Fall Back Down When I Die

by Joe Wilkins

  Glen shook his head.

  —Goddamn. You don’t even know what you’re in for, son. Who’d you say the boy’s daddy was?

  —Lacy never did let on. His last name is Burns, though.

  —And you never knew Lacy to run with a Burns?

  —There’s a lot I don’t know, I guess.

  Glen shook his head again and sucked at his teeth.

  —That girl was buck wild from day one. No disrespect. But there was nothing your mama could’ve done. You start messing around with that methamphetamine—well, you’re up shit creek. That boy ain’t quite right, is he. Poor kid’s gonna have it all kinds of rough. What’s his first name?

  —Rowdy.

  —Rowdy Burns?

  —Yeah.

  —Goddamn.

  His junior year was the year Delphia was finally going to make State again. Everyone said so. Wendell could shoot the lights out, Daniel McCleary was quick and smart with the ball, and the Korenko boy, despite his general lunkheadedness—he’d been held back two grades and was twenty years old—was six and a half feet tall.

  The championship game at the divisional tournament saw two of the three news stations in Billings send reporters. Wendell scored thirty-three points and with just over a second left had a chance to tie the game, send it into overtime, with a one-and-one from the free-throw line. He made the front end, then clanked the second. That night, after the oblivion of the ride home on the team bus and the many dark turnings of the gravel road back to the trailer, Lacy came into his room and crawled into bed with him. Spooned herself up against him. Small as she was, she took him in her arms and held him. The summer before, he and Lacy had played a thousand dusty, furious games of one-on-one at the hoop nailed to the barn wall. She was quick and sharp-elbowed. She’d pushed him hard and could be downright mean about it. All that long ride home, he’d thought of her, of what she might say. But she hadn’t said a thing. Just held him. He cried, really cried, and then like a tumbling stone in a river fell into a black, thrashing sleep.

  He dreamed, as he often did, of wolves, their great forepaws soft and sure on the earth, and later woke to find Lacy standing over him, a rifle in her hands.

  —Let’s go.

  —Where?

  She turned toward the door.

  —Just get the fuck up, she said.

  Wendell followed her into the mountains. Black, high-running clouds, the light of the late-winter moon watery and blue. Grass and sticks and the night’s freeze sharp beneath their bootfalls, scratch of pine bark, grit of rocks. The chatter of coyotes. A great horned owl’s whoo, whoo, whoo-whoo. Then all was still, silent. And as the howl rang and rose around them, Lacy stopped, took her bearings, and followed that fading bell of sound. The slim, shifting, indomitable bit of darkness that she was disappeared into the fuller darkness. And he followed.

  They walked all night. Dawn found them near Hawk Creek, where before hiking back they slept a cold hour huddled beneath a pine.

  They never saw the wolf.

  Stopping for Rowdy to piss, running back to the trailer because he’d forgotten to pack butter crackers, slowing to comfort the boy when something set him off—it all had Wendell back to the field slow, the combines full and waiting and Glen shaking his big bald head, spitting in the dust. Otherwise it was a good day. Wendell liked how the boy’s presence gave him an excuse to talk or gripe or act goofy. And for the most part Rowdy seemed to do fine. He liked to spin the radio knob. He liked the ups and downs of the dirt roads, the bumps and turns and washboards. Wendell gunned the engine now and again just to see his eyes go wide.

  Once, midafternoon, the boy got some chaff or something stuck in his throat and couldn’t seem to stop coughing. He got redder and redder, and Wendell pulled over and clapped him on the back and tried to get him to drink some water, and Rowdy finally did get a little water down and was okay then, though in the dusty, angled light Wendell felt wrung out.

  Late in the evening, the sun bleeding through the pines, the broken land about going shadowed and blue, Wendell turned to find the boy sitting ramrod straight on the bench seat, like he’d been most of the day, scrawny shoulders cockeyed, eyes wide as skipping rocks. Wendell figured Glen would most likely work them until midnight to try to catch up, and remembering the tall bedtime tales his old man used to spin for him, he thought he might tell a story to help the boy relax, maybe even curl up and close his eyes.

  —What say I tell a story? What would you say to that?

  The boy turned and blinked, waited.

  —All right, then. Let me get a dip here first.

