To Héctor Tobar
We’re disconnected from nature. When you talk to old people from Mexico, they’ll tell you stories about how they hunted, about how they knew rain was coming. They would look at the color of the trees to see if there was enough water. But we stay inside our houses, and even when we go outside, we don’t look up.
Why is there fracking in Bakersfield? Right in the middle of the groundwater. Why would you do that in one of the most polluted places in the world?
—Interview with Dr. Ricardo Cisneros, Associate Professor of Public Health, U.C. Merced
State and regional inspectors found concentrations of methane in the air around some of the wells at levels considered potentially explosive and environmental activists in the region are worried that other chemicals may also be leaking from the wells that could pose a threat to public health.
—Drew Costley, “Gas wells leak explosive levels of methane in Bakersfield,” Associated Press, 25 May 2022
“Did you do your homework?” Bernarda asked. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen while a pot bubbled on the stove.
Sigrid, her sixteen-year-old grandchild, sat on the living room sofa and fiddled with her phone.
“Did you do your English and the math?” Bernarda said.
“Yeah.”
“What are you up to?”
“Talking to my friends.”
“That’s not talking to your friends, baby.”
Sigrid poked her machine.
Bernarda glanced out the window. The trees lining the street looked like they’d been braided out of old leather. Black-brown branches, curling brown leaves. The sky was charcoal-colored, too, from the wildfire burning in Placer County, about six hours north.
“You should see your pals,” Bernarda said. “Go on a hike, go swimming.”
“School says we should stay inside when the smoke’s bad,” Sigrid answered in the dead voice that had shown up after her mother, Kiki, had passed away.
Bernarda went back into the kitchen to finish up a stew. An hour later, they were supposed to be eating it, along with a loaf of bread and glasses of purified water. Instead, Sigrid brought an iPad to the table, and her shiny black hair fell around her face like feathers as she studied pictures of a girl with a nose ring and glasses. Bernarda put pieces of butt roast on Sigrid’s plate and dug into the potatoes.
“Tell me about your English homework.”
“Reading The Great Gatsby.”
“Aw, sure. Like with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.”
“Unmmnh.”
Bernarda put her knife and fork down. “Lady, I ain’t the family poodle, you’ve got to talk to me like I’m a human being.”
“Well, then I guess we could talk about how Jennifer broke up with me.”
This was not news. Since the late summer, when Sigrid had finally, briefly, seemed happy again, everything had been about Jennifer, Jennifer—that she was beautiful, that she was bisexual, that they were in love, that she was Sigrid’s whole world, that she was an ice maiden, that she was ghosting Sigrid, that she was hooking up with an asshat named Raymond . . . Bernarda stroked her granddaughter’s hand, but Sigrid only frowned at her dinner, which she’d mashed into a patty with a fork.
“You can’t eat solid food?” Bernarda asked. “You need dentures?”
“I was thinking of going vegan.”
“Vegan, like no meat or anything like that.”
“Yeah, because I love animals.”
“Animals are cute. But you’re an animal. Animals eat animals.”
“Animals aren’t just cute. They get sad. Last week, I saw a YouTube of a gorilla named Delilah who wouldn’t eat. She was starving to death because her sister Daisy died.”
Bernarda’s eyes tingled.
The girl tilted her head and appraised her grandmother. Bernarda knew Sigrid wanted them both to clasp each other, weeping and calling out Kiki’s name or the names of the sad gorillas. But Bernarda couldn’t invite any more sorrow into her home. She’d secretly and silently wept in the bathroom every night for eight months after she’d buried her daughter. As she’d shuddered on the cold white tile, she’d learned that if you cried long and hard enough it could ruin you.
“You want to worry about something, worry about these cottonwoods,” Bernarda said.
Sigrid sighed. “What’s cottonwoods?”
“Those trees.” Bernarda gestured at the window, which framed black, Halloween-looking branches.
Sigrid craned her neck to look outside. “Don’t see any cotton on them.”
