Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Spur
I drove two hours last night and ended up back where I started.
I don't know why I left. I didn't pack a bag. I didn't tell anyone.
I got in the Ford after the fire pit cleared out, after Dakota's hand let go of mine and she walked back to the table without looking at me, and I drove west on the county road until I hit the gas station outside Mason.
Sat in the parking lot with the engine running for forty minutes.
Didn't go inside. Didn't go further.
Turned around and drove back.
I don't know what I thought I was going to do at a closed Phillips 66 in the middle of the night sixty miles from home.
Get gas. Buy a pack of cigarettes I don't smoke. Sit in my truck and pretend I wasn't running from a woman who held my hand for ten seconds in front of my brothers and said the word mine.
I came back at three.
Sat on my porch until four-thirty.
Walked to the round pen at five.
That was an hour ago. I haven't moved since.
The mustang is at the far rail. Same place. Same six feet of distance he's been keeping for six weeks. He's watching me the way he always watches me, head low, eyes half-lidded, the gray light starting to come up over the eastern fence.
Coffee in my hands. Cold by now. I haven't drunk it. My jaw won't unlock.
There's a thing my body does when I haven't slept and haven't eaten.
It locks the joints down. Femur first. Jaw second. Hands third.
By the time the sun comes up, I'm a man made of cement on a bucket in a round pen, and the only soft thing inside me is the place where her hand was.
I keep flexing my right hand. The one she took.
I can't stop.
The calluses on my palm have a memory now.
Eight years they've been free of her.
Eight years of riding, roping, and breaking horses and shaking other men's hands, and not one of those grips ever stuck to my skin.
Hers stuck. The shape of her palm. The pressure of her grip. The way she didn't let go on the count I expected her to.
I count to ten.
Try to feel something else, but I don't.
* * *
The truck comes up the gravel at five-fifty. I hear it before I see it.
Diesel, tuned tight, gear shifting at the dip in the road, the way her truck always shifts because she taps the brake at that dip out of habit, even though the truck doesn't need it.
My back is to the gate.
I don't turn.
I hear her cut the engine. The door opens. Boots on gravel. The gate latch clicks open and shut.
Then the dirt.
She's on the rail before I turn my head.
Boot on the lower bar, hand on the top, swinging her leg over and dropping into the pen the way she's been climbing fences since she was a kid.
I look.
I told myself I wouldn't. Told myself the play this morning was to be the same man I've been for eight years. The man who doesn't look. The man who keeps his hat down and his boots moving.
I look anyway.
She's wearing yesterday's jeans.
Or, the same type. Probably a different pair.
There’s dust at the knee, and a rip starting at the back pocket where she keeps her pocket knife.
She's got a paperback in her left hand.
A coffee in her right— a paper cup from the gas station with the brown lid that always leaks.
Hair up in a green bandana. No makeup. The morning-after of a woman who didn't sleep and isn't pretending to.
"You don't have to start today," I say. It comes out lower than I meant it.
"I made a bet last night. I start today."
"Okay."
"Okay." She holds my eyes a beat too long when she says it.
I look away first.
She walks into the middle of the pen.
Not toward the mustang. Not toward me.
Just to the dead center, where the dirt is packed hard from a thousand morning circles and the sun hasn't reached yet.
She sits down cross-legged, sets her coffee in the dirt beside her, and opens her paperback.
Dakota starts reading her book and the mustang flicks an ear.
His head comes up half an inch.
I watch him notice that something is in the middle of his pen that wasn't there yesterday, and the thing isn't moving toward him.
I watch him start to think, then I watch Dakota.
She's twenty feet from me. Maybe less. Sitting cross-legged in the dirt with her boots tucked under her thighs and a paperback held in both hands.
Her hair comes loose from the bandana in pieces she keeps tucking back behind her ear without looking up.
The book is something with a worn spine. Cracked along the seam from being read more than once. I can't see the title.
I sit on my bucket and she stays seated in the dirt.
The mustang watches both of us from the rail.
Twenty minutes go by, then thirty.
Her bottom lip catches in her teeth when she reads. She doesn't know she does it.
It happens at the bottom of every page right before she turns it, and then she releases the lip, and the page turns, and her eyes go back to the top.
I’ve watched this woman for eight years. Yet, I haven’t, in eight years, sat in the same dirt with her at six in the morning while she read a book.
