Chapter 5 Bastien — Day 10
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The road into Alpine ran flat and straight enough a man could think, and Bastien had been trying not to for ten days now.
Thayer had handed him a list at seven that morning. Sweet feed, salt blocks, a case of horse wormer, two rolls of the good fencing wire. “Take the truck,” he'd said. “Don't dawdle.” Then, after a beat, “But dawdle a little. She'll be less tense if she's got the porch to herself for an hour.”
Bastien hadn't asked which she. There was only one at Vale Ranch, and Thayer already knew that Bastien knew.
He hit the outskirts of Alpine a little before ten.
The town flattened in front of him — low sun-white buildings, a gas station with dead-fly stickers on the pumps, the Sul Ross campus off to the left with its scattering of trees.
He liked the size of it. Alpine was small enough you could count the trucks in a lot and know which ones were in for the day.
In Toronto he'd measured a city by its towers.
Here he measured a town by whether the feed store kept a dog out front.
The feed store dog was named Bishop. A red heeler with one blue eye and one brown, chained loosely to a post no one seemed to think he needed. Bastien crouched and let him smell his knuckles.
“He'll take a scratch behind the left ear,” said the boy loading his truck. “Not the right. Bit off a wasp there last spring, still tender.”
“Thank you.” Bastien gave the left ear a scratch. The dog groaned like a man remembering the sea.
The kid stacked the last salt block and slapped the tailgate twice. “Y'all with a ranch out this way?”
“Vale.”
The kid nodded and didn't say anything else, which was what Bastien had come to love best about West Texans. In Toronto a name was an opening. Out here a name was a fact you set down, and someone either picked it up or let it lie.
He tipped the boy a five, signed for the account, and started to climb back into the truck.
Then he stopped.
The bed was full. The list was done. The road home ran straight for thirty-eight miles and finished at a porch he wasn't, at the moment, ready to walk up onto.
Not because Mara Vale had done anything to keep him off.
Because she hadn't. Because she'd sat with him at the kitchen table three nights ago and eaten Opal's stew across from him and asked one plain question about his hands—“You didn't get those calluses in a month, so where'd you get them?”—and he hadn't lied to her, quite, but he hadn't answered, and she'd let it go.
That patience of hers had sat in his chest all the way from the barn to bed and was still there.
He needed an hour to be a man in a truck in a town nobody knew him in. That was all.
He crossed Holland Avenue on foot with his hands in his pockets.
The bookshop sat between a taqueria and a shop that sold turquoise.
It had a screen door and a hand-painted sign and a chalkboard on the sidewalk that read, in a woman's clean square hand, IF YOU'RE HIDING FROM SOMETHING, IT'S COOLER INSIDE.
He almost turned around.
Instead he pushed the door open, and a bell rang above his head, and he stepped into the smell of paper and coffee and old wood floors.
“Morning,” said a voice from behind the counter.
He looked up. The woman there was a few years younger than him, small and light-boned, with pale skin gone pink across the nose from the sun and hair the color of a fox pulled back in a knot.
She had a pencil behind her ear and another in her teeth, and she'd been marking up a receipt when he came in.
She set the pencil down and looked at him fully.
Her eyes were light hazel, and they assessed him in a single practiced sweep — boots, hands, forearms, the fact he'd taken his cap off inside — and settled on his face without hurry.
“Morning, ma'am.”
“Cassia.” She smiled around the pencil in her teeth, then pulled it out. “Nobody's ma'am'd me since my grandma's funeral. What are you looking for?”
“Just looking.”
“Mm.” She leaned on the counter on both forearms. “You're new.”
He must've hesitated a second too long, because she laughed.
“Not a trick question,” she said. “Boots are broke in from working but the toe leather's still bright. Hands are working but the knuckles haven't split yet. That's a two-week man. Three at most.”
“Ten days,” Bastien said, before he could think better of it.
“Ten days.” She nodded like a woman confirming a diagnosis. “West Texas or Texas at all?”
“Texas at all.”
“Where'd Texas come from?”
He almost said Toronto. It was the pull of a good question honestly asked. He let a moment go by instead, and by the time it was gone the answer had softened at the edges.
“North,” he said. “Farther north than you'd think.”
“Canada north?”
“Something like that.”
She hummed. Not an unfriendly sound. She let him alone, let her eyes go past his shoulder to the shelves like she was giving him room to be there without being looked at.
