Joe stared at Owen with a face as dejected as it was angry. His voice was thick with sarcasm as he expelled whatever venom had made him drink in the first place. “The wolf is my brother. Don’t you know his spirit must run free?” He shooed the dogs. “Get going, brothers. Track deep into the woods. If you’re smart, you’ll steer clear of bitches altogether.”
“Jesus, Joe! Them are show dogs, not wolves.” Owen ran, trying to corral the scared dogs. He whistled for Hopeful. Inside the cab of his own truck, Hope saw a job that needed doing, heard permission, dived through the open window, and set to heeling. The driver of the Ford emerged from the station, a Twinkie sticking out of his mouth and in his hand, a Styrofoam cup of coffee he immediately dropped.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing, you stinking Indian?” He started into the traffic after the dogs, then apparently thought better of things, because Owen heard him yell to the clerk inside to call the police.
The Camaro that hit the unlucky dog stopped immediately. The driver was a young blond woman who reminded Owen so much of Sara Kay that he had to stop himself from calling out her name. She got out of her car, ran to the laboring dog, and bent over his body, crying, stroking its neck fur, and begging it to keep breathing, trying to will life back into the beautiful coat and glistening eyes.
“I didn’t see him until it was too late,” she kept repeating, as Owen patted her shoulders, urging her away from the dog.
“It’s all right, honey,” he said.
“No, it’s not.” She wept into the dog’s fur, and hearing her grief, staring at her pretty blouse getting streaked with blood, Owen thought his heart would break.
The delivery man had a rifle set on Joe, and the store clerk was trying to talk him out of the gun. “Joe won’t take off on you. Put the gun down before somebody gets hurt.”
Owen put his arm around the crying girl, and in his head he heard a montage of voices, noises he’d tried hard to deafen himself to. Daddy! Watch me jump this horse. Daddy? When are you coming home? Daddy? The sound of a pool cue breaking. Maggie’s singing in the summer sunshine. The impact of car meeting dog bone. The long sigh that made up the dog’s last mortal breath. Hello, my name is Owen, and I’m an alcoholic. The wolf is my brother…. The keening cry of the young woman beside him.
Hope was bursting with pride; he’d seen a job that needed doing and gotten two out of three of the escapees. Number four was still barking safe inside his cage. Owen stood at the foot of the truck while Joe sat, shameful tears streaming down his face.
“White man come up and shot my dog,” he explained in a shaky voice. “Gut-shot old White Dog, just bad enough so there weren’t time to get him to no vet. I ask him please shoot him in the fucking head and get it over with, but he took his rifle and went on back to his car.” He paused to wipe his face, then continued rambling. “We shouldn’t have burned them villages because there was children hiding in huts no one could see. I can still hear ’em calling out, like my own people calling out for water, and she’s the best-looking girl I ever saw, white or red, but I’m just a stupid Indian and nothing going to change that….”
Owen said to the driver, “He’s got some troubles.”
The Ford man took his finger off the trigger. “I don’t give a shit if he’s Jay fucking Silverheels, he owes me one purebred husky show dog, and I mean to get my money even if I have to sell his tipi out from under him.”
The sheriff’s department was there in minutes. They disarmed the driver, set Joe into the rear seat of their car, and covered the dead dog. They took the girl’s statistics before sending her on her way. Her old year was going out with a bang, all right. Owen wondered how Sara Kay was spending this night—if she had a date, a steady young man, if they were drinking just one glass of champagne or driving crazy with open containers, the radio blasting encouragement. Owen did his best to explain to the cops about Joe’s condition. The cops asked him his name.
“Owen Garrett. I don’t see why you need that.”
“You’re a witness, Mr. Garrett. We take witnesses’ names in case we need to follow up.”
“Told you what I saw.”
Impatiently they opened their pads and waited. “You want to just let us take a look at your license so we can get on to our next call?”
Owen started to protest, then realized his predicament of not having a license went much deeper. If he didn’t show it, they’d run his truck plate, discover it wasn’t registered. Either way they were asking too many questions. “I’m ashamed to say I left it home. Sorry. You guys probably have a long night ahead, what with this holiday. Too bad it had to begin this way. Can I come by and bring it to you tomorrow? Guy who runs the station will vouch for me.”
