"Does it still hurt a lot?" he asked her, following her to the bed.
"Not anymore," she said wearily, her head bowed. He knelt before her and took her knee in one hand and her calf in the other, gently and carefully testing the joint. She winced with its play. "It'll be fi ne. Please go now. Please."
"I said I would come."
"I asked you not to," she said, pushing off his hands.
"So you don't want to see me anymore?"
"Maybe I'll see you tomorrow."
"He'll be back tomorrow!" Hector cried, the instant thunder in his voice surprising even him.
She was silent. "Please, Hector. You can't be here now."
"Why? Because you've changed your mind?"
"I've never changed my mind. Not about you. It was never a question of that."
"Then what was it a question of ? Would you tell me? Because I'm stupid. I'm confused. Are you in love again with your husband?"
"I've always loved him," she murmured.
"You've always loved him," he scorned her. "I guess you were loving him right from the beginning. I guess you were thinking about how you loved him when you were fucking me on this bed. You've thought about him so much that every time he goes away you come around to wherever I am."
"I didn't come to you tonight," she said.
"It's because you're strong," he said. He was standing now, glowering as he angled his words sharply down at her. Had he not had a voice he might have actually struck her. "You don't pace around your room like an animal in a cage. But I'm an animal that's too awake. Before you showed up I didn't care one way or the other about anything. But now here I am, waiting to be petted and fed. Told how much I'm loved. Here," he said, holding his open palms before her. "What if I need comforting? What if I need some ministering to? What will you do for me, Mrs. Tanner?"
She didn't move. She was silently crying, the tears running down her face. Her natural paleness was warmed in the honeyed lamplight, her brow and cheeks a vital, gleaming shade, and as much as he was raging he couldn't help but see that she had never appeared as lovely to him as now. Which only made him burn. "You won't help me?" he said. "You won't come to my aid? It's okay. You do me good just like that. I've told you some of the things I've done and so you know that I'm not a good man. I'm an awful person, by any account. But looking at you makes me feel better about myself. You know why? Because you're like me. You're frail and selfi sh, but you're reckless, too. You're a whore for love. Hope is your drug. To me that adds up to a pretty sorry religion."
Sylvie didn't answer. But a different color had now risen in her face. She said, "My mother once told me something. I never quite understood her, but I think I do now. She said there was a surplus of benevolence in this world. Of loving mercy. Surely too much of it went begging. But it was worse, she said, when it was misspent. Because then it was no good at all."
"I don't care if it is," he said, fi ercely gripping her shoulders. "Misspend it on me."
She took his hands then and had them cup her face, blot her eyes. She turned them over and kissed his palms. She kissed his fi ngers and his wrists. He kissed her madly in return and began pulling off her robe but she said not here and so they made their way slowly across the yard to his room, Hector bracing her. Once inside they made love. Or a kind of love. He was overwrought. It was as if the entire army of him had fallen upon her, overrunning her in waves, the breakneck charge of a thousand faceless troops. He kept waiting for her to try to slow him, or tilt against him with equal fervor, with the disquieting roughness he craved from her, but even as she mirrored him and was strong enough it was as if she drifted outside of herself and was watching them from across the room. After a short while he was done. He got up and pulled on a pair of trousers, a mountain of shame in his gut. She lay in silence on the cramped cot, her back to him. Then she rose and put on her robe. She was looking for her slippers but he told her that she had come barefoot. He asked her not to go but when she opened the door he didn't try to bar her.
Outside, the smell of kerosene oddly prevailed. But it was a car that made her halt. It was rolling up through the gate, following the path that went around the field and then led in front of the buildings. It was too late to be Reverend Kim. The glare of the headlamps swept across her like a harbor light as she stood in Hector's doorway and the car imperceptibly slowed, as if the driver momentarily had taken his foot off the gas, before resuming speed again. Sylvie stepped off the stoop and onto the ground but she didn't move. The car had turned and was tracking straight for her and for a second Hector was certain it was going to run her over. But it stopped just short of her and when the driver came out it was too dark behind the bright beams to see but of course he knew it was Tanner.
"Sylvie," Tanner said, his voice throaty, beseeching. "What is this?
What's going on? There was a message you were hurt. I drove myself back all night. Why are you out here?"
Sylvie stood barefoot in her white robe directly in front of the car, the stars above them gone out for her brightness. She was clearly naked beneath. She drifted toward him, her hand outstretched, but Tanner slapped it away. When she tried to get close to him he hit her, once, quite hard, and she fell beside the wheel of the car. "What are you doing to us?" Tanner shouted down at her. "What are you doing?"