  Wendell reached for the can of Copenhagen he’d left on the dash, thumped it once, and set it on his thigh. Left hand on the wheel, he carefully worked the lid off with his right and set it too on his thigh and pinched up a chew. Just as he got the tobacco situated in his lip, the boy reached over for the tin and the lid and clicked the two together and handed the can back to Wendell. Wendell smiled, winked at the boy.

  —I don’t care what anyone says, Rowdy Burns, you’re a gentleman.

  Wendell told the boy about the long days of tilling and leveling and planting in the spring, the hope of rain hooked to the inside of you like a weight on your heart, and how when the rain comes, hope pulls the other way, lifting the heart like the rain does the green shoots, which poke up and lengthen and before you know it dry to gold and deeper gold. He told the boy about the tremendous red machine of the combine, the spinning forks that feed the wheat to the cutter bar, the triangle blades that snip the wheat, the thresher that does the sorting—sending chaff spinning out behind the combine onto the stubbled field and collecting hard red durum in the hopper—until the combine makes for the edge of the field, the auger bar straightens out, and the wheat spills into the empty bed of the grain truck.

  —And here we are, bud, driving these dirt roads back and forth, carrying the wheat to the silos, where we auger it up into the silos, and then it waits in the silos to be sold, and then it’s sold. And then, well, it’s sold.

  Wendell glanced at the boy, who was listening hard, watching him like a pilgrim watches the sky for a sign. Before them the road unspooled and narrowed off into the far reaches of the gathering night, starlight sliding down through road dust. In the silence Rowdy blinked and shivered, leaned into the bench seat, relaxing his shoulders ever so slightly. Wendell went on. He told about what came next and easiest to him, which was high-school basketball, how everyone in a fifty-mile radius showed up for home games, with more than half that traveling to away games and tournaments. He told about how goddamn much he missed playing basketball, coming hard and sharp off Toby Korenko’s pick—the squeak of his sneakers, the slick of sweat as shoulder bumped shoulder—and catching the pass from Daniel McCleary and squaring and rising and at the apex of his leap levering the ball up and out and watching, as he dropped back to the hardwood, the ball snap through the net. How the crowd rose up then and hooted and hollered and stomped on the old wood and steel bleachers, and how the gym, a tight cinder-block square with the out-of-bounds lines right against the walls, fairly shook with that unbridled sound.

  Basketball had set things right for him, he told the boy. With his father gone and most of their land sold or leased, he’d been the odd one out on the playground. Here, in this far place, a frontier that was all men and territory, he was the one without, lacking both, and the rules concerning such things were hard and fixed and applied with full and violent force to everyone—but Wendell couldn’t find the words to explain this except to say again that basketball had saved him. He closed his eyes for a moment, felt the gravel and the ruts and the old cracked tires and the wheezing metal frame, the secret worries of the stars. He opened his eyes. After they won the district tournament his junior year, he told Rowdy, Glen had bought the whole team dinner at Jake’s, the best steak house in Billings. Wendell had scored twenty-six points and grabbed eleven rebounds, and Glen had come right up to him special and said he couldn’t order anything
but prime rib, the most expensive thing on the menu. That steak, Wendell told the boy, was as big as the plate.

  The sweet, bracing burn of tobacco was in his throat. The boy had curled himself into the passenger-side door, eyelids drifting, falling shut. The two of them were close enough to touch but they were not touching. They were alone in the old rattletrap grain truck, traveling through the dark, one small, true, utterly unseen thing in a universe of such things.

  Now Wendell told this sleeping, shirttail relative of his something he’d never told anyone, that even though he didn’t take much but basketball seriously in high school, he loved nothing more than when Mrs. Jorgeson, the English teacher, ancient, stern, an angry-looking mole on the side of her nose, would assign a new book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Outsiders, Cannery Row—he would come home and say barely two words to his mother or Lacy before disappearing into his room and from there into the strange, particular worlds of those pages, places and times where the rules were sometimes the same and sometimes different, and the place he knew so well, Musselshell County, with its residents numbering fewer than five thousand, was suddenly, frighteningly one of many. It confused and thrilled him—that the world was mutable, variegated. He told the sleeping boy that even though you were supposed to turn the books back in after the quiz and the report, he started keeping them. Mrs. Jorgeson must have known, but she never told him to stay after so she could ask him about it, and even if he didn’t much have the time to read anymore, those books were still stacked on his bed stand. Lacy had teased him about getting his nose stuck in those books some, and his mother had thinned her eyes at him not turning the books back in to the school, but they’d been good enough to mostly let it pass. They were like that for a while, he thought, a family of sorts, each with a room of the trailer to clean on Sunday, each carrying wounds and sadnesses.

