Fall Back Down When I Die Read online

  Gillian studied her daughter, how long and lean she was—that was all Kevin. And her smile, slight dimples even now. That was Kevin too. God, the man could just smile. She tried to hold back, but the years collapsed, and she felt her eyes go watery.

  —Oh, Mom, don’t cry.

  Maddy rose and in two graceful steps was there, her arms around her mother. Though taller than Gillian by a couple of inches, out of habit she nestled her head into the crook of her mother’s neck. Gillian hugged her back tightly.

  —Thanks, honey. You know you just remind me so much of him. More and more all the time. You were so young. Sometimes I worry you’ll forget him.

  Maddy pulled away.

  —Why don’t we ever visit? Delphia, I mean. It’d be a way for me to know him, right? To see where he grew up? Where the three of us lived?

  Gillian let go a long breath. Though Maddy hadn’t asked in years, she used to, often, and Gillian had had to plan, practice, and revise her responses. Kevin’s mother, Elner, was in Delphia, and it had been hard convincing a little girl it wasn’t a good idea to go to Grandma’s house. But Gillian had done it. She had to—she knew she wasn’t strong enough to face them. Not there, anyway. Not in those mountains. Before Elner got so sick with Parkinson’s, she had visited Gillian and Maddy in Billings a couple of times. She’d been funny and irreverent, as she always was, but Gillian could no longer write off Elner’s ignorance as the harmless quirks of an old country woman. No, these ideas had real consequences, and Gillian seethed whenever Elner mentioned another farm foreclosure and blamed it on what “they” were doing to rural America. Gillian couldn’t stand the camo-and-pink outfits Elner bought for Maddy or the GLOBAL WARMING: ANOTHER LIBERAL TAX SCAM bumper sticker on the back of Elner’s truck. She dealt as best she could with the visits in Billings, but whenever Maddy asked after her aunts or for a visit to the ranch, Gillian explained to her daughter that sometimes a family just couldn’t spend time together, that it was sad but true, and that after what had happened to him, her father wouldn’t want them to know that place or those people—not anymore. Gillian repeated that mantra now with little variation from when Maddy had been a newly fatherless six-year-old.

  —We’re what mattered to him. You and me. Not that place. I promise you, he’s here with us more than he is anywhere else.

  Gillian touched her own chest, then her daughter’s.

  —He’s right here, honey.

  —I know, Maddy said. In our hearts.

  It was a familiar recitation. He’s right here, in our hearts. Mother and daughter could have chanted it together, if they’d wanted, with the same attendant intonations and pacing, yet even for their familiarity, the words still touched all the old delights and wounds. Now Maddy’s eyes slicked with tears, and she stood there a moment longer, letting Gillian look at her, take her in, then wiped at her eyes and slipped away, settled back onto the floor. She winged her arms behind her, twisted up her hair, and pinned it with a pencil. Plugged in her earbuds once more.

  She moved like a ribbon, Gillian thought. A spill of ribbon. She shook her head. That long, thick raven hair wasn’t Kevin’s. That was hers. When Maddy was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, Gillian remembered wishing she’d end up as straight-hipped and slim as Kevin. But though Maddy had Kevin’s height, her chest and hips, her every curving, were Gillian’s. The girl would be downright gorgeous in a year or two when she figured out how to put it all together. Gillian hoped, anyway, that it would take a year or two, so that when it happened Maddy would be off at college meeting people as smart and as interesting as she was. Gillian watched her daughter’s lips move, in silence at first, then with a throaty whisper. Though she would have liked to stay and listen, she closed her daughter’s door and made her way back down the hall.

  In the kitchen Gillian rooted in her purse and found her phone. She poured another glass of chardonnay, then called Dave Coles. The phone rang, and rang, and beeped:

  —You’ve got Dave Coles, publisher, editor, lead reporter, and errand boy at the Colter Courier, eastern Montana’s best newspaper! Leave a detailed message, and I’ll get right back to you. That’s my newspaperman’s promise!

  —Hi, Dave. Gillian. Haven’t seen you over at the Boiler Room lately. Want to grab a drink this Friday? And, if you would, check around for anything you have on a Tricia Wilson. And a guy she’s associated with named Brian. Maybe a husband, maybe just shacked up. I’m not sure. But probably a Delphia graduate. Or not necessarily a graduate but, you know, a Delphia kid. Anyway, it’s about Tricia’s boy, Tavin. Hoping we can keep him in school. Thanks. See you Friday.

