Chapter 13
The girl from Yampa quit at nine o'clock the night before.
She did it by text, which Tess would have minded more if the text had not been so obviously written by a nineteen-year-old with a mother standing behind her, and it said that she was real sorry and that her family didn't think six days with no phone was safe.
Tess read it twice, said one word, and started counting.
Nine clients. Nine head plus three pack animals borrowed out of Grand Junction. Six days. Two hands — herself and Toni — and Tate, who was worth two hands and was still nineteen, and a routing with a stock crossing on the second day that she was not going to attempt with three people.
She sat down on the tack room bench with the manifest in her hand and did the only arithmetic available, which was: postpone, refund, and be an outfit that cancelled its first trip in twelve years.
"No," she said.
She was still saying no to the empty tack room at half past five the next morning when she came out into the yard and Porter Thayer was standing by the barn with a duffel at his feet, catching a horse.
She looked at Toni.
Toni was checking a cinch and did not look up, and her whole back said don't.
There were nine clients in the yard. That was the thing. They were unloading out of four vehicles in the half-dark, drinking gas-station coffee, being loud and excited and completely oblivious, and one of them was already asking Tate what a britchen was.
Tess crossed the yard, and stood beside Toni, and said, quietly, in a completely level voice, "You are going to hear about this for the rest of your life."
"Yep."
"For the rest of your life, Toni."
"I know it," Toni said, and pulled the cinch. "You can fire me on the nineteenth."
Tess turned around.
Porter had the bay mare's head in one arm and was doing something to her ear, and she had let him, and he had not looked over once since Tess came out of the house.
She walked up to him and he straightened.
She had about four seconds and a yard full of paying clients.
"You've never done this."
"No."
"It's six days. You'll be up at four, you'll be the last one in a sleeping bag, and I don't have time to teach you anything."
"Okay."
"Tate is nineteen and he outranks you. If he tells you to do something you do it and you don't ask why until we're off the mountain."
"Okay."
"You'll be paid," Tess said. "Two hundred a day. It's the going rate and it comes out of the trip and you're going to take it, because I am not having you on this string as a favor."
Something went across his face and was gone.
"Okay," he said.
"Do you have gear?"
"I've got everything except a bag rated below twenty."
"Take the green one out of the tack room. It smells."
"Thank you," said Porter Thayer, and picked up his duffel, and that was the entire conversation they had about it, then or afterward.
Here is what she had not thought through.
For six days she was not a wife. That was the arrangement of the thing, and it was not something she constructed — it was simply what a string of nine clients does to a day.
She was the outfit. She was up at four and had the fire going and the manifest in her head, and every hour of every day belonged to somebody: where the water is, who is sore, who has not said anything about being sore and needs to be asked, whether the weather at four in the afternoon means we go over the bench or we don't.
And for six days he was not anything at all.
He was a hand. He was, specifically, the worst hand on the trip.
He could not throw a hitch. He got the diamond wrong four times on the first morning and Tate re-threw it four times without a word and on the fifth try Porter got it and Tate said "there you go," and Tess, thirty feet away with a client's stirrup in her hand, had to look at the ground for a second.
He was slow at everything and strong at everything and he did not complain once.
The first day nearly killed him. She watched it happen from the front of the string and did nothing about it, because there is nothing to do about it — the first day of a six-day trip is a machine that finds out what a person is, and by four in the afternoon he had been in a saddle for seven hours and on his feet for four more, and when they made camp he stood holding a lead rope with a completely blank face for about ten seconds before Tate said "hey" and pointed at the picket line and he went and did it.
At the fire that night he ate two plates and fell asleep sitting up, and Toni took the plate out of his hands the way you do with a child, and one of the clients said, "Long day for everybody," and Toni said, "It's a long day for him," and that was the closest anybody came to it.
He was up at four the next morning with the fire lit.
By day three the machine had done its work.
