Chapter 9 Bastien — Day 22
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The morning had the kind of clean cold that made the sky look scrubbed.
Bastien rode a quarter mile behind Rafe along the north fence, coffee still in his blood and the reins loose in his left hand.
Vespers walked easy under him. Rafe rode Junior, the sorrel, who was cheerful and stupid and had ideas.
They'd been sent out to check the water lines because a section had frozen three nights ago and Thayer wanted eyes on it before the sun climbed. Rafe was talking, because Rafe was always talking.
“Cassia's got that thing tonight,” Rafe said over his shoulder. “That reading. Poetry or whatever. I said I'd go.”
“You don't read poetry,” Bastien said.
“I do now.”
Bastien let a small smile pull at his mouth and kept his eyes on the dust the horses stirred against the low light. He'd learned early not to give Rafe the satisfaction of laughing.
“You could come,” Rafe said.
“I could.”
“Bring—”
“Don't.”
“I didn't even—”
“Don't.”
Rafe grinned back over his shoulder, and that was when Junior stopped moving.
Junior stopped the way a horse stops when he's decided a thing is wrong in the world. Ears forward. Weight coiling. Every muscle turning to spring. Bastien saw it before Rafe did, because Rafe had turned to say something else.
There was a dry sound in the brush at the fence line — a fast, papery rattle Bastien had never heard before in his life and knew instantly.
Junior went sideways. Not up. Sideways in a hard buck-and-twist, and Rafe, half-turned in the saddle, chin cocked wrong, went off the high side.
He hit the packed clay shoulder-first at the base of the fence with a sound Bastien would hear in his sleep for a week — the flat wet sound of a body meeting ground.
Junior bolted. Bastien didn't follow the horse.
He was off Vespers and on his knees beside Rafe before the dust had finished rising.
“Don't move,” Bastien said.
“I'm not moving.” Rafe's voice was thin and tight and near laughing. “I'm not stupid.”
“You're a little stupid.”
“Fair.”
Bastien ran his eyes down Rafe's body without touching him. Right arm at the wrong angle. Right shoulder sitting up in the shirt where a shoulder should not sit up. Face gone the color of old paper. Breath shallow but there.
He'd seen this before. He'd seen worse than this, higher up, in colder air, with a body that had mattered more than any body would ever matter again. He put that away.
“Snake?” Rafe said.
“Yeah.”
“Big one?”
“Big enough.”
“Did it—”
“You didn't get bit. Just thrown. Rafe. Look at me. Where does it hurt.”
“Shoulder. Chest. Not my head. Head's fine. I got it up in time.”
“Good.”
“I think — I think my collarbone's — is that a collarbone.”
“That's your collarbone.”
“Cool.”
“You are the coolest man in Texas.”
“Say it louder.”
Bastien didn't smile. He was already sliding his phone from his back pocket. He kept one hand light on Rafe's uninjured wrist so Rafe could feel him there.
He'd programmed the Alpine urgent-care clinic early, the way he programmed anything a rural life might need in a hurry. The clinic and the veterinary office next door shared an after-hours dispatcher; this time the human side answered.
“Beau.”
“I'm dialing.”
“Tell them it's Rafe.”
“They'll know.”
Doc's line picked up on the third ring. Bastien didn't raise his voice.
“This is Beau Lorne out at Vale,” he said. “One of our hands took a fall off a spooked horse. Right clavicle, likely — right shoulder sits proud. Conscious, oriented, no bleeding I can see. I'll bring him in. Twenty-six minutes.”
“Come,” she said, and hung up.
Bastien put the phone away.
Then he went and got Vespers, who hadn't gone anywhere. He tied her and Junior—Junior had circled back—to the fence with the lead ropes doubled, and left a note in a saddlebag in case Thayer rode the line before he got back.
“I'm going to lift you,” he said.
“Don't.”
“I have to.”
“I know. Say it anyway.”
“I'm going to lift you.”
“Do it.”
Rafe didn't scream. He breathed one hard sob through his nose and turned his face into Bastien's shoulder for the twelve steps to the F-150.
Bastien slid him along the bench seat, propped him with the folded coat and two saddle blankets he'd learned to keep in the cab. He belted him across the hips only. He closed the door slower than he'd ever closed a door.
He drove twenty-six miles at a steady sixty-two, both hands on the wheel, radio off. Rafe kept passing in and out of a shivery talking Bastien recognized as shock beginning and shock trying not to. Bastien talked back.
“Cassia's poetry thing,” he said. “What's it about.”
“Horses, I bet. Everyone's is.”
“You don't know?”
“She said it's about the desert.”
“Everyone's is.”
Rafe laughed, and the laugh hurt him, and he stopped. “Don't make me.”
