Trumpet Bell Land & Sheep Company

Baggs, Wyoming

1995

   

   

   

HOBBS SPENT HOURS SNIPPING METAL AT HIS WORKBENCH. This devotion spooked Adams. He thought it might be better for them both if they focused on less eccentric behaviors, so he was in the house, trying to register them for a weed-and-seed seminar, when the phone rang. The call was from a woman who said she was with the veterans post in Rawlins. She called herself Sugar. Adams had never heard of her. The VFW had stopped calling him years ago because he’d asked them to leave him out of things. When the woman asked for Hobbs, Adams was startled. He still thought of Hobbs as a man who rarely left footprints in the world. But he took a message. He gave the message to Hobbs, who didn’t look surprised even though he never got phone calls.

“W-we could go to town on Tuesday,” Hobbs said. “Get up there. Have some lunch.”

“We could. But I don’t go to the post. The boys out of Vietnam talk too much.”

“Maybe I could borrow the F-f-ford,” Hobbs said, referring to the only vehicle they had that was dependable enough to make the trip. “If you thought that was a option.”

It occurred to Adams that a change of scenery might be just the ticket. A trip to Rawlins and exposure to other people, regular people, might be better than chores when it came to taking Hobbs’s mind off his little doll workshop. He said, “It’s something to think about. I’d be willing to chauffeur you to the VFW for all the sliced roast beef and gossip you can stand. But I won’t come in. I’ll find my own way to waste time.”

Tuesday morning broke with clouds as low as the barn roof. Adams could feel the knife edge of a hovering cold front in his knees. But the drive north on the two-lane to Creston Junction was uneventful. Kerchiefs of snow wrapped themselves around the truck and turned the interior blue with shadow, but the visibility stayed good. On the interstate, they passed several semis that had been blown over on their sides by high wind the night before. They didn’t worry. The pavement was clear. Even an eighty-mile-an-hour gust wasn’t going to roll the heavy Ford.

The city of Rawlins looked hunkered down to Adams. Its plowed streets were the same gravel beige color as the surrounding hills. He could remember when Rawlins felt striving and expectant, when it was more than enough town for him and everybody he knew. These days Rawlins was more about hanging on than striving.

“Sure you won’t come in?” Hobbs asked as Adams swung onto Cedar Street.

“Not in a million, buddy. You have a good time.”

Hobbs stepped out of the heated cab into the nail taps of fresh, hard sleet. The way he hefted his shoulders into the weather gave Adams a jolt. Why was his friend so energized by the prospect of eating lunch in a windowless, sauerkraut-smelling hall with a bunch of strangers? Surely Hobbs wasn’t going to the post to drink. Drinking was easy there, and cheap, and there was always company. He cursed himself for not considering the possibility earlier. How stupid could he be? It would be a hell of a time for them both if Hobbs slipped into that tunnel.

He lit a cigarette and mulled over his options. He could follow Hobbs like a mother hen. He could park across from the VFW and pretend to keep an eye on things. He could go for his own hot lunch at Rose’s, where the Mexican food was worth the hour drive from home. Or he could give Hobbs some rope and head to the lumberyard and buy the supplies he needed to replace the kitchen floor. The old floor, with its buckled corners and cigarette burns, had become a recent source of embarrassment to him. Despite the weird moments, Hobbs’s reappearance on the ranch was changing how he saw the things in his life and the way he lived among them. He’d been squatting in the cave of his bachelorhood for too long. It was time to crawl out of that cave. Young Sam Gunderson had laid the current kitchen linoleum twenty years before as part of a barter deal for hay. Replacing it was just the sort of thing he and C.D. should do.

The do-it-yourself center at the lumberyard, which heralded budget optimism at every turn, was the sort of place he hated. But it had what he needed—backing paper, adhesive, scrapers, trowels, and too many patterns of vinyl flooring to choose from. He selected a pattern that was lighter and simpler than the corn-colored mosaic Sam Gunderson had installed. He didn’t ask many questions, and he didn’t leave much room for the sales clerk, an acned young man with fox-red hair, to offer advice, though he thanked him for his help as they loaded his purchases into the open bed of the Ford. He drove to the parking lot of the VFW with the truck’s exhaust rising and twitching behind him like the tail of an impatient animal. He was late.

Hobbs was waiting for him in the recessed door of the veterans post. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his caramel jacket, and he was stomping his work boots to keep his feet warm. There was a woman with him, undoubtedly the so-called Sugar. Sugar, Adams soon found out, had lost a brother in Vietnam and was married to a guy who’d done twenty solid years in the navy. She organized social events for the post. Hobbs started talking about her as soon as he got into the truck. He talked while Adams scrutinized the woman through the windshield. Sugar, sometimes called Shug, was small and stubbornly underdressed in Wranglers and a denim jacket embroidered with a POW/MIA flag. Her face, what he could see of it, was lived in but not unattractive. She had short, black, overdyed hair, and he could track the sashay of her eyes even from a distance. Adams guessed she was a good dancer, the kind he’d spun in and out of his arms many times in the past. She wore lots of rings on her fingers. Her lipstick was as orange as a highway flare. For a moment, Adams was sure he knew Sugar from somewhere—she was that familiar. When she lifted both hands to wave good-bye to Hobbs, he knew he recognized her only as a kind of ghost. It had been that long since he’d looked at a woman with interest. The realization made him laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Hobbs asked.

“That gal,” Adams said. “Looks like she’s got voltage.”

“She’s m-married,” Hobbs said.

“’Course she’s married, that’s part of what makes it funny. I’m finally old enough to enjoy being reminded I’m a fool.”

“You want me to call her over here?”

“No. She looks as good as she ever will from this distance. I’m glad she’s friendly.”

“You’d like her. I hadn’t thought about it, b-but you would. I d-do.”

“I know,” Adams said, and he kept some of the resonance of his remark to himself, for himself.

They made good time on the highway as part of a trickle of vehicles hoping to reach the desert promise of Nevada or California despite the lousy forecast. The horizon was a spume of cloud the color of burning oil. Adams reckoned it had been more than five years since he’d been farther west than Salt Lake City, though he felt no regret about that fact. Hobbs asked him what was loaded in the back of the truck, and he told him.

“I might need some help on the floor job. It’s straight grunt work, but the scraping and measuring will make me more of a S.O.B. than usual.”

“I been a grunt.”

“Yeah, you have, but you’re top hand now, C.D. I mean it. This is my own kind of house thing. I’ve neglected that house. You don’t have to pitch in.”

Hobbs dropped his chin toward his chest.

“I don’t mean to leave you out, if you’re willing,” Adams continued. “I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t use you.”

Hobbs sat bolt upright in his seat, as if he’d been called to attention. The prospect of a shared project pleased him. He asked if Adams wanted to hear about the meeting at the post, and Adams said he did as long as the telling was worth a cigarette. Adams looped the truck off the interstate at the Baggs exit without much reduction in speed, driving one-handed the way they’d both learned from Uncle Gene. Hobbs lit them Winstons, not his regular brand.

“It was nice,” Hobbs said. “Hot f-food, plenty of that. Beef—like you said—and beans and salad. You could have white b-bread or brown. No beer. That’s a lunch rule they’ve just started. I met two guys who guard at the prison. They served in th-that Desert Storm.”

“See anybody you know?” Adams didn’t want to hear about some dogface’s vacation in the Gulf.

“Ruth Colbert’s brother. Remember how he b-broke his leg in the wild-horse race at county fair? He d-don’t even have a limp.” Hobbs paused, tugged his pants down over his boot tops. “The Nam guys is getting old. That’s part of what Shug wants to t-talk to me about, if I had advice.”

“She think you were Vietnam?” Most of the gray hair Hobbs had was crowded at his temples. And people never remembered Korea. The Korean War was more forgotten than the Vietnam one they’d lost.

“Naw. I told her I was full-scale senior citizen. She’s only fifty-three.”

“Whoa. You got that far with her?”

Hobbs lathed up a grin. “Going to t-town brings out the devil in you, Fremont.”

“And that ain’t news, is it?”

“Guess not,” Hobbs said, shaking his head. “N-not if we count all the past times.” Then he got quiet like he was about to summon up a longer speech.

“Don’t even think it,” Adams said. “I told you I don’t go to the post, and I don’t. Drive to town whenever you want. You can take this truck. Say howdy to Sugar and all the rest. But I’m not in the mix. If you bother me about it again, I’ll ask a question you don’t want to answer.”

“What’s that?” Hobbs swung his head in Adams’s direction. His eyes had a filmy, condensed look.

Adams thought of winged spirits and spaceships, but he suddenly couldn’t bring himself to take his own bait. It seemed wrong to bring up the stories Hobbs was trying to retell with his little figurines. The whole point of going to Rawlins was to ease the pressure of those stories. “Well, for instance, just for speculation, I could ask for a complete list of all the ladies in your life.”

Hobbs clamped his lips and stared at the wet end of his half-smoked cigarette. He didn’t seem to know whether Adams’s comment was meant to be funny or mean. Adams didn’t know, either. He’d dodged one pit only to fall into another.

They didn’t speak for nearly twenty miles. Hobbs eventually recovered enough to count the steers he could see in the rubbed-out pastures owned by the absentee Coloradan who’d bought the Barnheisel spread after Steve cashed out to live with his daughter in Casper. The black fang of Battle Mountain came into view to the south, drawing them over the Continental Divide and into the open mouth of home. Adams welcomed the sight of his ice-stitched pastures and the rusty stanchion of Bell Butte. He felt bad about what he’d said to Hobbs. He hadn’t meant to pour cold water on the man’s enthusiasms; he just wanted Hobbs to stay connected to the real world. He wondered again if the VFW might be a bad idea. What if Sugar or somebody sprayed with the same kind of sweet perfume asked Hobbs the wrong kind of questions about his war?

When they got back to the Trumpet Bell, Hobbs went onto the porch to release the dogs from the mudroom where Adams had allowed them to stay because of the cold. The young dogs, Zeke and Dan, bolted from the house and leaped into the truck bed, their sinewy, thick-furred bodies taut with frustration because they’d been left behind. Rain ambled onto the porch and stretched his dappled legs in a slash of sunlight before he joined in a long moment of communion with Hobbs.

As Adams carried his smaller purchases into the house, he smelled the hot salt smell of dog urine. It came from the corner of the mudroom where he’d left the dogs a pair of old blankets. Surely the piss came from Rain, and surely it was a bad sign. A dog that couldn’t control himself was a dog you had to take behind the barn and shoot. The idea of losing Rain rifled across Adams’s heart. He dreaded that day. Rain had been with him a long time. But it was the way of this country to kill a creature when it could no longer take care of itself.

They tore up the old kitchen floor and hauled the pieces to the trash pit behind the barn. They scraped at the tarlike adhesive, and while they were doing that, Adams decided to re-floor the mudroom as well. He suspected he was rolling down a steep slope because a new floor would make the kitchen cabinets look dingy, and if they repainted the cabinets, the walls and battered gas stove would look like shit. But what the hell? He and Hobbs needed the challenge. He reminded himself of that.

Hobbs did a meticulous job measuring sections of new floor with a T square and pencil. He made himself a kind of bible-school necklace from knotted fishing line and lead sinkers, and he liked to wear the long strands of the necklace even though it sometimes got in his way as they worked. He seemed mostly calm and unprophetic, though he did talk to himself quite a bit. The conversations were animated and, in Hobbs’s mind, two-sided.

“He likes what we’re doing,” he said to Adams after they glued down the first shiny square of linoleum.

“What? Who?”

“You know. H-him.” Hobbs glanced up at the ceiling. “He approves of everything you do.”

Adams decided to play along. “Good. That satisfies me. I could use some approval.”

Hobbs nodded. “I know.”

“Give him my thanks, will you?” Adams pressed his hands onto the new piece of flooring to make sure it was set.

Hobbs nodded again. “I already have.”

Hobbs had stopped manufacturing his little people. This was a relief to Adams. The workbench looked the same each morning—dusty, half populated, on hiatus. He peered out his uncurtained kitchen windows into a depthless blue sky, and he felt something akin to hope. The air was varnished with the sheer and brittle light he’d known all his life, a promised heat that once again awakened desires he’d learned to lift out of himself and examine. He thought he understood brittleness now, how a man could crack and piece himself back together. There were ways to blend permanence and pain—he truly believed that.

