Smith said nothing.
“We’re selling to a Vegas man, Medina. For security, I used to contract out extra support from the Cordova cartel. I would have gotten at least a dozen more men than I have for a deal this size. The Cordovas have disintegrated. Whoever’s left is making a grab at whatever property and operations they can get, suppliers included, and there’s not one among them I can trust. Especially not now, with her here. You can never truly be a free agent in this world, can never stay truly neutral, no matter how you began, and now I’m out of men. I’m offering eighty thousand dollars cash, over two and a half percent of the take, for each man that stands beside me with a gun.
“The girl has already signed on. You could wait around and attempt to make your claim with her afterward, with one who has neither honor nor a sense of duty. Or, you could take one of the places yourself.”
The old man watched Smith and Smith watched a wooden pallet go up in the flames and the nails go vertically into the dirt as the wood that held them crumbled like paper in the heat.
“You have been hunting this girl for a reason. If it’s for the reason that you said, perhaps the money would fulfill the retribution you seek.”
Smith shifted.
“I aint never committed a crime in my life.”
“From what the girl has told me, you have killed a man.”
“We thought he was an elk.” He could not have stopped the words.
“I was told it has not been two days since it happened.”
Smith’s fist was to his mouth and he took it away.
“That was self-defense.”
“Self-defense in a situation that is bound to turn violent, when you yourself decided you would be there, is not truly self-defense.”
The old man continued.
“It is like going bear hunting, and when the grizzly turns on you and you shoot it dead calling it self-defense, when you were the one who went into the woods in the first place.”
“I understand. I’ve killed, then.”
The patricide. The son, the father. His son, daughter. No father. No father’s son.
He wished the old man would say something but he did not. They waited in silence for a long time. A brindle-furred pup walked among the men, nosing at their plates, unaware of all of the other things that made the world what it was.
“Eight-zero thousand, sir?”
“Yes. For your standing as intimidation against any robbery attempts, and manning a gun to protect the men and to protect the product if anything should happen. Then you can go back to whatever corner of the country it is that you’ve run from.”
“I didn’t run.”
Awan was silent.
“I’ll need some time to think bout it. Sleep on it at least.”
“As you want.”
A shadow moved in the doorway of the building. A few of them paused, then Guillermo ran over to it.
“You’ll tear your stitches you idiot.” He went onto one knee to get one of the girl’s arms about his shoulders and they shambled to the fire together.
“I was cold.”
The featureless men around the fire looked back and dispersed slightly at the girl’s approach, and when Guillermo set her down she folded herself against the ash-flecked dirt, beside the stones that rimmed the fire pit. Put her hand flat to one of them to take its warmth.
Smith watched them, unmoving, feeling outlandish to them but knowing he had just confessed to their leader that he was among them. Killer. Watched the men he feared becoming or perhaps was already. He felt another shot of pain from the arm and shuddered.
Awan nodded to where the bandage underneath deformed the lines of Smith’s jacket.
“Is that what your fever is from?”
Smith flinched at his words but put a hand to his sleeve.
“You can tell?”
“It’s a bad infection.”
“I know.”
“We can make a poultice that would cure it—”
“No,” Smith shook his head, “I’ve got antibiotics.”
He walked over toward the girl. There was something else in going to her now, less strength in the hands now that she was no longer a dying thing but an awakening thing. The others saw it as he passed. He crouched a few feet from her within the empty space they had left around her.
“What do you want?” She said it without moving.
“The pills.”
“No, I mean what do you want?” She rolled over and took a packet from her bag and threw it at him. He took three and pocketed the sheet.
“You already know.”
“Maybe not so much now.” She opened her eyes. “Killing that man back there—you won’t be caught for it, you know.”
“I know. That don’t hardly make a difference in it.”
He sat further back in the sand and took off the jacket and removed his flannel. It was better, but not good. He pulled the messed bandages away and tossed them into the edge of the bonfire, where they curled black and fractured into ash. Washed it with one of the water jugs left out until it burned.
Matthew appeared at his side holding a rag. Smith took it and the man sat down beside him.
“Figured you’d need it if you’re gonna do us any good later. Same people shot you as shot the kid?”
He wrapped the arm and the cloth was rough but nearer than the remaining bandages, in a dark unmanned truck a mile of emptiness away, and he put the flannel back on and buttoned it and mounted his jacket upon his shoulders.
“Nah it weren’t.”
Matthew turned his head, took out a can of chewing tobacco as he watched him. A little ways off from them the girl had turned over and unthreaded the plastic bag from her beltloop. She untied it and reached out a hand to Guillermo and he handed her the knife from his belt, an antique push-switchblade.
The girl flicked open the knife and Matthew caught the twitch in Smith’s face.
“Oh, shit.” Matthew opened the dip can and passed it to him.
“You still aint told us your name yet.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth, and his lips were chapped as if burned.
