Ivy Takes Care Page 4

  “Billy Joe,” she said, “if you don’t get on out of here right now, I will ruin you!”

  “Ruin me!” Billy Joe laughed. He snapped his bubble gum but did not yet reach for the gun. “And how would you go about that, Miss Climbing Vine?”

  So that he would have to listen to her very carefully, Ivy whispered, “Billy Joe, do you know what Joker! magazine is?”

  Billy Joe turned a shade of red. Everyone knew that Joker! was a magazine full of off-color humor. Completely and totally forbidden in the Butterworth house. “What of it?”

  “You remember Mr. Cuthbert?”

  Billy Joe squinted. It was hard to remember the guests’ names once they left the ranch, unless there was something special about them. “So, what about him?” asked Billy Joe.

  “When Mr. Cuthbert went home, he left a whole pile of Joker! magazines under his bed. I found ’em and hid ’em where no one knows but me. Billy Joe, if you hurt these critters, your mother is going to find those magazines under your bed someday soon, when you least expect it. And then she’ll skin you alive for reading smut.”

  “You are lying, girl!” said Billy Joe.

  “Try me,” said Ivy.

  Mr. Cuthbert had actually left a stash of Time magazines, not Joker! magazines, but Billy Joe couldn’t guess that. Ivy knew a thing or two about Cora Butterworth, a deacon of the Methodist church. To Cora Butterworth, Joker! magazine would stand about as close to the Devil’s work as ever came between two covers. Billy Joe knew it, too.

  She could almost hear Billy Joe skim through the possibilities of what would happen to him if his mother found a pile of Joker! magazines under his bed.

  Finally Billy Joe said darkly, “That’s blackmail, Ivy. Blackmail.”

  “And that’s murder,” said Ivy, pointing to the gun.

  Billy Joe did not linger. He walked out of the barn, untied Texas, threw the reins back over the horse’s neck, and got in the saddle. Ivy watched his every move.

  “Blackmailer!” he yelled, so Ivy was sure to hear it.

  She watched him until his horse made a turn at the top of Mule Canyon, so she knew for sure he intended to go home. But she also knew that life in the stable was no longer safe for her foxes. The vixen mother padded gracefully around the stall, putting her full weight on the injured foot. Her family was ready for the outside world.

  Ivy opened the door of the stall wide, got the hose, and aimed a jet of water above the foxes. “Go on, now!” she yelled.

  The fox mother and her kits bolted out of the stall and into the stable. Another blast of the hose sent them out into the paddock. But then they stopped. They circled and watched her, as if they might get one more piece of steak.

  Ivy picked up the gun and broke open the barrel. There was a cartridge in each chamber.

  “Git! Git!” she shouted at them. “Go, little family! Don’t ever come back!”

  As she discharged the gun into the air, the fox mother and her kits lit out like red streaks for the mountain beyond. The last things she saw were two white tail tips disappearing behind the sagebrush.

  Ivy piled up some stray cinder blocks to seal the hole where the mother fox had crawled into the stable. She ejected the used cartridge from the shotgun, then locked it and all the remaining cartridges in a drawer in the tack room. She didn’t trust Billy Joe one lick.

  “Stay out there, where you belong!” she yelled after the fox family and into the distance. She knew she would never see them again.

  Monday morning, Ivy woke as her alarm clock hit five a.m. She heard the train coming eastward from California. The Pratts were on that train, coming home after three weeks away.

  The night before, Ivy had made sure that Chestnut would be show-ring clean, with his mane braided, his hooves oiled, and his stall clean as a whistle when the Pratts’ Pontiac turned into the drive.

  Sure enough, Mrs. Pratt was thrilled to see her pony so fit and happy.

  “I’ll miss Chestnut,” said Ivy.

  “You may come anytime and say hello and enjoy him,” said Mrs. Pratt, taking five silver dollars and a fifty-cent piece out of her purse and giving them to Ivy.

  Ivy thanked Mrs. Pratt. “I would have taken care of Chestnut for nothing!” she added.

  “That’s the best kind of work, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Pratt. “The kind you’d do anyway, for nothing. Don’t spend it all in one place,” she added.

  “It all goes in my college envelope,” said Ivy.

