She’d never done a physical check-in around her feelings for another person before, but figured it would work. She took a discrete deep breath, pretending to sigh as she looked over at the morning paper next to her then invited her emotions into her body. It started in her tummy—a deep, thrumming warmth. The corners of her mouth twisted up and the corners of her eyes wrinkled. Her palms got a little damp. She stole a glance at George, reading The International Herald Tribune on-line on her barrowed laptop. They’d been having meals together like a married couple for the past week, but she never noticed how fine a jaw line he had, or how his shoulders spread. And George was brilliant, there was no mistake there. Like a lot of northerners she was used to thinking that a southern accent equaled ignorance, but when George talked about books, or psychology, or just about anything it was like tasting honey with her ears. She closed her eyes and opened them again. He was staring at her.
“You okay?”
“Huh?”
“You’re breathing heavy.” George’s brow drew down. “Erica, you feeling alright?”
She laughed. She was feeling fine. Better than fine. She wanted to stretch and roll around naked in this feeling. The room was extra bright and her blood was hot. Jesus, she’d come to the asshole of America and fallen in love. When she spoke, it felt a little like it was coming from someone else. “I just had too much coffee. Got the jitters. I think I’ll go take a shower.”
“Oh, okay.” George jumped up and grabbed her plate to take to the sink. Erica breathed in a swath of his scent as she rose from the table and her nipples stiffened so fast it was a little painful. She shook her head at herself. How long had she been feeling like this and just doing her usual Mendez Mega Bitch repression thing? She walked up the back stairs without a word.
George scraped the food off her plate and sat back down. He glanced once over his shoulder as the water thudded a little in the old pipes. He hoped she was okay. Erica seemed so wound up sometimes.
She called down to him, “George?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“There’s no hot water.”
“Really?” That was weird. “Okay, I’ll be right there!”
He hopped up and took the stairs two at a time. When he got to the bathroom she wasn’t there. He guessed she’d retreated to her room, not wanting to be seen in just her robe. He stuck his hand under the water and found it hot. Maybe she just hadn’t waited long enough. The floorboards creaked in the hallway. George said over his shoulder, “It’s fine now. You can have your shower.” He turned around and there she was. George’s breath caught: caramel skin, the sweep of her belly and breasts, the triangle of her sex. Her toes. Her toes were perfect. Her eyes laughed and craved. “Wanna’ join me?”
* * *
For a long time they held each other in a rocking slow dance under the steaming water. When she slid her hand down their bellies and wrapped her fingers around him, George had to grab the shower curtain rod and spread the other hand against the cool tile to steady himself. Swimming in delight, George was thrilled and relieved that his equipment still worked after all the poison he’d pumped into himself over the years. And there was gratitude for Erica, oceans of it. He found her mouth and they kissed, George’s eyes closed and dreaming, Erica’s open and searching his face. She found no guile or mal intent.
Was she doing something incredibly stupid? Not having a romp in the shower with the hunky innkeeper, but allowing her heart to swing open like this? She was happy, thrilled even. Before, it was like her skin had been electro-magnetized and covered in razor blades and rusty nails. Letting go for George was like cutting off the current and now all that tetanus armor was falling away. And her body was reacting to him to like she was a teenager. At home she kept a bottle of KY in her bedside table and another little bottle in her purse in case she ended up going to someone else’s place. When she did have sex, it was because it was a good idea, a dose of something necessary like a vitamin. She’d stopped getting wet enough on her own years ago. But with George, Jesus. She was going to have to remember to rehydrate when they were done. He laid a finger along the length of her and she gasped. Erica moaned into his mouth and her knees buckled.
