Theft (19 page)

Ciela and Hector swung their heads low as they loped, the pack following the two of them, their gaits becoming one, a weave of long, scrawny legs looping the horizon like threads that entwine and connect, their very presence blanketing the land.

Ciela had been with this pack since birth, born in the wild, and she took over the place of the alpha female when the former lead female was poached. Hector had come from the Sipapu pack into the West Canyon pack a few months later. He easily fought off the old alpha male who now stayed on the periphery of the pack, alone, and by doing so, Hector kept the Sipapu pack from invading the territory of the West Canyon wolves. If there had been more territory, the invasion would have gone on without question. But knowledge came to them through their noses, and they could smell devastation, and they could smell their own land curling up and pulling in at the edges, shrinking even as the rest of the world expanded. They knew without naming that resources were limited. They sensed things and lived within their means.

But they had no sense of imposed boundaries. For years they had been shot and killed if they crossed over an arbitrary line that cast them outside the Días de Ojos National Forest. Their home territory, historically, was huge, covered most of the North American southwest, and with their instincts they could read land like a story, the earth itself reciting a narrative over and over again, one of survival and balance—and now, of warning.

These days the elk had grown slow. They stood with a lazy confidence that eroded their wildness, grazing for months in one meadow or copse before moving on. Without large predators to keep their senses piqued, their animal minds had grown sluggish, cattle-like. They lived on the seam of domesticity. Human hunters would come once a season and take the strongest of the herd, and through this kind of unnatural selection, their overall stature had diminished. Smaller elk remained to mate when the leaders were taken.

But the wolves were constant, like weather, and they took the weakest, leaving the strong to proliferate. It would balance out, said the narrative of the earth. It would find its middle ground.

The wolves were constant. That is, until they weren't. Until the families they'd chosen and formed and fought for and loved grew fragmented and estranged, the fabric of them fraying from the outside, in. Ciela and Hector couldn't succumb to that kind
of imposed loss. Ciela and Hector had led their pack into a new territory, outside the bounds of the one provided for them. They had slipped unseen and unmonitored past Días de Ojos National Forest boundaries. They had found a way to survive.

T
O GO BACK TO the place I was born. Time had never drained it from memory. The black highway I'd traveled to get here was the tangled umbilical cord I'd tried to sever decades ago. They say there are no geographical borders drawn on a place itself, that the buildings and landmarks are the only things that make it readable. But I could have traveled a buildingless landscape and still found my way here. It was the feel of the place beneath it all, the way the grit of this terrain grasped my gut.

I pulled off the highway, and I saw a Dairy Queen where Mom's childhood home used to be, a Taco Bell in the exact place where Zeb and I used to fish. I parked the car, walked in, and ordered my ninety-nine-cent burrito. I could feel every story this land had ever told, the most vivid memories rising up like night-dreams, the way those kinds of images never really found their way to words. They haunted around inside you like spirits looking for form. But no words could embody them.

I trashed the rest of my burrito and walked out to my truck. I sat for some time before I turned the key in the ignition. The house I grew up in was a block away. My father had remained all these years, though he had not spoken to me and would not return my calls. By all accounts, he'd stopped talking to everyone. Still, I drove the block to see the house where I'd grown up. Chet and Dolly's rose bushes were still there. Every house had a green lawn now. Still, the houses looked even smaller than they did back then, more rundown. The whole neighborhood looked as if it had always been an afterthought, a quiet violence seething beneath it.

I pressed the gas pedal and drove away. At the stoplight in front of Johnny's, I pulled to the side of the road. I felt a
desperate longing for Magda and Cario, for my home with them on the mesa where I lived now. I picked up the phone and dialed Magda. No answer. A lump ached in my throat. I fumbled with my phone, flipped it open, then closed it, then opened it again and checked for messages. None. This time not even Christina had called. It felt like a small stroke of genius to me when I remembered I could call Raymond. Raymond always answered his phone.

“Hey, I was just about to call you,” he said when he answered, and the connection felt like a lifeline. “Taking the day off work tomorrow. I'll be visiting our wolves bright and early.”

“Good, good. Thank you.”

“Not doing it for you, my friend. All due respect. I'm doing it for our wolves.”

He made me smile. “Those wolves haven't killed livestock, you know. I mean, not by habit. They hunt.”

“Hey, is the sky blue?”

“What?”

“While you're telling me things I already know, I thought you might answer that.”

I laughed a little and so did Raymond. “Just make sure Andy knows those wolves are good wolves.”

“Andy,” he scoffed.

“Well, he's the only one who can protect them.”

“Oh, that's right. He's the man to trust the wolves' lives to. He's the head of the agency that's rehabbing them. Same agency that's killed more than half of the same wolves they paid to rehab and re-release. Good system your people have there.”

“Is the sky blue, Raymond?”

He laughed. “Just sayin. Anyway, I'm on my way right now. Like I said, they'd have to step over me to get to those two wolves and their pack. You know that.”

I could hear him walking to his truck, the outside air crackling through a bad cell phone connection. His voice was all static, and I heard him saying, “Hello, you there? Can you hear me?”
and then the line went dead. It felt like being dropped from great heights. I was alone again.

I sat in the truck, remembering what I had wanted to say to Raymond, a thing I had never told anyone.

Three years after Zeb left home, with no medication to soothe Mom's pain and Dad working three jobs to try to make life better for all of us, I helped Mom, like she had asked. I was there with her to the end, when the last sky she ever saw was the last sky she would ever see; when her breath turned quiet. I did not want to let her go. I wanted to hold her face in my palms and pull her close to me and tell her I never, ever, ever wanted it to end. But she asked me and I said yes and I helped her; I honored her choice. I gave her the pills she had asked for because she could not hold them in her hands, and she could not drink water without my help, and I sat with her and waited and held her hand as the life went out of her.

