The Work of Wolves (14 page)

"You called me Reb," she interrupted.

"I called you Reb," he repeated.

"No one's ever called me Reb."

"Rebecca, Reb. Saves me the trouble a pronouncin a couple syllables, I guess."

"That's a lot of work, is it?"

"No one's payin me four times what they're worth to say 'em."

They were standing near the corral, half-facing each other. She reached out and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

"I wouldn't pay you two cents to say them," she said.

He lost track of his thinking, got woven into the knot himself, and agreed to take the horses where she wanted.

IT BECAME THE PATTERN
—loading the horses into a small trailer, driving to one of Magnus's many pieces of land, working on the things the horses needed while she learned the finer points of riding. Away from the ranch she rode better—weightless, airborne.

In July heat they walked the horses along Red Medicine Creek, five miles from the ranch buildings. She was riding Surety now, Carson Jesse. Purple and yellow coneflowers bloomed, their petals drooping in the heat, their knobby brown heads thrust to the sun. Meadowlarks sang from invisible nests. In the high center of the sky, a hawk circled and circled.

"You didn't like me when you first met me, did you?" Rebecca asked.

Out of nowhere they had a history—a first meeting they could talk about. And that she wanted to talk about. Carson looked off at the land. Good land. Good empty land, not even the telltale lines of electrical wires running anywhere. He looked at the land and was quietly pleased that she'd asked the question.

"Wasn't a matter a liking or not," he said. "Just couldn't have you in the corral. Outside the corral, I liked you just fine."

She laughed. "Outside the corral you liked me just fine," she repeated. "You sure have a way of making a woman feel good."

"That's why I got 'em hangin all over me."

She reined Surety in and gazed at the water flowing in the creek, which was diminished and muddy in the heat. Carson, on Jesse, moved on a few steps before turning and looking back at her. She sat the horse, lost in thought. Finally she brought her head up. He questioned with his eyes, but she shook her head.

"Just thinking about corrals," she said.

THEN SHE ASKED TO GO
to the White River country.

"Good Lord, Reb," he said. "You want to go clear over there?"

"I've never been. I want to see it."

"You considered drivin over and havin a look?"

"Can we?"

He turned back to Jesse and rubbed the animal's shining hair.
Would the horse like the White River country
? he wondered. But he knew it was a false wonder. He was trying to deceive himself. He thought of his grandfather. "Yup," the old man would say, "that's why horses make such damn good real estate agents, they're so goddamn intristed in country."

"What do you think?"

Her voice behind him was light, teasing. Maybe too light. Too teasing. But Jesus!—what was he supposed to do? Go ask Magnus if it was OK? As if Magnus had the right to tell her where she could ride?

Several times, riding pastures, he'd seen Magnus's pickup parked on the top of a hill. Once he'd even thought—though it was too far away to be sure—that Magnus was standing outside the pickup using a rifle scope to watch them. Well, Carson had told himself, it was Magnus's land. No reason for him not to be on it. Nevertheless, he resented the man's presence. His shadow on the periphery. The truth was, if Magnus wanted to watch, the best thing was to make it easy for him. Invite it. Even ask him how he thought things were going. But Carson had the feeling that Magnus would interpret any invitation as a reason to come crowding in, to take control. Carson was too jealous of what he did with the horses to allow that.

And he was enjoying Rebecca's company. He found himself trying to make her laugh just to hear it. To watch the little jerk of her jaw upward just before the laughter came, her hair changing as the sun changed on it, and the surprise of the different earrings she wore, glinting through the parting wave of it. Carson imagined her holding earrings up to a mirror, dangling from her fingertips, her head tilted aside, one hand holding her hair back, her ear, its lobe and convolutions, the studied quiet on her face as she regarded herself. He imagined how she saw herself in her mind's eye with the sun in her eyes and the stone she had chosen, of one light and yet varied. He tried to remember when he had first imagined her in front of a mirror, but couldn't—just as he didn't know when they had come to a point where they had a history they could talk about, could look back and say that then things were different. When had
then
appeared?

