CHAPTER 3
Beck
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The ICU waiting room smelled like every hard hour Beck had ever spent in a chute, only worse, because there was no bull at the end of it he could ride and walk away from.
Antiseptic over the top, sharp and chemical, the kind that scoured the inside of your nose.
Under it, burnt coffee gone bitter in a pot somebody'd forgotten to turn off.
The two smells didn't mix so much as fight, and the fight was the whole room.
He'd been breathing it for three hours and his throat tasted like a penny.
He sat in a chair bolted to its neighbors, forearms on his knees, hat upside down in his hands, and he turned the brim a slow quarter every few minutes the way another man might pray.
The corridor behind him still hummed where she'd stood.
Laney. The collision in the hall had lasted maybe ten seconds — her copper braid coming loose at the temple, those green eyes reading him the way she read a downed animal, deciding what was salvageable and what wasn't. Cold, level.
Here for Jed, her whole body had said. Not for you.
He'd reached. He couldn't have stopped his hand if he'd tried, and she'd gone still as a fence post, and he'd let it drop, and that had been the conversation.
Ten years in ten seconds. Now she was somewhere down a different hall, and the not-knowing-where pulled at him like a thrown rope.
A door swung. Beck's head came up.
Charlie crossed the waiting room fast and small and folded into him before he was all the way out of the chair, arms tight around his ribs, her face in his shoulder. She smelled like cold night air and the lavender soap she'd used since she was twelve.
“You came,” she said into his shirt. “You actually came.”
“Hey.” He got an arm around her. Her shoulders shook once and stopped — Charlie, holding it the way she held everything, by main force. “Hey, now. I'm here.”
“I know you're here. I can feel you here.” She pulled back and swiped under both eyes with the heel of her hand, then spun her wedding band once around her finger, fast. “God, Beck. Look at you. You look like the side of a bus hit you.”
“Drove most of the night.” He didn't tell her about the speed, the dark road, the thing that had brushed past him out by the bridge that he wouldn't name. “Tell me about Dad.”
She opened her mouth. Behind her, the inner door breathed shut a second time, slower, and the temperature of the room changed.
Tucker came in the way he came into everything — squared up, sleeves shoved past the elbow, the working red on his forearms gone pale under the fluorescents.
He stopped a body's length off and looked at Beck, and there was no fold-in coming from that quarter, no soft place at all.
His jaw rolled once, the muscle ticking.
“Tuck,” Beck said.
“You found the place all right.” Tucker's voice was flat. “Ten years, but the road back's the same one.”
“Tucker.” Charlie put it between them like a hand on a chest.
“I'm just saying he found it.” Tucker hooked his thumbs in his belt. “Took a man falling down dead in the home pasture, but he found it.”
He's not dead, Beck wanted to say, and didn't, because he didn't know yet that it was true, and saying it might make a liar of him in front of God and his sister both.
He stood there and took it. The thing about Tucker was that every word landed because every word was earned, and that was the part with teeth.
Then the third person came through, and the room got quiet in a different way — the way a corral got quiet when the old hand stepped to the rail.
Hutch.
Thirty years older than the boy who'd taught Beck to dally without losing a finger, and exactly the same: bandy-legged, leather-faced, the deep tan stopping in a clean line under the hatband to the fair skin above.
Faded blue eyes that didn't waste themselves on a thing they'd already measured.
He took Beck in from boots to hatline, said nothing for a long beat, then crossed and put out his hand.
Beck took it. The grip was dry and hard, half a finger short on the left, same as always.
“Beck,” Hutch said. One word, his whole name and a verdict in it both.
“Hutch.” Beck's voice came out rougher than he meant. “How bad.”
Hutch didn't dress it. He never had. “Bad enough you're standing here.”
A nurse went past behind them with a covered tray, and the antiseptic-and-coffee smell of the place rolled up fresh, and Beck's stomach turned over slow. He sat back down because his knees wanted to and he wasn't going to give Tucker the satisfaction of watching them buckle.
It was the doctor who finally laid it out — a tired woman in scrubs who pulled a chair around so she was on Beck's level, which he'd remember later as a kindness, the not-standing-over-them.
Stroke, she said. Ischemic. The left side of his brain, which meant the right side of his body, which meant the weak hand and the dragging leg they'd see when he woke fuller.
And the words. The words would be the hard part for a man like their father.
