Chapter 20 Brick
brICK
The gate clangs, hooves thunder, and the sound inside my skull turns bright white.
I nod at the latch man and breathe through the leather, smell of hide and dust, and the old iron tang that lives in every arena like a ghost. The bull underneath me rolls his shoulders like he’s about to shake the world apart.
I like him. He’s mean in a showy way. He wants me to look sloppy. I grin at the thought and set my hips.
Bang!
We’re out and going, hard left, nose buried, shoulders popping like a busted metronome, back feet kicking for Jesus.
Crowd noise comes on like a storm behind glass—loud but far.
I float my free hand and feel my body do what it’s done a thousand times.
Loosen where I want to stick, stick where I want to loosen.
He fakes right on the second jump, and I don’t buy it. He’s got rhythm and I ride it, not ahead, not behind, just in it, the way you ride a song you know by heart.
I know this tune.
Four seconds. Five.
I hear my name get elongated into something syrupy and big in the announcer’s mouth. It’s funny and flattering, the kind of thing that slips through in moments like this.
Then the bull changes his mind midair.
I feel the cue a hair late.
He hitches. The rope slides a thumb’s breadth through my glove. My hips get a whisper too high. I course-correct, but physics cashes the check I just wrote.
The ground comes up fast and unkind. Tuck the chin. Round the back. Roll for meat not bone. Turn face away from hooves. Ignore the flaring pain.
It’s mechanical. But right now, I’m a slow robot. I land, bounce once, roll, plant my palms, and start to stand. I get to my knees, and the arena tips thirty degrees to starboard.
Someone put the whole fairground underwater. Echoes vibrate through me.
The bullfighter flashes by in bright pants and steals the bull’s attention with a move I taught him when he was a teenager. The pickup man skims the edge of my vision like a saint on a horse. The horn blows. My ears ring louder.
The world shrinks and blackens. What the—
Hands—many, too many—find my shoulders. The bell inside the bucket keeps going. It gets funny for half a second in the wrong way. Someone is talking at me. It sounds like a radio in the next room.
“—stay still, stay with me, I need—”
I blink slow. The sky is surrounded by the loaded stands of people shouting. I think they’re shouting, anyway. Not real sure. My jaw works. No words come out. I put a hand up to wave off the fuss, and the hand is not interested in waving. It’s interested in gravity.
“Don’t move. Brick, can you hear me?”
It takes three tries to land my eyes on his face. Young. Straw hat. Panic he’s trying to hide. I give him a thumb that might be a thumbs-up, or it might be me counting to one.
Stretcher. The plastic flexes under me. Straps clip closed. My head is held like I’m a baby the size of a man. The sky slides by.
The dang bell keeps ringing.
They hustle me out under the rail, wheels taking ruts like bad jokes. I try to sit up, and the world booms no. I lie back and let the air touch my face. People talk at me. A small boy yells my name. His voice sounds normal. Everything else is rain on a metal roof.
The medic tent is shade and clean, and the kind of order that makes you want to close your eyes and pretend the rest of the world was a trick of the light. They wheel me inside, and the air changes shape.
Annie’s here.
“Jaden, I need vitals, now,” she says, and her voice goes straight through the water and into the center of me. Clear, precise, not calm because calm is a lie. It’s steady because steady is a discipline, and she has that in spades. “Brick, eyes on me.”
I try to make my eyes behave. They do elsewise. I wanna look at her. I always wanna look at her. But I can’t.
“Hey,” she says, and the word cuts a path through the ringing and makes room for sense. “Stay with me.”
“Doc,” I say. Or try. It sounds like someone else borrowed my throat. “I’m good.”
“You’re horizontal and glassy,” she says, not buying a single thing. “Your definition of good is about to get smaller. Don’t talk. Blink for yes.”
I blink. It means yes, and also I just like doing what she tells me to do in here.
“Good,” she says. “Do not sit up.”
Sit up. Got it.
I lift my head a half inch off instinct, and she plants a palm on my sternum—gentle, implacable. “If you try to pull some macho bullshit,” she says, voice dry enough to snap, “I will strap you to this cot, head and all. Do you hear me?”
I can’t help it. I smile. Then I lie back because I like living and I like her, and both of those things want me to behave.
A blood pressure cuff hisses. Pulse ox kisses my finger and finds the red. Jaden moves like a man who knows where things live even when he’s not looking. Annie’s face is above me, and all the light in the tent chooses it like a destination.
