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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Further Than It Looks
Richard Mark Glover
When the principle introduced me at the teacher’s meeting in the fourth week of the semester, he announced that I jogged during my lunch break. “Not jogging,” I said. “Sprints.” Up and down the football field, I wanted to explain, steeling myself for the afternoon classes full of teenagers whose meds were wearing thin. Geography was of no interest to them; Mozambique, the Andes, the Tibetan Plateau might as well have been rows in a corn field. Austin was a free-thinking college town but high school education had been redesigned to be more compatible with the weltanschauung of politicians from towns like Muleshoe, Perryton and Woodville. My classroom time was limited to teaching the small freshmen brain about creationism and passing state tests.
Now I kicked at a swell of west Texas dirt under a cottonwood tree and discovered marbles in the earth, green, red and blue, shallow under thin mud like bubbles in a thick soup. With more footwork, rusty bailing wire, surfaced along with shotgun shells and a few sardine cans. I shoveled more with the tip of my boot and discovered the gray metal of a gyroscope. I brushed the desert from it, wound it and pulled the stiff string.
Man Camp - that’s what the old trapper called the place. He was trying to sell it to me and this was the day he’d show me the corners. I had met him once before. He carried extra pounds on his big-boned frame and his laugh purled with a staccato vigor. He had a large ruddy face with a crooked nose and dark brown eyes that often stared. We’d sat around the fire that first time, he quiet initially, as if his way of life was too strange for me, the city boy. I’d heard the school board up in Marfa was looking for him and he wasn’t sure yet if I could be trusted.
He said he home-schooled the boy, but there were no books lying around or anything in his disposition that might suggest a learned man who was able to prepare lesson plans on the lowlands of east Africa or the pre-historic migration of humans across the Bering Sea, something a fourteen year-old might encounter in school.
But as that night wore on we began to trade stories. He trapped coyote, bobcat and mountain lions. I trapped minds. He earned enough money to get by. I constantly wanted more. He ran his traps on the ranches of the Big Bend; I set’em in a classroom. During the off-season he stayed and worked as a cowboy, branding cattle, mending fences, while I toured the country thinking the next little town might be it.
The gyroscope wobbled. It caught the edge of the table and flipped clattering against a metal pan. Then I saw the glitter of a marbled rock. I picked it up. The round end fit neatly in my fist as if the smooth grooves were designed for fingers and the opposite side was jagged with sharp corrugations. Teach it as the work of wind, water and time, I thought.
“Hungry?” I heard the trapper shout from across the field. A cottontail dangled from his son’s grip.
We sat around the campfire in the afternoon sun as he knifed in the last bit of lard over the rabbit frying in the pan. A woodpecker screeched as the boy watched me squeeze the marble rock in my hand. “That’s a scraper,” the boy said. “Apaches used it to scrap the inside of hides.” He reached out and took the rock from me, then pulled it through the air in gouging half-loops. “Me and dad still uses it.” The boy pressed his lips and a sharp single note blasted through his teeth.
“He’s got a toothache on account of that mare that kicked him last week. Whistling relieves the pain,” the trapper explained.
Grease popped in the pan and the boy whistled again.
A roadrunner zipped under a barbed wire fence, crossed the dirt road and into a field of tumbleweed. The boy chased it. “Hey mister. Ever seen roadrunner tracks?”
I walked over and he showed me the claw marks in the sand. “Two claws ahead and two behind on each leg,” he said blinking several times, “they run faster than other birds - member of the Cuckoo family.”
I nodded then pulled a log out of the woodpile. Underneath, a black spider crabbed across its web bobbing in the silk, flashing the tattooed orange hourglass on its belly. I twisted a stick into the orange and watched the spider’s caramel guts ooze.
“Why’d you do that?” the boy asked.
“Do you know what that was?” I asked.
“Female black widow. Can kill you. But they don’t. Now we got bad luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“Apache believe if you kill for no reason it’s bad. And I’m Apache.”
“His momma was full-blooded Apache,” the trapper said, pulling the pan off the fire.
After we finished eating, the boy fingered marbles out of his pocket and set them in a circle in the dirt.
“Do you know how to play?” the boy asked.
“Line them up and I’ll show you,” I said.
“Got to be a circle, mister. Everything’s connected,” he said.
The boy leaned in the wind and his jet black hair blew off his shoulders.
“We don’t have time for marbles, son,” the trapper said. “I want to show the man the corners.”
We walked along a path bordered by creosote bush and mesquite. In the distance, salt cedars shrouded the Rio Grande in a lime canopy while the sun arced toward Cienaga Peak.
The old trapper pointed to a distant pole and said, “I could get electricity for two hundred bucks.” He spat brown juice. “Myself, I never saw any reason for it.”
