Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  “What ya want?”

  “It’s just a neighbor.”

  “We aint got no neighbors. We aint want yer business.”

  “No ma’am. From over ways. From the Smiths.”

  A pause.

  “The Smiths?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Another pause. And then—

  “Aight you hang on.”

  He stepped to the side of the door in case there was something he was not expecting and the two-by-fours groaned and then the woman appeared in the doorframe. Mid-thirties and in a dressing gown and hair racked in antithetic neatness in larval pink plastic rollers.

  She looked him up and down and stared longer at the badly fitting prosthetic that he knew looked like a stone in his head in the dark of the entryway, and still she did not step to the side to allow him in. Her eyelids were bordered in day-old mascara and a scar ran from her lip down across her chin that twitched parallel to her eye movements.

  “You’d be Sinclair’s boy, then, wouldn’t ya?”

  “Yes ma’am. It’s Wyatt.”

  “Well aint you grown. Come in, come in.”

  The trailer was a thing the width of a pickup truck’s cab but a cab’s length replicated several times over, and no more decorated than such a truck’s cab would be. In its waxed stiffness the carpet made louder protests against his boots than the wheat or even the leaves on the floor of the woods had, and he followed her and she did not object to the fact that he had his shotgun barrel pinned awkwardly against his chest by his right hand. Sights to the ceiling at least. When the door rattled to a close from her yank on it she turned away and shuffled through a floor brushed with discarded newspaper and forded her way to a woolen couch and he sat down beside her.

  A child ran across the floor in front of them, pushing a yellow plastic wagon.

  “That’s Bryson Horace there.”

  “Okay.”

  He held the shotgun between his knees. Watched a thick black fly traverse the two-inch window above the door.

  “Wyatt, you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m afraid Bo aint back from the shop until seven.”

  She thought for a second.

  “We got milk, you want some milk? Or some moonshine? We got apples for it.”

  She rose to her feet and Smith blurted out, “No—” and she sat back down, keeping her hands in front of her.

  “No,” he said it more softly and shook his head. “I’m lookin for someone—”

  “What happened to yer eye,” she burst out, voice frightened.

  “Dumb accident.”

  “Ah.”

  She was shifting nervously and took a toothpick from behind her ear and stuck it in one corner of her mouth and started picking at the scar on the other.

  “You seen anyone?”

  “Caint help ya there. Aint seen anybody outta place in these parts besides yourself.”

  The woman bent and flung a hand ineffectually at another child that was now writhing across the rancid magenta carpet before them, then turned back to Smith.

  “Who is it yer lookin for?”

  Her gaze still worked across his dead eye, ignored her offspring scattered around the floors.

  “A girl. Youngish one. She stole somethin from us.”

  “I hope it wasn’t nothin irreplaceable.”

  Smith laughed then tried to choke it down and the woman slid further from him on the couch. He recovered himself and wiped the glass eye with the back of his hand. The shotgun gaped at the ceiling.

  “But how’s your pa? Your sister? She must be somethin real pretty now. Aint seen you since your old man had to borrow tools to fix that tractor.”

  Smith stood.

  “She is. And it were the baler.”

  “What?”

  “It were the tractor hitch on the baler. Broke again the week after and I tried to fix it without him seein and the wire tore off the pulley and took my eye. Broken end right through to the top of the socket. You be careful if you see that girl around these parts.”

  He was halfway to the door.

  “But what do I do? What am I s’posed to do if I see her?”

  Smith looked at her as he opened the screen, then turned and went out, leaving her standing in front of the couch, one hand clutched to her collar and a dislodged pink curler in the other.

  When he threw the truck into reverse and started to back out of the drive he saw the boy still there on the rock, his white hair scrawled across his face, forking a stick between his bare toes. When the boy heard the engine he lifted up the stick and Smith saw that he’d broken it in places to make it look like a rifle. He pretended to cock it and aimed it toward the road. At the mouth of the drive Smith passed the kid a dollar through the window, one of his last, and the boy leapt down from the rock and snatched it and made off for the trailer home or for the woods behind, back to sisters whose hands had never killed.

  Smith watched close in the ditches for some fresh break in the low branches as he drove, but there was no point tracking in this country without a lead. Altogether too much land, and she or he or both would be dead before he ever found that fine line of human passage in the leaves and dirt. He’d have to go by the landmarks, the places where she might think she could get something and hitch or steal a ride. Cutting his options already, and the feeling settled weightily into his stomach.

  He let himself think about heading back, to confirm that she was not flat out on the pavement of some hick’s drive to their shoddy hunting shack. Knew she had to be smarter than that. He went on south like on instinct but in it was also sense. Weren’t nothing to the north besides abandoned lots and thousand-acre farms in which she’d find no more hospitality than she’d found in the man who had fired at her over the back of his own bull.

