“STFU.”

“I’m serious,” Megan tells Bill.  “You don’t need training.  More training.”

“This guy Burt’s suicidal and you want me to talk him out of it.”

“Not necessarily.  I want you to resolve the situation in advance.  Like you did with that father who put out a hit on his son by accident.”

“The Critical Father,” Bill says, rubbing his stem-hip, the younger one by seventy-three years.  “We know how effective I was there.”

“You stopped the murder.”

“You stopped the murderer.”

“Fine.  This time, I want you either to stop Burt or tell him it’s all right.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Which.”

“Tell Burt it’s all right.”

“Don’t then.”

“What if he goes ahead and offs himself?” Bill asks.

“He’s not going to off himself.  He’s just not going to keep on on-ing himself.  He’s talking about letting mortality happen.  We’ll attend the funeral.  Su is lovely.”

“Will she have you disrobed, or whatever happens to therapists, and me sent to Sweden for aiding and abetting?”

“Natural end-of-life is legal in Siou-Cataw.  Susan will understand that we did all we could.”

“What if Burt haunts us?”

“I told you,” Megan says.  “You’ll like him.”

Tex-Mex moves to the edge of the deck to look into the eddy on the Not-Telling River in Forget-About-Fishing-Here, Maine.  Melt-out is past and the water is clear.  Bill puts on his L.L. Bean combo ski/fishing pants, zips and seals it to the tops of his fishing boots.  He sets the temp at 50 degrees Fahrengrade (the New Measures compromise kept the freezing point of water at Centigrade’s 0 but, to throw Fahrenheit a bone, kept the Fahrenheit units so that water now boils at 180 degrees).  He rigs an Egg-Sucking Chrystal Leech.  

Tex-Mex leads him downstream for twenty-minutes on the ancient trail.  “When did you come up with this idea?” Bill asks.  Tex-Mex ignores him.  During his planning hours by the woodstove through the winter, Tex-Mex has done what any fishing dog would do--worked out the start of the season.

The pool Tex-Mex has chosen is hell to wade--irregular chunks of granite wrapped in green snot.  A current butting his calves, then knees, like three hungry goats.  If Bill stumbles on his out-of-practice legs, a bucket of water will spill over the top of his waders and run down his his belly, crotch and legs with the thrilling slow-yet-fast inevitability of peeing one’s pants, except ice-cold.  “Get on with it,” Tex-Mex says, and not for the first time Bill wonders how long it would take the dog to develop arms and hands and cast for himself, were he to live a couple centuries instead of the decade-plus he is allotted.  Dogs still die--this is a source of endless debate.  Treating dogs and cats exactly like humans would give them the same no-end-in-sight lifespans but would also require the same use of resources, money and expertise, as for humans.  Where would the line be drawn?  Pet rabbits would certainly make the cut.  Why not ferrets, gold fish, chameleons?  Eventually the entire medical system will be economical and robotic to the point at which many of these barriers will fall.  Until such time, pets die and this is the only way in which most humans of recent generations experience the death of a loved one.

So Tex won’t Lamarck into a fly-rod capable canine and is okay with that as long as Bill does what he’s told.  Others would say Tex doesn’t speak, but others would in no way influence how clearly Tex and Bill hear each other.  Bill wades a few feet into the river, willing himself not to bend at the waist as he deploys his wading staff, feeling the insistent push of the current.  Tex directs Bill’s cast with his inflexible gaze and--opening day!--an order-for-two chef’s-special salmon takes the Leech and tacks up and into the channel like an America’s Cup hopeful.  The fish bends Bill’s four-weight into a satisfying arc before snapping the leader.  Decent fish, Tex concedes, as unconcerned as Bill about netting fish.  

Bill ties a Zonker onto the existing leader, not even bothering to add tippet--Bill will tie to a leader until it’s too thick to go into the hook eye.  He wonders about Burt, the fellow who wants to just live until he dies.  It’s as if Megan has forgotten that Thompson, Bill’s best boyhood friend, took his own life, as they used to say, when Thompson and Bill were just kids--well, they were in their eighties.  No, he realizes.  It’s because of this unexamined trauma as Megan calls it--and it’s true that Bill not only doesn’t examine Thompson’s suicide, he tries not to think about it at all--that Megan wants Bill to work with her client who, to be fair, just wants to age to death, not kill himself.  Still, two with one stone--maybe Bill will convince Burt to hold on for another century or two.  Maybe at the same time, Bill will come to some kind of understanding of Thompson’s suicide.  Bill is stuck thinking about Thompson as if he is Thompson’s big brother and Thomson is in some kind of danger from which Bill needs to rescue him. 

Is Burt depressed? Bill asked Megan the day before while they were sparring in the home gym, because depression is often fixable--psychopharm, a rearranged domestic situation.  No, Megan told him, Burt is almost concerningly cheerful.  Isolated?  Disfigured?  Bill asked hopefully.  Disabled?  All of these can be corrected between the social workers, the surgeons, the labs.  No.  They weren’t really sparring.  Megan was running him.

“Hey!” Tex-Mex says.  “We fishing here?”  Tex does not truck with distracted casting.  You’re either fishing or you’re wandering around in a river thinking about random shit.   “Zonker?” Tex asks him, because bait fish are not on nature’s menu today.  Bill knows Tex is right but occasionally follows his own instincts.  Bill, and humans generally, understand random better than Tex-Mex, or dogs generally.  In Bill’s experience, fish are closer to humans in this regard.  If a salmonid sees what looks like a madtom (irresistible baitfish which made a big comeback after Global Cooling) pulled off of a ledge upstream--shehe might come after it--even in a river filled with bottom larvae.  Tex wanders up bank between fern and soggy downed birch to piss.  So it is particularly gratifying when the brookie takes the Zonker mid-stream.  I’ll be damned, Tex thinks, lowering his leg.  Bill plays lands and releases the beauty.  He wills himself not to look over at Tex in triumph and almost succeeds.

Burt looks like Burt Reynolds--same roguish smile, easy strength.  Burt mounts Blanche, Bill tightens his jetpack, and they head across the ranch at a trot/hover.  The distant hills are dun, the near prairie Ireland green.  Sandstone in piles like tan corduroy cloth awaiting a titan sewing machine.  Sky the airy blue of child eyes.  Western chill of night yielding to Western day heat.  Bill explains that horses don’t agree with the ligaments of his knees.  He doesn’t say that he’s scared of horses and that they don’t like him.  Burt knows anyway.

“Just watch out for Buffaloberries,” Burt says, as Bill veers too close to a tree-size shrub.

The ranch is half Dude, half Jainist.  Burt and Susan look after two hundred head of Chianina on the Dude side, The Lucky Y Ranch.  Lucky Y is for teenagers and college students in their twenties, thirties and forties, who come to learn to ride and care for cattle and horses--really, to care for themselves and get off their virtuals.  To the west is the Rishabhadeva Tirtha Jainist Temple, where a larger herd of Zebus spend peaceful lives.  The herders are a mixed lot of monks, nuns and teachers, silent or talking.  There are also regular cowboys and girls, all Jainists.  Acolytes live there and study.  Burt and Su’s old ranch house stands midway between the two establishments, three new miles of space in either direction, ten miles north and twelve south from the nearest ranches.

“You know I was in love with your wife,” Burt says without preamble and with the Reynolds smile.  Bill, flying beside him, wonders if this is a cowboy thing leading up to the stand-and-stare and the quick draw.

“I see,” Bill says, a couple of Burt’s horse’s tack-a-tacks later.  “Under” tack-a-tack, “standable,” Bill adds, to show he is enlightened, non-possessive.  Which is bullshit.

"Transference.  Plus she’s a looker,” Burt tells him.  “We talked about it and Megan explained it was useful.”

Tack-a-tack, tack-a-tack.

“Wore off.  My wife thought it was hilarious, like when our Bain fell for his first-grade teacher, Miss Pratt.  Far as that goes, Bain wasn’t wrong.”

Tack-a-tack, tack-a-tack.

“I’m not tired of living,” Burt says, changing subject but not pace.  “I don’t yearn for death.”

Tack-a-tack. 

“I just like being human.”

Tack-a-tack, tack-a-tack.

“Like my folks,” Bert adds.  “They were fine with getting old and dying.”

Tack-a-tack.

“Moms knew heaven was there, and that Grams Rita, her mom my gramma, was waiting for her.  Dad, Frank, loves a nap.”  

The tack-a-tacks slow.  Burt drops to a walk beside a graveyard.  

“Frank, Bill.  Bill, Frank.  I placed your hundred on the Packers.  Whoever you’re listening to up there doesn’t know fuhball.”

Bill takes a breath.  Burt laughs--a wide sound in the open air.

“Had you going there for a second, didn’t I?  No, Frank can’t hear anything.  He’s dead.  And I am, and he was, too flint to gamble.  With money.  I gamble--he gambled--with other things.”

Tack-a-tack.  Bill watches him ride off for a minute, then hovers after him.  Sure, Burt was “just funnin’” as they say in Westerns.  But why didn’t Burt introduce him to Moms? 

Because Burt’s mother is not napping. She’s in heaven with Rita.  If Bill were a gambling man--and who isn’t, when you come down to it--he’d put money on it that’s where Burt thinks Moms and Grams Rita are.

Anzick was often mistaken for a girl until his shoulders squared off.  His mother Ticwtkwa was Salish and lived in White Creek after his father Nkwusxwi drowned in the Bitterroot.  When Anzick was twelve, Ticwtkwa took up with a white guy, Greg.   After a summer and autumn of love, Greg became sarcastic sober and abusive under the influence of black neuros.   He occasionally hit Anzick’s mom until she had him under restraining order microdrones that kept him away from the house.  Sadly, the drones weren’t programmed for aggression outside that small area and Greg cornered Anzick in the woods, pinned him, ground his body on him, kissed him on the lips.  Pretended it was a joke.  He made Anzick promise not to tell.  Anzick kept the secret, became depressed.  A year later, he starting skipping ninth grade, drinking.  To get money, he broke into cars, houses.  Greg left town.

Ticwtkwa was at wit’s end when, at the strong suggestion of the juvenile court, she brought Anzick to the Jainists.  Anzick learned ranch work and almost became an acolyte before he fell in love with Dhisha, a girl who like him had been directed to the Jainists by the court.  Anzick and Disha went steady for two years, then got married in a combo Jainist-Salish-Kootenai ceremony.  They lived in town in the two-family Ticwtkwa had just managed the down payment for.  Anzick never told anyone about being humped and kissed by Greg and it didn’t seem like he would ever have any reason to.  No clothes had come off.  He was a married man now and would be a father one day--he and Dhisha weren’t in a hurry.  They kept a list of Salish and Kootenai names for their babies--they wanted two--in maybe twenty years.  

