Page 17 of The Reckless Rookie

“He’s had that in his bag the whole time,” Mack says, betrayed. “You’ve been waiting.”

“Man needs a hat,” Colt says. First words out of him, flat, final. He tips it at me. “Take it. You’re gonna cook out there without one, hockey hair or not.”

I take the hat. It fits, which is the funniest and most unsettling part.

“See, now he’s engaging,” Mack crows. “That’s growth. Nine days ago this man would’ve told us both to eat glass.”

He’s not wrong. Nine days ago I might have. There’s something about being humbled at dawn by a fence post that takes the edge off a guy by nightfall.

Colt finally looks up. “You good out there, though? Actually.”

And it’s a real question, under the bit, the kind Colt only asks with his eyes half on his stick so you don’t have to make it a thing. These two didn’t write me off after the lot. Half the league did and most of my own building did, and these two showed up to give me hats.

“Getting there,” I say, which is the most honest I’ve been with anybody in nine days.

“Good,” Colt says, and that’s the end of it, and it’s enough.

By the time I point the truck back north it’s full dark and I’m running on a gas-station sandwich and the kind of tired that comes from fitting two jobs into one day. The schedule protects the team hours. It doesn’t make the miles shorter.

Two lives. Neither one gets my best. Sully saw it today, watched me skate and didn’t say anything, which from Sully is a paragraph of concern. The ranch is grinding me down at one end and the game’s waiting at the other and there’s not enough of me to give full measure to both.

Here’s the part I don’t say out loud, driving back up a black county road toward a bunkroom that smells like other men’s boots.

I don’t hate it.

The work. The ranch. Any of it. By every law of who I’m supposed to be I should be counting down the days on the wall like a man in a cell, and instead I caught myself today, elbow-deep in a job I couldn’t do a week ago and can do now, feeling something I don’t have a name for and don’t trust. Nine days ago a fence post beat me. Today I set eight of them and one of them was straight because I made it straight, with these hands, and nobody handed it to me and nobody bought it for me and no agent negotiated it.

I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve never in my life been proud of anything that didn’t come with a crowd.

The ranch is the one I’m driving toward. I tell myself it’s the sleep. You drive toward where the bed is. That’s all it is.

It’s not the sleep.

Somewhere up this road there’s a woman who won’t look at me and a horse who reads me like a book and a man who says no until my hands learn something true, and God help me, at the end of the worst stretch of my life, that’s the direction that feels like the right way. I don’t look at why.

I drive toward it, and tell myself that’s the sleep too.

Chapter nine

Catalina

The problem with O’Sullivan is that he’s good, and I needed him to be bad.

Not bad at the work. Bad the way the tape promised. I needed the man from the ten seconds, the one who put a stranger in a hospital, because that man I know how to keep at arm’s length. You don’t have to guard yourself against a thug. You manage him, count his days, hand him back to the county in one piece, and never wonder what he’s thinking.

Instead I got this. A man three weeks in who’s stopped being useless.

I watch him from the tack room without deciding to, which is becoming a habit I don’t love. He’s resetting the corner posts on the south line, the caliche stretch that’s broken better men than a hockey player, and he’s doing it right. Not fast. Right. He’s got the bar choked up the way Jason showed him, and he’s stopped fighting the ground and started working with it, and when Vicente walks by and says “No” about something I can’t hear, O’Sullivan doesn’t flinch or argue. He fixes it and keeps going.

Three weeks ago he couldn’t set a post to save his life. Now he’s setting them straight.

Nobody warns you about this. It’s not the ones who come in swinging you have to worry about. It’s the ones who come in wrecked and get better, because getting better is what I’m a sucker for, and I know it about myself, and knowing it has never stopped it.

There’s a whole list I know about him that the file didn’t.

The knee has finally settled. Maren cleared him for full load after the swelling went down, and sometime last week he stopped protecting it when he thought nobody was looking. He still treats every other ache like private information, adjusts around it, and eats whatever the day costs him. He’s funny in the dry, mean way of a man who learned to make people laugh before they could decide to hit him. The other placements have stopped testing him, which happened faster than it happens for anybody, because he passed the only test that matters out here: he doesn’t fold, he doesn’t whine, and he doesn’t act like the work is beneath a man who plays on television.

And the horses like him.