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Nop's Hope

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The dog was better built for misery than the woman was. When the icy rain smacked his back, it clung briefly to the guard hairs before sliding off, and his downy undercoat kept him snug. In this low light, he could see better than she could and didn't misstep or stumble so often. When finally a pickup did come hurtling down the blacktop and she leaned out, pleading with her thumb, the dog narrowed his eyes against the headlights, and as it sluiced by, the empty stock trailer clattering behind, the dog simply turned his head. Clutching her ruined nylon jacket together, hanging over the asphalt, the woman caught the worst of the trailer's chilled rooster tail.

"Shoot," she said.

Three hundred yards down the road, the taillights were sucked up in the mist like they never had been.

Two trucks in two hours. The dog pushed his nose into the soft place behind the woman's knee, smelled her recent history: soured metallic sweat, adrenaline lees (which smelled like an electrical fire), and the faint hint of how her skin had smelled yesterday morning when she'd last showered. The dog smelled the cloak of her exhaustion. He made a noise in the back of his throat.

"Hush, Hope. It won't be so long until daylight."

In the daylight, the ranch land between Del Rio, Texas, and Meridian rolls softly in regular waves like a new furrowed cotton field. There aren't any houses beside Texas Farm Road 174, though every few miles ranch gates introduce the great acreages behind them. In a kinder time, before Dallas real estate speculators started gambling with hill country properties, these ranches were inhabited, each with its own dependencies, bunk-house and big house, but during the last oil boom, the ranches were put into play. In good times these ranches turned over quick as they could be vacated and a new wooden brand hung over the gate. When the boom collapsed, the Dallas boys were stuck with land they'd bought for $750 an acre and couldn't sell for $500. Some bailed out, took what they could, depressed the prices further. Those who could, hunkered down, took their licking, and leased their land to working stockmen for whatever they could get for it—often no more than five dollars per acre, per year.

From Texas 174 on a clear starry night, you can see a few sodium lights out there somewhere, guarding empty workshops and ranch houses. On a rainy night in January, you can only see the dark pavement, the sandy shoulder, the dead coyote smashed into the ditch, his broken jaws, the water backed up behind his matted gray body.

The dog was fastidious, shook his paws clear of the muddy water. His hackles settled.

"Come away from that, Hope," the woman said, wearily. "He's nobody's problem now."

Up the road a piece, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Blanchard (age twenty-four) was thinking that life could be pretty funny sometimes. When his car passed Del Rio's "fly-in" bank, the deputy noted this injustice: that some fellows get to traipse around the country in Lear jets while other fellows go off to jail.

The windshield wipers worked at the rain, which would drizzle for five or ten minutes before pouring down. He'd use his defrosters to clear his windows and then it'd get too hot in the car, so he'd turn them off again. When WYGO "The Voice of Bosque County" played George Strait singing about country honeymoons, the deputy turned the radio off.

If there'd been anybody else to take Billy Lee to Dallas, Dwight surely wouldn't have gone but most everybody, from Sheriff on down, was the Stock Show.

He worked at the lid of his coffee cup until he had a slot open so he wouldn't dribble on his shirt, which he was hoping to wear tomorrow, having put it on fresh this evening at ten o'clock when it got to be inevitable who'd take Billy Lee to Dallas. Him and Billy Lee had been a year apart in high school and both played for the Bosque County Bandits. Dwight had been a guard on account of how he couldn't pass or catch very well. Billy Lee had played end. He always had been small and quick.

Dwight wondered how come if Billy was so quick he got caught all the time. Some of the other bad guys in Bosque County went on stealing for years and years and never did get caught, but seemed like Billy Lee, every time he came out of a convenience store waving a bag full of cash receipts there'd be a police car just pulled up for a six of Lone Star before going off duty. Billy Lee took it right, give him credit, always dropped his pistol like it was hot and grabbed for the air, never tried to shoot it out or run or anything. And now he was a habitual offender and his old teammate had put his papers in a brown plastic folder and cuffed Billy Lee and drove him to Dallas because his court day was Monday and he likely would be sent away to Huntsville Penetentiary. Thinking how his and Billy Lee's lives had diverged, reflecting on the lucky choices he had made—Dwight was past the old pickup before he properly saw it. He drove a half mile farther before he turned around.

Hood up, flashers blinking weakly, Virginia plates, camper top, nobody up front, rounded bubbly fenders, Dodge, '67 or '68? No bright orange sticker on the door, the highway patrol hadn't found it yet. The rain gusted up and Dwight waited in his car until the computer checked it out.

