CHAPTER EIGHT
Back at the ranch, Penelope is sexually frustrated. Or more precisely, she is frustrated because she doesn’t want to keep thinking about sex, but somehow she can’t stop today. She wants to think about fixing the heating system or finishing the contract for the New Siberia shipment or what she will wear tonight at her party.
Instead, Penelope is thinking about how long it’s been since she’s had sex. It’s been a very long time.
“Surely the urge goes away eventually? How long does it take for the sex drive to die? What do nuns do about this?” Penelope sighs to herself as she oversees the food preparation for the gathering that happens here, without fail, every Friday night.
Usually, Penelope tries not to think about sex on the theory that if you don’t think about it, eventually you’ll forget about sex and be the happier for it. So far, fifteen years of practice has still not scratched that particular itch. Penelope finds this extremely vexing. And today she just can’t keep it out of her mind. She sighs again as her mind is filled with a lurid fantasy involving a warm night in this kitchen with a big bowl of ice cream.
Lupe snaps, “Where’s your head today?” as she pushes past Penelope with a large pan of smoked brisket.
“In the gutter,” Penelope says, but she puts a bite in her tone to play it off as a joke. A humorless joke.
“Because that’s how you could summarize my sex life,” Penelope mutters to herself.
Before Lupe can ask her what she means, Penelope sweeps out the door, determined to find some labor so intense that she’ll be too tired to think about anything, especially the state of her hormones. She gets as far as the nutrient capture filters on the water lines and spends a pleasant hour banging away on a dented valve with a sledgehammer before Ulixes shows up.
“Heard you could use some help,” he shouts over the din she is making.
Penelope looks up into those warm brown eyes, deep and entrancing, looking at her with such caring. He leans forward and puts a gentle hand on her arm to stop her. Penelope can see his hard rippling muscles as the roughness of his calloused palm sends shivers up her arm. She is acutely aware of how rapidly he is improving since his illness. With a few extra pounds on him, he looks more and more like the kind of man she wouldn’t mind…
“Dios me odia,” cries Penelope with disgust, moving away from him before she did something insane. She is so crazed by some sort of hormone disorder that she is actually getting in a tizzy over some stranger. What is wrong with her today?
Ulixes pulls his hand back as though he’s been scalded. “If God hates you, then at least you can rest assured that you’re not the only one,” he says sourly. And then he chuckles and somehow that makes it all right.
“So, do you want to fix that pipe now or do you plan to go on breaking it, ma’am?” asks Ulixes politely.
Penelope looks at the hammer in her hand and then at the pipe in front of her. Her shoulders slump when she realizes that she really ought to drop the hammer and let Ulixes fix it.
She does, but Penelope hates letting men fix things for her. It is degrading. She ought to be able to do these things. Penelope sits down on the ground and contemplates her many failings while she watches Ulixes grapple the pipe with a large wrench he brought.
They don’t speak until Ulixes rumbles, “So Lupe tells me the house will be full of your many suitors again tonight?”
There is a hint of amusement in his voice but also a question. Penelope knows the man has been too sick to notice the other parties in the past few weeks, so this will be the first one he really sees. Penelope waves her hands in the air to deny the word “suitors.”
“Oh, that Lupe is wicked,” she cries, dusting off her hands. “No, Mr. Ulixes, they aren’t my suitors. Please. Some of them would like to buy me out, sure, but most of them are here for social reasons. There’s no real government in the colonies so it’s important that we get together like this and talk. So we all know what’s going on and can decide important issues together. I’m happy to be able to provide a place for us all to meet. And who turns down a good party with free food?”
This is Penelope’s standard answer to questions about her parties, but it doesn’t satisfy even herself tonight. She gets up and paces restlessly as she watches him work. Her mind turns over the situation with Wilhelm Asner from the Ex-Austrian Engineering Complex. She is not looking forward to spending time with him tonight. He is one of the men who really does want to have a relationship with her, if only for her fortune. Rejecting him without offending is difficult.
“So how did you decide to start giving these parties?” Ulixes asks, breaking into her inner monologue.
“Oh, gods, who knows?” she replies, throwing up her hands.
And then she decides to let her guard down for once and just tell the truth: “Well, all right, so couple years after the War, I started getting a few hints from men that I worked with. They seemed to think that my husband wasn’t coming home and that I couldn’t possibly run this ranch by myself so perhaps I ought to find myself a man or else sell out. Hike up my skirts and run back home to my parents.”
Penelope snorts indignantly, “My husband disappeared and then my mother-in-law died. Soon after, my father-in-law became too sickly to manage the ranch, you see,” she explains.
Ulixes hisses and she turns to look at him. He quickly flaps his thumb and sticks it in his mouth like he’s just hit it. She arches an eyebrow at his carelessness but Penelope does not exactly have the handyman moral high ground right now, so she doesn’t say anything.
Penelope pushes her hair out of her eyes and stretches her back. “All the men that could went off to the War, off course, so the whole colony was short-handed. That’s when my cowgirls started showing up, looking for work. As you see, we get along just fine.”
“A few men were very pushy,” she continues, not noticing the sudden violence with which Ulixes is clamping the pipe. “I told them I was fine and I didn’t want to sell or shack up with some man, but they didn’t seem to believe me.”
Her words come faster now. She doesn’t bother to filter out the fear and worry of these past years.
“When all the men left Ithaca for the War, they took almost all the weapons. So here I was sitting on a goldmine of beef and manure with just a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Anybody who wanted could walk in and take the place and what could I do to stop them? What could I do to protect my son? I couldn’t just throw these men out and have them ride back to attack when I least expected it. Sure, we have a bit of a militia now who might look into it if the Vaquero Ranch suddenly had a new owner, but we’d still be dead and decaying in the compost bins, so what good is that?”
