Susan thinks about Ray being so scared but still getting out of bed in the morning. You’re a good one. You’re a good one. You’re a good one. The noise in her head quiets down, settles into a quiet place. She bends to the bindweed and pulls. It’s cold, even with the wool blanket wrapped over her shoulders, but she doesn’t stop until the bed is clean, ready for seeding.
Mama would be pleased. Susan sits on the old railroad tie and stares up at the stars. They look closer than they did in Wyoming. They look just the way they should. Kelly never thought she was a good one. He never really wanted kids, or her, just an idea of something he didn’t expect to be hard. They would never have made each other happy. How much better to be here, without Kelly, than bound to a life set to rot.
14
LATE AT NIGHT, THE girls long asleep, Camila and Ray sit up in their bed, both of them leaning against the wall, writing. Ray kicks off his jeans and makes a mental list of what needs to be done at Dunbars the next day.
Skunk in pipe/gate, lower field/Una’s tits.
If Camila asked, he’d tell her his hands are finally toughening up, his back feeling strong. If she looked at him, she’d see the strength in his bare legs, the new edge to his abs. He hasn’t had any liquor for more than a week, which he’d expect to please her but has caught no praise. For the third time, he looks at his wife, hoping she’ll look up too.
Camila has on an old T-shirt he got at a National Guard thing in Meeker; it’s huge on her. There was a time she didn’t wear a single thing to bed. He puts his hand on her leg.
“You should bring the girls up to Dunbars’ this week. They’d love to see the calves. We got another nine last week.”
She doesn’t look up from the yellow legal pad in her lap. “That’s nice, honey.”
“I didn’t know how much I missed working with my hands.”
“Hmmm.” She scowls and writes something down; she crosses her legs in a way that knocks his hand off.
“How’s your thing going?”
“I helped get Roberts elected. When you were gone, I went door to door for him, dragging the girls with me in the cold.” Her face is tighter than a wood screw in summer. “He needs to pay attention to us now.”
“What are you on about, baby?” He strokes her leg.
“The governor. I called his office to tell them about this gas well kick. And all the problems we’re dealing with, how the gas companies threaten the fabric of our town. His aide said she’ll look into it. I want to follow up with an email and I’m just working out the details.”
“Baby, the governor doesn’t care what happens in Silt. We’re three hundred miles from Denver; might as well be Alaska.”
“Well he can’t care until he knows about it.” Here she goes. “At the chamber meeting last night, Amick was there. He talked about how the night you lost your job—”
“I didn’t lose my job. I keep telling you. It’s just a few months’ probation.”
“Since that night the well blew up, the foundation of his house is cracked. And the walkway is crooked.” She’s finally looking at him now, counting on her hands. “And people say they’re having headaches and their eyes burn at night with the flares and some of them throw up and can’t sleep.”
Ray hasn’t ever been able to keep up with Mila when she gets on her high horse. This is stupid. He pulls off his sweatshirt and T-shirt and socks, hoping for a sorry second she might see his naked body and stop talking.
“Let me tell you, Ray. Ever since Deb Cowan got a well, she has a burn in her biscoche like a bladder infection, except Doc Pitkin of course says she doesn’t have one.”
“You don’t know that any of this has got to do with any of the rest of it.” He throws his mud-caked jeans into the hamper; his pocketknife falls on the floor. “People see a big company and they see a chance to get free shit. This whole thing is going to blow over in a few weeks; it’ll turn out to be nothing.”
“How can you not be worried?”
“Look, Camila, it’s not going to go down here like it did in Las Flores. This isn’t Mexico. We aren’t going to have to leave.”
Camila, her eyes flat, pulls the covers up to her chin and drops back into the hard place inside herself, shaped by a fear of change that is heavy and guarded. Ray has gotten lost many times while trying to find the gate to the inner workings of his wife.
“What is that?” Camila points at the knife.
“Susan gave it to me; some kind of thank-you, I guess.” He sets the knife on the dresser, behind a framed picture they took at the mall before he shipped off. “Want tea or anything?”
She studies him, her lips pressed together into a thin flat line. She stares like she knows that he is never without Bill Dunbar’s knife, that the feel of the metal against his leg makes him steady.
“You are working up there a lot, Papito.”
“You’re the one who told me to give them a hand.”
“We’re lucky, not like those Dunbar girls. They’re single. They don’t have families. I feel sorry for them.”
He studies the picture on the dresser. Lilly’s on Camila’s lap, her cheeks still chubby, and Monica, his big girl in braids, leans against his chest. He’s got his arm around the back of Camila’s chair, he’s touching her shoulder and they’re all tight and close. He tries to remember how it was back then, when what was between them didn’t drag like a limping dog.
She has been at him all the time for the littlest crap. That morning he’d lost track of his keys again, and she was mad about that. And she was already mad that he forgot to call Sheriff back to set up a meeting. Which isn’t a big deal. Sheriff doesn’t return calls for days.
“I’m tired, Mila.” He gets into the bed and shuts off the light.
It’s quiet for a while and he is almost asleep when she rolls over, touching his arm. “You yelled in your sleep again last night. Something about Marcus. Who is that, honey?”
