No Road Out

Chapter 1: The Last Good Morning

The smell of coffee and frying bacon woke Tommy Stenson the way it always did—slowly, like a hand pulling him up from deep water. He lay in the narrow bed beneath the window and watched his breath curl against the cold glass. October had teeth this year. The thermometer nailed to the porch post had read twenty-six degrees when he'd checked it before bed, and the frost on the inside of the windowpane told him it hadn't climbed since.

He could hear Bev in the kitchen. Not her voice—his grandmother wasn't a morning talker—but the particular sounds she made. The cast-iron skillet scraping the stovetop. The soft thud of the bread drawer. The creak of the floorboard in front of the sink, the one she always said she'd have him fix and never did, because she liked knowing where people were standing by the sounds they made in her house.

Tommy swung his legs out and set his bare feet on the cold pine floor. He was small for eleven, with knobby wrists and a sharp jaw that Bev said he'd inherited from his grandfather, a man who'd died before Tommy was born. His hair was the color of straw left out in the rain—not blond, not brown, but something in between that defied naming. His eyes were gray-blue, the color of the sky before snow.

He pulled on wool socks, jeans stiff from yesterday's mud, and a flannel shirt that had once been red and was now the color of old brick. The shirt had been his mother's. He didn't think about that every time he put it on anymore, but he thought about it most times.

The kitchen was warm. The woodstove in the corner had been fed already, and the air above it shimmered. Bev stood at the counter with her back to him, pouring coffee from the percolator into her blue enamel mug. She was sixty-eight years old, lean as a fence rail, with silver hair she kept in a single braid that hung between her shoulder blades. Her hands were rough and spotted from decades of ranch work, but they were steady. They were always steady.

"Eggs are on the table," she said without turning around.

"Morning to you too."

"Morning's been going on for three hours. You're just joining it."

Tommy sat down at the kitchen table—a heavy oak thing that Bev's husband had built forty years ago—and pulled the plate toward him. Two eggs over easy, three strips of bacon, a piece of toast with butter already soaking into it. He ate the way ranch kids eat: fast, serious, without much conversation.

Through the window over the sink, he could see the ranch spread out in the gray morning light. The house sat on a low rise, and from the kitchen you could see most of the forty acres—the barn and the two corrals, the hay shed with its tin roof, the line of cottonwoods along Sutter Creek, and beyond all of it, the dark wall of the Absaroka Range climbing into clouds. The mountains were already white above the timberline. Below it, the aspens had gone gold and were now dropping their leaves in long, spiraling falls whenever the wind picked up.

There were eighteen head of cattle left. There had been thirty-two when Tommy's mother was alive, but Bev had sold some to pay bills and lost a few to a bad winter two years back—the same winter that took Tommy's mother, though not in the same way. His mother, Jeanine, had died in a car accident on the highway outside Livingston. Black ice. A logging truck. Tommy had been nine.

He didn't think about it at breakfast. He had learned not to think about it at meals, because meals were for fuel and for the quiet company of Bev, and thinking about his mother made the food taste like nothing.

"Wind's supposed to pick up tonight," Bev said, sitting down across from him with her coffee. She didn't eat breakfast herself—never had, as far as Tommy could remember. Just coffee, black, two cups.

"Snow?"

"Maybe. Radio said a system coming down from Canada. Might miss us."

"Might not."

She looked at him over the rim of her mug. Her eyes were the same gray-blue as his, and they had the same quality of seeming to measure everything they settled on. "Might not," she agreed. "We should bring the herd down from the upper pasture today. Just in case."

Tommy nodded. That was a job for a horse, and he was glad of it. He loved riding more than almost anything—more than fishing, more than the paperback westerns he read by lamplight, more than the feeling of a hot bath after a cold day. On a horse, the world made sense. The horse moved and you moved with it, and the land unrolled beneath you like something you owned.

