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  “Yeah. Willie and me have some business to tend to. He’s got a heck of a sweet deal goin’ on right now. Willie’s the wrangler for that new movie they’re makin’ from that book that was on Good Mornin’ America a few years back. You remember—The Horseman?” Dad lowered his voice, saying the title as if he, himself, were the show’s announcer. “Remember how right after that book come out, all that horse whisperin’ was a big deal? Every yay-hoo around was gonna be a horse whisperer, like the fella in the book. Anyhow, now Willie’s got the contract to do all the horse wranglin’ for the movie. Big job for one man.”

  My father has gone Hollywood. He’s hiring on with Willie Wardlaw to help make The Horseman. Willie will rent him out for four times what Dad’s getting paid. “Sounds like it,” I agreed.

  “It’ll be worth the work, though. This thing’s gonna go all the way to the A-cademy A-wards, I’ll guar-own-tee. They’re gonna make it sure-enough authentic—change it up a little from the book, make the horseman a little older, so it’ll be believable that he’d have all them insights about horses and people.”

  My father has been asked to play the horseman. He’s going to be a movie star at sixty-six. “That makes sense. Sounds exciting, Dad. I bet it’ll be a big success.”

  “Sure is. They got star power, too—that there Justin … uhhh … Justin … well, you know, that there Justin fella that’s so famous. The fella Amber Anderson got to be friends with while she was in California singin’ on American Megastar. Justin … ”

  “Shay?”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s him. Justin Shay. Willie says he’ll be good for the part. He’s real popular. Just needs a little coaching in the horse whisperin’ end of it.”

  My father is going to train the Hollywood horse whisperer—Justin Shay, pop-action-thriller star who undoubtedly doesn’t know one end of a horse from the other. I’m offended. For years, I tried to bring my father in tune with modern, kinder, gentler methods of training horses. He had no interest. He wanted to do things the old-fashioned way. “A horse ain’t broke until you break it,” he’d say.

  “Well, Dad, there are definitely some things to know about resistance-free training. It isn’t all intuitive, even for people who have been around animals all their lives. You have to understand why the animal does what it does—what the body language means and what actions on the part of the trainer cause those reactions. It’s all about action and reaction.”

  “Exactly. That’s right. See, you know all them modern terms for that stuff. Back in my day, we just put a horse in the pen and got him broke, but now everyone’s gotta whisper. It’s a whole new science.”

  Good gravy, Dad has just admitted that resistance-free training is a science. What is going on? “There is some behavioral theory behind it.… ”

  “Well, sure. This movie’ll really be good for the whole horse whisperin’ industry.”

  “Could be.” It was strange to be talking about horses after not having been near one in two years. I felt like a reformed smoker discussing the taste of cigarettes.

  “They got star power on the horse end, too. The broke-down racehorse is gonna be played by Lucky Strike hisself—you remember, that big bay that was on the way to a triple crown a couple years ago until he snapped his leg? Willie bought into the stallion syndicate on that horse, big time. Got him cheap, but it turns out they can’t get hardly anything bred with him. Not enough huevos in the burrito, so to speak.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Growing up in the ranching business, you think nothing of discussing reproduction and who’s capable of it. This is acceptable dinner conversation.

  “The Lucky Strike syndicate owners are hopin’ that getting him on camera in a western-type setting will help make him popular with quarter horse breeders. Thoroughbred registry, of course, they’ll only allow live breedin’, but with the quarter horse registry, they can do it in a lab. It could be a whole new market for a horse like Lucky Strike.”

  Hmmm … my father has bought syndication shares in a very expensive reproductively challenged racehorse. He’s calling to see if I want to buy in, too. “Seems like the financial potential there would be limited.” Not to rain on your parade, or anything.

  “Lucky Strike’s gonna be a bigger star than that Arab horse that played the black stallion, what with that Justin … uhhh … Justin … Shay playin’ the horseman, the sky’s the limit, I guar-own-tee.”

  “So, they’re going to combine an actor who’s not really a horse trainer with a five-year-old racehorse stallion and try to make a movie? That doesn’t seem very wise.”

