The Work of Wolves (16 page)

She leaned back, put her hands flat on the grass behind her, tilted her head back, turned her face to the stars, remembering.

"I was totally in charge," she said. "It was wonderful. And you know what he did? He looked at that apron like it was a dead animal I was trying to hand him, and he said, 'Is it broke?'"

"Broke?" Carson laughed—both at the word and because of her pleasure in remembering it.

"His exact words. 'Take it,' I told him. And he did. I think I could've told the President what to do that night and he'd've done it. My manager took that apron and stood there rubbing it between his fingers, trying to figure out why he had it. Then I said what Magnus had told me to say—I was quitting because I'd been asked to dinner. And I walked away."

The moon was high enough Carson could see silver whorls in the horses' hair, and individual blades of grass etched out of the dark. Rebecca's hand came out of the grass behind her, moved through her hair, went back down. She turned her face to the dark horizon, her legs stretched in front of her, crossed at the ankles, the toes of her riding boots pointed at the sky.

"I should have walked right out of that casino," she said. "Instead I walked back to Magnus. Three pillars and a dozen slot machines. The time it took to walk past them. That's how long my freedom lasted. And you know what? It was all because he made me think I was a winner."

"It's that bad?"

"You don't know."

"I can't figure a guy who'd hate his wife riding horses."

"It was good at first. Romantic. Money. Travel. Things I'd never done. Never seen. But once I married him and he got me here, it all ended. He's a jealous, jealous man, Carson. Everyone's trying to take what he has."

"He told a good lie, huh?"

"He did. And I wanted it bad."

"People seem to think he's a decent guy."

"You know what I've learned? The rich just have better lies. Better ways of keeping secrets. If you're poor, your walls are thin, and your neighbor's on the other side. I've been there. Cry in your bathroom, and somebody knows it. Rich?" She shook her head. "I could scream in that house, and no one'd know. And if someone did know, they'd never let themselves believe anything was wrong. That, too: If you're rich, you can buy belief. He doesn't like me to go anywhere or do anything. That place is like a prison. With nice bathroom fixtures."

"You ever hadda scream?"

He asked the question quietly, and it took her a moment to understand. Then she shook her head. "It's never come to that. But sometimes I think it could."

Then she said, "He doesn't like these horses, Carson. Doesn't like that I'm riding. He agreed to it because he thought I'd just ride around the house. A little pony circuit kind of thing. Cute, you know? But gees!—once I got going! And what really bothers him is that he can't find a reason for me not to ride where I want. He's lost control of it."

"That worry you?"

She lifted her chin and laughed. "I think it's great. There's nothing he can say."

Carson remembered that no one had ever seen Magnus's first wife around town. No one knew anything about her. She had only appeared in public with him and was otherwise invisible. As far as he knew, she had no friends. Then there'd been talk that she and Magnus were divorcing, and sometime after that there were reports of a new, young wife. Rebecca.

"What now?" he asked.

"Hmmm?"

"You just ride horses for the rest of your life? That enough? Ride horses and let'm stew?"

"I don't know. It's a start. I married him. I'd like to make it work. Maybe he'll see it's OK. Loosen up eventually."

I doubt it,
Carson thought. But because he wanted to put his arm around her and couldn't trust the source of his thought, he didn't say it. He sat without moving, afraid that any movement would turn into the wrong one. That any movement would change its shape once he started it and turn into the wrong one, no matter what he intended. And he had no idea what he might intend. He sat paralyzed. Bound. She lifted her hand from the ground again and ran it through her hair. He wanted to read on the topography of the muscles and tendons there some map to release. But couldn't.

THE NEXT MORNING
he drove the fifteen miles to Magnus's ranch again. He told himself that he'd worked the horses on Saturdays before. He caught Surety, saddled and bridled her, led her out of the corral and into the pasture, rode away from the house. Just training. But fifteen minutes later he heard a pickup heaving over the rough pasture ground and, turning, saw Rebecca's face through the windshield. He reined Surety in and stood the horse, and the horse did well, shying away from the vehicle only at the last second, as Rebecca pulled up.

"I didn't think you were working them today," she said.

