“Should I move it?” I say, thinking if I move it closer to her, farther from the other horses, she might take it.
Your mother sniffs. “She’ll figure it out.” She swings back up onto the tractor, and I scamper to follow. Belle Star keeps dancing, as if penned by an invisible fence, tossing her mane, flicking her tail.
We stop at three fields, feed all twenty-one horses—paints and drafts and quarter horses. We roll from pasture to pasture in the tractor, and the landscape begins to take shape. The ranch is cut into the bottom of a mountain. There is a narrow plateau where the cabins rest, a curling chain of white boxes with red shutters. Your mother shows me the boating lake, the shooting range, a miniature train that winds around the property and the horse trails that climb in a sequence of switchbacks up the mountainside. The ranch has everything a guest could ask for, the perfect family vacation, and yet the lawn is overgrown, the cabins are clotted with spiderwebs, the outdoor games are rusted, the pool is mostly drained and the water that remains is the color of old piss. And blackberry bushes grow over everything.
“We’re experimenting,” she says, “with ways to kill them.”
I observe the way your mother sits on the tractor, tethered forward always, tense in a way that makes me look back over my shoulder, shiver at shadows. I wonder what she is afraid of.
As we pass down the hill at the far side of the ranch, a pair of elk bursts through the trees. We watch them pass with a casualness born of confidence. Then your mother releases the brake, and we roll down the hill. We pass a burn pile, left running with quiet embers near the edge of a cliff. Beside it is a modern house painted a dark, deep purple. It stands in contrast with the others, the red-and-whites. It looks like it got lost on its way to San Francisco.
Your mother points. “That’s where Jed is staying. Supposed to be here with ‘his family’; that’s why we gave him all that space. We built it for our son. It doesn’t look big on the outside but it’s big inside. We decorated it, everything exactly how he wanted it.” The engine rumbles beneath her words. “And now Jed lives there.” She jerks a lever and picks up speed.
“Where is your son?” I shout over the roar of the engine, but she doesn’t hear or she ignores me. I remember what you said about your brother. Episode 8: Everything came easily to him; Episode 13: My brother is one of the “good guys”; Episode 33: He swallowed religion and now he’s choking on it.
She drives back into the barn and shuts off the engine. Twilight crept in while we weren’t looking, and it holds everything in a heavenly light, at odds with the stifled atmosphere. Your mother points to her house, set high on the hill over everything. “In the summer we have dinners outside in the garden. We watch the sunset.” She takes off her gloves. “I can give you forty hours a week. Cleaning. Riding. Taking care of the animals.”
“Where would I live?”
“We have a staff cabin. I’ll show you it. It’s nothing fancy, not like where Jed is staying.” She slaps her gloves against her knee. “But we’ll see if he ever comes back.” She leans against the tractor. “You’ll have to make your own food—there’s a kitchen in there. You can’t be expecting to eat with us every meal. We try to make as much of our own food as we can, but there’s not enough to go around. Not yet. You’ll have to take care of yourself when you’re not working.”
“That’s fine.”
“And don’t buy your food in Happy Camp or anywhere around here.”
On cue, my stomach heats with hunger. “Where else can I go?”
“We buy all our food in Ashland.”
“Ashland? Where’s that?”
“Oregon.” Her eyes are fixed.
“. . . Isn’t that kind of far away?”
“It’s only three hours. We go up once a week for supplies. That’s where Emmett is now, visiting friends; he’ll be back in a few days.” Emmett is your father. “I wouldn’t give my money to the people around here or the California government. And you don’t want to hang around Happy Camp. You don’t want to talk to the people there.”
“Why not?”
“Would you want to hang around a bunch of liars?”
“I guess not.”
“We have everything you need here.”
All I have in my car is half a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. I will need food sooner rather than later, but I am afraid to say anything, afraid to lose my tenuous grasp on this job I am not at all qualified for (if there is any qualification beyond a willingness to disappear).
We take the ATV back to my car, and then I follow her to the staff cabin. It’s a dim, boxed cabin set crookedly on a bright green patch of poison ivy. It reeks of rat shit; I can smell it as I exit the car.
“Obviously we weren’t expecting you.” She opens the screen door and it falls off the hinges. “We don’t lock doors here. There’s no point. If someone wants to get in out here, a lock won’t stop them.” She has left the motor running on the ATV. The cabin opens on a front room, crowded by an old-fashioned pipe stove. “Don’t try to use it, unless you want to burn yourself alive.” She flicks a light switch and nothing happens. “I’ll get Emmett to look into that.” The sunset seems to have exhausted her, and there is a crabbiness as she shows me the various rooms, directs me where to stay. “You should choose this room. The bathroom’s just next door.” She shows me the kitchen and the quilts in the closet. “No heating.” Everything is coated with a thick layer of dust. The floor is a sea of dirty boot prints. “You can clean it yourself. Unpaid, of course.”
The window runners are stuffed with dead flies and black and red beetles. There are spiderwebs draped in every corner; they even wind around the broom. As we move through the house, there is a persistent scratching overhead that I recognize as mice, or rats, and that your mother does not acknowledge.
“That’s it.” She stops back at the door. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Seven o’clock start.” She hops down to the ground because the porch is missing; then she tears off on the ATV, leaving a cloud of dirt behind her.
The lock is broken. In the windowpane there is a crack that looks like it was made by a bullet. The cabin is cold. Although she told me there is no heating, I fiddle with a large wall grate before realizing there is nothing underneath. I pull one of the quilts from the closet and pile it on the slim single mattress. I climb into bed to keep warm, pulling the quilt tight around myself. I have nothing to eat and no time to drive to Oregon. My head is still spinning from the road. I wouldn’t even want to drive to Happy Camp if I could (which I can, I remind myself; your mother doesn’t control me).
I’m here now, like I tripped through the looking glass. I can’t go back. I lost my job, and I haven’t paid rent. They are probably in the process of evicting me. I could go to my parents’ place, but they would put up with me for only a week or two. And it never solves anything; it just keeps me on an endless reset loop.