Late one afternoon, when he scraped his knuckles working under the toe kick of the cabinets, Adams glimpsed an old memory that hurdled itself away from him like a startled pheasant. The memory came into focus as he sucked on the raw ooze of his own skin, tasting salt. Something to do with a pair of lambs and an overhang of scrub juniper near Mount Zirkel. Something almost forgotten. He had yanked the twin lambs to safety that day as their sag-bellied mother bawled from the top of the cliff. He was lucky he hadn’t dropped them or dislocated their shoulders. It was a maneuver that cost him the skin on the back of his hands. He was thirteen, and it was the last time he left summer camp without his gloves. Old Etchepare hadn’t bothered to praise him or tell him he was stupid as they sat together next to the cook’s tent. Adams soaked his hands in a stew pot of soapy water to get the sting out of them, and the boss herder never spoke. Old Etch didn’t believe judgment came with words.

“There is this one thing with the sheep,” Old Etch told him. It was later in both their lives, Adams back from his war, Old Etchepare carrying a tumor in his gut that rode in front of him like an unborn child. “A man who move the band, he go out in the world like you know. He walk, see a thing around him here and around him there.” Etch spread his gnarled fingers. “Man who beds sheep at end of the day, the world come to that man. Sometime, he find what other ones never wait for.”

On the third afternoon of floor work, Adams drove down to Baggs to buy vitamins for the horses. The stink of vinyl and adhesive had gotten to him, making his head feel empty and light. He wanted a break. He left Hobbs sharpening the teeth of the mower blade on the grinder in the shed. Baggs was the same as ever—good for postage stamps and a paint-stripping cup of coffee. When he drove back into the ranch yard, the collies, Dan and Zeke, streaked right for him. He saw the porch door slam itself against the blistered gray siding of the house. The dogs shouldn’t have been indoors. They kept their heads low and obedient as he greeted them. Strangely, their flanks were trembling. Inside, Adams found Hobbs sitting on the bright new kitchen floor, his belly and thighs ribboned with blood. Rain was huddled against him.

“You,” Hobbs gasped, the whites of his eyes huge and skittish, “you didn’t want dogs in here.”

Adams chose the slow approach because he knew something about the scene was very bad. He set the jar of vitamins on the countertop and closed the door between the mudroom and kitchen, damming the icy flow of air. He could see the fog of his breath, and the rising breath of Hobbs and the panting Rain. When he first approached Hobbs, Rain growled deep in his throat and showed his teeth, but Adams put a stop to that with a quiet word. Hobbs had both hands cradled against his gut. Adams could see blood that was both dry and wet.

“How bad is it? You lose a finger on the mower?”

“N … no.”

Adams didn’t like the fish belly color of Hobbs’s face or the way he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs. He wondered about a heart attack. “Let me see.”

Hobbs lifted his left arm and rotated it from front to back as if it was on a skewer.

The damage ran from the center of the palm up toward the elbow. Above the wrist was a dark line of exposed meat shaped like a hook. If arteries had been cut, Adams couldn’t see the pulsing. One of the curved linoleum knives was on the floor near the refrigerator. It was smeared with blood that had turned thick and brown in the cold.

“Try … try to help. Then … h-he came so fast … and Rain goes….” The words were short and shallow. Panicked.

“Slow yourself down. We don’t got a train to catch. Does it hurt much?”

Hobbs nodded. Portions of the cut were deep, but it wasn’t going to kill anybody, so Adams stayed with his worry about Hobbs’s heart.

“I want to wrap it in something clean, take you to town to see the doc.”

Hobbs’s left leg went rigid. The other leg flexed as if something was snaking inside it. Adams knelt closer, touching Hobbs’s elbow with both hands, feeling how cold his skin was against Hobbs’s. “I don’t mean a hospital, C.D., not like that. Just stitches and a antibiotic.”

“You do it.” The blued eyes rolled upward in their sockets, spooked and unforgiving at the same time. Adams had to look away.

“Oh, hell. Don’t make me—” But what could he promise that Hobbs would believe when it came to doctors? He’d burned that damn bridge a long time ago. “What were you doing, C.D.? You didn’t have to work in here without me. We’re not in a hurry, and you—”

“P-please.”

“Jesus, then. Jesus Christ. Can you move your fingers, all five of them, because if you can’t move your fingers, I’m not touching you.” He knew he’d turned the corner as soon as he opened his mouth. He couldn’t say exactly what had taken him around the turn, but it was happening. He was going to do whatever it took to keep Hobbs from going off the deep end. He held Hobbs’s arm at the bicep and watched the flat, glistening sheath of a tendon slide under the gap of the wound. It reminded him of a ewe he’d once found in Lame Jack Gulch. Coyotes had ripped at her right hind Achilles until you could see exactly how it worked.

Hobbs slumped against the kitchen wall. He appeared exhausted. And grateful. There was dried spit at the corners of his mouth. “I got to get the kit from the barn,” Adams said. “You be all right for a minute?”

Hobbs gave half a nod. His eyelids were closed, but Adams could see that his eyes were moving left, then right, as if they were tracking something small and slow in the distance. “Is there anything else going on, C.D? Does your chest hurt? Your head? Did you see something that made you….” He paused to lick at his lips. “Shit, did you cut yourself without meaning to? I don’t want to make a mistake here.”

“Hurt my neck.” The sealed eyes were still moving, like ball bearings in grease.

“Huh?”

“You … hurt my neck.”

Adams crouched next to Hobbs again, dread shaping itself into an iron band around his chest. He used his thumbs to probe both sides of Hobbs’s throat. There were no cuts or nicks there, only a reddish smudge that might be the beginning of a bruise. The fishing line necklace was no longer draped around the collar of Hobbs’s shirt. Adams wondered about that. When he spotted the necklace looped like pigging string around one of Hobbs’s belt loops, he wondered even more. Had Hobbs seen something, imagined something, that led him to take a whack at his own throat? Jesus, that was a black thought. And if he was aiming at his throat, how had he sliced his arm instead?

“Fix it, Fremont. She says you don’t have to fix everything, you just got to try.” Now the voice was as firm and polished as a teacher’s apple. It scared him.

“Hang on there, bud. I’m going to the barn.” Adams’s own words cracked against one another like finger bones. He tried to maintain his poise as he headed for the door.

He had the basics in his medical kit. Heavy silk thread. Suture needles. Wide, sterile bandages meant for the horses. He could put in enough stitches to make it look good, then talk Hobbs into having somebody else sew it up right. He could do it. But should he? Was he already too late? He found himself jogging out of the barn, his arms full of more supplies than he’d ever need. He just wanted it to stop. He wanted Hobbs to be the way he used to be, the way he’d been that very morning when they ate pancakes for breakfast. He wanted Hobbs to be normal. When he got back to the house, he found Rain licking blood from the floor. Hobbs had toppled onto his side and squeezed himself into a tight ball.

He was afraid he knew what Hobbs was thinking down there in his roly-poly ball. Hobbs was thinking that Fremont Adams was fresh out of excuses. If he could stitch the female parts back inside a ewe that had been turned inside out by a bad labor, he could handle a knife cut on a man’s arm. Fremont Adams could save him. Pain was never a reason to avoid a thing that had to be done.

He put what he needed on a plastic dinner plate. Then he unzipped the quilted jacket he’d worn to Baggs, though he didn’t take it off. He removed his knit hat, and he washed his hands twice, scrubbing at the fingernails before he squatted between Hobbs and the row of cabinets that held their pots and pans. He conceded the other side to Rain, who laid himself along the hunch of Hobbs’s spine with his grizzled head facing the door. Rain kept looking at that door, ears peaked, eyes shining, like he was waiting for something big and loud to come right through it.

Adams rolled up Hobbs’s stained sleeves, first one, then the other. “I might have to talk myself through this, C.D. Blue Pete always had to talk when he did something, remember?” Hobbs didn’t respond, so he applied a wet towel to the skin, refolding the towel as it absorbed blood. He’d seen head wounds bleed like this. They always looked worse than they were. He was glad when the hot, clean water seemed to unbind Hobbs a little. “Blue Pete never had his hands clean as this, did he? That man was a walking buffalo wallow.” Although Adams wasn’t able to make Hobbs speak or laugh, he was able to sit him back against the wall with his left elbow resting atop his knees. It was just like soothing a horse, he thought as he bathed the skin until the dried blood began to come off in flakes. You had to get comfort and trust moving in the same direction, flowing like a stream.

He made a kind of surgical table on his own lap and opened the dusty pack of needles, then the envelopes of coiled thread. He could feel Hobbs watching him. When he swabbed the arm with disinfectant, the color and smell made him think of Uncle Gene and all the injured animals they’d tried to put back together with their own hands. They’d played veterinarian to save money. And they’d never healed as many of their patients as they hoped.

Adams doused a hemostat with disinfectant and lined up the marbled edges of the cut as well as he could. “I’m sewing more skin than muscle,” he told Hobbs. “I think I can get the stitches to hold, but they’ll be hard to keep tight. You’ll have to stay real still, even when it hurts.” Hobbs flinched when the hemostat was clamped in, but Adams kept his pace and drove the needle through one flap of skin and then the other. The first stitch was lopsided and a little loose. When he tied off the second stitch, he felt rather than heard Hobbs begin to weep. The weeping moved from Hobbs’s body into his own with the same vibrations as the growl of an animal.

His own fingertips became brown with disinfectant. When he paused to soak up more blood, he could see those fingers tremble from effort. So much effort. There was sobbing now from Hobbs, the hot current of it pouring onto Adams’s shoulder where Hobbs had pressed his face. There were high-pitched whines from Rain, too. They flailed into his ears.

“Why don’t you open your eyes, C.D., and make a guess. I’m thinking twenty stitches will do her. What do you think?” His words—which were meant to comfort—didn’t change anything. Hobbs kept the bones of his arm flat and motionless. The stitches gathered like black barbs on a fence. But Hobbs was suffering, and Adams couldn’t escape the sense that he was sewing them both to a fate they’d hoped to avoid. “I suppose you got me right where you want me, huh—doctoring on you like you’re a piece of stock. After everything that’s happened with us, you probably think it makes sense, that this is as far as I’ve got.” He spoke with a tongue that tasted of bad meat. “I don’t blame you, you know. You bear no blame. So here’s my question: Why does it all keep coming back on us? You seem to be reliving … well, you seem to be remembering how I came after you on that Korea hill. What I did. I want to make it right, but why does it keep coming back? And why do you bring other people—like my sister or the boys from Easy Company—into what’s between us when they’re away from here or dead, and we’re just on our own?”

There were no words from Hobbs. No motion. Adams tied off another small, tight knot.

“Should a man turn around to face his wrongs, or should he try to make a good life from what’s in front of him? Which is the right way to live? That’s where I’m stuck, C.D. That’s the answer I need from you.”

Hobbs rolled against him, quaking, covering his swollen face with his uncut hand. Rain got to his feet to guard them all against whatever he believed was on the other side of the door. Adams could see a slickness amid the dog’s belly fur. The dog had pissed himself, bad. The silver hemostat shook itself free of Adams’s hand when he saw that.

“A answer,” he whispered, recalling the nothingness he’d emerged from after the Chinese mortar shell had erased all light and sound on Hill 1281. That shell had erased him, too, in a lot of ways. It had vaporized the self he was so sure of. He’d never shared with Hobbs the damning truths he’d learned after Chosin: how a battalion surgeon had seen Sutherland in a group of prisoners wired together by the Chinese, how Pilcher’s frozen body had been dumped in a shallow trench grave because the marines had no way to retreat with their dead. “I don’t know why I do what I do to you,” he said. “There’s no thinking to it. That knife—the Baker one—I lost it, you know. I left it with the medic who tried to help us. He said … he said I should hold onto you. He wasn’t ever coming down from there, and I left him the knife. A lot of us never came down from there.” His mind began to crowd with all the words and syllables he might finally say out loud. He felt as though a skin far below his real skin had been punctured, and he was going to have to say certain words if he wanted to survive the rupture. He tried to go on. “What do you think a selfish, unthinking son of a bitch can really fix?” He realized he was staring at the pink glaze of what had once been Hobbs’s right ear, addressing it. “I’ve done you wrong, more than once. I can’t see how to fix that.”

Hobbs tightened himself back into a ball, the suture thread scrawled across his wrist like an unfinished signature. He began to breathe like a man grappling with sleep. When Adams tried to clear his own eyes, he saw his dog, Rain, through a wet, warping haze. The dog was standing upright, still and judgmental and careful. And the dog held his own question in a pair of spackled eyes: What kind of lifelong casualty was John Fremont Adams willing to be?

