The Cattleman (Sons of Texas Book 2) (24 page)

Without a word, Johnnie Sue yanked the refrigerator door open. She slammed together a lunch, then stamped into the big pantry and returned with a small lunch cooler and a thermal gallon-jug. She threw the lunch into the cooler and filled the jug with ice and water. The Lockharts rarely bought bottled water. They disliked finding the empty plastic bottles scattered over the range. Besides that, it seemed silly when they had perfectly good
untreated water to drink from multiple drilled wells.

Pic definitely had to talk to Johnnie Sue about her attitude. She was supposed to cook, buy groceries for the house and bunkhouse and keep the household running. She was
not
supposed to react to who came and went. Though she had been employed only a short time, she behaved as if she owned the place.

But Pic didn’t intend to take the time to deal with it now. Today, he just wanted to bring this picture-taking obligation to an end.

Soon, he and Zoshamella were in the Jeep again, crawling over the pasture toward the mesa. With no more than a foot between them, her very presence surrounded him. Her alluring fragrance filled the Jeep. The image from yesterday morning of her delectable body wrapped only in a sheet had imprinted itself on his brain. That, combined with an abundance of her olive skin on display today, was affecting his thought processes. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever been near or seen in person and at this point, he had seen quite a lot of her. He felt a weird sense of intimacy with her.

She appeared to be nervous. He was nervous, too.

After a slow couple of miles of silence, she said, “Tell me again where we’re going?”

He pointed through the windshield. “See that long flat ridge? That’s what we call the mesa. In Spanish it means—”

“I know what it means in Spanish. What’s there?”

“A three hundred sixty degree view of the ranch. It’s scenic.”

More silence, more jostling and gear shifting. Finally, he said, “I’m still confused about your name. Johnnie Sue said it’s Zoshamella?”

She gave a huff of exasperation and turned her head toward him. Her eyes were hidden behind the bug-eyed glasses, but he felt a glare. “It’s Zo. Chee. Milka,” she said, exaggerating the pronunciation of each syllable. “It sounds like it starts with a Z, but it’s spelled with an X. And the middle syllable is pronounced with a CH. Not an SH.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I love my name, but people mispronounce all the time.”

“Well, it sounds real nice. I’ve just never heard it.”

She turned back toward the windshield, her arms crossed under her breasts, deepening her cleavage. “No one has. Unless they’ve spent time in Mexico.
It’s a lake and a town. It’s very old. My parents were vacationing there when I was conceived. My mother said it’s a romantic place. It actually isn’t Spanish. It’s an Indian name, like from maybe the Aztecs or someone.”

That explanation sounded rehearsed. Pic suspected she had made it so many times it fell out her mouth robotically. “I see. Well, I don’t know much about the geography in Mexico. The only places I’ve been down there are the coastal areas when I’ve gone down for some game fishing.”

Her head turned toward him again. “You kill fish, too?”

He chuckled. “C’mon now. Let’s don’t go there today, darlin’.”

She turned back to look out the windshield. “Please do not call me darling. That’s an Old World word with an unflattering meaning.”

Pic did a mental eyeroll. He called all women “darlin’.”  His dad
and brothers did, too. “I don’t know its Old World meaning. All it is to me is a figure of speech I grew up with.”

“Call me Zochimilka. Or you can call me Zochi if you want to. That’s what most of my friends….well, the people who know me call me.”

That was an odd reply. She had no friends? Maybe not. He could already see she wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. “Thanks,” he said, giving her a grin. “My tongue’s already gotten tangled up with the long version.”

“So has your maid’s,” she said sarcastically.

“Johnnie Sue isn’t a maid, darlin’. She the ranch’s housekeeper. She manages the household and the bunkhouse. She hires people from town to be maids.”

Zochi heaved a great sigh.
“What. Ever.”

More silence. More heat. More miles.

“If this is a cattle ranch, why don’t we see any cattle?” she asked.

“They’re around. We would’ve seen some yesterday if we’d ever gotten to the spring tank.”

“I know some people who go fishing in Mexico,” she said. “They go to a resort at Cabo San Lucas. They say those big fish you catch down there aren’t good to eat.”

