by Nick Petrie
He rubbed his bicep. “Ow.”
“I’m serious.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“What are you training for, with that backpack and that heavy pipe? You’re like a goddamn hamster on a wheel.”
She wasn’t wrong. And he didn’t have the answer she wanted to hear.
He was training to be useful. To be ready for whatever might come.
After seven months in the valley, the longest time he’d spent living in one place since he’d joined the Marines, Peter was more than restless. He was starting to climb the walls.
It was one of the souvenirs from his war, his need to move and work and do. Even sitting in that high meadow, his knee bobbed in time to some internal metronome that never stopped.
He didn’t want to screw this up, what he had with June. He’d never had anything like it before, and he couldn’t imagine finding anything like it again.
He didn’t want to tell her that he was afraid he’d never be ready. That he’d always be tilted toward whatever might happen next, always looking for the next adrenaline hit. Always wanting that dome of open sky above him.
That was his other souvenir, the one that powered his restlessness. It was hard for him to be inside, after the war. His fight-or-flight reflex was on overdrive. He’d done too much house-to-house fighting over there, kicked in too many doors. Lost too many friends.
After mustering out, he’d spent almost two years living rough in the mountains, coming down every few months for resupply. He could barely manage the grocery store. He couldn’t imagine a job. He felt like he’d become allergic to the civilized world.
Post-traumatic claustrophobia, his shrink called it.
Peter called it the white static.
It was the reason for the sleeping porch, so he and June could share a bed that wasn’t in a tent.
With hard work, the static was getting better. It was funny, what actually made a difference. Of all things, it was yoga and meditation that helped him learn to turn down that fight-or-flight feedback loop. He’d also found a veterans’ group in Hood River. They talked a lot of shit, but they talked about real things, too. About where they’d been, and what they’d done, pride and shame in equal amounts. Helping each other figure out how to move on with their lives.
Peter was still working on that himself.
But he’d learned to cook a meal in June’s kitchen without the static sending sparks up his brainstem. He could spend a day setting bathroom tile, or get into a crawl space to fix the antique plumbing, not without the white static, but without the lightning bolts of a full-blown panic attack. The repairs were part of his therapy. They forced him to push past his limits. To practice dealing with the static, to change his relationship to it. More friend than enemy.
He figured it would be with him for the rest of his life, along with everything else from those war years. But he was learning to see it coming, to take steps, to breathe in and out. And also to see its uses, the readiness it gave him.
Still, he’d always rather be outside and in motion.
He and June usually fell asleep tangled up in each other on the new porch, but they rarely woke in the same place. Some nights, even the porch was too much of an enclosure for Peter, and he’d step outside and wrap himself in his sleeping bag in the orchard, warm as toast in a blizzard at ten below. Or the porch was too exposed for June, and she’d migrate to the bedroom, where the wind didn’t howl quite so loudly, where the floor wasn’t quite so cold.
“June,” he began.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I’m afraid you’re going to run out of things to fix around here. And you’re going to, I don’t know, spontaneously combust or some fucking thing.” She skewered him with a look. “You need a goddamned hobby.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked out across the open valley at the rugged terrain beyond. “I’m not very good at this.”
“Me neither,” she said. “We’re experimenting on each other. But I don’t want you here because you feel like you have to be. I want you here because you want to be.”
“I do,” he said. “I am.”
“No,” she said, “you’re not. You can’t sit still for more than five minutes, and you’ve always got one eye on the fucking horizon.”
He felt the truth like a kick in the stomach. The evidence of his own internal damage, his inability to live a normal life. And another sensation he liked even less, like a cold wind blowing clean through him. A kind of relief.
She pulled her daypack closer and dug inside. “Anyway, I got you something for your birthday.”
“My birthday was in March. You already got me something.”
She dropped a bulky package into his lap. “Shut up and unwrap it already.”
It was an armored vest. A very good one, lightweight with ceramic plates. He looked at her.
She stared across the valley. “I got an email from a friend,” she said. “Wanda Wyatt in Memphis. We’ve worked together on a few things over the years. She’s a photojournalist, a conflict photographer. She’s worked in Iraq, Africa, Syria, a lot of places. Someone’s been harassing her. I thought maybe you could go lend a hand.”
Peter felt it already, his heart beating just a little faster. Training wasn’t the real thing. Was he that predictable? “You didn’t order this vest last night.”
“No,” she said. “But I knew you’d meet somebody, or someone would call, or some fucking thing would happen, and you’d need to go help. That’s how you’re built, I get it. But I also know you’re too much of a cheap-ass to buy something like this for yourself.”
She turned to look him full in the face, eyes bright, freckles spread across her cheeks like a constellation. Something was different there, he thought. Something in her he didn’t quite recognize. He knew she was strong, but he hadn’t known she was this strong.
“You’re throwing me out,” he said.
