by BK Loren
He smiled, bent forward a little bit, and his lanky arms dangled for a moment before he palmed her on the back and invited her in. “What can I get you? Whiskey? Beer? You name it.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, no, I’m on the road and—”
“What the hell’s happening up there with Zeb?” He ignored her words and folded in the middle like a suitcase as he plopped into a sunken La-Z-Boy chair. He leaned forward, chin on his hand, squinting and engaged. “That goddamn crazy Zeb,” he said, before she could answer. He shook his head and laughed. “Must’ve been something growing up with him as a brother.”
“It was something.”
He stretched out his arm, but from where he sat, she couldn’t get there fast enough to shake it before he absently recoiled it and resumed shaking his head. “I’m Frank,” he said, still rambling on. “Yeah, that goddamn crazy Zeb, he’s the only news we get around here, you know. Don’t see much of him. But we sure hear a lot.”
She nodded.
“You know, they put parking meters along the highway here once. Like a half a dozen meters is all. So Zeb come down here one night and sawed the tops off ’em.” He laughed. “Didn’t leave a trace, but there those meters were, just naked posts with their heads chopped off. They’ll never catch him,” he said. “No way, not unless he wants to be caught. Well, hell, you know that. You’re his sister, probably got some of his ways in you too, right? You sure I can’t get you a drink?” He stood up now and poured himself a Crown Royale, showed the bottle to her. “Special occasion, right?” He poured her a shot over a single ice cube, and she took it and sat it on the side table made of an electrical cable spool. Finally, he sat back down again, and he listened.
“I’m looking for Tommy,” she said.
Frank craned his veiny neck over the top of the chair and hollered his son’s name. A teenager with a Mohawk that swept down his back like a skinny black river came in from outdoors. He wore muddied boots and had a tree tattooed on the side of his head, the roots of the tree crawling down his neck and spreading like fingers gripping his throat under the collar of his black thermal shirt. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, a tabby cat curled up in his arms.
“The mules and the horses you been taking care of for Zeb and Brenda. You got a place to keep them?” Willa asked Tommy.
“They already got a place,” the kid said. His voice was like a hiccup, restrained and way back in this throat, choppy and hiding its own kindness.
“You like those animals?” Willa asked.
“Chey, that horse. Best horse I ever rode. Zeb favors Lita. Me, I always liked Chey.”
Willa looked at Frank. “I’ll send you money to care for them.” She looked back at the kid. “If Brenda doesn’t come back in a couple of weeks, they’re yours. You take care of them.”
The kid’s eyes widened. He looked at his dad.
“That’s Zeb’s property, Ma’am,” Frank said. “Can’t be giving his shit away.”
“Zeb won’t be needing them.”
Frank leaned in toward Willa. “Dad,” Tommy said. He tried not to sound desperate or excited. But he needed to know. “Can I?”
Frank’s long body sunk back into his chair. He stared off. “They caught him? They finally caught Zeb?”
“My brother’s dead,” Willa said. She felt the words in herself, and they numbed her and split her open at the same time. She didn’t hide the few tears that started up, but sat straight and looked at Frank, who buckled over in his chair now, not sad, but angry. “Did you know my brother well?”
Frank looked up, his face red. “As good as anyone knew him, I guess. Liked him. Liked him a lot.”
Willa looked hard at Frank as if trying to see some of Zeb in him. “You know the woman living with him?”
“Brenda.” Frank laughed. “Oh, hell yeah, everyone knows Brenda.”
“Think she’ll be coming back for those animals?” She looked at Tommy. He looked like Zeb at his age, living on an edge sharp enough that it toughened his own skin but left his insides shredded and vulnerable and tired because of all the effort he put toward refusing everything.
“Brenda? Hell. No telling what she’ll do,” Frank said. “She wouldn’t knowingly hurt them animals or leave them out there all alone. But she might not be back. You just never know about her. She’s got her own code.”
