Theft (22 page)

With one hand on the wheel, one arm reaching back through that little window between the cab and the bed of the truck, he held tight to the gathered end of the tarp. He cursed and prayed, settled on praying for a bit, then went back to cursing because what the hell was that semi truck doing there in the first place, and who had sent it out driving on this godforsaken road? He drove
the highway back home. The desert sun, high and hot, made him dizzy and turned him even more optimistic.

Soon as he pulled up to his place though, there it was. That goddamn semi truck sitting no more than a few hundred feet from his house. He shook his head in disgust, told himself he would take up his grievance with that gentleman later. For now, he went straight to his backyard. Greyhounds yapped and jumped on him as he rummaged through old tires, paint cans, doors of old cars, all strewn on the land around his place. The rays of the midmorning sun were still hitting him like razors, soaked his shirt and pants with sweat, and he took his shirt off, and a few seconds later he cursed the sun and took off his jeans, too, his whole body shiny and damp. Working in just his cowboy boots and bright red boxers, he uncovered the large dog crate he'd come for. “Hold on,” he whispered, even though Ciela was out of earshot. “It's gonna be fine, Ciela. Just hold on, please.” He had this hope clinging to him like mold now. He sang softly, working slowly and carefully, as he pulled the crate out from under the pile of junk, carried it to the truck, then stood looking at Ciela, figuring the best way to get her inside that contraption.

The heat was truly beginning to play with his head now. It turned his thoughts as delirious as the heat wave he'd driven through earlier. He heard the sound of a voice, soft at first, and he felt a presence. He didn't turn to look because the voice sounded like his daughter's and that's exactly what hope can do to a man. Let a little of it in and all hell breaks loose, and you start dreaming impossible things in the midst of doing something important. He unlatched the top of the crate from the bottom and split the thing in two. He heaved the Coleman with the Coors in it out of the truck. Concentrating, working fast, he walked into the house, came back out with a bucket of water and a flank of frozen venison. He placed these in the bottom of the crate. “Yeah,” he whispered to himself. “I can lift her right in there.”

“I can help,” he heard, distinctly this time, and he turned with fists at first. But that changed. Raymond was a big man, he knew
that, but at this particular second even the immensity of his body felt too small to hold everything he was feeling. She was standing there in front of him, Brenda, and the wolf he was trying to save was there, too, and he had to keep working and Brenda saw that, too, and without speaking a word to one another, the two worked together seamlessly, the father lifting the lower half of the crate into the truck, and the daughter moving with him to grab a corner of the tarp where Ciela lay. “Careful,” he said to her.

“Is it alive?” Brenda said.

“Name's Ciela. She's alive and snarling like a banshee, yeah.”

There wasn't time to smile, and Brenda's relief was more than a smile anyway. Raymond cinched the tarp tighter and worked his way around to the most dangerous part of Ciela, her head. He gripped the tarp, and then signaled with his head to Brenda, and the two of them lifted the wolf over the edge and into the crate. Without stopping to think, he secured the top to the bottom of the kennel, reached inside and slipped the tarp out, heard the wolf wake and snarl again, and it exhilarated him to the bone. He turned and hugged his daughter.

They held each other like that for a good long minute, maybe two, neither of them speaking. “You're my late-night visitor,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

He placed his entire hand on her face, covering her mouth and letting his fingers outline her cheeks and eyes. “Never sorry,” he said.

“For leaving. For the wolf,” she said. Then she whispered. “You sure it's alive?”

“You heard her yourself. She's welcoming you home.” His words released something in her, like the air going out of her and a brand new breath being taken in. The two of them stood facing each other, Raymond in his boxers and cowboy boots, Brenda with that semi truck looming behind her. “I want to sit with you, to talk. But I'm working against time,” he said. He shifted his eyes from Brenda to Ciela.

She gestured to the truck. “I'm on a route.”

He laughed. “You're driving a route now?”

She didn't laugh. “Not really. Long story.” Now she smiled. “I'll tell you on the flip-flop.”

