Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  She ran the message through again, to see if she felt any less fondled. She heard Hungerman testing her probity, easing her mind toward his bidding. He’d made it sound as if sleeping with him were her idea! She had to talk to Eve before she told him to buzz off. Something was weird.

  She hoped the unknown number would be something straightforward.

  Hello. This is Joe Samson from The Clarion.

  She stabbed the pause button. Was every loose end in her life converging? Had Isaac talked to him and somehow... No way she was calling Joe back tonight. Maybe she should forget all three calls, pretend they got lost in the ozone. She looked for a sign of Brian returning. Nothing moved. An ominous flash in the far western sky. And then, the vibration from an incoming call. Eve.

  “Meg. Where are you? You sound like you’re on an ice floe in the Arctic. Listen, a couple of Lew’s people had a sitdown with city planning staff today. Mostly presubmission formalities, explaining the drawings package, blah, blah, planner stuff. And one of our guys noticed the renderings they presented seemed...generic. Not at all site-specific. Anyway, it was just a vibe he got. He mentioned it to the Betterment crew and they said, oh, yeah, those concept drawings were done before they’d narrowed down the locations. That’s what he said, locations—plural. Are you there, hon? I know I’m blathering.”

  “I’m here,” Meg said. So it was possible.

  “Then I call Lew, do not tell me you’re still considering other cities for this! And he got all cute and said of course there was a downselect process or some b.s., and then he says, and I’m sure you’ll put together your most attractive package no matter what. No-matter-what what? How is there a most attractive if it isn’t a contest? Is he serious? Is he playing around? Tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  “Um... I...”

  “You’re breaking up,” Eve said. “I refuse to lose this. The stars will never align this way again. Fine, let’s go all out. But I will not lay myself on the line to move the Council if he only intends to use us to negotiate a better deal somewhere else. McCallam will crucify me.”

  What could Meg say? She didn’t know anything about Betterment’s plans and couldn’t say if she did. The flight to Idaho Falls might only inflame Eve’s distrust—or worse, Eve might urge her to go with him.

  Lights pulsed on the horizon. Suddenly, a burst of lightning strobed above the cloud scrim. It clarified into an uprooted forest of thrashing electric branches that obliterated the cowering quarter moon. A metallic zing suffused the air. And no sound. No thunder or wind. Just this great shaking, as if the earth had half-repressed its fury.

  “Eve, you should see this. We’re not being attacked are we?” Terrorists didn’t have missiles, did they? That left the Russians. Aliens. God.

  “See what? Where are you?”

  “I’ll try to text you a picture,” Meg said.

  “Don’t change the subject. Whatever your deal is with Lew, I refuse to be duped. I have to live here when his game’s over. I hope you feel the same way.”

  How strange to agonize over this disclosure, when Meg had once coolly concealed a man’s death. Eve was her friend. She expected loyalty. Hungerman expected to get into her panties.

  “He asked me to go on a trip with him.”

  “What kind of trip?”

  “A trip out of state.”

  “I meant business or pleasure. I’ll assume business,” Eve said.

  “He’s been cagey about that, too.”

  “Are you going to tell me where—or do we have to play Twenty Questions?”

  “I’ll give you a hint. It starts with an I.”

  “Not Illinois.”

  “No.”

  “Idaho? What’s in fricking Idaho? Boise? Coeur d’Alene?”

  “Let’s say it’s a city roughly comparable to ours. When I checked it out, I didn’t find anything in the news about Betterment.”

  “Of course until the last week, our paper would hardly be saying anything, either,” Eve said. She sounded calmer. “He has us all nicely compartmentalized, doesn’t he? So are you going?”

  “Of course not.”

  “No, how could you? I thought I was doing you a favor with him. Instead, I put you in a pickle. I’m sorry. Maybe there is something going on. Or maybe he knew you’d turn him down and would tell me about it so I’d believe there is.” Eve sighed. “God, politics has twisted my thinking about everybody. Shoot me that picture, okay?”

