Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  Smith drew back from his food, watched the fire reflected in the whites of the old man’s eyes.

  “I know Washakie.”

  “So you’re from the North. Tell me, is the desert something of discovery for you?”

  “No. It’s somethin I’ve always known. Even in the North you feel it there.” Had known it and felt it and watched it wash up over the edges of his land even when he was young enough that he hadn’t yet inherited it or understood its weight on his fate.

  “Men think they know the desert like they think they know violence. But they’re always wrong, on both counts.”

  It was dark, and in the cliffs far beyond something growled, a sound grating against back teeth that were already cold, the voice strained and mineral as if it had come from the stones that lined all of the stomachs out there that had thirsted for too long. The two teenage boys sat with the whiskey bottle and tried to imitate it, to get it to call out again.

  Awan and Smith watched the girl by the fire, the sparks expiring in the air above her hair and her breathing so still that it would suggest she was more of earth than of man. Her face bare under that light looked like something yet unborn and Smith realized it was more familiar when painted. And he thought of the rough-stitched slash riding below the black T-shirt at each breath but half-believed were he to lift the shirt it would be gone.

  After a while Awan got up and the girl moved to sit in close confidence with him and they spoke in whispers as she listened like a student and gradually the hollowed men at the fire retreated to the buildings and to sleep.

  All went quiet. The stars’ light collided at the edges of their auras, veining the sky like a sheet of shattered glass as the fist of the earth recoiled from it and turned, pausing until it would bash up against the atmosphere to create the constellations once more after the coming day. These places that were beats between violence, that foretold it and had the mark of past violence upon them, where the enactors of it sat and told stories of the things they had seen but never of what they had done and would soon go and do more that they would also not tell.

  The girl had curled into her place of dirt by the fire and Smith went to his truck. He rolled down the windows and lay down in the cab, put his jacket underneath his neck. Lucy was so far. So far from the nights when, sensing her gone from the room beside him, he’d dress and go downstairs to find her on the floor of the sitting room, where the moon ran through the window and colored the carpet in violet and navy and she’d sit hugging her knees behind the splotch of light with her bleeding fingers in front of her, and would look up at him and say, “It was like he was here, Wyatt. He came right in here and I tried to show him my hands so he’d know—” and he would kneel opposite her and she’d thrust her arms into the space below the window and the light would drape them in the colors of flowers that kill when eaten. And he’d reach out a hand to hers, and she’d crawl back sometimes and sometimes not, and they’d go to sit against the wall below the windowsill, washed in watercolor.

  He woke up a half dozen times in the night, in a fevered half-consciousness that the girl had slipped away and left, not knowing why it was that he cared whether she had gone or not. Twice, he knew she was there. Three times, he got up and went to find her curled by the fire and could not tell if the exposed eye not pressed against the sand was open or merely painted black with the side of her face. Each time he had stayed too long, looking. And once, before dawn and between these times when she feigned sleep or really slept, he could not find her. And then, in a shift of clouds, he caught her outline seated atop one of the skewbalds– a black figure of tiger’s glowing eyes, steering a behemoth’s shadow below the moon.

  Inside the toolshed, dark-faced men worked tirelessly at great vats of green powder while others tore open brown-paper sacks of chemicals and emptied them like bladders into the oil barrels used for mixing. The ones with smaller hands turned the rungs of the pill pressers until the calluses were bored through on their fingers but it was dark and they did not see the blood when they wiped their damp hands upon their shirts.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Time to Run

  They were to leave at first light, and noise ran among all of the buildings in a roar as they worked and at last they had left the fire to go out. The shed was cleared out and only half a safrole barrel remained. The men had placed a sheet of plywood to close the front doorway of the store to fend off the sand-saturated wind and they were talkative now for the first time, rambling and shouting out orders as four worked with scales and gloves counting out pills and weighing them to verify the count and ferrying them down the line of tables that they’d pulled from the greenhouse, to more men who packed them into bags.

  They took four trucks in total, two pickup trucks and two jeeps, leaving Smith’s since his was without a false plate. There were sixteen men including Smith and the girl, the old woman and two children the only ones who remained on the property.

  When the sun rose they set off, and the old woman did not stand in front of the compound to see them go. As they trailed their vehicles onto the dirt road the brindle hound was beating a line in the dust of the lean-to as it paced back and forth.

  Smith rode in the back of a jeep with Guillermo, with the oiled TEC-9 that had been shoved into his hands and an extra magazine stuffed behind his belt.

  They were headed down to the top of the land that encompassed Monument Valley, south enough for there to be mesas to mark their path by but not so far south that a stray hiker would ever stumble across. Awan and his followers had left the Navajo Nation but not abandoned it, Matthew had said, and for whatever protection from the cartels Awan could give them, he was repaid with use of the lands from which tourists and law enforcement would be deterred on the days he required. They would have a place of goliath sandstone shrines to obscure their dealings, where the rock was great enough to intimidate men, though both teams would arrive fully equipped to slaughter the other.

  The line slowed as they went over the cattle guard that marked the mouth of the greenhouse’s dirt road.

