CHAPTER 7 #2
It was the first thing he'd done since he got there. Beck caught it, the way you learn to catch the small tells of a quiet man, and held his breath without meaning to.
“How long,” Hutch said.
Three words. From Hutch they were a door cracking open.
“On the stud?” Beck said. “I won't lie to you.
I don't know. Weeks if I'm lucky and he's smarter than he's mean.
Longer if I'm wrong. But I've drawn a hundred horses with a buzzer counting against me, Hutch.
I know how to read one. He's not a killer.” He looked over at the pen, at the stallion watching all three of them with those hard dark eyes that never quite settled.
“He's scared. Somebody made him think the only way to win was to fight first and fight hard. He's not mean. He's just decided what he is, and everybody agreed with him.”
Beck had watched it for two mornings from the dark of the barn aisle, coffee going cold in his fist. The way the horse charged the rail when a man came at him fast, and the way he didn't, quite, when a man came slow.
The way his eye tracked your hands and not your face.
A killer didn't watch your hands to know what was coming; a killer didn't care. This horse cared.
This horse was bracing for a blow he'd learned to expect, and the bracing was getting called meanness by men who'd never once asked who'd taught him to flinch.
He heard the second meaning come out of his own mouth a beat after he'd said it, and so, he could tell, did Hutch.
The old man's faded eyes moved off the horse and onto Beck, and stayed there a moment, weighing, the way he'd weighed Beck at eight years old over a busted cinch, at sixteen over a wrecked truck, at twenty-four over the worst thing Beck ever did.
There was something in that look that wasn't scorn.
That was the trouble with Hutch. He'd known Beck longer than Beck's own father had paid attention, and the not-scorn was harder to stand than Tucker's contempt, because you couldn't argue with it.
“It's a fool's plan,” Hutch said.
“Yeah,” Beck said.
Hutch worked the matchstick. The windmill clanged behind them, that flat off-key note carrying down the rise and across the pens, and the stallion's ears flicked toward it and back.
“Most things that work start as fool's plans,” Hutch said. “I seen your daddy build this place on three of 'em.” He looked at Tucker. Looked at Beck. “Boy's got the bones of a real one. I'll give him that much.”
Hutch didn't deal in yeses, and this fell short of one. But Beck felt it move the air anyway, felt the thing he'd been swinging at finally connect, and under his ribs something he hadn't let himself name lifted half an inch off the floor.
Tucker felt it too, and didn't like it. “Hutch. Come on.”
“I said it's got bones,” Hutch said. “I didn't say it'd walk.”
Beck pressed the opening, because you press when the gate cracks, that was the only thing rodeo had ever really taught him.
“I'm not asking either one of you to bet the ranch on my say-so.
God knows I haven't earned that. I'm asking for a trial.
Give me the stud and a corner of the schedule and let me prove the pieces one at a time.
If I can't put hands on Diesel inside two, three weeks — if he's what they say he is — then I'm wrong about the horse and you can tell me so to my face and we go back to the only other plan, which is liquidate and pray.
I make the calls on the cattle contract this week.
I get one real bite, one buyer who'll sit down at a table, and we know the contract's live.
You watch every step. Nothing gets sold, nothing gets bet, until I've shown you it'll stand.” He looked at his brother, and for once he let the moment stand without a joke to soften it or a door to slip out through.
“You hold the books, Tucker. You always have.
You see one dollar move the wrong way, you shut me down. I'll hand you the matches myself.”
Tucker's jaw worked. The barbed-wire scar across his right palm flexed white as his fist opened and closed.
He stared at Beck a long time, and Beck could read the war in him plain as weather, because it was the same war Beck had been losing and winning since the day he drove out the gate — the wanting to believe, set against everything that had taught him not to.
“A trial,” Tucker said. Tasting it like something gone off.
“A trial. You can pull the plug any day.”
“And the foal.” Tucker's voice was lower now, and harder, because this was the real fear under all the rest of it, and Beck respected him for naming it.
“Juniper. You don't touch how we manage that mare.
That's Laney's call and hers alone, and if she says the breeding plan's too risky, it's too risky, and your sale finds something else to shine. The foal is not yours to gamble. You hear me. Not yours.”
The windmill clanged, soft, far off.
“The foal's not mine to gamble,” Beck said.
“Agreed. Laney's calls are Laney's.” He'd meant it to come out flat, businesslike.
Her name came out softer than he wanted it to, and he saw Hutch catch that too, damn the man, and Beck pushed past it before it could turn into anything.
“I want her in on this anyway. She knows that line better than anybody living.
She knows what it's worth. Get her behind the breeding piece and the sale's got teeth.”