Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  “And so? If you believe that one is part of your fate then you oughta protect them,” Matthew said.

  “No. That’s not true. The only way to influence another’s fate is by destroying them. It’s the only thing that can be done permanently and by an action within your control. To try to protect someone is to try to intervene in the actions of the world against them but that’s something you can’t face alone or entirely because if fate has bullets for them you can only take one.

  “You wouldn’t even know what you were trying to protect, what is it in someone else you can really know, when all you can be sure of is your own existence and be wary of it if that. Regardless of whether the other shared your existence from the start or was the source of your existence in the first place. You can lash out blindly against not knowing but it will always stay the same. Fratricide may have been the original killing, but all it does is wipe a side of your face from this earth. Patricide avenges yourself against the one who made you and damned you to walk a land in which deserts exist. That’s what the doctor-brother was trying to do.”

  There was a narrow line of light coming from their right. The girl got up and laid the strips of hide across the shoulder strap of her gun then slung it across her back.

  “We should make more distance before the sun is up.”

  They went on. Behind them, the pair of coyotes chewed slowly on the cartilage of their fallen comrade, lolling on their stomachs at the gluttony.

  The depth of that night was so deep that the glow at the horizon did nothing to crack the sky’s sheet of black. As he walked he could feel the blondeness washing over her shoulders as she ascended the hill in the fog and blowing backward as she delved into the woods like a hand into water. Under the branches the air would go from lack of light to true darkness that was not a lack but a thing in itself, a thing seeping from the earth that turned blades of grass up and made the webbing between the veins of dead leaves run frail. The darkness would meet her like a charcoal wall but if anyone could coax a wall into bending it was she, and she would slip through untouched with a bare foot put first and the tossed hem of a white dress to follow.

  The bare feet would sink into the mantle of the forest floor, damp moss for carpeting and dead leaves to arch in a cradle beneath each footfall and coat the heel as it left the ground. Toward a shallow hole that was really below the hill but no, now it had to be in the center of the woods, and the saplings with their bark ripped by wind all pointed that way, that way, and the cedars aged like stone lent their shadows to that direction as well, in rejection of the moonlight’s angle. She would follow, the twigs snatching at her hair as if to keep a piece, just a piece, she won’t feel it, but the velvet steps would turn to a run and the chattering of trees rise out of a whisper and the noise building and then, and on, until she landed upon a clearing in which all was silent. And then, she would spin. Spin and spin again, not looking at the ground as the out-flung dress obscured it like a flower and the moon mottling through the canopy to paint her dancing legs and her eyes closed against its acrid light and her arms weightless in the air and then when at last she slowed, and when the skirt went limp and when the flower fell, she would look upon the unmarked grave. “Ah, father, there you are.”

  They kept in close beside mesas whose shadows they could walk beneath, but there were still stretches of ground without any walls to hide beside and they felt the ground growing warmer. The blood on their faces had started to smell and it was something muscular and almost cold and after a while it dried and stopped smelling at all.

  The horizon to the east was churning in crimson as the sun rose dead to the side and created a pool of color more violent than the drippings he’d seen on their mouths in the navy dark of the night, but exposed to the daylight the red of their faces gained a new violence as well. That their feeding on the land should leave a mark altogether more putrid and leering than their slaughtering of men had.

  Smith walked behind the girl and watched for so long that he saw the strips of coyote skin wrapped around her gun strap start to curl in the heat. The sweat was making his hands start to slip and he gripped the trashbag of pills hard enough that the plastic ran beneath his fingernails. When the sun was fully up they found themselves in the center of a plain, and no shade to be given.

  The girl pointed to the north where another mesa lay a half-mile ahead. So far that if Smith raised a hand to cover it it was gone from his sight.

  “We have to go.”

  Matthew groaned and sank to the ground and the girl gave him a strip of hide to put his teeth into.

  “We have to go.”

  He rose to his feet again.

  When they came to the mesa they fell below it. The girl went to her knees and started upturning sand with her hands, trying to bury herself in it, and found the sand was already hotter than the air. They spread out the skin strips that were dry enough now and passed them among themselves. They tied them along their wrists and covered their necks and bound them to foreheads that were blistering with sunburn and the hides clasped to their skin like remoras when wetted by the sweat. Hung with the skin of the desert and bloodied with its children, they laid down to sleep.

  And he thought of her, Lucy running through the shadows of the woods, that she would be in search of something to warm her, a source of heat real or felt. Go somewhere cold, Lucy, take in the shadow and damp. Because if you can reach water then maybe I won’t die.

  “No, it’s the heatstroke.”

  “No, I’m so cold, I’m so cold.”

  “Matthew, it’s the heatstroke. Stop talking and close your eyes.”

  Smith turned to see and the girl was kneeling in front of Matthew, his head lolling back against the cliff in full daylight. She was close to him, like something like a healer or a mother but she heard Smith and her lurid painted face looked his way.

  Matthew was no longer sweating and they knew the moisture had broiled into a heat on the inside.

