Chapter 31
CLINT
The horse saw me coming and declared war.
He was a big gray, seventeen hands of him if there was an inch, standing in the middle of that corral with his tail up and his blood already hot.
When I came through the gate at a dead run, he reared and boxed the air with both front hooves and came down hard enough to shake dust off the rails.
He screamed at me. Not a whinny. A scream, a challenge, the sound a horse makes when he's beaten every man who's walked in and means to add one more to the count.
Any other day, I'd have given him an hour. Horses earn their attitudes same as men do. A horse this mad had been handled wrong by somebody, and the right way through that is patience.
I did not have patience. I had my mother at the end of a trail with a clock running.
There was a lariat hanging on the gate post, stiff with dust. My hands knew it before I did—built the loop on the move, my body running a program written into it before I could read.
The gray watched me come and reared again, hooves cutting.
I threw the loop under all that theater and took him around the neck and hauled.
He fought it. He fought it hard, backing, whipping his head, near lifting me off my boots.
I planted, and worked down that rope hand over hand the way my father taught all seven of us, and I brought his head down.
All the way down. Down to mine, his eye level with my eye, my fist in the rope right under his jaw.
"Listen to me," I told him, low, from about six inches. "I've got no time for you. Right now, in this fight, I am the big dog. That's over. Decide."
He tried to rear. I yanked him back down, hard, no give in it anywhere.
His ears went flat back. His nostrils flared wide, blowing hot air in my face. He stamped, and the muscles under that gray hide were jumping like a storm coming.
"Don't try me."
We locked eyes.
There's a moment with a horse. Anybody raised with them knows it.
It doesn't come from breaking and it doesn't come from sugar—it comes when the animal looks all the way into you and takes a reading of exactly what you are.
You'd better be what you're claiming, because a horse cannot be lied to.
That gray looked into me and found whatever was in there—the clock, my mother, the whole burning day—and something shifted behind that big, dark eye.
He snorted. Once. Disgusted. A king signing a treaty he'd be revisiting.
But when I swung up onto his bare back and got a fistful of mane, he didn't rear.
He bolted.
The gate stood open. He went through it like a bullet leaving a gun.
I nearly went off the back of him in the first three strides—no saddle, no rein, nothing under me but a half-ton of furious muscle and nothing in my hands but mane and the loose end of a lariat.
I clamped my legs down and got low over his neck and held on for my life.
He hit the southfork trail like he'd read it out of my head.
Maybe he had. A horse feels everything—the seat, the legs, the intent coming down through a man's hands—and every ounce of me was pointed down that trail. He took the pointing and ran it. The ranch fell away behind us. The country opened up.
And in the middle of the worst ten minutes of my life, some ancient piece of me came awake and sang.
This trail. This exact trail. The caliche going pale ahead through the scrub, the ocotillo standing up like burning wire, the arroyo cutting in from the east, the mountains laid blue and low along the far edge of everything.
I'd run away down this trail on foot as a boy—every time, this one, the southfork, because it went the direction he'd gone—and now, I was running it on a devil of a horse with the wind ripping my eyes to water, hunting my mother where I used to hunt my father.
The land came at me and came at me and I knew every rise before it rose.
The gray's hooves hit the hardpan like a drumline.
Jackrabbits blew out of the brush ahead of us and scattered.
Somewhere overhead, a hawk was surely watching two fools run flat-out through the heat of the day.
The whole gold world poured past, and I rode it the way I was raised to ride it.
I risked the watch.
Five minutes gone.
Five. The word went through me like ice water. Half the clock burned and no sign of her. The trail ran on ahead of us to the rim of the world.
"Faster," I told the gray, right down into his laid-back ears.
I don't know what he heard in it—the fear, maybe; a horse can smell fear and this once it worked for me instead of against—but that animal found another gear that had no business being in him.
He flattened out and ran, and the beat of him went from a drumline to one long roll of thunder.
I quit being a rider and became a thing the horse had decided to keep.
The curve came up fast.
