No Windows on the Mountain

Dutch’s head came up at 2:52.

Tessa had stopped watching the clock around one and started watching the dog instead, because the dog was the only thing in the lobby that seemed to know anything. He’d lain down finally, sometime after the trucker stopped snoring and started again. Not on his mat. On the carpet in the middle of the room with his chin on his paws and his eyes on the door, and every so often the skin along his back would twitch like a horse shaking off flies.

Now his head came up and his ears came forward and he did not growl.

That was what she noticed first. Not what he did. What he didn’t.

“Dutch?”

He stood. Slow this time, back end first, the old way, like his joints had come back to him. He took two steps toward the door and sat down in front of it and looked out through the glass, and his tail moved once against the carpet.

Tessa stood up behind the desk and looked where he was looking.

There was a man crossing the highway.

He came out of the dark on the far side of the road like the dark had made him, walking, not fast, one arm crooked across his stomach. The neon caught him halfway over. Then he was in the gravel of the lot with his boots crunching, then on the concrete walk, then his shape was filling up the glass of her front door and he had stopped and was looking at the bolt she’d thrown at midnight.

He looked up. Their eyes met through the glass.

He knocked. Twice, with the side of his fist, not hard.

Don’t, said the part of her that had heard Mateo. Stay in the light. Stay in. Her hand had gone to the locket without asking her.

“Lobby’s open,” she called through the door. Her voice sounded almost normal. “It’s a motel. Give me a second.”

She came around the desk. Dutch didn’t move out of her way and she had to step over him. She turned the bolt and pulled the door in six inches and put her foot behind it, and the night came in around the edges, cold and smelling of sage and something metallic and sweet that she didn’t place right away.

“Help you?”

“I need a room.”

His voice was low and rough, like he’d been shouting or hadn’t used it. He was not a tall man. That surprised her, though she couldn’t have said why she’d expected tall. He was maybe five-ten, and wide, wide through the shoulders and heavy through the chest and thick in the middle in a way that wasn’t fat, a body like a stump. Rust-colored hair cropped close to his skull. A beard a shade darker going gray at the chin, though his face didn’t look old enough for gray. His nose had been broken once and set by somebody who didn’t care much. His eyes were pale, some color between gray and green that the neon turned to nothing, and they were on her and they didn’t leave.

He was wearing a dark green flannel shirt. The whole right side of it was black and wet.

“You’re bleeding,” Tessa said.

“I know.”

“You’re bleeding a lot.”

“I know that too. I need a room. One night.” He shifted his weight and she saw his jaw go tight. “One with no windows facing the ridge.”

She stared at him.

“The mountain,” he said. “I don’t want a window on the mountain.”

“I heard you. I’m just—” She shook her head. “You’re standing on my step at three in the morning bleeding through your shirt and your first question is which way the window faces?”

“It’s my only question.”

“Well, my first question is what the hell happened to you.”

“Nothing that concerns a motel.”

“Everything that happens on my step concerns the motel. That’s how steps work.” She didn’t move her foot from behind the door. “Where’s your car?”

“Don’t have one.”

“You walked here.”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes went past her into the lobby for the first time — the paneling, the elk, the key rack — and came back. “Do you have a room or don’t you?”

Dutch got up. He went around Tessa’s legs, right through the six inches of open door, and stood on the concrete in front of the man with his nose an inch from the man’s knee and his tail low and moving. The man didn’t look down at him. He didn’t do anything at all. He just stood there with the dog breathing on his jeans and looked at Tessa, and after a moment Dutch turned around and walked back inside and lay down on his mat under the coffee counter for the first time since midnight and put his head on his paws and closed his eyes.

“He doesn’t do that,” Tessa said.

“Do what.”

“That. Any of that. He barks at the UPS man. He’s barked at the UPS man every Tuesday for twelve years. He bit a man from the propane company.” She looked at the dog, then back. “He’s been staring at that door for three hours. Since — since the noise.”

Something moved in the man’s face and was gone. “What noise.”

“You didn’t hear it?”

“I heard a lot of things tonight.”

“Up on the ridge. Around midnight. Something screamed.” She heard herself say it and felt stupid and said it anyway. “Everybody in town must have heard it. It sounded like — I don’t know what it sounded like. Mateo said it was a cat.”

“Probably was.”

“It was not a cat.”

“Ma’am,” the man said. He said it very evenly, like a man holding a heavy thing very still. “I’ve been on my feet a long time. I’ve got a hole in my side. I’d like a bed and a wall to put between me and that mountain and I’d like it before I fall down on your step. If you don’t have that, tell me, and I’ll go sit in the diner lot until it opens.”

“The diner doesn’t open till six.”

“Then I’ll sit till six.”

“You’ll bleed to death till six.”

