Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  Copyright © 2018 by Abigail Rae DelBianco

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Excerpt from “In Adjuntas” from King Me by Roger Reeves. Copyright © 2013 by Roger Reeves. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or arcade@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  Visit the author’s site at raedelbianco.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: DelBianco, Rae, author.

  Title: Rough animals: a novel / Rae DelBianco.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Arcade Publishing, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017061147 (print) | LCCN 2018004637 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628729740 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628729733 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Twin—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Ranch Life—Fiction. | Violence—Fiction. | Self-perception—Fiction. | Utah—Fiction. | Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.E427 (ebook) | LCC PS3604.E427 R68 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061147

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover photograph of cut box elder: Rae DelBianco

  Printed in the United States of America

  TO DANNY DELBIANCO

  If the dirt beneath this valley slides into the river,

  as it surely will take the lives above and beneath it,

  forgive your son’s ghost for fighting the moon-

  light coming through the pines. He understands

  very little of the fire you put his body in,

  the ashtray you fill with sorrow, the priest

  filling the church with smoke and tongues.

  The dead are a rough animal with very little grace.

  ROGER REEVES, “In Adjuntas”

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  Box Elder County, Utah

  It was before dawn when Smith walked out, and a full two hours before the sunlight would be high enough to strip across the tops of the cliff beyond. A flock of starlings pulled out from a scrub oak as he passed and went tittering across the sky black-winged, like bats or demons borne back to hell before daybreak.

  He held a .10 gauge horizontal in his right hand, too big for birds, but that was what the old man had left him and so he had to make do with taking the harder shot and blowing the head off supper.

  He spat and shuffled his boots through the wheat, or rather stepped large but the reeds still made a swish against the oiled leather as if he’d scuffed them along. Blades of yellow grass for gods or giants.

  The cattle grazed up ahead. The sky was melting from black to clouded gray, like an exhaust pipe being wiped clean. He’d been walking for the better part of an hour now. It was not quite light enough to see the beasts along the edge of the hill but he could feel them there.

  He slung the shotgun over a shoulder as he waded in the dew-washed crop. Ran his hand over the thin suggestion of a beard in a face that was wind-marked hard and tanned dark as his boots, but still young, twenty-three. A face with a seriousness that belonged to the rock and those fossilized within it, marred in its earthiness only by the blue glass eye in his left socket. It was the color of a bird’s wing, fit badly, and clashed with the soil brown of the right.

  The dew was mounting into the air with the coming warmth of day and the mist was now knee-high, and flies rose behind his steps, lost hunters awakening from whatever patches of dark they are made of or wherever flies sleep. He lifted his flashlight half out of boredom and half out of a sense of something else, and one of the steers turned its head and gave him its eye, flashed back as an amphibious green glow. It lowed and shifted on and the others started to low and shift.

  He deadened the light. No sense in illuminating what he knew was there. Put the flashlight half in a coat pocket.

  Ferric smell as he approached. He’d closed in the last few hundred yards and the cattle steamed a bit in the gray as if it emanated from their hides. But a damp iron smell; burned the nose.

  He crossed over the top of the ridge and the animals lumbered on even when he stopped dead and lost his breath.

  One of the herd, a midsized steer, down with a bullet in its forehead.

  He laid the barrel of his shotgun over his left wrist, holding the flashlight with that hand, his right hand on the trigger. Stepped closer. Saw movement at the underside of the steer, where the hide was peeled back from the meat. He turned on the flashlight and a figure leapt back and the stream of light was instantly met by a flash of something else. Gunshot. Not his. He flinched as he heard a hiss follow the shot and he pinned his shotgun to his side with his elbow to put his hand to his sleeve where the bullet had mangled it and the canvas jacket torn in spikes but mushed ones as they soaked fast and he clamped the hand on his tricep and threw himself back a few feet to drop to the ground at the cusp of the ridge.

  The shotgun’s action-piece hit him in the back of the head as he fell and rebounded against just the part of the base of the skull to mute the pain of his arm for a moment. He took the gun with his good arm, right, and pumped it with the stock heel against the ground in front of his face.

  The figure was gone. Watched from the fallen steer to the ground behind. Gone. His breath was becoming labored now, and he imagined for a moment that his lungs were filling up with blood, and goddamn it’s only your arm but goddamn I’m shot but shit man get it together and shoot and he threw his chest upwards to pull himself onto his elbows and wedged himself there and aimed the gun.

  Aimed it at what. A line of trees lay beyond the herd of forty, and beyond that, the forest in which at least one man and countless animals had been felled and into which the herd never ventured.

  He tried to slow his breath like theirs and picked a spot of brush that looked guiltier than the rest in the depth of its hunter-green color and fired.

