Chapter 13 Bastien — Day 33
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The truck ate the first hour before the sun came up.
The dash light caught the side of her face.
Sun-streaked braid over one shoulder. Gray-green eyes half-lidded.
Her hand rested loose on her thigh, thumb tapping once, twice, then still.
Working hands. He'd noticed those first — the neat trim of her nails, the pale ridge of a scar on her left palm he'd wanted to ask about since the second week.
“You slept?” he asked.
“Some.” Mara's voice was low, made lower by the hour. “You?”
“Some.”
“Liar.”
He almost smiled. “A little.”
“Better.” She turned the heater down a notch. “Motel outside Wichita Falls tonight. Bull tomorrow morning. Home by dark, if he loads without a tantrum.”
“He's a bull,” Bastien said. “He'll have a tantrum.”
“He's paid for.”
“That's never once stopped a tantrum.”
She turned her head. He kept his eyes on the road but felt it anyway — that quick, evaluating glance she gave things she wasn't sure of yet. He'd been getting it for weeks. He was getting it less lately.
“You're funny in the morning,” she said.
“I'm funny after coffee.”
“There's no coffee in this truck.”
“That's the problem I'm identifying.”
She huffed, almost a laugh. “Fort Stockton has coffee. Or something that calls itself that.”
“Then Fort Stockton is our shining city.”
She let that one sit and went back to the window.
The mountains started to shape themselves out of the black as they left Marfa.
He knew them by now — the low humped bones of the Davis range to the north, the flat scrub running east toward Alpine, the sky doing its slow patient trick where it turned first from black to iron and then, unfair and sudden, to a color a poet would ruin trying to name. He didn't try. He drove.
Mara took a small notebook out of the door pocket, checked something in it, and put it away. It was the second time this week he'd watched her look at that notebook the way another person might look at a rosary.
“Loan?” he asked, careful.
“Numbers,” she said. “Same thing lately.”
“Selene?”
“She's been kind.”
“She should be. You aren't the one who took the loan.”
“I'm the one who owns the barn now.” She rested her forearm along the door. “Dad took it out when the drought hit in ten. Going to pay it off with the calf sale in twelve. Didn't rain in twelve either.”
“So he refinanced.”
“He refinanced.” A little shrug. “It was a slow leak. He was patient. Thought he had another twenty years to plug the hole.”
Bastien didn't say anything for a mile. He'd learned, on the ranch, when to let a sentence stand up on its own two feet.
“You were in the barn,” he said eventually, “when it happened.”
“I was in the barn.”
“You don't have to.”
“Vespers had just foaled. Dad was at her stall, talking to her the way he did when he wanted an animal calm. He made a small sound, went to his knees, and said, “Mara-honey.” I caught him before he hit the floor. By the time Thayer came, the sky was gray and I was still holding him.”
Bastien's throat did something he hoped she couldn't see.
“I knew before I finished saying his name,” she added, softer. “I said it anyway.”
“I'm sorry,” he said.
“You'd have liked him. He'd have made you split wood the day you moved in and given you a beer at sundown.”
“I'd have taken both.”
“I know.”
She was quiet for a while after that. He watched the road, watched the mileage climb, listened to the tires eat the pavement. The heater ticked. The Davis Mountains lifted themselves up on their left and then, at the turn, slid slowly behind them into the rearview.
He glanced up at the mirror.
“They're prettier from the back,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Mara looked up too. She tilted her head. “Yeah. Almost like they know you're leaving.”
“They do a trick,” he said. “The light. The way they lie flat one minute and stand up the next.”
“You've been watching them.”
“I've been watching a lot of things.”
She let that one sit too. She was good at letting things sit.
Marathon came and went. A gas station awning, a diner, two old dogs asleep on a porch that hadn't been painted since before he was born.
The truck ate hour two and hour three. Somewhere around the turn onto the 385, Mara took her braid apart, combed it out with her fingers, and did it again.
He tried not to watch. He watched a little anyway.
“Your turn,” she said.
“For what?”
“A father story. Or whatever's the equivalent.”
He kept both hands on the wheel. “I don't have a father story that isn't a company story.”
“Give me the company story, then.”
“He was a hard man.” He picked the words carefully, in an English that still felt borrowed after thirty years. “He didn't yell. Didn't hit. Worse than that. He was disappointed.”
