Kickdown

by Rebecca Clarren

“He was there.” Susan shrugs.

  “You got home awfully late.”

  Susan picks at the watch on her wrist, turning the dial backward and forward. Quiet fills the room, sucking all the air between them. Finally, she meets Jackie’s eye. The look that passes between them spans a decade. That Jackie couldn’t prevent this from happening is one more failure. She walks into the room and throws herself on the unmade bed.

  “Of all the husbands in this town, you pick Camila Stark’s?”

  “Nothing happened. Not really.”

  “Is he going to tell her?”

  “There’s nothing to tell. Honestly.” She spins away from the door and folds herself into her wooden desk chair.

  There is a bald spot in the rug near the desk leg. Jackie stares at that for a long time. What makes the Starks’ marriage work has never been obvious. They have no shared interests. They don’t laugh together. It’s never been a relationship Jackie wanted, but she has respected its durability. It has been something she could look to, to believe that relationships worked if you just worked hard enough.

  “Stop judging me.” Susan talks to her computer screen.

  “I’m not. I just—” She is unsure what to say to her sister’s back. There are sisters who share clothes, who share secrets. There are sisters who call each other every day. Jackie shivers. “Do you really think it can go anywhere?”

  “Remind me how many relationships you’ve had that’ve lasted longer than six months?” Susan’s anger sets her face at an angle, all her features bent.

  “Things don’t stay quiet in this town. People are going to judge the shit out of you.”

  “Well, that’ll be a change.” Susan shrugs and knocks on a stack of papers. “I need to work on this.”

  “We have to brand tomorrow. First thing.”

  “Fine.”

  Jackie gets up and gets out, slams the door, then stands there, listening. There is no typing. There is no shuffling of papers. Whatever Susan is doing in there, it’s not productive.

  Dad and Uncle Ellis understood one another in a way that never required much talk. The two of them worked the ranch together for thirty years, not one of them the boss. Uncle Ellis, the better cook, used to make dinner for them both, before heading out to the cabin he built by the creek. They shared the same shyness in groups of people, the same brown eyes, the same gap-toothed smile. They both loved fishing and chess, things they did together every single week. At Uncle Ellis’s funeral, Dad said he felt like he lost his left hand. Then he drank too much and threw up all over the bathroom floor.

  There is no one in the world Jackie knows better than Susan. She can read her moods better than weather coming over Mount Baldy. She knows, for example, that anger in Susan breathes with gills underwater, but that given a few hours, the anger floats away. She knows that Ray can act in many terrible, thoughtless ways before Susan will stop loving him. She knows that Susan will spend no time considering that Jackie will worry.

  But knowing and understanding aren’t the same. Why they aren’t closer, why Susan makes her own life so hard, why she would fool around with the husband of a friend, even an ex-friend, all of this escapes Jackie.

  She tries to back up from the situation, to see them both from a scientific distance, her sister inside the bedroom smelling of stale cigarettes, herself in the dark hall. From that place, it’s easy to see the journal articles she’s ignoring in the living room, the old clothes she has on, the empty place on her ring finger, the bruises and cuts from falling on the ranch. She doesn’t linger for long at this bird’s-eye view. To stay up there, to make connections between herself and Susan, to see the sadness left behind by their missing parents, puts her dangerously close to the pool of grief she wants to avoid.

  Jackie jumps away from the bedroom door and walks to the kitchen telephone to call Tim. She tells herself that inviting someone, him, on an outing is a demonstration of her innate strength and independence, of how she and Susan are different at the cellular level.

  Half the county are on their feet, yelling. Jackie joins in, letting the crowd drown her out. White smoke pours from the hood of Randy Pyle’s tiger-striped Escalade. Ricky Colton slams his silver Cadillac into the back fender, backs up and hits it again; the smoke turns black and rises above the families in the stands. The evening light of early summer is soft. The smell of exhaust mingles with the freshly-cut grass of the ball field across the road. Joey Arnet’s black station wagon, advertising his portable welding service, slams backward into Colton’s driver’s side, crushing the door, his wheels spinning in the fairground’s mud. A boy and girl, teenagers, stand beside Jackie, their hands in each other’s back pockets.

