Colorado High Read online

  Interpreting the ensuing silence as another reproof, she ended it with a muttered, “See you Thursday then.”

  “I could bring a bottle of red wine,” Jed offered stiffly. “One of those Australian Pinot Noirs.”

  “And you say you’re not fancy!” Her tone had lightened, reflecting no more than wry amusement.

  “It’ll be good to have Garland home . . . kinda calls for a celebration.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” she agreed softly. “Thanks, Uncle Jed.”

  Chapter Two

  Jed replaced the receiver on the kitchen wall bracket and stood staring at it.

  Uncle Jed.

  “Hope that wasn’t that durn life insurance salesman again,” his father called in from the doorway. “As if I had a life worth insuring.”

  “It was Tessa, Pop, asking me for supper on Thursday, the day Garland’s due home from college.”

  “Garland, huh? Hard to think of that little tyke all grown up— hard enough thinking of Tessa that way.” Walter Bradburn wheeled his chair closer and peered up at his son. “They could’ve been yours, you know, Tessa and the twins both. But no, you and your ma—“

  “Leave it be, Pop.”

  “Can’t, Jed. Riles me every time I think of that Barry Wagner, always thinking those muscles of his made up for his lack of brains. Never could, understand why Tessa— “

  “There’s no future in looking at the past. Barry’s dead, and Tessa and me . . .” Jed wiped a weary hand across his brow. “The road the three of us traveled forked a long time ago. I keep telling you that, and you keep getting mad. No point to it.”

  “These days, getting mad’s about the only thing that gets my juices flowing. That’s point enough for me.” He rolled closer; his rheumy eyes darted from the bare kitchen counter to the cold electric range. “You planning on skipping supper here tonight, too?”

  It was a classic Bradburn double whammy, so blatant it amused Jed more than it annoyed him. “I have a couple of portions of that macaroni and cheese dish you like in the freezer. I thought I’d heat it up in the microwave.”

  “That all?”

  “Iceberg lettuce wedges with thousand island dressing, fresh-baked rolls, and brownies from Nellie’s Delly”

  Mollified, the old man gave a grunt of satisfaction. “You buy those brownies?”

  Jed laughed. “I sure didn’t swipe them.”

  “I thought maybe that silly woman gave ‘em to you. She’s sweet on you, you know. Driving in here every two minutes with her baked goods, buttering me up, making goo-goo eyes at you.”

  “Was sweet on me, Pop. She finally realized it wasn’t worth the effort.”

  “Durn silly woman. Be nice to have one around the place though . . . your hands ain’t exactly soothing, you know.”

  Being an old man’s handmaiden wasn’t exactly what Nellie had had in mind, but Jed knew better than to say so. Walt Bradburn had always perceived himself as the center of a universe; the cruel accident that crippled him, robbing him of his cherished physical prowess, had further limited his horizon. His universe had become the universe ... or at least the only one he gave a damn about.

  After supper, Jed helped his father get ready for bed. The routine never varied: off with his clothes and leg braces, into a hot bath for a ten-minute soak, then over to the bed for a massage followed by an application of a talcum powder, the kind formulated for babies, whose scent was the only one his father tolerated.

  Some years back, another woman accused by his father of making goo-goo eyes had brought a gift-wrapped container of talc by Calvin Klein— or was it Ralph Lauren?— in a misguided effort to win him over. She departed, fuming, after telling Jed not to bother calling her until he cut himself loose from “that old coot’s” apron strings.

  Once settled, Walter Bradburn switched on his small color TV and zapped to the channel celebrating John Wayne Week, and although he frowned when Jed— having seen Rio Bravo three times in the last two years—declined to pull up a chair, the rousing opening theme soon distracted him.

  Closing the door quietly behind him, Jed walked down the hall and into the dark low-ceilinged living room. Familiarity guided him behind the shabby armchairs facing the stone-faced fireplace, around the old black-and-white television set to the window commanding in good weather a partial view of Courthouse Peak. If he had been given any say in the matter, he would have long ago replaced the graceless double-hung window with a wide bay.

