Page 13 of The Drifter

He does it the way other men fish. Last I'd heard, he was still doing it.

That was the Cash I knew. Steady. Reverent. A little bit not-here.

The man on that walkway was still all of that. But he'd changed again. It took me longer than it should have to read it, because I'd never seen it on him before and I'd never expected to.

He was settled.

There was a scar coming up out of his collar. There was a dog glued to his leg like a shadow with a heartbeat. And there was something in his face I had no name for, some weight that had come off him, or maybe some weight that had come on—the kind a man carries on purpose.

He looked like a man who had somewhere to be.

I have never in my life looked like that.

"Come in out of the sun," I said.

He didn't. He put his hands in his pockets, and the grin went off him, and the thing that came into his face after it was the one I've known since he was a kid.

"We need you," he said.

My gut went to ice.

It was instant. I didn't reason my way to it. Two years of loops and eighty miles and never once turning in, and everything I had ever known about myself came down on me at once in the doorway of that motel room.

Mama.

Cash's hand came up onto my shoulder before I got the word out. He'd seen it happen on my face. He always sees it.

"It's not Mama," he said. "She's all right, Clint. I saw her Tuesday. She had a good day. She ate her lunch out on the porch and she told the woman there about the flood in '88."

Something in me came loose and I had to stand still for a second and let it.

"Then, who?"

"The brothers."

I looked at him.

"They need you," he said. "In Charleston."

I turned that over. I could not make it mean anything.

"Charleston," I said. "South Carolina?"

"That's the one."

"What in God's name is in Charleston?"

Cash looked out past me, over the roof of the motel, out at all that scrub and heat running away to the rim of the world. His hand stayed on my shoulder.

"It'll all get explained when you're there."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

And that was all he was going to say. I knew it the way I know north.

There is a thing that happens between men who have done the work. You learn very fast which questions are worth the air. Cash had come all those miles to stand on a walkway in the heat and put his hand on my shoulder and tell me almost nothing. He was not going to be moved off that. Every word I spent pushing was a word wasted.