by BK Loren
I dim the lights and pull the truck into the U-shaped piece of land where I will park it, and it will sit naked and stark in summer, covered with snow in winter. The slopey-topped mountains of New Mexico—so unlike the craggy ranges in Colorado—diminish my truck to a Tonka toy sitting beside a Monopoly-sized adobe hut on the mesa. I want to live my small life here forever.
I turn the key, and the truck rumbles to silence. I walk into my home—no key, the door left open, no fear of anyone stealing anything. I’m the only trained thief I know.
I take a few minutes and sit alone on the couch. I imagine Zeb being here with me. I wanted that. I wanted to show him the life I’ve come to love, the life that is possible. Not special, not “free,” as he would call it (a term I have never understood). Just possible.
As I’m sitting there, late night, my phone pulses. It’s news from Polo about Zeb—that someone set the hillside on fire intentionally, kept it contained as long as they could, then fled the scene. It was the exact spot where Zeb’s body lay. “Looks like someone had it out for Zeb,” Polo says.
“Something like that,” I tell him, knowing. Thanking Frank.
“There was very little left of him,” Polo says. “This was definitely directed at Zeb. Looks like he had more than a few enemies.” I listen, knowing that what was left of Zeb was more than Polo could ever imagine, that the fire was part of Zeb’s own doing, his friends looking out for him, even still.
When I hang up, I try to imagine going back there for a traditional burial ceremony. It seems an affront, in the aftermath. I’ll find my own way to say goodbye. I dial the phone and call Frank at Gnarly’s, knowing he’ll be there till two AM, at least. I tell him I probably won’t be back.
“Sure thing,” he says. He tells me they’re having a party in town, “Starting now and ending when we can’t dance anymore,” he says.
I thank him. “You let me know if you hear from Brenda.”
“Sure thing,” he says. Then he tells me Tommy is a good boy. He tells me how much Tommy cares for things, how much he loves animals, and, “He loves working hard, as long as it’s outside.” He says, “He doesn’t come off that way, you know. But you gotta get to know him. He’s a good boy. Hard worker. A responsible kid. He does a good job.”
“I understand,” I tell him. I understand hardworking kids who haven’t found a way to make their kind of work valued in this world. When I hang up, I know my last visit to those mountains will have been my last visit to those mountains. I bid the field farewell, too, the neighborhood all grown up around it now, and the quiet history of the land still whispering beneath it all.
I sit there for I don’t know how long—until my skin twitches like chiggers from lack of sleep. I stand up, look out across the mesa, and see the bedroom light in Magda and Cario’s place turn off. Soon as I see a sign of them in their home, I feel like I can finally sleep.
When I get to my room, I find Christina sleeping in my bed. She wakes, groggy and bleary-eyed. “It’s you,” she says. The way she says, “you,” as if there is no other you in the world. I tell her, yes, it’s me.
“Magda and Cario were worried. They called you nineteen times,” she tells me. “They asked me to come up here.” She starts to get up to go home.
“I know.” I crawl into bed and pull her back, next to me. I tell her about Zeb. She listens. When the story is done, I say to her, “Stay?”
Though she has never spent the entire night with me before—some fear on my part—she doesn’t question me now. She just holds me, and I hold her. I can’t think of words to say to her, but my body has a hard time letting go. So does hers. We sleep.
I wake a few hours later, early morning, the smell of hot peppers and chorizo filling my nostrils, the sound of Magda and Cario arguing in a whisper in the kitchen. “Go,” Christina says, and pushes me out of bed, laughing. “They’ll be crazy excited to see you.”
It’s hard to leave her, to get out of bed. But I do it. I stand in the doorway of my room for a minute, just watching them.
Some people buzz around the kitchen. But Magda and Cario bumble around the kitchen. There is nothing fast about the way they move. They bump into each other intentionally, as far as I can tell. They kind of waddle. They seem to enjoy this kind of kitchen wrestling, but they complain to each other each time they touch. “Estás demasiado gordo para esta cocina,” Magda says, even though Cario is the thinner of the two. He shrugs and keeps cooking, and then they both turn and see me. “Santa Madre de Dios está en casa,” Magda whispers. She whips Cario with her dishtowel, and they both open their arms to me. Their warm skin feels so good when we embrace. “Christina, she’s been here waiting for you,” Magda says. “Go see her. Go now.” She pushes me toward the bedroom.
