Cheri Johnson
The rancher’s son was thin because he kept himself on a Russian Orthodox vegetarian diet three or four days of the week; but the animals’ bones showed the weakness of the land. The boy was small and sad, deer-faced, and fifteen, and he had tacked up paper portraits of every member of the Russian aristocracy down the line onto the wall behind his bed. He liked to tell Nels, the new ranch-hand, that he had even been to Russia. He had giggled with his Russian cousins on a tour of the palace. They had gone into the bedchambers of the nymphomaniac Catherine the Great. The girl cousin whispered about Catherine’s son, who had hated his mother and spread the story that she had died in the room, under the weight of a horse she had ordered to be suspended above her, so she could couple with it. The bed was an obvious reconstruction, the girl cousin said. The original one must have been kicked to pieces, and sopped with the blood and brains of Catherine Alexeyevna.
……The ranch was in north Texas. The new ranch hand Nels was twenty-two, and he had come to Texas in the spring from the flat scrubby bogs of northern Minnesota. He had arrived on their ranch one day saying only that he had come to Texas looking for his brother, and that he needed work. Now (the rancher’s son had learned, from eavesdropping on Nels’s hushed and angry phone calls), the brother had shown up back at home. He had taken some kind of joy-ride, that was all. Nels was furious because he had been sent here by his family in a worried rush, when they had gotten a postcard from the town near the ranch. Now Nels didn’t have any money to take a bus back.
……The boy’s mother had given Nels a job. But after he had worked there only a week, it was obvious to the rancher, and probably to Nels, that he wasn’t going to be of much help at reviving any land that didn’t sink underneath his feet. The boy liked him anyway, and in the evenings he bothered Nels to tell him about Minnesota. The boy responded with stories of his own, not about Texas, but Russia. When Nels said that as a child he had known a timber wolf to drag his dog Princess down the road by the neck, the boy told about a pack of legendary Russian wolves, who loped hungrily and easily after the sleigh of Borkena and Pasha Pulikovsky.
……The wolves were on the heels, human and horse, of the little troika, the boy said on an afternoon in May. It had been a lean winter, and they were starving. Ivan, the boy told the story to Nels, mimicking the high hysterical voice of poor Madame Pulikovsky, a new bride—also flapping his hands and running madly from one end of the broad gray-wood porch to the other, sending cottonwood seeds to frothing the air—Do something, you must do something, or we’re all going to die! So Borenka shoved her into the snow, the boy finished triumphantly, and the wolves devoured her immediately, and let the troika alone.
……In the first week on the ranch, the weather was unseasonably cool, and Nels didn’t seem to mind the boy tagging around after him. For the first week, too, the boy’s mother was kind to Nels.
……The boy called her Mother. Whenever he did it, she screwed up her eyes at him and said, “Whatever happened to ‘Mummy’?” She was a small woman with a round face tanned and rouged orange-pink. She had dry flaxen hair and wore tight tan pants pulled up too high on her waist. When bill-collectors called she listened for several minutes, as if truly considering the caller’s information and threats. Then she said sweetly, “I don’t have it,” and hung up the phone. The boy could hardly remember his father, and didn’t know where he had gone to.
……At the beginning of the second week, hot winds blew in, but the rancher’s kindness to Nels began to cool. The boy had seen his mother’s eyes alight on Nels, when he first walked up to the house, with a great impossible hope. Every day, as he proved more and more inept, her eyes hardened and dimmed. It had been three weeks. Nels had begun to grumble to the boy about still not having any money; apparently his mother hadn’t paid Nels a dime.
……One night Nels said in a low voice to his brother on the phone, “It’s your fault I’m here. Get Mom and Dad to send me the money to get back, would you?”
……“Won’t they send it?” the rancher’s son asked him, when Nels had hung up and come outside. The boy was glad that they would not. He wanted Nels to stay around.
……“They don’t have it. They’re as poor as me. I couldn’t ever hitchhike,” Nels said. He sat on the porch with his head in his hands. “Do you know what people’ll do to you when they pick you up? You go to sleep and wake up and some guy’s hands are on your goddamn leg. All these crazy perverts out driving around! I’ve heard of that happening. People on the bus were telling me that’s what happens all the time.”
……The boy listened with interest.
