“Maybe he will,” I said, unable to help it.
For a while, none of us said anything. Beside me, Penny shifted her weight from one foot to another and started to say something, trailing off as Rena’s cigarette began to bob, the cherry dipping dangerously close to her knee. Penny grabbed Rena by the shoulder as she began to nod off. I didn’t want to think about how many of Charlie’s pills were making it to him, which one of them might need them more.
“What?” Rena jerked away, sitting up.
“Maybe you’d better lie down,” I said. A second later, Rena’s eyes were closing again. I picked the cigarette out from between Rena’s fingers, watching her body weight fall incrementally closer toward Penny, until Penny was grasping Rena under her arms, struggling to keep her up. Rena grunted but didn’t pull away.
“A little help!”
I took a drag on Rena’s cigarette. When Rena was just about to slip off the bed, I reached over and grabbed her ankles. Penny pulled toward the head of the mattress, and I heaved, both of us ignoring Rena’s grumbling until we had her laid out next to Charlie. She was still precariously close to the edge.
“If she turns over she’s going to fall off,” I said. I looked around for somewhere to put out the cigarette, and, finding none, pressed the filter more tightly between my lips. We rolled Rena over as best we could. Penny stretched an arm to drape over Charlie’s bulk, and I lifted one leg, angling it over his casts. When we were done, we took a step back, surveying our work. It looked as if we’d just stumbled upon them; a long-married couple in repose.
* * *
—
Outside, the air smelled sweet, wet pinyon bark and loosened earth. It had cooled slightly, and a light mist was clinging to the hood of the truck. We had missed a delicate shower, a light summer rain. The beers provided the evening a flexible quality. I bent my face to an opaque sky. Penny stood by, watching me carefully.
“Maybe I should drive,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I gathered myself and walked around the truck, unlocking the doors. I waited for her to climb in and buckle up, flipping on the lights. We idled in the driveway for a few moments, Penny still scrutinizing me from the shadows.
“I told you it would be depressing,” she said.
“That’s not what I’m trying to figure out.”
Somewhere between Rena’s kitchen and climbing into the truck, Penny had let her hair down. It hung down impossibly heavy and black, brushing her elbows. She turned to the window, hiding her face. “Elvin ran into her at the hospital, high as a kite. I knew she’d want pills.”
I was sure Rena hadn’t moved from where we’d placed her, curled around her husband. Still I worried she might somehow be watching us from a window, wondering why we lingered. I turned on the radio, letting the sound fill the space between us, and pulled out of the drive. The headlights were weak against the growing dark, illuminating only a small pool of dirt and brush, but there was only one way back to the palo and I knew it by feel alone.
When we were almost to the center of town, Penny turned down the radio. “You’re mad now?”
“Where do you live?”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“I can drop you somewhere else.”
“I don’t want to be dropped off anywhere.”
I turned the radio back up. We drove the straight route back through the palo, passing the turquoise hour motel. Beyond the narrow crosshatch of streets lay the rest of town, but few options within it. The diner was the only place that stayed open late besides the palo bars, which wouldn’t serve us unless Penny charmed a bartender. In Golan, fifteen miles down the interstate, there was the all-night Texaco and the strip club that I had visited in the disordered days after finding Lamb’s blood in the sink, driving the highways past familiar landmarks and interstate drive-thrus until the warning light lit up on my dash and I veered off the exit to the path dead-ending at the gas station, the Fat Trap marquee next door spelling out an eternal special on beers and wings, a lavender-pink light seeping from its shuttered windows. I almost suggested it, because we could get in and they would serve us. Plenty of girls from Vista began dancing there after graduation; we saw them around town in good jeans and expensive hair. Curious, I had expected some barrel-chested bouncer at the door, but it was only Eric from school with his long blond ponytail and an ill-fitting black suit, still the new guy three years after landing in Pomoc. The Trap was dark and icebox cold inside, truckers slitting their eyes underneath their ball caps. Onstage, Kate Enders from freshman biology was twisting around the pole in wobbly clear heels, her soft body moving languorously off-beat to a decades-old rock track, the lingering smell of tanning salons and fruit body spray on the girls walking by, trailing their acrylics on the bar.
“Let’s just go to your place,” Penny said now, still staring out the window.
“I never have friends over.”
“That’s because you’ve never had any friends,” Penny said.
It was possible I’d hurt her feelings, that Penny had feelings, that they were vulnerable like everyone else’s. But in all the time I had known her, she had always seemed immune. We were heading for the sparse lights of Main Street, and I was sifting through memories of our childhood, trying to recall how often I had ever seen Penny alone, without Luz or Flaca or Lourdes in tow. I wanted to ask about them again—how Lourdes seemed to disappear after graduation while Luz came and went; how strange it was not to see them all together anymore, when some part of me had assumed we would all go on seeing each other forever, that nothing would ever change. But maybe it was only school that had brought the girls together in the first place; maybe their bonds had begun to fray.
The road we followed was bordered by that same endless gravel on both sides, clumps of bitterbrush overgrown in the road, their poky stems in the headlights like the legs of so many spiders. Penny was quiet the rest of the drive. Where else could I have taken her? Really, there was nowhere else to go.
