Fitting Ends Read Online Free PDF Page B

over?” he says. They are walking by a parked pickup, and Scott can see two paunchy cowboys leaned up against it, trading what looks like a joint back and forth. He can’t think of an excuse to get out of staying. “I guess so,” Scott says, and follows, keeping pace with his father’s slow, regretful walk.
    The truck Scott’s father drives is an old ten-ton, the kind Scott remembers seeing when he was out at his father’s place in those long-ago summers. He can recall trucks like that, loaded with wheat, bearing down on him like some roaring dinosaur as he rode his bike along the hazy dirt road.
    They call it the “dead truck,” his father tells him. His father’s job is to drive through the rows of cattle pens and pick up the ones that have died. Wearing thick leather gloves and coveralls, he attaches a chain to their bodies and cranks them up into the back of the truck. Later, Scott’s father explains, they’ll be taken to be made into dog food and fertilizer.
    The cattle shift and mass in their pens, staring uneasily as Scott and his father pass. After a few minutes, Scott’s father spots one in the midst of the ebb and flow of brown-and-white bodies. He points it out, and Scott sits, looking at it—the swollen belly, the stiff legs that point in the air at odd angles. “We lose sometimes thirty a day,” his father tells him, and Scott can picture them, lying down in the heat and mud and the maggots that thrive in the fresh manure, lying down and never getting up again.
    He watches through the rearview mirror after his father backs the truck up to the narrow edge of the pen. The cattle bellow, scatter away, then circle like bystanders at a respectful distance. His father bends over the dead animal and lifts its head so he can work the chain under its body. He strains, pulling the chain under the torso, hooks it under the front legs, which sway lazily. When he activates the crank, the watching cattle bolt again, and the dead cow’s body jerks once, then slowly begins to sidle along the dark, tadpole-colored ground, and finally Scott sees it lift. He stops looking. It’s impossible to imagine, he thinks—days, weeks, months of this: the sickly sweet smell of the dead and the manure; the boring maze of dirt roads that trace around and around the circumference of the pens. You would almost have to be drunk or high, Scott thinks, just to make yourself go to work in the morning.
    His father climbs back into the cab of the truck and wipes his face with his forearm. Scott lets his gaze drift over his father’s gloves, then, involuntarily, to his eye, which is fixed on some distant point—the hills, the faint white line an airplane is making along the sky.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” His father puts his gloved hand on Scott’s knee, and Scott can’t help but flinch. “Oh,” his father says, and his expression wavers. He takes off his gloves. “Not a pretty sight, is it? But it don’t take much to get used to it.”
    â€œYeah.” Scott looks away, ashamed of his own squeamishness. “No big deal,” he says. He tries to sound upbeat. He doesn’t want to offend his father, to seem prissy or snobbish. Besides, he’s almost positive he won’t get the job, anyway.
    â€œIt’s only to September, even if you don’t like it,” his father says. They nod at one another, neither sure of what to say, and Scott’s father clears his throat. “Well. How about some of that coffee?”
    Scott pours him a cup out of the thermos, balancing as the truck jogs forward. He is trying to concentrate on making himself believe that there will be a time when his life is back in order, when he’ll be back at the university, walking through the quad with a load of books or looking out his window at night and seeing the bright dominoes of city lights on the horizon. He remembers how, once, when