In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  To Austin. A trailer park on a hill, campers and RVs littering the slope like gravestones sunk at odd angles in the earth. He is not here, she knows, almost instantly. She feels his absence keenly, suddenly, like bursting through a door to find naught but an empty room. But here she stands on a length of sandy sidewalk by a stretch of broken picket fence, looking up at the trailers and the cottonwood trees and the tufts of weed growing among the roots, and it is here that the blood has brought her. And there is something else, she realizes: a soreness in her chest. In his chest. Another woman, Rue thinks, closing her eyes. I can see her. Like the first, she’s young and pretty and sad and used, the kind of woman men fight over only to bury. The belt had slipped with this one, and the woman kicked him in the breastbone. Rue puts her hand over her heart, rubs flesh and bone and feels the ache of the bruise as she moves quietly up the drive to a mobile home the color of chalk.

  This one.

  Yellow police tape crisscrosses the front door, so she goes around to the back of the trailer and stands on a milk crate and breaks a window. Reaches in, unclasps the lock, and slips in over the sill, being careful of the broken glass.

  She sees the place where the body was found in the living room, now just an empty swath of carpet. But she can see the woman still, somehow, sprawled on the floor, one leg thrown up on the couch. Naked, like the one in Grandview. She has a birthmark on the back of her left calf, a wine-colored stain the size and shape of a postage stamp.

  Rue blinks.

  The body is gone.

  She moves slowly through the trailer, finds evidence in a kitchen stack of mail that the woman, Tanya Wilson, worked at a local electric cooperative. Rue sifts through bills and credit card statements and advertisements for a local car dealership. Grocery circulars. The mail is heaped high and crooked and unread, spilling into the floor. The accumulation of neglect, the rising tide of the mundane.

  The bedroom walls are bare, the floor messy. Undergarments tossed in a pile in a corner of the room, brassieres draped over the iron bedstead.

  She was not all of her, Rue thinks, but she was part of her. Just as the one in Fort Worth was part of her.

  The one he lost.

  Her.

  She closes her eyes and reaches out, tries to find him once again. She listens for the hum of tires on asphalt, the creak of the metal camper rocking over every rut. The fan belt screeching, his voice singing quietly with the radio.

  Now, nothing.

  He is gone.

  She will always be a step behind, always among the detritus of his passing, and he will not leave blood behind again. He is careful now, because Tanya Wilson had not been dead, though he had thought she was, and she had mustered the strength when the belt had slackened to kick him like an angry, bull-headed horse. Without his blood to taste again, the bond between them will fade into white, inscrutable static. Into silence. And her eyes will never shine out green in glass again.

  Rue takes the tissue from her pocket and touches the dried blood to her tongue, and though it is faint and stale, and the Kleenex dissolves, she feels him. Hears his heart beating, pumping. She hears his tires and radio and the music of his voice, and she knows that if she feeds now, feeds heavy, grows stronger than she ever has before, she will be able to close her eyes and cross the great wide open valleys and mountains between them with little more than thought, an act of will, and when she opens her eyes, she will be with him.

  She sits on the edge of a sunken sofa in Tanya Wilson’s living room and stares down at the naked expanse of carpet and recalls the clear green eyes that had stared back at her from a mirror in a dead woman’s apartment. I will find him, she thinks.

  Outside, the sun is coming up, and so she goes into the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, and there she curls up on the ratty carpet and sleeps.

  Along Highway 90

  October 4

  Blood.

  A dark wave washing over.

  Into.

  Through.

  Filling her.

  Drowning her.

  Mother.

  She drinks her cowboy to the edge of his life.

  Mother, don’t.

  His slow, rhythmic pulse in her skull.

  Please.

  Veins in her throat and chest and arms and legs expanding, arteries rushing afresh.

  I’m sorry I love you I love you.

  Her face buried in his thigh, her tongue probing soft tissue, gash.

  Mommy.

  She closes her eyes, swallows, the red-hot heavy pleasure of it. Sinking into him like a stone.

