NEXT MORNING, SOON AS the sun oozed red over the horizon, I woke up and headed out. I heard the warped screen door slam behind me, then swing back to its halfway open position, as it always did. I walked out into the sounds of morning, the ravens starting up already, songbirds beginning, coyotes fading, and there, across the mesa, I saw Magda, standing on her porch, waving goodbye. If there had been a tug when I said goodbye to Zeb or to Mom long ago, that same tug went out to Magda now. I felt pulled back to Colorado, the place I'd grown up, and at the same time, tied here, to New Mexico, this land, these people, this love.
I took the long way through town so I could drive by Chris's little adobe house. I had every intention of knocking on the door, saying goodbye, letting her know what was going on. But the house was dark, and I told myself it would be best not to wake her. The engine of my truck rumbled, the sparse lights of my little town becoming a distant constellation that faded to darkness in the rearview mirror.
Zeb
THE ROAD DIMINISHED IN both directions, around the bend before him, behind him in a thin whip that trailed for some
time before it disappeared in his rearview mirror. Late summer wheat lay flattened by wind and heat, strapped across the hillsides like the greying hair of a blonde woman, strawlike and dull by now.
There are some things you cannot change, you just cannot change.
The engine brake hissed and sputtered, the only sound in the predawn night. Hand over hand, his whole body working, he steered the Peterbilt up the exit ramp, to the stoplight. With the driver side window rolled down, the morning cool brushed across his bare arms, lean and more muscular than they should have been for his forty-some years. The chill felt good to him. He sat for a few seconds in the quiet, then felt the engine rumble in his chest as he pressed the pedal. He pulled the rig into the bay.
He logged his hours by the splash of moonlight through the cab window, didn't want the dome light on, hated the goddamn interrogation lights of cities that dimmed the stars above, hated anything that took away from the darkness, made something as abundant as stars struggle to do their job. Most things he loved had dimmed.
He pulled the leather ties from his ponytail, let his dark hair fall around his shoulders now, then closed the log book, walked across the lot, turned in his time sheet without so much as a good goddamn to the other drivers milling around and shooting the shit after their shifts. He made his way to the bare tables where three computers sat, drivers checking email and writing to their families. Zeb sat down, pulled up the same pages he always looked at, the ones that told of the work his sister was doing in New Mexico, though they never said exactly where in New Mexico. Some secluded place kept top secret from the general public, for good reason, but still. How to find her, wherever she was now. It worried him. He would give up most of what he had now to see her again. He hovered too long over his email, then made a decision he'd keep to himself. After he hit “send,” he stared at the computer a while longer. Then he signed off and walked back outside, across the lot.
An hour's drive lay head of him, and about two miles from home, he killed the lights of his '68 Chevy truck, drove in darkness, sensed his way around the curves of familiar blacktop and intersections that lay as open and forgiving as a young woman's body. His wife was no longer young, no longer the girl he'd grown up with in the field. Brenda was at home in bed now, fat, snoring, her black hair streaked with wires of grey. The glowing embers of his cigarette outlined her form every time he inhaled, the bearlike heap of her beneath woolen blankets, the smell of her sharp, whiskeyed breath as she exhaled in her sleep. He could see her silhouette even as he drove.
In the long gravel driveway, he released the clutch, let the engine die before turning the key. He still missed his old Australian shepherd, Hitch, who had greeted him along this road for nearly five years, his ghosted outline still visible to Zeb along this path. He tried to shake the memory of the mountain lion that had taken Hitch, but the spirit of that cat was embedded in him to the bone. The first time he'd seen the lion, he'd been walking through the meadow near his cabin. It was a fall day, no snow yet, and he had just settled into his cabin, his first real home as an adult (something he'd never imagined would be possible for him).
At first, she was completely shadowed by the trees. But light changed fast in the highlands, and the shadows shifted, and where once there was nothing, now there were three lions, a female with two kits that were almost full grown. Female cougars keep their offspring with them for up to three years before sending them into their own territories, and these kits, Zeb figured, were a season or two away from being pushed out. The family was sharing a recent kill, a doe, as far as he could tell.
