Love and Country

by Christina Adam

  “I wonder . . . ,” her mother said. “What do you think, Earl?”

  “Who’s taking you?” Her father talked through a mouthful of beef.

  “Nobody. I was just going.”

  Her father finished chewing his meat before he spoke. “Might as well go,” he said.

  “People will talk,” her mother said.

  “What people?” her father said. “How would a person know Cynthia went to the funeral this morning—unless they went there too?”

  Her mother gave a slow nod of agreement.

  “You go on ahead.” Her father dismissed the subject. Cynthia listened to them talk about the Lattimores for a while before she asked to be excused. She cleared the table and washed the dishes. When she finished, she carried the scraps outside.

  She found the old dog curled in a nest against the house, twitching in her sleep. “Hey, girl,” she said. “Supper’s here.” It took a long time for the dog to straighten up and find her bowl. Must be the cold, Cynthia thought. She should have stayed, given the dog a pat, but she went back inside.

  In her room she pulled on new jeans and a clean black sweater. She dampened her hair and brushed it until it hung shiny and thick in a slant across her cheek. She didn’t usually go to school dances, but she’d promised the tapes, and tonight she wanted to get out of the house. She’d felt better after practicing, but the sense she’d had after the funeral, an unreal restlessness, had come back. She could always leave the dance and walk uptown. Or she might drive around.

  She parked her dad’s car in the wide gravel lot behind the high school and walked between the rows of pickup trucks and cars toward the gym. The sky was black, and it seemed colder than it would be later, in the winter.

  Inside, the gym was brightly lit, as if a basketball game instead of a dance were going on, and the overheated air was yeasty with the smell of sweat and stale gym clothes. On one side, the bleachers had been left standing, but they’d been folded away on the other to make room for the sound system and refreshments.

  Cynthia hung her jacket on the rack by the door, circled around the dancers in the middle of the court, and dropped off the tapes. She found a spot where she could lean her shoulder blades against the wall. She crossed her feet at the ankles and shoved her hands down in the pockets of her jeans.

  It gave her a pleasant feeling to be there with the lights gleaming in long streaks off the high varnish on the floor, something familiar going on all around her. The music thumped through the floor and buzzed in her bones where she leaned against the wall.

  She saw Mr. Everts moving through the dancers. He was a dark, heavy man who, even at eight in the morning, had a blue-black shadow of beard, like iron filings. He wore shoes with thick pink rubber soles that made him seem to stick a little as he crossed the gym floor.

  It made her nervous, watching him turn and come her way. He’d made her his lab assistant, but she never knew what to say when he tried to make conversation. Though she got good grades, he was the first teacher who’d ever seemed to like her. He approached and turned his back, leaning against the wall a foot or two away.

  “Good crowd,” he said.

  Cynthia looked down at her shoes and let her hair fall. “Looks like it,” she said.

  “I wish you kids wouldn’t play the music quite so loud,” he said. But he said it as if he was sticking up for the adults out of habit. As if he didn’t really care.

  Cynthia tilted her chin up and let her hair fall back. “We only do it,” she said, “to drive you nuts.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, laughing and pushing himself upright. “Back to work,” he said, and nodded before he resumed his slow vigil around the gym.

  Cynthia folded her arms across her chest and watched the dancers. The sense of comfort she’d had when she arrived was gone. Her sweater itched where it pulled tight at her neck and wrists. There wasn’t a single person in the gym who she didn’t see every day. She looked for a shirt or a dress or a pair of shoes she hadn’t seen before. The girls were flirting now. Her father was right, half the kids on the dance floor had been at the funeral. Cynthia couldn’t find a trace of tears. She started for the door, stopping a few times to nod hello to kids she knew, retrieved her jacket, and walked out.

  The night air hit her chest like a wall of ice water. She struggled to zip her jacket before the sweat on her back could freeze, shoved her hands deep in its pockets, and started walking toward town. When she exhaled, her breath steamed warm and white.

