by Alyson Hagy
“You keep him away from me, that’s what you need to do. Right now.”
Adams unclamped his teeth, thinking that might improve his hearing. His wristwatch said it was one in the morning. The television was a cold beacon beyond his feet. He’d fallen asleep in his recliner, or that’s what the magazine on his lap seemed to indicate. He was holding the receiver of the phone to his ear, though he didn’t remember picking it up.
“He’s been up here twice this week, and friends of mine saw him at the bar in Sinclair. Maybe you don’t know that. Maybe you think it’s not your beeswax.” The voice was female, fast and toothy. He didn’t … he couldn’t think who it might be. He remembered eating calf liver and onions for dinner. He could taste those on his breath. And there had been some sort of dream, a physical pursuit that was hungry and troubling. He hadn’t slept well since he’d gotten the merinos. Grogginess still had him nailed flat.
“Wake up,” the voice shrieked. “I ain’t kidding. He’s following me all over the place and it’s getting outta hand. There’s them’ll do something if you won’t. It don’t matter how brave he thinks he is. How he thinks there’s something to hisself when he drinks.”
Hobbs? Was she talking … could it be Sugar? Was it Sugar on the phone? He tried to unkink his neck to see if the Ford truck was in the yard, but he was laid out stiff in the recliner, couldn’t see a damn thing from there.
“He…. Is this … jail?” It was all he could put together on short notice. The woman and her voice were way ahead of him.
“No, this ain’t no jail or snitch. This is a Good God Damn Citizen telling you somebody you should be taking care of is off the rails.” She paused to suck in some breath, and Adams decided she was no drunker than he was. She didn’t breathe like a drunk. “Tell him what I said. Tell him to leave me the hell alone.” And she hung up.
He held onto the phone long after he needed to. It kept talking at him—errrrr, errrrr, errrrr. He rubbed his face and stared at the haft of moonlight that stood guard between the imperfectly closed window curtains and tried to assemble what he knew. It was April. Close to lambing time. There were inoculations to give. Bills to pay. He’d sent Hobbs to the bank in Rawlins that afternoon, but Hobbs had been back by sundown. They’d been together every day since the sheep arrived, utterly busy except at night, and who knew how either of them made it through one of those.
Could Hobbs be tomcatting at night?
Tell him…. Tell him. … This was a new responsibility. It had been decades since he’d had to protect C.D. Hobbs from anybody outside his own family. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say, how something like this got addressed. But address it he would. He rubbed the distant mask of his face again, then studied the dissolved edges of the room and all its furniture. He knew what the room would tell him. The room would tell him what it had told him before: he had to take care of C.D. Hobbs. Without Hobbs, this was it right here, all there ever was day after day after day—a box and him inside it.
He fed the horses well before dawn, then turned them out into the hoof-chewed paddock that smelled of frost and stone. He could just make out the shape of Bell Butte as it rose above the roofline of the house. It looked like a black-handled reef awash in the light of the fading stars. He made himself go into the machine shed, and he made himself knock on Hobbs’s door. There was no answer. When he pushed open the door, the dogs Zeke and Dan unfurled themselves from the camp bed and came to nudge at his boots. There was no sign of Hobbs, or Rain, although the Mexican blanket on the bed had been carefully folded across the foot of Hobbs’s sleeping bag. The harder part came when he discovered that the old flatbed International that had once been their ditching truck was no longer parked on the east side of the barn.
So, that was it. Hobbs had gone off into the night after Sugar and her friends, whether he was welcome or not. The knowledge of Hobbs’s capering and drinking dried itself like rawhide around his gullet and jaw.
He wasn’t given much time to suffer in his worries. He took his shepherd’s crook and the two ignorant dogs and moved into the cold cave of the day, hoping that motion, a walk to survey his modest holdings, would ease his thoughts. The pasture that held the merinos was still white with a few crusts of snow, but it didn’t take him long to see the dead ewe for what she was. Her body was pressed against a stretch of woven-wire fence. Her belly was bloated, and her tongue was thick and gray between her lips. Her hooves had cut sharp crescents in the ground as they spasmed. There was no blood, so Adams knew she hadn’t been taken down by coyotes. It was likely she’d gone septic from a dead lamb. Her loss was unfortunate, but not unusual. That was how he was thinking before he found the second one.
