The Lincoln County Wars Read online

  THE LINCOLN COUNTY WARS

  With bonus story

  TRES HOMBRES OF THE HIGH LONESOME

  Sarah Black

  ®

  www.loose-id.com

  Warning

  This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id® e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  * * * * *

  This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable (male/male sexual practices)

  The Lincoln County Wars

  With bonus story Tres Hombres of the High Lonesome

  Sarah Black

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  Loose Id LLC

  1802 N Carson Street, Suite 212-2924

  Carson City NV 89701-1215

  www.loose-id.com

  Copyright © May 2007 by Sarah Black

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared in any form, including, but not limited to printing, photocopying, faxing, or emailing without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-59632-469-5

  Available in Adobe PDF, HTML, MobiPocket, and MS Reader

  Printed in the United States of America

  Editor: Judith David

  Cover Artist: April Martinez

  Dedication

  For the Blackhawk Medevac Crews C/2-135th GSAB.

  Thanks to the Black Jacks on duty in Iraq, and the families and friends waiting for them back home.

  If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges

  White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.

  It would be the same at the end of the journey,

  If you came at night like a broken king…

  – T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  Graham rolled the big elk roast over in the marinade, then tossed in a couple of extra cloves and crushed peppercorns. He turned the slow cooker to low and put the lid back on, picked up the potato peeler, and moved to the sink. The Mad Moose went through fifty pounds of potatoes a night. Mostly mashed, with butter and red-eye moose gravy, or fried, cowboy style – sliced and layered in an iron skillet with bacon, onions, and green chilies. The men of Lincoln County, New Mexico had been eating their potatoes this way for a hundred and fifty years. Change came slowly to this corner of the world.

  Baxter came in the back kitchen door in a blaze of color. His orange hair was spiked up in a punk Bozo the Clown sort of do, and he was wearing cycling gear – black Lycra shorts and a tight jersey with rainbow colors across his chest.

  “It’s getting cold outside for shorts, Baxter. You dress like that just to ride your bike one block to the grocery?”

  “Yes, I did.” Baxter turned around so Graham could see the back of the jersey – a printed cloth flyer was pinned to his back. The Mad Moose Café across the shoulder blades, with a sketch of a moose kicking up his legs in a little dance. It was a confused, goofy-looking moose, and his eyes were a bit too close together. It looked to Graham like he might have been drinking. “What do you think? Every bit of good advertising helps, right?”

  “Right.”

  Baxter turned back around and started unloading sacks of fresh green beans. He was looking a little wistful.

  “So did Max do the drawing? It looks good. Very authentic. Moose-like.”

  “Yeah, he did, and ran the cloth through the ink jet printer. I think he’s a little down, Graham. He draws moose all the time. There isn’t much of an artistic community in Lincoln County. Maybe he misses being around other artists. Or just other people like us.”

  “Other people like us? Baxter, you were born and raised here. You’re gonna have to work hard to be an outsider.”

  Max had moved to Capitan from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico when he and Baxter had fallen in love. They were both trying very hard to make things work, but Lincoln County was full of tired and intolerant men, and expectations and traditions, none of which were quick to change. This was not an easy place to be a modern gay couple, out and about.

  The men of Lincoln County worked the land from sunup without a break. They were on horseback in the blistering parched heat of the summer to the wild howling snowstorms of winter on the High Lonesome. By the time they put their horses in the corral and drove their old rattletrap pickups into town to have supper at the Mad Moose, any ability they might have had to open their minds to discussions of diversity with gay artists and cooks who had Chinese tattoos and flaming orange hair had long since evaporated. Luckily, working ranch hands were almost universally too tired to cause much trouble, and Graham suspected they were too tired to care, as well. Besides, these men had watched Baxter grow up here. Most of those cowboys looked at him and saw a red-headed, freckle-faced kid with a cane fishing pole and a pair of overalls, about eight years old. They had all been in love with his mamma.

