Chapter 4 #2
My gut went to ice.
It was instant. I didn't reason my way to it. Two years of loops and eighty miles and never once turning in, and everything I had ever known about myself came down on me at once in the doorway of that motel room.
Mama.
Cash's hand came up onto my shoulder before I got the word out. He'd seen it happen on my face. He always sees it.
"It's not Mama," he said. "She's all right, Clint. I saw her Tuesday. She had a good day. She ate her lunch out on the porch and she told the woman there about the flood in '88."
Something in me came loose and I had to stand still for a second and let it.
"Then, who?"
"The brothers."
I looked at him.
"They need you," he said. "In Charleston."
I turned that over. I could not make it mean anything.
"Charleston," I said. "South Carolina?"
"That's the one."
"What in God's name is in Charleston?"
Cash looked out past me, over the roof of the motel, out at all that scrub and heat running away to the rim of the world. His hand stayed on my shoulder.
"It'll all get explained when you're there."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
And that was all he was going to say. I knew it the way I know north.
There is a thing that happens between men who have done the work.
You learn very fast which questions are worth the air.
Cash had come all those miles to stand on a walkway in the heat and put his hand on my shoulder and tell me almost nothing.
He was not going to be moved off that. Every word I spent pushing was a word wasted.
Also, he had found me.
I don't have a phone. I don't have an address. I hadn't known myself, four days ago, that I'd be in that town. I picked it off a bus board. Nobody on this earth knew where I was, because nobody knowing where I was is not an accident of my life.
And my little brother had knocked on my door before checkout.
"There's a strip forty-some miles east," Cash said. "Private. There's an airplane on it."
"I'll take the bus."
He didn't argue. He just looked at me.
That's all he did. He looked at me, patient and flat and utterly without judgment, the way he has looked at every hard thing in his life, including, I have no doubt, the ones that were dying.
I looked back. And I understood, standing there with my pack on one shoulder, exactly what that look meant, which was: You already know how bad it is, or I would not be standing here.
"All right," I said. "I'll take the airplane."
"Good."
"You're not coming."
It wasn't a question, and he didn't insult me by making it one.
"No."
"Where are you going?"
"Out to see Mama again," he said. "Then, the ranch. Somebody ought to walk the fence line."
And there it was again. Straight through the ribs, no armor on that side, none there'd ever been.
I almost asked him.
I stood there on that concrete in the heat with the words all the way up in my throat—let me ride out with you—and I could see the whole thing, the drive out, the two of us not talking, the gravel of that lot, the door of that place, the chair by the window. Her face coming up.
I didn't say it.
I'm not ready. I don't know that I'll ever be ready. And I have never once in my life been able to explain to another human being how a man can be afraid of the one person on this earth who always came out into the dark to find him.
Cash watched me not ask.
He didn't push. He never has. He just took his hand off my shoulder and said, "Go check out. I'll be in the car."
I turned in the key. The woman with the crossword took it and said nothing and did not look up.
He'd rented something gray and forgettable. The dog rode in the back and put his chin on the seat behind Cash's shoulder and stayed there the whole way. Cash drove east into that country with one wrist on the wheel.
Fifty miles.
We didn't talk. That wasn't him. Cash gives back exactly what you give him. He'd have talked all fifty if I'd opened my mouth.
I didn't. I sat there and watched the fence posts come and go.
Because this thing—whatever it was, whatever waited on the far end of it—was already reaching into my life, and my life is a road, and a road is the one thing that does not survive being interrupted. You stop it once and it isn't a road anymore. It's just a place you're standing.
They'd found me. That was the thing that wouldn't stop coming up. My brothers had reached into an empty part of Texas and put a hand on a man who has spent years making certain no hand could reach him. And they'd done it in a week, maybe less. That takes reach. It takes money. It takes people.
It takes something being very badly wrong.
Fine.
That's the deal I've had with this world since I was old enough to make one. Trouble finds me, and I settle it, and I move on. This was just a bigger piece of trouble, out of a bigger door, and it happened to have my brothers standing in it.
So, we'd handle it. Whatever it was. And then, I'd shake every one of their hands and say the thing I always say. I'd walk out to the shoulder of whatever road was closest, and stick out my thumb, and be gone.
I found, somewhere around mile thirty, that I was looking forward to seeing them.
That surprised me. It shouldn't have.
And I found that I was glad of the man beside me. Not for the talk, because there wasn't any. Just for the fact of him. My strange brother, who died and came back and never once flinched at anything, sitting there quiet with his wrist on the wheel and his dog breathing on his neck.
The strip was a scab of asphalt out in the middle of nothing, with a wind sock and a shed and one airplane on it.
It was black. It didn't have a name on it, or a number I could see from where I stood. I have stood next to a lot of aircraft in my life, and I knew what I was looking at. Somebody had spent money the way you spend it when the money isn't the point.
Cash walked me to the stairs. He didn't say much. He got an arm around my neck and pulled my head down against his and held it there for a second, the way he used to when we were boys and one of us was about to catch it, and he said, "It's good, Clint. You'll see. It's good."
Then, he stepped back, and the dog came around and sat against his leg. The two of them stood there in the heat shimmer at the bottom of those stairs.
I went up.
And at the top, with my hand on the rail and the cabin door open in front of me and cold air coming out of it, I stopped and turned around.
Texas.
All of it. Miles and miles of it in every direction, going brown and gold and blue and finally to nothing at all, and the sky sitting down on it the way it does, and the whole enormous, indifferent, holy emptiness of the only country I have ever loved.
And way out west, out past the shed and the fence and the last of it, I could see the highway.
Just a thin white line at that distance. Lying there in the sun. Shining. Going somewhere.
I stood there a good while.
Then, I ducked my head and went inside. Somebody closed the door behind me.