“These trees have roots that go forty feet down,” he said. “They suck up the water all around them, which is why the ground looks so poor. That’s why we have to get rid of them. The vinegar is what will keep them from growing back, but we have to keep doing it, keep checking to make sure they stay gone.”
Kell could see the sense in this, but it was going to take forever to get the job done. He had blisters along the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, on both hands, and his feet felt as though they were boiling inside of his boots.
Gabe set Kell to gathering up scraps of leaves and branches and the small, rough olives that the clipping left everywhere. Even one olive could grow into a tree, and Gabe joked that maybe even the leaves could sprout into a tree one day, they were so pervasive.
Bending and stooping wasn’t as hard as clipping, but it was still hard, and the afternoon air was hot and still, hovering over the hard grasses, making it feel as though Kell was dipping down to put his head in an oven. It had rained so many other days, why not that day?
When Gabe finally called a stop to the work, they wiped off their tools and laid them in the truck bed, then followed the truck back to the supply shed at the end of the pasture nearest the compound.
The shed, which had started out as a place to store grain and some salt blocks, was now cluttered with halters, grooming equipment, three bridles and four saddles. Kell helped as best he could, then, when dismissed, raced to take a shower, and to shave, and to put on a new clean shirt before showing up at the mess tent for dinner.
His heart was a rush of anticipation, the scent of soap on his own skin swirling around him, the leftover feel of the disposable razor on his cheek leaving him bare and exposed. Except, even after he’d gotten in line at the buffet, and made sure to sit at the end of the table, where there was an empty seat next to him, Marston did not show up.
Chowing down on some very good chili, accompanied by several glasses of fresh, cool milk, Kell kept his eyes wide and his ears wider, listening to the general gossip and chatter, waiting for the moment when he could ask where Marston was or, better yet, find out without having to ask.
And what was he supposed to do if Marston had shown up? Flirt like a seventh grader who’d drawn a big heart on his brand new blue canvas three-ring binder?
He hardly knew, only that the draw of seeing that tall form at the open end of the mess tent would really have made his day, and maybe settled the butterflies of anticipation in his belly. Or maybe not because when he heard someone say Marston’s name, Kell’s head jerked up, and he went quite still, then made himself reach for the saltines to crumble into his nearly empty bowl.
“I think he took the truck and went into town,” said Gabe.
“I think he went further than that,” said Royce, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “There’s that place he likes to go, the Bucking Horse Grill in Torrington.”
“All that way? Eighty miles just for a steak?” asked Gabe, shaking his head.
“I think he likes the drive,” said Royce, and then the conversation moved on to the subject of steaks in general, and whether rare or medium rare was the best way to have it.
After dinner, as it had been so hot that day, nobody wanted to sit around a campfire, so Gabe hauled out the projector and the screen and they voted on the movie they all wanted to watch.
Kell didn’t care, but it was nice to sit in the dark and not have to actively participate. Instead, he could munch on popcorn and watchBack to the Futurewith everybody else, and keep his ear cocked for Marston coming in, and think about how he might sit next to Kell, or across from him, and join in the low-key fun.
But Marston never came, and after the movie was over, Kell wandered back to his tent to futz around before getting ready for bed. Wayne joined him in the futzing, an oddly companionable silence filling the tent.
A pair of moths joined them, fluttering around the single overhead light while Wayne grumbled as he searched under his bed for something, and Kell sat on the edge of his cot, thinking, perhaps for the first time in a while, that it might be nice to have a book so he could read before bedtime, the way he used to back home. Or in prison, when Bede would let him take something from his small shelf of books.
While he’d been on the road, access to books was a hit-or-miss opportunity, so it was hard to remember what he used to like to read. His old life was hard to remember and felt so long ago, as though he’d been another person living in a bubble where feeling loved and happy was easy to reach for.
Now, though he mentally squinted, he could not recall a single name of any book in the stack next to his bed. Granted, it had been a small stack, as he’d had an e-reader for most of his books and, naturally, he’d not had his reader in his backpack when he’d left home.
“I’m going to go get a book,” he said, standing up. Still wearing his cowboy boots, he rather loomed over Wayne, who was still on the floor. Wayne’s response was an absent nod, as though it mattered very little to him where Kell went or why.
As he walked through the small glade of trees that surrounded his tent, he inhaled a big lungful of cool, pine-scented night air. Off in the distance was the between-the-trees glitter of someone at the facilities, taking a shower maybe, and in the other direction was the gleaming auto-light on the outside of the mess tent.
Everything was not as dark as it had seemed his first few nights, but though he thought about getting his flashlight in case both of those lights went off, he trudged along the shadowed path to the mess tent. Where he found out why the auto-light had come on.
Someone was in the kitchen building in the back of the tent. The electric light blazed from the partially opened door, so as Kell went up to the set of low bookshelves in the mess tent, he looked into the kitchen, and saw a very familiar pair of shoulders.
The butterflies in his stomach went into high gear, like they’d been startled from pure stillness into frantic flight. He didn’t quite know what to do with feeling like he was being called, pulled from the front of the mess tent, all the way through, past the row of now-empty steamers, to the rubber mat between the mess tent and the kitchen building.
It smelled a little like cleanser and soap, maybe a trace of onions in the breezeway between the two, though at this hour, everything seemed to want to settle into sleep. Except for Marston beneath the blazing light, his back to the door, busy at the metal table in the middle of the single room.
He must have heard Kell’s step on the threshold, for his shoulders twitched, and he turned around. His eyes were level and there was almost no expression in them, and beneath the bright light, the planes of his face were hard.
Instead of the regular snap-button shirt that Kell was used to seeing him in, Marston wore a t-shirt that looked like it had been washed and worn a thousand times, the gray cloth faded to pearl.
His neck was bare, and his arms, from the bicep down, were bare, and Kell could imagine him in the silver F150, elbow propped on the open window, driving to nowhere as the sun warmed his skin, and then back again, the evening-cool air swirling all around.
“Hey,” said Kell, feeling foolish and barging ahead, anyway. “I came to get a book and saw the light on.”
