By J. Dominic Patacsil

Lakey Sturgis took a palmful of margarine from the brown plastic tub between her feet and ran it over the cheekbones of her grandson’s face. She smeared the pale-yellow spread across the boy’s sloped forehead, deep into the wrinkles of his ears, working her way down the turkey skin of his throat to his bare chest, then beyond.

Just a little more, she said to Peep, who batted long, effeminate eyelashes back at her. Nuggets of the margarine stuck to them, and for a second, Lakey was reminded of nights long past when she lived in Greenpoint and Hans was still living. She looked into her grandson’s globby lashes and saw her twenty-year-old self going to bed without caring to wipe away the makeup she spent so long painting on for nights of swing dancing and manhattans at Truffani’s. That was before Hans’ job brought them to the desert, before their daughter was born. Now Lakey was sixty-six and dying, far from any place she called home.

As she lathered the boy’s ankles with the last of the margarine, Lakey told him without looking up, Remember what we talked about. It’s those first thirty seconds. If you survive ‘em, you’re right as rain. Two minutes will be cake, and then, Little Peep, we’ll be rich. She lifted her grandson’s chin with a single greasy finger to force his gaze up to hers. His eyes, which were usually the sort of unnoticeable brown one associates with suede furniture, were piercingly clear against the yellow sheen that slicked his skull, communicating to Lakey all she needed to know—that he understood the stakes of the Elko Butter Chase and how desperately she needed him to win.

I believe in you, she said, falling back onto the five-gallon bucket she’d been using as a stool. Peep was seven, an age at which a lack of self-awareness encouraged his soft temperament. Looking at him then, Lakey knew he was, in all her estimations, bound to be crippled by a cruel world.

Ready? she said to the boy.

Ready, meemaw, he said, and then, Should I do some more drills? Lakey nodded without giving it much thought, which sent the boy marching into a measured routine of high knees, skips, and jumps of varying heights. Everything was very practiced, exacted with the boy’s precision, though watching Peep run through his calisthenics made Lakey nervous all the same. Never mind it was some Olympic warm-up routine she’d found online. It only mattered if it worked.

She’d never been a coach before but imagined this is what it might’ve felt like before a big game—the bubbling nerves giving way to a nausea so acidic she could taste it. Except, as Lakey watched Peep lunge into a series of single-foot skips, she recognized this was not at all what it was like. This was not a game.

Instinctively, her hand went down to the fleshy part of her tummy, as it often did those days. She probed at the lump just above her right hip, in all, the size of a walnut. Where the skin around it was soft and gave way, the center of the lump did not. It never seemed to, and that was what worried her the most. That something so small and hard could be growing inside her. That her grandson might only know loss.

---

Lakey found the tumor with a beer in hand, lounging by the Community Pool. She occupied a gummy chaise lounge whose fabric sagged. The Nevada sun blistered overhead.

Come get some more sunscreen, Lakey said. I can see your shoulders are pink.

One sec, meemaw, Little Peep replied before ramping a plastic speedboat into the air.

Over the crisp metal of the can at her lips, the day brimmed with summer glory. A June weekend with nowhere to be except beneath the great big blue. It was days like that when she missed them the most, when she wished that she wasn’t alone.

Peep’s boat crashed back into the water, where it bobbed over waves of his slapping arm’s creation.

Peep! Lakey said, Sunscreen now, though when she tried to stand, she fell right back down. A swift pain coursed her stomach.

She brought her hands to a place she imagined an appendix might be and when she pressed there, she was sure it had burst. The pain dizzied her vision, caused her to slump in the chair. When she called Peep a third time, he came.

She heard his little wet feet slap against the cement as he ran to her. Lakey’s eyes were closed and then open when she felt the boy’s fingers going naturally to the spot on her stomach that she covered. She must’ve given him a serious look then, a look that communicated severity, because Little Peep broke into a harsh sob.

You’re dying, he said, and Lakey couldn’t fight him. She thought she might’ve been.

Grab my phone and dial 911. She watched him upend her handbag on the pool deck. He grabbed her big silver iPhone and pressed it to his cheek.

Help! Help! This is Peep Sturgis and my meemaw is dying at the pool.

