“I don’t know what to do, buddy. What should I do?”
Chicken noses one of the cow pies toward her.
“Leave it alone.”
He whines and paws at her until fine, OK, she gets up.
One black rubber boot steps toward the edge of the mesa. She pulls it back. Time to go home. Each step takes care. There’s a rock. A fallen tree. Poison ivy. She shivers. She is a giant stick bug. Her coat is too big. Nothing fits right. Even the fat on her feet has melted away. She tried when Ray came. She boiled water. But he could tell it was her fault. Anyone could.
Life is never going to just happen to you, Susie, Dad used to say when he saw another report card. All her A’s lined up like perfect stitches in a wound. You go make the Dunbar name something people talk about. He told her that before he stopped talking.
He’d said the same exact thing six years ago, the day she left for Wyoming with twenty new reporter’s notebooks in her bag and a cheap gold ring on her finger. She stepped into Kelly’s truck as if life would roll out a red carpet, and all she had to do was run down it, smiling and thanking everyone for the opportunity.
Just a few more steps to the gate, to Jackie inside. The only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other. Dad wasn’t one for metaphor, but he did say that. She stares at her boots. They say, go make something of the day.
Inside Don’s Market, the vegetables cling to a small corner of real estate across from the end caps of cloth flowers and chocolate bars. Susan stands in front of the lettuce, seeing not the lettuce but the small sticker on the price tag that reads San Joaquin Valley. Perfectly good soil all around, and the produce here has traveled farther than most people in Silt ever do in their entire lives.
The grocery cart is stuck; the wheels aren’t working. She walks backward and yanks the cart. A forward push, and no, that’s still not right. She bends over until she is eye to eye with the wheels. They have probably never once been washed. Oh well. She stands up. She’s almost done shopping anyway.
Mama used to make meals of all the food groups. They ate together every night. Grain, vegetable, fruit, meat, dairy. She should get some bread. Milk. She should have made a list.
“Susan Dunbar, how are you?”
Susan turns toward the deep familiar voice. The voice she’s been avoiding. Next to the phone in the kitchen are several notes from Jackie that all say the same thing: Camila called again.
“Hi Mila.” The aisles are so narrow in Don’s Market. Like the spaghetti sauce might fall on them any second now. Ray would have talked. Camila must have heard how weird Susan was that night. Camila has always used gossip as currency, in trade for acceptance; she will have told the entire town. Try to smile.
“How’s Jackie?”
“She’s home now,” says Susan. She touches the blue sheet of paper in her pocket. Just knowing it’s there helps a little. “I’m taking care of her.”
There’s no reason for this to sound convincing. Her black rubber boots stare up at her from the polished floor. They tell her, you have no reason to wear anything nice. They say, you are lying.
“I’ve been worried about you,” says Camila, who is staring at Susan’s hair.
Her dirty hair is beside the point. The point has proven pointless. Try a pointed question.
“How are your girls?”
It works. The train switches tracks and there’s Camila, off into the mountain of herself. Monica is great at math but isn’t used to Ray being home. Lilly looks so much like Ray, you have to see her, it’s really been too long. She goes on and on about her part-time job in the lawyer’s office in Glenwood, about how well her mother is, about the new color she and Ray painted their bedroom.
She hasn’t changed at all. Still the big hair and the eyeliner over the top lid, the same almond skin that Doc Pitkin referred to once as Mexican. She is still beautiful. More beautiful than Susan. Not that it matters. Not that it ever did, despite all those men at the restaurant who asked for Camila’s section.
“You never call me back,” says Camila.
“I’m sorry. It’s just been so busy.”
Camila looks at her like she knows everything. Things Ray would have no idea about. She was always this way.
“I just haven’t felt like talking,” says Susan.
“Well maybe I have. You ever think of that?”
“I’m sorry.”
Susan touches her toes to the floor, one foot, the other, breathe, don’t look down. She can’t feel her feet. Don’t look down. Camila pulls her in for a hug. She smells like she always has, like lavender hair gel.
