McEban parks in the alley behind the Miracle Bar, and Holly’s the first to stand out of the truck. She still wears her cap and chaps and spurs and the swelled globe of a single breast falls from her open shirtfront. The nipple is dark and taut, and slick from her daughter’s gumming, and her shirt sags wet with sweat for the length of her spine and under each arm.
Gretchen takes up the child long enough for Holly to palm the breast back into its bra-cup and snap her shirt closed. Bennett shakes the rum bottle and the last inch of liquor catches golden in the sunlight.
“No more for this mom,” Holly says. She leans down into her daughter’s sleeping face and sniffs, and cradles the child back into her arms. She winks at Gretchen. “I believe my milk’s gone wild.”
Bennett steps to the Miracle’s alley door, and tips back the rum and tosses the empty bottle into an open Dumpster. “Can we buy you something to eat?”
“I’ll come in for a burger,” Holly says. She laughs because she’s hot and drowsy, and because of the soft flex of her daughter in her arms, and because it feels good to laugh.
Gretchen sways in the glare off the trailergate, caught for a moment in the slap of afternoon light, the sweet spread of rum. “I’ll be in in a minute,” she says.
“Order me a cheeseburger,” McEban says. He stands by the trailer’s side. “And one for Woody.” He lifts his hat away from his face and peers in at the weanling stud. “Woody likes catsup.”
The little stud stands spraddled on the trailer’s floorboards. He carries his head low and rolls his eyes at McEban. He’s braced and still ready for a fight. Gretchen folds her arms against the trailerside. She looks to the fresh dents and scrapes that run along both inside panels and on the inside of the trailergate.
“What do you think of him?” she asks.
McEban shifts his weight and rubs the knot that’s risen hard on the front of his leg. The horse squats lower and chatters its teeth like a cat. “I don’t think I feel lucky enough to step him out and try to get him loaded again,” he says. “I probably don’t need to be kicked twice in the same day.”
“Happy birthday.”
McEban turns to her but she just squints in at the weanling. She shrugs a shoulder up against her jawline to wipe the sweat away but will not turn.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.
“It means today was the first day I had to shop.”
“You bought me a ruptured horse for my birthday?”
“I thought I’d get you something you could improve.” She steps away from the trailer.
“He’ll surprise you.” He bends again at the trailer. “He’s going to make a horse.”
“Everything surprises me,” she says, and he listens to the faint sound of her steps, the bardoor opening and falling closed.
He reaches over the trailer’s side panel, talking slowly, evenly, his pocketknife open in his hand. “There, son,” he whispers, “that’s the man,” and he pulls the blade back sharply and the weanling quivers like he’s stepped on ice, and the nylon noose and numbered tag drop to the floorboards.
The horse bows his head between his legs and snorts and keeps his head that way. His ribs heave against his dark-red sides, and the pouch of ruptured gut stands tight. McEban pockets the knife and rubs his thigh.
“I’ll bet you’re thirsty.” He straightens and limps back on the knotted leg. “I am.”
When he steps inside the Miracle he catches his breath in the air-conditioned darkness and stands huffing against the chill. His eyes water and he presses the heel of a hand to his brow. He can feel the muscles across his shoulders tighten, cinching at the back of his scalp.
“You got a headache?”
He drops his hand and blinks to focus. A middle-aged woman stands before him. Her hair’s been freshly permed and smells sharply of chemicals. Like dry-cleaning, McEban thinks.
“I’m Mrs. Spaulding,” she says.
“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Somebody new buy this place?”
“I did. About a month ago. How can you tell?”
“I don’t remember the air-conditioning being used this much.”
Past Mrs. Spaulding a young soldier sits straight on his barstool, smoking, blowing rings at the backbar.
Bennett and Gretchen and Holly are settled in a booth. Over the booth there’s an oil painting of a pair of sage grouse, and spaced away from the sage grouse, encircling the room, the unframed canvases of parrots, chickadees, flamingoes, eagles, pelicans, wood ducks, a parakeet.
“Did you change the burgers too?” McEban asks.
“I’ve kept the booze and the food the same.” Mrs. Spaulding smoothes the front of her apron with both hands. “The paintings aren’t just décor,” she says. “They’re for sale. Sometimes people forget to ask.”
