Truck's This Way

The bus smells like burnt coffee and somebody's tuna sandwich, and you have been staring at the same fence line for forty miles.

Wyoming in April doesn't bother being pretty. It's brown grass and old snow in the ditches, a sky so big it feels like it's leaning on you, and wind that hits the side of the bus hard enough to make the driver swear under his breath. You know this country. You left it. It doesn't seem to have noticed.

Your right arm is strapped to your chest in a black brace. Under it, your shoulder is a plate, eleven screws and a lot of opinions. Every bump in the highway sends a hot wire from your collarbone to your back teeth.

Sweetgrass, 3 miles, says a sign with bullet holes in it.

You close your eyes.

Ten years ago you rode out of this town in the passenger seat of a stock contractor's truck, twenty-two years old, a saddle in the back and a hole in your chest where a man used to be. You told yourself you'd come back when you were somebody. You became somebody. World champion saddle bronc rider, gold buckle, your name in the program in big letters.

And now you're coming back like this.

The bus sighs to a stop in front of the feed store, because Sweetgrass has never had a bus station and never will. The door folds open. Cold air rushes in, sage and diesel and wet dirt, and your stupid heart climbs into your throat.

"Sweetgrass," the driver calls, bored. "Anybody?"

"Me," you say, and grab your duffel with your good hand.

You step down onto the gravel.

He's there.

Of course he's there. You'd told yourself on the phone call that it'd be Ysidro, or Imogene, or nobody and you'd walk the twelve miles. But he's leaning on the tailgate of a dented white pickup like he's been there since sunrise, arms crossed, hat low, and every one of your careful plans goes out the bus window.

Bartholomew Rennard.

Ten years have done something unfair to him. He was a beautiful boy at twenty-four, long and rangy and too serious. Now he's a man, and the man is worse. The shoulders are wider under the canvas jacket. The jaw's sharper, shadowed with stubble. His dark-blond hair curls out from under a sweat-stained gray Stetson, and when he tips his head up, his eyes are exactly the color you remember: storm gray, steady, the color of the sky right before hail.

A woman leaving the feed store with a sack of chicken scratch stops dead to stare at him. You don't blame her.

He looks you over. The brace. The duffel with the broken zipper. The boots you resoled with tape in a motel in Amarillo.

You make yourself smile, because smiling is the thing you're good at. "Hey, Bart."

His jaw shifts. That's all.

"Truck's this way," he says.

That's it. That's the welcome. Three words and he's already turning, already taking your duffel out of your hand before you can argue, slinging it into the bed like it weighs nothing.

Then you get in the truck.

The cab smells like coffee and saddle soap and him. You'd forgotten that. You hadn't forgotten anything, apparently, because your whole body remembers before your brain catches up.

He drives with one wrist on the wheel, the radio low.

"Thanks," you say, after a mile. "For the job. I know you didn't have to."

"Needed a hand."

"A one-handed hand."

"Ysidro's sixty-three." He glances at your brace, then back at the road. "You'll do."

"High praise."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. It isn't a smile. It's the place a smile used to live.

You try again. "Ranch looking good?"

He's quiet long enough that you think he isn't going to answer. The road climbs toward the foothills, and there it is in the distance, the long ridge above Rennard Creek, dark with pine at the top, a single cottonwood standing alone near the crest.

You stop breathing for a second. You don't mean to.

He sees. Of course he sees.

"Ranch is fine," he says.

It's the first lie he's ever told you. You know it the way you know a bronc's going left before it goes.

Rennard Creek hasn't changed and has changed completely. The same red barn, faded to rust. The same white house with the green trim, porch sagging a little more at one end. The corrals are patched with three different kinds of wire. Half the equipment in the yard is older than you.

A blue heeler explodes off the porch, barking like the world's ending, then skids to a stop at your boots and sniffs.

"Pistol," you say, stunned. "You're alive."

The dog is gray around the muzzle now. She was a puppy the summer you were here, chewing your gloves, sleeping on your boots. She looks up at you. Then she leans her whole body against your shins and whines.

"Traitor," Bartholomew says to the dog, very quietly.

The screen door bangs. Imogene Rennard comes down the porch steps drying her hands on a dish towel, silver braid over one shoulder, reading glasses on a beaded cord. She stops in front of you and looks you up and down exactly the way her son did.

"Well, Ethan," she says. "You got old."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Skinny, too." She pulls you into a hug, careful of the brace, and holds on a beat longer than you expect. Her voice drops so only you can hear. "Your grandmother would skin you for that haircut."

Your throat closes. You can't say anything at all.

She lets you go, pats your good arm, and says, louder, "Supper's at six. Bunkhouse is aired out. Ysidro's in the south pasture pretending he's not curious."

"I'm not curious," calls a voice from the barn, and Ysidro Ferrel walks out with a toothpick in his mouth and his white mustache twitching. He shakes your left hand. "World champion. Look at you. Busted like a cheap saddle."

"Good to see you too, Ysidro."

"Still Ethan Kestler on the program?"

"Still."

Bartholomew is already carrying your duffel toward the bunkhouse. He doesn't look back.

The bunkhouse is one room with a woodstove, an iron bed, a table, a window that faces the barn. A bottle of ibuprofen on the table that nobody mentions.

He sets your duffel on the bed. Stands there, too big for the room, hat brushing the low beam.

"Work starts at six," he says. "You do what the therapist tells you. You don't lift with that arm."

"Yes, boss."

He looks at you for a long second. You think he's about to say something real.

"Barn," he says instead. "Check your stall before supper."

"My stall? I don't have a horse."

He's already out the door.

You stand alone in the quiet. Then, because you've never been able to leave a mystery alone, you walk across the yard to the barn.

It's dim inside, warm with hay dust and horse. Swallows in the rafters. A row of stalls, a few heads turning to see who's come in. You walk down the aisle, past a heavily pregnant sorrel mare, past a big gray gelding that pins its ears.

At the end stall, a horse lifts its head.

A bay. White blaze shaped like a lightning bolt. One ear that never quite stands up straight.

He looks at you. He nickers, low and rumbling, the way he used to every morning when you came in with the grain.

Your knees go out. You grab the stall door with your good hand.

It's Ransom.

You sold him ten years ago to a man from Billings to pay your first season's entry fees. You cried in a truck stop bathroom afterward and never told anyone.

Behind you, the barn door creaks. You don't have to turn around to know who's standing there.

"You bought him back," you say.

A long silence. Then, low: "Supper's at six, Ethan."