The Work of Wolves (38 page)

And Carson did not know where Rebecca slept or of what she dreamed. And if he wanted to walk alone into a world made large by the coyotes' calling, he also wanted to walk with her and sit beside her as his grandfather had sat with him, and speak of voices locked inside him. But he did not know for sure what those voices were. Unless he spoke them. Until he spoke them. Until she allowed him to speak them. Brought them forth.

And, more practically and near at hand, Carson did not know what story Wagner Cecil had told Magnus and from what basis that story had been built. Did not know what movements Wagner Cecil had performed or in what shadows he had enacted them, in what blind spots of Carson's vision he had been and out of what clouds of ignorance and half-knowledge and obsequious need he had spoken. This minor character, this blot, this cipher—just what did he have to do with that mad race across the prairie that had ended in that pile of distraught, heaving flesh and broken bone? What did he have to do with those weak and starving horses? Carson knew nothing of him. Did not want to know anything. Yet wanted to know everything.

Yet, he thought, whatever story Wagner had told Magnus, based on how much or how little evidence, and whatever story Magnus had compounded and imagined beyond what Wagner told, they had approached the truth. He had to admit it. It was the startle of hawk eyes only, those golden eyes cutting swaths of light across the dim rooms of Elmer Johannssen's house, that had kept their stories from being truth. That near. Or it was the weight of a piano only, dusty from years of never moving, the mouse tracks in the dust upon its keys, the touch of mouse feet too light to bring any music forth, that long silence. As if false stories, as if gossip, as if imagination and suspicion, as if babble and Babel all, rushed from windows, then veered upward, almost but not quite becoming what had happened. How important, Carson wondered, was the not-quite? Was it all or nothing? Or something in between?

In the face of the false story that had been built, he thought, the truth itself could never be conveyed. Even if he and Rebecca could agree on the truth, on so simple a thing as the order of events, their halting and their going forth, they could never oppose it to the false story in a way that mattered. The god of jealousy imposed a tongue not spoken by other men, and the gulf between Carson and Magnus was too great to bridge with words. The cow's death, that terrific heave and snap and sandbag leadenness, had been a wordless message, and words could not correct it or reply to it. Of all the languages human beings could not translate for each other, the gulf between the voice and the fist was surely greatest, between the voice and a pickup speeding through thistles. He could no more speak to Magnus with the hope of affecting him than he could speak to affect the course of the moon.

Carson listened to another coyote howl, listened to the sound diminish and die. "It's unbelievable, Burt," he said.

"That Magnus'd pay Wagner to spy on his wife? Or that Wagner'd do it?"

"All of it."

He meant more than Burt knew.

"Lotta things're unbelievable," Burt said ruminatively. "I don't believe half the shit that's happened to me. Least I wouldn't if it hadn't a happened."

"You know about them horses?"

"Them horses." Burt nodded slowly. "He got rid a them pretty quick after you was gone."

"Is that what he did?"

"That's what I
know
what he did. If I got any other suspicions, they was never confirmed."

"Because you didn't want a confirm 'em?"

Burt opened the window he'd shut just moments before, spat, then stared into the cold darkness for a while, while the coyotes echoed each other and his white breath blew back around his head so that he looked like an ancient prophet wrapped in smoke.

"Damn right I didn't want a confirm it," he finally said. "Workin for Magnus is a active ignorance. I work real hard at bein ignorant. Otherwise, shit! I know how to do anything needs doin, but I start tryin a find out
why,
there ain't no end to it. Magnus says plant that there field inna wheat, and I know damn well it oughta be planted inna milo, I just whistle 'Yankee Doodle' an planter inna wheat."

"You whistle 'Yankee Doodle.'"

"Oh, hell, you got no idea how tuneful a guy can get workin for Magnus."

"You help build a fence above Lostman's Lake, maybe?"

Burt reached into his mouth, hooked the wad of tobacco with his forefinger, lifted it out, balanced it on the crook of his finger, and flicked it into the darkness.

"You seen that fence, huh?"

"I seen it. You help build it?"

"Me an Wagner started on 't. Wagner finished on his own. I did a lotta whistlin buildin that thing. Every damn tune I knew. Whistled up a goddamn storm. Goddamn hurricane."