  The call went dead. Meg pointed her phone’s camera at the storm but the images disappointed. The blazing tributaries had blurred to smeared chalkboard sentence diagrams. She texted one image to Eve: Armageddon loses something in translation. The message appeared to go, but the strokes crazing the heavens might have wiped it out before it reached a satellite. The entire landscape jittered as if an old war newsreel were shuddering off its sprockets. Brian crossed under the tracers, running up the switchbacks. When he reached her his skin smelled clean as a surgeon’s.

  “We should get back. That storm’s far away but anything can happen,” he said. “Did you find a room?”

  She thought her answer made his pace quicken.

  On their return, she presented Brian a fuller now of her life—her business recovering, Vaughn’s evolution, Pandora’s record demise as her latest scholarship girl and her uncomfortable position with Wesley. She described her sense of being maneuvered by Eve and Hungerman and Sister Rose, how each fanned a different ember of her ego. And the surprising conversation about running for office. Yes, she had name awareness with her magazine column and advertising, and yes, the community needed progressive leadership to attract new business. But through Eve she had glimpsed the corrosive effects of public life. The constant negativity. Ready assumptions of corruption or incompetence.

  “I was surprised you wanted to move back there,” he said. “When we met you couldn’t stand the place.”

  That wasn’t quite right. She loved the place; it was home. She couldn’t stand what staying there demanded of her—to be stable, dutiful and competent. To fit in. To achieve, but not too much, to fulfill her destiny as a smart girl who might think about doing something different with her hair. She had in mind a new self more expressive and exciting than a blond with brown roots and a banker husband. She wanted to create. The first step to her reinvention was a new environment, away from hometown assumptions and expectations. After college, like a patient receiving a Betterment Institute facelift, she could return to amazement and acclaim, fully transformed. Into what, exactly, she expected to discover.

  Then Helen’s bright flame was extinguished. In her daring and ambition, Helen had taken risks to win attention. To an artist, exposure meant the spotlight, a path to success, but in an uncaring landscape the word described harsh conditions, severe drops and fatal consequences. Caution that smothered also protected. In the aftermath of Helen’s death, Meg recalibrated her life. She would inspire people from a more grounded position as a teacher.

  And then a second shock. Instruction turned out to be much harder than she expected, the classroom more chaotic, students beyond her control—findings made more dispiriting by Brian’s easy brilliance with children. He came home chattering about the sweetness and delight that poured from his kids while she sat in knots tied by her day’s defiance and insurgencies. Why did they resist Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson; Huck Finn, Jane Eyre and Miss Jane Pittman? If her students were lethargic in the presence of greatness, the blame must lie with her teaching. You are not who you think you are not who you think you are not who you think you are was written behind her on the board a hundred times over.

  Her failure in Denver cast no shadows on the other side of the mountains so she returned home, already authenticated as a high achiever—with a new name and a husband, some whispered, who seemed too good to be true. With her father’s help, she launched herself again, this time into the receptive circle of real estate, never considering that she had also landed within the orbit of Neulan Kornhauer.<
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  Brian read her silence and moved the topic to the present. “So you’re writing a column. That’s cool. Take some pictures of the campito while you’re here. You could do one about living small.”

  “That’s not just small, it’s tiny. I’d be out of business if everyone lived like you.”

  “You were almost out of business when everyone lived in houses they couldn’t afford. Why not write about the things that really matter? Write about why people live. About how to live together, instead of apart from each other and divorced from the land.”

  He wasn’t so pure. He lived more apart than anyone she knew, but she was not in a mood to argue. “It’s a home column, not a political column.”

  Or a relationships advice column.

  The light show flashing behind him eclipsed his face. “It is a political column if you never say anything about the real costs of living the way we do,” he said. “Money always makes a political statement—whether people have it or not, how they get it, where they spend it. And housing is where people spend the most on themselves. That has to inform how you write about home. Do you ever mention your work with the homeless?”

