In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  His legs went weak. He sagged against the cabinet and slid to the floor, one arm stretched up and grasping the handle of a cabinet drawer. He saw her pale hands withdraw into shadow, and in the silence that followed he thought—he swore—he heard the wet smack of the tiger’s jaws. Like a drum in his head, his own heartbeat, slowing. Then, tiny and distant, a snatch of song from the Wurlitzer in the bar: a man-woman duet, the bright patter of a xylophone.

  “This sad little shell. You carry your home on your back.”

  And now she was bending over him, her arms encircling him, lifting him from the floor as if he were a child. The locket she wore brushed his cheek.

  He felt a cry rising in his throat, a cry that had been years building, building all his life, ever since he was a boy and he had seen a spot of blood on his father’s undershirt, the morning after his mother left forever—all her music burned, a heap of melted plastic—but what came out of him when he opened his mouth, thinking his vocal cords might just burst with the force of it, was barely a moan, low and pitiful.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know. But you don’t have to be afraid now. You’re so special. So precious.”

  She held him close and somehow lifted him up into his narrow sleeping berth, placing him in his own bed, where she removed his hat and lay beside him and cradled him, and the soft press of her breast through her cotton dress against his cheek reminded him of all the old songs, the ones she played, the ones she loved, his bare feet atop hers as they had danced.

  “No other woman ever saw so much of the man, child, or stranger called Travis Stillwell,” Rue said, smoothing his hair with her hand. “We are kindred spirits.”

  He was trembling and he had not trembled like this for a very long time.

  “We are kin.”

  Her hand slipped down to the handle of his knife, closing around the eagle’s head, and as she slid the blade from its scabbard, he saw its glint in the orange light leaking through the cracked sleeper window.

  “Oh Travis,” she said. “Everything we’ve ever lost will be found.”

  He closed his eyes and let this, her final promise, take him.

  I

  The Sundowner Inn

  Sunday

  October 5

  The boy sat in church clothes on the steps of the farmhouse, a white rabbit in his lap. He tumbled the rabbit in his arms, cradled it, all the while looking out from the wide morning shade of the porch to a spot far down the grassy hill, where his mother now stood, her back to him, the wind pulling at the hem and sleeves of her Sunday dress, the one with the yellow birds over blue and the high lace collar. She stood like a steel bolt set on end, balanced and still.

  Earlier, the woman and the boy had looked out together from inside the house, from behind a shut screen door. Staring out. A pickup was parked in the gravel lot behind the motel. A cabover camper sat on its back. The camper was filmed in orange road dust, a single long crack in the sleeper window. The crack was sealed with duct tape. There were six other hookups behind the Sundowner, and all of them, like the motel itself, were empty.

  The woman had put her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Stay,” she’d told him. “And don’t come down less I call.” She had looked at him, and the boy had nodded, a red clip-on tie in one hand, his shirt collar buttoned tight. After that, his mother had kissed him atop his head and pushed through the door, fly-screen slapping behind her. She went down the hill in bold, long strides.

  The boy ran through the house and out the back and past the clothesline, past the old windmill and tank, and into the small, tin-roofed shed, where in the dark the two white Netherland dwarf rabbits sat in wire cages atop a makeshift work table the boy’s father had built. Both nibbling fresh cabbage stems. The boy scooped the female from her cage—a warm, white handful—and went round the corner of the house, and when he saw his mother at the foot of the hill, he sat down on the porch steps to wait and watch, holding the rabbit close.

  Today of all days, the boy thought. He ran his hands through the rabbit’s fur. She better not take anything for granted. It could be any mean son of a bitch in that thing.

  His mother turned in the scant brown grass and when she saw the boy on the steps with his rabbit she waved.

  The boy waved back.

