They danced that slow dance and the next one. Sometime later, when the music stopped, she blinked and took a small step back. Roddy ran a thumb over a smudge on her cheek. Her eyelashes were long and dark, gathered by tears into stars. When he touched her she looked up, suddenly alarmed, as if she were surprised to see him there.
Outside, Lenna shook with cold. He couldn’t touch her now, but he could hear the tremor in her voice. He wanted to drive her home, but her own car was parked right there. He had to let her go. It was only later that he learned how shaken she was, and ashamed. He’d felt guilty himself, though he didn’t know why he should. It had to do with trading on somebody else’s sadness.
He looked over at Lenna. The girls he knew would have slid over to the middle of the seat, but Lenna sat close to the door. He drove faster. He always drove fast, but the wet black road with no snow made him drive fast enough to turn the white fields into blurs. He watched to see if Lenna would reach for something to hold on to, but she sat still.
At the ski hill road, he braked abruptly and turned off the highway. Lenna could have moved closer then, but she didn’t. He could feel the space between them like a solid thing. He took another turn, onto the Forest Service road, and pushed through deep-rutted snow where the road twisted through high timber. At the crest of the hill, he pulled up with the hood of the truck facing out over the valley and set the brake.
Lenna slipped off her shoes and bent down to pull on her snow boots. He came around to hold open her door and stood beside her looking down at the valley.
“There,” Roddy said, making sure she followed his gaze. He pointed out the ranch house, the slant roof of the barn, and equipment sheds. The barn was the oldest log building in the valley, what was left of the original homestead. From this distance, the ranch was a scene for a model train set, the dark log buildings gathered close together, the rail fences, a forest of leafless aspen trees inserted like twigs in the snow.
“It’s beautiful,” Lenna said. “How can your father want to sell it?”
“That’s what he does for a living. Buys and sells. Real estate. But he’s not selling the whole thing.” Roddy pointed to a spot where section lines met at crossing fences. “Just that piece. It’s no good for the ranch. It’s all rock bar and sagebrush.”
“But you’ll have houses there, and neighbors.”
Roddy wanted to tell her he didn’t care. The land wouldn’t be subdivided and built on for years, and he had no idea where he’d be by then. He’d grown up mostly on the ranch, gone to school in the valley, but he didn’t feel bound to stay. “Things change,” he said. “There’s not so much you can do about it.”
Lenna rolled an aerial map out on the truck fender, smoothed it with the edge of her glove, and held it flat. She asked him questions about the land, when it was surveyed, where the stakes and markers were. She checked creeks and fence lines against the map. Afterward, he backed the truck out and drove down to the ranch. They came in along an alley between barbed-wire fences, skidded up over a stretch of clear ice, and circled in front of the main house.
“It’s like a hotel,” Lenna said, standing in the entry, looking down into the sunken living room. Roddy tried to see it through her eyes. The room was furnished with oversize leather sofas and Navajo blankets and rugs. At one end a broad stone fireplace stood empty, and at the other end a black grand piano gleamed in the shadows. He showed Lenna where the wings of the house branched from the main room.
“This all came from real estate?” Lenna asked.
Roddy laughed. “Well, some of the real estate had oil under it. My granddad was a rock picker—a geologist.”
“You live here?” She looked at Roddy.
“No,” he said, “this way.” He pushed through a swinging door into the kitchen.
“This is the kitchen,” he said.
“Oh, really?” Lenna said.
“Yes,” he said solemnly.
Lenna stood in her coat in the center of the room, looking around. He couldn’t tell if she was impressed or disapproving. “It’s like a kitchen for a restaurant.”
“Hay crew,” he said. “In the summer, they feed the hay crew out of here.”
“I helped cook for hay crews when I was a girl,” Lenna said. “In a kitchen the size of your icebox.”
