The Work of Wolves (48 page)

O
NE BY ONE THE HORSES FELL
in separate canyons, collapsing and losing shape and sinking into the ground until they looked as if they would go through the soil and disappear, kicking and twitching until the kicking and twitching stopped, and they lay immense and still.

T
HEY DIDN'T SPEAK
the whole long walk back. The mute way the horses had faced the pistol and the mute way they had fallen had infected the four of them, so that when they thought of speaking, the words rose like underwater things in their throats and sank back down to silence. Above them the Dog Star loped down its lanes of loneliness. They felt they would never leave what they'd just done. It would always be close. Always proximate. None of them knew a word in any language for what they were feeling: regret that is not regret, regret that points not to futility and uselessness but to necessity and so demarcates the stark but not barren oudines of the world. None of them had a word for this. They had to let their silence speak it. They walked side by side when they could, sometimes touching, letting the accidental drift and bump happen and maintaining the contact a fraction longer than mere accident would allow.

In the dark of early morning, they emerged into time again and stared at Ted's car parked where they had left it—a vague memory, almost familiar, from another life. They milled around it and did not enter it, until slowly the future returned to them, and they knew its urgency and remembered the coming light. Then they opened the doors and settled into their seats, and Ted started the engine and turned the car around and drove back the way they had come.

"We're just making new tracks," Earl said at one point.

No one answered him for a long time. The car ground onward. The lights of Twisted Tree appeared in the sky, a faint glowing, and high against them the red, blinking lights of Tower Hill, on and off and on.

"Maybe it will snow some more," Willi finally offered.

"Maybe."

But the thought of being found out no longer mattered to any of them. They couldn't bring its consequences into their imaginations. Their minds were consumed by the recent past and couldn't shape any detailed future.

"He wanted 'em gone," Ted said. "Why would he bother to report 'em?"

"Maybe he won't. But then why did he let them starve in the first place?"

Another long silence. The red lights rose over them, and Red Medicine Creek, off on their right, began to widen, and they were back in familiar territory—above them, the fence they had crossed so often when the horses were pastured by the artesian spring, and below them, the ice of Lostman's Lake spreading inward from the shore to the dark, lapping waves at its center. Ted drove out of the old road, and the swish of frozen grass bending under the car turned to the crunch of gravel under cold snow.

"Jesus," Carson said, "I'm tired."

Suddenly they were all exhausted. Drained. The words provoked weariness from their veins and bones, and they slumped against the doors and seats momentarily like drunks. They were halfway past the lake, the shoreline just a few yards from them, when Ted's burritos had the effect they had feared. His hands loose on the wheel, Ted leaned back in his seat, bracing his left leg against the floorboard, to lift his butt from the upholstery.

"This'11 wake us up," he said.

And ripped an enormous fart.

As he did, his braced foot caught one of the burrito wrappers he'd thrown on the floor earlier and pushed it upward. At the same time the headlights dimmed, the wire under the dashboard sizzled, and then the headlights died entirely and the car erupted into flames. It all happened at once, the lights from outside the car suddenly sucked inside to become flame, and they could no longer see out at all. The flames rose up from under the dashboard, spreading from the pile of greasy wrappers as if they were gasoline. They caught Ted's pants leg and the car's upholstery, so quickly the air itself seemed to have caught fire.

For a moment they were stunned. They sat in the burning vehicle staring at what was happening, all four of them, and in that time the fire leapt from the upholstery to the roof and ran backwards in a sizzling sheet. They ducked. Ted rammed the transmission into
PARK,
and all four doors opened, and they tumbled onto the frozen gravel headfirst, reaching out with their arms to break their falls, spreading away from each other and from the burning car in four directions.

Earl, who was on Ted's side, lay for a moment in the snow. Then he thought of the possibility of the gas tank catching fire. He jumped up and heard flames outside the car and then Ted's voice, shouting, but oddly calm and unconcerned.

"Shit! I'm on fire!"

