Roger and Lacey: A History of Love and Ranching in Quailwood, Arizona
A short story

Roger Dawes drank his beer like a horse at water, remembering that he once owned a beautiful buckskin mare, but shot it in the spring of 1953 after a night of drinking and gambling in Prescott with his hunting buddy Casper. They'd returned to the Dawes ranch in Quailwood, where Roger cried, "Th-th-there," tossing his .30-.30 onto the aluminum roof of the row barn where he knew he wouldn't be nimble-footed enough to climb and retrieve it, "take your goddamned prize horse. And I 'spect that bullet back."

"Don't tempt me," Casper said.

That horse, dubbed Appropriate Cowboy (from sire A Great Cowboy and dam The Appropriate Chestnut Ranger), stuck with him. Even after forty years on the ranch Roger found himself wandering to the feed barn and the bottle of bourbon he hid behind the 5-gallon bags of rice bran so his wife didn't have to watch him get crocked. He brought a Pabst Blue Ribbon to chase the bourbon, put it in the bib of his overalls, and leaned on the fence of Cowboy's old stall, now inhabited by a bay mare named Santo Christo. He inhaled the scent of horse manure and alfalfa, waiting for his wife to fall asleep.

Nights were cool in Quailwood. The days burned with a fury, no tree cover and only sand to share the sun, though in spring there was enough wind to keep cool. The night Roger killed Cowboy, Roger and Casper retired under the awning of the breed barn to smoke Lucky Strikes and spit to the wind. They were twenty-one years old; Casper led trail rides through Bloody Gulch Canyon and Roger worked for his father boarding quarter horses for traders in Phoenix and Scottsdale. They passed a bottle of Old Forester Bourbon until passing out, the clouds curtailing the edges of the night's vastness, the stars considerable and fizzing against the shadowed silhouette of the two-room cabin where Roger's parents slept. "By God," Roger whispered just before blacking out, "I'm gonna be the most appropriate son of a bitch this side of Mexico. I've been fractured by this here experience, Casper, this here gutbucket's my final foray. It's time to get hep, we can't go on with this transpired existence. I've been getting into reading, and there's more to life than bourbon and cards, turns out."

Casper spit the stub of his cigarette and rolled onto his side, "God bless tobacco," he mumbled, and fell asleep.

In the Spring of '54, having failed to keep from drinking and gambling and sex, Roger Dawes started attending the Quailwood Community Church, promised the Reverend he'd be clean as barber's shears, dry as Morton's Gully, the most sacrosanct gent this side of Mexico. So when he met the second most sacrosanct American this side of Mexico, a nineteen year-old postman's daughter named Lacey Crane, he was most discouraged.

"I don't wanna touch you," he told her, sitting on a boulder and inching his hand closer and closer to her thigh.

"Well that's all right," she said, her sweet dimpled smile spreading like a wild fire, "cause I just had a baby four months ago."

Roger found this both terribly unacceptable and slightly encouraging, his heart sunk, his cock jumped, and he pulled his hands back into his lap, saying, "You did?"

Lacey's dress dipped casually over her ankles as she rubbed the bottoms of her stockinged feet. She was small but indelicate, straw-yellow hair cut into bangs by her mother. "Sure did," she laughed. "A beautiful baby something-or-other. Momma kicked me out the house, sent me out here to live with my Auntie Mim and Uncle Leonard. She gonna raise it like it's hers." She bowed her head and looked up at him coyly, "don't you tell nobody."

Roger bit the end off a cigar he'd swiped from his Father's secret stash behind the bridle rack, "But you're repentant," he said, "feeling real awful bout yerself, asking Jesus for forgiveness and a clean slate, right?"

"Sure am," she nodded with enthusiasm. "I'm born-again, for the second time. Auntie Mim took me down to Quailwood and everything, had me baptized fresh." She put her hand above her left breast like she was swearing in court, "Dunked my head in a drinking trough and slapped my ass with bridle reins, figuratively speakin'." She batted her eyelashes and looked up at him with a pair of kittenish green eyes, asking, "What'd you do to be so down-n-out on your moral well-being?"