Willa stood up and handed Frank a hundred dollars. “That’ll take care of them until we know if she’s coming back. And if she comes back, I’m counting on you to tell her I want to see her. I’ll write you a bill of sale for the animals in case she doesn’t show.” She looked at Tommy. “I’m leaving them to you, you know, not to your dad. I’m sure he’s a fine man, but I am leaving Zeb’s animals to you, Tommy.”
Frank agreed. Tommy said nothing to the people in the room, but he whispered something to the cat, and he glanced at Willa and then stepped over and shook her hand. If he’d talked, she was sure he would have never quit talking, never quit saying thanks to her for this small gesture. But he stayed quiet. “I’ll send money regularly for their care,” Willa said.
“Like hell you will,” Frank said. “I got Gnarly’s over there. I pull down a good wage. We don’t need no money being sent in from outside.” Willa wasn’t in the mood to push it. She thanked him and then headed toward the door. “That’s it?” Frank said.
“What else is there?” She stopped with her hand resting on the doorknob.
“No ceremony? No service for your own kin?”
“I have some business to take care of back home, then I’m coming up to arrange it.”
“No,” Frank said.
Again, Willa was not in the mood. She opened the door and started out.
“Where is he?”
Willa tried to hide her clenching jaw, her reddening eyes. She stepped back inside. “My brother?”
“Where’s Zeb?”
She squinted to understand what she thought was one rude and dim-witted question. “Like I said. He’s passed. I imagine he’s right where they left him.”
“That mountain lion take him after all?”
“No.”
“Well then there’s something left of him somewhere.”
“They’re taking care of it,” Willa said.
Frank stood over her now, and when she said this, his back curved like a hook. “They?”
“The people that set out looking for him.”
“No,” he said, before she could finish. “It’s not right.”
“Well, they’ve got—”
“They got no right. He’s your brother, man. Those sonsabitches, they got no notion of what Zeb asked to be done with his remains.”
Frank was beginning to make a bit of sense to her now.
“He doesn’t want that shit, that ceremony, that formal crap.”
Willa stopped short of saying what was on her mind, that Zeb had finally quit wanting anything. He’d done so much stealing he’d realized there was nothing he could own anyway. But Frank’s anger had fingered its way into the guilt of her, and into her heart, too, and she felt friendship and love coming out of every word Frank spoke about Zeb. “What’re you thinking?” she asked.
He pulled on a thick flannel shirt-jacket and opened the door. “Look, I have to at least open up over at Gnarly’s. Ody can take over for me once I get it opened,” he said. “You got some time to talk?” Willa stood up and followed him on the short path up to the highway where Gnarly’s was located.
She sat on a bar stool while Frank started a fire in the wood stove, opened the cash register, and did whatever he had to do to get the bar ready. She didn’t know if there was a spirit to be passed on, but if there was such a passing, she felt like it might be now for Zeb. While she sat there with Frank, clinking glasses and cutting fresh limes, it was as if Zeb were there, talking with her, telling that same story about the fox.
But this time, when the story came to her, Zeb’s life had ended. She remembered the whole of it now, how the
fox lay bloodied on Zeb’s chest, and her picture of his life shifted. Her picture of her own life growing up with him shifted too, the differences between her and her brother and how they viewed the world. The connection they’d shared remained. But she was different than he was, had been since the beginning. The choices she had made with her mother were not the same as the choices Zeb had made. She understood that now, and she had learned it from him.
From then on, whenever she told the story of the fox, she’d tell it all the way to the end. Because she understood now that it was not true that you can’t change the past. You tell a story different than you told it before, you tell it without any gaps or omissions or parts where you make up your own twist at the end, and the past changes. You tell it true, and it changes the present and the future, too. It changes your life. Like freeing a fox from a trap.
WHEN FRANK FINALLY CAME over and sat next to her, she was already remembering Zeb differently, more honestly than she had over the decades they’d been apart. Maybe more honestly than ever. His contradictions were final now, and she embraced them wholly.
