Theft

by BK Loren

  Chet stops cold now. He stands in the clearing, turning in a circle, looking for the source of the gunfire. Zeb walks toward Chet, his rifle hanging at his side. “You fucking asshole, it’s the middle of fucking deer season and you’re fucking target practicing?”

  “There’s no need for that kind of language,” says Zeb’s dad, and Zeb is too angry to even laugh at that Howdy-Doody response. He looks behind him, sees his father waving at Chet, saying hello like a friendly neighbor.

  Dolly comes running out of the house now. She’s got her frilly apron on, and her hands are white with flour, and she’s cooking Chet a fine meal, no doubt. She waves toward Zeb, smiles like she’s greeting the president himself into her home. Chet hears her voice, turns around, and tells her to get back into the house. “I’m target practicing,” he says. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s dangerous.”

  “Oh, now it’s dangerous,” Zeb says. “Two seconds ago me and my dad were ducks in your fucking shooting gallery. But now it’s dangerous. Good thing you couldn’t hit a goddamn elephant two feet in front of you.”

  “Your boy’s got a mouth on him,” Chet says, to Zeb’s dad.

  “Better watch it, Chet. That’s my son you’re talking about.” Zeb hears his father’s voice like a cyclone rushing through his head.

  “Better keep a leash on him,” Chet says.

  “Now, Chet,” Dolly says, admonishing him while at the same time smiling at Zeb and his dad.

  She doesn’t have time to know what hits her when Chet turns on her, grabs her arms so tight that his fingers dig through her sweater and into her flesh. He pulls her close to his face and says through clenched teeth, “I said get back in the house.”

  “Get your fucking hands off her,” Zeb says.

  Zeb can see his father stepping aside now, half-stunned, still trying for the friendly smile, anger and confusion spilling out of him, and that’s when Chet turns back to the two men. He lets go of Dolly and points the pearl-handled handgun at Zeb. Right then, Zeb sees his own father step toward Chet, asking Chet to stop, and Chet has the gun.

  And then Dolly walks up to Chet and says, “Who are you kidding? Put that thing down. You look silly. That’s the Robbinses, honey. That’s our next door neighbors, Zeb and Hal Robbins,” and she walks right between Chet and Zeb, no fear of the gun. She takes Zeb and Hal by the hand, saying, “Come on in. I’ve got coffee and cookies inside,” and that’s when Chet does his favorite trick. He grabs her by the hair, almost lifts her off her feet. When he lets go, he slams her to the ground, her bones crack, you can hear them, and Chet doesn’t see that Zeb’s up on him now too, doesn’t see that Zeb is about to take that gun back from him, and his father is still back there trying to be a good neighbor, but Dolly is on all fours, blood streaming from her nose and hands. Zeb catches sight of the blood now, and he elbows Chet in the face, grabs the gun, and the stupid sonofabitch wrestles with Zeb. He knows Zeb already beat him, he knows it, but he keeps coming at Zeb and calling Dolly a bitch and saying he’s going to teach Zeb a lesson, and that’s when Zeb stops. He takes the handgun and presses it to Chet’s head. He pulls the trigger.

  IN THE AFTERMATH THERE’S just silence. Zeb can’t hear anything now except his own breathing. He wants to kneel down, to beg forgiveness from Dolly, but Dolly seems a part of it all. Her eyes go wide and she looks scared, and it’s like she has absorbed some of Zeb’s guilt, his bad feeling. She is the first one to move. She bends down and holds Chet’s bleeding head. Tears come. She holds her husband’s lifeless body. “I’m sorry,” Zeb starts saying, and then he can’t stop saying it, and he realizes he’s not saying it aloud anyway. It just plays over and over in his head. Then Dolly stands up. Tears slice her plump and reddened cheeks, and she starts walking in circles, then she beelines for Zeb. “Give me the gun.”