  “Oh sure. Sure.” Dad swished off my comment like a pesky gnat. “Amazin’ thing is, they’re gonna film the movie right here in Daily. After that Justin fella was here with Amber last April, he bought the old Barlinger ranch. He says he wants to film the movie there.”

  “In Daily?” I imagined my little hometown, which was only now recovering from the excitement of Amber Anderson’s big second-place Megastar finish, caught up in another dose of glitz. Suddenly, I was glad I lived two states away.

  “Sure ’nuf.”

  “At the Barlinger ranch? That place is a wreck. It’s been abandoned for years.” Back when I was in high school, we held spook houses at the Barlinger ranch. The sprawling limestone homestead had been trapped in probate for as long as anyone could remember.

  “Wooh-wee, not anymore.” Dad whistled appreciatively. “They got all kinds of crews out there workin’. You oughta see it. Amber and that Justin fella are gonna turn the ranch into some kind of camp for foster kids, eventually. But right now, they’re gonna film the movie there. A’course, first they show the bigwig directors and movie-mogul types the project—sell ’em on it, so to speak, then the movie gets made. We gotta take a few days to get the horse calm and bring ol’ Justin up to speed on lookin’ like a horse whisperer.”

  In a few days? Good luck. “Sounds interesting. Are you going to help Willie with that?”

  Dad paused, and my attention drifted to the window, where a student was loading her suitcases into her car and hugging her boyfriend good-bye in the parking lot. I checked my watch. Time to get back to work if I was going to have the grades in before I went home. I was really looking forward to taking Friday off, rather than coming in to check leftover exams.

  “Well, Puggy, you know I’m not any good at that kinda thing,” Dad said. “I’m just an old cowhand. I only know how to break a horse one way.” He held an extended pause. I didn’t notice at first, because I was watching the girl on the sidewalk cling to her boyfriend like she couldn’t bear to let go. I hoped she was smart enough not to elope, leave school, and ride off into the sunset on the back of his rodeo pony.

  For a moment, I saw Danny and myself all those years ago, standing on a sidewalk at Texas A&M. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s just do it … take a year and travel hard, hit all the big rodeos. Grad school’s not going anywhere. … ”

  “I was thinking you could come do it.” Dad’s voice seemed far away at first.

  “What … Dad. I got distracted. What did you say?”

  “I thought you could come here and help teach this Justin … uhhh … Justin … what’s ’iz name to work with the horse.”

  “Huh?” was the only answer I could come up with.

  Dad huffed impatiently. He’d soft-pedaled as long as he could. Now he was ready to put this mule in the chute. “You know, come down here, help out with the project. There’s never been anyone could work a horse like you could, Puggy. Everybody knows it wasn’t Danny who trained Mo and Blue. It was you. All Danny could do was throw a rope and tie a calf. Only reason he made it as far as he did was because you trained the horses for him. Surely you can help this Justin fella get on with Lucky Strike.”

  The instant he said Mo and Blue and come down here, an invisible fist seized my lungs and squeezed tight. I couldn’t breathe. The room seemed airless. Training Mo and Blue was the greatest regret of my life, because of what it led to. “Dad I … I can’t,
I … have tests to grade.” The words were wooden, robotic.

  “You just said you had a long weekend startin’. This’ll only take a few days.”

  “I have to log the scores … for minimester finals.”

  “Bring that stuff along. You can do paperwork anyplace, right? You can stay down at Aunt Netta’s hotel if you don’t want to bunk out at the ranch with Willie, Mimi, and me. Come on. Folks around here think you’ve gone and moved to Timbuktu.”

  “Dad, I can’t just drop everything and run off to Daily. I’m sorry.” A rising tide of nervousness mingled with guilt and made the words sound harsh. I closed my eyes, thinking, Calm down, calm down. He can’t force you to do anything …

  Dad’s voice was gentle. “It’ll be good for ya, Puggy. Been an awful long time since you seen the hometown. You won’t hardly recognize it. Road’s been repaved and we got souvenir shops with Amber Anderson T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and CDs.”

