CHAPTER 17 #2
And over that rise came light. Two of them, high and white, and the rolling air-horn moan of a stock truck running hard, a man who couldn't see what was waiting for him on the far slope of a hill in the grey.
There was a half a heartbeat where the whole math of it laid itself out cold and complete.
The cow. The calf following the cow. The truck.
The number of seconds. It came the way a bull's first jump used to come, the future already happening, and he didn't think, I should run, not this time, not the old reflex, he thought only turn her or you lose her and the calf both and maybe the fool in that truck, and he laid the reins across Gunsmoke's neck and asked the old horse for everything he had left in him.
They came up the centerline in a dead run with the headlights swelling.
Beck got even with the cow's shoulder, then ahead of it, crowding her, his knee a foot off her ribs, the calf scrambling, the truck's horn one long unbroken scream now and the brakes after it, that long shriek of a heavy rig hauled down too late and too fast.
Beck cut hard in front of the cow, cut her off the centerline, cut his own horse across the truck's path, and for one stretched and roaring instant there was nothing in the world but white light and the smell of scorched brakes and rain and iron, and his own voice gone flat and certain, come on, old man, one more, one more—
The cow broke right. Off the blacktop, down the shoulder, calf at her flank, gone toward the gap and the others.
Gunsmoke cleared the road in two bounding strides and the stock truck went past them so close the wall of wind off it slammed sideways into them, the spray stinging, the rig shuddering on its locked-up brakes and finally dragging itself to a stop forty yards on, hazards stuttering orange in the grey.
The driver's door opened. A pale face, a raised hand, more disbelief than anger.
Beck lifted a hand back. His own was shaking. He let it shake.
Then the rain came all at once, the way it does out here, no working up to it, just the whole bruised sky letting go at once and the iron smell drowning under the clean cold flood of it, and Beck turned Gunsmoke's streaming head toward the fence and went back to work, because the cattle were turned but they weren't home, and turned wasn't the job. Home was the job.
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It took the better part of an hour in the downpour.
They worked it the way it had to be worked, no glory in it, just wet men and wet horses and a wetter dog, pushing soaked black cattle a few head at a time off the borrow pit and the bar ditch and the shoulder, up through the gap, back onto Red Mesa ground.
Beck rode the dangerous outside line of it every time, the road side, putting his horse between the herd and the highway over and over, never once thinking about the door at the end of the lane, never once clocking the open road for an exit.
There wasn't room in him for it. There was only the next cow, the next gap, the next length of wet rope coming through his hands.
Hutch worked the ditch like a man half his age.
Rafe ran the gate with Cody, the boy steadier now that he had a job that wasn't blaming himself.
And Laney was everywhere on the south spread, off her horse to her knees in the mud getting the down heifer up, back on it to ghost a drifting bunch toward the gap, reading every animal that came through the gap with one flat sweep of those green eyes, that's a strain, that one's lame, that calf's mismothered, find me his mama.
She surfaced through the rain again and again and each time something in his chest pulled tight and would not loosen.
Then the last of them was through, and Rafe and Cody had the wire stretched and spliced across the gap, ugly but holding, and the herd was milling and blowing and bawling on the right side of the fence, and it was over.
Just like that. The way a wreck is over.
One second it's everything and the next second you're standing in the dirt counting your fingers.
Beck sat Gunsmoke in the pouring rain and counted his.
Nobody dead. Nobody under a truck. A calf or two would need a look and the down heifer would be stove up for a week and there'd be a vet bill and a fence bill and a long hard reckoning over who held the bolt cutters, but the herd was behind wire.
The asset that fed the contract that paid the note was behind wire. He'd held on.
His breath wouldn't come right, snagging high in his chest. Just the riding, he said inside, and didn't believe it.
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They came back to the gate strung out and steaming, and that was where the thing happened that Beck would turn over in his mind for a long time after.
Tucker was there. He'd ridden up from the home place somewhere in the last of it and pitched in without a word, and now he sat his horse next to the spliced wire with rain running off his hat brim, looking at the herd, and then looking at Beck.
There was the old thing in his face, the grievance, the brother who stayed and got the debt while the other got the buckle.
Beck braced for it the way he always braced.
It didn't come.
“That on the highway,” Tucker said. “With the truck.”
“Yeah.”
Tucker's jaw worked. He looked back at the cattle, all of them, every head accounted for, behind Red Mesa wire because his brother had cut a stock truck off the road on a twenty-year-old horse. “That was a damn fool thing to do,” Tucker said.
“It was.”
“Worked, though.” A long beat, rain hammering both their hats. Then, lower, like it cost him: “Glad it was you out there and not the kid.”
It wasn't brother. It wasn't forgiveness for ten years gone. It was four words and a glance and a thing handed across the wet space between two men who'd spent a decade not handing each other anything. Beck took it like water in August.
“Fence is cut, Tuck,” he said, because the other thing was too big to hold and this was the work. “Clean. Bolt cutters. This wasn't an accident and it wasn't weather.”
Tucker's eyes went hard and flat, and for once it wasn't aimed at Beck. “Dell,” he said.
“Can't prove it. Yet.”
“No.” Tucker turned his horse. “But we will. Come on. Birdie'll have the stove going. You look like something the creek spit up.”
Hutch was at the gate as they came through, soaked to the bone, his grey mustache dripping, and he didn't say much, because Hutch never said much.
He just looked Beck up and down, this man who'd been more father to him than his own had managed, and then he reached out one gnarled hand with the half-tip missing and laid it flat on Gunsmoke's wet neck and on Beck's knee both at once, the way you'd steady a thing you meant to keep.
“Good ride,” Hutch said. Two words. They landed like a verdict.
Then he took the reins from Beck's hand so Beck could swing down, and that was all, and it was everything.
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