The old man holds a book up close to his face and silently mouths the words. He sits by McEban’s shoulder, straight-backed and flat-lapped, in an overstuffed chair.
He’s a sledge-headed old man, square-jawed, with gunmetal-blue eyes and slate-gray hair. His hair and eyebrows sprout wildly away from his skull. He wears a white shirt buttoned at his throat.
“Are you a priest?” McEban asks.
The old man lowers the book. He takes the right sidepiece of his eyeglasses and drags the glasses away from his face. He squints at McEban.
“I’m Gunnar,” he says. “Have I changed so much I look religious?”
“You still outside Chadron, Nebraska?”
“So are you. Bennett drove you in here a night and a day ago.”
“What are you reading?”
“Poetry. I’ve lost the patience for novels.”
McEban looks up to the blood-filled IV bottle that hangs from a sixteen-penny nail driven into the wallboard above his head. The tubing snakes from the bottle’s mouth into a needle taped to the inside of his forearm.
“Are you still a vet?” he asks.
“I’m retired. Lucky for you I’m not long retired. Luckier still I ran my practice out of my house.”
“Is this horse blood, or cow?”
“It’s mine,” says Gunnar. “Seems we’re sized out with the same brand.”
The old man gets up at the sound of a teapot whistling and walks to the stove. He pours hot water into a cup-size French press and stirs the coffee up into the water and lets it stand. He turns the heat on under a stainless saucepot. “I made you some broth,” he says. “It’ll be another day before you can handle whole food.”
“Why am I in your kitchen?”
“Because it was easier to muscle that bed down the stairs, than you up. I’m sorry about your dad.”
McEban pushes into the mattress with his heels and his left elbow and sits against the pillows. “That was twenty-two years ago.”
“Well, I never said so before.”
McEban blinks at the bandage that wraps his right shoulder. He moves his arm slightly away from his side, testing the shoulder. It seems just stiff. “This doesn’t hurt like I thought it might.”
Gunnar plunges the coffee to the bottom of the press and pours a cup and leans back against the stove.
“I’ve kept a good dose of painkillers in you,” he says. “And enough antibiotic to cure a racehorse of the clap.”
When the soup boils he tucks a dish towel under McEban’s chin and spoons the broth into McEban’s mouth, one steady spoonful at a time.
“How bad am I shot?” McEban asks.
“Your shoulder bone was fine,” Gunnar says. “I trimmed out the ragged flesh and sewed you closed. Turns out the bullet went through and into the side panel of Bennett’s truck.”
There’s a scratching at the kitchen door and Gunnar gets up and lets Woody in.
He says, “Lie down,” and the dog does, and Gunnar sits again on the edge of the chair by the bed and tilts up the bowl and spoons out the last inch of broth.
“Where’s Rita and the boy?” McEban asks.
“She’s upstairs asleep. The boy is too.”
“Where’s Bennett?”
“He drove out of here the night we carried you in.” Gunnar sits back in the chair. “He parked his rig in under the trees by the river. He said he thought the cops might be looking for it. I gave him the loan of my car. You want more broth?”
“I’m done.”
Gunnar walks the bowl to the sink and runs it full of water. He turns back to McEban.
“Bennett said to tell you he thought he’d located his wife. He called this morning. I forget her name.”
“Her name’s Gretchen.”
“You ever get married?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Who’s Rita belong to?”
“Herself,” McEban says.
Gunnar nods. “How’s my brother?”
“He’s the same way he’s always been.”
“It must be that Ishawooa country,” he says. “It strikes me that the lot of you do pretty much as you please.”
“You miss him?”
“Who?”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” Gunnar says.
He lit Ansel’s oven and pulled a kitchen chair in front of the oven. He dropped the door and rested his stocking feet on it and drank his coffee. It was Thanksgiving and his father had been in the ground for six weeks. Ansel had called and said there was more work than he could manage, and McEban had driven home in his own truck.
He was nineteen and felt like a man. He felt limber and strong and limited by the responsibilities he knew were his. He felt the boundaries of his life strung around him as tautly as new wire. He felt the barbs on the wire.
Bennett came in without knocking and stood by the door and stomped his feet. When McEban didn’t turn he stomped them again.
“Did Ansel take the stocktank heater into town?” McEban asked.
“He said he’d be back with it fixed by this evening. Or with a new one if it can’t be fixed.” Bennett pulled off his gloves and blew on his fingers. “I can’t remember it getting this cold in November,” he said. “Not all at once.”
McEban flexed his toes. His feet were thawing and itched and he bent to scratch them. He’d been at work since dawn. “It’s always some guy in town you hear bitching about the weather.”
“I could live in town,” Bennett said. “On a morning like this one town’d be just fine.” His face had grown fat enough to furrow between his brows and crease at the corners of his eyes. “Are you going to stay in school?”
“Probably through the semester,” McEban said. “I don’t know whether I’ll stay when we start to calve.”
Bennett pulled a second chair to the oven and held his hands out to the heat. “Are you going to stay pissy all day?”
“I’m just making conversation.”
Bennett looked at the coffeepot and the carafe was empty, and McEban saw him look and offered his cup.
“I’m fine,” Bennett said.
They sat for another few minutes and Bennett said, “We didn’t invite you to the wedding because we didn’t think you’d come.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“That’s what we thought.”
McEban set his cup on the oven door and stood away from the stove. “I’m going to ride the north side of the creek and bring what pregnant cows I find down to the buildings.”
“Won’t they come down when you feed?”
“I want to make sure they’re down. My dad wouldn’t wait for them to come in on their own.”
He bounced on the balls of his feet and it drove the warmth up as far as his knees.
“I’ll ride up there with you,” Bennett said.
“I guess you can do what you want.”
