Hell's Bottom, Colorado

by Laura Pritchett

  The horses are back there now. She can barely see them huddled together, right in front of the small dark square that is her husband’s home. The colt is trotting wildly around the group, throwing his head in the air. He suddenly bunches to a halt and kicks his hind legs up and out. She remembers what it’s like to feel that way, the buzz of energy in her chest, in her throat. How she would shudder with the force of it, which was too much to control, her thoughts and laughter and love shooting off in every direction. She can recall the sensation perfectly. Her throat aches with its absence. Where once a joy swirled she feels a cavern, and though she does not know how to right herself, she is sure she has faltered, and how sorry she is for that. How incomplete she is now.

  Ben decides to dump the pieces of this calf beyond his cabin, near the gully. He’ll throw the head and hindquarters and body into the brush. The dogs won’t dig through the mass of sticks to get to the calf; and besides, the body will be frozen to the ground soon, then covered by snow. By the time everything melts, the calf will have decayed. It’s amazing, he thinks, how a life—laughter, arguments, little arms reaching out for him to carry her to bed—how everything ends up as clean bones. As far as he can tell, there’s nothing more.

  He looks up to find Renny watching him. Her head is tilted, her face soft—both of which are unusual enough to startle him. “I’m going to get Danny Black’s calf,” she says, lifting her chin, straightening out. “Before the snow starts to stick on the roads.”

  Ben nods and looks away. But once she’s turned, he looks back up to watch her go, his eyes following the one pink curler she’s left in the back of her hair.

  “Would have been a bull calf,” Andrews says as the other hind leg slips out of the cow and thuds down in the snow. “I bet a hundred pounder. She may be able to push the rest out. That big butt was the problem. Give us a push, Mama.”

  A waterfall of blood and yellow fluid comes with her strain. She relaxes and shifts her weight, then tenses. The rest of the calf slithers from her in a pool of membranes and blood and flops to the ground. A blue tongue hangs from the side of a small mouth, eyes open in a dead stare. Guts and the spinal cord protrude from the back part of the calf, and steam rises from them as blood seeps down and pools out into the snow. Immediately the cow tries to turn and thrashes wildly when she cannot break free of her halter.

  “Whoa mama, good mama. You saved us a lot of work by pushing it out.” Andrews gently tugs on the membranes hanging filmy-clear from the back of the cow. “I’ll give her a few sulfur pellets for immediate infections and then give her a shot of penicillin. I’ll leave a bottle and syringe. Keep her up here for a few days and watch her.”

  “I don’t want to lose her,” Ben says, running his hand down her rump. “She’s a good mama.”

  “She looks like it,” Andrews says from where he’s kneeling, putting the coiled razor wire back into his bag.

  “She would have protected this calf with her own life if she had the chance.”

  “Yes, I know.” Andrews is standing now, ready to go.

  “Leave the antibiotic in the barn, if you don’t mind,” Ben says, and then, winking, adds, “but if you want to get paid, you better leave the bill in my truck.”

  “Will do.” Andrews smiles and then turns, with a wave, toward the barn.

  Ben waits until he hears the truck start up before bending over to grab a piece of the calf in each hand. As he drags the parts toward a bench near the barn where he can sit and skin them, he considers how close this calf came to living—only a few degrees of circumstance. He’s learned this much, how so much of life is the precarious moment, the sudden event, the surprise that spikes out of an ordinary day. How the rest—the bulk of life—is necessary to absorb these little bits. Absorb them and heal and wonder at.

  They’ve been through the plains and the spikes of life together, Renny and he. It seems they’re still circling and connecting where they can, to do what they must, on the ordinary days such as this.

  By the time Ben is done skinning the pieces, Renny has returned with a sickly looking calf. She struggles under the weight of it as she carries it through the barn and into the corral. She kneels down in the snow and holds it against her as Ben rubs the hide over the calf’s head. With orange baling twine, they tie the largest pieces of hide onto the shivering animal.

