by Abby Geni
I took aim at a knothole in a nearby tree. Tucker had showed me what to do: cradle the gun in both hands, splay my feet for balance, hold my breath for a moment, and press the trigger gently rather than squeezing it hard.
The recoil and the report were terrifying. My ears rang and my fingers ached, but I did not flinch or stumble this time. I lowered the weapon calmly to my side and waited for the wave of disorientation to pass.
My aim was improving. As I stepped forward to examine my handiwork, I saw that I had missed the knothole but struck the right tree, which was progress. Splintered bark and oozing sap. A fresh, reddish scar.
AN HOUR LATER, WE WERE driving down a lonely road when my brother let out a noise. To the left of the car was a prairie vibrating with cricket song. To the right, a row of oaks shone in the sun. The tidiness of their organization suggested human intervention—planted in a row to block the wind—but it was obvious that nobody had tended to them in a long time. Many had succumbed to thirst, their greenery giving way to parched, denuded branches. A hawk perched high on a bare, ashy limb.
Beyond the trees was a paddock. In the paddock were horses, four or five of them grazing serenely. They were all but camouflaged against the golden grass. Their coats were mocha colored, their manes as white and frothy as whipped cream. They shared enough physical similarities with one another that I suspected they were all related: blunted ears, long noses, and spindly limbs.
Tucker threw the pickup into park right there in the middle of the dirt lane. He climbed out with a grin. There was no need to pull over to the side; we had not seen another car all morning.
I followed my brother between the trees. He was striding so fast that I had to jog to keep up. As we crashed through the underbrush, the hawk took flight overhead, slashing the sunlit grass with its shadow.
The horses lifted their heads at the sound. They gazed in our direction. I wondered who owned them. There was no house nearby, no barn. At the very edge of my vision stood a silo—a smudge the size of a postage stamp against the horizon—the only hint of civilization.
The horses began to drift our way. The largest of the group, a stallion, paused every few feet to graze. Two mares trailed behind him, shaking their tails to chase away the flies. A pair of colts followed at a distance, skittish and timid. Tucker and I helped one another through the fence, each taking a turn holding up the lowest skein of barbed wire so the other could wriggle through the gap beneath.
I felt a shimmer of déjà vu. So many years before, my brother and I had done the inverse of this—a night walk, black horses, over the fence into an inky field. Now the morning was lush with heat, the grass broiled blond, and we were scrambling under the fence to greet tallow-colored beasts. The stallion approached first. Tucker held out a clump of grass as a peace offering. He still possessed the animal magic I remembered. Within minutes, all five horses surrounded him in a ring, snorting against his shoulders, stamping their feet in anticipation of his touch, their flesh quivering beneath his hands.
“Open the gate,” he said. “Over there.”
He pointed to a gleam of metal down the road.
My heart began to pound. “Are you sure about this?”
“Hell yeah,” he said.
I jogged away through the long grass, passing our pickup truck, heading for the gate. Weeds caught around my ankles. My progress launched scores of crickets into flight. I wiped the sweat from my neck.
The gate was fastened by a length of chain looped around a post. No lock. The metal scalded my palms as I pushed it open with a screech of hinges.
The horses marched behind my brother in single file, as though they had known him all their lives. Tucker seemed too happy to smile, his expression solemn and prayerful. He walked with his arms wide, sunlight cupped in his palms.
One by one, the animals followed him through the gate. Their milky tails swished away the flies. Up close, I could see that their coats were patchy and dull, their ribs outlined by shadows. All of them were a little too thin. The colts were nervous about my presence, whinnying and tossing their heads as they passed. But once they were in the road, their attention was captured by the novelty of shade. The trees dappled them, cooled them. The colts began to dance. The mares watched, standing with their hips touching companionably. The stallion nickered, still hovering beside Tucker, his chin resting on my brother’s shoulder, his murky eyes half shut.
“Come on,” Tucker said.
He motioned me toward the pickup truck. I did not want to go, but it did not occur to me to argue with him. My brother stuck the key in the ignition. He paused, gazing down the lane for a long moment at the horses as though imprinting the image on his memory.
Then he slammed his palm against the horn.
The stallion reared up, doubling his height, his lips pulled back in a snarl, hooves flashing against the sky. The mares were instantly in motion, pelting toward the horizon, kicking up a wake of dust, both colts in hot pursuit. Their speed was astonishing. They dashed away with the intensity and purpose of wild animals, rather than domesticated beasts jogging for pleasure behind the safety of a fence. Perhaps they had never moved like that before, pushing their bodies to the limit. In flight, their equine legginess became grace, a kind of bony perfection. Within minutes, they were out of sight.
“That’s right,” Tucker said, smiling. “Run away.”
24
The story quickly became a legend. Over and over again, my brother told me about the time Tucker and Corey freed the horses in a lonely field. I could not get enough of it, and the tale grew taller with each telling. Soon a cruel farmer who did not love his animals came into play. There were beatings and threats of slaughter, a lack of water and food. By the fourth incarnation, Tucker and Corey had rescued the horses from a life of vicious brutality.
“This is all true, you know,” he said each time. “This really happened.”