They pulled on two stocking caps each, one over the other, and tied bandannas over their mouths so they wouldn’t suck in the frozen air, and stamped their riding boots into fleece-lined overboots and buckled the overboots, and buckled on their chaps, and walked to the barn.
They caught up two horses and saddled them and stood up into the saddles. The horses groaned, and reined out stiffly, and swung their heads, and chomped at the steel bits that warmed in their mouths.
“I’m sorry,” Bennett said.
McEban looked at him. His eyes watered in the cold and the tears froze on his cheeks. “I didn’t think things would turn out the way they have.”
“She didn’t either,” Bennett said.
They picked their way through the bared and brittle timber in the creek bottom, and the horses’ hooves threw back clots of ice and snow, and the clots stood out in the dusting of snow like rinded gemstones. The tops of their thighs stung in the cold and their faces above the bandannas went raw. They shifted their reins from one hand to the other, as their hands numbed, and raised up in their stirrups, and thrust their empty hands in under their nuts, and sat back down on them to keep them warm.
They whipped the heifers they found out of their daybeds and started them down the creek. The cow’s lashes and muzzles were frosted white, and their bellies hung low and taut, and their shit was frozen in their tails.
“I heard on the radio it’s supposed to warm enough to snow,” Bennett said.
“How much snow?”
“Enough to make the news, I guess.”
And then the wind came up out of the west and the temperature rose, and they pulled off the bandannas and the air didn’t rake at their lungs. The snow came in on the wind. It was wet and heavy and the flakes spun through the air as big as quarters. It melted against their cheeks, and stuck to their chests and arms and legs, and to the horses too.
Where the north fork of Horse Creek emptied out of its canyon McEban put his brown horse up the slope. He meant to gain the bench above the alluvial gutters. He gripped the horse’s mane in his right hand and pulled himself forward off the horse’s kidneys to help with the climb.
The brown horse slipped and fell to his knees, and scrabbled in the loose and frozen rock, and dug in with just the toes of his hooves, and slipped again. The wind came in gusts and the snow drove sideways down the drainage, and the horse stood for just a moment quivering against the sidehill, blowing in the snow-lashed air.
“You might want to come down off there,” Bennett called from below.
McEban turned over his shoulder to say something like, no shit, and the horse tried the slope again, and lost his hindquarters, and came over backwards slow enough it seemed like a dream. McEban let loose of the mane and kicked free of the stirrups.
He thought that he wouldn’t get dragged to death. That he wouldn’t die in little bits. That’s what he was thinking when he landed facedown, and the horse came down on top of him, and rolled away into the wind.
McEban comes awake in the night and lies still and listens to the gas heater tick and ping, and Gunnar’s steady, bass snore. Woody stretches in his sleep, and there is the scrape of his nails as he sweeps the linoleum in a sudden burst of dream-chase. That is all there is. The house is pressed quiet and McEban wonders about the accumulation of snow. He has always been able to feel the weight of snow, the added silence that it spreads.
His shoulder throbs but the pain is not so stark it will keep him awake. More than the pain there is a sense of emptiness. He feels a curve of warmth against his good side and cracks an eye and lifts the sheet away and finds Paul asleep against his ribs. The boy’s arm lies across McEban’s chest. He’s gripped up the Saint Christopher medal in his sleep and holds it in his small fist.
McEban drifts back to sleep and when he wakes a second time the room is gray with dawnlight and Gunnar is bent at his arm. The old man pulls the IV needle free and thumbs a ball of cotton against the vein.
“You figure I’m filled?” McEban asks.
Gunnar bends McEban’s arm back against the cotton ball and stands away. “Your color’s come up good.” He yawns and stands a leg to his side and farts.
Paul sits up in the bed smiling at McEban. “Are you hungry?” he asks.
“A peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich is what I’m used to.”
“I could make you one of those.” He gets to his knees on the bed.
“When did you squirm in there?” Gunnar asks.
“When it started to snow,” the boy says.
Gunnar walks to an uncurtained window and stares out into the soft light.
“This’ll be the end of my garden. Except for the rootcrop,” he says.
“How much did we get?” McEban asks.
“Three or four inches. It’ll no doubt melt off by noon.”
Paul scoots off the end of the bed and stands bare-legged at the kitchen counter. He wears just a pair of Jockey shorts and a T-shirt. He lines up the peanut butter and white bread and a plastic squeeze-bottle of honey. The honey bottle’s shaped like a bear.
McEban swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands, and the room spins and lifts away and he sits back on the bed.
“You have to piss?” Gunnar asks.
“Like Jack the Green Bear.”
“That’s something my brother would say.”
“That must be where I got it.”
Gunnar hooks an arm around McEban’s waist and steadies him to the bathroom off the hallway. He centers him in front of the toilet and stands beside him, his arm still around McEban’s waist.
“I’m going to need you to look away,” McEban says, and the old man stares into the corner past the medicine cabinet until McEban gets his stream started.
“Sounds like your prostate’s in good shape.”
“It’s about the only thing left on me that hasn’t been in an accident.”
“How hard’s Bennett trying to get himself killed?” Gunnar asks.
McEban looks up from the bowl.
“I don’t think he’s thought it out.”
“What about you?”
“I just came along for the ride.”
They both stare down at McEban’s pecker.
“Do you think he means to hurt his wife when he finds her?” Gunnar asks.
“Alma doesn’t think so.”
“Who’s Alma?”
“She’s already dead,” McEban says.
Gunnar nods. “You going to stand here forever shaking that thing?” he asks, and before McEban can answer the phone rings and Gunnar leans him against the bathroom wall, between a towel rack and the door, and walks back to the kitchen.
McEban hears the old man talking on the phone but cannot make out the words. He bends to flush the toilet and slides down the wall and settles in the corner behind the door and doesn’t try to get back to his feet.
