The Clincher Read online

In a big arc over the house phone number, the decal read: DALE’S HORSESHOEING.

  “Oh, the lettering you were thinking about ordering, to go on the truck door.” I was generally a C student, except for the four hundred or so days I skipped.

  When we’d kicked around the idea of getting lettering, I thought it would go on the door and Guy thought it should go on the camper shell. I’d told him it was called a topper and I hadn’t even bothered explaining to him there’s topper people and there’s camper shell people. Anyways, he’d gone ahead and bought the size to go on the door. Now Ol’ Blue would be a rolling advertisement for my business.

  Guy got himself a glass of iced tea. We’re likely the only two-legged critters to come out of the Texas panhandle not liking sweet tea. It’s an amazing thing that we found each other here near the end of the Oregon Trail. Amazing we’re together anyways, me shoeing and eating his cooking, him cooking and helping me get set as a shoer.

  Was it just convenience? A sexy, good guy with a pasture and empty garage to use as a bedroom, a hookup that didn’t unlatch?

  Fixing to tell Guy about Abby’s mare and the kid going skeezy, I thought back. He’d gotten me that client, too. Keith Langston had bought the pony a few months before Guy and I met up. Guy knew Langston from the bank in town.

  Now Guy got dopey-looking and sort of beamed at me before he got busy confussing me again.

  “The truck,” he announced.

  “Mmm.” I closed my eyes and took a long pull of tea. The cold glass soothed my hand.

  “Why did you call it the truck?”

  I opened one eye and gave him a look that was supposed to mean Because It’s A Truck. But he wasn’t grabbing, just grinning, so I gave him another eye and another look. This one meant Because It’s A Truck, Stupid.

  Still, Guy stood there all expectant.

  If he wanted to be thick as mud, he could do his own stirring. It’s hard to think of a reason why I should have to beg a man to make himself clear. He knows I wish he’d just speak his mind.

  Then it seemed like he all the sudden remembered my yearning for clarity. “It’s just that I think most people would use the possessive pronoun. Most would say my truck and I’ve noticed you’re saying the truck and I’m wondering when that started and what it means.”

  Eyeballing him some more was my best option.

  Guy grinned, looking chock full of delight, then popped his eyebrows up and asked, “Do you know?”

  “No idea.”

  When Guy talks like this, I don’t even have any idea why I’m in the room with him. If I wasn’t already puppydog tired, it would have been a fine thing to slay him with my old rounding hammer, pop his eyes out with my hoof level, do dentistry on his molars with my clinchers and any other good new uses for my trade tools I could think up.

  Guy was ready to discourse. “It might be that you’re not thinking of property in terms of yours or mine. You’re thinking of us and the future. Maybe you’re finally relaxing a little bit about living together and—”

  For one thing, we don’t live together, I just rent his garage for a sleeping place. I was all set to congratulate myself on the awesome power of my scowl, ’cause he shut up like he’d slapped himself. But it was just a new subject.

  “Oh,” Guy said. “Look, something happened. I should have told you right away. It’s upsetting. I don’t know how I managed to get distracted. You looked cute, as always, and you’re adorable when you’re dirty from work and there I go again.”

  We nodded together, ’cause, yeah, there he did go again.

  Guy took a serious sip of air. “Well, I’m sorry, this really is bad.”

  I waited, since that seemed to be the only thing I could do. We were both pretty quiet while Guy’s mood got softer still.

  “The police were here,” he said.

  “Po-lice?” I said it proper, like the two-word way it was pronounced in my part of Texas.

  “Po-lice.” Guy nodded. “Well, Mrs. Harper, Patsy-Lynn Harper, she’s . . . they said someone found her body.”

  I set my tea down and realized my hand that hadn’t been holding the glass was cold, too. Maybe I looked confussed because Guy said it again, in another way.

  “Your client, Mrs. Harper, is dead.”

  Chapter 3

  GUY MADE LIKE TO HUG ME, but I was having none of that. There was stuff to know and I gave him a look to say so.

  He put his hand over mine.

  “She’s dead?” My mind spun hard to get wrapped around this thing. Death was a specter bad enough to say twice. “Really? Dead?”

