by Callan Wink
He drank his beer and watched the deer that were coming out of the trees to the feeder near the hill’s summit. He leaned back and propped his feet on the golf cart’s dash. A flock of mourning doves came and settled in the grass, close enough that he could hear their chortling love warbles to one another. He noticed the deer at the feeder were looking back over their shoulders to the tree line. And then, a zebra poked its black-and-white striped head out of the brush and made its way slowly across the clearing as the sun set.
A zebra. It joined the deer at the feeder. The sinking sun burnished its flanks so it glowed like polished variegated copper. The deer were sad dead leaves next to its majesty.
He sat stunned, didn’t want to move, but then it was dark and the mosquitos came out in full force. He turned on the golf cart’s headlights and caught the zebra, its eyes like huge white marbles, before it disappeared. He drove slowly back to the bunkhouse, straining for just one more look, but it was gone.
—
Karl was on his porch scratching the red heeler behind the ears. James pulled up a chair and sat. “Well,” he said. “I just saw a random.”
“Yeah?”
“A zebra.”
Karl straightened. “You’re shitting me.”
James shook his head. “No shit.”
“Huh. I’ll be damned. We got a crew of hunters coming in from Fort Worth next weekend. That would be a hell of a way to kick the season off. Those ol’ boys would lose their minds over something like that.”
“You’d really let them shoot it?”
“Sure, what the hell else would you do with it?”
“I don’t know. Just doesn’t seem right.”
Karl shook his head, crushed his empty beer can in his fist. “I know what you’re getting at, and you’re off base. That thing you saw wasn’t a zebra.”
“No. It was a zebra. I’m sure of it.”
“Nope. Zebras are in Africa. That’s the only place. A zebra anywhere else in the world ain’t a zebra. See what I mean?”
“Not really.”
Karl gave an exasperated sigh. “You set these Fort Worth boys down in Africa and let them unload on a zebra, and then maybe I can see your point. That’s not something they’re worthy of. But here, in Texas? A Texas man is worthy of anything in Texas. That’s how I feel.”
“Karl, I was thinking, what if I stayed on through the fall?”
“What about your one-room schoolhouse and all that?”
James shrugged. “They’d find a replacement for me quickly enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be indispensible?”
“Shit. Indispensible don’t exist. God’s a junk man and he’s got spare parts to replace everything he’s ever made.”
“What if you have a family, children? My brother’s wife is pregnant. No matter what happens, that kid will never have another real father.”
“All sorts of ingrates reproduce. There’s nothing sacred about it.”
“I guess,” James said. “But, I’m serious, if I called and told them I wasn’t coming back to teach, would you let me stay on through the fall?”
Karl was using a straightened metal coat hanger to scratch under his cast. “I’m supposed to get this damn thing cut off in a week,” he said. “I’m tempted to go get a hacksaw and do the job myself.” He stopped scratching and leaned back. “Montana, why do you think men come here? The thrill of the hunt and all that? Bullshit. In olden times, when you were sick, you went to the doctor and he vented your blood to release the bad humors. I’ve seen men cry. Grown men with tears on their cheeks confronting the mangy old buffalo they’ve just shot. Tears of joy, mind you.” Karl waved his hand as if to encompass the yard, the ranch, Texas as a whole. “You’re here for the same reason as those Fort Worth boys. Even if you try to hide it behind something else. And, I’m going to do you a favor here and tell you what I tell all of them when they get a little drunk on the last day of their vacation and start in about how they want to come down here and buy a little ranch and just leave it all behind. Do you know what they say in the bar at closing time?”
“What do they say?”
“You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
—
James packed his things, and then stretched out on the bed. In a few days he would walk back into his house, his life. It would be stuffy after the summer’s vacancy. Her things would be gone—gaping holes in the closets where her clothes had been, the empty place in the toothbrush holder like an unblinking vacant eye. He felt like he deserved a better homecoming. Maybe he’d go to Carina’s first. They could sit outside in the grass under the cottonwoods. She would tell him about her summer school girls and he’d describe Echo Canyon Ranch in ways that made it all seem more spectacular than it really was. He wanted to tell her about the zebra. It was very important that he do it in such a way that she wouldn’t dream of laughing.
