“I’ll make sure everyone’s safe.” Ray wipes a lake of sweat from his forehead. “It’ll be all right.”
Ray punches the button for the loud speaker with a shaking hand. He clears his throat, coughs.
“You are strongly encouraged to evacuate the area. Get yourselves and your families south of O road on Dry Hollow. Help is on the way.”
Help isn’t on the way fast enough. Far as he knows, the thing could blow at any minute. He jogs across the road to the rig, sticks his boot on the steel gate, and hoists his skinny ass over. Rocks the size of grenades fly out of the well bore, and pipes clang through the blare. They land in a rough arc three feet away. The wires blur and he swallows hard, but his teeth shake; they won’t quit shaking.
Keep it solid, Ray. Keep it solid.
“Where’s your safety officer?” he yells at a kid who is up on a ladder near the well.
“On his way.” The pad rat looks like someone caught in his first sandstorm. He jumps down off a ladder and falls on his ass. Ray yells over the roar of the fire, telling the guy to clear out, and the kid shakes his head no. Ray’s Glock is warm at his side. He won’t be the reason for another fool death. Again he tells the kid to leave. Again the kid won’t go.
Something explodes on the rig like a street grenade in Sadr. The taste of puke fills his mouth. His jaw gets tight like he’s going to flatten the entire fucking scene between his molars. The roughneck isn’t safe. He isn’t working to make it safe.
“You got to come with me.” The gun is out of Ray’s holster, not pointed at the kid, not really.
“Officer, what are you doing?” The guy steps back a few paces and trips. “Seriously, I’m just a grunt around here.”
Ray wants to break the kid’s fucking arm. He points the Glock at him then. Tells him to get on the ground, and he might be yelling a little too. He’s just trying to keep the peace around here and no one is helping. He locks his eyes on the kid and stares him down.
“What the heck is going on, Ray?” Ty appears out of no place, sprinting across the rutted mud of the well pad. Ray doesn’t bother to lower the gun. Ty stares at him for a second and then just stands at his side. Ty offers his hand up to the roughneck and smiles, like it’s pancake breakfast on Fourth of July. Ray watches Ty talk to the kid, feeling like he’s on the other side of a closed window. Slowly, he comes back, Ty’s hand on his arm. The Glock is too heavy; it clatters on the dirt pad. Ty whispers that he should get out of there and for once, Ray follows orders. The heat of the fire burns the backs of his knees as he runs to his car.
Ray drives a half-mile from the well, rolls onto the shoulder of Dry Hollow, and cuts the engine. He makes short work of what’s left in the flask but his head is still full of wasps. He never wants to move from this seat in this car on this shoulder of this road. His muscles ache like he’s been in a bar fight and he knows now that he’s had an episode and that he’s got to get quiet, get down with himself, stay away from people. The fire flicks across his side mirror. He stares long enough that the glow blurs to simple shapes. Eyes shut, the fire burns in there too.
It’s gotten late, that time of night where the sun escapes to someplace better. He bangs his head against the steering wheel, hard, three times. He pushes his fingers against his closed eyelids. He never figured on being the asshole.
Then he remembers the Dunbars.
He starts the car, a failure in uniform, driving south.
When the road turns to dirt he’s close, and soon enough he’s past the old rusted combine and tractors, past the creek where he learned to swim, until he is there. The pretty little place down below, Gramps used to call it, back when he and Bill Dunbar ran the two ranches as if they were the same place. Back when Gramps was alive and Bill was alive and that Iraqi kid was alive.
He rings the bell. He knocks. The poplars blow at his back. The mountains above make a white outline against the black sky. He rings again. The night crowds in on him; he shuts his eyes for a minute. Everyone everywhere is basically the same. They all want saving; they just need to know they won’t need saving from you.
He’s about to clear a perimeter of the house, to see about another way in, to do one thing right tonight, when the door opens an inch and an eye so light it’s almost gray, an eye he knows well, looks him over.
“Ray Stark?” She opens the door another half-foot.
“Evening, Sue. Good to see you’re all right.”
