Page 6 of Thunder

"Doctor says move it or lose it."

There’s a moment of silence between us.

"Figured I'd move it out this direction."

"There's nothing out this direction but my cattle."

"I know what's out this direction."

I write the tag number down twice because I stopped hearing my own hand the first time.

He says things like that and doesn't lean on them, doesn't push, just sets them down between us and lets them sit, and it's worse than if he begged.

A man begging you can turn down.

A man who just tells you the plain truth and waits—that's harder to walk away from, and he knows it, and he's counting on it.

And his neck is bare.

That's what stops me.

The last I knew, he was wrapped and bandaged from the surgery and the shooting, gauze at his collar.

Now the wrap's gone, his collar's open against the morning heat, and the left side of his throat is bare to the light.

And it's not bare.

There's a rattlesnake on it.

I don't mean to walk closer.

My feet do it before I've decided anything, two steps to the rail, close enough that if I reached through I could touch him, close enough to read the ink that wasn't there in the spring.

It's coiled.

Small and dark and beautifully done, set right over the script that was already there, the words I read the first night in a bar and never said out loud.

The snake's wrapped around them now like it's guarding them.

Head up.

Ready.

The kind of thing that puts a man in the ground if he's fool enough to get close.

Little rattlesnake.

That's what he calls me.

Called me.

In my ear, against my throat, into my hair—rattlesnake, little rattlesnake— and here it is on his skin, permanent, healing, pink still at the edges of the black where the needle's barely finished with it.

He got it while we were apart.

He sat in a chair somewhere and let a man carve me into the side of his throat where he'd feel it every time he turned his head.

He did it after I stood in his cabin and told him we were done, after I walked out his door and cried in my truck in a hospital parking lot, after the whole thing came down around both of us.