  She had left Tim a message, inviting him to come to the demolition derby, telling him she’d be there. Her voice had been upbeat, almost perky, a voice that didn’t belong to her but to the person she was trying to be. Again, Jackie scans the crowd, the beer tent, the trailer selling hot dogs, looking for Tim’s familiar wide back.

  A pack of kids jump off hay bales that someone brought in for extra seating. The women lean over smaller children, helping them eat their popcorn. All around her are men dressed like her dad, with their pearl button shirts and felt hats, who hold their mouths in the same sort of frozen way when they listen, their arms resting lazily against their wives’ lower backs. The crowd takes a collective seat, waiting for the next round. The sound dies down for a minute. The talk, spoken over cups of burnt coffee and cans of beer, is not much different than it has always been: the expected price for calves, predictions for a dry summer, high school baseball. They look to Jackie as perfect as the summer night, an extension of the life she knew when she was very young, before her mom died, when life was predictable.

  Jackie turns around, looking up behind her. Looking to see if maybe, possibly, Tim had gotten there early, found a seat but not found her. Instead, she sees Ray. Camila sits beside him, leaning in to say something. Lilly sits on his lap. Monica hops up and down, pointing to one of the smoking cars. They look contained and happy and immune to any outside threat. Susan was right. She, Jackie, doesn’t know anything about relationships.

  A beer will help. One beer and she will go.

  After she has collected her drink, and the sun has set, leaving behind a blank sky, she stands near the kids by the hay bales watching Randy ride up over the back of the station wagon, pushing it back. The two cars reverse and square off, then Randy pummels forward and clips the station wagon. She isn’t clear on why this is fun. Why this is looked forward to all year. She doesn’t understand anything.

  “Enjoying the best this place has to offer?” Tim’s voice from behind makes her jump. She spins around and seeing him there in the fresh grass, something small compresses in her diaphragm. Dressed like a hipster, in sneakers and a T-shirt for some obscure band, he looks out of place.

  “You came. I wasn’t sure you were coming.” She bites her thumbnail.

  Behind her, two cars sideswipe each other; metal slides and screeches against metal. The crowd is on its feet, cheering.

  “I’m here.”

  “I was a dick earlier. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I was like that.”

  “I like you. You know that, right?” He has to shout to be heard over the crowd.

  “What?”

  “Don’t make me say that again.”

  Something lightens inside of her and she laughs. “No one has a relationship talk at a smash-up derby.”

  “Fine, Jackie. Forget it.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way.” She grabs his arm and leans in. “Could we go someplace together? Someplace not here?”

  “Where?” The floodlights shine in his eyes.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She presses her arms to her sides to hold herself very tight, to wait to see what he says. “Anywhere.”

  “Hell yes. Let’s go.”

  They head north in his truck. Some terrible band she doesn’t know sings about logging camps and depression. The
lights of town disappear in the rearview. Outside, the odd hills rise up and down, interrupted only by sagebrush, an endless, unchanging landscape.

  “There’s nothing subtle about this place, is there?” She talks to the closed window. “All my life I never saw that, never noticed how the land here goes to extremes.”

  “How you doing, Jack?”

  “Fine.” She pauses. “I don’t know.”

  He shakes his head silently in the dark.

  “You wouldn’t like it if I laid it all on you.” She waits for him to turn up the music, to make a joke, to turn the car around, for any sign that he feels suffocated, that he feels like she does around Susan.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “It’s boring.”

  “I doubt that. I know you want to be all tough and self-sufficient. I’m not a threat to that, you know.”

  It’s quiet for a long time. She rolls down the window, letting the darkness come inside to swallow her. It had been hot for April and now is hot for May, the extreme of it another thing to worry over but in the safety of that darkness, the warm wind on her neck, she loosens her hold on herself.