Gunnar steps into the doorway. “That was Bennett,” he says. He doesn’t look behind the door. He stands in front of the sink and speaks to McEban’s reflection in the medicine-cabinet mirror. “He said he’s found his wife a little ways outside Valentine.”
“Was that all he said?”
“He said you shouldn’t worry about him. He said he was sorry he got you shot. He asked if you were one-armed or two.”
“How far is the drive to Valentine?” McEban asks.
“About a hundred and forty miles.”
He tried to get to his feet, and when his left foot struck the ground there seemed to be none of it there, just the splintering pain, and he spun away and sat hard and felt like he was still falling. His stomach came into his throat and he vomited, and his ears rang.
He opened his mouth and the wind filled him, and for a moment his head cleared. He crossed his left foot over his right knee. He gripped the heel of the boot and pulled and screamed and stopped pulling and looked around until he realized it was his own scream he’d heard. He gripped the boot again and pulled harder. The pain spiked up his leg clear to his gut, and then the boot came off and everything felt better than it had.
“How bad are you hurt?” Bennett called.
He looked away from the foot to Bennett and said, “My foot’s broke,” but the wind sliced the words into the swirl of snow and he had to shout again, “My foot’s broke all to hell.”
He felt hot and weak and like he might have to shit. He shouted, “Is my horse alright?”
“He’s fine,” Bennett said. He knelt behind McEban and hugged him around his chest and stood all at once. He dragged McEban away from the bottom of the hill, and steadied himself at the creekbank and took a deep breath. He squatted and hefted the weight altogether up in his arms and slid them both down onto the apron of stones beside the channel of ice and struggled to his feet again. McEban was up in his arms and Bennett staggered up the creek until he found an overhanging cutbank out of the wind.
He lowered McEban to the stones and helped him crawl in under the overhang and stumbled out into the dizzying white mess and came back with his arms filled with spruce boughs he’d beaten away from a tree. He leaned the boughs up against the cutbank to make them some sort of shelter and crawled in.
“Did you catch my horse?” McEban asked.
“We aren’t going anywhere in this storm.”
“Did you catch him?”
“He got by me.”
“But he was walking?”
“He was running.”
“What about yours?” McEban asked.
“He’s tied to an aspen just above us.”
There was the smell of broken evergreen, the faint musk of frozen soil. McEban laid his head back and stared up into the tangle of shredded roots that hung out of the undercut ground.
“You better have a look at my foot,” he said.
“Right now?”
“You better look while we still have the light.”
Bennett bit into the fingertips of his gloves and pulled them away from his hands and unbuckled the waiststrap of his chaps and unsnapped them from his legs. He rolled the chaps into a pillow for McEban.
“You cold?” he asked.
“I’m hot.”
“You’re hot?”
“Yes, I am,” McEban said. “I feel like I’m burning up.”
Bennett crawled to the broken foot and worked his pocket knife out of his jeans. The wind still howled and the snow fell against the pine boughs, and it sounded like something was digging its way to them. Something that had a long way to go.
“How’s it look?” McEban asked.
“The sock’s soaked with blood.”
“Cut it off.”
Bennett lifted the elastic away from the ankle and eased the blade under it and sliced right down to the toe and sat back from the foot with the bloody sock in his lap.
“Did you get it off?” McEban asked.
“It’s off.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“The bones are broken through,” Bennett said.
“Where?”
“The top and bottom both. They’ve snapped and broken right through.” Bennett pulled off his slicker and spread it over McEban’s chest.
“I don’t need it,” McEban said. “I’m still hot.”
“Your teeth are chattering.”
“I can’t help what my teeth are doing. The rest of me’s hot.”
“Just leave the slicker where it is,” Bennett said. He got out of his jacket and shirt and peeled off his long underwear top and put the shirt and jacket back on again. “I’ll be right back.”
When he got back in under the slant of spruce boughs he wrung the last of the creekwater out of the undershirt and kicked a half-dozen head-size stones away from the frozen ground. He ringed the broken foot with the stones and knelt over the ring and gently tucked the wet cloth around the foot.
“Does this hurt?” he asked.
“What are you doing?” McEban raised his head from the rolled chaps.
“I’m trying to keep the bone-ends from drying out, but I’m worried your foot might get frostbit.”
“I wouldn’t mind if it froze solid. Is it still snowing?”
“Like it just remembered how,” Bennett said.
Gunnar lifts a gray-faced golden retriever onto the Formica-topped kitchen table. He takes up a pair of needle-nosed pliers and hooks an arm around the dog’s neck and goes to work pulling the porcupine quills from its mouth and muzzle, a single quill at a time. The dog quivers and whines and Woody crawls under McEban’s bed, and stays there, nosed into the far corner.
“Somebody want to give me a hand?” Gunnar asks.
The dog’s owner moves to the table and rubs the retriever’s ears, whispering, “There’s my sweet boy. Yes, that’s a brave dog,” and Paul steps to Gunnar’s side and works his hands into the ridge of thick fur along the dog’s chest and smoothes its underbelly.
McEban sits in the soft chair by his bed. “Are there any physicists in Valentine?” he asks.
Gunnar looks at McEban over the tops of his glasses. He holds a bloody quill up in the pliers. “Physicists?”
“Kind of a bulked-up mathematician,” McEban explains.
“I know what a goddamn physicist is. I’m just trying to remember if I heard that Stephen Hawking had plans to winter in Nebraska.”
“There’s the Renquist boy,” the dog’s owner says.
They all look at the woman.
“Adam Renquist got his doctorate in physics from Northwestern,” she says. “He’s raising sheep a couple miles south of Valentine on his folks’ place. Out on Highway 20. He used to work in Denver but moved back when his folks retired to some old-people’s compound outside of Phoenix.”
