Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  He felt in his pocket for his wallet. He saw Kirsten and Tom look at each other.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Tom. ‘Just regular cream?’

  ‘Regular. Thickened,’ said Kirsten. She squeezed his fingers. The front door slapped open and shut.

  Wes made them each a cup of tea while they waited.

  ‘I went to that Chinese massage place.’

  ‘Did you? How was it?’

  ‘Terrific,’ he said. ‘My shoulders feel sort of—lighter?’

  ‘Had you ever had one?’

  ‘Not for years. Once your mother and I got massages in Bali.’

  ‘Well, that was years ago.’

  She was drawing the teabag up and down in her cup, releasing whatever was in there. Wes watched her. ‘It was almost as if I didn’t know how bad I felt,’ he said, ‘until I didn’t feel like that anymore.’

  ‘Once,’ Kirsten said, ‘Jules and Olivia gave me a voucher for a massage for my birthday. It was at one of those swish spa places. They did a facial and all this other stuff. Hot stones. Anyway it was a full body massage and it went for an hour. And before the woman started, she said, Sometimes people experience very strong emotions during the massage, or just after it. Something about the emotion being trapped in the tissue.’

  ‘Tom’s a good bloke,’ he said.

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘I think Mum would have loved him more,’ Kirsten said. She made a sound like a cough or a sob, but her face was laughing. ‘I don’t know if Tom and I—if this is all there is. Is this it?’

  Wes heard the car pull up, the handbrake, outside in the driveway.

  ‘Dad,’ Kirsten said. She sounded frightened.

  COARSEGOLD

  I

  In Coarsegold our life was slow and small. Lux was the one who’d suggested the move, but she was the one who went crazy with it. I took a job teaching at Mariposa County High. She worked as a receptionist in a motel in Oakhurst, seven or eight miles up. She dyed her hair the colour of sunshine sometime around then. I remember us in the bathroom of the new old house. Her hair was wrapped in plastic. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, one foot propped on the enamel and the other lifting the linoleum from the f loor where it was coming unstuck. We were both smoking cigarettes, both in our underwear. The window was wide open. Those months were real hot. Too hot to smoke, we said, but kept at it anyway. I painted my toenails. The dusty grit from the bathroom got caught in the varnish. That was more or less how it was there.

  It was summer when we moved in. My brother Jeff drove up from Fresno to help. The house hadn’t been lived in for a long time. Everything was coated in a film of sticky dust. We painted the skirting boards, sugar-soaped the walls, hung a drugstore calendar in the kitchen.

  In the front room two things had been left behind: a dirty mattress on the floor and a message on the ceiling, written in black marker—

  THAT CRAZY FUCK HE DONE IT ONE TIME TO MANY HE LEVING IN A COFIN

  Lux lay on the filthy mattress, tucked her arms behind her head.

  ‘What do you think she meant,’ she said. ‘One time, but to many women? Or, he’s pushed it too far, one time too many—’

  ‘Gives me the willies,’ said my brother. He stood in the doorway as if he weren’t going any further. I pushed past him and began to take down the net curtain, blackened with grime.

  ‘It’s just a room. They don’t live here anymore,’ Lux said.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Jeff, ‘how do you know it was a woman wrote that?’

  ‘It was a woman,’ Lux said.

  She had no patience for my brother.

  We painted over the message. We pulled up the carpet tacks. That room became our bedroom.

  It was a hot summer, then it was a hot fall. Thursdays were Lux’s night off. We went swimming in the Merced. I have this picture in my head of her, hair dripping wet, towel draped over her shoulders and tied under her chin like a superhero’s cape; pale thighs, legs like two young shoots, hiking boots. We cooled off in the swimming hole. We only returned to the car when it began to get dark. We spread our towels on the seats (the car was still new enough that we cared about those things). In the parking lot by the Wawona stable, we kissed like a couple of kids. We were already hot again from the walk back. Her skin smelled of minerals, of the river. She wore this striped one-piece with a low back. She drove me wild.

