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“Yup. Take your food and head to the truck. I’ll be right out. I thought I heard coyotes last night, so I’m gonna get another rifle for us to take.”
Guns. I was used to them, of course. I was in the military, so that went hand in hand, but since the bomb… anything that made a noise louder than the pop of a champagne cork and I was hitting the dirt. The first time I’d heard even that, at one of those parties Harvey took me too, I almost lost my mind.
“Okay, you just got real pale on me, Eli,” Noah said, setting down his cup of coffee.
“Guns… I’m not afraid of them, per se…”
“It’s the noise, right?”
I nodded and took another bite, almost swallowing it without chewing. “You should see me on the fourth of July,” I said, trying to ease the way that sounded by a little laughter that came out as shaky as I suddenly was. “I’m a mess.”
“I bet. Listen, I don’t shoot coyotes unless I absolutely have no other choice. If you kill them, their pack actually goes nuts in making more of them. The females go like instantly into heat and then you’ve got a real problem. So, I don’t want you to worry about me just shooting willy nilly.”
“Okay,” I said in relief. “That’s good to know.”
“You ever get any help with your PTSD?”
Those letters. I hated them. We were all labeled that, sure, mostly because we had the fucking issue, but I hated them. Every emotion I had after I came home was pushed onto that, so it could be ignored as my PTSD. “I did, right after, but it’s not something I like to talk about.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” he said, but added, “Hey, look at me a minute.”
It took me a second, but I did, turning my head to him. His eyes narrowed as he examined my face, and his hand moved slowly to it, and once there, his thumb brushed a tear from my cheek I hadn’t felt.
“Shh, now. If you don’t wanna be around guns, that’ll be hard here. I don’t walk around with them like they’re my entire personality, like some idiots, but I gotta have ‘em. There are real predators here.”
I hated him seeing me cry, hated the weakness I was showing to such a powerful man. Still, that one touch made me remember all those feelings from the previous day, and I had to push them away or make a fool of myself.
“I’m gonna get to the truck. I’ll meet you.”
I almost ran out of the house and trudged through the newly blown drifts to get to the truck, but I didn’t get into it. I leaned back on it, watching my huffing breaths as they clouded outside my lips, evaporating into the air, only to be replaced as they came fast.
The red barn, red as an apple, stood tall in front of me, reminding me of everything I loved about the ranch. It was firm, bright, cutting through the rest of the world and making me feel as if I was finally home.
But even home didn’t take my nightmares, my panic, my shaking. I’d gone to therapy, sure, I’d listened to all the shrinks talk about trauma and the effects it had on the body. I wasn’t stupid, and I knew the things to do, but then something came along to cut through my brain and reach those fears…
“You ready?” Noah called from behind me and I spun around, trying to make my face brighter.
“Sure,” I rushed to say, smiling. At least that time, it didn’t come with tears to show what a liar I was.
We got into the truck and Noah turned it on to get it warm before taking off. As we sat there in the freezing truck, I used my being cold to hide my shaking, running my gloved hands over my arms, shoving them between my knees after that. Noah was watching me like he always did, without his eyes on me. I felt him, though, taking notes on everything I was doing and not doing.
Thankfully, he said nothing about it and as soon as the heater was blowing air that wasn’t icier than it was outside, we backed out of the driveway and headed east on the little dirt road.
“I had this horse once,” he said as he drove slowly over the crusted snow that made a terrible racket as the tires busted through it. “I took him off this guy that was a piece of shit if ever I saw one. He enjoyed using spurs and crops on his animals, and that horse, he was a little wild, didn’t like being treated harshly. So, I had enough one day and took him, brought him home and he did like you sometimes. Even after he was treated nice, he would hear a crack, like a crop was coming to smack him, and he’d start bucking like he was seeing red, bolting away from the noise.”
“You’re comparing me to horses again.”
“Sure. Horses are like humans, only better, in my opinion. I’d hand over most of the human race to the aliens to take on their ships, but not horses.”
In other words, he thought I was a keeper, maybe. That eased me some. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. No use for ‘em. Horses, now, I’d put up a fight for any of ‘em. Treat ‘em right, they’ll treat you right. Treat ‘em bad, and you’ll get bucked right into a field of cactus.”
“What if… what if that horse is too far gone? If they don’t have much buck in them anymore? What then?”
“I don’t believe it’s possible. You can break their spirit, sure, but it’ll come back, given the right circumstances. Eli, your spirit isn’t broken. I see it in you. You just need to remember what it feels like to have it.”
I admitted, “Just when I think I feel it again, I have some stupid episode and it’s gone.”
