The horse seemed indifferent as to whether it would live the life of a wild mustang or hang around with Rufus. It was a pinto, mostly chestnut but spattered with white on the legs and belly. Mexicans, Indians, and horse fanciers had complicated names for different kinds of pintos, depending on the pattern of the spots, but Rufus had never made a study of it. A freeze brand—a row of white hieroglyphs on the left side of the horse’s neck—marked him as a formerly wild horse that had at some point been rounded up and auctioned. A second brand on its shoulder marked it as property of one of the three older ranches that T.R. had, in the last few years, bought up and lumped together to form the Flying S. This animal must have got loose at some point during the merger and returned to its wild ways. The lack of shoes, and the condition of its hooves, suggested that it had escaped at least several months ago.
A good thing about horses, as opposed to some other domestic animals, was that they did not insist on being entertained. As long as they had food and water they would contentedly pass the time of day. So getting this animal put to rights was a side project
that Rufus was able to prosecute in his spare time over a couple of weeks. He arranged for a farrier to come up and see to its hooves and get it shod, and for a vet to give it the recommended shots and pills and to care for some wounds it had presumably sustained during the conflict with the late boar. The ranch possessed a surfeit of saddles and other tack that was no longer being much used. This was made available to him when he let it be known that he had become the trustee of this particular animal. Online shopping caused a few other necessaries to show up at his locker down at High Noon. Once he had given the horse a day or two to get used to the look and the smell of the tack, he bridled and saddled him, whereupon he gave every indication of having been ridden in his past life.
Before mounting up for the first time, Rufus considered what the animal ought to be named. The Lone Ranger’s horse had been Silver, but this creature was mostly brown. He considered “Copper.” That, however, seemed like what a twelve-year-old girl would name her horse. Eventually he settled on Bildad, who in Moby-Dick was one of the three owners of the Pequod. In the Bible, he was one of the friends of Job, who came to him in the wilderness to lay a guilt trip on him.
T.R. had the habit, always surprising to Rufus, of shooting him a text message—usually swine-or drone-related—every couple of weeks. Most of these were just links or pictures. Rufus did not dare to suppose that this made him in any way special. He had sort of assembled the picture in his mind that he might be one of several hundred people in T.R.’s mental Rolodex who would occasionally be so favored, and that T.R. probably sent out dozens of such messages on every occasion when he got a snatch of time on the throne or whatever. Rufus was pretty sure that to send a whole lot of messages back the other way would get him blocked, or even fired. So he mostly kept his mouth shut. But a decent respect for another man’s property did place him under an obligation to document Bildad, so he fired off a couple of pictures detailing the brands, as well as a few more intended to convey the
general idea that the animal was safe and well cared for at the marble mine. T.R. seemed pleased by that out of all proportion to the actual monetary value of one stray horse. Rufus remembered their conversation about the importance of having good people on the property who could make decisions and manage things, and he reckoned that this was an example of that, and that, to the extent T.R. ever thought of him at all, it was now in a favorable light.
All pretty normal as Texas ranch management went, but with T.R. there was always some kind of extra, weird twist. One day in early October the peace and quiet of the marble mine were shattered by the strains of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” which was the ringtone that Rufus had assigned to T.R., and only T.R. It was a video call and so Rufus propped his phone up against a stack of drone batteries on his worktable.
“I got a call from our Dutch friend,” T.R. announced.
“Which one?”
“The jet pilot.”
Rufus now had some cause to regret that he had turned on the video, because his heart started pounding and he was afraid that some consternation might be visible on his face. But if he was about to be fired for fornicating with the queen, there was really nothing he could do but take it like a man.
“How is she?”
“Fine. Sends her regards. Asked how you were doing.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“I filled her in. She came up with an idea.”