“KJ?” says Virgil. He looks as confused as I feel.
Kenner just stares at me.
“Hey,” I say.
Mrs. Martin walks in after them on her way to the back of the house. “Put those things away now. You two know the rules. You have ten minutes and then I want you boys getting all the animals in. Kenner, go help your sister. That cat of hers is going to go burst. And your dad and William need help with the feedin’. We don’t have time for socializing tonight.”
“What brings you out here?” says Kenner, the edge back in his voice. “I thought nature boy was keeping this a big secret.”
I struggle to keep up with the shifting social terrain. I look at Virgil for help in knowing how to answer but all I see are more questions. Once again I punt with the truth. “Virgil didn’t tell me anything. I was driving by and I saw his car here.”
“So you’re a stalker then,” says Kenner. “Well, I believe it. Nothing you do would surprise me.”
Addie jumps in, “Oh, hush, Kenner. You mean you didn’t tell her after all, Virgil?”
“No,” says Virgil, looking at me and then looking at the gun in his hands. “I didn’t.”
I can see that Dad was right, except it’s only taken me thirty seconds to make the mess. “Addie,” I say quietly. “I appreciate your help. Will you tell Mrs. Martin thank you for letting me use the phone?”
I step as quietly to the door as I can and slip into the cold air. A young border collie mix looks up from its place under the swing on the porch. It wasn’t here when I came so I’m guessing it must be Kenner’s dog, his replacement for the one the wolves killed. It jumps to attention and barks at me but doesn’t come closer. I walk quickly down the path and then onto the road that leads to my car. I am nearly to the highway when I hear someone running behind me.
“Wait.”
I turn and see Virgil hurtling toward me. If I was a good daughter I would jump in my car and drive away.
“Wait! KJ!” His words make thin clouds between us. “What are you doing here?”
I am too confused to make anything up. “Just what I said. I had to go to Ennis and I saw your car. I thought . . . I wondered what you were doing.”
“Okay,” he says, still breathing hard. “What did you think I was doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you thought,” he says, stepping closer, “I’ve been avoiding you.”
I step back. “I’ve got to go.”
“Because of your dad?”
“This has nothing to do with my dad, Virgil. And don’t you pretend . . .”
“But it does.”
I’m not cold anymore. I’m seething. “How many times are you going to blame everything on my dad? For three weeks I had nothing but . . .”
“Could you shut up so I can tell you something?”
We glare at each other in the dark.
“Sorry,” he says softly.
I say nothing.
“This is going to take a minute. Do you want to go sit in your truck?”
“Are you sure the Martins will let you back in the house?”
“No,” he says flatly. “Mrs. Martin feels like you have bad-mouthed her boys to the town.”
“That would require me to have someone to talk to, wouldn’t it?”
“Let’s get in your truck.”
I start the engine. He leans back against his seat. I watch him in the half-light. His mouth puckers as he blows heat into his fingers. I remind myself that he is a big fat liar that has been ignoring me for weeks. He says, “I’m trying to help.”
I fold my arms across my chest. He clears his throat.
“When your dad’s place burned it scared me. I kept thinking what I would do if something happened to you. Then I realized that was the problem. . . . The whole town was scared, that was what was driving everything.”
“So you decided to take shooting lessons from the Martin brothers?”
“No,” he says impatiently. “I decided to come out here and talk to the Martins. Put a face to what I was afraid of. Hear their side of the story.”
“Must have been an amazing story.”
“It really is, KJ. These people aren’t what you think.”
“How would you know what I think?”
“I don’t,” he says. “But I know what I thought. I didn’t have any idea how hard it is for them.”
“What
did
you think? Hard is what ranchers
do
. That’s their
specialty
. They do hard like photographers do . . . weddings. That doesn’t make it okay for someone to shoot at people or burn down their store.”
Virgil raises his voice again. “Would you stop being so mad and listen to what I’m trying to tell you?”
“I can’t stop being mad just because you tell me to.”
