Triplet Babies for the Mafia

Chapter 1

NORA

The colt has decided today is the day he kills me.

"Okay," I tell him. "Okay. I'm not the guy with the cattle prod."

His ears swivel. The left one comes forward. That's the whole conversation so far, the left ear, but I'll take it.

It's a late-September morning, the light coming up gray over the Sierras.

Then all at once it goes gold, sliding down the foothills and across the arena, turning the dust we've kicked up into something you could almost drink.

The air smells like horse, like diesel, like the dry grass of the valley before the heat finds it.

Somewhere behind me Dewey is running the hose into the south trough, singing to it, badly. It's a Merle Haggard song. He gets two lines in before he forgets the rest, then starts over. He's been forgetting the same two lines for the eleven years I've known him.

I move my weight an inch. The colt copies me an inch. We're dancing, sort of, the worst dance in the world. His sock-foot lifts, sets down. The muscle jumps under the black hide of his shoulder where the fear lives.

"You're fine," I tell him, low. "You're going to be so annoying when you figure out you're fine."

The gate latch clanks.

I don't turn around. You don't turn your back on a colt to greet a person.

And anyway I already know who it is, because the colt's whole body changes.

He goes from scared to scared-and-insulted, head up, nostrils wide.

I feel it the second before I hear the boots.

Heavy, slow, in no hurry at all, taking the soft dirt one unbothered step at a time while a colt the size of a car loses his mind twenty feet away.

"He'll spook," I say, still soft, still to the horse. "Stop right there."

The boots stop.

I get a hand on the colt's neck at last, flat-palmed. He shudders down the length of his spine like a struck bell. He doesn't run. Good boy. I hold it three breaths. Then I duck under the rail, turn around. There he is, ruining my morning the way he's been ruining it on and off for two years.

Isaak Radulov.

He's leaning on the outside of the pen, forearms along the top rail.

He came in quiet enough that I never heard the car.

Rude, somehow, that a man that size moves that soft.

The suit is charcoal, no tie, the collar open one button.

It would buy the colt twice over, plus the trailer that brought him.

He has dressed for a board meeting to come stand in eight inches of horse manure.

The sun is behind him. It lights the gray that's started at his temples, the gold in his stubble, the pale scar that runs through his left eyebrow and stops.

His sleeves are pushed up past the elbow.

He always does that, like he's about to do something with his hands, then never does.

The forearms are corded, sun-darker than the rest of him, a vein standing up the back of one where it grips the rail.

For two years I've pretended not to notice those forearms. Two years of lying to myself, because they're the least of it. So are the hands, big and scarred, never in a hurry. I have thought about those hands on me in detail I'd never admit to a soul, least of all this morning.

So is the open collar showing the base of his throat.

So, God help me, is the sheer size of him.

He's got a head and shoulders on me. He could put me up against the side of this barn one-handed, and we'd both know I wasn't going anywhere I didn't want to go.

That thought heats the back of my neck, then drops lower, and I hate every inch of where it goes.

I have stood at this rail and thought, in detail, about what those hands would do if I ever let them.

Then I remind myself the man is a loan shark in a forty-thousand-dollar suit, currently ruining my family, and I make my body behave the way I make a green colt behave.

Firm hand, zero negotiation. It mostly works. It isn't working today.

"You scared my horse," I say.

"I scared your horse." The accent is mostly gone, just a weight on the vowels. A man who learned English somewhere expensive after he learned it somewhere hard. "He wasn't scared before me, then. He was relaxed. Reading a book, maybe."

"He was making progress, you smug son of a bitch, until your six and a half feet of bad news came strolling up on him from behind."

"He looks like he wants to eat your liver."

"That's the progress."

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The pre-budget for one. He looks at the colt. The colt looks at him. Neither one blinks for a long unfriendly second. Then the colt decides Isaak is beneath his notice, goes back to glaring at me, and I swear the man looks the smallest bit stung.

"You named him yet?" Isaak tips his chin at the colt.

"Working on it."

"Lot 114 has a certain music."

"I'm calling him Cricket."

He turns his head and looks at me then, properly.

