A moan from the hill. Horse or man. If the Kid looked away to the hill, at the noise, it would change everything. He doesn’t look. He sits on the top step. She’s eye to eye with the Rodeo Kid. She is very ugly now, a cow. Her face is destroyed with bruising. Tits sag under flannel. Her teeth are crooked and black. The boy never noticed it before. She is the personification of something. She takes another step. A smile again splits her split face. He stands. This makes him much, much taller than she on the top step. He says peace with his hands, says stop with his pout, but her swing is good and fast.

The nail gets him in the thigh, not deep. He doesn’t howl. She whips the stick-nail into another swing of impressive force and speed. He ducks but his cheek is grazed. She’s on the top step now, and the Kid has to wonder whether all her crawling and limping was an act. He’s backed against the door, under the shade of the porch. She has him pinned with her weapon across his neck, her face in his face speaking vicious and ugly. He has her arms locked, the nail at his face. Maybe he could pry the stick free and turn it on her. Instead he breaks away, ducks under. Blood spills down his cheek, smears across it. Another backswing, another miss as he jumps. She’s slowing down. She’s expended her energy. She’d be nearly comical if you had time to stop and watch. The boy is quicksilver now, gone, young legs pumping. He somersaults under the gate, runs through the truck’s settling dust, looking back, falling to one hand, skinning it, more blood for his trouble. He’s a black speck on the distant road. He cuts into the woods and doubles back.

The woman drags her bloody stick into the house and closes the door. She ransacks the place. The curtains quiver in the parlor. The hens flap on the porch at the noise. The brass chandelier swings. The cat’s head ticktocks staring in from the window box. The woman leaves with a pack on a shoulder, a knife in her hand, an umbrella under the other arm. She wears good walking boots with wide rubber treads, no heel, no leather sole. Only a little limp. She wrenches a small ax at the splitting stump, rips the clothesline down all the way on her detour to the barn, shoves branches aside with umbrella and ax.

Meanwhile, back up the hill with the mare, Dan sprawls beside the branch naked but for a rag about his head, dreaming of a different world, hovering spaceships, women who obey.