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"Atonement (Part 2)"
The road unrolled like a Sunday tie, crooked in places, respectable enough if you didn't stare too long.
Cash drove one-handed, the way men who grew up steering tractors and arguments do. His other hand occupied Daisy's thermos lid, which had already been promoted to cup, communion by caffeine. Jackson had his feet braced on the glove box, his ankles crossed, and a paper sack of biscuits between his knees like a sacrament he planned to share once he was sure Cash remembered how to be grateful.
"Tell me again why Daisy wrote 'CALL ME AT 9, 12, 2, 5' like she's the Department of Transportation," Cash said, eyes ahead, mouth leaning toward a grin he'd deny under oath.
"Because you forget lunch if she don't," Jackson said, tearing a biscuit and shoving the half toward him. "Because she knows you try to outrun your stomach and that never ends well. Because she loves bossin' you. Take your pick."
Cash accepted the bread with the air of a man forgiving a debt. "I do love a clear directive," he allowed. "What I do not love is how this map is greasier than a county fair funnel cake." He held up the folded atlas Cassidy had insisted they take, edges shine-slick with barbecue thumbprints from three summers ago. "You know, GPS would tell us where Blake is right now."
"GPS would sell our souls to a man named Gary in Tampa for a coupon code," Jackson said, scrolling through his own phone anyway like he might catch a whisper of a trail in the notifications. "Also, Blake don't turn his on. He could hide in a parade and no one would see him, less he wanted 'em to."
Cash swung them around a slow cattle truck, courtesy of a preacher passing the plate. "So where's he wantin' to be seen now?" he asked, casual, but there was a line in it, an old, bright wire of belief. "C'mon, golden. You and that man know each other like you know the back roads. Where's he gone?"
Jackson watched the pines strobe. "If I was him," he said, words picking their way like men in boots across slick rocks, "I'd follow the old circuit. Not the money shows...the little ones. Fairgrounds that still use chalk and prayer. He'll count exits. He always counts exits." He smiled, touched and hurt by his own remembering. "He'll sit where he can see the highway like it might stand up and testify."
"So." Cash tilted his head. "North? South? West toward nothin'? East toward worse nothin'?"
Jackson blew out a breath, cheeks hollowing. "I ain't sure where to start."
They hit a rough seam. Cash's jaw moved once. Then, brake lights bloomed, gravel hissed, and the truck shouldered onto the skinny dirt lip of a county road as if it had remembered a chore it had left behind. Jackson grabbed the oh-hell handle and Daisy's biscuits at the same time, priorities correct.
Cash cut the engine. Silence fell in a circle, hot and surprised. Out beyond the ditch a hand-painted board announced JESUS & TATERS in faded red, and an armadillo looked up like it had been appointed judge.
Cash got out like the door had offended him. He set his boots in the powder and put his hands on his hips, a narrow-hipped silhouette against a slab of sky, and Jackson had to clamp his teeth on a laugh because if he let it go now it was gonna run all day.
Cash pointed at the horizon. "You mean to tell me," he said, very calm in that way, which meant not calm at all. "We left Willow Creek with a sack of biscuits, two saints, and not one single plan? 'We'll find him'...that was the plan? That's not a plan, Jackson Bell, that's a feeling."
Jackson's shoulders were already shaking, and he slid out slowly, hands up in surrender. "In my defense," he said, the words tripping over laughter he was trying to contain, "feelings have carried this relationship a long way."
Cash squinted at him. "Boy, if you don't quit smilin' like a possum at a picnic..." He broke off, exasperated and fond, getting into a fistfight behind his eyes. He gestured vaguely at the empty county: pines, a sun-blind field, a mailbox with its red flag up like it was trying to wave down an ambulance. "We are in the middle of nowhere. We got 'Jesus & Taters' as our best landmark, and your plan is to let fate drive."
"Fate ain't insured," Jackson said, and that did it. He doubled with a laugh he tried to stuff back behind his teeth, which only made it louder. It came out young and helpless, and Cash's mouth betrayed him, a smile punching through before he could re-holster it.
"You're laughin' at me."
"I am," Jackson said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. "'Cause you're nervous, and the only thing that scares Cash Dalton is leavin' Willow Creek."
"I been beyond the sign," Cash said, offended on principle. "Plenty."
"You been to Yazoo and back for a hinge catalog," Jackson said. "This is a quest."
"Don't you make it sound like we gon' meet a wizard."
"Might," Jackson said, nodding toward the armadillo. "There he is. Go ask him where Blake is."
Cash folded his arms, and the pose was every photo of him at thirteen when he thought sulk was a career. He held it three beats and then let it go like a man laying down a weapon. "Fine," he said. He looked at Jackson over the roof of the truck. "But I ain't drivin' blind another mile. We need a how."
Jackson sobered, the laughter sliding back into his chest as birds go quiet when a cloud covers the sun. "You're right," he said. "Okay. He likes the feed stores that tack rodeo flyers to corkboards with pushpins missin' their heads. We stop at every one 'tween here and the county line and look for his name or his hat." He ticked them off on his fingers. "We call Shorty and Roany and Miguel. We ask Tessa what contracts he turned down. We check motels and ask for a man with a belt buckle tan and a trailer parked outta the way. We eat somethin' green before three o'clock so we don't get ugly."
Cash's mouth twitched. "Now that is almost a plan." He scuffed the toe of his boot at the red dust. "We stop at the next gas station that sells boiled peanuts. If they got them, we ask if a man with a hat like weather filled up late last night payin' cash and countin' exits. Folks always remember a man that size."
Jackson nodded, serious as a ledger. "They sure do."
Cash blew out a breath and shook the nerves off like water. "Alright," he said, climbing back in. "We aim for Franklin, then the little fairground in Bogue Chitto. If we end up at a bait shop I'm makin' you eat an earthworm."
"Deal," Jackson said, and slid back into the cab, flicking the paper map open like it was a fan. "We are here," he announced, pointing to absolutely nowhere. "And Blake is between here and...somewhere."
Cash grunted, keyed the engine, and patted the dashboard twice. The truck understood its assignment and climbed back into the lane. Gravel spit, then settled.
They rolled on.
Half an hour later, they'd found their rhythm again, engine hum and coffee sips, the paper map sliding around like a fish on a cutting board.
Jackson squinted past the bug spatter on the windshield and said, almost to himself, "We ain't that far from Bogalusa."
Cash tipped his chin without looking over. "What's in Bogalusa?"
Jackson's mouth crooked. "His past."
Cash snorted. "Well, ain't that a polite way to say 'rattlesnakes.'"
"Also, a man named Tom Earl with grease for blood and a soft spot for strays," Jackson said. "If the shop's still standin'. Blake used to sleep in a parts room there when he was sixteen and mean as a cut rope." He drummed fingers on his knee, weighing the risk like hardware in a palm. "It's a long shot. Might be the kind that pays out."
Cash's eyes flicked to him, quick, a smile shaving the edge off his skepticism. "Say the word. I'll point this sled toward childhood trauma and hope the brakes work."
Jackson laughed, low, grateful. "Turn off 98 at the sign with the possum on it."
They passed the feed store with the rooster plywood cutout, promising salt blocks and miracle feed. Cash filed it for the trip back. He put the blinker on like manners were owed to an empty road. "You think he went home-home," he said, making the word gentler by not poking at it too hard.
