Chapter 26 Brick
brICK
Ford’s grin has too many teeth when he knocks and doesn’t wait for me to answer.
“Opportunity,” he says, already halfway in my trailer like the word is a badge that gets him through any door. He’s charged up, eyes bright the way they get when he’s holding a number in his head big enough to drown arguments.
“I’m concussed,” I say, because that was the last truth I said out loud, and it’s still true. “Twenty-four hours, Doc said. I mean to listen.”
He steeples his fingers like a preacher about to sell grace. “It’s not a standard draw. It’s a showcase. Sponsors, cameras, side pot. Winner-take-all purse is obscene.”
“How obscene?”
He names a number that would provide diapers and daycare for triplets.
If it’s just one kid, they’d be set right up until college.
“It’s risky,” he adds, because his ethics require disclosure.
“It’s always risky. But these bulls are handpicked, Brick.
You could do this all day. It’s cash on the table. ”
“You know that thing they say about something being too good to be true?”
“Brick,” he presses, leaning over the table like he’s trying to warm his hands.
“This is the kind of purse you don’t get to say no to at your age.
You sit on the bench for twenty-four hours and let some kid with a clean brain take your check?
He’ll blow it on a truck with a payment plan and a buckle so big it needs its own belt.
You could put that money somewhere it matters—like making sure your grandkids are set with one hell of an investment. ”
He doesn’t know about Annie. He doesn’t know I’ve spent the last twelve hours hating myself for every version of noble I’ve tried on and found wanting.
“You’re acting like I can be bought.”
“I’m acting like you can be convinced,” he says, and for once, he lets the smarm fall off. “This contest is yours for the taking. Make the check out to whatever church of good you want. Let me do my job, and let yourself do yours, and we stand to make a killing.”
I stare at the AC vent long enough to watch a bit of lint tremble and fall. I picture Annie in her lab, helping poor people. I picture her scraping rent out of a line item that says donation jar because she’s stubborn about people and disgracefully bad at capitalism.
I picture a crib. “When’s the contest?”
Ford’s eyes flicker. “One hour. Enough time to tape what needs taping and let me get the right mouths pointed at the right microphones.”
“Send me the draw,” I say, and he does with a little more speed than the situation demands. It’s a roster of bad ideas.
I sit there for a long minute with the phone in my hand and the number he said coiled in my chest. I hear the crowd, even with the door closed, the slur of sound that always makes me feel both bigger and smaller than I am.
I hear Annie telling me twenty-four hours, but it’s been twenty-four hours, and my head feels better, but the rest of me is thrashed.
It’s hard not to think of Vicki the day she said yes to everything that came after, stubborn and bright and too young to know what she’d already decided to carry for both of us. I think of Reno slamming my door and calling me old like it was the worst thing he could make true by saying it out loud.
I stand up. The room shifts and then holds. “I’m in.”
“You sure?” Ford asks, because he’s not completely heartless.
“No. But I’m doing it anyway.”
He nods and claps my shoulder, careful of the part that hurts. “That’s all I need.”
Tape. Vest. Chaps. I move slower than I want to.
My hands are steady because they know what to do, even when my head is arguing with a ghost. The bull rope feels heavier than it did yesterday.
The glove goes on like a handshake I’ve been avoiding.
I don’t look in the mirror. I don’t need to see my face to know what it’s doing.
The walk to the chutes is a corridor of noise. Blaze spots me and opens her mouth to yell something—warning, joy, threat—but Ford materializes at her elbow with two words and a clipboard that convinces her this is already written. I tip my brim. She narrows her eyes at me and does not smile.
I deserve worse, and if I’m not careful, I’m about to get it.
There are cameras where there shouldn’t be and a sponsor banner so big it makes the bull look smaller for a second, which is a lie I refuse to tell myself, even with money on the line.
The animal in my chute is rank the way men write songs about.
He’s all neck and bad attitude, and he eyes the gate like he can see through it to the part of the evening where he’s right about everything.