Dhisha told Anzick and Ticwtkwa that she had been raped by her father and that when she told her mother about it when she was still a skinny girl her mom had said she was lying and that later after she rounded out her mother said it was Disha’s fault because she looked and dressed like a whore.  There were times when Anzick almost told Dhisha his own story, but then didn’t.  It didn’t seem respectful after what Dhisha had lived through, plus he was chicken.  Dhisha knew there were gaps in her knowledge of Anzick.  Except for his bursts of anger, his periods of silence, he was a good guy.  There were things beside the years of rape she had lived that he didn’t know about her--she figured the same was true for him.  In their way, they did okay.  Ticwtkwa watched and listened to the two of them--the heat ducts to her kitchen were right above them and she heard many of their conversations.  She began to hope that her stupid relationship with Greg was safely in the past.  But she knew Anzick was not at peace.  

“Wanna dance?” Su asks Bill.  

“Certainly.”  His answer is good manners his mother taught him--his rising to his feet and allowing Burt’s regal wife to take his hands, pull him to the livingroom.  Burt clears the table--the clank of the dishes is followed by the sonic mosquito hum of the dishthrosher.  Su and Bill dance for a quarter of an hour.  From time to time Su lays warm fingers across his neck, the backs of his hands.

“Thanks for coming,” she says.

The songs span the centuries.  Bill remembers some, has never heard others.  Maybe a hundred twenty years ago, he stopped trying to play name-that-tune.

Susan’s the same age as him and Megan--well, fifty-nine years younger.

“So when did you--” he asks and she laughs and gathers him in until her words are right on his shoulder.  Su and Burt were post-Era of Common Mortality by a couple-three decades.  There’s debate about the date, which was a string of medical and scientific breakthroughs culminating in nobody much dying.  Sue and Burt, like everyone, were not sure it would last.  They had courted in time, with the understanding that years were precious, that one chose one’s mate, lived life together, then helped each other through life’s decline.  It was a romantic idea that was hard to let go of--rocking chairs on the porch, eternal vows.  Like all who married young, Su and Burt had faced that strange transition to the New Time.  There were recommitment ceremonies, but mostly there were separations and divorces once couples came to grips with what forever meant in a post-Hallmark world.  Spiteful separations but mostly sheepish ones, as when one running partner drops to a walk in a marathon.  People who had been together traveled on alone.

Susan has that monogamous privilege to offer touch without seduction.  It’s a given that if things were different, they might explore--but things aren’t different.  They just dance.

“Are you going to--” he asks.  She pulls back and looks into his eyes.

“Not yet.”  The song changes.  Not yet could mean Susan isn’t thinking about embracing mortality for another couple decades, or a couple hundred years.

“But you can imagine it,” he says.  Their hands are on each other’s shoulders.  They are exactly the same height.  Bill has always liked this, just as he likes having a couple inches on Megan.  There are so many different ways he fits with women and one of the nagging downers of monogamy that Megan tells him he really doesn’t have to put up with is not enjoying different fits.

“I can understand it,” Su tells him.  “It’s appealing.”  Mortality.  The way the old human story rounded to a close.

For about a heartbeat Bill tries to imagining being asked to try to understand Megan telling him she is going to let death come, not get herself reconfigured every third March (her birth month).  But no it turns out he can’t imagine trying to understand this and has no intention of doing so.

“Rootbeer float?” Su asks.  She pulls him, her grip ‘surprisingly strong’ except that he isn’t surprised, toward the kitchen.  Sweat cools their bodies in the desert air.  Su makes their floats and they sit on the counter chairs.

“I should wait for the ice cream to melt,” Bill tells her, licking his white-stache.  Su is waiting.  Bill drinks. “I’m not great at waiting.”  It’s easily the most flirtatious thing he’s said in a year.  “Su, what am I supposed to do here?”

“Talk,” Su says.  “Think.”

“I can do that.”

Danielle (Dani) was the first woman Megan loved.  They met when Megan was studying engineering at Colorado School of Mines.  Dani was older, an actress, lived with Carl, Megan’s faculty advisor.  Megan was already secretly married and publicly mated with Bill.  It was Megan who had to convince Dani of everything--that she could love a woman, that Megan wasn’t too young (Megan was forty-seven, the oldest sophomore in the school, Dani ninety-three years older), that Bill knew about it.  Megan had been methodical and the night they slept together, after weeks of delay on Dani’s part, Dani told her, “I hope you’re still going to desire me when I’m not elusive.”  That was the way Dani spoke, and Megan couldn’t get enough of it.  Any of Megan’s engineer classmates would have said, “All right already.  If you want me that bad, let’s do it.”

Two days after Bill flew Queen off to the West, Dani’s Pontiac lands on the roof pad.  Megan runs upstairs and throws her arms around her.  Tex-Mex looks on with his usual ambivalence.  Bitches, he mutters, the word having particular bitterness in Dog, the polite form being Hündin.  But when Dani comes over, squats and hugs him, Tex-Mex’s tail thumps the floor and he gives her salty neck a lick.  Tex-Mex doesn’t approve.  Amoragamy is catshit, he tells Megan when he recovers his dignity.  I’m going to tell Bill.  Megan just laughs and treats him like a sulky puppy, giving him a chunk of biosteak when they get to the kitchen, which just pisses him off more.  He still eats it.  All afternoon he stalks in and out of whatever rooms the two women are in.  He pretends not to hear or smell their lovemaking.

“Do you think about it?” Dani asks Megan when they are in front of the fire, Megan leaning back against Dani who is leaning against the sofa, a quilt around their hips, catching up, covering Bill’s whereabouts and discussing his mission.

Suicide by missed medical appointment has been the leading cause of death for centuries.  It isn’t hard to die--all one has to do is not show up for a decade of screenings, endocrine tuneups, psychotherapy and psychopharm tweeks, physical therapy home practice reviews, stem cell harvests/implants slash organ replacements, continuing sexual education, nutrition and wellness lessons, serenity and sobriety retreats.  Health is not for the disorganized.

“Remember when I had P.M.S. after Esther?” Megan tells Dani. Postpartum Mortality Syndrome affects fifty-three percent of first-mothers and thirty-two percent of second-on mothers.  Motherhood after two centuries results in far lower levels of P.M.S., but is still significant.  “It took me by surprise because I was fine with Mo.” Dani gently tugs Megan’s thick auburn hair.  “I remember the day it started.  I was in आजी Jaga’s rocking chair, nursing Esther.  The sun was setting on the kitchen wall.  Bill and Mo were making dinner.  I thought, I just want this to be the last time.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want more children.  I wanted to be the woman who raised that girl and that boy, and then grows old and dies.

“Because it was so right,” Dani says.

“Yes.  Perfect.  Not to be repeated.”

““We can’t stop wanting our lives to be art.”

Anzick walks his stallion Tulip parallel to each of the Zebus in turn, scratching Mildred between her shoulder blades, Blake behind his ears.  There are three hundred eleven calves, cows and bulls, so this takes a good part of the afternoon.  The Sikhs taught Anzick that not killing animals was only a first step.  Not butchering for meat or money, not indenturing for milk, allowed a whole range of emotions and relationships that had been the exclusive privilege of smaller pets and their humans.  The Janists explained to Anzick, when he was first sober, that the point was that certain cows would become his friends and guides  Some would like him and he them.  They would teach him new ways to live.  Anzick believed his ancestors had pointed him down this path that he traveled so easily, but his mother reminded him that the Salish killed fish and game.  Still, Anzick argued, the old stories were about the spirits of living things.  The old ways were built around tx’otx, Earth Mother.  Okay, Ticwtkwa said, half agreeing and in any case not wanting to undermine the new identity her son and the Janists were constructing in the place of booze and theft.

When the herd approached the capacity of the windbreaks and dry-bedding areas, which were necessary or at least really nice when the winter storms came, cattle were given away to Jainist folks all over the continent.  The trickiest part of Anzick’s job was to help his cows and bulls decide that they were okay with leaving Rishabhadeva Tirtha for new pastures.  It was too much to ask the cattle to voluntarily walk up into a drone to be flown out on Exodus Day.  Anzick’s honor and burden was to chose the Explorers in the late summer, and a week before autumn equinox, to lead them up the ramps to their air stalls with alfalfa and sugar beats, then to fly with them to their new homes.  As Anzick and his charges ascended, everyone sang End of Day as loudly as they could to dilute the mournful bleats of the remaining Zebus.  It was also Anzick’s job when he returned to the ranch to explain to the family and friends of the departed  cow or bull where shehe had gone, and why this was a time for celebration as well as for sadness.  Anzick wasn’t a cattle whisperer--that would be Jörn, one of the oldest Jainists, whose job included cow marriage and death counseling, and general psychiatry.  No, Anzick was more of a cattle college advisor.  He also looked out for all the ailments and conditions that Dhisha, Sylvia and Rob, the vets-in-training and the old vet, took care of.

Anzick is almost finished visiting everybody, and feeling that sleepy contentment that being almost part of the herd gives him, when he sees Greg on his dirt bike up on the bluff.  For a moment Anzick thinks the familiar figure under the battered grey Stetson is a daydream.  How many times, asleep, drunk, has Anzick imagined Greg’s lean silhouette, his crooked smile?  Greg waves a friendly hello.  Anzick, suddenly his teenage pre-grind-and-kiss self, waves back.  Then Anzick is his grown self again, thinking, What did I wave for?  

Greg’s dirt bike pirouettes a funnel of dust.  The tall man in his sweat-stained denim shirt and jeans floats off.

Shame comes hot up Anzick’s back into his scalp.

Born in Salida, Colorado.  Burt had a brother Steve, just a year-and-a-half older.  He had a little sister, Kate, born when Burt was eighteen.  Burt and Steve were always together--skiing, fishing, reading, hiking, riding, taking care of Kate, kayaking, rafting, virtual and regular sparring in the basement.  Also school, just a year apart because of how their birthdays fell.  Dad, Doug, primary at-home parent, occasionally sold real estate but was always cutting young couples deals such as not taking his full commission, so he couldn’t work for a company.  Mom, Sila, was a doctor, a semi-Luddhite who performed non-robot-assist surgery with what some would describe as recklessness.  Practice was family plus, meaning she did everything the family docs up in the mountains had always done--births, annuals, gyn, orthopedics, but also had privileges in a surgical theater with second-tier robotics capable of routine organ replacements and repairs, oncology, cosmetics.  Sila was licensed to monitor all these procedures and joked that her robots called her Aunt Sila, she had known their robot parents, which was true.  Sila had overseen the installation of the first theater when people were still leery of being operated on by machines, physician supervised, machine intelligence robotics from somewhere else on the planet.  The remote surgeons only stepped in when--well, they never stepped in.  But their presence reassured especially that first generation of patients.

