The Work of Wolves (28 page)

"How far do you think they'll go?" Earl had asked—his voice close and quiet, lilting the way so many Indian voices did. He'd seen the consequences of Carson's action so clearly. Earl had been so quiet and reserved that night, and his voice seemed to be always asking questions, as if he were afraid to commit to anything—but when it came down to it, he'd had the clearest vision of anyone that night, the most dispassionate and disinterested, and he'd been, maybe, the most committed of all. Carson regretted he hadn't paid more attention and asked for more information when Earl had told him about Greggy Longwell. Greggy probably put the kid through hell. Thinking all this, Carson felt the need to talk to Earl again.

He smiled ruefully. "Crazy," he said to himself.

He wasn't accustomed to finding himself needing help from anyone, but to find himself needing help from an Indian teenager—this was rare. He watched his father slip the Farmhand's tines under another bale and hoist it off the ground. Then he looked away, in the direction of the reservation.
Time for a visit,
he thought. How odd. The rez was only a few miles away, but he hadn't been on it since high school, when he'd visited a few Indian friends. But he'd lost touch with them. The rez was its own world. He didn't have much to do with it. Well, he did now. Far off, at the edge of the horizon to the west, the spires of the Badlands pierced the sky.

E
ARL OFTEN WALKED THE TWO MILES
home from school. The bus went out of town in a different direction and traveled thirty miles before reaching his house. He usually preferred to walk, clearing his mind of the haze of school, the sexual tensions and posturing, the constant maintenance of the pecking order that often, by the end of the day, left him feeling exhausted and numb. The walk home helped restore him. He walked on the left shoulder of the road to discourage offers of rides, but it didn't always work. For people on the rez who didn't have cars, mass transportation meant walking down the highway in the direction of their destinations until someone stopped and gave them a ride. Earl sometimes had to refuse four or five offers in the two-mile stretch to his house.

He was just stepping over the blown retread that had been lying on the shoulder for several weeks, its cords protruding from the rubber like distended veins, when he heard a vehicle slow down behind him. He swept his arm forward to indicate it should go by, but it didn't. It appeared in his peripheral vision and stopped. Earl turned and saw Carson Fielding leaning out the window.

"Headin home?" Carson asked.

Earl nodded.

"I'm goin up to Lostman's Lake."

A fall chill was in the air, and the wind whipped Earl's shirt sleeves in a frenzy around his elbows. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pressed his elbows against his sides to silence them, and wondered what this cowboy was up to. Carson hadn't seemed to care at all when Earl told him about Greggy Longwell. Not that Earl was expecting sympathy—or not too much, at least. Some. A little. At least a word or two directed against Greggy Longwell. Instead Carson had acted as if Greggy's behavior, being expected, was also acceptable. But it wasn't, and Earl's meeting with the sheriff had turned the problem with the horses into something personal. It wasn't just about saving them any more; it was redeeming himself, compensating for the humiliation Greggy had put him through. But he'd been unable to come up with anything he could do.

"You want a go up there?" Carson asked.

Earl looked down the highway in the direction of town. When they'd been up to see the horses before, Carson had as much as told Earl to stay out of his business. Now he was inviting him to go back? Earl suspected a trick. He imagined himself reaching for the door handle on Carson's pickup only to have Carson speed away, laughing, muttering something about a dumb Indian.

"Why?" Earl asked.

Carson stared blankly at him, puzzled. "To look at them horses," he said.

A horn seared the air, and an eighteen-wheeler rocketed between them, sending Earl back a step with the battering ram of hard air it pushed. Straw and dead leaves swirled high behind it and descended in slow, chaotic circles as the semi's square rear end diminished down the highway, a doorway growing smaller and smaller toward oblivion. The smell of the cattle it carried remained for a few seconds, thick as soup, before the wind diluted and swept it away.

"I don't think those horses have changed much, you know?" Earl said. "I don't need to look at them again."

Carson stared through his windshield, watching the semi re-cede. "It ain't just lookin," he said. "I need some advice."

This surprised Earl. "About those horses?"

"Not a whole lot else we got in common, is there?"