She holds onto the doorframe like she needs it to stand. Pink lipstick is like a gash across her mouth. The tube top is a strange choice for March, but it’d be strange on Sue in August: she’s gotten too skinny. Her arms dangle from her shoulders; her cheeks are hollows. She looks as old as he feels.
“I’m real sorry to barge in like this. They sent me up here to make sure you were all OK,” he says, apologizing.
“Ray.” Her eyes dart from his face to his shoes to the night outside. She bites her lip. “I don’t know.”
Camila used to say Susan had laughing eyes.
Camila used to say, Susan don’t take crap from any of them.
There’s a long pause while Susan sways from side to side. Her eyes do not smile. They don’t seem to take anything in.
“You OK, Sue? Anything you need help with?”
“Good luck with that.” She laughs, loud in his face, and this—more than the rest of it—gives him a start.
“Where’s Jackie?”
“I’m fine.”
He is trying to think what to say, how to make sense of what happened to the girl who was good equally at keg stands and grades, who used to make him laugh, make him feel listened to, who was always way too good for him, who left Silt, saying she’d never be back.
She turns into the hall and gestures for him to follow.
The wood paneling in the hall is cracked and faded. The living room where Susan leads him is cold and musty: nothing but a yellow TV tray in front of a tired couch, a television rested on an apple crate, a dog bed in the corner by the woodstove. He’d heard Susan had been back in Silt for months; she hadn’t exactly brought a feminine touch to the place.
Susan curls up on the old couch like a cat. She keeps twisting a big watch on her wrist, around and around.
“Those cows take too long.”
“Is Jackie out with the cows?”
Susan stares at the wall, as if thinking wore her out. “Mac and cheese sounds good. Do I seem strange to you?”
“Oh Sue, I could ask you the same thing.” He tucks a blanket over her shoulders. “Let me go check the fields.”
From the front porch he hears what he didn’t before: a cow bellowing, a dog barking. He stops thinking and jogs toward sound. He’s got wind in his shirt.
Past the hilltop, the Maglite beam catches the outline of a cow twenty feet away and he slows down. Ray hollers at her, tries to run her off. She doesn’t move. He yells and pinwheels his arms until finally she moves off a ways, far enough. There’s a lump. Muddy boots flopped on the ground.
Never losing sight of the cow, never turning his back on her, he runs to Jackie’s side. Her body’s twisted, her left arm draped across her chest. She’s pale, like she’s got milk in her veins. Her breathing, quick and shallow, makes frost smoke into the night. He should’ve been there sooner. He should’ve been a lot of things.
“Howdy partner.” He drops into the mud and snow. In the years since he’s seen her, she’s lost all softness, her body tall and straight. Her face, which set out to be pretty, has ended up caught on its hard edges. “Can you hear me, Jackie?”
With his mouth next to her ear he can smell the mud, and something else, something sweet. He taps her left shoulder. Circles of pink pockmark the snow under her hand. He taps again, harder. Her pulse is wild, her skin clammy. She moans. She blinks. Behind her, across the snowy field, there’s a streak of mud maybe twenty feet long, a handprint in the ground by her head. She’d tried to drag herself someplace.
“Shit. Looks like you were
made tough like your dad.”
“Not tough as the cow.” Her words are slurred and slow, but they are words, and they sound like more than he deserves. He drapes his crappy thin uniform jacket across her body and tells the dog to stay. She opens her eyes, her face breaking apart. “She died.”
“You’re going to be OK. I’ll be right back.”
He runs. Across the field he skids on the snow but doesn’t fall and then he keeps at it, fast as he can, and he hits the hill and slips again and this time he stumbles and lands forward on his bad knee but he pushes off the ground with both hands and takes off again. His mind is like one of those metal cages that the lottery people use to spin the balls around. There’s the hawk making a dip toward the river and the feel of Ty standing beside him and then there’s Camila’s heart-shaped ass. He’s going to start being better about things, like lifting weights every day, and maybe he really should try a shrink at the VA like Camila’s been nagging at him to do. There’s the car with the door still open but he doesn’t even try the mic because cell phones have never worked up here and so that might not work either and he just can’t waste another second, and then he’s at the gate and into the house, not bothering to knock, and to the kitchen and on the phone.