“Just a guy I used to know.”
“You can tell me about it. You never tell me anything about your time over there.”
“Leave it, Mila.” Her hand weighs a thousand pounds and even though it’s on his shoulder, not his throat, he can’t breathe.
“I just want to understand.”
“You can’t.”
It’s quiet again for a while and he is working on sleep, working to ignore Marcus Wilson and the rest of it, but Camila doesn’t ever know when to let a thing drop.
“You’re saying all these people up Dry Hollow Road are making this up?”
“Maybe,” he sighs. “I don’t know. I overreacted; not everyone needs to.”
“This isn’t overreacting, Ray. Three days after the kick, two of Tina’s goats had stillborns. And Johnson’s lost a baby cow the next day.”
“We got enough problems of our own right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t do anything about this, Mila. It’s not your problem to fix.”
“Things don’t work out just because you want them to, Ray.”
“I know.”
How anyone ever stays married is a fucking mystery.
“I don’t know how you were ever a soldier.”
“What?”
“Baby, I know all of it, the war, it’s hard on you. But you don’t share anything. Why am I the bad one because I say how I feel? Because I fight for things to be better? You. You’ve dropped out of this family, this town, your life.”
“This is shit.” His feet hit the floor before his mouth makes it worse. “You’re out of line.” The pillow is a better thing to punch, and he does. And he is already out the bedroom door, he can already taste the whiskey, when she says it. Don’t go.
For a long time, he sits in the parked truck, staring at his dark house. Inside the garage is Camila’s used Kia, payment due end of the week. The backyard, a snarl of weeds and broken things, looks like shit. The shingles on the roof are curled and cracked in spots. This is his job, to handle such things. The
loneliness of adulthood is like dirt under his fingernails. He carries it with him, embarrassed by it, a constant job of digging it away.
The JD doesn’t help; neither does Eazy-E, turned up as loud as the old tape player will go. He’s cold, wearing only his boxers, a sweatshirt, and a hat. His bare feet touch the rubber floor mat and he’s safe, he shouldn’t need to tell himself that, but so much went wrong that he never planned on and why should he get to feel safe, no one made him that special. His mom, with her long days sitting quiet in bed with the curtains drawn—she could’ve told him that.
He tries but fails to not drag out certain memories. Eventually, he gets out of the truck and into the house. He stops at the kids’ bedroom door and listens. Gently he opens the door. He visits each girl’s bed, pulling Lilly’s covers back over her sprawled body, setting Monica’s book onto the floor. He lies down on the floor between their beds and listens to the air coming and going from their bodies. He takes a breath every time they do. After a long time, he falls asleep.
15
TIM TAKES IT SLOW and lets Jackie keep pace on the wide, worn trail. It’s a warm April afternoon and the runoff has mostly slipped through. Beside them, Clear Creek runs silver. She stops, her ribs aching, out of breath. Tim’s lightweight waders swish as he walks ahead, in his short vest and cylinder case, all of it straight from the Orvis catalog.
“Did the guy who sold you those $800 waders tell you that they don’t actually catch the fish for you?”
He looks over his shoulder, slack-jawed, and points his finger at her dad’s old cotton fishing vest with a slow smile.
“It’s not about how many fish we catch, Jack. It’s about being here.”
“It’s totally about how many fish we catch. Let me clarify—it’s about how many more fish I catch than you.”
“Jackie Dunbar, you are going to miss the forest and the trees. What? What’s funny?”
“I think you mean the forest for the trees.”
“No, miss smarty-pants, I mean what I said. Look at this place.”
Midges buzz and dive above the surface. Twenty miles north of Silt, back up in the mountains, where the road turns from cement to dirt and narrows to trail, everything is left to its own devices, a relief in country where land is meant for hard use. Things are leafing out. There is more air here. For the first time since her accident, she feels like she can breathe.
Her dad used to say he fished to commune with the bugs, but he always made sure he caught the biggest fish on the river, the most fish, and that he returned with the best story. He put a rod in her hand when she was five. He loved it here.
Jackie and Tim break away from the trail and through the willows to a place where the creek is no wider than ten feet across, held by the twin edges of a sloped hillside. In her old canvas shoes, blown out at the sides, she steps sockless into the current. Water slips past her calves, quick and cold. Sun falls through the new green leaves on the aspens and scatters the trail with bits of light. Wind raises goose bumps on her bare legs.
She looks down at herself, at the contusions that have faded to a light yellow below the frayed edge of her cutoffs. She is weak, possibly too weak to be at leisure in the late afternoon.
“We shouldn’t stay too long,” she says.
“Will you do yourself a favor?” Tim stands beside her and stares at the nail knot he’s tying to connect his tippet and leader. His big fingers are clumsy; he’d make a terrible surgeon. “Can you try to enjoy yourself for just a few hours?”
She tilts her head and raises an eyebrow at him. At no time in medical school has she met anyone like him. “You’re like a gateway drug to indolence.”
“Be nice, Dunbar. You’re alone in the woods with me and you’re basically a gimp. You walk any slower on the way in and I thought I might have to carry you.”
“Like you could carry me.”
“I’d do what it takes.”