  The peak was shrouded in clouds now, the earlier drizzle having given way to a steady, sullen rain. Jed’s well-muscled shoulders drooped as he envisioned the muddy runoff from the mesa behind the house swirling into the creeks. He’d really pushed himself that week to free up Sunday for trying his luck with the trout-fly patterns he had dreamed up over the winter, but he knew it would take three days for the water to run clear again.

  A couple of those flies were pretty fanciful, but these days he got more pleasure out of fooling trout than eating them. He’d even taken to using barbless hooks. Trouble was, once school let out for the summer, it was hardly even worth the trying. This weekend, it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s trying . . .

  Jed sighed. Each year saw more and more out-of-state campers crowding the Forest Service roads, parking alongside the newly stocked creeks, the eager tourists throwing in worms any which way, their kids following on behind throwing rocks.

  There was still some posted water that held wild cutthroats, but Jed figured their days were numbered, too, considering all the “no trespassing” notices that got ripped off over the summer. Hardly worth the time and expense of posting ‘em.

  Jed turned away to the fire-blackened hearth. He tossed in a couple of logs on top of the half-burnt remnants of last night’s fire, twisted a few sheets of newspaper into spills, and clicked a wooden match into flame with his fingernail, a practice his mother had deplored.

  “Leave the boy be, Aggie,” his father would growl.

  “How can he keep his grades up if he can’t write?”

  “Burnt fingers never kept a man from tending stock!”

  Walter Bradburn had fought his wife’s determination to send Jed off to college right down to the wire. Nothing he actually said could be singled out as proof that Jed’s being adopted prompted his objections, but Jed couldn’t help thinking it did.

  “Your Pa don’t mean nothing by it,” his mother would say. “It’s just his way.”

  He never had any such wonderings about her. No natural son ever had a better mother. Her rough hands, when she patted his, always seemed soft as silk. He’d won his scholarship for her, and although the years would prove her right about the many ongoing benefits a college education would bring him, she fretted until the day she died about his one regret, which at the time had almost overwhelmed him.

  It happened the fall of his sophomore year. He’d come home at Thanksgiving, thinking they’d go together to the Cottonwood High’s homecoming game as they always did: Barry Wagner, famed for his quarterbacking and flamboyant bulldogging; Tessa Hatton, former high-stepping cheerleader and present barrel-racing champion, and Jed Bradburn, whose outlandish devotion to book learning was generally agreed to be outweighed by his stand-out performance in bareback bronc-riding events, near and far.

  The Trio Con Brio.

  Jed settled back into one of the armchairs, smiling as he recalled the source of the nickname. According to Tessa, the director of her church’s youth choir, frustrated by a particularly lackluster performance, had waved his arms and shouted, “Con brio, you turkeys, con brio!”

  “We didn’t know if we were being insulted or what!” she reported indignantly. “But I damn well wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking, so I looked it up later at school. ‘Con brio,’ ‘ she recited in her husky alto, “ ‘with vivacity, dash, and spirit.’ Not bad, huh?”

  “Like us,” Barry said smugly.

  “Trio con brio,” Jed had suggested.

  His reward had been Tessa
’s heart-stopping smile. Then, five years later, without warning, three became a crowd.

  Tessa had entered a barrel-racing event down Albuquerque way, and Barry offered to drive the van. It was the last big rodeo of the fall season; the championship of the southwest division was at stake, and she had always depended on Jed and Barry’s psyching-up to give her that extra edge. This time, Jed wasn’t available.

  According to Jeannie Disbrow, who came in second riding one of Tessa’s horses, Barry followed up his pep talk with a whole lot of TLC at the super blow-out celebration of Tessa’s big win.

  “Bought her champagne, massaged her ego, and just about everything else he could get at in public.” At that point, Jeannie had rolled her eyes. “No one saw ‘em leave, Jed. Like that song says, they must’ve got married in a fever. Came trailing back to Cottonwood three days later, Tessa with this pukey little gold band— no wider’n horsehair—on her finger, both of ‘em looking like something drug through a knothole.”

