By the time I reached the heavy piled-stone corner posts that marked the boundary of the old Barlinger ranch, now the Anderson-Shay project, I felt good. The day was bright, the sky an endless blue that seemed filled with possibilities. On the horizon, the hills basked in the uneven light of sun and shadow, dotted with live oak groves and sc.r.a.ppy cedars, feathery mesquite trees and squatty thickets of the p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus that gave shelter to jackrabbits and roadrunners and, as my father had always warned us, rattlesnakes.

Ahead, a fencing crew was repairing the tumbledown gateway, the laborers cleaning old mortar from the limestone blocks and putting them back together like giant puzzle pieces, while a crew foreman ran a string from one guidepost to the next and squinted down the line, checking for plumb. I recognized the crew boss. Pearly Parsons had been building fences for as long as I could remember. When he finished here, this gateway would be ready to go another hundred years, and the fence would be as straight as an arrow, as tight as a fiddle string. The posts would be so even you could use them to count the seconds as you drove past.

My father admired Pearly, even though Pearly was rumored to have only made it through the sixth grade in school and did most of his fencing math by a system no one understood. My father said that if Pearly wanted a post hole four feet deep, and he ran into a rock at three feet six inches, he didn't cut off the post, he broke up the rock. More than once, when people made jokes about Pearly's hand-written advertis.e.m.e.nts on the bulletin board at the cafe, my father confronted them. He said that any man who thought less of Pearly because of his lack of education had only to look at one of the fences Pearly built. Those fences would be there long after the achievements of most men had faded away.

Pearly himself thumbed his nose at the educational issues. The cab of his flatbed truck and his ads at the cafe always read: Pearly Parsons, PHD Post Hole Digger Fencing, welding, post drilling The harder the ground, the bigger the shovel Every fence true and straight Fair prices Nothing wasted It was a good motto for life, my father said. When we complained that a school a.s.signment was too hard, whined that we were being picked on, or said we couldn't do something, Dad quoted Pearly Parsons. The harder the ground, the bigger the shovel. ...

I stuck my hand out the window and waved at Pearly as I turned into the driveway. Pearly tipped his hat without taking his eye off the string.

Ahead, the old Barlinger headquarters looked more like a construction site than a ranch. The cavernous limestone home that had been the site of haunted houses, teenage parties, and more double-dog dares than I could count was now surrounded by scaffolding. A painting crew was sc.r.a.ping window frames and eaves as a workman in white coveralls carried new panes of gla.s.s to the wide double doors. A drilling truck was at work on the well, and high atop the third-story roof, a chimney sweep in a black stovepipe hat stood against the sky, slowly moving his brush three stories up and down.

As I drove closer, I could see that the barn and corrals had also been cleaned and repaired, and behind the old orchard, areas had been leveled for new construction. The extent of the work was awe-inspiring.

Pa.s.sing by the house, I considered the almost frenzied effort to reclaim what the gra.s.s, and the mustang grapevine, and the mesquite thickets had all but absorbed into the land. The money and sense of purpose involved here were staggering. For years, everyone in Daily had a.s.sumed that the remnants of the once-grand Barlinger ranch would remain in financial limbo until finally falling beneath the gra.s.s and the brush and disappearing altogether.

My father had once told Kemp and me that only a miracle could bring the place back to life, but apparently the miracle had arrived. Who could have predicted that the little girl from the trailer house down the road would win a TV talent contest, make big-money friends, and come back to reclaim the homestead that had been left for dead?

Drifting through the barnyard, I looked for my father's truck or signs of Nate and Justin Shay. There seemed to be n.o.body around but the work crews. Apparently, my father and Willie hadn't made it there yet. There was no telling where Nate and Justin Shay had ended up. Maybe they were lost somewhere in the backcountry. Once you were a mile or two out of town, all the roads looked the same and only half of them were marked.

