Oscar mounted the horse, swinging over the saddle like a green-horn. "It's been awhile," he explained with some satisfaction. "Been awhile, and it doesn't come back as easily as I'd supposed." He was unsure why he'd dismounted in the first place.

Across the sharp blade of an horizon the twilight hid behind gathering clouds. Storm clouds, everyday lightning-spitting-down-the-sky clouds, and pretty soon there would be no razor line separating the heavens from the earth; pretty soon they'd be squashed and blended together and lit up from the inside like God's own disco, and the rain would scour the air clean and lightning would ionize the atmosphere with the clear and bitter odor of ozone.

So it seemed to Oscar. The light leached quickly away, fading and gone, and in the time it took him to swing off his horse and face the old man, twilight dissolved into premature night. He waited for the first flashes, the growl of thunder, the tremble of the air. He laughed, and said, "Storm's brewing." The wind blew his hair around like pale seaweed waving about in a current, blew it over the dark sand-dollars of his eyes, and the first drops of rain touched his cheeks like spray off an exploding surf.

"You weren't made for the saddle," his grandfather said. "Horses like you fine, but the saddle just won't take you." Then he spit generally at the storm, the soft ball of saliva landing someplace in the dust next to the small entrance of a burrow. A mouse crept out and lapped it up.

The clouds up-ended, and the rain spilled all around.

"We better head back home," said Oscar. "Better go home before we drown." He tugged his reins, started his horse stepping.

His grandfather said, "Even when you were little you didn't fit right in the saddle. I told your dad then you'd never stick around, that you'd be heading out, off someplace else. I told him anyplace else, probably."

Oscar squinted critically through the rain. "Think the storm will do more damage?" He hoped it wouldn't. Already he'd helped repair two miles of fencing where downpours gorged the ditches beside Highway 113, lifting the dirt from the edge of the ranch and smearing it over the pavement, barbed wire and all. Over the last couple of days he'd pounded railing, pulled twisted barbed wire taught, stapled the wire to the posts. He rode out to help because his grandfather had asked, and because it was Grandpa. Oscar's hands hurt.

"I seem to recall," the older man continued, "one particular incident when the saddle slipped upside down on you, and you damn near got trampled. It's a good thing horses like you, or you'd be dead by now, the way the saddles keep throwing you."

The dust beneath the horses quickly turned to mud, and their hooves sucked audibly with every step. "I really think we should head back now," Oscar said.

Oscar's grandfather nodded. "I wonder if that's how the Aussies ride?"

Oscar looked at him and grunted.

"With the saddle on the belly, all upside down and all." The old man laughed at his own joke, his rough dark face stretched tight at the cheeks, and loose and wrinkled at the eyes.

Oscar shook his head and wished, in spite of how stupid they look, he'd inherited the habit of the cowboy hat. He imagined himself in a fifties cowboy movie, head tucked down a bit so the rain channelled around the brim of his stiff black Stetson and down the mane of his horse. The fantasy didn't come easily. His life had almost turned out too much like that.

They ambled on, moving slowly in the darkening rain.

"See," the old man said, "I bet you're sorry you gave all this up." His laugh was as dry and easy as wind through a field of piss-yellow hay. "I'll bet you stay up in your little room reading through whatever-the-hell text you need to on nights like this, all warm and toasty. I'll bet you don't feel the wet down your back too often, do you?"

"Nope, Grandad, I don't." Oscar's head was retracted as far back into his body as he could, like a turtle. "Bet your ass I'd be tight and dry in my dorm right now, reading or petting my girlfriend. I certainly wouldn't be pushing a horse through this miserable shit."

His grandfather aired out his laugh again, and the horses kept sucking their hooves out of the deepening mud. Oscar spent the minutes anticipating the squishing, the sucking, and pretty soon monotony pulled his mind away from any thoughts at all. He threw static around the inside of his mind, like a mass of darting fish flashing away from feeding salmon, or like the blur of headlights through a rain-splattered windshield. These thoughts of nothing held him for a time, and he imagined slipping between the static, weaving in and out of the chaotic rain.

