Beartooth

by Callan Wink

The water tasted of moss and stone. A silkiness on the tongue that water from the tap never seemed to possess.

Thad could remember his brother’s laugh, ecstatic, slightly terrified, the thundering awareness that comes instantly to all boys when they realize for the first time that the way of their father is not always the best way.

The river drained out cold and green from country that few visited and no one called home.

“There’s two worlds,” he’d said once. “They sit there like two rooms side-by-side in the same house, and sleep is a door that opens for a while so you can go back and forth.”

a dozen or more trunks knit together in a dense, conical, leaning configuration—a shape that almost seemed to suggest preordination, a dwelling of some kind, a wickiup wind-crafted by a mad god.

At her age the balance must shift, the weight of memory gathering mass until each waking day was more of a waking dream haunted by the shades of people you’d known who were a long time gone.

“We’re born in one spot and spend the rest of our lives trying to get back there.”

The air smelled of the burning gas-and-oil mix from the saw and the fresh acrid tang of cut cottonwood. It was as close as anything to what spring should smell like,

Someone had told him that it took the passing of two sets of seasons for grief to subside. He didn’t think that was true, but there were times, situations, smells, particular turns of phases that cause the mind to jolt itself awake, and then in that instant, the grief was as fresh as it had ever been.

The porch supports with the strange miscellanea hanging from their branches and the twisted, pieced-together bark-covered railing—it was like having coffee in the center of an abandoned pagan ritual.

The air carried differently at night, damp, cool, and close.

Thad breathed in deeply of this wind coming up from the south, born of a land that harbored no people, just rocks and snow and trees and the twisting braids of rivers.

He hefted the rack and skull and thought about how fine a line it was between being in the prime of life and being a pile of bones so picked over that there was no longer enough left to feed a worm.

The human vascular system resembled the drainages of mountains, resembled the branching prongs of a lightning strike resembled the xylem and phloem of trees from roots all the way to the lacework veins of the leaves.

The sun was out of sight below the west rim, and the creek dashing against the rocks reincarnated as cold humidity.

no amount of expended effort can make fruitful the worker who toils aimlessly.

I always thought that was a funny thing. That you’d find something that was perfectly suited for exactly what you wanted to do, but something about that fact, that it was perfect, made you unable to actually do it.”

But then, what man on earth isn’t his mother’s debtor? There could hardly be another way.

The snow was gone for the most part, and ferns began to poke up through the humus. I ate the fiddleheads and wandered through a green and dripping world.

He was on the couch and I was on the rug. When he started to leave, I put myself on his lap. He said he had to go in the morning, but he never did. He never quite got around to it.

You’d think that the state of motherhood would come with a certain understanding of the world and your place in it. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t. Motherhood conveys responsibility. It conveys a certain ache. It doesn’t grant knowledge.

“Yeah?” Hazen said. “I don’t know about that. No one likes to kill a dog. It’s just one of those things.”

He no longer left rooms when she entered them. It was whatever it was. Life’s too short, he told himself.

From here he could see the jagged white peaks of the Absarokas stretching all the way back into the park, where they linked with the Beartooths. An immensity of country.

I think that everything in the universe started as a single perfectly smooth thing that somehow broke apart. Everything that has happened since is just the pieces bouncing off one another in space. It’s random, but occasionally broken pieces find themselves sticking together, and if this occurs an infinite number of times, don’t you think that at some point everything will be one big smooth piece again?”

Maybe, if your brother happened to be sticking his hand in that water at the same time, wherever he might be, there’s a chance he might know that it was you, feel you giving him a riverine handshake, telling him he was a crazy son of a bitch. Telling him to keep going all the way.

But he sometimes felt that humans underestimated the degree to which personality could be found in the animal kingdom. Could a dog feel abandonment? Could a grizzly bear feel satisfaction? Hazen had told the girl he loved her. Was it true, and if so, what did it mean?

He realized for the first time that acute aloneness has something of a presence. His lonely was dark as a shadow, and it sat there drinking coffee with him, a silent companion.

In Spanish, I believe it’s caminar es atesorar. It means ‘to walk is to gather treasure.’ It’s a perfect phrase. It contains the history of humankind. What else is there, really?”

He said that, as far as he knew, 100 percent of the folks who died preferred to stay that way. Death had a perfect record. Not one unhappy customer. It couldn’t be that bad.