After another minute, she reached out and clutched his shoulders. “Bedroom,” she said. “Right now.” She whipped aside the shower curtain and grabbed his hand. They ran naked and steaming down the hall like a couple of kids truant from the bath, leaving wet foot prints on the hardwood. In the back of his mind, George could just make out his mother’s outraged voice. Something about the water eating through the varnish maybe? Sounded like her, but he couldn’t really make out the rest or worry about it now. He was chasing the most beautiful woman he had ever seen into the bedroom. She splashed down onto the divan and rolled over with her arms stretched out to either side. George stopped at the foot of the bed and took a moment to drink her in.
“You know boys fantasize about this kind of thing from about age eleven, right?”
Erica slid her eyes along the length of him. “Same for us girls. Now, come over here.”
“Yes’m.”
They spent all morning in bed. Laughter and talk filled in the chinks between love making—sometimes languid sometimes fevered—as their minds and hearts began to lock hard into one another. George lay on his side staring at her face. “I can’t even begin to imagine the evolutionary processes that’d be necessary to eventuate a bone structure like yours.”
Erica smiled up at the ceiling, eye closed. “Mmm, you get that from a Hallmark card?
George brushed a loose strand of her hair out of her face. “You know I can practically feel the oxytocin re-wiring my head around you.”
“Oxy-what?”
“Don’t worry, not oxycontin, oxytocin—it’s a neural transmitter like serotonin. It’s the way the brain forms really powerful emotional bonds.”
“Damn,” she said. “Again with the romantic talk. You just don’t give a girl much of a chance to chill out do you?” She turned and winked at him. “Really, though, I like it when you talk like a big nerd.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” She got up on one elbow. “For one, you seem to know a little bit about just about everything. And two, your accent in just plain hot.”
“Wot?” he brayed in terrible Cockney, “this one? Blimey!”
She stopped his mouth with hers but pulled away before they got wrapped up in their bodies again. “George?”
“Erica?”
“Why’d you quit drinking?”
He scanned her face. “You worried I did it for you?”
“Yes.”
George sat up and leaned against the headboard. He laid his hands in his lap. “I’ve thought a lot about why,” he said. “I didn’t do it for you. A person can’t tie a thing like sobriety to another person. That can’t work.”
Erica let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “Why then?”
“I think I did it,” George cherry picked his words, “because I felt something coming.” Great, spreading wings filled the chambers of his memory. The rattle tap of spear-point legs and the far away drone of insect swarms echoed in his mind.
Erica startled him with a hand on his arm. “You’re shaking.”
George snapped out of it. “What? Oh…I am.” He was tempted for a second, just one second, to lie to her. There would be none of that with Erica. Even if this thing they’d fallen into together lasted only another day, he would never lie to her.
“You okay?” she asked.
George took a deep breath and looked over at her. The planes of her face swept into his mind and brushed away the terrors. “I am,” he said, nodding. “No, I’m good.” Her eyes were so dark. He could see himself and the room reflected in them. He wondered if Erica could see herself in his. She filled his mind, it only made sense that she would show in his eyes as well. He was still afraid to say I love you but that’s what he was feeling when T.R. stepped into the room and racked a shel
l into his daddy’s rifle.
Erica and George sat up bolt straight, eyes huge.
T.R. stood in a slanting bar of dusty sunlight, a pale specter. Deep circles ringed his eyes and his mouth hung open just a little. His clothes were streaked and filthy. He leveled the gun at George. Erica tried to move in front of him, but George grabbed her by the shoulders and kept her rooted. For a moment, she forgot to be terrified and was instead furious with George that he would restrain her when she was trying to protect him. Then the wraith with the gun spoke:
“She ain’t yours. She’s the Outrider’s.”
George’s eyes narrowed, “What’d you say?”
T.R. pulled the trigger.
Erica didn’t hear a sound. There was no moment of flinching or impact. There was just the release of George’s fingers from her arms and the strong smell of cordite. He lay back on the white pillow, blood pouring from the side of his head. Erica became aware of the sound of her own heart beating, then her breath. Slowly, the volume turned up and she could hear screaming. When it filled the world T.R., stepped forward and hit her in the back of the head with the butt of the rifle. Erica plunged into nothing, grateful.