Then they saw the carcass.

The steer lay on its side, motionless, barely noticeable in the downpour and dark though it was only a dozen feet away. Oscar's grandfather saw it first, and nudged his grandson with a stiff finger. He pointed with the same finger. "See it?"

Oscar followed the finger to the dark mound heaped up in the mud. He saw it was a steer, but something lay oddly about it. Its belly seemed flat, caved-in, almost. "It starved to death. It has no meat on its bones." Then he said, "It broke its damn neck."

His grandfather dismounted, knelt in the mud before the carcass. The head pulled easily away from the body, cut cleanly where it used to join the neck. "Yep," he said. "Broke it right off." The head plopped into the mud at his feet.

Oscar lowered himself from the horse and hunkered beside his grandfather. "Look here." He traced an opening along the underside of the steer. "My God." The flesh beneath the cut chilled his fingers, but he managed to grip around one side of the cut and open the wound.

His grandfather stood and turned to his horse, unlaced a saddlebag. The flashlight was big and bright and waterproof. Oscar flinched at the intensity of it. "Gutted like a trout," the old man said.

Oscar pulled the belly wider. "Nothing left." He pushed his hand up the throat of the animal. "Nothing. Not a single organ left."

His grandfather said, "The hide," and Oscar replied with a flat and empty stare. "Skin's an organ. Don't look so stupid."

Oscar twitched his head in amused and baffled agreement. This was his grandfather, the teacher: always with a bit of knowledge nobody needs to possess.

Oscar stepped over the forelegs, reached down the the head his grandfather had dropped. The top of the skull lay too flat, the ears pointed at odd angles, like a television's rabbit ears on a night when you can't get a single station. He pulled open the split scalp. "Oh Christ," he said. "The brain's gone, Grandad. Someone must have wanted them scrambled up with some eggs." He turned the head on its side, and the light shone into the cavity. Then he said, "Oh Christ."

His grandfather laughed. "You expected any different?" He turned back to his horse, punched the flashlight off, pouched it back into the saddlebag. Suddenly in the dark, Oscar threw the head to the ground and squished his way briskly to his horse. "Come on, Patty," he said to her. "Let's go home." He pushed himself into the saddle, and Patty followed the old man's mount toward the house.

A flash shot through the sky, and Oscar counted thirteen before the report. The heart of the storm was passing several miles to the north.

"Who the hell did that?"

Oscar could almost feel his grandfather shrugging. "Who knows? Probably they got bored of crop circles."

Then the static silence of torrential rain wrapped Oscar up like a womb, and he didn't ask any more questions. The answers would probably frighten him.

The questions he most wanted answered were the ones most likely to remain unasked. Suddenly the night was no longer the absence of light; it was the lair of something dark and sharp and sucking, or a ravenous coyote with a bizarre appetite, or some lunatic would-be Jack the Ripper; of probably an unholy conspiracy of all three. Where were they, these obscene cattle murderers? He hoped fervently they were phoning home right now, and not waiting for some human-equivalent parts.

Oscar hadn't been afraid of the dark since he was twelve.

For a tiny moment, a brief flicker of thought pulled his sight inward. He imagined himself in place of the gaunt, organ-less steer. He saw sharp glowing blades split him open while his eyes pressed open, staring thoughtlessly as his guts were removed handfuls at a time, while his heart was sliced from his chest, while his scalp and skull were peeled back to expose the soft tender meat inside. All this his imagined in the amount of time it takes to register a thought.

Then it was gone.

He remembered a trick he learned when he first conquered fear; he thought of something pleasant, something warm and bright and miles from the rain and the dead empty steer and mud. He thought of something smooth and soft and quite rightly unique. He rolled the thought around his brain, over and over, like a ritual.