Roger puffed on the cigar and said, "I shot my horse."

Lacey faked a shocked gasp but asked seriously, "Was he lame?"

"Once," he said. "But we nerved him and that was that. I was plum drunk, is all."

"That's terrible," she whispered.

"I know, Lacey Crain," he whispered back, "I'm down-n-out."

Roger Dawes married Lacey Crane not two weeks later, signed the papers at the courthouse in Prescott Valley with Casper Koyie as witness.

"I'm gonna make an honest lady outta you, Lacey Dawes," Roger told her, sneaking her to their hay barn loft with a blanket under one arm and Lacey under the other.

"All right," she smiled, looking up at him, hanging sideways onto his waist and unbuckling his belt as he climbed the ladder, "but more importantly, now that's we hitched, I'm gonna screw ya like a flat head fixes a hinge."

Roger laughed out loud, giddy with excitement and feeling finally like an honest-to-God Arizona wrangler, "Can't think of a more appropriate or honest thing to do," he said, laying her down in a bed of grass hay and baling wire. He added, stroking her cheek and feeling like Clark Gable, "The grass hay is softer than the alfalfa, and less itchy to the skin."

They kissed, her soft tongue searching, her hands fluttery and firm. His hands expanded and scanned the oft-imagined surfaces of her skin, down from her neck and shoulder, her breasts and naval, the stomach that had already held another man's baby. Roger grew timid and hid himself beneath their blanket. He curled in beside her and tightened the blanket above his head, around her shoulders.

"Where are you going?" Lacey asked, locked like a mummy with her hands trapped beneath the blanket.

"I've never done this without whiskey of some kind," he answered.

Lacey wriggled her body, rubbing against Roger's fetal form. "Well what's the problem, cowboy? I'm your wife and I love you, best kind of whiskey there is. Lacey-brand liquor," she said, "goes down easy."

Roger unfolded and spread across Lacey's body, dropping his leg between hers, pushing his forehead against her collarbone, feeling her breasts with his cheeks. "I'm ashamed of my body," he said, his hot breath on her chest, making her tingle. "Ever since I shot Cowboy I haven't gotten but a bit of exercise. I'm fat as a tick, a spittin' image of Cowboy hisself."

Lacey thought for a moment, pushing her lips to one side of her mouth, saying, "And you loved Cowboy, didn't you?"

"I loved that horse more than anything," he said, lifting the blanket and peaking up at her, his pupils shining like a mountain lion stalking prey through the dark. "Pa said I shouldn't get attached cause I was lucky enough to be born with a brain and Cowboy was unlucky enough to be born a beast of burden and that's just how it was, but I couldn't stand to see Casper's grimey mitts grabbing at her."

"What happens when another boy takes a shine to me? You gonna shoot me or him?"

Roger dives back beneath the blanket. "No way to know," he said.

She tapped his head through the blanket and spoke to the frizzled lump of cotton, "Make love to me and then decide."

Roger turned his head and kissed the curve of her breast, bit it, said, "I can't remember how."

"Whaddya mean? Here's the recipe: one part you, one part me, heat on high."

Roger giggled, but having heard his unbridled effete laughter, grew disheartened again, twisted a piece of grass hay around his finger and pushed it into Lacey's liver. "I wish we had some whiskey."

"You don't need that," Lacey cooed, pulling him up by the armpits. "It's just like ridin' a horse." She kissed his neck, spoke with hot breath behind his ear, "first we walk, nice and slow." She pulled him atop her, aligning themselves properly, "then we start to trot a little," she pushed her hips against his and swiveled, Roger would tell Casper, like a tractor hitch on its bearings. "Get out of your head," she said softly, " feel my motion and allow yourself to flow into it like the wind takes sand, just like posting on ole Cowboy, look here dear," she said, moving his hand to her waist, "watch my hip bones like ole Cowboy's shoulder muscles…"

"This is not appropriate," Roger said, gripping her hip with his calloused hand.

