Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  He was still on top of it; the plain spread as a valley before him and the highway cut to the right before switchbacking down into the lower country. The mouth. Where time and land swallowed up the green of his ranch and ejected it dry, as blasted quartz and trilobite fossils and a hundred millennia older. He stopped here and got out and kicked his legs over the guardrail and sat. His arm hurt now and the pain made him hold it piked against his chest but he was glad for the reason to keep a tight, balled posture. Felt too exposed for one used to hunting by flattening himself against the leaves and dirt.

  He’d wait, as long as he had to. He thought once about striking it out on foot and picking his way among the boulders down the cliff face in case she had trouble with the bike and he could catch her with a broken wheel somewhere in that mile-wide of rough slope and rock, but decided against it. Not enough of a guarantee.

  Flies picked along the old manure on the leg of his jeans and he rubbed the bad arm with his hand. The heat was making the socket around the glass eye sting and he blinked it out of turn, mirrored the disjointed flicking of the insects. Out in the sky before him was someplace where the birds stopped. Dead air, where there was nothing below to give it life, like a certain point too far from shore where the gulls stop and as if a colorless gas rose up from the ground to say no more, no more here. Dead in a different way from the burned cattle with white sparrow footprints parting the ash down the nose of the skull.

  He’d never been this far out before, but he knew what it was. Where the sheets of sand were not the color of dust, but the color of light. His forefathers had seen it, and he cursed them more now that he had seen it himself. What that man Wyatt Sinclair would have seen, whether he would have seen its blankness as a place to hide or to run or a clean slate so clean that even the hand of a god could not have made a forest grow there.

  And to settle upon the tract of land that fed it, in the North. And had the men that came before and died before intended for their sons to die upon the same land or to excise themselves from it as the first Sinclair had done from the East? But had only a son and daughter left behind them, two who were one and the same, grown up without a mother and perhaps the father had simply made them grow out of the land himself. That a mother meant no more than photographs on a side table and no more than the wrinkled portraiture of those men who had come before and perhaps there was no history and they were each other’s own mother, and had willed one another into creation or existence in the dark of the woods themselves, as nothing was more true than that they were a remnant of those woods and carried a darkness of leaves that blocked the sun from their hearts. She is me.

  He shook with it, that the place that belonged to them now or that they had always belonged to could already be lost.

  Waited. Glared at the line where the cliffs hit the sand until his eye blurred.

  They were eight years old when the father took them out into the woods for their first hunt. When she’d realized it’d grown past her shoulders, Lucy had asked the father to cut her hair short, so Wyatt had helped in the kitchen with a broom while the father placed a soup bowl over Lucy’s head and cropped off her hair with garden shears, and she’d laughed and tried to kick the falling strands of blonde with her boots before Wyatt could get to them. “I wanted to look like you,” she’d said. And the father had asked whether she didn’t want to look like him and she had held the shorn pieces of blonde to her chin in a beard and Wyatt picked some up and tried it too.

  They’d marched into the woods single file at sunrise and Wyatt made her walk in front of him but she let him carry the rifle, a Ruger 10/22 with a maplewood youth stock painted red. The father led, the shotgun that ten years later would kill him and be bestowed upon Smith slung across his shoulders. Lucy called out names of plants and trees and insects while they walked and the father told her to hush when they approached the meadow.

  Wyatt took her hand then found that the rifle was too heavy to carry with just one arm so he pretended to be annoyed with her and took his hand back.

  Fifty yards before they reached the meadow the father stopped and held his hands out to the sides and his children fanned out behind him, one behind each palm. They could see where the clearing began, the sunlight chewing holes in the block of green that was the woods.

  They moved forward slowly, more as one than as three, or at least as two, the father and then he and Lucy. Their footfalls were silent as the small shoes nudged under last winter’s leaves and the father’s boots bent expertly around the brush. At the edge of the meadow he lowered his hands and the children scrambled forward and went onto their knees and crawled in the yard-high wild oats until they reached the crest of a small hill, the best vantage point. The father came behind them and lay on his stomach and Wyatt put the Ruger in position against his shoulder.

  They waited there in the meadow, and a grasshopper landed on the rifle barrel and Wyatt watched it as it moved across it and snapped up into the air and tumbled into the tall grass. They lay there for a while, not speaking, and Lucy began to fidget, braiding strands of oats into blonde shoestrings. And then the father—“there”—and touched Wyatt’s shoulder and pointed at a blackbird that had alighted on a branch extending over the far side of the space ten yards off.

  “Now aim carefully, think. Distance, wind. Think. Hold yer breath when you pull the trigger.”

  He squinted and scrunched his left eye shut and took the shot.

  He hit the mark, square on the bird, but the thing fell backward off the branch and its wings fell open and it floated as it went down, wafting pitifully in the air until it landed in the grass.

  Lucy jumped up first.

  “You got it.”

  Wyatt stood there holding the Ruger, red-faced.