Hector made a short sprint and rammed him, knocking him to the ground. Tanner lay gasping for wind. Hector was kneeling and checking on Sylvie when a sound like a mortar round, a plosive, metallic thump, went off from the direction of the dormitory. As he craned to see what had happened a dead, sheer weight struck him, this broad, leaden plate meeting the back of his head, his shoulder blades, like the angry hand of a god. Hector crumpled from the blow, his mind momentarily emptied as he fell forward on his face. He couldn't quite move. He could see but not yet speak. The cold ground tasted almost good to him, clean and flinty, like a freshly etched stone. And he could hear Sylvie shouting at her husband, who loomed tall above them; Tanner had walloped him from behind with the heavy sedan door. Hector got up on his knees and would have been struck again but for the sudden bright dawning of firelight, sharp licks of fl ame spearing up around the chimney pipe on the roof above the chapel.
"My God," Sylvie said, getting to her feet. "The children!" Though faltering, she ran to the chapel. Tanner went after her. Some of the children were already fleeing the building, smoke billowing from the top of the chapel door, oozing out from under the eaves. None of them could see it yet but the flames inside were spreading quickly, fl ying through the parched wood of the old structure, and by the time Sylvie reached the main door others were climbing out of the windows from the dorm rooms on either side. Sylvie frantically counted the children, making sure the youngest ones were out. Tanner was asking everyone to check for his bunkmate, each calling out a name and waiting for a reply, when Sylvie said, "Where's June? Where is she?"
"She's not here!" one of the children said. "Neither is Min!"
"Where are they?"
"They were in the chapel," Byong-Ok said.
"But why?"
"They were bunking there together."
"Oh, my June!"
Sylvie was headed in but Tanner grabbed her. She fought him but he commanded her, "Stay here! Stay here with them!" Tanner took off his suit jacket and used it to cover his mouth and nose. He took a few quick breaths and then held the last and rushed inside the door. Although his skull felt smashed Hector was now on his feet, and he could see Sylvie drifting toward the door. She was calling for them to come out. She was calling their names. But before he could gather himself enough to try to dissuade her she stepped inside and disappeared. Hector went in after her. The vestibule was choked with smoke. He bent down so he could breathe and when he pushed through to the chapel there was a blast of heat. The roof timbers were aflame.
The front pews were on fire, as were the altar table and the cross, which had fallen to the floor. The back wall of the chapel was burning, part of it fallen away or b
lown out where the woodstove had been, and nearby were Sylvie and Tanner, huddling over a child. A fierce draft was being drawn in from the gap in the wall, feeding the confl agration. Hector felt his own hair begin to singe, the skin on his shoulders begin to prickle and burn. The heat was turning, it was on the verge, as though a sun were just about to push into the room. And in a fl ash a plumed beast of flame leaped up from the flooring to enfold the couple and child, for a moment cradling them in an almost placid repose before swallowing them whole. Hector gave a bloody cry. The walls gave a shearing squeal and a terrible crack and then the chapel roof fell in. There was a great burning pile where there had been a room, the black sky exposed. He was trapped at the edge of the pile by burning beams across his legs, shattered clay roof tiles searing his arms, his chest. He was in the bonfire now. The adjoining walls of the dorms would collapse next. Yet he didn't try to move. He was more than ready to pass; maybe at last transmogrify. But a hand gripped his wrist, another lifting the beam from his back. The girl was inordinately strong. And she dragged him through the collapsed back wall and out into the cold, quenching night.
" T H E R E Y O U A R E , " June said softly when he finally returned to the room. Nearly two hours had passed. He could tell by her eyes that she had not quite expected to see him again. Somehow she had managed to move a stuffed chair to face the vista of the church on the hill, and she was sitting in it before the now opened window. Though it was nearing dusk the breeze was still quite warm, faintly fragrant with pine and earth. She repositioned herself now and sat up, as if to try to demonstrate that she still had a measure of control. But even this tiny exertion was too much for her and her head lolled over the chair back at an unnatural angle, her mouth hanging open. "Did you bring me something?"
He had: the proprietor had arranged a few cookies and bite-sized cafe pastries in a basket, as well as a pink plastic parfait cup with a scoop of lemon ice. Hector put the basket on her lap and she beheld it like a girl at Easter. She picked up the spoon and was about to take some ice when she paused and asked if he would like some. He shook his head. She dug out a dollop and placed it upside down on her tongue, holding the spoon there as she closed her eyes, her drawn cheeks clenching with the tartness, or the sweetness, or both. He couldn't help but watch her swallow, the mechanism ponderous, wholly voluntary now, and he imagined the melting ice finding the besiegement of her insides, how utterly thronged she was with disease, that there was nowhere to go. She didn't take another taste, just clutching the spoon at her belly as she sat for a moment with her eyes closed, as if she were counting the seconds before the first kind swells of a drug washed over her. He asked her if she wanted a shot and though her face had gone suddenly ragged and chalky she firmly said no.
"Do you remember when we first met?" she said, gazing again out the window. "On the road?"
He said he did.
"I was thinking about that day while you were gone. It was such a hot day."
"It might have been a hundred degrees."
"I was so thirsty. The days before I saw you, I was searching less for food than for water. It hadn't rained for some time. The one well I found had gone dry."
"Didn't I give you some water?"
