19. The Strangers Gaze
THE STRANGER'S GAZE
COLE
She comes out of St. Brigid's and I'm the first thing she sees, exactly like I told her I'd be, and she looks at me from forty feet the way you look at a stranger you've decided not to ask the time of.
I've spent two weeks learning to read this woman.
The quarter-inch of her chin. The press of her palms flat on a bar when the floor won't hold still.
The half-second she holds a door before she decides about a man.
I learned her the way I learned terrain in places that killed you for misreading it, and right now every instrument I've got comes back the same: nothing.
She's giving me nothing. On purpose, and clean, with the exact discipline I spent fifteen years building into myself — the discipline she read off me across a bar the first night, and cracked, and kept.
She's giving me back my own held face. And I taught it to her without meaning to.
She walks to the truck. She gets in. She thanks me for waiting in a voice she'd use on Ed, and she looks out the windshield at the gold fields the whole way home and doesn't look at me once.
I drive. I don't fill the quiet, because we're the two people on earth best at letting a quiet stand, except this is the first one between us that's a wall instead of a room, and I know the difference, and I file it, and I do not like one thing about what I'm filing.
Whatever happened in that church changed the math.
She went in carrying the worst thing she owns and a federal clock, and she came out carrying something heavier, and she's decided I don't get to see the weight of it.
This morning she slept against me past five with the dream locked out.
Now she's a closed building and I'm standing in the dark outside it reading windows that won't light.
I've run the man on the other side of that wall. I know exactly how much he's not going to tell you.
With her shut, I've got nowhere to put myself, and a man with nowhere to put himself goes back to the thing he's been walking around for two weeks.
The truck sits in Ed's side lot under three weeks of dust, dead by my own order.
The part's on the shelf where I told Ed to leave it — a timing chain in a box with my name on it, one day's work between that dead engine and a live one.
One day, and three more behind the wheel, and I'd be standing at the trailhead Holt drew with his finger in the dust of a rooftop a long way from here.
Lander. Big Sandy. Jackass Pass. The Cirque on the third day.
I told Ed to leave the chain because I chose the living over the dead. A woman with men hunting her needed a wall more than a dead man needed a mountain he's already waited a year for. That was the call. I made it clean and I'd make it again.
Except the living just turned her back on me in a truck, and the dead are still wrapped in a blanket on Eleanor's floor waiting on a promise I keep finding reasons not to keep, and standing in Ed's lot with my hand flat on a dusty hood I can't tell anymore what I bought with that call.
I sold Holt three more weeks of sitting in the dark so I could stand a wall for a woman who's decided she'd rather face whatever's coming without me.
The mountain's been there ten million years. It can wait on you. That's what he'd say.
He's been saying it for a year. I'm starting to think the mountain's the one thing in my life that'll wait, and I've been hiding behind that — letting the one patient thing I own carry the weight of every appointment I'm too much a coward to keep.
Reyes calls that night. He doesn't sleep; none of us do; it's about the last thing we've got in common now the rest of it's over.
"Mathison." Behind him the low TV, the houseful that never sleeps. "Hagen's on. Say hey, Hagen."
"You sound like hell, Cole," Hagen says, somewhere with a baby monitor hissing behind him.
"It's late."
"It's late where you are too, and you're up," Reyes says, "which means it's the same as here.
So here's the thing, brother, and I'm just gonna say it.
You've been in one spot three weeks. You.
The man who couldn't sit still long enough to finish a beer at my mother's table.
Three weeks in a town nobody's heard of, and every time I call, you sound like you're standing watch on something.
" A beat. "So either you tell us, or we come find out. Hagen already looked at flights."
"I looked at flights," Hagen confirms.
There it is. The team, doing the only thing the team ever knew how to do — close on a man who's in something, whether he asked or not.
I sit on Eleanor's porch step in the cold with the phone against my ear and the one gold light burning at the end of Main, and the want to say yes comes up so hard and so fast it scares me.
Because here's what they're offering, and they don't even know the half of it.
They're offering to come finish the trip.
All of us, the way we drew it up, back when it was the whole team drawing it and Holt was the one who was going to walk it.
Get the truck running, drive to Lander, put him up the mountain together.
The thing we promised. The thing that was never supposed to be one man alone on a Wyoming shoulder with an urn on the floorboard.
And I can't take it. Not because of the mountain.
Because of the other thing — the war I can't put on a phone line, the woman with a price on her head who just closed a door in my face, the federal apparatus, the men on the county roads who count guns.
If they come, they come into that, and that's not their fight.
That's Sloane's fight, and I will not pull Reyes off a mother who needs him and Hagen off a wife and a baby and a mortgage to go stand in another person's war a long way from home — because that's the exact thing the last fifteen years taught me costs the most. You don't spend the living to settle a debt with the dead.
Holt taught me that by dying. I'm not unlearning it now.
"I can't," I say. "Not yet. There's a thing here I've got to see through first, and it's not mine to bring you into."
The line goes quiet the way our lines go quiet.
"It's a woman," Reyes says. Not a question.
"It's more than that now."
"Cole." Hagen, careful. "Is she the thing you've got to see through, or is she the reason you can't finish the trip?"
And that's Hagen — quiet for six hands and then he lays the one card that takes the pot.
Because that's the question, isn't it. Is she the mission, or is she the excuse.
Have I postponed the mountain to keep a living woman safe, or have I been using a living woman to keep from climbing a mountain I've been afraid of for a year — afraid of the after, the part where I scatter him and walk back down alone and there's nobody left on my flank and no mission and no him.
"I don't know," I tell him, because they earned the truth and I don't have a better one. "Ask me in a month."
"We'll come in a month, then," Reyes says.
"For the mountain or the woman. You don't get to do either one alone, Mathison.
That's not a thing we let each other do anymore.
We learned." He doesn't say where we learned it.
He doesn't have to. We learned it on a third room outside Kandahar, all of us, the hard way, the only way the lesson takes.
I tell them I love them, which is a thing men like us only say down a phone line in the dark, and I hang up, and I sit on Eleanor's step a long time with the cold coming through my jacket and the one gold light burning down the street, hers, the last thing awake in the valley, the way it's burned every night since I broke down in this town.
I went and turned away the only men who'd come. For her. And she won't have me.
I go in and sit with Holt.
He's where I left him, wrapped by the window, set solid where he can't tip.
I crouch and fold the blanket back and put my hand flat on the cool metal, the way I do, and for the first time in two weeks I don't square it and check it and stand back up.
I stay down on the floor of a stranger's front room with my dead brother under my hand, and I do the thing I haven't let myself do since the funeral.
I talk to him.
"I met somebody," I tell him, low, so Eleanor two doors down doesn't hear a grown man talking to an urn.
"You'd have liked her. You'd have liked her so much it'd be unbearable.
She reads a room like we read a room. She's got a town that'd burn down for her and a father who calls me son and a thing in her past so bad I won't say it out loud to you even now.
And I chose her over the mountain, brother.
I left you in a box on a floor and I stood a wall for her instead, and I told myself you'd understand, because you're the one man who would. "
The metal doesn't warm under my hand. It never does. That's the part I can't get used to, a year on.
"And now she's shut me out. Walked out of a church an hour ago and bricked me up like the last two weeks didn't happen, and I can't get at why, and the operator in me already knows the shape of it — she's planning to do something alone.
The way I'd do it. The way you'd tell me not to.
" A breath that doesn't go all the way down.
"So I don't know what I bought with you, Holt.
I traded your mountain for her and she's walking away anyway, and I'm sitting on a floor with what's left of you, an hour south of a porch in Pinedale I still can't make myself drive to. "