……“My brother Bobby went all over the place,” Nels went on grimly, “and I can’t even do this. Bobby went to Texas and California and spent all his money and I can’t even hitchhike a little ways. You can’t do that—you never know who’s going to pick you up! Bobby says it was all fine and he hitched all the way to New Mexico,” he said, and squeezed his hands into fists.
……The rancher’s son followed Nels around most of the day, because it was summer now. The boy was not doing well in school, and his mother had assigned him a series of exercises from texts and workbooks, so sometimes he carried these around, when he trailed muttering after Nels in the bright parched air. Often the boy’s books and papers ended up covered with sand and dung. “I hate school,” he said. every day. When Nels finally asked him why, he sighed and said, “Because everyone thinks I’m stuck-up.”
……“Why do they think that?” Nels said.
……“Because I am. They can’t speak right, and they don’t even know that you can say ‘persons’ instead of ‘people,’ and that’s perfectly correct.” The boy sighed again, thinking of all of them, of the tough Texas boys who beat him up.
……His mother looked at him sadly and kissed him on the forehead when he described what they did to him. Up close her face was covered with oily beads of face powder mixed with liquid makeup and sweat.
……“It’s going to be harder for a gentle boy like you,” she said.
……The boy wasn’t gentle, but big-mouthed and bitchy, so he knew she must mean something else.
……Despite her sadness, she still refused to teach him full-time at home. How could she find the time to add that to her list?
……“What a bunch of idiots!” the boy said now to Nels.
……“I don’t know all that much about talking right. What do you think of that?”
……“Oh, I know. Don’t you think I know it! You’ve proven to be a great disappointment to me, sir!” The boy hoped that Nels knew he wasn’t serious.
……They were sitting on the porch. After a moment Nels reached out and patted the boy’s shoulder briefly. He said in a gruff voice, “Yah, you’re a cool kid. You’re cooler than those shitheads.” The boy beamed.
……Still he felt he needed to tease Nels a little. Once he came into the dim barn where Nels was brushing the horses. Outside of the stall where Nels was with a little quarter horse mare, the boy dropped a Spanish book onto the dirt floor. The horse skittered and her warm bulk of twitching auburn flesh pressed Nels into the wall. The boy watched through the slats as Nels put his hand out on her side, to reassure her, and to ease her back. She quieted quickly. She was a calm, sweet animal.
……“Hola, there, Nels,” the boy said. He climbed up the stall door and hung there. He looked at Nels, short and slender in his dirty jeans and a t-shirt with a racecar printed on it.
……The boy thought he should be able to learn Russian. This was the main, if not the only, grievance about the current state of his education. A descendant of Russian nobles, who had driven out the Jews, who had later only narrowly missed execution themselves—such a boy ought to be given the opportunity of learning the tongue of his people.
……“I want to take her for a lead,” the boy said.
……Nels looked up at him, and the boy jerked his head at the mare. Nels bent to brush her legs, while keeping one hand on her shoulder. He rubbed her knee gently before tapping it a bit to get her to bend and lift the leg. She shifted to balance and snorted, and the warm blast of hay-breath tousled Nels’s thick pale curls.
……“She’s my horse,” the boy said, his eyes on the back of Nels’s golden neck. “She is my mother’s horse, and I can lead her whenever I like.”
……Nels grunted, inspecting one of the hooves. “Get the halter, then,” he said.
…….The boy paused a moment then slid down, giving the door a kick as he went. The mare shied, and Nels dropped the leg. The boy went to the tack board and made a lot of noise. Metal bits clanked the wall, leather straps slapped against the metal. Finally he came back with a halter and Nels held his hand out over the stall door, but the boy stayed a few feet away.
……“I will do it,” he said.
……The boy watched Nels study him. The boy had on royal blue pants today which he hoped made him stand out from the landscape, and a blue-and-brown necktie looped around his waist as a belt. He was trying to start a fashion. His reddish-brown hair was short with spiked bangs. Nels did not take his hand away and the boy frowned. He put on his face the look of a car turned the wrong way on a road but refusing to swerve or stop.
……Nels looked at the tack in the boy’s hands and his eyes grew wide.
……“For God’s sakes!” Nels gave him a pained look, as if the boy had just slapped him. “What do you think you need a bit for? You don’t need a bit if you’re just going to lead her around.”
