Lamb

by Bonnie Nadzam

He looked out the window at Lamb’s truck. “When you get out of that vehicle, and get out on the river, or up in the mountains, you’ll need a knife.” The clerk looked at him. “Won’t she?” He took a shining silver knife with a five-inch blade out of the case and handed it to the girl, handle first.

  Lamb looked at her. “I don’t know. I think your mother would kill me.”

  Tommie shrugged. “She won’t care.”

  Lamb looked from the girl to the man behind the counter and into the glass. “You don’t have a good knife do you, Em.”

  The clerk retrieved the first knife and picked up another. “Maybe you want a skinning knife.”

  “Something practical,” Lamb said. “Something she can fold up and keep in the coin pocket of her jeans.”

  “Like for an emergency?” The clerk asked, splaying his open palms upon the glass.

  “Yes,” he said, “like that.”

  The clerk nodded at the case. “Go ahead and look.”

  Lamb looked the man in the eye. “Why don’t you give us the most expensive one you have in there.” The man slid open the glass doors and selected a tiny bone-handled pocketknife. Reaching over the counter, he nodded at the girl, who opened her palm. He set it in her hand.

  “That’s one twenty.”

  She weighed it in her hand—surprisingly heavy for its size. They both had the same thought: like the pencil sharpener. She nodded at Lamb, and the clerk pointed his eyes at the girl’s pockets.

  “You can fit that one in your Levi’s,” he said.

  • • • • •

  The first morning was cold, gas blue, perfect. As the light evened out above him, David Lamb leaned against the Ford in the sheepskin jacket he’d found in the cabin and listened to sporadic trills of white-throated sparrows tipping in the wind along the fence wire. Paper birch stood in thick white rows between the river and the road, straight and bare as bleached bones, their uppermost branches feathered and brain green. A headache that began as a tightening of the temple had now spread to the back of Lamb’s eye, to his neck and jaw, clenched and twisted up toward the corner of his brain as if in deference to or fear of some thought lurking there. Altitude. She’d have a headache too.

  He shaved in the frigid river water and scrubbed his face and nose and eyes with it, the wind like cold breath in his hair and filling his teeth and cleaning him through.

  In the shop he chose a can of chili beans and five eggs and a flat tin of brisling sardines in cottonseed oil, and set everything on a flat rock behind the cabin where he’d already decided they’d make their fires. Out of Foster’s view.

  He lifted a bird’s nest from a low slope of the gutter and tucked it under his arm. He filled his pockets with dead leaves and dried and broken grass and gathered a fistful of brittle sticks and carried it all back to camp. From the diminished woodpile in the shop he carried out the longest, narrowest logs, set them parallel in the dirt and drew two ends together, stuffing the closed point with tinder. He lit the bird’s nest on fire and set it on top.

  Gently he set one egg and a handful of coffee grounds into the smallest pan filled with water, then poured just a finger of brown whiskey into his tin cup. In a short while his bones were warm and the fire was cheerful and the birds were at it and his coffee was boiling. He drank the first cup slowly as he peeled the warm boiled egg in his cold hands, eating it in small bites, sipping the coffee. He was in this moment half sorry about the girl, that he’d brought her at all.

  There were antelope everywhere on the ridge to the west, beyond Foster’s house, their faces long and matted with shaggy white fur. Smoke from the fire rose in blue curls and woofed up into the cold and he imagined seeing it as if from a distance, the low ceiling of it thinning in a flat line beneath a slowly rising column: a signal of his presence in the world.

  He refilled his cup, black this time, and opened the chili beans and spilled them into the round metal pan. His ears and fingers were stinging with cold, his nose running, his insides radiant with warmth. Shadows of grass blades in the grass blades, rising sun knitting everything together in its warmth. For the first time in a week, maybe it’d been a year, he didn’t know anymore, he felt if given the chance he could really sleep.

  He set the pan on the narrowest end of the fire and stirred to keep the beans from burning. One clear breaking note of birdsong. Meadowlark. The trees were luminous now, frost dissolving off the grass and off the top of the truck and here comes his girl, his little freckled daughter-niece, new sleeping bag around her shoulders. She found Lamb behind the cabin stoking a bright orange fire that stretched and shrank in the wind. There was a little pile of a mess kit beside him and a pan balanced on the pointed end of the logs.

  “Come over here if you want to see the world’s most perfect fire,” he said. A little crooked flag of gray hair stood up on the back of his head.

  She stood beside him, her face still closed up with sleep, and stared at the fire. “How long have you been up?”

  “Hours. I had to make the day. One detail at a time. Very painstaking. How does it look?”

  “Besides freezing?”

  “It’ll warm up. What do you think of the black-and-yellow bird I put over there?”

  “Nice touch.”

  “Nice touch, she says.”

  “What are you drinking.”

  “Black coffee. We’ll mix some cocoa into yours in a minute.”