  We never ate dinner those blue nights. We’d stop someplace on the way home, one of the diners where the waitresses introduced themselves, for brownie à la mode or lemon meringue pie. I have this picture in my head of Lux, hair damp, American flag pinned to the wall behind her head; licking a spoon clean before she tried to balance it on the tip of her perfect nose. While she was at it my hand shot out and grabbed the maraschino cherry from her dish. She laughed and said, God, you’re such a fucking bitch, Joanna, and we looked at each other’s faces ref lected in the window. Fluorescent humming above us. Love was small-town adventure, it was our knees touching beneath tabletops. It was Lux tearing open the saccharin sachet with her teeth and emptying its contents into her cup, then doing the same for me. The packets were pink. They said SWEET’N LOW. I always kept a few in my purse, just in case.

  I’m saying this so you know: there was plenty of love. I don’t know why I started what I did. There’s no defending it.

  His name was Perry. He was a junior, but he’d been held back a year. He was in my English class. He played football. His family was part of the sixteen per cent of the county that lived under the official poverty line. His daddy had a cabbage farm. His ma did something with the Department of Corrections, but he said she never worked these days, and I didn’t ask more than that. We fucked under the bleachers. We fucked in his truck. We fucked in the pup tent in his daddy’s backyard. We fucked in the dry creek bed in the summertime, and by the fall that secret place, that hollow in the ground, was full of leaf litter and muddy water. The earth bore no imprint of our bodies ever again. I was learning to think in a forensic way. I hung the sheets out to dry. I invented alibis. Lux never knew a thing. The truck-tyre marks in our drive could have told her everything she needed to know, but she was never observant in the way you’d expect. She could leave a pair of dirty pyjama shorts on the floor for a month and forget they were there, or a newly bought bag of fertiliser on top of the dryer. And anyway, she believed me good.

  Lux was an addict when we met. I told her it was me or the smack. She laughed in my face, so close I felt the mean huff of her breath. She said she didn’t respond to ultimatums. But she tried. Cold turkey, cold comfort. Cold sweats, she said, but I didn’t see her when she was withdrawing that first time, so I wouldn’t know. It lasted four months. When she relapsed she went to a clinic in Minnesota. That was where she’d finally gotten clean. The day she was discharged it was fifteen below freezing. I remember her in the snow. It was so early that the roads hadn’t been salted yet. I remember her walking gingerly in the parking lot, laughing, dark rings under her eyes. ‘What if I slipped now, broke my pelvis. They wouldn’t be able to give me fucking anything.’ We drove back into the cities, sat in a diner on Hennepin while she phoned her parents. She was crying, they were crying.

  So you know—we’d survived things. Small fights, money stuff, new cities, lost jobs. Once she’d been 5150’d when we lived in LA. They called me at work. I was at Centennial High then. There had been riot police there that very week on account of a student brawl, and that’s what I pictured when I heard she’d been committed, but apparently it all happened very quietly. It was her therapist who made the call, nothing dramatic like you see on TV, and, when I went to visit, Lux wasn’t raging or violent, just sedated out of her fucking mind.

  I don’t say this to absolve myself of anything: Lux could be hard work, but that wasn’t why I started with Perry. Anyway, everybody is hard work in their own way.

  Late in the fall it was too cold to go swimming, but we hiked the different Yosemit
e trails. My body felt strong; I was making new muscles. On the weekends we sometimes drove to Fresno or Merced, once to Death Valley. I took a picture of Lux standing at Dante’s View. She pointed things out to me, recited their names. Funeral Mountains, Telescope Peak, Badwater Basin. We laughed when we looked at the photo properly, back in the car: all the majesty of the valleys and mountains, and she was standing, frowning at me a little, with a hand to her brow for the sun, like she was waiting for a bus. Coming home we hit bad traffic. The sky got dark while the car rolled and stopped.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I said. I punched the steering wheel.

  ‘We can’t do anything. We’ll get home eventually,’ Lux said. She was good at waiting. At last I realised why we’d come to a halt: blue and red party lights outside. There had been an accident. Beside the road was a field and that’s where the car had ended up, in two bits. There was something on the road; a bundled, ragged shape. I stared for a second. Lux reached across. She took my chin in her hand, hard, and forced it so I was looking out front again.

