The Work of Wolves (50 page)

"Ain't them things hard to adjust, though?" Greggy asked.

"No," Ted said, "we ain't heard about that."

Greggy whistled. "Now that's just what I'm sayin. You're as ignorant as everybody else in this county. Ignorance is rampant around here. Never seen it so profuse. How 'bout you, Mr. Walks Alone? You heard about them horses?"

Earl shook his head. "It's an ignorant county," he said.

"You got that mirror the way you want it now?"

Earl looked into it. It was pointing to some far point of the sky, full of stars. "Yeah," he said. "I think it's pretty good."

"Well, a proper adjusted rearview mirror is vital for safe drivin. What I was sayin, though. I ain't never since I been sheriff seen such a load a ignorance. Usually around here, somethin happens, the gossip's reportin it before the dispatcher is. And the case gets solved a hundred times before I solve 'r. But this horse thing—you'd think people been inoculated against knowing anything. Just like you two."

Greggy sucked his teeth, then whistled lowly again. In the far-off distance, so faint it seemed an echo to the whistle, changed and modulated by the land, a coyote's howl made its faint comment.

"Still," Greggy continued when Earl and Ted had nothing to say. "Like I said, sometimes the more people tell me, the more confusing things get. This much silence, it ain't as hard to read things, in some ways."

Earl suddenly realized what Greggy was saying. He felt such huge relief he couldn't prevent the beginnings of a smile tugging his lips upward. He looked up at the sheriff, who looked back.

"So what's your reading telling you?" Earl asked.

"Oh, hell, I'm still half-illiterate. About as illiterate as an invisible man can be. Take these tracks I found on this old road, for instance. Maybe a week-old set a tire tracks. But still a guy could prob'ly compare 'em to some real tires, if he could find the tires to compare 'em to. You might say truth is a
relative
thing in such a case, now."

Now it was Ted sitting silent and stupefied while Earl and the sheriff talked.

"I know what you mean," Earl said. "Very relative."

"I've even been doin some trespassing," Greggy said. '"Course I'd never admit that if I was actually here. Against the rules, you know. Trespassing is. Amazing the things you notice if you do, though. Trouble is, you can't ever make it official. Anyway, I'm beginning to think the guy first told me about them horses was tellin the truth. Shoulda listened to 'm. 'Course that guy'd be a suspect right now, if I knew who the hell he was any more. But an invisible man don't have much for memory. And his handwriting—shit! It's invisible, too. Don't hardly pay to take notes."

Earl remembered his name in big block letters pressed hard into the notepad on Greggy's desk. He thought that what Greggy had just said was as close to an apology as he was going to get. He decided it was close enough.

Greggy lifted his head. "Listen to that," he said.

Silence rang all around them.

"I don't hear nothing," Ted said.

"Me, neither. I don't hear nothin at all. Heard some yappin from Wagner Cecil a while back, an some growlin from Yarborough. But they sure as hell ain't louder 'n
that.
" He jerked his head backwards at the vast, dark, quiet land, and the lights of the town below the hills shining silently into the night sky.

"Maybe Goat Man took those horses," Earl said.

"Now there," Greggy said. "You're the first person said somethin useful since I started puzzlin this whole thing over. I think you could be right. Could be like a few years ago in Harding County when them aliens was mutilatin cattle. I oughta go work on that theory. Don't bother to wave. I ain't even here."

He turned, walked back to his car, opened the door, called out, "Say hi to Carson Fielding for me, you happen a see him.
Gute Nacht.
"

His headlights filled Earl's car momentarily, then swung around, cutting a wide swath of brightness that faded in an arc across the prairie. Then Earl saw his red taillights in the interior mirror creep up the hill and disappear. He looked into the other mirror, at the stars framed there.

"What the hell was that all about?" Ted asked.

Earl thought there was a documentary to narrate somewhere in all this, but he couldn't think what it was. He felt the cold air pouring in the window and rolled it up. He looked at Ted. "What are you talking about?" he asked. "I didn't see anything. What'd I stop here for?"

He reached over, grinned, socked Ted on the arm, and started the car.

