Fall Back Down When I Die Page 8
But how was he supposed to go into town to meet with the principal when they’d suspended Rowdy for the rest of the week? He couldn’t ask Carol to look after the boy. Not after what had happened last weekend. And he couldn’t leave Rowdy alone. That’s what Lacy had done.
Wendell rocked and rocked, and Rowdy fell into a deep, thrashing sleep, his small body jerking through dreams. Wendell found himself reciting in his head the two lines from Macbeth that he remembered best. How goes the night, boy? Banquo inquires of his son Fleance, who is at the watch. And Fleance responds, The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
How goes the night, boy? The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
How goes the night, boy? The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
How goes the night, boy? The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.
The way those two lines clicked and clacked, the way the father asks not after the son but after the night, and the son offers exactly that, the night—it all crushed down on his heart so wonderfully. Nearly a decade and a half had passed since Mr. Whearty had staged the play with them, and in that time Wendell had often chanted those lines to himself as he fixed the fence or drove the combine or rode for strays. It was Freddie Benson who’d played Fleance, and in both shows he’d mumbled and tripped over those words—The moon is down; I have not heard the clock—and Wendell had been angry. Still was, in a way. After the show, on the dark drive home, he had complained to his mother about Freddie. He had tried to explain how much those lines mattered to him, and though she listened, she just smoothed her hand over his head, told him not to worry, that he’d been such a good, scary ghost.
He hadn’t seen Glen or Carol since picking Rowdy up last Saturday morning. He’d set it up with Glen the week before that he’d be doing fence work close to home, which meant he could meet Rowdy at the bus after school the first few days. Tomorrow, though, he was supposed to help Glen ready the corrals for the roundup and the sale. Wendell thought about calling him to say he was sick and heading out into the mountains tomorrow to set a trapline with Rowdy. He thought about calling the school at Colter and enrolling Rowdy over there, which would probably be easier, true, but it was all he knew to do. He thought about sad, thrashing boys and sad, hard words and the sudden guns we make of our fists.
The chair groaned beneath them. Motes of dust sifted through the lamplight. The mountain dark pooled at the windows.
Verl
Day Eleven New Dispensation
Have walked and climbed maybe six miles in the early dark but stopped here now in the light by these sunwarm sandrocks and leaned my back up against them because it is nice to do and also I have thought of something. It is getting to be a decent stretch of time I have been out here. They are after me yet but by winter the feds will think I am dead and rotting somewhere and stop looking. Then I will be free. (Of course I have been free and that is why I am hunted.) Anyways after they have gone home I can live like this is my true home. Then I can shoot a mulie deer through the heart and not worry about the noise. I can smoke deer chops over a pine fire. I can dry hides and wrap them around me like an old Indian. Oh I will live big then. Do not worry about your old dad then.
Must make it through these cold weeks though. These cold weeks they are looking for me.
Or you can leave something for me. Yes fuck yes I see it now boy you could leave me long johns and lined pants and gloves and sweaters and a good stocking cap. God but I might give a knuckle of a finger for a good wool stocking cap. Here is what you do. Leave a wool hat and a flannel jacket in the cab of that old three-wheel Ford in the junk coulee in the south section and give me a signal like a bit of baling twine tied around the side mirror that all is clear and no surprises and I will go get that hat and jacket and the feds will wonder how I am doing it in the snow and cold and not know I am doing it because of you boy. Yes I will not wait. I’ll live big right now.
But goddamn.
How will I get this to you? How would I send this page to you? You must read this if you are to know. This page I am writing on. It is a school notebook of yours I grabbed thinking to use for starting fires but I was not thinking straight. I can have no fires. I should have been as prepared in my head as I was in my hands. Let that be a lesson to you boy.
Anyways how to take a sheet of this paper with my instructions for you all the way to you? A boy should be able to hear always his father. Know always his father’s mind. But I am all the way out here and you and your mother are in the trailer. The feds between us.
Goddamn them.
A man cannot even lay for the night next to his woman. A man cannot even give his voice to his son. I think of them now closer to your bodies than me and see red. I pick up my rifle and figure to sneak up on them and end it. But that is what they want goddamn them I cannot think on that.
