The boy turned around and looked at him, suspicious. An old cowboy with a white mustache and a bad hip, sitting on a stool in a pawn shop.
"Jace," he said. "Jace Doran."
Clay nodded slowly, the way you nod when something you've been waiting for finally arrives.
"Your daddy's name was Dusty."
Jace went very still.
"How do you know that?"
Clay picked up the buckle from the counter and turned it over, so the boy could see the back. *C.H. to D.D.*
"Because I'm C.H.," he said.
They talked on the bench out front while it got dark. Marlene went and got three coffees from the diner down the street and then sat in the truck with the heater running, close enough to watch, far enough to let them be.
Dusty Doran had settled outside of Parkersburg, just across the river in West Virginia. He married. He broke horses for people and drove a feed truck. He rode a little rodeo on weekends until his knees gave out. He told his son stories about an old cowboy from Wyoming who taught him everything and gave him the best thing he ever owned.
Last March, Dusty's feed truck slid off an icy road. He didn't make it.
"He wore it every day," Jace said, looking at the buckle. "Every single day. My mom said she couldn't stand to look at it. So she gave it to me."
"And you pawned it."
Jace's jaw got tight. "My mom's car died. She cleans offices at night in Marietta. No car, no job. I didn't know what else to do. I figured I'd get it back. I've been working at the tire shop after school." He looked at the crumpled bills in his fist. "I was forty dollars short."
Clay didn't say anything for a long time.
"You ride?" he asked finally.
Jace looked up. Something came into his face for the first time.
"Broncs," he said. "High school rodeo. Dad taught me. I'm not very good yet. I've got a saddle that's older than me."
"Held together with baling wire?"
Jace stared at him. "How'd you know?"
Clay almost laughed.
Inside, Lou had not put the price tag on. He was standing at the counter with his arms crossed, pretending to read the newspaper.
Clay paid the loan. All of it. Then he set the buckle on the counter between himself and Jace.
Jace reached for it. Clay put his hand on top of it.
"Not yet," Clay said.
Jace pulled his hand back, confused and a little angry. "It's mine. My dad..."
"It was your dad's. He earned it." Clay looked at him steadily. "Now you're going to."
Here was the deal, and Clay made it plain.
Jace would work at the Hollister place on Saturdays and Sundays all winter. Feeding cattle, fixing fence, mucking stalls. Fifteen dollars an hour, paid every Sunday, in cash. Half of it went to his mother for the car. The other half went to Clay, until the four hundred was paid back.
And after the chores, every weekend, Clay would teach him to ride a bronc the right way.
The buckle went to Jace's mother to keep. Not to Jace. To her.
"When you've paid me back," Clay said, "and when you ride a bronc for eight seconds in front of her, she can decide if you've earned it."
Jace looked at the buckle for a long time. Then at Clay.
He stuck out his hand.
Clay shook it. The kid had a grip like his father.
Jace Doran never missed a Saturday.
He showed up in the dark, in the snow, in the ice. He fed thirty cows and fixed half a mile of fence and mucked out every stall in the barn. Clay built a practice bucking barrel out of an old oil drum and four ropes tied to trees, and Jace fell off it about four hundred times.
Marlene fed him lunch every weekend and pretended not to notice that he always took seconds.
In February, Jace paid back the last forty dollars. He counted it out on Clay's kitchen table in fives and ones.
In May, at the high school rodeo at the county fairgrounds, Jace Doran nodded his head in chute number three on a big gray bronc named Thunder Road.
Clay Hollister watched from the back row, top bleacher. Marlene held his hand. Down at the rail, a small woman in a cleaning company uniform held something silver against her chest.
The gate swung open.
The gray horse went straight up.
Clay didn't watch the horse. He watched the boy's feet. Toes out. Spurs moving. Free hand high. Just like he'd taught him. Just like he'd taught Dusty, thirty-eight years ago in Montana.
The buzzer sounded at eight seconds.
Jace stepped off, landed on his feet, and the first place he looked wasn't the scoreboard.
It was the back row.
Clay Hollister tipped his hat.