“That’s because those are the males. We’ve got all kinds of trees here in Kern County. Cottonwoods, sweetgums, cedars.”
Sigrid traced an invisible pattern on the table with her fingers.
“Cottonwoods should be green and orange, pretty colors. The trees grow by groundwater, so you know that javelina or turkey are near if you see one. If you ever find a healthy cottonwood, rub the buds under your nose. They smell like honey. And they’re medicine, too. Use the buds and bark for fever, infections, cuts, all kinds of things.”
“Grandma, I just remembered that I have some more homework.”
“Okay, mija. So much extra reading you have. Such a homework emergency you can’t have a conversation.”
Sigrid slipped from her chair and vanished into her room. The house grew silent. Bernarda wanted a drink, but she was an alcoholic and could only drink bottled water and Coke and crap like that.
Bernarda picked at the pork cubes in the stew. She’d seared them black at the edges and seasoned them with pimento and oregano, but she couldn’t make up for the jellybean flavor of USDA swine. She’d inherited the recipe from her father, Gregor, who’d raised her alone after her own mother had passed away from an infection. Bernarda looked down the table and imagined her papa, her mama, and Kiki sitting in their old chairs, gray-faced and mounted by golden halos.
Why aren’t you alive? she asked them, but they just shrugged.
_____
The next morning, after the two women grouched at each other over Sigrid’s choice of a chocolate bar for breakfast, they got into Bernarda’s truck and drove through the smoky streets. “Look up at these trees, Siggie, see how the bark’s flaking and the shade of the leaves. It means the drought’s going deep, below even the roots. I learned that when your grandpa and me went hunting when I was just a chiquitita. He’d teach me all about the plants, the animals, stars.” While she was chattering on, Bernarda teared up at her memories, but Sigrid made a prune mouth.
“Hunting, that’s gross,” she said.
“Oh, no, we had a good time.”
“Did you ever kill anything?”
Bernarda wiped her tears away by pretending she was scratching an itch. “Sure did. We had to eat.”
“What’d you kill?”
“Javelina, they’re like pigs.”
“Did you, like, shoot them?”
“With a rifle. I think I still got it in the garage.”
“That is beyond.” Sigrid’s voice rasped and Bernarda saw tears spangled her eyelashes, too. The girl turned toward the passenger window and pawed at her phone, probably sifting her screens to see if Jennifer had left her a message. Bernarda wanted to say, Baby, in two jiggles of a chicken’s gizzard you going to be smiling again. But she knew better than to lie like that. Her grandbaby was learning the lesson that one loss weakened you for the next. Eventually, the memories of all your dead loves together made a solid lead weight that lodged deep in your belly. If you weren’t careful, the anvil would sink you down until you found yourself at the bottom of a well, staring in shock at the bright, far-away sky. The trick was not talking about everything all the time, and to just keep moving. Bernarda pressed on the gas and sped toward the oil field that spread over the Kern bluffs. Praying-mantis-looking rigs bowed rhythmically to the earth. She tried to forget about how the oil company’s chemicals and methane trash crawled up from the land like monsters and could kill Sigrid and her even easier than grief could, as easy as they killed Kiki two years ago. Bernarda felt her blood pressure jack up as she puttered past the whirring haunches of the rigs, then turned left on Morning Drive and made her way to Highland High. The school’s concrete steps swarmed with laughing teens, but when Sigrid scrabbled out of the car she hiked up her backpack and walked fast past the crowd.
“Have a good day, baby,” Bernarda called out. Sigrid flapped her hand backwards and disappeared inside the campus.
Bernarda motored to Costco, where she’d worked since the nineties, with a long break for taking care of Kiki after the blood test came back bad. Stocking, forklifting, member services, retail—she’d done almost every job at the store. For the past eighteen months she’d been stuck in food services, which was in the back, by the electronics. Bernarda already had her mask on when she walked in. She slipped her apron around her neck and checked in with Henry, her boss.
Henry had a big Adam’s apple and the top button of his shirt jittered like a honeybee when he talked.
