by Waite, Urban
“Looks to be about three.”
“That’s a bad one.”
“It’s certainly not a good one.”
“I feel bad for people like that.”
“People like what?”
“People who get stranded. I hate passing them on the road.”
“Why don’t you pick them up, then?”
“I think I would if I saw them out there alone.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said.
“Well, probably not, but I’d still feel bad for them.”
“I always think maybe they had it coming.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
Drake believed wayward souls were responsible for their own salvation. He didn’t have any other way of thinking about it, nor did he want to. The scars ran deep, and he thought that if healing was going to come, it would come from within and grow outward. He didn’t say any of this to his wife, though he’d been thinking about it. Finally, compromising with a simple statement of the facts, he said, “Bad drivers cause accidents,” as if he’d been born to believe it.
“Listen to you,” she said. “Any number of things cause accidents.”
“Well, bad drivers cause most of them.”
“Not very compassionate, are you?”
“It’s how I rationalize it,” Drake said. “If I went around saying all these people are good, I think it would break my heart. It would just tear it all to pieces.”
“What do you have to say about those two men in the mountains? Are they good people?”
“I don’t know. How can you tell something like that?”
“I don’t think you can,” Sheri said.
“Well, maybe that’s it then. Maybe I was trying to find out something about them, find out something for myself.”
“About your father?”
Drake didn’t turn to look at her. He kept his eyes at the window and didn’t say anything. After a moment passed, after the yellow emergency lights spun several times across his face, he said, “I don’t know. I didn’t know my father was involved in all that, and then I’m getting notified all about his smuggling down in Arizona. Most of it I had to read in the newspapers. I still don’t know what type of man my father is, not now, not then.”
“You know you don’t have to make up for him,” Sheri said.
Drake turned away from the window and walked over to the bed. He felt restless. He’d been up all day answering questions for Driscoll. Getting settled into the hotel room. He’d taken nothing more than a thirty-minute nap before Sheri had shown up with all her questions. “I know I don’t have to make up for him,” Drake said. “But somehow—no matter what I say—I always am.”
WHEN HE WOKE IN THE MORNING, NORA WASN’T there. The clock showed it was a quarter to eight. From the window he could see the horses had been let into the field and Nora was down there in a pair of jeans and a thick work shirt, setting hay out in the paddock. He dressed and went downstairs, where he could hear Eddie’s uneven breathing from the living room couch.
Out the back he watched Nora raise the hay and then let it out in a rough tumble onto the ground. They were barely breaking even, between feed and the mortgage on the place. He’d had no way of saying no to what Eddie offered. Quarter horses and stallions out there that cost more than his house, more than his whole operation. From the hook near the door he took the boat keys and stuffed them into his pocket. He was dressed warmly, in a sweatshirt and jeans, white tennis shoes for traction on the boat.
Nora looked up when he stepped outside, but then she went back to her work. He went over to the fence and put his arms over it and stood watching her.
He waited. Nora ignored him, not looking up from her work. He thought about how none of these horses were his. Every one of them belonged to someone else. The two they had owned—raised from foals—had been lost in the mountains. They were gone. No brandings or mark to tell the law whom they belonged to. He felt their loss as he looked out on the field where they should have been, standing out there in the grass among the others. He knew these horses meant too much to him. Knew he shouldn’t get hung up on them. He thought of them like children, like people. Sometimes he knew he placed them over people, understood them better, their habits, their needs. The two horses were gone and there was nothing he could do or say to bring them back.
One was dead, he knew this, shot through the head. He couldn’t say what had happened to the other, the one the kid had been riding. Now gone, might as well have been dead for all he knew, but he hoped she wasn’t.
“Nora,” he said. She wouldn’t look at him. He waited another moment, thinking the situation over. He didn’t have much time. “I’ve got to go.”
She put down the pitchfork she’d been working with and walked toward him. The horses out there with their piles of hay. Several golden piles to choose from and the six remaining horses standing there. He watched one of the stronger horses, a big brown, turn and regard him. This could be it, he thought, this could be all there is and it might be over.
Nora came to the fence and took off her gloves. It was early and the mist climbed off the field as the sun came on. She put her hand on his forearm, and he could feel the sweat and the warmth from her hand come onto him. “I didn’t mean to call you selfish last night,” Nora said. She looked away, back to where she’d been with the horses. “I’m just angry, that’s all. It all just makes me so angry.”
Hunt covered her hand with his. “I know,” he said, “but it’s part of it. It just means we care enough that it gets under the skin from time to time.”
“We don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Yes, we do.”
“No, I mean this. These horses. We don’t have to have this business. We don’t have to do this.” She looked again toward the horses and then she drifted off for a while, just looking at the end of their property, at something Hunt couldn’t see. “We can find something more suited to us.”
“This is it,” he said. “I don’t know anything else. There is nothing else for me.”
Nora made a face, and he heard her sigh. “Why don’t we just go away?” she said.
It was his turn to sigh. He looked at her, then looked away at the truck waiting for him across the lawn. He would humor her. “Where do you want to go?”