"Sure it is," she said, kissing his cheek. "Then we start feeling each other and swaying, dancing, posting at a good trot here, now that's it, just think of me like your prize-winning buckskin–"

"That is not appropriate."

"Sure it is," she said again, kissing his other cheek.

"You're more a Palomino." The rustle of crickets and coyotes joined them in the pale moon glow.

"Oh, all right then," Lacey giggled. "There you go. Now you're riding."

"I'm posting good."

"You sure are," she smiled, noticing quail and quail babies bobbing through the loft, unaware of their coupling. "Now you ready to canter?"

Roger frowned, softening, "Ole Cowboy never asked me, he just went."

"Well all right then," she said, rousing him back into focus by biting his earlobe and sliding her hand, unabated, down the muscles of his spine.

In the fall of that year, Francis Dawes, Roger's father, was tossed from a bay stallion they were keeping for a car parts distributor from Safford, broke his pelvis and died from the bleeding. "No more," his mother Adeline agreed with Lacey, "from now on we'll train our own damn horses, let these aristocrats from Phoenix and Salt Lake buy from us."

"But Momma," Roger insisted, "how in the hell are we gonna do that?" Roger's older brother John had been killed during World War II, so Roger, feeling the pressure of being the new patriarch, was hesitant to up and change the structure of their ranch with only Adeline, Lacey, and his kid sister Maryann to man it.

"Christ a'mighty, Roger," Adeline shouted, slamming back a tin cup of Old Forester, "we'll find our niche, and fill it, that's how."

By 1958 they had more than one-hundred quarter horses for show, the timber industry in the White Mountains was booming and urban sprawl rampant in parts around Phoenix, Dawes Ranch renamed themselves Buckskins Unlimited, Lacey carved the Beautiful Buck Stops Here above their entrance gate and on the breeding barn doors, they started marketing their horses as leisure horses with Roger hauling gooseneck loads of buckskin geldings to Wyoming and Montana every couple of months, selling to high-society types from Phoenix and Southern California, yukking it up with other ranchers at the All Arabian Horse Show in Scottsdale. Uranium tycoons from the Powder River Basin brought their daughters on weekend riding trips, and anthracite miners from the Coal Region of Pennsylvania moved west after the Knox Mine Disaster in '59. They started cattle ranches and hunting outfits throughout the Southwest and they needed horses. The industry hadn't yet reached its peak but already there was space enough for lots of small ranch owners like Roger Dawes to make their way and find their niche. For Roger Dawes, it was buckskins: if you thought buckskins, you thought Roger Dawes.

Roger woke at five for the morning feedings, kept twenty or so geldings and mares well-ridden and groomed for show while Lacey learned to handle all the weanlings, the yearlings, and all reproductive aspects of horse raising. At eighteen Maryann blossomed into a damn fine rider. Shy and soft-spoken, she helped Roger with reining and spent the rest of her time smoking Fatima cigarettes and watching the road, hoping for a man to come steal her away. Adeline took to handling all the administrative aspects of Buckskins Unlimited, handling the money and keeping track of clients and their sales history, telling Maryann, "Your doom and gloom is unattractive, you'll net a man when you relax," telling Lacey, "Don't let Roger deaden your heart, boy's a fine worker but he don't got shit for romantic sensibilities," telling Roger, "You keep up that drinking and you'll die before you're grown, if Lacey don't shoot you first, which I told her was fine by me." In 1960 Adeline got Valley Fever that turned into pneumonia and killed her shortly after her sixtieth birthday.

They sat on hay bales in the feed barn after burying her next to Francis and Cowboy. Roger smelled of wet horsehair, leaning against a support pillar with arms crossed and wide-brimmed hat tipped up to reveal a pale portion of balding skull. Lacey wore dirty jean coveralls, pulled from a fifth of Old Crow and tossed it to Roger. She shook her head and pushed strands of pale hair behind her ears, saying, "It's damn tragic."

