They top the Continental Divide out of West Yellowstone and gather speed on a high plateau of mostly Forest Service scenery: stands of mature pine, reseeded clearcuts, browning meadow grass, a cloud-broken sky. The air smells of elevation and the wind is up and out of the northwest. Paul pushes upright in the middle of the seat and rubs his eyes. He brings his knees to his nose and sniffs his jeans.
“I’m not all the way dry,” he says.
“I have to pee,” says Rita.
“We’ll be in Ashton in half an hour,” McEban tells her.
The boy taps him lightly on his thigh. “I think she means now.”
McEban turns the truck into a campground and parks by the cinderblock toilets. The timber presses in around the campsites, and the wind lifts and drops the pine boughs and they sweep the air into the sound of falling water. There are no other campers.
Rita slides her panties to her knees and steps her right leg out of the elastic bands. She throws the door open and hikes up her skirt and swings her ass out over the threshold. She grips the armrest with her right hand and the metal doorjamb with the other and digs into the floormat with her toes. She rolls her eyes to illustrate the pleasure of her toilet.
There is the sound of the engine ticking as it cools, the wind, and the softer sound of her urine on pine needles. McEban stares into the trees.
“This embarrass you?” she asks.
“When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” he says, but doesn’t turn his head.
“You look like you want to poke your eyes out.”
“My eyes are just fine where they are.”
She shakes her fanny in a series of small shudders and steps back and down and pulls up her panties. She lets her skirt fall and lifts it away from her thighs and lets it fall again.
Paul slides across the seat and out and Rita climbs into the truck’s bed.
“Some people might’ve used the outhouse just over there,” shouts McEban.
She opens the window panel behind the seat and sticks her head into the cab. “Outhouses smell like shit.”
McEban stands out of the truck. He watches her work a pair of sneakers from her backpack. When she has them laced she rises on the balls of her feet and bounces once, and then again, and steps over the tailgate and onto the ground.
“I’m going for a run,” she says.
Paul leans against the far side of the pickup. He’s only tall enough for his head to show over the panel. They hear her swing the trailergate open and step Aruba out.
“She isn’t usually this comfortable around live people,” Paul says.
They turn to watch her against the wall of wind-fluxed evergreen. She leads the horse and he trots behind her. He throws his forelegs out as though he’s trained to pace. Woody’s lined out at his heels. Her skirt blouses away from her knees and her hair snaps at her shoulders.
They watch her duck through a gap in the pines and disappear and the animals disappear after her. The scene is reduced to green and tan and blue, and, above, the ivory press of a rounded shelf of cumulus.
Paul steps onto the top of the tire and over the sidewall. He kicks out of his shoes and pulls his T-shirt over his head. When he’s found dry clothes in Rita’s backpack he skins out of his damp jeans and underpants. “Besides me and about six dead people she doesn’t really like anybody very much,” he says. He zips and buttons the dry jeans. “She likes dead people because she says you can trust them. She says dead people don’t pretend to like you unless they really do.”
He buttons the front of the flannel shirt he’s put on and fishes a sweater out of the backpack.
McEban lifts the bag of groceries from the toolbox. “You hungry?”
“You ask that a lot.” The sweater’s brown and his eyes appear darker above its dark collar. He sits against the toolbox and opens his hands in exasperation. “There’s people she didn’t like at all when they were alive,” he says, “but she gets along fine with them after they die.”
A week after they buried his grandmother and stood her granite marker up in the sun and wind he was at work with Ansel and his father. They were out on the east slope of the Bighorns, and they were horseback.
They flushed the mother cows and their calves from the willow bottoms and the brush-choked breaks where they’d lain up for the night. They moved them down into the sage and nativegrass and wildflower foothills, and fell in behind them, and kept them moving down.
When the calves tried to break away from the gathered body of cows, the horses threw their lathered shoulders back and forth over their front feet and worked the flanks of the herd like sparring partners, keeping them bunched—the cows and calves—hating them for their lives of passive leisure, proud to be horses with a trade.
Ansel’s colt laid his ears along his skull and chattered his teeth and rushed the cow’s heels and steamed in the morning air. Ansel laughed and rocked back in the saddle and turned out his toes.
“Look at this working roan son of a bitch,” he shouted and slapped his lariat against his thigh and reined the horse, just with his fingertips, just when the colt needed the experience of the man.
There was the smell of broken sage, and fresh cowshit, and turned soil, and leather, and the air was struck thick with pollen.
His father chanted, “There cow, now cow, hey, hey, hey,” and whistled through his front teeth and kept his horse just below them on the sidehill, kept them bunched away from the rimrocks, moving steadily against the fall line.
They walked stones loose and the stones rolled where they could, and where there was just shale, the shale shattered and slid.
The flies swarmed in the warming air and fed at the cows’ faces, their asses, at their chafed and swinging teats.
The new calves bucked and bolted and squeezed against their mothers’ sides. And there was the general complaint they made—the mothers, and their soft children—in their lumbering descent. The sun broke out of a low cloudbank and put an edge to the shadows and glinted in the pint of sour mash Jock pulled from his saddlebags, again, and then again.
The boy looked at Ansel but Ansel looked only to the work, so he spurred his horse wide of the herd, ahead of the men, and opened the wiregate to the lane. He swung back onto his horse and squared the horse in the lane beyond the gate.
Ansel crowded the cattle through and McEban’s horse paced and bobbed its head and nickered, and Ansel’s colt answered. And then his father tipped back the last of the pint and tossed the bottle under the brace at the gate and said what a comfort it was to have a kid who thought he was handy as a man.
They rode behind the settling cows in the dirt lane, and swung in hard behind them in the corrals. They went to work sorting the calves from their mothers, turning the mothers out, two and three at a time, where they stood hunched in the pasture and bawled.