McEban nods and stares down at the salad bar at his side. A stainless-steel corner catches the dull-blue flash of a neon Hamm’s sign. He stirs a finger through a tub of melting ice and iceberg lettuce.
“Can I buy this bowl of lettuce from you?” he asks.
“There’s not much lettuce left.”
“I’m not after the lettuce.”
“I’ll need the bowl back,” she says.
He lifts the bowl out of the spread of ice and holds it up in both hands, careful not to slosh the water out.
“I don’t know much about art.”
Mrs. Spaulding shrugs. “That’s too bad.”
He backs out through the door and into the sunlight and sets the metal bowl in the alley-dirt by the trailer tongue. He scoops the half-dozen torn leaves of lettuce out and opens a hinged half-door high in the nose of the trailer. He lifts the bowl in through the door and levels it in the manger.
The little stud paws at the floorboards and snaps his jaws. McEban stands away from the door. He hears the horse step forward and pause and step again. He hears him suck at the icy water and stop and hold his muzzle above the bowl, the water dripping from the horse’s chin whiskers.
When the horse is altogether finished McEban pulls the bowl out and sets it in the pickup’s bed, and Woody laps up the last of the water. The wet stainless throws an oval of glare against the cab, and McEban leans into the truck’s side and reaches an open hand in and Woody presses his chest into the hand.
There is the rise and slack of traffic on the side streets. The spiking drone of a motorcycle working through its lower gears, backing off for a stoplight. The buzz of flies at the Dumpster, the general weight of sunlight. And then the truck falls into shadow and a wind plucks at the alley-dirt.
McEban looks to the west, to a high bank of cumulus risen off the mountains. Woody lifts his nose and sniffs at the surge of ozone, and the temperature drops ten degrees all at once.
“Don’t you love it here?” McEban asks.
He steps to the side mirror just as the first big drops strike and sizzle on the truck metal. He whistles Woody out of the truckbed and they sit together in the cab.
The temperature drops another ten degrees and the rain turns to hail, and they listen to the sharp snare-drum shatter of the ice pellets against the truck’s hood and roof. The windows steam. Woody climbs onto McEban’s lap, and McEban sets his hat crown-down on the seat and rests his head against the seatback and shuts his eyes.
“I ordered you a cheeseburger,” he says.
In the early spring dawn it was his job to break the skims of ice that sealed the water troughs. He shoveled the broken shards out of the cold water, and they broke upon the frost-stiffened ground and sparkled in the weak light. The earth still held itself hard, stunned from a season of below-freezing nights.
He kicked the ice chunks away from the troughs so they wouldn’t freeze into jagged drifts and hung the scoop shovel on a nail driven into the barnside. He slapped his hands together until he could feel them sting and bent through the corral rails and stood out of the wind. The wind was raw and down from Canada. It reddened his face and cracked the meat of his lower lip. He drew the bloody lip back between his teeth and held it there and looked away toward the creek.
He was looking toward the creek when his father led two saddled horses from the barn. The wings of the man’s chaps caught in the wind and slapped at the sides of his legs, and he stood up onto his horse and left the second horse trailing its reins on the stonehard ground.
“You get those troughs cleared?” his father asked.
“Yes, sir. I did.”
When he spoke he felt his lip split more deeply, and he sucked it back between his teeth. He caught up the reins of the second horse and stood by its shoulder, and when his father nodded he looped the off-rein around the horse’s neck and shortened the near-rein so the animal would spin into him. He turned the stirrup forward and seated his foot and kicked away from the ground. He’d just gained the off-stirrup when the horse bowed its head and farted and crow-hopped sideways toward the creek.
He heard his father yell, “Pull his goddamn head up,” and he sawed back on the reins, and the horse stumbled and stood and blew hard in the chilled air.
“That smacks the blood out of your ass,” his father said, but he was smiling when he spoke.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “It does.” He was smiling too.
His father spurred his horse into the trees along the creek, and McEban reined back a pace to study him, and the horse he sat, not their parts, but the whole of them. It was what he meant to take away from his father. He meant to ride like his father rode.
The Naugahyde booth is brown, stained nearly black at the top of the seatback by years of hair-oil, and the seat is patched with lengths of gray duct tape. It crackles when McEban settles in.
Bennett rests his elbows against the tabletop and holds a bottle of Coors to his swollen eye. His cheeks are red and speckled as the Formica, and there’s an empty shot glass slid to the table’s edge.