  She didn’t want to talk about that, either. Certainly not in Grand Junction Style. Her work with the homeless sounded so noble and selfless instead of what it really was—a sham display of social consciousness that might not help them at all. She had not meant her role to turn out this way. It was supposed to be a feel-good thing, a nice moral endeavor, not a compromise.

  “It seems exploitative to write about,” she said. “It feels like, look at me, the charitable businesswoman, the benign benefactor.”

  “Well, yours is not the story there, is it?”

  The heavenly display gradually lost intensity on the way back. The darkness reasserted. A blister had developed on the back of her heel. Out-of-breath and out-of-place, Meg scrambled to catch a man completely at home.

  Brian stopped just as the trailer’s mushroom dome came into view. A light in the window.

  “That shouldn’t be on.”

  “I might’ve left it.”

  “The timer takes care of it.”

  “Trouble then?”

  “Depends on your definition.”

  Then she saw the battered blue Mazda pickup, two bumperstickers on the tailgate: Do what’s right and Save what’s left. A mountain bike slung on its side in the bed. Not exactly the ride of a burglar.

  “Alex!” he called.

  The trailer door opened and the light cast a figure in full silhouette.

  “What an epic night!” A woman’s voice.

  A shiver of lightning illuminated olive skin, a black bell-rope braid over her shoulder. Meg immediately thought Native American but Alex could have been Greek, Hispanic, Creole, all in one.

  “A friend,” Brian whispered. “We teach together.”

  Do you.

  The friend—the young friend—stood above them on the step of the wagon. Her assertive crouch and cargo shorts projected a slight sense of military occupation. At Meg’s nose level, a bicycle chain ring mark was visible on the inside of her right calf. Her nicely toned right calf.

  “Hey,” she said, “I brought you an apple pie.”

  Brian offered a breezy introduction to defuse his embarrassment. Or perhaps to prevent the feline Alex from delivering a neck-breaking pounce.

  “Meg—as in Meg-Meg? I’ve heard so much about you.” Alex waved and ducked back through the door, returning with a crisp, brown-latticed pie.

  “That top crust—it looks like bacon,” Meg said.

  “Applewood smoked with maple sugar. I got inspired. Bri, I see you still have some of the dulce leche. That’ll be an awesome combo.”

  Fit, offhand, confident, she had the ethnically ambiguous look so in demand with national advertisers: part mountain-biking brown she-devil and part apple-pie-baking paleface dolly next door. When did that girl combo become an option for real? If Alex ever delivered a pizza to her table, Meg would tip extra simply to express her appreciation for evolution, the melting pot, and the feminist brush-clearing that had given America this Eco-Babe.

  Alex dropped lightly off the end of the trailer, gave Brian a hug and tossed a nice meeting you to Meg. The Mazda erupted tiny knocks as if about to produce popcorn. Neither headlight pointed where the truck was aimed to travel.

  Campito life suddenly seemed so much less monkish. “She’s lovely,” Meg said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Alex’s single tail light winked goodbye.

  “She didn’t have to leave. We’re not married. I don’t care.”

  “Are you still doing that snap-judgment thing, where you prelabel someone within three seconds?”

  “Sort of. I’m trying to quit.”

  “And?”

  “Eco-Babe.”

  Brian shrugged. “I know, I’m too old for her. The social circles are pretty limited out here. We see each other in the summer. It’s too awkward during school. Such a tight little world—three different groups of Anglos who stick together and talk about the other two. The teachers. The BIA-BLMers. The Indian Health Service docs.”

  “I’m sorry if I got in the way. I’m glad you have a relationship.” Not entirely glad. But it was good to see that he had a life beyond the classroom, his desert runs and this heartbreaking retreat.

  “This is her last year. She’s going to grad school and not coming back. That’s the relationship.” He made a point of studying the diminishing events in the northern sky. “And you?”

