Ancient Enemy

by Michael McBride

  The screen door swung open behind me with a screech. I froze and listened to my heartbeat thunder in my ears. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around.

  “What’s all this?” The words weren’t slurred, which meant my mother was about as sober as she got. It also meant her head was undoubtedly pounding and her rattlesnake temper was wired to a hair-trigger. “The hell you doing out here?”

  I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. Sank the hatchet into the flat trunk we used as a cutting block. Turned around and shaded my eyes with my hand, as though the sun were the reason I couldn’t make eye contact.

  “Coyotes got them last night. I figured—”

  “You figured what? I’d want to eat their leftovers?”

  “No, I thought—”

  “You didn’t think is the problem. Your father was the same way. Never thought about anything or anyone other than himself.”

  I turned away and busied myself with the sack I’d brought out for the innards. I listened to her breathing, which grew more labored by the day thanks to the cigarettes and her increasing weight. There was a rhythm to it, one that often betrayed her thoughts before she spoke them.

  “Just finish up and bring the meat inside,” she finally said. “I’ll see if I can find something to go with it.”

  The porch planks creaked and the screen door closed behind her with a screech-slam.

  I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I released it and nearly had to double over to catch it again.

  FOUR

  I told Grandfather about the sheep while I helped him eat his atoo’—a traditional Navajo soup made by boiling vegetables with the salvaged viscera of the sheep and one of their heads. All prejudices were checked at the door when it came to food. Eating the head was an acquired taste, or so I was told, and one I’d decided long ago not to acquire. Give me a steak or a chop—the bloodier the better—and I’m a happy guy. It was all I could do to keep the expression of revulsion from my face as I tipped each spoonful to his lips. Precious little actually made it into his mouth, but I was careful to dab the mess from his chin and neck. I chose to believe he enjoyed it. Or maybe he simply enjoyed having someone sitting in his dim room talking to him.

  He hadn’t spoken a word since his stroke, nor had he managed to get out of bed since he returned from the hospital. We all knew he was going to die soon. The doctors hadn’t come right out and said it in so few words, but everything they did say pretty much added up to that conclusion. The paralysis would likely be permanent. As would the incontinence and aphasia—a fancy way of saying that the area in his brain responsible for verbal communication was fried. And that was the problem. When it came to acute ischemic strokes—the sudden formation of a clot in one of the arteries of the brain that cuts off circulation to the tissue—there was a one-hour golden window to treat the patient with clot-busting drugs. It was probably somewhere between three and four hours by the time I found him and five by the time I got him to Southwest Memorial in Cortez, where I knew the doctors were better prepared to handle emergencies than they were at the clinic in Towaoc. They’d pumped him full of what they called a tissue plasminogen activator and told me the goal from there was to try to save the areas of the brain surrounding the tissue adjacent to the clot, which had already been deprived of oxygen for too long. What they meant was things might have turned out differently if I’d gotten him there sooner.

  Grandfather had been there for us when we needed him most, and where were we in his time of greatest need? I’d been killing time in the hills because I wanted to come home so little and my mother had been unconscious on the couch, maybe twenty feet away, when he dropped right there in the dirt in front of our trailer.

  The right side of his face drooped in what had come to resemble permanent sadness, while the skin on the left side had been pulled tighter. The combined effect made his eyes look wider, as though he existed in a perpetual state of terror. I could still see him inside them, though. Deep in those brown eyes. I could see him, trapped like a fox in a snare. The sparkle of cunning remained, a heartbreaking reminder of sentience, the last remaining glimmer of the man who had been both a mother and a father to me when neither of those who’d been cast in the role wanted the part.

  The framed photographs above his head were crammed together so tightly that I couldn’t see the wall between them. Most were old and faded by the years, others from an age before the advent of color film. The older ones featured a younger version of my grandfather, one I barely recognized. With his parents and his brothers. With my grandmother, who died a good decade before I was born. With my mother as a baby and as a child and as a young woman with her whole life in front of her. There were pictures of her with my father, when times had been better and before the glow of happiness in her eyes had been replaced by the shine of alcohol. And then there were pictures of me as a toddler in the arms of my mother, wearing clothes that looked like they’d been donated to our tribe from another era. Photos of grandfather and me posing with trophy bucks and stringers overflowing with trout and wild game of all kinds. And that was where the photographs ended. Where the timeline of my grandfather’s life reached its tragic denouement.

  I once asked him why there were no pictures of me as a baby. He said it was because those years had been sacred to my mother and the memories belonged solely to her, and her alone. And then he’d asked me if I remembered anything about those years. When I said I didn’t, he merely smiled and said they must not have been worth remembering then, that my best years still lie ahead of me and I could make them whatever I wanted them to be.

  That was the same argument I made to myself when I was approached with the opportunity to enroll in an advanced online high school program through Colorado State. If my best years were ahead of me, I was going to make sure they counted. I was going to ensure that I lived them as far away from here as I could get.

  I set aside the soup and held his hand. I hoped he drew strength from the gesture. I didn’t want his only physical contact to come from the acts of changing his catheter and his soiled undergarments.

