by BK Loren
“They’re not off limits to anyone. They’re classified as a special, non-essential species. Anyone can kill them if they can prove a need.”
He smacked the rack of jerky harder this time, and Simon ducked and covered. “I could help,” Simon offered. “I could witness it with you, Raymond.”
“Two Indians witnessing wolves killing a deer. That ought to change their minds, yeah.” Raymond paced the store, going nowhere, trying to calm himself. He took a deep breath and came back to me. “This is jackass-stupid, Willa. The WWA is jackass-stupid on a normal day, but you’re competing with them now, going away to chase your coyote brother when all this shit is going down.”
“I’ll be back in a week or two.”
“You have no idea when you’ll be back.”
“I just—I need you to watch Ciela and Hector, for me. Track them. Witness them hunting, not killing cattle. Get some evidence of it, if you can. Andy—he’s the one guy at Wilderness and Water who knows you’re the best. He’ll listen to you.”
“Andy got me arrested.”
“He didn’t have a choice.”
“They always have a choice.”
“Please, Raymond, just tell him you saw Ciela and Hector, he’ll call off the shooting, at least till I get back. He’s the top guy there, Raymond. He’s not a bullshitter. And he knows you’re good.”
“He sure didn’t help me when they dragged my ass to jail.”
I shrugged. “Were you bringing in jaguars?”
“Jaguars, other large predators, shit, they’ve been on this land since who knows when? Getting them back here’s the only thing that’ll restore this land to the way it was, the way it needs to be.”
“You might be right. But were you bringing in jaguars?”
“They keep people humble, too. Large predators, they remind us we’re part of the food chain. Arrogant shits that we are.”
“So you were bringing them in.”
“Never brought one single big cat onto this land.”
“But you tried. You set it up. And you paid for it. Paid an undercover cop, if I recall right.”
He turned his head away. No answer.
I sighed. “Look. You’re Ciela and Hector’s only hope while I’m gone, Raymond.”
He inhaled, and his huge chest nearly split the buttons on his shirt. “All right. Done,” he said, on the exhale. “I’ll do everything I can. I’ll witness the wolves. I’ll talk to Andy.” He shook his head, resisting my request, but I had his word. I knew that’s all I needed.
I STAYED THAT NIGHT at Raymond’s house. His pack of greyhounds—he had at least a dozen of them that he’d “confiscated” from men who used the hounds to hunt coyotes—wandered in and out of the open doors, the sheer size of them weaving through Raymond’s small hut like schools of fish winding around rocks in a river. Raymond and I drank beer, told stories, talked wolves, petted the hounds, and sat silently, the silence charged with everything that had bound us together over the years, our families both fragmented in their own ways, then healed a bit by our mutual love for Cario and Magda. We also shared a passion for wilderness, and we were part of witnessing the constant fragmentation of that, too. Either one of us would have done just about anything to keep at least some corner of that wilderness whole. The land itself had become our extended family, the anchor we would always return to.
“You know,” Raymond said, as the night wore on, “I don’t know what reason you got for going to Colorado, Willa. But it ain’t Zeb.”
I sat quiet.
He tapped his beer can with his pointer finger, then took the last swig and crumpled the can in his fist. “Better be a damn good reason,” he said. “Better be worth the lives of those wolves.” He stood up, tossed the can in a bin, then kissed my head, like a father. He stood above me and held my head to his stomach, stroking my hair. I smelled the sweat of him, and it smelled good. I could have stayed there in that huge hug longer, but he let me go, then said, “Last chance. You can sleep in the big, comfy bed, and I’ll gladly take the couch.”
I stared at him, wanted to remember every last detail of what he looked like before I went to sleep. “Thanks. But I like the couch. And I’ll be up and out early. I don’t want to wake you,” I said.
“Seriously. Last chance,” he repeated.
I smiled and waved him away.
“Sweet dreams, Willa,” he said. I heard the heels of his boots thump down the short hallway. I slept that night on the same musty, sagging couch where I always slept, the one that had been his bed during the short time Brenda lived with him and he let her have the private room.
