Dawn’s Thoughts

Copyright Dawn Wood 5/25/2005

Russell has brought home a collection of water dogs. They swim with their feathered gills flowing in the muddy river water like a fringe of a woman’s coat. They have small pale eyes, and possess cold blood and a two-chambered heart, like all amphibians. Rush kneels by the bucket, poking at them with a twig.

Gene says, “If you’ll quit that, son, I’ll show you a magic trick.”

Rush ignores him. He is practiced at this because he has never been any older than he is now; it will be a lifetime before he is Gene’s age. At eight years old, Rush is ancient.

After a minute Russell eyes him and says, “What kind of magic trick?”

“I’ll make the gills on them mud puppies disappear.”

“Big deal. They’ll turn into salamanders anyway. That ain’t magic.”

Gene grins. The boy has begun to lose the city speech he came here with, the tilted voice his mother uses with its proper grammar. Gene watches him. Russell’s head is bent over the pail; his eyes follow the water dogs swimming in circles, clawing at the bottom with their short stubby legs, not built for life on land. Was his mother this small? Gene doesn’t remember. The boy is bone skinny and short. He looks as though he would break if the wind hit him wrong.

“No.” Gene crouches awkwardly by the bucket with a small groan. His knees ache. He reaches a hand into the bucket that smells distinctly of the pond, a thick stench of rotting weeds and stagnant water, and strokes the back of one water dog. The skin feels smooth and spongy moving under his fingers, like a feather, as though the amphibian isn’t of this earth at all, but a spirit. “They won’t grow legs at all. They don’t never turn. But I read somewhere that a man made ‘em turn by putting medicine in the water.”

Russell wiggles his nose. “Medicine?”

“That’s right. Thy-something. Thyroid, that’s it. It’s thyroid that makes frogs metamorphous happen. Makes ‘em grow legs and such. I bet you I can’t make these here turn into salamanders in weeks.”

The boy’s eyes watch him suspiciously. Lord, he wonders, what did Sally do with the boy to make him this way? Any other kid wouldn’t look at him like that. He doesn’t trust Gene yet. The trip to the river was a reward for the doctor’s appointment today. The doctor told him Russell was malnourished. He hinted strongly that Sally was to blame. Gene made the mistake of losing his temper. “I know Sally,” he said. “Sally wouldn’t ever hurt that kid. I know Sally.” But in fact he’s not sure he knows Sally anymore. After all, it’s been five or six years since he’s heard anything from her, and until she showed up with Russell a month ago, he had no idea she had a child. Sally was a good girl, a hell-raiser who was skilled at fishing like nobody else he knew, but somewhere along the way he must have made a mistake because she turned out scatterbrained. She lives off drugs. He tries not to tell himself this, what he knows is true, but sometimes he forgets and remembers. No wonder she fled to the city. Drugs were never common here.

The doctor was kind. Gene had talked to him in a low voice by the door of the office while Russell slumped on the examining table. He hadn’t uttered a sound since Gene told him they were going to the doctor’s, only wrapped his arms tightly around himself and performed a sit-in on the kitchen floor. Gene had scooped him up under one arm like a sack of potatoes and carried him to the car.

The doctor smiles widely when he sees Russell and tells a few jokes that make him grin weakly. The boy shoots accusing glances at Gene, but he is shivering in spite of the overheated examining room. Sally probably wouldn’t notice if the boy was lying half dead on the floor, dammit.

“Now look,” Gene sits with the boy on the table, resting his feet on the step stool below. Even with the stool, Russell is too small to climb up to the table by himself and Gene has to lift him up to it. He doubts the boy will let the doctor lay a finger on him.“Anything he does that hurts, you can blame me. And I can tell you some really good words to say.”

“Really?”

Gene nods.

“Tell me the words.” Rush looks at him with interest. Gene tells them, and is informed that Russell already knew all those words. Gene raises one eyebrow.

“Do you? Tell me the others you know.”