It was out there, the zebra, somewhere, moving through the sticky darkness. He imagined what the land would look like if you could somehow strip away all the brush—the mesquite and the cedars and the prickly pear and the madrones—to expose the animals. All the randoms. It would be like a goddamn menagerie.
Maybe there was a lion. If there was a zebra then it seemed like anything was possible. He hoped so.
If all was right in the world, there was a lion out there right now stalking the hills, eating deer and hogs to pass the time, but really hunting the zebra. Eventually the two would cross each other in the brush. The zebra would run, gratefully, and the lion would chase, and, ultimately, under the low shade of a live oak, the lion would feast on the zebra’s flesh before either one of them had to suffer one more indignity.
SUN DANCE
Rand spent whole afternoons sitting in his trailer, head in his hands, blueprints in rolls on the tables around him, the water cooler giving an occasional gurgle. Sometimes a shadow crossed the sun, flocks of starlings, coming down to perch, chattering in the trees.
It was early spring. When the ice had come off enough, he took his boat up to the Bighorn reservoir. He’d always liked fishing but now he had a hard time concentrating on it. After a while, he stopped bringing a rod. He’d pack a sandwich, a thermos of coffee, and a six-pack of beer. He’d fill an extra gas tank and run upstream against the placid flow of the river, hugging the soaring canyon walls, hearing nothing but the drone of the outboard.
When it was time for lunch, he’d nose the boat into a side canyon and tie off in the lee of a boulder to get out of the wind. After the constant noise of the motor his ears would taste the strange silence of the canyon, and Rand would feel for a moment that there had been a reprieve. He would sit perfectly still until something broke the silence—the boat rubbing against the rock, the croak of a passing raven, a fish jumping somewhere out across the lake—and then the spell was shattered and he’d unpack his sandwich and drink his beer. He’d stare at the wild striations of the sandstone canyon walls and invent lives for the four men he’d killed.
—
The crew leader’s name was Angel. He spoke perfect English. As was usually the case, he’d hired his cousins and brothers to work for him. They did block, concrete flatwork, and stone masonry. Rand had been using Angel’s crew for a few years. Always on time and dependable. He’d never found fault with their work. On the news there’d been a story about a contractor in New Jersey who’d gotten fourteen months in jail for hiring illegals to build a Wal-mart. There were sex offenders who got less time than that. If a man wanted to work, let him work.
Official company policy was that he needed a copy of a driver’s license from any laborer on his job site. Some of the licenses they came in with looked like they’d been printed off at Kinko’s. Rand would laugh and shake his head on the way to the copy machine. The guys would leave the trailer grateful. A man who was appreciative of his job made the best worker. Rand had figured that out a long time ago. And, ev
eryone knew that the Mexicans were the best bricklayers around. Theirs was a country whose history could be sketched out in the transition from stacked stone to adobe brick to rebar-enforced concrete block.
The weather that fall had been unusually bad—a foot of snow on the ground on Halloween day. By Thanksgiving, they were over a week behind schedule. It was a residential job, a huge stone-and-timber ski chalet–style house in the Yellowstone Club Ski Resort development complex. The owner was some sort of tech genius. He’d made a fortune creating apps. Rand was peripherally aware of what an app was. The guy wanted to be in the house by New Year’s, in time for his annual ski vacation. The place had a private lift line running up the mountain from the garage. Rand was pushing, paying out more overtime than he would have liked. Then Thanksgiving hit. The thought of the project being stalled for one whole day at this stage set his teeth on edge. Angel’s crew was in the process of building the large stone pillars that offset the main entrance, one of the final touches to be completed on the home’s exterior. He was supposed to give the owner’s representative a walk-through soon. If they could get the pillars done, Rand thought that the whole endeavor would have a more finished feel, despite the fact that the interior was still a mess of raw walls and floors and wires spewing from the Sheetrock.
