Chili for Two

Rhys woke with a cool hand on his forehead and his teeth knocking together.

It was still dark outside the kitchen window. The lantern on the table was lit and the stove was roaring, and he was shaking under two quilts as if somebody had dropped him in the creek.

“Open,” Nora said, and slid a thermometer under his tongue. “Close. Don’t talk.”

She was in wool socks and long johns and a grey sweatshirt, and her braid had come half undone in the night. She took his wrist in two fingers and looked at her watch. He lay there and let her count. Her scent was all through the room by now, and even with his head full of hot sand it reached him and eased something.

The thermometer beeped. She turned it to the lantern.

“A hundred and three point four,” she said. “What’s normal for you, in this shape?”

“Same as for you.”

“Then one of those bites has gone bad on me. Stay on your back. I need the hip.”

She folded the quilt off his left side and unzipped Doc’s coveralls as briskly as she would have lifted a horse’s foot. First she peeled the dressing from his ribs and bent over the long wound with the lantern. He saw her nostrils move.

“That’s clean,” she said. “Good. I’d have hated to do it a third time.”

Then she pressed two fingers beside the deepest puncture on his hip, and he said a word his grandmother would have charged him a dollar for.

“There you are.” She sounded almost pleased. “It’s the back one. It closed over on top and it’s brewing underneath. I left those open to drain, and you healed the skin shut before the bottom was done. That’s a thing Doc might have mentioned.”

“He’d have put a wick in it.”

“Would he? Thank you. You could have said so Tuesday.”

“Tuesday I was a wolf.”

“That’s no excuse.” She was already drawing up lidocaine. “Sting, then pressure.”

She opened the puncture with a blade no longer than a fingernail and flushed it with warm saline until what ran out was clear. He watched her face while she did it, because that was easier than watching the bowl. She did not frown or hurry. Her hands went from one thing to the next without ever stopping to hunt for anything, and when she packed a strip of gauze into the hole she did it gently and all the way to the bottom.

“I’m going to the clinic,” she said. “Ten minutes. If you get off that couch I’ll know, and I’ll be unpleasant about it.”

He heard the door, and her boots on the porch, and then the long push of a body through deep snow. He heard the clinic door thirty yards off, and glass clinking. He was a man who had spent his whole life listening to where his people were, and it was no effort to follow her. He thought she could probably have followed him just as well, and that she had no idea why.

She came back white to the thigh, with a tote under her arm and a bag of fluids inside her coat against her ribs to keep it from freezing. She stood the bag in a pan of warm water on the stove. She put a catheter into the vein of his left forearm on the first try and taped it down, and she hung the bag from a hook in the window frame where somebody had once kept a plant.

“You lost a lot of blood Tuesday, and you’ve been cooking since about four this morning,” she said. “This will help more than anything else I do.”

Then she sat down at the table with the green ledger, a brown bottle from the tote and a notepad with a feed store’s name printed across the top.

“Tuesday night I gave you what I’d give a dog, and it didn’t hold.” She turned ledger pages. “Doc’s got a note here from 1998. He says a bite from another wolf wants the heavy stuff, and he used what was on his cattle shelf. So that’s what I’m using.” She held the bottle to the light. “The label gives me a dose for a twelve-hundred-pound cow with foot rot. The ledger gives me what he gave a hundred-and-eighty-pound wolf. Neither of those is a man on a couch.”

“I weigh the same as I did.”

“I know what you weigh. I don’t know what your liver does with this when you’ve got hands.” Her pen was moving. “So I’m working it by weight, the way he did, and then I’m working it backward from the label to see if I land in the same place.”

She did the sum and tore off the sheet and did it again on a fresh one. He had seen her do the same thing with her stitches, counting them twice. She put the two sheets side by side.

“Same number. Are you allergic to anything?”

“Porcupines.”

“Anything on a drug shelf.”

“Doc’s given me everything on that shelf at one time or another.”

“That’s every rancher’s answer right before he swells up.” She drew the dose and came over and pushed it into the line, slowly, with her eyes on his face. “For the record, I’m not licensed for your species. In either shape. If the state board ever asks, you were a large dog on Tuesday and you’re a figment today.”

“What do I tell them?”

“Figments don’t talk to the board.”

He laughed, and it hurt his side, and it was worth it. She wrote the dose and the time in the ledger and went upstairs to dress.
***
The fever kept him flat all morning, so he watched her.

