All Things Left Wild

by James Wade

  The day was hotter than most and by noon we were, the three of us, covered in sweat and the girl’s dark hair stuck to her neck and she saw me watching. The desert sand turned to dry prairie grass and the hills and mountains were dotted with short pines and scrub oaks and we nooned and took our lunch under their shade. We’d seen no game since the rabbit, so we rationed a half a can of beans between the two of us, Shelby and me, and our stomachs grumbled even after but there was nothing to be done. I gave the girl a few bites of beans and a piece of dried meat and asked how her shoulder felt and Shelby cussed me as wasteful and soft.

  I ignored him and fed the girl from my spoon.

  “You have brothers or sisters?” I asked her.

  She swallowed and spit into the dirt.

  “What are you doing out here in this country alone?”

  She did not answer.

  “What happened to you?”

  I asked her where she lived, if she was on the run, if she’d done something wrong.

  “How about a name?”

  She spit again.

  “Alright then, good talk.”

  * * *

  The heat only worsened and Shelby complained and said Texas weather was no good and he missed the territory and he put the girl off his horse and told me to deal with her.

  “C’mon,” I said and offered my hand and she refused.

  I dismounted while Shelby sat his horse and watched, and I untied her hands and pulled an eight-foot basswood rope from my saddlebag. I wrapped two feet around the girls hands and asked if it was too tight and she glared at me and with every movement I felt like an oppressor, like I was a murderer and a kidnapper and a horse thief and the weight pressed down on me.

  “None of this is right,” I said, holding the rope in my hand and the girl on the other end. I stood by the horse. My chest grew heavy and my throat began to close up. “I can’t breathe.”

  The girl looked at me and for the first time her face softened and she leaned forward as if she wanted to comfort me, but thought better of it. Then she ran. I felt the rope snaking through my hands and I tightened my grip just before it was gone. The girl had momentum, but I dug my boot heels into the ground and as soon as the slack disappeared the girl’s feet flew forward from under her and she twisted in the air and landed hard on her side. She rolled onto her back and looked up at the sky. I walked over to her and her breathing was heavy and the sky blue and with only one cloud. I thought it looked like a bear, but the bear was being stretched thin and soon it was nothing and there was just sky again.

  “If you two are through playing cowboy and Mexican, how ’bout we get on with it,” Shelby said.

  I felt weak and dizzy, but I helped the girl to her feet and saw her shoulder had pulled out again and she held her lips tight and made no sound.

  “I can pop it back again, if you want,” I told her and she thought and gave a single nod, and this time the going was a little smoother and she stayed on her feet and screamed, which I thought was a good sign.

  “You really ought to ride. It’s hell-hot out here and plus them boots is too big for you.”

  We both looked down at the worn, black cow leather.

  “You take them from somebody? Your father? Your husband?”

  I took off my hat and wiped the back of my arm across my forehead.

  “Listen, I’m not here to hurt you,” I spoke slowly, as if she was a child. “If you’re running from somebody, you gotta let me know. I can protect you. You understand? Keep you safe. I’d like to do that for you. Would you like that?”

  Her face scrunched and she began walking up the trail and me behind her with the rope and Shelby laughing on his stolen horse.

  “Looks like you’re the prisoner now, little brother.”

  And maybe I was.

  * * *

  That night I tended the fire for hours even when it didn’t need tending. As hot as the day had been, the darkness brought with it a chill and it added to my sleeplessness. I watched the flames eat away at the wood and the logs consumed from their middle and then split in half by the fire. One piece became two and I was a whole log once.

  I didn’t know I was crying until I felt the girl’s eyes on me and awareness came like a wave and I wiped my face and stared back at her. I’d tied the basswood in a knot around my old calf lariat made of horsehair, then tied one end of the lariat to my ankle and the other to one of the junipers in the stand where we’d made camp. The girl couldn’t run without me feeling it. I wiped my eyes and took her water and watched her drink and when she had her fill she handed back the canteen and studied my face with concern.

  She motioned for me to come closer and when I leaned down she kissed me. It wasn’t wet or passionate or exaggerated like I’d seen in the Tanglefoot. It was soft and sweet and over too soon.

  She sat back against a fallen red rock and looked at me and I felt a strange comfort until I thought of the things I’d done and wondered how I could have deserved a kiss as perfect as that one, and the tears came again and I did not stop them. I wept in silence as Shelby slept and the fire burned and the wolves closed in and the girl saw it all.

  * * *

  Shelby was into the whiskey early the next day. At first it had him talking about ranches and outlaws and the guns he would buy. But soon the talking bored him, and I could see in his face the sinister things that were taking hold and the way he stared at the girl did little to curtail my worries.

  I thought back to the two women on the road with their father and wondered what might have happened before the shots rang out and again I felt sick and I tried to think of my mother but all I could see was Shelby’s face as it grinned and I wondered if there was any good left in him.

  By noon he was far gone and angry at the world and dumped out the half can of beans and said he was tired of eating at the poor table and he cussed the lack of game and cussed the girl for slowing us down.