Virgil reaches across the air to touch me but I pull back. He scoots back on the seat. “Okay. Be mad. But I need to explain. At first I just wanted to talk to them. Addie came and made sure they didn’t kill me. It was tense. Then we all sort of got to be friends, after a while. So I wanted to be useful. I volunteered to sleep with the herd.”
“You what?” I stare at him. Even for Virgil this is bizarre.
“They laughed at me, too. Eloise thinks I have a death wish.”
“You sleep outside with the cattle?”
“It’s still way too cold to sleep outside. I stay in the bunkhouse. During the day I fix fences and scout for tracks. At night I get up at intervals and walk around, checking on things, making a little noise, and make man smell on everything, if you know what I mean. I read about it in book about cattle drives.”
“How do you watch them all? Do the Martins keep all their cattle here in the winter?”
“No, they can’t afford to. But the ones that are here were being harassed. They’ve had the Madison pack right on the place. So I’m a walking deterrent.”
“You’re a freaking cow babysitter, is what you are.”
“I figured if my scent scared off the wolves, they wouldn’t be shot, the cattle wouldn’t be eaten, and the people would settle down.”
Virgil never stops surprising me. Never.
“Is it working?” I say.
“We haven’t had an incident since we started doing it.”
“Kenner helps?”
“He and William spell me a little each night. It’s pretty cool of them really.”
“What are you talking about? You’re guarding their cattle for free.”
“Well, they pay me in kind. William taught me to shoot soda cans, and Kenner taught me to pee my name in the snow.”
“Can’t beat that.”
“And Mrs. Martin feeds me. . . .”
I try to imagine this. “Does she make you vegetarian dinners?”
“No.”
“So what do you eat?”
“Are you my mother?”
“But, these people . . .”
Virgil throws up his hands. “These people are your neighbors, KJ. And before I moved here they liked you or at least they didn’t hate you. They liked your dad. Now they feel as persecuted as you do. They feel that in addition to having wolves forced on them, they have half the town looking down on them for something they didn’t even do.”
“They are good storytellers.”
“Do you really think the Martins are stupid enough to set fire to your dad’s store?”
It’s a good question. Not one I’ve considered much lately because I’ve been busy thinking that Kenner is stupid enough to do anything. Finally I say, “What about the words on Mr. Muir’s store? Who else but Kenner would write something like that?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it was him.”
I look out the window. The highway is silent. I’m late.
Then, maybe just because it’s been a very long three weeks for both of us, we stop talking. That’s the thing about kissing. You don’t have to talk. You can spend hours not talking. Entire eons not talking. Unless of course you are me and your dad is waiting to incarcerate you when you get home. I look at my watch. “I’m in so much trouble.”
“Yeah,” he says, drawing a smile on the fogged-up window.
I turn on the defroster. It’s going to take a minute.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” I say.
“I hope so.”
“Where?”
“Can you come back here?”
“Oh, the Martins will love that.”
“I’ll talk to them. I’ll call you after school tomorrow.”
“You can’t just quit going to school, Virgil. Even in Montana, we have laws about that. And you weren’t doing so hot to begin with.”
“I know. If you and I could trade off it would be better.”
“Trade off?”
“Yeah. But I’ll bet Addie’s family would let her do it with you. And maybe even Sondra and Dennis would help. We could maybe even get school credit for it. Call it research for the paper or health or something.”
“I sort of lost my spot . . . remember? Wait, you are serious?”
“I have to keep it going to show that it works.”
“And what if it doesn’t?”
“Then at least I’ve learned how to shoot and piss with greater accuracy.”
“You’ve got it made.”
“I need a girl. These cows are starting to look good.”
Just as Virgil says this, a semi barrels by and sprays a wall of mud all the way from the road to my dad’s truck. I turn on my wipers. “Have you ever noticed how bad things seem to happen when we’re together?”
“It’s occurred to me.”
“And that right when we’re getting along, for some reason we stop getting along?”
