Chapter 7
LANEY
The photograph sits in a zip-top specimen bag at the bottom of my duffel, sealed and labeled like anything else contaminated. Handling it like evidence was the only way I could make myself touch it at all.
My hair was longer then. I'm wearing a sundress and smiling in front of the house in Oklahoma, standing where he posed me, smiling because the camera was in his hands and the smile was part of the job.
Come home, he wrote on the back. Garrett never wastes ink on threats. A command and a memory do more damage.
The smart move is to run tonight, pack the truck, pick a direction, and burn this name the way I burned the last one. Fourteen months of staying alive by staying gone have trained every cell in my body to recite the old instructions about a new state, a new name, and a new nobody.
Instead, I'm standing at the stock pens on the biggest night of the run with a field kit on my shoulder, because the horses on this circuit are being poisoned and I'm the only person who can read the pattern. Running saves me. Staying saves them.
Garrett taught me plenty of things, and the ugliest lesson is this one: I already know what I look like when I only save myself.
The arena is packed to the rafters, the kind of Saturday night crowd that turns the concourse into a river of straw hats and beer cups.
Television trucks line the back lot with their masts up.
The lights over the arena burn white and merciless, hot enough that the dirt below them looks bleached.
The sound system pushes the announcer's voice out over a full house that came to watch men get thrown by animals that outweigh them by more than half a ton.
I work the pens through the early events with my head down and my hands busy.
A steer needs a shallow laceration cleaned and closed.
A heeler's horse throws a shoe, and her owner argues with me about the fix.
He loses. The routine is a kindness that keeps the photograph zipped in its bag where it belongs.
The saddle bronc event starts halfway through the card, and I drift toward the chutes. That's where the stock is, and the stock is why I'm still here.
Sidewinder loads into the chute nearest me.
I know it’s her before I read the brand.
Wade has ridden this mare before. The crooked blaze gives her away, that off-center strip of white running down her face like a lightning strike that changed its mind.
She's big even by bucking horse standards, a heavy-boned mare with a reputation that fills the stands.
She's a money horse, and riders want her number.
She stands quiet in the chute.
The wrongness of it brushes past me the way a draft brushes past a closed door, felt and then dismissed. Bucking horses argue with the panels. They slam and rattle and make the gate men earn their keep. She stands with her head level and her weight square.
I catch it, file it away, and half a second later hate myself for noticing instead of climbing the rail.
A young rider named Charlie settles onto her back. The gate man leans in. The announcer stretches her name out long for the cameras, and the gate swings open.
She comes out strong. She breaks clean and hard, front end high, and for three seconds she's the horse the crowd paid to see, violent and beautiful under the lights, dirt flying off her hooves in fans.
Then she stumbles.
The sound in the arena changes before most people understand why. A stumble happens sometimes. A stumble is nothing.
But her hindquarters lock mid-stride, both hind legs seizing together like the signal from her brain got cut.
Her front legs buckle. Charlie bails hard to the left as the mare goes down in the dirt with her whole body shaking.
The crowd goes quiet in a wave, the hush rolling up from the boxes to the cheap seats.
I'm over the fence before the announcer finishes asking for medical personnel.
The dirt is deep and loose and it drags at my boots as I run. The pickup men are wheeling their horses around, shouting, trying to figure out whether to rope her or clear her. Charlie is scrambling backward on his hands like a crab.
Sidewinder is down flat on her side, seizing hard enough to read from the top rows. Her head whips. Her legs paddle against the ground, gouging trenches.
"She's seizing," I shout at the nearest pickup man. "Keep the ropes off her. Give me room."
He gives me room. They all do, because a person who runs toward a convulsing animal that size sounds like a person who knows what she's doing, and sounding like it is most of the job.
Wade reaches her when I do. He must have come off the chute platform at a dead run, and he drops to his knees at the mare's head without asking me what to do. He already knows.
He gets his weight across her neck and his hands on her halter, pinning her head to the dirt so she can't beat her own skull apart. He shields the space where I need to work with his body, taking a hoof strike across the forearm that would've caught my temple.
