Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

The only repair shop in Crow Agency was Robidoux’s Fix-it, a lean-to built off the back of a double-wide trailer. Perry pulled in and Ted Robidoux came down the trailer steps in his bathrobe running his hand through his short black hair. Ted occasionally rode in the reenactment. Three years ago he had taken care of a clogged fuel line in Perry’s car.

“Morning, Ted. It’s Perry. Remember me, the General?”

“Hey, Perry. Of course. I didn’t make the reenactment this year. How did it go?”

“Well, it was a spectacle, as always.”

“Good. Good. Looks like you got a bum wheel there. This country’s hard on tires.”

“And other things.”

“Ha, well, I should be able to handle the tire at least. Let me go put my pants on.”

He went into the trailer and reemerged clothed, with a mug of coffee that he handed to Perry. “Take a seat,” he said. “This could take a few.”

Perry sat on the porch and sipped at the hot coffee. It was still early and cool and the land seemed refreshed from yesterday’s rain. There was a stack of freshly cut lodgepoles leaning up against the trailer wall, and after he had finished his coffee, Perry went over to take a closer look. He was running his hand over their smooth, peeled surfaces when Ted came from the lean-to.

“Hey,” he said, “you like my new poles? I just finished peeling those yesterday. Last time we went to the mountains and put up the good ol’ lodge I had two poles break in the middle of the night. You should have seen how pissed my old lady was when the whole thing came down on us and we had to sleep in the cab of the truck.”

“Well, you did a good job with these,” Perry said. “They’re smooth. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I can’t even peel a potato.”

“The secret’s a sharp drawknife. And a light hand. And practice.” Ted patted one of the lodgepoles and laughed. “Ah yes,” he said. “The good ol’ tipi.” Then he patted the side of his trailer and laughed again. “And here’s the new tipi. I got a leaky roof. Fuck me. Well, anyway, we got her patched — the tire. A good-sized hole.”

“Thanks. It was the damnedest thing. I had an arrow sticking out of it this morning.”

“An arrow? Like a good ol’ Indian arrow?”

“Not exactly.”

Perry got the arrow and handed it to Ted, who held it between two fingers as if it were something particularly distasteful.

“Whackmaster?” he said.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, you know what we need to do, Perry?”

“What?”

“Back in the old days, if a warrior got hit by an arrow he had to break the shaft to make sure the guy who shot him didn’t still have power over him. So his wound would heal.” Ted handed the arrow back to Perry.

“Really?”

“Sure. I’m an Indian. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to situations like this.”

“Okay. How should I do it? Is there, like, a certain way it should be done?”

“I think just over the knee, like a piece of kindling for the fire.”

Perry brought the shaft down over his knee. The aluminum didn’t break, but bent sharply. He looked up at Ted, who shrugged. Perry bent it back and forth a few times and eventually the shaft broke cleanly, like a paper clip.

“There,” said Ted. “Now you keep that forever.”

There were cats in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters — some thin and misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.

“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife? You have it sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board and then after a few days, we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”

The cats — calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny — sat among the hay bales scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but — like most farm boys — he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the same rules of husbandry as those that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain — they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close, in return they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.

A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange martian bank. Fifty dollars at least, maybe even seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.

He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August liked to go there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature deep in the bowels of a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.

In the pole barn there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery. Looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval looking welder’s mask, and, interspersed amongst the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying degrees of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a broadsword-sized mower blade, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it. Then he uncovered a four-foot-long spanner wrench, a slim stainless steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques — the sidearm full-swing golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing axe strike, the short, quick, line-drive baseball check swing — the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat, and then shouldered his weapon, put the pair of gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.

—

The old house was set back against a low, rock-plated hill. A year-round spring wept from the face of the rock, and the dampness of it filled the house with the smell of wet leaves and impending rain. The house was a single-level ranch, low slung like a dog crouching to avoid a kick. August’s mother’s parents had built the house with their own hands, and lived in it until they died. The old house looked up at the new house, the one August’s father had finished the year after August was born. The new house was tall with a sharp-peaked roof. It had white shutters, a full wraparound porch. August’s grandparents had both died before he was born and the first thing his father had done when the farm became his was sell fifty acres of fallow pasture and build the new house.

“He feels like it’s his own,” August’s mother had said to him once, smoking in the kitchen of the new house. “His people didn’t have much. Everything we got came from my side, you know. He would never admit it in a hundred years, but it bothers him.” She coughed. “It’s too big. That was my complaint from the get-go. It’s hard to heat, too, exposed up on the hill like this, the wind gets in everywhere. My father would have never done it like that. He built a smart house for himself and my mother, but, that’s the type of man he was.”