Part Four
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Heatstroke
The hermit managed to get a hand to the wound on his gullet before he died, then was quiet thirty seconds later. The girl was already in the shack, digging through mothwing stacks of old newspapers and rags and pulling whatever was of use, which was only an armful of canned vegetables. She took two of these and sat down in the sand and opened her plastic bag and Smith reached for the other five but she said “wait” and took out her knife again. Punctured the lid of the first can and the smell came out rotten and then she did the same with the next then grabbed the others from Smith and did the same again, then threw them at the shack with a cry so anguished that the voice could have come from the sum of those who had fallen on that ground that day.
Matthew was standing by the dead man when she passed on her way from the shack to the water trough.
“Goddamn you.”
Smith was close behind her and Matthew turned and grabbed his arm.
“There are some people in this world, that killing them when you get the chance means sparing the lives of a hundred men.” The light in the shack was a solar-charged lantern and it started to fade. It went from white to a toasted gold as it lessened, alone among the marauders while legions of stars flickered along the mesa-tops like enemy fires. “What you did was no act of mercy. Everything she does is on your hands.”
Smith turned his working eye away and shook him off and went to hunt for anything useful among the piles of metal trash that bristled like rust-skinned cacti in the growing dark. He half-expected the rogue herd of cattle to break from among them, that the shells of car doors and kinked unusable piping formed some steel-and-aluminum woods from which strange metallic vermin would crawl. His hands itching to bleed to know that they had just fought. Matthew walked the perimeter of the place, futilely searching for tire marks from the caravan that they could follow back north, but they had all been washed by wind.
They each took turns drinking as much as their stomachs could carry and then drenching their clothes and then they were laughing, watching the dust run from them back into the sand. Matthew shouted a blissful curse to the desert while facing the east where the sun would later rise and poured a handful of water over his still-bloodied head. The stain turned to pink upon his sideburns as it diluted and left him a half-lucid carnival clown with a forehead wound and solitary burned eyebrow the only things to manifest that there was not merely hysteria but also violence within him.
They all took a final drink and rose one by one. The girl left the gate open for the remaining horses.
The mule’s eyes widened at her approach, and its shoulders were above her head but she spoke to it and roped its mane around her hand then gripped and got up onto it.
The loose horses were stumbling among the wreckage of the place, nosing it. The night had made the place cold and they shivered from their shoulders as they walked. The men were mounting their horses when the loose ones bolted. Smith’s mare bucked but he kept it down.
“Coyotes,” the girl said, and she kicked the black mule into the dark.
The horses pulsed forward in the cold and expelled steam through their nostrils and their eyes that would have rolled with white instead stayed liquid black in the lack of light.
After half an hour they slowed. The girl circled the mule back around so they could speak. The animal had venomous-looking eyes and was foaming around the bit as it gnawed it.
“Matthew, you’re the horseman. What’s your call?”
Matthew looked down from the saddle at the face of the roan. Its pattern dissipated on the face and left two clear white circles around the eyes like goggles.
“They’re okay. Used to distance and low water.” His voice cracked on a dry throat and he had to pause to catch his breath.
“Push em as far as we can tonight while it’s cool then let them take their own pace come daylight.”
They kneed the horses and walked on, side by side. The girl leaned forward and laid flat on the mule, so dwarfed by its size that she looked like a spider’s young clinging to its back.
After a while Matthew spoke against the sleeve that covered his mouth.
“Are you still counting, man?”
“It’s not wise to talk more in your state,” said the girl.
“Not wise to stay silent and let your brains go to the desert either. There’s two things will kill you in the desert, and half of it’s the thirst and the other half’s letting your mind go to it.”
“I aint counting them. Only tryna count how many more days this done bought us,” said Smith.
The girl murmured from where her face was half-buried in the mule’s fur.
“We had a man come through one of our supply chains once who could’ve mathed that out, how much time we got from drinking that amount of coyote blood plus that amount of water. Down to the minute. A photographic memory, but for numbers. Some religious understanding of them. He was in accounting, laundering money or whatever way you want to put it. To know how much money would be coming in he’d memorize figures and delivery schedules and could calculate market prices on any given combination of goods in a second. A genius.”
“Where’d he end up?” asked Matthew.
“At one time after a spat with some locals we were low on security, and so he went out with them on a run. He ended up with his gun to a man’s head when they were accused of ripping us off and the boss made him recite the current figures and wholesale prices right then for everything from E to marijuana at every grade so they could adjust how much was owed. He was so traumatized that his memory must have snapped, because after that he couldn’t remember figures unless he had his gun aimed. In the rest of his meetings from then on out he’d have to go stand in the corner and prop a gun to the wall and recite the numbers so no one would think he was pointing it at them.” She said it with no nostalgia but with the detachment of something that was no more hers than any other fact or history merely because she had been witness to it.
The mule started to toss its head and the girl laid out her arms along its neck to cover its nose.