"I think he circles what he ain't done with," Jackson said. "Bogalusa's a loop he never closed. If he's countin' exits, that town's a mile marker he can't drive by without lookin'." He rolled his lip under his teeth. "He told me he learned to sleep with his boots on there. You don't forget a floor like that."
Cash grunted then tapped the wheel twice, like a man knocking on a table to test the joinery. "You got an address? A cross street?"
"Tom Earl's was off Columbia near the mill," Jackson said. "Sign was half burned out, EAR _' S, like the Lord wanted it to say ears on purpose because that man could hear a transmission lie from a county over."
Cash chuckled. "We'll ask at the bait shop. Folks always know where the old men live who can fix things."
He slid them into the left lane, glancing in the mirror as if there might be anyone to see. The road shrugged, agreeable. Pine gave way to low country, the light changing in a way you felt in the wrists first. Somewhere behind them, Willow Creek's silhouette had already softened into the flip side of a coin; ahead. The Pearl River thought about braiding itself between two states and decided yes.
Jackson reached into the sack, found a biscuit that had become a warm, reliable promise, and handed it over. "Fuel," he said.
Cash took a bite, talking around it the way men do who trust each other's grammar. "I ain't opposed to goin' backwards to go forward," he said. "But we ain't goin' down there to yank him out by the collar. We ain't his fixers."
"No," Jackson said, serious. He let the window down two inches, the hot air shouldering in and the stink of pine and river breath threading the truck like an old story. "If he's not there, Bogalusa'll know where he ain't."
"Mm." Cash chewed, swallowed, wiped a crumb with his thumb like he was ashamed to waste it. "Pass me that thermos," Cash said. "I gotta baptize this plan with caffeine."
They rode a stretch with no talk. Sun laid a white blade across the hood. Dragonflies stitched crazy seams in the ditch. A red-tail made a lazy circle over a field full of hay bales wrapped like giant marshmallows. The road made that old melody sound under the tires, a whirr you could mistake for confidence if you weren't careful.
Jackson reached out and flicked the hanging saint with a knuckle, a sailor touching mast. "You good?" he asked, not because he doubted, just because he liked the way Cash's quiet yeses felt when they landed.
Cash slid him a look that had a lot of years and not a speck of doubt in it. "I'm in a truck with you and a mission. That's as good as I get." He let the grin grow. "I do reserve the right to complain about Louisiana humidity on behalf of my pores."
"You and your pores been to Biloxi in July," Jackson said. "You'll live."
They caught the two-lane that would spit them at the state line. The Pearl lifted its dark shoulder under the bridge and shouldered past cypress knees and beer cans without explaining itself to anyone. As they crossed, something in the cab shifted, a pressure ease, a name changing in the mouth. The sign popped up green and ungainly: WELCOME TO LOUISIANA. Somebody'd shot the O clean out twenty years ago. It remained a zero you drove through.
*
Bogalusa rose out of the heat like a mirage that had given up pretending.
Storefronts kept their eyes shut: plywood lids over glass, hand-painted FOR RENT curling at the corners, plastic pennants faded to the color of old teeth. A barber pole stood stone-still behind dusty glass, stripes the red of dried cherries. Next door, a neon OPEN flickered its lie to no one. The mill's dead stack held up a square of sky like a broken finger, its shadow laid across a lot of gravel where grass had forgotten to insist. Heat came off the blacktop in sheets, dry and hard, like the air had been ironed and hung back up wrong.
They rolled past a bait shop with its clapboard peeling in long, satisfying strips, WORMS, ICE, COLD SODAS, each word a faded hope. A plastic Jesus on a pole out front bowed in the wind that wasn't there. Mother-of-pearl ash glittered in the gutters where last night had burned and gone out. A stray dog rehearsed doubt at the edge of a parking lot, ribs like questions.
Paper dust had settled on everything like sorrow. You could taste it, papery and bitter at the back of the tongue. The mill smell, or the ghost of it, hung low and old, a sour the sun couldn't quite bake off. A length of chain-link leaned into a ditch, kinked and tired. Someone had left a kiddie pool upside down in a yard and the wind worried it, soft, relentless like a heart too worn-out to change its mind.
Tom Earl's place crouched like a tired dog under a sun that wouldn't blink. The bay doors were down. A paper wreath of inspection stickers bleached to ghosts in the office window. E A R _' S still clung to the scorched sign, half the bulbs gone, the other half too proud to admit it. Oil smell lingered like a memory that hadn't got the message.
Cash eased the truck to the curb. Engine ticked. Heat held.
"Closed," he said, which the building had already said three times.
They were halfway across the gravel when a voice called from the far side of the street, dry as a riverbed and twice as old. "You boys lookin' for Tom Earl, you su-ure late."
A man unpeeled himself from the shade of a caved-in awning, lean, leathered, face crosshatched with years and cigarettes. He wore a cap that might once've been red and a shirt with PEOPLES LUMBER stitched over a pocket that now held a soft pack and two lottery scratchers curled like leaves. His eyes were the pale, washed-out kind that say they've seen three different towns die and didn't much argue with any of them about it.
Jackson lifted a hand. "Mornin'. We are. He around back?"
The man shook his head slowly. "Tom passed 'bout month ago. Stroke got him sittin' on a milk crate, real polite. Laid him down like a baby. Preacher tried to make a fuss and the town didn't have the wind for it. Boy he raised come by and stacked the sockets where they belonged, and that's about all the ceremony you're gonna git." He spat into the dust with ceremony all his own. "You from around?"
"Mississippi." Jackson's voice thinned, then found its center. Tom Earl, gone. Blake would've felt that like a rib crack. "You see anybody else come through here lately? Big fella, hat like weather."
The man's brow ticked. "Week before last," he said. "Rolled in right' fore sundown. Big boy, cowboy hat, walk like he owed the ground money. Didn't say 'hey' to nobody. Sat in his truck a spell, then went round back, looked at Tom's roll-ups like they might look back. Left afore the skeeters really set in." He studied Jackson's face, then Cash's. "Who was he?"
"Blake Buckley," Jackson said, the name soft, not for shame, just reverence and caution in the same breath.
The man's eyes went wide and young for half a second. "Well I be," he said. "Buckley boy. Hellfire. He used to ride the devil's own luck off that county fair bull, back when the fair still had a light bill and a reason." He glanced down the road like memory might be late to its own self. "If it's him you huntin', you ain't gon' learn much at Tom's now. You go ask at old Buckley's house."
Jackson blinked. "Blake's...?"
"Daddy," the man supplied, pleased to be needed. "Curtis Buckley. Mean drunk, that one. Ain't died of it yet 'cause spite keeps him pickled. Louella..." He tipped his chin toward a sky empty of anything so considerate as a cloud. "...she passed three, four years back. Cancer took her neat. Curtis still breathin', cussin' the price of everything and the taste of water. If the boy came home, that's where his shadow went."
Cash shifted his weight, a hinge creak in the heat. "You know the address?"
The man scratched under the bill of his cap, measuring the map in his head. "Ain't an address so much as a direction," he said. "Head down Columbia till the mill stink ghosts you, hang a right at the busted Coke machine, go past the house with the three satellite dishes and the Saint Mary in the bathtub... she's missin' a hand but she's still blessin'...then look for a chain-link yard with a blue tarp flappin'. That's Curtis. If you hit the canal, you went too far. Turn around 'fore the road eats your shocks."
