by Joe Wilkins
Kevin ought to have goddamn known.
He may be the government’s man but he is a man. Before he is a game warden he is a man. Some few days after I killed the world wolf and took only two claws and a tooth which I have on this loop of fishing line about my neck and buried the rest of her in the junk ravine and hauled an old frigidaire up over the turned dirt Kevin Kincheloe came by knocking on our trailer door and scared your mother half to death. When I come home that evening I swore Kevin a blue streak up and down but she said it wasn’t Kevin’s fault. Why’d you have to do it she asks me. Why don’t you for once do what’s best for your family. Verl what in the hell will we do if they haul you in. All this she asks me. Then she up and starts to cry.
I imagine you heard. Those trailer walls are thin. There was a time when you were just a little green-nutter I did not think on what you heard. When I come home drunk. When your mother come home drunk. When she sat on the couch for days not saying a thing to either one of us and I cooked and cleaned without knowing why she was sitting there. I imagine you know. I knew about my folks. I did.
Anyways I thought to argue but answered her nothing. What kind of an answer could I give to all that? How can she say what is best for me isn’t best for my family? I answered her nothing. I only opened a can of beer and sat down and read my Louis L’Amour.
The next morning I go out to pump water for the yearlings and here comes Kevin in his green government pickup and out he gets and plucks a length of grass and commences to chewing like I don’t know what he’s come for. Can you believe it? Maybe that was when I decided. When he didn’t have but cowardice in him. Once I finished watering I set myself to loading bales and finally Kevin walks over and says I found the wolf. Says I don’t want to do it but Verl I got to take you in.
And the whole time he was saying these things he was acting like he was real sorry hanging his big head and such. And I almost believed him. Was almost a fool. But I am not a fool. I looked in the eye Kevin Kincheloe who I have known years and years and wanted to tell him you ain’t got to do a damn thing you don’t want to do because in your heart you are a free man Kevin. In your heart you do not have to turn against one that has been your brother and balled up his fists with you on the recess yard. That’s what I was thinking but I only stood there. I said nothing. I shot him.
It was easy. My .270 leaning there against the truck cab.
I pick it up. Kevin flaps his mouth like a fish says Verl what the hell. Verl it’s my job. Verl I knew your daddy. First I shoot him not really aiming and hit him in the guts. Then shoulder and aim and shoot him in the jaw.
There was about ten gallons of blood in the grass. I hope you did not have to see it. Or your mother. It was not a good thing to see though I did it and am telling you I did it. I don’t know how to square that. But I know I am a man who will not be pushed one inch farther. They have pushed and pushed on me. I have kept it from you and your mother thinking I could figure it on my own but I will just go ahead and say it.
They are trying to take our land.
That goddamn bank. I wish Daddy never mortgaged for machinery. Goddamn. When we lost your uncle’s section that was almost too much. To see that sonofabitch from California with his brown loafer shoes move in and pull out the fences and not graze a single goddamn sheep or cow and say around town he is letting the land heal itself. What does some long-haired dough-faced sunfucker from California know about this land? We are in this together. The land and us. If you take one from the other that is when we hurt. I am hurt and you are hurt and I do not know what will happen now with the loans and the back taxes but they just can’t keep taking it away. Someday there won’t be any left. What then? What of us? What of the land? Where is it all going? You would think it would stay where it is. It does not. Of a sudden it’s gone. The government or the bank or some such says a word and it’s gone. Goddamn goddamn goddamn I do not understand a goddamn thing about any of this.
Gillian
IN THE CHILL DAWN AIR THE BOYS JOSTLED AND CRACKED JOKES, THE clouds of their hot breath massing and thinning above their bare red ears, their ball-capped heads. In twos and threes the girls circled and whispered, cut their shadowed eyes at the boys. A handful of couples were paired off as well, holding hands or leaning hip to hip against the brick wall of the school. It was the first cold morning of the changing season, the grass out front laced with frost. Gillian closed her eyes, rubbed at her temples. She’d already turned away one request from a sophomore girl who claimed it was abuse on the level of torture to keep the students outside in this cold. But it was only the end of September. It wasn’t truly cold yet, at least not by Montana standards. And Gillian knew, too, that just as soon as she stepped into the warm, stuffy school building her headache would ratchet up another six notches. She wasn’t about to open the doors a minute before eight thirty.
