You'll Return Somewhere You've Been
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a short story by
Barbara
Haas
When
the llama guy and his wife split, they sold the acreage but left the llamas
behind. Bitterness, we
figured. A
You-take-the-llamas-No-you-take-the-llamas proposition. Or maybe the scruffy-necked
giraffe-faced creatures had in their graceful dignity come to represent
something--hope, happiness, dreams turned futile--something unbearable now for
either spouse to look upon. The
new owners turned the animals out in the lower 40 for the summer, a scrubby
pasture half-sunk in the flood plain, and remodeled the barn for their
college-age sons. It was
understood that the llama guy would come get his llamas by September. But he didn't. At
twilight, I'd drive down the gravel road and find statue-still silhouettes
grouped at the crest of the hill like a child's paper doll chain--black paper
beasts stretching into the fading light. The first couple months it threw me. Ignited something--fear? anger?--in me. Nameless, faceless, an unsettling
thing. The llamas clustered on
the hill, their breath steaming out like clouds in the thin November
air. I'd gun the engine to pass,
spray some gravel, feel relieved to find beyond the hill the golden glow in
my kitchen windows, sometimes the willowy flicker of Desiree as she moved from
the sink to the table. An
elementary logic grounded me:
the llama guy's situation was the llama guy's situation. Mine was mine. No overlap. Kicking
back later in my armchair, I'd be the Slipper King, the Hero of Hearthside
Happy. While Desiree cleaned up
after dinner, our boy Neil would show me the ship he was building, and the
baby'd paw through my pockets for candy. Even doing absolutely nothing I'd know that my hand was as
steady on our dreams, staying the course, as it was when I steered the Massey-Ferguson
down through the rows. The new
owners of the llama guy's property were not animal people. They'd never leave horses or goats
behind. No shadowy creatures at
twilight to spook you. When
a marriage ends, who is left to understand it? Certainly not the neighbors. But
the neighbors are still the neighbors.
Prone out in these parts to doing neighborly things. Which means I had begun checking the
llamas' water trough every couple days and dropping off a bale of alfalfa
whenever I trucked one down to my own horses. Bare as the pasture had gotten, what with late autumn
dormancy, they knew to look for me.
Once I'd topped the ridge on the tractor, I'd find them pressed up
against the fence, gazing expectantly in my direction. As I unlatched the gate, backed the
tractor in and began to unload, they'd stand aloof. Then the dominant male, this brutish shag-furred buck with
silver belly hair, would amble forward, black shiny eyes watchful, and he'd lower
his head to the bale, begin to eat.
By some signal his female harem would know to approach after
that. They'd tear strips of
alfalfa away from the bale with their black velvet lips, like children at a
carnival unwrapping feathers of cotton candy from a paper cone. The young males would shift and stamp
on the periphery, hungry eyes gazing at the bale, careful not to make eye
contact with the buck. In some
rough recess of their beings they could dream of that inevitable day when one
of them would in a display of chest-bumping, flared nostrils and thumping
hooves topple the old fella. Nature's
intractable pecking order. Except
these were abandoned llamas. Unlikely
to be kept as a herd by anyone much longer. God
knew what would happen to them. "They're
dead meat," I said one evening to Desiree. She
looked up from the cloth she was batiking, the tjanting tool gleaming a warm
brass in the firelight. "Not
yet." In
our climate the simple fact is that livestock can't be left unattended in
winter. Too unrelenting the
wind, too bitter the cold, too persistent the predators: timber wolves, coyotes, sometimes dog
packs. To leave animals in the
field was to bring trouble down on you. I
looked at the stack of invoices and receipts on my lap, the month's work
getting a leg up on me.
The quiet in our house was so deep I could hear our grandfather clock
ticking from down the hall. The
baby was already asleep, and in about an hour I'd drive to town to pick Neil
up at his First Communion class.
