I held up the faint Coleman to strange hoofed things. A tricolored sheep with a missing face. A rowboat unmanned and pretty. A woman, also faceless, arms reaching out in mid-movement, long hair a streak. Hollyhocks. Things that had taken time. And also suggestive, lewd pictures. A cock erect and blue. Another. Vulva and spread legs, breasts cupped by six multicolored hands. More flowers that grew more small splayed bodies. I held the lantern closer to the beautiful flesh, touched it again and, yes, the paint was new. Strange fecund bodies that did not stop or separate, their rivers would not dry, each limb a folded-back petal. No high school kid had done this. There was a tenderness, there was skill, and also sadness.
Only one face was painted, all the other bodies left faceless. The face painted red on a blue body with green hair. I couldn’t say if it was sad or happy, but the eyes looked real as if seeking me out, as if living. How could I not think of your hieroglyphs, Ruth, your desert cave walls where bird and body and bread sounded out the story? I backed up to take in the whole of it, nearly a mural, the right-hand side ending in rushed sketches, the painter had had to go. It was baffling and it moved me to think of it wasted on darkness. I switched off the lantern.
“ELLIS STINKS,” SAID NAN. “He needs a bath.”
The light had shifted in the Tennessee sky, autumnal and slanting though it was barely noon. Vague cloud cover. It felt like Mave’s dining room with its dusk of dead flies bowled in the light fixture. In the front seats of the Olds, Mave and I had settled back into our separate bodies. We didn’t comment.
“Well, you don’t have to cozy up with him,” said Nan as if we’d defended the dog’s clean-enough state.
I’d wanted the light to be opaque sometimes in that house. A blackout. The translucence was sometimes too hopeful and confusing, like her words caught in midsentence and about to mean something.
“We should go for a swim.” Nan rustled the confiscated atlas. Crunch of pork rind, flip of pages. “Scoot.” She shoved the offending hound, who whined. “Let’s go for a swim, buddy. You’re a garbage dump. You’re a dirtbag. What highway are we on? Forty?”
“Look up pawn shops on the map,” Mave said. “Guns and gold, those kinds of places.”
I felt her eyes on me. My body balked with rightness but lost conviction. My limbs felt slack again, hands loose atop the wheel. We should have been farther than Tennessee by now and we would have been, had the plan held—to bask under the desert sky then beat it back to resume treatment, resume life. But now? Now the urgency had bled out, the direction gone fuzzy. I knew now she wouldn’t make it all the way. We were cut loose and floating in the rusted tonnage of the car.
“We’re close to a park with a blue splotch. Let’s go swimming, Frankie. The exit might be coming up.”
“We buy gold, we sell ammo, that kind of thing. Let’s take that exit.”
“Come on, please. It’ll feel good.”
“It’s too cold,” I said.
“No, it’s not. It’s called Natchez Trace State Park, coming up. The brown sign for it was back a bit. Maybe this exit then.” Nan’s voice was guiding and gentle.
“We’ve only been going an hour and a half,” I said.
“Natchez Trace,” Mave said. “Fine to kill Indians as long as you name a state park after them.”
“It’s a reservoir or a lake or something.”
“You want to?” I asked Mave, who shrugged, said she could work on her tan, said she could hold silence for the tribe. Said, “I’m keener on Memphis.”
“You don’t even need a bathing suit.” Nan poked her head between our seats, then sat back. “I have that bikini, but I’ll skinny-dip in solidarity.” She poked Ellis’s head and thick body up between us with great effort. “Am I right? Like a garbage pit.”
Ellis looked at me, sorry. Paw to my shoulder in general protest.
I exited and we wound around skinny roads looking for the blue splotch. It was only October cold, Nan explained, the water would be warmer than the air, and the lake would probably be empty this time of year so we could swim naked in private. I said not a chance.
We saw a sign for Cub Lake with an etched stick-swimmer beside the arrow. I turned in. The small sandy beach was indeed empty. A boat skidded on the surface a good distance out, gone in a moment into a cove, and then it was only us. Nan didn’t wait and didn’t leash Ellis as he spilled from the car behind her. He stopped short of the sand and she held out a pork rind, bait he snubbed. She took his collar and lugged him toward the water, his paws dug in and legs out straight. She dragged him with both hands, gathering his loose neck folds into an accordion. At the edge she eased, he sniffed the lapping water, drank, and headed back to the car.