Movement by the barn caught my eye. I parked the car and climbed out, then walked around the corner. A black truck with monster tires and a ridiculous airbrushed paint job touting The Horseman was parked near the corral gate. I remembered it vaguely from my not-quite dream last night. Beside the truck, Nate and Amber Anderson stood shading their eyes, looking at something in the corral. Squinting into the sun to see what was happening, I moved closer. The corral gate was open, and in the pasture beyond, several horses bolted wildly from fence to fence, cavorting and kicking up their heels. From the look of things, they'd just been let out the gate by Justin Shay, who stood seeming somewhat bemused in his K-Mart cowboy getup.

I had a bad feeling one of the horses was Lucky Strike. He was running up and down the far fence alone, gliding over the ground on the long, graceful strides of a Thoroughbred, covering the rough terrain at a blinding pace, completely oblivious to rocks, mesquite bushes, jackrabbit holes. No doubt he'd never seen a barbed wire fence, either. An alarm bell rang in my chest as he skidded to a halt just before crashing into the corner, then did a ninety-degree rollback and dashed up the side fence whinnying and snorting, head high and nostrils flared. The other horses caught up to him finally, and he wheeled and kicked, then started running again.

Justin Shay stepped away from the gate, moving into position to head off Lucky Strike when he turned the next corner.

"Hey, don't ... get back!" I hollered, but my voice was lost in the noise.

Amber screamed and covered her mouth as Lucky Strike barreled toward Justin, who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that a cowboy hat waved in the air would stop a twelve-hundred-pound racehorse, running wild after having been turned loose in a pasture, probably for the first time in his life.

"Justin, watch out!" Nate's warning carried into the field. Scaling the fence in a move worthy of an Olympic athlete, he ran across the round pen with Amber and me only a few paces behind. Lucky Strike saw us coming and shied away at the last minute, missed Justin, and left him in a cloud of dust next to the fallen cowboy hat. Spitting out a string of profanities, Justin jumped up and down on the hat, picked it up, and ring-tossed it into a tree, then cussed when it hung on a branch and wouldn't fall back into his hands. He looked around for something to throw at it.

"Leave it," I said. "You'll stir the horses up even more."

Ramming his hands onto his tightly packed abs, he glared at me. "This is idiotic!" he roared, stabbing a finger into the air. "That horse isn't trained. He attacked me in the corral, and then when I ran out the gate, he nearly mowed me over."

"You shouldn'ta opened the gate," Amber muttered. Being a country girl, she probably knew that if a very large animal wants to get out badly enough, it's not going to care whether one itty-bitty human is standing in the way.

Justin opened his mouth and raised a finger to defend his position, then gave me a bewildered look and said, "I just came out here to show Amber and Nate the horses." He flailed a hand impatiently in the direction of the gate. "When Willie was here yesterday, he just opened some gates and shook a bucket, and they came in."

"I don't imagine Lucky Strike was in the round pen at the time." Judging from his current behavior, Lucky Strike wasn't the docile, come-to-the-bucket sort.

"Well ... no he wasn't in the corral yesterday." The faraway image of Lucky Strike running wild reflected off Justin's mirrored gla.s.ses. "But I didn't know he was going to, like, mow me over. I told him to back off."

Behind me, Nate snorted. "He's not a dog, Shayman."

Justin jerked upright, his chin dimple disappearing into the made-for-Hollywood bandanna he'd tied loosely around his neck. "You know what, Nate. You been nothin' but a pain in the rear this whole trip. You can either get on board or hit the road."

Nate threw his hands in the air and backed off a step, refusing to be baited into an argument.

"It was my fault," Amber said, stepping in as a scapegoat. "I'm sorry, Lauren. We shoulda just waited for everyone else to get here. I know better. My peepaw taught us kids not to go messin' with a horse we don't know."

"That horse is an idiot." Justin's cheeks boiled red and a sardonic puff of air burst from his mouth. "You know how much we're paying to put that animal in the movie?" He wagged a finger toward me and then toward Lucky Strike. "He needs to do what I say."