Day came grey, with the snow still falling straight and steady past the window. She carried in wood, four armloads, and stacked it herself. The well pump was dead with the power, so she filled a canning kettle with snow from the porch and set it on the stove to melt, and filled it again when it had shrunk to three inches of water. She checked his bag and his pulse. She went back out to the clinic, and through two walls and thirty yards of weather he heard the pull cord on Doc’s old Honda. She pulled it nine times. It coughed on the third and the seventh. After the ninth there was a silence, and then a short remark he was probably not meant to hear.

She came in stamping snow.

“It’s the carburetor,” he said.

She stopped with one boot off. “You heard that from here?”

He had been careless, and he covered it badly. “I heard the door bang. I’m guessing at the rest. That gas sat in the bowl all summer and turned to varnish. Fresh gas won’t help until the jets are clean.”

“I put fresh gas in yesterday. And starting fluid.”

“It’ll cough on starting fluid. It won’t run.”

“That is exactly what it does.” She pulled the other boot off. “I’ve got two thousand dollars of vaccine out there in a dead refrigerator. I packed snow in bread bags on the top shelf, and it’s holding at forty-two. I can keep that up another day, maybe two.”

“I could have that carburetor off in ten minutes.”

“You could have a temperature under a hundred first. Then we’ll talk.”

He let it go. She was right, and it was her generator.

She fed the cat from a coffee can on the counter. She washed one mug and set it in the rack beside one plate and one fork. He lay there and added it up. In all the hours he had watched her, she had not once looked around for somebody to hand a thing to. She carried the wood and the water, held her own lantern and checked her own arithmetic. When she talked, she talked to the cat or to him, and he had the idea that he was a recent change.

“Is anybody wondering where you are today?” he asked. “With the phone out.”

“My mother. She’ll call from Scottsbluff at four and get nothing, and she’ll decide I’m out on a call.” Nora shrugged. “She’ll be right, more or less. That’s the whole list.”

At Billie’s house this morning there would be two turkeys in the oven and three tables pushed end to end, and twenty-two people being told to wipe their feet. They would be short one, and nobody would be saying his name aloud. He did not like to think of that.

It was a little before noon when the cat, asleep on the couch arm, came up onto its toes with its tail like a bottle brush.

Nora went to the window over the sink. She stood there for some time.

“There’s a wolf at the edge of my timber,” she said, in her lame-horse voice. “A pale one, nearly white. It’s standing in the open, looking at the house. Is that one of yours?”

Rhys pushed himself up on his good elbow. He could not see from the couch, but the stove draft was pulling air in under the door, and he knew her.

“That’s Immy.”

“The woman on the tractor.”

“Maeve’s sent her to find me. They’ll have looked on the ridge yesterday and she’s worked down the creek.” He got his feet on the floor. “I have to go out on the porch.”

“You have a fever of a hundred and three.”

“If I don’t show myself, she’ll come down to the door. And if she goes home with nothing, there’ll be ten of them up here by dark, digging.”

Nora looked at him, and at the window, and at the bag on its hook. Then she unhooked the bag.

“I’ll carry this,” she said. “You carry you.”

She got his feet into the irrigation boots and a quilt around his shoulders, and they went out with his left hand on the door frame and her right arm held up over his head with the fluid bag in it. He had done some foolish-looking things in his life. He was fairly sure this one would be told at the ranch for years.

Immy stood eighty yards off, where the lodgepole came down to the yard fence. Snow had caked on her back and along her muzzle. She had been out a long time. Her head came up when she saw him, and she took three fast steps forward and stopped when she saw who was standing beside him.

“Immy!” His voice cracked, and he tried again. “I’m whole. I’m sewn up and I’m whole. Tell Maeve it was Pascoe and two young ones I don’t know. Pascoe’s mark is on the saddle, on the boundary larch. He cut it Tuesday at moonrise.”

The pale wolf’s ears went flat and came up again.

“Tell her the vet knows. She had me all the way under, and I woke up on two legs in her barn. There was no way around it, and that’s on me. I’ll answer for it when I get down.” He took a breath that pulled every stitch. “And tell her the vet’s to be left in peace. Nobody comes up here to talk to her until I’ve talked to Maeve. Nobody.”

Immy looked at him a moment longer. Then she looked at Nora.

Nora, with her right arm still in the air, lifted two fingers of her left hand off the porch rail.

The wolf’s tail moved, once, side to side. She turned and went up into the timber at a lope, breaking snow with her chest, and the grey swallowed her.

Neither of them said anything until he was back on the couch and the bag was back on its hook.

“I waved at a wolf,” Nora said.

“She waved back.”

“I saw.” She sat down hard in the kitchen chair. “Who’s Pascoe?”

“The one who had me by the shoulder.”

“And the saddle?”

