by BK Loren
“Call yourself on my phone, then I’ll have your number and you’ll have mine.” He pushed his phone her direction, and she plugged her numbers in fast and heard her cell ringing, and it made her look at the truck, a place she did not want to be.
“Drive,” he said. “I’ll do the same.” He hugged Brenda again. He wanted to ask her one more time to promise him that she would come back. But he knew it would mean nothing and that the only thing he had now was something he’d never trusted: hope. He hung onto that slippery trickster silently, fiercely now.
He watched Brenda grab the rearview mirror and pull herself up in the rig he’d cursed the night before. “Sonofabitch,” he said to himself, this time gently, this time with awe. His little Chevy drove off in the opposite direction of that huge rig that held his daughter.
He drove Highway 264, his hand-beaded jish sitting on the seat next to him, his heart pounding so strong he had to roll down the windows and sing as loud as he could, drumming a steady beat on the steering wheel as he sang. His voice was strong, and the mixed-up emotions resounded like a twister in his chest. The highway snaked out in front of him, curves only when curves were necessary, which was not often in this terrain. He drove and sang like that for who knows how long, his head emptying itself of daily thoughts, turning itself to old times, to Brenda, to the belief he had in everything he claimed he didn’t believe in. The beat of his own drumming moved through his body like the rumble of a Harley he’d ridden across the Sonoran Desert when he was eighteen, rode that bike all the way up into Osoyoos, Canada, a place he’d been told was the northernmost tip of the Sonoran Desert, even though the story was just a myth. That land was part of the Great Basin, a good enough place on its own, and nowhere near the Sonoran Desert. But he loved finishing the last leg of his trip in a place based on myth. The entire way, that engine had reverberated in the cavity of his torso, like he was the engine itself, making the Harley run. The beat of the drum was like that, and his love for his daughter was like that, too, the throb starting inside him, moving outward from there.
Driving fast, he came almost bumper to bumper with a rickety old VW bus patchworked with bumper stickers, rumbling down the highway. The hippies driving the VW heard him singing and started singing right along with him, and they waved when he passed them, and he waved back and kept singing loudly, drumming hard.
He would not have noticed the red light flashing behind him if the state patrol hadn’t whooped the siren a few times, too, and he wouldn’t have heard the damn siren if he hadn’t had to take breaths between his singing. He kept up his song and pulled to the shoulder of the road. He leaned out the window. “Hey, cute outfit,” he said, to the cop.
The officer was a young guy with a scrawny build for a cop, and his uniform looked all too baggy. He smiled as he spoke, but he put on an overly stern voice that did not belong to him. “Are you aware you were traveling a couple dozen miles per hour over the speed limit?”
“I am.” Raymond was still humming loudly.
“Twenty-seven miles over, to be exact.”
“Impressive. No arguments. Just write out the ticket.” He held out his palm to receive the summons.
The officer leaned in closer, showed Raymond the readout on the speed gun, and caught a glimpse of Raymond’s red boxers and cowboy boots. “Cute outfit,” he said.
Raymond chuckled, giving him props for his quick wit, but he nudged his palm closer to the cop, urging him to speed up writing that ticket.
“Got something in the back of the truck?” the officer kept on.
“Pretty clear that I do.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Why you waste your breath asking when you know you’re going to do it no matter what?” The cop nodded to Raymond now, giving him his props, too. Raymond’s foot tapped the gas pedal, testing his restraint.
The cop walked around to the back, lifted the tarp, and leapt back a few inches. “Holy shit! You got a vicious dog back here.”
“Yeah, that’s what it is. It’s a dog. And it’s vicious as hell, and I need to get it to a vet, fast.”
“You can’t take a vicious dog to a vet!”
“Everything’s vicious when it’s injured.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Stunned. Badly. Maybe a leg injury. Maybe more. Like I said, she needs help.”
The cop inched his way closer to the crate that held Ciela. She was stressed and more awake than she needed to be now. Raymond could hear her snarling, and it made him smile a little. When the cop came close to the kennel door, Ciela lunged, and that ungodly whine-like howl permeated the desert quiet. “Holy moly! That a wild dog?” the cop said.