“Are you drunk?” McEban asks.
“I’m getting there.”
Gretchen’s at work at the pool table in front of the streetside windows. She’s set a beer bottle on the north and south bumpers and shoots back and forth, stopping between shots to drink and chalk her cue.
They watch the soldier push away from the bar’s edge and stagger to the pool table. He circles Gretchen, watching her pocket the balls. His arms hang loosely at his sides. He clenches a cigarette in his front teeth, and his lips are pulled back from his teeth. He digs two quarters out of his pants pocket and snaps them on the bumper above the coin slot and smoothes out a twenty-dollar bill beside the quarters.
“Where’s Holly?” McEban asks.
“She ate and went home. Where were you?”
“Woody and I took a nap in the truck.”
The soldier’s cigarette ash falls and powders the green felt. Gretchen smiles at him and starts to hum.
“How drunk’s Gretchen?” McEban asks.
“She’s just flushed. Rum just makes her flushed.”
“She’s drinking beer now.”
Bennett squints toward his wife with his unswollen eye. “Beer just makes her flushed too. She’ll kick his ass.”
Mrs. Spaulding slides two baskets of fries onto the table. There’s a cheeseburger on top of each basket.
“What do you want to drink?” she asks.
“A cup of coffee,” McEban tells her. “And could I get you to take one of these cheeseburgers back? Maybe keep it warm if you could?”
“They said you wanted two.”
“The second one’s for my dog.”
“I won’t have a dog in here,” she says.
“I didn’t bring him in.”
Mrs. Spaulding tucks her chin to have a look over the top of her glasses. “The burger won’t be as good left under the warming lamp.”
“My dog’s not a whiner.” McEban smiles because he thinks the pun’s funny. Mrs. Spaulding does not.
She spreads out a paper napkin and wraps up a cheeseburger. “What about the fries?” she asks.
“I’ll take care of those,” Bennett says. He drags a basket of fries to his side of the table and asks her to bring him another beer and a shot when she gets the chance.
McEban watches Gretchen at the pool table, pacing, lining up the ten ball. The young soldier stands with his legs spread wide, his cue stick stabbed between his feet. He holds his head back to let the cigarette smoke rise away from his eyes.
“I saw Ansel in Ishawooa last week,” Bennett says. He sips his beer and turns the bottle and presses it back against his eye. “He was buying rifle cartridges at the Army Surplus Store.”
McEban snorts.
“Why is that funny?”
Gretchen sinks the ten in the southwest corner pocket and straightens, and the soldier levels his head.
“It’s funny because Thorpe was over the other day and warned him off shooting out the neighbors’ yardlights.”
“Where’s he want your neighbors to live?”
“Someplace else.” McEban sucks the hamburger grease from a thumb and wipes his hands. “When he looks up at that subdivision that used to be your dad’s place it ruins his whole day.”
“Is that why he doesn’t like me?”
“Mostly,” McEban says.
Mrs. Spaulding brings the coffee and beer and a shot of bourbon and Bennett downs the shot and sets the empty glass back at the table’s edge and nods for another. Mrs. Spaulding looks at McEban. “It’ll be okay,” McEban says. “I’m the one driving.”
She turns back to the bar and Bennett scoots up higher against the tabletop. “We’re all just a bunch of white immigrant sons of bitches,” he says. His face is screwed up into a battered complaint. “Ansel didn’t get here first. He just got here before the next guy did.”
McEban holds the coffee cup under his chin, and the steam rises into his face. “He didn’t like you when you were a kid either.”
Bennett relaxes his face and opens his mouth and closes his mouth and sits back in the booth. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Then I guess it can’t be helped.”
Mrs. Spaulding leaves a refilled shot glass on the table, and Bennett takes it up and turns it slowly between his thumb and forefinger.
“When you get a chance tell Ansel I’ve got to make a living whether he likes me or not. Just tell him that.”
“You can tell him yourself.”
Bennett nods. “I will,” he says. He stares down at the shot of bourbon. “Hell, I don’t especially like what I do.” He looks up at McEban. His eyes have moistened. “But I’m too meek to learn anything new. Aren’t the meek supposed to inherit something?”
“You aren’t meek,” McEban tells him. “You’re just too much of a pussy to keep a ranch together.”
