“I heard it flying, Gabey. I knew it was you right away.”
“I saw him go in the water. He tried to get up once but he slipped right under. ‘Cause he was hurting before he even fell down, I hit him so hard. And I saw Crutchfield go after him and he got his hand on him once where it was deep and then he slipped, too, right into the fastest part. I knew they wouldn’t make it out then.”
I spit from the bridge, watched the blob tumble and spin until it was swallowed in the darkness.
“I never asked you,” I said. “Why did you leave that morning when we were sleeping?”
Gabriel swallowed. “I knew they were after me. He said it that day, he was gonna get me for shooting him. I didn’t want them to find you and Tom, so I left, thinking I’d make it down okay. I thought they’d follow me, not you and Tom. And I knew you guys would take care of yourselves. I never thought they’d do anything to you, I swear. I swear.”
It was dark now. A car was coming down the highway, its headlights blinding us; so Gabe turned his head down to shade his eyes with his hat and I held mine up before me, a big black circle between me and the light, as we held on to our horses’ reins. The red taillights disappeared off the bridge in the darkness at the other side.
“Well, I know what you did, Gabey, so put it out of your head. You saved my life.” I looked at my hat. “I need a new one of these, too.” And I let the hat go from the bridge and it floated down and became the blackness.
“Troy,” he said, and looked back across the dark water. “I thought about killing myself even. I took a rope and rode out to that big mushroom oak by where we went shooting and I just sat under that tree all day and looked up at the cross on that hill and cried. Pretty stupid, huh? Then I just left that dumb rope coiled up there under that tree and came back home.”
“Everyone’s thought about killing themselves, I guess,” I said. “But, Gabey, you gotta give yourself a break on this. ‘Cause I already lost a brother and I don’t think I can do it again. You can do this, Gabey. You have to. For me and Luz.”
And then I looked at him and said, “Please.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“We’re gonna ride out and get that rope in the morning, Gabey,” I said. “And you have to swear to me if you ever feel that bad again … that you’re not going to feel that bad again, Gabey.”
Gabe didn’t say anything, just nodded his head a little. Just like Tommy nodding his head, so barely, on that dark ride down.
“Look,” I said, pulling back the sleeve of my jacket. “Remember this?” I showed him the little scar on my right wrist. “The horse medicine? We’re all brothers, right? If one of us dies, the other two die a little bit, too. No, a lot. I know it, and you do, too. That’s why you did what you did up at the river, too. You as much saved yourself as you did me, only you weren’t thinking that then.”
“I have bad dreams now,” he said. “It’s hard to stop thinking about it.”
“I gave up trying. ‘Cause I don’t think you ever do stop thinking about it. It’s just, after a while, those ghosts just don’t seem as scary. But they never really go away.” I put my hand on the back of his neck and rubbed. I felt so horrible for what Gabriel had suffered; what we all had suffered, even Chase. Reno pushed at my shoulder with his nose, tired of standing on the asphalt of the bridge for so long. “Come on. You ready to ride back home now?”
“I don’t want to. But, yeah.”
We got onto our horses and rode, in that dark, cold night, off the bridge in the direction from which we had come.
It hadn’t really rained much or snowed at all yet this year. It would be a dry winter. Working would be easier, at least. We rode slowly. Something huge and heavy and dark was hanging over my friend Gabriel Benavidez and I hoped he knew that all he needed was to be with someone who had been there, to let him know what he did was right. And I realized that Gabriel, the boy I remembered running around in diapers and nothing else, who dug that fort with me and got me in trouble, who dropped the gun and almost killed us that day Tommy got snakebit, had lost more than blood that night on the mountain. I was riding next to a different boy than the one I had taken up to that cabin.
“Does that tattoo still hurt?”
“It feels like I got scraped really bad.”
“I don’t think I could ever do that. Get a tattoo,” Gabriel said. “If you play up the hurting, you know, I bet Luz’ll kiss you there.”
“I’d punch you but I bet you’re big enough to take me now.”
Gabriel smiled.
TWENTY-EIGHT
We didn’t say anything to each other on the ride out to that oak tree, just patted the horses nervously and avoided each other’s eyes, like we were going to a doctor’s appointment or something. I felt a little sick, and silently cussed myself for having drunk too much coffee, but I also knew that wasn’t really what made my stomach feel so wrung out.
I could tell that Gabe knew what this was about. I could tell that he was sure I would let it be said aloud when the time was right; that it would be something we would talk about on one of those nights while we watched the fire we contained behind stones.
Maybe, I thought.
I saw the cross on the hill. The grass was brown and bent over, wet and heavy with a thick morning fog that glowed gray-white evenly all around, making the universe end fifty feet away. The blackish-green silhouette of the mushroom-shaped oak stood alone like a hunchbacked giant trying to hide something precious beneath its cloak.
And in this spot here, between the cross and the tree, I felt something I didn’t like.
“What are you thinking about?” Gabe asked.
Nothing, I was going to say; but I couldn’t.
“I wished we were home, Gabey.”
I couldn’t look at him.
“Sorry. You shouldn’t’ve come.”
I tried to breathe. “Neither should you.”