“I’m coming to visit. You can’t say no.”
“We’re really OK.”
Camila looks at Susan’s grocery cart. A box of Peeps. One potato. Mac and cheese from the deli in a Styrofoam box. “You can tell me if it isn’t.”
Susan nods.
“See you soon,” says Camila.
The dairy case is too far away; she can’t make it. Susan abandons her cart by the spaghetti and walks quickly out the sliding glass doors in the front. Back in the truck, she studies the crumpled blue paper, the list she made after her walk.
Stop thinking about Wyoming.
Make sure Jackie eats.
Put on lipstick and/or a clean shirt every day.
Listen to those relaxation tapes every morning.
Read the Sentinel at the library.
Finish Anna Karenina.
Dad would say, Good girl, I love a list. Kelly would say, I swear, you’d forget to breathe if you didn’t write it down.
9
“EAT THIS.” CAMILA, WEARING a tight pink cardigan, hovers beside the bed. “I pureed my enchiladas so they’d be easy to eat. Your daddy’s favorite.”
The green mush makes Jackie’s belly spasm. Her head spins. Pain tugs her under. She shuts her eyes and the room flips upside down. She is a paper doll, blowing in a tornado, which doesn’t make sense, which sounds like something Susan might say. She opens her eyes and counts to ten. Then she counts to twenty. Chicken whines from the floor beside her; he has been standing guard on her all day.
Pain is always in the brain. Pain is always in the brain.
The Vicodin is right there beside her in bed, but she’ll need water and then she’ll need a trip to the bathroom, which is seventeen steps away. It might as well be Denver. She holds her breath, tries to be still. When she opens her eyes Camila is still there, holding the bowl and spoon. “Eat, Jackita. It’ll help your spleen.”
“Spleens don’t grow back.” She could cry or laugh but she’s learned about the peril of emotion; it makes the hurt worse. “Listen, I’m fine. Just leave it there.”
Her spleen is gone. For the rest of her life, she’s vulnerable to sepsis and meningitis. She has three broken ribs; her legs and arms are covered in contusions. Everyone keeps saying how lucky she is, how much worse it could’ve been. She looks away from Camila, away from the bright light flooding through the window. Out there, snow is melting and new calves are being born. Three hundred and eleven cows on the ground, needing feed, needing care. And one small carcass that there is no reason to think about.
“Was Pete or Amick able to help us feed out yet? Any new calves dropped?” Beneath her broken ribs, fear rises in her chest like a real living thing that throbs and thrashes around. Their neighbors have their own ranches to worry after, their own calves to birth. They can’t keep doing double duty. “Is Susan eating? Is she taking her meds?”
“You rest, honey. You don’t worry.” Camila pushes the hair from Jackie’s face and moves a cool washcloth across her forehead. “Tim Layton called again. That’s interesting.”
Jackie shrugs. At the moment, to care or not care is a thing she can control. Whether to share her personal life with Camila is another.
“Was it fun?” Camila raises an eyebrow.
“I guess.”
“I could handle something fun about now,” Camila says. When Jackie won’t meet her eye,
she digs into a big red purse, pulling candies, a tampon, and tweezers onto the bed. With a handiwipe from her purse, she wipes the doorknob, then the TV tray beside the pullout couch. As she cleans, she rags on Ray, how checked out he is, how he could try more, drink less. She goes on and on.
Jackie can think of nothing but certain numbers. The insurance deductible, the inheritance taxes, the monthly payments on the second mortgage her dad took out, the max on her Visa.
Her future medical salary was meant to keep the ranch afloat. The “J. Dunbar subsidy,” Dad called it, when she proposed the idea at some point in high school. Never has that plan seemed more out of reach. She slips toward thoughts of medical school, of her friends there, of rotations. Stop. If only there was a stent she could put around the part of her brain that remembers Denver. There’s no use thinking about what she might be doing.
