Shame and Wonder Read online

  In the early nineties when this happened they lived north of here, in Snyder, where the girls attended school. The ranch—a lease—was sixty miles away, near Silver in Coke County. Coyotes, Courtney tells me, almost always come in about the first of September. Yearlings usually, driven from other ranges. Most of these are taken with snares. This one was older. He had females with him, too. A male will generally hunt with a female. They shot three of his companions. But each year he’d have another. After the second year he’d killed about 120 lambs. A three-pound lamb can get to ninety pounds in three and a half to four months if the range conditions are right. Sometimes a coyote waits. If there are rabbits to eat—and in those years there were; a “surfeit,” Courtney says—a coyote will wait until a lamb weighs maybe twenty pounds. A lamb, of course, is easier and fatter than a rabbit but, somehow, he knows to wait. How strange to think about a coyote out there—what could be more simply, purely present than a coyote—a coyote out there thinking of the future as if it were just a simple thing like dust or wind or something. Nancy’s sketching in the kitchen. There’s good light in there. She’s chatting with Elaine. The coyote skull is on the table. Courtney’s brought out the .280 that he hasn’t shot since then. Except for the buttstock, it’s entirely camo-taped. He says he did that while he waited on that morning. Not so easy, I imagine, in the dark. We’re in the living room. He’s got his tools to reattach the scope, to put the rifle back together as it was. He says that third year, about the third week in April after they had gotten through with shearing, there was a perfectly calm and moonlit night so he drove to where the sheep were gathered, parked and spread his bedroll out in the back of the pickup truck, lay down and waited. It was midnight probably, maybe a little later, when he heard the coyote howling. It was very still and the howling was right there, “like right up on you.” Then the sheep began to run and bleat and he raised up with his rifle in the moonlight—but no coyote. He had taken what he wanted. After that they pulled the lambs off the ewes and put them in the feedlot to protect them and that worked pretty well for the lambs but then the coyote went for the ewes.

  Andrew Delbanco, in The Puritan Ordeal, attempts to understand the Puritans’ sense of evil in the New World. How it changed. How, in the emptiness they found here, it condensed out of that vapor they’d imagined as the absence—the “privation”—of the good into a thing, an actual presence. It’s as if in such uncertainty, such emptiness, they needed more than anything to situate themselves securely opposite the danger. Had to sacrifice a bit of hope for that and place themselves, a little more deliberately, in the world. I like to imagine the Jethro Coffin house brand-new. On that hill above Nantucket a couple of generations after what seems to have been a sort of spiritual discouragement. Its newness still expressive of the general arrival, I should think. The tiny trepidatious windows peeking out upon the dark. Late in the book Delbanco quotes the Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade, who notes that “any village anywhere is the ‘Center of the World.’ ” And, by extension, any house.

