The Queen of Honduras Came to Texas to Buy Bulls, and Fell for the Shortest Cowboy in the Arena novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Herd Book
Clyde shows Isabella the ear tattoos and the price Strother paid while his father was dying, they ride the pasture together, and then Andrés's motorcade pulls up at the gate with cameras.
"I didn't know they were stolen," I said. "That's why I'm here."
The woman looked at me for a long time.
Then she leaned the shotgun against the doorframe.
"Loretta Bennett," she said. "Clyde's mama. He's in the barn. Wipe your feet when you come back through, I just mopped."
The barn was red once, a long time ago.
Clyde was inside, forking hay off a flatbed, in a canvas coat with the collar turned up.
He saw me in the doorway and stopped with the fork in the air.
"Ma'am."
"Mr. Bennett."
"Nobody calls me that but the bank." He leaned the fork against the truck. "Clyde's fine. You lost?"
"I came to see your bulls."
"Strother's got my bulls."
"Then I came to see the ones he hasn't got yet."
That almost made him smile.
He walked me out back to a pen of young bulls, gray and cream and as big as small cars.
They crowded the fence when they saw him.
He scratched one between the ears.
"This here's Domino. He's a year younger than the ones you saw. Same daddy."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a notebook so old the cover was soft.
"Herd book," he said. "My granddad started it."
Every page was a bull. A name, a date, a sire, a dam, and a tattoo number in neat pencil.
He flipped to September.
Forty names with a line through each one.
Next to every line, in the same pencil, it said: Sold, G. Strother, $2,000.
"Every Brahman gets a tattoo in the ear when he's registered," Clyde said. "Strother can tag them all he wants. He can't change the ink."
"Two thousand dollars," I said. "He's charging the Crown nine."
Clyde didn't answer that.
He closed the book.
"My daddy had cancer in his pancreas," he said. "Took eleven weeks. The hospital in Odessa wanted their money before the funeral home did."
"I'm sorry."
"Strother come over the day after the diagnosis with a checkbook. Said he'd take some bulls off my hands, being neighborly."
He put the notebook away.
"I knew what they were worth. I sold 'em anyway. That's on me, not him."
"It isn't on you."
He looked up at me.
He had to tip his hat back to do it, and he didn't seem to mind the climb.
"You always this sure about other people's business, ma'am?"
"Always. It's in the job description."
That time he did smile.
It changed his whole face.
Loretta yelled from the porch that there was coffee and biscuits, and she wasn't going to say it twice.
I hadn't eaten since lunch the day before.
I ate three biscuits with butter and honey standing up at her kitchen counter.
Loretta watched me do it with approval.
"You ride?" Clyde asked.
"Since I was six."
"I saw." He set his cup down. "Want to see the rest of it?"
He saddled two horses. A bay mare for me, sixteen hands and as calm as a church.
He'd picked her for me the minute he saw me in the yard.
I could tell because he didn't hesitate.
Most men look at me and reach for the smallest horse they have, as if they're doing me a kindness.
Clyde looked at me and reached for the strongest one.
We rode out over the brown grass toward the mountains.
The wind smelled like cold stone.
He showed me the creek his granddad dammed in 1958, and the windmills.
He showed me where the fence was down and he hadn't had money to fix it.
I told him about Olancho.
About my grandmother's hacienda, where the cattle came up from the river every evening in a long line.
About the two dry years, when the river went to mud and the ranchers lost everything.
The old men cried at the auction barns in Juticalpa.
"That's why I want four hundred bulls," I said. "To give every family that lost its herd a start."
"Four hundred's a lot of bulls."
"It's a lot of families."
He rode quiet for a while.
"You could buy 'em straight," he said. "From me, and from my neighbors. Half of Presidio County's got young bulls and no buyers. You'd pay fair and still save a million dollars."
"Then why hasn't anyone told me that?"
"Because nobody let anybody near you but Strother."
I pulled the mare up.
He stopped beside me.
On horseback, for the first time, we were almost the same height.
His knee was close to mine.
He was looking at my mouth, and then he wasn't, very deliberately.
"You've got the wind in your hair, ma'am," he said.
"Isabella," I said.
"Isabella," he said, testing the sound.
I heard the cars before I saw them.
Three black SUVs coming fast up the ranch road in a cloud of dust.
Behind them, a white van with a satellite dish on top.
We rode back down at a trot.
By the time we reached the yard, the SUVs had stopped at the cattle guard, and men in suits were getting out.
Cameras were already rolling.
Elena stepped out of the first car.
Then a tall man in a navy suit unfolded himself from the back seat and buttoned his jacket.
Andrés Montenegro.
I'd met him at three state dinners and never said ten words to him.
Clyde swung down and came around to hold my mare.
Andrés walked straight past my captain, took my hand off the reins, and kissed my knuckles for the cameras.
Then he looked down at Clyde, standing at my stirrup with dust on his boots.
"You must be the help," he said.
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