Russell does. Gene pulls a quarter out of the boy’s ear, and in a little while the doctor was done, and he talks with Gene again, this time out of the room entirely. Through the half-open door, he can see Russell’s arms and legs sticking out of the thin paper gown, his feet hanging limply in the drop foot position from the table. He is craning his head toward the door and pretending not to listen. Gene smiles thinly.

Gene makes it a point never to say anything mean to the boy. He has this real calm voice he uses when he should be upset, and it is a maddening voice, because he can tell Rush would have known what to do if they had been able to fight. It was challenging to be mean to someone who was never mean back.

“Malnutrition, and…” the doctor is saying. Then Gene says loudly, “I know Sally. She’s not ever mean to that kid. I know Sally.” The doctor says, “Well, neglect…Failure to thrive…size of a six year old…”

He glances toward the doctor’s office. Russell has pulled on his jeans and sneakers, minus socks, and is struggling to pull on his worn denim jacket. It’s the only jacket he came with. Gene has promised him a new jacket for winter. He swallows. His throat feels thick and swollen, as though he has a cold, when it’s the boy he should be thinking of. Russell’s face looks pinched, dead white in the flourescent light from the ceiling. Gene looks at the doctor; his hands fumble in front of his chest in motions that remind him strangely of holding a child.

“I’m…” He makes sure his voice is low. “The boy’s mother, she left him with me. I don’t expect she’ll be back for him any time soon. I raised her up too.”

“You’re the guardian, then?”

“Yes.” He wonders why he can’t gain control of himself. It’s Sally after all that affects him – the child Sally, as she was before the drugs made her thin and her face bulldoggy, and her hair frazzled. Not that Sally, but the bright-eyed wild six-year-old who tugged at his coat sleeves and liked to wear his hats. “No relation to me,” he adds.

“You should have some adoption papers,” the doctor is saying. “Mr. Tracker? Do you have papers that say Russell can stay with you?”

“No. I got no papers. It’s temporary, like. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

The doctor nods. Gene supposes they are used to such arrangements here, at the clinic, where grandmothers and uncles routinely take care of children while the parents do piecework in drying sheds or the oil fields. This is so common that no one at school asks a child what their name is, but “What name do you go by?” It might, after all, be a grandparent’s name the child claims as their own, or a nickname, and it’s best to make sure what they’ll answer to.

When he comes back in the room, he looks the same as ever and growls at Russell, “You done gettin’ out of that gown?”

The boy nods. He’s bitten his lip until it’s white and bloodless, and his hands are clenched inward as though in a spasm. Despite the T-shirt, Gene can see the arch of his back. Gene swings him down off the table. He mutters to himself, one big hand wrapped around Russell’s as they cross the parking lot to the truck, and he doesn’t say anything, just flicks the radio on as he drives.

“House of the Rising Sun,” and “Pastures of Plenty” are playing and Gene sings along with the words, rustily, drumming his fingers.

“You can’t sing,” Russell groans.

“Neither could Woody Guthrie,” Gene says, “but he made a living at it.” He adds, “Helps to sing a bit when you’re worried.”

Rush glances over at him. “Are you worried?”

Gene sucks in air between his teeth with a whistling sound. “No.”

“Mama Tried,” and “The Roots of my Raising” and “Act Naturally” come on next, and Gene hums some and sings with others. Russell sings a little too, thinly, half whispering the words with a quiver in his voice, watching Gene out of the corner of his eyes like he expects a whack over the head at any minute. He leans against the back of the seat, trying to whistle and rubbing at his arms. Gene notes absently that he needs a haircut.

“If you’re cold, I can turn the heater on,” Gene says at last, more for the sound of words than anything else.

“I ain’t cold,” Rush says. He pauses.“What’s malnutrition mean?”

Gene looks sideways at him.“Who told you that?” He shrugs one shoulder and takes one hand off the wheel. “Heard that, did you?”

“What’s it mean?”

He chews on his lip. “You’re onery, kiddo, you know that? Fire in you, that’s for sure. Means somebody who doesn’t eat right, is all.”

