Chapter 8
Morgan
Morgan
On Friday they took me to town, which in Orion Valley meant the North Star.
It was the only place there was to take anybody.
Dez drove. Lane rode shotgun and said nothing.
I sat in the back of the crew cab between a toolbox and a bag of feed with the heater roaring and the dark mountains sliding by.
Dez talked the whole twenty miles, a running history of every ranch we passed and who'd married whom and which fence line two families had been feuding over since before statehood.
"That's the Petersens, or it was. Kid sold it to a dentist." He took a hand off the wheel to point at a dark hillside. "Dentist runs alpacas. I shoe them. Don't ask me why a man needs eleven alpacas at eight thousand feet, because I've asked."
Lane said nothing. Dez did not appear to require it.
Somewhere around mile twelve I noticed I had stopped waiting for my turn.
There wasn't going to be one. He didn't need me to be anybody.
He just liked the company and the sound of his own voice and the road.
I sat there in the warm dark being nobody in particular, which was the most relaxed I had ever been in a moving vehicle.
The North Star was a low cinderblock building with a buzzing sign and a gravel lot full of trucks.
Inside it was scarred wood, old neon, and a jukebox in the corner playing something with a pedal steel that skipped on the same beat every time around.
It smelled like wet wool and cattle and men who'd come straight from work.
The woman behind the bar looked up when the four of us came in.
She looked at me about as long as she'd have looked at a weather report and went back to drying a glass.
"Dot," Dez said, delighted, like he hadn't seen her in a year instead of since Tuesday. "We brought a celebrity."
"I can see that." Dot did not look up. "He drinking, or is he just going to stand there being famous in my doorway?"
That was the total of the North Star's reaction to a man who couldn't buy a sandwich in Los Angeles without it ending up on a website by lunch.
Dot was sixty-something and built like a fence post and moved behind that bar like she'd worn a groove in the floor doing it. She did not once ask me a question about myself, which by the end of the night was starting to feel like a form of hospitality.
An old rancher at the end of the bar squinted at me a long moment, and I felt the machinery start up, the easy line loading itself, the angle. He said, "You that fella that married the singer?"
"No."
"Huh." He turned back to his beer, and that was the closest I came all night to being recognized.
A girl of about sixteen clearing plates on the restaurant side did a real double take and then, to her eternal credit, played it stone cold, refilling waters three feet from me with the studied casualness of a spy. On her fourth pass she set down a glass I hadn't asked for.
"My mom loves you," she said, very fast, and kept walking.
Nobody at the table even looked up.
Dot set a basket of fries down in front of me that I hadn't ordered.
"You look like you haven't eaten a potato since the last administration," she said, and walked off.
I ate every one of them, hot and salt and grease.
They were better than anything that had been put in front of me in a year of green juice and craft services.
My whole career ran on being the most interesting thing in any room. But I was in a room that had looked at me once and gone back to the hockey game. I could not tell you why that felt like being let out of somewhere.
Flynn was already there and already angry about something, which I was starting to understand was Flynn's resting state. He made room for me and told me I was shorter than I looked, which he'd said to me before and had clearly decided to keep.
I understood about half of what they talked about.
They talked in shorthand and in decades, in things that had happened to them at nine and eleven and nineteen with Gus in the middle of all of it.
Ordinarily I'd have steered it. I'd have found the thread I could pull to make myself the center, because the center was the only place I knew how to sit.
I didn't do it. I let it go by. I asked Lane a question about the dun colt and got four whole sentences out of him, which from the way Dez's eyebrows climbed was apparently an impressive achievement.
Kane came up twice, and I noticed it wasn't only Flynn who said the name like something gone bad in the mouth.
I drank my beer and laughed at things that were actually funny and stayed quiet at things I didn't have a right to yet.
Nobody once asked me to be Morgan Masterson.
At some point I looked at my phone and three hours had gone. I had no memory of deciding to stay, and nobody had checked with me about it.
Dez dragged me up to the pool table over my protests, on the theory that a man had to be good at something. I was bad at it, scratching on the break, sinking the cue ball with a kind of natural gift for it, and Flynn laughed so hard he had to sit down on the edge of the next table.
Lane took the cue out of my hands without a word. He stood in behind me and moved my elbow down and my chin lower and my weight onto my front foot, patient as he'd be with the colt. He didn't explain one thing he was doing. Nobody in my life had ever fixed me without telling me why.