I LEFT AT ABOUT five in the morning, tiptoeing past the dogs before Raymond woke, already one day late according to the cops’ schedule, and several days early according to mine. I drove along the mud-solid road that led back to the highway, and in that darkness, a group of teenagers had a game of hoops going. The basket was made of a restaurant-sized Crisco can they’d roped around one of the sandstone spires, the ball a red rubber playground ball like the one I used for four-square in elementary school. They played skins versus shirts, one girl among them, and they were playing hard enough that the sweat on their chests caught light from the sinking full moon, their skinny legs cutting fast around cactus and pinon pine. They dribbled surprisingly easily on uneven ground.
I’d played this kind of basketball with Raymond and his friends during a few of my visits—two-against-one, me and Simon against Raymond. We used a bike rim Raymond had nailed to a telephone pole near the convenience store as our hoop. When Cario and Magda were there, they’d cheer for Simon and me, and boo Raymond, who always ended up at twenty-one before we broke ten.
“You can’t even dribble on this damn dirt!” I’d holler to Raymond, and he’d whoosh right by Simon and me and dunk the ball in the bike rim.
“Helps your ball handling,” he’d say. “Anyone can dribble on them smooth courts they make in the city. Shit. This is real playing!” And Raymond would laugh and pass by us while we stood there gawking, and Magda and Cario sat there booing, all of us laughing and drinking beer as we played.
Even by reservation standards, though, it didn’t make sense for these kids to be playing here, on the side of the long, empty road in the middle of nowhere. But then I saw the powder blue Chevy pickup in a sand bank rolled upside down like a flipped tortoise. Fresh gas and oil leaked from its seams. Its cab had folded flat when it hit the ground, and one wheel had broken off from the axle, the tire and rim now halfway down the highway, in the middle of the road. The morning sun split the horizon, edging the shadowed land with angles as I drove away. I watched the game through my rearview mirror, and in that light, I saw the sweat on one young man show itself as a swath of blood dripping from his forehead, a gash from the accident. He paid it no attention. The game kept on, the clear sound of the kids’ voices and laughter suspended in the still morning air.
Willa, 1980
THE FIRST DAY OF Thanksgiving break I wake up early to help Zeb gather his things for his hunting trip. I sit on the floor in his bedroom and wake him by kicking his back with my feet. He groans, then says good morning. “You taking the big tent?” I ask him.
“Only tent we got, Willa.”
While he’s getting up, I heave the tent from the hallway closet. Dad sleeps on the sofa when he’s home now, since Mom’s Parkinson’s keeps him awake at night. When she can get medication, it gives her what doctors call “dyskinesia,” and her trembling turns to thrashing. Without the medication, she’s in too much pain to have anyone sleeping near her. So Dad doesn’t get much sleep either way, and I try not to wake Dad as I haul the tent back into Zeb’s room. “What’s Dad like when he’s hunting?” I ask.
“Dad doesn’t hunt.” Zeb sleeps in his long johns so he just pulls his jeans on over them to get dressed.
“I know he doesn’t shoot. But what’s he like when he goes hunting with you?”
“I don’t know. Walks with me. We talk some. Not a lot, bu
t more than we talk at home.”
“He doesn’t talk at all at home.”
“Not a lot. No.”
We head to the kitchen and make breakfast together: I break the eggs, get the bacon from the fridge, grate the potatoes, and he cooks it all up. When Dad gets up, he dresses fast and makes his way to the table. He sits next to Zeb, and both of them can barely bend their arms because of their thick clothes. They eat like it’s their last meal, three eggs, two glasses of orange juice, a package of bacon between them. “Good thing you’ll be bringing back more food for us to eat. Some meat,” I tell them. “Not too much left in the fridge right now.”
“Mom still sleeping?” Zeb asks.
“Let her sleep all she can today, Willa,” Dad says. There’s a sadness in his voice, too. It’s been that way ever since he’s had to sleep alone. Dad hasn’t been home much since that change happened, takes as many on-the-road sales jobs as he can get. When he is home, he mostly just sits alone in his chair, staring. He turns on the TV, but he doesn’t watch it.