“I eat right,” Rush tells him. Something in the way he says it makes Gene know he’s lying, but he lets it go. Likely Sally got scatterbrained and forgot to buy food some nights.

“What else did you hear?”

“The doctor thought Mom was crazy.”

Gene stares hard at him for a minute, then he swallows and grins crookedly.“Don’t say things like that, all right? People say that, but you shouldn’t, especially to your Mom. She’ll get upset.”

“You make her upset all the time,” Russell blurts.

“That’s different. She can take stuff from me she can’t handle from anybody else. She wouldn’t be able to take that from you.”

“Failure to…” The boy stumbles over the last word.

“Thrive,” Gene says. “It means you— it just means you’ll be a mite small till we get some meat on your bones. Nothing to worry about.”

Now, crouched over the bucket with the boy, he brushes a hand over Russell’s hair and straightens the collar on his jacket. The boy looks at him quizzically, but stays silent. He’s awed with the strange magical quiet that comes over children who are close to animals. The boy is mouthy, but Gene has rarely reacted to this. He understands the ways of fear. At the river today was the first sign of the grinning child he supposes Russell should be. A light entered his eyes on the river. It’s there still.

“Gene,” the boy whispers, “how long’ll it take for them water dogs to turn?”

“I told you, a couple weeks instead of months. We’ll get the throxine powder tomorrow, all right? You can put in the tank, mind, if your hands don’t shake.”

Russell nods. He could do with a shot of thyroxine himself. His skin looks pale, translucent, and he is, startlingly, the size of someone far younger.

“Gene?”

He shifts his feet. They’re cramped from his crouching. “Yeah, boy.”

“When’s Mom coming back?”

Gene takes a breath. “I don’t know, buddy. Could be awhile yet.”

“Will I be here when the mud puppies turn?”

Gene smiles and loops an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Yes,” he says, “I reckon so.”

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright Dawn Wood March 22, 2003

Fragmentation

“I want you to make something dead.”

He wakes sweating and untangles himself from blankets. He remembers the last time he held a gun, his own shotgun, trained for hunting as a little boy by his father. The hard cold metal of the barrel, and the warm feeling of the wood, like a living thing. He has something in him, a gift or a curse from the devil, that allows him to read guns the way others read books, an extension of himself that allows him to hit anything he aims for. He hears Estella Serrano’s voice over the phone as he gets his bearings in time and place, waking in that odd limbo where you are not sure yet which is reality and which is a dream. It is a bone-cold tule fog night, the fog so thick outside that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Estella says:

“Gene Tracker, I want you to make something dead.”

She is drunk, or halfway there at any rate, having a party to which he was not invited, a party of relatives, and her words come breathy and giggling over the line. He remembers the party lines that once ran through the valley, hanging from tree branches and fences because even the telephone company would not venture to bring services to the rural sections. His number was two longs and a short. As a child, he had run a very effective blackmail service by listening to neighbors’ calls. “Oh, Mabel, I tell you, my husband’s off work this whole week, and that meter man’s coming over, and we’re having us a time, let me tell you…” The last time he listened in was when he was sixteen, and then he went away, and when he came back they had changed to individual telephone lines. Many things had changed by then.

In a way, the loss of party lines was a blessing. A man could be electrocuted easily by the randomly strung wires, stumbling home through the brush at night, or a child in the daylight climbing trees. People electrocuted sometimes cling to things, riding a line of current that makes their body jerk like a fish’s. He once helped Estella’s next youngest, Molly, through a febrile seizure, and the motions were the same as electrocution. The eyes became glazed, like a dead person’s eyes.

“What do you need, Estella?” Aw, shit, he thinks, she’s fixing to kill somebody.

