CHAPTER 4
Victor woke up to the sound of his shower running. He supposed Johnny had helped himself to it. With a sigh, Victor rolled out of bed and threw on fresh clothes. By the time he’d finished that, the shower was cut and he heard footsteps on the floorboards in the hallway.
Victor opened the bedroom door and headed into the living room, followed by both dogs.
Johnny was on a chair trying to put his boots on but was quickly swarmed by dogs insistent on licking his face.
Johnny grinned as he pushed them back, urging them to give it a fucking break.
When he spotted Victor watching, he straightened, one boot on and one in his hands.
“You feeling okay?” Victor asked. If he’d drank as much as Johnny last night, he’d still be dead to the world.
“Aww yeah, I’ll be fine. Little bit of a headache, but I can manage.” He gestured to the dogs. “What’re their names?”
“Piper and Bailey. They were my aunt’s dogs.”
“Heelers?”
“Yeah.”
Johnny bent to grab Bailey by the face. “Yes, you’re very friendly, thank you.”
Bailey responded by trying to leap out of Johnny’s grip and lick his face. Johnny snorted and released him with a laugh.
“You don’t have any dogs?” Victor asked.
“Nah. Work too much. We had a few hound dogs when I was a kid, but they were more of my daddy’s huntin’ dogs than they were family pets, if you know what I mean.
Taylor’s been wantin’ a dog, but it’s probably best if she don’t get one.
Wouldn’t trust my sister’s boyfriend with a rock, let alone a dog.
” Johnny’s expression turned dark for an instant.
“I guess I better get outta your hair then, yeah?”
“I can make you breakfast, if you’re interested. I’ve got some eggs I can cook up.”
Johnny perked up immediately, and Victor tried not to laugh.
It was like he’d asked a dog if it wanted a treat.
He stood up from the chair by the front door and settled onto a stool on the opposite side of the kitchen island.
“Well, my mama taught me to never turn down free food. Ain’t never been offered a hot meal after crashing on someone’s couch before. ”
“Well, my mother taught me that no one goes hungry.” Victor grabbed several eggs from the carton in the fridge and set them on the counter. “How do you like them? Scrambled?”
“Don’t make no difference to me. However you like to cook ‘em.”
Scrambled it was then. Victor turned on the stove, pulled out a frying pan, and went to work.
“Cooking’s a skill I never learned. Mama never saw a reason to teach me.”
“My dad and abuela taught me how to cook,” Victor replied, cracking the eggs open into the pan and using a spatula to mix them together.
“Abuela, huh? That’s a grandma in Spanish?”
Victor hadn’t even realized he’d used Spanish, because he’d never called his abuela grandma.
He only used “grandma” for his mother’s mother.
He glanced over his shoulder at Johnny, hoping to God he wasn’t about to say some of the same racist shit a lot of rural white folk thought was acceptable, especially not when he was just starting to kind of like Johnny. “It is. My dad’s family is Mexican.”
“That’s nice. I got a D in Spanish in high school. All I can remember is don-day esta el ban-yo.”
Victor couldn’t help but laugh and turn to face Johnny. “Generous. I would have given you an F.”
Johnny guffawed and shrugged. “Wouldn’t have made much of a difference, cuz I dropped out when I was sixteen.”
“Oh. Can I ask why?”
“Ran away from home. Got involved in the rodeo circuit, then never looked back.”
Damn. Victor was desperately curious about his reasons, but he doubted they were close enough friends for him to inquire.
“Whose hat is that?” Johnny asked, pointing to the sombrero de charro that Victor had hung up as one of the few decorations he’d added to the place since his aunt’s death.
“My dad’s.”
“Cool hat. Your daddy really wear it?”
“Sure. He’d used to wear that to charreadas back when I was a kid.”
“What’s a char… whatever it is you said?”
“It’s like a traditional Mexican rodeo.”
“So your daddy was a cowboy?”
“Back when he was young, sure. My mother was hired to work at a Mormon family’s stable at a ranch down in Mexico back in the day, and that’s how they met.
When he got a bit older and more sensitive he didn’t do rodeo much, but he still rode and trained horses, along with my mother. I get it from both sides.”
