Shaye turned off the movie when my phone rang. It was a silly film, an old black-and-white that made you wonder what in the world people were thinking in those days. Right then, a woman in a short jungle-print toga with a palm-frond plume in her hair was being taken captive by drum-pounding natives. We’d been in our pajamas far too long, and it was time to get moving anyway. I went upstairs to talk to Amy, who was phoning from an old, ragged hotel near the bottom of an active volcano. There was a rain forest surrounding it, she told me. She and Hannah saw two capuchin monkeys. They had a view of the volcano from their room. Why had I been gone from home for so long, she wanted to know? Melissa told her I’d been at the ranch. I should go back to Seattle, she said, because Dad needed me. He was the kind of person who’d leave his coffee cup on the top of the car before driving off.
Whether it was distance or Amy’s own ever-laid-back temperament, she was less concerned about my absence than Melissa was. It made me think of the two of them, their small, distinct selves, getting ready for school. While Melissa organized her little blue backpack, Amy shoved everything into her orange one and hoped for the best. Back then, I’d have never thought I’d actually miss the days of buying school supplies, but there you have it.
I hung up from Amy and called Melissa to check in. It seemed she’d decided to ignore her parents’ bad behavior, which is a trick we used to try, too. She asked if we still had that blow-up raft we had when they were kids. She and Thomas had hunted around in the garage and couldn’t find it, but they were sure it was there somewhere. She and Kelly and Jess wanted to float it down the Sammamish River.
This is what we looked like: a trip out in a raft, Thomas making scrambled eggs, dinner with Richard and André or maybe our neighbors Lawrence and his wife, Sienna, at that great Italian place. Amy on the phone with a new love, her voice filling the house; Hugo barking his head off every time he heard the latch of the front gate. Thomas asking if I saw that thing on the news about the art heist; Thomas and me, lying on the couch together and laughing so hard at some comedian on TV. A trip to the Asian market, a meal gone wrong that we all made fun of, filling Easter baskets the kids had since they were babies. A sore throat; an opossum in the yard; the three of us plus Melissa’s new boyfriend sitting in a row at Amy’s violin concert. The poor guy clapped at the wrong place, because who ever knows when to clap at those things, and we kidded him hard about it. We could, because each and every one of us had done it over the years. Our marriage was us, but our marriage was also a family and a life. Lives entwined.
If I went home, and the mood came back and Thomas looked at me and said it was over, I didn’t know what I’d do. If I went home and I looked at Thomas and said it was over, I didn’t know what I’d do, either. I’d be destroyed, flattened. I’d be desolate. I’d be the desert. I’d be what the desert looks like at first glance. When you look further, though, when you look close enough to see it all, it is teeming with life. I’d be that old, desert old, and I’d be young as I once was, too.
“Are the horses afraid?” I asked. “Because I think I’d be afraid if a helicopter was chasing me.”
The corrals had grown in numbers and size. There were five large holding pens, and the fencing that created the chute now reached out toward the open land of the desert. Lorraine eyed me from the stables, but then she looked up toward the sky. I saw it, too, a dark cloud moving fast. A fat drop of water fell on my cheek and I wiped it away. The rain began to patter down, pinging against metal and plastic.
“Come on,” Kit Covey said. He grabbed my sleeve and we ran. We took the two wobbly stairs up into the trailer, where Kit exhaled. “Whew! It’s really coming down.”
“I’ve never seen it do this.”
“The desert,” he said, as explanation. “It won’t last long, which is a shame for those horses. They sure as hell need it. You’re soaked.” He handed me a towel from the padded bench, and I patted my hair dry.
“That came fast. Out of nowhere. The cold, too.”
“Sit,” he said. He went to a stove and turned on the burner under a pot of coffee. “Cup?”
“Please.”
The coffee was bitter and thick from sitting too long, but it was warm, at least, as the rain hit the roof. That day, I could tell that the energy was different at the site. The movement was faster, the voices louder. The chute that reached toward the desert had large, wide arms, arms that beckoned to the animals. I had seen new road-closure signs on the drive.
Kit Covey rubbed the side of his face with one hand. “You asked if they’re afraid? I won’t lie to you. Yeah, they are, and in part that’s why it works. The noise of the helicopter sets them running. And the pilot has to get pretty low to drive them toward the trap.”