Burt was a mountain boy, rangy and handsome, good conversationalist, smiler, comfortable with everybody--the tough old-timers, the rich kids, the religious parents and their confused or obedient kids.  He thought he too would become a doctor because his mother had such a respected and gregarious role.  But he didn’t like regular hours or listening patiently.  Briefly, he considered the kinds of medicine in which not listening to people is okay, but then he realized he just didn’t want to be a doctor, even if he didn’t know what he did want to be.

He went to the University of Colorado, Boulder, spent half his years at the Tokyo sister campus, and studied Artificial Humility, which had emerged as the complement to Intelligence after the bloom was off that rose.  It was discovered during those difficult centuries of MAs (Malicious Algorithms), MPJs (Machine Practical Jokes) and UE C and G As (Unpredictably Enabled Capital and Government Agency), that the key to machine oversight was a kind of common sense, coined Artificial Humility by Les Iskander, a graphic novelist and theoretical intelligist.  In layperson’s terms, AH, pronounced ah, is the ability of advanced machine actors to do less than they can, and to just not think about it.

Then Burt met Susan who was the section leader for his last required Gen Ed class, Genetic Sociology, basically a sociobiology class the engineers called Bioclocks for Jocks.  He spent a lot of time in Susan’s virtual office hours and, as the semester ended, took a plane back from Tokyo to Denver so he could walk into her actual office in Boulder.  As luck had it, Su turned in Burt’s grade an hour before his flight landed, and looked less surprised than he had imagined she would when he showed up.  It had never occurred to him it wasn’t the first time a love-struck undergrad had waited until his course ended to ask her out.

Su was fifty-three years older than Burt, and she tolerated his lovemaking--the doe eyes, the stilted compliments and silences, the sweaty hands and temperamental erections, the planning for well eternity, with amused familiarity.  She said she was Polly Amorous and didn’t want children for at least three hundred years, so there was no real point in accepting the silver band he slipped onto her finger one night when they were both moist with festivities so that even though it was slightly small for her marriage knuckle, it made it on.  Susan didn’t know herself why she kept it.  She didn’t consider herself engaged but found she liked wearing it--the way she enjoyed Protestant hymns, farming by hand, and reading paper.  There was something solid about old ways, things.  Burt’s love fell squarely in that category--tools with wooden handles, prayer before bed, soap and water, 2D images, fireplaces.

Almost in a dream, if a dream can last fifteen years, Su found herself telling one lover after the other that she wanted to be friends but not fuck anymore.  In year five, she introduced  Burt to her parents as a possible father of grandchildren.  In years eight-through-twelve she designed wedding dresses that she virtual wore and occasionally printed out and actual wore.  She let Burt bring her to dance classes where she learned tango and la pango along with the Texas two-step they had grown up on.  

The anti-marriage movement came at them from both coasts but before the waters of it closed over their heads, while her Lutheran and his Methodist parents still believed in God, family, marriage and children, Burt and Su got hitched.  Burt at the altar looked like a happy teenager, though he was well into his fifties.  Su felt strangely uplifted by the whole business, as if she were enacting a fairytale, the Princess of course, and would ascend immediately after the dinner at Burt’s parents’ house and the honeymoon in Manhattan into a palace where she would be Queen.  But Queen of what?  Over whom?  What actually transpired was that, in New York, when Burt brought her breakfast in bed, Susan found tears streaming and, in answer to Burt’s question why, answered, “Because I’m married.  To you.”  He hadn’t come up with anything to say to that and the moment, if moments can last weeks, passed.

Su found marriage suited her well enough.  She understood it from her parents--the richness of ritual, the theater of togetherness.  It needed procreation in the version she was committed to, and procreation was always the plan with Burt.  So much so that when it ended, when their second, Sophia, reached adulthood in her forties and moved out, her younger brother Bain having preceded her in this, Su understood for the first time why she had cried that morning on her honeymoon.  It was human life that was sad, the way it rose and fell around intimacy and time.  Burt was an ordinary exceptional man, high on the curves of kindness, dependability, protectiveness of her and theirs.  He was a good man.  When Bain and Sophia were gone, Su cried again, this time after dinner.  The ranch was just the two of them, the two herds, the cats and dogs, the pronghorn, elk, ferrets, mule deer and white-tails, groundhogs, hawks. beavers, rabbits, porcupines, bats, golden and bald eagles, turkeys, bullsnakes, grouse, foxes, herons, badgers, squirrels, woodpeckers, gophers, ospreys, trout.  Plus all the bugs--flying, burrowing, hiving, hovering, pollinating, hilling.  This time Burt, who had been her husband for seventy-three years, didn’t ask why.  He just sat by her, nodding and humming assent.

“But,” he said after a while, and hummed in a slightly different register.  Su smiled through her tears.  Burt was an ordinary, exceptional man.

Then centuries passed.  It used to be that seasons passed and of course they still did.  Minutes and hours, too.  Everything was actually slower than it ever had been.  For the first few centuries of New Time things sped up--there was a collective panic in human consciousness that, while death wasn’t imminent, nature was out of sorts and it was hard to focus on what was happening.  The brain was working like crazy to accommodate ongoingness and the effect was a blurring, as with speed.  But then the collective consciousness and the individual brain caught up, caught its breath, and said, Wait a minute, there really isn’t going to be an end for a very long time.  So just relax and enjoy the ride.  And one did.  One looked around, had another sip of coffee, checked out the sky, the light on the fields, the water, the buildings.  One took account, one breathed a little more slowly, one’s pulse slowed, and one started using the pronoun one.  In other words, one took things a little less personally, which enabled one to take in more of the world, without having to spend quite as much bandwidth on self.  The effect of which was that everything filled out its edges a bit more fully.  There was a positive meniscus to time and space, a bit more of it always, no matter how closely one looked, or even if one just reclined in one’s chair and let the eyes partially close.

It was in this phase that Su and Burt’s marriage really took off.  Up until then, they had been functionally well.  They planned, compromised, let the offspring manipulate and play one of them off the other.  They bickered, they fucked, they played out their disloyalties and secret abandonments, their equally secret devotions.  They were, in short, married with children.  But when those children left the ranch, they took a long look at each other.  Marriage, by this century, really was a relic.  They literally didn’t know a single other married couple.  They knew of other married couples, some in their county, but these weren’t people they actually knew.  Their parents had died of the sort of natural causes that had been incipient too long in their too old bodies by the time the new tech and knowledge kicked in.  It was weird to watch the oldsters die when so very much was known about what they were dying of, and how close they had come to not needing to die of those things, whether heart issues that made them too feeble to withstand heart transplants, or cancers that outpaced the new cures by what seemed minutes but was actually months.  Anyway, the old ones were gone, and the new ones either hadn’t married, or had only made it through a century or two before bailing, or being bailed on. So-called adultery in the over three-hundred set was childish at best, impressive at other best.  Simply running out of the things to say was what usually caused the separations.  Love turned out to be an aptitude distinct from emotional intelligence generally.  In fact, love turned out to correlate with a certain emotional dim-wittedness, a kind of resonance in the heart and soul that was second nature to many cats, dogs, cows, horses, rats, rabbits, but only present in one human in five, it became clear to the social psychologists.  

Love capacity or lack thereof didn’t reveal itself until well into the second or often third century of relationship.  A spouse might be passionate and generous, only to find, when the hundred-seventy-year-itch hit, that their love jones petered out.  While another spouse, who had been non-commital for the first century, alternating peevish, withdrawn, and tepid, distracted when fucking, might suddenly, in the fifteenth decade of a relationship, find herhimself blasted daily by an adoration and attraction as potent as religious rebirth. Sex might catch fire in the ten thousandth repedition, the body of the husband or wife suddenly becoming or again becoming  lovely, desirable, mysterious, the choreography of positions and frictions surprising and gratifying.  Dinner table gazing and hand-reaching might become commonplace, candles lit, at the two-hundred year anniversary, then become a weekly ritual, a love sabbath.

In ranch terms, this meant that in their sixth century Su started following Burt around the place the way, for half a millennium, Burt had dogged her ass.  Su couldn’t get enough of him, and couldn’t get it soon enough.  She tried not to let it show but she kept touching him as he passed, sometimes even pulling him to her and kissing him.  She waited impatiently for him in bed while he dawdled in the bathroom, soniced his teeth with deliberation, let the bot floss him as if he were one of their children age four and the machine one of the two of them, trying to gain points with their openly judgmental pediatric dentist, Lina.  As Su waited, she pretended to read or holo, but her body gave her away, wet, trembling, as soon as Burt lay beside her, so that it was all that he could do--as for three hundred years it had been all she could do--to hide his amusement as she impatiently climbed onto him.

Is symmetry possible?  Is there a law of physics that says that when one spouse adores, the other drifts?  It seems so.  One day Burt was keeping track of his wife’s every footstep through the house where she “saw” students or lectured in her office, or the stable, or to and from the university U MT on in-person days, the next he looked over his shoulder at her as if she were not even his woman--a sister maybe, an employee.  He could barely restrain himself from telling her to back off.

“Honey,” he said to her one day, when for twenty years he hadn’t.  “I’m right here.”  He gave her a kiss, not on her proffered lips but on her forehead.  Su only dimly remembered the days not fifty years previous when she had turned to where he was a few footsteps behind her--turned him around, patted his flank condescendingly, sent him away.  Burt had been as loyal and attentive to her as Marvin Gaye, her dobbin.  It had amused and flattered her that her husband, from courtship through the next two hundred plus years, needed to keep her always in view, as if she might change her mind and leave, which wasn’t always far from the truth.  Eventually, though, his vigilance got to be a drag.  Now she was the mooning lover, he the man with places to be and hay to bale.

Then that too passed. Crazy what eight hundred years will do.  Bain and Sophia were in their three-hundreds with their own lives, two or three each by the old counting of spouses and offspring, and Su and Burt had been alone on Lucky Y for three-hundred-twenty years.  They calmed down, neither chasing nor neglecting, lusting or busting.  Yet they weren’t friends.  They were married in a way that their ancestors hadn’t had to worry about, a eighty-six year marriage the Guinness old record.  Theirs was one of the new long relationships that Michel Levine, a French psychiatrist specializing in addiction, described as an Heureux-Pour-Toujours, Happy-Ever-After.  His book, La Vie en Ambre, characterized these long marriages, which for convenience sake he defined as over 750 years, as distillations, as “paired enlightenment, in which two minds and spirits equipose,” and also, of course, as addiction.  The spouses lose the ability to metabolize independently.  They forget how to sleep, how to eat, how to move, alone.  Separate them and they suffer organically.  They speak a private language like twins.  They have a repertoire of gestures, stories, conflicts, which they play out in ever more subtle variation.  As long as they have each other, they are healthy.  Separated, they slow to a crawl, or dramatically collapse--withdrawal but also heartbreak, confusion, loss of identity and purpose.  Eventually, some of them recover, as from other addictions.  Suicide is very difficult, remote and autonomous monitoring very good, and always prescribed at the end of long unions.  For the lucky ones, sadness yields to new horizons.  The heart opens to new love.  Or shehe realizes they are good on their own, in their second millenium.  Lovers Anonymous helps.  The recognition that, even contently alone, one is always a Love Addict, just one throb away from starting all over again.

