What if I don’t get another chance like this? To catch a coyote in the open?
Then you don’t get another chance, he said. That’ll happen more than once in life. The best you can do is make peace with the loss and try to hold out hope for something better.
Is that what you did after you deserted the Army? You hoped for something better?
He looked at me with a mix of anger and surprise, which made sense, I suppose, given how rarely I resorted to talking back to him. I wanted that coyote, damn it, and now it was gone, and in my resentment I forgot myself, and how easy it would’ve been for him to pack up the rifles and tell me never again. But instead he looked off into the distance at whatever point on the horizon he liked to fixate upon. The rings under his eyes were red and dry and scaled with dust from so many hours in the vineyard. He licked his lips and began to speak without turning.
There was no hope left in those days, he said. For a while we lived like animals. We took whatever we wanted, and measured the right and wrong of a situation by how strong we were compared to the other party. Some still live that way even now. You give up on the little things, the little rules you set for yourself, and you’ll forget the big ones too in time. That’s why we go for the clean kill. Because it’s a short walk down the road to savagery.
He put his hand to his nose and smelled the stink of tobacco on his fingers. I couldn’t tell, from where I sat, whether he was talking to me like I was a child or full-grown man. All I knew was that I had spoiled the mood somehow, as I was bound to do, and now the guilt of a hundred glaring priests was bearing down on me at once without Chris even having to look me in the eye. His words were enough.
I could do some wicked things, I said. If I wasn’t careful, I could be a pretty bad guy.
I expected him to laugh at me for talking tough, but instead he nodded his head and leaned in closer under the shade of the dry grass thicket. So could I, he said. Ain’t we a pair?
When I looked out again at the strip of clearing, the coyote was nowhere to be seen, and the sun was beginning its final blazing descent into the Pacific a whole world away. As if beholden to some similar, cosmic time piece, Chris stood and came out from behind the thicket with the rifle perched sideways across his forearms. He started walking away, not back toward the vineyard the way we came in, but farther out into the border edges that our neighbor’s parcel shared with two others just like it. I followed. I wiped the dirt from my pantlegs and jogged after him and kept the pace alongside him all the way to the end of the trail. My legs were half-asleep from crouching so long. I didn’t let it show.
You want to check out the orchard across the road?
He kept on walking at the same pace. Some other time, he said. Just got one thing left to do before we head back. Won’t take but a minute.
We walked through a gap in the tree line and out through the other end and walked down a dirt trail bordered on both sides by the deep-cut and hardened tread lines of two massive truck tires. At the end of the trail, we came upon the concrete bank of a waterway that had been dug out and paved long before I was born. All over the valley, the old American irrigation ditches lay dry except for a few repurposed channels the new authorities saw no point in letting go to waste. Two feet of black water flowed hurriedly along the floor of the ditch, driven onward by some change in elevation too imperceptible for human eyes to detect. Chris sat on the edge of the bank and tore his boots off one after the other and lay them upsidedown against his pack. His socks were soiled brown and sported gaping holes on both heels.
You going for a swim?
Chris started to undo his shirt buttons. I’m washing up, he said. Suggest you do the same if you plan to sit at your mother’s dinner table.
He had a point and I knew it. By any civilized standard, we were filthy beyond tolerance. All afternoon the sweat on our skins had sealed the drifting dust in our pores and built up a muddy residue behind our ears and in our ass cracks. Laying his shirt over the concrete, Chris revealed a chest covered in sweat-matted hair and two thick biceps split in half by what the white boys called a farmer’s tan. Tattoo across his right pectoral, insignia of some forgotten unit of an army of a nation that no longer existed.
Got some soap in my bag, he said. Reach in and get it, will ya?
I bent down and unzipped the pack and removed a crumpled ziploc baggie containing the eroded slivers of two soap cakes. When I stood up again, Chris had his pants off and was taking his first steps into the water below. His pale thighs clenched at the coldness of it, but he knelt down all the same and splashed some over his face and shoulders. Then he turned and looked at me, naked as the day he was made, and motioned for me to join him.
We got to make this fast, he said. Your mother’s liable to start worrying.
I held the baggie between my teeth and pulled off my shoes and socks. The heat of the ground against my bare soles was all the motivation I needed to get in. And once I was standing with the icy water racing past my legs, I didn’t think about what we looked like, standing together as we were, like a couple of Edenites basking in our own ignorance. I let out my breath and opened the baggie. Chris reached in and grabbed one of the slivers and started soaping himself. He laughed as I turned my back to him.
It’s nothing I ain’t seen before, he said. Quit fooling around and get to work. We both smell like ass, whether you notice or not. Wouldn’t feel right bringing you home in such a state. Your mother would never forgive me.
I backed away from the edge and turned and bent down to wet the soap. As I started in on my chest and armpits, I tried to keep my eyes on the water and its dizzying current and undertow. Sprigs of yellow grass growing up through cracks in the cement floor, bending with the flow of the water without yielding root. But gradually the sounds of Chris’ lathering drew my gaze until finally we stood facing each other, suds and scum leaking down our legs, with the high sun already bringing out the color in places that normally never saw its light. While I had barely begun to peel away the layer of grime on my own body, Chris was working himself over with the soap like he hadn’t had a real good scrub in months. He left no spot untreated, starting from the ridge of his freckled shoulders and moving down across his stomach and into the hairy pockets of his inner groin. It was the first time I’d seen anyone besides my brothers bathing, and even more exhilarating than the sight of him was the awareness that he was watching me too.
It’s okay, he said. We’re not breaking any rules out here. We’re just a couple of soldiers in the bush, doing the best we can. Am I right?
Yeah. You’re right.
Good. Now don’t forget the back of your neck. Lot of dirt builds up there.
When we’d finished rinsing off, we climbed back up to the bank and sat there for a while drying in the sun and not saying much. We slipped our clothes and shoes back on and started walking back toward the vineyard with wet dirt sloshing inside of our socks. It took me a while to get over the feeling that I was in trouble of some sprt, that despite the soap and water I was somehow even dirtier now than before. I couldn’t help but think of Dad standing over me with the swab in his hand, and what he would’ve said if he could’ve seen me there in the ditch. Or what Mom would’ve said for that matter. Or Father Ramsey. I’d always known, in one way or another, that I wasn’t the natural goody-goody the nuns and teachers doted on, that any goodness I hoped to exemplify would have to be done in spite of my nature and not because of it. But still, I always tried to keep my sinful tendencies in-check, and if from time to time I wandered off into the orchards, it was always on my own. No one had ever seen that side of me till now.