“It’s yours,” Travis said. He put his belt back on and sat down in the swing.
Sandy stared at the knife and scabbard in his hands. “Why?”
“Ain’t it your birthday coming up?” Travis said.
Sandy blushed, then eased the knife a few inches out of the sheath.
“You use that to look out for you and your momma. You do that?”
Sandy nodded slowly.
“You reckon you’ll remember your friend Travis now?”
“I’ll remember you.”
“There’s a saying, man gives another man a knife, you give him a coin in return. You don’t, the friendship’s cut.”
“I ain’t got no coin,” Sandy said. “I’m in my underwear.”
“Well. You can owe me.”
Sandy ran his finger along the blade. “When you leave, will the monster leave with you?” he asked.
Travis tossed the nub of his cigarette out into the yard, where it glowed briefly, like a firefly, before fading. “Don’t you worry about her,” he said, staring at the camper. “She’s my trouble.”
She’s your Roscoe Jenkins, Sandy thought, but he did not say this because he thought it would sound stupid. Instead, he slid the knife back into the scabbard and looked up at Travis and saw that the cowboy had turned his gaze from the camper to the motel, everything beyond it dark save for a few small, warm circles cast by the sodium lamps, a scattering of stars in the sky.
“When are you leaving?” Sandy asked.
Travis looked up at Sandy and back down at his boots, as if his actions were answer enough.
Sandy ran down the porch steps and around the house. He ran into the shed and locked the door behind him and sat down beneath the table where his empty rabbit cages were. He pulled his knees against his chest and drew the Ka-Bar and began to jab the blade into the dirt. He struck and struck and struck until he heard the Ford rumble down the hill and saw its headlights flash between the cracks of the shed wall.
He ran out to the corner of the house and saw the truck’s taillights growing smaller and smaller on the highway, and he stood that way for a long time until the chilly night forced him back indoors.
Connie drove them home. It was late, nearing midnight. Reader was drunk.
He had not meant to be, but the long hot afternoon at Cecil’s lake house had given way to cool twilight, a neighbor’s sprinkler tic-tic-ticking against the wooden fence, a sound that had put Reader in mind of summers when he was a boy, rain lashing the sides of his father’s wood shop in the old barn, and Reader had taken a fresh bottle from his partner and host who had walked over with a chair, and later another from his partner’s wife, and soon there was a litter of empty glass at his feet and he and Cecil were carving through their case notes as the wives sat up on the cool screened porch that wrapped the house. The doctor’s file on Stillwell, the yard in Cole County they had dug up in search of a woman who had vanished from the earth in 1951. No body found. Reader not knowing whether to be grateful or frustrated. A little of both, maybe, he thought. He and Cecil sat in Adirondack chairs beneath the wide boughs of a red maple, before them a wide grassy lawn sloping down to a little dock, Cecil’s johnboat turned facedown on the planks. Far out on the lake men fished for bass in the dwindling sun.
“Who is Travis Stillwell?” Cecil said, somewhere around beer four.
“A lonely, confused man,” Reader said. “Who lived as a ghost in the years after the war. Based on what the boy told the head-shrinker up in Wichita Falls, anyway.”
The doc had written it all down in his notes. Before the hospital, Stillwell had crept through four, five years of day jobs shoveling hot asphalt in parking lots alongside Mexicans, nights spent in rented rooms in Fort Worth, Dallas, roach-infested dumps with torn furniture, meals of cereal and toast burned over stove-tops on spits of untwisted wire hangers, warmed cans of chili bought with cash in hand. Years of disappearing until the shape of him was like a hole. He did not drive because he had walked so long through the hellscape of war that the only things he trusted were his own two feet. His hands shook when he spoke to others about the war, so he rarely spoke.
“‘He did not speak,’” Reader quoted, “‘because he had not spoken.’”
“Pretty flowery shit for a sweaty old geezer with ketchup on his tie,” Cecil said.
The sun sank. The crickets called. Frogs croaked in a chorus from the reeds.
Lights came on around the lake.
In the end it was emptiness, Reader told Cecil. Some cruel seed planted deep inside him, when he was just a boy. He had felt it, always. He knew it was there. Like an imperfection in a plank of wood. A warp, a knot. Some blemish that ruined the whole, from which no smooth shapes could e’er be turned.
“Pretty flowery shit,” Cecil said.
“I ever tell you,” Reader said to Connie, waking from a dream in the pickup’s passenger seat, the passing lights of Waco gleaming along the Chevy’s dash, “I sold my father’s tools?”
Connie looked sideways at him from behind the wheel, so beautiful, he thought, her long brown arms, the curve of her breasts beneath her dress. Her eyes were full of love and pity.
“He wanted me to learn his trade but I wasn’t no good—”
“It was his trade, not yours,” Connie said.
“Never could work a lathe well. My hands lacked his grace.”
“You haven’t been like this in a long time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, my love.”
“You want me to drive?” he said, struggling to sit upright.
She laughed.
Reader closed his eyes. Drifted back into his dream, which was of his father, who stood alone in a rolling grass field, a hammer in one hand, a saw in the other. No trees in sight.
