by Josh Weil
After a time, he dragged his sleeve under his nose and rubbed first one eye, then the other, with his palm. A shiver ran up his spine, shook his neck. He breathed in, long, stretching his lungs until they hurt. Then he rose and in the darkness felt along the frozen floorboards for his socks. They were as cold as the wood under them. He laced up his boots with fingers that felt barely attached to his knuckles, zipped his jacket, flicked on the flashlight.
He moved through the house, the beam finding pieces of linoleum in the dark, an overturned ceramic dog bowl broken in two, the worn wood stairs, until he was on the second-floor landing, facing the closed door to his father’s boyhood room. He stood there, fingers around the cold knob, holding the door shut as if the hinges would swing it open on their own. Above him, the old shagbark hickory scraped at the roof. He pushed the door open and stepped in.
His boot kicked something: metal, small. It rolled and rolled and then hit something else and stopped. The bullets, he remembered, had scattered all over the floor, spilled from the carton. Had his father’s arms flung outward? His legs bucked? Osby felt another under his boot. He picked it up and slipped it into his back pocket. Bullets glinted everywhere. He picked up another, and another, slowly making his way into the room, clearing the floor of them.
When his back pockets were full, he stopped gathering and turned the flashlight’s dim beam on the rest of the room: a few sun-spared light patches on the wallpaper where photographs once hung, a couple dust-dulled county fair ribbons, an old pair of shoes lying in a corner as if a boy had just kicked them off. Osby picked one up. It was so small it fit in his hand.
His grandparents had left his father’s outgrown clothes hanging in the closet when they had moved the family into the new house. They were spread out across the floor now: shirts, pajamas, pants, jackets. There was no mattress left on the bed, so his father had taken the clothes out of the closet and spread them neatly on the floor to soak up the blood. Osby had found him just like his father had planned, his shattered skull emptied out onto a wadded pile of young boy’s clothes.
Osby stooped down and touched a small, thin shirt. It was stiff with blood. He carefully lifted it off the floor, carried it to the closet, and hung it on a hanger.
When he was done, the closet was half full and the floor was clear again. The wood boards were still stained where blood had seeped through the clothes, still splattered where the bullet had blown pieces of bone and brain under the wire springs of the empty cot. The flashlight was little more than a faintly glowing bulb now, its beam near to dead by the time it reached the floor, hinting at glints of metal here and there. One of them, Osby knew, was the Ruger. The blast must have kicked the rifle across the room. He made his way carefully to the black mass of the wall, and then knelt down and rubbed his hands along the floor until he touched the cold barrel. When he picked it up it felt too light. It seemed to him a thing that had done what it had ought to be heavy, ought to strain his forearms. But it was just a gun.
The hickory shook against the house. Two gray squares had appeared in the walls where the windows were. Osby was glad his father’s room was clean. Standing there, his body loose and calm, he tried to think of what else he had to do. He shifted the rifle to his other hand as he walked out of the room, the sound of his boots on the wood floor disappearing after each step.
Outside, it wasn’t snowing anymore, and the sky was one dark slab of gray. The mountains were just dim distant shapes no more or less solid looking than the sky behind them.
At his own house, Osby dropped the Ruger on the kitchen table with a clunk. He didn’t care if the kid woke or not. He ran the water hard in the sink, waiting for it to warm up. After half a minute, it was still cold. He felt the iciness of it on his fingers, felt it drain the heat from the blood in his hand. It didn’t much matter, anyway, he thought, and tore open a packet of Cowdex.
It had grown lighter in the few minutes he’d been inside, and as he climbed into his truck he could see the clouds rolling overhead, strands of them hanging down like wool pulled off the edges of a blanket. The engine blew a brief pocket in the wind noise. He backed up and drove past the kid’s snow-covered pickup, heading for the north field.
He didn’t turn on his lights. The night’s squall had scraped the pasture free of all but a few inches of snow; the rest was piled deep against fence lines. The truck’s tires left long, dark gouges.
When he opened the truck door, a gust nearly tore it out of his hand. The cold cut through his clothes as he angled across the field, the jar of Cowdex in one hand, the rifle in the other. He couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the wind and the shrushing of his footsteps through the thin unblown snow left blanketing the land between the drifts.
