Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  He tightened the bag of drugs against his chest and walked on.

  “What’re the odds of them comin out here after us? They woulda heard the shot.”

  The girl answered him.

  “Not a chance. They know it’s nearly certain that we’ll be dead by sunset tomorrow.”

  Matthew broke and shouted “fuck!” into his hands but it went out into the wind and there was no echo.

  They watched the sky deepen and the stars alit across the air as if a hand had struck waters of glowing algae, pulling waves of light in an ocean that none of the three had ever seen.

  It was nearing midnight but still they had not stopped to rest and their way was straight, their tracks diverting only when mesas blocked their way, but one direction ingrained in their brains, and it read not as north but as away. The girl’s walk was still her strange movement of feet first and then bodyweight to follow and while the men’s shadows moved forward at a constant pace hers was lurching, that of a beast whose mouth leered from its stomach.

  Soon a herd of clouds hunted in and the ground was strewn with patches of deeper darkness, some the size of mountains. Another hour north and Matthew stopped.

  “I heard somethin.”

  “It weren’t nothin, your ears are hallucinating.”

  “No, I heard somethin.”

  The girl had stopped and cocked her head and the black on her face obscured it so that only her eyes were visible, two gold-backed insects traversing a wreck of charcoal and burnished slate, soiled wet tarp.

  They heard a trotting sound to the west and then it too stopped.

  “Shit—”

  And the girl turned around and threw her back against the men and they faltered then understood and stood shoulder to shoulder in a triangle.

  “Wolves,” said Matthew.

  “Aint no wolves in Utah,” said Smith.

  “Coyotes,” said the girl.

  “They hunt in the day.”

  “Not when the prey is as easy as this.”

  No need to stay quiet when the things already knew exactly where they were. The clouds were heavy here and they could not see.

  The trotting resumed and seemed to gain double time and it was only then that they understood there were three.

  “Save your bullets,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Save your bullets.”

  They waited for a long time like that, breathing as their shoulders joined with each collective inhale. And there was nothing. Without a word the girl turned from their circle and they moved on.

  They were making good time and walked in a line through one another’s footprints, and they passed in and out from below the clouds, with a train of shadows that sometimes absconded into the dark and other times reappeared to follow them under the pin-marked desert sky.

  Smith walked in the middle and a lizard crossed in front of his foot and followed for a few paces, leaving a line in the sand from its tail and little footprints on either side of it like the scar of a stitched wound where once the world had been sewn back together. They crossed into another dark space and it ran off into the night to weave its tracks over the width of the plain. And then, in front of them, the girl screamed.

  It was a sound not of fear or surprise but of anger, and they reached her in seconds but there was a snarl that followed and the sounds echoed together and whether it were hers or the beast’s Smith did not know but she had fallen forward with it then rolled up onto her knees by the time they got to her. She had one knee on the animal’s throat and one knee behind it and was hammering the butt of her gun onto its skull until it lay still, and she lay back in the sand with her legs still wrapped around the coyote’s head, holding her arm to her chest and shaking. They looked at her and she shook her head.

  “There’s probably more. Just give me a minute and stand watch.”

  She kept the arm against her and shuddered twice more before she stopped and looked up at the sky and let the dim light sink into her eyes until their color was visible again. Her forearm had an arc of distinct punctures and two darker than the others where the canines had gone in and doubtless the wound was mirrored on the other side that she held to her chest. At last she sat up and sucked the blood off the outside of the forearm and did the same to the underside and then rolled it in the sand. She rose using the uninjured hand for balance and swung the rifle over her back then squatted once more and put the coyote over her neck.

  It was a starving thing, fur the color of the landscape tight on the outcrop of ribs, and the jut of its hips was a mirror of the desert and its stone. It could not have weighed more than thirty pounds. Swung easily about her shoulders, and the blood of its skull ran down across her waist and then down her clothes and the only bit of it Smith could see was the trail’s ending down her right calf.

  “Move on. There’s more of them.”

  And the noise of their trotting resounded like the scrawling of their sins into a paper forged of sand.

  “Move on until what.” Matthew spoke, knowing that he’d lost the most blood and had the most blood upon him, guilt below his voice for having brought them on with the smell. They’d been going for half an hour.

  “Until they smell their own blood and move off. Then we’ll drink.”

  “Yeah, if it don’t all go out through his head.”

  She said nothing and lifted up the coyote’s skull with her hand. They all knew it had gone for her because she was the smallest.

  A quarter of an hour later and the iterations of four-legged footsteps had slowed but were still there, with a tone of aimless curiosity or of something pitiful and hunger-based knowing that there was nothing more efficacious for them to do. When the men and the girl came up over a sand ridge at the base of a mesa they could see the two coyotes in the moonlight, ten yards off, shying and circling one another as they kept their distance from the party that had stopped.

  “They want the dead one,” said the girl.

  “To eat,” she said.