He does it when the house is his alone. Hobbs has been bandaged, covered with blankets, and left to rest in his room in the shed. They’ve eaten a meal of buttered spaghetti decorated with peas from a can. They’ve gotten back to the surface of normal, if there is such a thing. Hobbs’s footfalls are delicate. He carries his head slightly to one side as if his neck is strained, but his pupils are stark and clear, the color of pond water under ice. When he’s finally by himself in the parlor, Adams realizes it’s almost the spring equinox. A beveled light breaches the parlor windows, and he knows if he stands close to the unwashed glass he will see the citrus plume of the sun disappear behind the black rampart of Skull Rim. Soon there will be heat and thaw. Long spring rains will fall upon his welcoming fields. This used to be what he waited for. When he was a man birthing lambs, a man who directed mountain runoff into his neighbors’ dry canals, he wanted each year to begin again. Now he doesn’t understand what he’s waiting for, or whether it’s worth waiting at all.

She says you don’t got to fix everything, you just got to try. The words settle on his shoulders like heavy droplets of fog. Chilled. Encompassing. He’s on the phone before he even thinks about it. He grips the receiver, contemplating the roar in his ears that comes partly from the clamoring fire in the stove and partly from the haste of his heart as the operator gives him a number for Charlotte Adams. Buren once tracked their sister to Denver. He says she works at a frame shop in the old downtown. The operator repeats the number as he copies it in pencil on a clean piece of typing paper drawn from the center drawer of his mother’s walnut desk. He thanks the operator, grateful he has received the information from a human voice. 970 … 381…. The numerals march and retreat before his eyes. He needs to turn the lamp on. He needs to find his reading glasses. He needs to hang on a moment, breathe, make sure his priorities are in a long, straight line. He tells himself not to talk about the ranch and how it’s cratered, she won’t give a fig about that. Let her tell about a husband, or a man if she has one, don’t take the lead there. Say hello, damn it. Be polite. Talk about Hobbs, mention Hobbs early because that’s why you’re calling, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

He punches the number pads with his forefinger, and the phone squawks its unpitched tune. His hands are icy. Sweat curdles under his arms and belt while the phone lines shiver and click, and then Charlotte’s end begins to ring—hollow, distant, as empty as a culvert. What if he gets one of those infernal machines? What if he gets a man’s voice? He’s thinking hard about that, girding himself as her phone continues to ring until that’s what he does get. The words of a man.

Don’t do it ‘cause of me.

The words ride above the racing of his blood like birds above the waves of the sea.

Put it down. She.

Don’t do it for me.

Hobbs lifts the receiver from Adams’s damp hand and places it in its hard, black cradle. Where has he come from?

“Sorry,” Hobbs says. He’s standing there with a blaze orange hunter’s cap on his head, his two-day beard giving a charcoal blur to every part of his face except the lit circuits of his eyes. He holds his bandaged arm close to his body as if it is a package, and he looks weary through the backbone, as weary as Adams feels. There is something slightly shrunken about him, too, a containment that is unfamiliar. It is the stance of a man who is looking for forgiveness. Or punishment.

“How’d you know?”

“Wish I could tell you, Fremont.”

“It’s my business.”

Hobbs shakes his head. “More hers.”

Adams’s blood coils between his lungs and heart. It tests its lash on him, striking a sharp pulse in his neck. He has to ask himself whether Hobbs is really ever sorry for anything.

“Coffee?” Hobbs points toward the kitchen.

“So we can sit and talk? I already got your point.”

Hobbs steers wide of him and gets to the coffeepot, which he fills with tap water. He’s wearing Adams’s sheepskin coat, unbuttoned. Its sleeves run almost as long as his fingers. The sight of the coat, which is something Hobbs has never asked to borrow, makes Adams wonder whether forgiveness and punishment might be the same thing to a man with flint sparks in his eyes.

“Don’t you think it’s interesting how a ranching man is always looking for things? I found the seven-pound bolt cutters the other morning, been looking forever. They were in the cab of the big tractor, right behind the seat.”

Adams wants to walk into the kitchen and get two coffee mugs out of the cabinet and do the regular duet. But Hobbs’s ministry makes him feel balloon-headed, like he’s waking up from a long sleep. He hasn’t been himself since … since he doesn’t know when.

“I always lose things. You used to tell me that as a kid.” Steam rises from the coffeepot as it percolates over its ring of pure flame. Hobbs shucks the heavy, fleece-lined coat and hangs it on the back of a chair.

“I think we were talking about Charlotte.”

“I am,” Hobbs says. “You’ve lost her. I’m trying to tell you we aren’t going to get her back.”

The blood lash falls again, whipping at him from the inside where he can keep the howling to himself.

“You don’t know that.”

“Then call her.”

“God damn you.” Adams drives one of his boots against the parlor floor. Window glass shakes; they both hear it. “You can’t tell me what to do about my own sister.” And he pivots to where the telephone squats on his mother’s walnut desk. But he can’t pick it up. It looks ugly to him, peeled and dead. Charlotte hit him in the face the day he stole Hobbs away from her. He feels those blows again—on his sagging, unshaved cheek. Across his eye socket. Harder than ever. Faster.

“I seen her, you know.”

Adams halts. He knows he couldn’t move now even if he tried. “Wh … what?”

“It weren’t that hard. You just have to talk to people when you get off the Denver bus, they’re mostly nice about it. You make a certain set of turns on the streets down there, and you can see her. Walk right up.”

“She talked to you?”

“She did. Charlotte ain’t lost none of her ease with talking. I did surprise her, though.”

Adams tries to focus on the door frame between the parlor and the kitchen, anything to give him an anchor. “Bet so.”

Hobbs shakes his oranged head while he lays down a pair of napkins and spoons. “She took me out for a sandwich. We both had BLTs, all she had to do was ask her manager. She looks fine. Her boobs are flatter, and she’s smaller all the way around but in a good way. She showed me a picture of a little brown girl from down below Mexico that she calls her daughter.”

Adams opens his mouth, but that’s as far as he’s allowed to get. “It’s okay,” Hobbs says. “There never was no baby. Charlotte says I was shooting blanks. She says she’s with a good man now too, though I didn’t see no pictures of him. I can tell you the man she’s with is not that shop manager. He ain’t her type.”

And who is? Adams thinks to himself, his heart rolling itself up like a carpet. “She’s all right, though? That’s what you’re saying?”

Hobbs sits himself down at the kitchen table with gusto. He heaps a spoon with sugar. “She’s close enough to happy to know what it is. She said it helped her to see me. But she don’t want to see you or know about you or Buren in any way. I told her I could change her mind about that.”

“I don’t think …”

“Some things are not yours to decide, Fremont.” Hobbs touches his temples with his fingers when he says this. His eyes are closed. “I’m gonna work this my way. Remember that question you asked when you were stitching on me? Sometimes what we done to other people and what we have ahead of us comes together and mixes.”

“I don’t know if I can believe that,” Adams says. He’s standing on his whirled floor rug. He’s staring at its pattern to nowhere. Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. Even the hushed sounds of her name slice into him. “You do certain things and you can never take them back. Some things don’t take a repair. I used to know that. I lived by it like a rule.”

“You do live hard and think hard,” Hobbs says, sipping. “You got everybody’s respect on that. But there’s one thing you don’t seem to get no matter how many times it’s laid out for you. People don’t follow your plans. You don’t get to choose what returns and what don’t. You only get to decide how you’ll treat it when it comes.”

“You deserve some kind of reward,” Buren said. “Both of you. Except I can’t imagine what the reward should be. You live on practically nothing.”

“We’re not going for any kind of prize here,” Adams said. “I just want you to know we’re getting along good. C.D. wants you to come out and see how we’ve fixed up the place.” He could barely believe he’d made the phone call, particularly because he’d found what he expected to find. Buren was obstreperous and more than a little drunk.

“Va bene. I’ll answer the Bell.”

“Bring some good steaks when you do. I’ll cook.”

“Can you promise our guest won’t hog-tie me to model for his art project?” Orchestral music played behind Buren’s lubricated voice. Its sounds faded in and out like the sound of water being moved by a wheel.

Adams swallowed the extra saliva in his mouth. He’d lied about C.D.’s involvement. He was the one who wanted Buren to come to the ranch. The knowledge that Hobbs had seen Charlotte was suffocating him. He’d been outflanked, out-maneuvered. He wanted to give Hobbs as much reality as he could handle, and to do that he needed help from his brother. “I’m not protecting you from anything, which is the same way I believe you’ve always treated me. I’m inviting you to dinner.”

“At C.D.’s request?”

“Much as he ever makes one,” Adams fibbed again. He told Buren a little about the kitchen repairs and nothing about the cut on Hobbs’s arm.

“Well. Yes. Do you know the myth of Tantalus? Perhaps C.D. has—”

“Shut up, Buren. I know you’ve been into the whiskey deep, that’s what I know. Name a day you’ll come out here and take a look at the ranch you still partly own so I can get the hell off the phone.”

“Ghosts,” Buren said.

Adams waited for the rest of a pronouncement that didn’t come. After a delay feather-dusted by music, he gave Buren a nudge. “You might want to fix yourself something with caffeine.”

“The reason C.D. is asking for me,” Buren said. “It’s always about phantoms with him, ghosts alive and dead. We know how he’s coping with the dead ones. They’re having a gala in your tractor shed. But the living….”

“Just name a day, Buren. Or call me back when you’re able.”

“… afraid he’ll see her. Charlotte.”

Adams felt the bull’s-eye strike under the shield of his sternum. He knew all too well which one of them was most afraid of his ghosts. “He’s already seen her,” he blurted. “Before he showed up here.”

The first noise he could distinguish sounded like the thin screaking of a wire against glass. He couldn’t imagine how his brother was making that noise.

“Did you hear me, Buren?” Adams couldn’t contain his shout.

“Yes. But no. He didn’t see Charlotte.” Buren cleared his throat. “Listen to me—he did not see her. It’s all part of the disintegration.”

“I believe him.”

“And you want me to come out there to celebrate that fact? Take a good look at yourself, Fremont. You’re calling me for assistance. Again. You’re asking for support because you know C.D. is pathetic and unsalvageable and, just like last time, you can’t take it anymore.”

“That’s not true,” Adams said, trying to separate his anger from a sob. “I got a idea. We’ll fix you a nice ranch dinner with the steaks you bring. We’ll talk about a few easy things, and C.D. will see we’re nothing he can’t manage.”

“That’s not how it’ll go, and you know it.”

“A day, Buren. Just name a god damn day.”

But there was no answer except a kind of low hissing that seemed intended as laughter.

“Fine,” Adams said. “I’ll take that as a vote for Saturday. Make sure you’re here by six.”

Adams told Hobbs that Buren was driving out for a meal, nothing more. They used Saturday afternoon to clean the house. Hobbs polished the parlor windows as it began to snow, a feathery, unhurried snow that wasn’t likely to foul the roads. Adams stacked wood on the porch as tightly as he might stack stones for a wall, then he mopped the kitchen floor, which didn’t need to be mopped. The preparations didn’t keep him from being nervous. When they were finished, standing together on the bright, foreign-smelling vinyl in their wool socks, Hobbs asked to borrow a clean shirt. Adams took his best red chamois from a hanger in his closet and gave it to Hobbs, who slipped into his fleece-lined boots to go to the shed where he would bathe himself with the lukewarm water he stored in a thermos. The ranch yard was purple with shadows cast by the same low clouds that cast their silent seeds of snow. Hobbs’s trek left black prints in that snow, and he was followed by the dogs who trailed easily behind him, their noses lifted into the muffled quiet.

Buren was punctual, his Buick rocking and whirring its way to the lee side of the horse corral. It was where he always parked. Hobbs was sweeping the porch steps clear of snow for a second time, and he met Buren with a broom in his hands and a shy duck of his uncovered head. Buren wore a tweed jacket and a string tie yoked by a small oval of jade he’d received in appreciation for his years of government lawyering in Cheyenne. If he had boots or an overcoat, he left them in the Buick. Adams met Buren at the door and took from him the paper bags that held steaks and scotch whisky and what felt like an unnecessary bottle of wine. His brother needed a haircut, he could see that much. Rusty white hair wisped over Buren’s ears and the high collar of his jacket. But he looked sober enough in the eyes, and his handshake was professionally determined. Adams wondered what it took out of Buren for him to gain control over his sloppiness.

Adams had been frying mushrooms in a skillet, so he went back to it, telling Buren he was welcome to take his jacket off if he saw fit. The kitchen—indeed, the whole house—was as warm as an oven. Buren kept his jacket. He admired the new floor before he stepped onto it with his wet wingtip shoes. “This looks worthy of a wife,” he said, a statement of mock praise Adams managed to ignore.

Hobbs asked Buren if he wanted to sit in the parlor, and Buren said yes, so they left Adams to the cooking. Hobbs came back into the kitchen to pour Buren four fingers of scotch over ice. He fixed himself a glass of tap water. Adams unwrapped the thick steaks and seasoned them, trying to eavesdrop on the talk in the parlor. He hadn’t thought about what he’d do if the other two started a real conversation without him. Until the sight of the two drinking glasses—one for whisky, one for water—he hadn’t thought it might be a possibility.

