Fall Back Down When I Die

by Joe Wilkins

  They sold most everything, packed what was left into their two-door Tercel, and drove forever up through the scrublands of Texas, across the Oklahoma panhandle, along the achingly flat eastern plains of Colorado, over the sloping land and past the sudden river canyons of Wyoming—so much Wyoming—and then they were sliding through the shadows of refinery stacks and bulbous, spiral-staired oil tanks along the ragged edge of Billings. It was spring, the high flats green and rolling, blue flax flowers brightening the ditches. As they drove north into the Bull Mountains, with their ridges and box canyons, their yucca and knots of prickly pear, Gillian was reminded, sharply, too sharply, of the big desert country they had left behind. Something hollowed around her heart.

  Then Kevin began to tell the stories.

  Hands on the wheel, turning them this way and that through the mountain curves, he narrated the history of most every little homesite, told her who lived here and there and for how long and what funny thing some grandmother or uncle had done—for the view down the valley, he put a glass door in the outhouse!—and as she listened, the hollow filled with his sure stories.

  They pulled into the Kincheloe place, a great sprawl of alfalfa fields and pastures south and east of Delphia, near the north bend of the Musselshell River, in among the foothills of the Bulls. Kevin cautioned her once again not to talk politics or religion, though he insisted, too, that they’d be welcomed, that his people were good and reasonable and kind.

  And he was right. His sisters, Billie and Pam, were cautious but warm, fussing over them and pushing glasses of iced tea on them immediately. Their husbands, Roy and Larry, were round-faced and shy and handy, both still somewhat sheepish about the fact that Kevin had let his sisters, their wives, have the Kincheloe land after his father’s death some years ago. Without a word, Larry hauled out his air compressor and filled their back left tire, which he’d noticed was a little low. Kevin’s mother, Elner, whom Gillian had met only briefly at their courthouse wedding ten years earlier, was a fiery little Irish woman who preferred horseback work to laundry. Gillian liked them all, liked Elner immensely.

  When she and Kevin found an old farmhouse to rent off the Delphia-Colter Road in a stand of cottonwoods near the river on land belonging to Glen Hougen, the whole Kincheloe clan pitched in to gut and scrub and paint and generally make the place livable again. They cut the weeds down out front, blackjacked the holes in the roof, painted the kitchen a canary yellow. After Billie and Pam’s picnic lunch—cold sliced roast beef, brown bread, garden radishes and cucumbers, and squares of dark sheet cake with burned-sugar frosting for dessert—Elner hauled an old rocking chair from the back room and carried it to the front porch, where she dusted it off and pushed on all the joints, just to make sure. She found Gillian in the kitchen, scrubbing out the cupboards, and took her by the hand, led her to the chair.

  —You just sit on down, Mama. Put your feet up on the rail.

  Some hundred yards below the porch, along a foot trail that bordered a tangle of chokecherry trees, an opening in the cottonwoods and willows framed a bend of the river, a shallow, gravel-bottomed rapids. Across the water, the forest thickened and the Bulls rose up humped and sloped and broken, the nearest peak washed with the blue-green of the trees everyone called cedars but that Gillian was sure were actually a kind of juniper. She sat gladly down, and the chair creaked beneath her weight. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back. How tired she was—she hadn’t even realized.

  Elner put a hand on her shoulder.

  —That’s right. Take it easy for a spell. We’ll get this here place whipped into shape. It’ll be a home before you know it.

  The fridge light cut through the night shadows of the front room. Gillian studied the many slick packages, the bright bottles and bins. Finding nothing, she shut the fridge and pulled open the freezer, that little pop as it came unstuck. There—a plastic cylinder of frozen orange juice. If Maddy came out, she’d say she was getting ready for Sunday breakfast. How about French toast? But save for the dim strip of light from under Maddy’s door and the low music, the hallway remained dark and quiet. Gillian plopped the concentrate into a pitcher and added water and mixed it all, then poured a tall glass half full and dropped in two ice cubes. From the cabinet on the other side of the fridge she lifted out a plastic handle of vodka—she’d drunk her last bottle of chardonnay earlier in the evening—unscrewed the lid and tipped it into her glass. Let it glug one, two, three times.