Nate turned and walked a few steps away, shaking his head as Justin ranted, "I'll call and order a new horse. I don't have time for this."

Me, either, I thought. There isn't enough time for this. It's impossible. On the heels of that realization came the memory of my father telling me that Willie Wardlaw's last dime, and my father's, were riding on this film and Lucky Strike's future. If the horse broke a leg out there, my father and Willie would be in even worse shape than before.

I took a halter and a lariat rope from the corral fence. "The first thing to do is get your costar back in the round pen before everyone else shows up." If my father and Willie Wardlaw arrived and saw their prized racehorse running loose inside a rusty barbed wire enclosure, one or both of them would probably have a coronary.

Justin considered the idea that, so far, only the four of us knew he'd let the horse escape. "Yeah, I guess so." Pulling his sungla.s.ses down, he squinted at me over the top. "How do we do that ... exactly?"

I attempted to quickly think it through. How, indeed? "You go around to the left, and I'll go around to the right, and we'll see if we can pen him in the corner by the two metal gates long enough to get a halter on him. The main thing is not to push too hard. Horses are like people-they don't like to feel trapped or pressured. You pretty much get out what you put in." It's all in the script-didn't you read it? The horseman works with animals, not against them. Negative input equals negative output. It's all very Zen.

The K-Mart cowboy pushed his gla.s.ses back into place, uncrossed his arms, and clapped his hands. "Let's go. I'm in. We'll go this way. You go that way." Without waiting for a reply or checking to see if anyone else was following, he started off across the pasture. Amber jogged a few steps and fell into step beside him. Her hands gesticulated wildly as they walked.

Nate followed me. There was the barest hint of a smile on his lips as we left the round pen behind for mission racehorse roundup. "Good job with The Shay," he complimented, giving me a wise look.

I caught myself studying him a little more intensely than I meant to. "Why do you let him talk to you that way?" As if I didn't know. Stars wouldn't be stars without the hangers-on who tolerated divalike behavior.

Nate shrugged. "He talks to everyone that way."

"He shouldn't."

"Yeah, maybe. It's Hollywood. Att.i.tude goes with the territory."

"That doesn't make it okay."

Squinting at Justin and Amber in the distance, Nate acquiesced with a noncommittal shrug, then changed the subject. "So you're not worried that when we start to crowd our friend, Lucky Strike, he might try to go over the fence or one of us?"

"I am worried about it." Hmmm ... the guy in the flip-flops and shorts knows more about equine behavior than he's letting on. "So, you have some experience with horses, I take it?"

"Nah ... not really," he answered evasively.

"Seems like it would be tough to write the script, then."

"Writing a screenplay is like riding a bicycle-you just get on and pedal-inciting incident, midpoint crisis, culminating crisis, act one, act two, act three. They're all pretty much the same."

"That must make it difficult to get inspired."

"Sometimes," he said, and there was a flash of emotion in his face that was difficult to read. His eyes, framed with thick, dark lashes, met mine very directly, and I felt the inconvenient tug of curiosity. Who is this guy and what's his story?

The contemplative look faded and he stopped to pull off a flip-flop, then hopped along on one foot while picking spear gra.s.s seeds from between his toes. "Guess I didn't dress for ranch work," he joked as he replaced the shoe.

"Where's your new cowboy suit?" I slanted a glance across the pasture toward Justin Shay, whose silver-toed boots were flashing Morse code in the sun.

"Missed the memo on that one." Nate grinned and winked, and something fluttered in my throat.

"Next time, wear boots." Next time? Did I say next time? As in, we'll all be doing this again in the future? What was wrong with me?

"I'll remember that." He grinned again, and I felt my body go hot and flush all over.

Chapter 10.

Nathaniel Heath Operation roundup looked more like the Three Stooges, plus one-two, if you factored in the horse. Lucky Strike had figured out the trick, and he was having fun with it. Every time we cornered him, he wheeled around, sized up the line of us, and bolted past Justin-practically right over the top of him. The horse was as fast as greased lightning, and apparently a fair judge of character. He knew Justin was afraid of him.