  “I take it black.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about we mix a spoonful of cocoa in today, see if you like it. We can make it stronger tomorrow.”

  Shrug.

  “Come have a seat.”

  “The sleeping bag will get dirty.”

  “That’s what sleeping bags are for. How did you sleep?”

  “I forgot where I was.”

  “Perfect.”

  He moved the pans and poured cold water from a plastic gallon jug into the smallest one.

  “How did you learn to do this?” she asked him.

  “Been waiting about fifty years to have a breakfast just like this one. I guess in all those days I figured out pretty well how it would go.”

  “But you didn’t know about me all that time.”

  “No,” he said, checking the water in the pan. “You I had not planned on. You are a complete and total surprise.”

  “A good surprise?”

  “I’m withholding any evaluative judgments for the time being.”

  “So you won’t miss me when you take me back?”

  He looked at her, his tin cup held to his lips. “Let’s just have the morning, okay? No more hard questions.”

  He gave her the job of making toast and told her soon she’d be preparing the whole breakfast, fire and all, which she didn’t believe. He latched bread slices inside a little metal cage and showed her where to hold it over the wide end of the fire.

  She turned it over. “Did we buy this thing?”

  “I found it here.”

  “Gary.” She watched the bread. “Do you think my mom called the police?”

  He watched the beans. “Honestly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Are you going to get in trouble?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Two reasons. You want to hear them?”

  She nodded.

  “One, I’m really smart.” He cracked an egg over the hottest side of the beans and set the shells in the dirt beside his boot. She grinned and studied the bread.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I! Don’t you think I’m smart?” He held an egg in his palm.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”

  “Good,” he said. “I know you do.”

  “Second,” she said.

  He opened another egg over the beans and gestured toward the pan, the yolks of the four eggs brightening in the red beans and sauce. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

 
She gave him a look.

  “Just look at it,” he said. “Think of all the chickens and bean pickers and bean canners and tomato growers and truckers in the world all collaborating to fill your belly and make you strong. It’s medicine. And we’re not worthy of it if we don’t acknowledge it.”

  “Okay, it’s beautiful.”

  “What’s beautiful about it?” he asked her.

  “The yellow and red.”

  “And all the work.”

  “I guess.”

  “All the sun and rain, which is magic.”

  She scrunched up her nose.

  “It is, Tom. I know I’m right about this. Want to know which part has the most magic in it?”

  “Which?”

  “The chili peppers.”

  “I don’t like spicy like that.”

  “You have to taste it carefully. With an open mind.”

  “But it burns my tongue.”

  “That’s a mistaken point of view. What you’re tasting in hot sauce like this is nothing less than the heat of starlight. Did you know the sun is a star?”

  “Do you think I’m retarded?”

  “How’s your coffee?”

  “Good. But not the cocoa in it.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because typically you take your coffee black.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, you’re my kind of girl.” He pulled the pan away a little from the flames. “Don’t burn our toast.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You want to hear the second reason?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the most important part, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s that I have you to help me. Isn’t that right? I’m trusting you to help me in this. We’re fifty-fifty.”

  “Right.”

  “Didn’t we shake on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. So. That’s how I know. Your mother and Jessie—even though you don’t like him, Em, don’t do that. That’s a nasty habit. I hope you never roll your eyes when someone mentions my name to you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “They love you very much. How could they not?”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t need to worry about it too much. Because this is going to be really good for everyone. It’s good for their love of each other, and it’s good for their love of you. And when you get back to that little apartment, and back to those girls like Jenny and Sid, there’s going to be a new light about you. The stillness of the earth in you. You’ll know so much more than you did. You’ll know about this country’s secret heart. You’ll just be drenched in it. And it’ll get all over everybody.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh? Doesn’t that sound good to you? Take this plate. Hold it steady. Got it? This is going to be the best breakfast of all time. Here. One, two, three eggs for you. I know how you are. Should I give you all four eggs?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ha. You see? Do I know everything about you, or what?”

  “I know. It’s totally weird.”

  “Taste those beans for me. Good?”

  Nod. “Hot.”

  “How about after breakfast we pack for a little hike out toward those hills?”

  “I can wear my new boots.”

  “We’ll break them in carefully, so we don’t blister your perfect white feet. And you can wear your new jacket. Unless you’re going to stay in that nightgown.”

  “Maybe I’ll wear the nightgown the whole week.”

  “I’d love that.”

  • • • • •

  The best way to honor your life is to perform every act with ceremony. Don’t do sloppy work. Tie your shoes carefully. Comb your hair carefully. And right now, he said, honoring our lives means packing carefully for the hike.

  “But you’re packing,” she said, “like we’re never coming back.”

  “Well, you still talk,” he said, “like you think we’re in a movie.”

  He kneeled to the ground whenever they came upon something new in the grass and weeds as they hiked out through the public lands beyond the old and abandoned ranches and along the major river. Tiny bloodred urns of prairie smoke, animal shit marbled with fur, and the slender bones of sparrows and deer mice.

