Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91

by Sean Williams

  “He could have,” I said.

  “Oh, Michael,” Mom said. She started to say something else, but then she stopped. “Talk to Letty,” she said, and turned and left the room.

  I listened to Mom’s footsteps going upstairs, and after a minute Letty said, “Mike, it’s not safe to go out there now. You know that, right? It wouldn’t be safe even in a truck. Not in this weather. And in the snow, you can know exactly where something is and still not be able to get at it.”

  “I know,” I said. “Like that hiker last year. The one whose body they didn’t find until spring.” Except that the hiker hadn’t had a transmitter, so they hadn’t known where he was. It didn’t matter. For ten days after he went missing, the cops and the BLM had search teams and helicopters all over the mountain, and never mind the weather.

  “Yes,” Letty said, very quietly. “Exactly.” She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t. “That guy was dying, you know. He was in a lot of pain all the time. His wife said later she thought maybe that was why he went out in a storm like that, while he could still go out at all.”

  Letty stopped and waited again, and I kept my head down. “He went out in bad weather,” she said finally, “near dark. It’s snowing now, and you were getting ready to hike up the mountain when your mom got home at seven-thirty. Michael?”

  “Bobo could still be alive,” I said fiercely. “It’s not like anybody else cares. It’s not like the state’s going to spend thousands of dollars on a search and rescue!”

  “So you were thinking—what?” Letty said. “That you’d go up there and get everybody hysterical, and get a search going, and while they were at it, they’d bring Bobo back? Was that the plan?”

  “No,” I said. I felt a little sick. I hadn’t thought about any of that. I hadn’t even thought about how I was going to get Bobo back down the mountain once I found him. “I just—I just wanted to get Bobo, that’s all. I thought I could go up there and it would be okay. I’ve hiked in snow before.”

  “At night?” Letty asked. Then she sighed. “Mike, you know, a lot of people care about Bobo. Your mom cares, and I care, and Rich Mills cares. He was a sweet cat, and we know you love him. But we care about you, too.”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. I wasn’t sitting in the mouth of a mine during a snowstorm. I wasn’t registered with the sheriff’s office.

  “You wouldn’t be fine if you went up on Peavine tonight,” Letty said. “That’s the point. And even if Bobo’s still alive—and I don’t think he can be, Michael—you can’t help him if you’re frozen to death in a gully somewhere. Okay?”

  I stared at the handheld, at the stationary signal. I thought about Bobo huddled in the mouth of the mine, getting colder and colder. He hated being cold. “Is it true that when you freeze to death,” I said, “you feel warm at the end?”

  “That’s what I hear,” Letty said. “I don’t plan to test it.”

  “I don’t either. That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Good. Don’t do anything stupid, Mike. Search and rescue might not be able to get you out of it.”

  I felt like I was suffocating. “I was putting food in my pack. An entire box of energy bars. Ask Mom.”

  Letty shrugged. “Energy bars won’t keep you from freezing.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good. And one more thing: don’t you pay any mind to those Schuster and Flanking kids. They’re slime.”

  I jerked my head up. How did she know about that? She raised an eyebrow when she saw my face, and said, “People talk. Folks at my office have kids in your school. The bullies are slime, Michael, and everybody knows it. Don’t let them give you grief. Your mother’s a good person.”

  “I know she is.” I wanted to ask Letty if she’d told Mom about Johnny and Leon, wanted to beg her not to tell Mom, but the way adults did things, that probably meant that telling Mom would be the first thing she’d do.

  Letty nodded. “Good. Just ignore them, then.”

  It was easy for her to say. She didn’t have to listen to them all the time. “That wasn’t why I was going out,” I told her. “I was going after Bobo.”

  “I know you were,” Letty said. “I also know nothing’s simple.” She folded her topo map and stood up and said, “I’d better be getting on home, before the weather gets any worse. Tell your Mom I’ll talk to her tomorrow. And try to have a good weekend.” She ruffled my hair before she went, the way Mom had when Bobo got the chip. Letty hadn’t done that since I was little. I didn’t move. I just sat there, looking at the blip on the handheld.

