Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  “Yes, it will,” Vale says, turning her wineglass in slow circles, making a mosaic of concentric rings on the bar’s countertop.

  THIS IS HOW THEY BEGIN SLEEPING TOGETHER. THEY leave the bar and walk to his parents’ house—a fifties mint-green cape a quarter mile down the road. They climb an external staircase to a room above the garage: a string of Christmas lights, a mattress on the floor, a wood stove in the corner. He puts a log on the fire, opens the damper, and the log bursts into flame, its birch bark crackling. Vale sits down on the futon. Neko pours Scotch into two cups. “Mademoiselle,” he says, handing one to her. A smile she can’t say no to.

  Vale takes a sip. That glorious burn through her upper body. She leans her head back against the wall.

  “What’s war like?” she asks quietly.

  Neko sits down on the floor across from her. He takes a sip from his cup. Closes his eyes. “It’s unlike anything else, war,” he says. “Humankind’s dark underbelly.”

  Vale nods.

  “But enough about that,” Neko says, loosening his shoulders, opening his eyes again. Adept, she can tell, at partitioning his brain. “What is it you do, when you’re not here, Vale?”

  HOW WILL SHE RESPOND TO THAT QUESTION? VALE PICTURES herself undressing under golden and red lights, surrounded by the ogling bodies of sick and sad and lonely men and women, in order to pay her bills.

  She thinks of the line from No Word for Time: To do damage to the earth does spiritual damage as well. “I tend bar. I make delicious drinks,” Vale says.

  “I believe it,” Neko says, smiling. “I’d like to try those drinks someday.”

  Vale nods. “That can happen.”

  He is beautiful, Neko—dark skin, thin bones, long fingers. Vale goes to him. Puts her lips against his lips. Slips his T-shirt up and over his shoulders. She knows nothing of war. Her pain has come from different wounds, but isn’t all pain shaded the same color? Soft blue, plum. Running up and down our veins. Recognizable across the room.

  Stephen

  JUNE 26, 1975

  The second time he sees her is a few weeks later at the Stonewall. It’s late June, the first truly warm night of summer. She raises her bare arm and motions him over to where she stands at the bar with some hippies: a tall striking woman who looks like a raven, a couple of soft-bellied, long-haired men.

  “Stephen, right?” Deb says, smiling, as he walks toward her.

  Stephen nods and tries not to look at the place where Deb’s white cotton shirt—faint stains in the armpits, frayed at the edges—buttons closed at her chest.

  “Hey, I owe you a drink,” she says, butting her elbow into his ribs. “You gave me a ride.”

  Stephen refuses but orders himself another Miller and pays for her glass of jug wine.

  “You live here?” one of the hippies with stringy reddish long hair asks him.

  “I guess you could call it that,” Stephen says quietly.

  “Stephen’s a local,” Deb says, hooking her finger into the belt loop of her jeans. They’re the same tight blue jeans she wore the first time he saw her. She smells like cigarettes and some other scent he can’t place—sweat, her sex. She asks about his summer and he asks about hers. On their second round of drinks she leans her mouth in toward Stephen’s ear and tells him she’d like to see his place.

  Stephen laughs. Nearly chokes on his beer. He is terrified of women always, but especially ones like this.

  “I’m serious,” she says. Those gray eyes. The space in the V of her shirt where he tries not to rest his gaze.

  “My place isn’t much,” Stephen says. “I don’t think you want to go there.” But his blood is racing and warm from his scalp to his toes and he tries quickly to think of some other place they can go. The creek. A field. The front seat of his truck.

  “No, I want to see your place,” she says. “I really do.”

  THEY DRIVE AS FAR AS THEY CAN IN STEPHEN’S TRUCK UP the steep track, then walk the rest of the way in the dark, breathing hard as they clamber up the old logging road. The night has not yet cooled, and by the time they reach the cabin they are both sweating. She leans in toward his body and looks around.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says after a minute, tilting her head up toward the stars. All they can see in the quarter-moon light that filters through the pines is the outline of the half-built cabin, the roof of his mother’s house below, and the lights of the town on the edge of the horizon ten miles away. Stephen offers her a Budweiser from the bucket where he keeps them cool, buried in a wet spot in the ground.