She adjusts her hip, a fraction of an inch, and her stomach seizes with a knife-sharp pain. Sweat pools at her back. Her dad must’ve suffered terribly at the end, worse than this, and there’s no chance he would’ve talked about it, complained. There was the time he hammered his thumbnail, the time he fell off the tractor and landed on his back. There was a regular occurrence of sunburns, rope burns and snake bites, sprains and gashes. Not once did she ever see him do more than wince.
Pain is always in the brain.
“Can you say that again?”
“I was saying how yesterday, I told him about how Pete and Lottie Johnson can light their lemonade on fire and Ray had no response.”
“Camila, I’m pretty tired.”
“Ray says we should mind our own business, that what’s happening to the Johnsons isn’t our problem.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s methane in their well. Tell me that doesn’t have to do with all this drilling.”
Camila crossed the desert when she was twelve after a garment factory moved to her town and ruined all the ranchers’ water. There were no protests; the drug cartels owned the factory. Jackie can’t count how many times she has heard Camila go on about the responsibility of freedom. The next Dolores Huerta, people called Camila, until Ray got her pregnant and moved her into his mom’s house.
“Ray sits on the couch with his beer all day. What am I going to do with him for three months?”
Jackie had heard all about it, from Delores, from Pete, from Susan. How Ray had pulled a gun on someone the night of the flare-ups, how he was somehow late getting to the ranch, how the department was doing an inquiry and had put Ray on forced leave. It was hard to believe.
In the bits and pieces of what she can remember, Ray had put his coat across her shaking body with great care. His words had been steady and kind. They’d been all that kept her there on the ground, away from the echo of her brain.
“Jackita. I have an idea.” Camila puts her hands on her hips. “Ray can come up here to work, to help with the ranch, until you’re better.”
“No. That’s too much. I’ll be out of here in just a few days.” With enough meds on board she’ll ride the four-wheeler, and with Susan’s help she’ll mend fences, and somehow they’ll get the irrigation in place and get on the tractor to break up manure for growing season. Pain is only in the brain.
“Cut the crap. Look at you. And your sister?” She looks at the bedroom door and lowers her voice. “Yesterday, she left the gate open and a whole bunch of cows got onto the road. They wandered all the way over to Boyce’s and he brought them home but anything could have happened. With all those new gas trucks on the road. Can you imagine?”
A dam breaks inside her chest. She swallows hard. As a general principle, help is not the problem. The problem is what comes from needing help: the waiting for someone to be mad that Jackie hasn’t been sufficiently appreciative, the worry over what is owed. If she needs someone, really relies on them, they’ll tire of her in no time.
“But we can’t pay him anything.”
“He’s on paid leave. Please. It would be a favor to me.”
Jackie stares at the ceiling and sighs. As a teenage mother, Camila managed to earn her GED and take night classes to become a paralegal. When people called her a whore, she joined the church choir and got herself elected treasurer of the chamber of commerce. Camila has been bossing Jackie around since she was nine. There is no way to say no.
“You are sweating, Jackita. Open your mouth. Take this.”
10
RAY DRIVES THE TRACTOR through Dunbars’ gate, over tracks made deep from years of use. His head feels like it’s bent sideways. The night before, he’d stayed up drinking in his truck, parked in the driveway, away from everyone. It didn’t help. He ought to re-enlist. Get the fuck out of here.
He idles the tractor and jumps down. The cows press round back, grabbing bites off the hay bales.
“Hold on.” He swings the wide metal gate closed, and as he gets the wire up and over the post it pinches his finger. “Shit.” His body is slow; it’s been too long since he fed out. “You’re stuck with me today, ladies.”
Get your shit together, Stark, Sheriff had told him when he served up the probation. His face burns remembering how Sheriff wouldn’t meet his eye when he turned in his badge. Ray’d left by the back stairs, using the door that the perps use. He’s been avoiding the diner, the Skyline, any place he might run into another person with a look on their face that makes it clear, Ray Stark is the butt of everyone’s favorite joke.