Jackson nodded, the picture laying itself in his mind. "Thank you."
The man spat again, aimed true, and shrugged as if to say thanks was a currency he didn't much traffic in. "Ain't nothin' else to do but help a soul find what's comin' to 'im," he said. Then, eyeing Jackson once more, softer than his voice had any right to be, "You tell that boy if he's lookin' to leave what made him, he oughta do it quick. Bogalusa got a way of keepin' what don't want to stay."
The man faded back into the strip of shade that had released him, and the town stood there, beat and dry and waiting to see if the boys had the right size of hope. Jackson slid behind the map and pointed them into the heat. Tom Earl's sign was small in the mirror, dust coming up and settling again like a breath nobody wanted to claim.
*
The directions were dead-on: busted Coke machine, Saint Mary in the bathtub, one hand gone, still blessing, a chain-link yard sagging under the weight of nothing, a blue tarp flapping like surrender. A Pontiac sat on blocks with grass growing up through its ribs. Tar paper blinked where a window should've been. Heat came off the house in waves that smelled like old oil and older anger.
Cash cut the engine. For a second the silence was so big you could hear the flies think. Jackson put his palm flat against the dash like he meant to steady the truck or himself, hard to say which. They clanged the chain-link gate and walked the path that wasn't, clay dust kicking up onto their boots.
Jackson knocked.
The door didn't answer.
He knocked again.
A bolt scraped, a chain clinked, and the door yawned open two inches on a sour hinge. Curtis Buckley filled the gap like a bad dream that'd learned to smoke. Wobbly and narrow-eyed, he had a face carved out of gristle and sun, a white stubble that looked meaner than most men's beards and a busted vein road-mapping his nose. A beer sweated in his hand like it was trying to escape. The first breath out of the house carried whiskey, mildew, and a long, unhappy life.
"What," he said, not a question so much as a policy.
"Sir," Cash said, polite like a man lays a level on a sill. "We're looking for your boy."
Curtis let his eyes drag slowly over them, clocking denim, sawdust, the Saint Christopher at Jackson's belt loop. "I ain't the Chamber of Commerce," he said. "Which boy?"
"Your son, Blake," Jackson said.
A nasty little smile touched one corner of Curtis's mouth and died. "Hnh. Folks comin' around sayin' that like he's Elvis." He took a drink that did not make him any nicer. "He come by. Week ago. Sat out yonder in his truck like a dog that knows it'll get beat if it crosses the porch. I watched him through the curtain 'til he drove off. Good riddance."
"Did he say where he was headed?" Cash asked.
Curtis scratched under his T-shirt like the question itched him. "Ain't ask. Ain't care. Boy's ungrateful's what he is. Thinks a hat and a belt buckle makes him somebody, comin' 'round here countin' exits like he too good for the door he come through." He snorted, a wet, contemptuous noise. "Him leavin' was the best thing that ever happened to this house."
"Sir," Cash said, and the sir did a lot of work.
Curtis flipped the chain, opened the door the rest of the way. "You wanna gape at the museum, come on then. Take your shoes off if you love manners that much. Ain't no floor clean enough to notice."
They stepped into the stale dim. The living room was a shrine to mean habits: two recliners sagged into the shape of a man who never apologized, a coffee table ringed with brown bottle halos, ashtrays overflowing, one balanced on a stack of hunting magazines that had never seen the woods. The TV howled a preacher with a hot mouth and cold eyes. The sound was down, but his finger still scolded from inside the glass. Nicotine had turned the walls the color of tea gone to God. A buck mount over the doorway wore a ball cap cocked smart, CURTIS stitched over the brim. The cap had grease on it that looked hereditary.
Jackson's eyes did the work. A dent in the drywall at shoulder height, patched lazy. A series of black half-moons chewed into the hallway door, like somebody's belt buckle had introduced itself to it more than once. On the fridge, a yellowed rodeo flyer had a dart hole where a face might have been.
Curtis caught Jackson looking at the nail. "Decoration," he said. "Woman put it up to keep me from dyin'. She died anyway." He thumbed toward the back. "Whole house got emptier and louder the same day."
"Sorry for your loss," Jackson said, and meant it for her, not him.
Curtis ignored that kindness like it was a fly. He dropped into his recliner and made the lever snap. The footrest shot out like a threat. "So," he said, "what you want from me 'sides the pleasure of my company."
"Mebbe tell us where ya reckon he went?" Cash said.
Curtis barked a laugh and coughed at the same time. "He don't talk to nobody worth knowin'. Ain't talked to me 'less he wanted somethin'." His eyes went meaner, which had seemed impossible. "World's full o' men to clap for him. I'm the one remembered him when he wet the bed. Ain't a ribbon for that, is there."
Jackson stood, hands in his pockets to keep from balling them. "He ever say why he didn't come in?"
"He don't come in 'cause there's rules," Curtis snapped. "Ain't bringin' what he is into my house." He leaned forward, the bottle penduluming. "Better to pretend he died than raise a faggot under my roof." The word came quick and ugly, a slur he'd kept oiled for years.
Silence made the room colder. The TV preacher wagged his finger from another county.
Cash's knuckles went white against his thigh, then flushed back to blood as he set his jaw and swallowed his first answer. Jackson drew breath through his nose and let it out slowly.
Jackson turned to Curtis. "Sir," he said, flat, the yes-sir gone out of him without losing the sir. "Can I see his room?" Jackson asked, voice steady. "If it's still here."
Curtis waved his beer like a scepter. "Down the hall. Last door on the left. I ain't touched nothin' 'cept to take the fan when August tried to kill me." He smirked at his own meanness. "It's the way he left it. Mess and all."
Jackson nodded, then turned to Cash, thumb flicking toward the porch. "Give me a minute?" he asked, softly. It wasn't about weakness. It was about not turning Cash loose in a room that begged a fight.
Cash looked at Curtis, then at Jackson, one heartbeat of reluctance, then trust. The screen door whined and snapped behind him.
Jackson took the hall slowly, his fingers grazing the nicotine wall like a blind man reading a history written in smoke. At the last door on the left, he paused, touched the jamb as if it were a threshold that could still bless or burn, and pushed it open.
Blake's room opened on a small square of air that had forgotten how to move. The heat in there was different from the hallway's. It was staler and quieter, like time had been shut in. The first breath tasted of dust and boy, old sweat baked into cotton, motor oil turned sweet at the edges, a ghost of cheap cologne from a bottle that had died trying.
It was a short room, narrow as a trailer prayer. A twin mattress sagged in the middle, sheet printed with blue stripes faded to rainwater. The window wore a trash bag taped up with painter's tape, sun soldered around the edges, doing a poor man's job of night. A fan was gone from a square shadow on the dresser. Curtis had told the truth about that much.