Aphasia, she called it. The wiring between what he meant and what he could say, frayed.
“Will he—” Charlie started, and couldn't finish the verb.
“It's early,” the doctor said. “The next days tell us a great deal. Some of it comes back. How much, how fast — I won't promise you numbers I don't have. He's stable for tonight. That's the word I'll give you. Stable.”
Stable. Beck turned the word over. It was a word that meant a horse hadn't kicked through the stall yet, a word a long mile short of fine.
When the doctor left, the three of them sat with it, and the pot ticked somewhere, and the smell pressed in, antiseptic and burnt coffee, the breath of every waiting room there'd ever been.
“I'll stay till he's stable,” Beck heard himself say. “Get him over the worst of it, see him on his feet, then—”
“Then you'll go.” Tucker said it for him, soft, almost gentle, which was worse than the flat. “Course you will.”
“Tuck—”
“No, it's good. It's real good.” Tucker rubbed the back of his neck hard, looked at the ceiling tiles like the answer was up there in the water stains.
“You came back to watch him go, never to stay.
Same as the buckles, Beck. You show up for the eight seconds and then you're gone before they sweep the dirt.”
Beck caught his own thumb worrying the old scar through his right eyebrow, back and forth, and made it quit.
Tell him he's wrong, he thought. Go on. Open your mouth and tell him.
He couldn't. The truth was he'd already, in three hours, started counting the road home in his head — the highway, the county line, the long flat run west to wherever they'd put him on a bull next.
He'd done it the way a man checks for the gate before he climbs on.
Tucker had read it off him the way Laney had. Everybody in this damn town could read him but the one man lying down the hall who'd written the book.
“You don't get a vote on it,” Beck said finally, low. “He's my father too.”
“Funny. He's been mine every day for ten years. Yours just tonight.” Tucker pushed off the wall. “Go home, Beck. There's a motel by the highway. You know the one. You've left out of it before.”
“Tucker.” Charlie was on her feet, band spinning, voice climbing the way it did when she was the bridge and the bridge was coming down. “Both of you. Stop. He is right there. Sixty feet away. And we are going to stand out here and bleed on each other in a hallway?”
The grievance hung. Tucker's jaw worked.
He didn't take it back, but he didn't say more, and from Tucker that was a kind of mercy.
He dropped into a chair across the aisle and put his face in his hands, and Beck saw, in the back of those broad fingers, how tired his brother was.
Bone-tired. Carrying-it-alone tired. A tiredness Beck had no right to and felt a coward's flush of guilt at not having earned.
Hutch chose that moment to speak, which was how you knew it mattered. He'd taken the chair nearest the wall, hat on his knee, and he'd been turning a paper coffee cup in his hands without drinking from it.
“Flowers came,” Hutch said.
Charlie went still. “What flowers?”
“To the desk. Hour ago. For Jed.” Hutch tipped his chin at the corner, and Beck followed it.
There, on a low table beside a stack of out-of-date magazines, sat an arrangement that did not belong in this room.
Too tall, too white, too expensive — lilies and roses and something with a waxed green leaf, the kind of thing that came from a city florist by courier, not from anybody in Cedar Gulch who'd have brought a casserole and meant it.
A small white card stood up in a plastic pick among the stems.
Beck got up and went to it before he'd decided to.
The smell of the lilies hit him first, thick and funereal, and under it the antiseptic-and-coffee of the room, so that the whole thing came at him at once — somebody sent funeral flowers to a man who isn't dead yet. He plucked the card out by its edge.
Heavy stock. A printed name across the top in a restrained serif: a land-and-cattle outfit he'd never heard of, the kind of name built to look like money and old family both. Below it, handwriting, fountain-pen blue, careful and courteous:
Jed — the whole county is praying for you. When the dust settles and you and yours are ready to talk about Red Mesa's future, my door is open and my offer stands. There's no shame in a dignified exit. — S. V.
Beck read it twice. The second time the bottom dropped out of his gut, slow, like a chute gate giving under a horse's weight.
“Who's S. V.,” he said.
Nobody answered for a second. Then Charlie, quiet: “Sterling Vance.”
The name meant nothing to him and everything about the way she said it told him it should. “And he is.”
“He bought up the old Renner place. And the two spreads past it. He's been—” She stopped, glanced at Tucker, who hadn't lifted his head. “He's been interested in Red Mesa for a while now.”