Chapter 2
Morgan
The kid at the rental counter in Denver recognized me at four in the morning and pretended he hadn't, which was a performance of its own.
I recognized him recognizing me and pretended not to notice, which was a better one.
Between the two of us we put on something more honest than anything I'd done in front of a camera in a year.
"You're all set, Mr. Masterson." He slid the keys across without looking up, and his voice came out about a third too casual, the way a man sounds when he's already rehearsing the story he'll tell somebody later. "Have a good one."
"You too. Thanks for being up at this hour, it's inhuman."
"It's fine." He looked up then. "It's, uh. It's fine."
So I gave him the smile, the one that had been focus-grouped and lit and sold in forty countries, and watched it do exactly what it was built to do.
It made a stranger feel for half a second like the warmest light in the room had swung around to land on him.
He'd remember it. He'd tell someone. That was the whole function of the thing, and I could run it now on no sleep and less feeling, which was either a useful skill or the saddest sentence ever written about a man.
I'd stopped being able to tell which a long time ago.
I'd told them I'd drive myself. It had caused a small professional crisis, the way everything I wanted that nobody could bill for tended to.
There had been a car arranged, and a driver, discreet and vetted and holding a sign with a fake name I'd picked out myself.
But I'd said no, and in the end I won, because I usually won the small ones.
The ones that didn't matter to anybody but me.
They let me have those. It kept me quiet about everything else.
I drove out of the city in the dark with the heater roaring and the highway empty enough to feel like a set after the crew goes home. I headed north, then west and then up.
The phone came through the car speakers before I'd made the second exit.
"You landed," Renata said.
"I landed. I'm driving. I'm a man operating a motor vehicle, like a normal citizen."
"There's a photo of you at baggage claim already."
"How do I look?"
"Tired."
"That's the character," I said. "That's a choice."
"Mm." I could hear her typing. Renata typed the way other people breathed, and it was four in the morning where I was and three where she was, and it had never once occurred to me to wonder when the woman slept. "Gerry had the car at the curb for forty minutes."
"Gerry is a lovely man. I hope he went home and got in bed."
"Gerry billed me for the forty minutes."
"Then Gerry is a professional and I respect him enormously."
The road went up. My ears filled and popped then filled again. Somewhere out to the left of me in all that black there were mountains I had to take on faith.
"Six weeks," she said.
"Six weeks."
"I've moved four things to get you six weeks. I cannot move a fifth."
"Then don't move the fifth."
I heard more typing. "How's the service up there?"
"I'm told it's poor."
"How poor?"
"I'm told it's the kind of poor where people drive to a hilltop to call their mother."
"Morgan."
"Renata."
"Call me on Sundays," she said. "If you don't call me on a Sunday I will assume a cow has killed you and I'll call the Colorado State Police. It'll be in the trades by Monday, and that'll be a much worse story than anything you are running away from."
"I'm not running away from anything. I'm doing research. I'm a serious actor now, it's very moving."
"Mm," she said again, and then, in a different voice, one I'd heard maybe four times in eleven years, "You don't have to do the voice with me."
"What voice?"
"That one," she said, and hung up.
A mile down the road I caught myself smiling at the rearview mirror. There was nobody in the back seat.
Around the second hour the radio started losing the country stations mid-chorus and not finding them again. The bars on my phone went to one and then to none. No one had asked anything of me in forty miles.
I should have been running lines. I had a head full of a script about a man who could ride and rope and stand in a doorway saying nothing until a whole theater leaned forward.
I could do the saying-nothing. The rest of it I could not do at all, and that was the entire reason for the next six weeks of my life.
Learn the hands. Learn the walk. Learn it from the inside so the lens couldn't catch the lie.
The director had told me so over a dinner I didn't eat, a serious man making a serious picture, the one that would finally get me a sentence with no heartthrob in it.
He wanted the genuine article. He'd find me a ranch, he said.
A real working one, off the map, somewhere that would treat me like a hand and not a guest.
Which was how I came to be alone in a rented car at eight thousand feet with the sky going gray behind me, three hours earlier than anyone was expecting me. I hadn't been able to think of a single reason to wait.
I typed a message to Renata at a stop sign that guarded nothing.
Made it. Gorgeous up here. Feeling good about the work.
I added a mountain. Then I sent it and watched it sit there with a small red mark beside it, undelivered, going nowhere at all. Nobody knew where I was. It took me a second to work out that the feeling was relief, and another to work out that it should have frightened me more than it did.
That was the job under the job, the one that never wrapped. Keeping everyone comfortable about Morgan. I was always feeling good about the work. I had been feeling good about the work for eleven years.
There had been a person once, before the agents and the trainers and the man who fixed my teeth.
I couldn't have said much about him anymore.
He was small, he belonged to the late nineties, and he'd been handed to a camera before he was old enough to spell his own name.
The camera was so pleased with him. So warm.
He spent every year after that trying to keep it that way.
The road climbed and the heater roared. I learned young what won the warmth back, younger than I should have, and by the time anybody got around to asking what I wanted I'd been answering with what the room wanted for so long that the two had welded together.
There was no seam left to find. Most days I'd stopped looking.
