Echo Burning

he closed his eyes.

    The maid brought supper forty minutes later. She was a middle-aged white woman who could have been a relative of Billy’s. She greeted him with familiarity. Maybe a cousin.Certainly she looked a little like him. Sounded like him. The same genes in there somewhere. She greeted Josh with ease and Reacher himself with coolness. Supper was a pail of pork and beans, which she served into metal bowls with a ladle taken from her apron pocket. She handed out forks and spoons, and empty metal cups.
    “Water in the bathroom faucet,” she said, for Reacher’s benefit.
    Then she went back down the stairs and Reacher turned his attention to the food. It was the first he had seen all day. He sat on his bed with the bowl on his knees and ate with the spoon. The beans were dark and soupy and mixed with a generous spoonful of molasses. The pork was tender and the fat was crisp. It must have been fried separately and mixed with the beans afterward.
    “Hey, Reacher,” Billy called over. “So what do you think?”
    “Good enough for me,” he said.
    “Bullshit,” Josh said. “More than a hundred degrees all day, and she brings us hot food? I showered already and now I’m sweating like a pig again.”
    “It’s free,” Billy said.
    “Bullshit, it’s free,” Josh said back. “It’s a part of our wages.”
    Reacher ignored them. Bitching about the food was a staple of dormitory life. And this food wasn’t bad. Better than some he’d eaten. Better than what came out of most barracks cookhouses. He dumped his empty bowl on the cabinet next to his toothbrush and lay back down and felt his stomach go to work on the sugars and the fats. Across the room Billy and Josh finished up and wiped their mouths with their forearms and took clean shirts out of their footlockers. Shrugged them on and buttoned them on the run and combed through their hair with their fingertips.
    “See you later,” Billy called.
    They clattered down the stairs and a moment later Reacher heard the sound of a gasoline engine starting up directly below. The pick-up, he guessed. He heard it back out through the doors and drive away. He stepped into the bathroom and saw it come around the corner and wind around the horse barn and bounce across the yard past the house.
    He walked back through the dormitory and piled the three used bowls on top of each other, with the silverware in the topmost. Threaded the three cup handles onto his forefinger and walked down the stairs and outside. The sun was nearly below the horizon but the heat hadn’t backed off at all. The air was impossibly hot. Almost suffocating. And it was getting humid. A warm damp breeze was coming in from somewhere. He walked up past the corrals, past the barn, through the yard. He skirted around the porch and looked for the kitchen door. Found it and knocked. The maid opened up.
    “I brought these back,” he said.
    He held up the bowls and the cups.
    “Well, that’s kind of you,” she said. “But I’d have come for them.”
    “Long walk,” he said. “Hot night.”
    She nodded.
    “I appreciate it,” she said. “You had enough?”
    “Plenty,” he said. “It was very good.”
    She shrugged, a little bashful. “Just cowboy food.”
    She took the used dishes from him and carried them inside.
    “Thanks again,” she called.
    It sounded like a dismissal. So he turned away and walked out to the road, with the low sun full on his face. He stopped under the wooden arch. Ahead of him to the west was nothing at all, just the empty eroded mesa he had seen on the way in. On the right, to the north, was a road sixty miles long with a few buildings at the end of it. A neighbor fifteen miles away. On the left, to the south, he had no idea. A bar two hours away, Billy had said. Could be a hundred miles. He turned around. To the east, Greer land for a stretch, and then somebody else’s, and then somebody else’s again, he guessed. Dry holes and dusty caliche and nothing much more all the way back to Austin, four hundred miles away.

    New guy comes to gate and stares right at us, the boy wrote. Then looks all around. Knows we’re here? Trouble?
    He closed his book again and pressed himself tighter to the ground.

    * * *

    “Reacher,” a voice called.
    Reacher squinted right and saw Bobby Greer in the shadows on the porch. He was sitting in the swing set. Same denims, same dirty T-shirt. Same backward ball cap.
    “Come here,” he called.
    Reacher paused a beat. Then