by Téa Obreht
So though Harlan insisted once again now “it hasn’t been long at all,” it occurred to her that this could not be true. An hour had gone by. Perhaps more.
Harlan put on his hat. “I’ll go have a lookround.”
He hurried out into the cool darkness. Paused for a moment just outside the door, lit up from behind by the yellow glare of the windows. From the tilt of his head, she could tell that he was checking his gun. Then he slid out of the light, and became just another imagined movement on the sageflat.
“Toby,” she said. “You sit put and wait awhile.”
Emmett’s old Colt was in the mailpile. Four bullets were chambered—the other two lost to whatever nonsense went on about the place when she wasn’t around.
“What’s happening, Mama?”
“Sit put right here, and don’t you move. Not for anything.”
SHE HAD EXPECTED IT TO be entirely dark by now, but a last, tightening slice of light still clung to the hills. A few pale clouds were unraveling into the eastward dark. Her knees shook the dewspray ahead of her into the sage. Halfway out across the field, she looked back at the house, the haze of fat, pale moths ticking against its windows. Toby was perched where she had left him, wavery through the glass, still and straightbacked on the kitchen chair.
She kept the plow to her left and made for the slanted black bones of the outer fence just ahead. The only sign of Harlan was the smell of his tobacco. She said his name a few times, and then Josie’s. Bats swooped overhead, clicking. Once or twice, some unseen bramble in the grass caught and almost sent her sprawling.
Harlan was in the barn. She could see a faint, orange orb drifting evenly past one of the upstairs windows. Then it disappeared. She stood still, listening. Soon followed the sound of his footsteps—or at least what she thought were his footsteps, for here and there between them came Evelyn’s voice again. What’s he looking for? What is it?
What had he meant to tell her? Everything had been going sideways all day, and Harlan’s arrival had brought the first promise of some familiar stillness. Now even that seemed to be falling away. Her throat was burning again. There was no reason for her presence out here, save for the sharp guilt of having forgotten the girl—but even now, Josie was less on her mind than was Harlan, whom she could see coming slowly down the ladder with his lit pipe orange between his teeth. Looking for what? Not the girl. He already knew she wasn’t in the barn.
Looking for something, Evelyn said.
Harlan emerged on the far side of the outhouse and went up the slope ahead of her, thin and rawboned in the moonlight. At the top of the rise he sprang up onto the jackfence and stood shouting Josie’s name downhill. Nothing came back. After a while, he called again.
“Reckon she’s still down there?” Harlan said, once Nora reached the fence.
“I expect so. She never could tell time, the goose. Probably found a few spirits to dance with.”
“Right kind of night for that.”
And it was. The moon was just clearing the bluff above their little patch of forest. By its light, the contours of familiar trees and stumps and the tumbledown perimeter wall looked quicksilvered and faraway. She stood with her arms slung over the palings and mulled over the prospect of having to find her way down to the stream among all these twisted shadows.
“Won’t you go indoors, Nora?”
“What the hell were you looking for upstairs?”
“Josie.”
“That’s not so. You knew she wasn’t back yet.”
“I reckon I forgot.”
She couldn’t see his face. “And what did you set out to tell me?”
“Please go on back to the house.”
“You don’t even know where you’re going,” she said, and set off for the trailhead.
The slope was far more treacherous by night. A steep, narrow grade, almost entirely scree. The crumbling embankment on both sides was shot through with rattail roots that snagged her fingers. She braced herself and slid one foot in front of the other. Rocks went crackling away from her downhill.
From somewhere behind her, Harlan bellowed: “Josie!”
The eruption of his voice was a shock. In answer to whether or not he intended to give some indication when he was fixing to do that again, he met her only with a blinding grin and she felt that greedy, nostalgic weight between her ribs like a bird resettling.
It was another quarter mile, maybe a little further, to the wash. The air was already cooler down here and thick with mosquitoes. She slapped at her forehead and fought the slide of the scree where the trail steepened just before easing out into the trees. There, her outheld hands met the undergrowth. A cobweb went into her mouth and she peeled at its invisible tendrils till Harlan took her hand and pushed swiftly through down to the beach.
They stood together with the dry wash before them and the black tanks along the shore shining with mud. Bluff to bluff, the beach was empty.
“She would’ve gone clear around that way,” Nora said. “Maybe she got turned around.”
Harlan moved her to the wall. “This is far enough to be playing hide-a-seek for three,” he said. “Don’t you wander off now. I can’t go looking for more than one of you at a time.”
She watched him feel his way along the bank, calling Josie’s name. The cane rustled and jerked wildly wherever he touched it. On the far shore she could see familiar forms, the ragged lip of the mesa, above which the stars sat in their whorled millions. The bluffsides, banded over with ore and stuck about with newborn scrub, all shadowed together. Nothing seemed much itself except the creek. From here it looked like water still, and she moved her tongue unthinkingly through the tanks of thick spit that had collected behind her teeth. To be an animal now and drop one’s chin in that slow, red mud. Moonlight had forged a second course along its surface and shone like hammered steel between the rocks. Toby’s fishing place sat midcourse, domed and still as a long-dead tortoise. Eddies came foaming in toward her along its little jetty of stones, and disappeared among the reeds.