“I won’t.”

He said it the way somebody said the sky was up. Not arguing. Stating.

Tessa took her foot out from behind the door.

“Seven,” she said. “Room seven’s on the end. The window’s on the side wall, it faces the creek and the cottonwoods. You can’t see the ridge from it. You can’t see anything from it, that’s why nobody wants it. Fifty dollars.”

“Fine.”

“Cash or card?”

“Cash.”

“Come in and don’t touch anything.”

He came in. He moved carefully, the way she’d seen men move at the rodeo in Dillon after a bad ride, all his weight kept away from one side. Up close the smell was stronger — that copper-sweet, and under it sweat and pine pitch and something wilder, something like the smell of the creek in the spring when the snowmelt came down brown. He was giving off heat. She felt it as he passed her, like walking by a stove.

She went behind the desk. He stood in front of it. There was a drop of something on the carpet between his boots and then, while she watched, another one.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She came right back around. “Sit down.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re dripping on my floor. Sit down. That chair. Now.”

“I’ll get blood on it.”

“It’s fake leather. It’s had worse on it. Sit.”

He sat. He did it like a man lowering himself into cold water, and when he was down he let out a breath through his nose and shut his eyes for a second and Tessa saw, for just that second, how bad it was. Then he opened them and was a wall again.

She went into the back and got down on her knees in front of the sink.

Her mother’s kit was in a green metal tackle box that had said PLANO on it once. Marisol had bought it at a yard sale in 1994 and thrown out the lures and filled it with gauze, and every few months she’d sit at the kitchen table and go through it and throw out what had expired and write a list. Tessa had done that last in August. She’d cried doing it. She grabbed the box by its handle and grabbed the bottle of peroxide from under the pipe and a clean towel off the stack and went back out.

He was watching the door to the back like he’d been waiting for her to come through it. His eyes went to the box.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t need—”

“You are bleeding on my mother’s chair. Take off the shirt.”

“Ma’am—”

“My name is Tessa. Stop calling me ma’am, I’m thirty-one. Take off the shirt or I will cut it off you with the scissors in this box, and they’re not sharp, and it will take a while.”

He looked at her. She looked back. Somewhere in the walls the pipes knocked as the water heater kicked on, and out on the highway nothing moved, and the man in her lobby chair held her eyes for a long five seconds with his own gone flat and strange in the yellow light, and then something in his face — not gave. Shifted. Like a big animal deciding, for its own reasons, not to.

He started on the buttons one-handed.

“I should call Dillon,” she said. She set the box on the coffee counter and popped the latches. “They’ve got the hospital. It’s an hour but they’ve got—”

“No hospital.”

“There’s an ambulance out of Wisdom, it’s closer, they could—”

“No ambulance.”

“You don’t even know how bad it—”

“I know exactly how bad it is.” He got the last button and pulled the shirt off his shoulders and it stuck on the right side and he peeled it off his skin with a sound she didn’t like and let it fall on the floor. “No doctor. No ambulance. Nobody comes here.”

Tessa turned around with the towel in her hands and stopped.

He was built the way he was built all over. A thick body, pale where his shirt had covered it and burned red-brown at the neck and forearms, with reddish hair across the chest going gray in the middle. He had scars. Not one or two. A lot of them, old and white, one across the top of his left shoulder that looked like something had grabbed him there and hung on. And down his right side from just under his ribs to just above the waist of his jeans, four lines, deep, red and black and shining, dragged through him like somebody had raked a garden.

“What did that,” she said.

“Cat.”

“Don’t.”

“Mountain lion. They’re on the ridge. You said so.”

“I said Mateo said. I said it wasn’t a—” She made herself walk over. She made herself kneel down on the carpet beside the chair and put the towel against the bottom of the wound where it was bleeding worst and press, and he hissed through his teeth and his whole body went rigid, and she didn’t let up. “Those are claws.”

“That’s what a cat’s got.”

“That’s too big for a cat. That’s too far apart. My mother hit a lion on the highway in ’06 and I saw its feet. That’s—”

“You a vet?”

“No.”

“A doctor?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you don’t know what a cat can do.” He was breathing hard now. His hands were on the arms of the chair and his knuckles were white and the arm of the chair on the right side was creaking. “Just tape it and let me go lie down.”

“It needs stitches.”

“It doesn’t.”

“It’s a finger deep, I can see—”

“It doesn’t need stitches. It needs to be closed and covered and left alone. That’s all. It’ll do the rest itself.”

“You’re not a doctor either.”

“No. But it’s my side.”

She lifted the towel to look. It was still coming but slower, or maybe the pressure had done something. In the lamplight the edges of the four furrows were clean, cleaner than she’d have thought, no ragged skin, no dirt she could see. Like whatever had done it had been sharp. Very sharp.

