CHAPTER 25
Beck
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The torch caught with a pop and a hiss, and then the world narrowed to that small blue star.
Beck held the flame to the cracked weld at the base of the corral post and the acetylene flare went from orange to a clean, savage blue, the color of something burning right.
Through the smoked glass of the helmet, everything else fell away — the red mesas, the dust, the two days of no sleep — and there was only the bead of molten steel pooling under his hands and the small roar of the cutting flame.
He fed the rod in slow. He'd learned a long time ago that you couldn't bully metal any more than you could bully a horse. You went slow or you ruined it.
Funny thing for him to know. He'd ruined plenty going fast.
The bead ran true. He killed the torch, flipped the helmet up, and the morning rushed back in all at once — heat already standing up off the hardpan at not even nine, grasshoppers ticking in the bunchgrass, the smell of scorched paint and his own sweat.
The post stood straight again where last week it had leaned drunk against the rail.
A small thing. Two feet of pipe and a stick of welding rod.
But it was fixed, and it was going to stay fixed, and there was a stupid amount of satisfaction in that for a man who'd spent ten years being good at exactly one thing and good at it for no longer than it took a man to fall.
He pressed his thumb to the medal under his shirt — Eleanor's St. Christopher, warm now from his body and the sun both — and stood up out of his crouch.
His left wrist gave its usual complaint, the pins aching where they always ached, a low grinding hum.
He flexed it twice and ignored it. The shoulder pulled too, the long scar tightening across the joint when he reached for the rail.
The body kept its ledgers. He'd quit reading them years ago.
“That'll hold a ton of mad horse leaning on it,” Hutch said.
Beck hadn't heard him come up. The old man stood at the rail, a matchstick wedged in his teeth and turning slow, hat pulled low, faded blue eyes going over the weld the way he went over everything — once, complete, no second look needed.
“It'll hold Diesel,” Beck said. “Which is a higher bar.”
Hutch made a sound that might have been a laugh in a younger man. He shifted his weight onto the rail, looked out across the pens to where the dangerous bay stood at the far side of the round corral, watching them both with one ear back.
“You set the camera?” Hutch asked.
Beck nodded toward the fence line that ran east toward the county road, toward the stock tank where two nights ago Laney had knelt in the dark over scouring calves and pulled the herd back from the edge of dead.
“Last night. Before dark. Cody helped me find the spot.” He peeled off his gloves and slapped the dust out of them against his thigh.
“It's up in the cottonwood at the corner where the lane meets the north line. Faces the tank and the gate both. You can't see it unless you know it's there, and the man who put it up barely knows it's there.”
“Solar?”
“Solar. Motion. It sits dead till something moves, then it wakes up and shoots.” Beck looked at the cottonwood, a green smudge a quarter mile off, and the thing he'd been carrying since he'd cinched the little camera to the trunk and walked away rose up in him again.
Call it hope with teeth in it, something hungrier than the plain word allowed.
“Whoever cut that tank open, Hutch — whoever dumped whatever they dumped in it — they'll come back. His kind always comes back to admire the work. And when he does, we'll have him in a photograph he can't lawyer his way out of.”
Hutch worked the matchstick. He was quiet a long beat, the way he got before the three words that mattered.
“Brand inspector,” he said. “Talk to him yet?”
“This afternoon. Two o'clock, at the clinic.” Beck hung the gloves over the rail.
“Laney's got the samples she pulled off the tank — the contamination, the bags she dated and sealed that night.
The inspector takes them into the chain official, and then it's not just us saying the Vances are poisoning a man's water.
It's an inspection record. Paper. Same weapon they like to use on us.” His mouth went flat and hard. “About time it cut both directions.”
The old man looked at him for a moment longer than he needed to.
Beck had grown up under that look. It used to mean you're about to do something dumb, boy.
It didn't mean that now. It meant something closer to the thing Beck didn't have a word for, the thing that had been creeping up on him these last weeks like weather you don't see till the temperature drops.
“Your daddy,” Hutch said, “would've welded that post slower.”
“My daddy,” Beck said, “would've had Tucker weld it.”
Hutch almost smiled. He pushed off the rail.