  The sun went on in its passage of burning and Smith lay with his head against a rock with his eyes closed and once the girl shouted and sprang up to fight coyotes that had not followed and were not there.

  Like an antithesis to waking at morning they all began to stir when the light waned toward sunset. When Smith awoke it was if he had awakened from something like dying and was unsure that he hadn’t, and if you died would you take the violence you’ve committed with you or would it remain as a scar upon the earth. And if the physical manifestation of it meant a thing, he knew that if he survived and made it back home and lived a long life that his body would rot into moss and dissolve centuries before the dried out bones of those he’d felled in the desert started to decay.

  He raised himself onto his knees and then stood. The girl and Matthew already walked before him, blackening figures against the dying arsenic red of the sun.

  Their footsteps forged forward in the bluing sand and tarantulas emerged from their tunneled holes then plunged back into the earth as they passed. They had been exhausted even before they had begun walking and their feet moved forward like dragging metal, their shadows giving the girl an extra limb with the rifle strapped to her back and Matthew’s a torso missing limbs as he held the pistol tight to his heart and Smith’s shadow something poorly winged and top-heavy as he carried the bag of pills against a sweat-dampened chest with his elbows out.

  In the clear starlight they could see their way, and see it well, better than when the daylight had swept blindness over their brows and bleached it all out. The light ricocheted off the stone borders of their world in blue. They went on, leaving tracks behind them that shone navy in the ground, grouped in a set of six but of four different boot tracks in a wandering herd.

  They soon reached an empty plain that stretched for miles, and they traversed it like the grotesque deep-sea carnivores that charade with the bodies of their prey as they hunt over the lightless sand. They each fell a few times in turn in their exhaustion, but the others were too slow to notice
or to react and each had raised themselves quickly and continued behind the others.

  The stars were thick as a net above their heads, and then there was a star that was touching the land. The girl dove to ground.

  “Down, get down!”

  They crouched down beside her and she settled onto her stomach and squinted.

  “Someone’s there.”

  They knew it at once: it was the shack they had passed on the way south.

  Smith pulled the shirtsleeve from over his nose and mouth. Inhaled. He could smell them.

  “Horses.”

  The girl started laughing like she had when she’d cornered him in the bed of his truck and he knew how close to death they’d been.

  “There’s no cover. We’ll go quietly until the house comes into view and then we’re going to have to run.”

  They stalked forward, rolling their footsteps to avoid making a sound. The girl readied the AK-47.

  The shack was made of plywood, no more material than would have fit in a single load from a pickup truck. The light came from within it; there was a window cut out at the side. The box of a home was flanked by piles of metal trash and scrap, old fencing, and a pool-sized basin to collect rain. The corral was beside it, to the east. Made of barbed wire strung up between hammered rebar. There were five horses standing motionless as trees within it.

  At two hundred feet away they were as close as they thought they could go, counting that whoever was in the house would lose a degree of night vision from the lamp. The girl was readying herself to run.

  A few of the horses shuffled to the side, and an enormous black mule raised its head between them. Swiveled its hare-like ears and looked directly at the three, and snorted high into the night air. The light brightened double as the curtain was shoved from the window.

  “Go go go!”

  The girl was lighter and faster in the sand and she was around the front of the shack first, then backed from it as the man within advanced with a gun held out. She had her rifle to him as well, and she glanced into the open window as she walked backward toward Smith and Matthew.

  The shack-dweller was old but muscular, the tendons of his arms eroded by malnutrition. He wore no shirt and a graying beard hung to his chest with his hair in knotted locks. His eyes bleary and sun-ruined.

  “Who’s er? Who’s er?” It was the voice of someone whose first language was not English or for whom language was a thing long forgotten.

  “He’s the only one,” said the girl.

  “He’s blind,” said Matthew.

  “He can see plenty,” said the girl.

  “Then the man’s gone in the head.”

  The horses were all gathered at the edge of the corral, watching. The fence was only the height of their chests. They were narrow-boned, desert-fed. Scars roping their chests from leaning across the wire for the water trough.

  The man was breathing hard and each breath combed his vocal cords and made a sighing sound.

  “Who are ye?!”

  The girl jerked the AK-47 at the hermit in response and he stepped back but kept his gun raised at her. It was a rot-handled Colt, Vietnam-era antique. The whole of his hands were callused as if encased in brown shells.

  The girl shifted the gun to lean on her hip with her left hand over the trigger and wrapped her other arm over her stomach.

  “What are ye things?”

  “Start saddling them up.” The girl spoke over her shoulder to Matthew and Smith.

  “The horses?” the hermit cried.

  The girl did not answer him. She called over her shoulder.

  “There water in there?”

  Smith and Matthew had already set upon the trough, soaking themselves with handfuls over the tops of their heads and the girl looked their way hungrily. The dust upon them ran down as mud and their bloodied wet bodies shone in the light of the lamp.

  The hermit looked back and forth from them to the girl, training his eyes upon either spectacle with equal wonder.

