Page 15 of Rolling Thunder

“Fixin’ your roof,” he replied around the nail he held in his mouth, without looking up.

“I didn’t ask you to fix the roof!” she blurted, angry at his casual air. Why was she so angry at him? She wasn’t a particularly angry person, but every time she saw him he was the only available target for her frustrations. For one, she hadn’t invited him to stay. But stay he did.

“Well, it needs fixin’,” he said simply.

It did. She didn’t want to admit even to herself how badly run down the farm was getting. She was embarrassed for him to see it. Some things she didn’t know how to do, some she couldn’t afford to do, and the rest she just didn’t have the time or energy for. She squinted up at him on the ladder into the bright sun and realized he’d replaced the piece of rusted sheet metal that had been leaking over the third stall. She needed all the help she could get. If Canyon Bill wanted to hang around and fix things for a while, she had to swallow her pride and her embarrassment, and let him.

“Okay. Well. I have to get horses ready for a trail ride…” She’d meant to say thank you. Instead, it had lodged in her throat like a stuck pill she couldn’t swallow.

“Glad to see some things ain’t changed all that much, fire ant,” he said, looking down at her with a lopsided grin through his bushy gray beard.

She stared up at him, wanting to be furious at him for waltzing in, setting up camp and using the childhood nickname he’d had for her as if he’d never abandoned them. But the charm that had always made Kay forgive him and love him seemed to be having the same effect on her. The edges of her mouth traitorously tugged into a grin in reply to his. In the end, she just walked away, muttering something about going to put on riding boots.

When her customers arrived, she walked out with the string of three trail horses to meet them. Bonnie and Clyde were exceptionally gentle horses that she had selected for this purpose. They could be trusted not to run away with novice riders. She rode Monty to lead the trail ride.

After the trail ride, she led the horses down to her wash rack. She drew them up, tying them up in a row under the shade of the simple metal roof. Canyon Bill was still there, but now sat on an overturned bucket, filling an empty gallon jug from her barn hose. The reality of it drew her up short. He was sleeping in a tent in the woods and getting drinking water from her barn. She didn’t know if he even had money for food. And he’d worked all day in brutal heat fixing her barn. She had two hundred dollars in her pocket from the trail ride. She counted off half of it and held it out to him.

“Thank you,” she said simply. He took a long look at the cash in her hand, but he shook his head and didn’t reach out to receive it.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and started to walk away. He paused, eyeing Joey in the round pen. She’d put him in there because it had the least grass and she was afraid for him to overeat in his thin condition and make himself sicker.

“That paint horse looks an awful lot like one your grandma used to have.”

Kayla nodded. “It’s Joey.”

Like Bill, he was aged and run down, but unmistakable.

“I found him at Thornton’s barn waiting for the auction, and I couldn’t leave him there.”

Bill walked over to the brown-and-white paint horse.

“Well, I’ll be damned. Joey. Kay sure loved you. Raised you right up from a baby.”

Joey nickered softly as Bill rubbed his neck.

“He can’t be ridden until I get him back to a healthy weight and see if he’s even sound. I can’t afford that sort of project on top of the mortgage… It was a stupid thing to do. But she loved him and…” I loved him too. Love was a luxury she couldn’t afford in any form. Life had taught her that hardness was the only way, and love made people soft. Or love was a lie. Trent had said he loved her once, and her foolish teenaged heart had believed. Love hurt people. But she loved the horses. They were the only thing besides her Gram Kay that she could trust. They were simple, and typically, if treated with kindness, they returned it.

“It ain’t stupid,” Bill said quietly. Without looking at her, he added, “Doin’ the next right thing ain’t ever stupid.”

Looking at Canyon Bill petting Joey, Kayla could almost imagine nothing had changed. The world hadn’t gone dark, and her grandmother hadn’t died. She would stroll out at any moment and chastise her for letting the horses stand there too long without being rinsed off. Her grief was like a deafening sound that drowned out everything else. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat, picking up the hose to get on with it.

Bill took the hint and headed off to his campsite without looking back.

As she sprayed the sweat off the trail horses, she steeled herself once more. She turned them out into the pasture next to where Joey stood in the round pen. He looked better already. Well enough that he’d eaten the grain she’d poured into the rubber feed pan and now was holding the feed pan in his teeth, flipping it this way and that.

It felt like a sign to find him just in time. He couldn’t have much time left in him and by all rights ought to have been doing nothing but standing in a pasture somewhere. But one day, he might still be able to carry tourists on gentle trail rides through the orange grove so she could stop borrowing Monty. More importantly, maybe she’d made one tiny thing right by getting him out of the auction barn where he would probably have gone to a kill buyer. He stopped flipping the feed pan and looked at her with a familiar sparkle in his eye.

“Haven’t I told you a thousand times not to play with your food?” she asked him. Her answer was an extra head flip, sending the feed pan flying. This time, it landed in his water trough with a huge splash. Joey was still Joey.

She heard the bark of an old motorcycle roaring to life, and she caught a glimpse of Canyon Bill, the very profile of the hardcore biker of the seventies with his beard and ponytail, winding his bike through the woods on an old path out to the road. Where he was heading or if he would come back, she had no idea.

The front gate squeaked in protest at being thrown open too quickly, and she glanced up, wondering what Bill was doing back so soon. But it wasn’t Bill. Her stomach plummeted as if she’d been suddenly thrown off a horse.

Evan and Dan sat hunched over Dan’s laptop—because of course neither one of them owned a real TV—and toasted beers and laughed at themselves. The pilot was airing, and they were finally getting to see the finished product.

“Oh my God, look at you!” Dan exclaimed, snorting with laughter. “I’m too tough for TV. But my buddy dragged me into this.” He narrated in a low voice as Evan dismounted his motorcycle on the screen. Dan cackled as Evan punched him in the arm.

Evan had surprised himself by having a blast making fun of himself on TV with Dan. The last time he’d seen himself on TV was on the five o’clock news when he was released from prison. That was only a ten-second clip of him scowling and shoving cameras away.

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