Mentors

February 10, 2012

Reading time min

I. Wendell

I had been reading a book about an autistic woman who had great empathy for cattle. Not only could she feel what they felt, she had a grasp of how they’d react, how their minds worked. She designed curved chutes so cows could not see the slaughterhouse; they moved peacefully toward their deaths. This was for big operations. The chute we were using on the ranch that day was perfectly straight. The cow knew what was going on, right from the beginning.

We did not enjoy the advantage of surprise. Balancing on the fence, we kicked at her hips, twisted her shit-slippery tail; we jumped down and walked the opposite direction, outside the fence, so she’d believe she’d gotten past us. She backed up against the slats we slid in behind her; she kicked a 2x4 in half. The six or seven other cows in the slaughter pen, there for crimes ranging from not having a calf that year to plain getting lost, had their heads stuck through the rails, trying to watch.

She balked her way up the stone steps, into the narrow stall which had the slaughterhouse for one side. I’d seen it many times, and today I was going to do the shooting. Wendell handed me the .357, a long-barreled pistol. I believed shooting a cow in the head would be a good thing to have done one time, or that at least some day it might impress people to say I had. Here I am.

You had to shoot the cow between the eyes, and then, when it fell to its knees, drop down on top and cut the jugular so it would bleed, so the blood wouldn’t rush into the meat. Once, amidst all the excitement, some other first-timer had cut into his own leg. I was certain I would have no such problems.

Wendell Brizendine was in charge of all slaughters. He was the mechanic on the ranch, twenty or thirty years older than we were. A collector of guns, he chewed Red Man because it was sweet, thick with molasses. He had one answer for all stubborn mechanical problems, though he’d look things over a long time before he said it: Torch the son of a bitch. Comb marks showing in his hair, he adjusted the oxy-acetylene mixture and the flame sharpened from orange to blue.

Byron and I tried to name the organs as we cut them out. We had our responsibilities on the ranch -- mostly he tried to convince his motorcycle to run and I took the dogs on long walks and pretended to read poetry. We did what Wendell said, killing cows and sheep, pigs and goats. Before he’d come to the ranch, Wendell had worked in a factory that made TV dinners. He claimed he spat in them. He was from Oklahoma.

He handed me the gun and it was heavy in my fingers, as if I didn’t recognize myself. The cow was kicking the walls of the stall. I rested the barrel on her head, the knife in my other hand.

I could not remember the sound of the gun, but it must have gone off. More stunned than the cow, the knife lost clattering around her hooves, I stared at her one broken horn, hanging by a strip, the blood on her ear, her eyes past frantic and back to calm.

Missed, Wendell said. Shoot the bitch again.

I was already on the ground, the rail I’d stood on splintered around my head, the sky above. She’d gone straight through and over the top of me. Trailing strands of one barbed wire fence, she went over the next.

We were after her. I don’t remember how we got to the truck. Wendell was driving and the spare tire was loose in the back, jumping around our feet. Sagebrush and tumbleweeds slid away beneath us, flattened and regaining their forms in our wake. The cow was moving faster, if anything, driven by fear, her thoughts shot loose. Once we were parallel to her, we could do nothing but wait for her to tire. Like a chase on Wild Kingdom, Byron said later.

She veered so sideways that all at once she was coming at us. Skidding, we couldn’t stop; she didn’t catch us head on, but glanced off to one side and fell there, her neck bent back and her legs still going.

The truck was a 1964 Chevrolet, dark green. Wendell didn’t own it, but he was the only person allowed to drive it. His dirty hands gently followed the truck’s metal curves, measuring the dent. He didn’t even look at the cow. She was gasping, blood down her back, sand on her tongue, the horn all the way gone now.

Wendell suddenly turned and kicked her in the side. His feet were small. He wore cowboy boots. Somehow he’d thought to bring the gun; he clicked the cylinder and snapped it shut, then cocked it. He fired low and level across the desert.

Ought to shoot her, he said. I’d like to, only now the adrenaline’s going and the blood’s all in the meat. Like to light her on fire.