I rustled the invoices, glanced over at Desiree. "The question is--when do I make the
call?" I meant to the County
Extension office, to report animal neglect. "I'd
call tomorrow. Beckett's not
coming back." True. We'd neither seen him nor heard from
him since the day last spring when he up and left. The occasional email went unanswered. The call to his university office got
the standard Audix. No
response. When I'd phoned the
Animal Science department, I learned that the llamas were indeed his
research property--his responsibility--not the university's. Out
of sight/out of mind animals may as well belong to anyone. Like me. But llamas were not in my future, no matter how much my
son Neil had begged to keep them a couple months ago. We just didn't have the space. And eventually the new people on the hill
would want to do something with that lower 40. Working as I did in town, it was enough for me to care for
our horses and, in summer, manage the crops. I supplied pesticide-free grain to the Organic Pork
Producers and during the off-season coordinated their mail order
division. Chops, bacon,
nitrite-free hams: there was
always a market for real food somewhere. Electric
wok at her side, Desiree was dipping the tjanting tool in the molten wax and
drawing designs on the fabric stretched before her. Stars, planets, loopy shapes--and of course the Host and
Chalice. This was a banner to
celebrate Neil's First Communion.
The planets all looked like Hosts, like a starfleet of Hosts orbiting
in a churchy universe. Cosmic
Communion, this. Wax bled into the
fabric, and she said, "They're predicting below-zero temps for the weekend." "Hard
freeze." The first step of an
inexorable process that would culminate in January with biting winds, bright
crystalline mornings. There'd
come a long string of days when our horses wouldn't leave the stable. To stay warm, they'd roll in their
own manure. Something in my
chest snapped, and the words burst out.
"I can't believe that guy." "Believe
it. Remember the hunting
incident?" Desiree made a sound
with her tongue. Instantly, the
image of Beckett and his trophy buck wavered up for me out of some distant
murk--Beckett, a 250-pound beefy guy, thick in the chest and broad of
shoulder, dragging a 160-class white-tail behind his snowmobile. When he hit washboard, the carcass
hopped up. When he hit powder,
it sprayed a cloud of white.
Animal Science? This guy? Whatever. Hunting season had ended two weeks before. He said he'd been target shooting in
the woods. Accidentally hit the
deer. "Couldn't
leave it lying. Couldn't leave
it for the wolves." His cheeks
looked raw from the cold. The
wind that day seemed to howl up out of a pit, as if chasing something. Each year after the thaw I'd walk the
timbered part of my acreage and find the place where an animal had died, now
just a nest of bones. You could
just leave it. Yes, even for the
wolves. Hungry as Nature was,
especially in the lean and cold season, she'd find a way to dispense with it. But
I never pursued the matter with Beckett. Neighbors, you know.
Snow fell that night, covering the blood trail of his snowmobile
tracks--easy to forget about it all.
Did he go on to mount the 5-point buck as a trophy over his
mantle? What business was it of
mine? And so what? But in my mind's eye tonight, sitting
here with Desiree, I could see the blood, and it was like that long ago snow
had never fallen. Brush
poised over Neil's First Communion banner, Desiree nodded at me. "Scary." "It
won't be like that." "How
can you be sure--? The guy's a
snake." I
stared down at the invoices and orders on my lap. Pepper hams, mesquite-smoked bacon, chops slow-cooked over
apple wood. "My life is too full
of meat." "You
want to get away." "I'd
like to live on the 30th Floor of a Manhattan high rise right
about now. And not Manhattan,
Kansas, either." Desiree
pushed her batiking away and came to me. Papers fell to the floor, a garden in pastel triplicate
around us. She nestled on my
lap. "No horses, no crops, no
pork." "No
llamas." With
one finger she traced a thin line down my face, along my jaw, as if making a
batik design. A light touch,
delicate, with enough looping whorls that I could imagine an intricate
world---perhaps a woodland expanse--of animals and Nature in balance. Encouraged
by her, I'd tried batiking.
Once. Where she created
graceful scenes of multi-layered color, I globbed fat drops of go-nowhere wax
on the fabric, exclamations of clumsiness. In my hands wax was dull and smeary, an inexpressive
stickiness. But Desiree could
fire it up under veils of red, orange and yellow dye that appeared lit from
within. Neil
had been a little quiet on the drive back from town, just sort of nodding
when I pointed out certain crystal clear constellations, not making any
comments. I could see the fog of
his breath on the window. Our
parish had the reputation for being one of the more liberal ones around. Even so, the Catholic Church was
the Catholic Church. First
Communion-wise, I worried that the Transmutation business of turning ordinary
wine into Christ's blood, for instance, might trip Neil up. As I'd waited outside his classroom
door, I heard one of the kids ask the teacher, "But does it still smell like
wine?" Upstairs
in his bedroom, Neil changed into jams, quiet. After brushing teeth, he slid between his flannel sheets
and waited for me to tuck him in.
