At 8:00 a.m. the sun was not yet risen but Joe and Aaron Teal sat at one corner of the wood slab of their rustic dining table in chairs made of glossy gnarled branches, sipping coffee. The two formed the only pod of heat in the house. Its new rooms failed to absorb life, sparse furniture smelled manufactured, forbidding the domesticity that would replace the aura of sterility with something human. Oak floors and banisters gleamed scuff-less, walls stood devoid of art, guestrooms sat vacant of all but beds with expensive neutral bedspreads like catalog ads. Father and son gravitated together mornings in keen awareness of the empty house around them and hustled out onto the ranch as escapees.

“You’re in the truck today, Aaron, I want you transporting hay” said Joe as he checked the weather forecast. In his head unrolled a map of the ranch hands throughout the day, bees spreading from the hive.

“It’s fine if Leah rides along, right? She’ll be around later,” Aaron said, his casual tone failing to mask the apprehension in the question. He yawned despite himself as gold began to slip across grass-pierced snow to the Big Belts sitting in the west.

“Fine if she doesn’t slow you down,” said Joe, thick fingers curled around his mug.

“Come on.”

“She’s always here, might as well lend a hand,” Joe took a sip, “I’d pay her.”

“She knows that, just doesn’t care to work. She doesn’t really need the money.”

“I’m well aware, her being a freshman is all,” Joe’s voice was laced with something, not disapproval, but nearing it. A slightly jesting tone.

“That’s never been a problem with you before, Dad.”

“And it’s still not, just tickles me, a freshman girl willing to ride in a stinky truck all day just to be with her boyfriend. Not willing to put in a little labor to make it worthwhile.”

“I think the boyfriend part makes it worthwhile, thank you very much,” Aaron said, lifting his mug to his lips. “And the truck don’t stink,” he smirked.

As though the country were in contract with the dawn, nothing yet stirred, no four-wheelers revved down at the hands’ housing, no pickups crunched down the snow-packed gravel road running arrow-straight out of White Sulfur. Black lumps of cattle speckled the land like pepper a distance away on the shallow slopes approaching the mountains. Aaron saw in his mind’s eye the Angus sending out puffs of breath from glistening quarter-size nostrils, melting snow along their flanks. Venturing out meant thick Carhartts over hoodies, stiff denim over long johns, rough-hewn gloves and heavy boots. The two men dressed in silence, started out into the workings of Teal Ranch.

Later that morning Leah’s aunt, who lived in White Sulfur, drove her to the ranch. She hopped into the passenger seat of the pickup beside Aaron, greeting him with her coy little flash of a smile, soon wiped from her face by his for several minutes.

When individual breaths were drawn again, Aaron said, “Hauling hay today. Dad’ll pay you if you help with the loading and unloading.”

“I’m good,” said Leah, settling herself into a comfortable position on the spacious leather seat and turning on its warmer.

“You just want to sit in the truck all day?” asked Aaron, watching the track of road.

“Well you’ll be in it, won’t you?” was the self-satisfied reply, and her dewy eyes swooped up to his from under feathered lashes, one cheek dimpling.

He beamed back, weak-kneed if he’d been standing, his question already forgotten. Anyone watching would have seen the truck swerve a little as Aaron leaned across the console.

“Do you wanna…?” murmured Leah.

It was a moment before Aaron took her meaning. He leaned away, eyebrows raised, scanning her face for several moments as the truck drifted to a stop on the gravel. He appeared to draw a conclusion from her expression; his brow furrowed and in earnest he said, “No.”

Turning back to the road, his voice shifted to an affected drawl of practicality. “Hell, we got work to do.”

Leah did sit in the truck all day, giggling and blaring country radio, reclining the seat to drowse in the afternoon when the novelty grew threadbare. She did slow Aaron down but he couldn’t claim to mind. He was a junior at the high school of 1,000-strong White Sulfur Springs, slim in its pickings. Leah, an olive-skinned round-hipped freshman, was alluring even in her naivety, and Aaron himself was something of a catch—tall, blond, strapping, to come into an affluent ranch someday. It had been an affair of several months.

That evening Aaron and Leah cooked pasta, slipping chewy noodles into each other’s mouths by the stove while Joe sat by ribbing.