The stagged steer watched him with one steady eye as he approached but didn’t lift its head, didn’t even snort. Shivers rippled over its whole body. There was something horrible about the involuntary movement of its muscles under its skin.
Sheltered from the wind, the gully was quiet, eerie. Osby could hear the steer’s struggled breathing, the working of his own lungs. He put down the jar of Cowdex, let the catheter drop into the snow, a loose, dead-snake coil. Looking at the steer’s wide eye, he felt like a fool for bringing the medicine. A weak, sentimental fool. Anger stiffened his neck: what would his father have thought? The old man would have looked away in disgust. Christ, he would have said, just put a bullet in him.
The light click of the Ruger’s bolt made everything after it quieter. Osby dug in his back pocket. In his dirt-grayed fingers, the bullet glinted like something precious, almost delicate. Plenty more, he thought, and slid the bullet into the chamber, locking the bolt.
Dark lumps of shit had smeared down the steer’s hindquarters, mounded under its tail, frozen. Except right by the flank, right where it came out: that was still soft. A ring of reddish brown earth encased the steer where its own heat had melted the snow. Osby tried not to look at that—it made his spine feel brittle. As he raised the rifle, the tip of the barrel shook. He wondered how his father had held the gun steady enough, if he’d had to jam the metal under his chin. It seemed almost worse than anything else, that the last touch would be a hard, cold edge jabbed into soft skin.
Well, Osby thought, that’s how it is.
He steadied the barrel end against the steer’s skull. Its eye never left his face. Osby squeezed the breath from his lungs, hoping that if he could get his shoulders still, his hands might stop shaking. A spattering broke the quiet. The steer pissed for a long time, the yellow arc instantly melting a dark line in the snow. Osby stared at the steam rising off of it. It suddenly seemed incredible to him that a body could make something so warm, that it could have such heat in it. He watched the steer’s foggy breath rise from its mouth, and lowered the gun.
He knew then that it was over. If he had just pulled the trigger, he might have driven back home, made breakfast in the quiet kitchen, satisfied with the knowledge that he had done something that could never be undone, that he had left a mark on another being as strong as any that man, or even God, could make. But he had not.
He wished the truck weren’t out there in the pasture behind him. It seemed wrong to leave it cluttering up the clean snow. He hated, too, to leave the job of burying the steer for someone else. He wondered what would happen to the house, if it would go the way of the Old House, rooms packed with hay or bags of fertilizer, car batteries and cattle medicine on the stairs. He felt bad about the kid; he would have to move again. Osby looked at the jar of Cowdex and the catheter in the snow, and then at the steer staring back at him. The liquid would be so cold by now it would kill it as soon as it hit its heart. That seemed easiest on everyone.
Osby carefully leaned the rifle against a snow-smothered rock. He straddled the steer’s neck and knelt against it: the solid meat of it under his legs, the sudden warmth on his frozen jeans. For a second, he watched the jugular throb. All the time he’d spent down in the gully with the steer, the way he’d
talked to it, given it a name—he was ashamed of that. He didn’t say any good-byes, just jabbed the needle in. The steer’s eye bulged. The muscle under Osby’s leg jerked, once. He raised the bottle high, wanting the liquid to run in fast, do it quick.
And then Osby was off the ground. The mass of muscle and meat erupted under him, slamming against his chest, the moist, hot scent of it so close it was as if he was smelling the inside of its ribs. His knee twisted painfully under him, his other leg yanked almost out of the socket. Something cracked against his chin and his head whipped back, hit ground, his shoulders smacked against the earth. The dark belly of the thing was over him, mud, snow, shit-smeared flecks of ice raining down, a spray of something wet and hot. It swayed, massive, heavy, hooves tearing the mud around him—and then it was gone.
Osby rose and clawed up the frozen bank, grabbing tufts of Broomsedge, his boots digging at the mud. The wind blasted through his ears. Fifty feet away, the steer charged back and forth, skidding in the snow, flailing its head on its bloodied neck. It bolted away up the hill and Osby climbed after it. At the top, he stopped. Hands on his knees, breathing hard, he watched the steer barrel down the other side, still twisting and throwing itself wildly. He stared after it until it was just a small brown shape moving through the vast white field.