“Ah,” she said.
“He died when I was twenty-two. My mother remarried before the paint on the stone was dry.”
“Ah.”
“There was a brother.” His hands tightened on the wheel, then loosened. “Older. Two years. He and I ran the — the family thing, after our father. He was the one who was good at it. Charming. He could walk into a room and every person in it thought he'd come especially for them.”
“That's a rare gift.”
“He knew it. He wasn't modest.” A small, painful smile. “He also called me every Sunday night for eleven years and asked if I was eating. I told him yes even when I wasn't.”
“Beau.” Very quiet.
He'd told her his name was Beau. He heard it in her mouth and had to look at the road very hard for a second before he could go on.
“My brother died almost two months ago,” he said. “An accident. A stupid one. He liked the mountains and the mountains didn't like him back that day.”
He heard her breath go in and out beside him. She didn't reach across. She didn't touch his hand. She sat with him.
“I don't know who I am without him,” he said. He said it plainly because it was plainly true, and because the truck was moving and it seemed easier to say hard things when the world was moving under you. “That's something I'm still figuring out.”
“Yeah,” she said. Just that.
They drove.
“You'd have liked him too,” he added, after a while.
“I don't doubt it.”
“Everybody liked him.”
“Some people are that kind of gift and some aren't.” She rolled her window down half an inch. The morning came in cold and sagebrush-smelling. “I'm sorry, Beau.”
“Thank you.”
“Almost two months isn't very long.”
“No.”
“You shouldn't be —” she paused, “you shouldn't be doing so much lifting.”
He glanced at her. The braid was neat again. The gray-green eyes were on him now and he didn't know what to do with them.
“Lifting keeps me upright,” he said.
“Yeah.” A small dry sound. “I've heard that one before. Said it too.”
“You'd know.”
“I would.”
They passed a mile marker. Then another. The sun climbed up over the passenger window and gilded her cheek and she turned her face into it like a cat into a hand.
“What were you?” she asked, mildly. “Before this. Before the ranch. Before the truck.”
He knew he'd have to answer. He also knew whatever he said would be the closest thing to honest he'd given her yet. He weighed it. He watched the yellow line.
“A man who couldn't breathe,” he said.
She didn't answer.
She didn't turn her head or make a face or reach across the cab. She let it sit in the space between them like something a bird had dropped and she wasn't sure yet whether to pick up. Ten miles of highway went by while she let it sit. He was grateful.
“Alright,” she said finally.
That was all.
He felt something loosen in his chest he hadn't known was tight.
Miles went by. Neither of them spoke for a long time. He watched a freight train run parallel to the highway for five minutes, matched its pace on purpose, then let it go on ahead. Mara found a low country station on the radio that was mostly guitar and static, and let it play under everything.
They stopped at a truck plaza on the edge of Abilene near the end of the afternoon.
The sun was low and hot and the diesel pump smelled like every long day of his life. Mara pumped. He went inside for water, and when he came back out, she was leaning against the door of the F-150 with her hat pushed back and two paper cups of coffee in her hands. She held one out.
“Warning,” she said. “It's an insult to the bean.”
“Thank you.”
He took a sip. He tried not to make a face. He made a face anyway.
“Told you.”
“You did.”
“You wanted it.”
“I did.” He took another sip, because coffee was coffee. “This is what a man drinks when he wants to remember what suffering tastes like.”
“That's the pitch.” She grinned. First real grin of the day. It did something to him. “They should put it on the sign.”
“I'd stop again.”
“You'd stop again.”
They stood there a minute in the smell of hot asphalt and sagebrush, drinking coffee that was mostly a punishment.
Two truckers pulled in and out. The bell on the door dinged.
Some kid played a video game inside on his phone, and the sound of it, tinny through the open glass, was the sound of every gas station in every state.
“You alright?” she asked.
“I'm alright.”
“You said a lot in that truck.”
“I know.”
“You don't have to. I'm not asking you to.”
“I know.” He looked at her. “I wanted to.”
She held his eyes a second longer than was safe. She was the one who broke it.
A hawk lifted off a fencepost past the diesel island and cut across the empty half-mile between the station and the low sun. She watched it. He watched her watch it. Neither of them said anything about it.
“We should push on,” she said. “I want a bed before midnight.”
“Amen.”
They tossed the cups. He climbed back into the cab. She let him drive.