Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spur
We leave Sharp a few minutes before four in the morning.
Dakota’s in the passenger seat of my Ford because I'm not letting her drive her own truck to a qualifier with a stalker note in her saddle bag and another one I haven't seen yet probably waiting for her somewhere on the road.
Jaeger is in her trailer hitched to the back and her gear is in the bed under a tarp.
Her phone is in her lap, screen down.
She's been quiet since I pulled up to her cabin at three forty-five and found her on the porch with two travel mugs and a duffel.
She handed me one of the mugs without saying a damn thing.
The first hour of the drive is dark and silent.
The county roads west of Sharp are nothing but barbed wire and sleep, and the only thing in the headlights is the white line and the occasional reflective marker that shows up the way a possum's eyes show up in November.
Country radio low. She has it on a station out of San Angelo because she likes the morning DJ.
I've never asked her how she knows the DJ on a station I've never tuned into in my life. I don't ask now.
At the county line she sets her phone face-down on the dash. "Spur?"
"Yeah."
"Don't do the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you don't talk for four hours and then I'm supposed to thank you for not talking."
A small sound comes out of me that isn't a laugh but isn't not one either. "Okay."
"Okay."
She doesn't say anything else. Neither do I.
The rest of the four hours we don't speak.
But it's not the silence she warned me against.
It's the silence of two people saving their breath for what's coming.
* * *
The Tri-State Fair grounds in Stephenville smell the way every rodeo grounds in Texas smells.
Manure. Diesel. Funnel cake grease that hasn't been turned on yet but soaks into the structure of the place.
The dust they spray on the arena floor between events to keep it down.
A Coors banner that's been hanging for decades and somehow looks new.
The PA tower with a man inside it adjusting a mic at seven in the morning.
Dakota's eyes change when we pull into the back lot.
I watch it happen.
She straightens. The slump from four hours in a truck disappears. The set of her jaw shifts into something that's been doing this since she was twelve years old.
By the time she's out of the truck and walking back to the trailer she's not the woman who slept in my passenger seat.
She's a competitor. Top fifteen in the country. Top fifteen for a reason.
She unloads Jaeger.
He comes off the trailer the way he always comes off, head up, ears forward, two seconds of looking around to figure out where we are before he settles into it.
She pats his neck twice. "I'm going to walk him."
"Okay."
She doesn't say come with me. She doesn't have to.
Phantom said twenty-four-seven. I told him I'd do it, and Dakota was in the kitchen when I said yes. She knows.
She walks Jaeger out of the back lot.
I follow three feet off her shoulder.
Past the trailer with GO BIG OR GO HOME stenciled across the back doors.
Past a stock contractor unloading a paint mare with a torn fly mask.
Past the concession trailer that hasn't lit up its grill yet.
She doesn't talk to me. I don't talk to her.
Jaeger walks between us the way a horse walks between two people who he knows aren't going to ask him for anything.
Calm. Ears soft. Halter loose in Dakota's hand.
Every fifteen feet he flicks an ear back to clock me, and every fifteen feet he settles again.
A horse trusts what his human trusts.
Luckily, Dakota trusts me. Or she's letting Phantom's order make the decision for her.
I don't know which it is yet.
We walk the perimeter of the back lot in silence for forty minutes. She comes back to the trailer when she's ready. Hands me Jaeger's lead. Goes to the trailer for her gear.
"Warm-up pen. Twenty minutes."
"I'll be there."
She walks off toward the warm-up pen with her saddle over her arm. I tie Jaeger to the trailer rail and follow.
* * *
Two hours have passed and we’re in the warm-up pen.
She's working Jaeger in slow circles to loosen him up. Cantering. Bringing him back to a trot. Then asking for the canter again.
He's flagging his ears the way he does before a run, forward then back then forward, listening.
She has a pre-ride routine I've watched on closed-circuit screens at the clubhouse for years. Watching it from this close in person is different.
Her hands on the reins. The way she holds her shoulders. The set of her hips in the saddle. The small flick of her wrist when she asks Jaeger for a transition.
I see what I have always known. She's better than her ranking.
Her ranking is what she does on her worst day. On her best she rides like she was born on a horse and got the human part installed afterward as an upgrade.
There's a woman at the rail next to me.
I don't know how long she's been there. I clock her when I shift my weight.
Late thirties. Black hat. Cut-off denim shirt over a tank top. Boots that have had a hard life.