“We don’t eat ’em.” Instantly, Pic wished he hadn’t said that.

Her head jerked in his direction. “Then why kill them? At least you eat the pigs you kill.”

He sighed and answered reluctantly. “It’s sport fishing. Mostly for marlin. I’ve got a couple of mounted trophies hanging on the wall in our office.”

“That’s terrible,” she said, staring through the windshield again. “Killing something just to hang it on your wall.”

“If the people you know who go fishing down there don’t think their catches are fit to eat, why do they fish for them?”

Her head turned toward him again. “I don’t know.”

“If they catch them and don’t eat them, most likely they have them mounted as trophies.”

She snatched off her sunglasses and glared at him. “It’s not right.”

“Yeah, I know. Marlin need love, too.”

They continued to creep over hill and swale and arroyo in silence. She hung on to the roll bar overhead. The sun hurled balls of fire down on the Jeep, turning the interior to an oven. From out of the blue, she said, “I didn’t know it was legal to wear a gun unless you’re a cop or something.

“I’ve got a
CHL. That’s a license. It means I can carry concealed if I want to.” Why he felt a need to explain that, he didn’t know. “But I don’t worry about that here on the ranch. I just strap on the pistol. It’s the easiest way to dispatch a rattler if I run into one.”

“A rattlesnake?” Half her face might be covered by sunglasses, but there was no mistaking
the apprehension in her voice.

“Don’t worry. Ever hear that old saying, ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat?’”

“No, I haven’t heard that. I hate cats.”

“It has nothing to do with cats. The point is there’s more than one way to kill a snake.”

She yanked off her sunglasses again and looked at him blankly for a few seconds. He couldn’t imagine what might be going on in her head, but in case she was about to panic, he said, “Ma’am, rattlesnakes are solitary creatures. They’ll run from you before they’ll confront you. If you don’t corner one, most likely, you’re not in danger.”

She shoved her sunglasses back on, crossed her arms under her breasts and stared out the passenger window.

Trying to lighten the mood, Pic said, “Down in Austin, what would you do if you came face to face with a snake?”

“There are no snakes in Austin.”

Austin was the seat of Texas government, the home of the University of Texas and the most liberal county in Texas. Hoping for a laugh, Pic said, “Austin’s got snakes more dangerous than rattlesnakes.”

When she didn’t seem to get his joke, he said, “
But you could be right. With all the people that live down there, all the snakes have probably headed for the hills.”

“I’m not cut out to live in the country,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Those coyotes howling were bad enough, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor pig.”

Bewilderment tugged at Pic’s brow. “Why?”

“Because. I told you, I don’t believe in killing things.”

“You’ve never killed a mouse?”

“I never see mice and I could never kill one if I did.
They’re too cute and they have sweet little faces.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you might make a note that
while they’re being cute and sweet, they’re also carrying all kinds of vermin, including tics and viruses. In this part of the country, they can carry the Hanta virus. That one is about fifty percent fatal to humans. So the next time you see a cute and sweet little mouse, you might think about that. We kill them at every opportunity. The last thing we want is them nesting and having babies or leaving their droppings in our barns and outbuildings. Or eating our feed.”

Her shoulders lifted on a great breath. “Whatever. It’s still different from killing something like a pig.”

Pic’s patience was being tested again. “Let me give you some information, darling.  These days, feral hogs are the worst predators on the Texas range. They give all farmers and ranchers grief and cost them a lot of money. They do serious damage. They run in groups that can tear up a hundred yards of fence and root up a whole hayfield in a night.

“
They eat everything in sight, including lambs and baby calves. They’ll even eat their own young. I could introduce you to half a dozen sheep growers who’ve lost whole lamb crops to the damned things. I’m waiting for the day when we hear they’ve eaten some little kid. So you see, they’re pretty nasty varmints. And they’re multiplying faster than fleas. They don’t have any natural enemies and they always birth big litters. Like I told you yesterday, if you’re in agriculture, you don’t have much choice but to kill ’em.”

“I don’t know anything about them. I didn’t even know they existed.”

