Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  “The rocks stay so long in one place, take so much heat and rain and time and rising and falling with the ground, and they endure and they’re untouched, only for you to come and pick them up and put them in your pocket. This place, just you two and …”

  And the land, and the father, and the cattle bones. Smith slammed his fist against the wood above his head and the voice stopped. The girl muttered and ground her teeth now and then, then at last went quiet enough for the previous words to pass out of the air.

  When he fell back to sleep with his head against the door the light in the hallway was still on—a solitary flare sent up from that square-mile-sized cheek of Box Elder, gold and alone in the dark, to confront the impudent bonfire of Utah stars.

  The sunlight broke first from the narrow windows to the east and melted across the floor to claw at the butt of his gun and he did not move until the heat had conducted up the barrel to burn his hand.

  Lucy was up and gone from the bed; as he passed the open door he did not have to look.

  He laid the shotgun against the bathroom doorframe and went to throw water onto his face from the basin with both hands but had forgotten the stiffness in his left arm and caught it halfway to his chest and the oat-colored water ran down his sleeve. He lowered it and then with the other hand wedged a finger under the rim of his right lid and let the glass eye drop from the socket.

  It landed with the sound of something hitting rock as it caught a pocket of air between the oblong curve of the glass and the surface of the water and then overturned and sank and overturned again. Landed on the sink bottom to look up at him in periwinkle blue, from a deep sea populated by invertebrates consisting only of misshapen eyes.

  He looked up at the flaking mirror on which the image of his scarred-open face wavered thinly, the seam of muscle where the eye had been like a misplaced thread. Or like a plow line raked in the clay of the field, deep enough to swallow the cattle, and his hands went to the sides of the sink at the flood of loss from the day before.

  He pulled the plug and stayed a finger in the drain to keep the eye from going down and waited as the water washed over it and the glass started to dry in the air. He heard Lucy on the stairs. She’d have a cup of water for the kid, the girl, no name for it that didn’t sound strange mouthed in the back of the head, but she’d wait for him to go in.

  He was fitting the eye back into place when he heard the latch and he grabbed the gun by its mouth but wasn’t fast enough and he heard Lucy say “shit!” and the china implode against the floor as the door was kicked open from inside. Then he was in the hall and Lucy turned toward his sound and the dark arm came across her face as the girl barreled past her from the room. He lunged to knock her away from Lucy with his shoulder but the girl rebounded to the right and flung herself down the stairs. She tumbled down not stepping and not even using feet any more than hands or elbows or hips, a hellborne flight in which she seemed to morph to fit the handholds as she fell.

  He started after her but was slow and four steps down he turned and ran back up. Looked at Lucy on the floor, feet sprawled holding her hand over her cheek, but she gestured him off so he ran on into the empty room.

  Among their footsteps in the dust and silt of the day before were the wormtrails of the chair’s feet, gone black in smears where the wood had tunneled far enough through the dirt to scuff. The chair was by the window, too narrow a space to climb out but enough glass to smash the finial of the chair through and cut the ropes on the jagged edges.

  Smith kicked the chair aside and held the shotgun readied to the window and watched the ground in front of the house. Before he had exhaled the girl was out from the floor below and running across the yard and he punched the gun along the splintered glass in the window and she sidewinded for a few strides at the noise but did not stop and he lowered his eye to the gunsights and waited to see if she—she was going for the truck, he would have to do it, and he dropped to one knee and aimed dead in front of her to scare her off it. Half the buckshot shattered the sideview mirror and the other half rang out against the metal bracket and the girl flung herself underneath the truck.

  “Son of a bitch!” She was too close to the tires now, no good.

  He bent the gun up and loaded in a second shot with the barrel balanced against the broken shards of the window, the rope strands still frayed on their edges like clusters of spiders frozen in place.

  He slid the barrel back through to a hollowed ribcage rattle of broken glass. He stared hard at the distance, trying to judge it from the mouth of the gun. Knew exactly how wide the cloud of shot would spread in the time it took to get there. Lucy appeared at his shoulder. The sister in a brown dress lowered the hand from her cheek expecting to see blood but instead the wet was the involuntary tears from a blow to the face and she stared ahead as the bruise flushed maple red. The brother with a wounded arm held his breath and took a shot that landed perfectly in the ground far enough from the tires but close enough to convince the one between them. And the girl-child with matted hair and glass-bloodied forearms was at a dead run to the road.

  Lucy was at his heels as they ran down the stairs. She skidded on the kitchen floor in her boots and grabbed the pistol from where she’d left it by the sink.

  “Keep it ready,” he called over his shoulder.

  “You afraid for me?”

  “Course not. Cover the house and the truck.”

  When he reached the door he saw her turn and get her back against a wall, both hands on the gun.

  “You!” Out in front of the house, and his voice echoed through the unanswering flagellum of wheat fields.

  It was a quarter mile to the road, and with just two pairs of hands to tend it the front field had long gone to wild brush and seed. The screen door shuddered like an old nag behind him as he ran out into the sand flats of grass with shotgun in hand. Birds screamed in their circling above the grain and he did not realize until a thistle sheared against his ankle that he was barefoot; she’d beaten him there as well.