“She’s been worried,” Cario says. “She’s been here every night.”
“You didn’t call and ask her to come up here?” I ask.
They look at each other and shrug. “No,” Magda says.
“I thought you didn’t like that we were more than friends.”
“You go see her. Tell her you’re home. Now.” Magda chides me. When Christina comes out of the bedroom looking scruffy and tired, it does nothing to make Magda stop. “Holy mother of Mary, you two,” she says. “I don’t understand you two.” She makes a sound of disapproval, but she sets four plates on the breakfast table, and we all sit down together. Magda and Cario don’t ask any specific questions about my trip. They say, “You’re back,” over and over again. They say, “You never should have gone. I told you so. They did not need you. We needed you here.” Finally, Magda asks if it is over now.
“Yes,” I tell her. “It’s over.” Like I said, we don’t know each other well. We know each other like family.
After breakfast, I walk Christina out to her car. I have a hard time considering leaving this place, even for a few hours. Through the front window, I see Cario sitting in my living room, the TV blaring, while Magda walks back and forth in the kitchen.
“Come with me today,” I say to Christina. She looks at me as if she doesn’t know me. I tell her, “I don’t want to leave you.”
“It’s secret, the work you do. Where the wolves are. You’ve told me a hundred times. I can’t come along.”
“These wolves, they’ve crossed the Días de Ojos border,” I tell her. “They’re expanding their territory. WWA has got nothing to do with them this time. Come with me.”
She smiles. “I could call in to work, I guess.”
It feels like a gift, and I hug her, and she laughs at me, not with me. We drive, listen to the radio, talk, and it feels right being with her.
I turn on to the final stretch of road to Raymond’s place, and the sun is muted by winter, softer around the edges than in summer, but the desert land is still stark and clear. The outline of a huge semi truck in front of Raymond’s place is new to me. Its back doors are flung open wide, as if someone’s been packing or unpacking, maybe getting ready to move. I can’t imagine Raymond driving that thing, can’t even imagine one of Raymond’s rare, and most times raucous and belligerent girlfriends driving it. And the one thing I know for sure is that Raymond would never move away from this land.
Christina and I walk together across the bare yard. Raymond’s door is unlocked and cracked open as it almost always is when he’s home. Still, I tap it lightly with a few knocks, and it swings wide open, slowly. “Raymond?”
No response.
From the threshold we can see most of the inside of the house, but no one’s there. Dogs are barking, as usual, but they’re not running in and out, no music is playing on his duct-taped boom box, no coffee is brewing, and no beer can is popped open and waiting on the kitchen counter. “You go ahead,” Christina says.
“No, come with me,” I tell her. “It’s okay.” I take her hand, and we walk inside now, through the tiny living room and peek into the bedroom. Also empty.
I look out the small window, and I see the greyhounds are kenneled. It’s unu
sual for Raymond to kennel his dogs like this, especially during the day. “What the hell?” The words fall from my mouth, and I can see they spook Christina, which spooks me, in return. There’s no reason to kennel the dogs during the day. I’ve never known Raymond to do it before, and it seems cruel, to me. I worry about what Zeb told me, even though Raymond’s dogs have nothing to do with it. It’s just, he made me fear some side of Raymond that I might not know about yet. If there’s one thing Zeb taught me it’s that all facets of people are never seen from one angle, but one angle is most often all we get. I don’t want to believe what Zeb told me about Raymond. But I also don’t want to believe that one of the last things Zeb said to me was a senseless lie.
Christina sees my hesitation. “It’s okay,” she says. I keep on walking. Together, we step to the back door and tap it open.
In the backyard, crouched down, I see Raymond and one of his lady friends. They’re hovered over one of the dog kennels, and the kennel is covered with a blanket.
