Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  Matthew slurred in the heat.

  “I got a lighter an’ a pack a cig’rettes.”

  The girl exhaled.

  “Fire then.”

  They were silent for a few moments.

  Matthew turned to speak but kept his eyes closed.

  “They got the pills.”

  “Of course they did,” she said.

  “There’s water in em trucks.”

  “We’re not going back,” the girl said.

  “Nah I’m not sayin that. I was jus’ sayin there is.”

  “Shit,” said Smith.

  “Yeah, shit.” Matthew said it with eyes still shut and coughed and ground the toe of his boot against the rocks.

  “What about the police?”

  “Aint no police ou’ here.” Matthew answered him.

  A mourning dove called out from among the rocks above and the sound seemed to inflict more heat on the air.

  Matthew turned against the boulder face and felt that it was cool and with his hands against it lifted himself up and when he’d made it into a crouch he opened his eyes and looked the girl square in the face.

  “You! You ran!” He lunged at her and, overpowered, she slammed hard into the cliff face beside and the rifle went off against their ears and when they both recoiled at the sound she threw up a knee and hit him fast in the gut and he went to the ground and she had her gun to his head in a second.

  “I ran. And we’re the only ones still alive. Now how do you figure that.”

  Matthew spat out blood to the side and curled his lip.

  “If you’d stayed and fought …”

  “Dead! They’re all dead! Either accept your luck or join them.”

  He put his fists to the ground and coughed out blood again on all fours and gave her a look that showed he’d consider the second option. The girl saw it too and squatted in front of him, gun across her knees.

  “Let them rest. We have other things to deal with now.”

  To the north ahead of them loomed the Utah desert, two hundred miles of implacable sand and a sun that sent down drying spires of light like the invertebrate ticks of the scorpions that burrowed below the surface of its skin.

  CHAPTER TEN

  No Wolves in Utah

  The three of them sat in the shade of the rock, Smith with his skinned cheek that had spilled down to mat in his beard and Matthew painted red down to the eyebrow and the bruise on the face of the girl darkening through a myriad span of colors as if to perpetually adjust its meaning.

  Another vulture did a single circle above them and then smelled something else and moved on.

  The three stared to the insurmountable north and the sun tilted as they sat and their space of shade shrank. The girl was the first to lean forward and she took out her knife and cut off one of her sleeves and tied the fabric so that it rode across her nose and mouth. “To conserve the moisture.” She handed the knife to Smith and he did the same with the right arm’s flannel sleeve then passed the knife to Matthew.

  “I guess you know what we have to do.” She said it with eyes still to the north.

  Matthew nodded before he slit the bottom of his white T-shirt and tied the fabric across his face.

  Smith pulled away the black plastic from the bag. Underneath it was a layer of cellophane with a smeared handprint of blood across its top. But within it, tens of thousands of light green pills.

  “That’s two hundred thousand dollars if we can get out of here alive,” said the girl.

  Smith stared at it for a while, the iterations of green cylinders like fragmented pieces of what was once the greenhouse, a ragged, shuddering breath in the desert, then covered it up in black plastic again.

  The cliff beside them gave no more shade with the position of the sun. It extended north for another mile, no way to get to shade before then. The girl swallowed and it was guttural in a dried throat and Matthew had already begun to sweat through the cloth on his face so that it was visible on the stained cotton.

  She stood and they followed and the three began their staggering passage in the midday sun, their adrenaline from the firefight no longer an aid and now a dead weight.

  She had the rifle hung about her shoulders and Smith carried the bag, the pistol in hand against it. Pistol taken from dead Awan who had hired him for protection, that he had used to kill more men, but you are no killer but yes now you are and is the reason you cannot see the blood upon your hands the fact that it bleeds out of Lucy’s instead? She standing there in the field of cattle and her blonde hair upon her shoulders that your shoulders looked like once and her standing there staring at her hands wondering why and wondering how and you’re not, you’re not—

  The girl walked ahead of them and Matthew fell into step beside Smith.

  “You know where the fuck we are?”

  “Nah. You know where the fuck we are?”

  “Nah.”

  There were things even greater than elk in those woods, and it took two men to catch them. At seventeen the father believed Wyatt counted as enough of a man to go. For the week leading up to it, he practiced on targets backed with bales of hay, emptying the shotgun then switching to the knife for close range. And when the day came that they were to go, they tacked up four horses, two for riding and two for gear.

  That morning the trees were blue and heavy below clouds shaded with implied snow, and they would reach the base of the mountains by sunset. Lucy rode alongside to the edge of the field, and Wyatt was sure she’d say “to hell with the livestock” and ride out with them, but instead she turned at the edge of the treeline, the toes of her horse’s hooves just barely sinking into the fallen leaves with the shattered-china sound of breaking frost, and murmured some reassurance to the father about tending the cattle before turning her animal’s head back around the way it came. She reined it there, a few yards back from the woods, as they walked their mounts and pack animals into the trees. Wyatt watched until she was gone from sight, the exhalations of her horse in the cold raising a column of smoke that obscured her face in its efforts toward the sky.