……The boy narrowed his eyes and grinned and said softly, “Mother’s right. The horses are going to go soft around you.”
……In the evenings when Nels came into supper, the boy’s mother, who had no one else to help her way out here, and who cooked and served all the meals herself, filled his plate with beef and beans. Her cheeks were darkened to a bloody sunset red from the heat of the stove. She asked if he had checked the bull’s torn leg yet, or fixed the north fence. Nels told her no, again and again. He had gone to do it, but had nearly collapsed in the heat. “How funny that he hasn’t gotten used to it yet!” the woman said to her son, in an unhappy sing-song. The boy snickered.
……One afternoon Nels had gone out with the rancher to give all of the herd what she hoped would be health-boosting Vitamin A shots. Nels told the boy later that he had no great love for those sneaky cattle, but if he could have he would have quit right then, because he had never seen cows treated so brutally in his life.
……On the evening when the boy had come into the barn, when Nels sat on the porch again staring out at the flat, nearly colorless, land, and the huge and horrible sky, the boy came in front of him again and stood with his hands on hips—the long fingers nearly fitting around the bony waist—and said, “You’re so interested in wolves, right? I haven’t told you about the little girl and her brother who got their throats ripped out, one night when they were walking …”
……Nels seemed only to be half-listening. The story took place in Zacatecas. Nels interrupted only once to say that he did not know much about the Mexican wolves.
……The boy sat beside him and kept talking. The story was only a fairy tale his mother had once told him, but he made it out to be real. He and Nels looked out at the land, covered with dry grass patched brown and green, and the spiny twists of mesquite trees. One night Nels had started a small fire, encircled with stones, in the yard for the boy, then stared in sick wonder at this strange fragrant wood, cut from the tree’s taproots, that put off no smoke.
……Soon the coyotes would come creeping up and eat the yellow seed pods off the ground and branches, and no one would bother them here. The boy’s mother thought there were too many barn cats now and was hopeful that the brush wolves would begin to take them, too.
……Finally Nels broke in again. “Listen,” he said. The boy pouted. Then he grinned, and moved closer to Nels’s feet. Nels backed his wicker chair away and squinted off into the cooling evening. “Listen!” he said again. “There was once—when I was a little kid, there was a time when there were a whole lot of big wolves running around. I mean, and going after everything. But there was a little boy who was walking out to the bus in the morning. It was in the winter, so—it was completely dark. He had a long driveway, and he had to wait at the end of it. His parents had sent their German Shepherd out with him. And at one point, it was like, whoosh—a wolf came out of the woods, grabbed the dog, then pulled it right back in. The dog didn’t even make a noise. But it was gone. The kid’s parents found it chewed up in the woods that afternoon.”
……“I bet it ripped its throat,” the boy said deliciously, and hugged himself, “they like to rip it right—”
……“What I’m trying to tell you is,” Nels said, his voice rising, “is that you’re not right, that what you said isn’t true. A wolf won’t go after a person—”
……“Maybe not your Minnesota wolves!” The boy sneered.
……“Think,” Nels said through his teeth, “think how much easier it would be to kill and eat a boy.” He glared at the rancher’s son, who only laughed. The boy began to rock on the porch like a disturbed child, his mouth wide open and his eyes big and focused on Nels, his arms still wrapped tightly around his body. The boy looked down at his own fingers, stretched out white and stick-like in the dark.
……“You’ve got to know what it is you’re talking about,” Nels said, his voice softer now, but still incensed. In a moment he added thoughtfully, “You’ve got to know about it firsthand before you go blabbing your mouth all over about it.”
……The land spread out flat and black and hard, and the trees were darker tangled spots like great bent witches. The air was thin and dry. There were no lights anywhere except the one from the kitchen behind them, where the boy’s mother sat at the table trying to figure the books into securing a future for the ranch, and failed.
……Nels glanced back into the kitchen. The boy watched him and said, “I hope this whole place goes in the trash. I hate it here. I’ve hated it since the day I was born.”
……Nels was still half-risen in his seat. He hovered for a moment more like this before sighing back down. “Where do you want to go, then?”
……“If Mother asks me, I’ll say Moscow.”