“All right, let’s get on the road,” says Zeb. He talks just like a man, takes his orange, flop-eared hunting hat from the table, adjusts it on his head.
Dad does the same exact thing, Zeb and Dad moving with the same kind of solid slowness, like hunting is a thing they have to do, when it’s usually a trip they both enjoy. Dad walks down the hall and looks in on Mom, then comes back out, no words. He looks out the front window. “Looks like the Thatchers are heading up to the mountains, too,” Dad says. He zips his coat.
Zeb turns to the window. The headlights of Chet’s Dodge light up. Dolly walks to the car carrying blankets and food while Chet sits waiting in the driver’s seat, smoke pouring from the tailpipe. “Chet doesn’t hunt,” Zeb says.
“They got that cabin they go to anyway,” says Dad.
I can see Zeb hating Chet and at the same time, he smiles and waves to the Thatchers right along with Dad. Then he reaches down and thumps my head lightly. “You be good while we’re away, Willa.”
“That’s right,” says Dad. “Your mother’s really going to need your help around the house.” He says it sad but firm, in a way that makes me think he expects me to heal Mom while they’re away, or something, like me and Mom are going to be doing housework together, maybe some Christmas shopping, when she hasn’t been able to do any of those things for a long time. It feels like that’s what he’s really asking me to do: to heal her. It weakens me, but I nod and assure him I’ll take care of Mom the best I can.
They head out the door. I press my palms against the glass of the living room window, and it is ice cold, and my palm leaves a handprint on the glass. Snow sputters from the grey sky, hitting the ground like tiny balls of hail. I watch Dad and Zeb drive around the corner and disappear.
AN HOUR OR SO later, the sky turns light. The snow is no longer sputtering, either. It’s dropping huge flakes that drift like feathers to the ground, like heaven is made of birds, which makes sense to me. Mom is still sleeping and our house is quiet, and the house she used to live in sits in the field, snow softening its edges. When I’m with her, I can’t imagine Mom ever being my age, but while she’s sleeping, I can almost see an amber light glowing in the window of that old house in the field, can hear the voices of parents and of a girl who is like me, but who wears dresses like they wore back then on special occasions, like Thanksgiving week. There’s something about it, knowing that she was my age in that house: I can look at it and feel her there and see her in a way I never have—before she was my mother, before she married Dad, before Parkinson’s crawled inside her—I can see all this when I walk on that land. When I’m walking where she walked and fishing in a pond where she used to fish when her legs worked and her body was not bent and stiff and shaking all at once. It feels good to me, even important. It’s like the land is a movie screen, and I can see a whole movie of Mom’s life there, and it feels like part of my life, and it all rises up from the land in the field somehow, like the place is alive and packed with lives that connect to mine. The walls of the house may have crumbled, but it’s not so much the house that matters, anyway. It’s the place itself, the given ground.
When I run out there sometimes, I like to see my own footprints as I come back. I see the imprint of my own tennies in the mud, and it makes me smile. I think, beneath them somewhere there’s the imprint of Mom’s shoes still on that land. I’m glad we don’t have a paved sidewalk like Chet and Dolly. I’m glad our ground is still soft, and in the future I can bring my kids here and let them leave their imprint too, all of us becoming a part of this land.
But all these images go away when I hear Mom rousing in her bedroom. I hear the bed creaking, and I know she’s awake and writhing to get out of it, and I have to go in there and help her. I really want to go in and help her, but I can’t bring myself to move. I’ve never felt anything like this before. Like my willpower will not let me do what I want to do, the fear, or whatever it is, it overwhelms me. It has more power than my own mind. I sit there on the couch, as stiff and immobile as Mom. I can’t breathe regularly for all the extra pounding my heart thinks it has to do. I tell it to be quiet. It keeps punching my chest like a pissed-off boxer.
Pretty soon I’m just mad, not sad anymore, and then I can finally stand up. Soon as I stand, though, the madness goes away because I have made my way back to Mom and she is in bed and trying to get herself out of bed, and she can’t. My mother can’t get her own self out of bed. There are medications that could make her better, but we cannot afford them. “No one lives forever,” Dad said to me once, explaining the situation, as if explaining would make me feel better about it and not just make me more pissed off.