The road came over a lip and the whole valley dropped away underneath me in the first real light.
I caught myself framing it before I'd taken a breath.
Wide on the floor of it, sage and dead grass and the green just starting in the wet bottoms. Push in on a creek throwing the sun back up at itself.
A fence line running out to a vanishing point.
Black cattle scattered across the distance in ones and twos, too far off to be doing anything.
Three peaks stood at the head of it all, sharp and strange, stacked up like a church somebody had carved and then left out in the weather a few thousand years.
It was beautiful and did not care that I was looking.
Everything I'd stood in front of for twenty years had been built to be looked at, including me.
Then the road turned to dirt and the beauty stopped being a shot and started being weather.
Cold came up through the floor of the car.
My hands, when I held them in front of the vents, looked like a stranger's hands, soft and clean and useless.
It went through me that I might have made a serious mistake, one I couldn't reshoot.
The air was thin enough that running my eyes across the dashboard left me dizzy.
Outside the glass the quiet had a pressure to it, a hand laid flat over the whole valley.
There was nobody out here to win over. There was nothing out here I could be charming at, and I had wanted that so badly I'd moved four projects on my calendar to get it.
Now that I had it, my hands were shaking on the wheel and it wasn't because of the cold.
The sign at the gate was a plank with three little triangles burned into it and the words THREE SAINTS under them.
That was all. No slogan. None of the expensive plainness the resorts pay designers to fake.
Just the actual plain thing, which somehow read as more exclusive than anything I'd ever been comped. I drove slowly under it.
The house was old and low, with a room stuck on one end in siding that didn't match the rest. Any production designer alive would have made that match.
It was the first thing I'd seen in years that nobody had fixed.
There were outbuildings that had clearly never once been photographed, a barn the color of nothing, a corral, and past all of it the peaks again, closer now, the tops of them already lit while the whole place underneath sat in the cold.
I parked the shining rental where it would look most expensive, in front of all that working brown.
Then I sat with my hands at ten and two on a wheel that wasn't going anywhere, finding the man who'd get out of it.
There was always somebody to be. I went with the easy one, a movie star with the good grace to know he was out of his depth and the charm to be forgiven for it.
I got into him the way you get into wardrobe and opened the door.
The cold took the breath out of me for real. I laughed at myself, because laughing at myself was step one of the bit, and that was when I saw the man at the rail.
He was just standing there. That was the first thing I noticed about him.
Not waiting in any way meant to be seen, not arranging himself, not doing a single thing with the fact of being looked at.
A big man gone still, dark coat, three or four days of beard on him.
Everyone I knew had their stubble trimmed and sculpted.
He didn't. He looked like he'd been up for hours.
It was on him in the mud drying on his boots.
And hands. I noticed the hands from thirty feet.
They were scarred and blunt, and they hung at his sides like tools he'd set down for a second.
I had spent my whole life among men who used their hands to gesture, and these were the first ones I'd seen in years that looked like they were only for doing.
He watched me cross the yard, and there was nothing on his face at all. Not a greeting, not a welcome, not the small readiness people get when they're about to meet somebody. I don't think I'd ever walked toward another person and not watched them get ready for me.
I gave him the smile.
I hadn't decided to do it. It came out of me on its own, the reflex of thirty years, the one that promised we were going to be friends, that I was so happy to be here, that I was delighted and harmless.
I felt it leave my face and cross the yard and arrive at him and do absolutely nothing.
It didn't bounce off. Bouncing off would have been a reaction.
It landed on a man who had no use for it and was absorbed without a trace, like throwing a match in the creek.
I'd stood across from senators and serial killers, or at least the actors playing them.
I'd stood in front of directors who could end me with a phone call.
Nobody had ever read me as fast as a cattle rancher did in that cold yard, in my ruined boots, in the time it took him to decide I wasn't much and quit looking.
It should have stung. Instead, it felt like the first honest review I'd had in twenty years.
"Mr. Thomas," I said. I'd done my homework. Doing my homework was the one genuinely diligent thing about me, and nobody had ever noticed. I put out my soft clean hand. "Morgan. Thanks for having me. I know I'm probably the last thing you needed showing up in your spring."
He looked at the hand long enough that I started to feel stupid holding it out. Then he took it, one hard brief shake. His palm felt like a piece of the barn.
"You can put your bag in the bunkhouse," he said. "Wear different boots tomorrow. Those'll be ruined by noon and they won't keep you warm anyway."
That was his whole greeting. No hello. He turned and started for the house, then stopped, like he'd remembered a manner he didn't believe in, and looked back at me over his shoulder.
For one second a stranger looked back at me and I understood that he had already decided what I was, and that he was right, and that it was nothing he wanted anywhere near his place.
Nobody had turned me down in a long time. I'd made very sure nobody could.
"Coffee's on inside when you're done standing in the yard," he said, and went.
I stayed where I was. The cold got in under the collar of a jacket that had been photographed on a mountain and had never once been on one.
Somewhere behind the barn a cow was carrying on about something and nobody was going to do anything about it.
I had spent thirty years knowing what to do with my hands.
I put them in my pockets, and took them out, and put them back.
Then I went and got my bag.