Chapter 4
CLINT
The Sundowner had ten rooms and a sign with a cactus on it. The woman who ran it took my cash without looking up from her crossword.
Room six. Second from the end. I'd asked for the end and she'd said the end was out.
The room had two exits. The door, and a window over the bathtub that a man my size would have to work at but could make in nine or ten seconds if he had a reason.
There was a mesquite tree outside it and a chain-link fence past that.
Beyond the fence, nothing but scrub all the way out to where the sky sat down on the ground.
I don't decide to notice these things. I've stopped apologizing for it.
The shower had no pressure to speak of. The water came out of that head in a thin, mean spray.
I stood under it, anyway. It was hot, and hot was the whole requirement.
I stayed in there a long time. I let it beat on the back of my neck and I watched the steam roll up the tile.
I did not think about the two men on the concrete.
They were already gone out of me. That's not a virtue and I've never once claimed it was. A man who can hold a grudge is a man who's still carrying something. I don't carry anything I can set down.
So, my mind went where it always goes.
Backward.
Two years.
That's how long I'd been running circuits around Valentine.
Two years of loops out and loops back, Marfa and Alpine and Fort Stockton and Sanderson, down to Presidio, up through Balmorhea.
Buses and rides and my own two feet. A hundred miles out.
Two hundred. Once, all the way to El Paso, which felt like a violation of some rule I'd never written down.
And every one of those loops, the center held.
Valentine. Every one of those roads bent, sooner or later, back around the same hard little dot on the map.
I would come inside of eighty miles of the house I grew up in, and inside of eighty miles of the place where my mother sits in a chair by a window and forgets things.
Two years. Not once.
I never went in.
There's a word for that, and I've never had any trouble saying it to myself. I say it in the shower and I say it on the shoulder of the highway and I say it in the dark of cheap rooms all across that state.
Coward.
I have been shot at on four continents. I have gone through doors I knew were wrong and gone through them, anyway. And I cannot make myself walk into a clean, bright building with a garden and a bench and sit down across from a woman who might look at me and say, Are you lost, honey?
She always came for me.
That's the thing that sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. Every single time.
I ran away seven times as a kid. I know the number. I keep it.
And every time, no matter the hour, no matter the weather, no matter that she'd worked all day and had six other boys under that roof, my mother put her boots on and went out into the dark and hunted me down.
She'd come out across that country with a flashlight and my father's old coat over her nightgown, calling my name, patient as an angel.
She never once hollered when she found me.
She'd just squat down in the dirt in front of me and look at me a long moment and say, All right, then.
And she'd take my hand and walk me home.
The first few times, I was looking for him.
That's the whole ugly truth of it and it's simpler than anybody would guess. My father walked out one morning and did not come back. I was a boy, and I had exactly one idea in my head about what a man does when something is missing.
You go find it.
So, I went. I'd stand out at the end of the road where the caliche turned to blacktop and I'd look one way and then the other.
I believed—the way you can only believe when you're eight—that there was a right one.
That if I chose correctly, if I picked the good road, if I read the country the way I could already read it better than anybody in that house, then somewhere out along it, I'd come over a rise and there he'd be. Walking. Coming back.
I never once picked wrong, either. That's the joke of it. I always knew exactly where I was. Every time they found me, I was precisely where I'd meant to be, dirty and hungry and cold and holding my ground, waiting on a man who was not coming.
And somewhere in there—I couldn't tell you the year—the reason changed.
I stopped looking for him. But I kept going out.
Because I'd found something better than him out there, and it wasn't a person.
It was the road itself. The clean, dumb, uncomplaining fact of it.
A road doesn't want anything from you. A road never once looked at me across a kitchen table with its eyes going wet, or asked me to be somebody, or left. You put your feet on it and it takes you. It doesn’t care who you are.
When you're done with it, it lets you go.
Everything else in this life is a house with people in it and a door that a man can walk out of.
The road is cleaner.
That was a few years ago. I never came back inside, not really.
