Reclamation

"Reckon we could say it died of its own accord?" Brenda asked, kicking the carcass with more conviction than her question.

I shook my head. "The bullet hole's clear through its face."

She bent down and scrutinized her handiwork. "Guess there's nothing for it. We'll have to go tell Pa."

It was a foregone conclusion, but I still quaked at the decision. "Maybe we can wait? Just till it's more dead?"

My cousin swatted at my braids. "Ain't gonna be any more dead later than it is now. 'Sides, you've got nothing to worry about. Not like you could've shot it."

I nodded, taking small comfort in my role as mere accomplice, but my eyes remained rooted on the mangled remains. It'd been the most graceful death you could have imagined: one minute a gallop of raw power and speed, chasing across the prairie in a fury, the next an elegant backflip through the air, ending in a slow descent of ever widening circles, 'till at last it came to a final resting place. Something that beautiful deserved better than it was like to get.

"Don't even think about it ...." Brenda warned, too late to stop my mind from turning the problem over.

"Couldn't we bury it? Not tell anyone?"

"No Lil, it don't work that way." For all her superiority you'd think she was far more than a year older. "These things have to be reported. They're tagged. Soon as one of 'em hits the dirt there's a signal that goes out. Before you know it we'll have somebody from the county office out here, asking questions, taking names." She scowled, tugging at a hangnail with a ferocity that'd make any two-bit county agent liable to take his time aiming questions her way. "That's what got Miss Rita in trouble last year, remember?"

"I know." I really did. It was sheer bad luck we'd run into this thing, and without any way of signaling it away. Not one local would blame us for bringing it down. These things happened. If it were any other kind our folks probably wouldn't bother filing out the forms. But this one demanded special treatment, had from the moment it was given life and even after it gave up the ghost before our eyes.

I knelt down and reached a hand out, touching the now cool outer layer at the point where its face pulled down in a mockery of ours. "This one's kinda pretty. Should have a decent burial."

"If you don't stop pettin' it, I'll bury you along with it," Brenda fumed, pulling me back. "There ain't no cause in wasting perfectly good scrap."

"But Grandma said—" At her look I stopped, indecisive, worried I might recall wrong and mess it all up.

"Go on then: what'd Grandma say?"

Brenda only got this angry when she was scared, so it was a shrug of the shoulders which way she'd blow if I told her. I took the chance anyway. "Grandma told me they were soldiers in the War, and we ought to remember what they did."

We both looked down at the corpse then, ramrod straight in a way no natural-born man could fake, not especially after getting stuffed with rifle shot. It didn't have hands or feet to slow it down, or a nose or a mouth to keep it friendly. Instead the artificial creature had all the vitals a fellow would need to run endless paces along a battle line, sending back reports, running from enemies, keeping one step ahead of everyone else forever. It'd outlived its kin, the ones built as shields and weapons, and the men like my Grandpa who fought alongside 'em. But it'd been too fast for its own good, 'cause now the battles were done. It wasn't needed anymore.

"It did run well," Brenda admitted in reluctant agreement. "But it's past time to get back now. 'Sides, I want Pa to see where I got my mark. Don't give me that look: it weren't never really alive, anyway."

I knew she was right as we walked away, and even afterward when we had to go through the bother of dealing with the Reclamation Man setting up shop on our land, eatin' our food and drinkin' our tea as he worked to strip Brenda's kill down to its precious metal bones. We got a week's ration of aluminum for our trouble, which wasn't much for what the man took, and was less than nothing compared to the fine he wrote out for wanton destruction of government property. There wasn't any help for it, and not much to be said when he left with his prize. It was just the way things were.

But I reckoned something that weren't alive to begin with wouldn't be too picky about when it got buried. So I bided my time, and watched the printer as we worked through the ration, spittin' out cans and hooks and pins. On the day there wasn't enough left even for a staple I scooped the last little bit out with my thumb and walked it out back to the memory bush. Grandpa got buried back east in the veteran's cemetery, and though I'd never been there, I'd seen it plenty of times through the bush's feed planted by the VA. I sat and waited for the signal to pickup, hoping it wouldn't flake out like it tended to on cloudy days.

Finally the picture came on, lagging a bit, but clear. Squinting I could see rows of old crosses from the wars no one talked about any more; closer up were the lockers where newer ashes moldered. The last battles hadn't left a lot of limbs behind or space to put 'em. I liked it better, 'cause each little box had the man's face on it, and then the camera zoomed in on my Grandpa's winking smile. "Howdy Lillian," he said, the voice scratchy through the feed, but there.

I waved with my free hand. "Hi Grandpa."

"Where're the others?" he asked after the feed finally realized no one else was comin'.

"Busy," I fibbed, and quickly got down to business before my visiting time was cut short. "Grandpa, I know burial's just for vets, but Grandma always said you had a guardian angel, and I got a piece of one right here." I held up my thumb, carefully cupping it to ensure the precious aluminum smudge didn't get swept away by a fresh breeze.

"Mighty nice, mighty nice," he said. It's what he said when I showed him my birthday hair ribbons or my first cookie from the tooth fairy. He didn't have many more words for me, since we'd never gotten acquainted outside the feed, and I was still too young to understand the ones he shared with my parents or Grandma. I liked that he kept things simple: he was the only one who let me say my piece all the way through and never said no.

"See, it's not much," I explained as best I could, "but I'm thinking if I hold it up close to the bush, it'll be like it's part of your grave. That's about as close as it can get to a proper burial, but don't you think that'll be OK? You won't mind, will you?"

"You know I'll always love you," he said like always, and that was answer enough for me. I leaned forward, pressing my thumb to the feed picture as delicately as my squishy digit could manage, and felt the static charge burn the last bit clean off.

I pulled back, fanning my thumb and searching for the proper end to the funeral. "Thanks Grandpa, but I don't know what to say. You knew it, or something like it. Think you could say some words for it, maybe from the War and such?"

Nothing happened for a minute, and I thought maybe the feed had froze, but then my Grandpa grinned wide. "When I woke up this morning I had the feeling it was my time to die. I don't want to, but I figure it's going to happen soon. So I'm going for a jog with my recorder on. I'm saying this now so you know what you're seeing. I don't want it edited down: you'll see why. I can't talk well, never could, but maybe you'll get what I'm trying to tell you from it."

The feed shifted, and I watched wide-eyed through my Grandpa's eyes as he ran behind the battle lines, passing abandoned city streets and used up buildings, finally blazing a trail alongside a dirty river to the top of a hill overlooking the whole thing. It was ugly. But it was pretty too, in a way, 'cause from that height I could see the way the people and the things and the trees and everything all just melted together beneath the big blue sky.

The picture was jerky, like my Grandpa couldn't stay still. Then it shifted, so that instead of seeing everything else all I saw was his young face, nowhere near as calm as it usually was on his little locker. He looked like Brenda did after she missed a shot, or Ma when the house rattled too much. "Just remember, this fighting's not gonna last. We're gonna see to that. And the Lord's gonna take me home, one way or the other. And we'll get back together, sooner or later. Guess I can talk OK when it's needed."

The feed winked out then, my time all used up. I reached and touched it again, the leftover static still pricking my skin, biting like the movie runnin' around in my mind.

It really was about the best funeral a thing like that could ask for.