Rough Animals Read online

  The girl stumbled with her head down and the dirty strands of hair fallen over her face, like the heavy veins of a dark disease.

  The day was hot and the blood from his arm had turned to brown on the jacket.

  Lucy’s running figure became visible in the wheat a half-mile out from the house.

  “Wyatt!” Her voice and its echoes were gone by the time she reached them.

  Lucy his twin, lighter than he. Blonde hair past her shoulders and a sharp brow that kept the sun from the skin above her cheeks and left it soft and paperwhite around the impassible blue eyes. Sister with unmarked hands that had butchered a hundred chickens and done far worse but should not have to do this. He stepped forward to stop her but she took the thing’s other arm anyway.

  The two of them pulled the girl up to the house together, she playing ragdoll now and falling in their arms as if her violence was spent. Lucy’s grip slipped once and Smith saw the flash of mud on her palm before she replaced her hand on the girl’s forearm.

  In half an hour they reached it, the old pine-shingled box with two floors and too many windows and half of them shedding their shutters and a porch to span the base of it all. Peeling white paint and a screen door that frayed wire like a corset used too hard. And the dead cattle behind them heating under the sun and under the hungered rotations of flies.

  In the kitchen he dropped the girl’s arm and leveled the gun at her again. The room was of a style not redone for sixty years, and the walls so spotted with fly waste that an unfamiliar eye would assume it was the pattern of the wallpaper. His sister stood there, thin under one of the thrift store dresses, this one blue. She wore them every day and nipped them in at the waist with a line of safety pins like a metallic scar.

  “Lucy, get the rope from the pantry.”

  She came back and cut a length of it.

  “Hold your hands out.”

  The girl’s hands were black but the index fingers were wiped clean from trigger-pulls. She watched him as Lucy bound her wrists, with eyes far too light for her and more animal than human, as if she had pried them with a knife from some wild thing’s skull and replaced her own.

  Lucy cut another length.

  “Bring it with you.”

  He nudged the girl’s shoulder with the mouth of the gun to turn her and then pushed it against her spine and marched her upstairs.

  Lucy looked to him when they got to the hall.

  “Your room, the bolt still works,” he said.

  It was bare, for living at least, with a bed of dust-stained sheets in the center and an unsanded desk and empty vase on its top. It was a room that invited decease, heavy with the sense of gone adolescence, though one could not imagine anyone young having run to it, carrying denim-blue bird feathers and silken cicada cases and walnut shells shaped like raccoons’ masks, things that shouted of being alive.

  A lone window with a crack in one of the panes was the room’s single expression of the weight that bridled the air within it. A room for dust to heat and then dance up in the sunspots on the floor like sporal ghosts only to fall back down again. That dust lay undisturbed in most places, staked out corners and territory along the walls around the tracts laid bare from pacing in an outline around the bed.

  Lucy waited at the door for a moment with a stricken expression, wary of something revealed in the others’ seeing it. Then either realizing the room was no more hers than the grounds outside, or as much hers as the grounds outside, the look slid off her face and she came in.

  Smith pulled the chair out from the desk with his foot and pushed the girl into it and Lucy bound the girl’s torso to the back and he set the gun on the bed and checked that the rope was well tied.

  “Who are you?”

  No answer.

  “Wyatt, your arm!”

  “It can wait—who are you?”

  He gripped the child’s shoulders and shook her.

  No answer. The T-shirt seemed to have become its own entity rather than something she wore, oversized and clinging more to the back of the chair than to her, like a splotch of tar melting over the wood.

  “What’s your name?” He was shouting again.

  “It’s not gonna matter to you any more than it’s mattered to me so far.”

  Again the accent like thick rope lugged over a dock edge and he felt Lucy wince at it without seeing her do so.

  “Where did you come from?”

  No answer. Knew then that he wasn’t going to get one.

  “For god’s sake Wyatt the blood’s runnin down your arm.”

  A chunk of dried mud fell from the girl’s cheek and shattered on the floor.

  “Where.”

  Regardless where was not here.

  “No name worth tellin us?”

  “Lucy, don’t talk to her.”

  He took a breath and clutched his arm and spoke again.

  “Where are your parents?”

  The girl turned her hellion’s face and looked directly into his working eye before she answered. “Where are yours?”

  At that he turned and snatched the gun from the bedspread where it left a white stamp in the drifts of dust. Went and checked the ropes at her back once more then went out and Lucy had already run out and he bolted the door behind them.

  When he turned to Lucy in the hall she was crying.

  “What is that? What happened?” She asked it as she tried to wipe her eyes but her hands were shaking and she merely pushed streaks of blonde across her face.

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Goddamn I don’t know. Gotta be on the run from somethin. She killed a steer to eat and took a shot at me when I put the gun on her.”

  “I heard the shots…”

  “Lucy, she shot out the bull and three others.”

  She held in her breath, waiting for him to say more, then passed her gaze from his glass eye to his working one as she realized.

  “The ranch—oh god—”

  “Stop crying.” He could feel his consciousness starting to go.

  She looked up at him in watered blue.