In the back of my mind I remembered my grandfather, taking me out in the pasture to help separate an ailing cow from the little herd of Guernseys he and my grandmother kept for their small dairy. "Never let them get a bluff in on you, Nate. They'll run right through you if they know you're afraid," he said as we herded the bellowing cow into the barn. "If you want to win against something that's bigger than you, you've got to have confidence and show confidence." Perhaps when he said that, he knew my mother and Doug would be coming for me soon, and I'd need that pearl of advice. At ten, I was ninety pounds of stick-armed self-confidence. A few months after we moved in with Doug, I told him if he ever laid a hand on me again, I'd go straight to school and tell everyone about it. He never hit me after that-until I got big enough to hit back. I guess by then he figured it was a fair fight.

Lucky Strike had a look in his eye I recognized-a look that said if he backed down even for a minute, something bad would happen. Despite Lauren trying to soothe him and Amber murmuring sweet nothings in her sugar-coated country drawl, the horse figured he'd be better off anywhere we weren't. We chased him around and around until he was lathered up, Amber was winded, and Justin had doubled over, trying to catch his breath.

My feet felt like slabs of raw meat, thanks to the flip-flops, but I noted with some satisfaction that even if I didn't have a personal trainer, I was in better shape than Justin. To make matters worse, a storm had started to brew on the horizon, and the black clouds billowing over the hills gave everything a new sense of immediacy.

Finally, Lauren uncoiled the rope on her shoulder. The next time we went through our routine with Lucky Strike, she made a la.s.so loop as he trotted into the corner. Three swings over her head like Roy Rogers, and it was zinging through the air. The loop sailed forth like the rim of a flying saucer, circled the horse's head as he prepared to make another escape, then dropped into place before he, or any of the rest of us, knew what was happening.

The horse panicked. Lauren tightened the rope as thunder rumbled on the horizon, and for a moment all of us stood frozen. Justin started toward the horse, and Lauren waved him off. "Don't move," she said, keeping her focus on her captive. We watched as she let him run backward until he b.u.mped into the gate. She waited patiently for him to settle there, then reeled him in with a slow tug and release on the rope, allowing the animal to come to her, rather than forcing it.

I was intrigued, impressed in a way I hadn't antic.i.p.ated-not only with the la.s.so throwing, but with the measured, patient process that came afterward. It reminded me of something, but the thought was evasive, like a picture through a foggy window. I watched the curve of Lauren's body, the slow, patient movement of her hands as she fed the rope through her fingers, then took it in, took it in, took it in, let go a little. By the time Lucky Strike was within reach, he'd lowered his head, stopped snorting, and started licking his lips contentedly. He rolled a concerned eye toward the rest of us, but seemed completely comfortable with Lauren, as if some silent agreement had been formed between them, a bond only she and the animal understood.

Lucky Strike let out a long sigh as Lauren buckled a halter around his head and started to lead him toward the corral. The dull sound of applause reverberated from across the pasture, where a group of construction workers were watching us.

"Hey, Amber, can we have an autograph?" one of them hollered, and Amber trotted ahead to oblige. I fell into step beside Justin, following Lauren and the horse.

"That was good, the way she did that," Justin mused, swiping a hand across his forehead and tossing his hair as he checked out the oncoming thunderheads. "It was like the horse whisperer in the script."

"True," I agreed. Justin was right, but there was still a misty a.s.sociation to something else in my mind, and it irritated me that I couldn't put my finger on it. What did that scene, watching Lauren work the horse closer and closer, remind me of?

Justin went on talking. "When Dane comes here on Monday, we show me doing that stuff, and we'll have him in the bag. He sees how good that'll look on film, he won't be able to say no."