His father overcrowded a rangy heifer and she got a leg and shoulder through the rails and thrashed and snapped a rail and came up just bruised and joined the others. He snatched his hat off his head and swung it in the air, and yahooed, and dropped the hat, and his horse stepped on the crown. McEban felt the heat of the morning on him, pressing down with weight.
McEban scuffs the horseshit out of the trailer, and they sit on the edge of the trailerboards and balance slices of white bread on their knees and take them up one at a time and smear them with peanut butter. Bennett is curled against the manger. The whiskey bottle is capped and tucked under his arm. He snores and murmurs in his sleep.
Paul digs a Leatherman out of his pocket and fans open the choice of tools. He closes the handles behind the crescent of metal meant to be a can opener and centers a can of tuna between his feet and stabs the opener into it.
“It’s got a knife and pliers and a saw blade too,” he says.
“I can see that it does. Where’d you get it?”
“Rita usually keeps it with her. Aren’t you still wet?”
“I’m fine,” McEban says. “I’ll be dry before it gets dark.”
He watches the boy pick chunks of tuna out of the can and thumb the chunks into the peanut butter. When he’s covered one side of his sandwich with fish he presses the two pieces of bread together and bites into it.
“I’ve never seen that combination before,” says McEban.
“It’s good.” Paul looks up, chewing.
“I’ll bet it’s not.”
“Try it.”
Paul holds his sandwich up and McEban manages a timid bite. “It’s not bad,” he says.
“I told you.” He skids the can over with the side of his foot and McEban picks at the fish, but keeps it separate from his sandwich.
“Where did you used to live before now?” McEban asks.
“In Lander. We lived in a trailer in Lander. With our mom.” Paul looks into the grocery bag. “Did you buy any smoked oysters?”
“I will next time I shop.”
The boy nods. “She died,” he says.
“Your mother?”
He nods again.
“How did she die?”
“She had diabetes. They had to cut off one of her feet. Afterward, she said I was her foot and Rita was her head.” He works the peanut butter away from the roof of his mouth. “After that she got a lot worse. We were with her when she died.”
“Was it a long time ago?” McEban asks.
“It was just January second.” He opens his sandwich and rearranges the tuna and closes it again. “I saved up and bought her a scarf for Christmas. I wish I’d’ve bought something she could’ve used.”
Bennett turns in his sleep and they look to see if he’s come awake. He hugs the whiskey bottle more tightly to his chest and settles, and McEban wipes his hands on his jeans and pulls a carton of grapefruit juice from the grocery bag and takes a long drink. “Is your dad alive?” he asks.
“I guess, but I don’t know where.”
Paul leans over and picks the tuna can up out of the dirt.
“Mom said she only saw him once and then he disappeared.” He plucks out the last chunks of tuna and eats them slowly. “She said he didn’t drive away, or get a job in Colorado. He just disappeared. While he was soaking in a tub of hot water. She said she was sitting on the toilet seat talking to him about the price of propane gas and he just disappeared.” He looks at McEban and shrugs. “She told me she thinks he was an angel. She said that when she was still alive.”
McEban hands the grapefruit juice to the boy. “This’ll cut that peanut butter,” he says. “Do you believe the thing about your dad?”
“Sometimes I do.” He takes a long drink of grapefruit juice. “Sometimes at night. Is your mom dead?”
“She lives in Albuquerque with a chiropractor. I’ve never met him,” McEban says. “She sends a Christmas letter every year. She always writes that she’s a woman in need of adjustment.”
“My mom went to a chiropractor once, in Lander.”
Paul hands the juice back to McEban. They can hear the sound of Rita and the animals in the timber.
“Do you know Rita’s boyfriend?” McEban asks.
“Rodney? Sure I do.”
“What do you know about him?”
Paul sucks the tuna juice from his fingers, one finger at a time.
“He worked at the One Stop in Lander with Rita. He was going to college in Laramie but then he came home. Rita said they were in love for exactly one year. From one Fourth of July to the next one. And then Rita said she got drunk and fell in love with herself. That’s what she said, and that’s what she told Rodney.” He looks up at McEban with a forefinger in his mouth. He works the finger around his gums. “Alma thinks Rodney wants to kill Rita.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” the boy says. “I’ve never been in love.”
“Do you think he’s following us?”
Paul takes the juice carton back and drinks and folds the top shut. “Alma sings to him. Rita says Rodney can hear Alma’s song.”
“Why does she sing to him?”
“Rita says Alma doesn’t like loose ends.”
The boy tilts the grocery bag down, searching for a treat. “When we get somewhere with a stove, can we boil some eggs?”
“Sure we can.” McEban sets the carton of grapefruit juice back into the bag and stands. He steps away from the boy. “Is Rodney crazy?”
Paul lifts his shoulders toward his ears and lets them drop. “I’ve never been crazy either,” he says.
Gene and Anna Maris parked their truck by the barn, and the Hansons, and the Reillys, and the Simpsons too. The boys and girls alike took up stockwhips and lariat ropes and waded into the cows and calves and helped with the sorting.
When a calf turned back over Bennett and knocked him down and got free into the pasture, Ansel spurred his roan colt into the distance behind the calf, and built a loop and rode him down, and swung once, and dallied, and dragged him back.
The calf’s tongue hung from its mouth and it wailed and blubbered and tossed its head and slavered and fought the rope.
The men fired the propane torch and lined the branding irons in the metal trough under the flame. They laid out the vaccination guns, and the dehorning tools, and the vials of vaccine, and the powder that would stanch the flow of blood.
They tilted down two four-by-eight sheets of plywood from where they leaned against the barnwall and laid them over sawhorses on the shaded side of the barn. The women filled the rough tables with bowls of tinfoil-covered food, gallon-size Thermoses, picnic plates, and plasticware.
The women who didn’t have infants in their arms, or at their breasts, rolled up their shirtsleeves and bent through the corral rails and stood ready for the work.
