He paused, looking down at her. “How are you doing? Shall we make getting a new cane a first priority?”
“Nah. I only use it for steep stairs or hills. If we don’t do any more hiking I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go on. Rich guy, you won a land deed.”
“He got a couple of the players to witness, and signed it over to me. I then proceeded to lose the rest of the pot as I drank myself numb, as usual. I stumbled to my room, put the deed in the bottom of my travel bag, and pretty much forgot about it.”
“Wow,” Godiva said, sighing with relief when the top of the trail appeared at last.
Rigo slowed his pace a little. She was able to catch her breath as they reached flat ground. Once again he let her hand go in that easy, natural manner. With that heightened awareness, she noted a pulse of regret. That, too, would need some thinking out.
Later.
He pointed to a picnic table a few yards away. “We can sit under the trees here for a few minutes if you like.”
How could he be so watchful without being a nag about it? She said, “Only long enough to drink the rest of my thermos off. Funny, half an hour ago the last thing I wanted was water. Uh,” she added as she took the thermos from her purse. “Want some?”
“Thanks, I’ll be fine,” he said. “You go ahead. Dehydration is bad for humans.”
“You’re human now,” she pointed out.
“I know my limits. I’m not anywhere near them.”
She swallowed down the water gratefully, even if it was warm and stale tasting. Then she said, “And so, you had a deed, and horses . . .”
“So I had to find me a map to Kentucky, and make my way there. Took a while. I had to work my way. Horses are expensive to feed, and we couldn’t always forage. But we found the place. I saw why that guy parted with the deed so easy. The land was neglected, with an old farmstead on it, falling down. No electricity, no plumbing. But the grass was good, and the horses loved it. So I hired myself onto a construction company to learn carpentry, and began rebuilding the house . . .”
As they returned along the path to the car, skirting the pools that were already evaporating in the summer heat, Rigo went on to describe how he’d learned carpentry by day so he could work on his house by night, in between taking basic care of his animals. When the house was weatherproofed, he began volunteering with animal rescue teams on weekends so he could learn something about care beyond the basics of food, water, and exercise.
“ . . . the last project was the electricity. That is, to install it. Since I’d grown up without it, I was used to living with oil lamps, candles, and in winter the fireplace, but electricity wasn’t going away. I wanted a refrigerator, which would be a vast improvement over the cold cellar. So I started taking classes in electrical engineering, while working with a farrier on weekends. I told you I can hear animals’ thoughts.”
“What’s that like?” she asked.
“Difficult to explain. Feelings, images, memory of smells, mostly. The thing is, I could figure out what was wrong but not fix it, so I had to learn how.”
He looked over, then said slowly, “It was just after I’d finished wiring the downstairs, where all the necessary appliances live, and I was about to commence the upstairs, when a new guy showed up at work. I sensed a mythic shifter. He was focused on me.”
They reached the car. She climbed in, and in seconds they had blessed air conditioning going. “Was he connected to the Midwest Guardian you keep mentioning?”
“Right. We worked together on a couple building projects before he spoke up. He brought up shifters, and when I revealed I knew a little, but not much, he told me about the Guardians, and their goal to protect shifters as well as other creatures, four-legged and two. He asked if I’d be willing to take on rescues if the Guardians needed help, and I said rescue was rescue, whoever found out about it. In fact, one came up. The day before I was to leave on one, the shifter turned up on my doorstep with this skinny kid who looked a lot like me, except he has your eyes.”
Alejo did have her eyes. Godiva’s heart turned over. She listened eagerly, hungry for all the details.
Rigo smiled reminiscently as he drove along the rain-swept road toward the highway. “Alejo had been staying with some Jackson relatives in Michigan, so he could learn how to shift without being boxed into a city, while the Guardian network found me and checked me out. He was thrilled at the idea of a road trip. I figured we could get to know each other just as easy on the road, only the two of us, as we could at the ranch, so we took off.”
“And that’s when he wrote to me. Was that your idea?”
“At first, yes. He was so excited about everything, he forgot for a week or two, but it only took the one reminder. After that, he picked out the cards himself. Once we returned that fall, I signed him up for his senior year of high school. Then I had to learn how to cook, when I was used to catching meals on the fly. I wanted to give him as regular a home as I never had. At least I had a house to offer him, instead of a tumble-down shack. Even if it wasn’t finished. But it turned out not having electricity upstairs was grand funk groovy, I believe he said.”
“He and his buddy Lance used to say that,” Godiva exclaimed, her hands tightly clasped in her lap. She felt his gaze, and consciously loosened them. “I think it was supposed to be ironic. Or as ironic as teenage boys can manage.”
“Yep. All the subtlety of a blowtorch. I remember that age,” Rigo said with a laugh. “He took right to oil lamps, but even better was getting to mess around with wires as he helped me get the upstairs wired to code. He also took to the animals. By then I’d adopted a lot of my rescues, since I had plenty of land. Within a mo
nth Alejo and all the animals were long-lost buddies, even the one-eyed cat with the bent tail and a chewed ear, who didn’t like anybody. His name, no surprise, was That Damn Cat, or Damn for short. Damn would sneak in at night—I don’t even know how he got in, when the house was shut up tight during winter, He’d sleep on Alejo’s pillow next to his head, his purr sounding like a metal shredder, but come sunup he’d vanish, nothing happened, no cat here!”
As the Phantom ate up the miles, Rigo kept up the little anecdotes, and managed to make even his failures sound like they were . . . if not fun, no real hardship. But Godiva could read between the lines. It was clear that on top of everything else, Rigo had piled onto his work schedule a crash course in the arcane rules of high school sports in order to support Alejo’s team. He’d also learned to deal with report cards and parent conferences, without revealing that he had barely an elementary school education himself. Luckily Alejo had always been an excellent student.
Then his tone changed, becoming reflective. “ . . . I began to understand how my self-medication with hard liquor during my early years had stunted me as far as developing skills as a shifter. I didn’t even know that until I heard Alejo talking to his animal.”
“Talking?” Godiva repeated. “But . . . aren’t you and the basilisk one and the same?”