I knew it was coming—the trail bent hard west around a shoulder of rock where the arroyo pinched in.
We were carrying too much speed. I felt him gather and commit and there was nothing to do but ride the choice.
His hindquarters slid. The whole back half of him broke loose on the loose rock, washing wide toward the drop, dust exploding off his hooves.
I threw my weight into the turn, low and inside, and that surefooted son of a bitch got one hoof onto solid ground, then another, clawed his balance back out of the air, and slung us through the bend still at a dead run.
And in the half-second of the turn, hanging off the inside of that horse with the world tilted, I glanced back down our dust.
Something was coming.
A blur. Low, flat to the ground, eating our trail at a speed nothing on two legs owns. Tan.
We came out of the curve and the trail straightened. I looked back again, and it resolved—ears pinned, body stretched into a single line of purpose, running like the ground was helping.
Max.
Something kicked in my chest. Cash. Cash hadn't gone back to any airplane. Cash had turned that truck around the second he was out of sight, and his dog was on my trail carrying my brother's intent the way the horse was carrying mine.
"MAX!" I yelled it back down the wind. I had no way to know what a dog understands, and I have believed my whole life that they understand more than we've got the humility to credit. "GO FIND MAMA! FIND HER!"
The dog didn't check. He accelerated.
He came up our left side like we were standing still—the gray saw him and spooked, tried to break stride and swing his head, wanting to fight or fly.
I hauled the mane and drove my legs in and shouted "KEEP GOING!
" and the horse, wonder of the day, kept going—and Max went past us.
Past a running horse. He hit the trail ahead and stretched even flatter and pulled away, a gold streak on the pale caliche, and was gone over the next rise with his shadow chasing him.
The watch. Seven minutes.
Fuck.
Three minutes and an unknown distance, and my whole world narrowed down to the trail and the drumbeat and the rise coming up ahead—the long one, the big swell of ground I used to top as a boy and stand on, looking down the far side at more empty country, learning again that he wasn't on it.
The gray took the rise at a run. The far side dropped away.
And there was a form on the trail.
Small, and far, and walking. Walking away from me, down the middle of the trail, slow, like a woman out taking the air.
A woman. In a nightgown. In slippers, in the middle of West Texas, a mile of scrub in every direction, her white-streaked hair loose and bright in all that sun.
My heart came up my throat and stayed there.
Max reached her first. I watched it from the closing distance—the dog braking out of a dead run into a gentle circle, coming around in front of her, and the small figure stopping, and looking down at him.
I was near enough now to see her put out one hand toward him, unafraid, the way she'd put out her hand to every animal that ever crossed that ranch.
Then, the gray and I came thundering up. I checked him hard. He slid and danced and I was off his back before he'd stopped moving—
Eight minutes, thirty seconds.
—hitting the ground at a run, the horse rearing and kicking out behind me, done with the entire enterprise. I didn't care, he'd done his part. I ran the last stretch of that trail toward my mother.
She turned around.
She was holding something against her chest, cradled in both arms the way you'd hold a cat. A small pack, dark nylon, hard-cornered. And from it ran a short chain, bright in the sun, up to a steel cuff closed around her right wrist.
She saw me, and her whole face opened up.
"Clint?" she said. "Is that you?"
The world went quiet.
Three years since she'd known my name on the first try.
I know, because I kept the count, the way I keep every count that hurts.
And on a trail in the middle of an armed and wired nowhere, with something deadly in her arms—she smiled at me like a Sunday morning, and pulled my name up out of the flood on the first cast.
"Yeah, Mama." My voice came out strange. I made my face do a smile and my legs keep walking, easy, no alarm anywhere on me, because she was calm and her calm was the most valuable thing on that trail. "It's me. It's Clint."
"Well, look at you." She looked me all the way up and down, proud, a little scolding. "You've been out in the sun."
"Yes, ma'am." I was close now. Close enough to see the pack clearly, and the good German steel of the cuff, and that her wrist under it wasn't marked—loose, like he'd said, padded, like he'd said, the monster keeping his promise. "Whatcha got there, Mama?"