  Remembering, Jed got up to poke at the fire. Sparks popped and flew up the chimney. Oh yeah, they got married in a fever, all right.

  Not that Tessa ever admitted as much. She was way too proud for that. She avoided him through the Christmas holidays; Jed avoided Barry—couldn’t stomach his swaggering—and returned to Boulder before his vacation ended, pleading the need to study. And for the next two and a half years, except for working himself half to death on the ranch during vacations, that’s about all he did. Hunched over his scarred desk, surrounded by teetering piles of paper-slipped books, dizzied by fatigue, and haunted by the memory of Tessa’s smile.

  In February of his last year at the university, his heartache was sidelined by tragedy. Walter Bradburn, driving back in early April from a cattlemen’s meeting in Durango, got caught by a late-season run of the notorious East Riverside slide north of Silverton. His truck ended up in the ravine, half-buried in snow, unseen until morning. By the time the volunteer EMTs got him out, the damage to his spine was irreversible.

  Jed’s mother insisted he finish out his senior year. Assured by rancher neighbors of their help until he returned, he reluctantly acceded, but when she arrived in Boulder in May for his graduation, relieved from her nursing chores by sympathetic friends, he was shocked by her appearance. In early September she died of the cancer she never found the time to have diagnosed.

  Jed slumped in his chair, assaulted anew by a wave of the guilt that over the years had become his closest companion; his sidekick; his goddamn shadow. Guilt he’d tried to drown in work, ease with caretaking, assuage through renunciation. . . .

  Renunciation ?

  “Jesus!” Jed muttered. “Of all the self-pitying, self-serving crap ...”

  He shoved himself up and paced in front of the dying fire. Why now? he wondered. His father’s rages erupted much less frequently than they once did— so did his own sexual urges for that matter.

  He didn’t much like being celibate, but the alternative— clumsy fumblings and couplings with lonely widows and desperate singles hoping for more— had even less to recommend it. There was a time when he’d hire a nurse and take off to Denver for a weekend with a woman— okay, a call girl, who accepted personally selected clients only, and only by appointment. But after the fifth weekend he decided the easing of his loins wasn’t worth the drain on his wallet and the paternal complaints that greeted him on his return.

  But that was, what, ten years ago? He’d come to terms with it long since. Sublimation, according to that psychology course he took. So why now?

  Wind rattled the windowpanes.

  The front must be moving out, thank God.

  Jed thought of Tessa on Hayden’s Bald. Wet, cold, miserable. Bitter. Barry’s death hadn’t seemed to help her any, cruel and crazy as it was.

  He thought of Scott Shelby. Pretentious s.o.b. He’d never quite forgiven Tessa for her connection with him.

  Forgiven? No, it was Barry who’d never done that.

  Accepted, that was it.

  Come to think of it, there was a whole lot he’d never accepted.

  Jed peered out the window. Shreds of the earlier cloud cover, chased by the rising wind, scudded across a bright, high, full moon. A coyote’s dolorous wail rose and fell in the dry wash-laced rough stretching behind the house into the juniper-studded foot of the high mesa that marked the northern boundary of the Bradburn spread. The familiar nighttime keening, as much a part of western ranchlife as the lowing of cows in more domesticated landscapes, struck a responsive chord in Jed’s heart. Unthinking, he lifted his chin. His mouth rounded. Then, coming to himself, he shook his head in private embarrassment.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “Next thing you know I’ll be sprouting fur on the back of my hands.”

  He paused at the door to his father’s room on the way to his own. A rumbling untroubled burr greeted his ears. Sleep was, he knew, the only place the old man found peace. The little death sought as temporary escape from his fierce, unyielding fight against the real thing.

  “Sleep well, Pop,” he murmured.

  Chapter Three

  “Mmm-mm, your pot roast smells just as good as I remember, Mom. Worth coming home to.”

  Tessa looked up from the black iron pot whose aromatic contents she was testing with a fork. “First it was your horse, now a hunk of meat. Where do I come in?”

  Garland hooked a long tanned arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Well, let’s see now . . . next comes Uncle Jed, Miguel, Plume—”

  “Oh, come on, Garland! Plume bites!”

