Tim nods, his entire body agitated.
“I don’t think my dad would sign something his brother was against. I just can’t sign it.”
“I can see that.” He shrugs and smiles his thin strange smile.
“You’re not disappointed? Don’t you get a bonus or something if the whole section signs on with them?”
“Oh man. It’s so much more complicated than you know.”
“Why didn’t you go to the meeting?”
Tim puts his palms flat against the table and stares at his beer. “I can’t stop thinking about what you said the other night. About omission of truth being kin to a lie.” He looks up at her. “I can’t stomach the idea that I’m like my dad. I can’t be like him. I’m not him.”
“What are you saying?”
“The DNR gave you an average of the levels of contaminate in the creek. They never showed you the individual data points from each water sample.” He pulls a sheet of paper from the envelope. “Look at this.”
A graph describes twelve water samples; in two of them the levels of benzene and hydrogen sulfide reach far above the safe drinking water standard, which is marked by a broken red line. In the corner is their address and the longitude and latitude of the creek.
Tim speaks quickly. “Those levels truly are outliers. Fisk could’ve just collected them incorrectly. That happens.”
Jackie stares at the graph and starts to feel anxious.
“They should’ve retested to be sure. How could you not tell me?”
“There’s a nondisclosure clause in my contract. I can lose my job for showing you this.”
“I feel so stupid. All this time I thought Susan was crazy, I told her she was crazy.”
“My parents rely on my paychecks, Jack. You of all people can understand that.”
“If something is a fact, you can’t pretend it out of existence. My god, you really are like your dad.”
“That’s low. Shit, that’s low. My dad never told us, he never fessed up. I had to figure it out by accident. I’m coming to you with this. It’s totally different.”
“You’re a real hero.”
“Come on, Jack, don’t be like that. You have a ton of choices. You’re smart. You can be a doctor if you just get it together and leave this town. Stop acting like you’re a victim to circumstance.”
“I liked you. Oh my god. I let myself like you.”
“What would you have done if you were me? Really think about it. I’m not sure you would’ve made a different choice.”
34
RAY STANDS AT THE window of his kids’ bedroom and stares past his dirt yard, past the garbage clogging the street’s storm drain, past the short spindly trees, up at the stars. You only see them when it’s dark outside. Marcus Wilson had told him that, the day before he died. He didn’t say what happens to the stars if a person moves past the known world.
The girls in their twin beds, their breath soft, their bodies surrendered to sleep, are so perfect they break his heart. He tucks Lilly’s bare leg back under the covers. He kisses Monica’s forehead. He prays silently that they will be all right. Before closing the door behind him, he takes one last look at their dark eyelashes, their serious, stubborn faces.
For a while, he stands in the dark hallway, listening to Camila tell her mom about the meeting. Her voice strains against the seams of the house, filling the room with a shotgun of Spanish. He doesn’t need to understand the words to know the real reason for her anger.
When the front door shuts behind his mother-in-law, he leaves the safety of the hall, pulled toward the light of the kitchen as if by draft. Pieces of Camila’s hair fall into her eyes as she leans into the dishwasher. Her hair has been cut in the same style—bangs, shoulder-length—since she was fifteen. He focuses on this. He tries very hard to see her as stuck in the past, because someone stuck in the past is someone partly to blame for the future.
He picks up a plate. Camila snatches it from his hands. “Don’t act like you want to help.” She puts it away on the shelf.
“Mila.”
She takes the broom from the corner and swipes at the floor. Her arm throttles the broom handle, her muscles defined against her skin.
“You’ve never once stood up for me like that, Ray.” Camila runs the broom under the lip of the cupboards. “Not one time.”
“You’d hate it if I got up like that while you were speaking. You don’t like the way I do things.”
The broom stops moving. Her stare is steady.
“Kimmy told me you left the bar with Susan the other night.”
Ray sits down at the table. He takes a deep breath. “That’s part of what we need to talk about.”
Camila’s eyes widen and her jaw drops. She leans against the broom handle. “You fucked her.”
“No.” Ray stares at his hands. Everything he once thought about the future shrinks to the size of a bullet. His voice is almost a whisper. “But I wanted to.”
“You wanted to.” She leans against the refrigerator and shuts her eyes.
Any hope Ray had held out that his wife might once look at him and really see something of his inner life, of the man he actually is instead of the man she has always wanted him to be, dies. Any hope that Camila will understand the seriousness of this moment and will find some inner compassion finally disappears. He moves quickly across the room until he is standing within inches of his wife. She still doesn’t look at him. He leans over, his arm resting on the fridge; his face is level with hers, willing her to make eye contact.
“You act like I’m not a part of this family.” Spit from his speech lands on Camila’s cheek. “I did everything you wanted—became a deputy, bought this house in town, joined the guard—because you wanted to belong, to seem American. I’ve never known what that means.”
“What were your great ideas, Ray? To be a rancher? To raise our kids without church? You like following my lead. It makes things easy for you.”
“I’m not a piece of furniture, Mila. You can’t just move me around when it suits you. Do you even love me?”
