Theft

by BK Loren

  I could still smell the rose petals from the drawer, feel their fragile age in my palm. I rested my hands on my knees, the scars where I’d scraped them on the sidewalk year after year with Brenda, making smooth and shiny circles beneath my jeans.

  “She misses you,” he said.

  “Brenda?”

  He nodded.

  “She never liked you, you know.” The words fell out of my mouth as if I were twelve years old again.

  He laughed. “Well, some things never change, I guess.”

  “She coming back? To the cabin? Does she know your plan?”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “Neither one of us have ever been much into planning things.” He looked up at me now. “If she figures out you’re here, though, she’ll be back, for sure.”

  “It’s been a long time, Zeb. I might mean nothing to her now.”

  “Everything means nothing to Brenda. It doesn’t keep her from loving it strong.”

  Through the trees, I saw a lantern come on in a tent in Polo’s camp. A man stepped out of the tent, smoked, then walked back in.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Zeb said.

  “I am worried. I’ve got a lot on the line here, Zeb. So do you.” I looked straight at him now. “I’m not losing you again. Not this time.”

  He pressed his hand on my leg to settle me. He kept talking, steady and slow. “Brenda still talks about you, tells old stories. Hell, they make up half her storytelling collection.”

  I was distracted now, looking down at Polo’s tent. “Yeah, I think about her, too. I talk to her father. He misses her.”

  “Her old man?”

  “Yeah. Whatever I didn’t learn from you about hunting and tracking, I learned from him.”

  “What’re you talking about? Her father’s dead.”

  “I mean her blood father. Her Indian father.”

  “Kabotie?”

  “Raymond, yeah.”

  “Raymond Kabotie’s working with your wolves?” he said.

  “Yeah. I mean he’s not formally employed, but I couldn’t do the work without him. He knows more about those wolves than—”

  “Kabotie’s not helping you,” he said. “He shoots wolves.”

  His words jolted me. They didn’t make any sense. This whole thing felt like one of Zeb’s lies, like when we were kids and he was trying to trick me into something he wanted. I wanted it to go away now. “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  He tilted his head and shrugged.

  “All right,” I said. “So tell me. What do you know? How do you know it?”

  “I know what Brenda told me. I know he shot wolves for ranchers. They can’t have the blood on their hands. Too much at stake if they get caught. So Kabotie tracked them, damn good tracker. And then he shot them. That’s why Brenda left. She couldn’t stand it. When she found out, she left.”

  Stars dimmed and went out in the east, and the faint outline of the mountains became visible. Soon, Polo’s men would be waking. There was no taming the mix of emotion that stormed me now, and no outlet for them either. What I needed to know right now and what I was learning were two very different things. I needed to know Zeb’s plan, nothing else. But Zeb was telling me this bullshit about Raymond. I thought of the times I’d been with Raymond, the singing and praying he’d done for the wolves, his absolute connection to them. That howl, he said to me sometimes. It’s a direct line to our evolution, something we think we’ve forgotten, but we haven’t. It’s in us. It’s a part of ourselves we can’t name. It’s sanctified. “You’re wrong about Raymond,” I said, finally, plain and simple.

  He kept it simple, too. “I hope I’m wrong,” he said, then he let it go. Nothing phased him or shook him these days. It was like when he was younger, when he faked calmness to appear strong. Except now, his calmness felt real. Nothing seeped into him. As if we’d never exchanged a word about Raymond and the wolves, he wrapped his arms around his own torso, rubbed his hands up and down his bare biceps. “Anyway,” he sighed. “I don’t really have a plan, Willa. I just—” He paused and looked around, as if tracking something with his eyes, but there was nothing there. “I’m thankful for having this chance to see you. Yeah. I’m so thankful about that.”

  Sounds of the morning started up, a few nuthatches peeping, the occasional cries of scrub jays. I had minutes with Zeb before Polo woke. I took the gun and the knife I’d found out of my pocket, held them out for him to see. “You want these back?”

