In my ridiculous city-boy-playing-ranch-hand outfit, Maggie and I quietly exited through the screen door by the kitchen. I needed time away from him to think. Outside, crunching the gravel, keeping a lookout for roving dogs, I thought we could stay here, me and Nate. We could live out the winter here. An entire cold season really could change things.
Cold’s what you apply to an injury, isn’t it? Time heals.
Cold plus time . . .
What would the world full of children—those at latitudes farther away from the equator, that is—what would they do when the cold came upon them and there they are out in it? Would it change them? Would they, to survive, deign to use old-world warmth, occupy buildings, use machines?
Probably not, I thought. They’d go old old world and build big goddamned fires out in the open. Like they did the burial pits. The good thing was, they’d have to stay near them.
Maggie trotted next to me. I stopped in the middle of the gravel drive and did a three-sixty turn. What a beautiful place. I’d been to Durango, Colorado, and this place was the Texas version. No kidding. Yeah, I could live out the winter here. A good amount of food sat in the pantry. The fridge and freezer have salvageable items that I can keep cool at the stream I crossed on my way in. And there! There’s the huge chicken coop the size of a racquetball court. There they are, clucking and squawking around. The list of things to do in my mind populated fast. I loved the feeling of having things to do other than worry and be afraid, though that’s always the bass line of life’s song. The way it was in the old world, too, just a different set of them, a manufactured set. These were real because they pertained directly to survival—not acceptance, not ambition, not material attainment, not even getting laid—and because this was so, I felt a burgeoning wholesomeness springing from my feverish to-do list.
This is the utopia I’d hoped for. But I’d wanted it with Kodie. How I missed her now. She’d be so into this idea of staying here, just us, for the winter at least.
I let my finger fiddle with the glock trigger so as to push the thoughts of her away. A redheaded turkey vulture glided on a thermal at the mouth of the valley. I aimed and fired at it. The gun’s report echoed and all went quiet. The bird didn’t even so much as dip a wing in response.
The slight wind coming from behind brought me Nate’s cry.
I jogged back and got within earshot, where we could see each other’s faces.
“My truck’s right there,” I’d pointed to the side of the house. “What, you think I’d just walk away from you?”
He leaned over to see it around the corner. “Oh,” he said. His head panned the scene from side to side as I walked up the incline to the wooden wraparound porch where he stood. “Where are the dogs?”
“Dunno. I’ll rattle the feed bins. They’ll come running, I’m sure.”
He took a step back into the shadow of the porch. “Wait until I’m inside, okay?”
“Sure. Maggie’s okay for you, right?”
He paused, nodded, slowly at first, then assertively, trying to please me by being brave. In that moment, Johnny’s features overlay Nate’s, making me pause my ascent. Maggie sat next to him, looked up at Nate, back at me. The dog knew we spoke of her; the dog knew I was experiencing powerful emotion, and that Nate’s fear was not yet quelled just because I said it should be.
As I say this, dear reader, know that I am leaning forward to stroke my dog’s sunbaked fur. The kayak shimmies as I do. She keeps her eyes closed, enjoys the sun, the water’s rock, having felt me do this innumerable times on this river and knowing that when I do so that I always think how her coming into my life when it did was pure providence.
Now that my old world had been forever stripped away, I can say things like that because now I believe it. And I can also say this: that it’s by providence that I’m doing this, telling you this story while heading toward the bay, for what else could it be?
“I’ve been thinking,” I said to Nate.
“Uh huh.” His response came out more circumspect than I thought possible for a ten-year-old. He pushed the too-big hunting cap up his forehead.
“I think we should stay here. For the winter.”
“Really?” His brimming excitement let show through the old world.
“Yep. It’s the best thing, I think.”
“And after that?”
“After what?”
“Winter.”
“Let’s get there when we get there.”
He nodded knowingly, brow furrowed—yes, of course, when we get there.
“You like coffee?”
