Blowout on Main Street
The silver Mercedes was parked in the loading zone again.
Val Halloway saw it through the front window of the Bitter Creek Feed & Seed, and her hands tightened on the fifty-pound bag of mineral she was carrying. She dropped the bag on the stack harder than she meant to. A puff of grey dust rose up and settled on her black jeans.
Nobody parked in the loading zone. Not the mayor, not the sheriff on his monthly visit, not even old Mrs. Gable, who parked wherever she liked because she was eighty-one and had taught half the town to read. The loading zone was for trucks. For trailers. For people who came to buy feed and salt and fencing staples, people who worked.
Clive Prentiss did not work. Clive Prentiss made offers.
It was six o’clock on a Thursday in the middle of July, and the heat had not broken all day. The thermometer by the door said ninety-four. A thin brown haze hung over the Sapphire Mountains from a fire somewhere in Idaho, and it made the sun look like an orange coin dropped in dirty water. The big fan in the corner pushed the hot air around without cooling anything.
Pistol lay under the fan with his chin on his paws. He was a blue heeler, fifteen years old, grey around the muzzle and stiff in the hips. When Val stomped past him, he opened one eye and closed it again.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Val told him. “I didn’t invite him.”
She heard the office door open at the back of the store. Footsteps. The soft, expensive click of loafers on the old pine floor.
Prentiss came down the aisle between the dog food and the horse wormer, smiling like a man in a catalog. Polo shirt. Beige chinos with a crease. Sunglasses pushed up into hair that had never been under a hat. He carried a paper cup from the coffee place in Hamilton, and the smell of hazelnut came with him, sweet and fake.
“Miss Halloway,” he said. “Hot one.”
“It’s July,” Val said.
“So it is.” He stopped at the counter and looked around the store the way a man looks at a used car. The scarred wood floor. The tin ceiling with the water stain shaped like Texas. The bulletin board crowded with notes for lost dogs and hay for sale and a kid who wanted to babysit. “You know what this place could be? With the right investment?”
“A feed store,” Val said.
He laughed as if she had made a joke. “A Western mercantile. Candles. Leather goods. Local honey in little glass jars. The resort guests will eat it up.”
“The resort guests can buy their honey in Bozeman.”
Prentiss smiled wider. He did not seem to mind being disliked. He seemed to collect it. He set a business card on the counter, white and thick, with gold letters. Bitter Creek Development and Trust.
“In case you ever want to talk about your future,” he said. “Not everyone in this valley has one. You might.”
He walked out. The bell over the door gave its tired little ring. Val watched him fold himself into the Mercedes and pull out of the loading zone without signaling.
She picked up the card, tore it in half, and dropped it in the trash can with the empty seed packets.
Then she went to find Hank.
Hank Dorsey was sitting in his office chair with an envelope on his knees. He did not look up when she filled the doorway.
He was seventy-nine years old. He had owned the Feed & Seed for fifty-two of those years, and he had built most of the shelves himself. His hands were big and spotted and bent at the knuckles now, and he walked with a cane he hated. His wife, Lorraine, had been gone six years. Some days Val thought the store was the only thing still holding Hank up.
“What did he want?” Val asked.
“What he always wants.”
“And you told him no.”
Hank turned the envelope over in his hands. It was heavy cream paper, the same kind as the card. “I told him I’d think about it.”
Val felt the floor tilt a little under her boots. “You’ve never told him that before.”
“My hip’s never been this bad before.” Hank finally looked at her. His eyes were watery blue behind his glasses, and tired in a way that scared her. “Dwight called again last night. From Phoenix. He wants me down there before winter. Says I can’t do another January on that staircase.”
Dwight was Hank’s son. Val had met him twice. He wore golf shirts too.
“You can do January,” Val said. “I’ll salt the stairs. I’ll carry you up them if I have to.”
