Wolves (11 page)

In the bedroom, Father takes each tiny pup, their fur soft as down and hot with life, takes them by the back legs and swings them sharply against the floor to break their necks. They strike the ground with hollow thuds and their high-pitched whines cease.

In the kitchen, the child winces at the sound. His eyes are burning, tears coming to them, not for grief over the dogs, but because he fears he's done something wrong, that finally he's done that bad thing that will cause him to be abandoned. Father said he wasn't mad, but Lowell could tell he wasn't happy. Lowell was only trying to help. He was only trying to get meat for them, and he knew that Father wouldn't want to fire his gun because it was so loud … 

He blinks away the tears, hoping that Father and Mother will still keep him. Hoping that the meat from the dog will convince them to let him stay. He stares up at his spear and watches as a single drop of blood meanders down the shaft of his spear toward his dirty hands, growing smaller as it travels, and he does not take his eyes off of it until the din of the anxious litter has fallen silent.

Chapter 2

Lowell doesn't cry when Father makes him skin the bitch. He just kind of goes still inside. His eyes have a half-lidded, uncaring quality, like he's gone into a place where he can't be affected by things. Father has seen him go here before. It seems like this is where he goes when there is death or blood around. Some holdover from those mysterious times when he was just a child in the Wastelands, by himself.

His hands shake a bit, but Father helps him. Father's hands are cold, but they are very steady when they grab his firmly and help guide the knife. Lowell is amazed at the resilience of animal skin. It takes a lot of effort to get it through.

“Her skin is tough,” Lowell says, wonderingly. “It doesn't cut like people skin.”

Father gives him a long look, then turns back to their work. “Well … it ain't skin, it's hide. People have skin, and it's delicate. Animals have hide, and it's tough.”

He helps Lowell work the blade from the dog's anus, carefully between her swollen teats. They nick one of the milk glands and white liquid bubbles over the meat. Lowell looks at Father with an expression that says,
I've done something wrong.
Father had clearly told him not to accidentally cut the dog's innards, that it might spoil the meat.

Father shakes his head. “It's okay. Keep going. Milk ain't gonna hurt nothing.”

Lowell continues working the blade, careful to keep the tip away from the dog's guts.

After Lowell had killed the bitch, and Father had dispatched the last of the litter of helpless puppies—mercy, though it didn't seem like it—he'd come out into the main area of the dilapidated trailer and he'd held Lowell firmly by the shoulders. He explained what Lowell had to do, and why.

“Sometimes you have to kill. Maybe it's an animal, or maybe it's a person. But each time you kill, you have to bear the consequences. If you kill a man, you have to bury him. If you kill an animal, you have to skin and eat it. If you don't bear the consequences, then you'll kill without respect or thought, and that is very dangerous.”

The work goes on, pulling the skin, heaving the gut-sack out onto the ground. Severing the trachea. Cutting around the anus, so now all the innards can be separated from the meat and bones that are left. The knife blade trembles in his hand as he works. It always shakes, every time, but Lowell does the work anyway. Father regards his son with some mix of curiosity and concern.

Sometimes Father forgets about Lowell's past. These days when he seems both child and strange adult are a grim reminder that Father and Mother don't really know the person they've adopted. It seems sometimes that the child barely knows himself.

The shakes have gone from Lowell's hand, and now he works with the knife to cut through the tendons of the hip and pulls the rear quarters from the hip bone with a soggy crunch.

It is moments like these that Mother would have looked at Lowell like a stranger.

Father gently takes the knife. “I'll finish it up. You did good.”

The boy nods and takes a step back, but he hovers over Father's shoulder and watches, blank-faced, as the gory work is done. They pack the meat into a bit of tarpaulin to keep the blood from soaking through Father's satchel and then they set out for home. They cannot continue to scavenge as he fears the meat will spoil, and they cannot build a fire to cook it because it would take too much time and possibly draw attention.

Their home is set far into the dry, desertlike plains, because that is the safest place now—away from the highways, away from the roads where people travel and slavers pass. It takes them three hours to hike it, and they do not stop until they reach their destination, neither the man nor the child. Lowell handles the march stoically.

The home is an old streamline trailer, the bright aluminum paneling faded with a caking of dust so that it camouflages itself into the surrounding countryside. It sits nestled into a cavity made in the hollow of a jumble of boulders, each one nearly twice the size of the trailer. This is how they found it, years ago. No sign as to how it got there.

The door in the side of the trailer swings open and Mother steps out, a tall woman, and very slender so her cheekbones appear very prominent, almost severe. She is dressed in an old pair of khaki pants fitted for a man and several sizes too large so that the waist is cinched in with a belt. She wears a similarly sized denim shirt, tucked in, and the rolled-up sleeves reveal that her arms, skinny like the rest of her, show the tough cordage of hard work.

