The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology

by Chamber Four

  A lamb separated from the group and ran flat out across the newly plowed field toward the tractor. When it got close enough, Billy saw one of its ears was half gone, which was strange because Sonny was supposed to be with the others they’d rounded up that morning. At first it looked like he was headed back to the pasture he’d escaped from and was going to cross in front of the tractor, but instead the lamb cut hard just short of the Versatile and took cover under it. Versatiles like the Big R were enormous, and though they swiveled in the middle, such tractors couldn’t be maneuvered like the tiny Fords and Farmalls Billy was used to operating. The tires alone were taller than he was, and there were eight of those. As fast as Sonny was running, the tractor must have looked parked. Billy heard and felt nothing, but he knew he got the lamb because it never came out the other side. He shut the tractor off and climbed out, mindful of James Carl’s position at the barn. With Sonny coming at him like he had, Billy had lost track of the other sheep.

  Shots echoed off the timberline from the north. Billy couldn’t see anything that James Carl might be shooting at by that time. He also couldn’t find Sonny.

  “Break down?” James Carl asked over the CB. Billy climbed back into the cab to answer him.

  “Ran over Sonny.”

  “Anything salvageable?”

  “Can’t find him.”

  “Quit plowing and go gather up what woolies you can find.”

  “How come you shot those sheep?” Billy asked.

  “What sheep?”

  “Those sheep up there I radioed about.” Billy waited long for a response.

  “My goddamn eyes. Who’d I kill?”

  “Not sure, but three.”

  “Shit. All right. Just get the dead.”

  Billy drove the Versatile a quarter-mile across the field and parked on the timberline where he last saw the dogs. He loaded the three sheep that James Carl had killed, pulling them on top of the plow. He found some old, rusty barbed wire rolled up and looped over a fence post and used it to tie them to the frame. He had expected to find one or two more dead, or at least some evidence that a couple had been killed by the dogs, but instead, he found seven strung out along a short path on Wewoka Creek, which was the east border of the property. He couldn’t believe the waste. Two went unaccounted for. He assumed they had been killed and carried off, but the fact the dogs had killed seven and let them lay was odd. And then there was Sonny, plowed under somewhere on the lower half of the 320. Billy drove the tractor and sheep to the shearing barn. James Carl looked over the dead.

  “Ten? Damn. Just three were mine? I shot eight times.”

  “Just the three.”

  “The Ewe I Hate and One Eye ran with this group.”

  “I didn’t find them,” Billy said.

  “Did a headcount. They ain’t with the rest. Why’d Sonny split off from the others?” Billy didn’t know. He also didn’t know why James Carl would ask him. He knew Billy didn’t know anything about sheep. “Sheep don’t split up. Don’t make sense. Why’d those dogs kill so many?” Billy didn’t know that either. From the recent lack of ticks in his bed, and the fact that he hadn’t seen Dog around, Billy thought he’d been missing a couple of days, but he wasn’t willing to mention it without something concrete to say about it.

  “Instinct never failed an animal so much as a damn sheep. Untie my three. I’ll skin them and hang them in the smokehouse. Take the rest to the bone yard in the pecan orchard. How’s your eyes? You see good?”

  Billy told him his eyes were fine, but that he was only a fair shot with open sights.

  “Can’t be any worse than me. I reckon you better start carrying the rifle, at least until I get a scope for it.”

  Billy had only been working with James Carl the three months since his parents died, and already he was used to seeing sheep do things that made no sense. He was used to seeing them get killed. They ran into barbed wire fences, off cliffs, into slow moving dirt road traffic, and other such nonsense on a regular basis. Apparently he and his boss could add running under tractors and straight at dogs to the list of stupid things sheep do.

  “Maybe Sonny was retarded,” James Carl said with serious wonder. “Get back to plowing. I’m going go find the hole he slipped through. I’ll yell at you when the Mexicans get here.” It was his last word on the subject of Sonny.

