Chapter 19 At the Ranch with scholars
Musical theme: Piano concerto in e flat by Schumann
Dave and Jainie went into the ranch house. The dining room was still full of computers and cowboys playing video games or asking how to do this or that in Windows. Dave looked over the scene, and decided everything was going all right. They went back to the kitchen to get something to eat. Carmelita wanted to make them steaks, so they had them, with stir fried vegetables and rice. Carmelita sautéed some finely diced cayenne peppers. Dave scattered them all over his food as Carmelita looked on in amazement. Dave started eating his steak as if it didn’t have a pepper on it.
Jainie motioned to a chair. “Sit down, Carmelita.”
“It’s not proper.”
“So you are going to stand over me when I want to talk to you? Sit down.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Miles London can teach you to read and write English. Would you like that?”
“I like Miles.”
“Don’t like him too much until you are 18.”
“I have been with men, ma’am. Not many I chose to be, but if I want to be with Miles, what is wrong?”
“It’s against the law here, and Miles could get put in prison. So you won’t do it. Tell Kevin I want you to have a medical check up. You’re an employee, so you have medical insurance. I want you tested for STD’s.”
“Yes, ma’am. I tell Kevin.”
“Do you save your money?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Let me look at your mail, Carmelita.”
She separated part of the pile, then rethought it, and took it all into the office. She looked over the bank statements, and saw that they showed deposits in amounts that looked right. She punched a file folder two hole, and put a fastener in it. She punched the statements two hole, and put them on the fastener, newest on top. She flipped the folder and taped the fastener in place. She turned it back over and put an envelope on the left side with another fastener. She put the bank’s account agreement into the envelope.
“Let me see your wallet, Carmelita.”
She handed it over.
Jainie found the debit card in it. “Do you have a pin for this?”
“I don’t know what this is.”
“We’ll get this fixed, so you will have money if you want a new pair of shoes or something. I’ll get Kevin appointed as your guardian. We will set up a trust account for the money the ranch pays you. Kevin will make sure nobody takes your money.”
“If I have money, someone takes it always.”
“Never again. You have two thousand dollars already in a retirement account the ranch puts money in every week. We’re going to make sure nobody can get it from you without going through Kevin, which is impossible. We’re going to protect your money, so someone can’t make you give it to them, but so you can buy things, and save money so you can buy a house when you grow up, a car when you get a license, that sort of thing.”
Jainie entered a bonus from petty cash for Carmelita, and handed her five $20 bills.
“Why do you give me this, ma’am?”
“It’s part of what you get for the work you do here. So you have money to do something you like to do.”
She got up. “You’re all done with being ripped off, kicked around, being raped, and that stuff. From now on, you live in dignity.”
“I have things I need to do, ma’am.”
“Go ahead and do them.”
Jainie found Kevin and told him about all of it. He was calm. “I be her guardian, huh? Dat fine. Trus coun’ for er money, uh huh. We take care dat girl, Jainie.”
“Great. Seen Dave?”
“He up front. Sit where it cold.”
She went to the front room. She told Dave about Carmelita.
“You’re right. Nobody is going to hurt her again. We’ll do all of those things, and if some creep shows up looking for her, we’ll run him over with the Baby.”
“Don’t say that, Dave, because I know you aren’t kidding. You’ll give me nightmares.”
“OK, I know you don’t want blood on your truck. We’ll just call in Tac Air.”
She laughed. “I don’t think anyone is coming after Carmelita with anything that requires a Tactical Air Strike.”
Dave nodded. “We can put some money into an investment account that has a payable on death provision to her, so when we’re both gone, she gets some money. No will needed, no probate, and we can change the amount in the account any time.”
“Let’s do that.”
“We getting those cars in the morning, honey?”
“Yeah. Whenever you want. I told them we had various things going on.”
“Did you see what the boys are taking?”
“English and math. Sarah is doing nursing. Michael is taking philosophy. Danny is taking an intro course for veterinary medicine.”
“This will be very good for them.”
“I hope so. I’m going to have Kevin buy a single shot 20 gauge shotgun for Carmelita. We think shooting will give her a sense of empowerment, that she can fight back.”
“Guns give me a sense of empowerment.”
“It’s not quite the sense I want Carmelita to have, Dave.”
“I sort of got that when you wanted to give her something that wasn’t belt fed.”
“I remembered you saying single shots encourage marksmanship.”
“You’re not thinking of the next round, you’re thinking of this one.”
“You think it’s a good choice?”
“Yeah. A .22 would be fine, but a shotgun makes more noise, and it will give her more of a sense of power, which it does have.”
“What choke do you want?”
“Full. If she shoots birds, she probably won’t be real close. For varmints, the full choke will put the whole load in him.”
“What varmints is she going to shoot?”
