“What do you want?” he asked.
“Good evening, sir,” Lawrence said, smiling. “I came to see Cora, if that’s all right.” He looked at Cora then, and she felt her cheeks go hot; she looked at her plate of food for a moment, then back up.
“What for?” her father said.
He was still looking at Cora, that quiet confidence thrust onto his face.
“There’s a dance tonight. Glenn Orfee in Nelson,” he said, and Cora felt a streak of heat shoot through her body. Those tobacco-scented fingers on her skin, that spinning.
But Cora’s father just looked at her, then at the boy in the doorway, and then he tipped his head back and laughed. “With an Indian? You think I’d let my daughter go dancing with an Indian?” And with those words Cora knew what she should have known all along: that was why those dark eyes and that dark hair and those cheekbones. Indian. Abenaki. The niggers of Vermont, her father called them.
“Come,” her father said, and Lawrence followed him out the door into the darkening yard and Cora stood up and followed too.
“Don’t,” her sister said, but Cora did.
They walked into the barn—this barn—and Cora followed. They went past the rows of cows, past their slow heat and the soft rhythm of chewing cuds, into the back room. Cora stopped in this room, amidst the cows, and watched through the doorway as her father put his left arm on Lawrence’s shoulder and leaned close to him and said through his teeth: “We don’t need no Gypsy-Indian blood on this farm,” and watched as Lawrence just stood there, not blinking, or flinching, or nodding, but said, quietly, between his teeth, “Asshole,” and then watched as her father swung his right knee into the crotch of the man she had let touch her, and as Lawrence fell back against the wall of the barn, and heard the small whimpering that escaped his lips, and then watched as her father strode out the back door and spit into the grass and disappeared. And then came the moment that Cora has not let herself fully remember since—the moment that she looked at him, and he looked at her, and that she turned, and walked out of the barn, without looking back, without saying anything, without feeling remorse, or love, only a strange kind of pity and fear, and she has never known, and still does not know to this day, whether that change in her was because she knew he was Abenaki, or because of the way he had crumpled, without resistance, into the wall of the barn, or because of that strange sound he made as he took the blow. All she knows is that she left, and went back to the table, and ate her mother’s meat loaf, quietly.
Cora cannot breathe. She thinks of that peppered outline of the deer’s body against the wall, of Lawrence Pial’s mother’s beautiful, dark face, of the look in his eyes against the back wall of this barn, and cannot breathe. She feels ill: a reeking bitterness in the pit of her stomach. Coffee, pennies, Kevin: sad, bruised-arm boy or no. And this barn, this hillside, this view and mist rising up out of the valley, off the water: is it, was it ever, God’s country?
The door swings open and there are footsteps. Cora swats the beam of her flashlight toward the door. Her heart pounds; she’s never been closer to believing in ghosts. But it’s Kevin. Just her grandson, Kevin, standing there in the doorway, wide-eyed.
“Grandma? What are you doing here?” He walks toward her a few steps, and she’s amazed to think she would have been found, after all, if that door had knocked her down at 3 A.M. He would have picked her up, carried her inside. The early hours of his eighteenth birthday. Her dear grandson.
“Oh, I don’t know, Kevin. I couldn’t sleep. The door was swinging and I went out.”
“Right,” he says, looking down at his hands, and she realizes he must come here often, in the middle of the night, to get away, to find a safe and quiet place.
“Sit down, Kevin. Sit down here near me. It’s so late. Or so early. It’s your birthday.” And so he does. He sits down and closes his eyes, his knee shaking, and the two of them are silent, his breath rancid with beer, or liquor, or both, watching the night’s blue sky through the open windows, and after a few moments she hears Kevin’s breath drift into the breath of sleep.
Cora lets her weight settle into the moldy green-checkered chair, the chair where Kevin sat to throw darts and drink beer, and her body feels small, thin, old, brittle, and she thinks this is the way it will go; Kevin is the way it will go, like a giant sheet being removed, revealing some darker, broken, meaner heart, and she closes her eyes, and thinks of Lawrence Pial, of what she has always wished she had done that night, of what she has never let herself imagine: that she had gone to him, and taken his hand, and pulled him up. That they had slipped out of the barn together into that August darkness and heat—crickets, fireflies, stars—that she had lain down in that grass with him, and let him touch her, and touched him, let her imperfect heart explode with his, let there be born, in that night, in that field, the possibility of something different, something beautiful, something new. But she did not. No, she did not. Cora closes her eyes. The barn is all darkness. Just Kevin’s slow, uneven breath and the swallow’s tail, flickering. Oh God, she thinks. She is old. How long until morning?
