by Anna Krien
Eva laid a rug on the grass and brought out a few cushions. Pickle tentatively picked her way down the steps, whiskers twitching. Elliott brought out a speaker and started doing stretches a little way off, near the water, while Eva carried her easel out of the bus, tightening the wingnuts under a canvas she was working on. Gerry watched them, trying to relax. He lay on the rug with the book Eva had tossed his way a couple of days earlier. He tried to focus on the type, but his eyes were restless. When Pickle started batting the pages with her paw, Gerry was grateful. He let the book go and played with the cat, pulling out a strand of grass, Pickle leaping and twisting for it. He laughed as the cat flattened herself on the grass and wriggled her back legs, getting ready to pounce.
When he looked up, the world had changed.
It was brighter, crisper. The blue sky was like a blown-glass dome and the grass crackled as if a kind of static ran through it. He sat up, to look through the whispering grass at the river. The water was amber, sunlit beer. A neon green dragonfly flitted across the surface and a strange feeling came over Gerry as he watched it, the needle body zipping about and hovering. He sensed an upward swell. Something is going to happen, he thought, and then a large fish jumped up out of the water, snatching the insect. Gerry looked around to check if the others had seen it. On a sandy patch at the river’s edge Elliott had his arms stretched to the sky, his sequin dress shimmering. Eva had stopped painting. She was watching Gerry, the brush still in her hand. She smiled and mouthed ‘hello’ when their eyes connected, heat and light radiating from her to him.
‘Want to go for a walk?’ she asked, holding out her hand. Gerry let her pull him up. All around his sneakers were purple flowers like tiny mouths. ‘Elliott?’ Eva called. Elliott floated his arms down and seemed to swim over. Gerry laughed, then got caught up in the sound of his laugh, a series of differently shaped bells being rung, and the pleasurable act of it, the feeling of being lifted and bobbing in the waves.
‘Do you see it?’ Elliott swam up to him. ‘Do you see it?’
Gerry nodded. He could see everything. He could even see his laughter, how it rippled out, like a bird flitting into a pond. Air is water, he thought, and it felt momentous. He wanted to tell the others, but they were laughing now too, the air splashing around them.
Eva led the way. Underneath them, the ground shifted, the earth a rich peat. Gerry’s worn sneakers sank at each footfall, as if in snow. Eva floated her hands over the wheat-coloured cattails as she walked, and a bee, loud as a helicopter, passed Gerry’s ear. At a large old tree, its trunk split, Eva stopped. The three of them studied it: the furrowed strips of bark; the zig-zag of ants. How each greeted the other with a caress of feelers before continuing their journey. Gerry glimpsed silky white bundles of spider’s eggs tucked under the bark.
‘Want to climb it?’ Eva asked, not waiting for an answer, putting her boot in the tree’s cleft, hauling herself up, then wriggling onto one of its long limbs. As Gerry climbed, the tree breathed, each ridge and groove the sinew and fold of skin. At the split where it sent out six or so arms, he peered into the trunk and saw a fragment of rings: years it had seen.
Elliott sprawled on the largest branch. Sunlight dappled them. They grew old there: Gerry watched them age, their skin catch the dust of time and roughen like the bark. ‘You okay?’ Eva called softly, and Gerry nodded. He wasn’t scared; he felt safe in the ligaments of this cottonwood tree. But there was a warning in his bones of an unbearable sadness. Their scars, he saw, were shinier than ever. Eva’s gill, the pocked craters on Elliott’s cheeks, the notch on his own forehead, the skin white and hard, a coagulated embroidery.
How old had he been? Eight? The night had been punctured with stars and he could feel the scratchy bush he’d hidden behind, the chafing of his wet shorts. He had peed himself. He could hear his father pacing on the side of the road, yelling at him to come out. What came first – closing his eyes or the crack against his forehead? For a long time, Gerry had thought his father had somehow stretched his fist out all the way from the highway and into the desert to punch him. It only dawned on him years later that his father must have thrown a rock. Now, a cowboy wouldn’t do that. Perhaps that was what he’d been banking on. A cowboy would soothe a frightened animal. He would make it brave.