“Two o'clock,” he said, and went, bandy-legged and unhurried, toward the barn, and Beck stood a minute in the rising heat and the strangeness of it worked on him — Hutch coming to find him with a question, treating him like a man whose answers were worth having.
Ten years ago the old man wouldn't have crossed the yard for Beck's opinion on the weather.
He looked at the blue ghost still flickering on his retinas, the afterimage of the flame, and thought: you keep showing up, they start handing you things to hold.
The trick was not dropping them.
---
By eleven the day had its full furnace going, and Beck found Charlie in the ranch office with the windows open and a box fan losing its war against the heat and the laptop screen lighting up her freckled face from below.
She had the sale circled on the calendar.
It was a paper calendar — Charlie kept the real numbers on the computer but she liked to see time, she said, liked a thing she could put a pencil to — and she'd drawn a fat red ring around a Saturday five weeks out and written PRODUCTION SALE inside it in her quick slanting hand, and under that, smaller, like she couldn't help herself: (the impossible one).
“You sure about the date?” Beck asked. He braced his hands on the back of her chair and read over her shoulder.
“I'm sure about the date.” Charlie spun her wedding band with her thumb, a thing she did when she was carrying weight she wouldn't set down.
“The fairgrounds had it open. The buyer's people can be here.
If we run it later we run it too close to the balloon and there's no cushion, and if we run it earlier Diesel's not ready and the foal's not on the ground to show the line's still producing.” She looked up at him.
“Five weeks, Beck. We send the catalog out Monday. We list Juniper's stock, the riding geldings, the two-year-olds — and we list Diesel as the headliner stallion prospect, gentled and shown under saddle, which means he has got to be gentled and shown under saddle, which means —”
“Which means me.” He heard his own voice go quiet.
“Which means you.” She held his eyes. Charlie was the only one of them who'd ever just said the thing. “No pressure, big brother. Only the whole place riding on whether you can put a saddle on a horse that put Cody on the fence rail last month.”
Beck looked at the red ring on the calendar.
Five weeks. Then he looked, the way he'd been looking at everything lately, at the shape of the whole gamble laid out — because Charlie's books had a way of making the gamble feel like arithmetic, and arithmetic he could hold in his head the way he held a bead steady down the length of a seam.
Three legs to the stool, and the stool had to stand or they lost the ground their mother was buried under.
One: the sale. The breeding line Laney and Tom had built across twenty years, its value finally cashed in — Juniper's get, the geldings, and Diesel as the proof that Red Mesa still made horses worth driving four states to buy.
Two: the cattle contract, the buyer cautious but circling, the thing his old rodeo connections had cracked open down at the sale barn.
And three, the one that lived in the county building under fluorescent light and smelled like hot paper: the water.
Win the hearing, prove the creek had been used every year through the lean times same as the fat ones, and Vance's claim on the decree came apart.
Lose it, and it didn't matter how many horses they sold — Vance would have his hand on the throat of the whole valley's water and the ranch would be worth dirt without it.
Sale plus contract cleared the balloon. The hearing kept the water. Both had to land. Either one alone and they were finished.
“You're doing the thing,” Charlie said.
“What thing.”
“The thing where you go away behind your face and add up everything that could go wrong.” She reached up and flicked his ear, hard, the way she'd done since she was six.
“Stop it. We've got a date. We've got a plan.
We've got a camera in a tree and a man at two o'clock and a stallion that hasn't killed anybody yet. That's more than we had a month ago.”
“That's a hell of a thing to put on a tombstone. Hasn't killed anybody yet.”
She laughed, and the sound of it loosened something in his chest, and he straightened up off her chair and looked at the red circle one more time. Five weeks. A door with a date on it.
What stopped him, standing there with his sister laughing in the heat and the box fan rattling, was that he wasn't, in the back of his mind, where he always kept it, working out the other door.
The one he kept for himself. The one a man leaves cracked so he can be gone before the floor comes up to meet him.
He went looking for it, the way you run your tongue over a tooth that ought to ache. The exit. The plan under the plan. The bag by the door.
His searching hand came up empty.
There was no exit, no plan under the plan, no bag by the door. He'd let it go without noticing, and for the first time he could remember in his whole sorry life, he hadn't even checked where the door was.