And after he was breathless from the telling of it and no weight had been lifted from his chest but the girl seemed to have inhaled it and fed upon it.
“You wouldn’t let her be the patricide.”
“It weren’t her fault. It were an accident. Call it somethin outta the land that got him, fate or somethin like revenge. But she didn’t deserve to be broken that way. I’d kill the man who killed him and broke her, but there aint no man. And what can you do when it’s the way things are you want justice against?”
“You test it.”
He had forgotten his thirst and remembered it now, wanted water but there was none. He knew how he looked, face burned and ragged with the moisture having long ago evacuated the skin and the animal parts wrapped around his head and the arm no longer rotting but something that used to rot. The appropriate face for a patricide. And he knew now, he was Jacob, bound to wander the earth.
A pair of nightbirds called out, floated down from the top of the mesa.
“Do you think up there it’s paradise?” he asked.
“If it’s got mud or water I’d call it that.” She closed her eyes sitting up. “But paradise isn’t real, no tree of knowledge would have fruit. It would have to have been a box elder. A tree of knowledge wouldn’t feed you, it would just show you that the blood had always been there.”
He laid the bag of pills behind his head but could not sleep. Her face leveled at the desert as if challenging it or watching from another eye. She wore the paint of the land, of all of the animal blood and disassembling of life that he and Lucy had grown up fearing as they trudged along carrying that out-of-Eden pain of having to kill to survive. And he knew that the girl was the closest thing to something hell-sent he would ever know, but in a place like this it would take that sort of god to get you out of here. He shut his eyes to the sounds of fevered yips as the coyotes urged their young toward the feed, and the girl crawled nearer. He made a space for her and she rested her head on the opposite end of the bag of the pills, and they slept.
He dreamed of Lucy that night. She was in the darkened leather chair that was still darker than her in the moonlit black with her fingers that should have been practiced enough to be stitching embroidery but instead had stayed clumsy in grief. They were bleeding out against a gratingly rough flannel shirt repaired three times over that might as well have been burlap and at last when a nightbird cried out in the emptiness she would come awake and raise her eyes and then the man’s ghost was there and skeletal thin but still there in the room.
And she would stand to go to him, and as she did the shadows from the trees outside and from the angles of the porch would wash over her and color her face in indigo and purple, as if the old bruises from rolling around on the farm as a kid in the years and years before were resurrected from beneath the skin. And as she moved farther into the moonlight from the window the shadow bruises would open in violet slits and empty themselves in dark over her cheek, and then across her collarbone where the light pooled, and then overflow across the chest and the arms and the legs draped in the colors of the sunsets that come before thunderstorms. She would kneel in the puddle of blue and look up at the man and raise her supplicant’s hands and the needle and thread still in them, flannel shirt dropped, and lavender-indigo-swirl-stained and white-faced would whisper, “Father I’m so sorry, Father I’m so sorry.” And the wound in the man’s chest would run to mix with the shadows of her own.
“You think we’re gonna die?” he asked.
“Nah. Only if you say it.”
Her voice was hoarse.
“Plus, it’s always the horse that dies before the man does.”
The sky began to stream in cracks of pink above them and it was still cold and such a strange sensation to try to wrap the cold around you while huddling like trying to grab up warmth. Their eyes shone where still it was dark and the cracked stains on their skin made them shine all the more in their dried casings, though Smith’s false eye had grown dull with the dust.
Hungry and without a thing to grasp his teeth on, Smith jawed and it caught the side of his cheek that had been cut and split the wound again, and he lapped up the iron taste on the inside of his mouth in an act of violence so insular and private.
The day was hot when they rode out and he started to see the silhouettes of the men he’d killed in the shrinking shadows of the mesas.
They were only a mile from where they’d slept when he snapped.
“You knew, didn’t you!”
His horse stumbled at his shout and the girl looked up from dozing in the saddle.
He wanted a fight. And then he had thrown down the bag of pills and was off his horse, heat-mad, walking toward her.
“You know, don’t you. You’ve seen it all so you know.”
He grabbed her leg and when she leaned down with amazement in her face he swung and clipped her chin.
“You knew how it all happened! You knew why!”
She was off the mule in a second and latched onto his torso. He rolled and she hit the ground hard on her back and he took another swing at her and he missed. She dragged a claw across his cheek as she scrambled to dodge the punch and his next punch hit her square in the nose. The girl rolled overtop of him and his back hit a rock and he kicked up at her and she dislodged herself and stood, staggered backward.
“Stop it!”
“You know why she did it!”
“Stop! You’re gonna get us both killed.”
He laid against the rock, coughing hard to regain his breath, and she felt the wet and ripped the cloth from her face. Her nose was spurting blood down her mouth and chin and she put up her hands and soaked them and looked at her palms. She was silent for a second and her eyes went red, fogged from the blow to the face. She put her hands up to her nose again and got them bloodier and then flung the contents of her hands onto Smith.