Maryann leaned her shoulder into a stack of alfalfa bales, one boot tip stuck in the dirt behind the other, her arms crossed, holding a Fatima cigarette between two fingers and bringing it to her lips. "Maybe you guys should have a baby," she said, thinking more of her own desire to start a family, to have something to care for besides horses.

Roger wiped bourbon from his mustache and turned his head to spit. "Friggin' sallys," he said, finishing the bourbon and tossing the bottle to land softly on the hay stacks. "I gotta do the turnouts," he called back to them, his boots kicking up dirt as he stamped toward the row barn.

Maryann couldn't help herself any longer and she started to cry, sucking up smoke and coughing into her elbow. "We can't have kids," Lacey told her, unmoving from across the barn. "We have horses."

She stood and walked to Maryann, pulled the cigarette from Maryann's lips and said, "We can't all die young, sweetheart. It's bad for business." She stamped the cigarette out in the sand and went to do her part of the turnouts, to take the weanlings and yearlings from their stalls in the wood barn and let them run, free and happy, in the wide-open, east-end, holding pen.

Tavis Rosewood was a kid. Nineteen years old in 1968 when he stood in Roger's kitchen, his hat in his hands, swinging the hair from his eyes like a horse bothered by flies. Roger turned his back and poured himself a glass of whiskey, drank it, and poured another. He wanted to get his gun and do the boy right there, but he couldn't leave Maryann without her baby's daddy.

"I love him, Roger," she said from the dining room table, rubbing her hands and stealing glances at the boy's smooth smile.

Roger turned on them, "You ever even work a day in your life, boy?" He marched across the room, his boots pounding the hardwood floor, his spurs jingling comically; he grabbed the boy's hands and flipped them over. "These aren't working hands," he said, shaking his head.

"I'm a ball player, sir," Tavis said, his voice soft, smiling at Maryann from the corner of his mouth, slick-as-can-be. "I was drafted by the Minnesota Twins. Figured I'd wed Maryann and take her up there with me to have the baby."

"A ballplayer? She-it." Roger made his way back to the counter and poured himself another drink.

Lacey leaned against the doorframe and looked sympathetically at Maryann, "C'mon now Roger," she said, "let's give this boy a chance."

"To do what," Roger yelled, "Turn my sister into a whore. To steal her from the only family she got. To take her up north to the cold where she don't know next to nothing bout nothing?"

"Roger!" Maryann yelled back. "I ain't no whore. Tavis loves me. Don't you, Tavis?" She turned to the boy, still uncertain, her big eyes wide, her smile tentative.

Tavis looked at Roger first, then back to her. "You're having my baby aren't you?"

Lacey suppressed a laugh. "That don't mean nothing."

"Listen," Tavis said, "I'm a good ballplayer. You should come see me play." He looked around at their skeptical glances, saying, "I'm gonna make a shit-ton of money."

"Baseball isn't a job," Roger said.

"What do you know?" Maryann said. "Your idea of work is drinking half the day anyhow."

Roger pointed at Maryann and said, "You're right." He grabbed the bottle of whiskey and slammed it down on the counter in front of Tavis. "Let's us have a drink," he said, "how bout it."

Tavis walked slowly up to the table. "Okay..."

Roger poured two glasses of whiskey, handed one to Tavis and took one up himself. Tavis held up his glass in a silent toast and they both drank their fill. The minute Tavis's glass hit the table Roger refilled it, and then his own. Tavis glanced to Maryann, who looked worried, and glanced at Lacey, who smiled with a curious sort of expectancy. Roger held up his glass again, and drank it. Tavis reciprocated. Roger immediately poured them another round. Tavis coughed and hit his fist against his chest, taking the glass in his hand and raising it to Roger a third time, smirking, secretly pleased with his new family. Roger and Tavis raised their glasses again in silent toast and drank them down. The very second their glasses slammed back into the counter, as Tavis turned his head to the side, squeezed his eyes closed tight and stretched his neck muscles in the strain of another drink, Roger reared back and punched Tavis square between the eyes, knocking him back onto his ass. Tavis sat with his legs extended in front of him, his eyes wide with fright, coughing and sputtering and wheezing like a brood mare caught in barbs.