Gerry shut his eyes, uttering an anguished moan. He felt Eva climb close to him. She put her hand on his and seemed to hold him by a wire as his body detonated, each level crushing down into the next, as with a building. Every now and then, something extra burst, a tinderbox tucked away in some recess. It took forever, until finally it was done. He was rubble. Slowly he opened his eyes. Eva was beside him. He cautiously touched his face, his skin wet. He had been crying. He stared at Eva. ‘Am I gone?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, turning over his hand and tracing the lines on his palm with a finger. ‘You’re here.’ She had done this a lot, Gerry realised, this peculiar way of dying. He looked over at Elliott. He, too, was familiar with this. He wondered how many times they’d done it, this sloughing off of old skins.
‘They even have scales over their eyes,’ his mother explained once when he’d come home with a snakeskin, back when they lived on the side of the mountain. He had been hoping to scare her, but instead she became wistful, studying it. ‘It must be an incredible feeling,’ she said. ‘Imagine being new again.’
*
They sat in a circle, sharing a joint. The smoke was soothing, softening the sharp edge that had snuck up on Gerry. When they finished, he and Eva lay back, their hair tangling, feeling the brief kisses of insects on their skin. Lacing their fingers, they watched the sky roll over them. It was impossible to determine the stretch of time before they heard feet. Elliott was breathless as he stood over them. ‘You’ve got to see this!’ he said, and they followed him, hurrying along the riverbank until Elliott stopped and split the tall grass with his hands. ‘Look,’ he whispered.
Eva’s eyes went wide with surprise.
There, neatly folded on the grass, was a pair of faded blue jeans and a denim cowboy shirt, an old salt-stained brown felt hat on top. Beside the pile was a pair of snakeskin boots. Even with what they all knew about cowboys, Gerry so recently educated, the mystical appearance of cowboy clothes on the riverbank had them transfixed. Eva looked at Gerry. ‘They’re yours,’ she whispered. ‘I just know it.’
Elliott nodded, his dreadlocks like springs. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know, right? That’s what I thought.’
Gerry looked at them both, then back at the pile of clothes. He felt the world had stopped for him.
‘Put them on,’ Eva whispered.
Gerry looked around. ‘You sure?’
‘Yes!’ they said, emphatic.
Gerry kicked off his sneakers, undid his pants and shrugged off his T-shirt. He pulled on the jeans, and clicked the pearly buttons on the shirt, and slid his socked feet into the boots. Elliott picked up the hat and put it on Gerry’s head. It sat a little lopsided, but snug.
Eva clapped her hand over her mouth and Elliott whooped. ‘Damn, man, you look amazing!’
Gerry grinned. ‘Really?’
Eva shook her head, looking dazed. ‘Gerry, it’s perfect.’
Then a slurp came from the river as a naked man pulled himself out by the reeds, scrambling up the mud towards them. ‘What the fuck are you kids doing?’ he yelled, beard dripping, skinny arms shaking angrily, droopy dick swinging.
The three stared as he came at them, and then Elliott broke the spell: ‘Run!’ Gerry and Eva snapped to it, all of them scattering, and laughter burbled from Elliott first, then Eva, then Gerry, until it was almost impossible to run, they were laughing so hard. As Elliott led the way, he made a trumpet with his hands. ‘D-d-dum, d-d-dum, d-d-d-d-d-dum, d-d-dum, d-d-dum, the Lone Ranger!’ he sang, and a stitch in Gerry’s side almost grounded him, but at last they reached the bus, hurling their things in, the cat bolting inside, and Eva peeling off as Gerry and Elliott collapsed
in giggles, shrieking at her to go faster.
It was only much later, after they’d driven north to another part of the Rio Grande and poured out trembly tumblers of rum, that Elliott wondered why the naked man hadn’t caught up with them. ‘After all, we were completely fucked.’
Gerry, in his cowboy get-up, slapped his forehead. ‘The money!’ he said. He pointed to the pocket of his new jeans. ‘The Honda money was in my pocket. This,’ and he gestured at his attire, ‘is a six-hundred-dollar outfit.’