“It’s just—it’s my dog, yeah. She’s mean as a jackal. You checked everything out now? Want to look in the cab here, too? I got nothing to hide.” He opened the glove compartment and emptied it of trash and papers.
“You in a hurry?” the cop said.
“As I said. Yes.” Raymond reached out the window and pointed to the back of the truck. “That animal’s counting its last few breaths and you’re using up a couple hundred of them jawing on and on to me.”
The cop walked closer to the cage now. “That’s not a dog. That’s a frickin wolf,” the kid cop said.
“Very likely it is, yes.”
His eyebrows went up. “Is it really a wolf?” He was excited now in the way that people who usually don’t care become excited once they see a wild animal for themselves.
“She’s one of about forty-nine of her kind left in this country. Which is about to become forty-eight because of your chattering, and I’m about to take off without waiting for your very belated permission.”
“You can’t have a wolf. Even Indians. You guys can have feathers. And certain psychotropic plants and paraphernalia like that. But you can’t have wolves.” He pulled a ticket book from his belt loops. “Would you say it was endangered? Are you endangering an endangered species?”
“Endangered? No. I’d say it was fucking massacred. I’d say this wolf and all her kind are on the brink of forever, and forever’s a bad thing, not heaven and streets paved with gold and eternity where all the special people go. The eternity I’m talking about is a fucking bad thing. Because when this wolf and her pack are gone, they’re gone forever, and if you don’t quit jawing on and making your lists and checking them twice like Santy Claus, it’s gonna be one less wolf for eternity, and that one less wolf is going to be your fault.” He took a breath. “Sir.”
After a few confused seconds, the cop said, “So you trapped and caged an endangered species?”
Raymond let a thin stream of air out through his lips, ran his hands over his balding head. “Whoo, that’s fresh. Look, mister cop, I gotta get this wolf to someone who can care for her, and that means—”
The cop’s radio shredded the air with static. He talked into it, ignoring Raymond, then pushed the kill button and asked Raymond to step out of the vehicle.
Raymond knew now. He sat stone still in the driver’s seat, shaking inside with anger and frustration. His past, one dedicated to restoring animals and land in all the wrong ways, at least according to the law of federal and state animal management, would do him in again. He had been arrested for importing animals in the past. He had a choice now, between this wolf and his own life. Between this wolf and the possibility of ever seeing his daughter again, of having a chance with her again. It was a position he’d been in too many times before, and he hated every choice available to him now. Staring the cop down hard, he stepped out of his truck, felt the handcuffs on his wrists, walked slowly to the officer’s car in his cowboy boots and boxers. “Look, Officer, you gotta hear me. That wolf’ll die unless you get her where she needs to be,” he said.
The officer nodded. “We’ll take care of it.”
It was a puny response. “You sonofabitch,” Raymond said, but he felt his powerlessness consuming him. He fell back in his seat. “Sir. Call Andy at Wilderness and Water. Tel
l him it’s Ciela, Willa Robbins’s wolf. Tell him the wolf is—”
The young cop was not listening. He was absorbed in radio talk and paperwork.
Raymond watched his truck and Ciela grow smaller in the side view mirror. He felt his chest caving, and he sang against it. He tossed back his head and started singing again, consumed with desperation. He opened his mouth and let his voice boom like a Harley going a hundred and fifty on a desert road on a summer night. The sounds came out of him like a drum, like his skin was the head of the drum and there was nothing but rage pulsing through him. “You sonofabitch, you make that call,” he said. “You get that wolf taken care of.”
The cop radioed for help. Raymond sang.
Willa
THE FALL PLUMAGE OF the aspens with their stark white trunks turned the mountain air even brighter. In the clearing sat Zeb’s cabin, small as I’d imagined, but it also looked so domestic, not like the Zeb I knew. Late-blooming pansies still spilled over the sides of old wine casks sitting around the place, and scraps of Zeb’s iron and wood projects scattered the land.
