She leans her forehead against the wall; she lets it hold her up. Swallow. Deep breath.
“Sue, I can hear you breathing. What do you want?”
She doesn’t know exactly. And the room spins with the question. She should’ve known the answer before calling. She can see that now.
“I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time,” she whispers.
“I know all about your hard time, about your crazy, and honey, the day you left, it stopped being my problem.”
The phone weighs a thousand pounds. The ground is made of sediment.
“Why are you being so quiet?” he barks. “Is that it? We done now?”
She hangs up, her chest heaving. The sink. No. The toilet. She sticks her finger down her throat and it burns on the way up. The burn is right; it feels like how she feels.
She should’ve asked: When can we talk in private? She should’ve asked: Do you miss me? Even a little? She should’ve told him about her dad, but then she would have had to explain why she didn’t call him when it happened, how she just couldn’t. The bathroom is small and dark and there is no place safe for her mind to land.
Quick Quick Quick, think of another thing to think about. The baseboards. The baseboards need cleaning and that is a thing she can do. She gets a rag and the cleaning product and gets down on her knees and makes long swipes through the dust and the dirt. She had wanted her own small child on her lap, a book beside them. To take her or him camping on the lease land. To watch Dad put a fishing pole in a small pair of hands. To feel tiny fingers close around her thumb. To teach someone how to skip, how to ride a bike, how to read. A million other things.
You’re crazy, that’s what Kelly said when she lost everything for the fourth time. Her plum-sized baby, dead on the bathroom floor. She’d yelled at him to bring a mason jar; she had wanted to keep it, not forever, but for a ritual, to plant it under a blueberry bush or cosmos. Kelly had taken it away, leaving her crying, curled up against the tile. They’d never talked about it again.
She directs herself to the job at hand, to the small satisfaction of a clean surface. She moves on hands and knees down the hall, into the bedrooms, the living room. But her mind will not settle there on the dirty rag. Again, she returns to her conversation with Kelly and what she should’ve said differently. She climbs onto the kitchen countertop, dusts the tops of every single cupboard. Her thoughts are like dice. Roll again. Find a new way to feel bad.
Inside the medicine cabinet are the two orange bottles from Doc Pitkin. Fuck it. She swallows one white pill and two blue ones, and waits to escape.
6
WHEN TIM AND JACKIE get back to the house, the sun is sliding down behind Mount Baldy, the clouds are closing in, and the cows have disappeared from view. Tim wants to hug; he wants to give her his number and he is slow, too slow. Jackie’s thoughts are in the fields, and the steps she needs to take before getting to the fields, and she rushes from the truck and through the gate. As soon as she gets into the house, it’s clear she has, once again, gotten home too late.
Susan sits on the kitchen floor with her back against the wall, her knees tucked up against her chest. She is dressed in summer clothes and she is shaking, her teeth chattering. Jackie drops to a squat before her sister.
“Susie, what happened? What’s wrong?”
“Why do you smell like a bar?” Susan looks at Jackie and then looks at the rag in her hand. Her speech is slow, slurred. “I’m so cold. Did you feel that shaking? It felt like an earthquake. It wouldn’t stop.”
Jackie squints at her sister, at her glassy eyes. The phone is off the hook, making an awful broken hum.
“Why is the phone off the hook? What is going on?”
“I didn’t know where you were or when you were coming back. You shouldn’t leave without saying good-bye. I called 911. But then John Cox answered the call—do you remember John? He was homecoming king when I won queen? I didn’t want to talk to him. I hung up. But the phone started ringing and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to say, so I just kept it off.”
Jackie pours herself a cup of cold coffee. If she can get the taste of whiskey and sex out of her mouth, she can deal. She swallows an entire cup. Outside the light is thinning, the trees shake in the wind. She needs to get out there.
“Susie, we’ve got to check the cows.”
Susan’s eyelids are heavy; they flutter open. “Fuck off.” She whispers. The words have hardly any power, except that she’s never said them to Jackie before. “Go away. You’re good at that.”