7
BARRED OWL
I choose the red dress, knee-high black leather cowboy boots, and aqua blue to dust my eyes. The camper is stinking hot and smells of Jimmy’s beer, of creek water, and of stained sheets, which I take to my great-aunt Hazel’s once a week to wash, but once a week is not enough in August. Not with Jimmy, not with the camper down near Silver Creek, where the sun doesn’t shine long enough to keep bread from turning blue, the corners of my books from curling up at the edges, the smells from sticking around. “That?” I said to Hazel four months ago when I came here asking for a place to stay and she pointed at the teal-colored tow-along camper that had been parked behind the barn for seventeen years.
“There’s always the chicken coop,” she said. She didn’t offer to let me live with her, and I didn’t want to, even though that’s what the social worker had in mind. Two birds with one stone, pretending I didn’t know it. But Hazel didn’t want me in her house, and I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be where Jimmy and I could screech like barn cats, fuck like bunnies, pop whatever kind of pill we want to. So I took the camper. “Down by the creek,” I said—not knowing that the sun wouldn’t shine here till eleven, that it would set at four—so my cousin pulled it down here to this little field that borders the water, dragged a two-hundred-foot run of extension cords down from the barn, and here I am now, three months later, calling it home.
I light a cigarette and step outside, sit on the cement-block step and smoke it. I’m waiting for Jimmy to come. Needing Jimmy to come. The sun went down an hour ago, and the fields are turning that hazy blue of evening that I like, the color of smoke. I don’t have a license or a car and my cell phone doesn’t work here, so when I get dressed up at night I have to sit outside and wait like this for Jimmy to wonder where I am and decide to come pick me up. Sixteen years old and I crashed my mother’s Chevy in a ravine and walked out too quick to hide the half-empty bottle of Bacardi on the floor, and so here I am sitting in fields getting a nicotine buzz on with leather on my feet, a red dress running silky down my legs, my face all made up, and no one to see me but fireflies. Or maybe Hazel. I can’t see her windows from here, but sometimes I like to think about her up there at the top of the hill, like a fucking ninety-year-old goat, teeth all splayed, hobbling back and forth between the barn and the house. “Hazel,” I whisper. “You crazy old horse of a lady. How ’bout coming and getting high with me?” And then I giggle, picturing her smoking a cigarette or cracking open a beer, but I don’t mean anything by it, because really I like having her up there, that light streaking across the field late at night, the sound of doors closing, her lawn mower starting up night and day. “Fucking ghost-woman,” Jimmy calls her, rifling through her bathroom cabinets and stashing bottles in his pockets, and I laugh, and then he pulls me toward him onto her bed, and then we are back in that place, that heat and sweet pain and necessity, and
oh my God I’m not thinking of Hazel then.
But I don’t mind thinking of her now, smoking my Marlboro. That’s the name of a college town nearby, full of rich kids—Marlboro—which is the reason I’ve always smoked them: “Spelled like the cigarette,” I’ll say, grinning, because I like to think how I’m sitting out in a field smoking a cigarette but I’m also, in some abstract way that turns me on, smoking this place, the whole fucking mess of it: the rich assholes and the punk kids like me and the sad old ladies like Hazel and the do-gooder hippies turned into yuppies or stoners and the ones with second homes and ski chalets meant to look like The Sound of Music Swiss crap. Now when people ask where I’m from I say, “Vicksburg, like the song,” and giggle, though most people don’t know the song. Yeah, that’s my hometown. Six generations, baby. Crazy fucked-up place the Japanese and southern bus tourists think is pretty. “Leaves!” they cry out, their buses getting stuck on back roads, falling into ditches and making detours to find the second homes of movie stars. Whoopi Goldberg has a house near here. For real. And once a Japanese woman fell into a beaver pond trying to get a picture of a maple tree reflecting on water. Fuck yeah! I giggle, thinking of them dragging her up out of the water, pond muck and rotting leaves and algae dripping from her face and hair. “So pretty!” I giggle again. Jimmy, who was on the volunteer fire department at the time, said the woman was fine, “just cold as a witch’s tits.”