Su wonders what will become of her when Burt is gone.  She has a short list of possibles, a longer list of that-would-be-a-fun-rompers.  Will she always miss him, remember him, look for him?  No one knows except Bill, who says, Sure, you’ll remember me.  And laughs.  He tells her she will remember all she loves about him and also everything about him she finds deeply, almost unbearably, irritating.  His natural side part, for instance (column A), and his way of walking heavy and waking her up (column B).  That she will love again, and that he will surely look better in the rearview mirror, in contrast to the new one with herhis flaws.  The next poor lucky soul who will be in her glorious arms and between her heavenly thighs will have to compete with him, little old Bert--new and improved in memory.  

If that isn’t funny, Burt asks her when she wants to go through it once again, then what the hell is? 

“Hi, Sweetie.  Whatcha doin’?” Bill asked.

“We’re on a hike.”

“Tell Dani hi for me.”

“Bill says hi.  Dani sends her love.”

Bill leaves that one where it falls.  I mean, two ways to be here--jealous, possessive, juvenile; or sophisticated, European, open-minded.  Love is many splendored and potentially painful thing.  Better to ask about Tex-Mex.

“How’s Tex?”

“Wandered off,” Megan tells him.  .  

“He keeping an eye on things?”  Megan laughs.  This is as close as Bill wants to go to what Tex is actually doing, judging the shit out of the two women.  Bill is going to get an earful when he gets back, Tex making it clear that Megan is a faithless bitch of the first order, and that Bill is not the dog he pretends to be or he would keep his house in order. 

“How’s Burt?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t even know how I’d know.”

“Well, do you have the sense that he is capable of making a thoughtful decision about letting himself grow old?”

“He’s happy enough.  He acts normal.  He wants to start aging next year.”

“And?”

“Makes it seem like everybody should be doing it.  Like when we were all doing it.  Makes me wonder again.”  Bill is standing by the river that borders Rishabhadeva Tirtha to the north.  In the lazy water, cucumber-size trout nibble, mostly creating ripples but occasionally flopping just into the sunny air after olives, like lazy teenagers turning over in bed.  Bill’s got a sparkle dun on the four-weight that’s leaning on the smokey pine beside him.  The air is warm in that way it is when it was cool in the morning and is suddenly cool no more.

“Wonder?” Megan asks.

“You know.  About always.  About tomorrows without end.”

She sighs--puffs, really.  She can breathe and hike, or she can talk but, despite her black belts, she’s not good at walking and talking.  Or walking and swallowing, for that matter.  She has to stand still to take a drink from her canteen.

“That’s the work of it,” she tells Bill.  “Entering the client’s frame of reference.  Maintaining your own.”  

“I don’t think I’ve got a handle on it.”

“Maybe you were right.  About not doing this one,” Megan says.  

“I’m falling half in love with easeful death.”

“What about Susan?”

“Yeah,” Bill admits.  “Easeful Su’s not bad either.”  He frees his rod from the tree and walks over to where his wading staff leans against the barn.  “But I’m not going to fall all the way into either of them.”

“You best not.”

Which means what?  It’s a double standard.  Megan’s allowed to love, he’s expected to have crushes  Expected by both of them.  It’s not like he’s not allowed to be with old loves or new--he has, he does.  But the expectation, the normal they pull off from, and return to, is a double standard.

“I love you,” Megan says.

“I know,” Bill says.  “I’m okay.  I’m learning.  Burt’s got me seeing how good this planet is.  How his wife and mine are one-of-a-kind irreplaceable love munchkins that each of us somehow get connected to.”

“Munchkins.”

“Antique carriages.”

“Antique.”

“Candy candelabras.”

“Bill.”

“Burt says morning light is popcorn from the suns, mostly just one sun.”

“Popcorn.”

“The cleanest white underwear I ever found in your bureau.”

“Underwear.”

“Orange juice squeezed from Calypso.”

“Baby,” Megan asks him, and from her slowing breathing Bill knows she has stopped walking to concentrate on her words.  “You shouldn’t microdose during the day.”

“Not even a tiny?”

“Maybe not.  Are you alone?”

“Burt!  Am I alone!”

“Always!”

“Where’s Susan?”

“Biscuits.”

“She’s making biscuits,” Megan repeats. “Can she see you and Burt from her window?”

Bill laughs.

“Does Su have a window?”

“Tell Megan I’m lightening.”  

“Maybe you guys don’t wade too deep.  You’re fishing, right?”

“River.”  Bill lifts his rod and detaches the fly.  He moves the rod to make the fly fly as slowly as he can make it fly.  Like a real fly hovering like a real fly.  

“Bill?  Honey?” Megan asks.  But he’s gone.

Anzick lifts the non-stick pan and holds it to the light.  Dhisha, putting away the clean stuff, knows this is for her.  Methodically, Anzick runs the distributor over the pan’s surface, removing traces of peatloaf that have adhered to it.  Very slowly, sighing.

“Fine,” Dhisha said, reaching for it.  “I ruined it.  I’ll buy you a new one."

“It’s not that bad.”  But Anzick has achieved his goal--picking on his wife.  Sure, she used the deionizer on the pan when the instructions it announced whenever you picked it up, in an annoying voice pitched between male and female, not to.  But whatever.  It was under warranty and the drone would pick it up as soon as he told it, the pan, that it was going back to its maker, and chucked it into the backyard while it was saying Goodbye, and I’ll come back to you refurbished next Tuesday, which never ceased to entertain him, the sound of the voice flying out into the backyard.  It was no big deal, but Anzick wanted to give Dhisha that little jostle, that nudge, that he knew would upset her.  

“Why are you cleaning it?”

“Just checking,” Anzick lied, and she knew he was lying, both of them knowing that once deionized, it was never going to be non-stick again.  

Since yesterday, when he had seen Greg on the bluff, he had felt that ember of anger, seeking release.  He had jostled Bain, a yearling, who had admittedly been biting the teat of Janice even though she was dry and it clearly hurt her slightly.  But a mother knows how to deteat a yearling.  There had been no cause for Greg to poke Bain in the hock with the toe of his Ariat.  And now?

“How is Babe Ruth’s knee?”

“Still swollen.”  Now Anzick was doing the man-of-few-words thing that, along with the tolerant-of-her-shortcomings thing he had just deployed using the pan, was bound to piss her off.  He could have prattled on about the bull’s bum knee, which Jörn was actually making good headway on using acupuncture.  Instead, he left Dhisha hanging, like a woman left holding out her hand to be affectionately taken.  The ember of helplessness and rage inside him glowed.

“Do you want to holo Programmers?”  She was giving it one more try.  Programmers was their show.  They loved hanging out in the dorm rooms, the computer centers and office start-ups that were the settings for the series, set way back when computers were still programmed by smart children in their first half-centuries of life, and money could still be held in the hand and accumulated in portions that could be measured as partial percentages of all human wealth.  The last episode had stopped with a college kid, Mark, inventing a program which would allow people to share their lives with each other--something that apparently had really been a big deal, photos that took seconds to unscroll on the authentic screens, which were actual physical things on wooden desks.  It was all super antique.  And he liked this girl Priscilla.  Priscilla was from Asia back when Homogeny hadn’t happened yet and people from different continents could be identified by certain common physical traits like skin tone and eye shape.  She was going to be a doctor and thought the programmer Mark was not a serious individual and so wouldn’t go on a date with him--that was where the last episode had left off.  Dhisha knew Anzick wanted to see the woman do what she Dhisha had done with him--give the programmer guy, Mark, a chance, even though or because he seemed to have potential though he was still a boy, just as Anzick had been when Dhisha found him nuzzling Aretha and telling her it was okay to come into the barn, the shadows weren’t monsters, just light.  Right away, Dhisha knew Anzick was worth checking out.

“Nah,” Anzick said.  “I’m going to Battle.”

“Okay,” Dhisha said.  Battle?  In the basement with his virtual helmet on and his transforming weighted stick which inside the program would look and feel like a mace?  Battle with some kid probably still living with his parents, in school or apprenticeship, during the one hour in two days the two of them, wife and husband, had to relax together, to sit on the aircouch with the temp set a little warm, maybe holding hands, maybe just floating there with their legs touching, laughing and smiling as the programmer and the strong woman who wanted to be a doctor went on their first date?  That hurt.  

Dhisha didn’t know why but she knew Anzick was yanking her chain.  She knew she should just walk away, maybe go upstairs and hang out with Ticwtkwa, her mom-in-law, really more like her mom since her own was literally worse than useless.  But no, the anger always in her, anger that belonged to her father and mother having done what they did to her, had to come out, like an alien popping out of her mouth .

“Be that way,” she said.  She tried to make it sound playful.  It just sounded hurt and angry.  Worst of all, it didn’t make her feel better, and she knew that was what he had intended.  

She walked away.

Tex-Mex had been leading the women on their hike on the upstream river trail.  Well, leading?  He abandoned them to their intimacy, their laughter and distracted inefficient strides, fingers intertwined, voices now dreamy, now excited, now solemn.  Three days of this stuff--he wasn’t about to stay close to it when he could instead get his spring on, tongue out, following smells carried to his super hd olfactory bulb, open his peepers and track without effort the spidery moves of the squirrels, chipmunks, and crows who were trashtalking him.

Then Beatrice came out of the west on a warm gust and everything changed.  Of course he didn’t know her name yet.  He stumbled in the direction of her spore.  When he hit the spot where she had marked the birch, he squatted as if to a sit command.  The almond punch of acetophenone, the cherry pop of benzaldehyde, right between the nostrils. Love.  He swore he pictured her exactly--chestnut brown, couple inches on him, camel eyes both color and lashes, laughing teeth--BEFORE he managed to stand tall, sleepwalk forward, snout trembling, out of the trees into the old camp clearing with the big house, fallen in now, and the intact waterside cabin, HER house, obviously, together with the man and girl she owned, there in her yard.  Yes, that was the way it had been, he was sure--smell, love, clear image--then, five minutes later, Beatrice herself.  So yes, love at first snuffle, but sight too, so love at first snuffle and pre-sight.  He was still trying to match the even more fine Beatrice with the very fine Beatrice in his head when herself strolled over smiling and said, “Good afternoon,” in her British accent, that crazy contralto, the timbre of it brushing his coat, her voice sophisticated and youthful, merry and condescending.  What had he said? 