“So who'd you land at?” she asked. “The Bell place is short a man, I know that. And the Kittrells always are.”
“Vale.”
Her whole face changed.
It didn't get harder. It got softer, and interested, and quicker. She straightened off the counter and set the pencil down for good.
“Mara Vale,” she said.
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Cassia,” she corrected, with the patience of someone who'd said it a lot in her life. “You're the one Thayer picked up off the highway.”
He didn't remember telling anyone he'd been picked up off the highway. He filed the observation away and nodded once.
“She okay?” Cassia asked, and the way she said it — plain and small — wasn't gossip. It was the way a friend asks after another friend she hasn't seen in a month and knows wouldn't have called even if the barn was on fire.
“She's tired,” Bastien said, and the words came out simpler than he'd meant them. “She works from dark to dark. She eats like she's forgotten there's a reason to. But she's steady. Steady on her feet.”
Cassia looked at him a moment longer than was comfortable. He held it. He didn't know why it mattered that he held it.
“Good,” she said, finally. “Good. Then you're good for her.”
“I'm a hand.”
“Mm.” That hum again. She turned and walked to a shelf and pulled a slim gray paperback off it without looking. “Take this.”
He took it. Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet. He'd read it years ago, in a copy his mother had left in a drawer in the Montreal house. He didn't say so. He turned it in his hands like a man who hadn't.
“How much?”
“Ten.”
He fished a twenty out of his wallet — the working one, cash and a Texas number written on a bar napkin, not the other — and laid it on the counter.
“You'll get change,” she said.
“Keep it.”
“I will not.” She rang the register and pressed a ten into his hand and closed his fingers over it. Her hand was cool and small and had ink on the knuckle. “I don't take tips on books. It's bad luck.”
“Bad luck for who?”
“The book.” She said this with a straight face. Then she turned and went behind a curtain and came back with another book, and this one she held a beat before she gave it over. He watched her thumb move on the cover.
It was a hardback. The dust jacket was long gone. The cloth was faded to the color of a wet field, and the title on the spine had been rubbed almost illegible. He didn't have to read it. He knew the shape of the letters. Blood Meridian.
“This is yours,” he said.
“It is.”
“You don't loan books to strangers.”
“No.” She held it another second, then set it in his palm. “I loan books to a man who walks into a bookshop with paper cuts on his thumbs and hasn't figured out yet where he's going to be tomorrow. You look like a man who needs Cormac McCarthy.”
He felt the corner of his mouth pull. He didn't remember letting it.
“That's diagnosis two.”
“I'm two for two.” She grinned. It was a good grin. It didn't ask him for anything. “Bring it back when Mara says you can be spared for an afternoon. Not before. It's a long one and it doesn't like to be rushed.”
“I'll bring it back.”
“I know you will,” said Cassia Wren, and turned back to her receipt and her pencil, and didn't watch him go.
The bell rang once above the door. The heat hit him again. He stood a moment on the sidewalk with two books tucked against his ribs and something moving in his chest he didn't want to name.
He'd been a man measured in a room again. A stranger had read him in ninety seconds and said kind things about it. It had been a while.
He walked back to the truck slower than he'd come.
He drove out of town the long way. Crossed the tracks, passed the last of the houses, and then the country opened up and there was only the road and the fence line and the sky. He let the truck settle at fifty. Blood Meridian rode on the passenger seat like a small dark animal.
At the gas station out past the town limits — the one with the dead flies and the crooked awning — he pulled off.
He didn't need gas.
He'd told himself all week he wasn't going to do this.
He'd told himself for ten days he'd sit at Mara Vale's kitchen table and let her carry what she carried and not touch it.
That was the deal he'd made the night he stood on her porch with his hand raised to knock.
He'd said it in his head, clear as if he'd said it aloud: I won't fix her life for her.
I'll work. I'll earn my keep. I'll be a man in a bunk and nothing more.
He killed the engine. Sat with the wheel under his hands and the ticking of hot metal in his ears, and looked at the pump nozzle he wasn't going to use.
The foreclosure notice sat in a coffee tin in a cupboard in her kitchen.
She thought no one had seen her put it there.
He'd walked in for water at eleven at night on his fourth day and she'd been standing at the counter with the tin open, and she'd closed it before she turned around, and she hadn't known he'd seen the paper in her hand.
A hundred and eighty-seven thousand four hundred dollars. Ninety days on the notice, minus ten. She had seventy-four left.