Page 12 of The Drifter

Because I'd found something better than him out there, and it wasn't a person. It was the road itself. The clean, dumb, uncomplaining fact of it. A road doesn't want anything from you. A road never once looked at me across a kitchen table with its eyes going wet, or asked me to be somebody, or left. You put your feet on it and it takes you. It doesn’t care who you are. When you're done with it, it lets you go.

Everything else in this life is a house with people in it and a door that a man can walk out of.

The road is cleaner.

That was a few years ago. I never came back inside, not really. Whatever the road did to me, it finished doing a long time ago. I'm not a man who travels. I'm a man who is the traveling. The rest of it—the towns, the diners, the two jailbirds on the concrete, the woman with the crossword—is just what goes by.

I shut the water off.

I dried off and dressed and put the last of it in the pack. Two shirts. Socks. The razor. The toothbrush and the little tube. The knife, the money clip, the card. The pistol went in the small of my back where it's lived, and the three mags went in the side pocket where they've lived just as long. It takes me under two minutes to leave anywhere. It has never once taken longer.

There was a bus out at one o'clock. I'd read the board at the Chevron on the way in, the way you read a board when you don't have a phone and never will.

West this time.

Not far. I'd go west and deeper in, and I'd sit up front and watch that big, empty country come at me. At some point—for no reason I'd be able to explain to anybody, and wouldn't try—I'd feel the pull go slack, and I'd get up and tell the driver to let me off. And he would. And the bus would go on without me, and I'd stand on the shoulder in the diesel smell and look around at wherever I was.

That's the way. That's been my way for a long time now.

Then, somebody knocked on the door.

I stood still and ran the list, which is a short one.

The woman with the crossword didn't knock. She'd already been paid and she had no interest in me past that. There was no housekeeping in a place like that; you got clean towels if you carried the dirty ones down to the office and looked pitiful. Nobody knew me. Nobody in that town knew my name, because I hadn't given it to anybody, including the sheriff, who hadn't asked, because he hadn't wanted it.

So, it was the law. The deputy, most likely, sent back around with a form to sign. It happens.

I moved to the side of the window and put one finger on the curtain and pulled it a half-inch off the glass.

It was not the law.

Not even in the neighborhood of the law.

Standing out on that hot concrete walkway in a black T-shirt with his hands loose at his sides was my brother, Cash. There was a big, tan dog sitting against his leg. The dog was looking directly at my window.

I stood there a second with my finger on that curtain. I’ll admit that the world went a little sideways on me.

I opened the door.

"Clint," Cash said.

And he grinned—Cash, who I have seen grin maybe eleven times in his life. Then, he came in fast and got both arms around me and about broke my back.

I held on to him. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I got a fistful of my little brother's shirt and I held on, out on the walkway of a ten-room motel with the heat coming up through my boots. It was a good few seconds before either one of us was ready to let go of the other.

"It's good to see you," I said. "What in the hell are you doing here?"

He stepped back and looked at me. He let the dog come forward and sniff my hand, once, professionally, and then sit down again against his leg.

"You're a hard man to find."

"That's the idea."

And I stood there and I looked at him, and something in my chest went quiet and strange.

Because Cash had changed.

You have to understand about my brother. Cash died when he was a boy. Down a shaft on our own ground. They got him out, but what came back up out of that hole was not the same child that went down it. He was never wrong afterward, and he was never afraid, and he was never anything but calm. He walked through this world like a man standing in a doorway with one foot in another room. The rest of us went into the service and got hard. Cash went in and got quiet. Then, he went and found the one line of work on this earth that nobody wants and almost nobody can do, which is going into the worst places in the world and bringing home our dead.