Wild Country

Chapter Five

As always after a month's absence from Sandy, Ted Quantrill felt buoyed by a sense of coming home. He always found changes — the corn stood in rosy golden rows, now, ready for picking, and the pumpkins would be turning color soon. Sandy's old windmill generator was gone, too, replaced by new vertical foils with a capstan drive. The new rig made more efficient use of ground winds and did not need to stand on a high tower, so it was not so conspicuous. Also, a secondhand hovercycle had been added since his last visit. Otherwise it was the same familiar little spread, he thought, strolling in the dusk with Sandra Grange.

Time was when Sandy would have crowded near him, even in weather hot as this. Yet her independence had grown with her body. Sandy was no longer a grubby eleven-year-old, staring worshipfully up at him; nor an ardent, full-breasted seventeen, anxious to discover whether love and sexuality could coexist in a world as hard as the one she'd chosen. Now she was within a few inches of Quantrill's height, her arms tan as his, her hands roughened by farm chores. He knew she had changed to the bodiced dress and open sandals for him on short notice, but she walked beside him as an equal, the queen of her small domain.

Pleased at thoughts of her self-sufficiency, Quantrill eased his arm around Sandy's waist, urged her to face him. "I've thought about you every day," he said, kissing her gently, one hand massaging her shoulder.

"Have you thought about changing your line of work every day, too?" Her soft South Texas drawl was like her responding kiss: warm, vibrant, but with a reserve born of longstanding arguments.

"That, too," he said, guiltily because he had done nothing of the sort. He let the massaging hand shift a bit. "You sure we won't have an hour before Childe gets home? I've missed you. Sandy."

"I know what you've missed," she said, accusing, her full lower lip pursed as though scorning what they both enjoyed. She eased herself away, put fingers to her lips, blew a piercing four-toned blast that echoed from a nearby arroyo. "Now I'm sure. She'll be here in five minutes or I'll tan her hide."

His smile was wry, his hands-out gesture full of defeat. "Umm, let's see; those first two notes say, 'Come in, all clear,' right? But I didn't get the others."

"The third said, 'Ba'al, too,' and the last note stands for your name. That's why she'll bust her buns to get home, poor darlin'. She doesn't know what a nasty old man you really are."

"Damn" little chance I get to prove it."

"We've been all over that, and I still say the older Childe gets, the more she understands. If you want to play house with me, Mister Deputy, we do it on neutral territory." Realizing how snappish that sounded, she took his ear gently, circled her forefinger in it. "I'm surprised you're still so randy after the last time, Ted."

"Last time?" It was nearly a yelp. "That was August, you blowsy wench! When do I fit into your bloody schedule again?"

She giggled, raised her face in bogus sweetness, and began to croon: "On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me-e-e…"

"Christmas your ass."

She snapped her fingers. "Couldn't phrase it better myself," and then dissolved in laughter at the look on his face. "Ted. I have to get the corn in. Then I'll see about letting Childe stay with friends in Rocksprings, and I'll give you a call. Soon, love."

"That's a promise," he insisted, half in frustration, half-amused.

"No. That's a threat," she replied, raking his stalwart body with her glance, mouth parted. The cool competence in her eyes had the effect she intended. She laughed again as he wheeled away and swore to herself that she would not be so cruel again. Not this trip, anyway.

He was muttering, "Jesus Christ, there must be a law against teasers," when Childe rode out of the scrub cedars, waving happily from her mount. Ted Quantrill wondered if he would ever grow accustomed to the sight, one that few others had ever seen and those few scarcely believed.

Childe sat at ease, gangly bare legs astride the great boar, Ba'al, one hand entwined in the grizzled neck ruff while she waved with the other. Quantrill waved back, wondering whether her grip might be painful to the boar. He had never seen the great insolent-eyed Ba'al hesitate from wariness of pain. The significance of Childe's method of sitting her mount was not that it hurt, but that it worked. It seemed that the boar had an Apache's outlook on life. For Ba'al, pain was overrated.

