Tex (14 page)

“It's time to go, Jamie.”

“Okay. Good-bye, Tex. See you at school.”

“Bye,” I said. I watched her hurry through the door. She was going to be the only girl for me. I could tell.

“I'm glad to hear you're going to be able to go home soon,” Cole said.

He seemed even bigger, towering over the hospital bed. Boy, if he knew what I'd been thinking about Jamie! “Yeah,” I said awkwardly, “I reckon you probably saved my life. Calling the ambulance.”

I thought he might say, “Forget it,” but he didn't. He said, “I hope I never regret it.”

And he glanced at the door where Jamie had just been.

“No, sir,” I said. When he left I understood how Johnny had felt, making a bargain with God, one you don't know you can keep.

“Any mail?” Mason asked me. He got home early from work on Tuesdays. He was working in a restaurant in the city.

“Just a postcard from Johnny and Jamie. They liked Disneyland and were going to see Blackie in San Francisco. I reckon him and Cole are going to bury the hatchet.”

That sounded like a good way to spend spring break to me. A lot better than dragging around the house because you weren't supposed to exert yourself. At least I didn't have to stay in bed anymore.

I didn't mention the letter I got from Lem.

Dear Tex,

We decided to leave town and I wanted to tell you I'm sorry about everything. I know Mace said he'd kill me if I ever tried to get in touch with you again. But I am sorry. Don't tell nobody where we are.

Lem

It was postmarked Arizona.

I looked down the barrel of my rifle to make sure the sights were clean. Then I started polishing the stock.

“You going hunting tomorrow?” Mason skimmed over the postcard.

“I'm goin' for a walk and I'll take the gun with me. I ain't going to shoot anything, though. I ain't going to shoot anything ever again.”

I knew how it felt.

Mason poured himself a glass of buttermilk. That was about all he could drink lately, besides water. His stomach had been acting up.

“Did you see Mr. Kencaide today?” He paused, but didn't give me the usual lecture about cleaning guns at the kitchen table. He hadn't given me the usual lecture about anything, ever since I came home from the hospital, a month ago.

“Yeah, Pop drove me over this morning. Mr. Kencaide said he could wait another week for me to start work.”

“That's good.”

Actually, for a minute I thought I wasn't going to get the job. Mr. Kencaide had said, “Well, I really need someone right now—”

My heart sank. The doctors had been real positive about me not lifting or shoveling for another week. There's lots of lifting and shoveling on a horse farm.

Then he said, “Didn't I see your little brother at the Fair a couple of years ago?”

“No, sir, I don't have a little brother. But you came up and talked to me after a class once.”

“Hmm. You've grown. I did like the way you handled your horse. I guess I can wait another week.”

So it looked like I had a job.

Mason was shifting from one foot to another, like he wanted to say something but didn't know how to start. I went on with my gun-cleaning. I wasn't expecting him to say anything that meant anything. Ever since I came home from the hospital, we'd all been pretending nothing had happened, that the subject was dropped. Actually I don't think Pop was pretending, he was forgetting. He doesn't have a very long attention span.

But me and Mason just went on being polite to each other, which cut down on the conversation considerably. I find it real hard to live politely.

I was tired of pretending, but I didn't know how to start talking to him. Mason always has been real hard to talk to about personal stuff, and to tell somebody you still loved them was pretty personal. I didn't know if he even wanted to hear it.

“Listen,” Mason said suddenly, staring hard out the kitchen window, “I've decided not to go on to college.”

I stopped, my polish rag in mid-air. I didn't say anything.

“I mean, I like working at the steak house, I've already got one raise. I can take a course in restaurant management at the junior college in the city.”

For one split second I fought to hang onto that polite, impersonal ghost I'd made myself into, then I jumped to my feet and yelled, “Are you crazy?”

That startled Mason so much he jumped. But he always had had more self-control than I had, so in a minute he continued, “I've thought it all over…”

I've been around guns too long to be stupid enough to throw one across the room, but I felt like it. “I'll tell you what you've thought over,” I said, laying the gun down carefully, because I wanted so bad to slam it into the floor. “You've thought that once you get gone Pop will leave again and I'll be on my own and I can't handle it. Well, I can. But even if I couldn't, Mason, dammit, you've tried to be my father long enough. You don't go to college because of me, and in two years you'd hate my guts.”

Mason tried to go on with his calm, rational pretense, then gave up, the desperation showing plainly on his face. “I don't know what to do. I can't go. I can't stay. Sometimes I feel like I really am going to go nuts.”

I knew how that felt. I knew exactly how it felt. Late at night, laying awake, rehashing everything until my mind was whirling around like a squirrel in a cage, I thought I was going to die or go crazy. But then, in the morning, I'd still be alive, and sometimes the pain seemed a fraction less.

“I don't know what to do. Sometimes I think nothing is ever going to get worked out.”

“Maybe sometimes things don't work out. I know I'll never figure out the ‘why' of a lot of stuff that's happened. Mace, you never read
Smokey the Cowhorse
, did you?”

Mason was leaning back against the kitchen sink. Now he glanced over at me and grinned briefly. “No.”

“Well, ol' Smokey, he had some bad things happen to him, had the heart knocked clean out of him. But he hung on and he came out of it okay. I've been bashed up pretty good, Mason, but I'm going to make it.”

“You know,” Mason said slowly, “I always thought—if you found out, if you knew Pop wasn't ever going to change, that he didn't care, I thought you'd—remember that hitchhiker? You said you thought something bad had happened to him. He hated everything and everybody. I thought that's what finding out would do to you. I couldn't stand that, Tex. Pop used to drive me crazy, he treated us so different, I was sure you'd start wondering why, the same as I did. I didn't see how you could help hating everybody, if you found out. Especially me.”

I remembered that day, in the office. Mason's face. The look on Mason's face before I turned and ran out. I remembered what Jamie had said, that love doesn't solve anything. Maybe. But it helps. “I don't hate you, Mace,” I said.

He nodded, and all at once I realized he was crying, not making any noise, but crying.

“I know,” he said, clearing his throat huskily. “At the hospital, before you went into surgery, you kept saying you had something to tell me, and when the doctors let me see you for a minute, you kept saying ‘I don't hate you, Mason. I don't hate you.' ”

He fell silent. Love ought to be a real simple thing. Animals don't complicate it, but with humans it gets so mixed up it's hard to know what you feel, much less how to say it. After a minute the best I could do was: “Tell you what—when you go to college, when you go out to the airport, I get to drive, okay?”

There are people who go places and people who stay…

“Okay,” Mason said. He turned around and washed a couple of dishes. Then he said, “You need somebody to go hunting with tomorrow?”

He looked at me. And absentmindedly added, “Geez, Tex, you're getting that gook all over the table.”

I started laughing. In a minute a slow grin started across Mason's face.

“Maybe we can go fishing instead,” I said. Mason said okay, so we're going in the morning.