Chapter 11 #2
Colt gives me the report in that spare way of his, stable, still hasn't opened his eyes, the swelling coming down slower than anybody likes, his wife reading him the sale papers by the hour. Brenda's been driving over twice a week with real food.
Then I stop dressing it.
"Colt. How long has Wade been drinking like this?"
The line goes quiet, and I let it stay quiet. Silence is a room people will eventually furnish.
"He rides hurt," Colt says at last, and there's no surprise anywhere in his voice, which tells me more than the words do. "Then he drinks so he can sleep. Then he gets up and does it all over again."
"How long."
"Since before I knew him, some. Worse the last two seasons.
Worse than that since the knee, and he never let a doctor look at the knee, so don't bother asking what's wrong with it.
" A door closes on his end, and his next words come quieter.
"I'm not going to sell you a story, Laney.
I've hauled him out of two bars and one ditch.
I've watched him ride a winning score on a morning he couldn't hold a fork.
Everybody on this circuit has watched it and calls it Wade, and I called it that too for years, because it was easier than calling it what it is. "
"And what is it?"
"A man paying interest on something he won't name, at a rate that's going to take the whole ranch.
" He breathes out. "He's better since you, and I'm not saying that to put it on you.
He's better and it's not enough, and those two things are going to stay true no matter what anybody does, until the day he decides different.
If that day comes, he'll need somebody standing there.
I've just quit pretending I know how far off it is. "
After we hang up I sit in my truck in the fairground lot and think about every person back in Oklahoma who watched Garrett work a room and decided that whatever they'd glimpsed underneath must have some other explanation, because it was easier to call it marriage.
Torres calls me at the pens in the early afternoon, while I've got a rope horse's foot in my lap and my phone on speaker in the grass.
"Two things, and then I'll let you get back to your patient.
First thing. A bucking horse died a few days back at a stand up the corridor from you, dropped in the pens overnight, contractor thought twisted gut until the insurance company wanted a necropsy.
" Paper moves on her end. "The state lab ran the toxicology.
Dr. Brooks, it matches. Same compound family, same metabolite profile, same exposure signature you've been flagging since the first mare in Midland.
An independent laboratory just replicated your chemistry without ever having seen it. "
The hoof pick goes still in my hand. The rope horse leans his weight into me, patient, and I make myself finish the foot, because my hands work better when the rest of me is taking a hit.
"As of this morning the Bureau has formally connected the cases. One investigation, multi-state, and your analysis is the spine of it. The US Attorney read the lab comparison twice and started talking about the grand jury calendar in the present tense."
"That's the good news," I say. "You always deal the good news first."
"You'd have made a fair investigator." Her chair creaks.
"Here's the other card. Everything that makes the case stronger makes you more expensive to leave standing.
Yesterday you were a vet with a theory. Today you're a vet with corroboration, and these organizations read a calendar as well as any lawyer.
Whatever their timetable was, it just got shorter.
Watch your patterns and tell that cowboy of yours the wall matters more this week than last."
I look across the pens to where the wall in question is coiling a rope in the sun, hat tipped back, laughing at something a pickup man said, beautiful and functional and three hours late to his own life, and I don't tell her that the wall has a crack running foundation to roofline and I'm the only one standing close enough to see it.
"Noted," I say.
"Get it in writing, Doctor. Get everything in writing."
The evening follows the shape our evenings have taken. Supper out of a sack at the little table, his boots by the door next to mine, the sample pouch riding its cold packs across the room like a pilot light, because the last time I trusted my coolers somebody opened every one of them.
I tell him about the rope horse and Torres's toxicology match, and the ease goes out of him between one breath and the next. What settles into the chair in its place is the other Wade, the one the circuit tells stories about, still in a way that makes the room feel smaller.
"Who knows the samples are in this room?"
"You. Me. Torres."
"Keep it that way." He reaches across the table and wraps his hand around my wrist, thumb resting on my pulse like he's taking custody of it.
"They connected the cases. That means tonight somebody's getting told his problem got bigger, and his problem has your name on it.
From here on, you don't work a pen I can't see. "
"That's not how my job works, cowboy."
"Then my job just got harder." There's no apology in it and no negotiation either. His thumb strokes once over the inside of my wrist, and the look he runs down me has nothing safe in it at all. "Come here."
"I'm eating."
"You're done."
"That's the most annoying thing about you," I tell him, going. "You're occasionally right."
He pulls me into his lap and puts his mouth to my throat like a man who's decided the rest of the night is already his, and for a while the room belongs to the two of us and nothing hunting either of us gets a vote.
I want him with the lights on and the ledger open. Nobody warns you about that part either.
He's easy to love. That's the clinical finding they leave out of every text. The drowning ones are easy to love, because they hold on so well.
Later, while he winds down, I finally run the differential I've been refusing to run since the first night I smelled the night air on him and called it the pens.
If I stay, I'm choosing a man who is killing himself on an installment plan. Slowly, politely, with excellent manners and a clean shirt, but the trend line only runs one direction, and loving the patient has never once changed the chemistry.
Love is not a treatment. I know the science on that cold.
If I walk, I do the thing I have always done.
Pack the truck, change the circuit, leave before the hurt clears the horizon.
Running from a man who hurt me on purpose taught me to leave early and travel light, and here I am with my hand already drifting toward the keys over a man who has never done anything but stand between me and the dark.
Walking away from Garrett was survival. Walking away from Wade would just be practice, the same muscle trained so well it doesn't ask permission anymore.
Stay and watch him drown. Leave and prove I never learned to do anything else.
There's no clean line through it, and I distrust clean lines anyway. Nothing that matters has ever presented with simple symptoms.
He turns in early, road-tired, and I stay up with a contamination chart I'm not reading. Sometime past midnight I surface out of a half sleep with the lamp still on and reach for him, and his side of the bed is cold.
The bathroom is dark. His boots are gone from the door. His hat is gone from the dresser, and the bottle beside where his hat was sits untouched, seal intact, faithful as a paid witness.
The gravel is sharp through my socks and the night has gone high-country chilly, the day's heat gone with the light, and his truck is right where it's been parked since supper, and he's in it.
Stretched across the back seat with his hat over his face and one arm hanging toward the floorboard, breathing slow and deep and even.
It takes me a long time to look down from the window. The bottle on the floorboard is a pint, flat-sided, made to ride under a seat. It's tipped on its side beneath his slack fingers, and the label is turned up toward me like it has nothing left to hide. It's empty.
I don't wake him. I stand in the cold with my arms crossed against it, watching the man I love sleep in a truck fifteen feet from a bed with his name on it, and the last open question in my workup closes itself without a sound.
The truck is where the drinking lives. Some half-drowned piece of him still refuses to bring it into the room with me, and I understand that tomorrow morning, for the first time since I met him, I'm not going to let him have that first hour alone.