7. Moth to the Fucking Flame
Moth to the Fucking Flame
There was nothing wrong with the north trough.
Harris checked the float anyway, then the valve and the line feeding it.
Everything held. The water sat clean and level beneath the rim, exactly where it had been the last time he checked it and exactly where it would probably remain until somebody gave him an actual reason to walk half the length of the ranch to look at it.
He crouched beside the pipe and pressed his thumb against a joint that was visibly dry.
Still dry.
Behind him, a cow tore grass from the edge of the pasture. A tractor worked somewhere beyond the south field, and hammering carried faintly from the guest cabins. Ordinary ranch noise. Ordinary afternoon.
Navarro had an ex-boyfriend.
A man named Miles.
Harris stood and looked across the pasture.
Nothing had changed. Navarro had liked men yesterday; Harris simply had not known it. Same ranch. Same documentary. Same aggravating man asking questions beside the truck and appearing wherever Harris least wanted another person standing.
Same Harris.
Knowing about a road did not build it. Knowing a gate could open did not require anybody to touch the latch. Harris had spent most of his life knowing perfectly well there were things about himself he had no intention of examining too closely, and the arrangement had worked fine.
Five years had lodged somewhere it did not belong.
That part was harder to dismiss.
Navarro had not mentioned somebody he had slept with once or twice.
He had shared an apartment, a routine, a whole section of his adult life with another man.
Somewhere in New York was a person who knew which side of the bed Navarro slept on, what he was like before enough coffee made him conversational, what he ate when he was sick, what made him angry enough to stop joking.
Five years meant holidays and bad moods and grocery lists.
It meant knowing where somebody kept the spare key.
None of Harris’s business.
He checked the valve again.
Jesus Christ.
Before that afternoon, Harris had kept Navarro somewhere simple in his mind: attractive, irritating, irrelevant.
The first part had not required much management because it had nowhere to go.
Harris could notice the line of his shoulders in a T-shirt or the way his hair curled at the back of his neck after a long day and file the information alongside any number of other things he had no intention of doing anything about.
Now there was a possibility where there had not been one before.
Not a likelihood. Certainly not an invitation. Navarro liking men did not mean he liked Harris, and even if he did, it did not mean Harris intended to act on it.
Nothing had changed.
But possibility had entered anyway, and Harris could not figure out how to drive it back out.
Eventually he left the perfectly functional trough alone and walked back toward the main buildings. By the time he reached the barn, he had decided the subject required no further thought.
Unfortunately, Navarro spent the days that followed supplying evidence that made that position harder to maintain.
The first piece arrived Thursday morning, when a yearling hit the gate at the wrong angle just after eight.
Harris heard the chain snap before he saw it. Metal struck wood, the gate swung hard against the post, and five cattle pushed through at once. One of the ranch hands shouted from the far side of the pen, but Harris was already running.
The animals broke downhill toward the central road. Two stayed together while the others spread, one angling toward the barn and another drifting toward the open lane where a production truck sat parked.
Navarro stood beside it with a camera case open at his feet.
Harris pointed. “Block the road!”
Navarro moved without asking for the rest of the plan. He climbed into the truck, reversed clear of the fence line, then pulled broadside across the lane. One of the yearlings broke toward the rear bumper just as he got out.
“Hold.”
Navarro stopped immediately.
The animal lifted its head. Harris came in from the opposite side, widening his stance and closing the space without crowding hard enough to make it bolt. Ahead of them, a ranch hand ran for the pasture gate and hauled it open.
The last yearling stalled near the truck, weight shifting back as it considered turning downhill. Harris saw the decision coming.
“Left.”
Navarro moved left, not too fast and not too far. The yearling saw the opening Harris had left and took it, trotting after the others through the pasture gate. The ranch hand slammed it behind them and looped a temporary chain through the latch.
The whole thing had taken less than a minute.
Harris stood with his hands on his hips while the dust settled. Navarro had dirt across one cheek and one hand braced against the truck bed. The camera remained in the open case exactly where he had left it.
