She pulled the mule by the mane over to where Smith stood with his arm looped through the reins of the mare and said, “Hold him,” and Smith took the animal’s muzzle in both his hands and it was enough to make the creature stay.
The girl went down into a crouch beside Matthew and laid her fingers without pressure on either side of his throat and then with a cautious hand raised his eyelids. After a moment she lowered them again.
“Matthew’s dead.”
She stepped back and there was no sound but then both felt the hammering of their thirst returning and that Matthew’s blood had slowed in his veins. Smith looked to her and then to the body, wide-eyed.
“I won’t do it.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to.”
The girl went to Matthew’s horse and removed its hobbles. It stood there not moving and the girl finished tacking the mule.
There was not the time nor the spare energy to bury him there in the sand and so the girl folded the cloth on his mouth up to cover his eyes and took Awan’s pistol from him and put it in her pocket and after a moment’s thought went back into his pockets and took the lighter and pack of cigarettes.
The roan that had been Matthew’s still lingered there.
They mounted their animals in silence and looked once more at the figure slowly turning gray then turned their animals to the north and went on, until they would not have been able to see the ghoulish red still painted on his face if they had looked back.
Dawn was full across them within the hour and as they hunched on their horses their eyes were on the ground, and they passed without seeing below mesas and spires of red rock grander than anything manmade they’d served witness to before. It was too hot and Smith pushed his jacket down around his waist and unbuttoned his shirt and tied it over his head and looked down at his arm. Still a dug-out gash on the bicep but the spider legs of infection retreating into it now, a week out from the shot.
He and the girl rode parallel, alternating which was against the sun and which rode in the other’s shadow, and after a while there were no shadows to ride in. The horses made no more objections, were too weary to do so or had settled into their fate. Matthew’s gelding would linger behind aimlessly for a time, then jog to catch up and keep pace for a while, only to repeat the lingering and jogging again.
When it was full daylight the girl untied the coyote skin from around her forehead and pushed her hair down to cover her neck from the sun and retied the skin to keep it there. She stood up in the saddle to get at her bag and took out a cigarette and passed one over to Smith.
She lit hers and raised it.
“A toast to our dead Matthew. Since he died in the desert and soon we probably will too, might as well have a smoke and waste our breath in talking.”
He nodded and took the lighter from her when she held it out. Her eyes were nervy and he had not seen them like this before.
“So, Wyatt, tell us about yourself.”
He flinched at his name’s being unearthed here. The only one who had said it in front of her was Lucy.
“You seen enough over the past few days that there can’t be much more to say.”
She exhaled through her nose and it seemed a gesture that matched the animal she rode.
“But that’s the thing. There has to be something behind it all. For starters—is Lucy your sister or your wife or both?”
“Good god.”
“Just asking.”
“It were never anythin like that. It’s that she’s the only person I’ve ever really known. She was me, I was her.”
The girl eyed him.
“How long were you two out there alone?”
“Technically, five years. Figuratively, longer’n that.”
The girl lay back on the mule and shielded her eyes with a hand. He felt suddenly at ease or suddenly hopeless and did the same, even though it exposed more for the sun to beat down upon.
“Tell me about them. All the ones from before.”
“The ancestors?”
“Yeah. The ones that put you there.”
“They came there decades before, but in a country in which there aint no town and nowhere to center people’s stories there aint much more history than that. Great-grandfather came west in the 1860s, civil war and whether it were being farsighted that the South was gonna end or just cowardice and abandoning a homeland we aint know.”
He paused.
“It’s a long story.”
The girl nodded, her cigarette between her teeth. A bit of ash landed on her chin but she did not brush it off.
“Fill the quiet.”
Because if you didn’t say it now it may never have the chance to be said again.
“That man was Wyatt Sinclair and he went to Utah, land that for some reason he had to get to farther than Texas and why Texas hadn’t been good enough there weren’t no reason, save ambition or again bein a coward, with Utah just as dry but farther, so many more miles toward a gold rush that had already done ended but not toward it enough, and away from Texas where all the cattle of them days were run, Utah a desert and no Apache to fight in it but so cold in the dark months and no water to freeze and so the waterings of your eyes freeze to your face, and still not far enough for coastline or gold.
“Old man Sinclair marked out this property, two thousand acres of old pine and maple that stood against the cold and the dry and lined the ribcages of cattle. Sinclair a man that done insisted on refrainin from history, not fit for the warrin over a split nation or the growing Western coast or the frontier against Mexico and cutthroat natives that scalped. Just went to Utah, to fight no man but fight nature, but that’s a battle that can’t be won by fight or strength of the arm and done took the fight outta him and the fight outta his generations after. Out of his bein a coward of men or out of ambition toward fighting something bigger, but against nature he couldn’t win. Would not. Did not.”
The mule stumbled and the girl jerked her hands out to catch herself and lost her cigarette. Took another and passed a second to Smith.
