Kell took it, wincing because his hand shook.
Without a word, Marston took the bottle of Tylenol from the metal table and put it away. With his back to Kell, it seemed as if he was giving Kell a minute to get himself together, but, of course, that couldn’t be true.
The only person who cared when Kell got shook was Bede, only he wasn’t here. Bede was a two-hour drive away, trapped behind a chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
When Marston finally turned back around, his eyes were still unsmiling, but they weren’t unkind either.
“You can take the ice with you,” Marston said, and when Kell didn’t move, he added, “If Wayne gives you any more trouble, bring it up to your team lead. This isn’t prison. You don’t get points for putting up with someone else’s bad behavior.”
Marston motioned to the door, so Kell got off the exam table and preceded him out, holding the ice bag to his jaw.
As Kell headed back to his tent, Marston went an entirely other direction, disappearing into the thick woods, so he wasn’t going to stick around and monitor what happened next. Wasn’t going to be there if Wayne decided that his bad mood was something he could continue to take out on Kell.
Marston was dead wrong about what would earn Kell points and what wouldn’t. It would be one thing if Marston told Gabe what had happened between Kell and Wayne. It’d be another thing entirely if Kell was the one tattling.
He might have only spent sixty days behind bars, but that and his two years on the road had taught him the hard lesson of not complaining, not whining. Not carrying tales. Nobody cared, nobody had, and nobody ever would. At least not about Kell.
He didn’t want to go back to the tent until he had to, and it was probably still too early for dinner, though he didn’t have a watch or a phone, so he couldn’t tell for sure.
Clasping the ice cloth to his face, he let his feet carry him where they would and, following a well-worn path between the trees, found himself in what looked like a picnic area, complete with picnic tables, beyond which was a large, flat blue lake that he’d glimpsed earlier when Gabe had taken him on a quick tour.
He’d said it was called Half Moon Lake, and it really did curve around like a half moon, its edges drawn by thick stands of pine trees on the west side, and gray rocks above that. On the east side, there were tall-grassed fields and horses grazing, and then the bottom of the lake curved, disappearing behind more trees.
It was pretty, there was no doubt about that, but a little overwhelming at the same time.
He wasn’t lost because the path behind him led almost straight to the first aid hut, the mess tent, and the long building where the laundry facilities were. But the sky above was so big, spreading wide from horizon to horizon, and the woods around the lake seemed so thick that he knew if he was to take a single step inside of them, he’d be swallowed alive.
When he’d been a kid, he’d gone to summer camp, of course, but there everything had been trimmed, organized, and regulated. There’d never even been any poison ivy in that camp in those long-ago days, and here there were likely to be poisonous plants and wild animals.
So he wasn’t going in that direction. And he wasn’t going to his tent, either. Not until he had to. Which left the option of sitting on one of the picnic tables to look at the lake. And this he did, putting his feet on one of the benches, an elbow resting on his knee while he held the ice cloth to his jaw.
Maybe this was as peaceful as it was going to get during his stay in the valley. Or maybe it would all be like this all the time. He didn’t know, couldn’t know. Only breathe slowly, in and out, and make his mind flatten from the rabbity scared place it would go sometimes, looking for danger around every corner. Not trusting anyone.
On the road, when he’d been hitching or hopping trains, being on high alert had served him well, but he’d always been on his own then. In prison, it’d not worked so well because there were too many men around, men like Ryan, who would take what they wanted from Kell with force. Now, in the valley, was it going to be different yet again?
He guessed he’d have to wait and see.
Chapter7
Kell
When the dinner bell rang, Kell almost didn’t recognize it for what it was.
The ice in the plastic baggie had melted, and the cloth wrapped around it had unfolded and hung limply from it.
Across the surface of the lake, curved slices of white appeared as the wind moved across it, wind whipped as though from the motion of the sun floating behind clouds as it sank lower in the west.
What was the name of the gray ridge? Gabe had told him, but Kell couldn’t remember. There’d been so much in the tour Gabe had taken him on, the names of things, the horses in the large pasture that followed the line of the lake. What his duties would be. When the bell calling them to meals would ring.
Which was now.
Kell slid off the picnic table and, bringing the now-thawed ice cloth with him, made his way back down the path that led to the main area, where the mess tent was.
There, men were already going inside the tent, wearing the kind of clothes Kell had only gotten a glimpse of inside of his cardboard boxes before Wayne had started throwing his weight around. And those soft-looking yellow boots, too.
That’s what everybody was wearing, and Kell was still in his prison-issued outfit. Maybe nobody would notice or care and besides, there wasn’t time to change so, stomach growling, Kell went up to the wooden platform and got in line, still holding the ice bag in one hand.
He kept his gaze forward, slightly unfocused so he wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye, so nobody would think he was issuing a challenge. That’s what Bede had taught him in prison to help him stay out of trouble. Hopefully, it would work in the valley as well, because having gotten off to such a bad start with his tent mate, Kell needed to stay out of trouble.
