of the house was neat in a military way—no dirty clothes strewn about, no piles of magazines and newspapers, no TV dinners left out, or filled ashtrays—the detritus typical of a man living alone. Instead, a bed made as tightly as the envelope of a Hallmark card, a small Pledge-polished fold-leaf oak table with a tin tray from the fifties that extolled the beauty of the Rockies as a travel destination, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a TV tray positioned in front of a black and white Zenith with rabbit ears. There was an area shag rug that was the color and texture of Chef Boyardi spaghetti, a gun safe, an old-fashioned percolator, and a framed black and white picture of a young boy standing next to a hard-looking peace officer with a brush mustache and campaign hat at the gun range in the quarry.

Sheriff Dudival took off his duty belt, his flack vest, his uniform, and carefully hung them up. He went to the bathroom, peed, and flossed his teeth. The cylinder lock, which he had collected earlier in the evening in an evidence bag, now went into his safe. He changed into ironed, cotton pajamas, got into bed and opened his copy of Mrs. Humphry’s Manners For Men. “Gentleness and moral strength combined must be the salient characteristics of the gentleman…” When Dudival’s eyelids began to dunk like catfish bobbers, he turned off the light.