Jackson stood in the doorway with his hand on the jamb, thumb pressing into the groove where a boy's height had once been marked and then scrubbed half-out with a dirty rag, the pencil ghosts still there if you squinted with your heart. A milk crate did nightstand duty, a cracked alarm clock forever owlish at 3:11, a pocketknife laid open beside a box of screws and bottle caps like a boy had tried to build something and ran out of father before he ran out of parts. On the wall, rodeo flyers tacked crooked, HOUMA, FRANKLINTON, YAZOO, sun-whitened around the thumbtacks. A Polaroid of a horse with a sway back was taped to the mirror, the boy taking it visible only as a hat brim reflected small in a corner of glass patched with clear tape. On the floor, a child's bull figurine with one horn snapped off watched the door from a dust drift like it remembered getting stomped and forgave the boot anyway.
Jackson crossed to the bed and sat. He let his eyes find what they were here for, because the room had begun to offer him pieces and he understood what kind of boy had lived here, the kind who hid his one good thing where a drunk man wouldn't stoop to look.
The diary showed itself with the easy drama only a poor boy's treasure can manage: a composition book shoved under the mattress and slid all the way against the wall, edges soft from being taken and hidden again, spine mended with electrical tape. Jackson tugged it free and held it a second, the paper warm from the bed's old heat.
He opened it. The first page had a name printed in a child's hand: BLAKE BUCKLEY. Then, in the same hand, as if daring someone to try it, DO NOT READ. Jackson smiled because he was the exact kind of sinner this book liked best.
He read.
April 12, 1999
I can turn screws without lookin'. Curtis says I can't turn out right. I took the clock apart and put it back together and it still don't know time. I can hear the fan talk when I lay on the floor. It says hum hum hum and I think that's God bein real quiet so He don't get in trouble.
June 30, 2000
Curtis got mad about nothin. Door got mad right back. I counted the hinges while I hid. 1, 2, 3. Three is enough to hold a thing even when it wants to jump the frame. I think I'm gon' be a hinge when I get big so Mama don't have to hold everything by herself. I ain't tell nobody that cause it sounds dumb. I wrote it here cause paper don't laugh back at ya.
Jackson swallowed.
October 5, 2002
Tom Earl let me sweep today. He said I hold a broom like it's worth more than a belt. He said "Boy, your hands are good. Keep 'em busy and they'll keep you." He gave me a Dr Pepper and let me sit on the milk crate and listen to the men talk about carburetors and money and wives like they all broke in the same place. I like the way grease smells when it's hot. It smells like work and not like reckonin'.
March 2, 2003
Curtis said I ain't got a handshake like a man. I shook his hand back and he laughed mean and I wanted to bite him. I put my teeth in my own arm instead cause I ain't stupid. I prayed. I don't think it reached.
July 19, 2004
Found a St. Christopher on the floor of the feed store. I said sorry to the saint for stealin him and then put him in my pocket cause sometimes God got to do without so a boy can get where he's goin. I rub his face till he ain't got one. Maybe that's how you make a thing holy, use it up keepin you alive.
Jackson set his thumb on his own medal and felt the smoothness like a scar rubbed shiny. He turned a page.
May 24, 2005
I can fix anything but a drunk man's mouth. I tried to fix the door so it wouldn't slam so loud. Curtis said it slammed louder. Mama cried like only ladies can, quiet, and then told me to get to sleep. I slept in the closet cause the room felt too big. I counted exits cause it makes my heart stop tryin to get out without me.
September 11, 2006
I seen a boy at the fair. He had a laugh like he was pullin rope outta his own chest and handin it to people to hold. He let a little kid pet a mean pony like the pony had been a baby once. I looked at his neck too long and then I looked at my boots till my eyes quit bein loud. I ain't tellin that to nobody not even paper. I guess I just did. If Curtis finds this he'll beat it out of me. If Mama finds it she'll make a pie and say a prayer and die a little trying not to know. I ain't proud. I wish it didn't have to scare nobody.
Jackson had to lift the book to his nose a second and breathe paper like medicine. He felt young Blake in the room the way you feel a thunderstorm before it breaks, pressure in the walls, a light you can't see yet. He turned carefully, the tape giving a little sigh.
February 8, 2007
Tom Earl let me sleep in the parts room last night. Floor was cold and smelled like tires and I slept with my boots on. He didn't say nothin bout why. He set a cup of coffee by my head in the mornin and said "You ain't got to tell me your business. But if you ever decide to quit dyin in that house you can come die at the shop instead and I'll teach you how to bring things back." I love him. I ain't tellin him that cause men like us ain't got a place to put that word without it breakin somethin.
June 3, 2007
First time on a chute. Hat felt like weather. I held on and counted the rails and thought about Jesus on the cross and wondered if he ever counted the nails. I stayed eight. When I let go, I felt like the ground had been waitin on me all my life. Folks clapped. Curtis said I looked ridiculous. I think I'm gon' leave.
August 29, 2008
Curtis said I could stay and be a man or leave and be a faggot. He said I ain't gonna make this house a joke. I told him this house been a joke since it chose whiskey over walls. He hit me. I didn't hit back. I put my clothes in the duffel Tom Earl gave me and stole one of Curtis's lighters and a can of Vienna sausages cause I don't know when a boy eats if the road don't feed him. I sat on the bed and listened to the fan pretend it could keep me.
Jackson smiled, hurt and proud together. He rubbed the heel of his hand under his eye and read.
September 1, 2008
Left at 3:11 cause the clock been stuck there and I figured I should let it feel right once. I stood on the porch and did not cry. I ain't goin to be what he said. I don't know what I am yet.
The last page was mostly blank, one line down at the bottom like a boy too young to preach and too old not to.
If I stay I die small. If I go I might die big, but maybe I live. Either way I ain't sittin still.
Jackson set the book in his lap and let his head fall forward, chin to chest. The room was the size of an apology nobody ever said. He could hear Cash shift on the porch, a boot heel scraping, not pacing, waiting. He could see Blake at sixteen knuckling tears out of his eyes with the same mouth he would later put on Jackson's shoulder like a sacrament. He could feel the throb of choices that had led them both here.
He closed the diary and thumbed the edge until the paper said stop. He stood and looked around, committing this altar of grit and grief to memory: the broken horn bull, the pencil ghosts on the jamb, the trash bag sky.
He slid the diary back where he'd found it, careful, then thought better and tucked it under his shirt against his ribs, a hot rectangle that felt like a heartbeat he could help carry. Then he wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, breathed once, and turned toward the hall.
The TV preacher wagged at nobody with the sound down.
He was a step from the screen door when Curtis' voice came behind him, gummy with beer and long practice. "Hey." Jackson turned. Curtis was half-sprawled in the recliner, but his eyes were mean-awake. He lifted the bottle in a salute that managed to be an insult. "What are you to my boy?" he asked, lazy as a roadside snake. "You come all this way with your pretty hair and your church manners." He let the grin show its broken teeth. "Friends, huh?"
"Friends," Jackson said, even. The word didn't wiggle.
Curtis's laugh came out wet and small. "I know what kind of friends you mean." He let the word curdle. "Men like you oughta be put down behind the shed and saved the trouble. That's mercy where I'm from."
The screen door banged.
Cash was inside in three strides, the movement of a man whose body had already done the math. His fist cocked up like the hammer on a nail gun, shoulder setting the way it did before a deadbolt took its last excuse.
Jackson's hand found Cash's wrist midair the way a good hinge finds its pin. "No," he said, quietly, and the quiet held.