  No matter how many times Baxter sat down with them, shook their chapped and worn hands and asked if they could open up a dialogue about tolerance, so far no one had punched him in the mouth, which Graham thought was something of a miracle. The fact that Baxter’s grandfather owned the biggest ranch in the county and, in fact, employed the majority of them, might have had something to do with it. But what Graham suspected was that tolerance in Lincoln County was a new concept, a very thin crust over some very strong feelings. He was afraid someone was walking on ice and about to break through.

  Baxter washed the green beans, then started snapping them into pieces and tossing them into a red enamel bowl. “Did you hear from Eddie? Are they coming?”

  “Yeah, they’re coming. He’s bringing six guys from his platoon when they get back in from hunting. You would think they were starving. I never heard such bitching and moaning about food as from those guys. Eddie complained every day for a solid year about the food in Iraq.”

  “Do you know any of the other guys from his National Guard unit?”

  Graham hesitated. “I went to high school with Tommy Lathrop. He was XO in Eddie’s unit.”

  “Really? You mean the Tommy Lathrop who’s chief deputy and was just appointed acting sheriff?”

  Graham nodded, and Baxter looked at him for a long moment before turning back to the beans. “Well, if we’re gonna have your big brother, Major Eddie, and the acting sheriff of Lincoln County, and a house full of war heroes and cowboys, we better give them an extra good dinner. What’s on the menu tonight?”

  “We’ve got elk pot roast with mashed potatoes and green beans. We’ve got venison chili with corn and cheddar tortillas. We’ll serve a salad with that one. And we’ve got burgers – buffalo and elk and regular cow – with fried potatoes and green beans. What kind of pies are you gonna fix?”

  Baxter rinsed his hands under the tap and dried them on a cup towel. “Four New Mexican apple. Two pumpkin, and some walnut brownies with vanilla ice cream. I could do that cherry crumble thing the ranch hands like so much, just to make sure we have enough. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds perfect. We aren’t gonna have a bit of food left in this place.”

  Graham wrote the evening’s menu on the chalkboard in the front window. The café serv
ed three main dishes every night, depending on what game meat was available, and people in town would drift by the window and check the chalkboard before deciding if they wanted to cook supper at home.

  Graham had a headache by noon, and Excedrin Migraine wouldn’t touch it. He couldn’t go home and lie down, though. He had too much to do. A year and a month the National Guard unit had been gone, most of that time around Baghdad or Fallujah. Graham had worried the whole time about Eddie and Tommy and the rest of the guys that he’d only met a few times. He’d swamped them with care packages and chatty, upbeat, down-home newsletters, and in the entire year, he’d only heard from Tommy once.

  It was Tommy’s foxhole letter, the one he’d written when he thought he wasn’t gonna climb out alive in the morning. Just a couple of lines that broke Graham’s heart, but didn’t change anything between them. I don’t regret anything, Graham. I wish I could die with your taste on my tongue and you asleep in my arms. Maybe we’ll have a chance in the next life.

  Graham knew Tommy didn’t want him to write back. They never talked about what was between them, not since the first time when they’d been nineteen and skunked on bourbon stolen from under the front seat of Eddie’s pickup. They had been best friends once, talking about everything, but then they took a step with no going back, slid into loving each other in the dark, and let the walls form between them in the light of day. In the ten years since high school, Graham had wondered more than once if it was worth it, if he wouldn’t rather have his friend back, and give up his lover.

  What he knew for sure was that he didn’t sleep an entire night through while they were gone and in danger. Graham had prayed for him, prayed for all of them, moved into that old habit of talking to God. He’d closed that door about sixteen, decided he had nothing else to say to the old man upstairs. But, as it happened, it felt good to pray for the guys. He felt like he was doing something constructive, not just lying in bed at night twisting the sheets and picturing Humvees on fire, Tommy trapped inside, picturing Eddie flying through the air, all those horrible CNN red and black nighttime pictures.

