Dog Run Moon (10 page)

In the late evening James sat on the back porch drinking a beer, half-reading a newspaper, sweat dampening the pages. He watched the sun turn red as it sunk through the dust. The houses and roofs and backyards of the neighborhood were cast in a blood-dusk glow. A martian suburb awash with the smell of a thousand barbecues being lit.

James finished his beer and finally, mercifully, it was dark. A few degrees cooler, maybe. There were fireflies blinking on and off in the yard. He hadn't seen a firefly in a long time. There were none in Montana as far as he knew. Maybe it was too cold. Years ago, he'd been camped next to an old hippie couple in Yellowstone and they'd told him that once, in Iowa, they'd dropped acid and went out and gathered a whole jar of fireflies and then rubbed them all over their naked bodies and then had luminescent sex in a moonlit cornfield. Their obvious happiness at relaying this story gave him a shiver. He saw in them all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things come and gone. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines, running on memories? Was it inevitable?

After a week of loafing at Casey's, the dust and feedlot smell of Amarillo started to wear on him. Casey worked long hours at his office. Being in the house all day with Linda—she did yoga in the living room, she constantly wanted to feed him sandwiches—was making James uncomfortable. The probing questions from Casey at the dinner table made him feel like an underachieving son, stalled out after college, living in his old bedroom.

James found himself a job. An unlikely one at that. It was a ranch-hand position at an outfit outside of Austin, in the hill country. The job description in the classifieds was spare.

WANTED
:

SEASONAL
RANCH
LABORER
.

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.

BEAUTIFUL LOCATION. REMOTE.
HARD
WORK
. FAIR PAY.

James called. He talked to a man who occasionally let out clipped groans, as if he were in pain. Their brief conversation was punctuated several times by loud birdcalls. In less than fifteen minutes, he was hired. He had two days before he was to start and he'd forgotten to ask about pay.

When James left Amarillo, Casey shook his hand and wished him luck, as if he were shipping off to basic training. Linda gave him a hairspray-scented hug. “Y'all take care now, darlin',” she said.

He pointed his car south into the fiery bowels of the Summertime Republic of Texas.

Outside of Austin, the land began to show some contour. The pure flat of the north gave way to wrinkled hills and canyons with cream-colored limestone walls. He was pleasantly surprised. He'd never known Texas to look like this. He admired the swells of oak-covered ridges, the white caliche ranch roads, glowing under the sun.

Two hours and several wrong turns later, he pulled up to a low ranch house tucked under a grove of pecan trees. There was a small pond and a windmill. A red heeler with a gray muzzle came out from under the shade of a parked truck and eyed him without approaching. Peacocks scratched in the gravel, bottle-green feathers resplendent. James stretched and looked around. His shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.

A man came out of the house. He wore a straw hat and had a cast on one of his legs—ankle to mid-thigh. The leg without a cast was jean-clad and it took James a moment to figure out that the man had apparently taken a pair of his Levis and cut one leg off three-quarters of the way up. He'd put a double-wrap of duct tape around the shortened pant leg to keep it snugged down over the cast. On the foot with the cast, the man wore a large rubber galosh. On the uninjured foot, he had a cowboy boot. Some folks with a full leg cast in Texas in late June probably just wore shorts. This man was obviously cut from a more rugged cloth.

“You James?”

“Yessir.”

“That's good. I'm Karl. We've talked. Montana, eh?”

“Yes.”

“I been there once. Saw Old Faithful. It could have been worse. Montana's better than a lot of places. But, you know what they say?”

James thought about telling Karl that Old Faithful was actually in Wyoming. He didn't. “What do they say?”

“In Montana, they make cowboys. In Texas, they make men.” Karl laughed and wiped at the sweat on his face with his shirtsleeve. “Montana, I got a broken leg here.” He pointed at the offending member. “Usually I do everything here myself but as you can imagine, this has got me limited. How's your back?”

“My back is fine.”

“That's good. We're going to be working. You're going to be working mostly. I'm going to be telling you what to do. There's where you'll bunk. Everything you need should be there.” Karl pointed to a low-ceilinged wing built off the side of the barn. “Stow your gear and then come on back and I'll give you a tour.”

The bunkhouse was more pleasant than James had expected. There was a double bed. A small kitchenette. A table with a bouquet of dried flowers. Most important, an air conditioner. James cranked it up and tossed his single bag on the bed. The back window looked out over the pond where the heeler was standing up to its belly in the water, panting. James looked in the small fridge. There were two cans of Tecate and a jar of peanut butter. He'd had a refrigerator just like this in his dorm in college. The sight of this one made him indescribably happy.

When James emerged from his room, Karl was sitting behind the wheel of an off-road vehicle, kind of like a golf cart but with large knobby tires, a camouflaged awning, and a rifle rack on the hood. There was a cooler in the back, and as James slid into the passenger seat, Karl reached around and rummaged in the ice pulling out a beer for each of them. He drank deeply and belched.

“You said on the phone the other day that you're a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“What subject do you teach?”

“Everything, pretty much.”

“What, like kindergarten?”

“No, I actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse. I have around fifteen kids.”

“A one-room schoolhouse? They still have those? Jesus, employment offers weren't exactly flooding your mailbox, or what?”

James laughed. “It was actually a competitive position. People
want
their kids to go to Pine Creek School. It's selective. We have to turn students down every year. It's a
unique learning environment
and we consistently get high test scores. We have brochures. That's what they say.”

“I see.” Karl drank and then released the parking break on the golf cart. “It's a yuppie one-room schoolhouse, not a real one-room schoolhouse. I'm sure the pay is better. Anyway. It don't matter because your ass is mine for the rest of the summer. Let's get you acquainted with the lay of the land.”

