Chapter 32
CLINT
The world came back in pieces.
Sound first. A high, thin ringing, one long tone, like a wire pulled tight across the whole sky.
Then, the ground under my back, hot. Then, light—light with shapes swimming in it that would not hold still.
I lay there and let my eyes do their slow work, the way you wait out a dust storm, because there's no rushing either one.
The shapes settled.
Blue sky. The rim of the world, tilted. And when I got my head turned, moving it like a cracked thing—
My mother.
She was sitting cross-legged beside the trail, a few feet from me, in her nightgown, her white-streaked hair lit up at the edges by the sun.
She had a little pile of flowers in her lap.
Blackfoot daisies. The tough, little, white ones that grow out of caliche where nothing has any business growing.
She was picking through them with both hands, laying stem against stem, building a bouquet with the patience of a woman who had nowhere else on earth to be.
She was doing it the way she did everything when we were boys. Completely.
"Mama." My voice came out like gravel poured from a bag. "You okay?"
She didn't answer. She turned a daisy in her fingers, checking it from all sides, and added it to the bunch.
Alive. Whole, near as I could see—no blood on her, no wrong angles, nightgown dusty but nothing worse.
Sitting in the wreckage of the loudest thing that country had ever heard, making a bouquet.
Whatever room her mind had gone to, it was a gentle one.
I lay there one more second and let myself be nothing but grateful for it.
Then, I remembered.
Max.
The gold streak going away down the trail with the pack under his chin.
The blast coming up like the earth firing back.
Poor, brave, holy animal—he'd taken it out of my hand.
He'd known, some way that I'll never get to ask him about, and he'd taken it and run it away from us, and the explosion had been huge, and he'd been carrying it.
What was I going to tell Cash?
The thought put me in motion before I'd cleared it for takeoff. The house. I had to get us back to the house. I got an arm under me, got a knee planted, pushed—
The back of my head detonated.
Pain like nothing in my catalog, and my catalog is long.
It came up the back of my skull and over the top in one white sheet and took my vision with it.
My knee hit the trail again, then my hands, and I knelt there in the dirt with my head hanging, breathing through it like breathing was a skill I was relearning.
"Max!" I called it out at the ground, at the country, anywhere. "MAX!"
Nothing. The ringing. The windmill of my own pulse, pounding. I've been concussed before—it comes with the trade, you learn its neighborhoods—but this was somewhere new. This was the part of town where the lights don't work.
I got my head up to call again.
And stopped.
There was something on the trail.
East, down where the dust was still standing in the dead air, low to the ground, hazy—a shape that swam and doubled and would not resolve. I blinked at it, once, twice, telling myself the truth the way I always tell myself the truth: concussion. Mirage. Want, wearing a costume.
It kept coming.
I blinked again, hard. My eyes finally did their job, and the shape came together out of the heat shimmer, low and tan and moving wrong—hitching, one leg off its rhythm—but moving. Coming up the trail. Coming to me.
My God.
"Max."
He was limping. Every third stride the whole back half of him dipped, and he ran, anyway—slower now, all the streak gone out of him, but the same straight line, the same single purpose, pointed at us and closing.
Movement at my side. I turned—careful, in pieces, the head coming around like a gate on a bad hinge—and my mother was up.
She'd set her bouquet down in the dirt, gentle, like setting down a sleeping thing. She was moving toward the dog, her nightgown bright in all that sun, her hands already out in front of her.
"There's a good dog," she said. Her voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go in years. Warm and sure and aimed. "Such a good dog. Come here. Come here, my little Max."
My little Max. Like she'd known him all his life. Like he was hers. Maybe, by then, he was—I've quit drawing lines around what animals and my mother know.
He came to her.
He limped the last stretch and pushed his big head into her hands. His whole side was matted dark—blood and dirt driven together in his coat, a long, ugly swipe of it from shoulder to hip. My heart went down through the floor of me until my mother's hands started moving.
She went over that dog the way she used to go over us—firm, quick, thorough, no flinching anywhere in her, parting the fur with her thumbs, following the wound down its length, pressing at the edges of it while Max stood stone-still under her hands and let her, because animals always let her.
"It's not deep." She said it in the voice.
The porch voice. The kitchen-table-at-nine-at-night voice, the one that presided over four decades of split lips and fishhooks and a nail through Tommy's foot.
"Looks worse than it is—that's the dirt talking.
We'll clean it up, put in a couple of stitches, and he'll be just fine.
" She stroked the dog's ears back, once, and looked into his face like they were finishing a conversation. "Just fine. Yes, you will."
And for the length of those sentences, all of her was there.
Not the woman in the chair by the window.
Not the woman who forgets the year. Her.
Elaine Dane, whole, risen up out of the flood for one more patient, competent minute because something living needed her hands.
I knelt in the dirt of the southfork trail with my skull coming apart and watched my mother come home to herself over a wounded dog.
If I could have stopped time anywhere in this life, I'd have stopped it there.
"Clint!"
A voice, far off, behind me. My name in it.
I turned toward it, and the turning cost me—the world slung sideways and kept going after my head stopped, everything smearing, the light going syrupy at the edges.
Through all of it, coming up the trail from the west at a dead run, I could just make out a shape I'd know in any condition, in any light, in any life.
"There he is, Mama." My voice was going somewhere underwater like I was drunk. I got an arm up, reached it out toward my brother, the way you reach for the last handhold. "Cash is coming."
My mother said something.
It came to me through fathoms, bent and slow and gentle, her voice the last thing moving in a world going dark from the edges in—and I never got the words.
For the second time that day, everything went to black.