Night of Thunder

Not that Swagger had escaped intact. The guy had laid him open to steel bone at the hip, and he’d gone too long before stitches saved his life. It never healed right, and he didn’t help by denying so fiercely that there was a problem. Somehow his leg stiffened, as if the tide of blood that the stitching dammed was still there, coagulating and about to break out in a red ocean spray and bleed him to death. Killer’s revenge. But the killer had also, as another part of his revenge, turned him comical, with one of those weird bounces in his gait. Could still ride, could still walk, couldn’t really run much. No talent at all for climbing. A motorcycle saved his life by giving him the illusion of freedom that had once been his strongest attribute.

“I look a hundred and fifty,” he’d said, just that morning.

“You don’t look a day aver one hundred forty-five,” his wife said. “Honey, look at Daddy, he’s turned white.”

“Daddy’s a snowman,” shouted the little girl, Miko, now seven, delighted to find a flaw in a hero so awesome as her strange, white father. “Snowman, snowman, snowman!”

“It’s gray, it’s gray,” Bob protested. Then he added, “I know someone’s going to find her ride cut short she don’t stop calling Daddy a snowman.” But the tone revealed the fraudulence of the threat, for it was his pleasure to spoil his daughters and then take pride in how well they turned out anyway.

He was a rich man. Rich in land-he now owned six lay-up barns in three western states, two in Arizona, two here in Idaho, and one each in Colorado and Montana, and was looking at property in Kansas and Oregon-and rich in pension from the United States Marine Corps. He was rich in homes, as he owned this beautiful, recently finished place sixty miles out of Boise, on land he’d cleared himself that looked across green prairie emptiness to blue scars of mountains under piles of cumulus cotton against a blue diamond sky. He was rich in wife, for Julie was handsome, a character out of a Howard Hawks movie, one of those tawny, feline women who never got excited, had a low voice, and was still sexy as hell. And he was richest of all in daughters.

He had two. Nikki was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and now working her first newspaper job in Bristol, Virginia, a place her father liked a lot more than the New York City where she’d spent the last year. He felt she’d be a lot safer in the small city right smack on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Meanwhile, his adopted daughter, Miko, had taken to western life without a hitch, and quickly became comfortable around horses, the messes that they made, the smells that they generated. She loved them, took to them automatically, and it thrilled her father to see such a tiny thing so relaxed atop such a giant thing, and controlling it so confidently, making it love and obey her. The kid was already earning blue ribbons in Eventing and might even overtake her big sister, who’d been a national champion in that sport two years running when she was a teenager.

Now it was morning, and since it was August there was no school for Miko, so they were doing what they loved: the girl on her horse, Sam, and her father watching her canter gently about the ring. But he was not dominating. For while that had been his way as a marine NCO, it was not his way with his daughter. He leaned on the fence, and you’d have thought, There’s a cool cowboy type of fellow. His jeans were tight, framing his lanky legs; he wore a horseman’s slouch and sucked on a weed. He was all cowboyed up-the Tony Lamas boots muddy but solid, a blue, denim shirt, a red handkerchief around his neck, for it gets hot in Idaho in August, and a straw Stetson to keep the sun off his face.

It really couldn’t have been more perfect, always a signal that disturbance lurks not far away.

“Easy, sweetie,” he called, “you don’t want to force him. You have to feel him, and when he’s ready, he’ll let you know.”

“I know, Daddy,” she called back. She rode eastern, on the snooty, Brit postage stamp of a saddle, with erect posture, a crop in her hand, tall, low-heeled boots, and of course a helmet. She was equally adept with the big western rigs that were like boats upon a horse’s plunging back, but both Bob and Julie agreed that she would eventually go to school in the East, that she should have riding skills set for that part of the country, and, on top of that, they wanted to keep her out of rodeos, where too many young gals flocked because they liked the string-bean boys who rode like hell and bounced up with a smile when they went for a sail in the air and a thump in the dirt. Though with Miko, maybe it would be something else. Maybe it would be to actually do some crazy rodeo thing, like leave a perfectly good cow pony for a ride on a bull’s horns.

“She’ll probably end up the women’s bull-dog champion of Idaho, but still you’ve got to try,” he told his wife.

“If she does, she’ll have to put up with a screaming nag of an old lady every damn day,” Julie said.