The Work of Wolves (10 page)

He stuck the toothpick back in his mouth and gazed at Carson. He not only remembered selling the horse, he remembered the price.

I'd say.

"Worth more, maybe?"

"Wouldn't say that."

Magnus removed the toothpick with his thumb and forefinger and flicked it off the porch into the grass.

"Hear you're good at training horses."

"It ain't mine to say how good I am."

"Modesty won't get you a job."

"I ain't lookin for a job."

"If you don't know how good you are, who does?"

"The horses."

Magnus's eyes sheared away, then steadied, came back.

"The horses," he said. "Well, I'll be sure to ask the horses, then."

"I ain't never yet managed to train one to talk."

Magnus's cool eyes regarded Carson. Then he shook his head, stepped off the porch.

"At least you grew some eyebrows," he said.

Carson had no idea what he was talking about.

WHILE THEY STOOD ON THE PORCH
, three pickups had driven into the yard and parked by the first machine shed. Magnus's hired men—Lonny Youngman, Wagner Cecil, and Burt Ramsay—got out and stood talking, drinking coffee from big, plastic truck stop mugs. Carson knew and liked Burt Ramsay. Burt had operated his own ranch for years, and Carson had helped him with branding, but Burt ran into financial difficulties after his wife divorced him. He sold out to Magnus, then started working for him. Carson knew Lonny Youngman less well. Lonny was in his thirties and had tried various jobs—highway construction, driving a Mount Rushmore tour bus for Gray Lines out of Rapid City—before coming back to Twisted Tree. Carson didn't know Wagner Cecil at all, except by face, name, and rumor. Wagner was about five years younger than Carson and had dropped out of school his junior year, disappeared for a year or two, then showed up in Twisted Tree again, tight-lipped about where he'd been and what he'd been doing. For a while he'd been a fixture at the Kwiker Fill convenience store, playing video lottery, but had finally taken this job with Yarborough.

"The horses are in the barn," Magnus said. "I'll be there in a minute. Got to give my hands their instructions."

Carson nodded at the three men as he walked past them. He heard Magnus talking to them, their brief responses. As he neared the barn, Magnus caught up to him and passed him: a big man, with a slight paunch visible in profile, torso shaped like a sledgehammer but gone soft around the edges—a man whose activity had decreased while his consumption hadn't. He reached the barn ahead of Carson and stepped through the door, leaving it hanging open. By the time Carson stepped into the dim interior, he saw Magnus walking between rows of steel pens, toward three horses watching them from the rear of the barn.

Magnus leaned on the gate penning the horses in, and when Carson walked up he nodded at the animals. "There they are," he said.

Carson put both hands on top of the gate, leaned his chin on the back of his hands, put one foot on the bottom rail, and observed the animals. They stood as far from the two humans as they could—not frightened but wary. If they'd had more space, they'd have used it, but they knew what space they had.

"Nice animals."

"Ought to be."

"A bit shy."

"Bought them up in Harding County. Eighty-year-old rancher wouldn't quit. His kids visited, noticed things falling apart. Figured he was losing it. They sold him out."

"Sold him out?"

"Got power of attorney and had an auction. I went up and bought these animals. Worked out well for me."

"What happened to him?"

"Who?"

"The old guy."

Magnus shrugged. "Probably ended up in a nursing home."

"Nice kids."

Carson thought of the old man staring out a window, remembering the space he used to roam, until he just crumbled, a nurse coming along one afternoon and finding a pile of dust in his chair and calling the janitor over with a vacuum cleaner. And his kids getting a call in the new houses they'd built with his money, hearing their father had just evaporated. Why not let the old guy wander around his ranch if that's what he wanted to do, until he fell into a gully and died?

"I need them broke," Magnus said.

"I don't break horses."

Magnus turned to stare at Carson, but Carson watched the animals. He didn't look them in the eye or challenge them but observed how they held themselves.

"You don't break horses. I been paying you for a half-hour now to stand in my yard and lean on my fence, and now I hear you don't break horses?"