"You did, but your canteen was almost empty," she said. "You had chewing gum. To this day, I think that was the most wonderful thing I've ever tasted. But mostly I was dying of thirst. I was truly close to death. There was only thick, stinking mud in the paddies, and I was so thirsty that I tried it. I scooped some with my fi ngers and put it in my mouth. It was terrible, but it was wet. So I ate it, two full handfuls."
"You kept it down?"
"For a little while. In the middle of the night I woke up with a terrible stomachache and threw up about a dozen times, right up until morning. I thought I was going to die from that. But if I hadn't eaten it, I doubt I would have lived to see you. You would have walked past my body on the road. Perhaps that would have been better for you."
He didn't answer her, though maybe less out of decency or compassion than to shield himself, such that he wouldn't have to consider a timeline that featured him alone, in sole steer of a likely unaltered fate. Like everyone else, he was at the helm, whether he wished it or not. Very soon he would be on his own again, and he thought about what June had said earlier, that he was the only person in the world who knew anything about her, or at least anything significant, which made him realize, now quite obtusely, that in this case the opposite was true, too.
"I haven't asked you," she said to him, as if she were reading his thoughts, "what you're going to do, afterward. Where you might go."
"I don't know yet," he said. The car was broken down and he had no interest in or idea of how to be a tourist, and although she had already given him the rest of the money (enough to buy, she said, a couple around-the-world plane tickets), he had no thought of where else he might go. He had finally telephoned Smitty the other night to let him and the fellows know he was still breathing, and Smitty told him how broken up everyone was over what had happened to Dora. Scenes of the accident had been on the ten-o'clock news. They fi gured that's why he'd been scarce, holed up someplace with his hurt. Hector didn't bother to say where he was calling from, nor did Smitty ask.
Smitty simply said, Well, stop in soon, we'll be here, as though Hector were just across town, and Hector replied that at some point he would. They would go on in their inertial drag, more or less, hang around in the dimness until the time of the reckoning. Then have one last drink and shuffle into line. The question was again what he would do. Nobody in his right mind would want to be immortal, as he was in the mad dreams of his father. Still, Hector feared his own persistence. He flashed on her request of cremation and her suggestion that he do it himself; he could pull off on some rural road and fi nd a clearing on which to build the pyre, and torch not just her body but douse the pile of brush and sticks with gasoline and, having filled his gut with fuel, climb atop the heap himself, before striking the match. He would make the hottest fire, burn up even their bones. Send them both far and nigh.
She said: "You could stay in this place for a while. You could live here for a long time with the money you have. Maybe you'd even fi nd someone. Someone who would take care of you."
"I wouldn't want that."
"Why not? Every person needs the love of a good woman. Don't you think that's true?"
Of course he didn't dispute her. How could he? Think of a world in which we all had such succor. The problem was that succor bore the sentence of frailty, infirmity. It expired too soon. And then what were you? Lost. Bewildered. A sack of broken things. It was cruel, and he meant it to be, but he asked her, "I wonder if you would have taken care of me. If I was the one who was sick."
She looked at him unwaveringly. "I don't think so," she said. "I've never taken care of anyone."
She took another spoonful of ice, but that was all. In the warmth of the breeze, the rest quickly melted in the bowl. The clouds were tinting amber and red with the falling light. This long day would soon be at its end. She rested the basket on the arm of the chair and tried to get up. He helped her to her feet. He asked if she wanted to change now into the special clothes.
"I want to bathe first. All of a sudden I feel very cold. Would you fi ll the tub for me? I tried to do it myself while you were out but it was too hard to bend down. And the hot tap seemed stuck. Do you mind?"
"No."
"Don't be afraid to make it hot, all right?"
He drew the bath for her, as hot as he thought she could bear. As the tub filled, he wondered if once she got in she would come out again--alive, that is. All this ferocious will and effort and now she might not make it up the hill. What did she think she was going to encounter?
What does the pilgrim hope for at journey's end? Her beliefs confirmed? Revelation? Or does she secretly wish that the destination never quite materializes, that it keeps receding, ever shrouded in the distance, all the more to feed an inextinguishable devotion.
June came into the bathroom and without shame took off her clothes. It was as if he weren't there. She had trouble twisting her arm out of her blouse, and so he helped her with that. Her belly was distended but it appeared full and vital compared to the rest of her, her drawn shoulders and limbs, the blades of her hips. He turned off the water and dipped his hand in the tub but before he could warn her she had already put one foot in. She sharply inhaled, wincing, but she gripped the side of the tub and eased herself down into the water. He rose to leave but she grabbed his hand and wouldn't let go as she rested back against the tiled wall. She wasn't going to take a last chance. Her eyes were shut and they didn't speak for a long while and when her hand relaxed he was afraid she was gone. But the bathwater welled and sloshed over the edge and she was suddenly on her feet, wrapping herself in one of the towels from the rack. The hot water had pulled up a color in her legs. Yet her expression was sallow; she was only cheekbones and eyes, as though the flesh had melted away into the bathwater, and she said, "Please, Hector. Let's be quick now."
The Surrendered Page 45