The way Childe communicated with the boar, it was no wonder the kid behaved so much like a white Indian. On the one hand, Childe had been taught the languages of Wild Country by her companion: tracking, weather signs, what you could eat, what might eat you — for bear, puma, and wolf had always lurked in these parts. On the other hand, Childe liked listening to Sandy talk, and Sandy usually had no one else to talk to. In this way, Childe learned a little about the books Sandy read. Dickens and McMurtry, Renault and Buck, Gibbon and Gibbons, Anger and Angier.

The truth is that Childe considered her grown sister slightly dotty about words, ‘specially the printed kind. Why, she and Ba'al got along day in, year out without a jotted note or a printed sign, theirs a world of genuine sign and not arbitrary symbols. It was a plain puzzlement the way Sandy filled two composition books a year, writing in a journal that nobody else had ever read.

Childe dismounted with a leap; ran pell-mell toward Quantrill, arms outstretched for one of the few dizzy delights that Ba'al could not provide. Quantrill braced himself, caught her, whirled Childe in a circle once, twice; heard the boar cough his concern. Then he let the girl regain her feet and hugged her briefly without speaking.

"Bring me somethin'?"

"No time, sis — but hold on! I have something for him." Quantrill recalled suddenly. He saw her big eyes ask the question. "Come and see," he chuckled. "For all I know he might not like it."

The leviathan boar had not moved a hoof, only switching his flywhisk tail now and then, the yellow eyes missing nothing. Sandy ambled over to her old protector, watched in silence, and scratched Ba'al under the jaw.

Another girlchild might have squealed in alarm when Quantrill hauled the headless rattler from stowage in the hovercycle. Childe squealed in delight. "Couldn't find a big one?"

"Gimme a break," he joked, holding the massive varmint up for display to show that it was longer than the girl.

She whistled, a quick two-note warble, and Quantrill turned to see Ba'al advance in a bouncing trot, the murderous hooves spurting dust, Then, as he had learned through harrowing experience, Quantrill bent his knees and waited. Ba'al took offense whenever Quantrill stood erect nearby, for then the man's eyes were a handsbreadth higher than the boar's. With bent knees. Quantrill would eye the boar on even terms.

Ba'al planted his forelegs like a cutting horse as he noted the offering; then advanced again, snuffling. Quantrill held the snake out in both hands, nodding, Childe moving to Ba'al's side with odd snortings and head motions. Then — perhaps it was only his imagination — Quantrill could have sworn the great jaws opened in a smile. Ba'al moved his snout across the snake, his enormous tusks long as a man's forearm, curving up and back. Now nearing middle age, Ba'al had to lower his snout even farther to impale an enemy. A product of Texas Aggie geneticists, Ba'al was beyond prediction. It was Sandy's hope that he would live until both tusks formed complete circles, which might take another twenty years.

Quantrill reached out, scratched the boar's bristly jowl, moved back with empty hands. Ba'al shifted the tidbit in his jaws, snuffled in curiosity, then stalked slowly to the hovercycle.

No one interfered as the sensitive snout inquired around the rear cowl and its tarp. The bodybag was, after all, sealed. After a moment the boar backed away, tail erect, and uttered a series of deep grunts before he turned and trotted from sight into the deepening shadows of range scrub.

"Huh; well, I guess it's okay," Childe said, and walked back to the soddy with Quantrill.

As always, he took potluck. Sandy hauled a block of venison chili from her old Peltier freezer and let Childe make the biscuits. Their guest noted, but did not mention, the new microwave cooker. If Sandy wanted to discuss her new gadgetry, she would.

Later, sharing strong coffee and the rich musk of buttermilk pecan pralines, Childe sighed as she heard a rusty old argument grind into motion between her elders. Sandy began it with, "I hear they're paying top dollar for construction work."

