The Work of Wolves (40 page)

"I doubt it. As much land as he's got, he can find a way to hide 'em. And do what he wants."

"We must wait and see."

"Those damn dogs."

"It is not their fault. They are just dogs."

"I shoulda kept 'em tied up."

"It is not your fault, either. I will tell Carson and Earl. They will know it is not your fault, too. Maybe, sometimes, things just happen."

S
TARING AT HIS PARENTS
, Carson felt caught in an immense machinery that ground on and on. He almost laughed, but his father wasn't joking. Carson set his fork down, picked it up again, looked at his mother, saw on her face the confirmation of his father's words.

"This ranch?" he asked. "Our ranch? He made an offer to buy our ranch?"

"He did." Carson's father cut off a chunk of roast, watching his knife saw through it, then lifted it to his mouth.

"That's nuts. This place isn't for sale."

His parents didn't reply. He looked from one to the other of them. His mother sat with her hands in her lap, looking down at her plate, and his father, still chewing, gazed at the uncovered bowl of mashed potatoes steaming in the center of the table. Carson had heard many silences, but never one like this.

"You aren't considering this?" he said. "You aren't even thinking about it."

He set his fork down, heard the tines ringing.

"He's offering nine hundred dollars an acre," Charles said. "That's twice what this land's worth. Twice 'n a half."

He swallowed, picked up his coffee cup, gulped the steaming liquid, set the cup back down. Carson watched these actions, his mind reeling. It had been a week since Willi had called to tell him how the horses had been chased from Ted's pasture. The following day they'd been discovered along the highway, identified, and returned to Magnus. Carson had gone up to the small pasture behind Lostman's Lake, found the pen dismantled—Wagner Cecil must have been busy—the artesian spring spouting and vaporous amid the trampled dust where the horses had stood. But Carson didn't trust that this was the end of things. Rebecca's leaving could only have inflamed Magnus's rage. If, as Burt had said, he had blamed the horses before, he would doubly blame them now; now they were the only visible object of his jealousy, the only thing left that he could see and control and release his anger upon.

Carson stood in the middle of the trampled dust and looked at the brown hillsides rising around him, the red lights of Tower Hill blinking faintly in the afternoon sky, and he thought of Rebecca. Wondered where she was. How she was doing. He hadn't heard from her, and he didn't know what that parting in the field had meant. He'd watched her walk back across the stubble, watched her push down the wires of the fence and swing her leg over them, then climb up the road ditch to her car. The chrome surrounding her mirror flashed in the sun when she opened her door, so bright even from that distance that Carson winced, and at that moment a great doubt seized him. Had she just said a final good-bye? Was that why she'd come? So much suddenly seemed implied by the things she'd said. In saying she didn't want Magnus involved in anything she and Carson did, was she closing off any future between them? Was she saying anything they might do would always be tainted by that dark silhouette standing on a hilltop watching them? Would she give Magnus that much power, believing she was freeing herself from him? On the other hand, did she intend to return to Magnus, to try, after all, as she had with her first husband, to make her marriage work?

These doubts ran through Carson's mind in a flash as she shut the car door, and he realized how little they'd ever really talked of anything that might answer these questions. Even the fact she'd said she loved him seemed full of ambiguity—perhaps the kind of thing said only because she now felt it was safe to say. The chrome stabbed his eyes again as the door swung shut, and then a few moments later, the car already moving away, the sound reached his ears. He wanted to call out to her, but it was useless. Useless. Her car trailed dust over the rise, and the dust remained for a while, besmirching the sky. She'd left no number where he might reach her. He could only wait for her to call. If she would.

And now Magnus had the horses back. It was almost too much to think about. Thinking just returned to its beginning or meandered aimlessly. Yet Carson couldn't stop thinking about it all: her words, her hair aslant in the wind, the way she had disappeared inside the car without waving or looking back at him. And the horses: Where were they now? He lay awake nights thinking about it. Sometimes he noticed in the darkness the smell of his grandfather, still faint in the rooms, and yet so powerful that he had the feeling, if he could snap the light on fast enough, surprising even himself with the movement, he might find the old man leaning against a wall and looking out the window, or sitting at the kitchen table with his boots up on its edge, thinking of horses. Or—Carson wondered—perhaps eyes. A woman's hair.