  Guy nodded.

  “How’d she die?”

  “I think she killed herself.”

  That didn’t fit with Patsy-Lynn sprucing up the ranch she married into.

  Didn’t fit with her being so chatty with me.

  “Why?” I didn’t mean to ask out loud.

  “Well,” Guy said, taking his time here, “I don’t know. People have issues, stuff you don’t know about them. Problems or demons or things of that nature.”

  He was dead right, but I shook my head anyway. Guy’s mother teaches people how to analyze others and his father is an economist who lectures on incentives. I kind of hate it when I can hear their learning in him. Makes me glad that he turned away from that professor life after his bachelor’s degree, followed his heart to cooking school.

  “But, Guy, you said you think she killed herself, like you don’t know for sure.”

  Again, he nodded.

  I thought of Patsy-Lynn making an appointment for me to re-shoe Spartacus in six weeks. “Then why are you jumping to the conclusion that she killed herself?”

  “The deputy who was here said that she was in a garage with the car running. There’s—”

  “In her garage with the car running? Guy, I don’t think they have a car. It’s all trucks and quads and maybe a Jeep-like thing over there.” It’s a vehicle my daddy would call a Jap Jeep, but I’m not going to be like him.

  Guy waved his hands, looking exasperated with me, which is silly, because I’m as clear as clean water. I’ve explained to Guy the difference between cars and trucks, and he claims to understand. I’ve also made clear the difference between car people and truck people. That, he doesn’t get.

  “Car, truck, whatever,” he said.

  “Why would she kill herself?” I fussed.

  Thinking about what a death leaves behind gave me the heebie-

  jeebies. Now there was a widower and, come to think of it, a stepson left behind, though he was away at college or traveling or some such. I’d never met him and I’d seen awful little of the old man. Patsy-Lynn had been the reason I got the Flying Cross account. The old man had used another shoer, but when he married her, she’d moved in and changed most everything. The horses became a bigger deal—Spartacus was grown up enough to be marketed as a stud—when Patsy-Lynn hired me to shoe. Changing the help was just her making her mark, cleaning house, I always figured. Patsy-Lynn had loved her well-run new barn she’d scored with the old man, sure enough. Made me wonder now about her husband, and how the dust would settle. Would the old man marry again?

  Imagine if my folks, like Mr. Harper, had remarried. Then I’d have me a couple stepparents. I shuddered at the thought of twice as many parents to disappoint.

  Guy hugged me and we both repeated how awful and hard to believe Patsy-Lynn’s sudden death was, then he gave me a side-of-the-neck caress like I was bereaved. That Guy’s a genuine sweetie, in any case.

  He picked up his huge wad of keys from the kitchen counter. He’s got one for the Cascade Kitchen, the restaurant where he works, two for his so-called vehicles, and a storage unit, and who knows what else. I’ve made him stop keeping them in his pocket—they bruise during his power hugs—unless he’s about to leave the house.

  “I had been about to make a run into town when the police came by. Is there anything you want from town?”

  “Red’d like a sack of oats.” There h
ad been some other reason I wanted to stop in town, but I couldn’t summon the notion. “What do you need?”

  “I’m going to buy a tool.”

  “Oh, dandy. What is it you want to make?” I asked, barely following the conversation. It was awful that Patsy-Lynn was gone, but why would the police come to tell me special?

  “Hmm?” Then Guy sang, “If I had a hammer . . .”

  He’s got a voice like a god. Not a major god, but one with some pull, definitely. So he can sing a tiny part of some stupid old song and it’s nice listening. But I’m a truth teller on almost all accounts now, so I said, “If you had a hammer, you might find you do less hammering than you think. Surely not in the morning and the evening and all night long.”

  Guy went on to a whole ’nother chorus, so it had to be said. “Quit singing that stupid song.”

  Silence, except his, “Well, fine.”

  “Could you possibly identify what tool you want?”

  “I just thought I’d go to a tool store and get a tool. I’m not too particular on what kind.”

  “What, exactly, do you want to do?”

  “Impress your father.”

  Oh, dandy.