14
At home, Wolf was lying on the porch in the dark. He climbed to his feet at the sight of Penny, curling back his lip to snarl. A mystery, where Wolf learned this distrust of strangers; from birth he had been showered with affection, though Lamb’s attempts at behavioral training were always scrupulously ignored. I laid a hand on the back of Wolf’s neck, feeling the vibration under his fur. He stood down but shook my hand free of him, annoyed by my interference, the fracturing of our silent pact against outsiders in our home. I held his collar and let Penny in ahead of the dog. Lamb was in the front room, reading in his chair. His glasses were perched at the edge of his nose, his profile a degree more sharp each day. Trixie raised her head from the floor and wagged a drowsy tail once, twice. At the sight of Lamb, Penny tucked her hair behind an ear, a nervy gesture I’d never seen before.
“Lamb, this is Penny. I work with her at the diner.”
“I know who you are,” Lamb said to her, closing his book around a finger so as not to lose his place. “Your father runs the nursery in Noe.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re surprised.”
“I’m surprised anyone knows him,” Penny said.
“We were visiting a friend,” I interrupted. “I forgot to call.”
Lamb didn’t bother to look at me. To Penny he said, “If you’re spending the night, you can use the phone in the kitchen to let your parents know you’re here.”
“Oh, I moved out a long time ago. There’s no one waiting up.”
“You must have been in Cale’s grade?”
“The year above. But I’m almost twenty.”
“We’re going to bed now,” I said, grabbing Penny’s arm to pull her along. A protective measure or punishment, I couldn’t tell, just an overwhelming need to separate them, to remove Penny from the private world I shared with Lamb. If I expected Lamb to express some measure of
surprise at my retreat, I was disappointed. He just met my eyes briefly and looked away, returning his attention to his book. After the blood in the sink and our combative, strained visits with the baby-faced doctor, maybe there was nothing left we could do to surprise each other.
I showed Penny up the stairs, leading her down the hall to my bedroom. I tried to see the space as she might: a fair-sized room with a small oak desk, a bookcase overcrowded with paperbacks, a narrow dresser painted white, the frayed oval rug Wolf considered his own. I went to the bureau and pulled out a couple of T-shirts, tossing one to her. She caught it, still studying the room.
“You have two dogs,” she said.
I began to undress, pulling my shirt over my head. Penny followed suit, not shy about shucking the jeans from her long, tanned legs or baring her breasts. By comparison, my slender figure must have reminded her of a child’s. I pulled back the sheets on my bed. It was only a double, but I was used to waking up in the middle of the night with Trixie like deadweight at the foot of the bed, or Wolf with his heavy, selfish sprawl pushing me to the corner of the mattress. Penny was a more considerate companion. She tucked herself into the far side of the mattress, her dark hair covering the pillow, and drew the sheet up to her chin, curling toward the wall. After I climbed in, she pushed a leg out behind her, resting her toes, inexplicably cold, against the side of my calf to warm them. I lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling joists I’d slept under since childhood, one of them a shade lighter than the others; a raw, pinkish hue. Sap, bleeding into the heartwood.
“Where are your real parents?” Penny asked.
“I don’t know.”
“And Lamb is—”
“Her father.”
I waited for the other questions, the ones I least liked answering. But she seemed to be considering how to proceed, or she had already closed her eyes. A few minutes later I turned off the light and lay back down.
“Do you ever wonder where she is?”
“I used to.” Our voices depressed to whispers in the dark.
“You just stopped?”
“I made myself think about something else. I started reading. I got through all of Lamb’s books, and then there was the library, the thrift store.”
Penny curled her toes to dig into my calf.
“Since when do you mess with pills?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“You brought me along. It’s hardly a secret now.”
“It’s Flaca. You know that. I just help out sometimes.”
“Why? You never did before.”
“We’re not in school anymore, are we? Business picked up. I see Rico all the time; one day she just asked me to pass his along. Then Rico’s brother came by. Rena found out. Some extra cash here and there.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Why would I? Waitressing isn’t enough.”
“To get a car?”
“A car,” she said, her voice softer by degrees. “I don’t care about a car.”
“Then what?”
“I want to get out of here.”
“And go where?”
“It doesn’t matter. You think about it, too. I know you do.”
“I don’t,” I said, surprised. But I tried to imagine it for her: Penny somewhere else, Penny anywhere but where I’d known her. All of Pomoc, a capsule of time and place. I started to say something, but stopped. Her breath had begun to deepen beside me. I heard Lamb climbing the stairs, the dogs’ collars tinkling as they followed behind. But in the middle of the night, I startled awake. I could tell by the quality of darkness pushing into the room and the profound hush that hours had passed. Some noise must have roused me, Penny shifting beside me in the bed, her unfamiliar weight enough to trigger unconscious alarm. When I resettled in the quiet, I realized the sound of Penny’s deep breathing was gone. I reached across the mattress to make sure she was still there. My fingers met her low, warm back, her reassuring solid form.
