Hell's Bottom, Colorado

by Laura Pritchett

  This few moments after falling, the pain unfolds inside her. Craze-producing pain. She needs to thrash with it, but because she cannot the pain ricochets back and forth. She feels like she is giving birth to a child, the same sort of twisting back-and-forth confusion.

  She vomits into the snow, feels her body throb as it brings up the contents of her stomach, and she’s able to lift her neck just enough to let the fluid pulse out of her mouth away from her. As she does, she is dully aware of Fury in the far distance, heading for the river, kicking and rearing at the saddle, which has slipped under his belly. Blue is running after him, barking and running circles in the snow.

  At least she is alone. She thinks this as she vomits again and then lies back down on her side and clutches at the snow, digging her fingernails into the hard-packed crust. Her children aren’t young anymore, not wailing beside her. She’s gotten them safely through childhood, and there’s something to that.

  She turns her face into the snow and bites at it, smashing her head down into the coolness, and as she does, she wraps her arms around her stomach like she did when she was pregnant. She can feel the precise source of pain now, not in her belly but in her leg and jaw and head, and soon it will subside, she is sure, and she will get up and somehow get home.

  This morning, she had been summoned by her son to the vet clinic, where he helps out after school. Jack had called and said a mutt was in labor and that they needed an extra pair of hands. Carolyn arrived just in time to see a deformed puppy removed from the birth canal, where it had been stuck in the cervix.

  “This one is causing all the trouble,” Dr. Andrews had said. He held up a huge, bloated puppy. Its size was grotesque, especially the puffy head and the way the swelling deformed the nose and mouth. “Hydrocephalus, maybe.” He turned and threw it in the trash can behind him.

  Two more pups were in the uterus. Andrews brought one out from the mother, who was splayed out and strapped to the table. He cupped the pup in his palm while he tied the umbilical cord, and then handed it to Carolyn. She received it in her towel-draped hands and watched Jack take the other.

  “Mine’s not breathing,” Jack said.

  “Rub,” Andrews said.

  They rubbed the limp bodies under toweled fingers, looking down at the soft, sleek eyelids, tiny paws with soft pads, ribs showing through dark fur.

  “Rub harder,” Andrews commanded. “They’re going to die.” He stuck a needle into a glass jar and suctioned a brown liquid into the syringe. Then he took Jack’s puppy, forced his finger into the small mouth, and gave the shot under the tongue. He moved so quickly, so fiercely, that Carolyn wanted to slap his hands and take the puppy away.

  But she stayed still, and Andrews pressed his index finger against the puppy’s chest and declared the presence of a heartbeat. He snatched Carolyn’s puppy and gave it the same shot. Then he stuck a syringe up the tiny nose and suctioned out amniotic fluid. Cupping the puppy in his palms, he thrust it downward.

  “To jar the fluid from the lungs,” Andrews said. “Now do it. Then rub. Rub hard.”

  So with the puppy cupped in her palms, Carolyn flung her hands and the puppy down. All she could imagine was brain slamming against skull. But the puppy wheezed, drew in a wispy breath of air.

  She can breathe, her heart is beating. She thinks of the basic human needs. Air. Water. Food. Shelter. In that order. “Ridiculous,” she whispers out loud, feeling more blood trickle from her mouth as she does. You need a heart to beat and a brain to function. Those things she cannot control. She hopes her body knows how to function, to keep on doing its own thing.

  The underbellies of gray clouds are puffing out huge, gorgeous snowflakes. She’s watching them, trying to remember what the midwife said long ago about letting the pain pass through the body without resistance, when Blue’s face appears above her, panting, his tongue dripping saliva onto her cheek. His tail is circling in huge arcs, and she wonders if he’s dumb enough to think she’s playing. Surely he must know something is wrong. She pushes him away with her right hand and closes her eyes. Pretend you are a wet noodle sinking into warm water, the midwife had said as she and Del lowered Carolyn into a bathtub. I am not a goddamn noodle, I am a goddamn lobster thrown in live, she hissed at her husband when they were alone. He had laughed, as she hoped he would. How strange, she thought then, that the human mind can still hope for a sense of humor, even when being both ravaged and dulled by the throes of pain.