  Twenty miles out, at the forked exit for the road to Salt Lake City, he found the abandoned truck. Pale turquoise blue with a black deer antler decal in the back window, and he recognized it as an old one from Bo Anderson’s yard. In the opposite lane, headed north. Slowed as he came up beside it but did not cut the engine in case she’d wrecked it and was waiting in the undergrowth to try and take another. But there were no skid marks on the pavement behind it, and only stamped down grass where the right wheels had gone into the ditch, no dug up mud as there would have been if it’d been braked quickly. Axle probably bent from going half off the road but would still run.

  The driver’s side door was open and the keys visible on the seat. He stopped his truck and got out. Listened. Could sense what a deer felt like when it was standing frozen in the brush nearby, that featureless presence of something breathing. He knew he was alone.

  The patterns of the trees here were strange to him, even though they were of the same stock as those rising in his woods. Had been known by the men that came before the roads did as all part of the same wilderness. Miles upon miles of forest that was strange, always morphing. Before the man had died in his woods and they somehow became no longer strange. Because in a forest in which you do not know which tree your father was killed behind, your father has been killed behind every tree.

  Smelled the air and was smelling it for her. Hunting her out like an animal, because that was the only thing he knew how to hunt. It was silent but the false silence of woodlands, the slurred or barked calls of featureless birds and the rustling of their wings through the brush like skirts and if you removed their sounds you would hear the sandpaper legs of the insects they preyed upon and if you removed their sounds in turn there would still be the maddening ticking of grubs in the heartwood of the trees, perhaps even the groaning movements of the trees themselves. And if there were a true difference between the trees of that ranch and the trees of this road the sounds made no discrimination.

  No tracks in the grass. She’d gone on the road. And he remembered—the gas station a mile ahead. Hadn’t wanted the stolen vehicle seen, had turned around to leave it. He got back in his truck and went on.

 
When they were children, the trees and the cattle had made equal giants to their size. They would race among both in the same, ducking sideways between close tree trunks in the woods or crowded shoulders at the trough, or vaulting hands-first over a fallen log the way they did over bedded-down cows.

  They were so small then that it seemed they could run below the bellies of the cattle by just scarcely bending over, and Lucy dared Wyatt to do it then volunteered to go in his stead before he could answer. She chose an older one stamping at flies, and she imitated it with her boots in the field and then she ran, and before Wyatt could follow she’d gotten cow-kicked in the knee.

  She had been laughing and he had carried her up to the house on piggyback even though he was no taller than she then. In the kitchen he’d wiped the mud and manure off her knee and cut a bandage. It was bruised good but no more than a scrape, that of a child who’s fallen on pavement.

  “I aint gonna let it scar,” she’d said.

  “Nah?”

  “We’re the same, so the only thing that can make us different is scars. So it’s only outside that can make us different from each other. We just have to make sure not to get scars.”

  “You gonna get scars on a ranch.”

  “Nah, I’ll git better at doin things. I won’t get kicked again. Not by no steer or horse or nothin.”

  “Shoot. It’s not like that anyway. You’re a girl and I’m a boy. Time and the world are gonna make us different.”

  “Change and scars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So we just gotta quit time and quit the world.”

  He was staring out to where the woods began beyond the hill, so far that they appeared only in a blurred black-green line like the bruise on her knee.

  “You in, Wyatt?”

  “What?” He’d let go of the bandage and looked back at her.

  “You’ll come with me?”

  It was a place that looked as if it had been erected for the edge of a swamp, and now acted like a sponge, with moss bristling in emerald fur on the eaves of the roof and the gravel-mixed dirt around it all dried and dusted. Gas station that functioned as country store in a tract of land too remote to have one.

  There were two young men in T-shirts standing on the porch in the morning gloom, one with a waxed straw cowboy hat lowered over his eyes and the other with his jeans funneled into his boots like a bullrider and when Smith parked and got out of the truck they eyed him and split wordlessly and went to lean against the front of the building. For a moment he saw himself as they saw him, gaunt and raggedly clothed and with one discolored eye and shotgun in hand, and knew more than anything it was that he was not often seen around these parts that had spooked them, and he went in.

  The proprietor raised his head from where he leaned over the counter with a newspaper fanned out in front of him, a portly man of over fifty and in sun-stained overalls who was balding unevenly and had not shaved for at least a few days.

  “Wyatt?”

  He smoothed his hands over the newspaper to make the gesture of putting it down but without having anywhere else to put it and looked up again.

  “Wyatt Smith?”

  Smith did not look at him and instead walked among the shelves of cellophane-wrapped pastries with dust upon them. He stared at the goods with a sense of alienation, pushed at a package of donuts with his finger and when the pastry didn’t budge he wiped the finger on his pantleg.

  “Wyatt it’s been what, three years? Five? We aint seen you here in a damn long time.”

  Smith rounded a corner of wire racks and at last met the man’s eyes.

  “Somethin like that.”

  “Was gettin to thinkin the winter must’ve gotten yall, way out there.”

  “Nah.”

  The man shifted uncomfortably and set his left hand on the corner of the newspaper.

  “Well … what can I do ya for?”

  Smith approached the counter.

  “You seen a girl around here? Short, dark hair, ’bout fourteen. Black T-shirt.”

