Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

They swung into their trucks, and diesel fumes filled the parking lot and the crazy-eyed paint horses in the trailers stamped their feet. It was clear that the Indians had become cowboys or that the cowboys had all turned into Indians or that the Indians were all cowboys to begin with just nobody ever noticed. Well, maybe that wasn’t clear but what was clear was the fact that something wasn’t quite right.

I got out to stretch my legs while my father pumped the gas. Our rental car was a small silver pony. The red clay clotting the panels made it look as if our pony had taken an arrow in its forelock and its heaving sides were fouled with sprayed blood and chunks of lung matter. I took my hand, pressed it into the red gumbo, then reached and made a splayed red handprint in the middle our silver pony’s chest, right over the engine. We left Lodge Grass in silence.

—

The fishing hadn’t been very good this trip. My father had hired us a guide, a young guy about my age, with shaggy hair, who spent most of the day apologizing. “I don’t know,” he would say, “usually it’s better than this. Fish can be fickle.”

“Well, hell,” my father said. “At least we have the scenery. There’s worse things we could be doing. At least we’re not at work.” For some reason then, I became acutely aware that the guide, hunched miserably at the oars, was indeed at work. I wondered what he thought of us. At the end of the day my father gave the guide two crumpled one-hundred-dollar bills and told him it was the best day he could remember having for quite some time.

After, in the car driving to our hotel, my father said, “Sorry the fishing was so bad. I’d hoped it would be better. But, that’s the problem with having a young guide. When the fishing is good, it’s not so bad. The young guide is going to work for it, keep you out late — he’s enthusiastic, see? But, when the fishing’s off, you’re screwed. No amount of enthusiasm is going to make up for lack of experience. I know if we would have had some old crusty salt out there today we would have caught plenty. But, that’s how it goes. That’s why they call it fishing, not catching.”

This was a phrase my father loved. Often he applied it to situations that had nothing to do with fishing. Once, I called him in misery after a longtime girlfriend had left me. After a few consoling words his closing remarks were, “Well, son, that’s why they call it fishing, not catching.”

I looked over at my father, driving, still in his fishing vest and obnoxious fishing hat, the one with the sweat-stained band and a line of ragged flies stuck in the brim.

“Maybe it’s just us,” I said. “Maybe we’re not that good. I bet the guide is somewhere right now talking about how when the fishing is bad it really sucks to have poor fishermen.”

My father laughed at this. “Could be,” he said. “I guess there is always the other side of the coin.”

I thought about the night they admitted my mother into the hospital in Grand Rapids. I’d come as soon as I could but she was already in the ICU. I sat with my father there, all night. When the doctor came out to talk to us, I remember my father’s ill-concealed disbelief, his rage. The doctor looked all of twenty-two, a young woman with henna-colored hair and a nose ring, who spoke in clipped British tones.

“Your wife has suffered a powerful stroke,” she said. “She is not responding to treatment.”

“And who are you, chippy?” my father said. “Just who the fuck do you think you are? Where is the doctor in charge?”

In the waiting room, the TV had been turned to a channel running some sort of classic western marathon. Eastwood. Peckinpah. Bronson. McQueen. Kristofferson. All the dramatic gunfights, the stolen horses, the barroom brawls, the slow pinwheeling deaths. We watched these movies, a seemingly endless loop, blurring together in one continuous meandering storyline, and then, sometime after dawn, the doctor came out again to break the news to us. This time my father had nothing to say to her. I shook her hand. I thanked her. I don’t know why.

—

Eventually, after driving around aimlessly for almost an hour, we got out the map and found our way back to the highway and the airport. But, before we did, we passed through a small town, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it type of place — a post office, a laundromat, a small Baptist church with graffiti sprayed on the brick — the whole place unremarkable except for the mounds of tumbleweed piled up against every standing surface. It was bizarre, like the weeds were some sort of fast-reproducing vermin threatening to overtake the town. We hadn’t seen a single sign of inhabitance. The whole place was empty, except, in the parking lot of a rundown motel, there was a pile of tumbleweed burning. The flames towered over a man, wearing fluorescent orange sunglasses, who stood with a hose in his hand to keep the fire from spreading. The man had a dark ponytail, and he held the hose like a six-gun. As we passed, my father did something remarkable, a thing that I will never forget. He pointed at the flaming tumbleweed and the man with the hose. My father’s hand was a cocked six-gun.

“Crow country Moses confronts the burning bush,” he said, and began humming the theme song to The Magnificent Seven .

I joined him. We did this for miles.

—

At the airport, we sat at the terminal and waited for our flight. My father had a bag of trail mix and was digging through it for the almonds. We could see out past the planes staging on the runway, the flat expanse of just-greening grassland. Antelope were grazing. A plane came in to land, and its shadow moved directly over their backs and they didn’t even look up.

“You want some of this?” my father said, shoving the bag of trail mix toward me.

“Did you eat all the almonds?”

“I think so.”

“Why don’t you just buy a bag of almonds? They had those for sale right next to the trail mix.”

“I like searching them out amongst the other stuff I don’t want.”

“Seems like a waste.”

“I’m offering what’s left to you.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, then you’re the one that’s being wasteful, not me. All I can do is offer.” He was still wearing his fishing hat. His stained vest. The sunburn on his nose was starting to peel.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll just save the bag, maybe someone on the plane will want them.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh. You mean what am I going to DO . I don’t know. I’m sixty-two years old. She managed the office for thirty-two years. Can you believe it? Men say stuff like this all the time, but I wouldn’t have acquired half of what I’ve got now if it wasn’t for her. I was thinking today, you and I are too much alike. You know that if she was with us there is no way in hell we wouldn’t’ve found that damn battlefield. She would have had the directions printed up last week. A brief synopsis of important facts regarding the massacre, and the location of a nearby café whose lunch menu featured reasonably priced healthful options with a local flair.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know what way my life would have gone. Maybe it sounds pathetic, but she picked me up, put me under her arm and ran with me like I was a football.”

“Regrets?”

“Oh no, but at certain moments you can’t help but imagine how things would have been different. I didn’t come out of the womb wanting to be a tax attorney, you know.”

“What would you have done instead?”

“What’s past is past. How about now? I’ve been thinking about moving out here.”

“What would you do?”