Prologue #2
"What else you want, cher, a parade?" He picked his spoon back up. "You made a decision. I'm not gonna wrestle a grown man in a kitchen. My back's bad and you're faster than me and I'd have to explain it to your mother in the next life."
"Can I ask you one thing," I said, "and get a true answer."
"You can ask."
"Have you ever wanted to open it?"
He was quiet so long I thought he wasn't going to take it.
"Every day since 1989," he said.
"Then why—"
"Because the day I open it I have to decide something.
" He looked at the tin the way you look at a dog you've had too long.
"Right now I don't decide anything. Right now I just hold.
You know how restful that is? Fifty-two years old and I have never once in my life had to be a good man or a bad one. I'm a hand. Hands don't get judged."
"That's the most cowardly thing I've ever heard you say."
"Yes," Rene agreed. "It is. And I've had a peaceful life and your daddy hasn't and neither will you, so you tell me who came out ahead."
"You're miserable."
"I'm comfortable."
"You've got a bulb you won't change."
"That is a separate issue," he said, with genuine heat, "and I've been meaning to get to it."
I laughed again. It was the second one and it was worse than the first.
Then I stood up and picked up the bag, and the room changed temperature the way rooms do.
"You gonna eat the rest of that?" he said.
"No."
"Then take it."
"I'm not taking gumbo on a motorcycle, Rene."
"Take the bowl and eat it in the yard like a person." He was already up, already moving toward the sink, already turning his back so neither of us had to do the other part. "Two minutes. Nobody's ever been late in the history of the world by two minutes."
So I stood in my uncle's yard at half past midnight and ate a bowl of gumbo I didn't want, in the dark, with the frogs starting and stopping, while a man I would not see again for fifteen years washed a pot at the window and did not look out at me one single time.
Then I brought the bowl back in and set it in the rack.
I got as far as the door.
"Bishop."
I turned.
"When it comes back around," he said, not looking at me, eating like it was any Tuesday, "and it will, and it'll be twenty years and you'll have a whole other life stacked up on top of this one — don't come back angry. Come back on time. Angry's no use to anybody and it's late by definition."
"That's the last thing you're gonna say to me?"
"No," he said. "The last thing I'm gonna say to you is your gumbo needs more time on the roux. You rush it. You've always rushed it. You rush everything and then you're surprised the color's wrong."
I laughed. God help me, I laughed, standing in that doorway with a duffel bag and fifteen years of not-calling in front of me.
"Bye, Rene."
"Mm," he said.
Then, when I was already through the screen door and it had already slapped shut behind me: "Your mother would've made you stay."
I stopped on the step.
"She'd have stood in that doorway and cried and you'd have unpacked that bag and been a keeper by Sunday," he said, from inside, still not turning around. "So it's a good thing for you she's dead, and I want you to think about that every single time you tell somebody I was hard on you."
I didn't answer. There wasn't an answer.
I rode west that night. I crossed the Atchafalaya at two in the morning with the windows down and the air so thick it was practically a passenger, and somewhere past Lake Charles the trees started thinning out and by the second day they'd quit entirely and I came into a country where you could see a storm from an hour away instead of finding out about it when it landed on your head.
I liked that. I liked being able to see weather coming.
That's most of why I stayed.
Nobody in Arizona asked me a single question I didn't want to answer.
The club that took me in was full of men who'd all left somewhere, and there's an etiquette about that, a kind of professional courtesy.
You don't ask a man what he ran from. You ask him if he can ride, if he can fight, if he'll show up.
I could ride. I could fight. I always showed up.
Cade asked me exactly one question, my first week, in a shop bay in a hundred and twelve degrees, with a socket wrench in his hand and no particular expression.
"Anybody coming after you?"
"No."
"You sure?"
"Nobody's coming after me," I said. "I'm just not going back."
He thought about that for a second. Then he handed me the wrench.
"Different thing," he said. "But it's your different thing."
And that was the interview.
There was one night, maybe year four, in a bar in Kingman, when a prospect got drunk and got sentimental and went around the table asking everybody what they'd left.
Torren said a girl. Reyes said a brother. A guy named Whitcomb who's dead now said a business and then corrected himself and said a partner.
When it got to me, I said, "Weather."
"Weather?"
"I left the weather."
He laughed and moved on, because he was twenty-two and drunk and it sounded like a joke, and it was the truest answer at the table.
Fifteen years I showed up. Road Captain by the ninth. Two thousand miles of highway a month and not one of them east of Fort Worth.
And every so often — three, four times a year, usually in August, when the air in Cerro Vista went briefly, stupidly humid and the smell of wet creosote got close enough to wet cypress to fool the back of my head — I'd think about a tin box with a pelican on it, and a man eating gumbo he was too proud to finish, and I'd tell myself the same thing I told him.
Not my debt. Not my fire.
I got one of those right.