CHAPTER 8
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The porch board under my boot had a dark stain where I spilled coffee last November. Six months. I clock it every morning at first light. Numbers keep me steady when nothing else will.
Half past four in the morning. I was three miles into the perimeter with the Winchester across my ribs before the sky went from black to grease.
I had walked the north fence corner, glassed the switchback drop from the game trail, glassed the aspen line, glassed the ridge alarm net where the first coil sat under the leaning ponderosa.
Nothing had been where nothing had not been the morning before.
A quarter past six in the morning now, and I stood on the porch with the mug cold in my hand and the wind coming out of the southwest at fifteen miles an hour and the taste of hot metal on the back of my tongue.
Bitterroot dust. By nine it would dry a throat to gravel.
The forecast on the county band was calling ninety-three for the peak.
It would run past ninety-three by two. The forecast always ran short in a west wind.
Ninety-six hours since the first bike tracks northwest of the cabin. Then ninety-six more. Now a hundred and forty-four. Round numbers again. I do not believe in coincidence.
I turned the signet ring one full revolution on my pinky. L. C. W. rasped once against the callus.
I would show her the Remington today. I had not said it out loud, not even to Copper in the barn, but the not-saying was already the deciding. I set the mug down on the rail and went inside.
Half past nine in the morning. I called her name from the utility hall.
“In a minute,” she answered from the great room. Then she was in the doorway with a pencil in her hair and a book in one hand. Her eyes went past me to the workbench.
The Remington 870 lay across the deal. Four number-four buckshot in the magazine. Chamber empty. Safety on. The muzzle pointed at twelve feet of nothing at the far end of the log wall.
“Set the book down.”
She set it on the shelf. Angle of Repose. Silver bookmark hanging from a page a little past the middle. She was in one of my gray T-shirts knotted at the hip and her own jeans and her own boots. She smelled like coffee and Marta's soap.
“Time you learned this.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
She stepped in. Six inches shorter than me. Tomboy-square across the shoulders. The pale of her forearms had turned walnut in the two weeks she had been under this sun.
“This is a Remington 870 pump. Twelve gauge. Four in the tube. One in the chamber when it is hot. Right now it is cold. That means the chamber is empty and the safety is on. Cold and safe.”
“Cold and safe.”
“Show me you know it is cold.”
I nodded at the action. She hesitated one beat. Then she leaned in, thumbed the tang like she had watched me thumb it, and cracked the action open two inches. The magazine gleamed brass at her. The chamber was empty and it looked empty.
“Close it.”
She closed it.
“Now you know it is cold. Every time you pick this thing up you check that it is cold before you do anything else with it. If you do not know it is cold, treat it as though it is hot. That means the barrel points at nothing you are not willing to shoot. Not the floor. Not the wall. Not your boot. Not me.”
“Not you.”
“Not me.”
I ran her through the pump twice with my hands under hers.
Then twice with her hands alone. She was slower than I would have been at her age and quicker than I would have been at hers if I had started with a book instead of a rifle.
She had watched the drill twice by the third time.
By the fifth she was calling the motion before I called it.
“Safety.” I tapped the tang. “Red is dead. If you see red you are one motion from firing. Green is safe.”
“Red is dead.”
“Say it back to me twice more.”
“Red is dead. Green is safe. Red is dead.”
“Chamber.”
She racked. The click came louder than she meant it to and she flinched half an inch and covered the flinch with a slow blink.
“Good.”
“That was not good.”
“You did not drop it. You did not point it at me. You did not put your finger on the trigger. That is three things you did not do wrong. Two weeks ago you had not held a shotgun. So it was good.”
Her mouth twitched at one corner. I stepped in behind her — flat palm, high on her spine, the way you correct a shoulder mount on a green horse — and moved her stance from a plant to a settle.
The T-shirt was thin. The heat of her went through it into my palm.
Her spine did that small straightening thing under my hand and I did not know what to do with the fact that I recognized the straightening.
I stepped back.
“Load a shell.”
I gave her a fresh red-plastic hull, brass base. She thumbed it into the magazine tube like she had done it a thousand times, which she had not.
“Live rounds later this week.” I said it to the workbench. “Today you know where it lives. You know how to pick it up.”
