I missed badly. I thought about running, but decided to hit her with my rifle if I had to. I didn’t think I’d get another chance to load, and my hands were shaking too much anyway.
Then that roar. That familiar roar of Tommy’s .40 caliber, pulling shots off, and in between the explosions, the sound of the shells ejecting, whizzing past me, hitting trees. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
The cat collapsed, deflated.
“You okay, Stotts?”
I exhaled. That was all I could do.
“You are insane, man. Just insane.” Tom put his hand on my shoulder. “Gabey! Gabey! We got it! Gabey!”
Gabe was across the creek.
I realized I had dropped my rifle. I picked it up. I could hear Gabriel slogging back across the water, breathing hard.
I sat down right where I was. I felt the wet of the ground soak through my pants.
“Thanks, Tom. I owe you five dollars.”
“I’ll take it.”
Tom dangled a fist in front of me. Numbly, I punched his knuckles.
Gabe looked white and sick. He dropped an open hand to help me to my feet. I didn’t look at him.
“Troy. You’re sitting in piss.”
“Thanks, Gabey. Thanks.” I dropped my head down between my knees and just sat like that, not saying anything, for what must have been at least five minutes.
Gabriel started to cry.
“I’m sorry, Troy.”
“Stotts? What happened?”
I kept my head down. “Nothing. You didn’t do anything, Gabey.”
I put my hand up for him, but Tommy pulled me up. Gabe had his face buried in his arm and was leaning into a tree, shuddering as he cried quietly.
“What’s wrong with him?” Tommy said.
“Nothing.”
I should have known better than to ask Tom Buller to bring him along that day. I knew how Gabriel was, how he was so scared of everything, a rabbit in a world of wolves. He was always falling apart under the least pressure; like he almost did the day Tommy was bitten by the snake, but I had known that boy since he was a baby and I loved him almost as much as I loved his sister.
I put my arm on Gabriel’s shoulder and lowered my face right next to his ear. I whispered, “It’s okay, Gabey. It’s okay. I didn’t mean to—”
“Troy!” He was crying hard and had to wait a bit before he could say anything. “I’m sorry I made you mad at me. I didn’t want you to do it.” He had to breathe a few times before he could go on. “I just wanted her to go away. It’s not her fault.”
“I know, Gabey. I know.”
“Jeez, you guys!” Tommy said, and I heard him spit. “That thing was about two seconds away from having you, Stotts.”
I felt so bad for Gabe. I guess I almost started to cry a bit then, too, looking at that beautiful animal lying there in the dirt, wanting Gabriel to be bigger than he was. I heard Tommy stepping over the sapling and then I took Gabriel away from that tree, with my arm tight on his shoulder and we turned around and saw what Tommy and I had done.
The lion was slumped down, lying on her side, head curled under her shoulder.
I heard Tommy click the hammer down on his pistol.
“Well, boys, let’s have a closer look at that kill.”
The lion was huge, thick, and heavy. I was the first to touch her, amazed at the texture and depth of her fur. Her eyes were like yellowed glass, fixed open. I had hit her in the eye socket, but it seemed like such a trivial wound, like the bullet had just smoothly passed beneath her eyelid. Blood ran down the side of her muzzle like tears. We grabbed her feet to roll her over straight. The feet were as big around as my opened hands. I pushed her pads in to reveal her black, sharp claws.
You could tell she was moving good when Tommy shot her. None of the bullet holes matched up in a straight line from one side to the other, as each bullet found its way in and out of her. She gave off very little blood from these wounds.
We were all sad. I could feel it. Looking at that cat, I couldn’t help but wonder what she had been thinking, where that thinking part of her was at that moment. And I pictured my mother, the last time I saw her, eyes open and quiet, the same as the cat’s, with an expression that looked like she’d run headfirst into something she thought she could break and then just didn’t care about anymore.
Gabe’s face was streaked with his tears and he wiped at his nose with the slick sleeve of his jacket.
And she was so beautiful and impressive, lying so still there in the wetness of the forest.