Jackie flattens her back against the wall and holds up the entire house with her shoulder blades. After their mom died, Susan seemed fine. Everyone said it like an accusation. As in Jackie, eat something, your sister is fine. Or Jackie, you have to start going to school, your sister is fine. Susan got straight A’s and won the science fair for a project about endangered falcons. No one ever saw her cry. But Jackie knew.
The pockets of Susan’s jeans, of her sweatshirts, were always stuffed with candy wrappers, bottle caps, envelopes from bills addressed to their mom. She watched her sister at school. Saw her chase a plastic bag across the field and shove it in her coat. None of Susan’s teachers or millions of friends ever seemed to notice. Susie, it’s just garbage. You can throw it away. Quit being so weird. She’d meant to say something a million times. But she hadn’t. And Dad never said anything. He never did anything.
For the past few weeks Jackie has clung to the idea that Susan’s anxiety will improve, that she will get excited about ranching, so that she, Jackie, can gallop back to medical school, to become a doctor whose only responsibility to the ranch is sending a portion of her monthly paycheck. What fantasy. Tears well in her eyes and she slaps them away. She doesn’t have time for this.
“You need to eat something and then you need to lie down. Sleep it off.”
She hangs up the phone and lets the door slam behind her. Then Jackie goes out to do what her sister could’ve done at any point all afternoon.
Jackie rides the four-wheeler across the fields, the sun slipping away, taking with it any warmth from the day. The pair is nowhere to be found. There was the time that she and Dad got to the birth too late. Four coyotes were ripping apart the calf, only halfway out of the cow, hung at the hips. Blue and pink tissue littered the pink snow. Jackie had panicked, raised her gun to shoot, stopped only by her Dad’s steady voice calming the heifer, running the coyotes off. He had known to save the cow, to help her birth her dead calf. He had known how to go on from a bad time.
After the light dies behind the mountains and the early evening is all shadow and wind, Jackie finally finds Blanca, off behind a small hill apart from the rest. She is lying in a pool of mucus, shit, and blood. Two hooves stick out of her vagina, the placenta making a web around the calf’s legs. The young cow grunts at Jackie to get back, to get away.
“I don’t want to be here either,” Jackie says.
Blanca grunts again and gets herself up, standing, her tail swinging like she might charge.
“Don’t you dare.” Jackie stares at the cow’s dungeon eyes and makes herself take big even breaths, building herself up big, to be bigger than the cow.
Suddenly, a blue nose slicks out between Blanca’s legs. The calf’s eyes are glassy. That baby’s been in there too long. Jackie needs to hurry. She should’ve been here an hour ago.
Blanca blinks at Jackie, her eyes wet black stones. You aren’t your dad, they say. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re still a little drunk.
“You’ll be fine, girl.”
The cow heaves and twists along her spine. Dad would rope her and snub her down. The come-along rod is awkward in Jackie’s hand; it’s a thing she’s never used alone. She’s mid-crouch, trying to decide whether to wait another minute or get in there, when the cow starts like she might charge. Jackie is telling her to stay, in her lowest voice, when a fireball the size of a car explodes beyond the lip of the mesa. It burns a hole into the dark
ening night. The cow shudders and groans in the glow. Like nothing Jackie has ever seen, as if a cloud burst and flickered across the sky. Then the fire is gone. Jackie edges backward toward the mesa, eyes shifting between the cow and the direction of the flare.
Far below, a black screen of smoke billows in the place of what was flame, casting a net over Dry Hollow Road, Johnson’s stock tanks, and Amick’s barn. It’s the wrong time of day for brush fires. Wrong season. Seconds later, another ball of fire erupts into the air.
Blanca grunts behind her, and Jackie runs back in time to see the calf slip onto the ground. The thin milky coat of the placenta is wrapped around its body like an extra, suffocating skin.
Jackie darts in quick, rips the placenta off the black legs with her hands, and jumps back before the cow knows she’s been there. The calf’s sleek white fur shines against the hard soil. The torn arm’s-length of umbilical cord, ropy and green, flops across her trunk. This is as it should be. Except. The ears don’t move. The eyes are unblinking. There’s no cough, and no amniotic fluid out of the lungs. Jackie strains into the wind to see a sign of breath.