She’s so pretty. Like an angel that wants to kick my ass for getting my ass kicked.
“Pupils equal and reactive,” she says, half to herself, half to us. “Brick. Follow my finger.”
I follow the world’s prettiest finger. There should be a ring on its neighbor two doors down. The ringing in my head gets quieter somehow.
“Any nausea?” she asks.
I consider it. “More like…loud.”
“Ringing?”
I blink yes. “Church bell. Bucket.”
“Cute,” she says with a ghost of a smile. “Neck pain?”
I shake my head, and the bell complains, so I stop. “No.”
“Headache?”
“Yeah.”
“Dizzy?”
“Some.”
“Any double vision?”
“Just one of you. Damn shame.” I can’t help it. It’s physically impossible not to flirt with the person trying to keep your skull together, and this one is particularly delightful.
Her mouth curves and then flattens back into work. “Let’s keep him down for ten and repeat. I want him still. Brick, you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” I say, which is a lie. It’s not clear. It’s loud. But Annie cuts through like a lighthouse. The rest is fog.
She’s the only thing that rings true.
“What hurts?” she asks.
“My pride.”
“Anything else?” she deadpans.
“Ribs,” I admit. “Left side. Shoulder. Not like break-bad. Like I lost an argument with a door.”
She palpates with hands that know the map and don’t get lost in their own opinions. It makes me grunt, but nothing more. “Tender. No crepitus.” She taps, feels, listens. “Breathe in.”
I do. It’s a symphony of complaint, not a scream. “Not likely broken. Bruised, most likely. Bruised and pissed off and loud about it,” she says, hearing something I can’t. “Lungs sound good. Abdomen soft.”
“There ain’t a part of me that’s soft, and I think you know that.”
She ignores my comment, then checks my skull, fingers careful. “No step-offs. No lacerations. You’re going to have a headache that will make you beg me to remove your head. Otherwise, you’re okay.”
I close my eyes for a second and let the word okay fill places I don’t admit are empty. I’d rather she filled them.
“Don’t sleep yet,” she says, testing my pupils again, light and dark, left and right. “I want you awake until I’m bored of your face.”
“Best line I’ve heard all week,” I mumble.
“Don’t get cute.” She looks at Jaden. “Get Ford.”
Jaden slips out. The tent breathes. Annie’s hands keep doing their work—glove squeak, soft rip of tape, the shake of a thermometer she doesn’t need because my skin tells her the story already. My ears keep ringing, but it’s lower now, a reminder instead of a siren.
“Doc,” I say, because I’m bad with silence when it sits on my chest like a heavy cat.
“Don’t you dare try to sit up and make this worse,” she says without looking up. “You are not impressing me by hurting yourself.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. I just want you to know that what you just said about strapping me down was the nicest thing anyone’s threatened me with in years.”
Her eyes flick to mine. They’re both worried and laughing. “You’re concussed. You don’t get to be charming.”
“It’s a chronic condition.”
“Which part? Being concussed or being charming?”
“Either one in my line of work.”
She rolls her eyes and presses an ice pack to my shoulder, so I let out a noise I can’t defend. “You still with me?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Keep it that way.”
The flap opens, and Ford leans in with a face like he ran a sprint while texting a crisis manager. “Oh, thank God,” he says, taking in my breathing and her posture and doing his own math. “Brick. You alive?”
“Apparently.”
Annie doesn’t look at Ford yet. She’s focused on the way my eyes track her finger. “He’s okay,” she says, and the words land in Ford like he can finally exhale. “Mild concussion, a carnival of bruises, ego in critical condition.”
Ford looks like he’s aged twenty years since I saw him an hour ago. “You scared the hell out of me. Blaze texted me five seconds after the gate opened.”
“I stuck seven and a half,” I say, as if that matters to anyone in here. “Most of ’em pretty.”
“Most of them very pretty,” Ford says. Then he frowns, doing a count of injuries I’ve had and expenses he’s paid. “How are you not paste?”
“Secret weapon,” I say, and the grin hits me before I can stop it. “Parents’ idea. Gymnastics.”
Both of them frown at the exact same time. It would be funny if I wasn’t dizzy.
“Explain,” Annie says.
“They thought it’d help me avoid becoming prematurely past tense.