“Get a lot done today, Leah?” he asked, an affable smile mottling his face.

“Nope,” she replied, unfazed, lifting a spoonful of sauce to Aaron’s mouth.

“Well I’ll have to put you to work if you’re gonna be hangin’ around here all the time. Maybe you and Aaron both working could equal how much he gets done when he’s not distracted.”

“Dad, lay off.”

“I’m just saying, you know me, I’m not one for missed chances.”

“More like not one for giving one damn inch,” muttered Aaron under his breath as he turned to stir the sauce. Leah heard and let it show on her face.

Joe saw the cloud descend and attempted to clear it. “You kids got anything planned for the evening?” he asked, tone dripping nonchalance.

“Probly watch a movie,” said Aaron, working to thaw himself out of to the same casual level of discourse again.

“Let’s do something scary,” suggested Leah eagerly, “I can only watch scary movies when I’m here for the night.”

“Oh you’re spending the night, are you?” said Joe.

“Oh…I thought so,” she wavered, looking to Aaron.

There was a moment of tacit standoff between father and son, unspoken interrogation and admonition and arrogance flying through the charged air between them. Finally Joe grinned as though the shootout had all been an act, an exaggerated joke.

“You can stay, Le, as long as it’s okay with your aunt. I trust you two.”

Aaron’s eyes fixed bewilderment for a moment. He broke into a nervous chuckle, convincing no one that he’d known all along.

Joe caught his eye. “I trust you.”

#

The next morning Leah went home and that evening the house was empty but for the two men. They ate leftover pasta on barstools at the granite countertop of the kitchen island. The silence in the house rang a distinct bell from each room as they chewed and gazed out broad windows into the descent of winter’s early darkness on the amber lights of the hands’ quarters down the gravel road.

“Got a lot done today,” said Joe.

Aaron let out an involuntary bark of a laugh. He hunched there weary to the core and sleep-deprived. Yes, a lot was accomplished today.

Joe gave him a warning glance and turned back to his plate. “We’re not done yet. Never done. This weekend I want you to go out with Tyson on four-wheelers and check the main body of the herd. Bill thought he might’ve seen signs of H. Somnus in a heifer and if he’s right we need to catch it before it gets anywhere.”

“I invited Leah and Ben from football over this weekend. Thought I would finally have a day or two off. Told ’em they could stay over.”

“They can come over and they can spend the night. But tell ‘em you’ll be workin’ late into the evening and gone early in the morning.”

“Who needs sleep anyway.”

“It’s your choice.”

“What kind of host would I be?”

“The ranch comes first, you know that. You learn the ropes now so you can work ’em like a professional when it’s your turn. You should just be happy learning how things are done, and here I pay you. So you’re gonna earn that pay. Whenever I need you. And I will. You’re sixteen and a damn sight better than most of the hands I hire on.”

“Thanks Dad,” Aaron put down his fork. “And I know. I know how it works around here. God knows I’m well aware of my responsibilities.”

“You’ve always held up your end.”

“Happy to.” But he was thinking of Leah.

A frosted moon started up from the Little Belts, began its train-tracked course across a sky of ice. Cattle slumbered close together, silken hides rising and falling in the deep hallowed hush and chill of the night.

#

One month later Joe and Aaron stood in the huge unfinished garage of the ranch house, dismantling their work attire—peeling off layer after damp layer, unsticking boots cemented to thick socks, removing hats to swipe hands through matted hair. Aaron paused to check his phone. He stood listening to a message. Then his hand fell from his ear and he bent almost double, hands to knees, head sunk beneath his shoulders. He concealed the motion by extending an arm further down to untie a frozen bootlace. Face hidden from his father, he shed the remainder of his work clothes and fled to his room. He didn’t appear again that evening.

On the following day, the two went up in the helicopter to gather the herd in closer to headquarters in anticipation of calving season. Before them rose the rounded hump of Mount Baldy, snow capping its pied scalp, beyond it the long low reservoir with 76 miles of crinoline shore, ice perforated by fishing holes as though to let the deep water breathe. Below the helicopter lay snow like frosting, textured by pines clustered high on the hills, running staggered evergreen lines down into the rimmels where runoff would flow come spring.

