by Joe Wilkins
One winter when his mom was laid up—medical leave without pay, they called it—he and Lacy took their rifles out into the mountains and each shot a cow elk. This was after the new year, months after the close of the legal season. They worked their knives up the bellies of the elk, pounding and sawing through hide and rib and chest bone. Lacy levered herself against the great cave of the ribs to hold it open, and with both his hands slippery and numb and steaming, Wendell got hold of the trachea—so wide and springy, still half alive beneath his fingers—and pulled. It ripped free with a scissoring sound, and he kept on pulling, all the way down through, as the guts spilled into the snow, which reddened and melted and ran beneath them. Because the elk were too heavy to drag, they went for a chain saw. They quartered both animals and hauled the quarters to the LUV and drove back home. In the barn they set about boning and cutting and wrapping the meat. It was hard work, and they hadn’t ever been taught correctly, and their knives weren’t sharp enough—the steaks and roasts hacked at and ugly. Still, late in the night they finished two quarters and strung the others up from the rafters. For a midnight dinner they fried onions and potatoes and elk steaks in a cast-iron pan. The meat lean, herbal, dark.
Wendell dreamed again that night of wolves, wolves mewling and circling the barn, scratching and gnashing at it, until finally they clawed the door to pieces and rushed into the barn and leaped up and tore down the hung quarters.
They had planned to butcher out the rest after school the next day, after Wendell’s basketball practice, but when they got home, the winter evening already black and bitter cold, there were tire tracks in the snow by the barn, a note pinned to the door. It was from the game warden out of Roundup. He’d seen them the day before, had caught them in his binoculars, but didn’t have time to make it out that night and so had come out this morning and confiscated the remaining quarters. Considering the circumstances—he’d heard Wendell’s mother was laid up—he was letting them off with a warning. That’s what the note said. But just this once. Next time there’d be a fine. Next time they’d lose their rifles.
Lacy was pissed. She wanted to go out again, spotlighting in the dark. But reading the note just made Wendell tired. Tired of so often wanting things to be other than they were. Lacy lit up a cigarette. She was only sixteen, a sophomore, just a year older than he was. He didn’t know where she was getting her smokes. She swung her arm out and the cigarette’s coal inscribed a red arc across the Bulls.
—Your dad’s still out there, you know. He’d want us out there too. He’d want us to put our thumbs right in their eyes.
Wendell thought of his mother hurting in the trailer, waiting for dinner, waiting for him to bring her a glass of water and her pill. But he could feel the pull of the hills.
—How do you know what he’d want? he said.
—I just do. So do you, if you don’t pout about it or think too much, if you’d just let yourself do what you ought to.
The night was so starry, so cloudless, that Wendell could make out the exact profiles of the mountains, the buttes, right down to the knobs, ridges, and canyons. He turned away, away from whatever ghosts haunted those hills, and left Lacy smoking in the dark.
Maddy came out that evening, after suppertime. It was already dark, but she insisted his directions had been super, that the drive had been nice, with the sun setting and all. She was carrying a cloth bag, and she held it out to Rowdy, who looked up at her and drummed at his cheeks.
Wendell patted him on the back.
—Go on. She brought it for you.
Rowdy reached his thin arms out and took the bag and, bumping it on the ground, peered inside at all the books. Looked up smiling.
Maddy smiled back, then motioned to her car with a mention of the clothes and took off before Wendell could offer to help. He felt unsure, wooden in his movements. Rowdy, though, sat right down in the dirt by the stairs and paged through a book about a boy and a penguin.
Maddy returned from her car toting a cardboard box. She set the box down near where Rowdy was reading and pulled out a puffy red and black winter jacket, which she held out by the shoulders, the zipper open. When she asked Rowdy what he thought, the boy was so absorbed by his penguin book that at first he looked at her with some irritation, but he got to his feet and slid himself into the jacket and let her zip it up. Then sat right back down and picked up his book.
Wendell reached down and squeezed the boy’s shoulder.
—It’s real nice. Just what he needs. This is awful kind of you. Really.
—Oh, good, she said, and drew a swing of black hair behind her ear.