  “See this one?” he whispered. “See those little green hearts on the inside? The green middle? The way they all cluster at the top here?” He made a circle with his index finger from the petals to the stamen.

  Nod.

  “If we dug it up, the roots would be scaly and black.”

  “No way.”

  “Like the hide of the devil himself.”

  She curled her lip.

  “It’s so poisonous that a single blossom would kill someone your size.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Put you right to sleep like a princess in a fairy tale.”

  “How many would it take to kill you?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a big guy.”

  “But how many?”

  “More than someone like you could gather in a single day.”

  “I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I can’t remember. Death something. Or deathly something. Do you want to keep one?”

  “Is it poisonous to touch?”

  He plucked the cluster and they held their breath, both of them eyes wide and tracing its arc through the air as he slowly lowered it between two pages of American elms in her new North American tree book. “You be careful with this.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m serious, Em. If anyone saw it they’d know you were out west.”

  “Okay.”

  The meadow between the house and the hem of the mountains was wider than Lamb had reckoned. By the time they had crossed halfway to the swell of hill and trees, it had been nearly two hours of steady hiking, and their pants were soaked to the knees and their boots caked with manure and mud.

  “If we hadn’t got you those boots, we’d have had to go back an hour ago.”

  “Why?”

  “In tennis shoes your feet would be blistered all to hell from wet socks.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is the part where you say, Gee, Gary, where would I be without you?”

  “Gee, Gary, where would I be without you?”

  “Tommie. Don’t ever say anything like that to a man.”

  The passing day was marked by ravens calling, by constant twittering of song sparrows in the trees and on the fence posts. Acres of dry grass banded by red and gold ribbons of fireweed and yellow gumweed. Sagebrush grew to the height of the girl’s throat, and after once lifting her over a wall of fallen alder he backed up and hurdled it.

  “I can still get up there!” he said, panting on the other side, hands on his knees, grinning up into the light at her.

  “You’re not that old.”

  “Oh, say that again, you sweet child.”

  “You’re not. You’re not that old.”

  By noon they were climbing the ridge, the aspen groves sporadically shading the sun from their foreheads and arms.

  “What are these things everywhere?”

  “Cow patties.”

  “Cow patties?”

  “Cow shit.”

  “There’s flowers growing out of them.”

  “I know it. Come here. I want to put some more sunblock on your face.”

  “Why are they flat?”

  “Cow faucet.”

  “Sick.”

  “Come here.” He squeezed a white pasty worm of sunblock into his hand. “Give me your face.”

  “It won’t help.”

  “I’m beginning to see that. You’re a little fragile, aren’t you?” He slathered her bluish white with the stuff, her skin hot to the touch, covering her face and nose and cheeks and collarbones and neck.

  “I should have bought you a hat.�
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  “Like your dad’s cap?”

  “A forest ranger hat. Let’s get one. Let’s braid your hair and get you a forest ranger hat.”

  “What’s a forest ranger hat?”

  “It’s what you need. Trust me. Hey.” He kneeled. “What do you think that is?”

  “Footprints.”

  “I know that,” he said. “Of what?”

  “A bear?”

  “No. That’s from a coyote. Maybe a fox. Come here,” he said, lowering his voice. “Get down here and I’ll show you.”

  On their knees in the weeds and dust he pointed at the paw print, its tiny dashes of claws in the dirt. “See that? That means it’s from a kind of dog, rather than a kind of cat.”

  “Like a wolf?”

  “Nah. No wolves up here. Just coyotes.”

  “Don’t they bite?”

  “They won’t bother us.”

  “When is it a cat?”

  “No claw marks.” He erased the claw marks with his thumb. “Like that. Got it?” And Tom. If you’re out on a hike and it’s a cat, like a mountain lion, you get out of town, okay?”

  “Now someone behind us will think there’s a lion out here.”

  “Is there someone behind us?”

  “If there was, they’d be scared.”

  “Aren’t we smart to make our trail safe like that?”

  “Pretty smart.”

  “Do you think it would work in Lombard, if you drew cat prints on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Maybe we could empty out the city that way,” he said, standing and wiping off his knees. “We could have the whole place to ourselves.”

  “If there were a real mountain lion in the city,” the girl said, standing and copying him, brushing off her pants, “they’d just shoot it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s correct.” He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked out ahead. “Listen. Let’s make a deal about this hike. We’ll eat lunch in the lowest trees we find, then head back.”

  “How far do you think that is?”

  “Two more miles. Are you good for it?”

  “This is the farthest I’ve ever gone.”

  “It’s good for you. You have to get your heart rate up every day.”

  Two hours past noon they reached the sudden tilt in the ground that eventually rose—still another mile before them—into the distant mountains socked in by clouds. The greasewood and sage gave way to taller brush, smaller trees braceleted with poison oak and ivy. It was dense. There was no trail.