  Once the cow is untied, she turns to sniff the calf, her nose running across the pieces of her own calf’s skin. Then she moves to where the blood has soaked into the ground, and her nose hovers there, twitching. She considers the calf for a moment, sniffs it again, regards it suspiciously. It steps toward her and lets out a meek bawl. She moves forward then, slides her tongue over the calf’s face and ears, and stands still as it teeters toward her bag of milk and sucks.

  Renny and Ben smile, catch the other doing so, and turn toward each other, still smiling.

  “At least,” Renny says quietly, “we can still do that.”

  Ben nods, then holds out his hand toward the barn, an invitation for her to walk with him. They move together to the bench where the remains of the calf are piled, covered with a thin layer of snow. Ben picks up the trunk of the calf by the head and starts for the truck. Renny follows, a hind quarter in each hand. They throw the pieces of calf into the bed of the pickup, then turn to face each other.

  “Wait,” Ben says, though Renny hasn’t moved. He wipes his bloody, orange-tinged hands on his jeans, inspects them, and reaches behind Renny. Gently, with the tips of his fingers, he takes the lone curler from her hair. She receives it with a good-natured scowl, starts to say something, then stops. He sees in her shrug what she intended him to, that she has no words that can begin to close this space. He nods his understanding and offers a sad smile in return. They turn, then, she toward the old farmhouse and he toward the truck, each ducking into the circling snow.

  A FINE WHITE DUST

  RAY’S HANDS SLIDE THE black, greasy rag along the barrel of his shotgun. That’s what he reminds me of, grease. His face and hair and clothes are greasy, like he’s been coated in a fine layer of oily dust. The only thing that doesn’t look like Ray are the soft white feathers poking through the duct-tape patches on his red down vest. His dark eyes spot one, the same feather I’m looking at, which makes me think he can read my mind. He pinches the white down between his fingers and pulls it out. “Damnit,” he says, squinting at it. “Let’s go, Billy. Speed it up.”

  Billy’s hurrying to put on his cracked tennis shoes, which are full of hay and caked with manure. His fingers look so thin, I can’t believe that one day they’ll be big like Ray’s, that a body can grow until it reaches such a size. That my body will someday be as big as Mom’s. I don’t know how bones get long and skin stretches and fingers thicken, and sometimes I wish we could just stay small.

  “Jess, you come too,” Ray says, looking from the feather to me. “It’ll be fun.” I don’t want to argue, so I pull on my old moon boots. Generally I only use them for chores, but they’re faster to get on because they don’t have laces and Ray, I guess, is not in the mood to wait.

  Billy and I follow Ray out of the front-porch door and into the cold. I cross my arms to hold my jacket tight to my chest because the zipper doesn’t work. Billy looks back at me and slows down until I have time to catch up, then winks at me as I jog along beside him.

  There’s a fine dusting of white that disappears when our feet touch it, leaving footprints of earth showing through the thin layer of snow. The sun should be close to setting behind the mountains but I can’t see it because of the clouds, and having the sun covered makes the whole world seem cold and gray, but in a beautiful way, like everything is just a little silver.

  We go through the back pasture and the wheat stubble, which the cows have been trampling, toward the empty irrigation canal. Billy helps me jump down. The canal is deep and narrow here, and frozen earth surrounds us on both sides, tiny ice crystals gleaming on the walls of dull brown. As we near the small pond, the cana
l gets flatter and wider, so we start crawling on our knees, then snaking along on our bellies. Ray points the gun ahead, holding it tight, moving with his elbows. Billy follows with his .20 gauge, and I’m last, clutching the cold earth close in order to stay low, because I don’t want to be the one to spook the birds. Though I’d like to. But I’m not brave enough, so instead I concentrate on the mist clouds I make each time I breathe.

  Ray raises his head, brings the gun up, slides his chapped finger to the trigger. Billy copies him, only his hand is smaller and browner and it’s shaking. There’s a long moment of quiet as they aim, quiet suddenly shattered, and I hold my hands to my ears as I jump up to watch.

  The mallards take off from the calm water, honking and slanting up into the frozen sky. Ray moves like a crazy-fast machine: pump, aim, shoot, pump. Billy just has a double-barrel, though, and he only gets two shots off in the time Ray finishes seven.