Six-time NFR jacket draped over the rail next to her even though the Texas morning is starting to get warm.
Ah, it’s Harper Beaumont.
I know her because every man and woman on the western circuit knows her. She rides a seventeen-hand gelding named Smoke. Three world titles. The kind of veteran the younger racers nod at and don't approach.
She's watching Dakota.
After a minute she says, "She rates clean."
She doesn't look at me when she says it. Just keeps her eyes on Jaeger.
I'm not the kind of man who chats with strangers at rodeos. I'm not the kind of man who chats with anyone. But Harper Beaumont didn't speak to me. She spoke about Dakota.
"Yeah," I say. "She does."
"I watched her at Lubbock last year. Kid pulled a 16.4 on a horse with a sore stifle and didn't tell anybody until she was off him. Most racers her age would've scratched."
"That sounds like her."
"You family?"
"No, ma'am."
She glances at me then. The patch on my cut. Then back to the rail. "Tell her Harper said good luck."
She walks off.
I stand at the rail watching Dakota work her horse and turning a sentence over in my head.
* * *
She's third out in her draw.
The two racers ahead of her are good but neither of them are her.
The first one runs a 16.8. The second runs a 17.1 and clips a barrel that doesn't fall but wobbles long enough that she'll be hearing about it from her trainer for a week.
Dakota is in the alley. Jaeger underneath her. She rolls her shoulders once. Drops her weight into her heels.
The announcer says her name. Adds Harlan Lyle's daughter, like he always does at Texas qualifiers. I see her jaw tighten in the alley.
Then the gate opens.
Jaeger goes from standing to a full lunge in the space of one breath.
The dirt comes up around his hooves the way water comes up around a thrown rock, and Dakota's body in the saddle is a single line of intention from the crown of her hat to the heel of her boot.
First barrel comes up. She rates him. Drops her shoulder into the pocket. Comes around clean. Three seconds. Four.
Second barrel.
She comes in a hair too tight.
I see it before she does. The pocket is half a foot tighter than her usual line.
Jaeger drops his shoulder anyway because he is the kind of horse who will give her whatever she asks for, but the angle is bad and his back hoof skids in the soft part of the dirt and for a tenth of a second the whole thing is wrong.
He recovers.
She recovers.
The barrel doesn't fall.
Third barrel clean. Home stretch wide open. She comes back across the timer at sixteen-flat.
Top five for the round.
Not a win. Points she needs.
The crowd does the thing crowds do for a clean ride that wasn't her best.
She walks Jaeger out of the arena.
Hat low. I can't see her face from where I am at the back rail, but I know the set of her shoulders.
She's mad. At herself. At the second barrel.
At the soft dirt and the angle and the way she let the pocket get away from her in front of eight thousand people.
She rides past me without looking up.
I follow her back to the trailer.
She's at Jaeger's neck when I get there. Forehead pressed against him. One hand flat on his shoulder. He's breathing hard and so is she.
"Sixteen-flat is points," I say.
"Sixteen-flat is third place at best."
"Third place gets you to nationals."
"Sixteen-flat doesn't win nationals."
I don't argue. She's right, and I don't insult her by pretending otherwise.
She unsaddles him in silence. I cool him out with her, walking him in a slow loop around the back lot while she does the things her hands need to do—wrap his legs, check his hooves, give him water in slow controlled amounts.
Routine work. The work of a woman processing a ride she didn't like through the body of an animal who doesn't know what placing is.
When she's done she leans against the trailer with her arms crossed.
"Harper Beaumont said good luck."
She looks at me. "Harper Beaumont?"
"Walked up to the rail at warm-up. Told me to tell you."
"Harper Beaumont said that to me?"
"To me. About you."
She looks at the ground. Her face does the thing I told myself I'd remember. Not a smile.
Something like the smile a woman has when an older woman she’s admired her whole career took thirty seconds to acknowledge her existence. The kind of acknowledgement that hits harder than a first place finish.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She doesn't say anything else, but the tension in her shoulders shifts a quarter turn.
"Let's get you to the motel."
"Okay."
We load Jaeger and drive across the parking lot toward the exit gate and the highway.
She has her phone out and she's typing something to Brynn or Cassidy or whoever she texts after a ride.
I'm watching the road and the rearview.
The sky has gone dark over the panhandle and rain is coming.
We get to the motel.
A Hampton off the access road.
I tell the clerk Dakota's my friend’s daughter and we need adjoining rooms.
She gives me two keys without looking at the cut.