by Callan Wink
“My back is fine.”
“That’s good. We’re going to be working. You’re going to be working mostly. I’m going to be telling you what to do. There’s where you’ll bunk. Everything you need should be there.” Karl pointed to a low-ceilinged wing built off the side of the barn. “Stow your gear and then come on back and I’ll give you a tour.”
The bunkhouse was more pleasant than James had expected. There was a double bed. A small kitchenette. A table with a bouquet of dried flowers. Most important, an air conditioner. James cranked it up and tossed his single bag on the bed. The back window looked out over the pond where the heeler was standing up to its belly in the water, panting. James looked in the small fridge. There were two cans of Tecate and a jar of peanut butter. He’d had a refrigerator just like this in his dorm in college. The sight of this one made him indescribably happy.
When James emerged from his room, Karl was sitting behind the wheel of an off-road vehicle, kind of like a golf cart but with large knobby tires, a camouflaged awning, and a rifle rack on the hood. There was a cooler in the back, and as James slid into the passenger seat, Karl reached around and rummaged in the ice pulling out a beer for each of them. He drank deeply and belched.
“You said on the phone the other day that you’re a teacher?”
“Yes.”
“What subject do you teach?”
“Everything, pretty much.”
“What, like kindergarten?”
“No, I actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse. I have around fifteen kids.”
“A one-room schoolhouse? They still have those? Jesus, employment offers weren’t exactly flooding your mailbox, or what?”
James laughed. “It was actually a competitive position. People want their kids to go to Pine Creek School. It’s selective. We have to turn students down every year. It’s a unique learning environment and we consistently get high test scores. We have brochures. That’s what they say.”
“I see.” Karl drank and then released the parking break on the golf cart. “It’s a yuppie one-room schoolhouse, not a real one-room schoolhouse. I’m sure the pay is better. Anyway. It don’t matter because your ass is mine for the rest of the summer. Let’s get you acquainted with the lay of the land.”
—
They embarked upon a rambling tour of the two-thousand-acre Echo Canyon Ranch, stopping frequently so Karl could lever himself out of the driver’s seat to take a piss. Occasionally, deer bolted out in front of them. Once James saw something larger and darker moving off into the brush and then it was gone.
“What happened to your leg?” James asked.
Karl laughed. “Buffalo fell on me,” he said.
Then the beer cooler ran dry. Karl, reaching and coming up empty, said, “Well, shit.”
Sooner than James would have thought possible they were back in front of the house. “There you have it, Montana, what’d you think?” Karl said.
James could hear the clank of the windmill turning lazily. The red dog came and put its muzzle on Karl’s broken leg. “It’s great,” he said.
“Likely as not you’ve noticed that we haven’t got so much as a milk cow on the whole spread.”
“I thought maybe they were in a different pasture or something.”
“Nope. Closest thing we’ve got is a few buffalo. Nasty things. Stay clear. They’d just as soon gore you as look at you. Same with the elk. Even the females. Especially the females. They’ll kick you through a barn door.”
“Elk?”
“Sure. This is a hunting ranch, son. We’ve got all the exotics. Aoudads. Sitka deer. Feral hogs, New Zealand red deer. Elk. A few different kinds of antelope. There’s things out there that I can’t even name off the top of my head. I was driving down to Bandera the other evening, and coming up out of the riverbed I saw this animal almost the size of a horse. It had corkscrew-looking horns, spots on the rear half of its body. Now what the hell was that? I have no idea. Who knows where it came from and who knows how long it’s been running? All I know is that there’s a dentist in Dallas who would pull his own eyeteeth to have that thing’s head hanging on his wall. That’s what we do here. It’s what all the ranches around here do. Been that way for a long time and that’s why you’ll occasionally see a random like that.”
“What do you mean, ‘a random’?”
“Just like it sounds. Some animal that was released at one time to be hunted but that just never got killed and was forgotten about or jumped a fence, or whatever. Ranches sell all the time. Fences fall over. Inventory is hard to keep track of. The hill country’s full of loose exotics. You’ve seen the brush. You can’t get much more than a few steps off a road and it just swallows you. The African species especially seem to find it just like home.”
James was slightly disappointed. He’d been under the impression that he was going to be out mending fences. Rounding up doggies and slapping hot iron to calves.
“What exactly, then, will I be doing?”
“Oh, we’ll keep you occupied. At least once a week we have to go around and fill the feeders with shelled corn. That takes a full day. There’s over forty of them on the property. Some fences might need shoring up. Some brush might need to be cleared out to keep the shooting lanes open. Like I said, I usually do it all myself but it’s just a little bit much right now for this ol’ boy.”
—
James got his own four-wheel-drive golf cart. One of the perks of the job. He filled a gallon jug with water, and set out to explore more on his own. Karl said the pain pills he was on were making him woozy and he was going to take a nap.
