She has two beers in her hands and she sets one in front of me on the rail and leans against the post with the other. "You okay?"
"I don't know."
"Yeah."
"I keep waiting for the next thing."
"There isn't a next thing, kiddo. The thing is over."
"It doesn't feel over."
"Over some time, it will."
I look at her over the rim of my beer.
Bex is older than me, older than Banshee, the kind of woman who has been around the Saints since before I was old enough to remember her.
She's got a piece of straw in her hair I bet she doesn't know is there from the round pen. "Bex."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for coming."
"Banshee comes when his Prez calls. I even come when your pops calls. It's how it works."
"I know."
"And for what it's worth, kiddo—I'd come anyway. You're family. Hell, I’ve known your family my whole damn life."
She bumps her shoulder against mine and we stand on the porch to watch the sun start its slow slide behind the western fence of Sharp.
Just before seven, Spur comes up to the porch, where I’ve been all damn day.
I don’t know why I wanted to be here. Maybe it’s because it’s so relaxing after the chaos that’s been happening over the last few weeks. There’s just something about sitting out on a porch with an ice cold beer in your hand.
He's got something small in his hand—a sandwich bag with a single Camel Wide cigarette inside. The one I forgot was on the counter of his cabin since the morning he found it on the rail of the round pen. "Walk with me, baby."
"Where?"
"Burn pile out behind the barn."
I nod. We walk down off the porch and across the gravel and around the back of the equipment barn to the burn pit where the brothers throw what they don't want anymore.
There's a small fire still going in it from earlier in the day—somebody must have been burning brush.
Spur opens the sandwich bag and tips the cigarette out into his hand.
He looks at it for a long second, then he tosses it into the pit.
The flames take it.
Neither of us speaks for a while.
Then he says, lowly, "That's the last of him."
"Yeah."
"I’m not giving you the details, but whatever's left is in a hog pen in Howard County and a piece of paper in a county tax office in Big Spring. The man's done."