“I need a better grip on this orange son of a bitch,” Gunnar says. “He’s got one broken off in the roof of his mouth.”
The woman hugs her dog up against her breasts and sings, “There’s my brave boy,” and the dog moans, and then Gunnar has the last quill out. He sets the dog on the floor, where it sits begging until he brings a biscuit from his pocket and hands it down.
“It’s a comfort to have neighbors with a trade,” the woman says. She snaps a leash to her dog’s collar, and turns to McEban. “You the guy chasing his wife across the West?”
“I’m the guy with the guy.”
She cocks her head and studies McEban’s face as though there are quills that have never been pulled out. “I suppose there’s more than one way to serve the Lord,” she says.
I’m cold now,” McEban said.
Bennett nodded and lifted the slicker away and wriggled in against McEban’s side. He bent his knees back so his legs wouldn’t jostle the ruined foot. His mouth was just an inch from McEban’s ear.
“Is that better?” he whispered.
“It probably will be. I can’t hear the wind anymore.”
“It let up,” Bennett said. “The snow’s just falling straight down.”
They were quiet for a moment in the dense, wet silence.
“I shouldn’t have put that horse up the slope,” McEban said.
“I know it.”
“You think he went back to the buildings?”
“Yes, I do.”
McEban nodded. They could hear his hair scrape against the rolled chaps. “Do you love her?”
“Like fire,” Bennett said.
McEban turned his head. “I’m warming up now,” he said. There was enough light left that he could see Bennett blink. And Bennett’s smile.
“I throw off a lot of heat,” Bennett said.
McEban smiled too.
“Are you scared?” Bennett asked.
“A little bit. You?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for acting like you’re not,” McEban said.
Rita stands with McEban on the screened porch off the kitchen. The sky has cleared and a halfhearted chinook has swept in from the southwest. They watch Paul sweep the inch of melting slush out of the back of Bennett’s pickup and Woody take his place against the toolbox. Gunnar leads Aruba around the corner of the house and loads him in the trailer. The ground is dark with melted snow. In the shadows remain clods of grainy ice-crystal, shrunken to humps and rounded angles.
Rita leans into the doorjamb at the top of the steps and closes her eyes and sniffs at the warming air.
“The weather’s changing,” she says.
“We’ll be fine as long as this wind holds.”
“It finally smells like fall.”
McEban eases his arm out of the sling draped around his neck and lifts the arm away from his side. The pain spikes up through his neck and sparks along his jawline.
“I’m going to need you to drive,” he says.
Rita nods. She stares absently toward the river and holds an opened hand against the slight swell of her abdomen. She is not aware of where she rests the hand.
“What’s it like to be pregnant?” he asks.
She drops the hand to her side. “Rodney tell you?”
“He said he’ll help out with the costs when he gets out of school.”
“I’m able to help myself.” She smiles toward the river. “I like not having my period.”
“You never hear about that being a major selling point.”
She turns back to McEban. “I wish Alma would tell me whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
“Have you asked her?”
“I ask her every day.” She places her hand high against her abdomen again and spreads her fingers. “The really bad news is I haven’t got any sort of excuse for my bitchiness now. I haven’t had day one of morning sickness.” She looks down and scuffs at the porchboards with the heel of her shoe. “I’m worried I’ll be a shitty mother.”
“You’ll probably be fine.”
“I don’t think being loving is something that comes naturally,” she says. “Anyway, not for me.”
“I’d help if you want,” he tells her, and when she just stares at him, adds, “I can be good help.”
She smiles and he digs the rose-colored stone out of his jeans and holds it up in the light. It flashes dull as a pearl. He thinks of his father’s hands on its surface, and his grandmother’s, and his own younger hands, oiling it with the scent of family.
“Why don’t you give this to Paul when you get a chance?” he asks.
She cocks her head before the offered stone and holds out her hand. He lays the stone on her palm.
“Tell him he can keep it in his pouch with the rest of his treasures.”
“If you want him to have it you should give it to him yourself.”
“It’s for both of you,” he tells her. “You’ll get the gift of the look on his face when he knows it’s his.”
He thought he must have fallen asleep because when he opened his eyes it was flatly black. He could feel Bennett still against him, could feel Bennett’s even breath against his cheek.
“Are you awake?” he asked.
“Is it still snowing?”
“I was afraid to check. You got to sleep and I didn’t want to jar you awake.”
“Why don’t you check?” McEban asked. “And when you’re up make sure there’s nothing chewing on my foot. It feels like there is.”
Bennett sat up in the dark. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s real bad.”
Bennett thumbed a lighter into flame and scooted on his butt out from under the spruce boughs and then right back in and snapped the lighter closed.
“It’s quit,” he said. “But there’s a good two feet on the ground.”
“Did you look at my foot?”
“There wasn’t anything chewing on it.”
“I hope your horse is still there.”
“I hope so, too.”
McEban got up on an elbow and the pain shot up his leg, and he knew his hands were shaking even though it was too dark to see them. He felt the tears run down his cheeks and he was breathing through his mouth.
“I’m crying,” he said.
“I already did,” Bennett told him. “While you had your nap.”
Rita drives them through the small towns of Hay Springs, Clinton, Gordon, Merriman, and Kilgore. The towns advertise themselves from miles away, with the sunstruck flare of their grain elevators and water towers.
And in between the towns the early October light falls bronzed and buttery on the endless sweep of grazeland, on the fenced pastures of mown hay, on the descending ridges of cedar and pine.
There is an occasional planted windbreak, the leaves gone yellow and red and rust, and a house and shop and toolshed and outbuildings squared in its lee, and everywhere there are cattle. Cream-colored cows, beige, red, black, spotted cows.