There’s still no sign of headlights coming down the river road toward me, so I get up and start walking. My cell only works once I hit the pavement, about a mile away, so I can’t even call Jimmy. He told me he’d be here by four and now it’s eight, and so I hope he’s at one of his buddy’s apartments: Duke of Hazzard and Skinny Lenny, that’s what Jimmy calls them, to their faces and behind their backs. They love it—grin their pocked faces and slap him five and say “Shit yeah” and know that Jimmy will be back tomorrow with however many OxyContin they want. That’s the kind of guy he is: the man. My man. Twenty-four-year-old Jimmy with a brand-new Jeep SUV and that beautiful win-you-over shit-eating grin, throwing fives down the front of my dress when we’re at parties, saying, “Shake it, Vale, come on, show me what you’ve got, shake it.” And just like a stripper I do.
The river road that winds along this side of the field isn’t a real road, it’s just a dirt track packed from farm trucks and tractors, so the heels of my boots sink down into mud. I stumble but the grass is worn enough so I can see where I’m going. Just a skinny moon—Skinny Lenny moon—coming up behind Hazel’s hill, turning my dress all shiny crimson. I didn’t grow up in fields like this; I grew up in Nelson, and it was only once a month or so that my mom would drop me off out here to throw hay bales up onto a truck with my cousin Danny or make strawberry jam in June with Hazel. My mom would never stick around. “It’s like hillbilly central out there,” she’d say, flicking her cigarette out the window, as if this wasn’t where she’d been fucking born and grown up and lost her virginity, no doubt, in some field like this one, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind it then, getting away from her and her shit. I don’t even mind it now, for the summer: this trippy field down by the water and crazy Hazel on her tractor (how many girls have tractor-driving great-aunts?) and the camper all my own where I’ve hung a picture of me as a baby and a picture of me and Jimmy last summer, swimming, and my collection of miniature owls. Owls—I don’t know why, except that I found a couple at a flea market once and they’ve been popping up ever since—salt and pepper shaker owls, plastic owls, wooden hand-carved owls. I go into the junk stores in town every now and then and look around and buy another for a dollar or two, and so they’re lined up on the bookshelf, staring at me when I’m trying to sleep, and the crazy thing is that there’s a real owl down here by the river that almost every night makes his crazy hooting love song, and when I hear it I turn to my little owls and say, “Hear that? The real thing, you little bug-eyed babies. The real thing.”
At the pavement I stop to catch my breath, pull my cell out of my bag. Where I don’t want him to be is at a party, without me. Where I don’t want him to be is near any other girl. I get two bars on my cell and call Jimmy. It rings three times, and then he’s there: “Vale.”
“Dude,” I say. “It’s eight thirty.”
I can tell he’s at a party by the music in the background. He laughs and yells, “Get your hand off my butt!” And then, “Sorry, Vale. What’d you say? Girl, where you be at?” And when I tell him I’m standing by the edge of the road at the edge of a fucking farm looking hot as melted butter he laughs and says, “I’ll be right there.”
I can hear his Jeep before I see the headlights—he’s pinholed the muffler so it sounds like a pack of Harleys.
“Woman,” he says when I open the door. “You look like a goddamn whore out here.” He grabs my thigh and I give him the finger and lean over and kiss him on his mouth. He tastes like beer and the taste goes all the way down through my body. I want him to live here with me, though I haven’t told him that. He says the woods are some spooky fucked-up shit. He spins the car around at a wide place in the road, but still we go down into the ditch and then peel out, leaving skid marks on the road and mud on our hubcaps, and I laugh and then we’re back out on the highway.