"Roger!" Maryann screamed, running to her new beau's side and wiping at his face with her hands.

Lacey ran forward too, but ended up just standing above them with her hands on her hips. She watched Roger for a moment as he poured himself another drink and stared wordlessly at the counter, seeing the extent of his hurt and the confusion with which he handled this situation. She finally leaned over, making Tavis, still wide-eyed and sputtering turn his head to look at her. She told him, "If you want her, you can have her."

Maryann looked at Lacey, her own eyes now wide, heartbroken, wondering how a sister could say such a thing about another. She whispered, "Lacey…"

Lacey cut her off, staring her flush in the face, trying to mix compassion with authority, saying, "Maryann, I love you, but you only got so many things you can care fully for in this world," she glanced up again at Roger, seeing him near tears and now drunk off his ass, wobbling toward the sink. She looked back to Maryann and said, "I got mine." She patted Tavis on the chest and stood to tend to Roger. When she finally did turn around again, getting Roger to settle himself in their bedroom, Maryann was gone and never coming back.

Every Sunday up till and after the spring of '74, when Roger finally opened his checkbook (slightly) and hired an illegal Mexican immigrant named Esteban to muck the stalls and take over the morning feeding, Lacey and Roger ate their Sunday breakfast at the Silver City Café, buying The Arizona Republic newspaper at the counter with their coffee and reading about how well Tavis Rosewood was performing for the Minnesota Twins as their second baseman. These Sundays they leave Esteban in charge, coming back to their two-room ranch house, having themselves a good cry and then getting good and drunk for the rest of the day.

They asked Casper to check in on Maryann one winter he went up to Minneapolis for a canoeing trip down the Mississippi. He came back to Quailwood in June, said she's doing fine, got two kids, divorced Tavis sometime that last summer though he pays good child support. Lacey skipped the drinking that Sunday, cried the entire day, whereas Roger skipped the crying and did his and her share of the drinking. He insisted Esteban let him help with the feedings and the turnouts, using sense at least not to ride so as to avoid the same fate as his daddy. Coming around the wood barn Roger tried to reach with the coffee can of alfalfa pellets, tried to drop them in the feed tires around the east-end pen and he fell right off the tractor before Esteban could stop it. Roger got a nasty cut over his eye and bruises along his right side, and though he didn't speak any Spanish, and Esteban didn't speak any English, they had a hell of a row that turned, inevitably, to blows. Esteban knocked out Roger's front teeth with a bridle bit and Roger called INS on Esteban, got him deported and himself arrested for harboring an illegal alien. He spent two days in general lock-up before using his phone call to ask Casper to watch the ranch for awhile and help Lacey till he got back, yelling into the receiver, dripping blood from his eye and whistling through the new gap in his teeth, "If you so much as smell her perfume I'll shoot you dead! You understand me you friggin' ratshit hound dog?"

Lacey had to mortgage the ranch and hire a woman named Delia to run the office. Lacey insisted that Casper stay in the house while she punished herself by sleeping in an empty horse stall. "I'm not sleeping in that house while Roger's locked in prison," she told him, "Esteban was my hire same as his, my crime same as his, I'll sleep in shit same as him." Roger returned after two months in jail with a box of Wild Turkey Whiskey for Casper and a brand-new padded carriage that Lacey could hitch to her favorite buckskin gelding and ride around the ranch.

Roger Dawes woke up on his sixtieth birthday, in the winter of 1992, struggling to move. "Goddammit," he moaned, a creaky bleat from the back of his throat. Lacey stood over him with one hand on her hip and the other twisting the hair on his forearm.

"We gotta get you to the hospital," she said.

"No friggin way," he moaned again. "It's Sunday. I want my Silver City pancakes."

Lacey bounced a laugh off the ceiling and 'awwwed' to her husband. "Old man you ain't that set in your ways are you? We gotta get you better."

"I'm fixin' to, Lacey Dawes," he said, "but you're not understanding. Get me my pancakes or you can bury me in the yard."

