Page 67 of Coyote

I started with the fences because they were the easy part, the four lines any map would have. Then I drew the parts no map had.

I drew the trail behind the second barn that dropped into the arroyo and came out past the gate, so a rider could leave without crossing the yard. Next came the service road, and where it met the county road behind the sheds. Then the stock tanks that held water through June, marked with circles, and the ones that dried up but still looked full from a distance, marked with crosses so he'd know not to trust them. The north wash, and I wrote DEAD in it, because the radio was, every time, and a man alone in there needed to know his voice wouldn't climb out.

I ran the pencil along the ridge line and stopped.

The pencil sat on the paper at the break in the rocks, and my thumb ached where I was pressing it.

Then I drew the cave, and the trail up, and the overhang where the saddles stayed dry, and beside it I drew a little string of hanging bones so he'd know it wasn't a mistake.

The last thing went in the corner, small: the flat rock in the east wash where I cleaned my kills. He'd asked where I went that day. Now the answer had a place on paper.

I rolled the map and tied it with a piece of baling twine off the bench.

In the equipment shed, the spare keys hung on the pegboard by the door, each on its own nail over a strip of Rafe's masking tape. I took down the key to the flatbed.

The last time I'd taken a key off a pegboard, I'd been stealing a man with it.

I closed my fist around this one and went to find him.

John was on the porch steps with his forearms on his knees, taking up the whole middle of the stairway, same as he took up doorframes and bunks and the inside of my chest. The porch light was on above him. Out past the yard, the dark had come down all the way. The cicadas had quit and the crickets had started.

Pearl lifted her head off the boards when I came around the corner. I sat down one stair up from him, close enough to catch his warmth in the night air, far enough that nothing on me touched anything on him. Nimue shifted at my throat and settled.

I put the rolled paper on his knee, and the key on top of it.

He looked at it for a moment. Then he picked both up, and the map crackled open between his big hands, and he tilted it into the porch light and held it there, reading. "What am I looking at?"

"Every way off Pae Saco." I leaned in and put my finger on the trail behind the second barn. "That one gets a rider out without crossing the yard, if a man doesn't want the yard watching him go. The circles are tanks that hold water in June." My finger crossed the ridge and stopped on the little hanging bones. "You know that one."

John's thumb came down slowly next to my finger, beside the bones, not on them.

"You put your cave on here."

"Everything's on there." My mouth had gone dry, and I made the words come anyway. "It's everything I know about leaving this place. Nobody else has all of it. Now you do."

He turned his head. The porch light sat in his eyes, and the rest of his face stayed in the dark, and I made myself keep talking before whatever was in that look could reach the part of me that wanted to take the map back and burn it.

"The key's to the flatbed. The spare's yours now. It stays in your pocket, and it never comes back on the pegboard."

He turned the key over in his fingers. "Is that Rafe's to give, or yours?"

"Rafe's nail. I took it." I looked out at the yard because it was easier than looking at him. "He'll count that pegboard inside a week and know whose pocket to look in, and I'll answer for it at the turquoise table. That's between me and him. When your ribs are knit, I'll teach you the saddle and the bridle. Then you won't need Linc, or the truck, or anybody."

"Coyote."

"So you never have to ask anybody the way out." I swallowed and held my breath.

The crickets carried the quiet for a while.

"And if I use it?" John asked. "The door."

"Then I'll follow." I turned my head and held his eyes. "That part doesn't change. You can have all the doors, big man. I'll just be behind you, everywhere, until I die."

He laughed. It was low and quiet, and it moved the boards under us, and it didn't have one sharp edge anywhere.

"That's the most romantic threat anybody's ever given me," he said.

"It isn't a threat."