How will I get this to you? How will you know me?
Later
I mean to tell you boy I was yet thinking on how to get this to you for it is yours and I am yours and I found where you had written your name on the back cover of this notebook. Your name. The name I gave you the name your granddaddy carried. Wendell. I tell you it fired me. I felt it in my tired bones and I was not tired then and got up and walked a mile along the dark ridgetop not fearing to be found or to slip or anything. Just your name boy. I stop here in the night and write this to you by starlight.
Gillian
WHEN MADDY WAS IN THE EIGHTH GRADE, AT ST. FRANCIS UPPER, SHE won the blue ribbon at the intercity science fair. Through the late winter and into the spring she’d ridden her bike every afternoon to Two Moon Park, on the east edge of Billings—a wide peninsula jutting into the Yellowstone. The park was a teardrop of gravel bars and grassy wetlands, of willow, cottonwood, and wild rose, and Maddy would hike to its far point and, with the bluffs to her back, the river widening into a rapid before her, sit on a fallen cottonwood and catalog the birds. The project required that she compare her findings each evening with a list compiled near Two Moon in the early 1950s by the elderly daughter of a long-dead railroad magnate. Gillian had insisted on going with her the first couple of trips and after that rode along whenever she could, usually on the weekends. Upriver, oil refineries roared and belched, and the sweet, chemical stink of processing sugar beets drifted with the wind. Yet Two Moon chirped and burbled—the afternoon light hazed with cottonwood fluff, gnats, the quick, iridescent wings of birds—and as the days lengthened, the park went riotously green.
When she accompanied Maddy, Gillian would lie back in the grass and nap. Maddy sat forward, binoculars about her neck, pencil in hand, and attended to her list. She had noted, by the time of the science fair, more than a hundred species. Compared with the earlier Two Moon catalog, more birds of prey plied the air above the river, though fewer herons stalked the waters, fewer larks called, and only a very few grouse beat the ground with their wings. Maddy worked up possible reasons for each of these observations and put together several conservation recommendations. At the science fair, standing off to the side of Maddy’s poster display, waiting and listening, Gillian marveled as her daughter spoke with the judges, as she pointed to her graphs and even disagreed, respectfully, with something one of the judges said.
Afterward, in celebration, they rode the glass elevator to the top of the Crowne Plaza, where they had drinks in the dining room—cava for Gillian, club soda with lime and a shot of lemonade for Maddy. They clinked glasses and grinned and talked about birds, politics, the general raise for the staff that Gillian had recently pressured her school board into. Later, they made dinner together—salmon with lemon and the first of the season’s fresh herbs, potatoes whipped with butter, roasted garlic, and Parmesan, and a green salad. They ate out on the back deck, reliving Maddy’s science-fair win and listening to Lightfoot. After the dishes, Maddy asked to stay up late to see what stars they could see, for the city lights, and though it was a school night, Gillian said yes. As the dark came down she brought out a blanket
and wrapped it around the both of them. And when she held her tall daughter in her arms, she thought they’d come through it all, finally, that like the hawks and eagles at Two Moon—despite the ashy air, the waters now and again rainbowed with discharge—they’d ridden out the hard winds and could drift the big, wide sky together, that they could live safely and well once again.
With Dave Coles calling after her, Gillian stumbled from the Boiler Room in a blur of vodka tonic. She missed a stop sign on the drive home and got honked at twice. She didn’t bother to check if Maddy was back, just shut herself in her bedroom with a bottle of wine and binge-watched episodes of The Wire, the sorrows and injustices of inner-city Baltimore carrying her away from Montana, away from those dark times a dozen years ago in the Bull Mountains of Montana—until she woke. Woke in her clothes bleary and chilled, an empty bottle on the bed stand, the brand name of the DVD player sliding silently across the dark television screen.