Chapter 29
The sun spread over Will’s shoulders like the arm of an old friend. They sauntered down Oak Street together, Will glancing at the shuttered brick houses hunkered in weedy yards. This was the part of Shard dedicated to the mine workers and their families. The houses were small and simple, nothing like the grand Victorians over on the north side of town. The smoldering coal seam zigged and zagged under Shard and had left this portion relatively untouched. But without the mine to support their inhabitants, the rows of solid brick boxes emptied as sure as they would have had the fire rose up in the night and gutted them. In fact, only three blocks over it had done just that. The brick shells still slumped against each other, their roofs long gone, the sun and moon lighting grassy living rooms. Most of the buildings on Oak were still in good shape, though.
The only way you’d know the street was deserted was the lack of cars at the curb and high grass in the yards. And the silence. There were no children playing or dogs barking, no flap of clothes on the line losing moisture to the high blue sky. There was only the sound of Will’s Chucks on the pavement, his hand brushing his jeans as he walked, his breath. A sparrow trilled a few notes and it was as loud as an aria in an opera house. Will closed his eyes and stood still a moment. The tang of sulfur was strong here, but like a smoker he was used to the slight burn in his nostrils and throat. An afternoon breeze toyed with the hair that peaked out from under his Kentucky Wildcats cap. A cloud passed over and the red behind his eyelids dimmed; the warm arm of the sun slipped off his shoulders. The sparrow, or whatever it was, stopped singing and Will opened his eyes.
He rounded the corner onto Hill Avenue and the houses plumped again. Hill was where many of the town merchants had lived. You couldn’t earn enough as a coal miner to buy a big house, but you could earn enough from the miners to do so. Will passed a three-story number with white gingerbread trim that had belonged to the Dearborns. Shirley and Mainard Dearborn owned the Watch N’ Wash laundromat where you could watch your favorite soaps on coin-opp TVs while your underwear tumbled behind you. Will remembered watching Kimba the White Lion, his legs dangling over the edge of a hard-plastic chair while his mom talked with the other women who’d come to try and wash the soot from their men’s clothes. Kimba always managed to stay pure white, but no matter how much bleach they used the women of Shard were never able to beat back the coal dust. Will’s nose wrinkled with the memory.
“You look like your pa.”
Will stopped and looked up a short flight of stone steps to the porch of an old Arts n’ Crafts style house. Every inch of the deep front porch was crammed with bookshelves and they in turn were crammed with mostly nothing. A few cans of soup here, a bag of rice or box of brownie mix there broke up the monotony, but there was little else. Will knew there was refrigerator just inside the front door with a few extra pounds of ground beef and maybe some frozen shrimp for Friday nights, not that there were any Catholics left in Shard. This is was what passed for Tooley’s General Store. When the fire shuttered main street most of the merchants picked up stakes, but Meg Tooley just picked up the stock and moved to higher, or in this case less smoky, ground. Will dug her out of the shadows between a couple of bookshelves, rocking in her old wicker chair. She squinted bright eyes back at him. “Now you look more like your ma—facing straight on like that. Got those Cherokee cheekbones. She was such a pretty thing, your ma.”
Will smiled. When his hands (and mind) had been too little to hold novels, Meg had comic books for him: Superman, Green Lantern, and Batman. As he got older, she began to horde used books for him. Before the fire, when the other kids were out running the streets, Will sat in the storeroom at Tooley’s and ran the jungles with Mowgli. Meg always gave him a big discount on the fragrant and sometimes water stained old books for an hour or two of chores around the store.
He lifted a hand to her as he climbed the steps. “I suppose it makes sense,” he called, “me baring a resemblance to my parents.”
Meg waved him off. “A changeling like you? You oughta’ look more like the fairies who left you in the bassinet.”
Will stepped into the shadow of the porch. He leaned down into the scent of old woman and chamomile tea…and whiskey. He gave her a peck on a papery cheek. “How’s business, Meg?”