“Next month, I’m getting out of this shit shack for five whole days,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Going to bag some quail out in Carrizo Plain.”
“Used to do a little of that in Chihuahua.”
“In Carrizo, they got everything—quail, doves, hog, rabbit.”
Henry got a dreamy look in his eye while talking about the new camo Weatherby he’d just bought, until the phone rang with an order from Halliburton. He turned all business and told Bernarda she had a date with seven dozen party platters. Start with the meat and cheese combos, he said. She washed her hands and snapped on gloves, took plastic-wrapped packages out of the big fridges. The proteins had been pre-cut by Mario or Victor, and it was her job to doodle them up so they looked good. She rolled up the sugary ham slices like they were big cigarettes and twirled the beef into curlicues. She sliced the provolone and Swiss pieces on the diagonal and fanned them out like they were decks of playing cards. Then she did this eighty-three more times, though some of the platters were of just chicken and Swiss, and five of them were heaped with shrimp like cut-off pinkie fingers to dip in cocktail sauce and sprinkle with lemon wedges.
“Time to shift rotisserie,” Henry called from his office.
Bernarda shoved the party platters into two chillers, grabbed a cart, and went out to the chickens glistening under the heat lamp next to the liquor and fruits. Chickens that sat for over two hours in the heater got tossed, and Bernarda had taken home so many old greasy squawkers she had to eat them with her eyes closed. After she’d dumped them, it was time to turn over the bakery. She stuffed wads of sheet cakes and croissants into boxes that were either going to the tough nuts at the homeless shelter or Bako’s fly-sizzling landfill. Pizza came next, and soon she made the incinerator sparkle with pepperonis that people ordered but didn’t pick up. During her break, she snuck out some of the ham and cheese left over from the party platters and made her way past Wine, Hunting & Fishing, and Cashiers. She got outside to the red benches and ate some ham, but the meat tasted like bubble gum, so she chucked it and killed time by trying to hum the bedtime song she used to sing to Kiki. The song wouldn’t come, though, and she got scared it had vanished from her mind, that she was getting Alzheimer’s.
At three o’clock, Bernarda got back in her car and picked up Sigrid at school. They passed the oil field again, which Bernarda saw as the dwelling of Satan’s minions, all of them dancing to the devil’s fiddle by waving their butts in the air and sticking their long tongues in the dirt. Sigrid shifted her posture away from Bernarda, ignoring her abuela’s stone-eyed susto. She’d never seen Bernarda gasping on the bathroom floor, mouthing Kiki’s name into the tile; the girl thought she had no feelings. Also, that child had now grown so obsessed with her cabrona ex-girlfriend who dumped her for a boy water polo player that she wouldn’t notice if aliens came down from the sky, which actually was a possibility now according to the television.
They got home. Bernarda went into the kitchen and started making hamburgers and Sigrid went to her room to sulk like a monk sitting on top of a mountain. After she’d also done the laundry and scrubbed the floors, Bernarda hollered that dinner was ready. Sigrid came out and shook her head when she saw the burgers.
“I told you, I’m thinking of going vegan,” she said.
“You can go vegan later,” Bernarda said.
“Maybe I should do it tonight. Like now or never.”
“What are you going to eat? Flowers? Air? Nice ideas?”
Sigrid took out a candy bar from her pocket and unwrapped it. They weren’t sitting at the table with the napkins, glasses, nothing, they were standing around like savages while the girl chewed the candy, which was covered in dark chocolate and what looked like chocolate-covered seeds.
“You can’t just eat chocolate,” Bernarda said.
“It has added vitamins and minerals.” Sigrid started crying. Her face glowed red and her eyes bugged out. “That bitch!”
Bernarda felt exhausted. “It’s okay, baby.” She rustled Sigrid out of the kitchen and into the living room, over to the sofa. Sigrid kept a tight hold of that maldita vegan thing, which rained chocolate seeds onto the sofa’s blue velour cushions. Bernarda rocked Sigrid in her arms and kissed her all over her wet, hot face.