He said, "What's a first-born?" I
told him it was the oldest child, the first one born to a family. He
swallowed. Didn't have to say, That's
me. "Will the Angel of Death come here?" I
patted him through the sheet.
"Things don't happen like that any more. Those are stories from the past." "But
we still tell them." "We
tell them. We don't live
them." What was my destination
with this? A place of
comfort and peacefulness that would allow sleep to come. Neil
was lying with the quilt drawn up to his chin, the very picture of cherubic
coziness. But he kept meshing
his fingers back and forth, kneading them in a nervous clasp. He had developed this habit lately of
picking at the meat of his thumb, stripping some of the calloused skin away
until it looked painful and raw.
Once, he'd even drawn blood.
His second-grade teacher sent a note home about it, inquiring about
stress. She said the soreness
interfered with his writing. "What
does 'mercy' mean?" Neil picked
away at his thumb. "Like 'the
Lord is kind of merciful'?" I
folded one of his hands in mine and smiled, remembering the ways he sometimes
misheard things: Our Father
who works in heaven, for
example, in the Lord's Prayer and In eggshells so stale for In excelsius deo in the "Gloria". His hand lay in mine, quite warm,
small and still. An animal
curled up in its lair. "The Lord is kind and merciful," I told
him. At church, it was the
cantor's responsorial psalm.
"We're asking for God to treat us gently and with love." "Why?" "Because
we need it." "Because
of the Angel of Death?" Ah. Now I got it: first-born, slaughtered lamb, blood
on the door jamb, Angel of Death passing over. "Because all of God's
creatures live on a planet harsh enough--the only inhabited one in this
galaxy--that we have to pray for mercy just to help us through our day." "It
stinks." "You'd
do things differently." Neil
became animated, even rising up on an elbow. "No sickness.
No people without food. No
bullies. But fireworks still and
mountains." His eyes widened,
seeing it there in the space between us. "Waterfalls, too.
No bees. Or wasps. But rainbows. Also fishing holes and fountains." "Mmmm. I want to visit your world." "And
stay?" "For
a while." "But
you'd come back? Here--?" "I
think so." Neil had begun
meshing his fingers again, back and forth, back and forth. "But maybe not," I said quickly. I played my hand in among his, a
creature cozying in. "Maybe I'd
just stay." "Dad,
what's going to happen to the llamas?" It
surprised me. Other than
pestering me to keep them a couple months back, he'd not mentioned them
again. "They'll have to go
somewhere else to live." "Will
God be kind of merciful?" Again,
I smiled--but right away I felt something sad in it. The fact that he'd spoken of Beckett's llamas and the
Angel of Death practically in the same breath--that didn't sit well with
me. Didn't bode well for
peaceful slumber, either. Mine,
not his. "They're out of God's
hands." "But
he's got the whole world in His hands. Even the little tiny babies." Neil yanked the flannel sheet tightly around him,
cocoon-like--a ritual of protection each night. He claimed it kept him safe in the dark. "We're
in His hands. Our world is. But He gives us some things to decide
about. The llamas are in
Beckett's hands. He's the
god of that world." "Can't
you help?" He screwed up his face--Serious & Somber Neil--and his eyes
looked spacious, almost alarmed, as if dilating with his own private Armageddon. Biblical evil, I thought. How dare they teach this stuff to children--? God, I sometimes hated the Church. "I
hope I can help," I told Neil. "It
stinks." I
clasped him to me. Bony ribs,
little boy shoulders, kissably smooth cheeks. Couldn't it all be this simple and real--? And
just like that, a moment later, everything was normal and forgotten, the
routine of bedtime starting to kick in.
I patted his leg through the sheet and listened to him: Now I lay me down to sleep.
But cold had sunk like stone in my gut. So inadequate, I thought, the things that get us through
the night--prayers, kisses, fuzzy sheets wrapped tight. The
next morning I phoned the sheriff, made an official report of animal
abandonment. The voice I spoke
to on the other end of the line remarked that there was a lot of that just
now, what with the change of season, stock left unattended. A week or so went by, the bitter cold
arriving predictably as the forecasters had said. As far as I could tell nobody had come to check on the
animals. No sign of Beckett,
either. Sitting
in my office downtown I found myself picking at the callous on my thumb one
day, picking, picking. When
the new people moved in last summer, I took them a 10-pound ham, sugar-cured
and slow-smoked over hickory, our best seller, the one that always flew out
of stock each Christmas and Easter.