  The lights at the hotel and farther up the street shone a liquid orange, like fires in the night, but otherwise Main Street was deserted. For a second, she had the sensation of walking alone in a big city—as if huge buildings and empty streets loomed just beyond the dark. The icy wind burned her ears. They ached down close to the eardrums.

  Near the hotel, she could hear voices. Dark figures leaned on the hoods of the cars parked at the curb. A shard of laughter broke out above the talking. In the light of the pink neon sign for the café she could make out who was there.

  She didn’t speak, but heads looked up. She recognized two girls from her class and Roddy Moyers. He leaned against the hood of his car with an arm draped around the neck of a girl she didn’t recognize, a girl with long dark hair and glasses. She was wrapped in a white shaggy coat, like a sheepskin rug.

  “Aren’t you guys cold?” Cynthia said, and one of the young men held out a paper bag crimped around the neck of a bottle.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  But Roddy Moyers disengaged himself from the girl and stood up straight.

  “I am,” he said. “You going in?” He looked directly at Cynthia in a way that made her want to look to see if somebody had walked up behind her. He hadn’t said a word to her in years, since she was a little child.

  “For a while,” she said.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”

  Cynthia glanced at the girl in the shaggy coat. Behind her glasses she had big dark eyes and cheekbones like a model. But she didn’t pay any attention when Moyers walked away and Cynthia turned to follow him. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt but no jacket, and the threadbare hems of his jeans hung over the heels of his boots. He pushed through the glass door and reached back to brace it open, just long enough for her to get a hold on it herself. Then he went on up the narrow hall and disappeared through the door to the right—into the bar. The café door was on the left. That was the door she’d expected him to take. She wasn’t old enough for the bar.

  She stood still, stunned, as if he’d slapped her, heat pumping into her cheeks. She’d made a mistake. When he said “going in,” she thought he meant in off the street. She didn’t know what to do, standing in the hall where anyone could see her, her weight shifting awkwardly over her shoes. She had to get out. She spun around and nearly ran.

  She pushed open the door and, without glancing at the people leaning on the cars, turned sharply and started down the street. She took long strides and felt the muscles in her calves burn. She covered one block, then crossed to the other side of the street. Even when she was a safe distance from the hotel, her heart pounded.

  She was nearly back at school, almost at the parking lot, when Roddy Moyers pulled up at the curb just ahead of her. Despite the cold, he had the top down on the car, a small white car with deep seats, like a powerboat. He cut the engine and tilted his head to look over at her.

  “What happened to you?”

  The truth jumped up at her. He thought she’d just disappeared for no reason. He didn’t know she was underage. She’d made a big deal out of nothing, and Roddy Moyers knew it.

  She searched for something to say, some lie to explain. But he was watching her intently, and she saw the truth slowly come to him.

  “Jesus,” he said, looking down at the gearshift. He looked at her again. “Jesus,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He reached over and shoved the car door open. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.”
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br />   She looked down at the open door hanging over the curb. “No, thanks,” she said. “I can walk.”

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go for a ride. It’s early.”

  Cynthia grasped the frame of the open door and pushed it closed. It slammed with a heavy, muffled sound. “No, thanks,” she said, a tight sarcasm coming into her voice. “Past my bedtime.”

  Moyers frowned. “Some other time,” he said, not asking but telling her, before he twisted the key in the ignition.

  “Fine,” Cynthia said, but he gunned the motor so loud she didn’t think he heard. He pulled away from the curb, circled in a wide U-turn, and drove back toward the hotel. The engine in the car growled with a tinny rattle, and a backfire echoed off the storefronts.

  She walked back to her father’s big Chevrolet, wanting to run, and drove it slowly out of the lot. The power steering was so loose she always felt as if she were driving a wide float in a parade. She liked the big, lumbering slowness of the car, the way it glided along the highway with no sound, but tonight she slowly pressed down on the gas until the car was speeding through the dark.