This is the look. It's the actual reason I keep a fence between us when I can.

His eyes are a pale brown the gold light turns almost yellow, wolf-colored, going over my face like he's checking it against a list. A man looks at you dirty, you know what to do with it.

You slap him, or you don't. This is worse.

He looks at me like he's already decided and he's content to wait for me to catch up.

"Cricket," he repeats.

"He's loud at night, he won't shut up, nobody asked him to be here."

"Ah." Now the smile gets approved, just barely, one side of his mouth. "A family name."

I laugh before I can stop it. That's the trouble with him. That's been the trouble for two years. He's funny. Nobody warns you that the scariest man in three counties is going to be funny. They warn you about everything else.

"Your father is looking for you," he says. The smile folds away. Something careful comes down over his face like a shade pulled. "He asked me to find you."

"He's got a phone."

"He didn't want to use the phone."

The morning had been good, and I should have known better than to trust it.

The light, the colt's left ear, Dewey murdering Merle.

A good morning on this ranch doesn't last out the hour anymore.

It hasn't for a year, since the markets, since the drought, since the thing nobody says out loud.

We are losing it. The dirt under my boots that my grandfather scraped out of nothing is slipping through our hands a little more every month.

"Where is he?" I say.

"The kitchen." He pauses. He's choosing, which is rare, because mostly he's decided everything before he opens his mouth. "Nora."

"Don't."

"I haven't said anything."

"You said my name like it's got bad news stapled to it. Don't soften it. Just point me at the bad news and get the hell off my rail."

He pushes off the rail and straightens. Standing, he's a wall, six and a half feet of him blocking out a good chunk of the Sierras. For one second the careful look slips, and underneath it's something I can't use, something that on another man I'd call worried.

"Go talk to your father," he says.

I leave the colt in the pen with hay and a full water trough, because whatever's in that kitchen will be quicker than a horse learning to trust me.

I cross the yard with my heart going like I've already heard the words.

Dewey's stopped singing. That's the first wrong thing.

Dewey only stops singing when somebody's hurt or somebody's come with papers.

The house is the oldest thing on the property, low and white, with a porch that sags on the east end where my mother always said she'd fix it.

She never did. The screen door has the same scream it's had my whole life.

Inside it smells like coffee. Dad's got the soft cloth out, the one he uses when his hands won't stay still.

His own father did it. There's nothing else to do with your hands when the news is bad.

The table is gleaming. He's been at it a while.

He's sitting at the head of it in his good shirt at seven in the morning, which is how I know before he says a word.

Hollis is there too, by the stove, hat in his hands.

Hollis never comes in the house. Hollis thinks houses are for sleeping and dying.

You should do as little of either one indoors as you can manage.

He's run this ranch's working end for thirty years.

He looks at me, then looks at the floor.

"Daddy."

"Sit down, baby."

"I'll stand."

"Nora." My father's hands are around a coffee cup he isn't drinking. They shake, just slightly, the tremor he gets. His knuckles are big as walnuts from sixty years of rope and rein, wrapped around that cup like it's the rail of a boat. "Sit down. Please. I can't say it to you standing up."

So I sit. The chair is the one I've sat in since I was four. There's still a notch in the arm where I carved a lopsided star with a paring knife when I was nine. I got the belt for it, the only time. He cried more than I did.

On the shelf behind him, over the cold woodstove, the trophies are lined up the way they've always been. Dull little men cast in dull metal on wooden bases, cutting-horse and reining trophies going back to before I was born. The big one in the middle is the National he won in '94.

Its base cracked two summers ago when Dewey knocked it dusting.

Dad sent it out, had it re-based, spent money we didn't have to put a sixty-dollar trophy back on its feet, because some things you don't let break.

It sits a half-inch taller than the others now.

The new base doesn't quite match the wood.

"How bad?" I say.

He tells me.

"There's a third mortgage you didn't know about," he says. "I kept thinking I'd find a way to fix it before you had to know." His hands tighten on the cup. "The feed bills. The water rights. I'm behind on the water rights, Nora. Three payments."

"The almond people," I say. "Two years ago they wanted to buy."