She was on a slope east of the feed troughs. She wasn’t bloated. Instead, she appeared desiccated, her hide furrowed with signs of dehydration. Birds had eaten at her upward facing eye while she was still alive, leaving ants a hole into the ripe skull beneath. Adams glanced overhead for the soaring scrap of a raven, then back at a carcass the dogs wouldn’t even sniff. The remaining ewes seemed unperturbed. They migrated into the golden bays of sunlight that began to pool across his mottled field, grazing with their usual single-minded efficiency. Adams put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. When he had both dogs at his feet, he had to keep himself from etching the hour and the date in his calamitous memory. For more than two weeks, he and Hobbs had had a ranch operation that was right and lucky. He was not ready to mark this moment as the beginning of its inevitable demise. He just wasn’t.
He cast the dogs in wide, sweeping arcs and limped his way to the gate that led toward the corrals. He pressed his feet hard against the rolls of flannel he used to fill out the ends of his boots where he no longer had toes. He would need all of his quickness, all of his balance, to pen the herd on his own. But he could do it. He had done it before many, many times, even in storms that left him deaf and blind. As the ewes began to bellow and bunch and turn in response to the prodding of the dogs, he unlatched the field gate and let it swing wide. He gripped his crook in both hands. The morning wind swept toward him, and into him, from the mallow crest of Powder Rim, and he let the wind fill him like a sail. He closed his eyes so hard he could feel his pulse thrum against their lids. He could do it again, he could, he could. He needed no soul other than his own, no friend, no partner, to work this perfect thing.
But the dogs had been unevenly trained, and the merinos didn’t yet know the layout of his ranch. They came at the gate like they didn’t see it. Zeke moved off the heels of a lagging ewe and thrust himself in front of her, nipping at her tender chin. This corked the movement of the herd, so Adams waded into the confusion with his crook held high. He shouted encouragement, he cajoled, he spooked Zeke back into position with a swing of his crook, and it all worked well enough until he tried to high-step free of the chaos. He’d just hooked the haunch of a blundering ewe from behind when he fell. And though she wasn’t big enough to drag him, she was strong enough, and frightened enough, to yank hard on his shoulder. The tear went through his right side like the tearing of fine cloth. The pain came right after.
He lay on the ground as his livestock bucked and farted its way past his aching head. The dogs were good enough to finish the job he had started; they pressed all forty-eight remaining ewes into the corral. He got to his feet, careful to pin his arm against his side as if it were a broken wing. He latched the gate with his left hand. In better days, younger days, he would have been ready to joke about his clumsiness, if not his frailty. He’d been hurt plenty of times. But he could find no joke in his spinning mind. A real rancher never minded when his stock got the better of him—not as long as it only happened once in a while. All right, he told himself, you are a real rancher. This is not for pretend. Nothing that really matters has gotten the jump on you.
He hung onto the swaying gate for a moment, catching his breath. He watched the black blade of a scavenging raven slice across the carnation petals of a high-flying cloud. It was headed for his
dead ewes, damn bird. It hadn’t been slowed down or undermined by its instincts. It knew what job it was supposed to do. And so did he.
Once he’d swallowed some of his embarrassment, Adams examined the gathered herd and decided that some of his merinos looked good and some appeared as dazed and starved as the day they had shipped in. The fine spice-colored dust of the corrals clumped at their tear ducts and nostrils, making them all seem weepy, but he tried to make distinctions. He tried to think through the most pressing problem he had—the death of the ewes. Was there poisonweed in the pasture or some kind of fungus in the seed cake? Had the sheep carried in a bug from Oregon? He had so many questions—and no one to ask them to. Where the hell was Hobbs? Why would he stay away in the morning? He spent a short, throbbing moment appraising the two bucks that had roused themselves in response to the arrival of the ewes. Both had forage-green slobber matted on their muzzles and chests, and their blatting calls wavered with uncertainty. What ugly luxuries they were. They had no good reason to be in the world.
