Fall Back Down When I Die

by Joe Wilkins

  He drank again and sat and rested. He studied the wolf track, looked up every now and again, up along the rims of the box canyon, half expecting to see yellow eyes staring down at him. For the howls this morning, for the damp press of this track, they must be close. Maybe he would finally see that wolf he and Lacy had hunted.

  It was getting on in the afternoon, time to find a place to hole up for the night. He’d put some distance between him and Betts’s men. Tomorrow he might make his way north, to the highway. Catch a ride into town, turn himself in, call Maddy to see about Rowdy. He drank one last time and stood, his knees cracking, his hamstring tight enough to tear. The little muscles beneath his eye twitched, went still, twitched again. He was tired way down to his bones. Just a little farther, he told himself. A little farther and he’d rest for the night. He took up the .22 and did his best to skirt the mud, to avoid leaving any tracks of his own. As he was leaping from rock to rock, the ball of his right foot touched a slick stone and he slipped. His weight got away from him and with a wet pop his ankle turned.

  He fell hard, wild rose ripping at him as he rolled. The rifle banged against the ground, was wrenched from his grip, but his finger was yet hard against the trigger, and a bullet fired, its report ricocheting through the canyon.

  He breathed dust, smoke, and sulfur. He was on his back, his right ankle a jailbreak of pain. He laced the fingers of both hands behind his knee and lifted the bad ankle into the air, where it pulsed in his boot, bright and hot. It was the same one he’d hurt in track, the one that had never healed right and had kept him off the all-state basketball team his senior year. Pain rivered up through him, circled his hips and ribs, pooled in his guts. He ground the back of his head into the hard earth and after the hurt rose and broke and washed again through him, he pushed himself up onto his elbows.

  The .22 was a few feet away, lying there in the grass. Goddamn. If Betts’s men were anywhere close, they’d have heard that shot. He grabbed at the rifle and army-crawled toward the canyon wall, where he leaned against the cool rocks, his ankle already drum-tight in his boot. He hauled himself up, one hand on the rocks, and hobbled to the mouth of the canyon.

  It was not yet evening. Low, tin-colored clouds scudded by, darkening with shadows that had begun to pull and stretch west to east. A faint road cut the broad, grassy plain before him, and the badlands beyond were thick with pines and tortured, wind-warped rocks. The grass would hold a track, but there was nothing for it. He had to get to the rocks.

  He tried to step with both feet, but each touch of his right foot on the ground sent hot tracers of pain arcing up through him. His heart banged away. Lines of cold sweat trickled down his back, his every trembling muscle. Halfway across, he doubled over and retched, the water he’d drunk coming up warm and sour. He was nearly certain the ankle was broken. He used the rifle then as a kind of crutch the rest of the way, despite the clear mark it made, and on the other side fell to his knees and scrambled up the rocky flank of the rising hill. No use hiding his tracks now. No use at all.

  He made the top of the ridge only to find another, higher ridge, rocks heaped on rocks. The path ahead was labyrinthine, overlaid and confused by the lengthening shadows of cedars and jack pines. Crutching with the rifle, his free hand on the cold, gritty stone, he started up a crevasse. He bent himself through twisted paths and ducked overhanging bulges and leaned into impossible whorls of sandstone. After navigating a tight stand of cedars he came to a high saddle between the mountains, where he exhaled and took his bearings.

  To the south the ridge fell away and the canyon wall was vertical for maybe forty feet before angling off in a field of scree and greasewood. To the north and west the badlands lifted and turned, a mess of jack pines and sandrock that resembled nothing so much as a heap of broken bowls and plates. Likely someone could come through it. No one would. Whoever was after him would come from the east, which meant all he could do now was put his back to a rock, lay the rifle across his lap, and wait. Hope the helicopter showed up before they did.

  From pine to pine he limped on. He used the rifle to negotiate two downed trees, then made his way along a game trail that led around an outcropping of stone. There, where the trail turned west, he found what he was looking for—a small clearing and the low, dark yawn of a cave beneath the far rocks.

  He crutched toward the cave. About its mouth lay a scatter of weather-pitted rib bones. Deer, he thought. Or elk. A winterkill, anyway, a thing long dead. His foot connected in the pine duff with something hard. He balanced on his good leg and worked at the thin soil with the barrel of the .22, his movements awkward, ungainly. When he struck it again, it clinked. He moved it through the dead needles, and its dimensions clarified.