  “Just stop cryin til we stop me bleedin.”

  She ran for the kitchen and called out for him to wait but he staggered slowly down the steps after. His brow was washed in sweat and he wanted to kill the thing upstairs.

  In the kitchen he took the jacket off and handed the bloodied and muddied canvas to her while he unbuttoned his flannel. It stuck on his arm and he nudged a finger in between the layers of fabric and plasmatic muck until he winced and it broke free.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Surface wound. Nothin lodged.”

  She held his discarded jacket over one shoulder now and the bloodstained sleeve fell over her left arm to replicate his.

  It still pumped slowly, and the arm was wet and red down to his wrist. He took it under the sink and let the water run, twisting his bicep beneath it. Lucy passed him a towel and a glass of whiskey and he dipped the towel then prodded it into where the missing flesh had been.

  He sat down in a kitchen chair and she brought a sewing needle and he shook his head even though she had made no offer to stitch his arm. He took the needle to close it himself, the metal already stained with dried blood. It unspooled itself in skeins and clouded inklike into the whiskey as he dipped the needle in.

  He sat there with thread to close a hole but found no hole, only a void chalked with flakes of canvas frayed or curled tight in the deep cardinal mess. So much more like a hole in that it could not be closed. He used the needle to dig two pieces of cloth from the wound. Soon he stopped and let all fall into the whiskey glass, the needle sinking along with its quarry and the unhunted still in his arm, and he stood.

  She was cutting a bed sheet and he took the strips from her hands and wrapped the arm and it bled to make a leech-sized spot in the linen and then stopped and he was already buttoning himself into a clean flannel.

  “What are you doin?”

  “Can’t wait no longer.”
/>   “The cattle?”

  She looked up into his face and immediately looked down again.

  “Here.” He took the pistol from the top of the china cabinet and thrust it into her hands so hard that her back hit the kitchen wall. “She could kill you.”

  “I know.”

  “So watch her.”

  “I know.”

  “Promise me you’ll shoot if you have to.”

  “Wyatt what is she?”

  “Mexican cartel maybe. The kid had a TEC-9.”

  She stood there holding the pistol to her chest, her skin blanching to milkglass in the shadows of the house.

  “What if they’re after her?”

  “She didn’t have nothin of value with her, just a bag full of rocks. I checked. They wouldn’t care.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned to go out but she stepped to block his way.

  “Did it happen near the old place?”

  “No, not the old place.”

  She nodded and bit her lip. He reached out a finger as if to touch her forehead but instead touched the gun, then turned and went out the door.

  The meat was as good as lost the moment he left the field with the girl but he could still save the hides if he worked quickly.

  In the barn he adjusted the bandaged arm and took down the ax from the inside wall and a jug of gasoline from beside the tractor. Money there too, but no other way of doing it. The barn swallows waded in and out of the sunlight above the open door like feathered bats to watch what felt so criminal. He looked up to their fevered gathering along the ceiling beams and they eyed him from black-beaded faces.

  “It wasn’t me!”

  No answer nor forgiveness, only a scuffling among themselves, and he trudged on.

  It was half a mile more to where the cattle were. He reached the fence and untied the barbed wire gate and cried a loud “Haw!” so that they would know a fresh pasture had been opened. Heard a low and then the heavy shifting as they rose from folded limbs onto hooves and mutilated the earth into small mountains in the mud behind their steps. He left the gate open and went through.

  After a few moments he came to where they were, and they hefted by without looking at him, and he stood still for a moment. Let them pass, counted out thirty-eight subtracting the fallen four and marked the heifer that had been buckshot-skimmed but saw that the skin had not been broken and then shut the gate behind himself and went on.

  Finally he came upon the downed cows, the reluctant butcher with Abraham’s knife. Ax such a crude tool but there was nothing else to do this job with. Things borne from hell must’ve come better equipped.

  The four lay in twisted disarray, the second steer still propped upon folded legs as if it were still alive, and he realized now it might not have died straightaway. The air smelled gray with the aftertaste of blood and the gunpowder had thinned back into the dust. No smell of rot but the flies dove and a few sparrows picked along the red shores lining the bullet wounds. Had to remove the heads and legs before he started to skin.

  He took the head off the bull first. Seemed fitting. Some semblance of honor in the funeral pyre. In his first swing his left hand slipped on the grip and the blade landed on the ground beside him and he cursed but the next swing met its mark.

  He turned his face when it hit though he’d gutted elk before and this should have been no different. Let its head and legs lie and pulled his knife from his belt and peeled back the skin starting at the shoulders and then cut on.

  The one killed in the night had bled too long for the leather to be salvageable. Pounds from the flank were gone and he shrank from thinking of how the girl had managed to eat that much of a leg on her own. Fleeting suspicion of her having had help but knew she had somehow as god or as monster done it herself. He chopped it into pieces without craftsmanship or design.

  It was grisly work, skinning then taking off pieces of a hundred pounds or so and dragging them to where the bull had fallen, and twice he thought his arm had started bleeding again. Thirty or so parts and three hours later he had amassed a pile. Three complete hides splayed wet in the grass and uncomfortably human in their having four limbs.

