Fall Back Down When I Die

by Joe Wilkins

  There was a night in the Sipsey Wilderness of northwest Alabama, Kevin’s first posting after Missoula. Old eroded hills and clear, curving streams burbling placidly along before falling from limestone cliffs, the pools below blue and deep, perfect for shucking off your clothes and diving right in. They’d hiked all day and set up camp near the head of Buck Rough Canyon. She set the chili to bubbling on the backpacking stove, and Kevin built a fire. Later, they sat knee to knee on stumps, the fire shadows at play on their hands and faces, and ate out of the same bowl, passed Kevin’s little silver flask of bourbon back and forth. In the tent that night, as they made love, they heard it rise and break, the hoarse, unhinged shriek of a mountain lion, a female in estrus. Such a sudden, shocking sound. They were still. Then began again in the Alabama dark to move against each other.

  It wasn’t the lion. It was only that she remembered the screams, that the one burning memory always led to the next: They woke early, a thick light sifting through the trees. Gillian went to pee at the far edge of camp and found boot prints, a handful of heel-stomped cigarette butts. She called for Kevin. Above the prints, on the same tree their packs hung from, the scarred bark still bleeding sap, they traced their fingers over a knife-drawn approximation of the Stars and Bars. She couldn’t imagine a man more capable or clearheaded than Kevin, and she knew herself to be fierce and insistent and ready to do what was necessary, but her breath ran anyway like water.

  They never went to the Sipsey again, though they were in Alabama another eight months before Kevin got a transfer to the national wildlife refuge on Key West. Spring, then summer, and Gillian couldn’t find work outside of tending bar and so wandered the island, talking to the wild, bright-feathered chickens and living off ceviche and sangria. Then there was a year in Nevada, where all the school districts were so desperate for teachers she was offered three positions the first day she was in town. In Colorado she worked, like Kevin, at Mesa Verde, teaching busloads of kids about the Basket Makers and the Ancestral Puebloans. Though the darkness was there, was growing, she found she could tamp it down, reason with it, as this was exactly how they’d dreamed their future lives those first years they were together in Missoula, while she taught at the middle school and Kevin finished his forestry degree. This was just how they’d planned it—here, there, and everywhere the wild land, all the many strange and delightful living things. Tulip poplar, key deer, sword-leaved yucca.

  But still—that muddiness, that darkness.

  * * *

  At the Boiler Room, instead of her usual glass of chardonnay, Gillian ordered a vodka tonic and dispatched it in record time. She speared the drowned lemon wedge with a straw and lifted it to her lips, bit down on the sour rind. Kent had been furious, had spun elaborate scenarios of mass walkouts, smug Fox News anchors broadcasting from the empty halls of Colter Public Schools—but she eventually talked him down, and he settled into a wounded mope for the rest of the day, finally allowing that he’d call the boy’s mother on Monday to see if there was anything that might be done.

  Gillian clicked her fingernails against the bright copper of the bar top, considered the ice melting in her glass. She’d come straight from school and would miss Maddy, but she’d call later. Maddy was going out with her new friend anyway, the college girl from her Starbucks. Gillian knew she’d need to meet this Jackie one of these days, as much time as Maddy was spending with her. Tonight, she had more urgent matters to attend to. She shook the last of the ice into her mouth and crushed it between her teeth. If she waited, Dave Coles would buy her another drink. She couldn’t wait. With a lift of her chin she caught the bartender’s attention.

  She was halfway into her second vodka tonic when Dave came careening between the tables, a half-shut briefcase smashed under one arm, a Colter Cougars booster jacket flopping across the other.

  —Gillian! Hey, I made it! How are you? Wow, hey, what are you drinking there? Better have one myself—but only one! I’ve got to get back for the game tonight.

  He ratcheted himself up onto the stool next to her and dropped an elbow onto the bar. Aimed his good eye at her, let the other, as it was wont to do, spin around the room. It was like he was made of Tinkertoys and bent springs. If there was an odder-looking man than Dave Coles, she hadn’t seen him. Gillian couldn’t help but smile and laugh.