The place was dotted with police cars—two painted with silver police badges on the door, two others that were solid black. From what I could tell, they were waiting for me inside Zeb’s cabin, and it felt like an intrusion to me, though I had no claim to Zeb’s property.
I waited in the car, imagining Zeb here, living the day-to-day life he’d built for himself alone throughout the years. I tried to remember my own home out on the mesa. My home, the mesa, it all felt like an illusion to me now, as if while I was driving here, the mesa had transformed into an island too far out to sea for anyone to reach. I felt it drifting farther and farther away from me. I needed to know Cario and Magda were there, that my house still existed, that my life in New Mexico was still real, not something I’d dreamed up.
I grabbed for my phone and dialed Cario and Magda. I redialed three or four times. Then I remembered where they spent their days, even when I was away. I dialed my own home phone number. “Bueno,” Magda said. It was a salve. “Buenos días,” she said again, into my silence.
“Magda.” Her name felt so good to say.
“Willa? Dulce Niño Jesús en un pesebre con burros y la Virgen María ¿dónde estás? ¿Qué cosa loca te has ido y—”
“Magda—”
The cell phone crackled with static, and then her voice came through again. “Estamos esperando por ti aquí con Chile verde y tamales que hice hoy frescas en su casa, estamos esperando por ti y—”
“Magda—”
“Mija, where are you?”
“Magda,” I said, loudly. She stopped talking. “I miss you. Te echo de menos.” I waited for her calmer reply. But after a pause, she set off on another string of words about food and fresh roasted green chilies and how my house was falling to shambles, and then Christina’s voice came on the line, a surprise not because she was there, but because hearing her voice calmed me even more than Magda’s. I heard her, and my home felt like my home again, solid and certain. “It’s all okay here,” Christina said. “Magda’s just being, you know, Magda.” We both laughed.
I could still hear Magda in the background telling Christina to hand over the phone, and then I heard a door closing, and Magda’s voice went away. I heard jays and ravens calling. “Beautiful day here,” Christina said.
I imagined her outside with that New Mexico land and sky wrapped all around her. I wanted to tell her I missed her, that I could not wait to be home, but what came out of my mouth was, “Is my house really falling into a shambles?”
She laughed. “The TV was out. Cable line. That’s all. I came up to fix it for them.” She asked me how it was going in Colorado, and I wanted to tell her I wanted to be there, with her. But the words didn’t come to me. I sat silent.
“You coming home sometime soon, or what’s up?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I just needed to hear your voice . . . I mean, Magda and Cario’s voices. I needed to know everything’s okay with them and my house.”
There was a pause on the phone and then Christina said, “They’re fine. Magda and Cario are fine. Your house is fine.”
“And I guess you’re fine, too?”
She paused. “I guess so, yeah. I’m fine, too.”
I could hear hurt in her voice, and I wanted to change the way I talked to her, but there was something holding me back. A man in a rugby shirt tucked into his well-pressed black slacks walked out of Zeb’s house. He wore a radio receiver on his belt and waved to me officiously, all business.
“Good,” I told her, but when I hung up, I kept staring at the phone, wanting something more.
“Polo,” the man said, extending his hand to me before I could open the door of my truck. I stumbled to greet him, and before I could say my name he said, “And you’re Willa Robbins,” not a question. I nodded and tucked the phone away. Polo, a tall, lean man with a round, boylike face that seemed too big for his body, patted my back with his wide palm. “Come in,” he said. “We’re glad you’re here.”
I tried for a firm handshake and a convincing smile. “This is Zeb’s home, right? We’re meeting in Zeb’s house?”
Polo cocked his head as if the answer was self-evident. “It’s the investigation site. The place your brother fled from. Sonofabitch, we had him right here.” He pointed at the cabin and let out a high-pitched chuckle. It disoriented me. I half expected him to know I’d come here because I thought they had something on me. But I saw now that Polo honestly thought I was in on it with them, that I had agreed to help them because I was on his side and wanted to bring my own brother in. He called my brother a sonofabitch to my face. “He’s not a sonofabitch,” I told him.