“Well, there ought to be a prize for that too,” Bennett says, and the soldier shouts “Damn it” and digs another couple of quarters from his pants pocket for a new rack of balls and unfolds a twenty from his shirt pocket.
“You think that’s going to be trouble?” McEban asks.
“I think I don’t know what’s going to be trouble.”
“Do you ever think how lucky we are not to be any older?”
Bennett throws back the bourbon, and grimaces and sips his beer. “I almost always feel lucky. If I’m not around you or Ansel.”
“If we were ten years older Vietnam would’ve probably gotten us.”
Bennett sucks in through his clenched teeth. He likes the way the cool air feels at the back of his mouth. “That’s not something I think about,” he says. “Do you think about it?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Gretchen breaks the new rack of balls, and Bennett stops his beer just at his lips, listening for a ball to drop. When it does they both look toward the table to see whether she’s shooting solids or stripes.
“Would you die for her?” McEban asks.
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Would you?”
Bennett brings his beer bottle up close to his good eye. Through the brown glass McEban appears dark and soft and indistinct. “It’s not going to come to that,” he says. “We’re all too old to have it come to that.” And after a moment, “I’ve got to piss.”
He scoots to the edge of the booth and pulls himself up by the pair of chromed prongs mounted on the booth’s end and stands weaving in the smoky air.
“You need some help?”
Bennett stares at him for a long moment. “I forgot why I’m up,” he says, and when McEban gets up to help him to the restroom Bennett swings a big, huffing roundhouse and misses McEban by a foot, and his legs buckle and he sits all the way down on the floor. He looks up and smiles. He’s still smiling when his good eye rolls back and he slumps to his side.
Gretchen strides over thumping her pool cue against the floor like a walking stick. She stares down at Bennett and when he doesn’t move takes up his half-full beer and tilts it back. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Her eyes are wild and dark, and she’s charged up over her string of pool victories. “You, therefore,” she says, “who wish to remain free, either instantly be wise or, as soon as possible, cease to be fools.” She grins and chugs the last swallow of Bennett’s beer.
“That Isaiah?” McEban asks.
“Milton.”
Bennett rolls over on his back and starts to snore.
“He tried to hit me,” McEban says. “You think he suspects something?”
Gretchen sits on the edge of the booth. “I think he’s suspected something his whole life.” She stares at the floor, still gripping her cue. She shakes her head. “It’s a goddamn miracle the suspense hasn’t killed him.”
“Can you help me get him in the truck?”
She shakes her head and says, “I don’t think I can.” She tries to stand and falls back unconscious, sprawled on the boothseat.
The soldier weaves at McEban’s side. “I could help you,” he says.
“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you do.”
“I wasn’t asking to get hired.”
“I know you weren’t,” McEban tells him. “How much did she win from you?”
“Sixty dollars.”
“Is that all you have?”
“I have seventeen dollars left.”
“Then let me give you twenty for your help. What’s your name?”
Bennett holds his breath, and they both stare down at him until he starts snoring again.
“Hadley,” the soldier says. He leans his cue stick against the table and strips off his tunic and bends over Gretchen. Her skirt is ridden high on her thighs, and her bookbag has fallen underneath the table.
Hadley brings the bookbag up and settles it against her belly and finds both her wrists and pulls her upright on the seat. Her head lolls to her left shoulder.
“Don’t let me catch you grabbing her ass or anything,” McEban says.
“I’m just a bad pool player,” says Hadley. “I’m not a pervert.”
McEban takes up Gretchen by the ankles and Hadley grips her under the arms, and they carry her out through the alley door and prop her upright in the middle of the truckseat. McEban puts Woody in the pickup’s bed.
When they come back in for Bennett, Mrs. Spaulding hands McEban his second cheeseburger, and he unsnaps the belly of his shirt and slips it inside.
“At least we didn’t break anything,” he says.
“You sure I can’t sell you a painting?”
“Maybe next time. We already bought a horse today.”
Hadley leans against the table, out of breath, staring down at the considerable rise of Bennett’s belly. He pinches the cigarette from his teeth and stubs it out in an ashtray. “Was that twenty dollars apiece?” he asks.
They crossed Horse Creek and the horses drank and came out of the water blowing, their bellies dark and steaming in the cool air.