"I train horses. An I don' take pay by the hour. I take it by the horse. Time ain't a factor. My dad didn't explain that?"

"All I know is I'm paying you a hell of a lot."

"You are. Wouldn't pay myself that much. Truth is, you'd a asked me, I'd said bring the horses to me or find another trainer. But my dad agreed to this, so I'm here."

Carson said this matter-of-factly, but Magnus tensed, leaned away from the fence, hooked his thumb in his belt.

"I guess you got definite ideas."

"Long as I'm workin with 'em, these horses are mine. I ain't a hired hand, an I don't follow orders. I do things my own way, an at my own speed. You don't like what I do, it ain't like we compromise. You either like it or you pay me what we agreed on to quit. You can watch, but you ain't allowed a give suggestions."

Magnus's jaw hardened. His fingers at his belt curled. Then he opened them and smiled humorlessly.

"I heard you knew what you were about," he said.

Carson turned back to the horses. The bay with the white diamond on its forehead was the most intense. It hadn't once, in all the time Carson had watched, put an ear back to catch a sound from another direction. The other two had relaxed, the black gelding even eating from a hay feeder. But the bay remained suspicious and alert.

"There's one other thing," Magnus said.

"What's that?"

He wished Magnus would leave. He wanted to be alone with the horses now.

"My wife wants to learn to ride. I thought, since you were training the horses, it'd make sense to teach her at the same time."

"A lot a people could teach her to ride."

"There isn't much sense in having two people out here working around these horses."

Carson nodded, considering it. At the movement of his head, the bay grew more alert, its spine hardening.

"OK," Carson said. "Same rate. Make it another horse."

W
ILLI CLICKED OFF THE PHONE
. He'd told Carol Druseman, his host mother here, that he was going to call his parents in Germany. Instead he'd called Carson. Why had he told that small lie? And should he now call his parents so it wouldn't be a lie? He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He thought of the huddled horses, the taut lines of gleaming wire: the order, the neatness, the perpendicularity of the posts against the ground. And that steaming water, pouring out of the earth with a life of its own. Its gurgling in the night. Willi thought of drinking that water, the hot liquid sliding down his throat. He thought of never being able to move away from that sound, of that endless bubbling from deep inside the earth, occupying his waking and sleeping, trapping him even in his dreams.

An air of secrecy pervaded that pen behind Lostman's Lake. And he'd heard in Carson Fielding's voice confirmation of his own suspicions. He thought of telling the Drusemans. He imagined their kind and open faces, the way they would listen to him. But in the end they would be like Earl—thinking he didn't understand something. They would try to explain away the pen and the horses and the steaming water. He would never be able to explain to them what troubled him.

Willi traced the half-circles in the plaster ceiling with his eyes. Ceilings were different here, he thought. Light switches were different. Even beds were made up differendy. But secrets were the same.

WHEN WILLI WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD
, he'd grown curious about the fact that he had only one set of grandparents, and he'd asked his mother. "Yes," she said. "It is a terrible thing. Your father's parents were in an accident on the autobahn a long time ago. They both died."

Willi wanted to ask more about his father's parents, but his mother turned her back to him and began to stuff groceries into the refrigerator. "This refrigerator is too small," she said. "We really need a new one. I've told your father that." Willi peered around her briefly at the neat, lighted space of the refrigerator with its milk and juices and glowing cans. He couldn't tell whether they needed a new refrigerator or not, so he said nothing and never asked about his grandparents again.

One evening when he was fourteen, his father answered the phone and listened without responding. He hung up and went into the living room, picked up the newspaper without a word of explanation. Later, from his bedroom, Willi heard his parents talking to each other, his mother urgently, his father with a toneless doggedness.

The next evening during supper, his father's sister Marti burst into the house without knocking. She'd never done anything like that before. Suddenly the door was open, and there she was, standing among them. Willi's father dropped his fork when she whirled into the dining room. He held up his hands as if to ward off a spell. He waved his hands back and forth, his fingers blurring like fan blades.

"How can you do this?" Marti cried, without even saying hello.