My father knew. It was something he figured out on his own. He covered for me like he had covered for Zeb. But he never forgave me. In the final years when I lived with him, he talked less and less to me. By the time I left home on a college scholarship, he had pretty much quit talking altogether.

I wanted to tell him I did not understand what I was doing at the time. It was a thing I wanted to take back as soon as I had done it, another act I didn't see the whole of until it was over and the permanence of it came clear. It never faded. It just kept playing clearer and more vividly through my mind across the years, something permanent in the face of everything else that was not permanent.

I wanted to tell Raymond that. I wanted my own confession.

BRENDA STOOD IN THE gravel lot, wind kicking up grit from the ground and blasting her eyes that were turning pink along their tender edges now. Peterbilts and Macks rumbled, idling, checking in from the road, rolling out. She looked up at that asshole
Mike, six-feet-plus and every jean-flannel-clad inch of him made of pure sonofabitch. “You got me or you got nothing, Mike. Zeb is not available,” she said.

“You telling me you're driving his rig? You got a license?”

She handed him Zeb's papers with his name whited-out and filled in with her own, and a delaminated driver's license with her photo jimmied into it to make her look legal sitting in the cab of a sixteen-wheeler.

Mike studied the paper and the license. And then he smiled, his deeply pocked, ruddy face creasing around the mouth. “Not bad, not bad.” He handed the documents back to her, nodding his head and patting her on the back like an old friend. “All right, fine. Let's see what we got for you, Bren.”

Mike walked inside the building and came back out with a set of keys, handed them to Brenda. They walked together across the lot. “Look, I don't know what's going on, but if Zeb wants to let his woman do his work for him, it's fine by me.”

“You gotta make the check out to me, though, Mike.” Brenda could feel herself shrinking in his presence, something she had not felt for years, something that ate at her.

“Check?”

“Look, Mike, I'm filling in for Zeb. He's not around and I gotta get paid, you understand. I need Zeb's check. I need to get by.”

Mike waved his hand like he was blocking the grit from the wind. “I'm not saying I won't pay you. I'm a man of honor. I'm just saying I'll pay you the same way I paid when I fucked you. When we all fucked you.” He swept his arm over the whole lot. “Whatever's in my pocket when you get back, that's yours.”

She gripped the keys so tight the jagged edges nearly split her skin.

“You know I'm good for it, Bren. There's never less than a big, fat hun-dun sitting right here in my jeans.” He patted himself just to the right of his bulging zipper. “Take it, or leave it, sweetheart.”

The shiny toes of his cowboy boots stood directly across from her tattered work boots. She could feel the hate for him grinding in her jaw, and she wanted to be drunk. But she wouldn't drink.
Not today, not tonight. Not tomorrow. She looked at him square. “What am I driving?” she said.

He chuckled. “Yeah, just as I thought. You'll take whatever you can get.” Then amused, and half to himself, “Once a whore, always a whore.” He patted her on the back again. “Okay, well, you're taking the same route Zeb had, up to Boulder, out to California, back through Arizona, driving the meat wagon.”

“That's shit, Mike. Zeb didn't drive no goddamn meat wagon.”

“Welp, Brenda, the route we got open today is a meat wagon. That's it. You drive the dead head up to Boulder, visit most of the plastic surgeons up there, fill the trailer up with body parts, few other stops in between before you drop them body parts off at the bio hazmat dump in Arizona, then head out to shaky town, drive all around Hollywood picking up more body parts, and you drive all that body fat right back to that toxic dump—you know it. It's right around your own homeland there, your Indian reservation. Then you come back, check in, and make the circle all over again.” Mike was getting a big kick out of himself right about now. “Who knows? You could be hauling some movie star's lipo-ed hips, some rock star's nose. It's a good gig, Brenda, a glamorous gig.” Self satisfied, he took off across the lot.

“Fuck you, Mike,” her words a whisper as she climbed into the cab. And then louder. “Fuck you, Mike.”

He turned. “Say what?”

“This is a goddamned twin stick.”

“Most guys'd kill to drive that vintage beauty. Zeb's rig. One he drove most often.”

“Zeb's been driving a single stick for years.”

Mike shrugged, and she knew she'd get nothing out of him except sheer satisfaction if she complained for one more second. So she shut up, walked around the truck, checked the lights, the tires, the brakes, the radio, then hopped in and turned the key. The rig shook like a small earthquake when it started up, and with all the shaking already going on inside her body, she thought she might be sick to her stomach. She held her gut tight, swallowed hard, and jammed the main stick into what she thought was reverse. She checked all
three mirrors, let the clutch out, and the rig leapt forward a few feet before she could slam the clutch, hit neutral, and try again.

She could see Mike standing in the lot, his back arched, his head tossed back, gut jiggling with laughter, and she was glad her windows were rolled up tight so he was rendered a flat-screened, silent movie. Fuck him. She'd driven with Zeb before. He'd taught her how to drive, and she had taken the wheel for him more than once. That was back when they were younger, when being on the road meant being so pumped full of white cross speed that they came in fast on almost every trip, too early to log in, and so why not take some time for some fun on their own? So what if they were a little more tight-skinned back then and hard times slid off them like oil off rubber? She had it in her still. She knew how to work hard and have fun doing it. She knew how to drive.

She slid the clutch in—the only time she would have to use the clutch till she stopped again—and the gears ground, then finally engaged. As she backed up, the curved mirrors turned Mike small and contorted, like a circus clown, something that pleased her more than anything on that goddamned day. He was still laughing as she drove past him, and she had a hard time not turning the wheel toward him and watching him flatten into a cartoon cutout beneath the ton of metal she was driving. He blew her a kiss as she passed. She blew him one too, straight off her middle finger.