  She held the glass up and out, so as not to spill, and padded down the hall to her office, where she closed the door behind her, making sure it latched, and settled into her high-backed chair. Her first sip was mostly vodka, which watered her eyes and set her to coughing. She took another drink to clear her throat and clicked the computer screen to life again. Against a black background with a splash of camouflage flashed a banner taking up a quarter of the screen: ***JOIN THE BULL MOUNTAIN RESISTANCE***

  With the shades drawn against the streetlights, against the great black shadows of the Rimrocks, Gillian leaned into her computer, careful not to bump her scraped knee, and tried again to make sense of what she saw before her. It was like another language. The tyranny of the EPA, the IRS, and the BLM. The lie of ecology and the primacy of wise-use. Allodial title and sovereign citizens. Christian identity, Adamites, and kind after kind. The original ten. The liens to be served at gunpoint on the federal government and Barack HUSSEIN Obama for unconstitutional takings. The seal of the Bull Mountain Resistance was a howling wolf touched by crosshairs set inside a silver circle. There were links to other groups as well: Posse Comitatus, the Three Percenters, the Pacific Patriots Network, the Militia of Montana, the Idaho Militia, the Jefferson Free Staters. And a dozen links to gun shows and gun stores, with strings of bullets bordering both sides of the website. Gillian read about the coming land war, the time of trial, the suffering and the blood that must be let, about the sure victory of free and pure and godly people, of the new dispensation.

  The shifting lights played across her face. She took a swallow of vodka and juice, scrolled, and landed on a picture of Brian Betts, the first general, wearing black boots, baggy camo pants, and a tight khaki T-shirt, some kind of assault rifle cradled in his arms. His hair was buzzed, his mustache dark and sharp, which was expected, yet he was short, his arms stubby, his belly soft. Tavin might even be his height. How had Tricia ever ended up with such a chinless little sausage of a man? How could she have let him poison her boy?

  When Gillian clicked on the link below the photo, she found the call for the gathering that Dave had mentioned. All Free and Sovereign Citizens were invited to join the Bull Mountain Resistance on October 25, the first day of the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in over thirty years. Yet in an act the flyer termed Patriotic Resistance to TYRANNY, no one was to buy a wolf tag, as that would only legitimize the government’s supposed right to keep free people from defending their property from vicious animals. With no authorization other than their own will and their own rifles, they planned to gather at Betts’s place and move into the Bull Mountains, slaughtering every wolf, coyote, and other nuisance animal they might find.

  Gillian scrolled down to the bottom of the web flyer, and there, under a slash of cursive purple script that read MARTYR, was his picture. Verl Newman. Kevin’s killer. She tried to stand, tried to get away, but banged her hurt knee on the bottom of the desk and fell back into her chair, knocking over what was left of her drink, sending the ice skittering across the desktop, shushing wetly to the carpet. Before she could even read his name, she clicked the mouse. The little wheel spun, and she zoomed in—zoomed until his face began to pixelate, explode.

  Which reminded her of the cloud of pepper spray, the boy’s face obliterated like that. Of how good it had felt. How good it would feel to do that to Brian Betts.

  Verl

  Day Twelve

  They are not even close. I shook them days ago and circled back. You want to know the godhonest truth I am not so far from you boy.
It makes me smile to think on that. I have taken to sleeping in the afternoons when the sun is round and warm. Writing these words in the evening. Traveling through the night and early morning when it is cold and my heart thumps and thumps to keep me warm. This afternoon I snoozed like a big old bear only rolling over to get the sun on the other side of me. Are there bears here in the Bulls anymore? I do not think so. Those like my old granddaddy killed the wolves and tried for the bears though the bears got away up into the Rockies. I believe I am the only old bear up in these mountains now.

