The Work of Wolves (37 page)

"I look up and there's this face," he said.

"You drunk bad?"

"You was wantin to talk to me, you coulda come inside."

"How bad?"

"Some."

"I got some questions. You gonna be able to answer' em?"

"Didn't figure you was sittin in my pickup cause you was lackin a chair at home."

"I am lackin a chair."

"Sorry to hear that."

"What I wanta know is, he payin Wagner Cecil more 'n he pays you?"

Burt paused a moment.

"Wagner Cecil," he finally said. "Now there's a subject. Wagner Cecil is not my idea of a outstanding young man. Can't hardly stand to be around the sonofabitch. Don't hardly know his pecker from a fence post."

"That right?"

Burt nodded, the brim of his cowboy hat describing small arcs, rising and falling.

"He have some different responsibilities than you, maybe?"

"Maybe."

"Like what?"

"You gettin at somethin?"

"He talk to Magnus more 'n seems necessary, for instance? He go off on errands you got no idea what they are?"

Burt put both hands on the steering wheel and gazed into the pile of tumbleweeds, a picture of suicidal intent to ram the pickup • into the vast and brittle mess.

"Appears you got things figured about the way I do," he said.

Andrew Pettijohn, the bartender, appeared black in the door of the bar, reached out with a thin arm and pulled the door shut, leaving nothing but night. Then the flash and commotion of headlights and brake lights began, the sound of engines rumbling, tires spewing stones and gravel, squealing on pavement as the pickups hit the highway. Headlights splashed over the windshield, illuminated the dirty interior of Burt's pickup where Carson and Burt sat: Burt's creased face, the slip joint pliers on the dashboard, the dirty foam erupting from the cracked vinyl.

"Tell you the truth," Burt said, "if I hanta knowed you better, I might a wondered myself about you an her. Ridin all over the country like you was."

"It look that bad?"

"I'm just sayin a guy coulda wondered, he was inclined to."

"He hired me to teach her to ride."

Burt raised both hands off the steering wheel, turned them palms up, dropped them again. "Like I said, I knowed better."

"He was suspecting us from the start. Felt like he hired me just so he could have suspicions. She was just tryin a get away from it."

"I don't need a know any a that," Burt said. "He's a controlling sonofabitch, ain't no doubt."

Carson wondered again how he had gotten tangled in this thicket of circumstance and uncertainties. Even as he sat here and explained how Magnus had made his own suspicions come alive and nurtured them, he remembered in shattering counterpoint that long day's ride on Elmer Johannssen's ranch and how his grandfather had risen up from the past on the swell of Rebecca's laughter and how she had been there when he came around Surety's head, as unavoidable as the day. How much did Magnus have to do with that?

"The man don't make any sense to me," he said.

Burt rolled his window down, spat, his breath an explosive white plume thrust into the night. "Goddamn gettin cold out there," he said. He rolled the window up. "Magnus makes sense all right," he said. "He wants things his way. Clear as a bell. An he has the money to have 'em his way. So there you are."

"I don't know. Seems too simple, Burt."

"It is simple. Shit. It's the rest've us don't make sense. We want things our way, but then we ain't so sure we oughta have 'em. So we back off. Fits 'n starts. Zigs 'n zags. That's how most've us live. Confusin what we want with what we oughta want. Till we don't know either one."

"Ain't that called growin up?"

"You got enough money, you don't gotta grow up. You just go on wantin what you want an gettin it. There ain't no particular complexity to that. Ain't like you gotta go to college an major in Magnus to figure out how goddamn deep he is. Break your neck divin into that. You will."

"You sure you're drunk?"

"Oh, hell, I ain't nearly this smart when I'm sober."

Burt contemplated the night.

"You an me," he said. "We're the deep sonsabitches. Sittin here in a goddamn pickup in the middle a nowhere. Neither one've us got a cent to our name. Shit. I sold a ranch to Magnus an lost a wife and went to work for the bastard. An I'm probably pissed off as hell about it all, but I'm a reasonably happy man anyway. Would be at least if I weren't such a pathetic, forlorn sonofabitch. Don't know what the hell I want or how the hell to get it or what the hell I'd do with't if I got it. An I'd feel guilty as hell if I did. That is, if I knew I had it. Which I wouldn't. An you can't figure Magnus Yarborough out? You shouldn't even be talkin a me."

