He nudged the nose of the shotgun in along his thigh past where his hands could reach and scraped away at the sand. Began to dig.
Looked out once more into the dark as he worked and felt a shift. Knew it was the screen door behind Lucy. It was too late for her to be tending the animals, and he knew what she would be doing. His heartbeat slowed to the pattern of her footfalls as she made her way to the grave. She would see now that the rabbit’s jaw was gone, and would perhaps not understand, would think it’d been carried off like carrion by some scavenger far late to the feast. He saw her kneel and sink her hands into the dirt at the foot of the crudely nailed cross that was still soft dirt because she did this every night, as if to hold the fungal things that lived within it and would lift a handful of dirt to her chest, as these things would not communicate by voice but by heartbeat. Telling the decomposers, not yet, not yet, don’t take it all away just yet. And would set it down again and wipe her hands on her dress but hands stained with dirt and no blood. In the shadow of where the cross was dug in and beyond what her hands had tilled were the mandrakes, her skirt across them as she knelt, which perhaps was the thing that gave the shade to make them grow. Something that was not right.
Smith made one last whisper beside the dead man.
“I didn’t really wanna shoot, but somethin told me to do it. So I just did it.”
I know.
He kept digging.
He did not know when he slept but at some point he had or had lost consciousness and when he awoke the air was white and there was no division between it and the sky. The sand below him was soaked and left a cast of his arm when he sat up and the rain had sprayed drops across the canvas of his jacket. He could not see three feet in from of him. His legs hurt, were half-aching and half-sensationless under the beached motorcycle. And the land was steaming.
The man next to him, dead. A weevil crossed from the man’s throat to the dried cliffs of the torn shirt and fumbled onto Smith’s hand, one of the creatures here that only existed in the moment after rain. He shook it away. Looked at the man once more though the man was graying already with the dew and there was nothing more to see that he had not already seen and he turned back to digging.
He’d worked his wounded left arm to the point of uselessness where the right arm couldn’t reach, but he was almost free. Continued on, his brow crusted and caked with gun oil and sand and sweat and he could feel where the grit had edged its way underneath the glass eye from the now-dead one’s fingers and he took it out but it burned more without it so he wiped it and put it back in.
At last his right leg felt loose enough to slide it under the steering column, and he twisted until he could pull it back and braced his foot against the engine. Flinched as the weight shifted and put more pressure on his left leg.
It slid away undamaged, below the torn denim nothing more than skinned, like a child’s. He crawled from beneath the bike on his back in the motion of an arachnid molting. His legs were numbed from so many hours and it took fifteen minutes’ crawling in that flat of ground before he was able to put full weight on them.
There were no birds and the insects still hummed ravenously, and he wondered if the sun had risen. Then realized it would not rise today. In the egg-white sky he would not see it move, and by the time this cleared it was just going to be there. He walked away from the dead man and took his first steps as a killer.
He went in the direction that the girl and her pursuers had gone. The mesas parted from one another ahead like hands falling from prayer. The heat was a part of the air now, a gelatinous thickness that slid over his face, and he stumbled out into the desert in a zombie’s pilgrimage.
Smith passed the motorcycle that had been dropped by its owner when he’d leapt upon the girl. Dead man sprawled near it with his arms spread and rainwater still in the dishes between the bridge of his nose and his eyes. Past the motorcycle there were no tracks; he was unsure whether they had been washed by the rain or the light had bleached his eyesight too much to see them.
At the base of the twin mesas lay the second bike, and the downed horse. A body beneath the bike but it was not the girl’s. Up close the horse’s hide was windbeaten to the color and texture of cornmeal. Broken upon the handlebars by the forelegs and shot through the stomach. Its mouth white with sand, like a rabid animal in a grainy encyclopedia photograph. A TEC-9 lay nearby and Smith checked the clip and it was empty.
He went on, holding his shotgun flat in two hands like an offering. Ascended the dune that rose between the mesas and stood at its crest. The ground was still white here and the shadows of the mesas were more a feeling than a visible thing.
Slumped against a mesa wall at the far end of the passageway was the final man. Smith hugged the stone and approached with his gun leveled but lowered it as he got close. The man was dried, dead. Shot through the head and a shot in each knee pluming red to leave a pair of eyes in the sand. Bullet holes in the sandstone beside his head like the nests that rock swallows take.
Smith knelt to look at him. Knowing now that someone had sent a team of four after her thinking that that many would be needed and even then had failed.
The sand here was broken up, waves made from spinning tires, and he walked further out. Ten feet from the dead man he saw a new trail of blood, someone else’s. It went on for another five feet and then the tire tracks of the bike became clear and straight, and the blood was gone.
He stood there upon that hill, staring out at the Utah desert into which she had vanished. It stretched endlessly, and he wondered whether it were a trick of his loss of depth perception that did it or if the emptiness really was that long. The mesas rose to either side of him, trilobite fossils locked within them, stacks of millennia in red and gray to make the towers of some alien city. And she was out there, dead or perhaps evaporated into the dust of motorcycle wakes and had never existed at all, or perhaps there were horses, more horses that she willed up out of the sand and that ran their course across the endless flats of desert, cast into purgatory merely by the cruelty of the geography.