Matthew turned to Smith.
“Was that your first gunfight?”
“Depends on what you’d call a gunfight.” He could see the girl ahead lower her chin to ride upon the canines of the coyote jaw. The arm still burned quietly.
“Well, a havin to kill men indiscriminately.”
“Yeah.”
“You thinking on it lots?”
“Nah. There’s a good deal more to be thinkin on out here.”
“Got that right.”
Matthew eyed him and Smith knew Matthew now thought him merciless.
“And you? Were that yer first?”
He wanted noise to kill the silence.
“Nah. It’s not the reason I got into the trade but it’s part of the trade.”
“You aint from here. How’d you do it?”
“I’m an import, fresh from the suburbs. Got mixed up with the wrong crowd or the right one, depending on how you put it. But I realized quick there’s no other life than this one, this’s the only one that’s real.”
“What makes it real?”
“The nature of men.”
“What nature is that?”
“Survival. Fighting to live. The concept of ‘living’ is a construct. It’s the only state any of us have experienced and so we have nothing to compare it to, nothin else we’ve ever been. In itself, it doesn’t mean anything. But if you bring in the threat of death, suddenly it’s got a definition by opposites. You can see living and not-living right there in front of you. It’s only in those minutes that you’re actively aware that you’re living.”
Matthew wiped his nose under the scrap of his shirt as the animals walked on.
Lucy would be spreading hay among the cattle now. Feed for bovine guts that carried planks of meat over bones and made rumbled grunts in the dusk, as if it were the mountains beyond that moved. She could
never spread anything whether it were salt for hides or hay for the living or grain for chickens without spinning, and he saw her there, out in the fields where it was black save for the opalescent shine of cattle eyes as they watched her with the dull expressions of animals that trust you. If the moon was bright enough there her skirts would show white, and the hay would fall to the ground before they did. That maybe, out of something of innocence or good she took longer to fall back to earth than anything else.
They used to lie on the backs of the cattle out there, when the cattle had bedded down in the pasture for the night. Stretched on a sheet of fur that was warm and lifted with a breath every few moments, and they’d watch the sky and say all of the typical things about the stars that were so pleasurable to say. The mosquitoes would always go for the cattle instead of them and the air tasted amber with the smell of timothy cud. Lucy settled down onto one of them now, and looked at it all as she used to. Behind her in the house, the hides were softening like the skin of her palms across the whole bedroom floor, white and a week old.
In the south, the three moved along on their mounts, charred and dried with viscera, the horsemen of the apocalypse as the water steamed from them in cold, their fourth member following them as a series of limbs dragged across the desert by coyotes’ teeth.
The girl held out an arm at the first glimpse of sunrise and they stumbled to a stop to watch it and Matthew’s horse trotted forward then sank to its knees to roll in the dust but he yanked it back up.
“We’ll ride them out until dark. We need to get as far as we can, there’s no point in conserving them past that.”
They kicked the animals back into motion and the horses snorted objections and tossed their heads and the girl’s mule let out a full bellow. In the stagger north, their riders were shadowed effigies of ruin, clothes stiffening in wrinkles and cracks as the water departed them.
The sun completely dried them within the hour and they all placed strands of coyote hide between their teeth to try and suck from them whatever water was left. They got little moisture from it and it tasted like bone. Once they stopped to piss into the sand and in the same pause took up stones to roll against their sapless molars.
When dark finally fell, their eyes were too sun-ruined to notice it. They’d gone fifty miles at least and they went down into the yellow wash below an archway and as they stopped and dismounted they pulled the bridles from their horses and used them to hobble their legs.
They went to take off the saddles but Matthew was too weak and Smith had to lift it from the gelding for him. They sat in a circle with no fire and nothing to drink and nothing to eat. The horses mumbled their mouths along the brush in the foreground and it was dried brambles and nothing much but still something and the girl put a few strands of it between her teeth as well and then followed it with more antibiotics. The air started to cool once more and the three lay back and let it take the heat from them.
“The horses are flagging,” said the girl.
“No more than their due. Should get another day or two out of them,” said Smith.
They both turned to Matthew, whose face was collapsing and then contorting as he moved in and out of consciousness. When he furrowed his brows it cracked the dried blood on his forehead, and a bit of foam was wetting the cloth over his mouth. He did not speak and they watched him with something of concern, something of futility, and also something of the knowledge that they themselves were not far off. For the latter reason, they eventually looked away.
“You hungry?” Smith asked.
“No.”
He sat silently and toed at the sand, felt its heat fold over the top of his boot.
She looked at him.
“You’re expecting me to kill something.”
“It’s your most consistent habit so far.”
She laughed and crossed her legs, but it was a thing not like laughing, with the child’s sound in her mouth.
“It’s not a habit, it’s a method.”
“There a difference?”