“Pleased to meet you.  I’m Tex-Mex.”  “I live just--”  Nothing?  For the life of him, he couldn’t remember.

“I’m familiar with your domicile, and your people.  We walk the periphery regularly.  I wondered when you be coming this way.  Beatrice is my given name,” she added, extending her snout but, before he could meet it with his, turning and giving him her rear instead.  “Call me Bea.”

“Just leave him,” Dani says.  “There must be fifty ways.”

“That’s lovers,” Megan counters.  “Husbands, not so much.  There’s really only one way, I mean if they don’t transgress, regress or suppress.  It’s called abandonment.’

“Oh, please.  You given the man almost a millennium.”

“Abandonment,” Megan says.  “Which in this case amounts to murder.  Murder of the person he is.  Sure, he would become a new person.  But Bill Baker, husband of Megan, father of Mo and Mrun, would die.  I know him.  He would die.”

“Everybody thinks that.  It’s not true.  Sometimes the husbands are relieved.  They wanted to leave but thought you would die.”

“Nobody dies.  But who they are inside.”  Megan lets go of Dani’s hand--which actually pains her slightly, the loss of touch after days of near constant touch--to shape her thought in the air in front of her.   “Some people, Bill, have a brittle-fragile selves that don’t remold.  They break.  In Sneaky Technique we call this kind of person ไม่สามารถโค้งงอหรือไม่ยืดหยุ่นได้.  They are not necessarily weaker or stronger than an opponent who is งอได้หรือยืดหยุ่น. It depends on many things.  The match-up of strike vocabulary.  Also the circumstances.  For instance, a zozo chual or lean-horse might attack a won bèf or round bull.  In this case, the lean-horse--”

“Snap out of it, Megs.  You’re evading.” Dani takes Megan’s hand again and both women feel this retouch in deep parts of themselves.  “I’m saying Bill would be okay, maybe even better off, after some time.”  Dani pauses, both words and steps.  She squeezes Megan’s hand.  “OK, now I’m evading.  I’m saying I want you and you need me.”

“Is that what you’re saying?  I thought you were saying you need me and I want you.”

“I want you to want me.  I need you you to need me.  Didn’t I didn’t didn’t I see you cryin’?”  

They laugh but there are tears in Dani’s eyes.  They walk on.  Eighty new meters later, Megan speaks.

“No.  I’m not unhappy.  I’m happy with Bill and blissful with you.  If I lived with you, I’d be happy with you and blissful with Bill.”

“Ouch.”

“What?  I said I’d be happy with you.”

“But you wouldn’t be blissful.”

“My personal best for blissful is nine days.  With you.  Then we were happy.”

“You were happy.  I was still blissful.”

“Only for two more days.  Then I left.  I saw signs you were becoming happy.”

“I deny that.”

They walk.

“Where’s Tex?” Megan asks.

“Greg’s back,” Burt says.  

He and Bill are looking at the body of a Zebu heifer.  It was brought down by an arrow.  Maybe twenty pounds of meat have been neatly harvested from it.  It hadn’t been dead more than a few hours.  Bill and Burt had been headed to the big pond to bass fish when they saw and followed the vultures dropping to the far side of what Burt called Ketchup Hill, presumably because it was red.  It didn’t take a tracker to see the dirt bike tracks leading to the south toward Crow Rock.  

“He used to pull this shit years ago.  Get stoned on smeth and become the criminal mastermind you see here, killing a three-hundred pound animal for a week of meat.  Leaving tracks as good as a signature.”

“You collect?” 

“No.  Dirtbikebag we call him.  Owes everybody from the bike shop to the Boot Shop.  Man loves his cowboy outfits.  Beat his woman, mother of that Jainist Cow Friend I introduced you to.”

“Ashwick?

“Aswick.  Nice kid.  Married Dhiska, the young woman you saw sculpting.”

“What happened?” 

“His mother  took out a restraining order.  Eventually, Greg blew town.  Till now.”

“So what now?”

“Well, if this were a Western, we’d ride him down and horsewhip him.  Tell him if we ever see hide or hair of him in these here parts, we’ll hang him high.”

“Right.”

“We’ll see him tonight at the Y Knot.  He loves trivia night.  We can kick his ass there.”

“Let’s take this outside, kinda thing?  You let him knock you down, he feels all cocky and confident, then you stand up and clock him?”

“No.  He doesn’t know painting.  He’s untouchable on popular song, history of World Presidents, non-mech-assisted sports.  But,” Burt tells Bill, finishing tying the animal’s drag rope to his saddle horn. “Greg is worthless on painters.  Not too strong on opera, either,” he adds, jumping on Trigger and walking slowly toward home.  “Which helps me not at all.  You don’t know opera, by any chance.”

Bill kicks the jetpack on and hovers overground until he’s right beside the walking horse.  “No.  I’m fairly strong on NASCAR.”

“Good enough.”

“When you’re dealing with stuff like this,” Bill asks, “do you ever ask yourself who is going to deal with it when you’re gone?”

“Sure.  I worry.  I think I’m the only one who can handle the crises that come along in my world.”  Burt indicates Circle Y in the distance and the land around it--the creek, the tank, the hills, the herd, the butte, the sky.  “Without me, the world will probably just stop.”

“I take your point.”  Bill hovers and thinks.  Burt on Trigger drags.  “So let’s say you weren’t here because this didn’t happen until after you--”

“Die.”

“And Su is told by--” 

“Her new husband or wife, or the guy or gal managing Circle Y--”

“That Turdbrain--”

“Greg--”

“is back and killed another heifer so he wouldn’t have to buy food at the store.”

“Or hunt.”

“So Su is where we are now, presumably knowing little about opera or NASCAR.”

“But a ton about painters and tv.  Also architecture, jazz and rock, chemistry, tree care, amphibians, looms, ducks, Turkish cooking, gems.”

“I get it.”

“No,” Burt says.  “I don’t think so.  My point is--”

“She can handle it and will.”

“Bingo.”

“But you’ll still be--”

“Dead. Crazy, right?  Won’t be able to lift a finger.  Sophia and Bain can come help her if she needs them.  Sophia  is good with a rifle.   Bain’s a lawyer.”

“Again, your point being she will have options, resources.”

“We have another winner.  Bring Bill Baker the barbeque tool set.”

“And that doesn’t bother you.  That--”

“They can get along fine without me?  No.  I mean, sure.  But isn’t that why we marry strong competent ones?  Isn’t that why we raise same?”

“Is that why?  I thought it was because the strong smart gals turn us on.”

“That, too.”

Bill allows his butt rocket to accelerate slightly and veers along the creek a ways, scaring trout who think he’s the biggest hawk in history.  One minute they’re holding in the current eating midge and scuds that drift down, the next his shadow crosses them and they disappear, presumable using rocks.  It’s hard to say because they disappear.

Ticwtkwa does the dishes the old way with water and soap and listens to the silence coming through the heating vents.  It’s the hour Anzick and Dhishka usually watch Programmers.  Sometimes this time is instead filled with music of moderate tempo at moderate volume, which means they are making love and think the sound makes it so she can’t hear their voices or creaking bedframe.  Today, nothing.  

She knows this means they are having another not fight but time of separateness and she tries not to worry about it.  Couples drift and return, this is the way it is, though the problem is it wasn’t that way for her and Nkwusxwi.  They did disagree and even argue but rarely and in between they were always chatting laughing and loving.  Has time made her forget difficulty and remember only joy?  No, it was that way, that good.  When he died, drowning in the Bitterroot either from slipping and hitting his head, very possible since he was a dreamer and clumsy, or had a heart attack or a stroke and then drowned, she didn’t allow an autopsy so doesn’t know.  Nkwusxwi was Kutanai and autopsy was not done.  When Kwiǂqa Nupika calls man to the westward journey that lasts throughout time,  man goes.  Woman doesn’t ask why man is on the following side of the light.  

For almost five years, Ticwtkwa was content to love and mourn Nkwusxwi.  Then bossy Earth Mother  said, Hey Woman, find a man.  You are not dead--Nkwusxwi is.

So Ticwtkwa went to the bars in Crow Rock and drank and danced and met men, some People, Salish and Kootenai, some lost Whites wandering the world as if in search of pigment.  Greg was different.  He had a powerful s7éy'le, his mansoul fierce, his tongue a wonder of funny ways.  His body a dancer’s and a hunter’s, stringy and playful like a teenager, his bottom strong small and high, his hips narrow, his shoulders curved and taut like carved wood.  His hands skillful, a braider’s hands.  So strong and sweet had been their lovemaking, so free their dancing drinking and drugging, that her little girl had surged between her legs, wet and wild, and she had come fast and hard, after years of dancing alone.  

When he hit her the first time over a trifle, her coming home late, it had been almost welcome.  He loved her so much.  She shouldn’t have made him wait.  It was exciting.  She felt like an actress in a daytime holo drama.  It hadn’t really hurt--in fact, the sharp slap on her face had been invigorating, a kind of erotic switch turning on the play that had quickly followed.  He had never been so tender and loving as that night and the next day.

Not so the next time, or the times after that, when his blows had hurt, his reasons if they existed at all hadn’t made sense, and she hadn’t felt like a woman in a holo but like a child in a nightmare.  The sex hadn’t been good for her but it had for him, until she hated him.  Anzick saw a number of these punches and Greg moved closer and closer to hitting her child as well.  That pushed her to call the sheriff, take Greg’s things to the police station for him to pick up, and get the restraining order.  She wished she had done it sooner, though the whole phase of life, from first slap to restraining order, was just five weeks.  She never saw Greg after that except across a crowded room or on the street.  It was as if she were a powerful creature and had simply exiled him from the air around her.

Being in love with Beatrice might have made Tex-Mex tolerant of the fragrant fucking at the Baker-Shinde house, but it had the opposite effect.  Tex’s love for his Beatrice so transcended the carnal nonsense that literally shook the floorboards in the den outside Bill and Megan’s bedroom, the door of which the women didn’t bother to close, that there was really no comparing the human and dog love.  Tex increasingly felt higher morally and more ready to bite an achilles or even a tender back-of-thigh, so easy to reach.  Just a nip to let the women know he had their number and Dog aka God was not at all happy with their amorogamy, no matter what the human rules were.  A day of reckoning was coming, when the Watchdog would separate the noble, faithful hounds from the mangy curs, and until that day, Tex’s two-step--a run-and-nip that a woman would not soon forget--would have to do.  He was Bill’s best friend and though he couldn’t keep Dani from the house itself, he would defend Bill’s honor. Tex and Beatrice’s love was a thing of gossamer lightness, perfume of methylketones, benzaldehyde, and acetophenone on a moonlit night. Megan and Dani were randy lay-abouts.  When would Bill come to his senses, return to the den, set things right?