  As they made their way down the hill the girl let out a cry to scare them off. The sound emanated harsh into the desert and rebounded with despair but still with aggression, the sense as much an addition from the mesa faces as in her voice to begin with. One of the coyotes barked in response and the pair strayed a bit but continued on behind their progress, jostling their shoulders against each other as they jogged through the sand.

  At last they came upon another red-rock archway and the girl said they’d stop there.

  She bent down and unbridled the canine from around her neck and held the right forearm to her chest as she sat down in front of one of the rock sides and Smith and Matthew took the other. There was nothing to make a fire with. The girl took out her knife and cut a length from along the bottom hem of her shirt and tied this over her bleeding arm, then turned the dead coyote onto its back and worked down from the chest to gut it. She let the gut-sack fall to the side and picked up the body and bent it at the middle on her lap, then rolled up the tied sleeve from over her mouth and it rode upon the midsection of her face like a half-consummated noose. She waited for a minute and then propped the coyote’s head against her knees and she dipped her face into it and came up bloody from the tip of her nose downward.

  She passed the bunched animal to Matthew and he drank and came up bloodied in the same manner and then reached in with a hand to pull at the meat.

  “Stop.”

  He looked up at the girl with a swath of muscle in his fist.

  “Digestion dehydrates you. We’re not eating.”

  He shrugged and let the meat drop back into the cavity and passed it to Smith.

  Smith sat with the coyote in his lap and looked at the two bloodied faces in the dark beside him. Creatures gone half animal or half infernal in the sloughs of visceral muck on their jaws. He looked down into the cavity that was still wet in the crevices of it and then at the crushed head of the animal. The blow that had done it in was visible in the ellipsoid outline of
the butt of the gun and the brain leaking out around it and he put a hand to it and snapped off a piece of the skull along one of the seams and used this to scoop out the remaining mouthfuls of blood. His face stayed unstained excepting a single line that ran down from the right corner of his mouth, and he sat back from the drink in a trance with the red lining his teeth like velvet coating ceramic.

  He stood and laid the emptied carcass at the feet of the girl and she crouched over it and began to skin it. Still the coyote’s unfallen peers skittered at the invisible border they’d drawn between the humans and themselves. One of them was a good bit larger than the other and had a broken tail, and the smaller one circled it back and forth with rolling shoulders above a sunken back.

  They had left a space between them for a fire though there was none to be had. Matthew sat back and swallowed, then another look of directionless panic gathered into his face and he spoke.

  “I’m the only one here who’s given a name.”

  “Does that plague you?” The girl said it flippantly as she ran the knife along the left foreleg.

  “Yeah it does. I don’t wanna die so anonymous in the desert.”

  He turned to Smith.

  “You still aint told us your name.”

  “Aint no need for you to know it.”

  “You know mine.”

  “You aint know hers.”

  “She doesn’t have one. You do.”

  The girl was taking a rest from skinning and sat with her eyes closed, blowing her breath upwards from under the cloth tied about her mouth, the reverberations in the cotton the only thing about her that moved.

  “Ten miles we did tonight?” asked Matthew.

  “About that much. We’ll try for twenty tomorrow,” the girl answered.

  “You think that out? We aren’t gonna make it through a week.”

  “You got another way you’d suggest?”

  Matthew was silent for a moment to fake considering when he knew there was no other way.

  “Nah. It’s just that—fuck it. I didn’t get into this business to die like this.”

  “Yeah, but you got into this business to see if it were possible for you to die.”

  Matthew didn’t answer. He smeared some of the blood off of his chin and looked at it on his hand.

  “And are you starting to think it possible?”

  Matthew glared and then burst out laughing.

  “Damn you,” he said.

  The ends of her eyes curled against the black paint and under the cloth over her mouth she must have smiled.

  “I died in a desert once already, some hellhole far south of this. Five days without water before I fell against a saguaro and then got myself up by my own will the next time it rained.”

  She sat back and pulled her plastic bag around and took out a few of the rocks to roll in her hands and then went on.

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “That aint up for you to decide,” said Matthew.

  “Yes it is.”

  Matthew inhaled. His hair had hardened with blood and muck like a helmet and was traversed with cracks now.

  “No. This aint right. We don’t deserve to be here. After Awan and all the others who fell. This isn’t right.”

  She dropped the rocks.

  “In the wilderness there’s no such thing as right.”

  “Fuck your principles.”

  “You’ve had water, and blood’s thick enough that we might as well call you fed. You won’t die in the next few hours. Awan already did.”

  Matthew chewed on his chapped lower lip, his token from years in that climate. It split and sent a coil of his own blood to join that of the animal on his jaw.

  The girl had started skinning again and when she was finished and the fur laid out in a headless four-legged outline in the sand she stood and lifted the skeleton of meat and gathered the guts into her arms and walked out to where the two coyotes still shivered against one another in the starlight.