……“Well, but that’s just crazy, though,” Nels said, and shook his head slowly in the boy’s direction. “I mean—you can’t just go off and move to another country, just like that.” He shook his head again.
……“Can’t you?” said the boy.
……“Can you?” said Nels.
……Out in the blackness there was a short low bark. Nels sat up straight again, then stood slowly. He stepped off the porch and the boy watched him. He thought of things Nels had told him about where he was from. He wondered jealously if Nels was, in his mind, a thousand miles away from him, going out into the bogs at night with his brothers to see the gassy glow of the swamp lights in the moss and black spruce and blueberry, and coming back out onto the road for their four-wheelers. Did he see an ugly loose-jointed moose cross the sand and gravel, through heavy white slices of fog, and listen to the horrible music of the wolves’ pathetic howls? Was he thinking of how the smell of burning peat steamed into his clothes, and how the air by the big lake smelled like a warm wet dog in the summer? How, in the winter, he walked for blue-white blinding miles out on the lonely ice?
……The boy got up and followed him. Nels came upon the coyotes eating beneath the mesquite and crouched to watch them. They looked at him but did not move away. They had gotten used to coming here and being left alone. Soon the cows would all die or be sold, the boy thought, and he and his mother would move away, and maybe she would be happier. Perhaps, since probably no one else would want it either, this land would be returned to the coyotes and the moles and the jackrabbits completely.
……The boy could see the night shining in the brush wolves’ eyes. He could also pull out of the dark the skinny shapes of them, their raspy tails and big radio ears. Their jaws were bent to the ground, crunching seed pods. There were three of them. One was a touch taller than the other two. It was also the laziest and didn’t keep an eye on Nels, who was creeping toward the animals, in a strange waddle like a duck or an ape. Sometimes the big coyote even turned its back on Nels completely, or concentrated on reaching up to wrestle a pod off with its teeth. The boy got up close to Nels, who was focused on this bigger coyote. He heard Nels say softly, “Oh, but that’s a little wolf, though.”
……It was not a wolf, there were no wolves in Texas, only these little scavengers.
……The boy thought of the story Nels had told him about the timber wolf that had taken his own dog. Nels’s father, who heard the fighting, came out in the middle of the night to shoot a gun into the air. After he had shot, Nels’s father went out into the dry frigid dark—the boy imagined him as a short man, built powerfully in the arms and shoulders, with pale blue eyes and curly yellow hair, looking like Nels almost exactly—in an old pair of moccasins, and came back with the big dog bleeding in his arms. He laid her on the kitchen floor by the squat black wood stove with its four claw legs like a fat little animal’s.
……The boy had seen a real wolf once. It was tied up in the back of a truck. A man had gotten her from up north somewhere and raised her from a pup. Her tail bushed out like a squirrel’s and the yellow-gray fur on her back was black-tippled, leaving markings like shaggy V’s. She had a dark spot too between her almond eyes. The eyes looked with an odd calm out over the world, a calm made, it had seemed to the boy, of an unsettling mix of readiness and inestimable patience. On the end of her long snout her small nose curved lightly into the air.
……In the darkness Nels crept even closer to the big coyote. When he was very close, he reached forward. The boy felt a sick anger come over him and he grabbed a rock and threw it. All three of the coyotes were gone in seconds. When Nels straightened and turned around, the boy threw another rock, then ran in the direction of the house.
……Nels hissed behind him in the dark, “You little son-of-a-bitch!”
……Near the porch, the boy let Nels catch up with him. He grinned when Nels pulled him down by the tie around his waist and threw him roughly on the ground. The boy was still giggling and did not stop when Nels got down on his knees and pushed the boy’s bony shoulders into the hard dirt.
……The boy whipped his head to the side, wrapped his hand around Nels’s wrist, and kissed it. He closed his eyes. Languidly he opened them again and moved his gaze back to Nels’s face, which he could hardly see in the dark. “You’re a hick, but I’ve decided I don’t care,” he said, joy spreading warmly in his chest. “So if we’re going to be lovers, you’ll have to know now that I’ve been lying to you all along. I’m not Russian. I’ve never even been to Russia. I’m just German and a bunch of other things! Like everyone else! I thought the other one sounded so much better! You can ask my mother. She’ll tell you it’s the truth! I love you and I’m not lying to you anymore!”
