by Chris Offutt
Joe didn’t want her to leave.
“Your kids?” he said.
“Yes. You have any?”
“No, but I like them. What’s their names?”
“Dallas and Abilene.”
Joe lifted his eyebrows.
“It’s where their fathers are from,” Botree said. “I lived in Texas for a while. Long story.”
“They’re good boys.”
“It’s nice you think so. Their uncles are hard on them, and Coop doesn’t have much use for lads.”
“I never understood people like that.”
“I do,” she said. “People who don’t like kids don’t like people.”
“Yeah, so.”
“And if you don’t like people, you generally don’t like yourself.”
“How about if you like animals?”
“I guess there’s hope,” Botree said.
“My daddy always said animals and kids were a lot alike.”
“That sounds like something a man would say.”
She left the room, easing the door shut, and Joe stared at the ceiling. The dull pain was deep in his leg like the ache of a mountain after the coal was removed. He ate four more ibuprophen. His father had died in a bed at home and Joe decided that tomorrow he would rise.
In the morning he asked Botree to stay after she’d changed the dressing on his leg. The wound was healing gradually, like earth set-ding on a fresh grave. Both legs had withered from disuse. He care-fully pivoted his hips to move his bad leg to the edge of the bed. Bending the knee produced an enormous pain. Breath blew from his mouth in a harsh gust and he squeezed the mattress until his hands hurt. He refused to look at Botree. He sat until his breathing was normal. Slowly he stood on his good leg, using the bed for balance, and prepared for what scared him the most—taking a step.
He tested the weight on his bad leg. It didn’t hurt as much as he’d anticipated. Encouraged, he moved his bad leg forward slightly, one hand placed against the wall. He stared at the six inches he intended to walk. He stepped forward and his bad leg buckled and he fell against the wall. When the pain subsided, he leaned backwards until he found the edge of the bed, and lowered himself to sit. Hours seemed to have passed, but he knew the entire action had taken a few seconds. Sweat trickled down his back.
He began the slow process of lifting his bad leg, leaning backwards, scooting sideways on the bed, and swinging both legs to the mattress. Botree moved to help but he waved her away. He lay on his back panting like an animal.
“You did good,” she said.
He nodded.
“You’ll walk,” she said. “I know you will.”
After she left he took more ibuprofen and slept. When he woke, the pain was worse and the wounds were seeping. He called to Botree, who changed the dressing.
“I hate you having to do this,” he said.
“It doesn’t bother me,”
“I don’t like needing help.”
“Nobody does.”
“Or owing anybody, either.”
“You don’t owe me nothing, mister,” she said. “I’m just paying off people who helped me already.”
From, outside the door came the sound of running feet, and the children raced into the room. They wore small cowboy boots. Dallas spoke while Abilene stared at Joe.
“What’s the difference between a lake and a creek?”
“A creek moves,” Botree said, “and a lake doesn’t.”
“No, Mommy,” Dallas said. “A lake moves. Just real slow. Only people who move slow can see it.”
Joe chuckled and Botree gave him a quick smile.
“I guess I could see it, then,” Joe said, “Nobody moves slower than me.”
Abilene whispered in his brother’s ear, Dallas looked at Joe.
“My brother wants to know if you’re going to die there.”
“Dallas!” Botree said. “That’s no way to talk.”
“It wasn’t me, it was him. He said it.”
“No,” Joe said. “I ain’t dying here. But I was wondering if you can tell me what kind of skulls these are.”
The children remained with him the rest of the afternoon, Dallas identified all the bones and feathers of the room, and labeled the variety of cattle outside his window. Abilene occupied a three-year old’s world that was wholly his. At six, Dallas was twice his brother’s age. They’d never be as far apart as they were now, and Joe tried to explain this to Botree when she brought him a plate of supper.
“Maybe that’s why you got a way with kids,” she said. “How you dunk’s not like most.”
“Most people don’t think.”
“I know, I been around them all my life.”
“Well, maybe I think too much.”
“There’s something you think too much about.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “But it’s there.”
Joe turned away too fast, driving a pain into his leg like a knife between the bones. When he turned back to her, she was looking out the window, allowing him the space to recover. He wondered if that distance was her own style, or the way Montanans were.
The next day she brought him a set of aluminum crutches and accompanied him outside. He felt the strain in his triceps and his wrists. The wing nut for the adjustable handhold caught his pants pocket and ripped the fabric, tumbling him against the wall. He asked Botree for something to cover the wing nut and she brought him a roll of black electrical tape. As he bound the metal, he recalled winding the same material around the barrel of the pistol he’d used on Rodale. It seemed like years ago.
He hobbled down a long narrow hall to a large room, with a fireplace and high ceilings. Beyond it was a kitchen and another long room that contained a table and chairs. The house was the longest Joe had ever been inside, very different from the cramped houses of Kentucky. Botree guided him through a utility room, where a washer and dryer stood beside a freezer, a row of hooks, and a large wash basin. They went outside through a side door. A breeze cooled Joe’s face, the first fresh air he’d felt in weeks. The light burnished the metal roof of an outbuilding, causing him to look away. They circled the house. He took small steps with the crutches, glad for the hardness of the earth. At home, the tips would have sunk deep into the soil.