“A pig,” she says, and laughs, and he sees that he’ll get nowhere with her this way, tells her he’ll be right over. He takes a locked chest from the garage and puts it in the bed of the pickup. In the kitchen doorway stands a child. He thinks for a brief moment it’s Sally, hair back in a ponytail, socks slumped from worn-out elastic, wearing his old shirt, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She’s not his daughter, but sometimes he forgets this. He looks again and sees it’s not Sally at all – Sally is grown and raising hell in the city, she never would listen to him – it’s her son, Russell. They look so much alike sometimes. Russell has legs and arms thin as a bird’s, and large eyes. He looks malnourished in the dim light. Russell scratches at a bug bite on his leg and pulls fitfully at his socks, which immediately slip down again over his ankles.

“Gene,” he says, “I had a bad dream.”

Gene nods. He sees the boy’s eyes move to his boots, and he knows that Russell is wondering where he’s going. Russell is subject to night terrors and dreams and sleepwalking, and in the daytime he is afraid of nothing, using horned toad lizards as bloody squirt guns, throwing rocks, mouthing off to Gene a hundred times a day – but he has a fear that Gene will abandon him. Damn Sally, anyway. She is cruel to the boy without knowing it, leaving him here because she gets distracted by parties in the city.

“What did you dream about?” Gene asks. He’s quiet. This is a ritual he has performed many times; Russell has nightmares about every two months. He wonders sometimes if this wasn’t something the boy inherited from Sally, an inheritance of dreams. They sit on the steps to the garage. Rush slumps, his eyes bloodshot, and Gene rubs his back, feeling the vertebrae and scapula that appear starkly in contrast with the skin. Good Lord, the boy’s nothing but bones, like calaveras, skeleton candy sold to children on the Mexican Day of the Dead.

“I don’t remember,” Rush says. He looks at the car and tightens one hand around Gene’s arm, a reflex that reminds Gene of a crawdad’s claws.

“You get to go to a party with me,” Gene tells him. “So hop to it. Get your jeans on and that rat’s nest out of your hair, at least, so you look presentable. On the double. The sooner you get back here, the sooner we get to Estella’s to have ice cream, right?”

Russell grins widely and runs into the house. Gene can hear his feet slipping on the linoleum in the kitchen. In a few minutes he returns and clambers into his side of the truck.

“You don’t have any squirt guns or water balloons hidden on you, do you?”

“No.” Russell laughs. “Why’re we going to the party this late?”

“Top secret,” Gene says, looking furtively around. “Estella gave me a message and told me to come. She didn’t say anything about you, though, so I guess you’ll just have to stay…”

“I’m going,”

“She needs my help with a sick beast, that’s all.” There is no reason to tell the boy something he’ll never see anyway. He’ll likely be too busy stuffing dirt clods down Molly Serrano’s neck to notice Gene putting down an animal. Rush has seen other deaths of course, but small animals that could be contained with vacuams and plastic bags. Noiseless, uneventful deaths. Gene talks easily of nothing. It’s only nine o’clock at night, but seems later. In a minute Rush’s head is against the window, asleep. His eyelids flicker, rapid eye movement that indicates dreaming, but before they have crossed the orchard that separates Estella’s land from theirs he wakes with a small muffled cry like a wounded dog.

“I have nightmares too,” Gene says suddenly. This is the truth. Rush looks at him with interest.

“Do they scare you bad?”

“Yes. They make my palms sweat. They’re about…” Careful, now. No need to tell too much. In his mind’s eye he sees the forest, dark leaves wet with dew and shimmery in the moonlight, their foxhole underneath the stars. Him and his buddies are drawing straws. “About the war.”

“World War Two,” Rush’s eyes brighten. “1933 to 44.”

“!945,” Gene corrects him. “I lied about my age to get in. I was sixteen.”

“Oh.” Russell yawns. “You were grown up.”

No, not really. But in Russell’s mind, he supposes, a war would have to be made of children to make sense, nine-year-olds in army green, helmets cinched underneath chins. In the Civil War, children his age were drummers. Gene remembers this abruptly from his eighth grade textbook, the year he graduated and left school for good.