Zeb watched from his distance as the cougars pulled at the fresh meat, their muzzles thick with blood in a way photos in souvenir shops never showed, uncomfortable as people are with an animal that is both beautiful
and
deadly. He watched silently until the female lion dragged the remains of the doe deeper into the woods and covered the carcass with leaves and debris.
The following winter, he was walking home alone after a day of unsuccessful bow hunting. Twilight had turned to dusk and dusk to dark, the seam of the day now folded over into night. He inhaled the menthol air, let it flood his lungs. It felt good to him, and his constant vigilance lagged. In that vulnerable moment, without so much as the snap of a twig as a warning, a mountain lion was on him. It knocked him to the ground, and he felt his skin pop as the knifelike claws sunk into his fleshy shoulder muscles. He felt his own warm blood covering his skin, and then he went numb and strong with adrenalin. With the butt of his bow he hammered the animal between the eyes, and the cougar fell back enough to let him reach for his handgun, aim, and pull the trigger. The animal went down instantly, no struggle, no suffering.
He stood there, shaken. It was a young cat, just pushed out of his mother's care, in search of his own territory now. But with houses and subdivisions crawling up the mountainside like they were, new territory for mountain lions was meager. Zeb knew this young male was the offspring of the female he'd seen with her two kits at the edge of the meadow. It had been a while since he'd broken the law, and now a dead mountain lion, out of season, lay in front of him. As he looked down at the blood and earth, he knew this lion would go to waste in the woods. Scavengers would pick at it till it rotted. With the bears already asleep for the winter, there was no predator large enough to consume this much meat. So he bled the animal from the neck, then took out his hunting knife and split the lion from ribcage to anus. He field dressed it like a deer, and he hauled the remains home. It was the first time he had tasted the meat of another hunter.
He blinked as he drove now, trying to shake the memory. He leaned into the steering wheel and coasted home.
His bad leg caught on some sharp spur he could feel on his hip bone as he stepped out of the truck, and he limped without hiding it now, no one watching at this time in the morning anyway.
At the corral, he bent at the waist and slipped between the wood slats of the fence. “Lita, Chey.” He clicked his tongue between his back teeth and jaw. “C'mon girl, c'mon, boy.” Cheyenne, the
bay, trotted over, his dusky mane swaying. “Yeah, boy, yeah.” The horse bowed to meet him, and Zeb rested his own forehead against the blaze on Chey's nose, stroked the sides of the horse's muscled neck, saying, “Yeah, boy. Hungry? Yeah, let's get you fed.” He pulled armfuls of hay from the feed shed, walked back out to the troughs, kicked at Bonnie and Clyde, the two old mules who had lumbered out of the stable, shooing them away from Chey's bin, “Git, now, git,” then he spread enough hay on the ground to feed them, too. “Lita, Rosalita,” he called again, louder. He clicked his tongue.
In the lightening dusk, he saw the silhouette of her neck. It rose from the earth like a sapling tree. “Well, come on, girl. Gonna let Bonnie and Clyde steal your breakfast?” He kicked again at the mules. “Y'old robbers.”
Rosalita, the small paint pony Zeb favored, struggled to stand, her front hooves flailing. Then the reaching arc of her neck gave up and folded. Her head hit the earth with a thud.
For a split second Zeb's eyes widened like a boy's. He felt like a boy again, the veins in his neck thick with fear, his heart a wild and bloodied thing snared in a steel trap. From his distance he watched the muscles in Rosalita's whole body go limp in the certain way of death. He set his jaw, willed himself numb. He slapped the flanks of the bay stallion, let Bonnie press her stubbly, soft muzzle into his hip, felt the heat of her body in the cool morning, and gave her an extra good scrub behind the ears. He took out a cigarette, made motion to light it, then tucked it back into the front pocket of the flannel shirt he'd ripped the sleeves off of while driving through the Mojave, the damned heat that had scorched him all across the lowlands. He folded his arms over his chest, shivered, then walked toward Rosalita.
“Lita. My Rosalita,” his voice cracking now. The horse's flanks were torn clean, a row of knives dragged along them, the red striations of muscle pulsing visibly, the hieroglyphics of a wild cat engraved in her flesh. It had always bothered him that there was so little blood in dying. The white and brown hair of her hide was bloodied, yes, but very little blood had touched the ground,
and what did just darkened the already red Colorado dirt, soaked in too fast to notice. Shaking, he placed a gentle finger on one of the deep puncture wounds in her neck.
