Dog Run Moon (19 page)

It was a full moon, fat as a tick stuck to midnight's flank. The coyotes worshipped it faithfully. They made their home in the coulee for a week and she could hear the snapping and popping of their teeth. If she had owned a gun, she would have left the coulee littered with their corpses. If she had a gun, she would have gone down and shot Jason and his black dog. If she had a gun, maybe she would have sat down on her couch and never gotten up from it again.

Her refund check came. She ordered her trees, two dozen blue spruces, and spent a weekend with a pick and shovel digging holes. Two dozen pits, neatly spaced, with the piles of dirt and rock next to them, like little graves awaiting occupants. At night, she had long conversations with Jason during which she showed him the error of his ways in a multitude of devastatingly articulated reproaches. She didn't go down there and actually face him though, and each day that passed it seemed less likely that she would.

The trees came. Much of her excitement was gone but she planted them carefully, tamping the loose dirt around the roots, sinking them deep so the wind wouldn't blow them over. She spent a whole afternoon watering each one of them in turn, standing with the hose, looking out over the backs of her cattle, to the mountains that hunched white and silent over the valley. The trees were small. She had no idea they would be so expensive. To get the number she wanted she had to settle on spruces that were only slightly larger than seedlings. When planted, her shelterbelt, her brilliant idea, only came to just above her knees. The trees themselves seemed fragile. She wondered if she should have used her money in some other more responsible way. That one thousand dollars would have bought a lot of feed. She watched the trees pitch and blow with the wind, the strong gusts nearly laying them flat.

It was early summer now. Lauren watered the trees every morning before she left for work. She watered them again in the evening. They all seemed to have taken root just fine. She sometimes plucked a green needle from a tree and chewed it as she did her chores. She liked the taste of pine. It was astringent and clean. It seemed like she'd had a bad taste in her mouth for as long as she could remember.

It was just past dark when Lauren drove home from work. It was summer school now, which meant shorter hours. Fewer students meant fewer trash cans to empty, fewer toilet paper spools to refill. The night was warm and she had the windows down so she could smell the river and the cut hay in the fields. She was nearing her driveway when a huge, red-brown form filled her headlights. She braked and cursed, and the steer stood with its massive horns lowered, its eyes like rolling white marbles in the glare.

She honked her horn and shouted, waving one arm out the window, and the animal turned and ambled slowly down the road toward home. Lauren followed and saw other shadowed forms moving in the ditches. She could hear the cattle's hoofs striking rocks and their occasional groans.

In her driveway, she turned her high beams on, the twin shafts of light stabbing out at the cattle milling around in the yard. When Lauren got out of the truck to assess the damage to the fence, she saw what had happened. Her trees. They lay in trampled wreckage, limbs splintered, thin trunks snapped off near ground level, the whole line of them violently trod to pieces under the churning hoofs of the escaped cattle. Lauren sat down, right there in the dust and manure of the cattle enclosure. She sat with her legs out in front of her and then even this was too much. The earth wanted her flat. She lay back with her arms spread, the headlights running parallel above her, white moths and dust motes swirling through them. She tried, very earnestly, with only a hint of self-pity, to remember the last time someone had said that they loved her.

At age twenty, Lauren was fairly certain she would never be considered pretty. However, she had been told she was
shapely,
and she thought this was better than nothing. She liked to walk. Once she set out from the small apartment she rented in town and hiked along the frontage road and then up the trailhead to Livingston Peak and then up to the peak itself, scrambling the last hundred yards over loose, sliding scree as the sun set behind her. It was a one-way journey of some twenty miles. She'd brought a sleeping bag and a few granola bars. She found a declivity in the rocks out of the wind and looked out over the range stretching down and away to the south, dark and silent under the wash of stars. She hiked back home the next day after watching the sunrise.

She had boyfriends. She liked to dance. She could two-step and jitterbug and waltz a little. On Friday nights she'd go to the Longbranch and sit at the bar and drink soda water and twirl on the floor with anyone who would ask her until her feet hurt in her boots and the small of her back was damp from the hands of her partners.

She went to school. For three semesters, she'd been a college girl. She worried about finals. She worked part-time at the Western Café serving breakfast. She lived in the dorms. Once she'd had sex with a boy she'd met only that night and never saw much again after. She still marveled about this sometimes; not the act itself, just her ability to perform it. It seemed like something someone else had done.