He thought of his partner, still back at school. He thought of Jaz, and her olive smell, her small polite hands, her bristly black hair. She stood before his imagination like a stage within his mind; she stood silently, seeming very tall though his chin could rest on her prickly scalp. His mind dressed her comfortably in a raw wool sweater (red, mostly), a paisley skirt (purposefully very wrinkled), and red tights. He imagined touching her, feeling her body through her loose clothes. In her nose she wore the platinum stud he had given her for no real reason at all.

But that was all. She stood before him, in his mind, and she continued to stand; but he could not animate her beyond a gentle rotation of her body, shoulders pivoting slightly around her spine, a shy motion he always associated with her. She stood, and he cursed his lack of imagination. He fought to move her, to make her prepare to kiss him, to invite him; somehow she resisted, and though he could pull the strings, it took so much effort to make her bend he knew it wasn't Jasmine inside his mind at all.

Just as he was about to give up, just as the darkness was about to engulf him, he saw the light of home glowing in the rain like a television jammed between stations.

"Arthur!" his grandfather called as they neared the door. By the time Oscar dismounted, his father was there to meet them at the stables. His grandfather handed the reins to Oscar. "Take care of Leftfoot for me, Son." He barely looked back as he headed for the house, leaving Oscar in the darkness holding two horses.

After brushing Patty and Leftfoot down and giving them each a half-bucket of oats, he slipped warily from the stables to the house. Both his grandfather and father were sitting at the table, a scotch and water near each. The redness of the wood-slab walls pushed against Oscar's eyes, and he felt alien, out of place. He suddenly yearned for the yellow concrete of his dorm, the spartan single bed, the comforting narrow room decorated with the clear blue iMac computer he never turned on, and Jaz carelessly splashed across his blanket, who always turned him on. He missed the paste-and-paper commons food.

He remembered playing within these warm dark wooden rooms, playing cowboys and indians with his older brother, Walt. They ran around the house, shrieking and whooping until his mother beat her hands against her apron and said, "That's enough! Either you go, or I go. Outside!" And she pushed them out, and every time they came back in she had donuts, or cookies, or just a slab of warm bread.

And every time she said, "Either you go, or I go," until one day she did go. Walt and Oscar had stopped playing so much together by then, and Walt worked summers for the Bentons, and Oscar felt the walls slip around him until the warmth was that of a carcass waiting for the buzzards and bugs to strip it clean. His brother hired on as foreman at Benton's, beating out men almost twice his age for the job.

And when Walt offered him work, Oscar turned him down. "Hell no," he said, "Mom was right. I'd miss too much, staying around here."

Walt scuffed the ground with his shoe. He wasn't angry, quite, and he wasn't sad, really, and he said, "Mom didn't leave us because she was missing something. She just plain didn't like us."

"Huh." Oscar shook his head. "She might not have liked Dad. She loved you and me."

Walt nodded and bit his lower lip, like he had something he hated to say, but was going to anyway. "Don't kid yourself, Ozzie. She didn't like me, and she didn't like you, and she didn't like Dad. She's never called. She's never come to see us. Remember that, and stop being delusional."

But Oscar could only remember the cookies and chunks of warm bread, and he imagined, during his short subdued affair with Jesus, that manna must have been very much like his mother's bread.

And as he drifted off to sleep in his alien house, with his father and grandfather speaking softly and laughing loudly, he smelled the kitchen-smells of baking bread.

The next day, a Sunday, Arthur had his father and his son lead him to the mutilated steer. "Show me," he said after a breakfast of bacon, milk, and apple pie. "I want to see for myself."

They led him west, toward 113 and the freshly-repaired fence and the dead, dissected steer. They found it easily enough, too. Oscar's sense of direction was none too refined, but his grandfather remember exactly where it lay.

"Over yonder," he said about fifteen minutes out, and sure enough, the death stink hit them not two minutes later.

