Chapter 20
CLINT
Idon't remember crossing the courtyard.
There was the doorway, and the man in it, and then nothing—no steps, no distance, no decision. Then, my father's arms around me, and mine around him, the two of us standing in the door of a castle holding on like men in a river.
He was real. That was the first report my body filed. Real, and solid, heavier than the man who'd walked away down the caliche. His hand came up and gripped the back of my neck the way it did when I was a boy and had done something right. A sound came out of me that I'd never made before.
"Clint," he said. Into the side of my head. Rough. "Clint. Son."
So many years.
I had stood at the end of a dirt road and watched him go.
I had run away as a kid looking for him.
I had crossed and recrossed Texas, put a thousand miles under boot leather and bus tires and borrowed trucks, and told myself for the last of those years that I wasn't looking anymore.
That the road was just the road. That the search had ended somewhere and what was left was only motion.
There should have been rage.
I'd have bet on rage. Any man who knew my story would have bet on rage—years of a dead father turning up alive in a mansion, years of my mother raising seven boys alone on that hardpan, years of a boy standing at a window. Rage was owed. Rage would have been correct.
What came instead was relief.
It came up out of the floor of me the way everything true comes, from underneath. It was so big and so total that my knees took notice.
He’s alive.
Not how could you. Not where were you. Just—he's alive, he's here, he's holding on to me, and I did not imagine the whole first part of my life. The anger was in there somewhere, waiting. It would want its day and I'd give it one. But it stood aside.
And something in me unwound.
I felt it happen. Physically, mechanically, like a strap coming off a load that had been cinched so long the rope had grown into the wood.
Years of motion, and all of it—every loop around Valentine, every bus board, every next town, every mile of my whole entire life—had been one long walk with one question in it.
The question had just put its arms around me on a doorstep in South Carolina.
The walk was over.
I stood there in the wreck of that and I thought, of all things, of Sasha.
Beautiful, wonderful Sasha, standing in her hallway.
Sasha, who couldn't be looked at, letting me look.
She'd started this—whatever was unwinding in me had started unwinding at a marble counter, when a woman asked for my name and wrote half of it in a book.
My father was the wound. But she'd been the one who got the strap loose enough for today to cut it.
I wanted to tell her. Standing in my father's arms, that was the thought that surfaced: I want to tell Sasha. I already knew what it meant.
"You'd think he saw a ghost or something."
Tommy's voice, from the doorway.
My father laughed—laughed, a sound I had kept in a sealed jar for years. It hadn’t changed, not one note of it. Then, the doorway was full of them.
Wyatt, first, because Wyatt was always first through any door.
Grant behind him, wider than I remembered, gray coming in at his temples like our father's.
Brock, who is a wall that walks, and who picked me half off the ground without ceremony.
Tommy, grinning like sunrise. Cash, coming up the steps easy with Max at his knee.
And then, it was all of us.
Six grown men and their father stood in a pile on the front steps of a fortress and held on to each other.
Somebody's arm was across my back and somebody's fist was in my shirt.
Brock had about three of us gathered at once.
My father was in the middle of it with his hands reaching for every head he could touch.
Max circled the whole operation barking twice, keeping the perimeter.
The feeling that came up in me, then, I don't have a name for.
I've been in reunions. I've stood on tarmacs and watched men come home to their families and felt the warm secondhand glow of it.
This wasn't that. This was in the bone. It was bigger than the doorway and bigger than the day. I felt it to the floor of myself and just stood in it, the way you stand in rain after a long dry, not understanding it, not needing to.
My brothers. My father. One roof.
The boy at the end of the caliche road put his flashlight down.
"We should talk," Cash said, finally. Quiet, from the edge of the pile. "There's a lot to say."
"And there it is." Tommy stepped back and threw his hands up. "Every time. We're having a moment, a beautiful, cinematic moment, and Cash pulls the pin on it. You take the fun out of everything, you know that? It's a gift. It's genuinely a gift."