I slide my rope and set my seat and nod at the latch man without a word. I hear Ford’s number. I hear Annie’s voice. I hear Vicki laughing the first time she took a header off a horse bareback and stood up with straw in her hair like a crown.
My fallen queen.
The gate slides away, and it’s on.
He blows out mean and straight and then jumps left, high and hard enough to make re-entry negotiable.
I stick, loose where I should be loose, tight where I should be tight.
He finds the rhythm of left-left-left and then decides to decorate it with a hook—head swing and horn kiss, a feint that would fool a younger man and a dumber one.
I see it a breath too late, and then, I’m launched and soaring. The horn—not padded, not shaved. Sharp. Aiming at my stomach. The time inside the air is endless. I hear the crowd turn in on itself with a gasp.
The horn gleams. It’s going to catch me under the ribs and turn me into a hole. I know it. The bull knows it.
I aim for muscle memory to flip and turn, but I miss, grabbing for memories instead.
Vicki in middle school, alphabetical fate putting White next to Wyatt and both of us rolling our eyes before we knew the joke would last. Running away to get married behind her parents’ backs, with my aunt signing what she shouldn’t have because love seemed more important than paperwork.
Reno’s birth, terrifying and blessed and loud.
Then Cash, so fast that we almost didn’t get to the hospital in time.
Levi, long and lazy, almost ended in a C-section because the labor lasted so long.
Blaze, later, when we were already tired and thought our hearts couldn’t possibly make more room, and then they did without asking us.
The way Vicki’s laugh made people forget they hated each other.
The way she’d tell me to stop being a martyr when it was so damned obvious what the right thing was.
And then I see Annie. The way she holds a suture needle like a pen that writes second chances. The way she says my name. The way she stood in my doorway and said a word that should belong to both of us, and then left me with it, because I told her that leaving was better for her.
Everything clicks. I’m a dumbass.
Correction: I was a dumbass.
Life is too short. It’s too short to keep pretending I’m noble when I’m just chicken. I am older. That just means I’m experienced.
I’m not dead yet. And I’m not dying tonight.
The horn comes, and I roll. Tuck, chin down, meat not bone.
My shirt snags on the tip of the horn, but I slide down the bull’s back like a kid on a hill and miss the worst of his anger by a hair and a prayer and a gymnastics coach I never thanked enough.
I hit the dirt the way you want to hit dirt, and then I run.
The pickup man puts himself between me and the animal like he’s still earning his buckle. The bullfighter throws his body and takes up the empty space in the bull’s vision. I’m out under the rail before fear remembers what it wanted to do to me.
Ford is there with his headset and his face like a spreadsheet on fire. “What are you doing?” he yells over the din. “Get back in there! You can still win this! The clock—”
“I don’t care,” I say, and I mean it so deep it scares me. I’m not saying it to spite him. It’s just the honest truth. “I just don’t care about that anymore, Ford. I’m out.”
“Brick,” he pleads, jogging sideways to keep up with me, because I’m not walking to the locker room. I’m moving toward my trailer like a man who decided he’s done pretending to be other people’s idea of brave. “You can’t—this is—people will say—”
“Let them. They were going to anyway.”
“What am I supposed to tell the committee? The sponsors? The—”
“Tell them I remembered who I was,” I say, and for once in our long friendship, he has no dart to throw and no joke to sand the edge. He stops in the middle of the lane and watches me go.
I head for my trailer. My shoulder protests with every step, which is fine; it should. Pain is the bill you pay when you ignore what a woman with a stethoscope tells you. The bell in my head is quiet now. I’m not healed.
But this isn’t about that.
I’m going to find her. I’m going to tell her the truth before my courage gets petty. I’m going to make it right before the angle of the world stops favoring the brave.
If she tells me to leave, I’ll leave. If she tells me to stay, I’ll stay. If she tells me we need to learn a new map neither of us has read before, I’ll try to figure that out too. Whatever she wants.
But first, I have to talk to my kids.