  Billy didn’t say anything, but he didn’t think Sonny was retarded. For one thing, the lamb had been the only one to find the hole in the fence, which Billy thought was smart. And had he not run under the Versatile, splitting off from the rest of the sheep would have proven a wise move. He considered it a huge oversight on the part of James Carl for him to think a lamb running from dogs pointed to low intelligence.

  Sweating, Billy climbed back into the Versatile. It had been a dry year. A drought if you listened to farmers. Farmers couldn’t be trusted when it came to weather, though. They’ll tell you it’s either too wet to get the wheat up or too dry for it to grow. Billy had never met a farmer yet who had a good year where weather was concerned. But it was dry that morning, that’s for sure. The wind had blown all during the night before and dried the ground to a powder by daylight.

  Dust puffed in through the cracks of the cab. Billy tied a bandana around his nose. Soon it was too soaked with snot to be of use. He took the bandana off and leaned over the gear shifts. Eyes squinting and nose dripping like hydraulic fluid, he thought about James Carl. He had never known a tougher man. For years he’d heard his father talk about the James Carl Henry who could lift Hemi blocks without a cherry picker and who stepped over gates instead of opening them.

  When Billy was six, he and his father were fishing a roadside pond when he first saw James Carl. At that time the man wore a thick black beard. He was looking for Billy’s father in order to trade him a beefalo for a .223 Remington rifle. Billy saw him step out of his Chevy one-ton and walk toward them.

  Billy said, “Daddy, there’s a really big man coming.”

  “What do you think that man wants?” Billy’s father asked, casting his line.

  “I don’t know. He looks mad.”

  “Think we ought to run or fight it out?”

  “I think we ought to run.”

  After that Billy found it fascinating to hear all the stories about the big man. James Carl once took on a band of Hell’s Angels sixty miles away in Lehigh, Oklahoma, back when being a Hell’s Angel had nothing to do with parades or charities. Back when all outlaw motorcycle gangs called themselves Hell’s Angels. Outside the only bar in Lehigh, for fun he kicked one of their bikes to the ground. After a short chase down unfamiliar dirt roads, he wound up taking twenty-three stabs in a wheat field. Billy had heard his father tell the story many times.

  Shortly after being hired on, and in a rare moment of courage, Billy had asked his boss about the stabbing. The courage to raise the question resulted from James Carl having burned the palms of both his hands when Billy had mistakenly tried to open the hood on the feed truck he was driving. What Billy had thought was steam rolling from under the hood, James Carl had realized was actually smoke. He had knocked the boy out of the way and burned himself instead. He had talked Billy through how to bandage his hands for him, and in the moment, though Billy had felt responsible for getting his boss burned, he’d also felt a kind of safety and trust in doctoring the man’s burns. In feeling that sense of safety, Billy asked about Lehigh. James Carl said it was the prettiest stand of wheat he ever saw. He claimed it’s what saved him. Said the wheat sang to him and kept him from bleeding out. Billy didn’t much buy it, but he wouldn’t have been the one to disagree. Two of those stabs were to James Carl’s neck, and not pocket knife stabs either. All his scars were at least an inch wide. Those bikers had used big knives.

  Starting to doze into his daydream, the CB cracked. “Wake up, goddamn it.”

  Billy hit the brakes and looked up. He had been veering off into a cut in the timber toward the creek. James Carl must have seen him an
d figured he had gone to sleep.

  “I’m awake.”

  “The Mexicans are here. Park the tractor and come on.”

  * * * *

  James Carl did the introductions. “Billy, these are the Mexicans. Mexicans, this is Billy. Tell them how many head we got and ask them how long’s it going to take. Not that I care. I just like to know. I’ll go get some ice for the water cooler.” James Carl carried the water can to the house.