"It is," Cash agreed, and punched him in the arm. Max barked once, sharp, an exclamation point with fur on it, and the whole pile of us came apart laughing.
We went inside.
Max led the way, trotting point down a hall with ceilings like a church, nose working, checking doorways with quick, professional sweeps like he was sniffing the place for spies.
I got the tour at a walk—stone and old wood and windows full of harbor, and a long hallway of portraits I marked to come back to, soldiers in frames, and a brass plate I read on the move. DANE.
Then, double doors, and a room that told me everything the gates had started to say.
The table in the middle of it was the size of a boat.
Long, dark, ringed in chairs, with screens gone dark on the walls and maps in drawers I could smell.
The whole room was wired and clean and quiet the way certain rooms in certain buildings are quiet—rooms where the talking matters.
A war room. A real one. I'd sat in its cousins on other continents, under other flags.
The seven of us took one end of the table. Six brothers, and my father in the middle, and every face turned to him.
It was Wyatt who broke it. He tipped his chair back and looked at the old man sideways.
"You getting tired of telling this tale yet?"
"No." My father shook his head slow. His eyes hadn't left me since the courtyard, not for more than a few seconds at a stretch, the way you keep checking a fire. "It's part of the job."
Then, he turned all the way to me, and he folded his hands on the table, and he told me.
"It starts with work," he said. "Before you were born.
Before your mother. I was a soldier, and then, I was something after a soldier, the kind of thing that doesn't get a name or a discharge.
And the outfit I ended up inside of ran a program.
" He said the next two words carefully, laying them down like they were heavy. "Project Trueborn."
The room was still. My brothers had heard this. I watched them not-listen the way men not-listen to a briefing they could give themselves—but nobody looked away, either. It mattered every time.
"The government wanted better soldiers, and they got tired of waiting for training to make them.
So, they decided to breed them." He let that sit.
He didn't dress it up and he didn't flinch from it.
"Select the fathers. Select the mothers.
Engineer the match, guide it, and raise the results in conditions built to produce a certain kind of man.
Strong. Fast-thinking. Cool under fire. They tried it their way and I came up with a better one.
" His eyes moved to Cash, half a second, and came back.
"It wasn't a theory. It worked. You're sitting at a table full of the proof. "
The floor moved under me. Slow, the way big things move.
"The program belonged to something called Department 77," he said.
"I was theirs. Your mother—" and here, his voice changed, roughened, and he didn't fight it, "—your mother was theirs, too, though she knew even less than I did about what that meant.
They put us together like you'd pair horses.
And then, you boys started coming, and here is the part I need you to hear, Clint, because it's the only part that matters. "
He leaned in.
"What they engineered was the match. Nobody engineered the rest of it. I loved your mother. God as my witness, I love her now. And there is nothing in a lab or a file anywhere on this earth that had one thing to do with what I feel for the seven of you."
Seven. I caught it, and filed it, and it would matter in about four minutes.
"Then why'd you leave?" I asked. My voice came out level. It surprised me.
"Because they were done letting me be a rancher.
" He said it flat. "The program was ending—officially. Unofficially, Department 77 didn’t end things, it buried them, used them, and it was starting to look at the evidence.
The evidence was a ranch in Jeff Davis County with seven boys on it.
" His jaw set, and for a second, I saw the man from the end of the road, the one whose walk I'd hunted on two thousand highways. "They were going to take all of you. And I couldn’t let that happen. I walked down that road and I didn’t look back, because if I'd looked back, I'd have stopped, and if I'd stopped, they'd have come.
And I started a war, a war that kept them from you. "
The room held still.
All those years, I'd carried one morning.
A man walking away and a boy who concluded, with a boy's arithmetic, that he hadn't been worth staying for.
I'd built a whole life on that math. Every road I ever walked was that math.
And the math had been wrong—not off by a little, wrong at the root, inverted. He hadn't walked away from us.
He'd drawn fire.