  Annabelle Gaskin stood in the sage at the edge of the motel, one hand shielding her eyes from the morning sun, the other clenching and unclenching a fold of dress at her side. The wind pushed tumbleweeds across the fields and highway and gathered them like wayward chicks beneath the brick portico of the old filling station that was the motel’s office and cafe. The farmhouse cat, an orange tabby with a bobbed tail and a leaky eye, sat on the concrete pump island, licking its paw. Atop the station’s roof, what was left of a great winged horse—a white Pegasus of molded concrete—reared, the right hind leg little more than a bone of rebar below the fetlock. In the horse’s long morning shadow: the RV lot, the camper and pickup.

  Annabelle turned her gaze from the pickup to the west, where a cloud the color of a bruise was spreading over the low, dry hills. Rain had passed the valley by for ages now, great dark thunderheads to the west and south always breaking up, moving on. What had the old minister said, three weeks past, Annabelle’s hand trembling in his?

  “Do not be afraid, pobrecita. All will be made new. All will be washed clean.”

  Annabelle looked back to the pickup. She clenched the dress at her side and chewed her lip and thought, resentfully, that her entire life had been a series of things to take care of. Most of them owing to the foolishness of men. Men who promised comfort like it was a thing that could come from the sky and not the workings of their own hands, their own hearts. She let go her dress and smoothed the fabric beneath her palms. Looked over her shoulder to her son. Annabelle saw the boy holding his rabbit and knew that he was anxious, and though she waved and smiled and he waved back, she felt her son’s unease creep around her like a chill. No warm creature to hold against her own breast, she set out across the field to knock on the camper’s door.

  Travis Stillwell woke from a dream of empty rooms in a decrepit house where open doors led to nothing but darkness and the hallways were thick with the smells of fresh earth and kerosene. He sat up on one elbow in his narrow berth and drew his boot-socked feet along the edge of the mattress, the crown of his head just touching the metal ceiling. The world was dim, unfocused. His head throbbed, as if with drink. He coughed on a bad taste in his mouth, like pennies, and spat a quarter-sized dollop of red phlegm at the linoleum below. He stared at this for a while, then fished for the pack of cigarettes he kept in the right breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Except for the shirt and socks, he was naked. His jeans had been tossed over an open cabinet door. He shook out a cigarette and drew it from the pack with his lips and reached for the jeans, where he kept a plastic lighter in the front hip pocket.

  Travis saw a long red smear from the third knuckle of his hand to the crook of his thumb and index finger.

  He dropped the pack of smokes, turned his hand over.

  The whole of his palm and the underside of every finger were sticky red. Rust-colored crescents beneath every nail.

  Blood.

  He turned his hand before his face in the dim light like a guilty man’s nightmare. Not a dream, he thought. The textures were too harsh, too gritty. His throat felt like fine-grained sandpaper.

  The air in the camper was thin, had a stale stink. He could smell himself, a days-old funk of night-sweats and booze and tar and smoke and—

  death

  —blood.

  Christ, he thought.

  A flutter of panic in his chest: what had happened last night?

  Last night, last night.

  He thought the words over and over, closing his fingers, opening them.

  He couldn’t remember. Last night was a black hole punched through his head.

  Cigarette unlit between his lips, lighter forgotten, he rolled out of the bunk and dropped to the fl
oor.

  A fierce, bright pain shot through his leg.

  Travis cried out and staggered and the camper and pickup rocked.

  A metal pot fell from where it hung above the stove.

  He shot a hand out to steady himself, made a red handprint on the white vinyl of the dinette seat at his back. Here, by the hutch window, the light was brighter—through the thin drapes he could see a cinder-block building painted a fading pink—so he put his leg up on the padded seat and examined it, cigarette still clamped in his mouth. Sweat popped all over him when he saw it. His inner left thigh down to his knee was the color of rust where it looked as if a bucket of his own blood had dried. The flesh near the juncture of leg and groin was swollen and red, the skin broken by a ragged half-moon ring of six punctures, each shallow and crusted over. Below this: a single raw, angry slit, about two inches long.

  A smiling pink mouth.

  Travis pressed his fingers around the wound. The flesh was hot and throbbing.