  “Thank you. This is good,” she says. They sit on a log, their legs spread out straight in front of them. She moves closer to him so their legs touch.

  “It’s something,” Stephen says.

  “More than that.” She puts her hand on his thigh.

  Stephen laughs. “Okay.”

  “Hey, Stephen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to live here with you.” That clear resounding voice of hers—like a bell.

  Stephen chokes on his beer. “You don’t know me.”

  “I still want to live here with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I like everything about it. Woods. The view. You. I just have a feeling.” She’s not smiling now. Her voice is serious. “Plus,” she says. “I’m sick of the commune. This is far more real. Quieter. I like trees.” Then she sets her beer down and reaches toward Stephen, puts her mouth against his mouth. He fumbles with the buttons of her blouse until she laughs and helps him.

  “Here,” she says, undoing the buttons herself and slipping the cotton off her shoulders. He doesn’t have any rubbers that night, so he tries to pull out of her—Stephen’s father isn’t a man he wants to see reflected in himself, and he doesn’t know his way in the world well enough to guide another—but she pulls him back inside her. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I won’t.”

  “Won’t what?”

  “Get pregnant.”

  “Oh,” Stephen says, not asking why, and then he lets himself loose inside her, a clean explosive sensation that leaves his insides feeling ripped apart and raw. They fall asleep like that, naked, their limbs wrapped around each other, his sleeping bag thrown over them to keep off June’s midnight chill.

  SHE MOVES IN WITH HIM THAT SUMMER. THEY INSULATE the cabin walls with fiberglass, cover them with planed pine boards, fresh from the mill. Stephen cuts more trees to the east and south for the light, and turns the track that leads up the hill into a two-season road with three loads of gravel.

  “I love it here,” Deb says, often enough that it becomes a refrain. “Let’s make everything we do right, Stephen. Everything. Down to the bone.” She quotes the Nearings: “To take his life into his own hands and live it in the country, in a decent, simple, kindly way.” Stephen withholds comment—thinks of his mother. The bitterness that can come from isolation.

  But he likes her. She surprises him with her capacity to work, her willingness to learn new things, her ability to laugh out loud. Stephen borrows a neighbor’s tractor, and they spend hours that summer transforming the once-forest into a small field. Deb follows behind the tractor, pulling rocks and roots out of the ground and piling them at the edge of the clearing in rows. She wears, every day, the same blue cotton eyelet top, cutoff blue jeans, and a straw hat she brought with her from the commune, and Stephen loves catching a glimpse of her behind him, small and strong, her feet and hands black with dirt, her limbs turning brown as tree bark.

  All summer and fall they work like that, late, side by side, and on weekends after dark they drive down the long driveway to the store for cold beers and fast food.

  “You’re quiet,” she says one night, sitting in the dirt outside the cabin, touching his leg with the back of her hand.

  “I guess.”

  “I’m used to talking about how I feel. Blathering. Acting compulsive. You make me feel like a fool.”

  “No need to feel that way.” Stephen smiles an
d runs a cold bottle up the length of Deb’s browned thigh and feels happier than he has ever imagined he could.

  IN OCTOBER SHE TELLS HIM SHE IS PREGNANT. SHE SAYS she doesn’t know how it happened—that she must have gotten slack with the pill. She has cooked a dinner of ribs and green beans from the new garden. She opens a bottle of wine, rolls a joint, and sets the makeshift table—some boards laid across two sawhorses—with candles and a tablecloth. When Stephen comes in from splitting wood she meets him at the door and kisses him on the mouth. Her clean, still-damp dark hair smells like jasmine and lemon. A hint of woodsmoke.

  “Guess what?” She closes her eyes and lifts her face up toward his.

  Stephen sits down at the table and grins at her. He can’t think what. A job? Money? “What?” he asks.

  Deb sits down across from him and takes his hand in hers. She leans in close and squeezes his palm with her fingers. “You’re going to be a father,” she says.