  He tore through the undergrowth past the bramble-choked wheat and it went green for the last hundred yards with something sleeker, more slippery than the bur-ridden tangles of the field. Something sickness-colored. He put his hands on his thighs heaving from the run and stared at the roadside, that half-paved snakehide that went on empty in either direction. No vehicles coming through, and with him close behind she could not wait for one.

  Too much wild grass and it had erased the path behind him as if he’d waded through water. Too many directions to go and too many thousands of acres to cover. He could not stalk and hunt her out. But if she hadn’t left, if she’d merely doubled back—

  He turned back toward the house and forded the field again, turning constantly to check behind him with his gun. The birds were silent this time. The strands of wheat tangled and burst in little explosions of grain behind his calves as he ran.

  He wanted to fire a shot as warning but knew not where to aim and the bottoms of his feet cracked over old silage and went numb but it distracted from the sear of the arm against his shirt. Cows lowed from a distance and cicadas wore through the air in a heady tenor lull and he was coming through the crop and the locusts cried out and at last he was at the steps. Lucy met him at the door.

  “You’re okay?” He panted it.

  “Why. What happened.” She held the wet white shards of the cup in one hand and the pistol in the other.

  He hefted the shotgun back to his shoulder.

  “Nothin. I thought somethin might’ve happened in here.”

  She exhaled, ribs lowering dangerously toward the safety pins, but did not relax her grip on the pistol.

  “You know she’s gone, Wyatt.”

  He followed her in and slammed the door behind and she startled.

  “We gotta get it back, somethin back so we don’t lose this place.”

  “She’s gone.”

  Smith rested the shotgun on the edge of the table and did not reply.

/>   “There’s nothin she could want here,” Lucy said.

  She dropped the shards into the trash and turned to him again. Her eyes were something melting.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know.” But he did. “I gotta go out after her.”

  “I know.”

  “It don’t make no sense. But the sellin it off in crumbs, gettin the mortgage—I can’t let it go so easy. I gotta do it. Something.”

  “I know.” She said it to the hole in his arm.

  He thought of the steer the girl had eaten from. Nearly half a flank missing and he’d never found the remains. A bottomless, wall-less, fetid hunger that had a face different from the one that carried it and a dragging body elsewhere that held the poundage consumed. That much gone overnight and a chunk of his arm, but no perhaps she didn’t eat it all but fed some gray force in the woods that had always been there, but no it was just a girl. You have to go.

  Smith went to the pantry and ripped a few cans of food from the shelves and threw them in a feed sack from under the sink. He began filling jugs of water then glanced at the countertop once more. He’d left the girl’s guns and plastic bag there the previous morning. The guns were untouched but the bag was gone. He set upon them and disassembled them with the same clinical deftness with which he would a shot rabbit, then gathered the pieces in his arms and carried them into the pantry. Came back with boxes of ammunition and spread them on the table.

  Lucy sat down and laid the pistol on the table before him, and not understanding that she had meant to give him both guns he shoved the shotgun toward her. The bolt dragged in the surface of the table and left a war trench in the resin and she flinched from it but stayed in her chair. He stuffed the pistol in the back of his jeans.

  “You’ve got the ammo for it.”

  Lucy stood but said nothing and he ascended the stairs again, boots on and ringing in leaden collision on each step like a buck’s dull and half-bored cry and he pulled another box of bullets from under his bed and the wool blanket from above it. He paused for a moment by the bed, the pistol heavy in his waistband. The palm-sized Winchester they’d gotten for self-defense though the father was never without the shotgun anyway. It’d never been used besides target practice in their fields, Lucy shooting out empty soup cans with a smile that twisted toward the eye she closed when she aimed.

  He turned from the room that had encapsulated his boyhood or lack thereof and if he did not return would remain as soulless as it had always been. White room with flannel shirts hanging in the closet with their various tears stenciled in with misaligned stitching, glued by sister’s finger blood. Because she never did any sewing to create, and bled only in retrospect, to repair. Would still bleed while he was gone, the land still tearing and wearing out cloth, or might stop bleeding if they were forced off the ranch, and that would be worse because that would mean forgetting. He left it behind him.

  When he came back down she’d sat again, patterned dress slumped in the spindled wooden chair. Smith put on his jacket with the left-arm gash and as it warmed it felt like it bled anew.

  Her eyes were wide but without emotion. Tangles of blonde framed her face, the color of wheat as if it had been made from the fields or they from it.

  “You’ll be okay?” he asked.

  “Will you?”

  “And you’ll tend the cattle?”

  Cattle too few in number now, animals that had not known to run from a world exploding.

  He told rather than asked.

  “I’ll tend the cattle,” she said.

  She was staring out the window toward the corner of the woods, and he knew what she saw. Two hundred yards out at the base of a hill lay the sunken six-foot-long divot in the ground, a grave with only a hand-nailed cross to mark it and her rabbit’s jaw necklace hung across the planks.

  He looked back at her. The shotgun was still on the table. She glanced at it with her hands behind her back as if she wanted them tied.

  “Wyatt, I can’t.”