  A woman, she sees, an apparition from his mind, merging with and emerging from her own, the blood flowing, mixing, his becoming hers. A woman in a white dress. A summer dress. Mommy. The flowers on the dress are yellow. Toenails painted red, small white feet sinking into carpet. The cowboy’s last thought before death: he is a boy standing on these feet, his small arms tight around a slender waist, he and his mother dancing in a gray living room on a gray afternoon and his mother smiles, and her smile is a lie. Rue feels it, his comprehension of the lie. As the blood slows like a tap drained out, she knows that he knows the smile and the love are both lies, not the kind fashioned deliberately to pierce a heart like the sharp edge of the knife he carries in his leather holster, but the kind wielded carelessly, casually, the sort of lies the teller herself believes until—a memory now, his—Mommy sits crying in the street of a dusty town and the man she ran away with left us, and now she feels the cowboy’s pain, his sadness, so sweet and vile, like overripe figs burst upon the ground and drawing gnats.

  Her own pulse slowing, matching his.

  The pump of his heart spits a last hot gout, then churns silent.

  Blackness.

  Mommy?

  She moves gently over the wound. In the cowboy’s long sadness, his wandering misery, his stranger self’s errant desire to seek out the mother he lost and take some twisted vengeance upon her, to love her as she never loved him, to hurt her as she would always hurt him, in all of these contradictions and curses, he is filling, his blood a rich, luxurious drug, a luscious velvet, a liquid flame. She has eaten her weight in lesser blood since Austin and has crossed night and time to make him hers, and he is a balm. She draws away from his thigh and wipes her mouth with the back of her arm. There will always be a scar there now, she thinks, as there will always be a scar upon her throat where the man in the stovepipe hat cut her. And it will remind him, as mine reminds me. We are creatures of need. She reaches her other hand above her, to the ceiling of the sleeping perch, where the cowboy’s knife is lodged. She pulls it from the tin. Naked, he has bled onto the sheets. He is not in the world at all now. His member small and flaccid against his thigh. The cleanest smell, she thinks, of any man she has ever smelled.

  “I want you, Travis. I want you, my beautiful Travis. My killer. My kin.”

  She looks at her reflection in the blade of the knife: clear and solid and real. I am reborn, she thinks. The promise of everything once lost—beauty, love, a stomach full and warm with life—dawns inside her. She remembers her brother, Matthew, the clumsy way he had held the newborn pups, wet and rolled in sprigs of hay. How the pups had sought the bitch’s teats.

  “Oh, Travis,” she says. She holds the knife in her right hand and cups his cheek, strokes his cheekbone with the ball of her thumb. “I love you so much,” she whispers.

  She draws the blade across her nipple, opens the flesh of the areola.

  The knife she sticks back in the ceiling, punching the blade through the tin.

  She slips alongside him and cups one hand gently beneath the base of his skull, guides his mouth to her bleeding breast. She holds him there and rests her cheek against the top of his head until she hears a single drumbeat, the engine of his life turning over, mortality straining toward her blood like a plant toward the light.

  His lips close around her.

  He begins to suck.

  After his lips, then come
his arms. They close about her in a fierce embrace. He moans, and soon she feels the warm firm press of him against her thigh. She reaches down and takes him in her hand and remembers her brother as she rolls onto him, puts him inside her, guides him to that place in herself that has not been warm for a very long time. He drinks at her breast and she moves against him, and she knows that, like she, he has only ever done this once before, frantically. In the cab of a pickup in the parking lot of a country fair but then it was wrong, the girl asking things he did not want, things with a belt. Rue moves slowly, tenderly, loving him with her body and her blood in a way that no other ever has or will. He comes quickly, but the warmth of it, the last human warmth he will ever shed, leaves her shivering against him, even as he wilts inside her.

  Through it all, he drinks, and afterward he is still drinking.

  “You are mine now,” she whispers against his scalp. “I have claimed you, and you are mine.”

