He sat down beside her on his heels. He looked like an old Mexican man, wearing a button-down shirt without any buttons. His hair was silver gray as a rabbit’s fur. Grandma wasn’t fooled for a minute.
“Get lonely down there in your town, Maggie?” he asked. “Did you come out here for a little wild company?”
Grandma Harken leaned over to the jackalope wife and smoothed one long ear back from her face. She looked up at them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
“Shit,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Never seen that before.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “What did you do to her, Maggie?”
“I didn’t do a damn thing, except not let her die when I should have.”
“There’s those would say that was more than enough.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.
“She put on a half-burnt skin. Don’t suppose you can fix her up?” It cost Grandma a lot of pride to say that, and the Father of Rabbits tipped his chin in acknowledgment.
“Ha! No. If it was loose I could fix it up, maybe, but I couldn’t get it off her now with a knife.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Now I see why you wanted one of the Patterned People.”
Grandma nodded stiffly.
The Father of Rabbits shook his head. “He might want a life, you know. Piddly little dead mouse might not be enough.”
“Then he can have mine.”
“Ah, Maggie, Maggie… You’d have made a fine rabbit, once. Too many stones in your belly now.” He shook his head regretfully. “Besides, it’s not your life he’s owed.”
“It’s my life he’d be getting. My kin did it, it’s up to me to put it right.” It occurred to her that she should have left Eva a note, telling her to send the fool boy back East, away from the desert.
Well. Too late now. Either she’d raised a fool for a daughter or not, and likely she wouldn’t be around to tell.
“Suppose we’ll find out,” said the Father of Rabbits, and nodded.
A man came around the edge of the standing stone. He moved quick then slow and his eyes didn’t blink. He was naked and his skin was covered in painted diamonds.
Grandma Harken bowed to him, because the Patterned People can’t hear speech.
He looked at her and the Father of Rabbits and the jackalope wife. He looked down at the stone in front of him.
The cigarettes he ignored. The mouse he scooped up in two fingers and dropped into his mouth.
Then he crouched there, for a long time. He was so still that it made Grandma’s eyes water, and she had to look away.
“Suppose he does it,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Suppose he sheds that skin right off her. Then what? You’ve got a human left over, not a jackalope wife.”
Grandma stared down at her bony hands. “It’s not so bad, being a human,” she said. “You make do. And it’s got to be better than that.”
She jerked her chin in the direction of the jackalope wife.
“Still meddling, Maggie?” said the Father of Rabbits.
“And what do you call what you’re doing?”
He grinned.
The Patterned Man stood up and nodded to the jackalope wife.
She looked at Grandma, who met her too-wide eyes. “He’ll kill you,” the old woman said. “Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don’t have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it’s over, you’ll be all the way something, even if it’s just all the way dead.”
The jackalope wife nodded.
She left the crutch lying on the stones and stood up. Rabbit legs weren’t meant for it, but she walked three steps and the Patterned Man opened his arms and caught her.
He bit her on the forearm, where the thick veins run, and sank his teeth in up to the gums. Grandma cursed.
“Easy now,” said the Father of Rabbits, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s one of the Patterned People, and they only know the one way.”
The jackalope wife’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged down onto the stone.
He set her down gently and picked up one of the cigarettes.
Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.
The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”
The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”
“Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said.
“Could be that, too.”
The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.
“How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.
“As long as it takes,” she snapped back.
The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half-full, half-new, halfway between one thing and the other.
“She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Man had left behind and offered one to Grandma.
“She doesn’t have a jackalope skin any more.”
He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”
“I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”
The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark.
“It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”
They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.
“I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”
The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.
From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.
“It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.
“Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once—must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it… Unless you want it?”
He held it out to Grandma Harken.
She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands.
“You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.
It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose—and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.