Come on and pop up. Get on those legs and wobble like a drunk. Jackie puts her hand down the neck of her shirt and grabs onto the side of her breast. She holds herself tight.
A few feet away, Blanca stays down, part of the placenta still hanging out of her like an extra tail. Jackie jogs across the several feet of space between her and the calf and falls to her knees beside the white bundle. It’s slightly bigger than Chicken. Jackie tells herself that she has been here before. She’s fixed things up, and the gamble has paid. But never alone, never on several drinks. She stuffs this away. This is what it means to be a doctor: to pay attention to everything but yourself.
She inserts her thumb in one black nostril. The nose is cold, soft. Then her index finger slips into the other nostril and jerks twice. The calf wants to move, it wants to breathe, to get up, to nurse. The smell—of blood’s salinity, of biological moistness—tells Jackie it’s possible.
“You can’t die. Get it together.”
Another flame bursts into the sky. Blanca bellows three loud notes and looks out her dungeon eye at her baby. Her gray tongue hangs long out of her mouth.
Get out of there, Jackie Blue. It’s her dad’s voice in her head. She puts her hand on the calf’s chest. The heartbeat is there. If she can clear the mucus plug, the baby will breathe and the entire day, the entire winter, will be redeemed. She clamps the calf’s mouth shut with her left hand and stops up the right nostril with her right thumb and index finger. Puts her mouth on the other nostril and blows. Breathes quick and blows again, all the air in her body pushed into that dime-sized hole. One more try.
She turns her head to gulp at the air and Blanca’s head is down, ears forward, all fifteen hundred pounds running at her. Jackie yanks her hand away from the calf and pushes into the ground. There is snow, sky, mud, clover, snow. She is rolling and then she is not. Blanca whacks at Jackie’s ribs with the middle of her forehead, bone to bone. The cow snorts and blows her cud back. The sweet smell of clover, the rotten eggs of methane, all the bile of the cow’s gut.
Jackie’s breath is broken glass. Her heartbeat a hammer. This can’t be happening. This isn’t how it goes for her. She moves her tongue behind her front teeth and tastes iron, blood, and the grit of dirt. There is the sky. Another cloud of flame. Yellow and black. It rises. Like a rooster tail, she thinks, before pain consumes her thinking.
7
WHEN THE CALL COMES through his radio, Ray is at the movies. Gary Malin, owner of the Paradise Theater, is a Vietnam vet. Since Ray’s been back, Gary’s been letting him up to the projection room for the five o’clock show, not noticing his uniform, not asking any questions. It’s just their secret, this little arrangement.
“We got a 911 hang up from Dunbars’.” John’s voice over the radio interrupts the opening credits. “Something sounds off. Hustle up there.”
Ray turns up the handheld in his lap, sets his Bud Light on the rug.
“Dunbars? Any intel?” Ray asks.
“Nothing yet. I can’t get through.”
“Over.”
Ray nods at Gary and heads out the door, taking the stairs two at a time. He had wondered after those Dunbar girls but had figured a visit from him would be of little use to them.
Paul McCurdy was flapping his mouth a few weeks back at the Skyline about did Ray remember that hot piece of ass Susan Dunbar and how he’d seen her walking the ditch road with her dog and smoking a pipe. And what a shame that neither sister ever came by the bar. Ray said he’d hardly known them, but of course that wasn’t true.
His cell phone rings and he picks up out of habit, wishing right away that he had not.
“What do you need, Mila?”
“I’m just wondering why exactly your patrol car is parked behind the movie theatre again. That’s the third time this week.”
“Jeez honey, you following me?”
“Please. My mother drove by and noticed. We’re all just worried about you.”
“Shit, Mila, do me a favor and worry less, will you? Jesus.”
“What time are you home tonight?”
“You know what time.”
“Will we see you then, or will you be late again, smelling like booze?”
“Mila, I don’t have time to talk about this. Really. I got a call.”
“Sure you do.”
He hesitates. “I hear you, OK? I’ll see you tonight.”