“He cut it on the mower blade,” he shouted, scraping his spatula through the pool of butter in the skillet. “He says he don’t need a new tetanus.”

There was murmuring from the parlor followed by Buren’s legislative voice. “That’s what he told me, Fremont. Twice. Now we’re talking about a quarter-crack on the roan horse. I didn’t know you still had the roan horse. It’s a lively time you have out here.”

“Yeah,” Adams said. “You better believe it.”

He tried to stay out of it. He scooped the shrivel of mushrooms onto paper towels and wiped the skillet clean for the steaks. Then he heard laughter. Buren’s chuckle was as smooth and deep as their father’s. The noise that came from Hobbs was hee-hawing and split. Adams hoped they were making fun of him, trading insults about how bossy and frugal he was, but he knew something else was going on when he made out the name “Shug.” He strained his ears until he was certain Buren had asked Hobbs about women, baiting his way up that trail with a series of bad jokes. Buren would latch onto anything Hobbs had to say about a woman. His obnoxious, obsessive loneliness would see to that. And talk about Shug would lead to talk about Charlotte, Adams was sure of it. Buren was definitely looking for trouble.

Adams stepped into the parlor, his spatula held upright so that it dripped steak fat onto his sleeve. He stared at Buren, just stared at him, until he got a response. “C.D. tells me he’s joined the inveterate veterans bureaucracy in Rawlins. I asked if he was on a mission to convert you.”

“Sounds like I’m missing all the good stories,” Adams said. “I sure hate to do that. Could you hold them back until we eat?”

“He knows Sugar,” Hobbs said, his water glass resting carefully on both knees. “From his lawyer work. She’s told me how proud she is of the protesting she’s done in Cheyenne.”

Adams knew Buren had never heard of Sugar. He was just trying to ferret out information. Adams wanted to throw his brother out the door, but he badly needed him. That need—which he’d been sanding smooth since he got the idea to invite Buren to dinner—trussed itself tight across his shoulders. He wished to hell he’d been a good enough man to keep the friends he’d once had. Instead, he’d cut them out, ignored them, pretended he only needed himself to be a man. It was a bad fact that Buren was the only person he could turn to for help in this current mess.

They ate at the chrome-legged kitchen table that Hobbs had covered with a square of red-checked oilcloth. Buren went into lecture mode. He talked about his house in Baggs and how it suffered from widely spaced joists and rotting eaves. He talked about the time the three of them had herded sheep together in the mountains as replacements for Francisco who’d been taken in a hay truck to Fort Collins for an emergency operation on a hernia in his balls. It was Uncle Gene’s idea to send three boys to replace one invalid man. Buren had not been much help. He was impatient with the sheep and the dogs even though all he had to do was tend camp. The whole topic was designed to make Buren look bad, and it did. Hobbs laughed without caution when Buren recalled the morning he’d lost the entire string of pack animals in the fog.

“That damn mule went off the edge of the trail and took two others with her. Lucky for me my knots didn’t hold. It was the only time that son-of-a-bitch Basque ever touched me.” Buren smiled, but not with pleasure.

Adams remembered none of it as funny. He and C.D. had stood over the downed mule in a slick black gully of shale, one rifle between them, trying to decide how best to shoot her. Adams had done it, pressing the barrel hard between the mule’s frantic eyes. He made himself study the neat hole in her skull and smell the scorched smell of powder and mule hair before they left the carcass for the ravens and the bears. When Old Etch arrived in camp with the week’s supplies, he listened to what each boy had to say, then he beat Buren across the ass with his thick belt of Spanish leather until Buren’s insolent mouth was out of words. It was the last time Buren went into the mountains.

“Etch cared about mules,” Adams said. “Good ones were hard to replace.”

“That was his dream world, and he was welcome to it,” Buren said, his face heated pink by unexacted revenge. “He was just another of Gene’s pathetic projects.”

After his second drink and his T-bone steak, Buren told them about the book he was writing. He directed most of his commentary toward Hobbs who listened while Adams stacked dishes. The book was a narrative of the Laury family. It was based on a short, snobbish article Buren had published in a heritage-society magazine in the 1980s. He told them he needed to go to Scotland in order to finish the project. Maybe Ireland as well, if he could find the time. Adams thought about the throng of unfinished family stories he’d heard as a child, the agricultural mishaps and predictable scandals. These were what had attracted Buren’s gelid eye. Adams couldn’t make himself believe other people would be interested in those ancestral leftovers, but he hadn’t seen his poorly shaved brother this enthusiastic about a project since his failed attempt to resurrect the independent weekly newspaper in Baggs, an enterprise that had begun with exaggeration and ended with slander and a single, leaky mimeograph machine. Adams put a box of toothpicks on the wiped oilcloth and made fresh coffee as Buren regaled Hobbs with details of his archival research. Dull as shit, that’s what their talk had become. And dullness was the last visitor he’d expected.

Buren rose from the table after half a cup of coffee. The snow, which was accumulating in powdery drifts, gave him an excuse. Adams escorted his brother to the blanketed Buick, offering to sweep the car clean with the straw broom from the porch. As they faced each other under the humming disk of the yard light, which cast its planet rings over the barn and empty corrals, Adams realized that though they had looked nothing alike as boys, age was stamping them with more similarities than he cared to acknowledge. The bony height, the undermined proportions of their cheekbones, the Scots breadth of their hands—he recognized those features from his own bathroom mirror.

“I’ve never seen him better,” Buren said, his cinnamon-colored eyebrows beaded with moisture. “I’ll be honest—a trait I rarely favor even with family. I don’t believe in a cure for C.D.’s ailments. The state hospital is where he ought to be. Yet I can’t deny the efficacy of this.” He waved a hand over his jacketed shoulder, but Adams couldn’t tell if he was referring to the ranch or the dinner they’d just shared.

“You took a good poke at him, aiming the conversation toward women and Charlotte like that. That was a risk I don’t appreciate.”

“And you stepped right in like the protector you are, didn’t you? You’ve even made sure he’s had a chance to charm a new lady friend, that Sugar he talks about. I almost envy the man his fresh opportunities. But you don’t need to worry. I heard enough to convince myself that he hasn’t really spoken to Charlotte. I don’t ca—”

Adams interrupted. “I want some money.”

Buren slid his fingers under the flap of a tweed pocket, looking for cigarettes that weren’t there. He claimed he’d stopped smoking on President’s Day. “Don’t we all. Are you asking for my share of the property taxes? Early?”

“You need to listen to me,” Adams said. “I want serious money, like a loan without the bank slowdown and bullshit.”

“For what? You’ve already transformed the house into Ye Olde Comfort Home for Aged Gentlemen. I thought the plan was to put up your feet, admire the blank views.”

“Sheep,” Adams said, getting irritated. “I’ve given it a lot of thought since C.D. told me about seeing Charlotte. Maybe I was thinking about it even before then, I don’t know. But this ranch needs stock. I need stock. I got some help now. It’s time for me and the Trumpet Bell to get back into business.”

Buren shut his eyes for one extended moment. Adams found himself staring at the skin of his brother’s eyelids, which was slack and veined. Then Buren coughed into a phlegmy, knowing laugh, and he kept laughing for a long time as if the sound moving up and down his throat was a better drink than whisky. Adams cursed himself for rushing into his request. He should have gone slow and laid the groundwork. Instead, he’d given his brother a big chance to consider him ridiculous.

“Bless you for … for your thick-skinned innocence, Fremont. You maintain it well. I was sure you wanted me to orchestrate a way to pry C.D. out of here, but no, you have positive ideas. You still think you’re a landowner with chattel you can organize around you. You still think you’ve got some sort of family.” The cheerful scorn humiliated Adams who hadn’t realized until that very moment how much he really wanted the cash for a small herd of sheep and everything it might give him. “Money—the sinew of love as well as war. Is this supposed to salve my conscience about what happened with the dynamite and all the rest?”

Adams didn’t answer. His hands were laced tight around the polished wood of the broom handle.

“Our dear, departed uncle Gene Laury would cut your tendons like a fatted wether for such impulsive planning. Your fiscal track record is lousy. There’s not a bank in the Rockies that would lend you a thin dime.”

Adams tried not to look away.

“Money is the only thing I’ve ever had that you didn’t.” Buren dropped his voice until its pitch was slow and savage. The phlegm and humor were gone. “You got the ranch and the man-sized character that supposedly goes with it because most of the Stetson heads out here believe that one is absolutely linked to the other. You got the courage because courage is what our mother insisted it took for you to handle Korea, though I suspect you haven’t handled a thing about it. You got the love and devotion of our sister, and you treated her like scum, but who could blame you for that, she is an Adams, after all—a person a little too unfettered. You got the community respect, the halo of managing water rights, and you fiddled while Rome went dry because you never learned how to look beyond your own nose. Now, what you ought to do is step aside and let C.D.’s crooked nature run its course. But you can’t do it. You won’t. So, yes. I’m a lifelong student of tragedy. I’ll pay to see the final act.”

He kicked the snow off the toes of his wingtips as if it was the worst sort of dust. “Is ten thousand dollars enough for me to throw into the winter wind? It’s worth it to me—every penny—just to have you suggest that one of us believes in something beyond the purgatory of this place where we grew up.” Something like a chuckle came back into Buren’s mouth. “Grew up. That’s the wrong phrase for the Adams legacy. We have grown nothing. I suspect it’s a proper blessing that neither of us ever had children.”

He went straight to the barn. Buren, for all his manners and calculation, was a sack of pure shit. It took a while to clean up after a talk with Buren. He had asked his brother for one thing—it wasn’t like he’d gone to his knees in desperation—but Buren had still gotten his claws in. He had promised to transfer the money to Adams’s bank account even though, he said, they both knew money wasn’t really what Adams needed.

The horses were in their stalls, each covered with a quilted blanket. The sorrel was off her feet when Adams came in, but the old roan was awake and alert. He swung his whitened head over his stall door and waited, drawing long breaths through his nostrils. The roan’s eyes weren’t good, but he knew Adams as soon as he smelled him. The smell made him lift his head higher. Adams went into the tack room, moving through the dark by touch, and he took the heavy lid off the feed barrel and scooped up a measure of feed. He gave each horse a half scoop and stood between their narrow, straw-bedded stalls to listen to them eat. The sorrel stood up and downed the molasses-rinsed grain and cracked corn as fast as she could. She wasn’t an animal who savored much. The roan, who was older, and a descendant of fine Texas horses, ate slowly. The noises of his pleasure took some of the heat out of Adams’s frustrations. Horses were direct. He’d always liked that about them. The ones he’d loved the most, like the dun colt Jackson he’d trained with the dedication of a master sergeant after his return from Korea, were the ones that were the most predictable.

He could use some of that predictability right now.

Buren was wrong. There wasn’t a tin roof nailed over the top of his life. Hell yes, he was sixty-four years old and somewhat bad in the back and constantly plagued by arthritis in the feet he’d frozen in Korea. And there were other weaknesses, like how his belly was bulldogging the steak and scotch he’d had for dinner. Things didn’t go down easy like they once had. But whatever future he had was still going to be a future he chose—not one that C.D. Hobbs or Buren chose for him. The rest of his days weren’t going to be about sniffing the thin smoke of a purpose he’d given up somewhere along the line. He was going to put sheep back in his corrals. They might be merinos, the delicate boutique kind of animal he used to laugh about, but they would still be sheep. He understood their limits. He should never have given up on sheep in the first place. They were the only safe thing he had ever wanted.

He opened the barn door and slipped into the cocoon of snow and darkness. Hobbs was cleaning up after their meal. Adams could see his jerky, deliberate movements through the yellow square of the kitchen window. He looked like he was swatting flies. Hobbs’s dishwashing was generally all puddles and chipped plates, but it got the job done. He had enjoyed the dinner with Buren. He would, Adams knew, enjoy the news about the sheep even more. So why wasn’t he hustling into the house to share their good fortune? Why did he feel more comfortable in his silence and isolation? The machine shed, large and white-capped and dented, suddenly seemed more inviting.

