It’d been six weeks since I bumped into Sam and Hope on the highway. On one hand it had passed quickly. The blink of an eye. On the other, a lifetime. For all of us, the range of emotions had swung the arc of the pendulum.
I stood at the mirror, my face half shaven, and took a deep breath. My divorce had been official at noon and I was a free man. Legally. Andie had been released that morning but I did not know where she went or how she got wherever she was going. The tether had been cut and I was no longer responsible. I knew she had no money, no transportation, and none of that was my problem. I figured at some point in the next few days she’d contact me and come by and get her things and we’d work out a schedule for her to see Brodie, but I wasn’t too focused on that at the moment. I had full custody so it would be on my terms. I’d made up my mind to move on. Turn a new page. And I was doing just that.
I pulled on my sport coat, brushed my hat, grabbed my keys, and walked out the door.
Straight into Andie.
She stood on the porch, staring out across an empty pasture. Faded jeans, flip-flops, tank top. I pushed open the screen door and she turned, tried to smile. “Hey.”
Every strong resolution I’d just made shattered. I nodded and spoke softly. “Hey.”
She held out her hands. “I won’t stay, I just—” She paused. “How’s Brodie?”
“He’s good. Mostly. He’s doing okay. Dumps took him to the rodeo. He’ll be back in a bit. Just let me know when you want to see him. I know he wants to spend time with you. We’ll work something out.”
She backed up, crossed her arms, looked away.
“Your things, you can get them whenever. Your key still works.” Another nod. “You got a place to stay?”
“Jill’s going to let me stay with her a while. Until I can get settled.”
Jill Sievert was her oldest friend. “She was always good to you.”
A pause. “The best.” A Ford Bronco sat in the drive. “That’s hers. She let me borrow it.” She looked up at me. “You? You look good.” She moved aside and spoke as I took a step toward my truck. “Brodie said you sold the ’vette.”
I took another step. “I did.”
She glanced out across the pasture. “Where’s the herd?”
She knew the answer but I guess she needed to ask the question. “The bank… I paid off some debts.”
“You sold the herd?”
“It was either the herd or the Bar S.”
I wanted very much to leave. I glanced at my watch. “I’ve got to—”
“Ty? Please.” I stopped and turned around. She took a deep breath but it only went in halfway. She gave a slight shake of her head. Tried to laugh. “I’ve had so long to rehearse this, now I can’t remember.”
Another glance at my watch. “Really, Andie… I’m late.”
She looked down toward the river. Cinch and May were feeding together. Mr. B was noticeably absent. “Where’s Mr. B?”
I eyed the cross on the hill.
“What! What happened?”
“Stepped in a hole. Nothing we could do.”
“And Brodie?”
I shook my head. “He’s taking it pretty tough.”
A tear trickled down alongside her nose.
I stared at her. “Andie, you slept with another man. Remember? I never did that. Never shared us with anybody else. So, it’s a little late to be wondering who here is crushed.”
She nodded and stepped back. “I deserve that. And more.” I climbed into the truck and shut the door. She stood until I rolled down the window. “Can I please say one thing?”
I waited. She bit her lip. More tears. No makeup. No running mascara. I’d seen it all before. I turned off the truck. Stared down at her. I said, “I drove down there… ten times. Eleven if you count the last. I sat in a hollowed out stump and watched you drink coffee. Jog laps. Lose weight. Smile with Earl. Then, after dark, I crept through the woods, crawled into a large rock, and watched you swim at night. Lie close enough to touch you. Count the freckles. Ten times. You know why?” Her tears were streaming now. Bottom lip quivering. She had hit bottom. The realization had come home. The weight heavy. Her shoulders bowed. I read the body language yet I could not get past the pain. The anger. “I wanted a reason, just one, not to sign those papers. Any reason at all.” I shook my head. “I sat there looking back on the story of us and I could look past single events, each one. I could. Even Earl. ’Cause I could see my role in them. How who I’d become had created the woman you were. Are. But each time they all came flooding back and when hit with the sum of you, no reason remained. All I had to show for my time in that stump or rock was a cigarette I had not smoked. Then I’d climb back into my truck and drive home where I found that to hold on to this—” I scanned the boundaries of the Bar S—“I had to give up everything I ever cared for. ’Cause you pissed it away at some craps table. And no matter how I tried, I couldn’t explain all that to a boy whose life was turned upside down and who can’t understand why his dad doesn’t want to live with his mom. And every time I looked in his eyes, I saw yours—’cause you gave them to him. For three years, I been holding on, hoping, but my hope is played out.” I tapped my chest. “I wear this T-shirt for my son because he thinks it protects me from the stuff that’s trying to kill me, but… it doesn’t even slow it down.”
