by Kim Barnes
Charlene and I smoked together, filling our ashtray with her lipstick-kissed Winstons and my Virginia Slims.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Charlene said.
I stubbed out one cigarette and lit another, as I’d learned to do when the talk turned serious. “I don’t know. How men are.”
Charlene laughed. She believed in keeping her men guessing. “Got to give them a little, but not too much,” she’d say, and even though I knew some women were capable of such magic, I also knew that I wasn’t one of them. I was no good at the games, the push and pull, the approach and retreat.
“When Tony gets home,” Charlene said, “he’s going to fill me so full.…” She gave a tight moan and closed her eyes. Then she began to laugh, that deep, rolling laugh that anyone could see was honest, and pretty soon we were both laughing, slumped sideways in the booth, the men at the bar grinning, shaking their heads, and the bartender saying, “Somebody better buy those ladies a drink.”
We drank until there was no rum left, then stumbled into the night, rummaging through our purses for keys. I made it home and into my bathroom before getting sick. I clung to the porcelain, intent on keeping the walls still long enough so I could fall asleep or pass out or do whatever it took to stop the roiling deep in my gut.
I wiped my mouth, blew my nose, looked at myself in the mirror. Strands of hair stuck to the sides of my face. Mascara and eye shadow smeared my temples; spittle shone on my chin. I didn’t care. Who was I afraid might see me, anyway?
I slipped to the floor, rested on the green throw rug my mother had given me, then covered myself with a towel, still damp from that morning’s bath. Knees drawn tight against my chest, I shivered beneath the white brilliance of the two bare bulbs on either side of the mirror, wishing for 7-Up and saltines, my mother’s cure for stomachache. I longed for her cool hand, her voice telling me I’d feel better soon. I thought of her lying in bed next to my father, and I felt a sharp pang of loneliness. When either of them was ill, the other was always there, bringing bowls of Campbell’s soup, offering toast and sweet tea. How much was it worth to have such a companion, someone to care for you, someone to brush the hair from your forehead?
I thought about the guy in the ’Vette. He was not my type, not jockish or boy-next-door cute, yet I felt drawn to him for reasons I could not name. Years later, I would meet women who would have wanted him immediately, women whose dreamed-of lovers bore the deep marks of hard living, dangerous to the core. I’d told Charlene that there was something about him that intrigued me. It wasn’t just the car or his attention. Something I sensed more than saw, a kind of familiar intimacy. He made me feel funny, like he knew something about me, like there was this secret.
At the bar, I’d whispered to Charlene what I had gleaned from his deposit slip and account information: his name was David M. Jenkins. He lived at 542 Meadowlark Lane, Apartment C. I knew that he had $3,987.55 in checking and over $1,000 in savings, which seemed like a lot of money to me. I knew his paychecks came out of Oregon and that he was much older than I was.
What I didn’t know was that he was a long-haul truck driver with a speed habit and an envelope full of Quaaludes, that he knew more about guns, traps, and pelts than any man I had ever met, that he had a great horned owl mounted on his wall and a pistol under his pillow. That the Corvette was not his, and that what he knew about me had nothing to do with money or age and everything to do with the hunt: he had chosen me. He was waiting, watching me more carefully than I could ever imagine.
WHEN THE FLOWERS CAME—A DOZEN long-stemmed red roses spraying their scent into the bank’s lobby—Mr. Paul could barely contain his distaste. When customers asked who the flowers were from, I said, “David,” as though his name were already familiar and expected.
I took the roses home and set them on the small dinette. Their color, gaudy and warm, brightened the room. Several days later the Corvette was back at my window.
“Do you like steak and lobster?”
I nodded at David from my post at the drive-through, trying to remember if I had ever eaten lobster.
“Tuesday night?”
“I have karate lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
David raised an eyebrow. “Black belt yet?”
“Not yet.” I wished that he would take my cue and lower his voice, which boomed from the single speaker. Mr. Paul had noticed the length and probable inappropriateness of our conversation and was craning his neck my way. I pushed the drawer further out.
