Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  She was watching his finger on the trigger. Two of the horses had come back to the water trough and he considered if he had to cut her down here whether he could catch the horses to sell but knew they were worth nothing.

  “Find a way or I kill you right here.”

  No ranch no home. No way to save a sister. A killer in front of you, calling you one too. The horses watched with gaping, sad, sun-sick eyes.

  “Do it then.”

  He braced his heels. Do it. Lose it all; it’s already gone.

  She took a hand off the barrel, wiped her brow, looked at the blood on her fingers, then spit.

  “Do it.”

  There was a shot and the horses scattered with a jolt.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Trees with Meat Inside

  The girl landed on her back like an inkblot crumpling. Smith flung himself back against a tree and yanked open the mechanism to his gun. The girl had her hands to her forehead and was pulling at it and Smith found the two shells still loaded.

  “The fuck was that?”

  The bark of the tree to his left was torn white across the side of the trunk and she touched it as she scrambled up then looked toward the road as Smith realized the sound he heard was not echoes of the shot but approaching engines.

  “Fucking motel junkies must’ve ratted—” And the girl was at a run from the grove. Smith shouldered his gun and ran after her, past the water trough, and it was when he broke clear of the trees that he saw them.

  There were four of them, out from the highway, on dirt bikes and hack motorcycles. Dark faces with rags tied across their foreheads or mouths and still two hundred yards out. The one in front leveled his 9mm again and the shot cut wide and landed in the sand ahead of the girl.

  The sand was rocky beyond the juniper grove and then bowed up into a pair of mesas and they headed there. The horses had sprinted off with a snap of their hips and it made a sound like a prequel to the gunfire that followed. One of them caught its leg in a root and was squealing and the motorcycles were closing in, a hundred feet off. Men with tattooed hands and black oiled guns, a different breed from the dead men at the motel. He could see from the girl’s face that she knew them.

  The rocks had slowed the bikes but Smith and the girl were in full handgun range. Three bullets passed Smith’s temple in quick succession and he twisted to return fire without time to aim and the shot laid gnat-bites in the sand that were quickly washed over in tire tracks. He racked in another shell as he ran.

  One of the bikes swerved for the girl from the side and the rider leapt from his vehicle and advanced upon the girl on foot, screaming in Spanish. The man had his gun in the air and did not take a shot and she did not answer the words but turned and ran into him and the two fell into a tangle on the ground. She rolled away from him faster and got her knees up onto his shoulders while he was still on his back. His neck folded as she broke it and in seconds she was up again, running with his gun.

  The girl glanced over her shoulder once, then veered away from the mesas, away from cover. She was going for the caught horse.

  More shots came and she kicked at the root to free its hoof and when it didn’t work she pointed the gun down and shot the root loose. The horse buckled at the hindquarters and slipped and the girl dove low and hooked onto the side of the animal in a parasitic grasp as it flung itself onward.

  The men shouted to one another and in response one of them twisted his bike and headed directly at Smith.

  The girl made it as far as the feet of the mesas before the horse stalled and began to flail to throw her off. A bullet clipped its flank and it quit its protesting and lunged forward again but the motorcycles had by now closed the gap between them. The first of them skidded into the horse’s hind leg and both crashed in a yelping of animal flesh and chrome as the second collided with the animal’s front. The second machine reared as it fell and its headlights flashed twofold over the horse’s muzzle, the nostrils flared and dipped in black viscera or motor grease, and the fallen lights faded as the glass was washed with blood, bulbs caked dark but still glowing gold at the edges. There was white splinter across the handlebars and then the first of the bikes was back up and gone and there was a thundering that seemed to come from the ground itself as the echoes off the red rock dove and burrowed into the sand.

  It was too late for Smith to get out of the way of the man headed toward him. Like running through water, the sand clawing at his boots and weighing them down, and another shot missed. The man on the bike was within arm’s reach now, red-rimmed eyes caged by pierced eyebrows, and Smith dove and rolled to the side over the ground, covering his face from the rocks. The man braked and yanked the handlebars over to double back, and drew his pistol for another shot as the rear wheel skidded and sprayed sand. He was too close, and almost above Smith, and Smith outstretched his hand for the shotgun that had fallen in the sand and swung it around by the muzzle and flung himself upward, jamming the butt of the gun into the man’s shoulder. The shoulder imploded and the pistol flew and the bike flipped.

  The man’s tibia snapped as the bike came down and it caught Smith at the hip and pinned both men beneath it.

  Sand soaked his teeth and the man was pinioned at the knees beside him, the emaciated creature with a brown bandana around the neck and ire in the eyes. Smith’s shotgun wedged between their chests with its barrel to the sky, the man’s shoulder loose and left arm thrashing and his hands clawing in aimless fury at Smith’s throat and Smith tucked his neck to block it. The man’s hands went down the sternum snatching for some weak spot and then plunged toward the mechanism of the gun. Smith tried to wrest it back but the man’s weight was against him and his fingers reached the trigger but Smith held it tight and the gun went off and the shot broke through the empty seal-brown air above.

