CHAPTER 15
Beck
◆
The breeding ledger had been Tom Cross's once.
Beck could tell by the handwriting, square and patient and slanted hard to the right, the kind of hand a man wrote in when he meant every word to hold up under weather.
Laney had it open on an upturned feed bucket between them, tracing a line down the broodmare records with the chewed end of a pen, and Beck was trying to keep his eyes on the page and not on the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, gone pink in the high-summer light.
“Juniper to the gray stud out of Wickenburg,” she said. “The cross my father always wanted to make and never had the money to. Good bone, good mind. You get a foal out of that, you get a horse people drive six hours to bid on.”
“And Diesel?”
She looked at him then, level and green and not unkind, a change he hadn't earned and didn't trust. “Diesel is a beautiful animal that's hurt three men.
Put him in front of buyers as a using stallion instead of a cautionary tale, you double the value of this whole line.
Can't, and you've got an expensive way to break your neck.”
“Hell of a sales pitch.”
“I don't sell. I diagnose.” But one side of her mouth tugged loose anyway, and Beck felt it land somewhere under his ribs like a hoof.
They were in the barn aisle, midmorning, the doors thrown open at both ends so the hot dry air pulled straight through and lifted the chaff off the floor in slow drifting sheets.
It smelled the way it had always smelled — clean straw and horse and iodine and warm hide — and that was the trouble with Red Mesa.
Everything here was a door back into who he used to be.
He had gotten very good, across a decade of leaving, at walking out of rooms. This was the one building that walked into him instead.
She turned a page. Tom's hand gave way to a newer one, smaller, just as exact. “That's mine,” she said, before he could ask. “Picked up where he left off. Somebody had to.”
The way she said somebody had to came out flat, almost gentle.
She'd stopped aiming things at him a few days back, somewhere in the long wet ride down off Eagle Bench.
The meaning sat in it anyway, plain as a brand.
Somebody had to, because you didn't. He thumbed the medal through his shirt instead of answering, and that was a coward's move too, just a quieter one.
“One problem with the foaling-out plan,” she said.
“You've got Juniper in the front stall, but it floods when the ditch backs up, and she's a red-bag risk waiting to happen. We move her to the corner. Closer to the lamp, the door, and me when it goes wrong in the dead middle of some night, which it will.”
“You really know how to sell a man on the dream.”
“I told you. I don't sell.”
“You diagnose.” He almost smiled. “Corner stall it is, Doc.”
She wrote it down. He watched her tuck a strand of copper hair behind her ear with a knuckle that had a thin chemical-pale scar across it, and he thought, with the dull misery of a man who already knows the answer, I would have followed this woman into any kind of fire and called it warm.
---
The corner stall meant moving feed sacks, and moving feed sacks meant the loft.
He climbed the ladder ahead of her out of old reflex and came up into the warm hay-dust dark, and the past hit him so hard he had to stand still and take it.
That was the only name he'd ever had for the place.
Up under the barn's high roof, the light came through the gable vents in two slow gold bars full of floating chaff, the heat gathered and held, and the whole world smelled of cured grass and old wood and a faraway sweetness like a summer put up in jars.
This was where they used to hide. Seventeen and certain the two of them had invented the feeling, that nobody before them had ever lain back in the dust and counted the cracks of light and not gone home until somebody hollered.
He heard her come up behind him. Heard her stop.
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
The rest stayed unsaid between them. There wasn't a square foot of this loft that didn't have one of them written into it.
She moved past him to the stacked feed and put her hands on her hips and surveyed it like a problem, Laney all over, taking a haunted room and turning it into a chore. “These go down to the corner. You carry, I stack.”
“You stack, I carry. There it is.”
“I weigh a hundred and forty soaking wet and you used to ride a ton of bull for a living. Yes. You carry.”
“A ton's generous,” he said, hauling the first sack up onto his shoulder. “Most I drew were closer to seventeen hundred. And most threw me before the buzzer.”
“Most.”
“Most. Some I rode clean.” He grinned at her over the sack, the old grin, a thing he'd shelved a long while back and found still fit. “I held on more than I let go of, contrary to local opinion.”