"You think he's got what he wants?"

Burt spat out the window again. The smell of sagebrush and grass, the smell of fall, of cold, of high, desolate, imminent winter winds, filled the pickup cab.

"You mean her? Bein she's gone an all?" He shrugged. "She does complicate things for'm. No doubt. Puts a dent in my theory, some. Women tend to do that."

He thought some more. "I guess he wanted her," he said. "Probably thought money could keep her. Then when he started a figure out it couldn't ... Hell, I don't know. I need a drink another beer before I'm wise enough for that one. My own wife left half because I wasn't rich enough. Spite a the fact she ain't never gonna find a finer man, huh? An Magnus's got all the money in the world, an his wife leaves him because I guess money's all he gave her. She's the complex one. She's the one hard a unnerstand. Wants money, but wants somethin else, too. Who knows what? But Magnus, he's simple. Thinks the one thing oughta be enough."

"An when it ain't, he starts to spy on her."

"Yep."

"An pay someone else to spy on her."

"Wouldn't surprise me none."

"Wagner Cecil."

"Wouldn't surprise me none either."

"Jesus, Burt. He was havin Wagner spy on his own wife?"

"Spyin, now, would suggest more intelligence than Wagner has. An I ain't sayin I absolutely know any a this. Just Magnus and Wagner seemed a have more to talk about than me and Magnus ever did."

"Wagner got a pretty good imagination, you'd say?"

"I'd bet Wagner can imagine about anything he thinks he might be gettin paid to imagine."

Wagner had been working around the ranch that evening when Carson and Rebecca had returned from their picnic on the hillside, and he'd been there again the next day when they'd returned from riding the Elmer Johannssen place. Carson remembered saying hello to him. What had Wagner reported to Magnus? What could he have reported? Almost nothing, if he stuck to the facts—that Carson and Rebecca had ridden out twice, returned late Friday evening, and spent much of Saturday gone. That was all. Even if Wagner had somehow followed them, watched them with binoculars, all he would have seen was sitting and talking and riding. Except for that one single moment at Elmer Johannssen's place—and that was in the middle of a section of land. Carson had never seen Wagner ride a horse, and if he had followed them with a four-wheeler or a pickup, they would have noticed. Wouldn't they? Carson wondered if he could have possibly been so wrapped up in Rebecca and in the stories he told her about Elmer and his grandfather that he would have failed to notice the sound of an engine in the distance, pacing them.

All of it chilled him—to think that Wagner might have been out there, over a hill somewhere, watching. Magnus's eyes. But it wasn't much better, though more likely, if Wagner—lazy, deceitful, cowardly—had made up for Magnus whatever he thought Magnus wanted to hear, elaborated on the facts he had, and then given his boss the story he thought he was being paid to give. Earning his wages. Working overtime. In either case, Wagner was suddenly a malevolent presence added to Carson's sense of what had happened, and he couldn't fit him in, couldn't picture him or place him. It was as if part of Carson's memory was incomplete. Somewhere within it Wagner Cecil stalked, but Carson could not find him. Where had he been? In all that growing intimacy between himself and Rebecca, all that assumed privacy, where had Wagner Cecil been? How much had his movements intersected theirs, how much had his invisible story blended into theirs, how much of what he told Magnus had he actually seen, how much made up?

And the horses themselves. Rebecca had said that Magnus hadn't called the sheriff and had instead been surprised when Longwell called him. Had Wagner Cecil been visiting the horses? Ever the minion, ever the sycophant, had he taken upon himself the perverse role of watching the animals starve? Had he enjoyed it? And, finding them gone, had he reported immediately to Magnus? Or had he perhaps talked it around over too many beers, spooked out of his wits by the way the horses had disappeared without sign, from an ungated pasture, afraid to tell Magnus but afraid to keep it to himself, too—and had that been the origin of the Goat Man stories? Or had Goat Man, as Earl said, started those stories himself?

Far away in the night, in the hills beyond Ruination, a coyote howled—a sound old, familiar, comforting. A few moments later another one answered, and the two calls demarcated a vast space, measureless by any other means. Carson wanted to open the pickup door and walk away. Walk into that big darkness. That great aloneness. Walk and walk between the calls of coyotes, and never meet them, and be soothed by that endless recession. Be alone and alive out there.

