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Desert Storm was true to its name.
That’s what he wants to tell Raylan, amassed over the many things he wants to tell Raylan, and doesn’t-- because Raylan would never ask him, and asking is the key, the threshold magic writ bare across his tongue. His eyelashes and the corners of his mouth were always rubbed raw, gritty, and there were times when he aimed his gun and he couldn’t have told you with his hand upon a Bible exactly what he thought he’d been aiming at. He doesn’t think it broke something in him, because there was nothing left to break, not with his Daddy as his lord and master, but it left something behind. But he still wasn’t angry. He still hadn’t given up all hope.
He came home and kept his back to the wall and he still wasn’t heir to the kingdom, and he still wasn’t angry. He went back and he told a commanding officer that his plan was fuckin’ irreversible insanity, and it wasn’t an honourable move, it was his neck on the line as much as anyone’s, but that dishonourable discharge stung all the same. He put everything he owned in a cardboard box, and he still wasn’t angry. He drove back to Harlan County with the sunset behind him, and found not a single thing had changed.
He got out of his truck and his father welcomed him with dismissal and half-truths, and that was when he realised. He was his Daddy’s son. Time to act like it. He was his Daddy’s son, only better, because his Daddy’s men never loved him, not really, not in any way that counted. He scarred hatred into his skin in a grimy tattoo parlour in Memphis, Tennessee, and then, maybe, maybe, he started to get angry.
That’s what he wants to tell Raylan the most, he supposes, not about Desert Storm, not about any of it, but the truth that Raylan consistently turns his face from, no matter how many times it writes itself in the blood of his (their) county. It don’t matter if you get angry. That’s why you oughta be angry. But Raylan trusts the system. Raylan gave away that brand of anger for thirty pieces of silver and a star on his belt. (And it is a brand, never doubt it.) But Raylan would never ask, and he will never tell.
There’s an answer in there somewhere, if you were looking for it.
“Why’s it so important t’you that I’m fakin’,” says Boyd, Jesus under his skin and Raylan both, and Raylan’s mouth twists, a betrayal he always thinks he’s smart enough to master, and never will be, because he never quite figures out that smart’s got nothing to do with it.
“Why’s it so important to you that you ain’t,” says Raylan, the man who did not shoot him dead, the coal miner, the lawman, the heir to the Givens bloodline, the saint of his church, and although he is all of those things he thinks himself only one, so Boyd merely smiles, says, “Like the Lord, Raylan, I work in mysterious ways.”
The mine is dust in his lungs and too-loud sounds in the night, slamming to his knees with his hands over his ears with explosions those fingers set incandescent at his back. He ran from this once, and found everything exactly the same, dirt under his nails and dynamite in his belt and there’s no way to run from this, no place to run, where he won’t be the Kentucky hillbilly who can make a carbomb the way most men make a sandwich. Crime pays, and this does too, even if it’s a different sort of crime, the legacy of broken strikes and starving mouths carved into the rock of their hills, the kind of crime of which white trash ex-con Boyd Crowder can only dream. (Even, if he were given the chance, he would never.) Crime paid, until it didn’t, so it’s back to this, even if this never seems to change all that much, but what can he say, he’s got a limited skill-set but he’s awful talented at finding numerous ways of making it do his work for him.
“You’re gonna die down there, Boyd,” says Raylan, whisky on his breath and a snarl at the back of his throat, and Boyd knows that even Raylan doesn’t know if that’s an earnest wish or a plea for him to stop.
He’s never held a snake.
He could have, once, could have conceived of that belief that burned, like Greek Fire, in the chest of that foolish, arrogant boy. He was an arrogant fool once, and he’s half-convinced that the man he loves like the ground beneath his feet remains one still. It didn’t matter, anyway, because his words were a weapon and a weapon his Daddy turned into a hell of a lot of guns. That boy’s words killed him, not that snake, and not Boyd Crowder, even if the man in question feels more guilt than he usually would, over the death of a deposed rival.
“That kid’s dead cause of you and your bullshit,” says Raylan, which is true, in its way, and not, in so many others.
“Men who think themselves instruments of the Lord are deluded, Raylan,” says Boyd, does not finish it with as you well know.
“Be that as it may, that’s a goddamn terrible way to go,” says Raylan and there’s a flicker of his eyes to the left, and Boyd knows what that is, even if Raylan doesn’t. Raylan’s never been afraid of dying. He’s probably not even frightened by the method. What happened in that tent is something beyond Raylan’s understanding, metaphysics and epistemology a frame of reference he cannot even begin to fit himself inside.
“A powerful terrible way to die it may be,” says Boyd, and he does not touch Raylan because he never touches Raylan, but he wants to, if only a little, “But he believed what he believed, Raylan. Even I ain’t capable of makin’ a true believer see the light.”
“It worked on you,” says Raylan, which is cruel, even for him, which is saying something.
“We are what our Daddies made us, Raylan Givens,” says Boyd, and if he does not smile, well, Raylan don’t neither.
“You got the Hills in your blood, Raylan,” says Boyd, on a quiet night that he can tell already Raylan is going to pretend never happened, and probably not even wait until the morning for the pretense to begin. They talk, and Raylan leaves, and they’re not friends, they’re not brothers, they’re not lovers, and yet-- and, yet.
“Like you ain’t,” says Raylan, snorting on it, and Boyd pours him a shot, and Raylan knocks it back without waiting for Boyd to go first--
--and if that ain’t love in Harlan County, Boyd Crowder is more damned that he is already, because he don’t know for the life of him what else it could be.