He looked back to the house to see if he could find the outline of his mother. He didn’t see her on the porch, or at a window, and when Nancy Reilly saw him looking she smiled, and he looked away and stepped down from his horse.
He handed Brian Reilly his bridle reins because the man’s foot was broken and wrapped, and he needed work that got him off the foot and on top of a horse.
“Help me set these stirrups out to the length of my legs,” Brian told him, and he ducked under his horse’s head and unbuckled the stirrup strap on the offside.
“How many holes down?” McEban asked.
“Four should do it,” Brian said. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. And so is the wife. Bennett cried all night the day she died.”
“Thank you,” McEban said.
He looked at his father. He had his horse parked away from the work and sat the animal, weaving, gripping the saddle’s horn, smiling into the sunglare.
“I’ve never seen your dad drunk before,” Brian said.
And McEban nodded because it was the truth, and he was glad a grown man had said it out loud.
Bennett wakes at dusk and crawls to the trailergate and swings his legs out and sits.
“Are you ready for supper?” Rita asks.
She squats on her haunches, turning hotdogs with a sharpened stick. She’s built a fire under one of the campground grates and let the fire burn down to coals. She’s stirred macaroni and cheese and creekwater into an aluminum pot and broken open a package of hotdogs on the grate around the pot. McEban and Paul sit across from her on a length of fallen pine they’ve rolled to the fireside.
Bennett reaches back for his bottle and stands out of the trailer. He holds onto the gate. “Do we have catsup?”
“Just mustard,” she says.
“I can’t eat a hotdog without catsup. Where’s my letter?”
“In the glovebox,” she says.
He starts along the trailerside and falls once and gets back up. They can hear him open the truckdoor and the leafsprings shift and the door close. He staggers to the fire and sits in the dirt next to Rita and opens the letter on his lap. “Did you read it?” he asks.
“Twice.” She sits back on a smooth stone behind her and takes up a paper plate of blackened hotdogs and balances the plate on her knees.
Bennett sucks his upper lip between his teeth and lets it go. He holds the letter to the fire. McEban can see the careful loop of Gretchen’s handwriting through the milky paper.
“I read it the second time to make sure I’d remembered it right from the first time.” She takes a hotdog off her plate and folds a slice of bread around it and hands it to her brother.
Bennett tilts back a sip of whiskey. “When you see Alma how does she look to you?”
Rita studies him as he stares into the fire. “Like pond ice,” she says. “Alma looks like the ice at the edge of a pond when it’s splintered and the sun’s out.”
“Is that the way you think we all look?” he asks. “After we’re dead?”
“I think it’s the way Alma looks.”
Bennett squints against the firelight. “Do you see anybody else that’s dead?”
“Not regularly,” she says. “But sometimes.”
Bennett takes up a stick and pokes at the coals. The coals pulse orange and red and silver, as though gasping for breath.
“I think your wife loved you as much as she could,” Rita says. She holds a hotdog by its end. She nibbles at it and wags it toward Bennett. “I think she stayed with you because she felt superior to you, and when she couldn’t anymore, she left. I don’t think she feels superior to anything anymore.”
The night presses in against them, against the wavering bulb of firelight in which they sit. Bennett drops his head back and stares up into the darkness.
“I still love her,” he says.
“I still love Rodney,” she says. “Rodney made the same mistake. Every morning he woke up next to me he thought his life couldn’t do anything but improve.”
Bennett levels his head. “Who’s Rodney?”
“Her boyfriend,” McEban says. “Alma thinks he’s going to kill her.”
Bennett stares blankly at Rita and then to the sheet of paper in his hands. He nods and rips the letter in half and then again, and leans forward and lays it on the coals. The paper curls and blackens and bursts into flame.
“Goddamn it.” Rita pokes at the flaming paper with the sharpened stick. “I just got those coals spread out right.”
“Do I look like I could start over?” Bennett asks.
She looks up at him. The nightside of her face is flattened against the darkness. “What do you want to start over?”
Bennett shrugs. “Just about everything, I guess. I looked in the truck mirror to see if I looked like I had any energy left, but I couldn’t tell under the domelight. I feel used up.”
“You’ve been drunk for a day,” she says. “Nobody looks good when they’re drunk.”
“Take that into consideration,” he tells her. “And remember I was beat up just a couple of days ago.”
Rita sets the pot of macaroni off the grate and kneels at Bennett’s side. She shuts her eyes so that when she opens them and looks it will be like the first time. She lifts his chin toward the firelight and studies his face. The swelling has gone down, but there’s still a hammock of purple under his left eye, and the lid droops, and the left side of his jaw is bruised from its hinge to the point of his chin.
“You look tired,” she says. “And you need a bath.” She sits back against her heels. “I don’t think any of us can start all the way over.”
Ansel and Brian Reilly roped the calves by their heels when they could, and around their necks when they missed the heels, and dragged them to the boys.
The boys waited in pairs at the center of the corral. McEban worked with Jack Maris, and the Hanson brothers worked as a team, and Gretchen Simpson worked with Bennett because McEban hadn’t gotten to her first. He watched his father more than he watched anything else and tried to act as though he didn’t.
His father missed three calves, and caught his horse’s front feet once, and finally reined his horse away, and took out a second pint of whiskey from his saddlebags.
Ansel dragged a calf to McEban headfirst, and said about the boy’s father, “That’s none of your business,” and McEban bent over the calf and gripped its front leg, and the flap of hide at its flank, and lifted against his thighs, and let the calf drop on its side. He knelt against its neck and bent its foreleg back at the knee and took the catchrope off its neck. He looked to where his father sat his horse and drank.
“It feels like my business,” he said.
Ansel nodded down at the calf. “Right there’s your business. What you’ve got in your hands.”
Jack Maris sat in the corral dirt behind the calf and pulled its top hindleg back to his lap. He pushed with his boot sole against the lower hindleg, and scissored the animal in place.