They slowly climbed the slope to the top of the rise. Botree moved with surprising grace over the rough ground, her boots finding purchase where there appeared to be none. Joe followed on cow trails worn smooth by thousands of hooves. The country was hard, its beauty grim. He crested the hill and looked across a vast green valley specked with cattle. A band of water wound through the bottomland, marked by the rich green of cottonwood trees. Dark clouds dropped lines of rain to the north while sun in the south glared off the river and made the land glow.
Joe leaned on the crutches to rest, his armpits raw.
“What is this place,” he said.
“The Bitterroot Valley.”
“Nice country.”
“That mountain over there was named for my great-great-grandfather, one of the first to homestead here.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen-twelve. I’m fifth-generation Montana. Not too many of us.”
“Counting your kids, you all go through folks pretty quick.”
“People in my family either die off or ran off.”
“Your dad one of them?”
“He died after Mom run off. Coop was drinking hard. Owen left and I went down to Texas for three years. It wasn’t easy around here for Johnny,”
“Don’t reckon.”
“He’s scared of you,” Botree said. “He thinks you might want to get him back.”
Joe shifted his weight to look her in the face. Her eyes were neither hard nor soft, but regarded him with patience. She gave nothing away.
“I’m not mad at Johnny over it,” he said. “He didn’t know me so it wasn’t anything against me personal.”
She nodded.
> “It was a mistake or you all wouldn’t have kept me alive.”
“There’s some who think that was the mistake.”
“Who?”
“Just people.”
“What people?”
Botree adjusted her hat until its brim jutted from her forehead in a straight line. The action served to enclose her in a private space.
Joe backtracked rapidly through events, trying to learn what made him a threat. The only reason they’d want him dead was if he’d stumbled across something valuable. At home that meant coming too close to someone’s whisky still or pot field. Here, the ground was too rocky for marijuana, and liquor was legal everywhere.
“Up there in those woods,” he said. “I got too close to something, didn’t I? What was it, a gold mine? Or maybe you’re a bunch of gun runners. What is it, Botree? I know it’s something because Owen and Frank didn’t want me to go to a hospital.”
She turned her head to gaze across the valley. A rainbow formed beside the mountains as the dark cloud moved south, firing lines of lightning toward the water.
“Don’t getting shot give me a right to know?” Joe said.
“A right?” Botree said. “What do you know about rights? We got ten in the Constitution, and none of them cover somebody else’s business. I wouldn’t get into rights if I were you.”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Joe said.
“You don’t have to cuss at me.”
“I ain’t,” Joe said. “I’m cussing in general. I never cussed a person in my life. I just want to know what’s going on.”
“You got your secrets, too.”
“There’s a difference.”
“There always is when it comes to someone else.”
“I got shot over your secrets.”
“The fact is, Joe, they ain’t mine to tell.”
“Who, then?”
“Damn near anybody else. Owen, Johnny, Coop. Take your pick.”
“How about Frank?”
“Him, too.”
“Who is he, anyhow? How come he don’t come around?”
“He plays a lone hand.”
“Everybody out here does.”
“It’s the way we are, Joe. That’s what all the old pioneers came out here for. The mountain men first. It’s a way of being free.”
“Free?” Joe was astonished. “Freedom ain’t silence, freedom’s being able to talk. You all don’t say nothing.”
“It’s not either one,” Botree said. “It’s just doing what you want to do and not hurting nobody,”
“Well, I sure got hurt.”
“I know it. We all know it. That’s why we took you in.”
“Hell’s fire, the way you talk, I ain’t no more than a stray dog.”
Botree smiled briefly.
“In that case,” she said, “it’s a good thing I like animals.”
Joe stretched on his back. Sun followed the rain cloud along the valley, peeling shadows from the mountaintops as if lifting dark scalps. His face warmed. A hovering hawk was a smudge in the sky. His leg throbbed from the climb, but it was the pain of exertion rather than damage.
He picked pebbles from the rubber tread of each crutch, thinking that the crutch had not progressed in a hundred years. Someone could make a lot of money with a new design. He remembered Boyd’s ideas for inventions—a razor with a narrow blade for men with acne; hand tools with a retractable cord that fastened to your clothes. His greatest idea was a tire-changing tool that used the car engine to remove lug nuts.
Joe pulled his good leg beneath him and rose unsteadily, using the crutches to push himself upright. Botree didn’t offer any help. She showed neither pity nor sadness for him, only a kind of dispassionate concern, similar to how he’d felt about Rodale’s dog. He looked at her narrow back curved inside the man’s wool jacket. Her hair flowed over the collar. She was lovely.
“Botree.”
His voice was gentle and she turned to him. Her dark eyes were soft, her lips slightly parted. He wanted to say more but couldn’t. He felt like a child. He craved her touch, her smell. He turned and began his tedious descent.
Last year’s dead grass swayed above the fresh green tufts. Pasture fence surrounded the house while pronghorn grazed with the cattle on the upper slopes. Botree’s children waited at the bottom of the hill. Abilene was eating a spider in a casual fashion, as if raised to it. His brother watched without judgment.