  “I thought you’d say something like that,” said Mrs. Pratt. “Honey, if you are going to run a business, you should get yourself a wristwatch. Strunk’s carries a large variety of them. Here’s another five dollars. Consider it a tip. Promise you’ll get a nice watch for yourself, now?”

  Ivy promised with a big smile. “You can call me anytime,” she said. “I’ll be here. And, thank you, Mrs. Pratt. I never thought I’d have a wristwatch till I graduated from high school!”

  Ivy rode into downtown Carson City. She parked her bike at Strunk’s General Store and clanked down her ten new silver dollars for Mr. Strunk’s Savers’ Club. If you put a dollar in the Savers’ Club every month, Mr. Strunk gave back your twelve dollars at Christmastime and added a dollar interest, hoping you’d spend it in his store. But come Christmastime Ivy was going to withdraw her money with interest and put it all in the U. envelope.

  “Well, if it isn’t Miss Moneybags!” came a voice from the end of the soda fountain. This was followed by a loud snap of gum. Who else but Billy Joe Butterworth was looking right down the soda bar at Ivy with that superior expression on his face. “Making money hand over fist! How much did you get paid?” he asked with a snort. Ivy paid Billy Joe no mind whatsoever.

  On one side of Strunk’s front window was an array of Star Crazy watches. The tiny Star Crazy girl on the face of the watch smiled a movie-star smile, little jewels for eyes.

  Ivy asked to try the watch on. Mr. Strunk was happy to let her try it in three different color band and jewel combinations. “I asked you a question, Miss Snoot!” said Billy Joe. “How much did those people pay you for walking that fat little horse around the paddock twice a day?”

  Ivy plonked her arm down right in front of Billy Joe, who didn’t own a watch, and never would, because his mother knew he’d lose it, break it, or dunk it in the rain barrel the very first day.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out!” said Ivy.

  Tick, tick, tick, went the watch. Billy Joe looked at it enviously. Ivy took the watch off and gave it back to Mr. Strunk. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Billy Joe said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?” asked Ivy.

  “I’ll buy you a soda if you cross your heart and hope to die never to go in my room and leave anything there or under my bed!”

  “Looks like you’ve learned a thing or two about private property, Billy Joe,” said Ivy. “It’s a deal. Providing you call me by my right name, Ivy, and never call me Miss Snoot or Miss Climbing Vine from here on in.”

  “Deal,” said Billy Joe. He slapped the soda counter with the palm of his hand. “Two chocolate malts, please, Mr. Strunk! One for me and one for Ivy here.”

  “Make mine a double!” said Ivy.

  Opportunity always knocks when you least expect it,” Ivy’s mother said, after Ivy complained that the telephone was not immediately ringing with new jobs. Ivy never would have guessed that her next assignment would come from one of the guests at the Red Star Ranch.

  “Poor Mr. Burgess,” said Ivy’s father one July evening when the Red Star guests had been taken to the Christmas Tree Lodge for a fancy dinner. “I took him out on the Eagle River trail today. I showed him beautiful Washoe Lake, and all he did was cry. Comes from New Jersey. Terrible wife.”

  It went without saying that all the guests at the Red Star Ranch had terrible wives or terrible husbands, because that was the side of the story you got when you ran a dude ranch in Nevada in 1949.

>   Ivy’s dad was a man who hated gossip. On the other hand, it was near impossible not to reveal details of the guests and their troubles, because it was all in a day’s work and there were always interesting guests at the Red Star Ranch.

  Ivy didn’t usually listen in on conversations, but she drank in every word of what her dad told her happened along the trails. The guests usually spilled the beans about what was happening back home the second or third week they went out riding with him. That was how Ivy’d found out all about a certain Mr. Smith, who, by mistake, married a lady who liked to throw dishes at him and had run off with a traveling salesman.

  Billy Joe Butterworth made it his business to know all about the guests. When he could, Billy Joe had been known to listen in on guests’ conversations over the telephone line. He had been especially interested in a Mrs. Jones, married by mistake to a bank robber who ate nothing but garlic.

  Billy Joe could hardly contain himself when a really interesting guest came along. He said he kept a book of all their doings and undoings, but Ivy didn’t believe him because Billy Joe was too disorganized to write anything down, even in his school notebook.

  Ivy waited for her dad to release a little more information about Mr. Burgess. Ivy’s dad went on. “That poor sap, Burgess. Still boo-hooing like the world has come to its end.”