  His eyebrows raised slightly in surprise. Then he shook his head, no.

  “You want to tell me about the lion you’re tracking?” Even this didn’t jar him. “What’s going on, Zeb? It’s freezing cold and you’ve got nothing. How did you even make it through the first few days out here?”

  “I’ve been dancing,” he said. “Went into town and danced at Gnarly’s, something I never did enough of in my life.” He had this smile that I remembered, one that got under my skin for all the lies it told.

  “You really don’t have a plan?” I asked again.

  The moonlight caught the water forming in the corners of his eyes. “You should go back now,” he said.

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Look, if I tell you what’s going on for me, it makes you complicit. I don’t want that shit. I never wanted that shit. You never stole anything without me telling you to do it, Willa. What you did with Mom and what I did to Chet, they’re different. You gotta know that.” He took a deep breath. “But it’s going to be okay now. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  The sunlight bent over the horizon. I figured Polo and his men must have been on the verge of waking. “So you do have a plan?”

  He wrapped his arms around me again in answer. He held me close, and I could feel warm tears from his face dripping onto my neck. He said, “It’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.” Before he pulled away from me, he wiped tears from his cheek, and when I looked at him again, his eyes were clear brown and innocent, as always.

  “All right. I have to go back now,” I told him. “Promise me you’ll come find me, Zeb. If we don’t meet up.” I tried to walk away like when I was a kid. The tug was still there. “I have so much I want to show you. The wolves. My friends. My life.”

  “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  There wasn’t anything left for me to do. For both of our sakes, I had to go back to camp. As I walked away, he said, “Willa,” just my name, said it soft enough that I knew it was mostly to himself. I didn’t turn and look back at him.

  I WALKED BACK TO camp. There was nothing else I could do. I crawled inside my tent, a thin tremble of sleeplessness running throughout my body. I pulled my sleeping bag up around my neck. The earth was frozen hard, but it felt familiar and comfortable. I closed my eyes, hoping to rest. But the sleep that came was deep and fast. When I heard Polo’s voice outside my tent, I woke up disoriented, my head full of images of Magda and Cario, dreams so vivid that I could hear their voices, and I almost reached out for Christina as I woke up here, in this cold place with this strange man’s voice coming through the tent at me.

  Polo called again from outside the tent, and I asked him to give me a second. The acrid stench of their Marlboros tainted the snowy air. They talked, and I could hear them moving around, and pieces of last night with Zeb fell into my memory. I was half giddy, elated to have seen him, scared about where he was now, but I had to pull it all together for the day with Polo. I had to fake it good. I knew where Zeb was. I could lead them away from him now. I could lead them off track. I unzipped the tent, and the reddish-pink snow of dawn flooded the ground, and then it hit me. I saw it in him now, the same look in Zeb that I’d seen in Mom. “Fuck!”

  “You say something, Willa?” Polo asked.

  I unzipped the fly of the tent, stood next to Polo, and slapped his arm. “Let’s move,” I told him. “Let’s get on the trail. We’ve got to find him. We’ve got to find Zeb now.” Polo stood there confused, and I took off, hoping he’d follow
. I’d lead him right to Zeb. I would not let him go through with his plan. I would not let go of my brother this time.

  Zeb

  HE HAD IMAGES IN his head. Who he was, who he’d wanted to be, and who he had become. They were layered one on top of the other like transparent playing cards, the ace landing on the king, the king on the nine, the nine on the deuce—a blur of luck and strategy that no longer interested him, this life. Now he carried an image of this: He would walk into the woods. He had an appointment with the mountain lion. That’s what it felt like to him. They had agreed on something, and a hunter keeps true to his word. And so he would walk, and he would find her tracks. They were always there, had become part of the landscape he read daily, a story he had written himself into long ago. He didn’t plan on killing her. It was not revenge. It was just a matter of loose ends he had to tie up, of letting go of something that had twisted and knotted itself around the coils of his mind.