Under freezing stars in the foxhole, he massages his feet, split with a case of trench foot. He draws the short straw. He can barely see in the dark. He is a sniper. A silence falls over the small group in his hole, huddled together for warmth. The short straw is like the Death card in fortune-telling, except it foreshadows not his death, but his commanding officer’s.

That CO is regular chickenshit army, not only a stickler about protocol, which is bad enough, but damn stupid as well and certain to get them all killed. He has made fun of Gene’s accent more than once and called him an Okie, not knowing that the Okies will soon gain respect working in ship yards and on front lines, no longer in San Joaquin Valley agriculture. But now they are still a second-class citizen, in the same class as the blacks hanging from trees in Bakersfield. Gene has learned play-acting, how to swallow pride between his teeth, instead of jumping into fights, and hiding his accent and thick broken leather boots. It leaves a bitter taste, this hiding of himself.

Russell touches his arm and he jumps involuntarily. “You passed Estella’s.” Rush points out the window to the string of Christmas lights across the line of apricot trees, there regardless of the season.

“Sorry, bud. Wasn’t thinking.”

He swings the truck down the dirt road until they reach the tangle of people milling about in front of the Serrano’s house. The house is small, like his own, but at least it has a lick of paint on it that’s not peeling. Estella comes to the car. Gene says, “Rush, go see if you can’t find Molly to play with.” Russell dashes from the truck, glad for a chance to stay up late and wreck havoc with Estella’s kids. Estella watches him and grins. Gene leans his head on his arms for a minute, and releases he’s sweating. A sour film coats his tongue, and he spits over the side of the car door, but it’s no use; the feeling won’t leave him.

“All right?” Estella asks. He nods. “Come over here. We need to butcher this later tonight.” He carries the locked case with him, which Estella notices but doesn’t comment on. Chained by the line of pecan and apricot trees is a pig, young yet, no more than a year. Gene drops the case in the dust and Estella leaves him to it. He watches the pig dragging one leg in the dust and wonders numbly if pigs get rabies. He opens the case…

In the foxhole, Gene watches the CO a few yards away in the next foxhole. In Vietnam, they called this business “fragging” from the fragmentation grenades used to murder commanding officers, but Gene is a sniper, and good with a gun, and in this war he doesn’t know the name for what he’s doing. He sights down the rifle: the back of the head where the backbone connects to the skull, where he has learned to shoot dogs sick from distemper, a merciful and quick killing, damn near impossible because the man still wears his helmet. He aims, and his hands shake…

Six feet away from the pig. Not much left after the .30-30 fires. Fragments of white bone on the ground, and the bullet gone into the trees, and red on the ground, too, and a mixture of Mexican and English cursing, and Estella yelling at him, “Gene, what are you doing? We were going to eat that.” He thinks of Indians giving thanks for animal’s lives when they killed for food and wonders what prayer he could say over the pig. He kneels on the ground to pack the shotgun away in the case. It sounds stupid even to him when he mumbles, “I thought you called me for…to put it down. I thought it was crazy.” He sees folks glaring at him, puzzled faces in the light that comes from the house and the barbecue pit, all set up for a pig roast. Of course. They meant for him to slit its throat with a knife. His feet feel slow and heavy as he walks to the truck and puts the case back. Estella follows him. He can feel her eyes on his back. He turns to her angrily.

“Don’t you never tell me to make something dead again!”

“I should have told you,” she says. Her eyes are full of shadows in the dark. “I should have made it clear that you weren’t here like a vet, I should have…” she stumbles to a halt, and adds, “I’m sorry.”

“Get back to your party,” he says roughly. “It’s waiting.” He leans against the side of the truck. A few minutes after death, the eyes glaze from lack of oxygen, and literally change to a darker color. They look the same in asthma attacks he’s helped neighbors’ children through. A green-eyed cat can turn red-eyed from this. He’s seen it. Estella continues to stand there and watch him, her eyes soft.