  They could hope for no more than ten miles that day through the bogging snarls of undergrowth, and even less when the snow began to fall. At some invisible place in the woods lay the legal border of the ranch. It was unmarked, and it did not matter because there was nothing but wilderness beyond, miles upon miles that no man had ever seen. Yet for Wyatt there was still a sense of crossing, of moving between the land that was theirs and this other, this new, the awareness of being the first to lay eyes on it making it seem as if they were gone from the surface and now walked the underside of the world, affixed to it by some trick of gravity. He assessed as they rode whether this part of the woods was still familiar and at times felt that it was and then at other turns and when certain branches slid snow-covered and wet across his face he wasn’t sure anymore. But after they had gone an hour they would have covered three miles and that would be farther than the property reached and he could be sure, sure that they had passed into the unknown.

  The mountains were a shadowed hood above them when late in the afternoon they decided to stop and make camp.

  The snow was falling harder now, and the fire protested and spat and wept ash as the flakes landed in it. They’d brought no hay for the horses but the heat of the flames warmed dormant leaves around their clearing, ran the frost from them in rivulets and for a moment the leaves were green and alive and spring again before their consumption by the foursome of rope-foamed mouths.

  They’d strung a tarp to cover the bedding and the saddles but the fire would melt it so they sat cross-legged on either side of the flames under open air. The father was dividing blocks of brown sugar with his knife, because that’s what you use for bait when you’re hunting bear.

  “You understand why this is different, Wyatt,” said the father, when he had laid out the sugar into palm-sized patties and far enough from the fire that they would not melt but not so far away that they would freeze.
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br />   “This is a killing we don’t have to do. We’ll eat the meat but it won’t taste as good as if we’d just killed a steer. There’s sport in what we’re doin.

  “Some men make excuses—like the vague threat that it might come down from the mountain and kill your horses. But a man ought to have more faith in his horses than that.”

  The father wiped the sugar from the knife blade on his pants then went on.

  “It’s alright to do it like this, sometimes. We won’t waste it. Just have to take responsibility for it, is all.”

  There was jerky in their packs and they took it out and held it in their gloved hands in front of the fire to warm it. The snow had not slowed and the men packed it underneath their blankets to form a cushion and the horses ducked their heads below the height of the smoke, and in unison man and animal slept.

  The father was up before sunrise, had taken a single horse. Wyatt was smothering the fire when he rode back up and flung a bundle at his son. Wyatt caught it and looked into his hands: a squirrel, killed with a knife. The father wouldn’t fire a gun this close to the target of the hunt and was among few men in this world who could get breakfast without needing to.

  Wyatt re-stoked the fire and they ate and broke camp enough to protect it from the weather but left it there, and rode further up the mountain. The father had laid the sugar blocks that morning.

  There are three ways to hunt bear: baiting, calling, and dogging. And the father wouldn’t risk the dogs.

  The father had been scouting all morning, and had found the signs and trails. They would take the four horses up and when they neared the bait would leave them. They would then call the bear on foot.

  They were riding among boulders here, and the ground leaned toward the mountaintops at a visible pitch. At a point they paused and could see out over the ranch, crop fields stitched to the earth in discolored bandages. The hairs of smoke from the house’s chimney were what struck Wyatt—he had not yet thought of Lucy. He had felt no separation because she may as well have been right there. That the ground here was as much her as the body, even as the interlacing of feeling that connected them below the dirt stretched and expanded, amoeba-like, with the places they walked upon and walked upon anew, coating everything in between them with themselves.

  “You see it from up here it makes you wonder that you could’ve ever had any control over all it,” said the father as they turned back to face the mountain and continued the ascent.

  “There’s a thin balance between the things you’re given and the way you can make things be,” said the man that had raised his children alone.

  “This place takes somethin from you. As you take from it, each time it takes a bit back. Only a bit at a time. Don’t let it sneak up on you.” “You” meaning both Wyatt and Lucy, as the father had no reason to differentiate between them, so rarely used their individual names.

  The horses were slipping along the rocks and the men stood up in their saddles to lean their weight between the animals’ shoulders.

  “If you take good care of it then a lot of the time you won’t want, and not wanting, not havin to want, is the best thing in the world.”

  A quarter mile from where they’d set the bait they tied the horses with slipknots so that they could easily break away and the father took out a wooden mouthpiece, the bear call. They stalked low through the undergrowth, guns still slung on their backs, Wyatt at his father’s heels.

  “You’ve called turkeys. This isn’t it—be more frantic, constant. It’s a dying rabbit’s voice.”

  “It’s always a rabbit.”

  “That’s the role they’ve gotta play.”

  The father stopped behind a bluff and they hunkered down and he blew the call. It was a shriek, one of broken backs and of legs caught in traps and of birdshot in the ribs. Again and again and the father continued and they heard the bear far off and the father continued the shrieking and quickly it had gone on for longer than Wyatt had ever heard the real thing; it was a sound reserved for last moments. The bear was responding, fumbling in the brush a hundred yards off.