N
ONE OF THEM KNEW WHY
Carson wanted them to come to his place. He had called each of them, said he had some work that needed doing and could use some help. Ted hadn't yet found a car at a price he wanted to pay, so Earl picked up both him and Willi, and they drove out to Carson's ranch on a gray day, a few stray flakes of snow falling so slowly out of the sky they seemed suspended. Carson's place appeared deserted when they got there. Earl pulled up in front of the house, and they were about to get out when Carson came out of a small, ramshackle house they hadn't noticed when they first drove up. It was in plain sight, but their eyes had been fixed on the main house, and this other was so much smaller, perhaps half the size of the main one, with such a sagging roof line that it had the look of a natural thing and their vision had passed right over it. When Carson stepped out the door, though, the house leapt into their recognition—an old house, worn, small, poorly built.

They all got out and greeted each other. In their greetings they felt a common desire to avoid what they all remembered, to just be who they were at the moment, doing whatever it was they were being asked to do. Carson came to the point.

"I got some furniture needs movin," he said. "My parents 're gone, signin some papers. Thought I'd get this done while they're away."

He took them to a round tin shed, led them past an old Case tractor and some other machinery to the back of the shed, and pulled back a plastic tarp so thickly coated with dust it looked gray until he lifted it and the dust shook off and revealed the tarp's blue color. Underneath they saw furniture—end tables, stuffed chairs, beds and mattresses, lamps.

"This stuff needs a go back inta that old house," Carson said. "You willin a help?"

It took them two hours, back and forth from the shed to the old house, in the door, set something down, go back for more. Carson didn't care where they put things. "Anywhere," he told them. "Just so it's in."

When they were done, the space in the shed looked strangely barren—a big hole, surrounded by machinery staring like petrified bystanders having witnessed some remarkable vanishing. And in the old house there was a chaos of furniture, a bed in the kitchen, a table in a bedroom, chairs scattered without pattern or order, things tipped on their sides.

They looked at it. Carson offered them water, soda, a sandwich. They drank and ate. In the moving, Carson had been all business, saying little. They had all sensed some portent in what they were doing, but had stiff-armed the feeling with the work. Now Earl asked, "What's this all about?"

"It's my grandma's furniture," Carson said.

Earl waited, finally said, "That doesn't tell us a whole lot, you know?"

"Grampa moved it out to that Quonset when she died. I'm movin it back. They're sellin the place today. My parents are. Those papers they're signin? That's it. What I told you about that night. But I ain't lettin 'em have this house."

"Yarborough?"

Carson nodded.

"I guess I don't get it."

"That fire in your car?" Carson looked at Ted. "I been dreamin about it. Finally figured out why." He looked around the disarrayed room.

"Wasn't the work I needed so much," he said. "Just wanted the three a you here."

They were silent for a long time, Earl sitting at the old table across from Carson, Ted sitting in an overstuffed chair in the middle of the room, holding his half-eaten sandwich in one hand, Willi slouched in a ladder-back chair, his feet stretched before him, a can of pop dangling from his fingertips.

"Gonna make a hell of a fire, enit?" Ted asked quietly.

C
ARSON HAD THE FEELING
it was all happening again: the knock on the door, the waiting, the sound of footsteps inside the house. Except that it was winter now, and except for memory. Winter and memory. It had been only a few months ago that he had stood like this, with no idea what lay before him. For a moment memory pretended to be the future instead of the past, and just before the door opened, the footsteps inside the house nearing, it seemed that within a couple of days he would see her opening the corral gate, stepping inside, wearing boots that had never been in a stirrup.

Then the door was opening, and Magnus Yarborough's eyes gazed at him through the storm door. He was reaching for the latch when he recognized who stood on the porch. His hand fell. Other than that, he didn't react. Carson might have been a salesman, neither welcome nor unwelcome until his wares and prices were known.

Then Magnus grunted. "Huh. You looking for work?"

Carson heard the derision—that he no longer had a ranch.

"Not hardly," he answered. "Won't be needin to work for a long time."