“And then it was one thousand seven hundred acres, three hundred sold off in pieces in years after to failed men from Vegas and Salt Lake with just enough cash for a half-size trailer but more cash than them Sinclair-Smiths had on hand. And it was fittin that Sinclair lost his name by a line of females; two daughters and one of them wifed by a man from California and the other run off god-knows-where and all that determination or cowardice buried in the tractor ruts on that land they done tilled with artificial irrigation into ground that aint want it but when forced still gave up wheat.
“And then that land left to the only son of the woman that hadn’t run off and the man Smith that done came from the West.”
Smith went quiet. Took his hands from above his eyes and let the sun eat away at his retina.
“Then what happened to him? That one was your father?”
“He died. Aint nothin more to it.”
Had died young and unsuccessful against the land like the ones before had died old and unsuccessful, but shot in the chest, gone from that house by the road that was there before the road was, built small for the times as if failure was imminent but too large for now, with empty rooms for the self-orphaned daughter to wander in the shadows that too many windows made. And this seventeen hundred acres, without a name as any estate should have been given and without a purpose, so that Sinclair’s descendants forever after were chained to it, to absolve it of its namelessness and give it some purpose, to give the three generations before some purpose for whatever it was they had left undone, before the desert fractured it all to dust.
“You think it was fate?” the girl asked.
“How so?”
“Fate that they ended up on land where no one has a business to ever be let alone try to man and so led you here, to where you are now.”
He sat up from the horse’s back.
“Of course.”
She tossed her finished cigarette to the side, knowing that, in the des
ert, it would feed something.
“Fate is only a number, a count of how much time you have left.”
But what of fate not as number but with hands, that had folded the leaves in that way and bent the daughter’s sight so that she believed the father was an elk, she who had hunted and navigated those woods a thousand times before.
“Damn this place.” He shouted it and the mare spooked and then settled to a walk again.
The girl kicked the mule to catch up the few paces. She looked forward as they rode on and was quiet for a long time before she spoke again.
“Who did you lose?”
“Don’t matter. Why so much asking? Tell your own history since we’ve got air to fill.”
“No point. It’s my aim in life to defy my past. It’s your aim in life to resolve yours.”
In the midafternoon, the roan broke from its jog and barreled past them, and did not stop until it was another quarter mile out, where it shied and spun in its tracks.
The girl was up in the saddle immediately.
“Coyotes. It has to be.”
Smith looked at her and she shaded her eyes and looked backward to where the horse had come from. There was a faint string of dust-colored dots on the horizon that separated and grew then shrank again as the animals moved.
“Shit. They must have gathered at Matthew.”
Smith had turned around his horse to look. “At least eight. That’s enough for a horse. If we run them we might end up without horses anyway.”
“We have to catch the roan.”
“It’s spooked out of its mind, you aint gonna catch that thing.”
“Shit!”
From her face, she knew as well as he did that there was no outrunning them. Coyotes could cover twenty miles in a day.
They had perhaps an hour until the distance was closed, and in the heat they could not give the time to waiting. They nudged their animals on.
The mesas here were low, and their bases swept down to the flat of the earth and expunged the sand from it, the ground a sheet of red rock jagged where opposing mesa feet met and parted again. The girl rode standing in the saddle, a fixed figure bent to run without the ability to do so, a frozen and impotent posture under the wasting hot air. The horses were uneasy but exhausted or too without faith to run, and so expressed their fear in stumblings and lurchings that resounded in their hooves against the stone as they marched without heart or passion from the coming tide of teeth.
The roan was a red silhouette standing in the distance. It was waiting for them, staring, as only grasslands creatures can do, at once at the open expanse to the north and at the pair of horses and riders with their low train of pursuers stippling the white-air southern horizon. Smith did not turn around to see. He would hear their nails on the stone when they advanced onto that ground, and until then, looking would give him nothing. The fate does not change for the watching. And if time was a flat plain then there was no escaping it nor beginning or ending of it; there were always coyotes, there was always a gun in your hand. Lucy was always four hundred miles away.
Within half an hour the clicking sound began as the pack passed from the sand to the rock, their nails skidding over it as they tripped in their hunger. He could not say that he did not think it would have happened like this, with blood under an August sun, but he could not have foreseen that death would have the audacity to arrive at a lope. He knew the girl spoke because she could no longer stand the sound of their footsteps.
“Navajo legend says the mesas are the bodies of giants that a pair of twins fought and killed,” she said from the back of the mule.
“You believe it?”
The roan was minutes from them; it had not moved. Its head was lowered to graze on plants that were not there.
“I don’t think those are what giants would look like. Giants go among regular men.”
“Cartels.”
“We’ve already fought one,” she said.
“Didn’t win.”
Day was hot and white where it flowed over the cracks between the tops of the mesas, a molten river above them.
“Not cartels. They’re too large to feed on men so they’re not a danger to them; they feed on civilization instead. What they did in the desert was self-preservation. A bull’s an herbivore but it’ll kill you if you cross it.”
