by Callan Wink
“Well? How about it? For our boy Ramsay,” he said.
For Ramsay. Someone else said it, and then someone after that. Jostling. Laughter. August was at the back but eventually he was at the front. The group had shifted to circle her and everyone who was there was there all the way. June in the dirt. Swaying on hands and knees, back arched with a moan, eyes closed, cheek pressed to the leaves. When it was August’s turn, June had gone silent; no longer able to maintain hands and knees she slumped to her side. She’d vomited again and he could smell it on his hands, and at this he faltered.
“Looks like Augie’s got himself a case of the whiskey dick,” someone said. August wiped his palms on his jeans and finally June rolled onto her back and spit, badly, so most of it glistened down her chin and neck. She opened her eyes and looked at him. She laughed. And then her whole body convulsed in a dry heave. August broke away, hobbling at first, hitching his pants, running headlong into the dark, the cottonwood branches clutching at him. He ran until he tripped and fell. He was far out, away from the party that was all but done anyway. He couldn’t hear voices. He could see the vague outlines of the trees, and he could still see the fire.
For some reason, lying there was where it came to him. The last thing he’d ever said to Ramsay. It had been after that float trip. They’d come back to town and stopped for burgers at Mark’s In and Out. They were sitting at a picnic table outside bullshitting, as usual, but Ramsay wasn’t really talking. He was tapping his fork on the table, staring at it. Someone threw an empty fry container at him to get him to stop, and he kind of shook his head and came to. Up until this point everyone had been talking about girls or football or something. But Ramsay looked around, his hand still rapping his fork on the table like he couldn’t stop himself.
“If you could do this an infinite number of times,” he said, “eventually it would fall right through to the other side. We learned about it in physics last year. I was just thinking about it for some reason.”
Everyone was looking at him, wondering what in the hell he was talking about.
“Yeah,” he said, dropping the fork. “It has to do with the vibration of particles. Everything vibrates, and if all the particles making up this fork were to zig when the particles of the table were zagging, bam. Fork right through table.”
“Oh, bullshit,” August had said. “No way. What keeps us from falling right through the earth?”
Then Ramsay lowered his sunglasses and looked over the rims. “It’s theoretical, dumbass.” And then he looked over August’s shoulder. “Speaking of ass,” he said. And everyone turned to watch Ms. Moore, the new gym teacher, jogging down the sidewalk in her yoga pants, headphones on. After that they went their separate ways. Ramsay walked off down the street, out of Montana, and, after a certain length of time, onto an IED.
That was what it was, and there’d never be a chance for revision. The permanent stupidity of this made August’s eyes water. From where he’d fallen he watched as the scaffold of telephone poles collapsed, sending a billowing cloud of sparks two stories high.
* * *
—
The morning after the party, August and a few of the guys went for breakfast. They sat in the truck-stop diner, hungover, eating biscuits and gravy. Not talking, other than to ask for the salt or pepper or butter, and even this was oddly formal. Some of the guys had known one another since birth practically, and this morning they ate like strangers.
“That damn Southern Comfort,” someone said. “I feel like shit.” Everyone groaned, as if that was the real source of the problem. There was a Billings Gazette in the booth, and August flipped through it. On the second page was a picture of June’s father. He had just been indicted for allegedly embezzling close to half a million dollars from his partner in the car dealership. He passed it around.
“Jesus,” he said. “No wonder she got so wasted last night. She must have just found out about it.”
Everyone nodded, shook their heads. It all kind of made sense.
August didn’t see June again for the rest of that summer. No one did, really. He got a job out at the Heart K Ranch, doing grunt work around the place. A lot of fencing. He’d set out on the four-wheeler and be gone all day, twisting broken wire back together, resetting posts. He was still living at home but was hardly there. Most of the time he’d get done working and crash on a cot in the back of the tack room.
His mother had been bringing Art around more often. August had the general sense that she was trying to press the three of them into some sort of familial unit. She had Art over for dinner frequently and she always invited August to stay, but he’d make up excuses to be gone. Sometimes, seeing Art’s car in the driveway, August would just turn around and go back to the Heart K—lie down on his cot and breathe in the smell of leather and horse sweat leaking from the saddles.
August called his father to tell him that he’d found a job.
“It’s been a hot one, this summer,” his father said. “We had a week straight of midnineties. You been getting that out there?”
“Not that bad. People are worried about how dry it is, though. Feels like the whole place could go up in smoke at any minute. The place I’m working has me cutting brush away from the buildings, cutting the tall grass. We’ve got hoses ready in case we have to wet down the roofs. There’s a lot of outbuildings, though. It’s a pretty big spread.”
“Oh yeah? A spread. Sounds better than a little old farm.”
“It’s different out here.”
“I wouldn’t know. It might not be a spread, but you’ve got a place back here. Seems ridiculous to be working for another man when you could be part owner of something that’s rightfully yours. Am I that bad?”
August wanted to tell him about the silent presence of the mountains, about going out to work every day under a great blue shifting tarp of sky. Instead, he told his father he had a girlfriend. It seemed like something he’d be more likely to understand.
