Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  “Get the fuck up.”

  Guillermo grabbed his shirtfront and swung him back into cover behind the cab.

  Another man had ventured out for the money and he stood between two Cordovas who had their hands upon him and only one with a gun still and he threw his elbow and broke one of their noses and knocked a punch to throw the gun but still the two men took him to the ground and in a roil of dust it was over.

  Their line was spread thin and they had men behind each of the trucks but the burning one and that made seven spread behind three vehicles. The girl ran from her place behind the wheel well and across the open space between two bumpers to get to Awan.

  “What’s your plan!” She screamed it and all of them could hear but there was no other volume that would have surmounted the gunfire.

  “Fight them off!” It was a harrowing sound from a man who had not yet raised his voice before a single one of them.

  The rear tires of the truck they crouched behind were hit and the truck dropped six inches lower with an addled sigh. She was on one knee with her gun propped on the other, reloading.

  “We’re outgunned! You can’t!”

  “We have to! There’s no other choice!”

  Smith watched them from where he crouched and she turned her head to survey the vehicles and there were still the three not burning but not a single engine that hadn’t taken a shot to it.

  “Awan you can’t do it! You need to run—”

  Her words were cut off by a bullet that flew between their heads and both ducked and then came up again.

  “I will not run.”

  The old man panted it but all the others heard and with it Matthew yelled and stood above the pickup truck bed and fired against the men that were stepping forward to take the bags of pills and he took down three and then he dropped again as bullets perforated the truck’s cab. Their numbers were close now, despite Awan’s being outgunned at the start.

  A man let his leg stray from cover and screamed as his ankle was hit. A Cordova was on his stomach now, firing beneath the wheels.

  The girl saw it and turned back and did what none of them would have dared do, and grabbed Awan’s shoulders.

  “You cannot beat them! You need to run!”

  Whether it was a gesture meant to coerce him or to beg him they did not know. But he spun his hand out and struck her in the face.

  Guillermo and Matthew had frozen at their posts and watched the girl instead of the gunfire.

  She stared, and would not raise a hand to the cheek where he’d burned it, and they saw it sear red in the clouded air. Awan spoke before she could.

  “I … will … not … run.”

  She dropped her hands back onto her rifle and leaned up over him to fire at the Cordova that had centered in on their spot then crouched back down to meet his eyes.

  Smith watched the girl’s face fold into one of absolute fury, a madness in defiance of reason and of nothing but hate, and then she was running along their lines and ducking under the gunfire and she ran out through the archway whence they’d come and was gone in the din of bullets entering rock and the crackling of burning engines.

  “Do you love me?”

  The threads of blonde hair crossed over her eyes in the field and he handed her an ax.

  “Well, do you love me?” he answered.

  She laughed.

  “I aint never told another living person that. But you’re me and I’m you, aint it the same?”

  It was spring then but she wore no coat and he still had two eyes. She went on.

  “Why are we doin this anyway? A bonfire in the middle of the day for no reason.”

  “It’s a Sunday.”

  The logs lay in a crusted gray pile by the table-sized stump of the dead oak that had sourced them. Wyatt rolled one down from the top and split it with his ax until it was in shards.

  “Aint no Sabbath for farmers,” she said as she stood.

  He kicked the grass from the skin of the earth in a circle with his heel and picked up the shattered pieces of wood. Made a teepee with the kindling and stuffed in the grass he’d uprooted and lit it and she knelt on the other side of it and blew on it until the flame took hold.

  “I had some extra wood to burn,” he said.

  He rolled another pair of logs off the top of the pile and kicked one toward her.

  “Some extra wood and so we gotta burn it. I like that.”

  The light was upon her brow and it seemed the wind had painted it there.

  They swung their axes in tandem. Hit, split, kick to the side. He rolled more logs from the pile.

  “Why?” he asked.

  Hit, split, kick to the side.

  “You caint ask me that, Wyatt. It implies we don’t share the same head and you don’t already know.”

  Hit, and her ax stuck. She yanked it out of the bark and took another hit and it went through, but she was lagging behind. Wyatt took a moment to set a few pieces into the growing flames.

  “You don’t ask yourself ‘why’ bout anythin?” he asked.

  Kept chopping. She was lagging behind him, never had before. The second time he stopped to feed the flames he looked over at her.

  She held the ax with a loose wrist and was staring up at the surface of the cloud-washed sky with her hair pooled around her face as if she were underwater. She bent again and swung again.

  There was no pit for the bonfire but he dug a narrow trench around it with the toe of his boot as it grew. The breeze was cold and snapped against the edges of the flames.

  “Nah I do. Do you ever think that—”

  She’d swung again and the log hadn’t split.

  “I can’t—I don’t know why I can’t.” They were fifteen and still wearing the same clothes and she looked at her arms and then looked at Wyatt’s and his were tight against the fabric and it was visible in her eyes that she was seeing now that hers would never grow that way.

  “Stop,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said.

  He reached for her and she swung again and the log did not break and with an exhale that expanded into a grunt she kicked it whole toward the fire, where it rocked on top of the kindling and smothered the flames.

