Chapter 5
Who would’ve thought that fried Spam, cornbread griddlecakes, and pintos out of the can simmered with a little sidemeat, all served on a plastic plate, would taste like a meal fit for a king? But that’s exactly how Zach felt as he sat in the prairie twilight in the lawn chair Nick had left them basking in the sated glow of that meal heavy on carbohydrates and not much else. At least part of his satisfaction derived from the frontier-style self-sufficiency that had produced the meal. He’d brought their drinking and cooking water up from the freshly cleared spring, made the fire in the cookstove, and managed to prepare the entire meal while only scorching the first two griddlecakes (which Gina was nonetheless happy to devour). So now, as that self-crowned king, he leaned back against the nylon chair strapping and gazed past the sheepwagon out over his new kingdom, across the broad plain of sage prairie to the snowy peaks beyond which the sun had just set. This was certainly a different and, in many ways, surreal world; but its prospects looked good.
“Is this a vacation or something more?” Allison asked. She was sitting in the open doorway to the sheepwagon, her feet on the steps.
In the evening shadows, with the wagon backlit by that fading sunset, it was difficult for Zach to see her silhouette, and her face was totally obscured. He looked again at the distant mountains. Their peaks had already faded from pink to lavender—that fast. “This camp?”
“No, this state—Wyoming.”
“Do we have to decide now?”
“We should’ve decided before we ever left home.”
“Why?”
“Mom wants to know. Gramma and Aunt Ruth want to know.”
“So what.”
“Zach, I want to know.”
“Because?”
“Because it matters. Because I want to know how long I’ll be living out of two shoe boxes and a milk crate. Because I want to know when I’ll have a shower and a toilet that flushes. Because I want to know if I’ll have a bedroom where I can stand up or a kitchen bigger than a coat closet. Because I want to know—that’s all.”
The prairie had turned into an unbroken plain of charcoal sameness, the mountains obsidian teeth gnawing at the ink-blue sky. Stars had suddenly appeared—hundreds, thousands. Zach lunged forward out of his chair, closed the few yards between them in two long strides, found Allison’s pale face out of the deeper dark of the doorway, and gently cradled her chin in his two warm hands. “Soon,” he whispered, then kissed her forehead.
He found his way to the van in the new dark and opened the driver’s side door, releasing the dome light’s three watts on the potent night. He switched the ignition to accessory and pushed a Renaissance cartridge into the eight-track tape player. The plaintive instruments and haunting soprano of “Ocean Gypsy” blossomed into the stillness. Somewhere out there on the prairie the music would fade to silence; but right here, between the van and the wagon, these familiar notes were all the assurance Zach needed. He left the door open, its light on. He moved around to the back of the van to unhook Gina from her chain latched to the trailer hitch, then walked off with her into the shadows.
When they got back from their walk—a slow circuit at the outermost edges of the van’s pale light—the music was off and Allison was in her pj shorts and tanktop sitting cross-legged under the blanket of the van’s mattress playing solitaire by the light of a battery-powered lantern. Zach lifted Gina onto her bed on the front seat, then slid off his boots and stripped down to his boxer shorts while standing just outside the van’s rear doors. The desert air had cooled quickly with the setting of the sun, and Zach started shivering uncontrollably. He opened the van’s doors and leapt onto the mattress, slamming the doors behind him and pulling the sheet and blanket over his freezing body and all the way up over his head. In the process, he sent Allison’s cards flying in all directions.
“Zach!”
He peeked out from under the covers, holding the two of clubs in his mouth like a prize bone, or peace offering.
“I would’ve won,” she said, collecting the scattered cards. “Give me that,” she added, grabbing the card out of his mouth.
He slid his hand under the covers and found the softness of her bare inner thigh. “I did win,” he whispered, his shivering fading.
“You always do,” she said as she set the cards on the wheel well and switched off the light.
How do bodies know? And what do they know? And what do they tell? Or keep secret?
All the parts were the same, the nerve endings too—smell and taste, purr and moan and request, light streaks just back of closed eyes, and the touch, oh the touch, luscious precious touch, again—familiar lips to lips, cheek, earlobe, eyelid brush, tongue to tongue, along teeth, hollow of neck, shoulder, breast, navel, gentle parting of already parted seas. All this the same.
Yet, different, a difference known first in the skin:
The place—threatening wilderness pressing in from all sides and above and below, past glass and steel, floorboards and mattress, past coarse woven wool and finely weaved pima, pressed up tight against joined and joining very skin.
And the distance—more than two thousand miles removed from the locus of all their previous unions, far as the moon, as Pluto lonely in interstellar orbit wander.
And, most different of all, their title—husband-wife, one entity in the eyes of the world, one flesh defined before touching, even without touching.
But maybe not one flesh each before the other, maybe now for the first time since mating four years past, two fleshes—the cosmic puzzle pieces shifted, the interlocks not interlocking, no key to fit.
Not that any of these lethal challenges halted their gradual slow creep then staccato quickening lunge then ease back then slowly quickened then heart-bursting quickened ecstatic rush into blinding flash collapse, into the soft fall into the practiced familiar cushioned melting that was now irreversibly changed.
Yet their skin knew—right there in that wilderness blank, in the first union of their disuniting—what for the longest time their hearts and minds couldn’t decipher.
Wyoming Page 5