  The eastern sky this evening blue and dark as your mother’s eyes. On one side of me there is that nightward blue. On the other the far mountains red and gold in the setting sun. Did you know there is a whole box of colors between red and gold? I never knew. Or maybe I knew but forgot. Anyways I see now some dozen shades between the two.

  Later

  I am thinking of things. Here in the night. It was seeing the sun set like that over the Rockies which I know are real mountains and not just twisted hills like these Bulls. But these here are where I am. These I call mine.

  How does a body come into country? Sure these Bulls are mine because there is no other way things are but only this way. What I am after is would I have chosen this country? I am thinking if I was a homesteader on a train or even earlier some fur trapper like in the Louis L’Amours. If I come strolling through would I say yes this is for me. That is what I am wondering. Things are a sight prettier once you get farther west nearer the Rockies. And it is goddamn dry hereabouts. Windy and hot in the summer. Windy and cold in the winter. West of here the mountains snag the rain and they put up three cuttings of hay without a drop of irrigation. Might I have spat and gone on? Might I have passed through? What I am saying is maybe I have just gone and gotten used to this country?

  No. I tried it for a spell but that kind of thinking does not sit right with me. I do not like to think like that. Do not like to think this country I call mine is just a crapshoot chance. There is a country for each of us we might in our bones call home. The shape of the land what fits us to ourselves. These plains and hills. That snarl of chokecherries down the draw from the house where we pick until our fingers go blue. Meadowlarks singing because they are lonesome and scared and the sun is about for the night to burn down. Does some bear up in the Rockies remember he walked these hills and plains and pine for them? I say yes. They are all a part of it. Like me. Like you boy. Like your granddaddy my daddy and our granddaddies down the line. The country is us. We know it from time before. Like a hand we would miss and feel ghosting us if it was gone.

  Or maybe that is backwards. Maybe we are but an organ of the land. Maybe we are the ghosts and when we go the country mourns us. Is that right? Does the country grieve my old granddaddy? The gone grizzly bears? Does it sorrow the both of them?

  Wendell

  THEY LEFT THE TRAIL. THE PINES TIGHTENED ABOUT THEM. WENDELL had to get down on his hands and knees and shoulder through tangles of honeysuckle and wild rose, little weepings of blood along the backs of his hands. Rowdy came behind, in the space Wendell made, having to crouch only now and again. On a shelf above the ravine they found a small clearing with a gnarled jack pine near the edge to serve as an anchor, and Wendell stood back up, slapped the dust from the knees of his jeans. He set Rowdy to digging near the pine, then stepped down on the springs, the trap’s jaws lolling open, and placed the pin beneath the shaft of the pan.

  —That’s it, good job. You’ve got it deep enough now.

  Wendell set the trap in the shallow hole Rowdy had dug and showed the boy how to sprinkle enough dirt back around it to bury it, but only lightly, and they took turns sifting dust and grass over the trap, and Wendell drove a spike through the trap’s chain, deep into the roots of the tree, and buried the chain as well.

  He pulled his ball cap off and wiped at his forehead. Rowdy wore no hat but he wiped at his head just the same. They stood there and admired their work. It was clear there’d been some disturbance, but you’d have to know where the trap was not to step in it. Wendell had gone ahead and skipped out on work, held the boy out of school for the day—he’d called the district in Colter and gotten Rowdy enrolled over there—and he was awful glad about it all now.

  —We need a bone, he told the boy.

  Rowdy blinked up at him and took off along the lip of the coulee, shoulders bent toward the ground. There were always bones about—in ditches along the roads, in the dead pile near the house, here in the mountains. As a boy Wendell had gathered bones and brought them back to the old farmhouse, to the bone shrine his grandfather had started in the basement. His mother, fearing the unoccupied house might collapse, hadn’t wanted him in there, but she didn’t want all those bones in the trailer either. As a compromise, she let him build his ossuary on the screened porch of the old place. It had been quite a collection. The fragile straws of bird bones. The thin, sickle moons of prairie-dog skulls. The quick, hard curves of coyote. The mandibles of a mountain lion, teeth like ragged knives. And cow and sheep bones too. And yellowed bones, impossibly thick, from the last bear his great-grandfather had killed out in the Bulls. His favorite was the great long hollow skull of a horse, which he’d found, crumbling and sun-bleached, miles out in the mountains. He would often dream the thing back into flesh and sinew, hide and hair: a Crow warhorse or a seventeen-hander in the Seventh Cavalry.