Nate shook his head, his tongue jumping from his mouth in a grimace.
“I’ll make a fire. Cold cereal is all we got right now. We’re going to need to spend the morning collecting firewood. Then we can get eggs from the coop.”
“Okay.”
“But first, let me feed the dogs. We lose them, and the winter here isn’t as attractive.”
Nate turned on his heel and dashed inside. He stood at the tall single-paned glass door and watched me at an angle as I fed the dogs. The noises I made did indeed make them come, about thirty of them. “Can you feed her in here?” Nate yelled from the cracked door. Maggie sitting next to him, waiting, knowing.
The cereal we ate had held its crunch and the fire I’d conjured filled the room with hope and warmth. Out the window, the sun was a white coin pinned above the ridge. I showed Nate the empty wood rack and said we’d need to go out and collect a bunch of deadfall. The dusty-webby storage room contained all manner of axes and saws, chained and toothed. Nate found clothes that fit better in the closet up in the loft above the great room he’d annexed. He’d claimed the loft with blunt territoriality, running up and down the flight of steps, fleet and noiseless on the jute carpet.
We set out to collect wood with a green wheelbarrow. Plenty of it in the immediate area but the real stuff we could see was beyond the tall industrial barbwire fence. An aluminum ranch ladder straddling the fence didn’t help us wood-gathering-wise. I considered snapping the wire with one of the million sharp objects in the medieval oubliette of a storage room, but a part of me thought it best not to.
Then we saw why. Buffalo. Only twenty-five yards away on the other side of the fence, lying so still I had to blink to make sure. Two of them lying on the slanted meadow in the sun between cedar copses.
“A whole herd of them out there,” Nate said. “Forgot to tell you that.”
“Huh. Buffalo.” I’d heard stories of people out in the boonies having panthers and ocelots and zebras. Never heard of buffalo out here. I muttered, “Well, should the fecal matter really strike against the rotating blades, we could hunt down one of these and eat for a month.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just postulating.”
“I don’t know what that means either.”
“That’s a good thing.”
The only animal I’d hunted was quail. A few times in high school, Johnny coming with us the second time just last winter, we’d driven out to a hunting lease in Hill Country, near Burnet. Martin and his real estate bud, Frank somebody. We’d go out in the blue dawn and drive many miles just to shoot quail. Sitting in the bed of a beater pickup, Frank’s brown Labrador, Bevo, would flush them out from the brush under mesquites, coming back with pear cactus quills on his muzzle, then go retrieve them once they plummeted from the sky. I’m not a bad shot, truth be known, but I took no pride in it. I wasn’t into hunting, not with Martin at least, not for, uh, sport. Starving to death? Totally could do it.
We decided to stay inside the fence wire for now and succeeded in finding enough wood in the immediate area to keep us warm for a while, thanks mostly to a keeled hackberry which I hacked at until noon. Nate got proficient with wheeling the wood to the porch though slowed by his need to look over his shoulders every few yards. When he
dumped his loads at the entrance to the carport, he’d run back to be near me with that wheelbarrow swerving. I wondered how long his acute fear would last.
“This will do us for today, with some left for tomorrow, but we’ve got to make this a daily thing to keep up with so we can hopefully get ahead of the weather. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll take that Bobcat farther away.”
Nate nodded. We loaded the last of what I’d chopped into the wheelbarrow and made our way back to the house. Nate strode apace and close enough for us to bump. Halfway there, he hooked fingers into the pocket of my peacoat.
I know I looked like Rocky Balboa, hunched over, chasing those chickens. Nate laughing at me. I finally grabbed one and held it to my body as it squawked and flapped. I petted it and it calmed. “Just seeing if I could do it,” I said to the brown hen. “You keep laying eggs and it’ll just be for sport.”
Nate and I made our way around the coop, ducking under the corrugated roofs, filling our baskets with eggs.