Rita shifts on the seat behind the wheel. “Did you know there are more cows in Cherry County, Nebraska, than the whole state of Wyoming?”
“Then we ought to be able to find an affordable steak in Valentine,” he says.
“I want pizza,” says Paul.
The boy sits at the edge of the truckseat with his hand laid out on the dash. The rose-colored stone rocks in his cupped palm. “Did you buy this for me?”
“I found it,” says McEban. “When I was a boy. I built a rock tumbler and put it in and it came out like that.”
“Are there more stones like this one?”
“I guess there are. But that’s the only one I ever found that color.”
The boy sits back in the seat and holds the stone in his lap. He looks up at McEban. He looks concerned.
“Wouldn’t you rather give it to Bennett?” he asks.
“I’d rather you had it.”
“Has Bennett seen it?”
“Sure he has.”
“When?”
“When we were boys.”
“Anybody else?”
“My mom and dad and grandmother. And a man named Ansel.”
“Is that everybody?”
“Now you and Rita.”
Paul nods and pops the stone in his mouth and shifts it from cheek to cheek with his tongue. He breathes through his nose, and smiles around the bulge of the stone, and spits it back into his hand, freshly wetted and sparkling in the sunlight.
“What do you think would’ve happened if I’d’ve swallowed it?” he asks.
“I think you’d’ve lost your appetite for pizza,” McEban says.
“You wouldn’t have been mad?”
“I wouldn’t have been mad.”
“Do you think it would have come out?”
“First thing tomorrow morning, I imagine.”
Paul brings the stone up inches from his nose and squeezes his eyes into slits.
“It looks like it belongs in a dream,” he says. “Don’t you think it does?”
McEban nods and Rita gears them down into Valentine and parks along the curb by the Pizza Hut, and they take a booth under a streetside window.
A blocky teenager sets plastic water glasses and silverware and paper napkins on the table and shifts her weight back solidly onto the heels of her red tennis shoes. She hums while they study their menus.
McEban looks at the nametag pinned to her shirtfront.
“I guess a deluxe,” he says. “With everything but anchovies.”
“And extra pepperoni,” Paul says, and looks to McEban.
“You want a pop with that extra pepperoni?” he asks the boy.
“I’d like a Coke. A medium, please.”
“Just tell Maxine, then,” McEban says.
“Max,” the waitress corrects.
McEban looks at her nametag again.
“I like Max better than Maxine,” she says.
“I’ll stick with water,” says McEban.
Rita folds her menu. “I’ll have the salad bar. And a glass of milk.”
Max writes their orders on her pad and McEban sips his water and stares out at the truck and trailer. “Is Alma around?” he asks.
“In the booth here next to me,” Rita says.
“Could you ask her about Bailey? If he’s feeling okay?”
“Alma says he’s feeling just fine.”
McEban watches a truck and trailer park across the street. He watches Ansel step out of the truck and walk to the tongue of Bennett’s trailer and crank the tongue away from the ballhitch. He watches the old man drive Bennett’s truck to the corner and leave it idling, and unhook the ranch truck from its trailer.
“Do you know that man?” Paul asks.
“Yes, I do.”
“Is he the old man who listens to Beethoven?” Rita asks.
McEban stands out of the booth. “He listens to Mahler too,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
Ansel backs the ranch truck under Bennett’s trailerhitch and drops the safety chain over the ball and whistles Woody into the bed of the new rig. He tips his hat back from his face and smiles as McEban approaches.
“You getting something to eat?” he asks.
“A pizza,” McEban tells him.
“Pizza sounds good.”
“It looked good on the menu.”
“What happened to your arm?” Ansel asks.
“I got shot.”
“I can’t remember you ever did that before.”
“I got in the middle of an armed shoplift.”
Ansel steps onto the sidewalk. “I had to go clear to France to get shot,” he says. “If I’d’ve known I could have done it at home I could’ve missed a whole war.”
“You come down here to bring me home?”
Ansel points his chin to the trailer across the street. “I came down here to sell cows,” he says. “I had six open heifers in the trailer just there.”
“You get tired of the truck you were driving?”
Ansel lifts his hat away from his head and scratches his head and reseats the hat. “I thought you might like to drive something that didn’t have a bullet hole in it. It catches the eye.”
McEban looks back to the Pizza Hut. The windows glare white and blue.
“Bennett in there?” Ansel asks.
“No, he’s not.”
A Highway Patrol cruiser passes in the street and McEban steps his slung arm against the truck’s side panel, and Ansel moves in front of him and nods to the trooper and the trooper nods back. They watch the car until it turns the corner at the light.
“Thank you,” McEban says.
“I don’t guess anyone’s looking for an old man,” Ansel says.
The wind lifts the streetdust and the people out on the sidewalk tuck their heads against the grit. McEban looks at the ranch trailer.
“Were those the only open cows we had?”
“Just the six,” Ansel says.
McEban nods and humps his back into the lifting wind, and the cop cruises past again and he doesn’t bother to step his shot arm away.
“I might bring some people home with me,” he says.
“What kind of people?”
“A woman and a boy. The woman’s pregnant.”
Ansel pulls a pouch of Red Man from his shirt pocket and gathers out a wad and works the wad into his cheek. “Is this for permanent?”
“Probably just for the winter. Maybe not even for that. I’m not sure they’ll come.”
“It’s not like that,” McEban says.
Ansel nods and pulls a string of tobacco from his mouth and snaps it away. “Is the boy big enough to be some help?”
“He’s plenty big enough.”
Ansel spits into the street. “It’s your house.”
“I know it’s my house. You give up smoking?”
“Just giving my lungs a rest,” Ansel says. The pickup door stands open and he leans in against the edge of the seat.
“I don’t know what else to talk about,” McEban says.