James started noticing the feeders. They were metal tripods with a hopper operated by some sort of timing device. At a set time each day a measured amount of shelled corn would fall from the hopper to the ground. The feeders were placed in small clearings hacked from the brush. Twenty yards from each feeder, in a lane cut through the trees, was a blind—a small, tin-roofed camouflage-painted shack with low windows from which a rifle could be fired. James went to one of these blinds and opened the door. Inside was an office chair and a pair of ear-protecting headphones.
An office chair—with adjustable lumbar support and rollers and pneumatic suspension system. It was the seat every accountant in the world sat in all day. It seemed strange to think that that same accountant might get a day off and come down here to Echo Canyon Ranch to sit in that same chair some more, listening to the rhythmic clunk of the feeder hopper opening, the musical shower of corn falling to the leaf litter. Waiting with anticipation for something, anything, to present itself for killing.
All the blinds were numbered. The two-track roads were like fairways claimed from the mesquite and shin oak and cedar. James felt that he’d landed on some sort of morbid golf course, where, instead of clubs, the camouflaged hackers toted .30-06s and tallied their day’s end score, factoring in missed-shot bogies, sand trap woundings, extra clip mulligans—counting pars and birdies and eagles in hides and horns and tusks.
“Fore,” James shouted.
His voice was swallowed immediately by the tangle of dense green that surrounded him. Echo Canyon was kind of a misnomer.
—
That night his air conditioner melted down. He woke in the early hours, his bed sheet drenched in sweat. There was the god-awful squealing of the hogs rooting in the brush behind the barn. He lay in the dark, thinking about a conversation he’d once had with Carina. She had called him on his lunch break at school to tell him that he didn’t value his own profession, and this made him unattractive to her.
“You have disdain for those who teach,” she said. “And yet you do it yourself. That must be exhausting.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, when we first met, when you told me you were a teacher, and I said that’s great, you said, ‘You know what they say, those who can’t, teach.’ That’s a bullshit philosophy. And if you truly feel that way then you should quit teaching immediately before you infect any
more students.”
“You called just to tell me this?”
“Yes, I thought you should know.”
James tried to imagine Molly Hanchet, his red-haired sixth-grader, smuggling a scalpel from their dissection unit into the bathroom and opening her veins. He imagined finding her, the red of her blood shaming the red of her hair. He tried to imagine returning to the classroom the next day, all the days after, and it was here that his imagination failed completely. He didn’t know much about Carina’s childhood but he knew enough to realize that she had once been an at-risk girl. Her resilience and dedication seemed to stem from some deep-seated need to save an earlier version of herself. Could he fairly fault himself for lacking this dimension of commitment? Did one’s vocation need to be so deeply personal?
He got up and banged on the AC with his boot heel. It clanked to life slowly. Out behind the barn, there was a vicious cacophony of squealing and grunting and thrashing and then it was silent. Clearly it was going to be a long night, the mind chasing the heart in circles around the moon.
—
The days passed. True to his word, Karl kept James moderately busy. But, it was pleasant work, at a stately pace. Lots of golf cart driving, and standing around discussing strategy before anything was actually done. James patched a few fences. He cut and cleared some brush. He filled the feeders, hauling sacks of corn, winching the hoppers down to the ground, smelling that good midwestern smell as the golden stream poured forth from the tipped bag. On weekend evenings he and Karl would load up in the truck and head to Bandera, the nearest town, for beers and a hamburger. As far as James could tell, Bandera was not populated by a single attractive female between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. This relaxed him in a way that he, up until this point, had thought impossible.
—
He called Casey to update him on ranch life. After listening for a while Casey said, “Hey, while I got you on the phone, I wanted to ask you for something.”
“What?”
“Your life, basically. I want your life.”
“Like, you want to sacrifice me for something, or you need a heart transplant, or—?”
“I just want to take off when I want to and go live on a ranch and mend fences and screw around with strange women and drink beer.”
James laughed. “Don’t tempt me, brother. I’d take your place in a heartbeat. Wear your house slippers. Drink your fancy whiskey. Enjoy your bank account. Choke your wife.” There was silence on the line for a moment.
Casey cleared his throat. “Please never mention that again.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Seriously, though, James. Never change. For the sake of all of us sad bastards who need to live vicariously through you, never stop what you’re doing.”
James knew what his brother needed. He gave it to him. He said, “I have a feeling that all this will be decidedly less thrilling when I’m fifty. You ever think of that? Because I do, all the time. I worry that I’ll be doing all the same stuff, just none of it will be quite as good as it used to be. There’ll still be strange women but most of the time I won’t be able to get it up anyway. I’ll still have my freedom but I’ll be too tired to go anywhere, and I’ll probably start to accumulate cats and when I finally ride the big one, sitting alone in my recliner in front of the TV, no one will find me for three weeks and the cats will have eaten most of my face. So, there. Stop your bitching. You’re living the dream.”
Casey didn’t say anything for a few moments. James could hear the rhythmic clicking of a pen.
“You remember Linda’s ovaries?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, we’ve been walking the tightrope with no safety net for a while. Flying with no parachutes. Rafting with no life jackets.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“We agreed that Linda should go off birth control and just see what happens.”
“And?”