  Dave laughed right along with her, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He asked after Maddy and whether she still liked Central.

  Ever since they’d left Delphia, where Maddy had started but not finished kindergarten, Gillian had kept her daughter in private schools. First Grace Montessori, then St. Francis Upper, and now Central Catholic. For the most part, her colleagues and friends understood; in the past decade, only a handful of Colter students had gone on to finish degrees at four-year institutions, while at Central, last year’s graduating class alone boasted three National Merit Scholars and over two dozen students headed for top-ranked universities.

  Gillian complained that between Maddy’s job and homework and college applications, she hardly saw her daughter. And tonight she was out with a friend. Gillian glanced down at her cocktail, almost empty now.

  —Say, Dave, get us another drink, would you?

  After Dave hailed the bartender, Gillian got down to business. What did he know about Tricia Wilson? About this Brian?

  Dave opened his briefcase, accidentally elbowing the man on the stool next to him and spilling half his papers on the floor. He gathered them, then shuffled through his notes and started at the beginning, as he always did, telling Gillian about the Wilsons, who by ’17 were late for the homestead rush and so ended up settling deep in the Bulls, out by Bascom Creek, a sour, alkaline seep north and east of Colter. There’d been a lot of kids and not enough land, of course, and while there were a couple of Wilsons yet on the creek, Tricia’s granddad, the youngest of five boys in the family, had ended up with the short end of the stick. For a time he managed a grocery in Big Horn, which was only a few tumbledown buildings off to the side of the interstate now, not even an exit, then a hardware store in Colter, though soon enough that went under as well. Tricia’s dad, however, one of four boys himself, was right in time for the oil boom and got on with the company that ran the wells north of the Yellowstone near Vananda. He fell off a derrick and compacted his spine, but since it happened just before the oil dried up, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing, as it meant he was eligible for benefits. By the time Tricia was in high school, her old man had pretty much settled into a life of collecting disability and drinking. Tricia herself was actually on a half section of land that had come down through her mother’s side, the Feeneys, and the Feeneys…

  Dave kept on, but Gillian tuned the Feeney odyssey out. The bartender set the fresh glass down, and she swished her ice and took a long drink. Dave could likely keep worrying the history for hours, but it was all the same old dry-land-homesteading tragedy she’d heard before.

  —But what about this Brian? she broke in. I saw a Delphia Broncs jacket there at the house, but I keep thinking I’d remember him. I mean, I taught there for eight years. The only Brians I knew would’ve been too young for Tricia. Or—and here Gillian leaned in and grinned conspiratorially—not quite her type. You know that Brian Martin, the youngest Martin boy? Well, he turned out to be gay. He’s in Seattle now. I got a holiday card from him and his partner just last year. They’ve adopted a little boy.

  Gillian straightened herself back up on her stool, enjoying the confused look on Dave’s face. He wasn’t a bigot by any means, just sheltered, isolated, nervous around anything new. Gillian let him wriggle another moment before rescuing him.

  —But Tricia’s Brian, did you find anything on him?

  Though she expected Dave to launch right in, to prattle on about whichever train it was coming west in ’08 or ’16 or ’23, he didn’t. He took a big snort of his drink, coughed, wiped the wet from his broom of a mustache.

  —Listen, I don’t know how much you want to go into t
his. You’re here in Billings, and it probably won’t come to much. There’s really no sense in getting worked up about this kind of thing. I’d say steer clear of it.

  Something swirled in her, a suck-hole in a muddy river.

  —Dave, come on. Just what are we talking about here?

  —Ah, geez, I hate to upset you.

  Brian Betts, it turned out, was not from Delphia or Colter at all, Dave told her. He was from Oregon. Had run with a group of free-staters there near the California border. People who wanted out of Oregon and California, wanted their own state. And now Brian, who was calling himself the first general of the Bull Mountain Resistance, was planning some kind of gathering.

  —It’s all over the internet, Dave said. Or, you know, the places on the internet these types go.