“Trail’s gone cold,” Reader had told Cecil. He had tried to stand and fallen back in his chair. The stars were out by then.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Cecil said.
Reader had closed his eyes to let the world set itself right. He opened them. “He won’t stop, Cecil. He’s searching for what he’s lost. He don’t know he’ll never find it.”
“What’s he lost, boss?”
“Same thing we all lose,” Reader said.
“Mi amor?” Connie shook him. “We’re home.”
He opened his eyes. The pickup was parked in the garage. Through the windshield he saw the familiar shapes of his own tools hanging on pegboard on the wall, things accumulated through necessity. Among them was a hammer, the head shiny and unscored. He had used it twice. It was cheap. A price tag still hung from the handle.
Saturday
October 18
The sun was faint and the dark desert made its shapes against the sky. Somewhere in New Mexico, before the salt flats, he pulled off the highway and into a campground called Hungry Bend. He paid the fat, glassy-eyed night clerk fifteen dollars for a hookup. The clerk passed a slip of paper across the counter and said “Number eleven” and turned on his stool back to a portable twelve-inch Magnavox where a commercial for soap was running.
Travis stood on the porch of the adobe building that was the office, slip of paper in hand, his truck parked at a hitching post nearby, a cow skull screwed to the center of the post. Above his head a dim yellow bulb popped with moths. To the east the sky warmed as if the land beyond the horizon were burning. Back west everything was cool and black. He saw the lights of a passing rig out on the highway, about a quarter mile from the island of light where he stood.
She’s all I have now, he thought. But they’ll be safe.
He closed his eyes and, for the first time in weeks, listened for the music, tried to conjure it from the dark without the aid of a quarter in a box. He listened for rain on the living room wall, for the comforting scratch of the needle in its groove. But there was only silence, big and loud as wind through an empty canyon. He would not hear the music again, he thought, and now it was one more thing—
—lost.
Before the Gaskins, he had not imagined he could ever lose more than he already had.
Her promises are empty, he thought. Lies, every one.
He felt something wet against his side and looked down and saw that the wound beneath his shirt had begun to bleed again. The stitching had come undone—the threads having popped loose with no urging, as if the blood itself had pushed them out in crazy, vengeful spite—and now it was seeping through Tom Gaskin’s gray T-shirt.
But she needs me. As much as I need her now. And maybe that was how it was all different this time around, he thought. He was needed, too.
The sun crawled out of the dark mountains on the horizon.
He climbed into his pickup and backed the Roadrunner out of the office lot and made the wide gravel circle around the campground’s center, where a white wooden gazebo stood among cacti and blooming desert flowers. He pulled into the narrow campsite bordered on either side by big, quartz-veined stones, number eleven, no different from numbers ten or twelve. He cut the engine and got out of the cab and limped to the back and opened the door, sparing one last, dreadful glance over his shoulder at the rising terror to the east.
Once inside, he locked the door.
She waited for him in the cool dark of the sleeper perch, this narrow space that had become like a shelf in his heart. He stood perfectly still in the lightening gloom, he watching her, she watching him, her eyes burning their fierce red, then softening, then guttering to black.
Travis imagined himself naked, arms spread, walking out into the desert like a penitent wading into the River Jordan. I will do this, he thought. You’ll see. I’ll sit cross-legged in the sand among the lizards and rocks like some mystic on a spirit quest. And I’ll wait. And the sun will rise and boil this hateful blood right in my veins. Leaving him a dry and hollow effigy, so much chaff to break apart and blow away. And then where will you be.
She moved in the berth like an agitated snake, coiling, rearing. The sun fell through the dusty, cracked portal at the head of the perch and lit her monstrous head with a crown of fire.
Travis saw tendrils of smoke rising from her pate, smelled something that reminded him of a village on the other side of the world, the crackling of straw-topped huts afire.
She smiled tightly through the pain and withdrew into shadow, smoldering. See how I burn for you. She laughed.
His stomach began to growl—a long, empty, angry sound. His guts clenched.
He thought of the boy, the farmhouse. Of Annabelle Gaskin and the orange cat.
Travis. Rue spoke his name like a sigh. Oh Travis. Look at me now.
He saw her move out of shadow into the gray morning light, and the face he saw was not a monster’s cracked and leering visage but a white, round, and beautiful face, framed in a nimbus of red curls.
Do not forsake me, she said. Let me be your love. Your family.
The hand that seized his from the berth was warm as it had never been before, and he could feel her blood stirring in his veins, rushing to greet the false warmth of her and rattle at the gate of his flesh like the hungry, needy kin it was. She was smiling and he knew that she was at once speaking lie and truth. He could feel the last of her strength ebbing as she fought to maintain the illusion that she could be warm, too, this form so familiar, so like the music, and this was the lie she sought to use against him, to tether him, but the truth was this: her love was not the love he sought.
We are eternal in our needs, Travis. What use could a woman, a boy, be to you if not to feed?
He felt sick, dizzy.
So tired and weak, she said. We have to sleep. We have to sleep, my love.