The guy was a slope-shouldered fellow a little older than me with
frame glasses and a razor-trimmed moustache going gray. He wore a t-shirt and a pair of nylon
running shorts. A cell phone was
clipped to his waistband. His
wife was hard-coiffed--for some reason I thought of Margaret Thatcher--with
hatch mark worry lines to either side of the eye. Appropriate on a woman who had raised teenage sons. I shook hands with them both and
found in that quick clasp a softness of palm that spoke to me of too many
hours spent seated before a computer terminal, too long an
online-all-the-time lifestyle.
Turned out neither had ever lived away from the city. This seven-plus-40 was a first for
them. An investment. They didn't even have a tractor
yet. And, like I said, not
animal people. Margaret
Thatcher looked at him. "Maybe
we should call the realtor."
This after I'd mentioned the llamas. What the hell was a realtor going to do? Once they'd closed the deal, realtors
tended to disappear. Cell
Phone tapped his Nokia 5120.
"Got her on speed dial still." She
turned back to me, a severe-looking woman with deep smile-lines etched to
either side of her mouth, as if with a stylus. Smile lines.
Right. It didn't look
like she ever smiled. Her
scent reminded me of department store perfume counters--an expensive flower
essence. Past her shoulder, I
could see his 'n her golf carts parked inside the barn. One had a canopy of pale blue fringe,
the other a canopy of pink. The
fringe undulated in the slight breeze.
I glanced from the golf carts to her.
Cell
Phone said, "From what I understand it was a real doozy, their divorce." I
nodded. She
was cradling the nitrite-free ham in her arms like a baby. The sight would have made a perfect
photo in the weird Diane Arbus style.
"Llamas weren't all they left behind." I
leaned in. "How's that?" "Hon,
don't bother the guy. He was
their neighbor." Cell
Phone looked at me. "I'm sure he
got an earful." All
at once, Margaret Thatcher blurted, "You can tell there was a lot of hate in
that house." Her face went
white, her eyes wide. The
instant she said it I knew she wanted those words back. Her
husband turned. "You don't mean
the accordion." "Ugh." She turned back to me, the seasoned
diplomat catching herself now.
In an instant she'd composed her face. I had no idea what she did for a living, but if the public
were involved I could see how cool controlling clarity might figure in. She said, "Now how long did you say
you've lived out here?" I
shaded my eyes in Cell Phone's direction. "I never heard accordion music around here." He
snorted. "Thing wasn't for
playing. Busting up is more like
it. Had a pitchfork clear
through the bellows. Hurled like
a lightning bolt." "Oh,
God." His wife shifted the ham
to the hollow of her other arm, looked down at it. This was the sobering instant--full of regret and
self-loathing--just after Diane Arbus has snapped the pix. "Can
you believe he left it there?
Sitting? First thing we
saw when we climbed the hay loft."
Cell Phone jutted his chin in the direction of the barn. "The realtor didn't even know it was
there." Indignation was thick in
his voice. A
phone chirped, and I assumed it was his. He must have too, because he was right on it, scooping it
from his waistband in one practiced move. It had a faceplate of golf scenes. He teethed the antenna up. Turned out, it was Margaret
Thatcher's cell phone. Smoked
ham slung in the balance of one arm, she slid a slim candy-apple red model
out of her hip pocket and wandered over toward the barn, giving her attention
to the voice on the line. He
clipped his phone to his waistband again. Neil had been at me to buy one of these, said it would
come in handy on the farm, said mom could use it, I could take it to work,
everything. I guess one of his
friends from church--the dad--had one. Cell
Phone scruffed his hand through his hair, eyed me. "So you see, llamas aren't the whole story." His wife was standing just inside the
barn now, and he looked over at her.
She had set the ham down in the passenger seat of the pink golf cart
and had begun to lean against it, absentmindedly chatting away. Another Diane Arbus moment. Cell Phone shook his head. "Maybe any married stiff wonders. An
ugly divorce. Desperation. Is it a 'There but for the grace of
God go I' situation? You
know? Can you put yourself in his
shoes?" He chucked me on the arm.
