Page 58 of Animal Tamer
Not the bedroom. The couch, with a bed pillow jammed under his head and a crocheted throw half-kicked onto the floor, like even drunk blind, he couldn't make himself climb into the bed his wife left. Empty bottles stand on the coffee table in a little congregation—bourbon, a second bourbon,something clear tipped on its side. There's a wad of gauze duct-taped over his ribs, brown at the center. His shirt is off. His mouth is open. He's snoring.
Logan looks down at him for a long moment.
“This is going to be too easy,” he says. “I mean it. I've had harder fights with the carousel.”
“Easy is good,” Silas says. “Easy is the whole design.”
“Easy is boring,” Cole grumbles.
I almost want to roll my eyes. “You can find ways to entertain yourself later.”
I look at the man on the couch. Gray stubble, soft belly, the hands that grabbed Wren’s wrist folded on his chest like he's already rehearsing to be a corpse.
This isn't Harlan. This isn't years of scars carved into me. But this is a man who put his hands on the only person who ever built a door for me, and now the bill's come due.
“Where are the guns?” I ask.
“Cabinet over here,” Silas answers. “Got a little collection.”
He's right. The cabinet is oak with a glass front and a lock a child could open, and Cole doesn't even use a pick—the key is on top of the cabinet, because of course it is. Silas lifts out a pump shotgun, checks it with gloved hands, finds shells in the drawer beneath.
“His father's, probably. It's older than we are.” He feeds one shell in and racks it. “One is all the story needs.”
We take Vance under the arms.
He doesn't wake. We lift a grown man off his couch and walk him out his own back door across his own dark yard, his bare feet dragging twin lines through the dew, and all he does is groan and turn his face into Logan's shoulder like a child being carried to bed.
“Don't get comfortable,” Logan mutters at him.
The barn smells of old hay and machine oil and mouse. There's a water trough along the near wall, half full of black rainwater, and a five-gallon bucket hanging off a nail beside it. We set Vance down against a support post, and he slumps there, chin on his chest.
Cole drags a hay bale over because he likes to sit during the talking parts. Silas leans the shotgun against the far wall. Then he looks at me.
“Your show, brother.”
I take the bucket off its nail and dip it into the stale water. Then I throw it in Vance’s face.
The good doc wakes up with a strangled shout, arms flailing, and cracks the back of his head on the post. His eyes roll, focus, roll again. He blinks water out of them and finds four men standing in his barn in the moonlight coming through the loft door, and I watch him try to make sense of the situation.
“What—” His voice cracks. “What is this. Who?—”
“You know who,” I say coldly.
He squints at me and his lip curls with disgust.
“The carnival trash,” he says. “You're here abouther.”
“Careful,” Logan says softly.
“She stabbed me. You know that?” Vance presses a hand to the taped gauze and hisses. “I've got a wound. I'll have her license, I'll have her arrested, assault with a?—”
“You tore her blouse,” I say.
He stops talking.
“You crushed her wrist against a table she's worked at for six years. You put your mouth on her while she screamed in an empty building.” My voice stays surprisingly level.
“That's not—she wanted—girls like that, they—” Vance sputters.