The man stopped short of opening Zeb’s front door for me. He was still smiling. “What’s that, Miss Robbins?”
“My brother. Zeb. He’s not a sonofabitch.”
Polo kept up the chuckle. “Hell, we’ve been trying to pin something on that guy for one helluva long time. You know that? This or that, here or there, I’m telling you, that sonofabitch gets around, man, steals and lies and never leaves a trace, which is how we know. Where there’s damage done and no trace left behind, we know it’s Zeb Robbins.”
“You know it’s him when there’s no proof left behind?”
He nodded.
“That kind of evidence hold up much in court?” I asked.
He shook his head with a twisted kind of admiration. “Can’t get the sonofabitch into court. He’s a slick one, all right,” he said, and then we were inside the cabin.
I could smell part of the story of Zeb’s life now: the scent of tobacco, wood, leather, fire, wool, something beneath those earthy smells, too, something sweeter, everything mingling with the distinct sharpness of whiskey. Polo introduced me to three other men, and they shook my hand, but their words were a blur. Here was the kitchen table where my brother had eaten his meals over the years, the tile counter, the window that looked out on the mountains he had always loved. I decided to take a chance and interrupt the blur of sound behind me, the men making plans about how to track Zeb. “Hey, guys, could I maybe have a second? Just a few minutes to look around the place, alone?”
They all stood up in unison. “Sure, sure,” one man said. “Study the place. Get a sense of the man. Sniff him out. Good idea.”
Sniff him out? He spoke gibberish, far as I could tell, but I nodded, and the men quieted down, and everyone but Polo headed outdoors. I walked from room to room, looking at signs of my own brother’s distant life. There was a full set of dishes in the kitchen, pots and pans for more than one person. Woolen throws hung haphazardly over the sofa. After the living room, I walked into a small workroom jam packed with a table saw, some leather working tools, wood scraps here and there, and a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers on the handmade workbench. I lifted the Zig-Zags, pressed them to my face, then tucked them into my pocket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco lay next to them. I pressed my fingertip onto the tobacc
o pieces. They were so fresh that they stuck to the pad of my finger. He’d been there recently. It came clear to me now. I was on the verge of seeing my brother. Whatever obligations I had to Polo and his men, there was also this: I would get to see Zeb again.
I moved on to the bedroom, and I could tell right away that the workmanship of the quilt on the bed was not Zeb’s. The edges were not straight, and the stitching was machine done. I looked through a few of the dresser drawers: handmade elk-skin clothes, Lee jeans and flannel shirts. Along with that, Lee jeans for a woman, some cowgirl blouses.
I opened the top dresser drawer and found a sachet of rose petals. They turned me stock-still and silent, my heart sore with memory. There was nothing else in the drawer—no linens or pajamas to be sacheted, just the rose petals in the bare drawer. I lifted the petals in my cupped palms and brought them close to my face. They were dusty reddish-brown, fragile enough to flake in my hands. Even in their aged discoloration, I saw that none of them had any white at the tip. I inhaled their sweet and acrid scent, then lowered them back into the drawer, slid my palms out from under them, scraping the backs of my hands on the rough wood. On the wall there were two photos: one of Mom and Dad when they were young, the other of Raymond surrounded by his greyhounds.
I heard the faint sound of Polo’s men talking outside the window. Slowly, I stiffened up and walked back out into the kitchen. Soon as I entered, Polo sat down at the table again, and, like a sudden blast of instinct had overcome them, all the other men came barreling in from outside to join him. One man offered me his chair. I shook my head no, choosing to stand. “Someone else lives here,” I said. “Along with Zeb.”
Polo chuckled. “You’re good,” he said. “They said you were good, and you’re good.”
“His wife?” one man said.
“Nah,” Polo said. “They’re shacking up is all. Who knows how long. But the damn hippies never tied the knot.”
“But they’re together?” I asked.
Polo nodded. “The old lady’s in on it with him, too.”