"Wagner do any whistlin?"

"Wagner's asshole's pulled so tight he ain't got enough skin left: over to purse his lips."

"Bit curious, ain't it, Wagner finishin that fence on his own?"

"Damn curious. I hadda work up a regular sweat a ignorance on that one. I oughta get paid more, hard as I work at not knowin a damn thing."

They sat in silence for a while.

"What the hell happened the day we was movin them cattle, anyway?" Burt asked. "That old cow took off and you after her, and then Magnus goes drivin off to help. I was tryin a tell him you'd handle it, but a course I work for him so I can't tell him anything. Two a you after one cow. I never did notice when she got corralled."

"You don' wanta know."

"You're goddamn right I don't. Almost forgot myself there. I appreciate bein reminded."

"You think Magnus'd starve them horses, Burt?"

"That what he did?"

Carson didn't say anything.

"Yeah, you're right, I don' wanta know that either. An I sure as hell don' wanta know why Greggy Longwell showed up the other day. An it's a mystery to me how some horses that far as I know was sold, could also turn out to be stole. An the last thing I wanta know is who the hell stole 'em."

"Life's just full a mysteries, ain't it?"

"It is. Nothin but a wonder."

"So you think he'd starve 'em? Or you think Wagner could get that idea on his own? You know, interpret what Magnus says about 'em a little liberally?"

"If Wagner can have any idea on his own at all, it'd be that kind a idea. On the other hand, Magnus does like things to go his way. When they don't, he has a hard time distinguishin one thing from another. Magnus is a differences-disabled person."

The coyotes howled and racketed, then all at once went silent, and the world seemed to ring more loudly with that silence than with the howls.

"A woman like her," Burt said. "I wondered how long she'd put up with it. I don' know nothin, you unnerstan. But if a guy thought much about it, which a course I never, it sure could seem Magnus wanted her just because she was the type wasn't goin a be reined in like he had her reined in. Some women'd take it, I guess. Sit in that house and not go anywhere an think they was happy 'cause they could buy new drapes. But Magnus didn't want a woman like that. Not one who'd
be
happy. He wanted one he could force inna bein happy. Or force inna somethin. Screwed up as that thinkin is, he sure could also think it woulda worked, just hadn'a been for them horses."

F
ROST RIMED THE GRASS
in the mornings, the prairie a glittering sheet of metal. At the edges of the stock ponds, ice formed in delicate tracery, clarifying the water and stilling it. And then, before they knew it, the horses were back in Magnus Yarborough's hands. Willi listened to Ted's halting, apologetic story on the phone and thought,
This is how it is. This nothing ever ends. This no thing can be finished.

"They've never behaved that way before," Ted was saying. "You believe me?"

"It is not your fault," Willi said. "You cannot know what dogs will do."

"Something got into them," Ted said.

"Got into them?" The phrase puzzled Willi.

"It had to be, enit? Something more 'n them just taking off running."

Ted had heard the dogs milling in the night, their restless shifting outside the house, the padding of their feet along the trails they'd worn through the grass between the cars. He lay in bed listening, and a feeling of dread came over him. He couldn't rise, he told Willi, couldn't throw back the thin blanket that covered him. Maybe he was paralyzed only by the eerie chill of waking to commotion, to things moving beyond his eyelids and dreams. But he wasn't sure. It might have been something more. In the trailer house he heard the breathing of sleeping others, the various refugees who had drifted in during the day, knowing they wouldn't be refused. In the dark that lay inches from his eyes, Ted couldn't remember who they were. Someone moaned, and the moan traveled through the house and pierced someone else's dream, and that person cried out in great alarm, something unintelligible, as from a lost and ancient language. And beneath it all the dogs were gathering.

"What do you mean, though?" Willi asked. "Something more—what do you mean by something more?"

He lay on his bed in the Drusemans' house, following with his eyes the whorls on the ceiling. How they circled and started again. If he ignored them, they were just haze and texture, but if he concentrated on them, they gave him no rest. They forced his eyes to constantly trace them. Constantly start over. Constantly end.