She shivered and swallowed. A headache cracked across her temples. Maddy was already up and moving around in the front room, humming, breaking into a few lines of song now and then. Right, Saturday. Gillian forced herself out of bed, splashed water on her face. Pulled on her running gear. They had a standing date, every Saturday morning, as long as the weather allowed, to run for an hour. They’d started with routes through their neighborhood, sometimes stopping by Maddy’s Starbucks for a bagel on the way home or dipping downtown for a slice of quiche at the new place Gillian liked, but lately Maddy had convinced her mother to start running the many park trails below the Rimrocks, the eighteen-mile-long wall of sandstone rising a thousand feet above the Yellowstone Valley and slicing through the city of Billings. Even if the houses and streets quickly disappeared, Gillian reasoned, the trails were well used, were, for the most part, in cell-phone range. Still, whenever they came on meth-heads zonked out in the sagebrush or derelict, muttering men shuffling through the scree, she gripped Maddy’s hand and held on tight. Maddy seemed to understand and most days let her mother’s worry go without comment.
The morning was bright and cold, the sky white-blue at its heights and stone blue along the horizon. They ran, talking at first as their breath allowed—the chances of Obama’s new health-care bill passing the House; Maddy’s latest thoughts on college, Gonzaga, Lewis and Clark, or Linfield—but both mother and daughter, it seemed, had other things on their minds, and as they bounded off the sidewalk and onto the dusty trails below the Rims, their talk fell away until the only sounds were their breath and the crunch of rock and dirt.
Gillian’s head throbbed. Her arms felt made of granite. She began to flag. Maddy didn’t slow or wait, as she usually did, but kept on, her stride lengthening the distance between them, her shadow long and slim and shifting as she disappeared over a yucca-pocked hill. Gillian slowed on her way up and stopped at the top, laced her fingers behind her head and blew. The trail bent left, then right, winding through sage, sandrock, and bunchgrass before climbing another dusty hill. Maddy was nowhere to be seen. Likely she was over the next rise and halfway to Starbucks by now. Gillian couldn’t summon the energy to be angry with her, or even annoyed. Anyway, she’d rather be alone this morning, rather be in her own itching skin, let her bad thoughts pound around her pounding skull. Hands on her hips, she started down the trail, the chill wind drying the sweat along her neck and back.
She knew Dave was probably right: this business with the wolf hunt most likely wouldn’t come to much. There wasn’t a thing those redneck morons could do to her or her daughter. And if she didn’t pay attention, if she just turned away and refused to look, it would probably be as if it never even happened. She knew this. Still, she couldn’t help but imagine the river below their old house, that same river turning north toward the rodeo grounds on the outskirts of Delphia. She could see all their old neighbors gathered there for some idiot’s idea of a patriotic rally, full-ton pickups parked at every angle, Western-style shirts made to look like flags, folks spouting lots of drivel about standing on your own two feet, about hard work and private property. Pam and Larry, Kevin’s sister and her husband, would be there, she was sure of that. God, but she didn’t want to think of Elner there. She wouldn’t go, would she? And would they say Verl Newman’s name? Would the vowels and liquids of his name crackle and spill from the tinny speakers—and no one even blink? No one dare to be so good as to say, That’s not right, not right at all?
—Hey, lady, got a buck?
Gillian startled, tripped, and her right knee came down hard on the packed dirt and gravel of the trail. She caught hold of a wiry knot of bunchgrass to keep from slipping farther down the hill and pulled herself back up to her feet. A thin line of blood traced the bone of her shin. The man, or boy—she couldn’t quite tell for the saggy layers of dark clothing and the stained American flag bandanna tied tightly around his skull—picked his way among the rocks and cactus in the lee and shadow of the Rimrocks. He stepped into the light and rubbed his eyes. He was skinny, unshaven, his face all blades and angles. A meth-head, she thought. Maybe twenty, maybe thirty-seven. It was hard to tell. Stooped, skeletal, the bones of his wrists pronounced. He took another half step toward her.
—Hey, sorry. It’s just I haven’t eaten in a couple of days.
She reached behind her, reached for the belt she wore around her waist, up under her running shirt. The man cracked a weary, thankful smile and continued toward her, lifting his cupped hand.