  “Yeah, but your bark— “

  “Is worse than his bite,” they finished together. “Very funny,” Tessa said.

  “Laugh-a-minute Wagner, they call me.”

  Tessa closed the oven door, tossed the fork and hot pad on the counter, and planted a kiss on her daughter’s smooth cheek.

  “Gorgeous, I call you.”

  Garland tossed her tawny blond head and affected a Miss America simper. “Oh, well, that, too.” She grinned at her mother and began assembling napkins and stainless steel cutlery on a tray. “Wine glasses, you said?”

  “Jed’s bringing an Australian red— does Pinot Noir sound right to you?”

  “Sounds classy, but then he always was a classy dude. Me? I’m strictly a California jug wine girl—I offer two choices: red or white.”

  As Garland turned, tray in hand, towards the table at the other end of the big kitchen, her full flower-strewn cotton skirt swirled above her fine-boned ankles.

  Strictly thoroughbred, Tessa thought fiercely. Jug wine? Hell, champagne is the least she deserves!

  She recalled the first time she tasted champagne. It was at the big bash Scott Shelby threw at his ranch to celebrate the first, over-the-top sales reports of the Wild Westerns line. Tessa, outfitted in the latest Shelby gear, was lavishly toasted with a French champagne she overheard someone say cost in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars a bottle. A lot of bucks for something that tasted to her like a slightly sour, upscale soda pop, but she had to admit it went down easy.

  Too easy maybe, because afterwards she had only a hazy memory of promising to go on a nationwide department store tour to further boost his skyrocketing fortunes. “I want every woman in America yearning to look like you,” Scott had said. How could she refuse?

  For Barry, however, refusal had by that time become second nature. They slept together less and less, and when they did, his performance could be described as perfunctory at best. So it came as no surprise when, at the last minute, he refused to accompany her to the party.

  “You want to show yourself off to your Los An-geeleeze buddies, that’s okay with me, but I’m not about to be your fancy-man escort.”

  By then she already knew that nothing about her involvement with fashion and Scott Shelby was remotely “okay” with Barry, but she never expected to come home that night to a dark house and locked door. Her door more than Barry’s, actually. After her parents died in a plane crash, she and
Barry had exchanged their mobile home on the Wagner homestead for the spacious log dwelling on the Hatton spread she inherited.

  She recalled pounding on the door until her fists ached, then crunching through the frosty gravel out to the barn where she burrowed— mouth dry, head spinning— into the corner of the stall she’d earlier filled with fresh straw, taking some small comfort from the warm looming presence and inquiring velvet nose of the equine resident she’d raised and trained.

  The following night was the last they spent together in the same bed. In those days, no one thought of forced marital intercourse in terms of rape, but afterwards, when her pregnancy was confirmed, Tessa couldn’t help wondering if Barry’s violence had given his listless sperm an extra jolt. Unable to appreciate the irony after more than ten childless years, Barry had assumed the worst.

  “Hey, anybody home?”

  Tessa looked up from the salad-cutting board. “Goddammit!”

  Jed hesitated in the doorway, shifting from one boot-shod foot to the other. “Wrong day? Wrong guy, maybe?”

  “No, no ... come on in, Jed. It’s just . . .” She sighed, regretting she hadn’t gone upstairs sooner to change. Her fingers brushed ineffectually at tendrils of hair that had fallen loose from the knot bundled at the back of her head. “Oh, well, it’s not me you came to see, is it?”

  Before Jed had a chance to answer, Garland raced across the room and plastered herself against him. He reeled back against the door-jamb and flung up the hand holding a paper bag. “Whoa, there, I promised your mother wine to drink, not marinate the floor with.”

  “Oooh, mon cher oncle, I’m so glad to see you!”

  Tessa’s cleaver whacked harder than intended into the head of cabbage she was holding. Bits of green flew up into her mouth, her eyes, her hair. “Seems to me, Garland, living where we do, Spanish would come in a lot handier’n French.”

  Garland’s huge hazel eyes blinked. “I’m taking Spanish, too, Mom.”