  The proprietor ran a hand over his skull as if to push hair back but only succeeded in moving too-long strands of gray over his baldness from the overgrown hair at his temples.

  “What you searching her fer?”

  Smith stopped in front of the counter.

  “You seen her then?”

  The proprietor took his hands off the newspaper and held them up in defense.

  “No, nothin the like. I’d just wondered who she is and why you searchin her.”

  Smith turned and went back among the white-painted wire racks.

  “It aint nothin.”

  “Alright.”

  “You sure you aint seen her?”

  “I’d swear on the god almighty.”

  “Alright.”

  “Say, how’s your pa doin these days?”

  Smith looked up at him.

  “He’s doin right fine, thank ye.”

  “Tell him to stop in sometime, say hello. Yall caint be getting by just off your land and mail-orders that well.”

  “I sure will. But we are.”

  Smith went out and the door clattered behind him as its decade-old bell smothered itself among flyers for lost dogs and horses for sale.

  The teenagers were standing on the porch still and the one with the tucked-in jeans hacked and evacuated a mouthful of tobacco spit in front of Smith’s boot. The boy was all-over dun-colored and had a missing canine tooth and wore two heirloom rings on his right hand.

  Smith stopped.

  “What you doin way out here.” The boy shifted the pack of chew from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue.

  Smith turned to look at him with the good eye.

  “Aint ‘way out here’ comin from Box Elder.”

  Smith stepped over the grease-slick of spit and continued down the stairs.

  The teenagers closed the gap between themselves at the edge of the porch, one inadvertently sliding his boot heel into the mess.

  Smith stopped at the beginning of the gravel wash and turned to them.

  “You two seen a young girl round here? Black shirt black hair.”

  “Yeah we seen her,” the one in the Stetson hat jawed. “Yer ma make off with a Mexican or somethin?”

  “Somethin like that.”

  The other one had been about to elbow his friend in the ribs but stopped mid-motion. Smith handled the shotgun into the passenger seat and started the truck. Was on the right path.

  As he backed it from the lot, the one with tucked-in jeans called out.

  “She went on with a crew of bikers. Not from here but there were a half dozen bikes and one of them had tan saddlebags with matchin tassels on the handlebars. Went on south. Hope ya find her.”

  Smith nodded. When his truck had edged into the mouth of the road the boy who had spat turned to the one in the Stetson.

  “You don’t mess with Box Elder people you dumb fuck.”

  It was no longer necessary that he slow to look for her between the trees that lined the road. There’d be nothing for another twenty-six miles and that was short time in their terms of square-mile ranches, lands of no name with trailer parks littered in between. He caught his eyes in the rearview mirror and thought they were just tired enough for twenty-three. One eye that had seen things and one that was unseeing now but had enclosed the things seen in seventeen years behind it, to keep forever. Six years without the eye and five years without the father and an hour and a half without Lucy.

  The fury had risen up again if it had ever abated. It was a live thing now, a worm stretching the tops of his arteries and smashing itself against the hole in his arm.

  They had never been away from one another. When they had still gone to the country store they had gone together, and on the ranch you were never apart. There was an interconnectedness in those family grounds, wires laid by the burying of the hopes or the bodies of the men who came before or the bones of the cattle they raised and killed, and he could f
eel her move across the fields and through the barns and flit along the edges of the woods as if he could reach out a hand to know for sure. Because it had always been that—that we are the same, that I am she and she is me.

  And if I am she and she is me then I did it also. If my hands are her hands also then I am a patricide. When I awake in the night tearing the sheets off of myself to see if the blood is on my hands and feel the pounding all the way to the vertebrae at the back of the throat. And when it is dark you can see the dark on your hands as if it is there, like there would have been blood on her hands that day if she had held him close as he died. But there was not and she had not. And so you’d check your hands to see if they were covered in blood or holding the gun while she lay sleeping in the room beside yours dressed in white, exhaling hushed breaths because now she does not even breathe like she did before.

  She would never be a patricide because it was an accident, an accident and she could never be one, so I would play patricide to take that guilt away from her. I am patricide and I killed my father and I shot him dead. Because in a tract of grain tilled over dried bones she is everything right in the world. Because she is me and I am she and blood on her hands is blood on mine.

  He blew through the twenty-six miles and killed a squirrel as he sped because there weren’t enough cars on that road to teach the wildlife to keep off of it. And when he saw the place he slowed.

  A motel, the type that smelled of vice more heavily than it did of vermin. A signpost peeling yellow among the cacti splayed around it spoiling from being too far into the north, too much in the wet, and the sign was blank. He knew there were some things that couldn’t be made any better or any worse by giving them a name.

  He parked behind a semi truck beside the leasing office and watched the proprietor look up at him through the window and then down again at a livestock supply catalog.

  The motel was sloughed in the same yellow paint as the rotting signpost. Flat roof, only a dozen rooms. The remnants of his sideview mirror shot light at his back, shards hanging onto old glue like a glass anemone. A breeze passed across the parking lot and it bristled, went silent.