"You're going to learn to do that in a little over a week?" I had a feeling skills like that took a lifetime to develop, and most people could probably work at it forever and never get it right. A big part of it was probably innate, a natural ability to understand the fears of a frightened, displaced, powerless creature, to see beyond the bl.u.s.ter, the self-defense mechanisms, and to understand-as The Horseman script poorly put it-that all communal creatures have an instinctive need to belong.

Looking ahead as Lauren led Lucky Strike through the gate into a round corral, where high pipe fences would safeguard the horse from further danger, I realized in a sudden, startling rush, why the capture scene had fascinated me. It reminded me of Mama Louise's house. Kids came in wild, defensive, hard, afraid down deep. They fought becoming part of the family because life had taught them, as it had taught Lucky Strike, that trust was to be avoided. Where relationships tended to end painfully, it was better to keep a safe distance.

From the moment a new kid came to Mama Louise's, she was there. She never laid on the pressure in a way that made you aware of it, that made you feel the need to run from it, but it was always present. A kind word, a pat on the back, a one-armed hug, a school paper taped to the refrigerator, a parent-teacher conference she showed up for, a basketball game in which you could see her waving a handmade sign with your name on it.

You'd never had a sign with your name on it before. ...

A gentle tug on the rope, a beckoning that brought you out of the dark corners into the light of your own possibilities.

Suddenly, I wanted to call her, even though I hadn't talked to her in years. I wanted to tell her again that I was sorry Justin and I had taken off with the Comet the day after graduation. I wanted to tell her it wasn't because she'd failed with us, but because she'd succeeded. Without Mama Louise, I never would have had the courage to head for California and try to become a writer in the first place.

"You know, I was thinking maybe it'd be cool to name the basketball courts after Mama Louise," Justin said, and I had the eerie sense of having my mind read by Justin, of all people. If The Shay and I were thinking in parallel, then I needed a good shrink. "Remember how she used to make all those signs and go to the games?"

A disquieting deja vu slipped over me. I'd just been thinking about the signs. "You hated it when she went to the games," I pointed out. Of all the kids I'd seen come and go through Mama Louise's, Justin was the least susceptible to her Mama magic. Justin just wanted to be left alone. A solo ent.i.ty, too cool for school and just about everything else. He wouldn't have made it through his senior year at all if Mama Louise hadn't finally started walking him in the school door and following him around to his cla.s.ses until she made her point. He could finish on his own, or he could finish with her on his tail.

He finally settled on a plan to have me complete most of his homework, which I did. The homework was easy, and I had to do my own, anyway. I figured what the heck, help a buddy out.

I never thought that twenty years later we'd be sharing the same brainwaves. Scary thought.

"I didn't really hate it when she came to the basketball games."

Justin had never admitted that before, at least not to me. Occasionally, I suspected that he might have told Stephanie things he'd never confided to anyone else. Before they split for good, Stephanie seemed to know quite a bit about our time at Mama Louise's. "I just ... didn't want to get used to that kind of stuff, you know? I figured sooner or later she'd drop me off at the mall and never come back."

I stared at Justin, dumbfounded. I'd never, ever heard him admit that anything he did, any of his life patterns, might in any way be connected to the fact that his mother had abandoned him in a video arcade on his tenth birthday. The way I overheard it, she dropped him off with two dollars in change, told him she was headed to the store to get a birthday cake, took off with his little sister in hand, and never came back. He hung around all day waiting. At closing time, someone called child protective services, and that was that. He bounced around in foster kid limbo five years before ending up at Mama Louise's.

"She'd like it if you named the basketball courts after her," I said, and there was a weird tickle in the back of my nose. I pretended to study the oncoming storm, but found myself thinking ahead to the future of the ranch, to what it might mean to some kid who needed a safe place to be. Mama Louise would love it. "You ought to call her and tell her about it."

Justin nodded. "I thought she might like to fly out here- maybe pull the cover off the sign or break a champagne bottle on the fence-something like that. I could get her a plane ticket. I bet she's old by now, though."

I calculated the years gone by. "Well, about sixty-five, I'd guess.