  The lights and shadows of the bar eddied, roiled. Dave’s voice narrowed and flattened, disappearing into the high whine building in her skull. All those years ago, in her grief and terror, with nowhere in particular to go—her father dead by then, her stepmother a stranger—she had thought that moving to Billings, the biggest city by far in the state of Montana, with its private schools, wine bars, and theaters, its busy streets and great tall glassy buildings and more than a hundred and fifty thousand souls, would shield them from the idiocy and violence that had befallen them in Delphia. She had thought she and Maddy could both take her maiden name again, Houlton, and cut ties with most everyone back in Delphia, and the city would surely deliver them from the scraped distances of the plains, the god-bent Bull Mountains.

  Dave pulled his glasses from his face and frowned, his bad eye drifting, and his voice began again to match the flapping of his lips. He was sorry as hell to spring this on her, he was saying, but everything he was finding out about Brian Betts had to do with the wolf hunt next month and with what had happened back in ’97, with the killing of her husband.

  Verl

  Day Ten of the New Dispensation

  It has been some time since I wrote. Those voices put the fear back into me. I ran through the night. God I thought any moment to feel a bullet in my thigh. My shoulder. The back of my neck.

  Just the end of October but it is colder than you might think at night when you are out like an animal in the night. I camp hidden away in jack pines. Or settled in some cave in the rock. Still. The wind finds me. Here is how it is. I lay my head on a pillow of sand. I shiver. I feel like a little child to shiver but anyways I shiver. I guess I cannot help it.

  I have thought of slipping up to some house and stealing. There are not many but a few houses out here in the Bulls. A few ranches and hunting cabins and log houses with big windows which are owned by goddamn Californians or some such.

  But those voices have me thinking twice. I know I talked big earlier but you know me boy. I talk. If I steal a hen or clothes off a line someone might notice what is missing and make a report and the feds would be on my trail. To shiver is better than to run. To let my belly growl is better. I will shiver and wolf growl for now.

  Later

  Also I do not like to think I am some thief. That is another thing that keeps me from it. I am no thief. (Not like the goddamn government taking my right to live the way I please to shoot what I please on my own land. The banks taking folks’ land. Goddamn.) If I do have to steal you will have to tell them boy how it was them that made me do it. What is a man to do with only a thin shirt on his back in the cold? They do not think on that when they think on thieves.

  I write this to you boy in the middle of the night. It is too cold to sleep. How are you boy? I hope you are warm. Even if your old dad is cold clean to his rib slats I hope you are knowing your old dad is a free man and chose to be a free man. I hear now a coyote call from the ridge over Lemonade Springs. Some others off south yip back. I cannot place where from.

  Wendell

  FROM THE HIGHWAY, ALL THAT ANNOUNCED THE PLACE WAS A SMEAR OF neon in the dark, the quick glare of bare bulbs. But Wendell knew where it was. He pulled the LUV up out front of the Antlers, an old roadhouse between Roundup and Delphia, and killed the engine. The truck ticked and settled. A knot of moths cut and spun. Above the muted, tinny music coming from inside the bar, a coyote howled. Another answered the first.

  Wendell had ironed his blue jeans last night, left Rowdy with Carol early this morning, and driven along the river valley and through the mountains and then south across the Comanche flats—sage and bunchgrass bejeweled with the season’s first frost, the blue leaves and dry stems sharp and bright in the rising light—and down through the heights, around the Rimrocks, and onto the gray one-way streets that always made him so nervous, hands hard and slick on the wheel, before finally pulling into the lot behind the sandstone courthouse in downtown Billings. They hauled Lacy in wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. Didn’t take their time at all sentencing her to three years for possession of methamphetamine and one year for child endangerment and willful neglect. Lacy never once looked at him. Never once even looked up that he could tell. It was another person sitting there was all he could think. The Lacy he knew would have raised hell. Would have pleaded not guilty, would have cursed them, demanded to see her son.

