CHAPTER 24 #3
By a little past the lowest point of the night the sour-sweet reek of the sick pen had begun, finally, to thin — not gone, it would hang in the dirt for days, but the edge of it dulling as the live cattle's guts quieted and the danger drained out of the night with the last of her fluid bags.
She walked the pen one more time, headlamp dimming on its tired battery, and counted them off the way she'd come to count everything she loved: the four down ones up on their briskets, ears working; the standing scours dull but stable; the bright ones bright.
She came back to the tailgate and stopped, because she didn't have a next thing to do, and that was its own strange vertigo after a night that had been nothing but next things.
Beck sat on the open tailgate of her rig, elbows on his knees, head hung.
He looked up when she came into the light.
The quiet held between them a while before either spoke.
The cooler sat between them with the samples in it, dated and bagged, the torn corner of a feed sack that wasn't theirs sealed beside the tubes — the proof of Dell's hand, secured, waiting for a lab and a lens and a man with a badge.
She sat down beside him because her legs had quit asking permission. The metal was cold through her jeans. He smelled like the pen and sweat and faintly, under it, like the cedar soap he used, and she was too far gone to pretend she hadn't catalogued that.
“Herd's going to hold,” she said. The only diagnosis she had left in her. “I'll come back at first light and pull the lines and recheck, but the turn's behind us. We kept most of them.”
“We lost two.” He said it like he'd been counting all night and saving it for the dark.
“Two head dead under your hands, and a dozen more that'll come off their feed for weeks.
Two holes in the contract count, Laney. The buyer wanted a clean two hundred delivered sound, and now I'm short and the rest of them look like hell.”
She didn't soften that either, because softening it would have been a lie and he'd have heard the lie.
“Two head, and the vet bill on top,” she said.
“I burned a whole case of fluids tonight — that's restock at emergency rates, and the lab panel isn't cheap.
You're into me for real money before the note's even due.”
“I know what I'm into you for.” His jaw worked.
“Two head dead is four, five thousand gone, plus the bills, plus every pound those scoured cattle won't put back on before delivery — and that's if the buyer doesn't get cold feet over a sick herd and walk.
If he walks, the note math doesn't close, and Dell knows it.
That's the whole point of the water. He didn't need to kill the herd. He just needed to scare the contract off it.”
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “He's not trying to bleed us out. He's trying to bleed us slow, right up to the day Vance's clock runs out.”
“Then we don't let the buyer hear 'sick herd,'” she said.
“We let him hear 'poisoned, documented, prosecuted, and certified sound by the vet who pulled them through.
' That's a different sentence. I'll write it on letterhead if I have to.” She let a beat go.
“But I won't lie to you about the dent. Two head and the bills and a herd that has to be nursed back to weight — that's real, and it lands square in the worst month you could afford it.”
He nodded, slow. Then, low, leaving every joke unreached: “Thank you. For coming. I know what I'm asking when I call you out here. I know whose night I'm taking.”
“You're not taking anything.” She turned and looked at him in the failing headlamp, this filthy exhausted man who had not gotten up, not once, not for the dead ones or the dark hours or the easy out, and let herself look without the chart between them for one full breath.
“I came for the herd. For Tom's line and what me and him built out here.” It was the speech she'd given herself a hundred times, the clean professional distinction, for the ranch, not for him.
She heard how thin it had worn. “But you stayed all night, Beck.
You didn't have to and you did, and I don't — ” Her hands started in on the rag again, folding it down to a hard square and smaller, the old reflex of keeping them busy to cover the place where it hurt, and for once she made them stop and said the true thing through it anyway.
“I don't have a column to file that under anymore.”
He didn't move to touch her. That undid her quieter than anything else could have — that he understood the gift was the not-reaching, that tonight the kindest thing his reckless hands could do was stay where they were.
He just looked at her, and the thing in his face was so plain and unguarded she had to look back at the pen.
The first gray was thinking about coming up behind the mesas. The cattle breathed in the dark, alive. And there it was, the one fact she had run out of ways to defend against:
The predawn dark gone over toward dawn, the sour-sweet reek finally easing as the herd held, the proof of Dell's hand bagged and dated in her kit — and Beck beside her, filthy and exhausted and still there, which was the one thing she no longer knew how to defend against.