  Some months back, Guy had the bright idea that we should be introduced to each other’s parents. My mama’s too liberal to be a Democrat and Daddy’s too conservative for the Republicans to claim him. I’d no idea where Guy’s folks fit, but he’d gotten them on the phone from Amarillo and made a big bunch of noise, telling them all about me.

  Given that Guy’s parents teach college, they might not have been impressed that their son’s girlfriend hadn’t finished high school. His mother kept saying, “A fairy what? She’s a fairy?”

  “Farrier, farrier,” Guy had hollered.

  “Horseshoer,” I’d said.

  It went like that.

  “Wonderful, darling,” is what Mama said.

  “I’ll see about getting a run up that way,” is what my daddy said. He’d done trucking along Interstate 10 for a long while, ever since he got too gimped up to make a ranch hand and took to driving truck for his wages. My folks split when I was five years old, and this is how I come to have the luck of being born Texan and the misfortune of being passed back and forth between California and Texas. But there is nothing my daddy can’t fix, as long as it isn’t a relationship.

  We headed for the truck—my truck—to get to Cowdry. I’m not big on riding on Guy’s scooter and his little car’s an embarrassment, so we always go places together in the truck. In my truck.

  Looking back, I don’t know how Patsy-Lynn slipped my mind so quick, but I’m not proud of it.

  * * *

  Since Abby had paid me in cash, the ready money let me pull into the 24 Fuel on the way home. An old Ford Supercab with two men, both slightly familiar by sight—the driver in a blue cowboy shirt turned toward the passenger in a dark hat—pulled out as I parked at the diesel pump. I can’t drive up to the 24 Fuel without thinking about my first time there, that night last year.

  It’s where I met Guy.

  Ol’ Blue had 80,000 miles and six years on when I got the loan. Part of this truck’s appeal, in addition to the hand-sized longhorn hood ornament a prior owner had added, was it already had a topper over the bed. Having a topper lets me lock up my tools. I’m not one of those shoers with a fancy, special-built unit in the truck bed with locking drawers and compartments to store everything. I counted myself lucky in managing to buy a good used pickup truck. And the first thing I did with the new-to-me truck was go searching for Red, my old horse, planning to buy him back as soon as I found him.

  My old man had sold Red ten years back. I wanted to make things right with him. With the horse, I mean. At that point, I’d just wanted to get one thing right and Red was the only piece of the past I could see to fix.

  The people in West Texas my daddy sold Red to had moved to Arizona and later traded him away for a mare. Then Red’s new people leased him out, eventually selling him again. Red spent time in Nevada. A farmer swapped him for a tractor. And so on, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. It took many months for me to figure out Red was up here in Oregon, but that’s where the trail ended. I hadn’t known this part of the country and didn’t know what I was going to do once I got my hands on my horse. I was just taking one step at a time.

  Although I’d climbed all over my young horse when he was two and three, I hadn’t started Red; I had just planned and dreamed about when I’d make him a riding horse. But strangers got to break my horse. They took Red’s prime, but there’s still plenty of life left in a fourteen-year-old Quarter Horse.

  Finding Red and buying him back took me all of a winter, but it was the best thing I’d done since graduating horseshoeing school. And while I burned with shame over the bigger thing that I hadn’t mended, I did patch things up with Red. First, I told him how sorry I was for his having been sold and traded. Horses have to say goodbye too much. I promised Red he’d never be sold again, and we’d have a good cry about lost years soon as we cleared that second-to-last owner’s property. He agreed.

  Loading Red was a bear. Then I saw that I didn’t have enough diesel to get Red to the next county, much less across a western state or two, not that I had a destination. So, there I was under twittering lights at this all-night gas place, the 24 Fuel, debating with Charley, the old gold-colored Australian Shepherd I’d found on Interstate 5 just the week before.

  The night we got Red back, the debate for Charley and me was whether to buy dinner out of the coolers and shelves in the 24 Fuel. He’d been hungry when I found him and I—hungry for good company—had been giving him half my food for the last week.

  Then this fancy scooter-motorcycle-whatever thingy pulled in. A tall lean-muscled guy in a polo shirt and tan pants hopped off and bought himself a cup-and-a-half of gasoline for the zippy thing he rode.

