The day after school let out that year, and the evening of the day before the van arrived to take him to camp, Kell shoved his backpack full with everything he could think of that he might need. Then he crawled out the narrow window of the bathroom connected to his bedroom.
Shivering, he’d headed to the train tracks, where the land sloped up and the trains always went quite slowly. Slower than walking speed. And jumped aboard by grabbing the metal ladder, and finding himself a spot to hunker in as the train rumbled westward.
“You been on your own two years?” asked Bede, interrupting Kell only the once. “You got balls, kid.”
Bede’s arm around Kell’s back tightened, a brief hug. Kell’s head slumped in the crook of Bede’s shoulder. He was tired of keeping it together. So tired of being alone, and fighting everything, and it was good, just for one night, to have unburdened himself of everything.
In the morning, of course, they would go on as they always had, pretending that Kell was Bede’s twinky prison bitch, and that Bede barely had a brain beneath his muscled body and twisting, Maori-style tattoos. This was their secret, a precious little flame in the chaos of his life.
When Kell got out of prison at the end of ninety days, of course, he’d have to leave Bede and his protection behind. A long road of unknowing loomed, making his breath come fast, his heart beat like a rabbit’s. Making him think of ways of committing some kind of crime so the prison system would just have to keep him, and he’d be able to stay with Bede, who’d been in prison for five years and knew the ropes.
But then the parole board hearing had come and everything had changed.
Chapter4
Marston
Marston knew it wasn’t his fault, but when Gabe delivered the news that two ex-cons had withdrawn from the program—the two ex-cons who had been assigned to be on Marston’s team—a sense of failure settled over him like a well-worn blanket.
“Then what’s the point?” Marston asked Gabe. He looked at his surroundings, a green canvas tent on a wooden platform so he could pretend he was camping, and wondered again at the setup Leland had designed to make folks feel they could kick off their metaphorical shoes, unplug from the world, and just relax. The tent for each team lead was part of that, as was the rustic tone of the mess tent, the facilities—which weren’t rustic at all—and the almost complete lack of cell phone service in different, unexpected places in the valley.
He didn’t mention to Gabe the fact that he’d spent the evenings during his stay at the Holiday Inn in Torrington while attending training memorizing the files on Jeremy Lomax and Enrique Hicton, to the point where he would have gotten a hundred percent on any exam about them, he wanted to.
He’d not just memorized what had been in those folders, he’dabsorbedthem. He knew both men's strengths and weaknesses, knew what tasks they were most suited to. He knew not only the crimes they’d committed to be incarcerated in the first place, but why they were paroled. Knew the amount of their gate money down to the penny.
He even knew their favorite foods because he’d taken the extra step to make several phone calls to the prison, asking for the information so he could make sure that the kitchen had those items on hand. Twinkies, frozen preferably, and chocolate Pop-Tarts, with chocolate frosting.
The valley’s kitchen was now stocked with these things, but without Lomax and Hicton to eat them, they would probably go stale. So all of Marston’s efforts, once again, had come to nothing.
While at twenty-nine years old, he wasn’t exactly living his dream life, he still had a job to do, a good job. After all, he was pretty sure Leland Tate, who ran the Farthingale Guest ranch, would be sorely disappointed in him if he up and quit.
Not that Leland would put it like that, no. He’d still be blunt, but in a different way. He might not mention how Marston had gone a little crazy at the end of last season, drinking himself into a bleak stupor for no reason that he could remember, the memory of it was something Marston knew would take a while to overcome and erase from everybody’s mind, if ever.
Luckily it had been Clay, one of the ranch’s ranch hands, who’d found him, early in the morning, passed out in the tack room, where he’d gone to get away from all the movement and commotion of the Tuesday night swing dance in front of the dining hall.
Everybody had partners, everybody was having a good time, and though Marston had attempted to participate, a smile plastered on his face, he couldn’t manage to insert himself anywhere. The dance and the joy of the evening had moved on without him, and he walked away into the darkness of the late summer night, knowing that nobody would want to dance with a disaster like him, let alone love him.
That’s when he’d gone to his room, unearthed an elderly bottle of Bombay Sapphire, and finished it off. Then he’d driven into Farthing to get more from the bodega, come back, and tucked himself in the tack room, which always smelled amazing, leather oil and barn dust and the evocative passage of time, and kept on drinking.
Clay had done his best to get Marston on his feet, and cleaned up, partially sobered by the thermos of black coffee that Clay had fetched for him. The only thing Clay hadn’t done was hide Marston’s condition from Leland, mostly because Clay wasn’t that kind of guy and also, a little bit, because Leland would have found out in the end, the way he always did.
Leland had a bunch of sticks up his ass, and one of those was the rule against drinking while on the job and certainly not to the point of stumbling and passing out in an ungainly position in an unlikely place to be discovered with as much dismay as if he’d been a week-old corpse.
The gasp from Clay’s throat had come out like he was the heroine in a horror movie, which had made Marston want to giggle deep in his chest, but he couldn’t catch his breath and ended up almost choking on his own vomit. Great way to start the morning, and his own fault entirely.
It had taken him a full day and night to sober up enough for the lecture Leland had called Marston into his small office to deliver, with the door shut, no less, which was always a bad sign as to how serious Leland felt the issue was. Or actually a good sign, a precisely correct sign that whoever was behind that closed door with Leland Tate was in deep shit trouble.
That time, one of the few times that door had been closed all summer, it had been Marston.
“Your strength is your independence,” Leland had said, though Marston had been unable to focus on what had come before that during Leland’s lecture, so he didn’t understand why Leland was saying it.
The only thing Marston could manage to think was that he didn’t want to be alone, only he didn’t know how to go about rectifying that.
And no matter what Leland said about his expectations for Marston, and the conditions of his continued employment on the ranch, Marston’s mind had focused on the fact that he’d never wanted to be alone, but that circumstances made sure that he always was.
Like, for very good example, the fact that his room in the staff quarters was at the end of the hall in the basement, beyond the laundry room, and the ice machine. Out of sight, out of mind.
Nobody knocked on his door wanting to borrow a pair of socks or for advice or to invite him out with the gang for a Saturday night spent at the local tavern.
