Red Dirt Heart 04 - Red Dirt Heart 4 by N.R. Walker

Author:N.R. Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

If stubborn was an Olympic event.

I’d been to the sale yards at Alice Springs twice before, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the place. Though admittedly, those times were for cattle and this was for horses.

The dusty rows of corrals were no different this time, six long rows with five or six yards with five or six horses in each. People clad in Akubra hats, plaid shirts, moleskin pants and riding boots came from all over looking for stockhorses and brood mares.

And we walked up and down and up and down, looking at each corral, at each horse. Some were priced in the thousands, some just a few hundred. Not that price mattered to Charlie. Each time I thought Charlie looked remotely interested, he’d make a pained face and shake his head.

No horse was ever gonna match his Shelby.

A lot of the buyers and most of the sellers knew Charlie, and he called them by name when he said hello. Whether they knew him because he was Charlie Sutton of Sutton Station fame or if he knew them from his meetings at the Beef Farmers, I didn’t know. But to those he stopped and spoke to, he introduced me without hesitation—and maybe just a little bit of pride.

It still amazed me at how far he’d come.

“What’s so funny?” he asked. We’d just stopped and spoke to a guy who Charlie called Mick, and when we moved on, I guess I was smiling.

“Oh nothing,” I replied. “Just you. You’re like ‘this is Travis’, like you don’t give a shit what they think.”

“Well, I don’t,” he said. “Give a shit what they think, that is. At one of the meetings I was at, we were talking about the collars we put on the cattle and I mentioned that it was your idea. They asked who you were and I didn’t want to say you were one of my staff, because you’re not. And I didn’t want to say ‘boyfriend’ and scare the guy or call you my ‘de facto’ because I’d sound like a wanker, so I said you were my partner.” He cringed at the word and sighed. “But then I had to explain that no, Sutton Station didn’t have a business partner, that no, I hadn’t sold any portion of my business and no, I wasn’t in financial trouble. I had to explain partner as in boyfriend, de facto. It was so much worse. So now I just say you’re Travis.”

I burst out laughing. “Oh my God. Tell me you’re kidding?”

“No, it was embarrassing,” he said with a smile. “The word partner means something different out here. I hate the term de facto, it’s as corny as live-in lover, and there ain’t no way I’m callin’ you that. Then I had to explain using the exact words I was trying to avoid.”

I laughed at that. “You could just always tell them the truth,” I told him. “You know, ‘Hi, this is Travis. He’s my American fiancé.’”

Charlie snorted. “Yeah, because the word boyfriend didn’t scare ’em enough.

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