slowly to Blue, heavily favoring his bad knee.
Once there, he stood looking back at Andie Lee. Blue looked at her, too.
She stood with her hand on the door handle, still trying to get a grip on the situation by talking to the patrolman across the top of his car. Gordon, scornful and fierce, was bent over to look in at Shane and berate him again.
“Damn shame,” Micah said. “It’s nothin’ but a goddamn shame. Andie Lee was the sweetest girl ever lived and she’s growed up to be a good, hardworking woman. She don’t deserve such hell.”
“Not many people do,” Blue said.
“No, and them that does don’t seem to catch it,” Micah said. “Leastways, not on this earth.”
Blue stared at Gordon. “Once in awhile they do,” he said.
“I figure we orter help each other through the rough patches,” Micah said. “No tellin’ when we’ll hit one of our own.”
Blue whipped his head around. Micah had him locked in his sharp sights.
“Helpin’ somebody else can take a man’s mind off his own trouble.”
“What’re you talking about?” Blue said. “I can’t help Andie Lee, if that’s what you mean.”
He tasted her name on his tongue.
“You can help that boy,” Micah said. “You seen that look he give you, and don’t try to tell me you didn’t. Shane has some respect for you when he don’t have none for nobody else.”
“You heard him,” Blue said. “He hates my guts for getting in his way.”
“Yeah, but he admires you for it, too,” Micah said. “Ever’body else chasin’ around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off and you put the kibosh on the whole deal in a heartbeat. He’s glad you done it, he just won’t admit it.”
Blue turned toward the truck.
Micah came along behind him. Blue could hear his boot-heel scrape against the dirt.
“Your horse is loose,” Micah said. “You know that?”
“I untied him to keep him from hanging himself again,” Blue said. He strode to the truck, jerked open the door, got in and slammed it shut.
Micah stopped at his window. “You’d do that fer a horse but not fer a boy?”
Blue ignored him.
Micah went around and got in on the driver’s side. He closed his door, reached for the key and fired up the old truck. Then he just sat there.
The roan kicked the tailgate of the trailer hard enough to knock it down.
“The horse is mine,” Blue said.
“Because you’re the one can handle him,” Micah said.
“Because I paid money for him.”
“No,” the old man said, shaking his head to lament Blue’s willful blindness, “it’s because you can bring him along to be all the horse he’s made to be. You’re the one he can connect with, so he is your horse.”
Blue turned and glared at him.
Micah met his look with one just as unyielding, shifted gears, and put the truck in motion.
“Ownership,” Micah said. “It’s a funny deal. Is it who holds the papers or who’s got the know-how to put a thing to use? Gordon holds the papers on this ranch. He uses a lot of it and he’s a top hand at breeding and raising cattle and horses and feed. Lots of jobs connected with them things he can do better than any other man on this place.”
He swung the truck around to head back to the road, pausing in his sermon only long enough to spit out the window.
“But there’s parts of this ranch Gordon don’t even know how to use. So who’s the real owners then? Jemmy in the machine shop. Toby in the show barn. Me in my wranglin’ pen and my garden spot.”
“I don’t own Shane just because I stopped him from running away,” Blue said. “He belongs to Andie Lee.”
Micah shook his head.
“She holds the papers on him,” he said. “But you’re the man with the juice when it comes to that boy.”
Blue snorted. “You’re smoking something besides tobacco,” he said.
Micah shook his head. “Nope.”
Amazingly enough, for another minute, he didn’t say a word. He just looked at Blue, his hands loose on the wheel while the old truck followed the road.
“I may never get another thing out of that colt,” Blue said. “As far as we are now may be as far as we go.”
Micah nodded and broke into a grin that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Sounds like plain old life to me,” he said.
He slapped Blue on the shoulder as if they had just come to an agreement and pulled the rig back from the edge of the Center’s gravel road.
“Yessir,” he said, speeding up a little, “from where I sit, looks like the best any of us can ever do is just go ahead and hook up and hope for the best.”
Hope for the best wasn’t going to cut it for Shane.
Blue raised his voice to carry over the rattling of the rig.
“What could I do for him, anyhow?”
“For starters, let him ride with you,” Micah said. “That roan colt could teach him as much as he’s teaching you and you could teach Shane more, too.”
Blue’s stomach tied into a hard knot.
“You heard Gordon,” he said. “The kid could be gone a long time—maybe he’ll use his influence to get him sent to reform school.”
“He’ll bring him home in a day or two,” Micah said. “Gordon aims to be the one that gets him off the dope for Andie Lee. Gordon likes to prove he can do what nobody else can.”
“The way he’s going about it, he’ll drive him to it instead.”
“How would you go about it?” Micah asked.
Blue sensed the trap. “I wouldn’t.”
“Horses heal a lot of wounds,” Micah said, completely undeterred. “Shane likes horses but he never has stayed with ’em because he likes them drugs more.”
He drove on out to the main ranch road, then stopped and looked both ways as if the traffic was terrible instead of nonexistent.
“You still want to go down to the arena?”
“No,” Blue said. “Let’s go see about