"Oh baby, you're getting a little bourbon belly anyway."

"The hell I am," he grumbled, trying to sit up on his elbows and failing.

"You want to go get the horse doctor?"

"At least get me a nip of Old Crow, eh?"

Lacey shook her head and got herself dressed. "Sure baby," she called from the closet, "I'll have the EMTs stop off at the cantina."

Roger had to have a hip replacement, a procedure the doctors said was long overdue, metal prostheses replacing his hip joint, physical therapy at Prescott Medical Center for eight weeks after. "I'm sure Casper will be willing to come help out for a week or two," Lacey assured him.

"That turkey-necked horndog!" He roared, flapping madly in his hospital gown, "Jeez-o-man, I can't even trust my own damn body."

The doctors gave him anti-depressants as part of his treatment, encouraging him to stay on them even after he was back on his feet. They did improve his general demeanor, Lacey said, but Roger told her that if she wanted to nerve him she'd need a scalpel, not Prozac, and he'd do it himself, just say the word. He flushed the pills down the toilet and hobbled outside to help Alfredo, their new hired hand train a weanling how to get saddled and ride.

Roger Dawes watched Twin Peaks on his 41-inch Toshiba television while unhooking the spurs from his boots and bandaging his wrist where a halter wrapped and burned him. Lacey's dog Lorena spooked a new brown gelding as Roger walked it from the wood barn to an outside pen. Lacey, in the adjoining kitchen, stood smashing ground beef into patties for the grill.

"Toss me that sausage from the fridge there, Lacey Dawes," Roger said, putting a treated wrap around his wrist.

Lacey frowned at him, worried as his accidents become more frequent, "You barely got hands enough to keep your wrist attached to your palm and these burgers'll only take me a minute to cook."

"I like the gloss you get on your fingers from them sausages, though."

Lacey ignored him and rinsed her hands in the sink, "What did Dave Calo have to say?"

"Who?"

""Didn't Dave Calo call?"

"Oh yeah," Roger remembered, "he got all them studs and don't know what to do with 'em. I told him, I'll give you the same deal I give folks for their yearlings, if that's help, two-hundred I told him, and he says, well, what're they gonna fetch?" Roger chuckled as he put a pin clip at the end of his wrist wrap, "I told him, Dave, I got no idea, I oversee the friggin' sale, not buy the horses myself, I told him could be six-hundred, could be sixteen hundred. I bet he's got some shapely horses in that bunch, though, Lacey Dawes."

Lacey clicked her tongue and put her fist on her hip, facing Roger, "Delia says she saw Corinne buying spam at the Safeway." She raised her eyebrows in scandal.

"Our Delia?" Roger asked, wondering why their bookkeeper even knew Dave and Corinne Calo. "What business she got gossiping bout Dave and Corinne?"

"All I know," Lacey said, draping the dish rag back onto the stove door, "is if you're down to spam it's cause you're too proud to eat cat food."

A knock came at the door and a middle-aged lady peaked her head through, a long brown braid dangling down her back and bouncing on her butt.

"Well speak of the devil," Lacey said.

Roger turned around, groaning at the effort, craning his neck to get a look at her, saying, "Delia, you flop-tongued ole coot, what're you doin talking bout Dave 'n' Corinne Calo?"

"There's a phone call," she said.

"Well doggone it," Roger went on, "what're you still doin here anyhow? We oughta unhook that friggin' thing."

"I think you oughta take this phone call."

"Lookie there," Lacey said, straightening up and putting the plate of patties back on the countertop, "What's wrong Delia? Who is it?"

Delia raised her eyebrows in the direction of the phone and backed out the house. Lacey went to pick up the phone, answering, "Buckskins Unlimited, this is Lacey."

Roger watched age finally take to his wife's face, her eyes wrinkling, her forehead folding in on itself, the corners of her mouth dropping. Roger could feel his own face collapse even before he heard Lacey say, "Aw shit," her head falling to one side, her eyes arching and beginning to glisten, "baby," she said, "your sister's dead."