  Rowdy came pounding back through the trees with a small white femur clenched in his fist.

  —That’s the ticket. Here, let’s have that.

  Wendell took the bone, likely deer or antelope, and broke it. One piece he handed back to the boy and the other he buried, with just the torn end showing, between the trap and the tree. Then he took a small glass vial from his pocket.

  —This here’s a stew of piss and what all else my old man milked from the insides of a coyote. It’ll about knock you down. Go ahead, take a sniff.

  The boy’s eyes went wide. He reached out and clutched the amber vial, waved it under his nose. Blinked, pulled a face.

  —Yeah, it’s nasty stuff, but coyotes love it.

  Wendell dribbled a few drops of the tincture into the broken end of the bone, then capped the bottle and stowed it.

  —All right. Four more to go. What d’you say? Being a mountain man work for you?

  Rowdy grinned, toothy and lopsided, and took off running, angling through the pines.

  He hadn’t seen his mother much that last year.

  Wendell had left the community college over in Glendive after a semester and a half to come take care of her after her first surgery. He’d thought she’d get better. Thought he’d go back and take up his basketball scholarship again. He never did. He worked odd jobs for a few years until Glen hired him on steady, which then meant Wendell left in the early dark and didn’t get back to the trailer until the day’s last light leaned on the trees. More and more often he found her zonked out on pills in front of the television. She was only forty-three, but she’d been in pain for a long time. He could remember evenings from way back when he was just a kid that his father would work at the knots in his mother’s shoulders while the two of them sipped beer and listened to the classic-country hour on KGHL. It would flare up like that, and she’d take a couple of months off work, go on temporary disability. By the time she quit working at the oven factory for good, the winter after Wendell graduated, she could barely sleep for the pain. They said something was the matter with her synovial joints, then she was diagnosed with lumbar spinal stenosis, but Wendell wasn’t sure any of the doctors really knew what was wrong. She had a string of surgeries, each more extensive than the last, and they seemed to help at first, though each time, just as Wendell was starting to think about heading back to Glendive, there was some new complication. Eventually, she stuffed her workout videos and exercise equipment in the closet. Shuffled from bed to couch to bed. Every once in a while drove into town for her prescriptions.

  When Wendell got back from work and found her pass
ed out on the couch he’d get ahold of her and help her down the hallway to her room. She’d stumble and slur, sometimes thank him, sometimes curse. Often she called him by his father’s name. Once, as he lowered her to her frilly bed, she kissed at his mouth, reached for the crotch of his jeans. He pulled away, nearly dropped her, embarrassed to find himself swelling at her touch. She said his father’s name again—Verl—and then parted her robe to reveal an old sports bra, her loose white stomach. When she reached for the straps of the bra, he turned and rushed down the hallway, grabbed his hat and slammed the trailer door behind him, jumped in the LUV. He reached under the bench seat as he drove and lifted a fifth of Jack by the neck. An inch of amber liquid sloshed around the bottom of the bottle and he tipped it up and up, then slung the empty out the window. Watched it shatter against a fence post. An old girlfriend, Starla Collier—though she was married by then to Toby Korenko, even had a kid at home—was tying one on at the Antlers. They closed the place down that night and ended up fucking in the parking lot up against his truck. Some old bulb-nosed drunks stood around watching, cheering now and again, and Starla bit at his neck and said she’d always loved him.

  Wendell felt so shitty afterward—like he was up to his ears in shit, had been sinking in it so long, he saw the world through a scrim of it, felt the muck in his lungs—that the next week he asked for even more hours. He started taking some of his meals with Glen and Carol and had a good run of months away from the bars. Those times he did come home to find his mother on the couch, he just threw a blanket over her, turned off the TV.