Whatever the road did to me, it finished doing a long time ago.
I'm not a man who travels. I'm a man who is the traveling.
The rest of it—the towns, the diners, the two jailbirds on the concrete, the woman with the crossword—is just what goes by.
I shut the water off.
I dried off and dressed and put the last of it in the pack.
Two shirts. Socks. The razor. The toothbrush and the little tube.
The knife, the money clip, the card. The pistol went in the small of my back where it's lived, and the three mags went in the side pocket where they've lived just as long.
It takes me under two minutes to leave anywhere. It has never once taken longer.
There was a bus out at one o'clock. I'd read the board at the Chevron on the way in, the way you read a board when you don't have a phone and never will.
West this time.
Not far. I'd go west and deeper in, and I'd sit up front and watch that big, empty country come at me.
At some point—for no reason I'd be able to explain to anybody, and wouldn't try—I'd feel the pull go slack, and I'd get up and tell the driver to let me off.
And he would. And the bus would go on without me, and I'd stand on the shoulder in the diesel smell and look around at wherever I was.
That's the way. That's been my way for a long time now.
Then, somebody knocked on the door.
I stood still and ran the list, which is a short one.
The woman with the crossword didn't knock.
She'd already been paid and she had no interest in me past that.
There was no housekeeping in a place like that; you got clean towels if you carried the dirty ones down to the office and looked pitiful.
Nobody knew me. Nobody in that town knew my name, because I hadn't given it to anybody, including the sheriff, who hadn't asked, because he hadn't wanted it.
So, it was the law. The deputy, most likely, sent back around with a form to sign. It happens.
I moved to the side of the window and put one finger on the curtain and pulled it a half-inch off the glass.
It was not the law.
Not even in the neighborhood of the law.
Standing out on that hot concrete walkway in a black T-shirt with his hands loose at his sides was my brother, Cash. There was a big, tan dog sitting against his leg. The dog was looking directly at my window.
I stood there a second with my finger on that curtain. I’ll admit that the world went a little sideways on me.
I opened the door.
"Clint," Cash said.
And he grinned—Cash, who I have seen grin maybe eleven times in his life. Then, he came in fast and got both arms around me and about broke my back.
I held on to him. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I got a fistful of my little brother's shirt and I held on, out on the walkway of a ten-room motel with the heat coming up through my boots. It was a good few seconds before either one of us was ready to let go of the other.
"It's good to see you," I said. "What in the hell are you doing here?"
He stepped back and looked at me. He let the dog come forward and sniff my hand, once, professionally, and then sit down again against his leg.
"You're a hard man to find."
"That's the idea."
And I stood there and I looked at him, and something in my chest went quiet and strange.
Because Cash had changed.
You have to understand about my brother.
Cash died when he was a boy. Down a shaft on our own ground.
They got him out, but what came back up out of that hole was not the same child that went down it.
He was never wrong afterward, and he was never afraid, and he was never anything but calm.
He walked through this world like a man standing in a doorway with one foot in another room.
The rest of us went into the service and got hard.
Cash went in and got quiet. Then, he went and found the one line of work on this earth that nobody wants and almost nobody can do, which is going into the worst places in the world and bringing home our dead.
He does it the way other men fish. Last I'd heard, he was still doing it.
That was the Cash I knew. Steady. Reverent. A little bit not-here.
The man on that walkway was still all of that. But he'd changed again. It took me longer than it should have to read it, because I'd never seen it on him before and I'd never expected to.
He was settled.
There was a scar coming up out of his collar. There was a dog glued to his leg like a shadow with a heartbeat. And there was something in his face I had no name for, some weight that had come off him, or maybe some weight that had come on—the kind a man carries on purpose.
He looked like a man who had somewhere to be.
I have never in my life looked like that.
"Come in out of the sun," I said.
He didn't. He put his hands in his pockets, and the grin went off him, and the thing that came into his face after it was the one I've known since he was a kid.
"We need you," he said.