Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

The cattle dead and the ranch soon to be gone, because in a land where a hailstorm or a snowmelt flood or a bout of blackleg could take out a year’s crop, somewhere in those years you’d have to mortgage the ranch, and then someday you would reach a point where you could not lose a single steer if you were to keep the place. They’d reached that point a year ago.

  It should have been wild storms that licked them after all these years, torrents of black rain and hurricanes of wind and ice shaped in spikes that sloughed from the sky like armored scales of a creature you’d never see. There was altogether too much feeling in it for the only mark of the end to be a muddy kid tied to an antique chair and cattle that did not know to run from gunfire.

  He wanted to say or shout something at the girl but could think of nothing and she did not move and so he shut and locked the door again and went out to feed the remaining cattle and the half-broken mustangs and hogs and cluster of chickens in the encroaching dark.

  Smith took the gas can and ax from the expired fire and gathered the guns from the woods and the plastic bag of effects that the girl had left and went to the barn. As he worked, each of the animals watched his silhouette, bloodied to the waist as if he’d waded in it, and they skittered from his lamplight.

  Behind him in the house upstairs, Lucy was flitting back and forth above bared skins with a skirtful of salt, tossing crystals like a flower girl sprinkling petals for a wedding march or for a grave, dancing in circles with bare heels as the room went from the spoiled pink of sunset to dark blue. And whose grave it was whether it were the cattle’s or their parents’ or the grave for the death of their safety in a fugitive communion here away from the world was uncertain, but here in the dark and iron smell he was sure she was again the child she once had been.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Black Steercalf

  Night fully fell and he came in exhausted and still thinking of the meat that was burnt up now and he went upstairs. The hides were crystalline with salt and the light shivered across them through the open door and Lucy was gone, had likely disappeared to an arbitrary dark corner as she did most nights since the father died.

  She would sit in a chair or on the floor and watch night slide by, doing nothing or with her sewing in hand, sightless fingers stabbing at patches and tears with needle bent and when the sprinklings of red had stopped showing up on his socks he had wondered if she had learned to darn blind or if her fingers had merely run out of red to bleed.

  Silence beyond the locked door still, but a more true silence than before, as if the animal finally slept. He left the shotgun in front of the door. It would lie there, a watchdog for the man who is without one, set of bolts and wood that he was sure had a mind of its own and would awaken like a hound with buckshot teeth when necessary. He turned and descended the stairs.

  The kitchen was lightless now but there was a single lit bulb hand-wired to a beam on the porch. Its light fell through the unshuttered window and onto the table in a dust-tinted gold, and the moths that batted around it outside were reprinted in little black shadows upon the oak like ghosts suspended in the plane of a different underworld than this. A horned owl lowed in the woods beyond in a bass of something too large to reside in trees.

  He walked through to the sitting room. There was a low ceiling scarred across with beams in warped faultlines and a frayed rag-woven rug the only thing to keep his boots from the floor. He slid them off even though he always felt weaker unshod.

  He ran his hand along the sideboard and wondered at what point splinters wore smooth. It was quiet now and there was no owl. Was no longer sure there ever had been. The air empty with chill and tangibly without voice.

  Photographs on the sideboard. The father at the back of the portrait of three, with two pallid children, one of dark eyes and one of light. He pushed the frame down to lie flat. Behind it a cameo of the father that had come before and one of the father before that, who had come from the East and into the desert, exploring too late for adventure but too early for towns or civilization, so that life for his descendants was a series of unremarkable struggles against nature with neither triumph nor end.

  What to do when the father was gone and they were too young, too young but had been born old and youth had been nothing but a season in which calves were new and then butchered by the next fall. He withdrew his hand and looked to the answerless dark of the room, felt the force locked in the room above it lend the darkness a compressive weight.

  But there were no more photographs to show that only two remained, after the gun went off in the woods and Lucy had killed the father.

  He was eighteen and still a boy and was halter-breaking a steer on the day the father died.

  It was a black steercalf, born the spring before and the thickest of the herd. In the heat of the sun its hide was sleek with sweat that ran like oil and the light reflected off the sheen on Wyatt’s arms and neck and face in blinding white. Six hundred pounds, and he’d faced it down in the steel-bar corral and manned the halter over its head.

  He’d worked it in circles, tight in against its right side so that he could dig in his heels if it made to run. They’d been going for an hour already and the blue rope frayed against the calluses of his palms as if to braid into them like veins. When the shot echoed from the woods the steer had bucked, hind legs first and then the stabbing toes of the front like a lever and boy-Smith had been thrown against the wall of the corral.

  They’d gone hunting. Before first light. They would be three miles out now at least and Wyatt dusted himself off and circled the steer in the corral, half-bent at the waist, as his father and his twin would be circling the shot elk if it were not yet dead. The rope hung from the steer’s face and its end followed in the dust, raising taupe clouds that stuck to the sweat of its legs like the powder on moth’s wings. It went on like that, drudging a groove into the circumference of the corral, every now and then tossing its head to loosen the trailing rope from about its feet, Wyatt a few steps behind and unable to close in any faster else the steer would run. Eyes down and the ground gone shattered gold with the glare.