"I mean a spirit," Ted said. "Keeping me down. The same one that got into the dogs. If I'd a got up sooner I mighta called them back. But I couldn't get up."

A feeling like a moving, cold, and slippery stone ran up Willi's back, starting at the base of his spine, constricting the muscles around his neck.

"You don't believe it, do you?" Ted said, a little bitterly.

Willi realized he hadn't responded. His eyes reached the end of a whorl, started on another. He shut them. He might go crazy. Darkness—nothing—was better than that endless repetition.

"No," he said, quietly. "I do. I think there could be spirits."

"On the rez there are," Ted said. His voice was bleak. "Nothing 'could be' about it."

Willi thought of his grandmother, dead now, a ghost dressed in pale green slacks, with her hair wispy and floating, swooping out of the darkness over Ted's place, material and insubstantial both, passing over the dogs so that they raised their muzzles to the stars, looking for what had just touched them, and then feeling in their doggy hearts a rush and longing that made them scramble to their feet out of their grassy beds or off the ripped car seats where they slept. His grandmother, the ghostly dogherd. She would do it, he thought—she would become a ghost if anyone would. She would will herself to ghostliness, carry the ghost of her living right through her death and keep living it. And then insert all her confusion and twisted logic, which she could never in her life make anyone believe through words, directly into the hearts of those mute and helpless dogs. Willi almost asked Ted if he had felt an actual force holding him in the bed. Did it feel like a soft, white hand? Did a single index finger lift and drop upon his chest?

Before he could find the words, however, Ted said, "Goat Man."

"Goat Man?" Willi asked.

"Mighta been him. He's been back, lately. Anyway, it was something."

Willi didn't know what to make of that. In his studies of Lakota culture, he'd heard of Hinshmu, the Hairy One, a wild, apelike being, but he'd never heard of a Goat Man. What was Ted talking about? And why had Willi not heard these stories, in spite of all his questioning, all his listening? But Ted didn't give him time to ask. Ted needed to talk, and Willi understood that Ted had chosen him to listen.

Ted had finally managed to force himself to move, to creak from his bed, to slowly hit the blanket and rise, but by the time he made it to the door and into the night, where clouds high and barred and regular imprisoned the moon, the dogs were moving shadows at the edge of the clearing, disappearing into the deeper shadows of the willows and cottonwoods along the draw. Ted managed to call, in spite of his fear that it would direct the spirit's attention back toward him. He knew where the dogs were going. He knew—and he barked them back, in languages both human and canine. He saw them in the shadows turn their shadowbodies toward him, saw their eyes, hard as glass, flickering in the light of the caged moon. Then all those pairs of eyes but one turned away from him again. All those shadows but one lost their form to the deeper shadows of the trees and sculpted earth and were gone, and the single dog that stayed, at the end of the line, having not yet crossed the border where Ted's voice lost its power and the call of the night and spirit gained force—that dog sat on its haunches and howled in misery, in confusion. But the others did not answer. They were silent as cats, prowling single file along the pathways worn by cattle and deer under the trees, emerging into the intermittent moonlight of the prairie on the other side, a dozen of them, trotting through the grass slick as weasels. On the hunt.

Coyotes wouldn't have done what they did, Ted told Willi. Not even wolves would have done what they did. Coyotes and wolves could not be infected so easily by evil or stupidity. But dogs had lived with people long enough to be susceptible to the manipulations of spirits, or to have lost their instinctive common sense.

Ted hadn't seen what happened, but he knew, and as he talked, Willi listened with a wonder that bordered on disbelief—not in what had happened, but that Ted could imagine the hearts of the animals so well. The dogs had slipped through the grass, trotting at first and then loping and then all out running, the greyhounds holding back, the pit bulls and the mutts straining to keep up, the greyhounds with their heads high, scanning with their eyes, the others casting for scent. Moonlight alternated with darkness on the land. Long swaths of grass lay in silver light and long swaths lay in blackness, and the dogs ran through them heedless, and when the greyhounds saw the horses, barred with light and darkness, they raised their voices, and immediately the whole pack raised its single, multitudinous voice, and Ted, standing motionless outside his house, heard it rolling back to him.