He pointed at her, all that hope swelling like a storm in him now. “You're coming back this time,” he said. It wasn't a question.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm coming back.” It was simple and sure.

Raymond couldn't stop looking at Brenda, but he knew he had to get the wolf to his vet, fast. He walked back to the house, grabbed his cell phone, didn't take even enough time to pull on a pair of jeans.

When he came back out, he handed his phone to Brenda. “Call yourself,” he said.

“What?”

“Call yourself on my phone, then I'll have your number and you'll have mine.” He pushed his phone her direction, and she plugged her numbers in fast and heard her cell ringing, and it made her look at the truck, a place she did not want to be.

“Drive,” he said. “I'll do the same.” He hugged Brenda again. He wanted to ask her one more time to promise him that she would come back. But he knew it would mean nothing and that the only thing he had now was something he'd never trusted: hope. He hung onto that slippery trickster silently, fiercely now.

He watched Brenda grab the rearview mirror and pull herself up in the rig he'd cursed the night before. “Sonofabitch,” he said to himself, this time gently, this time with awe. His little Chevy drove off in the opposite direction of that huge rig that held his daughter.

He drove Highway 264, his hand-beaded
jish
sitting on the seat next to him, his heart pounding so strong he had to roll down the windows and sing as loud as he could, drumming a steady beat on the steering wheel as he sang. His voice was strong, and the mixed-up emotions resounded like a twister in his chest. The highway snaked out in front of him, curves only when curves were necessary, which was not often in this terrain. He drove and sang like that for who knows how long, his head emptying itself of daily thoughts, turning itself to old times, to Brenda, to the belief he had in everything he claimed he didn't believe in. The beat of his own drumming moved through his body like the rumble of a Harley he'd ridden across the Sonoran Desert when he was
eighteen, rode that bike all the way up into Osoyoos, Canada, a place he'd been told was the northernmost tip of the Sonoran Desert, even though the story was just a myth. That land was part of the Great Basin, a good enough place on its own, and nowhere near the Sonoran Desert. But he loved finishing the last leg of his trip in a place based on myth. The entire way, that engine had reverberated in the cavity of his torso, like he was the engine itself, making the Harley run. The beat of the drum was like that, and his love for his daughter was like that, too, the throb starting inside him, moving outward from there.

Driving fast, he came almost bumper to bumper with a rickety old VW bus patchworked with bumper stickers, rumbling down the highway. The hippies driving the VW heard him singing and started singing right along with him, and they waved when he passed them, and he waved back and kept singing loudly, drumming hard.

He would not have noticed the red light flashing behind him if the state patrol hadn't whooped the siren a few times, too, and he wouldn't have heard the damn siren if he hadn't had to take breaths between his singing. He kept up his song and pulled to the shoulder of the road. He leaned out the window. “Hey, cute outfit,” he said, to the cop.

The officer was a young guy with a scrawny build for a cop, and his uniform looked all too baggy. He smiled as he spoke, but he put on an overly stern voice that did not belong to him. “Are you aware you were traveling a couple dozen miles per hour
over
the speed limit?”

“I am.” Raymond was still humming loudly.

“Twenty-seven miles over, to be exact.”

“Impressive. No arguments. Just write out the ticket.” He held out his palm to receive the summons.

The officer leaned in closer, showed Raymond the readout on the speed gun, and caught a glimpse of Raymond's red boxers and cowboy boots. “Cute outfit,” he said.

Raymond chuckled, giving him props for his quick wit, but he nudged his palm closer to the cop, urging him to speed up writing that ticket.

“Got something in the back of the truck?” the officer kept on.

“Pretty clear that I do.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Why you waste your breath asking when you know you're going to do it no matter what?” The cop nodded to Raymond now, giving him his props, too. Raymond's foot tapped the gas pedal, testing his restraint.

The cop walked around to the back, lifted the tarp, and leapt back a few inches. “Holy shit! You got a vicious dog back here.”

“Yeah, that's what it is. It's a dog. And it's vicious as hell, and I need to get it to a vet, fast.”