In the bright, clinical morning light the body looked more benign. The rough sage and scrub grass reflected the blue-green of the young sky. Somewhere a bird sounded, though Oscar couldn't identify which kind of bird; and everywhere the wind scooped noises and smells up like water and delivered them to Oscar, drenching him in morning. He wondered at himself, wondered how suddenly he could feel the land all around him when most times he felt numb to it all. His eyes and ears and nose felt switched on this morning, like a dry riverbed suddenly in flood. Dust and sage pushed themselves through Oscar's nostrils and into his mouth, drowning him until he couldn't distinguish the smelling from the tasting.

"Here you are," his grandpa said, "just like we found him last night."

Arthur leaned out of the saddle and eased himself to the ground. He poked at the hide, opened up the body cavity, pried open the skull. "Looks like a thorough job to me." He grasped the head by the horns, stared at the dark clouded eyes. "Huh," he said. "Didn't take the eyeballs."

"Nor the skin," Oscar's grandfather pointed out. "That's two organs left behind."

Oscar waited a few respectful yards away, listening to his father prod the stiffened flesh, spread the chest open, pry the split skull loose.

Arthur said, "Odd, isn't it? Two most important organs, too," and Oscar's grandfather replied, "Most important, hell. This steer's got them both, and he isn't alive any more than that pig we had for breakfast."

"Dad," Oscar said, "what do you think about tongue piercing?"

"Hadn't thought of that," Arthur replied. He picked up the head, pulled the lips down, spread the teeth apart. "I'll be damned. It still has its tongue. That's three."

Oscar continued, "Jaz thinks I should get a stud, put it in my tongue."

"The tongue's not an organ, it's simply a muscle," said Oscar's grandfather.

Oscar said, "Just a little round stud through the tip of the tongue."

Arthur said, "The heart's just a muscle, but it's still an organ. The tongue serves a specialized purpose, and has chemical receptors in the form of taste buds. I'm pretty sure it's considered an organ."

"She thinks it will improve oral sex."

Arthur said, "I'm sure she does, Son," and slipped back into the saddle and nudged Railroad home.

"The tongue itself," said Oscar's grandfather, "is not an organ, tastebuds notwithstanding."

----------------------------------------

Oscar's mother never called, but she did occasionally write. Her letters were short, and never conveyed any real information; they were just vague descriptions of her life in Salem, where she worked in a nursing home doing the kinds of things she used to do for her family: laundry, dishes, baking. They were flat and emotionless and empty, and if she held any hope or dreams at all, there was not enough to fill the spaces between the words.

Oscar kept every single letter. So far his collection approached ten letters; the ninth had arrived not long before he left his dorm and Jasmine for spring break. He replied immediately, though she hadn't asked about his life; he lived in fear that his letters were as emotionless and distant as hers. He had dropped the letter in the mailbox as he left campus.

He had decided to write another letter and tell his mother about the dead steer and baking bread, when the newsvan slipped up the driveway, gravel popping under knobby tires. The number five was stenciled in a large red circle on its side, with the catchphrase, "5 at five," stenciled in the same shade of red just beneath.

Oscar's grandfather muttered, "Well, shit in December," and Oscar wasn't sure what he meant. Grandfather didn't often curse. But Oscar squished his face in toward his nose as the van barfed newsfolks all over the gravel of the driveway.

Newsfolks come in swarms of three. Two usually wear T-shirts and grubby jeans. These are the worker-bees. The one in the suit is the queen bee, the talking head. The worker-bees are usually intelligent, and able to carry on a conversation; the talking head queen-bee looks good, but can't articulate an intelligent question. At least, this is how Oscar imagined them. The queen-bee, a tall, slightly flabby man with a museum-quality head of hair, didn't destroy any stereotypes at all.

And so he said, "Good evening, gentlemen. Tell us about your mutilated cattle." He wore his objective belligerence like a leather jacket, perfect and black and dead, supple as an oily rag. The two worker-bees soundlessly set up cameras, and thrust microphones like erections in the faces of the three riders.