He pried at the shed’s roll doors with trembling fingers. He’d come outside with Buren without putting on gloves or a coat, but he hadn’t felt the arrows of winter until now. The chill spiked into his kidneys. The shed did not feel deserted, even though he knew Hobbs was still in the house. The air he eased into his lungs was dense and strangely dry, the kind of air he associated with packed linens. Slowly, cautiously, he worked his way from the shed door to Hobbs’s workbench in nearly total darkness. He smelled the clumped grease and mud of his tractors. He tasted the sour hone of iron and steel. He moved in silence, believing the silence was in honor of Hobbs and the work he did in that place. Yet he didn’t hesitate to take the thing he wanted. He made his claim. She was in a lidless green coffee can, one he’d seen Hobbs wash and polish with a torn clump of bath towel. Charlotte in miniature—alone in a dry cistern of memory. He grasped her gently with his thumb and finger; she was the size of a three-inch bolt. The rim of the coffee can was decorated with small shreds of cloth he recognized all too well. He’d seen them on the plundered hills near Chosin. Flags for the dead. Prayers for the spirits of the lost. He swaddled the tiny Charlotte with his right hand. Hobbs might not even miss her. The workbench currently imprisoned a dozen more exactly like her.

The ranch yard was an estuary of snow. He churned across its quiet surface, bisecting the ribbons left by Buren’s spinning car tires. He saw no sign of Hobbs or the dogs. The house, which was warm with the scents of beef fat and detergent, seemed empty. He called for Hobbs once, then walked through the kitchen and parlor, flipping off light switches before he ascended the steep cordon of stairs, which creaked as they had creaked for sixty-four years. He went down the hall to the door of Charlotte’s room and opened it.

The room was cold because he kept it closed off to save money. A sliver of him expected to see Hobbs there, curled on the mattress with his dogs, though he couldn’t say why he expected that. Winter kept the room smelling fresh, the way the root cellar under the house smelled fresh when it was empty. He turned on the light. The space was still entirely Charlotte’s. The ivory-colored bureau. The clover-pink walls that matched the dust ruffle on the bed. The dozens of faded 4-H ribbons—reds and purples and greens and yellows—that hung on a clothesline strung above the bed. There was the Viennese music box that had belonged to their mother’s mother. And the family pictures tucked along the edges of a mirror frame. Rows of porcelain horses, their legs cracked from rough play, stood on a pair of painted shelves mounted on one wall. The sateen comforter on the bed looked cheap and faded beneath the illumination of the single lightbulb screwed into the ceiling, but it was all hers, maintained as if she’d died as a child.

The figurine had grown warm in the clutch of his hand. It wasn’t easy to see her against his skin: Hobbs’s princess in a coffee-can tower. His sister as amulet. He thought of her walking the slushy spring streets of Denver, having an entire life he knew nothing about among the brick warehouses and glass towers of the city. He thought about how she wasn’t a schoolteacher anymore, and he wondered what her eyes looked like. Her sculpted shape was subtle and smooth, as easy to palm as a worn river stone. He touched her head once with the tip of his left thumb. Then he laid her on top of the ivory-painted bureau. There. Hobbs was wrong. They hadn’t lost all of Charlotte. Part of her was here and would always be here. He had never let that part go.

He wouldn’t try to call her again. Calling would do no good. He’d leave her to a kind of peace in Denver. You’re afraid of love, of everything that matters. He turned off the light and went to the north window that faced Bell Butte. He parted the heavy curtains and breathed the unsettling of their dust. A fine gauze of falling snow obscured his view of the butte, but he could see the heavy black scrawl of his fence lines running away from the house. Demarcation. That’s what he’d always been about, and it had cost him. You hate everything that’s different from you. He didn’t. Not really. He had tried to accept things that were awkward and different into his life. But he was cautious, and he’d too often been slow to act. The result was a man as taut and insubstantial as his fences.

He left the curtains parted, allowing the phosphorus light of winter to probe his sister’s room, then he closed the door and crossed the hall to the cluttered, carpeted square where he slept when sleep could find him. Rain was there for the first time in weeks, stretched across the pad of yellow foam that was his bed. Hobbs must have carried him up the stairs. The dog raised his head blindly, his nose working to take in Adams’s scent before he lowered his jaw onto his forelegs and closed his eyes once again. Adams said a word for the dog, but he didn’t lean over to caress him. He waited, instead, for the sounds of the house to settle over them. How often had he stood in that chipped doorway waiting for his sister to hustle her ass out of the bathroom while they were both getting ready for school? Charlotte had taken plenty of his time in those days, hadn’t she? And plenty of his space. He could almost hear it now, the rustle of her importance, her haste, as she passed him in that narrow pioneer hall. Her presence came back to him in a sweet, rising cloud of girl soap and the twin intake of their breaths. They had slipped by each other often in those days, brother and sister. Quickly. Passing familiarly and without touch.

He slept later than he should have, grinding a long dream about Charlotte and her horse, Redrock, between his teeth. Redrock had finally died of old age in the early 1980s. But in his dream the horse had crippled himself while racing at full gallop under the prick of Charlotte’s spurs. Redrock jammed a foreleg into a gopher hole, broke it, and fell. But Charlotte did not fall with him, not in the dream. Charlotte rose upward on the pink carpet of her own dust, still spurring, as if she were a thick-husked seed in the wind.

Hobbs was not in the kitchen. There was no breakfast, no coffee, only a greasy plate of leftover mushrooms from the night before. Seven o’clock. Adams could not remember the last time he’d stayed in bed so late. And the sleep hadn’t come from whisky, either. It had come from an exhaustion beyond his bones.

He found Hobbs in the shed. But Hobbs wasn’t adding new members to his circus; he was hammering at some freshly sawn lengths of 2 × 4, instead. His boots were sprinkled with wood shavings. They resembled a pair of decorated rye cakes.

“What you’re making there looks like a piece of feeder gate.” Adams rubbed his eyes with the back of a hand. Sawdust always made him itchy.

“S-smart,” Hobbs said. “I thought it’s what y-you’d want. We need to spruce up them corrals.”

“We do, do we?” Adams felt a drill bit of apprehension bore into his ribs.

“Y-yes. For the sheep. The new ones. I was guessing you’d go for yearlings, but I wasn’t sure how many. Buren d-didn’t say nothing to me. I just….” Hobbs paused, the hammer dangling from his good hand, a pleased dimple to his smile. “I just knew how it should go, Fremont. You’ve always been a good boss, e-easy to figure, easy to read.”

“That so? You enjoy Buren’s visit that much?”

Hobbs hung the hammer from his belt. “Buren is like a single note of music to m-m-me. I don’t … I’d rather not explain how it works when it comes to Buren. He was nice last night. It’s nicer that you’re buying sheep.”

Adams rubbed at his eyes again. He wished he was able to keep himself prepared for Hobbs’s surprises. “And how can you tell that without talking to me or looking in a crystal ball, one or the other?”

Hobbs rubbed a fond thumb along the red welt of his recent injury. “It’s wrote like a book on your f-face, Fremont. And it’s pretty much made a kind of light all around you, just the thoughts you been h-having. It’s a thing I learned to see, th-that kind of light.”

“Jesus.” Adams held back an onrushing sneeze. “You got me, C.D. You’re way ahead of me again. You’re always ahead of me.” He told himself that Hobbs’s strangeness was only as strange as he allowed it be. “I reckon I better retire and give up right now.”

“N-no,” Hobbs said, pulling a handful of nails from somewhere inside his jeans. “That can’t be said about you on good days or bad, Fremont. It’s what there is to like about you. You’re one who never gives up.”

The sheep arrived in a welter of bleating and mud, whether they were ready for them or not. The driver of the tri-level stayed long enough to have a cigarette while Adams studied the invoices. Fifty ewes: all registered, all puny. Their shorn flanks heaved above their frail black legs, and their slit eyes—which looked goaty to Adams—were dull with exhaustion. The bucks, which he and Hobbs chuted into the horse pen for close inspection, were worse. There were only two of them. The ewes had already been bred, they didn’t even need the bucks, but here they were fat and slack and awkward in their long, untended bodies. The bucks’ curled horns were pitted from poor nutrition. “I hate to give them up, but my youngest son’s gone for the computers in Seattle.” That’s what the east Oregon farmer had said. He had made Adams sit through the story of his family’s rise and fall in the highlands above the Owyhee River. It was a good story, inflated by improbable luck and honest partnerships that never disappointed. Adams was familiar with it, chapter and verse. It was the ballad a man had to sing when he was left with nothing but overgrazed land and dogs.

Adams told the farmer he’d gotten moldy in retirement and wanted the company of some breeding stock. When the farmer responded with a diatribe against hippies and organic apple orchards in a voice that whistled through its consonants, Adams knew the farmer believed he had the kind of money and leisure time the farmer had only dreamed about. He tried, and failed, to cut off the farmer as the man recited, by tag number, exactly how each ewe liked to be handled before she dropped her lambs. Hearing the farmer evaporate his ranching history into a loose skein of words made Adams’s skin pucker.

The ewes were mostly quiet until Hobbs drove the tractor and a wagon filled with seed cake into the front field. Adams closed the gate behind Hobbs and hefted an axe onto his shoulder. As he trailed the tractor, the stunned ewes began to rally and trail it, too. At first, they moved alone or in small groups linked jaw to flank to jaw. They didn’t stop to nibble at the clumps of bunchgrass as the spring sun spread like water across their backs. They stumbled directly toward the feed troughs, the one destination they recognized. A few plaintive bleats gathered and harmonized above the shallow contours of the field, and Adams listened to the sound blend with the local uproar of his magpies. He saw the more vigorous ewes butt the submissive ones aside as Hobbs began to shovel feed. While Adams watched, a luscious, unreined panic lunged through him. There was so much for them to do: feed, doctor, tag, brand, record weights and births. He had spent Buren’s money as lavishly as a first-time bride. And now he had the chance to know the animals again. Which were boss and which were rogue and which too stupid to make good decisions on the open range. It felt so right, so deeply familiar. A new purpose was within his grasp, and its momentum came from the loud, begging, needful cries of these sheep. Those cries had once stapled his days to his nights as tightly as a saddle tree was stapled to its leathers.

He made his way to the troughs, loosening the scarf he’d wrapped around his throat and feeling his fingers warm to a sweat inside his gloves. Long, layered terraces of cloud marbled the field with shadows that swirled across the banks of Muddy Creek. He saw Rain circle a portion of the herd, the black mask of the dog’s face raised as he, too, memorized the possibilities before him. The small band of dark-legged ewes flowed around the feed wagon as balanced and heedless as a flood. Their underfed shanks were still blotched with the purple paint of their Owyhee River brands. The day those brands were replaced with the of the Trumpet Bell would be a fine day.

“They don’t look like m-much,” Hobbs said. He was smiling. He had been a smiler ever since they’d first talked about the sheep.

“They never do,” Adams said. “Cows make a man feel richer.”

Hobbs thrust his shovel into the dusty bank of seed cake and hauled. “Cows make their own kind of trouble. I’m glad you and Buren didn’t go for cows.”

“Should I ask what would’ve happened if we had?” Adams gripped the axe so he could lay into the thick ice that covered the watering trough.

“N-no lambs,” Hobbs said. “Calves ain’t the same, and I’m not ready to take you through a spring season without lambs.”

Adams laughed. Then he thought about what Hobbs had really said. “You think this wormy bunch can do the trick?”

He heard Hobbs and his shovel pause, so he raised the axe and broke through the ice in the trough with one swing. The blow soaked his arms and chest with water. After he pulled off his gloves, he began to fish sour chunks of ice from the trough and throw them to the ground.

“We’ll l-lose a few,” Hobbs said, finally, and Adams knew he was assessing the ewes as he stood on the wagon, looking at their eyes and bellies. He was good at that. He always had been. “Enough’ll make it. For what we want.”

“And what’s that?” Adams asked, his hips and back hot from working. He’d been making a list in his head of all the familiar things he and Hobbs would get to do once the sheep were fed. “I know you like good animals, but what, exactly, do you think we want? Since you’re talking about it.”

Hobbs peered down at him, then up into the sky that seemed too huge for the one small sun it held. He pushed his orange hunting cap off his sweat-slick head. They hadn’t spoken seriously about anything but sheep since Buren’s visit. “You remember that fellow B-big Mike from up around Billings, used to herd some for your uncle Gene?”

Adams thought he could conjure up an attitude, if not a face, to go with that name. The Trumpet Bell had seen dozens of men come and go. Big Mike, as he recalled, had been some sort of distant cousin to Old Etchepare. “I believe so. A little.”

“Big Mike weren’t no good with sheep, or horses n-neither, but he did tell me this story about a wolf that hunted this territory long ago. I believe he w-wanted to scare me. He thought I was the kind who could be scared.”

Adams plunged both hands into the slushy water of the trough. He scooped ice onto the ground as noisily as he could. Hobbs hadn’t tried to tell him a story of this kind in quite a while. The warning buzz in his head suggested he should pay attention to the details of this one.