Aaron said not a word and Joe didn’t pry into his reticence. All young men have days of deeper contemplation, he thought. They were far afield, high up and searching for the farthest stragglers to turn and guide back when Aaron broke his silence.

“Dad, I’ve always understood the agreement. I’ve never deviated from the responsibilities you’ve given me, I’ve always wanted to please you more than anything and I think I—I’ve done that, or at least you’ve never really had anything negative to say and I just—I want you to keep in mind the relationship we’ve always had, which is just, it’s more than father and son, it’s almost like we’re friends and sometimes business partners. I’ve really always tried my best so you have to understand about this that it didn’t happen for lack of precaution, I mean, we were careful, and I know people always say that when this happens but that just shows that you can never be sure and that it’s no one’s fault and—what are you doing?”

Joe had plunged the helicopter sharply downward, sending it toward the permafrosted ground below. “When we land you get out.”

“What? Dad, I’m trying to tell you— “

“I know.”

“—that Leah’s pregnant.”

“I know. You can get out.”

“What? Why?”

“You’re too damn smart for this Aaron. Or I thought you were too damn smart.”

The helicopter touched down harder than was good for it. Aaron sat gaping at his father but was met by a stony-faced stare. Finally, he opened the door and walked hunched over out of range of the blades. The helicopter began lifting off before he even turned around, and he stood watching it recede as his breath froze leaving his body.

It was full night and frigid by the time he crossed the six or seven miles back to the ranch house. Dragging himself up the long hill to the mansion, he arrived keyless to locked doors, rounded the house trying them all. When he came to the side of the house with the garage he saw his own pickup parked outside. Under the dim amber light on the side of the house was a sheet of paper taped to the locked door. He approached it and read, “Go to your mom’s. You won’t be living in my house anymore,” in Joe’s blocky handwriting.

His face blank, he went to the truck, saw his suitcase thrown haphazardly in the bed, climbed into a cab that seemed vastly colder than the outside air. In an early hour of the endless night he drove down the hill and off Teal Ranch.

#

Two days passed for Aaron at his mother’s, absent from school as he lay through the days in numb avoidance of confrontation, of future thought. His mother did not cater to his depression, did not bring him sandwiches, did not look in on him. She was not so livid as to deny him a home, but livid enough to lack any compassion spawned by pity.

In the new dark just after the sun’s disappearance that second day, Leah appeared. She crept into his room—let into the house by the cold condescending permission of his mother—and sat on the bed where he lay. He rolled over, saw her there and leapt up, coming around to kneel in front of her and take her hands. She stared through her lap down into the floor. Neither spoke for several minutes. Then Leah uttered without expression, “Your dad visited me today.”

Aaron shot up rigid with tension, staring straight ahead, then set to pacing across his room. Leah watched him march back and forth as though she looked through a window. He ground out, not looking at her, “What did he want?”

“He gave me money. Said to go to Billings and…have the procedure.”

Aaron halted, a vein showing in his temple. He tottered to Leah and collapsed in front of her, resting his face against her shins. “Not one damn inch,” came his strained voice from between her legs.

“I took it,” she said, her voice still devoid of inflection. “And I’m gonna do it.”

He lifted a horror-stricken face to stare into her blank one. “What?”

“We can’t have a fucking kid Aaron.”

He turned around and leaned back hard against the edge of his bed, knees pulled up, elbows draped over them. “I know we can’t Leah.”

“We’re kids. Just children.” She was next to tears now, fighting to keep her face neutral.

“So our lives shouldn’t just end here.”

“I want to go to college, Aaron, somewhere out of state. I want to be a nurse.”

“I want you to be a nurse,” said Aaron.

They sat in silence. Both looked down forked roads and saw one potential and inexorable common lane. A lane with crib and onesies—hand-me-downs or thrift store finds, squalling infant, squabbling parents, eyes desperate and frazzled, ambition foregone. But both saw others too. Many others rolling into the future, lanes leading to college, to scrubs, to ranch management, all beyond the gate that blocked them only to permit passage along the first lane. Leah opened the gate.

“Good,” she said, and rose and went out.