  Billy wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve. Words passed back and forth through his head, but he was afraid to say them. He knew that once spoken, he’d be expected to make sense of the words that would come back at him. He pretended to spot something important on the ground, bent to pick up a rock, and stuffed it in his pocket. He wiped his nose again. A square-faced man stepped forward and handed Billy a red bandana. Billy took it but didn’t know what to do with it. The man motioned to his face like wiping his nose and Billy got it. Even though Billy already had a bandana, he nodded a “thank you” to the man and blew his nose into it. It smelled of lemons. The Mexican pulled a blue bandana from his pocket to show him he had another and motioned for Billy to keep the one he’d handed him. Billy nodded again but said nothing.

  A boy about fifteen, Billy guessed, stepped out from behind the others. The boy looked toward the sheep gathered out in the pasture.

  “Looks like two thousand. He thinks you speak Spanish, huh?” the boy said.

  “I can read it.”

  “Tell him we will do it in one day and one half.”

  “Okay,” Billy said.

  The boy leaned in close and whispered, “Drink whiskey?”

  The sound of James Carl closing the house door straightened the boys. The rancher returned with a five-gallon orange water can filled and ready. He took Billy aside. “What’d Miguel say?”

  “That was Miguel?”

  “I’ve been gone ten minutes, and ya’ll didn’t so much as introduce yourself?”

  “No.”

  James Carl got loud. “Did you talk sheep at all or what? Pimples and jacking off?”

  “He said it would take the rest of today and half of tomorrow.”

  “Twenty-three hundred head? Seven Mexicans? You misheard.”

  “No.”

  James Carl thought about it. “I guess that boy’s got faster.”

  The Mexicans rigged up, tested their shears, and donned their chaps, but mostly they waited for sheep. James Carl and Billy ended their conversation and herded in the animals from the pasture through hog panel corrals they’d rigged up for that purpose. After getting ahead of the shearers by five-hundred head, James Carl sat in lawn chair in the shade of an elm growing beside the shearing barn. He opened an ice chest full of beer and watched.

  The shed was set up with ten shearing stalls, which were just plywood cubicles with eight-foot tall burlap bags hanging in wooden racks in the corner of each one. Each stall was six feet wide and had a back and two sides. The front was open to the outside. Billy helped Miguel’s little brother stuff the bags with shorn wool, and when each bag was full, James Carl left his beer and hoisted the little boy into the sacks so he could tamp the wool down. Billy noted the little boy was wide between the eyes, and though he wasn’t clumsy, it appeared he never really looked at anything. Like he looked past everything. He was a pleasant boy, though, and stayed steady.

  Billy’s hands, already soft from handling the wool every day, turned yellowish-brown and grew foul from the stink of it. He wiped his hands on his pants but couldn’t rid himself of its stickiness.

  “Lanolin,” James Carl said from the shade. “Wool’s got lanolin in it. Give up, you ain’t getting it off. Look at your boots.” Billy’s boots glistened in the rich grease. “They won’t be leaking for a while.”

  “It’s like ear wax,” Billy said.

  “Quit stuffing a minute. Watch that boy shear.”

  Billy had been working so hard to keep up that he hadn’t been able to watch the shearing like he’d meant to. Miguel kicked a sheep loose two-to-one faster than the next fastest. James Carl timed him.

  “Goddamn.” He showed the stopwatch to Billy.

  “It looked fast. Was it fast?”

  “The record is about twenty seconds slower than his average. That one was twenty-seven seconds.” James Carl timed again. “Twenty-nine seconds. Look how he hardly nicks them.”

  Miguel was beautiful. The sheep, quiet, docile in his hands, trusted the boy. Where the other men occasionally had to struggle to get the sheep positioned just right, Miguel molded them between his legs exactly the way he wanted the first time. He never repositioned until he was ready to turn them to his shears, and he never grabbed an animal that went rank in his hands, not even the moody rams.

  At the day’s end, two-thousand one-hundred and nine sheep were sheared. Nine-hundred and seventy-two were Miguel’s alone. With less than two-hundred sheep to go, the Mexicans were antsy to finish, but James Carl refused to string lights in the shed. Instead, he built a great fire in the pit he’d dug earlier. A white man fire, he called it. He spit a gimp yearling and feasted them on mutton and beer. When everyone had their bellies full and their heads buzzing, he ordered Billy to get two cots from out of the shed behind the house.