She had the idea that she might want to be a nurse. It wasn't something she'd put a lot of thought into, but she had a vague idea that nurses were generally optimistic and competent and rarely lacked for employment opportunities. That is what she told people when they asked her what she was studying. “I'm
pursuing
my nursing degree,” she'd say, liking the way it sounded, as if the degree were something she had to chase down. She pictured the diploma—the piece of paper itself, the little embossed seal and looping signature of the dean—wind-borne, fluttering out across the empty field behind her house. Herself in pursuit.

Three days a week she opened the café at six in the morning. The early crowd was mostly old men who wore jeans and pearl-snap shirts and Stetsons that they would put beside them on the bar top when they ate. These were men whose wives had finally gone on to rest after a lifetime of ranch work and whose children hadn't yet gotten up the courage to suggest a retirement home.

She liked the job well enough. She poured endless cups of coffee and laughed and rolled her eyes when one of the old buzzards made a feeble pass at her.

And then, a regular she knew by first name only, Edward, had a stroke in the bathroom and she simultaneously learned two things. First, that she wouldn't be able to continue working at the Western and second, that she might not have what it took to be a nurse.

The realities of the old men's prostates coupled with severe coffee consumption meant that the single-stall restroom at the Western was in near-constant use every morning. When a line four-deep had formed at the closed door, and the occupant wasn't responding to knocks, she was forced to do something. Still holding her coffee pot, she rapped sharply on the door and there was silence. Everyone in the restaurant was watching now, and she didn't know what to do. She cleared her throat.

“I'm going to come in, Edward,” she said, surprised to hear her own voice. It was her do-you-want-another-refill voice. There was no reply and she handed the coffee pot to the nearest man and put her shoulder to the thin door. It splintered at the lock, too easily, and she stumbled in under her own force and almost landed in Edward's lap. He was slumped on the toilet, pants around his ankles, his legs spread, with a long line of spittle trailing out from his crooked lips. She remembered clearly that his eyes were open and that they watched her, dully. He was still alive, but he had cow eyes.

She tried to stick it out for a while longer but no matter what was cooking on the hot line, the Western smelled like the bathroom had smelled that day—the rankness of Edward's loosened bowels spiked with the chemical odor of the air freshener. It made her nauseous. What troubled her more, though, was what this incident seemed to reveal about her own lack of backbone. A nurse would have taken control, would have felt an innate sense of compassion and made the best out of a horrible situation. Lauren had, as it turned out, a weak stomach. She'd backed out of the room with her hands over her mouth, Edward's bovine glare following her every move. The old men had to do everything. She'd even been unable to make her fingers work to dial for the ambulance.

At school, she felt like an impostor. She knew that it would only get worse. She would have to attend to people in pain. Wipe excrement from people's bodies. Go home and wash blood and worse from her scrubs. It all seemed too much. She looked for signs among her classmates. Did anyone else sitting on either side of her in the lecture hall have this inner recoiling when confronted with the sight and smells of humanity most basic? If they did, she saw no sign. These women seemed staunch and solid. The type who could look unblinking into fevered faces, smooth the brows of children with incurable ailments, not panic when confronted with the unnatural sight of limbs mangled in a car accident. Her classmates were people who could be unperturbed by ill health. She had been tested and found wanting. Simple as that.

She stopped attending classes. She moved out of the dorms and back in with her mother until she could find her own place. She got a job.

By age thirty-two, Lauren had been sole caretaker for her mother for three years. Her mother had given birth to her when she was forty-one years old. An accident, with a man she had no intentions of marrying. She'd been divorced once already, and said that she wanted no part of that song and dance. “I met him at the rodeo on Fourth of July and we watched the fireworks,” she said.

“I think he was maybe twenty-two years old. I mean, come on. We had fun for the weekend, and he left when the rodeo pulled out. Don't think of him as your daddy. Think of him as a sperm donor working pro bono. He was good-looking and smart, for a cowboy.”

Lauren always had the vague idea that at some point she would track down her father, just to meet him. Maybe an awkward conversation over coffee so she could have a face to attach to the word, and then that would be that. She didn't want a relationship with the guy, but it did seem that she almost owed him the knowledge of her existence. In her time at college, Lauren had taken a biology course where the professor had tried to show them that the one constant for life in the universe, the purpose of life, if you will, was procreation. When it came right down to it, the goal of life in nature is simply to create more life. This had always stuck with her and she didn't like the idea that maybe the sperm-supplying half of her biological makeup might be a broken-down old cowboy who didn't know that he had a daughter to show for his years on earth.