“They were a menace down by where you live a long time before they migrated up here. How is it you’ve never heard of them?”

“I don’t know any”—her shoulders lifted and fell on a great breath—“any people who kill things.”

“You mean you don’t know any hunters.”

“I have no occasion to.” Her head turned in his direction again. “I presume you’re one.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am. And proud of it. Managed hunting controls the animal populations and puts meat on the table for a lot of folks. As for those hogs, if you wanted some reality shots of the true picture in Texas agriculture, you should’ve taken some pictures of that ol’ boar I shot yesterday. That sucker probably weighed five or six hundred pounds. Wild hogs just like him are everywhere now. That’s why the state has declared open season on ’em.”

She gave him another look. “I don’t know what that means.”

He couldn’t stop a great sigh. She was the last person he wanted to try to explain hunting regulations to. He said nothing else. It appeared they no common ground for communication and he was in no mood to try to find one.

Chapter 15

The sun was high in the sky when Pic and Xochi reached the mesa. He was sweating like a race horse. The final leg of the trip had been a body-lurching
climb uphill over deep erosion cuts in the rugged road. Zochi, too, was sweating, moisture glistening on the cushiony slope of her breasts. Every time Pic glanced in her direction, his tongue itched to touch that smooth soft-looking flesh.

“Here we are,” he said, coming to a stop and killing the engine. He stepped out of the Jeep and turned in a circle, drinking in the view and
wanting to take advantage of the ever-present breeze. Today, it felt as if came from a furnace.

He hadn’t been up here since the fall. Emotion always filled his chest when he came to this spot. Sometimes the immensity of the responsibility Dad and his family had bestowed on him became vague and lost in the minutiae of the daily grind, but this location, like no other on the ranch, brought it home to him.

He rounded the Jeep’s frontend and opened the passenger door. Zochi, too, stepped out, cautiously looking around.

“I don’t think you’re gonna see a snake, if that’s worrying you,” he said. “
I sent a message up here last night for all of them to leave.” He gave her grin and a wink.

She yanked off her sunglasses and glared up at him.

He raised his palms in a calming gesture. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Where’s your sense of humor? Seriously? If there
were
any, we made so much noise getting up here, they probably all left for the next county.” He walked back and opened the Wrangler’s back gate.

Zochi came beside him and dragged her backpack out. “You said this is scenic. I don’t see anything scenic. What am I supposed to take pictures of?”

The flat-topped mesa was a rocky, treeless no-man’s-land of hard clay and stones, but from Pic’s perspective, it offered plenty of subjects to photograph. From here, in all directions, he looked down on rolling hills that lay like pillows of variable shades of green and deep blue for miles, the panorama ever-changing by shadows from passing clouds.

A couple of months back, blankets of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush had spread over the landscape like
paint on an artist’s palette. Far below, the Brazos River and a two of its larger tributaries curled and curved like silver ribbons unfurling in the breeze. Years back, when he’d had more free time, he had come here with his colored pencils and spent afternoons or mornings drawing the raw landscape and the rugged denizens.

“Take pictures of the vista,” he said, making a wide arc with his arm. “This is the highest point on the whole ranch. You asked about the cattle? Look down in the nearer pastures.”

She walked closer to the edge. “Those dark spots are cattle?”

He sighed inwardly. “Just take a picture of the view. Or if you don’t like that”—he turned and pointed at a lone yucca plant—“See that lonesome yucca over there. It’s almost perfectly symmetrical. You don’t see many that well-shaped. It takes a lot for it to survive in this spot. Makes you wonder why and how it does. I check on it every time I come up here. It’s one of God’s miracles.”

“I don’t believe in God,” she said.

H
is brow tugged into a frown. “Sure you do.”

“No, I
don’t.”

“If you don’t believe in God, why believe in life? You have to believe. There’s no other explanation for all of this.” He made another sweeping gesture of the panoramic view.

Planting her hands on her hips, she looked out and into the distance. “I don’t know. Maybe. Are you religious or something?”