“When we’re all dead,” Dallas said to Joe, “will there be dinosaurs?”
“Yes,” Joe said.
Dallas nodded slowly, as if the expected confirmation lent credence to a grand theory. Joe waited for him to continue, but the boy was distracted by the glitter of a button on the ground. Joe leaned against the fence. Botree joined him. Sunshine glowed through dandelions gone to seed.
Joe felt a contentment the likes of which he’d not experienced in nearly a year. He no longer missed Boyd and he didn’t feel homesick. What he missed was Virgil. He felt like a man who’d abandoned his religion without having found a replacement. The laughter of the children drifted in the still air. He glanced at Botree and away. The sky was a plank of blue between the far peaks.
18
* * *
During the next several days, Joe refused narcotics and endured the gnawing pangs of withdrawal. His appetite returned. Botree continued to care for him as she might an animal—providing regular food, kind words, the occasional gentle touch. Joe was bothered by his dependence, although he was glad of the attention. Every morning Abilene asked which was Joe’s bad leg and began pounding the other one.
Owen brought a checkers set to Joe’s room and beat him easily. Coop came by once, standing rigid and awkward in the presence of a damaged man. Joe never saw Johnny, an omission for which he wasn’t sure if he felt gratitude or disappointment. Rodney visited, smelling of horse and dog, carrying a six-foot length of rubber sliced from an innertube. He looped it through the handle of a window, tied the ends together, and showed Joe how to exercise his leg. He hooked his ankle into the loop and strained against the rubber, then shifted position and demonstrated how to strengthen the muscles of the thigh and hamstrings.
Each day Joe spent two hours exercising. He used a sock filled with number-four shot as an ankle weight and performed a variety of leg lifts. His knee felt stronger, but he despised the tedium of routine and wondered what bodybuilders thought about during a workout. He discarded the crutches for a cane.
Owen came to his room one afternoon while Joe was icing his knee. There was a change in his demeanor, a remoteness that Joe had come to think of as the Montana distance.
“There’s something we got to do,” Owen said. “I’ll be waiting in the mud room.”
“We going somewhere?”
“Not far.”
“Do I need anything?”
Owen shook his head and left. Joe maneuvered himself into a pair of jeans and hobbled out of the room. Owen led him to an old pickup that Botree called the ranch rig. It bore no license plate, and the dashboard was covered with paper and tools. The cab needed hosing out as much as the bed.
Owen drove the dirt road past the old bunkhouse to a barn. The scent of sage drifted along the fence. Several vehicles that Joe did not recognize were parked on the barren earth. Owen left the truck and motioned Joe inside the bam. Two pairs of ancient chaps hung on the wall, one as stiff-legged as tin pipes, the other a rotted set of woolies. He was enjoying the smell of hay and manure until he saw a man with a military rifle in the shadows.
Owen led him into an old tack room that still smelled of leather. Several men were inside, including Coop and Frank. The men were dark from sun and carried pistols on their hips. Their faces were serious, their eyes hard. Several wore Bills hats.
Frank gave a curt nod and gestured to a stool. Joe sat, his leg stretched in front of him. He propped the cane across his lap like a rifle.
“How’s your wheel?” Frank said.
“My what?”
“Your leg.”
“Coming along,” Joe said. “Stiff in the morning.”
Coop spat through a gap in the boards. “I used to wake up that way in my younger days,” he said.
The men ducked their heads and a couple chuckled. Light glowed from a dusty window with tape that covered cracks in the glass.
“Boys,” Frank said. “This is Joe Tiller in the flesh. He had the bad luck to lean against a bullet going past.” He spoke now to Joe. “These gentlemen have some concerns, and we’re hoping you might clear the air.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Joe said. “But I don’t know what it is you want.”
“What were you doing on that mountain?”
“Burying a possum.”
“Why?”
“It Just came on me to do it.”
“Why there?”
“No reason,” Joe said. “Highest point that was close to my cabin mainly.”
A man wearing military trousers spoke.
“It’s not that close,” he said. “You had to travel a ways.”
“It was easier to get up in the mountains there than right beside the cabin. Plus there was a road.”
The man lifted his hat to rub his head. A white scar ran across his scalp and ended at his ear, the top half of which was missing. Joe wondered why he didn’t grow his hair long to cover it. The man’s voice was low and slow.
“You ever in the service?”
“No,” Joe said. “Were you?”
The man’s face hardened like wet clay in the sun. Instead of answering, he looked at Owen, who spoke.
“It’s what you wrote on the shovel blade is why he wants to know.”
“I don’t get it,” Joe said.
“V.C.,” Owen said. “That’s short for Viet Cong.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Joe said.
“Then what was it?”
There was a rustling overhead and Joe watched a swallow leave a mud nest built against a rafter. Joe spoke calmly, without rancor or challenge.
“I can’t tell you,” he said.
“Why not?” Owen said.
“It don’t have a thing to do with anybody here.”
“Then tell us.”
“Sorry.” Joe shook his head. “It’s personal.”