“I s’pose it’s goin to stay that way,” said Smith.
“Where you from, then?”
“Box Elder County.”
“Don’t know it.”
“You heard of the box elder tree?”
“No.”
“It’s a type of maple, like any other of the maples on the outside. But if you damage it or stress it or expose it to fungus, nobody’s sure what does it, when you cut it down the wood will be stained like blood inside.”
The horses had clustered at the edge of the corral to see the fire and their eyes alit in the dark, the curves of their irises rippling like the fan-shaped fungi that grow on bark. He saw that the girl was watching him.
“Bloody red stain, just like flesh. So when you’re choppin trees for your own fire you never know if you’re taking down just regular wood or somethin that will open up like meat on the inside. All you can know is that there’s bloody ones in your woods no matter what.”
Matthew did not answer, and eyed the palms of his hands under the firelight.
Then the girl spoke.
“It’s the opposite with men.”
“What?”
“Some don’t really bleed.”
The girl went back to pulling stones from her bag. She took out forty at least, each small enough to fit in the hand, and laid them out in four straight lines. Most were crudely numbered, in etchings faded or fresh or packed with dirt. Using Guillermo’s knife she set upon the ones that were yet unmarked.
They varied from sandstone to basalt, shale, and there was a chunk of turquoise and a trilobite as well, and with them the rabbit’s jaw. Its leather cord had been ripped off. He watched it, so far from home, knew it was not yet time to take it back.
The moon had risen and obliterated the swath of stars around it but the rest toed slowly along the horizon as the earth spun with the prog
ression of the night. Men still stirred about the fire, passed unmarked bottles of whiskey around.
The girl continued working on her stones, lying with her back propped against a stump and studying them in turn, a rolling in the hands and bringing to the nose that told not composition but memory, before scraping a number onto its face in slow but precise method with the knife edge.
After a time one of the younger men, a teenager with long hair and one deformed ear, leaned over to the girl.
“What’s all this here for?”
She stopped and set down the trilobite.
“The rocks?” As if the boy might have asked her purpose in this place in this country in this world.
“Yeah.”
She stuck the knife into the dirt.
“To leave my tracks across the earth.”
“How so?”
“For those who weren’t born with the arms to move mountains, what other way would you mark your passage on the earth than by at least moving the smallest stones?”
“That don’t change anything though.”
“By whose standards?”
“Anybody’s.”
She picked up the trilobite and threw it to him and he caught it against his chest. The men on either side of him bent in to look at it.
“That thing’s been traveling three hundred million years so far. And the only thing that managed to move it before I carved it out of a rock were the continental plates.”
He held it up to the light, eyed it, and tossed it back. ‘724’ was scrawled into its side.
She caught it with one hand and turned it over in palms so washed over with dust and blood that they had gone lineless and smooth, like gloves of wine-colored kidskin.
“Things that have traveled thousands or millions of years until they get to you and then you throw their fate. That’s the greatest hand any man could have on history,” she said.
“But you got bones over there too.”
She picked up the rabbit’s jaw in response. Not yet numbered.
Smith knew Matthew was watching him again.
“You think that counts less?” the girl asked.
“Nah. Not if you’re the one that put them there.”
“You equate taking a life to bending the path of something a thousand years old.”
She considered for a moment then spoke again.
“It’s an interesting thought, leaving your stain on the earth as a trail of bones. Ones that wouldn’t have fallen in that place if it weren’t for you.”
The teenager nodded.
She picked up the knife and continued.
“But who would do a thing like that. Would you?”
“I might. If the justifications were there.”
“But then there’s no point, if it’s something you would have done anyway. True violence has no reason behind it, but killing when it’s justified is a byproduct of life. Like leaving behind waste or the bones of a chicken you had to eat. No more than any other man did before you and will do after you and so on until they’re all gone.”
“That one there’s a rabbit aint it?”
“It is, but that one means something else.”
She pulled the knife back from the dirt and set into another stone. Matthew spoke up.
“So would you say that what a man does counts for nothing unless it’s beyond what he has to do to survive?”
“Not entirely. Everything’s done for survival to some degree. But there’s a difference between killing a bird that you’ll starve without or killing a man who’s got a knife to your throat and killing a calf that will feed you for a week or killing a man who will probably come back for you with a rifle inside of a month. The man who has a knife to your throat has brought his bones to that place knowing he might leave them there for good. But the man who is gradually readying a bullet for you will not see it coming if you get to him before he thinks to go for you. You always have to survive, but sometimes you have the foresight to survive so much that you move bones.”
Most of the men were listening to her by now. The way in which she spoke was foreign to them in both its words and articulation, and its alienness made it as unquestionable as the divide between her appearance and the unfounded otherworldly voice.
