by Nick Lake
i can picture it, the orbit of the object, the tilt, the spin—the sine wave of the sun’s height in the sky relative to a person standing on the northern hemisphere.
only now i am a person standing on the northern hemisphere & i can feel it too.
the seasons, turning.
it makes me wonder when my mother is coming. summer is giving way to fall, a whole shift is happening, & i have not seen her since that day on the rooftop. i don’t miss her or anything. but it’s weird. i’m her son. doesn’t she want to come home & c me? i do miss Orion & Libra, but whenever i try to vid them i can’t—the internet is down, or they’re not answering. i don’t get it. they must want to speak to me too.
the piece of paper, meanwhile, i have hidden in the dresser in my room. SPACE BOY. we can help u.
sometimes i think i’m being blocked from speaking to the twins. like maybe that’s what i need help with, according to the mysterious flyer people.
i wonder who could be trying to communicate with me. someone from the base? it doesn’t make sense tho. wouldn’t they have done it when i was there? then who? thinking of the base makes me think of Santiago, how she raised the possibility of some kind of PR leak. at the time, i thought she meant about the cargo mission, like she was exploring the scenario of something going wrong & the media finding out.
now, i ask myself: was the leak she feared the story of me & Orion & Libra? us growing up out there? i’ve never really thought about it before, but from what Grandpa has said about avoiding celebrity, i get the impression…that people don’t know about us. don’t know that we were up there. & came down here.
maybe whoever left that flyer does know tho. maybe they know & they want to help me.
but that thought circles me back to: why? help me with what? i’m ok here. i’m happy.
so mostly i think i’m being paranoid. the Company wouldn’t cut me off from Libra & Orion. what would be the point? i’m with my grandpa. he loves me. i have my puppy. i also, for some reason i can’t explain, don’t believe that whoever printed those sheets actually wanted to help me, not really. i sense…a threat behind it. & anyway, they may not have been for me.
no. they were for me.
i shake my head. too much worrying. i need to enjoy this. to enjoy earth.
i go downstairs, Comet at my feet. in the living room Grandpa is lighting a fire in the woodstove & i help him. every time i do something like this i increase my flexibility but i add to my bank of experiences too, the things i can hold against 1 another in my mind.
i’d read books: i knew that there were sounds described as dry twigs snapping, or logs crackling. but i had never heard a dry twig snapping, or logs crackling in a fire.
now i have.
mutely, i hand Grandpa a bundle of twigs. he snaps them until they are the right size—pop, pop, pop; this is the sound of a dry twig snapping—& then pyramids them over the dry moss & leaves he has gathered as tinder, in the bottom of the fire grate. he lights it & when the flames are whooshing up, blue & green & every color in between, he begins to add in compressed pellets of turf.
they crackle.
fire, talking low to itself, about how it feels to burn.
Grandpa nods, satisfied. i still say nothing. Comet too sits below me, looking up at me; the mute adoration of a puppy. his eyes dance in the light of the fire. i have discovered that Grandpa is not big on talking, not like over vidscreen—when there is no news to relate, he’d prefer silence. it’s fine by me.
we go to the kitchen & have breakfast.
“what jobs today?” i say, when we have eaten our bacon. there are other foods, but i feel like i haven’t exhausted the appeal of bacon yet.
“no jobs,” says Grandpa. this is unusual. every day there is some fence to be mended, or hoof to be fixed, or snakebite to c to, or irrigation device to mend, or drone to pilot over the calves, checking they’re all ok.
or immunizations.
or booster feed.
or…
or…
“thought we’d tour the perimeter,” says Grandpa.
i look at him questioningly.
“i do it with the drones, mostly,” he says. “but i also like to walk the perimeters as much as i can too. study the land. check the fences. u know?”
i don’t, but i nod. “ok.”
all the time he’s talking, there’s a screen in front of him, & a flip device is projecting a keyboard onto the table. “what are u doing with that?” i ask.
he turns it round. i c a field from above, a tall fence like the 1 alongside the road we drove in on, some cows in the distance.
“preflying the route,” he says. “checking if there’s anything we should be looking out for.”
“& is there?”
he turns the screen, taps on the keyboard. the image jumps closer, a saccadic zoom—snap—& when he pivots the screen i’m looking at a hole in the fence. the drone is hovering, preternaturally still in the air.
“who would make a hole in the fence?” i say. i’m thinking: maybe whoever dropped those flyers.
“could be wild dogs,” he says. “but it’s an electric fence. we’ll check it out. maybe get Randy down with his crew to patch it up. voltage is still running thru the upper part at least.” he taps the screen where the higher section of the fence is.
i drop a dog biscuit to Comet. he eats it noisily, then barks.
“we’re supposed to be fattening the cows, not the dogs,” says Grandpa. only half joking.
i only half salute, in return, & he raises his eyes to the sky.
then we start heading out. before we leave the house Grandpa goes to a cupboard on the wall in the living room & opens it with a key he takes from his pocket. from a rack inside he lifts a shotgun & a pistol. he puts the pistol in his pocket & carries the shotgun out to the pickup truck. i think of the people lining up in the town. for money they’re short on & guns to protect it.
i follow Grandpa. Comet runs ahead of me. when i climb into the passenger seat—i can do it myself now; the running board Grandpa installed helps—he jumps in after me & turns a couple of times before settling on my lap.
