by John Brandon
He looked out from his half-assed grotto, which gave him shade mostly when he didn’t need it, late in the day, and the far-off mountains appeared to be crumbling. The mountains he could barely see, veiled in the blue dust of distance—that’s where he would survive or perish, where he would find himself in a type of straightforward peril men had found themselves in since the beginning of time.
SOREN’S FATHER
He had decided maybe it wasn’t a great idea to have Gee keep coming up to the clinic room. Something was wrong and he wasn’t interested in figuring out whose fault it was because it was probably his. He hadn’t told Gee any of this and had been avoiding her calls. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. Everything was his fault. Doctor Raymond had come in that morning to flash his penlight in Soren’s eyes as he did every week and then listen to his chest and declare with astonishment, as he did every week, that Soren still didn’t need a tracheotomy. Soren’s father had asked him exactly what he was looking for with the light and when the doctor said he was watching for any changes, Soren’s father cut him off and said there weren’t any damn changes and that was obvious and if it was really necessary to keep shining a bright light in the kid’s eyes and making useless checkmarks on a useless clipboard then could the doctor come do that when Soren’s father wasn’t around?
“But you’re always around,” said the doctor.
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” said Soren’s father.
Now Soren’s father felt bad about that. He wasn’t upset at the doctor. He was upset because he saw he had to face Soren’s situation alone. It was one of those things. There were four walls where Soren’s father lived and a wasteland out the window, and Soren’s father had to figure out how to do the time alone. He had to make peace with the beeps and cycling hums of the machines that monitored Soren. He had to make peace with the clinic food, which he now knew was terrible. He had to make peace with his son’s sallow, sinking face. He did not need to be leading on some woman who was too good for him anyway. He wasn’t with the living. He wasn’t with the living and he wasn’t where his son was.
He took magazines into his hands and he remembered to brush his teeth and clip his nails, and he reminded himself that Soren, if and when he woke up, would need him. He saw Gee’s weird roadrunners in his mind’s eye. On vigil nights, he closed the blinds tight and flipped off the lamp. He did not want to offer the remaining vigilers any encouragement. Before, when his son had been healthy, Soren’s father had been happy and the vigilers had been miserable, and now these people were using his son to try and find peace. There were a few left who refused to quit. They didn’t want Soren to wake up. They didn’t want anybody to be happy.
DANNIE
Something was wrong with her body. Her body was against her, betrayed. No one had forced her to get married. No one had forced her into a job where she never met new people. No one had forced her out to New Mexico. Dannie had to get this period to arrive and get out of her sweatpants and out of her condo. If she could get through this period she could leave Arn behind and make hopeful new plans. Her back was aching. Her hands and feet were tender. She could lie still for hours without falling asleep. She’d been eating nothing but dry sopapilla. It was hard to open the honey jar and tedious to keep dipping the bread. She could make it as far as the balcony, where she could breathe fresh air and keep an eye on the heavens, but every time Dannie came inside she smelled bacon. That smell was never going to leave. It was in the furniture, in her hair.
Dannie managed to make an appointment. She showered and put on jeans and a flannel shirt. She made it down her condo stairs and over to her car. It had rained all yesterday and there was no way to tell. No puddles or sog. The desert was dry and the sky was how it always was, close and distracted. Dannie looked at herself in the rearview. She was stuck smack in the middle of her life. Her hormones were brawling. Dannie kept her eyes on the road, kept the car between the lines.
She parked in front of a low building made of mirrors and found the mirror that was the door. She signed in on a clipboard and then had to fill out paperwork. The other women in the waiting room were nondescript. They were nondescript to Dannie because they were just like her. They were in their thirties, trim and savvy. Except when it came to becoming thirty-five, thirty-seven, thirty-nine years old; they didn’t know how that had happened. When it came to knowing where their youths had gone, they weren’t savvy at all. Here they were, flipping through magazines, meekly awaiting verdicts.
