Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  “How much for a night?”

  The man’s eyes went among Smith’s face and his clothing and his gun and the man was stepping back until he hit the wall taped with past years’ national park calendars and ads for horses.

  “Forty dollars.”

  “I’ll pay you upfront.”

  “You’re supposed to pay when you check out.”

  “No, I’ll pay you upfront.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why would you ask?”

  Smith slid a dirty cracked hand onto the counter with two hundred-dollar bills. The proprietor looked down at them and then at Smith.

  “Two nights,” Smith said.

  “That all?”

  “That’s all.”

  The man eyed Smith once more and made his choice or decided there was none to make, then turned and brought over the key.

  “Thirty-seven, down by the end. Checkout’s at noon.”

  Smith went out without a word.

  He walked back to the truck and the girl got the bag of pills and he got the food and water from the truckbed and they went in. Neither bothered to turn on the light, and they collapsed on opposite sides of the bed with their boots still on and a jug of water each next to their heads.

  He didn’t know how long it had been when the sun rose but when it did it ran across the floor in amber stripes like plow lines. He kept his head beneath the pillow except for some interval of the blurred sense of time, every few moments or every few hours, when he’d wake up gasping and clutch at the water jug once more. Clawing at the sheets to feel for the sand below his nails, looking for the smell of the mule to assure himself it had not gone while he slept. And after a while, whether it was the afternoon’s fading light, or passing a certain threshold of how much water he’d restored to his blood, his thoughts moved north.

  He was waking up but it was not a thing entirely like waking, might have taken days or minutes and no sense in preferring either way as none was the easier. The pressure was still inside his head, and you still open the lids expecting to see the dark of a bandage over your eye but there’s not even that. He knew the eye was gone and he remembered the trip to the hospital that was not an attempt to save it but to take out what remained. He instinctively covered the place where it had been and opened the right eye. Lucy sat balanced on the edge of the bed, watching him.

  “How long has it been?”

  “Eight days. They knocked you out good for the surgery and then two days after you got a fever and the doctor said it was infected and you been fightin it since. You aint remember?”

  “Nah.”

  She leaned across him and put the back of her hand to his forehead. She no longer smelled of hay.

  “Fever broke yesterday. It’s almost gone,” she said.

  He struggled to sit up and she pushed the other pillow behind him.

  “What about the ranch? Can you two manage? Is it okay?”

  She made a semblance of a smile.

  “We’re fine. You got six more days of this before you’re allowed to lift anything. Relax.”

  He looked at her and things were still hard to look at but something in her face was falling.

  “Does it hurt, Wyatt?”

  “A bit.”

  She took his hands and when she turned them over they were strange to him, too clean, the memory of work too far away.

  “Are you angry?” she asked.

  “Nah.”

  She went over to the window and pulled up the sash then crawled across the bed and sat beside him, their backs propped against the wall.

  “Are you okay?”

  He turned to her, found he had to turn further in order for the right eye to meet her stare.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Wyatt, I found you on the floor of the barn then.”

  “Tell me.”

  She moved to sit in the center of the bed so that he would not have to turn so far to see her.

  “You were on your back like how you’d lie in the field when you’d managed to swipe one of Pa’s cigarettes and the weather was good. There was something floral blooming out of your face. I thought it was somethin beautiful, that flowers so red are rare in the mountains. It weren’t until I saw the way it ran over your teeth that I realized it was blood and turned and saw the other part of it on the baler wire.

  “You lookin at me like that, no more a part of you but had been part of you our whole lives. Had been lookin at me for years. Watched me grow up. You layin there and I didn’t know what part of you was watchin me then.

  “An’ I was holdin two buckets of feed when I’d walked in an’ I turned away and still fed those damn horses and hid in the stall for a moment more then came back to you and cried and cried with your head to my chest until night fell and he came lookin for us and we carried you together like you two used to carry me when I got too tired in the woods. Had to wash the blood off my hands, off my dress, from holdin onto you.”

  She put her head in her hands and he looked at the wrinkles and sweat-stains of her clothes, the darkening grease of her hair, and knew that she hadn’t left him since it happened.

  “We still don’t change, right? Us, we’re still gonna be the same, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s still the same. You gotta hold to what’s yours.”

  Smith woke up choking and knocked the water from the bedside table. The girl was sitting on the windowsill across the room, two fingers splaying the blinds so that the moonlight pooled on the carpet.

  “Thought maybe you were going to die for a second.”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “You going to be good to go tomorrow?”

  He sat up and nodded, reached for the water.

  “I have to make a call,” she said.

  The room shook with light as she opened the door and when it closed again he turned on the lamp on the table.

  The floor was strewn with knifed-open cans of food and wet towels and the pieces of coyote hide torn from their faces and arms as they’d twisted in a hungering sleep. He kicked off his boots and chose not to examine the condition of his feet.