  She drove across the valley and turned north on the oil road toward the ranch, but she went on past the gate and turned up the track to the graveyard. The tires crunched across the gravel parking lot. She found the service road in the headlights, an overgrown dry track winding to the top of the hill above the graves. Tall weeds slid and broke under the frame of the car, scraping along the doors. Where the road ended, she backed the car around and got out. Just below her the tall flagpole was anchored in a concrete platform. She walked across the spongy grass and sat down on its edge. Behind her, she could sense the mountains, a massive weight of darkness rising up behind her.

  The damp feel of the concrete turned her hip bones into hard knobs, and her arms and legs seemed to disappear in the cold. She heard a scrape, the step of something wild behind her. She flinched before she realized it was the rustle of her own jacket. She wrapped her arms around herself. The moon came up, round and white over the mountains in the east. It outlined the peaks and dropped a gauzy mist into the canyons.

  She thought about how you freeze to death, how you just lie down in the snow. She felt so dark, so black inside. She never did the right thing. The heat of being left out in the hall, of Roddy disappearing, came back, shame rising inside her like seepage. A basement of black water. But running away was worse. Roddy knew. He knew there was something the matter with her.

  If she’d only stayed there and waited, he would have come out to find her. Why didn’t she just go in the bar and get him? Tell him she was underage?

  She thought about Goldie, going hungry all through the funeral, and her mother’s look when she was playing the piano. There was something wrong with her. Her parents had wanted a boy, and she wasn’t a boy. She had believed that story for so long and, at the same time, known it wasn’t true. It didn’t explain anything. It didn’t tell her what was wrong. No one trusted her. Most of her aunts and uncles and the teachers at school and at church had always been suspicious.

  She thought about Curly Lattimore, the white coffin like a cake, and her father carrying it up the hill himself. The whole town coming to her funeral. She couldn’t imagine anybody, ever, loving her that way. Somehow, if she died, they’d say it was her fault.

  The moon hung, smaller now, suspended over the mountains and threw the shadow of the flagpole long across the hill. Below her she could see the raw new grave, a mound of pale earth against the grass. Beside it they had left a tractor, the raised elbow of a backhoe still attached. It loomed up in the moonlight like a praying mantis.

  6

  At first, the window was a square of blue slate. Kenny pulled the worn, cool quilt up around his face and watched the dawn sky over the mountains slowly turn the color of a healing bruise. He floated in the hollow of the mattress, half awake, as if he were resting at the bottom of a pool, breathing underwater. Across the room, the pattern on the wallpaper stood out in glimmers of white against the shadows. The pattern repeated round, white movie reels, unwinding like springs in a clock. And he could make out sets of vacation postcards hanging down in accordion folds. In the dim light, Kenny couldn’t see the figures on the cards, but he knew them by heart: a man on horseback; a sportsman fishing from a rock; a woman in a bathing suit, diving like a jackknife. The pictures made him think of the damp, pitchy cold in the shade of pine trees. And of the other boy, the boy who had the room when the wallpaper was new. Kenny thought he must be grown by now. On the ceiling, leaks had left receding waves the color of tobacco juice, and the roof sloped just above his head. He sat up carefully, swung his feet over the edge of the mattress, and stepped on something hard and alive. It rolled underfoot like a marble, or a snake. He jerked his feet back. Then he remembered. His father had come upstairs late the night before; the gray cocoon of his sleeping bag took up all the empty floor space in the room. Kenny heard his father groan, struggling in his sleep. His shoulders and elbows jabbed bulges in the canvas bag. Rising from the floor, the sour smell of last night’s beer on his father’s breath seemed to use up all the air. Kenny opened his mouth to breathe and stepped, teetering off balance, over the sleeping bag. He lifted up on the doorknob to keep the hinges from creaking and edged out onto the upstairs landing. His father sleeping in his room made him feel shy and formal, as if a total stranger had come to spend the night.