And then I thought, how strange it was that Gabriel seemed so emotionless and plain, while I was so horrified and angry and ready to bawl like a baby about being there. I felt like I did when I saw Tommy Buller disappearing on that dark ride down from the mountain. And I remembered watching my mother lying in the bed, eyes open and fixed up at the ceiling, just breathing and nothing else. Just breathing and nothing else.
I brushed my hair back from my eyes. It was wet with the heavy cold fog. I rubbed at the scar, trying to wake myself up somehow; and I caught myself wondering, Where’s my hat?
I realized I had been sitting still there. Gabriel had taken Dusty down the slope of that hill toward my right, toward the cover of the tree, fading slightly as the gray fog dimmed the light and color between us.
“C’mon, Reno.”
Gabriel was down from his horse, just standing there under that big tree, watching me; or looking past me up to the top of that little hill. I left Reno there and waded through the wet brown grass.
The toe of Gabriel’s boot just touched that thick coil of rope, one end trailing off through the decaying scatterings from the oak just like that big snake I chased the day Tommy got bit. Looped over the top was a pretty neatly tied noose, its open mouth pulled wide like it was ready to receive an offering. Gabe was looking right at me as I stared down at that monstrous rope.
“I told you,” he said.
“I believed you.”
I didn’t want to touch it. I bent down, my hair dripped water as I did, and scooped the rope up, dragging that loose end toward me from beyond where Gabriel was standing. It felt cold and reptilian, moist, like shaking the minister’s hand at my mother’s funeral. I felt sick and dizzy, and my hands didn’t seem to work right as I fumbled with untying that noose. I couldn’t take it home looking like that; but the end stayed twisted and corkscrewed in the damp memory of what it was supposed to do, and I tramped back out across that soggy field and tossed it over Reno’s saddle.
Gabe just leaned back against that calloused trunk and watched me as I left and returned. I knew wh
at he was thinking, that he was really going to do it, but I didn’t want to say it; still don’t want to say it even now.
I felt a tear coming out of my right eye, but I just looked down at Gabriel’s boots, thinking dumbly that maybe it was too dark, and, anyway, my face was wet already so maybe he wouldn’t see; and I was so mad I just wanted to howl up into those branches and shake that tree, but I did nothing.
I sat down in that spot where the rope had been and stared off at Reno, at that cross, digging my hands numbly and unconsciously into the leaves and dirt, waiting for him to say something that would make it okay, so we could leave, so maybe the day would get on and the fog would burn away and it would get warm.
“You want to know why I didn’t do it?”
I stared out at the hill. This must have been the same spot where he had sat.
“ ‘Cause I’m afraid I’ll go to hell. That’s why.”
“Gabe.”
“Stupid, huh?”
I put my face down into my hands and closed my eyes, pushing my wet hair back between my fingers. I didn’t want him to see me crying.
“You want to wear my hat?”
“No.”
I wiped my face and stood up, turning away from that hill. I looked at him then; he was calm and relaxed against that tree.
“Here, Gabey,” I said. “You keep this in your pocket. That way, if I tag along, I know you’ll be ready to stick up for me, too.”
And I pressed a little stone into his hand.
He turned it over and looked at it.
“That’s not funny, Troy.”
“I know it’s not.”
“Well, I’ll keep it then.” And he put the rock into his pocket.
“I bet it’s gonna snow tonight,” I said, looking away.
Gabriel stooped down and picked up a striped feather tangled in the weeds.
“A hawk,” he said. “Messenger medicine. You said it. Remember?”
I did. “Yeah. It means somebody’s trying to tell you something, so you need to listen.”
“I heard it.”
“Well, I don’t know about the other, though, ‘cause some ghosts just never go away. And they never die, either. Some of ‘em.”
Gabe wedged the feather’s quill into a fissure in the bark of the tree.
“And, Gabey? Your dad was wrong about me always having to come around to protect you. Just ‘cause he can’t see why we’re friends like we are.”
“You wanna get on our horses, Troy?”
“We could just walk ‘em back on their leads.”
“I’d like that.”
And so, wet up to our knees, we walked out from that tree and across that damp gray field, lazily leading our horses behind us, probably leaving them to wonder why we were so crazy we would be walking, and them all saddled up and ready to go.
And Gabriel Benavidez never said anything else about that rope we burned in the fire pit that evening, either, but it smoked and stunk something awful.
TWENTY-NINE
I got a new hat when I turned seventeen; another black one, and it came straight the way I liked it, but stiff and hard to get used to until I’d worked a couple good sweats into it. I still wouldn’t wear boots, though, and didn’t like to wear belts, either, but I know I had grown, because I’d eaten more regularly, and was stronger because I’d been working so hard in all my free time at what everyone just naturally started calling “Troy’s place.”
I thought I’d stop dreaming after a year had passed, but I never did, the dreams just evolved into ones less troubling; and I came to the point where I almost wished those ghosts would just go on and leave me alone, no longer to feel that frustration at their vanishing that always came with my waking.
Maybe I want to disappear.
