The Work of Wolves (19 page)

Then he saw what was going to happen, but it was too late. "Hey! Hey! Hey!" he cried. He had only time to grip the dashboard to brace and steady himself. He never thought to grab the steering wheel from Magnus and turn it. His realization was too slow. That step in the turning drum that tumbles you. That mistake of keeping your eyes on the world you know instead of the world you're in.

There was a moment of almost cartoon lightness, the faraway clouds rising up and up and the metal grill bearing down on the swinging tail and rising and falling flanks as if the pickup were merely going to boot the animal, and her body, soft and pliable, would compress momentarily and then loft high into the soft white bed of clouds.

Then Magnus quit swearing the streak he'd been swearing, and all was silent, the only sound a sound of rushing, and from another place and time a meadowlark's song, note by note dropping like individual bits of a distilled world through the window. Then the grill collapsed space, and the pickup ran right over the cow's rear legs, and the animal barked like a huge, hoarse dog amidst a sound of splintering.

THAT STUPID BITCH
won't run away again."

Out of the silence, those words.

Magnus backed the pickup away. The cow lay with its rear legs skewed like a child's crude drawing, bone erupted and glistening out of the muscle and hide. A tuft of hair and gore clung to the jagged end of a femur and fluttered in the wind. The cow tried to rise, its front hooves tapping the ground almost gently, as if to sound it, the legs gathering for a moment under the animal, knee joints knobbed and straining before collapsing. Then the animal lay still except for a deep trembling, its neck stretched forward, ears back, eyes crazed.

Magnus stared at the trembling animal, his face as gray as the clipped hair around his head. His ring tapped the gearshift knob once, the sound startling in the confines of the cab.

"You bastard," Carson said quietly. "You ran right into her. You son of a bitch."

Magnus lifted his hand off the gearshift lever, reached up, turned off the ignition key. The gold ring splashed rose and green light across the dusty dashboard. The meadowlark sang again. Wind roamed the grass.

"You best not call me a son of a bitch," he said.

"You son of a bitch. If you'd backed off, she'd a never bolted."

Beyond the windshield the cow quivered seismically.

"I don't back off. And I sure don't listen to someone like you. You and your goddamn horse breaking. You think you can come onto my place and just take over?"

Carson stepped out of the pickup. When he shut the door, the cow groaned—long, shuddering—the voice of everything broken and sad in the world. He spoke through the open window. "You invited me onto this goddamn place. And what the hell's my horse training got to do with that pathetic thing?"

But just as he turned away, he knew. He stumbled under the realization, caught himself, veered off, dazed. What did Magnus know? And how could Rebecca have told him?

He was fifty yards away, plodding through the grass, his joints weak, feeling betrayed, confused, and totally alone, when he heard the pickup start, the ball joints knocking as it neared. He glanced back, saw it looming, a menacing thing, the sun striking the windshield in a hard glaze of light, fresh blood shining on an edge of the grill. But at the last instant it turned and came alongside him, so close the mirror nearly hit him, and he could smell oil burning on the manifold.

Then he saw the rifle pointed at his chest.

Magnus held the steering wheel with his left: hand, the rifle with his right, across his chest, the barrel resting on the window frame. The green and rose ring peeked from under the synthetic stock. Carson was too sick at heart to be frightened. He stopped walking and stared at Magnus over the black barrel of the rifle. In one of Magnus's thick, gray eyebrows, a thistle seed had caught.

"What?" Carson asked. "You're goin a shoot me? Like that don't mean you're a bastard?"

Whatever Magnus believed, it didn't justify what he'd done. Even if Carson and Rebecca hadn't stopped in the doorway, that ruin of flesh back there could not be excused. This conviction fueled Carson's anger. But for a moment he thought he'd gone too far. Magnus's eyes receded into themselves, swallowing light, and he tensed, and tendons stood out on the hand wrapped around the rifle's stock. The thistle seed fluttered.

Then he smiled briefly, his teeth square and precise under his shaved upper lip. "Herding cows with horses," he said. "Shooting people. You are a believer in the old ways, aren't you?"