  After a while I went up to my room. David hadn’t come back yet, not that I cared, and Mom’s door was closed. I knew she was sleeping off the shift. I also knew she’d be out of bed and downstairs in two seconds if she heard David coming in or me going out. She’d hung the front and back doors with bells, brass things from Nepal or someplace she’d gotten at Pier One. You couldn’t go out or come in without making a racket, and you couldn’t take the bells off the door without making one, either. “You learn to sleep lightly when you have babies,” Mom told me once, as if either me or David had been babies for years. And our windows were old, and pretty noisy in their own right. And it was snowing harder.

  So I just sat on my bed and stared out the window at the snow, trying not to think. My window faces east, away from Peavine, towards downtown. I couldn’t see the lights from the casinos because of the snow, but I knew they were there. After a while it stopped snowing, and a few stars came out between the clouds, and so did the neon: the blue and white stripes of the Peppermill, which stands apart from everything else, south of downtown, and the bright white of the Hilton a bit north of that—“the Mother ship,” Mom always calls it—and then, clustered downtown, the red of Circus Circus and the green of Harrah’s, which Mom calls Oz City, and the flashing purple of the Silverado, where Dad used to work.

  Dad loved this view; he was so proud that we could look down on the city. He couldn’t stop crowing about it to all his friends. I remember when he brought George Flanking and Howard Schuster, Leon and Johnny’s dads, into my room so they could look out my window, too. So they could see “the panorama.” That was what Dad called it. We’d never been able to see anything from our old windows, except more trailers across the way. “I’m going to get us out of this box,” Dad said when we lived there. “We’re going to live in a real house, I swear we are.” And then we moved here, to a real house, and pretty soon that wasn’t big enough for him, either.

  I shut my blinds and flopped down on my bed. Someplace a dog had started to bark, and then another joined in, and another and another, until the whole damn neighborhood was going nuts. And then I heard what must have set them off: the yipping howl of a coyote, trotting between houses looking for prey.

  When we bought our house five years ago, the street ended a block from here, and that was where the mountain started. Winter mornings, sometimes, we’d see coyotes in our driveway. Now the developers have built another hundred houses up the street, with more subdivisions going up all the time: fancy houses, big, the kind we could never afford, the kind that made Dad’s eyes narrow, that made him spend hours hunched over his desk. The kind he talked about when he went out drinking with George and Howard, I guess. I don’t know who’s buying those big houses; casino and warehouse workers can’t afford places like that. Mom could, maybe, if she weren’t saving for nursing school. The only people I can think of who might live there are the ones who work for the development companies.

  So we don’t get coyotes in our driveway anymore, but they’re still around. They travel in back of the houses, next to the six-foot fences people put around their yards. There’s still sagebrush between the subdivisions, and rabbits, and you can still follow those little strips of wildness to the really wild places, up on the mountain.

  Coyotes are unbelievably smart, and they’ll eat anything if they have to, and it doesn’t bother them when people cut the land into pieces. They like it, because th
e boundaries between city and wilderness are where rodents live, and rodents are about coyotes’ favorite food, aside from cats. So when we cut things up for them, there are more edges where they can hunt. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve killed most of the wolves, who eat coyotes when they can, or that coyotes look so much like dogs. They can sneak in just about anyplace. Dr. Mills says there are coyotes living in New York City now, in Central Park. There are millions of them, all over the country.

  Ranchers and farmers hate them because they’re so hard to kill, and because even if you kill them, there are always more. But I can’t hate them, not even for eating cats. They’re smart and they’re beautiful, and they’re just trying to get by, and as far as I can tell, they’re doing a better job of it than we are. They know how to work the system. That’s what Dad thought he was doing, but he wasn’t smart enough.

