Lions Live Here

Lions Live Here

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 10

Tom Bass

The cottonwoods are moving with wind along Rawhide Creek, where the grass is chest high and the water’s nearly stagnant. Beyond the swings and slide and over the footbridge, a small cemetery, untended and exposed human bones washing from the pioneers’ graves into the cinnamon waters.

Toby curls his toes on the porch, some minerals encrusted around its edge; the boy’s ready to pull on his ropers. Hunks of white quartz sparkle in the sun, here and there the crystals stained with algae. A slab of amethyst is propped in one corner.

Wyatt sucks a cheroot through his brown teeth while he disassembles an old rifle. He attends to the inside, oiling; it has a tendency to jam at important moments. He’s already cleaned the barrel with a long rod tipped with a fuzzy brush.

Toby’s toes want to leap into their boots but he has to tell them no.

Wyatt asks him to slip the hollow-tipped shells into the magazine in a low tone signaling that guns should be revered.

“They’re good enough to kill a gopher… even a man if you hit him in the right place.”

Toby’s fingers load in the cold brass bullets, not without a few falling onto the brown Astroturf of the porch. He recovers the slippery devils and locks the magazine and they’re ready to go. Wyatt moves through the hissing aluminum screen door to return the kit to the closet where the gold shag carpet extends. Flies are buzzing against the door, bashing their eyes against the steel mesh, inside and out. Hissssss, it cries again.

Wyatt gathers the Remington in the crook of his arm, walks to the Chevy, its bonnet black and sappy from a dripping elm. He looks in the bed and tightens the top of the yellow plastic water jug. He scoots into the cab and places the gun barrel down next to his thigh. Toby is already there, sitting on the peanut bars and apples.

“Your boots, kid,” Wyatt reminds him, and it’s true—the ropers on the porch like a couple of dead rabbits. Toby fetches them, the key turns and the truck grunts a complaint. It reverses into the gravel road, scratches a turn, then engages, gravel pinging.

The pick-up moves along the south side of the single block that defines Jay Em—the decrepit lumber yard where bats dwell, the boarded up windows and peeling paint of the general store guarded by two rusty white Standard Oil pumps, the subsiding premises of the bank, some quarters behind its single plate glass window held together by tape. The truck veers past a mansion obscured behind a tangle of trees, the singing domain of wild turkeys, morels and does.

The vehicle thunders over the bridge. A cloud of dust mushrooms behind as it bends around the big corner that leads into the brown prairie. His arm hangs out the window. They pass the first abandoned homestead, tin roof peeled apart by the wind, clumps of wire around the perimeter and a knot of iris that has somehow survived without any human care.

Wyatt fires up another cigarette. The tobacco wind circulates right under Toby’s nose. He figures they’re not stopping at the dump to shoot bottles. He hasn’t asked what the quarry is to be. Maybe nothing. The truck rises over the first big hill. Jay Em disappears from view. Ahead is grass, cattle, cactus, fences, hills and the road.

“See the pronghorns,” says Wyatt indicating the herd with his cigarette. He is naturally the first to spot anything. Anything that moves on the blanket of grassy sea betrays its presence. The pronghorns are not worried about a passing truck. It’s when the truck halts that the antelope will sprint away under the high cirrus clouds and raw blue sky. The hills dip, rise, undulate, the road flanked by barbed wire and old cedar fence posts screwed up by the wind.

“You wanna look for some horny toads?” he asks when the truck passes a gully.

“Nah, dad, last time I just found rattlers with Gramma.”

“Horny toads don’t bite, kid. But they might pee on ya’.” He chuckles half a breath.

“I don’t want no toads. No snakes.”

Wyatt laughs a touch. “Well, we gonna hunt birds or critters?”

“How about both?”

“Don’t be greedy, son. And there’s no good cover for pheasant out here.”

Indeed, there are no rows of corn, marsh or sorghum that might be a rooster’s idyll.

“How about twittlins?” he queries.

Wyatt furrows his brow. “Speak up, kid! I guess I saw a whole flock of what you call twittlins not a few hundred yards back. But it ain’t really the season and we don’t have a permit.”

“We could shoot the doves off the fences if we aim right. Oh please!”

“That’s a mean trick, boy, but I kinda get the idea that we could have ourselves some pigeon pie.