We spent the rest of the day on the road. Tucker steered with his good hand, gesturing with his damaged one. The stumps of his pinkie and ring finger moved in unison with his intact digits, a ghostly reminder of the bones and flesh he once possessed. This part of Texas was not exactly hilly, not exactly flat. The topography was composed of slow, gradual inclines that made everything feel slightly askew. The barns in the distance were sitting at an angle. The horizon never seemed quite straight. Occasionally we would see a weather-beaten sign with AMARILLO on it. Tucker would point and read the name aloud.
“Almost there,” he said.
I did not ask what he intended to do when we arrived. I was not sure I wanted to know. Instead, we talked about the turkey vultures circling in the distance, spiraling like the ornaments in a child’s mobile. We talked about the different kinds of crops. We talked some more about Daddy—his love of a good pipe in the evening, his hatred of the Arkansas Razorbacks. The sun poured through the back windshield, turning the dashboard into a slab of fiery bronze.
“What’s the meaning of life?” Tucker said.
I stared at him. “You tell me.”
“It’s a stupid question,” he said. “That’s what it is. A human question. Animals don’t worry about the meaning of life. They don’t get bored. They don’t sit around pondering their purpose.”
“Huh,” I said, considering this.
“The meaning of life is to live. You eat and drink and find shelter and have babies and keep your species going. That’s it. That’s all.”
I trickled my fingers through the sunlight. The shadow of my hand was printed on the dashboard.
“Humans have forgotten so much,” Tucker said. “It’s so easy for us to live now that our lives have no meaning. So we start looking for something else, something more. Money. A bigger house. A hobby. Church.”
My perceptions seemed slightly altered. There was a hierarchy to my senses: Tucker’s voice, his smell, his physical presence took precedence over everything else. He was bigger than the sun and louder than the wind.
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“The tornado was a gift,” he said. “My life has meaning. Yours too, Corey.”
“Yeah,” I said. I was so used to my brother’s brand of rhetoric that I found it soothing, like a familiar nursery rhyme.
“There’s a tension to being human,” he said. “People are the only animals that die in childbirth. Did you know that?”
I began to reply, but he interrupted me: “The only ones that die on a regular basis, I mean. It’s really common for our species. Even now, with all our modern medicine, it happens all the time.”
I said nothing. I bit my lip.
“It’s because of our brains.” Tucker reached across the gap between our seats and knocked on my skull with his knuckles. “It makes you what you are, but it doesn’t fit easily through a tiny birth canal.”
I averted my gaze, experiencing the elixir of sorrow and regret that Mama’s death always evoked in me. Tucker seemed to understand. He gripped my shoulder and gave me a bracing shake—a boyish reassurance, brother to brother.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It’s a flaw in the human design. We evolved to stand on two legs, which means we need a narrow pelvic girdle. We evolved to be smart, which means we need an enormous brain. That’s bad math. You can’t put those two things together and expect it to work right every time.”
He clucked his tongue disapprovingly. I kept my gaze on the window.
“Tell me about Mama,” I said.
There was a long, ruminative pause. I could almost feel the memories shifting inside Tucker’s mind.
“The Wildlands,” he said finally.
“What?”
“It’s something Mama used to say to me. When I was in the cow paddock and suppertime rolled around, she’d holler out the back door, ‘Tucker, come back from the Wildlands.’ I’d hear her on the phone with her friends: ‘That boy of mine has been in the Wildlands all day long.’”
His voice changed as he mimicked her cadence, high and sweet. It was the most gentleness I’d ever heard from my brother.
“When I was little, I didn’t know what the word meant,” he said. “Our farm, I figured. Or just outside anywhere.”
He wiped roughly at his cheek as though palming away a tear. He did not seem to be crying, though. I wondered if the gesture was for my benefit, an attempt to illustrate the depth of his grief.
“When I got older,” he said, “I decided that Oklahoma was the Wildlands. Mama’s nickname for the whole state.”
He wiped his eyes again, a little ostentatiously.
“After Mama died, things were awful,” he said. “I missed her so much. One day I came across her old dictionary on the shelf. She had marked a few words. Notes in the margins. Wildland was underlined, and she wrote Tucker right next to it. Can you believe that?” He paused, pressing his knuckles to his mouth. “Wildland means ‘land that is uncultivated or unfit for cultivation.’ I memorized it.”
I was holding my breath, hoping for more. I had never heard anything like this about my mother. Darlene had told me the basic facts of her existence—her place of birth, her lack of siblings, how she met Daddy, and how she died—but intimate, everyday details about her life were rare and precious.
“I can’t remember the color of her eyes anymore,” Tucker said. “I’m not sure how tall she was. She seemed so big and strong to me back then.”
His eyes were red, maybe from tears, maybe from contact with his hands.
“Sometimes I wonder,” he said. “I wonder what Mama was really saying about me. The Wildlands. Uncultivated land. Cultivation—that’s what humans do.”
I wrapped my arms around myself for comfort. Maybe Mama would have come up with a term to describe my temperament too. Something just for the two of us. If only had she lived long enough to do that for me.