#

The land thawed, cracking like ice melted too quickly as false summer arrived and encouraged the disposal of heavy coats only to cower again under late snows that taxed winter-weary patience. Finally temperatures rose as the north leaned sunward and the hills greened, water sliding from diminishing patches of snow to feed emerald threads winding down in the troughs of the earth. Calves gleamed like onyx on spindly legs, lowing inquiries to their placid mothers who gnawed cud and observed through half-closed eyes. Teal Ranch hired new hands to pick up the slack in the rush of spring work and the absence of the owner’s son. None of the men asked about that, cowed as they were by Joe Teal’s strident expectations of perfection. They just did the work.

Aaron went back to the ranch house during work hours to collect his things when he knew his father wouldn’t be there. Clothes, knickknacks, books piled into duffel bags, he made his furtive exit, passing his father’s bedroom on the way. But it had ceased to be his father’s bedroom. All personal traces had vanished; it could now be another guest room, as could the one Aaron had just vacated. He stood in the doorway of what had been his father’s room, staring at the bare bedside table and dresser top, the house’s pervasive sterility reaching its fingers in already to reclaim lost ground. He wondered only for a moment where Joe had gone, then knew without a doubt. He was back down at the double-wide, the trailer where he’d lived so long when Aaron was growing up with his mother, before the boy had been able to choose to be part of the breath of the ranch.

Now his father had retreated in his absence. Aaron in his mind’s eye saw his father land the helicopter that day and return to the house, saw him throw a wad of his son’s clothes into a suitcase and chuck it like a garbage sack into the back of the truck. He watched him go back inside to sit rigid in the creeping dusk, waiting, waiting for his son to get home and get out. He saw him hunch low over his mug in that deeper dark when he heard the footsteps on the driveway, the engine start, saw him refuse to admit the effect of these sounds upon him even to the empty house, empty of the boy who couldn’t come in. Aaron saw his father lying in bed that night suffocating under the weight of the void he’d created. He saw him choose to flee at first light to his haven of bachelorhood instead of refilling what he’d hollowed.

When Aaron locked the door behind him he locked in a blank house-mold of air, a cadre of guest bedrooms.

The student stood before a bathroom sink, leaning over it to apply her makeup, a debutante at her toilette, her torso vaulting the gap from counter’s edge to smeared mirror. She wore a loose silken camisole that swung low between her breasts and revealed the suggestions of them and of ribs meeting sternum. The same skirt as last night.

Alessandra came in clad in her garb of the nocturnal.

“We’re headed to Mar’s sister’s off-campus to pre-game. Ready?”

They walked. The five of them lithe giants, clubfooted and slick-calved, bare-shouldered down the dorm blocks where other tribes brayed and bellowed pre-carnage. They brandished screens, lit boxes like torches glowing their faces and the student looked up to Venus visible even under streetlamps. This horde sutured into its garments strutted past packs of boys heated and visceral and whooping and it early yet. Things quieted just off campus, just out of the dorm realm where apartments sat and sported their own recklessness but a more private recklessness, weightier in the morning. Among these was Mar’s sister’s apartment on the ground floor.

They entered saying “aaayyy” with their hands up, chins lowered, backs bowed backward in some strange benediction. Around an island kitchen counter they collected. Bottles rested there, red cups quickly unnestled. Girls leaned on the counter with straight backs and one leg straight, one bent, their hips forming diagonals down which the earth could roll. The student sank low in a couch, cup in her hand, and raised one leg straight up before her and smiled and raised her cup as well and cried, “ow ow!” The girls looked at her and laughed.

They departed again flushed and formed their caravan across campus to the cloistered halls of Greek Row, that fixture of supposed nobility, actual debauchery. One house shook from the inside with the tremor of a heartbeat and it was toward this house the girls stalked.

They went in unquestioned, uninhibited, wafting into the dense booze, sweat scented air, into the darkness lit by shocks of lights, into the thud where they could no longer hear each other’s cackles.

Bodies ground together here and near the dj’s stand a boy with a camera scanned up and down the form of a girl bent over sending tremors through the flesh of her lower body as though it were unattached to her bones. A boy to her left grabbed her ass like meat and stuck out his tongue in wretched pantomime for the lens. A boy to her right poured some clear poison down onto her ass. She smiled over her shoulder and bit her lip.