“They don’t hire cooks like you. We get somebody’s grandmother. One year we had a buck sergeant. I think he cooked in World War Two.” Roddy swung open the refrigerator and reached for a beer. “You want anything? Beer? Coffee?” Lenna shook her head. He uncapped the beer and took a long drink.
He led her out the back door and along a wooden boardwalk to a low building.
“Bunkhouse,” he said, holding open the door to a bare log barracks, long and narrow, with one crooked window at each end and iron cots with thin, rolled-up mattresses in rows down each wall. The farthest one was his. He’d made it that morning by throwing a green army blanket over the sheets. His shirts, an extra jacket, and his duffel hung on fencing spikes hammered into the log wall. He motioned for Lenna to go ahead down the aisle to where the fire had gone out in the potbellied stove.
“You sleep here?” Lenna asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you move into the house?”
Roddy shrugged. “Too hard to heat.” They stood in the aisle. Lenna folded her arms across her chest, holding her coat close. Shifting to keep warm, they seemed stuck in the center of the room, circling each other.
“You want to see the barn?”
Lenna glanced down at her white boots. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you something. Wait here.” He went back to the kitchen and rummaged in the back closet where the cook kept odds and ends and returned with a pair of rubber irrigation boots. He sorted through the clean laundry at the bottom of his duffel bag and handed Lenna a pair of thick socks.
Lenna pulled on the socks and boots, and he helped her into his canvas jacket. It sat stiff up over her shoulders and hung past her knees. Roddy laughed. “You look like a fireman,” he said. “A midget fireman.” But that’s not how she looked to him. She looked so small under the coat that she seemed naked. He could sense the shape of her shoulders and white arms.
He took her outside. They walked together along a path of tramped-down snow. When they passed the foreman’s trailer, Lenna stopped, afraid.
“You said nobody was here.”
“He’s not,” Roddy said. “Gone to his daughter’s for Christmas.”
“Aren’t you going somewhere for Christmas?”
“No. Somebody has to stay and feed. Come on, I’ll show you the barn.”
The barn was not much used now. A loft of rough beams tilted low over the dirt floor, and the empty stalls were hung with shredding burlap sacks and scraps of stiff black harness. It smelled of rotting hay and dry manure. In the last stalls, two dark draft horses stood sleeping on their feet.
“Hey, big guy,” Roddy said, and reached up to grab an ear. The big horse pulled back, then lowered his face to be scratched. Roddy scrubbed at the huge Roman nose with the stiff edge of his glove until heat moved through the leather to his hand. Lenna leaned against the half door.
“They have feet like dinner plates. They wouldn’t fit in gallon cans.”
“You should see them standing out in the field. Sometimes I just go watch them. Go out and holler at ’em.”
“What are their names?”
“This one’s Don,” he said. “And that one’s Chub. Chub and Don.” Roddy laughed. “I didn’t name ’em. We don’t use them much unless there’s a blizzard, or the tractor breaks down.”
“How can you tell them apart?” Lenna asked.
“Chub’s a girl.”
Inside the bunkhouse, Roddy told Lenna to sit on the bed, and he helped her pull off the black rubber boots. He cracked some kindling and stuffed it in the woodstove. The bunkhouse was heated, but barely. He used the stove at night. In a fe
w minutes he had a hot fire going. He turned back to Lenna, where she sat on the edge of the bed in his jacket.
“Sure you don’t want a beer? Coffee? I could make you some coffee.”
“No, a beer’s all right.”
Roddy brought six beers back from the kitchen. He worked four bottles down into the snow outside and carried two in with him.
He opened one and handed it to Lenna. She had taken off the big jacket and sat there on the bed in her blue skirt and sweater. She was flushed from the cold, her hair curled in wisps around her face. She looked at him and glanced away. For the first time that afternoon, he saw she was embarrassed. Her hand, holding the beer, was unsteady.