  The sweat was streaming into his eyes and he pulled it from the crease of his upper lip and had paused to crouch in the dirt and rest one or two or three times and he didn’t know for how long and each time the steer waited, a few steps ahead of him and just out of reach, and he’d trudge after it again, and then at last he got a boot toe on the end of the rope. The steer had felt the line on its mouth go taut and was just beginning to test it when Wyatt saw her at the edge of the woods and she was not hauling an elk but a man. He stepped off of the steer rope and opened the corral gate and the steer stormed past him into the field as he walked silently toward the barbed wire fence that would let him out to the woods.

  When she looked up, it was the first time her face ever wore real fear.

  It wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t your fault and the steer had gone out to pasture and bucked against the dying light and he never got a halter on it again from that day on—wasn’t your fault.

  The sweat had dried on him then and turned to brown and his forearms were like slicked with clay and he made his way toward the sister in a sundress with a man at her feet. Wasn’t your fault.

  And Lucy had broken that day.

  The blue rope carried off into the twilight.

  They’d buried him on the ranch, a hundred feet from the forest in which it’d happened. And never reported it, because why report it when she never meant to do it. When he could never let her be a patricide. When it was an accident. But the man had not been an elk.

  The darkness in the room shifted.

  “Wyatt.”

  She was in the armchair in the eastern corner. He turned toward the voice.

  “I aint know what to do.”

  He walked over to her and the proximity pulled her features out of the darkness. Her lower lip protruded beyond the upper, and the shadows turned their natural pink to the sepia of something in the photographs. Her feet were ba
re, half out of the pair of steeltoe boots squared in front of her, toes toying with the boot tongues as if deliberating whether to run. The leather upholstery behind her shoulders was tacked tight with metal that echoed the safety pins at the waist of her dress, and her hands lay upturned over the arms of the chair like two fallen horses.

  He reached out a hand to one of hers but did not touch it. She rose and followed him to the kitchen table, and he lit a kerosene lamp between them as they sat around it in childlike conference.

  Twin faced twin, a single face mirrored overtop of the brown-tinted light. Same cheekbones, same brow and mouth, and the reflections deviated slightly with the flame. The lamp was soon encircled by gnats that expired in winged sparks after a moment in the heat. Then his eye adjusted to the light, and some of the deviances remained.

  Just stared at one another for a moment. Had been truly twins until twelve years ago, when in boyhood he still had that angled stubble-less jaw. She’d worn her hair short like his then, hadn’t given it up until she was eighteen.

  In the lamplight she was still that figure of eleven, with wing-thin shoulders and untamed eyebrows that would furrow and nearly meet when she butchered livestock. His face was irrevocably its age of twenty-three, and he could feel it as age, the wear and losses of the past half-decade across his temples in a sunburned and weathered mark of misfortune or decay. But she, she was unaffected, and her face showed nothing of losses or storms.

  She spoke first.

  “We caint call the police, can we.”

  Smith shook his head. Not with a father buried in your land.

  “I weren’t so scared by her til I realized she really is just a kid,” she said. Whispered in a place that was too remote for anyone to hear had it been a shout.

  “I know.”

  “So young, barely into her teens young.”

  “I know.”

  “And the cattle.” Her voice ran cold.

  “You know we aint had enough stock to take that loss.”

  She bit her bloodied sewing thumb. They both knew what it meant.

  “How much more we need?”

  “To keep them from seizing the ranch?”

  She nodded.

  “Forty-six hundred dollars. What we woulda got from the ones that died, minus the hides.”

  “You mean that she done killed.”

  “Yeah. That she done killed. We needed every one we had.”

  The skin between her eyes and cheeks buckled.

  “God …”

  “ …Damn it all to hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sat back and let the smile leave her face and took a breath. He hunched forward in his chair as if it were not already all silence and he would not be able to hear her. With his lowering of stature their eyes aligned and she watched both of his as if one were not dead. An errant strand of blonde had fallen against her cheek like a snapped piece of straw. She touched it for a moment then let it lie, and spoke again.

  “What do we do?”

  He picked at a smudge of manure caught under a thumbnail and considered as if he had not been considering it these past ten hours. Her finger had begun to bleed again and she laid it between her lips, the blood dappling the anemic pale of them as she waited for him.

  “I’ve got nothin. I don’t know. All I know for now’s that we caint just let her go.”

  “Until we figure somethin out?”

  “Until we figure somethin out.”

  “We aint gonna be able to make it up. We’re gonna lose the ranch.”

  “Don’t, Lucy.”

  The thumb dragged to her cheek now as her hand enveloped her face.

  “Wyatt, we can’t leave it now.”

  “Lemme take a day to think. There’s gotta be somethin. She aint got nowhere to go. No food, no money. She can’t run.”

  Lucy put her hands on the table and made as if to push it away from her.

  “We shouldn’t have done it this way. We shoulda called it in, even if we had to leave, even if I got in trouble—”

  He looked at her.