Hoping the situation might be one that had a simple solution, Adams gimped his way into the dry vacancy of the machine shed.
“C.D.,” he shouted. “I god damn need you, you know. I need you right now.” His voice roused only the sparrows that nested in the building’s eaves. They fled from his echoing voice like a handful of hurled stones.
The veterinarian was new to Baggs, one in a long line of doctors who served the area on rotation and never stayed for long. But she knew her sheep, and she was smart enough not to make promises. She took samples from the two bodies Adams had kicked onto the front loader of the big tractor and left elevated, like a raised dish of meat, in the ranch yard. She helped the injured Adams chute a pair of healthy-looking ewes so she could collect their blood and urine. She didn’t seem convinced the deaths were caused by a single ailment, some kind of epidemic barreling down on him out of nowhere.
“I’ve read….” The new vet paused, dampening her student impulse. “A Colorado fellow told me it’s hard for some breeds to adapt to the harsh conditions up here. Have you raised merinos for long?”
“Sixty-nine years,” he blurted. Then he had to correct himself and repeat the brief history of the Trumpet Bell he’d given her when she arrived. “It’s my first shot at merinos, I admit that. I can’t see what Colorado has to do with anything.” He knew he sounded like a maidenish old man who hadn’t eaten breakfast and who’d just had his shoulder torn loose, but god damn it, he respected the fact this child vet had gone to school way over at Iowa State, she ought to respect him.
Hobbs finally showed up behind the wheel of the backfiring International truck just before the vet departed. He was wearing a brand-new hat and shirt. He had another necklace around his neck. This one looked like it had started its life as a bicycle chain. The vet went over her assessment again, for Hobbs’s benefit—what they should watch for and how some culling, followed by injections of medicine they could get from her office might be their best option. Hobbs didn’t ask any questions. He suspended his wide mouth in an open, fluted shape while the doctor spoke. Adams stared at Hobbs, trying to smell liquor on him or at least the sweat of late-night dancing and its aftermaths, but he couldn’t detect what he wanted to detect—hints of guilt or ruin. Hobbs also didn’t seem particularly upset about the dead ewes. He was polite to the vet, cautious with Adams, but he appeared oddly calm.
“She’s nice,” Hobbs said as they watched the vet’s customized Dodge fishtail onto the highway.
“For what she’s selling, sure. Nice and smart and expensive as all get out. How’s the ditch truck run?” It was Adams’s way of asking Hobbs where the hell he had been all night. He did it with a shaved voice.
“Stops every few miles. Thirsty as a c-camel for water. Oil, too.” Hobbs squatted to look at the two lolling bucks through the warped slats of the horse pen.
“This herd doesn’t have to be a job for both of us,” Adams said, “in case you’ve got more important things to do.”
Hobbs answered with words as flat as the ground they stood on. “Nothing’s more important.”
“Then why is the telephone waking me up at night, filling my ears with news of your adventures? I can see how the partying might be fun for you, but I thought we’d agreed on something here. We got a business to run.”
“We have b-business,” Hobbs muttered, squinting at the dirty, placid bucks. “We have business. We have business.”
Adams felt the blood rush to his face. “Could you at least stay home at night? I don’t want somebody to hurt … I worry that … Jesus, I just want to say that I could use your help and attention with this sick bunch of ewes.”
Hobbs removed the new, unhandled straw hat from his head. His eyes were like split shot. “You don’t look so good this morning, F-fremont. You’re hearing all this news as bad. Has anybody ever t-told you that you see too many things as s-sick or bad? These sheep ain’t sick. I wouldn’t let them bring you any kind of disease.”
“What are you—” Adams stopped and held his breath hot behind his teeth. Listening to this version of Hobbs talk was like listening to somebody read from a torn and plundered book. Too many pages were missing. Too much failed to make sense.
“The t-t-telephone’s not about me,” Hobbs continued. “I don’t know what you mean by that. Where I go is not a place that’s got t-telephones. I can’t g-go very fast in that truck, but there’s a lot to see when I get up toward the sky. G-galaxies, p-planets, all that sort of thing. Th-there’s lots of nice parts in the sky a person can see if he knows how to ask.”
