Generations in Agony...Texas: Chapter Ten

10) Early to rise…

The changes that had been made in the bunkhouse only served to aggravate Carl Speck even more than normal. The TV was on all the time, even when none of the hands were watching it. Most played cards: a cowboy staple shared by just about anybody who knew how to toss a saddle over the back of a horse.

Carl had eaten some of Lupe’s stew, and then gone to bed, trying in vain to sleep with the rest of the crew still up talking and carrying on around the card table. By the time they all fell into their bunks, the incessant snoring began and Carl came to the end of his patience. He got up, grabbed his saddlebags and went out to the barn to sleep with Cleo. The cutter stood over him for the few hours he slept, then happily allowed him to saddle her up well before anyone on the ranch had stirred.

Quietly, they walked back down the dirt road and into town where the only lights burning were at Mildred’s Diner.

The old hitching post had been out front for decades. Carl tied Cleo off and hung a feed bag over her ears before he walked inside. Travis Drylander, all four hundred sixty pounds of him, occupied a booth in one corner. He nodded at Carl but was too busy shoving food in his face to do more than that.

“Morning, Carl…” Mildred sounded a little winded as she came from the kitchen. She picked up a coffee pot and followed Carl to the booth he sat down in. He had only just set his hat down on the seat when she poured him a cup. “…usual?”

Carl nodded and sipped his coffee.

“Have it out shortly, then.”

“Thanks, Milly.”

A pick up truck full of roughnecks rolled into the lot and the men inside it began to pile out, headed as a group through the front doors. Their chatter disturbed Carl’s quiet sense of the morning. He glanced at the clock over the kitchen door: 3:42. His foot tapped impatiently. The roughnecks were getting too rowdy, for his tastes, but it was breakfast time and his stomach was not going to let him rush out the door before it was full of biscuits and a little milk gravy.

Mildred came back out of the kitchen with a steaming plate. She picked up a coffee pot on the way back to Carl’s booth. “I had Julio chicken fry you a steak, Carl. You look too thin.”

He was too hungry to complain as he held out his coffee cup for Mildred to refill.

“These dang roughnecks. If they didn’t spend money, I’d run ‘em out.”

Carl said nothing to this. Instead, he forked a biscuit and dunked it into his gravy as Mildred went to take care of the roughnecks.
*

By the time he finished eating and had rolled himself a smoke, more roughnecks began to pile in, filling the eatery to half capacity, too many for Carl’s nerves to take at one time. He picked up his check and walked to the register, grumbled his thanks to Mildred and then walked out into the dark, sticking his hat on his head as he lit his smoke.

Of course, nothing was open, so none of the business he wanted to take care of could be done yet. Climbing up on Cleo, he turned her back down the street, headed toward the far end of town. At the Esso, he could see that his truck was already inside one of the bays with the hood still up. No sign of Morgansen. He nudged Cleo’s sides and they went on down the road.

It occurred to Carl that watching the sunrise over the Cuts of Agony might lift his sagging spirits a little. He had a few things to think over, after all. This business about his son, and now, evidently, two new relatives that he had never met were the first he felt the need to deal with. It would take, what Carl considered to be, some hard thinking. So, once they reached open range, he and Cleo loped over the scrub and up the gentle rise to the ridgeline that overlooked Stump’s gulch.

He rolled another smoke and lit it, then stood there with Cleo as the sun began to lift over the edge of the world. Out here, with no one in sight, Carl felt himself coming back to rights. My son is dead…

That rolled around his head for a bit. He was careful not to let such thoughts go too deep. There was a darkness down inside him, Carl knew, that he must not allow anything to touch. It was a discipline he developed out of necessity long ago. The trouble he was having now, was that the feelings he should be experiencing over his son’s death, were down in that dark place.

I never really knew the boy… He knew that was no excuse. By the time he was in school, Carl had only ever seen Carl Jr. a handful of times, and had never held the child, much less talk to him. There was one point, when Jr. was playing ball in high school, that Carl had gone and watched a game. He had stood alone along the outfield fence and when it was over, he had just gone on back to his truck and rig to head back out on the range. It was a tearing, feeling, when he let himself dwell on Jr. For the most, he felt a sense of pride that the boy had done well. Better, Carl assumed, than he might have turned out had Carl been around to influence his life. That, only Carl knew, was what he felt best. After all, Carl’s past, would have only given the boy more to deal with than any young man should. Besides…Carl knew that he did not deserve to have a son.

Now, the boy he had pushed away was gone for good. In his place, there was another boy, and a woman he had never met. Despite his remoteness, they were now attached to him, if only by name and blood. Do I need to put myself in their life?
Everything inside himself told him that it was not the best of ideas.

Cleo snickered, then turned her ears back as she flared her nostrils at the shifting wind. The sun was now a big, orange ball in the eastern sky. Daylight was burning, and he had business to tend to back in town. Best to get it done and move on back out before anything could get too complicated. He had not lived this long by putting complication in his path to worry over.

He smelled it then: a rotten smell, something in the vicinity was dead and going over. Probably a coyote or an armadillo had met its end here-abouts. Still, it could be one of Onyx or Tucks’ head. If it had succumbed to disease, things could be much worse, not only for Carl. He pulled Cleo around to scout the area, just to make certain. Whatever that is, probably just got snake-bit and died…He told himself. After all, there were a lot of snakes in the area. Everybody knew that.

*