"We got hay to move back home pretty soon. Thought I'd work Surety a bit more while I can."

"Only Surety?"

"Jesse could use riding."

"Away?"

"Yeah. We could leave."

"Twenty minutes."

She turned the pickup and headed back to the house. Twenty minutes later they were loading Jesse and Surety into the horse trailer. They drove to a piece of land ten miles away, roughly in the direction of Twisted Tree. Carson knew the place. It had once been the Elmer Johannssen ranch. Elmer had been one of Ves Fielding's friends, though Carson had never met him. Ves Fielding used to tell stories of Elmer's stinginess, his absolute inability to buy anything new. "Wasn't just a dislike of new things," Ves would chuckle. "It was Elmer
couldn't
buy anything new. No more 'n a cat can play the fiddle. Wasn't possible in his nature."

When Elmer died, his wife lived on the ranch alone for a year, then sold it to Magnus Yarborough and moved to California to five with her sister. Carson was curious to see the ranch, to locate some of the stories his grandfather used to tell about helping Elmer brand his cattle or repair his fences, and how every time, no matter what they were doing, some tool or machine would break, and Elmer would stare at the broken thing with a stupefied look on his face—"like he couldn't believe it could happen," Ves Fielding said. "Like the world had a conspiracy against him, and he needed a figure it out. Spent more damn time, Elmer did, tryin a work out the nature a broken things. He coulda wrote a book. Coulda classified all things broke. If a hammer handle broke, this'd be Elmer: first he'd stare at the damn thing for a good minute or so, hold it in his hand and just look at it, tryin a see it from all angles and sides. Then he'd swear. A good, long streak a cuss words to get his mind workin on the problem. Then he'd get to discussin it. He'd say, 'Now just two days ago I had a bearing on a auger go out right in the middle a movin grain, and now this here happens right in the middle a buildin fence. Ain't that the strangest damn thing? I swear it proves the existence a the devil. It ain't temptation the devil brings to the world. No it ain't. It's broke.'

"An I'd say, 'Elmer, things break when you're usin 'em. They don't break when they ain't bein used. That's why things break in the middle a somethin. It ain't the devil brings broke into the world. It's usin things does.'

"'No, no,' he'd say. 'That's what the devil wants you to think. Wants you to think there's a simple way a lookin at broke. But it's more complicated. Two days ago that auger and today this hammer. What are the chances?'

"And then, hell, I might as well plan on sittin an listenin for a half-hour and doin nothin else, 'cause Elmer'd get off on these connections between things that'd broke for him in the past month and even the past year. Or more. Elmer'd sometimes go back ten years. I once heard'm connect a flat tire on a bale rack with a broke axle on a homemade wagon he'd had as a kid. He'd trace 'em all out, these connections. Find all sortsa mysteries. It was the meaning of Elmer's life, damn near. The Religion of Broke. I tried a tell 'm if he'd just once buy somethin new, it might last through a job or two. But I don't think Elmer wanted a believe that. Woulda ruined his faith. Taken away his main reason for livin. A pair a slip joint pliers slippin a joint would be enough to make Elmer sorrowful, and God! Elmer loved bein sorrowful. Nothin he loved more. And then he'd get goin on the difference between the way things were supposed to work and the way they did, the difference between the theory a things an the practice, an if I didn't get'm stopped, he'd start talkin about the spirit a things versus their goddamn materiality. He'd actually use them words. The places Elmer could go from a pair a slipped slip joint pliers! Go further 'n anyone else I ever knew."

Riding the empty ranch with Rebecca, Carson remembered his grandfather's stories. Walking the horses side by side, he told them to her, imitating his grandfather and his imitation of Elmer. She laughed at it, and Carson felt a bittersweet longing for the old man. It was good to tell her about him and to hear his stories new because of how she heard them. It was the first time since his grandfather had died that long-ago morning that Carson had ever talked about him with anyone else, the first time he'd revoiced him, let him speak again. He'd preserved the old man in a quiet area of his heart, his deepest privacy, and let no one know it. But Rebecca revived the old man. Carson hadn't thought it possible. In her laughter and understanding, she made him even more alive in some ways than he'd been when he was alive. And Elmer Johannssen, whom Carson had never known, lived again, and his Religion of Broke, with its codified laws and relationships in all their complexities. Carson understood the world through it as he rode, though it seemed, with Rebecca, a serene arrangement and a verdant philosophy, capable of explaining how he felt and how a man dead could be alive, and how time past and present could coexist in the telling of a story and its hearing.

