Page 87 of Guitars and Cages

“Yes.”

“Then you shouldn’t have to ask why I didn’t come back.”

I turned away from her then, looking back down at Gage. Damn, but now that I was getting used to the bandages I could see how half of his face wasn’t touched much. Just some scrapes and bruises, and I wished like hell I could wipe them away. I ran my thumb over the back of his hand, studying the parts of his face I could see. “I wish you’d wake up, man; it ain’t right seein’ you so damned quiet. I’ve missed the hell outta you. Never thought I’d ever get to tell ya that, figured you wouldn’t give a shit anyway. Why would you ask for me after what I did? Why would you ever think anything about me except that I oughta rot in hell?”

I kept on rubbing the back of his hand, gently, looking at the old scars and remembering how some of them had gotten there. Baling hay and building fences, getting kicked by a mule and cut falling off his dirt bike. There was one from a fishing hook and one from smashing his fingers in the door of his old pickup truck. He’d sworn a blue streak after that one and kicked the hell outta that door.

“I won’t lie, Asher; he is furious with you, but I’m not sure it’s for the reason you think.”

“I turned my back on him, let my old man beat the shit outta him—hell, I hit him, too. He has every right to hate me for it; I’ll never stop hating myself for it.”

“You’re a fuckin’ fool, Asher,” Eve said, her voice betraying how tired she was. “He forgave you for that a long time ago.”

“What?” I looked at them both, saw Gage’s old man nod his head in confirmation, and my head started spinning ’cause I was so fuckin’ confused it wasn’t funny.

“He loved you,” Earl told me. “He told me more than once that he’d rather that he had taken that beating instead of you. He understood why you lied, why you shoved him away. Hell, I’m the one who wanted to kill you for it, until he told me about the way your old man treated you boys. I always wondered, but what he said confirmed it. No, Asher, what he’s pissed at you for is staying away. He always expected you to come back. He waited for you to come home, and the longer you stayed away the angrier he got, but he never hated you.”

Hot tears slid down my cheeks and I didn’t even try to hide them. The next thing I knew I was bawling like a baby, still holding Gage’s hand. It was like a dam had broken and everything I’d felt but refused to show came rushing out. I cried until it hurt, and even then it was hard to stop. All this time and the thing he was mad at me for wasn’t what I’d done, but that I’d never come back home to face it. When I finally sat up a bit to wipe away the tears, I felt sick to my stomach, ’cause it had come to this to find out the truth, and now the truth wasn’t even gonna matter ’cause Gage was... No, I didn’t want to think that he was gonna die, no matter what they were telling me. I leaned even closer, so I could speak into Gage’s ear.

“I wish you’d wake up and yell at me. Tell me to go to hell or something, threaten to blacken my eye—hell, I’d even hold still for you to hit me if you’d just wake up right about now. I, uhh, really suck at this, man, it’s like looking at my mom dying all over again and I never knew what to say then, either. I don’t want you to die, you...there were so many things you talked about doing, like buying your own ranch and raising the best rodeo bulls that had ever been on the circuit. I don’t even know if you got the ranch yet, but I bet you have; you were always the ambitious one.”

“He doesn’t talk about that ranch anymore,” Earl said. “Especially after his mama passed, he stayed on with me and the horses.”

I looked over at him, startled, because that was the first time I noticed that Gage’s mom was nowhere to be seen.

“When did she die?”

“Last May. She went quickly. One day she was sick, the next she just didn’t wake up.”

“I... I’m sorry. She was always nice to me, never minded me stayin’ and havin’ dinner or sleepin’ over, even when it was a school night.”

“She liked having you there; we both did, always felt like you were the brother that we were never able to give Gage. You boys were like two peas in a pod, always poking at things you shouldn’t.”

I chuckled, ’cause the memory, though painful at the time, was exactly what he meant by us poking in places we didn’t belong. “It took hours to get all those quills out. You kept going between laughing at us and lecturing us about not messing with porcupines, not like we needed the lecture after the lesson that old boy taught us.”

A faint grin crossed his face. “You boys were a mess. I thought a pack of wild animals was attacking the place the way you tore outta the woods screaming and hollering and waving your arms all around.”

“He wouldn’t have even got hit with them if I hadn’t kept messing with that damn thing. He warned me to leave it alone.”

“You always were the stubborn one.”

“Yeah, I know. I used to wonder why you kept letting him hang out with me. Most everyone else told their kids to stay clear of the Logan boys, but you guys never did.”

He chuckled at that. “Quiet as he was, I figured if I didn’t let him spend time with you, he wouldn’t have ever had another friend. And you weren’t as bad as you liked to think you were. Trying to copy those brothers of yours, I used to worry, but the more time you spent over at the ranch the more his mama and I got to see the real you. Or least, what we thought was you.”

I retreated at that, hiding back behind my hair.

“I wish you’d have told us the truth, son,” Earl said, his voice full of regret. “All those times we asked you about the cuts you had, the bruises, that burn on your shoulder, the black eyes, the welts, you always had a ready answer. I didn’t figure anyone to be as clumsy as you claimed to be and still be as good with the horses as you were, but we didn’t want to cause trouble for someone without being sure. If you’d have told us you were being hurt, we’d have helped you in a heartbeat, and then you wouldn’t have had to do all that runnin’ and lyin’.”

I shook my head.

“I couldn’t,” I said. “They’d have split us all up and I wouldn’t have seen my brothers anymore. He used to tell us all the time about how the county would come in and they’d send us all over the state and we wouldn’t have no one. He’d tell us we’d be treated worse with strangers than with him, so we all kept quiet, ’cause we knew it was only a matter of time before he’d get locked up again, and then we’d all be safe for a while.”

“Wasn’t any way to live, Asher.”

“I’ve lived worse.”

He sighed at hearing that, his weathered hands folding beneath his chin. “You got my son to lie for you, too, did you know that?”

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