Ghost Medicine (10 page)

My dad came up to the enclosure, undid the catch on the gate. “Were you screaming?”

“A huge mountain lion got one of the goats. That little black stupid one.”

Calling a goat stupid is like calling water wet.

But you didn't mean that about those wild horses, too, did you, Tommy?

Well, they're not so dumb, I guess.

You wanna come back here with me and get us a couple of ‘em?

She said we could.

Bring her some more tobacco. And Tommy? I'd take ‘em all if she'd let us.

I showed my dad where I had seen the cat carrying off its kill. We climbed between the rails and followed the blood trail back into the trees. There was no mark on the ground here, so following the lion was difficult, and both of us realized we didn't want to get too close to her anyway.

“I guess we should call Fish and Game.”

“Dad, by the time that guy gets out here it'll be April. I'm calling Carl Buller and see what he says we should do. They've probly had lions before on the Benavidez.”

“You could call him. But I don't think it'll come back here anyway. Look how long we've lived here and never even seen one.”

We went back inside and had more coffee. I was nervous about leaving Reno out there, but I couldn't believe a cat would think of bothering him. We penned up the other two goats inside the barn and sealed shut the hen house. My dad got on the phone to the Fish and Game Department, and had to call the opposite end of the state just to get the number of our local agent, and then he had to leave a recorded message for him anyway. I went back to my room and got my .22 from the closet and propped it, along with a box of loose ammo, beside the kitchen door.

“I wouldn't shoot a lion with a .22, Troy, unless you're sure you can outrun her.”

“Let me use that thirty-ought-six then.”

“I say we just wait a while. She's not coming back for anything else here.”

But my dad was wrong.

It rained the next afternoon. The stain of blood disappeared.

She rode out to see me. I was working alone that day. I had driven the F-150 out into the pasture to drop off some dry bales of alfalfa to the horses after the rain. I saw her riding out on Doats, wondering how she could get away, unnoticed, from her parents' watching.

We sat on the open tailgate of the truck, swinging our feet in the air over the edge, leaning back against the hay, hooks hanging like floppy ears from the bale's upturned corners. I put my arm around her shoulder and we hooked our ankles together and swung those legs, like one, up and down off the gate. And we sat there like that as the horses gathered around the feeder, sticking their noses through the metal poles that supported the hay as they ate, occasionally looking up, ears perked, and sniffing at us. I can't imagine there was anywhere better either of us could be.

And she kissed my cheek, so softly. We sat there, watching the horses, looking at the sky, smelling the smell of the land.

“Isn't this about the most beautiful place in the world, Troy?”

I took my hat off and put it on her head.

“I wouldn't pick anywhere else over it.”

She picked up a piece of straw and tickled the bottom of my chin with it, and we sat there for the longest time, not saying anything, just watching.

“What do you want, Troy?”

“You mean more than
this
?” I asked. And I know I should have been choking on nervous ness, but I felt so relaxed beside her.

“Yes.”

“Nothing could be better than this, Luz.”

She brushed the straw through the hair over my ear.

“How about you?” I said.

Luz cleared her throat and put her hand on my knee.

“My dad says that one day this whole ranch is going to be mine,” she said. “He says that I'd be the only woman who could ever keep it running.”

“I bet that's true.”

I lay my head back farther in the hay and stretched my leg out straight and held it there, so I could see the shape of her ankle where it rested over my foot.

“Is that what you would want?” I asked.

“I love it here,” she said. And she said it slowly, so my heart nearly jumped out of my mouth because I thought she was about to say something else. Something about me, that I wanted to hear, but it scared me just the same.

My throat was still tight. “Does Gabey know that?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

I lowered my leg and began swinging our feet from the edge of the gate again.

“He doesn't want this place, anyway,” Luz said.

“He doesn't?”

“No. He only wants our dad to think he'd be good enough to do it.”

“He is good enough,” I said.

“I know.”

By Friday of that week, the lion had taken another of our goats, and the Fish and Game officer hadn't called us back. Carl said we should track the cat and kill it ourselves, and I was starting to feel more and more like doing that, too. So when I got home that day, nervous because I had to leave Reno behind in the morning to drive with Tommy into Holmes, the first thing I did was to go out to the barn and check on my horse. It started raining softly.

And there was the cat. I saw her right away, but her coloring blended right in with the bare dirt in the grayness of the afternoon drizzle. She was in the middle of the enclosure, hunched over my big tom turkey, biting its neck as it offered up a feeble and fading flutter of protest. And even though I was kind of happy to see that mean turkey finally meet his match and then some, I was mad at the thought of this cat coming back to take whatever she wanted from us. So I grabbed a big rake propped up against Reno's stall, and I threw it like a spear. It tumbled in the air, landing so its handle struck right across the lion's shoulders.

