Page 18 of Forbidden Protector

Then I find the part that stops me.

He didn't step on his own tracks going out. He walked beside them.

A man covering his trail walks in his own prints, because it halves the count and it's what everybody thinks is clever. Walking beside them doubles the set and leaves both lines clean, in and out, start to finish.

I do that. I have done it where the difference was my life.

You lay a second track so the man reading it can tell exactly where you went and exactly where you stopped.

You do it when you want him to know.

I crouch at the wire with my forearms on my knees and look back up the line he came down. The timber is black now all the way to the first bench, and somewhere past it is a mountain nobody in my family has surveyed in a hundred and fifty years.

He walked in during the two hours everybody in this valley was standing on a hill east of St. Bridget’s. He had our schedule and he had it early.

Nobody flags a fence for himself. You flag for the man who comes after. Eye height for a rider, on the exact line where the survey stops, double knotted so the wind couldn't take it before I got here.

Here. He's taunting. This is where I stopped.

Come see how far I got.

I photograph it from four angles and leave it hanging, because a man who takes a thing like that down has told the other man he was frightened by it. Then I get in and drive back down the slope.

My house sits off the county road a half mile up the Blackwater driveway with nothing around it. Can’t see it from the road and that was the point.

I come in through the mudroom, put the folder in the safe and the rifle in the rack, and I stand in the kitchen in the dark with the refrigerator running and my coat still on. I am tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

Then I go upstairs and turn the water on.

I get the shirt off over my head and drop it, then step out of the suit pants, and catch myself in the mirror over the sink like a stranger coming around a corner.

Two years of ranch work on top of ten in a Ranger regiment, most of it flat on my belly behind a rifle in country nobody sends postcards from, waiting on one man to walk into the crosshairs I'd already decided he'd walk into.

Shoulders that don't fit through a church pew. Dark ink down both arms, my mother's side surfacing in me the same as it surfaced in her. The scroll on my chest and the line of numbers under it that mean home to every man who ever asked and something else entirely to me. The mountain across my back I have never explained to a living soul.

The hoop in my ear catching the light. A dead-serious man with a piece of jewelry in his head because a kid from Butte thought it was funny in a hangar in a country I don't talk about.

I look at all of it and think: she catalogued every one of these in ninety minutes with her hands in her lap.

And that's the end of the fighting.

The water comes down hot and I get under it and put both hands flat on the tile and let it run over the back of my neck and between my shoulders, and I do not last ten seconds.

She turned around.

That's where it starts. A church full of people and a hundred and thirty years of floorboards announcing me, and she turned around in her pew and looked up at me and did not stop looking.

She took the whole thing in, unhurried, the way she reads a scene.

And I let her.

And then the color came up her throat from the collar. She knew I could see it and she still would not look away first.

She turned around to catalogue me and caught herself wanting instead, in public, in front of her own body, and then had to sit with it for fifty minutes with my knees against her spine.

I drop one hand and take hold of myself and I'm already hard enough that it pulls a sound out of me I'm glad the water covers.

I skip the kiss. Not because I'm being noble about it. Because the kiss is what a man pictures when he still thinks he'd be gentle, and I am not going to lie to myself in my own shower.