Now, though, he stared at his parents, all other thoughts washed away by this new thing they were saying. His father had just told him that Magnus Yarborough had stopped his pickup on the road alongside a field where Charles was working and flagged Charles down and, right there, standing on the road side of the fence while Charles stood on the field side, had offered to buy the entire ranch.

"I couldn't believe it myself," Charles said now, shaking his head. He cut another piece of roast, brought it meditatively to his mouth, shook his head again while he chewed. "I told him what you'd expect. Asked him where he'd come up with the crazy notion the place was for sale. Weird guy. He doesn't bat 'n eye. Says he thinks maybe it is for sale, only I don't know it yet."

Charles swallowed, worked his tongue against his teeth, then reached over the table for the green beans, lifted a spoonful onto his plate. Carson felt his mother's eyes on him, but he couldn't look at her. He felt physically unbalanced and had to put his hands on the table to steady himself. Even then the room seemed to tilt around him.

"He says to me," Charles went on, '"How much would it take to convince you your ranch's for sale?' I don't even understand the question, and when I do, I got no answer. But he's serious. I joke with 'm, say, 'Twelve hundred dollars an acre,' kind of laughing, you know, tryin a figure out what his game is. You know what he does? He takes me serious, nods a little, an says, 'Twelve hundred's a lot. Maybe you'd consider nine.'

"Maybe I'd consider nine. Jesus." Charles glanced at Marie. He'd forgotten he didn't use the Lord's name in vain in her presence, but she gave no sign of disapproval.

"Maybe I'd consider nine," he said again. "And maybe I'd consider the sun comes up in the west. But the guy is dead serious.
Dead
serious."

He stopped. He waved his fork in a series of little vertical circles, trying to make sense of what he was saying. Then he stopped the circles but kept the fork held up and looked at Carson.

"Nine hundred, Carson. He's dead serious about nine hundred. The man is not joking. He'll give us nine hundred an acre for this place. Every goddamn acre of it."

He glanced at Marie again. This was all so unprecedented he couldn't contain himself, couldn't remember his language. But again she registered no surprise. She was observing Carson.

"Nine hundred dollars," Charles said. "You got any idea what that adds up to?"

"What'd you tell'm?" Carson's voice echoed in his skull. By staring at a spot on the wall hard enough, he'd stopped the room's spinning, though he felt it could start again at any moment.

"Told'm I'd think about it. Talk it over with you and Ma."

"You told him you'd think about it."

"Carson," Marie said.

Carson couldn't think. Was this what Rebecca had tried to warn him about when she'd said that Magnus never quit? Did she know something then, or was she just worried, conjecturing? And was this an attack on Carson or was it just business? Carson couldn't pin his thoughts down. The one thing he knew was that his father had already made up his mind. He felt the old inability to understand his father. He'd seen the gleam in his father's eye when he'd pronounced "nine hundred an acre," and that gleam had been replaced by a bulldog tightening in his jaw, the muscles hardening in the shadow of the overhead fluorescent light, when Carson had spoken. Carson knew his father had already thought about it. He already knew.

He was grateful for his mother's interruption, and he turned from his father's tight face to his mother's sorrowing one. And yet hopeful, too. Sorrowing and hopeful and with a reddish blush of shame brightening her neck, the edges of her jaw.

"We haven't made a decision yet," she said. "We're just talking about it. But we can't just dismiss this." She glanced at Charles. "We'll never get an offer like this again."

"We don't want an offer like this again."

His mother looked at her hands in her lap. Her eyelids downcast, neck bowed. Something meek, prayerful, innocent, hurt, in the gesture. Carson felt sorry for her. It pierced his other feelings, and for a moment he was purely sorry for her, with nothing else inside him. She didn't want to be doing this to him. But his father was so excited. So ready.

"It's like winnin the lottery," Charles said.

"I don't want a win the lottery. I want a ranch. Far as I'm concerned, this ain't somethin we oughta even think about."