  He crept down to the kitchen, his feet turned nearly sideways on the narrow steps, and started the coffee heating in the kitchen before he built a fire in the stove. Thin sheets of ice covered the insides of the windows. The empty living room felt cavernous, but Kenny liked the ice. It made him feel as if they had moved farther north, to a cabin in the mountains or a ranch in Canada. He was tempted to shave it off, to carve his initials on the glass, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the stove. He’d come downstairs in the bottoms of his long johns, and his feet were bare. He stood in front of the black cast-iron stove, his neck and chest muscles clenched against the cold—hoping his mother would wake up before his dad.

  He waited until the coffee started to bubble and perk and the smell of roasting coffee seemed warmer than the heat from the stove before he made a dash for the kitchen and pulled clean clothes from his stack on top of the dryer. He worked his legs into a pair of stiff new jeans and put on a frayed woolen shirt. When he finished dressing, his socks hung limp at the ankles, but he tugged them up and went to fill a cracked blue mixing bowl with cereal. He carried the bowl back to the front room and ate standing up, his back to the fire. The milk had begun to turn sweet and cheesy, but he finished the cereal and tipped the bowl to drink off the rest of it. As the frost began to melt, scallops of lacy crystals formed on the windows. When the windows began to glisten with sunlight, like a coating of blue sugar, he poured a mug of coffee and carried it back to his mother’s room. He knocked softly on the doorframe, but he didn’t hear an answer.

  “Mom?” he said.

  When she still didn’t answer, he turned the doorknob. The door was locked. Kenny felt the resistance on the knob like a fist punched, not hard but unexpected, high up in his stomach. His mother never locked her door. He didn’t know what he should do.

  He stood in the hall, feeling the cold from the linoleum chill the bottoms of his socks and spread up into his feet. He tried to listen through the door, but all he could hear was the rush of his own breathing and the small bones at the base of his skull creaking, settling like odd noises in the quiet house. He wandered back into the kitchen and poured his mother’s coffee back into the pot. He sat down on the rocker to pull on his boots. Then he bundled up in his old ski jacket and gloves and went outside.

  His boots made dark, wet footprints in the frost, and he could smell the wood smoke from the chimney. The air seemed to crackle with cold. Except for a wisp of dark, trailing cloud over the mountains, the sky was blue now, and the air so clear that objects in the distance looked close up. Kenny saw a road he’d
never seen before running straight up through the foothills like a piece of frozen twine. He began to feel excited, like being the first one up on Christmas morning. If his father woke up in time, they were going hunting.

  He walked back to the sagging sheep-wire corral, where his father had left the horses for the night. They stood dozing on their feet, their soft, triangular eyelids wrinkled shut. Except for the scooped-out marks where their saddles had been, they were coated with damp, gray road dust. Kenny went to the truck to hunt for a brush. He searched behind the seat, rummaging through the empty beer cans and wadded-up paper bags, but he couldn’t even find a rag to wipe the horses down with. He gave up, gathered an armful of hay, and opened the gate to drop it in a pile before each horse. They opened their liquid, melancholy eyes, and began to lip at the alfalfa. The grinding of their teeth, high up in their jaws, made a sound like footsteps marching down a gravel road. He leaned into the tall shoulder of one of the horses and breathed in the smell of dried sweat. Then he tugged off a glove and ran his bare palm along the horse’s neck. Under the coarse weight of its mane, his hand grew warm with steam.

  Kenny heard the screen door slam and turned around to see his dad stamping his boots on the concrete step. He already wore his orange hunting vest. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he said. He clapped his hands together. “We’re losin’ daylight.” He acted as if Kenny had been outside goofing off, holding them up.

  Kenny blinked, confused by his father’s sudden hurry. But he shrugged, relieved that somebody was finally awake. He gave the horse a pat and followed his father back inside the house.

  His dad stood at the sink and finished the last drops of his coffee. His shaving kit was balanced on top of his sleeping bag, where he’d piled his things beside the door.

  “I guess Mom’s sleeping in,” Kenny said, apologizing. He crossed the kitchen, clicked open the door of the refrigerator and looked inside. “I think we’ve got some eggs. I could cook you some breakfast.”