Fall Back Down When I Die

by Joe Wilkins

Here was his nephew, this scrawny kid with a plastic grocery sack of clothes and a spiral notebook. Wendell was just back from hours on the combine.

boy but a cousin. Lacy, the boy’s mother, had come to live with Wendell and his mom, Maureen, because Lacy’s father had left to work a fishing boat in Alaska and her mother, Maureen’s sister, had died in a car accident years before that. When her father’s letters quit coming, Lacy had simply hung a curtain across the room that she and Wendell shared and stayed with them through most of high school. Yes, Lacy had been like an older sister to him—they were a year apart—but she was really only a cousin. He wanted to make sure that was clear.

didn’t need a boy to look after, that was for sure, but Wendell still wanted this woman up from Billings to see him and think something good, think he might be able to do whatever it was that needed to be done.

still thought of Jackie Maxwell as the new kid, the one whose parents had moved from Colorado and bought the Shellhammer place after Art Jr. lost it to the bank and had begun raising goats, of all things—a line of organic goat meat that took off when a chain of fancy grocery stores in California started buying it all up months in advance.

Now here she was, grown up and nice-looking and telling him she was registering for college classes while he was living in his mother’s trailer, bringing in someone else’s wheat.

territory, he was the one without, lacking both, and the rules concerning such things were hard and fixed and applied with full and violent force to everyone—but Wendell couldn’t find the words to explain this except to say again that basketball had saved him.

Suicide art, Gillian had dubbed it. The sort that led not to an art scholarship but to a stint as a tattoo artist. She’d seen it again and again during her nineteen years in the Montana school system.

And the boy himself, Tavin, would end up just about like his stepdad—running a few cattle, poaching, drinking, doing terrible things to this girl and that girl and having a kid or three, voting Republican even as he lived off the usual rural welfare: government grazing leases and Conservation Reserve Program payments. God, the cycle of rural poverty.

four-by-five grid of gravel and dust featuring an impressive collection of crumbling brick false-fronts, one or two of which, depending on the year and the severity of the most recent drought, housed saloons with names like the Grand, the Branding Iron, and the Ace. Just off Main, as if in counterpoint, lay the old mission Catholic church and the steeply roofed Lutheran church, both sanctuaries shaded by massive, ancient cottonwoods, and on the edge of town, near the rodeo grounds, stretched the brand-new, shedlike evangelical church, the Church of the Plains, whose oiled parking lot baked in any kind of sun.

And even as Gillian had known right away what she had to do, she’d also known that it likely wouldn’t be enough, that for most of these kids it would never be enough—a knowledge that was only confirmed when she saw the shivering rib slats of those dogs, the pearlescent underbelly of that deer hide, the hunting jacket dipped in blood. The way Tricia lit her cigarette on the stove coil, her face so close to all that bright, hard heat.

She was sure she’d be both more fun and more firm than her own instructors had been—middle-aged men and women who snuck out for cigarette breaks during reading time and let the boys who made the most trouble put their heads down on their desks and sleep.

The station cut to local news and her heart stilled a moment, then crashed against the bones of her chest—three quick interviews, all with men who had put in for the wolf lottery and were hoping to draw hunting tags. She could almost smell the tobacco on their breath, see the devil in their eyes.

that they’d lost the section because of something his father had failed to do, some part of the BLM lease he hadn’t fulfilled and might yet get in more trouble for, it still seemed a good season

the ones who thought the whole of eastern Montana was somehow theirs to do with as they pleased, who conveniently forgot that their great-grandfathers were the ones given free land in the first place, that their grandfathers were the ones who had caused the dust bowl, that their grandfathers and fathers had poisoned the rivers and nearly decimated the elk, antelope, and grouse populations, and that the federal government had stepped in every step of the way—from rural electrification to cheap government grazing leases to generous rental agreements—to pay for this ridiculous way of life they were always going

three months pregnant, and without an explanation for any of it—not her disappearance or the pregnancy or the gummy squiggle of scar beneath her right eye.