A smile from her is rare indeed, both for him and Father. But she favors them with one now, as she usually does when Father returns.

Father smiles back and waves.

As they near, she steps down and greets them. “Your pack looks full.”

“It is.” Father puts his hand around the boy's shoulders. “Lowell here caught us some meat.”

Mother looks down at him and smiles brightly, so he knows that he has done well. “Really? Well, thank you very much, Lowell!”

The boy beams.

Father slips a hand into the strap of Lowell's pack and relieves him of it. “How about you go get us some water?”

Still feeling very proud of himself, Lowell takes to the task quickly. As Father and Mother disappear inside the trailer, Lowell takes an old plastic pail from where it sits near the rickety steps to the trailer's door. He inspects the sides and bottom and inside, checking for scorpions or brown recluses or black widows, all of which could kill him in a heartbeat, Father had told him once.

When he finds the pail arachnid-free, he takes it toward a dark hole amidst the boulders. Father has to squirm into this spot, but Lowell accesses it easily, his small frame fitting inside the narrow opening without his shoulders touching either side. In the dim hollow, the scent of water is the cleanest thing he has smelled all day. A glistening wet patch trickles from a fissure in the rock and gathers in a sandy-bottomed pool. He dips the pail into the pool and fills it. Lowell doesn't know how much water this small spring provides each day, but he knows that it is more than they are able to use in a day.

Once he asked Father why they didn't barter the water off.

“Because,” Father had replied very seriously. “If anyone ever found out we had water, they'd kill us for it.”

Chapter 3

Dawn has crept up on Huxley like a spurned dog.

Jay and Rigo and Gordon sleep fastly. Huxley watches them, wondering how sleep came so sweetly to them. For himself, it eluded him all night until frustration and anger forced him to give up trying. He sits on a clump of dirt, unrested, feeling twitchy and wakeful. His body aches for sleep, but his mind will not allow it.

Last night … 

He shakes his head at the thought. What about it? What about last night? The things that were done? To the man who Huxley showed what it was like to have his jaw taken? To the woman who was shown what it was like to be the victim of wild men in the throes of bloodlust?

Huxley doesn't let it touch him.

He doesn't
dare
let it touch him.

To give into it, to acknowledge it, to look it in the face and to wonder what was wrong with him … that would only make him weak. It would only make him hesitate. And what does he have to live for? Nothing. That much he'd already determined. Jay had put into words the feeling that Huxley had known for a long, long time. He has nothing left to live for, and so he has no hope. And without hope, there is no fear. Reprisal, consequences, both for his body and his soul—they mean nothing to him. Good has become evil, and evil good.

Guilt and shame are useless. He holds his anger in his chest, like you might hold your head above water and wait for the floods to recede. He will not change what he has done. He will just harden himself to it. He will throw away all thoughts of goodness. He will throw away his gentle memories. He will be the animal that they made him become.

This is their doing.

Not his.

Huxley accepts the new day, calcified and bone dry in his soul.

This is the path you have chosen. And now you are hurtling down it. You've crested that hill, and it is all momentum now. You cannot be stopped. You can only plunge ahead. If you try to stop yourself, if you try to slow yourself, you will only succeed in tearing yourself to pieces.

Beside him, Jay comes awake as the sun glimmers against his face, the light setting the fine blonde hairs of his eyelids and brows alight. His pale eyes open, but he doesn't move, staying motionless on his side with his hands folded beneath his head, a strangely beatific pose. The acceptance that Huxley has only just found seems something that Jay has made peace with long ago. His near-colorless eyes land on Huxley and they linger there with curiosity.

Huxley looks away, into the sun. “Sleep well?”

Jay only grunts and rises into a sitting position.

Huxley looks at the wagon that hulks beside them. Bullet holes pock through the graying board walls. One of the two oxen hangs dead in its yoke, a bloody chunk of flesh missing from its hindquarters. The other stands indifferent, chewing its cud. The wagon itself is empty, but it still smells of people. It still smells like a latrine.

“You think they sold them already?” Huxley asks.

“I don't think they attacked Borderline with them in the wagon,” Jay says. “So maybe they'd pawned them off before those three ever walked into the whorehouse. Who knows where they are.” Jay's fingers start up again. “Maybe there's a … stash house or something.”

Huxley pictures that. All the slaves stuffed into a little shack, tied and bound and waiting in thirst and starvation for the slavers to return. Except that they wouldn't. And Huxley had not asked them where all those slaves had been taken to. He'd taken the one man's jaw in a fit of rage, and the woman with the black braid refused to say anything. She just wept and told them to get it over with.