*
It was like that for a time, their life on the road. They played hide-and-seek in an outcrop of conical grey boulders like huge misshapen heads, while in a paddock of satellite dishes scanning the heavens they became paranoid and tetchy. They shared a picnic in the shade of a rock with petroglyphs of bighorn sheep, and walked alongside fences with odd lengths of wood nailed at strange angles as though they’d somehow gotten hitched there in a gust of wind. In San Acacia, Eva stared hard at the ground, turning over pieces of ancient clay pots. They followed signs pocked by bullets and stopped in boarded-up towns – abandoned railroad and trading outposts, dry water-soaks, exhausted mining settlements, and a few places just killed by the Interstate. In disused trailers they found old newspapers and calendars open to the day of abandonment. Once, after crawling through a broken window at the back of a diner, Gerry pretended to be a waiter, passing Eva and Elliott out cups and saucers and wiping the counter.
In Santa Rosa, they drove to the Blue Hole, a luminous bell-shaped well in the desert. Stripping to underwear, they jumped in, the water cool, and washed off the dead towns. As the day drifted, they lay on warm rocks as other swimmers arrived, some kitted up in diving gear, waddling up to the well in their flippers and flopping in over the edge. A man told them that at the bottom lay skulls of steers from way-back Apache times. They parked on the sides of highways next to tourist attractions and outside strip malls, and sold pikelets, crepes and whatever other damn size pancake people wanted, and bought cheap boxes of overripe fruit, squeezing the life out of them, and Gerry had almost come around to Burning Man when Amos showed up.
*
‘Navajo,’ Eva said, as they waited for him. ‘His mum, not mine.’ Amos Bald Buzzard Homey was Eva’s half-brother. They’d agreed to meet in a bar outside Santa Rosa.
‘You just get out?’ the bartender asked when they arrived, looking pointedly at Elliott and explaining that the first drink was on the house if he had papers showing he’d been discharged from the prison down the road.
‘Nope,’ Elliott said, adding, ‘record’s clean.’
The bartender shrugged, a doubtful look on his face. ‘Bad luck for you,’ he said, before swivelling to serve someone at the other end of the bar.
Elliott looked at Eva and Gerry, his eyebrow arched. ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he said sarcastically. They slid into a booth with their drinks.
‘You just get out?’ they heard the bartender ask again.
‘Sure.’
They turned around to see the speaker. The bartender looked cynical. ‘Guadalupe Correctional?’
‘Nope,’ said the voice, ‘Amazon warehouse.’
‘Amos!’ Eva leapt up and ran around the bar, launching herself at the wiry guy in a hoodie and baggy blue jeans standing at the counter. When he saw Eva, warmth cracked his scowl and he picked her up, spinning her around.
He sat down with them, and it was uncanny to see the two siblings, so different in looks: Amos with the cramped features of a boxer, his mouth, nose and new-moon eyes almost touching; Eva with her open face and wide-set irises. And yet, they had the same mannerisms. Gerry observed the way they tapped their fingers as they spoke, how their eyes flared when they had a point to make. Amos had a power, a charisma. He spoke and they listened, even Elliott – albeit reluctantly.
It seemed to Gerry that Amos had worked all over the country. He was a leak detector for a natural-gas company in Wisconsin, walking for miles along a buried conduit with a flame pack. He picked sugar beets in South Dakota. His last job was a stint at an Amazon in Nevada. ‘I’m not doing it again,’ he said.
Eva laughed. ‘You said that last time!’
‘Well, this time I mean it. The warehouse is the size of fucking Harlem and everyone shows up in their RVs and pick-up trucks converted into homes, or, if you’re me, in your piece-of-shit sedan. It’s fucking Grapes of Wrath in the twenty-first century.’ He paused. Gerry hadn’t read the book, but he nodded along with the others. ‘Pickers and packers, that’s what we are. Ten-hour shifts for eleven twenty-five an hour.’
Eva shook her head. Amos glanced at her. ‘We can’t all get scholarships to go to college.’
‘Oh, shut up, Amos, not this again,’ she replied.
Amos grinned at Gerry. ‘You know Eva is a big-shot smarty-pants, right?’
Eva punched him. ‘Shut up! Those two things don’t even make sense together!’
Gerry smiled, eager to hear more, but Amos returned to his story. ‘Each shift you walk, on average, about fifteen miles on concrete, the warehouse is that big.’
‘Miles?’ Gerry said, his eyes wide.
Amos nodded. ‘Yeah, and heaps of workers think it’s “awe-some!”’ He said it in a high-pitched voice.
‘No more, Amos,’ Eva pleaded. ‘Promise me you won’t do another stint?’