“Cuando te duele, me duele,” she said.
_____
As she slept that night, Bernarda had a dream where she walked with her father through the Chihuahua Desert. The two of them hunted the wild javelina, a black hairy dog-pig with a long nose and teeth like bony fingers. Bernarda saw Gregor striding ahead of her, his rifle slung over his left shoulder. The desert trembled with army-green yucca plants, their leaves ending in fang-sharp points. Red flowers scattered over the gold grass. Blue mountains thrust up from the horizon. Gregor stood still, focusing on a spot beyond the yucca. He waved her over. Bernarda saw a dark shape moving through the brush. The air felt as dry and clean as linen on a line as it swept across her throat. She heard her sneakers crunching through sand as she ran toward Papa, then felt her fingers close around his rifle. The weapon kicked back into her shoulder like a man’s punch and the javelina toppled forward.
Bernarda opened her eyes. The clock next to her bed said five am. With her whole body she remembered how, after the javelina fell, Gregor had dipped his hand in the animal’s blood and rubbed his wet thumb over her lips.
This is your father’s blessing, he had said.
Under her nightgown, Bernarda’s arms bristled with goose bumps. She pushed her pillow onto her eyes and tried to block out her thoughts. Hours passed. She felt wide awake even when the desert in her mind darkened with smoke, filth, machines. Somehow, she and Kiki were walking barefoot over the Kern Bluff oil fields, feeling its chemicals trickling into the water that shimmered under the earth’s spine while methane burst from its unplugged wells and set the sands on fire. As the flames flew toward them, Kiki sang her old lullaby, but Bernarda couldn’t make out the words.
She woke with a dirty feeling that didn’t go away. Not when she had her coffee and bread for breakfast. Not when she drove Sigrid to school and tried to talk to her about The Great Gatsby, which was about a guy with a lot of shirts. Not later at work, when Henry joked about how she had a date with one hundred and fifty submarine sandwiches.
Bernarda took lunch at 1:15. She spent it in Hunting & Fishing. She’d worked the department for a year back in 2016 and got to know the sometimes weird or scary white guys grabbing skinning knives or squabbling about prepper how-to. They’d gabbled nonstop about where to go glass hogs and where the best honey holes were, but she hadn’t paid enough attention to remember their tips. Today, she bought a tent, a small stove, gas for the stove, a knife set, a shovel, coolers, logs, dry ice, a tin coffee pot, sleeping bags, and seven liters of purified water. She carted her purchases to her truck and jammed the back seat with boxes and bags. At the end of her shift, she asked Henry to show her Carrizo Plain on her phone’s map.
“Quality quail, right here, in the American Ranch Unit,” he said, widening the picture with his thumb and forefinger.
“But you said they have other animals, too?”
“There’s deer, hogs, rabbits.”
“Hog is what I’m after.”
He told her all the best places to park, where to put up your site.
“Thanks, Henry.”
Half an hour later, when she picked up her granddaughter from Highland, Sigrid widened her eyes at the cargo.
“We going on a trip?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, yet. Have to see if we need more supplies.”
First thing Bernarda did after she rolled the car up the driveway was look for Papi’s rifle. The garage was crammed full of slumping boxes full of baby clothes, records, cruddy electronics. She knew where she’d last seen the gun, though. Bernarda climbed on her washing machine and, as she stood on it to reach a high shelf, a spasm shot through her left leg like she was a puppet and her strings had just been cut. Last spring, when she’d been walking up a flight of stairs at Sigrid’s school, she heard a snap and next thing she knew her whole knee’d gone big as a cabbage. Tottering on the washer, she waited to see if her limb would fall apart, but the pain flamed out and the joint held. Better still, the box was still up here, the long one holding the Winchester. Two other, smaller boxes clustered nearby. Bernarda opened all three to make sure. She grasped the gear and managed to get down, then walked into Sigrid’s room to see her granddaughter sprawled on her bed like a dead possum.