She tried once. “Josie!”
The bullfrogs were at their nighttime frisk. Their bloated calls moved up and down the wash. The cattails rattled all together, a long line of them like nodding spearheads broken up by a long, dark sandbar lying slantwise across the stream. A mud turtle was making its silhouetted way along this obstruction, one clawed foot sinking ahead of the other.
“Harlan?”
There was no answer.
She stood awhile, trying to remember what those stones looked like by daylight. She freed her soles from the sucking mud and eased down toward the water. Her shoe met something and sent it skidding away. She found it again a few feet later, and bending with her hand outheld, touched the coarse weave of Josie’s basket. There were brambles inside, and a rancid foam that stuck to her fingers.
She heard Harlan at the bend. All the lightness had gone out of his voice. He was calling her name as if he thought, perhaps, she might not answer.
“What is it?” she called.
“Stay there.”
“What is it?”
And what was there in the reeds? She didn’t remember having seen this sandbar in the daytime at all. It looked more like a toppled line of rocks that had knocked some of the cattails down. A gentle roll pinched its middle. The slow mud had pushed up around it, and foam had caught between it and the streambed, and it seemed to move a little with the reeds, though she could not be sure. She looked down its length again, from one end to the other. It was wearing a boot.
Harlan was coming back, crashing around in the cane. She tried to stand, but everything in her had gone very still and sour, and here came the blood to her head again. The mud sucked at her boots. She teetered where she knelt. Harlan dragged her to her feet and held her up, but she couldn’t look away from it, the broken reeds and the boot. Harlan saw
it, too. He shoved her back up the bank and said Josie’s name—very differently now, harshly, as though he were speaking to a child caught red-handed in some calamitous game. He went down into the reeds and made a sound.
When he lifted the girl’s head, streams of mud came coursing down her face. He overturned her and carried her up the shore, struggling against the drag and the weight of her clothes and the stiffness of her limbs. Nora slid down toward them on her knees, and opened the girl’s mouth and listened for breath. “Josie?”
Rolled over and slapped, she continued to lie still.
Then she groaned.
“Jesus,” Harlan said. His hand left a trail of darkness across his brow. In their moonlit mud calderas, the frogs went on singing.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?”
“It struck me all at once.”
“What struck you? What did?”
“My head hurts awful,” Josie said, and fell away again.
“You’ve all your fingers at least.” Harlan opened his fist to reveal a crumbling of thin yellow fragments. “These ain’t yours, merciful God.”
“What in hell are those?” said Nora.
“Knucklebones. I found them over yonder.”
“What’s happened to her?” A shoulder dangled loose in its socket, and down the length of Josie’s body one of her boots was twisted the wrong way around.
“Leg’s just about broke in half.” Harlan stood looking away downstream. He turned and took in the whole length of the beach. “She didn’t just fall. Something did for her mightily.”
He crouched back down. She wondered at the purpose of whispering. Hadn’t they just been shouting and joking up and down this hill together? Joking she thought, joking while Josie lay here in the mud. Not to mention the racket they had raised getting the poor girl out and breathing. If something were lying in wait for them, hadn’t it wised up to them by now?
A mudbubble bloated the edge of Josie’s lip. Nora wiped it with the edge of her sleeve. Through the fabric and swollen lips, she felt gaps in the sharp line of Josie’s incisors.
“Some of her teeth are broke.”
Harlan slid a finger under Josie’s lip and felt around. He did this without looking at her, staring straight ahead into the dark.
“Bear,” he said. He shifted around, folding Josie’s arms one over the other. “Must’ve come up on her in the dark and got startled and brought her down in the creek when she ran. A sow with cubs’ll do that—kill a man without eating of him. Jim Wainsbrouk up in Fort Hollow run afoul of a sowbear last summer and she took his eye and broke his every rib and left him there for dead.”
“I remember.” Bertrand Stills had found him and written about it as though he had fought the sow off personally with nothing but his caustic wit.
“She don’t look bit.”
“Poor Josie.” A dark and exsanguinating realization made its way forward through her fear. “What will I tell Toby?”
“You ain’t telling him a thing less we get ourselves back to the house in one piece.”
She patted the mudlogged little head and steadied herself against the ground and waited for him to plan their way out. Toby. If only there were some evidence to point to the fact that Josie’s mishap—as she was already resolving to call it—had only just befallen her just this second. Some way around the fact that Toby’s dearest friend had been lying there for an unknown length of time, crushed and disregarded, like dead timber only good for going past while his unthinking mother took the air with a sheriff loathed by the household.
“All right,” Harlan said. “I’m gone carry her up. You follow along soft as you can.”
“I’d like to spare Toby the sight of her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Harlan.”
“The barn then.”
For a moment she feared he might sling Josie over his shoulder like a ham. He lifted her instead as if she were a child and started up moving crabwise over the beach until he met the hard flat of the imbricated rocks.