Slowly, he straightened up. The wind hit him so hard he had to strain to keep his neck from tilting forward. It blew by him down the hill, blasting sprays of snow before it. Behind him, the trees were in a frenzy. He heard a tree trunk crack, the explosion of snapping branches as it fell, and he turned and faced the pounding wind. It could not move him an inch. Overhead, gray masses of clouds churned, so close to the top of the hill it seemed that if he were to reach up he could rip out a handful and bring it down in his fist.
Up at the top of Bowmans Ridge the very tips of the branches were going pink. Osby cupped his hands to his face and, breathing into them, warmed his cold nose and cheeks, looking for a glint of white up there among the trees. All around him, his cattle were spread out in his pastures, the whole valley full of them moving slowly through the new snow. They had pawed the ground where he’d rolled out the hay the day before and the hills were striped with dark, wet trails. Only way in the distance, alongside his northernmost pasture, was the snow smooth and unbroken. He wondered if any of that hay on the government land was still good. If he scraped off the rotted stuff, he might save 30, 40 percent. That afternoon, he’d drive over and see.
STILLMAN
WING
The Deutz was back there where it had been all the years, and Stillman, who had been there almost as many, was back there looking at it. Dawn. Or should have been. The clouds had thickened overnight and behind the giant metal sheds of Pfersick & Son the back lot looked as black as the field beyond it that looked as black as the trees that abutted the hills, which were blacker. All was still: dark crawlers with their frozen treads, bulldozers motionless as boulders, backhoes with bent necks and sleeping hearts and shovel-mouth jaws pillowed on gravel. And tractors. An antique Case Model DEX in signature flambeau red, last year’s twenty-foot-tall New Holland TV140 gleaming like a groomed thoroughbred, Minneapolis-Molines and John Deeres and Steigers and Fords and still, among them all, nothing quite like the Deutz.
It sat there under the halogen beam of Stillman’s head lamp. Between them, the string of blue light stretched like an umbilical cord. Slowly, he moved his head. The beam roamed the exhaust pipe, a sickle of steering wheel, the block body painted battleship gray and solid as a panzer tank. The iron wheels had corroded to hoops of rust-leaf. The metal scoop of seat cupped dead leaves turned sog. The front grill was dented and gouged. They’d let it go to hell. It made Stillman’s teeth hurt and his eyes ache just to look at it.
Far off a car engine droned. The only other sound was Stillman’s breath pushing at his ribs. Shutting his eyes, he tried to bring it back to calm. He settled his weight, anchoring his heel bones in the memory-foam insoles of his walking shoes, drawing the bond between his feet and the gravel up through the calf-grip of his graduated compression socks, into his pelvis, along the bones of his back, so that it filled his chest beneath the ripstop shell of his windbreaker and straightened his skull on his spine. He pressed the tip of his tongue against the top of his palate and squeezed his lungs empty: seven short sharp breaths. For a moment he held himself devoid of air. Then, with a long sucking noise, he filled up on the cold, fresh stuff of autumn high in the Blue Hills.
He could feel the Deutz watching him. It looked at him as if its teeth hurt and its eyes ached, too. No, he told it in his thoughts, not for me, Charlie. He was in as good shape as he’d been in all his seventy-one years. Never needed glasses, never doubted his ears. True, his hair had gone white, but it was as thick as when he was a boy, and he still wore it to his shoulders. The sinewy muscles of those shoulders ran like high-tension wires up his neck to his jawbone, tight even in sleep. He was part Iroquois and part German, his face a crag of corners and crevices with eyes as dark and deep as spring water pooled in caves.
He opened them now, watched the tractor back. Stillman Wing and the Deutz. This mountain-raised, long-working, hard-minded, fear-driven man. This MTZ222 fourteen-horsepower, water-cooled, semidiesel, six-thousand-pound tractor. Both built in 1928. One assembled in a factory in Frankfurt by a hundred German hands, the other made right here in the valley of the Swain, and hands the least of it. Face-to-face: they’d been like that for half a century. Ever since old Pfersick hired Stillman and Stillman had seen it out there, where it was now, looking at him with blood knowledge in its steel.
