by Callan Wink
Montana Bob spoke to him on the other side of the door, his words just barely whiskey-softened around the edges.
“You, sir, are in possession of my royal French canine. Charlie Chaplin and myself come to you as missionaries. Also, as pilgrims and crusaders.”
When Montana Bob kicked in the flimsy trailer door Sid had already slammed out the back, catching Charlie Chaplin off guard. The accountant was standing on the trailer’s rickety back porch and the door handle hit him in the midsection, doubling him over. Sid ran down the sloping trailer court drive and across his neighbors’ weed-choked lawns, down the alley across the dead main street and through the train yard, his bare toes curling around the cold iron track as he gathered himself to hurdle over the crushed-granite railbed. It wasn’t until he reached the barren lots at the base of the rimrock’s upslope that he realized the dog was running beside him, occasionally stopping to lift his leg on a rock or clump of sagebrush. Back toward the road Sid could see the lights of an ATV coming fast. He waited until he could see the shape of Montana Bob’s hat and the pale, bare arms of Charlie Chaplin wrapped around his midsection—and then he started scrabbling his way up the slope, the dog flowing effortlessly through the rock above him.
—
She was a small woman, pale, so much so that the desert hurt her in ways that Sid would never fully understand. Like Sid, she was a nude sleeper. When he found this out it became one of those happy little intersections of shared personality, the slow accumulation of which is love. With her it was years of nights spent bare back to bare chest. Sometimes, when it was hot, they woke up and had to peel themselves apart, their tangled limbs stuck together like the fleshy segments of some strange misshapen fruit.
They were alike in other ways as well, and at one time these things had seemed natural and unaffected, important even. They both liked the river. Sid got inner tubes from the tire store and when the heat got unbearable they would float, keeping their beer cool in a mesh bag trailing in the river behind them. And, if she never fully came to love the desert, Sid was pretty sure she came to understand why he did. Once, Sid took her up to see the hoodoos in Goblin Valley. It was midnight on a full moon and they were half-drunk and a little high. They played tag and hide-and-seek around the hulking sandstone formations, laughing, hooting and shrieking, the sounds careening, giving voice to the rocks themselves. For a while after this if one of them initiated an impromptu game of tag, the other would have to follow suit, no matter the location—the grocery store, the front lawn, the movie theater, at a neighborhood barbecue with half the town watching, everyone laughing and shaking their heads. Things were good this way for a long time and then one night he woke to the sound of her crying in the bathroom. And the next night she came to bed in one of his T-shirts and boxer shorts. And the next night Sid slept alone.
As he ran Sid could clearly see her, laid out on their bed, a night-blooming moonflower, her white limbs like petals unfolding finally in the absence of light. He remembered the first house they’d ever lived in, the way the door latch was broken and how the wind would blow the door open if they didn’t remember to throw the bolt. They’d be sitting in that little dining room, eating dinner, a table full of mismatched cups and plates and silverware, and all of a sudden the door would swing open like someone pushed it in. She’d always flinch like someone was breaking in on them, uninvited. Sid used to tease her about it but now he found himself wondering who exactly it was she thought was coming unannounced into their home. Who was the man with his hand on the doorknob ready to push his way into their kitchen like the wind?
Sid ran and the rocks cut him; the piñon pines clutched and tore at him. Dried sweat crusted his bare torso and thighs and any moment of rest brought cramps, the muscles of his legs twitching and popping of their own accord. He found himself moving his cracked lips, making strange utterances with each painful footfall, the desert a silent observer, an expressionless juror to whom he tried to make his plea. I ran afoul of some bad people in a matter concerning a dog. Irana foul. Iranafoul. I ran, a foul?
It sounded melodramatic and desperate, a wild call for attention. Best to leave the dog out of it. Get right to the point.
Since we dissolved I’ve been a specter running blind and naked in the desert. Is that melodramatic? Well, that’s what is happening to me now.