When Lauren was young, her mother always maintained that she didn't know how to get in touch with him. But Lauren was pretty sure she could have if she'd wanted to. She was just protecting her from disappointment. Lauren figured that at some point she and her mother would get a little drunk on wine and the whole thing would come out, and she'd get his name and last known address and at some point would track him down for that awkward conversation over coffee. As it turned out, her mother, entering her late sixties, began to experience periods of slippage. She'd stop in mid-conversation and hold her finger to her nose the way she always did when she was thinking hard. “Now,” she'd say. “What? What were we talking about just then? Jesus, I must be tired.”

A year later, she'd been in two car accidents and had her license taken away. A year after that, Lauren found herself moving back home once more. This time to take care of her mother, who, the doctors said, in another year's time might not remember how to feed herself.

This was a typical dinnertime conversation:

“What is this, chicken? I don't want chicken.”

“You love chicken, Mom.”

“I don't like it. Do we have any cookies? I'd like a peanut butter cookie.”

“You can't have a cookie for dinner.”

“And who hired you to tell me what to do? Did Lauren put you up to this?”

“Mom.”

“Don't call me Mom.”

“Eat your chicken.”

“Am I a prisoner in my own home? Lauren wouldn't be happy if she knew the way you treated me.”

“Mom. I am Lauren. Eat your chicken. I cut it up for you.”

“What? I know you're Lauren. I'm not an idiot. Shouldn't you be doing your homework?”

“I don't have homework anymore.”

“Well, why the hell not? You think you can just coast through school without doing your homework? Young lady, you're going to be in for a real surprise when you hit high school.”

“Okay, Mom. Eat your chicken.”

“I hate chicken. Do we have any cookies? I'd like a peanut butter cookie. With milk. Lauren would let me if she was here. Where is she? I'd like to call her now.”

Lauren had been worried about her ability to care for others. She thought herself prone to wilting under the smelly reality of human corporality. It was almost laughable now. Lauren washed food stains and worse from her mother's clothing, struggled to get her spongy body into the shower, kept the knives in a locked drawer, endured horrible looping conversations that weren't conversations as much as they were brutal endurance events. Demonic anger followed by tearful bouts of recognition and apology. Her mother had cataracts coming on, and when Lauren looked into her eyes it was like watching a star die back there in some far distant galaxy behind the white veil of the Milky Way.

At age thirty-nine, Lauren fell in love for the first time. She was working at the veterinary clinic in town as an assistant. She'd clean cages, fill food bowls, calm skittish cats, and help lift large dogs onto the table for surgery. She was living alone. Still renting the house she'd grown up in.

She'd had her mother cremated and she hiked up to Livingston Peak with the tin urn of ashes in her pack. She waited for the wind to gust, and tossed the ashes up and they were borne away, a small matriarchal cloud, scudding across the sun. At the top of the mountain there was a USGS survey plaque bolted to the rock and a small cairn of stones. On the top of other mountains Lauren had climbed there was often a container with a logbook or just loose notes scribbled by other hikers on whatever paper they had handy. She liked to read these little glimpses into the lives of other walkers. Most were simple. Some were flippant. Some were beautiful. She'd brought a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen and she sat on the rock cairn and tried to think of what to write. She wrote the date. She sat and thought and then wrote:
My mom and I made the hike this morning. It was nice and sunny. My mom is staying for a while. I'm heading down now.
She signed her name, and put the notebook and pen in the plastic bag and pushed the bag down into the tin, pressing the lid down tightly. She wedged the urn in between some rocks and left it there, hoping the mountain goats would leave it alone so others could do as she had.

Lauren put the knives back in the drawers, threw away the packages of moist wipes and the weekly pill dividers and adult diapers. She had long silent meals with a magazine open on the table and a glass of wine in her hand. She'd felt mostly relief at her mother's passing, and was fairly certain this made her a bad person. She worked as much as possible at the clinic, picking up extra shifts whenever she could. She occasionally thought about returning to school, but it had been so long. She couldn't imagine sitting in a classroom. Coming home from work to memorize anatomy terms.

She got up early. Made coffee and drank it while she walked the two miles to the clinic. Work was work, but with the arrival of the new veterinarian, Dr. Genther, it had become something more. Sandra Genther, DVM, was short and compact. Wide hips, strong legs, thick black hair that she kept in a braid twisted up in a severe bun. She'd come to work at the clinic in Lauren's third year of employment there and surprised her by asking her name and remembering it, using it even, in conjunction with a smile, every morning when she walked through the door. The previous in-house vet had retired. Leif Gustafson was a taciturn old Swede who'd ignored the assistants as much as possible outside of the occasional barked order. In the three years she'd worked with him, Lauren couldn't recall Gustafson once using her name. They had worked well together. But, this new doctor—Dr. Genther. Dr. Sandra.
Dr. Just-call-me-Sandy, honey
—she was something altogether different. She came from some deep southern state—Louisiana, or Alabama—one of those places. Dr. Sandy could calm a high-strung bird dog with a touch and a few murmured words. She was gentle, but she was strong too. Lauren had seen her single-handedly hoist a sedated ninety-five-pound Chesapeake Bay retriever from floor to operating table. She worked with a smile, and was a hearty clutcher of arms and rubber of backs and giver of enthusiastic high-fives.