“Sawmill Saddle. It’s the ridge six miles above your house. Our boundary runs along it.” He had said the rest in front of her because he had no choice, and he owed her that much plainly. “What his mark means is the part I told you was Maeve’s. It still is.”

“All right.” She rubbed her eyes. “‘Left in peace.’ What does it look like when I’m not?”

“Maeve at your kitchen table, deciding what’s to be done about you. I’d as soon you had a few days to do some deciding yourself, before she starts.”

Nora thought about that. He could see that she did not entirely like it.

“That was decent of you,” she said. “Next time, ask me before you speak for me.”

“That’s fair.”

“I’ve just watched a man shout at a wolf from my porch and I held his IV bag while he did it. I’m going to make lunch now, because I can’t think what else a person does.”
***
Lunch was the can of chili. She had a second can in the cupboard, and after a look at him she opened that too. She heated them together in a saucepan on top of the wood stove and brought two bowls over, with a sleeve of saltines and a block of cheddar and a knife. She sat on the floor with her back against the couch, near his knees.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said.

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Earl Pettibone told me Tuesday that a can of chili was a sad thing to hear from a young woman.”

“What’s Earl having?”

“A turkey breast and a football game.”

“Then Earl can keep quiet.”

She smiled into her bowl. The chili was hot and salty, and he was hungrier than he had known. They ate without talking for a while. The cat came and sat between them and watched the cheese.

“I should tell you something,” she said. She did not turn around. “You ought to know what kind of doctor you’ve got. I didn’t take your temperature this morning because you looked sick. I was upstairs asleep. I woke up a little before five because the house smelled wrong. It was a hot, sweetish smell, and it was coming up the stairs. I knew it was a fever before I had my feet on the floor. The thermometer was for the number.”

Rhys set his spoon down.

“The red cow at Earl’s on Tuesday, I got her from twenty feet, on the wind. I told him I had a good nose. I’ve been telling people that since first grade.” She broke a cracker in half and did not eat it. “It isn’t only my nose. I can hear the plow on the highway before the dogs do. I can hear a calf’s heart through the cow if the barn’s quiet. I could hear yours on Tuesday night from six feet off, through the storm. I can hear it now.”

He believed that. It had picked up, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“In Torrington there was a man at the sale barn, a big, cheerful man who bought me coffee. I stood next to him at the ring one day and he smelled just like that red cow. So I told him he ought to get his blood sugar checked. He laughed at me. A week later he was in the hospital in Scottsbluff, and they told him he’d had diabetes for a year.” She shrugged, and her shoulder moved against the quilt by his knee. “After that I was the witch. It started as a joke, and people said it to my face, and some of them drove fifty miles to have the witch look at a horse. But they quit sitting next to me at the café. They were never rude about it. They just found another stool.”

“That was their loss.”

“It was four years of eating by myself.” She said it without self-pity, as she might have reported a weight. “I looked it up, you know, in school. I thought it might be a tumor, or a seizure thing. People smell things before seizures. I had my head scanned my second year and paid for it myself. It was a perfectly ordinary head. So for a long time I thought the other possibility was that I was making some of it up. That I wanted to be right so badly I was hearing what I expected to hear.” She turned then and looked up at him. Her hazel eyes were tired and very direct. “I’ve never said that to anyone. I’m saying it to you because you turn into a wolf, and I don’t see how you could look at me sideways.”

He knew exactly what she was. He could smell it on her from where he lay, that faint cold thread under the hay and the wood smoke, and he could have given her the name for it and the reason and thirty years of answers in one sentence.

“You’re not crazy,” he said.

She waited. He kept his mouth shut.

“That’s all?”

“I turn into a wolf. My line for crazy isn’t where other people’s is.”

She laughed, a short surprised laugh, and turned back to her bowl. Her shoulders had come down. It had been enough for her. He felt worse about that than if it hadn’t been.

She washed the two bowls and set them in the rack beside the one plate. She changed his bag, and wrote in the ledger, and went out twice more before dark to pack fresh snow into a dead refrigerator. At nine she checked his temperature, said, “A hundred and one, that’s the right direction,” and turned the lantern down and went up the stairs.

Rhys lay awake a long time, listening to the house settle.

He went over it carefully. Pascoe had cut a claim-mark on Tuesday, and nobody on the creek knew yet what Vaughn Tierney meant to claim. A man like Tierney used whatever he could find. The woman at the top of the road, alone, six miles from the highway, was safest as exactly what everyone took her for. If she knew what she was, she would have to hide it, and she had found out about wolves two days ago and had no practice at all. He would tell her when he knew what was coming. He would tell her when it could not be used against her.

He told himself that was a reason. It was one, and he noticed all the same that it was also much easier than telling her.
***