Page 14 of The Drifter

Also, he had found me.

I don't have a phone. I don't have an address. I hadn't known myself, four days ago, that I'd be in that town. I picked it off a bus board. Nobody on this earth knew where I was, because nobody knowing where I was is not an accident of my life.

And my little brother had knocked on my door before checkout.

"There's a strip forty-some miles east," Cash said. "Private. There's an airplane on it."

"I'll take the bus."

He didn't argue. He just looked at me.

That's all he did. He looked at me, patient and flat and utterly without judgment, the way he has looked at every hard thing in his life, including, I have no doubt, the ones that were dying.

I looked back. And I understood, standing there with my pack on one shoulder, exactly what that look meant, which was: You already know how bad it is, or I would not be standing here.

"All right," I said. "I'll take the airplane."

"Good."

"You're not coming."

It wasn't a question, and he didn't insult me by making it one.

"No."

"Where are you going?"

"Out to see Mama again," he said. "Then, the ranch. Somebody ought to walk the fence line."

And there it was again. Straight through the ribs, no armor on that side, none there'd ever been.

I almost asked him.

I stood there on that concrete in the heat with the words all the way up in my throat—let me ride out with you—and I could see the whole thing, the drive out, the two of us not talking, the gravel of that lot, the door of that place, the chair by the window. Her face coming up.

I didn't say it.

I'm not ready. I don't know that I'll ever be ready. And I have never once in my life been able to explain to another human being how a man can be afraid of the one person on this earth who always came out into the dark to find him.

Cash watched me not ask.

He didn't push. He never has. He just took his hand off my shoulder and said, "Go check out. I'll be in the car."

I turned in the key. The woman with the crossword took it and said nothing and did not look up.

He'd rented something gray and forgettable. The dog rode in the back and put his chin on the seat behind Cash's shoulder and stayed there the whole way. Cash drove east into that country with one wrist on the wheel.

Fifty miles.

We didn't talk. That wasn't him. Cash gives back exactly what you give him. He'd have talked all fifty if I'd opened my mouth.

I didn't. I sat there and watched the fence posts come and go.

Because this thing—whatever it was, whatever waited on the far end of it—was already reaching into my life, and my life is a road, and a road is the one thing that does not survive being interrupted. You stop it once and it isn't a road anymore. It's just a place you're standing.

They'd found me. That was the thing that wouldn't stop coming up. My brothers had reached into an empty part of Texas and put a hand on a man who has spent years making certain no hand could reach him. And they'd done it in a week, maybe less. That takes reach. It takes money. It takes people.

It takes something being very badly wrong.