Page 10 of Rolling Thunder

She couldn’t think how a fire could have started over there, but since her barn was less than 500 feet away, she got up to investigate. The old fence was in a tree line, rusted and sagging. It was easy to step over sober. Drunk and in the pitch dark, it was a bit more challenging.

When she finally had a clear view through the trees, she could see a ragged tent and a motorcycle on its kickstand next to a crackling campfire. Someone was squatting on her land.

There was a flash of anger that someone had trespassed on her land, followed by a clap of fear that she was out here in the woods alone, mostly drunk, and had stumbled upon some vagrant.

Movement in the tent startled her, and she drew back into the shadows as a mountain of a man emerged from the tent with the slow shuffle of a long, hard life. A long, silver ponytail wrapped in a half dozen black hair bands in the style of old-school bikers hung over his shoulder. When he reached for a can warming in the coals of the fire, the glow illuminated a weathered face that had seen too much sun and too much hardship.

She knew that face! He had aged, but she would know that face anywhere.

Another jolt of emotion rushed through her, a storm surge of murky water concealing all manner of flotsam bobbing up at intervals—a blink of happiness followed by the tangle of anger, shame, and a good splash of whiskey, but it propelled her forward.

“Canyon Bill?” she demanded without thinking.

He startled, losing his balance and his grip on the can, which went flying, wasting its contents on the ground.

“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve to come back now!” she blurted, drunken anger bubbling up inside her. But didn’t that apply at least as much to her as it did him? She was trying to take over the farm that by all rights she didn’t deserve. As he struggled to his feet, she saw trembling hands, gnarled with arthritis, and it tamped down her fury.

“Lord God, Kayla, you damn near scared the life out of me,” he stammered. “And look at you, all grown up.” He stared at her, a mix of emotions playing across his face.

She recoiled toward the shadows again, trying to hide her stage makeup from Bill. She’d probably been fourteen the last time they’d seen each other.

“How long have you been out here?” she demanded, hating the quiver in her voice.

“I just got in tonight. I didn’t want to wake anybody up. I was hoping to see your grandma.”

“You’re about three years too late. She’s dead.”

It was blunt, and she said it with an attitude. She’d meant to keep the anger between them as a shield. He recoiled slightly from her words as if she’d struck him. He looked toward the house as if he didn’t believe her and her grandmother would be coming along in just a moment. Then, as if the weight of the world were hanging on his shoulders, he sank down next to the fire. She knew the feeling. She remembered receiving the same news, complete with the knowledge that she had also been too late. It brought back the rush of grief against the back of her throat, the never-relenting pressure that she had to push away and swallow down, lest it come bursting out of her.

“I’m mighty sorry to hear that,” he said quietly after a moment.

He was a big man, tall and broad as a bear, but age and remorse made him look less powerful. She remembered him as a usually jolly, fun-loving man with an edge. She’d never seen him as he was now, apparently struggling to comprehend that she’d just told him the only woman he’d ever loved was gone. It took the blaze of her anger toward him down another notch but didn’t snuff it out entirely.

“You might as well keep on riding,” she said with a bitterness that he didn’t entirely deserve, and she didn’t entirely feel.

He was no blood kin to her. He’d never been legally married to Kay or adopted Kayla’s mother, despite being her grandma Kay’s only lifelong partner. Surely some or even most of her anger was more rightly directed at her own absentee father, whoever he was. If Kayla’s mother knew, she had never told. But to Kayla, Canyon Bill was the living embodiment of the rambling man who couldn’t be trusted to stick around, and his comings and goings had wounded three generations of Daniels women. Even still, he had been the only male figure in her life, and she did love him. Maybe the absence of her grandmother made her love him even more, or at least need him more.

“You runnin’ the place now?” Canyon Bill asked her.

He looked at Kayla as if she were the last thread of hope to hang on to above a pit of despair. She prayed she had retreated into the shadows enough that he couldn’t see the body glitter on her skin. It was exactly why she’d never come back to see her grandmother. The shame of what she’d done was a thing she wore…whether it was glitter and eyeliner or just the sting in her heart that she was sure would show on her skin just as clearly.

“Well, I’m trying to,” she said.

“Need some help?” he asked. She’d just told him the love of his life was dead, and his first impulse was to help her? Well, she didn’t deserve that either.

“I can manage.” Right now, her life was no different from the rusty, broken barbed-wire fence. The leaking roof, the rotting wood. Everything was broken. This farm, just like her heart, had sat empty while local vandals had made off with literally anything that could be scrapped for cash. What they hadn’t taken had been battered by the brutal southwest Florida weather. Her grandmother’s trails through the woods in which she now stood were grown over and had been reclaimed by the jungle. Every cent she managed to earn went to the mortgage, and she was still behind on payments. There was no money for upkeep or repair. She only knew how to fix stuff with duct tape. Some of Bill’s old tools had survived the pillage hidden in the back of the shed, but she didn’t know how to use them, so there they sat, rusting in the humidity. Yeah, she was managing, all right. She was managing to run everything straight off the rails.

At a loss, Kayla stormed off into the night before she said more things she would regret, forgetting the broken-down fence and how drunk she was. Her feet tangled, and she pitched forward into the dark. Her hands broke her fall, but what she felt was sand, immediately followed by the sting of fire ants.

“Fuck!” she screamed into the night. Her dramatic exit ruined, she lay in a heap on the ground, slapping at stinging ants. As if it couldn’t get any worse—or more ironic…

“You all right, Kayla?” she heard Canyon Bill asking from the dark.

“Great. Fine. Never better,” she replied, pulling herself up, trying to scrape ants off with her foot and tripping again.

She dragged herself back into the house, scratching at burning ant bites. In her bathroom mirror was a girl she didn’t want to see. She shook her head, scrubbed the evidence of the Palm from her body, crawled into bed disgusted with everything, and slipped into dreamless oblivion.

Impossibly too soon, the morning sunlight seeped into her skull, igniting a throbbing headache that seemed to take on the rhythm of the sound of a distant hammer. She peeked out her bedroom window and saw Canyon Bill hoist a new board and begin to hammer it in place. Two sections of her round pen had fallen into disrepair after being kicked by a client’s horse. She’d bought the lumber, but then found she wasn’t strong enough to hold the board in place by herself to fix it. Now Bill was doing it.

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