He had the rhythm of it. He knew where the panniers went and which horse would not stand and how to move around a nervous animal without thinking about it, and there was a moment on the fourth afternoon when Tess came around the end of the string and found him standing with a bad-tempered gelding's head against his chest, doing nothing, waiting the animal out, and she stopped for a second before she went on.
He had been raised on a ranch he did not work. Somewhere under forty-six years of a family office there had been a boy who knew how to stand next to a horse.
By the third day he had a blister on his right palm the size of a quarter that he had taped himself and did not mention, and a limp from somewhere he did not mention either, and he was still the first one out of the tent in the morning and the last one to sit down at night.
The clients thought he was staff. Nobody told them otherwise.
On the fourth night a woman from Fort Collins asked him how long he'd been guiding and he said, "This is my first trip," and she said, "Well, you're doing great," and he said, "That's very kind of you and it isn't true," and the whole fire laughed, and Tess turned a piece of meat over and did not join in.
She had the conversation with Toni on the second night, at the picket line, in the dark, because there was nowhere else on that mountain to have it.
"Go ahead," Toni said.
"When did you call him?"
"Yesterday at nine-forty, about four minutes after the kid texted you.
" Toni went on running her hand down a leg.
"I called him because he owns a flatbed and answers his phone and can throw a bale, and because you had nine paid clients and three people, and because the only other option was you cancelling the first trip of your life and eating four thousand dollars of refunds. "
"You could have asked me."
"You'd have said no."
"That's my call to make."
"It is," Toni agreed. "And I made it instead, and if you want to be angry about that you're entitled and I'll take it, and I'd do it again tomorrow."
They stood there in the dark with nine horses breathing around them.
"I don't like it," Tess said.
"I know."
"I don't like that you can call him."
Toni straightened up.
"That's the part, isn't it," she said. "It's not that I called him. It's that I've got his number and he picks up on the first ring and I've known that since June the ninth, and you've been standing three feet away from it for two weeks not saying anything."
Tess did not answer that.
"For what it's worth," Toni said, "which is nothing, and I want to say it once and never again — I hated that man in December.
I have been carrying a specific, personal, satisfying hatred of him since a Wednesday in December and I have enjoyed it very much.
" She picked up the halter. "And he stood in that creek today for forty minutes with his jaw locked and he never once looked over to see if you were watching. "
"Toni."
"That's all. That's the whole thing. I'm going to bed."
They talked about work.
That was all they did and it was the most dangerous thing that could have happened.
Because there was a stock crossing on the second day and the creek was up, and she needed a second opinion from somebody who was not going to be polite about it, and she said, "Come look at this," out of pure reflex, the way she'd have said it to Toni.
He came and looked at it.
"How deep in the middle?"
"Thirty inches, maybe more. The bottom's the problem, it's all cobble and it moves."
"Can we go up?"
"Half a mile, and there's a cut bank on the far side we'd have to bring nine amateurs down."
"Then this," he said, "and I'll stand in it."
And he did. He stood in a snowmelt creek in the middle of June for forty minutes, thigh deep, holding a lead and putting a hand on nine clients' knees one at a time as they came past him, and when the last one was over he came out gray to the waist and could not talk properly for ten minutes because his jaw was locked.
That night at the fire she said, "Thank you for the crossing."
"It was the right call."
"It was the only call."
"No," Porter said, "it was the right one.
Up would have been safe and we'd have lost two hours and put nine people on a cut bank at four in the afternoon, which is when people fall off.
" He was rubbing his hands together over the fire.
"You made the right call. I'm just saying it because you keep looking at the crossing like it's a thing you got away with. "
Tess sat there with a cup in her hands.
She had run an outfit for ten years and nobody, not one person in that entire decade, had ever said a sentence like that to her — not her clients, not her hands, not the district, not her husband. Toni came closest, and Toni's way was to say nothing when a thing was right.
Don't, she told herself. That is one competent sentence from a man who set fence posts badly and stood in a creek. Do not build anything on it.
She said, "Get warm," and went to check the picket line.
On the fifth night she saw the thing she was not supposed to see.