West With Giraffes(77)

I can leave. I will leave.

Time to live instead of die—without him.

I take a step back and then another, lowering the rifle to turn and just walk away, when I hear the click of his pistol’s hammer.

Whirling around in time to see the pistol blast, I feel my cheek burn, grazed by his pistol’s slug. Then hearing my own rifle fire, I see his shoulder pop back, hit by my rifle’s bullet—

—and there we stand, two dead-inside beings who have shot each other.

I find my feet if not my balance, and I throw down the rifle.

Pa, standing like he doesn’t even feel my bullet in his shoulder, lowers his pistol, too.

Then he shoves it under his chin.

And shoots.

I reel back, spattered now in both bloods, both bodies at my feet, my lungs forgetting how to breathe. As new puke mingles with the blood on my boots, my mind is stuttering with only one thought—

I made my pa kill himself.

Until another thought comes home to roost—

I could have been the one doing the killing. If he hadn’t done it, my young fury would have. I’d have shot my pa for making me shoot that mare. I’d have shot him for letting the dust take my ma and my baby sister. I’d have shot him dead if he’d tried to make me stay. I knew it to be true beyond true.

“. . . I could have been the one,” I finished telling the Old Man, squeezing the wheel even tighter.

For a long moment, I couldn’t go on, until I heard the Old Man speaking in the same timbre he used for the giraffes.

“Son,” he murmured, and I tensed at that word, “you need to tell me it all.”

Sinking back into my own skin, I braced to tell the rest. “The dust was so bad that static electricity was always in the air like black magic,” I told him. “Any spark could set it off, sometimes flaming right in front of us, silver-blue flames we’d have to stomp out before they set ablaze. So the shooting must have started the fire.”

I paused, parsing my words, because it wasn’t our gunplay that started the fire, it was mine. I had staggered back from the puke and the blood, and I started firing at the house. I emptied the rifle, and I picked up Pa’s pistol and did the same, clicking long past empty, screaming myself hoarse as the silver-blue sparks began flying like the hell I felt I was in . . . until one took to the wood and burst into true flames, taking my homeplace back to the devil. I did not tell him that. I lied by omission, as church people call such sins, desperate for the Old Man to not know my own dust-fever crazy.

Instead I said, “The place was matchsticks. There was no saving it and nothing worth saving.” So I’d sunk to the ground, I told him, watching my house burn until the flames had taken it full. When it was over, when I found my feet again, I pulled more wood off the side of the barn and built another pine box. I put Pa in by Ma, hitched myself to that wagon, and pulled it to the churchyard to bury them both by my baby sister. After I finished, I sat there letting evening turn into morning, then stumbled back to my ma’s dead garden to dig up her Mason jar of coins from its hiding place, before I lit out.

But not before digging another grave, as best I could, for the mare where she lay. “Because nobody was going to eat her—nobody,” I mumbled, “not even the buzzards and the coyotes.”

And they found her anyway.

Then I was done, but it was not done with me. The reliving of it had fired up my leftover fury so bad, I thought I might burst into flames right there behind the wheel. I knew I had to tamp it down, but I wasn’t quite doing it. Feeling a tug from the rig, I slowed, focusing hard on the gears, on my driving, on anything but the burning inside, until I found the courage to glance at the Old Man.

He’d pushed his fedora back on his head and was sitting silently, eyes on the road, arm propped on his open window. When he spoke, it was barely above a mumble itself.

“People look at you peculiar if you talk about the feeling you got for animals, saying animals have no souls, no sense of good or bad, no value up next to humans,” he said. “I don’t know about that. Sometimes I think animals are the ones who should be saying such things about us.” He shook his head. “Animals can tear your heart out. They can maim you. They can kill you dead on instinct alone and saunter into the next minute like it was nothing. But at least you know the ground rules with animals. You can count the cost of breaking the rules. You never know with people. Even the good can hurt you bad, and the bad, well, they’re going to hurt you but good.” He dropped his arm from the window to rub his gnarled hand. “It’s why I keep choosing animals. Even if it kills me. One day, it probably will.”

He stopped talking. Yet I kept listening. I thought for sure he was going to tell me about that hand. Or why Percival Bowles had called him what he called him. Or both. I yearned for it, for anything to help free me from myself. But he propped his arm back on the window and went the kind of silent I knew I was supposed to leave alone. Instead I squeezed the wheel near to bending and asked what I feared most. “You going to call the sheriff?”

He cut his eyes back at me. “Now why would I do that! We got giraffes to get to San Diego.”

“But I made my pa shoot himself.”

“You did no such thing. He did it to himself.”

“But I shot him. I could’ve killed him.”

“You winged him.”