“How low?”
“Low enough to get them going the right direction. He’ll back off a little after that, depending on the distance, so they don’t get as stressed. Then they’ll usually follow the Judas horse right on in. There may be a few stragglers for the wranglers to deal with, but it’s the helicopter that does most of the work. So, yeah, they’re afraid.”
“The Judas horse.” The name sounded awful. Tricked, trapped.
“The Judas horse, the Prada. The pilot. Called a lot of things.”
“Jasper.”
“Jasper, too.” He smiled. This was the Kit that was familiar to me, the one who drove his truck and danced with me, ever so briefly. The Kit out here, though, he reminded me that there was much I didn’t know about this man. How he felt about his mother, what he was like when he was angry. What his daughter sounded like, laughing.
I tried to imagine it: Something overhead. The frightening whick-whick-whick of helicopter blades, a huge object lowering itself above you. Running. Fearing for your life and the lives of your offspring. “This is the way it has to be done?”
“There are other ways. I told you about the water traps, right? Fire crews’ll bring water to an existing spring to lure them. That means three thousand gallons every few days, and I can tell you, that’s a lot of water. Then you wait. You can gather maybe twenty-five, thirty horses at a time that way. But it’d take too long, and it’d be too expensive here. We aim to gather eight hundred.”
“Eight hundred!”
“Well, Nevada’s got maybe twenty thousand wild horses and burros. Half the entire wild-horse population of the West. This land out here can’t sustain them.”
The rain stopped, just like that. One of the men yelled, “Damn sandwich is wet,” and the others laughed.
“Trevor Tompkins,” Kit said. “Our helicopter pilot. And that man’s gotta have his food. You need to come and watch.”
“I can watch?”
“Anyone can. You call the BLM, tell ’em you want to. Meet at the assigned place of the day, and there you go. And you, Miss McBride, can skip the call to the office.”
“P.R.,” I said.
“I want you to see.”
“I want to see.”
“I’ll let you know. The first one will probably be in a few days. We can’t always tell. Conditions change.”
“A few days. So it’s happening.”
“It’s happening.”
“My aunt, she said she saw a gather before. She told me last night. She said…Well, it wasn’t what she said exactly. She just indicated that something bad happened. I think that’s the reason for the boot-throwing.” I shrugged. I didn’t know how I felt about this, or about much else, truthfully.
“Around here? Recently?”
“I think she meant a long time ago.”
“Well, that explains it. It was brutal then. It was. Even the early gathers the BLM did. And before that? Damn mustangers did whatever the hell they wanted. It was a free-for-all. They sold the corpses for cash. Dog-food companies…Jesus.” He shook his head in disgust. “We’ve got the same pieces, sure—horses, land, humans—but we have a different mindset and different problems. Overburdened land, first off. Depleted vegetation. Vanishing species of it, even. We’ve got to think about the health of the wildlife, all of it, and how the horses themselves are doing. It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s the most gentle, humane one we have. Are they afraid? Yeah. Are they sometimes hurt? Yeah. But we give them our care and our respect. We’re as thoughtful as we can reasonably be. Some things don’t change, right? They gathered back then. We still do it today. They used airplanes. We use helicopters. But we understand more as time goes on, and we try to do better. We try to be a damn sight more kind.”
I nodded. “That’s all anyone can ask for.”
“That’s all anyone can do.” He put his hand briefly on mine. “Callie, I promise you. I will personally make sure they’re as all right as possible.”
All right. Couldn’t you just lay your head right down on those words and rest? I wanted those words for my own. No matter how much things changed or how time passed, every single earthly creature pursued the promise of all right, and I was no different. We sought it in the shelter of caves and underground hollows and in successful husbands and suburban neighborhoods with gates. We fought for it, and manipulated others to get it, and tried to buy it in our organic food and cars with every safety feature, and tried to fake it with tough exteriors, and camouflage, and false hopes. We could want a sense of shelter, real shelter, so badly that we could lose air until the panic of not having it was over, or we could ditch our lives in an instant. The desire for all right was perhaps the only thing we all—every human, every animal—truly had in common, even though the relentless drive for it could make us both stand against one another and seek out one another’s warm and flawed company. And yet, fleeing it, even briefly, also gave us the thrill of our lives.