  It was a rifle.

  The night came on. The clouds blackened and lifted and thinned to nothing. Then the nail holes of stars, the brittle, copper-smelling cold, the dark, hard wind.

  Wendell had found his father’s rifle. He had found his father’s notebook. His father’s bones.

  Out in these mountains he’d come around a ridge and walked into another kind of life. One where the cacophonous hollers and shouts might fall into rhythm, where chaos and pain might signify and resolve, where things for once worked out. He wondered at the rotted wood of the rifle stock, the ashen barrel. He held his father’s bones, as if to warm them. Like the snakeskin, the clinging scraps of cloth disintegrated with even the lightest touch, and the old, tough Carhartt dusted away. Lacking dirt enough to bury his father, he gathered the bones, piled them together in the back of the cave, then laid the rotting .270 across the top of them. With his ankle, with the coming night, it was as good as he could do. The off-white of the bones, the black barrel, the dark wood.

  To see his own name there on the cover of the notebook, the first few pages of his own scratchings, penmanship exercises, a couple of sets of math problems, and then to turn a single sheet and behold his father’s gone hand: the letters blocky, wide, definite. For the shock, the embarrassment of it, he nearly dropped the notebook. He gathered himself and turned the pages. The dry air and shelter of the cave had kept the notebook well—the paper yellow and brittle but the letters and words legible. He leaned up against the rocks, laid the .22 in the dirt beside him, and in the last light began to read. Page to page, day to day. Until he arrived at the final lines, his father’s last words, which slanted off and faded as the night came on, as though rising in the dark to meet the stars.

  They’d never talked, he and his father. He’d been only a boy, but still. Later, his mother had maybe tried to talk with him a time or two, but he’d likely turned away. He’d learned too well the old rule that said it wasn’t okay for a man to let himself be open like that. Which was of course what he’d gotten in all those books, what he’d been so hungry for—the chance to be completely open. Yet here, beyond death and the wildest wish, he was being given this moment with his father. These words had been meant for him all along, and he’d found them, and despite all the time and confusions and fears coursing beneath them, they were between him and his father now, a bridge of sorts, one end in the mountains, the other end in the mountains.

  Now, in the dark, he said his boyhood lines from Macbeth once more, said them aloud and timed them just so, to both ask and answer, as if he could be at once father and son.

  —How goes the night, boy? The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.

  The light of the stars was insufficient to the task. Wendell set himself to it anyway. He pulled the old blue pen from the spiral whorls of the notebook. It had been there since his father stowed it there, he thought, stowed it there and lay down to die. He clicked it to life and put it to the paper on the page after his father’s last entry. It only scratched at first, tearing at the yellowed leaf. Soon enough, though, the ink stained the page.

  It is October of 2009, he wrote. Then:

  I am Wendell Newman, the son of Verl Newman, and like my father I am in the mountains. I have found my father in the mo
untains.

  Also, I have shot Brian Betts and killed him with this .22 I have with me now.

  I have sent Maddy Kincheloe—her father the man my own father murdered—I have sent her north toward Delphia and hope by now she is safe. She has Rowdy Burns, who is my little nephew, who I have been taking care of, who is like my own.

  I have hurt my ankle pretty bad and am no good for running. I’ll be waiting here. I hope for one of those helicopters to show tomorrow. Hope for it before those others show. I feel angry at and bad for those others. They are turned around about it all. My father was turned around about it all. You read this and you’ll know. By the end, he saw it just the same.

  I can’t see what it is I’m writing. I hope it makes any sense.

  The night is cold about me. The stars too. I am thinking now if it comes to it everything that is mine I give to my boy Rowdy Burns. Glen Hougen is a man I trust. Ask him, and he’ll see it done. Rowdy, if ever you get this I want you to know you’re a good listener, and a hard worker, and a fine boy for the woods. I love you. Your mother is having a hard spell but she loves you too. I know her. I know she does.

  Maddy Kincheloe I want to thank for helping me here in the mountains. Maddy, I am goddamn sorry for the trouble. But I am glad of all things Rowdy is with you. I would have liked to talk some more with you. Maybe yet I will talk some more with you.