  The moon came up whistle-thin. A tooth, a claw, the leanest blade. And a low wind skulked among the twisted knots of sage and greasewood and drifted down the hills, its breath cool and dry where it touched him on the inside of his arm, the hollow of his neck. Because he wanted to, because he’d realized in the telling there was so much to tell, he told Rowdy about the countless days he’d spent tromping through the woods, trapping and hunting in the Bulls. He told about the sheer sides of canyons, the faded markings that Indians and homesteaders had carved into the sandrocks. He told about the elk herds growing year after year, surprising everyone, and the beetle-sick pine trees, whole ridges gone orange with chewed, dead trees. He told about the time he and his old man were checking their trapline when they came on a lynx, the first and last he’d ever seen, just as it was about to gnaw through its own front left knee. His father, calm as could be, raised up his .22 and put a clean hole in the cat’s head. They skinned it out that day and cured the hide, and even now that banded, dun, three-legged lynx hide hung across the back of the easy chair in the trailer.

  The memory of his father quieted him. There was a sheaf of coyote pelts in one closet or another and any number of fox and raccoon and rabbit skins tucked here and there. He’d get a couple out for the boy, he thought. Hang one in his room, maybe. Put one on the floor by his bed for when he got up in the night. He and Glen had gone into town a couple of weeks ago and stopped for coffee at the drugstore, and all the talk was of the upcoming wolf hunt, the first fair-chase wolf hunt in the history of the state of Montana. “You ever run your hand across a wolf hide?” one of the old-timers, milky-eyed Kreele Poole, had asked him before remembering who it was he was asking. Wendell thought again of his father, how in one motion full of grace he could lift the rifle, firm the butt, and fire.

  Wendell came up a low hill, and the headlights of the truck slid from dark sky and star-scatter to cheatgrass and gravel road. He still had a few rifles, and he still had his father’s old traps, though for how busy Glen kept him he hadn’t buffed the rust from the teeth or boiled them in dye for a long, long time.

  The boy shifted in his sleep and stretched his thin legs out until one of his socked feet just touched Wendell’s leg.

  Wendell showed up with Rowdy again the next day, and Carol, Glen’s wife, met them at the field. She was hot at Glen for not letting her know the day before. Just what was he thinking, allowing a poor, troubled child of God to ride in that nasty old grain truck all the long day? And she was hot at Wendell for not calling her to sit with the boy, as he knew very well she was a Christian woman and would surely look after one of God’s innocents if Wendell had only had the good common sense to ask, which Maureen had had in spades and he ought to think on his mother more. Why, he surely ought to have known, Carol continued, stamping her foot, that with her own grandboy living nearly over in Billings now, she was lonesome to look after somebody and here was this little boy right close by needing taking care of and no one had thought to even tell her.

  She shook her head at the both of them, then came over to Rowdy as sweet as you please, pulled out a packet of gummy worms, and fussed over him. As Rowdy gnashed the gummy worms like they might get away, she straightened up, her hands on the boy’s shoulders, and told Wendell he could pick him up after work. She’d make sure that by then Rowdy would have had his supper and said his prayers and be ready for bed.

  Wendell worked the toe of his boot against the dry earth, the cut stalks. He’d already had it in mind that Glen would let him drive the grain truck another couple of days or so, and Rowdy would ride with him. He’d packed butter crackers and two gallon jugs of water and had been thinking of stories to tell, even stories about the boy’s mother, Lacy, about her time with them, how beautiful, fierce, and fun she was. But Rowdy’s mouth rolled with bright bits of gummy worm, and Carol held him close.

  Wendell knelt in the stubble and touched the boy’s chest.

  —You gonna be all right?

  Rowdy rooted around in the plastic package, extracted an orange gummy worm, studied it, and shoved it in his mouth.

  Wendell stood and thanked Carol.

