Page 69 of Broken Ride

"Yes," I say. "Obviously, yes."

He doesn't whoop and he doesn't make a speech. He pulls me up his body and kisses me once, slow, the kind that finishes a conversation. Then he fits me against his ribs and kills the lamp.

Inside a few minutes the man is asleep, unarmed, in a room he isn't watching, which from Wade Ashcroft is the closest thing to surrender I'll ever see.

I lie awake a while longer with my hand on his chest, listening to the interstate hum out past the curtain gap. My keys sit on the nightstand where I can reach them, old habit. In the dark the shape of the spare motel key tag still rides the ring, some room in some town I could be inside of by morning if the world went wrong again. Over a year it's hung there. It weighs nothing and I've felt it every day.

I don't take it off tonight. A body earns its way out of a habit the same way it earned its way in, one day at a time, and he'd be the first to tell me so.

But for the first time since a truck stop in the dark in another life, I fall asleep without rehearsing the route to anywhere. The last thing I think before I go under is that the finals are coming, and after the finals there's a road south. For once in my life I already know where it ends.

20

WADE

The buzzer sounds and the arena lights cut the dust into gold. I land on the pickup man's horse with both legs under me for what might be the last time this season.

The score comes over the PA while I'm still stripping my glove. It's enough. It's been enough all fall, one ride at a time, the standings holding because the man in them finally quit trying to outrun the numbers.

The crowd is loud. They always are at finals, these big rooms full of strangers who paid for the spectacle and got it. There was a season not far behind this one when the noise was the thing I rode for, the proof that Wade Ashcroft still registered on the scorecard.

Tonight it sounds different. Not smaller. Just further away, the way a siren sounds when you're no longer the emergency.

The arena empties in layers. Sponsors first, then the press, then the families with kids asleep on their shoulders.

The chute crew breaks down the panels while the livestock hands load the last of the broncs. The sound of it, steel on steel, diesel turning over in the lot, the particular quiet of a venue going dark, is the sound of every season I've ever ridden. I used to dread it the way you dread a doctor's waiting room, sitting in the noise and knowing what comes after.

Tonight I lean against the rail and let it happen. The lights cut off in sections. The dirt goes dark. Somewhere past the parking lot, trailers pull onto the highway in a line that stretches toward the next town and the next season, and the man leaning on this rail lets them go without running a ledger on what he's losing.

Colt finds me behind the chutes with a bottle of water and the same expression I’ve been wearing since the cell, the quiet appraisal of someone who remembers what he nearly had to bury. He doesn't say anything about the ride. Doesn't need to. We've been doing this long enough that the silence carries the review.

"Laney's at the trailer," he says. "Brenda's got her cornered about a lame gelding."

"Brenda corners everybody about something."

"Brenda cornered me about you before you got sober. Told me if I didn't do something useful she'd handle it herself, and I believe her." He tips his hat back. "You sticking around for the ceremony or you done being famous?"

"Done." The word fits better than it used to. A season ago it would've landed like a diagnosis.

Tonight it sits where it belongs, which is next to the rest of the decisions I've made sober, without fanfare and without anybody handing me a trophy for making them.

I call the gravel voice from the parking lot while the trailers load. Montana picks up on the second ring because Montana always picks up, and the conversation runs as it always does, honest, short, stripped to the studs.

I give him the count. He gives me the nod. The want showed up around the sixth ride of the week, wearing its usual suit, and I told it the same thing I've been telling it since the cell, which is that I'm occupied.

It doesn't leave. It never leaves. The difference between now and the man who woke up on his back seat in a fairground lot is that I've quit expecting it to.

The drive south takes two days with the trailer hitched and the highway unwinding under the kind of sky that makes you understand why people came out here and stayed.

Late fall in the Southwest is a different country from the summer circuit, the light sharper, the air carrying the smell of pinon smoke from towns you pass through without stopping. The tourist traffic is gone. The roads belong to the rigs, the ranchers, the people with somewhere to be that isn't a vacation.

Laney drives her own rig. She's been driving her own rig since I've known her, and she isn't about to start riding passenger because the season ended and the road got long. Her truck with Prescott on the door holds steady in my side mirror, following my trailer at the distance she picks, which is close enough to read my plates and far enough to make a point.

"You're driving too slow," she says over the phone, an hour south of nowhere.

"I'm pulling a loaded trailer."

"You're pulling a loaded trailer at the speed of a man who likes watching my truck in his mirror."