From maybe three feet away Gillian hit him full in the face with a blast of pepper spray. It was cartoon-like, the way his whole body, leaning toward her a moment ago, pivoted the other way around the fulcrum of his feet as the first shot knocked him onto his back. She hit him once more with the spray, a quick, whistling blast. He screamed and curled into a fetal position, pawed and kicked, rubbed his wet eyes, twisted his face right into the rocks and scrub and dust.
Gillian stood above him. At one point he struggled onto his hands and knees, his black jeans twisting down to reveal the pasty white skin of his backside, and began to cough in short, chirrupy breaths and to throw his head from side to side. Gillian had the urge to kick him in the stomach, even felt her muscles ready themselves, but his hands slid out from under him, and he fell again to the ground.
She slipped the canister back into the holster on her belt and turned and ran down the trail—away from the Rimrocks, back into the city.
Alabama, Key West, Nevada, Colorado, and their longest stint was their last: Alpine, Texas. Kevin was stationed at Big Bend, down along the border, and she was teaching at the high school, just three blocks from the small adobe house they rented on the edge of town, the Davis Mountains rising to the north and the Chisos like dark, dusty rumors in the frame of the south-facing kitchen window as shoulder to shoulder they scrubbed the evening’s dishes. One sunset they drove south, turned off on a dirt road, then another, and finally pulled to a stop near a barbed-wire gate that led to a remote spread of BLM land administered by the park service, a wildlife migration corridor recently declared off-limits to grazing. They left Kevin’s green work truck and hiked the dry washes and creosote hills. Kevin kept reaching for her hand. She was four months pregnant. They spread a blanket on the brittle desert ground and lay back as the stars sharpened in the dark. Though Kevin swore the stars of eastern Montana were just as bright, just as numerous, Gillian had never seen anything quite like it, the way the land beneath seemed to lift them toward the perfect black bowl of night. Such a spill of sugar, salt.
Hours later, after picking their way back by flashlight, laughing, planning, throwing out baby names both beautiful and ridiculous—Evelyne, River, Gracie Ann, Cuthbert—they found all four of the truck’s tires knifed, the headlights shattered. And scratched into the driver-side door: Fuck you fed. Ill kill you dead fed.
She couldn’t keep herself from spinning—around and around. Someone was there, she was sure. Someone was watching them, advancing each time she turned her back.
These threats weren’t ne
w—but this was the most brazen. In one way or another they’d been dealing with the slow erosion of respect for NPS, Forest Service, and BLM employees for the past ten years, from Reagan’s embrace of the Sagebrush Rebellion to the relative respectability of the now ascendant and even more radical wise-use movement. And there’d been trouble before, of course—a red-faced governor calling for privatization of public lands, ominous letters to the editor after the arrest of a rancher who refused to pay his grazing fees, and just recently the trash cans out back of the ranger station lit on fire. But now they were stranded on a gravel road in Texas, stranded in the purest dark she’d ever known, and there was a violent idiot out there with a knife, and maybe worse.
Kevin tried to take her by her shoulders. She cursed and pulled away. He tried once more to hold her, and she spun and fell. On her knees in the gravel, cradling her belly, she wept. She loved this life. But she couldn’t live this life anymore.
Kevin stood above her, spread wide his useless hands, said sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
On the ride home that night, they talked—they had to leave Texas; they had to find a place they could imagine raising a child. The next day, Kevin started looking for work. The best of what was available was Montana, where she had kept up her teaching credentials, where they had felt, if not at home, then at least reasonably safe. There wasn’t anything near Missoula, which would have been their first choice, but there was an opening for a game warden out of Roundup, just west of Delphia, where Kevin had grown up. Kevin’s mother was still on the homeplace and, though he wasn’t especially close to them, so were his two older sisters, their husbands, and a handful of nieces and nephews. The county school wasn’t much, but Gillian could supplement their child’s education. While game warden was still a government position, it was a state post rather than federal. And Kevin knew most everyone living out in those mountains. There wouldn’t be any surprises. Even though he’d gone off to college and turned his back on ranching—let alone farming that dry country—it was still where he was born and raised. It was home.