They rode for two hours. Once a five-point mule deer crashed through the cattails in the spillway of a stock dam as they watered the horses. They heard the noise first, an ominous thrashing, but couldn't see anything. Then Carson saw the antlers floating over the rushes and under them the ears and the brown eyes, so like the color of the dry cattails that it seemed for a moment that the cattails had changed their form and that the whole marsh was converting itself into a single deer, until the animal separated itself and became a deer distinct and heaved itself up the bank and bounded away.

They rode again, in much silence, thinking their own thoughts, and they came at last to a homestead: a once white, now gray house, a barn with a caved-in roof, a windmill with a broken blade creaking in the moving air but completing no revolution. These structures stood at the end of a driveway still visible and weed-free, though potholed. Carson and Rebecca approached from over the rolling land behind the house, so that they looked down through the hole in the barn roof and over it to the driveway leading away from the house, long and thin toward the county road. Elmer had built far back from the road, coveting his privacy, and coveting, Ves Fielding claimed, "the privilege of complainin every winter how his snowplow broke down in the middle a plowin himself out, so he and Helen were stranded, even though the sonofabitch never wanted a go to town unless he couldn't make it there."

Carson had told this story to Rebecca, and when they came over the hill, she said, "There's the famous driveway, then."

They stopped the horses and looked at that driveway, imagined Elmer in the middle of a blizzard, plowing away and breaking down, staring mutely at the unfaithful machine and then softly cursing into the storm, to get his mind working, and then putting this new fact into his system of all things broke, and turning around to go home and tell his wife, reaffirming in this new betrayal of the material world his confidence in sorrow and mutability.
A strange old guy,
Carson thought. He nudged Surety and descended the hill, and Rebecca followed.

They dismounted the horses near the barn and tied them to a rusted running gear, and as Carson came around Surety's head, he found Rebecca coming the other way, and they ran into each other and were in each other's arms, falling wordless there so that Carson would never be able to remember whether he had first reached for her or she for him. It was all rush and fall and merging and not knowing what had happened. And when they finally separated and looked into each other's eyes, he took her hand and they went to the house, all without words.

Carson reached for the doorknob—the screen door only shards of wood, having long ago been ruined by the wind—but the door was open and moved inward at his touch, and for a moment he and Rebecca stood frozen in the door frame, holding each other, ready to fall like water flowing through the frame and into the house.

But from within the house there was a resistance of moving air. There was a sound of muted thunder, the sound of a world disturbed, the air in turmoil. Carson, slightly ahead, saw a blur of movement, amber eyes and ivory beaks, a confusion of wings that changed the interior space of the house and made it sway and lurch. His eyes focused, and he saw two hawks beating the air within the room, their energy so great that the room descended in Carson's eyes, tipped downward and sideways as the hawks rose up. An eye, a living agate, gazed straight into his—piercing, ancient, superior, merciless. Then the hawks tipped their bodies and timed their wing beats one after the other and burst through the broken window, the space within the shards of dirty glass like a blue flower made of sky, and they hung for onetwothree wing beats in that skybloom and were gone, sweeping upward at an angle so steep they seemed to be pushed by a wind rising from the ground.

Their wing beats still filled the room, and air rushed against Carson's face, and Rebecca's, and she gasped and let him go and stepped backward from the threshold, out of the shadows of the house and into the sun. When Carson turned, feeling only air against him where her body had been pressed, he saw her like a lost child, eyes wide, hurt, troubled. He saw how green those eyes were, and how her hair sprayed in a flame of red around her face, wild and untamed, and he was strangely puzzled, a clear, still moment of puzzlement and rationality, wondering when she had lost her hat. He looked past her to the horses and saw the hat beneath Jesse's neck, upside down, the crown dusty, and he thought,
She must a lost it then. I must a knocked it off
.