Give the man nothing. Pretend to be, like his father, glad for the money.

"You got some balls coming here, don't you?"

"I got somethin to tell you."

"So tell it."

"I ain't gonna talk through a door."

The wind drove snow from a drift in the yard, a white stream peeling off the top of the drift like ocean spray off a wave, clattering against the house.

Magnus's jaw hardened. He wanted to shut the door in Carson's face. But he also wanted to know what Carson had to tell him. Carson saw doubt in his eyes. Everything had become so complicated. Magnus couldn't be sure of anything Carson might or might not know—about Rebecca, the horses, the land. And he couldn't resist his need to know. His mouth moved as if he had tasted something sour. Then he stepped away from the door.

"It better be good," he said.

He didn't open the screen door for Carson. He just stepped into the dimmer light inside the house. Carson reached out, pressed the screen door latch. Magnus had left the foyer and was in the living room. Carson stood for a moment in a pool of blue, golden, and reddish light transformed by the stained glass panels above the door.

It was the first time he'd been inside the house. For a moment he gave in to thinking about Rebecca here—the routines she managed, the way her face would look sitting in a chair reading or wrapped in thought—and he realized he'd never seen her face in interior light. The only house they'd ever come close to entering had been Elmer Johannssen's, and that had ceased to be a house, had become something else.

Carson couldn't afford these thoughts. He closed his mind to them, walked to the living room.

"It's your visit," Magnus said.

He didn't sit down or offer Carson a chair. They stood: ungainly, stiff, wary.

"Ain't really a visit. I just got a thing to say."

So say it.

"What you think happened didn't happen."

"I'm supposed to know what that means?"

"Between her an me. It didn't happen."

Magnus's head jutted forward almost imperceptibly. So suppressed was the movement that Carson wouldn't have noticed it at all except that a chance ray of light shifted from his forehead, brightening his coarse hair with the suddenness of a switch thrown.

"You come to me with that?" he asked. "And I'm supposed to believe you?"

"That don't matter to me."

Magnus's pupils dilated slightly. He hadn't expected that reply.

"I'm just tellin you," Carson said. "Whether you believe it, whether it makes a difference to you, that don't concern me."

"Why the hell should I believe it? Coming from you?"

Carson refused to respond to the belligerence. He wasn't here for that.

"I ain't offerin reasons," he said calmly. "Like I said, it don't matter to me if you believe it. I just want a say it. That's as far as I need a go with it."

"You know what that sounds like? Bullshit. You think coming over here and saying that will make things all right?"

Underneath Magnus's anger, Carson heard that he was hurt. He was trying to hide it, but he was hurt. Even if he'd played a role in hurting himself, still Carson wished it wasn't so. But that, too, was beyond Carson's purpose. He wasn't here to convince Magnus of his integrity or to excuse himself. He wasn't here to make either of them feel better.

"I ain't tryin a make things all right," he said. "I'm tellin you because I'm guessin she said the same thing."

He met Magnus's eyes, saw them shift—surprised again by Carson's answer and his refusal to get drawn into confrontation and its predictable paths. Magnus didn't like being surprised. He lifted his hands, placed them near his back pockets, elbows sticking out, shoulders and jaw leaning forward.

"What she said isn't your business," he said.

"It ain't. I'm just tellin you the truth because I think she mighta, too. Personally, I don't care if you believe me. I don't like you. I don't like the way you treated her. I don't like the way you treat animals. I don't know what goes on in your head. So it ain't like I need you to believe me so I can feel good about myself. I just come here to say it in case she said it, too. In case it matters to her. It don't to me. But it might to her."

If antagonism lay in the words, it lay in the words alone. The tone was factual, a mere report. If Magnus took offense at the report, it couldn't be helped.

And he did. He stiffened as Carson talked, a slow fossilization that locked his knees and spread upward through his body. With his elbows out and jaw jutting forward, he resembled the skeleton of an ancient bird trapped in mineral. But he also looked dangerous. He projected the sense that if he broke from that pose, it would be toward some explosive end.

"You come into my house and talk to me that way? Where the hell do you get off?"