Nothing. The wind was cold, but the sun had started to cut through the clouds.

He tried two more trailers. At the third one, a skinny old white woman holding a cigarette came to the glass door but didn’t open it. She just stared at Quinn. He smiled back at her while she blew some smoke out from her lips and cracked the door. She was wearing a set of pink pajamas and tube socks. “I done paid that ticket.”

Quinn shook his head. “I’m looking for Jason Colson.”

The woman shrugged. Her eyes were shrunken and sallow, and she wiped her nose while she stood there and waited for Quinn to offer her something. She was skinny, her wrinkled skin just kind of sagged from the bone.

“He lives in one of these trailers,” Quinn said. “He’s not in any trouble. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Good,” she said. “Man don’t need no more.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s been keeping himself clean,” she said. “He paid off those mean men from Jackson. He don’t need no more trouble from the law.”

Quinn waited a few seconds. “It’s a personal matter,” he said.

“Why?”

“He’s a relative.”

“Oh, sure . . .” she said, smiling a row of yellowed and uneven teeth. “Just who are you to him?”

Quinn studied the wrinkled woman, holding herself in the wedge of the door, blowing smoke out into the cold air. The whole thing crazy as hell, that this woman would know more about his own father, feel like she’s got to be kind of protective of him. She couldn’t stop squinting at Quinn’s face. He couldn’t answer her.

“Mr. Jason don’t live here no more.”

Quinn nodded.

“He was living with that woman, Darlene, but they got into it one night and she left,” the woman said. “I think she stole his truck. He tossed all her shit out in the yard. She come back and got it, and that’s the last I seen of her. She was only with him till his money run out. She said she loved him, but she was just hanging on the man ’cause he used to be a big shot. But I figure you know about who he is, and all the folks he knowed, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Burt Reynolds,” she said. “My Lord. Did you know Mr. Jason once broke a beer bottle off Terry Bradshaw’s head? You know, that old quarterback on TV?”

Quinn had heard the story.

“Where’d he go?” Quinn said.

She tiptoed outside the house, delicately, as if leaving her tin shell was going to make her too vulnerable. She smoked more of the cigarette, blowing a long stream into the air. Her voice was as gravelly and worn as a lifetime smoker’s should be. She nodded over toward a trailer up the hill on some eroded land. It wasn’t the worst on the lot, but it was close. The single-wide set up on concrete blocks, with a rusted roof and tinfoil in the windows. An old red Trans Am, with flat tires and half covered in a tarp, sat in the front yard. The window had been busted out, and the wind ruffled the tarp up over what probably had once been a fine car.

“Y’all are kin.”

“Why you say that?”

“You look damn-near just like him.”

Quinn nodded, still looking at that relic of a car.

“He works down the road at that big horse barn,” the woman said.

“How far?”

“Not far,” she said. “You can’t miss the place. Biggest goddamn barn I ever seen in my life. He’s been working for those rich folks for a while. I hear he’s been living up there, too. Real nice, when he’s not drinking. Something awful wrong with him. To hear the things come out of that trailer up there . . . That woman Darlene was the devil. She beat him down to nothing.”

•   •   •

The barn was fashioned out of river stone and large cypress beams and stood as large as a couple aircraft hangars joined end to end. It had been built high on a hill overlooking hundreds of acres of rolling farmland where horses grazed among Black Angus cattle. Quinn followed a private road that twisted past an endless lake, a big stone mansion, and through the pasture, until he turned uphill and saw the stables and two large open corrals, where some kind of training was happening. The sun was setting over the pasture and turned the air a bright orange through the kicked-up dust.

A group of young kids in thick coats, western wear, and cowboy boots sat on a fence as a man and a young woman stood near a young boy on the back of a small spotted horse. They were talking to the kids, showing them the basic tack, handing over the reins to the kid in the saddle. The man rubbing the horse’s forehead between the eyes. The man wore a hat low across his eyes, but as Quinn walked closer, studying him, he could see the guy wasn’t much older than himself. He was telling the kids about the right kind of pull on the reins when they were ready to go and when they were ready to stop. He talked about being gentle to the animal and that a kick in the ribs could be firm without hurting the animal.

Quinn recalled a horse that had belonged to his father, a palomino named Bandit. There was a strange feeling as Quinn walked, a little bit of light-headedness with the copper-colored air and the reddening skies. The laughter of the children sitting on the rail. The woman who was helping with the instruction was pretty and blond and smiled right at Quinn as he made his way to the railing and leaned his forearms across the top rung. The girl let go of the horse and came over to where he stood. She had a slow, easy walk, with her boots, tight jeans, fitted Sherpa coat, and feathered hair.

“Looking for Jason Colson,” he said.

She smiled some more at Quinn, strangely, as if should she know him, and pointed to the mouth of the barn. Quinn tipped his ball cap and walked toward the door, the feeling of being uneasy and unsettled something very unfamiliar. Before he walked into the big open cavern, he spit into dirt and clenched his teeth.

The floors of the barn were red brick and the ceiling was cathedral-tall, with thick cypress beams crossing overhead. The big sliding doors were open at the opposite side of the barn, hundreds of meters away, and above them was a circular window of stained glass showing two horses grazing in a green meadow. Its colored light shone down onto the bricks.

Quinn followed a lot of empty stalls, nicer than many homes in Tibbehah County, and on through the big central space, its brickwork laid in Byzantine patterns and different colors. Above was one of the tall spires he’d spotted on the drive from the main gates.

Quinn kept walking. Not seeing anyone, not even a horse, only hearing the sound of a radio playing down among the stalls. He followed the music, recognizing the song, “Choctaw Bingo,” this one sounding like Ray Wylie Hubbard and not James McMurtry. More reverb and twang through the barn.

His arms and legs felt funny and loose as he spotted a man leaning into a stall over a half door. The man wore Wrangler’s and beaten boots, a tight green-checked snap-button shirt and no hat. The man’s hair was longish, more gray than blond, his skin the color of stained wood. He had a graying mustache and goatee and he was laughing.

Quinn stopped walking. He just stood there, watching the man, and then a horse leaned its big head out of the stall. The man popped open a beer, the horse taking it from his hand and shaking it all loose from the can, throwing his head back in pleasure. The man laughed and laughed, taking the empty and tossing it. He rubbed the forehead of the horse, walking away from the stall, eyes down, smirk on his face, and then raised them and looked at Quinn.

Quinn just stared.

The man stopped walking, hands on his hips. Something familiar but off about the face. The lines were different. He had a big scar on his cheek, white and zagging, different from the burnt skin. The man took in all of Quinn, eyes and mouth serious as hell, finally just shaking his head and saying, “Well, god damn, ain’t you got big.”