The Work of Wolves (44 page)

"They got food?" Burt asked.

"Some," Wagner replied.

"Water?"

"Kind of."

"Kind of? You got shit for brains? There ain't no
kind of
water."

"There's a draw. There's some water in it."

"You do any fence building up there?"

"Some."

"Christ! You're too damn pathetic to even beat the shit out of. You know that?"

Wagner, breathing again, agreed. Burt slammed him into the tractor tire again just because he couldn't stand to see the sonofabitch breathing like a normal human being, and suggested that this conversation ought to be their secret, since Magnus might not look favorably on Wagner telling Burt what he knew, and Burt would look even less favorably on Wagner telling Magnus. Wagner grunted his understanding.

"I oughta quit this job," Burt told Carson. "It's like sandpaper. Just wears me away. Sometimes I ain't sure there's anything left a me any more but dust. Trouble is, way Magnus's buyin land, I could go work for someone else, but by the time I got there, that someone else'd be Magnus."

Carson winced. He told Burt Magnus had offered to buy his place.

"Your place? The hell."

"True. Offering nine hundred."

Burt whistled into the phone. "Nine hundred."

"Claims he wants a start a huntin operation."

"Tourism with a chance a shoot somethin. Might work."

"I wouldn't sell. But Ma and Pa. I don't know."

"Anyone with two ounces a common sense is gonna take that offer an run. Even you oughta know that."

"Right now I gotta deal with these horses."

"Someone does. I was hopin you'd volunteer. I need a get back t' not knowin nothin."

As Carson told these things, Earl listened with a feeling of snow both in and against his chest, a swirling inside, cold and austere. "Did you go find them?" he asked Carson.

Behind the window he saw a shadowy movement—his grandmother risen from her chair to take a peek at them. He couldn't make her out, only a vague and indistinct shape behind the glass. She knew what was going on, Earl was pretty sure. Or had a good idea.

"Yeah," Carson said. "I found 'em."

"What did you find?"

"They maybe got a half-acre this time. Poor grass. A little muddy water in the bottom of a draw. Be freezin up soon. They'll kick through the ice for a while, till it freezes to the bottom. Then, I don't know. Eat snow till they're gone."

Earl shivered. The wind raced through the barren trees surrounding the house. They moaned thinly, and their skeletal limbs shook, and a last few leaves detached themselves and swirled away.

"I don't get it, you know?" he said. "Why's he keep going after these horses?"

Carson shook his head. "Maybe it don't even make sense to him any more," he said.

"If he hates them, why not just get rid of them, you know? Or just shoot them and have it over with?"

A wild chattering came from the top of a tree. They both looked up. A plastic grocery sack had just caught against a twig in the very top of the tallest cottonwood in the grove. It was shaking violently in the wind up there. Carson listened to the bag's vibrations for a while.

"I dunno," he said. "Maybe sometimes you do somethin so screwed up and ugly you gotta keep it invisible even to yourself."

"Maybe, huh?"

They contemplated this.

"But still," Earl said, "why's he doing it at all? They're just horses, you know?"

"Yeah. To you an me. To him? I don't know. Maybe they explain every bad thing ever happened to 'm. Bad deal, makin an animal something it ain't. And he's pissed at me—maybe he wants me to know about 'em. Way a gettin revenge. Wants me to know they're starvin, an nothin I can do. He's all caught up in this thing, just like we are. Only difference is he thinks he's the one pullin the strings. Can't see he's controllin things so much he's lost control of himself."

"He's controlling things all right. Seems like there's nothing we can do now."

"There's a thing."

"There is? What?"

"Shoot 'em. Like you said. Take 'em out an shoot 'em."

Carson might have been talking about how to repair an automobile. Earl stared at him, waiting to see if he would take back or explain the words, but he didn't. He let them stand, by themselves, for what they were.

"What do you mean?" Earl asked.

"What I said. Nothin else I could mean."

"But there's got to be something else."

"Name it."

"Maybe Longwell."

Carson's gaze was withering, and Earl was almost ashamed to have suggested the sheriff, after the way Longwell had treated him. It was just that he wasn't ready to think about what Carson was suggesting.