He felt slightly out of control. Whatever was going on between Rebecca and Magnus, he couldn't keep the horses out of it. Any answer he gave to her question about the White River was freighted one way or the other. Every step he took, his foot came down in a different place than he expected. He should have insisted the horses be brought to him, where he controlled the conditions. Here, escaping Magnus's eye meant deception. Carson was drawn in, no matter what he did. It was a spinning drum, like the one he'd entered at the Central States Fair in Rapid City one year when he was a kid—a big, wooden spinning drum tipped on its side, and you had to walk through from one end to the other, and if you tried to walk it straight, you'd actually be walking it crooked, and you'd trip and fall. Carson had had the feeling the first time he fell that he'd be caught up on the sides of the thing, tumbled around like clothes in a dryer, mangled. That hadn't happened. He'd just slid on the polished wood and scrambled back up and figured out how to walk the angle of spin. But it had meant placing his feet down not in relation to the world he saw outside the drum but only in relation to the drum itself, its large, round, silent spinning. Now he had that feeling again—that he'd entered a tunnel where his landmarks had to be not in the world he knew but in the tunnel itself.

THEY WENT, HE AGREED TO IT
. Was teased into it, or talked into it. By her or by himself. When the White River came into view, Rebecca let out a cry and nudged Orlando, and the big bay was gone. Carson watched them go. He watched her perfect back, gliding toward the gleaming and sandbarred river above the swing and torsion of the horse's striding, so that the river seemed to move toward them upward, as if a single horse and rider could change the configuration of the world and unroll its rivers uphill. He watched them approach the river, still running, and he was startled to see Orlando plunge down the sloping bank and pound into the water. A curtain of light rose into the air, obscuring and hiding Rebecca. Carson had the sense that when that curtain fell she would be gone and Orlando would be standing alone in the chalky water.

Then Orlando did stop, and the curtain of light descended into the river's surface, and the river flowed on, and Rebecca sat the horse's back. Orlando dropped his muzzle and drank. Carson walked Jesse on, having never yet urged the horse to any other pace, restraining him because that was what he needed to learn. Rebecca turned in the saddle and watched him come, then turned her back to him. Drops of water fell from her hat brim and hair. She waited for Orlando to finish drinking, then reined him around and walked him back to dry land. By the time Carson arrived, she had dismounted and was standing, holding the reins. Her shirt hung soaked and limp from her shoulders. Carson thought at first her face was just wet, then was surprised to see tears.

"What's goin on?" he asked.

"Why didn't you come after me?"

"Didn want Jesse runnin yet."

"So you'd just let Orlando take me into the river? Let me fall in a hole and disappear? And just bring jesse along slow and easy? Because you don't want him running yet?"

She lifted a palm to her face. He swung his leg over Jesse's back, stepped to the ground, and stood near the horse. He looked at her, then at the river, its slow current, the sandbars visible just under the surface of the water, then at her again.

"Wasn't Orlando takin you anywhere, Reb," he said. "You were ridin him."

"And how would you know that?"

The river shone in the sun, forced small whirlpools out of its surface, smoothed them over, flowed on.

"You sayin that ain't how it was? Sayin Orlando really was out a control?"

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just asking how
you
know how it was. How can you be so damn sure you know? Just walk along like that so smug and not even think of hurrying?"

"Smug?"

"Smug. My horse is running into the river, and you're just walking along, enjoying the damn scenery. What would you call it? What if I had fallen off? What if I'd drowned?"

He looked at her angry eyes, the hard flecks of gold in them, and the tight, straight line of her mouth. Then he looked at the river again, finally nodded at it.

"That's the White," he said. "In July. Ain't a hole deep enough to drown a cat 'n it from here to the Missouri."

But her gaze was unrelenting.

"I don' know what's goin on here, Reb," he said. "It sure don't seem to be about drownin. You really want a know, you never lost your balance. You want a fake losin control've a horse, you gotta fake losin your balance. Sway around some. Flap your arms. Slip down the saddle an grab the horn. You can't keep your back nice an straight like that. We maybe could practice it some, you really want me to break Jesse's trainin to come chasin after you next time."