“Skunk, coon, possum, rat, rattlesnake, stuff like that.”
“You don’t like coons?”
“They will kill your barn cats. I was going to ask you if you would like to have some housecats.”
“I love cats. Let’s have a bunch.”
“I thought you would. We can ask around, or maybe we should just go to the SPCA and go ahead and pay the fees.”
“We can afford them. You need to adjust your thinking.”
“Next time we come in, we’ll get 5 or so. Put in some cat doors.”
“I like that.”
“I’m about ready to go to sleep.”
“Maybe something else first?”
“Or in the morning.”
They went to their bedroom. “It isn’t about me?”
“Nah. Just slowing down. It happened before, and I came back. Some day, I guess I won’t. I’ll still love you. If you want me to do it with my hand, well, any time.”
“Your hands are very nice. I think what I really want is a good cuddle.”
They got in bed and she burrowed in. He caressed her and played with her hair, and then she discovered the very thing she had hoped for. She took it and put it in herself.
* * *
In the morning, she was hustling around, putting things in her suitcase and his duffel. She was wearing stretch pants and some nice high heeled boots. Her top was one of those fluffy fuzzy sweaters. She had her hair in a pony tail. Dave got out of bed, came up behind her and held her, and kissed her on the cheek. Then he went to take a shower. He came out, dried off, and got dressed in brown overalls and a light grey cotton sweater, with Red Wing Irish Setters.
“I’d want to get back in bed if I thought there was a chance.”
“You can count on a lunchtime cuddle, and we’ll see where it leads.”
“I’m getting my cuddle. In fact, I might demand several of them today.”
“It’s somewhere in the rights of a princess, that she can get a cuddle whenever she wants.”
“I’m glad you know that. Roseanna is making breakfast right now.”
“You’re frisky, and in a great mood this morning.”
“I had a great night last night. The sex was great, but the kissing and caressing after was really something.”
“I liked it, too.”
“Now we go out and try not to look like we’ve been fucking like rabbits.”
They went into the kitchen, and sat at the table. They ate some scrambled eggs and pancakes. Dave had a few slices of nice crisp bacon. He got a small bowl of oatmeal. He dipped a piece of toast in a puddle of cheese sauce. “There is going to be a lot left over.”
“She takes it out to the bunkhouse and it’s gone instantly. Then she cooks a bunch of eggs and stuff on the grill there. The deep fryer is up because as soon as we finish eating, she is going to drop a five pound bag of French fries, and the boys will eat every one of them in 10 minutes.”
“I suppose there is a lot I don’t know about ranch life.”
“We’re not going to buy a bulldozer.”
“Because?”
“Everyone is against it. They say they don’t need perimeter roads, they can ride horses there. As to snowmobiles, they say fine, buy them and we will beat them to pieces, but we don’t need no stinking roads. They did the whole perimeter since we discussed it. They used a bunch of pipe I bought surplus in Oklahoma, and they welded some old bolts to them, and they put a clove hitch in the barbed wire, half above and half below the bolt. Also, they don’t want to cut down good trees to make roads. They think you should cut down junk trees and ride between the nice ones.”
“Well, that is that.”
“You’re not mad?”
“No. I was kind of thinking it was too much money.”
“Let’s go get some cars.”
They got in the Baby, and headed onto the highway. Jainie was driving.
“I-94 east.”
“Yeah.”
It was cold and clear, with not much ice on the road. On the Interstate, the tires would have melted and sprayed away the ice.
“Do they keep this plowed year round?”
“I think so. Usually the traffic keeps the Interstates clear. In the North, you can find out at truck stops when they get closed or very icy. Sometimes you do drive hundreds of miles on icy pavement. The truck stops can be skating rinks.”
“We won’t be up here for that stuff.”
“No.”
“This looks pretty good.”
“Stay wary. If you think you see water, it may be water with black ice under it. Or it may be black ice straight up.”
“Is it better or worse for a truck, relative to a car?”
“Usually better. You hit some ice, but you have a lot of wheels that are not on it, so you can remain in control. If it’s worse, it is much worse. Cars can do a 360 and be driven away from it. Trucks jackknife, and sometimes overturn. You can’t hardly drift a truck. You need to be very observant. Black ice sometimes has a glittery look from ice crystals on top. You see that, and you know it’s no puddle. But a puddle often has black ice under it, especially later in winter when the road has frozen hard already. The cold pavement can freeze water to itself while it runs off on top. This time of year, the worst stuff is usually when the day goes above freezing for a while. The snow melts, and runs across the road and freezes. The worst black ice will be where water drained, and then froze without running off. Also places where there is shade from the southwest, because the sun could melt off the road for miles and miles, and this one spot is still ice. The road is wet for miles, but this one spot, there is ice under there. You might see snow on the shoulders in that spot, and that could tip you off that the water on the road isn’t water.”
