The Work of Wolves (51 page)

Carson held up his hand—brief, conciliatory, but refusing to accept Magnus's challenge.

"I never wanted a come over here in the first place," he said. "Was you insisted. I'm just needin a finish it. Friend a mine claims that's important."

"Well, you've finished it."

"Just about. I'll go in a sec. I'm just sayin, she's your wife. Still. And she might still want a be your wife. That's a thing I don't know. What I'm tellin you's die truth. You don't believe it, that's fine with me. But it might matter to her. That's all."

"Are you trying to tell me all you did was teach her to ride?"

"I've already told what I've got to say. Anything else you wanta know is hers to tell. If she wants."

"What makes you think I want to hear anything from her?"

"What you want ain't nothin to me. I ain't concerned with you."

Magnus jerked his head, a movement so full of suppressed emotion that Carson had the impression Magnus had snapped bones in his neck controlling it, and he realized with a start that Magnus wanted his concern. Wanted Carson's attention. His notice. He didn't care if Carson hated him, as long as Carson noticed him. And all Carson had ever done was ignore him. With the horses, even with Rebecca, Magnus had been merely beside the point.

Carson stared at Magnus with a dumbstruck wonder. He remembered how Magnus, swollen with a rage he'd barely contained, had come down to where Carson was working the horses and tried to bully him the day after Carson had kicked Rebecca out of the corral. It dawned on Carson like something that had always been there but that he hadn't recognized, a thing taking shape out of the background before him, that Magnus had tried to bully him not because Carson had treated
Rebecca
like anyone else, but because he had treated Magnus Yarborough's
wife
like anyone else. Carson hadn't been enough concerned with Magnus.

They stared at each other across the space of the living room, Magnus trying to hide what his movement had revealed, Carson hiding the fact that he'd recognized it. In Carson, astonishment replaced realization: he had the oddest power over Magnus he could imagine—the power to ignore him. To find him beneath notice. Carson had come here to speak of Rebecca, and everything he'd said to keep the conversation on her, to avoid any confrontation with Magnus himself, had the opposite effect. It antagonized Magnus even more. Had everything—the fleeing cow, the horses, the purchase of the ranch—been a demand that Carson notice him? Was that possible?

But the thought was too pathetic to be borne. Carson had to get away from the man. He turned to go. But Magnus had one thing yet to keep him. In a voice tight with anger he said, "What'd you do with them?"

Carson knew what he meant, and he thought he could ignore this, too. Just keep going. He hadn't come to talk about the horses, either. He'd come to say the one thing, for Rebecca's sake, if she wanted it. He hoped with every cell of his body that she didn't want it. But he couldn't forget that moment of doubt when the sunlight off her mirror had stabbed his eyes, and the sound of her car door shutting had come across the field to him. He didn't know what she was doing, what deciding. He knew what he wanted, whether it was right to want it or not—but he wouldn't be part of preventing whatever she might decide. That's the only reason he'd come: to let her be. And to free both of them—to let Magnus have a choice, if that were possible, so that if Rebecca did refuse him, Magnus's influence would be over, the spell he cast—if he cast it—broken, and nothing Rebecca and Carson might do would then be his.

Still, Carson turned back to Magnus. He knew the man was trying to make him acknowledge his power. He wanted to force Carson to admit it. Carson turned back not to admit anything but because by speaking he could say less than silence would say.

"They're safe," he said.

With
their relations,
he thought.

"Safe, huh? I knew you were involved. That goddamn Longwell claims there's no evidence."

"Guess you oughta get him fired."

"Maybe."

Carson turned to go again, but Magnus said, "Safe like that cow, maybe."

Carson felt rage, and he turned back to face Magnus and in that instant knew that, in spite of Magnus's greater size, he could physically annihilate the man. Destroy him. Leave him a crumpled heap bloodying the cream-colored carpet of this living room. He saw fear leap like a flame into Magnus's eyes and knew that Magnus had just realized he was alone with Carson and not at all in control of what might happen, confronting a man boundless and unpredictable and with an energy greater than his. Magnus stepped back, away from what he saw, and stumbled, and almost fell. And all Carson had done was look at him.

