The Ram (15 page)

No matter how he argues the merit of his intended action, Walker won’t go downtown with Riley, at the behest of a card, on Easter morning. He badgered him yesterday after his hangover had subsided and left Walker a voicemail at six this morning. But he’d heard nothing from his friend. So Riley knew if he wanted to get downtown to see whatever it was this Hamal wanted him to see, he would have to do it alone.

He curses himself for owning an SUV. The vehicle is high, not as tall as Double Al’s Dodge Ram, but the Nissan requires him to step up and in and he’s happy at least he can put his right foot in first and pull up his body with the handlebar over the door.

He makes a game of counting the number of churches he passes between his home and the Basque Block downtown. He notes seven, all of them with front entrances flung open and people flowing inside. One is bedecked in a garland of fake, white lilies. At a stop sign, sweat beading at his temples, he hears the distinctive bellow of an organ coming from another church. The singing voices of parishioners compete against the sonorous pipes.

During his journey downtown, he panics at every stop light. He’s lucky his vehicle isn’t a manual transmission. But this does little to calm his anxiousness when he needs to push on the brake or the gas. All these presses are done with the right foot, but Riley works himself into a mild sweat, wondering if he’ll get a rare charley horse in his right foot and be forced to maneuver the pedals with his wounded left foot. He’d surely crash into a median or rear-end a worshipper on his way to pray. So he takes the drive slowly, decreasing speed before each green light, getting honked at by two cars at one intersection.

It takes him fifteen minutes to get downtown from his home in the residential area of southeast Boise. He hooks a right on Capitol Boulevard, a wide one-way expanse that leads straight to the steps of the white marble of Idaho’s capitol building. He hits a major cross street at Capitol and Myrtle and spots orange barriers a half block in front of his vehicle. Behind the barricades are stretches of roads without cars. Police cars, new Dodge Chargers, are spread out downtown, their red and blue lights whirling in the early morning sun, sirens turned off.

Riley keeps going forward, through the intersection and as close as he can drive up to one of the heavy plastic barricades before he can hang a left or right and try and work his way around the blocked off area. He frowns and flips down his visor. The Basque Block, an area of cultural and ethnic pride for Boise’s Basques, is only a few blocks away. He wanted to park as close as possible, maybe even leave his crutches in his car.

A police officer in a bright yellow vest lined with metallic deflectors steps from the sidewalk near one of the barricades and waves at Riley to stop his vehicle. The cop rubs his gloved hands together and Riley puts his car in park and rolls down his window. There aren’t any cars behind him, the morning still young; those who are awake are either in church, hunting Easter Eggs or tucking into breakfast somewhere warm.

“Can I ask what’s going on?” Riley smiles at the cop.

The man is young, likely fresh to his calling as a cop, and has a ratty moustache covering his upper lip.

“You’re going to have to turn around. If you’re trying to get north of here, you’ll have to go down to 1
^st
or up to 11
^th
to get past the perimeter.”

Riley clicks on the heat in his vehicle and rubs his finger over the bumps on his steering wheel.

“Right,” he says, “but what’s happening?”

And the officer doesn’t need to open his mouth, because Riley gets to experience the answer to his question directly. A sheep, its white wool dirty and twisted, pushes through a gap between two of the orange barricades.

The officer swears and moves toward the animal, his arms outstretched. He hums loudly as he walks toward the sheep, doing his best to shoo it back through the gap and toward the city center.

Riley can see a hint of color on the sheep and when it turns sharply to avoid the movements of the cop, he sees it’s been painted on one of its flanks. The number 73 seems to hover over the wool in deep red relief.

And there’s something else. Riley pokes his head out of his SUV to get a better look at the sheep’s head and neck before the cop is victorious and ushers the beast back into its corral. It looks as if a picture, maybe cut out of a magazine, hangs from the sheep’s neck by a length of string.

Riley’s gaze confirms it’s a photograph. The image is of Heidi Klum, dazzling in a floor-length gown made in alternating layers of green and blue fabric.