“Penny?”
She didn’t answer, but I knew she was awake, too, I could feel it. She had been awake for some time. I rolled away and closed my eyes, meaning to afford her some privacy; to distance myself in slumber. Only sleep never came. We lay beside each other for hours, silent in the dead of night, each of us barely breathing.
17
The brush fires bloomed on the mountain like California poppies, burning steadily through the night. I woke with the smell of smoke in my hair, on my pillow, a lingering trace of cinder on the laundry I loaded into the washing machine. After darkness fell, Lamb and I took our cold drinks out on the porch. The blaze was close enough that we could hear the dry brush snap and crackle. We nursed the smoke in our lungs. Trixie followed us onto the porch and settled down, only to rise a few moments later, circling, whining at our knees, pushing her snout into the screen to be let back inside. The fires made both the dogs nervous, but Trixie was beginning to rely on Wolf to spot her guard. Wolf had been banished from the porch altogether for his incessant howling, as if indignation alone could beat the fires back; his persistence, year after year, undeterred by spectacular lack of outcome. Whatever his shortcomings, at least Wolf managed to communicate.
Lamb struck a match in the dark, the small flare illuminating the edge of his rough jaw, his thick, calloused fingers as they shook out the flame. His profile, day by day, was whittling down to the essential, and his expressions were becoming more spare along with it. He ran a finger unconsciously along the length of his shirt collar buttoned high, the movement revealing an inch of raw, singed flesh.
“How does it feel?” I asked.
This heat lingering in the creases of our elbows, behind knees.
“The radiation,” I said.
“I know what you mean.”
“But you keep at it.” I reached forward, picking up his pack of cigarettes. I dropped my voice several registers and spread it out, his syrup drawl. “Quittin’ ain’t spittin.”
In the dark, the movement from the whites of his eyes.
“Jackson saw tracks by his hose,” he said.
“Where?”
“Didn’t I just say?”
It was the same every year; the fires smoking coyotes and mountain lions out from their dens. They stole into our yards, prowling the cool dark spaces of garages and sheds, stretching themselves to fit underneath the bodies of cars.
“You’d do best to keep the dogs inside,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “The dogs listen.”
He coughed, a car backfiring in mud. When he finished he took another sip of tea, ice clinking against the glass. Nearby, a cluster of dry brush popped. Since childhood it had seemed like a game, watching the fires advance every season—how far down they would come, how much they would burn. Why Lamb still watched, I didn’t know. Maybe there was a sense he could protect the house through his surveillance, though he knew better. The expression on his face when neighbors hosed down their fences and roofs, the recognition of futility.
“Remember when you listened?” he asked.
“Maybe that’s been my problem,” I said. “I always listened.”
In the distance the choppers were ticking in against the dark. Several minutes later, twin sabers of light crested the mountain, piercing the haze. The sound grew louder until we could just make them out, two small tin cans bobbing atop the flames. In daylight we would have been able to make out the shape of men in the cockpit, but they were invisible now. They released their buckets one after another, water flaring down in slender galactic streams.
Lamb climbed to his feet, grinding out his cigarette on the railing. The screen door snapped shut behind him. I waited for his kitchen sounds to fade before reaching for the matches left behind on his chair. Trixie nosed my knee, her black eyes shimmering in the dark. She turned back to the screen door and whimpered.
The helicopters banked right, circling for a moment before chopping away. In half an hour they would return again, dropping water all night until the flames hissed to ash. After crushing out one cigarette, I smoked another, then a third, and a fourth, until the pack was empty and there was a raw, caustic feeling in my chest, until I could imagine how it might be for him, my lungs a pulsing, upper body sore. By the time I stood up the fire was sputtering low to the ground. I held the door open for Trixie and followed her up the stairs. At the top of the staircase she paused, deliberating which end of the hall to choose. She wanted to leave me for Lamb, I knew. I turned to my room, surprised to hear Trixie trailing behind. She leapt onto my bed in one graceful movement, stepping her paws up and down. I pulled back the sheets to join her. Did she wonder which one of us she might rely on in her waning years, to feed her, brush her coat, wash her paws? All of us, just survivalists in the end.
When I lay down she arranged herself peculiarly, curling herself on top of the pillows in a sinuous, furred corona around my head. In the middle of the night she nudged me awake, whispering elaborate mongrel confidences in my ear.
15
It had been years since I’d driven through the Crossroads, but the park was largely unchanged. I drove with Penny through a dense hive of mobile homes connected by narrow tar lanes, a smattering of cars parked under aluminum awnings. I found myself looking for Cesar’s cream-colored sedan among them, even though I knew it was gone, along with the rest of him, to a lively retirement community in Florida Bay. The photos he sent us every Christmas were not of his new wife or the white-sand beaches or the majestic Everglades, but a small, sunlit corner of his room where he tended a collection of potted cacti and smoky quartz, the postcards we sent him of the dry, desert landscape taped up on his wall—everything he couldn’t quite leave behind. In the Crossroads his doublewide suffered under new ownership, the siding repainted a lurid salmon pink.
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