Anzick was hanging with the old guys, Mitch, Winchester, Paul and Matt, bulls who had seen and done it all, when he felt that prickling on the back of his neck.  He turned enough to see Greg leaning his bike against the barn and walking bowlegged like a rodeo veteran across the cowpaddy strewn paddock toward where he and old bulls lounged under the creek willow.  

“Hey, Anz,” Greg said, the nickname Greg had given him.  Everybody needs a nickname, Greg had said.  Anzick had loved it, as if Greg was welcoming him into the world of real men.  After his father died, the world of women had grown vast and confining around Anzick, all their compassion and feeding hemming him in like a travel trailer.  Then Greg showed up and the horizon was present again--open fields, river, sky.

“What’s up?” Anzick answered.  The strange thing about having a secret like having been pinned and dry-humped was you constantly had to maintain it.  It wasn’t a one-time thing, the secret.  It was like a pet that had to be looked after.

“Not much.  Wondering if you want to bike later.  I’ve got Dee’s at the trailer.”  Dee was Greg’s trivia partner and fellow bikehead.  Unlike Greg, Dee was a mechanic too.  So everyone wanted to be Dee’s friend cause he fixed bikes for the cost of the parts, plus drinks.  He drank a lot and expected to be tabbed for two weeks for a large job, a week for a little one.  

“Nah,” Anzick said, then realized the pet had to be fed.  There had to be an excuse.  “I told Dhisha I’d take her to MetaWalZon.”

“In Crow?”

“Yeah.  She loves the whole deal.”  There was no reason to shop.  If you wanted to see aisles, you could put on your glasses and Meta, then Wal out, and Zon would drone you whatever you had “found on the shelves.”  But the old ritual--car, parking lot, store--meant a lot to women.  It was what they had done with their grandmothers.  Some women even bought groceries that way, though the produce was never fresh and the inventory pathetic.

“How’s Mom?”  Greg called Ticwtkwa Mom.  Which had been part of the boys men thing--Anzick’s mom, Greg’s old lady, same woman.  Anzick cuddled with her, Greg made love to her.  It had kind of made sense until Greg’s repertoire expanded to punching her.  You don’t punch Mom, or your woman.  Greg never stopped calling Ticwtkwa Mom even when he was punching her.  He hit her whether stoned on those designer neuros he pirated, or just bored, or feeling good--anytime.  Anzick knew Greg saw him--skinny, long-haired, girl-looking fourteen-year-old Anzick--starting to get ideas.  What if I picked up the blender pitcher, Anzick used to think--fucker weighed two pounds easy, glass an inch thick--and just smashed the back of Greg’s head as hard as I could when he was about to pop “Mom.”  Better yet, clock him when Greg’s just minding his own beeswax, as Gramma Chenoa says, when Greg was wearing his gaming mask, virtual poker playing or virtending a non-robotic NFL game somewhere.  Of course Greg knew what Anzick was thinking even before Anzick did--so when Anzick’s eyes travelled toward the blender, he heard Greg make that little click sound he used toward all animals from cats to stallions.  When Anzick looked at Greg instead of at the blender, Greg made a little back-and-forth wave of his index finger, and mouthed “Unh-Unh.”  The laser knife, the quartz door stop, the hatchet--same thing happened.  Mom saw it all, saw too Greg going from the click “Ugh-ughs” to rising slowly to his feet, hitching his belt over his narrow hips, as if readying himself to perform a chore that annoyingly interrupted a key moment at the football game in Tokyo or Bakrain, and move a foot or two in Anzick’s direction before sighing,  smiling, and sitting back down.  I won’t hit the kid.  Today. was what that sigh meant.  Master of his domain, Greg was--beat them, fuck them, take money from them, all three.

“Well, stop by,” Greg said now.  “Dee wants to sell you that piece of shit you can ride.  Might not be a bad deal.  You never know when you’re going to want a bike, even if it looks like it was stampeded.”  He glanced at the plump heifers a couple trees down.  Anzick knew that was why he was really here, to boast about the killing at Lucky Y without saying anything, to let Anzick know that one of the Zebu heifers was next, and that there wasn’t a goddamn thing Anzick or the rest of the non-violent Jainists would or could do about it.  

“Sure,” Anzick said,  “I’ll come by soon.”

Greg brushed his arm with his fist, almost a shoulder punch but then a caress, before walking away.  His second reason for dropping by.  I can take you again, any way I want, any time.  You know it, I know it.

Anzick had loved cuddling between Mom and Greg a few times, during those couple weeks when it seemed like they might become a real family, that Greg might be, not a new Dad, cause who needs a new Dad, but Greg and Mom might be a couple and love and take care of him.  Before the hitting started.

“See you,” Anzick said, using his low, manly voice.  The pet had to be fed.

“Frank spends weekends with you?”

“I know,” Dani says.  I should be flattered, right?  I’m the fancy woman now.”

Megan agrees because what else is there to say?  Dani’s man Frank is now spending his work weeks with Terry, his new woman.  Dani and Frank had never married, just breed agreed, had their two, never considered monogamy or even amorogamy, instead taking freedom for granted as was the norm.  They had met at a party after a production of an Edward Albee play that seemed like it been written yesterday, so little having changed in university domestic life.  Dani had been the star and Frank hadn’t been able to believe his good fortune when she responded to his terrible self introduction, “I really enjoyed your performance.  You were terrifying.”

Now Frank was moving slowly on to Terry.  One day, his weekends with Dani would become some weekends, then a few weekends a year.  They would be like Megan and Dani, passionate, occasional, nostalgic.  Which explained why Dani had suddenly, in the last decade, introduced the notion of Megan leaving Bill for her.  

At first it had been a playful aside, a what-if.  Then it had become a leitmotif that was sure to be heard twice or thrice during their annual or biannual trysts.  Now, for the first time, it was an obstacle to fun, to lascivious holidayness.  Dani wants more of Megan.  Dani is lonely, Megan is not.

They are out for their daily walk, the spring daylight holding thinly into crepuscule.  Tex is somewhere that Beatrice, whose cabin has become the daily Mecca around which walks contour, can be found.  It is the time of lasts--last walk, last dinner, last night together--and the tingle of that, the joy and pain, is tinctured with melancholy.  Dani has the body and face of a young woman, but time, hours alone, have overtaken her.  She visits her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, but there’s only a couple of these whom she actually has a fond connection to, and these are inevitably the ones whom the other four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, feel drawn to.  Holidays have become fraught, popular children attracting crowds of ancestors, unpopular children none.

“Just try it,” Dani says.  “Come for a month.”

“I’ll think about it.”  Megan almost says, I’ll talk to Bill about it,” but catches herself in time.  She’s being diplomatic.  She has thought about it.  Bill is the only man she wants to spend a month with.  A month alone, or traveling, visiting former loves, children, colleagues, dojos, yes.  But a whole month with Dani?  Too long.  Bill is her husband, strange as that is.  She wears him like an old terry cloth robe, comes to him after dawn like morning coffee, resents him in the afternoon like governments and self-inflicted moods, settles into him in the evening like a rocking chair.  Bill is her protective covering and her voice bouncer, thought teaser, self knower, historian, umbrella, protein.

Ferns are tightly curled along the soaking path.  The earth smells spermy.  

“After Killer Take All, we can go to Santa Fe.  Les is in Apparently the Heir.

Dani always has cool shit coming up--now it’s a campy drama about old-time murder set in a logging camp.  Then her friend Les is starring in a comedy of manners about old-time money.  People approaching their millennium spend more and more entertainment share on stories set in the period of their first twentieth of life, when mortality regulated things.  Somehow, even another eight centuries of this not being the case has not led to art which comfortably or meaningfully encompasses the way things are.

“You’re not coming, are you?” Dani asks.  “For a month.  To try.”

“No,” Megan tells her.  She stops their walk, pulls Dani in a slow u-turn.  Takes her other hand.  Leans and kisses her.  “I’m married.”

“When I’m in heat, I mate with different fellows,” Beatrice tells Tex.  She squats to drop a bit of pee on a bed of moss by the river.

“Naturally.”

“Of course when in I’m in town, I have Ron and Dixon.”  

“Good cães.”  Beatrice diplomatically questioned Tex, during yesterday’s walk, about his sexual experience--none, not counting pillows and legs.  Now she’s getting the troublesome question of possessiveness out of the way.  Cães are notoriously jealous, prone to self-destructive attacks on other males twice to four-times their size.  The Teddy complex, named in honor of the famous twenty-first century Cairn Terrier, is a problem.  But Tex is either cool with superfecundation or is pretending to be.  Smart as she is, and having already had a litter, Beatrice knows it’s impossible to get a straight answer out of a cão before copulation.   Cães will profess belief in the Tooth Dog, Santa Dog, and Immaculate Conception, at such times.  They will pledge to mind the puppies, eat half rations in order to feed the family, give up chasing other bitches, you name it.  Beatrice knows that Tex is a good dog.  There’s a chivalric gentleness in him, a mooning devotion that, sure, is at least half due to his virginity and certainty about having found “the one,” but is also his nature.

“You won’t object to my being with Ron and Dixon, the fathers of Kate, Linda, Jackson and Penelope, when I bring my humans to The River House?”  Beatrice had explained that the humans liked to think that they were simple rural types, at home in the cabin with only stationary virtual experience and no fabricator for meals, but that after a few weeks, they get on each other’s nerves and need time in town to spread out to schools, jobs which are still in person one day a month, with virtual meetings every day of the three-day work week.  In-person get-togethers for the children, arranged intoxication packs for the adults, and amorogamy.  

“That makes sense,” Tex says, amiably bounding along beside her.  Her chestnut coat glows like gold.  Her lips tongue and teeth are fresh and sweet.  Her hindquarters call to him in a persistent aria.

“There’s Joe, who dropped by yesterday,” Beatrice says, diplomatically alluding to what had been one of the most athletic rutting sessions of her seven years.  “He’s might bring his humans by again day-after-tomorrow.”

“I like Joe.”  

Beatrice had to pull her tongue in and turn away.  Joe and Tex were famously unable to be in the same acre without trying to tear each other to kibble.  Each had scars from the other.  It had started, word was, over a rabbit, which Tex says he could have eaten but let go on moral principles, and Joe said he was too cat to kill when he had the chance.