“Well, shit,” he said, his voice changing. “Why didn’t you just say so? I guess I’m not surprised. You have yourself a little cowgirl?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s her name?”
“June.”
He laughed. “Well, if you get married and have a few girls you can name them April, May, and July and you’ll have all the pleasant months covered.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.”
“Well, be smart. That’s all I’m going to say. And you could come back for a visit, you know? I’ll send you money for a plane ticket this fall. We could go hunting. Maybe Thanksgiving?”
August told him sure, and when he hung up he realized he hadn’t really asked his father anything about him. This was a relatively new thing, the knowledge that his father was something other than just his father. He had a separate life, a unique existence, one that August might inquire about. He couldn’t say for sure what had done it but there had been a shift, and for the first time August knew he would never go back to stay.
August kept busy at the ranch and didn’t see his old crew too much, but even so, he couldn’t help but hear things. Toward September, word was that June had just resurfaced. August saw her once. He was driving through town and she was walking into the movie theater, with Veldtkamp of all people. He couldn’t believe it. He braked so hard the car behind him almost hit his bumper. He saw her for only a second, and she was turning away. Veldtkamp had his hand on her waist.
August found out later that they were dating. He also heard that Veldtkamp had fought and successfully beat up every other guy that had been there that night. And that he was looking for August.
In a small town a person could run for only so long. August knew that if Veldtkamp was dead set on it, he’d catch him eventually. If it was just a matter of taking a minor ass-beating, August might have come out some night when
there was a party. Let him puff and blow for a bit in front of everyone; take a few shots before the guys dragged him off. It would be worth it to just have the whole thing finished. The problem was that August was the last one. Once Veldtkamp settled with August, possibly he’d be able to put it to rest in his mind. This was what bothered August the most. The fact that, after punching him out, Veldtkamp might just be able to forget about the whole thing.
Veldtkamp was saying August wouldn’t even come into town because he was so scared. August didn’t try to explain himself. Even to Gaskill, who tried to give August some boxing pointers that he’d learned from his dad, who’d won a Golden Gloves tournament in Helena twenty-some years ago. “Just jab with the left,” he said. “Jab-jab-jab, to set up the distance, and drop the right. That’s the finisher.”
“All right, Tyson,” August said. “Is that what you did when he called you out?”
“Tried. He just body-slammed me. You can’t let it ruin your life, man. Take a couple swings. Maybe you’ll get a black eye. It’s not that big of a deal.”
* * *
—
The day August found the buffalo jump was the same one that Veldtkamp finally caught up to him. He’d been out on the backside of Baldy, riding the fence line, when he came across it. No one on the ranch ever told him it was there. He felt like, at the very least, he’d rediscovered it for his generation, and that gave him some sort of ownership. Just from walking around he could get a pretty good sense of how it worked. They had rocks and sticks and stuff piled up so it was like a funnel. This was what caught August’s attention at first. It was all still there—two parallel lines of stones and bleached-out juniper stumps, tightening in, narrower and narrower the closer you got to the lip. The Crow would get up there on top of the butte and hide under buffalo skins, waiting to chase the herd over the edge.
August parked his four-wheeler and scrambled around the sagebrush to the steep face of the butte. The buffalo bones were thick, sun-bleached white. He could see butcher marks on some of them, the places where the knife had scraped the flesh loose. There were scapulae as big as shovel blades, ribs like scattered parentheses. Mostly, though, just countless unidentifiable broken bits and pieces. He kicked his way through the rubble on his way up to the top, a hollow clacking sound, bone against bone, grinding under his boots, the sound of it rising up against the face of the cliff, magnifying somehow, until it seemed that the buffalo had risen, were coming down the hill again, a skeleton herd racing toward doom with the wind whistling through the empty sockets of their skulls.
When he got all the way up to where it was grassy and flat, he sat with his legs kicking over the edge, looking down at the white jumble of old buffalo parts below him. It was like death’s own mosaic down there. He squinted for a long time, trying to find a pattern in all the nonsense. He thought that if he could just see June and talk to her. If he could just ask her something. He’d say, Did you used to have a yellow one-piece swimsuit? Did you ever do flips off the railroad trestle into the river? Did your hair ever come down to your lower back, and did you wear it in a braid? Do you know that I saw you and I’m sorry?
He made up his mind right then that he was going to leave. It was hard to explain, but he got a real strong feeling that he’d just stumbled onto the last thing in this country worth discovering, and he might stay around for the rest of his life and he wouldn’t happen upon anything even half as good.
The sun was setting by the time he made it back to the pole barn at the ranch. He parked the four-wheeler and threw his gear into the truck. It was a decent enough evening to part ways with the Heart K, he thought. The sky, like a tangerine had split and was leaking all over it; the windmill clattering in the breeze, a couple of the horses rolling in the dust of the corral. He’d be happy to find another job like it, exactly the same, just somewhere else.
