Theft

by BK Loren

  I almost laugh a little, but what the guy says next takes away any chance of that. His voice goes from being frustrated and excited to mean and deadly serious. “We have him on this, though,” the man said. “Homicide. Killing a man.” His cocky laughter came like a machine gun now. “Killing a man is no petty theft, you know. Zeb’s done. We have him now.”

  My gut sunk. I knew exactly what he was talking about. There was no way to pretend. “I don’t understand. There’s no new evidence.” Any proof they’d gathered since Zeb had killed Chet had to be over twenty-five years old.

  “We don’t need much evidence, Miss Robbins,” he said. “We have a confession, written, along with his description of what happened that day, right down to the last detail. Things only the killer would know. You know what he did? He emailed it to us. Sent it to a few state offices too, just to make sure, you know. Emailed it, like a damn party invitation.”

  I could feel my throat tightening, my mind reeling back to the time it all happened. I felt the person I was now shrinking away underneath the kid I was back then, stealing right alongside Zeb. “It doesn’t make sense. If my brother turned himself in, why would he run?”

  “You tell me how your brother’s mind works, and we’ll both know.” He had a point there. Zeb’s thoughts had always been a jungle. “Probably some stupid impulse decision, and we got email to thank for that, right? Can you be here Monday?” he said.

  I gulped for air, felt my lungs fill with the New Mexico evening. I loved this place now, and I couldn’t imagine leaving it. From the living room where I stood, I could see Magda standing in my kitchen, making fresh chorizo that smelled of smoke and chilies. I looked out the window and saw her husband, Cario, walking across the open desert, a blue-jeaned, blue-shirted dot on the purple horizon. Every evening and every morning, Cario and Magda made the trek from their little adobe home, about a quarter mile away, to my place. We shared breakfast, dinner, conversation. Some nights, Christina stopped by on her way home from work, too, and the four of us had good food, a rich and vibrant love between us, though love was a word I was careful with around Christina. Still, this was the life I had made for myself, my makeshift, mongrel family. I’d lived here most of my adult life, had built my home from the ground up, had found peace, a way to live comfortably—things I never thought possible when I was growing up with Zeb.

  I carried the phone with me as I walked outside, leaned against my truck, the wheel wells as rusty as the earth I stood on, same red color that soaked the marrow of my bones. When I thought of going back to Colorado, I longed for it, yet it frightened me. I worried that this call, so out of the blue, was a set up for what I’d done. I wondered if they had somehow figured out that I was as guilty of taking a life as Zeb. I’d worked hard to bury what I knew, to redefine it to myself, to tell the story a different way. But there were the bony, hard facts of it. I was responsible for my own mother’s death. Did they know that? Was that the unspoken reason for the call?

  “There’s a good chance I won’t have any more luck finding Zeb than you,” I said. “If you already spent a day and a half tracking him, with dogs, I can’t sniff things out any better than a canine.”

  “I’m told you’re one of the best trackers around.”

  “Overstatement.”

  “So you know damn well that tracking is 90 percent getting inside the head of whatever or whoever you’re tracking. And you know Zeb.” He was right on all counts. “And he’s your brother, for chrissake. You find him, he comes out alive. We find him, and—” He left it to me to fill in the blank. There was silence on his end of the line. He knew he had me.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come.” My words felt hollow.

  “Good.”

  I had lowered the receiver away from my ear, ready to hang up, when his voice came at me again, sounding like a Dragnet man. “Without you, Willa, our choices are limited. If you don’t show, I’ll have to give my men the right to shoot.”

  My jaw tightened. I watched Cario, his bow-legged Mexican cowboy gait. He opened the screen door, walked into my house. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him and Magda. “I’ll be there. I’m glad to do it,” I said into the phone. I hung up.

  It wasn’t a complete lie. To have a reason and a way to see Zeb again—I’d been waiting for that since we went our separate ways so long ago, the tug between us still visceral across place and time. The man was right. I knew everything about Zeb. And Zeb knew almost everything about me. I’d had what felt like a bird batting around in my chest since I was a kid, something caged and trying to get out. This was it: my chance to release it, once and for all. I needed to see Zeb again.