  We didn’t speak for almost a half-hour. Close to home I said, ‘Did you see? There was something on the road.’

  ‘It might have been an animal,’ Lux said.

  II

  Lux worked evening shifts, which suited her. She was a poor sleeper and liked having the days to get things done. Without ever saying so, Perry and I created this plausible charade where he came by after school with his books, as if I were going to teach him something. He parked his truck out back so it couldn’t be seen from the road. We didn’t talk about any of this. We just had the same ideas about things. When I told him I was sorry, he knew what I meant. He didn’t ask beyond it. On the last Wednesday in October we drove to the lake, the artificial one out by Raymond, and fucked in the car there. Might as well make it nice, he said. I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. I was straddling him, my back to the water. I was swimming on his body.

  Afterwards we walked around the lake. He took a flashlight out of his glove compartment and shone it on the ground in front of us. It was cold. He wasn’t graceful enough to offer me his jacket. I didn’t expect it. There had been a good sunset earlier. Neon California sky, the kind that doesn’t photograph easy. I’d stood out on the porch to watch it. Now everything was grey and blue.

  ‘You ever kill a snake?’ Perry asked.

  ‘I grew up in Minneapolis.’

  ‘I had to do it this last summer,’ he said. ‘With a hoe. Had to cut off its head.’

  ‘Make you feel like a man.’

  ‘It kind of did,’ he said.

  ‘What are we doing,’ I said. I felt ridiculous. We stopped walking. ‘Take me home,’ I said.

  He turned eighteen.

  ‘I’m having a party,’ he said. ‘Just at home. You want to come?’ His sense of humour was not so different from Lux’s. I snorted. We were in my bed. His legs were heavy between mine. The room smelled of him.

  ‘You want to see where I live?’ he asked.

  ‘What, you going to take me to meet your mom? I’m sure she’d love that.’

  ‘No, dummy. I’ll just drive you out there.’

  It started with me humouring him, climbing out of bed and pulling on my shirt. I knew where he lived, more or less; he’d told me before, and I could have looked it up on his school records. But I realised he was serious, standing there with his keys in his hands. There was a nervous, tender part of him I only saw sometimes. When it flashed at me, it was like a warning signal.

  We were quiet in the car. It was dusk, the time for animals to run out in front of the headlights. I watched the roadside for deer. He was playing a CD of awful heavy metal and at last I said, This music is the worst, and he grinned and turned it off.

  ‘Tell me about your girlfriend,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you about her.’

  ‘Tell me something nice about her.’

  ‘What the fuck,’ I said. I looked at him sideways. ‘What are you doing.’

  ‘I just wanted to get to know you some.’

  ‘I think you know me well enough.’

  He was silent.

  ‘I’m not your date,’ I said, ‘or your girlfriend.’

  ‘I know. You’re my teacher. And you could go to prison.’

  ‘Yes. I could.’

  We’d reached his house. The drive was long and unmade. There were no streetlights, but in the dark I could make out the metal husks of old cars and a tractor in the front yard; unmowed grass. He’d brought me here with purpose. He was showing me the house he’d grown up in, the house where he still lived with his mom. I knew not to underestimate him. A light flickered on at one end of the place, a small yellow rectangle of light. I tried to think of something nice to say, but I could barely distinguish the shape of the building.

  ‘I’m not gonna tell anyone,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

  Saturday was clear, unseasonably warm. Lux and I hiked the Cathedral Lakes trail. By the time we got to Upper Lake the sun was so high and hot that we stripped off and went swimming.

  Lux ploughed right into the water, shrieking when it hit her ribs. ‘It’s cold!’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘It’s November.’ I was standing at the lake’s edge, arms crossed over my chest.

  She pulled a face and disappeared underwater. I saw a stream of tiny bubbles, then nothing. I had the sudden, foolish impression she was gone. The woods were silent. I crouched, naked. My nails dug in to the flesh of my arms. A forest of pine needles sprouted between my toes. I had to hold my breath to keep myself from calling her name. I counted to ten, then twenty.