  “I guess you done noticed Awan aint got any cattle.” Guil-lermo dropped his cigarette on the floor as the jeep bounced over the panels and picked it up, then gave up and threw it off the side of the jeep and into the dirt.

  “Yeah.”

  “He was paranoid after the last place went belly up, wanted to cover all his bases. Bought a whole goddamn herd because he thought it would look more right if he had one.”

  He pulled up the collar of his shirt and wiped his mouth on it and then let it down again.

  “Awan bought this herd, or at least what he thought would make up one, ten longhorn heifers and a yearling bull. But after a few months we seen that this greenhouse business were gonna work and them cattle were just a pain in the ass so he set em loose.”

  The man in the passenger seat started passing around a sack of sunflower seeds, and they all took handfuls and let the folded shells fall into the wind like crumpled paper or wings.

  “So now somewhere out in this country there’s a pack of wild longhorns roamin about with no brand and overgrown hooves and left to fend for themselves. We all say someday that herd is gonna come back around and it’s either gonna be superevolved from havin to fight off coyotes on their own all this time and they might even be predatory by then, or it’s gonna be inbred to all hell after havin only one bull and are gonna have eyes in places they shouldn’t be or somethin the like.”

  After they had driven for two hours they slowed the trucks to a stop on the side of the road and some had only half-bothered to get off of the road because they knew no other vehicles would pass in the time that they were stopped.

  Most of the men went off separately and stopped at the barbed wire fence that followed the road some five or ten yards off and pissed into the sand, and Smith sat down upon his heels and watched the air bend in the heat off the road. A lone lizard crouched at the opposite edge, had apparently run off from heating itself there as they a
pproached but now toed its way out again; a yellow-spiked fan about its neck was the face of one of Awan’s orchids exposed to the desert for too long.

  The girl came and sat beside him with her heels out on the pavement and he sat back and did the same. Realized that even his boots were not of this country. Were of something wet and northern and were rounded with none of the bite of the skull-jaw toes that Guillermo dragged through sand.

  She’d repainted her face in ash again, blackened from her eyebrows up, and had tied back her hair with a string of the same plastic line that had been used to sew her stitches.

  They sat there for a moment, heels against the pavement as they felt the desert pull the moisture off their exposed skin, and then the girl took the package of antibiotics from her pocket.

  “You missed me on purpose when you shot under the truck, didn’t you?” She popped a few of them into her mouth like chewing gum and held out the packet to Smith.

  He nodded.

  “How can you shoot that well with just one eye?”

  He took a few of the tablets and handed the sheet back.

  “I was re-taught depth perception after it happened. Used paper targets, memorized the buckshot patterns down to the inch for every distance within the range of the gun. I went on practice hunts with him until I was sure again.”

  She nodded and the air was still and the footsteps of the men behind them resounded with weight against the mesas beyond like greater ghosts.

  After a while Awan called out for them to move on, and the girl climbed into the back of a pickup truck in front.

  They were counting cattle guards again for direction, and another hundred or so miles out they reached their mark. A man from the first truck in their caravan jumped out to open the fence gate and waited until all had turned through from the road then closed it again. They went on, now in dirt that was also sand. It was soundless under their tires, even as they pounded closed the escape routes of tarantulas and lizards and other mites that had dug underground there.

  The way was uneven off of the road, and the truck in front had to brake many times to skim the edges of a flood-scarred arroyo with its tires or to reverse and take the long way around an archway that could not be forded. Several miles in, one of the jeeps clipped a cliff-side and lost its side mirror and a man jumped out from it and threw the mirror in back and ran to catch up as the caravan had not slowed.

  They were just above the lines of the national park’s territory and they passed a lone shack as they sped across sheets of sand marred by the odd piece of crippled-looking brush.

  Half an hour later they drove below the butte that Awan and the buyers had marked out as looking like a barfight-broken hand, fingers cracked and vertical with a disjointed thumb.

  It was five hours from their first setting out and Awan called out that this was the place. They passed through a wide archway to the other side of the butte and encircled the trucks in an arc, end to end, and now the wheels sat half in sand and half in the footings of stone extending from the bases of the formations behind them.

  The men got out of the trucks and held their guns readied in both hands against their waists and Smith did the same, the group carrying a mixture of salvaged TEC-9s and AK-47s and the odd Texas-looking pistol that had likely been passed down through a family. There was no sound from the south, where the monuments blurred in the midday heat, and some of the men turned to the north to check that the others were not going to come through the same archway as they had but at last they saw clouds of dust to the south and behind it the grayed grills of the trucks of the buyers.

  The others came within twenty feet of them and as the dust stilled they shifted their six vehicles into the same Conestoga arc formation.

  The first man to get out came from a middle truck, and he wore all black and a leather jacket with a skull and a red scorpion wound through the eye sockets painted upon it. He was Mexican, his head shaved and his hands empty. A whitened scar riveted from the bridge of his nose and divided into three through the right eyebrow. The others spilled from the vehicles and flanked him in black denim and kneepads. It was a uniform, a mixture of black button-downs and T-shirts, and a half dozen of them wore canvas jackets even in the heat and looked untouched by it. Two of those in black cowboy shirts went to the man’s side, carrying semi-autos.

