Page 8

Because I had boards. Of course I had boards — two lengths of two-by-eight riding in the bed with the duffels. A woman rebuilding her life from scratch reads packing lists like scripture, and every list said carry boards for mud or snow. I hauled them out, slopped around to the back, and dug at the slop behind each rear tire with my hands until I could jam the lumber in under the treads. Then the floor mats, both of them, wedged in front of the front tires. Then back up into the cab, muddy to the elbows now too, and I put it in low and eased the gas like a surgeon, gentle, gentle — and felt it bite, felt the truck heave up and forward six whole inches with my heart going up with it — and then the boards squirted out backward like watermelon seeds and the tires dropped and spun, and mud fountained up over the tailgate and rained down on the blue tarp, on the duffels, on everything I owned.

I tried it in reverse. I tried rocking it, forward-reverse-forward, which works on snow and does absolutely nothing in gumbo except distribute the vehicle more evenly downward. I got out and repositioned the boards and tried again, and the second time one board snapped with a crack like a rifle and the truck settled deeper, past the axles now, the frame nearly kissing the mud, and I stood there in the last of the light, painted brown from the knees down and the elbows down, breathing hard, absolutely beaten, over soil.

I climbed back into the cab because there was nowhere else in the world to go. Put my forehead on the wheel. The wheel was cold. Somewhere out in the dusk a cow bawled and another one answered, and the pamphlet came to me, the way it did — the one from the Bozeman crisis center that I'd read standing up in a laundromat because taking it home was too dangerous, back when everything was too dangerous. Box breathing, it said. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four. It had a diagram, a friendly little square with arrows, as if panic were a shape you could walk the fence line of.

In for four. The truck ticked and settled. Hold. Out for four. Mud dripped somewhere under the chassis with a sound like a slow clock. Hold. Again. Again, until my heart came down out of my throat and went back to its regular job, and the courtroom in my head adjourned for lack of a quorum, and I was just a tired woman in a cold truck in the beautiful dark, which was survivable. Which was, technically, everything I'd asked for.

I rolled my head sideways on the wheel and looked at Clover, who had slid against the phone at some point during the flailing and was now face-down in the seat crease, which frankly tracked.

"Three years," I told her, propping her back up with one muddy finger. "Three years we lived with an actual monster. We planned. We saved. We executed a nighttime extraction that would've impressed the Army." I gestured, largely, at the windshield, the bog, the situation. "Defeated by soil. Dirt with a water feature. That's what gets us."

Clover regarded the mud with her one good eye and declined to editorialize, and I was actually, against every odd, starting to laugh — a small cracked disaster of a laugh, but real — when I heard it.

An engine. Not behind me on the county road. Ahead. Up the drive, from the ranch side, low and big and coming unhurried through the dusk, and then headlights swung around some unseen bend and found me, twin beams lighting up the mud and the drowned truck and the tarp and all of it, and behind the lights I could make out the shape of the thing carrying them — a ranch pickup, high and wide, the kind of truck that makes other trucks look like toys.

Something very large was coming, and every cell in my body stood up at once to count the exits.

My hand hit the door lock before I'd had a single conscious thought.

And then I reached across and did the passenger side too, and only afterward did the rest of me arrive to review the decision. Doors locked. Engine — I turned the key one click, so the battery was live, so the windows worked, so the horn worked. Headlights of my own: off, because lit up I was a display case and dark I was harder to read. Six months out and the checklist still ran itself, smooth as a tide, and I sat in my drowned truck behind my locked doors and watched the lights come.

The pickup came down the drive at the speed of a man who had never been late for anything because the world waited on him, not the other way around. It was huge — I could hear that before I could see it, the diesel note rolling ahead of it through the dusk, something felt in the chest as much as heard — and when its lights leveled out of the last bend they caught my truck full on, and me in it, and I sat very still in the brightness like a rabbit in a field.

And then it stopped.

Not close. That was the first thing that didn't fit, and I logged it before I understood I was logging it. The pickup rolled to a stop a full truck-length back from my front bumper — an entire body of space left deliberately between us, when every instinct I had said a man in his position pulls up door-to-door, leans out, takes the high ground. This one stopped short, out in the open, where I could see all of him, and set his parking brake with a clunk I heard through two windshields, and for a moment nothing happened at all. Just his lights and my mud and the cooling tick of two engines, and the dark coming down over the valley like a lid.