“Wednesday?” he asked. Smoke from his cigarette wafted into the bin.
“Sure. Okay.” I scribbled my address on a debit slip and pushed it against the window for him to read. He did not bother to write it down, and I wondered how he would remember it.
“See you at seven.” He winked, then motored casually out of the lot. I turned to see the entire line of tellers staring at me. I shrugged, grinning, until Mr. Paul clapped his hands twice, sending us all back to our ten-keys.
FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW I watched the Corvette pull into the driveway, saw David step from the car and straighten. His height startled me. I was used to tall men—John, my father, my uncles and brother all over six feet—but not to David, who beat them by several inches, whose wrists and ankles showed long and lean beyond his cuffs. “Built for speed, not comfort,” he joked, and I liked that he could laugh at himself.
He opened the Corvette’s passenger door, which swung out wide and low. He kept his window cracked enough to draw out the smoke. He didn’t gun the car across the bridge but steered it smoothly through traffic, content with his control. As we talked I studied the hard angles of his face, the thin length of his legs. He was nothing like John. I liked his full, eye-wrinkling smile, the roughness of his skin—proof that he’d seen some things, knew what mattered.
Cedars III was as plush as restaurants got in the valley—red carpet, heavy drapes, more silverware than I knew what to do with. Miniature loaves of dark bread came on little wooden boards. I remembered the first time I had been in the restaurant: prom night with John, who had thought the small brown loaf a potato and reprimanded the waitress for bringing him a spud he hadn’t ordered. I rolled my eyes at the memory.
“What are you thinking?” David asked.
“Nothing, really. Do you come here a lot?”
He grinned. “Haven’t been, but I think I will.”
He might have said more, reached across the white linen tablecloth and touched my hand, but he didn’t. He left it that way, a hint of expectation. Instead, we began to get acquainted, and soon our talk turned toward an interest we shared: the woods and the ways of the hunt.
He seemed delighted by my knowledge of the outdoors. He listened and agreed or disagreed, and then we fell into jocular argumentation about whitetail versus muleys, bolt-action versus pump.
When David told me about his work, the semi-truck he drove from Lewiston to Seattle one night, then back the next, with a few days off between trips, I was again reminded of my father. But there was a difference: I noted the dark circles beneath David’s eyes, the eyes themselves shot through with red. His shirt was wrinkled; he needed a haircut. My mother would have seen it immediately: he had no woman at home.
We ate the thick tenderloins rare, the way he said they needed to be. The lobster tail we dipped in little pots of melted butter, kept warm over candles. I loved it, loved the way the flesh melted on my tongue. It was white, firm, succulent, I thought, and looked up to find David watching me, leaned back and smiling. I saw then what the evening might cost.
But I was wrong. That night David walked me to my door, told me how much he’d enjoyed my company, then turned away without a touch. I watched him pull out of the driveway and disappear around the corner. I was surprised and relieved but also concerned. In my experience with men, satisfaction with my presence had always expressed itself in the physical: if the night had gone well, the man would at least attempt some contact, and I would have the choice of demurring or
acquiescing. David’s simple exit had left me feeling empty, unsettled, as though the play had ended without its final scene.
Inside my apartment, I flipped on the TV, then turned it off. I paced the length of the small rooms. I ran a bath, covered my face with the steaming washrag. I wondered if he would call me again.
THURSDAY EVENING I pulled on my stiff white gia and knotted the sash showing my rank in the martial art of Do Shin Kan. It made me feel stronger to learn the kicks and parries, but it was the kata I most enjoyed—geometric dance, the grace and force of contained movement, the wide arcs and small circles our feet and fists made through air. The sparring I liked least, always a little afraid of the men I fought, whose height and weight made me desperate to kick and run. I came home bruised—my forearms from blocking, my sides from blows I should have deflected. The skin of my knuckles broke and scarred from hours spent boxing a tape-wrapped plank. Even the rubber-bladed knives with which we mimed battle caught me with their spurred edges, scratching more than cutting—long, shallow wounds that stained my gia with blood.