“Yeah. Why is that?” says Virgil.
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re cursed or something.”
Virgil smiles. “I guess there’s one way to find out.”
“You sure you want me to come out here with you?”
“Are you sure you want to come out here with me?”
I kiss him one last time for bad luck and drive my dad’s mud-splattered, fogged-up truck home.
Poem Composed While Driving Home in the Dark
My entry there was not auspicious
But Virgil’s kisses were delicious
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS
THE GOOD NEWS is that when I get home Dad is asleep on the couch with the TV on, snoring like a bear with a head cold. The bad news is that he had sauerkraut for dinner, and I nearly pass out from the smell. Sauerkraut: German for pickled barf.
I sit on the floor next to Dad. I wonder what he will say when he wakes up. I wonder what I will say. How can I tell him? I replay the night, slowing down for the part where I am kissing Virgil, and then speeding up for the part where he tells me that he wants me to help him babysit cows. I try to think of something about tonight that won’t make my dad furious. At least I got the wood sample.
I realize with disgust that I am in Virgil-induced denial. If I tell Dad that I want to go camp out at the Martins’ a few times a week, he will disown me. If I go out there, Kenner will probably tie me up with bailing wire and pee his name on me. If I don’t go, Virgil will have to do this amazing thing on his own. If I do help him, I will probably flunk out of school and end up as a waitress at a greasy bar where men pay their tips in gold teeth. If I do go, and Virgil can prove that the wolves can be dealt with in other ways besides killing them, then maybe the town could get over all this wolf insanity and get back to the business of being overworked and underpaid like the good old days.
I grab a pillow from the floor. Even the pillow smells like sauerkraut. I watch the shapes on the television: death, destruction, doom, and a new baby hippo at the Denver Zoo. I’m smiling again and it’s not because of the hippo.
Dad’s face is tucked into his coffee cup. I might as well be telling him I am running away to become a professional mime.
“So we’d be kind of like old-fashioned shepherds, but with cows,” I say for the third time. “The girls and I could go on the same nights, I guess, if the other girls get permission.”
“So you think this is going to make ranchers stop killing wolves?”
“If it works . . . I mean maybe it could at least show killing wolves isn’t the only answer, and that pro-wolf isn’t anti-ranching. Maybe people would stop signing that stupid petition.”
“You’re planning on becoming a permanent resident at the Martins’?”
“No.”
“So what do they do when you leave?”
“Maybe if it works we could get some grants or something. . . .”
“That’s your solution? Grants for sleepovers?”
“It’s a start.”
“Then everyone is going to live happily ever after?”
“Dad, I’m asking . . . your permission.”
He looks at me coldly. “I’ll put an ad in the paper for shop help.” Then he lifts himself from his chair and leaves me alone in the kitchen with a BDG knife through the heart.
I make a few phone calls. It seems that Sondra’s mother would love to have her out of the house and Dennis’s parents think it would look good on his résumé for all the freakish tech schools he’s applying to next year. Addie says she might not have much time but she will “do her best to be supportive of her friends in their journey toward self-actualization and healing.” I think that if the wolves spoke English we could just play some tapes of Addie talking, and they wouldn’t come anywhere near the Martins’ place.
I race to the shop, where my dad is sorting new supplies in the back room. I don’t actually try to talk to him. I just get to work. We work like that for about four hours before I leave to get some food. When I come back he is on the phone and the words floating in the dry air seem to calm things down a little. I know I can do the store and the night shift a few times a week. I can study a little when I’m out there, too, just like I do here. And the season is so slow this time of year—even if the shop was all finished, the town’s basically shut down anyway.
I get up the nerve to ask my dad where he wants the new set of fire extinguishers. He frowns. “Well, with all this good will you’re spreading around, you better put one at each door and then order another set.”
“Dad. I can work the shop and keep up my grades. I can miss a little sleep. Everyone else said they’d help, too. So it will only be a few nights a week.”