Now and again, Dad gets enough insurance coverage from work that Mom can get some doctor help, and things are better for a little bit. But the insurance runs out fast, Dad says, and then he loses that job because he takes on a third job that makes him so tired, and when he’s home we do things like drive all over the state of Colorado on what we call a scavenger hunt for medications. The pharmacy companies give free samples to doctors, and if we can get the doctors to donate their free sample pills to us, we can sometimes bridge the gaps in between insurances and Dad’s jobs, and Mom’s disease gets better, for a while. But it’s not a perfect set up, like Dad says, not a good situation overall.
I can see it’s not perfect when I look at Mom. She is fading away. She is twig-thin and brittle and even her head is veiny, and it frightens me. She looks like a baby bird before it has feathers, her head too heavy for her neck to hold up, her bony wings laying useless at her side. I love her, and she scares me.
I know I have to buck up; it’s on me this week while Dad and Zeb are hunting. Her care is on me. I take a deep breath, and I walk over to the bed, where Mom is now. We’ve put chairs all around it so she can’t fall out at night, and I move one of those chairs and sit down next to her. “Ready to get up?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” she says. Her voice is soft, not because she is feeling gentle, but because her voice is shrinking away.
I help Mom from the bed, into one of the wooden chairs, and then into the wheelchair where she spends her days now. Her body has folded in two, like a wilted sunflower in a vase, that heavy head on that weak stem, and she can’t straighten it up. So I have to prop pillows on both sides of her to keep her halfway upright. But her neck is still wilted so she looks at me sideways all the time. I look at her and feel weak. I don’t wonder if she knows she’s dying. I wonder if she knows I know she is dying. It’s unspoken between us, and I think it’s something she thinks I shouldn’t know—like not knowing Zeb smokes cigarettes, not knowing about sex, not knowing about Zeb’s stealing. It’s been too long now that he’s said he was stealing to help her. His theft hasn’t helped a goddamn thing, and he keeps at it, and it’s like he’s addicted and he can’t stop, and I’m old enough now to make my own decisions and I have quit going with him. I made up my mind firm about that because whatever he’s stealing
has not made a goddamn difference, because this is my mother, and even if I don’t want her to be sick, she is. Nothing you can take or give to someone else makes one bit of difference. That’s what I know.
It’s a month before Christmas, and in school they asked us to go through a bunch of catalogues and cut out pictures of things we want to give or get as gifts. But I can’t understand it. All this stuff—it comes and goes, and there’s nothing in those catalogues that you can own. I learned that from stealing with Zeb for sure, but I can’t say that to the teacher. Can’t say, “Everything in this catalogue goes away. Just leave your window open a tiny crack one night. You’ll see.”
What I want is not in her slick little catalogue. I want my mom back. She’s alive with me now, and already I can’t remember who she was before Parkinson’s wilted her. Give me that back in the fucking Sears catalogue.
I wheel Mom out into the living room, and I put on the TV for her. Days of Our Lives is on, but it’s about people killing and stealing and dying, so I turn the channel. We settle on reruns of Alice, a show she used to like, but she stares at the TV blankly. It’s different than Dad staring at the TV because Dad looks like he has too much in his head and he’s trying to erase it. Mom looks like she has thoughts brimming over, too, but she can’t say them aloud anymore. They escape her. She is too tired to speak them.
“Maybe we could take a nap,” she says. She’s been up about an hour now, but I understand her wanting to take a nap because even though we haven’t done anything, I’m exhausted.
It takes another hour or so to get her back into bed, but this time I stay there with her. I take a book she’s been trying to read but hasn’t gotten too far in. “Want me to read it to you?” I ask.
She says yes. I snuggle up next to her and read about five pages of The Way to Rainy Mountain before we both fall asleep.
WHEN WE WAKE, THE window is bright blue, the sky pressing against it, and the sun melts the snow so fast that when I sit by the tiny opening in the window, I can hear crystals of snow popping in the sudden heat. “Let’s go outside,” I say aloud, though I meant to just think it to myself, but Mom says, “Good idea. Let’s.”