  “A bonfire for no reason in broad daylight on a cold day,” she said.

  She turned toward the smoke and sat down on the log, black streaking through the air in front of her face. The smell of smoke brutishly masking the scent of her so that it was as if you weren’t there anymore at all. He pulled up a log and sat down in the scentlessness, disappearing beside her, the fire dead and their feet kicking at the exhalant embers.

  Smith looked once more at Guillermo and Matthew beside him and they were still firing and he could not, no longer, and he turned and sprinted along to the archway and one of them shouted something at him but he didn’t hear it. Through the archway he met with the girl’s leveled gun and when he put his hands up and she saw it was him she pulled him against the side of the mesa that flanked the arch.

  She had most of a magazine left and hefted the gun against her hip and checked his and he had four shots to go and she shoved it back into his hands and said “goddamn useless thing.”

  They had flattened themselves against the mesa wall and a Cordova came through the arch and from where they stood she opened fire on him and he went down with six shots to the torso.

  Another man followed him and cut out into the archway from the side and the girl had not seen him but Smith lunged forward and with two shots to the head took him down and marveled at his hand for a moment at how steadied it had been. They were closer to the archway and to the gunfire now with that affront and she was still shouting and hadn’t taken a breath as all the words spilled.

  “Idiots are going to get themselves all killed they’ve got no space with that wall behind them and if they close them in from either side they’ll just fire into that nest and take them all out and they’re fucking done for god
damn useless idiots I tried to tell him I tried to tell him!”

  And she started at a run from the fight and Smith followed and the horizon lay heavily yellow to the north before them and she was leaping over brush and dodging rocks with one hand balled against her stomach and the other holding the rifle and did not stop when she skimmed a cactus and kept moving with spines in her bare calf.

  Several minutes and half a mile out she stopped and dropped her gun in front of her and bent and put her hands on her thighs and yelled “Shit!”

  Smith thought it was for the cactus spines and she ripped these out but then she turned and grabbed her gun and was running back toward the fight.

  He followed and overtook her and when they were almost to the archway he stopped dead.

  It was Awan. He staggered through the arch and raised his arms, a shot to his thigh bleeding and pistol in one hand and mouth open about to shout something. An arm came from behind the arch-side and drove an ax into his head lengthwise. He sank to his knees then slumped facedown as the blood spread translucent over the steel.

  The girl passed Smith and ran toward him, passed her rifle over her back by its strap and leapt over a boulder and crouched to lift his face and put it upon her knee and for the thread of a second it seemed a sentimental gesture and then she leveraged an elbow on his temple and wrenched the ax from his skull before grabbing the pistol from his hand. She lunged backward against the opposite side of the arch and fired at the man behind. He slumped in the archway on top of Awan, shot through the cheek and teeth cracked symmetrically around the wound in white like the patterns on butterfly wings.

  She threw the pistol into the dirt and kicked it toward Smith and he grabbed it, still holding the TEC-9 in the other hand. A stream of blood was emptying from Awan’s boot as he passed.

  The fire had died in the first jeep but another truck was burning and another one steadily leaking gasoline like putrid urine. About fifteen men left still firing at one another through trucks that were perforated hulls of steel now. A Cordova man with a rifle dove onto his stomach from the other side and took out a man cowering under the truck closest to the girl.

  Their men were still pinned between their trucks and the mesa face and one scaled twelve feet up the rock like a sand-bloodied monkey. He took a handhold and turned with a TEC-9 and emptied a clip one-handed overtop those that lay behind the opposing trucks before he was shot down and curled into a ball as he fell and lay there.

  Two Cordovas had tried to drive away in two trucks in a row and had been caught in their escape and the windshields matched with great hibiscus-colored blooms, textured by cracked glass and iridescent violet in the cooking sun.

  The girl ran behind an engine and hunkered down there and two shots passed Smith untouched at the shoulder and he ran half-bent behind the cab too.

  Matthew was at the hood, AK-47 steadied in the divot in front of the windshield and him ducking down between shots, eyes wild and face bloodied with muck and black dirt like a mask over the burned skin around his eyes. Mouth open in a fixed and boundless void, screaming in the face of everything and nothing at all with a voice that could have belonged to the fossils below their feet.

  Guillermo squatted behind him feeding him magazines from a toolbox. He looked over when Smith and the girl crowded in and yelled over the blare.

  “Where’s Awan!”

  “Dead!” the girl answered.

  “Fuck!”

  The cartel men were circling around in front of the archway and closing in the space between the two lines of trucks. There were just a half dozen of Awan’s men remaining and at that angle the two teenagers were sprayed with bullets. The one with the deformed ear grabbed at the girl’s ankles from the ground, crying, “You did this, you knew the whole time they’d come for you—”

  A Cordova came around toward them and Smith leveled the TEC-9 and hit him twice in the chest and without ammo threw it away and aimed the one he’d taken from Awan. The girl kicked the now-dead boy from her feet and ran forward after the shot and sank the tomahawk into the forehead of another and hammered her fist on top to drive it in further as the man went down before ripping it out again to a myriad floral spray of pink filth across her knees and over the sand.

