Page 13 of The Maverick
I poured myself a couple of fingers, set the bottle back, and walked it to a window seat near the rear of the cabin. The leather sighed when I sat down. I took a sip.
It was good. Better than good. The kind of bourbon a man saved for nights he wanted to remember and couldn't afford to drink for nights he wanted to forget. It tasted like char and caramel and something darker underneath, like a campfire that had been burning a long time.
The engines spooled up. The pilots said something muffled through the cabin speaker and the plane rolled, then turned, then ran. The desert peeled back under the wing. The red rock got smaller and smaller and then disappeared into the kind of blue that only exists at altitude.
I let myself stop thinking about Davari.
He was a pebble in the boot. Already shaken out. I'd dump the rest of him out at altitude, and by the time we were overKansas he'd be the way every dead man eventually was for me, which was nobody.
I let my mind go where it wanted to go.
It wanted to go home.
Not to Bragg. Not to the apartment in Fayetteville with the bad shower and the shotgun shells in the kitchen drawer. Not to any of the cities I'd put my passport stamp in.
Homemeant Valentine. It meant the ranch outside town and the cottonwoods that lined the south fence and the little tin-roofed bunkhouse our daddy had built with his own hands the summer before I was born. It meant horses. It meant the sound seven boys made coming through a screen door at the same time. It meant ropes coiled on saddle horns and dust working its way into every fold of every shirt I owned and our daddy's voice from the porch sayingboys, supper.
It meant Mama at the kitchen table, sun coming in low through the window, humming something with no words while she rolled out a pie crust.
We'd been a family.
We'd been the kind of family people pointed at in town.Look, the Dane boys.Seven of us, stair-stepped, all of us with the same square jaw and the same loud laugh and the same instinct to wrestle whatever happiness we could out of a day before the day shut down. We'd been good at it. I'd been the best at it. Tommy Dane could find a reason to grin in a hailstorm.
Then, it had all gone away.
Daddy walked out the door one morning and didn't come back. The boys scattered. The Army got me. The rest went where they went. Mama held the ranch together as long as she could, and then her brain started doing what brains sometimes do when they've been holding too much for too long, and the ranch went to a manager and Mama went to a place in Marfa where thestaff wore name badges and the carpet was the kind of beige that didn't show stains.
That was the family.
That was what was left of it.
If this trip across the country meant somebody was coming for what was left—if it meant some piece of what we'd had needed defending, or if there was even a chance, however small, of getting some sliver of it back—then I didn't need to know any more than I already knew.
I'd move heaven. I'd move earth. I'd move whatever was in between.
That was the whole calculation.
The bourbon was good.
The plane flew east.
5
REBECCA
Mama called on Sunday mornings the way the sun came up over Caton's Chapel—without asking permission, steady and warm and completely indifferent to whether you were ready for it.
My phone lit up early, and I was already awake, lying on my back in the narrow bed in my narrow room, listening to the apartment breathe around me. Tasha was still sleeping—I could tell by the quality of the silence on her side of the wall. Devon had worked a closing shift and wouldn't surface until noon. Geoff was the wild card. Geoff was always the wild card.
I picked up on the second ring.
"Hey, Mama."
"Rebecca Lynn." She said my name the way she always did, both words together, like they were one word, like she'd invented it. "I was thinking about you this morning during my coffee. How are you, baby? How's Charleston treating you?"
I pulled the blanket up to my chin and looked at the water stain on the ceiling that I'd decided, sometime in the secondweek, looked like the state of Tennessee if you tilted your head. "It's good. Real good. I played a wine bar the other night."
"You did?" The pleasure in her voice was immediate and uncomplicated, the kind that didn't have any ego in it. My mama had never been to a wine bar in her life. She didn't know what one looked like or what people did there or why a person would pay twelve dollars for a glass of something they could buy by the bottle at the Walmart in Sevierville for eight. But she heardplayedand she heard the pride underneath my careful casual and she lit up for me the way she always had. "How'd it go, honey?"