  He went into the bathroom and stripped himself of the remaining bits of coyote and left them on the floor and threw a handful of water onto his face and wiped it with the towel, and the towel came away burgundy and brown and a bit green. More water and wiped it again and again until the towel was soaked through and fell to the floor like a rock. His empty eye sulked with the lid nearly closed, a slash of red beneath. He rinsed the cut sleeve he’d had around his mouth and tied it diagonal over the socket.

  When he came back into the room the girl was crouched on the end of the bed. She turned around when she heard him.

  “Noon tomorrow. There’s an abandoned metals reduction mill fifty miles north of here.”

  He came over and sat next to her, opened a can of chicken.

  “Got ammo too?” He nodded at the box in her lap.

  “We’re in the North, there’s not a man out here that doesn’t have a pistol in their glove compartment.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  He pushed himself back into the body outline of dirt he’d left on the sheets. Worked the last of the chicken from the can with his lower jaw and simultaneously tried to sleep. Perhaps now would always be among those for whom day and night have no difference.

  Two hours before noon, the girl got up and dragged the bag of pills from beneath the bed, leaving it in the pillowcase she’d wrapped it in. Cracked open the box of pistol ammo and started lining her socks and pockets with it and he got a box from his truck and started doing the same.

  The two sat there like that for a while on the green bedspread, the girl with her face repainted in dual stripes with motor grease from a car that’d been parked out front.

  “We should go soon,” said Smith.

  “One more hour,” she said.

  When the time had passed Smith left the key in front of the room and they drove out. When they hit th
e old wooden signs for the reduction mill, still two miles away, they chose a spot obscured by leaves and left the truck just off the road, out of sight. They walked on from there, the girl with the pillowcase bundled against her chest.

  They went along the scrub brush path that diverted from the main road for the last mile, trees that had been broken to make way for it a hundred years old now, regrown and deformed around the places the quarry trucks had clipped them. At the end of it the plain opened before them. Northern Utah. From the top of the hill they could see the green-gray of bluestem and Indian grass stretch for miles before it hit the sinister indigo of mountains beyond.

  At the top of the mill was a rectangular steel-sided building, the size of a forty-stall barn and its walls pinto-marked with rust and the sliding door crumpled beside its tracks like a discarded note.

  The air was dry and Smith upturned his collar instinctively against the dehydration. They stood beside the crippled doors for a moment and looked out at the silent plain. The girl hugged the pillowcase of pills tight like a child dragged from a nightmarish sleepover, pistol in the front of her pants and her ankles braceleted with spare bullets.

  The rest of the facility ran down the hillside below, a syncopated line of emptied vats, for holding water or for roasting, thirty feet wide, cast in sandstone-colored concrete and splintered by rebar where parts had collapsed. Every surface of it was splashed in an explosive sprawl of graffiti, quivering in color against the monotone plain. A maze of shattered concrete down the side of the hill, like a nest of mammoth insects destroyed and unearthed.

  Neither said a word but both had been listening. Satisfied it was clear, they walked through the gutted building and stopped near the other side and waited there in the shadows, the lines of light from where the rain had broken open the corrugated roof like warpaint on their somber faces.

  A truck pulled up ten minutes later. A man entered and stopped just inside the doorway. He wore a white T-shirt and bleached hair that was tied in a ponytail behind a face with dark eyebrows. There were others behind him, all armed with handguns.

  “Jackson,” the girl said.

  “You made it.” The man’s voice was angular as he spoke, matched the severe tilt of his brows. He widened his stance and crossed his arms, eyed both of them.

  “I said we would.”

  She then nodded toward the men flanking him.

  “Five men. Do I make you nervous?”

  “No, no. Call it prepared.”

  She set down the bag beside her boots and held it by the corner of the pillowcase.

  “Two hundred thousand dollars for the lot of twenty thousand,” said Jackson.

  “I told you. No wholesale price on these. Three hundred thousand dollars.” Her voice was cold, cast across the empty floor.

  He laughed and shook his head.

  “I was afraid you’d say that, and I came ready for it.”

  One of the men behind him brought forth a navy duffel bag and started walking forward and the girl went to meet him there in the center of the floor. Smith gripped his shotgun tight against his right arm. The man opened the bag and held it for her and when she put both hands in it to count the cash Jackson spoke.

  “I’m so sorry, dear.”

  He yanked the pistol from his hip and fired and the girl pushed off of the man holding the bag of cash and the man was hit in the back instead. She rolled and kicked out her heels against the base of the rotting metal wall and the metal gave and she tumbled outside.

  Smith dropped the shotgun into position and fired and one of the men fell and he was running backward through the end of the building and turned and at once he was running beside the girl as they skidded in the broken concrete around the base of the first vat.

  The shots came fast and in quick succession; the men had automatics with them. Smith and the girl crouched behind the side of the vat as the slugs shattered through the structure above and rained concrete onto them in colored dust. They stayed tight against the wall, red concrete-bugs crossing their fingers like walking miniatures of the bursts of paint on the stone, and listened to the men gathering around the front of the building and the frequency of gunfire mounting.