“Can’t we take a trip up to the San Juans? To that resort we stayed at on Orcas. Wouldn’t you like that?”
When he turned back to look at her, he could see the intense look in her eye, like she thought they would actually do it, like he could get away, like it was as simple as just packing up a suitcase and running off to the islands. “You know we can’t do that,” he said.
“Yes, we can,” she said. “We can order room service, never leave the room, and lie in bed. It will be like when we were there before, spending money we don’t have. But we’ll be happy, won’t we? Just you and I, and none of this trouble to bother us.”
“Stop it,” he said, the anger sudden in his voice. He didn’t know where it had come from, but it was there and he could feel it trembling in his vocal cords. He could see he had scared her, too. He was losing it a little. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We just can’t.”
He watched her, and he knew she understood. He could see she was waiting for someone to carry her away, to make it all better so they could go on with their life, but he didn’t know if that person was going to be him. He just didn’t know.
“I hate this,” she said with some finality. “I just want to know we’re going to come out of this. I just want to know that.”
“I’m not going to tell you it’s all going to be fine,” Hunt said. “It won’t. This is what we’re good at, this house, this pasture, these horses. I can’t just run away. We can’t. But I’ll tell you I’d rather be broke and doing something I love than working some minimum-wage job and hating every moment of it. That’s no way to live and you know it.”
“No,” she said.
He could sense she w
anted to say more, and he waited for it to come, but it didn’t. He’d always felt that she had saved him from something. Perhaps she’d saved him from himself in the long-ago time when they’d first met, when they’d begun to know each other. Who knew? He certainly couldn’t say. He just hoped that, as it had in the past, everything would turn out for the better. That they could just keep on going. He loved her, he knew this, he loved the horses, and all he could hope for was that he would make it back here, to his house, to his wife, and to his horses.
They watched the pasture for a while. Steam escaped from the horses’ lungs and broke into the early morning field and commingled with the rising dew. He rattled the keys in his pocket and pulled his hand away.
She kissed him and watched him walk over to the truck. When he pulled out onto the drive, he could see Nora out there in the field again, feeding the horses, the field rising golden with the sun and the horses all around enjoying it.
GRADY HAD BEEN TOLD WHERE TO FIND THE GIRL, and when he pulled up he could see her waiting there with her suitcase. He honked the horn and watched her turn to look in his direction. She seemed cautious, the morning sun bright on her face, unsure of what he was offering. A Vietnamese girl. When he stepped from the car to take her suitcase, she came nearly to his shoulder. He guessed her to be no older than nineteen. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t be shy, get yourself in the car and close the door.” He had no way of knowing if she understood him. He didn’t know what she’d been told. Probably that there would be a few of her countrymen there to pick her up. There probably should have been, but Grady thought he’d do fine, and it would suit him perfectly to do the job himself.
Grady was always battling that same familiar ache in his heart. He felt it now, throwing her bag in the backseat next to his knife bag and opening the passenger-side door. This ache, this urge, had brought him to prison and had been his salvation. The priest at the prison had always said he had the devil inside him, that it was the devil who had brought him there. Grady had understood this, had understood what the priest was saying, what the doctors had told him before, giving him pills, asking him questions, trying to calm that ache he felt deep down in his insides, humming away like a little bird trying to take wing. They’d said he was almost ready to be back out in society. Young as he was, he shouldn’t waste his time in prison. He’d told them all that he intended to kick the devil right out of his body, take him by the head and kick his front teeth right down his throat. They’d said that was a step in the right direction. Grady had grinned then, imagining his foot so far down the devil’s throat, he was tickling that devil’s heart with his toes.
He watched the little Vietnamese girl get in the car, then close the door. He was already sizing her up. One hundred pounds. He’d read somewhere that the human stomach could expand to hold up to fifty times its resting capacity. He started the car and drove out toward the highway. When he was sure there were no cops around, he put his hand up under her shirt and felt her stomach. She slapped him hard across the hand and said something in Vietnamese he didn’t understand.
The skin stretched tight and smooth under his hand. He’d been told to take her to the Vietnamese. It was what he was paid for, what he had been instructed to do. But looking at her, he couldn’t help it, a little piece inside him coming loose. The lawyer was paid to deliver drugs, not little things like this. Not little girls like this one. “Can’t wait to get you home,” he said. She didn’t say anything back, just kept staring out the front window at the highway, at a world she didn’t yet understand.
DRAKE WOKE EARLY. HE MADE HIMSELF A CUP OF coffee in the small two-cup pot and watched the city turn from blue to gray. He poured the second cup and sat in the big armchair that faced the television and the dressing table. Sheri was still asleep and he could hear the soft pull of her breathing. He hadn’t turned on a light, but the early sun came through the curtain and he saw she was lying half beneath the covers as she always did.
With the cup still in his hands, he dressed. A little under ten years of regular work had gotten him trained on early mornings, and he couldn’t sit there, hidden away in the hotel room, for the rest of the day. He didn’t like being out of his depth. The city was something he didn’t know, but he figured it was just like anything else: he had to experience it to understand it.
