Stars Always Shine (2 page)

As he viewed the passing scenes, breaking them up into individual life stories that began and ended with each demarcation of a fence or a long dirt driveway, Plácido reflected on the important events of his and Michelle’s relationship. They had met in the library at Berkeley when Michelle was in law school and Plácido was just in school. He had expressed a joking sentiment about lawyers while waiting in line to check out books, and Michelle, standing behind him, took the quip as a challenge. Over coffee, she defended her profession faithfully and held up well to Plácido’s cynical questions and comments. After a few quick dates and a fast marriage, they eventually finished school and settled in northern California where Michelle worked as a public defender and Plácido worked as a househusband. His master’s degree in American Studies yielded little more than part-time private tutoring in the way of gainful employment.

During their eight-year marriage, they had lived modestly, first in a studio apartment in Berkeley, then in a conservative condominium in Santa Rosa. They had learned so much about each other, not having the space or private place in such small quarters to retreat to alone. And they had come, through their individual training, to respect the language of silence that each of them was fluent in.

Plácido, self-conscious and soft-spoken, had spent years working in fields and orchards. His parents had coached him that field work should be done in silence, speaking only when absolutely necessary. The important objective was to work quickly and quietly, pulling pears, plums, grapes, or cotton from their life source, placing them in buckets, boxes, or bags, and then moving on to the next tree or row. In the silent pace of mute desperation brought on by the possibilities of piecework, it was important that the eyes looked ahead. So while the hands took from one area of a vine or tree, the eyes were scanning another. For Plácido and his family, the future hung only seconds and branches away. Michelle had learned her communicative silence from working with animals, which were more responsive to soft coos, low murmurs, and caressing whispers. Especially in her years of dressage, she had learned the still and subtle cues and maneuvers that enabled her horse to understand and respond to the slightest movements of her hands and legs, and the most delicate and discreet shifts in weight. For her, this was true interaction, more than she had ever felt or known with humans.

“Are you nervous?” Plácido finally asked, now studying Michelle’s profile, the strong, straight nose, self-assured jaw, and bold chin line. Her light red hair was tied back into a ponytail, and in her short-sleeved cotton blouse and blue jeans, she looked as if she belonged on this land rather than in a courtroom.

She released a reserved smile and continued to look ahead. “No. I’m not nervous at all. There’s nothing to be nervous about.”

“So you know what you’re going to tell them?” Plácido asked, hesitated, and then added, “And what you’re not going to tell them?”

“Of course I do! Our moot court last night proceeded beautifully. If you’re well prepared to answer questions and you anticipate what the other side will ask, you’ll do well. Don’t I always win when we argue?”

“Yeah, okay,” Plácido said. “But why am
I
nervous?”

“Because you want us to get this place. We decided it was time for a change and this is the perfect situation.”

Michelle slowed on the last corner, and they drove onto StarRidge Ranch and past the resting cottage. Michelle took a long look at the ranch as she slowly made her way toward the house. A bright red, wide pickup truck with four wheels occupying the rear axle and ovals of orange reflectors outlining the running boards and roof of the cab was parked in front of the main house. Michelle pulled up alongside it. Before they exited their truck, she patted Plácido on the leg.

“Don’t be nervous, honey. We’ll do fine,” she said, and her mind registered a photographic scene of the ranch before they went up to the house.

Jacqueline and Mickey Kittle sat at a kitchen table inside the ranch house. When they heard the vehicle drive up, they looked at each other. Mickey raised his eyebrows and Jacqueline rolled her eyes. There were paragraphs communicated in those expressions. Mickey’s facial statement expressed a positive possibility that this interview might produce competent individuals. Jacqueline’s aspect showed a hint of frustration.

He was young, in his late twenties. His wiry body and short hair exposed elfish ears, and his face was punctuated with a dot of a nose that made him look boyish. His large cowboy hat seemed too large for him, and it somehow made him look unbalanced. Mickey rose from the table and went to the front door. He was dressed for the interviews as he dressed for virtually everything else he did: the big hat, a loose and hanging T-shirt, blue jeans, and pointed, thick-heeled boots. He opened the door before Michelle or Plácido had reached it, and his kind eyes and mellow smile greeted them as he put up a hand in a waving gesture.