  Goddamn. It has been a hard season. For me and so many. It seems there were times that were better. I don’t know. I love those long hot harvest days. I love how they come every year. Every year, I guess, until they don’t.

  I sit here in the dark and am not sure what to write.

  There’s a lot yet for me to say. I don’t know that anyone asked, but I feel it now in me. Maddy would have listened. Rowdy too. And I tell you, I would have listened back. Whatever they had to say, I’d have heard it. Every word. I wish them everything and that. Someone listening. Yes, goddamn I do.

  Verl

  Is it a month now? Two? I found the furry shit of an owl. There were bones in it. I ate them. The first thing I have eaten in some days. My head cleared a few hours. I sat down just where I was here in this high clearing a cave off in the rocks. I remembered my name. Remembered your name. Remember your name boy here it is on the back cover of this notebook I am writing to you boy the sky wide and dark and cut by stars what claws tear the holes of stars

  Tavin

  THEY LEFT BEFORE SUNDOWN, TAVIN, FREDDIE, AND NORRIS, WHILE Daniel, Toby, and Clay stayed behind, with the CPS woman. On a two-track road they drove west from the Newman place as far as their stronghold at the cave and gathered what they needed—ammunition, food, water, jackets, blankets, and a couple of shovels—and turned back, knowing Wendell couldn’t have gotten that far on foot. They drove without lights, in the true dark, and after a time they left the road and bumped over the prairie, then parked in a stand of pines in a wide canyon.

  Earlier they’d rolled the sheriff’s vehicle back behind the barn, with the deputy dead in the front seat, then locked the CPS woman, who’d pissed all over herself and wasn’t making a lick of sense, in the trailer’s back bedroom. They’d had a hard time deciding what to do with Brian. There was Tricia to consider, but they didn’t want to risk a phone call. One of the out-of-town men, Clay, had gone to the same high school as Brian and been part of the free-state movement with him down there in Oregon, and he said Brian had a younger brother in Portland, though he was one of those who’d gone off to college and forgotten where he came from. He said, too, that not six weeks after Brian’s old man had eaten the end of his shotgun, Brian’s mother up and married a Mexican and moved to California. There wasn’t anyone back home, he said, and spit. It was agreed, then, that it ought to be Tavin’s decision, and they turned and looked at him.

  All six of them were standing in a rough circle in the front room of the trailer. Brian was laid out on the carpet, his blood dark and thick as jam in the dime-size hole below his jaw. They’d all been telling Tavin what a soldier he was not to cry. Telling him how proud Brian would be. Sharp metal stars spun through Tavin’s bloodstream. He was sad, yes, but it was the rage that felt best, that felt good and clean and sure. In fact, it even seemed that because of Brian’s fall Tavin had somehow grown. He hated and loved the feeling. He fingered the medallion at his neck. Picked at the scab along his jaw. The mountains were the only thing that made sense for this. They’d bury Brian there, then find Wendell.

  By flashlight now, beneath the pines, they dug. It was slow going, the ground hard and dry, shot through with roots. Tavin thought of Daniel, Toby, and Clay back at the trailer, just sitting there, rifles across their laps, waiting for the cops or the FBI or whoever. They’d all voted for three of them to stay at the trailer. A standoff there would leave the other three more time to find Wendell in the mountains, and time, too, for those at the trailer, with a hostage and all, to get their message out, to give copies of Brian’s manifesto to reporters. Tavin was glad, though, that he was one of the ones in the mountains. He was glad, too, that Norris had come. Norris was from north Idaho and was nearly as wide as he was tall. He spoke mostly in grunts and nods, his long yellow beard mashed against his broad chest. A tracker, he had shown up ten days earlier and, to Tricia’s dismay, pitched an army-surplus tent right by the trailer. Most mornings he wandered off to chart the comings and goings of the Bull Mountain wolf pack, to ready them all for the hunt. Tavin had argued it should be just him and Norris who went after Wendell, but Freddie, the only one to cry as they stood there around Brian, insisted he should come.