Jackson stepped forward a half pace, set his feet like Daisy had taught him, weight back, voice steady, truth tempered. When he spoke, it wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. "Somewhere in this world," he said, "your son is still hurtin' from what you taught him about love," he said. "He only ever spoke of ya once, back when we met. He lied...told me you'd done passed. But I reckon I understand now why he said it."
Curtis rolled his eyes, but something down in them flinched.
"You made a house," Jackson went on, "where a boy learned three things before he learned to shave: how to count exits, how to sleep in his boots, and how to believe he didn't deserve to be happy. You called that manhood. You called it church when it suited you. You turned your own boy into smoke and then blamed him when he couldn't get hold of himself."
The preacher's silent finger waggled in the corner of the screen.
"You don't know me," Curtis sneered. "You don't know him."
"I know the shape of a wound," Jackson said. "I know what it makes a man do. I've watched him pick up good things with both hands and set 'em back down because some voice that sounds like yours told him they wasn't his to keep. I watched him send a truth that could get him killed because it was right, and then run like hell because that's the only way he knows to breathe. That runnin' started in this room."
Curtis shifted, the recliner creaking like an old lie. "He's ungrateful," he said, weakly ferocious. "Boy shoulda thanked me for food and a roof."
Jackson's mouth cut a small, sad smile that looked borrowed from Daisy. "Food ain't love, Mister Buckley." He tipped his head toward the tar-papered window. "You want me to call you a father? Fathers hold the door open. They don't stand in it."
Curtis's lips skinned back. "You feel big sayin' that to an old man?"
"No, sir," Jackson said. "I feel sorry." He glanced around the room, buck head with the greasy cap, ash rings, the upside-down saint nailed to the wall like a warning sign, and let the verdict arrive without fireworks. "The only satisfaction I'm takin' out of this place is you gon' die alone," Jackson uttered, plain and true. "You'll have nothin' but this rotten house to your name and a dark heart to keep you company. The world will keep turnin'."
The beer bottle hung there, useless as a prayer Curtis had never learned. He looked like he meant to spit and couldn't find spit.
Jackson turned to Cash. "We're done," he said, soft.
He stepped onto the porch. The screen door gave that tired whine and slapped back into its frame. Outside, the heat felt honest. Saint Mary nodded at nothing in her bathtub, her chipped hand missing and her blessing undiminished. Somewhere down the block a dog barked at the afternoon and won.
They walked through the sagging gate without looking back. They climbed in. Jackson set the diary between them like a living thing, clipped St. Christopher off his belt, and slid it inside the diary.
The engine found itself.
Gravel spat and settled.
In the side mirror, the house hunched smaller, then smaller still, until it wasn't anything but heat and dust and a story that had finally been told out loud.
*
The road ran out ahead of them in a long, hot ribbon, edges frayed where the pines had worried at it all their lives.
Cash had been a kind of silence Jackson knew, the tool-bag kind, heavy and sorted. He drove with both hands again, jaw set, eyes fixed on the road like it owed him money.
"You alright?" Jackson asked, not pressing, just laying the question down where Cash could step on it or walk around it.
Cash let the white lines pass under them, one, two, ten, before he answered. "I been thinkin'," he said. "Back at the hospital, the night after Weston's..." His mouth pulled sideways. "Blake told me we were alike. I didn't take to that."
Jackson half-turned, but Cash didn't look over. The road had his face. Jackson could feel the thought building anyway, the way he felt summer storms long before the first five drops hit the porch.
"I didn't know what he meant," Cash went on, voice low, not unkind. "Figured he was just posturin', takin' my measure in case he needed it for a fight." His fingers flexed on the wheel, then settled, like a man remembering a better grip. "But sittin' in that house back there... smellin' the rot he had to breathe comin' up..." He blew air out, humorless. "I think I know now."
Jackson waited.
"We both learned to hold a thing steady with our hands while our insides try to burn it down," Cash said. "Me, I had you, Cass, Mama, Daisy's rules, and a shop to put that fire in." He shook his head, small. "Buckley didn't get a place to lay it."
Jackson felt that land somewhere behind his ribs and open a window. The sunset had begun to say its piece, peach and bruise laid thin across the western pines. He turned to the glass and let it wash him.
"He ain't just the part that runs," Cash said after a while. "I can see that."
Jackson's throat got tight, then did what it knew: swallow, breathe, leave the yes sitting there where it wouldn't spook. The sky deepened. Pines went black at the edges like cut paper.
They drove through a stretch where even the crickets seemed to listen to their tires.
After a while, Cash cleared his throat as if to set the world back on its tracks. "We oughta find a place to lay our heads," he said. "Start fresh at first light."
Jackson nodded, still looking at the seam of color where the day was giving itself over. "Alright."
*
The motel room wore the smell of someone else's night. The spread was scratchy, the curtains heavy as wet jeans. None of it mattered. They were breath and skin and the soft, stubborn sounds people make when the world finally lets up a little.
Jackson lay naked on his stomach, cheek turned to the cool of the sheet, the lamplight laying a pale stripe across his shoulder. Cash's weight was a warmth across his back, careful and claiming both, his mouth finding that place at the hinge of Jackson's neck as he pistoned his cock inside Jackson's hole.
"Lawd, ya feel so good," Cash grunted, his muscular ass flexing as his hips worked, bouncing up and down.
Their bodies knew the road to one another now, hands and breath moving in a rhythm that felt more like building than breaking. Cash's palm slid to lace their fingers, anchoring and asking. Jackson's squeeze answered.
"Good?" Cash murmured at his ear, the consonants soft as a thumb.
"Mm," Jackson breathed, the sound low enough to allow the sensual melody of his hole to speak for him.
They moved fast and sure. Sweat made a slick map where chest met shoulder blade. Cash checked in with his hands the way he did with hinges, gentle pressure, listening for anything that caught. That was when he felt it: Jackson's body was there, but his mind had gone somewhere with no lamp on.
Cash stilled, not a flinch, his throbbing cock buried deep inside Jackson. He pressed his lips to his lover's nape and stayed. "Talk to me, golden," he pleaded, keeping small pelvic movements, feeling the warmth of Jackson's insides.
Jackson's shoulders rose in a careful breath. "I'm fine," he said into the sheet, voice steady on purpose.
Cash didn't move back to motion. He curled an arm under Jackson, dick slowly sliding off with a soft queef, and rolled him half on his side so he could see his face, hair damp at the temples, eyes miles away. The lamp put a thin shine in those blue irises. Guilt had its fingerprints on the rest.
"Hey," Cash said, quiet as a shop at closing. "What's wrong?"
Jackson blinked hard, jaw working like he was debating whether silence counted as bravery. Cash waited. He had always been good at waiting when Jackson was concerned.
"It ain't you," Jackson managed, a whisper with a rasp in it. "It's just...the way I left him. Back home. The look on his face when I..." He shut his eyes, ashamed at the way the memory could still pull him out of his own body. "It feels like I'm doin' you wrong just for thinkin'."
Cash's touch went softer still. "You ain't doin' me wrong for tellin' me the truth," he said, which was one of his truest sentences. "You regret comin' to me?"
"No." Jackson's answer was quick, fierce. Then he swallowed, the muscle in his throat jumping. "No. I don't. I'd come to you in every life God ever gives me." He let the breath go. "But I..." he stammered before the truth finally came. Soft and clear. "Cash...I love you. And I love him." The words landed between them, hot and helpless. "It ain't the same. It's just...different."