Wrapped in his yellow rain slicker he aimed his light into the camper part. Sleeping bag rolled up, inflatable mat, a Coleman stove, couple suitcases, half gone loaf of bread. Nothing up front but a blanket folded neatly on the passenger side and some kind of curved stick, like a stockman's cane in the rifle rack. The engine compartment smelled like burnt oil and Dwight wrinkled his nose. He attached the abandoned vehicle sticker and peeled off his slicker before he got in the car. He'd been on duty since eight o'clock last night, and when he got home he was going to have breakfast with Sally Anne before she went off to work at the school board. "Ships that pass in the night," was how Sally put it.

When he turned the radio on again, it was a commercial for Johnson's Farm Supply. "If you've got those frozen water pipe blues," the announcer said, "we've got the torches and heat tapes to cure them."

WYGO swung into a bluegrass fiddle tune, upbeat and sorrowful, and Dwight drove right by the Mexican and the dog, thinking that it was odd to see a Mexican walking a dog, wondering if it was something special about Mexican culture that they didn't take their dogs with them like white people did. Plenty of dogs around their houses, usually the skinny kind, but, to be fair (Dwight thought), he supposed some of the rich Mexicans in Dallas had dogs just as fancy as any white person did.

"God damn it to hell," Dwight said, and backed and sawed before he got himself turned around heading back the way he came. The way the Mexican had his thumb out, like it was real important Dwight stopped—that's what got him.

Because he was a cop and it wasn't entirely unknown for a hitchhiker to pull a gun out of his pocket and dispatch the helpful cop, he stopped well short of the Mexican and kept his high beams on him. Her? Awful long black hair for a him. And she walked like a her, clutched her jacket like a her. Dwight flicked his low beams and got out of the car. "Mornin' ma'am, you alright?"

She didn't say anything just kept coming and that dog walking right beside her, keeping his eyes on Dwight and the dog's eyes shining blood red in the headlights. Dwight dropped his hand to his holster and unsnapped the hammer strap. "I sure hope that dog is friendly."

The woman's black cowboy hat was so sodden it drooped over her face, her red and black nylon jacket was molded to her shoulders like slick skin. "You the police?"

"Yes, ma'am. Bosque County sheriff's department."

When she stopped, the dog stopped too. "I thought I could take care of myself. A woman hasn't much chance against two of them."

"Yes, ma'am. You're going to catch your death standing out there, why don't you come in the car and I'll put the heater on." When he opened the door, he added, "Not the dog."

Young Dwight Blanchard spent most of his working days in his Mustang patrol car. Dwight kept a pine tree air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, his own rattan seat pad and a trash receptacle he emptied faithfully after each shift.

"Ma'am, we can tie him to a fence and I'll take you into Meridian and we'll send the animal control officer for him when it gets light."

But the woman started off down the highway toward Meridian, just twenty miles away. Dwight jerked the Mustang into Drive and rolled up alongside the woman. "Ma'am, I got to take you in to the courthouse if you want to make a complaint, and I try to keep this car clean and, you're wet enough already, and I don't want no dirty dog in here messin' it up."

Finally, he slewed the car onto the shoulder blocking her. "Alright," he said. "But the dog gets in back."

He had to step out of the car because the prisoner compartment didn't open from the inside and the rain decided to give it a real burst and Dwight'd left his rain slicker inside.

The dog jumped right in the back, scooting onto the floorboards on the far side. Before Dwight could protest, the woman slipped in too, slippery as a sack of wet laundry.

Though the rain was slinging itself at his back and working right through his uniform shirt Dwight said, politely, "Ma'am it'd be warmer for you up front where the heater is." She scooted over nearer the dog. "Yes, ma'am," Dwight sighed and got back behind the wheel. She and the dog were sopping and he turned on the defroster as moisture smudges crawled across the windshield. He radioed the courthouse and said he was coming in with a woman victim, female Caucasian, black-haired, forty or fifty. "What's your name, ma'am?"

"Penny Burkeholder. He's Hope."

He kept the defrost going, hotter than he liked, because cold wafted out of the prisoner's compartment like an open freezer on an August day.

She coughed, coughed again, and he hoped she didn't have anything he'd catch. He smelled wet cloth, wet dog.

"What happened with your truck? Did it seize up or quit kind of gradual?"

Dwight Blanchard couldn't have fixed a car if his life depended on it. The one time he decided, as an economy measure, to change his oil he'd cross-threaded the oil plug and Roy Mack had had to helicoil the threads, but like most male Americans, Dwight had a great many opinions about motors. Hell, might as well not know anything about the Dallas Cowboys or Houston Oilers.

"Oil pump," she said. "It has to be the oil pump."

Meridian is the county seat of Bosque County and has been since the county was formed. The courthouse is a blocky stone edifice. Small old-timey Texas buildings line courthouse square where lawyers and realtors have their offices. Since the boom fizzled, they'd been coming in late and taking long coffee breaks.

The rain had quit. In the eastern horizon a faint line promised that light was on its way soon.

"Here we are," Dwight said.

