CHAPTER 17
Beck
◆
Beck hadn't slept, and he wasn't sorry about it.
He stood out past the corrals in the blue hour before dawn, coffee going cold in a tin cup he'd forgotten he was holding, and went over it one more time.
The dance. The ditch. Laney's mouth under his after ten years, her hands fisted in his shirt like she meant to keep him this time, like keeping him was a thing a person could decide to do.
The way she'd pulled back at the end with her eyes wide and her breath wrecked and the truth sitting plain on her face that she was scared clean through. Same fear lived in him. He was scared too.
That was the part he kept turning over, and it had nothing to do with the kiss. What scared him was the hope.
He'd ridden a lot of things in his life that could kill him.
A man learned to be afraid the right way, to fold the fear down small and tuck it under the rope and nod for the gate.
But hope was a different animal. Hope didn't buck.
Hope just stood there being beautiful until you reached for it, and then it cost you everything you had.
Don't, he told himself. Don't already be planning the exit.
But his eyes were on the lane anyway, the way they always went, measuring the distance to the county road. Ten years of practice. You could stand in the most homecoming place on earth and still know to the yard how far it was to gone.
The air had changed overnight. It had been working at the edge of him without a name, the way the dark had gotten a weight to it, a low charged stillness.
Now he named it. Iron and rain. That hard mineral smell that came up off the ground out here before a real gully-washer, the smell of a storm still an hour out over the rim but coming, coming sure, the dust already bracing for it. He'd grown up on that smell.
It meant get the gates, check the low crossings, bring the green stock in. It meant weather you didn't argue with.
He drank the cold coffee anyway. The medal lay warm at his throat where his hand had worried it half the night.
That was when he heard the dog.
Roscoe came off the dark in a low fast streak, not barking the way he barked at a coyote or a stranger but the other way, the wrong way, a high frantic stutter that put the hair up on Beck's arms before his brain caught up.
Then the truck. Headlights swinging hard across the bunkhouse, and Cody Lang half falling out of the cab before it stopped rolling, his voice already breaking.
“Beck. Beck, the fence is down, the north line, there's cattle on the road, they're on the highway, oh God, I didn't, I tried to turn them but they just.” The boy's voice gave out.
“Breathe.” Beck had the boy by the shoulder. Cody was shaking, nineteen and white to the lips under his sunburn, his too-big hat gone somewhere in the dark. “Slow. Where's the wire.”
“North forty. By the cattle guard. It's cut, Beck, it ain't pushed down, it's cut, I seen the ends.” Cody dragged a sleeve across his face. “They're spread from the gate clear to the bar ditch and some of 'em walked right out onto the blacktop and I couldn't get ahead of 'em.”
Cut. Somebody had stretched no wire, rotted no post through a hard winter.
Cut clean, the boy said, and Beck felt the old cold drop through him, the same cold as the night the call came about Jed, except this one had a name behind it and the name was a Vance.
Dell, smiling at the spring works with his too-white teeth.
Be a real shame if a gate got left open some night.
So much for a gate left open. This was a blade.
“Go wake Hutch,” Beck said, and the steadiness in his own voice surprised him. “Tell Rafe to bring the trailer and the wire spool to the cattle guard. Then you saddle up and you come back to me, you hear? You're not the one who left it open. Somebody opened it on you.”
Cody nodded so hard his whole body went with it, and ran.
Beck was already moving for the barn.
---
Gunsmoke met him at the stall door with his ears up, the old buckskin reading the morning faster than most men would.
Beck threw the saddle on him and didn't bother with anything he didn't need, and the horse stood like a rock while he cinched, only the one back foot cocked and set down, ready.
Twenty-some years old and he'd forgotten more about working cattle than Beck had ever learned.
“All right, old man,” Beck said low, swinging up. “One more.”
He came out of the barn into a yard going full awake.
A lamp in the kitchen window, Birdie's shape behind it.
Hutch crossing the gravel pulling his suspenders up, already barking the orders that Beck would have barked, the two of them landing on the same plan without a word between them, and that was its own kind of homecoming if a man had time to feel it, which he did not.