I sank one. Exactly one. The booth erupted like I'd solved world hunger.
I bought the next round. One ball in about forty attempts and I was buying drinks like I'd won something.
Nobody let me pay for the one after. That was a rule, it turned out, an old one, and both parts of it were deliberate.
They let me buy a round so I'd know I could.
They bought the next so I'd know I didn't have to.
Holt came in on a gust of cold. He stopped inside the door and looked the room over once, and what he was looking for was the booth.
I made myself not think about whether that included me.
Then he crossed the floor and nothing happened.
Men lifted a chin at him from the bar. Dot had his beer poured before he asked for it.
He was easier here than I'd seen him. Not loose, Holt would never be loose, but unguarded by a degree or two, at home in his own body in front of people who knew him well.
I had been to a thousand parties where everyone was somebody and watched grown men perform ease at each other until four in the morning. Holt crossed that floor without once looking at anybody to see how he was doing.
I wanted that. Not him, I told myself. That.
He slid into the booth across from me and his knee found mine under the table. Neither of us moved.
He didn't move away. I couldn't stop circling that. There was room. He could have shifted an inch and he didn't. So I sat there with the warm press of it against mine through two layers of denim, talking to Dez about nothing, not looking at Holt, and all of me was in one square inch.
Flynn was saying something about a bull. I nodded at it. I could not have repeated one word.
Gus didn't come.
"He used to close this place," Dez said. "Boots up on that chair right there, two in the morning, telling the same four stories."
"He's in bed by nine now," Flynn said.
Nobody picked it up. Dez looked at his beer. Lane didn't move at all, which from Lane was a reaction.
Dez recovered the fastest.
"Nineteen eighty-six he put a man through that window." He pointed with his bottle. "That one. New glass and everything."
"It was the other window," Flynn said.
"It was that window."
"What'd the guy do?" I asked.
"Said something about a horse." Dez shrugged like that settled it. "Said it twice too."
And the whole booth laughed, and the laugh had the old man in it, alive, eighty pounds heavier and twice as dangerous, sitting right there with us for a second.
I thought about the hand on the porch post. I thought about him asking me, in that warm kitchen, whether I slept all right.
I had walked in on the end of something.
They were waiting for a loss none of them would say out loud, and they'd put me in the booth anyway, in the seat across from Holt, like it had been sitting empty for somebody.
When I tried to settle up at the end Dot pushed my card back across the bar without looking at it.
"Dez got it." She was already onto the next thing. "You can get it next month."
I stood there a second with my card in my hand. Nobody had put me on a schedule that far out and meant nothing by it in twenty years.
Holt drove me home. The others stayed longer. It was his turn, or he'd made it his turn. We went out into a cold hard enough to hurt, and the cab was dark and close and smelled like him.
"You had a good time." It wasn't a question.
"I did."
"They like you."
"Everybody likes me. It's my job." It came out flatter than I wanted. "Do they?"
"Flynn made fun of your height twice. Dez taught you a game. Lane put his hands on you." He shifted down for the grade. "Work it out."
He drove with one wrist on the wheel and his face lit green by the dash. I looked at him more than was wise and he let me, or didn't notice, or noticed and let me. I didn't want to know which. Out past the glass there was nothing but stars all the way down to the mountains.
Once the truck dropped through a frost heave and his hand came off the wheel and landed on the bench seat between us, inches from my thigh, and stayed there a mile.
I didn't move. I didn't look down at it.
He put it back on the wheel at the cattle guard like nothing had happened, and maybe to him nothing had.
It was only when he'd dropped me at the bunkhouse and I was standing inside it in the dark, my ears still ringing with the jukebox and my knee still warm where his had been, that it caught up with me.
I hadn't performed all day.
Not once. Not for Dot, not for the old man who thought I'd married a singer, not in the booth, not in the truck. Not for Holt. A whole day, dark to dark, and the world had not ended. People had liked me anyway. Or they hadn't, and had let me sit there regardless, which was better.
I stood in the cold dark shaking. It was relief or it was terror and there was no telling them apart, because I was thirty-five years old and I had no idea who I was when nobody was watching.
I had four more weeks of it all. I was going to have to find out.