  The blood was running down to his elbow now.

  He had not bled like this before and with it came the shattering understanding of the body as a machine, the warm sludge running down like oil and with it flecks of canvas jacket, the casing for the mechanism. He crossed a hand over the top of his gun to clasp the wound shut and his index finger slotted perfectly into the missing part of the arm, sticky and almost suctioning, realized there was no hole to plug shut, realized with even more alarm that he’d taken his hand off the trigger. Corrected that and fired again at the damned spot of darkened green he imagined as something inexplicable and festering, and the green seemed to intensify and he reloaded, hefting onto the wounded left shoulder to dig in the coat pocket for the ammo that had been ruminating there for months in brass and red plastic, unused.

  The shot was answered this time, screeched past his right ear. They could see him.

  Another answer an
d a steer moaned like the sigh of a braking truck and tilted into the ground. A two-pronged heaving into the earth of a four-hundred-pound shoulder and then a nine-hundred-pound hip; it took more than one shudder to ground a creature of that size. With the second concussion he saw that he had never realized just how large they were.

  Why didn’t they run; they should have run.

  A bullet sang above his head and he ducked to the ground, strands of grass pliant but warm like the fur of some beast greater than the one that had just fallen upon it.

  Another shot and another animal dropped, ribs emerging like teeth from its side. Three cattle down, enough to make everything go. His stomach rolled.

  The sights of his gun blurred from black right angles to static before his eyes and he turned toward his intact arm to vomit. The relief in staring for a moment at the placid wrinkles in tan canvas. And then back again to dark green targetless depths.

  His knees yanked him backward instinctively as the herd’s breeder bull rolled to the ground in front of him. He grabbed its head as one of the blunted horns met with his sternum and he saw the cloud of buckshot holes in its forehead as the shine of the eyes went from raven’s feather blue-black to the dullness of shoe polish. So there was more than one of them, two guns—this was from a shotgun and he’d been hit by a slug.

  Why did they still not run!

  He dug his elbows into the back of the bull, the sacrilege of propping his gun on a warm body. The flesh pulsed forward and back a final time like the propulsions of a massive jellyfish, and in its last exhale he leaned into it and seated the shotgun atop the ribcage.

  A few birds tilted to the south across a sky that was just starting to leak orange across rot-colored clouds.

  His chest ached from the blow of the horn.

  He aimed slightly to the left this time and fired again. He carried only two extra shells with him and the next would be his last. Shots for foxes, vermin.

  He stared hard at the spot of green and then at the trusses of dark trees above it and then back to the low-slung brush that wrapped the trunks in snarled olive lace. Hoped staring harder could make him see through things that couldn’t be seen through. Come on, come on, damn you come on.

  Waiting to take the shot, waiting for something to emerge. He’d never before been down to his last shot, his last match, and he wanted to curse himself for not carrying more shells but it would have made no sense. Coyotes only required one to the chest, with his aim.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have fired at nothing. Was that block of deep foliage nothing? He could almost see it breathe, pulse, as if it had formed the barrel to throw the bullets, as if leaves could cock back and shoot through a cylinder of vine.

  The arm was still bleeding but more slowly now. He’d forgotten about it and was surprised to see the red sleeve. He gave it a cursory grasp and stood.

  “Alright goddamn you show yourself!”

  Another shot sputtered out like an objection but there was a sense of halting behind it. The shots had been coming at a rhythm and this one was merely a beat in time. A heifer grunted, shifted her weight, then kept walking after the buckshot grazed her quarters.

  Then silence.

  “You’d be wise to give it up now!”

  He shouted harder and the voice came out deeper than he’d expected, a boom that rang out against the bars of the tree trunks and reverberated against the bull’s side to throw itself back up against his ears. Adrenaline was a hell of a drug.

  The shots had ceased. There had been nothing more since the spit of buckshot on the heifer but still it was in the air that they had ceased. He kept the butt of the shotgun lodged against his shoulder and stepped around the bull’s head. The left arm burned but he raised it to level the barrel ahead of him.

  The woods were thirty yards away and he strode toward them slowly, as if he had more cover than the knee-high lumps of cattle that had fallen like flies. All that property, and they were too still for the loss of livestock to crash upon his thoughts now.

  The mud weighed heavily on his legs as he measured each step with listening, watching. A slow crack of wind came from across the open field behind him, smelled like morning. The cliff-tops had not yet seen their sun.

  The treeline lay ahead, stretch of dark for a few hundred acres and shearing mountains beyond them. A moldering pocket of damp green in a basin bordered by rock and snags of salt cedar nudged between the open hands of a hungering desert.

  The shotgun grew heavy and he placed most of the weight of it on his right arm. His hands were lurid with blood and black mud.