The younger officer went to the car to talk into his police radio. Maybe he was calling home, asking his young wife to check if they had enough beer in the fridge for watching the game tomorrow, but then again, he might be one of those kind who went above and beyond the call of duty and did it all by the book.
When he returned he said, “Be sure you come by tomorrow, Mr. Garrett. In the meantime, a phone number where we can reach you?”
He had no phone at the bunkhouse. Maggie had none at the farmhouse. To say so would sound falser than calling the night sky pink. He gave them Rabbott’s number and drove off, rolling his window down to signal his merge into traffic, sweat pouring down his armpits, Hopeful next to him tense as coiled wire, sensing his fear.
His mind ran in a loop, replaying the accident from the initial screech of brakes to seeing Joe’s mouth close around that beer and clear back to Minnie’s television show. He made a wrong turn, stopped the truck in the middle of a dark stretch of road, and stared at the houses in front of him, trimmed with Christmas cheer, lights in the windows, mailboxes with the names painted on in block letters. He could never do that. He’d been using the name Owen Garrett so long he almost believed it was his. He’d chosen it carefully, during the long trip from Durango to El Paso. The Owen part he’d lifted from the guy who wrote The Virginian, one of the first books he’d ever read, given to him by his momma, who appreciated a little romance to soften her hard life. The Garrett sounded enough like the guy who shot Billy the Kid that everytime he said it, he’d remember how the boy died and what he’d died for, but it was a modern name, too, you could find it in any phone book.
Time was up. It had been up a while now, and here he was, going through the motions of a regular life, pretending he had a right to one. The way you left a place was simple. You packed the essentials: three changes of clothing, no more. Razor, toothbrush, the few tools you needed to prove you could do a job. There was no room for getting sentimental. You destroyed anything that would connect you, swept away your tracks like dusting off your boots, and you went. It was best to lie low for a few days, circle around, then make your trail long and wide, boring to anyone who might come looking, to make a path through cities where people came and went in droves, just like it used to be working cattle on the big ranches. Find work as soon as possible, nothing special that might call attention to you, and act like you been there doing that job ten years. Volunteer to stay late, keep watch, work graveyard shift if they had it. Avoid bars, not just because the temptation to drink was greater than usual but because that’s where the truly desperate soaked their sorrows, and they would sell your face to anyone who asked, if it meant a bankroll for the next night’s drinking. Find a meeting, and let those one hour segments be as much medicine to your scared self as Joe’s pills were to his mixed-up thinking.
Home in the bunkhouse, Owen rolled his bedding up into a sleepingbag size-coil, two sets of clean clothes flat inside. Dishes were anonymous and could be left behind. His paperback books, traded back and forth with Joe Yazzi, their names and comments to each other on the inside cover, he burned in the woodstove. The painting Maggie did of Hope stopped him. If he folded it, it would spoil. If he left it behind, she would think all the time this had meant nothing to him, and nothing co
uld be more hurtful to her, or further than the truth. He could burn it, but then what she’d painted would never be anywhere else again. Though it wasn’t a satisfying decision, he tucked it behind the cowboy painting on the wall, the one she fancied, hoping she’d take both, discover his hidden, somehow come to understand.
When he considered the sheep and Red going hungry and untended, he felt like his head might blow. Owen Garrett was not one to mistreat his animals. What could he do? That almost broke him, and he sat down on the bare mattress, ready to give up. He knew he had to go to stay clear of the law, but suddenly it seemed neither possible nor right to pack up his truck and head off in no particular direction and leave these people behind. He needed them. He was no longer able to handle all this solitary. He needed somewhere—or someone to go toward.
Sara Kay. Make up these last seven years.