The waxy paper of the doctor’s table crinkled beneath Lakey’s shifting corduroy seat. Doctor Marigold perched on a miniature stool wheeling from the computer at one end of the office to the adjacent counter at the other. There, a thick manila folder was stacked high with paperwork from the last few weeks’ labs and their corresponding notes. When Marigold had trekked the short distance between computer and folder three times, he removed the rimless glasses that clung to the sharp ledge of his nose and folded them into the breast pocket of his white coat.

I’m sorry, was all he said for a good long while, letting the shake of his head do the talking. You’re in for it. It’s late stage, he said after a time. Somehow, Lakey already knew.

She knew everything when she looked in the mirror of the sterile hospital bathroom just outside the oncology office. She cupped her hands under the greening faucet and tossed cold water at her face as if it all could be washed away and renewal lay just ahead. Most of it, though, soaked her blue linen blouse which she buttoned close around her craggy neck. The water that did make it to her face seemed futile in the end, as it was quickly replaced by tears.

She hadn’t slept more than a pair of consecutive hours since the emergency room doctors confirmed it was a tumor in her belly. Peep had been there to hold her hand in the ER, and she told him he was a savior. He crossed his legs like a shy little thing and said, I’ll always save you, meemaw.

Marigold went on to explain it was colon cancer and the next step a simple one, If you wanna make it to the end of the year, we’ll have to go in and cut out a bit of the intestine. The bluntness of his tone showed Lakey he was practiced in this art—the one of relating death. He was, as she thought about it, a publicist for the grim reaper’s plans, and as she watched Marigold’s face still wagging, his posture altogether in ruin, it hit her that she was now a part of those plans, that she might actually die.

What are my chances, she said, without the surgery? Marigold continued to shake his head.

You’ll be gone before September. It was late June by then. The breath in her chest disappeared.

Lakey was acutely aware of the hard spot above her hip. Her right hand rested there, over that nucleus of trouble, massaging lightly as if maybe by treating the spot better than she had, it’d dissolve away as quickly as it came.

How much will the surgery cost? Lakey asked.

Do you have insurance? Marigold countered. She did—a simple Medicare policy, but only because her bridge partner, Jaqueline, coerced her into getting it. Jacqueline’s own mother died penniless to treat her diabetes. She told Lakey she wouldn’t let her do the same.

She produced the blue card from her trifold clutch and handed it over to Marigold. With a few clicks on the keyboard, he turned to her, Now this is only an estimate mind you, and our finance people can probably narrow it down if you like, but if we conduct the procedure here at Northeastern Nevada Regional, you’ll be due for somewhere in the ballpark of twelve to fifteen thousand, give or take your recovery post-op.

Lakey exhaled loudly and thanked the doctor for his help. Life now had a price, and not a dollar in her pocket was hers.

Sonnova bitch, she said beating her hands against the steering wheel. She was out in the parking lot then.

Down ten grand plus on her most recent loan, where would thousands for a procedure come from? Not from any of the banks around there, not with her credit. And the Social Security? That would hardly make a dent. Even Hans’ inheritance had bled dry by then.

Fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand. Fuck you, lump!

Lakey looked up to find the parking lot still empty, the lone road that snaked the beige desert just beyond it. She knew if she followed that road, she’d plunge deep into the canyon’s serrated stomach, where the pavement gave way to dirt, and eventually, if she made it that far, where two wood crosses stood next to the road.

Lakey was so alone. She wiped at her eyes preemptively, but the tears still came. Her cheeks felt raw, and as she dried them with Han’s old hanky, she caught sight of the cutout taped over her odometer. It showed Little Peep in a dark suit so big the hem of his pants wrapped around the heel of his dress shoes. The boy had his little finger pointed up at the sky.

Lakey could never forget that day, that moment, a double funeral in the sun. It was the one that confirmed her husband and daughter would never return to her. When she asked Little Peep, who was then just four, if he would offer his final goodbye, the boy stood next to both of the coffins and pointed straight up.

They went up there, he said.

---

Jacqueline suggested the Elko Butter Chase at bridge club the following Wednesday.