When Camila told him, never asked him but told him, to hustle his ass on up here in the morning, she talked long about neighborly duty, about Jesus, but he’s been married to that woman long enough to know when an idea serves her purpose more than God’s.
It’s not that he minds helping out. But only if he does right, and he wouldn’t bet on himself this morning, not one penny down. And no matter that Jackie and half the county feed cows alone, it isn’t easy work.
He’d been the first to get out to old Jonathan Pyle after his neighbor found the dead-ended tractor, engine still running, in a ravine near the creek. Center of his body was crushed like a beer can. He must’ve tripped, a piece of shirt got caught on something and that was it. The big rear tire had run him right down. That’s the way it’ll probably go: live through war and then die at home under a fucking tractor.
Camila won’t think any of that through; she never thinks it through from his side. How it might be for him to be doing all this for the first time since his gramps died and his dad, living someplace in Pennsylvania, without asking Ray, leased the land to some hobby farmer from Boulder. In the cool morning he turns the question over in his mind again: is she still in love with him? If she were, it seems she’d want to have more sex, that she’d care for him in the way she used to. All he’s ever wanted is to be good to her. She used to let him take care of her, to wrap her up on his lap. She used to look at him, really look. And caught in her gaze, life was just fine, better than fine.
Here goes fuck-all. He wraps the bungee from the steering wheel to the hood and sets a dead slow gear. Then he jumps. He stumbles and rolls onto his shoulder and he lies there like a goddamn idiot, staring up at the wide blue sky. Cows crowd around, snorting. One starts to shit right near his head.
“God dammit.”
The tractor is already halfway across the field. He gets there with all the quick he can and hauls himself onto the trailer in back. The pocketknife in his pocket isn’t there. He has to get off and go back for it to where he fell and there it is, covered in shit, but he wipes it in the field and gets his ass back on the trailer and finally, he gets to it.
He slices the orange twine that binds the bales. Womp. The flake falls off the end like a thing that can be counted on. There’s the sweet dry smell of the clover that grows good in this silty ground. He flakes it off the trailer like he’s done so many times, so many years back. Loose bits of hay rise and fall in the wind, blow back in his face. It isn’t much to do—it isn’t keeping the peace or saving the world—but those cows
do get fed.
By the time he’s done and gotten back to the stack yard and set the tractor right for the next day, he’s sweating like a fucking old man. The blue tarp cracks in the wind; he’s climbing up the haystack to pull it tight over the bales when he hears the sound of feet shuffling across the concrete slab.
Susan looks lost under her big sweater and scarf. He climbs down. Camila had told him to get Susan outside with him, Get that girl away from herself, but Ray sees fear in her eyes and he doesn’t care to push.
“Jackie needs you for something.” She stares like something wild and trapped and figuring his intent.
“You bet.” He touches her shoulder. “How you doing, Sue?”
She shrugs and starts back to the house. Her red hair flies from her hat. When Monica was a baby she used to grab that red hair, sitting on Susan’s hip, Susan dancing them around the trailer kitchen. Monica was a shy thing but Susie made that baby laugh, dipping her and holding her arm out straight. One time he and Mila had joined in, turned up the music. The kitchen was small, and they kept bumping into each other, all of them happy and warm and sure about the world and how it worked.
“I didn’t mean to, the other night.” She stops by the gate, not looking at him. “I’m sorry.”
He starts to ask what the hell she means, but she doesn’t give him a chance, just spins on those big-ass boots and walks away.
He enters into the bedroom like he might a courthouse or a church. Jackie sits up in bed; a poster of Colorado native trout is tacked to the wall. She’s staring out the window, a book in her lap. Her dog jumps up to sniff at him, and Ray gives him a good rub. She looks better than she did at the hospital, still pale but better. He can smell himself, his stink of sweat and liquor, and he keeps by the door until she tells him to get over and sit down in the plain wooden chair. He takes off his hat.
“I didn’t kill any cows this morning,” he says. “I guess that’s a start.”
“Well, you’re already doing better than me.”
Kickdown Page 6