  As he walked, he felt the tug of the world falling away. He thought it would be difficult. He thought walking away from everything like this would undo his regret. It was a decision he’d made with sadness, but as he walked, it transformed into the deepest elation, this shivering cold, this giddy laughter that followed. And then there was a kind of peace.

  The letting go grew easier from then on.

  He had planned this much: to face the lion as any animal faces another animal, no protection, no weapons, unencumbered. The night wrapped around him, and he walked bare chested, and then barefooted, and the colder he got, the more he felt the illusion of heat. The snow ached against his feet. He hadn’t felt that kind of pleasurable pain before, not that he could remember, not like this. It felt as if his bare feet rooted him to the earth and lifting them tugged at the sinews of his legs, a sharp sting that had always been there but had been shielded.

  In his mind, he saw himself tangling with the lion barehanded. He’d seen this on TV when he was younger. He’d read it in stories. He’d read the myth of the man who had been punished by the gods in Greek mythology, the one whose chest had been split open for eternity, buzzards plucking at his heart, and he had wondered why that was a punishment, when it felt to him like the only way to live in the world. He longed for his own sternum to split, for the air to touch his open chest, his heart pumping and alive. It was how his sister had lived. He thought he’d seen this in Willa, her innocence and openness, compared to his sutured life.

  The air chilled to icy blackness, slick and sharp and smothering his skin. He imagined himself meeting the cougar. He sat at the entrance to her den and waited. They had made several appointments in the past, and she had kept every one of them. This would be the final one. He savored the couple of hours he’d spent with Willa. But he felt his ties with her loosening now. He let them sag. He let her go. After a while of sitting and shivering, he started walking, no longer waiting, but now actively tracking the lion. There were the usual signs, old and crusted over, unreadable if you didn’t already know they were there, vestiges of what had already been left behind. There were newer tracks, the ones he’d come across earlier. He kept on through the woods. His head tangled itself up with images of what it would be like when he met the lion. He would face her, and they would lock gazes. That in itself would be a challenge to her, would make her attack him. It’s what he wanted. He imagined her leaping and saw her tawny-furred underbelly as she leapt, claws unsheathed, sinking into his flesh. He felt the full weight of her. He was strong enough to give her a good fight. He felt her claws hooked into him, and he didn’t dream of surviving. It wasn’t about survival. He had been done with his life for some time. If you listened, he believed, you could hear the moment when your life let go of you. The rest was just hanging on.

  For one glorious moment, before he died, there would be his body and hers wrapped around each other, his belly pressed close to her wild body as they fell to the ground together, and they would be bound into a whole until her jaws clamped down onto his neck, teeth to bone, and then a snap, and his life would be over. He wondered if he would be able to feel her dragging him away. If, like Rosalita, the snowy earth would be the last thing he felt on his skin. He wondered if he would feel her devouring him, as they said of deer, that the deer were still living as the big cats tore their flesh and opened the rib-caged cavity of their bodies.

  Everything was a story. And the story he told became the only truth he knew. The farther he walked, the more the night chilled. His body shook with cold. There was no glory in this. He knew what it felt like now, this shivering, this craving stillness beneath his skin and no way to turn off the shaking. His bones felt more alive than his skin now, the way they chattered to hold onto life, the way they would not let him sink into the earth.

  And then the cold seeped inside him, and he quit shaking. The skin of his feet looked charred, his toes completely numb now. It felt as if the inside of him was crystallizing, his heart shattering off into facets, his blood slowing like mud. He felt warm, even hot. He stripped down to nothing but his boxers now. The lion was nowhere, at least not that he could see. His thoughts had turned to dreams. His thoughts became the images he’d seen, the ones he’d dreamed of for himself. His body lay on the snowy ground now, and dreams leeched his mind. It was not how he’d expected it to be, his last moment of life. It was not glorious. Or wild. It was something altogether different. He wanted to turn back. He had not expected that, but there was no undoing it now. His body was no longer his, and his thoughts had become ghosts. He had already become memory in the minds of those he had loved.