  In the future it will always hurt Stephen to remember that moment—how it affected his breath. What it had done to the strength in his legs. Deb stands and steps toward Stephen and grabs his hands and starts, there by the table, to dance. A single lightbulb hangs from the kitchen ceiling, and she moves directly underneath it, her body weaving in and out between shadow and light. He can smell her, the remains of her jasmine perfume overpowered by her particular scent of sweet, overripe fruit. He wants to reach out to her, grab her body, swaying in the light before him, but something catches near his heart, making his breathing quick. He thinks of his father’s drinking, of his sad fiddle on the porch at night. Of him slamming the door, the reverberation of wood on wood. Of the day he disappeared and did not come back.

  “You’re unhappy,” Deb says. She stops moving her body and looks up at him.

  “No, no, I’m not. I’m happy,” he says, and picks her up and carries her out of the house and onto the porch and sets her down in the rocking chair they have brought there and gently begins to rub her bare feet and legs.

  “Thank you, Stephen,” she says quietly, tipping her head back against the rocker, pointing her face up toward the stars.

  Vale

  OCTOBER 15, 2011

  Three nights a week she works late; three nights a week he meets her at the bar; three nights a week she sleeps in Neko’s bed in the room above the garage. They find each other there between the sheets: lips on nipples, lips on ankles, lips on her inner thigh.

  This night, afterward, they eat dinner at his table: a loaf of bread, chunks of cheese, a bottle of wine.

  He tells her that he’s been taking pictures of the wreckage here. That photographing the damage of Irene is a quieter job than documenting war, but painful all the same. “It’s the connection that stings,” he says. “These wars fought over oil. These storms caused by the burning of that same oil. I want to show the thread.”

  Vale nods, sips her wine. “Can I see them? Your photos?”

  Neko pulls out his camera and shows her: a white house by the river with a wrecked foundation, a Trans Am wedged ten feet up in the trees, the mustard-colored trailer Vale saw when she arrived tipped on its side, its pink curtain blowing through a broken window.

  Vale takes another sip from her glass. The photos make it hard for her to breathe. The way they capture the startling stillness that follows storms seems too accurate: everything still and nothing the same.

  “You’re good at what you do,” she says.

  “Thank you,” Neko says. “The challenge is to not make war or destruction too beautiful. Because they can be—aesthetic masterpieces.”

  He closes his eyes. Tells her that in August he pulled a girl—nine or ten years old—out of a bombed building. A yellow dress, covered in blood. That he doesn’t know if she survived.

  Vale looks out the window: orange trees, gray sky. Jesus. War: how little she knows of it. Her worst apocalyptic fears of the future, she realizes, are happening in many places in the world, right now. “I’m sorry,” Vale says, laying her head on Neko’s thigh.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, NEKO SLEEPING, VALE CLIMBS OUT of bed, puts Lena’s green fedora on, goes to the window and looks out. She feels the moonlight on her bare breasts, bare stomach, bare thighs.

  She thinks how good Neko is at what he does. The necessity of his work. What is it she brings to the world?

  Vale pictures herself dancing to Shante’s music at a warehouse party. Shante singing, voice of liquid gold, ukulele strumming and the entire room lit by the heat of bodies, alcohol, rhythm. A circle parted around Vale as she danced in the center of them all. In that moment, sweat trickling down her spine, eyes all around her, she had felt powerful. As if she was doing what she was meant to do. Just for a moment—but that moment was there—amber-colored, the heat of it embedded in her bones and in her blood.

  She wants to transport Neko to that room. Say: this is what I am. What I do.

  She remembers a letter Danny wrote her years ago, quoting Faulkner: “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans—those cities where she found herself but didn’t find herself. Sleeping on couches and in closets and in windowless rooms the size of her camper. She missed the stars in those windowless rooms and in those cities. Stars in the Abenaki language, according to the book she checked out of the library: alakws. She missed the creek: sibosis. She missed the woods. She missed the fields and the creek and no—she did not miss her mother. She did not miss her mother.

  Vale returns to the bed, picks up Neko’s camera, lying on the floor. She turns it on and flips through more photos: the flooded contents of a downtown Indian import store—bright-colored saris and tapestries hanging from tree branches to dry. A woman standing in front of her house, a wash of gravel where her front yard used to be. An old barn Vale recognizes from town, collapsed, its timber bones scattered along the ground, its rafters and roof flipped on its side.