  They took turns, two of them shoveling, one holding the flashlight. Three feet down, they began to scoop up plate-size disks of sandrock and knew they wouldn’t get much farther. Freddie and Tavin slid the tarp they had Brian on from the bed of the S-10, held its crinkling corners like impromptu pallbearers, and hauled him over to the makeshift grave. Given the darkness and the loose dirt all about, they were careful. But even so, the tarp, which they’d pulled from the rafters in Wendell Newman’s shed, was old, and one of the corners Freddie had ahold of began to tear with the sound of a dry breath. Brian’s body fell and rolled into the hole, landing facedown, arms and legs all cockeyed.

  Tavin caught Freddie in the flashlight beam.

  —Jesus fucking Christ.

  Freddie made to get down into the hole.

  —Don’t even think about it. You’ll just fuck it up.

  Tavin handed the flashlight to Norris and slid into the hole and turned Brian’s body over. He folded the arms across the chest, like he’d seen them do in the movies, then lifted himself out.

  Brian had known the Bible, or had at least quoted lots of things he said were from the Bible, and Tavin recited, as best he could, the ones he remembered. Norris held the light on the mouth of the grave. Freddie started crying again. Tavin bent to the shovel. He didn’t want to hear Freddie’s sniveling and didn’t want to look at Brian dead there in the ground.

  Tavin didn’t sleep so much as slide through the cold and the dark and the many visions Brian had fired in his mind. All the while he scratched at the scab on his jaw. Tricia had been telling him to stop, to quit fucking picking at it or he’d give himself a scar. Now his scratching tore the old wound open all the wider, until blood welled and stained the greasy sweatshirt he was using as a pillow. They’d been out cutting fence, and he’d been all fired up, not paying attention like he should have. When he turned his four-wheeler up a steep saddle between two hills, it tipped back ass-over-teakettle and slammed him to the ground, then dragged him through the sagebrush and cheatgrass halfway down the hill. Brian made sure he was okay, handed him a handkerchief for the oozing wound on his jaw. Remember, he told him, the land has its peculiarities. You have to know it to master it. Make it your own. Back in Oregon, Brian said, he’d seen a couple of loggers go soft, not want to fuck up a creek, say, or clear-cut a whole slope. But the land wasn’t some kind of thing you baby-talked. No, the land was what a man pulled his lif
e and wealth from. That’s what it was there for. Loggers who went soft were the ones who dropped pines across their backs. Brian took Tavin by the shoulder and said once they were done with this wolf hunt, they’d get a tractor or a dozer out here and take the top off that saddle, make a proper road.

  The night lifted. The stars shaded from diamond to cream. Off nearer the grave Freddie jerked in his sleep, whimpered and mewled. Norris came wheezing through the trees and said he’d found the trail, two sets of tracks, Wendell and the girl, not a quarter mile away. They ought to leave the S-10 behind, he said, as Wendell was sticking to the rocks, and they’d have to be careful he didn’t double back on them. They gathered from the cab everything they might need—binoculars, ammo, canteens—and Tavin slammed the door hard, the crack and whummpf sharp in the still night air. He didn’t give a damn who heard it. It would give Wendell and whoever that bitch was a chance. They would fucking need it.

  For the first half hour the trail was faint, and they had to move carefully to make sure they were on it. Then the track cut south, plain as day, and they hurried. A low howl spilled down the hills like the sound of a bell, then thinned into a high, sharp cry. Tavin had heard wolves before, when he and Brian were out in the mountains, but never so close as this. He slowed and swung his head about, as though a wolf might be in sighting distance.

  They ran on, rifles at their chests. Any moment, Tavin thought, any moment they’d come around a ridge and see them—he was goddamn sure of it. Brian had told him many times that they were all blind, his schoolteachers and playmates, most everyone. That for their fear of the truth, their shame at sucking at the government teat, they wouldn’t open their eyes and see. They were sheep is what they were, following the herd, never questioning, never realizing that they could make their own decisions, that they could just fucking stop living that way, that they could live a new way. It took only the strong shoulder of a free man to knock things off-kilter, to send the usual rules toppling like a load of badly stacked bricks. When you got right down to it, there was only your word and your will and your rifle. Everything else a lie. Do you hear me? Brian would ask. Yes, sir, Tavin would say, then quote Brian’s favorite line of Scripture back at him: Those who have eyes for seeing should see, those who have ears for hearing should hear. Tavin ran, knowing in his bones that he’d see Wendell Newman before Wendell saw him.