She was a few years older than Lauren and had small parentheses-like creases that formed at the corners of her mouth when she smiled or was concentrating, but otherwise her face was smooth and unwrinkled. Sometimes the nature of their work would put the two of them in close physical proximity and from these instances Lauren learned that Dr. Sandy smelled like GOJO citrus soap and that she had a few strands of gray hair interspersed within the black.

Dr. Sandy was gentle and she was strong and she had lived her whole life in other places. She started giving Lauren hugs in the parking lot sometimes before they went their separate ways. Nothing much. Just a quick tight squeeze and a
good job today; see you tomorrow
. Lauren was still walking to and from the clinic then, and she'd wave as Dr. Sandy pulled out and drove by in her Subaru wagon.

And then, on one rather blustery cold evening in late fall, already nearly dark at five-thirty, Sandy slowed and pulled over next to Lauren who was striding toward home on the sidewalk. She reached over and opened the passenger door.

“Get yourself in this car, honey.”

“I don't mind walking. I prefer it, actually.”

“Oh, come on, it's colder than a well digger's ass out there.”

Lauren laughed. Her nose was running, and she sniffed and wiped it with her glove. She looked up and down the street. The wind coming through the power lines sounded like a Saturday morning cartoon ghost. Dr. Sandy patted the passenger seat and smiled. Lauren got in.

“That was always my dad's line, by the way. About the well digger and his ass. I use it whenever I can, and I think of him. He's been gone for a good while now.”

“My mom always said it's hotter than the hinges of hell.”

“Don't get me started on hot, girl. I'm from Lafayette. I know a few things about hot. It's hotter than a tick on a dog's balls, hotter than a half-bred fox in a forest fire, hotter than a two-dollar pistol on the Fourth of July—it's so hot I want to take off my skin and sit in my bones.”

They were both laughing now, and Dr. Sandy was slapping her own thigh and Lauren's alternately. She drove Lauren home and they sat in her car, talking, for a long time. They picked up the next night right where they left off. And the night after that. And before long they were taking turns cooking each other dinner and sometimes, at work, Lauren would be standing at the sink washing her hands, and Dr. Sandy would come up behind her and rest her hand right on her hip. She'd reach around Lauren with her other arm and pull paper towels from the dispenser and give them to her with a smile, close, practically in an embrace, their faces almost touching.

Years removed, Lauren would realize that if this had happened to her—if Dr. Sandra Genther, DVM, had happened to her—when she was younger or older, her life might have taken a surprising and beautiful turn. It was strange to think about, but the young and the old seem to be uniquely positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that life affords. It's that middle time that's a bitch. That time when you first realize without a doubt you can't do everything you wanted to do, or be everything you wanted to be, but you still cling to the hope that if you just
make the right choices,
it will all work out in the end. Of course, as a result, you are paralyzed by indecision.

For Lauren—age thirty-nine, unmarried, not a homeowner, underemployed, mother a drifting cloud of ash—every choice made carried such
weight
. How ridiculous. Never in her life had she been so unencumbered. If only she'd known it at the time.

One night, Dr. Sandy put her wineglass down in mid-conversation, leaned over the dinner table, and kissed Lauren full on the lips, one hand wandering and getting tangled in Lauren's hair.

Kisses have a way of gathering mass unto themselves—first there is a snowflake, then a snowball, then an avalanche. Dinners became sleepovers, and Lauren walked around feeling like overnight she somehow sprouted a strange new appendage, or woke up to find that an unexplored room had appeared in her old house. It was disconcerting, but not unpleasant. Definitely not unpleasant.

The Montana winters were hard on Sandy, sweet blooming flower of the South. She had arthritis in her knee from a riding accident she'd suffered as a girl, and when cold fronts blew down from the Canadian Rockies, she'd hobble and swear. Lauren bought her an electric blanket and made a point of coming by to shovel her out on the mornings when they'd gotten new snow. They made frequent trips down the valley to Chico Hot Springs to soak in the mineral water. Sandy said it helped her knee, and Lauren loved the way the thick white steam hung in the cold air, blanketing the pool, and how they could sit there, arms around each other, and no one could see a thing.