After breakfast, he pulled on his boots—scarred Justins that Bev had bought secondhand in Billings—and his canvas jacket, and walked out into the cold. Jig was waiting on the porch, tail going. Jig was a blue heeler, four years old, with one brown eye and one that was half blue and half brown, split right down the middle like a marble. He was a working dog, but he was also Tommy's dog, and the distinction between those two things had blurred so completely that neither Tommy nor Jig recognized it anymore.

"Hey, boy." Tommy scratched behind Jig's ears. The dog leaned into his hand, then dropped off the porch and trotted toward the barn, looking back to make sure Tommy was following.

The barn was old but solid—log walls chinked with mortar, a tin roof that sang in the rain. Inside, it smelled of hay and horse and the particular sweet-sour smell of old leather. There were two horses: Clementine, Bev's mare, a stocky bay quarter horse who was fourteen years old and knew every trail in the foothills; and Dutch, a younger sorrel gelding who was strong but skittish and had a habit of shying at shadows.

Tommy led Clementine out of her stall and brushed her down, working the curry comb in slow circles the way Bev had taught him. The mare stood patient and half-asleep, one hind foot cocked. He picked her hooves, checking for stones, then saddled her with Bev's old roping saddle—a heavy thing with a deep seat that Tommy had to stand on a bucket to cinch properly.

By the time he led Clementine out of the barn, Bev was crossing the yard in her old Carhartt coat, her braid swinging. She carried a stock whip in one hand, though she rarely used it for anything but pointing.

"I'll take Dutch," she said. "We'll push them down through the draw. Should take an hour if they cooperate."

"They won't cooperate."

"No. They won't." She almost smiled. Bev's smiles were rare and quick, like birds landing on a wire—there and then gone before you could be sure you'd seen them.

They rode out together into the upper pasture, Jig racing ahead with his belly low to the ground, and for a while the morning was just work, the good kind—the kind that made your muscles ache and your mind go quiet. The cattle were scattered across a hillside of brown grass and early snow, and they didn't want to move, but between the two horses and the dog, they got them down into the lower pasture and through the gate in just over ninety minutes.

Bev was breathing hard when they finished. Tommy noticed but didn't say anything. She'd been breathing hard more often lately—at the top of the porch steps, after splitting wood, sometimes just standing up from her chair. He'd asked her about it once, and she'd said, "I'm sixty-eight years old, Thomas. I'm allowed to breathe hard."

She called him Thomas only when she wanted the conversation to be over.

They unsaddled the horses and turned them out. Tommy forked hay into the feed trough while Bev leaned against the corral fence and watched the mountains. The clouds were thicker now, pressing down on the peaks like a gray lid.

"Might come sooner than tonight," she said.

"The storm?"

"Mm-hmm."

They went inside. Bev put a pot of soup on the woodstove—beef and barley, made from leftovers—and Tommy sat at the table with a school workbook. He was homeschooled, had been since his mother died. Bev taught him math and reading and history, and she was a better teacher than she gave herself credit for, though her methods were unconventional. History was mostly stories she told from memory—about the homesteaders, the Crow people, the copper miners, the ranchers who'd built this valley into something. Math was practical: how many bales per head per month, how many fence posts per quarter mile, what a calf would bring at auction if beef was at a dollar sixty-two a pound.

Tommy worked through a set of long-division problems while the soup bubbled and the wind began to scratch at the windows. Jig lay under the table with his chin on Tommy's foot.

It was a good morning. It was, in fact, the last good morning Tommy would have for a while, though he didn't know that yet.

At eleven-fifteen, Bev set her coffee mug down on the counter with a sound that was wrong—not a clink but a thud, as if she'd lost control of her hand at the last second. Tommy looked up.

She was standing very still, one hand on the counter, the other hanging at her side. Her face had changed. The left side of it had gone slack, like a mask that was melting. Her left eye drooped. Her mouth pulled down on that side.

"Bev?"

She tried to speak. What came out was not words. It was a sound—a garbled, wet sound, like someone talking underwater. Her left hand opened and closed, opened and closed, as if she were trying to grab something that wasn't there.