  “Me and you are going to sleep outside with them tonight,” he said.

  Billy fetched the two cots and started setting them up beside the fire. The Mexicans looked uneasy about it. It was clear they didn’t know if the cots were for them or for James Carl and Billy.

  “Explain it to them, Billy. They look scared.”

  “Explain what?”

  “I don’t want them thinking we don’t trust them. Just tell them we feel like sleeping under the stars tonight. The fat one plays guitar. I might get my fiddle. Tell him I’m better than last year.” Billy waited for his boss to walk away liked he had before, but the big man waited to see what was said.

  “Well?” James Carl asked.

  Billy looked for Miguel but didn’t see him. “They’re shy, and only Miguel will talk to me.”

  “They’ve been chattering all day. They ain’t looked shy to me.”

  “But Miguel—”

  “Billy,” James Carl said, raising his voice, “if the next word out of your mouth ain’t some Mexican gibberish I can’t understand, then I don’t want to hear another word.”

  “Dormir?” Billy said.

  “Good, but look at them when you’re talking. They’re the Spanish speakers, now ain’t they?”

  Billy turned to the group of Mexicans, who had grown silent as James Carl’s voice had risen. Miguel walked up. Billy searched the boy’s face, then said, “Dormir. Quere dormir.”

  Miguel nodded to him. “We will, too, then.”

  “I’m a dirty bastard,” James Carl said, looking at Billy. “I had me a feeling about this.” He walked off toward the house. “Put the cots up.”

  Watching his boss walk away, Billy thought he should say something. Anything. Explain himself somehow. He wanted to tell him how he would try to learn how to speak it and how he knows how to read it, but what came out was, “But my parents—”

  James Carl turned back. “What? What about your parents?”

  Billy couldn’t finish his thought because he didn’t have any idea what he had planned to say. It just came out. Embarrassed, he lowered his eyes and stared at the ground.

  “I won’t put up with a boy who’ll run his parents down, particularly when they ain’t here to defend themselves. Is that what you intended to do? Tell me it’s their fault you lied to me?”

  Billy said nothing.

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy said.

  “Well, I don’t, either. But I know what trust is. Do you?”

  When Billy couldn’t answer, James Carl walked away.

  “You better sleep out here tonight,” Miguel said.

  “Yeah,” Billy said, but he didn’t move until his boss was fully out of sight. “Wh
y did you speak English? You got me caught.”

  “Already caught. I just made it hurry,” Miguel said. He spoke to his family in Spanish, which Billy couldn’t understand, but when the square-faced one went to the back of their truck and retrieved a blanket for him, he figured out what had been said.

  Billy wrapped the blanket around him and pulled a lawn chair close to the warm pit of embers. He sat wondering if he’d be fired, but more than anything, he was just sorry he’d disappointed the man. He’d disappointed people before. So far as he could tell, it was as much his purpose to disappoint as it was the sheep’s apparent desire to die. The way James Carl looked at him when he realized he’d been lied to, Billy had seen before. He’d seen it when he let the bottom burn completely out of his mother’s favorite bean pot that had been handed down three generations. He’d seen it in his father when he stumbled in one night drunk and bloody. And he’d seen it especially severe in his grandmother when he’d doubted God. But he’d never seen it like it was in James Carl. It felt as different to him as the difference between killing a mouse and a horse. The bigger they are, the more it hurts. There is something in the weight of it. The size. The space a thing takes up in the world. He fell asleep in the chair feeling he had scarred a big piece of the world. A really big piece.

  Billy woke, scratching the back of his neck. Miguel’s little brother, springing from behind him, giggled and tossed a tuft of wool in Billy’s lap. From his cot Miguel shushed him, then pulled a bottle of whiskey from his sleeping bag and offered it to Billy. Billy shook his head “no,” but looking at the people sleeping around him and back at the house to see if lights were on, he eased out of his creaking chair and signaled Miguel to follow him.