Frank was a jittery man. Nervous energy poured out of him, accounting for his lanky frame. He was a kind man, but he had these jitters, even when he seemed otherwise calm. He sat next to her, his foot tapping the bar stool as he spoke. “They haven’t taken his body away yet, right?” he said.
“Right,” Willa said.
He convinced her over the next half hour that he knew what Zeb would have wanted. It was out of the question for Zeb to leave a will or any directions for burial. “But he sat right here less than a week ago and pretty much said what he wanted,” he told her. “He was telling that story, knowing, knowing he was going to die,” Frank said, “He knew what he had planned. Right? He was saying how that roadie had been loyal to Parsons. He was asking the same of us. Right?”
He said it was a friend’s duty to oblige. Wild with some kind of adoration for Zeb, Frank was set on some crazy idea, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. She was not convinced she should try to stop him anyway.
She told Frank where Zeb’s body had been found, under the cliffs where the lion had sometimes been seen. “But it was hypothermia,” she told him. “Not the lion.”
SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW long it would take Frank to make his way up the mountain, or even if he would actually make the trek. She didn’t know what Frank would find, if anything.
She spent the night in a roadside motel with six rooms. She slept late the next morning, exhausted from the days before. In the afternoon, she headed out. The road twisted downward, and the mountain silhouettes loomed in her rearview mirror.
three
The Return
I DON’T THINK ANYONE ever does someone else’s dying right. There’s no telling if we do our own right, and my guess is that matters less anyway. On the highway heading south, I rested my hand on a note Mom had written, something she left for all of us before she died, something I’d carried with me ever since. I don’t know why I never showed it to Dad and didn’t tell Zeb about it, even when he asked. Maybe I felt like he was looking for something that would answer his questions, and I knew the nothing and the everything that this note answered.
I have to leave now, but please know I’ll be with you always. When you hear meadowlarks in the spring and see geese flying across the field in the fall, think of me. But please don’t be sad. I always wanted you to be happy. Remember I will love you always. There were so many things I wanted to do still, so many things left to say to all of you. I wasn’t afraid of dying. It was just leaving all of you that was so hard. We can’t see beyond, but this much I know: I loved you all so much, and it was heaven having your love in return.
I think because of the meadowlark I buried, because of the stealing and the broken promises, I wanted to keep this one thing for myself. It’s selfish. If I’d known Zeb was dying, I would have shared it with him. That’s the story I’ll tell now, because revision is always cleaner than the first pass. But the perfection of it, if we could live it, wouldn’t leave any grit in the wound to remind us of what we had lost. Right now, driving, I don’t believe we ever really want to heal. We just want to move on, carrying our wounds with us, imperfect and moving ahead.
Before I head home, I drive one last time past the field where Zeb and I grew up, where Mom grew up before us, and her parents before that. Any imprint we had on this place is lost now, buried under so much of what we don’t need. But that matters less than the imprint it made on us, and I’m grateful for that now. Without the grit in the wound, I might be able to forget it. But it stays with me, the whole field and the stars and the meadowlarks and the green-sweet smell of new grass in summer and the musty scent of the wet-and-dead grass in winter, and the fish swimming in the muck in January and jumping like praying hands out of the water in June. None of it is lost. None of it can be stolen.
I drive past the field and to the house where Zeb and I grew up. The drapes are open, and I can see my father sitting in his chair. This is the only way I have seen him since I left home, through the window, sitting in his chair. I park the car, take the note Mom wrote, and carry it to the door. I knock. I wait. I want to peer in the window from this closer distance, but it feels like an intrusion. And so I wait.
There’s nothing. No answer. Not even footsteps. I take the note from my pocket, and I wedge it between the seal on the door. I walk away.
I imagine my father finding the note. I imagine him being alone when he learns of Zeb’s death, of reaching out to me when he understands what happened. For a moment, I even imagine seeing him again, talking with him.