In gymnastics,” I say, focusing on the thread that keeps my mind in the room, “you learn how to fall. Tuck and roll, where to land, how to find meat not bone, how to keep your neck from crinkling the bad way. Mom put us in classes whenever we were anywhere near a gym. Dad made us practice in the yard like idiots. The secret sauce to Wyatt longevity is somersaults, not whiskey. Been saving my hide for over thirty years.”
Ford’s face goes through three colors. “That,” he says, pointing a finger at Annie like it’s a magic wand, “is under doctor-patient confidentiality, right? You can’t tell anyone about…any of that. It would ruin the family’s image—”
“I’m not telling anyone anything,” Annie says. “You have nothing to worry about from me when it comes to that.”
“Good,” Ford says, and then he doubles down.
He leans over me to be urgent in the air.
“And I know you have a concussion, but you cannot go around telling anyone about gymnastics. That’s all we need.
Your image is built on family and being a widower-turned-ladies’ man.
If the thing about gymnastics gets out, they’ll all think you’re a pus—”
“A what, Ford?” Annie snaps, so sharp it makes the room flinch. “You think he’s less than because he did something usually associated with women?”
Ford freezes with his sentence halfway out like a man who just realized he invited a bear to argue ethics.
“Well, no, I don’t,” he says quickly, hands up.
“You know how people are out there. If you can’t shoot whiskey and a shotgun equally well, they’ll eat you alive.
If word got out about this, he’d be done for. ”
“I have more faith in the people out there than you do, apparently,” she says sharply, and the authority in it makes Ford look like a kid who’s supposedly too old to be scolded.
She starts cleaning up instruments without looking at him.
“Brick, you’re going to be okay. No riding for the next twenty-four hours. ”
I make a face that gives her too much credit. “I thought you’d say I was finished for the rest of the Old West Fest.”
“If I thought you’d listen to me about it, that’s exactly what I’d say,” she answers, not meeting my attempt at humor.
“But since I think I know you better than that, I’ll take twenty-four hours.
Don’t get knocked around again, or it might be the last time you do.
” Her voice tremors on those last few words.
Something low and dark inside me appreciates being spoken to like a man whose life is still worth speaking about plainly. “Understood, Doc.”
She finally looks at me again, and the worry is back, honest and unhidden, and it does more for my head than the ice. I stack that look somewhere behind my breastbone where the bell can’t knock it over.
I turn to Ford because if I stare at her any longer, I’m going to get sentimental in front of people who don’t know about us, and I probably ought not do that. Sitting up makes my brain slosh in my head, but once I’m up, I’m good. “How about I get you out of here, before she tears you a new one?”
Ford laughs the nervous laugh of a man who knows he earned it. “Let’s grab a bite to eat,” he says to the tent at large. He squeezes Annie’s shoulder like an apology and backs out as if a stray word could hit him in the spine.
We’re alone again except for the humming machines and the fan that has two speeds—sulk and whine. Annie peels her gloves with a snap, tosses them in the bin, and starts lining gauze into those perfect stacks that make chaos obey her fingers.
“I’m sorry about him,” I say, because apology is the only thing that feels right even when it’s not my debt. “He’s old school—”
“No need to apologize,” she says, eyes on the gauze. Then she looks up, and the thing in her expression is the kind you don’t get unless life took something from you and you are meaner and kinder because of it. “Just…be careful. I mean it. There are people who need you.”
I’m not sure if by people she means herself. I hope she means herself. I want her to mean herself so badly it makes me restless. “I will do my best.”
She nods once, satisfied in the way only a person who has decided to trust your choices can be. She turns back to her order, and I stand there for another breath just to remember what her voice sounds like when the room isn’t on fire.
The bell inside the bucket has become a tone I can live with. The floor mercifully stays where it’s supposed to. Annie hands me the ice pack without looking, and I put it on my shoulder because I like being obedient for once.
I tip two fingers at the woman who just gave me back my edges. “Twenty-four hours?”
“Minimum,” she says, not smiling, which is how I know she’s not bluffing.
“Minimum,” I echo.
I step out into the fairground light, blink against the gold, and see Ford twenty yards down the lane trying to decide whether to text a crisis or eat a corn dog about it.
I catch up to him, walking steady, ice pack cold against the dent in my shoulder, and I carry with me the exact sound of her voice when she said People need you.
So I’ll take the twenty-four hours she asked for and make it a promise instead of a leash. Twenty-four hours is a long time in my world to wait to ride. But I’ll do anything for that woman.