They embarked upon a rambling tour of the two-thousand-acre Echo Canyon Ranch, stopping frequently so Karl could lever himself out of the driver's seat to take a piss. Occasionally, deer bolted out in front of them. Once James saw something larger and darker moving off into the brush and then it was gone.

“What happened to your leg?” James asked.

Karl laughed. “Buffalo fell on me,” he said.

Then the beer cooler ran dry. Karl, reaching and coming up empty, said, “Well, shit.”

Sooner than James would have thought possible they were back in front of the house. “There you have it, Montana, what'd you think?” Karl said.

James could hear the clank of the windmill turning lazily. The red dog came and put its muzzle on Karl's broken leg. “It's great,” he said.

“Likely as not you've noticed that we haven't got so much as a milk cow on the whole spread.”

“I thought maybe they were in a different pasture or something.”

“Nope. Closest thing we've got is a few buffalo. Nasty things. Stay clear. They'd just as soon gore you as look at you. Same with the elk. Even the females. Especially the females. They'll kick you through a barn door.”

“Elk?”

“Sure. This is a hunting ranch, son. We've got all the exotics. Aoudads. Sitka deer. Feral hogs, New Zealand red deer. Elk. A few different kinds of antelope. There's things out there that I can't even name off the top of my head. I was driving down to Bandera the other evening, and coming up out of the riverbed I saw this animal almost the size of a horse. It had corkscrew-looking horns, spots on the rear half of its body. Now what the hell was that? I have no idea. Who knows where it came from and who knows how long it's been running? All I know is that there's a dentist in Dallas who would pull his own eyeteeth to have that thing's head hanging on his wall. That's what we do here. It's what all the ranches around here do. Been that way for a long time and that's why you'll occasionally see a random like that.”

“What do you mean, ‘a random'?”

“Just like it sounds. Some animal that was released at one time to be hunted but that just never got killed and was forgotten about or jumped a fence, or whatever. Ranches sell all the time. Fences fall over. Inventory is hard to keep track of. The hill country's full of loose exotics. You've seen the brush. You can't get much more than a few steps off a road and it just swallows you. The African species especially seem to find it just like home.”

James was slightly disappointed. He'd been under the impression that he was going to be out mending fences. Rounding up doggies and slapping hot iron to calves.

“What exactly, then, will I be doing?”

“Oh, we'll keep you occupied. At least once a week we have to go around and fill the feeders with shelled corn. That takes a full day. There's over forty of them on the property. Some fences might need shoring up. Some brush might need to be cleared out to keep the shooting lanes open. Like I said, I usually do it all myself but it's just a little bit much right now for this ol' boy.”

James got his own four-wheel-drive golf cart. One of the perks of the job. He filled a gallon jug with water, and set out to explore more on his own. Karl said the pain pills he was on were making him woozy and he was going to take a nap.

James started noticing the feeders. They were metal tripods with a hopper operated by some sort of timing device. At a set time each day a measured amount of shelled corn would fall from the hopper to the ground. The feeders were placed in small clearings hacked from the brush. Twenty yards from each feeder, in a lane cut through the trees, was a blind—a small, tin-roofed camouflage-painted shack with low windows from which a rifle could be fired. James went to one of these blinds and opened the door. Inside was an office chair and a pair of ear-protecting headphones.

An
office chair
—with adjustable lumbar support and rollers and pneumatic suspension system. It was the seat every accountant in the world sat in all day. It seemed strange to think that that same accountant might get a day off and come down here to Echo Canyon Ranch to sit in that same chair some more, listening to the rhythmic clunk of the feeder hopper opening, the musical shower of corn falling to the leaf litter. Waiting with anticipation for something, anything, to present itself for killing.

All the blinds were numbered. The two-track roads were like fairways claimed from the mesquite and shin oak and cedar. James felt that he'd landed on some sort of morbid golf course, where, instead of clubs, the camouflaged hackers toted .30-06s and tallied their day's end score, factoring in missed-shot bogies, sand trap woundings, extra clip mulligans—counting pars and birdies and eagles in hides and horns and tusks.

“Fore,” James shouted.

His voice was swallowed immediately by the tangle of dense green that surrounded him. Echo Canyon was kind of a misnomer.

That night his air conditioner melted down. He woke in the early hours, his bed sheet drenched in sweat. There was the god-awful squealing of the hogs rooting in the brush behind the barn. He lay in the dark, thinking about a conversation he'd once had with Carina. She had called him on his lunch break at school to tell him that he didn't value his own profession, and this made him unattractive to her.

“You have disdain for those who teach,” she said. “And yet you do it yourself. That must be exhausting.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, when we first met, when you told me you were a teacher, and I said that's great, you said, ‘You know what they say, those who
can't,
teach.' That's a bullshit philosophy. And if you truly feel that way then you should quit teaching immediately before you infect any more students.”

“You called just to tell me this?”

“Yes, I thought you should know.”

James tried to imagine Molly Hanchet, his red-haired sixth-grader, smuggling a scalpel from their dissection unit into the bathroom and opening her veins. He imagined finding her, the red of her blood shaming the red of her hair. He tried to imagine returning to the classroom the next day, all the days after, and it was here that his imagination failed completely. He didn't know much about Carina's childhood but he knew enough to realize that she had once been an at-risk girl. Her resilience and dedication seemed to stem from some deep-seated need to save an earlier version of herself. Could he fairly fault himself for lacking this dimension of commitment? Did one's vocation need to be so deeply personal?

He got up and banged on the AC with his boot heel. It clanked to life slowly. Out behind the barn, there was a vicious cacophony of squealing and grunting and thrashing and then it was silent. Clearly it was going to be a long night, the mind chasing the heart in circles around the moon.