3. The Long Way Round
THE LONG WAY ROUND
COLE
Eleanor Voss put me in a front bedroom with a four-poster bed, a quilt with flowers on it, and more pillows than a man could find a use for in a year. Softest bed I've slept in since before the Navy.
I can't sleep.
It isn't the bed.
It's her.
Small — small enough that the bottle on the third shelf should've been a stretch, and wasn't. She went up for it easy, no crate, nobody asked to move, the room just made room, and her shirt rode up with the reach.
Half a second. Maybe less.
My body answered before I got a vote in it.
Low, and immediate, and not up for discussion.
It surprised the shit out of me — not the wanting.
The wanting made sense the second her shirt rode up.
What got me was my body moving before I gave the order.
Fifteen years I've trained it to do what I tell it and hold still when I tell it to. It didn't think to ask.
Dark hair cut short, a streak of turquoise above one ear like a thing she dared the world to mention. A mouth I noticed, and then had to work at not noticing.
She poured the Blanton's before I ordered it. Read me off the door and set it down neat before I'd taken the stool. Said something about not making her guess. She wasn't wrong.
I looked down first.
I have not been the man who looks down first since I was sixteen.
I made it quick — reached for the glass like the look was always headed there and never went near her at all.
Told myself she didn't catch it. A woman who reads a room the way she reads one caught it.
And it wasn't her being pretty that did it, though she is.
It was that she was looking at the man and not the size of him — past the shoulders, past the look that makes women lean in, all the way to the part I keep back of all that — and she'd already added it up and set it down.
I broke first because I wasn't ready to be seen that clean. Not by her. Not by anybody, a year in.
Women come easy. Always have. They stand a little too close, laugh a half-second early, turn so the light finds them — they hang on a man like a cheap suit and wait for him to admire the cut.
I quit being flattered by it a long time ago.
Since the funeral there've been a few of them, the kind that fill a night and don't ask for the morning, a name I didn't keep.
They wanted the shape of me. Not one of them ever looked under it, which was the whole point of them.
A man can't be reached by someone who never sees him.
She didn't do one bit of it. Poured my drink, called me cowboy, went back to her bottles like I was an order she'd already filled.
Didn't perform. Didn't need me to admire her back, didn't ask me to be the thing women ask a man like me to be.
She'd read all the way to the bottom of me in the time it takes to pour two fingers, and then she wanted not one thing from what she found.
Just turned around and let me sit there, seen, and got back to her work.
That's the part I can't put down.
A year now I've kept everybody on the far side of the glass.
It's how I've stayed upright — file it, hold the line, be nowhere anybody can reach.
The last person who looked at me and saw the whole man is wrapped in a blanket on the floor of my room three blocks south.
I made my peace with the quiet that came after.
I'd decided the part of a man that can be reached goes in the ground with the men who knew how to reach it.
What I didn't expect was to want like this. Not a body — a person. The lying-awake kind. I'd buried it, filed it with everything else the last fifteen years took and didn't hand back.
Then a five-foot-two bartender poured a drink I didn't order, looked at me the way Holt used to look at me — like she already had the whole file — and the quiet's gone.
She turned a thumbnail of it up without trying, and now I can feel the rest of it down there, awake, the way you feel a limb come back that's been asleep so long you'd quit counting on it.
I didn't know it could still go.
I put a forearm over my eyes, and it does nothing, because she's in there too.
I don't make noise. Eleanor's two doors down, and I've spent fifteen years learning how to leave a building without waking the people in it. I take the stairs on the outside of the treads, ease the front door shut behind me, and step out into the cold.
Coldwater at this hour is one yellow light blinking on a cable over an empty intersection, a few trucks nosed in along the curb, and a dog asleep on the porch of the feed store who lifts his head, decides I'm nobody worth the trouble, and puts it back down.
I walk because walking is the thing I do instead of sleeping.
Main Street is four blocks and I take all of them.
