CHAPTER 10 #2
That was the trouble with him, the trouble that had always been the trouble.
He'd been gone ten years and his hands still knew it.
She watched him cut the two off cows out of a bunched group without crowding them, watched Gunsmoke read his seat before the rein ever moved, watched him drop a loop she'd have bet money he couldn't throw anymore — clean over the horns of a yearling bull that had gotten itself snarled in a coil of old wire by the spring, dallied soft, backed the gelding to take the slack without sawing the calf off its feet.
He talked low to the animal the whole time, easy nonsense, the way you'd gentle anything scared, and the bull stood for it, and Laney got down and cut the wire away from a hind leg that was scraped but sound.
“He'll be tender a few days,” she said, running her hand down the cannon bone, feeling for heat. “No wire cut deep enough to worry. Let him go.”
Beck flipped the loop off and coiled his rope, and the bull bolted for the herd, indignant and whole, and for one unguarded second the two of them were grinning at each other across thirty feet of bent grass like the last ten years hadn't happened at all.
Laney felt her pulse pick up. She knew the number of it the way she knew everything about a body in front of her — knew the climb of it, the heat under her collar, the particular quickness that wasn't exertion.
That's the altitude, she told herself. That's a hard day's work at nine thousand feet.
That's weather. It was going to be weather, anyway; she could feel the air changing.
She told her pulse it was the storm coming and not the way he sat a horse, and she got back in the saddle, and she did not look at him again until her face was her own.
They counted twice, because her tally came up one short the first pass and she didn't trust a count she couldn't square, and the second time they found the missing pair down in a draw — a cow standing over a new calf still wet enough at the ears that it had to have dropped that morning, out of season and stubborn about it.
Laney slid down and checked the calf over while the cow watched her with flat suspicion, and the calf was sound, bright-eyed, sucked down and content, and she felt the small particular gladness she always felt at a live one, the gladness that had never once gotten old in twelve years of this work.
“Late,” Beck said, sitting Gunsmoke easy a respectful distance off so as not to crowd the cow. “She'll be hell to bring down with a baby that new.”
“She'll come when the rest go. They always do.” Laney got back up. “That's the herd for you. Nobody wants to be the one left up the mountain alone.”
She heard the words after she'd said them and wished she hadn't, and didn't look at him to see if he'd heard them too.
They checked the lick. They found the spring box half-choked with leaves and cleared it together without much talking, working from opposite sides, and it was the working that undid her, a little — the way their hands found the rhythm without being told, the way he handed her the wrench before she asked and she'd already put out her hand to take it.
A decade apart, and their bodies still kept the same labor between them, fluent as a shared language neither had spoken aloud in years.
She filed it under symptom, ignore, and scrubbed her hands clean in the cold runoff, and the water numbed her fingers and she was glad of it.
“Laney.”
She didn't look up from her hands. “We're losing the light. We need to start down.”
“Laney.” Quieter. She knew that voice. She'd heard that voice ten years ago and not until much later understood it was the voice he used right before he did something that took the floor out from under her. “About the way I left. I never —”
“No.” She said it level. She said it the way she'd say stop to a horse about to step on her.
She stood and faced him, and she felt herself go still — the deep stillness, the one that cost the most, the one Tom used to call her vet calm and Beck, once, long ago, had called something tenderer.
She let it close over her like cold water. Some things you don't reopen.
You debride a wound or you leave it be, but you don't keep tearing the same scar to see if it still bleeds. It bleeds. I can tell you it bleeds. You learn to live around it. “We are not doing this up here. We are not doing it anywhere. You don't get ten years late and then pick the moment.”
His jaw worked. The thumb went up to the scar through his eyebrow and dragged across it, and she knew that tell, God help her, she'd known it before he had — the thing he did when the words coming out of his mouth and the truth in his chest weren't the same shape. He dropped his hand.
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
And that was worse, somehow. That he let her have it.
The Beck of ten years ago would have pushed, or joked, or left.
This one just looked at her with those storm-grey eyes gone soft and sorry and stepped back, and gave her the ground, and the ache of being given the ground was so much sharper than the fight would have been that for a second she couldn't get her breath.
Then the thunder spoke off the rim, and they both looked up, and the day had changed while they weren't watching it.
---
She read the sky the way she read a mare going into distress — too fast, too wrong, the signs stacking quicker than the textbook said they should.
The high blue had gone bruised and yellow-grey in the west. A wall of cloud was climbing the back of the mesa, towering, its top sheared flat and spreading, the underside a sick olive color she didn't like at all.
The wind had quit pretending to be a breeze.
It came hard across the bench now and cold, and it carried the smell ahead of the rain — wet sage, scorched dust, the sharp metal tang of ozone that meant the lightning was already working somewhere behind that wall.
“That's moving on us,” Beck said.
“That's already on us.” She was tightening her cinch, fingers fast and sure, talking it through out loud the way she'd talk a triage.
“We're an hour from the trucks down the switchbacks.
That cell's twenty minutes out, maybe less, and it's coming over the rim where there's nothing taller than us and our horses for half a mile. We are the highest thing on this bench, Beck, us and two head of livestock with steel shoes.”