  The girl flung herself back against the open door of that second truck and exhaled in a shudder like a dog’s to throw the blood off of her and ducked in. Came out with a trash bag under her arm. Matthew still screaming.

  She threw the bag at Smith and he hugged it to his chest.

  “Take it and go!”

  Guillermo lay in the dirt with one eye rolled back to stare at them through the open cracks in his skull.

  Smith stood huddled against the cab and she shouted at him again.

  “Time to run!”

  “What!”

  “Time to run! Time to go!”

  She ducked and bolted toward the incoming line of men, flung the ax into the neck of one as she passed and left it there and ran through the arch and Smith tight at her heels. Leapt over dead Awan and dead Cordova and continued running for he didn’t know how long, for half an hour or an hour or two hours until she collapsed into the crevice behind a boulder, heaving. They could no longer hear gunfire and the desert silence was prickling again and their heaving enough to tear at the ears.

  Five miles back, the last of the blood drained from Awan’s boot, mercury-slick and cast in shadow by the torso of the man who had landed on top of its owner.

  The red that was now black-violet after passing through the filter of the wool sock and mixing with leather-sweat ran and darkened a final thread flower on the lip of the cowboy boot’s embroidery. A drop clung there and the rest ran past it, down and down, into a pool forming in the desert like unscrawled ink tossed into the sand. As it leached in and spread, it softened sand that had not seen water in six months and excited the larvae of microscopic creatures that had remained frozen in wait for it. And so the liquid that was hot but no hotter than the desert seeped in the shapes of petals or scars into the depths of the sand and touched the nurseries of mites or talitridae below and collectively they all hatched and breathed in water and then as quickly as it had come the water had dried again, and the mites died and were all gone as well, an instant after having been created by the blood and sweat in the boot of an old man.

  A turkey vulture groaned from above, an utterance of want from a throat without voice. The darkness stained the sand like a burn, and was a burn, in that this layer upon time would be marked by firefight and gunpowder and when these bodies were overlaid with sandstone as the trilobites had been that was all they would smell of when unearthed. The buzzard circled. It would feed soon.

  Smith and the girl leaned to either side of the boulder, still low on breath, Smith still watching to the south where the battle had been. He had never seen men fall like that. As if the animation was gone from them in an instant. When running deer were shot their momentum carried them another few feet before they fell but the men had just gone straight down; you felt yourself taking them when you pulled the trigger. And perhaps had he not been there they still would have died anyway this fight still would have gone on and there had been so many bullets in the air and perhaps they hadn’t been—but he knew they had been his. His stomach overturned and he dropped the bag and bent at the waist with his hands to his mouth and the girl was on him within a second, pushing his shoulders back against the rock.

  “Don’t vomit. Whatever you have to do don’t do it.”

  He nodded and swallowed and gasped and sank to the ground, leaned back on the boulder.

  “You lose that much water out here you die. Tell yourself whatever lies you have to to stop yourself.”

  Lies. You’re not a killer and they didn’t die. You’re not a killer. You’re not black in the soul and you haven’t blacked Lucy’s soul by association.

  “Why’d you go back?” There was sand in his throat.

  “Had to kill more of them first. Or else they would’ve com
e after us easy.”

  “That it?”

  She coughed.

  “Take out all the trucks too.”

  She turned suddenly. It was a lone figure running over the horizon from the south that she saw, and she threw herself back against the mesa and aimed the rifle and Smith crouched behind the boulder with bag in one arm and pistol readied in the other until they saw that it was Matthew.

  He shied when he saw them and froze for a moment with eyes wide and hands up, and took longer than he should have to realize who it was but when he did he let himself fall into the sand. Wherever he’d been cut before was still bleeding and coated the entire sheet of his forehead in red and his blond hair was glazed intermittently in crimson and gun-oil black like the fur of some putrid mechanical animal.

  She went to his side and rolled him on his back.

  “Matthew. Matthew get out of the sun. You’re too heavy for me to pull you.”

  She moved aside and Smith dragged Matthew by the shoulders until his face was in the shadow of the boulder and Smith and the girl trembled there in the shade like frozen soldiers at a fire.

  Matthew did not move and finally she spit in his face and he raised his head and opened his eyes and wiped a hand on his cheek and it came off a mixture of blood and saliva and he licked it off, thirst already setting in. He closed his eyes again.

  “Were you the last man standing?”

  He groaned and turned onto his side.

  “What the hell do you think.”

  “And?” she asked.

  “I’m the last one of our men standing. There’s at least three of the others left.”

  She sat back on her feet; it was too hot to go out of the shade to stand.

  “Alright. What do we have. There’s three shots left in the AK and I have a knife and a box of antibiotics.”

  “Four shots left in the pistol and a knife.”

  “Keep that jacket on, it’ll help when the heat surpasses body temperature. It doesn’t look like Matthew has anything.”