Chapter 16
WADE
Concrete has a smell when your face has been against it long enough.
Bleach over old sickness over older regret.
I know where I am before I know one other fact about the night, because I've collected enough hungover traveling partners from county counters over the years to know the smell by heart, and the smell says drunk tank.
Every wreck I've ever taken, I knew which way the ground was before I hit it. This one I have to piece together from the wreckage.
The fluorescents hum the way they hum in every government building in the Southwest, and my skull answers them like a struck rail.
I sit up slow, fast being permanently off the menu, and take inventory. Boots still on my feet, belt gone, hat gone since the honky-tonk, wherever champions' hats go. There's a knot over my left eyebrow with gravel still in the story of it, and my mouth tastes like the inside of a rain barrel.
The night comes back in torn pieces. The bar. The glasses that kept arriving. Laney's mouth at my ear saying something my morning self was supposed to find, and me laughing at it.
Then comes gravel. Then a fence line standing sideways in my headlights, a flashlight making a sunrise out of the driver's window, and a voice asking me to step out with the particular patience the law saves for men it recognizes.
I remember thinking I was fine to drive. Of everything the night broke, that one sits worst. Every drunk on every road in this country was fine to drive, right up until the count came up different.
There's a kid in the corner of the tank, twenty maybe, hugging his knees and wearing last night like a borrowed suit. He's been watching me since I sat up.
"You're Wade Ashcroft," he says.
"Not this morning."
He has the good sense to leave it there, and the two of us sit in the bleach hum while the little window in the door goes from gray to daylight.
The deputy who works the morning shift reads me the sheet without theater. Small words, a stack of them, none big enough to end a career and every one big enough to print. Driving under the influence gets said out loud in a room built to echo.
The word champion doesn't come up, and its absence has a weight all its own, because everybody in the building knows it and nobody needs it for the paperwork.
Two-time title holder. Biggest purse of my life still clearing the bank. First light of the first morning after, and the county has my belt in an envelope so I can't hurt myself with it.
The account is full, I told the bottle once. Turns out the bottle was running its own books the whole time, and last night it called the balance due and collected out of everything I had that mattered.
They give me the phone call midmorning. I dial Laney's number with the receiver against a wall that a thousand men have leaned their bad news into. It rings the full count and dies into nothing, because she never has to answer anything again where I'm concerned.
I take the verdict standing up, the way you take a judge's gavel. No appeal comes to mind that a sober man would file.
The deputy, unasked, lets me try one more.
Colt answers on the second ring, and there's a beat of quiet on the line while the county recording tells him where I'm calling from. He doesn't fill the quiet. Colt Holloway has never once filled a quiet in his life.
"You hurt anybody?" he says at last.
"No."
"Then you got lucky twice. Once with the road. Once with the county." A gate latch clanks somewhere behind him, a ranch going about its morning. "Say what you called to say."
"It was one night." The words are out before I inspect them, worn smooth from years of handling, and I hear what they are while they're still in the air.
"It was every night wearing one night's clothes.
" No heat in it. Colt doesn't do heat. He does true, delivered flat, the way he's done it since we were young enough to think we'd never owe anybody anything.
"Don't hand me the night, Wade. I was standing in a hundred of them.
You want something from me or did you call to hear yourself talk? "
The tank kid watches me through the glass in the door. He's looking at a two-time champion holding a jailhouse phone, and whatever he's learning, I already know it.
"I want a number," I say. "Somebody who does this for a living. A program with a bed and a book and a man who's heard every lie I know. Not a favor, Colt. Not something quiet. Book it under my name where the whole circuit can read it if they care to look."
The gate latch stops clanking. When Colt speaks again, his voice hasn't changed, but something under it has.
"First right thing you've said in a year. I'll make calls." Papers move, and I can picture Kenna's kitchen table doing double duty like always. "Wade. Are you making this call because you woke up in a cage?"
"No." The truth of it arrives assembled, the clearest thought I've had in years, and I give it to him whole because he paid for it by answering. "I'm making it because of what I'm asking her to stand beside if I don't."
"Then it might hold," Colt says, and hangs up, because that's as close to a blessing as the man has ever issued.
The hours in the tank after that do the work the county built them to do.
I sit on a steel bench and think about my old man. Not the buckle in the bottom of my war bag, riding out there in an impound lot right now inside a truck I drove drunk. The man himself, the last years of him.
He got smaller every season, a big man going down a size at a time, and everybody around him called it retirement and kept his glass full at the VFW because he'd been somebody once and that bought him doubles.
The funeral finished the accounting. The same men who kept his glass full all those years carried the box, steady as deacons, and I stood at the graveside hating them with a purity I've never managed since.
It took me until this morning, on county steel, to finish the thought I started at that grave. Enablers make the best pallbearers. They've had years of practice holding a man up.
Then I think about Garrett Voss, a man I've never stood closer to than a phone line. A county's favorite deputy, polished and certain, a voice I've heard exactly once and will know until I die, warm as a man leaning on a sale rail talking about a horse he owns.
The county kept his story simple for him. The judges believed him. All that charm ran downhill onto one woman until she had to burn her own name to get out from under it.
Different poisons. My old man drowned in his and never laid a hand on anybody but himself. Garrett bottles his and pours it down one throat at a time.
But I run the accounts side by side from a drunk-tank bench, and the bottom line comes out identical.
The people who stand closest become the casualties.
The wives drive them home. The sons learn the bars by their parking lots.
The woman who loves the man gets smaller by proximity, one enabled night at a time, until she's the one standing at the far end of the bar with a club soda, keeping the only sober watch in the building.
Laney stood at the end of that bar last night and watched a barroom's worth of people hand me the night one glass at a time. She has stood in that exact room before, and I'm the one who put her back in it.
Not the violence. I've never raised a hand to her and I never will, and that's the cheapest sentence a drinking man ever says, because the violence was never the whole of what she ran from.
She ran from a man whose damage outweighed his love and from a county that kept the scales. I've been letting this circuit keep mine for years.
That sits with me until the light in the door glass goes past noon, and I don't reach for a single excuse the whole time, because the supply finally ran out.
The judge takes my plea over a video screen in the early afternoon, and the county takes my money at a clerk's window after that.
The first thing the biggest payday of my life buys is my walk out of the place.
There's a joke in that dark enough for the circuit to love, and someday I'll let somebody else make it.
Somewhere across town my truck sits in an impound row with my father's buckle boxed in the bottom of my war bag, and standing at that window I finally understand why I never managed to leave it home.
A man carries the weight he intends to answer for.
I've been hauling mine twenty years without opening the box.
The lobby has the same fluorescent hum and a row of plastic chairs facing the counter, and every one of them is empty. I stand there a minute longer than the paperwork requires, because some stupid animal part of me is listening for boots I know the sound of.
Nobody comes. Colt is half a state of ranch road away. Brenda has a circuit to ride. And Laney told me plain and close that there was no treating this tonight, and a doctor's word is good.
That's the worst of it, I think, standing in a jail lobby with my belt back on and nobody in the chairs. I'm wrong about that before sundown.
They hand me my phone with the rest of my pockets, and the screen stacks the night against me in order.
Missed calls from Colt after the county called him.
A text from a sponsor's assistant, carefully worded, that means the billboard is having second thoughts.
And one missed call from Laney, a few minutes shy of midnight, before any deputy ever lit up my window.
She came looking. She walked away from me at that bar with every right to keep walking, and inside the hour she picked up the phone and tried me once. I was already facedown in the county's arms.
Whatever she called to say rang against a voicemail I never bothered to set up. A recorded woman apologized on my behalf, and that's the last conversation we had.