“And your aunt owned this place.”
“Yes, it’s in the blood. The only one in my immediate family who’s not involved is my brother, who’s a booking agent for musicians in LA.”
“Y’all disown him for that?”
Victor chuckled. “Not quite, but I don’t think he’d notice even if we did.
” Victor and his brother Oscar didn’t talk all that much, on account of being very different people with vastly divergent interests.
The only times Oscar called Victor was when he needed money, which was more often than Victor would have liked.
Oscar had always been the “difficult one”; even their father had been willing to admit that.
“My parents desperately tried to get my brother involved with the family business but horses scared him. He was into music instead.”
“Well, kids are gonna be the way they’re gonna be. I was kinda hopin’ Taylor’d be into somethin’ like science or computers—might give her a leg up in society. Instead she’s like her uncle and her granddaddy, so I already know she’s in for trouble.”
“There are worse things than an interest in horses.”
“She’s still got time to discover drugs.”
Victor laughed. “Let’s hope not.”
Victor grabbed some grated cheese out of the refrigerator, as well as a jalapeno to dice.
Victor tossed the jalapeno in, scattered in a pinch of pepper, and then, when the eggs were nearly ready, sprinkled them with cheese.
He cut the contents of the pan in half and deposited each half on a plate, one for himself and one for Johnny.
Victor went about throwing some slices of bread into the toaster and pulling out his selection of butter and jams.
“Does every guest that passes out on your couch get a continental breakfast?” Johnny joked.
“Depends how annoying I think they are.”
Johnny laughed. “I can get more annoyin’, trust me.”
Victor bent over the kitchen island to eat his eggs, which were about perfect, if he had to say so himself.
For the first time he glanced at the time on his phone.
It was a late morning for him, about eight-thirty.
Because it was a Sunday, he didn’t have any lessons planned for today, though he had two horses coming in for training.
Johnny inhaled the eggs, finishing them before Victor even got halfway through his. He went to the toaster to extract his toast, and when Victor handed him a butter knife, he slathered on an almost comical amount of jam.
“You want any toast with that jam?” Victor asked, unable to keep from smiling.
“I’mma growin’ boy,” Johnny said through a full mouth, and they both laughed. It had been a long time since Victor was in this good of a mood in the morning, so he decided to throw caution to the wind.
“You want a tour of the place?” Victor asked.
“I ain’t got nothin’ to do today ‘cept sit at home. A tour sounds good to me.”
“Let me finish my toast then and I’ll show you around.”
* * *
Victor did a tour of the house first, but there wasn’t much to see.
His aunt never had children, so the modular she and her husband had selected to put on the property was one floor with three bedrooms, none of which had ever seen a child.
One of the rooms had been his aunt’s office, but Victor did most of his work in the office in the barn, so the desk in that room just held a TV and his laptop.
The other room was set up for guests, but Victor doubted anyone had slept in it since his uncle had died.
After a quick tour of the house, they headed outside toward the barn.
There were three barns, in fact—one was the main facility that contained the indoor arena and most of the stalls, along with the office, tack room, and wash stalls.
One of the outlying barns was for equipment, like the tractor, the manure spreader, arena drag, and other miscellaneous machinery that kept the place in shape.
The last barn was for any hay that couldn’t be stored in the upper level of the main barn.
This barn also had three large stalls that Victor used for quarantining horses from the auction, separating feral horses for training, or providing a quiet place for mares about to give birth
There was a small pasture set aside for eight head of young steers that he used for training purposes, because he liked to round horses out as well as he could, and cow work was fun and interesting for horses bored with doing circles in the arena.
Johnny hadn’t asked for an introduction to all the horses, but Victor felt compelled.
Many of the horses he didn’t have much to say about, but there were a few around with their own interesting backstories, including his seal bay Mustang mare Saturn, who came to greet them the moment they moved in front of her stall.
She’d come in Feral with a capital F; she’d tried jumping the 6-foot corral the first day he worked with her.
She was highly sensitive and she needed to trust her handler, but with time and patience, she came around to be one of his best horses in the past eight years.