  “I haven’t been sleeping.” Her arms tremble against the windowsill. “I wake up at night convinced a cow’s running over my ribs, its hooves crunching my bones. And in the dream there’s coyotes trying to rip apart my intestines. It takes hours for the adrenaline to leave my bloodstream. I just have this nagging uncertainty about all of my choices.” Her heart is beating fast. “I don’t know if I care enough anymore about becoming a doctor.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m mad at my dad.” She stares at the rubber strip on the windowsill. “I haven’t told anyone that.”

  A large steel hasp inside Jackie’s gut unlocks. Tears fall down her cheeks.

  “This is just a hard time,” says Tim. He pauses and stares at the road ahead. “I think you’re fearless.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You don’t give up. We have that in common.”

  “That doesn’t make us fearless; that makes us stupid.”

  “Nah. We’re pragmatic. We see the choices presented to us and pick the best one.”

  She squeezes his hand and listens to the tires as they turn onto a narrow dirt road that snakes through the canyon walls, dropping down, away from the highway. She doesn’t know what to say so she keeps her mouth shut, a thing she learned from her dad.

  At the Dominguez River they get out and hike across the boulders back into the red rock canyon, the moon casting a blue light across their bodies. After a half-mile on the well-worn path, they come to the lake, a dammed man-made thing that shines in the moonlight. Without saying anything, they both strip, tossing their clothes at their feet. Neither of them is the kind to wade. They climb to the cliff edge and jump, the cold a shock. Jackie comes up laughing at the first stars.

  Afterward, they lie out naked on the big flat rocks, still warm from the day. They’ve done this before, a million years ago. It’s a moment she would pick again and again.

  “How’s your mom?” she asks, facing him, their feet touching.

  “You want to talk about my mom right now?”

  “She was always nice to me.”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugs. “She still works at the Village Thrift. Her idea of a big night out is eating someone else’s chili. My parents’ life basically revolves around my cousin’s kids and the Broncos.”

  “They’re good people.”

  “It’s just too easy. I want way more than they can possibly imagine for themselves.”

  She squints at Tim as if to see him better. The moonlight glints off the water caught in his stubble. She climbs from her rock onto his and lies down beside him. He puts his arm around her and her head fits nicely into his chest. They lie on their backs, breathing each other’s air.

  He speaks quietly, seriously. “You know, you’re the only person who I ever told about that stuff with my dad. About my brother.”

  It comes back to her then, the secret she’d kept. Tim’s dad had fathered a son while he was in Vietnam during the war, a son he sent money to, but he’d never told Tim or his mom. When Tim had found out accidentally that summer they were eighteen, he’d been a mess, making her promise not to tell anyone, sleeping in his car. He was the first boy she had ever seen cry.

  “Thanks for taking me here,” she says.

  “I’m not such a bad guy.”

  “It’s possible you’re actually a good guy.”

  She kisses him, her tongue losing itself in a rhythm of its own making. When they break away, the need and want and dirty mess of her dark insides is on her face, exposed.

  “Even with everything you know about me, you like me, right?” asks Tim, threading his hand through her hair. He takes a long look at her.

  “Remind me. What is there to like about you?”

  “My winning personality. My moves.”

  “I don’t think I’m familiar with your moves,” she says, rolling over to straddle him. “You better acquaint me.”

  His touch is light, like he is mapping her body with his hands. The river moves westward and the wind doesn’t blow and the moon tracks higher through the night sky, the light of it seeping across their bodies.

  29

  THE CALVES’ HOLLERING IS a symphony of dismay. On the other side of the fence, out in the lower field, the mother cows bellow back at their young, desperate to be reuinted. The calves, black and white and red, pile against each other in the narrow corral behind the squeeze chute. Their snouts tip skyward. The irrigation in the lower field whispers at them: gogogogogogo. Inside the corral, piss hits the dust.

  Jackie is busy. She’s in charge. She sets out the vaccinations, the needle, the bander on the small table she brought from the mudroom. She plugs the branding iron into the outlet in the base of a post. Susan sets one foot on the lowest rung of the corral and rests her elbows on the third.

