The Work of Wolves (18 page)

And he was left with this. These walls.

He repeated his mother's phrase again, and it seemed like a bell tolling, fitting perfectly where he was. "The barren end of memory," he said. "How the hell'd I get here?"

HE WENT BACK ON WEDNESDAY
. To finish the job—to wrap up what he had to do with the horses and get away from the place. Still, he glanced at the house when he drove into the driveway, and he listened for her footsteps as he gathered tack from the hooks where they'd hung it Saturday afternoon, when they'd returned from Elmer and Helen Johannssen's empty house. Wagner Cecil had been doing chores when they'd arrived back and had said hello to them, but Carson could barely bring himself to reply. Carson had backed the horse trailer up to the corral gate, and Rebecca had climbed out of the pickup to open the gate, and they'd released the horses, and Carson was relatching the horse trailer gate when she said, "Can we talk?"

"What's there to say?" He knocked down the latch.

"It wasn't supposed to go this far."

"It did."

"I'm married, Carson."

"I best be goin."

"That's it? That's all you're going to say?"

He looked at his hand on the latch, paused, then turned and faced her. "What, Reb? You goin a ask me if we can just be friends? You just said it: You're married, an it wasn't supposed a go this far."

"I need time."

He lifted his hand from the latch.

"Are you coming back?"

"You turned into a hell of a rider. Horses are about trained. I'll wrap things up. I got my own ranch to work."

Four days later, he listened for her steps, but she didn't come from the house. Truth was, he'd stretched the training beyond any need. He knew it. Even the horses didn't require him here. He'd give them a good-bye ride. That was it. That was all that was left to do.

He was saddling Surety when Burt Ramsay drove up to the fence in his pickup and shut the engine off. He rolled the pickup window down.

"Howdy, Carson."

"Burt."

"Trainin goin OK?"

"About done."

"Magnus is wonderin, maybe you could give us some help."

"How's that?"

"Movin a herd. Could use another hand. Lonny's sick. Hung over, more like."

Carson just wanted to be done with this place. But if they needed help, they needed help.

"All right."

"He'll pay you extra."

"No need. I'm here."

Burt shrugged. "Up to you. Far as I'm concerned, pay's pay."

"You got a horse for me?"

"A few. Mainly four-wheelers."

Carson released Surety, carried the saddle to the barn, and climbed into Burt's pickup. As they drove past the house, he thought he might see her, a glimpse through a pane, but didn't. Burt drove a mile north on the county road, then turned off into a pasture. Dust rose from behind a hill, and the wind blew it gritty against Carson's teeth, and he could hear the cattle lowing.

It was an odd time to be moving cattle, and Carson questioned Burt about it.

"I didn't ask"

"That how it works? He says something, you do it?"

"It's his money. Don't needa make sense for me to get paid."

They bumped over a hill and saw the herd spread out below them. Burt swung wide to avoid them and circled around to where a few horses were standing saddled near an ATV.

"I'm 'na let you out here. You go ahead and grab that four-wheeler there and follow me. Got a few slipped through we need a bring in."

"Think I'll take a horse."

CARSON AND BURT GATHERED THE STRAGGLERS
and brought them back to the main herd, then Carson helped push the cattle through the gate into the next pasture. He noticed Magnus driving the black Chevy pickup with the metal grill welded to the front. The herd was going through the gate well when an old cow broke away. Carson didn't see how it happened. By the time he noticed it, the cow, a black baldy, had already evaded Magnus's pickup and was running high-rumped, her back legs kicking out sideways, her tail swinging, up the rise and into the open pasture, angling in Carson's direction. He yelled at Wagner Cecil, riding a four-wheeler near him, to watch the space he was vacating, then drew the horse around.

He was closing the gap between himself and the fleeing cow when he heard an engine behind him, and then the black pickup loomed in his peripheral vision, heaving at reckless speed over the rough ground of the pasture. It startled the horse, and Carson slowed to reassure the animal.

Magnus yelled out the window, pacing Carson. "Forget the horse. We'll get her with this."

His voice was so loud and the pickup so near—edging closer as Carson guided the horse away from it—that the animal started again, and Carson brought it to a complete halt. Anyone ought to know better than to bring a pickup with a bad muffler close to a running horse. Magnus skidded to a stop, tearing into the ground, pushing dust up. The cow kept going.