He looked up, verifying that he was alone in the cabin. Surely he’d heard the voice, not imagined it. He listened hard, but it didn’t come again. He put his face in his hands and reached out to his Higher Power, the same way he did when he wanted to drink so bad he could taste the icy-hot whiskey burning down his throat. He wanted to see his daughter. He’d never stopped wanting to make things right between them. But to go directly to her would be to put her in danger, and further, to once again postpone the step that came between him and his Program, what he really needed to do, which was deal with what had happened that night in the bar. But I’m not ready. Fluttering between his eyebrows, concentrating hard, he heard the same voice whisper, Go.
All those hours logged on his knees, never once hearing any answer that wasn’t his own echo—well, if all this sober time he’d been asking for direction, he guessed at long last, he’d gotten his wish.
Peter was no trouble to track down. After stopping off at Rabbott’s to leave his last uncashed paycheck in exchange for traveling money, Owen drove to the Youngcloud place. It seemed like everyone gathered there—from the smallest kid to the creakiest Indian. If Minnie’s television couldn’t cheer you up, chances were, Verbena Youngcloud’s coffee and conversation could make you momentarily forget your troubles. He shook the snow off his hat and cleaned his feet at Verbena’s door.
“Owen Garrett,” Verbena said. “You come ask me for date?”
He smiled, kissed her, shook his head no. Three couples sat in the blue cathode glow of the screen, watching the surging crowd in Times Square—it always struck Owen odd that they got their holiday earlier, that you could tune it in on the ten o’clock news and all the kissing would be done with, the party hats and confetti so much trash. Bonnie Tsosie sat on Peter’s lap. If they were watching anything, it was their own show. He signed to Peter, “You-me, outside.”
By the truck Owen said, “Need a favor.”
Peter frowned as if he didn’t understand. “What?”
Owen took out a voided lumber receipt from Rabbott’s, found a pencil stub in one of his pockets. On it he wrote, “Look after Red. The sheep, too. I got to take off for a while.”
Peter read, then looked up with that sneer he’d worn the first day they met. “How long is awhile?”
Owen looked down at his boot toes in the dirty snow. He didn’t know how to tell the boy that awhile could mean a length of time so unmeasurable and uncertain that whatever he’d answer would be perceived as a lie. “Awhile.”
Peter pressed his lips together. Owen tried hard to think how to say what he wanted to say next. “It’s not what I want.”
When the fury erupted, as he knew it would, the force of the boy’s response shocked him. That funny screeching voice of his made a piercing wail in the wind, and Owen looked toward the house, where any second he expected the door to open. “You dick!” Peter yelled. “Why’d you get her hopes up if you knew you weren’t going to stick around?”
“Try to understand.”
“I understand! You think because I’m deaf I can’t understand when people leave?” He began to stomp away from the truck in no particular direction, and Owen caught his shoulder and hauled him back. He was young yet. His own father had deserted him. He wanted to say, Listen here, son, one of life’s hardest lessons is learning that a man is nothing but flesh, bones, and bad decisions, but it would take too long to write, and the boy was too mad to lip-read.
Peter jerked away, and Owen again hauled him back, shoving him up against the truck. “I’m writing this note, and you’re going to sit there until I’m done, okay?”
Peter, breathing heavily, folded his arms across his chest.
Owen wrote, “Take care of the horse. I can’t leave him behind to starve. Ride him all you want. Keep him for me. Sell the sheep for firewood money for your momma. Please give Ruby to Verbena.”
Peter read the note, crumpled it and tried to throw it away with force, but being paper, the note only fell a foot away from where they were standing. “At least find the balls to tell her goodbye.”
He shook his head no. “Can’t.”
When Peter swung. Owen found the grace not to duck. The first angry adolescent fist barely glanced off his cheek, and he felt his neck creak in protest. The second punch was more surely aimed and caught him square in the nose, dazing him. He’d locked his knees and taken it fully, knowing that by doing so it would injure Peter’s knuckles, give him something sore to nurse besides what was flaring up in his heart. If the kid needed to punch him a couple times to better take what was going down, so be it, and better he learn that there was damage in swinging as well as being on the wrong end of the punch.