John rips into him. Says Sheriff wants to see him as soon as possible but Ray doesn’t hear the rest of it because he’s trying to tell him the mess of the now, so he just keeps covering up John’s words with his own until John stops for breath and Ray can explain. It’s too much time wasted with talk but John says he’ll get people out and Ray hangs up knowing it’ll happen. He turns around and Susan is there, inches away, hand over her mouth, rocking back and forth, her cheeks full of air.
No one likes bad news delivered on a tray of bullshit. No one deserves to be alone and afraid.
“You heard what I told John?”
She nods and spins and runs into the hall. Ray pauses, but then heads to the door, heading back to Jackie, when she comes out of a bedroom with a blanket.
“Come up there with me? Hold her hand?”
“I’ll make coffee.” She hands him the blanket. “I know how to do that.”
When he reaches Jackie, she’s rolled onto her left shoulder, her forehead in the mud. The dog licks at her face, whimpering. Her breathing has lost its pace. Smoke from the rig fire rolls up onto the mesa, and he can’t risk a trigger, can’t risk anything else. He sits down cross-legged with his back to the fire, his knees close to her forehead, and carefully rolls her onto her back and covers her with the blanket.
“I’m here now. I ain’t going again.” She’s shaking and her pulse is way too fast. She doesn’t open her eyes. Her cheeks and forehead are unlined, unscarred, a face vulnerable to life. He looks at her and goes cold with dread. Monica in a ditch, Lilly hit by a car, hurt like Jackie, worse than Jackie, and he, unable to help.
Out of his own fear, or hopelessness or panic, or maybe to offer proof that she isn’t totally alone, Ray starts to talk. He tells her what he remembers about her dad, how he was a class A rancher, the type made of barbed wire and leather. No one runs land and cattle like Bill Dunbar, Gramps would say. And Gramps, he tells her, never praised easy. She doesn’t answer, doesn’t say a thing. Cold seeps into his skin; he is shivering now but it’s not from the cold. He feels water sting his eyes. He keeps talking.
He tells her what he remembers about the pond on his grandpa’s land where they used to fish. About the time he found her pulling porcupine quills out of his dog. He tells her the stars he sees in the sky: there’s the big dip, there’s the little one, there’s Orion’s Belt. He talks about his kids. How Lilly is making up her own jokes now and how they’re terrible: why did the toothbrush want to brush the teeth? To clean them. Why did the toothbrush want to clean them? To make them healthy. He tells her how Monica is so quiet, how she’s shy around him, how he doesn’t know how to reach her. He tells her he has no idea how to be a good dad but that he really does want to know. That he hopes someday he’ll know more than he does now. He goes on and on; more words come out of his mouth than he would’ve guessed he knew, until eventually, at last, there are sirens, and then a light jumps across the field. He wipes his eyes dry, glad for help, ashamed to be glad.
Delores Holt runs up on those short legs with a cervical collar under her arm and a backboard. She checks vitals in her calm, steady way and then on three, they’re lifting the litter. Jackie’s eyes shut.
“Honey, you see Susan tonight?” Delores asks Ray as they scramble down the lip of the slope. She stares toward the house like she’s listening for a pulse. “She don’t make it to town much these days and I been wondering. My mom was tight with their people. Crazy don’t run in that family, it gallops.”
Small towns breed two different kinds of folks. There are those who don’t feel safe unless they know their neighbors’ business, like their tooth rot or if they go to the county dump more than twice a year. Then there’s the other kind, who can only stand living so closely knitted together if they keep to themselves.
“I don’t know much about that,” Ray says. Gramps was in the second camp. “You know how it is around here—everyone got their own special brand of crazy.”
“True.” Delores grins as they reach the ambulance. “You did good tonight, honey.”
At that Jackie blinks. She tries to say something and Delores gives her a hard stare. Ray leans in close and then he gets it.
“Don’t worry.” He pats her arm as they slide her into the back of the can. “I’ll look in on Sue.”
The bottoms of Jackie’s boots are small and caked in dirty snow. Before the dog can jump in with her, Delores has the bread door shut and they take off, the red lights flick on, the tires kicking mud.