“You need anything out of your rig?”
“There’s a few things in the toolbox.”
Ansel pushes away from the seat and they walk across the street to the tailgate of Bennett’s truck, and McEban steps onto the bumper and into the bed. He hands down his duffel and Rita’s backpack and a bedroll and Ansel stacks them by the tire, and McEban steps out of the truckbed. He shoulders his duffel on his good arm and Ansel brings the rest. They load the gear in the ranch truck and Ansel spits against the curb. McEban stares down at his boots. “I saw Gunnar,” he says. “He sewed up my arm. Maybe you’ll want to stop and see him on your way home.”
“Is he sick?”
McEban levels his head. “He looked fit to me.”
“Then I guess I’ll just go home. Gunnar and I catch up on the phone every Christmas, and lately on the Fourth of July.”
“I thought he might’ve called you,” McEban says. “I thought that was why you drove all the way down here to sell cows.”
Ansel wipes his mouth on the back of his forearm. “Gunnar got worried for you,” he says. “He’s no good when he worries. He called because he couldn’t stand the worry.”
McEban looks down at his boots. “Maybe I ought to get off the street before that cop wants another look at me. Thanks for trading out these trucks.”
Ansel nods. “Gunnar’s family,” he says. “The man doesn’t need me to stop by and tell him I love him. It’s not something he’d forget.”
“I guess I’m just feeling old,” McEban says.
“Hell, I’m the one that’s old,” Ansel tells him. “You’re just done being young.”
Bennett threw the spruce boughs back and scrabbled up the creekbank and slid down, and went up and down three more times to trench out the snow. The last time down he kicked a series of shelving footholds for himself, so he might not fall when he carried McEban out.
He rolled the rocks away from McEban’s foot and lifted the wet underwear away and struck the lighter into flame.
“How’s it look?” McEban asked. He was panting and couldn’t quit.
“It looks just like it did before. I’m going to wrap it up.”
“Do it fast.”
Bennett pocketed the lighter and gently sacked the undershirt around the foot, gathering the bottom and neck at McEban’s ankle, and tying it together with the sleeves.
McEban began to whine, and was still whining, up high in his chest and thought he might need to scream. Bennett took him by the hands and pulled him up onto his good foot, and steadied him where he hopped. He caught his balance and settled.
“You ready?” Bennett asked.
McEban nodded. He wasn’t sure Bennett could see him nod, but Bennett turned and crouched and reached back and hefted him up piggyback, and then hefted him higher. McEban circled his arms over Bennett’s shoulders and gripped his right elbow with his left hand.
A quarter moon had come up in the gauzy sky and the snowcover gathered the weak light and they stood for just a moment blinking out at the soft, gray world, and then Bennett took just one step up the creekbank, and the next, and the one after that, slowly, and when he got to the top, turned down the creek, shuffling ahead through the thigh-deep snow.
“Where’s your horse?” McEban asked.
“There was just the bridle reins where I had him tied.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I wasn’t sure I could even get you up away from the creek.” Bennett moved ahead steadily, huffing, and when McEban’s weight settled lower against his hips, he stopped and hefted his friend up higher on his back.
“Are you sure you can do this?” McEban asked.
“I’m sure.”
“If you get tired I could stand down until you catch your breath.”
“I’m not going to get tired,” Bennett said. “How’s your foot feel?”
“It feels better than when I was lying down. How come you have a lighter with you?”
“I borrowed it from my dad.”
“Do you have cigarettes too?”
“My mom says smoking keeps her thin,” Bennett said.
“You aren’t that fat.”
“Yes, I am that fat.” Bennett stopped and leaned his forehead into an aspen trunk to rest, McEban straddling his hips.
“Things aren’t ever going to be the same. Are they?” McEban asked.
“You’re going to be a gimp. That’s for certain.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Bennett was breathing in huffs. “I know that’s not what you meant,” he said, and then, “No, things aren’t going to be the same. Not for me, or you, or her either.”
They drive southeast out of Valentine and the sky has dulled and the wind picked up steady out of the west.
McEban looks at Rita, at the side of her smooth face. She downshifts past a row of mailboxes along the edge of Highway 20 and Paul reads aloud the name “Renquist” stenciled on the side of a box, and Rita gets the truck stopped without jackknifing the trailer and backs up even with the mailboxes.
“Where to now?” she asks.
“I guess there,” says McEban, meaning the dirt-and-gravel track that curves away to the northeast.
She nods and turns onto the road and a mile out into the sandhills the wind blows harder still. The light talc the truck raises sweeps ahead of them and they put up their windows and open the floor vents.
“What are you going to do after we find Bennett?” she asks.
“I’m going back home,” says McEban.
“To Wyoming?”
McEban fills himself up with the overwarm air and holds it high in his chest. “You could come if you want,” he says. “I’ve got rooms I don’t use. I wouldn’t bother you if you came.”
She looks down at Paul. “What do you think?”
“Are there horses?” the boy asks.
“There’s a dozen of them,” says McEban.
Paul nods and brings his heels up against the seatedge.
“Do you have MTV?” Rita asks.
“I’m not sure I can get whatever that is,” McEban says. “Maybe if I bought a satellite dish I could.”
“I’m just messing with you, Barnum,” she says. “Is there a town near where you live?”
“Ishawooa,” he says and her cheeks lift into her eyes. She looks back down to the boy. The boy smiles too.
“Why is ‘Ishawooa’ funny?” McEban asks.
“It’s not,” she says but she cannot relax her smile.
“It sure seems like it’s funny.” He looks back and forth at their grinning faces.
“It’s what my grandfather used to call the BIA agent,” she says. “It’s a Shoshone word.”
The boy bends his smile into his lap.
“A bartender told me it means to lie down against something uncomfortable,” McEban says.