That's not so old."

"She's probably big as a house."

"She always was."

"Remember that red sweat suit she used to wear to the games?

The guys used to sing 'Attack of the Killer Tomatoes' when she came in."

"Yeah, I remember." I could still picture Mama Louise decked out in her wind suit, out of breath from hustling across the parking lot, her caramel-colored skin glistening with a fine sheen of sweat beneath neatly-braided rows of hair that were gathered in the back and tied with a huge bow in our school colors. On game nights, she burst through the door like a force of nature, poster boards in one hand and an air horn in the other, yelling, "We gonna play some basketball tonight! Where's my kids?"

"I don't know why she did all that stuff." Justin cast a perplexed expression, as if he were earnestly trying to decipher something for which he had no frame of reference. We drifted to a halt by the big live oak tree, and he stared longingly up at his suspended cowboy hat. "I mean, CPS was gonna send her checks every month whether she put on the red suit and came to basketball games or not."

I guess she really cared, ran through my mind, but it sounded sappy, sentimental, and unmanly, so instead I said, "She probably wanted to make sure you were at the game, not out behind the gym lighting up."

"Yeah, you're probably right." Justin chuckled, and I was kind of glad, because this conversation was starting to feel mushy and vaguely uncomfortable. I wasn't used to seeing Justin so somber and reflective, so ... serious. I was ready to move on to the pipefenced corral, where Willie Wardlaw, Frank, Frederico, and Mimi had gathered after getting out of their vehicle. Mimi frowned at the darkening sky, smoothing her silky hair with trepidation as the others watched from outside the fence. Inside, Lauren released Lucky Strike, and he ran back and forth along the opposite perimeter, staying as far away from the people as possible.

Bracing his hands on his hips, Justin sighed at his hat in the tree, then took in the horse and everything around him. "This place could be like Mama Louise's, only bigger." His shoulders rounded forward as if he felt the weight of the dream, and it was too big, too heavy. I knew that look on him. It was the look of moving out of a pie-in-the-sky manic phase and crashing back to reality. A binge of all things destructive and mind-numbing usually followed. Sometimes the low ride lasted a few days, sometimes it lasted a few months. Sometimes he landed in the hospital, and sometimes he came out of it on his own.

How many times had I told myself I wouldn't go on this ride with him again? Hence, the cabin in the mountains, the new and quiet life separate from the roller coaster ride that was Justin Shay.

I didn't want to watch him try to blow himself up again. "Hey, you know, one step at a time," I said. "You've got to make friends with the horse first, right?"

"Yeah." I was hoping for another laugh, but I didn't get it. "I figure with all the publicity from the film, it won't be any problem to get people to donate to this place. We can put together a trailer about the foster shelter, attach it to the publicity, maybe have it roll after the credits. I want the ranch to have plenty of backing, you know, to keep it going in the future. I don't want it all to fall on Amber. She needs her money for her family."

A sense of disquiet settled in the corner of my consciousness, rumbling like the thunder. "Why would it fall on Amber?" As in, Where will you be? With Justin, you have to be careful how you ask questions if you want answers that are real and not pulled out of some past script somewhere.

He stared off into the distance for so long that I thought his thoughts had drifted off. "I just think one of these times I'll go down and maybe I won't come back."

Something clenched in my gut, because I knew exactly what he meant by go down. He meant that one of these days he'd take a ride on the party train and not get off. The textbook reaction from my end would have been to say something like, Don't talk that way, but there wasn't any point. Justin was going to do what Justin wanted to do, no matter what anybody said. "Let's focus on today," I urged, and I had the disturbing sense that this crazy project, The Horseman, the foster shelter, Mama Louise's basketball courts, was his way of trying to keep from going down-one final last-ditch effort. A commitment so huge, so important he couldn't bail on it. So insane, it couldn't possibly happen unless he held it together. "You've got a lot of work to do here. You have to build those basketball courts for Mama Louise."