8
SUSAN SNEAKS INTO JACKIE’S room as quiet as death, but no, that’s a terrible metaphor. She walks over to the edge of the bed, a fold-out couch really, wedged between two four-drawer filing cabinets in what was not so long ago Dad’s office, and stares at her sister sleeping. Ten days since the accident, Jackie’s cheeks are waxy, her cheekbones like mountains that have lost their glaciers. They say to Susan, look what you have done. Asleep, Jackie looks younger, less most-likely-to-succeed.
After Mama died, Susan would crawl under Jackie’s sheets and hold her little sister’s cold feet between her own. To stop Jackie’s crying, Susan read books. Entire chapters from Little House in the Big Woods. Nancy Drew. As many pages as Jackie wanted. Sometimes Susan made up stories about two pioneer sisters on the Oregon Trail. Dad was always out with the cows. In the mornings before school, Susan would brush the tangles from Jackie’s long hair just like their mama had. She’d pack them both a lunch, made sure they had a piece of fruit.
Jackie decided to be a doctor around then and Dad went all crazy for it. Dr. Dunbar, come clean my wound, he’d holler from the bathroom when he cut himself shaving. And Jackie’d slide down the hall in socks to fix him up with hydrogen peroxide and a Band-Aid. In those moments, it was clear that Dad favored his younger daughter; in those moments, Susan understood why. Being capable has always been the key to love. Susan grabs a broom from the kitchen and comes back to sweep under the bed, finding dust balls and tissue.
“Susie.” Jackie opens one eye. Frowns. “What are you doing?”
“It’s dirty.”
“Please stop doing that.”
“OK.” Susan pinches the skin of her inner upper arm until the pain goes away. Jackie shuts her eyes again, her frown as wide as the mesa. Another terrible metaphor.
“Did Pete come by yet to feed out?”
“Yes. I was going to tell him that I would do it but then I got worried I might do it wrong.” The dust is a shroud. The broom pushes it around but never takes it away. Susan sweeps, watching the dust fly.
“Stop sweeping.” Jackie says it the way she talks to the dog. “Please.”
“Fine.” Susan sets down the broom, lets it clatter against the wall. And then, knowing what Jackie misses most,
“I’m going outside for a walk.”
The ditch road is a mess. Snow. Cow pies. Mud. Susan might trip and fall off the narrow path and into the brown ice-water. She takes another careful step. Chicken follows her; he doesn’t trust her to walk alone.
She stops to rest. She is panting. She makes herself walk to the side of the mesa, to stare again at the proof of her failure. The coyotes have made ribbons of the dead calf’s skin. Guts hang from its belly. She’d dragged it here, almost to the mesa’s edge, to let nature take care of things. By summer, the carcass will be nothing more than a pile of bleached bones. Its hair looks so soft near the ears. Its little hoof sticks out like it’s ready to walk.
She sits down. The ground is hard; right away the cold seeps through her jeans and thin underpants. She is like a hose with too little pressure, no way to direct the flow. It wasn’t always this way.
From here, she can see the ranch as it used to be. All those hundreds of cows in the upper fields like flecks of pepper in a salad. Summers, the clover turned scarlet. The willows crowding the ditch smelled of wet, of relief. Push the cows through a gate and the dust, a mark of accomplishment, rose and drifted.
Everyone worked, all of them, almost all of the time. Mama, off in the summers from teaching at the high school, used to haul bales and move handline, strong as any man. Susan can’t remember her complaining about the long days, about the work. Your mother had the best laugh I ever heard, Dad always said that, but Susan can no longer remember what it sounded like. And she can’t help it—it’s not that she wants to think about it, but there it is, the hard turn to the right just before the overpass, her and Mama in the Dodge, on the way home from church, just before everything went wrong the first time.
The radio had been on. Shh Susan, just a second, he just said something about a late cold snap. If she hadn’t been talking, would it have mattered? And she can’t remember what Mama was wearing, or did she have her glasses on, and was she very annoyed with her in that moment, the last moment before she died? In sixteen years she never asked Dad, and now it is too late for that too.
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