"You're a married stiff, right?
Damn near gives you the willies, huh?" I
said nothing but remembered how those left-behind llamas spooked me, how
relieved I always felt to crest their dark hill and find the golden glow in
my windows. Cell
Phone huffed his breath out in one choppy stream. "Quite frankly, we'd like to be done with this shit. Their shit. For the money we're paying out here." I
didn't blame the guy.
Accordions, pitchforks and llamas. What a lousy mix.
Like items on an aptitude test, where the point is to make a logical
connection between three seemingly unrelated things. An indication of intelligence. You could be smart and not want to
figure this out. When
I left that day, I noticed they'd piled stuff out by the road, waiting for
trash pick-up. It would be a
couple weeks still before they figured out that there was no trash pick-up
out here. You were your
trash pick-up, you and a rust bucket truck. Enough to cause idyllic dreams of a country acreage to go
sour, whether you both had golf carts or not. I glanced through the stuff they'd piled up, found a
gearbox from an old John Deere I thought I could salvage and, of course, the
pitchfork. I took them both with
me, stuck the gearbox in my shed for later and left the pitchfork down at the
lower 40 with the llamas. For
when I needed to unload a bale.
Didn't see the accordion, though, in their pile of stuff, mutilated or
not. The
Saturday after I'd reported Beckett to the authorities I was sitting at the
dining table at dawn, shaking off sleep and sipping some coffee. A light powdery snow had sifted down
overnight, just enough to lend a luminous wintry feel to this otherwise gray
sunrise. The sky promised more
snow--4 or 5 inches, they were saying.
No one else was up yet. The
coffee mug felt warm against the heel of my hand, and I sat listening in the
dawn stillness to the ticking of the clock. With the sunrise had come the wind. It whipped the light snow, drove
flakes pinging against the windows, a counter cadence to the clock. Then
I heard the shot. A
clipped clear report on the morning air. It carried like the sound of breaking glass. My head jerked toward the south
windows. I turned just in time
to catch a whole flock of crows lifting up out of a stubble field, black
smudges on the paper sky. In
the mud room I stumbled into my boots and then pushed out into the wind,
still pulling my Carhartt on.
Bare tree limbs clicked against each other, a nervous sort of
switching. My boots crunched in
the powdery stuff. The ground
still felt soft and friable underfoot, the hard freeze not gripping it
yet. From the stable, my horses
nickered as I passed. Their
trough was topped off with a window pane of ice. I smashed it through and kept going. At
the top of the hill it was gustier, a cutting sort of brisk wind that sliced
through the quilted lining of my coat.
My eyes teared up, and I stood for a few moments blinking. Then I saw it--blood on the snow. Stark. Dramatic.
Primal. The llama
struggling to rise up on all fours.
Silver belly fur stiff with blood. I
scanned the scene, taking it panoramically in. Trough.
Trees. Scrubby weeds gone
dormant. The alfalfa bale I left
last week. Everything was
normal. But it was not normal. The
rest of the herd had clustered at the farthest edge of the lower 40, a dipped
out basin that stood under water all summer. It was a sheet of brittle ice today. Their hooves had shattered
through. The gutshot llama was
struggling to join his herd. And
there he was--Beckett. Twelve
gauge in hand, he was looking not at the llamas but down at the snow around
his feet. He was wearing a thin
terry-cloth bathrobe over a pair of sweatpants--no shirt--and the robe was
flowing open so that I could see his bare chest. The skin there looked raw from the cold and wind. He was toeing something in the snow
at his feet, his pair of worn leather house slippers dark with wetness. He crouched down, the bathrobe
flaring out behind him like a banner, and he began pawing at something in the
tufts of grass. Like a mad king,
I thought. Crowned with
bed-head. Wiry strands of
graying hair stood stiffly straight, defying the wind. The
world was in Beckett's hands.
Along with a shotgun. I
could not leave the world in Beckett's hands. "Yo!" He
straightened laboriously, his reactions a little slow. Drunk, I thought. Along the periphery of my vision I
saw the wounded llama hobbling toward its herd, dropping its hindquarters,
then staggering up again.
