“Tim Layton.” She folds her arms across her chest. She doesn’t smile. “I heard you lived in Idaho.”
“I do, I mean that’s what my driver’s license says? But I’m on the road a lot. I get through here when I can.” He runs his hand through the side of his hair. “Shit. Jackie Dunbar. It’s been a long time.”
Though he is still handsome, his face has its softness. He is her same age, twenty-four, and it startles her to realize how old he looks for an age that she has wanted to believe is still young. He is smiling too much. It’s as if he doesn’t remember what happened the last time they spoke.
“We have this modern convenience up here, it’s called a phone.” She has never had enough manners; to fake anything, even small talk, makes her nervous, as if she were being unreliable to herself.
“I called. No one answered.”
“It’s not a great day for a visit.”
“Come on, Jack. Can’t an old friend stop by for a cup of coffee?”
No one has called her Jack in six years. His ring finger is naked. There’s no way she’s inviting him inside.
“I really have a ton of work to do. Maybe another day?”
“Listen, Jackie, I heard about your dad. I’m really sorry.” He touches her arm and she stiffens. “My mom told me I should’ve brought up some food. I should’ve gotten up here sooner, I wish I had, I know it’s been like what, four weeks already, but I was in New Mexico for work.”
She stares at his mouth with a stump-like expression while he strings more words together in a row than she has heard in days.
“I bet your dad was glad to have you back here. People in town keep saying what a nice thing it is that you and your sister are trying to make a go of things. Everyone says how proud your dad would be.”
Tim has never had trouble saying the right thing. She shifts her legs uneasily.
“Is it true you lived in Paris for a while?” Shorty had told her that, loudly, one day in line at the post office. And the way she’d said it, Jackie knew what she was thinking: leaving doesn’t make you special.
“Well, yeah. That’s where I live. Paris, Idaho,” he laughs, his left eye twitching.
“Pretty glamorous?”
“Exactly. It’s a tiny place but there’s sick fishing around there and the mountain biking is killer. I’m building my own place on some land I bought, although it’s taking forever because I’m never there. I still don’t have a bathroom sink or dry wall in the back room.” He trails off, sheepishly as if he could read her mind: follow-through had never been his strength. “Enough about me. How are you doing? How long are you home for?”
To answer either of these questions honestly isn’t something Jackie can do. She studies the faint lines beside his eyes.
“Was there something specific that brought you up here?”
He starts talking about mixing business with pleasure, but she stops paying attention. A blur of black and white sprints across the field and down toward the house. As it nears, she makes out a tail and two heads.
“What the fuck is that?” Tim squints as Chicken jumps through two slats in the wooden fence; between his teeth is something gray with long curly brown hair. The eye sockets are empty and the jaw is unhinged.
With his black ears back and his neck covered in slime, the dog drops the head at her feet and sits there panting and proud. Tim has folded into a defensive crouch against the gate. If he were an animal, his ears would be pinned back. He always was made more for town than the ranch.
She smiles, despite herself. “It’s just a dog head, our old dog George.” She hides her mouth behind her hand and snorts. It’s the first time she’s laughed in weeks and now started, she can’t stop. “You look a little scared.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“Yes you are.”
“Yes I am.” Chicken squats in the space between them and takes a shit. “Bad dog. You git.” Jackie runs the dog off and shakes her head. “We’ve been spoiling that damn dog.”
Now it is his turn to laugh. “I don’t know how I ever left all this.”
“I know what you mean.”
“What are you going to do with that thing?” He nods toward George’s former head tossed in the grass.
“We need some taxidermy in the house. Something for the living room.”
“That’s a joke? You’re being funny?”
“I’ll put him back in the ground.”
“You want a hand?”
“That’s OK. I don’t need any help.”
“How about company? I have a sixer in the truck.” He holds out his hands and something about it, the way he stands, is funny. He always was funny.
She shrugs.
“Why not.”
The grave is tossed where Chicken got at it; Dad hadn’t dug it deep enough, another sure sign of the decline Jackie had failed to notice. She leans over the bones and hair and dirt and sinks the shovel neatly into earth. Tim sits on the hood of his truck and cracks a beer and watches her work.
“Nice view.” He looks past her out to Grass Mesa below. From up here, the wide land swallows a person whole. The peeling paint on the house and the blow-down in the lower field isn’t visible. Only the sliver of Dry Hollow Road and the ranches that cling to it, and the red-ribboned mesas beyond. It’s a view made for breathing in relief, for making a person feel a sense of their place in the world.
“You all still have that creek?”
She meets his eyes, sees the laughter in them, and quickly returns to the hole in the ground. They’d fished Divide Creek a lot that summer before college. A few times when her dad and uncle were away they’d gone skinny-dipping. She had loved to open her eyes underwater and see the curve of his ass, like something that belonged to her.
“Has your swimming improved?” she asks.
“Has your casting?”
“I don’t have time for fishing; I haven’t been in years. What are you doing with your life, Tim Layton? How do you have so much free time?”
“I’m a landman. I set ranchers and farmers up with oil and gas contracts.”
“I know what a landman does. Good money in that.”