He watched it for a long time, then turned back toward his truck with violence on his mind.
Smith grabbed one of the water jugs from his back seat and poured it over his face. Stray bits of sand stung at his eyelids.
He knew she was wounded and would die out there. She belonged to the desert now and it was a definite thing. He’d gone so far and she was probably dead already. He looked at the road that simmered in mirage to the right. Perfectly straight as it cut through the dry country. Lead-filled vein in a wash of skin.
A road to nowhere because the ranch becomes nowhere without that money, and a road to make a killer because your becoming makes her one too, in your returning to you-were-she-and-she-was-you. And then would come the leaving, two wandering shadows good as dead, gone from the place where their first dead was laid.
It was all gone.
He put his head in his hands and sat there on the tailgate of the pickup truck for a long time, arm paining him softly and boots suspended motionless over the shaded sand and the red rock cliffs looming in rusted daggers beyond. Had a feeling the girl wasn’t dead.
That place that had risen off the plane of the desert in the distant North like Mount Olympus or a floating land—to men standing in the desert, the fathers that came before, a place forested by trees with meat on their insides must have looked like paradise. An empire to raise with cattle and sons. He looked up.
If this was to be the end of that empire, he wanted to see it. He wanted to see the end of his home. He wanted to see the end of his life. If it was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not, he wanted to watch.
Fresh hides had to be salted daily for twelve days, and Lucy circled about the upstairs of the house like a child with nothing to do. She’d salted the hides for their third day, in a room that still smelled wet and was hung with blue shadow for a few unnatural minutes past the arrival of dawn. She ran across it as the rays of sunrise h
ad, snowing crystals over underskin, but that was hours ago and now the livestock outside were bellowing to be fed. They made the clamor of a hangman’s crowd, the throats of horses and the tongues of cattle and jaws of pigs. She walked now with her hands over her ears. Circled again and again. Stopped once and addressed them.
“Be quiet. It’s all ending.”
At last she gave up and went to see what Wyatt had done to the cattle.
The wheat field ended with a cliff of air that no longer smelled like it. The herd was in the other pasture still. She walked on a few hundred yards until she hit the site of the bonfire. Had never recoiled at a burnt smell before but this time she knew what it was. Charred ribcages in a pile like blackened springs of an old mattress ripped open to exorcise all its years of sin. Reached past the height of her shoulders, the odd horn spiking toward her throat from black skull faces that shone with white eyes of clean bone inside the socket where the smoke hadn’t scathed as much, like mad cartoon expressions to caricature their end. A bird with a clammy-skinned neck was picking at the calcified leather on a tailhead. The bone-eyes laughed as it stumbled and fluttered to catch its balance again where it teetered on a heat-cracked hip. A few wisps of ash caught the wind and cleaved off of the charcoal at the base of the heap and spread into fingers of poisoned lace as they lighted through the grass that was a mockery simply because it lived on. Because it was not like a house that had burned.
She started to gag, mostly with the loss, and covered her head with her hands.
Before she ran back to the house she turned around once more and looked at the dead things.
“Be quiet. Please.”
Part Two
CHAPTER SIX
Walmart
He took the road south and stopped when he saw her, twenty miles out.
The figure on the horizon staggered, a narrow black form with the lowering sun beyond it and the ground rinsed white. It took another step to the south and then dropped.
Smith slammed the truck door shut and walked slowly out from it. There was flat sandstone out from the side of the road and he marked his steps across it and stopped where it sank into gravel and then into wind-washed sand.
It was the kind of desert quiet that few men experience in their lifetimes, and the ones who experience it more than a few times start inventing voices to fill the silence. He stood with his back to the truck and his face to the sun. Raised the hand of his good arm to his eyes. The sound of the fall still echoed, with nothing more for the sound waves to rebound against but him or because his mind held to it a little longer, with no other noise to grasp upon. Sickly warmth of familiarity in that sound. And then he remembered: the sound of shot game going down.
He shook his head at nothing at all and descended into the wash.
One would have expected some birds, but this far out they were scarce and there were none.
A beetle circled a small piece of brush as he treaded past. Little tracks stamped in a ring in the sand to suggest it had been circling it for all time.
Walked on, and as he got closer there was sound in the air again. A grating against the ground as each limb scraped ahead in turn. Sand rolled away in minuscule waves from the channels she made as she dragged herself along in progressions of two inches at a time, but still in the desert that makes a sound.
She continued on even when he came to stand above her. Arm bent at the elbow and two outstretched legs. The other arm was clutching underneath at the stomach that he couldn’t see but the left pant leg ran red-black down the side, and in the waning light it only looked as if the black T-shirt had worn out to the point at which it had simply liquefied. Her plastic bag of belongings still tied to a beltloop at the back of her jeans. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his pockets.
“Hey.”
She still continued on, moving elbow, foot, foot, and then again, each in time to a perfect rhythm of maddening slowness and ineffectuality.