The what? Lakey said. There was such a slew of festivals, holidays, and fairs in Elko that she could hardly keep up. Just two weeks before they’d hosted the annual Hot Dog Days, a weekend-long celebration of northeast Nevada’s most iconic cylindrical meat product, complete with a DIY weenie roaster workshop and a complementary Oscar Meyer frank.

You know, the Butter Chase, Jacqueline said. Kid runs around the football field, covered in butter, and a bunch of men chase after. First person to catch the kid gets a $15,000 tax credit, certified by the state. It was part of Gomez’s platform after ’08 had all of us down on our asses.

Jacqueline was what Lakey called a young grandma. She was, in fact, a grandma; it was just that her daughter had a daughter at 19 just as she did, meaning that by the time Jacqueline was 40, she’d settled into her title of Nana just as the first wrinkles of premature sun damage began to streak their way across her forehead.

Ring any bells? Jacqueline asked. She pulled thick, black-framed glasses from her face and bit at one of the arms where a line of gnawings marked the plastic.

Unfortunately, it did jog a single harrowing memory for Lakey. She’d been to Butter Chase just the once in her time in Elko, though now that she remembered it, she was shocked she’d been able to forget. The scene of a scrawny young boy, perhaps eleven, rolling in a dust cloud after a particularly brutal miner caught the young lad’s arm and yanked him to the dirt like a cloth doll. With a count of One! Two! Three! from the crowd, an air horn signaled that the miner was the winner. He threw his hands into triumphant fists over his head, and if she remembered correctly, she thought he even cried.

How does that help anything? Lakey asked. She sounded pissy without really even meaning to.

Well, if the runner makes it two minutes without being wrangled, they win the $15,000 outright, all cash. Jacqueline paused as if that was hint enough, but Lakey didn’t say a thing. She traced the smooth caramel angles of the woman’s jawline across from her. Jacqueline’s shiny black hair was pulled straight back from her face, the same as the day Lakey met her at the Community Pool. It was a usual Saturday a year after the car crash. Jacqueline brought her granddaughter, Sierra.

I think Little Peep can be the runner, Jacqueline said firmly. Lakey nearly reached across the table to yank one of the gold hoops clean from Jacqueline’s ear. The thought of Little Peep, all 67 pounds of him, being wrestled to the ground by a pack of potbelly miners with hands that would never be clean; it was disgusting. A used car salesman in a polyester shirt would dogpile on top, followed by a burger chef, a dog groomer. Where did it end?

Out of the question, Lakey said.

But what option do you have, girlfriend? You said it yourself, you can’t afford the surgery. I’m talking about a free opportunity, free as air, where you could potentially pay for the damn thing, not to mention maybe just save your frickin life.

Jacqueline reminded Lakey of her daughter when she got going like this. They would’ve been about the same age. Lakey looked across the table to find her friend staring bullets into her cards.

Are you gonna play? Jacqueline said. It’s your turn. They both knew it was Lakey’s turn. They knew Lakey was gonna die if she didn’t have the surgery. And, most pointedly, they knew that whether it was a good idea or not, Little Peep had to run in the Elko Butter Chase.

Lakey wrinkled her fingers over the bridge of her nose, whose skin had gone raw in the days since she learned of her predicament. She still imagined Little Peep at the bottom of a pile, his full brown eyes beaming out at her from under the bodies with questions she would never be able to answer. She found that when she emerged from her head, her hands had tracked their way down to her stomach, where they urged the unpliable mass that composed the tumor to return to before.

Am I ready to die? Lakey asked herself. What would come of my sweet Peep?

She laid down her cards, and together, she and Jacqueline drove over to the city building to inquire if the year’s Butter Chase runner had been chosen.

---

Mayor Gómez met Lakey and Peep at the 50-yard line of what could hardly be called a football field. The dirt plot was lined with uneven ruts from the various purposes it served: host to the Elko County farmers’ market, Elko County fish and game headquarters, and of course, the home field of all the local sports teams of which there were many. Dewey Field had a red chain-link fence around its circumference containing clumps of fescue grass interspersed across the open expanse at odd intervals. Lakey pointed out the latter to Little Peep, saying, Be sure to lift your feet as you run.

