12. Eleven
I was splitting wood nobody had asked for when Sarah put her hands on my man.
Through the kitchen window she rolled John's sleeve back from the wrapping on his forearm, and I put the ax through a round of juniper hard enough to bury the head in the block. The halves jumped off and landed in the dirt. Nimue cinched tight at my throat and held on.
Five days she'd been at Pae Saco. Six since John had let me touch him.
That was the third time since sunup. She'd touched his wrist at the coffee pot and his shoulder at the table, and now she had his arm turned over in the morning light, checking Sierra's wrapping, her fingers on skin I hadn't touched in days, and John sat there and let her.
Meanwhile, he hadn't let me touch him since the cave.
I rocked the ax loose from the block. My knuckles had gone white around the handle. I stacked the split halves on the pile with the rest, enough kindling now for a winter nobody was expecting, and there was still nothing to do with my hands that helped.
There was nobody to stab over it, either.
She was his sister. He'd wanted her here, and I'd stood on Winston's porch and let her come.
My teeth ached anyway. They didn't care about the difference between taking and borrowing.
I wanted to walk into that kitchen and put my body between them, and I stood at the block and split wood instead, because the last time I'd decided what John could have, he'd looked at me like I was a stranger.
Sierra leaned out the screen door. "Percy. Food!"
I buried the ax in the block and went.
The kitchen smelled like chorizo and lemon. The chorizo was Sierra's. The lemon was hers, some lotion out of her bag, and it had rubbed off onto the coffee pot handle, the back of John's chair, and John.
I took the seat across from him, back to the wall, where I could see the door, both windows, and every place her hands went.
Pearl lay under Sarah's chair with her chin resting on the woman's shoe.
Traitor.
Sarah had quit asking where the spare apron hung about three mornings ago, and she and Sierra were moving around each other at the stove without bumping, trading the skillet and the tongs without a word between them.
I'd been on this land nine years, and Sierra still slapped my hand off the tortilla press.
She flipped an egg one-handed, and I hated that it was a good flip.
Cruz banged in through the screen door, saw a strange woman at the stove, and sat down without taking his eyes off her.
"Was he always..." Cruz raised a flat hand over his own head, as high as his arm reached.
"Nine pounds at birth." She slid the egg onto a plate. "My mother never let him forget it."
"Sare," John said.
"Ask him about the tomatoes."
"That was one summer."
"It was every summer, and Mom guarded those plants like the federal mint."
John laughed. The sound came up out of his chest, and it went up my spine and into my back teeth. I reached over and took the salsa. Close up, the lemon sat on him where his collar was open, over the pulse, right where I put my nose when he let me. My jaw clenched tight enough to creak.
I wanted him in the bathhouse under the well water until he smelled like himself again. He hadn't offered it, and the asking stayed stuck somewhere behind my teeth, so I put salsa on my eggs and ate them without tasting anything.
After we cleared the plates, Sierra took the field kit down off the shelf and set it on the table in front of me.
"Dressings," he said. "My hands are in the masa."
John looked at the kit. Then he glanced at me across the table, and for a moment nothing in the kitchen moved, not Pearl, not Sarah, not the air.
He turned his chair sideways for me and pulled his shirttail up out of the way. "Go on, then, little one."
I held my hands steady when I reached him.
I peeled the tape back a corner at a time, eyes on his stomach instead of the dressing, watching for a flinch.
The stitches sat clean in skin gone green and yellow at the edges where the bruising had started to fade.
No heat under my fingers, nice and dry. The smell of him came up off his skin under the gauze, river and cedar and John, no lemon anywhere on that part of him, and I unclenched my jaw.
"That one pulled when you got out of the truck last night," I said. "Don't lie about it."
"It pulled. It held."
"Breathe in."
The stitches pulled tight over his ribs when he breathed in, and every one of them held. I laid the new gauze and taped it, then moved down his forearm and unwound Sarah's straightened wrapping and did it right.
She watched my hands the whole time. She'd pulled her chair back to give me the light, and she sat with her coffee going cold in both hands, watching me handle her brother. Good. Let her see how I taped the edges down flat so nothing snagged.
I pressed the last strip of tape along his forearm and took my time with the corner.
"I'd have kept him from you forever," I said, without looking up from the tape. "Fed him. Moved him somewhere better every time you got close. I want you to know that before you decide anything about me."
Sierra's rag stopped on the counter. John's ribs went up and down under my palm, no catch in them, and he said nothing.
"At least you're honest." She glanced at John. He was looking at me, and whatever was in his face made her set the coffee down and turn her chair back to the table, and that was the end of it. She didn't thank me again. I liked her better for that.
Sierra put a plate of sopapillas down between us, and Cruz came back in asking whether Sarah knew John's shoe size, and nobody said anything else about it.
I rode along the east fence with Mateo, reset two leaning posts, and pulled a tumbleweed the size of Pearl off the wire, and all day my hands worked while the rest of me stayed back in that kitchen with my palm on his ribs and John saying nothing under it.
After supper, I pulled the string on the shop light in the tack room, dug the roll of butcher paper out from behind the tins where Sierra kept it, and cut a piece the length of my arm.
