CHAPTER 1 #2
His sister. Who had not called him in two years, not since the last fight, and who would not call him now, at suppertime on a Friday, with no warning, unless the world had come off its hinges.
Beck looked at the name and the cold came up through him before he ever touched the phone, the deep ground-cold that creeps into a man at the bad end of a calving night, the body knowing the wreck before the mind would say it.
He answered it. “Charlie.”
“Beck.” Her voice was wrong, fast and thin and stripped.
“Beck, where are you, are you — God, I don't even know why I'm calling, I just — it's Daddy.
It's Jed. He went down in the kitchen, he was talking and then he wasn't, half his face just, Beck, he went down and Hutch couldn't get him up and the ambulance —” She stopped.
He could hear her swallow. “They're taking him to the county hospital. Right now. They think it's a stroke.”
The bar got very far away. The ball game, the two old boys, the bartender's careful eyes, all of it slid back and dimmed, gone muffled and far, the way the world goes from the bottom of a stock tank.
Beck set the glass down with great care, the way you set a thing down when your hands have started to shake and you don't want anyone to see, and pressed two fingers hard against the bridge of his nose until the white light behind his eyes steadied.
“How bad,” he said. His own voice came out level. It always did.
“I don't know. I don't know, Beck, nobody knows yet, they just — can you. Are you close. I don't even know where you are.”
He looked at the dark window of The Broke Spoke and past it at Main Street going copper in the last light, at the town he had not been able to drive through without flinching, eight minutes from the hospital, white and low at the north end of town, already risen up clear behind his eyes.
“I'm close,” he said. “Charlie. I'm here. I'm coming.”
A silence on the line, and into it came his little sister's crying, quiet, the way she'd cried as a girl when she didn't want their mother to hear. “You're here?” she said. “You're already —”
“I'm here.” He was already off the stool, already dropping a bill on the bar, already moving for the door. “Ten minutes. Less.”
He hung up before she could ask the question under the question, the one that had been hanging over every conversation he'd had with anyone in this family for ten years: and are you staying.
The bartender said something behind him.
Beck didn't hear it. He was through the door and into the dust-gold evening and the truck was warm under his hand and the medal was a small hard weight at his throat, St. Christopher, patron of travelers, riding along with the one man he'd never been able to bring all the way home.
The Calhoun who leaves, he thought, swinging up into the cab, called back by the one thing he couldn't outrun.
---
He drove too fast and he knew it and he did it anyway.
That was the thing nobody understood about him, the thing the town had decided about him ten years ago and gotten wrong in the particulars and right in the bone.
They thought he'd been drunk that night.
He'd never corrected them because the truth was worse and not his to give.
The truth was he hadn't needed to be drunk.
The truth was there was a reckless thing that lived in him, low down, that came up when the pain got past a certain point, a thing that wanted to put a heavy machine on a dark road and aim it at whatever was coming and let the wreck decide.
He'd ridden bulls all this while to feed that thing one eight-second meal at a time so it wouldn't eat him alive on the highway.
And here it was again, in his hands, in his foot on the floor, the speedometer climbing as the streetlights ran out and the road went black and open toward the north end of town.
The headlights cut a tunnel. The white center line came at him and ticked under and was gone, came and ticked and was gone, fast as a pulse, and out past the glow there was nothing, just the shapes of fence posts and the dark heave of land and somewhere off to the right the cottonwoods that meant the river and the place the river was crossed.
He did not look that way. He kept his eyes dead center on the line.
But the thing came up at him anyway, the way it always did when he drove a dark road too fast, the way it had been crouched in the floor of him all these years waiting for exactly this combination of speed and dark and grief — the cold breath of another set of headlights swinging up out of the black, the wrench of the wheel, the long sick float of a truck leaving the road.
The sound of a man beside him saying his name. Beck. Just that. Beck. And then the world turning over and over and the smell of gas and somebody screaming who couldn't get his leg free.
Beck's hands had gone white on the wheel.
His breath was high in his chest. He made himself ease off, foot lifting, the engine dropping out of its howl, the needle falling back, because the one absolute law he had set himself across all those years away was that he would not be the cause of one more wreck on one more dark road, he would not, he had already spent everything a man had to spend on that account and there was nothing left in him to pay with, and his father was lying somewhere up ahead with half his face gone slack and the boy who broke everything he touched was not, was not, going to wrap a truck around a fence post on the way to him.
He slowed to something almost sane. He breathed. The medal lay against his sternum. Up ahead the low white lights of the hospital rose out of the dark like a thing surfacing, and Beck pointed the truck at them and held on.
---
The emergency entrance was a wash of fluorescent white spilling out onto blacktop, and after the dark road it hit his eyes like a slap.
He parked crooked across two spaces and didn't care and was through the sliding doors into a cold he could taste, antiseptic and floor wax and the particular hum a building makes when it never sleeps.