"Far as I know," Carson said, "Longwell's still tryin a pin somethin on you. We're lost in a goddamn maze with that. Even supposin we convince Longwell somethin's up, first thing he does is go to Yarborough an ask about it. An Yarborough stalls 'm an moves em. By the time Longwell gets to where they are, they're not. An we gotta find 'em again. How many times you think Longwell'll put up with that kinda cryin wolf?"

"Still, you know, it might be enough to get Yarborough to stop."

"He don't stop. Someone knows 'm well told me that, an I'm findin it out. He don't." He shrugged, fatalistic. "Don't know how to. Like I said, in control of everything but himself. Kind of a sad sonofabitchin thing, really."

A crow appeared in the blue sky above the trees, feathered its wings, and landed in the tree next to the trapped plastic bag. They both swayed high up there, white bag and black bird, one yammering incessantly, the other giving a single, loud caw, then going silent.

"If you're going to do it, I'm coming with you," Earl said.

Carson betrayed no surprise. He gazed upward at the crow.

"You think so, huh?" he asked.

"I do."

"I don't."

"And so are the others, if they want."

"Even less likely."

"We're all involved. Maybe this started between you and Magnus. But it sucked the rest of us in. So we're in. Until we're out."

"It complicates things," Carson said after a moment.

"That can't be helped. We all crossed into this. You don't cross back just by saying you did."

"That some kinda Indian philosophy?"

"Indian named Jack Bean Stalk"

"The hell?"

"Jack's just going about his business, you know? Just selling a cow. And what's he get? Seeds that will take him into the sky. And then, there's no stopping. He's got to go through until the giant's dead."

"We ain't killin no giant here."

"That's OK. We're not getting any golden eggs, either."

"We sure ain't."

"My uncle would say, if you walk into a story, you have to stay there until it's finished. And we all walked into this one."

"Maybe you're right."

"I am right."

"Uncle a yours sounds like an interesting guy."

T
HE FOUR OF THEM LEFT TED'S CAR
in the shadow of the Badlands wall, on an abandoned section line road Carson pointed out, and they followed him, crossing a fence line, then another, until they found the draw Burt Ramsay had described. They descended into it in deepening dusk. The horses came to them.

"Unbelievable," Carson said.

Where the draw widened, water had collected, and on this water ice had formed. They could see where the horses had kicked through it at the edges. Their ribs showed through patchy coats. Their eyes were stone, in hanging heads.

"They do not look so good again," Willi said.

"They look real bad. This cold weather takes a lot out of 'em. An look't this forage."

Dried and skeletal forbs stood out raggedly in the gloom, and dark, intermittent silhouettes of sagebrush punctuated the foreground of sparse, bunched grasses.

"Anyone see another way?" Carson asked.

All bird and insect life had fled the land before the approaching ■winter, and the land was silent.

"It is hard to believe there is not another way," Willi said. "But we cannot let them starve."

"We tried the law and we tried breakin the law. We was kiddin ourselves thinkin they wouldn' be found. Be kiddin ourselves if we tried it again."

"We could just turn them loose out here, maybe."

Carson shook his head at Earl. "That water's gonna freeze solid before long. I don't know how far it is to other water. Long ways, I'd say."

Ted had his arm over Surety's neck. "This is one real bastard," he said.

"One word for'm."

"It seems like there has to be something else we can do, you know?"

"I've gone around and around with 't."

"There is another thing."

Willi spoke so quietly his voice seemed to come out of the night itself. The other three all turned and looked at him. He looked back without speaking, his features obscure, his hair a pale corona wavering above his head.

"Yeah?" Carson said. "You got 'n idea, name it."

"We could Magnus Yarborough kill. Instead. We could kill him instead."

Orlando shifted his weight. Arcturus stuck its red point through the dark envelope of sky.

They couldn't look at each other. Willi's words affected their eyes, so that they stared at the spaces between shoulders, the chunks of night outlined by bodies. For a moment they stood stunned, paralyzed: a tableau of stone.

Then Ted whistled softly. "My man," he said.

"Wait," Earl said. "You can't even be meaning this."

"Can't? Why not?" Ted undraped his arm from Surety's neck.