Blood trickled down his nostrils, the smell metallic, familiar, bringing to the surface memories of the bar, the rattlesnake headband, all of it. He wiped it away with his hands, his bandanna already packed for the road. Behind him he could hear Hope in the truck, toenails scrabbling against the window, trying instinctively to free himself to go to his undeserving master’s aid. Maggie’s boy stood in front of him, slightly hunched over, gasping, shaking his aching hand distractedly. Owen reached for it, hoping that Peter would shake his now, see that a gentleman’s agreement didn’t have to be based on total agreement, or on anything more than this sorry compromise, but bullheaded Peter would have no part. He gave Owen one last look, and in that look Owen saw the good in this boy rise up, shake itself off, then turn and walk through the blood-spattered snow toward the house, toward Bonnie and, eventually, his mother.
Owen smiled, though it made his nose ache. He was right to do this—Peter’d take care of those animals. He’d been that kind all along, but this new responsibility would find its way into any weak places and shore them up firmly.
He got into his truck and started the engine. It was going to be a long, hard drive in too many ways. He’d have to get used to looking over in the shotgun seat, seeing a three-legged dog sitting where a tall woman, one who was way too good for him, ought to be.
18
NEVER MIND WHAT THE POETS SAID ABOUT APRIL BEING THE cruelest month—obviously none of them had taken into account a Blue Dog February. Plenty of ice patches to slip on as she walked to the mailbox. Inside, there was a color postcard of the Eiffel Tower with Nori’s scribbling on the reverse, another chunk of sisterly wisdom meant to be kind, but sounding too much like an accusation to be of any comfort—Mag, I told you the cowboy would bail out on you. Forget him. That’s men for you…. She never thought of herself as Maggie anymore. Margaret tucked the card into the bottom of the mail stack. Next she uncovered an envelope postmarked Riverwall—Peter’s letters were now a weekly occurrence, full of questions he made certain she had to answer in a letter of her own. How’s my dog? Are you making sure to feed Red that special grain I bought? What do you think about Bonnie and me going to Monument Valley for spring vacation? Fine, as long as I come along to chaperon and you sleep in separate states, was what she thought, but she wouldn’t phrase her reply in exactly those words. If it was the first of the month, there would be a check from Deeter, but she no longer looked for a note to accompany it.
&nb
sp; With her mail spread out before her on the kitchen table, Margaret studied the cup of instant cappuccino she’d just made. It smelled like its label promised it would—“a magnificent blend of cinnamon and the finest blend of European coffees.” Sure, it did—somewhere in there her nose registered a slight coffee aroma. Zero cholesterol, 99.5 percent caffeine free, so low in fat it wasn’t worth mentioning, what really was the point of drinking such a concoction? She knew if she could locate the energy to lift the mug and take a sip, it would be a warming experience, which was what this cold day called for. Instead she reread Peter’s letter. Monument Valley indeed.
Before he returned to Riverwall, he had become so attentive Margaret thought she’d go insane. She hoped his behavior wasn’t an indication of how life would be when she was eighty—her son fawning over her doddering-old-lady helplessness. He’d left firewood stacked so high outside her kitchen door that when she did remove a length of wood, the gesture had to be accompanied by a strategic leap out of the way, lest the wobbly pile topple. It was true, firewood could go a long way in heating the body in winter, but there were limits as to its effect on the soul. Bless his teenage heart all the same—her son so worried that Owen Garrett’s leaving had devastated his mother that overnight he’d turned good.
She stirred the coffee, watching the mocha clouds swirl into themselves. Just because he’d gone away, as he’d warned he might, everyone—including Nori—expected she would take to her bed in a vaporous collapse, spend the rest of her life crying. But this dry sorrow, with its accompanying absence of tears, hadn’t surprised her a bit. The older you got, it seemed like juicing those lachrymal glands took serious effort. The last year and a half had depleted her reserves. Besides, what was one man’s departure compared to divorce, a son’s deafness, a sister always leaving wreckage in her wake? Ironically this was proving to be the one time Nori wasn’t completely off base—men left. Short ones, tall ones, good ones, bad ones, even mediocre ones. They looked out for their own needs first, and when it was time to move on to wherever they were going, apparently they didn’t bother saying goodbye.
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