As she’d done most of the last week, she’d woken hours before her alarm, mouth dry, sour heart thudding, the spike of a wine headache just beginning to hammer at the base of her skull, and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. She hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours the past six days. This morning she’d burned a piece of toast and left a note for Maddy, then taken off for work early.
Now the north and west buses rumbled up, sighing to a stop at nearly the same time, the one behind the other, and the yellow doors folded back. The Bull Mountain kids came bounding off the north bus, grinning and hollering. They wiped their noses on the sleeves of jackets that were too thin and nearly to a child lacked stocking caps, their hair nesty and wild. The kids living in the ranchette communities and suburbs halfway to Billings came off the west bus coats puffy and bright, backpacks decorated with popular cartoons and superheroes, the girls with ribbons and clips in their hair, the boys stocky, shining, those little red lights running around the edges of their tennis shoes.
The Hougen boy, Tyler, jumped off the bottom step of the west bus and strutted toward the playground. As if he owned the place, he surveyed the jungle gym, the tetherball, the little girls shrieking on the swings. With his round head, his big chest and bandy legs, Tyler looked so much like his grandfather Glen that Gillian often had to remind herself that the boy’s last name was actually Meredith. His father, Timmy Meredith, was a former star running back for Colter, yet that hadn’t done him much good. His parents had lost their land in the ’90s, and only by staying in his father-in-law’s good graces did Timmy keep himself afloat. For a time he had tried his hand on the Hougen spread, but he hadn’t proved much of a farmer, and Glen set him up at the John Deere dealer, where the owners were smart enough to know that it was customers like Glen Hougen who really ran the place.
Gillian had long resented the outsize sway the big farmers and ranchers held in Montana. She wasn’t a class warrior, not exactly, but still, she hadn’t inherited a thing. No, she’d put herself through college, working in the library during the school year and waitressing during the summers. She had saved and bought the house in Billings on her own, managed to save as well for Maddy’s college tuition and her own retirement. Yet all these ranchers lived on land that had just been given to their grandparents or great-grandparents, and they somehow thought they were the only ones working hard, their way of life the only one that mattered when it came to making decisions about the state of Montana.
To hear the stories, Glen Hougen ought to have been the worst of the lot. He’d inherited a veritable kingdom, nearly fifteen sections—each a full square mile, 640 acres, as Kevin had once explained to her—but like everyone else, Glen had landed in financial trouble by the mid-’70s: too many loans for machinery, too many dry acres plowed into corn and wheat, one too many years of drought. That was just when they found oil on his place, the lucky son of a bitch. But she had to admit that Glen had been good to her and Kevin when they first moved back to Montana and rented that farmhouse down on the Musselshell. He’d charged them only half the rent the first year as they fixed the place up, and Carol, Glen’s wife, had ma
de Maddy a cream-and-red star quilt for her first birthday. It was often hard for her to square the facts that one of the richest landowners in the Bull Mountains was also, in many ways, one of the kindest, though maybe it was just that he didn’t have anything to prove, that he had so much, he could afford to be considerate.
Gillian closed her eyes and pressed at her temples again. The first bell jangled through her, its long, loud electromechanical ring occasioning a circus of shouts and hurried steps from the students, the whoosh of the glass double doors. Gillian kept her back to the ruckus. The cold, as the noises faded, again enveloped her, and she opened her eyes. Before her stood a small boy. No, not small—scrawny. His legs thin, arms awkward, neck jutting at a funny angle. Ears bright red in the cold, eyes wide and dark. No proper winter coat. No stocking cap. He tapped his hands at his cheeks.
Gillian put her hands on her knees and leaned down. That was the bell, she told him. He ought to be lined up with the other kids over by the playground.
The boy looked up at her, fingers still drumming his face. Eyes jittery, scared.
—All right, Gillian said. I’ll walk you over.