  Gillian took her wineglass to the couch and clicked a lamp on. Dave Coles’s great-grandfather had published the first edition of the Courier in 1908, and alongside churning out the weekly, Dave now curated a dusty, slipshod museum of sorts out of the newspaper offices. Two years ago, when Gillian was filling in for a social studies teacher who’d quit midyear, she and her students spent a good chunk of the semester at the old brick Courier building on Main, researching and putting together a town-history pamphlet. Dave was kind and peculiar and full of stories, and though his goofiness always made her shake her head, he truly cared about his community. He’d helped her out before, when it meant getting a bond passed or not letting the school-board members fire a good teacher because of their problems with her politics or just keeping a kid out of trouble. And though he was Colter through and through, Dave liked to dip his toe into the city. He enjoyed the rib eye over at Jake’s and often held court at the Boiler Room.

  Gillian took a swallow of wine, and another, and soon set the empty glass on the coffee table. The streetlights came on. An evening breeze drifted through the ash trees, knocked against the sliding glass door. She tried to read her novel but couldn’t concentrate for the wine behind her eyes, for hearing her daughter’s voice, indistinct but rising now and again into a pure, sure note.

  Verl

  Day Six of the New Dispensation

  You see now I have given this here a fine new title. I have said no to your laws that would not let a man shoot a vicious animal on his own land. That would neuter a man on his own land. You are the ones that put the wolves back in this country that was just fine without them. And I have said no and am here in this country that has borne me and held me and that I have loved.

  I am living this new way. This is a new dispensation.

  Also you best understand this isn’t for me. This isn’t some kind of diary book my boy’s mother would keep. I’ve no need to write this down. Don’t mistake it. I could live out here on the land without another soul around the rest of my born days and be goddamn happy as a buck goat.

  Later

  I have been thinking. All this day I have been walking. I have not done such walking as I’ve done here lately in a goddamn time and even over the banging of my fat heart I have been thinking and have stopped and read over what I wrote (for I have nothing to read but this with my Louis L’Amours back at the trailer) and had another thought. What I mean is I wander wonder at myself for writing this. Why tell the cowards and the fuckers? Won’t do a lick of good. Sick in the head as they are. They would never see the truth of any of this. I guess this ought to be for those it could do some good.

  Well this is for my boy then.

  For you boy. I speak to you now. Listen. It takes training to be a free man. Your television and your schoolteachers will feed you all kinds of rot. I want you to know rot for rot. Even years on I want you to know what kind of a man your old dad was. A free man. A man of hands and plans. A man of mountains. These Bull Mountains. You hear me?

  Listen so as you’ll know. Carry my voice in your head.

  What is most important is I have my .270 and a thirty box of shells. I have my lace-up steel-toe boots a pair of wool socks heavy Carhartts a tee shirt flannel shirt duck jacket scotch cap. I have a wolf’s tooth and two wolf’s claws on a length of fishing wire strung around my neck. I have thirty-two dollars (not that I will
ever need such funny money again might as well roll it up and smoke it for the good it will do me) a two-liter stainless steel canteen and a jackknife. My coat pockets stuffed to busting with candy bars and copenhagen and antelope jerky and it is no shame to raid the odd henhouse. A hen’s head yanks right off and if you roast them in their feathers under a pile of rocks there is not much smoke. I’ll suck an egg too. Like an old dog. I’ll not think twice for an egg is full of vitamins and fat and good especially for a man’s body sucked right out of a little tapped hole in the narrow end of the shell.

  I saw that once about vitamins on a morning show your mother watches. That’s how I know.

  It is late now boy. Dark but for the stars. The air sharp and cold. Writing to you this way I think of you. And your mother.

  Wendell

  A​LTHOUGH WEEKS LATER THE BOY STILL HADN’T SAID A WORD, HE listened well enough. When Wendell told him to pick up the pace, Rowdy lifted his knees and fairly hustled through the dry grass and duff.