“Get packed.”
Sigrid barely budged, but an eye flickered. “What?”
“Move your ass.”
Sigrid laughed. “Where we going?”
“West.”
_____
It was already dark by the time Bernarda got the car packed and set off into the night with Sigrid. When they passed Buttonwillow, the 58 looked like a long black ribbon under a moon made purple by the smoke. Bernarda and Sigrid rolled down their windows and Sigrid leaned out so the wind could play on her face. Neither of them said a word when they passed the town’s hazardous waste dump, which Kiki had worked at for a year in 2006, treating and trashing pesticides for good money when she was between high school and college.
The hills shrank back from the highway, their spiky sage bushes making them look like giant porcupines. Sometimes Bernarda and Sigrid passed scabby lots dotted with trucks and trailers and other times Spanish-tiled houses fronted by white Chevrolets. When they hit Simmler Road at seven o’clock, the truck clattered like a space shuttle about to go bust on account there was no pavement, only a dirt trail leading up to Soda Lake.
Bernarda stopped the truck by a hillside and they got out. The air was cold as a frozen can. Lights glimmered from a few campsites scattered across the grassland and faint thumpings echoed from at least two speakers.
“We going to sleep here?” Sigrid leaned against the truck, pulling her jacket up to her chin. Soda Lake wasn’t a lake anymore, only a big expanse of salt that twinkled like rhinestones and made the earth soft under their shoes.
“Tent’s in the back,” Bernarda said.
They pulled out the equipment. Bernarda showed Sigrid how to lay the tarp, throw on the tent, and fix it into the ground with stakes pounded with their house hammer. When that was done, she told Sigrid to find wood fallen from nearby trees and started setting up the stove. Sigrid came back with three sticks of honey mesquite forty minutes later, talking about how she got lost and it was spooky out there. Bernarda got two of the emergency Duraflames she’d brought and told Sigrid to stack them, then tossed her a lighter. On the stove, she threw on her old frying pan and some of the last eggs and butter they’d had in the fridge. She cooked the mess up, poking it with a fork, and put in a few slices of bread to fry. The two of them ate from the pan and Sigrid didn’t say anything about vegan this or vegan that. After they cleaned up, they watched the fire until they got sleepy, then peed on bushes and put the stove into the tent. They slept in the blackness, needled by the remote sound of Dwight Yoakam singing “Honky Tonk Man.”
At six they woke. Above them, the sky was a palace made of red crystal. A thin, burnt scent floated in the air but was overtaken by salt and juniper. As far as they could see, gold and knuckle-tough scrub stubbled the earth, and brown squirrels popped up from their burrows. Bernarda put on coffee and, after drinking it, both women peed and shat by an outlying bush before washing themselves with bottled water and Ivory soap. More eggs for breakfast. Extra coffee. Bernarda fetched the third Duraflame and lit it in the ashes where the other two had burned the night before.
“How long we staying here?” Sigrid asked.
“Till we get ourselves a hog,” Bernarda said.
“What do you mean, ‘get ourselves a hog’?”
“Till we shoot one, carve it, and eat it for dinner.”
“I’m not shooting any hog!”
“Lady, that’s what we’re here for.”
“I told you I was going vegan.”
“Liked your eggs enough ten minutes ago and the ones last night, too.”
“Eating eggs isn’t anything like killing something for real, Grandma.”
Bernarda didn’t talk much after that and Sigrid didn’t either. A coolness settled between them, though they both pitched in with scrubbing the pan and their coffee cups and taking away the ash from the Duraflames and burying it next to their poop. Around seven am, Bernarda checked the rifle, which she’d stored in the back of the truck, and filled it with .30-30 ammo, the way her father had taught her when she was seven years old. She tried to show Sigrid how to push the rounds into the loading gate and the way to move the lever, but her granddaughter wouldn’t touch it.
“I said I don’t want to,” she said.