  Lordy, he was good looking enough to curl my ponytail. Straight blond hair, green eyes, twisty grin and a nose crooked enough to give him character. The beauty part was, this fellow studied me and clearly liked what he saw. His breath steamed in the cool night air, which showed just how hot he was, ’cause my exhales didn’t make vapor.

  “I’m Guy.” He looked to be, like me, mid-twenties, and offered his hand.

  I’m a gal, I wanted to say. But I didn’t say anything.

  “Guy Kittredge,” he said, his right hand still waiting.

  “Rainy Dale.” I shook paws because I am familiar with at least some social norms.

  “Filling up, Rainy Dale?” he asked, bright as a barn.

  “I believe I will.”

  The scent of diesel rose as Guy started pumping my fuel, followed up with ammonia from the mighty fine job on the windshield. Ol’ Blue had probably not had such clean glass since five or six owners ago, rolling off the line in Detroit.

  Then the screaming started, along with those disaster-type noises that come from a shod horse striking his steel on the inside guts of a trailer. Ol’ Blue swayed as the trailer groaned on its axles. This guy, Guy, froze mid-wipe, taking a break on the headlight-smearing job he’d given himself.

  See, from day one, Red was one of those who sometimes has a switch flip in his head and suddenly a fine animal is only taking orders from Horse Planet. He’s not a joyous gift from God when he’s like this. That night, Red must have received a set of orders to behave like a lunatic and proceeded to go insane in the back of the borrowed stock trailer. The night was cool—spring is sharp and wet here—and Red’s steamy horse-breath showed, oozing out the sheet-metal seams.

  Guy’s eyes went huge, then huger.

  Patting my truck door as I switched the ignition partway and waited for the glow plugs, I said, “I’d better get Ol’ Blue down the road.”

  “Ol’ Blue.” Guy sort of smirked, but the grin fell off his face when Red got a fresh set of orders and set to thrashing. All my horse really needed was to be moving down the road. I figured he wouldn’t be so bad if the trailer was in tow.<
br />
  “Red’s not big on trailer time,” I explained.

  “Red.” Guy looked ready to let his chuckle become a howl.

  Charley wiggled at the window, cocking his head with questions, his uneven ears pricked up. Both his ears are shorter than when he was born, but the hair grows in long fringes that cover the old injury. He chortled his pre-woof, which seemed like an endorsement of Guy as a guy. I felt entirely safe on that front. In appreciation for Charley’s dog quality opinion, I scratched his chest. Pale fur went flying.

  “This is . . .” I started to say, then reflected that I didn’t have much of a life if I was about to introduce my new pooch to some stranger at a gas station.

  “Old Yeller,” Guy suggested, a look of triumph on his face like he’d cured cancer or idiocy or something. “You have the primary colors.”

  The primary colors? Something was un-level in this guy’s thinking, but for some reason I didn’t feel warned off the man. Still, he needed to be set straight. “His name’s Charley. I better go and get this whackjob horse of mine unloaded somewhere for the night.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. I just need to park and let him be on some grass for a while.”

  “There’s a pasture at my place. I’m about two miles down the road.” He pointed as though he really believed he was in two places at the same time.

  But the thing of it was, I didn’t know where I was going to park. I was just hoping for a grassy field somewhere. Red pickets okay—I’d taught him all his ground manners when he was young—and I was going to sleep in Ol’ Blue’s cab of course, but hey, a pasture a couple miles down the road sounded pretty soon. So I’d followed this Guy fellow down to his keep, looked it over, and knew we’d be okay for the night.

  Red started screaming as soon as I stopped at Guy’s place and the kicking recommenced, too. Then I made to unload.

  “You’re not going in there, are you?” Guy looked horrified. I wasn’t so keen on it myself, but it wasn’t my trailer and it was my horse, so them’s, as they say, the breaks.

  All this was before I knew enough about the man to see that some folks would later be inclined to call him my foo-foo boyfriend. It was before I knew he’d memorized every show tune and sings parts of every song, but with the wrong words. Before I knew I’d be living in his garage. Before I started digging myself into Butte County in general and the little town of Cowdry in particular as a professional horseshoer on her own.