Grandpa leans the gun in the footwell by his feet & starts the engine & we bump across the field & drive straight for a few minutes before we reach the tall perimeter fence. i think again how no one could climb over it. i think of the line at the gun store. i think how the fence height is probably deliberate.
i think of the gun, propped against Grandpa’s leg. & the other in his pocket.
we drive, following the line of the fence, & slowly warm up. we’re wearing thick clothes & also Grandpa is blasting the heater on the old pickup truck, which doesn’t work very well. i mean this thing is from the early 2000s or something. the sun’s climbing too tho.
every so often he stops & we get out & Comet catapults around, chasing shadows, as Grandpa examines a calf or some invisible defect in the fence. at 1 point we come across a cow that is lying on the ground, dead. it looks like she got her foot caught & then something wild got to her. mountain lion. coyotes.
Grandpa kneels beside the cow & puts his hand on her side.
“goodbye, Matilda,” he says.
“u recognize them all?” i say.
“of course,” he says. he pulls out his portable screen, unrolls it, & calls a number. “yeah, Murat? i got a cow that’s died on me. tomorrow morning? great.”
he hangs up.
strange that we still use that language. no one has hung a phone on a hook since about 1930, when everything was made of Bakelite. no one has “dialed” a number since 1960.
we get back in the truck & drive on.
the sun rises.
clouds scud. only clouds & ships scud—i mean dogs don’t do it. cars. nothing else that moves. another weird thing about language.
that’s what happens when u’re in a pickup truck driving around a big ranch as light slowly floods the day—ur mind wanders.
we pass a small cow or bul
l. “that’s Pepper,” says Grandpa. “u saw him on the drone cam?”
wow. i marvel at his already-tallness, how quickly his rickety legs have grown.
eventually we reach the hole. we stop & get out. Grandpa goes over to it & crouches down. crouching is still tricky for me but i follow him & stand there, looking. the gap is roughly circular. it’s like it’s been cut, but i don’t know what by. the thick wires, thru which electricity courses, are just gone.
“what could have done that?” i say.
Grandpa touches the ground. there’s a smudge of black on the grass.
“blowtorch?” he says.
i glance around. i suddenly feel vulnerable. just the 2 of us standing by a fence in a field, with a wide valley all around us, stretching all the way to the mountains in 1 direction & the fields in another—no other person to be seen, & i don’t know if that’s reassuring or not.
“are u serious?” i say.
“yes. or bolt cutters. my guess is blowtorch because of the 4,000 volts in the fence.”
“why?”
he looks around now too. there is a hawk circling far above us. “cattle rustling would be my guess. used to be a big thing. tho now there aren’t so many other ranches or markets to take them to. also it used to be u could cut the tags out but now we earmark the cows, or put the tags in randomly. to help stop thieves.”
that word: help.
it echoes in me.
i take a breath. “Grandpa,” i say. “is there anyone…i mean…would anyone think i needed help?”
he leans his head to 1 side. “help?”
“yes.”
“with what?”
“i don’t know,” i say.
he purses his lips. “i don’t really understand what u’re asking.”
“i don’t really either,” i say. “but i feel like there’s something…” i think of the things i don’t understand. of why i can’t get thru to Orion & Libra but Grandpa can call Yuri. of why Santiago was there 1 second & gone the next. i even think of the farmer & the guys in the suits who descended on him as we took off; of the flyers. “i feel like there’s something i don’t know.”
“there are a lot of things u don’t know,” says Grandpa. he smiles. a half smile—sort of sad too.
then he is frowning. he looks up.
i look up too. i realize it isn’t a hawk. it’s the drone, circling. i don’t know why i thought it was a hawk actually. the 2 wings are superficially similar, but the drones have spinning rotors, i can c the blur of them from down here.
“well, i’ll keep that looping the perimeter,” he says. “set it to motion sense & infrared.”
“ok,” i say. what else can i say?
we get back in the truck—Grandpa is even quieter than usual. even Comet seems subdued, slipping off into a fitful sleep almost right away as we bump over mounds of grass.
we pass a familiar shape to our right, which i c is the corral where we gathered the bulls for slaughter. i say we but i mean Grandpa & the men. but i walked on my own, without crutches, & when we got back to the truck—i had been distracted by following the cows on the way—i was surprised to c that we had covered maybe 3 miles in each direction.
he’s sneaky like that, Grandpa. he gets u doing work, gets u making progress, without u realizing. i wonder how much that contributed to my mother: to her being top gun so young, getting her first doctorate at 19, that stuff. if it did, i wonder if she even realizes.
maybe she does. maybe that’s part of the problem.
maybe he made her what she is.
i blink this thought away. the hole in the fence has made me feel unsafe. visible. i understand what prey have felt like, all thru history.
i shake the feeling away, & Comet shakes too, in his sleep.
we drive a little farther & then Grandpa stops. we are at the edge of the pasture where we collected the 2-year-olds. above us, the mound of the first hill that eventually turns into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. we get out & i look up & c their snowy peaks. then i feel something, & raise my hand, palm up.
a tiny sensation of cold—sharp against my skin, yet somehow soft too.
i turn my head, watching. snow is falling—not much of it, but fat flakes, drifting slowly down. amazing, in their softness & size, like interference, like the signal of the whole scene i can c is being disrupted. no 2 are alike; we can’t know that absolutely, of course, but scientists have extrapolated it, from observing sufficient quantities. i think about that: all these snowflakes falling, every 1 different, every crystalline structure a different pattern.