  The fires inside begin to dim, what blood is left in her going cold. She pulls his head away from her breast before he can take it all—she has already given too much and will need reserves in the coming days and her body will not make more—and his face in the orange light slanting through the cracked sleeper window is the face of a child born beneath a caul and pulsing with its mother’s fluids. His eyes filled with blood, his lips smeared red. She wipes his face with the back of her right forearm and smiles. “You make your crossing,” she says, “and tomorrow you will be new. I carry you in my blood now. I have emptied you. You will forget me come the morning. But you will remember me soon enough. When you are hungry. And I will be with you then. And you with me.”

  He closes his eyes.

  She lowers him gently onto the sheets.

  “Only the blood makes us real,” she says. “Only the blood.”

  Hours later she wakes in the dark beside him, the urgent press of dawn’s cold fingers on the cabover windows. A strange new hurting deep in her bones and limbs and joints, a sharp pain at the very center of her like the slow twisting of a dull blade. She swings out of the berth and goes into the toilet to look at herself in the mirror and there is little more than a ghostly shimmer. A faint whisper of movement where her hand waves before the glass. Otherwise she is gone. She holds her hand above the sink and studies it. Her skin is dry and when she rubs her fingers together, the flesh peels up like old glue. Her throat is parched, as if she has not fed in weeks. She feels the coming dawn in her joints as an old woman feels the coming winter, and so she pulls herself up the ladder of the narrow berth and fishes the rabbit’s foot keychain from the pocket of the cowboy’s jeans. She climbs down the ladder, sluggish, pain in her knees and spine. She pulls on her crumpled dress and steps out of the camper and walks round to the pickup’s cab, barefoot. Her shadow long and thin in the orange lamplight. She opens the cab and climbs in, shaking, though the night air has already warmed in anticipation of the coming day. She grinds the pickup into gear.

  She is dry. Bled dry. It is all in him. She glances in the rearview mirror and sees her faint, faraway self, her eyes no color at all. She is a husk now. An empty skin. She hisses at the mirror, knocks it askew.

  It is a sacrificial sickness, she thinks. What I owe for his passage. He will feed, and I will grow strong again. As it was with her own pale man, the morning after the storm. He had found her an empty vessel shaped for love, and he had given her his blood, and when she had fed for the first time, he, too, had been restored.

  It is the only act of sacrifice our kind know.

  She drives west, putting the camper on the Ford’s back between her and the rising sun. She sees it coming in the side mirror. Has a thought that the sun is, in fact, chasing her. She cranks down the window and turns the mirror away.

  Six miles later, her vision is blurring red. She pulls off at an empty motel, around back, into a lot for campers. Where a pickup and RV will not be amiss. Where a motel owner might come and knock upon the door, and Rue’s cowboy, her killer, might feed, and then the two of them will grow strong again together in the sharing, the blood-begetting.

  The day’s light is cracking above the white farmhouse on the hill that overlooks the motel. Yes, she thinks, retreating into the camper. He will wake and feed and I will feed and we will be whole and real together. And he will love me, because I love him.

  But back inside the camper, she hesitates, gazes into the bathroom mirror once more, where now there is nothing to see but the dingy walls of the narrow toilet stall. She puts both hands on the edge of the sink and drives the top of her head into the glass. “I am still here,” she says out loud. Licking away the precious blood that drips down her face.

  And if he chooses not to love you? the empty mirror asks.

  She goes back to the berth, one foot dragging now, and looks up at the knife jammed in the tin above.

  He will love me, she thinks. He has to. He is kin.

  She looks down at the wide cabinet below the berth, large enough, dark enough. She crawls inside among the tanks and jugs and tools and shuts out the day.

  III

  Two White Rabbits

  Wednesday

  October 8

  Midday, the Gaskin woman brought Travis thirty dollars and called it his first pay in advance. He came down the ladder from painting trim along the boardwalk eaves, one of a dozen tasks she had written on a piece of paper and left clipped above the night-deposit box outside the office. She waited in the shade. He set his paint can on the ground and balanced the brush on the edge and wiped his hands on his shirt and took the money as she held it out.