  “That big, handsome, barrel-chested man?” asked Ivy’s mother. “Why, he ate three plates of pancakes for breakfast! I didn’t have any more batter after him, not to mention all the bacon.”

  “And he’s been here three weeks already,” Ivy’s dad added. “Most of ’em have calmed down some by this time.”

  “What kind of wife would leave such a handsome, sweet man? I’d like to know!” Ivy’s mother said.

  Ivy twirled a forkful of her spaghetti and wondered how much her daddy would tell about why such a man might have cried on the horse trails up in the mountains, where the desert flowers bloomed and Lake Tahoe shone like a diamond miles off on the California line.

  “He misses his dogs is what,” said Ivy’s dad. “He don’t like horses so much. He likes dogs. Dog breeder. He’s got a whole kennel back home, and you’d think the dogs was his kids.”

  Late that night, Ivy was awoken by a low moaning sound coming from one of the guest cottages. For a minute she thought it might be a coyote who’d lost her kits. But if it was a coyote, Hoover and Coover would be on it in a flash, and they were quiet. The moaning grew louder.

  Ivy sat up and listened. I bet that’s poor Mr. Burgess crying over his dogs. I bet I could cheer him up, said Ivy to herself. She put on her jeans and T-shirt and slipped out the front door. On the way out she grabbed a handful of chocolate Hershey’s Kisses from the candy dish, meant only for ranch guests. She let herself out and crossed the grassy patch that separated the guest cottages from the Butterworth’s main house. Mr. Burgess occupied cottage number three. Ivy tapped politely on the door.

  She had to tap louder before Mr. Burgess heard her. He opened the door, blowing his nose. “I’m so sorry if I disturbed you,” said Mr. Burgess. “I’ll be quiet.”

  “I brought you some Hershey’s Kisses,” said Ivy. “Sometimes when I get upset, my mama gives me one and I unwrap the silver paper and eat it and it stops the crying, bam!” She kept her voice low. The guest cottages were close to the Butterworths’ house, and Billy Joe could hear a pin drop.

  “Come in,” said Mr. Burgess. “Why on earth should a nice girl like you cry?”

  “Because Mary Louise Merriweather at school makes my life miserable because she’s so perfect and snotty to everyone who isn’t her friend,” explained Ivy, “and my best friend hasn’t written to me all summer from camp.”

  Ivy took a chocolate out of her pocket and offered it to Mr. Burgess. He peeled off the wrapper, popped it into his mouth, and sucked on it. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his pajamas and sat on his bed.

  “I’m a fool,” he said. “A fool for my dogs. I came out here to divorce my wife and had to leave my German shepherds in Teaneck, New Jersey, with my brother.”

  “What are their names?” asked Ivy. She sat in the moonlight in the rocking chair opposite Mr. Burgess.

  “Siegfried,” he answered, blowing his nose with a neatly folded handkerchief. With each dog’s name, his voice grew happier. “Birgit, Tristan, Elsa, and Parsifal. I trained them to be champions in the show and obedience ring. I have photos.”

  He turned on the light next to his bed and from his wallet on the dresser removed five photographs of five German shepherds. They all looked exactly the same to Ivy.

  “Beautiful!” she said. “Especially that one!”

  “That’s Birgit,” said Mr. Burgess. He unfolded a newspaper clipping, also kept in his wallet. It showed him with a winning team of shepherds at the Madison Square Garden Westminster dog show.

  “Wow!” said Ivy. “That’s the most famous dog show in the country!”

  “I have only three weeks and three days before I see them again,” Mr. Burgess explained, as if in Nevada he were the prisoner of Zenda. “My wife, Elma, thinks dogs are dirty and dangerous. She left me and fell in love with a banker who hates dogs and lives in a big modern apartment building in New York City and drives a yellow racing car.”

  “I’d be upset, too, Mr. Burgess,” said Ivy. “I don’t understand people who don’t love animals. I actually run my own business. It’s an animal take-care service. I do dogs, horses, turtles, birds — whatever people have.”

  “I wish Elma had taken lessons from you, Ivy,” said Mr. Burgess. “Dogs are just creatures like us people, and I love ’em like my own kids. That is, if I had kids, which I don’t, ’cause Elma doesn’t like kids, either.”

  Ivy nodded in sturdy agreement. “I’d rather have five German shepherds than any old New York City banker,” said Ivy.