“Need me anywhere?” he asked.
Harris checked the pen once more. “Nope.”
“Okay.”
Navarro closed the case, moved the truck out of the lane, and headed toward the lodge without turning thirty seconds of basic usefulness into a speech about how useful he had been.
Harris watched him go.
Anyone with sense would have helped. What Harris could not dismiss was how Navarro had done it.
Three instructions followed immediately, without panic, argument, or an attempt to improve Harris’s plan before he understood what the plan was.
Most surprising of all, there had been no joke at the wrong time.
He had simply trusted Harris to see the whole problem before he could.
Which should not have mattered as much as it did.
Harris trusted competence. He trusted it more than charm, intentions, enthusiasm, or almost anything else people offered when they wanted access to the ranch.
Plenty of people claimed to know what they were doing until something went wrong, at which point Harris usually discovered he was responsible for fixing both the original problem and whatever they had added to it.
Navarro talked too much. He wandered. He asked questions in the middle of work and cared considerably more about the state of his clothes than anybody spending this much time on a ranch had a right to.
But when the gate broke, he listened.
The high-country access was still waiting on Harris’s answer. A careful load table proved Navarro could prepare. This was different. This proved that when preparation failed and somebody else needed to take control, he did not waste time protecting his pride.
That mattered on a ranch. It mattered even more in the high country.
Whether Navarro could manage the same thing from the back of a horse remained another question, but Harris could no longer pretend the answer was obviously no.
He found that mildly irritating.
The second piece arrived two hours later.
By then the broken gate had been temporarily chained and Harris was fitting a new latch near the equipment shed.
Della had settled onto the lodge porch for another interview, close enough that he could hear without participating, which was where Harris preferred to be for most of the filming.
Eli operated the camera while Navarro sat outside the frame with his headphones around his neck and a notebook balanced against one knee.
The interview was about Nell, but not her cancer.
That caught Harris’s attention.
Navarro asked about the first guest cabins, the north-pasture plans, and the water project Nell had started and never finished.
He asked Della what Nell had been good at and what she had been terrible at, which made Della laugh before she answered.
He asked what she had argued about with Walt and which project she had been proudest of.
Harris tightened the bolt beneath the new latch and kept listening.
Since Nell died, people had developed a habit of starting with the end. They asked how long she had been sick, whether she had known what was coming, how Della and Walt had managed those last months. Even people who meant well could reduce an entire life to the thing that ended it.
Navarro didn’t.
For twenty minutes under his guiding questions, Nell got to be stubborn again, funny again, alive again.
Della described the first guest cabin and the argument that had followed when Walt discovered Nell had already ordered the beds.
Navarro smiled. “So the discussion was largely ceremonial.”
“Oh, completely. Walt learned fairly quickly that Eleanor asking permission usually meant she’d already done whatever the thing was.”
“She got that from you,” Walt called from somewhere inside the lodge.
Della turned toward the open door. “Nobody asked you.”
Navarro laughed, and Harris looked down at the latch before anybody could see his own mouth move.
“She was right about those beds,” Della added.
“’Course she was,” Walt called back.
“That isn’t the point.”
“What was the point?”
“The point was that she was supposed to ask.”
“She did ask.”
“After she ordered them.”
There was a pause from inside. “That sounds like asking.”
Della stared toward the doorway. “Thirty-eight years.”
Navarro covered his mouth with one hand, shoulders moving.
Harris concentrated on the latch, which did not require nearly as much attention as he was giving it.
When he glanced over again, Della was smiling in a way Harris had not seen much since Nell died, especially when Nell was the topic of conversation. The grief was still there. It was simply sharing space with something else for once.
The filmmaker asked another question, and Della started telling him about the time Nell had convinced Evan that the north pasture was haunted when they were kids.
Harris knew the story. He also knew Nell had been the one hiding behind the equipment shed making noises after dark, although as far as Harris knew, Della had never learned that part.
He was considering whether loyalty to his dead sister required continued silence when Willa came out of the lodge carrying a framed photograph.