“He likes you, too.  He says you’re fast.”

Fast enough to take a meatball-size chunk out of his ginger ass, Tex thinks, but says, “He’s fast too.  He corners tight.”

They leave the clearing and find their way to a quiet spot with good sight lines for humans, bears, bobcats and coyotes.

“Come here, you,” Beatrice tells Tex.

Black market neuros (brain stim hacks) come and go as the way to get fucked up.  First leaked from labs and clinics, when the side-effects of the psycho pharm were well understood and a sustainable substitution was a medical priority, the apparati which took the form of a very carefully placed and secured beanie full of electrodes which when activated did what the addict wanted--up or down, alert or sedate--black neuros were the sexy new thing for seventy-five years.  The usual hype carried that first wave--neuros weren’t bad for you because you didn’t put any chemicals in your body.  They actually made you happier, smarter, more effective.  Like prescription drug abuse, the Neuros were for the well-heeled, a condo not a street drug, a path to insight and fulfillment, not isolation and sloth.  Then folks realized they were increasing the strength of the electro-mag field to get the same feelings and cognitive clarity they had first experienced.  Stories circulated of men women teens who fried their brains.  They were never themselves again, though with new brain tissue they were fine, in a way--just someone else with a mix of old and new characteristics, and memories of their old selves.

Black Neuros were different.  They became a countryside drug, the favorite of the rural addict, smuggled around the country from Kentucky, the descendents of hill distillers building, programming the caps, hand-driving delivery cars to outrun the auto-driven Bureau of Substances and Devices rovers.

Greg became addicted to Black Neuros during that second wave of their popularity, a typical small Western town user whose access to substances ground to a halt with the election of the hyper-conservative Green Party (MAGAs, Make America Green Again).  The new Green Party evolved out of the pro-environmental Green Party, harnessing the same social coercion first used to end global warming and begin the far more destructive global cooling.  The seeding of the upper atmosphere, which had been concurrent with the Forced Biking Amendment, the House-Size Reduction Act, and the Dietary Laws, not to mention the Zero Tolerance executive order requiring mandatory minimum education and a decade of monitoring for possession of as little as a gram of artificial thc or a hundredth of a gram of fentanyl.  Greg, along with 1.3 million others, “went electro” as it was called, buying his -trode beanie off the Neeley Gang out of Owsley County.  The Green Party was disturbingly comfortable with a hundred thousand people a year destroying their basal ganglia and pre-frontal cortexes electro-magnetically, noting that where traditional rehab failed, the partial brain reconstruction that followed Black Neuro addicts’ crashes essentially created a new, less addiction-prone person in the same body.  The effect, it was said in private conversation, was similar to that of the weight-loss drugs in the second-to-last century of mortality.

Greg had come close to “burning the popcorn,” as overuse of Black Neuros was called, but had always pulled back.  His best friend Tony had fried himself, been refurbished, and seemed like himself at first, looked great in fact, but turned out to be a tedious born-again meditator who never wanted to get so much as tweaked with a microohm of Giggle after coming home to Crow Rock.

Greg was sitting at his usual table at the Oxford Saloon to the right of the mini-stage, which served djs, erotic dancers and trivia consoles, as well as bands of up to three very crowded musicians, on Saturdays.  This was Thursday Trivia Night, a reason to sell the microbrewery’s beer, with ramen, Tandoori, or pizza.  Greg prided himself on his knowledge of popular music, fan life, virtuals all the way back to 2D, and political history, pre- and post-Second Continental Congress.  He regularly won the house credit of a hundred dinars which he pretended he didn’t care about, though everyone knew he depended on the meals to get through the end of the month until his Social Disability voucher cleared and his palm chip stopped bouncing.  Hell, Susan let him win, half the time, her own knowledge of especially story media at least as esoteric as his, just cause she and Burt didn’t need the Oxford scholarship.

Bill and Burt push through the swinging doors--God that feels good, Bill thinks, along with the fringed coat and cowboy boots he’s borrowed from Burt, who is exactly his size--and Burt heads straight for Greg’s table.  Greg doesn’t attempt to hide his displeasure when Burt scrapes his chair forward, slouching into it and taking off his hat.  He doesn’t say, Mind if we join you?  or  Bill here is taking Su’s place tonight.  Just sits down, Bill following suit, doesn’t nod a greeting to Greg or even look his way.  It’s as if Burt doesn’t see Greg at all.

“You owe me a heifer.  The closest you can come to paying it is to lose to us tonight.  Together we’re smarter than you about all this trivia that you’ve spent your doper jobless life soaking up. Also, we’re going to cheat, giving each other answers. You can leave now or you can lose and pay for your drinks, too.”

Still, Burt doesn’t look at him.  It’s as if Greg is a water mark made by a coasterless beer mug on the plain wooden table that Burt chooses to by-pass as he scans his surrounds.  So Bill, not Burt, sees Greg try to smile as if all this is fun.

“Finally realized you’d never beat me straight.”

“Always knew but tried anyway,” Burt says.  They pause while Kendra takes Bill’s drink order for his and Burt’s bourbons, nothing for the cattle not rustler but killer.  “If tonight’s loss doesn’t learn you, if you butcher more stock on my spread or at The Temple, I’ll lasso you, strip you, and give you a markweed rubdown.”  

“You lucky son of a.  Immune?”

“I wiped my ass with it once,” Burt admits.  “Mason did too.”

“And you--”

“That’s right.”

“Poor Mason,” Greg said. 

“It was bad,” Burt confirms.  “Steroids at Missoula Gen for nine days.  You immune?”

“No.”  

Burt looks at him.  

“I’m sorry, Quqwu.”

They had been polite for three days, Diskha waiting for Anzick to apologize, Anzick waiting for Anzick to apologize.

“Yeah.  What was up?”

Anzick comes to her, embraces her loosely, sighs.  It’s like he’s entering a house after working two shifts at some stupid job and is at last able to drop the for-everyone expression on his face, release his breath into a child’s huff-and-puff, drop his shoulders, letting his long arms hang not by his sides but hers, touching her civilized flanks which feel to him like safety and kindness in denim.

“Greg,” Anzick says.  He didn’t know until that moment that he was going to tell her but now he knew he was.

“He’s back?” 

“Three weeks.”

“He come here?  Don’t the drones--”

“The restraining order is still working.”

“He come here?” 

No, Anzick tells her.  Greg hasn’t tried to contact Ticwtkwa.  Ticwtkwa knows Greg is in town and doesn’t like it but isn’t worried.

“He touched me.”  Anzick looks at his wife. 

“He hit you?  When?”

“He never hit me.  He touched me.”

He takes a step back so she can look at him.  

“But.”  She stops.  “I thought.”   She reaches, touches his cheek.  Her fingertips are cool and dry.  “Oh.”. 

They go to the holoroom and watch Programmers.  It’s been killing both of them not to know what happened after the programmer started trying to date the pre-med girl .  Afterwards they take their showers and climb into bed.  Dhisha’s fingers find Anzick’s.  They sleep.

Burt works his way up the creek with long strides.  Bill chases him like a child.  Burt raises his rod and line straight overhead, a simpleminded woodsman chopping wood.  He drops his Adams onto the water, behind outcrops, right in the foam off wiffles.  He lets the fly sit a second, then up it goes into the sky to drop in a new spot.  Never a second backcast, just the straight-up retrieve and drop, fifteen feet on a angle or straight up stream.  Gait unhurried. Pauses when a cutthroat takes the fly and Burt lets it have its dignity, tacking diagonal downstream once, the other way, then brings it near enough to parlay the catch-and-release tool, underhanding the barbless out of the shining fish’s lips, watches the flash of red as it drops, rolls, splits.  Then resumes his upstream march, line and fly overhead like an infantryman showing company colors.

Stream sparkles.  Gray rock like cigarette ash in sunlight.  After an hour they find a cottonwood log in the shade and eat cheese and mustard sandwiches with cucumbers, carrots and chips.

“Are you going to miss this?  Isn’t life beautiful?  Aren’t you telling your children grandchildren and great-grandchildren not to mention Su that you don’t love them or love them enough?  What is your legacy going to be?  Do you think you’re better than me?  Pass the mustard.  What kind of chip is that?”

“Inneresting,” Burt says.  “Wait three weeks and just ask them all at once.”

“I’ve been saving them while we--” Bill indicates the length of river.

“Loudly.  I could barely hear myself splash what with all those questions echoing upstream.  Why do you think I wanted you to lead?”

“Hell, I could barely draft.  You’re fast for a bowleg fella.”  

“What were they again?”

“Natural beauty.  Lust for life.  Wrong messages to kids, Su.  Your legend.  Superiority complex.  Mustard and chips.”

“Right.  Okay.  Yes, yes, not that wrong after eight hundredth birthday.  Su knows she’s my queen.  Softie with cooking skills, savior complex, good rancher, generous cheapskate.  Sure, here.  Dill.”

They munch in silence.  The water in front of them is broken by fish slurping down a midday hatch of duns.  Life begins and ends.  

“Shut the fuck up,” Bill says, and Burt laughs, losing bits of chip and bread.

Greg knows he should think but he so loves not to.  He got his ass handed to him by Burt and that guy Bill nobody can figure out what he’s doing at their ranch who shared answers whispering and scribbling cribnotes that everyone in the bar could see them writing but nobody called them on, figuring if Greg wanted to he would, the men doing it right in front of him at Greg’s own table.  But that would have made Greg look pathetic, like he needed the bar tab prize which he did, so he wasn’t about to call them on it and damn that Eastern fucker knew his NASCAR.  What with Burt’s long suit biology going strong, their lead was uncatchupableupto in the time allotted.   

Now he dirtbiked out to The Temple to torture Anzick in some way he hadn’t pinned down yet haha that was a good one.  Why not?  The kid had put on some muscle but Greg knew he could throw and pin him easy.  Married but still living with Mom, two women bossing him.  Why Greg wanted to hurt the kid, really a sweet boy since the day they’d met, Greg didn’t think about.  That was part of the not thinking that was essential to who Greg is.  There was who gives a shit and you can’t make me in his personality cocktail, but just plain not think is the main ingredient.  He knows that when he ground against the boy through two pairs of jeans that Anzick would never forget him, never forget the day, that it would haunt and hurt him, and that was power, that was win, and not think.  Time to do it again.

One thing was clear, Greg cannot kill any more cattle.  Burt is a rich principled type like the many Greg has bullied and crossed since his first days at Hay Creek-White Creek  Combined Junior-Senior High, but Burt has a mean hard streak to him that lifts him out of rich boy weak and predictable into desert rat dangerous, especially any time his younger brother Steve is or was in the mix.  You don’t fuck with Burt, everybody knows that, unless you’re willing to go the distance.  In this case unless you wanted a painful oozing rash over your entire body including your privates because Burt would deliver on the markweed threat.  No doubt about it.  

