When the car was truly out of sight, the smell of exhaust fading, the scent of pine trees growing, the cooks headed back to the mess tent.
“I guess we better get back to work,” said Gabe. “Blaze and I will take care of the horses, and Wayne, will you be able to finish up mapping those stumps? Then tomorrow, I can get someone from the ranch to help you, as I hate to think of you working alone with those sharp tools.”
“I’m good, boss,” said Wayne. “I don’t mind being alone. Makes a nice change from prison. Just a ton of silence and me.”
“Fair enough.” Now Gabe turned those blue eyes to look at Blaze, and Blaze suddenly couldn’t come up with enough song and dance to keep Gabe from asking again if everything was all right. Because it wasn’t, only it wasn’t anything he could put into words that would make any sense to anybody.
Time flew forward, as hard as Blaze scrabbled to make it stop or at least slow down. When his chores were done, and he’d managed to at least pretend to eat dinner, Blaze was at liberty to enjoy his evening.
He could borrow a book from the little library in the mess tent. He could take an hour-long shower. He could take another one. He could grab a snack from the mess tent, if he wanted, and read in his bed, or Tom’s bed, if he wanted to, to save himself from having to sleep in a litter of Cheez-It crumbs.
Instead of doing any of this, he went to his tent, sat on his cot, and stared at Tom’s cot, at the rumpled bedclothes, the empty shelf, the odd single shoelace beneath the bed. It was odd because nobody wore sneakers around the valley, though Tom might have had a pair he’d brought with him and lost the lace while packing.
Thinking about all these details, unimportant and dismissible, was better than doing what he was really doing, which was watching the shadows grow long and then longer, black fingers, inky and sharp, reaching through the trees to his tent. Twilight became deep blue and then purple, and then, finally, without any attention to Blaze’s desire to stop time and the sunset, night entered the tent.
Shaking, Blaze stood up and, without letting himself think, made his way along the path out of the clump of trees, and around to Wayne’s tent. Wayne was reading by his flashlight, or maybe he’d been jerking off and reading at the same time, because at Blaze’s approach, the flashlight went off.
“What do you want?” asked Wayne, his voice hard, the sheets rustling.
“Can I sleep with you?” asked Blaze. “I mean, in Kurt’s old cot?”
“Hell, no.” Wayne didn’t offer any excuse, but he was adjusting the sheets again in the dark. “You’ve got two cots, so if you don’t like yours, sleep in Tom’s. Now, go away, ’cause there ain’t no way I’m giving up this roomy tent just to do your stupid ass a favor.”
Wayne liked to work alone. He’d said that more than once. And after prison crowding, to Wayne, a tent to himself was the perfect setup. But it left Blaze standing at the opening of Wayne’s tent, his skin prickly with worry, an untamable pounding in his head, brain crawling to get away from itself.
“Fine,” he said, but it wasn’t fine, though there was nothing else to do but stumble back to his own tent. There, he sat on the edge of his cot, his head in his hands, the light overhead casting very stark shadows over the memories that climbed over him.
His last night in jail, after the guards had shown up, he’d been hunkered on the floor, his naked back against the wall, knees bent to his chest, his nose bleeding, one eye swelling up hard enough to block his vision. His ribs pounded with hurt, skin peeled back from his knuckles.
You’re fine,the guards who had stopped the assault had said.Nothing happened, you’re fine. Get up and clean up and get to bed. You’ve got a big day ahead of you tomorrow.
Maybe that was what had made it even worse than it actually had been. That the two guards who’d stopped it hadn’t cared what had almost happened to Blaze.
Sure, they’d been alerted by Blaze’s muffled curses, the banging of the metal bed against the wall, Blaze’s stuff thundering to the floor from his little metal shelf, maybe a combination of all three. But even with his boxers torn and the scratches on the other prisoners’ faces, after they checked that he wasn’t bleeding from any orifice, they didn’t treat it as anything other than a rough game of gimme-your-commissary-tokens.
The two prisoners who’d made their way into Blaze’s cell hadn’t said anything, just denied all wrongdoing, and Blaze, pushing himself up along that wall as he pulled up his boxers, wasn’t about to say anything either.
You’re fine. Nothing happened.
Which was just about as bad as,Officer, this is all Blaze’s fault. He’s such a bad influence on my son Alex, and he’s the one that caused this fight. These drugs are his. This gun is his. Alex has done nothing wrong.
Or was it worse? The guards owed him no loyalty, and his fellow prisoners certainly did not have any affection for him. But his family? Now it was all mixing together, and Blaze struggled hard to shove it all into the back of his brain so he could at least try to get to sleep.
He never got as far as actually putting his head on his pillow, but remained upright on the edge of his cot, where he met daylight, grateful but exhausted, his eyes burning, his limbs so heavy, he could barely stand up.
But he did stand up and went through the motions of shaving, not looking in the mirror at the wild, burned look in his eyes. After which he stumbled to breakfast and ate what he could as he avoided Gabe’s concerned look his way.
“Everything all right, Blaze?” asked Gabe as they finished with breakfast and went to the pasture to feed and water the horses. “Already missing Tom?”
This last was asked with a little laugh because, of course, Gabe, or any man, would find it funny that Blaze might be missing his tent mate. There was no malice in the humor, he knew that, but he had to clamp his jaw tight over any reply.
Toward the middle of the day, when the sun was high in the blue sky, spreading golden light over everything, it was easier to pretend that hewasokay. That he wouldn’t be freaking out come nightfall over memories of whatalmosthappened to him. But being alone at night made it feel as if it could happen to him. Which made absolutely no sense at all because those two guys were still in prison, and nobody in the valley had it in for Blaze. There was only Wayne, and Gabe, and the two cooks. Not an aggressive bone among them.
After lunch that day, when he’d gotten his second wind and his body felt like it could keep going, he was on chainsaw duty. Which was fine. He could wear the fact protection, clamp on the noise-canceling earmuffs, and just work without having to pretend he wasn’t the least bit interested in conversation or human connection, not even Gabe’s.
The less attention Gabe paid to him, the better. That way, Blaze could just soldier on until dark in the hopes that he could ignore the memories crowding in the back of his brain and just get some damn sleep.
Blaze kept his focus on the work that was in front of him. That was the best way to get through this. Except, as he buzzed through the trunk of a dead tree, he’d not checked to see which way it might fall, or even paused when he saw that Wayne and Gabe were standing in the path of that fall.