The party’s at Liz Stokes’s house, a dude ranch in a field with three horses and two Beemers and a pool. The doors and windows are open, and JT blasts from the thousand-dollar stereo. Jimmy hops out and grabs my hand, and I leap out the driver’s door behind him. Inside there’s a fishbowl of pills and everyone I know is there. Jimmy pulls something out of the bowl for each of us and hands me a beer, and I start to shake my booty to JT’s beat. My best friend, April, comes up behind me, and we grind together and I whisper, “Sexy ladies” into her ear, and for a minute—I have no fucking idea why—I think of Hazel up at the top of that hill in her house alone and wonder what she’d think if she saw me here, if she’s ever heard this music, if she’s ever even moved her body the way I’m shaking mine now, say while trying to get shit off a shovel. The thought makes me snort, and I finish my beer and look around for Jimmy but he’s gone, so I go to the keg for another. He’s probably outside selling whatever pills he’s got and I think of the way money rolls through his hands and I imagine the kind of ring or car he might buy me someday and I close my eyes and shake, shake, shake, until I feel hands on my hips and my back—big hands, strong hands, Jimmy’s hands—and those hands are around my flat stomach now and his tongue is in my ear and I’m still shaking my hips to the music, still tossing my head, and he is whispering, “I want you,” into my ear, and then everything is all right.
At midnight people start taking their clothes off and leaping into Liz Stokes’s pool. “Come,” Jimmy says, pulling me into the master bedroom. He puts two pills on my tongue. My head goes blitzo. He slips my dress down off my shoulders, reaches in his pocket, and pulls out a handful of pretzels. Pretzels—I start to giggle. Through the open windows come the sounds of splashing, of bodies cascading into water, of dudes and girls and every once in a while the whinny of a horse. Jimmy pushes me down onto my back on the bed. He is whispering to me—“Vale, Vale, Valley Vale.” He takes a pretzel from the bed and slips it between my lips. “Eat this,” he’s whispering, and I let the pretzel slide into my mouth and the salt explodes all along my tongue and gums and seeps into the roof of my mouth like some crazy constellation of bright stars. A pretzel! And then Jimmy is slipping my underwear down off my legs and his lips are on my stomach and brushing against my thighs and the sounds of squeals and screams and water splashing drifts in through the open window, and then he is going down on me and someone screams at the pool and oh my God I am no longer in my body I am no longer even a body I am a flame, a globe of trembling light and I am about to disintegrate into that flame and into ash when the lights flick on and Liz is standing in the doorway, stone-eyed, saying, “My mom’s home,” and Jimmy starts to laugh so hard that blood comes out of his nose and drips onto my leg and
Liz rolls her eyes and leaves the room and I yell, “Fuck!” and scramble to get my dress back on.
He drives me home, popping PBRs and throwing the empties out the open windows. He’s laughing the whole time, but he’s not looking at me, and my body is some bruised color, so tender I think my skin might break if it is touched. But it doesn’t. Jimmy is drunk by the time we get home, and our sex is Jimmy’s drunk and stoned sex: fine. Okay. Quick and painless and easy, and I lie in bed afterward with my head spinning listening to Jimmy snore and think of Hazel up there in her house alone in the dark and wonder if she was ever in love, and if so, if this is what came of it, or not.
When I wake up, the clock next to my head says four; the moon’s gone, there’s a faint rim of blue at the edge of the sky. I reach my arm across the bed, but there’s just a pocket of cold sheets. My head throbs and that bruised feeling slides up from my toes back into my whole body and fills it, and then I hear the owl—Who-cooks-for-you?—a barred owl. I look up at my little owls on the shelf that I can just barely make out in the moonlight. “Hear that?” I say. The barred calls again and its sound slips down and settles between my legs. I wonder if Hazel hears it, up there on the hill, Hazel who once told me that owls are a sign of the death of something old and the start of something new. It calls again, only this time it’s right outside my window on a low-hanging branch, so close I could touch it if there weren’t a screen between us. “What the fuck?” I whisper to that bird who’s staring back at me, and I think for a moment I might cry, like a fucking baby, but I don’t. Its eyes are black, unblinking. They don’t look away. They take it all in: me, the creek, the camper, sky. They swallow us whole, and inside its body is stillness: blue velvet, peppered with holes. “What the fuck?” I ask again, to which it blinks its black eyes and flies away, not telling me a thing.
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