"They're OK, Reb," he said.
"I knew it."
She lifted both hands to her face, covered her mouth and nose, her hands a triangular mask, the tips of her middle fingers in the corners of her eyes and her eyes wide and large and her hair tangled in front of them. Then she moved her fingers outward, wiping away the traces of tears.
She touched her fingertips to her jeans. Small, dark stains drying instantly in the wind.
"It's why I was able to leave," she said. "Because I knew you'd taken them. I knew they were safe. And if you could do that, I could at least have the courage to leave."
He nodded. "Yeah. You need a leave him."
"He told the sheriff you were involved."
"Longwell came and talked to me."
"He didn't...?"
Carson shook his head. "They're nowhere near my place. And Longwell never believed I took 'em in the first place. He wasn't exactly pushin me hard."
"I never thought it could go this far."
She meant the horses, but the moment she said it they both heard the reference to their relationship, and their eyes met before she looked away.
"Why would he go after the animals?" he asked, salvaging her thought.
"What happened with them?"
He told her briefly—the pen, the scars, the apparent intent to let the horses starve, and how he and the others had taken them into the reservation. When he was finished, Rebecca seemed shaken.
"I don't know him," she said. "He never wanted me to have those horses. It's like he's blaming them. Them and me and you and everything. You know, he can be really generous when things are going his way. That's all I saw. Even when he wouldn't let me go anywhere or do anything, I thought it wasn't so bad. It didn't seem possible it
could
be bad."
"Long as he had control, it was just a fairy tale, huh?"
"Maybe it still is. Just not one for kids."
"How's that?"
"In the originals, the wolf eats Grandma and Red Riding Hood and even the woodcutter."
"That right? Some wolf."
"Some wolf."
"Hell, though. Even the wolf don't hate Grandma. He's just got 'n appetite."
"I know."
They were both silent for a moment. Then she said, "He doesn't stop, Carson."
"Meaning?" He heard some warning in the words.
"If he thinks he's been wronged. He isn't able to let things go. I've seen it before. Smaller things. He'll throw a thousand dollars away a night, gambling, and consider it entertainment, but if he thinks a car salesman took him for a hundred, he'll never forget it. And this."
This: They let the word lie between them. But Carson wasn't sure what "this" was. "All we did was ride horses," he wanted to say. But it would be both true and false and would come out as an accusation, disguised as an excuse.
Rebecca spoke again. "He's so jealous. Just filled with it. When he first took the horses, I thought he'd sold them to punish me. And that could have been what he intended. But once he started, he had to punish them, too. He can't stop. And you. He blames you even more than he blames me."
He heard her concern. "Don't worry," he reassured her. "What can he do to me?" He didn't tell her about the cow. Remembering it, though, stirred up an anger in him, that it had happened at all, that he'd been ambushed like that because she'd told Magnus whatever she'd told him and not warned Carson. If he'd at least been prepared.
To take his mind off it, he asked, "When he found out them horses were gone, what'd he do, anyway?"
"He was awfully angry. He wouldn't say anything to me, of course. But I knew something was going on. He got a call from Longwell, and—"
"Longwell called him?"
She nodded.
"You tellin me he didn' report it to Longwell?"
"No. He was angry Longwell was involved. That anyone knew. That he'd lost control of it. He didn't want to deal with Longwell at all."
"This don' make sense. How the hell'd Longwell find out, then? The only people knew about them horses was us."
The wind gusted even stronger, and her hair went wild. She couldn't contain it. Carson reached across the space separating them and with his index and middle finger gathered several strands that had sprayed across her eyes. When she realized what he was doing, she stood completely still. Didn't move toward him. Or away. She might have quit breathing. Might have been a statue. Except she shut her eyes, and his fingertips brushed her eyelashes. When she opened her eyes, he had her hair between his fingers. He moved the strands to the side of her face. Offered them to her. Her fingers opened, closed. He dropped his hand to his side.
"Can we get out of this wind?" she asked.