  She burst from the water, laughing, gasping for air. Her face was slick and dripping. She opened her eyes, saw me squatted there. ‘What are you doing? Come in.’

  I swam right into her arms. She hugged me from behind, both of us facing the mountains. She kissed my neck, my temple. Her hand ran the length of my body underwater, traced a line right down my belly.

  ‘You looked like a feudal woman giving birth in a field,’ she said. We fooled around in the water. There was almost no way anyone would hike down here this time of year, but we still messed with each other. Hello, sir. Nice day for it, Lux hollered to a phantom man on the shore once while I was floating on my back. I flailed around in a panic. She cackled even as I pushed her under.

  On the hike back our clothes stuck to our bodies. We were mostly quiet.

  Lux walked in front. I saw the muscles working in the backs of her legs.

  ‘Let’s play a game where we tell each other something new. Something we don’t know about each other,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘We know each other pretty well.’

  ‘There’s so much stuff,’ she said. We were going uphill. I could hear the effort in her voice. ‘I’ll go first. When I was younger I was really self-conscious about my ears. That they stuck out.’

  I almost laughed. ‘Your ears are so normal.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. They were all I could see when I looked at my face. I thought I looked like a monkey.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I used to sit out in my dad’s car in the drive, tape my ears back and scream.’

  I was glad I hadn’t laughed. I waited for her to say more, but that was the end. I tried to think of something innocuous. I felt my lungs fill with panic.

  ‘Um. When we were kids, Jeff and I were messing around after school with some other kids from the neighbourhood. This was when we were living in Winona. Coming home we found this dog that had been hit by a car. It was still alive, but not by much. It was making this terrible noise.’ I shifted my backpack. ‘Jeff told me to wait with it while he went home to get our dad’s shotgun. We were absolutely not supposed to touch it. I’m not even sure how he knew where the key to the cupboard was—Dad always kept it locked. I never saw him pick up the gun. We just knew where it was kept.’

  ‘What hap
pened?’

  ‘Nothing. Jeff came back with the shotgun. He made me stand away and close my eyes, and he put it to sleep.’

  ‘Put it to sleep,’ Lux echoed. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘You didn’t say it had to be a secret.’

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  She stopped, heaved her pack off her shoulders, and found her water bottle. She took a drink, handed it to me. She started to braid her hair.

  ‘Remember when we were first together, and we went to Seattle for a weekend, and we stayed with that friend of yours from college? Mike, or Matt, or someone?’

  ‘Matt.’

  ‘Right. I was still using.’ She finished her braid. ‘I stole $250 from him.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘He left it right there on the table one morning. You know, he didn’t strike me as the type to miss it, exactly.’

  ‘He never mentioned it to me,’ I said.

  ‘Of course he didn’t. How embarrassing for him. If he even noticed it was gone.’

  ‘Matt wasn’t loaded. That was a shitty apartment,’ I said. It sounded weak.

  Lux shot me a glance. She picked up her pack, shrugged into it and started walking again. ‘Do you think we’re too close?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was just thinking. Maybe I depend on you too much.’

  I was calcified with terror. I had to work very hard to put one foot in front of the other. I wished I could see her face. ‘Why would you—why were you thinking about that?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I feel like you’re not always here.’

  ‘I’m here. It’s just us. You wanted to get out of the city. I thought you wanted this.’

  ‘I do. It’s not like that.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  She didn’t answer.

  By the time we got home she was late for work. She tore around the house in a sudden fury. I packed her some leftovers to take. I told her to drive safely. She frightened me when she moved that recklessly. She was like a hurricane.

  The house was airless without her. I ate my dinner in front of the television. I wished we had a dog. I grabbed my keys and drove to Oakhurst, to call in on Lux, but by the time I reached China Creek I pictured her face—surprised, ready to laugh at me—and I was suddenly scared of what I might say to her. I made a left at the Golden Chain Highway, the way I drove to work every morning, only I went straight through Mariposa, too. I headed out to Midpines, where Perry lived.