“You think sleeping with Susan Dunbar is going to help things between us? That’s your plan to show me how invested you are?”
“I don’t know what I want anymore.”
“You never did. Don’t pretend that life cheated you on some brilliant future with Susan because I got pregnant. You think this is what I wanted?”
“Do you love me? I need to know.”
Camila throws a plate in the sink. It breaks in half.
Ray heads toward the door.
“Don’t walk away from me.” Camila’s voice is quiet.
“I need some time, Mila. Give me a little time.” He shuts the door carefully behind him.
35
HOME FROM THE MEETING, home like all the other sheep, Susan ignores the dark house, ignores Chicken whining inside the gate. She walks. Faster, faster, up the hill, over the ditch, and across the field until she is at the creek. The beavers should be working nonstop. The snow melts. It makes a flood. The beavers repair their dams. They should be out plugging post-flood holes. They should be damming up the ditch, making a headache.
But they aren’t.
She paces back and forth above the creek. Fast enough, she can race her own thoughts. Fast enough, she can leave them behind.
Tick, tick, tick. Her dad’s watch counts off the time she is wasting, has wasted, will waste. Sixty seconds on the minute. Sixty minutes on the hour. People are born with the same amount of luck. Susan must have used hers up to survive the accident that killed her mom.
Susan scoops some foamy sand from the bank and flings it at the beaver dam.
“Come out,” she yells. “Let me see you.”
Nothing happens. Tick. Tick.
The eagle isn’t in the snag circling for fish, for her young. The scrub oak looks like it’s been gassed at the roots. And the water bubbles.
The crumpled contract in her coat pocket doesn’t make this right.
This remains a mess of someone else’s making, a mess that can’t be fixed until it’s understood.
Jackie doesn’t know, and the people who might know don’t live here anymore. They don’t live anywhere. And Benny Fisk and Danny Jay might know, they probably know, but they won’t say unless she makes them say.
What will you do, Susan?
Her dirty hand against her cheek doesn’t help answer the question. She hits herself again. Harder. Again. It doesn’t hurt near enough for someone who would steal someone else’s husband; it doesn’t feel like anything.
Tickticktickticktick. Life doesn’t change on its own. It stays this way. A tome of ticking. A tomb of ticking. There is no one on the bank, no one watching. She has checked. She should not be acting this way. She should not be acting. She should not be. Be aggressive, B-E aggressive. B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E aggressive.
The people in Canada were aggressive. The people in Canada defended their land. They knew exactly what to do.
This is not the journalist’s way. The journalist’s way is to stand on the sidelines, pencil in hand, detached, just the facts ma’am, but who is she kidding, she was never much of a journalist.
Her dead whisper to her through the trees: her parents, her unborn babies, her uncles and aunts and grandparents, all the old ones buried up top. She, Susan, is the only hope she has left.
The creek bubbles and pushes itself onward, through, around, making a mess of the beaver dam. She stares at it, thinking about what she will need. Anger moves through her, a force of its own making. She will need tools. And socks to cover her shoes, and that old Folgers can. And the Ruger. Drumbeats pulse inside her ribs as she runs to the shed.
36
JACKIE STEPS OUT OF the Skyline and night sears her lungs. Her hands shaking, her breath short, she tries to run, tries not to be slow, like something Tim would be, but her ribs ache and she finds after the end of a block that she has to stop. She walks in the empty street, past the hotel parking lot, over the bridge, muddy water flowing under her feet, bats hunting above. Soon she is out of town, onto the thin strip of dirt between Dry Hollow Road and an electric fence with fields on the other side. There is nothing and no one at her back.
A coyote howls someplace close and she is climbing the hill, past an old pump jack lifting its mechanical arm up and down, when the headlights of a car bounce past her. She jumps away from the road and trips. Her knees hit the thick weeds. Her elbow lands on a plastic bottle of motor oil. This is a good enough spot. She breathes the smell of dirt, her chest heaving.
For years, there had been a tube of purple lipstick, the exact color of Shorty’s, on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet. That was a specific Jackie had missed. Fay’s lace cape was a specific she had missed. For too long she has focused on the bottom line, on the end game. Devoid of scientific scrutiny, she has missed the salient details. The specifics that expose the truth of things.
On the fridge is the timeline she made months ago: when to brand, when to bring in the bull, when to push the herd onto rangeland, when to hay. By the phone are the shear pins that need installing in the baler. There’s a chunk of fence in the upper fields that’s down. Two hundred and three cows have been pushed to a smaller piece of home; the turnout date is still weeks away. And the creek cuts across their land with god knows what running through it.
She considers the coffee she made that morning with tap water, the showers she’s taken over the past seven weeks, the water irrigating the fields of grass, which her cows will eat. She feels sick. Jackie pictures Tim’s smug face. Her own smug face. She lies there and tries to breathe, but it’s as if another cow were trampling her. She rolls onto her back. The stars are cold and distant.
The same sky had been pale white one morning, all those years ago, when she woke not far from this spot, to the high-pitched call of Sandhill Cranes. Susie’s warm body had been beside her, their sleeping bags zipped together. Nearby were Stark’s pond and ash from the fire and some empty beer cans: their final campout. The next day she’d leave for college.