“Sure is. Have to admit, I like that part.”
“Weren’t you going to work at your dad’s mill?”
“There was nothing new in it. And I hated all that dust, being inside.” He shrugs. “Plenty of paperwork with this job but at least I can get a ride or a climb in most days between house calls.”
“Sounds right.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you always care more about being outdoors than your grades?”
“I wasn’t an idiot, I just didn’t want to be an astronaut like you did.” His look is eager; he’s trying too hard.
“Doctor. I always wanted to be a doctor.”
“Right. I don’t remember you ever letting one thing drop. Except maybe me.” He laughs.
Jackie narrows her eyes and shoves the blade into the ground hard enough that it can stand on its own.
“I’m in medical school. I’m just on leave because of my dad dying and my sister. Someone needs to run things.”
She stares at him and then she starts to dig with all her effort.
“Are you mad? Is this about me? About that summer?”
“We don’t need to talk about it.”
“But you broke up with me.”
“It wasn’t exactly a breakup. I was being practical. We were eighteen. No one needs a long-distance relationship at eighteen.”
“You didn’t. Not with your full ride to that fancy school.”
“You canceled on me the day before we were supposed to leave. We’d been planning that road trip for weeks.”
“Did you really care?”
Jackie stops digging. Her chest rises and falls.
The thing is she hadn’t cared, not exactly, not after the first few weeks. And if he had ever once called her back or sent any
sort of smoke signal, she would likely never have thought of him again. But to be ignored picked at her, it raised the question why and left it unanswered, a thing for her to return to again and again.
She thinks about the version of herself, the one from six years ago, and sees that she can hardly remember what it was like to be her. She looks at Tim. “I guess I did care, but it doesn’t matter, not anymore.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
She shrugs. “What’s done is done. I think I’m ready for that beer.”
Three beers later, she’s gotten George’s head back in the ground and is sitting in Tim’s truck. The cab smells like dirty socks. The floor is strewn with empty sports drink bottles. She has a loose-limbed feeling, like being underwater. They’re talking about nothing important, she’s not talking much at all. Tim tells story after story about people they used to know or funny things he’s seen on the road.
“We’re in Wyoming for work, and my buddy can’t stop talking about this amazing thing he found at the grocery store called Sirloin-in-a-Can.” Tim opens another beer and passes it to Jackie. “I finally open up the fridge to check it out. There’s a picture of a golden retriever on the side. He was eating fucking dog food. Fuck, that was funny.”
He looks at Jackie like she’s the only glass of water he’s seen all week. Then he looks at the mountains, and then at the can in his hand. There’s a scab on his lower lip, the kind you get from sunburn. He always was too slow. She leans over and kisses him. He tastes like cheap beer and salt and her eighteen-year-old self.
Her head is wedged against the passenger door. With his body pressed against hers, she can feel his heartbeat inside her own belly, can feel it quicken. There is the heat of his mouth and the warmth of the cab. After a while, he touches her cheek.
“You’ve grown up. You’re prettier than you used to be.”
Is that a compliment or a slam? Does that mean she’s actually pretty or just prettier? Susan was always the pretty one. Jackie closes her eyes and kisses his neck; he needs to shut up. She needs to keep her brain quiet. With one hand she unbuttons and unzips his pants; she is pushing them down with her knee when Tim grabs her leg.
“I feel like I’m in high school,” he says, laughing, which isn’t the right thing to say at all. “You want to get out of here?”
Jackie pulls down her shirt and moves as far from Tim as she can.
“There’s nowhere to go around here. I better get home anyways.”
“Sorry. Can’t take you home yet. You need a shower. I’m going to wash your hair.”
Her head snaps toward him as if he’d yanked her leash. The skin of his fingers against her thigh holds a charge. This isn’t the Tim Layton she remembers.
“You go to beauty school up there in Paris?”
He starts with the bottoms of her feet. Then he washes her legs, and between her thighs, and her nipples and her back. The dirt from her body stains the hotel shower. They drink bourbon out of a plastic cup that they rest on the soap dish. When he soaps her hair, he keeps the suds from her eyes, which is a detail she might once have told Susan.
She drops to her knees and pulls him to her in the tub. They don’t quite fit together in the narrow short space, and his knee presses into her hip. He tries to lead her out of the bathroom to the bed, but she pulls him onto the thin bath mat. She doesn’t need some big romantic hotel bedroom scene.
Afterward, under the bright bathroom lights, they lie on the floor side by side for a long time; they’re the same size and her arm fits neatly against his torso. Her mind relishes the pulsing buzz of orgasm. She shuts her eyes and tries to keep the dazed feeling from fading.
“Remember that road trip to Moab?” He traces her ear with his finger; she has to keep herself from swatting it away. Tim goes on and on about the map he forgot and how hot it was and how he wishes Moab was still sleepy like it was then. Jackie remembers it, sort of, but what she remembers more is coming home. Dad had seemed mad. When she offered to make dinner, he’d gone to watch television in his room, which he never did. And when she asked him, what’s wrong, why are you upset, he looked small, shrunken. It’s so quiet when you’re not here. What am I going to do without you next year? She’d hugged him and he smelled like he always did, of dust and cigarettes. It had been hard to breathe.
