Page 11 of The Drifter

Not my business, I thought, and I went to bed. I lay there in the dark in a room I owned outright, listening to a building make no sound at all.

4

CLINT

The Sundowner had ten rooms and a sign with a cactus on it. The woman who ran it took my cash without looking up from her crossword.

Room six. Second from the end. I'd asked for the end and she'd said the end was out.

The room had two exits. The door, and a window over the bathtub that a man my size would have to work at but could make in nine or ten seconds if he had a reason. There was a mesquite tree outside it and a chain-link fence past that. Beyond the fence, nothing but scrub all the way out to where the sky sat down on the ground.

I don't decide to notice these things. I've stopped apologizing for it.

The shower had no pressure to speak of. The water came out of that head in a thin, mean spray. I stood under it, anyway. It was hot, and hot was the whole requirement. I stayed in there a long time. I let it beat on the back of my neck and I watched the steam roll up the tile. I did not think about the two men on the concrete.

They were already gone out of me. That's not a virtue and I've never once claimed it was. A man who can hold a grudge is a man who's still carrying something. I don't carry anything I can set down.

So, my mind went where it always goes.

Backward.

Two years.

That's how long I'd been running circuits around Valentine. Two years of loops out and loops back, Marfa and Alpine and Fort Stockton and Sanderson, down to Presidio, up through Balmorhea. Buses and rides and my own two feet. A hundred miles out. Two hundred. Once, all the way to El Paso, which felt like a violation of some rule I'd never written down.

And every one of those loops, the center held. Valentine. Every one of those roads bent, sooner or later, back around the same hard little dot on the map. I would come inside of eighty miles of the house I grew up in, and inside of eighty miles of the place where my mother sits in a chair by a window and forgets things.

Two years. Not once.

I never went in.

There's a word for that, and I've never had any trouble saying it to myself. I say it in the shower and I say it on the shoulder of the highway and I say it in the dark of cheap rooms all across that state.

Coward.

I have been shot at on four continents. I have gone through doors I knew were wrong and gone through them, anyway. And I cannot make myself walk into a clean, bright building with a garden and a bench and sit down across from a woman who might look at me and say, Are you lost, honey?

She always came for me.

That's the thing that sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. Every single time.

I ran away seven times as a kid. I know the number. I keep it.

And every time, no matter the hour, no matter the weather, no matter that she'd worked all day and had six other boys under that roof, my mother put her boots on and went out into the dark and hunted me down. She'd come out across that country with a flashlight and my father's old coat over her nightgown, calling my name, patient as an angel. She never once hollered when she found me. She'd just squat down in the dirt in front of me and look at me a long moment and say, All right, then. And she'd take my hand and walk me home.

The first few times, I was looking for him.

That's the whole ugly truth of it and it's simpler than anybody would guess. My father walked out one morning and did not come back. I was a boy, and I had exactly one idea in my head about what a man does when something is missing.

You go find it.

So, I went. I'd stand out at the end of the road where the caliche turned to blacktop and I'd look one way and then the other. I believed—the way you can only believe when you're eight—that there was a right one. That if I chose correctly, if I picked the good road, if I read the country the way I could already read it better than anybody in that house, then somewhere out along it, I'd come over a rise and there he'd be. Walking. Coming back.

I never once picked wrong, either. That's the joke of it. I always knew exactly where I was. Every time they found me, I was precisely where I'd meant to be, dirty and hungry and cold and holding my ground, waiting on a man who was not coming.

And somewhere in there—I couldn't tell you the year—the reason changed.

I stopped looking for him. But I kept going out.