  She pointed at the wrappings he still wore and said, “You’re free to work the place at night, you know. I got no objections to it. I’d rather that than you suffer in the sun.”

  “I might,” he said.

  “Take the rest of the day, if you want. Go on into town. Pick up some things.”

  “Obliged,” he said, tucking the money into his shirt pocket.

  She stood as if waiting for something to happen, and when it didn’t she went away.

  After the paint was put up in the closet out back, he lowered his camper’s steel legs and slid flat concrete blocks beneath each to keep them level. Moving the blocks was a chore. He was weak and the wrappings sometimes made it difficult to breathe as he went about in a chamber of his own foul breath, a chemical sweet tang. He fumbled with the jack in its compartment, almost dropped it. After three tries he got it set up and cranked the cabover off the ground. He drove his pickup slowly out from beneath the camper and turned the wide circle of the RV lot, rocks popping beneath his tires, then out onto the highway.

  He was not sorry to be leaving the camper behind. It had become den-like in its lingering stink of blood and rot.

  He had slept fitfully the night before, dreaming that something unknown stalked him through a dense copse of trees. His father was with him, and they were both carrying rifles, thirty-ought-sixes. They were dressed in hunter green and Travis was fourteen, and the woods were not the woods of the hill country northwest of Cole County where his father had once taken him, intent upon teaching the boy a lesson about the way men should be, but these were the steaming, hot woods of North Vietnam, where fat speckled snakes spooled out of trees that blocked the day and water dripped and plopped on palm fronds the size of kites, and there were unseen things with teeth and venom. He and his father moved quietly, their rifles tipped down toward the jungle floor, and Travis knew that a long dark shape was pacing them. He caught glimpses of it in his periphery, a black formless thing that wafted between the trees. A branch snapped beneath his boot and now they were in a forest of oaks and maples, bur and blackjack and honey locust with their dense thorns, and they came upon a great silver wolf yelping in a trap, its snout turned upon its own hind leg and dripping red as it tried to chew itself free. His father lifted his rifle. Travis reached for the barrel, and the barrel swung toward him and the gun went off and he woke. He woke with a sore jaw, the wound in his leg bleeding
.

  There was no more sleeping after that, so he got up and splashed water on his face at the kitchen sink and then went out and sat on the stoop of his camper, where the air was fresh and the night was alive with the sounds of the desert: the call and answer of coyotes, the rustle of wings, the scurry of mice in the fields. He heard these things and more. He heard the clatter of gravel in the parking lot as the wind blew across it, the static of the television up at the farmhouse, after the broadcast night had ended with the national anthem. The creak of floorboards in the house beneath the feet of the Gaskin woman, whose shape from time to time he caught passing behind the lighted window shades. At the sight of her, a rush of blood from his heart and a new, hungry ache in his jaw.

  He was hungry all the time, in fact, but he could not eat. He had tried a strip of beef jerky that morning, taken down from a tin in the camper, and the smell alone had caused his gorge to rise. He had carried the jerky in his pocket and tossed it to the orange cat when he saw it. His muscles ached and cramped and the wound on his thigh would not close up, though it did not always bleed. Rather, it oozed unpredictably, as if the blood inside his body now had some mysterious agenda all its own, and biology no longer had any part in it.

  The drive to town was not a long one, but it felt good to be moving, despite the sun. To hear the highway hum beneath his tires. It cheered him, as much as he could be cheered, until he passed a field, where grass grew green and a man-made lake with a fountain churned water that was an unnatural blue. Long metal buildings at the far side of the lake stood empty, marked with signs that read Swine, Cattle, Poultry. Fairgrounds, he thought, even before he saw the sign at the turnout, and he quickly looked away and thought not about the things that wanted to come into his head. In a few miles, he passed a white steepled church with a sign in Spanish, the fenced-in yard of a butane company, and then the city limits of Cielo Rojo.