Chapter 13 #2
There was a client named Osgood — sixty-two, a big soft-spoken man from Pueblo who had come on the trip alone and had spent five days being enormously, exhaustingly enthusiastic about everything. He had told them at the trailhead that he had never been above nine thousand feet in his life.
At two in the morning Tess woke up because a person's brain wakes up when the shape of a camp changes, and she came out of her tent in her socks and boots with her coat over her nightclothes.
Osgood was sitting on a log by the dead fire with a headlamp in his hand, breathing wrong.
Porter was sitting on the log beside him.
Not close. Not touching him. Not talking, either — that was the part Tess stood in the dark and could not get past. He was just sitting there in the cold with his forearms on his knees, looking at the ashes, doing absolutely nothing, while a frightened sixty-two-year-old man got his breath back beside him.
She watched for maybe four minutes.
Once, Osgood said something, low, and Porter said something short back, and Osgood laughed a little and then made a sound like he might not be laughing, and Porter did not turn his head or put a hand on him or say any of the dozen things a man says in that moment to make himself feel better about it.
He just stayed there.
Tess went back to her tent and lay in the dark with her heart going.
He was still out there at four when she got up to start the fire. He never mentioned it. Osgood never mentioned it either, though at the trailhead on the last day he shook Porter's hand for slightly too long.
That is not a gesture. That is what she kept coming back to, all the way down the mountain.
There is no audience for a log at two in the morning.
He had not known she was awake. There was nobody to be seen doing it by, and no way for it ever to be reported to her, and the only reason she had it at all was that she is a light sleeper in a camp.
Whatever that was, it was not a man performing a recovery.
It was a man sitting with somebody who was frightened, and not needing it to be about him.
On the last morning she rode drag and he rode drag, because that is where you put your two most expendable people, and they were both of them the most expendable people on that string.
It was fourteen miles down. Nobody talks for the first hour of a last day; everybody talks for the last hour.
In the middle there is a long stretch of two hours where the country does the work and people go quiet, and in that stretch Tess found herself riding beside her husband for about forty minutes with no clients in earshot.
They did not discuss anything.
He asked about the permit. She told him about the wet meadow and the reroute and the twenty-two pages, and he laughed once — a real one, out loud, the first she had heard out of him since a Thursday in January — at the part where she had attached the other outfits' violation history without comment.
"That's vicious."
"That's a citation from their own file."
"It's vicious and it's from their own file," he said. "Both things."
She told him about the four thousand feet of new wire she still needed on the north side and he did not say a single word about the east line, and she watched him not say it, and she thought: he is going to sit there for fourteen miles and let me not know.
He asked her, once, whether her shoulder gave her trouble on a long day.
She said yes. He said okay, and did not ask anything else about it, and did not offer to do anything, and at the water crossing an hour later he was simply on the downhill side of her horse without ever having ridden across to get there.
That was the whole conversation. Two competent people on a trail, talking about wire.
She thought, somewhere in there, with real dismay: I like him.
Not the twelve years. Not the memory of him, which she had been carrying around in a box since February like a thing she was going to have to deal with eventually.
This one. The sunburned slow uncomplaining man on the horse beside her who was bad at hitches and good at frightened people and had not asked her for anything in five months.
She had never met him before in her life.
They came off the mountain on the nineteenth at four in the afternoon.
The clients went the way clients go — enormous, loud, hugging people, promising to come back, one of them crying, all of them gone inside forty minutes.
Toni took the stock and Tate took the trailer and Tess stood in the trailhead lot with a clipboard and did the count, because you always do the count.
And then the lot was empty except for two trucks.
Porter was loading his duffel into his and she was standing by hers with the clipboard against her leg and neither of them had said anything that was not about horses in six days.
He shut the tailgate.
"Well," he said.
"Yeah."
"That was—" He stopped. He looked out at the mountain for a second and then back at her, and he was filthy, and sunburned across the nose, and thinner than he had been in February, and he had six days of beard and a taped hand.
"Don't," Tess said.
"I'm not going to."
"I know you're not. I'm saying it for me."
He nodded.
They stood there in the gravel in the long yellow six-o'clock light with the truck ticking, three feet apart, and she was aware of every inch of the space in a way she had not been in months.
He said, "I'm going to get in the truck now."
"Okay."
"Tess."
"Yeah."
And then he did not say whatever it was.
He looked at her for about two seconds and something moved through both of them that neither of them was going to be able to pretend had not happened, and Tess felt her own hand start to come up off the clipboard and stopped it about four inches into the gesture.
He saw it. Every bit of it.
"Okay," Porter said, very quietly, to the gravel.
Then he got in his truck and drove out of the lot, and Tess stood there alone with a clipboard and nine names on it and let herself say, out loud, in an empty trailhead, "Well, that's a problem."