Her name wasn’t Zochi; it was “contrary.” She might not be a religious zealot, but she believed in something. Every human being he had ever met believed in
something
. “I’m not in church every time the doors open, but I’m a frequent witness to the beginning and ending of life. I marvel at that and how the earth replenishes itself every spring or after some disaster like the fires we had last summer. So yeah, I guess you could say I’m religious.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean. You haven’t demonstrated—”

“Forget religion,” he barked, his words blurting more sharply than he meant them to. He didn’t want to have this conversation baking in the hundred-degree sun on the bald mesa. “Look, just take a picture of the yucca,” he said, no longer trying to mask his frustration. “It’s a dramatic shot, especially in black and white.”

“Are you a photographer?” she asked.

“No, but I know how to take a picture.”

She walked back to the backpack she had placed on the ground beside the Jeep, dug out a camera. Pic saw instantly that it was very nice Nikon digital with a hi
ghly sophisticated lens that was not cheap. She began fumbling with it. He leaned his butt on the Jeep’s hot fender, crossed his ankles, crossed his arms over his chest and watched, willing himself to wait without comment for whatever length of time it took for her to get the shots she wanted.

Between wrestling to keep the wind from blowing her hat off and struggling with
her sunglasses and her plastic fingernails getting in the way of dealing with the camera settings, she snapped no more than a few pictures. He tried to be objective, but she was having so much trouble, he couldn’t keep from wondering just how much experience she had as a photographer.

He owned a good camera himself, had bought it from a buddy in town and paid twice what he could have bought it for in a store because the guy needed the money. At the time, he couldn’t imagine what he would use it for, but he discovered it was good for photographing scenes and images he wanted to draw. Over time, he had accumulated several boxes of photographs. Enough to last his lifetime. Maybe he should just give some of them to her and solve both their problems.

Sweat trailed down his spine. His hair and T-shirt were soaked through in spots. Hell, he knew as much about photography as she did. He walked over to her, holding out a hand. “Ma’am, let me help you. I know a little bit about cameras.”

She passed him the camera and stood beside him while he studied it. After he had acquainted himself with it, he leaned down toward her and pointed out some of the sophisticated features. “See this little thing right here? This is an aperture. On a bright sunny day like today, this is where you want it set. He changed the setting, then handed the camera back to her.

“Now I’m gonna show you a picture that would probably look good in a magazine.” He pointed toward an image so far away it was almost un-seeable. To the naked eye, it looked like a faint vertical line extending from the top of one of the distant hills. “See that vertical line way over there?”

She craned her neck. “No.”

Still pointing, he placed his other hand on her shoulder and turned her to directly face what he was trying to show her. He leaned down, his cheek near hers and pointed. “Look at where I’m pointing.”

His face was no more than an inch from hers. The scent of her heated body mixed with her perfume shot straight to his groin, leaving him taken aback.
He barely stayed focused on the subject of the conversation. “That’s a radio tower,” he said, willing his tone to neutral. “If you set up your shot so that all of these rolling hills and their shadows show between your camera lens and that tower, it speaks to distance. Seems to me that if you’re gonna write anything about this ranch in your article, you’d show that everything between where you’re standing and on beyond that tower belongs to the Double-Barrel. That fact would be true if you took the same shot in the four directions.”

She raised the camera and snapped a picture. Her hands were shaking. Had she, too, been affected by their closeness?

“How far away is it?” she asked.

He looked at her. They stood no more than a foot apart. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he knew they were focused on his. He heard her little breaths, saw the rise and fall of her chest, little beads of perspiration lying between her breasts along with the bauble that looked like glittering glass. “I dunno,” he forced out. “Eight or nine miles maybe. There’s no haze today, so it’s more visible than it usually is.”

She stepped back and turned her head away. Even more nervous, he walked away from her and went to the yucca. On the ground near its base, he spotted an arrowhead. A distraction to what was going on inside him and a relief.

He had found many of the small arrowheads at this site. He picked today’s find up and carried it over to her. “See this?”

She stared at the arrowhead. “What is it?”

“It’s a
n arrowhead.”

She took it from him, her fingers touching his and sending a little charge through him. “You mean Indians?”

