Chapter 5

Mom and Dad went old school on us. Well, I suppose you could call it hybrid school.

The old school part was that they called my dad’s brother, Uncle Bob (who I was named after) and asked him if he would host Emma for roughly a year, which would encompass the next whole school year and the birth of our baby, with some time for it to emerge from infancy before they were back home and everybody in town would find out about it. The new school part was that both of us were going there, instead of just Emma. Emma argued that I needed to be involved in her pregnancy, because I needed to be involved in taking care of the baby after its birth. It is evidence of just how upset our parents were that they agreed to this. Or, maybe they took an out of sight, out of mind approach to the problem. In either case, my sister managed to get both of us banished to the same place. That, of course, meant we could still be together.

Uncle Bob is kind of cool, but kind of odd. Everybody calls him the black sheep of the family. He’s the only sibling who didn’t go to college. Instead, he spent six years in the Marine Corps and then became a professional gambler. He was good at it and won a bunch of championships. Gambling isn’t “respectable”, though, and the rest of the family tried to make him feel unwelcome at family events. He didn’t care and came anyway.

The other thing was that he didn’t get married. Instead, he had a whole string of girlfriends, and every time he came to a holiday dinner, or reunion, he had a different babe with him. They were always babes, and I’m talking Playboy Bunny quality babes. That also made him a pariah, because if he stayed overnight, his girlfriend always stayed in the same room he did. Mom and dad had an argument about that, in fact. Mom wanted to blame Uncle Bob for influencing Emma and me to “break the rules.”

“I never even thought of Uncle Bob once while all this was happening,” said Emma, and that was that.

Uncle Bob was smart like a fox. When he’d won a whole boatload of money gambling, he quit gambling and bought a ranch from a player who needed money. He got it for a song, or so he said, and it came with “some horses, too”. It was in Wyoming, and nobody in the family had ever been there.

The reason they chose Uncle Bob to farm us out to (quite literally) was because he was the rule-breaker in the family. If anybody would sympathize with the situation, he would. And the worst he could do was say no.

He didn’t say no.

So, on the long 4th of July weekend, when Dad was off work, we put as many clothes and personal belongings as we could fit in the car and he drove us to Uncle Bob’s 30,000 acre ranch, west of the town of Basin, Wyoming.

We had thought we were isolated, living in the farmhouse Dad bought.

We were wrong.

Uncle Bob’s place was isolated. The turnoff to his place was 35 miles from Basin, and the road (driveway?) that went from the highway to his house was eight miles long.

I think we all expected him to be living in a mobile home, or shack. We’d seen a lot of those on the trip here. Instead, when we saw the house, it was astonishing. It was made of logs that were eighteen inches in diameter, and stained a golden brown. The place was huge, and ornate in ways that made my jaw drop. He said a company from Canada had built it for him. I found out later it cost four million dollars.

Inside there were bear rugs and animal heads mounted on the walls. His furniture was also hand made from raw wood. His dining room table was a single slab of wood cut on the diagonal from a tree that had to be eight feet in diameter. It was six inches thick, and sat on legs that had been turned on a lathe but were still a foot in diameter.

There were fireplaces everywhere and the one in the living room was tall enough Emma could walk into it without ducking.

“You got all this with gambling money?” asked Dad, whose jaw was as low as mine.

“I’ve won pots that had two hundred grand in them,” said Uncle Bob, who was wearing a faded checkered shirt and jeans. He looked like the caretaker, not the owner.

“Man!” sighed my father.

“It’s only money,” said Uncle Bob. “I spent almost everything I ever made to get this place fixed up. I only have a couple hundred thousand in the bank these days, and to run a place like this, that’s chicken feed. I’m either gonna have to come out of retirement to play poker again, or sell some of my breeding stock next year.” He frowned. “I really don’t want to play cards again.”

“Why not?” asked Dad, as he fingered a Zebra skin stretched across one wall.

“It’s a hard life,” he said. “Drinking, smoking, and the stress is terrible. I’d rather go into a firefight than be around some of the people on the circuit.”

“I thought you loved that life,” said Dad.

“I hated that life,” said Uncle Bob. “But I could make a ton of money. I thought about going back to the Middle East and working for one of the security contractors. I had some contacts in that area and I could have made a lot that way, but I could also have gotten killed. Poker isn’t quite as dangerous.”