  When we set off again he jerked the girl up onto his horse and said it was so we could make better time and we all knew, the three of us, it was a lie. Within minutes he had nuzzled his face into her neck. She squirmed and ducked and he clouted her ear and went on kissing her shoulder and grabbing at her small breasts and laughing.

  “Hey, don’t do her like that,” I said.

  Shelby threw daggers at me with his stare and continued his fondling, challenging me to do anything about it.

  I could feel my face heating up, some mix of embarrassment and anger and I tried to look away, patting my horse and running my hand along his mane, whispering to him and congratulating him on being a good horse.

  I rode ahead, escaping the things to come, which I knew I could not stomach. I dismounted and led the horse up a stone-cut path that I figured the Indians had put there all them years back. When we reached the top the vistas showed the places we’d come from and the way we were headed and I could see Fort Stockton, less than a day’s ride, and the lonely country that stretched east from there.

  The world whole seemed to sit below, and I fought against the feeling that the dried salt flats and the scrub desert and the canyons and plains beyond were all there was, all there ever had been. No beginning, no end, just a sprawling, staggered overlay of what the earth once was, and perhaps would be again.

  I pissed in a dying cluster of fiddleneck that had grown up around the rocks and drank water from my canteen to replace what I’d lost. I knew I ought to eat but I wasn’t hungry and I kept imagining Shelby and the girl and his hands on her and I told my horse I was sorry and that I was a damn fool and then I led him back down the path to confront my brother and my fears.

  * * *

  The country sloped east and I imagined it covered with snow and knew there were cold days ahead and wondered about the weather in East Texas and if I might make a good timberman. I walked the horse back down the Indian steps and I
didn’t like them being there, something made by man in otherwise untouched country. I knew no land was left virgin, but my boot prints were alone in the dust and that gave me a great comfort unlike I had felt before. I looked out again and thought of how far we could go, the Missouri and me, and it was something beautiful. But there was still Shelby and the girl to see about and I had made up my mind, so I kept down the ridge toward the valley and there a man appeared in my path and it was as though he had manifested onto the trail with no horse and without making a sound.

  My horse pawed at the dirt and shook its head, and I held it with one hand and tipped my hat with the other. The man wore no hat and no gun belt and had dark-gray hair which hung back across his scalp and his skin had been turned leather by the sun and his days under it. He was draped in a blue-and-black poncho and the man nodded and stared at the nervous horse and moved toward it. I said nothing as he reached for it and stroked its nose and we all stood still, horse and men.

  “Fine animal,” the man spoke and his voice was deep but kind and his eyes shone bright blue.

  I agreed and asked if he was lost and he laughed and said we all are and I figured him a drunkard.

  “Fine country, too,” he said, and I couldn’t discern from his tone if his words were meant for me or himself or perhaps the horse, and there was something that unnerved me about the man.

  “You alone?” I asked and the man ignored my question, walking past me and the horse and the patches of alkali grass to where the ridge looked out over the empty land below.

  “You ever hear of the Caddo?” the man asked without turning around.

  “They were Indians, I think,” I answered, strangely drawn to this man and his casual display.

  “Yes, Indians, very good,” he said.

  “Did they build these steps?”

  The man shook his head.

  “No, the Caddo people lived in East Texas. Along the rivers and among the pines, where the deer were too many to count and the smell of the forest was bitter in their nostrils but sweet in their souls. I lived in these places once.”

  “How come you’re out here?”

  Again the man ignored me.

  “There is a story—a legend if you will—in Caddo lore,” he said. “It’s the story of Lightning.”

  “Lightning?”

  “In the first days of the people, Lightning lived among them, free upon the earth. But he was too strong and too powerful and the people feared him. So they banished him to the spirit realm so that he could not hurt them.”

  The man turned from the cliffside and faced me. He stared at me, into my eyes, and continued.

  “But then a great monster came from under the ground and laid waste to the people. They fought it, bravely, but could not kill it. Then other monsters came. Finally Lightning appeared again to the people and told them, ‘I will kill these monsters, if you will but allow me back into your world.’ And the people were afraid, but they let Lightning return because only he was powerful enough to rid the earth of those things that wished to destroy it.”

  The man spoke no more but continued to watch me and the horse to my back.

  “Well,” I said, “alright then.”

  “We’re all lost and we’re all alone. But we don’t have to be,” he said and looked at me like he knew me and everything and more. “You just keep that in mind when the time comes.”

  I didn’t know the appropriate response and so I gave none. But the man smiled anyway, his demeanor instantly changing, loosening.

  “Now,” he said, with a grin and a wave, “get on down there to that girl, ’fore the fella you’re riding with does something he can’t take back.”

  The man turned back toward the vista and spit and shook his head and said again that it was damn fine country. I mounted the horse and rode it hard into the valley.

  * * *

  I heard screams and followed them and the Indian grass swayed and parted as the horse charged through. I didn’t see the cactus grove but the horse did and moved to the side of it without so much as shifting the saddle and I told him again he was a good horse and I meant it. The screams grew louder, and I burst into the clearing with my rifle raised and there was Shelby’s horse tied to a tree and the girl tied also and there was blood but not her own.