I drive my truck away from my home and take the highway south. I drive through the open prairie where pronghorns graze and the Air Force Academy is having some kind of practice. Low flying planes strafe the land, and helicopters sputter overhead. Occasionally, a skydiver, or a group of skydivers, floats down to the prairie. Their floating doesn’t look like practice for war. It looks almost beautiful, the way the soldiers hanging from those gliders seem as if they have chosen this falling, this landing back on earth. It takes so much machinery to ascend, and so much grace to return to land.
I wait for the moment when my own life will return to me. When the permanence of Zeb’s loss will shift the way I live now—will shift my life permanently—but will also send me back to my day to day life. It happens when I hit the New Mexico border. I know it will happen in layers, but the first shift I notice takes place when I leave “Colorful Colorado” and enter “The Land of Enchantment.” I know there is a life waiting for me here and that the life will look different now than it ever has before, and it will remain different, thank god. I wait for the tectonic shift to lock into place inside me, to form some new continent I can stand on. But for now, all I feel is the shifting. I want to return here, to my home. I want this life.
The thing I notice: When a part of you empties out, it feels hollow, for sure, but it also feels good, the wonder of what will fill that place, in a different way, but all the same.
By the time I hit the border, stars fill the black sky, and I feel three strands of my life pulling me home: The first is Magda and Cario. They are my everyday, the ones I take for granted and who take me for granted because there is something necessary in this—the assumption that, yes, they’ll be there, no matter the misunderstandings or the offenses between us. I don’t know them well. I don’t know their pains and their losses. What I know is the path they walk daily and what they do to pass the time day-to-day. They walk to my house. We cook. We share a meal and some conversation. It is glorious, this passing of time without worry, without meaning. Having some unscrutinized part of my life makes life not only worth living, it is living. Maybe it’s the heart of it all. The scrutinized life is overrated.
And then there is Raymond. I could turn the opposite direction on this road and see him. I think of what Zeb told me, that Raymond has killed wolves. I want to forget Zeb ever said it. I don’t know which is more impor
tant, the truth, or the love that the truth could destroy. For now, I’m betting on the love. I’m trusting in Raymond. But I’ll wait and see.
The third strand is the wolves. I need to know they have survived. What they have become to me—I can’t put a finger on it. They are every strand I have ever lived all woven into one long braid of time. They are, like Raymond says, a connection to a past that goes beyond my own past. They are wild, and they are completely dependent on us, on our every decision. The only truth they know is hunger; their only right or wrong is survival; their only belief is the day as it comes to them. It’s not how I want to live. But I need them to live that way, to remind me that everything beyond this is gravy.
I pick up my cell phone, and it feels foreign. Even still, I see the familiar icons that tell me Cario and Magda called nineteen times while I was out on the mountain, looking for Zeb. They never call me on my cell phone, except in emergencies. It’s a difficult decision to make, given the attachment and loyalty I feel to the wolves. But regardless of what Zeb said, I know Raymond will take care of the wolves. What I want most is one of Magda’s enchiladas smothered in chili verde with some homemade chorizo, frijoles, and plenty of empty conversation. Maybe some silence. Or some stupid TV to annoy me. I want to be annoyed by something meaningless. I consider going to Raymond’s first, but instead, I take the turn toward the mesa that is my home.
I hit the dirt road that winds up the side of the mesa just as the moon slips out from under some clouds. Holy shit. I had forgotten the feel of this gravel popping under my tires, the sound it makes as it rumbles through the truck and up into my chest, jostling my breathing in the most beautiful way. The smell of sage has never been my favorite, not in and of itself. It smells, to me, like a closet of sweaty clothes, and I’ve complained about it to Cario and Magda. But right now, it is the sweet and welcome stink of home. There is the shadow-red mesa pasted flat against the indigo sky. A few coyotes yip.
