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The only thing I needed to worry about was cleaning out the stable.
* * *
A few hours later, I’d worked up a good sweat, but the stable was looking and smelling a lot better. I chuckled when I thought about my jobs.
Both construction and working a ranch involved a lot of hard work and nasty smells. It was only a matter of getting used to them, and after a while, you didn’t even notice all that much.
Even though it’d been a while since I worked on the ranch, it felt like it’d only been a few weeks. I guess that kind of thing stayed with a man, or maybe it had stayed with me for other reasons. I didn’t know.
I wiped some sweat from my brow and headed over to a water spigot to get a drink to soothe my parched throat. Good thing about a ranch was, no one was going to look at you funny for drinking straight from a spigot.
Carl was close by, inspecting another horse. He walked over to me.
“You looking to trade Perri in for a horse now?”
He laughed. “What are you even talking about?”
I gestured to the horse. “You’ve been all over the horses today. Checking them a lot more than I’m guessing you normally do, unless things have really changed around here.”
He gave a big grin. “I’ve got a buyer coming in today to look at them. Good price.”
“Oh, that’s cool.”
“Yeah. This has been coming for a while.”
I glanced over at the palomino he’d been checking out before. It was a damn fine animal and looked healthy with a good coat. It’d fetch a nice price. I wondered if Carl found it easier to do horse breeding than dealing with cattle.
Carl glanced over his shoulder before looking back over at me. “I had a question for you, Alex.”
I eyed him and nodded slowly. “Is this about what you keep trying to ask me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You obviously have something on your mind, but you keep stopping before you say anything.” I shrugged.
He frowned and looked to the side for a moment before shaking his head. “No, I don’t … well, anyway, why are you working at the ranch?”
“You know why. I told you.” I stared at him and shrugged again. I didn’t understand where any of this was coming from.
He shook his head. “I understand all that about getting your head on straight, but what I don’t get is why you need to work a job. You have enough money from that accident settlement to take a year or two off. Why not buy a nice little house on the outskirts of town and relax? Watch some NASCAR. Drink some beer.”
I regretted ever telling him about the settlement. I’d not even been interested in that kind of thing, but then lawyers for the family of the man killed showed up, and they wanted to represent me as well. The next thing I knew, I had a huge amount of money sitting in my bank account in addition to my already healthy savings.
All the money didn’t help, though. It didn’t stop my nightmares. It didn’t turn back the clock.
What was it that the headshrinker had said? It didn’t bring me closure.
“I can’t sit around, Carl,” I said. “That won’t clear my head. I
need to do something, keep busy. This is the best way I know how. It’s good work I understand that doesn’t remind me of construction in the city.”
He held up a hand. “Now don’t get me wrong. Like I said, I’m glad to have you here, but I was curious. I only want to help you, bro.”
“What would you do if you had the money? Would you sit around on your ass drinking and watching NASCAR?”
Carl furrowed his brow. “No, I guess I wouldn’t.”
“Then you understand, right? We’re men. We can’t putter around and do nothing. That isn’t our nature. That’s not what God wants from us.”