“Might be good,” she said. “You buying something?”
“I’ll take that brownie mix off your hands if the price is right.”
“Hunert dollars,” she deadpanned.
Will put his hands on his hips and sighed as he peered out into the yard. Meg’s lawn was in good shape. “You’ll have to stand me the money, I’m afraid.” He looked back at her. Wizened, sharp-eyed old crow—could she have mowed the yard herself? Will smiled a little, imagining her trundling around the yard on a riding mower behind a big pair of sunglasses.
“Care to sit for a spell, William?”
“Thanks.” Will took off his cap and folded into the rocker next to Meg’s. For a while neither of them said anything, just stared out at the neat patch of green. Hill Avenue was a border street, the last of Shard’s asphalt clothing on the southeastern end. Across the road from Meg’s front porch, the land tumbled off and down a good seventy-five feet before a new border. The same creek that flowed near Amy James’s Winnebago just off the mine office parking lot slid by at the bottom of the hill. It was well below their site line, but Meg and Will knew it was there. Each thought of it in turn. If they held their breaths and the wind stilled completely, chance was they might hear it.
Will elected to speak instead. “You never really answered my question.”
“’Bout business?” She took a sip of high-octane “coffee”. “It’s been bad even for this place.”
“Yeah?”
“Most usually I can count on a visit from at least three or four folks a week, but your pretty cheekbones are the first I’ve seen in days.”
Will nodded. “Meg? Would you ever leave?”
“My house? Laws no. I own this place outright. You talking about that lawyer lady? She’s been out here, oh yes, talking about relocation stipends and whatnot. I told her it was lovely having a fresh face on the porch to jaw with, especially one as pretty as hers, but that she was barking up the wrong maple if she thought she could get rid of Meg Tooley.”
Will smiled and held up a hand. “No, I didn’t mean Erica. I was just thinking: what if some of natural disaster was coming? Oh, wait, I know—what if The Fire moved over this way? What would you do?”
Meg cocked a wispy silver eyebrow. “I’d burn.”
“C’mon, Meg, seriously now—what if you had to leave?”
She eyed him. Will felt a little like a shiny bottle cap being scanned over by a jackdaw. “Why you asking?” she said at length. She could see the worry on his face, the fear, though he tried
to hide them both. He was frightened for himself, but there was more concern there for her. “You’re a good boy, William.” She chuckled. “Listen to me, like you’re still sitting in the back of my shop all of eleven years old. You’re a good man, Mr. Constable. Do you have something you need to tell me?”
“Maybe,” Will sighed. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I promise, Meg. I’m just trying to get a sense of whether or not you’d budge…I guess…I guess if your life depended on it.”
Meg had her answer on the tip of her tongue but held that rascal still. William wanted an answer, a real one, so she was going to give it a minute to percolate. She stared off past the front yard into the tree tops. They were low across the street, their trunks having to stretch that much higher for the drop off in the land. When she was a younger woman—a real honey if you wanted to know—she and Mr. Tooley had gone sledding down that hill after a fierce snow storm. She’d been afraid because the drop was steep and the creek cut through the pure white at the bottom. It was frozen over, sure, but that ice was hard and so were the rocks that jutted from it. Mr. Tooley was a clever young man, though, and pushed the snow into a ramp. She could still remember that look he gave her when he hopped on his sled. It’ll work, darlin’. You watch. She’d never been so randy for him after he gave her look, so excited by just the idea of her man being brave and foolhardy. She’d stolen his chance and gone first. Meg whooped and jumped out over the drop, hugging her sled to her chest and belly for dear life. She slammed into the slope and shot down it like an iron ball through a greased cannon. Meg hit that snow ramp and launched through the cold air. Her blue knit cap flew off and landed on the ice, but she cleared it with room to spare and a executed beautiful landing. She stood in the sudden silence and looked at that blue hat sitting on the ice, then up at her husband, Clemson.
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