“Yeah. Killing’s not an end but a transfer of power. Like how protein is never wasted in death, just redirected to another use, power’s the same. It’s transferred to control over life, or one more day alive. If you kill sincerely, it’s impersonal, done without hesitation, and with the intent to use it to its fullest purpose.”
She rocked back and forth a bit. He looked out into the gray washed night and then took out his knife and began to dig at the muck caking the seams of his boots. Matthew spluttered once at the sky and then lay still. She stared hard at him then looked back and continued.
“Only killing done without a purpose would be gratuitous, but there’s no gratuitous violence among men. A fox goes into a killing frenzy and destroys more than it needed but it doesn’t know why. Each man is born with an amount of power, and some amass more power by violence, and others test it in violence and by gambling either gain more or give all theirs up to others. Power not as brute strength but as the number of days a man has. Every man has metal waiting for him whether it’s a bullet or knife or gurney, and an act that extends your days beyond what you were born with can never be gratuitous. That’s the truth behind all killing. A truth Matthew doesn’t know.”
Matthew rolled over and then pulled himself up against the rock and closed his eyes again.
Smith put the bag of pills behind himself and laid his head upon it.
He had carried it for so many miles. Carrying two hundred thousand dollars like a chunk of a ranch against your chest, the last bit of green in the desert as if it would generate life again, your life, grow a forest if you planted it.
His gums no longer felt epithelial, as dry as the skin of his cheeks, and the arm was nothing now in the face of how much the rest of his body ached. And Father, did it feel like this when you died, even though I carry the fate with me and you went as if fate were the thing that commanded it. But Father did it feel like this, when your wetness went out in blood instead of in sweat and by the time you hit the ground were you as dried as the steer carcass I passed by out here and if or when I fall out here will I feel the same, feel as if I’ve been shot.
He took a ragged breath against the cloth and put his hands behind his head and dug his fingers in close to feel the pills.
Will I feel as if she’d shot me too.
He was at the kitchen table, memorizing the patterns on the pieces of paper the father had given him, fingers rooting along the perforations like reading braille. When the father realized that the loss of the eye made it so that Wyatt could no longer shoot, he had taken paper targets and pinned them against the edge of the woods. Shot one from twenty-five yards, twenty-three, twenty-one, all the way down to one.
Wyatt was getting good enough now that his father could show him a pheasant in the woods then shoot it and bring it over and ask him how far and Wyatt would turn the animal in his hands and look at the shot pattern and say “twelve to fifteen yards,” or “between twenty and twenty-five,” and then he would turn and look again at where the pheasant had been and commit to memory that the distance that looked that far away was that many yards.
He had the sheets spread out on the bare table in front of him and the paper flakes hanging from the shotgun holes were like bleached leaves. It was January now.
She came in from outside before the father did, and her nose was snowburnt red and she left her boots at the door and the ice stuck in two rings of white around her calves that dulled to gray against her socks as it melted. She sat in the chair next to his and rocked for a moment where she sat then smirked and fell sideways onto his lap, ripping the target out of his hands.
“Lucy get up, you smell like horse manure.”
He slid halfway out of his chair and she was laughing now and laid her head on the part of the seat he’d vacated.
“Better to smell like it than look like it.”
“Keep messing with that yearling he’s gonna run your face into a fence so hard you’re gonna wish you d
one looked like it.”
She stood back up and wiped her knuckles in her dress; the snow had gone to water on them.
“Nah. I got a saddle on him today.”
“Not a chance.”
“Swear to God, Wyatt.”
“Hell, well done.”
She broke a smile and flicked a patch of snow from her sock.
“Pulled a rabbit this morning an’ it’s there if you want it.”
She nodded and went over to the woodburner and nudged at the meat then took a loin from the pan and he pushed aside the papers and laid his gun on the table to clean it.
Lucy went to stand by the window and he watched her for a long while. Her dress had been pulled over the legs of dirty jeans and she lifted the mud-caked hem to wipe her hands, flashing cotton-patched denim knees that were translucent with wear. Her hair was unbrushed; now that she would let it grow she would not tell it how to do so, and it tangled as a golden fur collar around her neck. The wind was making a sound against the glass like something prying, and she had her fingers to the pane, letting the moisture fan out from them in ovals that turned clear. The ice melted through the glass in the places she touched, and she was laughing at once in spite of the weather that could do nothing to her and out of pleasure that for the two of them there were horses to tame and rabbits to eat off the stove. And he understood then that she was the sort of thing that made houses warm.
Smith kicked out a boot but it only met with sand and he threw an arm forward and it met with sand as well.
He was still on the desert floor, staring up at a black sky bleeding aquamarine in the presence of a coming dawn that was not yet there and so he lay like something sunken with his head against the bag of pills. And after a while he rose and went to the piebald and started to undo its hobbles and the girl heard him and rose and did the same and it was when she turned that she saw that Matthew still lay prostrate in the sand.
Rough Animals Page 20