She was pleased, Wendell could tell, and maybe a little embarrassed.
—I mean it. It’s been hard, taking care of a boy all of a sudden. This helps a lot.
He paused, tried to gauge her reaction.
—You want to come in, warm up? I’ve got a can or two of pop in the fridge.
Maddy took a half step back. Ah, he’d gone too far, misread all of this. It was about charity, pure and simple.
Then a meadowlark called, and Maddy turned toward the rise and fall of sound and reached out, just touching Wendell’s arm.
—A meadowlark! We don’t hear them often in Billings.
She lifted her hand, and where she’d touched him at his elbow was warm, alive.
—Used to be even more, he said. But there’s some yet. They like the dry creek bed there along the road.
Despite the shadows, the deepening night about, Maddy studied the creek, the woods, the ridges beyond. She asked Wendell if he’d lived here all his life and he said he had.
—What’s it like? she asked.
—Like anywhere, I guess. But farther away.
Maddy cocked her head at him, like she didn’t quite believe him. He wasn’t sure he believed himself. But how could he answer a question like that?
—There used to be some towns out here in the Bulls, he went on. Mining towns with hotels and saloons and such. They’re all gone now. Just falling-down shacks. Bits of blue and purple glass in the washes.
She was staring right at him, wide-eyed, unguarded. He turned away, checked on Rowdy sitting there in the dirt. When he glanced back up, Maddy had finally caught herself. She swallowed, shifted on her feet.
—I’m glad the coat fits, she said. And that Rowdy likes the books.
She started toward her car, then turned back. For his awkwardness, he hadn’t really been able to see her until now, and he took her in. She was wearing fitted jeans and a black blouse, a silky, blue-green scarf about her neck. She was nearly as tall as he was.
She had to go, she said, but wanted to come back the next Friday, if that was all right, and bring some more books. She had a half day at school—she could get there before dark.
—You could show me around, she said.
The light fell from the windows of the trailer, from the stars. With her dark clothes, her dark hair, Wendell could barely see her.
—Yeah, you bet, Wendell said, and grinned despite himself. That’d be all right. That’d be good.
She took her leave, calling out a good-bye to both of them, and as she pulled away, Rowdy looked up, blinked a few times, and went back to his penguin book.
The next days, the wind stilled for a time. And the hills and old scarred trees settled down into the unyielding densities of themselves. Then the wind came again, harder and from the north, carrying the smell of ice and minerals.
The bite of it was at his wrists, his neck, the quick of his eyes. They’d been at the roundup three days now, since Monday morning, and only a fraction of the herd was left to gather. Wendell rode the dirt bike north and west, zigzagging up and down the broad valleys, hunting the draws and box canyons. At tight stands of chokecherry, cedar, and jack pine, he dismounted and thrashed his way through. Here and there he turned out a few cows and calves and got them moving south toward the bulk of the herd, then rode north again himself.
He came to the cut fences late in th
e afternoon—the heaped wires now snagged with cheatgrass and elk hair—and killed the engine. He and Rowdy had tromped out to check their trapline over the weekend in those windless hours that were almost warm, and he’d checked the line each day since. They hadn’t gotten ahold of anything. It had been a long time since he’d run a line, and he didn’t know the mountains quite like he had as a boy, when he was still his father’s son. Maybe once the calves were sold he’d take the boy out and pull up the sets, try somewhere deeper in the mountains. He wanted a chew and reached for his back pocket, forgetting it wasn’t there, forgetting he’d decided something, though what that was, exactly, he wasn’t sure.
Wendell kicked the dirt bike to life and rode on. The ghost of Betts’s tracks narrowed into the hills before him. He drove slowly, considering each box canyon, each valley mouth and rising ridge. He crossed the dry run of Hawk Creek, where the mountains rose in earnest, their high spine visible in the distance. The wind whirled and gusted, spit snow that stung his eyes and cheeks. A bit early, the first of October, but not unusual. He turned up a wash and kickstanded the bike and scrambled twenty feet up the blind ridge to a mass of sandstone, then skirted the rocks, the footing precarious in places, to the yawning opening of a cave. He ducked in, crouched a step or two, and straightened up.