I cranked the truck, the diesel idled. When I eased off the clutch, she held out her hand. Palm down. She was holding something. “Andie, really. I don’t want anything from you.”
“Please.”
I shook my head.
“Tyler, please.”
I extended my hand, palm up. She uncurled her fingers and ten tightly rolled and unsmoked cigarettes fell into it.
She stepped back, crossed her arms, and stared at the ground. I looked at each one. They were sweaty from her palm. Some more brittle than others. I swallowed. I stared through the windshield. “Andie, I have loved you a long time. I still do. But I hurt, too. I hurt a lot. This, you and me”—I looked at her—“is not easy.”
“Tyler, I’m sorry. For everything.” She looked away. “And for some things, more than others.”
I wanted to be angry. To lash out. To hurt her like she’d hurt me, but what would it do? What good would come? She was once my wife. My best friend. The mother of my son. Would it ease the hurt? Lessen the pain?
I nodded, and cranked the truck. “Me, too.”
I drove slowly. Trying to make sense of what made no sense. A few minutes after six, I knocked on the apartment door and heard the hair dryer blowing. I sat and waited until it quit. When it did, I knocked again. Sam ran to the door, swung it open, smiled, and then twirled, holding onto the sides of her sun dress. “How do I look?” The dress was black, thin straps, and fell just above the knee. When she twirled, light shone through highlighting her curves. It wasn’t see through as much as thin. I whispered, “Lord a’mighty.”
She smiled. “Good answer.” She’d gotten comfortable kissing me, so she stepped forward, leaned onto her toes, and kissed the side of my mouth. She smelled my neck. “Mmmm, you smell good.”
“For what they charge, it ought to.”
“What is it?”
“Something Georgia ordered off the Internet and told me that if I wore it you’d melt like butter in my hand.”
“What’s it called?”
“Crabtree and…”
“Evelyn.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“I like it.”
She sniffed my neck again then twirled a second time, this time slower. The turquoise star on the front of her boots matched the jewelry hanging around her neck. She touched it. “Georgia let me borrow it.”
“It looks real nice on you.”
She stopped twirling, a smirk across her face, and slowly raised the hem of her dress a little more than halfway up her right thigh. Her legs were tan. Shaven. The skin smooth. “You like my new dress?”
“It’s…”
The dr
ess inched higher. “Yes?”
I blushed. Scratched my head. “It’s very pretty.”
She let go, and hooked her arm in mine. “Good. Then it was worth what I paid, which was stupid-crazy expensive.”
I helped her into my truck and we drove to dinner. She was excited, talkative, and she’d grown comfortable with me. Shifting into second, listening to her talk about a lady with real smelly feet and nasty nails, it struck me that in the six weeks I’d known her, we’d become friends. I knew this because I’d never before in my life cared one iota about the intricate details of a pedicure, but there in that truck, I found myself actually listening and engaged.
I adjusted the rearview and stared at her profile while she talked. She’d pulled her hair up and back, and wore some earrings that matched the necklace. They swung with the animated movement of her head. And when she sat and crossed her legs, the dress climbed above her knee and draped across her thigh. One spaghetti strap from her dress had slid slightly off her shoulder exposing the tan line.