The day was dry and the corral worked to dust, and the dust hung close to the ground. He could taste it in his mouth, could see it mixed with the sweat on his hands, ground into his clothes, and the feel and smell of it got all the way into him. He looked only to the next calf that came his way.
Gene Maris and Dan Hanson ran the irons. They wore leather gloves and walked to the calves with the brands glowing red, and the iron cooled as they walked, but not enough.
They stepped a boot up onto each calf’s hip and pressed the iron into the wiry red hair, and the hair burned, and the hide did too, and the smoke made the boys’ eyes water. Sometimes it made them cough.
The calves bucked against the ground and bawled. They bulged their eyes until the whites showed plainly all the way around. Their tongues hung from their mouths, and the red dirt stuck to their tongues.
The man with the iron stepped back and almost always bent down and rubbed the palm of his glove against the brand to make sure it was right. These were men with their own stock; men who would bring their cows into their home corrals tomorrow, or the day after, or on the weekend, and all this would be done again.
Anna Maris ran the vaccination gun, and whichever of the men had his hands free first stabbed the razored circle of the dehorning tool over the horn nubs and twisted it into the calf’s skull, and popped the little buds of horn onto the ground. If the blood didn’t stop the man shook in the styptic powder and stood away, and waited, and when the boys turned them loose the calves jumped right up, and when they didn’t the boys helped them to their feet, and ran them through a gate into the pasture where they trotted to their mothers, and tried to nurse.
If it was a bull calf there was more to do.
Anna Maris shook her hair away from her face, and reloaded her syringe, and laughed, and said, “This is the only time it doesn’t go against the girls,” and Dale Simpson knelt down and slit the sack, and fished out the nuts, and cut and feathered the cords. His wife stood behind him with a coffee can and he dropped the nuts in the can for the nutfry they’d have that night.
Rowene Simpson shook the can at McEban, right under his nose, and said, “Mess with my daughter and this is where you’ll come to find your little oysters.” Then she said as much to Jack Maris too.
McEban snuck a look at Gretchen and she smiled at him, and he looked back down at the can of wet and bloody nuts.
And then his father fell off his horse and lay faceup in the sun and they all stood away from their work. For just one moment. And then Anna Maris and Dan Hanson walked over to him and hooked him under the armpits and dragged him into the shade of the barn. They propped him against the barnwall and never said a thing, and in another hour the work was done and it was only one in the afternoon.
They washed up at the hose bib by the barn, and Rowene Simpson brought his father’s hat out of the corral. She reshaped its crown and knelt by him and tipped the hat down over his eyes. She wiped around his mouth with the corner of a bandanna she’d damped at the bib and stood and joined the others.
They sat on benches at the homemade tables to have their dinner. They gripped one another’s rough and work-thickened hands and bowed their heads, and Ansel said, “God bless every one of us according to our need,” and then he thanked the Lord that no one needed stitches, for more twin calves than stillborns, for good grass, enough winter snow to keep the creeks up, for good-natured horses. “And for Cleva,” he said. “She was the best of us.” He cleared his throat, and added, “I wish to someday be the man she saw in me.”
Every one of them said, “Amen.”
There was potato salad and corn on the cob and white bread and chicken and baked beans reheated in a Dutch oven that Nancy Reilly had set in the branding trough.
They ate with their hands and with spoons, and they laughed while they ate. They wiped their butter-slick fingers on their jeans.
“I got this recipe from your grandmother,” Rowene Simpson said about her potato salad. “I’d’ve never thought to put the olives in.”
Dale Simpson looked up and said, “It’s only God who gets the pleasure of her now,” but his mouth was full and his wife asked him to repeat it and he did.
Nancy Reilly asked McEban if his mother was feeling weak again this year, and he said she was.
“I’ll save out a plate for her. It’s no fun feeling weak,” Nancy said, and she looked up toward the house.
They’re asleep under the tarp in the pickup bed when the barking starts. The moon is set and the night has fallen soundly dark. McEban takes up the flashlight he’s laid by his hat and sweeps the night with its beam.
He finds Woody backed against the truck tire. The dog’s hackles are spiked and he growls and drools and won’t look away when McEban calls his name.
Bennett has the toolbox open and McEban hears him bolt a cartridge into the rifle’s chamber. “Try to get a light on what’s out there,” he says.
“Is it Rodney?” Rita asks.
McEban turns the light toward the sound of her voice and back into the night. She’s taken Paul up under an arm and moved to the tailgate.
They hear snuffling and a series of rasping coughs. Bennett shuts the toolbox and steps up onto its lid. “If it’s Rodney,” he says, “the man’s dying of tuberculosis.”
They hear Aruba neigh and whistle and stamp in the meadow grass, and Woody crouches lower and whimpers and snarls.
“I think we might lose that horse,” Bennett says.
“Shit,” says Rita, and when McEban puts the light on her again the boy is gone.
“Where is he?” he asks.
“He’s gone for the horse,” she says.
McEban stands and snatches the rifle from Bennett and slides over the sidewall. “Get the girl in the cab,” he says and thumbs the safety off. “And the dog too.”
He seats the rifle against his shoulder and holds the flashlight up under the forestock and sights along the side of the scope. He keeps both eyes wide and moves into the night a step at a time.
He hears the snapping of brush and the horse hit the end of its picket line and fall and get back up and run in a circle.
He sweeps the flashlight and rifle back and forth. The beam throws an empty cone of yellowed light. It catches in the pines and meadow grass. There is only that. And the sounds of the horse and the huffing of the wild thing come in out of the night.
He wishes he had checked his watch. He’d like to know if it’s an hour until dawn or more. If he’s mauled, he thinks, he’d like to know how long he will have to lie in the darkness. His flesh feels hot and his blood throbs at his temples and in his neck. He sniffs the air for the odor of blood. His ears ring.