“No, you don’t—help me, Frankie!” Nan yelled, grabbing his collar again and slipping off her shoes. I pictured the goose flesh rising up her legs. She got Ellis in a headlock. She was in up to mid-calf.
“Semiotics of the body,” Mave said, head cocked. She opened the car door, oxygen squeezed in armpit, got the leash from the backseat and carried it to the water’s edge for Nan. They spoke, they wrangled Ellis, I couldn’t hear them. The dead-fly shadowed light cracked to some real sun rays, shining as if upon them. Nan was so pretty in bare feet and new cheap dress with no bra, a slip of ease and skin and great bushy head. Mave stretched her stiff back. Ellis tested the water with his front paws and didn’t pull away this time.
Then Mave removed the tubes, the plastic hooking around her ears, the cotton, the nostril fittings. Like a clump of cooked spaghetti in her palm. From her back pocket she pulled a napkin, probably from the motel lobby, unfolded it on the sand and lay her tubing and tank in a pile. Her back was to me, T-shirt tucked in, jeans, belt with mother of pearl buckle, boots. In one yank, she took off her shirt.
Mave’s back so broad and pale, the flesh-colored compression bandage barely visible, barely not flesh by this time in her life. Light shone on Nan, and somehow shone out from Nan, her wild hair radiating, her face unbruising. My looking shifted—it was the kind of looking you do so you will remember. Any lingering urgency ebbed from the car and I got out, put my elbow up on the roof watching your Mave unwind the wrap so tenderly, as you might have done it, Ruth, and watching Nan waste no time, in one swift fling, off with her dress, her black panties, and into the water with Ellis, yelling and barking from the cold like a seal. Mave stripped jeans and men’s briefs and took her time at the lake edge, allowing for this new variety of light to make her seeable, to let her body speak and mean the way words can’t. The mysterious language of her lungs remained indecipherable, but I could read and hear the language of the rest of her, the way you hear better near a body of water.
She eased in, stiffened with the cold at first, as it neared her crotch, then she crouched and half-dove forward, an arc of flat butt, then gone. When her head surfaced above water she was facing me, all that wire-gray cropped hair swept back from her naked face. So rarely now did I see her plain face, no tubing, no deflection, no shadow, an open page.
Nan splashed the bobbing hound, stood up in the shallow, “See, it’s not even deep, Frankie, come on,” and the water reached her mid-thigh. Her breasts pointed their small bulk. I thought briefly of a longhorn skull, the womb shape memorialized in oils, but this one, superimposed on Nan, did not deteriorate down at the bone snout, but ended in a promising nest of wet hair. A long distinct scar just under Nan’s ribs too, speaking. Other vague reddish tissue murmured across her taut belly.
I remember once entering Mave’s house thinking she’d shot herself. I’d heard the shot go off closer to Clarissa and Darrell’s, probably Darrell shooting groundhogs, but I had run to her house sure she’d finally done it. It was before Clay, it was evening, I still had the film of squash vines on my hands, I remember my skin itchy with it.
The dining room light was on, the dead flies ever hushing the light. I breathed as though I were standing in a closet of old coats. Your books bowed the boards that were all propped haphazardly and mak
eshift with bricks, as always, and the always-detritus raised alarm only because it was unshaped, it orbited around nothing—old papers and plastic bags and rotted philodendrons and rotted TV guides and a Halloween wolf mask that was a joke once and food uneaten. I choked with intense missing, not with a fresh grief, but one years old, dulled.
“In here—out soon,” Mave had said from the bathroom. “That you, Frankie?” I remember leaving without answering her. I remember not wanting to see her body emerge in the midst of feelings so forceful.
At Cub Lake, grief solidified like a hard bone in my throat with that similar rockflint of missing, though she was right there before me, so nakedly there. Almost small and knowable in the water.
I left the keys on the seat and followed them. The sun was still warm and the dry coolness in the fall air didn’t threaten. I unbuttoned my blouse, unhooked my bra, felt the air reach for me. I shed my jeans and underwear in a cotton pile next to the black lace peeking from under Nan’s inside-out dress and winced from the water and they watched. The lake was clear, the sand and pebbles shifted under my feet. My skin opened, nipples hard, I considered tying back my hair but left it alone to soak slowly as I waded in.