Oscar's grandfather smiled through his dentures. Arthur swung off his horse and waved towards highway 113. "My son found him out yonder," he said. He sounds like a hick, Oscar thought. He despises hicks. Arthur smiled a proud and mindless smile.

Oscar watched his father perform some classical dance with the talking head, who asked penetrating benign questions. Arthur answered with as much ignorance as he could muster. The waltz led back to the body, trailing cameras and the scent of a put-on, embarrassing Oscar with every step. Somehow, the head was laughing at them.

When the worker-bees first saw the body, they broke their seeming vow of silence. "My God," said the one with the camera. "A perfect, classic specimen," said the one carrying the microphone. "It's perfect."

For the first time, Oscar felt a touch of pride.

That night at five-fifteen, when the short cynically humorous segment about the local rancher with the mutilated cattle aired ("Could it be Aliens? Fetishists? Or perhaps something more sinister? Whoever they were, they took every organ with surgical precision."), Arthur smiled and said, "Sonsabitches swallowed her like a worm, didn't they? But the morons ignored the skin, tongue, and eyes."

"The tongue," said Grandpa, "is not an organ."

------------------------------------------------

They burned the body the next morning. "It's getting too damned ripe." Arthur led them to the body, dragging a cart of brush and kerosene.

Oscar said, "Dad, what do you think of tattoos?"

Oscar's grandfather said, "A couple of boys got some tattoos in Korea." Oscar nodded, accepting the support, and his grandfather continued, "Course, they got the clap, too."

"You ever get the clap, Dad?" Arthur asked.

"Hell, no. I only got you boys." He paused, then said, "I did get crabs once, from a New Orleans whore." He pronounced it, "Gnarlins hoe." Then he said, "Don't tell your mother." Oscar's grandmother had died in childbirth forty years before, along with the newborn who would have been Oscar's Uncle William. His grandfather had never remarried.

Oscar said, "I'm thinking about a tattoo. Jasmine thinks I should get a capital letter 'O' with a little devil sitting in it."

Oscar's grandfather said, "One of the boys got an icon, like one of those Russian religious things. But instead of the Christ, it was his wife. Only, he got a dear john not a week after that tattoo."

"Thanks for the support, Grandpa." Oscar tried to shake the odd feeling that he was being ridiculed. Black smoke curled up from the body, barely visible through the brush and flames. The wind turned, pushing the smell of woodsmoke and charred flesh deep into his nostrils.

Between coughs, he heard his father say, "Oscar, move on over here. Get out from downwind."

Oscar's father put his arm around Oscar's shoulder. "Son," he said, "every one of us has got a sickness inside us." He pointed to the burning corpse. "That steer had a sickness. One day you seem fine, and the next day you're dead."

Oscar's grandfather said, "And missing your organs."

"Dad," Oscar said, "what the hell are you talking about?"

"We have two sicknesses," his father said. "One is just plain mortality. That one'll get you whether you're ready for it or not." The wind changed again, and Oscar's eyes stung with the smoke, and his stomach rumbled with the smell of seared beef. Arthur continued, "The other sickness is the one that gets you, though. It's the desire you have in your belly, when you wish things were different. It makes you do stupid things just to make things different."

Oscar stared at the pyre a moment; he watched his grandfather stream kerosene on the tail end of the burning steer. "The tattoo isn't such a great idea, huh?"

"Son," Arthur said, "this isn't about tattoos, or tongue piercings, or cunnilingus. You can change a lot without changing the things you really wish you could."

They watched the steer burn a bit more, and threw on the last of the brush. About sundown, Arthur mounted Railroad without speaking.

The horizon drew close again, and dark with lightening ready to be born. Oscar wanted to get home before the rain came. As the universe flashed, and growled playfully, he thought about bread, and letters. His tongue tickled the roof of his mouth, and he imagined how it would feel with a platinum stud. He wanted suddenly to write his mother, and tell her about manna, and bread, and Jasmine, and the smell of home.

"That saddle gonna turn you upside down?" his grandfather asked.