Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

“And worse. Much worse. That’s the version generally fit for public consumption.”

“You might as well just do it. What’s there to wait for? You’re rich. You could support a small tribe.”

“A boy wouldn’t be too bad. I’d like that, actually. But a girl, I don’t know if I could take it. And this isn’t something I can talk to Linda about very well.”

“What’s wrong with having a girl? Girls love their daddies. You wouldn’t have to fight with her like you would a boy. Linda would get to have all the awkward talks.”

Casey took a drink of his whiskey and swished it audibly around in his mouth. He swallowed and grimaced. “One time I was involved with a gal that liked me to put my hand around her throat and squeeze. I mean, she liked me to choke her, James. Now, can you tell me what happens to make a little girl grow up to become a woman who wants something like that?”

James laughed and then he saw that Casey was serious. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But, how’d you handle that situation? I mean, did you, you know?” James made a gripping motion with his hand.

Casey shook his head. He drank the rest of his whiskey and set the glass down carefully on a coaster shaped like a bass.

“Shit, man, I did more than that. I married her.”

—

It was mid-June, and North Texas was a smoking hot plate. In the cotton fields outside of town, farmers were doing something to raise the dust. There was nothing to see and you couldn’t see it if there was.

In the late evening James sat on the back porch drinking a beer, half-reading a newspaper, sweat dampening the pages. He watched the sun turn red as it sunk through the dust. The houses and roofs and backyards of the neighborhood were cast in a blood-dusk glow. A martian suburb awash with the smell of a thousand barbecues being lit.

James finished his beer and finally, mercifully, it was dark. A few degrees cooler, maybe. There were fireflies blinking on and off in the yard. He hadn’t seen a firefly in a long time. There were none in Montana as far as he knew. Maybe it was too cold. Years ago, he’d been camped next to an old hippie couple in Yellowstone and they’d told him that once, in Iowa, they’d dropped acid and went out and gathered a whole jar of fireflies and then rubbed them all over their naked bodies and then had luminescent sex in a moonlit cornfield. Their obvious happiness at relaying this story gave him a shiver. He saw in them all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things come and gone. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines, running on memories? Was it inevitable?

—

After a week of loafing at Casey’s, the dust and feedlot smell of Amarillo started to wear on him. Casey worked long hours at his office. Being in the house all day with Linda — she did yoga in the living room, she constantly wanted to feed him sandwiches — was making James uncomfortable. The probing questions from Casey at the dinner table made him feel like an underachieving son, stalled out after college, living in his old bedroom.

James found himself a job. An unlikely one at that. It was a ranch-hand position at an outfit outside of Austin, in the hill country. The job description in the classifieds was spare.

WANTED:

SEASONAL RANCH LABORER.

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.

BEAUTIFUL LOCATION. REMOTE. HARD WORK. FAIR PAY.

James called. He talked to a man who occasionally let out clipped groans, as if he were in pain. Their brief conversation was punctuated several times by loud birdcalls. In less than fifteen minutes, he was hired. He had two days before he was to start and he’d forgotten to ask about pay.

When James left Amarillo, Casey shook his hand and wished him luck, as if he were shipping off to basic training. Linda gave him a hairspray-scented hug. “Y’all take care now, darlin’,” she said.

He pointed his car south into the fiery bowels of the Summertime Republic of Texas.

—

Outside of Austin, the land began to show some contour. The pure flat of the north gave way to wrinkled hills and canyons with cream-colored limestone walls. He was pleasantly surprised. He’d never known Texas to look like this. He admired the swells of oak-covered ridges, the white caliche ranch roads, glowing under the sun.

Two hours and several wrong turns later, he pulled up to a low ranch house tucked under a grove of pecan trees. There was a small pond and a windmill. A red heeler with a gray muzzle came out from under the shade of a parked truck and eyed him without approaching. Peacocks scratched in the gravel, bottle-green feathers resplendent. James stretched and looked around. His shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.

A man came out of the house. He wore a straw hat and had a cast on one of his legs — ankle to mid-thigh. The leg without a cast was jean-clad and it took James a moment to figure out that the man had apparently taken a pair of his Levis and cut one leg off three-quarters of the way up. He’d put a double-wrap of duct tape around the shortened pant leg to keep it snugged down over the cast. On the foot with the cast, the man wore a large rubber galosh. On the uninjured foot, he had a cowboy boot. Some folks with a full leg cast in Texas in late June probably just wore shorts. This man was obviously cut from a more rugged cloth.

“You James?”

“Yessir.”

“That’s good. I’m Karl. We’ve talked. Montana, eh?”

“Yes.”

“I been there once. Saw Old Faithful. It could have been worse. Montana’s better than a lot of places. But, you know what they say?”

James thought about telling Karl that Old Faithful was actually in Wyoming. He didn’t. “What do they say?”

“In Montana, they make cowboys. In Texas, they make men.” Karl laughed and wiped at the sweat on his face with his shirtsleeve. “Montana, I got a broken leg here.” He pointed at the offending member. “Usually I do everything here myself but as you can imagine, this has got me limited. How’s your back?”

“My back is fine.”

“That’s good. We’re going to be working. You’re going to be working mostly. I’m going to be telling you what to do. There’s where you’ll bunk. Everything you need should be there.” Karl pointed to a low-ceilinged wing built off the side of the barn. “Stow your gear and then come on back and I’ll give you a tour.”

The bunkhouse was more pleasant than James had expected. There was a double bed. A small kitchenette. A table with a bouquet of dried flowers. Most important, an air conditioner. James cranked it up and tossed his single bag on the bed. The back window looked out over the pond where the heeler was standing up to its belly in the water, panting. James looked in the small fridge. There were two cans of Tecate and a jar of peanut butter. He’d had a refrigerator just like this in his dorm in college. The sight of this one made him indescribably happy.

When James emerged from his room, Karl was sitting behind the wheel of an off-road vehicle, kind of like a golf cart but with large knobby tires, a camouflaged awning, and a rifle rack on the hood. There was a cooler in the back, and as James slid into the passenger seat, Karl reached around and rummaged in the ice pulling out a beer for each of them. He drank deeply and belched.

“You said on the phone the other day that you’re a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“What subject do you teach?”

“Everything, pretty much.”

“What, like kindergarten?”

“No, I actually teach in a one-room schoolhouse. I have around fifteen kids.”

“A one-room schoolhouse? They still have those? Jesus, employment offers weren’t exactly flooding your mailbox, or what?”