  I lay there, listening to that coyote and to all the dogs, still trying not to think, but thinking anyway: about what a weird town this is, where you get casinos and coyotes both, where the developers are covering everything with new subdivisions, but there’s still a mountain where you can die. After a while it got quiet again, and I peeked out the window and saw more snow. A while after that I heard the bells jangling downstairs, and heard Mom’s feet hitting her bedroom floor and thudding down the stairs. When she and David started yelling at each other, I pulled my pillow over my head and finally managed to go to sleep.

  It wasn’t snowing when I woke up on Saturday, but it looked like it might start again any minute. The transmitter signal still hadn’t moved, and when I thought about Bobo out there in the cold, I felt my own heart freezing in my chest. I heard voices from downstairs, and smelled coffee and bacon. Mom and David were both home, then. I threw on clothing and grabbed the handheld and ran down to the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” Mom said, and handed me a plate of bacon and eggs. She was wearing sweats and looked pretty relaxed. David was wearing his bathrobe and scowling, but David always scowls. I wondered what he was doing up so early. “Any change on the screen, Mike?”

  “No,” I said. I knew she didn’t think there ever would be, and I wondered why she’d asked. David’s face had gone from scowling to murderous, but that was all right, because I planned to be out the door as soon as possible.

  “Okay,” Mom said. “We’re all going up there after breakfast.”

  “We are?” I said.

  “Your brother’s coming whether he wants to or not, and I asked Letty to come too. Rich Mills has to work this morning. Unless you’d rather not have all those people, honey.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. So that’s what David was doing up. Mom was making him come as punishment, so he could see what he’d done, and Letty was coming because she had the maps, and maybe to help Mom keep me and David apart if we tried to kill each other. And Mom wouldn’t think it was important to have Dr. Mills there, because she didn’t think Bobo was still alive. I put down my plate and gulped down some coffee and said, “I’m going to go put the carrying case in the SUV.”

  “You’re going to eat first,” Mom said. “Sit down.”

  I sat. Driving up Peavine in the snow wasn’t exactly Mom’s idea of a day off; the least I could do was not give her any lip. David bit into his toast and said around a mouthful of bread, “I’m not going.”

  That was fine with me, but I wasn’t going to say so in front of Mom. It was their fight. “You’re coming,” she told him. “And if Bobo’s still alive you’re paying the vet bills, and if he’s not, you’re buying your brother another cat. And if we get another cat you’ll damn well help us keep it in the house, or I’ll call the sheriff’s office myself and tell them to take you off probation and put you in jail, David, I swear to God I will!”

  She would, too. Even David knew that much. He scowled up at her and said, “The cat didn’t want to stay in the house.”

  “That’s not the issue,” Mom said, and I stuffed my face full of eggs to keep from screaming at David that he’d hated Bobo, that he’d wanted Bobo to die, and that I hoped he’d die, too: alone, in the cold.

  I remembered one of the first times David had let Bobo out. Bobo didn’t have the transmitter yet, and I was in the backyard calling his name. Suddenly I saw something race over the fence and he ran up to me, mewing and mewing, his tail all puffy. I picked him up and carried him inside and he stayed on my lap, with his face stuck into my armpit like he was hiding, for half an hour, until finally he calmed down and stopped shaking and jumped down to get some food. I’d hoped that whatever had spooked him so badly would keep him from wanting to go out again, even if David opened all the doors and windows, but I guess he forgot how scared he’d been. “He didn’t want to freeze to death, either,” I said.

  David pushed his chair back from the table and said, “Look, whatever happened to your fucking cat, it’s not my fault, and I’m not wasting my day off going up there.” He looked at Mom and said, “Do whatever you want: it doesn’t matter. I might as well be in prison already.”

  “Bullshit,” Mom said. “If you go to prison, you’ll lose a lot more than a Saturday. Do you have any idea how lucky you are not to be there already? Especially after the stunts you’ve been pulling this week?” Nevada’s a zero-tolerance drug state, even for minors, so when David got caught driving stoned last year, with most of a lid of pot in the glove compartment of his Jeep, Mom had to use every connection she had to get him probation instead of jail. It would have been a “juvenile facility,” since David was still a few weeks short of eighteen, but Mom says her connections said that wouldn’t make much difference. Juvenile facilities are worse, if anything.