  He looked around the camper. He was alone. Whatever had done this, whatever had brought him here—wherever here is—it was gone, like the morning’s dreams, swallowed by the ever-rising tide of light outside the camper.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm.

  He put his leg down and sat in the dinette.

  Hunched forward over his knees.

  Heart pounding.

  Travis took the cigarette from his mouth and got up and spat twice in the kitchen sink, more red. He sat in the dinette seat again. He put the cigarette between his lips, took it out, saw the blood on it, saw his fingerprints on the filter. He broke the cigarette, threw it away.

  Stared down at the slit in his leg.

  Touched it again.

  He said aloud, “Ever thing I ever lost.”

  He had no idea what the words meant, and they left behind a kind of vacuum.

  In the narrow toilet at the back of the camper, he rummaged a tiny bottle of antiseptic out of a drawer. Hitching his leg onto the commode, he slathered reddish-brown ointment over the wound. When he was finished, he couldn’t tell what was medicine and what was blood. He capped the bottle and made to set it on the rim of the sink, but his hands were shaking, and the bottle fell from the lavatory and spilled in a brown wash across the floor. He ignored it and tried the hot water. Nothing: no hookup, no supply. He tried to think back, past the morning’s dream. To the night before. Before sleep. Before—

  her

  —here.

  Her.

  Who?

  He looked up and saw his reflection in the vanity above the sink.

  Travis cried out and shrank away, his back thudding against the wood paneling of the narrow toilet.

  The mirror was broken, cracked in three places, and in the shards he saw the face of the man he had always seen in mirrors, the man who steals my face. Sharp cheekbones and a squared jaw and two hollow eyes, a face that had always seemed like a stranger’s staring back, searching Travis’s own eyes for something lost, something that would never be found. But now, God help him, now there was something new, new and awful like the blood on his hand and leg and the taste of metal in his mouth. A thinness to the flesh, like scraped paint. The reflection seemed to shimmer, or stutter, like a light on the brink. It was unnatural and horrible-weird and made Travis queasy. He looked away and looked back and realized it was actually a kind of transparency: he could see through the reflection to the fake woodgrain of the paneling he pressed against in terror.

  And his eyes.

  Christ a-mighty, what was wrong with his eyes?

  He lunged out of the toilet, heart rabbiting, the taste of copper in his mouth suddenly overpowering, gagging. He clambered for a jug of distilled water from beneath the kitchenette sink. Tilted his head back and drank and spat, not swallowing. Drank, spat. His stomach curled. He poured the water over his face and stood there with it running down, eyes shut. The blood on his hands thinning along the plastic jug and dripping onto the floor.

  “Shh,” he said to himself.

  Shh. Shh. Shh.

  After a while, when his breathing had slowed and his stomach was no longer pitching and rolling, he opened his eyes and looked back to his bed, to the berth where he had slept. The morning light had penetrated into the camper and glowed along the arched metal walls of the berth, and there, now, Travis saw long fans of blood drying in the shapes of splayed handprints. A left hand, large and masculine, his own. A right hand, smaller, the fingers narrow and tapered, a woman’s—

  What did you do?

  Blood on the sheets, staining the foam mattress.

  I didn’t, I wouldn’t—

  Blood on the quilt bunched at the foot of the bed, old and threadbare, a patchwork of desert roses, cacti, big white moons soaked red.

  Not like this, no. So much blood, not like this—

  Travis set the jug of water aside and fumbled his jeans from the cabinet door near the bunk. His scabbard was hooked to his belt, but there was no knife—

  No body. Two, three, how many now, but not like this—

  He pulled on his jeans and looked up at the sleeping berth and saw it: his Ka-Bar, lodged in the ceiling above the mattress, near the small air vent that was cranked open. He took one, two steps up the ladder to the berth, careful to keep his weight off his bad leg, and yanked the knife from the tin. Reversed the blade in his hand, angled down, a loose grip.

  Dried blood along the blade.

  The slit in his thigh.

  Is it me? Is all of it me?

