The Heart Is Exposed Wire
by Jessica Moore
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Ask any cattle farmer between Blacktail River and the Rockies, and they’ll tell you that the Broken O doesn’t operate like any other ranch here in the yellow grasslands of Big Sky Country. From early morning until the sun sets, Simon Scriver holes up in the enormous barnhouse-turned-garage that sits on the south side of the main house, about two miles east of Duck Pond and the Hogan Slough Buffalo Jump, and tinkers with the robots. The robots help work the cattle, although we sometimes lose them over the buffalo jumps and later find in the scree piles of creaking gears and the luminous red ends of snapped wires, still hot to the touch.
I try not to invent reasons. That’s my husband’s job. But people talk, and reasons sometimes invent themselves.
While Simon works in the barnhouse, I fix fences, tractors, balers, maintain records, cut hay. I also help run the cattle alongside the robots and, in the mornings, ride out to check on the heifers and the calves with their colorful ear tags and still-wobbly legs. Whenever one of them is born, a few of the ranch hands and I hold a little ceremony that mostly involves drinking alpine whiskey in the parking lot of Small Bar after Mack, the owner, has gone upstairs for the night.
Sometimes from where Simon and I sit on the split rails of a fence, we can see Mack’s square upstairs window illuminated with the dull orange light of a lamp and, as the sun sets, it appears the same lampshade has been placed gently over everything, over the robots and the grasses and the big prairie-land sky and the ranchers on horseback cantering together across the long tawny plains.
Folk know Simon pretty well in these parts, but no one knows him like I do. In the days before the robots, he was the one fixing the fences and tractors and balers with hands more careful than mine ever will be. Until it happened, he could fix anything anyone set in front of him, for a dollar or two, of course. Engines, broken bicycles, the plumbing at old Dag’s outhouse: you name it, he could fix it in his sleep. Then he invented the first robot — we named him Rob out of a sheer lack of creativity and one too many beers — and he stopped fixing outhouses altogether, which turned out to be very good for our relationship, at least for a little while.
The Broken O has nine robots at the moment, some more useful than others:
Rob, whom we sometimes call Mister Zero, knows better than any living human how to rouse the cattle without frightening so much as a sable hair on their heads.
McCauley has wheels like a JCB and a lasso release God would pay gold for. But, without a lariat in his hand, he trundles around like a kick scooter.
Boy Oil is still what Simon and I like to call a “work in progress.” Robetsy, on the other hand, understands cows like nobody’s business. She’s best with the calves; once on a still-frosty springtime morning, I caught her helping one of the little ones master the tricks of four-legged walking.
Miss Irving squeaks when she rolls, but she does what we say and has never needed a single copper wire replaced.
Taller and bigger than the others is Ada. She moves as slow as the cattle themselves and never startles them on account of her having an engine quieter than a hunter’s breath.
Then there’s Willie and Nellie, named after a bull and heifer we lost to a grizzly one year in September. And lastly there’s Ol’ Dusty, built like a two-carriage train and with a single red eye blinking slowly in his cowcatcher.
Four of the robots have fallen over the Hogan Slough Buffalo Jump and one more over the Flat Butte Buffalo Jump in the last two months. The first fall — Ol’ Dusty over the edge of the Hogan Slough at night — could have been an accident, but every other time has seemed oddly intentional.
The phenomenon has left many of the ranchers and ranch hands in the area uneasy, and sometimes when we gather outside of Small Bar in the evenings under Mack’s honey-orange light, conversation turns toward their strange behavior, toward the time McCauley — trundling sluggishly in the rear — froze suddenly and then rolled with all the velocity of a prairie falcon toward the Hogan Slough jump before catapulting noiselessly over the edge.
Or the time we found the bronze gears of slow, gentle Ada rotating in the breeze under Flat Butte, engine cut, one of her little green eyes black as pitch. We rush them to Simon every time in the back of flat-beds, and Simon fixes them up, quiet, concerned, slightly exasperated, and sends them toddling back into the fields good as new.