Grandpa raises his hand too. “wait. this is ur first snow, isn’t it?”
“yes.”
he smiles. “stick out ur tongue.”
i do. i have to wait a while—whole minutes—but then a flake lands there, nestles, feathery cold. it’s like…i don’t know. similes, & all that. it’s like a charge, thru me, the shock of the icy feeling, then the melting, & then a tiny drop of water, that i swallow.
“wow,” i say.
Comet is going crazy with it. yapping & running in circles, trying to catch the snowflakes, & i am catching them too, my palms & tongue extended—i must look like a crazy person, to anyone watching, to anyone with binoculars.
i stop.
the snow continues to fall, lightly. not much of it. but a sign, all the same. of winter coming. ice. the precession of the earth, casting us into darkness.
Grandpa points up the hill. “c something strange about the fence?” he says.
i look.
it takes me a while, but then i c it. the fence goes up the hill, disappears from sight. then far to our right, it appears again, & snakes back downhill. it frames the hill, a curve, embracing it almost.
“c anything else?”
i look.
i c the stream that runs down—& as he traces his finger over the land i c how it channels into his land, into our land as he would call it, & then disappears behind a rise to our right.
“i bought this land in 2018,” he says. “people thought i was just expanding the ranch—it was contiguous with my existing parcel after all.”
“contiguous?”
“bordering.” he narrows his eyes. “we need to think about school for u, boy. ur brilliance is a little inconsistent.”
i shiver, & not just with the morning chill. but it’s a passing moment, & Grandpa is focused again on the ranch, as he usually is. school frightens me. all the people: i am not used to crowds, to busy hallways. apart from the canteen, i have never been in a space with more than 4 or 5 people in my life.
but still. i need to go. i know that. i need a math degree, or physics, if i’m ever going to be an astronaut.
“anyway,” he says. “i didn’t buy it to extend my land. or at least i did, but not so i could have more head of cattle, which is what the others assumed. or high ground for summer grazing, because i was already an advocate for rotation in those days. no. can u guess why i bought it?”
well, there’s only 1 thing that i can c.
“for the stream.”
he nods approvingly. “yes. i bought the stream. & the source of the stream. now u know why my irrigators can still run. a lot of the others, they got banned from pumping, or had half their land turned over to forced fallow. they got by a few years, on subsidies mostly, but they were finished when the aquifer dried up.”
“but u had the stream.”
“yes. at the right time, & in the right place. precipitation’s been falling, but the ice on the mountains has been melting too. of course that’s not sustainable; it’ll run out eventually, all the snow, but that’s ur problem, not mine.” he winks at me.
“u kept the farm alive,” i say. i look at the land, stretching back below us, the whole strip of it, from the stream down to the valley floor, dotted with cows. on 1 of the lower fields the rows of irrigators are slowly rolling. i can c the ranch, small as a toy set.
“yes. it was just a question of opportunity. &
money.”
money & guns, i think.
i shiver again.
i c movement out of the corner of my eye. i turn & c a calf, a small 1, picking its way across the uneven land. i’m not yet a rancher & even i can c that it isn’t meant to be here. it must have gotten separated from its mother. Grandpa sees it too & frowns, starts to walk toward it.
“grab him,” says Grandpa.
“what?” i say.
then i clock that he is looking down at Comet, who is taut as a slingshot stretched, but too late.
because just then, Comet bolts away from me. this is an event without transition. he is at my feet, frantic but keeping by me, & then he is a streak of black & white across the grass, & i track ahead of him & c the calf, & that Comet is going for it. i don’t know if it’s just a hunting instinct—it’s a small calf—or if he has some idea of herding it, or what, but he is fast, & the calf sees him, panics & starts to run, slipping & sliding.
it takes a while to get its balance & Comet is on it, his muscles have thickened & he has grown & he is a projectile fired at the running animal, at the prey, which has nowhere to hide on the sparse, treeless ground.
“no!” i call.
Grandpa starts to run & turns, his face a mask of anger. “come on!” he says. “ur dog. u stop him.”
i run forward, catch up with Grandpa, calling. “no! Comet! no!”
Grandpa speeds up, waves at me, urging me on.
“faster!” he shouts, over his shoulder.
i run.
i run, & i am not looking down at my feet, & i feel a jolt as i go down into 1 of those deep holes in the ground—maybe it’s a rabbit’s hole, i think even in the moment that i’m falling forward, my momentum carrying me on like the cargo container that hit Moon 2—& the lower part of my leg hits the layers of rock & loam while my knee continues at maybe 30 mph in its previous trajectory, following a vector defined by my mass, my direction—