“When he died, Daddy went to the Wildlands for sure,” Tucker said. “He rode a tornado to get there.”
THE NEXT DAY, THE HEAT became unbearable, the air so dry I had to concentrate on breathing. The gush of the breeze through the car window was the only thing keeping me cool enough to survive. In a red, austere desert, we drove past a wiry bush denuded of both leaves and bark, a sculpture of smooth silver limbs. The plant had perished long ago, probably of dehydration, but its skeleton remained erect, stained by bird droppings. A meeting place for crows, I guessed.
No one in my life had ever talked to me the way my brother did. He treated me as an equal, as if my ideas mattered, as though I possessed as much wisdom as he did. I was used to adults who spoke down to me. Teachers asked questions with specific answers in mind, and it was my job to guess right. Darlene asked questions that were secretly commands: Could you get me some water? or What exactly do you think you’re doing?
Tucker, on the other hand, held nothing back. I used to think of adulthood as a hallway lined with doors, each marked by a different milestone: Sex, Money, Marriage, Parenthood, Death. As people entered puberty, they moved along the corridor, opening the rooms one by one, gaining access at last to the mysteries within. To children, however, the doors were locked. I knew the terms of adulthood—the words written outside—and that was all. Most grown-ups were willing to offer only a hint, a glance through the keyhole.
But Tucker did not have any closed doors. Mile by mile, he told me about his time as a runaway. He told me about loneliness. He told me about hitchhiking and panhandling, squatting in abandoned buildings and sleeping beneath overpasses, stealing wallets and eating from garbage bins behind restaurants. He told me about bathing in creeks and rainstorms. He told me about walking so far that his shoes fell to pieces. He told me about heartbreak as sharp as a splinter.
“Did you miss us?” I said.
“Just you,” he said.
“I missed you too,” I said. “Every day.”
A mesa loomed up, spare and craggy. It was striped with horizontal layers: a vein of crimson, a seam of granite, a stratum of chalk. I could not gauge how tall it was or how far away. It might have been my height or the size of a skyscraper. There was nothing to use for scale. The mesa was the only object standing erect against the plane of the rust-colored desert.
“That summer, I met Mike,” Tucker said. “A few months after I left home. I’d never known anyone like him before. So confident.”
I remembered the name. A former friend. Dead to me now.
My brother told me about their bond—brief but swell, lightning in a bottle. The two of them organized a boycott of a pet store in Oklahoma City that was known to harm its animals. They spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to tackle invasive species in Lake Tenkiller. They headed out to Shamrock with seven other ECO members to test soil samples after hearing reports of illegal dumping in a nature preserve. As the months passed, Tucker and his new friends traveled across the Southwest. He had never felt so useful, so determined.
He and Mike quickly became the leaders of ECO’s more radical wing. They donned guerrilla masks and used homemade smoke bombs to break up a dogfighting ring in Kingfisher. They sabotaged the engine of a city van bringing strays to a high-kill shelter near Dover, then released its cargo into the prairie.
As we drove, a bug struck the windshield and burst into green gel. Tucker switched on the wipers, which squeaked and groaned, dragging themselves painfully across the glass. We were out of washer fluid again.
“I did good work with ECO,” he said.
“Why did it end?” I asked tentatively.
“Me and Mike had a fight.”
“Like you and Darlene?”
Some powerful emotion flickered across Tucker’s face, gone too quickly for me to identify what it was. His hand tightened on the wheel.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just like that.”
Another mesa appeared at the edge of my vision, far enough away that the heat in the air obscured its shape. It shimmered in and out of being like a mirage.
“I did some stuff on my own,” Tucker said, “but it felt empty.
Being alone didn’t suit me. I missed being a part of something. I kept thinking about y’all. Especially you. Always you.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly,” he said.
I grinned into my palm.
“Sometimes I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I’d be thinking about Mercy and everything I left behind. I would worry about you. Then I’d remember our horses and all the poor cows. That dumb little goat. And that would get me started on the cosmetics plant. Those barrels of hazardous waste. Animal testing. There were living creatures being tortured and killed right in my own backyard. It all got”—he churned a hand through the air—“tangled up in my mind. The third anniversary of the tornado was coming up. Eventually I figured out what I had to do.”
He took his foot off the gas, and the car slowed to a lazy glide. Pebbles clanged against the undercarriage. He glanced at me, smiling.
“I came home,” he said. “To you.”
25
That afternoon we reached a small town, an oasis of struggling greenery in the desert. We drove past an elementary school—the playground empty, the windows shuttered—and a row of dingy houses. There were saguaros everywhere. I had never seen these cacti in such numbers: lurking next to a mailbox, bristling behind a parked car, darkening the street with their shadows. Their flesh varied in color from tropical green to gunmetal. The churchyard was full of massive plants standing sentinel. Each cactus had a different number of limbs, ranging from a single erect arm to a crown of fat, prickly oblongs. A few saguaros were taller than the telephone poles. Their omnipresence was disconcerting. The streets were empty of people—the heat had forced them all indoors—but the cacti appeared to have taken their place. A slow, stealthy invasion by enormous, well-armed vegetation.