  The side of the vat started to shake and Smith and the girl made a run for it again, slid down the hillside through the gravel and ducked behind the second vat unscathed. The third vat had long since collapsed, and the broken concrete was buckled against the intact second vat to create an alleyway that ran horizontal on the hillside, scored across by rebar that spiked and coiled from the broken places.

  The gunmen were clambering down through the rock toward where the pair was crouched under cover and Smith and the girl leaned around and clipped one in the side but he didn’t drop, and one ducked to dodge a bullet as the gravel caved under his feet and impaled his hip on a piece of rebar that protruded from the ground in a hook, and he was yelling while aiming his gun once more and the girl shot him where he lay. The sounds were coarse against the concrete, rang out over the open plain where somewhere far ahead a flock of upland birds took off and blackened the sky.

  Smith still firing and loading shells from his socks with the bullets rocketing against his ears and the concrete behind his head singing in a delinquent’s history in layer upon layer of illicit paint. A shot winged in close and the girl cried out as she was hit in the shoulder but she reloaded even as it started to bleed.

  They had the vantage point in taking down the men from behind cover, and the barrage of shots slowed as the men regrouped on the slope above.

  Jackson’s voice came metallic and heavy from over their heads.

  “They’re letting me keep the E if I bring you in, you know.”

  The girl looked once at Smith then turned in among the rebar and sunken concrete and began to run down the alleyway between the vats. Smith followed and they moved as if underground, below the skin of the land and at once feeling the walls shuddering above them, chunks of rock gunned down, so brittle for having so much weight, and a hundred feet into the half-dark the alleyway ended in a meteoric pile of rubble and they spun around.

  “Here,” the girl panted and they got in behind a massive boulder of concrete and lined their guns up atop it and readied themselves. The girl’s shoulder hung limp and her face was white. The broken flats of concrete vaulted up in a steeple above them, sliced through with sunlight.

  The first of the shots came and hit above their heads. A shadow blocked the light of the entryway to the alley and they saw the man’s legs first and tried to gun him down at the thighs but he dove for cover behind another fallen slab. Outside was altogether too bright and the dust clouded the view. Bullets were biting into the dirt behind their heads but they had too little ammo to fire back without a target to aim at.

  Two more silhouettes came into view, shadows advancing through the dust, the echoes of their shots blaring through the dark as they hit. Stone fracturing around them and the girl reloading in a fever and screaming in that animal call she’d adopted in the desert battle and screaming at Smith, “Shoot faster, man, take what’s yours!”

  He reloaded again, his ears blinding with the words. Shot again, shot again, reloaded, shouting with her but without words, and it became something like falling, something like the death of rabbits and the death of grizzlies, and all of it that rang out from under the ground and under the concrete and under their hoofbeats and tiretracks, something like flying.

  He could smell the blood of her arm and the powder sticking to his face from his gun and his finger stronger against the trigger than all of the strength in his arm.

  “Take what’s yours!”

  The girl was screaming something more at him in between shots and he could not hear her. The black on her face smeared with the side of her hand.

  “Take what’s yours!” This whole crazy violent world. And he was pulling the trigger like she had pulled the trigger and she had broken them apart but he had too and the blood, all the blood had always been there, and y
ou had to take it even if it was broken, even if it was wrong and half gone, because that was what was yours. And only yours, in a world in which trilobites rode mountains for a million years then were carried off in a teenager’s pocket the same way she threw the bones of men, where scores of fathers who came before you lost the fight against the same land they raised you up to feed from, where trees ran red with meat inside if you chose the right ones.

  He pulled the trigger again and another man went down from his shot.

  Take what’s yours. And suddenly he was running through the bullets out from the alleyway and up across the gravel wash.

  He saw Jackson and the other men in a blur and they were climbing the concrete that formed the alley roof and dropping gun-first into it as if leaping into the sea and they must have seen him but would not take their eyes from pursuing the girl. He kept running. And in front of the building there was a man taking the duffel bag of cash to the truck and Smith removed the back of his head with a blow from the shotgun and grabbed the bag and kept running.

  He was at the mouth of the wooded path when he heard the alleyway collapse. He turned around to look. The dust rose in fragments like a fog of locusts, the mountains still pitilessly blue beyond it. When the rock had settled and silenced itself, the shooting had stopped. No sound save his own pulse. His hands wet with sweat on the shotgun.

  He waited until the dust had faded, as if the air had been washed. Looked at his hands. Then went to his knees, counted out four thousand six hundred dollars from the bag of cash, put it in his pockets, and started toward home.

  It took him two hours to get to the ranch. He had sprinted all the way down the dirt path and then down the road until he got to the truck and drove it north from there.

  The road here was in among the trees, the asphalt a faint line in the green you could hardly see, and it felt like home. The screaming cicadas and the wet upon his face and he thought for a moment that he could smell cattle far off. The window open and the branches clipping the truck mirrors and he tore the cloth away from the empty eye socket and let the air hit it. The land, the land, and he didn’t hate it. Sparrows lined the box elder boughs above his head and as the sun turned they made off for fields beyond to eat the grain.