He took a chain and lashed three of her legs together, then attached the other end to the bumper of the truck. We dragged the cow all the way back, a wave of sand pushed ahead of her, the loose leg kicking at the sky. The desert expanded around us, no landmarks, everything wheeling until all directions were the same. The cow coughed through mouthfuls of sand, plowing the desert, trying to rise from the sand that was pieces of glass, tearing her up. In the back of the truck, watching this, we cheered and slapped each other’s hands.

She had earned herself an extra month in this world. We took one of her friends instead. Wendell did the shooting and Byron and I went at it until our clothes were dark with blood and our skin slick with fat. No matter how well we hosed the floor, the dogs would come lick the concrete in the morning.

I saw Wendell the next morning, out checking the sheep while I fed the chickens. He didn’t say a thing about the cow. His teeth were out and his face was a whole different shape. I don’t know how Wendell felt then or how he feels now, if he even remembers. Perhaps he merely set out to entertain us.

II. Slaton

All you out here aren’t so smart, Dave Slaton always said. Lucky, maybe. Rich.

His skinny face was all moustache and sideburns as he stood saying this, wearing cowboy boots, tight jeans, a shirt with pearl snaps. In eighth grade, his math teacher had hit him with a ruler. The next day his father went after the teacher, and Dave never returned to school. Yet he had the Intelligence Quotient of a genius. He told us. He had been tested.

He was ten years older than we were. We were a bunch of city boys taken out into the desert to attempt a much-vaunted mixture of practical and intellectual labor. Dave had been a cowboy since he was twelve, all over Nevada, and it made sense that he had no respect for us. He detected all slights, real or imagined.

If anyone has a problem with me, he’d say, well, don’t let it fester. We can settle things. I’d be more than happy to meet any one of you out behind the green shed -- shoes off, no guns, no knives, stone cold sober. That was his favorite litany, and when we repeated it we were careful he did not overhear. A hundred and forty-five pounds, he was perhaps the strongest person I’ve ever met.

Mornings, we sat around tables, in classrooms, and discussed Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Machiavelli. Eminent professors listened, gestured with an unlit pipes while we tried to impress them. One day, someone -- probably me -- was setting forth some ridiculous idea about the Noble Savage when the door jerked open, slapping the wall behind it. Dave Slaton stood there.

Those dyke pigs are running fucking wild again, he said.

Immediately, all our books were shut, chairs overturned, and we were out under the desert sun, along the green alfalfa field where the pigs always headed. There were three of them, three sisters, notorious for breaking out of their ramshackle pen and running loose; that, and mercilessly humping each other.

That day our dog, Bert, tried to mount one. We laughed as he fell off, then we made a loose circle around the pigs, keeping our distance, slowly closing in. Eventually they would tire; if we ran them too hard, they might have heart attacks right there, and no one wanted to do the butchering under that sun. We were just north of Death Valley, in the high desert, surrounded by the White Mountains. The pigs squealed, somersaulted over each over, and finally collapsed, resting.

Porcine, someone said.

Shit, Dave Slaton said. They damn near trampled three acres here.

He was in charge of the alfalfa operation, seeding and irrigating and putting up hay. I worked as an irrigator, so Dave was my boss. I moved lines a quarter mile long, metal wagon wheels five feet tall with metal claws that pulled and tore at the earth, jerking the long pipes across. My lines were never straight enough; Dave always found something wrong, always let me know he was watching, reaping great joy from my incompetence. Trying to please him, I unjointed the pipes in my line and set them together again; I pulled dead birds and the bones of mice through sprinkler heads; I worked when it was dark and had no idea what I was doing.

One such night I left the pressure on too high, and by the morning the standpipe, where the water came out of the ground, had blown the connector and the heavy hose clear and was spouting a geyser fifty feet into the air. Like all disasters, this one was compounded by weather, and I found myself out in a thunderstorm, slipping in the mud, trying to get close enough to screw the cap back down, to turn it all off. The water froze the bones in my fingers, my arms; I kept trying, harboring no belief that I’d succeed.

The rain and all the other gushing water was so loud I didn’t hear the motorcycle pull up. Dave climbed off and surveyed the situation, smiling, hands on his hips, the brim of his hat saturated and drooping. Without saying a word, he tried as I had. He failed also, though not so pathetically, and retreated back to where I was standing. Lightning searched the desert valley, turning the mountains to silhouettes, looking for us.