“I’m sorry, cat,” I said. “We had to do it.”
Then I heard Gabe crying again, swallowing hard. I looked at Tommy and knew he was upset, too. He just didn’t have that gleam in his eyes, and when he saw me watching him, he turned away and spit at the ground. With all the reckless ease that Tom Buller absorbed the bad things that happened to him, he could still get so pained when he saw an animal or one of his friends suffering, and that was one of the things I liked most about him. Neither one of us was going to give Gabey a hard time about the crying. I didn’t need to say that to Tom Buller, and he didn’t need to say it to me, either.
Tom crouched down beside me, kneeling at the cat. We both touched her side. Tommy put a finger to one of the bullet holes, dipping it past his fingernail into the blood. He made a line with the blood above his nose, right in the middle of his forehead, and then he tasted the blood from his finger.
He swallowed and straightened the look on his face. “Okay, pine cone, what kind of medicine is this one?”
I breathed out, watching a sort of fog form between me and the lion, mixing with the fading heat from her body. I knew. I remembered.
“Ghost medicine.” I swallowed, a lump in my throat.
I took the middle two fingers of my right hand and wiped at the blood on the lion’s face. Then I made two lines down over my own right eye, starting above the eyebrow, ending at my cheek.
“I’m sorry, cat.”
Ghost medicine. I could feel it, too.
Then Tommy said, “What’s it do?”
“You know how you can look right at ‘em and not see ‘em? The cats, I mean. How they move so quiet? They’re like ghosts.”
The rain was crackling its fire sound through the trees. A wind blew through the tops, saying, “Ssshhhhhhhh.”
“It makes you like that. Like a ghost. So people can look right at you, but not see you if you don’t want them to.”
I put my fingers in the blood again and marked across my other eye. I closed my eyes. And then I tasted the blood, too.
“And it does something else, too.” When I took my hand from my mouth I could taste how that blood was still living. “It makes the other ghosts leave you alone. It’s everything you could ever want.”
“Damn, Stotts,” Tommy said, and looked at the red smear on his fingertip. “You joining the tribe, Gabey?”
Gabe didn’t say anything. He was breathing hard, still kind of crying. He dropped to one knee beside us. He put a thumb to one of the side wounds, like he was being fingerprinted for arrest, and, expressionless, smeared a slash of blood across his cheek.
“There’s no way I’m tasting it,” he said, and wiped his thumb on his pants. “You guys are sick.”
“I got her with that first shot. See it? I knew I did. She would’ve died.”
“Yeah. Of old age. Or maybe she would’ve choked to death trying to swallow your skinny carcass in one bite,” Tommy said. “Anyway, we could get in lots of trouble for this. It’s against the law, you know. So maybe we should just get the hell out of here.”
I couldn’t do that now.
“Let’s go back to the truck and get a shovel so we can bury her,” I said.
And we all three, painted and worn, made our way back along the creek to that little bridge. And along the way we talked about Tommy’s difficult horse, that Goat Woman and her twenty-four-pound cat and the horses we’d be getting from her soon, and Gabriel’s older sister. And then T
ommy grinning and pretending that he couldn’t see me and Gabe anymore because we had disappeared.
And as we walked through the woods, wet past our knees, Tommy waved his hands in the air, smiling and acting like he was trying to feel where his invisible friends had gone.
NINE
We knew better than to even knock on her door without first gathering up a couple armloads of stovewood.
The inside of that round steel house saved up all the colds from a year of nights. Maybe it wasn’t so much the temperature as the thought of those black widows dangling up there. Rose was bundled in what looked like at least six layers of sweaters, the outermost pink, and stretched to the limit of its buttons’ holding strength.
“Sit down, boys,” she said, pointing us toward her two folding chairs and the oak half-barrel that doubled as a table and a third seat. We dumped the wood down on the dirt floor by the stove.
“We got some stuff for you. Food, too,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”
And we went out to get the supplies we’d brought.