Rafe had the truck and the long trailer swinging around.
And there, headlights coming down the ranch road too fast and too sure, the vet rig.
Of course she'd come. Word traveled out here on the same wind that carried the rain.
Laney climbed out in her work jacket with her braid already coming loose, and for one stripped-bare second they just looked at each other across the lit-up yard.
Everything from the ditch was still in it.
Then she decided not to deal with that now.
She filed it, the way she filed a thing too big to hold, and went to vet calm, that flat clean stillness that on anybody else would read as nothing and on her read as everything.
“How many on the road,” she said.
“Don't know yet. Cody says spread to the bar ditch.”
“Then we ride.” She was already pulling a horse off her trailer, a stout little ranch gelding she kept for exactly this.
She mounted clean, gathered her reins, and looked at him once more, and what she said wasn't about the kiss and was entirely about the kiss.
“Don't do anything stupid on that highway, Beck.”
“Me,” he said. “Stupid.”
Something almost broke loose at her mouth, not quite a smile, and then she was gone at a long trot toward the north line with Banjo flat-out beside her, and Beck put his heels to Gunsmoke and went after.
---
The world got worse as it got lighter.
They came up over the rise above the north forty in the first grey crawl of dawn, and Beck's stomach dropped at the whole of it.
The fence stood open like a wound, two strands curled back on themselves, the posts leaning where the wire that held them taut had been taken away.
And beyond it the herd was scattered to hell and gone, black shapes humped in the half-dark across the bar ditch and the borrow pit and out, out where they should never be, out on the long pale ribbon of the county highway where it ran straight and fast and where the trucks came through at seventy before the sun was up.
The iron-and-rain smell sat heavy over everything now, the storm walking closer along the rim, lightning stuttering somewhere far off and no thunder yet.
The cattle felt it. That was half the danger.
They were already up on their nerves, already churned, and a spooked cow didn't run for home, she ran for daylight, she ran into whatever was coming.
“Cody, hold this gate,” Beck called. “Anything we bring back, you funnel it through, you do not chase. Hutch, Rafe, you got the ditch side, push 'em up off the low ground toward the gap. Laney.”
“I've got the south spread.” She was already reading it the way she read a barn full of sick stock, who's worst, who first, what kills you if you wait.
“There's a heifer down in the borrow pit, I'll get her up.
The bunch on the blacktop is your problem, Beck, and it's the one that'll get somebody killed.”
“I know it.”
“Then you know to be smart about it.” She pulled a breath in slow and let it go slower. “Don't put yourself in front of a half-ton of beef and a Peterbilt to prove something to your daddy or to me. I will never forgive you. Do you understand me.”
He understood her. He understood her better than he'd understood anything in ten years.
“Stay on the south, doc,” he said, and rode for the road.
---
There were maybe a dozen head on the highway and the shoulder, and they were the spooked ones, the ones that had kept walking, heads up and tails kinked, drifting in that loose dangerous way that meant they'd break any direction at all.
The light was coming up grey and wrong, the storm eating the sunrise, and the asphalt was already going dark in patches where the first fat drops were starting to hit, a smell of hot dust and wet rock rising up to meet the iron of the coming rain.
Beck took Gunsmoke onto the road at a walk.
You didn't gallop into a thing like this.
You came soft and you came slow and you let the cattle find the one direction you'd left open, which was the only kind of leading worth a damn, the kind that made the other fellow think it was his idea to come home.
One breath, he thought, easing the old horse along the centerline. You only ever had to get through the one breath in front of you. So get through it.
He got below them. Got the road behind him and the open gap of the fence ahead of them and started the slow squeeze, leaning Gunsmoke side to side, a low steady word, no sudden anything.
Three peeled off and trotted for the gap.
Then five. The horse knew, the horse loved it, the old buckskin floating those quick collected steps that cut a cow's angle before the cow knew she had one.
And then the lead cow, a big rangy mossy-horned thing with her calf bawling somewhere on the wrong side of her, lost her nerve all at once and bolted straight up the centerline of the highway, away from the gap, away from home, dead toward the long blind rise where the road came down out of the dark.