“Hey—” He nudged the thigh with the toe of his boot.
She turned her head in his direction and retched, and it echoed in the silence so loudly that he recoiled as if hearing a gun go off. The echo died and he looked at his boot and tried to scrape the wet that had adhered to it off into the sand.
The sand merely coated his boot and stuck.
Her hair was plastered to her forehead and matted around her neckline where she’d tried to tuck it into her shirt with soiled hands and there was sand on her chin. She moved a final foot and stopped and lay there and looked up at him, found she had to squint, and then just shut her eyes, kept her face in his direction.
“You got a cigarette?”
“What you want a cigarette for?”
“Just to have.”
“I aint got no cigarettes.”
She turned her face back into the ground. More sand stuck to her cheek. She turned it back up. Eyes still closed and expressionless face tilted his way like one of the figures at the bottom of the pile in a war painting.
“Got water?”
“Nah.”
She lowered her face and continued on, heaving herself forward on the lone elbow and trailing it with two little steps in the mismatched boots. As if climbing a wall that stretched for miles. Babylon of sand, and the footholds of its walls crumble, shear straight down.
He followed for a few steps. She stopped as if in thought but then he realized all her movements now were slow and mechanical enough to suggest there was thought behind them and it meant nothing.
“Then what’d you come out here for?”
“Just to see.”
She spat into the sand and a bit of mucus ran down her chin. Then she laughed.
“Goddamn it,” limply shaking her head. “Goddamn you.”
He shrugged and turned back toward the truck.
“You. Wait.”
He stopped but did not face her.
“Help me.”
“You’ve taken everything from me. I aint owe you nothin.”
“Please.”
“I aint owe you for nothin.”
He walked back to the truck and when he got there the sun was down and it was night.
He took one of the cans of food from the back seat and loosened the top with his knife and then took the blanket roll too and stretched out in the bed of the truck drinking out of the can cold. Mouth extracting beans from the can that were like glutinous stones.
He shifted to get off the bad arm. It left a wet spot on the blanket and he dizzied. He lay back again and looked up at the sky. It still held a fevered purple at the horizon but bled to blue and then black up above, the stars breaking through as it darkened like holes shot through a canvas ceiling and he thought of the daylight poured through those holes but no it wasn’t like daylight and no it was cold, like ice somewhere, and he heard a coyote cry to the north. If they came close it would only be right to get up and shoot her out of mercy but he decided he wouldn’t do it.
Perhaps that was the better way to go anyway. So fiercely natural, a tearing of limb then gut with teeth, instead of the sterile physics of another man’s finger on a trigger. But too much like cattle, wasn’t it. Dying too much like cattle.
A thunderstorm started far out to the east and the lightning touched down with electric hands, melting sand into strands of glass so deep in the ground that no one of these times would ever get to see them. If there was rain with it, it was too many miles from here to make a difference. He settled deeper into the blanket as the wind picked up. Out here the wind could come like something four-legged, like something plodding in drafted rhythm under an ox’s yoke, or it could come like an ocean, a body that, if it had still waters, they were beyond your reach and not what you were made to breathe. If it were like an ocean tonight perhaps the girl would be washed away come morning, washed away with the whole history of it all and his tracking out here and his forefathers’ footsteps across it years before alongside those of however many of the mules had made it this far into the journey. And if he awoke
early enough to still see a bloodstain in the sand where she’d lain, then a few more rushes of wind would surely take that away as well, and then you could go home. You could go home, and it would not be like it had never happened, but in not being able to see it anymore it was still as if something had been undone.
He hunkered down deeper in the truck bed and told himself that it was the noise of the coyotes that kept him from sleep, not the knowledge of what they might do.
He awoke just before dawn, to a blade at his throat.
He drew back, but she had a hand firmly on his shoulder. Was straddling him in the back of the pickup truck and he could smell the blood that seeped from her abdomen. Felt at his belt for his hunting knife and it was gone. Still mostly dark, to an unadjusted eye, but he could see the slash of teeth in a half-slack mouth six inches from his face, half-slack mouth that was laughing. An amputated grin in the desert half-dawn.
“You son of a bitch. Ha, you piece of shit son of a bitch.”
He inhaled and tried to pull backward again but her grip held fast and he waited a long time before he exhaled.
She laughed again and shook her head.
“Ah, you stupid piece of shit.”
She leaned away and looked off into the west where her dragged tracks lay worm-like in the sand.
“Thank god, ah thank god.”
“What do you want?”
Turned her face again to look at him, the gesture apparently as quick as she could muster but in its slowness came off as so cold.
“The hell you think? Give me whatever water you’ve got then drive me somewhere I can get bandages and iodine.”
She rotated herself backward so that he could stand, and she leaned on his shoulder with the knife pointed at his neck as they walked around to the cab.
It was his old deer knife in her hand. Flipped open from the hollowed-out antler handle with a woodland scene carved into the side, a setting expunged from the memory of every animal and man and stone out here. The thing he’d used to gut so many meals and goddamn a four-inch blade why had the father left him with a four-inch blade.
Rough Animals Page 9