“Girl.” Hank said it gently. He had called her girl since she was fifteen and came in asking for a job because her mother had just told her there was no money for school clothes. “It’s a lot of money he’s offering.”
“How much?”
He told her.
Val did not say anything for a moment. It was more money than she had ever seen in one place. It was more money than the building was worth, and they both knew it, and they both knew why. Prentiss was not buying a feed store. He was buying Main Street, one door at a time.
“He gave me until the end of August,” Hank said. “Noon, the twenty-eighth. Then the offer goes away.”
“Then let it go away.”
“I said I’d think.” Hank set the envelope on the desk and covered it with his hand, as if it might blow away. “That’s all I said. Go on. Close up. It’s too hot to fight.”
Val opened her mouth to argue.
Outside, something exploded.
It was a tire. She knew it before she reached the door. A blowout has its own sound, a flat, hard bang like a rifle shot, followed by the slap of rubber on the road. Then came another sound, worse. A horse screaming inside a metal box.
Val shoved through the door so hard the bell jammed against its bracket.
An old green Dodge pickup sat crooked in the middle of Main Street, pulling a two-horse trailer that had once been white. The trailer leaned hard to the left. The rear tire was gone, nothing left but black strips of rubber hanging off the rim. And the whole trailer was rocking. Something heavy was slamming against the walls inside, again and again, a sound like a fist on a drum.
A man was already at the back of the trailer. Tall, dusty, a straw hat with a sweat stain around the band. His left arm was strapped against his chest in a blue sling. With his right hand he was reaching for the latch on the rear door.
“Don’t,” Val said.
He did not hear her. The horse screamed again.
“Don’t open that door.”
This time he heard. He turned his head. He had a long face, sunburned across the nose, and eyes the grey-green of sage after rain.
“He’s going to hurt himself,” the man said.
“He’s going to come out backward over the top of you and run down Main Street on three good legs,” Val said. “And then he’s going to meet the propane truck that comes through here at six-fifteen. Move.”
He moved.
There was a small escape door at the front of the trailer, the kind meant for a person, not a horse. Val opened it and climbed up into the heat and the noise.
The inside of the trailer smelled of hot metal, sweat, and fear. A buckskin gelding filled the left stall, golden body, black legs, black mane. His head was high and his eyes were white all around. He was tied, and he had pulled the rope so tight that the knot had locked. Every time the trailer tilted under him, he panicked and threw his weight against the wall.
Val did not reach for him. Reaching for a scared horse is a good way to lose a finger.
She stood still in the narrow space by his head. She let her shoulders drop. She breathed out, slow and long, and she started to talk.
It was the voice she used in the chutes at the sale barn, when a two-thousand-pound bull decided he did not like the world. Low. Flat. Boring. Nothing in it to be afraid of.
“Hey, now,” she said. “Hey. That was loud, huh. That was a loud, stupid noise. It’s over now. Nothing is chasing you. Nothing at all.”
The buckskin snorted. He slammed one more time. Then he stood, shaking, sweat running down his neck in dark lines.
“That’s it,” Val said. “You’re fine. You’re just tired of this box. Me too, buddy. Me too.”
She talked to him about nothing. The heat. The fire smoke. The bad coffee at the Rusty Spur. Slowly, his head came down a few inches. His ears turned toward her. She reached up, very slowly, and laid her palm flat on his neck. His skin jumped under her hand, then went still.
She pulled the knife from her back pocket and cut the locked rope, and the gelding let out a long, rattling breath through his nose. Then he dropped his head and pressed his forehead against her chest, heavy and damp.
“Yeah,” Val murmured. “I know.”
When she climbed back out through the escape door, the man in the sling was standing right there. He had taken off his hat. His hair was the color of dry wheat and stuck up in the back.
He was staring at her as if she had walked on water.
“Marry me,” he said.
“No,” said Val.
His name was Wyatt Cordell. He said it while she was jacking up the trailer, because he could not do it one-handed, and she was not going to stand on Main Street and watch him try.