The storefronts are dark. Mercer Hardware, Walt's name on the glass.
Rena's diner, one light over the register.
At the end of the block her bar — red brick, black trim, the sign on its iron bracket dead-still because there's no wind to move it.
The Devil's Daughter. The lights are off. She's gone home.
I think about her father telling me whatever I thought I saw, I didn't. A man who tows a stranger six miles, hands him his own thermos, and warns him off his daughter inside the same hour. I don't have the shape of it yet. I file it and keep walking.
Above the rooftops the range stands up black against the sky, and it's the sky that stops me.
I haven't seen stars like this since the deployments. That thick. That close. The dark crowded with them edge to edge. Out here you could read by it.
Holt would have liked it here. It hits before I'm ready for it.
Mid-step. Before I know it's on me. Fifteen years that man had my six.
First one through every door, last one to complain, the kind who'd haul another man's gear up a ridgeline on top of his own and crack a joke about the view from the top.
He wanted to see this sky his whole life and never got the chance.
I'm three days short of the trailhead he picked, finishing the trip because he made me swear I would — and a man does not break a promise to the brother who kept him alive.
And it's more than a trip. Up in that black range, three days past the trailhead, is the ground where I leave him for good — scatter what's left of him in the only place he ever wanted to be, and walk back out without him.
Not a visit. The last thing I'll ever do for him. Then he's home, and I'm not anywhere.
Nobody trains you for after. The war ends, the team scatters, and a man who spent fifteen years with somebody always on his flank has to learn how to stand in the open alone.
I breathe in through the nose. I let it out. I keep walking.
The quiet out here is enormous. No traffic. No rotors. No generator hum, no men breathing in the dark waiting on a word from me. Just a town asleep, and a man who can't.
I want one of the guys on the phone. Somebody who knew him.
So I turn around and walk back. The B it's about the only thing we've got left in common, now the rest of it's over.
"Mathison. It's one in the morning, brother." Behind him a TV turned low, a kitchen.
"Your mother up?"
"She's always up. Houseful of people who don't sleep." The TV goes quiet behind him. "Where are you? You sound like you’re outside."
"Wyoming. Town called Coldwater. Truck quit on me six miles out."
"The Ford." I can hear the grin. "Holt's Ford died on you. You just made me forty bucks — Hagen had money on her going the distance." Then the grin goes out of his voice the way it does with all of us now, mid-sentence, no warning. "You close?"
"Three days short. She's in the shop."
He lets that sit. He knows the route. He helped draw it up, back when it was all of us drawing it and Holt was the one who was going to walk it.
"You good to do this by yourself, man? I can still get a flight, I can be there by?—"
"You can't. Your mother needs you. Hagen's got a wife and a mortgage. It's fine."
"It's not fine. It's just yours."
Neither of us says anything. That's the thing about us — we let a silence stand. Civilians fill them. We never learned how.
Then: "You sound different."
"It's late."
"No. Different." A pause while he decides whether to push, and decides yes. "Who'd you meet?"
I don't answer.
"Mathison."
"I'm gonna let you get back to your mother."
"Oh." The grin comes all the way back, and under it something careful, something glad I don't have anywhere to put. "You met somebody. Cole Mathison met a woman in a town called Coldwater."
"Goodnight, Reyes."
"Hey." He catches me before I can go. "You tell Holt I said —"
He doesn't finish it. There's no good end to that sentence and there hasn't been for a year, and we both let it go.
"I'll tell him," I say.
I hang up.
It's just mine.
The cold finally drives me inside. The bed's no better than it was — too soft, too many pillows, built for a man who sleeps easy, which I'm not.
I pull the throw down onto the floor and stretch out where it's the right kind of hard, and sometime before the sky goes gray my body quits fighting me and gives up a couple of hours.
I take them.
Rena's diner is half full when I walk in the next morning, and I'm news before the door swings shut behind me.