He smiled. ‘I promise.’ He looked uncertain for a second, as though wrestling with something. ‘I kind of lost it there anyway. Not sure they’d take me back.’
Eva sat up, alert. ‘What happened?’
Amos glanced at Gerry and Elliott, as if wishing they weren’t there. ‘There’s a thing on your scanner that starts a countdown when you scan something, showing how many seconds you’ve got to find the next item to scan.’ He turned to Eva. ‘I started to get strung out when the countdown started, and I fucked up after one scan, went down a wrong aisle, then another wrong aisle, and I tried to go back to where I’d been so I could start over.’
‘Oh, Amos.’ Eva said knowingly, and put her hand on his hand.
‘Eight minutes and thirty-two seconds,’ Amos continued. ‘That was all I went over. Eight, thirty-two. It felt like forever. You know what I was meant to find?’ Eva shook her head. ‘An audiobook of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.’ He stared at her. ‘Can you fucking believe it?’ His eyes became tight and angry. ‘Can you two fucking believe it?’ he said to Gerry and Elliott. Taken aback, they shook their heads. ‘Fucking Americans, they tried to scorch us off the face of this country and some fucker orders in Buddhist bullshit from Tibet? I mean, we had men at the top of the mountain. We were fucking there.’ Amos slapped his empty glass, sending it spinning across the table.
They were quiet. On a small stage with curtains and a disco ball, a band was setting up, checking uno, dos, tres into the microphone and tuning their guitars. Eva put her arms around Amos and he leaned gratefully into her. He had brought a new intensity, like the heat had been turned up.
They ordered more drinks. When the band began to play, they got up to dance, Amos slipping his hands around the hourglass waist of a honey-haired woman. Back at the table, Amos snorted when Eva told him they were heading to Burning Man. ‘Not anymore,’ he said. Elliott frowned. Amos tossed his head back so his straight black hair was out of his eyes and the woman snuggled into his neck. ‘North Dakota,’ he continued, ‘Standing Rock. We’re going to fight, little sister.’
*
‘No drugs or alcohol allowed in the camp,’ Amos told them. ‘It’s not fucking Burning Man.’ And so, instead of gathering in a temporary desert city with a thousand glitterheads, Gerry found himself heading north. In his beat-up sedan, Amos led the way on a highway that cut through rusted cliffs and jagged escarpments marbled with various eras. They drove past feedlots, adobes with turquoise doors, and unfinished Earthships, the solar-earth shelters tiered into the sides of thirsty hills.
In Denver, Elliott announced he was out. He’d go to Burning Man without them.
When the train arrived, the doors wheezed open to let people off, then sat idle.
‘So, see you later, Skippy,’ Elliott said, propping his sunglasses up on his hair. His lashes, thickened with mascara, hung like awnings over his brown eyes. Gerry looked at the ground, at his cowboy boots. He couldn’t say anything.
‘Don’t be a cock,’ Elliott scolded, loud and haughty. Gerry blushed. People were watching them, corners of their mouths turned down in disgust. He felt it then, the menace and malice, a barely contained tolerance, how it seeped towards Elliott. He hadn’t noticed it before, how Elliott deflected it. ‘Eyes and teeth,’ he often said, tapping the side of his brow near his eyes and the enamel on his teeth as if turning them on, his eyes instantly sparkling, lips wide. Gerry felt ashamed. His loyalty was thin. He had sniffed the air and fallen in line without even realising it. Elliott had sensed it, too.
Don’t be a cock. Gerry took a breath and looked at Elliott. He laughed, seeing himself suddenly. A kid dressed up as a cowboy.
‘What?’ demanded Elliott. ‘What’s so funny?’
Gerry shook his head. He felt a bolt of love for Elliott and put his hand on the man’s cheek. ‘Nothing,’ he said, smiling. Amos, he thought, was a prick for not playing along. His father would have done the same. Maybe worse. Gerry felt a tiny burst of bravery. So fucking what? Who cared what his father or Amos would do, would think? He pulled Elliott close, clutching his mauve waist, and put his lips on his. He felt the surprise in Elliott and the ripple of disgust around them. Elliott closed his silvery, powdered eyes, and when they separated, he opened them, throwing his head back, his laugh filling the station. Gerry grinned. Elliott looked at Eva before pulling her in for a hug. ‘We brought him up good,’ he said teasingly.