  I ask Elaine at one point, “Doesn’t it get lonely?” “No,” she answers almost before I get the question out. It doesn’t. It gets late, though. Light comes in at a softer angle. Afternoon is wearing on and I’ve not asked to see the tape. I’m not really sure I want to hear it. All the tapes are kept together in the top drawer of a dresser in the guest room. All the predator-calling tapes. I hadn’t realized. But certainly that makes sense. Why should you have to be a musician, as it were, with horns and squeakers or whatever—though he uses those, as well. Why not just get a recording of what you want. And what you want is very specific forms of misery. I look through them: “Chicken Hen Squalls,” “Gray Fox Distress,” “Young Turkey Distress,” “Mad Crows,” “Raccoon Fight,” “Baby Crying (Joellen).” Really. There with the mad crows and the others. These things happen after all. These small misfortunes. Raccoons fight and babies cry. It’s touching, though—the parenthetical attribution. Almost reluctant. He knows very well he’s placed her in that range of possibilities. That the coyote doesn’t care—he’s looking way beyond the personal. So it’s not “Joellen Crying.” That would not be parallel. But still—as if to say I know, I know. He’s got the player, too. Not the one he used back then but one just like it. Dusty, scuffed black box like evidence recovered from a crash site. In the kitchen Nancy’s finishing a sketch, a nice one on gray paper. Simple side view of the coyote skull in charcoal with white highlights. Courtney takes a seat and places the recorder on the table. “Want to hear it?” He leans back. He has a toothpick in his mouth. See? What did I tell you. There’s no flossing. There are no flossing habits here. But here? I’m thinking. Should we really play it here? Right here in the kitchen? In the fading afternoon? Elaine is standing. No expression. “Sure,” says Nancy. What is there about the toothpick? As he gazes down. The thoughtlessness. Or no, it isn’t thoughtlessness. My God. It’s like a shock. I sort of expected a little accidental background noise or something, a little preparatory blankness. But it’s right there. Fully present. Six weeks old, I think they said. A shriek to take your breath away. The way a baby shrieks to end all shrieks—all shrieks contained therein, all forms of misery, the wilderness itself. Elaine has backed away. Of course the coyote came. How could it not? It’s all right there. And it goes on and on. I’m looking at Elaine. Okay. She hears her baby out there in the wilderness, I’m thinking. But it’s not quite that. He shuts it off and looks at her. “Oh my,” says Nancy. “What?” he says. Or maybe I say, “What?” Elaine says, “Why didn’t you pick her up?” Oh my. She’s gone right past the coyote and all that. Back to the baby at that moment. “Why did you let her cry?” “I didn’t.” Courtney smiles. “She wouldn’t stop.” She knows, of course. They know all that. So I just go ahead and ask the thing I want to ask, insert the big idea where it won’t fit, I’m pretty sure, where it seems awkward and impractical—and Courtney’s so polite, they’re both so kind to let us come in here like this so he just listens to me, smiley-eyed, as I get all jacked up to make him see what must have been there in his heart, the faint suspicion on that morning on that hillside as he played that tape that something more was going on. He had to sense it, right? That there was something more at risk. You know. Perhaps there were misgivings. Sure, he knows. “Hell no,” he says. “I wanted to kill it.”

  —

  THERE HAS BEEN, along with the drought, the wind, and the constant threat of fire, another hovering concern. Just after Christmas, a young girl disappeared not far from here in Colorado City. Courtney’s eleven-year-old granddaughter lives near there. It was believed at first that the girl, thirteen, had run away from home. But pretty soon it began to look like an abduction. Attention turned to the mom and her live-in boyfriend. There were reports of child pornography and drugs. Failed polygraph tests. I’m not even sure in what connection this came up in conversation. We were talking—Courtney and I; Elaine and Nancy had gone off by themselves somewhere—about the coyote and the tape. About that ranch they had back then—and which I wish it had been possible to visit and is out that way, just down the road from Colorado City. It was on his mind. On everybody’s mind, I guess. The miles between these little towns seem so completely empty, like a vacuum, no resistance to events, so when a fire pops up or someone disappears, it’s like it’s right here, right outside. So people talk about the danger, what to watch for. There are certain things he told me. Not just things like don’t get into cars with strangers. But more subtle things. For example, if you hear the water running after dark, don’t go outside; they’ll cut your water line to make you come outside. Or if you hear a baby crying. They will do that, too. The very same thing. To bring a woman out. A girl. “They will go out to that,” he said. Can you imagine? What if you heard that crying out there in the dark? Not even thinking of the danger—just the emptiness of that. In every sense. No parenthetical attribution there, for sure. No hope at all. Do not go out. That child is lost. Like running water. Irretrievab
le. Like the wind and smoke and threat of fire and everything. You can’t do any good.