“The two horses I have coming in today for training are mustangs,” Victor said, reaching out without thinking to run a hand over Saturn’s forelock to form it into a long point down her forehead.
“They’re from the same Herd Management Area in Wyoming as this girl here, so I’m hoping they’ll be similar in temperament. ”
“You ever train one that’s too crazy to bother with?”
“Occasionally you’ll meet one that makes it very clear they want nothing to do with you or domesticity, and those horses are better off at sanctuaries enjoying their lives in the way they like them.
” He decided he was starting to ramble, so he switched gears.
“Anyway, you’ve seen most of the place.”
“Decent sized property then.”
“There’s a path around the edge of it that makes for a nice trail ride. I actually may be due for a ride around to check all the fences.” Victor paused, wondering how much he could ask for without being seen as too forward. “You wanna go for a ride?”
“Right now?”
“As long as I’m back by noon then yeah.”
“Well, sure!” Johnny said with a smile, which provided Victor some relief.
He was still a bit unsure of what was “normal” when it came to men asking other men for company.
Johnny was more talkative and friendly than your average Oklahoman red-blooded male, so he felt safer to test the waters with.
Victor’s other option was to ask women for company instead, but they perceived that sort of thing far more differently than they used to.
He’d moved into “potential predator” status, and that never stopped bumming him out.
“You can ride either Saturn or Blitz, either is fine with me.”
“I’ll take Blitz. Ain’t every day you get to ride a stallion.”
Victor waved down the aisle. “Feel free to grab him and tack him up then.”
When Johnny headed off to do that, Victor grabbed Saturn.
In ten minutes both Blitz and Saturn were tacked up and ready to go.
Johnny was six-foot-three on a 14.2 hand horse, so he looked big on him.
Blitz was stocky for a Quarter Horse, so Victor knew he could manage the trip.
Together they mounted and headed out on a meandering walk along the fence border.
The fence by the road was made of posts and planks, but the rest was electric wire, which made it important to check once a month to ensure no trees had fallen on it or that a horse had leaned too heavily on a post and damaged it.
Still, when they came to a very long, wide aisle between two fields, Victor looked to Johnny with a smirk.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Victor asked.
Johnny shifted in his saddle, the leather creaking under his weight. “What?”
Victor pushed Saturn forward, trotting a few steps before breaking into a canter. He heard Johnny let out a whoop behind him, and in the next two seconds, Johnny was racing past him on Blitz in a full gallop.
“Fuck!” Victor blurted, kicking Saturn again. The race was on.
Whenever Victor rode at full speed on a horse, it was about two seconds of sheer terror followed by an exhilaration he imagined sky divers and bungee jumpers also experienced at the moment they realized they’d live through it.
Saturn snorted with each stride, head bobbing as she sprinted to catch up with Blitz.
Blitz was fast, but he wasn’t a trained racehorse, so within ten seconds, Victor and Johnny were neck and neck.
The wind and the pounding of Saturn’s hooves roared in Victor’s ears.
When their eyes met, Johnny pumped a fist in the air and yelled yeehaw, which made Victor laugh.
The aisle between the fields eventually ended, so their race came to its conclusion before they spilled onto the driveway.
Saturn yanked at Victor’s hands when he tried coaxing her back to a trot.
She still wanted to run. She may have enjoyed herself as much as Victor had.
Blitz was more polite about it, and he quieted quickly as Johnny laughed through heavy breathing.
“Shoulda warned me you were gonna do that,” Johnny chuckled as he pulled up beside Saturn. “Woulda had a better start.”
Victor swallowed a few times to rewet his mouth, which must have been open the whole time. “Damn, it’s been a while since I did that.”
“Me, too.” Johnny leaned down to give Blitz a few firm pats. Both horses were breathing hard and sweating. “Feels good, don’t it?”
“Yeah.” Victor grinned, thinking back to his days as a child racing his pony through the pasture. “Feels like being a kid again.”
Johnny nodded, a bit red in the face but happy. He was more handsome when he smiled, even if his teeth were a bit crooked.
Victor swallowed one more time before he returned Saturn to a sensible walk. “Anyway, let’s finish our loop.”