This story was written by Whitman Wander, a pen name of mine and an all around fascinating fellow. It first appeared in the coincidentally titled Asheville literary magazine, Wander, in February, 2006

Arkie Arkwright vaulted into the driver's seat of his pickup and slammed the door. He was about to stab the wrong key at the ignition when a wave of nausea caused him to drop the key ring. He threw open the door as the hunter's stew he'd been eating boiled up from his guts. No amount of bourbon or barbeque sauce could sweeten that abomination. All of it had to go. He'd told Nate to leave the damned jackrabbit where it fell. If Edd had known where it came from, he'd never have cooked it.

Nate Cummins, who trailed the older man's flight from Cap and Edd Rosser's supper table stopped at a respectful distance and watched the open door shudder with Arkie's wretched groans. In the barnyard light, Arkwright's white truck was a sickly green. Nate hadn't thought to grab his coat on the way out. He rubbed his arms and bounced up and down for warmth. The temperature was dropping fast.

The outburst had come out of nowhere. Nate, who'd known Mr. Arkwright for as long as he could remember, hadn't seen anything like it out of him before. Arkie was a straight-up guy, rough, dependable, generous, strong enough to lift the hind end of a pickup with his bare hands, a railroad man. Western Kansas incarnate. He had a temper; who didn't? But he didn't destroy kitchens. Even when he had to disown his son, Jesse, he'd done it with the force of personality, not physical violence. Then he'd maintained better than most after Jesse died and Mrs. Arkwright divorced him. So the flying dishes and overturned table made no sense. Lucky the old codgers weren't hurt. And all over a jackrabbit.

Wild meat didn't get any cleaner than Nate's rabbit. Not a single pellet in it. Truth to tell, he was proud of the shot, nothing but head at the apex of a leap. Why shouldn't he brag a little? No sooner had he mentioned it though than Arkwright threw the stewpot at the sink and their bowls after it. Now the poor guy was puking so hard Nate feared he might hemorrhage.

When Arkie's salt and pepper crew cut appeared at last in the window of the door, Nate began apologizing. "I'm sorry, okay? Really. I didn't mean anything. Just didn't want to waste meat, you know? I wouldn't have had them cook it if I knew it bothered you. Come on back in now. It's freezing out here. I'll clean up the mess; don't worry. Just come inside where it's warm."

"Get away from me, you sonofabitch. I guess some men might forget their best friend, but he was my son, goddamn it."

Another accusation. Nate and Jesse had been best friends growing up. But that was over after Jesse went to college. "What are you talking about? I haven't forgotten him. I didn't go for what he turned into, but it hurt me bad when he killed himself. You don't forget things like that. Come on. Lets go in."

Nate chose his words carefully. Himself a father of two, he tried to imagine the horror of having a child commit suicide. All the what ifs and if onlys. But Jesse had gone his own way. Nobody forced him to forsake his upbringing. And it was a year after Arkie disowned him before he died, for Christ's sake.

Arkie didn't move from his perch on the side of the seat. Nate tried again. "Is there anything I can do for you? Please. Come on, man. You can't stay out here."
 
"To hell with you. Get out of my way." Arkie wiped the burning slime from his chin and slammed the door again. He bent forward for the keys on the floorboard and busted his lip on the steering wheel. The taste of iron in his mouth infuriated him so much he almost tore off the window crank in his haste to roll the window down. He spat the blood and bile at Nate. "I said git, or I'll beat your sorry ass here and now."

Nate backed off and yelled toward the house for the Rossers.

"Leave them out of this. I'm warning you." Arkie held his keys to the light and found the one he was looking for. It snicked into the ignition. Without another word, he started the truck, jerked the transmission into reverse, and sped away.

He fled with no more direction than a rat in a dry stock tank. The gravel section roads, which cut the plains into a checkerboard of fields a mile on a side, were deserted thanks to the rapid approach of the season's first predicted blizzard. He reached for the fifth of Dickel he'd stashed behind the seat days earlier in joyful anticipation of this annual hunt. The ageless Rosser boys and the cycle of seasons on their land grounded him. Each visit was a homecoming celebration. Never had he dreamed the whiskey might be pressed into service on such a night as this.

North of the Ogalla crossroads, the bottle ran dry. Arkie drove on to the bridge over the Saline River, parked in the middle of the span, and got out into a moaning Canadian gale that chased him around to the shelter of the passenger side. He threw the empty bottle into the featureless blackness beyond the bridge rail, expecting a splash, but heard a faint explosion of glass instead.  He leaned back against the coldness of the truck. It reduced the bitter gusts to sways and nudges.
 