“Saddle bronc,” he said, when she asked about the arm. “A horse named Midnight Gravel tossed me into the fence at Sheridan. Separated shoulder. Doctor says six weeks, no riding.”
“So you came to Bitter Creek?” Val put her weight on the tire iron. The first lug nut squealed and gave. “Nobody comes to Bitter Creek on purpose.”
“My uncle lives here. Red. He’s foreman out at Walker Ranch.”
Val stopped and looked up at him. “You’re Red’s nephew?”
“The good-looking one.”
“Red has other nephews?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am.” She went back to the lug nuts. “Red got you work?”
“Starting colts for Mr. Walker. Six weeks. Light work.”
Val snorted. She thought of Nash Walker, who had not smiled in public since his mother’s funeral, who fixed the boundary fence with the Calloway place alone at dawn because he did not trust anyone else to do it right. Nash Walker did not hire men with one arm.
“Nash knows about the sling?” she asked.
Wyatt looked at the sky. “He will on Monday.”
She almost laughed. She caught it before it got out.
He held the lug nuts for her in the cup of his good hand, and he handed them to her one at a time, without being asked, in the right order. He did not try to help with the heavy lifting, and he did not try to explain to her how to change a tire. She noticed both things and did not like how much she noticed them.
“Jasper,” he said, when she asked the horse’s name. “He’s fourteen. He’s been to every rodeo I’ve ever been to. He hates trailers and he hates thunder and he loves me more than anybody alive.”
“That’s a low bar,” Val said.
He grinned. One of his front teeth had a small chip in the corner. It made the grin look like it had been in a fight and won.
When the spare was on, she let the jack down and stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. “That was your only spare,” she said. “Buy a new one. Today.”
“Yes, boss.”
She gave him a look, and he held up his good hand in surrender.
The sun had dropped behind the false fronts of Main Street. The light had gone gold and soft, and the haze made everything look like an old photograph.
“Where’s Red putting you up?” she asked. “He’s got the hay crew in the bunkhouse till August.”
Wyatt did not answer. He was looking past her, at the front window of the Feed & Seed.
Val turned around.
There was a sign taped inside the glass. White cardboard, black marker, Hank’s shaky capitals.
ROOM FOR RENT. ASK HANK.
Val had taken that sign down in May. And again in June. She had thought it was in the trash.
“No,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it loud.”
The door opened behind her, the bell finally free of its bracket. Hank stood there leaning on his cane, looking at the trailer and the horse and the stranger with the sling. He looked more awake than he had looked in the office.
“You need a room, son?” Hank asked.
“Hank,” Val said.
“Fifty a week,” Hank said. “Back bedroom, top of the stairs. Shared kitchen. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall, and the hot water runs out after ten minutes, so don’t be a hog. There’s a paddock behind the building for your horse.”
“Hank. That’s my hall.”
“It’s my building, girl.” Hank looked at Wyatt over his glasses. “And you carry feed for Val when she asks. Every morning before you go out to Walker’s. With the arm you’ve got.”
Wyatt looked at Val. Val looked at Hank. Hank looked at nobody, because he had already turned around and was going back inside.
“I can carry a lot with one arm,” Wyatt said.
He carried his own things up the narrow staircase that night. A duffel bag. A saddle, which he would not let her touch. A coffee can that rattled. A pillow with no case on it.
Val stood in the doorway of her own apartment at the front of the building and watched him with her arms crossed.
The upstairs had once been one big apartment. Lorraine Dorsey had divided it in two when Dwight moved out. Val had the front, with the windows over Main Street. The back bedroom looked out over the paddock and the dark hills beyond. Between them was a short hallway, a small kitchen with a yellow table, and the bathroom with the bad water heater. Val had lived there alone for nine years.
Alone was the point.
“Rules,” she said.
Wyatt set his saddle on the floor of his new room and turned around. “I love rules.”