“Okay.”
“It moves to your side of the bed tonight.”
She looked at me. Hazel goes green in the afternoon. In utility-hall light it went the color of moss.
“It moves to my side of the bed.”
“Yes.”
She cycled the shell one more time. The click was cleaner.
She was learning a thing about metal that would live in her hands for the rest of her life, and it was seven minutes past nine in the morning on the eleventh day of a twelve-month contract, and I had not been able to think about anything else since I set the coffee down on the rail.
One in the afternoon. Barn. Ninety-one in the shade and the shade was not doing what the shade should.
Copper was patient the way he was always patient.
He turned his head at the latch, walked to the front of the stall, and put his nose against my sternum for exactly the length of time that meant good in the language he had.
I ran the curry comb over the blue-roan shoulder in circles the size of a fist and did the perimeter in my head.
Cabin porch to nearest treeline: one hundred and forty yards, north.
Cabin porch to ridge alarm net: half a mile, northwest.
Cabin porch to west fence corner: five hundred yards, southwest.
Cabin porch to main house: mile and a half, south, via switchback, twenty minutes on foot, eight on horse, no truck.
Cabin porch to fire lookout: two miles, north-uphill, forty-five on horse.
Cabin porch to the collapsed line cabin on her strip: seven-tenths, west.
Numbers were the closest thing to prayer that had ever worked on me. Marcus Aurelius had been the second closest and he was on the shelf in the great room and she had already once run her hand across his spine and not pulled him down. Yet.
I did the numbers again. I did not think about the way her back had been warm through the T-shirt.
Copper flicked an ear at nothing. I ran the curry over his neck. He shifted his weight to his off hip the way an old horse shifts when he is about to sleep standing up. I ran the comb again. I did not think about her back very much.
By three in the afternoon I had cleaned all four hooves and checked the tack in the tack room for a strap I had oiled three days ago and did not need to oil again, and I could not think of one more honest thing to do in the barn.
I walked back up to the cabin the long way, past the west fence corner.
The dust ran off the ridge in a low brown veil where the wind pushed it against the pines.
I did not glass the horizon. Nothing to see. I had glassed it already at six in the morning and at eleven in the morning and I would glass it again at seven in the evening.
Half past six in the evening. The west light through the ballistic-rated glass was the color of a rusted horseshoe, and I had a coffee I did not want and the Winchester leaned against the east wall inside the bedroom because I had walked back through with it on my way to check the ridge line one last time before dark and left the rifle where I would want it if I heard anything.
The bathroom door opened.
She held the doorway for a beat. Wet hair up in a twist. No pencil.
A rubber band this time. Her feet were bare.
She was in my gray flannel and she had buttoned it wrong down the front — one button skipped at the ribs, one doubled at the sternum — and the flannel came halfway down her thigh and no farther.
Time slowed the way it did when a scope caught a moving shoulder at four hundred yards.
I set the coffee down on the sill.
Two steps.
“Can I.”
“Yes.”
I had her mouth on the second step. Her hands came up to my jacket collar and closed there.
The flannel was warm on my forearm. Her back met the wall beside the wardrobe and my hand went under the flannel at her ribs and her ribs were the temperature of a mug that had just been set down.
My mouth went to the pulse under her jaw and the pulse was already going.
Her hands were at my belt buckle.
The buckle was leather and steel and it was under her fingers before I had thought about the buckle and then I stopped thinking about it.
My hand slid up. Thumb and forefinger. The flannel over her nipple, then the flannel under my thumb, then only her under my thumb.
She breathed in a full breath and out and the word she said was quiet and it was the first time she had used it in front of me.
“Fuck.”
The word came in low. I marked it. I moved my hand down.
Down her ribs, down the plane of her stomach, over the elastic of her underwear, and there. My palm cupped her over cotton and she was warm through the cotton and low in my chest something moved without my say-so. She was already —
“The bed,” she said.
I lifted her. Fireman-carry, brief, three steps, and I set her on Marta's quilt.
Blue and rust hexagons. Her flannel had come open at the ribs.
My hand was already at my own belt. My T-shirt was gone.
My mouth was on hers again and hers was open under mine and her hand was on my chest, flat, palm-down, over the place my heart moves.