For just a moment her eyes turned fierce. Even in the shadow of her hat they blazed, and he had no idea where things were going to go now. She opened her mouth—then turned her face aside, and he saw she couldn't keep a smile from beginning.

"You're a real jerk," she said. "You know that?"

"I didn't," he said.

Then he said, "Even if you'd faked it good, I probably would a trusted Orlando. Not likely a horse that smart is goin a run into a river without someone made him."

"A real jerk."

"Someone half crazy."

FRIDAY, THE SECOND WEEK OF AUGUST
. They'd unsaddled Jesse and Surety and were hanging up the tack when she asked, "You want to have a picnic? I could make some sandwiches, and we could take the horses out and watch the sun set."

Carson let his hand slip down the reins he was hanging on a hook, then released them. The reins swung against the post, clacked, swished. He turned around. Rebecca was hanging her own bridle up, not looking at him. As if the question were one she asked routinely: picnic or not tonight, what do you think? Carson thought of the pound of hamburger in his refrigerator, the browning lettuce, his grandfather's small, warped table. Or he could go eat with his parents, talk about how poorly the wheat was doing, how shriveled, and how the milo might not make a crop at all. Or maybe there'd be talk of a grass fire somewhere, or doings in Twisted Tree: someone's marriage breaking up, someone's kid going in for drug rehab, or another churchgoing high schooler pregnant.

"I think I better go on home," he said.

"I'll bring beer, too."

Talk that was all circumference. All surface.

"I need a get home."

"You have other work to do."

They looked at each other across five feet of space, each of them standing by the reins they'd just hung up. Carson couldn't affirm or deny her statement. She reached up and adjusted the bridle on the hook where she'd hung it. He watched her hands: the tendons and the hollow spaces between them, her long fingers.

"He left this afternoon," she said. "A stock growers' meeting in Sioux Falls. He won't be back until Monday."

Her face uplifted to the bridle, the hook on which it hung. Her hands adjusting it as if, working carefully enough, she could make it hang straighter, truer, more plumb. That understood "he." Silence, and Carson feeling his heart thud four distinct double-beats inside his chest, against the cage of his ribs, until she dropped her hands and turned and faced him. Eyes wide, defiant, worried, but a little triumphant.

"Why'nt you go with him?"

"Four hours in a pickup cab," she said. "Waylon Jennings tapes. Daytime motel rooms. The Empire Mall."

"The Empire Mall's one a my favorite shopping places."

She smiled, but only briefly.

"Reb," he said. "I..."

"He didn't ask me to go," she said. "Didn't even ask."

He held her eyes a moment longer, then dropped his gaze to the concrete floor. He walked to the open barn door, stood in the rhombus of light created by the descending sun. A duck rose from the stock pond below the pasture, circled the pond twice, changed its mind for some duckish reason, and angled back, braced its feet, splashed into the water precisely where it had left. Wagner Cecil, working late, banged up the driveway from the county road in Magnus's old black pickup with the metal grill welded to the front. He got out near the second machine shed and nodded across the yard at Carson, who nodded back. Carson waited for Wagner to disappear inside the machine shed before he spoke out the door.

"What kind a sandwiches?"

"Roast beef?"

"You got horseradish?"

"I do."

He turned and looked back at her, for a moment couldn't find her, his eyes stunned by the outdoor light. Then she emerged from the shadow.

"And beer, you said."

"Beer, too."

THEY SAT NEAR THE TOP OF A HILL
, the sun's angle so low it shone under the grass blades, so that the grass seemed to glow upward, emitting light. Shadows of hills cut sharp edges across swaths of gold and purple vegetation, texturing the distance. On a far hillside a herd of pronghorn antelope grazed, their rumps and sides like white rocks set into the hills, their brown bodies otherwise invisible. White rocks that shifted positions slowly against a landscape without sign of human touch, except for, a half-mile away, four parallel silver electrical lines along a county road. They ate sandwiches and drank beer.

"The way that light's in the grass," Carson pointed out, "it looks like the world's hollow and lit from inside, don't it? Shining straight up."