  “I can’t come, Dad.” That much was true. I can’t. Perspiration beaded on my forehead, and I mopped it away, focused on my reflection in the window. The woman there was pale, frightened, her eyes, green in this light, hiding behind a mop of dark curls that, by this time in the morning, needed a barrette. She looked tired, afraid, worried, older than thirty-one.

  Dad sighed. I pictured him stroking his long gray mustache, analyzing the situation.

  Pressing a hand over my stomach, I gulped in a breath, let it out, took in another, quelling the fear-induced adrenaline. You’re having a panic attack. Stop it. Right now. Calm down. You’re a grown woman. He can’t make you do anything.

  “Lauren Lee.” When my father took that tone with me, I felt ten years old. “You can’t spend the rest of your natural life hidin’ from the past. You can’t. It’s been over two years. Nobody blames you for what happened. We all just want you to come home.”

  We all just want you to come home. … I gripped the side of the desk. “I’m sorry, I just … ”

  “You gotta face this thing, baby girl. It’s time.”

  I deflated into a chair with my head in my hand. A curtain of hair fell across my face, catching the light from the window and turning a soft coffee color. “I know, Dad.” What had gone unsaid between us for so long was finally out in the open. “I’ll work toward it, I promise. But not right now. Not this way.”

  “Why not? Why not now? This movie business’ll be a good distraction—help keep yer mind off … things.”

  Things … what a strange way to put it.

  “Come on, puddin’-pie. Pack up your suitcase and get on the road home.”

  Now he was using childhood endearments to try to talk me into it. I’d become so pathetic my father was cooing to me at thirty-one years old. “No, Dad. No. All right? I’m not interested in helping some neophyte actor—who, by the way, is known for having a lousy attitude—play cowboy with a horse that’s also known for having a bad attitude. I heard Lucky Strike almost killed one vet, and he was so prone to kicking the stall, they had to reset his leg a dozen times.”

  Dad clicked his tongue—a gesture of regret, of finally hitting the brass tacks. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, but Willie’s got lung cancer. He don’t want people to know. He hasn’t even told his girlfriend, Mimi, because as soon as he does, she’ll hit the road. She’s thirty-six and she wants to be an actress. She ain’t gonna stay around for some old man with lung cancer, even if he does have a ponytail and a twelve-hundred-dollar cowboy hat. Willie’s son from his second marriage died a few years back in a motorcycle accident. He don’t have anyone else.”

  “I’m sorry … ” A kernel of sympathy sprouted in my chest, and I pictured Willie Wardlaw, the once-strapping movie studio wrangler, who in my memory still stood laughing on a backlot with my father, now washed up, aging, with a few bad marriages, a superficial girlfriend, lung cancer, and a son who’d passed away prematurely. I thought of the times that checks from Willie’s studio had bought extra Christmas presents, helped pay the bills at our ranch, or financed a new truck or tractor. I remembered Friday nights, curled up on the couch between Kemp and Dad, watching The Texan on TV, pointing out Willie working as an extra in the background—a tall man on a tall horse.

  This wasn’t a fitting way for a childhood icon to end up.

  Another part of me, my self-defense mechanism, said, For heaven’s sake, don’t go sappy. You barely know this man. Dad hasn’t seen him in years. Now suddenly everyone’s supposed to drop everything? “Dad, I don’t see what I can—”

  “This movie deal’s gotta work with Lucky Strike, Puggy. Willie’s got everything tied up in the syndicate on that horse, and he’s got some partners turning impatient.” Dad’s tone was low and somber, laced with a weary disappointment. Disappointment in me. In my weakness. In my selfishness. In my lack of willingness to do for him what he had done for me two years ago. Drop everything, give all. “I need you here, Puggy. I got money tied up in this thing, too.”

  “What money? What are you talking about?”

  His hesitation indicated that I wasn’t going to like his answer. “I took out a loan to help Willie. I put the shop building and the ranch up against it.”

  My mind went blank. “You did what? Dad, why would you do that for someone you haven’t seen in years?”