"They gave it to me to carry." She said it comfortably. "The men. They were polite, but I didn't care for them." Her eyes went past me and found the dog, who had planted himself two feet from her hip and gone still as a cut stone, watching the pack. "Whose dog is this? He's a good dog."
"That's Cash's dog." I got my hands on the pack, slow, gentle, taking the weight of it out of her arms like taking a dish she'd carried too far. The cuff chain clinked. The weight told me things I didn't want to know—dense, packed, heavier than its size. "His name's Max."
"Cash." Her face lit again, another name up out of the flood, two for two, my mother running a perfect day at the worst hour of mine. "Is Cash here?"
"He's coming." I got the top of the pack open with two fingers and looked inside as I said it, keeping my voice in Sunday. "Cash is coming, Mama."
The inside of the pack was the end of the world.
A charge, molded, bricked, wired into a small, black module with a hairline of green light running across it.
Everything about it clean and compact and expensive—the best that federal money buys, packed dense, cabled to the cuff chain.
No screen. No count showing. He hadn't given me the courtesy of a number.
The number was in my head, off my own watch, and my watch said—
Under a minute.
"Mama." Sunday voice. Sunday voice with the sky coming down. "I need to take that bracelet off your wrist now, all right? And then, you and me are going to move quick. Like when you'd race us to the porch."
"Race you to the porch," she said, and laughed—she laughed, a girl's laugh, some old, bright day surfacing whole—and there was confusion swimming up behind it, her eyes going from me to the pack, the first cloud coming in. "Clint, honey, what—"
"Wrist, Mama."
And whatever was left in her from a lifetime of raising soldiers—it answered. She held her arm out to me, steady, trusting, no more questions.
The key. My fingers were nothing but calm, which is a trick I know, the hands going quiet while the whole rest of you screams. Key in. Turn.
The cuff fell open.
Thirty seconds.
I had it built already: sling the pack, one motion, into the arroyo cut east of the trail, deep rock, take the blast in the ground's teeth—grab her—run west—cover the horse's distance—I turned, arm already loading, pack swinging back—
And Max took it out of my hand.
He came off the ground in one clean arc, jaws closing on the strap, and the pack was gone out of my grip with a strength that spun me half around.
He landed already running. East. Away. Straight down the trail away from us, the pack swinging under his chin, ears flat, body stretched into that same single line of purpose, running the way he'd passed the horse, running like the ground was helping.
"MAX!" It ripped out of me. "MAX, NO! DROP IT—"
He was gone. A gold streak going away down the pale trail, and there was no calling him back and no catching him. I understood in one thundering heartbeat what I was watching. He wasn't running away with it.
He was taking it away from us.
I scooped my mother up and ran.
She weighed nothing. That was its own grief, moving through the middle of everything else—my mother, who used to carry two of us at once and a feed bucket besides, come to nothing in my arms, light as a bird, her arms going around my neck out of pure old instinct, her voice at my ear saying my name, a question in it now, the cloud all the way in.
I ran west, back up the trail, the ground hammering up through my boots, ten strides, fifteen, the rise ahead.
Behind me, I heard nothing, no bark, no blast, nothing but my own blood, and I thought—maybe—I thought—run, Max, drop it and run, you good, dumb, holy animal—
The world came apart.
It wasn’t the blast that pack should have made.
I've been near enough to enough of them to know the arithmetic in my bones, and this was wrong, this was huge—something concocted in a sadist’s lab, Craine's real gift underneath his little one.
It came up out of the ground behind us like the earth itself had been fired.
The sound arrived as a wall. The pressure picked us both up off the trail and threw us.
I turned in the air.
It was the last thing I had. No thought in it—just the old program, the body spending its final tenth of a second on the only job left. I got myself around and under her, my back to the ground coming up, my arms a cage around the bird-light everything of her, my hand cupping her head into my chest.
The ground hit me like the flat side of God.
Light went through the world, white, total.
Then, dark.