“Comanches. My Grandpa used to bring me up here when I was a kid. He believed this was sacred ground to them and they had ceremonies and rituals here.”

She stood close, her breast almost touching his arm
, turning the arrowhead over in her own fingers. “What’s it made of?”

“We’ve never had
any of them analyzed, but my granddad thought it was slate.” He took it back and examined it more closely, then held it out on his flattened palm. “Here, take a picture of it. This is evidence of more history of this ranch that you can write about. There’s not any slate around here naturally. They probably would’ve gotten it trading.”

“And you know this how?”

“I know a little about the history of the area.”

“You studied history
somewhere?”

“No. I studied range management and business ag. What I learned about history I learned on my own and from my dad. He told us every day to learn history so we don’t repeat mistakes.”

“I learned a little about history in college,” she said. “Mostly related to politics.”

He ignored that comment, suspecting that a conversation with her about politics would only tighten the tension between them. “What I told you about this yucca plant? In a magazine article, you could write about that.”

“Why? I mean, what’s the point?”

“You could point out the power of Nature and the geologic events that shaped what’s around us. Like I said before, for that plant to grow, a seed had to be deposited here at some point. It took a bird or the wind or a wandering animal to bring it to this place. So you could write about the enormity of one tiny seed taking root on solid rock and thriving. That’s all I’m saying.”

She chewed on her lower lip. “I hadn’t thought about writing something. I’m just taking pictures.”

Pic was even more puzzled. He knew almost nothing about journalism, but in his mind, a magazine article would include writing as well as pictures. “Okay. Then let’s get pictures. Let me take a few.”

He thought, but didn’t say,
Otherwise we’ll be here cooking in the sun all day long
.

He took the camera from her and began to snap—the panoramic landscape, plants, lizards and insects. She stood by in silence and let him.

Finally, he returned the camera to her. “Maybe you’ll find one or two in that bunch that you can use.”

The sun continued to hurl down blasts of pure fire. He
pegged the temperature at a hundred plus. The back of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. Her shoulders and breasts shone with perspiration. “Let’s sit down out of the sun and eat lunch,” he said.

She went to her backpack and took out something wrapped in a
piece of paper towel. He dragged the cooler Johnnie Sue had packed and the jug of water out of the Jeep’s backend and they climbed inside the Jeep. The interior felt like a sauna but was a relief from the direct sun. Johnnie Sue had put plastic cups and napkins in the cooler, so he poured cups of ice water, handed her one, then handed her some napkins.

She pulled off her sunglasses and hung them by the earpiece in the middle of her top, then opened her own napkin and lifted out a sandwich. She raised a corner of the top slice of bread and looked at the filling. “It’s peanut butter and grape jelly,” she said and laughed. “I eat peanut butter a lot.”

Remembering Johnnie Sue’s sarcasm back in the kitchen, Pic laughed, too. “You can’t beat that,” he said, taking out his own he-man sandwich made of roast beef slices, lettuce and tomato slices all stacked on thick slices of homemade bread. “When I was a kid, I thought peanut butter and jelly was a feast. My mom didn’t let us have a lot of junk food.”

They chewed in silence for a few beats. “You sure you don’t want a bite of roast beef? This is an awful good sandwich. Homemade bread. Johnnie Sue’s a helluva good cook.”

“I’m fine,” she said, munching on her sandwich. And she seemed to be fine. Content with her peanut butter and jelly.

Finally, Pic asked her the question that had been bugging him ever since he saw her ineptitude with the camera. “How long have you been a photographer?”

She huffed a laugh. “Three days. You’ve probably figured out that I know almost nothing about photography.”

Her answer didn’t surprise him, but the honesty of it did. “And a magazine hired you to take pictures?”

“It wasn’t quite that simple.” She finished the last of her sandwich and wadded her napkin into a neat ball. “I’m, uh, between jobs. My father has a friend who’s some kind of editor at
Texas, Our Texas!
. He told him his daughter might have a contact with an owner of an old ranch, meaning your mom. The editor asked my father if I could get some pictures. He told them yes, so they decided to do a story about old Texas ranches.”