Mystic Cowboy(66)

“Hiya, Rebel.” Somehow he managed to sound worse than he looked. “I, uh, got a sleeping bag into the truck. I couldn’t get...Albert,” he said, like the name was shards of glass in his mouth. “In. By myself, I mean.”

“You doing okay?” Nothing like an obvious question with an obvious answer, Rebel thought. But he was just as responsible for the living as he was for the dead. And Jesse was still living.

“I...” Jesse looked to the sky. Rebel dismounted and sat on the step.

“I thought I hated him,” Jesse said, and Rebel waited. Jesse wasn’t known for introspection, but this sounded serious. “He loved me. I wasn’t even his own family, and he loved me anyway.”

That much was true. “He was your family, Jesse.”

“You’re the only family I’ve got now.” Jesse sounded in serious danger of breaking up.

Rebel looked at him. His first instinct was to remind him not to cry, because true Lakotas did not cry over their dead. If Albert’s spirit saw Jesse crying, he would worry, and a worried spirit wouldn’t move on to the afterworld.

But Jesse needed another reminder that he wasn’t a full Lakota like he needed another broken leg. No, what he really needed was to finish growing up. Albert was gone, and Rebel couldn’t babysit him the rest of his life. Not if he wanted to hold onto Madeline for as long as he could. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“What?” Jesse jumped, like he’d been asleep and Rebel had dumped a bucket of water on him.

“You have a family, or did you forget? Tara, your woman? Nelly, your daughter?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You know what Albert did for you? He raised you because you didn’t have a father, the same thing he did for me. You want someone else raising your kid?”

Jesse began to squirm. “No, but—”

“No buts. It’s your turn to be the man.”

Jesse squirmed, looking like Rebel had issued a life sentence. He dropped his gaze to the ground. “Albert—he told me, after you left to get her—”Amazingly, Rebel didn’t hear anything but sorrow in Jesse’s voice. All the sneer that used to color his voice any time he talked about Madeline was gone. “After you left, he said you would see something. He told me you’d tell me what to do, Rebel.”

Jesse looked up at him, and suddenly Rebel was nine and Jesse was four again, and they’d been alone all night, all alone until Albert had come to get them. He’d taken them home and then, three days later, taken them to their mother’s funeral. Jesse had been so little, younger than Nelly, too young to really understand that Mom had died, face down in a ditch outside a bar. All he had known then was that Mom wasn’t coming back. Rebel remembered standing next to the pine casket, his arm around Jesse’s little shoulders, and Jesse looking at him with watery eyes—not crying—because Albert told them they couldn’t. Mom was going to have enough trouble getting past Owl Woman without the tears of little boys pulling her back. “What are we going to do, Rebel?” Jesse had asked in that little-kid voice. “What are we going to do now?”

“Don’t worry. I promise I’ll take care of you,” was all Rebel could say then. “We’ll do what Albert tells us to.”

It was a promise he’d kept—maybe for too long. Then, now—it was the same. Even though Albert’s spirit had gone on, his will was still strong. Albert had made Rebel who he was. Now, it seemed, he wanted Rebel to do the same for Jesse.

The problem with this plan, however, was that Rebel had had no such vision, no flash of the past that gave clues to the future. Even if he had, he doubted a vision would have been specific enough to get Jesse’s ass moving.

Which only left one option. Faking it.

He rubbed his eyes. Pretending he’d had a vision went against just about everything he believed. But Albert had laid out the path. It was up to Rebel to walk it.

Rebel sat back down, staring out into the warming sky. This was a unique opportunity—not only could he tell Jesse what to do, there was a decent chance the man would listen. For once.

What the hell. “I saw...” How best to get Jesse to man up? “I saw a vision. Your hair was white with age and you walked with a staff.” Which was probable, so not quite a make-believe lie, right? As Jesse nodded, Rebel’s mind scrambled for a future Jesse could hold onto. “Your family was here,” he added, sweeping his hands around to show Albert’s house and land, “and you were cooking the venison your grandchildren had hunted for you.” Also probable—after all, he and Jesse had done the same thing often enough. Jesse would take comfort in the familiar.