We lined the eggs in rows on a towel on the kitchen counter. They needed to stay cool and I didn’t want to get in and out of the fridge too much for fear of losing what little cold remained. The immediate need for warmth solved, the need to keep food cool and fresh now presented itself. Coolers tied with bungee or rope outside would work, though raccoons would solve those riddles.
The carport storage room with all the torture implements could act as a large fridge. I’d inventory and transfer salvageable fridge food into the storage room, including the daily eggs.
Somehow the water still ran and the toilet flushed. I guess the water came from a well. No idea how long that would last or what was involved in making sure it did. What did I know of such things? How many different ways could I make things substantially worse by monkeying with it?
Would this be my life? Was it just a matter of time until I boxed myself into a deathly situation? Maybe, but I felt we had the winter and the dogs, enough of a buffer. Maybe I could make contact with others, if they were out there, and maybe, just maybe, the kids would change.
Look at Nate. My presence has had a major impact on him. Couldn’t the same be achieved with other kids? Occam’s Razor says: of course. True or False SAT answer: True.
Let a long cold winter chill us all out. I smiled at that thought as I watched my fire dance upon the wood I’d collected. All I needed to do was keep things fresh, keep water available, and feed the dogs and chickens. At some point we’d need to drive into Medina to get more food and feed. Inherent risks there.
What I needed to do was be resourceful and live for today. Maybe that’s all there is. This whole world of ours got too crowded and busy and mother nature just decided to hit the kill switch.
Did she use Jespers’s Gene to do it? Were those old guys nuts? As time goes by, it seems so farfetched. But, then, look what’s happened. Farfetched.
I don’t know. Philosophy is so old world.
It took three days for something resembling normality to set in. A rhythm, a beat structured the hours for the first time since the morning of. I sensed my shoulders relaxing from their residence near my ears in constant defensive mode. My hummings and whistlings flowed while I worked, and not just to quell fear. These songs I hum-whistled were original tunes from my subconscious which didn’t want to recall and revamp old-world melodies and arrangements. I collected these tunes in my mind like eggs, like firewood, put them on a shelf for later. Then, in the evening by candlelight, I wrote them down in a notebook17 I found in the office.
Before the morning of, my life was prosaic. Now it started taking on the more elegant and exalted forms of poetry, of music. Three nights in a row I’ve gone out into the dusk to flesh out these things I’ve heard in my head all day. I use my lips and throat as a horn, missing my instrument terribly. When Nate and I go back to Austin in the spring, I thought, I’ll retrieve it, bursting with a notebook full of songs to blow through it. Hope springs eternal.
Cold came and leveled off in preparation for its full invasion. I couldn’t wait for more cold. I thought of them out there in it, how it had to change them, break them into something approachable.
What we did in those first three days, we did together. Nate never wanted to be alone, and the things we did were simple. We got our bearings and readied for this newest of seasons. The simplicity of the days gave them rhythm, and with that, comfort.
Setting the pieces up on a large stump, I got good at splitting wood. Nate would smile when I got on a roll. The rhythm, the breathing, the cadences. I drank it up through my pores. It nourished me. Whenever I took a breather, I’d ask him if he wanted to try and he always paused, then shook his head.
Maybe his head hurt. I didn’t ask him, but sometimes when leaning on his axe and staring off glassy-eyed into the sky I thought maybe it did. My earlier desire to know what he knew had evaporated. He didn’t know anything anyway, not that he could relate. He had been part of the hive, and the hive thinks as one. Now that he’d broken off from it, or been exiled, I don’t believe he had anything to tell me. He’s excommunicated and thus incommunicado. What he said to me in his somnambulism was it. There were no such moments thereafter. It all seemed moot. Tabula rasa.
On the third day, Nate told me he could do the egg-gathering by himself now. He wanted to do it next time, first thing in the morning. Busy with my chicken chasing while hearing the Rocky theme in my head—getting strong now!—I grunted sure, go for it, you know where the baskets are.