  Get the barrel down, get the goddamn barrel down, now and do it now or he’s going to kill you and the man went again, this time at Smith’s eyes with his index fingers and thumbs and Smith turned his dead eye toward him and felt the fingers worming into the edges of its socket and with his working eye could see no more than his warped reflection in the metal of the gas tank, the spreading fungal dark eating into the image as the shadows grew. He rose up to slam his shoulder into the man’s chest and it was enough. Smith swung the gun down and implanted the barrel into the pocket of the man’s collarbone and fired.

  There was silence for a moment and the air seemed to flake in gray then there was the smell of gunpowder soaked in blood and the man had stopped and laid his hand across his chest at the wound which was only a small thing when shot at contact point and the eyes that had rolled about wildly now were fixed and there was screaming far in the background but not his and the rabid calls of chasing motors and muscular collisions of kicking horses that were imagined or still there. And the man’s eyes upon him in viral black and Smith’s hands were fumbling with a shell from his pocket and digging for it and the depth of the pocket had never felt like this much and he was at once squirming with his legs to get himself backward but the weight of the bike held him fast. And the man was saying nothing and was not screaming and his mouth opened in a black hole to absorb something, anything, or to expel it, but air would do no good either way now and those eyes gaping as much as the mouth if not more and they had not looked down at the wound or at the blood now running down through the man’s fingers and Smith finally got the shell in and racked the shotgun and laid there with the barrel shaking trying to align it and his arms shaking and still trying to align it and the man’s eyes were suddenly animal. Smith fired again and the man’s torso jerked back as far as his pinned legs would let it go, turned up to the darkening sky with the shotgun blow to his chest.

  Smith collapsed back into the sand, the emptied shotgun in his arms. Breathing hard. Couldn’t feel either leg.

  There were no more sounds of horses or engines and the gunshots were gone in the distance, but the world was beating beneath the side of his head and he was no longer s
ure whether the tak-tak-tak was instead the sound of the desert and the souls that must people it, red-eyed and sand-skinned, scraping themselves off of the ancient rock and reanimating from where they’d lain frozen beneath the mesas. The sky had gone from blood red to black.

  “In the desert, the skies aint look like this,” the father told them. They were in the dark, he and Lucy and Wyatt, but what need was there for a fire on those nights when the sky was shot through with stars like birdshot and if you held out your hands they’d be blue in the light.

  “You git the same stars, but the horizon comes all the way to the ground, so it looks like if you ran far enough you’d run right into em.”

  They watched the father spread his arms to demonstrate then looked to where the mountains lay beyond the start of the woods, like teeth to cut the horizon off. They knew things were different in Box Elder, even though it was the only place they had ever been. It was a place with something wrong about it, you could sense it, and they didn’t suspect that all the world was wrong like that because they knew somehow that this place was different, was something else.

  The three were sitting on the porch steps and the dog would snuffle around the back of the siding and pull out critters and pestilential things. And the father told them about the trees and they listened and listened and to Wyatt the crickets made it sound like you could never be alone in that world again even if you tried.

  After, the father told them not to get too scared without him and went inside for a lip of tobacco and a rawhide for the dog. And Lucy grabbed his hand and said, “Let’s go see if it’s real,” and he said, “There aint gonna be enough light to see shit,” because he was just learning to curse and thought it was the thing to say but she only laughed at him. They went anyway and Wyatt took the ax from the barn and he carried it at its head and Lucy carried it at the handle and he dragged it when they got to the woods because there were no stars through the leaves and they were going to have to feel for the kind of bark they were looking for.

  He realized there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to be able to chop a tree by himself so he told her to look for something smaller, and it was so dark that he ran into her once and grabbed her arm thinking it was a branch and she screamed and laughed but Wyatt screamed louder, grabbing what he thought was a tree and it turned out to be warm.

  And finally he found a sapling that had died and fallen over, the right breed, right bark, and they dragged it out together like they had the ax, and took it to a crest in the field where there was plenty of light from the moon and from the sky that had opened up again and was reflected in the droplets of sweat on her, looked to Wyatt like the stars were sprinkled across her arms.

  It took him one chop, and he halved the thing. The father was right. Box elder’s just a kind of maple, good for sap and all that. But if you find a box elder tree in the woods that’s gotten sick or been scarred or done had anything else bad happen to it, nobody knows exactly what does it, when you chop it open the wood will have a bloody red stain inside.

  Wyatt yelled like hell when he saw it and Lucy pulled up her shirt to cover her mouth and just stared. They left the thing out there, sapling so small and no taller than they and what had really gotten them was that the trunk he cut open was no wider than one of their arms.

  They went up to bed, and despite the silence neither fell asleep until sunrise, nor said a word about it. And the next morning, Wyatt didn’t know if the father must have found it or the dog but it was gone.

  The man coughed, and then coughed again and some of the air expelled straight from the perforations in his chest. Smith woke up suddenly to what had gone on and tried to crawl away but the bike held him without give. The man’s chest rose with one more expulsion of breath and it looked for a moment as if he would sit up, then the momentum was lost and he fell back into the sand beside Smith.

