Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [81]
“You make fun, but you don’t know. Sheep ranching needs all the help it can get. You’re right on the edge of busted all the time.”
“What don’t I know? You start down that mountainside and you’ll come to the edge of a field, OK? From that point on, you can’t walk right or left without stepping on some family that’s lost its farm to bad luck, bad weather, chestnut blight, change, economics, the antitobacco lobby. You name it, there’s some farmer I know who got eaten by it. But they’re not bitter. They go to work at Toyota and forget about it.”
“They don’t forget about it,” said Eddie Bondo. “They just don’t have an enemy they can look at through a rifle sight.”
She looked at him for a long time. Thought of her father, drinking to diffuse his grief in the last year before they sold out. If he’d had something to shoot at, what would he have done?
“I can’t say you’re right,” she said finally. “You don’t know that.”
“If there’s coyotes moving into this country now, they’ll get shot at.”
“I know that. I think about it all the time.”
“So they’re here. You know where they are.”
She returned his clear-eyed gaze. “Is that why you’re hanging around me? You’re trying to get information?”
His green eyes went dark, a turmoil under the surface briefly revealed. “If that’s what you think, I’ll get my boots on and leave right now.”
“I don’t know if it’s what I think. I’ve never known what to think since the first day you showed up here. But if that’s what you’re after, you should go.”
“If that were what I was after, I’d be a fool. I know there’s coyotes denned up around here someplace where I can’t get a bead on them, and not for love nor money are you going to give me a clue.”
“That’s the story.”
“Deanna, don’t you think I know that?”
“If I trusted you I would show you where they are, but I don’t. Not in that way, not that kind of trust.”
“You already told me that. The first day up there on the mountain when I found you tracking that bobcat. You told me what the deal was. I accepted.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“Having breakfast in bed,” he replied. “Trying to catch a moth without harming one scale on its fuzzy little head.”
She examined his beautiful face and the exquisite planes of his body, wishing she could look inside him to see what mixture of love and anger and deception resided there, in what proportions. “How old are you?” she asked him.
He seemed surprised. “Twenty-eight. Why? How old are you?”
She hesitated, surprised at herself. Sat forward and drew the covers close around her. It was the first time in her life she’d felt uneasy owning her age. Nearly twenty years older than this man—it made no sense.
“I don’t want to say.”
“Damn, girl, get over that. Look at you. It takes more than thirty years to tune an engine to run like that.”
“Way more than thirty,” she said. “More than forty.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
She thought she saw a flicker of surprise, but he covered well. “So, you’re ninety-seven. You’re my grandma. Come here, Granny, I want to rub the rheumatism out of your bones.” As he pulled her down close to him the fire cracked again, flaring brilliant orange in the stove’s small, round window. She could see the flame reflected in his eyes.
“I want to tell you something,” she said, holding his stare. “You’re a good tracker, but I’m a better one. If you find any coyote pups around here and kill them, I’ll put a bullet in your leg. Accidentally.”
“That true?”
She knew it wasn’t, but maybe he didn’t. “Absolutely. I might even follow you a ways to do it, if I had to. That’s the kind of accident I’m talking about.”
“A leg. Not between my eyes?”
“No.”
He smiled and rolled away from her onto his back, clasping his hands behind