  Ever since she’d come to live with his mother and him, she was the one out front, the one no one could catch. Her senior year, at the district track meet, there were only three girls running the eight-hundred, so they’d lined them up with the boys. Wendell watched from the sideline. He’d been running first in the district, had even had his eye on State, but then he’d turned his ankle and torn some ligaments, and now he was just hoping he’d be all healed up by next year’s basketball season, his senior season. In the noon light the boys and girls stood there together, quiet, focused, nervous—everyone but Lacy, anyway. She was all spit and giggle, winking at the boys and poking fun at the other girls, and 2 minutes and 9.23 seconds after the gun sounded, she broke the ribbon, besting every boy in the race and setting a district record. There was even an article in the Billings paper, a picture of her making her hand into a pistol, shooting someone outside the frame of the photo. That’s me, Wendell remembered thinking, though he wasn’t sure, couldn’t picture who it was Lacy had been shooting at.

  A few days later, just before the divisional meet, Lacy jumped into the silver Mustang of her new boyfriend—a thirty-year-old down from Roundup—and didn’t come home that night. Didn’t show for school the rest of the week or for the divisional meet, and the day she should have been competing at State, Wendell loaded his rifle, stowed it in the rack in his LUV, and drove to Roundup. He felt betrayed, as if what he’d thought mattered hadn’t, as if the years spent pushing each other on the court and on the field were only years and not a kind of promise. At a gas station he ran into the boyfriend, who was buying Doritos, Mountain Dew, and Sudafed. Wendell waited until he was crossing the lot and then dragged him behind the building by his long, ratty hair. When the boyfriend tried to run, Wendell slugged him one, two, three times. While he rolled and bled in the weeds, Wendell got his rifle, chambered a round, and stuck the barrel into the hollow of the son of a bitch’s neck. He blubbered and told Wendell he didn’t know where Lacy was, that he was looking for her too, that she’d stolen his car. The cops found the Mustang weeks later, abandoned on the side of a highway between Billings and Laurel, but Wendell and his mother didn’t see Lacy again until the next winter, in the middle of his last, disappointing basketball season, when she came walking down the gravel road to the trailer with her hair hacked short. Came walking down the gravel wrung out and half starved and three months pregnant, and without an explanation for any of it—not her disappearance or the pregnancy or the gummy squiggle of scar beneath her right eye.

  Thwap of pool balls, gravel of men’s laughter, smoke of a woodstove, sour warmth of beer and bodies—all of it washed over Wendell as he stepped into the Antlers. He paused a moment in the doorway, and it felt good and right, even necessary. He took his bearings and slid onto an open stool and ordered a shot of Beam with a
beer back. The whiskey rolled through him and bloomed in his gut. He closed his eyes with satisfaction. After his mom’s death, he’d made his own trouble in bars and had to stop frequenting them for a while. But he had to pick up Rowdy later and didn’t intend to start all that again. For now he just wanted to enjoy the burn, wash it down with a couple big, cold chugs of watery beer. Lean into the three-drink swirl that might swirl his last glimpse of Lacy away.

  —Wendell! Wow! Fancy meeting you here! How are you?

  Wendell turned to find Jackie Maxwell smiling at him. Jackie Maxwell wearing a sleeveless, Western-style blouse and tight Wrangler’s, underage but trying hard to look the part of an Antlers-going rodeo gal. Jackie Maxwell lightly touching her hand to his shoulder.

  —Gosh, you ever think two south-bus kids would end up way out here at the Antlers on a Friday night?

  Jackie lifted her drink, Coke and something, and sipped at it through a small green straw.

  Wendell couldn’t help but think how nice she looked, how damned nice it would be to settle into some easy bar banter and see where the night might take them. Yet even if Jackie, the pleasant daughter of pleasant hippies and goat farmers, was new to all of this, he knew it was about as likely as the sun coming up—that a couple of south-bus kids would end up riding the night down at the Antlers. Why start driving that bad road? Wendell knew all the dead ends it led to. He was just about to claim an early workday tomorrow and take his leave when another girl joined Jackie. She was tall, nearly as tall as he was, hair long and midnight dark, bare shoulders bony and wide. She too wore boots, jeans, and a low-cut blouse, but Jackie could pull it off. Not this one. No, she looked like she was from another country, another planet—like he imagined Cherry from The Outsiders must have looked. She moved toward Jackie, and he was reminded of the way the silver leaves of cottonwoods shift in the wind along the river.