Tommy was on his feet. The chair scraped back and hit the wall. "Bev!"

She took one step toward him, and her left leg buckled. She went down hard—not a fall, exactly, but a collapse, her body folding in on itself like a puppet with cut strings. She hit the floor on her side, and the blue enamel mug rolled across the kitchen and came to rest against the leg of the stove.

Tommy was beside her in two steps. He knelt on the floor and put his hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were open. The right one was terrified. The left one stared at nothing.

"Bev. Bev, can you hear me?"

She made the underwater sound again. Her right hand came up and gripped his wrist—hard, desperate, the grip of someone drowning.

"Okay," Tommy said. His voice was shaking, but his hands were steady. He didn't know where that came from—maybe from her. "Okay. I'm going to get help. Don't move."

He ran to the phone on the wall by the door. Picked up the receiver. The line was dead—not the buzzing dead of a downed wire, but the silent dead of no connection at all. He hadn't noticed it go out. The storm, maybe, or something else—the lines out here were old and went down in bad weather.

He ran back to Bev. She hadn't moved. Her breathing was rough, ragged, each inhale a small battle.

"Phone's out," he said. "I'm going to go to the Petersons'. I'm going to get help."

The Petersons were the nearest neighbors, three miles down the ranch road. Earl Peterson was seventy-four and his wife, Louise, was seventy-one, but they had a truck and they knew the way to the hospital in Livingston.

Tommy grabbed his jacket and ran out the door. He was halfway to the barn—thinking he'd saddle Clementine, ride to the Petersons'—when he saw the dust plume on the road. Not dust—mud. A truck was coming up the ranch road, moving fast, its headlights on in the gray morning.

It was Earl Peterson's truck.

Earl pulled into the yard and got out. He was a big man, slow-moving, with a white mustache and hands like shovels. He took one look at Tommy's face and said, "What's wrong?"

"Bev fell. She can't talk. Her face—" Tommy's voice broke. He swallowed hard and forced it back together. "Something's wrong with her face."

Earl moved faster than Tommy had ever seen him move. He was inside the house and kneeling beside Bev in seconds. He looked at her face, lifted her left arm and let it go—it dropped like a dead thing—and said, "Stroke."

"What do we do?"

"We get her to the hospital. Right now." Earl looked at Tommy. "Help me get her to the truck."

They carried her between them—Earl taking most of the weight, Tommy holding her legs. She was lighter than Tommy expected, and that scared him more than anything, because Bev had always seemed immovable, permanent, like the mountains themselves.

They got her into the back seat of the truck. Earl grabbed a blanket from behind the seat and tucked it around her. Then he turned to Tommy.

"Son, I need you to stay here."

"I want to come."

"I know you do. But it's ninety minutes to Livingston, and I need to drive fast, and I can't be worrying about you in the back seat while I'm doing it. Your grandmother needs all my attention."

"But—"

"Listen to me." Earl put his hand on Tommy's shoulder. His grip was firm but not unkind. "I'm going to call your uncle when I get to town. Russell. He's in Bozeman, right?"

Tommy nodded. Uncle Russell was his mother's brother. They weren't close—Russell came out to the ranch maybe once a year, usually at Christmas, and he always seemed uncomfortable, like a man wearing a suit that didn't fit.

"Russell will come get you. Probably be here by tonight. You just sit tight, keep the fire going, feed the animals. Can you do that?"

Tommy nodded again. He didn't trust his voice.

Earl squeezed his shoulder, then got in the truck. Through the window, Tommy could see Bev's face—the ruined left side, the terrified right eye. She was looking at him. Her right hand came up and pressed against the glass.

Tommy put his hand against the glass on the other side.

Then Earl put the truck in gear, and they were gone, bouncing down the ranch road in a spray of mud, and Tommy was standing in the yard with Jig pressed against his leg, watching the taillights disappear into the gray.

He stood there for a long time.

The wind was picking up.