Roddy flipped down the mattress on the next cot and sat on it, his knees nearly touching hers. This time, she didn’t look away. He set his beer on the floor, then hers, and lifted her up. He pulled her tight against his chest, enclosed her in his arms, and held her. He felt the heat of her body, the solid feel of a body, calm him, like a homing signal. Her breathing caught, and stopped. She kissed him on the mouth.
Her eyes were open, softly staring at him, and he knew something was happening to him that had not happened before. He slipped his hands under the soft sweater, and lifted it over her head. When he touched her breast, the tip of his rough finger outlining the lace edge of her bra, she looked at him as if she might blow away, like petals held out on his palm, but she held very still, wanting him to know how his hands felt to her.
She stood and stepped out of her skirt, and when he lay down next to her, they moved like one living thing, all skin and tears. This was a thing he didn’t know about—grief and rage and shame. For a moment, he wanted to use his hands to soothe her, as he would an injured bird, but her body was stronger than his. She drew him in, and he followed, tracing an endless silver thread that disappeared into darkness. When he thought he couldn’t go on any longer, go any farther, he did. He raised himself on both arms to see her face, to make sure she was separate and there. Her eyes were open, looking back at him, her hair tangled and dark with sweat. She let him watch her, unashamed.
When finally they were exhausted, he turned sideways and held the curve of her back against him, his hand on the softness of her breast. It seemed so surprising to him, the rough ends of his fingers pressed into her skin. He could feel her heart beating hard, then slower, under his palm.
He had been to Lenna’s house when Kenny was in Florida. He had waited two days after they met, then walked into the courthouse and asked her where she lived, if he could come to see her. Except for Lenna, the offices were empty, but he still had an eerie feeling there could be people upstairs who might overhear. Lenna must have felt that, too. She put him off, said people would talk. But finally, to get him to leave, he thought, she asked him to help her with a Christmas tree, a surprise for Kenny. Roddy had parked the ranch truck downtown and walked over. He told himself he did this not to avoid gossip but because there was no sense in upsetting people, but he knew better. He knew there would be talk.
But that time had not been like this. Lenna had been tense, and when it was over, crying.
“I can’t do this,” she had told him. “It’s wrong.”
“It’s not wrong,” Roddy said. “Why do you say that?”
“I have to help Kenny. I have to do this right. Be a mom for Kenny. You can’t understand.” Her voice broke. “I feel like I’ve been a mother so long.” Roddy put his arms around her, listened to her cry. When she stopped, she said, “I need to be sad. I want to grieve for Ken, and I can’t. I’m so glad to be alive myself.”
Roddy remembered kissing her where her cheek was damp with tears. He had tightened his arms around her and whispered, “It’s not wrong. It’s fine. Just have fun. These things don’t come along that often.”
She’d looked up, surprised. “Not even for you?”
Roddy laughed, wondering what she thought his life was like. “Not even for me,” he said.
Roddy left the cot to make coffee and stoke up the fire in the woodstove. When he returned, they sat up together on the cot, wrapped in blankets.
“I have to go,” Lenna said.
Though it was nearly dark, Roddy didn’t want her to go.
“Kenny thinks I’m at work. The office thinks I’m looking at the ranch.”
“You wish you hadn’t come?”
“No. But you don’t know how lonely it is to be the divorcée, how ugly people can get.”
He could tell it took some struggle for her to admit it when she said, “I’m scared.
“Roddy,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if she could force him to understand just by the heat of her feelings, “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never felt like this before.”
“Felt like what?”
“I don’t know. Sad. And wrong. Guilty somehow. Ken was such a bully—so right all the time. But when I had to file for divorce he acted like a little kid. He was so hurt. That’s how I think of him now. Waiting for a rescue plane—just a boy out there in the water by himself.”
“You might be wrong,” Roddy said. “It might have been different. He was trained for that, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Well, think of something terrible he did.”