  The water in the stock pond has a reddish tint, and Susan can’t remember if that’s normal. Tina Krest’s goats had another stillbirth, and that is definitely not normal. Driving home the other night, the gas wells along the highway flared into the sky and it looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno.

  “What do you want to do about bulls this year?” she asks Jackie, which isn’t a direct question, at least not enough of one.

  “I set it up with Pete to bring one over two weeks from Wednesday.”

  “But what does that mean about next year? What will we do next year?”

  “I guess I figure one of us will stay on.”

  “I guess.”

  There was the time when she was sixteen and she had a note from Ray Stark in her back pocket, asking her to hang out after school, and when Camila had asked if she could come with, Susan had said sure. There was the time when Kelly had told her that if she ever cheated on him he wouldn’t want to know, raising a question Susan hadn’t dared ask. There was the time when Dad had told her not to tell Jackie that he didn’t want to have the surgery, when she’d agreed not to try to convince him otherwise. Even the other night, she hadn’t tried to stop Ray from leaving. She’d just sat there and watched him run.

  Her entire life has been a study in conflict avoidance.

  “You about ready?” Jackie asks.

  The answer is no, but that isn’t something Susan is going to say. Not today, when they have to brand one hundred calves in the heat of the afternoon without any help, because Jackie was too stubborn and Susan was too the way she is to call any of the neighbors.

  Susan tightens her grip on the fencing. She needs to get calm, to be gentle; the calves, they smell fear. Gogogogogogo, the handline sprays from its cheerleader arm. She climbs up and over the fence and down into the corral among the calves, their legs and tails knocking against her knees.

  Both Dunbars wear jeans and boots with thick soles, and tank tops with long-sleeved shirts over them, and ball caps they found in the shed. Jackie has on their dad’s old leather gloves and they�
�re too big, they’re certain to slip, but Susan doesn’t say a word. She pulls the bandana from around her neck up over her mouth.

  “OK, little calves,” Jackie calls from the calf table, her hand already at the ready. “Who wants to be brave?”

  Susan gets behind a small chocolate one, number 27, her body close against its butt. It’s best if they know it’s inevitable. Life isn’t about to hand anyone options. “That’s right, honey. Go on.”

  The calf hangs back, unsure, uninterested in leaving the herd.

  “Push a little harder, Susie.”

  Susan pushes her knees against the calf’s butt; it doesn’t budge. She places the flat sole of her boot against the hindquarters and pushes. “That’s the way. That’s it.” The mama cows keep bawling. The calf’s tail swishes frantically.

  “Don’t give them room to kick you,” Jackie calls, from five feet down the long, never-ending squeeze chute. As if Susan hasn’t done this before.

  Susan grabs the prod and whacks the calf, and finally the animal snorts and trips forward into the head gate, where Jackie gets it shut around her neck. They spin the calf table sideways, the calf pressed between the metal bars, and she kicks and rattles the cage, which is what a calf table should really be called.

  There is power in what a thing is called. Natural gas and clean coal sound like something benign, something safe. Call an activist a defender or a terrorist and the headline reads different. Free-range cattle evokes the life of a beat poet, the living easy.

  Jackie lowers the orange-hot brand to the flank, and sssss. Pale yellow smoke billows into her face. The sharp smell of burnt hair. The calf kicks and squirms against the metal wall and bellows, and Jackie picks up the brand only to lower it down a second time. Green shit leaks from under the tail, against the blue metal. It’s illegal to buy a cow that isn’t branded. There’s no choice here. This is the only way to be a rancher.

  “Dammit.” Jackie steps back, both hands on the branding iron. “I didn’t get the second brand in the same spot.”

  Jackie nominated herself to be in charge, to be the one to know. And she doesn’t know. She isn’t Dad and she isn’t Uncle Ellis and she isn’t Ray and they, the Dunbar girls, do not have one small clue what the hell they’re doing with these thousands of pounds of animals.