by Logan Miller
He turned and rode back through the dust and over to where they had parleyed. He rubbed the back of his head where the rifle had struck him. He winced and smiled good-naturedly.
“Already got a bump.”
“That’s gonna hurt tomorrow,” said the man with the handgun.
The dog finally stopped running in circles around the horses and dropped a huge rat onto the ground and barked up at his masters.
“See. He’s a good dog,” said the man with the rifle, squaring his horse back up for conversation. “He’s a helper. Good boy.”
“You two brothers?” asked the man with the handgun.
“Yeah,” Caleb said.
“That’s why it’s called Brother Firewood,” Jake said, pointing to the sign and then back and forth at himself and Caleb. “Because we’re brothers.”
“That’s interesting,” said the man with the handgun. “I like that.”
The once taciturn horsemen now appeared to be enjoying themselves and showed every inclination of staying for a while and a desire to talk. Caleb and Jake just wanted them to leave. Now.
“What are your names?” asked the man with the rifle.
“I’m Caleb. He’s Jake.”
“Why do you limp?” asked the man with the handgun.
“Because he’s a pimp,” Jake said on an exhale of cigarette smoke. “He’s a goddamn pimp.”
“A pimp limp. Funny.” The horsemen laughed and rocked atop their horses.
“We’re brothers too,” said the man with the rifle.
“Good for you,” Jake said under his breath. Either the horsemen didn’t perceive that he was being condescending or they didn’t care.
“How much you want for a cord?” asked the man with the handgun. When the brothers were slow to respond he said, “It says on the sign you sell by the cord.”
“We do,” Caleb said.
“How much?”
“Two hundred and fifty.”
“How much for two cords?”
“Five hundred.”
“You make us a deal for three?”
“Sure.”
“How much?”
“Seven hundred,” Caleb said. “That’s fifty dollars off.”
“You deliver to the Pueblo?”
“Why not.”
“Free of charge?”
“Sure.”
“You stack it?”
“Yeah.”
The horsemen nodded.
“Gonna be a cold winter,” said the man with the rifle.
“What days are you open?” asked the man with the handgun.
“Seven days a week,” Caleb said.
“You got a card?”
“Yeah,” said Jake, “I got one.” He pulled his wallet from his front pocket and handed the man a creased business card with rounded edges.
The man with the rifle removed a phone from his jeans and punched in the number and gave the card back to Jake.
“You can use it again. Recycle it.” He smiled and leaned over. “Gwambo?”
The dog looked up at his master.
“Grab your rat. That’s your lunch my four-legged friend.”
Gwambo picked up the dead rat and wagged his tail, waiting for the next command.
“Have a good one,” said the man with the rifle. “We’ll call you soon, brothers.”
They nudged their horses and moved at a walking pace across the wood yard and into the prairie and their dog followed behind with the rat in his mouth. Jake had smoked two cigarettes and Caleb had discarded and squeezed the nicotine high from another dip before the horsemen and dog vanished into the mesa land.
“What do you make of those two?” Caleb asked.
“Just a couple of Indians out for a little ride, I guess.”
“You sure about that?”
“It was their land before it was ours.”
“I know the history, fucker.”
Jake ground his cigarette into the dirt with his boot and began laughing as if struck with some humorous revelation that made sense of it all.
“You know what this is like?” he said. “This is fucking amazing. It really is. You remember that time I sent away for the ant farm when we were kids? The ones they used to advertise in the back of comic books? Well, when the ant farm arrived, all the ants were dead. Every little fucking one of them. Remember that shit? They all must’ve suffocated or starved to death or killed one another on the trip out here from wherever the fuck it is that ant farms come from. But you know what I did? I didn’t cry. Nope. I didn’t blame the world for getting ripped off. I didn’t even call the company to complain. Hell, I didn’t even tell mom and dad about my tragedy. Nope. Nine-year-old Jake went out in the yard, dug a hole, and held a funeral for the little fuckers. And then nine-year-old Jake went and caught him some alive ones. And I had me a thriving ant farm for a couple months until Dad knocked it over and the glass broke and the ants ran away. But you know what it was? It was a valuable lesson I learned then. It was like making lemonade out of lemons, only with ants. And that’s what we’re doing now.”
Jake waited for some sort of recognition. He had just made a profound correlation between the past and the present and expected his brother to say something about it. But he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t.
“Let’s face it, Caleb. I’ve always had the business mind between us. And you’ve always been, well, you know, the younger brother. It’s not an easy role. And I’ve never blamed you for being jealous of me at times.”
“You see things that nobody else sees, Jake, that’s for sure.”
“You’re still sour about our new machine, aren’t you?”
But Caleb had nothing more to say to his brother. He opened his can again and packed another chew and retied the sweaty red bandana around his head. The afternoon wind was rising up and kicking dust over the mesa. To the south violet clouds tumbled before dark thunderheads casting rain into the low country. He could smell the fragrant sagebrush and the approaching moisture on the air and he saw the thin stripes of a rainbow arching out of the darkness toward a sunbeam throwing light onto the sandstone hills below.