But Carson reined his fury in.

"Truth is," he said, "we thought a killin you. It was an option. But we did another thing."

Magnus had just regained his balance. But at Carson's words he swayed, steadied, stared for a moment in disbelief. Then his face went slack, the flesh suddenly hanging from his cheekbones like soggy newspaper caught on a fence.

In ways he had never imagined, his manipulations had turned against him. What he thought he controlled had freed itself from him. Become wild. Going its own direction. Carson's words left no room for doubt or disbelief. Magnus's mouth opened and closed. He licked his lips.

But he pulled himself erect. Tightened his features, though he couldn't quite firm up his cheeks. He tried to take back the offensive.

"That's a direct threat," he said. "I could get you arrested for that."

"Who's listenin?"

"If anything happens to me."

Carson shook his head, dismissing it. "We decided it wasn't worth doin."

As if it were a minor thing. Beneath notice.

"We?"

Magnus, for the first time, picked up the implications of the word.

"There's a few of us got involved. One guy was a bit hard to convince. I think we talked him out of it. Least for now. Hard to say, though. He's out there."

Carson nodded vaguely, swung his head to indicate all of space.

Magnus had no words. He stared at a world he didn't know, with a random being in it whose attention he didn't want but whose attention he had gathered. It could be anybody—the next person he talked to, the next person he tried to look in the face.

Carson left him. He was in the foyer when Magnus tried to re-cover, to shout away what couldn't be known or faced.

"You've got nothing," he yelled. "You hear me? I'll even get her back."

Carson didn't know. It seemed doubtful. Rebecca wouldn't come back to this, would she? But now it was up to her. That's all he'd come here for—to make sure it could be up to her.

He reached for the door handle.

"I hate gutless people who won't even go after what they want," Magnus called.

"Yeah. Me, too."

Carson opened the door. His response had silenced Magnus momentarily as he tried to understand what Carson meant.

Then he called again. "You sonofabitch. You can't just walk out of here."

But Carson already had.

I
N MAGNUS'S YARD
Carson opened the door to his pickup, climbed behind the wheel, and suddenly lost the strength to turn the ignition key. He sat there with the sun pouring through the windshield out of the cold winter air, and he broke into a sweat that turned icy on his skin. He shivered. He was landless and womanless. All he had was money. He didn't know what he'd do with it. Didn't know what its point could be.

E
ARL'S GRANDMOTHER LIFTED
the moccasins off her lap, held them up to the window light, out of the sphere of the incandescent bulb.

"There," she said. "Finished."

They were like no moccasins Earl had ever seen: red horses, blue water, green hills, and four human figures, young warriors, guarding them. Out of the straight, geometric lines of the beads, using only the variation of color, his grandmother had created a sense of movement and space and running things and wind. Yet nothing moved. All was still.

"They're beautifvd," he said.

"They're yours."

He took them, as one should take a gift, with humility and thanks and without protest. He looked at the moccasins in his hand, and he wanted to ask her how she'd known, and what she'd known, and for how long. But then he didn't want to know. It was a mystery, best left so.

"They're not traditional," his grandmother said. "I kind of made up the pattern."

Earl nodded. The moccasins gleamed in the light. "Are you allowed to do that?" he asked.

"I think so," she said. "I never asked."

WILLI TOOK THE PHONE
upstairs to his bedroom. He sat on the bed, began to punch in numbers, then looked up at the ceiling and stopped. But he saw only texture, only the ceiling spreading away from his eyes. He stared at it for several long moments, but his eyes didn't circle into the whorls up there, didn't start and stop and start. It was just a ceiling. Just texture and relief. He looked back down at the phone in his hand. Punched in the last two numbers.

In Koblenz his father heard the phone ring and took his gaze away from the city outside the window, walked to the phone and, without waiting for it to ring again, picked it up.