I loved the discipline, the will it took, the concentration, the denial of pain, and I loved the mysticism—the meditation a kind of prayer. In the gym with the lights off, the glow of the streetlamps shut out by the heavy, industrial shades, we sparred blind.
“Listen,” our sensei would whisper, “and you will hear the muscle tense, you will feel the passage a sleeve makes through air.”
Afterward we sat cross-legged on the floor, concentrating on the dark. “You must find a place to go to, where your mind can be soothed, where the wind is a comfort, the water tranquil, the air warm and sweet.” I closed my eyes and went back to the woods, to the meadow and stream, the breeze spiced with camas.
“Breathe with your stomach,” the sensei said. He touched me where my rib cage ended and the softness of my belly began. “Here,” he said, and I made my muscles tighten against his hand.
I pulled the air in, pushed the air out, until my pulse slowed and the blood that rushed through my ears was the brush of pine against pine, the sound the caddis made when I was ten and the day held still so that I might listen, my head laid back and resting in grass, the grass so high that no one could see me there, a girl stretching lean to welcome the sun.
My guns, my knives, my feet and fists—I thought I might keep myself safe. Had I forgotten the books, the stories I had learned? The fruit of the tree, ripe and unblemished, the snake. Leda beneath a summer sky, its clouds gathering low like swan’s wings. The spring’s new flowers, the ones Persephone pulled from the earth, meaning only to breathe in their sweetness. I had forgotten that things are not always as they seem—that what catches you can come in light, bearing no weapons, open, alluring, calling your name.
DAVID DECIDED our next date would be to the woods. I could hardly wait to feel the cool canopy of trees, to walk the hills where bear had clawed through heart-rotted cedar in search of grubs. He picked me up in a new four-wheel-drive Ford with a matching canopy, an eight-thousand-pound Warn winch on the bumper: he was prepared for the rutted roads, the deep pockets of mud left by spring thaw. I handed him the Ithaca shotgun John had bought me for Christmas—the stock with its lovely grain, the breech so finely en-graved—and felt a moment’s regret. But its worth to me now had to do not with John but with David, who admired the gun but didn’t ask how I came to have it. There was very little he asked, and his willingness to keep our attention on the present comforted me: my teenage romances had begun to seem juvenile and embarrassing. I wanted this older man to see me as mature, a worthwhile companion.
We drove south along the edge of the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, climbing toward the summit of Winchester Grade, onto the Camas Prairie. From the high flats the land looks unbroken; only when we reached the lip of the wide, millennial cuts could we see the abrupt drop-off of long-worked fields into basalt canyons, miles of hidden draws, home to whitetail and bobcat. But it was spring, and other than a few magpies rowing through the air with their black-and-white wings, we had little on which to aim our guns. We stood at the edge of a meadow near the crossroads settlement of Melrose, and I followed David’s lead, blowing the early monarchs and lacewings into velvet tatters. I remember being made uneasy by such casual cruelty, but I dared not protest. Just as when I’d watched John sight in the starlings and inky ravens, I knew that any emotional response on my part would compromise the place I held in the company of men.
As we drove the gravel roads, David told me he had been raised in Lewiston. Some of his family lived up north, where the best hunting could be found: deer, elk, bear, grouse, moose if you drew a tag. He said he hunted coyotes to bring in extra money, that he hoped the coming winter would be as the Farmer’s Almanac had promised: long and hard. Cold more than anything brought on the best pelts. Maybe, he said, he’d take me with him.
I’d done my share of varmint shooting from roadsides and pickup windows, even as I secretly longed to let the coyotes be. I admired their efficiency, the way they multiplied and prospered despite the ranchers’ poisons. I loved the way they materialized from roadside brush, the way they loped across the sage and rocks, especially the way their single voices rose together in mezzosoprano yips, raucous and joyful and pleased with the moon. Still, I said yes, I would go with him and learn how to fashion a blind of snow and branches, how to wrap my rifle in a torn white sheet, how to blend into the landscape and make the sounds of wounded prey and wait for the coyotes to come.