“Not bad, right?” Nan like a child. “Look how funny Ellis swims.”
Once I was in, he paddled cheerfully toward me, swam oddly, yes, with his back legs hanging, using only his front.
“Look at his legs limp like his dick,” Nan said, her fondness for him evident. “Little useless thing.”
He was more spry and alive in the lake, gulping the water into his black mouth at intervals. My nearness gave him leave to take off swimming for the center of the lake and I swam out to steer him back. He hugged over to the shallows, then, in the cattails, and stirred the mud. I rolled to my back, my hair spread into a heavy fan. I rose and watched Mave near me. She went under, came up eyes closed and skin smoothed. I had never before seen her fully naked.
“Why nobody after Ruth?” Nan asked. “You weren’t old.” She was closer to both of us suddenly, treading water, the roots of her hair a darker color unnoticeable when the webbed curly mass was dry. She had gone from stowaway to navigator. She had taken on the role of soother, too, soothsayer, truth-seeker. “Why didn’t you move on? Sleep with some other woman?”
I had never dared ask Mave that. I watched Ellis panic-paddle toward a water bird that flitted from the weeds.
“There was no after Ruth,” said Mave. Shut her eyes, sank under, bubbles rose above her face and she stayed under longer.
Nan was silent. I was silent, ears under water.
Mave’s face emerged. She wiped lake from her eyes, started moving for the shallows and her body rose from the water like a creature out of the bog, sun remaking the skin as it oxidized. The broad shoulders, the indentations of the wrap, the small of her back.
“Why?” Nan asked.
“Because,” said Mave toward the shore where Ellis was now shaking off, “if you study my geologic strata, split the stone, you find all the rich ores there, in only that Ruth layer.”
The admission hurt me—that the dead dull years were her and me, and she saw no richness there, but I didn’t say anything. I knew that’s how it was for me and my rock layer of Dillon. Still. Ellis rolled in the sand, probably in the remains of old fish.
“You all swim on. I’ll sunbathe upon the lakeshore. Need my metal lung.” She was fully formed and bright on the sand, breasts purpled and wrung. She reinstalled nostril and ear fittings and dressed, and she stood a few beats letting the tanked air do its work. But Nan wasn’t satisfied.
“Why?” she asked again. “You can’t just seal up and quit your life.”
“Leave it, Nan,” I said.
“She told me the same thing, Little Gypsy.” Mave sat in the sand, knees up to pull on her socks and boots. “When Ruth was dying, I brought her home to Aldrich Street and set up her bed downstairs in a room we left empty except for this elaborate tapestry hanging and a record player on the floor. She used to dance around in that room in private because of her limp. She was vain, you know. When I carried her from the car to the hospital bed, she was weightless, just bone and wing. She was a wisp, my mighty Ruth. But not her voice—her voice was still that bold full sound I’d first heard in a lecture hall, and she lectured me still. She said, ‘Bury me like the pharaohs with all my jewels and favorite foods and flowers for the next world, and you move on. You stay out of the tomb.’ I said okay and put on a Sarah Vaughan record. I had to be careful because the pain was in her back and neck mostly, but she was so light, I picked her up like you do a kid—well, maybe like you do a kid, I wouldn’t know—and danced with her all wrapped in these rough Bedouin blankets she loved, without her feet touching the floor.” Mave stood again. “A lot of days, Nannette, I can feel that scratchy blanket on my cheek still. I feel us in a slow spin. Barely moving.” She walked toward the car as Nan and I treaded water.
A red pickup turned into the gravel lot with a crunch, pulled up next to the Oldsmobile near Mave and the hound, who had trotted over and now sat back on his haunches. A man got out and scanned the sand where our sloughed clothes lay piled. He and Mave spoke but I couldn’t hear them.
“Shit,” said Nan, “wish he was cuter.” An attempt to ease the sadness that surrounded our naked selves as completely as lake water.
He was older than Mave and dumpy in his fishing hat. He pulled at its brim several times as though a wind were trying to take it. He remained about ten feet from her, shook his head, looked out at us. Nan waved and I couldn’t help but smile at the situation. He got back in the truck and took off and Mave turned toward us, clearly amused, her body so square yet gaunt at the neck.
