We're on the road by seven. In Sharp at noon.
And every mile of the panhandle behind us, I’m thinking about the man who put a piece of paper under my wiper, and the promise I made him in a motel room.
He’ll know soon enough.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dakota
The drive home from Stephenville is four hours of nothing.
I'm in the passenger seat of Spur's Ford with the note from his windshield in my back pocket and Jaeger in the trailer behind us.
The sun came up about an hour ago and now it's flat morning light over the kind of country that doesn't change much between Stephenville and Sharp—oak, fence, cattle, oak.
The radio's off. Spur's been silent since we crossed into Comanchee County.
He hasn't slept since the qualifier. I have. Five hours, dead, the kind of sleep you don't earn—you just collapse into it because somebody else is watching the door.
That somebody else is the man two feet from me with both hands on the wheel and a jaw that's been locked since we hit the highway.
I want to thank him. I don't know how.
I've been thanked by men my whole life for things I didn't do, and I've watched my Pops get thanked by men who owed him their lives, and I know how it goes—the words don't fit in a truck cab.
They fit even less when the man you're thanking is the one you're trying not to think about while he holds the wheel and the road keeps coming.
So I don't say anything.
I sit there with my coffee in the tumbler Presley made me and I watch the brush country turn into hill country and I let him drive.
We pull into Sharp at noon.
He cuts the engine outside the main barn and just sits there a second, hands still on the wheel. Then he gets out without looking at me and goes around to unhitch the trailer.
I get out the passenger side. Stretch the four hours out of my back. Walk to the trailer to help him with Jaeger.
"I've got him," he says.
"Spur."
"Go put your saddle up. I'll bring him in."
His voice is the voice of a man who hasn't slept and has decided things in the night that he hasn't told anybody yet.
I know that voice. Pops has it. Banshee has it. It's the voice that says don't ask me anything right now.
I take my saddle bag off the hook in the trailer and walk it across the barn to the tack room.
The tack room is empty.
Same room I found the first note in a few days ago.
The afternoon light cuts through the high window the way it always does and the air smells like leather and the cedar shavings Earl used to throw in the corners to keep the moths out.
I haven't been in here since Buckley. Since the note. Since the rain in Stephenville.
I set my bag down on the bench and pull my saddle off my shoulder.