  Stunned, Zeb does what she says. She takes the gun and rubs it in the snow. She hands it to Zeb, places it right into his gloved hand. “Put it in Chet’s right hand,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Put the gun in Chet’s hand.” She commands him. She is suddenly stronger than all of them, and Zeb does what she says. He bends down and wraps his hand around Chet’s hand. This is the hand that beat the dog, that beat Dolly, the hand that he has killed, and it makes him want to throw up. He stays stoic and strong, but in his gut he wants to puke. He knows what Dolly is doing. He doesn’t know if she’s protecting him, or if she’s thinking about how many years she’s been beaten. It doesn’t matter. Zeb wraps his own hand around Chet’s and let’s go of the gun.

  “He’s been shooting that gun all day,” Dolly says. “No one will know, Zeb. Know one will know. Now leave,” Dolly says. “Get out. Both of you.”

  Zeb and his father stand motionless. Then Zeb grabs his father’s shirt sleeve. “We need to help her,” he says. “We need to help Chet.”

  Dolly steps up close to him. Her entire body shakes, and she seems bigger than Zeb can remember her being. “Go. Now,” she says in a whisper that is so strong and threatening that both men move away from her, Zeb leading the way.

  A few minutes later, Zeb hears footsteps. He does not have the gun and Dolly does, and he hears footsteps and he turns. She is behind him and his knees weaken. She comes at him strong and she is sobbing now. She hugs him. She squeezes his whole body tight and presses her sobbing face into his chest. Then she backs up, pushes him away, and walks back toward Chet’s body.

  “Son,” Zeb hears his father say, but it’s like a dead hum that goes nowhere in him. “Son!”

  Zeb keeps walking. By the time they get back to the deer, the father has quit calling to Zeb. Zeb knows he has to leave his home now. He knows this is the last time he will hunt with his father, that this is the last time he will have Thanksgiving with his family, that if he sees his Mom and sister again, it will be the last time he sees them. The deer is heavier now, even though it is hollowed out. It feels weighty and full of guts and heart and blood and bile, even though it has been relieved of all those things. He looks back at it as they walk. Zeb and his father carry the deer through the woods, back to camp.

  two

  Wolves

  UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, no pack was stable. Pack members disappeared sometimes like vapor in the desert, like the dust devils that started up and turned to ghosts in the same in-out breath of the land. Sometimes new pups were introduced and accepted into a pack. Centuries of tradition in their clans had been fractured. They would change, adapt, or they would die off forever.

  There was something about the word forever that they could taste. They could smell it in the smoke trailing from the fireplaces of new suburban homes built at the edges of the wild, in the star-hazed sky that turned cold sooner than it had in centuries past, the winds that shredded the same lands they once caressed, the earth itself frayed at the edges, pulsing like a wound, and fighting to survive all the same. They could taste it in the bony meat of a dozen scrawny rabbits and the fading memory of the heft of a single elk, in the scraps of the elk kill they had traditionally left for scavengers. It was in their nature to feed what remained around them, what depended on them, the same things they depended on.

  In this climate, within these confines, only the alpha female and the alpha male would mate, and there was room, on this slender ground, for only one of each. Their survival depended on scarcity and proliferation, simultaneously. Every pup must be strong. They killed to eat, and in that act, encouraged life in their habitat to flourish, a paradox like proliferation and scarcity held in one human fist.

  With their loping canine gaits they feigned ease, even arrogance, as they crossed the earth, all four paws leaving the ground for an instant with every stride. But within that split-second suspension lay the solid desire to return to earth, the dirt beneath their feet, the ground that gives rise to all life. They followed the deer and elk, kept the animals on the move, which let the land beneath the hooves of their prey replenish as they all moved together with what fed them, a relation
ship of understanding, a simpatico of survival.