  After a few minutes the men relented from the trough and Smith checked the bag against one of the piles of scrap metal and started hunting among the junk. There was old tack piled by the loose gate of the corral, all of the leather heat-cracked. Matthew laced an arm through a bridle and started untying the gate.

  The hermit flinched and looked away from the girl and toward where the sound had come from.

  “Not them horses!”

  Matthew opened the gate.

  “I catched thems out of the desert I’ll be damned if I’s give em up now!” The hermit turned his gun and shot the horse nearest to him clean between the eyes and there was a scream but it was the girl’s and she had cracked the barrel of her rifle down on the hermit’s wrist and the pistol skidded into the sand and she kicked it toward the men. The horse oscillated in place for a moment, then sank into the corral fence, the wire reverberating with a singing sound.

  Smith was on the gun first and opened it up.

  “It’s empty. There was just the one shot.”

  That last shot that you always hold onto in the desert.

  The hermit was on his knees in the sand now, clutching his head and rocking back and forth.

  “Keep saddling them up. Leave me the mule,” said the girl.

  “No I’s be damned them horses no.” The hermit had lowered his hands and was screeching now and watching them as Smith took the thickest piebald mare and Matthew a roan with a docked tail.

  He would not stop screeching and the girl barked, “Shut up!” and pushed her gun in closer to his face.

  Smith walked the piebald over and took the gun and the hostage from her and the girl sprinted to the trough, climbed directly into it and did not surface for a few seconds. When she breached the water the two remaining horses skittered but did not break the lines of their already-broken corral. She left Matthew holding the mule as well as his gelding and took the gun back from Smith.

  The hermit was rocking back and forth again, weeping.

  “He got food in there?” asked Smith.

  The two loose horses were toeing around the dead one, curiously. Looking with turned heads at where the fence angled down from the weight of its back.

  Matthew tied his horse and the mule and came over and put a hand on the gun.

  “Ah leave the man be already. We got what we need.”

  Smith eyed the girl.

  “Was there food in there?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Just cans, we wouldn’t be able to carry much but it’s another day of water.”

  “He’s harmless, let the old man go already,” said Matthew.

  The girl’s back teeth showed when she answered.

  “He’s not harmless. His shot hit exactly where he wanted it to. And he’d rather have his own horses dead than us riding them.”

  “Please, please please.” The hermit with his face to the sand now and tears and snot blacking the ground beneath.

  Matthew let go of the gun and ran a hand through his hair.

  “There’s no truck, he aint got no way out of here. We can bust up his radio so he can’t call anyone. Come on, most human contact the man prolly gets is someone bringing in supplies every couple a months.”

  The girl shook her head.

  Matthew turned to Smith.

  “You—you, say something! We don’t have to do this, this isn’t right.”

  Smith looked at the girl and she would not take her eyes from the man on the ground. So many dead so far and some by his hand and some not, but he was thinking of Lucy. He inhaled again and looked at the legs of the horse that could take him back and then looked at the man curled, beaten, on the ground.

  He nodded at the girl and walked away.

  The hermit sensed the shift and took his hands from his eyes and sat back and then stood and stumbled backward and the girl shifted the gun to touch the side of his temple. Propped the butt of the gun against her hip once more with her finger on the trigger and the other hand free.r />
  “Please, please damn yous …”

  And at the last minute she lowered the gun and yanked her knife from her pocket and slit his throat. Save your bullets.

  Fresh hides had to be salted daily for twelve days and they would be finished soon and ready for hanging, but Lucy was not strong enough to string them up herself.

  She lit the lamp then stood in the center of them to give them their day’s worth of salt, still barefooted and in a dress that skimmed her ankles. And as she turned this time in the firelight she saw them as humanoid outlines, faceless shadows, and the unjointedness of their limbs made it seem as if they moved and they circled her and hummed and reached and the three, three silhouettes too familiar to what she once had had, once had been, and she flew from the door and down the stairs and thrust her hands into the sink.

  Above and behind her the skins on the floor tightened further with a collective grating breath and it looked to be snow that had tracked across the hides and along the floor and on her hands, but snow that sucked the wet out of everything and desiccated the living as much as the dead as it pulled the veins tight and cracked the skin over her knuckles. It was not snow, and would show no more sympathy than anything else in this house, than anything in Box Elder had.

  There was a sound against the kitchen window and she jolted at the noise and wrapped her burning hands in her skirts and took the pistol from the sideboard and went out to see.

  It was a blackbird, out too late. The little thing lay splay-winged on its back on the porch floor, and could not move. Needed to be put out of its misery.

  She leveled the gun at the bird but her hands were weak.

  “Wyatt, I caint kill it.”

  And again, and a piece of blonde fell into her face as she leaned down toward the flailing thing.

  “I caint kill it, Wyatt.”

  And she pulled the pistol away and bent her arms and held it there to her chest and at last bit her lip and with her eyes to the wingprints on the window slid a boot forward and stepped on it.