  Mid-September, early morning, cool, the sky the blue of birds’ eggs—they’d finished harvest yesterday. Since Glen had worked them through the past two weekends, he’d given Wendell this Thursday and Friday off. And here they were, then, he and the boy, their first full day together since they’d rode in the grain truck, and the soap smell of sage was sharp in the air, meadowlarks letting loose their liquid, six-note songs.

  Wendell unlatched the wooden door of the shop, which slumped some fifty yards back of the trailer, and they went in together, the musk of grease and rust and still, dark spaces enveloping them. Wendell readied the workbench and then told Rowdy to bring him the number threes and fours out of the tangle of traps hanging by that spool of twine. Rowdy didn’t hesitate. He sorted through and hefted the traps by their dark, clanking chains—bending his small body against the awkward weight of them, jaws and springs knocking against his belly—and hauled them over to Wendell. He strained to get them up onto the oil-stained bench.

  —That’s right, set those right up there. We’ll work the dirt off with this brush and get the worst of the rust off with steel wool. You want the brush or the wool? Okay, the brush. That means you take first crack. There you go. When you finish, slide them my way.

  They scrubbed the traps side by side, the boy’s bony shoulder every once in a while bumping Wendell’s waist. Once they finished, Wendell handed the number threes to the boy and took up the fours himself. They came out into the light, blinking and shying a moment for the dark of the shop, then crossed the dirt yard and hung the traps from sixty-penny nails Wendell’s father had long ago pounded in a spiral around the trunk of a sizable pine.

  Wendell set up the propane burner, and the boy watched wide-eyed as he lit it with a long-handled lighter and the flames leaped up orange and gold and settled into a ring of shimmering blue knives. Wendell had the boy turn on the garden hose and fill the big, smoke-black pot. Then Wendell heaved it up onto the burner.

  —Pine needles, bud. We need some pine needles.

  The boy looked up at Wendell, then took off running into the woods.

  Wendell grinned, pulled a can of Copenhagen from his back pocket. Another meadowlark called. The wind turned in the trees. As far back as he could reach, he found in memory the oily dark of the shop, the feather blue of the sky, and the bubbling pot of trap dye. There was his father, sharp-eyed and black-whiskered, hands rangy and sure, and his mother, slender, her hair undone, stepping out the back door, shivering in her nightdress as she waved them in for a breakfast of eggs and deer sausage, with black coffee already on the table. Hadn’t they had a good number of years like that? Sometimes he wasn’t sure, as he couldn’t ever call to mind those good years without thinking about what came after.

  The boy came pounding down the hillside, his arms full of pine branches.

  —That’s the ticket. Drop those right here and let’s shuck the needles into the pot.

  The smell of the boiling pine needles was green and heady, and Wendell gathered the traps and dropped them one by one into the pot, where they clattered and shook.

  —Some trappers dye and wax. But my old man only ever dyed. I figure that ought to be good enough for the likes of us. What d’you say?

  The boy stared at the pot, his fingers at his cheeks, though he seemed to have forgotten to drum them. From somewhere off in the trees came the hack-hack-hack of a magpie.

  —We’ll let these boil for a half hour or so and then bury them out back of the shed. Then when we dig them up, maybe a couple of days, we’ll be ready to run us a trapline. Sound good?

  The boy looked from the pot to the shed and back to Wendell, then reached both hands out and took hold of one of Wendell’s hands and stared up at him.

  With the traps buried they gathered Wendell’s guns, at least the few he hadn’t sold to pay down the medical bills he discovered after his mom died: a .243 with an adjustable nine-power scope for deer and antelope; a 30.06 with a six-power scope for anything bigger; and his grandfather’s old bolt-action .22 for varmints and plinking.

  They hiked back of the trailer, skirting the collapsing farmhouses that were once Wendell’s great-grandfather’s and great-great-uncle’s, and turned south down the draw, moving through sagebrush and bunchgrass for a time, before rising into jack pines and cedars. To their right a sandrock ridge jutted up. The junk coulee widened and fell to their left.