The doctor was that perfect doctor age, about forty-five. He spoke to Dannie in an exam room. He wore a suit without a tie, no scrubs or lab coat. He weighed Dannie and took her blood pressure. There didn’t seem to be any nurses anywhere. The doctor’s hands were big and smooth as silk on Dannie’s arm.
“You look like someone,” he said. He was puzzled, not happily.
“I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
The doctor tapped his forehead with his knuckle. “Are you a chef? Do you work at a restaurant?”
Dannie shook her head.
“I’m telling you, you remind me of someone.”
The doctor left her in the exam room. There was an empty hat rack in the corner. There weren’t any diagrams on the walls, no drawings of organs, just a photograph of sheep on a hillside.
After a while a woman came in, another doctor, and Dannie learned that she was married to the male doctor. She had stringy hair and pointy-toed shoes. She was the one who gave Dannie her exam. Afterward, she had Dannie drink a bunch of water and pee in a cup, and then Dannie was back in the waiting room. It was a different bunch of women, but they might as well have been the same.
After a time, the male doctor opened the waiting room door and waved her back and she followed him to the same exam room. Dannie saw how the office worked. The wife performed the exams and the husband handled the bedside stuff.
“I thought of it,” he said. “You know the talent show on TV with the Australian guy?”
“I know of it.”
The doctor motioned for Dannie to sit. “They had a girl on it who throws footballs through tires. This prim thing with manners, and she stands twenty yards away and zip, zip, zip—one after the next.”
“I’ve never thrown a football in my life.”
“You’re not from Texas. This girl was from Texas.” The doctor drew his hand behind his head daintily, and then whipped his arm forward. He held the pose. “They kept her around because she was an attractive female who could throw footballs.”
“Mystery solved,” said Dannie.
The doctor set the file flat on the desk. He made sure it wasn’t too close to his soda. “So, you’re pregnant.”
Dannie looked at him.
“In my opinion, the answer to whether or not you’re likely to get pregnant is yes—it’s overwhelmingly likely, a hundred percent likely. You can quit waiting on that period.”
Dannie didn’t know how to feel. She felt stupid. She was a woman who’d been having sex with no birth control and then her period had been late. Her mind had not allowed itself to consider the obvious. Nothing could happen until you stopped hoping for it. She’d met Arn after she’d decided not to try and meet anyone. She’d gotten pregnant when she’d deemed herself unable. Her womb was not a cobwebby corner in the rafters.
The doctor had a lot of literature for Dannie. She was in a fog. He gave her many phone numbers. He gave her his card. It had his name on it and his wife’s. Her name was Marney. The husband and wife would no longer be her doctors. Their duties ended with conception. There were a bunch of foods Dannie was encouraged to eat and a bunch she needed to avoid. There were exercise programs. Dannie looked at the photograph of sheep and it looked different. The sheep looked like they’d been through an ordeal. They looked dumb with gratitude. Dannie was passing back through the waiting room, all those other women. She was out of the building. She was in her car.
She didn’t know where to drive. She wasn’t going home. When the lights were g
reen she went on through. When they were red, she got into a turning lane. She headed mostly south. It was the middle of the afternoon. She went down past the factories and the scattered, one-story neighborhoods and took a ramp onto an interstate. There was a dairy farm with a complicated irrigation system and then a flurry of signs for a taxidermy museum. She was down into the featureless desert. There weren’t mountains down here and there had never been towns.
Dannie felt something unfamiliar and she hoped it was joy. Joy wouldn’t feel this complicated, though, this unfinished. People were going to want to help Dannie. They were going to judge her. She was going to be an open book. She had so much to learn. She was about to start a twenty-four-hour-a-day job that was going to last many, many years. Dannie wanted to tell her friends. She would be let back into their good graces because she had a story to tell. That’s what was required when you forsook people and disappeared into the wilderness: a story. They would support her. But she wasn’t going to tell them until she was ready. Dannie didn’t want a bunch of fluttering attention just yet. She had to think things over. She had cards in her hand but the game she was playing was wholly unfamiliar. She was still heading south, the only car on the road. Albuquerque had disappeared from her rearview. The Owl Café was supposed to be down here. Maybe she’d stop and get a greasy burger. She adjusted her visor and opened the window a crack.