  It was still hard to stare into his eyes and know he was in there, looking back at me without the ability to communicate what he was thinking, but at least I could finally do it without crying. Right about now, I could really use his advice. If we lost many more animals, we’d be lucky to survive the winter, at least not without me finding a job, and if I did that, who would be here to tend to the animals and take care of him and my mother?

  I was alone and scared and would have given my own tongue to speak with him one last time.

  “Please tell me what to do,” I whispered, and kissed the back of his hand.

  The last of the sun’s rays drew lines across the blanket covering his diminishing form. They faded from scarlet to orange to gray as I stared into his eyes, hoping to somehow latch onto him and pull him back out from the depths. Watched his eyes tick to the left and then back again. Left, then back again. I followed his gaze to my right, toward the shelf where he displayed relics that were obviously important to him, but about which I’d never been curious enough to ask. When I looked back, he did the same thing again.

  I stood and walked over to the shelf. There was a purple- and brown-mottled water jar, carved from either cottonwood or pine, with a handle made of horsehair. A rawhide parfleche, painted with an almost child-like design of a sun setting between two inverted mountain ranges. A beaded ration pouch from which the yellowed stub of a ration ticket still protruded. A rawhide rattle seamed along both sides and discolored where countless hands had grasped the handle to shake it. And a chunk of limestone covered with petroglyphs: a lone stick man with a short, blunt club in one hand and a long spear in the other, surrounded by tall cliffs decorated with spirals and an ancient Anasazi pueblo that resembled the House of Many Windows.

  The floor creaked in the adjacent room. I knew the sounds well enough to recognize my mother was retiring to her couch. The click and hum of the tele
vision tube snapping on and warming up confirmed it.

  I looked back at my grandfather and reached for the water jar. His wide eyes twitched to the right. I ran my fingers over the course surface of the parfleche. Again, the twitch. Lifting the ration pouch produced the same result. When I grabbed the rattle, however, his irises held still and his eyes grew wider. I brought it down from the shelf and shook it. It sounded like it was filled with pebbles. His eyes focused right on it.

  “Would you like this rattle?”

  He closed his eyes and then opened them again, a gesture I interpreted as his version of a nod.

  I sat down beside him once again and lifted his hand so I could close it around the rattle. He looked quickly away and I detected a slight furrowing of his brow. I set his hand back down on the covers and shook the rattle. He closed his eyes. The expression on his face was more contented than I’d seen it since his stroke. Or perhaps I was merely seeing what I wanted to see.

  I continued to shake the rattle past the point when the sun set and darkness crept into the room, at which point I learned that it was filled with more than ordinary pebbles. There had to be quartz crystals inside, for the pale blue glow created by the countless collisions of so many tiny shards radiated through the worn hide and shone in pinprick-beams through the seams. The harder I shook it, the brighter it glowed. The color reminded me of lightning.

  It was in that moment that I recognized my grandfather’s frailty. Even with death lurking in this very room, he feared the darkness more.

  FIVE

  I used a flashlight to check the lock on the stable door and gave it a tug of confirmation. The wood was gray and warped, but solid enough to hold up against anything that had been thrown at it so far. I could see Yanaba through the gaps between the slats, pacing and huffing in her stable. Shaking her mane. When she saw the columns of light stretch across the ground at her feet, she swung around to face me. My flashlight beam drew lines down her long face and reflected from her eyes. I had to look away. There was a bond that existed between humans and horses that only those who shared their lives with them could understand. Yanaba had been a colt when I moved here and we’d grown up together. I could read her thoughts by her movements and expressions every bit as easily as she could sense my feelings by mine. She was scared and felt abandoned. On any other night I would have slept out here in the straw with her, regardless of how cold it was, but I had other plans tonight.

  Her mother dozed in the stable beside her. Paa—short for Muatagoci Paa, which roughly translated to “reflection of the moon upon water”—opened her eyes and snorted, then closed them again. My grandparents had bought her for my mother as a foal. She’d taken to sleeping more and walking less, too. Like I said, there are bonds that transcend mere words.

  Something that wanted to get in there badly enough could tunnel its way under the walls, but I wouldn’t want to be whatever it was when it stuck its head out. I’d seen Yanaba snap a fence rail in half with a playful kick. I had no doubt that if she was scared she could kick a coyote hard enough to knock its teeth clean through the boards.

  The goats were similarly secured inside their pen. They scuffled around in the dirt, pressed closely together in the middle of the open area. They started making high-pitched neighing sounds that reminded me of the baaing of sheep when my light passed through the gaps between boards and across the ground. I walked the full perimeter, but didn’t see any disturbances in the frozen dirt where something had tried to dig under the walls.

  I closed and latched the door on the chicken coop. A coyote might still be able to squirm under the wire; however, there wasn’t a whole lot else it could do in there without opposable thumbs or a battering ram.

  I was just going to have to trust that they were going to be safe enough to make it through the night if anything came back.

