You do that for me. " He picked up his jacket from the chair. He put it on. He walked to the door of the dojo and pushed it open and stepped out into the October evening. The sky above the Mojave was turning orange at the horizon, purple above it, the first pale star appearing to the east.
The desert air was cold now, the sharp, clean cold of high desert at nightfall. He stood in the parking lot beside his motorcycle for a long time. Behind him, through the glass front of Garrison Martial Arts Academy, he could see the room still gathered. He could see Archer Garrison with his arm around his son's shoulders. He could see Vince Steel and Rupert Cobb and Curtis Whitmore standing together near the back wall, the posture of men who have known each other in the way that service creates.
He touched the empty chain at his neck. It hung without the ring now, lighter than it had been this morning. He mounted the Harley, started the engine, let the motor run for a moment in the cooling air. 6:00 tomorrow morning, he had told the young man he had not been up before 6 with a purpose for 9 years. He pulled out of the parking lot and rode north through Ridgerest out to the edge of town, where the street lights gave way to open desert, and the road ran straight toward the mountains.
He rode until the town was behind him and there was nothing around him but the high desert and the enormous sky and the sound of the engine carrying him forward through the dark. He did not know exactly what he was carrying home with him tonight. He knew it was heavier than what he had left the house with this morning. He knew it was heavier in the way that things get heavier when they are real rather than theoretical when the distance between what you have been telling yourself and what is actually true has finally been closed. He had spent 9 years believing that the sum of his life was 63 names on an arm and a house full of one person's quiet.
Tomorrow morning at 6:00, a 24year-old man was going to come to his door carrying June's wedding ring and a willingness to try. Hank Briggs was not sure that was an accident. He rode home through the dark desert of California with the empty chain at his neck and the engine running steady beneath him. And for the first time in nine years, he was not entirely certain that he was done. Hank did not sleep.
He sat on the back porch of the cabin with a blanket over his shoulders and a mug of coffee that went cold before he finished half of it. The desert night was clear and enormous, the kind of sky that only exists far enough from city lights where the stars come all the way down to the horizon and the Milky Way is not a suggestion but a fact. He had brought June's photograph outside for the first time. In four years of porch evenings and late nights and early mornings, the photograph had always stayed on the mantle above the fireplace. But tonight he had carried it out and set it on the small wooden table beside his rocking chair, and he sat with it the way he sat with her inside, talking quietly to the dark.
""You saw that coming, didn't you? "" he said. "You always saw things coming before I did. " That was the arrangement for 31 years and I was comfortable with it and I did not appreciate it adequately and I am aware of that now. The wind moved through the creosote.
He looked at the photograph in the moonlight, the yellow sundress, the tomato plants, the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes catching the summer light of a July afternoon in a garden that no longer existed. He talked to her for a long time. He told her about Roy and the diner and the conversation about Wyatt Decker that he had walked away from. He told her about the Shell station in Dela Flynn. He told her about the dojo, about Cole Garrison, about 92 seconds on a white mat in front of 40 people, about the eight men who had stood up one after another and said things they had been carrying for years without a place to put them.
He told her about giving her ring to a 24-year-old boy who had stood in the center of a room and told the truth about himself at significant personal cost, which Hank had come to believe was one of the most difficult things a human being could do. He touched the empty chain at his neck. "I gave away your ring tonight, sweetheart," he said. "I want you to know that I know what I did. I want you to know that I believe you would have understood why.
You always understood the things that mattered more than I did. " He sat until the coffee was cold and then long after that until the eastern horizon began to gray almost imperceptibly the first suggestion of dawn still an hour away. He went inside at 4 in the morning. He did not go to bed. He sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and a pen and wrote down names.
Colt Garrison, Archer Garrison, Wyatt Decker, Roy Boon, Vince Steel, Rupert Cobb, Curtis Whitmore, Dela Flynn, Cole Boon. Then beside each name, he wrote one or two words. What each person needed, not what they wanted, what they needed. It was the kind of list a Sergeant Major makes. A list of people who are about to become his responsibility.
The kind of list he had not made in 9 years. His handwriting was steady. His mind was clear in the specific way. It got clear when there was work to be done. He made a fresh pot of coffee at 5:30.
He called Roy at 5:45. Roy answered on the second ring, which meant he had been awake. "Wyatt Decker," Hank said. "The young man at the halfway house on Inyokern Road. Can you reach him this morning?
" There was a brief pause. Roy said I talked to him last night after everything happened. I told him something was going on and to be ready if I called in the morning. You called to him last night. I had a feeling you might change your mind.
Roy's voice held something careful in it. Hank heard it and understood. "Tell him to be ready at 6:30. We are going to Bakersfield. " Another pause shorter this time.
"I will pick him up myself," Roy said. Hank heard the truck at 558. The sound of tires on the gravel driveway, a truck engine cutting off a door opening. Then footsteps on the porch steps measured and deliberate the footsteps of someone who was making themselves walk steadily when steadily was an effort. Hank opened the door before the knock.
Colt Garrison looked like a man who had not slept. His face was pale and his eyes were red at the edges. And he was wearing a plain gray sweatshirt and jeans, which made him look considerably younger, more like the 24year-old he was and less like the persona he had been constructing since his mother died. He was holding a paper bag in his right hand. He held it out.