On Thursday, none of the other guys were going to be working. If there was one thing Rand had learned in his years on job sites it was that you couldn’t fuck with Thanksgiving. There was the holy trinity of football, food, and booze to contend with. The electricians and plumbers and finish carpenters had knocked it off early on Wednesday afternoon. It was bitterly cold and supposed to only get worse. The next day was forecasted to reach zero degrees for a high. Rand sat in the job trailer all afternoon looking out the window at the house, those damn unfinished pillars. Angel and his crew had the stone worked up about halfway but there were at least two more full days of work to be done.
The more Rand sat and looked at the pillars, the more he knew they needed to be completed before the walk-through. He went out to talk to Angel.
—
The masons were gathering their tools. Their big diesel was already running in the parking lot. The sky over the Spanish Peaks was going a washed-out pastel pink. He stood under the scaffolding, hands jammed into his pockets, waiting for Angel to finish what he was doing and climb down.
Mexicans didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving anyway. He figured it wouldn’t be a big deal—that they’d want to work. They always wanted to work.
As it turned out, they didn’t want to work.
“I already told my guys to take the day off,” Angel said. “Sorry.”
Rand sighed and spit into the snow. “Shit, man. I was really hoping you would be able to make some headway on this thing tomorrow.”
Angel shrugged. “Gonna be too cold anyway. We should have heaters as it is. The mud isn’t setting up right.”
“I’d consider it a big favor if you’d come in tomorrow. I’ve got a walk-through coming up. These pillars. If they’re done the whole thing looks more done, you know what I mean?”
Angel shrugged again, he was gathering an extension cord, wrapping it in loose coils around his arm from hand to elbow. “Sorry, man. The guys already have plans. No one else is working anyway, right?”
“I’ll be here.”
Angel smiled. He was missing a canine, and Rand could see the pink mollusk of his tongue through the gap. “But, you’re the boss,” he said. “No days off for the general.”
“Okay,” Rand said. “Sure.” He kicked a little at a chunk of snow. “I understand.” He started to walk away and then stopped. He cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said. “There’s another thing that has recently come to my attention. Now, I just want to say that this is coming from the higher-ups, my boss, you know? I’m getting some pressure to verify that everyone on my job site is legal. I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying it could be an issue. Get me?”
Angel was still smiling. “I was born in San Antonio,” he said, squinting a little.
“Sure. I know that.” Rand nodded toward Angel’s crew, up on the scaffolding gathering their tools. “I don’t know about them, though. And, up until this point, it hasn’t mattered. I’m just saying that might change.”
Angel nodded slowly. “And if we come in to work tomorrow?”
“I don’t foresee any problems. Can I count on you?”
Angel’s smile tightened. “Heaters,” he said.
“I’ll get them set up tonight, personally.”
Angel shouted up to his men, and Rand headed back to his trailer. He didn’t understand what Angel was saying but he could tell his crew was unhappy. There was rapid-fire Spanish, grumbling. One of them threw a shovel down from the scaffolding and it hit an overturned metal mortar trough. There was a hollow boom that echoed once, and then was swallowed up by the cold. It would be dark soon. An inversion cloud was forming over the distant peaks, a pewter sheet turned down over the sky.
—
When everyone had left, Rand bundled up and pointed his truck so the headlights were on the house. He felt bad about coming at Angel that way, but that was sometimes the way things had to go. Years ago Rand had thought that getting into the building trades would be a simple, straightforward, honorable profession. You made things with your hands, and at the end of the day you had hard physical evidence of your effort. You wouldn’t get rich but you slept well—sore muscles and a clear conscience, that sort of thing. That might have been true in the beginning. When he was a journeyman carpenter swinging his hammer for a paycheck things had been much easier. But, as it happened, he’d been good at his work, and he’d advanced.
