“Kid!” Different voice, Hawley’s. It made him flinch out of the flashy swing up he intended, but it wasn’t going to stop him: he chose the steadier, belly-down mount he knew he wouldn’t fail.
So he wasn’t good. So he got up like a kid. He was on Cloud’s back, and Cloud turned away from the fire.
“Kid. Use your damn head. Where are you going?”
“What do you care?” <Us downhill,> he thought, and Luke came and tried to get into his path. <Luke riding to stop him,> was in the ambient; but Jonas said,
“We don’t need him. If he wants to tag us he can follow. That’s all.”
He’d expected more interference. He’d frankly expected more concern. He sat there on Cloud’s back staring down at Jonas, mad, damned mad, and Jonas stared back at him.
“You’re a magnet for that thing, kid,” Jonas said. “You know that? You and that horse—making all that noise. You care about that horse? No?”
“Go to hell,” he said. He wished he hadn’t. But he’d said it. Now he couldn’t slink back to the fire. He stared down at all of them from Cloud’s back, then wanted <downhill,> and <empty road,> not <going back to Shamesey.> Just <empty road.>
“Doesn’t solve your problem, kid,” Jonas’ voice pursued him into the dark.
But Cloud took him onto the road and upped the pace to a trot, downhill into the dark of a clouded night, with a wind cold and keen as a knife.
He already wanted to go back to the fire. He knew he wasn’t fool enough to ride straight uphill to Tarmin Height, first and alone, taking Cloud into what an experienced rider like Aby Dale hadn’t been wary enough to survive.
But he couldn’t find a way to go back and duck his head and take it anymore—he couldn’t see getting Cloud hurt in a horse-fight, either, and he saw it coming if he didn’t give in: Jonas was pushing for it, because Jonas intended to run him the way he bossed Luke and Hawley, and once you started taking Jonas’ orders, he had the strong suspicion, it got harder and harder to break away from what Jonas wanted. A small group riding together wasn’t at all like Shamesey camp, where there was a whole thought-deaf town to escape to when you felt thoughts crowding in on you; and when the town got too bad to tolerate, which usually took a few hours, there was Cloud to come back to.
And if everybody in the world pushed them too far they could go out to the hills and hunt for three and four days and not need anybody. He’d managed to stay out of trouble. He’d never gotten Cloud into a fight. He wasn’t about to. Not three on one. Jonas knew it. Jonas kept pushing.
Bad decision maybe, that had made Jonas drag him along; so Jonas had thought better of it, and maybe Jonas had found out he wasn’t going to knuckle under easily—but was Jonas going to say he was wrong and manage the situation as civilly as possible until they went their separate ways? Hell if he was. Jonas couldn’t take somebody who didn’t think Jonas had done right by Stuart. Maybe that was Jonas’ conscience talking to him. Maybe it was just that Jonas was born a son of a bitch. It didn’t matter.
He had to wonder how Stuart’s partner had gotten along with the man. Why Aby Dale was lying dead up there on the ridge and they’d gotten away safe.
Then they’d gone over to Anveney to draw Aby Dale’s money out of the bank before they broke the news to Stuart at Shamesey. That was two, three days to make that detour, with some trucks that had to go that direction, he was sure—riders had to take their charges where they were hired to go, and that had to be the case. Hawley hadn’t told Jonas about taking the money. That was a point in Jonas’ favor. But hell, it hadn’t been exactly a straight line they blazed with their bad news, had it? And there were telephones. If they were running a race with the weather getting up there, they could have phoned. They could have told Stuart without the rogue-image in the ambient with him at the time. Maybe he thought of that because he was a town-kid. But they knew there were telephones. Now Stuart’s friends had his money the way they had his gear, to give to him, of course. And Stuart was out there with nothing, and going all the way up to Anveney, to the bank, he supposed, to find it out.
His throat ached. His chest hurt. Cloud slowed to a walk, mad, too, thinking <kick men, bite horses > until Danny reached down and patted his neck.
<Men by quiet water, three men at the table, with mama and papa and Denis and Sam… >
Sometimes the images that came up were outright stupid. He didn’t know why he put those three men in the apartment with his family. They didn’t belong there.
He was mad at them and mad at his family. Luke asked who’d hit him, which was none of Luke’s business.
So what if he was mad that papa had hit him: he knew why papa had hit him, which Luke didn’t understand: papa hit him when papa couldn’t talk, the same reason he’d hit Denis—it was just something men in his family did, and it never meant you didn’t love somebody, it just meant you’d gotten to that point your throat wouldn’t work and the words weren’t there, which was when you loved somebody a whole lot and they did things you didn’t understand.
Sometimes thoughts came up that didn’t make sense, as if they’d always lived in different spots in his brain and suddenly, because some nosy fool went asking into things he’d no right to ask, these separate things got together in scary combination, notifying you things didn’t match up right, they couldn’t make sense, and maybe the only safe way to deal with thoughts like that was to send them apart from each other before they messed up something in your life you couldn’t put back the way it was.
Same way he’d found he was at odds with what the preachers said, once there was Cloud. And he was going to hell, but he still thought about God.
Same way he loved his family, and got madder at them than he ever could at Luke and Jonas, and Luke and Jonas made him mad at his family all over again. Luke and Jonas were messing with what he thought, messing with what he was, that was what they were doing—trying to bend his mind around to directions he couldn’t figure. Luke thought he was like Stuart. Luke didn’t think Stuart was a good thing to be. Neither did Jonas. Probably Hawley didn’t.
He was Aby Dale’s cousin, which he guessed explained why Aby Dale had been with them this trip and not with her partner, Stuart. But it didn’t explain the other things. Hawley hadn’t said about the money. He’d kept that even from Jonas. It wasn’t easy to keep secrets with the horses around. He couldn’t do it. But some senior riders had that reputation—he’d run into them, and you didn’t know that they were different from other people, you just wouldn’t know, that was the problem—but word got around about some, that they lied really well. He just wished it had gotten around about Jonas and Hawley before he’d been so gullible.
And hell if he or Cloud would come and eat out of Luke’s hand. He was mad that he’d almost liked Luke. He wouldn’t give in to Luke’s tricks.
Cloud hadn’t either, not really. Cloud had just gotten his candy and backed off, still mad, still free of debts. Cloud just always knew things. Cloud was smarter than people sometimes. Cloud wanted to kick the men to the moon, was all, end of problem.
<Kicking men,> Cloud thought, pleased with the thought, going along quite energetically—but he wanted Cloud to slow down on the road. They’d gone far enough they wouldn’t hear him, no matter how loud he was.
Not far enough down the road to run into trouble, either, if there was anybody back there.
Jonas, damn him, knew he’d be following them tomorrow— Jonas had flatly said so. There was just one way up from here, he was on it, and they thought they could have him back any time they wanted to slow down and let him overtake them.