I was nearly drunk with the sight and smell of a woman. I felt like a sixteen-year-old kid. And, it wasn’t just lust. Sure, I had a good bit of that, I admit. My thoughts were going places they hadn’t gone in a while. But it was something else. It was beauty. In the presence of it. Witnessing it. Real beauty. And not just for beauty’s sake but beauty shared. Offered. She’d done all this for me. And she was sharing it, herself, with me.
I’d made a reservation at Rock Basin’s only white-tablecloth restaurant, Steve’s. We were already ten minutes late but I didn’t care. I just could not wait any longer. I drove us four blocks out of the way, out behind a deserted and rusty manufacturing plant alongside the railroad. I pulled up alongside a loading dock, pushed in the parking brake, set my hat on the dash, and turned toward her. She was in midsentence, lost in her own conversation, when I leaned over, wrapped my arms around her, and pulled her toward me.
She melted.
When I finished, she blinked, wiped the lipstick off my lips and said, “Wow, can we do that again?”
We did.
When I sat up, her face was flush. She said, “Oh my.”
I put on my hat and shifted into first. “I been wanting to do that for about six weeks.”
“Took you long enough.”
They sat us at a table in the back. Candlelight. White napkins. I pushed in her chair and we ate and talked for nearly two hours during which she hooked her heel around my calf. She drank red wine, I sipped tea, and after dinner we split a piece of key lime pie and two cappuccinos. When we stood and I walked her toward the door, it hit me. I had fallen. Hard, fast, and devoid of a parachute.
We drove through town. I stopped at a light. “We can catch a movie. It’s a love story about a couple lost in the mountains. The Mountain something or other. Supposed to be pretty good. You’ll probably love it. Or—”
She lit. “Oh, all the girls were talking about it today. Let’s go.”
“Or…” I really didn’t want to sit in a movie. “We could go swimming.” Emmylou Harris and Don Williams were singing a duet on the radio. If you needed me, I would come to you—
She sat back. Shrugged. “No bathing suit.”
I turned and started driving toward the river. “Me neither.” She moved to the middle of the seat and pulled my arm around her shoulders. The song continued. I would swim the seas, for to ease your pain.
I drove back roads. Dirt mostly. Slow. Windows down. It was a cool night. We rolled off the road onto the hard pack alongside the river. I drove a mile and parked up on a bluff where the cottonwoods grew up over a spring-fed pool that bubbled up and joined the river. The water was clear and always bath-temperature warm this time of year for reasons I can’t begin to explain. A moon rose outside my windshield and glistened across the water. Blooming amaryllis rose up along the water’s edge. She whispered, “It’s beautiful.”
And she was.
I stepped out of the truck when the cell phone rang. I was in the process of turning it off when I saw the caller ID read, “Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard gunshots in the background. Too many to count. He whispered. “Come a running! Prison! Riot! Can’t hold them. Down to my last magazine. Bring everybody.” He said something else garbled. Then he screamed two words, “Come heavy!” And the line went dead.
I clicked the phone shut, climbed back up into the truck, and turned to Sam, “Put on your seatbelt and hold on.” In the distance, I could see the lights from the prison reflecting off the clouds. An orangish glow.
They’d set it on fire.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
There is an old fable that goes something like: A local sheriff was dealing with a town riot. He called the Rangers and stood on the train platform waiting for the train and the posse. After all the passengers departed, a single man wearing a badge unloaded his horse and walked toward the sheriff. The sheriff looked around him and said, “Where is everybody?” The Ranger replied, “One riot. One Ranger.”
The truth is there are only about 130 Rangers. Total. We cover a large area. That means we are used to not counting on backup for we seldom get it in time. By the time it gets there, whatever was going to happen, has already happened. It’s not that we don’t want to back each other up, but rather that Texas is too big. Or, maybe we are too few. I have great respect for anyone who wears a badge, and this country has some world-class units—LA SWAT comes to mind—but the Rangers have been, are, and always will be the most storied law enforcement unit on the planet. There’s a reason for that. And if there’s respect tied to it, we earned it.