She reached out her hand. The boy stopped drumming a moment and squinted. Then took her hand.
Kent popped three mints into his mouth, crushed one between his teeth—Gillian could smell the damp peppermint—and banged his drawer shut.
Gillian had wanted to ask about the new kid, the one who didn’t talk, but now here she was, not fifteen minutes into the school day, and Kent was telling her the special-ed teacher had quit. Gillian would have to take the elementary kids in special ed, and Mr. Stormer, the football coach, would take the high-school and junior-high kids.
This was a whole new class to prepare for, Gillian protested. Kent was sorry, he was. He knew it would mean more work for her, but there was no one else. Another wave of headache crashed across Gillian’s vision, and she breathed and pinched the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Pinched hard.
—Let me get this straight, she said. We’ve burned through three special-ed teachers in two years, and putting this onto Stormer and me is your grand plan?
Kent leaned forward. Even smiled. She didn’t allow him to say a word.
—Even though neither of us has a special-ed degree or any special-ed experience?
—I know, Kent said, but Coach Stormer will at least be able to keep order, and you’re about the best teacher on staff. Sometimes I think it’s a shame you have as many administrative duties as you do.
Gillian shoved her way up from the chair.
—Oh Jesus. Save the patronizing bullshit for your ex-wife. Really.
—Gillian, hold on.
But she was gone, slamming Kent’s door and brushing past the peroxide-blond school secretary, Miss Kanta, who stared at her wide-eyed and open-mouthed, wad of gum forgotten on her tongue. Gillian was surprised to find, as she hurried down the hallway, that she was close to crying. She swallowed and wiped at her eyes, then slowed at the door to the special-ed room. Stormer stood up front, his massive shoulders framed by the chalkboard, and slapped a ruler into his palm. The junior-high and high-school students, absolutely silent, bent to some worksheets on their desks.
Her hands began to shake. She tried to still them but couldn’t. She crossed her arms, trapped her hands in her armpits. What was wrong with her? Lack of sleep, too much wine, this whole mess out in the mountains. She needed to get ahold of herself. She needed—Jesus, what was it she needed?
Maddy had been born in June, a summer of drought, the days hot and curtained with hard, white light, the nights hot as well, though more bearable, save for the hour after sunset, when mosquitoes swarmed. Even for the heat, the first two weeks had been an exhausting delight, as she and Kevin passed this tiny red-faced baby girl back and forth, reading to her, cooing at her, spending nearly every minute, waking and sleeping, together. The three of them.
But then Kevin ran out of vacation and had to go back to work. As if on cue, Maddy’s colic—the fussiness before bed, after naps—cranked up another notch. At first, the baby swing was enough. Gillian would turn it on high, and Maddy would nap in there for twenty blessed minutes, enough time for her to shower or make a phone call or just have a cup of coffee and collect herself. When that quit working, Gillian discovered the only way she could get her daughter to sleep was by holding her, bouncing her, walking with her. She would swaddle Maddy and tie her to her chest with a sheet, then take off for the river—which by then had dried to a chain of fetid pools, a few carp thrashing in the still water, scaling themselves on the rocks—and the jounce of her walk would eventually put Maddy out.
Grasshoppers flung themselves through the dry grass. The seconds cracked and ticked. The bleached sear of them always on her back, in her scorched lungs. Soon she’d be sweating, Maddy a hot, wet stone at her chest. After fifteen minutes of hard walking, she’d loop back, hoping Maddy wouldn’t wake until she made it to the house, where she could sit in a chair to nurse her. Sometimes she timed it right. Other times, before she made it home, Maddy would begin to wail. She’d lift her head away from Gillian’s chest, hold a moment, scream, then slam herself back down, the little slit of her lips like a wound. Once, tired, hot, half a mile from the house and half out of her mind from her daughter’s piercing squall, Gillian pulled Maddy from the sheet, tore off the swaddle, and just set her on the ground, on the shaling mud and river gravel, as if she were a red, raging fish, and stood there and cried.