“You better believe I do,” Tommy said when Rose asked him if he had any tobacco.
As soon as we sat down, that brown kitten pounced on my lap, but I pushed it down. Tom spit at it and it howled and kicked its back legs up and disappeared in the dark end of Rose’s home.
“He’s a real mean cat,” Rose said. “That’s good out here ‘cause he might live a long time that way. Anyways, I don’t use bug spray no more.”
And then Rose spit at the side of the woodstove, making a hissing sizzle. “You boys come for your horses, then? Well, you better get out there and catch ‘em. It’s not gonna be too easy, you know.”
“It’ll be easy enough,” Tommy said, and spit on the floor.
“Are you sure it’s gonna be okay if we take one for each of us?” I guess I still couldn’t believe she was just letting us take some horses for nothing.
“Sometimes people’ll just give you something, Tennis Shoes, without expecting nothing in return,” she said, and pushed the tobacco down deeper in her front lip with her tongue. “Is that so hard for you to reckon with?”
“Sometimes everything is too hard for that boy to reckon with, Miss Rose,” Tommy said. “But we’re working on him. Let me just get him up on that horse of his and he’ll stop asking you to say no to him.”
Rose pushed herself away from the stove and turned to face me.
“Well, get up. I want to see you cowboys catch those horses.”
Tommy reached out his right hand and pulled me to my feet. I almost never took my hat off inside Rose’s house, but not just because I was afraid of the spiders, it was that I felt like Rose’s place was somewhere you just didn’t need to take it off and it wouldn’t matter. I pushed my hat down straight as we walked out the door into the bright sunlight. Tommy snapped at his can of tobacco and held it out to me.
“Want some?”
“Okay.”
Rose laughed behind me as I dipped my fingers into the can. “Ha! Look what he’s doin’ to that boy now! Ha!”
I told Tom, “Last time I did this, you got bit by a snake.”
We didn’t get any horses that day from Rose. I could hear her belly-laughing as we took off after them, Reno trying to cut right into them and Arrow lagging back on the outside. Tom and me leaning forward over the saddle horns, swinging ropes to move the ones we had our eyes on, trying to cut them out. The black mare that I admired looked like she would be foaling soon, and I didn’t want to scare her too bad, but she was smart and stayed away from us by hiding among the other horses. Tom was after a real tall reddish-roan stallion that looked to be about two years old, and maybe seventeen hands already. And he was the one in charge, I could tell, because where he went the rest of those horses followed along, younger colts trailing in the back. There was no way Arrow would get Tommy anywhere near that mean boy.
We weren’t used to riding like that, either. Reno was so tall and Arrow’s legs were so stiff, and cutting wild horses from a nervous herd was a lot harder than they always made it look in the movies, where no one would ever get dirty or make a mistake, or have his horse going one way when he was leaning the other.
Tommy was the first to fall off. He landed on his elbow and was bleeding pretty good, but got right up and brushed himself off, cussing at Arrow, and went back for another try.
I laughed at him when he fell, and then immediately fell off myself when Reno took a sharp turn to his left and I flipped, facefirst, over his shoulders. I landed on my chin, got dirt in my mouth, and a cut over my eyebrow. But it was still fun. I came up spitting dirt, and my tobacco with it. I wiped the blood away with the back of my gloved hand and replaced my hat as Tom rode up to me.
“Want some more?” he asked, holding out his can of tobacco.
I spit out some more dirt. “Yeah.”
“Is it me, Stotts, or are these the spookiest horses you ever saw? And fastest.”
“I can only get close to the ugly ones.”
“I guess they like your looks.”
“Well, that big roan of yours is going to have to get shot before you lay a hand on him.”
“With a bazooka.”
“Twice.”
I looked down and noticed one of my shoes had come off and was about ten feet away in a patch of weeds. I limped over and got it, jamming my dirt-crusted socked foot back into it without untying. I tossed Tom his tobacco, and he snapped it down and took some more for himself. “What do you say we try again another day, Stottsy?”