Bernarda looked at her kid. Pale cheeks, tough mouth. Depressed, again. Well, that was just too bad, because the older woman couldn’t get rid of that dirty feeling she’d had when she’d woke up yesterday morning, nor the memory of her father blessing her by touching blood to her lips.
“I didn’t bring us enough food to last,” Bernarda said.
“Then let’s go home.”
Bernarda raised her eyebrows. “You want to go home?”
Sigrid ground her sneaker heels in the glittering dirt.
“What about school?”
“Write you a note.”
Sigrid didn’t say anything.
“Get in the truck, baby.”
Sigrid got in and Bernarda climbed behind the wheel. For the next four hours, they drove around the hills, dumber than the doves fluttering in the sky about the location of hogs in this part of the world. Henry hadn’t been much help in that department, saying something about a honey hole and then getting a secret look in his eyes while waving his hand vaguely at her iPhone map. Bernarda scooted the truck around, passing blackened grass, a deer carcass, a badger too far away to hit, and the busted lumber of a house that looked haunted by pioneer ghosts.
“If Jen knew I had a gun she’d freak out,” Sigrid said.
“Hmmm.” Bernarda watched the birds arrow overhead.
“She’s the one who taught me about the factory farms. The chickens with no beaks and the cows getting shot in the head.”
“Good thing she’s got a boyfriend so he can be the one listening to her jaw flap.”
“If she were here right now, I’d be so happy I’d never need another thing ever.”
“Doesn’t work like that. You always need another thing. Let her go be with a boy and you’ll find a good girl who doesn’t screw around.”
Sigrid started crying again.
“What you should be paying attention to is what’s in front of your face.”
Sigrid wiped her nose. “Nothing around here.”
“What I mean. Desert’s supposed to have more life in it.”
“There’s birds.”
“Should be green yucca. Flowers. Gold and white cottonwoods.”
“Yeah, global warming. I know all about that.”
Bernarda let the kid natter on about Greta Thunberg and how animal fats get stored in your pancreas and murder you. While Sigrid explained that the end of the world was coming and everything was horrible, Bernarda maneuvered her truck past SUVs and pickups full of white men who looked terrifying. Bernarda raised two fingers up from her wheel in salutations. They waved back, but when she crossed paths with a Wrangler, its bald-headed driver only glowered at Sigrid and her like they were old enemies. At the sight of the guy’s fists gripping his wheel and his mean eyes, all kinds of bad pictures came into her brain, of him ramming and knifing them or doing worse to Sigrid. What was funny was that she would rip his throat out if he even fidgeted in Sigrid’s direction, but Bon Jovi was blasting out his windows and so they liked some of the same music. As the Wrangler puttered into the distance, she breathed easier. The women were left with no company but some blackened cottonwoods scratching the clouds, and Bernarda drove with her arm hanging out of the window, her head waggling as she mentally sang the hair band songs she’d learned when Gregor first moved them to California. At around eleven o’clock, she shared string cheese and bottled water with her granddaughter, who’d settled back into her funk.
About fifteen minutes later, they saw a dark line wobbling down a nearby hill.
Bernarda stopped the truck and squinted.
“It’s hogs,” Sigrid said. “Big black ones. Like a family of them.”
Bernarda put on the gas.
“Let’s go back,” Sigrid said.
Bernarda drove forward. Her heart beat like a horse’s hoof.
Sigrid twisted her hands together. “Let’s go back, let’s go back.”
Bernarda mapped the hogs’ course. If the creatures continued their same route, they were headed to another hill on the east side of the plain. Looking for water. She drove along their trajectory, stopped the truck a ways back, and grabbed the rifle from the backseat. There was a big fluff of shrub at the foot of the hill. She hiked about the length of half a football field and squatted by the bush in the crumbly earth, her bad knee rattling like pebbles shook in a paper bag.
Bernarda waved her granddaughter over.
Sigrid stayed in the truck, a dark form behind the shiny windshield.
Bernarda jerked her hand in the air like she was yelling get the fuck over here in sign language.