The cat shrunk down, alarmed, and without looking back at me leapt through the bars of the corral and vanished. The turkey lay in the mud, a big mound of bloodied white feathers, wheezing a bubbling spray of blood from its nearly severed neck.

And Reno just stood there in the mud, getting rained on, watching the whole thing impassively, the way that horses do.

“A couple months early for Thanksgiving,” I said, straight-mouthed, as I looked down at the bird's remains.

I put Reno and all the other animals inside the barn and closed it up. I picked up the turkey by its horny, muddy feet, its purpled head lolling limply beneath its huge carcass, wings splayed out like filthy fans. It was heavy, about forty-five pounds, and in good enough condition that I wondered whether my father would ask me to pluck it and clean it.

I put the turkey on top of a big plastic trash bag and left it in the mudroom off the back porch and waited for my father to come home.

I called Tommy.

“We've got to get that mountain lion. I just hit her with a rake. She killed our turkey.”

“Hit her with a rake? Jeez, Stotts, you're a caveman!”

“We could go out tonight, but it's gonna get dark in about an hour and I don't want to be out there in the dark, you know? Can you see if we can get out of work tomorrow and you and Gabey meet me up here early in the morning?”

“CB'll cover for us. Sounds like fun.”

“Bring your gun.”

“As long as you keep Gabey away from it.”

“And Tom? We're not saying nothing to my dad, okay?”

“Even if one of us gets killed, bud.”

“So we'll have to leave before he's up. Meet me at the bridge at five.”

“Happy Saturday, Stottsy.”

My dad told me to clean and gut the turkey. Then, he said, he'd cook it. I didn't really mind being assigned this duty, and I half expected it. But I'd never done it before, and now, looking back, I don't think I'll ever do it again.

“How?” I asked him.

“Well, you know what a turkey looks like when you buy it in the store. Make it look like that,” he said, smiling. And that was about the extent of his instructions. But he stayed and watched me while I worked at it, and I never asked him for help and he never told me I was doing anything wrong. He just watched me and smiled.

After I took off the head, which wasn't too hard since the lion had gotten it most of the way free, I had to deal with all those feathers. I'd seen my mother put a bird in boiling water to do this, but we didn't have any pots big enough for this thing. So I worked for over an hour, plucking it in the sink and pouring boiling water from the teakettle onto it as I went. This made the bird give off a smell like a boiled barnyard.

Once I had it plucked, it looked reasonably good. I took the feet off at the knee joints and opened up the body cavity. Then the powerful stink of that tom turkey came oozing out, smelling like cigar smoke mixed with furniture polish and cheap perfume. That about nearly made me gag. That, and the texture of the guts, the popping little air sacs in the lungs, which looked like pale pink caviar, and my father standing quietly behind me, watching me, blood spilling down the yellowing porcelain of the sink basin, me reaching into the cavity up to my elbows and holding my breath all the while. I had taken my shirt off because I didn't want any of the blood and guts on it, and I was splattered all over my chest and belly.

“Man, I bet most third-graders don't have this many guts in ‘em.” I squinted my eyes, my mouth was turned down in sour disgust.

My dad laughed.

Then I went to clean out the crop, full of gritty, chewed-up food, looking like a pale and warm kind of oatmeal, which added another depth to the overall stench. When I was finished, I washed the bird off. I held out my arms, away from my body, fingers pointed up like a surgeon, like those mountains. But I did it.

“There. You can cook him now. I'll be in the shower for the rest of the night.”

And I left my dad standing in the kitchen.

Even under the running water of the shower I could smell that turkey. What I had always remembered and associated with holidays and family reunions was now somehow transformed into something else, mature and unpleasant. I put on clean clothes, but that smell was everywhere in the house.

It was raining steadily now. I walked through the living room, stopping and bending down by our woodstove to breathe in a cleansing smell of burning oak.

My dad was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me.

“Feel better?”

“Yeah.”

“Smells good, doesn't it?”

“Smells. That's for sure.”

“I don't think it'll be ready before midnight, though.”

“I don't think I can eat right now, Dad. I think I'm going to bed.”

And I didn't eat turkey again until the following year.

I woke up at 4 the next morning. The house smelled like turkey. It was still raining, but lightly and sporadically. I pulled my jeans on over the long johns I slept in, but even then they weren't going to stay up. After not eating the night before, I felt like I was shrinking. I pulled a T-shirt on over my thermal, and then a sweatshirt over those.