  “I would, too,” said Mr. Burgess, his voice squeaking a little.

  “I’ll take the yellow racing car!” said a voice from the doorway. It was Billy Joe Butterworth, in his blue striped pajamas. He stood in the light of the porch lamp, batting at the moths that gathered there.

  “Billy Joe, you get on out of here!” snapped Ivy. “This is a private conversation!” But it was too late. Billy Joe had already unlatched the cottage door and let himself into Mr. Burgess’s room, cool as a cucumber.

  “I have an idea!” Billy Joe said. “It’s better than any old chocolate candy, too.”

  Ivy had half a mind to clock him over the head then and there, but he signaled her and went on. “Five miles south of town, there’s a lady who’s got five of them shepherd pups. Saw them today, ’cause my dad dropped off some hay at the Perkins place. Cute as day, those pups. Born end of May, I reckon. She’s got a sign up now, advertising ’em. Maybe you’d like to see ’em just to cheer you up!”

  Ivy knew what Billy Joe was up to. He was afraid Mr. Burgess might bolt right back to New Jersey to his dogs and not pay his bill if he was this homesick. Guests who didn’t pay were bad news for the Red Star Ranch. Sometimes guests just skedaddled. Some guests got telephone calls and all their marriage troubles were forgiven over the phone. The whole ranch suffered when the divorcers kissed, made up, and went home. It was important to keep the guests happy. Unpaid rentals meant mashed potato sandwiches instead of ham-and-cheese for both Ivy’s family and Billy Joe’s.

  Mr. Burgess looked at Billy Joe as if he had seen the second coming of the Lord.

  “I’d love to see those pups,” he said. “What time do you two finish day chores tomorrow?”

  Ivy did not un-dignify the day by arguing with Billy Joe as to who would sit in the front seat of Mr. Burgess’s rented Cadillac. A fancy car meant more to Billy Joe than it did to her. Ivy had it in the back of her mind that, just maybe, one of the Perkinses’ pups might come home with Mr. Burgess and it might just as well ride in the backseat with her. Another dog wouldn’t matter much at the Red Star Ranch. Hoover and Coover were eleven-year-old sheepdog brothers and didn’t like to
do much more than lie in the sun and chew the burrs off their feet. They didn’t even get up for jackrabbits anymore.

  “Boy, it must be fun to drive this baby!” said Billy Joe as Mr. Burgess put the car in reverse. Ivy knew this was Billy Joe’s way of asking if Mr. Burgess would let him take the Caddy to the end of the driveway.

  “It’s a rented car, Billy Joe,” said Ivy. “It’d cost a lot of money if something went wrong, like stripping the gears!”

  Billy Joe turned around and gave Ivy a serious stink eye. He knew that she knew that he had stripped the gears on his dad’s pickup and was forbidden to even put a hand on the steering wheel.

  At the Perkinses’ farm, Mr. Burgess vaulted into the middle of the puppy enclosure. Mrs. Perkins tossed an apron at him so his pants wouldn’t get messed up.

  “Champion bloodlines, dam and sire,” she recited. “They got all their inoculations and are vet-certified in perfect health. Look at the bone on that one. Look at the bites. No overshots, no undershots, no fiddle fronts, no straight stifles, and no laggy, draggy hindquarters in this madhouse!”

  Ivy knew the words dam and sire meant the mother and father, the same as for horses. But she wondered about straight stifles and fiddle fronts, not to mention laggy, draggy hindquarters. Mrs. Perkins did not explain these things, but handed out sodas all around.

  The price of the pups sounded like a small fortune to Ivy. Ivy guessed that Mr. Burgess, having rented a Cadillac when he might have rented a Chevy or a Ford, did not have too much trouble with money.

  “How come the females are more costly?” asked Ivy.

  Mrs. Perkins picked up a girl pup with a sherbet-pink tummy. “ ’Cause they’re gonna give you a lot of litters,” she answered. “Breed ’em and you’ll get the price back ten times over in a jiffy. Not that we do it for the money, mind you!”

  One after another, Mr. Burgess cuddled the German shepherd babies in his arms. As the afternoon grew late, it was clear he could not bear to leave without one. Finally after much backing and forthing, Mr. Burgess chose a male with a black saddle on his reddish-tan back, black stockings, and a black-as-charcoal muzzle.