Page 95 of Guitars and Cages

He said his goodbye in that quiet, respectful way of his, and then brushed me off with a shake of his head when I asked if he wanted me to drive. When we pulled away from the ranch, I couldn’t take my eyes off the ridge, half expecting to see a horse and rider silhouetted against the bright blue sky, waving. Instead, all I saw were crows.

“Think you’ll ever come back?” Conner asked as we drove away.

I thought about the things I loved there: the wide open space and the bright blue of the sky, the smell of fresh-cut hay and the way hard, honest work felt way down deep in the bones. Cattle and horses, river crossings and rodeos, fishing catfish in the summer and hunting in the winter; no place I’d ever been could compare. But there had been bad times, too: pain, misery, and fear; all the things that had driven me away.

“Maybe,” I said, turning the radio up to listen to the words of the Springsteen song roll loud and clear through my soul.

The song wasn’t even halfway over when something dawned on me and I turned it off. “What did you mean when you said you’d ridden before, but not like what you saw me do?”

He chuckled and glanced over at me. “I wasn’t sure you’d caught that; wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t. My brother and I took riding lessons when we were kids—well, mostly he did; they always kind of scared me, so I found a million and one ways to get out of them until my parents finally gave up and let me quit.”

“All that extreme stuff you were talking about, and a horse had you scared?”

“Yeah, but I’m only taking pictures of them, I’m not taking part. Riding, I actually had to get on the back of the horse.”

“Well, yeah, you wouldn’t want to see the view from under the hooves.”

He shuddered at that, and I found myself wishing we weren’t leaving, at least not before I had the chance to get Conner on a horse and prove to him there was nothing to be afraid of. Still, I hadn’t ever pictured him as having grown up somewhere with horses.

“So, where’d you take lessons at?”

“One of the other partners at my dad’s firm raised Saddlebreds. His wife taught show riding and my parents thought it would be a good thing for my brother and me to do, you know, so we didn’t get all filthy and end up rolling around in the mud playing football.”

I couldn’t help it, I doubled over in the seat laughing. After the last few days, it felt good to laugh, even if Conner was darting scowling looks at me every now and again, when he wasn’t paying attention to traffic.

“I’m sorry,” I finally choked out when I was somewhat calm again. “It’s just that...well, hell, I played football and half the fun was getting filthy and tackling each other in the mud.”

He sighed, and I made myself stop laughing. “Believe me when I say I would have preferred to play, but my mom hated us tracking mud in and she worried we’d break an arm, or a leg, or end up with a concussion or something.”

Maybe it wasn’t full-on laughing, but I couldn’t hold back the occasional chuckle and snort. “I broke my arm; Cole broke his leg and a wrist; Chase got a concussion, twice; and Michael ended up with three busted ribs. Gage, he played defense, he had a star on his helmet for every person he ever knocked out of a game, but even he got an ankle broken one year and his shoulder dislocated another. Those were some of the best moments, though: stepping out onto the field, the lights bright, all those people in the stands on a Friday night; you can’t find moments like that anywhere else. I hated school, I hated most of the people I went to school with, but on the field none of that mattered. We were a team, and we won and lost as a team.”

“Didn’t figure you for team sports.”

“That was the only sport I ever played, from Pee Wee until I dropped out. Gage, Cole, and me, we were usually on a team together. Was the only sport our old man would come see. Even when Cole fought, he wouldn’t come; said only pussies fought with gloves on their hands.”

“He sounds like an asshole, no offense. It’s not like my mom is any better, everything with her was about appearances. You couldn’t get dirty, you couldn’t come in second, you couldn’t mess up, and God forbid if you did anything to get the tongues of the gossips wagging. It’s no wonder Jace went into the priesthood; it’s pretty hard to upset the gossips doing that.”

“Jace, that’s your brother?”

He nodded. “My twin.”

“You never said you were a twin.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a sore subject. Him and I don’t talk much.”

“Why?”

He sighed and then fell silent, and I figured he wasn’t gonna answer.

“The day I came out to him and my parents, he preached a sermon at me about the evils of homosexuality and how I was gonna go to hell for what I was doing. Since then, I haven’t been able to have a single conversation with him that didn’t involve him trying to get me to convert, or repent, or confess my sins to someone. And you wanna know the fucked-up part? There’s nothing to even confess. I have such a hard time talking to people that I’ve only ever gone on a handful of dates, and they never turned into anything serious. I’ve had one kiss with a guy, that’s it, and aside from that, nothing.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah, sad, isn’t it?”

“Not sad, surprising. I mean, you’re nice, I guess it’s hard to see how you wouldn’t find someone as nice as you are.”

“Yeah, well, nice is worthless if people never get to know you. I was the kid in school who always sat in the back and rarely said anything. The one who walked to classes by himself, ate lunch alone, and never had any friends. I was always too scared of making a mistake and getting laughed at—or worse, messing up and having my mom find out about it. It was easier to fade into the background or hide behind a camera.”

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