Jake shrugged and walked back over to the loader.
“You’ll see,” he said. “Edgar’s coming tomorrow. It’s all gonna work out. We’re gonna be millionaires.”
He climbed up the ladder and swung into the chair.
“You sure you don’t want to take her for a spin?”
Caleb turned his back and limped over to the woodshed and padlocked the door.
23.
They started wide and circled back through the forest. They hiked through the pine needle carpet and up the ridgeline and along the outcropping for perspective and squatted on their heels and gazed into the scorched grassland, the interstate a noiseless filament running the divide.
“They could’ve come up from Los Alamos and across the Valles Caldera,” Sparks said, pointing up and down the land. “And then exited by the same route. It’s only about twenty miles on a fast dirt road. Or they could’ve come in from the west and the long route from 550. Or up the old road from Española. Or north from Abiquiú off of eighty-four or ninety-six.”
“What does it matter where and how they came?” Gates said. He winced and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his right thumb and index finger. His head was pounding. “That’s all a bunch of extraneous details that only sound like investigative work.”
“I figured it might be important if we knew the provenance of the thieves.”
“The provenance?”
“Yeah.”
“Do me a favor, Lester.”
“Sure.”
“Shut the fuck up so I can think.”
Gates stared over the land. To the north the pinyon tumbled down the folds of the canyons and bled green into the ashen plain that stretched to the volcanic steeple of Pedernal, standing as a black witness to all that had ever traveled up and down the broad valley.
He shook his head.
You can’t start over. Not at your age.
The numbers he’d lost kept running around his mind and leaping into his thoughts in the form of a harlequin trickster fanning dollars stolen from his pocket and howling in his face with crimson fangs from some fisheyed carnival world. Half of the profits from the marijuana haul were going to be his. That was the deal he had worked out with Marlo. A fifty-fifty split. Marlo had lined up a buyer in Denver who owned several dispensaries and would pay $2,150 per pound. Delivery was in six weeks. He would be back on his feet with close to $650,000 in cash. And then these thieves showed up and took his money and his future.
He wanted to stand and scream into the canyon: “YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!!”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples again and he could see in the darkness the seared vision of the land before him. He reassured himself that he would find the thieves soon enough. Find them and take back what was his. Take back his new beginning.
He walked down the outcropping and they scoured the steep arroyo for clues they might have missed. A rusted and faded Pepsi can was half-submerged in the silted bottom. Gates kicked it loose. The can tumbled and the pebbles inside rattled. He moved on and the arroyo curved and his boots crunched on the gravel bed and then became soft when he stepped onto a sandy deposit. He bent down and picked up a fractured piece of obsidian that he imagined might have broken off inside a deer centuries ago or perhaps it was just an errant shot. He set it in his pant pocket.
They rifled through Ruben’s trash and concluded that he drank even more than they had thought. He must have been making secret runs down the mountain all the time and arousing suspicion from the locals.
No wonder he was dead.
They fanned out and inspected the undergrowth bordering the marijuana garden and tracked their way back to where they had found the deep rutted tire tracks, stirring the ground with their black boots, attempting to find a story in the earth.
To their favor the recent monsoons that had washed out roads and muddied rivers and torn across the mesas had forked around the higher elevations of the mountain and focused their deluge on the lands below. There had been a few drops up here and little wind, almost no disturbance.
“I think I found another set of footprints over here,” Sparks said. “Much smaller than the others. Tennis shoes, not boots. Like a kid’s size.”
“Or a woman’s,” Gates said.
He moved up the rise and through the trees, searching the tinder for the slightest deviation, slow and deliberate, when a metallic glint caught his eye near the base of a pine. He bent down to the exposed roots and picked up a bottle cap. He turned it in the sunlight. It was new. No rust. It was not faded from time and smelled of fresh beer. He read the emblem, LAGUNITAS IPA, and then repeated the name phonetically just like he had at Bode’s a few days earlier.
Lah-goo-KNEE-tuss.
He rolled the bottle cap between his fingers and looked up at the wind blowing through the tops of the pine trees. Far off he could see a thunderstorm sweeping through the eastern mesas, dropping its dark tentacles and drenching the badlands in watery shades of charcoal and flashing lightning like some malignant jellyfish stinging the world.
He pressed the bottle cap ridges into his palm. A white sun with serrated edges.
“You hungry?” he asked Sparks.
“I could eat.”
He dropped the bottle cap into his breast pocket where it tinked softly against the bindle of cocaine.
“There’s too much goddamn land out here,” he said.
“There’s certainly a lot of it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
24.
“My boss said that he could go as high as eight-twenty-five an hour.”
“Did you wear your push-up bra when you talked to him?” Caleb asked, trying to lighten the mood. He looked down and smoothed the gravel of the motel parking lot with his work boot. He pulled on the cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the twilight and passed the cigarette to her.