  Wendell hadn’t taken the boy up this way yet, and when he glanced back, Rowdy was standing stock-still at the lip of the junk coulee, studying the mess as if reading runes or auguries. Wendell swung the rifles off his shoulder and took a look himself, the first good, long look he’d had in years. Here was the scrap and evidence of not quite a century of Newman settlement. First, the recent castoffs: maimed toys and cardboard boxes and piles of mice-infested clothes; a ridiculously large projection TV; a toaster shaped like a Trans Am; at least three microwaves, one nearly the size of an easy chair; two actual easy chairs, pea green and sun-washed blue; a set of frayed and faded lawn furniture; and smashed pallets, mangled irrigation siphons, old wooden fence posts, and countless car batteries and tires. Next, deeper in: a slope-sided Ford truck, an agitator and matching wringer, a refrigerator with a long silver handle, and the moldering but intricately carved and inlaid boards of what might once have been a traveling trunk of the sort you see being unloaded from trains in old Western movies. Last, at the very limits of vision, deep in the crevasse: a steam tractor, a seeder, a subsurface packer, and some half dozen other ancient, alien-looking farming implements, their architecture bewildering, their names and uses long forgotten, though a splash of paint on a row of tines remained as red as a wound.

  They stood there at the edge of time and distance, scions, inheritors—and the wind flung dust at them, the grit of it gathering at the corners of their eyes. On the ridge above, a flat ten-inch whorl of sandrock, balanced just so for millennia, slipped and came rolling down the cliff and over the trail, where it landed with a crunch in the face of a microwave.

  The boy startled and fell onto his backside, his breath whistling, thin. He sat in the dirt and drummed his cheeks.

  —Hey, bud, you’re all right. Just a rock. Wait, tell you what you do at the junk coulee.

  Wendell turned and unzipped his pants. He pulled himself free and out over the edge of the crevasse loosed a great stream that spattered below, among the molder and rust. Rowdy stared a moment, then scrambled to his feet and unzipped and dug in his jeans and pissed all over a cracked tire.

  They’d lost their BLM land, three good sections with plenty of grass and an artesian spring, in ’95. Then, for lack of rangeland, they had to sell off what was left of the cattle. His old man cursed how far they’d fallen.

  —I guess we’re sheepmen now, he said. Fucking wool farmers.

  Yet for months they ate steaks from the last few steers they’d butchered, and even though Wendell intuited, from his parents’ evening arguments and morning silences, that they’d lost the section be
cause of something his father had failed to do, some part of the BLM lease he hadn’t fulfilled and might yet get in more trouble for, it still seemed a good season to him. Without the cattle around, his old man was doing more trapping, taking Wendell out into the mountains after school and on the weekends. And his mother was still janitoring four tens at the oven factory in Roundup, which meant there was money for new shoes and powdered Gatorade.

  Evenings, Wendell would be out in the mountains with his father until sunset, and then his mother would wake him early the next morning, a soft hand on his forehead. Every day but Friday, when she was off work for the week and he took the south bus, Wendell and his mother rode into Delphia together as the sky from east to west tried on shade after shade of blue. They didn’t talk much, or their talk was of schedules and essentials—when his basketball practice would be over, a new recipe she wanted to try for dinner, a low grade on a math test—but Wendell had loved those mornings. The quiet, the chill of sunrise, how after his mother dropped him at school she always honked the horn of the Cavalier twice as she drove away.

  He was in the fifth grade then and liked his teacher, Mr. Whearty, whom most folks called a hippie or a tree hugger, and maybe he was, but he was a good teacher, the kind you knew you had to do your homework for. Mr. Whearty didn’t abide laziness, wouldn’t truck with attitude, but he was fun, too—he had a chart up in the classroom with little yellow smiley-face stickers for every book you read, and though Wendell wasn’t much in math or science, he was the first to reach the top of the chart. Mr. Whearty made a big deal of it, even taped up another sheet of paper just for Wendell so he could keep track of all the books he read. And in April, as a final class project, Mr. Whearty had them put on an abridged version of Macbeth for the whole school. The principal thought Whearty was nuts, trying something like that with fifth-graders—the high-school drama club never put on anything more than silly one-acts—but Mr. Whearty insisted. So they all read the play and talked about it, and Mr. Whearty wrote the words ambition, choice, violence, manhood, and morality on the board, and they all had to go up and write quotes and scenes from the play beneath each. Wendell ended up playing Banquo—What, can the devil speak true?—and got to wander out onto the stage with red corn syrup dripping from his fingers and sit on the king’s throne with a bloom of sweet blood above his ghost’s heart.