It was possible that this particularly unwinnable game might have broken Pete’s will to work, but luckily for him, a thunderstorm came in, fast and roaring. The desert caught his attention with a puff of dust and weeds, so he just had time to take cover in the six-stall barn before the rain really began to come down. Inside the barn, Pete began to shovel manure and sweep the aisle. It was hard work, but it was better than the never-ending drudgery of beetle picking.
Inside, it was dim and comforting, either because of or despite Pete not being raised around horses. There were only two horses in the stable at the moment—three if you counted the one the mare was carrying inside her—but they were all terrible horses. The mare was a savage creature kept mostly because she was the fastest barrel racer to come out of Colorado in a generation. She was so mean that she even killed her own name, and now people just pointed to her. They kept breeding her, hoping that she’d throw a foal with all the speed and none of the malice, but so far, no dice. They had great hopes for the foal she was carrying now, but the truth was that the tiny filly inside her would, in six years, bear the state’s current barrel-racing champion out of a competition and through the display window of a local furniture store.
The other horse in the barn was Salto, a saddlebred stallion that one of the pilgrims had come riding in on five years before. He was a very fancy horse, it turned out, one of the last of a very rare bloodline, and so although the Sorias were not particularly interested in saddlebreds, he was nonetheless valuable for his progeny. Every so often, people would come from very far away to breed their mares to him and would pay an enormous sum for this privilege. And so he remained. The only problem with Salto was that he was extremely high-strung and would not respect a fence. He had to remain in his box stall day in and day out, and as he was so anxious and excitable, he had to wear a small bit of padding strapped between his ears to prevent him from rearing up and murdering himself on the ceiling of his own stall. Michael had put a radio in the stable to soothe Salto and prevent him from attempting escape.
Pete was looking at Salto when he realized that he was not the only human in the barn. There was another man scrubbing buckets in one of the empty stalls. To break the silence and to be friendly, Pete said, “Crazy weather, right?”
Pete did not know it, but he was talking to Luis the one-handed, who was not actually one-handed but was called that because his left hand was a full one-inch wider than his right. Luis used the spread of those left fingers to great advantage: He was the finest guitar player in a fifty-mile radius and no one could catch a baseball like he could. There were two things that people did not know about Luis: First, that he was a collector of gloves. He bought two pairs of gloves each time, as he needed two different sizes, and he kept the too-small left gloves in a box that he stored between his mattress and the wall. Second, Luis the one-handed was a great romantic, and he daydreamed that there existed a love of his life who also had mismatched hands, and that his useless left-hand gloves would one day fit her. So he kept those gloves in a box like a stack of prewritten love letters, waiting for the heart that was longing to read them.
“It’s a big change from Oklahoma,” Pete tried.
“Llueve a cántaros,” said Luis.
This exchange was unproductive as Luis the one-handed did not speak very good English and Pete was from Oklahoma and had only loneliness as his second language.
They both shrugged, and, his bucket scrubbing done, Luis went into the hayloft to nap until the rain was over.
So Pete worked with only the galloping rain on the roof for company. He was happier than he’d been in a while. Although homesickness still plucked at him, his overall mood had been so poor in the days leading up to his exodus from Oklahoma that everything else seemed brighter in comparison.
It would be easy to think that the reason Pete’s failure to serve hit him so hard was because his family wasn’t understanding. But the truth was the opposite. If one lives with a brood of ogres, it is not a hard thing at all to let them down. One can even feel, perhaps, that the ogres had it coming—they were ogres, after all. But the Wyatts were not ogres. George Wyatt was a brusque and realistic man, but he was not cruel. He eyed the situation at hand and took the steps needed to correct for it. When Pete the doctor handed Pete the son back to him with the verdict of unfit for service, he surveyed the situation and told Pete, factually, that Pete would find something else to do and, in any case, he was sure that Dexter would continue the family’s military legacy, so Pete didn’t have to feel he was letting down the home front. Flor Wyatt, Pete’s mother, was married to a military man, and her mother had been married to a military man, and her mother’s mother had been married to a military man, and even back in Spain her mother’s mother’s mother had been married to a military man, and so on and so forth until the beginning of both women and the military, but she did not shame Pete’s inability to enlist. Instead, she said, “I’m sure you’ll find another way to serve your country.” And Dexter Wyatt, Pete’s slightly younger brother, who was the closest to an ogre the Wyatt family had, said, “I’ll shoot ’em for you, Pete.”
This kindness, however, only made the situation worse for Pete. It emphasized that the person who was being cruelest to Pete was actually Pete.
He knew that leaving wouldn’t change the way he felt. He didn’t pretend that he would outrun himself. But he did think he might find something to feed that voracious sense of duty inside him, unless that hungry feeling was just the gaping hole in his heart.
The box truck, he thought, had to be the answer.
Pete peered at the vehicle as he worked in the barn, looking out the windows to where it was parked at every opportunity. It was a touchstone, reminding him of what all of his new blisters would eventually be traded for. He thought he saw the back of the truck open at one point, but when he looked back out the window, it was closed again.