“It’s not like that.” Her voice was quiet. “I just don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck here. Think of it as a catch-and-release program. We don’t always have to be joined at the hip, right?”
“Well.” He looked at her. “Sometimes it’s nice to be joined at the hip.”
Wide-eyed and innocent, she glanced around at the grassy meadow, fingers pressed demurely to her chest. “What, up here?”
With a wolfish smile, he reached for her. “Come sit on my lap.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s not going to be that easy.”
She stood and stripped off her clothes with a few swift, graceful moves.
She wore lacy red underwear that went nicely with her red hair and creamy skin and the spray of freckles across her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.
“You’re going to have to catch me first.”
She’d always been way ahead of him.
6
In the end he spent four days driving his old green Chevy pickup from Washington State to Tennessee.
He took I-84 through Oregon into Idaho. He didn’t like the interstate, but it was the fastest and most reliable way east through the mountains in the spring. He laid out his sleeping bag on a gravel bar beside the Snake River, running cold and fast and high.
He dropped down into Utah, where 84 merged with 80 past Ogden, and he drove partway through Wyoming to spend the night inside an oxbow of the Green River, where a pair of young black bears wandered curiously through his campsite. He got off the interstate at Ogallala the next day, and rode narrower highways east and south through the dry, empty plains of southern Nebraska and northern Kansas into the hotter, greener country of southeast Kansas, then Missouri.
He carried a cooler full of ice and groceries so he could cook himself breakfast and dinner on his little backpacking stove. His midday meal was a peanut butter and apple sandwich, washed down with lukewarm leftover coffee, except for once i
n a dusty little town in Nebraska, when he stopped at a nameless gas station with old farm trucks and a pair of bug-spattered state police cruisers angle-parked outside. When he went in to pay for his fuel, he couldn’t resist a jumbo hot dog with everything.
June had bought him a new phone—he couldn’t seem to hang on to them—and had asked him to text her pictures of his campsites along the way, which he did. Twice he called her while he was driving, but his old truck was too loud for phone conversation, and once he got off the interstate, the cell towers were too far apart and kept dropping his calls.
She’d had it all figured out, Peter’s trip to Memphis. But he worried that he’d agreed too quickly. After three days alone in the truck, he thought about it a lot.
That third evening, he drove until long after dark, feeling his connection with June growing thinner with each passing mile. He slept with his truck pulled to the side of a gravel road, his hammock hung between his window frame and the limb of a tree, to be woken at first light by a policeman of some unknown jurisdiction telling him there warn’t no camping allowed nor vagrancy tolerated and if he didn’t get himself gone in ten minutes, he’d find himself in front of a judge.
He got himself gone, and angled south and east through Missouri, where the land rumpled up into the Ozarks, until he dropped down into flat green fields with long lines of trees for windbreaks and he knew he was nearing the Mississippi. He saw the wide, muddy river for the first time at Hayti, crossed into Tennessee after Caruthersville, then worked his way south through Dyersburg and Ripley and Covington until it was clear he was in the suburban sprawl around Memphis.
* * *
• • •
Wanda Wyatt lived in an old brick house on a residential street off of Ayers in North Memphis. Her block was crowded with tall trees and shrubs, and lush, semi-wild gardens. Invasive kudzu vines smothered fences and sheds, climbed trees and garages. Some of the lots were empty, with cracked steps and driveways showing where homes had once stood. The remaining houses had seen better days, especially Wanda’s.
The back end of a dump truck was visible in her front yard.
The rest of the truck was jammed into her living room.
Her street was clogged with the curious. Cars slowed as they drove by, or stopped so the drivers could get out and get a closer look. Several had their phones out to document the disaster, the ruined house and the deeply rutted tire tracks in the yard. The crash seemed recent. Getting out of his truck, Peter could still smell the brick dust.
A police cruiser sat flashing at the curb, with a young officer moving the traffic along. Yellow police tape reading DO NOT CROSS ran from the neighbor’s fence, around the massive rear bumper of the truck, to the side gate.
Wanda Wyatt was a tall, angular woman, and she stood in the shadow of the dump bed with her back to the building and a big long-lensed camera hanging negligently from her fingertips like some sort of permanent prosthetic device. As each car rolled by, she’d raise the camera as if somehow surprised to find it in her hand, but Peter could see her index finger twitch, taking shot after shot. Without anyone else noticing, she captured each passing car and each person who got out to look.
Then she was taking a photo of Peter as he strode up her gravel driveway.
“Hi, I’m Peter,” he said. “June Cassidy’s friend?”
She lowered the camera and looked him up and down. She saw a man who looked like Picasso’s drawing of Don Quixote, tall and rangy and durable, but without the horse. Later Peter would understand that she was comparing him to the picture June had sent, held in her head along with many others. Like a lot of professional photographers, she had a kind of permanent mental file of images, some kept on purpose, some she couldn’t erase.