“You don’t touch my coffee. You don’t touch my dog. You don’t sing in the shower.”
“How did you know I sing in the shower?”
“You look like a man who sings in the shower.”
He leaned on the door frame. He was taller than her by a head, and the hallway was very narrow. In the yellow light from the kitchen, she could see the sunburn on his nose and a pale line on his forehead where his hat usually sat.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Val said. “Six weeks. Then you go.”
Something moved behind his eyes. It was there and gone so fast she almost missed it.
“That’s the plan,” he said quietly. “That’s always the plan.”
She shut her door.
She lay on her bed in the dark with the window open and the sound of crickets coming up from the paddock. Pistol snored on the rug. Through the thin wall she could hear the stranger moving around. A drawer opening. Boots dropping, one, then a long pause, then the other, as if taking them off one-handed was a puzzle. A low voice. He was talking to someone on the phone, or maybe to himself.
Then, very softly, off-key, he started to whistle.
Val stared at the ceiling.
Six weeks. She had survived worse things for longer.
The Room Across the Hall
Nash Walker found out about the sling at six-forty on Monday morning.
Wyatt was standing in the round pen with a three-year-old sorrel filly, trying to lift a saddle onto her back with one hand. The filly did not like the saddle. She did not like Wyatt. She did not like the morning, or the flies, or the fact that she had been born. She kept swinging her hindquarters away just as the saddle reached the top of its arc, and the saddle kept dropping into the dirt.
On the fourth try, a voice behind him said, “Red told me you could ride.”
Wyatt turned around.
The man leaning on the top rail of the pen wore a black Stetson pulled low, a faded work shirt, and the kind of face that had been carved instead of born. Dark hair. Dark stubble. A thin white scar through his upper lip. He did not look angry. He looked like a man who had decided long ago that anger used too much energy, and had replaced it with something colder.
“I can ride,” Wyatt said. “Just not this month.”
Nash Walker looked at the sling. He looked at the saddle in the dirt. He looked at the filly, who had stopped trying to kill anyone now that the saddle was on the ground.
Then his eyes dropped to Wyatt’s belt buckle. It was big and silver, with a bronc carved on the front and words around the edge. Cheyenne Frontier Days. Saddle Bronc. Reserve Champion. Second place, in the biggest outdoor rodeo in the world. Wyatt had worn it every day for three years.
Nash studied that buckle. He studied it longer than a man studies something he does not care about.
“Don’t saddle her today,” Nash said finally. “Sack her out. Blanket on, blanket off. Rope around her legs. Let her learn that nothing touching her is going to eat her. You can do that with one arm.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir.” Nash pushed off the rail. “And stay off the Calloway side of the north fence. Their bull gets out sometimes. He’s got horns like a coat rack and no manners.”
He walked away toward his truck, a black Ford that was cleaner than any working truck Wyatt had ever seen. He walked like his back hurt and he would die before he let anyone see it.
Red came over from the barn a minute later, wiping his hands on a rag. Uncle Red was sixty-three, short and wide, with a face as brown and lined as an old saddle. He had the same nose as Wyatt’s mother, his little sister, and none of her restlessness. He had worked on Walker Ranch for thirty years.
“Well?” Red asked.
“He told me not to call him sir.”
“That means he likes you.” Red squinted after the black truck. “Don’t take it personal, the way he is. That boy could ride anything with hair on it, once. Best in the state. Had his ticket out of here.” He shook his head. “Then life happened. Life happens a lot on this ranch.”
Wyatt wanted to ask what kind of life. But Red had already turned away, the way men in this valley seemed to turn away from anything that hurt.
So Wyatt sacked out the sorrel filly. Blanket on, blanket off. A soft rope around her front legs, then her back legs. It was slow, quiet, patient work, and he was surprised to find he liked it. A bronc ride lasted eight seconds. This was a whole morning, spent teaching one scared animal that the world was not out to get her.