He hears the truckdoor slam behind him and Bennett’s voice. “It’s probably just a bear,” Bennett shouts.
McEban thinks of the eyes that surely must be on him. Dark eyes, dark nose, dark fur, black lips, white teeth. He thinks of the brain behind the eyes. He knows it is a mind bent singularly on its own satisfaction, its own hungers. Primitive, without remorse.
Skin covers meat, he thinks. Protein. Broken skin presents a meal. A snapped bone reveals the bonus of marrow. Only that. And a belly full of blood brings a sound and satisfied sleep. He wonders where he will find the boy. He prays the boy isn’t torn open and dragged away into the deep timber.
He hears steps to his right and swings the light and rifle and blinks to clear his sight. He hears the approach of footfalls, hears them quicken, the drumming upon the earth. He feels the vibrations move into his calves and thighs, and he widens his stance and bends at the knees and holds his breath and grits his teeth. He can hear his teeth squeal. Enamel sliding against enamel.
Sweat runs from his armpits and down his back. His scalp pricks and itches and he narrows his eyes. He centers himself over his lowered ass. He is crouched that way, sweating, his arms gone leaden when the boy trots the blind horse out of the brush and into the light.
McEban relaxes his finger from the trigger and turns the barrel away and puts the safety on. He exhales and sucks full of the night air and it makes him choke. He turns away and coughs and tries to spit. He licks his lips and tries again.
Paul has stopped the horse before him and leans along its neck and whispers sweetly and clucks his tongue.
“Aren’t your feet cold?” he asks.
McEban looks down to where he stands. A small stream parts neatly around his calves. He steps up onto the bank. “I forgot to pull my boots on.”
The boy slides from the horse’s back and steps to its head. He’s fashioned the end of the picket rope into a crude hackamore, and still twenty feet of the rope trail away. He pulls the rope to them, and the horse swings its hindquarters and rolls its blind eyes. Paul whispers to the horse and loops the rope against his open hand.
“There now,” McEban chants, “that’s the man.” He steps closer so the horse can scent him. He holds the light on the boy’s hand and they watch the rope coil against his palm. The hobble comes up out of the grass unbuckled and wet with dew.
“Were you scared?” McEban asks.
“Yes, I was.” Paul ties off the coil of rope. “And then I got sort of calm. Were you scared?”
“I never got calm.”
The boy looks over his shoulder into the dark. “Did you see what was out here?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I never did either.”
McEban holds the flashlight to his side and they look down together and bend to have a better look at the single track. The footpad is broadly triangular and the toepads arched to the middle toe and the foreclaws straight and deeply gouged.
“It looks bigger because the ground’s wet.” McEban steps to the side and finds a second track with the light.
“Is it a grizzly?” the boy asks.
“Yes, it is,” McEban says. He still stares at the track.
“I wouldn’t have come out here if I’d’ve known.”
McEban brings the light up to Paul’s face. “I probably wouldn’t have come after you.” He smiles and the boy smiles too.
They hear Bennett start the truck and the throaty flush of the engine and see the headlights stretch into the timber and not quite reach them.
McEban steps back across the creek. “Lead that horse up close behind me.”
“I will for sure,” the boy tells him.
In the afternoon they played horseshoes and napped on blankets in the shade. The men drank beer, and so did Rowene Simpson, and the rest of the women and the kids drank soda pop.
In the late afternoon the women cleaned the calf nuts at Ansel’s sink. They rolled them in batter and deep-fried them in two inches of lard and let them cool on a spread of paper towels.
His father came awake and Rowene asked if he was hungry, and he said he was just thirsty so she handed him a beer.
They sat on Ansel’s porch and ate the nuts with their fingers and enjoyed the end of the day, and at dusk Brian Reilly was left, and so were the Simpsons. Everyone else had gone.
Brian asked his father if he was going to take up smoking too, and his father said he thought learning to drink was hard enough.
Brian said he’d help him get the hang of it and got up and fished a Miller High Life out of the cooler and sat back on the porch.
The evening came down warm and windless and McEban thought he’d never seen his father so relaxed.
When they were out of beer Ansel said he was tired of company, and his father said he wasn’t, and Brian Reilly backed his truck around.
“We’ll run into Ishawooa for another six-pack or two,” his father said and looked at his son, “and maybe a bonfire by the river for the kids.”
“Suit yourself,” Ansel said.
Brian asked who would ride up front with him and Rowene said she would. Everyone else rode in the back and held their hats in their laps and watched the spread of stars grow brighter as they drove away from the porchlight and into the night.
His father leaned against the tailgate, and McEban and Gretchen and Bennett and Dale Simpson sat against the cabwall. Gretchen sat between him and Bennett and they pressed into her, and everyone watched his father.
His father had his catchrope coiled on his knees. He spun out a loop and stared into the grassy trough of the barrow pit.
Dale Simpson said, “It never hurts to practice.”
His father said practice was what he needed. His hair blew over his forehead and he smiled at his son, and McEban tried to remember the last time he’d seen his father have such a good time, and couldn’t, so he smiled right back, and tried to have a good time too.
Bennett drives with his window up and the heater on and the whiskey bottle stuck between his thighs. “Did you see anything?” he asks.
“There were some tracks,” McEban says. “The boy says he saw something move.”
“My bowel,” says Bennett. “That’s what would’ve moved if I’d’ve gone out there.” He elbows Paul. “How’re your pants?” he asks, grinning.
“They’re fine,” the boy says, and Bennett laughs and lifts up the bottle again.
They drop off the timbered plateau into the fertile, deeded farmland at Ashton, Idaho. A roadside sign catches in the headlights. It advertises the town as the Seed Potato Capital of the World. The streets are empty of traffic and they guess all the potato farmers to be in bed, and they idle through town and turn back east toward Wyoming.
