Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

“Fish. Relax. I think there’s some sort of golf course around here somewhere. I’m sure it’s no Pebble Beach, but I bet you don’t have to call ahead for a tee time. I could get a dog. Chase birds in the fall. I’m not joking. I’ve always thought that had things been different for me, I’d’ve ended up out here as a young man.” He patted the carry-on bag at his side. “I picked up some real estate literature. I’m going to look at it on the plane. If I sold just the house back home I could buy a whole damn ranch out here. Think about it. Land you couldn’t ride across in a day.”

“What are you talking about? Ride? You don’t ride.”

“I might learn.”

—

Two years later, I had to come home to Michigan to handle my father’s affairs. As I was cleaning out his desk I found a stack of real estate brochures in the top drawer. BIG SKY COUNTRY REAL ESTATE: OWN A PIECE OF THE LAST BEST PLACE. REAL WEST: EXPERIENCE THE TRADITION. There were glossy photos of middle-aged men holding large trout, middle-aged men smiling in ski gear with their pretty second wives, middle-aged men in Stetsons doing things with horses. My father had suffered a heart attack waiting in line at the DMV to get his driver’s license renewed. To me, this seemed like a punch line to a joke, not a legitimate way for a person to die. He’d never moved to Montana, of course. The process of disentangling himself from the practice proved insurmountable. The last time I’d talked to him had been on the phone for my thirtieth birthday. I’d told him I was thinking of going back to school, or going to Alaska to work at a salmon cannery for the summer to save up enough money to go to New Zealand — or possibly signing up to teach English in Korea.

He’d laughed. “Was I hard on you when you were a boy?”

“Not especially, no.”

“I didn’t think so, either. My dad was hard on me, and it didn’t make any damn difference. I think women are the only real source of motivation in the world for men. You know what your problem is?”

“What?”

“I can say this because I recognize my symptoms in you. You and I, we have a capacity for work, dedication, all that. It’s just that we suffer from the diffusion of desire.”

“I have a lot of things I want to do.”

“I understand. And we should do something before you move to Alaska or New Zealand or Korea. We should go to Montana, do a little fishing. Maybe we’ll take a day and look at some land.”

—

After the brochures, the rest of the papers in my father’s desk were inscrutably impersonal. He had a whole drawer full of receipts for gas, lunches, and travel expenses. He had another drawer full of warranty statements for every appliance in the house dating back to the first microwave he and my mother ever purchased in 1979.

I ended up just throwing everything away, brochures and all, and sitting in his chair with my feet on his desk. I thought about how you could tell a house was empty, even a big house like this one, just by how it feels when you’re quiet. A house can give a sense of emptiness that moves beyond mere silence. It’s a hollowness. You can be more alone in an empty house than anywhere on earth. And now, the house was mine — all the stuff and all the absence, the empty dark matter between the stuff. I realized for the first time what it must have been like for my father here, and this, too, was something I’d inherited — a newfound awareness that nothing amplifies the emptiness of a place like ownership.

I got up from the desk and went to the gun cabinet, opening the door on the neatly aligned regiment of English and Italian shotguns. I ran my fingers over the blued barrels, the glossy hardwood stocks. The Purdey was there, the one I’d tried to pawn all those years ago. I took it out and swung it like I was following a low-incoming grouse. I sighted down the barrel at the Tiffany lamp on my father’s desk. I broke the gun open, and smelled the tang of Hoppe’s 9 oil. I snapped it shut and the barrel reseated with a satisfying click. I stuffed some shells in my pocket, and headed out to the woods behind the house.

I 1.

Lauren followed the drag mark for a mile down the gravel road and then another half a mile down her dusty driveway — and then parked her truck and cried. The bastard had shot one of her steers — of which she had six, red Texas longhorns — and dragged it down the road by its neck and deposited it here for her to find, practically on her front step.

She’d gotten her taxes done that day at the free tax preparation kiosk in the County Market. Lauren hadn’t filed a tax return since Manuel died, two years before. She wouldn’t have this year either, but she was in the store and had just gotten her mail and she had the W-2 forms in her pocket, and thought, what the hell? It was free. As it turned out, she had almost one thousand dollars coming to her as a refund. Manuel’s death had put her in some sort of different tax bracket.

She’d left with her groceries and was feeling pretty good all the way home. And then, the drag marks. None of the cattle were to be seen except for the dead one. Its tongue hung from its mouth. Its eyes were open and skimmed with white. Its neck was twisted strangely and one of its horn points was buried in the dirt. That was what had made the groove all the way down her road. The poor animal’s beautiful, ivory-colored horn scraping through the dirt as he dragged it to her doorstep.

Lauren wiped at her eyes with her shirtsleeve and got out of her truck and sat on the animal’s massive flank and cried some more. And then she wiped her eyes on the other sleeve of her shirt, opened the back door to let her dogs out, and went to track down the rest of her cattle.

There was a section of fence down, and she followed the tracks leading through the gap — and there they were, just over the first rise, on the vacant lot next to hers where there was a small creek and the grass was tall and green. They watched her approach, and she talked to them like she always did. She didn’t have names for them. She called them all Red.

“Hey there, Red. You goddamn Reds. Let’s go now.” She was behind them, waving her arms and hazing them back toward the fence. With some reluctance, they left the creek bottom and trudged in single file to their own rocky pasture. Lauren twisted the wire fence-ends back together. It had already broken once, and her mend had failed — and so she pulled the wire a little tighter to overlap the ends and then twisted. Fixing the fix. The definition of insanity was continuing to fix the fix.

Her dogs sat and watched her work, two small brown mutts of indeterminate breed. They’d shown up together a few years back and decided they would stay. They were two neutered males and they seemed to be good friends, old traveling companions. She’d named them as a unit, not separately, because they were never apart. Elton John. That was their name.

—

With the cattle back in the pasture, she stood and looked some more at the dead steer. She pulled on one side of its horns to get its head straightened so its neck wasn’t in such a gruesome position. It was getting close to dark, and she thought about driving down to Jason’s house. He had a big German shepherd that he let roam and it was pure black and didn’t ever bark, just growled, a wet rumbling deep in its chest. She didn’t like that dog and she didn’t like Jason and Jason didn’t like her and she knew damn well it was him who’d shot and dragged her steer. She didn’t want to go down there because it was dark. She didn’t want to go down there at all, really. But, she was going to make herself go down there, because a dead steer was not just something a person could turn a blind eye to. She wasn’t going to go down there now, though. She’d wait until morning and then she would do it.