  “I owe a debt,” he said, as if it were that simple, as if it made sense to have mortgaged everything he owned for an old rodeo buddy. “Willie helped me out when I had to have it, Pug. It was Willie that paid for the surgery on Kemp’s arm when he got hurt pitching his junior year. Without that operation, Kemp wouldn’t have been able to play college ball. Willie never would take a dime back, until now. It’s time to repay.”

  Not this way, I thought. How dare Willie Wardlaw drag my father into his problems. My father had fixed cars, scrimped, and saved for years to take care of the ranch left to him by my grandparents. His shop building was part and parcel with the building that housed Aunt Donetta’s beauty shop and the Daily Hotel. The building owned by Eldridges for over a hundred years. How could my father be so foolish as to gamble it on some ill-conceived film project? He could lose everything. Aunt Donetta could lose everything. Where was Kemp while all this was happening?

  “Don’t sign anything else.” The words seemed to come from somewhere outside my body. “I’ll be in Daily tomorrow afternoon.”

  Chapter 2

  Nathaniel Heath

  There are days when it just doesn’t pay to wake up. There shouldn’t be days like that in a million-dollar house in Malibu, where the surf is as blue as liquid sapphires and the would-be actresses come out early to jog and comb the beach, getting workouts and tans on the way to their day jobs in sunless confines of upscale restaurants and stores. They see me on the deck and they slow down, their curious and slightly forlorn glances saying, Come on, notice me. Offer me my big break. If they’ve studied the star maps, they know this is Justin Shay’s beach bungalow. They’ve heard he likes girls in bikinis. He’s been known to invite them in and keep them for days—take them around town and show them all the hot spots. Sometimes they make the tabloids. Once in a while, one of them gets discovered. They probably think I’m his manager or a producer. I’m really just the last guy who can stand to hang out with him. And that’s only because we’ve got history together.

  It’s hard to turn your back on someone you’ve got twenty years of history with. Every once in a while, I swear off trying to fix Justin and tell myself that the next time he calls, I won’t answer. I won’t drop everything and come to the beach house, or the LA compound, or the Moroccan desert, or wherever he is. He can crash and burn without me—paint the town, live the good life while I head for the mountains, promising myself that the next thing I create won’t be a Shay special. No more straight-from-the-can action flicks. I’ll write something meaningful—the next On Golden Pond or To Kill a Mockingbird.

  I sit in a rented cabin in Tahoe, Mammoth Lakes, Truckee, or some other quiet place, staring at the
computer screen as it goes into snooze, framing the reflection of the guy with the shaggy brown hair and unshaven writer chin against fathomless darkness, which seems appropriate. The guy in the screen waits, blinking bleary eyes that disappear into the fog, to take on its color, turn from brown to black and surrender. The words won’t come. Finally Justin shows up with a hot new car and a screenplay he needs me to work over so that it fits him—sometime before next week. I take it on and tell myself, I’m a guy who writes movies no one will remember next year. I’m a script doctor. There are worse things to be in life. At least the money’s good.

  But no matter what you tell yourself when you’re hanging out in Shay-ville, it usually feels like the best thing might be to stay in bed and never get up. If you rise and start the day—at noon, or whenever The Shay decides to roll out—you can pretty much figure the hours ahead will be weirdness, piled on insanity, stuck together with an act of pure stupidity or two. Sprinkled through all of it will be lots of hooch, weed, and girls in tight clothes.

  Eventually, sometime before the age of thirty-eight, that stuff gets old. You get … tired somewhere down deep inside. You start thinking, There must be more to human existence than this. …

  But old habits die hard. One cryptic Shay phone call, and there I was, standing on the deck of the Malibu house, taking in the ocean view, and waiting for The Shay to roll out of bed. I was probably up about three hours too early. He’d buzzed in last night on a late flight from somewhere, long after I’d driven down from the cabin in Mammoth Lakes and sacked out in one of the guest rooms.

  There was a blonde wandering around inside this morning. As usual. In a minute or two, she’d come out and ask why there was no food in the house. Unless she wanted beer, wine, or Weller and water for breakfast, she’d be out of luck. I’d offer to drive her to the Coffee Bean. She probably didn’t have a car here. On the way, she’d try to figure out if I was anyone who could do her any good, in terms of getting work in the industry.