Once You Break a Knuckle by W. D. Wilson Page B

ballcap, who could run her fingers through her hair and make you watch. She always had a smudge of dirt or sawdust or oil on her cheek, sure as makeup. She was damn near as strong as him, and if he’d ever had to fight her he wouldn’t have wagered either way. One time, when the boy couldn’t have been more than ten, Biff and the ex hauled a cargo of teenagers around town so they could hawk Ice-Melt tickets to raise money for their football team. Biff boughta dozen himself, bet on March twenty-second, and when the twenty-second rolled around he and the ex woke in the smoky hours when the Rocky Mountains cast long shadows over town. She smelled like wax paper and bronze, as though she’d been counting change all day, and as he watched her sitting wide-legged in passenger he had a feeling in his gut that the two of them were too similar to last. The ice on the lake had melted, so they were two hundred bucks richer, but rather than celebrate they sat in the Ranger just looking at the view – the glass-work lake lit by the morning sun, as if on fire, as if made of miles and miles of fire. Between them: his cheap steel thermos, her cigarettes. Between them: the gearshift, the empty seat.
    Two years later they were divorced. That same summer, Biff and the boy drove eighteen hours to the Prairies and stayed with his brother, Bill, on a cattle farm outside Regina, where Biff drank more home-brewed wine than a man should and where the boy spent whole days in Bill’s yard with Bill’s dogs – two big Rottweilers named Moose I and Moose II. Biff’s clothes were a wreck of torn work tops and khaki pants, and he’d quit shaving. The way his brother stared at him – it felt like coming home beaten. It felt like not coming home at all.
    â€”You still got Princess? Biff said at dinner one day.
    His brother nodded – one deep, deliberate dip of his chin. —She had a calf.
    â€”No way.
    â€”After all these years, his brother said.
    â€”She a cow of yours? the boy said through a mouthful of steak.
    Biff sucked on his teeth, saw his brother watching. He shrug-a-lugged. —Not only that, he told the boy. —She’s my first cow ever. Might not mind seeing her, actually.
    â€”She had a calf, got all mean.
    â€”It’s Princess.
    â€”Yeah. But like I say, she’s mean now.
    Biff barely heard him, took the boy and hopped in the Ranger and made his way to the barn. Then he was facing Princess, his darling cow, who, as a young man, Biff had saved from certain death – the only living creature he could say that for. That time, Princess was pregnant, and Biff woke in the night with this sudden feeling – the same feeling he’d later have about him and his wife, how doomed they were – as if she needed his help. He bolted out the door, ignored his hollering old man, and found Princess in labour. They lost the calf – and every other one, every other time – but Princess persisted.
    And now her little sucker of a calf was sucking milk, legs as wobbly as a TV stand. Princess had a bottle-shaped blotch along her bottom ribs. One eye was grey and the other green, and both of them a tad too close together. Her head was big for the rest of her, which itself was pretty damned big.
    The boy stayed outside the stall, but Biff went in. Princess’s tail whipped against her sides. The bleary-eyed calf slunk toward Princess’s hind legs but Biff lowered his palm at it and it seemed to calm. He laid his hand onPrincess’s flank – he loved that cow, would’ve nicknamed his daughter the same had he had one, and never told her its origins.
    â€”Hey, gal, he said.
    Princess made a deep, mewling sound in her throat, like a drill stuck in low gear. He patted her, like you might a dog. —Remember me? he said, and she raised her head as if acknowledging that she did, in fact, remember him.
    â€”See? Biff said, turning to the boy.
    In hindsight,