“I understand you didn’t want to,” she said, “with the gun. I know you haven’t handled it since…”

“You understand nothing.” He wipes his cheek and is surprised to see wetness on his hands. He’s crying. The hackles on the back of his neck rise as wailing comes from the trees. He thinks of La Llorana, the Spanish woman who drowned her own children, and whose ghost wanders river banks in search of children. She steals souls. It is said that this is what happens to kids who drown, that it is La Llorana, the Crying Woman, who keeps them.

“Oh, damn,” he says savagely. “Russell.” He sets off in a short run toward the trees, listening as an animal listens. He follows the sound of the wailing down the rows, stopping ever now and then to track it, getting his bearings in the net of branches. Twigs snap around his face and beat against his arms. He hollers, “Rush! Answer me!” But there is nothing but strangled sobbing. He thinks, absurdly, of the gun, of the gunshot into the trees, but the trees near the house, not here, where no people were. He knows this– doesn’t he? He was careful. He is always careful. He has not picked up a gun since his return from the war. Rush is a good kid, already beginning to pester him for shooting lessons like his friends at school receive from fathers or uncles. It was stupid of him to do that tonight. Stupid. Robert Johnson has a pack of jackrabbit dogs, and the ones that never come back from chasing jackrabbits he leaves to form a ragged pack of roaming wild dogs. Rush told him over breakfast the other day that they are called “the ghost dogs” for the mournful baying that rides on the wind when they’re nearby.

Russell is disobedient, always where he’s never supposed to be, a damn nuisance and a bother half the time, a boy with stick-out ears and a crazy grin and a wild sense of humor that makes Gene laugh. Folks tell Gene he’d mind better with a few belt whippings applied to his hind end, here in the valley where corporal punishment is still commonly practiced, but Gene has never hit a child like that, and doesn’t know how someone could. But in spite of himself, and out of desperation, he calls out, “Russell, you answer me or by God when I find you, I’ll…”

How many seconds to a hand grenade? This forest of crops reminds him of places full of mud and mist they trudged through as soldiers. He shot many people as a sniper, of course he did, but it’s odd the one he remembers is the commanding officer, because the man turned and fixed his eyes on Gene as he died, and Gene saw the point when oxygen leached from his eyes and death seized him. Five. Five seconds to a hand grenade after you pull the pin.

Five. The wailing has stopped. There is nothing but the muted sounds of the party by the house. He wonders why Estella is not beside him, searching. He takes a step forward, mud squelching under his boots.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One. He sees something in the trees, in the branches, a cloth fluttering in the wind. There, clinging to the branches in the crook of the tree is Russell. He isn’t wailing anymore, but a kind of muffled choked sobbing with erratic breathing, like asthma, comes from his throat. The signs of extreme fear. Or shock. Gene shoves his hands in his pockets and looks up at him without anger. “Talk to me, son,” he says.

Rush shakes his head. His knuckles are white and he clings so tight to the branch that the muscles in his forearm stand out and his elbow juts at an angle. His face looks blue. Gene hopes it’s only the light.

Gene takes a step forward and reaches his hands up. Rush’s skin is clammy. “I won’t hurt you,” Gene says. “You know that.” Gently, he pries Russell’s hands from the tree branches and swings the boy’s body toward him. Russell moves stiffly, his muscles rigid. Gene holds him away from his chest and studies him for signs of injury: ragged clothes, blood, a favored leg or arm. There is nothing he can see in this light. He hugs Rush and sits down in the mud and baby tears which carpet the orchard. His legs feel weak.

Russell whispers, “I thought you were supposed to help animals. I thought that’s what you do.”

“Yeah,” he clears his throat. “But I thought that pig was sick, I thought that’s why Estella called me. Sometimes that’s what you do to help things, put them down when they’re hurting too bad, you understand?”

“No,” Russell wiggles, but his arms stay circled around Gene’s chest, a weight that squeezes him. In the morning, the boy will be embarrassed and likely deny that he ever wailed this way and clung to Gene because everyone knows crying is for babies and girls. But tonight is different.

“I’m sorry you had to see it.”

