“Why is it always the horse that dies first, and never you?” the girl asked.
“Because of strength of will.”
She stopped with the sand.
“Does that still matter out here?”
“It always does.”
“That sounds like fate.”
The mule shifted and he put a hand on one of its legs.
“Well, maybe it’s fate.”
“Then what is fate?” she asked, the voice seeming amputated and roving in the sightless black.
“It’s somethin you’re born with. Somethin that’s passed down from the fathers before and shows itself in triggers that weren’t meant to be pulled and triggers that were. You caint control it and can only look back on it as explanation for why you did the things you did even if they’ve ruined you because it couldn’t have been any other way.”
“Can you fight against it?”
“Yeah, like you can fight against the land.”
“But how do you know?”
“How do you know what?”
“How do you know what’s meant to have been, and what you’ve managed to change?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t she?”
“Lucy.”
“Doesn’t she know? What she’s changed and what she could not change.” The girl had not moved but the voice seemed to circle, stalking.
“I aint know what you mean.”
“That once there was only one of you.”
“Yes.”
“That there was only one of you, you saw it and she saw it too. And she saw, thought, that maybe she could make the whole world like that. Change the way the land was and time was and make it all exist for the two of you.”
“Stop.”
“That so few in this world ever defeat solitude, but by magic or fate you two did and because she had that gift, had that power of existing in another, thought she could make it all be so, could stop the blood and the killing that you did every day and the one that taught you to do it and had become synonymous with the land and the nature itself.”
“Quit it, you aint got a right to talk about it.”
“And maybe you knew it would happen, because you knew her and she was you, and maybe you didn’t stop it because some part of you wanted it too, wanted to see if the world was something you could make your own because ‘your own’ was singular when you two were the same.”
“Dammit, stop!”
“And why should she have thought it wouldn’t work, wouldn’t change things, when she had the godliness of living in another body than her own. And why should she ever obey the rules of the living when all your life you’d grown up standing on the dead. Did you see the diameter of the buckshot pattern?”
“Stop.”
The clouds had not moved and they were still blind, in the cold and the bite of sand beneath his hands and the smell of cooling sweat.
“She broke from it—that’s not guilt. It’s not possible to torture yourself like I saw. It’s solitude. It’s that she saw you saw and wouldn’t say it and by not saying it you made you two and not one. Did you see the buckshot pattern! Say it!”
“Stop it, goddamn you.”
“Did you see it!”
He was shaking.
“Yes. Yes. Goddammit, I saw it. She shot him dead in the chest at less than a yard.”
Without emotion the girl put an arm in front of his chest to keep him from falling forward, the warmth of the arm a line in the blackness.
A lone coyote padded across the plain, leaving crab-tracks in the sand as it carried its shallow ribcage through the dark. It paused at a squat of bramble then slipped behind it and emerged carrying a hare by the neck. Trotted on, as the blood ran along its gums, toward the west where the sun had set and tomorrow would set again.
The steer had felt the line on its mouth go taut and was just beginning to test it when Wyatt saw her at the edge of the woods and she was not hauling an elk but a man. He stepped off of the steer rope and opened the corral gate and the steer stormed past him into the field as he walked silently toward the barbed wire fence that would let him out to the woods.
She had dragged him for a mile, and the leaves and thorns that had attached themselves to his clothes and hair had snarled into a bed or a pyre. She was stooped above him, had not dropped him to the ground because she had never had the strength to lift him off of it. The shotgun was laid across his torso with his arms set to hold it there as she’d hauled him by his armpits, and at the center of his chest the shotgun’s mechanism, from the trigger to the sights, was steeped in liquid rust.
The son looked to the father’s face. The man had lost all expression and there was nothing to guide, nothing to speak to there. The brother turned to the sister and the face she gave him was blank and her hands open and clean and he grabbed her into his arms and he shook as he spoke into her hair.
“It aint your fault.”
And she pulled back from his hands and looked up into his face, for he was taller than her now. And it was the first time he ever saw fear in her eyes.
Smith was down for no longer than a quarter of an hour, then he was undoing the hobbles of the mule below the separating clouds. The girl reached to stop him and he shook her away.
“We’re goin on now.”
“You’ll kill it.”
“Now.”
She looked at him, saw what she needed to see either to believe something or not to protest, and swung her gun over her back and they rode out.
They were silent from then on and once he thought he felt Lucy’s hands and shook them off and rode on in abandonment, of all of it.
And as he rode he learned as she had, must have on that day when he wouldn’t say it, that breaking with the other was not a loss but an invalidation, of whatever you had until now thought you were.
The sun rose and lit the fields of sand, and they crossed through the land that stretched for hellish hours, sheets of blond that wiped away his perception of his past like grinding across the folds of the brain.
And if it had not been fate that bent her hand along the trigger then it was not for him either. The slaughter since he set out from home—it had not been some mandate of fate laid out by the ancestors before you nor some selfless duty to a sister and a ranch that meant more than just that. No, the things you did, you did alone.