The mustang takes a step. One step. Toward her.
The first step toward a human being he's taken in six weeks.
She doesn't react. Doesn't look up. Doesn't even acknowledge it.
She turns a page and the mustang takes another step.
I sit on my bucket and I watch a wild thing decide that this woman is safe to walk toward, and I think—for the first time clearly that she knows what she's doing.
This is my method.
She sits the way I sit. She breathes the way I breathe.
She doesn't ask the horse for anything because she knows the horse doesn't have anything to give yet, and asking is the thing that keeps a wild horse wild.
She didn't learn this from Banshee. Banshee doesn't sit at dawn.
Banshee works horses in the afternoon when the heat slows them down.
He's said it a hundred times at church. I get them tired before I get them quiet.
I get them quiet first.
She closes the paperback an hour and four minutes after she opened it.
The mustang is fifteen feet from her now. Not fifteen feet from the rail. Fifteen feet from her body.
He's never been that close to a human since he came off the trailer six weeks ago.
She doesn't look at him. Just stands up. Slowly.
The kind of slow you stand up when you've been sitting cross-legged for an hour, and your knees crack, and your hip catches.
She picks up her coffee, walks toward the gate and walks past me.
Close.
Too close—the round pen is wide, she has thirty feet of dirt on either side of me, and she walks within a foot of my shoulder on her way to the gate.
Her arm brushes mine.
Just the brush. Just the friction of cotton on denim.
It hits me in the femur.
I don't move. Don't turn my head. Don't let any part of my body think about the contact on the outside.
But on the inside, it hits.
She stops at the gate and looks back.
Not at me. At the mustang.
The mustang has come three more steps closer to where she was sitting.
He's standing there in the middle of the pen like a horse confused about why his territory has changed.
She watches him for a second, then she looks at me.
"Where'd you learn that?" I ask.
It's not the question I meant to ask.
She doesn't look away.
"From the fence line."
"How long?"
"Don't flatter yourself, cowboy." But she's smiling. Small.
The crooked one. The same one she gave me all those years ago with a beer in her hand.
"I was bored," she says.
She's lying.
She's lying in the way a woman lies when she wants you to know she's lying, which is the exact opposite of telling the truth, and we both know it.
"See ya at the same time tomorrow, cowboy." She walks out and doesn't look back.
The gate latches behind her with a small bright sound that I'm going to hear in my sleep.
I sit on the bucket for ten minutes after she leaves.
The mustang takes another step toward where she was.
He stops, lowers his head, and smells the dirt where her boot prints are.
I’ve been sitting on this bucket for six weeks.
I haven’t, in six weeks, gotten a wild horse to walk into the center of his own pen and smell anything.
She did it in an hour.
With a paperback and a paper cup of gas station coffee.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and don't make a sound.
I stay here longer than I care to admit.
Grace shows up at mid-morning with two mugs.
I don't hear her coming.
That's how locked I am in my own head—I hear everything on this compound, every truck, every horse, every door, and I didn't hear my brother's wife walk up to my own round pen with a baby on her hip.
She's at the rail when I look up.
Waylon's strapped to her front in a baby carrier that says GRACE & WAYLON in stitched letters on the front.
He's asleep. Drool on his chin. One small fist closed around the strap of the carrier.
Grace has two mugs.
She hands one over the rail without asking. Not to be polite. Because she knows I'll take it.
I take it.
Coffee. Real coffee, not Shadow's war crime bullshit. Cream. Two sugars. The way I take it.
She knows the way I take it because she's been bringing me coffee at the round pen for years now.
Sometimes once a week. Sometimes twice. Always two mugs.
Always one for her, one for me.
"She barely slept last night," Grace says.
She means Dakota. I don't pretend not to know.
"How’d you know that?"
"Her cabin light was on at four. I was up with the baby."
I drink my coffee. Grace looks at the mustang.
The mustang has gone back to the far rail. He's pretending the last hour didn't happen.
"He moved," Grace says.
"Yeah."
"For her?"
"Yeah."
Grace is quiet for a minute.
I know this Grace.
Whenever she’s quiet, it’s the brief pause she makes before she says the thing she came to say.
Quiet for a minute. Then the question. I wait for it, knowing it’s coming.
"You know she's had eyes for you since the night you were patched in, right?" Grace says.
I don't answer. I can't. There's a thing inside my chest that just dropped a foot.