Spur Marks on Paper Maps

By July, Chet Sorrell had become part of every fairground in Blythe’s mind: near the chutes, at the rail, walking toward a problem before most people had noticed one existed. She still wanted to beat him at every argument. She still disliked how often he proved useful.

But when the gate opened for her name, she had begun to know exactly where to look for his hat.

By the time the circuit reached Mineral Wells, rain had followed them across four counties and turned every fairground drive into a brown, rutted mess. Blythe pulled into the Golden Spur Motor Lodge after dark, her trailer lights reflected in the flooded parking lot.

The woman at the desk clicked through her reservation twice, then looked past Blythe toward Chet, who had come in behind her carrying his damp hat.

“Somebody put both of you in 214,” she said. “It’s the last room. Two beds.”

Chet set his hat against his thigh. “I can sleep in my truck.”

“Your rear window leaks,” Blythe said.

His eyes moved to hers. “You noticed that?”

“It has been raining on every road since Tuesday.”

The clerk waited with the key between two fingers.

Blythe took it. “Two beds.”

“Your choice?” Chet asked.

“It is.”

Room 214 had a peeling door, a cracked ice bucket, and two adjoining beds with burnt-orange covers that had survived more circuit seasons than either of them cared to count. The window unit rattled without cooling much of anything. Water threaded down the glass outside, blurring the motel sign into red smears.

Chet put his duffel by the bed nearest the door. “You want the bathroom first?”

“I want food first.”

That earned a change in his face, small but real. “There’s barbecue across the highway.”

He came back twenty minutes later with paper sacks tucked beneath his oilskin. They sat at the little laminate table beneath a lamp that leaned to one side, sharing brisket, beans, pickles, and a slice of pecan pie divided by a plastic knife.

For a while, the only sound was rain on the roof and the snap of foil wrappers.

“You ever get tired of it?” Blythe asked.

“The barbecue?”

“The road.”

Chet looked down at the remains of his sandwich. “Sometimes.”

She waited.

“I like the work,” he said. “I like knowing where I’m needed. But after enough motels, you wake up and have to look at the receipt to remember what town you’re in.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“It isn’t the part I advertise.”

Blythe broke a piece from the cornbread. “I thought traveling alone would make me feel independent.”

“And?”

“Some nights it just makes me hard to find.”

His attention lifted then, steady and quiet.

She regretted saying it almost at once. Not because it was false. Because Chet had a way of keeping a truth once she gave it to him.

“Aunt Lorna says I’m trying to prove something,” Blythe went on. “Maybe I am. I don’t want anybody saying a Bledsoe name bought my entry fees or my wins.”

“They can say what they like.”

“They do.”

“They don’t get to decide whose work it is.”

The words settled somewhere deep in her, somewhere no buckle or payout had ever reached.

She looked at the pie between them. “You always this good at saying the right thing?”

“No.” His mouth moved at one corner. “Mostly I say what I mean and get in trouble.”

“That part I believe.”

Later, Chet took the bed closest to the door without asking again. Blythe lay beneath a scratchy motel blanket with rain hammering the roof and listened to the soft, even sounds of him settling into the other bed. She had shared rooms with women from the circuit, cousins, ranch hands caught in bad weather. None of it had ever made her so aware of the simple fact of another person being there.

Three nights later, the rain finally slackened after delaying the evening performance at the Crowley fairgrounds. Payout ran late. By the time Blythe reached the office to sign for her check, the grandstands had emptied and the livestock barns had gone dark one row at a time.

Chet stood at the counter waiting for his pickup rider’s pay, hat in hand. A folded Texas road map lay beside his elbow, soft at the creases and marked with circles, coffee stains, and the faint scuffs of spur marks near half the towns Blythe knew by heart.

“That thing ought to be in a museum,” she said.

“It still gets me where I’m going.”

“Does it?”

“Most days.”

The bookkeeper handed them their envelopes, apologized for the hour, and left them with instructions to switch off the lights when they went. Her car rolled away through the wet lot. Soon the office belonged to Blythe and Chet alone, with filing cabinets, a dead vending machine, and rain tapping the metal awning outside.

Chet folded his check into his wallet. “You fixed your entry today.”

Blythe leaned against the counter. “You watched it?”

“I watch your runs.”

“You say that like it’s ordinary.”

“It is for me.”

Her pulse changed course.

She looked down at the envelope in her hands. “Why did you take that motel room with me?”

“Because you told me to.”

“That isn’t all.”

“No.” He set his hat on the counter. “It isn’t.”

When he came around the desk, he moved slowly enough that she could have stepped away. Instead she stayed where she was.

His hand lifted beside her face and paused.

“Tell me to stop,” he said.

“Don’t stop.”

His palm settled against her cheek. Calluses caught lightly against her skin. He stood close enough that she could see the pale scar along his chin, the faint rain marks still darkening his collar, the care he took even now.

Blythe tipped toward him.

Chet did not close the last inch.

“Not here,” he said.

Her temper sparked, though it had no real heat behind it. “You have a rule for everything.”

“I have one for things that matter.”

“And this matters?”

“Yes.”

The answer left her with nowhere to hide.

He lowered his hand, though his eyes stayed on her. “I want something with you that isn’t borrowed from a motel clerk or a fairgrounds office.”

Blythe held her check so tightly the paper bent. “You are making it very difficult to dislike you.”

“I know.”

“That was not praise.”

“Still taking it.”

He picked up his hat and opened the office door for her. Blythe walked out into the wet, emptied fairgrounds with every sensible rule she had made for herself feeling suddenly thin as paper.

The paper-thin feeling did not keep her safe.

Six days later, during a morning slack at the Temple rodeo, Blythe took her mare into the covered warm-up pen and found the third corner slick from a water truck’s careless pass. Chet stood beyond the rail with his hat pushed back.

“Give her room there,” he called.

“I know my ground.”

“I know you do.”

She sent the mare through the pattern anyway, wanting one clean turn before the afternoon draw. The mare reached the third barrel, set herself, and lost purchase for one terrible stride. She recovered. Blythe did not. The saddle pitched beneath her, and Blythe landed sideways in the packed dirt with her right ankle bent beneath her.

Pain tore up her leg.

Chet was over the rail before she had gathered enough sense to sit up. He crouched beside her but did not touch her.

“May I check it?”

She shut her eyes, angry at the ground, at herself, at the white flare of pain. “Yes.”

His hands were careful. He called the medic, kept her still, and rode with her to the clinic after the arena doctor said she needed films. No break, the physician told her. A bad sprain. Ten days off a horse, perhaps more if she insisted on being foolish.

“I can drive,” Blythe said when they came outside.

Chet took her truck keys from the clinic counter where she had set them. “You cannot work the pedals.”

“The trailer—”

“Lorna’s sending a hand for it.”

“I did not ask her to.”

“No. I did.”

She ought to have been furious. Instead she leaned against the clinic wall while he opened the passenger door and hated how badly she needed him to do it.

Chet drove her back to the Bledsoe ranch beneath a sky scrubbed pale after rain. He worked for Lorna between rodeo dates, fixing fence, tending the far pasture, taking whatever hard job needed doing before dawn. His bunkhouse room stood beyond the barn, but for the next several days he seemed to be everywhere Blythe turned.

He changed the ice around her ankle. He carried coffee to the porch before she could balance a mug on her crutch. He took feed buckets from her hands without treating her like she was made of glass.

That was almost worse.