Carson tried to still his mind, to calmly consider what was happening. He'd known this land as long, nearly, as he'd known his mother's face, and the wind over it was the way he moved. This place was his heart and breath. But how could Magnus know him that well? How could Magnus know he wasn't like his father, who saw the money as opportunity and dream? Saw it as the lottery—a rare, impossible alignment of random events? It surely did not make sense that Magnus would offer to enrich the man he saw as the thief of his wife's affections—yet he had to know that Carson would share in any profits the family made selling the land. Two and a half times the ranch's value? To imagine that as an act of revenge? It felt like an act of revenge to Carson—but could Magnus have that kind of imagination? Could he possibly see that far? That deep?

Carson was as shocked by his own vulnerability as he was by the offer itself. He'd been so confident when he told Rebecca not to worry. "What can he do to me?" he'd said. He'd never imagined this. Couldn't have ever imagined this. How had Magnus managed to think of it? How could he reach this deeply into Carson's interior and pluck this forth? If Magnus truly intended to take from Carson what was most dear to him because he thought Carson had stolen Rebecca, then his was an imagination strangely large, his was a mind that, in its exercise of power, didn't recognize any boundaries. And Carson knew nothing of Magnus. The more involved he became with the man, the more he receded from understanding. It couldn't be that this was aggression and revenge. And it had to be.

Rebecca had said that money for Magnus was just a way to power and control and that otherwise he cared nothing for it. Could Magnus possibly understand that Carson, in an entirely different way, also cared nothing for money, and that therefore this offer would enrich him violently—and leave him bereft? Was that possible? Or was this just a business deal, acquisition and profit only, indifferent to love, indifferent to jealousy?

"Why's he want this land?" Carson was almost afraid of the question.

"Says he wants a set up a game lodge. Raise pheasants 'n grouse 'n deer, even elk 'n buffalo. Charge big to hunt. He's got the old Elmer Johannssen place already, and this one runs up against it. He figures to fence around both of 'em. Needs the room, he says, for them animals to roam. An we got water. The Johannssen place's only got one decent stock pond. Man does his research—he knew we had three ponds and that artesian well. Enough water there, if you can stand to drink it, to do about anything."

"Hunting'll pay off twice what land's worth?"

"I sure don't know. He seems to have it all worked out. He's talkin corporate trips. Memberships. Safari stuff. Hell, he even talked about puttin in a golf course. Maybe that's what he'd use that well water for. Anyway, he's got the money. He can afford to wait a long time for a place like he's plannin to pay off."

Carson pictured bison and elk roaming over this place, outside the window, rubbing up against the old house, grazing around the Quonset. It was an odd vision but one he could live with, something familiar in it. But then he thought of strangers, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them, arriving here—by plane, by car, coming from their anonymous places and claiming this land with their ironic, confident eyes: smooth-shaven, corporate types with thousand-dollar shotguns and rifles. Making their big kills. Turning the place into an arcade and pretending it was real. Toasting themselves in the evening. He thought of them on the Johannssen place, outside that abandoned and wrecked house with its never-played piano, the hawks listening within. Quivering. It seemed a defilement, and he understood suddenly that it had been an explosion of the holy that had driven Rebecca and him back from that doorway. They had intruded on the sacred, and the wind of the hawks' wings against their faces had encrypted a message of mystery and power; the amber eyes had carved it like lighted brands, suspending hieroglyphics in the air; the piano's silence had played it.

He felt how such defilement could be a private thing, a defilement of the heart itself. For he thought of those anonymous hunters opening the door of Elmer and Helen Johannssen's house and tramping in, making loud comments, clanging the keys of the piano, kicking the hawk's nest into dust. And then he thought of them on this place. He looked out the window past his mother's shoulder and saw the door to the old house out there, and he thought of them breaking down that door, the tiny whirlwinds of dust its opening would churn—and then, cocksure and curious, invading. Voyeurs. Casting their cynical eyes upon his grandmother's drapes. Laughing at the meager furniture, kicking the few chairs around, and never understanding why it was so little—because his grandfather had made those small, painful pilgrimages to the Quonset with the things that Lucy treasured, preserving them there as he preserved them in his mind. Carson imagined those anonymous men defiling the place year after year, then flying away again to their plush living rooms and air-conditioned offices, and telling their stories. Turning what they'd done into an adventure. And never understanding, or caring to understand, the real story. The real history. Never knowing they had been in the Old House.