His father spurred his horse into the sage and grass foothills, and McEban followed. They curved southward, out across the belly of a hill, and struck a west-running fenceline and rode the fence west and stopped at its corner. The wind was still out of the north and hard on them. The horses’ hooves raised little puffs of dust.
His father stood down from the buckskin he rode and skirted the horse’s ass, his left arm laid along its rump, chanting “There, son, that’s the man” to let the horse know where he was, and unsnapped the saddle scabbard and pulled the rifle free.
McEban stood by the fence, holding his horse, and his father handed him the buckskin’s reins.
“Walk them down the fence,” he said. “Hold them tight and watch yourself. They aren’t going to like this a bit.”
The man’s cheeks were flushed and mottled by the wind. He looked into the fence corner and the boy looked too.
The horses pulled back steadily against their bridle reins and rolled their eyes.
A doe deer lay gray and gaunt before them, on her side, her left front shoulder dislocated, the leg drawn back and up, as though in her sleep she had reached for something above herself, just beyond her grasp. Two wires were twisted around her pastern, and her shrunken body hung down from the diamond-shaped snare. She had begun to rot and she smelled of decay.
McEban shut his eyes and stood braced against the shifting wind, against the stench of the nearly dead thing before him.
He imagined her well, sleek, welcoming the spring; with her kind. In his imagination he could see her approach the fence, settle her weight back to jump. He could feel the miscalculation. Could hear the toe of the heart-shaped black hoof click against the topwire, hear the wire sing, see her flight tip, the leg stabbing down for balance, stabbing down between the wires, top and secondmost, and the scramble and fall, the wires scissoring the leg and holding fast.
A bank of cloud-shadow moved over them and the sun broke free against the midsky and flashed his eyelids pink, and he stepped back one pace and sucked at the air. When he opened his eyes he looked away from the fence corner to the bottom of the hillside. He looked to the leafless cottonwoods that grew in against the sage. The day had warmed enough for the trees to come sweet with sap. But that was all there was. Just the scent of summer flushed up for a moment when the wind changed. Just the promise of ease.
He looked again at the doe. The ground around her was scarred with the effort of her struggle. She breathed through her mouth, and her tongue was fallen from her muzzle and dry and caked with dirt. Her cheek was busy with ants.
She watched them but did not lift her head. When she blinked she blinked slowly and only the curve of her lashes caught the light. There was no struggle left in her eyes.
“This is the harm we do,” his father said.
He stepped forward and bolted a shell into the rifle’s chamber, and McEban stepped back and opened his mouth. The doe still did not move.
“I can do this,” he said.
His father turned to him and searched his face. He held the rifle in both hands, across his waist. The wind had eased.
“I’m not sure you can,” he said.
“I can.”
“And after it’s done?”
“I can do that too.”
“Even though you’re not sure what that is?”
“Yes.”
The man looked south and then down at the rifle he held. He thought of the life he was asked to live when he was a boy. When he was just twelve.
“This is faster than your mother wants you to grow,” he said.
“I’m not like her,” McEban said. “Not altogether.”
“No, you’re not.”
He stepped forward and held the rifle out to his son, and the boy gripped it by the forestock and offered the braid of bridle reins he held in his hand.
“The safety’s on,” his father said. He walked away with the horses and stood with them at a distance.
McEban swung back to the fence corner. The doe’s eyes were large and brown and stayed on him, and because it’s what he’d said he would do, he seated the rifle stock into his shoulder and thumbed the safety off. He sighted along the barrel. Dozens of woodticks fed in the scallops of her ears, bloated big as thumbnails, gone bluish white, gorged with her blood.
He brought the front sight down between her eyes. He held the gun steady and he held his breath. When she blinked he squeezed the trigger, and the rifle bucked against his cheek and went still. He lowered the rifle from his shoulder. And then he lowered his eyes.
He heard the horses dance their iron shoes against a scatter of stones and his father talking to them in a low and steady voice: “There, son, that’s the man, stand solid. Stand.”
He heard the horses quiet and his father bring them up behind him and he stood for a moment and looked down at what he had just done. And then his father stepped up and took the rifle from him and leaned it in the fence corner and held the wires apart, and McEban straddled the new corpse and pulled its leg free. The leg dropped against the haired body and bounced and lay still. The sage and the posts were flecked with blood.
“There isn’t a lot that feels like you think it’s going to,” his father said.
“Is that true for everything?”