He rode on merely because it did not require moving.
After the fifth hour they passed the scars of a deep arroyo, where floodwaters had once run in a river thirty feet wide. They crossed slow along the base of it, the mule stumbling into the trough as though it wished for a reason to fall. A mockery to the life that used to be there, and beyond that they were in empty sand again.
At last the air began to waver, and Smith almost welcoming it slid in the saddle and went down, landing with a foot still in a stirrup and the bag hit the ground, the little green things hopping across the sand like larvae.
The girl was upon him a moment later and she’d rolled him over on his back and then was crawling over the ground to grab the pills, pulling them from the sand as if uprooting plants. She gathered the pills back into the bag and retied it where it’d burst.
Then she stood above him, holding the bag in one hand and the reins in the other.
“Get up.”
He lifted a hand to his brow to see the by now hardly anthropomorphic creature bristling in front of him, covered in the sand and bones and skins of the desert, the impious carrier of the knowledge that destroyed his world.
“So once you thought you had a sister and then by even further mistake once you thought you weren’t alone. You’ll live. Get up.”
Whether the voice held some mark of promise or some lie of past Lucy he did not know, but he stood and wiped the grit from his mouth with the back of his hand and lifted himself into the saddle. They rode on for four more hours, with no reason to stop and nothing to stop for, and no longer any care for the mule. So they went on, his
scraped cheek bleeding again.
It was the girl who spotted the highway.
It had started as a roar and each had considered the hallucinatory effects of the desert before letting the other see that they had heard. But the girl pointed first and there it was, manifested in the curved plumes of dust beyond the lizard face of a Peterbilt barreling from the north.
They were a half-mile out from it and the girl was off the mule and scrambling toward it in the sand, falling twice on her way. He kicked the animal into a trot and met the girl coming back from the road. She was breathless, her knotted hair flung about her face like scattered rock and her shirt newly streaked with sweat.
Milepost 48. Another six miles before they would reach the dirt road and they would have to make it by dark in order to see it.
She got up in front of the saddle and turned the mule with a hand on its cheek and they angled toward the highway but kept a quarter mile away and the upsets of dust from the sporadic passage of trucks rose up to the left as they crossed the expanse of the horizon and then faded, and the mule did not stray from the track they had set it upon with their dual set of heels.
The sun had lowered to a pool of congealed orange sky by the time they reached their mark and the girl cut the mule straight to the west. They found the cattle grid in short order and the mule would not cross it nor jump it, and it staggered back and spun where it stood. They took it down ten yards and backward another twenty and kicked the animal into a canter to vault over the three-foot barbed wire fence. It caught the mule at the quarter and its flank dripped scarlet onto the stippled pelt as they ferried their mount against the dying sun.
Wyatt had the sheets spread out on the bare table in front of him and she came in from outside before the father did and when she fell sideways onto his lap she ripped the target out of his hands.
“Lucy get up you smell like horse manure.”
She had taken a piece of rabbit from the stove and gone to the window while he cleaned his gun, but then she came back to the table. He had forgotten the dropped target on the floor and she picked it up.
“He shouldn’t have let you hitch that baler on your own, Wyatt. Or kill that rabbit. You shouldn’t have to do any of those awful things.”
She overturned the target in her hands. It held the inexorable hole of buckshot fired at one yard.
They slowed then dismounted at last beside Smith’s truck. There were no tracks coming in; the Cordovas had not found it.
Still fully tacked the mule looked at them and then started to walk away and when neither the girl nor Smith reacted it turned back toward the desert and ran, heat-stroked and exhausted and not just a little mad. They could see it run far as the old corral, fading piece of charcoal rocketing over hoof-patterned ground to brave the cold and heave out hot breaths into it as it wove back west, contraband animal sent back into the desert to die there or to return home to a master who was already one with the dust.
They turned back around and stared at the place for a moment in the quiet, only half sure that they indeed had made it there and almost checked their arms to see that they were alive, then were at a run to the storeroom.
Smith was at the sink first and drank below the faucet frantically and the girl followed and they began clawing down the smoked meat that hung on hooks from the ceiling and tearing chunks from it with their hands and ripped packages of bread from the shelves in a place that had been fully stocked to feed ten men.
The old woman who had been somewhere upon the place came in and when she saw it was only them she began yelling in that old language and covered her face with her hands. The children shied behind her skirts.
They walked past her and carried bags of the remaining food and a few jugs of water and flung them into the back of the truck, then went around the back of the place and ripped the hoses from the piping in the greenhouse. The girl went to drag them out front to empty the water into the ground.
Smith stayed behind for a moment, took a last look at the place that had been color in the desert. One last bloom of the colors of birds, and he felt he could nearly see it breathing. He picked up a shovel and drove it into the glass wall. The shards lavished down into the mouths of the flowers like rain.