“I’m calling Ibarra,” she said.

That got him. She felt it before she saw it — his whole side under her hand went hard as a board and stayed. “Who.”

“Sheriff. Lives four miles up 43 in a double-wide with a satellite dish. He’s got nothing to do out here but write speeding tickets and he’d love a reason to get out of bed at three in the morning, and I have his home number on a card behind that desk. A man walks into my motel with no car and no name and no story, bleeding like he’s been in a knife fight, and won’t let me call a doctor? That’s his job. Not mine.”

The man didn’t say anything.

“I’ll count to five,” Tessa said.

“You won’t.”

“One.”

“Tessa.”

“Two. Don’t use my name like you know me. Three.”

“Fine.”

It came out of him low and rough and furious, and it was the first thing he’d said all night that sounded like a person instead of a wall. She stopped counting.

“Fine,” he said again, quieter. “Tape it. Do what you want. No sheriff.”

“That’s all I asked.”

“It’s not all you asked. You asked me to go to Dillon and lie in a bed for a week.”

“I asked you not to die on my carpet.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You keep saying that like you’d know.”

“I would know,” he said, and then shut his mouth like he’d said too much.

She let it go. She got the peroxide.

“This is going to hurt.”

“Everything’s hurt.”

“This is going to hurt more.”

“Just do it.”

She did it. The peroxide went white and foaming in the furrows and he didn’t make a sound, but she was kneeling with her shoulder against the outside of his thigh and she felt the whole of him lock up, felt the tremor go through the big muscle of his leg and stay there, and she had a stupid moment of wanting to put her hand on his knee and say sorry, sorry, and didn’t.

She blotted. She got the gauze out.

“You’re very warm,” she said.

“Am I.”

“Like you’ve got a fever.”

“I run hot.”

“Everybody who’s about to have a fever says that.”

“Everybody who runs hot says it too.”

She was close now. She had to be. She had a stack of gauze pads pressed along the wound with her left hand and she was tearing tape with her teeth because her right hand was busy, and to reach the top of the top furrow she had to lean in and up, and her hair fell forward and brushed his stomach and she felt him breathe in.

Not a wince. A breath. Deep, slow, deliberate, through the nose, like a man standing over a pot.

She looked up. He was looking down at her, and his face had gone still in a different way than before, and his eyes in the lamplight were not gray at all but a pale clear green like creek water over stones.

“Are you smelling me?”

“No.”

“You are. You just—”

“You smell like coffee.”

“I run a motel at three in the morning. What am I supposed to smell like?”

“Burnt coffee,” he said, like he hadn’t heard her. “Been on the warmer a long time.”

Tessa looked at the pot behind her and back at him. “That’s been on since nine. Who are you?”

He didn’t answer. He’d stopped looking at her face. His eyes had gone down to her throat, to the locket, which had swung out on its chain when she leaned and was hanging in the air between them turning slowly, catching the light. He looked at it the way Dutch had looked at the door.

“Hey.”

His eyes came up.

“Up here. I’m asking you a question.”

“You’ve asked about thirty.”

“And you’ve answered none. That’s not a conversation, that’s a hostage situation.” She tore another strip of tape. “Hold that. There. Press. Harder than that, you’re not going to break yourself.”

He put his hand over hers on the gauze. His hand was enormous, square, scarred across all four knuckles, with a thumbnail that had been smashed sometime and grown back black. It was so hot it was almost uncomfortable. It covered her hand entirely and for a second neither of them moved and she was very aware of her own pulse going in her wrist right there under his palm, and of his going, fast, in the side of his neck a foot from her face.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let go, I’ve got it.”

He let go.

She taped. She did it right, the way her mother had shown her on a hunter who’d put a broadhead through his own hand in 2009, long strips anchored high on the ribs and pulled down and around so the gauze couldn’t slip. Six of them. The last one she smoothed down with her thumb, all along its length, and felt the muscle under it jump.

“There.” She sat back on her heels. Her knees hurt. Her hands were red to the wrist and she looked at them and felt something turn over in her stomach and looked away. “That’ll hold till morning. Not longer. It’s going to soak through by noon and when it does you’re going to need a real—”

“It’ll hold.”

“You have got to stop saying things like you know.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Maybe you’re a stubborn son of a — ” She stopped. She wiped her hands on the towel. “Fifty dollars. Register’s on the desk. I need a name.”

She stood up. Her legs weren’t steady and she put a hand on the back of the chair to hide it, and the hand landed an inch from his bare shoulder, and she moved it.

He got up slower than she had. He left the shirt on the floor. He dug in the front pocket of his jeans and came out with a fold of bills and stood at the desk with the lamp on his face and counted off a twenty, a twenty, a twenty, a twenty, and a ten, and put them down on the register.