“In my experience.” He slid the rifle into its scabbard and stepped up on the buckskin. “What happened to your lip?”
“It split in the cold.”
“Just now?”
“This morning.”
The man took a pair of yellow cloth gloves from his jacket pocket and pulled them on and looked down at the dead doe. He unbuckled his catchrope and handed it to the boy. “I don’t want her left out here.”
“Why?” McEban’s ears rang from the gunshot.
“Because I ride past here a lot,” he said and turned his horse down the fenceline, riding east.
McEban stops the truck on the shoulder of the two-lane at the top of the Bighorns. He turns off the headlights and stands out to piss, and Woody jumps onto the still-warm macadam and lifts a leg against a front tire. The engine pings. The sun has set and the night sky is swelled up black and prickling with starlight. The Milky Way casts a smear of light directly overhead, and it brings the limestone scarps up pale from the dark timber and glows softly on the truck metal. The weanling steps and stamps on the trailer’s floorboards. An owl hoots, and then another, and the owlsounds roll in softly and hold against the lower ground.
Bennett leans against the passenger-side window, sleeping with his mouth open, and Gretchen is curled under his shoulder. She coughs and resettles herself against her husband.
McEban pulls the cheeseburger from under his shirt and peels back the napkin and takes a bite and drops the rest to the pavement. Woody wolfs the burger and the catsup-smeared half of the bun and tosses the other half of the bun in the air and lets it fall and circles it, snapping at it.
Orion lies on its side against the uneven horizon to the southeast, and the moon breaks the earth’s curve: oblong and orange and searing in the dark sky. It rises up into the constellation’s chest, and shadows fall back from the truck and trailer, man and dog. A coyote yips. Nothing answers. Jupiter and Mars and the North Star bear down, and McEban wonders what his life might be like alone. He tries to imagine his life without Bennett and Gretchen, without Ansel to return home to, and cannot. He tries to imagine a life without this high rocky ground and feels vacant and useless as the constellation before him, as any man defined by just an assemblage of lighted points.
He drives slowly off the Bighorns, through drifts of moonlight, and when he’s gained the rolling grazeland at their base, slows the truck for half a hundred Black Angus cows that line both sides of the borrow ditch. He worries that a calf might become alarmed and try to cross through the headlights. He thinks he should call Gene and Anna Maris when he gets home and tell them they have a fence down.
He turns off the county road and gears down on the dirt track that leads up along Horse Creek. Gretchen jostles on the seat beside him, against Bennett. Her left arm hangs off the front of the seat, and her hand bounces back against the shifting column.
The lights are on at Ansel’s, and he honks as he drives by. He looks in the side mirror and sees the porchlight flick on and off, and he grinds into compound and eases the truck and trailer across a shallow irrigation ditch and through an open wiregate.
The pasture is dry and he cuts the headlights and allows the truck to idle in a wide arc that returns him to the fence. He stands out into the night and puffs his cheeks and blows. He stretches his arms wide and turns his palms to the sky. He thinks that even blind he would know he is home. He feels it in his hands.
He walks to the back of the trailer and swings the trailergate open. The hinges squeal like a rolled-on shoat, and the sound catches in his spine and he shivers. The weanling kicks one hindfoot into the night air and cocks the leg, ready to kick again.
The moon is centered in the sapphire-blue sky, and it is enough to dull the starlight. A dozen usable geldings work the fenceline along the lane. They are curious and hopeful for grain. They appear soft and round and dark as legged cattails in the moonlight. They stop along the fence and pace. They lean against the topwire for a better look and whinny and nip at one another and draw closer and stop. They approach as though a trap is laid.
A rangy bay ducks his head at the open gate. He snorts at the ground and paws and gathers his weight in his hindquarters and bursts through the opening. The others follow in twos and threes, and when they are all safely through circle the pasture bucking and playful and glad for their lives.
McEban reckons his notion of freedom to be like theirs, parceled into pasture and corral, hemmed by barbed wire.
He stands the gatepost into a bottom loop of wire and draws it tight and drops a wire loop over the top of the post, and returns to the side of the trailer. The little mustang swings his muzzle against the trailer’s slats and bares his teeth. McEban thinks the weanling will not back into this new world. He thinks he will come out all at once, head first and fierce.
The cab of the truck rocks, and he watches Gretchen rise into the back window.