After going through all his jacket pockets, Dave held a vise-grip pliers in front of my face; then he pulled me in after him, toward the geyser. He kneeled on one side, I on the other. Finally he got the pliers clamped on to the cap of the standpipe and, the handle parallel to the ground, he pulled and pushed it around half a circle and then I struggled it around my side, back to him. As the cap came down, the water went horizontal, all around us, trying to hold us away. The next morning my ribs were so bruised I couldn’t lift my arms, but right then there was nothing to do but take it.

Dave stepped back to rest when the cap was halfway closed, and I did the same. We stood with our hands in our armpits, our backs to the wind and rain, not speaking. Dave looked back toward the ranch, toward his house where no one waited except his pit bull, Bronco. His wife, Patti, was pregnant; she’d gone to live with her parents, somewhere near Sacramento, and no one really dared ask him about that.

All right, Goddamn it! he said, and we crawled back in, eyes closed and faces turned away from the spray, floundering like two drowning blind men until the standpipe was closed down and there was only the rain.

He gave me a ride back on his motorcycle, and I struggled to find a hold that was both secure and inoffensive. We passed the pump, set like a giant buried to its waist, sending water to all the irrigation lines. Surely, it would have been easier to turn the whole thing off, then repressurize the lines, but Dave wanted to teach me a lesson. Puddles exploded around us, behind us, striping my back with mud as I held on.

When Dave Slaton vanished, it was in a thunderstorm like that, in the middle of the night, and he stole license plates from two ranch trucks, leaving his own behind. No one ever heard of or from him again. That day, though, before he disappeared, we shivered together in the green shed, listening to the rain on the roof. He looked at me and laughed, then hooked a finger into his lip and threw away a dip of Copenhagen. He fished for a cigarette, lit it, blew some smoke around.

We did it, I said. I didn’t think we could.

Pussy, he said, and I laughed, too, hoping it was one of those rare times when an insult is the highest compliment.

III. Rick

Wearing knee-high rubber boots, I walked upstream in the narrow concrete ditch; it carried water to the alfalfa fields further south. The water ran only six, eight inches deep, and small fish, trout that had gone through the filter by the reservoir, lived there. I herded them ahead of me, turning my feet sideways to block those that tried to get past.

It was ninety-five degrees, no humidity, the sky almost white and the mountains circling. The valley had a dry lake at one end and was cut in two by the highway. Atop one pass grew Bristlecone Pines, the oldest living things in the world.

The ditch had been poured in the Sixties. With sticks, people had left inscriptions. As I walked, I read. PEPSI GENERATION, it said, SING MY PRAISES. I started out with one or two trout, long as my fingers, but soon the number multiplied; they fought to stay ahead of me, worrying the water’s surface. PULL MY DAISY, said the words along the ditch, YANK MY CHAIN. I kept after the fish, merciless. Finally, we reached the beginning of the ditch, up by the reservoir, and they had nowhere to go. The little trout leapt onto the slanted metal screen, slapping themselves into the air, slippery and shining. Satisfied, I stepped out of the ditch and let them return downstream.

When I heard the engine, at first I thought it was my boss, Dave Slaton, coming to tell me my irrigation lines weren’t straight, or birdies were jammed, or just to call me a pretzelhead, a pigfucker, or worse. Yet I looked up and saw the white van, coming the back way, on the dirt road along the north field. Rick. He’d seen me and would not pass by. Stopping, he waved until I headed toward him, across the sagebrush full of rattlesnakes, jackrabbits that shot out with no warning.

Hello, Rick said, one long, tan arm hanging out the window. About fifty, his beard was steel gray, his hair held in piece by a strip of rawhide like a leather shoelace around his forehead.

Thought you’d gone, I said.

I did, he said. His eyes were almost too steady. Unwavering. I left a few things behind, he said. By mistake.

I just nodded and looked out across the valley. Rick often referred to himself as a desert rathe’d been born in Placerville and knew the high desert of the California/Nevada border. I’d heard him talk of his boyhood, hunting and fishing, roaming through dangerous, abandoned mines.

Hello, he said again.