“Sorry.”
“Keep talking.”
“I don't have anything to say.”
“Then lie.”
Bastien lied. He talked about a place called Prince Edward Island and its red dirt. He talked about a bread Opal had made last Tuesday. He listed the horses' names and got Roman's wrong on purpose. Rafe corrected him.
They were seven miles out of Alpine when Rafe said, “You've done this before.”
Bastien kept his eyes on the road.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Who.”
Bastien didn't answer. He counted the mile markers by the fence posts on the right instead. He'd learned to count things when he wanted to not say things.
Doc was waiting at the clinic door with the light already on and a nurse behind her whose name Bastien didn't know.
They took Rafe out of the truck the way Bastien had put him in and better.
Bastien stood in the parking lot for one long second with his hand on the F-150's tailgate and his face turned to the mountains where the sun was just off the ridges. Then he went inside.
He signed the papers a person signs. He wrote Rafe Calderon on the line and paused at the emergency-contact line and wrote Mara Vale and the ranch landline. He wrote Beau Lorne as accompanying and gave a number that would ring his own phone. The clerk was kind and didn't ask him things.
He sat down in a molded plastic chair the color of a bad orange, elbows on his knees, hands hanging.
He'd flown two men off a ridge in British Columbia the year Julien first tried to teach him to ski.
He'd been sixteen. Julien had been the pilot.
Both men had lived. He'd learned to hand a man his coat, to keep a voice low, to not add fear to a room.
He'd used the skill maybe eleven times since, always for other people's brothers, until the day the ridge came for his own.
He didn't think about that day. He never let himself think about that day. He thought about the color of the chair.
The clock on the wall said 7:41 a.m.
A nurse came out at eleven and told him: broken clavicle, subluxated shoulder — meaning it had slid and gone back — no head involvement, no rib. They wanted to keep Rafe overnight because of the shock and to run a slow drip and to be sure of the shoulder in the morning.
“You family?” the nurse said.
“No.”
“Friend?”
“Yes.”
“Sit tight or come back at seven.”
“I'll sit.”
She looked at him the way a working woman looks at a working man she's decided is all right, and she nodded and went away.
He sat.
He called the ranch. Opal picked up. He told her plainly. Opal said, “Oh honey,” which he thought was for Rafe, and then, “You eat,” which was for him. He said he would. He didn't.
At two Thayer called back and said, “I've got the horses in. Junior's fine. You stay.” He heard Mara in the background asking a question he couldn't make out. Thayer said, “He says stay,” and hung up.
He stayed.
The waiting room emptied and refilled twice.
He walked a lost man with a hurt dog to the vet side, came back, drank water from a paper cone, and watched the clock hand go around.
At six that evening he dozed. He woke at midnight when a nurse checked Rafe, at four when a cleaning cart rattled past, and at six the next morning he closed his eyes for what felt like one minute.
He woke to the smell of good coffee.
Mara stood in front of him with a paper cup in each hand and her braid over her shoulder and the dust of the drive on the toes of her boots. Her hair looked like she hadn't slept. Her eyes looked like she'd driven fast. She'd come. He hadn't asked her to, and she'd come.
“Hey,” she said, very quietly.
“Hey.”
“You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
She held out the coffee. He took it. Their fingers touched around the cup and he registered it and moved past it because he was still coming up out of sleep and didn't trust himself.
“How is he,” she said.
“Fine. They set the shoulder. Bone'll knit. He'll be in a sling six weeks and mad about it four.”
“You stayed the whole night.”
“Wasn't going to leave him.”
“I know you weren't.” She said it small. “Can I see him.”
“Down that hall. Second door.”
She looked at him a second longer than she needed to.
He couldn't read her face — he was half-asleep, and he'd never been good at reading her face fully awake either.
Something was moving in it. Something he didn't have a name for.
He watched her go, tipped his head back against the wall, and drank the coffee too fast so it burned him. Burning was a thing to feel.
When she came back Rafe walked behind her, moving like an old man made of glass, and Doc was behind Rafe with a clipboard.
“You'll take him home,” Doc said to Bastien. “Keep the arm supported, follow the medication sheet, and wake him if his breathing changes. Bring him back Friday. Are you the one who called?”
“Yes.”
“You did fine.”
She left. Rafe stood in his shirt from yesterday with an ugly canvas sling and a pale grin. “Can we go.”
“We can go.”
They put him in the middle of the bench because the middle was safest. Bastien drove and Mara sat by the window with her knees turned toward Rafe, one hand loose on his good arm.
She talked to him about nothing — the fence line, a message from Cassia, how she'd left Orin in charge of feeding, which made Rafe laugh once, small and careful.