“Come out and have a look at this,” he calls.
She steps out of the truck and stumbles and catches herself against its side. The weanling stud squeals. The older horses have gathered at the back of the trailer. They snort and nicker softly in their throats, and the weanling stamps and turns and backs against the manger. Gretchen spits to clear her mouth.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Is there anything to drink?”
“Up at the house.”
“What time is it?”
“After midnight.”
The weanling steps one foot out of the trailer and snorts at the pasture and the geldings press toward him, and he backs into the trailer once again.
“I didn’t think you’d ever come back,” she says.
McEban looks toward Gretchen. He can hear the weanling pace. Gretchen holds onto the truck’s side panel with both hands.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When you went away to college,” she says.
“But I did come back.”
“I know you did. I’m just saying I didn’t think you would. Not then.”
A miller moth flutters against McEban’s face, against his lips, nearly into his mouth. He waves a hand in front of his face. “Even if I hadn’t come back,” he says, “I thought you’d wait longer than you did.”
“I thought I would too.” She straightens her bookbag and pulls down her dress at the waist and breathes in deeply. The dark night air stings in her chest and she coughs, and when she stops coughing tells him that she thinks he’s a fine man.
“Thank you,” he says.
“I’m serious.”
“I believe you.”
“Just so you know.”
The weanling tries to rear in the trailer and rises into a steel crossbeam and it knocks him into a crouch, and he comes out of the trailer as though it’s collapsing around him. The gelded horses flush away to the east, and then fall in behind him as he runs. He runs for what he believes is his life. He hits the south fence at a run. The wires sing and stretch, and he’s thrown onto his back where he kicks and shrieks and struggles to his feet. He staggers and paws into the darkness and stands finally, shaking his head.
Gretchen has taken a step toward the colt.
“How long is this going to go on?” she asks.
“Until it stops.”
He knelt by the doe and lifted her ruined head from the ground. He slipped the loop of the catchrope around her neck and stood and wiped his bloodied hands on his pantlegs. He backed away, paying out the coils of his father’s lariat, and when he reached the knot in the end he stopped. He stood and held on tight to the rope’s end. That was as far as he could go. The wind came up hard again and thrashed at his chest, and he dropped the rope and brought his horse around.
He picked the rope out of the sage and swung into the saddle and dallied and reined the horse away. He turned in the saddle to watch the rope draw tight at the doe’s throat. He held his breath.
She came along easily in the patches of open ground and then caught on a sage and pulled free and bounced up the rope after them. The horse shied and whistled but after it happened again did not even turn. McEban sat straight on the horse and didn’t look back either.
That was the way he brought her out. By not looking back.
He dragged her out of the sage and onto a dirt track, and there was only the sound her body made on the hardpacked ground. Like the sound of deep water curling under a cutbank, he thought.
At the end of the track the ground was worn into the rutted circle of a turnaround, and where the turnaround quit the ground dropped away into a steep-sided ravine. The ravine was strewn with cans, bottles, weather-blanched cardboard, scraps of broken lumber, bones, wind-tattered plastic. There was a swather with no tines. A ruptured water heater. A stove. The recent litter of fresh garbage, the buzz of flies. It was his family’s small patch of landfill.
He undallied the lariat and stood down from his horse.
The day was still chill and when he filled his chest he thought he could feel his heart beat against the cool sacks of his lungs. The lariat lay hard in his hands. He drew the doe’s ragged body to him, hand over hand, down the length of the rope. The horse backed away, ears pricked, and rolled its eyes.
He knelt and slipped the rope from the doe’s neck and grasped a hindleg with both hands and bunched the muscles in his shoulders and across his back. He stepped to the side and swung her out into the air and dropped his arms and watched her fall. The flies rose into the air and settled. He looked at his hands for fresh blood and there was none. He picked the end of the rope out of the dust and coiled it and stepped to his horse, but the horse sidestepped away. It held its chin high, careful not to walk on the bridle reins. He cursed the horse and caught up the trailing reins and stepped in close to its shoulder and spun into the saddle. He pulled his hat snug on his head and dug in his heels, but the horse just lunged and fell into a trot, and would not buck.
He reined the horse onto the two-track and closed his eyes and crossed his hands, one atop the other, on the saddle’s horn and rode that way. With his eyes shut and his body filled with the cool dry air.