"In SanTone Ringcity, yes," Quantrill said. Of the American urban centers that had felt nuclear fury, perhaps half of them had been rebuilt. Some, like San Antonio, had been firestormed to their beltline freeways. San Antonio had been unlucky enough to catch some intercepted nukes, bombs that had been scattered over ground zero without detonating. The center of San Antonio would not be fully safe for human life until that contamination was all scraped away. It was quicker to rebuild this nexus of Texas commerce as SanTone Ringcity, looking outward, away from the inner ruins.

Quantrill knew SanTone well. "No half-built boomtown is a proper place to raise a kid," he said, cutting his eyes toward Childe. "And you'd have to kiss that boar goodbye."

"There's lots of work nearer, at Wild Country Safari," Sandy replied, and whacked her cup down with unnecessary force. "Dammit, Ted, you have to work your way into something better than deputy work; you've just got to!" She saw the film of stubborn resolve cross his face; tried to attack through it. "Don't kid me about working your way up to Marshal Teague's office; that's a political job, and you can't run with that crowd."

"Don't want to," he grumped. "I prefer the company of ol' Jess Marrow, keeping track of exotic game on Safari lands. It's not as if I were a full-time deputy."

"And someday those freak reflexes of yours will fail you; everybody slows down eventually. And then, instead of having two part-time jobs, you'll be full-time dead. You think I intend to wait around until the day some cimarron buries you?"

Long silence. Then, "Who asked you to wait?"

"You did, a month ago," Childe piped angrily.

Frowning at the girl, a half smile giving the lie to it, Quantrill winked. "You hear too much, sis."

"I hear Sandy cry at night. She wouldn't if you stayed here more."

He nodded slowly. "Sis, these are hard times. I wish the exotic game work would pay a man enough to marry and settle, but it won't. I make more money as a deputy in a week than I do in a month with Jess Marrow. Do you know what a federal deputy marshal does?"

"Manhunter." It was a flat accusation from a nine-year-old, and it hurt. Even if Childe attached very few demerits to the idea.

Grudging it: "Sometimes, yes. Before you were born, this wasn't Wild Country — not this wild, anyhow. A lot of Americans suffer today because of smuggled drugs, poorly refined fuel, and diseased animals coming across the border. Somebody has to stop it."

He saw only polite interest in the girl's gaze. To her, these problems seemed very far away. He rarely opened old wounds, but this was a special case. "I had a friend named Kent Ethridge once. One of the finest gymnasts this country ever had." He stopped, turned to Sandy. "Can she handle this?"

"I think so," Sandy replied.

Quantrill faced the memory, gnawing his lip as he proceeded. "Kent Ethridge and I were — manhunters for a bad government. We hated it. Ethridge began to spend his time off with drugs, stuff that made him forget what he was. The stuff is terribly expensive; that's bad enough. But it did terrible things to his mind and his body, too." He saw Childe nod solemnly, considered explaining the terror of knowing that your mastoid implant could be detonated by pitiless masters; decided against it. "Ethridge was a hero in the rebellion, and became an agent for our new government."

"This gov'ment? The good one?"

"Good as we deserve, as usual. We thought Ethridge had cleaned himself up, didn't use drugs anymore; but maybe you never get entirely cured. Anyway, he stopped a shipment of heavy sh — drugs, and he didn't turn it all in." A silence. "I guess he decided then there was no way he could get straight. So he took the best way out that he knew."

"I don't get it."

"He took a massive overdose," Quantrill said softly. "When they found him in his apartment, he'd been dead for a week."

Childe knew about that. "Yuck." she said, wrinkling her nose.

"I had to identify him. and yuck is right. I know it was partly his own fault, but Ethridge didn't start the drug smuggling. He just got caught in it. It turns good men into bad ones."

"And you hunt those bad men?"

"Sometimes. Now then: Mexico could help stop it, but too many bad men pay mordidas, bribes, to their government."