Nimue slid off my shoulders onto the workbench and coiled against the battery charger where the casing ran warm.
I shaved the pencil stub to a point with my knife, then weighted the paper's corners with a hoof pick, a tin of pine tar, a dead phone somebody had left charging since spring, and the knife, and sat there awhile with the empty paper.
I'd never had the whole ranch on paper before. It was in my legs. It was in the soles of my feet. Every wash and tank and cut, and the pencil felt smaller in my grip than the knife.
I started with the fences because they were the easy part, the four lines any map would have. Then I drew the parts no map had.
I drew the trail behind the second barn that dropped into the arroyo and came out past the gate, so a rider could leave without crossing the yard.
Next came the service road, and where it met the county road behind the sheds.
Then the stock tanks that held water through June, marked with circles, and the ones that dried up but still looked full from a distance, marked with crosses so he'd know not to trust them.
The north wash, and I wrote DEAD in it, because the radio was, every time, and a man alone in there needed to know his voice wouldn't climb out.
I ran the pencil along the ridge line and stopped.
The pencil sat on the paper at the break in the rocks, and my thumb ached where I was pressing it.
Then I drew the cave, and the trail up, and the overhang where the saddles stayed dry, and beside it I drew a little string of hanging bones so he'd know it wasn't a mistake.
The last thing went in the corner, small: the flat rock in the east wash where I cleaned my kills. He'd asked where I went that day. Now the answer had a place on paper.
I rolled the map and tied it with a piece of baling twine off the bench.
In the equipment shed, the spare keys hung on the pegboard by the door, each on its own nail over a strip of Rafe's masking tape. I took down the key to the flatbed.
The last time I'd taken a key off a pegboard, I'd been stealing a man with it.
I closed my fist around this one and went to find him.
John was on the porch steps with his forearms on his knees, taking up the whole middle of the stairway, same as he took up doorframes and bunks and the inside of my chest. The porch light was on above him.
Out past the yard, the dark had come down all the way.
The cicadas had quit and the crickets had started.
Pearl lifted her head off the boards when I came around the corner. I sat down one stair up from him, close enough to catch his warmth in the night air, far enough that nothing on me touched anything on him. Nimue shifted at my throat and settled.
I put the rolled paper on his knee, and the key on top of it.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he picked both up, and the map crackled open between his big hands, and he tilted it into the porch light and held it there, reading. "What am I looking at?"
"Every way off Pae Saco." I leaned in and put my finger on the trail behind the second barn.
"That one gets a rider out without crossing the yard, if a man doesn't want the yard watching him go.
The circles are tanks that hold water in June.
" My finger crossed the ridge and stopped on the little hanging bones. "You know that one."
John's thumb came down slowly next to my finger, beside the bones, not on them.
"You put your cave on here."
"Everything's on there." My mouth had gone dry, and I made the words come anyway. "It's everything I know about leaving this place. Nobody else has all of it. Now you do."
He turned his head. The porch light sat in his eyes, and the rest of his face stayed in the dark, and I made myself keep talking before whatever was in that look could reach the part of me that wanted to take the map back and burn it.
"The key's to the flatbed. The spare's yours now. It stays in your pocket, and it never comes back on the pegboard."
He turned the key over in his fingers. "Is that Rafe's to give, or yours?"
"Rafe's nail. I took it." I looked out at the yard because it was easier than looking at him.
"He'll count that pegboard inside a week and know whose pocket to look in, and I'll answer for it at the turquoise table.
That's between me and him. When your ribs are knit, I'll teach you the saddle and the bridle.
Then you won't need Linc, or the truck, or anybody. "
"Coyote."
"So you never have to ask anybody the way out." I swallowed and held my breath.
The crickets carried the quiet for a while.
"And if I use it?" John asked. "The door."
"Then I'll follow." I turned my head and held his eyes. "That part doesn't change. You can have all the doors, big man. I'll just be behind you, everywhere, until I die."
He laughed. It was low and quiet, and it moved the boards under us, and it didn't have one sharp edge anywhere.
"That's the most romantic threat anybody's ever given me," he said.
"It isn't a threat."
"I know what it is, little one."
He looked at the map for a while longer, back up at the ridge, at the bones. His thumb moved once over the paper beside them. Then he folded the map along my creases, taking his time with each one, and slid it into his shirt pocket.
John braced a hand on his knee and stood, one careful stage at a time, guarding the ribs. On his feet, he blocked out the porch light, and the whole night smelled like him. I sat where I was and let him tower over me.
His hand came up as he passed me. It stopped above my hair, close enough that the warmth of it reached my scalp. My whole body leaned into a touch that wasn't landing, one degree of heat off his palm, and I held so still that Nimue tightened against my throat.
Then he turned and he took the warmth with him down the steps and across the yard, toward the equipment shed and his bedroll. Pearl got up, stretched her back legs one at a time, and followed him.
I stayed on the step until the wood went cold where he'd been sitting.
Then I crossed the yard after him, let myself in past the patched place in the wall, and lay down on my blanket an arm's length from the biggest thing in my life, close enough to take and too far to be taking, and I listened to his breathing go long and deep and stay.