13. Something Happened Somewhere Else
Something Happened Somewhere Else
They broke camp and rode before seven.
Jay was feeling the ride. Harris could tell by the increasingly careful way he lowered himself into the saddle and the expression he made whenever Red stepped down hard on the steeper sections. He complained about the line-cabin bunk twice before nine.
By then, the swelling in his mouth had gone down but not disappeared, and a red mark showed beneath his jaw. Harris knew exactly where that one had come from.
He didn’t mention it. He noticed, though. He noticed a lot of things now that he no longer had to pretend he wasn’t looking.
They took their time coming down, stopping whenever Jay found something worth filming.
The fires remained several ridges away, but tankers crossed above the mountains often enough to have become part of the sky, silver flashes moving through the smoke haze.
Where the trail narrowed Harris rode ahead; where it widened, Red kept finding his way alongside.
By midafternoon, Shaw Ranch began appearing through the trees in pieces—the lodge roof first, then barns and corrals, trucks moving between the cottonwoods.
With every familiar landmark came the awareness of other people.
At the lookout there had been nobody to see where Harris’s attention went.
At the line cabin, nobody had noticed how easily the space between them kept disappearing or why the coffee went cold.
Down there were his parents, Evan and Elise, the girls, ranch hands, guests, and an entire film crew whose job involved noticing things.
Harris let a little more distance open between the horses.
Priya was already striding toward them when they rode into the yard.
“I’ve been texting you for three hours, Jay.”
Jay reached for the phone buried somewhere in his pack. “We just got signal.”
“I figured.” Priya barely slowed. “The stock move got pushed to tonight, the regional well test moved up to Friday morning, and if we leave in the next twenty minutes we can still get both.”
Jay was halfway out of the saddle before she finished. “Access confirmed?”
“Yeah, a couple hours ago.”
“Light?”
“Three hours if we’re lucky.”
Eli came out of the lodge carrying two equipment cases. “We’re staying out, right?”
“We have to.” Priya looked at Jay. “Through Sunday.”
Four nights.
Harris took Red’s reins while Jay hit the ground.
He had spent three days knowing exactly where Jay was—behind him on the trail, across the table, in the other bunk. Apparently that had been enough time for four nights to sound like a long time.
“I need ten minutes to shower,” Jay was saying.
Priya looked him over. “Take fifteen. You smell like livestock.”
“Professional cruelty.”
She was already turning away. “Hurry up, Jay.”
Jay looked at Harris over Red’s neck. “Thanks for not letting me die.”
“Was close.”
“My riding that bad?”
“Worse.”
The corner of Jay’s mouth moved.
Priya shouted his name from halfway across the yard.
“Coming!”
Jay started toward the lodge, then looked back. “See you in a few days?”
Harris met his eyes. “I’ll be here.”
Something in Jay’s expression softened. “Good.”
Twenty minutes later, the SUV pulled away. Harris happened to be near the barn when it did.
Jay sat in the passenger seat with his hair still damp, turned partly toward Eli. At the bend, he looked back. Their eyes met through the open window, and then the SUV passed beyond the cottonwoods.
Something happened somewhere else, and Jay went toward it.
That was basically the gist of his job.
The ranch did not become empty after he left.
Guests crossed the porch until after dark.
Somebody dropped a metal pan in the lodge kitchen.
Willa and June conducted a screaming property dispute over a plastic horse.
Evan caught Harris outside the barn and kept him there twenty minutes discussing the north-boundary fence.
At dinner, Walt asked about the homestead roof while Della ignored Harris’s refusal and put another helping of potatoes on his plate.
Everything was where it belonged.
Jay simply was not among it.
Harris noticed the difference often enough to become irritated by the fact.
By ten, he had showered, opened a beer, smoked half a cigarette on the porch, and run out of anything useful to do. He felt too restless to read.
His laptop sat on the kitchen table where he had left it, and a quick search confirmed that Nell’s emails were still there.
Not for some sentimental reason, but because Harris never deleted anything.
Somewhere in his inbox were appointment confirmations from a dentist he had stopped seeing seven years ago and a shipping notice for boots he no longer owned.
The message he was looking for appeared near the top of the search history.
SUBJECT: WATCH THIS BEFORE YOU SAY NO
HARRIS. This guy’s GOOD.