They met with the roan; it pitched its head back and forth and fell in to walk between them, the sclera of its eyes settled within the sand-patched face, placated in the grain-and-sweat air between its brothers.
“How many ticks does it take to kill a bull?” she asked.
“Ten per pound of body mass til they start losing weight. Then it’s just a matter a time.”
The sound was no longer a clicking only, in the multitude of steps, but a rumbling and a snapping of teeth as the dogs bit at one another’s heels.
“You see? It takes a tick to kill a giant,” she called out.
The roan reared once between their faces, the calico of its dinnerplate cheek a blurred impression of the landscape, before it shouldered its weight against the mule and the pair stumbled in their tracks. The horses were making sounds like murmuring.
“A tick on the back of the world, with a gun,” said Smith, as he kicked the mare.
“Yes.”
The roan went to move past them but the girl swung her mule to the right to cut it off. Smith’s heart was thrashing in his chest; the coyotes were too close.
“No. You’re not. There aint a word for what you are.”
“And you have a word for what you are?”
“Too many.” He drew Awan’s pistol.
The sound was growing so loud that it shook the rest of his addled senses and the crags of the mesa walls on either side of them seemed to shudder like either side of a titan jaw. The girl reined her mule to fall in behind the others.
There was a cry as a coyote fell from the blow of the mule’s hoof and at last they turned. The pack filtering from among the mesas like a mud tide across the stone, floating febrile eyes. The girl kicked the mule hard and it reared, and when it came down she planted the AK-47 between its ears and shot the roan horse in the back of the head.
The mule broke into a wild run at the shot and Matthew’s horse went tumbling down, washed over in the wave of desert fur with the blood of its last rider still on its consumers’ muzzles.
The crowd of mesas broke into an open plain, and the girl hacked at the mule with her heels and circled it until she got it under control. A few of the coyotes had sprinted after them but turned around at the mounting smell of blood.
They rode until they reached a plateau. The girl slid from the mule and turned away.
“We’ll stop here for the night.”
Four shots left between their guns.
The horses were burned out and shaking, and they stayed close beside one another and huddled against the cliff-side as they listened to the devouring in the distance.
Smith and the girl fell against the rock alongside the animals. She lifted her shirt to look at her stomach. The bandages were dung-colored with sweat and she closed her eyes and leaned back.
Dark was coming and he could feel the coolness starting in the way salt pulls at the mouth.
A hawk cried from the top of the plateau. The elevated column held trees gone alien from whatever evolving besets seeds that are blown upward to the sky, and what life forms and gardens lay on that island in the mid-atmosphere no man would ever see or know. The girl noticed it too and got up and stepped back, strained to get a look.
“It’s green up there.” She wandered around the base, looking for a way up, but found none.
“But it’s not for us.” She sat back down. Not for them, confined to the lifeless ground with scavengers peeling apart a horse a quarter of a mile from them and they no better, having scavenged the horse in the first place by the blood of fellow man.
The cold was growing and Smith took the tied shirt from his head, clasped the arm once more, th
en put it back on.
“It’s your father.”
He looked at her.
“The rabbit’s jaw man.”
He nodded, said nothing. Looked back into the darkening air.
“You can always tell a patricide. Always. But the thing is, you’re a patricide, but I don’t think you’re really the one that did it. Are you?”
He shook his head.
“Have you told it?”
He rested the back of his head against the rock.
“No.”
“Ever?”
“It’s not somethin you tell.”
“You never told her?”
“You know it was her?”
“It couldn’t have been anyone else. You never told her?”
“But she’s the one that done it.”
“That’s a reason as good as any. Few of us in this world really know what we’ve done.”
He lowered his eyes and the girl adjusted the fabric on her wounded forearm and was staring at him again when he looked up.
“There aint but one way to tell it and I’ll aim to tell it right. There was an accident. She thought it was an elk. In the woods she shot my father and that’s where he went down and it took her ninety minutes and a mile to drag him out from where he fell to the edge of the woods. And I’d let go of the black steercalf I was breaking and let it run and went to her to help and just stared from her to the man and back again and when I looked back another time she was gone.
“She left him there and walked up to the house, and I followed after her. In the kitchen she set the shotgun on the table never to pick it up again. Didn’t say nothin, just put the gun on the table like that. She didn’t cry and if she’d cried the tears were on the father and there weren’t no lines in the dirt across her cheeks anymore.
“I went to hold onto her but she shied from me like a dog and so we went back for him and laid him out in his own bed and changed his shirt to cover the hole and we left him like that for two days and passed in and out of the room as if it would change somethin or mean somethin and at the end of two days when we knew there’d be a smell soon we wrapped him in a sheet and I drug him to the base of the hill and buried him. There were no playact of a funeral though she was there when I spilled the final shovelful of dirt, her standin in the shadows at the mouth of the woods, and when I was done she came up and put her rabbit’s jaw necklace on the beam of the wooden cross above his head.”
Rough Animals Page 21