“Would you please—” But Adams couldn’t continue the scolding. Hobbs was obviously lying to him. He’d been gone the same time somebody was stalking Sugar. There had to be a connection. And the way he talked. Planets? Galaxies? Christ almighty, maybe there was just no hope. Maybe insanity was as inevitable as the arrival of summer. Adams dropped his eyes. He didn’t want Hobbs to see the belief that was fracturing inside him.
“Don’t w-worry, Fremont.” Hobbs stood, serenading Adams with his hingeless smile. “You look so worried. It’ll happen like it h-has to happen. You’re running sheep like you love to do, and you’re mad I wasn’t here. Y-you’re telling me you need more help. All right. I c-can fix that. I got a idea for that.”
Hobbs sauntered long-legged into the machine shed and soon sauntered out again. He held a black barrel lid in front of himself like a tray, and he began to circle the sheep corrals, pausing every few feet to touch the low wooden fences with his fingers. The sullen ewes barely reacted to his presence, but the young dogs yipped and whined and leaped at Hobbs’s flashing hands. He progressed deliberately, like a man laying out survey stakes. Adams knew what it all meant even before Hobbs ducked back into the machine shed to resupply. Hobbs was bringing his little friends out to play. He was setting them up as guards around their indefensible world.
Adams moved closer to the fence and grabbed one of the figures. It was a marine, barefoot, unarmed, distinguished by a face that was all eyes. It was all he could do not to hurl the figure to the ground. Oh, he’d been a damn fool to believe in normal deeds like tractor repair and kitchen floors and merinos. He dug the rough points of his fingernails into his callused palms. Normal never won out at the Trumpet Bell. There was no such thing as an undisturbed, healing life on his ranch—and he was no healer. There was truly nothing left of his home place except its name and its ability to skin men out like pelts.
Hobbs gamboled his way up the loading chute, the young dogs on his heels. Rain, meanwhile, curled himself into a dark comma at Adams’s feet. Adams watched Hobbs drive one of his larger figurines into the soft wood of the chute with the heel of his hand as if he were driving a nail. He felt each blow in the floor of his belly. He watched Hobbs hang what looked like a strand of shiny beads around the figurine’s tiny neck. “You don’t got to w-worry, Fremont. We all need a little more help from t-time to time.” Hobbs plucked two more shapes from his barrel lid a
nd slipped them into his shirt pocket as a pair. Adams tried to see who made up the pair: himself and Hobbs, Charlotte and Hobbs, Devlin and Hobbs. Each possibility riddled him with a different brand of guilt. He set the silvery, barefoot marine back on its fence post, its pained eyes aimed toward the setting sun. Hobbs balanced himself on the front edge of the loading chute and began to flap his old-man arms as if they were feathered wings. “It’s good, ain’t it, Fremont? Th-this is how it gathers. Things won’t be like they used to be. This is all the h-h-help we’ll ever need.”
“Been awhile,” the voice said. “I don’t get down there no more. It don’t feel right to come even when I miss it like a missing leg.”
“Steve?” he asked. “Steve Barnheisel?” Adams hadn’t wanted to answer the phone. He had let it ring itself out twice because Hobbs was gone again, had been gone since he’d cleared off his workbench, so Adams believed the phone could only bring him bad news. Plus, his shoulder hurt like hell whenever he reached for anything. Then he’d gotten mad at himself for being afraid of what the phone might tell him. Jesus god, he was tougher than that, hurt shoulder or no hurt shoulder. He’d lost another ewe that afternoon and had burned her where she died, watching her smoke like an untended skillet. His hands still smelled of gasoline. If Hobbs was already on his way to cuckoo, what did he have to be afraid of?
“Yeah, it’s me, the old fart who quit on you. Right now I’m living in a house the size of a wool sack. Mexicans to the right of me, Mexicans to the left of me, there’s a lot of Mexicans in Casper even when it’s winter. How you doing, Fremont?”
“I’m doing.” He produced words that rang with the conviction he knew Steve Barnheisel, neighbor and former hand, expected.