  “Take it—”

  The movement in the trees ahead had stopped. Wyatt palmed the mouthpiece.

  “There’s a gully back there, he must’ve gone down—draw him out, go.”

  Wyatt blew on the call once and shrank at the squealing sound it made.

  “Go!”

  He watched the undergrowth for the bear and blew the call and shrank with it again. Took a few steps and again, shrank again. And then the bear began to crash ahead of him and his shrinking from the false rabbit’s cries became something like running, and as the snow nicked his face and the bare branches whipped the emptiness of his clothes, through the faunal warmth of the ground and the anesthetizing cold of the air, the wind fetching minuscule storms after him without direction or source or end or fate or mandate to bring them to the ground, the rabbit dying again and again, with a goliath roaring in the shadows ahead of him, the running became something like flying.

  The bear died with no more drama than its size warranted and with no more complaint than the event justified. They dressed it there and made camp for the night and in the morning divided the weight among the horses and had to sit forward on their saddles to make room.

  Lucy was in the chair in the living room when they returned and she’d taken down the needlework that the father normally did and she’d pierced her fingers on it in lack of skill and there was blood. They got the salt from the pantry together and the bear’s hide took up the entire kitchen floor and they had to step over it for three months, each of them scattering a palmful of salt over it each time they passed, making an hourglass of grizzly fur to mark how a family spent its days. And when on one spring night it was ready, and the weather was already much too hot for it, Wyatt and Lucy sat on the edge of the porch with the hide over their heads so that the sweat streamed down their faces like the rain falling from the porch roof ahead of them, and he told her how it all had happened.

  “Shade. We need some shade,” Matthew slurred almost incoherently but the girl responded.

  “No shit. Close your mouth before your spit evaporates.”

  In the August sun it was already far above ninety degrees. There was no sound save their steps and in the silence these grew to a crashing noise as their boots plunged through the wheat-colored grains of sand. They watched for the break in the mesa and after a half hour of slogging forward they saw the northern edge of it and the girl made two steps that were the start of a run and stopped herself and returned to a slow, crestfallen walk to conserve energy. The sweat dripped through the black upon her brow and smeared the rest of her face in gray.

  The sun was overhead still and excised most shadows from the land but there was a small outcropping on the north end of the plateau and the three gathered in the tight circle of shade it made.

  “We wait here until night,” the girl had said.

  They lay there together, not shrinking at one another’s touch as they would have if fully conscious, and the plateau rose above them flat and foreboding and as if providing shade only against its will.

  Smith pulled his knees to his chest but it was too hot so he outstretched his legs and the light hit them like a burn and he pulled them back in again. Pinned under this beating sky, it felt like something that must abate but he knew would not because you never stop to think how lost you are without water in the desert. Then in his mind her hands were upon his shoulders and the twin was there as he was, and as he breathed in hard under the torn segment of his shirt he breathed all of her lightness in.

  Night fell long hours later and he thought he had slept and then the memories of waking with eyes washed white in the sun and turning in the sand without rest came back and he no longer knew if he had.

  They had shifted their cluster of three by inches as the sun progressed and they waited until dusk had passed to rise, either to shy from even that bit of the light or because it took that long to rouse themselve
s from their paralysis below the sun.

  When the stars were visible they started to walk.

  “Where’s the road?” Matthew asked.

  “Straight to the west but it turned to dirt twenty miles before we got here. We might not be able to find it and if we end up overshooting it there’s another five hundred miles of wilderness after that.”

  “And the greenhouse?”

  “Dead north. We head there.”

  They were three shadowed figures in a line, black in the dark but underneath still going pink in the exposed spots where the sun had scalded them. Through a valley they pushed their boots through brush and cacti and Matthew had taken the pistol since Smith held the bag and he carried it readied against his chest out of habit or with wishing he’d be given the chance to prove his survival against another man instead of in a winnerless fight against nature.

  They had been going for an hour at least when the girl spoke to Smith.

  “You’re counting, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re counting the men you killed.”

  They moved automatically, as if riding something separate from them. War-torn cowboys on shuffling mounts that consisted only of their own quadriceps.

  “Yeah. Seein how the number feels.”

  “How many?”

  “Three for certain, and maybe four. I’m not sure.”

  “Three is enough for one day. Let the fourth man lie.”

  He did not answer.

  “You know, the first one is the only one that never leaves. Like the first animal you kill. But the others go. I’d bet the faces of those you killed today are already gone.”

  The first animal the blackbird he’d taken with the Ruger with Lucy there and the hole in its chest reflected in the man’s eyes when he was pinned beneath the motorcycle and pulling the trigger then and the father, when had the father been shot and which of them had shot him, he didn’t remember anymore, and the faces of the men today: the one who cast his arm up to cover his face as he buckled to his knees and when he lowered it down again he’d smeared blood across it, and another who cried out at the sky with his mouth wide like a smile. Someday you forget them. He didn’t know whether he’d forgotten the father’s face or whether he saw something of the father’s face in every man he’d killed.