  Blue is sniffing her crotch, at the wetness between her legs that has now turned cold. If he lifts his leg on me, she thinks, I swear to God I’ll kill him. But he only paws at her, his nails clawing into her side. She winces and tries to roll away. He slides his head under her hand, wanting a pet. Good God, she thinks. Even now something is being asked of me.

  She’s given and given. Given to each child and, for the most part, gladly. Giving hasn’t made her bitter or sad. She hasn’t been drained. Jack and Leanne—she has been granted these two children. They’re sturdy souls now, but there was a time when she waited for them to slip away from her, too, as her other babies had, the three miscarriages in early pregnancy. She was unsure of their essence, each time, until she held them wet and screaming in her arms. They’d lived such precarious lives inside her, she felt they deserved sanctuary in the world—she’d begged with the forces of nature to protect them, to lash out at her if need be, but to insulate them. And they do seem strong. Her Extra Hearty Varieties she calls them. They’re like winter wheat stressed by drought, which turns out stronger in the end, stronger and with deeper roots.

  Jack, in his last winter at home, seems to be turning cold. “I need out of here,” he accuses. Meaning, Carolyn knows, too many rules, restrictions, too much of a mother’s love. She understands, and still she feels betrayed.

  She was determined, when she drove to the clinic this morning, to find a connection, reestablish a bond. She’s felt recently that the pain of her son leaving her this time was too much to bear.

  The horse, she decides, will run to its pasture near the house. The kids will be home from school and Del is around doing chores. One of them will see the horse and investigate. Once she has recovered, she will tell them that she’d been checking to see if the calves had eaten the grain in the creep feeder. She’d been looking at the salt block, at how the cows’ tongues sculpted it, and have they ever noticed that, how smooth and hilly a salt block becomes? A bird had whooshed out of the grass, right next to the creep feeder, making Fury buck. The bird flew up as she flew down, and she felt its wing graze her hair.

  She reaches out to touch the air above her. The snowflakes have become smaller and the wind is picking up. She is so thirsty. She opens her mouth to the snowflakes and feels the air turn her mouth a sharp cold.

  This morning she was too hot, and she’d complained about the temperature at the clinic. Stupid Andrews, flinging those pups around. The limp puppies couldn’t bear such fierce energy, Carolyn felt sure. Saving requires softness. The pups had lived, though—opened their tiny mouths in noiseless mewls, stretched their necks sideways, searched for their mother’s teat.

  “There’s nothing like nursing,” Carolyn used to tell people, “to make you feel like a mammal.” After nursing Jack, she never regarded female animals without the knowledge that she and they were not so different. She could imagine mama dogs feeling puppies rolling around inside them for the sixty-some days of gestation. Cows must feel a calf’s strong hooves during those nine months, just like a human. She’s relieved to know she can remember these details. She’s relieved she has the memory of pulling a few calves herself, on afternoons just like this, cold and snowy. She’s relieved to know that her body could support a baby after all, that she has two, that she can remember their names. Her brain has not been thrown forward into skull.

  She is panicking, though. She can feel the surge of fear rising up through her body, her heart constricting. How, she wonders, does that happen? The heart is only a muscle. Yet it can open an
d close and tighten and relax, not like a muscle but like a sensation. After all, some hearts are strong and some are weak, and it has nothing to do with strength of muscle.

  “Shackleton.” She says the name out loud. Then a bark of laughter escapes her. Finally she is able to use this bit of information! If ever caught in a perilous situation, she used to think, she would remember Shackleton’s expedition. His tenacity would guide her. She’s delighted she remembered, delighted to be delighted by such an absurd thing at a moment like this.

  “They were in Antarctica, and they shot their dogs, you know. Just so the dogs wouldn’t suffer and starve.” She whispers this to Blue, who is lying next to her, panting. She looks him in the eye. “Blue, how about you run home and get some help?” He cocks his head and leans forward to lick her cheek. “Go home,” she commands. He rolls onto his back and wiggles in the snow.