And before you complain that you don’t have two hours, it’s only 94 minutes. You spent longer than that last week arguing with Dad about a culvert.
Watch it.
A link sat beneath the last line.
Harris remembered receiving it. He also remembered not clicking it.
Two days later, Nell had tried again.
SUBJECT: I KNOW YOU DIDN’T WATCH IT!
Sending another one because apparently I have to build a legal case.
Different subject. Same director.
Pay attention to what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t make people look stupid just so he can look smart.
I want him for ours!!!
It sounded so much like her that for one brief second, she was there again—impatient, certain, waiting for him to give in.
“Yeah,” Harris muttered. “All right.”
He clicked the first film intending to watch ten minutes and remained at the table for ninety-four.
It began in southern Argentina. Mountains cut against a white sky, grass bent beneath wind strong enough to move a person sideways, and a dirt road disappeared toward buildings so isolated Harris could not guess what qualified as the nearest town.
He recognized Jay’s voice before his name appeared.
There was less of it than Harris expected. A man who talked as much as Jay did seemed likely to put himself everywhere, but instead he would ask a question and then get out of the way.
The film followed a ranching family through water disputes, changing snowfall, cattle moves, and the problem of younger people leaving because the work no longer paid enough to justify staying.
An old man sat at a kitchen table and described a river that had frozen every winter when he was a boy and now rarely did.
The camera stayed on him after he stopped talking, long enough for the silence to register but not long enough to turn it into spectacle.
Nell had been right. As usual.
Jay never asked a question designed to make himself sound smarter than the person answering it.
He did not turn the family into stubborn rural people refusing to understand a changing world, nor into noble keepers of some disappearing way of life.
They were competent and worried and funny and occasionally wrong.
They complained about money. They argued with one another.
One of the sons forgot to close a gate and got yelled at on camera.
Harris had spent weeks objecting to cameras partly because he knew how easily a life could be made to look simpler from the outside.
Jay seemed to understand that too.
It didn’t make Harris like cameras. It did make him understand why Nell had wanted Jay behind one.
As the film continued, Jay became harder to contain inside the version Harris knew.
Argentina had been a story about a horse before sunrise; onscreen, it became mountains Harris had never seen, roads disappearing toward places he could not name, people Jay had known well enough that they eventually stopped seeming aware of him.
Once, during an interview, Jay appeared faintly in the reflection of a window behind the subject. Jeans, dark jacket, hair shorter than it was now. Then the angle changed and he vanished again.
By the time DIRECTED BY JAY NAVARRO appeared onscreen, Harris had finished his beer and forgotten to get another.
Nell had sent Harris the film expecting him to form an opinion. To argue. To watch another one and eventually concede she was right using language specifically designed to deny her satisfaction.
He had done none of it in time.
An unopened link should have been just a small failure.
But death made ordinary delays permanent.
He lay awake for a long time that night.
* * *
The next morning, Harris rehung a gate that had been crooked since spring, dealt with the feed truck, replaced a leaking trough valve, and explained to a guest that easy trail did not mean a horse would refrain from moving unexpectedly.
The day restored its usual proportions around him until Evan found him in Nell’s old office with an invoice open on the desk.
“You see the picture Priya sent?”
“Why would I?”
“You muted the production thread again?”
“Yup.”
“Of course you did.”
Evan held out his phone.
The photograph showed cattle moving through dust beneath portable lights. Jay stood near the edge of the frame with headphones around his neck and one hand raised while he spoke to someone outside the image.
Harris looked longer than necessary. “Looks like cattle.”
“That is generally what they’re filming.”
Harris handed the phone back.
Evan’s attention lingered for half a second. “North gate after lunch?”
“Yup.”
That was all.
Harris appreciated him for it.
The Iceland film waited until after dinner.
Jay had not exaggerated about the horse, though Harris disputed whether what he did onscreen qualified as riding. He sat too far forward, held the reins as if they might escape, and looked personally betrayed when the animal ignored him.
Harris watched that section twice.
For accuracy.
The rest followed fishing families, erosion, and a harbor being rebuilt farther inland. At one point somebody else held the camera while Jay walked beside an older fisherman, both men leaning into the wind with their hands shoved deep into their coats.