The clotted rage within him began to yield to the warmth of the Dickel. Then something like sadness tried to muscle in. It snapped him to attention like an ammonia capsule under the nose. His flannel shirt and wool pants wouldn't be worth much after it started snowing. And he wasn't where he needed to be.

He started the truck and drove slowly, two miles west, one south, another four miles over, and south again to the fence-wire gate at the corner of the Rosser boys' land. He pulled in there and left the high beams on while he flipped the keeper loop off the gatepost, stepped through the gap, and reset the loop. Drunk or sober, a man always closed the gate. It didn't matter that Martin, the only animal in the pasture, had died in August. Whether out of respect or forgetfulness, the Rosser boys hadn't called the rendering plant to take him. Whichever it was, Arkie was grateful for the chance to say goodbye. Martin had been Jesse's bull, his Future Farmers of America project.

In the afternoon, when he and Nate had walked in from the other direction, through the milo field and up the creek, winter was only a gathering bruise on the western horizon. The pheasants were running in the Indian summer heat but not fast enough to outfox a man familiar with their tricks. Arkie had his limit by noon. Nate was one short. Who needed a dog? Arkie figured they could spare the time to pay their respects to Martin.

The Hereford sat on its haunches in the sedge; only a faint dank smell remained, not unpleasant. Martin's hide had darkened and shrunk down tight over the spine and ribs. Arkie traced a finger over the brand scar, one of the precious few marks of his son's hand remaining on Earth. He remembered the day Jesse applied it. The boy was squeamish. He had a worse time of it than the calf. Martin might as well have been a big red puppy, as far as Jesse was concerned. Fortunately for him, the Rossers bought Martin after the judging. They'd gotten a good sire for their money. Then, after Jessie died, Cap hadn't had the heart to sell the bull. No words of gratitude were necessary. Cap understood what Martin meant.

Nightfall and the looming storm had changed everything. In the headlights, the overgrown pasture appeared insubstantial, a sea of nervous silver lines scratched in the dark. He trudged through them, his toes burning with cold inside his boots. His hands, also burning, wouldn't remain in the shelter of his armpits. They repeatedly shot out as he staggered, grasping for balance. Invisible granules of cold lashed his cheeks stiff and brought water to his eyes. When he reached the bull, the stinging water spilled over and froze in a week’s worth of grizzled beard. Arkie wobbled to military attention and saluted.

Others might not have been able to stand such cold without a coat. But Staff Sergeant Arkwright had survived the 2nd Division's godforsaken retreat back across the 38th parallel in 1950, a frigid hell of firefights and sleepless nights stretching from Thanksgiving to New Years. Then, the Korean winter had been the least of his concerns. Was it worse to be cornered in some burnt-out vehicle by murderous whistle-blowing gooks or live to explain why the US Army had cut and run from the little yellow bastards? That year they said Santa Claus drove the Republic of Korea supply truck into General Walker’s jeep, killing the incompetent sonofabitch. It had taken the arrival of General Ridgeway in January to rally the troops and show the Chinese what American will was all about.

A sudden urge to piss commandeered Arkie's attention. Christ, he needed to get his butt out of here. Cap and Edd's barn light shone a mile and a half distant, catty-corner across the section, the only star in the sky.  It must be ten o’clock. He tottered toward the pickup on wooden feet, flexing his toes in hopes of restoring some circulation. He negotiated the gate again and pulled himself into the cab. The truck refused to start. He cut the lights and tried again. The starter kicked over lethargically and ground to a halt.

He crossed his arms on the wheel and rested his forehead. Whiskey static had broken his train of thought into a chaos of loose cars, careening and crashing in a nightmare switchyard. A sane man would have been in bed hours ago. Screw them. Let them worry. Because of the warm weather he hadn't gotten around to equipping the pickup for winter emergencies. Nothing but a ball cap and work gloves behind the seat. They were better than nothing.

His feet missed the ground when he stepped down from the cab, but he landed on his shoulder and rolled, damaging little more than his pride. It didn't occur to him to curse until after he'd hauled himself vertical.  But the recoil pad of his favorite Remington pump swam into view on the gun rack and cut the string of damnations short. It couldn't be left in plain sight. He pulled the shotgun off the rack and double-checked it for empty. A bout of shivers shook him, then another more severe. Where was his bird vest? At the house. He switched on the truck's dying headlights for help with the gate and secured the vehicle before he left it.