He hadn’t done any serious shovel work or walked joists in years. He wasn’t complaining—he owned his own home, he had a fishing boat and his truck was paid for—it was just, now, at the end of a day, he had a harder time determining what it was exactly he’d done.
Managing people. That’s what he concerned himself with these days. It was tricky, but he’d discovered he had an aptitude for it. He didn’t have a construction management degree like many of the kids the companies hired now. He’d come up through the ranks and he thought the men respected him for this. He knew what it was like to work for an hourly wage, to actually do the work. He was familiar with the grind. That was something you couldn’t learn in college. Case in point, here he was, after dark—his truck thermometer had read minus seventeen—making a tent around the pillars and scaffolding with lengths of plastic sheeting. The plastic would retain the heat from the forced-air propane blower. The stonemasons would get the pillar done in comfort. The walk-through would go well.
Rand dragged the heater in place, made sure the propane tank was full, gave one final look over his work, and was satisfied. He was halfway home before the pins and needles subsided in his fingers and toes. It really was brutally cold. He’d go home and make a pot of coffee, put some bourbon in it. Crank up the woodstove. Go to bed early to wake up and do it all again, Thanksgiving be damned. Like Angel had said, he was the general. He had never once expected anything out of a worker that he himself was unwilling to do. That was fairness.
—
Earlier that week, his friend Sam had invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner. He had just gotten married and was irritatingly happy. “We don’t acknowledge Thanksgiving, for obvious reasons,” Sam had said. “But Stella decided to make a big old turkey dinner on Thursday. Just a coincidence, really. We’d love to have you.” Sam was laughing and Rand could hear Stella scolding him playfully in the background. Sam’s new wife was from Lodge Grass—a member of the Crow Nation. Her maiden name was Estella Marie Stabs-on-Top. Sam was a short, pale-blond Swede from Minnesota. Stella was a long-limbed black-haired woman of the plains. After their marriage, Sam and Stella had taken each other’s names. They were now, officially, unbelievably, Sam and Stella Stabs-on-Top-Gunderson.
“It’s for the kids we’re eventually going to have,” Sam had expla
ined. “It’s unfair, not to mention chauvinistic, to expect her to take my name. And, our kids should grow up having a fair representation of their heritage present in their name. I mean, Gunderson is only half of the story here.”
—
When he got to the site in the morning, they were already there, their radio blasting mariachi out into the snow-laden pines. It was the kind of brittle temperature that froze the mucus at the corners of your eyes, made your nose hairs prickle, made you cough if you breathed in too deep. Rand got the coffee going in the trailer and did some paperwork. Once, he looked up from his desk to see a string of elk emerging from the edge of the timber. They looked patchy and miserable, their caution lost to the cold, moving aimlessly for warmth.
At noon Rand bundled up and went out to check on the crew. He brought a case of Miller High Life. A peace offering. Angel nodded at him when he ducked under the tarp. Rand saw that they were making good progress.
“Warm enough in here?” he shouted over the radio.
Angel gave him a thumbs-up.
“I brought you some Thanksgiving beer.” Rand set the beer on a bucket.
Angel gave him a double thumbs-up.
“Okay. Good work, guys. I appreciate it, Angel. I’m going to take off. Make sure the propane is unhooked when you leave.”
Angel nodded and shouted, “Okay!” His crew had barely looked at Rand. He wasn’t sure how much English they understood, although it had always been his experience that they understood more than they let on.
—
Rand went to dinner at the Stabs-on-Top-Gunderson’s and had a good time. He felt a little guilty about leaving work early, but he had been caught up on his progress reports and would have just been sitting there twiddling his thumbs anyway.
When they sat down to eat, Stella said, “For the record, I have no problem with Thanksgiving.” She pointed her fork at Sam. “Who could argue with a holiday based on giving thanks for what you have?”
Sam shrugged. “I’m going to eat the hell out of this turkey, but I just want everyone to know that is no way indicative of me endorsing this gluttonous festival of oppression.”