  —I imagine he’ll be fine, he told her.

  And a couple of weeks later, he was. He’d even played some with Tyler, Glen and Carol’s grandson, when he visited over the weekend, though Glen told Wendell one morning, grinning, that Carol was more than a little distraught that Rowdy still hadn’t opened his mouth, not even to say his prayers.

  Verl

  Day Three

  Goddamn but I have been running. I hear engines and the squawk of your radios and once like revelation a glassy helicopter lifted itself over the ridge and flattened the grass and cracked three sick trees. My heart I thought would charge out of me. But even then you missed. I hunkered down. Then ran. When I had to do what I had to do. I did. I shot the wolf clean. I did not miss. Each time you have missed me.

  Gillian

  T​HE FARMSTEAD, AS IT CAME INTO VIEW DOWN THE WEEDY ROAD, LOOKED like most farmsteads this far north of the Yellowstone, this far into the Bull Mountains—a break in the cottonwoods or jack pines sheltering an outbuilding of corrugated tin, some falling-down corrals, the hulks of old pickups and tractors, a two-story farmhouse in some late stage of collapse, and off to the side of the house a double-wide with cinder-block steps surrounded by a yard of cheatgrass and dust. And here, at this particular Bull Mountain outpost, beneath a lightning-split pine by the barn, a pack of dogs—brown, mottled, rib-skinny—bellied down in the dirt, chewing on what looked to be a fresh deer hide.

  Gillian slowed her Prius and parked near the trailer, then breathed a prayer, a habit from her Catholic girlhood that she’d never kicked. She clicked open the glove box and reached for her pepper spray, slid the cold cylinder into her purse. She eased out and shut the door gingerly. The dogs—three, four, maybe five—ripped at the hide and growled at one another. She quickstepped across the dirt yard and checked for rattlers before hurrying up the cinder blocks. She knocked. The trailer door swung open beneath her fist. The smells of grease and cigarettes and closed spaces washed over her.

  —Hello? she call
ed. Ms. Wilson? Hello?

  A door opening, closing. Footsteps. A small woman, large-eyed, maybe thirty, emerged from the back hallway. She wore charcoal pajama pants studded with little pink hearts, and a faded pink hoodie.

  Gillian introduced herself as the assistant principal and counselor at Colter Schools. She mentioned the phone message she’d left the day before.

  —You just barge on in, huh?

  —I’m sorry. Your door swung open when I knocked.

  —Oh yeah, it does that. The latch is busted.

  Gillian held her hand out, and Tricia Wilson hesitated but took it, her own hand small and cold, the purple on her fingernails chipped.

  —I can heat some coffee up in the microwave if you want.

  —That’d be lovely, Gillian said.

  She followed Tricia into the trailer—Kiss This scrawled in bubbly, pink cursive across the rear end of her pajama pants—and waited in the living room, where a shampoo commercial twisted across the screen of the muted television. On the wall hung three framed paintings featuring sharp lines, shadowed figures, a girl’s naked back—everything black, electric blue, or silver, punctuated with a few bursts of hot pink or blood red. Suicide art, Gillian had dubbed it. The sort that led not to an art scholarship but to a stint as a tattoo artist. She’d seen it again and again during her nineteen years in the Montana school system.

  The microwave whirred. On the television, Dr. Oz threw his arms wide and the camera cut to the studio audience, all clapping fanatically. Standing in the kitchen, Gillian toed a small burn mark at the edge of the dark green shag, took note of a blue satin Delphia Broncs jacket lying on the wraparound couch. Delphia was north of the Bull Mountains, along the Musselshell River, and Colter was south, along the Yellowstone. Only fifty crow-fly miles separated the two small towns and their schoolhouses, but it was fifty miles of canyons and cutbanks, of jack pines and cactus, of wild mountain country. Still, it happened most every year: A kid would get kicked out of one school and enroll in the other. Then get in trouble there. Come back to the first school for a time. Maybe fail a few classes and leave again. A dance over and across the mountains that most often ended in the kid dropping out—or going to juvenile or jail or simply disappearing. Gillian had done the dance in her own way, starting as a science teacher at Delphia in 1990, then taking the assistant-principal position at Colter in ’98, more than a decade ago now. Though that was for different reasons altogether.