  But I’m mostly watching the ducks drop from sky into pond. Seven dark figures spinning down against a gray sky, spinning until they smack into the water. The rest escape fast, their scared, crazy noise growing dimmer as they fly toward the distant mountains, and I think, yes, that’s where I would go too, toward those blue towering peaks where you can hide.

  “Hot damn!” Ray says. “That was some good shooting.”

  “I thought the limit was three,” Billy says.

  “Yeah, the goddamn limit’s three,” Ray whines in a sissy voice. Then he says, “You go fetch those birds.” Which surprises me, but I guess I already knew that’s how it happened before. Because once I walked into Billy’s room and saw him sitting on the mattress on the floor, rubbing his small foot, which was gray-white instead of brown, and shaking so bad I thought he would crack apart.

  I watch Billy unzip his jacket and pull off his shirt as he kicks off his shoes. He’s facing away from me, looking at the floating ducks scattered across the lake.

  “Won’t he get cold? I say it real soft, hoping maybe Ray won’t even hear me.

  But he turns and squints down into my eyes. “Not too much, honey. Though we should get a good hunting dog, shouldn’t we? You talk Rachel into that, how about? Save your brother from having to go in there next time.”

  “Sure,” I say. But he already knows I’d love to have a dog, a yellow Lab to be specific, because they’ve got that soft fur that’s almost white. He also knows my mom will say no. No, because we’re saving every cent so we can move, so we can get on with our lives. Move to our land, build a new house, and get ourselves together.

  That’s why Billy is wading out into that cold water. His shoulder blades jut out from his skinny back. I think Ray is staring at those little triangles under Billy’s skin, too, and he says to me, but in a voice loud enough that Billy can hear, “Gonna make a man out of him yet. Don’t know who the father was, but he didn’t leave Billy with much, now, did he?”

  Billy hunches his shoulders and sucks in his breath as he steps into the water. When he’s in as deep as his stomach, my eyes blur, so I just see the colors—his tiny skin-colored back in this big expanse of gray-blue. He starts swimming and I blink away the water in my eyes so I can watch him, watch his little head and revolving arms.

  “Get the furthest one out,” Ray hollers. “Then get the others.”

  Billy swims from one side of the pond to the other, and by the time he has all seven ducks, you can tell how heavy they must be, because he’s struggling to tug their floating bodies to shore. Finally he stands there, dripping, handing the ducks to Ray. Ray starts whistling as he grabs them by their feet, holds up the bundle of birds, and eyes them up and down. I’m looking at the birds, too—at the wounds, how some are in the neck and some are in the chest, and how the blood makes its way down the glistening feathers and into the dark dead eyes. That’s where it pools before dripping down.

  When Billy’s got his shirt and jacket and shoes back on, Ray hands us each two ducks to carry. Ray and Billy carry the birds in one hand, their guns in the other, but I hold one bird in each hand, away from me, thinking how sorry I am that they were alive a few minutes ago and now their blood is dripping at my feet. I want to get home fast, but the ducks are heavy with death, slick with water and blood, and they keep slipping from my hands and thudding on the thin layer of snow.

  “Damnit,” Ray says when I drop another one. “Billy, give me your shoelaces.”

  Billy bends down and pulls the laces out of his shoes and hands them up, and I’m thinking, I was stupid to wish my mom would meet someone, to think getting a dad would mean things would get better.

  Ray says, “Now, I bet you two never had experiences like this before.”

  Blood from the birds soaks into the cotton laces as Ray ties them around all seven glistening necks. The other end he wraps around his hand. “Good memories,” he says and starts walking again.

  I’m thinking, poor Billy, those are his only shoes, the ones he’ll wear to school on Monday. He gets enough teasing already, and when the laces dry they’ll be brown with blood. But Billy’s just jogging along like that’s okay, shuffling his feet to keep the shoes on.

  By the time we get home, it’s pretty dark out and it’s started to snow. Ray stays outside to clean the ducks. As we go inside, Billy starts to shake and he hugs himself like he’s trying to hold his body together. Mom’s sitting in the living room, leaning forward, piecing together a puzzle that shows an old log cabin in a field of flowers below some huge blue mountains. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail and she looks so young, and I think maybe she’s right when she says she had me and Billy before it was time to be a mom, and that really she’d rather be our sister. Her hand is outstretched, hovering over the puzzle pieces as she looks for the perfect one.