The single low star shining just off the horizon in the Rosser's distant barnyard guided his second crossing of Martin's pasture. He poked the night with the Remington's barrel, waving it before him like a blind man's cane, wary of the creek somewhere to his right, probing for the fence that marked the beginning of the milo fields. The shivering worsened, rendering his exploratory sweeps increasingly erratic. He managed to hang onto the weapon but couldn't clench his jaws tightly enough to prevent his teeth from chattering. He inched forward over the uneven ground until barbwire scraped against the barrel. The wire snagged his shirt when he ducked between two of the slack strands and ripped a hole in his sleeve large enough to slip a hand through.

The harvested field proved easier to negotiate, a monotonous undulation of stubble rows and bare ground. The cut stalks slapped the toes of his boots. He imagined the boots as small boats, their bows cleaving the swells of an arctic sea. They sailed northeasterly, row after row, pitching and yawing from the full effect of a fifth of Dickel. With each step the barnyard star floated a fraction higher in the sky, though he had nothing by which to gauge its progress.

Arkie had convinced himself the star actually was climbing when he stepped off the edge of the stubble sea. He was weightless, then hammered by a concussive force worthy of an artillery shell. He slid down an embankment in a cascade of loose dirt and came to rest, head down on his back, the Remington between his legs. Before considering himself, he pulled the weapon to him and inspected it. Nothing bent or broken. No dirt in the barrel. He still might defend himself if he could tough out the pain that clamped his chest like pincers when he tried to take a breath. And his left knee didn't seem to function.

Dazed, he tried to fix his position. There were no more explosions or sounds of Chinese whistles on the wind. He groaned for assistance and received no answer. Then he remembered the milo field and the ravine that meandered across it to the creek. For fifty years he'd seen tillable land crumble into the ravine's advancing serpentine tributaries. He cursed his stupidity, rolled onto his stomach, and raised himself onto his elbows and good knee.

Sleet rattled across the field as he gained the rim of the gully. Cognizant of the proximity of the enemy, he stayed below the lip and peered through a thin ribbon of weeds. His guiding light was dimmed by the sleet but larger than before. Another spasm of shivering ratcheted the agony of his injuries beyond endurance. He muffled the screams by biting his forearm.

A spreading warmth in his pants told him he'd lost bladder control. He remembered a couple of green privates in Korea who'd pissed themselves on a night like this. The dumb clucks thought it was the cat's meow until their pants froze and the wool scoured their thighs like sandpaper. He couldn't afford any more mistakes. Determination and presence of mind were the attributes of a soldier. Cap Rosser had drilled it into Arkie since the day he was assigned his first chores on the farm. Rules were rules for a reason.

Why didn't the enemy show himself? Why was he stalling? Did he suspect the US Army wasn't going to bug out for once?  Arkie would go over the top, bum leg and all, like Cap and his men had done in the Argonne. He had to. America's clarity was at stake, the hard work, the straight roads, and the trust between men. Moral compromise and appeasement were the nation's true peril. Commies and hijackers were only flies buzzing around an open sore.

Where was the goddamned medic? And where was the General Ridgeway or Black Jack Pershing to lead the charge?  This would be no desperate solo advance. Arkie had witnessed one such stunt, a desertion by suicide, committed by a man too cowardly to pull his own trigger.

Even Jesse, he thought, in the throes of perversion, hadn’t been that kind of pansy. Arkie’s eyes watered again. He and Sophia had been so proud of their son and only child, the first Arkwright to attend college. They should never have allowed him to go. Kansas University, den of iniquities, had changed him, destroyed him, deafened him to the warnings of his father and real friends like Nate. How could you reach a son who rejected his own manhood? You couldn't. Arkie had to disown him, even if Momma couldn't understand why and cried herself to sleep for months. In those days, Arkie hated Jesse for Sophia's suffering above all else. In a horrible way, Jesse had reclaimed his honor by shooting himself. The lost was found. They'd cleaned him up and carried him home, safe from further evil.

Arkie wriggled into firing position on the weed-line, daring the bastards. The wind had eased. The sleet was turning to snow. Alert for any telltale noise, he jacked a nonexistent shell into the Remington's chamber. The slide seemed balky, perhaps bent after all. He hoped it was only poor grip in the frozen gloves. There’d be an opportunity to take them off when the attack commenced. He'd not let Cap down.