Sigrid got out of the truck and tramped across the sand. The hogs were just dots on the plain, but they got bigger and bigger. Through her scope, Bernarda saw they were thin and bristly, with the long noses and crazy fangs. They walked together daintily like they were part of the same circus. When Bernarda had the lead one in her hairs, she waited until it was within range. Her pulse battered in her neck.
Her hog was an ugly girl with whiskers like Porfirio Díaz. The animal waddled back and forth as it came closer. Bernarda placed her finger on the Winchester’s trigger and her mouth turned dry as the salt crusting the ground.
“No!”
Sigrid slapped at the rifle so it shot in the air, making Bernarda fall on her tail. The hogs scattered like ballerinas. They bolted up the hill and disappeared.
Bernarda hustled to her feet and grabbed Sigrid’s arm. “Don’t you ever do that again!”
Sigrid met Bernarda’s glare with one of her own.
“Goddammit!” Bernarda said.
They got into the truck again, barreled down the road.
After half an hour of mutual raging silence, Sigrid asked: “Why do you want to do this so bad?”
Bernarda shook her head.
“Why do you want to kill some little pig?”
Bernarda’s throat clenched. “I’m doing this for you.”
“How is this for me?”
Bernarda looked at the hills fluttering in the rising heat. These badlands were as empty as Mars. Her lips trembled, but her voice was clear and steady when she said, “Got to show you how to survive.”
_____
Around five o’clock, after they’d been driving north for three hours, Bernarda saw two black dots hurrying across the grasslands. Sigrid stiffened as her grandmother tracked the arc of where the animals appeared headed. Bernarda drove northwest toward a set of hills and parked by a patch of shrub. Getting Gregor’s rifle, she jumped out of the truck and ran low and quiet toward the mounds. About halfway there, she felt her knee snap. She kept running. The knee gave way and she fell into the dirt, her face hitting the salted ground. She didn’t feel anything yet; nothing hurt. She was heaving herself up when she heard Sigrid scrambling behind her. The girl snatched her by the armpits and pulled her forward. Bernarda still had her rifle and with her free hand clung to her granddaughter’s shoulder. They rushed toward the foothills. When they reached a shady, hidden spot, Bernarda half-collapsed onto the ground, huffing and sweating. Sigrid crouched next to her with her face in her hands. Bernarda positioned the rifle and got the two hogs within her scope. She focused on the front one, a smaller swine with a sagging belly with long teats. Been pregnant, had babies. Tears rolled down Bernarda’s face, but when the animal got within closing distance, she pulled the trigger. The hog jerked and fell in the dust, while the other one raced in the opposite direction. Bernarda had been thrown backward by the rifle’s kick.
Sigrid was screaming.
Bernarda lay down in the dirt and let the child go on. The screaming died down soon enough and then came the crying. Bernarda reached out and gripped Sigrid’s leg. Snot ran down the girl’s face and Bernarda tried to rub it off with her forearm, but she couldn’t reach from her splayed position. Bernarda’s knee felt like it had been whacked by a baseball bat.
After about ten minutes she said, “Okay.”
Choking sounds, a line of spit dropping from Sigrid’s lip.
“It’s time for you to pull yourself together,” Bernarda said, trying not to sound bitter or cruel. “What’s gone is gone.”
Sigrid’s sobs softened and petered out. She helped her grandmother up and Bernarda limped back to the truck, Sigrid lagging. They drove toward the black body of the hog. When walking toward it, Bernarda saw the trail of blood leading down from the bullet wound in the hog’s neck to its belly and then to the soil, where it flowered. She wanted to dip her thumb into the deep redness of that blood and dab it on Sigrid’s mouth.
“Help me get it into the truck,” she said instead.
Sigrid stared at the desert like she hoped to wander there alone the same as Jesus himself. Bernarda let her make up her mind. The girl spat out a few newfangled cusses that Bernarda had never heard before, then bent down and got her arms around the hog’s shoulders. Bernarda took the back end. It must have weighed seventy pounds. Bernarda opened the back of the truck with an index finger and they threw it in. The beast hit with a thump, landing on a blanket Bernarda had put there this morning.