It is not yet dawn and the cultivated fields to the sides of the road fall darkly away. No one sleeps. Rita and Paul are squeezed side by side in the middle of the seat. They blink and rub their eyes and stare through the windshield eastward for the first hint of day. McEban leans into the passenger doorpanel.
Bennett stops the truck in front of a roadside bar in Driggs, Idaho, and stands out with the headlights on bright and the motor running. He pounds on the bardoor until an old man turns on the porchlight and cracks the door open. Bennett talks to the man and follows him in and comes back out with a gallon jar of pickled hard-boiled eggs and a fist of beef jerky.
He stuffs the jerky in his shirt pocket and hands the jar to Paul, and the boy centers it on the seat and keeps it in place with a knee on either side.
“Help yourself to breakfast,” Bennett says and, when no one does, grips the lid and turns it. The whole jar turns. “Clamp down,” he orders, and Paul scissors the jar between his legs and Bennett twists the top off. He scoops out an egg and holds it up in the dashboard lights. The smell of sulfur and vinegar fills the cab. “To your health,” he says.
He eats three, one after the other, and Paul eats one. Rita leans into McEban and closes her eyes, and after a while begins to sing. McEban has to tilt his head to hear the words. She sings just above a whisper. “Have mercy on us Lord, have mercy on us. Let your mercy, O Lord, be upon us, for we have placed our hope in you.”
He means to ask her where she’s learned the words to “Missa Solemnis” but doesn’t want to interrupt. And he’s tired of the sound of his own voice.
They top Teton Pass as the sun breaks the southeastern horizon seemingly all at once. The day is cloudless and the sky blanched pale, and Bennett swerves against the glare and paws down the visor and double-clutches and they drop a gear. Rita holds her hands before her and squints into the sun. She can see the fan of bones, from her wrists to her fingertips, the flesh become just a rosy blur.
The gearbox whines and Bennett pumps the brakes into the canted switchbacks, and still they drop faster than the sun can rise, back into the shadowed valley, the peaks surrounding the valley sun-slapped and glowing amber.
Halfway to the valley floor the sun gains the sky again and the Snake River glows as an uneven rend in the green country below them, and then they’re in the little town of Wilson at the bottom of the pass and the smell of their burning brakepads fills the cab and it is fully dawn.
Bennett drives the ten miles to Jackson slowly, veering across the center line, correcting into the gravel at the road’s side. He’s taken up the bottle in his right hand, and points to the behemoth log homes that break up the hillsides and crowd the river bottom.
“They tell me the billionaires are buying out the millionaires down here,” he says. “Can you imagine selling real estate in this little burg?”
“I can’t,” McEban tells him.
At the edge of Jackson they pass a drunk asleep in his car and half a dozen joggers out loping at the roadside. The breakwater tourist shops stand closed.
A gang of old men loiter in front of a downtown café, waiting for the coffee to brew.
Bennett stops the truck at the traffic light at the southwest corner of the main square, and because he’s pointed east and the sun feels good on his chest, he continues east on Broadway past the Church of Latter-Day Saints, past St. John’s Hospital, and out toward the elk refuge. When he’s miles from the nearest building he parks on the shoulder of the two-lane.
McEban unloads Aruba and the horse bends to the thick grass at the roadside. Woody finds a patch of broken ground and stretches out on it, and McEban brings him a bowl of kibble.
“What time do you think the post office opens?” Bennett asks.
“Nine probably,” McEban says.
“How long do you plan on doing this?” Rita asks.
Paul stands beside her and she pulls a comb from a pocket in her skirt and kneels in front of him. She combs his hair until it snaps with static and rises away from his head, and she licks her fingers and smoothes the hair down flat.
“How long do I plan on doing what?” Bennett sets the jar of eggs on the truck hood. He’s rolled up his sleeve. He grips them out two at a time, and when he thinks of it underhands one to Woody. The dog gets up and sniffs the egg and cocks a leg and pisses on it.
“Driving from post office to post office,” she says.
“As long as it takes. Except on Sundays. I guess we’ll rest on Sundays.”
“Why?”
Bennett studies the egg he holds. “Because she asked me to.” Brine drips from his elbow and he wipes the elbow against the bulge of his gut. “Anyway,” he says, “new misery’s more interesting than old.” He pops the whole egg in his mouth and caps the jar. “You want these?” he asks, and when no one answers, he sets the jar on the truckseat and gets in beside it.
“I might go back into Jackson and see which bar opens first.”
McEban has started up a balded hillside. He stops, huffing, looking down at the truck. “We’ll come in to town in a couple of hours,” he calls.
Bennett waves and turns the truck in an arc that dips him through both barrow pits. Paul stretches out in the dirt next to Woody and Rita starts up after McEban.
“Alma says there’s a good place to sit at the top,” she calls, and he turns and waits for her to catch him. They sit in the sage at the crown of the hill and watch the land north toward Yellowstone. The glaciers on the Tetons flash in the morning light.
“Where’s the elk?” she asks.
“They come down in these meadows when the snow drives them out of Yellowstone.”
“Does somebody feed them?”
“Off the backs of wagons,” he says. “There’s some handsome teams of draft horses that pull the wagons. I’ve come over to watch.” He plucks a grass stem up and sucks on the shaft. “When it greens up in the spring the elk wander back.”
“Where do you think they’d go if no one fed them?” she asks.
“I guess they’d die.”
“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if you weren’t here?”
“Just me, or everybody?”
“Everybody.”
“It’d be quieter.” He leans back against his elbows. “And there’d probably be a lot more dead elk.”
“I think it was the men who put up the fences who crowded them into the park.” She sits with her knees drawn up. With her slim brown hands clasped over her knees.
“Maybe it’d just be quieter,” he allows.
They watch Paul find a can along the roadway and set it on a fencepost and back off and gather a pile of rocks. He picks out each rock, one at a time, and collects himself like a big-league pitcher, and winds up, and tries to knock the can off the post.