  He landed on the dislocated shoulder with his face to the side, eyes open though one of them stuck with grains of sand and when the eyes watered and blinked to clear themselves the movement was too slow, more a weakened mechanical function than a reflex. The tears of sand ran down his nose and then went unseeable into the shadow on the ground.

  The man opened his mouth but blood ran out, no words, and Smith stared at the hole in the man’s chest.

  “I … I …”

  The man said nothing, stared at him with one eye and the other was turned to the sand now. He was still breathing.

  “Oh god, I aint …”

  The shotgun had fallen between them, like a limp thing now that it was without shells. A slice of the man’s lung was visible through the ribcage like a piece of pulsing coral. Soon he would be dead, and soon Smith would have killed a man for the first time.

  “I—”

  Couldn’t say you didn’t mean to.

  The dying man still stared and Smith did not know if it was with seeing or not.

  Killer.

  “I … I caint get up.”

  The dying man still stared.

  Killer. He shouted and punched his good hand against the bike and strained against it and could not move and he shouted again and his hand burned and he dropped his head back into the sand. Night had lowered itself and lay brooding on top of them now as if protecting its young. The metal of the bike went cold against the exposed skin where Smith’s jeans had torn and he was suddenly conscious of the warmth of the ground.

  The dying man blinked once more, but the nether eye was drying out against the sand so the eyelid stuck halfway down and then caught up with the other.

  The man coughed again. Smith never would have allowed hunted game to suffer for this long. He raised his hands, one shaking from the wound up the arm and the other with blood-streaked knuckles from punching the bike. Slid one hand behind the man’s head, past an ear scarred in an X where a piercing had closed, to where his hair was matted with sand, and gripped the chin with the other. If he got up onto his elbow he’d have enough leverage to do it, but he waited.

  Just another minute. Wait a bit longer, so he doesn’t die and so you’re not a murderer. The dying man was wearing a T-shirt that now read delta–shotgun blast–delta fun run, with older bloodstains on the collar. The bandana had been nudged down around his jawline at some point, so saturated it looked black now.

  You can wait. One more minute in the before, before the rest of your life is the after and you are, you are now and you will always be, forever now, a—

  He looked at the man. Took his hand from the chin and held it in front of the open mouth to feel for breath and there was none. Whether you’d been strong enough to put him out of his misery or not, it was over now. Killer. He clawed at his own legs and the bike would not move.

  He watched the droplets of perspiration dry into flattened spheres of sand on the man’s brow and exhaled, then looked out into the dark. The stars had overtaken the last strands of twilight and he could see a few feet in front of him, all of it cast in silver. Beyond that, everything was black. The mesas huddled on the plain beyond like mastodons at rest and the warmth ran out from the one beside him.

  His legs were not moving. He’d dug out around them as far as he could reach but he could get no further under the bike to dig them all the way out. The dead man’s body bore some of the weight, but the machine was edging four hundred pounds. The sweat and spit started to run cold down his face and he knew the drops of water gone were successions of minutes lost out here.

  There are two ways to die in the desert. Heatstroke and disembowelment. The coyotes would get to you either way, but the dehydration determined whether you were still alive when they did.

  He fingered the shotgun next to him in the dark. Wished he’d filled his pockets and socks and waistband with shells. His truck sitting thirty yards off with a full box of them.

  He pictured the coyotes trotting through the dark if he stayed conscious for that long and wondered if it’d be Lucy’s broken eyes in the faces of the ones that came for him or if they’d have he
r rabbit jaw’s teeth.

  He realized he was lying on the wounded arm. He got up on his elbows as much as he could and took the jacket off and laid back. It had gone numb and he watched the hole bleed like a fist opening into the sand. Enough blood around here already that this bit wouldn’t draw them any more than they were drawn already. He wondered whether he could put up enough of a fight when they came that they would choose the dead man over fresh meat. Think, man.

  Smith dug at the sand around his thighs until the sand ate the nail beds of his fingers raw. Midway from the thigh down, the legs were still pinned tight. No use, couldn’t reach to dig out any farther.

  The highway shook awake with the passing of an eighteen-wheeler but he knew he was invisible to it now.

  He looked around himself for anything that would work—no tools in the dead man’s pockets, none in his own, no sticks or vines under the first layer of sand after he tore it up with the side of his hand. And then his glance came to the shotgun. Empty, half-covered in sand now, gritty and oiled antique thing of his father’s.

  Reached out the shotgun over the width of the bike to see if it was long enough. It was.

  He laid the gun to the side for now. He steadied the left arm at the elbow, put his weight on it, and flung himself up to reach the upper handlebar with the right hand. He grabbed it on the first try and felt something, a skein of tissue or the skin, split in the wounded arm and yanked back on the handlebar with the remaining strength in his torso and the effort made him scream.

  Smith fell back into the sand and looked at the dead man as if worried about waking a sleeper, but the handlebars had turned as he had wanted and the angle of the front wheel would give him leverage against the midsection of the bike.

  It would take hours upon hours but he might get out of here. Dragging yourself through minutes like Lucy dragging the father through the woods and his fingers crawled into the sand as if searching for whatever reserve of strength her hands must have had then.