Earl looked up, and the sight that met his eyes was so strange, grotesque, and unexpected that at first he didn't comprehend it. When Ted fell from the car, the snow had extinguished the fire on his pants cuff, but his coat had ignited, and he was crawling around on his hands and knees in a little circle, proclaiming loudly that he was on fire—flames shooting out of his back and rising into the air above him. His hands and knees were scurrying frantically, and snow was flying from them, and the fire on his back was casting shadows that doubled his limbs, so that he looked to Earl like a great and grotesque and flaming spider spinning some notionless spider-web in the snow.

Earl walked over, put his foot on the side of Ted's ribs, and kicked him over.

He pushed so hard Ted lifted off the ground, his legs and arms still flailing, and flipped onto his back. The fire sizzled in the snow. Ted lay staring up at Earl, slowly waving his arms and legs as if they were winding down, while the car blazed behind them, throwing lurid, orange light.

Earl knelt next to Ted. "Are you all right?"

"I think so." Ted wiggled his back against the ground.

Earl held out his hand. Ted grasped it, and Earl pulled him to his feet. The fire had burned the outer shell of Ted's coat but hadn't burned completely through the insulation and inner membrane. The back of the coat was a charred hole, with blackened filler sticking out of it, but Ted was unharmed except for his long hair, which had curled from the heat, leaving the nape of his neck exposed.

Carson and Willi had come around the car. Carson slapped some of the char off Ted's coat. "Nice haircut," he said.

"Look at my car!"

They suddenly all recalled the car, which by now was a flaming wreck, fire bursting from all four doors, sheets of hot vapor lifting into the air.

"We must the doors shut!" Willi ran to the car, shielding his face with his hands, and kicked the driver's door shut, backed away for a moment, then did the same thing to the back door. Earl and Carson, seeing what he was doing, ran to the other side and did the same thing. Immediately the flames, deprived of oxygen, diminished, and within a few seconds the car darkened and filled with smoke, and the last orange light within it died.

"What do we do now?" Willi asked.

Though it was still dark, the eastern horizon was graying.

"Damn good question," Carson said.

Their predicament slowly became clear to them all. "Even Longwell might just figure out a connection between that"—Earl nodded at the car—"and those horses disappearing. If it comes to that."

"If the fire did not the engine reach," Willi suggested hopefully, "maybe we could drive it."

"Be a bit hot," Carson said.

"Sure is full a smoke, enit? If we opened and closed the doors, we could send messages. Sell it to the phone company, improve service on the rez."

"There you go."

"Or we got us a Port-a-Hell. We could sell tickets. All them born-agains? What'd they give to ride in that? Take it to Rapid City, Denver. Better 'n winning a bingo game."

"Has anyone noticed morning is coming?" Earl asked.

They all looked at the eastern sky.

"Truth is," Ted said, "that car ain't worth a thing. Maybe we should just make it disappear. Use some old-time Indian magic. What they used to do when they needed a vehicle to disappear."

"They did not have vehicles in the old-time days," Willi informed him.

"They didn't? Well, they used this on travois, then."

"What the hell you talkin about?" Carson asked.

Ted started to grin. His face was covered with streaks of soot, and he looked like a demented clown who'd had an accident with his makeup.

"Time for a magic act," he said. He pointed with his lips to the open water in the middle of the lake. "Courtesy the Army Corps of Engineers."

THEY GATHERED AT THE CAR'S REAR
, with Ted in the open driver's door to steer. They feared that when he opened the door, the car might burst into flames again, but all that happened was that Ted disappeared for a moment in the cloud of smoke that rolled out. Then they all pushed. The car moved slowly at first, gaining momentum, then rolling down the slope of the shore as they stopped and watched it. They expected it to break through the ice and sink, but instead it rolled ponderously off the frozen gravel and with a squeak of springs and a sigh and crack of ice, squatted on the lake. They stared at it.

"What do we do now?"

"Hafta keep going," Ted said.

"Walk out there an push that sonofabitch? Are you nuts? If we're pushin when it sinks, we're gonna go with it. Unless you got some way we can walk on water."

