Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  When the stitching was finished he stayed behind the men until Awan came back for him and they went out together. Was half sure if he went through the door then turned around again that she would be gone and irretrievable, or he would be.

  Awan spoke to him when he hesitated again on the threshold.

  “I know. For all she does it feels safer to have her in sight than out of it.” He went ahead of Smith. “We’ll be eating soon. Come outside.”

  Smith followed him through the main building to a shed attached behind, dark and unlit, and strayed as the man walked through, cast his eyes about the room.

  It was an equine run-in shed that had been laid with its original open side to the main building and fitted with a sliding door. It was large enough to fit half a dozen horses had it been put to its intended use. The shed’s door to the outside, the building’s only opening that had an actual wooden door with a visible lock, had been cut in line with the door to the main building, and this Awan opened and exited through, back into the light, but off to the left and in the further dark sat sacks of pesticides and chemical drums and two metal racks. The racks reached to the low ceiling and carried trays of green powder on baking sheets sheathed neatly onto their shelves. Beside them was a workbench lined with four tabletop mechanisms, things with steel funnels at the top and a handwheel and small output tray at the front. There was a metal cylinder the size of a pen lying next to them, a small tree cut in relief at its base, and Smith walked over and picked it up, turned it over. He set it down. Had suspected as much.

  Outside, the land was flat and distance was an odd thing but a few yards off lay an enormous fire and a dozen dried stumps set out around it, the circle punctuated by a few harried plastic chairs. Beyond it lay a corral with four mealy mustang ponies, two gray and two skewbald.

  Smith had not realized how many manned the compound. Some of the men dozed in the chairs, others drifted in and out of the fire heat on wasted legs, another hauled a hose between hardy-looking plants in cinderblock pots. All of them had faces awash with the desert, features carved as if of material not made to move, but yet they did move, with a weariness driven through them in the way that they worked without urgency but also without pause, and it was a weariness that appeared not as an affliction of the climate but of their own inexhaustion, wrought by some indomitability at the core.

  Some of them spoke intermittently but they were gentle sounds that were washed away in the air.

  A solitary blond man stood watching the fire and laid another log on it. His hair was shorn short in the crew cut style and he wore a dirtied T-shirt like most of them and was tanned dark as any of them, but there was something about his expression that suggested it had not been rendered by years in the sun. His eyes were darkened brown and his face nervously lucid. In that environment he did not look afflicted but instead appeared alien, something grafted. He could not have been more than thirty.

  In the heat of the day the fire was something redundant, or perhaps something defiant. The men sweated around it but still did not stray from it, as if to assert that the temperature, the slow burn of the body out here, was nothing they feared.

  An old woman in a woven poncho and dress went about those at the fire with a half dozen tins of food carried between the crook of her arm and the uncertain landscape of her chest. Her hair was white, had the translucence of cobwebs, formed a fog around her face then continued as a steely braid whose plaits fit together with the rigid tightness of insect shells.

  Awan was seated on a stump directly in front, looking at the fire, and Smith went and sat on his heels to the man’s right. The old man pushed a dusted milk jug of water over to Smith with his boot heel.

  “I don’t know who you are, but it’s clear that wherever you’re from is far from here.”

  Smith took his mouth from the jug.

  “I’m not—”

  The old man held up a hand, a movement that was courteous but incontestable.

  “I have no intention of asking you who you are, and don’t believe it would be fair of me to require it of you.”

  Smith nodded.

  The woman approached them empty-handed and Awan spoke to her in a language that Smith did not know and she went away.

  A man by the fire was nailing a fresh sole onto his boot and when he had finished he set the heel, foot inside, on a rock edging the fire and leaned down and trimmed the outlying pieces of leather with a bowie knife as they went brittle and curled off in the heat.

  Smith had consumed half of the jug’s water and was pouring the remainder over his head when Awan spoke again.

  “You’re not afraid of her, are you.”

  Smith said nothing.

  “You have my respect for that.”

  Smith lowered the jug and turned to look at him. The man was sincere.

  “I aint unafraid, I’m just pissed off.”

  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, do you,” Awan said, watching him from under white-patched brows. “The first time I saw her, she was ten years old, wearing a stolen mink coat raked with mud. She’d tried to make up her face to look older but the smears of blush and eyeblack were violent, and her hair was matted and wild, as she came up through the fog of that desert dawn carrying a man’s scalp.”

  He stood and pressed his hands into the wrinkles of his overalls, firmly as if to smooth blue-bleached canyons, then sat again beside Smith.

  The woman brought over two tins of an unidentifiable food and set them in the sand and the old man ate several forkfuls and stared off into the expanse of land as he chewed, the fire intercepting the view of whatever he saw out there. Smith did not reach for the other tin. Could not enter into obligation by taking food from them. He watched the man eat, hands hot with hunger and throat cold.

  “We were working in the south, down near Grand Staircase-Escalante. You know it?”

  Smith nodded. Heard of it. Wind-ripped spires of sandstone and not a shred of grass nor life.