  Shelby screamed and it sounded like dying cattle and I saw him on his knees frantic and digging his hands through the dust as blood poured from the side of his head.

  “I can’t find it!” he shouted and then screamed again and his horse whinnied and I asked the girl what happened and still she didn’t speak.

  “Stupid bitch bit my goddamn ear off !” Shelby yelled and then sunk his head in his hand and cried. “My goddamn ear.”

  I could see the front of the girl’s shirt freshly torn and the tie string on her pants undone but if there was fear in her it did not show and I looked at her for a while and the blood on her lips. She was beautiful and ferocious.

  “I can’t find it,” Shelby moaned and rocked back and forth and we looked up, the girl and me, onto the ridge and there was the shape of a man against the sun.

  “Brother,” I called to Shelby. “Stand up. Now.”

  Whatever strength the girl had shown in the face of my brother quickly dissipated and she began to tremble where she stood.

  “He’s coming,” she said.

  “My goddamn ear.”

  “Now, Shelby!”

  Howls began to echo through the valley and the dry brush and tall grass swayed with no wind and the girl struggled against her ties while Shelby sat in the dirt.

  “Damn it, Shelby, we got trouble,” I pleaded with him. “Use the ear you still got and listen to me: get your ass up.”

  I heard movement behind me and a man sprang from the underbrush and knocked the rifle from my hands. He caught me with one fist, but I blocked the next and kicked his knee out from under him. He pulled a knife and came up slashing and I grabbed his wrist and we stood pushing against each other in some sort of backward tug-o’-war. I kicked his knee again and it buckled and I brought the blade down from his own hand and it went into him somewhere near his ear and drug across toward his neck. He went limp and fell and the girl screamed and pointed up.

  I looked at her and then back at the top of the ridge and there was no one and Shelby stood and wiped his face and drew his gun and the howls grew louder. The horse turned a nervous circle and I put my hand on his neck to calm us both and the girl shouted something but her words were drowned in the yips and yells all around us.

  I picked up the rifle and there was everywhere to aim but nothing to see and Shelby, the only one moving, stepped toward the girl with his pistol in hand.

  “My goddamn ear,” he said and the girl’s eyes grew wide.

  I took two steps and leapt at him and our bodies collided, us brothers, and we were there in the dust, where we’d always been, and Shelby’s eyes were sad and confused with betrayal.

  The girl shouted again and I turned in time to see the butt end of the rifle as it closed my eyes and I was back in the territory and the rain fell like a sheet over the mountains and my mother said not to worry.

  14

  The eastern light summoned from the darkness a world of shapes turned to stone and the wind blew at nothing, but it blew unsparing, and the four riders found no shelter or mercy as the cold came into the land like the flowing of a river into the sea.

  A herd of antelope crossed the flat plain and the dawn saw the life-breath from their nostrils and the dust of the earth come up from their feet and they paid the riders no mind save a glance before moving on into the mist of morning.

  Randall felt the iron at either side shifting as Mara moved under him and his gaze was to Charlotte and he felt something else. Their horses moved in unison, as if being called home into the rising sun, and soon his look of adoration was returned�
�and even a smile—and so they were as a pair, horses and riders.

  “People coming,” Tad said, and they sat their horses, watching the specters grow taller in the distance.

  “Pumpkin,” the child said.

  “Shut up,” Tad told him.

  The images appeared on the horizon as if born from the morning and moved slowly on foot and a mule behind them carried what little there was. The man among them saw the horses and their riders and sent the rest of his party scurrying mouselike into the cover of the underbrush and that cover would not have been enough and the man knew it.

  He raised a shotgun and called out and took a few steps toward the unknown, then thought better of it and stood sentry midtrail. Randall put the horse forward and called “friend” to the man, who kept the shotgun trained on the rider even so.

  The distance between eroded, and Randall put both his hands out near his shoulders and again called “friend” and the man lowered the gun, nervous, and each motioned to their companions and there they all met in the road, in the desert, in the world.

  With the man were a woman and two girls no older than ten years.

  “Y’all bandits?” the man asked of Randall in a scratched and low tone, and though the sun was at his back his eyes were squinted almost to closure.

  “Nossir,” Randall told him.

  “Alright then, Geanie, go on,” the man said, nodding, and shoved forward the woman, who kept her head down as she spoke.

  “You like to go yonder behind them bushes with me?” the woman asked softly, and only when she was finished asking did she tilt her eyes up enough to see an answer.

  Randall looked to Charlotte, who shook her head in a sad way, and to Tad, whose eyes had grown double their size, and then back to the woman.

  “No ma’am,” he managed, at a loss for what else is to be said at such a strange encounter as this, and the man in front of him grabbed the woman and pulled her back behind him, where she began to cry.

  “Shut up, whore,” the man said and turned back to the silent onlookers. “Well, I would offer up the little’uns, but I imagine I’ll get more for ’em if they ain’t ruint.”