The wind freed the seed. It floated away. Carson's eyes followed it momentarily, then returned to Magnus, and when he saw those flat eyes again, he sensed that explanation would only make things worse. Magnus was determined to believe what he believed, and in running over the cow, he had created a need to believe it. He might believe Carson and Rebecca were physically intimate, or that they were only emotionally so, or that they were merely friends—but all these in his view overstepped a boundary. Facts and the order of events, what had happened or not happened, were irrelevant. Anything Carson might say would only confirm Magnus's convictions. Denial would confirm them. Or admission. Or silence. He'd run over the cow in rage. If he now allowed his rage to be corrected, he would have to face that cruelty for what it was, and that he couldn't afford.

Carson turned away. He wasn't sure whether he was guilty of a wrong against this man. He probably was. But he wouldn't seek forgiveness or understanding. Not after what had just happened. Not after that.

"What makes you think you can walk away?" Magnus asked quietly behind him.

Carson kept walking.

"You're still in my employ. And you've got a job to finish."

Carson turned back.

"I ain't never been in your employ."

"I say you are. And I say that cow back there needs finishing."

"You hit it. You finish it."

Magnus let the pickup roll forward until it was next to Carson again. Over the rifle they stared at each other. Magnus jabbed the rifle at Carson's chest. Carson didn't move. The barrel touched him, a round, cold imprint through his wet shirt.

"Take it. Take the rifle."

Carson turned his back. A shadow of cloud ran over the land, darkening the dust over the hill where the other men were pushing the cattle into the adjoining pasture. Such a brief time: They were still herding them. It had been only a few minutes since Carson had turned his horse back to chase the runaway cow. The lowing of the cattle and the indistinct shouts of the men reached him. Behind him the pickup door opened and shut. Tires crushed the grass, and again the pickup slid into his peripheral vision. He didn't turn his head. Magnus paced him.

"You want to quit, let's see if you can." Magnus spoke just loud enough to be heard over the racket of the muffler and the crackle of the tires. "I left that rifle back there. I'm going home, have a beer. You want to quit, I'll give you a ride. Hop in."

Carson kept walking.

"I thought so. Goddamn horse breaker. It ain't so goddamn easy to just walk away from things."

The muffler roared, the pickup spun dust out of the grass, and grasshoppers sprayed before it over the land as it fled. Carson stood stock-still watching it, until it crested the hill in front of him and disappeared, and only the dust of its leaving remained.

He turned around. The bright clouds in the west covered half the sky, billowed and broken. He looked at them. Thought of what lay back there.

"This is no goddamn time to be proud," he murmured to himself.

The rifle was lying on the ground. Under its stock, paper-clipped together, was a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Carson stared at it, unable to comprehend what it meant. He squatted down, picked it up, fingered it. Then he realized it was the money Magnus had agreed to pay him to train the horses. Plus a fourth. He could see it was all there. The deal complete. The transaction finished. The bargain kept.

He bowed his head. He wanted to throw the entire wad away. But he couldn't. The only reason he'd taken the job was because his father had agreed to it, to help out the ranch. He felt beaten, exhausted.

He stood. He pushed the wad of money into his pants pocket, hating the feel of it, the pressure and bulge. He stared at the rifle at his feet. Then he bent down and picked up the weapon and turned back toward the wounded cow.

N
ORMAN WALKS ALONE
heaved himself up from his lawn chair. His braid, streaked with gray, rippled against his shirt. He walked to the fire and stood for a few seconds staring into the washtub set on a ring of stones. The flames wrapped around the bottom of the tub, licked away. Earl had the impression his uncle was looking for an answer in the way the water boiled or the way the flies swarmed and swirled above the steam. Then Norm lifted the stick in his hand and stirred. Flies fled, returned. The sweetish smell of brain rose from the stirring. Norm turned from the fire and tub and sat back down in his lawn chair, the aluminum creaking under his weight. He adjusted the stick across his legs.

"Tell me more," he said.

"He said they were being starved. He said there were marks on them where someone had cut them. He couldn't say with what. He said it looked like someone was trying to kill them. Slow, you know?"