They went up the hill diagonally together, bending low with their hands outheld to feel ahead. The rocks were huge, abraded and wedged upstream by some extinct current, but the cracks between them were deep and treacherous, might easily swallow an ankle or a leg. She thought she knew them. She did not. She fell and fell again. Every time she got back up, Harlan was a little further away. Josie’s crooked boots swung and clacked against the rocks. They reached the bajada, the once-shore of that ancient river, and straightened and moved sideways, searching the bluffline ahead for the chevron that marked the cliff trail. Ahead lay the ruffled darkness of the trees.
She walked in the wake of Harlan’s sweat. He was breathing fast and whistling through his nose. Then he stopped.
Something stood a little ways ahead of them. Too close already to be wary of now. At first, she just thought it was a very tall thicket, but then it shifted, and its movement was accompanied by thin metallic song. What looked like a long, articulated post peeled slowly from the massed haze of it and braced up in the dirt behind. A leg. Fore or hind, she couldn’t say—but it did not belong to a bear.
The sixgun was in her pocket. As her hand met the barrel blindly and overturned it, she thought of the old adages about territorial standoffs: Arizonans, she’d read someplace, always shoot through the pocket. The clarity steadied her. She was calm enough to think of how strange it would be to shoot a bear in the dark through her own pants. But this entity—whatever it was—stood eight feet at the shoulder and stank like a trench, and it was not a bear. Harlan evidently had yet to realize this, for here he was saying “Hey bear!” breathlessly, lest their presence come as an unwelcome surprise.
It looked up abruptly. Its head, snakelike and bobbing, was free of armature. Not a bull elk then, either, nor a steer. It was something much bigger, with a ragged outline and a webbed, periscoping head from which emanated now a long, malodorous belch. It shouldered a tree aside, thumped out into the open, and rushed them.
In the brief moment before Nora moved or was pushed out of its path, she looked up, up past legs and neck and a web of tackle and saw the black sockets and bared teeth of some screaming rider as the animal tore downhill. Then her hands clenched, something struck her in the ribs, and she and Harlan fell in separate directions.
When she sat up, the animal was rounding below. This angle made it look more familiar. Something about the slope of its shoulders, and the way its back swayed independently of its front. It turned back up the hill and rushed straight over the hole where Harlan lay. Then it lit into the treeline. For a long while, they could hear it thrashing around in the undergrowth. It was moving up and sideways, away from the path, away from the house.
“Harlan—are you kilt?”
“Not quite.”
“What then?”
“I’m twisted up some.”
She went over to him. He had dropped rather ridiculously down among the rocks and sat grasping his left leg. His trouser was darkening. A little ways up from him, Josie had fallen in a crumple of skirts and limbs that made her look like one of those twisted fair freaks whose parents folded them into tiny barrels to keep their joints from setting. Nora rolled her over and righted her. She came to once more, blinked around, and was gone again.
“What in God’s hole,” Harlan said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There was a rider.”
“A what?”
“A rider.”
“Well fuck him, then.”
Harlan was trying to stand. As soon as his foot met the ground, the knee buckled. He sat back down again.
They came now to a reckoning. He wanted to leave Josie here while they went up, and return for her with help. “No, please no,” Nora said, shaking her head, and saw that he had merely been waiting for her to say it.
He tried t
he leg again. This time a black upwelling bloomed out and hurried down the cloth.
“I’ll take her up,” Nora said. “And then come back for you.”
She gave him the gun and tried to lift the girl sideways, as he had. Josie’s legs slipped and thumped on the ground. For a moment Nora imagined herself grappling with a bird of improbable size. How often had she called this very same child a goose? She caught the head and tried to work around the twisted arm. All this time, she had thought herself taller than Josie. It had certainly seemed so. But there was a good six inches between them, with Nora at the disadvantage.
Harlan was staring her down with worried impatience. “Get rid of her skirts.”
He slid down the boulder and began undoing Josie’s dress. Nora cradled the head between her knees, watching the thin white frill of Josie’s underthings widen under the blue fabric, the little waist muddy and broken. At the third button, she brushed away his fingers. “Turn around.” He swung both legs over the boulder and sat with his back to her, wiping his hands on his trousers.
Some of Josie’s buttons were missing. Nora undid the rest and pulled open the caked neck of the dress. The shoulders gave her trouble, and for a moment she thought she might have need of Harlan after all. But then she stood and tried again from the opposite direction: pulling, as in life, was easier. Having managed to secure one pale arm, she freed the other. Half out of her dress, the girl looked like a split-open seedpod. White ruffles fleeing a stiff casing. Evidence of her previous mishaps met Nora’s fingers: a huge bee-sting; a razorwire cut Nora herself had sewn up last summer. She didn’t remember the gash being so long. Its meandering stitchline surprised her. Could such careless work be her own? She would disavow it were it not for the clear memory of heating the needle and assailing Josie to keep still, goddamn it, when the thread pulled her flesh.