The teenager with the deformed ear said shit, the only bones he’d move were these shit horses that kept going down in the desert, and Guillermo nodded to what the girl had said in a way in which the others could see that he did not know but understood. Matthew got up and placed another log on the fire and retreated as silently as one could behind a landslide of sparks and the girl continued on with her numbering. After a time, Guillermo rose and crouched beside her as they talked in a low voice.
The two children had spent the evening pestering the horses and sat at the edges of the fire now toying with a small calico kitten that squirmed in their grasp. The younger one, no more than five, lit a stick in the fire and commenced lighting its whiskers until it struggled away from them.
The girl paused in her speaking and unfolded her legs from where she sat and stuck out a foot to catch the kitten in its path and gently kicked it upward and handed it back to the boys.
The children clutched at the kitten and ran off but when the animal stumbled back into the firelight an hour later all of its whiskers were gone and its tail broken off and cauterized black and bloody at the base.
Awan had gone back into the building, and Guillermo had heard what he needed to hear from the girl or had heard as much as he could stomach and had taken a seat on his haunches by the woodpile. As she rested with open eyes they went black against the reflection of the bluing embers and when she shut her eyes the pupils appeared to continue in their darkening below the lids.
After a while the men drifted one by one from the fire and then collectively in groups or in chunks and Smith did not know where they slept, whether it were dark corners of the store or in absconded areas about them dug into the sheet of sand. The woman came again and ferried the children off into the dark toward the outbuildings and they grudgingly went, with blackened hands stuck with grime and sand and bits of fur, and one of them sucked its thumb.
When the last of the men had gone, Smith took the sheet of antibiotics from his pocket, removed two more, and outstretched the sheet toward the girl, an offering to she who still sat with her legs crossed on top of one another, a dead desert saint. She opened her eyes, and took it from him.
“You said some men don’t really bleed.”
“Did he bleed?” She said it quietly.
“Not on me.”
She watched him for a long time, then turned her face back toward the fire and closed her eyes.
Before morning he awoke by the dying fire smearing its smoke into the sky light of the coming dawn and the girl was gone. He found Awan on his pallet bed behind the counter in the main building and went to touch the man’s arm but the man’s eyes were already open.
“I’ll do it.”
She’d gone back to her own room when he left, but last night she had gotten too cold, and so Lucy ran down the steps with bare feet after sleeping in his bed alone for the first time. But there was still no one there in the kitchen, so she went back upstairs and laid back down in the bed. Still kept her head to that isolated corner of the pillow he didn’t use.
“What are we gonna do, Wyatt?”
And then to fill the silence of the one that was not there beside her she spoke again.
“We can stay like this forever, caint we, Wyatt?”
And she smiled and nuzzled her face further into the pillow, then smudged her lashes into the cotton at the knowledge that behind her in the bed there was no one there.
An hour later she ran down the steps again, taking the pistol from the bedside table, and skipped breakfast because she didn’t want to open the cabinet and remember that there was one less cup now, and she laced on her boots and ran out to the cattle, while behind her upstairs the skins gasped and swallowed the fifth day’s salt.
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She stood among the cattle in the field, and there was a sound from within the woods and Wyatt was not there and she leveled the pistol at the aimless green and found that she was only used to firing a shotgun, that when her right hand held the pistol with bent elbow the left arm had extended to carry the weight of a barrel that was not there. The swooping veils of an owl’s wings unfolded into the air above the pasture, the nightbird chasing sunrise too late. She lowered the pistol, sat down in the grass, and stared out at the green like a prayer or in submission. That there was something of defeat in that firing a shotgun was ingrained perfectly in the muscle memory of her arms.
Part Three
CHAPTER EIGHT
Too Many Demons in the Desert
He was given a can of gasoline from the storeroom and began the hike out to the truck. The sun had not yet breached the mesas that crawled the horizon but the light was enough that the visibility was good. As he passed by the ridge that was shaped like the horse’s back, he turned to look at the compound. In the matte air of sunless morning the greenhouse sat as a leaf-colored prism in a wash of ground without color. Like a pocket or a casing, filled with the only thing left alive in the desert. He wondered if the sense of it was something you could survive off of. Whether the men here had sought it dead already, or the drying death had been an act of the landscape upon them. He could see no one. He turned back to the faceless cliffs.
Thirty seconds later he stopped again and turned around. Guillermo was behind him, taking heavy steps with a shovel and an armful of black wires. Smith waited for the man to catch up.
“If I was a coyote I’d a eaten halfway through your leg before you seen me.”
Smith took up one of the black boxes that had fallen and started on.
“Woulda heard you a hundred yards away up in the woods. Aint know why it’s different out here.”
“That’s ’cause in the woods, huntin is a matter of hearin a hundred sounds at once and figuring out which it is you’re trying to find. Out here it’s a matter of quieting your mind enough to hear just one.”
Rough Animals Page 13