Rita pulls a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wipes her eyes and holds the handkerchief in front of her mouth. “I don’t want you to see me laughing,” she says.
“But I can see that you are. I can hear you laughing.”
“I don’t want you to see me this happy.” She wipes her eyes again and asks her brother to pinch her leg to ruin her smile. When he does, she says, “It doesn’t mean lying down next to anything. It means not telling the truth. It means ‘lying prick.’”
“Bullshit.”
She asks Paul to pinch harder. “It’s pronounced with a ‘j’ or a ‘g’ sound after the first ‘a,’” she says. “Harder,” she tells the boy, and then, “There’s an accent over the last ‘a.’ Ishajwooá.”
McEban leans into the armrest. “You’re telling me I went to high school in Lying Prick, Wyoming?”
“Where’d you think you grew up?”
McEban opens his mouth to answer and Paul says, “There it is,” and points ahead to Gunnar’s red Subaru wagon parked just off the chalk-white road. Rita pulls in behind the car and kills the engine and the wind rocks the truck. She’s still smiling but she’s put her handkerchief away.
The car sits at the edge of an oval of sand where the grassland has worn away from the surrounding hills.
“You sure it’s Gunnar’s?” McEban asks.
“It’s the right color and the right bumper sticker,” she says.
The bumper sticker reads: NATIVE AMERICANS HAD LOUSY IMMIGRATION LAWS.
McEban steps out of the truck and looks in through the car windows and comes back and stands by the truck.
“Is Bennett’s rifle in the car?” she asks.
McEban shakes his head. “How do you suppose a town got named ‘Ishawooa’?”
“How would I know?” She looks past his shoulder. The sandhills rise and fall away behind him. “Maybe some white guy asked some Shoshone guy where he was and the Shoshone smiled at him and said, ‘Ishajwooá.’”
He tests his arm and winces. “That’s probably what happened.”
“I’ll think about your offer.” She looks down at Paul. “We’ll both think about it.”
McEban nods and looks to the west. “I better go find Bennett.”
“I think I won’t,” Rita tells him. “I think I’ll stay right here.” She pulls the truckdoor shut, and McEban walks to the back of the truck and tells Woody to stay.
Bennett stopped only twice to lean into a tree to catch his breath and he never put McEban down. Not once.
And then they heard the horse before they saw it and Bennett called out, and a flashlight beam shone in his face, and Ansel spurred the horse right to them and stepped down into the deep snow.
“How bad are you hurt?” Ansel played the flashlight down McEban’s leg and they all stared for a moment at the blood-soaked undershirt knotted at the end of the leg.
“I’m going to need to go to the hospital right away,” McEban told him. “Did my horse come in?”
“Yours and Bennett’s both. I had to wait until the snow let up before I could get out after you. I rode up on the bench first and didn’t find you.”
“How far are we from the buildings?” Bennett asked.
“Probably two hundred yards is all,” Ansel said.
“I want to take him the whole way.”
Ansel shone the flashlight into Bennett’s face. “I can put him on this horse.”
“I want him to take me,” McEban said.
Ansel shifted the light to McEban’s face and then turned it off. They stood for a moment letting their eyes adjust. And then they heard the stirrup leather squeal when Ansel stood up on his horse.
“Shuffle along where I broke the trail,” Ansel said.
“I will,” Bennett told him.
“I’ll have the pickup chained up by the time you’re there.”
They heard the horse dig in and the muffled hoofstrikes and Bennett stood just holding him.
“I told you I could do this,” he said.
McEban crosses the road and down through the borrow ditch and seats his hat against the wind and bows his head. The wind is hot and stiff and lifts the grasshoppers out of the seedtops, and they rain against his thighs and die broken in the grass.
He finds Bennett just thirty yards on the other side of the crest of the first big hill to the west. He lies belly-down, lifted up on his elbows, pointing the rifle toward a stand of buildings arranged across a spring-fed slough at the hill’s bottom.
McEban squints into the wind. The slough is choked with cattails and on the flat beyond there’s a small blue house and a barn and a row of weathered lambing sheds. Cottonwoods grow along the irrigation ditches and rattle in the wind, and from this distance look to be just slants of yellowed steam escaped from fissures in a newly cracked earth. A tractor and swather and baler are parked against the leeside of the barn.
A man and two black-and-white border collies work a couple hundred ewes and this year’s lambs through a gate and into a holding pen.
The sheep bleat and turn away in drifts and the dogs mold them back through the gate, and when the last of them are through a woman walks the gate closed and stands up on the fence next to the man.
The sun catches in the woman’s hair, and it flashes red as flame.
McEban walks down the slope and sits in the thick grass by Bennett’s side. He doesn’t take his eyes from Gretchen. He hopes she won’t look their way and wonder why two men sit in her pastureland, watching in this wind.
“It’s a nice little place,” Bennett says. “Don’t you think it’s a nice little place?”
The rifle is still up in his hands. He hasn’t taken his eye from the scope. His voice is phlegmy and choked.
“You crying?” McEban asks.
“Not so much anymore.”
“You do me a favor?”
“I will if I’m able.”
Beyond the man and the woman and the sheep the sky is massed black and gray and purple, and before it, stabbed into the earth, just the blunt and broken end of a rainbow. As though some comet has smashed there into the earth and left the bright evidence of its effort.
“Look at me,” McEban says.
“Just put the rifle down and look at me.”
Bennett lowers the rifle into the grass and turns to McEban. His face is swollen and yellow and red and in places gone dark as eggplant. The skin has split above his eyebrows and his eyes are blackened and glazed and run with blood, and he dabs at them with a kerchief he holds wadded in his hand. He swipes at the smear of snot that runs from his nose.