  —

  AFTER HE KILLED IT, Courtney waited about a week then went out calling to make sure. Just to see what might turn up. I should have asked what kind of call he used—I’m sure he’s got all kinds. He could have used a blade of grass for all I know. Back then before the drought they probably had some grass. That’s what my friend across the street would show me how to use when we were kids. His father was a hunter and he showed me how to take a blade of grass and sort of stretch it out between your thumbs and blow. It made a reed and sounded awful. That’s a rabbit when it’s hurt, he said. And I remember wondering—I was probably eight or nine—why in the world would you want to make a sound like that? But anyway, he’s out there calling—out in the bush, the range, whatever; out where the coyotes wait and listen—and he’s out there quite a while but nothing comes. Until, at last, a little gray fox shows up—this sounds like a fable but it’s not. This little gray fox comes skidding up within five feet or so. Starts barking at him. Barks and barks. And this is good, thinks Courtney. Coyotes tend to kill or run the foxes off. So this is good. No coyotes. Just this little gray fox that keeps on barking at him. Courtney grabs a handful of dust and throws it at him. Fox just backs away and keeps on barking. I didn’t know a fox could bark. But this one does and won’t go away. And as he tells me I keep seeing this, imagining it, as if from a certain distance. From a certain elevation as from a prominence somewhere, with Courtney standing way out there in the middle of nowhere and this little gray fox just barking. From this distance, very faintly. Barking and barking. And that puff of dust dispersing in the wind.

  I have this story from the artist Tracy Hicks about his former father-in-law, who had a 1960s pickup he’d restored and customized—spent years on the project, loved this truck like nothing else—until one day he backed it over one of his kittens in the driveway. Killed the kitten. Sold the pickup truck. Like that. Well, that sort of sums it up, I thought. That pretty much says it all, it seemed to me at the time. Is metaphor everywhere? Of course it is. Once consciousness, once meaning gets a start it keeps on going. You get literacy and metaphor and God.

  The thing about custom cars and hot rods—glancing through a copy of Rod & Custom magazine, you can see they tend to grade into each other—is the strangely counterintuitive sort of dreaminess involved. I haven’t checked to see if angel hair is still the concours style but it was when I was a kid. That ectoplasmic spun-glass stuff they’d use sometimes in school plays to suggest a mist or heavenly atmospherics. You would see these cars at shows—again, in magazines; I never went to a show but I was fascinated—and they’d always have these cloudy mounds of angel hair around them. Underneath and around the tires, like they were floating. Not entirely of this world. And yet so massively mechanical and sculptural. The custom cars especially, which, although they’d generally have these gorgeously chromed and souped-up engines, seemed intended more as presence, pure idea. And the idea, I think, was more or less that paradise is possible. That you can actually get there in the proper frame of mind—which those archetypal chopped and purple-painted ’49 Mercurys sought to represent. They’d hover just above the ground—no more than a couple of inches’ clearance, I would guess—sustained by angel hair, it seemed, and not much else, the wheels a concession, a politeness, ornamental and vestigial. I remember thinking how extraordinarily cool that looked. And how impractical. How could you drive that down an ordinary road? The road would have to be like a showroom floor. Where would you find a perfect road like that? Like in a dream. Where would it lead? Yet here were the means for such a journey—as gloriously real and here-and-now as they could be. Which was the point. That they were not like concept cars, those empty visions of the future that manufacturers like to roll out on occasion. These were ordinary cars transformed. Revealed, in a way, as what they ought to be. And were, essentially, we were allowed to feel. The marvelous implicit in the everyday. How striking and encouraging to discover that a ’51 Ford pickup or whatever had a soul. Who would have thought? So, get behind the wheel of that and where do you go? Can you imagine?