He licks his lips, grins, and turns to wade into the creek. His compact body moves in tandem with his rod, and he is such a surprising thing of beauty to watch that she forgets to be a smart-ass. He casts and his line makes a clean arc across the water, landing exactly where it should, behind a large boulder. For a few minutes there is only the sound of his line whipping the air and the white noise of the creek and the buzz of insects weaving above the water.
Be the fly. That’s what Dad used to say.
She casts away from the sunlit water into shadow, where fish hide in the weeds and feed. The sharp pain in her chest when she raises her arms doesn’t hold her back. For a string of perfect moments, she thinks of nothing but trying to keep her wrist straight, to forget about her thumb. She reels in. She casts. It’s almost as if she were actually the fly, floating on the river, held between water and sky. Her laughter skids across the air.
“Hey, Dunbar, you’re scaring the fish,” Tim whispers over his shoulder. “Hush up.”
She smiles and gives him the finger and wades deeper into the water.
She had never let her dad meet Tim, never even let him know she had a boyfriend. She had seen how it had gone with Susan, the frozen forced smile he gave to the boys who showed up at the door, the sarcastic comments he’d make later. Jackie learned to duck such encounters. Her dad, she was sure then, wouldn’t be too crazy about Tim, with his easy life in town and easy smile, his popularity, all his friends. But now she reconsiders. Her dad might have seen the earnestness in Tim. He, like Susan, was perceptive in this way, in a way that Jackie is not. He might’ve sensed, without being told, that Tim was weighted by a longing to be his own man. She glances downstream at Tim, at his fancy gear and strong cast and feels oddly proud of the person he has become.
At dusk they sit on the hillside above the creek and trade the glass pipe back and forth. The valley splays out below them and the ridges and green and red grow soft in the fading light. The fire burns her throat but she manages not to cough, not to look like the prude she truly is. There’s a lightness behind her ears.
“You don’t look like someone who doesn’t smoke pot,” says Tim, looking at her admiringly.
“This isn’t me.”
“If you say so.” Tim takes the pipe, cashes it, and tucks it into the open flap of his backpack, a mess of orange Twix wrappers, lip balm, and the unmistakable blue edge of an unwrapped condom. Jackie is staring at all that, distracted. Tim had brought a portable radio and the song pulses into the sky. She feels inside the music, her body hopping across the lyrics, as if she were physically propelling the notes forward. The night air settles on her skin like something alive, which maybe it actually is, she stops to wonder at that, when Tim is suddenly close, his mouth on hers, his tongue jostling against her teeth. Again, like before at the house, the closeness towers over her.
She pulls away and reaches to turn down the radio. And again she stares at the condom and wonders at what exactly Tim had been planning and what had she been planning herself. She wonders at how she hadn’t really thought it all through. A wide puzzled smile sits on her face. It has been such a long time since she has felt capable of letting anything go. She lies back onto the scrub of the hill and watches the bats swerve and dive, hunting without sight.
“Did I ever tell you about the first time I tried to wear a condom?” Tim lies on his belly beside her, the length of their bodies touching. He is up on his forearms as if at a slumber party.
Jackie shakes her head no.
“I’m like 10, maybe 11, and all I know about condoms is that they’re sexy, right? I’ve heard Barry, my older cousin, talking about them and so one Sunday at family dinner I take one from his underwear drawer. That night after everyone has gone to bed, I get the condom on my dick and then I do what I think they’re made for.” He grins. “I pee in it.”
She turns to stare at him. “Shut up.”
“That’s what I thought you were supposed to do. I pee in it and it gets huge, like a massive water balloon, and I panic a little because how am I supposed to get the thi
ng off without getting pee everywhere.” Tim laughs. “Finally, I just take it off and of course there’s piss all over my legs and the floor. I tie it in a big knot and throw it away. I couldn’t understand what the big deal was.”
Laughter slips easily from Jackie’s body. She can picture a young Tim, his hair a mullet, the roundness of his face. “You really know how to put a girl in the mood.”
“Too much information?” His eye twitches twice.
“No way.”
“I over-share when I’m nervous.”
“Oh, right. Spare me.”
Again, he tries to kiss her, but she is thinking about bats. Little brown bats can eat one hundred fifty mosquitos in fifteen minutes, they pollinate crops, they work hard. She is up there hovering with the bats, watching herself and Tim, their bodies vulnerable, easily bitten by hundreds of mosquitos. Tim slides his hand across her belly and she wonders at the distance from his eyes to his hands, at how a central human instrument for noticing could be so far away from the mechanism for action. Her body is responding to him, she’s kissing him back, but her mouth is too close to her eyes, the kissing too pure an expression of optical insight. She pulls away and sits up. “I’m not emotionally available.”
Tim laughs nervously. “That sounds like something you read in a magazine.”
Jackie startles because it is in fact something she had read somewhere. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just want to be clear about where I’m at.”
“Didn’t we have sex like a month ago?”
“Yeah, but you were more of a stranger then.”
“I don’t get it.”
She shrugs and smiles. She tries to make the muscles of her face perform the action that the rest of her body is incapable of.
Tim tilts his head, studying her. “I remember this about you.”
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