  He put the knife in the scabbard and held the ladder with both hands, knuckles white. He shook like a man in the throes of a fit. He put his right hand in his mouth and bit down, hard, into the soft flesh at the base of his thumb.

  Show me, he thought he heard. A woman’s voice. Show me, killer.

  Someone knocked on his door.

  He bit harder, managed not to scream.

  Annabelle rapped three times and stood waiting, the wind pulling at her dress and hair. There was a stillness about the camper that unsettled her. A sense of eyes upon her from behind darkened panes of glass. A voice that was not her own sprang into her mind like a cat, an old woman’s voice made rough by cigarettes and the long, slow heave of dying: Ninny. It was her mother’s voice, and it was followed by a series of harsh barks, what had passed for laughter in the old woman’s final days, ending in a fractured cough and the sudden, bright hiss of oxygen.

  “Ninny,” Annabelle muttered, speaking the word to herself as if to weigh it upon some scale, to judge its heft and value. No, she thought. Not today. She stepped forward and knocked once more, loudly, then took three steps back.

  The camper shifted on its struts.

  From inside came the scrape of boots, the light clink of a belt buckle fastening.

  The wind blew Annabelle’s hair into her face, so she gathered it back into a knot behind her head and crossed her arms to wait.

  When the door opened, the man who emerged from the camper was tall and skinny and bleary-eyed. His face was thin but youthful, his cheekbones high. He had hollow eyes and a few days’ stubble and a cowlick the size of the panhandle. She made him thirty, give or take. He wore jeans and a denim coat with a sheepskin collar, and the coat was buttoned tight. The fingernails of his left hand were caked black. He was barefoot.

  Annabelle did not wait for him to speak. “Hookup and electric run you ten a night,” she said. “You want to stay longer, you pay in advance.”

  He put his forearm up against the morning sun and squinted at her.

  She thought to say more, to ask questions, demand answers, but she did not. Instead, she waited. Let the wind churn the silence between them.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was surprisingly deep but soft, little more than a mumble. “What is this place?”

  She started to answer, then stopped. He was edging back from the threshold into shadow, as if retreating from the light. The man hugged himself, despite the denim coat. He k
ept his eyes cast down.

  Annabelle said, “This is my place.”

  The man’s eyes flicked up, met hers, then moved past her, to the house at the top of the hill. “What day is it?” he asked.

  Drunk, she thought. Pulled off the first place he could. “It’s Sunday,” she said.

  “How long I been here?”

  “Bout ten dollars’ worth,” she said.

  Just then a stiff gust of wind snagged the rank, days-old smell of sweat and cigarettes and yanked it from the camper, blew it over Annabelle like a blanket, and she had to turn her head and swallow her gorge. When she looked back, the man had receded fully into the gloom of the camper. She watched through the open doorway as he rummaged in an overhead cabinet. It was hardly no space at all, this camper. She saw dirty dishes stacked in one half of the sink and clothes draped over open cabinet doors. She smelled mildew. A curtain made of a blue bed sheet and twine tied between two cabinets had been hung across the sleeping berth. The fabric was thin and worn. From above the sink, the man took down a Folger’s coffee can. He opened it and dumped the contents onto the range, spilling two bills and a handful of coin, most of which ended up on the floor or beneath the twin burners of the cooktop.

  Ain’t no way for a grown man to live.

  The man stared at the pennies and nickels and dimes for a while. He moved them around with his finger. He said to Annabelle, “I’m gone be short.”

  The boy returned from the shed in back of the farmhouse, dusting white fur from his dress slacks. When he had seen his mother and the man from the camper go walking round the front of the motel, out of the shadow of the winged horse and into the light, the two of them driving the orange cat from where it lay in the sun by the pumps to flee beneath the boardwalk, his mother had waved at him a second time, and so he had gone to put the rabbit back in her cage. He had fed both rabbits more cabbage and half a stick of celery each through a hatch in the side of the mesh wire. Now, he leaned against the rear fender of his mother’s station wagon, which was parked in the drive alongside the house. He watched, impatient that something was happening down at the motel without him.