Theft (20 page)

B
RENDA FELT THE FIBERS of every muscle in her body frayed. An electrical quiver ran just beneath the surface of her skin. She'd made it safely up to Boulder, picked up several Tupperware-like tubs full of human waste, and now she was heading back through Denver, then south, toward the state line. She dialed her cell with one hand, double-checked with Tommy, the kid down the mountain she had hired before she left, making sure he'd take good care of the animals. “There's pay in it for you if you do a good job,” she
said, and he promised, and she trusted him. He said he didn't need any pay for doing what he loved to do. He was Frank's son, after all, and Frank was one of Zeb's long-time friends. “We're looking after him,” Tommy told her. He didn't know too much more than that. But “We got his back,” Tommy said. It was something Brenda needed to hear to allow her to keep going. That no matter what they had Zeb on this time, someone was looking out for him. She held back her desire to turn around and head home, just to see Zeb again. But it was the least she could do for him, to take over some responsibility now, to keep on. The night pressed black against the wide windshield of the truck now, and the silence collected her thoughts.

“Son of a woolly bitch, what a day,” she said in a whistled voice. It was a curse at Mike and the cops who had invaded her cabin, and it was a longing for Zeb all in the same breath. She remembered the way Mike had come at her, over and over, back in the days when she turned tricks on the lot for cash, and though she'd never liked him, never once put her lips close to his, she'd done her job, and that was that.

But Zeb was different. The first time she saw him at the truck stop, she was standing with her back pressed against the office window, the work of the day and the heat of a midsummer night wilting her. She was looking the other way, not pressing a trick, when she felt his leather-gloved finger tap her shoulder. “Hey, Miss,” his voice low and calm.

“Not working tonight,” she said, not looking at him.

And he squinted to look at her, moving in closer for a second. Then he pulled away and leaned his back against the window with her, standing side by side. “Hot night,” he said. He took his driving gloves off, slapped them against his knee, then folded them and stuffed them into his back pocket. She didn't move, didn't have anything to say to him, and they both stood for some time in that silence before he said, “Been a long time.”

It was a line she'd heard a thousand times before. She'd heard every line. She didn't turn. Something familiar in his
voice strummed her memory, but there was no trusting memory. To her, it was just a story the mind started telling at its most desperate times, wishing for a soft place to land, a quick and easy comfort.

He stood there a good while longer, till his presence began to itch at her and she started to move away, and he said, “Never thought we'd see you again, me or Willa.”

She was pushing thirty by then, her days with Willa so far behind her they seemed ghosted, mere figments. But when he spoke, she could hear something real behind his voice, and in it, she heard the memory of Willa's voice calling out in Mother-May-I and hide-'n'-seek. When Zeb spoke, she remembered the evening settling over the field on a hot summer night just like this one, but full of innocence and hope, and the memory of those two things weakened her, and she stopped walking away from him. “Zeb?” she said, and she saw him, and her question turned into certainty. She looked at his adult face, his smooth, tanned cheekbones lit by the dim light coming from inside the office, the other half of his face shadowed.

He took her home with him that night, no romance between them in the beginning. They both knew how their lives had fractured long ago. It wasn't a nostalgia of place and time, really, as much as it was a recollection of something that had belonged to them. It was fragile and at the same time, indelible. There was no way to put a finger on what they had lost back then, no way to tell what, if anything, had belonged to them to begin with.

They sat in Zeb's cabin that night, drinking Jack Daniels straight, and that simultaneous fear and attraction she'd had around Zeb when she was a kid turned to comfort now, a deep familiarity. She'd had her own transgressions by then, had seen the ragged edges of life, had no time for the smoothed-out bullshit of too much privilege and ease. Zeb knew her. They shared something she could not share with anyone else.

Come time for sleep that night, Zeb curled up on the couch in a sleeping bag, gave the bed to her. It wasn't until then that he said,
“She missed you, you know. A lot. Wherever she is right now, my guess is, Willa still misses you.”

“You haven't seen her, either?”

He shook his head. “Not since the day I left.” There was a thinness in his voice. They slept separately that night.

S
HE'D MAPPED OUT HER route: She would cut the top off of New Mexico, then wind her way into southern California through Arizona, rehearsing the same route she'd have to take on her return. That was the plan she'd made. But there was so much going on in her head that she drove half-dazed. She didn't follow the highway signs correctly, and the shitty GPS Mike had tossed into the truck called out, “lost satellites” in a fucking computer robot voice every time she turned it on. With the holy bullshit of the last few days barreling through her throbbing head and no alcohol to numb it, her limbs were shaking, and her life was coming at her vivid and strong, the presence of it, the past of it. By the time she gathered her wits again, she realized she'd followed some off-trail scent she knew too well to forget, though forgetting is exactly what she'd wanted. She had sniffed her way by habit to a place that was unfamiliar, but at the same time felt like home. She shifted the main stick, then the second stick, gears grinding, the cab trembling, the constant tremor of it all like a hand of some god shaking her to remind her that what was happening now was real. The tires rumbled on the dirt road, lurching with every shift, the truck moving huge as a dinosaur on what she finally knew was the reservation road that led to her father's house.

Well, she was there now. And though she hadn't really intended to be there, because she hadn't intended much in her life up to that point, she made the decision to carry on with it. The decision felt good. She drove to Raymond's place.