“So now you breed horses?”

“Actually, Brad does the breeding. He kind of came with the property. He had some ideas of his own that the previous owner didn’t buy into, but I told him to go ahead. If it works out, my money problems will go away.”

“Why?” asked Dad.

“We’re breeding Arabians, and there are some wealthy sheiks in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Oman who want Arabians.”

“Wait. You mean they’ll pay what it costs to get the horse and then ship it halfway around the world?” My father was agog.

“Yup,” said Uncle Bob. “I have a contract right now for a pair of Arabians that, when complete, will net me seven hundred thousand. And if he likes the horses, he’ll buy more.” Uncle Bob smiled. “And he has friends who will be jealous as hell of his stock. They like to keep up with the Joneses, too, over there.”

“Doesn’t it take time for them to grow up?” asked Emma.

“Yes, and that’s what makes this a speculative investment. There are vet bills, and feed bills, and you have to have the right studs. Then, after the foal is born, you have to wait two years before you ship it. So all those bills go on for two years before you can sell them and recoup your investment. You need to let them out on the range so their muscles develop properly, but there are predators on the range. You can lose a horse to lots of things, and then all the money you spent on it is down the drain.”

“I think I’ll stick with engineering,” said Dad.

“You were always smarter than me,” said Uncle Bob. He didn’t smile when he said it. “So, what’s the deal with these two?”

That was when I found out they hadn’t told him why he was being asked to let us live with him for a year.

My father decided it would be good for us if we had to explain why we were there. In fact, to make sure we had to do it ourselves, he basically said, “They’ll fill you in. I need to get back on the road.”

Just like that, only twenty minutes after getting there, our father was gone and we were at the mercy of our black sheep uncle.

We’d met him, of course. He was the cool uncle, who told great stories and always had a beautiful woman with him. But we hadn’t spent any “quality time” with him.

He had always looked spiffy, in good quality clothes. He wore boots and I remember one pair that he said were made of ostrich skin. Now he looked kind of worn down, and the boots on his feet were plain brown ones that looked like they must be ten years old.

He took us to the kitchen, where there was an island in the middle that had bar stools around it. He opened the doors of a massive, stainless steel fridge that was stocked with twenty different flavors of a cheap soda brand. I picked a cherry cola and Emma got a can of something and we sat down.

“So, obviously you two are in trouble,” said Uncle Bob. “I can’t imagine they’d quarantine you here if you wrecked the car, or broke something. It has to be something you were both involved with. If it was drugs, they’d have said something, so I’d know to keep an eye on that, but they didn’t say anything, so it’s not drugs. I doubt you’re what we used to call incorrigible.”

He looked at me, and then at my sister.

“That leaves sex,” he said. “And it’s hard for me to believe that both of you separately can’t keep your pants on, so that suggests to my admittedly perverted mind, that the sex involved both of you.” He blinked. “At the same time.” He blinked some more. “Together,” he finally finished.

“I’m pregnant,” said Emma, cutting to the chase.

Uncle Bob looked at me.

“And you’re the daddy?”

I nodded.

“Hmph,” went Uncle Bob.

He fiddled with something and a section of the table top retracted, creating a rectangular opening. A shelf with a laptop rose to fill that opening. He tapped keys and waited, and then tapped more keys. He pulled a phone from his rear pocket and dialed.

“This is Bob Masters, out at the Box T ranch. Are you accepting new patients? I’ve got a sixteen year old girl here who needs obstetric care.”

He went on, gave them personal information about her I had no idea he knew. He made an appointment for five days hence and then hung up.

“Okay, that’s taken care of. I plan to put you both to work to earn your keep. I’m not a slave driver, though, so you’ll have options as to what kind of work you do.”

He frowned.

“Actually, you may have to pitch in with just about everything, but it won’t kill you or anything.”

“We have no idea how to do anything connected with horse ranching,” I said.

“Neither did I when I bought this place. But there were experts already on the ground, and I kept them. You’ll learn. School will be a pain, unless you opt for online school. The brick and mortar school is forty miles away and winters here don’t like letting you get around, even with four wheel drive. You can go to regular school if you want to, but I’d recommend online school.”

“Do they have diplomas?”