“There was this wolf, see, a big lone male that come down from Montana before the ranchers were all in here. He ate all the b-buffalo he could get. He ate all the elk. It got so the Crow people and the Sioux was afraid of him and glad when he left their country. Big Mike said it was a giant wolf and bright as silver by the time it got to the Ferris Mountains because of all the miners it had swallowed for its meals. That wolf glowed with the glow of their riches. I don’t remember all the parts of how he told it. Big Mike was mean and unfriendly in his speaking, s-so if you don’t remember him, I’m glad you don’t. The ending had to do with a Indian girl who lived along a deep stretch of the Platte River. She somehow fooled that wolf into drowning himself in that water, she saved herself with some kind of special trick, and that’s why they say the Platte Canyon runs so pretty and silver in the spring.”

Adams wagged his head, wanting Hobbs to see he was amused. “I’m glad to say those damn dogs the government plans to restock in Yellowstone Park will never be allowed to get down this far again. Wolves won’t bother us. They are one thing us hard-working sheep men don’t have to worry about.”

“Th-that’s not why I’m saying what I’m saying, Fremont.”

Adams glanced upward again. Some of the bolder ewes were butting at his knees now, thirsty for a drink. There were sheep scratching their backs against the wagon axles and tires. He could smell the dispensing scent of their long, desperate journey from Oregon, the piss and shit of animals that have been trapped. “Then why’d you bring it up?”

“I don’t know for sure. They just come out of my mouth sometimes, the s-stories. They make these shapes in my m-mind. You’re the man who likes a goal he can see and touch.”

Adams shook his head. A strange, hard pressure in his skull made it seem as though his ears were about to pop. “What’s that mean? That mean you got a prediction, some kind of sensation, about a big wolf bearing down on us now that we got something to protect?”

“N-no,” said Hobbs, closing his eyes. “It ain’t that complicated. It’s not about seeing one danger, or even two. Danger’s always there. Y-you can’t get rid of it. She says it’s about living with what makes you happy until the day you die.”

Adams didn’t have to ask who she was. He felt a clutching at his spine, as if distant fingers were digging toward his heart. “Jesus, C.D. I don’t know how you manage to make all these connections, but you do. Is it all right if we don’t talk about my sister? I can’t do Charlotte right now, I really can’t. This is a big day for me—for us. I’d rather talk about wolves and these brand-new merinos. I might still have a chance to get things right with them.”

Hobbs drove his shovel into the load of seed cake. He lifted a bladeful and added it to the trough, careful not to dump it on the desperate heads of the ewes. “See, that’s your story, Fremont. And you tell it p-pretty good. I like it. These merino gals like it. You got c-confidence. The confidence has come back. You don’t give away no sense of how there might some day be a finish to things. Y-you don’t go for the end. That’s what you leave for everybody else, ain’t it? H-how it all ends.”

“You keep him away from me, that’s what you need to do. Right now.”

Adams unclamped his teeth, thinking that might improve his hearing. His wristwatch said it was one in the morning. The television was a cold beacon beyond his feet. He’d fallen asleep in his recliner, or that’s what the magazine on his lap seemed to indicate. He was holding the receiver of the phone to his ear, though he didn’t remember picking it up.

“He’s been up here twice this week, and friends of mine saw him at the bar in Sinclair. Maybe you don’t know that. Maybe you think it’s not your beeswax.” The voice was female, fast and toothy. He didn’t … he couldn’t think who it might be. He remembered eating calf liver and onions for dinner. He could taste those on his breath. And there had been some sort of dream, a physical pursuit that was hungry and troubling. He hadn’t slept well since he’d gotten the merinos. Grogginess still had him nailed flat.

“Wake up,” the voice shrieked. “I ain’t kidding. He’s following me all over the place and it’s getting outta hand. There’s them’ll do something if you won’t. It don’t matter how brave he thinks he is. How he thinks there’s something to hisself when he drinks.”

Hobbs? Was she talking … could it be Sugar? Was it Sugar on the phone? He tried to unkink his neck to see if the Ford truck was in the yard, but he was laid out stiff in the recliner, couldn’t see a damn thing from there.

“He…. Is this … jail?” It was all he could put together on short notice. The woman and her voice were way ahead of him.

“No, this ain’t no jail or snitch. This is a Good God Damn Citizen telling you somebody you should be taking care of is off the rails.” She paused to suck in some breath, and Adams decided she was no drunker than he was. She didn’t breathe like a drunk. “Tell him what I said. Tell him to leave me the hell alone.” And she hung up.

He held onto the phone long after he needed to. It kept talking at him—errrrr, errrrr, errrrr. He rubbed his face and stared at the haft of moonlight that stood guard between the imperfectly closed window curtains and tried to assemble what he knew. It was April. Close to lambing time. There were inoculations to give. Bills to pay. He’d sent Hobbs to the bank in Rawlins that afternoon, but Hobbs had been back by sundown. They’d been together every day since the sheep arrived, utterly busy except at night, and who knew how either of them made it through one of those.

Could Hobbs be tomcatting at night?

Tell him…. Tell him. … This was a new responsibility. It had been decades since he’d had to protect C.D. Hobbs from anybody outside his own family. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say, how something like this got addressed. But address it he would. He rubbed the distant mask of his face again, then studied the dissolved edges of the room and all its furniture. He knew what the room would tell him. The room would tell him what it had told him before: he had to take care of C.D. Hobbs. Without Hobbs, this was it right here, all there ever was day after day after day—a box and him inside it.

He fed the horses well before dawn, then turned them out into the hoof-chewed paddock that smelled of frost and stone. He could just make out the shape of Bell Butte as it rose above the roofline of the house. It looked like a black-handled reef awash in the light of the fading stars. He made himself go into the machine shed, and he made himself knock on Hobbs’s door. There was no answer. When he pushed open the door, the dogs Zeke and Dan unfurled themselves from the camp bed and came to nudge at his boots. There was no sign of Hobbs, or Rain, although the Mexican blanket on the bed had been carefully folded across the foot of Hobbs’s sleeping bag. The harder part came when he discovered that the old flatbed International that had once been their ditching truck was no longer parked on the east side of the barn.

So, that was it. Hobbs had gone off into the night after Sugar and her friends, whether he was welcome or not. The knowledge of Hobbs’s capering and drinking dried itself like rawhide around his gullet and jaw.

He wasn’t given much time to suffer in his worries. He took his shepherd’s crook and the two ignorant dogs and moved into the cold cave of the day, hoping that motion, a walk to survey his modest holdings, would ease his thoughts. The pasture that held the merinos was still white with a few crusts of snow, but it didn’t take him long to see the dead ewe for what she was. Her body was pressed against a stretch of woven-wire fence. Her belly was bloated, and her tongue was thick and gray between her lips. Her hooves had cut sharp crescents in the ground as they spasmed. There was no blood, so Adams knew she hadn’t been taken down by coyotes. It was likely she’d gone septic from a dead lamb. Her loss was unfortunate, but not unusual. That was how he was thinking before he found the second one.

She was on a slope east of the feed troughs. She wasn’t bloated. Instead, she appeared desiccated, her hide furrowed with signs of dehydration. Birds had eaten at her upward facing eye while she was still alive, leaving ants a hole into the ripe skull beneath. Adams glanced overhead for the soaring scrap of a raven, then back at a carcass the dogs wouldn’t even sniff. The remaining ewes seemed unperturbed. They migrated into the golden bays of sunlight that began to pool across his mottled field, grazing with their usual single-minded efficiency. Adams put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. When he had both dogs at his feet, he had to keep himself from etching the hour and the date in his calamitous memory. For more than two weeks, he and Hobbs had had a ranch operation that was right and lucky. He was not ready to mark this moment as the beginning of its inevitable demise. He just wasn’t.

He cast the dogs in wide, sweeping arcs and limped his way to the gate that led toward the corrals. He pressed his feet hard against the rolls of flannel he used to fill out the ends of his boots where he no longer had toes. He would need all of his quickness, all of his balance, to pen the herd on his own. But he could do it. He had done it before many, many times, even in storms that left him deaf and blind. As the ewes began to bellow and bunch and turn in response to the prodding of the dogs, he unlatched the field gate and let it swing wide. He gripped his crook in both hands. The morning wind swept toward him, and into him, from the mallow crest of Powder Rim, and he let the wind fill him like a sail. He closed his eyes so hard he could feel his pulse thrum against their lids. He could do it again, he could, he could. He needed no soul other than his own, no friend, no partner, to work this perfect thing.

But the dogs had been unevenly trained, and the merinos didn’t yet know the layout of his ranch. They came at the gate like they didn’t see it. Zeke moved off the heels of a lagging ewe and thrust himself in front of her, nipping at her tender chin. This corked the movement of the herd, so Adams waded into the confusion with his crook held high. He shouted encouragement, he cajoled, he spooked Zeke back into position with a swing of his crook, and it all worked well enough until he tried to high-step free of the chaos. He’d just hooked the haunch of a blundering ewe from behind when he fell. And though she wasn’t big enough to drag him, she was strong enough, and frightened enough, to yank hard on his shoulder. The tear went through his right side like the tearing of fine cloth. The pain came right after.

He lay on the ground as his livestock bucked and farted its way past his aching head. The dogs were good enough to finish the job he had started; they pressed all forty-eight remaining ewes into the corral. He got to his feet, careful to pin his arm against his side as if it were a broken wing. He latched the gate with his left hand. In better days, younger days, he would have been ready to joke about his clumsiness, if not his frailty. He’d been hurt plenty of times. But he could find no joke in his spinning mind. A real rancher never minded when his stock got the better of him—not as long as it only happened once in a while. All right, he told himself, you are a real rancher. This is not for pretend. Nothing that really matters has gotten the jump on you.

He hung onto the swaying gate for a moment, catching his breath. He watched the black blade of a scavenging raven slice across the carnation petals of a high-flying cloud. It was headed for his dead ewes, damn bird. It hadn’t been slowed down or undermined by its instincts. It knew what job it was supposed to do. And so did he.

Once he’d swallowed some of his embarrassment, Adams examined the gathered herd and decided that some of his merinos looked good and some appeared as dazed and starved as the day they had shipped in. The fine spice-colored dust of the corrals clumped at their tear ducts and nostrils, making them all seem weepy, but he tried to make distinctions. He tried to think through the most pressing problem he had—the death of the ewes. Was there poisonweed in the pasture or some kind of fungus in the seed cake? Had the sheep carried in a bug from Oregon? He had so many questions—and no one to ask them to. Where the hell was Hobbs? Why would he stay away in the morning? He spent a short, throbbing moment appraising the two bucks that had roused themselves in response to the arrival of the ewes. Both had forage-green slobber matted on their muzzles and chests, and their blatting calls wavered with uncertainty. What ugly luxuries they were. They had no good reason to be in the world.

Hoping the situation might be one that had a simple solution, Adams gimped his way into the dry vacancy of the machine shed.

“C.D.,” he shouted. “I god damn need you, you know. I need you right now.” His voice roused only the sparrows that nested in the building’s eaves. They fled from his echoing voice like a handful of hurled stones.

The veterinarian was new to Baggs, one in a long line of doctors who served the area on rotation and never stayed for long. But she knew her sheep, and she was smart enough not to make promises. She took samples from the two bodies Adams had kicked onto the front loader of the big tractor and left elevated, like a raised dish of meat, in the ranch yard. She helped the injured Adams chute a pair of healthy-looking ewes so she could collect their blood and urine. She didn’t seem convinced the deaths were caused by a single ailment, some kind of epidemic barreling down on him out of nowhere.

“I’ve read….” The new vet paused, dampening her student impulse. “A Colorado fellow told me it’s hard for some breeds to adapt to the harsh conditions up here. Have you raised merinos for long?”

“Sixty-nine years,” he blurted. Then he had to correct himself and repeat the brief history of the Trumpet Bell he’d given her when she arrived. “It’s my first shot at merinos, I admit that. I can’t see what Colorado has to do with anything.” He knew he sounded like a maidenish old man who hadn’t eaten breakfast and who’d just had his shoulder torn loose, but god damn it, he respected the fact this child vet had gone to school way over at Iowa State, she ought to respect him.

Hobbs finally showed up behind the wheel of the backfiring International truck just before the vet departed. He was wearing a brand-new hat and shirt. He had another necklace around his neck. This one looked like it had started its life as a bicycle chain. The vet went over her assessment again, for Hobbs’s benefit—what they should watch for and how some culling, followed by injections of medicine they could get from her office might be their best option. Hobbs didn’t ask any questions. He suspended his wide mouth in an open, fluted shape while the doctor spoke. Adams stared at Hobbs, trying to smell liquor on him or at least the sweat of late-night dancing and its aftermaths, but he couldn’t detect what he wanted to detect—hints of guilt or ruin. Hobbs also didn’t seem particularly upset about the dead ewes. He was polite to the vet, cautious with Adams, but he appeared oddly calm.