Nan and I quickly got out, Nan making herself laugh, and we rummaged in the trunk for T-shirts to dry off with before someone else could show up.
“What did you say to him?” Nan asked Mave, who was drying her head as if it itched.
“I asked him if he had a gun. Said I’d trade him the dog, but he said no, then I said I’d trade you, Gypsy.”
“Oh, fuck off, Crazy,” still laughing and glad for the banter.
“He gave it good consideration.”
“No doubt he did.”
Dressed, my raw skin stung with clarity and freshness. I started the car and tried to figure out the heater for the first time until I saw the heater had gone the way of the radio. They got in but Ellis had wandered off lakeside again, vigorous in his rolling around, grainy with sand now and happy like a pup. “Come on, Flop,” I said out my window. He grudged up and left behind what was, in fact, a fish skeleton knotted with weeds.
“In you go, boy,” said Mave. “Let’s head to Memphis.” He steadied then accomplished his practiced jump into the backseat, immediately going for Nan’s lap.
“Oh god, he smells worse than before!” she said. “Get off! God.”
We kept the windows down, freezing, and Mave moved her head out into the air current and her short hair dried pressed back like that, so her face looked like it was just breaking the surface of the water.
TWO DAYS AFTER DARRELL’S BURIAL, CLARISSA AND I crossed the Ohio River in my pickup, her body nervous, as if it were her first transatlantic. She lifted her feet as we hit the bridge, canvas shoes, her best jumper ending just above her ankle socks. I should have dressed in better than jeans, but I’d scrubbed all Lottie’s floors, thorough and long, steadying. I still smelled of Murphy Oil. Tess had left the very day of the burial to prepare her first art show in Cleveland, and she’d asked me to bring Clarissa for the opening.
What we did not say in the truck cab: Dillon is back. Who will design the LaFaber plate for Darrell’s marker? Who are we, really, anymore? I remembered the bronze plate she’d brought me one day, with a lily of the valley etched on it, and the date, for my dead child’s nonexistent grave.
What Clarissa did say, once her feet settled onto the floor mat again: “Want some zucchini bread?” Unfolding the Saran Wrap. “I put black walnuts
in it.” I took a chunk. “I never put black walnuts in his quick breads,” she said. “They overpower, like licorice, he never liked them.”
The building in Cleveland to which Tess had written us directions was squat and cylindrical and stylish in the evening light, simple on the outside, and, inside, air conditioned and elegant. The small gallery space sat just inside the door, to the left. Spotlights angled toward the center and shone on the walls. Tess sat in the middle of a crowd on a tall stool, hands in her lap like her mom, but Tess’s was a lap of military pants with a cowboy belt. A red handkerchief held up and out her ropy dreaded hair, and a black tank top exposed more than she ever exposed at home: a tattoo as pretty insect crawling above her heart.
She would have impressed you, Ruth. Me, on the other hand, in my Murphy Oil drench and jeans—I don’t know. I like to think you’d have glimpsed some kind of life inside the life, whatever you had seen in my letters at one time.
Clarissa hovered near the door. Someone asked Tess something and she answered and those folded hands flapped with a sureness as she spoke. Clarissa had a clutch of jumper in one hand, stood very still. Barrettes held back her pieced horse-mane hair on each side. People soon noticed us, and then so did Tess.
Clarissa looked elsewhere from her girl to the art hanging on the walls. There were charcoal drawings first, and it was clear to me they were drawings of Clarissa. Some others were red pastel and, in some, I could hardly make her out, but she was there, even in abstract, one in blue ink with a gold streak like a scar of light, some mixed media, according to the card beside the frame—gelatin print, bone, paper, gouache, collage with an old photo of Clarissa painting her gourds on a backyard table I knew very well—I’d found her the plywood at Rex’s to put up on sawhorses. The bone crushed and sprinkled onto glue like road-dirty snow. A tiny bit of lace at the edge. I didn’t know the right words for this. One was a field, with a flowing section of Heather Run—I somehow knew it was Heather Run and its laurel and moss, appearing clipped from the marsh like a lock of hair, and even this was Clarissa portrayed. It was her body, blue and black and lace.
Call It Horses Page 17