“Don’t seem very apologetic about the whole thing,” Simon said once, standing outside of the barnhouse with his arms crossed and eyes narrowed, watching Miss Irving squeak as she rolled away. “Shameless, the lot of them. That’s four now, and I haven’t felt a hint of regret in their circuits. Except for Ol’ Dusty that first time around.”
He looked down at his hands, black with grease, and back at Miss Irving, and I knew by his expression he was trying to fit pieces of a puzzle together without a reference.
“Dinner?” he asked eventually, but I shook my head. We used to sit down for dinner together every evening and talk about our long days.
“Catching up with Nuna tonight over drinks,” I explained.
And we kissed and headed in opposite directions: Simon, toward the barnhouse and I, into town. That was the summer, and it came and went too quickly.
Simon has explained to me more than once that he doesn’t see anything in the robots’ programming that would incline them toward the buffalo jumps, no hardware or software malfunction behind their erratic behavior, not a transistor out of place, and the knowledge makes the whole thing more eerie than ever.
I fall asleep sometimes at night thinking of grainy old science-fiction films where robots come to life and kill or overtake their makers, but McCauley and Ada and Miss Irving are about as content as robots can be: they squeak and chirp happily during cattle drives; they enjoy simple games like tag and, in the autumn, will devote hours to navigating corn mazes; they feel happy, at least. Trouble is that before now, Simon never had any trouble identifying the problem with a piece of equipment, and suddenly he can’t identify four of them.
When Simon was assembling our first robot — Rob, or Mister Zero — the whole town of Riverfork showed up at the door of Simon’s and my barnhouse. Folk rattled off questions, mostly about whether the town’s odds of eventual takeover by The Machine had at all increased, but eventually the concern morphed instead into picnics and beer bottles and a good-humored curiosity, and people sat outside on fences day after day while the whirrs and clangs and whistles of Simon’s work echoed throughout the windy valley.
News spread to Augusta and to Aspen, all the way to Red River, over hills and flat marshlands and rusty river bridges, beyond the beaver dams and the yellow grass, and then past the trees — green and dark at the foot of the mountain range — and over the mountains into larger towns with larger houses and more curious people.
For weeks, the valley in which the barnhouse sat smelled like barbecue smoke and hosted all the activities of a traditional festival. And then, one bright, blue morning, Simon opened the wide doors and out came Mister Zero, silver paint shining like a river in the sun. He could throw a lasso as respectably as anyone, and he understood people even if he couldn’t speak the language — little head tilts and a good ear for commands — and no animals were frightened of him when he approached.
He helped with all kinds of cattle work, with feeding and calving, herding and branding, vaccines and general maintenance. Folk liked him well enough. Still do. Nobody wants to see Mister Zero dive over one of the jumps, or find his silver paint chipped and scraped and his wires tangled like a tumbleweed, but not even Simon can promise it won’t happen.
* * *
Autumn is a strange beast. It appears from nowhere and leaves miscellaneous scraps at my feet: a pile of windswept leaves on the doormat, muddy wheel tracks from Simon’s robots across my kitchen floor, the innocuous prickle of sweet gum briars clinging to the soft fabric of my clothes.
It’s a Tuesday, and Simon is tinkering in the barnhouse with one of Boy Oil’s circuit boards after a rough morning of wind and rain. Nuna has given me a book called Old Town Riverfork, and I’m sitting across the workbench from Simon and read silently about Machk and Jimmy Lee and Old Tanya Buckhorn and other names I don’t recognize from town stories.
“Been busy lately?” Simon asks. He pauses his work to pat Boy Oil on his head.
I nod and meet his eyes over the book’s brim.
“Tough year,” I admit, “with everyone worried about the robots. Had to divvy up jobs different this season on account of their falls.”
Simon hums in agreement and returns to his work.