He imagined driving to their old house and stepping up onto the porch. She’d be alone and come out to meet him in one of the sundresses she always wore in the hot months, the fabric like gauze, like a soft bandage laid over healing flesh. She’d offer him a cool drink and they’d sit in the shade and the words, all the right ones, would flow from him, an upwelling, an eruption of cleansing language.
Remember when we went way up north that winter and rented the cabin and there was a hot spring not too far away? We’d go out at night and shiver down the path to the water and slip in the warmth like pulling a hot sheet around us. My feet in the sulfur-smelling mud of the pool, your legs twined around mine like white, earth-seeking roots. Remember that? The way the deer would come down when it got really cold just to stand in the steam rising up from the water? And then, the day we left for home? How cold it was? We went outside and our eyes started to freeze up at the corners and you, southern girl, had never seen anything like it and took a picture of me standing next to a thermometer that was bottomed out at forty below. In that picture I’m standing on the cabin porch and behind me there’s the river frozen solid, or so it seemed.
Here Sid imagined moving in a little closer, putting his work-rough hand on her smooth one.
I’ve been thinking about that picture and that river on the coldest day of the year. Underneath that ice, the river was still moving. Forty below, but even then the water closest to the riverbed will be moving, cold but unfrozen. It’s like a river exists in defiance, or has a secret life. Everything above is frozen and stiff but down below it moves along, liquid over the rocks, like nothing happening on the surface matters. On a day like this you could walk across the river like crossing the street. But you can’t forget that just below that shell there is current. That is my love for you.
And that would be it. She’d come with him, push up next to him on the bench seat of his pickup, and he’d drive with the windows down, her hair tossing into his face and mouth and eyes. Dust and the scent of her shampoo in his nose. They’d pick up right where they’d left off.
—
He was moving up a dry creek bed, shuffling through the soft red sand deposited by spring floods in years past, when he had had the feeling that the creek wasn’t dry after all, that he was splashing through the ankle-deep current of muddy red water. He was thirsty. Christ was he thirsty, but when he scooped a great double handful of water up to his cracked lips it turned back to sand and flowed through his fingers. This seemed like a particularly cruel joke and he had thoughts of finding a dark place to curl up inside, a rock for a pillow and a soft blanket of sand. But there was the matter of the dog, the matter of Charlie Chaplin’s vacuous eyes and pistol, which in Sid’s mind, had achieved magnificent proportions. Charlie Chaplin rode it like an evil old mare with cracked hoofs and faded brand. It was the gun itself in pursuit, half horse, half instrument of percussion and death. A spavined nag whose blued flanks were singed and smoking.
At first, running on the sand was deliriously comfortable, the soft ground like an answered prayer for the raw soles of Sid’s feet. But then, the farther he went the harder it became, the sand shifting and giving way under his feet so that each stride required more effort from his already screaming calves.
When the twisting and turning of the creek bed became unbearable Sid clambered out onto the exposed rock. From this vantage point he watched the now greatly diminished moon drift down toward the far black horizon like a pale phosphorus match head broken off in the striking. If Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin were still in pursuit he had no evidence. In fact, some small, dislodged part of him was unsure that they had ever existed. Sid could
n’t see the dog most of the time. Sometimes he forgot about it all together. It ran ahead silent and unperturbed as the earth itself.
—
It was a loud dawn. Sid had never seen or heard anything quite like it, the sun breaking the horizon line with a sound like a dull knife ripping a sheet. He was walking stiffly now, moving his arms in great circles, slapping his thighs and torso to fend off the cold. He looked down and for the first time could see himself clearly, the angry red whip welts on his calves from branches, the purple cracked toenails and raised blue lines of engorged veins and capillaries, over everything a grimy patina of sweat crust and desert dust and leaking blood.
He crested a small hill where, on the backside of the slope, there was a rusted stock tank fed by a leaning windmill that rose out of a clump of acacia. He didn’t believe in the stock tank. It was like a river of muddy water, a thing that would dry up and slip through his fingers. He sat on a flat rock and looked. The windmill was missing some slats and he knew there was no water in the tank. This was a definite truth and Sid felt it like gravity. After a while the dog emerged from a tangle of sagebrush and with no fanfare proceeded to lap from the tank, its tail fanning slightly in a breeze that did not reach Sid.