“I do that, too. I hate him. I really hate him. I think of things he said—and I can’t sleep at night. He lied. He saw other women. He spent all the money. I’d go to town to buy something, and they wouldn’t take Ken’s checks. Once, I was standing at the checkout stand with a cart filled with groceries. I felt I should have put them all back, but I couldn’t . . .”
She stopped and looked at Roddy. “I don’t want to tell those things. I never wanted anyone to know. At the end, he told me he’d bet his co-pilot two hundred dollars that I couldn’t get a job. Couldn’t raise a boy.”
“Didn’t he send money?”
“Child support. Not much and never on time.”
“Won’t you get insurance money?”
“No. He signed it over to his new wife.”
“Jesus,” Roddy said. “No wonder you’re mad.” He kissed her on the edge of her mouth so softly they nearly lay down again. She pulled away.
“I have to get home.”
“Not right now.”
17
He’s dining with me again,” Cynthia said.
“The boy?” Dill grinned.
Cynthia grinned back at him. “Kenny Swanson,” she said.
Dill lit a cigarette and coughed. She wanted to ask him for one, but she didn’t dare. She thought about Kenny Swanson, the new kid. She joked about the boy “dining” with her, but he was disturbing. Early in the year, she’d seen him most days leaning on the wall outside some class.
Before vacation started, he’d been following her outside to a bench on the snow-packed lawn, no matter how bad the weather. He sat just near enough to hear her if she spoke. When she looked up, he lowered his eyes. She felt odd when he did this; it was odd for a ninth-grader to hang around a senior. It was partly that he followed her, but it might have been the way he looked. He had fine reddish hair, pushed out of his eyes, and long eyelashes. He was so pretty it embarrassed her.
“How do you come to be down this way?” Dill asked her. “You ride down on Goldie?”
“She’s outside.”
“Didn’t even hear you comin’,” Dill said.
“You must be getting old.”
“Not so old as that horse. Your dad know you’re here?”
When she left the ranch, her dad had been out feeding. While she saddled the mare, she kept watch on her father and the hired man far down in the field pitching hay from the sled, the cattle trailing behind like sleepwalkers. From a distance, the dark red cattle in the snow looked like a crooked line of stitches in a blanket. They seemed so small and far away. She could remember how big and menacing they seemed when she was small and her dad had packed her out on the sled with him every morning.
She’d ridden Goldie out a
cross the fields, down to the river, and along the old swamp road until she came to the dump. Dill had strung the chain across the entrance, but smoke rose from his trailer, and his rusty Dodge pickup, overflowing with cans and scrap iron and rolls of chicken wire, was parked in front. She’d put up her horse in the shed and knocked on the door.
Now she looked to see if he was paying attention. “Dill,” she said, “I might get a scholarship.”
“Well, that beats all,” he said. “You goin’ out below?”
Cynthia didn’t answer. The small room was hot; a trickle of sweat ran down her temples. She shifted her hair behind her ear. Dill reached back and opened the silver door. She could smell the acrid black smoke from tires burning in the dump.
“You tell your dad?”
She shook her head.
“You tell your dad about that school. He won’t find out from me. But he’ll find out. He pays the bills.”
“I know,” she said.
“You tell him, then. He’ll surprise you. Your dad’ll be proud.”
“Proud?” Cynthia didn’t believe it.
“If it was like when him and I were kids, if you’d stay here in the valley, he could watch over you. He doesn’t know about this music thing. But he’s proud of you. He told me that.”
She looked at Dill with suspicion. What he said made her throat contract, as if she were going to cry, even though it made no sense. It didn’t have the feel of truth; it didn’t fit anything she knew about her father.
She sat back against the wall, a wave of anger tightening her jaw.
“Not going for music,” she said. “It’s a science scholarship.”
Dill blinked at her. He looked surprised, and a look of sadness came into his eyes. He reached out and groped for her hand. She looked down at his hand, the creases black with grease, and her own white fingers.
He held her hand a long time, and when she said nothing more, he let it drop to her knee and carried his cup to the sink.
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