Norm said nothing. The fire's heat warped the air above the tub, and the trunk of the Cottonwood tree behind it shifted, blurred, floated. The cloud of flies moved strangely in that warped air. A meadowlark sang from the distance, and a near one answered, and then the far one sang again. Norm seemed to listen to the birds.

Earl knew to wait for his uncle, but he had to say a little more. He interrupted the silence. "He was so sure," he said. "But it was dark, and all we had was the moon, you know? And that big flashlight he'd brought."

"You weren't convinced."

Earl didn't know how to answer. He had been convinced. He'd been convinced even before he and Willi had walked with Carson over the hill to the horses. Been convinced the moment he'd looked back at Tower Hill and its lights flashing among the constellations and known that he'd seen a thing intended to be hidden. Or unrecognized. But he'd resisted Carson's confirming it.

"How can you be so sure?" he'd asked.

Carson had flicked on the flashlight and run it along the horses' bodies. He'd shown Earl hair growing thin and discolored, and he'd placed Earl's fingers on long, running scars that felt like giant, scaly caterpillars. He'd knelt down and said, "An look't this," and invited Earl to kneel too, and Earl had done so and felt with Carson the thin ridge along a fetlock where a bone had cracked. Or, as Carson had put it, "Been cracked. Don' know how the hell you'd do somethin like that. Hit it with a hammer, maybe."

Then he'd clicked the flashlight off. And out of the new darkness said, "An now he's starvin 'em. Ain't enough to hurt 'em. Looks like he plans to leave 'em here till they die. If you hadn't a seen 'em, they'd a just turned inna bone out here."

Against his fingertips Earl could still feel, like a residue, the thick, coarse scabs and the way the horses' skin had quivered when he touched them. His fingertips wanted to curl into a fist, press themselves into his palm. Or rub themselves on his blue jeans, or on a rock. Something. Scrape away the memory of that scarred and quivering flesh.

"But a lot of things could cause those scars, you know?" he said. "Maybe they hurt themselves, and they're penned up until they heal. Maybe we're the ones making a problem here."

And it almost made sense when he said it. His fingertips weren't convinced, but his mind almost was. Goat Man could be found anywhere, Earl thought. Those who hunted him could smell him in smoke from a fire, find his track in the way a grass blade bent. Their eyesight could be too good, their hearing too acute.

"Look't this pen," Carson said. He flicked the flashlight back on and ran it all the way around the barbwire fence surrounding them. Earl's eyes followed it, a faint circle of light hitting the barbs and gleaming in the wire, and touching the grass beyond the fence in a dim oval. When the light returned to where Carson had started it, he flicked it off again. "What makes this different from any pen you've ever seen?" he asked.

Earl wasn't in the mood for a riddle. "It looks like a fence to me," he said.

Willi, who'd been silent, spoke. "I see what you are seeing. There is no way to leave."

It was true. The strands of barbwire went corner to corner without a gate.

"Whoever built this fence," Carson said, "must a built it around these animals. An he didn't intend they'd be walkin out. Not unless he tore the fence down."

"That," Norm said, when Earl had finished telling this, "is a spooky thing, nephew."

That's what Earl had felt, too. He'd thought of someone bringing the horses to that spot of ground, staking them, then methodically building this fence around them, digging the holes for the wooden corner posts, pounding the steel posts into the ground, stretching and clipping the wire, all while the horses watched. Then walking away. He'd thought of that person walking away. Carrying his tools.

Norm pushed down on the stick he held in both hands, drove it into the ground and rose up from his chair on it. He went to the fire, stared into the washtub again. After a while Earl rose and stood beside him. They listened to the buzz of flies.

"You told your mother about this?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't want. She would..."

Norm leaned his entire weight into the stick, his huge hands around its top. He put his chin in the hollow of his thumb.

"My sister-in-law," he said. "She would have asked you what you were doing in that pasture. Hanh? That would have been her first question."

Earl said nothing, and Norm twisted the stick back and forth, its end digging into the ashy ground at his feet.

"And I guess," he said, "it's my third or fourth."

"What?"

"Question. It's not my first, but I am asking it."