He thought about Val Halloway climbing into that trailer while Jasper tried to kick it apart. Talking to him in that flat, low voice. Not afraid of anything.
He thought about her a lot that week, for a man who had been told he had six weeks and then he could go.
By Thursday he had learned three things about Val Halloway.
The first was that she got up at four-thirty. He knew because the old floorboards in the hall told him so, every morning, in the dark. She made coffee strong enough to strip paint. She drank it standing at the kitchen window, looking out at nothing, with the dog leaning against her leg.
The second was that she was not as mean as she wanted people to think. On Tuesday, a little girl had come into the store crying because her rabbit had stopped eating. Val had knelt down on the floor in her combat boots and asked the girl questions in a voice so soft Wyatt barely recognized it. Then she had sent the girl home with a bag of hay and a small bottle of something, and she had not charged the mother a cent.
The third was that she did not like being looked at. She caught him doing it twice, and both times she said, “What?” in a way that meant stop.
He did not stop. He just got better at it.
She was not pretty the way the girls in the rodeo grandstands were pretty. She was something else. Her black hair was shaved close on one side and fell in a rough curtain on the other. She wore a silver ring in her nose, and there were tattoos of ivy vines climbing up the side of her neck, green and dark, disappearing into her collar. Wyatt wanted, very badly, to know where those vines ended.
He did not ask. He was not a stupid man, most days.
On Thursday evening he was driving back to town from Walker Ranch along the county road. The sun was low. The haze had thinned a little, and the light came across the valley in long gold bars. The fields smelled of cut hay and dust.
He saw the old man a quarter mile ahead, walking on the white line.
He wore a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the chin, in that heat. His white hair was too long and stuck out over his ears. He was carrying an empty wicker basket on one arm, and he was walking right down the middle of the road as if it were a garden path.
Wyatt pulled onto the shoulder and got out. He did it slowly, with no sudden moves.
“Evening,” he said. “You headed somewhere, sir?”
The old man stopped. He looked at Wyatt with hazel eyes that were clouded, like a window someone had breathed on.
“Tomatoes,” the old man said. “Martha wants tomatoes. For sauce. But I can’t find the garden.” He frowned at the basket. “It used to be right here.”
“Well,” Wyatt said, “let’s go find it. It’s a hot evening for walking. How about a ride?”
The old man considered this. Then he nodded, with great politeness, and climbed into the truck like an old friend.
Wyatt did not know who he was or where he lived. He only had one number in this town besides Red’s, and Red would be in the hay field until dark.
Val had given him her number on Monday, standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed. For emergencies. If you call me to talk, I’ll change it.
He called her.
She came in the black Silverado so fast that gravel sprayed across the shoulder.
She did not run to the truck. She walked, slowly, and she came around to the passenger side where the old man could see her, and she leaned on the open window.
“Hey, Doc,” she said. “Out for a walk?”
The old man turned and looked at her. For a moment, nothing. Then his face cleared like the sun coming out.
“The Halloway girl,” he said. “How’s that heeler of yours? The one that got into the rat poison?”
“He’s fine, Doc. He’s fifteen now. Grumpy as ever.”
“Good. Good.” The old man nodded. “That was close, that one.”
Val’s mouth did something complicated. “Yeah,” she said. “It was close. Somebody did a good job on him.”
His name was Arthur Calloway. He was the town veterinarian, or he had been, for forty years. Val told Wyatt that much while they drove him home. Wyatt followed the Silverado down a long gravel driveway to a low clinic with a sagging porch and a faded sign. The Calloway Veterinary Clinic. The C in Calloway hung by one screw. Beyond the clinic was a house with an overgrown lilac bush and a yard full of weeds.
And beyond the house, past a line of barbed wire, the clean green fields of Walker Ranch rolled away toward the mountains.
So this was the Calloway side. The place Nash Walker had told him to stay away from.