Then the driver's door opened, and the figure that came out of it unfolded.

And kept unfolding.

I'd been braced for big. Ranch country, big truck, I'd done the projection. I had not braced for this, because there was no bracing for this — the man straightened up out of that cab in stages, like something assembling itself, and when he finally stood at his whole height against the last gray light in the western sky he blotted out a measurable percentage of it. Six and a half feet of him, or close enough that the difference was academic from where I sat. A hat. Shoulders that belonged on machinery, on load-bearing architecture, filling out a dark canvas coat that would have fit over my entire wardrobe with room left for the duffels. And hands — even at a truck-length, even in the dying light, I could see the hands, hanging loose and open at his sides, enormous, the kind of hands that made you recalculate everything else you'd been looking at.

My body did its math.

It did it fast and it did it cold, the flush moving down from my scalp like ice water, my vision tunneling in at the edges, my heartbeat relocating to my ears — and underneath the noise, the old animal arithmetic ran its columns. Distance to him: forty feet. His stride: call it four feet. Ten strides, seven seconds, maybe five. My exits: none, that was the joke, the truck was part of the earth now; I could climb out the passenger side into knee-deep gumbo and be run down in the dark by a man with a two-foot reach advantage and legs like fence posts, in a county where nobody knew my name yet, with a phone that was off.

Except.

Except my eyes kept feeding me data that wouldn't file.

He hadn't moved. That was the thing. He'd gotten out of the truck and then he'd just — stood there, beside his own door, one hand resting on the top of it, making no approach at all. And when he finally did move, he did it slow. Not cautious-slow, not creeping — deliberate slow, every motion announced before it happened, his boots finding the firm ground at the edge of the bog and stopping there, well back, his body angled half away from me instead of squared up. I knew that walk. I knew it professionally. It was the walk I used on a cast horse, on a down cow, on anything wild and cornered and thinking about dying rather than being touched — you come in oblique, you telegraph everything, you stop before their fear line and you let them do the rest of the looking. I had spent my whole working life moving exactly the way this enormous man was moving, and I had never once seen it from the inside before, and something in my chest turned over slowly, like ground thawing, and I hated it, and I couldn't stop watching.

He looked at my truck. At the buried axles, the snapped board, the mud thrown twenty feet in every direction, the whole crime scene of my competence. He didn't laugh. He didn't shake his head. He didn't produce a phone or a smile or a single one of the gestures men produce over a woman's stuck vehicle. He just read it, the way I'd read the town — thoroughly, once — and then he lifted his eyes to my windshield, to the dark shape of me behind the glass, and touched two fingers to the brim of his hat.

And spoke.

"Evenin'." His voice came across forty feet of mud and through my rolled-up window like it didn't acknowledge either obstacle. It was unhurried. Unbothered.

"You stuck good."

That was all. Not are you okay, sweetheart, not need a big strong hand, not any of the openers I had catalogued and armored against over three years of watching charm work a room. No smile — I could see that much even in the half-dark, the beard, the stillness of the face under the hat brim. No teeth. No performance. He delivered his assessment of my situation the way a man reads a thermometer, flat and factual and correct, and then he just stood there at the edge of the bog with his enormous hands hanging open at his sides, and waited.

Waited. For me.

He wasn't coming closer. I understood it slowly, the way you understand a thing your whole body has been screaming against — he had stopped at a distance he'd chosen, and the distance was the message, and he was not going to cross it until something on my side of the glass changed. The next move belonged to me. He'd handed it over, forty feet of dark mud between us.

Derek's voice tried again — it's a trick, Jojo, the nice ones are the patient ones, you of all people should know — and for once the voice sounded thin. Rehearsed. Because the animals wouldn't have cared about any of it, the size or the silence or the stories I hadn't heard yet, and the animals were the only judges I still trusted, and every skittish, cornered, wild-eyed creature I had ever gentled was standing up inside me now and telling me the same impossible thing.