Page 32

“Yes. Dust’ll cut visibility for twenty minutes. The truck’s facing out.”

I go and check it myself. Engine, lights, satellite switch. I shut it off and keep the keys.

The dust comes in like a low brown wall and swallows the fence and the brush beyond it. I help him lower the west curtains in the shed, and when we’re done we’re both coated and coughing, and we end up on the porch because it’s the only place the wind isn’t.

“I’m staying till the ten-thirty check,” I say. “If it’s still bad after, I’m staying till morning. That’s my weather decision. Not yours.”

“Yes.”

“And you stay out there.”

“Unless you ask for help with the cow.”

At eight-forty, the mesquite reappears out of the brown. I carry two sealed meal trays out of the supply cooler and set one on the rail near him.

“The county checked the seals,” I say. “You can eat it without adding yourself to the evidence list.”

“You should take both.”

“I’ve watched you work since before dawn. If you tell me you aren’t hungry, I’ll document a credibility concern.”

He takes the tray. We eat ten feet apart with the cabin door propped open behind me and the truck between us and the road. The wind drops. Somewhere a cricket starts up.

When I finish, I don’t get up. I keep looking at him. There’s no practical reason left to be looking at him.

He sets his tray down. “What?”

“You watch me.”

“Yes.”

“In the pens. In the kitchen. At that gate.” I rest my forearms on my knees. “Sometimes you’re watching for a threat. Sometimes you’re watching my hands because you told me they know what they’re doing. And the rest of the time, you look at me like a man waiting for an order he doesn’t intend to follow.”

His fork stops.

“And today,” I say, “you didn’t look at me at all.”

“You didn’t ask me to.”

“That’s not why.”

A long silence. The cricket. The creak of the rail under his hand.

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

“Then why?”

He looks at me now, and I stop being able to look anywhere else. “Because for four days, the only thing I was allowed to do with what I want was nothing. I got good at it. I didn’t know how to stop.”

My heart does something stupid.

“And what do you want?” I ask.

“You know.”

“I know you look. I don’t know if you can say what you want without turning it into something I have to manage for you.”

His hand tightens on the edge of the tray until the aluminum creaks. He sets it down before it bends.