“You gotta be kidding,” I said.
I thought about it—I really did. I thought about just lying there, about giving up. Only I couldn’t do it. No voice spoke to me; I wasn’t visited by images of my dead parents or friends or Nina or some ethereal creature sent by God. I just couldn’t do it—quit, I mean. I got up and I started walking. I had no idea if I was heading east or not. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. All that mattered was that I remain on my feet.
What we have here is a stand-up fight with Death, my inner voice proclaimed.
Damn, that’s heroic, I thought.
Except that you’re losing.
It was when the sun was as low as my heart, when I was sure that I was slipping away, that I first saw it, something white moving in the distance. It came and it went, and for a few moments I was convinced I was seeing things.
It was heading toward me, so I started toward it.
After a while, I saw that it was a horse.
There was a rider on the back of the horse.
The rider was a young woman.
The young woman was beautiful. Her hair was the color of wheat and neatly tucked beneath her wide-brimmed cowboy hat, the hat tied beneath her chin to keep it from falling off. She wore a blue cotton short-sleeve shirt tucked inside worn blue jeans. Her eyes were blue. Her soft face and arms glistened with sunscreen.
She reined up in front of me.
I kept walking until I was standing next to the white horse. I ran my hand over its neck, patted it.
“You’re real,” I said.
“Are you all right, mister?” the young woman said.
She slid out of the saddle and dropped to the ground. She unwound the strap of a canteen from the pommel of her saddle. She unscrewed the cap and offered the canteen to me. I took the canteen and drank. I tried to drink slowly.
She asked me what I was doing out there.
I stopped drinking just long enough to tell her that it was a complicated story.
She asked if I needed help.
I told her that I did.
I drank some more of the water and handed the canteen back.
She suggested that I wasn’t from around there.
I asked if it would be too much of an imposition for her to take me to Libbie.
“Who’s Libbie?” she said. “Is there someone else out here?”
“No, Libbie—Libbie, South Dakota. It’s a town.”
“Mister, this is Montana.”
But not Canada, my inner voice said.
“I better take you to our place,” the young woman said. “Can you ride?”
I told her that the only time I was ever on a horse was during a vacation in Colorado.
She showed me how to mount the horse. I sat in back and she sat in front, holding the reins. She told me to hang on tight and I did. I hung on for dear life.
We set off at a trot.
“Our ranch is just a few miles over the rise,” she said.
Rise? my inner voice said. I didn’t see any rise, but I took the girl’s word for it. I asked her name.
“Angela,” she said.
No one is going to believe this, my inner voice told me. Saved from a slow and probably agonizing death on the Great American Desert by a beautiful young woman named Angela riding a white horse. Hell, I don’t believe it.
“May I ask how old you are?” I said.
“Seventeen.”
Well, of course she is.
“Are you in high school?” I said.
“I start my senior year in September.”
“What are you going to do after that?”
“I’d like to go to college. I have a list of about a dozen schools I’m going to apply to. Except times are tough, you know? Where I go, if I go, depends on how much scholarship and grant money I can scrape up.”
“Well, don’t worry about it.”
“Why not?”
“I know an eccentric millionaire who will guarantee you a full ride to any school you can get into.”
Angela turned in the saddle to look at me.
“Why would he do that?” she said.
It wasn’t a particularly funny question, yet it made me laugh just the same.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Angela halted the pickup in front of the Pioneer Hotel and put it in park. As I slid out of the passenger seat, she jumped out of the driver’s side and sprinted around the truck to my side. I didn’t need her help. A full day in the comfort of her family’s ranch house, being ministered to by both Angela and her mother, had set me up nicely. Even the sunburn didn’t hurt anymore, unless someone hugged my neck like she was doing now.
“Thank you, McKenzie,” Angela said.
Her eyes were as bright, wet, and shiny as they were when I had H. B. Sutton transfer fifty thousand dollars into her father’s money market fund. He thought that was a sufficient reward for saving my life, despite protests that I considered my health and well-being to be worth considerably more than that. ’Course, now that I had his account numbers, I figured I could deposit a couple more bucks when he wasn’t looking. Call it a tip for letting me use his razor.
“Thank you, Angela,” I said and hugged back.