  Awan stepped forward with two men at his side as well. The engines cracked and went silent, and seemed the signal to speak.

  “Three hundred thousand pills, for the agreed-upon price of three million US dollars.”

  The man with the painted leather jacket nodded to either side and men went into the trucks and brought out five cardboard boxes and set them in the sand. There were near twenty men with him.

  “Six hundred thousand cash in each box.”

  Awan nodded at his men and they brought out the fifteen bags of pills and laid them in a line of black plastic behind him.

  “We’ll count the cash and then leave you the pills.”

  Awan nodded again to one of the men flanking him and the man went forward to one of the boxes and opened it then went to his knees to count. They all watched as he began to pile stacks of bills on the ground beside him.

  “Tell Medina, as usual, it’s been a pleasure doing business with him,” said Awan.

  The man in the leather jacket laughed and turned to the man at his right, though the rest of the crew kept straight faces held forward.

  “I’d rather not.”

  The man beside Smith opened his mouth.

  “Oh, shit, that’s––”

  But the shot had already been taken and the man who had been counting the money rolled back with a bullet to the head.

  Awan’s men opened fire immediately as they dove behind their trucks and another ten men emerged from the buyer’s vehicles and started to shoot.

  Smith got behind the cab of the pickup truck and the windows were not down so he shot through them then continued to fire. One of the opposing men had been thrown backward against the truck with a shot to the chest but got back up laughing and stumbled on his way forward and his jacket fell off the shoulder and exposed a bulletproof vest underneath. Another shot came from Awan’s crew and hit the man in the head and the window of the truck went marbled in reds behind him.

  Three-quarters of Awan’s group had made it behind the trucks when the firing had started and the three remaining lay bleeding in the sheet of sand between the lines and soon every truck whose driver had not thought to leave the windows rolled down had them shot out and men laid their guns across the lines of pickup truck beds and riddled holes waist-height through the entire line of metal before them. They soon hunkered down and crouched with arms reached up to fire their guns and wouldn’t raise their heads to that level and fired blind at the opposing trucks.

  The man beside Smith began to stand to aim his shots and ducked down when a bullet came close but was roused by it and leaned forward as he cursed and “these fucking Cordovas I’m gonna fucking kill em all and have their bowels for breakfast,” and in a noise that sounded like a punch he went down with a hit in the forehead and Smith sprang back from the split skull and flung himself into the line of fire in the process and then the girl was there and outstretched a hand and pushed him down.

  She crouched behind a wheel with an AK-47 and he crawled to the rear wheel to do the same as she bent around the engine to fire and he lifted his gun up over the edge of the truck bed. A bottle with a lit rag hurtled over and ignited one of their jeeps ahead but their men behind it already lay with entrails stringing from exit wounds.

  Smith hazarded a look over the top of the truck bed and the Cordova men were crouched around the cardboard boxes hauling them back to their vehicles and Smith took a shot and knocked one of them onto their back and probably killed him too and then he fired again at a man that was walking aimlessly toward them, stumbling with a head wound but gun raised, and the man went down.

  One of Awan’s men was going for a box of money
and he squatted to lift it and when he was hit in the shoulder he slumped across it, hips coupled to the cardboard box of cash. He was still breathing and shuddered a bit and a Cordova braved the gunfire and came close enough to pull him up by the hair and shoot him. The Cordova pushed the body backward, leaving a pan of red that would filter through layers upon layers of bills before whatever the cash hadn’t winnowed from it reached the sand and dissolved.

  Smith had forgotten that the truck at the front was still burning and the flames spreading then a man lurched screaming past them on fire in an uneven gait until he fell and it had been Matthew’s shot that brought him down and then Matthew had done an about-face and started shooting at the others again with no pause in the trigger-finger.

  Those on the other line had fallen in large numbers but still the vehicular absorption of bullets slowed the bloodshed and Awan ran behind his nine men remaining, giving orders to shoot and to conceal themselves behind axles and engine blocks and not to make a run for the money as the cash was likely in false-bottomed boxes.

  There was only a small alleyway between their blockade and the wall of rock behind them and the space was littered with bullets and glass and the rock face soon became a canvas for blood and organs shot out against it and one man, mostly whole, lay reclined against it.

  Smith ducked up and saw that there were a dozen Cordovas left at least and he dropped down and reloaded and when he came up again a shot snapped the metal bracket from the roof of the pickup and it landed square on his sternum and pitched him back.

  For a second he lay panting against the mesa where the side of his face had been thrown against it and he tongued the blood in his mouth like syrup. Without moving he turned his eyes to look at a trilobite fossil in the sandstone that was cleaved in half by a bullet hole an inch from his face. Thing had traveled three hundred million years and countless miles into the dirt and under seas and back up again only to be split by the stolen bullet of a cartel man. Goddamn shit way to go, even for a prehistoric bug. For a moment his hearing blurred and then went concrete as a voice came out of the murk.