“We’re not going to drive on the icy roads, are we?”
“Not unless you want to get to the ranch in winter. We don’t need the money bad enough to drive on ice.”
“I want to stop here.”
“Be careful with exits and bridges. They can be shady and icy. They can be lower and colder. Conditions are different. You have to be aware of different conditions. So you suspect ice before you are on it.”
She slowed for the exit, and continued to lose speed. Dave looked, but saw nothing to alert him. She turned and went into the truck stop. She parked the truck.
They went in. “Dave, do you sometimes feel like you have dropped into an alien world?”
“I get that feeling a lot. This can’t really be where I belong.”
“What, though, is there? That guy at the JC told me about the two theorems, and I was just amazed. My husband did that? You’re such a regular guy with the overalls and trucks and stuff, and then I find out that, my investigators notwithstanding, you are this incredible mathematician who will be remembered 500 years from now in encyclopedias.”
“Or not. Remember that my code and results are gone.”
“You let them…no, what you did was sensible. The theorems have no value to you. You did it all just to do it. So then you went to the private sector and got ripped off again.”
“Let’s get some coffee.”
“Are you going to drive?”
“You need a break, don’t you? “We will be back out of the icy area by tonight.”
“Yeah.”
They went in the door. “It’s just money, and I don’t need it. Especially now. We run the ranch well, we will never lack for it. Us working is an add on.”
“But you had a whole career, and you wrote all that code, and then you end up with nothing for it.”
“You don’t always make money just because you do something well.”
A man in a strange green suit stepped up alongside him. “What language do you code in?”
“Cobol. It was a long time ago.”
The man gave him a strange look. Dave turned toward the door flicking his finger to his eyes and mouth. Jainie followed him out. He headed for the truck. He took a quarter out of his pocket and dropped it. Jainie picked it up as he turned. He looked at the truck stop entrance as she handed him the quarter. They went on to the truck, and he stood behind the truck next to her and looked at the entrance. He got into the truck as Jainie got in the passenger seat. They drove off.
“What?”
“I guess nothing.”
“It didn’t look like nothing.”
“He came up and started talking about code. But we were talking when we should not have been. Be that as it may, I told him Cobol because it’s a business language. Awful. Anything you can write in Cobol, it can be written faster in C, and it will be better. Faster, more robust. Cobol sucks. He acted like like I was going to say something else.”
“Assembler.”
“Well, watch that word. It’s a very uncommon language. It’s hard to learn, and not much used. So it’s something they could notice. See, you drive a big truck. It was hard to learn to drive it, but now you would probably rather take the Baby to Houston than drive a compact car. You like being able to see, you like the space, and you don’t care about the size, because you have learned to live with it. Right?”
“Yes. I like to travel in the Baby. I don’t want a car any more.”
“That’s what an assembly language programmer is like. She doesn’t give a shit about some compiler that is supposedly going to keep her out of trouble. She doesn’t need an automatic transmission or any of that kind of crap. But if she says she would like to travel in a 70 foot long truck, it makes her unusual. Noticable. So we don’t want to be noticed, and we don’t say assembler or machine language.”
“I have this. We are low profile. Computers? We have laptops with pictures of our families on them. Programming? No, I don’t do that. Topography? I know what a topographic map is, the ones with the lines on them. Non linear topography? I have no idea what that is.”
“Right, exactly.”
He pulled into a truck stop, and looked at the traffic behind for a minute, then pulled to the fuel islands. “We may as well get some fuel.” They went in, and got the pump started. Dave went out and pumped the fuel, then came back and got it run on the Trendar. He took the receipt and put it in his pocket, and went to find Jainie at the coffee island. She handed him a cup. “I’ll take it from the shipper, maybe.”
“OK. Whenever.”
They looked over the deli stuff, and ended up buying some sandwiches that had a lot of meat on them. There was cheese in the truck.
They went out again. Jainie said “What is that?” She pointed to some deer corn.
Dave leaned up against it. “They feed it to deer.” He looked behind them, but did not see anything.
They continued walking. “I didn’t see anything, Dave, I was just making an excuse for you to look behind us.”
This was just wonderful. He had taken a sweet innocent girl from the highway, and now he was teaching her intelligence tradecraft. Then he thought of how she had come to be there, and the law of unintended consequences was doing overtime.
“I didn’t see anything, Sarah.”
They got in the truck. He sat on the edge of the bed in the sleeper, and started to look in the bag for the sandwiches. She took the bag from him, and put it in the refrigerator. She pushed him down on the bed and burrowed in. “Hold me, Dave.”