In the early spring, Sandy's mother fell and broke her pelvis and Sandy took two weeks to go be with her. During this separation, Lauren spent a good deal of time trying to figure out just what in the hell she was doing. She was thirty-nine. She could still have kids or a kid, at least, if she wanted to. She could get married and all the rest. She didn't have to resign herself to anything. But, she missed Sandy. It was an almost visceral truth. Had she ever wanted kids anyway, or was that just something she thought she
should
want? From what mixture of head and heart and womb do these thoughts arise?

Sandy came back and things continued as they had for a while. It was summer, maybe the best summer of Lauren's life. They hiked up to the lakes above Pine Creek and had a picnic. They stripped and jumped in, shouting and cursing at the shock of the frigid water, then they dried off, lying side by side, shivering on the sun-warmed rock.

Fall came, days when you could taste the coming snow, the bloody-copper tang of it on the wind. People in town burning leaves under gray skies. Great flocks of geese making their way south, the ragged lines of them like stitched wounds in the bellies of the clouds.

Sandy's mother was not doing well. She was going to need full-time care soon. Lauren could see what was coming. She wasn't surprised when Sandy, after dinner one night, grasped her hand and said, “I've got an idea.” She had a smile on her face, hopeful, but scared too, she was putting her heart in her hands and offering it to Lauren. “What if you came with me down to Lafayette? You'd like my mother. She's an old southern belle but smart and tough and I can see you two sitting on her porch drinking sweet tea and talking and that thought makes me happier than anything else I can think of. It's warm there. There's pecan trees and the people are so nice.”

Lauren thought about it. She really did. She got up and ran water in the sink and put the dinner dishes in to soak. She came back and sat at the table.

“What would I do,” she said. “In Lafayette, what could I possibly do, other than drink tea with your mother?”

Sandy was holding her hand again. She had both of hers around one of Lauren's. Lauren was briefly aware of how alike the two of them were, their hands almost indistinguishable from one another. Blunt nails, dry cracked skin on the knuckles from frequent vigorous washing.

“You'd just help with my mother. I'd work—my old practice would be glad to have me back—and you'd make sure mom was okay. It wouldn't be too demanding, and mostly you could do whatever you wanted. It would be perfect. I'd feel better having my mother looked after by someone I love and trust, and you wouldn't have to find a crummy job someplace.” Sandy kept talking, her words speeding up and colliding with one another. Lauren had mostly stopped listening. She leaned back in her chair, pulling her hand from between Sandy's.

Sometimes an action you think is born of conviction, staunchness, taking a stand, is actually a simple product of fear of the unknown. At the time she was indignant. How dare Sandy even ask that of her, after everything Lauren had told her about her own mother? Did Sandy really think she would be content to be some combination of housewife and caretaker? How would it look, their happy little family? Lauren stuck in the house with a querulous old woman in the Louisiana heat while Sandy went out and made a living for them both? Absolutely not.

Lauren's self-righteous anger carried her through that fall. Work became awkward, and she slowly became aware of a growing suspicion that she'd been wrong, and cruel, and an idiot on top of that. But, she'd lived her entire life in one place. It was too late for her to reimagine herself as someone who could just pick up and leave. Louisiana wasn't real to her. It was a swamp.

Dr. Sandy was gone before the snow hit. On her last day at the clinic, they had a going away party. They hugged and Lauren said something, choked on tears. “We'll stay in touch. I'll call you. Maybe I can visit?” They were in the middle of a crowded room and Dr. Sandy kissed her full on the lips and shook her head. “That's not how it works with me,” she said. “I don't do halfways.”

Then someone came and wished Dr. Sandy well and they were separated. Lauren watched her for a while. She was talking, laughing, even, holding a paper plate with a piece of cake on it. Dr. Sandy would be fine. It was written all over her. She was a woman who would make a good life for herself wherever she ended up. Lauren had the peculiar feeling that it was she who'd had her affections spurned, not the other way around. She never spoke to Dr. Sandy again.

No one had ever told Lauren that you could be in love and not know it until after the fact. It seemed like love, the very state of it, should be self-evident. That this wasn't always the case rendered the whole enterprise suspect. If you were in love and didn't know it, were you in love? If love didn't clearly reveal itself to all parties involved, did it even exist on this planet? Was love a thing or an idea or just a hope? Does love have gradations? Levels? Volumes? Variations in force or intensity? Or, is love, as it seemed like it should be, a perfect natural phenomenon like the homing instinct of salmon or the supreme vision of an osprey or the incredible tensile strength of spider's silk? Is love the human animal's one ceaseless, oft-neglected gift from the universe?