  The light from the television flickered through the living room blinds. I stood under the massive cottonwood behind the trailer and listened for the sounds of movement inside for several minutes. I could hear my grandfather’s labored breathing through the cracked seam around his window. A coyote yipped in the distance, from the next valley over to the northeast. Far enough away not to worry me, but close enough to encourage me to get a move on.

  The bag of bones, lungs, and other castoffs from the sheep was behind the board in the trailer’s skirt where I hid it, along with my old Marlin Model 60 .22 Long Rifle. I grabbed one in either hand and made my way around the single-wide to the same path I had followed only last night down to the Mancos River, which had already formed a layer of ice near the banks. It was all I could do to keep them above the waist-deep water as I crossed on the trunk of a fallen pine tree. I tried to move quietly enough that I could hear the gentle baaing of the sheep in the pasture on the other side. I wished I’d been able to lock them up as well, but this field was their home year round and they generally weathered the worst storms near the escarpments to the north, where they were spared the brunt of the elements. I’d have to go into town and see if I could find someone who’d be willing to let me use their livestock trailer. With nothing to offer in exchange, I had a pretty good idea how that would turn out.

  I shoved through the willows on the far side and surveyed the field. The sheep were somewhere off to the west, beyond my range of sight. The moon was little more than a sliver and even that was hidden behind dark clouds that foretold of the snowstorm to come. I opened the sack and dumped the contents onto the ground. Spread them around with my feet. Then ducked back into the trees, sat on the hard dirt, and leaned back against one of the trunks. Arranged the branches in front of me to serve as a blind. Rested the rifle on my lap. Breathed into my hands and rubbed them together for warmth.

  The howl of a coyote echoed from the canyon on the far side of the mountains from me.

  I worked out the kinks in my neck and settled in for what promised to be a long night.

  SIX

  Time stood still in the darkness. Only the occasional gust of wind rattled the branches overhead and ruffled the stiff blades of grass. The starlight faded as clouds spread across the night sky from the east. The wind screaming through the valley caused the sheep to bleat, but their constant baaing remained subdued. I felt the crisp promise of snow in the air, which caused my skin to prickle with goosebumps under my heavy coat. It was all I could do to hold sleep at bay, and I’m not entirely sure I succeeded. There were stretches when I felt as though a blink had lasted a little too long or perhaps resting my burning eyes had become something more. Yet still I remained attuned to the sounds of the night for fear I might miss the stealthy approach of a predator over the whispering river and my own chattering teeth.

  I hadn’t heard the coyotes in a while now. Their yipping had grown increasingly distant, as though they’d been traveling deeper into the maze of canyons. Either that or their silence was meant to lull the flock into a false sense of security while they swung around the cliffs to the east. A part of me felt stupid sitting there on the cold ground when I could have been at home in my bed. I mean, really, what were the odds of them attacking our livestock for a fourth straight night when they’d gorged themselves on goat to such an extent that they’d been unable to consume the sheep?

  I wished my grandfather had been able to talk. Surely he would have come up with a logical explanation and talked me out of throwing away my night on this idiotic—

  A sound. Faraway. High-pitched.

  I shifted the rifle in my lap. Found the safety with my trigger finger.

  A whinny.

  Yanaba.

  A thump. Another. Hooves striking wood.

  I rose to a crouch and turned in the direction of the sound. I couldn’t see the stables through the willows.

  The baaing from the pasture ceased.

  Only the river continued to gurgle.

  I turned back toward the field, conscious of the crackle of moldering leaves underfoot. Brought the stock to my shoulder and sighted down the ridgeline through the
scope. Boulders and pines and shrubs. Anything could be hiding behind them or within their branches and I wouldn’t be able to tell.

  Yanaba was again silent.

  My pulse rushed in my ears.

  Whoomph. Whoomph. Whoomph.

  I whirled around at the sound of screaming. The goats. Clattering noises. Something striking the plank walls? Or testing the locked doors?

  A nervous whinny.

  The river continued to flow, maddeningly loud now.

  Whoomph. Whoomph. Whoomph.

  A bleat from my left, followed by the clatter of breaking branches and crunching leaves.

  I spun back toward the field. Sighted my rifle on the ridgeline. Followed it down to where the rocks met with the trees, enclosing the pasture.

  Whoomph-whoomph-whoomph.

  A crinkling of dead grass.

  I stole my eye from the scope and glanced left in time to catch a hint of movement. Nothing overt. An impression. A feeling that something had just disappeared into the bushes a heartbeat before I looked.

  Silence.

  Whoomph-whoomph-whoomph.

  The moon momentarily parted the storm clouds, which rolled over the mountains like an avalanche. The brief, wan glow revealed an empty field before the shadows swept over it once more.

  The wind howled through the canyon, then faded beneath the ceaseless cackling of the river.

  Whoomph-whoomph-whoomph.

  I glanced at the mess of entrails and bones I’d dumped out in the grass as bait. Had it been spread out even more? Had one of the heads somehow rolled farther toward the tree line to my left than I remembered?

  Darkness.

  A scream of the wind and beneath it, the shrill bleating commenced.

  I took off at a sprint toward the source of the ruckus. The same sounds as last night. Of terror and pain.