They’d scraped out the floor and put beams across the rock-and-sod roof. The cave proper, a stretched rectangle, shadowed and dank, had space for maybe ten men to sleep out of the wind. At the far end, a few steps were hacked into the wall, with scattered shafts of gray light leaking in from where a man could haul himself up and out onto the ridgetop. A second entrance, or exit. Along one wall stretched a section of metal shelving filled with traps, snares, water jugs, gas cans, maps, shovels, tarps, tools, and whatnot. There were three steel trunks as well, below the shelves, the first two crammed with canned and dried food, the third bristling with rifles and pistols and boxes of ammunition. Wendell hefted one of the more ridiculous-looking guns, some kind of air-cooled assault rifle, the metal black and oily. Still holding it, he peered out of the cave mouth. The freezing wind tore at the pines along the ridge, lifted the dead, dry branches, even bits of rock, and sent them crashing into other trees and rocks, scraping along the face of the flats.
Verl
18
I have slept some and feel better. But sleep has been hard. I wake every few minutes to listen for engines. Voices. Helicopter blades. For the last days I have heard nothing but wind. My bootfalls on the cold hard ground.
I guess I should tell you boy. I am okay. Hungry but okay. I ate only a few small bites of that mulie deer. Even as I pulled the trigger. Even then I knew it was a bad idea. Knew someone would hear and word would get around and soon the fuckers would be crawling all over. I hurried. Butchered out a back leg and cooked some in the ground like I told you and ate some blood raw while I ran like a wolf. It tasted good. I sit and rest now and wish for more. There is no more. I heard hunger stories from my old granddaddy but did not know hunger. Nothing but a howl in the belly.
Later
Saw the frost come down this morning. That was all right a thing to see. Was tired was walking to warm myself through the cold early dark when the sky lifted. As if a man shrugged a weight from his shoulders. The wind came a notch warmer then and like that the grass broke with frost under my boots.
Gillian
THEY WERE OUT BACK OF THE SCHOOL, IN THE SCRUB HILLS WEST OF THE dirt football field and the scoria track, hunting specimens—empty egg sacks and cracked chrysalises, the desiccated bodies of beetles and flies. Cold wind gusted across the hilltops, swirled down the draws. A front had moved in, and the kids hurried here and there, winter jackets flapping, notebooks tucked up in their armpits, as they knelt down in the greasewood and dry grass and held magnifying glasses up to their watery eyes and chapped noses.
After just a single day in the enrichment room Gillian had seen that working her way from child to child, helping each of them finish homework sheets from their regular classes, just wasn’t going to cut it. That was probably why the last special-ed teacher had struggled so much—she, like too many other teachers, had thought kids ought to be able to sit still for twenty minutes. Of course they couldn’t. They’d get fidgety and bored and turn to the quick delights of mischief. No, Gillian knew she had to get the whole group involved in something. Hence this unit on bugs—on where they go in the winter and what they leave behind.
On Monday, they’d brainstormed a list of all the things they knew about bugs. Yesterday she had the older kids do some online research and the younger kids draw pictures of what they found. They were collecting specimens today. Tomorrow, they’d count and graph and see if their results matched the research. And Friday they’d write and illustrate small reports. She was thinking of having the kids present their reports as well. She could probably drum up a small audience of teachers. She could even call Dave Coles, have him cover it for the paper. It was just the kind of feel-good, small-town story he’d love. She was having a bit of her own feel-good, small-town story, she thought now, and laughed at herself for thinking it. But it was true, the classroom gave her something necessary and absolutely real to focus on. And she and Maddy had had a great run last Saturday, making it all the way to Zimmerman Park. Then, Sunday, she’d met Kent for brunch, just to clear the air, and they’d ended up talking for hours. As they gathered their things to leave, she told him it was her turn. Her turn for what? Her turn to ask him out to dinner, she said. He grinned and accepted.
