PROLOGUE:
THREE POINTS

 

 

I can see myself lying in the dirt, on my back, on a warm, starry night, with my feet up on those rocks, ringing a swirling and noisy fire, listening, laughing, seeing the sparks that corkscrew, spinning above me into the black like dying stars, fading, disappearing, becoming something else; my hat back on my head so I can just see my friends from the corners of my eyes. I can feel the warmth of the dirt in my hair, smell the smoke, hear the horses’ hooves as they move restlessly in the humid summer dark. And I can close my eyes and see the conjuring, electrified, and vaporous shapes of the granite mountains, those two fingers; parting the wind, luring the thunder in that time of year.

I never really figured out why those boys had to die. But everything starts somewhere else, and keeps going forever after you can’t see it, can’t see anything, anymore. I believe there’s some reason beneath it all; but I’m going to stop trying to figure out those reasons because I’ve never been right, or lucky, one time yet. At least I can tell the truth, as well as I can remember it, about how I gave up all those pieces of myself and watched while the same thing happened to them, too. Because I can still close my eyes and feel the wet of the rain that summer, smell the horses, the blood, the river on the mountain that called three boys up, and remember how three boys died, too. And that was a terrible and frightening thing, but it was what we wanted. I know this is what I want. I can still hear myself saying that.

I will look back at all of the things that happened to me this past summer and I will always wonder where they came from, and will never guess where they’ll go; but the more I think about that time, the more certain I’ve become that somehow things started in the middle, on that day after the celebration, and then bloomed out in every direction possible, away from the center, and collided with us all.

That was the day when Tommy Buller, Gabriel Benavidez, and I went swimming in our underwear in the lake and Chase Rutledge stole our clothes, just trying to be mean and nothing else, I guess. But, of course, we wouldn’t let it go at just a prank.

I have tried to make sense of it as best I can; to look for the healing, the signs, the medicine in those scattered events—the running away, coming home, Tom’s fight, and those amazing and beautiful wild horses that belonged to no one, but were harbored by the woman who lived on the other side of that broken fence.

And I can’t help but wonder, sometimes, what might have happened if we hadn’t shot Chase Rutledge.

That was the day when everything kind of blew up on us.

But if I’m going to tell the whole truth, I guess I better start at the beginning.