All over the room people kissed, not kissing but slavering drunk and lust-eaten. They jumped and waved forearms like levers above heads. The floor stuck with unknown substances layered and weeping from cups held only precariously and girls bent over flat-backed grinning at the male motions behind them, this dry and public sex condoned. The music was no music but an illness, a possession also welcome. On a banister a cat lay like a sphinx and observed undisturbed by the melee, weathered to it. The strobes caught behind its eyes.

The student spun and hopped with the mosh, a gleam appearing on her forehead. At one point she stopped and stood still looking around her. A wall formed behind her eyes. She moved off from the circle of her pack and strode toward sliding glass doors that led out the back. Outside the sound was little subdued and people hung here too but she walked across the dirt and dead grass and out through a gate in the fence. She brought out her phone and its screen lit the blue in her face and then she brought it to her ear.

“What the hell Quinn,” came husked from the other end.

“Dexter. You were asleep.”

“Course not, wide awake and lucid as all get out, that’s why I sound so groggy.”

“Sorry.”

“What do you need?”

“I’m at a frat party Dexter and I can’t decide if it’s really just appalling on an unspeakable level because of the booze and fucking and the shitty music and the fact that for many here this is the ultimate joy and it’s not even a true unaided joy! Or if it’s sort of euphoric and beautiful because we’re all young and willing to throw up our hands and implement evil on our bodies without concern and feel what joy we can get our hands on even if we know there’s nothing worthy to it.”

“Well are you leaning one way?”

“Maybe but I want to know what you think.”

“I think it’s appallingly beautiful.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Cop out.”

“Okay, I think if you look close into each pair of eyes at that party you’re attending you’ll see mirth, because at the level they keep close to their eyes they believe they’ll live lives full of this similar euphoria, but below that surface they know they won’t—you know you won't—so since they can’t fully shake that cynicism, that fatalism, they drink and snort and forget about it for a bit and, well, that’s soothing, right? I don’t think it matters whether it’s beautiful or appalling because at one flash of the strobe you think the former and at the next the latter and then you go outside and call your brother and you ask him what he thinks but that’s not even really what you want to know. You want to know whether you personally are appalling or beautiful and if you’re wasting your time.”

“And?”

“And you are all three.”

“Dexter.”

“Yeah?”

“You good?”

“I’m peachy keen.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No one’s making you.”

“I’m gonna go get a drink.”

“Drink away.”

“You go back to sleep.”

“That I will.”

“Night.”

The student lowered the phone and stood looking across a bare cracked lot, a net-less basketball hoop on one side. She turned and looked back at the house which stood before her chimerical and comical, some sinister circus. She went back in.

Her group no longer bobbed in its inward facing circle on the floor. She went to the bathroom and found Alessandra and Mar doing nothing but giggling at each other, each with a hand on the shoulder of the other to steady herself. They bowed with their laughter as though the muscles of their abdomens curled them forward inexorably with each constriction. When the student entered they turned to her and their laughter ceased for a moment and then burst gushing forth into her face, drenched and warm as they relinquished their holds on each other to cling to, to hang from her.

“Where are the others?” she asked smiling.

Mar waved a hand absently. “Guys or other party.”

“Are you two about ready?”

Alessandra stood straight up, brow furrowed. “I’m hungry.”

“Come on, we’ll get food.”

“Oh my god I love food.”

The student led the way out of the bathroom, out of the house, the point of a female arrow whose auricles weaved and giggled and she took their arms and ushered them forth. At a campus minimart and canteen known for its late hours Alessandra and Mar ate thick breakfast burritos while the student drank coffee. Her companions spoke of boys she didn’t know in their slurred dialect and she watched two boys come in, sober-faced and silent. They strode to the refrigerated walls of the minimart and stood side by side staring into lit coolness at the serried ranks for but a moment. Then one of the boys wrenched open a glass door, snatched a slender can, handed it to his counterpart, snatched another and let the door thud closed. They strode to the counter, paid without a word and were gone out into the night.

When the girls finished their food Alessandra hung low over the table, head propped in her hand, smiling up at the student. Mar set her chin on her forearms folded before her and smiled at Alessandra. The student smiled at them both and gathered the napkins and wrappers and stood. “Bedtime,” she said.

“Ah bed…time,” said Alessandra.

They floated back to the dorm and entered their rooms in darkness and slept the sleep of the dead.