He put his arms around her, and pulled her up against himself. She wriggled, getting as close as she could. She sighed. Dave concentrated on the moment, thinking of nothing but his feelings for her. She twitched like she had felt an electric shock, and gripped him tighter. She rubbed her cheek against his. Then she got onto her elbows, and looked him in the eyes from very close. “Do you love me like I love you, Dave?”
“I think so.”
She leapt into the driver’s seat and drove off. “You think so?”
“You ask me to compare the unknowable to the unfathomable.”
“In calculus, you compare one infinity to another?”
“Yes.”
“So why can’t you solve this one?”
“The incalculable is more or less than the incomprehensible?”
“Give me another one, and I’ll let you off the hook.”
“The nonintegrable is compared to the innumerable.”
“How clever you are! Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“One more.”
“The relation of the indeterminate to the equivocal.”
“And you’re a mathematician. Why not a poet?”
“Poetry is a way of saying nothing and making it seem profound. Mathematics is a way of stating the profound and making it seem like nothing.”
“Physics.”
“Mathematics forced to work for a living.”
“Chemistry.”
“Physics forced to work for a living.”
“Biology.”
“A science devoted to proving that it is not physics and chemistry.”
“Sociology.”
“Philosopy pretending to be science.”
“Psychology.”
“Daddy Freud and a lot of Oedipus complexes.”
“Economics.”
“Philosophy wearing a shirt that says science on it, but the buttons are off by one.”
“Computer science.”
“In programming, if you can’t do, teach.”
“History.”
“Those who study it are also condemned to repeat it.”
“Engineering.”
“Science forced to work for a living.”
“Science.”
“Physics and its results.”
“You’re very snappy today.”
“You don’t mean snippy.”
“No. Quick. A little snippy. Opinionated but informed, and funny. A little bit judgmental and a little bit mean but wry.”
The landscape was a light layer of snow on dead grass, with an occasional leafless tree.
“If there were a Hell, it could be built right here.”
“That’s more on the bitter side. Ambrose Bierce.”
“You don’t like him?”
“He can be fun, but sometimes he is too mean.”
“All of us are sometimes.”
“You’re never mean to me. Sometimes you hurt my feelings, but you’re not being mean. I think I chose my prince wisely. Since saying otherwise would indicate your own unworthiness, as well as insult the princess, it follows that you will say I did choose wisely.”
“You did.”
“That was kind of like scoring a bull’s eye by driving the arrow into the target with a hammer, but I still liked it.”
“The next exit is the shipper.”
“I knew that, but it’s always worth mentioning.” She took the exit and went to the shipper. A young guy met them. “I have some of the keys here. The cars are out back. My boss is collecting keys and paperwork still.”
“Let’s get the truck in place. Dave?”
“I’ll walk alongside you and signal.”
She handed him the little handheld CB with the headphone. They put them on 67, and nobody was on it, so he got out and walked ahead. Straight back. A little left wheel. Hold it there. Keep coming. Straighten out. Right wheel, about a turn. Little more. Keep coming. Ok, straight back, and put your left corner about 20 feet out from that little sky blue car. Nothing on the right if you miss the old yellow bus. Keep coming. Looking good. You always do. Keep coming, good right there. Set the brakes.”
He turned off the CB and handed it in the door to Jainie. “I’m looking good?”
“You are.”
Dave went to the back of the trailer and turned on the little motor. He lowered the upper ramp. “What’s your name, my man?”
“Phil.”
“Dave and Jainie.”
“Do you load cars, Phil?”
“I would, if they let me.”
“We can. Our insurance covers anyone we ask to help.”
“I’d be glad to help.”
“Watch the master put that Aston Martin in the top deck forward. That’s the hardest spot to load.”
The Aston Martin came around in a wide circle, and shot up the ramp, and to the forward berth. Jainie got out and locked the wheel chocks up, and tightened the hold downs.
Dave took a key from Phil, and Jainie took another. They ran 3 more cars in, and chocked them and locked them down. Back out, the shipper had 4 more sets of keys, and they ran 3 more cars in to the lower deck. Dave let Phil put in the last one, and went through the papers, with Jainie checking vin numbers against the papers. Everything was right, so they signed the bill of lading, and took their copy. Dave handed Phil a $100 bill. “We needed your help.”
“Can I take this?” he asked the shipper.
“Of course he can.”
“Right. You can, Phil. Thank the gentleman, and take a last look at the pretty lady, and we go back to work.”
Phil did both.
Jainie basked in the compliment as she got back in the truck. She rolled the window down. “Phil, you can ride on the running board.” He got on it, while the shipper refused a similar offer. They came down to the office and stopped. Jainie tousled Phil’s hair. He got off, and she took off. Dave fussed with the papers and keys. “We have everything. West to Billings.” He said.
“We’re doing it. I’ll stop for coffee in an hour or so, and we can check the cars.”