  Survival stories. Here’s her chance to do what she’d imagined in a situation such as this. She searches her memory for brave and tenacious hearts. Into Thin Air. The Perfect Storm. Donner party. Ah, yes, that one about the two enemies trapped beneath a fallen tree. Stuck there just long enough to talk all their differences out. One can see, but the other has been blinded. They hear a noise, they rejoice—someone has come to save them! The one who can see lifts his head to look, a smile upon his face. Only it’s not rescuers but a snarling pack of wolves.

  You idiot, she thinks. That’s not a survival story, that’s a death story. What a way to go, torn apart by wolves. There’s a mountain lion out here; she’s seen its tracks. “I’m not going to be eaten by a mountain lion,” she whispers, rolling her eyes at the clouds. But this thought has given her the impetus, finally, to sit up. Because the snow beneath her is tipping and spinning, she squints at Blue until the sickness created by the revolving world subsides. He has leapt up and his tail is circling furiously. “Remember,” she tells him, “how you always peed in the kitchen?” It must be an unnatural sensation, this holding of urine. She keeps her eyes on the snowflakes on Blue’s nose, watches as they melt and turn to beads of water.

  She sees, when she is able to take her eyes from him, quite a lot of blood on the snow, which is packed down from cows’ hooves. Various crevices are filled with blood, a spiderweb of red soaked into dirty white.

  She takes the glove from her hand and presses it to her head, wanting to feel the sticky warmth she is sure is there. Her earlobe is cut, only partly attached to her head, in fact. But it is her jaw that sears with pain. Her brain seems fine, though. The first question she asked her children any time they’d been injured was, how’s your head? Protection of the essential.

  She imagines how she will be when she wakes tomorrow, safe in her bed. She will be frowsy-headed instead of taut, warm instead of cold. No whipping flurry. She rests her head in her arms and listens to her breathing. Hers will be soft, a very soft saving.

  Once the puppies were saved, Andrews had turned his attention to the mother dog, who had been drugged and strapped to the padded table. Her respiratory monitor beeped and the rubber bag inflated with each breath, which was, she remembers being told, thirty times per minute. Andrews told her this as he stood above the mutt, sewing the layers shut. First the uterus. Then the muscles, then the tissue between muscle and skin, then the skin. Twelve-pound clear nylon, made dried-blood brown with Betadine.

  As he worked, Andrews also explained about the surgical light overhead. It was made, he said, with special mirrors to prevent the shadows of his hand from being cast into the body, so he could see. Also, this light cast no heat, so his hands wouldn’t get hot. No shadows, no warmth. How strange it seemed to her that a light could be voided of its basic properties.

  She’s sobbing now. She can’t help it, can’t stay calm. Blue nudges her with his nose, whimpering. He licks the blood at her neck, and she can smell it too, the metallic salt of it, and the scent of vomit mixed with vanilla-smelling traces of shampoo in her hair. The wind is howling, blowing snow from the ground into her face. She twists so that she faces east, away from the wind and toward the direction of her house.

  Come on, she commands herself. Pull it together. She’s suffered and been fine before. Years ago when she curled up in bed and felt her body cramp and expel the beginnings of a baby—what had she done, then, to comfort herself? As she miscarried the babies, one before Jack and two before Leanne? She can’t remember. She only remembers whispering, each time, “Good-bye, baby. I would have loved you.”

  They moved the mutt to a blanket on the floor, and as Andrews wiped down the operating table and Jack loaded the washing machine with bloody towels, Carolyn stroked the dog’s ears as she came out of the anesthetic. Jack placed the two pups against their mother and they immediately nudged against her and suckled.

  Jack stood beside Carolyn and watched. He would blush and move away if she told him he once nursed in a similar way, lying in the bed next to her, his face pressed against her breast. So she did not tell him of the tenderness that seized her, for his grown-up self beside her, for that baby he once was.