I stopped and looked at a meaty hind leg, checkered with flies, dangling from a wire, nailed to a corner post. Below it, laid the cocked steel jaws of a trap. The old trapper walked on, but the boy and I stopped. I threw a rock at the trap and sprung it.
“Why’d you do that?” the boy asked.
“Save a coyote.”
“That’s a trap for feral hog. We catch one once a month for meat,” he said.
I looked at him then turned away. We climbed down the creek bank and a red-furred critter darted through the creosote bush.
“Coyote.” I said.
“Nope, Gray Fox. They change color during the season,” the boy said.
I walked on.
“Hey mister.” I heard the boy yell from behind me. “How long you think it took the arroyo to change course?”
I turned. The brown of his skin and the color of his clothes blended in the auburn reach of the desert. He pointed ahead to a high bluffed bend.
“Millions of years,” I said.
“Nope,” he said. “Happened last summer.”
I tucked my shirttail in and walked on.
We visited the corners then headed back toward Man Camp, in silence save the boy’s occasional whistle. A long billed bird flew over a pond in the distance. I wanted to beat the boy to its identification and quickly said, “Kingfisher.”
The old trapper looked at me and the boy giggled.
I glared back.
“There’s a desert mockingbird. That’s igneous rock. Over there’s Micky Mouse Nopal,” I said, pointing there, there and there. My urge was to bamboozle the boy, to pull the rug out, regain teacher status, up-end the classroom as the freshmen had done me.
The boy turned and walked away. I lost him as an audience, just as I had lost the freshmen on the first mention of demographics. I wondered if blaming the meds and the state curriculum was really the problem.
In the east, a crescent moon glowed between jagged peaks and a north wind blew across my face as I sat under the cottonwood. The boy had run off to catch fish and now in the twilight he stood holding a stringer of small bass. The old trapper dropped to his knees, cracked branches and set them for a fire. The boy whistled and the trapper struck a match. High-pitched yips rolled across the valley. A howl followed, then a cacophony of coyote song filled the air. We listened, eating the fish, pan fried in limejuice and oil separated from my jar of organic peanut butter.
I asked about the Apaches.
“Plenty of sign ‘round here. Mostly arrowheads, but we’ve found a few spearheads from the earlier people.” The trapper pushed his cowboy hat back and the glow of the fire reflected in his eyes.
The boy handed me a flint rock with pockmarks. “You can tell a worked rock by the percussion bubble made when it’s struck,” he said, then added, “We found it on top of that hill.” He pointed in the darkness.
The father chuckled. “Tell’em what we call that hill.”
“We calls it, ‘Further Than It Looks’,” the boy said.
A log popped in the fire.
“What do you know about physics?” I asked the boy as I wound the gyroscope.
It whirled on the picnic table. Then with the loss of inertia it flipped and fell into a pot of beans.
The boy whistled. “For a minute there, it had a loophole with gravity.”
“That about sums up Newton,” the father chuckled.
I looked at the father and noticed for the first time the I-phone in his shirt pocket.
I asked the father about his plans.
“Lesson plans, teacher?” He grinned.
“No, I mean life plans.”
“Life plans,” he rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Maybe I’ll go back and finish my degree.” He paused and stared at me, then continued, “Or maybe we’ll go down to Paraguay. They got some big cats down there.”
“Degree? I mean Paraguay?” I squirmed.
“Yeah.” He paused and looked away. “Paraguay.” He pushed the heel of his cowboy boot into the dirt. Then he stood, split a log with the axe in one blow and tossed a piece of the splintered wood into the fire.
“What degree are you working on?” I finally asked.
“Biology.” The father starred again and I looked away. Then he asked, “What do you believe in?”
Surprised by the question, I sat up and gave my pat answer, “I’m an agnostic Catholic.”
“No, no,” he chuckled. “I mean what do you think about raising boys in the wild?”
“Oh,” I said.
I stood then walked toward a dead limb that lay under the cottonwood. I dragged it into the fire as I thought about his question. The boy whistled.
“If whistling relieves the pain, then maybe you’re on to something,” I said.
The father looked at me.
I pulled my boots from the fire’s edge.
“Your fire is big,” he said.
“Big, too big?” I asked.
The old trapper picked up a sketchpad from the table. Then he tore a page from the metal coil and handed it to me.
I looked for a drawing, a painting, a sketch, some words, I checked both sides, but it was blank.
He grinned, then stood up and walked away.
From the window of my camper that night I watched as they spread their bedrolls out next to the fire. I heard the father say, “Good night, son.”
“Good night, dad.”
A week later I strolled through the region’s natural history museum and passed by a collection of Native American artifacts, neat and labeled in a glass case. Mounted in the background was a hide scraper similar to the one at Man Camp. I asked the curator if they were still used. Her eyebrow cocked up.
“No,” she said. “They don’t do it that way anymore.” She grinned, turned and walked away and I looked out the museum window, south, toward a place called Man Camp.
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