Something flickered across her face and folded itself away, and he heard the words back the way she must have heard them and wished he hadn't said them, because they fell apart on the one ride that mattered, and that truth sat in the air between them, plain to them both.
He carried the sack down. He came back up. The wishing didn't help. It never had.
By the third trip the joke had cooled into work, and the work was good the way work between them had always been good — wordless, geared, each of them reaching for the thing the other was about to hand over.
She'd toss the twine end so it hung where his hand already was.
He'd set a sack down at the angle that let her drag it without straightening her back.
Their hands still knew the same labor. That was the part that scared him.
A man could lie about everything but his hands.
When they finished, both of them filmed in chaff and sweat, she sat down on the last sack and pushed the hair off her damp forehead with the back of her wrist, and for one unguarded second she looked seventeen.
“We used to lie right there,” she said, nodding at the boards under the gable.
She didn't sound soft about it. She sounded like a doctor reading a chart she didn't like.
“You'd tell me you were going to ride in Vegas.
I'd tell you I'd be the best large-animal vet in three counties. We were both insufferable about it.”
“You did it, though.” He stayed standing. Standing was safer. “Best in three counties.”
“Four, on a good week.” She tipped her head. “And you did yours. World champion, buckle and all. You don't wear it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He'd been asked that by reporters and a long parade of people who didn't actually want the answer, and he'd always had a joke for it.
The joke climbed up now out of habit and stalled out, because she was looking at him with those green eyes that read bodies the way other folks read faces, and a joke would've been a sack she'd see straight through.
“Because I won it the year after I left,” he said.
“And every time I'd unzip the bag and look at it, all I could see was what it cost to get there. Felt like wearing a receipt.” He shrugged, one-shouldered, the left one that didn't quite work right anymore.
“Some things you win, you don't get to enjoy. You just get to have paid for them.”
The barn ticked and settled in the heat below them. Down in the dark Juniper shifted and blew out a long breath.
“That,” Laney said finally, “is the most honest thing you've said to me in ten years.”
“Don't get used to it. I'm rusty.”
“Clearly.” But her gaze stayed on him, and he held his own there to match it, and the warm hay-dust dark held the two of them the way it always had, like the loft itself remembered and was waiting to see if they would.
He went down the ladder first. It was that or do something he hadn't earned the right to do yet.
---
Diesel had killed nothing yet, but he meant to.
You could see it in the way the bay came off the back rail when Beck stepped in, all that dark muscle bunching, the white showing all the way around one rolling eye, ears pinned flat as a snake's.
A thousand pounds of horse who had decided, somewhere in his short hard life, that every two-legged thing was coming to hurt him, and built his whole self around getting his licks in first.
Beck shut the gate soft behind him and didn't look at the horse, just stood in the middle of the pen, in the white midsummer dust, breathing.
Laney came to the rail. He felt her there. He didn't turn.
“Beck. He struck Rafe last week. You know that.”
“I know.”
“That bad wrist of yours isn't going to grow back if he gets a hoof on it.”
“I know that too.” He kept his eyes soft and middle-distance, the way a thing that isn't hunting keeps its eyes. “Just going to stand here and be boring until I'm not worth being scared of.”
She settled in to watch, arms crossed on the top rail, and he knew exactly how this looked to her — another Calhoun in another pen with another animal nobody could fix, betting his body on it the way he'd bet his body on everything his life.
The reckless one. The one who breaks things. He'd been raised in that story.
So he didn't do anything reckless. That was the thing nobody understood about a horse like Diesel, the thing it had taken Beck thirty-one wrecks and two surgeries and ten years of being afraid of the right things to learn: you couldn't out-tough a frightened animal.
You could only outlast its fear. He let his shoulders drop, let the air out slow.
When Diesel finally stopped circling and stood, blowing, trembling, watching him with that one wild eye, Beck turned a quarter away, and the horse's near ear flicked forward half an inch.
Half an inch. To Beck it was eight seconds on the rankest bull he'd ever drawn.