There was no way Marston could refuse, not after everything Gabe had done for him, being his friend, getting him the magic job on the magic ranch. Putting in a good word for him when he’d screwed up.
“Sure,” he said, even though he wasn’t at all sure. “I’d be glad to.”
“Good.” Gabe pulled out the manila folder he’d tucked into his clipboard and handed it over. “That’s confidential, by the way. You read it and then give it back. I’ve got a locked file cabinet in the first aid hut.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll tell him tomorrow that he’s on your team,” said Gabe. “Then you take him on starting Monday, okay?”
“Okay,” said Marston again, feeling the weight of the file in his hands.
He did his best to listen to the rest of the meeting, which, oddly, mostly seemed to be about whether they should be having line dancing lessons for the parolees, and, if they did, whether the parolees should be hauled up to the ranch to participate in the Tuesday night dance sessions that regular guests attended.
Marston kept silent, as he figured that had nothing to do with him, his mind focused, knife-sharp, on the idea of working with Kell day in and day out.
Surely now would be the time for him to confess what was spinning inside of him like a runaway tornado. Want. The draw of connection. The image of that sweet, hunger-thin face, the hope that lingered behind those sparkling green eyes. The way Kell’s hair fell over his forehead. How badly he needed a haircut. Someone to care for him. Someone to hold him.
A great lot of this was outside the bounds of propriety, of basic ethics. And now that Kell would be on his team—wouldbehis team—Marston was going to be tested every minute of every day. He had a strong will, but would it be strong enough?
Surely he should speak now, because if not now, when? But his mouth never opened, and his vocal cords ceased to work. He nodded when Gabe asked him if he agreed that line dancing might happen, but perhaps later during the summer.
“Here’s the other thing,” said Gabe, breaking into Marston’s thoughts with a wave of his coffee mug. “Leland wants these guys to have riding lessons and you, Marston, have the most flexible schedule. Tell me if this won’t work, but can you manage a few days a week for the rest of the summer?”
“Me?” asked Marston, an echo from before.
“Just you for now,” said Gabe. “Other team leads will be joining us, among them, Zeke, who’s very good at lessons. Knows horses as well as anybody I know. Once he starts working with us, you two can get together to set up a balanced way of going about it.”
“Be happy to,” said Marston, sitting up, holding the manila folder between his palms as though it was a prayer book.
He’d met Zeke, worked with him, too. Zeke was pure cowboy, all the way through, rangy, unobtrusive, slow to speak, observing everything around him. A bad bronc ride had messed up his knee, and essentially ended his rodeo career, but Zeke, in his laconic way, only said,It was time for me to get a move on, anyhow.
Once Zeke showed up in the valley, Marston would let him take the lead. In the meantime, he mentally went over how a lesson might go.
“How many parolees at a time for the lessons?” asked Marston. “We only have a few saddles on hand, and that supply shed is a disaster.”
“Depends on how many sign up,” said Gabe. “I’m going to encourage all the parolees to at least give it a try, except for Wayne, as he’s allergic. Otherwise, you call up to the ranch for what you need, and as for that shed, I’ll leave that up to you.”
Marston could see what Gabe was doing, and he wasn’t even being subtle about it. He was throwing responsibility at Marston like a knife thrower at a circus. In Gabe’s eyes, Marston wasn’t a failure, he was an opportunity.
Gabe was also throwing the temptation of Kell at him, full-throttle, and Marston knew he needed to shoulder through this or call it quits and wash his hands of the valley, the ranch, and all the magic that came with it. Life was good here, so he was just going to have to brace himself for the close quarters, the lack of distance between him and Kell.
The distance of a long drive was all he had available to him, so he took it. Drove off in the long shadows of afternoon, heading east so the low sun would be behind him and not in his eyes.
He usually drove this way, along a two-lane blacktop road that went on and on and on, grass and sky and a whole lot of nothing on either side of him. It grew especially pretty past Hawk Springs, as he drove past Goshen Hole Reservoir, because the presence of a body of water meant birds on the wing, and that, along with the strong golden light stretching over the waving green grasses, settled on his shoulders like a cloak of peace.
When he reached Torrington, he thought about heading to the steak house, but it was kind of a fancy place, and he would look strange reading Kell’s file in a restaurant that was a tad more elegant than the rest in town, with white tablecloths and fancy folded napkins. So he headed to the Bronco Grill House, which was on the lower end of the old town on Main Street, right across from the Ammo Shack.
Once inside, the kindly waitress gave him a table tucked in the corner, and he ordered an iced tea and their very good pulled pork sandwich. While he waited, he opened the manila folder and thumbed through the pages, absently taking a sip of his iced tea when the waitress brought it to him.
The file was thin, and while he wasn’t an expert, he’d had his two weeks of training at Wyoming Correctional, and knew that it meant Kell didn’t have much of a record. That in fact, up until the time he’d run away at age seventeen, he’d been a model student, son, citizen.
The file stated that Kell had been a rising star on his high school’s track and field team, the picture of Kell standing proud and jaunty in his running shorts and jersey attesting to his energy and youth and hope, his smile broad, the dark hair out of his eyes, the watchful, suspicious look totally missing from those green eyes, sparkling in the sun.
His grades had been good, nothing outstanding, demonstrating, at least to Marston, that Kell was smart enough to get by without much effort. There were no truant notices, no interactions with the local law enforcement, no visits to the principal’s office.
Marston turned the page to reveal a smudged copy of a police report that Kell had run away right after school let out, at the end of his junior year of high school. The parents appeared distraught and, from what the police could tell, this was the first time anything like this had happened. There was a copy of a sticky note that someone had written that said:Find out why he ran away.
Someone had done this very thing. A young woman from local Social Services, Ms. Hanrihan, had paid the family a visit three days after the report had been filed. She had gotten the understandably upset couple to open up to her, and was able to find out that Kell had come out to his parents around Christmas, and that, according to Ms. Hanrihan’s notes, the parents seemed unwilling to accept this and were concerned that someone had brainwashed their son, perhaps given him drugs to seduce him and turn him gay.