A tall bay leans into the little stud and nuzzles his shoulder and snorts, and the weanling turns and kicks and the other horses press in close, all of them quivering in the moonlight. And then they run.
“There’s someone you don’t know about,” she says. “A man.”
“You aren’t talking about Bennett?”
“No. Not Bennett. Another man. A man I love.”
The horses move fast along the fenceline. The weanling runs at their center.
“I don’t believe you,” he says.
“I thought you might already know.”
“How would I know?”
“I don’t know how you’d know. But sometimes people know. Some things just happen,” she says, “and other people know about them.”
He cocks his head. He listens for the stretch and snap of the wires, and when there is just the drumming of hooves on the grassed pasture he asks her how long some things have just happened.
“For a year. He came up from Denver,” she says. “He’s a physicist. I met him when he came to give a talk at a Nature Conservancy meeting.”
McEban feels the rhythm of the horses’ movement, the pulse of it in the soles of his feet. “What’d he talk about?”
“What?”
“The physicist. You said he gave a talk.”
“The nature of light,” she says. “He talked about light.”
McEban nods. He squints into the pasture’s halflight. He watches the dark forms of the horses moving against the gauzy moonscape.
“Is that why you came over the other night?” he asks. “To say goodbye?”
“That’s why I came over.”
He nods and looks toward the house as if he expects to see the lights come on and their silhouettes appear in a window, but the windows are dark. The glass reflects as would slabs of black jade.
“Does Bennett know?”
“If he does he hasn’t said anything.” She spits again to clear her mouth. “I don’t think he knows.”
The little stud trots the fenceline. He smells the wire as he moves along it. He rolls his eyes, searching for a place where the wire will quit. He nickers into the darkness beyond the wire. The geldings follow and flush away and are drawn back. They keep him close enough to scent. It is as though they are afraid if he is lost he will be lost from them forever. They flare their soft nostrils, drawn to his odor of wildness.
A reef of broken clouds move across the moon, and Gretchen falls dull in the shadows and flashes clear in the riffs of moonlight.
“I’m leaving,” she says.
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” she says, and after a moment asks, “Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.” He calls Woody out of the truck and pushes the topwire down where a staple has worked free and steps over. “This is a good place to cross,” he calls.
“What?”
“The fence. If you step over here, you won’t snag your dress.”
“I need to go home,” she tells him. “I need to put Bennett to bed.”
He pushes the wire down and steps back over and opens the gate and lays it back along the fence. He walks to the truck and leans in through the window to look at Bennett asleep against the far doorpanel.
He hears the thudding of wings so close overhead he ducks and throws an arm over his head.
“What do you think that was?” he asks.
“I don’t know. It could have been an owl.” She looks into the trees at the pasture’s edge. She still holds on to the side of the truck.
“I’ll help you get Bennett to the house,” he says. “Get him to bed.”
He opens the truckdoor and the cablight falls out hard against him, and he winces and shuts the door.
She lays a hand along his forearm. “Are you alright?”
He turns to her and blinks. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t listening.”
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” He opens the door again and steps back and she slides to the middle of the seat. He gets in after her and shuts the door.
The little horse has turned against the far corner and is coming back along the fenceline but just at a trot.
“Do you think he’ll hit the fence again?”
“I think he’s got it out of his system,” he says. “I think he’ll be just fine.”
In the dream she stands against the cocked rise of her left hip, her right leg spread wide to steady the drop of her ribcage and shoulders. She’s winded and sucks at the air. Her breasts heave unevenly and run slick with sweat and her belly runs with sweat, and it gathers in the alluvium of the curled and coal-colored hair that tangles between her legs, and drops from the soft split of her vulva.
He thinks of the warm heart of a forest. Hot heart, he thinks, and supposes her a woman sprung from such a place; lush, a collector of dew, a vessel where hallucinations might ferment.
She steps to him and takes his head in her hands and presses the side of his face to her belly, her hands in his hair, and holds him there. He is afraid, but more afraid to struggle. He shuts his eyes. He listens. For a moment he imagines melody, an anthem, but in a language he does not own. He shuts his eyes tighter and feels more alone than he imagined possible, and when he thinks he might have to cry out she pulls him to his feet.
He is lightheaded and she steadies him where he stands. He tilts forward, unbalanced, falling—into her damp breath, against her fruit-smooth flesh.