She entered the driver’s side first with the knife still to his throat and hoisted herself over the middle console and into the passenger seat without lowering her hand.
“There’s nowhere’s gonna be open yet.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She exhaled and leaned back and removed her arm from her stomach. Red and black parts came away with her hand. The shirt stuck to her across most of her abdomen. Bullet had passed flat along the surface from what he could see, and torn through a good portion of the muscle there, the fabric puckered and stuck to the span of it in an eight-inch slash of dark that cut from the center and delved to the left side.
Sand had glued itself to the damp where she bled and where she had sweated, and in the half-light it looked as if the shirt were patched with scales, her own or torn from another creature altogether. No organ damage if she was still moving but still too much blood for it not to be running thin.
He started the ignition.
“Where’s your water?”
Smith nodded toward the back seat and remembered as he did it that the shotgun was back there. Lying on the seat, left unloaded. She put the knife between her teeth and hauled herself to lean into the back seat. He thought to lunge for it but knew she’d have the knife in him before he got it racked. Clenched his jaw and bit the inside of his cheek.
She brought up the first of the two jugs with methodical effort. Had not seen the shotgun. She took the knife out of her mouth and held it against the jug as she drank like something starved, then drew back from the opening and let the rest run down her shirt. It started to pool around her on the cloth seat in a darkish placental muck and he looked away.
“Drive.”
He pressed the accelerator as yellow light sparked from the east.
He drove south because there didn’t seem to be any way else to go. She kept her eyes locked on him and the knife close, her arm outstretched with her elbow rested on the middle console. She sputtered and coughed every few minutes, and the outside of her arm was cracked and blistered from dragging through the sand.
He could feel the sweat running down onto his eyelids. Knew the fever was starting and looked down the collar of his shirt and could see the threads of red beginning under the skin, reaching from the hole in the arm. Couldn’t think yet. Just drive, man, drive.
The knifepoint was tight enough against his neck to make an indentation, and he would feel it go a bit slack when her consciousness would falter, and then she’d awaken with a start and dig it back in. He felt a surge of panic that he might die that way, by her jerking her hand like that. Dead because some kid couldn’t hold her head up, with his father’s hunting knife stuck in his jugular.
Could you kill her, could you kill her now. Leave her in the hot truck and make a run for it or take a grab at the knife at the risk of your own neck. Twist the knife into the wounded gut, make it feel the way he felt the flesh depart his arm and felt the cattle sink through the surface of his earth. He wanted the shotgun.
But his hands were going slick with sweat on the wheel and he drove on, and he leaned away each time her arm went slack. To the left the sun rose and fanned light across his exhausted sullen face and her sand-worn opened gut.
About forty miles out he saw a Walmart. She was still curled in a ball in the seat, watching him, her eyes calcified amber and furious even as the rest of the face hung off her cheekbones, the muscles there too exhausted for expression. She’d left the water jug horizontal on her chest after the last drink, and with each deceleration of the truck it rocked, sloshing a bit more onto her throat. He parked in a handicapped spot at the front.
“We’re here.”
“Is it open?”
“Walmarts always are.” It was seven AM.
She suddenly became aware of the presence of the water jug and set it on the floor and slowly sat up while holding the knife to him, a feat he had not thought her capable of given her state during the ride.
She nodded to the door and he opened it and she crawled over the console to follow him as he got out. She had to hold herself up against the doorframe.
“Untuck your shirt.”
“What?” He pulled it from his waistband and started unbuttoning it to give it to her.
“No. Just untuck it.”
He did.
“Put your arm around me.”
He bent his arm around her ribcage, found a grip away from the part of the shirt that stuck to the skin. Still it was wet and seeped against his fingers, fragmented between cloth and sand and muck and nearly pulsing in its amoebic mix of colors derived from black.
She transferred the knife to her left hand and slid it up under the back of his shirt, hand on his shoulder and blade against the ligaments there. She leaned hard into him and they walked in through the automatic doors, arms entwined and a slice of steel beneath.
The clerk at the entrance, withered woman of over sixty, merely nodded to them. A cadaverous pair spat from the desert was no spectacle to those who worked at a place where deer had been butchered in the parking lot.
They turned in a limp toward the back of the store, though it was not so much a limp as it was the struggling of a spider that was missing several legs. Not the imbalance of a limp but a series of errors in the patterned steps of a creature that still thinks it has a greater number of viable feet than it really does.
The white paint on steel shelves leveled out a sanitary smell, and the fluorescent lights chewed with a tinnitus hum. The tile floors were all washed or at least made to look that way, and the sand between their boot soles and the floor turned into a sheet of crushed glass.
The girl stopped and looked back over her shoulder to call to the clerk.
“Is there a pet section?”
“A what?”
“A pet section.”
“There.” The clerk pointed and went back to her needlework.
