Once I’d taken advantage of a bathroom with warm running water to wash up, I walked the entire town. Wasn’t hard to do, because there wasn’t much of it. I inquired about jobs in the gas station, the laundromat, the grocery quick-mart, the feed and hardware store, the appliance repairs and snow removal, small beat-down businesses. No surprise that all I got were nos, and some curiosity about who I was. Mostly who I was related to. I guess no one came to Selbyville to stay unless they were moving in with family.
By the time I’d circled my way back to the diner, my hopes had narrowed down to the ranch. Pete was right, of course. Fall roundup and sorting would be done. They might still be moving herds to the winter pastures, but that needed fewer hands than the roundup. They’d be letting cowboys go, not hiring. Still,maybe I could barter some of the roughest chores for room and board.
It wasn’t the gay life I’d hoped for in San Francisco, but shoveling manure wouldn’t have me on my knees for some stranger on the San Francisco streets, which I’d also pictured.
Worth a try. If Tilly consented to start.
I got in, set my hat on the pack in the other seat. Turned the key. The pickup coughed, then the ignition caught and roared to life, the rusted muffler doing not much of anything. Probably nothing the folks around here weren’t familiar with. I drove out of the lot and turned south, looking for the sign to the Bar & Star. A mile beyond the last house, I spotted the turnoff, and hung a left.
The road wound down through some gullies and canyons. At one point, a vista opened out and I caught sight of a big property in the valley below, a dozen outbuildings and silos. Then the hillsides closed in again. No one passed me or came up behind, which was just as well as Tilly ground her laborious way up another steep slope. She cleared the top, coughed twice, started down the other side, and died.
Shit.Momentum kept us rolling downhill.
Neither side of the road had a shoulder worthy of the name. I held my foot off the brake and let the truck gather speed. The tires whined a complaint as I steered through a curve. For a moment, I looked out across space at the valley below and thought about… just not. Not steering. Letting gravity take me wherever it wanted.
But down there, a man on horseback loped across the grassy field, sitting easy on his palomino, and I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I touched the brakes and wrestled the truck around the next bend.
Luck more than skill let me steer without losing too much speed or over-correcting. After a few more turns, the slopelessened, the road flattening out between stands of trees. I began coasting, checking for a wider bit of shoulder, when I spotted a rutted lane leading off to some trees. Some last vestige of pride made me steer for the gap, momentum carrying Tilly off the pavement, bouncing over the ruts, and into the trees. She slowed, barely crawling along, screened from the road, and I wrenched the wheel to take her off the track in case someone used it to get somewhere. We shuddered inch by inch beneath a tall pine, the lowest branches scraping over the roof of the cab.
And stopped.
The silence hit me first. Somewhere out there were traffic and people, horses and cattle, music, dogs, but here under the tree, the silence settled on me like a heavy blanket.
This is really it.
Until I had money for gas, this was where Joe’s truck would stay, and all my stuff with it. Somewhere south of Selbyville, California, on a cold November day with the daylight already fading.
This was the moment to set my hat on my head, get out, and start hiking, but my resolve failed. I didn’t know how far I was from the ranch, and although I had a flashlight in the glove compartment, I didn’t want to walk a dark road in the middle of nowhere. Even if I didn’t get lost, bears and occasional cougars roamed these mountains.
Tomorrow,I told myself. I had pie in my belly that an hour’s job-hunting wouldn’t have walked off. I had my bedroll in the footwell, good enough to keep me warm. I had nature’s toilet outside, some water left in the pop bottle I’d filled at a waystation hours back. I’d be fine till tomorrow.
What I didn’t have was any way to keep my mind off my situation. I was used to having my phone, with Instagram and music and videos at my fingertips. And yeah, porn. Not that I felt like watching hot guys right now. Mostly, I felt stupid. I’d pridedmyself on how working a real outdoor job meant I didn’t have my phone glued to my fingers, like most of my classmates. The last three days showed me I was more addicted than I knew.
I unrolled my sleeping bag, tilted my seat back, and pulled the insulating fabric around me. Outside the car, the evening shadows deepened quickly. With the engine off, chill air sank off the windows, and I shivered.
Think of something else.
I hadn’t thought about my mother in years. Not on purpose, anyhow. Now I remembered one vacation we all took to some cabin a friend loaned my dad. The second day, it rained. Dad went off fishing but Mom and I holed up in the cabin. There was no TV, so Mom spent several hours teaching me to tie knots. A bowline, a square knot, a clove hitch. Slip knot, anchor hitch, and butterfly. A few I used regularly— till two days ago— on the ranch, but a bunch more besides.
I was nine, not super good with my hands, but for some reason the work fascinated me. Mom said her dad was a sailor, and he taught her. Knots became kind of our thing, after that.
When she left a year later, before I knew she wasn’t coming back, I used to work on tying knots under the covers at night using pieces of string, watching my fingers in the beam of a flashlight. Double sheet bend, Carrick bend, and handcuff knot.
There was probably rope in the truck bed, but I wasn’t going out there. However, I had sneakers in my pack. For no reason I could figure, I pulled out the laces and began to tie, squinting in the fading light.Butterfly knot, monkey’s fist, Spanish bowline…
Chapter 2
Seth
I saw the guy trudging down our road from a mile away as I rode the hilly fenceline. The stranger wore a Stetson and had a small pack slung over his shoulder. A couple of times, as I glanced down, he stopped and looked around, but then he kept right on walking.
Coming to the Star & Bar, no doubt. The road dead-ended with us, and there was nothing else for miles.
The whole thing was weird. No one walked to the ranch. Selbyville was a twenty-minute drive, and Tolberg was even farther. The nearest highway exit was fifteen. Sometimes, when we were hosting guests, one of the dudes would jog down the road and jog back, supposedly for fun, but we’d closed the guest houses until spring and no cowboy needed extra exercise.
Probably his car broke down. The stranger was none of my business— I was just one of the hands, not the foreman or theowner— but I couldn’t help checking back over and over to watch him coming.
He walked steady, like a young man, dressed for the weather in boots, jeans and a parka. We’d had a frost overnight, though it’d evaporated off the grass in the morning sun, so the warm coat made sense.