“She’s nice,” Hobbs said as they watched the vet’s customized Dodge fishtail onto the highway.

“For what she’s selling, sure. Nice and smart and expensive as all get out. How’s the ditch truck run?” It was Adams’s way of asking Hobbs where the hell he had been all night. He did it with a shaved voice.

“Stops every few miles. Thirsty as a c-camel for water. Oil, too.” Hobbs squatted to look at the two lolling bucks through the warped slats of the horse pen.

“This herd doesn’t have to be a job for both of us,” Adams said, “in case you’ve got more important things to do.”

Hobbs answered with words as flat as the ground they stood on. “Nothing’s more important.”

“Then why is the telephone waking me up at night, filling my ears with news of your adventures? I can see how the partying might be fun for you, but I thought we’d agreed on something here. We got a business to run.”

“We have b-business,” Hobbs muttered, squinting at the dirty, placid bucks. “We have business. We have business.”

Adams felt the blood rush to his face. “Could you at least stay home at night? I don’t want somebody to hurt … I worry that … Jesus, I just want to say that I could use your help and attention with this sick bunch of ewes.”

Hobbs removed the new, unhandled straw hat from his head. His eyes were like split shot. “You don’t look so good this morning, F-fremont. You’re hearing all this news as bad. Has anybody ever t-told you that you see too many things as s-sick or bad? These sheep ain’t sick. I wouldn’t let them bring you any kind of disease.”

“What are you—” Adams stopped and held his breath hot behind his teeth. Listening to this version of Hobbs talk was like listening to somebody read from a torn and plundered book. Too many pages were missing. Too much failed to make sense.

“The t-t-telephone’s not about me,” Hobbs continued. “I don’t know what you mean by that. Where I go is not a place that’s got t-telephones. I can’t g-go very fast in that truck, but there’s a lot to see when I get up toward the sky. G-galaxies, p-planets, all that sort of thing. Th-there’s lots of nice parts in the sky a person can see if he knows how to ask.”

“Would you please—” But Adams couldn’t continue the scolding. Hobbs was obviously lying to him. He’d been gone the same time somebody was stalking Sugar. There had to be a connection. And the way he talked. Planets? Galaxies? Christ almighty, maybe there was just no hope. Maybe insanity was as inevitable as the arrival of summer. Adams dropped his eyes. He didn’t want Hobbs to see the belief that was fracturing inside him.

“Don’t w-worry, Fremont.” Hobbs stood, serenading Adams with his hingeless smile. “You look so worried. It’ll happen like it h-has to happen. You’re running sheep like you love to do, and you’re mad I wasn’t here. Y-you’re telling me you need more help. All right. I c-can fix that. I got a idea for that.”

Hobbs sauntered long-legged into the machine shed and soon sauntered out again. He held a black barrel lid in front of himself like a tray, and he began to circle the sheep corrals, pausing every few feet to touch the low wooden fences with his fingers. The sullen ewes barely reacted to his presence, but the young dogs yipped and whined and leaped at Hobbs’s flashing hands. He progressed deliberately, like a man laying out survey stakes. Adams knew what it all meant even before Hobbs ducked back into the machine shed to resupply. Hobbs was bringing his little friends out to play. He was setting them up as guards around their indefensible world.

Adams moved closer to the fence and grabbed one of the figures. It was a marine, barefoot, unarmed, distinguished by a face that was all eyes. It was all he could do not to hurl the figure to the ground. Oh, he’d been a damn fool to believe in normal deeds like tractor repair and kitchen floors and merinos. He dug the rough points of his fingernails into his callused palms. Normal never won out at the Trumpet Bell. There was no such thing as an undisturbed, healing life on his ranch—and he was no healer. There was truly nothing left of his home place except its name and its ability to skin men out like pelts.

Hobbs gamboled his way up the loading chute, the young dogs on his heels. Rain, meanwhile, curled himself into a dark comma at Adams’s feet. Adams watched Hobbs drive one of his larger figurines into the soft wood of the chute with the heel of his hand as if he were driving a nail. He felt each blow in the floor of his belly. He watched Hobbs hang what looked like a strand of shiny beads around the figurine’s tiny neck. “You don’t got to w-worry, Fremont. We all need a little more help from t-time to time.” Hobbs plucked two more shapes from his barrel lid and slipped them into his shirt pocket as a pair. Adams tried to see who made up the pair: himself and Hobbs, Charlotte and Hobbs, Devlin and Hobbs. Each possibility riddled him with a different brand of guilt. He set the silvery, barefoot marine back on its fence post, its pained eyes aimed toward the setting sun. Hobbs balanced himself on the front edge of the loading chute and began to flap his old-man arms as if they were feathered wings. “It’s good, ain’t it, Fremont? Th-this is how it gathers. Things won’t be like they used to be. This is all the h-h-help we’ll ever need.”

“Been awhile,” the voice said. “I don’t get down there no more. It don’t feel right to come even when I miss it like a missing leg.”

“Steve?” he asked. “Steve Barnheisel?” Adams hadn’t wanted to answer the phone. He had let it ring itself out twice because Hobbs was gone again, had been gone since he’d cleared off his workbench, so Adams believed the phone could only bring him bad news. Plus, his shoulder hurt like hell whenever he reached for anything. Then he’d gotten mad at himself for being afraid of what the phone might tell him. Jesus god, he was tougher than that, hurt shoulder or no hurt shoulder. He’d lost another ewe that afternoon and had burned her where she died, watching her smoke like an untended skillet. His hands still smelled of gasoline. If Hobbs was already on his way to cuckoo, what did he have to be afraid of?

“Yeah, it’s me, the old fart who quit on you. Right now I’m living in a house the size of a wool sack. Mexicans to the right of me, Mexicans to the left of me, there’s a lot of Mexicans in Casper even when it’s winter. How you doing, Fremont?”

“I’m doing.” He produced words that rang with the conviction he knew Steve Barnheisel, neighbor and former hand, expected.

“Don’t know if you’ve heard, I guess you haven’t or you’d be saying something about it, but Buren is in the hospital up here. He wanted me to let you know.”

Adams stopped breathing.

“Buren,” Steve repeated. “Your brother? He told me to call.”

Adams tried to loosen the tentacles clenched around his spine. “Did he wreck his car?”

“No. You really hadn’t heard, have you? I guess it helps that my granddaughter nurses at the medical center, so I’m in that loop. Sammi, she’s Trina’s girl. Nice kid. It weren’t a car accident. He come into the emergency yesterday morning, after midnight. Sammi was on a twelve-hour shift. Police brought Buren in, she says, and he was smashed up bad. He had enough eyesight to read Sammi’s name tag, I don’t know how that happened but it did. Sammi’s got my name just like Trina does because Trina and her boyfriend never managed to get married. Buren made a joke about it, her name—this was when he was still talking—and Sammi put two and two together. So I went up there this morning to see what I could do, we’ve known each other for so long. Buren wrote your name down on a pad since he can’t—Well, hell, he’s beat bad. Somebody took it to him.”

“How bad?” He made himself say it, thinking all the time about the bones of the burned ewe that lay in a scorched halo on the open page of his field.

“He’s gonna make it. I shoulda said that first. I’m not used to being the … talking like this isn’t what I know how to do. He’s not dying, nothing like that. But he’s got the jaws wired, bruises all over his face. Lot a stitches. I think Sammi said one of his knees is about smashed to pudding. In a parking lot near the Safeway is where they found him, and there’d been drinking. They found broke bottles on the pavement. What he writes on paper to the police makes it sound like he don’t know what happened to him, but there’s been a lawyer to his room, more than one as a matter of fact. Lawyers he knows, I guess. And Sammi says the talk is it was over a woman. I’m not sure I get that. I remember you being a cat for women, not Buren, but there’s plenty I don’t know, I suppose. He was staying at the Parkway. His car’s still there.”

“I better make the trip.”

Steve Barnheisel made a sluggish cluck with his tongue. “I don’t know what to tell you about that, Fremont. A visit’s not what he asked for.”

Adams waited. He’d stretched the black curlicue of the phone cord as far as it would stretch. He paced his way almost into the kitchen, making the cord twirl from its own tension.

“He wanted to write a message. You know how Buren is, can’t make nothing easy. At first I couldn’t read half his words. Sammi says he’s maybe on more painkillers than he thinks. I kept after it, though. It’s like he needs you to finish some list for him. He kept writing your name, then what looks like the word sugar or S-U-G or something. When I said those letters out loud to him, he nodded straight up and down, like that was it. All you needed to know.”

“Christ.”

“I’ll tell him I talked to you, Fremont. And I got a phone number for his hospital room. Then I might just step back on this one, though I hope I’ll get to see you if you come up here. That Buren—” Adams could almost smell the rancid truth of Steve’s sigh. “That brother of yours, he is not easy to be around.”

He thought about it for a long time, longer than it deserved maybe, but the thinking didn’t come easy. It was like climbing over wet scree in the rain—you could only get where you were going with a lot of clawing and shifting and sliding. He went out onto the porch where he could see the unchangeable flare of the evening sun—golden, smeared, effortless. Then he went back inside and took the shotgun off the rack and loaded it with slugs he kept in a box on the windowsill in the mudroom. His rifle was gone, another connection he’d failed to make, but the shotgun would do. He could handle it with one hand. He slipped his right elbow into the sling he’d made from a saddle strap and crossed the ranch yard with a simple, sealed-off urgency he hadn’t felt in a long time.

Jesus, he’d been stupid, and it was the stupid who were led astray. Like idiot lambs. He had never come close to guessing that it was his lonely son-of-a-bitch brother Buren who was bothering Sugar. Buren must have trailed her to Casper and Sinclair, and maybe other places too, trying to buy her drinks like it was his right to pursue her and upstage C.D. Hobbs whenever he felt like it. It hadn’t quite gotten him killed, but it had gotten him busted up enough for police photos and trials and lawsuits, which were precisely the kinds of fun houses Buren understood. Jesus. It was just like his sick, arrogant brother to get exactly what he wanted. He was half dead, and probably more alive than he’d been in years. Now he would have a righteous goal once again. Adams knew Buren would harass Sugar or whoever had done her fighting for her until he had their very last penny and their dreams.

He got to the horse pen and let himself in through the high-swinging pole gate. He shot the first buck where it lay, right in the head, shattering the upper portion of its goaty skull. The second one ran from him. It hit the far end of the pen and tried to climb the slats with its soft, forked hooves. When that failed, the buck began to butt the fence with its thick brow, never turning to look back at the danger, never ceasing its instinctive, absurd movement. Adams watched the humping drive of its shaggy ass, thinking to himself that some things in the world just had to be stopped and ended, then he moved to his left, aimed, and shot the buck behind the shoulder. The shot slapped through rib and meat and the warm, pressured air of the buck’s lungs, and the animal was down and finished before the sounds of its death had run their scale. Adams left the bodies where they lay. It was still too cold for flies. And if he shut the gate, which he did, there would be no way in for coyotes.

He returned to the house, made coffee but didn’t drink it, cleaned the shotgun with oil and a rag until the throb in his shoulder made his eyes burn. He piled his wood box with more kindling than he would use in a week. He filled several buckets with curled magazines and phone books that he swore he’d drive to the county dump. But nothing brought relief. Even when he realized he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, he began to tear down, unhook, and dismantle all the tawdry belongings that he considered his. The parlor floor became tiled with faded, unshelved books, and his father’s picture of the Grand Tetons lay bent and flapping behind the cabbage-rose settee. The woodstove roared with the conflagration of burning files and correspondence. When the room looked and felt as abandoned as he did, he put on a coat and hat and gloves and went outside to keep vigil on his porch. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, what he thought was going to arrive and finish him off for good, but he knew what was leaving him. He could see it lifting and whirling into the sky above his house. The small shreds of his life rose red through a single chimney. They blew across his scattered lands on a slack prairie wind, cooling and crumbling and falling into untraceable smudges of nothing.

He didn’t have long to wait. When it was light enough for the hungriest of the magpies to glide into his ranch yard from its cottonwood perch along Muddy Creek, he forced himself to feed the horses and the remaining sheep. He fueled that hapless chore with mutterings of self-hatred and slugs of scotch straight from the bottle. He was inhaling a harsh breakfast of nicotine, trying to decide whether he should murder the handsome bird that had begun to peck at the bodies of the slaughtered bucks, when he heard the distant bark of a dog. It was Rain, he was sure of it. Rain was calling to him from somewhere on the butte.

