Day after the school shooting in Florida, my son’s elementary practices lockdown. When I pick his
five-year-old self up in the parking lot crowded with parents I don’t breathe.
I’ve been drinking, is why, so I hold my body in my mouth. “Noel and his partner are in town,
we’re meeting for dinner at Matt’s,” I say to my boy, loading him in the car. Strapping him down.
“We’re good at traveling together,” my brother tells me at the restaurant. He takes a bite from his
Juicy Lucy. “We’re good at avoiding hate crimes.”
“Oh,” Kiel leans across the table, touches my forearm. “Ranchers are terrible.” They tell the story
in tandem. Last weekend. Then, last night, the cop who stopped them. His cruel eyes, what he said,
what could have been so much worse, but wasn’t. They’re long distance, each in his own Dakota.
Kiel, in a small town at the base of the Black Hills. Noel, a Ph.D. at a conservative ag school.
“No one wants to hang out anymore but I’m not hiding Kiel,” Noel says, referring to the shit men
in his program who have only ever invited him hunting. Kiel, a hand on Noel’s thigh under the table.
“We both swore off love.” Then he’s refilling the pints of beer frothing between us.
“I didn’t think I’d meet the love of my life in a red state,” Noel says back.
“Do you know,” Kiel asks my son, “What a jackalope is? Here, let me show you a picture.”
I want tonight to keep thrumming. “Tell another,” I say. “Tell us everything.”
My brother is so lovely, I think, and I grin stupidly while he tells one from when he used to work for
the forestry department, before he got into the ag school. How his friend was the last archeologist
stationed at Bears Ear. When he visited her before she got axed by the hateful administration,
they got drunk and broke into the forestry office, stole his personnel file, read it giddy with trespass
on the roof of her beat-up Jeep. I hold the broad dark Utah sky, with them under it, in my mind
while he talks, the night like a secret we’re all keeping safe.
Someone in his department at the ag school researches coyote population control, he says now.
“Sometimes they’ll just round up the coyotes. Fence the species they want to control in and
shoot them.” I am struck not by the cruelty of this because cruelty doesn’t shock me in this place, in
this body, in this year. I am instead struck, after his story, standing in the glow of the restaurant’s
neon sign brightening the damp sidewalk, that it has rained, and now the road is glassy as taffy, and
none of this is a metaphor for anything else. It is a job, to kill the coyotes. He wasn’t telling me
about language, but about coyotes and how easily they are fenced in at the ag school,
how methodically. Who builds the fences is hardly the question for me to ask him.
There are fences. There are cages. It would be stupid to see coyotes in fences as symbolic at the ag
school, with all those straight-boy hunters. I imagine the fences hold the coyotes well.
So instead I say, “When did it rain?” “Come visit,” they tell me and my boy. “We’ll find a jackalope!”
Kiel claps his hands and my son claps his hands back. Driving, my boy tells of the day’s lockdown.
How the kids played at keeping their bodies hidden behind book bins, piles of coats.
“Do you always hide together?” I ask, because it feels important that he should have someone
beside him, small and familiar and alike, should there be a day he needs to hide. I should know
how they hide. I’ve had too much to drink to be driving us safely home. I cannot save us,
which is not really the point I want to make to him, so instead I smile in the rearview. Tonight, I
pray to what’s holy that none of us gets stopped. “It’s fun,” he says, his cheeks plump
full of blood. I want to pull over and smooth my hands down them endlessly like some
good mother in some good movie. He says, of lockdown, “It’s hide and seek.”