There it was. The place she'd dreamed of when she was a kid. The place she had found, and then left. She killed the engine. It lurched and grumbled once, then sighed. Then silence. She dimmed her lights. The hounds around the place started a clamor so loud that the noise blurred to nothing in her mind—just blended with the howl that had been screaming through her own head the past few days. A couple of hounds ran at the truck, their long legs unfolding like the legs of giraffes as they ran, then backed off, frightened by the size of the vehicle.

The slats of the house were so loosely bound that light shone through them—sunlight creeping in during the daytime and lamplight leaking out at night. In this darkness, those cracks made the whole house glow, a square of jagged brightness in the midst of the dark desert. She remembered Raymond, the father she'd dreamed of being with before she met him, the one she'd idolized so much from a distance. When she finally met him, she could not tolerate any contradictions in him. If he was not all good, he was all bad. And when she learned that he had done some things he was not proud of, some things that had gone against everything he believed, she could not comprehend it. It was the reason she'd left Raymond's place and set out on her own when she was eighteen. It was a child's mistake she knew now, but too many years had engrained it and set her decision in stone. She remembered Raymond's stature now, his huge bear hugs, and she missed him. She stared at the tiny hut unable to fathom how a man of Raymond's size could live there, how he even squeezed through the bright turquoise doorway. It was right about then that she saw the shape of him, his blue jeans and silver belt buckle clearly lit by the lamp inside the house as he passed by the window. A few seconds later, the door opened, and he stood there, on the threshold, looking out. With the flimsy wood door flapped open behind him, no screen, he lifted his huge hand and waved to her.

Did he actually see her? Could he recognize her from where he stood? Or was he just waving, Raymond being who Raymond was, helpful to any traveler, a wicked smart ass, but a good willed man to the core. Her father. He waved. And it was reflex. She
turned the key, tripped the clutch, and floored the pedal. The truck lunged in huge hiccups away from the place, a dinosaur lumbering down the road. She felt the strain of it, her whole body aching and relieved as she drove away.

The trailer of the truck snaked behind her cab. She drank coffee, praying for some mental focus, some emotional calm. She wanted to do this job well, to give Mike no reason to keep her paycheck. She hadn't intended to get off track so early on, and she needed to make time now. Her mistake made her body ache for a drink, and she was glad she was on the reservation without any booze for sale for miles. Knowing she could not have a drink gave her the shakes, and she knew it was right, even though she gritted her teeth against it.

Somewhere down the road, breathing hard and still not catching her breath, she caught sight of something that calmed her: the graceful figures of two coyotes loping across the desert. She looked closer, remembered seeing coyotes with her father long ago, something beautiful to watch, the way they loped in a straight line, like wild animals almost always do, knowing their way, their purpose. She watched them run, and as they stepped near to the shoulder of the road, she realized her lights were still dimmed from when she'd pulled up to Raymond's, and she moved to turn them brighter, and the first coyote stepped into the road, and she lifted her foot from the pedal, slammed it toward the brake, hoping she was fast enough. She swerved and felt the heft of the trailer rock behind her, and she wrestled with the wheel to steer clear of that soft, narrow shoulder, and she felt a few seconds of confidence when she righted the truck. She stopped, took a few seconds to breathe. After that, she set off steady down the road again. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the silhouette of one four-legged figure make its way across the road. She hoped the other animal would follow. She waited, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror. There was nothing.

With time already lost to her senseless detour that took her to Raymond's, she pressed the pedal even harder now, kept the truck roaring forward, focused on what lay ahead. But her eyes kept drifting up to that rearview mirror long after she'd seen the
coyotes. The thought of them crossing the desert alone, and of her crossing the same land, too, and the way their paths had intersected—it hovered in her mind. She knew she had seen one coyote make it to safety. She was sure of that. But the other coyote? She wasn't sure.

It gnawed at her like every single other goddamn thing gnawed at her, every little mistake and every bad decision, but she had no booze to drown out her conscience now and so
fuck it
, she was going to do the right thing, right now, which meant doing the wrong thing as far as Mike was concerned, but
fuck him, too
. She hit the brakes and took the next left onto a dirt road. She maneuvered the rig with what turned out to be about a twelve point U-turn that took up the whole road and the trailer rocked when it hit the soft sand, but she stuck with it. She turned that goddamn rig around and headed back down the road. She would check. That's all. Just five minutes more off schedule. She would check.

She saw her own skid marks in the stretch of her headlights and pulled to the side of the road. Already the sun was beginning to rise and the new light outlined the sandstone monoliths, and she scrambled her way up a small embankment, the scurry of lizards scraping the sand now and again, the hollow calls of sunrise birds sketching their song into the morning sky. She was out of shape, and by the time she crested the small hill, she was out of breath. The leftover night still shadowed the land, and it looked as if the heap of an animal slept at the base of every sandstone pillar. But those were just illusions, made more real by the tangible form she saw to her right. It was straggled and awkwardly laid out, not heaped neatly at the base of the monolith. She took a deep breath. She walked toward it.

It was like glimpsing a sliver of her past, the time she'd spent with her blood-father. She had helped Raymond reintroduce animals to the wild, one way to heal the land he loved so much. She didn't second-guess herself now. She knew what she was looking at, what her truck had struck. And she knew it was no coyote. It was a wolf, the only wolf indigenous to this territory,
the most endangered mammal in North America. She played the instant back over in her head. She thought she had braked before she crossed paths with the two wolves. Her rig had come to a complete stop by the time she saw the first wolf cross to safety.