"Hold her head down and keep her neck straight," I tell him. "If that airway crimps shut, we lose her."
"Got her," he says. His voice stays flat and even, the kind men keep for frightened animals, and it works on me too, which I'll resent later.
My hands find the kit blind. Over a year of practicing this in parking lots and pens pays off in the dark math of muscle memory.
The anticonvulsant comes up into the syringe while my thumb raises the jugular.
The needle goes in clean, and the flash comes fast. I push the drug slow while her muscles ripple under the hide like something alive is trying to climb out of her.
Cowboys arrive behind me. They form up without being told, a wall of denim and shoulders between us and the fence line, blocking the phones and the cameras and the rows of people leaning forward in dead silence.
Somewhere above us the announcer is saying calm, meaningless things about waiting for word.
The seizure loosens. I seat a catheter in the vein and secure it while her legs slow from paddling to trembling. The convulsions are only the fire alarm. The fire is still burning.
Her respiration is dropping, breaths going slow and shallow.
Her mucous membranes are dusky when I peel her lip back, and both pupils have blown wide and sluggish under lights bright enough to make that reading count.
Everything presents on both sides, and it's killing her in front of a television audience.
I know what this is. I've been reading quieter versions of it in bloodwork for weeks, and every one of those horses rode the same trucks this mare rides.
The difference tonight is dose. The quiet cases never showed more than off bloodwork and a dull eye.
This mare was bucking at full strength three seconds before she went down.
Whatever she took on, there's enough of it to drop an animal her size mid-ride, and how it got there is a question somebody will have to answer.
The next vial comes from the side pouch I've carried since the tox panels came back, restocked the morning after somebody went through my truck, and I keep my body between it and the camera line while I load the syringe.
The reversal goes into the catheter port with my back to the crowd and the words pitched for Wade alone.
"If she comes up swinging, get clear," I warn him. "Don't be brave about it."
"Little late for that advice," he says. There's blood on his forearm where the hoof caught him, and he hasn't glanced at it once.
Her breathing changes first. The slow shallow drags deepen, her ribs swelling with something that finally looks like effort instead of surrender.
Her sluggish pupils sharpen back to life.
A shudder rolls through her that has nothing in common with the seizures.
It's the shudder of an animal surfacing.
She thrashes once, hard. Wade rides her neck down and holds.
Then she lies still and breathes, ragged and gorgeous. The arena is so quiet that a sold-out crowd can hear one horse breathing. Wade eases his weight off her neck and stays crouched at her head, one hand light on the halter, ready to move if she comes up wrong.
When she lifts her head on her own, the sound that comes down from those stands is less like cheering and more like a whole town exhaling at once.
We get her up in stages. She staggers, plants, steadies. The pickup men flank her, ropes coiled, and Wade keeps her halter. I walk at her shoulder with my hand on her jugular pulse for the long parade to the stock gate. The crowd stays on its feet the entire way.
In the vet pens behind the arena, I draw blood before I do anything else, six tubes of it. Two go in the labeled rack for the treating record. Four go in the insulated pouch inside my jacket, initialed and dated.
By tomorrow there will be people interested in what's inside this mare's bloodstream, and I intend to have samples they never got the chance to lose. The last time I trusted my coolers, somebody opened every one of them.
I'm labeling the last tube when I see the man on the walkway.
He stands above the stock gate with his hands folded on the rail, hat brim level, as unhurried as a man reviewing inventory.
Everything else back here is in motion, pen hands and pickup men and officials with radios, and he's the one stationary thing in it, which tells me who the motion is for.
A horse nearly died on camera in front of the sponsors, and whoever he is, his face carries all the feeling of a ledger. He isn't watching Sidewinder.
He's watching me.
I hold his gaze for as long as it takes to cap and pocket the tube, because looking away first is a language men like him read fluently, and then I go back to my work.
When I check the walkway again, he's gone, and the space he occupied feels colder than the night accounts for.