“You can't take a vicious dog to a vet!”

“Everything's vicious when it's injured.”

“What's wrong with it?”

“Stunned. Badly. Maybe a leg injury. Maybe more. Like I said, she needs help.”

The cop inched his way closer to the crate that held Ciela. She was stressed and more awake than she needed to be now. Raymond could hear her snarling, and it made him smile a little. When the cop came close to the kennel door, Ciela lunged, and that ungodly whine-like howl permeated the desert quiet. “Holy moly! That a wild dog?” the cop said.

“It's just—it's my dog, yeah. She's mean as a jackal. You checked everything out now? Want to look in the cab here, too? I got nothing to hide.” He opened the glove compartment and emptied it of trash and papers.

“You in a hurry?” the cop said.

“As I said. Yes.” Raymond reached out the window and pointed to the back of the truck. “That animal's counting its last few breaths and you're using up a couple hundred of them jawing on and on to me.”

The cop walked closer to the cage now. “That's not a dog. That's a frickin wolf,” the kid cop said.

“Very likely it is, yes.”

His eyebrows went up. “Is it really a wolf?” He was excited now in the way that people who usually don't care become
excited once they see a wild animal for themselves.

“She's one of about forty-nine of her kind left in this country. Which is about to become forty-eight because of your chattering, and I'm about to take off without waiting for your very belated permission.”

“You can't have a wolf. Even Indians. You guys can have feathers. And certain psychotropic plants and paraphernalia like that. But you can't have wolves.” He pulled a ticket book from his belt loops. “Would you say it was endangered? Are you endangering an endangered species?”

“Endangered? No. I'd say it was fucking massacred. I'd say this wolf and all her kind are on the brink of forever, and forever's a bad thing, not heaven and streets paved with gold and eternity where all the special people go. The eternity I'm talking about is a fucking bad thing. Because when this wolf and her pack are gone, they're gone forever, and if you don't quit jawing on and making your lists and checking them twice like Santy Claus, it's gonna be one less wolf for eternity, and that one less wolf is going to be your fault.” He took a breath. “Sir.”

After a few confused seconds, the cop said, “So you trapped and caged an endangered species?”

Raymond let a thin stream of air out through his lips, ran his hands over his balding head. “Whoo, that's fresh. Look, mister cop, I gotta get this wolf to someone who can care for her, and that means—”

The cop's radio shredded the air with static. He talked into it, ignoring Raymond, then pushed the kill button and asked Raymond to step out of the vehicle.

Raymond knew now. He sat stone still in the driver's seat, shaking inside with anger and frustration. His past, one dedicated to restoring animals and land in all the wrong ways, at least according to the law of federal and state animal management, would do him in again. He had been arrested for importing animals in the past. He had a choice now, between this wolf and his own life. Between this wolf and the possibility of ever seeing his daughter again, of having a chance with her again. It was a position he'd been in too many times
before, and he hated every choice available to him now. Staring the cop down hard, he stepped out of his truck, felt the handcuffs on his wrists, walked slowly to the officer's car in his cowboy boots and boxers. “Look, Officer, you gotta hear me. That wolf'll die unless you get her where she needs to be,” he said.

The officer nodded. “We'll take care of it.”

It was a puny response. “You sonofabitch,” Raymond said, but he felt his powerlessness consuming him. He fell back in his seat. “Sir. Call Andy at Wilderness and Water. Tell him it's Ciela, Willa Robbins's wolf. Tell him the wolf is—”

The young cop was not listening. He was absorbed in radio talk and paperwork.

Raymond watched his truck and Ciela grow smaller in the side view mirror. He felt his chest caving, and he sang against it. He tossed back his head and started singing again, consumed with desperation. He opened his mouth and let his voice boom like a Harley going a hundred and fifty on a desert road on a summer night. The sounds came out of him like a drum, like his skin was the head of the drum and there was nothing but rage pulsing through him. “You sonofabitch, you make that call,” he said. “You get that wolf taken care of.”