"Because you can't. Because it's murder. That's what you're talking about."

"What do you call this?" Ted waved his hand at the horses standing around them.

"Not murder."

"I ain't sure about that. He's the one hurting things, enit? And we're sitting here talking about helping him. Willi's got it right. We oughta be going after him."

"No," Earl said. "I won't. I won't even think about it."

"You won't even think about it? Christ, Walks Alone! What kinda shit is that? We shoulda thought about it a long time ago. You can't take the easy way out just because you don't have the guts for the right way."

"It ain't about guts," Carson said quietly. "There's nothin easy about either thing."

Ted's face was shining, exultant and contemptuous. He turned to Carson. "You agree with Walks Alone?"

"Maybe my reasons ain't his. But I come up with the same answer, yeah."

"Reasons? Shit. Yarborough's hurting these animals. They ain't done nothing wrong. So why're we even talking about finishing his job? Seems pretty clear to me he's the one we need to finish."

"It'd suit me just fine if Yarborough was dead. You got no idea how many problems that'd solve for me."

"There you go."

"Which is why I can't even think about killin 'm."

Ted's face twisted in scorn. His eyes glittered. "What's that mean?"

"Means I ain't about a murder someone to solve my own problems. If it was just the horses, I don't know. Probably not then, either. But I got too many other reasons."

"That sounds like so much bullshit."

"You want a think so, fine. But I ain't murderin Yarborough."

"I can't believe this. What kind of system is it where you even gotta ask this question?"

"A screwed-up one, maybe. But that don't mean we're gonna commit murder."

"Goddamn white-man system is what it is."

They were taken aback by Ted's vehemence, and his sudden change in direction. In the silence that followed, he glared at each of them, challenging them to speak. When no one did, he went on, bitterly. "A guy starves horses and we're called murderers if we do something about it. You think that'd happen in a traditional culture?"

Earl swallowed, found his voice.

"This isn't about whites and Indians," he said.

"Then what is it about? Why're we standing here? Justice, shit! There ain't any. What do you think it's about, Walks Alone, since you know so much?"

Earl felt the old familiar withering under the force of Ted's fury, and for a moment his throat swelled and tightened, and a radical silence seized him and made him abject and ashamed. But he forced himself to meet Ted's eyes and saw in them, beneath the fury, despair. Sorrow. And he realized that Ted was right. Things were aligned against them. He'd known it in Greggy Longwell's office. Why was he denying it here? In a traditional culture this kind of thing wouldn't happen. Even if some rogue individual chose to hurt horses like this, he could not hide his actions or put himself at the end of a single response. Family and kinship and interlocking relationships would form varying pathways to action.

"All right," Earl said quietly to Ted. "Maybe it is the system. So let's change it, you know? Can we get that done before these animals starve to death?"

They stared at each other. Ted's face worked, and his hands turned to fists at his sides.

"I'm not your enemy," Earl said.

Ted's eyes widened. He hadn't known he was prepared to strike. Recognizing it, his face went slack. His fists slowly uncurled. He stared at Earl, breathing hard.

"A lot of things are trying to make me your enemy, you know?" Earl said. "But I'm just someone with a different opinion."

Ted's shoulders slumped. Earl was almost sorry for it. There was a greatness in Ted's anger and Earl regretted that he'd subdued it. He turned his eyes to the horses. He heard their ragged breathing, the dry phlegm inside their throats, and he wished that Ted would always keep his sense of injustice and that it would sustain and not destroy him. And perhaps because he hoped for this, he said to Willi,

"Did you mean it? You brought it up. Killing Magnus. Did you mean it?"

W
ILLI WATCHED TED'S HAND
reach up again and stroke Surety's mane. Bury itself in the dark hair. He watched the horse's ears move back and forth. Did he mean it? He thought of his father's face turning from the window when he'd come back from his grandmother's funeral. His father's voice speaking his name. And how he'd looked at his father across the room, thinking still of the sad little funeral and how he'd had to support Aunt Marti, who had been grim-lipped and white. Her nails had dug into his elbow. He could still feel their sharp pressure, could imagine the red, half-moon indentations in the skin.