  Mornings, Ciela and Hector would rise from the horizon like smoke coming up over a desert ridge, you could see them, their doglike heads familiar, almost human in their gaze, their awareness. They had this working for them and against them: their doglike appearance to humans, half-familiar, wholly wild. They were the essence of evil on the one hand, and on the other, the only animal humans saw as able to take in and raise children, the myth of the wolf-child. Their coats were tufted here and there, clumps of grey fur making them look scrappy, lean at the haunches, bony and almost hunched at the shoulders like silhouettes of the buffalo that once grazed the land with the elk, the shadows of everything that had come before cast over them now. Their evolution had narrowed the set of their eyes even closer together, their line of sight designed for the tunnel vision of predators, not the wide, two-sided eyes of prey, the softened gaze that can see the world as two wholes coming together at the center. Like humans, the wolves had the eyes of hunters, set forward in their heads, with only a slight sense of periphery.

  Ciela and Hector swung their heads low as they loped, the pack following the two of them, their gaits becoming one, a weave of long, scrawny legs looping the horizon like threads that entwine and connect, their very presence blanketing the land.

  Ciela had been with this pack since birth, born in the wild, and she took over the place of the alpha female when the former lead female was poached. Hector had come from the Sipapu pack into the West Canyon pack a few months later. He easily fought off the old alpha male who now stayed on the periphery of the pack, alone, and by doing so, Hector kept the Sipapu pack from invading the territory of the West Canyon wolves. If there had been more territory, the invasion would have gone on without question. But knowledge came to them through their noses, and they could smell devastation, and they could smell their own land curling up and pulling in at the edges, shrinking even as the rest of the world expanded. They knew without naming that resources were limited. They sensed things and lived within their means.

  But they had no sense of imposed boundaries. For years they had been shot and killed if they crossed over an arbitrary line that cast them outside the Días de Ojos National Forest. Their home territory, historically, was huge, covered most of the North American southwest, and with their instincts they could read land like a story, the earth itself reciting a narrative over and over again, one of survival and balance—and now, of warning.

  These days the elk had grown slow. They stood with a lazy confidence that eroded their wildness, grazing for months in one meadow or copse before moving on. Without large predators to keep their senses piqued, their animal minds had grown sluggish, cattle-like. They lived on the seam of domesticity. Human hunters would come once a season and take the strongest of the herd, and through this kind of unnatural selection, their overall stature had diminished. Smaller elk remained to mate when the leaders were taken.

  But the wolves were constant, like weather, and they took the weakest, leaving the strong to proliferate. It would balance out, said the narrative of the earth. It would find its middle ground.

  The wolves were constant. That is, until they weren’t. Until the families they’d chosen and formed and fought for and loved grew fragmented and estranged, the fabric of them fraying from the outside, in. Ciela and Hector couldn’t succumb to that kind of imposed loss. Ciela and Hector had led their pack into a new territory, outside the bounds of the one provided for them. They had slipped unseen and unmonitored past Días de Ojos National Forest boundaries. They had found a way to survive.

  Willa

  TO GO BACK TO the place I was born. Time had never drained it from memory. The black highway I’d traveled to get here was the tangled umbilical cord I’d tried to sever decades ago. They say there are no geographical borders drawn on a place itself, that the buildings and landmarks are the only things that make it readable. But I could have traveled a buildingless landscape and still found my way here. It was the feel of the place beneath it all, the way the grit of this terrain grasped my gut.

  I pulled off the highway, and I saw a Dairy Queen where Mom’s childhood home used to be, a Taco Bell in the exact place where Zeb and I used to fish. I parked the car, walked in, and ordered my ninety-nine-cent burrito. I could feel every story this land had ever told, the most vivid memories rising up like night-dreams, the way those kinds of images never really found their way to words. They haunted around inside you like spirits looking for form. But no words could embody them.

  I trashed the rest of my burrito and walked out to my truck. I sat for some time before I turned the key in the ignition. The house I grew up in was a block away. My father had remained all these years, though he had not spoken to me and would not return my calls. By all accounts, he’d stopped talking to everyone. Still, I drove the block to see the house where I’d grown up. Chet and Dolly’s rose bushes were still there. Every house had a green lawn now. Still, the houses looked even smaller than they did back then, more rundown. The whole neighborhood looked as if it had always been an afterthought, a quiet violence seething beneath it.