Arn. What about Arn now? He had held up his end of the bargain, not that he’d known a bargain was ever in place. He was an unwitting donor. He lived like he didn’t want to ever be wise and now he was none the wiser. He wasn’t ready to become a father. Not even close. He would have a whole different life a few years from now, and Dannie had no right to ruin that life by telling him about this pregnancy. Their time together had been mutually beneficial. She’d given him a fling with an older woman and he’d saved her from the world of sperm banks and adoption. At a sperm bank they had contributions from a bunch of tall guys with college degrees, as if the world wasn’t crawling with six-foot college graduates who were complete assholes. Dannie’s child was going to look like Arn—there was no way around it—but Dannie was an adult and that meant dealing with difficult circumstances. The child might have Arn’s temperament, and that would please Dannie but also make her miss him. She’d be ready for that. She’d handle missing him. She would miss the way his eyes could appear uninterested while his touch was full of passion. She would miss his voice, would miss the way he never cried but always seemed not far from it. People cried too much. Dannie was a mother now. Her crying didn’t mean anything anymore. She was a mother and she was going to have to miss all sorts of things.
Dannie saw the billboard for the Owl Café and then she saw the exit and blew past it. She wanted to be in her car. There was something way out ahead of her on the horizon, either low clouds or lofty mountain peaks. They were as far off as her eyes could see, in another state or another country.
MAYOR CABRERA
He walked his sister-in-law out to his car and she lowered herself down into the passenger seat without any help. Mayor Cabrera got them going north on the old Turquoise Trail. His sister-in-law was wearing an actual outfit, a blouse and pants that matched and a coat and shoes that went together. She’d made some effort with her hair. Mayor Cabrera could tell by the way his sister-in-law looked around at the scenery that she hadn’t been up this way in a long time. She placed her hand on the dashboard, bracing herself, and Mayor Cabrera slowed down. When they were young, she’d have been egging him to go faster. She and Tam and Mayor Cabrera had spent so many hours in a car, in his old El Camino. They’d burned a whole summer chasing around the state to sites where aliens had been spotted.
At the cemetery they walked at a measured pace, browsing the tombstones. Some of these people had lived in the Old West, Mayor Cabrera thought. The Old West had not been so long ago. Mayor Cabrera asked how his sister-in-law’s chickens were doing, which was a way of asking if she was worried about the wolf. She said she couldn’t bring the chickens in at night because of the mess they’d make. She hoped there were enough of them to look out for one another, or at least raise enough racket to wake her. She seemed resigned to leave her chickens to fate, which Mayor Cabrera decided to take as a sign of sanity. She seemed a little embarrassed about the chickens, in general. If she could be embarrassed, she was rejoining the human race.
They came to the tombstone they were looking for. Mayor Cabrera had decided not to put dates on his wife’s stone. He didn’t want her hemmed in that way. There was an engraving on the stone of verbena, her favorite flower. There was a weed the landscaping crew had missed, leaning against the stone like a drunk against an alley wall. Mayor Cabrera reached down and plucked it.
His sister-in-law’s cheeks looked blanched, out in the chilly breeze. “Things have never felt real,” she said, “without her here to see them.”
Mayor Cabrera knew what she meant. The moment he was in now didn’t seem all that real. “We used to be the best people we knew,” he said. “We walked around with that. The knowledge that we were fun and tough.”
His sister-in-law’s lips became a hard line and then she said, “I remember. I remember how I was.”
The sun found its way out of the clouds and Mayor Cabrera saw that they were standing in the shade. He hadn’t visited his wife’s grave in forever but the feeling was nonetheless familiar, the uncertainty about what to feel, about whether he was there for himself or Tam, whether that mattered. Maybe it was good to feel confused. Maybe some people didn’t feel anything at the cemetery, and that had to be worse.