They’ll have migrated by the time it’s the season, so we might as well get those twittlins now.”

The truck’s far enough from Jay Em that the shooting isn’t going to bother anyone, that little amount of anyone who still lives in the town. Certainly not the heifers and steers out in the prairie grouped around a windmill, saltlick or trail. The truck parks and Wyatt doesn’t bother to turn off the engine. He snugs the gun into his armpit and cradles it in his palm and aims at the hand-sized mourning doves clustered on a wire fence in neat rows, some left, swinging on the top wire, others right, perched on a post or flitting in a bundle of tumbleweeds bunched in a corner. He knows the difference between meadowlarks and killdeer and how to aim at the gray mauve birds that kindly sit on the wires. Wyatt sights along the barrel, fills the sight with one bird, then two. His hairy finger is just so on the trigger. His thumb unlatches the safety.

Pock!

He pulls the bolt and out rings a shell. A gray feather drifts onto the road.

Toby pushes the heavy door open and scuffs down the road to where he expects to find a macerated bird. It’s not Wyatt’s gun for nothing, for under the wire in the grass where the cattle cannot reach is a pair of decapitated doves. The hollow point has swallowed up their heads and all that remains is their white collars.

“You got two!” Toby shouts, picking up the two birds, the warm blood trickling onto his fingers. He’s not one of those people who object to meat resembling the animal it comes from. He puts the birds in a sack in the back of the truck. “Two for one sure is a mighty good start.”

Wyatt smiles, sucking at another cheroot, letting the truck casually roll on.

“You try, kid,” he signals and Toby takes the gun.

His hand and eye wobbles and it seems like he has the dove in the canyon of the sights. He squeezes the trigger but there is no give.

“Try taking the safety off,” Wyatt instructs him as the doves fly further down the road and the truck ominously strolls on, the stones and pebbles sticking to its round feet.

Toby sights up again.

Pock!

The gun recoils and the wire sings with the sound of the ricochet and the dove is still sitting there with his amigos. Wyatt is willing to be patient. “I ain’t see no twittlin drop, son. Try again.”

Toby squints harder and his hand is wobbling again, and this time when he pulls the trigger he finds that the dove is no longer there.

By the time Wyatt says, “Go look for it, kid,” Toby has opened the door. He hustles down the road and locates his bird, a little worse for the wear.

“It’s still alive!” he hollers.

“Well, either wring its neck or step on its head!” Wyatt shouts in reply.

This choice makes Toby squeamish… so he opts to step on the head. It sickeningly implodes under his boot and the deed is done. The tally — one for Toby, two for Wyatt.

The two of them alternate now — Wyatt efficient, decapitating most of his victims, and Toby making a mess of things, shooting out the breast, really the only edible part, or clipping a wing, the dove hobbling in the underbrush and mewing like a cat when Toby is lucky enough to score.

In an interim of the carnage for a snack of apple and peanut bar, a snake slithers across the road.

Toby hoots but the snake is already in the ditch. He wants to chop its head off with a shovel like he’s seen Gramma do, its tail shaking and coiling up the handle.

Wyatt puts a stop to that idea. “It was a bull snake. They eat the rattlers and prairie dogs so they can’t be that bad.”

It’s a war of attrition: who is going to kill who?

The truck arrives at one of several plots of featureless land. Out of sight, behind the fence, beyond a draw and behind a bluff rests a homestead, every blade of grass accounted for by Wyatt’s boots of childhood. This particular fence holds his wealth according to the county cadastre. Wyatt indicates that they’re to try their luck on the old plot of family land.

Toby unhitches the gate. A barely visible track leads through the cropped prairie. It’s rarely used, except by the rancher who runs his cattle on the place for a fair rent and checks the windmills from time to time. The truck sways and bounces, its chassis creaking over the lumps of grass. Time seems to pause as Wyatt carefully navigates, aware of any rocks that might crack an oil pan or break an axel. In the draw, which drops into a sequence of gullies and the serpentine meandering of Muskrat Creek, they might startle a buck or a bunny, if the wind is blowing against them, carrying away their scent and sounds, but there is no burst of animal speed on this day. The truck fords the creek and grinds up the bank.

A sequence of low domes is mottled with rocks. Here, they stop.