  They walked together to where it had fallen and it was so small that it took them a few moments to find it and at last the father saw it and picked it up and held it out to Wyatt. Its wings were still outstretched and the bullet had hit square in its small chest.

  Wyatt’s lip began to tremble.

  “Take it, son.”

  The little thing and its beak so small and the feet smaller still and the bullet hole like a cannon gone through it at that size and had never meant to hurt anything had never meant to kill and he could not hold back the tears any longer.

  “Son. Take it.”

  And he snatched the bird from his father’s hands and went running from the meadow so that they would not see his face or hear his tear-clogged breathing.

  He was back in the woods, back in the place where there was no light and he felt alone and it was comfort and he wiped his nose on his shirt and looked at the bird and then held it tight to his chest and hoped with some farfetched shred of hope that because it was still warm it might get better, though its heart was most likely implanted deep in the bullet hole in the tree trunk behind.

  Lucy and the father had followed at a run and they caught up to him. Lucy pushed his shoulder.

  “Where do you think dinner comes from dummy.”

  “Not this one.”

  “Still.” She held the Ruger now.

  “Why didn’t you go first?”

  “’Cause you’re the better shot, dummy.”

  He sniffed and she took the bird from him so he could blow his nose again into his shirt and then he took it back and held it once more to his chest. The father put a hand on his shoulder.

  “When I was your age, my father made me kill and skin a fox kit.”

  Lucy took a cartridge from her pocket and reloaded. They went on. Tears still ran down Wyatt’s face and none of the three looked at each other. He held the bird to the top of his shirt against the skin.

  Just as they were reaching the ranch’s pastures Lucy stopped and shouldered the gun. Wyatt and the father froze.

  “What is it?”

  Lucy lifted the pinky from her trigger hand to point.

  There was a gray rabbit in the brush some feet in front of them. It had seen them, but was
still deciding its next move and its muzzle twitched with such a fever that it was visible from where they stood.

  Lucy pulled the trigger and it flinched then went down on its side.

  The father yelled of excitement or pride and then quieted himself and they went to it and he picked it up by the back feet and showed it to her.

  “A fine shot. Right in the head.”

  She stood silently, visibly steeled herself.

  “We’ll have it for dinner tonight.”

  The father kneeled and spread the rabbit on the ground.

  “You two may as well watch this, as it’s gotta be done each time yall hunt.”

  Lucy still held the Ruger and Wyatt still held the blackbird.

  The father pulled the hunting knife from his belt, an antler-handled elliptically shaped thing like a stone, and detached the head and feet and started at the rabbit’s back to skin it then flipped it and worked backward from the hip. The tiny viscera went onto the ground in a single movement of the chest cavity breaking and the father stood and lifted up the small carcass and shook it.

  “And one last thing—”

  He handed the carcass to Wyatt who took it, wide-eyed, and went back to the rabbit’s head and pulled the skin from the lower half and broke off the lower jaw and handed it to Lucy.

  “You boil that, and we’ll get it on a string for you to keep.”

  She nodded, and reached into his palm to take the animal part, and only looked once at the red that wiped off onto her hand as she turned the thing with yellowed teeth half-covered in fur and half-covered in flesh and then closed it in her fist.

  Wyatt left his blackbird at the edge of the woods.

  After they’d eaten dinner they had all gone to bed, and once the light was turned off in the father’s room Lucy came into Wyatt’s room and climbed in bed with him and they joined hands and did not speak for a long time. Then Lucy pulled the blanket over her face.

  “I didn’t really wanna shoot that rabbit.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you have a light?”

  “No. Flashlight’s out of batteries.”

  “Oh.”

  They laid there, her right hand in his left, stretched on their backs and faces toward the ceiling but the covers pulled up over their heads so that the heat from their breath would rebound off the blanket and onto their cheeks.

  “Wyatt?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t wanna, but somethin told me to do it. So I just did it.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Or maybe, do you think that maybe that rabbit was supposed to die today? That that sort of thing is what fate is?”

  “I wouldn’t put too much fate to where our dinner done comes from.”

  She turned onto her side and encircled his hand in both of hers.

  “My room’s too cold.”

  “I know.”

  Dusk fell and the desert floor shifted and went mottled rose, like a mammoth carpetfish shaking itself from the reef bottom. The silence tore at his ears, reverberated against the plain so that his breath echoed back from the distant mesas in a sound of something shattering.

  And at last there it was. A half-mile to the east, sand tossed up like smoke and drawing a line due south, too far to see the line waver around ditches and brush. He rose, watching, and then ran to the truck; he wouldn’t make it down there much before dark but knew she’d be slowed in swerving against the arroyos and snakeholes that littered that type of ground.

  No vehicles had passed him since he’d stopped and he pulled the truck back to the searing flat of the road. Each switchback was a sprint to an abrupt gray horizon as the air darkened. The descent felt like one done in a box.