"Don't say another word!" Willi's father shouted.

He pushed his chair back so hard it tipped over. He rushed around it, his pants cuff catching for a moment on a protruding chair leg so that he stumbled, and his head went down, and he looked for a moment like a wounded bull charging Marti. He barely managed to right himself before he reached her, and then he glanced back at Willi and positioned himself between Willi and Marti, shielding Willi from her—from Marti, soft and overweight, who was always talking in a distracted way about her troubles finding a decent man, who spent the Christmas holidays with them, lounging all day in her bathrobe until it glittered with sugar flaked from pastries, and who spoke of peace as something real and not just a word in holiday lyrics.

"Your own father!" Marti cried, her voice hoarse. Over his father's shoulder Willi, still at the table, could see her swollen eyes, her short hair in punctuated disarray about her head.

"Stop, Marti," Willi's father commanded. "Not in this house."

"I'll say what I want. I won't go along with this any more. Your own father, and you won't go to his funeral."

"Not another word. You're not welcome here saying these things."

"I don't care about welcome. Good God! Are you my brother? You have to honor him at least in death."

Willi had his head down, staring at the table. His mother had placed a bouquet there. One of the flowers had a bent stem. He saw how the tiny fibers had torn, how they protruded from the break, how the stem was white instead of green where it bent. He didn't want to hear his father and Marti shouting at each other. He wanted to be invisible.

His mother, sitting next to him, reached over and covered his hand with hers. But Willi wouldn't look at her. He stared at the flower's broken stem.

"You can still leave, Marti," his father said. "You haven't caused complete damage yet." His voice had gone gray, no longer shouting, just a grim and desperate argument.

"I didn't think you'd stay stubborn this long, Hermann. You're just like him."

"Don't ever say that."

"I'm through not saying things."

They faced each other. Two bulldozers. If they collided, they would ruin each other. They would tear each other apart. End up a tangled and ruined pile where they stood. That's what Willi felt. He didn't know either of them could be so massive, so obstinate, so deeply iron, and so willing to destroy themselves over whatever lay between them.

Then his father bowed his head. As if he were giving into something he knew all along he would never defeat. He looked back at Willi. His face was gray, wet paper, sagging. Then he stepped aside. His eyes went to the floor. Willi was exposed to whatever Marti carried.

"Willi," she said.

Willi stared at the bent stem in the bouquet. He didn't want to see Marti's tear-swollen face. Didn't want to hear her earnest, pleading voice.

Then his mother spoke. "Marti."

She said only the name, but it halted Marti. Startled her. Willi glanced up and saw Marti's blue eyes wide in surprise, as if she hadn't known anyone else could be in the room.

"Whatever you think your responsibility is," Willi's mother said, "it's over. The rest is up to us. You've given us no choice. If that's what you intended, it's been done."

She never raised her voice, but her eyes never left her sister-in-law's. Marti's eyes suddenly had no focus. They darted around the room. As if she didn't know where she was. Then she saw her brother again, and her face and posture sagged. They stood looking at each other like paper statues disintegrating in rain.

"Hermann," she said. "I'm sorry. I just can't believe. You're not even going to the funeral. I just can't."

She thrust her hands into the bulky bag she carried everywhere. She rummaged in it, emerged with a tissue. She blew her nose, then waved the tissue in a tiny, helpless gesture.

"He was your father," she said in a small, little-girl voice. "No matter what."

Willi's father shook his head. A dull, mechanical movement. His neck didn't look strong enough to support the weight of its moving. He just stood there, shaking his head. As if there was a weight inside, rolling aimlessly about.

"Mom's in terrible shape," Marti said. She wiped tears from her face with the back of her hand. Her handbag slipped off her round, sloping shoulder, caught in the crook of her elbow. She grabbed at it, caught it, readjusted it on her shoulder, hitching it up. She looked around for a place to throw the soiled tissue.

"I don't care."

Willi had to look at his father to be sure it was his father speaking. It was a worn and old man's voice. Then Willi saw it was a worn, old man who spoke.

"My God, Hermann. She's our mother."