  WHAT HE LEFT BEHIND as he walked told the story of him letting things fall away. The imprint left by his footprints grew lighter and lighter, the weight of him lessened with each step until he turned too light to leave any spore at all. Polo guessed it was intentional and directed at him. “The sonofabitch’s last defiance,” he said. “A fucking suicide mission, a fucking waste of my time.”

  Willa didn’t see it that way. By the time they found Zeb, later the following evening, his limbs were swollen and black as a lightning-struck tree, the rest of his body frozen and stiff, skin on his chest blue as new-fallen snow but muted and fleshy and horrifying in its utter objectness. If it had not been her brother, the sight might have sickened her. But she knelt by Zeb’s side, and she cried. She looked at his body, then she lay down on the snowy earth and held him close to her. She sobbed, and it felt like oceans inside her, the uncertainty that Zeb had taught her, the constant way he’d made her question everything, all of it turning still now, turning permanently. She felt Polo standing above her, and she said her brother’s name softly to herself: Zebulon Pike Robbins.

  By the time she let him go, she knew Polo was wrong. Zeb wasn’t defiant at all. He never had been. He’d been devoured by some story he’d never even read, some dream that had seeped into his bones without him being able to name it, the tracks of that story leaving an imprint on him that he could not name and could never trap or escape or revise to make it his own story. The beauty of the animal he had hunted and consumed, this time, had been himself.

  After

  BY EVENING, POLO AND Willa had made it back to camp. They didn’t have too many words for each other. “So what’s this all mean to you?” Willa asked, before they parted ways. “Why did Zeb matter so damn much to you?”

  “Sonofabitch didn’t have the guts to face me,” he said. “To come in to the office and do his confession there. To come in and face me and own up.”

  Own up. The words made Willa laugh. What was owned and what was lost. There was a thin line between the two notions, and each one canceled the other out. What remained was what could not be taken away, the final imprint of a life, a track blown away by wind, perceptible maybe by some trained eye somewhere. But even then, it was never certain.

  WILLA WALKED INSIDE THE cabin, lifted a few of the rose petals from the dresser drawer into a nylon stuff sack. When she returned back outside, she asked for information about Brenda. Polo said he wished he c
ould help, but he knew nothing.

  “Tell her I was here,” Willa said. “Tell her I’d like to see her. If you see her, please give her my contact information.” She handed Polo a piece of paper.

  Polo agreed, and she figured he’d honor his word. He had at least that much to prove to Zeb, even now. As she cleaned up her campsite and tossed the issued gear back to Polo, she thought of walking back through Zeb and Brenda’s cabin one more time. But it felt meaningless. She had no idea when and if Brenda would be back to the cabin. What was in the house had little to do with Zeb. She’d had years with him, and they had left their mark on her, and she’d had a couple of hours with him before his death. That time, those hours: That’s what she would keep.

  As for the mules and the horse that remained, they were hers now, Polo said, next of kin because the marriage between Zeb and Brenda had never been legal. “Here’s the name and address of the boy in town who’s taking care of them,” Polo said. He handed her a sticky note.

  She stood outside the cabin, looking at the closed doorway, and said her goodbyes. Then she climbed into her truck, and the engine hummed. The icy pathway pitched the wheels this way and that, and the gouged road reminded her of her home on the mesa. She wanted to be there. With Christina. With Magda and Cario, too. Instead, she followed the map Polo had drawn (not much to map in this town: a gas station, a gun shop, a bar) and pulled up to an old wooden house, tawny paint peeling off the sides like birch bark, just off the state highway, behind Gnarly’s Tavern. She knocked on the door, and a tall, bony man with a long, hollow face and a crooked-toothed smile answered. “Help ya?” he said.

  “I’m Willa Robbins,” she said. He stared. “Zeb Robbins’s sister.”