  At the head of the plain on flat ground he hauled his truck to the left, off the road. She was a quarter mile or two ahead of him and he’d take it at an angle. The tan upholstery of the motorcycle was invisible against the dust, merely looked as if a louse tunneled just below the surface of the desert’s skin, the black of her hair its cretaceous markings as its armored back broke through.

  Fifty yards off the highway he had to stop to unwind a barbed wire fence. No gloves but his calluses were enough and he took the loops from around the fenceposts and laid them on the ground and drove the truck through.

  He knew she could see him, the space between them closing. Dusk was falling fast, and it was as if the desert took a collective breath and shook the insects from within its surface like a steer shivers flies off its hide.

  The highway ran thick to their right, a halved graphite pencil. It fed into the interstate down here, and every few moments he could see the last strands of sun rock off of the metal of the cars that were passing on like dried beetles on a string. The sky had gone bruise red.

  Twenty miles out, a grove of dried junipers twisted out of the horizon like browned hands. He was close enough to see her turn back to look at him, her face a terracotta sheet turning navy in the coming dark. The motorcycle dipped in among the trees and was gone. He stopped the truck and got out; there’d be sinkholes and exposed roots to wreck on if he got any closer.

  Most of the trees were dead. Their bark was of a sinewed pattern and the same color as the shotgun, trees like discarded cicada shells. He went on. The highway still droned in the distance.

  The motorcycle was riderless and on its side; a twisted handlebar coiled against the earth like a quicksilvered snake. The sand was shaded enough here that it was cold and stuck to his boots, formed the fragile constructions of footprints behind them.

  He went on through the grove and a thread of green started up among the brambles and dried stalks, ran from the ground to the tips of branches. The ground got wetter and he started to suspect there being old well pipes here, cracked and abandoned.

  The grove broke and he reached the output of the pipes. A rusting water trough, the size and shape of a bathtub, algae and red fungus bloomed down its sides, and the girl’s face buried in it to drink. Three stone-colored mustang ponies stumbled near her, gums green and agitated from the putrid water but too thirst-desperate to leave. Had the malformed spines of wild horses grown their whole lives in the desert.

  The girl was crouched with her shoulders up like a cat’s. Three hours in the desert air and the thirsting had already started. Had a palmful of water halfway to her mouth and he racked the shotgun. She looked up and let her fingers open and the water fell through. The ends of her hair had fallen into the trough as well and slid from its rim to give her a dripping collar. The dust stained black with wet on her chin and jaws.

  She stood before he could tell her to. He walked around the side of the trough and her face was within a foot of the gun’s mouth. She stared at the eclipse it made until she went nearly cross-eyed then looked beyond it into his working eye.

  “What do you want.”

  He could hear the spit catching on the sand along the back of her teeth.

  “My cattle.” His hands were shaking on the gun. “I want what’s owed for my cattle.”

  “Got nothing to give you for them.” Her face was still.

  “Then find some way. There’s got to be some way.”

  No answer.

  “Forty-six hundred dollars. I need forty-six hundred dollars to keep the ranch.”

  The girl’s eyes flashed the color of tin as the sky darkened and a mustang in the background nickered then chewed at its leg. One of them approached the trough and then fell back again.

  “Just gimme the goddamn forty-six hundred or tell me how you’ll get it so this can be finished and I can go home.”

  He was almost in tears. Gun still angled down at her head and finger pressing sweat into the trigger guard.

  She lifted her hands out to the side and turned slowly in a circle. Her unmatched boots sloshed the sand around her in waves. The plastic grocery bag was tied to a beltloop at her hip.

  “I’ve got nothing. I don’t have it.”

  “Then you find a way—”

 
“And if I don’t?”

  “If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

  “Gonna kill me the same way you killed the one buried on your ranch?”

  He thrust the barrel of the gun forward so hard that it knocked her head back and she grabbed it with both hands to keep her balance. She regained her step and forced herself forward on it, the mouth of the gun tight against her forehead where its semicircle imprint was starting to bleed. He locked his arms and the two braced like stags ensnared in combat.

  Their breathing was hard enough that the pressure between the gun and her skin wavered and with every few breaths the contact would slacken then be shut again, the barrel spraying dots of blood across her face. She would not draw back, and soon the breadth of her forehead was littered with pinprick-sized spots like the hide of a demonic Appaloosa. He glanced at the bag on her hip, saw what he thought he’d seen through the clear plastic.

  She had the rabbit’s jaw. She’d been to the grave.

  “The mandrakes give it away,” she slurred through sweat and spit. Blood pooling along her upper lip.

  “He wasn’t hanged!” The shout echoed against the horizon lines of the desert and through to the tendons of the hands on the gun.

  “I can see the guilt.”

  “He wasn’t hanged!”

  The girl twisted her hands on the barrel of the gun and he pressed it in further and she looked down toward her chin as she made something of a smile and a droplet of blood slid over the corner of her mouth. She’d been bluffing. Could not have known it was a killing. Her eyes were a pair of black dogs when she raised them again.

  “Maybe not. But mandrakes have a certain sense of things. Something in it was not right.”