  When the unit came home Tommy didn’t come and find him, or call, or even come into the restaurant to eat supper, even though he only lived thirty miles up the road. All their lives, Tommy had come to him. Football practice in high school, Tommy had come by his house to get him, so they could walk together. When he wanted to touch Graham in the dark, Tommy would slide into his bed with the lights turned out. It had always been that way, but this time Tommy didn’t come. When he was named Chief Deputy of Lincoln County, Graham had sent a note of congratulations, not expecting to hear back. And he hadn’t. He actually thought that Tommy wouldn’t show up tonight for the platoon’s reunion dinner.

  Two months they’d been home, and a couple of the guys were acting squirrelly. That’s what Eddie said, and it was Graham’s idea for Eddie to take them out hunting. Lincoln County, New Mexico had some of the world’s greatest hunting. Maybe the guys needed to hang around in the woods, sleep out in wet clothes, pee in the open air, talk to each other over a campfire made of juniper wood with no one else around. Graham told them he’d buy their deer. Venison was the most popular game meat in the restaurant, and he had developed some killer recipes in the five years since he’d started working in the kitchen of the Mad Moose.

  “I’ve got a great idea.” Baxter was dropping a load of cold butter into the Hobart mixer for the piecrust. “Let’s do a John Wayne in Drag contest to raise money for the VFW, in honor of Eddie’s unit. You know, impersonations. Lines from favorite movies. I want to do Big Jake, if I can do Maureen O’Hara – ‘You haven’t changed one bit, have you, Jacob McCandles!’ Oh, wait, wait. How about that Richard Boone line – ‘Anything goes wrong, your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault, that boy is dead. Do you understand me, Mister? Say it.’” Baxter gave an exaggerated shiver. “No, Eddie’ll have to do Richard Boone. I’ll stick with Maureen O’Hara. The VFW isn’t keeping up with the building. I know they built one of those ramps out front, but you still can’t get into that bathroom in a wheelchair.”

  Graham looked up from the pile of lettuce he was washing. “Baxter, give me a break. You’re gonna be the first man lynched in Lincoln County since those two horse thieves your granddad’s always talking about.” He stood up and stretched his back. “You think it’s true? He really saw a couple of horse thieves hang back when he was a kid?”

  Baxter nodded. “Yep. But you know the VFW…”

  “The VFW,” Graham interrupted, “needs a new bathroom. But don’t screw with Big Jake around here, Hoss. That would be worse than having a Jesus in Drag contest. What’s wrong with just doing a chili cook-off again? That’s what we always do for Veteran’s Day and everybody likes it.”

  “Well, you win the chili cook-off every year.” Graham shrugged. “Is there any reason that we can’t encourage tolerance at the same time we raise money for the new bathroom?” Baxter upended a basket of bright green Hatch chili peppers on the counter. He rinsed them under the faucet, then laid them out on the grill to roast. “This is gonna be good pie tonight. Where are those Granny Smith apples?”

  Graham pulled the box out from under the counter and handed it to him. “I think you’re pushing too hard, Baxter. You’ve got this tolerance bee in your bonnet, and I don’t think change comes quickly or easily, not around here. Just…” He hesitated, studying the droop to Baxter’s neck as he bent over the apples. “Just take it easy. Let things come.”

  Baxter looked back at him over his shoulder. “You think your way is the right way?”

  “What’s my way?”

  “You think you’re out of the closet? Maybe you took one step out of the closet, but then you wrapped yourself up in an invisibility cloak like Harry Potter. It’s like you’re in gay limbo. What are you waiting for?” Graham was silent, praying Baxter would just shut up and peel apples. “Who are you waiting for?”

  “Give it a rest, Baxter. My head’s killing me.”

  “You think Harry Potter’s gay?”