“Mickey Kittle,” he said as he reached out to Michelle and then to Plácido. “Come on in.”

The huge house was empty except for the kitchen table and chairs, which were out of place in the living room. Jacqueline remained seated as she hypnotically looked down at her yellow pad covered with inky scrawls that only ancient Egyptians might understand. Jacqueline was thirteen years older than Mickey. Mickey’s sanguine attitude and easygoing manner conveyed a youthful freshness that was attractive to her, especially since her previous marriage had recently ended in a heated battle over ownership of real estate and a couple of small business holdings. At the urging of her new and young husband, Jacqueline had invested other endowed monies and sold her portion of a bar to purchase StarRidge Ranch—the name she christened it at the close of escrow. She had a prognathic jaw and perpetually downward-slanting eyebrows that caused the skin between them to crease vertically and which made her look as if she were always angry. Her nose sloped like a ski jump, and her thin lips glossed in a torrid crimson, matching her long, spiked fingernails, lacked passion. She wore a gingham scarf over mousy brown hair, and her double-yoked western shirt with pearl buttons and bright colors, turquoise jeans, and cowboy boots with elaborate swirls and curves made her look like a ranch owner.

Michelle reached across the table and offered her hand. “Michelle Stanton. Pleased to meet you.”

“Plácido Moreno,” her partner said, and offered his hand too.

Jacqueline looked up from her mesmerizing pad and said, “Oh. Hi. I’m Jacqueline Kittle.” She stared at Michelle blankly for a few awkward moments before accepting her hand.

Mickey cleared his nervous throat before commencing the interview and motioned for Michelle and Plácido to have a seat. “Well, why don’t we just get this thing underway?”

“I’ve read your resume and your letters of recommendation,” Jacqueline began. “They seem to be impressive.”

“Well, thank you,” Michelle replied. “When I saw the ad in the paper, I thought about what it called for and what I had done years ago and what I am currently employed in, and I felt that I was as qualified as anyone around.”

“Well, you do understand that the position calls for an on-site manager of this big ranch?” Jacqueline asked. “There’s a lot of work on a ranch this size. But I’m sure you know that. If I asked you to go out to a pasture and halter a horse, do you think you could do it?”

“Do you have a horse and halter here?” Michelle asked. “I can go out and halter it now if you want.”

Jacqueline looked away. She sublimated her surprise at Michelle’s eager offer by looking over her and talking to the living room wall. “Uh, no, we don’t have any horses on the place yet. We just bought it. But when we start to get some horses in, you need to be ready. We need reliable on-site people now because it will take us about a year to wrap up our business at our ranch in Woodside. Mickey is a building contractor and he has some projects to finish. I’m a trainer. We can’t just walk away from our customers, you know.”

“I understand what you mean, Mrs. Kittle,” Michelle replied, and then asked, “What kind of a spread do you have in Woodside?”

Both Mickey and Jacqueline were caught off guard by the turn in the interview. None of the previous candidates had asked any questions and had mumbled and stuttered and sidestepped through Jacqueline’s tense questioning. The couple looked at each other quickly, and Mickey said, “Well, it’s a two-acre place. We’ve outgrew it a long time ago, and we finally decided that we needed a bigger ranch where I could do my roping and Jacqueline here could relocate her training business. This place was a steal.”

Michelle, accustomed to asking questions, proceeded with another. “What kind of training do you do? English? Western?”

Jacqueline looked down at her pad and drew in a deep breath while clenching her distinct jaw. “Am I doing the interview or are you?” she asked brusquely.

“Oh! I’m sorry, Mrs. Kittle,” Michelle answered, unrattled. “I just get carried away when people start to talk horses.”

“She’d talk to Mr. Ed and Francis the talking mule if she could,” Plácido chimed in, thinking he was witty.

Mickey laughed loudly and long. Michelle looked over at Plácido with a straight face. Jacqueline sat looking matronly and unamused.