Halfway to the back there was the whir of an electric motor and they froze. An overweight man in a camouflage sweatshirt appeared past the end of the aisle on a seated scooter, and gaped as he rode along until the next row of shelves obscured him again.
They passed a wall of algaed aquariums, beyond it a stand-alone wire rack of betta fish held in pint-sized cups. A few of them hung still, suspended as if in agar, like so many decorative foods. A solitary red one floated, fantail drooping in water that was slowly rotting green.
The girl leaned forward and started rooting through the white cardboard boxes of tank filters and water additives and fish food. Then she stopped. She shook her head and laughed, and looked about to cry.
“Ampicillin. My god, he was right.”
She reached in and pulled an entire line of boxes onto the floor but the last box caught on the ridge of the shelf and she slipped. Now.
He yanked his right hand from her side and slammed her shoulder down. The knife caught in the back of his shirt as she fell and when it landed he kicked it but she swung her leg and caught him in the ankle as he did it and he went down onto the floor as well. She seized some final flare of strength and flung herself toward the knife but he grabbed her leg and she left a brushstroke of blood on the tiles as she skidded. Her shoulders crashed into the wire shelf and the cups of betta fish rained down on her and burst open like eggs.
She rolled onto her back to reach the knife and grasped it but he lunged at her and got her wrist and shoved it back and it slashed open a bag of aquarium salt above them and her fingernails went into his hand and he got on top of her and pressed the heel of his other hand into her bullet wound.
She gagged and spit out blood from the corners of her mouth and a bit of bile followed it and he pried the knife from her fist as he leaned in harder and at last got the knife loose and put it to her throat.
She looked up at him with her head against the steel shelving, the salt purpling the cut on her forehead and stuck like rocks to her cheeks and two colored fish working back and forth in her wet hair.
Her face was impas
sible; he knew she saw the killing in his eyes this time.
Smith started searching out the jugular vein, couldn’t see it with the dust and sweat slathered on her throat. He could go through the existing wound into the stomach but this would be quieter, faster. She was saying nothing, clenched teeth and breathing through her nose. He took his other hand from her gut and brought it to her neck to wipe away the dirt, but when he overturned the palm he stopped and held it there.
It was black with blood.
The girl closed her mouth and stared at him. He folded the bloodied hand onto her jaw to steady himself. The girl’s eyes flared and she gritted her teeth and tried to turn her face but the knife was still flush against her skin.
Smith looked down at the girl.
“You’re dead if I don’t get you out of here, and I might as well be dead if I don’t get that money.”
The girl followed him with panicked, animal eyes.
“You know I’ll do it this time. And if I got up and walked away right now instead you’d bleed out within the hour or the cops’d get to you first. I’ll give ya the same pair of choices as before.”
She stared at him with something that looked like faith and something that looked like disbelief but without overshadowing the something that was always there of violence and she looked at the dying fish and boxes of antibiotics beside her head. Her breathing reverberated almost silently against the cardboard and through the static department store music. She nodded against the knife.
“Get me out of here alive and I’ll get you what you need.”
When they had learned to shoot and excelled at it, and could gut and skin and twist the necks of the geese in the yard and the broiler chickens when they had them, the father taught them to build box traps. Box traps saved time, for you could leave them there in the woods and return to your work, but there was always a risk of capturing a possum or a skunk, and Wyatt and Lucy loved that part of it, that you could open up a box and out would pop dinner or stink-for-a-month.
There were no broiler chickens left this late in the fall, only laying hens, and you did not kill those if you wanted eggs this year or broilers next year.
They brought the Ruger with them, in case they saw anything on the way, and Wyatt gave it over to Lucy halfway in and she passed him the burlap of apple slices they carried to reset the bait. The father had mapped out the dozen traps on a piece of paper and brought it with him, which astounded the children, when the father knew every bramble and leaf and turn of those woods, and they at last grasped that the ranch really was that large.
The first five traps held nothing, the children bending over with their matching hand-shorn hair hanging down over their eyes when they stared upside-down, and the sixth trap was a false trigger.
They moved through the woods and it was far from the march of carrying the gun into the forest for the first time; the children had also learned how to silence their boots in the leaves. The three made a leaderless unit now, and each paused with cocked ears for the sounds of insect wings and bird beaks, backs bent as if they were perpetually about to crawl.
The door of the seventh trap was closed and the father nudged it with the toe of his boot and the inside of the box responded with a thumping against the back panel in blows like a heart against a ribcage.
“Lucy,” said the father, and Wyatt knew the father was remembering his handling of their first ever hunting trip, and felt his cheeks burn as his hands went cold from not moving them.
They turned the box onto its end and heard the creature scrambling to the bottom and the father already knew it was a rabbit and not a skunk from the pattern of the thumping. He slid the door away and Lucy wiped her nose with one of her sleeves then rolled them up and reached in.