  They both looked up when Tommy Lathrop pushed open the restaurant’s back door. His brown hair was tumbled and messy, like he’d just taken off his hat, and it was longer than it had been the last time Graham had seen him. His moustache was longer, too. Graham almost reached up and pushed those curls off Tommy’s forehead, smoothed them down. His headache spiked suddenly over his right eye. Graham turned away and closed his eyes. His stomach clenched down to the size of an English pea.

  Tommy was carrying something bloody, wrapped up in white butcher paper. He put the package on the counter. “Eddie sent some meat. Wanted to know if you could cook it that way he likes for tonight, with the brown sugar and bacon.”

  Graham dried his hands on his apron, then turned around and held one out to Tommy. Baxter was watching them both with interest. Graham knew his hand was shaking. Knew Tommy would feel it. Tommy took Graham’s hand in his, his eyes narrowing. Tommy, you sorry son of a bitch. I ought to kick your ass.

  Tommy smiled at him, his teeth clenched so hard he was about to chip enamel. “Callahan.” He dropped Graham’s hand as fast as he could and turned to Baxter.

  He looked good. Older. Graham didn’t know why he kept that picture in his mind of Tommy’s face at nineteen. He looked good now. The corners of his eyes crinkled into laugh lines, and they softened the arctic blue. Tommy’s moustache was a long, dark brown lawman’s moustache that drooped over his upper lip. It looked good on him. But Tommy looked worn to the bone, with lines on his forehead that were too old for twenty-nine.

  Tommy was studying Baxter’s colorful getup, hands on his hips. “Jesus H. Christ, Baxter. What the hell are you doing? You trying to give your granddaddy a stroke?”

  Baxter laughed out loud, and Tommy turned to Graham, his eyes as cold as winter. “Why don’t you make him put on some jeans and boots? You want him to look like a goddamn fruit in public?”

  Graham felt like he’d been kicked in the balls. “Oh, well,
we sure don’t want to look like fruit in public, do we?” What the fuck was going on? Tommy wasn’t going to say one word about where he’d been? Why he’d gone off to war and dropped Graham like a pair of old socks with holes in the toes? No apology? No explanation?

  Tommy stepped closer and reached out, his fingers tracing Graham’s forehead. “What’s the matter? You look like you got a migraine.”

  He was so close, Graham could smell his skin, feel the heat of his body, just inches away. “Fuck you, Tommy. Get out of my kitchen.” He turned away, grabbed the haunch of venison, and carried it through the kitchen to the prep table. A moment later he heard the back door close quietly.

  “We got enough brown sugar?” He didn’t look up. Baxter set the box down next to him and got the big marinade pan out of the cabinet without saying a word.

  * * * * *

  The restaurant was packed for supper, and Baxter put on his Wranglers and rattlesnake boots for the occasion. He also wore his John Wayne T-shirt, the Duke’s face so enlarged his ears were as big as artichokes, the famous squint resting right about the level of Baxter’s nipples.

  Max had brought a couple of their artist friends for dinner, a potter with a tiny smear of dried white clay on his forehead; a photographer in a long black skirt and black lipstick, gender undetermined; and a guitar player with guitar, a funny shaped instrument that he explained was designed to fit into a backpack. He offered to play for the restaurant, and Graham agreed, but suggested they wait until the place cleared out a bit.

  Max smiled at him, his big dark eyes shy. Max looked like some character in a Japanese comic, all huge eyes and delicate hands. Eye contact wasn’t easy for Max, but Graham thought there were some still waters there. He looked them over with affection. They were a goofy bunch, vulnerable. They were so young still, trying hard to figure out who they wanted to be. He turned and surveyed the room. The ranch hands were at a long table set next to the wood stove. They ate together every night, as if they’d just walked over from the bunkhouse. It never occurred to them to sit at separate tables. They’d taken their hats and spurs off but kept their jackets on, and they ate in silence, hunched over their plates. When they finished eating they stretched out, boots toward the fire, raw hands folded over their bellies. Baxter always served them their dessert himself.