Kit removed his hand from mine. He lifted that cup to his lips. “Damn,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something? This coffee is awful.”
Shaye’s rear end stuck out of the Ford Fusion Hybrid, and she was screeching. “Get out of there this minute!”
“I am not one of your misbehaving toddlers!”
“My misbehaving toddlers aren’t toddlers anymore!”
There was the push–pull of arms, and Shaye banged her head backing out. “Shit!” she yelled.
They both looked like toddlers, if you asked me. They reminded me of Amy and Melissa, fighting over a single garish-pink plastic pony.
“People!” I clapped my hands. “Quiet down, and listen up!” The girls’ classroom teachers flashed before my eyes, from Mrs. Benjamin to Mr. Clymer, all the way on up to Doug Longman, Ravenna High’s orchestra conductor. I wasn’t sure which one of them I’d stolen that line from. “What is going on here? You two should see yourselves!”
Clearly, Shaye had won. She held a key ring on her index finger and gave it a triumphant twirl. Her face blazed with righteousness. “She was just going to take off! First she’s too scared to get in the damn thing to learn, and then she’s heading out like nothing! Luckily, Tex started barking when he heard the car start.”
Tex lay on the porch, his chin on his paws. At the mention of his name, his ear twitched. He looked bored with the whole affair, actually, and maybe even a tad disgusted. How humans even managed in the world, well, it was beyond him.
“I got my courage up, is all! Have I suddenly turned into a baby? What would I do right now if you girls weren’t here? I’d be getting in the car I just bought and driving it, and neither of you would be the wiser.” She got out and slammed the door hard, and the car gave a terrified shiver. I hoped I was that strong when I was her age.
“Well, we’re here now.”
“Whoop-de-doo.”
It was sad, because she’d even dressed up for the trip. She had a red blouse on, tucked into tan slacks. I didn’t even know she had slacks, let alone a blouse. Her hair was loose from her braid, and I could see a bit of color painted onto her lips and brushed onto her cheekbones. Honestly, the lipstick broke my heart. I saw her teenage self then, those glimpses you got of people sometimes when the lonely adolescent crept out from the adult exterior. I could only imagine the way she and my mother must have fought. They seemed so different on the surface. My mother was girlish and self-centered, needful of attention, while Nash puttered along on her own merits, defying interference. Still, they were sisters. They had the same downturn of eyes and a stubborn streak. A determination flowed through their blood like defeat flows through the blood of some others. Nash could gaze out a window and I’d see my mother’s profile. Then again, Shaye could gaze out a window and I’d see mine.
“We are not here to thwart you,” I said. Nash looked up to the sky, then rolled her eyes at the heavens, which surely understood her better than we did. “We care about you. We don’t want anything to happen to you. Getting in a car and taking off who knows where—you’re not well. You haven’t driven in years. It’s dangerous.”
“Yeah!” Shaye said. It was a two-against-one yeah, a proven-right yeah. As a little sister, she’d had a lot of years to perfect it.
“And what’s going to happen? Tell me that. I’m going to die?”
She had us there. Shaye rubbed the back of her neck and sighed.
I looked up at the rambunctious clouds, which had lined up across the sky, ready to march. One slid over the sun, and shade slunk past, like the villain in a melodrama, before brightness returned. “Please,” Shaye said. “Just let us help you. My friend Janey? Her grandmother reunited with a man she knew in high school. They got married! They were both eighty-something. I saw the pictures. They were so cute! Janey even bought her a garter, but thankfully there were no pictures of that.”
“Cute?” Nash said.
“I’m sorry,” Shaye said. “I didn’t mean it like that. Just tell us where he lives. I mean, look at you. You’re all dressed up. We can go right now! What do we have to do here anyway, watch the deer and the antelope play?”
“This is not about Jack,” Nash said. She threw her hands in the air, huffed toward the house. She’d had enough of us.
“Come on, Nash,” Shaye called after her. In spite of everything, this was the story she was sticking with. Shaye was a romantic, which was probably what had gotten her into so much trouble.
“It wasn’t Jack who I loved,” Nash said, as the screen door slammed shut behind her.