“We’re knocked up over here in Amarillo.”
“Oh, man. Congratulations. Tell Linda I love her. That’s great.”
“I still don’t know if I’m ready for it all, but I guess it’s too late. We are about to go shopping for stuff to make one of the spare bedrooms a nursery. Lord help me.”
James could hear the happiness in his brother’s voice, and felt a small twinge. It stopped short of jealousy. But just short.
—
There was a rainy day. A small miracle. The air was thick and humid and it was still hot but the dust lay down. James and Karl pulled the golf carts into the barn and did some maintenance. James had never been mechanically minded and Karl was having a good time exposing his ignorance. “Hand me that oil filter wrench there, Montana. No, I said the oil filter wrench. No, the oil filter wrench.”
“Karl, I don’t know what that is.”
“Goddamn, son, are you serious? You’ve never changed your own oil? The decline of a once great nation. Evidence.”
Later, James drove up to the hill where he was able to get spotty cellphone reception. He had one voice message from Carina. “Call me immediately.” This was how she always left him messages. No one else he knew did this and it always drove him to think the worst, that she had been involved in an accident of some kind or that she needed him to bail her out of jail or that she was pregnant. There was something about Carina that placed all of these things firmly in the realm of possibility. But, up until this point it had always been something benign, something like, she had just heard an NPR program about life on the Wind River reservation that she thought was horribly off base and she wanted to discuss it with him.
He wasn’t sure he was ready to talk to her. He’d called her only once since leaving, and he’d kept it vague. He’d told her he was going to visit his brother, and that was it. His life at the ranch was simple, unexamined, not something she’d understand. He could picture the conversation, trying to defend himself in the face of her incredulousness. You’re filling deer feeders with corn? Are you serious? Everything unraveling under her scrutiny. She would accuse him of trying to hide. “My god,” she had said to him once. “Am I the first adult woman you’ve ever had to deal with?” They were parked in his car on the hill overlooking town. This was when they were still stealing moments wherever they could.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Just that you seem incapable of taking anything seriously. Is that how she likes you to be? Or, is it just a coping mechanism you’ve developed in order to endure swimming in a pond that shallow?”
“Shallow ponds are the best for swimming. They warm up the quickest. And you can always touch the bottom if you get tired.” She looked at him for a long moment. Shook her head. Got out of his car and into hers.
He figured that she had probably never been swimming in a pond her whole life. He could see her as a child, in the summer, running wild through the concrete heat of whatever hellhole she’d grown up in, the busy city pool her only escape. After that, how could she help it if her aura was clear-blue California chlorine?
He sat for a while watching the rain dapple the truck windshield. Then, he drove back to the bunkhouse and stripped, running through the rain, to dive into the spring pond. He kicked down until his outstretched feet had felt the muck bottom, and then he turned and drifted slowly back to the surface, opening his eyes to see the raindrop-pocked roof of water above him. He floated for a while on his back trying to evaluate his level of enthusiasm for the return home. A new school year at Pine Creek. Anxious parents. Lesson plans. His classroom had two long bulletin boards that would need to be rehung with inspirational quotes and motivational posters. These bulletin boards had become nightmare fodder. In one memorable dream his posters had somehow morphed overnight, so that, on the first morning of school, the children were greeted by walls plastered with profanity-laced diatribes and pornographic pictures. He woke up soon after his firing.
He toweled off and sat at the small table in the bunkhouse.
Call me immediately. Maybe he’d write her a letter.
—
Somehow, it was mid-August. There was more activity on the ranch than there had been all summer. Housekeepers came to air out the guest cabins. Men in camouflage shirts with binoculars around their necks patrolled on golf carts. Hunting season was approaching. The actual owner of the ranch came from Austin for the day. He was a big, white-toothed, red-nosed man who didn’t have much to say to James but immediately fell to back slapping and exchanging barely coherent Texas good ol’ boy insults with Karl. They loaded a cooler with beer and departed on a golf cart and were gone for the rest of the day. Apparently he’d made his money mostly in real estate. Probably a little oil revenue there on the top, like salad dressing.
To James, it was fairly clear that men of certain standing in Texas needed to own ranches. They needed to have a man like Karl on the payroll. It’s what separated them from the citified businessmen on the coasts. During the week they might sell and trade commodities but on the weekends they were ranchers, desperately. How else to justify their existence, if not by holding themselves to a moral code developed in large part from watching John Wayne movies as boys?
—
James gassed up his golf cart and took one last long evening drive. The summer was all but spent. He had a six-pack on ice and he drove slowly on his favorite two-track, the brush gathering evening shadow on either side of him until he broke out on the hilltop overlooking the ranch. He was going to watch the sunset, and tomorrow he was going to leave. He was surprised to find that he would miss Echo Canyon. He really would. He hadn’t been to town in a week. Hadn’t bought anything. Hadn’t had lust-filled thoughts toward a strange woman, hadn’t had a hangover, or a fast-food meal. It was amazing how these things could accumulate in your system, like toxic heavy metals, without you realizing it.