Cash flinched. He slipped away the width of a hand, the sudden cool on Jackson's back proof of absence. He sat up, scrubbed a palm over his face, stood. For a few seconds he paced the narrow strip of carpet between the foot of the bed and the dresser, naked, cock still unbending, hair raked back hard enough to smart. Jackson didn't rush after him. He lay on his side and waited like a man who knows trying to hold a thing tighter will only make it bolt.
Finally Cash stopped.
He leaned one forearm on the wall and looked at the curtains like they had an answer stitched in. When he spoke, it was without heat. "Tell me what different means."
Jackson rolled to sit, the sheet bunched at his waist, lamplight painting him in salt and mercy. He ran a hand over his mouth as if to check the words before he let them out.
"Blake was the first man who made the sky open for me," he said. "He's...wildfire and a road that kept goin' even when I'm tired of miles. With him...I learned hunger wasn't a sin, and that want could be holy if you held it right. I love how he moves when he's brave. He's...weather, Cash. When he fucks me, I feel like the world stands up and testifies. When he runs, I feel twelve again, waitin' on footsteps that won't come."
He let that sit a beat. Cash's face didn't change, but his eyes did a small, painful work.
"With you," Jackson went on, voice going rough in the best way, "I ain't the sky. I'm the house. I'm the porch with a light in it. You look at me like I'm a thing you're buildin' with, not a thing you're tryin' to survive. You're the hand at my back that makes me say the thing I'm scared to say and then stays to hear it land. You fuck me good...and then you hold me and I don't disappear. I get more myself. You make me want to put my name on work and on love and not be ashamed when folks read it."
One of Cash's eyebrows rose. Ever so gently.
Jackson shook his head and laughed once, wet. "I keep reachin' for a word that ain't selfish. All I got is truth. And truth is...I don't want to let either of you go. I love you, Cash...but I love him, too." He searched Cash's face open and unarmored. "If you can't stand that, tell me now and I'll..." His voice caught. "I'll still love you from whatever distance you need. But I had to say it the right way at least once."
Cash stood motionless, eyes on the carpet, the lamplight turning the muscles in his jaw to soft shadow. When he finally looked up, it wasn't anger looking back. It was a man doing hard math and refusing to round.
"I don't understand it," he said, and the plainness of it was a kindness. He shook his head once. "Not yet, anyway. Maybe not the way you do. But...I can see he's important to you like breath is important. I can see that leavin' him how you did is a splinter in you and it ain't comin' out by itself."
He crossed back to the bed, slower now, the fight set down where it belonged. He knelt on the mattress, close enough that Jackson could count the sawdust nicks on his knuckles. He set his hand on Jackson's chest, right over the thud. "I ain't promisin' I won't get sideways or scared or mad along the road," he said. "But I ain't lettin' you carry this alone. We'll find him. I'll help you."
Jackson shut his eyes and let his head fall forward until his forehead touched Cash's. The breath he let go then was the first easy one the room had heard since the key turned in the lock. He smiled, small and raw. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Cash said, trying for dry and nearly making it. He nudged Jackson's nose with his own, gentle as a hinge settling. "Scoot on over and lemme slide back in, slow and sweet..." he teased. "I promise you'll rest easy till sunup, golden."
Jackson exhaled and pulled Cash back into the sheets, a small, youthful giggle accompanying his movement.
*
Jackson drifted easy through the convention, and the place noticed.
Heads turned, hands came up, "Jackson Bell!" He gave back what he had: a palm, a grin, and a photo by the booth with the fiberglass bull. Three old cowboys stopped him for a story they half-remembered, and he told it the way they liked, adding a wink that made their wives chuckle. A vendor pressed a free rope into his grip like a blessing.
Cash walked a step behind at first, eyes big as courthouse clocks. He'd wrangled doors and deacons and hydrangea committees. He had not, it turned out, been properly introduced to rodeo commerce. He leaned in close. "Is it rude," he murmured, deadpan, "if I tell you bein' famous is makin' me horny for you?"
Jackson almost snorted coffee through his nose.
"I'm just sayin'," Cash went on, as if discussing the weather. "If three more ladies tell me how handsome you are, I'm gon' have to lay you down on one of those boot displays and make a scene."
"Buy me dinner first," Jackson said, delighted.
They were cutting across toward the practice chute setup when a familiar voice came from their six, velvet stretched over mischief. "Lord above...if it ain't Jackson Bell growing up right on schedule."
Jackson stopped like somebody'd said his middle name. He turned and there was Evan, hair a little too good for the room, shirt that knew its way around a tailor, grin that had bought him out of more trouble than it should. He had a lanyard, a sponsor badge, and a gaze like a spotlight. It did a quick, appreciative pass over Cash like a man appraising a custom truck: wheels, frame, paint, bulge.
"Evan," Jackson said, and the hug was inevitable. Evan squeezed and let a hand linger a fraction longer than was strictly polite. "You look expensive."
"I wake up this way," Evan said. "You, on the other hand, look like a sin a choir director saves for after Easter." He slid his eyes to Cash and smiled like he'd been handed a gift at a raffle he hadn't entered. "And who, please God, are you."
"Cash," Cash said, offering a hand. Evan took it with both of his like they were starting a partnership. Cash's eyebrows went up a notch at the enthusiasm.
"Cash," Evan repeated. "As in currency. As in liquid assets. As in...starting troubles in thrift-store cotton. I love this for you, Jackson."
"He's a carpenter," Jackson said, amused and warning all at once.
"Of course he is," Evan sighed. "Of course he builds things. I will behave." He did not, at any point, look like he intended to behave.
They traded the shorthand news you give road family: who'd broken what bone and who'd pretended not to, who'd picked up a new sponsor, who'd lost one on account of choosing honesty over messaging. Evan kept watching Cash like checking for a flinch, found none, and seemed pleased.
"You here to sign autographs," Evan asked, "or to remind people you cannot be domesticated even with biscuits."
"Bit of both," Jackson said. "And, truth?...to ask around." He let his face go plain. "I'm lookin' for Blake."
Evan's grin flickered, then sharpened. "You and every tabloid that thinks a man can keep secrets on the circuit." He clicked his tongue. "It would be hard to miss him. Big hat, bigger shoulders, huge pecker. That look like he's checking every exit while making you feel like you the only point of...entry."
"You seen him?" Cash asked, direct.
Evan beamed, pleased to have the goods. "Two nights ago. Convention hotel, tenth floor, room with bad art and worse ice. He knocked around midnight and we did what consenting adults do when nostalgia trips them and the elevator cooperates." He wiggled his eyebrows at Jackson, shameless. "That cowboy sure knows how to make a person forget their own name for a little while."
Cash blinked. "People just say things like that out loud around here?"
"Bless your heart," Evan said, delighted. "Yes." He tipped his head toward Jackson, confiding. "We were saints about it, as usual. You know how it is." His mouth curled. "He left me dizzy and very...hydrated. Great manners."
Jackson's mouth twitched. "Evan."
"What? You asked." Evan's eyes slid back to Cash, wicked. "We could make it a reunion, you know. You bring the saint and the carpenter, I'll bring the room key. We'll have to sign a waiver for the furniture."