Spring ended as quickly as it came in that dry year when so little rain and snow fell; the lake was lower, the rivers slower and narrower. It was already sweltering in May and I was out driving the old truck I had bought, loaded down with treated four-by-fours to replace the barbed-wire fence posts that had burned in the fire of the past summer, or rotted down over the years.
I don’t really know why I felt the need to fix that fence, maybe it was just a way to assure myself of what was mine; and maybe it was a way to keep things out.
I had all but moved away from my father’s house now that it was warm; I slept most of my nights at the steel house or outside by the fire pit where Gabey and I had been spending more nights than we had in any year since we’d built it.
The things we’d talked about around the fire in the past had vanished behind the heavy cast of the things we talked about now.
Gabriel still missed church occasionally, and still paid the price for it, too. Almost sixteen now, he had grown into quite the opposite of that skittish, backwards-glancing boy I had grown up with. The events of the previous summer continued to haunt him, but he spoke of this haunting freely when we’d talk at the fire pit; and I still worried sometimes about his getting over it. We knew that no one, save for the few of us, would ever know what happened and how those boys died up there.
Both those times I went up in the mountains I left something behind; and that morning when we walked back in the fog after fetching Gabriel’s rope from under that tree he asked me, Troy, do you want to go back up there some time? and I guess I thought about it without saying anything for at least ten minutes as we waded through that wet dead winter grass, and then finally said, Only if you do, Gabey, only if you do.
Evenings, at times, I’d ride Reno out and talk to him, and we’d quietly watch the horses that roamed the land Rose left for me. I’d see Tom’s stallion there, and he’d look at me like he was grinning and saying, Are you going to try to catch me again, boy? But I never tried. Watching that horse running free was like getting a chance to see Tom Buller one more time, to feel his wildness, to know, somehow, everything was going to be healed.
I didn’t press my father about keeping his promise to ride with me that summer up the mountain to the old cabin where Gabriel Benavidez, Tom Buller, and I had carved our initials in the wall; and he never brought it up, either. The truth is that I just kind of hoped he forgot about it, like fathers do sometimes just to make things easier. And so my father and I became friends that year I turned seventeen, and I understood then that the things unspoken between men are sometimes more binding than the loudest promises sworn before witnesses.
The mare I’d named Ghost Medicine was pregnant, anyway, and I had intended him to ride her, but she would be foaling by September and wouldn’t take a rider. I promised the foal to Gabriel, and he was happy about that, but made me swear I’d let him name it this time. I said that he couldn’t name it after me, either, and Gabriel just smiled and said, Oh shoot, because he wanted to name it Lucky.
But I felt those mountains pulling at me, always. The pond, the wreck on the mountain, those huge stone fingers, the river; waiting, wanting to tug me under into a keeper hole I might never get out of again.
The line of fencing I was working on was out on the far south boundary of Rose’s land, atop low rolling foothills, well past where the easement road cut out through Benavidez ranch for the highway. I was wearing a thin ribbed undershirt, soaked through with sweat and smeared with dirt and rust from the barbed wire, pumping a post hole digger into the ground to sink another four-by-four, when I saw Luz Benavidez riding up the hill on her paint. School was nearly finished for the year; next year would be our last. I struggled with the decision about what to do next; I had already begun making money from those horses, and I found myself more and more comfortable in naming myself a horse man, and less at ease in imagining myself away at university. I couldn’t imagine leaving here, leaving her.
Isn’t this about the most beautiful place in the world, Troy?
I wouldn’t pick anywhere else over it.
And seeing her ride up that sunlit hill, looking toward me, where I was leaning on that two-handled shovel, her hair spilling loose on he
r shoulders as her horse trotted and bounced, I couldn’t help but break my straight mouth into a smile. I raised a hand up so she’d see me there in the shade of those old oaks.
She said she brought a picnic for me, and that Gabey had pointed out to her the direction in which I’d be stringing that fence. I was already tired and hungry, anyway, and so I was happy for the break, happier still to have her there with me. She spread a blanket out on the ryegrass in the shade and poured two cups of iced tea from a cooler jug.
“I can see that tattoo through your shirt,” she said. “Gabey told me you did that.”
Gabe was the only one who had seen it. Even my father didn’t know about it yet. I was embarrassed; I pulled my shirt away from my skin so the sweat wouldn’t show it through.
I drank my glass of tea. She poured me another. We sat on the blanket and she unfolded a pack of sandwiches and strawberries.
“Can I see it?” she asked.
I took my sweaty hat off and put it down on the grass. I pulled my hair back over my head with my palm and lifted the wet shirt up and took it off, laying it down in a ball by my hat. I lay flat on my back and put my arms up in the grass so my ribs stuck out and the horse stretched. Luz leaned close, examining the details of the tattoo.
“Tommy drew it,” I said.
She was so close I could feel her breath cooling the sweat on my body. Then she touched the tattoo and swirled her fingers along its outline. I felt her lips and tongue on my ribs there, and her hand stroking past my belly, touching the waist of my pants, following the path of my leg. She sat up and untied my shoes and pulled them off my feet, then my socks, rubbing my feet with both her hands. She held her face next to mine, her breath, warm, smelling like tea and strawberries.