He wore a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt with the tails pulled out to hide his gun. Outside the hotel it was warm, and he carried his gun in a holster at the small of his back. He didn’t like the feeling of not being in control. It was something he’d grown used to up north and it was something he understood. Down the street was a small coffee shop and he stopped in and bought a croissant and walked on. The morning buses were running and the streets were filling with people. Every once in a while a man in a suit or a woman walking by gave him a questioning look. He was wearing his cowboy hat and he tipped it and mumbled a good morning.
He walked down to the market and sat on a bench looking out on the sound. It was the first time in ten years he’d seen water that big and green. At the ferry terminal he saw a man panhandling for food. He wore a sign saying “Pregnant and Hungry” around his neck and danced and sang a tuneless ditty on a repeating circuit. Drake watched him for a time and then went into McDonald’s and bought the man a breakfast sandwich. “Here,” Drake said, holding the bag out to the man.
The man took the bag and looked inside. “Are you trying to kill me?”
Drake didn’t know what to say.
The man stepped out onto the sidewalk and surprised a woman walking by. “Here,” he said. “You take this.”
At the federal building, Drake called up for the DEA agent, but no one had seen him. He waited in the lobby for an hour, spinning his hat on his finger and watching the people as they came through the metal detectors. At noon he walked back to the hotel and went up in the elevator. In the brushed metal doors, Drake caught a woman staring at him. He took off his hat and held it to his chest.
On the floor of his room there was a note from Sheri written on hotel stationery. He picked it up and read it, then flipped it over and wrote a note and left it for Sheri.
It took him almost forty minutes with the traffic to drive from downtown Seattle to Emerald Downs, where the horses raced in Auburn. He didn’t have any clear idea of what he was doing, but he had to do something.
The horses weren’t running, but when he flashed his star, the guard at the gate let him through, saying, “You get that thing out of a cereal box?”
Drake walked the edge of the track, leaning on the railings and looking down on the dirt track. The ground was all smooth as if it had been gone over with a rake. One of the groundsmen came over and pointed him toward the stables.
The stalls were all empty, but Drake found a man hosing down the floors.
“What day they race around here?”
The man looked up and took his hand off the spray nozzle.
“What day they race around here?” Drake asked again.
“Sundays usually, though every once in a while they’ll do a few races during the week.”
“They any good to bet on?”
“Not if you want to keep your money.”
“Good advice.”
“Been working here almost ten years and it’s the best I’ve got.”
“How many horses come through here?”
“Two hundred or more on a busy day.”
“You keep them all in here?”
“We end up bringing them in in shifts. Usually, if they lose, it’s a quick turnout anyway.”
The man went back to washing the floors. “You know anyone I can talk to that might know a little something about riding?” Drake asked.
The man released the spray nozzle again. “What type of riding are you interested in?”
“Jumps and that sort of thing. Obstacles.”
“Best I can think of,” the man said, “is this place around here. A few of the owners board horses there. It’s a small opera
tion, but they’re good, decent people. They have a little run on the property and they can tell you a little more than I’d be able to.”
He followed the directions the man gave him, drove the few miles up the highway, and turned off at the next exit. It wasn’t the prettiest piece of land he’d seen, but it wasn’t the worst either. Freight tracks ran parallel to the highway, and where the road crossed, the rains had taken old newspapers and plastered them to the ground. There were cigarette butts, old soft-drink cups, all of it flung to the side when the gates lowered and the trains came through.
He drove a few miles in, passing a scrapyard and a long expanse of pasture where he could see cows grazing. Where the houses sat, he could see stands of ash and alder and a few bent pines. In the distance a hill rose, and beyond it, he thought, must be the freeway and the sound. The land was all low wetland and grass field. There was a smell of wet sod and foul earth in the air. He could taste it, and he went on down the road wondering what it would take to feel at home in a place like this.
He checked the address before turning in. The house lay below the road in a little depression that seemed to go back a fair ways, where he guessed the horse run must be, and the stables. In the drive outside the garage he saw a black Lincoln parked, and around the edge of the house, a silver horse trailer.
When he stepped from the car, he could see a hand at the blinds. He adjusted his hat and straightened the fall of his shirt so that it wouldn’t rise up on the gun. A skinny woman met him at the door. He guessed by the look of her that she was in her forties, in good shape, and he thought perhaps she could have been older but didn’t show it. It had taken two rings of the doorbell before she opened. “I wondered if I might come in,” Drake said. “I’d like to talk a little about riding.”
“We’re not that sort of operation.”
“I know,” Drake said, “but I asked at the track and they sent me here and I wondered if I could just ask you a few questions.”
The woman seemed to hesitate but then stepped aside and let him pass through. There was a man sitting at the table, wide bodied and unshaven, the black stubble showing on his dark skin. Drake took off his hat, straightening his thinning hair. The woman offered him a seat. He declined. Drake leaned across the table and offered the man his hand. “Bobby Drake, sir.”