* * *
—
Veldtkamp was waiting for August at the end of the ranch driveway. His Camaro was parked next to the cattle guard. A purple Camaro. Rear-wheel drive in a state where the snow was ass-deep by Thanksgiving. He was out leaning against the door and straightened up at the sight of August’s truck. When August rolled to a stop he was at the window.
“Get out so we can talk,” he said.
“I guess we can talk just like this.”
“You holier-than-thou little shit. Just because you ran off doesn’t mean you’re above it all.”
“It was your idea.”
“Get out.”
“I’m not getting out.”
Veldtkamp started to try to drag August from the truck. His hands found August’s shoulder and the collar of his jacket. August pulled away just enough that Veldtkamp’s head was almost inside the cab of the truck, and then he punched the gas. For a moment Veldtkamp was clutching August’s arm, and then his feet got tangled and he went down and there was a thump, the back of the truck jumping like August had hit a pothole, except it wasn’t a pothole, because Veldtkamp screamed. August didn’t look in the rearview. He went home to pack a bag.
* * *
—
When August came down the stairs from his room, his mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d made him a sandwich. It was there on the table, chips, a pickle, the whole nine yards. August was itching to be gone. He could still feel that thump—could hear Veldtkamp scream. His leg for sure. Maybe his knee. He’d been one of the first guys to be decent to August when he’d moved to town. They used to go out at lunch and throw the football around. Veldtkamp had earned that full ride.
August put his bag down and sat. His boot was tapping on the floor. He’d make it stop and then it would start again without him even realizing it.
“Are you going somewhere?”
He’d planned on telling her that he was just taking some clothes and stuff over to the ranch. But he’d never lied much to his mom. “I guess so,” he said.
“Are you going back to be with your dad?”
August could see how much it took for her to ask this question. “Nah. I think I’m going in the other direction.”
“Okay. Because I’d understand if you wanted to do that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t.”
“It’s fine, Mom. I’m not going back there.”
“What about school this fall?”
“I don’t think it’s for me.”
“So you’ve thought about it, really thought about it?”
“I have. Seems like something people do to put off actually doing something.”
“And that’s your conclusion?”
“For now.”
“Eat your sandwich before the mustard makes the bread soggy.”
August did, and she sat watching him, smoking. When he got up to leave she went to the fridge, came back with a grocery bag full of individually foil-wrapped sandwiches. She must have heard him packing and known all along he was leaving. She’d used up a whole loaf of bread. She gave them to him with a hug. “Goddamn it, Augie,” she said. “You had better remember to call your mother.”
After two cold, monotonous months on a rig outside of Casper, August quit without giving notice. Forfeited a small amount of due pay. Just drove. For a while he found temporary work on a ranch near Buffalo. It was a small place at the foot of the Bighorns. The foreman had broken his leg in a car accident, and he needed help getting things done. It was midwinter now, short days, the wind punching sharp and metallic from the high country. In the mornings August took the tractor out to spread last summer’s alfalfa hay in long rows on the wind-scoured winter pasture. The cattle gathering to feed, the gray fog of the tractor’s exhaust, the gray fog of the cattle’s breath, the gray fog strung along the cottonwoods that hid the river. In a sophomore English class he’d taken at Park High, Mrs. Defrain was always going on about the objective correlative. As far as he could tell, it was just a fancy-sounding name for a tri
ck writers used to portray a mood in their characters. August was starting to think that whoever was penning his life’s plot needed to experiment with a different tactic. Maybe some magical realism. June sprouting the wings of a dove, flying low to him so her feathers ruffled his hair. Maybe Julie rising from the ashes of a cold, dead fire to roll with him in snow that melted under the heat of their conjoined bodies, the sun finally rising, the water flowing warm as blood, yet barely able to slake the ravenous thirst of the flowering love trees that were taking root, growing, blossoming, enveloping them.
When the ranch foreman had mended enough to climb up on the tractor, August collected his pay and headed back to his mother’s for the holidays. He kept to himself. Slept late and ate too much, spent the afternoons scanning the classifieds. Not long after the new year, he drove north toward Great Falls, passing through all the dead and dying little towns—Clyde Park, Wilsall, Ringling. Towns in the sense that the signs proclaiming their existence were still standing, if nothing much else. Shells of crumbling houses, train depots, grain elevators with pigeons wheeling from under the eaves.
In the back of his truck August had two duffel bags full of clothes, and on the seat next to him he had another sack of foil-wrapped sandwiches from his mother. Ham and cheese and raw onion on wheat with Dijon. He’d eaten two of them already and drained a thermos of coffee. Willie Nelson on the radio coming slightly scratchy from a Billings station.
He had the directions to the Virostok Ranch written down and he read them just to hear the sound out loud. “On 89, head north to 294, then take 294 until you get to Martinsdale. In Martinsdale, hang a left at the blinking light and go five miles until you see the turnoff for Old Smith Road. Go right on Old Smith Road. It turns to gravel in a mile, and then after that go eight more miles. Crest a big hill, and just after, hang a left at the Virostok Angus sign. Head on up to the main house.”