The sun warms the hillside and McEban sits up and strips off his canvas jacket and spreads it behind him and leans back onto it.
“Alma says it’s the sound of our disbelief that makes more racket than anything else,” Rita says.
“Has she said what we don’t believe?”
“She says we don’t believe we’re going to die.”
“I believe I will,” he says. “I just don’t want to suffer before I do.”
“She says you won’t.”
He looks to Rita. “Is she sure about that?”
“Alma’s always sure. She’s just not always right.”
McEban slumps back fully and closes his eyes. He listens to the sound of the wind, a horsefly, the swish of the boy throwing rocks, and when he looks up Gretchen stands over him. He can see her clearly. Her red hair catches in the sun like hot copper. She stands with a foot at either side of his chest and smiles down at him. She holds a small round stone in her left hand, and when he smiles back at her, she lets it drop.
He watches the stone fall. He watches it enter him just below his sternum and he feels it pass, without a sound, through his body, and continue falling. He lies listening, waiting for the stone to strike a surface, and when it doesn’t he opens his eyes and blinks into the violet-blue sky.
“Was I asleep?” he asks.
“For an hour,” Rita tells him. She still sits with her knees drawn up.
He nods and stands and takes up his jacket, and she follows him down through the sagebrush to the road.
“You ready to go to town?” he asks Paul.
“I want to hit the can first.”
“Why don’t you bring it with you?”
McEban catches Aruba’s halter rope out of the grass and swings up on him and turns him in the borrow ditch. He reaches down for Rita’s hand and pulls her up behind him.
“Walking or riding?” he calls to Paul.
The boy is coming back toward them with the can.
“I don’t feel like riding,” he says.
“Will you bring Woody’s bowl with you?”
“Sure I will,” the boy says and takes up the bowl and breaks into a skipping run in the waist-deep grass, and his smile flashes bright as glacier ice.
His father’d missed a SOFT SHOULDER and a DEER CROSSING sign by twenty feet each, and got to his knees against the wheelwell so he could better see the signs come up out of the night.
Brian Reilly hung his head out the cab window and shouted, “What’re you going to do if you catch one?”
“What’s he want?” his father asked.
“He wants to know what you’re going to do if you catch a sign,” Dale said.
“Dally off hard and fast,” his father said.
“To what?” Dale was laughing, and the wind caught his laughter and swirled it against his face.
“To my dick,” his father said, and when Brian wanted to know what was said, Dale shouted, “His dick,” and didn’t even look down at his daughter and the boys didn’t look at Gretchen either, but she felt bright-hot against their sides. The men laughed, and the boys sat wide-eyed, working hard at their smiles. They sipped at their cans of pop. Gretchen smiled too but tucked her chin.
At the bend in the two-lane, where it curved through a gap in the red rocks, his father looked directly at him and winked.
“Pay attention,” his father said. “This’ll make a good story someday.”
The man rose against his cocked right knee and threw a high backhanded loop into the night and spun on his bootheels and leaned back against the stiffened rope and the rope paid out through his hands at fifty miles an hour, and the knot in the end snapped up against what was left of the meat of his hands. He bore down and was jerked against the tailgate, and over, and the darkness swallowed him whole.
Dale threw down his beer can and stood and beat on the cabroof, and Brian locked up the brakes. There was the smell of rubber and transmission fluid and rope-seared flesh.
They backed along the shoulder, and the boys and Gretchen knelt at the tailgate and when they saw his father come red in the brakelights shouted, “Whoa.”
When they got to him Dale asked, “Jesus Christ, Jock, do you think you can move?”
“I probably can,” his father said.
“Why don’t you try?” asked Rowene. She was kneeling by his shoulder.
“Maybe I will when I feel more confident about it.”
Jock lay on his back in the new grass and stared straight up into the night. They all stood around him except Rowene, who was kneeling. They cast shadows in the brakelights and Brian Reilly finally sat down in the hem of road cinders and laughed and couldn’t stop.
“He’s missing a boot,” Gretchen said.
“Just the one?” his father asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Is the foot still there?”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
Rowene said, “Why don’t you see if you can find the boot?” and Gretchen started down the borrow ditch sweeping through the grass. Dale Simpson knelt at Jock’s head and lifted him up against his thighs.
McEban knelt on the ground by his father’s side, beside Rowene.
“What did I catch?” his father asked.
Dale said, “A curve sign.”
“Isn’t that a hell of a thing?”
They all nodded. McEban could see the shadow of his head move up and down, and he tilted his head to tilt the shadow.
Rowene got his father’s fingers peeled away from the catchrope, and Bennett got the rope off the sign. Gretchen found the missing boot.
His father held his hands before his face. The fingers were curved down toward the heels, and the right thumbnail was gone, and most of the skin from the palms. “They’re in better shape than I thought they’d be,” he said, and they all agreed they expected more blood.
“Can you straighten the fingers out?” Rowene asked.
“They’ll probably do that for me at the hospital.”
“I’m going to get you up now,” Dale said.
McEban and Bennett cocked the man’s knees and bent his feet back under his butt, and Dale lifted straight away from the ground. When his father was up and weaving in the brakelights McEban gripped his left arm, and Bennett gripped the right. Brian Reilly lowered the tailgate and said, “Walk him over this way if you can.”
His father looked down at his son and said, “I just got up this morning missing your grandmother. That’s all there was to it. This won’t happen again.”
“At least you didn’t get your dally made,” Rowene said and they all laughed, and his father sat down again in the borrow ditch with his bloody hands in his lap.
Bennett’s truck and trailer are parked on the lawn in Jackson’s main square. They’re cordoned off with yellow police tape and a Teton County sheriff’s car is nosed in at the curb. The cop car’s door stands open and its bank of rooflights flash blue and red and yellow.