“That’s ninety.”

“For the carpet.”

“The carpet’s been ugly since 1961. Fifty.”

“Then for the chair.”

“I told you about the chair—”

“Then for you,” he said, “getting on your knees on the floor for a stranger at three in the morning when you didn’t have to,” and he said it like a fact and not like a line, and something about that made her face go hot and she looked down at the register so he wouldn’t see.

She left the ninety where it was.

The register was a ledger. Green cloth, red spine, the kind you bought at the office supply in Butte in a stack of five. It had a column for the date and a column for the room and a column for the name and a column for the plate. Her mother’s handwriting went up the page in blue ink and stopped on a Thursday in August. Tessa’s went on below it in pencil.

She wrote the date. She wrote 7. She wrote cash — 50 and then, after a second, (90).

“Name.”

“Cade.”

She looked up. “That’s not a name, that’s a sound.”

“It’s a name.”

“Cade what.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I need a last name. It’s a ledger. It’s the law. If the health inspector comes through—”

“Nobody’s coming through.”

“—or Ibarra comes asking who was in seven the night of the fifteenth—”

“Nobody’s going to ask.”

“Somebody always asks,” Tessa said. “That’s the whole lesson of my life.” She held the pencil over the page. “Cade what.”

He looked at her for a long time. He looked, she thought, like a man standing at the top of a slope trying to see the bottom.

“Marrick,” he said.

The pencil didn’t move.

She knew the name. Everybody knew the name. Mateo had said it three hours ago with his eyes on the ridge — the Marricks own that mountain — and her mother had said it before that, over the years, always sideways, always with a little pause in front of it like a stone in a river you stepped around. There was a Marrick who had lunch with the sheriff twice a year in the diner and sat with his back to the wall. There was a Marrick truck that came through for feed. There were Marrick fences on Marrick land that went up the mountain into timber nobody hunted, and a Marrick gate with a chain on it, and a whole town of people who’d lived under that gate for a hundred years and had agreed without ever saying so not to wonder what was behind it.

She had never seen one up close. She wasn’t sure anyone had.

“You came down off the mountain,” she said.

“I came down the road.”

“That noise—”

“Was a cat.”

“You were up there. That was — that’s your land. That was on your land, and something screamed on it, and an hour later you walk into my—”

“Tessa,” he said. Just that.

Something in the way he said it stopped her. It wasn’t a threat. It was almost the opposite. It was the sound of a man asking her, without any right to, to please not walk through a door he was holding shut with his whole weight.

She looked down and wrote it.

Cade Marrick. In pencil, small and neat, faces up, the way her mother had taught her to lay money.

“Don’t,” he said.

Very quietly. Not an order. She’d heard him order — she’d heard him say no hospital, no ambulance, nobody comes here, in a voice that came from down under his throat and expected the world to bend. This wasn’t that. This was almost a question.

She looked at the word on the page. She looked at him.

“It’s my register,” she said.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask again. He picked up the key to seven off the hook where she’d put her hand on it without noticing, and stood there holding it, half-naked and taped and bleeding a little already at the edge of the gauze, and looked at her with those creek-water eyes like he was trying to memorize the room.

“Left, out the door,” she said. “All the way to the end. The light over it’s burnt out. I’ve got a bulb in the back if you—”

“I can see fine.”

“Ice machine’s by four. It’s loud. Checkout’s eleven but nobody’s in the lot, so.” She swallowed. “So take your time. If it soaks through. If it — if you need anything. The lobby’s open. I’m here. I’m always here.”

“I know,” Cade Marrick said, and went out.

The door jangled and shut. She watched him go past the window, one arm across his stomach again, past four and five and six, and then he was out of the light and she couldn’t see him anymore.

She stood at the desk with the pencil still in her hand.

The ninety dollars sat on the register. Her mother’s kit was open on the coffee counter with the peroxide cap off and the tape unrolled. There was a green flannel shirt on her floor soaked black on one side and four pink smears on the fake leather of the chair, and the smell of him was still in the lobby under the coffee, pine pitch and copper and creek-water in spring.

Don’t.

Her hand went up to the locket. It was warm. It was always warm. She turned it over, once, twice.

Then she looked down, because something had changed in the room and it took her a second to know what.

Dutch was asleep.

Not the watching sleep. Not the pretending. He was on his side on his mat with his legs stretched out and his gray muzzle slack and his ribs going slow and even, and one of his back feet was twitching the way it did when he dreamed about rabbits. He looked like a dog who had waited up for something all night long and had finally, finally seen it come through the door.

Tessa looked at the dog for a long time. Then she looked at the name in the register.

She didn’t erase it.

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