"Hop in." Magnus jerked his head at the passenger seat.

"Don't need two of us to get a single cow. Might's well one of us keep with the herd."

"Get in. We'll have the whore corralled before anyone even knows she's gone."

Carson hesitated.

"It's my cow," Magnus said, smiling. "Guess I oughta be allowed to retrieve it any way I want. Now hurry up and hop in here."

It made no sense for Carson to get off the horse and become a passenger in the pickup. He could have the cow back in minutes if he just went after it. But Magnus's smiling face disarmed him, and the man was right: He was in charge here. Carson felt the presence of the weekend. He didn't know how to behave around Magnus, couldn't discern what he would normally do. He looked at the cow disappearing over a hill.
What the hell,
he thought.
I'm just helping out. Do it his way and get out of here.
He could mention he was done with the horses and so wrap everything up. He dismounted, let the reins trail, walked around the front of the pickup, and got in.

He was pulling the door shut when Magnus punched the accelerator. The engine roared, grass and dry soil spewed from the tires, and the pickup shot forward. Carson, barely seated, lost his grip on the door handle. It slammed against his groping fingers, jamming them, and a crystalline pain, like a thread of ice, snicked up his arm. He wedged his knees against the dashboard to keep from hitting the roof on the bumps, his hand burning and limp. Magnus squatted on the seat, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. On his right ring finger he wore a heavy Black Hills Gold ring, rose and green, which he clacked against the hard plastic of the wheel, a sound barely audible over the racketing and exploding muffler and the bad shocks banging. In Carson's ear a rifle behind the seat clattered in its wooden cradle.

"Great you could help out," Magnus shouted, not turning his head.

Carson squeezed his right hand, working movement back into it, and tried to anticipate the pickup's bucking. It heaved over the rise where the cow had disappeared, sky filling the windshield for a moment, a few high, white clouds that rushed upward as the pickup nosed violently down and the cow hove into view, moving toward the blue stock pond below. She had slowed to a walk. She swung her head around and looked past her belly at the approaching pickup, her white face a triangle of wonder. Then she turned and began her clumsy gallop again.

"The bitch," Magnus shouted over the roar of the engine.

His friendly tone was gone, his voice now grim and angry.

"She's just bein a cow," Carson shouted back.

Magnus said nothing. He swung the pickup in a large circle around and in front of the running animal. The metal grating welded to the bumper rose and fell against the sky. On the stock pond, circles of feeding bass appeared and faded in intersecting patterns.

"I'll show you something about herding these ornery bitches."

Carson looked sideways at Magnus, puzzled. This is what cattle did—they ran if they had a chance. You tried to keep them in the herd, but if they got away you caught them and brought them back. That was all. There was no sense taking it personally. But Magnus emanated a palpable antagonism. The dust of the cab seemed tainted with it. Before Carson could say anything, Magnus made a sharp and high-speed turn, throwing Carson against the passenger door. When he straightened up, the pickup was heading straight toward the cow, which had stopped and was watching them walleyed, as if unable to comprehend how the pickup had gotten in front of her. She stood with legs outspread, a knock-kneed and splay-hooved upside-down Y her head lowered. A string of slobber stretched from her mouth to the ground, like a tether on one of those big, ridiculous balloons Carson had seen in parades on television he'd watched as a kid with his mother. The cow looked like it might rise on that tether, its butt end up, anchored by its jaw, astounded at its own emptiness.

"All right, you stupid whore," Magnus said. "We'll see how far you can run."

"She's just a cow," Carson said again.

"A stupidass cow."

Magnus turned and grinned at Carson, a stiff, fleeting grin of tightened lips over his teeth. The cow had turned back toward the herd, and they were pushing it along, the engine quieter now. Carson would have trailed further behind, letting the animal find her own way and correcting her direction only if she needed it. He noticed her hard, agitated trot, her back jarring up and down. A clot of manure on the end of her tail swung like a misshapen pendulum, and specks of dirt thrown from her hooves hit the windshield in a staccato of hard, dark snow. Carson looked down on the animal's spine, patches of sweat staining its back. The cow shat, green and scoury. The smell compressed the air inside the pickup cab.