In the distance, that car was struggling up the hill toward him. Even now, he couldn’t help trying to diagnose the engine noise—a clogged carburetor, a leak in the vacuum gasket. That part of his brain stirred from the oily soil smell of this lot where he had worked for fifty years. Retired, he thought, and ended the idea in an unmouthable amalgamation of everything from bullshit to my ass.
Seventy-one, Pfersick’s son had said. Too old, he’d said.
Half my goddamn age, Stillman thought, and calls himself my boss. Well, not anymore.
They’d thrown the retirement party, forced retirement party, firing party, Friday. Cola he would not drink, and coffin nails he would not stand near, and four eighteen-inch grease pies he could feel clog his veins just looking at them. Kept calling it his last day, the bunch of them. Well, here it was the next day, his birthday, and here he was back. And he’d brought the trailer with him.
He got moving. Lithe as a teenager, he undid the pins, lowered the gate, loped up the ramp and onto the trailer, his jeans whisking and his mind churning over the penalties for auto theft, or if there was something else for heavy machinery, or antiques, or if this was plain larceny, and what the punishment was for that. None so bad as the one Caroline would dish out if she had to get him out of jail, of that he was sure. She was the first reason he’d tell them all—from Pfersick’s son to the county judge—to go to hell. If he were gone for a year or two, she’d die on him. She was too much woman, too much pure flesh for one person to take care of. He knew because there was only one person taking care of her now, and that was him. He unlocked the winch, grabbed the hook end, and started back down the trailer in a thunderous unraveling of chain. He had looked it up: only two even close that he could find, a 1932 320 and a 1931 30 hp with rubber tires added, and neither one for sale, though there was a machine a decade younger and not half as rare that was going for upwards of four grand. After the idea of leaving Caroline alone, the only thing that worried him about jail was the food. He kept his guts clean. And had seen what happened to men his age who didn’t—watched them clog up and die.
At the bottom of the ramp, he stopped. Somewhere toward the north edge of the lot, the Pfersicks’ dog whined. Stillman glanced at the brick ranch house up the hill, at the darkness below it that he knew held that husky, or malamute, or elk-hound, or whatever wolfish beast it was. He shifted a little in his sure-grip
shoes. The fur sack rattled its chain.
“Hush,” he hissed.
It let out a howl. That dog was bark impaired, but it could howl on par with hounds.
Up on the hill a light went on. Stillman snuffed his head lamp. He watched the rectangle of yellow float in the gray. The bathroom window. The dim shape of a man moving in it. Eric Pfersick. Do it now, he thought, now while old Pfersick’s son was still in the shower. Before he had even finished the thought, he had crossed the lot and was eye to eye with the Deutz’s grill, reaching past the drag link to loop the chain around the front axle and, climbing on the draw bar, knock off that brake, release that clutch, put her in first…. Out in the lifting dark that long-snouted slabber-jawed son of a bitch had worked itself into full howl. He felt a shiver crawl his spine.
He had just given the winch a test tug when he heard the bell. A high, rapid, epileptic fit of ringing. From his crouch, Stillman looked up at the house. The front door was gone. In its place sat old Les Pfersick. The light flared around his shrunken shape, the wheelchair’s square back trying to give the frail chest solidity, the thin-boned arms, that small hickory nut of a head, that black knob of a hand on that armrest ringing at that bell.
Two years ago, after Les was sideswiped by the stroke, broken and muted in one blow, his son had taken the bell off his first ex-wife’s bike and rigged it on his father’s wheelchair handle, and now old Les Pfersick sat up there in the doorway letting loose the nerve-jarring ringing he had taken to so well. Could have been meant to shut the dog up, or a Hello, friend, or Get the hell off, a summons for the son, or just old Les doing the best he could to make up for a voice pipe gone soft. There was no way to tell. Never had been. Even before, it had been damn near impossible to nail their friendship down. They’d known each other the whole of their lives, worked together for two-thirds, and, at the end, Stillman was still unsure of whether to call him boss or friend, of how to read a proffered cruller, an invitation to a baby shower, and finally, the ringing of that damaged man’s damn bell. But then, Stillman didn’t have a knack for knowing things like that, and didn’t have the opportunity to practice. On the chart that tied Stillman’s life to others, Les Pfersick could pretty much pick a place. So long as it was far behind the only other two: Stillman’s onetime nearly wife, and Caroline.