I will, meemaw, Peep said. I will.

At midfield, Gómez extended one of his strong, square hands to crush Lakey’s own.

One of the best days for a Chase I can remember, he boomed. The mayor emitted a prevailing sense of false joviality of the order Lakey had come to associate with most politicians. She looked warily to Peep, filled then with doubt, but the boy stood strong beside her.

All it takes is two minutes, Gómez said. He squatted in his creaseless boots to look at Peep eye-to-eye. We haven’t had a runner win in all the runnings, but by the look of it, I could see you being the first.

The margarine began to drip down Little Peep’s ear lobes in the warming air. The morning was cast in a white glow, accentuating the sheen of Peep’s oily skin. Lakey thought the boy’s tummy looked sunken beneath the tiny piano keys of his ribs, the margarine gathered in yellow lumps at the waistband of his cotton briefs. Has he eaten enough? Is he ready? Her tumor seemed to ache as she asked the questions.

What do you think, huh? Gómez finished. Can ya handle that? Peep glanced from the mayor to Lakey before looking straight up into the sky. The blue expanse was aqua and nearly unblemished, save a pair of clouds just above them. The look in Peep’s eyes was soft, generous even, in the face of everything becoming real. With a nod, he stuck out his fist to the mayor, who bumped the boy’s buttery little knuckles with his own.

Three! Two! One! An air horn sounded, but nobody moved. Peep stood, legs like a point guard playing defense, as the twenty-two men circled him at the center of the dirt field.

Lakey perched at the fence, her tumor radiating a short, injectable pain beneath the red canvas blouse she wore. Her knuckles showed white as she looped her fingers in the chain link in front of her. Over her shoulder, four sets of short metal bleachers stood filled with generations of battle-born Nevadans, who whooped and whistled with the first attack.

It was a miner by the look of him. He wore a long beard trimmed into a point beneath his chin, the same color as the soot caked into the labor of his hands. He charged like a maverick in tennis shorts, closing the ten yards between the circle of attackers and Peep in no time flat.

The miner lunged low, actually getting a hand on Peep’s ankle, though it slid off just as quickly, sending the man collapsing to the dust as Peep shimmied to the right with a juke. Lakey’s grandson wore the brazen look of a matador, though a butter-slicked one at that.

The chase was officially on.

At the twenty-second mark, Peep had already ducked two more in a display of flamenco hips, weaseling his way from another’s headlock by retracting his lubed-up neck into his shoulders like a snapping turtle. With it, and the onslaught of ten others, packed and chasing after him with all sense of strategy thrown by the wayside, Little Peep made for a gap in the bodies that would allow him to run free and clear.

Lakey couldn’t help but hold the tumor with both her hands. The pain that radiated from the mass was gaining heat, pinching at her with the precision of forceps.

She nearly collapsed, propped up by the fence in front of her. That is, until she saw Little Peep slide between one fella’s legs, scamper quickly to his bare feet, and hustle to the near sideline while all the others trailed behind him in a stampede.

The boy was gazellian. He moved past thirty seconds, a minute fifteen, with ease. He was covered in dust by then, all but minimizing his margarine advantage, still the seconds ticked on. Peep was free. Look how far he’d made it in such an elegant fashion. How could Lakey not believe he would save her?

She’d take the big fake check that Mayor Gómez held not thirty feet away and scream into the air, I’m getting saved! Do you get that? I’m staying here!

Everything depended on her grandson, the gaunt powdered donut running not just for his life but hers. Lakey felt power in his lifting knees, enough power to move her hands from the quelling heat at her side. He’s gonna do it, she thought. Good god, he’s gonna do it. When she glanced at the short rectangular scoreboard at the far end of the field, only twenty-four seconds remained.

Little Peep stood in the far corner of what Lakey supposed was an end zone. He skittered around in short zig-zagging lines, up then back, just as she’d taught him. He listened, that boy.

But listening couldn’t have prepared him, at least not all the way. The Elko Butter Chase, like so much of Lakey’s life, was reduced to a great improvisation.

The band of twenty-two attackers linked arms, spreading themselves, red-rover-style, across the width of the field.