Her eyes get wet. She is not going to fall apart in the bathroom of the Holiday Inn, especially not in front of Tim Layton.
“I’ve got to go.”
“No, stay. We’ve got HBO. We can order tacos from that new Mexican place. We have so much to talk about.”
She explains about calving season and how she needs to check the girls. Which, it occurs to her as soon as she says it, is actually true. At feeding, Blanca’s tail had been flying and she’d been walking fences away from the herd. Dad would never have left a second-year heifer on the verge of labor.
The floor is wet as she jumps up, and she slips, feeling sick from the alcohol, and has to grab the towel rack. Her clothes are in a pile with his and she sorts through them, pulling on what’s hers.
“Seriously, Tim, I really shouldn’t have come.”
“I could make a joke right now.” He takes another swig of bourbon from the bottle and stays right there on the floor.
“Get up. I need a ride.” She throws him his boxers. “Or let me take your truck.”
“Hold your horses, cowgirl; give me a sec.”
Tim puts his shirt on inside out. He can’t find his keys, making jokes, making a running narration of his movements. He is disorganized and slow. His pink skin looks like it could bruise with mild impact. Jackie watches him as if from a great distance, as if he has nothing to do with her because of course he doesn’t.
5
IF SOMEONE ELSE WERE in bed, if Kelly were here, Susan could feel his weight at her back, his warmth, and she could roll over and he would touch her hair and say Good morning, sweetheart. She stares out the window at nothing but endless suffocating blue sky. Her skin itches. Her hips need popping. Other people, they’re serving a lunch-hour rush, or filing on deadline, or drinking coffee at the diner, or reading stories to a child on their lap. Susan has no reason to get up, to stop looking at the sky. Knit, purl, knit, purl, that’s the lining of her stomach. Jackie is outside working hard, doing everything right.
Beside the bed is yesterday’s paper. Here is a whole world of ideas. Listen to this, she wishes she could say. The river runs dark and gritty as unfiltered coffee. Pretty good line for a local paper. Sediment is building up behind Glen Canyon Dam, the 710-foot concrete wall that blocks the Colorado River. So much silt sits in the reservoir behind the dam that the river is backing up on itself, changing its shape and direction, into the floodplains where people like to live. She wants to lean in, over her coffee and pancakes, and say, You know what I think? People around here think silt is just dirt. It’s not their fault; it’s what the Bureau of Reclamation tells them. Nature can be tamed, bent to human will. But control has its limits. Give it time. In a couple hundred decades, all that silt is going to break down the dam.
Susan tosses the paper onto the floor. Tick. Tock. Her watch stares at her. Out the window, the poplars move in the wind. She holds her breath. Listen. No car up the drive. No train in the distance. The apocalypse could’ve happened, and she the only survivor. She stares at the window and puts her hands on her empty hull of a belly.
The sound of tires against the gravel drive draws her from bed. Into the kitchen, quick quick. And there is Jackie, driving away in a white truck with a man whose face she can’t place. Knock knock knock, her fist against the window, but they don’t hear, they are gone, and there is only the dust and Chicken barking at the dust.
Susan paces in front of the sink. To leave without saying goodbye isn’t polite. Jackie can do this, she can be surprising, though never to herself. But why today, on this terrible sad low day, would she leave without word. Jackie must remember about today, about how six years ago, she’d tucked garde
nias into Susan’s hair. They had gone to Joann Fabrics to buy a veil, and Jackie had turned to her in the felt aisle to ask if she was really sure. And Susan had laughed with the joy of certainty. Sure she was sure. She had never been more sure.
Her wedding ring didn’t have a stone. It had looked so small next to the deodorant in the medicine cabinet, where it stayed the day she left. A note would’ve been redundant.
She picks up the phone. Sets it back down.
They never said it was over. She didn’t pack everything. She just drove to Colorado for Thanksgiving and never went back. And he didn’t come after her.
In the bathroom, she washes her face. Puts on lipstick, a coral color that brings out the gold highlights of her hair. He always liked her black tube top; she puts it on. She’ll tell him about the silt behind the dam, he’ll like that. She’ll ask him about the AA meetings. And maybe, if it all goes straight, she’ll suggest he visit.
A pony races around in her gut; she dials the number from memory.
“Hel-lo. Kelly Eastman’s answering service.” A southern accent in Wyoming isn’t such a common thing.
“Heidi?”
Heidi Hooten, the welder with the big tits and the cotton candy mouth. Heidi Horndog, the guys called her.
“Oh shit, is this Susan? You been away too long, sweetie.”
“Give the phone to Kelly, will you?”
It takes a while.
“What do you want?”
“Well, hi. I don’t know. I read something in the paper that made me think of you.”
“I ain’t heard from you in three months and you want to tell me about the newspaper? Fuck off.”
The gruff of his voice used to, at first, be sexy. Billy Goat Gruff. It hadn’t taken long to learn to ignore it, to find the cracks in his tone where the sad, vulnerable part of him poured out.
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