  Smith watched her, the impish figure carrying a bundle half the size of herself in the feeble blue shadow. They shied as she approached them and then at the lure of the smell they shied less and when she tossed them the gut-sack and it burst upon the ground in front of her they ran to it immediately. Smith watched her like that for a while, tossing pieces of the thing she’d killed as charity to the species that had tried to kill her, so that they would survive by her doing the thing that they could not have brought themselves to do.

  After a while she tossed the rest of the carcass to them and came back to sit under the archway. Her forearms were lined in muck besides where the one was bandaged and Smith knew she would not clean it because it would keep the sun off her skin, and he regretted for a moment that he had not covered himself in it as well. But it still meant something, and stalking through the desert covered in blood was a thing that he still did not want to do. Not yet.

  She came back and did not fully sit down but bent on her haunches and stared at Smith from across the archway.

  “Whose ghost is following you?”

  Matthew was war-torn and tired as well but it was clear to whom the question was directed.

  “What ghost.”

  “The one that rides your shoulders and speaks from the eye you’ve got left. We can see it.”

  Smith swallowed.

  “A man’s.”

  My father’s.

  No, it is my sister’s. My sister who got a ghost without having died and they must be wandering the house now, together or apart or leaning back to back across that dust-flaked bed in the emptied room, platinum hair rolling over each other’s shoulders. And one of them or both of them make that pilgrimage to his grave each night as if they would bid him rise, and if he ever did rise one of them would have to go and he did not know if it would be the ghost or the sister. Just as he did not know which of them wandered the hall outside his bedroom door with feet cottony blue in the moonlit dark when she could not sleep.

  “Shouldn’t be the one you shot by the juniper trees.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Is it the rabbit jaw man?”

  Smith shook his head and looked away from her. She watched him for a long time; he felt it.

  After a few minutes the girl crawled back to the hide. She’d discarded the pulverized skull but left the intact lower jaw attached to the skin and pulled the torn mouth over her head like a necklace, the empty eyeholes bordering her throat and the teeth riding her sternum. She cut the rest of the hide into strips and rolled their wet sides to the sand to dry them as much as could be done and left them for now. The strips of hide made a segmented blur in the sheet of sand that ran out from the archway, as if a step upon them would break through to the mesh of channels underground, where perhaps there was light, because the desert held too tightly to its memories of daily burning for the grasp of the heat and sun to be punctuated by turns of the planet, and that the walls of the tunnels along which the tarantulas walked were lined in a blue glow, and that there was something of life or of beauty out there after all. There was a cracking sound and it came from the mouths of the coyotes, gnawing the sinew along the vertebrae of their brother.

  The girl took out another sheet of ampicillin and swallowed some and passed it to Smith and he took two and they made for powdered stones in his drying mouth but at last he got them down and passed the packet back. Matthew took none; a cut to the head required nothing in the face of gunshot wounds.

  “Tell us something,” Matthew said.

  “Something of what?” she replied.

  “A thought, or a story.”

  The girl nodded and took off a boot to re-stuff the newspaper lining of it, a thing for the hands to do while the mouth spoke.

  “I have a story. It’s one I heard years ago down in Texas.”

  “Tell it.”

  “I will.”

  She turned the cloth on her wrist and gripped it then went on.

  “In El Paso there was a girl who bore twins, and
was neither scared nor sorry about it, but gave them up because she was deep in work with the cartel and found that to be her calling and did not have the time. And so the twins, they were boys, were sent to live with families that either were connected to the cartel or paid it protection money, and one was raised with balance and level-headedness and he became a doctor and the other was raised with fury and retribution and he returned to the cartel and became a killer of men.

  “After they had passed their thirtieth year the mother still had not searched them out. In her uncommonly long lifespan for a cartel woman she had learned that men build the illusions about their ill-begun destinies early in life, and she had no wish to take their illusions now. And so within the same tract of country they continued on, one saving lives and the other one taking, though it was never the other brother’s victims who the brother revived on the hospital bed because the other brother was swift and always effective in his jobs. And neither knew a thing about the other’s existence.

  “Then one day the doctor got a man in the hospital bed that looked exactly like him. The man had been shot through the gut and he was critical but savable and on the second day he awoke and the doctor was sitting in a chair by his bed and the man said, ‘you look just like me.’ And the doctor also said, ‘you look just like me.’ And they joined hands and cried and when the man in the hospital bed fell back to sleep the doctor doubled his dosage of morphine and killed him.”

  “He killed him knowing it was his brother?” asked Matthew.

  “No. It was the father,” said the girl.

  Smith looked at the girl and then regretted it. She could not have known. She was testing it. Matthew had called her fluent in reading fear.

  “No man’s ever killed another just for lookin like him,” said Matthew.

  The girl looked back to her boot and restuffed it then moved on to the other one.

  “Don’t say ‘ever.’ At this point in history every reason man could use for killing he’s used. But you’re wrong—there are men who fear their image in others. It’s something to do with sharing their fate.”