Fifteen minutes later, his thoughts still scattered from the call with his wife, his life feeling penned in tight, he is almost at the top of the ridge. He passes the weed-clogged field where he used to play ball and he remembers the smell of wet grass through his catcher’s mask, how good he was at calling a game, at being a backstop, and he thinks how he could still do that, he’s still strong, and maybe that’s the thing he needs, the thing that will kick him back into the motor of this town, and it’s then that he catches the first one in his peripherals.
Behind Amick’s Quonset about a half-mile ahead, a flame the size of a helicopter rips apart the sky. Ray doesn’t breathe or blink. It’s near dark but the valley floor is too bright. Pretty quick, a massive cloud of black smoke comes at him.
Someone is attacking. Tall palm trees off the road. He hits the gas and hauls toward the smoke. Overhead, the whir of rotors. He flies around the S-curve past a few of Amick’s sheep, before he actually forms a thought. No terrorist ever heard of this place. There’s no helicopter. The palms are cottonwoods. He lets off the pedal. What the fuck?
Another cloud of flame, and smoke erupts outside his window. He grabs the mic and turns the radio up, way up.
“PD3 to Dispatch. PD3 to Dispatch.” A loud hiss comes off the gully, back in the deep beyond Dry Hollow. There are houses all over the place. Those people have got to be scared to death.
“John, there’s fireballs in the sky.” Ray swings onto the unnamed gravel artery that links a couple ranchettes and hay farms and gas wells. The smoke is a giant mass, screening electric lines and forest. “I’m rolling out to investigate.” The dirt spins at his tires and dust fills the car. He keeps the window down, keeps his eye on the flame burning a hole in the sky.
“Negative, Zebra.” John is quick back. “The law makes all possible domestics fast calls. You know that. You hit Dunbars’ and check back in.”
“That’s a bad call, John.” He learned this lesson a million miles away. John hasn’t ever been farther away than Wyoming. “I’m going in.”
“I’m in touch with Fire on this and they’re on it. PD3, do not go there.”
Sometimes breaking the rules is the only way things go right. He shuts off the radio. John’ll thank him later.
Trailer-sized fireballs burp from a big pit in front of a gas well. There is heat and smoke and mess. The rural night smells of airports and long-haul trucks. A crowd of folks across the road from the well looks up, heads back, black spots against
a wall of flame. Ranchers, teenage potheads, his seventh-grade teacher, a checker from Don’s Market. On every face is a combination of fear and stupid wonder. The only thing between them and fire is a barbed-wire fence, the road, and clumps of sagebrush.
His heart flaps its fucking wings. He’s got to get them the hell out of here. Now.
Before he can reach into the car and radio for backup, a woman wearing a pink sweatsuit and silver cowboy boots hustles across the road.
“Stark, what the heck is this about?” Shorty Lee has always been a real bee in cheesecake. Pete Johnson and Jim Boyce crowd around. “We’ve been calling that dang gas commission for ten minutes and all we get is recording.”
“You feel that shaking, Ray? Before this thing blew?” Johnson straddles his four-wheeler, his eyes flinty. “Lottie and I landed on the kitchen floor.”
“Shit, I thought it was a goddamn earthquake before I remembered, we don’t get earthquakes around here.” Boyce leans over to shake hands. “Glad you’re here, Stark. I got to get back and check on Nancy, she’s all banged up.”
What Ray knows about gas wells and what can go wrong is nothing. He has zero training on this type of thing.
“It smells like goddamn Oklahoma around here.” Shorty takes a long drag on her cigarette. Exhales and spits. “God dammit, will you look at that. It’s still going.”
Behind the fireballs and a screen of smoke, the rig pushes pipe into the ground. Two guys with hard hats, too far away to see well, run around the derrick, one of them pointing up at the scaffolding.
“The tanks over there by the derrick got condensate or diesel in them.” Johnson nods at a stack of crap near the tanks. “We got no clue what’s in them bags of chemicals.” He’s straddling his four-wheeler, his gimme cap casting shadow across his face.
“And Stark, I ain’t seen no one from Amick’s place.” Shorty shakes her finger at him. “They got them two young kids, you know.”
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