He whistled for the dog, heard nothing more, then staggered into the house for his binoculars. The sun was a fist of white thorns to the east. He squared himself against the cold clay of the yard and glassed the dawn-tipped ridges of the Trumpet Bell. Before long, the sun winked at him from the fenders of the old International truck. The truck was on a trail at the base of Bell Butte, not a mile from the house. It looked like it had gotten high-centered on some stumps of sagebrush. He did not see Hobbs, but he did spot Rain looking dead-whipped near the rear of the truck. There was also a glint of flat light from the crown of the butte. Maybe he was being glassed, too. He wondered when Hobbs had gotten back to the ranch. Then he wondered whether Hobbs and the dog had ever left at all.

He started after them with the small John Deere, but he left the tractor at the fence line of the alfalfa meadow. If he needed to tow the truck, he could come back for the John Deere. It seemed easier, somehow—though slower—to hoof it straight across the prairie and up the hill. He pulled down the flaps of his hunting cap and checked his pockets for keys and coins he wouldn’t need. He had already made up his mind to carry the shotgun.

Zeke and Dan accompanied him in a squall of lunges and casts. They preferred him when they believed he had work to do. They fell away, nevertheless, as he picked a difficult route through the greasewood and wind-glossed snow. To them, loyalty remained a matter of distance.

The shadows he traversed clawed long and blue toward the west. The rasp of his movements reminded him, as he didn’t need to be reminded, of the doomed marine retreat from Chosin Reservoir. Fewer than two thousand men had made it out of Chosin alive, and he was one of them, and for what? For what? Every fourth or fifth step inspired phantom pain from his missing toes. His shoulder ached like a bad tooth. When he crossed the barren wheel ruts of the Overland Trail, a stretch of stagecoach-carved mud that the federal government had been pestering him to preserve, he paused to look for the International. He couldn’t see it. He was on the low point of his land, a washed-out road that people who had never lived outside a city wanted him to save. No scars on the scars of history—that was their reasoning. Well, to hell with them. History was nothing but scars. He was living proof of that.

He did not have to turn around to know how he felt about everything that was behind him. The ranch, perhaps, was salvageable. With enough money and optimism, they usually were. But he was not. He could hear the bleats of his vestigial sheep—thoughtless and eager—and he knew they had been a bad idea. Too sentimental. Too impractical. The sheep were the result of a body that kept waking up alive and its need—or, hell, call it a desire—to manage animals the way he might have managed all the better extensions of himself.

He passed the gray kilter of an old docking pen. He crossed the collapsed bowel of Bell Butte ditch. His feet, as always, finally gave way to the dead Korean cold.

Hobbs wasn’t at the truck. Adams called out his name and got nothing, not even the dog. The truck keys were in the ignition, however. What he was supposed to do seemed clear. He was supposed to let Hobbs go nuts and clean up afterwards. He placed the shotgun in the truck bed with a hollow feeling in his arms and legs. It took him several trips to collect enough rocks to wedge beneath the truck tires so that the differential would rise over the sagebrush when he did a fancy dance on the clutch. When the truck was free, he allowed himself a bitter smile. Two men could have done the job in less than five minutes. For one man, it was an elegy.

He rolled the truck downhill until he reached a faint track that shouldered west of the butte. He drove the snowy ruts carefully, avoiding deep drifts and badger holes. It was the way he’d driven when his ewes were fat and sleek and ready to drop loose-skinned lambs, and anticipation was a thing to be cultivated.

He got out of the truck at a place they called Indian Sink, opened the gate, and drove through. The gate was adjacent to the site for Bell Butte Well #3, a wrecked pad that had gone dry on him and Buren in 1979, a time when failed gambles still led Adams and his raucous neighbors to throw up their ranchers’ hands and laugh. There had seemed no end to things in those days. Oil. Gas. Deeds to more acres than you could drive across in a single day. Now there was nothing left of the well but a pair of rust-sutured condensation tanks. If there had ever been much oil, maybe the money would have kept the polish on the Trumpet Bell. His old age, Adams thought, would be banked away in some vault.

He latched the gate at Indian Sink with a loop of wire and gave one more whistle for the dog, Rain. His lips were so dry the sound they made was akin to the hiss of a propane leak. It didn’t matter. The dog didn’t show. But when he jammed the truck into gear, Hobbs was suddenly there, a flumed shape in his rearview mirror.

Adams was startled. Hobbs had gotten inside his peripheral vision, not an easy thing to do on that broad jut of hill where everything but the junipers was the color of bleached cowhide. He had his thumb primed like a hitchhiker. Adams had seen that pose only once, he’d swear it, and that had been for the benefit of a gnashing, heat-boiled marine sergeant at Camp Pendleton. The sergeant, as everybody knew, had been badly whip-sawed on Guadalcanal. Hobbs was the first, and last, recruit who tried to joke with him.

Adams stood on the clutch, then reached over and opened the passenger door while the truck was still rolling.

“S-sorry about the truck, Fremont. I wasn’t driving too good. Whyn’t you stop? I want you to s-s-see something.” Hobbs was dip-shouldered and grinning. There was a thick smear of something on one cheek, and his doeskin gloves were dark with what looked like axle grease. He kept his eyes on the chromed handle of the truck door, appraising it as if he’d never seen one before. He didn’t touch it.

Adams set the brake, but left the truck engine running. That was a joke of his own. It suggested that he and Hobbs would be finished with their encounter in one short minute. Or two.

He got out and faced what was in front of him.

He’d climbed Bell Butte from this direction many times as a boy, they all had, despite his mother’s warnings about rattlesnakes and his father’s tales of child-eating lions, tales of skulking Ute warriors—so many false tales. When had the butte, that hunch of sandstone and burled light, gone bad on him? He’d shot his share of eagles from its shit-frosted brink, illegally of course, but the damned things had been taking his lambs, and he’d never felt one stab of grief. He had loved the rock’s height and permanence. He had admired its stature. Now he could hardly bear to look at the fraudulent mountain that had hovered over his family and their enterprises for two culled-out generations. Bell Butte had finally deserted him as so many things had, everything but Hobbs and memory. Maybe that was how it had to be. It made him like every old man he’d ever known.

He looked into the valley of his empty household and saw vultures corkscrewing the sky above the corrals.

He believed it was his duty to begin the talking. “You up here to earn us a new fortune in oil?”

“No. Uh-uh,” Hobbs said. “Though it brings the stink back, don’t it? Stink of times g-gone by. I was good on a rig once.” He tugged at his cap, a freebie from the hardware store in Rawlins. Its bill was already skeined with grease, maybe graphite. Hobbs’s eyes looked strangely white to Adams, as if they were sealed over by an inner distraction.

“I heard some of them at the post talking about the arthritis or bad hearts. C-cancer,” Hobbs continued. “How is it that we never talk like that?”

Adams began to relax himself into a shrug, then thought better of it. “Not because we’re so different, C.D. We’re not. We just haven’t got to it yet.”

“Think we will?”

“If you want.”

Hobbs gaped his wide mouth until his teeth were uncovered. “I like how you believe it’s a option, Fremont. You’re a b-believer. I remember plinking gophers up here for money from your uncle Gene. You remember that? P-penny for each one. You were always the best shot.”

“And Buren the worst.”

“Well, sure.” Hobbs crowbarred a true laugh from his lungs. “Buren was always the worst.”

Adams paused as the wind pressed against the back of his neck, cold and unmannerly. He listened to it toss grit against the pitted windshield of his truck. “I guess you heard me shoot them last evening,” he said. “Those damn bucks.”

Hobbs nodded. “I worried for a minute you’d shot the horses. Then I decided you wouldn’t d-do that. I’m sorry I had the rifle. A rifle’s neater.”

“It don’t matter,” Adams said.

“Are more of them sick?”

“Some, probably. I haven’t looked this morning. Don’t want to. They’re a weak bunch, and I haven’t handled them so good.”

“You handle them fine. I hadn’t seen anybody so good at it since Etch and G-Gene. You got the knack.” Hobbs’s body was so enthusiastic even the binoculars that hung around his neck took on a happy sway. “K-keep on it. You ain’t meant to give it up.”

“I already have. Starting again was a damn stupid idea. The whole bunch of them has already stomped on me and run me over.”

“N-not stupid,” Hobbs insisted.

“Well, here’s something that is. My brother got himself attached to your friend Sugar. He’s caused some serious trouble.” He went on to tell how Buren had overstepped himself and landed in the hospital with his jaw wired shut.

Hobbs etched at the dry ground with his steel-toed boots, absorbing the news. His eyebrows drew themselves into a straight line as if he was reworking some kind of internal calculation. Finally, he puckered his mouth and gave a little whistle. He said, “Death is a punishment to some people, and to others it’s a gift. I b-been practicing how to say that. I taught the words to myself for you and Buren, especially Buren.”

“I’m happy to say my brother’s not here to ruin our day. What you been memorizing?”

“How to explain. Th-there’s a thing I want to explain.”

Adams stared at his own feet. “What are you telling me, C.D.?”

“I only saw Sugar that one time in Rawlins. We never did g-get to be real friends, though it would have b-been nice. I just didn’t have the time. Anyhow, I’m sorry Buren found trouble, but I have a announcement on the schedule. I-it’s time to go.”

Adams cupped his hands behind his ears. “Say that again.”

“It’s time to go.”

He began to understand what had been laid out on that trampled well pad, what he had been led there to perceive since that had always been his role, he the scout, Hobbs the one who bore the consequences. This was the balance between them that he’d never tried to change. The well’s pump shed had been crudely reassembled—he finally noticed that. He could see tire treads, and boot prints, and deep drag marks leading up to the shed now that he was looking for them. And he knew exactly what was inside that shed. He could visualize how Hobbs would set things up. There would be an overhauled gas generator cross-wired to a waxy packet of dynamite. That way, Hobbs could be sure this explosion was triggered on his terms.

His body came back into itself when he felt heat and stirring near one of his dangled hands. It was his old dog, Rain.

“You got the shotgun with you?” Hobbs’s voice was singsong and terrible.

“Yes.”

“Want to use it again?”

Adams didn’t withhold his answer. He’d done a lot wrong in his life—maybe too much—but he could still call himself honest. “No, I don’t.”

“Good. That’s not the way I have it in my head, just so you know. My h-head doesn’t have us struggling over this one.” Hobbs defused his eyes, and Adams saw a glimmer of stillness within them, an ocean-rich column of blue. “It’s not like anybody t-told me how it has to go, not a preacher or a dream or anything like that. This is my answer. I just see the way I have to be. It s-seems right after all these scarecrow years.”

“I guess … I don’t know what to say.” Adams heard something begin to restore itself in his voice. It came very quickly, a pure gout of letters, and then it was gone. “Do you have to—leave?”

“I ain’t left you yet, F-fremont. And I won’t ever leave you—not in a way that matters. That house might be empty, but you’re not empty. This is what you got to learn. For a long time we’ve kept each other going on and on. But you’ve got something to take care of down there.” Hobbs pointed a finger toward the toppled dominos of the ranch.

“No. There’s nothing left to that.”

“There is. Sh-she’s gonna come—and you got to be home. She’ll come to the graves to see your ma and your father and me.”

His mouth wouldn’t make the sound he wanted.

“She gave me this to give to you,” Hobbs said, as he unfurled a stained and empty hand. He seemed to see something in that hand that Adams did not. He reached out, and Adams reached out, and their bodies touched one last time.

Adams turned to water at the hips and knees. “I d-don’t…. I just wanted … I w-want to help you—”

Hobbs cut him off with a captivated grin. “I thank you for trying. Old Etch would say we stayed wh-who we were and that it was a good thing. What I don’t know is how it ends for you. Who’s to say what’s best for a human man? I never did get a answer to that one.” He turned and blinked into the striations of the morning breeze. “B-but this ain’t never been about the two of us squawking. Some things don’t ever get taken away from people, Fremont. Some things we keep inside us forever,” he said. “I n-need you to remember that.”

Then he walked in his slow, pronating way toward the shed. It sounded as though he said one last thing to his friend John Fremont Adams, but Adams couldn’t be sure of the words. Wait for her. Don’t forget. Your turn. Which was the answer to his question? Uncertainty rooted him to the crumbled soil beneath his feet. He saw the hinges on the pump-shed door glitter like hung decorations. He saw Rain leave the shade of his body and follow Hobbs into the pump shed, a fine dog. He saw C.D. Hobbs cover the last strides of his life like a herder who has more stragglers to round up. He recognized no choice other than the choice to stand steady, eyes open, eyes gathering, heart rising like a freed bird in his chest. It would come to him. The answer would surely come. He had only to wait and see how much of this destruction was his to share.