11. I’m Caught Up Now
I’m Caught Up Now
Harris was back in the hospital room, and Nell was asking where Rain was.
The room was wrong—too white, no windows, light without warmth. Nell sat propped against the pillows looking twenty and eighty at once, her hair gone and her face narrowed to bone and anger.
You said you’d check her.
“I did.”
Then where is she?
“I don’t know.”
She gave him an old, familiar look, the same one she had used when they were kids and he tried to lie badly, or when they were grown and she thought he was being stubborn for no good reason. Entirely Nell, except for the thin hands gripping the blanket.
“I’ll find her.”
You said that already.
He turned toward the door, but there wasn’t one. Only a blank wall where it should have been. Somewhere beyond it, Rain called once, distant and sharp.
Harris put his hand against the wall, searching for a seam or a handle. “I’ll find her.”
Behind him, Nell said his name.
He turned, and for a second she looked like herself again—hair braided over one shoulder, sun across her face, one eyebrow raised at him. Then she was back beneath the hospital blankets.
Where is she?
“I don’t know.”
The words landed wrong, too close to something else, and Nell’s expression changed.
Harris—
He came awake hard enough to strike his shoulder against the cabin wall.
Darkness. Wood beneath his palm. The low red seam of coals inside the stove. His heart working too hard against his ribs.
Across the room, blankets shifted. “Harris?”
“Fine.”
Navarro pushed himself onto one elbow. “You were dreaming.”
“Wasn’t.” Harris sat up and put his feet on the cold floor. “What time is it?”
“Uh… Four forty,” Navarro replied sleepily.
“Fuck.”
Harris opened the stove even though the coals were holding and added another piece of wood, needing something practical to do with his hands.
“Nell,” he said eventually, still facing the stove. “Dream was about Nell.”
“Okay.” Navarro accepted the piece without treating it like the loose end of a rope he could pull. After a moment, he asked, “And Rain?”
Harris looked over.
“You said her name.”
He hadn’t known that. Harris rubbed both hands over his face. “Near the end, Nell worried about her all the time. Called Dad asking if she was eating, if we’d moved her pasture, if her feet got done.”
Navarro was quiet for a moment. “She knew she wasn’t going to be there to check.”
Harris looked toward the stove. “Yeah.”
That had been the part Nell couldn’t leave alone.
Not whether Rain would stay at the ranch—of course she would.
Nell wanted to know who would notice when her mare was stiff, whether somebody would keep riding her, whether she’d get turned out with horses she liked instead of in whichever pasture happened to have room.
“She made me promise I’d look after her.”
Navarro glanced toward him. “So you are.”
“Only thing I can do.”
Harris looked away. The cabin suddenly felt smaller than it had a minute ago, the air too still, Navarro too close and too willing to understand.
He pushed himself to his feet. “Coffee?”
Navarro watched him for half a second. “Please.”
By eight, they were back on the trail. The old Shaw homestead lay farther north, beyond pasture the family no longer owned. Bright survey stakes stood along the adjoining slope, their plastic ribbons snapping in the wind where cattle had moved when Harris was a boy.
Vacation homes. Twelve approved lots, each advertised with mountain views and private access to a landscape that would become less private with every driveway cut into it.
Navarro filmed the stakes first. He positioned them in the foreground, then widened the frame until the empty slope and distant ridgeline appeared behind them. Afterward he filmed Harris beside the old fence, explaining where the grazing boundary had run before the parcel sold.
Harris watched him work. Navarro changed when he put the camera to his eye.
The constant commentary shut down—not completely, because that might have required medical intervention, but enough that everything unnecessary fell away.
His movements became economical, his whole attention narrowing toward whatever he had decided mattered.
Harris understood why Nell had liked his films, though he still had not watched them.
The homestead appeared beyond a stand of cottonwoods near noon, rusted roof first, then the collapsed corner of the porch.
The barn downhill had lost one door and most of its paint.
Grass had swallowed the old road almost completely, leaving only a shallow depression where wagon wheels and truck tires had once followed the same path toward the house.
Navarro lowered the camera. “Is this still yours?”
“Was.”
“How long has it been empty?”
“Since the fifties, maybe.”
Navarro looked from the house to the survey stakes on the ridge behind it. The frame had arranged itself without his help: the original Shaw place rotting below, new construction marked above it. Past and future occupying the same piece of land and neither looking especially permanent.