“This …”
She mashed the blood down the sides of her face, down her shirt and held her hands out to him again.
“This! Is this what I have to be for all of you? This is why you didn’t run from the greenhouse and why Awan and his men didn’t throw me back into the desert. Because this is what you want the killer to look like, so that you don’t have to believe the ones you love would ever do the same. So that because she never got blood on her maybe she didn’t really do it and none of it ever happened. Because the killer looks like something you’ve never seen before and probably never will see again, so you never have to look at your fathers your mothers your brothers your goddamn sisters and say, ‘This is what we are all like. This is what we all have inside of us.’ That even as you do it yourself and haven’t washed it off your face yet, you’re different and you can see better with just the one eye. She’s more like me than you could bear. And so are you.”
He watched her as the droplets of her blood started to run on his face. She had recaught the mule and was mounting it, but stopped. She turned back and outstretched a hand to him.
“If you’re trying to resurrect your ghost of a sister that’s not the way. Let’s go.”
He took it and rose and grabbed the piebald and the pills, and the girl dragged herself slowly back into the saddle.
The day was nearly gone before he spoke again.
“I don’t know why I didn’t kill you at Walmart.”
She nodded.
“I don’t know why I haven’t killed you out here.”
And she broke two ampicillins from their package and passed them his way.
When they stopped the animals were dehydrated enough that exertion no longer left foam on their mouths and the piebald tongued its bit dry.
Before the girl untacked the mule she leaned against it for support and checked the stitches along her stomach. Her skin was smooth but graying like shark leather in that dying light. He thought of the glass that had lodged in her fingers in the gunfight as she fired through broken windows, wondered if it still shivered there, the manifestation of the reflections o
f light on Lucy’s arms that years-gone night. The girl turned her wrist and removed the cloth. The teeth marks were a black constellation. He watched her examine it, stared at the circular cut now scabbing on her forehead. Change and scars are the only things that’re gonna make us different. He looked at her child’s knees then checked the quieting hole of his arm.
She came over and sat down opposite him.
They were quiet for a moment and Smith could feel where the sun had burned his scalp through his hair and put a hand to it and felt that it was beginning to blister.
There were dried brambles here and Smith collected a few from where he sat and lit them with Matthew’s lighter and in a few minutes they were out again.
“Why did you take the gamble?” she asked.
“Of usin you instead of killin you?”
She nodded.
“Is it because the sister’s as good as gone?”
He didn’t move.
“The guilt took her. Never mattered that it were an accident. Took her all the same.”
The girl thought about this for a long while.
He took out his eye to wipe the dust from it, but found it was useless, not a single clean surface among his clothes or his skin to wipe it with.
“Can I see it?” the girl asked.
He handed it to her and she turned it in her palm. White glass in a valley of dried rust red. There was too much dirt out here; he would not be able to put it back in.
“Can we make a trade?”
The girl turned and dug into her bag and held her other fist out to Smith. Opened it with the rabbit’s jaw within. It had the number 792 carved into it.
He took it from her and she closed her hand around the eye, which with the motionlessness of staring up from a palm seemed to have gained something of resolve in being independent from his head. Had traveled far enough.
He awoke many times during the night and at one point the girl was gone from her divot in the sand and he looked backward and she had scaled the rock face and was sitting on an outcropping thirty feet up, with her knees to her chest and her eyes black and reflective, staring out into the night as the stars came unpinned from their places and shot across the cesspool of the sky to collide with the supplicant hands of dead plateaus reaching from the desert below. He awoke once more and she was there still, and when he awoke next she lay curled in the sand once more, as if she had never left it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Yours
In the morning the piebald mare was down. Smith tried to rouse it but its eyes did not follow his hand as he snapped his fingers in front of its face and when he shoved its side with his knees it grunted but did not move. The girl looked over.
“I said the horse always dies before the men do.” She shrugged. “This isn’t good.”
She passed him the AK-47 and he shot it point blank. Had earned its bullet.
The girl took the gun back and slung it across her shoulders and started toward the mule but he said, “Wait” and knelt down beside the horse with his hunting knife out.
He stared at it for a while before he did anything, turning over the thought in his mind. That maybe you were always like this. He nicked a hole in one of the neck arteries and put his mouth to the hide.
It wasn’t water and it was warm but he was so thirsty.
The taste of livestock and iron so much like the smell in his nose from the morning in the field. The blood spilled in aftermath of gunfire had been different because it smelled of burning, but this was the same as a steer with a leg gone. On that land at home where the bones of that steer still were and had been burned and sparrow-picked clean and the bones of the father still there too but he did not know how exposed, how decayed, nor from how far in the field Lucy watched them do so—
He stayed coupled to the horse’s neck, drinking. Coming alive again. Lucy, who now at dawn would still be in bed in white. And she’d char and grow old alone on that solitary pillow but only on the edge because even there she did not belong and even in rest her soul did not have a home. And he knew as she slept her soul or her ghost was wandering among the trees, in the bark-clad dark where she had taken one life and shackled her own.