  “You ought to hide those mallards, Mom. Only six allowed in a freezer at a time, and we got more than that just today,” Billy says.

  But she doesn’t look up like he was hoping she’d do. Her eyes scan the pieces and she says, “Ah, no one’s gonna come way out here and check. We don’t need to worry.”

  So Billy bonks me on top of the head like he does sometimes, then goes into his room to take off his wet clothes. I sit down next to my mom and pretend to look for a piece she needs. As soon as she fits one and I see her smile, I touch her shoulder. “Billy had to go in the pond and get the birds. It’s so cold out.”

  She’s thinking about this, I can tell, gauging how cold it might be, gauging if it was a wrong thing for Ray to have Billy do or not.

  “He had to swim with all seven ducks, and Mom, he needs a new pair of tennis shoes.” All of a sudden, even though I don’t mean to, I’m crying hard and leaning into her shoulder and I can feel her surprise, and I just keep gulping in air and the words keep coming out when there’s air enough to form them. “His shoes are so old, and I need a new coat and it’s so cold, and he shouldn’t have to be swimming, he’s not a dog.” I’m just pouring out everything, but I manage to keep quiet about the main thing I’m thinking, which is, “How come you never notice any of this?”

  Which is a good thing, because as long as I don’t say it, she’ll keep rocking me and holding me to her and saying “Yes, yes, you’re right. You’re all I’ve got” and kissing me on the head. I keep crying and it feels like I’ll never be able to stop until I melt and dissolve into everything around me.

  But then I hear the door shut and the crack and fizz of a beer being opened, and I lean against my mom and try to make it look like I’m just curled against her, taking a nap, and I try to even my breath and let the snot drip out my nose instead of sniffling it up, and I hold still. I can picture Ray leaning against the doorway with the beer in his hand, looking down at us. He says, “Ah, my two young, pretty ladies.”

  My mom is still deciding, I know. Is it worth it? After all, it’s nothing too bad, nothing serious, just a swim in a cold pond. I feel her body relax under me, so I know she’s made her decision, and I shudder when she does this, because I want to start crying again. I think
she feels me because her body grows tense and now she’s smiling up at Ray, probably cocking her head, trying to look pretty. She says, “Looks like Billy was wet and it sure is cold out. Isn’t there any other way you could get those ducks?”

  Ray’s considering, deciding if he should get mad, because he thinks Billy is a wimp, and he probably thinks one of us complained, which I did, after all. He finally says, “Nope. No other way. I can’t swim, as you know, because otherwise I would. Or we could get a dog.”

  She says, “Maybe we should, then,” and I smile, because that means that we will. But I’m feeling a little sorry for that dog, because he probably doesn’t want to swim in cold water, either. I’ll love him so much, though. Enough to make up for everything else.

  I decide that when Ray steps out of the doorway, I’ll get off this couch and run to my brother. I’ll tease him till he laughs, wash the blood from his shoelaces, have him look out his window at the falling snow. I’ll love him so much it will make up for all the bad that comes his way. But I know, like my mom should know, that it won’t ever be enough.

  SUMMER FLOOD

  LEX IS BACK IN town. This is why, no doubt, Carolyn has been dreaming of him, of his hands sliding into her jeans, insistent, pushing their bodies together.

  These dreams are simply her way of working through her fears, her understanding that she is growing older. She knows this. She knows that she misses that falling-in-love love, the first time someone leans forward and oh, God, demands a kiss kind of love.

  As she lies next to her husband, whom she really does love, she dreams of her old boyfriend reaching out for her. She is young and he is young, and the intensity that comes from youth and desire fills her pelvis and her heart. She wakes throbbing with the knowledge she is both in love and loved intensely. Then the pang of waking, of finding Del beside her. She is filled with an odd intense yearning, the kind of pain that refuses to dissipate, even now in the afternoon sun.