“Raymond,” I say softly.
He turns. He walks to me in slow motion, and his huge arms wrap around me, and he holds me, and he weeps. Unashamed, huge Raymond just weeps. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him do this. He says “You’re back, you’re back,” maybe five or six times, whispering it, and squeezing me close to him. After he hugs me, he embraces Christina, too. Though he’s never met her, he gives her the Raymond hug. “You must be Christina,” he says. He lets her go, and I introduce them formally, saying yes, this is Christina, and yes, I happen to love her, which makes Christina’s eyebrows arch up and makes Raymond hug her again.
I step outside and nod to Raymond’s lady friend. She looks at me familiar-like, and I nod again, awkwardly. “Another injured greyhound?” I say, walking toward the kennel.
“Willa, meet my daughter, Brenda,” he says.
She turns to face me, and I feel twelve years old again. I can’t recall if I ever hugged Brenda when we were kids, but we hug now, a tight and fast embrace that feels like healing. I can smell the rose bushes and see Mom living and breathing and standing on her own, and I can see Chet, too, seething at the edges, and I can smell the field and the ponds. I can hear the meadowlarks. I remember Zeb, as a kid. So much taken away and so much given back.
When we finally let go of one another, I see that Brenda is still big boned and tall and . . . an adult. Of all the crazy damn things, Brenda is an adult. We embrace again, this time laughing. She remembers me, like Zeb said. She remembers in the same way I do, as if there has been no time in-between. We hold each other’s childhoods in the core of us. We own them.
“Damn, Willa,” she says, smiling huge. She bends at the waist and rolls up her pant leg to show me a well-scarred knee left over from our annual pacts. We both laugh, and we embrace again. “Blood sisters,” she says. I tell her yes, we’ve always been family, always will be family. I introduce her to Christina.
I’m shaking with elation, and at the same time cinched with sadness. Our reunion is missing one person. It’s hard to do, but I know waiting won’t make it any better. I hear my breathing crack a little as I take a deep breath. I tell her and Raymond about Polo and the tracking, and I tell them about seeing Zeb.
“Is he okay?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Remember Chet,” I tell her, and she says yes, and she remembers that Zeb left home just after Chet’s death, and I explain to her that the story we all told back then was not the true story, that I’d known all along that Zeb had killed Chet. “It’s what they had him on this time,” I said. “He confessed.” I can see by the way she nods knowingly that part of her knew all along, too. “He never went far away from your home,” I tell her. “He stayed in town or on the mountain the whole time. It wasn’t Polo or any of the men. They were not responsible for what happened to Zeb,” I tell her. “I would’ve stopped them.” I take a breath, finding the words. “But he died. Zeb died on the mountain. Not by his own hand, but by his own choice.”
Brenda doesn’t flinch. She’s a lot like her father in that way. She sits upright, and tears fall, and she wipes them away without shame. After a while, she says, “It was the lion that got him, wasn’t it?” She knows the lion, and she knows Zeb’s entangled relationship with it.
I don’t think about my answer. It just comes out. “Yeah. It was the lion.” I leave it at that. Because there’s more to truth than the actual facts of a story can ever tell.
She nods, knowingly. “I wanted to see him again,” she says. “I wanted him to see who I am now.” I comprehend her love for him, and for the first time ever, I understand that Zeb must have been happy, at least for a while, with her. He must have felt loved.
When Raymond hears the news, he holds Brenda and lets her cry. Then we all sit in silence for some time.
After a while, Raymond stands up, hands on knees, stiff back. “Well,” he says. “I got some work to do.”
Brenda stands too. “We all have work to do.” She nudges Christina and me. “C’mon,” she says.
We all walk together out to the dog kennel that he and Brenda were tending to when we walked in. He lifts a corner of the blanket, and from the slightest glimpse, I see her, and I know her. “Ciela.” I look up at him, desperate. “Where’s Hector?”
“We were just getting ready to get her back out there with him. Wanted to get it done before you came back. She’s healed now.”
It feels like a punch in the chest. “Healed?”