“Ain't shit we can do about it now,” Huxley says quietly, rising to his aching feet. He wishes he'd been able to sleep. He looks to the wagon, glances up those long poles with the jawbones on top. He stares at them for a while.

“We should leave them on,” Jay says.

Huxley sneers in distaste. “Why the hell would I leave them on?”

“So people will think we're slavers. Then they won't mess with us.”

Huxley gives it the minimum consideration possible, then walks over to the back of the wagon and yanks the pole from its brackets and lets it fall. The sound of it hitting the ground reverberates through the pole and clatters through the dead teeth, loud and sacrilegious in the silent morning air. Then he walks to the other side and does the same thing with the other pole.

He stands there and stares at them laying on the ground. He considers it for a time, then makes another decision. He hefts them up and slides them into the back of the wagon. He cringes as his hands glide over dried gore that, over the years, has dripped down from fresh jaws and hardened at the base of the poles.

Rigo and Gordon are now awake. Huxley supposes the noise of the poles hitting the ground was enough to stir them. They are standing near their makeshift beds—the ones stolen from the slavers—and regarding him with bleary eyes, but still curious.

Huxley motions to the poles, still wrinkling his nose with disgust. “Proof,” he says.

It is only then that he forces his eyes out into the surrounding scrub brush where the bodies of the slavers have been laid out, away from the campsite. Huxley has noticed the shadows of buzzards beginning to circle, but he is surprised that coyotes never came in the night. Not like they did at the Mexicans' caravan.

The four men are clothed, bloody.

The woman is naked.

Hold your head above the water,
Huxley tells himself.
Keep breathing.

“Gather the dead,” he tells the others. “Put them in the wagon.”

Gordon scratches his head, looking at the bodies. “Why?”

Huxley gives him a sharp glance. “Because I said so. And because we're taking them to New Amarillo. We're gonna ditch this shit there so that town knows these fucks are dead and they ain't coming for them. Let New Amarillo bury them.”

Jay makes a dubious noise.

Huxley looks at him. “Problem?”

Jay looks at the bodies. “That might bring more attention.”

But Gordon and Rigo are already moving toward the bodies.

“No,” Gordon says. “No problem.”

“And put some clothes back on the woman,” Huxley says.

They load the wagon with the dead, piled in beside their slavers poles. Huxley looks out into the low brush surrounding them. He cannot see much of the man he killed. Just his leg. He wonders if he should take this body, but decides against it. The rest have been shot and killed. This one had his jaw taken. Huxley does not want to show that to whoever will be taking these bodies at New Amarillo. He doesn't want to answer questions about it.

The horses that are still alive, they string up in a chain that trails the wagon. The dead animals—an ox and a few horses—are stripped haphazardly and the meat piled in the back of the wagon, away from the rest of the dead, as though the human corpses would spoil the food. Gordon and Rigo ride horses, but Huxley and Jay take positions on the bench seat of the wagon, and Huxley takes the reins. The load is light, and the ox moves them along without much trouble, even though it is only one now.

In the rocking, swaying of the wagon, in the bright sunshine that thaws him from the chill of the night before, Huxley holds to the reins, but he finds his eyes heavy. He drifts in that odd state between asleep and awake, the movement of the wagon simultaneously relaxing him, and then jolting him up out of unconsciousness, so that he bobs in the shallow end.

He does not like this place in his mind.

He has no control over what comes for him.

Nadine … 

My sweet girl.

Memories and dreams meld, and they are dangerous in their perceived realism as the Texas landscape rumbles by and is lost in the visions that take over his brain for short periods. He sees his girl. Of course, he cannot see the details, he can't seem to get those back, all the little things that made her
her
. It is the same with his daughter as it is with his wife. The small things are lost. But the broad strokes are there. Like he is looking through dark glass at her.

Him and her.

Him and his daughter.

His sweet girl. His Nadine.

Standing outside and looking up at a night sky full of stars … 

He is jolted out of his memories by the tires passing over a rut. He jerks a bit, taking a sharp breath in. Had he been asleep? He doesn't think he had been. Gone is the night sky. Gone is the cold air. Gone is the warmth of his daughter holding to him. Gone is the hope for a better future.

Replacing all of this is more empty landscape.

To his left, a man he barely knows, with pale gray eyes that sometimes seem soulless. To his right are two other men that he knows even less. A Mexican who he almost killed for stealing water. And another man he almost killed because … because he
could.

He looks down at his hands. Hard hands. Holding reins. He can see the darkness of blood, the way it sits in the fine lines of his knuckles, the way it crusts in the tiny valleys of his unique handprint. Sitting like black dirt beneath his fingernails. Crusting his cuticles. He would not touch his daughter with these hands.