Down the slope in jerks, his muscles and ligaments tightened like catgut tennis racket cord. Sid submerged his entire head, eyes wide open, into the water, metallic-tasting, gelid with the flavor of the past night. The bottom of the tank was lined with a slick layer of electric green algae over which a single orange carp hovered blimplike. Sid wanted to get in, to live with this carp alone in this desert within a desert. But the water was cold and he knew the carp did not want him. He drank for so long that points of black began to form at the edges of his vision, small, black-legged forms like water striders skating the clear pool of his periphery. He broke for air and collapsed with his back against the tank, the rivets pressing his flesh. From this position he could see into the twisted inner workings of the windmill, the busted-sprung parts, the pieces held together by coils of baling wire. The dog was moving around the base of the acacia trees, its snout plowing last year’s dead grass, the fur ends around its paws just slightly reddened by the touch of the desert rock. Above the dog, in the twisting acacia branches, Sid could make out two sparrows, dead and skewered on thorns.
—
When Sid woke he found Charlie Chaplin squatting next to him, his Oxford shirt stained desert red, his corduroys dusty. His pale cheeks were streaked with twin rivulets of what looked like tears and his eyes were leaking and red. He had his knife out and was poking Sid’s bare thigh, raising bright little beads of blood, a ragged collection of blood drops like pissants gathering on his skin. From the number of them it looked like he’d been at it awhile. Seeing that Sid was awake, Charlie Chaplin swiped at his cheeks with his sleeve. He gave Sid one more poke and then sheathed his knife and went to stand beside Montana Bob, who held a length of chain he’d hooked to the dog’s collar. The dog lay at Montana Bob’s boots with its muzzle resting on its paws.
“What the hell. Why?” Montana Bob tilted his hat brim down against the sun.
Sid considered this for a moment and then put up his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ve always liked running.” Realizing as he said it that it was true.
“You look like something from another planet. More dead than alive. Also, Charlie Chaplin isn’t happy with you. He wears contact lenses and, seeing how you kept us out here all night in the dust, his eyes are in poor shape. He wants you to know that that’s why he’s tearing up. He’s not actually crying. He suffers from the dust. Also, he lost his pistol. Fell out of his waistband on the ride. I know he feels badly about that.”
Sid found himself nodding in agreement with Montana Bob. It was a nearly involuntary movement and he had to force himself to stop.
“You dumb bastard. I don’t even know what to do to you. But, also, I guess you done it plenty to yourself. What do you think, Charlie Chaplin?”
Sid looked up into the pale, dirt-and-tear-streaked face of the accountant. He tried to read what was there but came up blank. Charlie Chaplin knelt creakily and untied his Top-Siders. He kicked them off his feet toward Sid and then turned to climb on the ATV, his socks startlingly white from the ankle down. Silently, Montana Bob took his seat in front of Charlie Chaplin and drove away, his accountant clinging to his waist from behind, his dog padding along at the end of the chain.
It was a long time before Sid could get to his feet and walk, slowly retracing his bloody tracks. It was even longer before the pain made him slip the Top-Siders over his ruined soles, feeling when he did, at once something like balm and betrayal. With the shoes he was somehow more naked than before, and he faced the reality of shuffling back to town, no longer unfettered, just exposed. He thought then about going for it, turning east and just continuing on till he either evaporated or made it, collapsing in a heap on her porch. Begging her to wash his feet.
RUNOFF
It was June 21, the longest day of the year, and the snow on Beartooth pass was still eight feet high on either side of the road. Dale drove Jeannette and her two boys up there. It was seventy degrees when they left town, at least twenty degrees cooler when they got to the top. They glissaded down the soft edges of the glacier and had a snowball fight. The sun at that altitude was close and they all got a little burned. Later that evening, back at her house, Dale grilled hamburgers, and they ate on the porch. The creek that normally trickled through her backyard was on the rise, noisy, the color of watery chocolate milk.