TED SAT HUDDLED IN A WINTER COAT
under the largest cottonwood outside his trailer house. He had his arm over the neck of one of the greyhounds. He looked up at the secondhand car he'd just bought. The muffler wasn't great, but the lights worked. He'd bought a bag of burritos to celebrate. He wrapped his arm tighter around the greyhound's neck to bring the burrito in his hand to his mouth. The dog's head was right next to his. Ted bit the burrito in half. The dog whined.

"Want some?" Ted asked.

He held out the other half. The greyhound wolfed it down. Ted held his face against the dog's and felt the dog's jaws working, bone against bone. He shivered again. He thought how a few beers or some wine would warm him up. Longing and emptiness that nothing would fill gaped inside him. He remembered the ice on Lostman's Lake, that open water, and how the car had gone down so soundlessly. So easily. There had been that moment when he'd almost jumped inside. The car was moving and he was moving with it, running alongside, and it was just a quick little swing, a pull on the wheel, and he would have been within the ruined hulk, behind the windshield, watching the water near. And then a sudden falling.

Instead, here he was. Just here. Why? He didn't know why. Ted clenched his eyes closed. The darkness swam with blood. He clutched the dog. Held it to him. Clutched the dog so hard it whined.

AND EARL WALKED WITH HIS MOTHER
across the frozen cemetery grass, past the prairie dog mounds that no one seemed able to rid the cemetery of. It was the first time he and his mother had ever visited the cemetery together. She had been surprised, saddened and pleased, when Earl had asked her to go with him. She had dressed for the occasion and had on dress shoes with slippery soles. She held his arm on the uneven ground.

He felt her grip tighten when she saw Norm standing in front of Cy's grave.

"Norman's here," she said.

"I know. I invited him."

"Earl."

"You said you should have him over for a meal."

"Yes. But—"

"But it just wouldn't have gotten done, you know?"

She'd stopped when she saw Norm. Now she started walking again. "You're right," she said. "It wouldn't have."

Then she said, "Earl. This kind of scares me."

"And him."

"You think?"

"I know."

Then with great dignity, Lorna let go Earl's arm and walked on her own to Norm and reached up. And at first he didn't know what she was doing and a look of great confusion came to his face. And then he saw and he opened his arms, and they fell into each other, and if it hadn't been for that, they both would have fallen. But their collapses canceled each other out somehow. That had to be it, some set of vectors, some equation that could be solved. But the truth was it looked to Earl like they were suspended, clear of the ground, floating.

I
N THE KITCHEN OF THE NEW HOUSE
, Marie Fielding stood alone, looking through the window at the empty space where the old house had stood, and she thought of her son watching it turn to flame. She thought of the heat against his face, his open eyes, and how within them there must have been the whole fire burning, compressed. Heat and light, he wouldn't have shut them. Would have watched. She knew that.

She and Charles had come back that day and found a pile of scorched rubble. Ash. Still-smoking timbers. Smoke curling up in various wisps before being swept away by wind. She'd been shocked. Charles had been shocked. It wasn't just the physical difference, the way the ranch place seemed almost unrecognizable without the old house there. It wasn't just the way that, without it, perspective seemed skewed, distorted, everything out of relationship. It was also that they felt the landscape of their lives had changed. As if things had shifted in their hearts and they couldn't quite recognize, suddenly, who they were. Couldn't quite navigate their own memories, couldn't quite steer a clear way through them, with that smoking absence before them, and the sky, the horizon, the snowy land visible where painted boards had been, sagging roof, silver wooden shingles. For a moment Marie had the disconcerting sense that she saw the outlines of the old house still standing, as if the smoke for a moment rose up and framed it, and it was there and not there both.

While she and Charles were staring at it, Carson drove up from the pasture where he'd carried hay to the cattle. He drove right up to where thev were standing, opened the pickup door, stepped out Marie felt a small astonishment: He looked as he had always looked. He moved as if he'd just come from carrying hay to the cattle and would now go to another thing that needed doing.

"Carson!" she cried. "What happened? Are you all right?"

"I burned it," he said.

"You...?" Her voice halted. "This wasn't an accident?"