McEban reins Aruba under an archway of elk antlers and through a milling crowd of onlookers and up to the yellow tape and lets him stand.
The sheriff sits on the tailgate with his Stetson thumbed back from his face. The toolbox is open and the chainsaw and tarp and clothes and groceries and bedroll and rifle are strewn on the truckbed. The man puffs his cheeks and blows and plucks a can of snoose from his shirt pocket. He settles a pinch of it in his lower lip and puffs his cheeks again.
“You tired, Jerry?” McEban asks.
The sheriff looks up at McEban and Rita and turns his head and spits a stream of slick brown juice over his shoulder. He’s a long, thin man and when he spits his narrow shoulders hunch up near his ears. “That horse looks like he’s blind,” he says.
“He turned up that way this summer. You like living over here?”
“Not as much as I thought. Housing’s expensive. Ansel still alive?”
“He was when I left,” McEban tells him.
Woody jumps into the truckbed and wags his tailstump and rolls onto his side and offers the sheriff his belly. The man scratches at the sides of the dog’s pecker and looks back to where Paul stands beside the blind horse.
“You join a commune, or did you get married?” the sheriff asks.
“I’m on vacation,” McEban tells him.
He swings his off leg over Aruba’s neck and slides to his feet and ducks under the police tape and stands against the truck, looking in.
“You find what you were searching for?” he asks.
“I was looking for drugs.”
“If I’d’ve known we were going to see you I’d’ve tried to get you some.”
“That’s not funny,” the sheriff says.
“What’d you do with Bennett?”
“I sapped him down with my pistol barrel and cuffed him and had a deputy run him over to the jail.”
McEban steps back from the truck. “I guess that was after he ran this outfit up on your public lawn.”
The sheriff stands and points north. “It was after he stood on a bench over there and waved a whiskey bottle around and read aloud from some letter he got.”
“Did he take a swing at you?”
“Hell yes, he took a swing at me. You ever hear of me striking a man if I didn’t have to?”
Paul steps up next to McEban and hooks a finger in a beltloop of McEban’s jeans, but McEban doesn’t look away from the thin sheriff. “I don’t remember your dad to ever hit a man whether he had it coming or not,” he says. “Maybe you should have been a plumber like your dad was.”
The sheriff turns and spits again. “I liked plumbing fine. I told my dad I did. It’s getting under people’s houses I didn’t like.” He stands and bends and picks the rifle out of the mess. “I get claustrophobic,” he says. He bolts the rifle open and finds it empty and closes the action. “This yours?”
“It’s Bennett’s. What do I have to do to get him away from you?”
The sheriff leans the rifle against the toolbox. He slips his hands in his back pockets and stares into the crowd at the edge of the yellow tape. “I never liked him,” he says.
“Nobody likes him except me and Gretchen,” McEban says.
“That’s not why I whacked him, though.”
“You already told me you whacked him because you don’t like to get under people’s houses.”
The sheriff stares down at McEban. “You’d have to make his bail to have him,” he says. “And guarantee me you’ll drive him out of town and bring him back when a court date’s set.”
“I can do that.”
“You going back over to Ishawooa?”
“Not today,” McEban says.
“Where are you going today?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“Jesus Christ, McEban. You’re in the middle of a goddamn mess here. If I was somebody else it could’ve been worse than it was.”
“Do you have his letter?” McEban asks.
“His what?”
“The thing he was reading from.”
“I have it in the car.”
The sheriff steps onto the trailerhitch and to the ground, and McEban follows him to his car. The man leans into the front seat and comes out with the letter and envelope in a plastic Baggie. He hands it to McEban and McEban squints through the plastic at the envelope’s postmark.
“Casper,” he reads. “We’re going to drive over to Casper next.”
“Bennett needs help. I hope I’m not the first person you’ve heard that from.”
McEban smiles. “I help him every chance I get.”
“I believe you.” The sheriff folds in behind his steering wheel and closes the door and leans back through the window and spits on the pavement and wipes his lip. “After I let you have him will you call in over here to let me know where you are?”
“If I think of it.”
The sheriff spits again and turns off his rooflights. “I’m sorry I rooted through your toolbox like some goddamn ape.”
“Thanks for saying so.”
“When you get your horse loaded, pull over to the jail. After Bennett sees the judge I’ll sign him out to you.” He watches Rita in the truckbed folding her clothes into her backpack. “She a friend of yours?” he asks.
“She and the boy were hitchhiking.”
“No shit.” The sheriff’s face falls blank in surprise. “I didn’t think anyone got around that way anymore.” He starts his car. “I helped myself to an egg.”
“A what?”
“You’ve got a jar of them on the front seat. I guess I like them better’n ice cream.” He looks into his rearview mirror and then back at McEban. He juts his chin out toward the Baggie. “There’s a letter in there for you too.”
McEban holds up the plastic envelope. “What’d it say?”
“I didn’t read it. It’s sealed up.” The sheriff eases the car away from the curb. “If you see Gretchen say howdy from me.”
“I’ll do it,” McEban says.
In the dream she closes her eyes and rocks her hips easily, and her face falls soft and unworried as a child’s, soft as her breasts, soft as her thighs. She thrusts her breasts out to him and he takes them in his hands and circles her nipples with his thumbs, and her mouth parts and she rocks harder against him, as a rider would in the middle part of a race, paced, and in control.
He moves his hands, both hands, to the swell of her hips and rises against her, and her mouth falls wider and her face is glazed in sweat and her black hair mats at her forehead and upon her cheeks. The cords stand taut in her neck and her shoulders show the strain and her breasts sway. She shudders and stops and shudders again. She slumps against him and he bucks his hips into her, and a keening comes up low in her throat.
He can feel her heart in his own chest. He can feel the pulse at her throat. The room smells of damp oats and marshgrass and clover and the salt-sweet lather of honest beasts. He wraps his arms around her and holds her, and will not let her fall away.