He rolled away and slumped against the horse’s stomach and the girl crawled over and took her fill as well. He exhaled hard, satisfied both in thirst and in having thought to do it.
They took half an hour there, drinking as much as their stomachs could carry. The girl vomited once down her shirt then swallowed what was in her mouth before drinking again. Then they saddled the mule and the girl got up first and Smith tossed her the bag of pills and swung up behind her.
They rode out, the one-eyed man reining the pawing black animal with the child perched on the saddle in front of him, the shadow of the gun across her back drawing lines in the sand behind.
“How far do you think we’ve got?” he asked.
“Fifty miles maybe. A few more days if we get that far.” She shook her head. “But we don’t know what we’ll find when we get there. They might’ve made the wounded give up the greenhouse.”
“You said you got the directions off one of their men.”
“Not their man. When the cartel fell, all were split across different factions. The Cordovas kept each supplier location among only the few men that needed to know, so that the suppliers would be safe from subordinates trying to go and hijack them. These didn’t know where the greenhouse is, otherwise they would have met us there.”
She was quiet for a while before she spoke again.
“You still alive?”
“Still breathin. You?”
“Still breathing.”
A lone coyote came from the west and trotted beside them for a few miles on leathery legs. Half bored and half delirious, the girl had taken the pistol and aimed it at the animal’s notched spine and imitated the recoil and the sound of the shot. The mule padded on, unbothered, its hooves each the size of the coyote’s head. After an hour the coyote looked once more at them with yellow eyes, staring as if to remember these miscreations of reddening hairless skin and black metal and the fur of its kind, and then it moved on, back into the blinding white air.
Smith outstretched a hand for antibiotics to roll against his teeth.
“Were the men that ambushed Awan there for you?”
She nodded.
“Did you know they’d come?”
She didn’t answer, stared out into the plain.
“Are you scared they’ll find you?”
“You don’t understand. They saw me run out here; they’re sure I’m dead.”
She lowered her voice before she went on.
“I’ve never been assumed dead before. If I make it out of here I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.”
They slowed only when the sun was high enough to beat straight down upon them and it was for the sake of extending the use of the mule but the two assumed various postures while trapped there under the sun, covering their heads with their hands against the heat, or lying face up on the haunches of the mule as if broken-backed, or flat out with their noses in the animal’s fur, like an assortment of victims of Pompeii.
With its rigid ears the mule made for an enormous black Doberman with filed teeth, and as the light passed the meridian of the day the shadows of its legs extended into ghostly trees. Smith watched them for what felt like hours, coal-colored lines gliding over the ground.
The girl tired and leaned back against Smith and might have slept. He watched the shadows still and they were still like trees, the trees that had blood inside and rose straight up like burned poles, some wide enough and with enough girth that it was as if they really did have a man inside each of them. A forest of dead men encased in wood and forced to stand, and without seeing their eyes, blinded in woodstuff, you would never know whether they would be looking up in search of some light or staring straight ahead. And in the spaces between them the man that had fallen flat on his back with a shotgun blow, with his face up to the sky like the silh
ouette printed onto a target, in the woods in some distant corner of Utah.
There were to be no stars this night, the sky blackening with clouds like gunpowdered cotton. At last it was so dark that they cast no shadow at all, that their passage across the earth should leave no mark even in a flickered obstruction of shallow light.
No stars to direct them north but that was still the direction in which they headed; they felt it. A few hours out there was a crash and a storm splintered, a needling of light driven into the ground a hundred miles to the west but with nothing between here and there they still could see it. Soon the clouds coagulated into a woolen sheet and it became too dark for them to see their hands in front of their faces.
They pushed the mule on, and it sloughed through the sand for another mile, stumbling and shying. Then it stopped completely, balking at the faceless dark, fearing the emergence of creatures larger and more nightmarish than he.
They dismounted and Smith tied his jacket around the mule’s face to blindfold it. On either side of its head they crossed the plain together, in such blackness that at one point the girl’s outstretched hand met with the side of a mesa. The thunder continued to the west and occasionally lit the air with electric bones but when the light would go they would start seeing things in the dark. Shapeless things, conglomerates of the violence in synesthetic sounds and the faces they had seen and maybe killed and maybe lost. And you wondered what the mule had seen to halt it, if the visions were unique to each of them. At last they decided to stop. Smith took the jacket from the mule’s eyes and hobbled it.
They lay down and he could hear her covering herself with the sand that was cooler than the air. He thought of the creatures she’d overturn, figured that if she unearthed scorpions or tarantulas that those things would find a home on her and burrow somewhere there against coyote-laced collarbone or mud-covered hip and stay with her for good.
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