Wyatt helped Val walk Arthur inside. The kitchen was a mess. Dishes in the sink. Mail stacked on the counter in drifts. A clock on the wall had stopped at ten past four. Val did not say anything about it. She sat Arthur down at a small oak table, poured him a glass of water, and made him drink all of it. Then she found a can of soup in the pantry and heated it on the stove.
Wyatt washed the dishes, one-handed, without being asked. It took a long time. Val looked at him once over her shoulder and did not say what.
When Arthur had eaten and was dozing in his chair, Val stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms wrapped around herself.
“He won’t let me help,” she said quietly. “Not when he’s himself. When his head is clear, he says Arthur Calloway doesn’t take charity from a feed store girl. He threw me off the porch in June.”
“Does he have family?”
“A daughter.” Val looked at the dark window, toward the fence and the clean fields beyond it. Something closed in her face. “In Seattle.”
“Does she know he’s like this?”
“Don’t,” Val said. Not angry. Just tired. “There’s a lot of history in this valley, cowboy. You don’t want to step in it.”
That night she put ice on his shoulder.
He had not asked her to. He had been sitting at the yellow kitchen table with the sling off, trying to roll a towel full of ice cubes around the joint with one hand, when she came out of her room and watched him for ten seconds.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Val said. “Take your shirt off.”
He did, slowly, because his shoulder hurt and because he liked the way she said it.
She stood behind his chair and pressed the cold towel against the joint. Her other hand rested flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, to hold him still. Her palm was warm and rough. He could feel each of her fingers.
“How many cowboys have you iced?” he asked.
“Cows, mostly. A few cowboys. The cows complain less.”
He laughed, and it hurt, and he didn’t care.
The kitchen was small and hot, and the window was open to the dark. A moth bumped against the screen. He could smell her. Not perfume. Hay and coffee and some kind of plain soap, and under it something warm that was only her.
“You were good with him,” Val said, after a while. “Arthur. A lot of people would have honked and driven around him.”
“He reminded me of somebody.”
“Who?”
Wyatt looked at the moth on the screen. “Me, probably. In forty years. Walking down a road somewhere looking for a garden I never planted.”
Her hand stopped moving on his back.
“That’s a sad thing to say,” she said.
“It’s a sad thing to think. I try not to do it often.”
She took the towel away. He turned in his chair to look at her. She was standing close enough to touch. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black in the yellow light, and they were looking at his mouth.
“I don’t kiss men who are leaving,” Val said. Her voice was rough.
“Who left?” he asked.
She did not answer. She put the towel in the sink and walked to her door.
He followed her. He did not decide to. His body just did it, before his mind caught up. She turned around in her doorway, and there they were again, in that narrow hallway, with nowhere for either of them to go.
“Go to bed, Wyatt,” she said.
“Okay.”
Neither of them moved.
The hallway light was off. The only light came from the kitchen behind him, and it lay across her face in a gold stripe. He could see her pulse beating in her throat, right where the ivy vines began.
“Tell me to go,” he said quietly, “and I’ll go.”
Val reached up and closed her fist in the front of his undershirt.
She did not pull him. She just held on, as if she were standing at the edge of something high and needed a rail. He put his good hand on the door frame above her head. He leaned down slowly, giving her every second in the world to say no.
She didn’t.
Her mouth was warm and tasted of coffee. For one heartbeat the kiss was careful, a question. Then she made a small sound in her throat, and her fist tightened in his shirt, and the question was answered. She kissed him like she was angry about it. He kissed her back like he had been waiting a week to do it, because he had.
He forgot about his shoulder. He forgot about Pendleton and the finals and the six weeks. Her back hit the door frame, and she pulled him closer, and her free hand slid up the back of his neck into his hair, and—
Downstairs, glass exploded.
It was a huge sound in the quiet night, a crash and then a long, falling, tinkling rain. Pistol came off the rug barking. Val tore her mouth away from his.
Below them, in the dark store, something heavy hit the floor and rolled.