“Huh,” she said. Her pupils were huge, and he could see her pulse in a vein at her temple. “I wasn’t expecting you. But your timing is excellent.”
She shifted the camera into her left hand and put out her right for him to shake. Her fingers were long and slender and surprisingly strong. She angled her head at the dump truck that had crashed into her house. “As you can see,” she said dryly, “things have gotten interesting.”
If she was concerned or afraid, it didn’t show.
As though the wreck of her home were an everyday occurrence.
She wore an electric blue T-shirt, vivid against her dark brown skin, and loose khaki cargo pants that exposed architectural ankles. Her dark eyes were enormous and slightly offset, her mouth wide in her narrow face. Short dreadlocks stuck out from her head like a hundred seeking antennae, each tuned to a slightly different frequency.
In high school, Peter thought, the popular crowd probably would have said she looked weird. Definitely not pretty.
At thirty-nine, Wanda Wyatt was striking. More than that, she had a kind of shine to her, a radiance. Maybe it was a byproduct of fifteen years as a conflict photographer, working freelance for newspapers and magazines in war zones around the world. Maybe it was what had allowed her to do that work in the first place.
Maybe it was because she was high as a kite.
June had worked with Wanda on several stories for Public Investigations, a nonprofit group of investigative reporters, so they certainly had a lot in common. But it was obvious why they had become friends. The heat of their fire came from the same internal combustion engine.
“When did this happen?” Peter tipped his chin toward her house.
“About four o’clock this morning,” she said. “My room is upstairs, in the back. I woke up when my bedframe banged against the wall.” She gave Peter an odd smile. “My first thought was a car bomb, until I was awake enough to remember I was back home in Memphis.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I threw on some clothes, ran downstairs, and found a dump truck in my workroom.” The smile came back. “I got some nice images before I called 911.”
“What happened to the driver?”
“I have no idea. I never saw anyone. But it’s got to be connected to the earlier stuff.”
The harassment had started after Wanda had bought the building as a foreclosure. She’d paid cash at auction, beating out another bidder, but she’d still gotten it for next to nothing because it needed a lot of work. North Memphis had more than a few foreclosures to choose from.
Not long after she took ownership, though, she’d gotten a series of anonymous emails, the sender increasingly angry about a long photo essay documenting civilian deaths by U.S. drone strikes in multiple war zones.
The last email called her a “black bitch traitor who hates America.” The sender had attached a video of a burning cross.
“I’d thought it would turn out to be footage someone had found online, but I couldn’t find anything that matched.” The odd smile again. “I think they burned that cross just for me.”
A week later, someone had thrown a rock through her front window. The note wrapped around it had read, “Memphis doesn’t want you. Leave town before you end up hanging from a tree.”
Wanda had reached out to June, looking for ideas about how to figure out who was responsible. “I’ve gotten letters before,” she said. “I thought it was just a crank. Any idiot can send hate mail and throw rocks, right? Until this.” She gestured at the dump truck.
“All because of some photographs?”
“Maybe they don’t need a reason,” she said. “I’m black, I’m gay, and I’m a journalist, although not necessarily in that order. Any one of those would be enough to light some dipshit’s fuse.”
“This is Memphis,” Peter said. “Half the city is black.”
“More like two-thirds of the city proper,” she said. “But the outlying areas are mostly white. The police think the whole thing is racially motivated, what with the burning cross and all. They weren’t paying much attention before, but they are now. The detective in charge of my case is supposed to call me in the morning.”
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br /> “Well, I’m sorry for your troubles,” Peter said.
“Not your fault,” said Wanda. “Unless you’re the one who drove that dump truck.”
“No.” Peter smiled. “But I’m happy to be of use. I can certainly look at the building, see what kind of damage was done, get started on putting things back together.”
“The fire department doesn’t want me back in the house until a structural engineer comes to evaluate. They turned off the gas, power, and water so it doesn’t, you know, explode or whatever. The engineer is coming tomorrow.”
“Did you call your insurance person?”
The pulse in her temple ticked faster. “That’s a problem,” she said. “I just moved in last month, and I hadn’t gotten around to getting insurance. So there won’t be much money unless the company that owns the dump truck is willing to help.”
“Actually, that makes things easier,” said Peter. “Your insurance company would have all these rules and requirements. I’m not licensed as a contractor in Tennessee—I’m not licensed anywhere, actually—so it would be hard to get them to reimburse you for repairs anyway. This way we just get it done.”
“But how will you get reimbursed?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll work it out.”
“I can’t pay you,” she said. “And you’re not working for free.”
Peter thought of the particular type of asshole who would email a video of a burning cross, and he smiled happily.
“Oh, someone’ll pay,” he said. “We just have to find him.”
She regarded him with a curious stillness, although her short dreadlocks kept quivering on her head. “Why are you here, exactly?”
“To help,” Peter said. Not exactly a complete answer. “Do you have any family or friends to put you up? Or should we find you a hotel?”