A moment's confusion. "Is a bribe more like a peso or a dollar?"

"More like a million dollars in good money."

"That's not good money," Childe said, going directly to the heart of the matter.

"Money is just money to most people, hon," Sandy put in. "I know that Ted's job is important. But it is also very, very dangerous, and he has done it long enough. He doesn't think so. and that." she said gently, placing a hand on Quantrill's while she spoke to her sister, "is why we argue."

"Our money's good," said Childe. "and Ba'al won't mind if you come live here." Then, through her shyness: "Me neither."

"I know that, sis," he sighed. "But this little spread of yours won't pay for new dresses or fencewire. Maybe when I've saved some money—"

"We're doing all right," Sandy said, cautious lest she say too much.

"So I noticed. Beats me how you do it," he said.

"What if I won a pile at roulette over in Faro — or something?"

"I'd want to hear all about it." he grinned. Sandy had visited the gambling hells of Faro, the synthetic Old West sin city of Wild Country Safari, exactly once, and she'd gone with a pass.

Now Sandy improvised on dangerous ground. "Maybe I wouldn't tell you. You don't know everything; maybe I do things you don't know about. Maybe you just have to take me as I am."

"That was what I had in mind," he said slyly.

Childe reached for another praline, got the lightest of slaps over her spindly wrist from Sandy. She pulled back then, bored with her immediate prospects, and innocently changed the subject. "Can I see the man?"

Too late, Quantrill realized her drift. He and Sandy, simultaneously: "What man?"

"The man in your cycle," Childe said.

"You've kept someone hiding out there?" Sandy wasn't more than half-horrified. Yet.

"Not hiding," said Childe. "Dead." Quantrill was not surprised that Ba'al's educated nose could detect the scent of a dead man. He was astonished that the boar could have communicated the fact to Childe with only a few passing grunts.

Quantrill: "Oh, shit."

Childe: "Not's'posed to say shit."

Sandy: "Ted Quantrill, is that true? Did you actually bring a — a corpse here?" With a more hopeful suspicion, she continued, "Was it some poor wetback dead of exposure? Snakebite?" But her mood darkened as she saw he was not going to offer some good Samaritan excuse.

He pushed back from the table; took a final sip of coffee before replying, staring at Sandy. "It was a man named Mike Rawson, a hired gun protecting a shipment of heroin — for a man he called Sorrel. You remember Espinel? Friend of your old hotsy, Lufo; my friend, too. Well, Espinel and some others were deputized up near Junction to stop Sorrel's people for a contraband search. Now Espinel is cold in the Junction morgue, thanks to that brush-poppin' sonofabitch Rawson. He tried to tomhorn me, bushwhack me, south of here. No, I wasn't going to tell you about it. I knew you'd get all spooked."

"I am not spooked. I am repelled, I am disgusted, I am—

"Mad as hell," Childe supplied with cheer.

"And I" — Quantrill sighed—"am on my way. Thanks a lot for everything, sis," he said to the girl, and remembered to flourish his hat to Sandy at the door. "Mighty good chili." he said, and then, on his way out, "and by-God first-rate entertainment."

The coffee cup missed him because he was already in darkness, navigating by memory to the hovercycle. Much of Sandy's vitriol also missed him because he was busy muttering to himself. He caught her phrases, "no better'n a goddamn saddle tramp, a hired gunsel" and "might've brought me flowers, but no, he brings me a dead cimarron instead."

The dial at his wrist told him it was half-past nine, and the pounding anger in his head told him he wouldn't be able, to sleep anyway. A cold moon showed him the way to the potholed county road and, without lights, he found his way to the Junction highway. He was still vulnerable to anyone with a nightscope, and this was still the raw edge of Wild Country, so he hunkered down and flipped the bullet-resistant polyglass side panels up. He knew he could cadge a free night's lodging at the Junction jail, if he could avoid a drygulching en route.