Read Online Long Shot by Paul Monette - Free Book Online Page A

rained for an hour before dawn, and the bushes on either side of the trail swagged against their legs and wet them to the skin. The pewter sky was bruised in the east with white, where the sun was coming through. Artie had packed sweet rolls and a Thermos in his saddlebags. He pointed down to the grassy spot by the water’s edge where they would stop for breakfast. He must have thought she needed cheering up, because he kept on reassuring her. He seemed to have gotten the tears out of his system.
    In fact, she was holding up all right. Not feeling much of anything. A suicide got what he wanted, after all. Her anger had somehow disappeared, like jet lag. Maybe, now that she saw what a fine man Harry Dawes turned out to be, the rage had no place else to go but Jasper. And she didn’t want to take it out on him. So she played it numb and glassy-eyed, and waited out the run of other people’s tears. This feeling next to nothing was almost second nature. It was part of her breeding, like the love of high prices.
    â€œArtie,” she said, because she had to say something , “was Jasper scared of getting old?”
    He was riding on the switchbacks just in front of her—burrheaded, musclebound, guileless, shy. He leaned forward and whispered into his horse’s ear, and she thought at first he hadn’t heard her. Then, when he straightened up and pranced ahead, she thought perhaps he didn’t consider the question worth an answer. She decided she agreed. But then he turned around in his saddle and for a moment looked at her piercingly. It was just the way he used to look at Jasper on the set, as if to check out whether he had a part down pat.
    â€œIt was being old he would have hated,” Artie said. “But he wasn’t the type to feel it yet.”
    â€œThat’s not what Max is saying.”
    â€œHe never even had a hangover. Not once in sixteen years I knew him. Jasper liked the way he felt.”
    â€œIt’s a funny way to kill yourself,” she said.
    They stopped by tacit consent on either side of a hairpin angle, so they faced away onto different hills. She was a couple of feet above him, and she saw him backed by the canyon and the wide and leaden water. In his black shirt yoked with yellow thread, he was surely the only substantial cowboy for miles around. The frontier verities clung about his person, glinting like a sheriff’s badge. Vivien made do very nicely drawing a blank with everyone else, but Artie seemed to require that she be present and accounted for. It was mildness a person couldn’t ignore.
    â€œMax makes out like he saw it coming, does he?” His own directness made his voice a trifle halting. “Like it’s there in Jasper’s face. Like some disease. That’s bullshit, Viv.”
    â€œBut Artie, it happened .”
    The spotted horse beneath her shivered with impatience, as if to say this wasn’t the right approach at all. She knew that if she’d looked at Jasper’s face herself, she wouldn’t have seen a thing. But she wondered if it didn’t expose some fundamental failure in her vision. Some loss of nerve in the face of love.
    â€œI mean, it didn’t come out of nowhere, right? A thing like this takes years.”
    â€œIt’s this way,” Artie said. “He finally got too stoned.” Sounding, all of a sudden, as if it ought to be self-evident. Just two days since, he was choked and panicked to find out why. “I think they both got ripped and played it out like a fantasy. They probably thought they’d wake up after and be as good as new.”
    As if it was only a movie.
    The horses seemed to sense a sudden impasse here. They started forward, all on their own, as if to resolve it in physical motion. They sashayed down an incline. From the sandy ditch on the uphill side of the trail, a canyon hen and her chicks went scurrying under a bush. Vivien hadn’t ridden here in years,