Nate might think Captain Walter Rosser was only half of an old joke, so thin and confused he could get lost in his overalls. But Arkie knew better. Captain Rosser hadn't yet been Nate's age when he braved the Boche gunners to rescue Arkie's eventual father from the mud of an Argonne no-man's land. Cap and Edd had saved Pap again after he lost his farm to the land bank. They gave him work and the use of the cabin where Arkie's sisters were born and died of the croup. And many were the occasions when Cap saved Arkie or Ma from Pap when he set to whaling the tar out of one of them. It was a sixth sense. Had to be. How else to explain Cap's absence on the day Pap was fixing to be gored by the Shorthorn bull?
 
Regular landlords would have kicked Ma out after Pap died. Not the Rosser boys. Arkie finished growing up under their tutelage, and Ma lived out her days in the cabin with no rent but cooking and cleaning for the bachelor brothers.

Arkie scanned across his line of fire again. The few rows of stubble visible in the silhouette of the Rosser's light were skimmed with sparkling crystals. They faded out when the friendly halo expanded and paled and finally disappeared behind curtains of snow. He envisioned Cap and Edd at the house, stuffing wood into the stove. Arkie had brought two cords, enough to heat the dilapidated two-story structure to body temperature, the way the Rossers liked it, for weeks.

He saw Nate pouring sweat in the kitchen, there being no other place to sit in the house except the beds. But for narrow walkways, the rooms were a waist-high maze of girlie magazines. The boys had been collecting since the year one, though until Ma passed, the porn was stored in the barn, out of sight. Nate's eyes popped when he first walked into the living room and beheld the stacks. Yes sirree Bob, he was suffering. He deserved every minute of roasting the boys could dish out. And he’d be doing it with his shirt on too. The kid had gone bare-chested in the house the night they arrived. Didn't know better. Why would he? But it wasn't ten minutes before Edd sidled up to him, cue ball head and toothless grin, and latched onto Nate’s titty like the Gerber baby. Arkie had nearly rolled. Poor Edd, so far gone he mistook Nate for his mama.

Arkie's mouth was parched. He strained to turn onto his back without sliding into the ravine again. Frozen clods raked his side and pulled the shirttail out of his pants. When he tried to tuck it in, the shotgun clattered to the bottom of the ditch. But he felt the first blessed pinpricks of snow on his tongue. The shivering stopped. He had to hang on. Ridgeway was a month away from turning this thing around. The US Army should be fighting, not running with its tail between its legs. Not lying in a field without a sidearm or sleeping bag. Not like this.
 
Leadership. Where was it? He couldn't expect a medic. The boys never bothered to get telephone service. Nate didn't have a car and wouldn’t have the faintest idea of where to find him anyway. Cap couldn’t tell him Arkie would have gone to the bull. The dead and wounded of too many battles lay entombed within the span of Martin’s ribs to let him go unguarded. Someone had to volunteer.
 
The hesitation of Truman and Acheson had festered into a national cancer. Now the world marveled at Jimmy Carter's humiliation. The United States hostage to a Persian in a sheet? Was it any wonder kids grew up any damned way they pleased, smoked dope, lived lives of open perversion, and aborted most of the babies they did manage to conceive? How could it go on like this? The heartland was dying.
 
God, he missed Jesse! He could still see Sophia's tears streaming. "Surely he'll grow out of it. There must be some other way," she'd pled.

If he hadn't taken action, Jesse might still be alive. Sophia might not have left. But, goddamn it! What else could he have done? The cruelty of this life overwhelmed him.
 
There they were, he and Nate, vests full of birds on a balmy afternoon, paying their respects to Martin. The weeds had grown high around him, reaching golden fingers to pull him in. Arkie had bent to light a cigarette when the kid whooped. In slow motion, he watched Nate's 16-gauge lock on to a jackrabbit springing away from a hole in Martin’s paunch. The thought of that vile thing gnawing at the bull's guts choked off Arkie's shout. Run you sonofabitch! Dodge! Git! Nate never heard it.

Now the boom would never quit echoing. The rabbit's head dissolved in a puff of blood. Jesse crumpled beside the bed in a crappy motel room. Cap couldn’t save him, and Ridgeway was still a month away.

—Michael Hopping
copyright © 2006 all rights reserved