“This one letter says you’ve been training out at North Coast Stables,” Jacqueline said as she studied the document with a detailed letterhead of a horse running on a beach.

“That’s right,” Michelle said. “Benny Manfredi runs a tight ranch. I was fortunate to last with him for these past five years. Plácido has been a ranch hand on the place during those years. So the arrangement we had with Manfredi is similar to the one you’re looking for.” Michelle did not flinch at the lies she had delivered. It was her strategy not to reveal that she was a lawyer, anticipating that the connotation alone could render unsubstantiated images of urban sophistication and rural ignorance. And Manfredi, along with the authors of the two other thoroughly bred lies that represented letters of high praise, were quite willing to say nice things about Michelle and then sign their names to the documents in exchange for advice in wiggling out of precarious litigious situations.

The first revelation this interview yielded was that Jacqueline did not like Michelle’s confidence. She cared even less for her strangely named sidekick of a husband. But having impulsively purchased a sixty-acre ranch, and not having anyone to watch and maintain it while they wrapped up business on their other property in Woodside created an urgent situation. She looked at Plácido for a few indifferent moments before asking coolly, “What kind of name is that, anyway?”

At times, Plácido was not as patient as his wife, and there was an ethnic impulse about him. References to his name were, in his mind, unsolicited references to his ethnicity, his culture, to an entire nation that helped shape and nurture California as well as other southwestern states before they were claimed by intruders. His deep blue eyes widened hatefully at Jacqueline for fleeting seconds. His high cheek bones twitched the tendons under his light brown skin as he tightened his jaw. In his mind the answer flashed, “It’s an American name.” But what emanated from his voice was: “It’s a Mexican name, I guess. I’m Mexican American. My parents were going to name me Zeferino, but they decided on Plácido instead. People who know me call me Place.”

Jacqueline remained as stoic as a statue. “Well, people who know me call me Jacqueline,” she said, unimpressed. Then thinking she had uncovered a flaw in Michelle and Plácido’s presentation, she asked accusingly, “Didn’t you two introduce yourselves with different last names?”

Under the table at which they sat, Michelle’s foot lightly tapped Place’s leg. She knew his anger would begin to flame as it always did when he became irritated by the conjugal question that never seemed to have any relevance to the arena in which it was presented. “Yes, we did,” Michelle explained. “I’m not quite sure why you’re asking, but we
are
married. I just didn’t change my name when Place and I got married. Why should I?” She looked at Jacqueline with questioning eyes and a blunt expression that expected an answer.

Jacqueline shifted in her seat and raised a hand to play with the hair at the back of her neck. “Well I just find that peculiar,” she said, and then diverted the discussion back to Plácido. “You say you worked on this North Coast ranch too?”

“Yes ma’am,” Plácido answered politely, the tide of his anger ebbing as he remembered how badly he and Michelle wanted to live in the country, away from the urgent demands of progressive society, criminals, too-close neighbors, and door-to-door salespeople. Especially lately, because the academic world did not seem to need his intellectual talents, Place had developed a snarling attitude toward life as an argyled, elbow-patched professional and he felt a sour-graped urge to abandon the institutions that didn’t want him. “I mainly mended fences, kept the barns up, made sure the waterers stayed clean, that sort of stuff,” he responded, remembering from the previous night’s rehearsal not to say too much and to keep things general. Plácido, as Michelle playfully teased him from time to time, was a dude. He had not had ranch exposure, even though as a young boy and before education made him more sapient and resourceful, he had worked with his parents and brothers and sisters as a migrant farm worker in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Plácido was tremulous from the mendacity of his words. As he waited to see if Jacqueline would accept his response, he felt the same gnawing nervousness from years ago as he flashed back to his final academic act when he delivered an oral defense of his thesis,
The Pastoral Violence in the Early Writings of Hamlin Garland.
Jacqueline maintained the same severed look that Plácido received from stern professors who determined whether he had produced anything defensible.

“I guess you noticed that this place has a few barns too, and things to keep up?” Jacqueline asked both of them. Before a response came from either Michelle or Plácido, Jacqueline added, “You say Manfredi’s ranch had more than one barn? It must have been about as big as this place.”