  I skirted a conversation with Cario and Magda by walking around to the back door. I walked into my room, started packing, the phone call echoing through my head as resonant and haunting as the wolf howls I’d heard yesterday in the canyon.

  I HAD SPENT THE day and night before working outside the borders of Días de Ojos National Forest, tracking Hector (called AM108 by the Wilderness and Water Agency reintroduction project) and Ciela (AF138), two Mexican grey wolves who had removal orders on their heads for allegedly feeding their young with meat from slow, dumb cattle, rather than wild deer, javelina, or elk.

  Even after working in the field for so long, I’d never learned not to fall in love with the animals I tracked. Hector and Ciela were two of the first wolves in Días de Ojos to mate and reproduce in the wild, the offspring of Sky (AF118) and Kody (AM97) who had been released into the forest five years earlier.

  Mexican wolves aren’t the same as the Yellowstone wolves getting all the press. They’re the most endangered sub-species of wolf in the world, and the most endangered mammal in North America. Because they don’t have a national park like Yellowstone protecting them, they’re more fragile. In National Parks, no ranching is allowed. National forests, however, depend on ranching. But reintroducing wolves to forest mixed with cattle ranchland was like putting sharks in a tank with guppies and then killing the sharks if the guppies didn’t survive. Pretty soon, the tank is empty. Though the Wilderness and Water Agency had tried to buy the ranchers out of their easements, none were selling. The only way the WWA had convinced the ranchers to agree to the mandatory reintroduction of the endangered wolf was to have the animals declared “nonessential experimental species.” They were still “endangered,” but this special designation allowed for more “management flexibility” with Mexican wolves, which meant they could be shot and killed, “if necessary.” The double bind was inescapable: The WWA was responsible for releasing 100 percent of the wolves in the southwest states. It was also responsible for killing—either by shooting or botched relocations—most of the same wolves they’d released.

  Hector and Ciela, though, had been born in the wild, had never been touched by human hands, never been collared with a transmitter. They were truly wild wolves. The Wilderness and Water Agency had agreed to monitor them by foot-tracking and helicopter only, and I worked for two large nonprofit wildlife defense organizations as an independent overseer. Just this year, the W WA had finally stopped shooting Mexican wolves for crossing out of the Días de Ojos boundaries. Hector and Ciela were the first wolves allowed to successfully migrate off the protected area, and they had made their way far from the ranchers’ properties. Because of this, they had a chance of surviving. They were the embodiment of hope.

  But Halvorson, a rancher from near the Navajo Nation border, said he’d witnessed Ciela and Hector and their pack (called the West Canyon pack) killing his cattle. Though Halvorson admitted he thought wolves should be extirpated and had made false claims about wolves before, the WWA said the ID was certain. Hector and Ciela’s offense had gone on too long. They’d killed his livestock three times now, and Halvorson claimed he had run them out of the territory with ATVs and rifle blanks. But each time, the wolves had found their way back to their home again.

  I’d tracked these wolves and found little evidence of these claims. The wolve
s scavenged dead, mismanaged cattle now and again, but had never killed. They were excellent hunters, and they had successfully raised their first litter. Three pups had survived to adolescence. But unless I could prove Hector and Ciela innocent once and for all, that would be their last litter. I was their final appeal.

  “Hell, Halvorson’s being nice about it, Willa. He could’ve shot them and been done with it,” Andy my contact at WWA had told me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell him thanks.”

  So I’d spent a few days and nights with my belly pressed close to the earth, enveloped in the musty scent of leaves and dirt, watching Ciela and Hector. Over the past year, I’d gained their trust. Not the kind of trust that made them immune to humans. I’d seen them run from the slightest suggestion of human movement. But they were used to my scent, in particular. I stayed under constant cover, but I no longer needed to look through the narrow tunnel of binoculars or a scope. Now I was able to get close enough to observe individual details: the rich black outline around Hector’s grey eyes, shaped in a narrow almond; the slight glitch in Ciela’s gait that told the story of a battle she’d had that we, in all our “close observation,” had missed, something that had left her permanently wounded, but thriving all the same. The will to survive inhabited her bones.