Wyatt already stands on a dome, expounding a glut of geological detail, for among the rocks is an abundance of samples not normally found here. Some pieces have been brought by his father—bits of agate and quartz like those around the porch in town, logs of petrified wood, more semi-precious rocks than Toby can possibly identify.

“Some of these rocks were brought here by primitive man,” he’s saying obtusely. “It’s a great spot and vantage point for huntin’ big fauna; a man can work a flint core into a tool or weapon—an axe, a scraper, a spearhead, an arrowhead—while keepin’ an eye on giant sloth or mammoth. Water’s near. There’s protection below from the wind. See those campsites, those rings of rock that’d hold down a wigwam or tepee?”

Toby isn’t paying attention to the lecture on the ages blowing from Wyatt’s mouth into the wind tinged with cigarette smoke. Instead, he’s hunting for ammunition for his catapult. The cattle collected around the creek make good targets, the projectiles stinging their haunches like flies.

“Cut it out, kid,” Wyatt says. “I don’t want to buy a heifer if you shoot out an eye.”

Toby desists shooting and lobs some rocks into the void of wind and prairie.

“Let’s check out my old place,” Wyatt concludes and they scramble back to the truck.

The house is indicated by a grove of dead elms and bare electricity poles, some posts, wire, a caved-in root cellar. Toby jumps down into the sandy earth that blows around the house and steps up the crumbling cement foundation into what is left of the doorway. The kitchen is scattered with bleached tin cans, broken cobalt bottles, shingles from the roof, bits of blistered wallpaper and dung. It smells vaguely of skunks, and Toby doesn’t stay in the house long investigating the kitchen and two rooms, long defunct and permeated with abrupt snakiness. He won’t recover an ephemeral photograph or a newspaper because paper is sweet, easy food for insects. His interest can only penetrate into the past so far; there are no artifacts to warm in his hand jammed in the denim pocket of his jeans for the moment.

Wyatt unwires a coffee can from the mouth to an old well and he’s already got some wire weighted with a rock ready to figure out if there is any water. Rain is as rare as people in this extreme environment where in the distance of Muskrat creek are two antediluvian cottonwoods, Adam and Eve. In the bark of these two witnesses are remnants of buffalo hair and bullets, in their rings accounts of drought and blizzard and certainly no account of old school, country boy entertainment.

Here at the old homestead, Wyatt can feel himself awakening like a child again, almost like his destructive son, to the memories of the past, yet memories his son can’t possibly have, being a boy of the modern suburbs.

He sneaks along the bluff. He draws the gun to his shoulder and plugs the snapping turtle with bullets. He catches some frogs and stuffs their mouths with cherry bombs. He baits a steel trap and covers it in the reeds and rushes for a muskrat or beaver, whose pelts he will sell for pocket money. He lures crayfish out of the mud and ties them to bottle rockets and sends them into the immediate hemisphere. He fashions a spear in the household forge and plunges it into the back of a carp surfacing like a monster. He carves a hole in a fallen branch, places an irresistible stamp of metal in it and drive two nails diagonally either side of it, so a raccoon will end up his newest victim, caught by his curiosity.

Nature’s a violent arena, and if he could so lucky as to find a cougar roaring in his trap, leaping into the sky as far as the chain will let him, he might loose some skin or even his life trying to kill it. The cougar will thrash and cry and moan more than a man, his paw locked in the jaws of steel. He will remind him that the country has eyes, and not necessarily friendly ones at that, before he kills him with a shot from his gun.

Or the cougar might play dead and come at him and scratch off a good part of his ear before he kills him with his Bowie knife. Or he might find the trap closed and empty and he will save the bullet for another day. Or he might carelessly step in the trap himself on a snowy afternoon when the light’s dwindling ominously and find the jaws have dismembered much of his foot and he will hobble around the plains ever after like a coyote that has chewed off its paw. Nature does have a capacity for revenge.

Toby’s itching to resume their partnership in ornithology. The gun’s in the truck and the doves are not here on the East Place. They’re on the fences. But Wyatt’s adamant about snooping around for more memories of his old home. Toby walks up one of the hills, littered with more rocks and studded with clumps of yucca, and looks down on the drab, half-toppled house and the man picking through the refuse against the expanse of nothingness. He could almost be a child.