"Damn coyotes," Burt said.

He opened the window and spat again. Before he could roll it shut, the first coyote repeated its call, and the sound through the open window had the clarity and force of music. Animal and land together. The loneliest music Carson knew. When he was young—he couldn't recall his age—his grandfather had taken him out one night to a hillside and sat him down, against his mother's protests, which Carson faintly remembered as a sound of birds protesting a strong wind, a sound which only claims the wind and notes it without any faith in stopping it. He could remember the night and his grandfather's hand, and his mother's voice coming out from the open kitchen door and then stopping, and then the silence of the darkness, and then, just as he'd heard it now, the burst of a coyote's howl: the night ruptured, torn apart. He'd spun like a top into his grandfather's legs and clung there, and the old man, laughing, had hoisted him from the ground and into his tobacco-smelling arms, his tobacco-laden breath, and without breaking stride had gone on walking, marching to the top of a hill amid the brief, bright yips and the eternal, drawn-out howls of the coyotes all around them. He had sat Carson down in his lap until he quit trembling, and then Carson had felt himself open up, the coyotesound tumbling into him from all around, a weird and—though he was too young to know it then—sensual, akin-to-sexual, delight.

After a long time in which he and his grandfather only listened, the old man said, "Ain't that a sound, now? If you had a be eaten alive, wouldn't they be the ones to do it?"

Carson wasn't quite sure what he meant, but he agreed they would be.

"Useta be wolves," the old man said. "Shoulda heard them. Pity you can't."

"Why can't I?"

"They're all gone."

"Why?"

"Shot."

"Who shot 'em?"

Carson vaguely remembered his own concern and dismay at the question. Yet he knew his grandfather, should any coyote actually decide to eat them alive, would shoot it without regret and without even considering its music.

"My father," the old man said. "Me. Just a couple. When I was a kid."

There had been sorrowing in his grandfather's voice—not complete sorrowing, not a giving over to sorrow, but a practical and everyday sorrow: that he'd done something he believed had to be done, and he'd do it again, but he would rather it hadn't been necessary. Just as, though he took joy from the coyote's music, he would indeed shoot any of them that dared to approach.

The old man then spoke of the last wolves and told how his father knew them as numerous as insects, a scourge that had to be removed, and how men on horseback would drive them toward the center of a narrowing circle and shoot dozens at a time. He spoke of Three Toes, the last wolf in South Dakota, gone in 1925, and how the news of Three Toe's death had traveled across the state and how he'd heard it on the streets of Twisted Tree as a boy and had felt that a great thing had been accomplished, and yet on the ride home an emptiness had visited him, and he'd had to ask his father, riding on the wagon seat beside him, for reassurance that the death of Three Toes was a good thing.

Carson felt, even young as he was, that he was missing some knowledge of his grandfather, not being able to hear the howls of the wolves his grandfather had once heard, that sound lost to all history and never to be released again upon this land. It was a mystery in his grandfather's makeup he would never know. When he had walked into the night, holding his grandfather's hand, the cries of the coyotes had seemed maniacal and dreadful. They had turned ecstatic and exultant, vibrating inside him like song. Now they suddenly seemed mournful, cries of the greatest loss. He had the feeling that his grandfather, more than anything in the world, wanted to pass along to him the sound of wolves in the night, but that sound was locked inside his memory like the vision of a mute, crazed prophet, so that all he could do was take his grandson out and point him to the voices of the lesser gods and, sorrowing, suggest that once, yes once, there had been greater. A time when the world was not safe to sit so like this. A time when the world was benumbed with godkilling and men wandered in it enraged and armed and unaware that their rage would turn to sorrow. And if they had been aware, even then they would not have known regret.

Sitting in Burt Ramsay's pickup and hearing the coyotes outside the windows, Carson felt himself wrapped in things he did not know. He did not know the sound of wolves. He did not know what his grandfather had seen or felt when, not yet a teenager, he had sighted down a barrel and pulled a trigger against a wolf. Neither did he know what the old man had felt in his later days, when he sat at his kitchen table and seemed to be listening to the world. Was he remembering the sound he'd first diminished and then destroyed? Did he hear in the night a land abandoned? Hollow? Dissonant with silence?