Beckett squinted in my direction, eyes adjusting to the distance. I hadn't seen the guy since last
spring. It was like he'd put on
ten years since then. Face
haggard, skin coarse-looking, belly sagging over the waistband of his sweat
pants, a real load of cheese there. "Beckett,
what's going on?" "Lost
a contact," he yelled. He jutted the rifle's barrel sharply skyward. It was a twin bore up-and-under. "Thing's got more kick than I
remember." "You
need some help, Beckett?
Here. Let me hold that
for you." Close now, I held my hand out, gestured toward the shotgun. He
grinned, squeezed one eye shut--the one without the contact? A laugh wheezed from between his
lips, its own eerie wind. "Stay
back, man." My
heart thumped wildly, adrenaline and early-morning caffeine amplifying each
other. The thought of Desiree,
Neil and the baby sleeping peacefully in their beds came to me, two vastly
different worlds existing side by side.
What the hell was I doing? "That
llama's been shot. Let's put it
out of its misery."
Elementary logic. Simple,
reassuring. The need not to
blame Beckett, or name him as the agent here, uppermost. That old pitchfork still leaned
against the gate where I'd left it, its tines jammed down in the near-frozen
ground. I jerked it up. Cell phone, I thought. What I needed was a cell phone right
now so I could call the sheriff.
But all I had was this. Beckett
glared at me, lip curled. "Put
it out of its misery? With that,
bub? Then you're more a heartless bastard than I." He spat in the snow, glanced at the gutshot llama, his
eyes restless, darting about, something flushed out of cover. He smelled powerfully of a sour mash
whiskey, an astringent almost kerosene-like odor that carried on the snowy
air. The wheels were turning
behind Beckett's eyes.
Ideas forming. I didn't
want Beckett getting ideas. All
at once, he leveled the gun barrel at me, almost casual-like. "Maybe I should put you
out of your misery." "But
I'm not miserable."
Elementary. Simple. Declarative. Befitting a second-grade reader. The Lord is kind of merciful. "Maybe
I should just put myself out of misery." He tipped the gun barrel up under his chin. It was an easy motion. The thing fit quite naturally
there. It bit into a loose flap
of skin just beneath. I doubted
it was the first time he'd done such a thing. "Not
worth it, Beckett." "Fuck-around
whore. Screwing somebody. Out here even, from what I hear
tell." He arched his eyebrows. "Wasn't you, was it?" "I
know how to stay on my side of the fence." "You're
on my property now, bub." "Think
again, Beckett." I inclined my
head toward the house on the hill.
The new guy. He
snorted, spat, brought the rifle back to hang loosely at his side. When he did, I heard something click
in the pocket of his bathrobe.
Too small to be car keys.
More like extra shells for the shotgun rattling against each
other. "Idiot bastard," Beckett
said. "Paying California prices
for something that's not even in California." I
held the pitchfork out. "You
lost something." Diversionary
Tactics 101. He
didn't look at it but at me, January's ice in his gaze. "What do you know about it?" I
shook the thing in my bare hand.
"Come on, Beckett. You
left stuff behind." He
did look at the pitchfork then.
"Ah! So that's
where it is. I wondered what
happened. Figured The Bitch took
it. Why, I was saying the other
day--who's got my goddamn pitchfork?" He rubbed his foot through the snow at
his feet once more, as if remembering the lost contact lens. When he looked up, he fixed me with a
cold stare. "You called The Man on me." "Had
to, Beckett. You weren't taking
care. You've got to take care of
what's yours." "Well,
that's why I'm here." Suddenly,
he swung around, rifle at his hip.
Fast. Like a mechanism
that surged more powerfully into motion than you'd thought possible: jet planes, steam shovels, hydraulic
equipment. He pointed the barrel
toward the herd, squeezed off a no-look shot. In
the instant his shotgun kicked, I leapt. Before I even knew my intention I lunged forward. His chest was thick and cold under my
fists--like a slab of processed meat--and in the bitter wind it had the surface
sheen of bologna. We rolled to
the ground, snow crunching beneath us.
I kicked the gun clear.
Beckett bucked his torso under me, a spooked horse. But it was no use. I got his neck pinned under the
hickory handle of the pitchfork.