  I pressed the gas pedal and drove away. At the stoplight in front of Johnny’s, I pulled to the side of the road. I felt a desperate longing for Magda and Cario, for my home with them on the mesa where I lived now. I picked up the phone and dialed Magda. No answer. A lump ached in my throat. I fumbled with my phone, flipped it open, then closed it, then opened it again and checked for messages. None. This time not even Christina had called. It felt like a small stroke of genius to me when I remembered I could call Raymond. Raymond always answered his phone.

  “Hey, I was just about to call you,” he said when he answered, and the connection felt like a lifeline. “Taking the day off work tomorrow. I’ll be visiting our wolves bright and early.”

  “Good, good. Thank you.”

  “Not doing it for you, my friend. All due respect. I’m doing it for our wolves.”

  He made me smile. “Those wolves haven’t killed livestock, you know. I mean, not by habit. They hunt.”

  “Hey, is the sky blue?”

  “What?”

  “While you’re telling me things I already know, I thought you might answer that.”

  I laughed a little and so did Raymond. “Just make sure Andy knows those wolves are good wolves.”

  “Andy,” he scoffed.

  “Well, he’s the only one who can protect them.”

  “Oh, that’s right. He’s the man to trust the wolves’ lives to. He’s the head of the agency that’s rehabbing them. Same agency that’s killed more than half of the same wolves they paid to rehab and re-release. Good system your people have there.”

  “Is the sky blue, Raymond?”

  He laughed. “Just sayin. Anyway, I’m on my way right now. Like I said, they’d have to step over me to get to those two wolves and their pack. You know that.”

  I could hear him walking to his truck, the outside air crackling through a bad cell phone connection. His voice was all static, and I heard him saying, “Hello, you there? Can you hear me?” and then the line went dead. It felt like being dropped from great heights. I was alone again.

  I sat in the truck, remembering what I had wanted to say to Raymond, a thing I had never told anyone.

  Three years after Zeb left home, with no medication to soothe Mom’s pain and Dad working three jobs to try to make life better for all of us, I helped Mom, like she had asked. I was there with her to the end, when the last sky she ever saw was the last sky she would ever see; when her breath turned quiet. I did not want to let her go. I wanted to hold her face in my palms and pull her close to me and tell her I never, ever, ever wanted it to end. But she asked me and I said yes and I helped her; I honored her choice. I gave her the pills she had asked for because she could not hold them in her hands, and she could not drink water without my help, and I sat with her and waited and held her hand as the life went out of her.

  My father knew. It was s
omething he figured out on his own. He covered for me like he had covered for Zeb. But he never forgave me. In the final years when I lived with him, he talked less and less to me. By the time I left home on a college scholarship, he had pretty much quit talking altogether.

  I wanted to tell him I did not understand what I was doing at the time. It was a thing I wanted to take back as soon as I had done it, another act I didn’t see the whole of until it was over and the permanence of it came clear. It never faded. It just kept playing clearer and more vividly through my mind across the years, something permanent in the face of everything else that was not permanent.

  I wanted to tell Raymond that. I wanted my own confession.

  Brenda

  BRENDA STOOD IN THE gravel lot, wind kicking up grit from the ground and blasting her eyes that were turning pink along their tender edges now. Peterbilts and Macks rumbled, idling, checking in from the road, rolling out. She looked up at that asshole Mike, six-feet-plus and every jean-flannel-clad inch of him made of pure sonofabitch. “You got me or you got nothing, Mike. Zeb is not available,” she said.

  “You telling me you’re driving his rig? You got a license?”

  She handed him Zeb’s papers with his name whited-out and filled in with her own, and a delaminated driver’s license with her photo jimmied into it to make her look legal sitting in the cab of a sixteen-wheeler.

  Mike studied the paper and the license. And then he smiled, his deeply pocked, ruddy face creasing around the mouth. “Not bad, not bad.” He handed the documents back to her, nodding his head and patting her on the back like an old friend. “All right, fine. Let’s see what we got for you, Bren.”