It was a good one, a cottontail of about eight pounds. She had one hand on its chest, its forepaws between her fingers, and the other hand supported its rump. It made no sound save its whiskers grazing her knuckles as it breathed. Wyatt averted his eyes as she shifted the rabbit’s weight onto her hip to get a better grip. No sound came.
“Lucy.” The father took a step closer.
Wyatt felt her eyes upon him, and even before he looked up he knew what she would do.
When he met her eyes she threw the rabbit from her arms. It hit the ground on its back legs and sprang into a jump and was gone.
“Lucy.” It wasn’t a yell from the father but an expression of pain. When one has gone without dinner enough times they learn that the yelling does not change it, and she heard it in her father’s voice and covered her face. He put a hand on her shoulder and they went to check the remaining five traps, but all were empty, and the three walked back to the house before sunset, soundlessly not out of necessity but out of the habit that barred them from making noise in the woods, while the Ruger lay horizontal in Wyatt’s hands as a dead thing but an inedible one.
There were no broiler chickens nor steers ready for the slaughter, and without a rabbit there was no dinner.
She climbed into his bed that night and had apparently already cried, in what he imagined as a forcing of the tears, choking them out like nausea into the pillow to get them out as fast as you could to get relief, and now she merely hiccupped. She grabbed both of his hands.
“I’m so hungry,” was the first thing she said when she caught her breath.
Wyatt nodded. He was hungry too, but by now it was a blameless hunger, and he figured it would pass as the times before had passed and the times in the future would probably pass too.
“I’m so hungry!” Her hands drew back an inch from his and balled into fists.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
She shook her head, and they lay in silence for a moment, no lights on but the moths still sensed the heat from the house and batted against the window with wings like white open palms.
She shook her head again and then was gone out of the bed.
Wyatt awoke past midnight and crept down the stairs in his underwear, and at hearing the father’s door he sat down on the bottom step as the father passed him and went into the kitchen and went behind Lucy and gently took her wrists in each hand.
“That’s not how we do it.”
The hen’s neck was snapped and half cut off and she had cut it on the board without thinking and the blood trailed from the sink where it pooled and then dribbled back to the cutting board again. She was midway through plucking it.
She lowered her hands, and then wiped them on her pajamas already filthy with chicken-shit and hay.
The father took the chicken up by the destroyed neck and nodded to Wyatt and Lucy followed and they put on their boots and coats over their pajamas and followed the father to the barn where he took down a shovel from the wall.
“We can’t do things that way if we want this to last.”
The father was strong and so it took only two shovelfuls, and he laid the dead laying hen in the ground and covered it over with dirt and Lucy understood and took two pieces of hay from the coop and laid them like a cross over the mound. She turned her face away every time Wyatt came close, at last covering it with her hands until the father led her into the house.
There was a cottontail in the sixth box when they went to check them the next day. They could not tell if it was the same rabbit, or whether fate had anything to do with where their dinner came from. But Wyatt reached it first and Lucy turned its neck within his hands without a word.
Neither spoke in the wake of what had happened, so they went through the pharmaceutical aisle silent in their steps of three, a set of faux and drastically wrong conjoined twins once more. She nodded at the things she wanted as the lights beat upon them, and the gore-mixed black of her shirt was something else entirely in the face of the colored print of pill bottles.
By the time they reached the end of the aisle he’d pulled a half dozen rolls of cloth bandage, a roll of medical tape, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of iodine.
They hobbled to the only cash register
open without breaking their connectedness. The cashier was a freckled blond teenager, with a bulge under his lower lip that suggested he was just learning to chew tobacco.
The boy blinked then stared when he saw the strain in the girl’s face and then the stomach of her shirt, though it was black with the muck and no red was visible. Smith dumped the contents of his arms upon the conveyor belt.
“Good lord, what happened?”
“She’s fine.”
The cashier boy still eyed her and opened his mouth.
“Really. Nothin to worry about.”
The girl stumbled and fell into Smith and it moved her closer to the cashier. They watched the change in his face when he smelled the wound and Smith realized they had made a mistake.
“I think I should call the police.”
The girl raised her head to meet the boy’s eyes and put a hand flat on the checkout conveyor belt.
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know your name …” She leaned forward until the credit card machine bent against her chest, to read his nametag through what was doubtless a blood-loss-induced blur. Sand came off at the base of the machine.
“Paul. That’s it, Paul. And I’m not a person you want knowing of your existence, let alone your name, where you work, and that you drive either that 1984 Ford, the Bronco with a cracked back window, or that piece of shit yellow Honda I saw in the parking lot.”
The cashier blanched and yanked his hands back from his checkout equipment as if it were that that he were being incriminated for.
“Now please let this man here pay for his items.” At the end of her sentence she ground her teeth with the effort of standing.
The cashier nodded profusely and seemed to know the gesture was too much but continued it anyway and scanned the items with shaking hand and was nodding still even when Smith dug out his wallet and handed him a bill and his thumbprint upon it came away red.
Rough Animals Page 10