Cash opened his mouth, then closed it, caught between scandalized and intrigued like a man trying to bless himself with the wrong hand. Jackson saved him with a grin that had been known to take the fuse out of dynamite. "Maybe some other time."
Evan laughed, took the deflection like a mint. "Someday I'll stop throwing perfect parties into the void." He let a beat pass. Beneath the tease there was something like respect. "Anyway. He didn't stay. Told me he was moving on at sun-up. Said the big-money meetings were giving him hives."
"Where to?" Jackson asked, all the light in him turned toward an answer.
"Hammond," Evan said. "Parish fairgrounds for the Bayou BuckOut, he promised a friend he'd put in a face, maybe a practice run, maybe just sign posters. After that he said something about Meridian, livestock pavilion jackpot, little, cash at the gate, no press, then he trailed off like a man who doesn't trust himself past thirty-six hours." He shrugged. "He had that look...one foot in the room, one foot on the gas."
Jackson felt it hit and brighten him, firefly under the breastbone. "Thank you," he said, meaning it. "You didn't have to..."
"I know," Evan said, and the flirt dropped away enough to make space for kindness. He tugged Jackson a fraction closer by his wrist and pitched his voice under the hall's noise. "He's a good man, even when he's terrible at it. You're lucky."
Jackson tilted his head, not sure if it was a blessing or a warning.
Evan's smile went askew and true. "Because when he was fuckin' me," he said, soft enough it didn't carry, "I could feel him holding somebody else's name behind his teeth." His eyes, for once, didn't dance. "An', baby, it wadn't mine."
For a second the convention receded, the barkers, the banners, the leather sugar in the air. Jackson stood in the middle of it with that small, sharp sentence in his hands and knew exactly which direction his day would go.
"Go get him," Evan said, back to bright. He patted Cash's bicep like a man checking good lumber. "You behave enough to keep him, misbehave enough to deserve him."
Cash found a dry half-grin, the kind he got right before doing something he wasn't trained for but meant to nail anyway. "I can probably manage that."
"Lord, the three of you," Evan sighed, delighted anew. "A whole dissertation." He kissed the air near Jackson's cheek. "Text me when you catch him, or I'll show up with balloons."
They peeled away into the flow again, Jackson humming with purpose, Cash shaking his head and smiling like he'd just learned a new dialect of the same language.
*
The parish fairgrounds wore their Saturday ruin proudly, lights strung like a cheap necklace, dust in the air sweet as kettle corn, the loud whine of generators and men who'd made peace with tinnitus.
Jackson clocked the trailer the second the tires rolled onto gravel. His heart did a sharp, private thing in his chest, half-hurt, half-homing beacon.
"Lord," Cash said, climbing down, "smells like sweat tryna wear cologne."
"More like money tryna look like fun," Jackson said, but he was already scanning, mapping exits like he'd been taught.
They fell into the river of people: hats high, belt buckles big as dinner plates, girls in fringe making nicotine look devotional, boys in starch punching each other soft to prove a point they didn't have yet. A band on a plywood stage sawed through a two-step while a drunk in a pearl snap slow-danced his Styrofoam cup. The drinks tent breathed cold air and neon; beer taps winked like chrome teeth.
Cash's eyes had that new-country glance, taking in the chutes, the practice pen, the smell of manure braided with barbecue, and then he grinned like a man who'd found a familiar hymn in a church he'd never set foot in. "I'll be right at that bar," he said, tilting his chin at the line of red cups and the bartender with the tattoo of a sparrow flying toward bad ideas.
Jackson bumped his shoulder, smiled, and let himself be pulled by the arena's low thunder, the metal-on-metal, the dusty exhale of cattle, the hum of a hundred men pretending they weren't scared.
He slipped down the rail to the board. Names chalked in a hand that had hurried forever: ROANY, MIGUEL, J.T. ARCHER, LUJÁN, and there, BLAKE BUCKLEY, pen stroke lazy, like even the letters had learned to saunter in their boots. A time scratched next to it, not far now. Jackson's mouth went dry the way it does when you're about to be handed back a piece of yourself you thought you'd lost.
He found a spot on the fence where he could see the gate and the clock. Riders buckled like bad prayers, two seconds, three, one spectacular yard-sale at five that made the crowd hoot and wince in the same breath. The bullpen bucked and bawled, clang of the latch, dirt coming up like applause.
And then finally, Jackson saw him.
Blake.
He came up the alley with that low-shouldered confidence that read as grace from a distance and danger up close. Hat like weather, jaw like a dare, rope tassel whispering against his thigh. He put his boot in the stirrup and swung up like the animal had offered him its back out of old friendship. He didn't look at the crowd. He settled. Jackson knew the exact tilt of his chin when he found the rhythm, a metronome only he could hear.
Horn.
The bull blew out of the chute like a sin come to get saved and changed its mind. Blake took the first yank with his shoulders soft, hips doing that cruel math, give, hold, lie, tell the truth, free arm painting sermon arcs in the hot light.
One second.
The crowd leaned.
Two.
The animal swapped ends and sunfished, dirt spitting, Blake locked in, that old wild love in his posture that said: I know you and I forgive you for trying to kill me.
Three. Four.
Jackson's hand clenched the rail.
Five. Six.
Then it happened. A mean left hook in the middle of the animal's spine, momentum dirty and new, and Blake lost the lie by a hair. The rope snapped backwards. His spur missed purchase. Gravity made its case. He came off ugly, shoulder first, rolled like a man who'd had to learn it, popped to his feet as the bullfighter split the space and took the temper on his own thigh.
The horn blew the end nobody wanted. Blake hurled his rope at the fence like it had betrayed him personally and stormed out the back gate, jaw set hard enough to break.
Jackson moved before he could remind himself not to. He slid along the shadow of the rail, ducked a cooler, let a sweep of boys with folding chairs hide him. He trailed Blake across gravel toward the trailers like a man following a weather front. Blake's stride told its own story, too long, too fast, the kind that burns the match to find the light.
And there, in the lane between rigs, beneath the halogen that made everything look like it needed a last rite, Blake went at the world. He punched the aluminum skin of his trailer once, twice. Hollow thud, the kind that cuts knuckles and doesn't say sorry. He kicked a plastic bin and sent tape, vetwrap, a rain-swelled glove arcing stupidly across the gravel. He shouldered the door, cursed low and mean, no theatrics, just bleed-off.
Jackson ducked behind the fender of a jacked-up Ford, heart beating in the soft skin under his jaw. He could see Blake's profile, older and not, beautiful like a bruise that had earned its color. Blake froze for a second, head cocked like a deer under a feeder, some animal sense catching the shift in the air. He turned halfway, scanning the dark, those eyes that had learned every man by his feet. For a heartbeat Jackson felt seen from thirty yards away. Then Blake made a small decision in his face and vanished up the steps, yanked the handle, and slammed the trailer door.
Jackson stayed still long enough to hear the trailer's thin skin talk: a bottle hitting a counter, a breath thrown hard at a wall, the dull thunk of a man sitting down like he'd been told to by his own bones.
"Jacks?" Cash's voice at his back was a crime and a mercy. Jackson jumped so hard he hit the edge of the truck bed with his knee.