  He cringed at the first crunch of his boot in the forest’s leaves. He was in; the air above him went splotched in shadow as the coming sunlight was scattered by branches. A toad crossed over his boot to the right and the movement made him drop his eyes.

  There was a scrambling some yards before him and he froze and looked up.

  “Show yourself! Now!”

  Nothing. Just the meanderings of birds among the brush.

  You’ve walked yourself into an ambush, that’s what you’ve done. You’re down to a single shot and that will only get one of them if that and then you’re done for.

  No, you know these woods better than any other could. Know where every tree lies so you can throw yourself backward without looking and get cover if you need it.

  But still, too many of them and you’ve got nothing and goddammit how has a single shot ever felt this futile.

  He stopped at an oak that had a chunk taken out of the side. Height of his kneecap. So they were much farther back or they had shitty aim or both.

  Sun shifted and a ray ran across his shoulder and into the ground. But no more visibility came with it; he’d given them the perfect cover, here on his own land, and had delved into the wooded dark without thought.

  The boots crunched in the groundcover and he tried sliding them to stifle the noise but it only slurred the cracking sounds and at last he took them off. Stalked across the forest floor in wool socks like an artificial wolf.

  He kept his breath shallow and his arms locked. A line of sweat ran down his temple, tunneling through the dirt that had collected there from explosions of cattle and explosions of earth.

  And then he saw it.

  Not ten feet away, folded under shadow the way a fawn hides itself in the undergrowth and dark air and seems to cease even breathing until one is nearly on top of it.

  The shooter looked up and he re-hefted the gun against his shoulder to tilt the sightline down to the stock-still head.

  It sat cross-legged against a maple tree, a piece of black hair caught in a seam of bark like a vein of dirt in the calluses of a ranchman’s hands.

  A creature with mud plastered to its face, dried and cracked around the eyes and in chunks of dirt upon the small forehead and cheeks, excepting a broken black slash of a mouth bordered in stain from the steer. A creature the size of a child in the posture of a monk. Its face was rendered browless by the caked mud, and the wild crop of hair was ridden with leaves and twigs and other flotsam of the woods in that river-rapid of matted black. Fevered eyes of yellowed tan rode below lids that were leveled, flat as earth, as if the gunfight had not stirred their expression. He lifted a shoeless foot as if to take cover behind the nearest tree but instead against his own will pushed it forward to make his stand. It held a TEC-9 in the left hand and a worn shotgun in the right.

  “Drop them!”

  The thing lifted its hands and let each weapon fall to the side, and they made the moist sound of a few snapping twigs as they went down into the brush. He nearly choked with relief that it had not acted on his being outgunned.

  It wore a dirty black T-shirt with holes across the shoulder and along the edges, a pattern of wear he’d never seen before but was clearly from having carried a pack long enough and far enough to chew through cotton. Through the mud it had child’s legs, in that muscleless slenderness like the belly of a gar, these in jeans rolled up to the knee, and a mismatch
ed pair of hiking boots—one construction-tan and with a sock, the other black and clearly much too large.

  He checked his six to look for others before stepping forward but there were none.

  “Who are you!” He shouted as loudly as he had in the field.

  The eyes widened and then narrowed, and he could have sworn he saw the pupil grow thinner as would a cat’s. Eyes he was sure could see in the dark.

  “I knew you weren’t gonna kill me.” The face unfolded with its speaking, through the opening faultlines in the surface of the mud, and revealed itself for a moment before hardening again. It was a young girl.

  “Who are you!” He panted outright now.

  “Does it matter so much?” Coarse accent, but measured, that slunk over its English, a snake sliding over the angles of trailer-porch steps.

  The filthy unlined hands rose and gripped her shirt collar as she peered at him more closely and he shrank from them, knew they were something of a place that was not like this one.

  “Who are you.”

  Softer now.

  She looked at her discarded firearms, first the shotgun and then the TEC-9. And then at him, until he saw his own dirty face and torn jacket reflected in the glassiness of the retinas.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.”

  Eighty yards out, a starling traced the progression of a beetle across a cow’s gunblack dead eye, the set of six steps trackless over the surface of the sphere that had gone matte and become a dark and unbounded world of its own. The sun was up.

  He hauled the child furiously through the woods by the elbow and it followed limply. The shotgun was balanced in his left hand with his elbow locked and the barrel against his shoulder.

  Halfway out he stopped and toed back into his boots without letting go of the girl or of the firearm and the soles sloughed in the leaves beside the girl’s mismatched pair, the set of four feet shuffling through dead-leaf detritus like four drunken invalids. Her guns still lay at the bottom of the tree.

  By the time they emerged into the field the cattle had begun to bellow, as if death was intangible until the puffs of flies began to swell.