"We'll push it until we don't think it's safe, enit? Then we'll start it and put it in gear and let it go the rest of the way on its own."

"Why not just do that right now?"

"Can't be sure it'll go straight. It's gotta go toward that open water. We get it going, and it turns and just drives around on the ice, we really got a mess."

"I can't swim. You know that?"

"Don't matter. You fall through that ice, the cold'll kill you even if you can swim."

"Well, hell, let's go then. I thought I had somethin to worry about."

They walked tentatively onto the ice, one at a time, and approached the car. The ice creaked but held, and they put their gloved hands to the trunk lid and began to push. The car moved slowly out toward the center of the lake.

They were about fifty yards from shore when the first crack came, loud as lightning splintering the sky. It started at their feet and boomed away, the lake suddenly and dangerously alive, the ice shuddering and vibrating in the soles of their boots. Sound and space were sucked into the splintering and then suddenly given back, and they jerked their hands off the car and stood completely still, letting the vehicle roll a few feet away from them.

"We're still here," Ted noted.

"And so's it."

The car crouched on the ice like an obstinate animal. Behind Tower Hill the sky was lightening, the clouds above the towers glowing faint orange.

"We gotta get that damn thing sunk before someone drives by on the highway."

"Go on back," Ted said. "I'll take care of it."

The open water was thirty yards away, lapping quietly at the ice, chuckling and subsiding. The cold smell of it came to them.

Ted started to shuffle toward the car. The others didn't move.

"Go back," he said.

"What if you fall through?"

"Then you probably ain't gonna be able to save me anyway."

"I wish we had a rope brought."

"We didn't expect to be drownin a car."

Ted shuffled forward, taking baby steps. His diminished hair blew about his ears, and the hole in his coat widened in the wind like a mouth opening, full of blackened teeth. The ice trembled. Underneath their feet the water was so near. A few inches. And then it went down. To a cold and rocky bottom, where trees stood upright yet, their naked branches lifting leafless to a sky that had been withdrawn from them. If the car would go through and open the ice to all of them, and if cold and weight would take them, they would drift down to hang like misshapen fruits in that forest of desert trees. Earl thought of how the spirits of that world, wandering between barkless trees and branches, might come upon them hanging head down. He thought of how silent it would all be, how silent the four of them and how silent the spirits contemplating this detritus from the upper world where they themselves had once moved and acted. It was the thought of that silence more than anything that made Earl shiver. How the spirits would look and pass on.

Ted reached the car and touched it and opened the door, and the ice held, though the creaking of the hinges seemed enough to shatter the world.

"Ted," Carson called. "Don't get in the thing. Start it standing."

Ted stared into the blackened interior of the car. They saw his head bend down to look, saw his burned and matted hair fall forward over his face. Then he stood erect and gazed at the open water. A breeze shivered over it, and it broke into a million points that then went still, and empty blackness settled there. Ted stood stock still, his back to them.

"Ted?" Earl called.

Ted turned slowly around, his face somber as stone. He didn't seem to see them, though he looked right at them. Earl, seeing his eyes as empty as the water's surface behind him, felt a jolt of fear. "Ted," he said again, more quietly.

Then Ted's teeth suddenly flashed white in his blackened face. "You're all supposed to be back on shore by now. You know what? I wouldn't get in this thing for a dozen burritos and a beer."

He reached inside the car and wrapped his arm around the steering column to find the ignition key. Gritty snow scampered along the ice and struck the car with a sound like sand.

Ted turned the key. The whole lake shook beneath the engine's rocking, and a second great splintering thundered through the ice, echoed off the hills surrounding the lake, rebounded and echoed again. They stood within the sound, paralyzed.

"Sometimes it don't start right away," Ted said.

"Christ!"

Ted turned the key again, and again the ice trembled as the starting motor rocked the vehicle. The lake felt like gelatin beneath their feet. Then the engine caught and smoothed and ran, and the ice stopped moving. Ted waited a moment to be sure the car would keep running, then pulled the gearshift lever down. The car lurched forward. He stayed with it for three steps, his hand inside the door, holding the steering wheel.