  In the background of that photo: a street Vale recognizes, a metal shop, and standing at the edge of the photo, back to the camera, a small woman in white, orange hunting hat pulled low, dark hair pooled around her neck, a large gray jacket wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Shit,” Vale whispers. A shock of adrenaline in her chest.

  She shakes Neko.

  He opens his eyes, rolls toward her. “What?”

  “Who is this?” Vale pulls on her underwear. Reaches for her bra. “Where did you take this photo?”

  Neko sits up. Rubs his eyes. Glances at the camera.

  “That one? In town. Cedar Street.”

  “When?”

  “A week ago, maybe. Why?”

  Vale reaches for her pants. She can’t see the woman’s face, but she is Bonnie-sized. Bonnie’s thin shoulders. Bonnie’s thin, dark hair.

  Vale slips on her T-shirt and sweater. Her socks and boots.

  “Talk to me, Vale,” Neko says quietly, rising.

  “I’ll see you later,” Vale says, lacing her boots, buttoning her sweater, heading toward the door.

  “I’ll give you a ride,” Neko calls from the top of the stairs, slipping into blue jeans.

  “No,” Vale calls back. Walking. “Thank you.” It’s not definitely Bonnie, but it might be, Vale thinks, looking up: the sky full of stars, their fluorescent, punctured holes.

  IN THE MORNING VALE WAKES EARLY. SHE DOWNS A CUP of instant coffee, puts her mother’s blue rosary in her pocket. Rosaries and that evangelical church—you never got it right, Bonnie, Vale thinks, did you? Though maybe it’s that she never once settled for a simple answer.

  Vale puts Lena’s green hat on and climbs the hill to Deb’s cabin, asks if she can borrow her truck again.

  “Of course,” Deb says, eyeing Vale over her cup of dark coffee.

  The pickup smells like mouse and sitting water; the Mexican blanket that lies across the bucket seat is ripped in various places.

  Of course she’s alive, Vale thinks, putting the truck into gear. My resilient-as-hell mo
ther. That golden streak of laughter. Vale waking in Bonnie’s arms for thirteen years in that sunlit bed above the river: morning breath, a smile. “You sleep in, baby. I’ll make tea and coffee.”

  Vale drives to Cedar Street. The barn is easy to find—its timbers still scattered in all directions. She parks the truck and steps out into the damp and cold air, pulls her jacket collar around her neck, and walks the perimeter of the barn, looking for places one might make a temporary home—a nest amid the wreckage.

  “Bonnie!” she calls out, shivering.

  Vale walks toward the closed-up metal shop and around back.

  At the far end there’s a small section of barn, a tacked-on wing, still standing. Vale steps inside the open doorway and waits for her eyes to adjust—an earthen floor, dark pine walls, one window filled with cobwebs. The room is filled with old furniture, some rusting machinery, and in the far corner a cot, on top of which lies a pile of blankets and an old pillow. Vale takes a deep breath. Steps closer. The blankets are matted, contain the hollowed-out shape, Vale thinks, of a body sleeping.

  “Bonnie?” Vale calls out again, quietly, her voice bouncing off the pine walls.

  Vale bends closer, puts her face into those blankets, and breathes in: dank wool, dust, a hint of cat piss.

  It doesn’t smell like the Bonnie she knows, but what would Bonnie’s smell be, after a month and a half of sleeping out of doors?

  A broken windowpane has been covered with plastic; straw and T-shirts and scraps of wool are stuffed into the cracks in the walls. There’s a postcard of California tacked above the flaking green paint dresser, a waterlogged Bible in the corner, a pen beside it. Vale rips out a blank page from the back of the Bible, picks up the pen, writes:

  Bonnie? I am here. –V, with her phone number scratched below.

  What does hope feel like in the body? Cool air moving through. An electric charge.

  VALE DRIVES SLOWLY AROUND BACKSTREETS FOR TWO hours, checks her phone every few minutes. In the early afternoon she drives to the supermarket for crackers and cheese, a bottle of red wine. She rips open the packaging there in the parking lot—breaks chunks of cheese off with her fingers. She unscrews the bottle of wine and takes a sip, looks out across the sea of mothers with their shopping carts, full to the brim, their small children tagging along after.