“I remember,” his sister-in-law repeated. “But it was easy back then.”
A small noise issued from behind them, a throat-clearing, and they turned to see an old man approach a nearby grave. He pulled a newspaper out from under his arm and rested it in front of the stone. It wasn’t yellowed or stiff, the paper. It looked like today’s paper. The old man removed his hat with a shaky hand. He didn’t seem to notice anyone else was around, and Mayor Cabrera and his sister-in-law, in order not to disturb him, grew still and quiet.
THE FRESHMAN
He was in ninth grade but was almost six feet tall and had strapping forearms. Each morning he came out before he left for school and fed his rabbit and stroked its ears back. It wasn’t a normal rabbit, nor even a jackrabbit. It was some European breed with long hair and a permanent frown that the boy’s mother had rescued from a defunct circus. The rabbit looked like a wizard. It had taken the boy’s mother one day to realize she didn’t want the rabbit inside the house and two days to realize it would make a poor pet. By then, the boy was attached.
When the boy came out, still chewing his last bite of cereal, he saw the buzzards all around and knew what had happened. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew the rabbit was dead. He couldn’t see the cage from where he stood because it was tucked against the side of the house in a utility shed that was really only some sheets of plywood. The buzzards had not dared inside. They were building courage. The wolf now knew everything about the boy. The wolf, by this time of morning, was hiding somewhere on the edge of the wilderness. He was hiding but he wasn’t worried about getting shot or captured. He was worried because the songs were coming less often and he needed them more and more. The girl in the house with the chickens was failing him. The wolf would have been relieved, somewhere inside him, to have the humans corner him, the same as the pets were relieved in their souls when they saw the wolf’s eyes before them.
The boy, the rabbit’s owner, was always alone at the house in the mornings because his mother worked early, and for once the boy was grateful for this. He went in and got the shotgun and the paper bag of shells. The paper of the bag was stiff and rough, like it had been rained on and then dried out. He sat himself on a stack of vinyl siding and aimed the shotgun and put even pressure on the trigger. Then he quickly fired the other shell. Then he reloaded. He was so close to his targets, he didn’t have to use the bead at the end of
the barrel. Each time he shot a pair of buzzards he had to wait for the rest of them to resettle. They would scurry a short ways, flapping and stumbling, wanting to get to safety but not wanting to forfeit their spot in the chow line. The boy didn’t want to see the rabbit yet. He wasn’t going to school. He was excusing himself. He shot twice and waited, shot twice and waited. The sun ascended shapeless and white. After a half-hour, there were more buzzards, not fewer. Some of them had lost interest in the hidden rabbit and were poking at their dead brethren. The man who lived on the next property came over to see what was happening. When he realized the boy’s pet was dead and the boy was almost out of ammo, he allowed the shooting to continue. It was a sight. The yard looked war-torn. The shot buzzards were fifty low, tattered flags from fifty defeated little forces.
In time, the boy had to go look. He saw. The rabbit had beaten its head against the bars. The boy had been right that the cage was sturdy enough to keep out any predator, but he had not counted on an animal that would scare the rabbit to death just to do it. The wolf hadn’t wanted to eat the rabbit, only to torture it. It was a lot for the boy to take in.
The man from the next property sent the boy inside. He agreed that the boy didn’t need to go to school that day. The man got his pickup truck and tossed every last buzzard in the bed, so he could haul them out in the desert and dump them. He couldn’t believe how light they were. Each bird weighed about as much as an apple. He had a tarpaulin cover for the bed and he stretched it on, to keep the rest of the buzzards at bay. He wondered if all the live ones would follow him when he drove off, a grim cloud. He got the rabbit out of its cage and rested it on the seat of his truck, and then he grabbed a shovel. He was going to dig a grave for the rabbit, and the buzzards he was going to dump on the side of a little-used road, to show them what it felt like.