The statement was so direct, and so true, and so totally without animosity or irony, that it struck Earl as funny. He walked around the pickup's hood, opened the door, got in.
Notice that the vehicle,
he thought as he reached for the door handle,
does not move away as the Suspicious Indian approaches it.

"We ought to go get Willi," he said as he sat down.

"Willi? Why?"

Earl didn't have an answer. Funny how things happened: Walk off a hill, and someone follows you, and just like that you feel he ought to be involved.

"We just should," he said.

"You're the one I wanted a talk to."

"He's just back in town. Not far to pick him up."

"I suppose."

"You said you wanted my advice."

"Wasn't what I wanted your advice on."

Earl lifted a shoulder, let it drop. "You start asking for advice, you get more 'n you bargained for, you know?"

"I guess so." Carson put the pickup into gear, glanced in his mirror, and heaved the steering wheel around in a U-turn, the right wheel going over into the ditch on the opposite side, so that Earl was hanging in space before Carson completed the turn. They headed back to town. Willi answered the door when Earl knocked. He glanced over Earl's shoulder and saw Carson's pickup at the curb. Before Earl could say anything, he asked, "Are we going?"

Earl heard other people in the house and was struck by the familiarity of Willi's question, the truncated code talk of it. Willi's words were almost like the symbols of calculus, a language all its own, and Earl felt an odd fondness for Willi, hearing it—a question only Earl and Carson would understand, embedded in a specific sequence of events, meaningless on its face, yet immediately conveying to Earl an image of the night and the depression behind Lostman's Lake, and the mute suffering of the horses. That image bound them together, and out of it a language was born. A fleeting moment of intimacy bloomed and faded between Earl and Willi as Willi asked the question and Earl nodded.

A plastic grocery bag, pregnant with wind, floated high over the Drusemans' roof as Earl and Willi walked down the sidewalk to the pickup. Earl watched it, shining whitely in the high sun. Somewhere beyond town, perhaps, the wind would desert it, and it would deflate and descend, and a sagebrush bush or Canada thistle or coneflower would blossom with plastic. Earl opened the door to the pickup and got in, working his left knee over the gearshift lever. Willi followed and slammed the door. Carson reached over Earl's knee, his shoulder bumping against Earl's, and put the pickup in gear. They waited silently at the intersection for the stoplight to change to green, then left town, past the blown retread, its tentacled cords waving in the wind. They were a quarter-mile past Earl's house before Carson spoke.

"I've always wondered somethin," he said. "About those trees around your house."

"What about them?"

"How'd you get 'em to grow like that?"

Earl leaned forward and looked in the right side mirror, saw the trees in diminished reflection, a round oasis of green against the distorted sky and land of the convex-mirror world. So many possible answers, he thought.
Love,
his mother would say.
Love and spirit. My love. Your father's love. Love and memory and their persistence. Rooted, knotted, fibered, twined. Things that go and things that stay. Love remains, Earl. Your father whispers to us yet. He speaks in the leaves.

And Norm had once said, "It's spirit. The spirit in things. The thing about spirit, nephew, is that it won't appear unless you pay attention. And you and your mother paid attention to those trees. You can't get the spirit world to answer unless you ask it in the proper way. And make a way for it. That's what you did there—made a way."

Carson waited for an answer. Earl thought of the hours he'd spent holding a hose. Even a little watering takes a long time when it's twenty-five trees. Every other day, the little guy with the glasses at the nursery in Pierre had told Cyrus—and Cyrus had told Lorna, and Lorna had insisted upon it to Earl, so that every other day Earl had stood, summer after summer, watering. Their place didn't have a deep well. The main water table, with its hot artesian currents, was so far down at their place that Lorna couldn't afford one. She had bought cheap water from a rancher's stock pond, and Earl had gotten to know the rancher well and had become familiar with the sound of his pickup on the highway, turning into the driveway with the green fiberglass water tank in back. When Earl complained, and he did often, Lorna said, "Your father planted those trees. We're going to make sure they grow."

Norman planted them, too,
Earl often thought.
Why do you forget that
? But he never voiced this thought.

"We just watered them a lot," he finally answered Carson.