  “You grew up with such speed,” she decides she’ll tell him one day. “Suddenly a spark of ornery attitude, with a girlfriend, keeping a quiet sad distance. The day I helped with the pups, the day I got bucked off Fury, remember? As I lay in the snow, I decided I was grateful that all that was even possible.”

  Something inside her feels like cracking. Her heart and head and uterus turned out good, but she knows she’d better do something soon. She cannot walk. She does not know what is wrong with her leg but knows from the pain that it will not support her. She begins to crawl, pulling herself toward the farmhouse. Blue is beside her, wagging his tail. “Shackleton Shackleton Shakelton,” she says. It’s been a long time since she cried from pure physical pain; she had forgotten how much a body can suffer.

  As long as she doesn’t look up and acknowledge how far she has to go, she is sure she can continue. She will crawl across the field, down the lane, alongside the barbed wire fence to home. She will do it by force of will, she decides, just as she willed her children into being.

  She’s startled when Blue barks, and she raises her eyes long enough to watch him bound toward a figure coming up the lane. Someone on Fury. She catches sight of Jack’s black cowboy hat dusted in white. He has seen her, has urged the horse into a gallop. She waits until she hears him call “Mom Mom Mom” before she sinks down. Then she closes her eyes to better hear the approach of hooves on snow, so she can focus on how it feels to have her son rush to her body.

  JAILBIRD GONE SONGBIRD

  HE’S NOT DANGEROUS, SHE says. It was just a drug bust and he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. Furthermore, it was just some marijuana growing by the side of the road, for God’s sake, and don’t our law enforcement officers have anything better to do with their time? Now he’s out and has to make a new life on his own, and I ought to try to be a little friendly instead of avoiding him all the time. According to her, I’m being very closed-minded and judgmental.

  “Grandma Renny,” I told her, “you’re always bringing weirdos here. But this tops them all.”

  “Leanne,” she said back, in the same whiny tone I had used, “when you grow up, you can live your own boring life full of safety and no surprises. Just like your mother. Carolyn’s always been like that.”

  Well, she just doesn’t see what I see, which doesn’t surprise me all that much, because she can be naive. Slade clearly is just not right in the head, and you never know what someone like that might do. For one thing, he has these blue eyes, so blue that they just don’t look right on a human—eyes that were meant for a dog or a cat or a wolf. But it’s not just that, it’s also the crazy look he has in those eyes. A wild kind of look, all intense, like he’s all wired up. Plus there’s his name, of course, which just doesn’t sound right. All this surface stuff adds up to something big underneath, I can tell.

  Just wait till he rapes me. Then she’ll be sorry.

  But even my grand
father, Ben, is getting to like him; I can see that. Says he’s a good worker. Slade has already cleaned out the barn, fixed the tractor, and helped pick up hay. Today they’re out building a new fence around the bull pen. I can hear Slade whistling as I walk down the lane to check on their progress, and I have to admit, it’s a pretty good whistle. It’s that “Delta Dawn” song, which probably makes Ben as happy as anything, since that’s his favorite song for road trips, which is always causing me to smile, because poor Ben doesn’t know how dorky it is to sing old songs when you’re driving along, especially when Renny chimes in. That kind of thing just cracks me up. But by the time I get closer, Slade has switched to that famous Mozart song, which we happen to be practicing in band, and which happens to be one of my favorites.

  He’s using the fence stretchers to pull the barbed wire tight as Ben hammers in the U-staple to the corner post, and I wonder if that barbed wire reminds him of the fence around a prison. I wonder if he ever tried to escape. When we get back to the house and we’re alone in the front yard, I take off my glasses and pretend I’m looking at them for dirt and dust, so that I don’t have to look at him, and I ask him.

  “Slade, you ever escaped before?”

  “Nope,” he says. “I served my time. I’m a jailbird gone songbird.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He says, “I’ll tell you a story.”

  Already I’m impatient. I don’t want to hear a story. But he starts up anyway, so I put on my glasses, flop down on the picnic table across from him, and stretch out my legs so I can get a tan.

  “I had this picture of my wife, see, in this locker in the jail.”