The woman shivered violently when a gust of knee-high wind touched her wet clothes, and the dog looked up at her. The dog worried he'd need to take over soon. When the time came the woman couldn't make decisions, the dog'd need to make them, and since he was a young dog he didn't know what those decisions might be. She stumbled on the bottom step and the dog made a sound in the back of his throat.

"Hush, Hope,"

Julio Del Flores was mopping up the communications center, sloshing steaming water out of a galvanized bucket and pushing it around with a filthy gray-black mop. Old Julio took the calls on the night shift, tended the jail, passed on messages, and cleaned up at the end of his shift. For his work he received a paycheck not quite half what Dwight, the junior deputy received, but it was good money (the Sheriff once remarked) for a Mexican.

The woman sat on the long scarred bench outside the partition, and Julio rang out his mop and vanished into the closet where they kept the emergency relief supplies, and brought a blanket and draped it over the woman's shoulders. "Thank you," she said through chattering teeth.

The dog shook himself, spattering dirty specks all over the wainscoting, and Julio raised one eyebrow. You may wish to say that an eyebrow cannot sigh, but Julio Del Flores's eyebrow did.

"Hope, lie down." With a clatter of bones the dog laid down.

In the light the woman was much younger than the deputy had thought, no more than thirty. And with her lanky black hair framing her pale face she was kind of pretty.

"Now, Mz. Burkeholder, if I could see some identification please?"

Her wallet was wet, the card folder damp and opaque and he wiped her driver's license on his knee. "Miss, it says your name is Penny Hilyer, is that correct? Ma'am?"

"I would give my life to be Penny Hilyer again," she said. She squeezed her eyes tight shut. "I am Penny Burkeholder. That's my maiden name."

"Yes, ma'am. I can take your statement or you can give it to another, uh, female."

"I don't need to make a report," the woman said. Clutching the edge of the blanket, her fingers were painfully white. "They didn't get me, though they surely tried. I never provoked 'em, I just wanted a ride. When Hope came through that window, I never saw two grown men so scared. 'Course they weren't real cowboys, just low-life show jocks. I'm cold. Could you send someone after my clothes? The camper's not locked. The lock's broke."

"Yes, ma'am. Another deputy will take care of that."

She looked up at him, studying his face. "I wouldn't have got in with 'em at all, except I saw them with Dickerson. That was at the stock show, you know. I'm not being real helpful, am I? Nothing happened. They tore my shirt and they scared heck out of me but everything turned out okay. It was creepy, that's all."

It was creepy riding down the road in their truck with the tall one silent, nipping on a pint, and the other one, the one with the acne scarred face, talking about the Brangus-cross cow which he'd bought cheap and sold to somebody didn't know better. Talking about the herd he was going to start as soon as he had money saved up. "Montana, that's God's Country out there, Little Lady."

"How far you say it was to the all-night mechanic?"

She wouldn't have got in their truck at all but she remembered them from the Stock Show, Friday night hanging around with the other show jocks after the animals were fitted, and the trimming stands were empty, and the wash racks drying, and the radios playing in the aisles between the pens and a few people wrapped up in quilts, snoozing in empty pens, and some of the younger jocks brought in beer and talked and drank and played cards. She'd seen the acne-faced one talking to Dickerson. Dickerson used to show Angus cattle, but he was showing Chianina these days.

When her truck's oil pressure dropped right off the gauge, Penny wasn't an hour out of Fort Worth, and she switched off and coasted onto the shoulder, her headlights going yellow and dim. She'd been feeling pretty good about her new job and Hope's third place at the sheepdog trial. The second she opened the hood, she could smell the hot oil.

Her bad luck that those two stopped. She asked could they send a mechanic back from the next twenty-four hour gas station and the tall one, Marvin, said, "I'm a stranger in this part of Texas, ma'am. Maybe you should come with us and ride back with the mechanic," and she thought it was okay because she'd seen them with Dickerson. She jumped Hope into the back of their pickup where she could keep an eye on him through the sliding window. A few drops of rain hit the roof.

"I seen that dog at the show," the tall one said. "I saw you and him loading cattle. What you get for a dog like that?"

"Hope's not for sale. He isn't fully trained yet."

Then the acne-scarred one told her how he'd had a dog in Montana who'd fetch any cow he wanted out of the herd. "Just tell Shep that damned cow's name, and he'd be off like a shot."

The tall one drank from his pint and held it out to Penny.

"No thanks."

"Ain't no dog can do that, P.T." the tall one said. "They ain't so smart as that."

"You tell Marvin about those dogs, Little Lady. And don't you make no liar out of me." P.T. began to stroke Penny's leg.

"Hey," she said. "Cut that out."

"Oh, there's no harm in it," he said. "I ain't mean like Ol' Marvin."

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Excerpted from Nop's Hope by Donald McCaig. Copyright © 1994 Donald McCaig. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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