  Tracy’s father-in-law, it seems, had had a pretty rough time in the war. He’d been in the infantry, in the thick of it. He’d tramped all over Italy, Tracy says, came home dispirited and worn out, wanted safety and a wife and a little frame house in Marshall, Texas. All of which, by the time we’re talking about, had settled into a fairly grim, habitual sort of life. His teenage bride had borne two daughters very early, lost her youth, and grown into a disagreeable, sharp-tongued woman Tracy remembers in the kitchen mostly, cooking and complaining at her husband, who was forbidden to smoke in the house and so would sit outside the kitchen in the carport smoking and talking to the cats. He had a morning-to-early-afternoon job at the railyard running a huge machine that straightened railcars damaged in collisions and derailings. It was quite a thing to witness, apparently—how this machine could grab a twisted boxcar, pick the whole thing up and bend it back into shape. You tend to think of travel by rail as pretty safe: it’s all laid out, after all; you can’t get lost; there’s nowhere to go but where you’re going, but maybe not. Among the people who would come by now and then to watch him run the operation was an auto mechanic friend whose personal project was a wrecked but restorable El Camino pickup truck. Well, this guy seems to have died and Tracy’s father-in-law was able to buy the pickup truck and take the project on himself. It wasn’t all that old. Not like some classic you could excuse yourself for spending too much money on. I’m sure he could have bought an unwrecked used one for far less than he eventually would spend. But you know how, when something’s wrecked, you kind of see it from a distance, see right past it toward what could have been and might be yet if you just take your time, don’t try to rush it. In such circumstances one can glimpse perfection. So it was with Tracy’s father-in-law, I guess. This truck became a thing of beauty. Not a full-blown “chopped and channeled” concours queen, of course, but given what was possible back then in Marshall, Texas, pretty nice. And better and better all the time. A fancy paint job—two-tone metal-flake gold and cream. Gold rolled-and-pleated leather seats with matching visors. Lots of little things, as well, to keep him busy afternoons and on the weekends in the carport with the cats. He’d get it washed and checked out weekly. Once a month, he’d change the oil. Sometimes, says Tracy, he’d just sit there in the carport with it. Cat in his lap, just sitting there and smoking and, I have to imagine, season after season, soft habitual sounds of cooking and complaining from the kitchen contrapuntal to the purring in his lap, just gazing off across the sadly less-than-prosperous little neighborhood and down the little street to God knows where, to who knows what subliminal paradise, not knowing really, consciously, I’m sure, but still, you’d think the heart must seek a destination.

  It was early one winter morning when he backed it over the kitten. Tracy heard he never drove the truck again and very quickly it was gone. And so, within a couple of years, was he—from cancer. Not much time to sit with nothing under the carport. But I bet that’s what he did. Just let the air come through and sit out there and smoke. What would you do? You couldn’t move. How could you not just sit there and blink your eyes at having it all break down like that, a bump in the road—not even a bump; you hardly feel it, but you know. That’s it, you think. Right off the rails. Can you believe it? Just like that. You have to wonder what to retain of a thing like that. Do you remember how it was? And maybe hold it in your thoughts? Or let it go and learn your lesson. How you can’t get there from here. How love obliterates itself. How you should probably just keep still for a while and let the other things come back. The other cats, the less beloved ones. Their little water bowls and dishes here and there. The early morning sounds of movement in the kitchen.

  I think I need to figure out what I was doing, what I really felt I was up to, as a kid when, overwhelmed by some enthusiasm, some new all-consuming fascination,
I’d require it to be fully expressed at once. I’d have to slap together something out of household odds and ends, available parts, to represent whatever it was, to come to terms as quickly and flimsily as possible. And generally leave it at that. And here I mean only the usual sorts of things you would expect to have engaged a dorky child’s imagination in the fifties—shortwave radio, rocket ships and outer space, the more spectacular forms of science—and, in the better class of dorky child, to have engendered actual seeking after knowledge, the discovery of the glory of the thing in its machinery.

  I knew kids like that. And admired them all the more to the extent I failed to appreciate that what they really loved was the machinery, the procedures toward a practical understanding. Strength of character, I preferred to believe, explained it. How they’d suffered through the tedious fundamentals to receive, as an award it seemed to me, the apparatus I so envied. That the visible instrumentation might be secondary, merely an extension, an uncelebrated consequence of studious application to the principles, not sought, nor forced, nor longed for in itself but rather simply coming to be there all around you in your bedroom easy as anything, as naturally as toys or sports equipment, unselfconsciously as that, was a dismaying possibility. It made me wonder sometimes if those kids, smart as they were, knew what they’d done, what they’d achieved, what all those dials and lights and switches, curly wires and metal rocket parts and laboratory glassware really meant in the overall view of things. One’s distant and incapable view of things. Which I may actually have felt permitted insight and perspective unavailable to the competent and concentrated gaze. I may have felt I’d caught a revelatory glimpse of something way out there, the glint of all that stuff, the shimmery sense of it, so delicate, thin as paper—cardboard maybe, which is generally what would come to hand when I would try to model it, invoke it with some taped-together cargo-cult construction on my desk. It could be anything. The look was what you wanted. The gesture. The idea of dials and switches seemed enough. So, what idea? Enough for what?