"That right?" Carson asked. He seemed genuinely interested in the trees. "My mother's tried a get trees to grow for years. Waters all the time, but they ain't never amounted to much. Half the time she gets 'em growing, an a wind knocks 'em over or the cattle get out and trample 'em. She's about give up. I think you got more than water working there."

"Like what?" Earl asked.

"Thought maybe you knew."

Earl stared out the windshield. He didn't know. He had only guesses, conjectures, mysteries, statements of reverence. Carson Fielding had from the first unsettled him, he wasn't sure why—and now he was touching on the core of Earl's life, apparently willing to believe things about that life that Earl himself doubted and that caused Earl to he awake at night, listening to the wind in the trees outside his window and hearing only wind and leaves, a great loneliness. A great aloneness. Earl was tempted to tell Carson what his mother said about the trees. Tempted to tell him what Norm said. But if he opened that door, he would find himself, before he finished talking, a baby with a newly widowed mother weeping over him and all the stories about the reservation that Carson might have heard—its dangerous highways, its alcoholism—confirmed by Earl himself. So much of Earl's life had been set toward resisting such stories. And now to admit to Carson, whom he didn't even know, that his life was grounded in that kind of thing? Admit he'd been shaped by that kind of thing from a time before he was even self-aware? Earl's stomach twisted into a knot. He didn't want to admit it even to himself.

And he couldn't tell Carson what Norm said—that it was spirits. Trust, again: Carson might just laugh at that. Or, if not laugh, he might hear it wrong—think of the spirits as some kind of magical way to manipulate the world. To get what you wanted. An Indian substitute for technology. Or else a way to leave the world entirely, float in dreams and visions. Earl didn't want Carson to conjure up the Drunken Indian, but he didn't want him to conjure up the Noble Indian either. Earl hadn't waved a wand over the trees. He'd waved a water hose. And if he'd done it in the proper manner, he hadn't known it.

"I don't know what else there could be," he said. Both lying and telling the truth. Or neither. "We put a lot of water on those trees."

On a hill an abandoned white church lifted its steeple against the sky in the midst of a junkyard of cars lying like a miniature, decrepit city around it—rusted, broken, hulking, random—a city of coyotes and fox and badger, mice and snakes, grasshoppers, ants, beetles, rust and broken glass. Dissonant psalms, sermons of wind. "I have been wondering since I got here," Willi said as they passed it, "why does that church have all those cars around it? Are even the cars religious here?"

Earl was glad for the distraction. He looked at the junkyard. It had always been there, and he'd never thought much of it. Just part of the landscape, part of the place. But Willi's question brought it into relief. As long as the place was just there, it was normal. Only when you thought about how it might have gotten there did it seem odd. The church, once painted white, had a molted appearance, portions of paint still gleaming in the sun amid patches of gray, weathered wood, lifting its steeple above its congregation of cars.

"Just happened," Carson said. "They built a church in town and quit usin this one. Were goin a tear it down but never got around to it. Then a member a the congregation's car broke down on the highway. Wasn't worth fixin, didn't want a pay a wrecker to take it. So he took his pickup and towed it himself up by the church just to get it off the road. Then someone else decided he had a good idea. Got to be a half-dozen cars up there. By the time people thought there was a problem, it was too many for anyone to keep after. And there were more appearin. They'd grow overnight. Might still be hap-penin. So many up there now you wouldn't know if there was a new convert to that church or not."

"Where'd you hear all that?" Earl asked.

"My grampa. Spent a whole afternoon up there with him when I was a kid. He knew every car, who'd owned it, everything. Told all these stories about 'em. Had two up there himself."

"He sounds like an interesting grandfather," Earl said.

"He was. He's the one taught me to train horses."

Then Carson looked out the side window and went silent.

Around a curve they saw the blue waters of the lake come and go between hills, and then they approached the turnoff, and Carson pulled up along the boat ramp. As usual there was no one at the lake. The horses stood with their heads to the wind, but when Carson spoke their names they turned, and the wind blew their manes and tails forward like old rags they wore. In the cool air the artesian spring sent up clouds of steam. The horses moved gaunt and emaciated through it. Horses of vapor, rising weightless from the earth. Their physical presence seemed leached away, and they came with heads down, responding to Carson's voice without heart or curiosity. Mere movement. The ground they walked was dust.