Outside, the rain beats noisily against the roof, and the wide door shudders with each heavy gust of wind. The first month we lived in Riverfork, fires swept through and burned down houses and stores, and it wasn’t until the rains came that everyone felt the terror from the fires drain out of them, that anyone ventured to rebuild or to talk of rebuilding. We had just moved to town, and Simon offered our assistance to everyone who needed it.
“You really want to fit in here, huh?” someone joked, and Simon shrugged and said, “Don’t we all?”
I never miss the fires, vicious and red-hot, or the drum-beat ictus of dread that accompanies the waiting, the deathly silence of sitting around a bar television, watching for news, but I do miss the care that the fires demanded of us. People were kinder, they paid attention to who needed help and they offered it. Riverfork was less lonely in those months after the big fires than it has ever been, long as I’ve been in it.
“Got any ideas yet?” I ask, setting down the book for the moment on top of a box that says misc. screwdrivers. The wooden stool beneath me creaks and scratches against the dusty floor.
“Not a one,” Simon says. He sighs, stops working again, looks up. “Doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“Maybe it’s fun for them, like a skydive.”
“I ain’t building them a skydive, Lori.”
“How about a big slide?”
We both chuckle. Yellow midday sunlight slants through the high barn windows and drops bars of gold over the workbench between us. I’ve seen Simon with the robots, is the thing. After Ada’s fall, once we hauled her through the barnhouse doors and told Simon the story — how Ada had left the cattle run and rolled for no ostensible reason a mile and a half toward the jump and then right over it — after that, I waited and worried and watched Simon’s work.
I don’t know much about machines or elegant technology, but I know competence when I see it. Simon’s hands — careful amid the tools and wires and the occasional blue shocks of electricity, little and bright — would betray his level of expertise to anyone. I watched him put Ada back together slowly and surely over the course of days, stopping occasionally to wipe sweat from his brow, and I remember thinking when he finished and Ada looked good as new that he certainly loved the robots, the way anyone loves the things they make with their hands, the things that sit in windowsills or on shelves or hang from wall hooks, or the things that roll around on creaky wheels and herd cattle.
“A hypothesis,” I propose. “The robots see something we don’t.”
“Like what?”
“An invisible bridge. You know, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
Simon narrows his eyes, his mouth flattening into a line, and there’s a detectable trace of amusement in the expression. “I don’t think so,” he says.
“All right. So maybe they’re having fun. You said they don’t seem apologetic or in any pain.”
“They don’t.” Simon pinches his brow, then bends once more over the circuit board before him. To his left, Boy Oil chirps happily as Simon clicks the board neatly into place.
“What if we bring someone in?” I offer. “A tech man from Greyeagle or some place. Might be nice to have a fresh set of eyes take a look at them.”
Simon puffs out his cheeks and blows a long, slow breath. He could almost be a child in the way he doesn’t like other people touching his things. “Not necessary.”
“Come on,” I try, although pushing the matter with Simon rarely results in success. “You’ve been at this for—”
“I’ll figure it out,” he interrupts, then says more softly: “Always do. You’ve seen me.”
“Might be different this time.”
He brushes the palms of his hands against his apron. “It’s not. I know them. I built them. I’ve been over every connector, transistor. Hell, I rewired Miss Irving head-to-toe just for fun, just to see if she might be the one that didn’t fall, but turns out she was the next one. The next damn week even. What’s anyone going to make of that?”
“I don’t know,” I say, picking up my book. “Might still be worth it. You have to keep trying new things, right? Or else you’re insane. Is that what they say?”
Simon looks at me, the shadows under his eyes dark as grease, and rubs sleep from his eyelids.
I watch him for a moment, carefully, as I gather my things, and then: “I’m going to make a call,” I decide, standing and steeling myself for Simon’s rebuttal. “Mack knows a guy in town.”
Simon only blinks at me, narrows his eyes for a moment, then nods.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Moore
