The Long Way In

Travis Stone woke before the alarm, the way he had for thirty years, and lay in the dark of the Airstream listening to the desert do nothing.

That was the thing about Marfa that people who came once never quite understood. They came for the lights, the art, the Instagram of it, and they left disappointed that there wasn't more to do. But the not-much was the whole point. At 4,400 feet, an hour from Big Bend, the silence had a texture. It pressed on you. It asked you a question and waited, patient as stone, for an answer you didn't have yet.

He swung his legs out of the bunk, found his jeans on the floor where he'd left them, and let himself out into the cold blue before sunrise. El Cielito was a graveyard of beautiful machines at this hour - the vintage trailers parked at their casual angles, the yurts dark, the fire pit a black smudge of last night's ash. Somebody had left a chair tipped back near it. Probably Eddie. Eddie always left a chair tipped back somewhere, like the world was a place you could lean against.

Travis walked to the truck.

The truck was a 1964 Volkswagen Type 2 bus, and it was the least practical vehicle a man running a content division in West Texas could possibly own, which was exactly why he owned it. He'd taken it on years ago as a half-dead project, told himself he'd restore it, and then never finished the restoration because the unfinishedness was part of what he liked about it. It started on the third try this morning. It always started on the third try. He'd come to think of those first two failures as the bus clearing its throat.

He didn't drive anywhere. He just sat in the cab with the door open and a thermos of coffee and watched the light come up over the Davis Mountains. The first of it caught a stand of brittle desert marigold near the fence line and turned the little flowers a hard, insistent yellow, the only loud thing for miles, and then the sun lifted and the whole basin went gold and ordinary again.

This was the part nobody saw. The part before the part. By eight o'clock he'd be a division head - answering Clark's questions, reviewing Eddie's selects, telling Cole what could wait and what couldn't, managing the particular weather system of six talented people who all needed slightly different things from him on any given Monday. But right now, in the blue, with the coffee going cold faster than he could drink it, he was just a man who had built something and was allowed, for twenty minutes, to sit inside it and feel it hold.

The Mavericks division worked. That was not a small thing. Travis had been in this business long enough to have watched good teams come apart for stupid reasons - a bad hire, a lost client, an ego that grew faster than the revenue. He'd watched agencies eat themselves. And somehow, against the odds, the thing he ran did not eat itself. The clients were real. The work was good. The team trusted him, and he had earned that trust the slow way, the only way it could be earned, which was by being the same person on the worst day as on the best one.

He'd heard things, lately. Nothing he could put a name to. A meeting Cynthia had taken in Dallas that nobody briefed him on. A consultant who'd been seen in the building on a Tuesday and was gone by Wednesday. The kind of weather you feel in your knee before you see it on the radar.

But that was Dallas. That was the operational reality, three hours and a different altitude away. Here, in Marfa, with the bus clearing its throat and the light coming up, none of it was real yet.

He drank the cold coffee anyway. Good time, he thought, to figure out what the week actually is - before anyone tells you what it should be.

The sun cleared the ridge. He finished the thermos, shut the door, and drove the long way into town.

This entry is part of The Marfa Mavericks, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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