After dinner Jeannette rubbed aloe on the boys’ red cheeks and put them, complaining, to bed. “Its not even dark yet,” he heard the oldest one say. “I can’t go to sleep when it’s light.”
“You’ve had a big day,” Jeannette said. “You just don’t know you’re tired yet.”
She came back out on the porch with a beer for him and a glass of wine for herself. She had the bottle of aloe too and she sat on his lap. She rubbed in the lotion, working it into the skin on his neck, his ear lobes, his cheekbones. Jeannette had small hands, strong fingers, blunt nails. Before she’d met her husband she’d been a massage therapist. She told Dale that when they got married her husband hadn’t quite demanded that she stop working. “He was always good at that, making demands seem like something less. I was a good massage therapist. And I enjoyed it. He said it was too sensual. He didn’t like me doing that with other men.”
“Too sensual?” Dale said.
“It wasn’t like I was giving happy endings. I’m thinking about getting back into it. It’s been ten years but I’ve still got my table and everything. I could use the money.”
“I volunteer to be your practice dummy. Maybe you could reconsider that happy ending policy.”
She laughed and swatted at him.
The aloe was tingling on his cheeks. Jeannette had her head back on his shoulder. He could feel her heat through the thin material of her sundress. She was a small woman. Small breasts, small waist, delicate feet, good thick heavy dark hair. She had an aversion to undergarments that he found attractive. This year she’d lost her father to cancer, turned forty-three, and watched as her husband was led away in handcuffs.
She sat on Dale’s lap, wriggling a little, as if she was just trying to get comfortable. She sighed. “What a great day,” she said. “That was the best day I can remember having in quite some time. The boys had fun. They really like you. They tell me that, I’m not just assuming.”
“I always kind of wished I had younger brothers,” Dale said, realizing immediately that it was probably not the right thing. Jeannette gave a soft laugh and sipped her wine. “How old would your mother have been?” she said.
“Much older than you.”
“How much?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful.”
“I guess I’m not quite a hag yet.”
Dale had recently turned twenty-five. He hadn’t managed to finish college. He was alm
ost done with his EMT certification but for the past few months he’d been living in his father’s basement. He considered meeting Jeannette to be the single best stroke of luck that had ever befallen him. Before Jeannette, he’d been dating a girl for almost a year. A bank teller. She called him every day for a week before she gave up.
Occasionally, he thought about Jeannette’s husband, but only occasionally. The last thing she had told Dale about him was that he was in a halfway house in Billings. The boys wanted to see him but she hadn’t decided yet. She thought maybe it was too soon. For the most part she didn’t talk about him, and Dale didn’t ask.
They sat on the porch in the slow solstice twilight. The lilacs had opened and the air was musky with them. Dale was rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb, listening to the sound of the creek, hearing in its dull murmur something like a gathering crowd, just beginning to voice its displeasure.
—
Dale ran in the mornings. It was a habit he’d picked up recently, part of some more general desire to straighten himself out. He’d tried meditating. That had never really worked. Running, though, was good. He laced up his shoes in the dark of his childhood bedroom, took the stairs two at a time, and did a five-mile loop. Across the tracks that bisected town, the gravel of the railway crunching under his shoes, down the hill to the river.
His dad would have considered all of it—meditation, breathing exercises, even running—nothing but hippie bullshit. Dale would have agreed, not too long ago. But then he went on his first ride-along with the Park County EMT crew and he’d seen a girl, a few years younger than himself, bleed out on the side of the highway while her drunk boyfriend got handcuffed and pushed into the police car. The boyfriend’s pickup was upside down in the barrow pit, the headlights still on, shooting off into the trees at a crazy angle. The girl was coughing, blood coming up. She’d been thrown from the truck and impaled on a jagged limb of a fallen pine tree.