He grabbed Cash by the forearm and yanked him low behind the bumper, adrenaline making him rough. "Shut up," he hissed, not unkind, eyes never leaving the rectangle of trailer window. He pulled him by the wrist toward their own truck, both of them crouched, ridiculous and alive, and slid them inside with a clatter of keys on the dash.
Cash, wide-eyed but game, shut his door soft. "What...?"
"Shh." Jackson leaned forward over the wheel, forearms on the dash, breath fogging the glass.
He kept watching.
From the row of trailers, a figure peeled itself out of shadow. Young, built the way boys get when they think they can arm-wrestle life into manners, denim painted on, tank top clinging, hat cocked to show he knew he was pretty. He swung along loose-hipped, cut across the lane, and bounded up Blake's two steps like he'd done it before. Two knuckles, sweet and cocky, on the aluminum.
Inside, the trailer made talking noises, boot on linoleum, a cabinet complaining, the soft punch of a man changing his mind twice. The latch snicked. The door opened.
Jackson leaned over the wheel without meaning to, breath fogging the glass. Blake filled the doorway in a T-shirt gone dark at the collar, jaw still set to don't. He didn't say anything that reached the truck, but the shape of his mouth was familiar: what?
Cash watched with a sideways grin, whispering out the corner of his mouth. "Well I'll be," he drawled. "You weren't lyin' 'bout him bein' a one-man petting zoo." He tipped his chin at the boy. "Lookit that. Calf come right up to the chute."
Jackson didn't answer. His eyes took in everything: the way Blake braced one palm on the frame like the house might try to throw him, the half step back that wasn't fear so much as reflex, the way his shoulders hadn't finished being mad.
The young cowboy reached, easy as you please, and set his fingers quick on Blake's chest, a little pat-persuasion right over the sternum, thumb half-curve like he knew the geography. Jackson felt the touch in his own ribs and had to unclench his teeth. The boy said something cocky, Jackson couldn't hear it, but the trailer air made the words look slick. He laughed, tipped his hat back with two fingers, leaned his hip to the jamb like come on, big man, let's turn the light off and make the night tell the truth.
Cash muttered, amused and mean in that friendly way. "Lord, he's out here collectin' belt buckles like baseball cards. Man-eater, your cowboy."
Jackson dragged a hand down his face and kept watching. Blake's gaze flicked once along the lane, counted nobody worth noting, came back to the kid. For a breath he went still, head tilted, like an old dog smelling rain before the wind changes. You could see the almost: his hand started to lift off the frame. His weight shifted off his back foot. The boy saw it, brightened, stepped closer, fingers finding Blake's shirt again like he had every right to before glazing his hand down to the man's crotch.
Then whatever line inside Blake still held snapped taut. He shook his head once, small, hard, no, put his palm to the kid's shoulder and set him back the width of a sin. His mouth moved, sharp, and this time enough sound bled through the night and the truck glass to scrape Jackson's ears raw.
"Leave," Blake ordered.
The young cowboy's face went ugly-fast, the way pretty boys' can when no is a language they skipped. He cursed, chin jutting. Jackson caught the shape of old man on his lips, then the barbs: "past your prime in every way," and "go buy a farm," and something nastier about what parts of Blake weren't eight-seconds anymore. He flung the last word like a bottle and clattered down the steps, boots loud on aluminum. He stalked off into the noise and light, still talking to the night, throwing his insults over his shoulder like feed to no one in particular, and the fairgrounds swallowed him whole.
A beat or two of silence followed before it came. The first fat drops hit the hood and made coins. Then the sky just let go. Rain hard enough to sand the light off the halogens, turning the gravel into black glass. Heat bled out of the night.
Out by the trailer, Blake braced his palm on the door like he meant to push the weather back. The bolt held. His shoulder sagged. He sat down hard on the top step without meaning to, spine sliding until his broad back hit the aluminum with a dull, hollow thud. The second step took his heel and stole it. He stumbled, caught himself on the jamb, and ducked his head between his shoulders as the rain found him honest. For a breath he held like a man fixing to swear. Then the breath left him in a sound you don't plan to make.
He bowed.
And then he broke.
Jackson went still so fast it hurt. Cash, mid-breath, shut his mouth on whatever joke was halfway born. In the weak blue spill the rain made, he could see Jackson's hand go to the door handle on instinct and stop there, tendons bright, trembling like something under a wet wire. He put his palm over Jackson's wrist and felt the shake.
He didn't say don't.
He let go.
Jackson opened the door and stepped down into the downpour like a man who'd finally remembered which way the road ran. He didn't run. He walked, slow enough not to spook a hurt thing, rain flattening his hair, t-shirt gone to his skin, boots taking the slick gravel careful. Blake didn't look up until the voice came, soft as a hand on a fevered brow.
"Blake."
The name worked its way through the rain. Blake lifted his head like it weighed a little more than it used to. His face was raw in the blur, his jaw unmade, his eyes red-rimmed, and he was stunned at being seen. Water tracked off the brim of his hat in hard lines, turning his lashes black.
Jackson stopped one step down, close enough to feel the heat rolling off a man who'd been fighting everything but the weather. Neither of them reached first. The rain filled the space between.
"Hey," Jackson said, barely there.
Blake swallowed. "Hey." The word broke in the middle.
They stood inside that small word. Blake's gaze flicked past Jackson once, checked the shadows out of old habit, came back and stayed. His hands were empty because he'd finally run out of things to hold. Jackson climbed the last step. He lifted his own hand slow enough to be refused, and when it wasn't, he took Blake's hat off and set it crown-down on the porch rail. Water sheeted off the brim and made its own river. Short hair clung to Blake's head, darker than memory, ears bare to the world.
"You cut it," Jackson said softly.
Blake huffed the ghost of a laugh. "Had to."
Jackson nodded like that was a kind of prayer. Blake's mouth gathered to try an explanation, sorry, or don't, or something that would put armor back where it had fallen.
"It's okay," Jackson said, gentler than a hush. His thumb brushed once across Blake's cheek, clearing rain and salt alike. The touch wasn't a claim. It was a permission.
Blake held very still, then leaned into that palm the slightest degree, a change you felt more than saw. Something in his chest unhooked. His shoulders dropped. His jaw let go. He breathed like the air was finally fit to share.
"Been a minute," he managed, eyes on Jackson's mouth like he was making sure the words came from someplace real.
"I know," Jackson said. "I'm here."
Blake swallowed again. His hand came up and hovered at Jackson's hip, not quite brave enough to close. Jackson gathered the distance and let it vanish. He stepped in, placed his arms around the man he'd chased across counties, put his face in the wet heat where Blake's neck met his shoulder, and held on.
Blake went hard for one last heartbeat, old training, last barricade, and then he melted. All that fuss and flight and fight gave under the simplest command the body knows: you're safe. He folded into Jackson like a door finally catching home, weight surrendering, breath syncing. Rain stitched them together. The trailer pinged as it cooled.
And in that wet, shivering quiet, with Blake's cut hair rough under his palm and the taste of rain turning the world honest, Jackson finally understood it.
Clean and without ornament.
Blake's home wasn't asphalt or county lines, wasn't a town that might forgive him or a porch that would welcome him or a past he could beat into shape. It wasn't an eight-second horn or a motel lamp or the map he kept in his mouth.
Blake's home was Jackson.
(To be concluded...)
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