He takes a glance behind him.

His periphery sees the bodies, the haphazard way they are strewn on top of each other. Flies swarm around them, and around the piles of meat stripped from the dead animals. The slavers' poles still lay there with their dismantled jawbones still tethered.

He looks forward again.

She would not recognize me
, he tells himself.
Wild man with a beard that touches his chest. Wild man with murder in his eyes. Stranger who calls himself Huxley and murders and encourages others to murder. Man with blood on his hands. Who are you?

No one she knows.

She would not recognize you.

They arrive back in New Amarillo by noon.

Even with the pikes and their grotesque ornaments removed, the wagon is still reminiscent of slavers, and the group receives stares as they stop their small column just inside the ring of adobe-and-scrap constructed buildings that makes up the settlement's southern perimeter. Those who stare do so quickly and then move on. But they also garner the attention of the guards, a red-banded man appearing around this corner, two around that corner.

Huxley steers the lone ox off to the side, stopping the wagon just beside the wooden boardwalks where one of the red-banded guards is standing, hand lazily draped over a scattergun. The guard stretches himself up and forward a bit, peering into the bed of the wagon. Huxley watches him. His eyes narrow slightly, then he realizes what he's looking at, and he looks at Huxley.

“The hell is this?” the guard says, settling back on his heels.

His feet spread, ever-so-slightly. Grip on the scattergun a little more firm.

Huxley holds up his hands to show he's not going to fight.

Off to the side, Rigo and Gordon are sitting in their saddles, relaxed, or tired. They don't raise their hands. Neither does Jay. He regards the red-banded man with an expression that dares.
Crank that scattergun
, Huxley can almost hear the other man thinking.
I fucking dare you.

“They're dead bodies,” Huxley says without humor or sarcasm.

“I can see that.” The guard's eyes flit here and there, to each person in Huxley's little group of killers, and then over their shoulders to the opposite boardwalk where Huxley knows there are more guards gathering. “Where'd they come from?”

Huxley spits into the dirt. “Slavers.”

“Slavers?”

“Yeah.” Huxley lowers his hands. “I'd like to speak to your boss … head guard … whatever.”

The guard's eyes go off to the side.

Huxley follows his gaze.

A man is standing behind the wagon. He has one foot up on the boardwalk, one down in the dirt. He is a middle-aged man with the slightest paunch to his gut, but everything else seems wiry. He wears a white cowboy hat turned dingy beige, and a single revolver in fine leather holster at his side.

The man smiles at Huxley. “Can you believe they wanted to call me a ‘Public Safety Officer'?” He laughs, his hands settling back to his waistband. His gunbelt, actually. “I told 'em, ‘Hell no. You can call me Captain of the Guard or you can find someone else.'”

Huxley looks into the man's eyes. He judges him. Senses that he is also being judged. Then he fixates on the dingy Stetson. “Nice hat,” Huxley remarks without enthusiasm.

The man's smile broadens. He looks up at it shading his eyes. “Yeah. I'm partial to them. Besides, you know folks seem to respect a man in a hat. Not sure why. They just do.”

“Interesting.” Huxley turns fully in his seat so he's not cranking his neck to speak to the captain. He nods at the cargo in his bed. “Bodies.”

“I see that.”

“Slavers.”

“So I gather.”

“You want them?”

“Not particularly.”

Huxley grunts, half-amused at the situation. A quick glance around reveals that there are now five red-banded guards surrounding them.

Jay lets out a little chuckle. “I told you this was a bad idea,” he says in a quiet sing-song voice.

Gordon shifts in his saddle, glaring at the captain. He points to the bodies in the wagon. “These fucks is the ones that hit Borderline. Don't know if you heard about that yet.”

The captain's smile falters a bit. “I hadn't heard that news. How'd you hear about it?”

“'Cause I was there,” Gordon snaps back. “I was one of the sentries.”

The captain's pleasant demeanor is completely gone now. “Well shit. Y'all had decent walls. What the fuck happened?”

Gordon's eyes twitch just slightly toward Huxley and Jay, but he seems to remember himself. He seems to remember where he stands. “Some boys I don't know got into a shoot-out with some other boys I don't know. Turns out some of the boys that got shot was slavers. They were posing as traders to come swap some of the shit they stole during raids. Got recognized by some of the folks they raided from and gunned down in the whorehouse.” Gordon rubs his eyebrows and Huxley sees his hand shaking just a bit. “Rest of the slavers didn't appreciate it. Came for a reckoning. We told them the guys that shot their men had already left off and they should do the same. Slavers didn't like that answer. Shot us up and lit the place on fire. Half of it was burned by the time I made it out.”