Dimly aware that something had begun to happen to him, something that had happened once before, something that he, himself, had done to the Gaskin woman only that morning—it seemed a lifetime ago, already—he thought of the jukebox at Calhoun’s, how the stars, outside, had spun. He climbed up into the berth and lay on his side, away from her, and now he felt the long, true length of her press against him. Her last whispered words, cold breath against his neck, the illusion gone: I love you, Travis. I love you.
I hate you, he thought, as she slept. You are not the thing I want, you are not the things I lost.
But he was tired.
So tired.
He slept.
Annabelle thanked the girl at the Tastee-Freez window and took two grease-spotted paper bags and wax paper cups over to the picnic table where Billy Calhoun sat waiting. She had pulled her hair into a blue kerchief atop her head and wore jeans and a plaid blouse. The blouse was speckled with yellow paint from when she and Sandy had painted the kitchen, not long after Tom had died. Don’t try to look nice for him, she had told herself that morning, staring at her open closet. That is not what this is. It is not. She had put the shirt on and turned from the bureau mirror to see her bedcovers folded back, the shape the cowboy had made in her bed the day before still there. That is not what this is, she thought again.
Calhoun took his burger from Annabelle but did not unwrap it. She sat across from him and peeled the wax paper from hers. Inside the Tastee-Freez, the girl leaned on her elbows through the window, watching them.
Annabelle said, “It’s his birthday tomorrow.”
“I remember,” Calhoun said.
“Jack Mooney said he’d make the trip out late this evening for the pool, no extra charge.”
“Jack’s a thoughtful man.”
“I thought you might come.”
Calhoun sipped his soda and looked off across the highway that ran the length of town. Annabelle followed his eye line, realized he was watching a mother and daughter getting into a Chevy in the parking lot of Thrifty Dan’s, the girl’s arms loaded with twin paper sacks almost as big as she was. The mother took the bags and placed them in the Chevy’s trunk. She kissed the top of her daughter’s head as she shut the trunk.
Calhoun unwrapped his burger and bit into it. He wiped his hands on a paper napkin.
“My tenant left,” Annabelle said. “Last night.”
“Something happen?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“He scared me.”
“What was it? He do something?”
“He didn’t do anything. I don’t know. It’s fine, it’s just—”
“Just what?”
She shook her head. I can’t remember, she thought. God, why can’t I remember? “He’s gone. I wanted him gone, he left. That’s all.”
“Then it’s for the best,” Calhoun said. “You and Sandy, you’re okay?”
She nodded, gave him a reassuring smile, and reached into her paper bag and ate a crinkle fry. “Anyway,” she said. “You’re invited to the party.”
“Can I come as me?” Calhoun said.
“It ain’t a costume party.”
“You know what I mean.”
She put her hands in her lap, pressed her thumbs against one another, like two goats butting heads. “He’s not ready for that,” she said.
“Annabelle.”
“I’m not ready for that.”
“You take your time with the truth. You know that?”
“You’ve probably said it to me once or twice.”
“Tom’s been gone a year,” he said.
She ate another fry.
“You don’t have to be ashamed, you know. What we did, we did it. Ten years ago, we did it, and I don’t—”
“Eleven,” she said. “Sandy’s turning eleven. And I’m not ashamed of that.” She threw a crinkle fry to a lone grackle hopping on the concrete. It plucked at the fry and flew away to the branches of a juniper tree in a scrub lot nearby, where a dozen more birds were shuffling and hopping and whistling. She looked down at Calhoun’s burger, dripping and greasy in the paper wrapper. A fly landed on the bun and crawled across it. She waved her hand over it and it flew away. “I want you at Sandy’s party,” she sa
id. “Can’t that be enough for me to want right now, at this moment?”
He set his food down and steepled his hands above it. “What is it?” he asked.
“What’s what?”
“Every time we meet, I feel like I’m this much further away from you.” He held up both arms, wide apart. “Like you’re a shimmer down the road I won’t ever reach. Some days I can’t help wondering if I took a wrong turn somewhere.”
She hesitated, then reached across the table and took his hand.
He seemed startled by this.
She squeezed his hand and met his eyes and said, “Sometimes I do need saving. But not how you think. Some days I just need a friend more than anything else. More than I need a Jesus or a husband or a man to help clean out the pool. And there may be other things I need that I don’t even know about, but those don’t have anything to do with Sandy’s birthday tomorrow. Or the fact that I was scared when I woke up this morning, and I’m still scared, and I don’t know why. But sitting here with you, I’m less scared. Now, doesn’t that count for something?”
He put his hand over hers. He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry,” Annabelle said. “Just be my friend.”
They sat hand in hand for a while, the sun warming the tin canopy above their heads, the smell of cooking meat coming out of the window where the girl in the paper hat was serving an ice cream cone dipped in chocolate to an old man in overalls. Out on the road, cars came and went all along the length of town and in the gravel parking lot where the station wagon and Calhoun’s pickup were parked, a few more grackles hopped and pecked at bugs, their purple heads sheening in the noonday sun.
Saturday night, having slept the day through, Travis went down to the campground office and bought a pack of cigarettes from a machine. He sat on the rear stoop of the cabover, smoking.
In Valley of the Sun Page 21