Wyatt hears the bleating of the sheep before sundown. He remembers the heavy stroke of the unreliable Model-T likely to splutter and fail. He smells the foam of his pony rising through his dungarees as it gallops over the hills from the schoolhouse. He smiles at the legs of his sister chasing a hen through the yard. He watches his father cut geodes in half and reveal their sparkling centers like stars. He recalls a neighbor who worries over the health of a newborn child and who will die. He marvels at the light emanating from the bulb brought by New Deal progress. He sickens at the putrid smell of offal and skin as his father dresses a buck strung by its haunches from a tree. He savors the taste of sugar in oatmeal cookies hot from the cowchip-fired stove. Wyatt’s memories, nostalgia without the hardship of wilderness living, will not blow away in the elements; they are fixed to this place, and it takes time for him to stem the flow of the past that rises from the ground like salt.

“Boy!”

That’s the holler that Toby has been waiting for. That’s his signal to tumble down the hill down to the truck and inhale the tobacco smoke.

The truck noses away, up the hill, past the samples of geologic time, fords the creek, circles past the gullies, heads towards the gate that he will squeeze open and close once more. Sure enough, the doves are there on the fences either side of the dirt road and Toby reaches for the gun.

Wyatt stops him with a firm brush of his hand. “Not yet,” he says.

Toby may not understand why but he heeds Wyatt’s advice, at least until the truck has made its way around a bend to another parcel of property arranged in alternating strips of sienna soil and bronze wheat.

“We’re too close,” he says. His eyes have acknowledged another sign of life, a red and white harvester chugs across the horizon, like a mantis gathering aphids, harvesting the fingers of wheat, spitting out straw. “A toot and a wave will be enough.” The wind drawls in the corner of his mouth.

They take a fork in dirt road. Gullies interstice the hills. The grass is shorn and spangled with cactus. Toby gets out of the cab of the pick-up coated with dust, bug juice and the blood of the doves. Apple cores, peanuts, shells and sand litter the inside. They’re near now.

Against the rose hills sits an old wooden house. This is another part of Wyatt’s desert empire.

Toby opens a hatch in the whistling barbed wire. The wind almost lifts Wyatt’s hat off. Sand blows into his tracks. They rock through the prairie and pass the well and the pump. The house is fenced off to stop cattle from eating it. Five big cottonwoods bend over the house; their eyes nictitate brown tears. He unlatches the wooden gate and digs around in an old iron stovetop for the key in a tin box of cough drops. The door jeers open with a kick. The floor is covered with hundreds of dead moths, millers. A few mementos fill the house and they quietly sit on their shelves. Among them are chert scrapers and flint blades. The fireplace is inlaid with minerals hacked out of the hills. The crystals phosphoresce under a black light. No one lives here but what looks like new embers rest in the grate.

Wyatt scratches his head, puzzled. There aren’t usually visitors. But he dismisses his worries and is quick to tackle what might need attention. They go to work mowing and watering the grounds. From the corner of his eye he keeps an eye on his son.

There is nothing tangible he can identify. It is only a feeling, a suspicion that he is being watched, as if the cougars had suddenly reappeared here against these hills, their claws writing, “Lions live here.” Something walks through the house and stokes the fire. Whether those eyes are his own father’s or, indeed, a lion, he doesn’t know. He returns from the house with a pistol and keeps it holstered on his thigh for the afternoon. But it is no remedy to the yellow eyes that prey from the crag in the hills.

Wyatt calls Toby when the sun is breaking over the hills like a sinking star and a few drops of rain pummel the opal dirt.

A hawk eerily cries somewhere. There aren’t any doves. The air shivers with wind. The ground respires imperceptibly, like the lungs of the planet. He’s spooked and decides they should finish up, quickly.

Unnerved, Wyatt moves the keys to another hiding place, hoping the beast is not in the house.

He leaves a can on the fence, the code to his neighbor that he is not there. His urine splashes on the chrome bumper. The land, it’s his, he thinks. But like a wet whip, the wind is weeping, weeping with the voices of the dead, those who are buried there beneath their wheels and feet, respiring in the dirt like so many roots unconcerned by barriers like roads or fences, and it worries him.


Up next: Amplification