How did that happen?"
"I'll tell you about it later."
"Why so secretive?"
"I'm not accustomed to telling war stories. Have you ever wanted to be a father, Kerney?"
"I always thought I would, some day."
"Still interested?"
"I'm too long in the tooth."
"Not at all."
Kerney pulled back his head.
"Are you staring at me in the dark?" Sara asked. Her fingers traveled down to the gunshot scar on Kerney's stomach. She rubbed it lightly and felt the rough texture of the skin and the hard abdominal muscle underneath.
"I have excellent night vision."
Outside the closed bedroom door. Shoe whined quietly in dismay.
"Your dog wants to come in," Sara said, moving her fingers down to Kerney's hip.
"Don't change the subject. Are you thinking of having a baby?"
"I'm putting a stud book together, just as a possibility.
Your name is on the list."
"I'm honored to be considered. But you'd be taking a chance. I've never sired any offspring."
"You seem to have the necessary enthusiasm for the task."
Kerney laughed.
"Is this something you're serious about?"
"I'm not sure."
"How many names are in your stud book?"
"I'm not telling." Sara's hand traveled below Kerney's hip to his crotch.
"Now, that's very interesting."
She rolled on top of Kerney, and for a very long time conversation ceased.
Carl Boaz saw hoofprints in the snow at the gate when he got back to the meadow late Sunday night. He unlocked the gate, moved the truck through, relocked the gate, and drove to his cabin, wondering who in the hell had been snooping around. He made a quick tour outside with a flashlight, looking for any sign of trespassing.
Everything appeared okay.
Inside, Boaz kept his coat on while he lit a kerosene lamp and fired up the wood stove. Off the power grid, the cabin had no electricity other than what a gasoline generator supplied. Boaz rarely used electricity in the cabin; it was much more important to reserve the power for the greenhouse and the well pump.
He left the cabin and walked to the greenhouse.
Prom the gate at the top of the meadow, the greenhouse looked like a cheap, thrown-together structure. But hidden from view on the south side, a row of solar panels fed power to a bank of batteries that ran fans and heating coils. The system was so efficient Boaz only needed to use the backup generator after three or four consecutive cloudy days.
He circled the greenhouse, checked the door locks, looked for fresh tracks, found nothing, and walked back to the cabin. Boaz smiled as he passed the child's bicycle propped against the porch rail. Wanda the bitch had left it behind when she moved out with her bratty eight-year-old son to return to L.A. He had found the bicycle in the toolshed and decided to use it to give the place a homey, family kind of look.
The cabin had warmed up nicely. Heavily insulated, it consisted of a large room with two sleeping lofts, a small bathroom off the downstairs kitchen area, and an attached room at the back of the cabin Boaz had built for Wanda to use as a pottery studio. With Wanda gone, Boaz had converted the room into a woodshed. It easily held three cords of dry firewood.
He shucked his coat, put a tea kettle on the propane stove to heat up cofiee water, and turned on the battery-powered shortwave receiver. He liked listening to the BBC Sunday night broadcasts.
At the table, Boaz studied his sketch of a cornfield that he would plant after the last spring frost. He would move new nursery stock to the cornfield, use the corn to shield the marijuana, and start another greenhouse crop of grass right away. That would more than double his yield in one season.
In the morning he would dig up the cactus plants in the greenhouse that Wanda had transplanted from the mesa, and start some more marijuana seedlings. There were only twenty cactus plants, but they took up valuable space. He couldn't believe he'd let the bitch talk him into starting a little cactus garden.
The teapot whistled and Boaz got up and made his coffee. A BBC news reader was reporting on a New Zealand woman who grew rare nineteenth-century roses in her garden. He turned up the volume, listened to the batty old lady ramble on about her roses in a down-under accent, and started working on his finances.
Money was tight, and he wouldn't see a profit until he could market his product. Every dime he'd made from dealing at colleges in Southern California had gone into his enterprise. The land, the cabin, the greenhouse, the move last year to New Mexico, had cost a lot of money.
But if he could make it through the next six months, and get half a dozen more crops in, he would be a rich man.
Then he would finish his novel.
He stared at his piece-of-shit Ph.D. diploma from UC Santa Barbara that was nailed to a joist supporting the sleeping lofts. All those years in school, for what? A shitty teaching assistant position in some backwater philosophy department with no hope for a tenure-track appointment. Worthless.
A truck horn blared from the locked gate-two short beeps. Boaz grabbed his coat and went outside. A full moon and a clear sky made it easy for him to see Rudy's truck. The headlights were off and the motor was running.
It was about time Rudy showed up to pay him some money. He was weeks overdue.
"Where have you been, man?" Boaz asked as he climbed over the gate and approached the driver's door.
"Working," Rudy replied through the open truck window.
"You want to come in?"
"Can't stay."
"Did you bring my money?"
"Yeah," Rudy said, as he raised the pistol from his lap and blew a third eye through Boaz's forehead.
Up early, Gabe Gonzales made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table reviewing his completed reports. It was much too soon for Orlando to be awake, and the house was quiet.