  That day, I’d been ecstatic when I watched her and Hector and two other West Canyon wolves chase and kill an adult mule deer. It was one of two successful wild hunts I’d witnessed in the past few months. It might have been enough to save Hector and Ciela, if I argued my point well. But I was the only person who had witnessed their kills. Now I could not be there to talk to WWA in person. I’d written a report, told every last detail of Ciela and Hector’s success. Still, as I packed for Colorado, the fate of the wolves worried the margins of my heart.

  I STOOD IN MY bedroom, tossing clothes and gear into my duffle, trying to explain all this to Cario and Magda who stood, now, in my doorway, questioning me.

  “I don’t like it,” Cario said. He took me by the hand and led me into the living room, so he could keep watching TV while he talked. “You don’t know your brother anymore, Willa. He could be dangerous, even to you.”

  “Could be,” I said. I set my duffle bag down and watched a few minutes of Anatomía de Grey. On the screen, two patients in the ER had a large pole running through the middle of their bodies.

  At a commercial break, Magda patted my thigh. “This is not good.” She pointed to the TV screen, stood up, and imitated my voice in a perfect American accent. “Why is this entertainment? These bleeding people in pain? Take my TV why don’t you? Take it to your own damn house.” She quit imitating me now and sat back down on the sofa. The soft, fleshy wrinkles on her cheeks, usually smile lines, turned to crevices of worry. “You’re watching Grey’s Anatomy, Willa, and for the love of Mary and Joseph and sweet baby Jesus, you are not complaining about it.” She shook her head. “You’re not yourself. You’re not right in the head.” She knocked her knuckles against my skull, took a break of silence, then reloaded. “And what about your friend, Christina?” She emphasized the word, reminding me that Christina meant more to me than a friend should, in her opinion. “Have you told her your hair-brained idea? Call her. She’ll tell you no. She’s got good sense.”

  I was absorbed in the TV.

  “Have you called Raymond? He’ll tell you: ‘Loco.’ He’ll tell you: ‘Stay.’” She lost her train of thought for a moment, and I was relieved. “You know, Raymond owes me twenty dollars. Last poker game we had here on the mesa. Remember?” She nudged Cario. “I took Raymond for twenty dollars and he did not pay up.”

  “Sí, Sí. Out of the hundreds he usually wins from you, that you’ve never paid him,” Cario said.

  “Ver la televisión,” Magda said, to Cario. Then to me, “Going to Colorado, Willa. It’s not good.”

  My whole life was happening in double exposures now. One film played Magda and Cario sitting in my living room, joking about good times we’d had out here on this mesa. And behind that image, the film of my childhood played. “I’ll be back before Raymond owes you another twenty,” I said. I tried for a smile. Magda didn’t. “I have to stop by and see him anyway. Got some wolves he needs to look after for me.”

  “Tell him to look after my twenty dollars.” She gestured to my small duffle bag. “That’s all you’re taking?”

  “Won’t be there long.”

  “Mierda santo,” a whisper meant for Cario’s ears only. “Nuestra niña es una locura.”

  “Sí, está loca,” Cario said, though his eyes never left the TV.

  “You bet I’m crazy. I live out on this godforsaken mesa with you two,” I said.

  This time, Magda found a smile, but it faded fast. “Your brother, Mija. Let him be.” She stood up, took my hand, and led me to my bedroom. “Sleep on it.”

  “Eres mi familia, you know,” I said.

  “Por supuesto. Somos familia.” She hugged me, closed the door, then walked back to my living room, my TV, and her husband.