I placed four calls and had law enforcement coming from as far away as Dallas but even with helicopters and supercharged engines, it’d take time. On a straightway, I glanced at the speedometer. Brodie’s face in the picture smiled up at me. The needle bounced somewhere above a hundred. Sam sat white-knuckled, sheet pale. I didn’t want her to see this.
Eight minutes after I hung up the phone, we arrived. A local boy—just out of the academy, think traffic cop—his sheriff’s badge still shiny and unscratched, sat outside the perimeter gate. Lights flashing. He was close to hyperventilating. A small crowd had gathered. I stopped. He had been speaking into his shoulder-mounted microphone when I stepped out. He saw my cinco peso. He let out, “Sure glad to see you, sir.” He shook his head. “Word is that Chuarez feller didn’t get let out like the papers was saying he was so he called for a riot and I guess we got us one.”
He followed me around the back of my truck and briefed me while I unloaded my duffel bag and strapped on my vest. Word had spread. Cars appeared. Behind me, Dumps and Georgia stood at a distance. Hope clutched her notebook. Brodie blinked under the lights. Sam stood with one arm around Brodie, the other clutching Hope. “Get them out of here,” I called to Sam.
The deputy continued, “Captain Packer is bottled up in the admin building just through the main gate but outside the primary fence. He was escorting a prisoner.” Flames rose up on the other side. Smoke was pouring out the second story window. “But you’ve got men up in the towers where the guards used to be. And, they’ve got rifles. Dallas SWAT said to hold and that they’re bringing the tank. It’ll allow us to get to him.”
I tried the captain on his phone. No answer. He didn’t have ten minutes. Maybe didn’t have five. As the sound of gunfire erupted from the admin building, I slung my rifle, checked magazines, press-checked my 1911, and pulled a mobile radio out of my duffel and turned it on, checking the frequency, and running the earpiece to my good ear. I turned to the boy. “Stay here. Guard them. Talk to me on”—I pointed at the mike on his shoulder—“that, and let me know when anybody else arrives.”
“But, sir, you can’t stop the riot.”
I cranked the truck. “Son, I’m not trying to stop the riot. I’m trying to get to my captain before they do.”
Sam grabbed me, shaking her head. “Ty, you could die in there.”
I shook my he
ad. “It’s a hell of a thing.”
She wouldn’t let go. “But why?”
Time was wasting. “If you have to ask me, then you won’t understand.” I glanced at Brodie. The distant firelight flickered off his face, highlighting the tear cascading down.
I kissed her, climbed up, eased off the clutch, and glanced in the rearview. Brodie had hid his face against Sam. The prison flickered. Flashes of orange. Black smoke billowing. Concertina wire glistening. Some sort of acid rock blaring from the loudspeakers. Sporadic gunfire. Rumblings in the belly of hell. The river flowed off to my right, outside the fence, passing into the shadow beyond the spotlights. Not so long ago, and not too far south of here, horse-mounted Rangers riding into Mexico would glance back over their shoulder at the Rio Grande and do so with longing.
If we could but make it back to the river.
I drove a half mile, passed through the main gate, ripped the rearview mirror off the glass, and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
A second later, the first round passed through the windshield.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Dear God,
Cowboy just drove off. He’s driving really fast. The prisoners are shooting at him. He just drove his truck through the front door of that building. I hear shooting coming from inside. There was an explosion.
God, if you’re not here, you need to because some real bad evil is coming up out of the earth.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
We’ve seen ten thousand on television, from the O.K. Corral to the Matrix. We all have our favorites. They flash across the screen with slow motion and Hollywood, high-def results, but once they’re over, nobody can remember much about them. Nor do they want to. Your adrenaline pumps, auditory exclusion blocks out much of the noise, peripheral vision becomes a tunnel, fine motor gives way to gross. Many men lose control of their bowels or bladder. And whatever the outcome, it’s never pretty. Bullets don’t just knock you down and kill you quietly or painlessly. They poke large holes, tear away flesh, and often kill you slowly. Painfully. It’s the nature of warfare.