  He lowered the ax and straightened to wipe the sweat from his brow as he had a dozen times and his hand came away red. It was good that Lucy was not watching.

  He took a breath and stared at the mound of meat the height of his chest. And sister I suppose this is the end of it all being ours and only ours.

  The smell in the field was digestive now of half-fermented cud and of raw things that had never seen daylight nor air before. He threw the ax into the final gut and did not flinch when it splashed. That part was done. Laid the ax aside.

  He emptied the gasoline over the banks of cattle spines and dropped in a match.

  Nothing to draw the coyotes now and put those still alive at risk.

  He staggered back from the blaze and watched one of the eyes go up in yellow and then run in a gluish paste over a velveteen cheek. Why hadn’t they run.

  Smith crossed his legs and sat down in front of the bonfire. Took a handful of grass and tossed it futilely in that direction for good measure.

  He’d killed a thousand times on this ground before. Chickens and cattle and deer and squirrels and an Appaloosa gelding that snapped its leg seven summers ago. This ground had seen innards before and maggots had painted it like patches of snow more than once. But the waste, was it different? Just called attention to it, weren’t nothin more than that. But when you counted it all out …

  A lone spider crawled over the tops of the blades of grass and chose the unfortunate direction of the base of the fire. Felt the heat and scuttled under the drying nose of the heifer in another poor decision, another set of carbon parts to crinkle and collapse under the heat. Like the snakes that propelled themselves through the wheat only to fall under tractor blades, and the insects that chopped across stems like calcium machines, and the worms that hooked and churned and overturned again and again in bovine guts, over and over and dead dead dead. A land that was built to consume them and to consume their descendants over and over once again. To consume him, and he pulled his hand away from the wild oat strands he held as if they were hot and then sank his hands back in.

  He killed on this land like a duty, and perhaps it was the land itself that did the killing, growing all of them only to eat, swallowing without chewing, and eating their house in bites of sinking peat and snatches of mold. And toward what—toward what underground underworld river was he supposed to go, if he were in fact the determinant of his own fate and had a boat with which to navigate his own direction upon it, with all of it sinking. But what could be harsher than the dried-out sky of Utah that whitened skulls and beat sand up through pastures and offered nothing to fight the chaotic downtaking of what floated on the irrigated mud above the southern deserts as they swallowed by the century. He kicked a skim of dirt toward the flames. Certain there were somethin more to it.

  In the face of the bonfire he stood and shouldered the smaller two of the hides, folded in half and hung across him like a giant’s lapels. Walked back to the house and held them with a hand on top of each as he hiked through the wheat and then left them on the porch railing.

  When he returned to the fire it had lessened, a few pieces of muscle still rising ridge-backed like fans as they unwound from the bones and the occasional spit of flame as the bits of fat caught alight. He waited for it to go out and did not look at the remains, sat and rested until the light died behind him, then turned to the hide of the bull.

  It was too large and too heavy to fold over a shoulder and so he took a foreleg in each hand and then stumbled forward. The thing fell upon his back like a cape, and he dragged it over the ground, blood in a smear below his false eye where he’d pushed away a fly and his shirt and jeans going dark with the viscera. Hunting knife between his fingers and for his mantle a thing going marbled blue with arterial blood nicked and running down the back
of the white alien underside of the skin as he staggered through the fields like some filthy prince of corporeal nightmares.

  At the house Lucy was waiting behind the shell of a door and went to grab a hide but he put an arm out to stop her and she stumbled back. He did not want to see her with blood on her hands, not now.

  She brought a sack of salt from the pantry and struggled with it behind him on the stairs and followed him to their parents’ room. It was devoid of furniture; they’d had to sell it off. A graveyard, pillaged of the marriage bed that had brought them forth, their own marauders. But here the floor was bare and there was space to stretch the hides flat. He felt the air of the room change when he entered and it could have been a smell from years before or the smell of meat when he laid out the skins.

  She dragged the salt bag and left it there in the middle of the floor then retreated to a corner of the room. Three impish outlines the size of beds framing it, and Smith watched the flickering light jostle the reflection in her eyes so that within them it looked as if the hides still stumbled, alive. He limped back into the hall even though it was only the arm that was wounded. Lucy stayed.

  The girl in the room beside had made no sound since they had left her, and Smith took up the shotgun again and slowly opened the door to look.

  She was where they had left her, sitting with her head bent so that her hair obscured her eyes, and it took away that sense in the gut that there was anything else alive in the room with him. He knew she was watching him from below the flats of entangled hair with a gaze like a scavenging bird’s. The hair was parted by the nose and her mouth was taut, concentrated, lips drawn into twin chapped railroad ties to span the tract of her face and he half-expected their repetition to continue down her chin.

  He did not approach her and instead fastened the hand of his shot arm around the doorframe. She stayed motionless, but a strand of her hair lifted with each nasal exhale until the breathing increased and it lodged under a chip of dirt on her cheek and stayed there.