It’s good to see you, I said. Nice to have you back.

Small things is what I left, he said. In the freezer.

His van idled, which gave me the hope he’d shift back into drive. He had come to the ranch to work as an engineer, to install a hydroelectric generator on one of the streams. The whole idea always reminded me of water wheels and mills, wheels of fortune -- or of fortune as a woman, hair growing down over her face, blinding her, as she spun around and around, grabbing hold of people at random.

What I left in the freezer, he said, is so small that someone could defrost the ice and never find it, never even notice. You know what I mean?

I think so, I said, watching the birdies on my line switch their circles, casting mist above the green alfalfa.

At first, Rick had fit right in, drinking burnt coffee in the boardinghouse, sitting in his white v-neck t-shirt, his belt buckle sideways on his hip, that rawhide around his head. Dave Slaton would argue with Wendell, the mechanic; Wendell claimed that Evel Knievel could have cleared the Snake River Canyon on that rocket bike if he hadn’t gotten scared, if he hadn’t bailed so early; Dave said it was not even an honest stunt, but all publicity, that the parachute was in the beginning and the ending of the plan. Or maybe he’d said it was possible, and Wendell argued the other way. Rick listened and he goaded them, baiting one, then taking that side. I sat at the other end of the table, attempting to effortlessly roll cigarettes.

Did I tell you about Puerto Rico? he said, the two of us alone by the alfalfa field, far from anyone else, any kind of help. Well, he said, the army drafted me -- highest I.Q. they ever tested -- and then kicked me out, saying my friends were secessionists or statists or Communists or whatever they thought. He paused, let out a long breath. I hate institutions, he said.

Yes, I said, trying to agree. The van was still idling.

My mother, he said. She’s into self-medication, over seventy years old -- no, she’s not getting what’s in the freezer -- and she told me once that most people on this earth have been replaced by actors. That’s a dangerous way to think.

I’d say so, I said.

Don’t you feel that way sometimes?

I thought about it. All I knew for sure was they had taken too long to fire Rick, and now that he was back it couldn’t be good.

Well? he said.

I don’t know, I said.

The same way he had gotten them going about Evel Kneivel, Rick got Wendell and Dave started on each other, and on each other’s wives. He wrote letters, unsigned, and posted them around the ranch, like a latter day Martin Luther. The letters were full of questions. He wondered whether some individuals were a waste of skin, speculated on what caliber weapon each deserved.

During that time, people moved furtively from house to boardinghouse, stayed low across corrals, tried to be small targets until they were inside the barn. No one knew what drugs Rick took, or if he took any at all. He spoke cryptically of substances both organic and chemically constructed, hybrids of the two. He had plenty of weapons, also, many which he’d modified himself. Yet after this week of terror, it surprised everyone how quietly he’d gone once he was told he’d been let go. Now he’d returned.

What if I were an actor? he said. What about that?

I don’t know, I said. If you never broke character, I’m not sure what the difference would be.

Exactly, he said, an urgency in his voice. You see, you might be me, or I could actually be you, or even someone else altogether.

I stood there in those black rubber boots, unable to run, armed with a hammer, pouches of rubber O-rings, a film canister of grease. The adjustable wrench in my back pocket neither adjusted nor worked as a wrench.

Do you know what I mean? he said.

I think so, I said, and the sound I heard might have been a bullet pumped into a chamber. It was the gear shift.

Nice talking to you, he said, and began to roll away.

The van went toward the center of the ranch, to the apartment at the back of the boardinghouse, where Rick had lived. He went inside and then, after a moment, reappeared, turning his head side to side before climbing back into the van. I watched the white van turn out onto the highway and disappear over the pass. I returned to my work.

The other day, waiting at a stoplight in San Francisco, I thought of Rick. Silver words BEWARE THE BEAST FOR HE IS THE DEVIL had been written on the black helmet of a motorcyclist one lane over. I pulled my truck closer, rolled down my window when I was next to the motorcycle. The biker turned toward me, the face of the helmet covered by a reflective visor. I saw myself looking back, my face in the helmet. The light turned green.


Peter Rock was a 1995-97 Stegner fellow in creative writing. He lives in Philadelphia.

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