The sheep is pushed back and the cop does his best to nudge the barriers closer together. They’re heavy with bases full of water but he manages by throwing his thighs against the plastic. Riley watches the entire thing, mouth slightly agape, until the cop comes back to the window of his Nissan.

The cop breathes heavily. “You should have seen number 49 with an old picture of Cheryl Tiegs around his neck,” he says to Riley, then pauses to let out a string of tight sneezes. “He jumped five barricades before we could run him down. Can you believe that?”

42 Peach

With hot lattes in hand and a bag of crusty almond croissants ready to be eaten on a bench further downtown, Peach and Linx stroll next to one another in the cool of the Easter morning. Linx bumps into her as they walk and never apologizes, even when the milky coffee in Peach’s hand spills over the lid and scalds her thumb.

“Knock it off,” she pleads. “Can’t we just walk in peace?”

She’s cranky and tired. The work she did last night did not afford her the luxury of napping in her car. Things had gone smoothly enough, but she’d been harried by time and physical limitations. Now she operates on the short high from her success and the mild buzz one receives when they have been awake for twenty-seven hours.

They pass a few office buildings, restaurants busying themselves with prepping for the slam they’ll get with the brunch crowd. And then they hit barricades, circling the street in front of them, enclosing the sidewalks and snaking across alleyways. For as far as Peach can see running north and south, the heart of downtown Boise is under containment.

“What’s this?” Linx asks. “And where are we going anyway?”

“I just wanted to walk. We don’t always need a destination, do we?” She takes in the barriers for a moment longer and then pushes her coffee into Linx’s hands and swings her legs over one of the rectangular plastic fences ballasted with liquid.

“Come on,” she waves for him to deliver the food back into her hands and smiles. “Let’s go see what’s happening.”

Linx hesitates and then shuffles his body on top of the barrier with the help of his hands and the hindrance of his short legs, and hops down to the other side. He gets a bit of dirt on his jeans and rubs at it until it comes away.

“You’re the type to run from danger, not toward it,” he says.

Peach hands him back his drink and the bag of pastries and proceeds forward, cautious of what she might find. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if her mind is running on pure adrenaline and minimal rest.

“Who knows if it’s something dangerous, Linx? It could just be cordoned off for a parade later this morning, or a fun run. Maybe there’s some fitness thing going on.”

“On Easter morning?” he laughs, doubt obvious in his voice.

“Maybe everyone dons Easter Bunny costumes and hops a 5K?”

Linx pushes at her back in play as they walk forward and Peach does her best not to tense up. She can see him smiling and she doesn’t want to disturb the moment of fun they’re having together.

They walk on, east, passing other groups of early morning folks, many of them dressed in nice suits or skirts. Some of the people look distressed or confused and Peach stops herself from asking them what’s so upsetting. She wants to discover it on her own, to take in whatever is happening to the people downtown with her own senses.

“Do you hear that?” she mumbles to Linx.

She turns and looks down Capitol Boulevard, toward the Basque Block where little restaurants serve paella and every few years Boise’s sizable Basque population gathers to hoop dance during San Ignacio or Jaialdi.

She takes Linx’s hand and he pulls back for a minute before letting her lead him down the sidewalk. She catches the sound of people, some shouting, others laughing. And under it all is the murmur of animal noise.

So when they turn the corner onto the cobblestone paving of the Basque Block, she’s not surprised to hit more barricades with her thighs. And behind the barricades are dozens, if not hundreds of sheep milling about the block. Police officers do their best to keep them within the blockade, but sheep are jumping the orange fences and making their way down side streets.

In the concentrated chaos of the Basque Block, small groups of people hug their bodies to storefront windows and keep away from the sheep, their eyes glued to the strange display of animals in front of them. She wonders if they attempt to make sense of their lamb chops and wool sweaters taking over their urban streets.