In the afternoons we scoped around the property’s perimeter, going a little farther down the road toward the nearest ranch each day. We could’ve taken the Bobcat but Nate bristled at the idea of getting on it. He always gave the vehicles a wide berth whenever we stacked wood in the carport. He clung to me when we got near them and he eyed them like they were sleeping creatures which would pounce if awakened.
That third afternoon, he didn’t want to keep going but I told him we were fine. He asked if we’d see dead people and I said we might but that I’d go in ahead of him and let him know.
He tugs on my sleeve, telling me he wants to turn back. As much I want to find this other ranch, can sense that it will come into view around the bend of this hill, I’m feeling it too. A fearsome pre-dusk density filled the air. I nod, I’m okay with turning back.
“Sorry,” he said, the shame in his voice a good thing. “Tomorrow we’ll go all the way.”
“Sure. No rush, though, okay? Baby steps. No shame in it.”
He cracked a smile and I tousled his hair. We turned around.
Maggie had been right there with us, usually leading the way and checking back. “C’mon Maggie,” I called out, my claps for her echoing off the limestone cliff walls. “Going back,” I cried through cupped hands, opening and deepening my voice. We both did a three-sixty turn. No Maggie.
With as much buoyancy mixed with calm as I could muster, I said, “Huh. Well, she’s off chasing something. She’ll catch up.” I think I even shrugged my shoulders like some fifties sitcom kid.
We began walking back. Our shoes crunched the trail which was mostly caliche, but in some places plates of limestone. Neither of us admitted that we didn’t hear her run off, heard no paws scratching on the trail. Neither of us wanted to admit that we didn’t see her dashing away. That neither of us wanted to discuss it made us walk faster.
Two vultures assuming their V-shapes made spiral sweeps down past the tree line horizon between us and the house. We had progressed a few hundred yards from the house this time, the farthest we’d been by a lot, and now the safety of a dwelling seemed far away and we felt exposed. The quiet, the distance from the house, and our nervous crunching feet got to me to the point where I wanted to draw the gun from my holster and walk with it, flick the safety off while pirouetting to see if we were being watched or followed.
Immense quiet does this to you. Even to you, dear reader, you there, sitting in a qu
iet place reading this. You feel it too. The quiet makes you uncomfortable. It makes you squirm. You have to look up to answer the questions all beings ask themselves all the time, consciously or not: Am I being watched, tracked, hunted? Even you, reading this, will now wonder and look about.
My watchful lieutenant of a dog had vanished. We were a good distance from anywhere. While we started this walk in the afternoon, I have to admit that I didn’t check the time nor the sun’s position in the sky and maybe we did depart from the house a bit later than before.
I didn’t want to scare Nate by drawing the glock, so I didn’t. I considered reaching in to pull loose the Velcro fastener, but I didn’t do that either.
What I did was pick up the pace and start whistling. I whistled a variation of one of the many themes that had come into my head those days. In my head I heard my trombone.
Nate had to trot some to keep up. “Kevin. Wait for me.”
I slowed just enough so he didn’t have to trot. “You know this one?” I asked. I started whistling the tune from Bridge Over the River Kwai. On the second pass, he tried to pick up on it and he got it on the third. We whistled like that for a hundred yards, walking fast enough so that the whistling became a challenge of breath.
Nate put his hand on me, stopped whistling, and asked, “Are you scared?”
I stopped whistling. “Huh-uh,” I lied, “just want to let Maggie know where we are.”
“Well, I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
“You’ve got a gun, right?”
“I do.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Yeah.” I started whistling again. Our pace had not slackened.
Winded, Nate asked, “You shot anything with it?”
“No, but I’ve been quail hunting with my stepdad. We used rifles.”
Nate got real quiet. He put his palms over his ears and then rubbed his temples with his fingers. “My mom carried one in her purse.” He blinked and jerked and stutter-stepped, as if he just heard it go off.
The Late Bloomer Page 28