She had thought motherhood would be easier for her. She’d been a teacher for ten years, had worked with all kinds of kids, even been named teacher of the year in her district in Alpine, and she and Kevin weren’t like so many other couples they knew. He cooked dinner all the time, and when it came to fixing a broken toilet flapper or rewiring a lamp, she was the handier one. They had spent years traveling, hiking and fishing and exploring, the two of them, always in it together. She thought all this would somehow matter, that motherhood wouldn’t look on her the same way it looked on Kevin’s sisters, with their loose jeans and stained sweatshirts, the stink of potato salad, day after day given over to the whims of an infant, a toddler, a child.
It infuriated her that Kevin didn’t seem to notice her struggle. When he was home, he got right down on the floor with Maddy, packed her everywhere in the crook of his arm, swung her about in the air. And she squealed, grabbed at his beard, smiled for him like she never smiled for her mother. Gillian was glad for the break, but it meant that while Kevin played with the baby, she was the one who had to cook dinner, finish the laundry, the dishes. It meant that each hot night lying in bed, only a thin sheet over them, Kevin was the one who prattled on and on about some funny little thing their daughter had done while she drifted near sleep, knowing she’d have to feed Maddy soon, knowing she didn’t have the luxury of attention, of delight. She envied the distance Kevin had, the perspective. He could dive in and pull himself out while she thrashed forever in the muddy water. She was too tired to love, she thought, too worn out.
That fall Kevin went hunting with some old friends from high school, way out in the Bulls, and he came home on the far side of a six-pack, full of piss and vinegar, having gotten a nice cow elk. He strung it up from the big cottonwood behind the house and was planning on butchering it the next day out at his mom’s place, where they had a cold room. He followed her around that evening as she did the laundry, telling her, in the grim, serious, declamatory voice he used after a few drinks, that he thought he’d seen some evidence of poaching out at his buddy’s place, that these guys needed to be reminded that he was their friend but he was the game warden too, that there were good ecological reasons for hunting regulations. That it didn’t matter your political affiliation—if you loved elk hunting, then you had to do right by the land and listen to what the science said. He cracked open another beer. Behind the bones of her chest Gillian felt the pop of that can, felt her blood fizzing in the tiny arteries that wrapped her heart.
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sp; Right then she didn’t give a good goddamn about ecology and reason, about poaching, about anything his idiot, unreconstructed friends did. She shoved through the screen door and stepped outside into the late heat, into the hum and hive of mosquitoes rising from the river.
With Kevin calling after her, she got into the Tercel and drove away.
She turned west down Highway 12 and was miles past Roundup before her blood began to settle, before she realized where she was, the high plateau country rising to meet the Rockies. The river curved to the south, and the highway lifted ever higher onto the dry plain: long golden wheat fields interspersed with strips of fallow, the rangeland pocked with sage and greasewood. Off to the west, over the Crazy Mountains, thunderheads massed—anvils, horseheads, stacks of black rock. She drove into that darkness, and the rain came pounding down. It steamed on the highway, veined the windshield. Wind screamed through fence wires and hammered at the car like invisible fists. Lightning cut here and there. Great claps of thunder sounded. Soon, she couldn’t see a thing but dark sky and rain. She slowed, pulled off the highway and onto a gravel road. The storm shrieked and beat its wings and just as suddenly passed over.
She cranked down the windows to clear them and up the gravel road spotted a sign, one of those brown tourist-information signs: DEADMAN’S BASIN 1.5 M. She drove north, toward the earthen wall of the reservoir, with the windows down and the smell of ozone, grass, and cow shit in her nose. She parked and got out. It was still hot, though more bearable now, a rain-rinsed heat. The ground was wet, yet each of her steps ground down through the mud to dust. Always the dust. In the basin, which was nearly dry, the mineral wrack of the receding waterline had painted the dirt bowl in concentric stripes. Far below, near the last of the water, a man splashed in the shallows. He had a long stick—no, a net. He stropped it through the water, this way and that, and suddenly lifted it into the air. A carp or a catfish twisted in its ropes. He walked up the bank and dumped the fish in the dirt, where it smacked its slick tail in the mud and dust, flipped itself six, eight inches off the ground, and fell, then lay still, working at the raw air.