“Can we go home now?” Rush asks. Gene can’t tell whether he believes him or not.

“If you aren’t too old for a piggyback, we can.” Russell nods, his head resting against Gene’s chest although he isn’t asleep. His eyes move and back and forth like the ticking of a clock. Gene lifts him on his back, nine-years-old and heavy, and Rush rides tall in the trees.

They are halfway back to the party before Rush says anything. He says, “When you killed people in the war, was it like that? Did you shoot them like that in the back of the head?”

Gene tightens his grip around Russell’s ankles. “Yes,” he says finally. “It was like that.”

In Estella’s kitchen, he lifts Russell’s shirt to look for wounds, but there is nothing except scratches from Russell’s dash through the trees. He must have run when he heard the shot, that’s all. He wasn’t in the orchard when Gene fired, thank God for that. His arms are striped from the branches.

Gene taps the side of Russell’s head with his fingers, making a small clicking noise with his tongue. The boy’s eyes swivel wordlessly to him, a reaction at least, and Gene waits for him to say something. He taps again and pretends to listen intently.

“What’re you doing?” Russell says at last.

“I’m waitin’ to see if I can hear your brains sloshing about. Nope, can’t hear a thing. My God, it’s empty in there.”

Russell gives a short laugh. “I’m nine, now,” he says importantly. “That’s a baby’s trick.”

“Oh. Nine, is it? I keep forgetting…”

Estella gives Russell a cookie and pours Gene a beer and they eat a plate of the roasted pig and potluck food. In the yellow warmth of the kitchen Russell falls asleep at the table, his ears visible through his brown hair. Gene drinks his beer and thinks about the CO, gone for many years now, and he finds himself telling the story to Estella, who listens across the table. When the firing eased up, he had crossed to that’s man’s foxhole and fumbled stupidly for a pulse, and at last he took the CO’s boot off and checked for a plantar’s reflex – a twitch that occurs when the muscle at the bottom of the foot is tickled, but there was nothing. No twitch. Severe brain damage. As if he couldn’t tell this by the exit wound through the jugular vein. But he hoped. Others from his company took the man’s boots and equipment – they were in bad need of supplies – and he took nothing. There was nothing left to take.

“Take,” Russell mumbles. Gene looks down at him, but he’s only talking in his sleep.

Gene grins slightly. “He gets ecoli sometimes after nightmares.” Something doesn’t sound right about the word, only he’s too tired to bother correcting it.

Estella chuckles. “E. coli? The bacteria?”

“No. He – ” Gene fumbles for words. “Echolalia. He repeats back what you say to him. I don’t know why, just those nightmares leave him paralyzed or something.” He grins and says with irony, “Yep, that’s me. Good with animals and kids.”

In the early morning Estella shakes him awake. He sees that the dishes have been cleared from the table. Beside him, Russell stirs, his thin shoulder blades moving as he breathes. For the time being he is free of dreams. Gene thinks of Russell’s mother, Sally, ten times worse at minding than Rush is, a knobby-kneed five-year-old that spent all her time at his house, away from her migrant family and her father dying of some lung disease in a picker house. He feels kinship with these people, Sally and Russell, and Estella, these folks that call him for their children’s aches and livestock problems because he’s cheaper than the vet or the clinic.

“I’ll be going,” he says to Estella. She nods and hands him three refrigerator dishes.

“Pork,” she says, “and some leftover pie, and there might be some frijoles in there, I don’t know.” She studies the top of Russell’s head as though divining his future from it. “You’re even, all right?” she tells Gene. “You took a life, but you’ve given some back, too. You hear me?”

“Copy that,” Gene says, and he grins. Just a little. Russell doesn’t wake when Gene lifts him, and his feet dangle limply. Gene carries him down the road to the car, Russell’s breath warm on his neck, and he drives home. If Russell raises hell today, he’ll just let him, that’s all. He can jump off the furniture and yell and shoot rubber bands at Molly Serrano, and Gene won’t mind. He’ll be thankful for it. There is so much to be thankful for.