The wind gusted now, canting the yellow grass, and Gillian turned on her heel, tallying—six, seven, eight, nine—her motley crew of entomologists. The light this afternoon came in swaths, the wind hauling great high clouds across the sky, and she squinted into a brilliant slice of it to see Rowdy Burns come running up to her, breathless, something held before him in both hands. He hadn’t said anything more after that first day, as if he’d already covered what was important—that he was Rowdy—but he’d listened devoutly, greedily, and had done everything she’d asked, as best he could, anyway. He recognized only half the alphabet. He had some number sense but seemed to have been given little arithmetic instruction. He was likely on the autism spectrum, though because of his selective mutism, it would be difficult to tell the extent of it. Yet the boy had shown up on Monday with a new coat, which was a good sign, and he’d tried hard the last three days, screwing his little face up as he drew his bugs. Over the years Gillian had had a few foster kids who’d done well, who’d landed in decent homes, were reasonably cared for, and had the time and space then to be kids again, to let down their defenses and learn. She didn’t yet know Rowdy’s home situation—Kent said the paperwork was in process—but a new coat, along with how well he listened, made Gillian think the boy just might get lucky.
He stood before her now, eyes wide, and slowly opened his hands into a cup. Gillian leaned down. He’d found a grasshopper in torpor, she told him, and reminded him that torpor meant its body was shutting down for the winter. That’s why it wasn’t jumping out of his hand. This grasshopper had probably already laid eggs or fertilized eggs, and those eggs were in the ground now, safe, and in the spring they would hatch a bunch of new little grasshoppers.
Rather than bring it inside, Gillian suggested that he draw a picture of this one that the class could use as a specimen. Rowdy pulled out his notebook, pushed his coat sleeves up his arms, sat right down in the dirt, and commenced drawing. Gillian watched him for a time, smiling. Just as she was about to look away, to check on the other students, the light shifted, a cloud far above whirling away in the wind, and something caught her eye—a butterfly wing of bruise, yellow with a bit of blue, on the underside of the boy’s wrist.
That afternoon, as the buses queued in front of the school—diesel engines grumbling, exhaust swirling up and reddening in the brake lights—the snow began. A hard, thin, spitting snow. The kind that freezes ruts, ices windshields, and leaves a scrim beneath loose windows and do
ors.
With Kent busy most of the afternoon mediating a disagreement between Coach Stormer and two sets of parents who both thought their respective sons should be getting more playing time at running back, Gillian had offered to take afternoon bus duty for him. The high-schoolers shivered and milled in the foyer, complaining about the snow, checking texts, until finally they ducked their heads and raced to the parking lot. The grade-school kids ran delirious circles on the small lawn out front. They gathered little handfuls of the dry snow and threw it in the air like confetti and tried to catch the snowflakes on their tongues. The town kids filtered off in clumps down the dirt roads of Colter, and the country kids eventually sorted themselves onto the buses.
Gillian watched for Rowdy, and when he came loping across the yard in that little sideways gallop of his, she squatted down to intercept him. She told him he’d done an awesome job collecting specimens today and asked if she could get a high five. He grinned and ratcheted his small shoulder back and slapped her hand. She touched his arm and held him lightly by his elbow, asked if everything was all right at home, if he was safe. Rowdy screwed his face up in confusion but nodded emphatically, mashing his knob of a chin against his chest, then tipping it up into the air.
Gillian let him go then and the boy hopped up into his bus. She looked for him to sit and wave at her, but he must have chosen a seat on the other side. The buses groaned, sighed, and one by one turned down Main Street. The scent of diesel swirled away with the wind, and Gillian took a deep breath of what would soon be winter air, the burn of it sharp and cold and clean inside her.
Back in her office, after readying the enrichment room for the next day, she brushed her hair and changed blouses and slipped on heels, dabbed perfume behind her ears. In the past year she’d been out for drinks and dinner with a lawyer, a contractor, and a software engineer, and while she’d enjoyed herself, she always found it hard to explain what it was she did. She’d say teacher or assistant principal, and they’d nod, but she knew they were seeing the private schools their own kids went to in Billings. There’d be wine and vinaigrette and small talk about interesting magazine articles, and she knew their world. They didn’t know hers. Colter, Montana, was beyond them. But Kent, Gillian thought as she pulled her phone from her purse—Kent understood.