Out front the girl was taking an ax to the beam that supported the lean-to in front of the door. The old woman walked out and had stopped yelling and just stared and Smith turned to her and said, “You better go on and gather your stuff then, anything you’re wantin to save,” and she looked at him not comprehending and the girl turned over her shoulder and shouted in that foreign tongue, still chopping, and the woman commenced yelling again, a screeching of sun-dried bellows, and ran into the storefront once more.
Smith went around to the back, opened the corral for the four mustangs, and they were gone in a squall of dust. The fire had long since gone out. He went into the shed and the girl took up a shovel and used its side to dismantle the pill presses, and without a tool Smith took to one of them on the table and started loosening bolts and pins and scattering the pieces in a mass on the floor. When that was finished they dumped the vats of powder and unfinished paste and used a crowbar to open the tops of barrels of acid and acetone but did not mix them, knew that much. Knew it would all go up sufficiently. She clasped the barrel of the AK-47 one last time and dropped it into one of the vats. They walked out of the place with their shirts held up to cover their mouths and noses, though the fabric had already been caked with others’ blood and their own sweat and coyote drippings and offered little air to filter through now.
The girl had taken down most of the plastic siding from the place and it buckled into the storefront in a single point of impact per panel, yellow sheeting shattered in percussive waves. The woman came to stand beside them with a blanket tied up with her belongings across her back and each of the children holding one of her hands. She had only cracked leather sandals for her feet and a shawl across her sun-whitened head and watched the building splinter apart with dim silt-colored eyes.
The girl had wanted to ascertain that there was nothing they had left that was valuable or could be traced and ran through once more, ripping open filing cabinets. There were four hundred dollars in the cash register, and the girl gave fifty to the old woman without apology.
Smith brought two cans of gasoline from the shed and the girl sliced open the fronts with her knife and toed backward through the shop like the dog that had laid its iterations of tracks just days before. Was nowhere to be seen now.
When they returned to the storefront the old woman had started south. The girl called to her, but she did not turn around, and the jutting unevenness of her limping form and the soft-footed children faded within moments like shrapnel spun into the dark.
The girl went back to pouring and when she’d wetted the bottoms of the wall she sloshed the liquid up along the structure, and let it drizzle down and did not wipe her mouth as it splashed.
When the cans were empty she threw them through the doorway and Smith bent to the base of the structure and lit it in several places and stood back and watched the fire take root and the girl shivered once and then stopped.
The gas-lit front went up first and then the flames bled backward over the scalp of the store. There was an explosion as the back room ignited and Smith grabbed the bumper of his truck as a six-inch hook of metal barrel was lofted over his left shoulder. He looked at the girl and she remained unmoved.
The fire mounted the roof and became enormous, and while it flared there among the jutting tears of iron sheeting it mirrored the desert opposite it, as the mesas were cast in black shadow in front of the roiling sunset. For a moment Smith and the girl were caught between the two behemoth walls of flame, and then the sun fell below the horizon and went out.
The girl took the keys from where they’d shelved them beneath the rear wheel well of his truck and she threw them to Smith and went for the passenger side but then jumped back. Smith opened the driver’s side and looked in. The pool of remna
nts of skin and blood on the passenger seat was now rife with bugs, small crawling beetles and maggots.
The girl cast an arm across it to scrape them off and then picked up the bag of pills and got in.
He pulled a mile out from the greenhouse then stopped and got out when he saw the pair of rocks leaned against one another. Knelt in the sand he dug up the shotgun slowly, unearthing it like a body or a fossil from some world else. Shook it off when he lifted it and looked one last time at the compound bending low now as if under the weight of the flames. Knew that to others, this was what home burning looked like.
The girl leaned out the window.
“We have to go before the police get here.”
And he got behind the wheel and hammered the accelerator north at last.
They rode as silently as they had on the mule an hour earlier, the girl in the caked slough of the passenger seat with the bag on her lap and her hands roaming occasionally to pick off another bug and cast it out the window.
“Let’s get clear of Salt Lake City then find a place to stop. By then we’ll be far enough up the state.” They both knew it was for their own sense of escape as much as it was for eluding any that would follow.
He nodded and she turned Awan’s pistol in her hands and released the magazine.
“We need more ammo. For this and your shotgun.”
“Shotgun ammo’s in the back seat.”
“Then just ammo for this.”
They kept on north, and passed the exit signs for the city until the lights along the highway faded and they were back in the part of the country where trees run black with moss and chill.
At the next motel they saw he pulled the truck into the spot furthest from the proprietor’s office.
The girl passed him more cash than he’d need and when he got out she’d ducked out from her seat and was leaned against the cab out of sight in the dark. He took the shotgun with him, still would not leave it with the girl.
The proprietor was a malnourished man of over seventy, in a trucking hat with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and he got out of his chair when he saw Smith come in. It was a few hours past midnight and the air of the office smelled like tobacco and ammonia.
Rough Animals Page 23