……Nels let go of him and sat up. “Jesus Christ,” he said softly, as if to himself or out into the night.
……“Nels,” the boy said.
……“What is it,” said Nels.
……The boy’s grin faded. Nels stood quickly and looked down at the boy for a moment and sighed. He backed away from him, then looked at the house. When he started to walk toward it, the boy grabbed Nels’s dusty boot and held it.
……“Don’t really go tell her,” he said.
……“Come on, now! I’m sorry!” Nels kicked his foot gently until the boy frowned and let him break away.
……The boy called after him. “She’s a whore. She hasn’t been doing it lately because she wants you, but usually she’s got a different man here every night,” he lied. “You don’t want to go near her, though! My lord! Her legs are covered with scabs and pus … I saw her once by accident, when she was getting out of the bath, and I threw up.” He trailed off, feeling sick with himself.
……Nels was going into the house. The boy watched him for a moment, then jumped up and followed. As Nels stormed through the kitchen, the boy heard his mother move in her bedroom and the light in there switched on. She opened the door to meet Nels. She had on a purple robe and her bristly hair was held off her face with a white terry band. She stood and looked at him at first with hardly concealed fear and then with her hard burnt smile. Something about the quick, deliberate change in her expression made the boy, coming up behind Nels, want to sob or scream. “What is it?” she said to Nels, her voice tight. “Why are you so loud?”
……“I’m leaving,” Nels said, and the boy frowned and slowed behind him.
……His mother laughed and crossed her arms, but she bit her lip when she said, “All right!”
……“You owe me money,” Nels said.
……She frowned, then laughed again, and for a moment the boy thought he might have heard in the laugh a touch of pity for Nels, and for herself, but if it was there it was gone soon.
……“Don’t let him,” the boy shouted suddenly. He had stopped a few feet behind Nels in the hall.
……“Oh,” his mother said to Nels, fiercely lifting her chin, her blue eyes like cold bright stones buried deep in some plainer rock, “so you just want us to starve? Is that it? You want him to not have anything to eat?” She gestured behind Nels to the boy and her eyes looked nearly mad. “To not be able to have any nice clothes,” she went on, her face growing very red now, “and show his face at school?”
……Nels turned for a moment to look at the boy, his own face red and his eyes crinkled. “It doesn’t even matter,” the boy said, looking desperately at Nels. “It won’t make any difference, what kind of clothes.” He felt his mouth twist wide open like a rag doll’s, as he felt he was saying the wrong thing. He did not take his eyes off Nels as he hastened to add, “Don’t pay him! He can’t go if you don’t pay him!”
……“Why should I, anyway?” his mother said, turning back to Nels. She narrowed her eyes. “You should pay me, for wasting my time—”
……Nels was still facing the boy. As quickly as Nels had finally built his defiance, the boy saw, it was already melting into shame. Nels muttered, turning slowly back to the boy’s mother, “Well, for God’s sakes—”
……The woman turned sideways and swept her arm around her bedroom before locking her fingers behind her head, as if she were lying down for a nap. “You can rob me if you want! See what you can find in there! Go ahead and try and rob me!” She was still laughing, like a bird who sings or calls out not to communicate or express any emotion, but only because it is in its nature to do so. She slammed the door.
……The boy wailed for himself, but for her as well. There was no room in him left to care about what happened to Nels, unless Nels decided he would stay.
……In a moment Nels turned and shoved past the boy, who overreacted to Nels’s push, flung himself against the wall, and slid slowly down it. He began to scream. The boy hoped that out on the road Nels could hear him crying for at least a half-mile as he walked.
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Cheri Johnson was raised in Lake of the Woods County in northern Minnesota, and has since lived in North Dakota, Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Minneapolis. She holds degrees in English and writing from Augsburg College, Hollins University, and the University of Minnesota, and has had work included in such magazines as The Rio Grande Review, Puerto Del Sol, Glimmer Train Stories, Emprise Review, Cerise Press, and New South. Her first chapbook of poems, Fun & Games, was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press, and she has won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, a Bush Artist Fellowship, a Loft McKnight Fellowship, a residency at Yaddo, and a fellowship in fiction at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Currently she’s working on a novel that uses the story of Rosemary’s Baby as a mythic template for a tale about love, betrayal, and the idea of the devil.