Peach thinks of climbing the barriers here, too, but before she does, she hears the voice of a little girl, no more than seven or eight years old, a few feet away. She wears a lavender dress with a lace petticoat and a white bonnet on her head. The hat is made of straw; a ring of pink, blue and purple rosettes festoon the material. Pastel satin is tied in a droopy bow around her waist. The girl’s face is glowing, her cheeks ruddy. And she points to one of the sheep, the beast vulnerable on the ground.

The sheep, a ewe, has her forelegs down flat on the pavers. She’s louder than the rest of the sheep moving around, anxious for a place to hide or a means of escape. She has her docked, fuzzy tail in the air and from what Peach can see, the brown crescent tip of a hoof protrudes from her uterine opening.

The child giggles and tugs at her mother’s hand. She does a little pirouette and exclaims so loudly some of the sheep surrounding her bolt to the other side of the street.

“It’s the Lamb of God! Everyone, look at the Lamb of God!”

43 Riley

The strangest thing about the scene he sees as he walks toward the Basque Block, slowly making his way on his crutches, the foamy cushions under his armpits wet with sweat, is the way that people act. He watches as a woman in a white dress and a green shawl walks cautiously up to individual sheep and tries to pet their sides. Another man he passes on his way to the epicenter of the chaos has two sheep backed into a corner between a dumpster and an opened door. He’s talking to them like they’re toddlers, trying to rationalize a course of events. He tells them not to panic, that they’ll be eating grass soon and then he picks up his phone and calls someone for help.

When he gimps past a sheep with a number 92 painted on its side—a tight shot of a woman with a blonde bob and wide, red lips around its neck—he wonders how many sheep there must be, confused and scared amongst the brick and metal of a metropolitan setting.

He reaches the Basque Block and stands next to another officer in the same bright yellow get-up with the reflective stripes the first cop he spoke with wore. He can see the cops are doing their best to keep the flock of sheep in one area. A large trailer is backing up down a side street close to the block and a few men in Carhartts and worn work shirts wave it toward the mass of animals. Two reporters are on the scene, large microphones clutched in their hands, video cameras pointed at them as they comment about the sheep and chat with onlookers tickled to be on camera.

Riley doesn’t understand the numbers crudely painted on the sides of the sheep, or the pictures of women gracing their necks. But he considers that this is what Hamal wanted him to see. It’s too coincidental to be otherwise. He doesn’t understand the why of it though. Why release a bunch of frightened animals in downtown Boise just for him to look at the ensuing mess? The idea isn’t just odd, it’s overly cryptic. Riley tussles with the idea he’s so important to someone else they would go to so much work on his account, especially such peculiar work. He doesn’t know what to believe. But if it’s true, if the livestock are there for him, he’s certain the letters are no simple prank played by his coworkers.

He looks at the officer next to him. He stares straight ahead, his eyes focused on a group of sheep rubbing their heads against the bark of a small golden locust. If he told the man about the cards, about how someone wanted him downtown to see these sheep, that these animals might be here solely for him, the cop would laugh at him. At best he would tell him to shove off. At worse he’d give him a police escort to a hospital for a psych test.

So he says nothing. And as interesting as the scene is, Riley is hungry for a stack of pancakes covered in strawberries with a side of link sausages and a cup of coffee to go with his thoughts about this morning. He puts his weight back on his crutches, a parting serenade of
baas
in his ears as he hobbles toward an area of downtown free of domesticated animals.

44 Peach

The lambing ewe is all the impetus Peach needs to clear the barricade in front of her. Linx calls after her but she ignores him. She’s desperate to see the miracle unfold before her. She is sure it is a sign. New life for them all.

No one stands by the ewe kneeling on her front legs. Peach is the first to approach and as she does, she coos lightly to the ewe, doing her best not to upset the expectant mother. The ewe bleats and grinds her teeth. Her mouth hangs open, a thick grayish-pink tongue lolling out the side.

Peach moves around the back end of the animal and lifts the tail slightly to get a better look at what’s happening. Now that she’s close she can see the tip of a nose along with a second front hoof protruding from the vagina. She keeps herself from yelling out in surprise and joy and instead looks up to the piercing blue of the sky overhead and smiles.