She moved past him, into the lee of the tractor. He rotated his body against the rock box, around it, stood near the engine. She turned at the tractor's lugged tire and faced him again. Her eyes so green.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
She shook her head, sorrowing. In the shadow of the tractor's cab, her hair was dark, and it fell now, out of the wind, straight along the sides of her face, moving with the shake of her head.
"I'm married," she said.
"You're leaving."
"Even leaving."
"You seeing a lawyer in Rapid?"
"I haven't seen one yet."
"In my book, Reb, when he hit you, your marriage ended. Don' matter what a court says. Or a church."
"It isn't as clear in my book."
The tractor's radiator gave a final, loud tick, and wind thrummed in the fan belt. Rebecca reached out and fingered the hexagonal head of a bolt, distractedly running her finger around its angled edges. Carson watched that finger go around and around.
"What he did to me can't be a reason for anything we do," she said quietly. "You and me. I don't want him involved that way."
"He is involved."
She didn't answer. In her silence, Carson didn't know whether anything he and Rebecca had was purely theirs. Even now, alone in the middle of this field, they were discussing Magnus. Had she been simply drawn toward Carson? Or pushed toward him because he was unlike Magnus? And he himself: Was his attraction to her mixed up somehow with his dislike of Magnus? Some opposing pole against which he reacted?
But he didn't care. He wanted to touch her right now. Right now he didn't believe in purity. Didn't believe in things unadulterated, distilled. Didn't care if her eyes seemed deeper, greener because something he didn't know in himself saw them as precious stones stolen from a man he disliked. And Carson didn't want her walking out of his life with some notion that by doing so she was keeping their relationship pure. By not keeping it at all. If that's what it took, he wanted no part of it. That was a dream not worth having. Just a way to justify emptiness. To tell yourself it had to be.
"Why'd you tell him, Reb?" He asked the question almost without knowing he was asking it. He felt the dull grip of his anger. Remembered how the cow had lain there, waiting. White clouds in the high blue. Circling in that eye. Was all of that because Rebecca needed some purity?
But she looked at him without comprehension. "Tell him what?"
He found it hard to speak. "About what happened. Between us. That day."
"I didn't tell him."
"You didn tell him?"
"No. Why would I tell him?"
Her puzzlement was so genuine, so obvious, that Carson felt displaced. He'd never assumed anything but that she had told Magnus. He couldn't get his bearings. "Jesus," he said.
"What are you talking about?"
More to himself than her, he said, "How the hell'd he know, then?"
"Carson, talk to me."
"It don't make sense, Reb. He was gone that weekend. He might've been suspicious, but things changed that weekend. He came back, an he knew somethin. I thought you'd told him. Thought you were feelin guilty or—I don't know. Just thought you'd told him. But if you didn't tell'm, how'd he know?"
Her eyes narrowed. "How do you know he knew something right after that weekend?"
"Huh? You told me what he did to you."
"That was later. I never said when he found out."
Carson realized his mistake. Her eyes were expectant, probing, curious.
"I don't know," he said. "He fired me the next day. Guess I assumed."
She shook her head. "Unh uh. I don't believe it. What happened? What'd he do, Carson?"
But he couldn't tell her. Perhaps because he'd been blaming her for it. Perhaps because he felt residual shame for having been victimized by Magnus, falling into his trap. Or perhaps it was something else entirely—a thing private and close to sacred, not to be violated, of which to speak would be to desecrate the animal more than it had already been desecrated. And the only way to undo that desecration at all, to redeem it at all, was to hold its dying to himself, that round globe of eye and cloud and warped, sticklike, wrenched human being compressed in memory and sealed off forever from other ears. Or maybe that was entirely the wrong thing to do. Maybe he had to tell her. But he couldn't.
Still, he couldn't mislead her, either. "I can't say," he said.
"You can't say? You mean you won't say?"
"I mean I can't."
"Damnit, Carson. This is me. I'm in this, too. I have a right..."
He lifted his hand off the frame of the tractor. "Reb," he said. "I can't."
She was angry—her jaw forward, lips compressed. She tossed her head. "You can frustrate the hell out of me, you know that?"