  “We’d had our northern lab for a decade and a half but had just split from the Nation and were working with a group from Albuquerque for distribution. We sent one of our men out to pass a dealer a half kilo, but this time he met with a band of three of them and they were high and were it crack or crystal or both we don’t know but they were uncontrolled and angry and when they saw that our man was Navajo they decided to rob and scalp him.

  “A group of us were waiting at the top of the canyon road and he’d gone out and walked from there and three hours later we’d sensed something was wrong and took the trucks offroad ten miles out into the desert and then sent two men out further to scout for him and they came back dragging him by the shoulders to keep him upright and he’d been shot in the back and that was leaking too but most of all his head was a bloody hood. You know how head wounds are.”

  He paused here with a glance to the glass eye then went on.

  “The scalping ended at his forehead and there was sand in the wound and he was losing consciousness and the two scouts dropped him there in our circle expecting me to declare him to be left for dead. The scalped man was curled in a ball there in the sand clutching the edges of his skin where it’d been cut but too afraid to touch his own skull, and I believe one man even grabbed a shovel from the back of a truck.

  “With the attention on the dying man we did not see the girl approach and now some say that they saw her but I did not remember it. But Guillermo, he was still a teenager then, said that she appeared from nowhere or out of the dust and fog or from behind some mesa and had stood there and looked at the man, and then had said ‘right,’ and run off. Just one word, ‘right,’ and was gone. I didn’t see or hear it. But twenty minutes later she returned through the gray clouds that were waist-high that morning after the first rain in forty-two days and she was carrying the scalp.

  “Now, we thought it was our man’s, of course. We got him back to the trailer we lived in then in the sand flats just off the reservation and on the way all our men had
given up their shirts to slow the blood from his back now that there was a thought he might live and at the trailer we packed the gunshot wound and then reattached the scalp. Our uncle was still with us then and had been medicine man for the tribe and so he was the one to stitch it and it was as good a job as could be done and the man lived, though the top of his head was slightly skewed from then on. He worked for us another three years and was apt and aggressive at it, having recaptured the soul that his heritage had him believe had been momentarily lost. And then one night, he had a dream.”

  The blond man came to stand at Awan’s shoulder and then Awan waved him off.

  “Later, Matthew.”

  Smith watched him go.

  “And he dreamed that the scalp that was sewn to his head was not his own. That the girl had come back with a scalp, but had never said whose scalp it was.

  “And it was true that we could never be sure. His attackers were black-haired too, and who can know the back of his own head. But whichever is true, she proved she is a thing not of the earth that we know, and one whose ways no nature-fearing man should venture to interfere with.”

  He courted the remains on his plate with a tortilla.

  “We saw her constantly after that, as we were firming up ties with the cartel and shortly after they sent her to travel with us. She was with us for nearly a year while we built outposts through new territory. But no one knows even now why she was there on that day when it happened.”

  Smith said nothing. The sky was fanning with darkness like gangrene spreading and the fire threatened to overtake the sun as the primary light source.

  There was the advancing sound of a diesel engine and Guillermo came jogging from the left wing of the conglomerated buildings.

  “We got Chanel No. 5 comin in!”

  Guillermo supported Awan by the arm and the two limped toward the front.

  When they had gone Smith unbuttoned the top of his flannel and reached down the sleeve to check the arm once more. It was as it had been and he knew if the fever did not break soon it’d take his ability to stand. He buttoned the shirt again as voices returned through the doorway.

  The wind-reddened truck driver was jawing as the men worked past him rolling steel drums.

  “Now I can only give you four, that’s as much as they won’t notice.”

  The man was about to go on in his explanations but Awan stopped him and gestured to Guillermo who went back inside then brought an open shipping envelope packed with bills.

  “Four barrels is what we agreed upon.”

  The men spun the barrels on their edges and lined them up against the back of the shed.

  The driver finished counting the money and checked the serial numbers on the barrels once more and turned to go back through the building but paused at the doorway.

  “Say, how about a sample for the road?”

  Awan frowned but then nodded and Guillermo passed the driver into the back room and came back with a few green tablets and implanted them into the man’s open palm, and the man nodded and smiled a more ingratiating smile than was justified and went off. Left Guillermo standing beside the final barrel, drumming his fingers on its top. He caught Smith watching him and half-smiled, jerked his head at the line of containers.

  “Safrole. On a perfume shipment an’ he cuts a small bit out for us. Fuckin Chanel No. 5, this shit was gonna become.”

  Awan came back over.

  “Sparin no expense for this one, are you, boss?”

  “No. None at all. Keep it moving.”

  The appearance of the safrole took over the direction of the evening, unhindered by the arrival of the girl, and every man rushed to flood the shed with gloved hands and set water baths of powder and oil in racks above the bonfire two at a time.

  The smell was acrid but most of the men did not heed it though Guillermo tied a gray bandana across his nose and mouth.

  Smith watched them for a while as they funneled equipment between the fire and the shed and the blond man Matthew still charged with managing the fire and Smith saw now why it’d been kept up at a consistent heat.