“What do you think the chances are of getting snakebit this late in the year?” Bennett asks and pushes his chest away from the matted grass and pulls out the limp body of the rattler. “It’s this goddamn warm weather,” he says. “I crawled right on the little fucker. He tried to squirm away, but then he got confused.”
He tosses the dead snake ahead of him, down the slope, and McEban blinks at the set of fang marks at the top of Bennett’s nose.
“We’ve got to get you to town right now.”
Bennett chokes and coughs, and hacks up a gob of venom-stained spittle. He tries to smile, but his lips won’t pull away from his teeth.
“I guess I should’ve been to town three hours ago.”
He rolls onto his back and McEban lifts him up against his thighs and holds him there.
“It might not be too late,” he says. “You don’t know that it’s too late.”
“You think I could stand the amputation?” Bennett asks, and laughs and coughs, and when he stops, the slaver that runs from his mouth is spotted with blood. “I never did put any shells in this rifle.”
“I never thought you did.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
The wind has turned sharp and the light is damped from the air. McEban looks to the west. The horizon is bruised as Bennett’s face and roiling and risen into an entablature of night-stained cloud.
“There’s the way winter comes,” Bennett says.
Bennett takes an envelope from his shirt pocket. It’s folded in half. “This was in Valentine.” He hands it to McEban. “I think she said all she had to say to me.”
The envelope is addressed to McEban and unopened. He tears the end off and lifts the paper out and it snaps in the wind. He holds it against Bennett’s shoulder and reads:
Dear Barnum,
If I could have carried our son to term I would have named him Bennett. Wouldn’t that have been fine? Besides me you are now the only person who knows this, or needs to. May God forgive us all.
Love,
Gretchen
They hear a sound on the wind and look up the slope, and there is Paul at the top of the hill. He sits alone in the grass and the wind snatches at his hair and blouses his shirt.
“That’s a good boy,” Bennett says.
“Yes, he is. He’s first-rate.”
Bennett rolls his head toward the buildings and sheep and dogs. “You aren’t going down there to bother her, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You want to tell me what the letter said?”
McEban folds the letter into Bennett’s shirt pocket and rests his hand there, against the pocket. “It says she loved you best.”
Bennett nods and settles against McEban and closes his eyes. His mouth hangs open and his tongue is thickened in his mouth.
“You could have come into town,” McEban says. “You had time to come in.”
“I meant to,” Bennett says. “Just as soon as I got tired of looking at her.”
McEban hugs Bennett to him until his back aches, and then he stands and slings the rifle strap. He squats and gets Bennett up in his arms and stands leaning into the hillside. He can feel the stitches tear in his shoulder and the welcome jag of pain, and when he gets close enough so the boy can see what he has, Paul runs ahead and drops the tailgate and puts Woody in the cab.
“Is he dead?” the boy whispers.
“Just a little bit ago,” McEban tells him.
They skid the body onto the truckbed and McEban gets in with it and the wind tears at him, and he sits there until it’s dark and the snow has started to fall.
Rita and Paul wait in the cab. They run the heater and the boy kneels on the seat, watching through the back window.
When the storm has pressed all the light from the sky and McEban cannot feel his hands or feet he staggers against the wind and gets over the side panel and into the cab.
Rita turns on the domelight and after a few minutes in the heat his face runs wet with the melted snow, and she pulls an arm out of her jacket and wipes his face with the empty sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Alma says he’s okay. She says his people were waiting for him.”
McEban nods and wonders if his memory is accurate enough to construct who he might now be. He wonders if he would exist if his mind was lost, or if it would matter. If he is kept alive only in the memories of his dead.
“Do you believe it?” he asks.
“Yes, I do,” she says. “It’s exactly what I believe.”
“I’m his people too.”
“You’re bleeding,” she says.
He looks down at his shoulder and she rips his shirt away and makes a bandage of some sacking she finds behind the truckseat and binds the wound, and turns off the domelight.
“You want to sit out here all night?” she asks.
He looks at her, stares at her, and then at the boy. Paul blinks slowly and smiles and bows his head. He curls down against McEban’s hip, and McEban smoothes the boy’s hair, feeling him shift and settle under the comfort of his hand.
“We better get the body to town,” McEban says.
“And then what?” Rita asks.
“And then it’ll be tomorrow and I’ll trailer Gretchen’s horse back out here and tell her she’s a widow. If you’ll ride with me we can get Gunnar’s car while we’re here.”
“What about the law?” she asks.
“I’ll check tomorrow to see if they want me.” He looks through the back window but there is only the swirl of snow in the night. “He’ll need a memorial,” he says. “I’ll take him home for that.”
Rita starts the truck. In the headlights the prairiescape comes crystalline and rippling in against them. She dims the lights.
“Will you come with me?” he asks.
She turns to him. Her hair catches green and red in the dashlights.
“How about right now we get in out of this weather.” She eases the truck out onto the drifting two-track. The tires bite and squeal against the snow. “Maybe I’ll come for a while, Barnum,” she says. “Maybe just until the baby’s born.”
In the dream the candle’s flame stirs the room. Her body drifts and begins to sink. She is sinking away from him and the candlelight wavers and sucks as water does. Like that. He feels her falling and tightens his grip. His hand gripping hers. And then with both hands. He shuts his eyes.
He hears the horses outside rear and strike at their leads and squeal, and stand shifting, quivering in the night—the pale and the dark alike. They lower their heads and snort at the ground, and stand listening to the promise of water beneath them. A stream run underground. All of it. Fish and foam and all.
And then it is her voice he hears. Clearly. Softly.
“It is a boy,” she whispers. She smiles but does not open her eyes. “Tell my sister it’s a boy,” she whispers. “In her belly it’s a boy.”
The words rise against his face, his tongue. They taste of salt. And they taste of mercy.