He tilts his head and glances sideways at Brenda. “Long story.”
“Tell,” I say, to him, using his own, forceful word.
He takes a deep breath and says, “She was stunned. Badly stunned,” and Brenda adds, “By me.” She takes over then, tells of leaving her cabin on the mountain, driving here, her confusion. Then she says, “I’m responsible.”
“We’re all responsible, Bren,” Raymond says. “I thought Ciela reinjured her bad leg at first,” he continues. “But I finally got a chance to look at that thing up close.” He nods with certainty. “That limp she’s had—it’s an old injury. Probably a four-and-a-half trap, but either way, it was some kind of trap. No two ways about that. My guess is, that’s the reason she wasn’t able to skedaddle as fast across the highway as Hector. But this new wound, it’s not going to cripple her. And as far as I can tell, this wolf got confused and ran headlong into the truck after Brenda had stopped, not the other way around. She stunned herself good. Gave herself a concussion, a few scrapes.”
“She’s healed for sure?” I ask again.
“If you ever quit jawing on and asking questions, we can take her out where she belongs, and you can see for yourself.”
He gestures to Christina and Brenda. “Take a corner. We’re lifting this crate, as gently and quietly as we can, into that truck.” He points to the semi sitting in front of his place.
The four of us move together as smoothly as possible. We lift Ciela’s crate into the trailer of the truck.
Brenda’s the only one who can drive this monster, so Christina, Raymond, and I sit in the trailer with Ciela while Brenda drives. Raymond sighs. “It gets to me, you know, seeing these animals, any animals, injured.” He nods his head, staring at Ciela’s crate.
I let his words sink in a little. Then I take a chance. “You ever shoot one of these wolves, Raymond?” I ask.
His eyes turn too quickly toward me. There’s a momentary stare, and he stutters and says, “Yes.” Then more directly, “Yes, I did that.” I can see the words sinking into him, owning him in a way that becomes more comfortable as he says them out loud. “Complex thing,” he says. And then he starts telling a story I need to hear so badly. He speaks with his eyes glazed, staring blankly. He says, “I was bringing in animals to rewild on my own, me and a group of people. You know all about that. We wanted to restore the plains and desert, you know, to how this land was before civilization even walked here. Before people of any nation caused this devastation. But I got caught, like you almost always get cau
ght when you’re doing something that stupid. It was when Brenda was here, living with me.” He points with his head toward where Brenda sits, driving the rig. “The cops gave me a choice. Do time away from Brenda, or help control the wolves. Community service, they called it.” He says, “Brenda was with me then. It was after she’d come back, when she was a teenager, and before she left again.” He thinks on it. “I only did it once. It killed me to shoot a wolf; I mean, it left some part of me dead.”
“You were on the management team?” I say to him, after a while.
He nods. “I was ‘controlling’ the wolves. Taking the lives of the ones they deemed unfit to live in the wild.” His eyes are glazed and empty. “I didn’t have a choice. If they put me away, I’d lose my daughter again.”
He quits looking at me now, goes back to staring blankly. I take in what he says. I know operations like this go on all the time. It’s the paradoxical part of any rehab plan, one I have never supported. After I’ve had enough time to filter what he’s saying, I reach over and rest my hand on his. He looks at me then. Nothing more or less than that.
The truck rumbles on, and we can’t see where we’re going. Like Ciela, we’re blocked in on all sides, no views to anything or cues to where we might be on the land. I understand now why they transport scared animals this way. There is something calming about it. We’re crowded in by plastic containers stacked behind us in the trailer. I tap one. “So what’s this?”
Raymond glances up. “Brenda took Zeb’s route,” he says. “But after we’re done here, she’s driving this rig back to Colorado and telling Mike he can shove it up his ass.” He looks satisfied, even proud. “After that, she’s coming back here to live. We’ll get her a place. She wants to stay.”
“I thought she couldn’t come back after she left the reservation?”
“Yeah,” Raymond laughs. “We’re rewilding her.”
“So what’s in the crates?” Christina asks.
“Oh.” Raymond hesitates. “Body parts.”