  A yelp and a swearing half in Spanish came from within the greenhouse and Awan stood from where he was crouched giving directions to men beside the fire, with the oldness and patience with which one would expect a tree to stand.

  Smith rose and followed to the humid-sweat room of garish floral. Guillermo and the blond man were already crouched at her retracted feet. She was lucid-faced, awake.

  “How did you find us? Washakie is gone,” asked the old man.

  Washakie in Box Elder. North of home.

  “I know, I went there first.” She took a breath and the air entered and exited the motionless body as if by its own will and not hers. “I asked around.”

  The old man frowned.

  “How many still know?”

  “None of the ones I found. Cleaned them.” She might have shaken her head but it was pinned by pain against the black and white Navajo blanket and so she spoke from a head that was ghostly still. Her hair was splayed in a medusal halo around her and the only thing that contrasted from the monochrome was the paling clay of her face.

  Awan nodded. She had done right.

  The blond man brushed a coil of hair away from where it had fallen in the girl’s mouth.

  “You’ll rest now?” Awan asked.

  She blinked hard, in a slow movement to reset the thoughts, then answered.

  “Yes—but are you still making?”

  Awan opened his mouth but it failed to conceal a moment’s misgiving before his reply.

  “Yes. We can do far more here than at Washakie. And when you are recovered you won’t want for work, if that’s what you came for.”

  The girl neither nodded nor voiced affirmation and instead let her eyes fold closed and her mouth lay itself out in a line of implacability.

  There were five of them now, men left standing while the force at their feet retracted into sleep, in that place with vaulted ceilings that became a house of worship for the wet that clung in droplets to its walls. With stalks past the height of arm’s reach it was a place of obscuring, a forest that held hopes of things slouching in the darkness, because when you were made to fight them at last you would know for sure that they were there, and it would be an act of steady eye and steady earth, away from a desert where sand and light blended in a place with no hiding, only hallucination and a flail, where you are forced to war as much with your own blindness as with the thing clawing your chest.

  One by one, they departed for drier grounds. Awan fell into step with Smith on their way out, the old one’s careful limp at pace with the other’s fever-wrought stagger.

  “You know, she will recover,” he said.

  As much a warning as a prayer.

  In the winters they’d made a constant fire in the stove at the heart of the pineboard house. Wouldn’t let it go out for weeks. They were children then, and they’d curl like cats in front of it on old braided rugs and read from the family Bible, as the father was a man with small use for words or want for them and when his stories would run thin for the telling there were sparse other books in the house for them to turn to, and none provided so much epic as this one. The father had taught the children to read when the time had been right for him to do so, and now Wyatt would sit and read aloud still with his finger on the lines. There were nights that they ran branches like warhorses across the wood floor as Old Testament kings and there were nights they reversed to earlier pages after reading that those kings had gone to their doom, the sadnesses and failures taped closed with greasy finger stains, and there was one night in which Lucy asked if Cain and Abel were twins and he’d said no, they could not have been, that two halves of the same would not have gone apart like that. A soul don’t break that way. And she’d nodded and held his hand tight.

  But eventually they came upon Jacob and Esau, and those truly were twins. They’d gone to the father and asked which had the birthright but in their n
ot truly believing in there ever having been a mother and the father never speaking on it they got no answer, and hoped that they were right and they were just one.

  And they’d traced the verses with their fingers for hours, sneaking the book into Wyatt’s room after both had been sent to bed, and when the last lights in the house went out with the father off to sleep and she knew he was still awake too she put the words to it and asked, “Which of us is Jacob and which of us is Esau?” And he had answered, “We’re us and neither of us is either but we’re both.” And she replied that she would never take a thing from him or let him leave home and he said the same and they’d fallen asleep with their hands on the scripture, fearing that they were wrong, pressing into the paper with some rebellion against fate or with pleading or with complete passivity in their sleep and their legs intertwined to keep them warm.

  He awoke before dawn and put the book away under the bed, her blue eyes black in the dark as she sat up to see. The world outside the pitch slick walls dark and frozen and violent with waiting. The book wasn’t for them. Because they weren’t twins they weren’t two, they were fire. And a thing without edges.

  Cold had fallen with the dark and they drew up chairs still a good distance from the fire; from ten feet away the heat was enough to singe the knuckles if they outstretched a hand. The old woman came around with plates once more. There were two dust-faced children playing in the dirt against the side of one of the outbuildings, barefooted and in frayed T-shirts and faded athletic shorts in sizes far too large, and they fell back as she passed.

  The woman bent to give Smith a plate but he raised his hand against it though he was shaking from hunger-weakness.

  “I don’t want to be in your debt.”

  “Please.” The old man said it with a host’s cold evenness.

  “No sir.”

  “It’s not charity. I need more men.”

  Smith nodded and took the plate.

  “I told you we would discuss the terms of her debt to you. In two days we will have our largest deal of the season. Three hundred thousand pills, to wholesale for three million dollars as there are no borders to cross before they’re distributed.”