Lacey made Roger wear his good blue jeans, his polished boots, belt, and silver buckle when he flew to Minneapolis. He took a taxi from the airport, his bones frozen beneath the new cotton plaid button-down he had to buy from Western Wear and Boots because his other shirts were all too worn. The Minnesota cold reminded Roger of Arizona heat, unadulterated by humidity or wind, it chilled his bones with a pure, blue-bodied cold.

The taxi dropped him off at an apartment complex on Grand Avenue. He waded through the sidewalk slush and approached the address he'd been given for Maryann's kids, a boy and girl, though he'd never seen them to know.

Roger stood in their limitedly furnished living room. The long-haired boy looked timid as he sat on the couch, the girl, probably anorexic, looking shockingly like Maryann. She stood with her ankles crossed, one soft-shoed toe pointed into the carpet, her arms folded, and lifting a cigarette lightly to her lips.

"We had a wake yesterday," she said. "Some really nice people came." She wiped her bottom lip with her pinky. "Sorry we couldn't get a hold of you in time."

"That's all right," Roger grumbled. "That son of a bitch Tavis show up?" he asked, looking at the pictures displayed on top of the television set.

"Yeah," she said, the boy still quiet on the couch. "He was there."

"You gonna live with him now," he asked, looking at her this time, "now that . . . you know."

"I'm twenty-one," she said, looking back sympathetically at the boy, "and Harvey will be eighteen in less than a year. We'll stay here."

Roger folded his hands into his jean pockets. "He a good dad?"

"Better than you are an uncle," the boy said suddenly, his arms crossed, his lips pursed, "or a brother."

"Harvey," the girl said, turning and taking a seat next to Harvey, her arm around his shoulder, her cigarette hand patting his arm with its free fingers. She looked up to Roger, said, "Not really."

"She-it you kids is skinny," Roger responded. "Maryann feed you?"

"We eat," the boy said.

"So uh," Roger shifted his feet, turned his jeans down over his boots, "what do y'all, uh-"

"Mom wanted to be buried at your ranch," the girl said. "Next to grandma and grandpa."

She puffed on the cigarette in her quiet way, her embarrassed glances avoiding eye contact while her fingers fluttered nervously on Harvey's spindly arm. "Grandma and Grandpa," Roger repeated, the words sounding strange to him.

"We bought plane tickets to Quailwood," the girl went on, the boy looking silently into his lap. "We'd like to see where she's buried." The girl tilted her head toward the kitchen counter. Roger noticed a plastic Ziploc bag filled with ashes in the middle of the table like a centerpiece.

"Is that her?" He asked.

Roger leaned his elbows on the fence of Cowboy's old stall and drank from the cool, sandy bottle of bourbon. The lead piping fence gave under his weight and stuck in the dirt. Quailwood was quiet, the horses undisturbed in their warmly lit barns. The light tricked them into thinking it was summer, kept their coats short and glossy, better for show.

Roger tossed the near-empty bottle of bourbon and shattered the bulb that hung from the rafters, submerging himself in the speckled glow of moonlight. He remembered the day they buried Maryann's ashes.

Lacey had carried them in an old, beat-up Folgers Coffee can where they used to keep horse medicine. She wore her hair tied back with a navy bandana, lilac stuck over one ear, both her arms cradling the coffee can like a pregnant mother holds her belly.

He remembered Maryann's squirrelly kids standing off to the side, the boy with long, greasy hair, holding his sister's hand while he cried. The girl rubbing his fingers with her thumb and sucking on a cigarette with the other hand. Her scarecrow thin cheeks hollowed when she smoked, like her mother's had.

Roger remembered digging and wondering how deep he'd have to bury a can of ashes to keep the tin can from ruining the topsoil.

End.

Tyler graduated from St. Olaf College in 2009 with a B.A. in Religion and Family Studies.  His work has been published with Meta-4-Magazine and Dark Sky Magazine.  Currently, he is an Investigator for the Public Defender Service in Washington D.C.