She’d roused Susan to see the birds before they flew into the white dawn.
“What if school doesn’t work out? What if I’m making a bad choice? I’ll be so far away.”
“I can’t see you making a mistake, Jackie. If you don’t like what you’re doing, you’ll change it. You’re entitled to a life of your own choosing.”
Jackie listens very hard and she can hear those cranes. She can hear her sister, saying exactly what she needed to hear. Susan had been so confident then, already engaged to Kelly, already a star at the paper in Junction, fleet-footed and full of ambition. The pump jack in the nearby field thrums and bangs and whines in an incessant robotic pattern. The deer and elk that winter in this field are gone. She once knew the names of every family who lived on this road but not anymore. Jackie shivers, cold. She doesn’t matter to this place. This would’ve been obvious long ago, if she had been paying better attention.
Her dad would agree that being outside, that having a sense of place, is a salve for loneliness, but she sees now, hidden in all those Sunday phone calls from him, how the land was never enough. She had been a fool to consider it was, that it could be for her.
Carefully, gently, she remembers the camaraderie of the early morning meetings on the hospital ward, the chaos of the hallways when she’d carry a list of things to do in her pocket and another list in her head, the racket and stench of humanity.
There was the man with the handlebar mustache and the bad jokes, scheduled for an angiogram. She’d read his chart and, terrified, excited, wondered aloud to her attending whether he’d been misdiagnosed, whether he might not have a pulmonary embolism. And when they had run the CT scan, and when she had been correct, the patient had thrown his arms around her, as if she had saved his life.
Her longing is palpable, and it’s not only from a deep love of science or wanting to do good in the world, but because it is simple. At medical school there are clear expectations. All she has to do is meet them. And if she fails, her failure is entirely her own.
She picks herself up and walks the hill. She takes it slow. She looks up at the stars and wonders about all the other constellations she has missed by staring too hard at the sun.
37
WITHOUT THINKING, HIS HEAD snapped shut, Ray coasts from his driveway, over the freeway, onto Dry Hollow Road. His hands shake. His knee bounces. He has been driving for ten minutes before he realizes where he’s going.
At the turnoff to Amick’s Quonset, halfway to the ranch, he pulls over onto the narrow shoulder. The derrick is gone. All that’s left of the well that kicked all those weeks past, the well that started everything, is a silver pipe sticking out of the ground and the flags above the sump. If it weren’t for the mess of his life, he could easily pretend that the fireballs had never existed.
The night settles in around him and all the unknowns about the future press against the window. The lights of town are far away. He longs for a drink. For anything but this darkness. He reaches under the seat, his hand groping the floor, hunting for a pint bottle or flask, forgotten somehow. He leans far forward, his face pressed to the wheel and he’s ready to give up and head back to town, to the Skyline where he belongs, when a white shape passes outside the passenger window.
Jackie Dunbar is walking slow, glaring at him, her face muddy, bits of sage stuck to her hair. The usual pinch around her mouth is soft. Ray rolls down the window and leans out.
“You all right, Jackie?”
“I could ask you the same.” Her eyes shine. “What are you doing up here?”
“I’m figuring that out.”
“If you say so.”
“You want a ride on home?”
She opens the door and slides in. For a while they drive in silence.
“Ray, I want to thank you. For what you did for Susie at the meeting.”
“It wasn’t much to do.”
“No one else did anything. I sure didn’t. I
think it was a very big deal.”
“Yeah, Camila thinks so too.”
“I guess she would. That explain why you’re driving around so late?”
“Something like that.”
“Well don’t expect Susie to lick your wounds.”
“Jesus, Jackie.”
“She’s too forgiving.”
“I’m not out to hurt your sister. You got to take my word on that.”
Jackie nods and stares at him, water in her eyes. Ray has rarely seen her so soft, so slack in her movements. He isn’t sure what to say.
“It’s a pretty night,” he says.
“I guess.” She stares at the side of his face for an uncomfortable amount of time. He keeps his eyes on the road. “Hey, Ray?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think my dad would want me and Susan to do with the ranch?”
It’s an easy question but Ray pauses, filled with renewed sadness. He can’t help but think of his own dad, who he never talks to, who lives out east with a new wife and her grandkids to dote on. Ray had promised to never leave his daughters and what the hell is this drive up the road, away from them, if not this most basic pledge broken. He collapses against the seat.
“He’d want what’s best for you girls. That’s all he’d want.”
It’s true and it’s not true. Ray tries and fails to imagine what his own dad might want for him, unclear since the man rarely visits or calls, a pattern made deep his whole life. And Ray knows what he wants for his own daughters is everything, the best of course, but what is the best? Is it best for him to stay at the house, a sliver of a man? It occurs to him that his own dad might once have felt this same confusion and the thought fills him with more heaviness.
“Hey, Ray?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry for asking you to stop working for us. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“I think you just wanted to protect your sister.”
“I was wrong.”
“You’re just human, Jackie. We’re all just making this up, best we know how.”
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