That same old shame, that fear and rage at being examined, judged, found wanting. Like in the days and months after his old man had taken off, like the night of the divisional championship game, like the last months of his senior year, after Lacy disappeared for the final time, like whenever he had to go to Billings to talk to some guy in a suit at the bank, like every other night he’d been in a bar since he’d found his mother slumped in the front seat of her Cavalier

He knew—by his thrift-store jeans, the thin walls of their trailer, the generic potato chips his mother bought—that his family was one kind of poor. He knew, too, that the Bensons were another kind of poor—a sadder, meaner kind. He wasn’t sure what the McClearys were, if they were rich or not, but they sure weren’t poor. They

The boy seemed fine, seemed as he always was, and the whole of Wendell’s chest seized and all but cracked open for the sadness of it, for his own shame. How many nights had Rowdy waited for Lacy to come home? How many nights had Wendell himself wished his own father would crawl out of the mountains? Not one more night, he swore to himself, standing in the pale light as the boy drummed his fingers across his cheeks. Not one fucking more.

He wished he didn’t know how a thing like this happened, but he knew exactly how. A teacher needed a cigarette or was getting a divorce or just didn’t want to deal with it and turned away, let a bunch of kids tease a boy like Rowdy because it was easier in the moment. But the easy thing

Eventually, she stuffed her workout videos and exercise equipment in the closet. Shuffled from bed to couch to bed. Every once in a while drove into town for her prescriptions.

was often hard for her to square the facts that one of the richest landowners in the Bull Mountains was also, in many ways, one of the kindest, though maybe it was just that he didn’t have anything to prove, that he had so much, he could afford to be considerate.

She thought all this would somehow matter, that motherhood wouldn’t look on her the same way it looked on Kevin’s sisters, with their loose jeans and stained sweatshirts, the stink of potato salad, day after day given over to the whims of an infant, a toddler, a child.

How did Glen Hougen get to be the one to decide what Wendell ought and ought not do? How did Betts get to be the one to ride four-wheelers with his boy all day? How did he, Wendell Newman, end up the one who couldn’t fuck up or take a day to set a trapline for fear of losing his

She wasn’t sure until Maddy, seven, wearing pink, long-sleeved pajamas, woke her one noon asking for cereal, asking who that was beside her. Gillian rolled over to find in her bed a hatchet-faced, ponytailed man with cigarette burns studding his upturned arms. That’s when she knew. It was about oblivion, the swirling pain we embrace hoping to eclipse the greater, harder pain of loss. Things hadn’t

Wendell Newman was the heir of it all. He was even still living in that same godforsaken trailer. He’d made his choice. He was in league with Betts, was part of the same sick cycle, was poisoning Rowdy as he’d been poisoned himself—filling the poor boy with all kinds of racist, sexist, ultraconservative junk. Violent, truly murderous shit. He had to be stopped.

Like wind-driven rain the light slanted down, burnishing the

rusted steel of pickups, the dirty shine of gravel, the ash-black barrels of rifles, and Wendell stood all the straighter against its wash, against the words he’d just heard.

murderer, the man who’d run with his rifle into the mountains a dozen years ago and disappeared forever. And there was the man who yet at times stepped from the shadowed edges of Wendell’s memory: the joke teller, the belly-laugher, the mountain trapper who’d take a knee as if in prayer to pluck a spray of Indian paintbrush for Wendell’s mother. Wendell had spent half his life fatherless now, and in his father’s absence...

the father who had a sprig of flower tucked behind his ear and blame the other father for everything—for Lacy’s taking off, for his own drunken fuck...

myths? The idiocy of watering the bar ditch? The vanity of irrigating this dry land at all? The land where the failures of the nation, the failures of myth, met the failures of men. Where history went to die. Where rivers brimful in April slicked to gravel by August. Where the grass was tough and thick before the plow and ever after dust lifted from the sour, alkali hardpan left in the plow’s wake. A land of ravaging pine beetles, of ever longer summers and shorter, dryer winters. The land itself animated sorrow and anger, birthed and cradled and raised up failure and fear, a raw and righteous violence.

Title description?

land beyond, traced at its edges by county roads but cut through its heart only by rutted, washed-out dirt tracks and faint horse trails.

Shakespere here

Daniel. Betts. His old man. Someone had told them they were owed something. He wasn’t yet sure who, hadn’t had time to think that through, but that’s what they thought, that it wasn’t fair.

goddamn thing. He’d known that all along, known it so deep in his bones that he hadn’t ever thought it outright before, and now that he did, he understood that Maddy had been right. That story he’d been telling Rowdy was a lie, pure and simple.

the EPA or the BLM making it all of a sudden hard. It had always been hard. That’s why the wolves were coming back. They were built for it. They didn’t worry about what was owed to them. They lived how the land demanded. Wendell could see it now. The land itself had taken his father, had left him with this sad riddle of a story, one those others were reading the wrong way altogether.