  Hadn’t touched that gun since it’d been used to kill the father. Father buried without a gun because they couldn’t spare it. Thing that couldn’t save him here and so couldn’t be expected to save him in the next world over, if there was hunting there to be done. He saw it in her eyes and immediately took it back and laid the pistol where the patricidal gun had been.

  “I shouldn’t have. Sorry.”

  She looked down.

  “I aint gonna be gone for long,” he said.

  He loaded the shotgun and put two shells in his pocket.

  “You gonna be alright without me?”

  “Wyatt—”

  “Yeah—”

  “You aint gone away before.”

  He took another step back and turned to face her fully and for the first time realized how the wounded arm had broken his posture. He wanted to say that it wouldn’t be nothing, but found that he could not voice it.

  She laughed and it turned to something like a shriek, and she lifted her chin as if to free the sound from her, the skin below washing ruddy tan from the sun reflecting up off her dress and the cheeks burgundy, excepting the darker stripe from the bruise.

  He felt something of his skin shift and put his hand to his wounded bicep and it came away clean.

  “Shoot if you need to. Promise me you will. You don’t know what she’ll do.”

  The one whose last trigger-pull had quit the father from the earth.

  Lucy held a box of bullets flat in her palms like a Bible in oath and nodded again.

  He looked over his shoulder once more as he walked to the front door, at the dirty hair like the wheat strands in the field, at the dress that washed to her ankles in papery mauve. Tried to forget the wide eyes even as he stared at them; they would look like this again if he came back to say that they would have to leave, and then even more so in the dark of roadsides and nameless woods where people without homes or histories go.

  “Won’t be long,” he said.

  “Aint nothin,” she said.

  She turned away and went back to staring through the window. He felt himself pale and the blood that had deserted his face found a home in pulsing about the wound in his arm and he looked out at the truck, the splintered side view mirror half hanging off the metal shell of burgundy and silver paint that ran like a tractor, waiting there. And he was at a run toward it.

  Mandrakes grew there now in the shadow of the hill though the man had not been hanged. He did not know how many years it would take until the roots twisted deep enough into that earth to pierce the body below or perhaps it was the guts of the body whence they had sprouted to begin with, or perhaps there were nothing there at all and perhaps this land really did swallow them all without mastication or digestion and were they to go out there with a shovel would find nothing. An empty space, or if he was to dig deeper and did find the father then maybe he could also find his eye, in that cavernous throat deep in the ground of which the desert was the eczemaed skin, that cavern filled with the myriad things they’d tossed down, chicken bones like cross-stitches strewn across discarded leather and the almost floral twistings of unrolled barbed wire and steer after steer, find it somewhere in the soiled hay or perhaps still stuck to the piece of baling-wire that had extracted it, still waiting for him and still seeing, still watching in the manure-heated dark where even here flies turned, would always turn where there was decay. This fever of hungering earth outside their door and under it and they’d fed it something that made it so that now they could not leave it but in doing so had bound themselves to be consumed by it someday as well, had maybe even given it a taste for it. But it is his family’s land. They had belonged to it from the beginning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Man from Box Elder

  The decade-old F-150 started with a sputter like the cracking of ribs. Shotgun in the passenger seat serving as witness to his pursuit. He went south. There was nothing much in either direction but there was Salt Lake City to
the south and he knew she knew that.

  Kept his speed low and watched the ditches at the side of the road. Slim chance at hitchhiking; she wouldn’t be far. Wasn’t reckless enough to risk a hundred miles of foodless wilderness by going back into the woods, or the pantry window of a house when not a one was without a shotgun in this country.

  No, he didn’t know that. Had to see, had to be sure.

  At the edges of their seventeen-hundred-acre property there was a trailer home left on one of the crumbs of sold-off land, the last ones that hadn’t abandoned their single acre to go south seeking cities for better work. He pulled in and a small wave of children surged around the building toward the back of the lot. Closest place she could go if it were vehicle or food she was after. Smith dismounted into the gravel, shotgun in hand.

  He caught one of the children by the shoulder, one who strayed too long gathering his younger siblings’ plastic toys from the dirt. The boy was white-blonde but tanned a deep red, with eyebrows that stuck out at odd angles like salt crystals and matched the flaking skin of his sunburnt ears. He was wearing only athletic shorts, with a handful of the waistband balled up and tied with baling twine and they were hemmed with the dust that had been kicked up the back of his calves and now the dust settled as he stood and gaped at Smith crouched before him.

  “Got a job for you, boy. Give you a dollar.”

  The boy’s lip ceased trembling and he nodded, nearly smiled.

  “Good. You see the rock over that way by the end of the drive?”

  The boy nodded.

  “I need you to sit out there, and if anyone comes down the road lookin this way you run like hell inside and git me. Got it?”

  The boy nodded profusely and Smith took his hand off of him as if suddenly stricken by the closeness, and the boy sprinted to his post on reddened legs capped by white heels.

  Smith turned toward the trailer. Shotgun barrel nosing along above the gravel like the muzzle of a hound as he walked. He went up the nailed two-by-four steps, bent the shotgun up readied because he knew they’d have one too. Rapped twice on the white aluminum door. There was mold in its casing.