We talked of range and trajectory, camouflage and blinds. But if David was impressed with my woodsman’s knowledge, he didn’t say so but simply nodded, as my father might. There was, in fact, much about him to remind me of my father. He smoked with the same casual intensity, had about him the same air of self-possession, the kind of near-arrogance backed with quietude that seems to suggest strength. Physically, he was taller, thinner, and not nearly so handsome. But their eyes were the same—clear, sapphire blue.
David, like my father, was a curious, engaged observer of the world. He’d read many of the same books on supernatural phenomena that I had, and he added to his firsthand knowledge of the ways of animals by referring to his extensive library of texts on the habits of prey, tanning techniques, big-game tales. He spent a great deal of time contemplating possibility, applying his analytical mind to various problems and projects. During the long drives across the mountains and flatlands of northern Idaho, David and I would take turns debunking each other’s theories on creation, evolution, ESP, extraterrestrial life.
Did I tell David about the miracles of my past, how I had once felt the rush of heat in my hands as I prayed for the sick, how I’d spoken in tongues and believed in the guidance of angels? Did we talk of God, Heaven, the Hell we might burn in? If so, I don’t remember, but I remember instead the games we played, badgering each other’s logic, challenging proof. And I think of how I’ve always been eager for a round of debate, how, as a girl, it was then that I felt my father’s greatest approval—when the gifts of good grades and exemplary behavior, even the gift of my child’s embrace, were not enough. What my father wanted from me were my moments of intellectual awareness, when he could see the workings of my mind. “Think,” he would say, his eyes narrowing. It was not a directive but a command. “You go think.” Only when I had come to a logical insight or conclusion would I come back, and then there would be the reward of his smile.
Over the next several weeks, as David and I spent more and more time together, I told him about my father, our alienation. I told him about John, how everything had changed after Brock’s accident. What little David told me of his life came in bits: he’d been married for a short while to a woman with three children; his mother and younger sisters still lived in Lewiston, in the house where he had been raised; his father had left the family years before. It had been up to him to provide, to bring home the seasonal kill to keep the long months’ hunger at bay.
David knew the old homesteads where trees still bore the dwarfi
sh fruit whose sweet decay brought deer to feed. He could project and intersect the lope of a spooked whitetail, decide if and when a buck would come back to its favored thrashing tree. I marveled at the practiced way he moved through the rough hedges of hackberry, the way his mouth dropped open to listen for the snap of a twig, the brush of a flank against pine.
When he told me that the Corvette had been borrowed from a friend, I didn’t care; I was coming to like him much better behind the wheel of his own Ford four-wheel-drive. He took me deeper into the mountains, along the breaks of the Salmon and the Snake. I packed bologna sandwiches, and we ate them sitting on the pickup’s tailgate, looking out over Idaho to the Wallowa Range of Oregon. It was there, open to miles and miles of wilderness, that David gave me one of the few stories I would ever hear him tell—how, as a teenager, he had traveled with two schoolmates over the same rutted roads, scanning the hillsides for game. The boy in the middle, afraid to pass up a close kill, had kept his rifle in hand, balanced between his knees, barrel pointed upward.
David recalled the deafening noise of the discharge but not stopping the pickup, only that he opened the door and fell to the ground, wounded and bleeding. He understood first that the rifle had gone off, then that the blood that covered his face and arms was both his and not his: the bullet had entered under the other boy’s chin, sending out shards of bone.
I imagined the one slumped forward against the pickup’s dash, his face gone. Miles from a phone and no choice but for the two left alive to crawl back in beside their friend. I didn’t ask how it felt to do that—spattered with bits of cartilage and brain, trying to remember the familiar road that would lead them out of the forest.