  Mom didn’t say who her connections are, and I don’t want to know. Whoever they are, I figure they didn’t help David entirely out of the goodness of their hearts. I figure they were scared of what Mom could tell people about them, even if what she does is legal.

  “I told you,” David said, “I’ve just been hanging out with some guys from work. You know: eating dinner, playing pool? I was in town.”

  “Right,” Mom said. “And there’s no way anybody could check that with the satellites down, is there? That’s what you were counting on.”

  David rolled his eyes. “What time did the damn GPS go back up last night? Six-thirty or something? We were still eating then. We were at that pizza place in the mall. Call the sheriff’s office and ask them, if you don’t believe me.” He jerked a thumb at my handheld and said, “How stupid do you think I am? I knew it could come back online any second. What, I’m going to take off for Mexico or something?”

  Mom didn’t bother to answer. She and I were the smart ones in the family: David took after Dad. Anybody stupid enough to get caught with that much pot was stupid enough to do just about anything else, as far as I could tell, but the only time I’d even started to say anything like that, right after his arrest, David had just glared at me and said, “Yeah, well, if you’d had to look at what I had to look at, you’d smoke dope too, baby brother.”

  As if I hadn’t wanted to look. As if I hadn’t kept trying to go outside. As if even now I didn’t keep imagining what it had looked like, a million different ways, enough to keep me awake, sometimes.

  But even then, I knew that David had only said it to make me feel guilty. He knew just how to get at everybody. Now he gestured at the handheld again and said bitterly, “I can’t wipe my ass without those people knowing about it.”

  He was needling Mom, because that’s what Dad had always said about dealing blackjack at the Silverado. The dealers were under surveillance all the time: from pit bosses, from hidden cameras. “You can’t get away from it,” Dad said. “It’s like working in a goddamn box, with the walls closing in on you.” But Dad chose his box, and so did David.

  “That’s not the issue,” Mom told David again. “It’s more than staying in county limits, David. You’re supposed to come home straight after work. You know that.”

  “So you’re my jailor now? Just like the casi
no was Dad’s and the Lyon County cops are—”

  “Stop it,” Mom said, her voice icy. “I’m not your jailor. I’m the one who kept you out of jail. You agreed to the terms of the probation!”

  “Like you agreed to all those terms when you decided to go down to Carson and play nurse?”

  Mom was out of her chair then, and David was out of his, and they stood nose to nose, glaring at each other, and I knew that there was no way we were all going up on Peavine today, because they wouldn’t be able to sit in the same car even if David had wanted to go, even if I’d wanted him there. Nothing David says to Mom ever makes any real sense, but he knows exactly how to get to her. Sometimes he has to keep at it for a while, but Mom always snaps eventually, even if the same thing has happened a million times before. Just like Bobo being scared by something outside, and still going out again when David gave him the chance. David knows exactly how to get people to hurt themselves.

  They were still eye to eye, like cats circling each other before a fight, when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I said. Maybe it was Letty, and I could warn her about what was happening before she came inside.

  It was a cop. “Good morning, son,” he said. “I’m looking for David. That your brother?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but my legs felt like wood, and I didn’t seem to be able to get out of the way.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just a routine drug test.”

  That was supposed to happen on Fridays. So David had skipped his drug test, too. My stomach shriveled some more. “Will he have to go to jail?” I said. The house would be a lot quieter if David was in jail, but school would be worse. If David went to jail, he’d probably be in the same place as George Flanking and Howard Schuster, and I didn’t want to think too much about that.

  The cop’s face softened. “No. Not if he’s clean. He’ll get a warning, that’s all.”

  And then Mom, behind me, said, “Michael, let him in,” and my legs came alive and I got out of the doorway, fast, and the cop came in, tipping his hat to Mom.