"Guess I can't help that. I ain't tryin to."
She looked at the horizon. A long time. He looked at her. Saw that she was wearing her riding boots. Without turning back to him, speaking to the horizon, she quietly said, "I love you."
It was the last thing he expected to hear. She'd never said those words. He'd never said them. And now? To say them now? She'd come to tell him she was leaving. There was no place words like that could take either one of them. It hurt to hear them. Hurt to the core. He went on staring at her boots, even when he knew she'd turned to him and was watching him.
"You're wearing those boots," he said.
"Carson."
"Why say it, Reb? Why say it now?"
"Then you do?"
"Why say it?"
"Then you do."
She had no doubt. Why did the knowledge give her relief and cause him such grief? Or did it grieve her, too, but less than if he didn't love her? She had moved further into the gap between the tractor's tire and the cab. Barricaded by metal and rubber. She seemed further from him now than she'd ever been.
"You best be goin," he said. "It's a good ways to Rapid."
T
HE TIN QUONSET HUT
was all that was left of the town of Ruination, other than the abandoned hulks of wood-frame stores surrounding it, their paint peeled off, their insides exposed through great gaps in the siding where drunks had rammed their pickups or scavenged firewood for parties on the plains, so that the buildings now stood in silent testament to the prophetic wisdom of those who had named the town, when more foolish and hopeful men had envisioned their children's children happily scurrying here and not the mice and raccoons and coyotes and feral cats that now prowled, oblivious to history or walls, happy to make of a drunk's mistake a shelter from the elements or a hunting ground. The painted words that had once identified the buildings' purposes were worn away by wind-driven dust until the letters had become so faint they looked like a message leaching outward through a transparency in the wood rather than something applied over it. Carson sat in the darkness, near an alley between two of these buildings. The alley was choked with tumbleweeds driven there year after year by hard winds, a tangled rage of stalk and stem, bone-white in the moon.
He dozed a little and woke and watched the door of the Quonset, a rusted galvanized-steel building that looked like a huge beer can half-buried sideways in the ground. No letters proclaimed the building's name, but it was known as the Ruination Bar, and its sole purpose was to maintain the fiction of the Municipality of Ruination. The fiction's sole purpose was to maintain a city council to meet once a year and reapprove the Ruination Bar's municipal liquor license and approve also the spending of the money the bar earned. The Municipality of Ruination, in spite of the fact that it no longer existed except in memory and on paper, funded, through the proceeds from its bar, road improvements miles away from its tumbleweed-choked alleys, and cancer benefits, hospital stays, economic-development schemes that never worked—a mix of philanthropy and ill-advised dreaming all watched over by city council members who believed not in the town itself—for there was nothing to believe in—but in the fiction that allowed the disposal of so much real money.
A half hour past the bar's closing time, with Carson barely awake in the pickup cab he had appropriated, the door to the bar opened, and a pallid rectangle of yellow-red light draped itself over the edge of the dirty cement slab and stained the gravel beyond. Shadows of men formed in the doorway, adjusting their hats, hitching up their pants. They emerged one by one, black and one-dimensional against the light, but disappearing at the edge of the rectangle, then reappearing again several steps further out, having gained dimension in the darkness while losing their edges: soft, clothed, calling to each other, wandering to their vehicles.
Burt Ramsay didn't see Carson until he had his hand on the door of his pickup. He froze. His jaw opened slowly. He stared through the side window slack-jawed. Then he stuck his tongue against the corner of his mouth and pushed his cheek outward, then bowed his head, hiding his face a moment, then looked back up, shrugged, opened the door. He climbed in, settled himself behind the steering wheel, filling the cab with the smells of cigarette smoke and alcohol, and stared at the graveyard of tumbleweeds outside the windshield.
"Scared the shit outta me," he said. "Thought for a sec there you was my ex come back to collect more money."
"How you doin, Burt?"
Burt unsnapped the flap on his shirt pocket and fished out a can of chewing tobacco. He removed the lid, lifted a wad of tobacco with his thumb and forefinger, and stuffed it between his gum and lower lip.