  “But you didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “And this is our family’s land. We do not leave. We did not leave then, and we will not leave now.”

  She looked down and the forget-me-nots shadowed to nightshade on her bodice. He put a hand over his shot arm and stood but went no closer to her.

  “We’ll figure it out, I promise.”

  Lucy started laughing. She fell back in the chair and her face flickered as she rocked into and out of the plane of the lamplight and the impressions of the insects outside the window scattered from the table below her shadow. She did not stop and grew hysterical and when she still did not stop he grabbed the arms of her chair.

  “What?”

  She shook her head.

  A moth caught itself in the lighter fluid of the kerosene lamp and combusted. Its remains stuck to the ceramic base like floral tar. She looked up at him as if looking at the darker half of herself.

  “You aint talked that much in a damn long time.”

  He let her laughter echo along the blackening walls, a weak raised ghost of the sounds they had made in that house as children. There was no moonlight and he went down the hall and up the stairs in the dark. Went into his room and left the door unlocked, as she’d have to sleep there too tonight. The reinstating of those nights of their childhood, when she’d crept into his bed for comfort or for courage or the semblance of it in seeing your own face on the pillow next to yours. The hall lamp would be out and the sheet pulled over their heads and they’d watch spindles of light pierce a battery lantern and touch their fingers to it when too frightened to grasp one another’s hands. They’d lain awake when the cold ran under the windowsill and their sameness was the only thing to keep them warm. Twins like sharing the same body and same metabolism, organs, to heat them both and perhaps even redeem them both merely by existing for the other.

  But after the father died they had grown too old for that, or she had had to gather the courage up and was unafraid now, and he would send his fears winging as thoughts through the wall that separated their rooms. Believing that, in some capacity, somehow, she was sending something back, be it comfort or secret fears of her own.

  He fell asleep to the surety that what was locked behind her bedroom door was indeed locked there.

  Lucy came in an hour later and he woke to the disturbance of the bed but did not move. She was clad in another thrift store dress that was a nightgown merely because it was white, and for whatever unspeaking reason it was she never wore white in daytime. She lay down and rested her head on only the edge of the pillow, as if she did not belong there and had not grown up there. Her silhouette falling into goose-down like a cartilage ghost, his blood-copy with sun-bleached eyes.

  She was far from him but her warmth streaked across the sheets toward him like something like frost but like something dark and from out of the earth. Would only come into his room once she believed him to be asleep.

  “You never would let it be my fault, would you Wyatt?”

  He knew he could not answer, let her see he’d heard. She talked to him most nights, and it was always “tell me I didn’t do it Wyatt,” or “we’re still the same aren’t we still?” or “if you’re still me then I’m still you.” She’d sit balanced on the edge of the bed, face steadied at the blank wall ahead. There were no more battery lanterns, it was not a conversation, and she would never stay. Save tonight, when she had nowhere else to sleep.

  He held his breath and waited for her to say something more and at last turned his head to look at her. But her eyes were closed now and he did not know when she had closed them, and so he turned his own eyes up and fell into ragged sleep, as the creature in the room next door heaved nightmarish breaths into the floorboards and shadows of Lucy pinned themselves to the ceiling.

  Hours before dawn he awoke and rolled out from the bed and dressed in another flannel and jeans, the house and the room still fully dark and h
is hands on the walls and on the closet door.

  In the hall he turned on the light and with his finger still on the switch he looked back at Lucy through the doorway to his bedroom. A collarbone bent out from the neck of her dress and curved upward with her breathing, a structure under milk-translucent skin that seemed too insistent, too strong to be a part of her but rather something she had grown onto, her skin and her capillaries and their blood and her hair like lichens wrapping stone. Between inhale and exhale there was no sense of life about her. He turned away, then closed the door and went to sit in front of the locked door where the shotgun already lay.

  He sat there for a while with his head in his hands, breath creeping through the quiet, then leaned back. There was a voice from behind him as soon as he set his head against the door.

  “You’re alone here, aren’t you?” It was muffled through the wood between them but the intonation was detached, moving, as if it rode the darkness feathering from the crack beneath the door. The hall empty and the lamp excising all shadows, and the voice could have come from below, spoke for the land instead.

  “I don’t think I’ve been in a place like this before. This is a strange place,” said the girl.

  “Don’t talk.” She had to have been calling out for him to hear her through the door but he spoke as if she were whispering behind his head.

  “It’s a different kind of alone, I think. The two of you.”

  “I said don’t talk, dammit.”

  “Is it?”

  “Is it what.”

  “A different kind.”

  He grimaced at having answered.

  “A different kind, a battle with the land every year, and no eyes for your war,” she said.

  He said nothing and could not hear her breathing, knew she was holding it to listen for his reaction. He did not move, and she spoke a minute later.

  “I want my bag of rocks back.”

  The shotgun had warmed to the temperature of his skin and he felt only its weight on his lap now. Through the door behind him, the child’s voice began to run without stop, a hum from within the throat or from the air within the walls.