He rested his open palm on her heart, felt her breathing. Zeb never wore a watch, just went by rhythms. About thirty-five breaths a minute, he figured, more than twice her average breathing rate. “Rosalita,” a whisper now. The scimitar calls of killdeers divided the morning from the night. His own breath was fast and shallow in his chest. “Jesus.” His knees gave way and he crumpled to the ground next to the horse, his body leaning into the soft part of her chest, the wide
V
just below her ribcage.
Sunrise came like an afterthought to the mountains where Zeb lived. Fourteen-thousand foot peaks stood like gods guarding the Arkansas river, the granite tree line on each mountain marking the place where oxygen thinned and most forms of life quit trying. By the time the sun brimmed over those giants, it had been warming the lowlands for hours, no ceremony left in the dawn. As the sun rose that morning, Zeb felt Rosalita's heart stop. “It's all right, Lita,” he whispered. “I'm here. I'm here.” He rested his head on her chest, listened to life slip out of her.
A few minutes later he stood and walked into the house.
“Well, you're dragging your withered ass in late this morning,” Brenda said. She tossed her meaty arms around his neck, so sun tanned from the road that it matched the dark brown of her own skin. She kissed him flat on the lips, a kiss he did not return.
“Got home at the regular time,” he said.
“Not that I seen of you.”
He sat down at the scarred wood table.
Brenda gave up, waved her hand toward the electric range. “There's cold eggs used to be hot waiting for you in the oven.”
Zeb helped himself, scraped the dried eggs, bacon, and hash browns onto his plate. He stared out the small kitchen window, saw nothing, then saw something. He dropped the plate, let the yellowed eggs bounce off onto the counter. “Sonofabitch, it's her.”
“You're on your own for the joe, too,” Brenda said. “I drank myself a pot already.” She poured vodka into her morning OJ, swished it around in the glass.
“Yeah, all right,” Zeb said, not to Brenda.
“Fire ants gnawing your panties this morning?” She shook her head. “Obsessed with that damn mountain lion again?”
He walked into the living room, grabbed a rifle, felt the satisfying click when he cocked it, and headed outside, walking fast, numb to whatever it was that had made him limp earlier.
The cougar slinked through ribbons of sunlight that fell through Doug firs and aspen. That cat could have been a shadow itself if it hadn't moved with such intention, if it had moved mindlessly, like wind. But a predator's moves always have purpose, have power. Especially a cat.
Zeb raised his rifle, and the scope brought the lion so close he could see her breathing, mouth open slightly, pink tongue, muzzle outlined by whiskers quivering with each inhalation, the wary pant of a cat: cautious, and at the same time fearless. He could see, too, the barrel of his rifle jerking, the throb of his heart made visible in his aim. He was an excellent marksman, but this time he tried to steady the gun, and couldn't.
“Goddamn.” He lowered the rifle. It was a rule he lived by: Never point a gun unless you plan to shoot it, and never take that shot unless you're sure it will hit dead on.
The big cat skulked from the wooded hillside out into the meadow, her graceful body moving low to the ground, a predator with a hunted look in its eyes. Away from the shelter of trees, the animal turned almost small under the wide, mountain sky. He watched the cat cross, and thenâAnd then what? The world had split in two, far as Zeb could tell. Along the horizon, a seam had opened up, as if the sky had always been only loosely stitched to the land anyway, and the cat had disappeared into the space in-between. Though it was walking, sauntering, really, and though Zeb had his eyes right on it, the cat vanished into the woods.
The sun was high in the sky now, but it didn't warm anything, just turned it brighter and more crisp in the autumn air.
Zeb stood still, watching. Then listening, then sniffing the wind like an animal.
After a while, he went back to Rosalita. There was his life inside the cabin, waiting for him. His love for Brenda had never been a passion. It was love, yes, the kind of love that has tendrils rooted in childhood, something beautiful, but something lost, a nostalgia even before it had a chance to become real in the present.