  No fair. He had driven to the edge of nowhere and still found someone. Her life pulsed with people and challenge and activity, yet without men who wrote her poems. She’d come here to figure out a situation, not to catch his semi-girlfriend delivering late evening pies. And certainly not to acknowledge how adept she had become at living alone. But she hadn’t expected a familiar t-shirt to knock her a little sideways or to enjoy hearing a whiteman’s version of Hopi wisdom or to cross the drift of a scent she’d once loved. She hadn’t imagined the old tension mellowing into something more like playing tag.

  “Does your offer to put me up still stand?” she said.

  “My government pad? I can’t vouch for its state of housekeeping.”

  “I’d really prefer it out here.”

  “Mmkay.” His head cocked as if trying to pinpoint the source of a faint sound. The storm shook one more fist of light and tucked in behind the clouds. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means I’m not ready to leave right now, that’s all.” That wasn’t all. It was just all she knew for sure.

  A rumble and a wobble as if a semi had passed close, then a ticking that quickened to a snare drum rattle. The dry, silent storm, hovering like an omen, had warned of this. Gravel-loads of hail hammered the campito’s metal roof, a full rocking assault. Her body hummed to vibration and the clean ozone smell. Her arm swept the mattress and found the far wall. Right... Not Brian, only his sheets and the shirt she slept in. He had curled in the back of her Enclave, either to stand guard or keep himself safe from her unspoken appeal. He did not understand why this moment was so necessary to her now. Their marriage was over but their custody of disquiet endured. Now, instead of talking they sprawled in each other’s vehicles, going nowhere, awaiting another drumming. She considered sending a signal with her car’s remote. A quick tap. You’re it! But it was three-thirty now, too late for mixed messages. Too late, period.

  Meg’s breakfast pie was served plain with a fork on a salad plate and Brian’s with a spoon and a blob of ice cream on a dinner plate. The dinner plate. The spoon. The little dog laughing. Meg wondered why the spoon ran away with the dish. Perhaps the fork had already found someone else.

  “One of everything. You really don’t entertain much, do you?”

  Brian cupped his bowl of coffee in both hands. He blew across its black surface. “There’s not much call for it, especially first thing in the morning.”

  What was he telling her
? Meg cut into the pie. It seemed less formidable now that it had been sliced into wedges. At first bite, sweet and salty, the oily crunch of bacon made it not very pie-like. More a bed of apples topped with bacon. Interesting but not magnificent. Of course, the taste probably wasn’t Eco-Babe’s entire point.

  “A life of pie for breakfast. I’d like that recipe,” she said.

  Brian’s face reappeared from behind the bowl. “I could get it for you.”

  “The recipe for being Alex?”

  His gaze fixed on the bowl. “I don’t believe in recipes.”

  “Baking’s different,” she said. “You have to be precise.”

  Brian poked at the ice cream pooling around the bottom crust. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful to you.”

  “It’s pointless, I suppose, to dwell on the past after all this time—not even dwell—to go back there at all. Not much can be undone at this point.”

  “No, except maybe to bring some closure for others.”

  “Others?”

  “For the people who still think Neulan’s alive. Victims’ families. Investigators. Even his family. This whole glass eye thing must have dredged them up in you.”

  They should have been, but no. You were.

  He carved a chip of bacon and halved an apple slice, then apportioned a bit of crust and spooned it all up with a crescent of ice cream. He continued to clear his plate slowly and methodically, as if dividing an estate among a bevy of equal heirs.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “I’m thinking how I hate speeches that begin with, If you want my advice...”

  “Go ahead. I’ll tell you if I hate it after I hear it.”

  “Maybe later. We always said this thing was going to be a team deal.” He waited for her affirmation. “A united front. No finger-pointing, no compromising, no one railroading the other into something. Not one person sacrificing themselves.”

  “But it happened anyway.”

  “Who are we talking about here?”

  “I could never do this,” she said.

  “That was the idea.”