That makes the trip out to The Temple necessary.  Greg’s going to fuck shit up.  It’s going to involve Anzick, because that’s as close, and really even better, than hurting Burt directly.  Because The Temple is part of Burt’s ranch, and Anzick, while not cattle, is under Burt’s protection.

Megan and Tex-Mex are cooking dinner.  Megan has an omelette underway and a salad ready.  Tex-Mex has venison which Randy brought over from his stash, this being spring and Randy and Momo having eaten their way through thirty of the new pounds (each being a kilo actually but still called pounds by the Anglocentrists, that being the compromise reached at the end of the Metric System Wars) and really not looking forward to eating the other thirty before autumn comes around with another deer to hunt butcher and freeze.  That’s the problem with hunting big animals.  Too much of one kind of meat.  Stem meat is better, cheaper and comes in reasonable sizes, whether you grow your own or have droned in fresh.  But hunters don’t want to admit.  Hence, lots of free venison and good population control so the deer don’t starve in the winter.  Dani and Beatrice are gone, Dani back to Colorado, Beatrice to Bangor.  

“It makes you sad.”

“Yes,” Megan says.  It’s sweet being with a young one who has made love for the first time.  It makes her remember the same moment in her children’s lives, and in her own.  “It’s one of the three points-of-the-sun.”

“What?” Tex-Mex says, almost pausing but no, still eating.

“First love and lovemaking is Morning Sun.  Death of parents is Noon Sun.  Illness and old age is Falling Sun.”

“Huh.”

“Morning Sun is sad because it creates awareness of time.”

“Yes,” Tex says.  “I felt that.  Right after.”  

“And you wanted Beatrice to stop the Sun in the sky.  To be with you forever in that moment.  But it passed and she was still a separate person.”

“I wanted to be her dog.  I wanted us to den.  I wanted to teach her puppies to follow fight and grin.”

“Not the way of dog.”

“Not too often.  It happens.”

Megan carries her meal to the table in front of the woodstove.  It’s wonderful to be alone with Tex.

“Your bitch is serious.”

“You got that right.  She wants to den too.”

“What did you say to her?”

Megan indicates the house with her fork.  She smiles and chews.

“Bill,” Tex says.

Megan nods.  

“You’re a good girl.”

“You’re a good boy.”

“But you miss mating her.”

“Not yet.  Right now I’m”

“Sore”

“Full up with joy and company and happy to be with you.”

“I can go to my house.”  Tex has finished and licked bowl and looks toward his couch.

“I like you near.  I might get eaten.”

“I won’t let anyone eat you.”

“That’s what she said,” Megan says, spearing a forkful of salad.  She and Tex laugh their asses off.  Eat jokes are very funny between dogs and people.

They eat and lick their balls in companionable silence.

“Bea misses you, too.”

“You think?”

“I know,” Megan tells him.

“Love.”

Megan reaches down and rubs the velvet between his stop and occiput.

Anzick is at the spring with Tara, who has been a little sad since barn season ended and green nibbling started.  Anzick has seen this before, spring supposedly being the season of contentment, fear of cold and actual cold fading to days comfortable for the cows, and the hay and alfalfa meal yielding to wheat grass and needle-and-thread shoots straight from Tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ .  But it doens’t seem to work that way.  The cozy barn winter nights, which allow or force family and herd life to take over from individual search for fulfillment and adventure, is often the best time of year for the Zebu.

Tara is a year old and pretty much the sweetest heifer Anzick has ever met.  She’s got this smile that just warms you. Today though she’s in one of those melancholy spirals that Anzick has come to look our for.  She’s browsing the wildrye on the moist side of hill, but distractedly, and is a couple too many feet from the herd.  There hasn’t been a grizzly or wolf attack in daylight this year, but there’s still a distance that’s in-herd and another distance, just a cow length or two further off, that off-herd, and when Tara lets herself be there, it means she’s not as attached to life as she should be.  It means she’s getting her way that she gets, not depressed, more abstracted.  Anzick has been talking to her for about an hour, just shooting the shit, both of them really, not talking about anything serious, Tara’s history, typical of a cow, having included loss, trauma, a brother to scours, a close friend to pneumonia.

“Dishka’s thinking about cutting her hair,” he’s telling Tara now.  “Not short short.  Just not People long.  White mid-length.”

Tara knows.

“Do you think she should?” Anzick asks.

“Dishka could shave her head and she’d still start stampedes.”

Anzick laughs.  “True.”

“That woman is pea tendrils.”  This is the highest a cow can go in terms of enthusiasm.

“She thinks you’re nice, too.”

Tara tosses her silkies and drops her head to nip.

“Hey.”  Greg.  Walking around the spring.  His bike is nowhere.  He must have parked and walked.  “How you?”

“Greg, what are you doing here?”

“I’m going to ask Incarnation of the Godhead if she needs like I don’t know kitchen help?”

“Nobody’s going to let you work here again.”

“No harm asking.  Nice looking cow,” Greg says, laying his hand on Tara’s hip.  Her skin twitches and he laughs, slaps her.  Before he can blink she spins and catches him square in the chest with a backkick.  The hoof makes a thud as it cracks his sternum and sends him off the ground.  Greg lands and lies groaning.  Then he’s on his knees and as he comes to his feet cursing, he gets out his dressing knife.  Anzick tackles him trying to reach the knife arm but Greg holds him off and the knife up and away and then plants it in Anzick’s trapezius.  Anzick screams and knees Greg in the balls and Greg grunts in surprise and raised the knife high.  

Dishka lands on him with her knees up under her as if she is canon-balling into a pool.  She has traveled so far through the air to reach her landing point on Greg’s back in time that she bounces right back off of him and rolls across the meadow through fresh cow patties and sun-warmed cheatgrass.  Greg laughs and sits back on his haunches while Anzick stands and throws up from pain.   Greg rocks back on his cowboy boots and stands without using his hands and starts quickly toward Tara.  Greg comes at him stumbling into a run from slightly downhill and Greg tosses his knife to his right hand and starts it’s arc toward Anzick’s throat.  Dishka catches him around the throat as she travels through the air from uphill.  Greg hits the ground laughing.  Dhisha is still on him and chops at him with a spork.  Greg laughs and bats her hand away, then slaps her hard across the jaw.  She rears back and raises the spork again and as she repeats her chopping motion Anzick comes from behind Greg and pins both his arms to the ground behind him, splaying his own knees wide to do it.  

“Stop,” he says not right away but he can’t reach Dishka and the spork rises and falls like a hatchet in a stubborn tussock, chips of flesh and bone yielding to the rhythmic, steady fall of the short-tined spoon for all the world like chips of bark and wood.  Greg makes terrible sounds.  “Stop,” Anzick says again, and then, “Dishka, stop!” as loud as he can.  

She looks at him as if she hasn’t seen him there on Greg’s arms.  

“I’m done,” she said and stands up, wiping her spork, then her hands, on her dress.

“Not even close,” Burt says.

“Dead as a doorknob if doornobs were clawed, had one eye, and were dejugularated.”

“All I was going to do was give him a bad rash.”

“Did they give a statement?”

“They told a story.  They handed over a spork.”

“No.”

“This was the work of a small albeit muscular woman and her spork.”

The grassland has been partitioned into a pastoral scene with cattle and spring, and a plastic bubble crime scene.  Images and samples are collected.  Ground is examined.  Burt leads Bill back across the airbridge that hovers inside the bubble, the workers leaning down with their equipment.  They pass through the lock and the air is alive with what air does when it isn’t in a tent.

“I’m supposed to reflect on death now,” Burt says.  “How I’m my own murderer.  How life is a precious no a sacred gift or state and not to be taken from another or the self or undervalued.”

“Could do.”

“Well, I am.  I see it.  And me not being a murderous sadist, I should be even more attached to it and others even less interested in depriving me of it.”

“Basically.”

“This happening just before you head back to Megan and that river and dog, that would be Providence, Moms would tell me, and Dad would study his boots.”

“Credible.”

“I’ll study on it.”

They walk back to the Temple.

“Do you believe in Hell?” Burt asks.

“I seem to.”

“Heaven.”

“No.  Unless Heaven is dying in a state of grace and then well you know eternal resting.”

“Hell being dying unshreved and somehow not getting a good eternity’s rest.”

“I think so.”

“Crazy how these beliefs persist.”

“Well,” Bill says.  “Narrative abhors a vacuum.”

They saddle up and head east.

“I’m going to miss you,” Burt says.

“Megan and I will come.  You and Susan will visit.”

“No we won’t,” Burt says.  “It’s just too fucking complicated leaving the ranch.”

“We’ll visit.”

“All right then.”

But they never did.  They would have but Burt died.

Megan opened the letter and read it while she sipped her maté.  It had appeared in their mailbox the previous afternoon.  Neither of them had seen the Post Swallow swoop drop it off.  She looks at Bill, nods and smiles, a mother’s smile as much as a wife’s.

“From Susan,” Megan tells him.

Dear Megan and Bill,

Burt died last Wednesday while I was teaching, I’m not kidding, End-Of-Life Rituals (Pyramids for Pre-Meds, the U MT kids call it).  Don’t know the cause.  He didn’t get old like a vampire who loses his powers or Dorian when he turns gray and prunes.  He was his regular self in his last months.  He treated me like I was delicate, not him, holding me and sniffing me like a flower.  His Duke as we called it worked but he used it differently, kind of placing it and exploring with it, like a pistol in a stamen.  He didn’t find religion but he said he understood why it had been so necessary back then.  Transitions require destinations, he said, trying out different phrases.  Journeys need endings, Leaving means going somewhere in particular.  

He’s definitely gone.  

I knew he would be.  I know the old ones talked about how their loves were with them the rest of their lives.  Mourning is tricky, what with seeing where Burt was, his stuff, remembering his smell taste sound look ideas humor ridiculousness love for me attraction childishness innocence grumpiness elegance fairness pettiness weird way of standing pivoting on the ball of his right foot his lopsided smile humming noises pissing sounds songs in the shower and unpredictable cooking snoring burrowing kisses and antique expressions like ice box.  

He wanted Bill to know that he really appreciated his doing your bidding, Megan, to double-check that his death not wish but preference wasn’t depression or anger but was really self  He says Bill was his last new friend and he had no doubt they would have been friends for as long as he lived and that was in fact the case.  

Come visit together but wait until I have a new man and then come visit together or separately if you like.  I don’t want to seduce Bill by accident while I’m in my heat-seeking phase.  

Love and soonish,

Su