“I was just waiting for you to say so. Let’s go tell Rose we’ll try again after we’re healed up. And clean.”
Rose was waiting outside her house when we rode up. That small brown cat saw us and took off into the brush, running like it was on fire. The sun was getting low and the afternoon was cooling.
“Ha! You two cowboys look like you run into a pack of Indians.”
“Might’ve,” Tom said, and spit.
“We’re hoping if you don’t mind if we come back another day and try again,” I said.
“Mind? Mind? It’s you the ones who should mind doing it again. Ha!” Then she turned toward her door. “Well, get down now and I’ll give you something to drink before you go home. Of course I don’t mind you boys coming back to get your horses. I gave ‘em to you.” And she opened the door.
Tommy looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders, then, painfully and slowly, we got down from our horses.
Rose was opening up one of those big green jugs of wine when we came in.
“You boys just drink a glass of this and you’ll feel a lot better.”
“Okay with me,” Tom said.
So we sat there around the light of her stove in our usual places, Tommy looking out for that cat, and she gave us each a big glass of yellow-looking wine.
That wine tasted horrible at first, but it kind of changed flavors as I drank more and more of it out of the glass. And she was right, it did make the hurting stop; and it made me feel real warm inside, too. Tommy finished his first and Rose offered him more, but I said no, ‘cause we had to go before it got dark. We got up, a little rubber-legged, but I felt more like riding my horse right then than I had in a long time. At that moment, Tom wouldn’t have even had to ask me twice to go out there and try to catch that roan and the black mare again, too. We thanked Rose and told her we’d be back soon; then we left.
“Man, I got to pee really bad,” I said.
“Me, too. Let’s go over there in those trees. I guess it would be pretty rude to take a piss right here next to her house.”
“Rude? Jeez, Buller, she’s not the Queen of England.”
And then we both laughed, really hard.
The sun was down and the sky was pale slate by the time we rode away from that steel house. Along the way, I noticed that Tommy was getting Arrow to move pretty good and confident, despite the lameness in his front legs.
“You look like hell, Stotts.”
“You’ve p
robly rode with uglier. I’m not cut bad, anyhow, it just bled a lot,” I said. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“I bet it doesn’t right now.”
“When do you want to come back?”
“Tomorrow. And I’m bringing her some bug spray for that new cat of hers.”
“Then you won’t have nothing to spit at in there.”
“I bet you’re not much bigger than that cat, Stottsy.”
“Do you think she knows we don’t know what we’re doing?”
“It’s a fair guess.” He spit and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
“We could put up a pipe corral on the other side of the fence when we catch ‘em,” I said. “Benavidez wouldn’t mind. We could tame ‘em there.”
“We’re never gonna catch ‘em,” Tommy said.
He lifted his hat and scratched his fingers through his black hair.
“I am.”
“You got some kind of strategy?”
“I’m gonna try to be nicer to ‘em, I think.”
Tommy burst out laughing. “Damn, Stotts, that’s a good one. You know what I believe?”
I leaned forward in my saddle. Tommy had to be drunk, I thought. He never told me what he believed, not one time in my life.
“What?”
“Wild horses don’t even know what sugar is.”
And we laughed and slid sideways and slumped over in our saddles along the trail to the ranch as darkness fell, all the way back to that little chute we had cut in the fence.
“Watch this, Tommy. I’m jumping it.”
“I guess you still have plenty more blood left in your head, then.”
And I snapped Reno’s reins a little and gave him a kick and we circled around once and went right for that barbed wire fence and I pulled him up, staying low and forward on him, and he glided right over the top of that fence like it wasn’t even there.
TEN
I believe that things happen for a reason, but I do not believe, like most people I know, that those reasons are conscious and directed. There might be a God, but if there is, I know He is not benevolent; He is, at best, ambivalent to all of the things set in motion in this world. So things do not happen by coincidence, and everything that is, is really a collision of paths. And so luck, which I also do not believe in in the way that most people do, is merely a chain of certain reckless collisions.