No chink in our armor, some plumber yelled, the row of them marching toward Peep. The clock ticked on: seventeen, sixteen. At fifteen, they had no choice. The wall of attackers bum-rushed, hands clasped and closing in. Lakey watched Little Peep’s eyes as he searched for escape.

The tallest one, she whispered. The only way is under. Her gaze went down the line until it landed on an ogre, two heads taller than the others, with a button-down shirt open to the sternum. Tufts of lettuce-like chest hair poked from beneath. It was Randy Stewart, loan officer at Wells Fargo.

Unfortunately, Lakey knew him well. He’d criticized Hans and her daughter for not having life insurance policies, for spurring her financial ruin.

You deserve to grieve, he’d told her, not worry about money, though his interest rates told a different story.

Little Peep met the charging bodies with an attack of his own.

Go, Lakey said to herself. Get that sonnova bitch. In her mind, she was running with the boy.

She watched Peep aim right where she wanted him: at the gaping doorway created by Randy Stewart’s gargantuan legs.

The attackers collapsed from the sides when they realized where Peep was headed.

Get back, get back, they yelled in unison. If Peep made it through that one man, he made it through all of them. One hundred yards of open field laid just on the other side.

The boy slid with nine seconds. Lakey hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until she gasped at the sight of Stewart, who went from his broad-based stance to stick-straight in an instant, closing the gap created by his legs. Her grandson crashed awkwardly into the loan officer’s shins, his head tossed back from the collision.

He tried to scramble off, crawling like a crab, but it was no use. One man was on top of him, then three more, as they held Little Peep in the dust. He kicked his feet and lashed his fists, but the three-count sounded all the same. Lakey could not see her grandson’s eyes at the bottom of the pile, but she knew them. She knew he was ruined.

The winner, a town mailman named Gotti, jumped into the air with his hands raised like a champion boxer. The other attackers swarmed him, lifting him in the air and then onto their shoulders.

Gotti needs a drink! they cried. Get this man a drink! The caravan flowed out to a nearby beer tent, where they were met with cheers and hollers from the crowd assembled there.

Little Peep remained on the field, lying on his back. Lakey let the congregation pass before she made her way to him. She was surprised to find that his face was not dotted with tears as she expected but staring in the softest of ways up at the sky.

He looked like a corpse. His shins were bloody with road rash from sliding in the dirt, and the rest of him covered in a filthy concoction of margarine, soil, and sweat. This was no way for her grandson to be. The pain reemerged in her side hotter than ever.

Hun? Lakey asked. Little Peep, my boy? He didn’t look at her, at least not right away. He seemed transfixed on the great blueness that was above them. Lakey looked too.

She found those two lumpy clouds from before looking like wads of stuffing ripped from a teddy bear. The sky was brightening with each minute, the whole of it so crystalline she felt sorry humans ever came to explore it. She wished it had stayed pure or else she wished only she could escape into it.

I lost, Little Peep said finally. I’m sorry, meemaw, but I lost. Lakey looked at her grandson, and he started crying then. The tears were blue like the sky and streaked the dust from his cheeks. Lakey got down on her knees. She grabbed her grandson’s face by either of his cheeks and looked deeply there. She saw his mother, his grandfather. She saw Peep.

Lakey pushed the fringe bangs from his forehead and exposed a white section of scalp untouched by the day. The pain in her side was dizzyingly hot. She felt faint and slight of breath.

Lakey lay next to her grandson, copying his position to lie on her back and look straight up as well. There they were, the only two left on the field.

Lakey turned her head in the dust after a time and saw the boy wore a look of fondness again. His tears had stopped, though their scars still showed in the tracks left on his cheeks. Then he pointed. Little Peep pointed his finger far to their right, at a lone cloud floating toward them from the east. It was rounder, had cleaner edges than the two just above them, though altogether of the cloud family. In time, minutes or months maybe, Lakey knew the lone cloud would join the others overhead, and that would make three. Right then, however, she grabbed Peep’s hand. She laced her fingers in his.

---

J. Dominic Patacsil is a fiction writer hailing from Indiana. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. His work can be found in various literary outlets or on his website at www.jdpatacsil.wixsite.com/fiction.