“I couldn’t find the bra,” she said, taking a drag. But there was no smile to match his. “He said you can start as soon as you like.”
She blew out the smoke and handed the cigarette back to him.
Thus far, they had managed to avoid talking about the only thing that was really on their minds. A hatch of moths swarmed around a light on a telephone pole that had winked on a moment ago not far from where they were standing. As if the moths kept time with the electric schedule and not the sun that was still hanging on in the western skyline.
“I’ll speak with him in the next couple of days,” he said. “I figure it ain’t half bad that I’ll be getting paid to see you.” He took a drag and grinned when he exhaled. “Maybe we can even sneak off to room seventeen every now and then?”
“That would be nice.” She lightened. A little. A glimmer of it on her face.
“There it is.” He touched the dimple on her cheek and she almost giggled. “Can you hold that smile forever? Just for me, please?”
“I can try.”
He took the cigarette from her.
“I forgot. You don’t get anymore of this.”
“I forgot too,” she said. “Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I’m the bad influence.”
He rarely bought cigarettes any more and she had nearly quit but he had been craving one and stopped at the gas station on the way to see her.
“This will be the last pack,” he said.
Her opal green eyes had a play of silver in the lowering sunlight and her strawberry hair almost appeared to flame as if she were a maiden in a Celtic myth and not real to him. How did he have such a beautiful woman? If this wasn’t luck, he thought, there was no such thing on earth. He ground the cigarette into the gravel with his heel and nuzzled into her neck.
“I still smell good?”
“Always,” she said. And she was not lying.
The humming of tires on the cooling asphalt came closer and then ran away as the first vehicle in a good while passed north on the interstate and across the bridge over the Chama, pushing along a sage breeze that spoke of a change in the season and tasted of autumn. The first bite of cold in the sunset, a blue fire.
“I’m scared, Caleb.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
“What are we gonna do?”
“Wait.”
“For what? I’m not like you, Caleb.” She showed him her hands. “They haven’t stopped shaking. I have no appetite. I can’t eat. I can’t live like this. I don’t even know how long it’s been—how long has it been?”
“Three days.”
He rubbed his hands down her shoulders and took her hands prayer-like into his and spoke softly to her.
“There hasn’t been any mention in the paper or on the news of anyone finding that guy’s body.”
“It doesn’t make him any less dead,” she said.
“No, but it gives us time.”
“To do what?”
“To think. To come up with a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Yes. A plan.”
“This isn’t war, Caleb.”
“It might be. And we need to know who the other side is.”
Another vehicle approached on the two-lane highway. It slowed and its tires crunched into the gravel parking lot, a gray-blue silhouette with pinhole headlights in the dimming sky.
The patriotic cruiser wheeled over and pulled alongside them.
“Howdy, lovebirds,” her father said.
“Hey, Mr. Gates,” said Caleb. “Hey, Sparks. Good to see you.”
“Likewise, Caleb,” said Gates.
Sparks nodded from across the cab and waved. “Yo.”
“How’s it going?” Caleb said, nodding back.
There was a sudden lull and an unusual pause of speech between them after the exchange of pleasantries. The low idle of the cruiser and the engine heat blowing from under the hood gave volume and temp
erature to the silence.
Gates looked at his daughter and then at Caleb and then back at his daughter, examining them as though he were performing some rehearsed procedure. He gave an easy smile and nodded.
“How was the beer party the other day?” he asked.
The question caught them off-guard and for a moment they had no idea what he was talking about. They had pretty much forgotten about the beer on the mountain.
“The one I wasn’t invited to?” Gates said, refreshing their memories.
“Nothing like an ice cold beer at the end of a long day,” Caleb said.
“Especially when it’s a Lagunitas,” Gates added.
There was another long pause in the evening stillness and Gates held his smile and his eyes on them. “Isn’t that the beer you like, Caleb?”
“One of them.”
“It’s hard to decide these days, isn’t it? There’s so damn many of them. I think I liked it better when it was just Coors and Bud. But I haven’t had a drink for a long time.” He locked eyes with Caleb and then turned to his daughter. “Babe, you doing alright?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine dad.”
“She telling me the truth, Caleb?”
Lelah interrupted before Caleb could reply. “Dad, I’m just tired. That’s all. Just tired.”
“Planning a wedding can be stressful,” Gates said. “You gotta make a lot of decisions. Have you decided on a location?”
Caleb looked at Lelah and she looked back at him.
“We haven’t really talked about it yet,” she said.
“Right,” said Gates. “Take your time. There’s no rush.”
Lelah wanted to run inside and sit at the front desk and pretend it was last week. Her heart jumped and then pounded against her ribs and her empty stomach turned over and she became nauseous. Her upper lip quivered involuntarily and the faint chill in the air wrapped around her and constricted her breathing. She set her trembling hands in her pockets. There was a disturbing edge to her father’s behavior and her thoughts sped into areas she did not want to think about, specifically, two chief anxieties: was her father using again and did he know.
