CHAPTER 7 #3
“Good luck,” Tucker said, but the heat had gone out of it, replaced by something tireder and more honest. “She's not exactly your biggest fan.”
No, Beck thought. She's got reasons. Better ones than you know.
He didn't say that. He said, “I'm not asking her to be a fan. I'm asking her to do what's right for the horses. She'll do that whether she can stand the sight of me or not. That's who she is.”
Something flickered over Tucker's face — surprise, maybe, that Beck had her measured that exactly — and then it was gone, and his brother unfolded his arms and pulled the gloves out of his back pocket and slapped them once against his thigh, dust coming off them in the slanting light.
“Three weeks on the stud,” Tucker said. “One real buyer at a table inside the month, or the cattle contract's dead and we don't speak of it again.
I see the books, all of them, every week, and the day this starts costing us money we don't have, I end it, and you don't fight me.
And you don't go near that foal.” He pointed two fingers at Beck, an old gesture, a kid-brother gesture grown up mean.
“And the second — the second — you decide this is too hard and you start eyeing the highway, I'll come find you myself. I mean that. I'm too tired to chase you twice.”
“I'm not running,” Beck said.
“You always say that.”
“I know.” Beck held his brother's eyes. “Watch the one who stayed.”
He knew the words fell short of enough. A decade didn't get paid off in one sentence at a fence line, and Tucker's face said as much, said we'll see, said I've been burned by you before and I've got the scars to count.
But Tucker didn't say no. He yanked the gloves on, gave the stallion one last sour look, and walked off toward the cattle and the thousand things, and that was as close to a yes as a Calhoun got when he hated the man he was saying it to.
Hutch stayed a moment longer. He turned and looked up the rise toward the windmill, toward the wheel turning crooked against the hard blue sky, and the loose blade caught and rang, that flat cracked note rolling down over the pens.
“Tower's been needing climbed two years,” Hutch said. “Nobody's had the time.”
“I'll climb it,” Beck said.
Hutch nodded once, slow, like that, more than the plan, more than the speech, was the thing he'd come to hear. Then he spat the matchstick into the dirt and went after Tucker, bandy-legged and unhurried, leaving Beck alone with the horse.
Beck crossed to the round pen and set his forearms on the top rail, slow, no sudden moves, and Diesel swung to face him head-on, that dark eye rimmed white, nostrils working. The stallion threw his head and crow-hopped sideways and slung a kick at the air to see what Beck would do.
Beck did nothing. He just stood, and breathed, and let the horse look at him.
“I know,” Beck said quietly. “I know what they think you are. Believe me. I've worn the same brand.”
The stallion blew, a hard wet snort, and stamped, and didn't come closer.
But he didn't leave the rail either. He stood his ground at the far side of the pen with every muscle ready, watching the man, and for one strange second across the dust the two of them were doing the exact same thing — measuring, deciding, deciding whether to trust the thing that said it wouldn't hurt them this time.
It was a fool's plan. Hutch had it right.
A stud nobody could ride, a sale they'd never run, a contract that lived in a phone call Beck hadn't made yet, a foal that wasn't even safely on the ground, ninety days, and a man holding the note who'd rather burn the whole valley than let it go.
Beck had bet on worse odds and lost. He'd bet on worse odds and walked away whole while a better man lost his leg.
He knew exactly what reckless cost, knew it down in the marrow, in the wrist that ached when the weather turned, in the medal at his throat that named him a traveler and meant a man who couldn't make himself stay.
And under all of it, in the part of him he wasn't ready to say out loud to anybody, least of all himself, there was this: that if he could pull off the impossible thing — if he could take what everybody had written off, the horse and the ranch and the prodigal son, and make it worth something again — then maybe, maybe, he'd be a man who'd earned the right to stand in front of Laney Cross and ask her to watch him not leave.
He didn't let himself finish the thought. It was too big and too soft and it would get him killed in a round pen. But it sat there anyway, under the reckless arithmetic, the real reason, the one even Hutch hadn't seen.
The trial was on. Everybody in his blood and his history said he'd lose it.
Beck rested his arms on the rail and watched the stallion watch him, and somewhere up the rise the loose blade caught the wind and rang its one cracked note out over Red Mesa, off-key and stubborn and not yet fixed, and he thought, one ride at a time.
Eight seconds at a time. That's all it ever was.
He stayed at the rail until the horse, at last, dropped its head an inch.
It was nothing. It was everything. It was a start.