He made a throaty gurgling sound. My knees were on either side of his neck, forcing the
handle down, down. His eyes
rolled back in his head. "Daddy!" The
sound punctured the air, a report all its own. I
glanced around. Neil was running
down the hill below the stable.
Barefoot, wearing only jams, wind whipping the flannel. "Go
back!" I shouted. "Have mom call
the sheriff." "Daddy,
look!" He was pointing toward
the llama. "The
sheriff! Have mom call." Snow skiffed up under Neil's
feet. The bare soles looked
pink. When he didn't stop, I
roared, "Now!" Beckett
went limp beneath me. I rolled
off, eased the pitchfork's handle from his neck. His chest rose and fell in tight shallow swells. Legs twitching in the snow, he lay
there, a beached thing. The
bathrobe had flapped open to either side of his torso. In various places--chest, belly--his
skin was mottled, the first waxy stages of frostbite setting in. I reached in his bathrobe pocket,
rummaged around for more shells.
Finding two, I duck-walked over to where I'd kicked the shotgun. The barrel still felt warm when I
broke it under my hands. I
loaded the shells, snapped it shut.
The wounded llama was dragging its hindquarters, hobbling toward the
herd, a slow action that had been going on ever since I'd crested the
ridge. I jammed the gunstock
back against the meat of my shoulder and sighted along the barrel. Stroked the trigger. It kicked, a bruising jab that winded
me. The llama fell in stages--to
its front fetlocks, haunches, upper chest, left shoulder. Finally, it dropped its long neck
across its body, a careful and precise move, like an origami fold that even
under steady hands proves tricky.
At the gun's report, the rest of the herd had leapt up, as one. Now they shuffled nervously on the
broken ice. I could hear it
crack beneath them. Behind
me came a moan, then something crunching in the snow. Beckett was sitting up. He wrapped the bathrobe around
him. The whiskey had worn off,
and the shakes had set in. He
yawned. Hypothermia was taking
over. "It's
hell, bub. What the bitches'll
drive you to." "You're
hell, Beckett." "So
it hasn't happened to you yet?
Okay. Hang around long
enough. It will." "Beckett,
the soothsayer." He
fingered the purplish bruise that was forming on his neck. "Laugh if you want. The Bitch used to go to a
fortuneteller. Card reader,
right? Never told her anything
truer than 'You'll return somewhere you've been.'" He snorted, swiped at his nose with the back of his
hand. "We always return
somewhere we've been, bub. Every
damn last one of us." "Like
you've returned here." He
spread his hands and tried to smile.
His teeth had begun to chatter ferociously. "It's not enough, bub. A gun. To
protect yourself from them.
Bitches gone bad." "It'll
do." An
engine sounded from up the ridge.
Too soon to be the sheriff.
When I turned to look, I saw a blue golf cart zigzagging down the
hill, snow flying up from its small tires, its fringe blown by the wind. Cell Phone. Before
the cart had even stopped, he was leaping out. He had on a pair of lycra running tights and a shiny
Goretex parka in an apple green shade.
He took the scene in--me with the gun, Beckett sitting in the snow, the
downed llama over there. "Poacher?"
he asked, eyes on me. It
hit me: they'd never met. Why should they? The way real estate got transacted
out here you'd never need to. I
told him it was Beckett, the llama guy.
The former owner. Cell
Phone gaped, stunned. "My
God, man!" The words kind
of choked in his throat. Beckett
was pathetic, yes. No
'walk a mile in my shoes' identification here. No 'There but for the grace of God go I' feelings at
all. This guy was a mess. A way you'd never be. Then,
lightly, like a bird landing, I felt something warm bump against my
side. Neil. His small arm encircled me. At least he had on a coat and boots
this time. I patted his hand. "Daddy!"
he breathed, urgency in the word.
He looked from our old neighbor to the dead llama, eyes focused and
intense. He tightened his grip
on my waist. "Daddy!" He gave me a clutching shake, as if
there were still more to be done. But
there was no more to be done. The
sheriff would eventually come. The
llamas would get trucked away. In
the spring, Cell Phone'd have the lower-40 ripped up and a driving range
installed. Neil's
First Communion would go off without a hitch. The
Angel of Death? He wouldn't ask
about it again. Because we'd
been there/done that. And
both wound up knowing what mercy is. |
"You'll
Return Somewhere You've Been" in GLIMMER TRAIN |
