Page 57 of Broken Ride

The account is full, I told the bottle once. Turns out the bottle was running its own books the whole time, and last night it called the balance due and collected out of everything I had that mattered.

They give me the phone call midmorning. I dial Laney's number with the receiver against a wall that a thousand men have leaned their bad news into. It rings the full count and dies into nothing, because she never has to answer anything again where I'm concerned.

I take the verdict standing up, the way you take a judge's gavel. No appeal comes to mind that a sober man would file.

The deputy, unasked, lets me try one more.

Colt answers on the second ring, and there's a beat of quiet on the line while the county recording tells him where I'm calling from. He doesn't fill the quiet. Colt Holloway has never once filled a quiet in his life.

"You hurt anybody?" he says at last.

"No."

"Then you got lucky twice. Once with the road. Once with the county." A gate latch clanks somewhere behind him, a ranch going about its morning. "Say what you called to say."

"It was one night." The words are out before I inspect them, worn smooth from years of handling, and I hear what they are while they're still in the air.

"It was every night wearing one night's clothes." No heat in it. Colt doesn't do heat. He does true, delivered flat, the way he's done it since we were young enough to think we'd never owe anybody anything. "Don't hand me the night, Wade. I was standing in a hundred of them. You want something from me or did you call to hear yourself talk?"

The tank kid watches me through the glass in the door. He's looking at a two-time champion holding a jailhouse phone, and whatever he's learning, I already know it.

"I want a number," I say. "Somebody who does this for a living. A program with a bed and a book and a man who's heard every lie I know. Not a favor, Colt. Not something quiet. Book it under my name where the whole circuit can read it if they care to look."

The gate latch stops clanking. When Colt speaks again, his voice hasn't changed, but something under it has.

"First right thing you've said in a year. I'll make calls." Papers move, and I can picture Kenna's kitchen table doing double duty like always. "Wade. Are you making this call because you woke up in a cage?"

"No." The truth of it arrives assembled, the clearest thought I've had in years, and I give it to him whole because he paid for it by answering. "I'm making it because of what I'm asking her to stand beside if I don't."

"Then it might hold," Colt says, and hangs up, because that's as close to a blessing as the man has ever issued.

The hours in the tank after that do the work the county built them to do.

I sit on a steel bench and think about my old man. Not the buckle in the bottom of my war bag, riding out there in an impound lot right now inside a truck I drove drunk. The man himself, the last years of him.

He got smaller every season, a big man going down a size at a time, and everybody around him called it retirement and kept his glass full at the VFW because he'd been somebody once and that bought him doubles.

The funeral finished the accounting. The same men who kept his glass full all those years carried the box, steady as deacons, and I stood at the graveside hating them with a purity I've never managed since.

It took me until this morning, on county steel, to finish the thought I started at that grave. Enablers make the best pallbearers. They've had years of practice holding a man up.

Then I think about Garrett Voss, a man I've never stood closer to than a phone line. A county's favorite deputy, polished and certain, a voice I've heard exactly once and will know until I die, warm as a man leaning on a sale rail talking about a horse he owns.

The county kept his story simple for him. The judges believed him. All that charm ran downhill onto one woman until she had to burn her own name to get out from under it.

Different poisons. My old man drowned in his and never laid a hand on anybody but himself. Garrett bottles his and pours it down one throat at a time.

But I run the accounts side by side from a drunk-tank bench, and the bottom line comes out identical. The people who stand closest become the casualties. The wives drive them home. The sons learn the bars by their parking lots. The woman who loves the man gets smaller by proximity, one enabled night at a time, until she's the one standing at the far end of the bar with a club soda, keeping the only sober watch in the building.

Laney stood at the end of that bar last night and watched a barroom's worth of people hand me the night one glass at a time. She has stood in that exact room before, and I'm the one who put her back in it.

Not the violence. I've never raised a hand to her and I never will, and that's the cheapest sentence a drinking man ever says, because the violence was never the whole of what she ran from.

She ran from a man whose damage outweighed his love and from a county that kept the scales. I've been letting this circuit keep mine for years.

That sits with me until the light in the door glass goes past noon, and I don't reach for a single excuse the whole time, because the supply finally ran out.

The judge takes my plea over a video screen in the early afternoon, and the county takes my money at a clerk's window after that. The first thing the biggest payday of my life buys is my walk out of the place. There's a joke in that dark enough for the circuit to love, and someday I'll let somebody else make it.