They drove back to camp.
_____
There wasn’t a place to hang the hog because there weren’t any nearby trees, so Bernarda covered the ground with the plastic and cardboard from the stove and the camping gear packaging. She told Sigrid to bring the coolers from the truck and fill them with the dry ice, and while that was being done, managed to lug the animal to the dressing site and lay it on its back. With the carving knife she’d bought at work, she sliced it up its middle. She opened it up and broke the pelvic bones with her hands, removed all feces, and cleaned the meat. She rolled it on its side and emptied the guts. Stripped out the leaf fat. Cut free the hangar, separated the membrane. Cut out the skirt. Tore out the tenderloin. Blood poured onto her shirt and her lap. She felt it on her face, her lips. Now it was time for the quartering, which took longer than she expected and required so much force she thought she’d sprain her back. She broke down the legs along the spine. Cut the shoulders off through the ribs and featherbones. Carved a rib loin. Trimmed the belly. She tucked everything into the coolers except for the loin, which she skinned and put on an unused piece of plastic. After that, she hauled the guts to the waste area, buried them deep. She came back and stripped and washed herself three times with soap and bottled water and scoured herself with a towel. Her knee was three times its normal size and ached worse than before. She put on sweatpants and a tee shirt and a sweatshirt and a puffy jacket, then poured gas into the stove and placed the frying pan on it.
While Bernarda worked, Sigrid sat by the dust of this morning’s Duraflames and wept like she had when her mother first died. Bernarda hobbled over to the truck and got Sigrid’s puffy jacket and put it over her granddaughter’s heaving shoulders. Next thing, she sliced the loin into strips and fried them in the pan until they were caramel-colored and smelled like home.
“No,” Sigrid said, when Bernarda gave her a plate. The girl looked like a wooden soldier. She hadn’t lit the last Duraflame, though night was coming and the temperature had already dipped to maybe 40 degrees.
Bernarda made the fire and sat by it with her meal. She ate the two portions while watching Sigrid. Though Sigrid wouldn’t touch her food, Bernarda tugged at her foot until she sat close enough to the heat to avoid getting sick.
The hog went down smooth, but Bernarda didn’t brag about it. She washed the dishes, put them aside, and sat with Sigrid by the Duraflame. Its red dancing flutters warmed their bones while they stayed mute and broody. Around midnight, they put the stove into the tent and got into their sleeping bags. Bernarda held Sigrid close and the girl cried some more, for a long time.
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The next morning, the sky came ablaze with a champagne dawn. The wildfire smoke had cleared enough that stars peeped out from the dark edges of the atmosphere. Birds sang and yallered at each other. Bernarda kissed Sigrid’s cool forehead and heaved out of the tent while dragging the stove along, her left cheek stinging from scrapes and her knee throbbing like a bullet wound and her breath making white clouds. She staggered to the waste section of camp and peed and dried herself before washing her hands. Digging through the cooler, she cut out a big hank of ribs. She turned on the stove and fried them. The perfume of the charred meat floated up and mingled with the pink sky and the frosted weather.
Sigrid crawled out of the tent and stood. She looked like she was twelve years old again. After all that woe, something pure had come into her face and she shone like a pearl.
Bernarda handed her a plate.
Sigrid looked at her grandmother.
“We both miss Mom,” she said.
Bernarda felt the lead weight in her belly. Nothing made it any lighter—not buttoning your lip, not hustling all over tarnation. Turned out the real trick was learning how to carry it.
“Yes,” she said.
Sigrid nodded, kicked at a stone.
“I’m going to be a real vegan when we get home.”
“Okay.”
They ate their ribs next to the dead Duraflame and watched the heavens swing. As the sun rose, it poured its nectar on the salt and the dry, pale soil, making everything shine. Sigrid observed the transformation in silence. She tilted back her head and closed her eyes.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said.
Fall 2022