Penelope kicks a pipe, but gently in case she breaks something else. As nice as it is to vent a little, she really needs to head back and get everything ready before her guests start arriving.
“So, you went for a bluff then?” asks Ulixes, finished with the pipe and gathering up his tools. “You start inviting all the men with guns over to keep an eye on each other? Because no man would stand for someone else getting the prize? You don’t have to worry about defending yourself because you set all the foxes watching each other instead of trying to pick the biggest fox to defend the henhouse?” Ulixes looks at her with disbelief.
Penelope shrugs her shoulders. “Well, yes, I guess I did,” she admits. “It’s not a great plan, but it’s been working for almost six years.”
Ulixes laughs out loud and gives her a frankly admiring look.
“Lady,” he chuckles. “That’s pretty damn clever.”
He looks for a minute like he might hug her and Penelope’s breath catches just a little, but he just grabs his tools and marches off towards the ranch house.
She catches up with him and says, “But with all these attacks and threats and sabotage attempts on the colony lately, I don’t know. I guess if I were smart, I’d sell and take Trevor somewhere safer.”
The man walking next to her gives her a long look before replying, “Well, in my experience if we were all smarter, the world would be a lot duller. Besides, there’s no place safer. The entire galaxy has nowhere that’s really safe. Trust me.”
“Hey, how did your trip into town with Trevor go?” Penelope asks, changing the subject. She wonders what it is about this man that makes her so twitchy. Catching her breath like a schoolgirl? It’s ridiculous.
“All right,” grunts Ulixes, taciturn again.
Then he says carefully, “The boy asks about his father. I don’t want to tell him stories that would upset you, but I don’t know…”
He trails off, but Penelope is sure she knows what the man is asking. “Oh, you mean all the whoring around my husband did?” she retorts.
His jaw drops, but she just chuckles, “Don’t worry. You won’t shock me. I’ve heard dozens of stories about women he got involved with, from one end of the sky to the other. A girl in every port, apparently.”
Ulixes drops his tools, looking deeply shocked. He stammers, “No, ma’am, that is not what I meant at all. I just didn’t know if it was all right to tell him…”
Penelope interrupts, “It’s really no problem. Now, I’ll thank you to keep the stories as clean as you can, but if Trevor must keep asking people about his dad then he’s going to have to deal with learning what his father was really like. I sure wish I had bothered to ask a few more questions before I married the man.”
She bites her lip after that last part. That is a little more truthful than she meant to be.
Ulixes cocks his head to the side, studying her as he picks up his tools. “Ma’am, I don’t know any stories about your husband and other women. I was asking about whether you’ve been telling the boy his daddy was a hero or a villain. I don’t want to confuse him or contradict you.”
He fidgets for a minute and then continues, “I know your husband sure loved you as much as a man could love a woman. He always wished he were a better man for your sake. But I can see why you’d regret marrying him.”
Then he murmurs, “He ran off and left you with all this and a kid to raise and never came back. It’s unforgivable.”
But he says it like it’s a question.
Penelope clasps her hands, suddenly very uncomfortable in this conversation. She says briskly, “Well, does it really matter one way or another if he was faithful to me out there? He’s either dead or never coming back, so who cares? To be honest, I barely remember him. Tell Trevor whatever you want.”
She strides past him, the conversation over as far as she is concerned. Penelope reflects that the opposite is also true. If he is never coming back, then what does it matter if she is faithful or not? She is tempted to turn back to the man behind her, but she knows it is just her treacherous libido trying to get her into trouble today.
When she gets back to the main house, everyone is in a tizzy about Trevor’s near-death experience with a charging platypig.
“What’s all this?” asks Penelope loudly, interrupting a much-too-pleased-with-himself Trevor as he holds court from atop the kitchen table.
“I didn’t do anything, Mom, I swear,” grins Trevor. “This platypig just started charging and he was wicked vicious. I was a goner for sure. Mr. Ulixes here, well, he just popped it one in the snout. He says they got really sensitive snouts. Sent that old pig crying back to its master. Would have ripped my leg off, Mom.”
Trevor nods solemnly while a few of the younger cowgirls sighed with admiration. Penelope snorts skeptically, giving Ulixes her best stink-eye for not mentioning this little escapade earlier. He looks embarrassed.
“Oh, well, Mr. Trevor may be exaggerating,” mutters Ulixes in the kind of thick drawl that Penelope has only heard from other Ithacans or true Texans. She reminds herself to ask the man where he’s from the next time she gets a chance.
“Seems a man was bringing a platypig from someplace swampy to show you,” Ulixes says. “I talked to the man who brought it. He said you showed him a dillo-bear the last time he was here and that’s what gave him the idea. The platypig thing was running loose and getting all riled up. It took an unreasonable dislike to Mr. Trevor here and, well, in my experience, getting punched in the nose brings everybody up short. That’s all.”
Penelope gives another “Humph!” and looks at her son.
Trevor widens those big brown eyes of his. “Honest, Mom. He saved my life. It was bigger than a bull and it has poisonous quills,” he says earnestly.
“Huh,” says Penelope.
Ulixes coughs, “The man said the creature’s poisonous quills had been removed, but it does have plenty of claws and teeth and it was awfully angry. I think I’ll go see about that heater out back, if you don’t mind? Argos said it needed some attention before tonight.”
He shuffles off before Penelope can thank him for helping her son. She hugs her boy and then claps her hands, “What are you all thinking, lollygagging around like this? Get a move on! We’ll have company here in less than an hour and I need this place to sparkle tonight!”