  NEXT MORNING, SOON AS the sun oozed red over the horizon, I woke up and headed out. I heard the warped screen door slam behind me, then swing back to its halfway open position, as it always did. I walked out into the sounds of morning, the ravens starting up already, songbirds beginning, coyotes fading, and there, across the mesa, I saw Magda, standing on her porch, waving goodbye. If there had been a tug when I said goodbye to Zeb or to Mom long ago, that same tug went out to Magda now. I felt pulled back to Colorado, the place I’d grown up, and at the same time, tied here, to New Mexico, this land, these people, this love.

  I took the long way through town so I could drive by Chris’s little adobe house. I had every intention of knocking on the door, saying goodbye, letting her know what was going on. But the house was dark, and I told myself it would be best not to wake her. The engine of my truck rumbled, the sparse lights of my little town becoming a distant constellation that faded to darkness in the rearview mirror.

  Zeb

  THE ROAD DIMINISHED IN both directions, around the bend before him, behind him in a thin whip that trailed for some time before it disappeared in his rearview mirror. Late summer wheat lay flattened by wind and heat, strapped across the hillsides like the greying hair of a blonde woman, strawlike and dull by now.

  There are some things you cannot change, you just cannot change.

  The engine brake hissed and sputtered, the only sound in the predawn night. Hand over hand, his whole body working, he steered the Peterbilt up the exit ramp, to the stoplight. With the driver side window rolled down, the morning cool brushed across his bare arms, lean and more muscular than they should have been for his forty-some years. The chill felt good to him. He sat for a few seconds in the quiet, then felt the engine rumble in his chest as he pressed the pedal. He pulled the rig into the bay.

  He logged his hours by the splash of moonlight through the cab window, didn’t want the dome light on, hated the goddamn interrogation lights of cities that dimmed the stars above, hated anything that took away from the darkness, made something as abundant as stars struggle to do their job. Most things he loved had dimmed.

  He pulled the leather ties from his ponytail, let his dark hair fall around his shoulders now, then closed the log book, walked across the lot, turned in his time sheet without so much as a good goddamn to the other drivers milling around and shooting the shit after their shifts. He made his way to the bare tables where three computers sat, drivers checking email and writing to their families. Zeb sat down, pulled up the same pages he always looked at, the ones that told of the work his sister was doing in New Mexico, though they never said exactly where in New Mexico. Some secluded place kept top secret from the general public, for good reason, but still. How to find her, wherever she was now. It worried him. He would give up most of what he had now to see her again. He hovered too long over his email, then made a decision he’d keep to himself. After he hit “send,” he stared at the computer a while longer. Then he s
igned off and walked back outside, across the lot.

  An hour’s drive lay head of him, and about two miles from home, he killed the lights of his ’68 Chevy truck, drove in darkness, sensed his way around the curves of familiar blacktop and intersections that lay as open and forgiving as a young woman’s body. His wife was no longer young, no longer the girl he’d grown up with in the field. Brenda was at home in bed now, fat, snoring, her black hair streaked with wires of grey. The glowing embers of his cigarette outlined her form every time he inhaled, the bearlike heap of her beneath woolen blankets, the smell of her sharp, whiskeyed breath as she exhaled in her sleep. He could see her silhouette even as he drove.

  In the long gravel driveway, he released the clutch, let the engine die before turning the key. He still missed his old Australian shepherd, Hitch, who had greeted him along this road for nearly five years, his ghosted outline still visible to Zeb along this path. He tried to shake the memory of the mountain lion that had taken Hitch, but the spirit of that cat was embedded in him to the bone. The first time he’d seen the lion, he’d been walking through the meadow near his cabin. It was a fall day, no snow yet, and he had just settled into his cabin, his first real home as an adult (something he’d never imagined would be possible for him).

  At first, she was completely shadowed by the trees. But light changed fast in the highlands, and the shadows shifted, and where once there was nothing, now there were three lions, a female with two kits that were almost full grown. Female cougars keep their offspring with them for up to three years before sending them into their own territories, and these kits, Zeb figured, were a season or two away from being pushed out. The family was sharing a recent kill, a doe, as far as he could tell.