“Yup. I know a couple of youngsters who did that and are in college now. So colleges accept an online school diploma.”

“I’m supposed to go to college,” I said.

“You sound reluctant,” he said.

“I don’t know what to major in,” I said. “I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I got my sister pregnant and I know I have to be a good father, but you don’t go to college for that.”

“Well, that’s a year away,” said Uncle Bob. “You have time to think about it.”

He looked at Emma.

“Do you want your own room?”

She blinked.

“Do I have to have my own room?”

“Of course not, though it might be a good idea if your parents think it’s that way. I’m not going to judge you. I’ve done things far worse than sleep with my sister.”

“So we can have a room together?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Ladies are highly respected in this part of the world. What you want is what you get.”

“Okay, what I want is a room together.”

He looked at me.

“Do you want to sleep with her while you’re here?”

I felt my face get hot and knew I was blushing.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“I’ll show you a couple of rooms and you can choose which one you want. Just make sure your folks don’t find out about it. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they had in mind when they sent you here.”

The rooms he showed us were like high-priced hotel rooms in a big city, where people who are willing to spend that much money for a room expect opulence.

I think Emma and I were both left a little slack-jawed.

“It’s so beautiful,” sighed Emma, in one room.

“I worked hard for my money, and I figured I might as well convert it to something I could enjoy,” he said.

“But you have no kids to leave it to,” said Emma.

“Actually, I might,” said Bob. “You haven’t met Gidget, yet.”

“Who’s Gidget?”

“She’s my girlfriend, kind of, sort of,” said Uncle Bob.

“Kind of, sort of?”

“She’s a very independent girl,” said Uncle Bob. “She thinks the title ‘girlfriend’ suggests some kind of ownership, and she rejects that concept.”

“And you think she might give you children?”

“She’s probably in her studio right now,” said Bob. “She writes music. Want to go meet her?”

“Does she live here?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Bob. “She definitely lives here.”

We followed him down a wide, curving staircase into a theater room, with a huge screen on one wall and actual movie theater seats in two rows. They were the plush, upholstered kind, like you find in the theaters that serve food while you watch the movie.

“You got all this playing cards?” said Emma, weakly.

“Well, if you’re going to be living with me, and since you were so honest about your, um, situation, I guess I’ll be honest with you, too, but I have to swear you to secrecy, okay? You can’t tell your parents what I’m going to tell you. You can’t tell anybody what I’m going to tell you. Deal?”

“Was it illegal?” asked Emma.

He laughed.

“Nope. Perfectly legal.”

“Okay, then, we promise,” she said.

He looked at me.

“She just made a promise you have to keep,” he pointed out.

“Oh, Sorry,” said Emma, looking sheepish. “I kind of think of us as one unit.” She patted her still barely bulging belly.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I promise, too.”

“Okay. When you play cards at the level I did, there are high rollers, who have more money than card sense. In one game, the game cleaned one guy out and he put the deed to some property in Colorado in the pot. He said it was an old gold mine and he had intended to fix it up as a tourist trap with a museum. I won that pot.”

“So now you own a gold mine?” Emma sounded impressed.

“It hadn’t been worked since the 1800s,” said Uncle Bob. “It was a hardrock mine, back then, which means they dug with picks, and blasted and things like that. They didn’t have the kind of technology that’s around these days. The mine was played out, based on 1800s technology but I figured that the tailings from the mine might still have some gold in them that could be recovered with today’s tech. So I hired a geologist to look around. She decided that whoever had called the mine ‘played out’ back in the early 20th century was wrong.”

“So there was gold there?” Emma sounded awe-struck.

“The tailings had some, but once we reopened the mine and started using modern tech and knowledge, it paid off. We found a vein that was forty feet deeper than the old miners had been digging at. We got two thousand troy ounces out of that in the first three months of operation and it’s still producing.”

“How much is a troy ounce of gold worth?” asked Emma.

“At current rates, about eighteen hundred dollars,” he said.

We could both see Emma trying to do the math in her head.

“Call it three point seven million,” said Uncle Bob.

“In three months?!” gasped Emma.

“Don’t be so impressed,” he said. “It dropped to an average of two hundred troy ounces a month after that.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s not very impressive at all. That’s what, about three hundred and fifty thousand a month?”