“Okay if I film you here?”
“All right.”
Harris led the way into the house while Navarro remained near the open doorway, filming past him.
Wet wood and mouse droppings had replaced whatever the place once smelled like.
Wallpaper hung loose in gray strips. An iron bedframe remained upstairs, rusted nearly through along one rail, and the old kitchen stove had collapsed inward on one side.
In the doorway between the kitchen and front room, pencil marks climbed the frame. Harris had forgotten all about them.
Walter, Della, Thomas.
Then lower, less faded:
Eleanor, Harrison, Evan.
Navarro stopped beside him. “You came here when you were kids?”
“Sometimes.”
“Who measured you?”
“Probably Grandma.”
Harris moved closer. His fingertip found Nell’s name, the line beside it sitting nearly level with his from the same year.
“She cheated,” Harris said.
Navarro looked over the camera. “How so?”
“Stood on her toes.”
“To beat you?”
“To piss me off.”
“Did it work?”
“Every damn time.”
Navarro laughed, the sound moving through the empty house and briefly occupying rooms that had held nothing but weather and mice for decades.
There it was again—the unarranged version of him. Head tipped slightly back, eyes narrowed, amusement escaping before he could turn it into something meant for an audience.
The man was so damn easy to look at. Harris forgot to make himself stop in time.
Navarro lowered the camera, and their eyes met.
Caught.
Harris turned toward the stairs before either of them could make anything of it.
They found a bundle of papers in an upstairs cupboard: receipts, grazing records, and a drought letter dated 1934. Harris sat next to the window and read part of it while Navarro filmed.
After Navarro seemed satisfied with the film stuff, they ate a quick lunch on the porch, then rode another two hours toward the lookout.
The trail climbed until the timber thinned and the land dropped away beneath them.
Smoke from a distant fire blurred the western horizon—not close enough to change the route or require a call home, but present enough to alter the light if you were paying attention.
The lookout sat on a bare granite shoulder above the valley, its paint nearly erased by weather and several windows missing completely.
Harris dismounted first and tied his gelding in the narrow strip of shade beside the structure. By the time he turned, Navarro had already pulled the camera back out.
* * *
Jay had been pretending not to notice Harris watching him for most of the day.
At the homestead, Jay had caught him staring when he laughed. Harris had turned away quickly, but not before Jay saw the arrested quality of his expression—the brief failure to disguise where his attention had landed.
On the trail afterward, Jay felt Harris looking at him more than once. But whenever he glanced over, Harris appeared to be studying the timber, the western sky, or some invisible ranch problem located conveniently near Jay’s body.
None of it actually proved anything. Harris watched everyone—animals, weather, family, guests—as though any of them might suddenly require his intervention. Jay had used that explanation after the equipment room, but repetition had made it increasingly unconvincing.
At the lookout, the attention felt sharper still.
Jay filmed the building from below, then climbed onto the weathered porch and ducked through the empty doorway.
The interior was a square room little larger than the line cabin, with gray walls and windows facing every direction.
Wind moved freely through the broken panes, carrying the smells of warm granite, pine, and faint smoke from the western fire.
Harris remained outside while Jay changed lenses. Even without looking, Jay could locate him in the doorway, a steady presence at the edge of his concentration. When Jay glanced over, Harris leaned one shoulder against the frame, hat hanging from one hand.
He was watching Jay rather than the view. Again.
Their eyes met, and Harris redirected his attention toward the valley.
Interesting.
Jay returned to the camera before that interest could become visible on his own face. He rejected three positions, climbed halfway onto the old steps and down again, then crouched near a granite shelf outside to catch the survey stakes on the distant slope.
The wind had strengthened, pulling his hair loose from the tie at his neck and blowing several strands across his face while he adjusted the focus.
“Careful,” Harris said. “You’re close to the edge.”
Jay didn’t turn. “I know where I am.”
“Do you?”
The concern was mild enough to be irritating and familiar enough to feel almost… intimate.
Jay looked back. Harris stood several feet away, still holding his hat. His hair had been flattened beneath it and was darker near the roots with sweat, the wind pressing his shirt against his chest.
Harris’s attention seemed fixed on Jay’s loose hair.
No—lower. His mouth?