"You're stressin her," Carson said.

Magnus ignored him. He inched the pickup even closer. Trotting now, stiff and limberless, the cow ran through a patch of dried Canada thistle. Magnus followed, the tops of the thistles bending before the onrush of the pickup, thumping against the bumper, then whipping under it and running in a rush and clatter along the oil pan and chassis. White seeds sprayed in a fragmented cloud that was sucked into the open windows and became individual seeds again, dark, hard knobs floating aimlessly in the cab, held aloft on lacy white architectures of filament and vein.

"Stressing her?" Magnus asked. He grinned again. "Nice you're so concerned. But she isn't your cow. And you aren't driving."

Carson's scalp prickled. At that moment he breathed a thistle seed in. He coughed, his eyes watered. Magnus hit the accelerator, and the pickup surged forward, knocking Carson back against the seat, and then the metal grill bumped the cow on the haunches, and Magnus braked, and Carson, his hand lifted to his mouth, still coughing, barely kept his head from striking the dashboard. The cow stumbled and almost fell, and a bleat of dismay whoofed out of her. She recovered and broke into her awkward gallop, tail swaying. The pickup rushed from the patch of thistles after her.

"Jesus Christ!" Carson managed to clear his throat. He spat the thistle seed, a damp brown lump, on the floor. "Give her some room."

"A little stress is good for her. Maybe she'll think the corral's not a bad place to be when I'm finished with her."

At that moment the cow broke left, and Magnus, following too closely, couldn't adjust. He shot past her, swore, braked, rammed the transmission into reverse, and backed in a circle away from the panicked animal, then forward again, cutting troughs from the sod with the tires. The high-lift jack in the bed of the pickup banged up and down, adding its metal racket to all the other noise. As they passed the cow, she had her head down, the whites of her eyes half-moons—too white: glazed, pure—and sweat was draped over her back like a dark, ugly blanket.

Magnus swung in front of her again, tires slicing the soil. Carson tried to anticipate his movements but couldn't and again was thrown against the door. The cow bellowed in dismay and wonder when the pickup appeared before her again. She put her head low to the ground, and for a moment threatened to charge but then swung around and turned toward the herd again.

"We got a slow learner here."

"She'll go on her own if you just stay back."

But Carson hadn't even finished the sentence when Magnus hit the accelerator, and the pickup closed the narrow gap between grill and haunch with unbelievable speed, slamming space shut. Magnus hit the cow and braked at once, flinging Carson forward and striking the animal on its haunches, knocking it to its knees with a sound like a sack of grain hitting a wooden floor. The cow's jaw plowed through the grass before she stumbled to her feet again.

"Christ!"

"Didn't hurt her a bit. Knocked some sense into her is all."

Magnus steered with his left hand, resting his right on the gearshift knob, the gold ring tapping, pretending nonchalance. But his face, as he stared through the windshield, had a gray look, like old concrete. In front of the pickup, the cow was swinging its head from side to side, white foam gathered on her muzzle.

"You stay this close," Carson shouted, "she's just going to break again. She'll never go in without you let her."

"We'll see about that."

Magnus took his eyes from the cow and looked at Carson, that tight, stretched grin on his face, that ball bearing look to his eyes. But at that moment, in spite of her exhaustion, the cow broke to their right, then came almost straight at the pickup, far inside its turning radius. She lumbered past Carson's window in a haze of sweat and heated air. Carson turned away from Magnus's gaze and murmured, "Go, girl."

Magnus slammed on the brakes. "The bitch!"

Carson turned his head out the window and watched the cow gallop downslope toward the stock pond, above which clouds on the western horizon were breeding white and bright.

Magnus took off downhill. For some reason Carson thought maybe he'd learned that what he was doing wasn't working and would give the cow some room. Even when he saw Magnus making no attempt to circle the animal, running the pickup right toward her, even when he saw the gap narrowing at a speed too fast for control as the V-8 roared out its bad muffler, even when he saw the cow's flailing rear legs coming up and going down, closer and closer, the clot of manure on the end of her tail growing in his vision like an ugly tumor—even then, somehow, Carson thought Magnus would turn aside and head the animal.