“You were part of the winter camp?”
She shook her head, jetted smoke from her nostrils with apparent ease.
“No, I was just on vacation. Wanted to be part of it though, you know. Some assholes call it protest tourism, but that’s bullshit. That money, from this shirt, that went to the cause. I mean it’s not much, but it makes me feel like I’m doing something, being part of the resistance. We all do what we can do with the pussy grabber-in-chief holding office, you know?”
He nodded, smoked.
It took a few minutes before Gavin Noon saw him. When he did, he told his small band of men to part so that he could get through to the barricade. As he neared, the crowd momentarily shrunk back, the woman next to Kyle among them.
“Good afternoon, Commissioner Pettus. I’m glad to see that you’ve taken an interest in the schedule of events. It’s important the people have an opportunity to express their opinion. I’m sure you agree.”
“Fucking pig!” the protesting woman shouted, now recovered from her initial shock. “Fucking fascist!”
A few others muttered something along similar lines, though nothing caught into a full-throated chorus and the disturbance soon quieted. One of Noon’s men began to sing the “Star Spangled Banner.” Some booed, but that too quickly diminished.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Kyle asked.
“Enjoying what?”
“This,” he said, raised his hand. “The spectacle.”
Kyle thought he might have seen the thinnest of smiles, but it was gone before he could be certain.
“Ah look,” Noon said, nodding past Kyle’s shoulder. “The cavalry has arrived.”
Kyle turned to see a marked news van from Knoxville’s NBC affiliate swing onto the sidewalk next to where he’d parked his truck. A second later a cameraman sprung from the side door as a man in a suit who touched the wings of his hair followed close behind. The crowd began to stir.
Noon now addressed himself to the protesting woman at Kyle’s side.
“What is your name, my dear?”
“I’m not going to tell you my name, asshole. I’m not here to make nice.”
“Well, could you tell me why you hate me so much?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I believe in trying to understand one another. Can you tell me what your profession is, at least? What is it that you do on a daily basis?”
The woman paused, unable to determine if answering him betrayed some principle she couldn’t immediately pinpoint. The ash on her cigarette had grown precipitously long. Kyle noticed Noon glance toward the news crew.
“I’m a professor. A sociology professor.”
“Ah, at East Tennessee State, I assume?”
“Yeah, A-plus and all that happy horseshit. I teach students about social problems in America. Stuff like neo-Confederates, neo-liberalists, et cetera.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re very passionate.”
The video camera was mounted to its tripod. The man with the impeccable hair was facing it and speaking. Kyle laid his hand on the woman’s shoulder to try to get her attention, but she shrugged it off, riveted now by her confrontation with Noon.
“You and your Nazis need to go home. Go home!” she shouted.
The crowd reacted to the cry and the chant was picked up, sustained itself. Noon turned to Kyle and briefly winked.
“I’m afraid I’m already home, miss.”
And then, what he’d clearly been anticipating happened. The slender ash from the forgotten cigarette clenched between her fingers collapsed and scattered softly on the ground.
“Look at that,” Noon said. “You’ve dropped a Jew.”
The woman’s fist connected with Noon’s jaw and he staggered back. Kyle couldn’t tell if the reaction was genuine or more of Noon’s theater, but by then it didn’t matter. The crowd thrust forward and several hands grabbed for Noon. His men rushed forward to shield him, but as soon as they were there the sheriff’s deputies stepped in, pushed back against the crowd, slapped cuffs on anyone who was standing in the immediate area. Kyle got clear and made his way back to the truck. The television reporter called to him, asked if he’d like to say something to the viewers. He got in the cab and drove.
LAURA GOT hold of him just as he was pulling up to the house. He sat there for a minute letting the cell ring before deciding whether to pick up.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself. Tell me I imagined seeing you in the middle of a Nazi protest on channel 10.”
“Afraid not.”
“Jesus, Kyle. What is happening here?”
He hesitated.
“I miss you,” he said. “I was hoping I could see you sometime. You know you can come up whenever you can get away.”
The line held its silence for a while. He thought he should hang up.
“It’s good to hear you say that,” she said. “I can be there in a little while, if you want.”
“If you think you can.”
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”
He went up to the house and spent a quarter of an hour straightening up the living room, walked back to the bedroom and tugged the sheets taut. There was a Dixie Chicks CD in the stereo. He skipped it up to their cover of “Landslide” and pulled a Rick Bragg book from the shelf, took it back out to the front porch with a bottle of zinfandel and a glass tumbler pinched between his fingers.
He read for a while with his feet propped up in a chair he’d drawn across from him. The wine disappeared in smooth gulps and by the time the bottle was half drained he began to lose his place in the sentences. He set the book down on the floorboards and watched the slow retreat of the sun across the front of the yard where the ground was baked hard and brown and in the trees around him the cicadas screamed.
He dozed there until sometime later Laura’s Subaru chugged up the drive. The sky was bluing toward eventide but the light was still strong and with the sun behind her he could see the long lines of her body. As she got closer it became more than that striking image, turned into the woman he knew, which made her look even better.
“You made it.”
“I did. You get an early start on me there?” she said, nodded at the empty wine bottle.
“Maybe just a little.”
She pulled up the empty chair, sat across from him.
“You want me to open another bottle?”
“I’m fine. Get yourself some if you want it.”
“Well, if you insist,” he said and smiled, though he made no effort to rise.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Probably not. I hope that’s not a deal breaker.”
“God, you should know by now that it isn’t.”
SHE STAYED over that evening, had even brought a tote bag with a change of clothes and a hairbrush. He didn’t ask her what that meant concerning her husband or her job, figuring she was enough of a grown-up to attend to those concerns. Maybe he was being a coward by not pinning her down, getting her to tell him where things could possibly go, but the question didn’t bother him enough to say something.
He woke up several times during the night from bad dreams and lay there looking at her, breathing easily in deep sleep. It was a comfort to have her here in the house. Since they’d first started seeing one another it had been hard to get a reasonable idea of how they could make sense of what life would be like together in its quietest moments. They’d never really had the chance to understand what that might mean because of their fear of discovery and the need to evade. That was the appeal of the affair at the outset. It broke through the walls of what was routine, sharpened their desire like blades, but over time that had changed. He had become curious about her, wanted to know more than bare details of her personal history. The simple tally of affection succumbed to something else. He wanted to understand her habits, know the shape of her presence, something that was beyond articulation. To be intuitively content because of the fact of her.
>
He got up and cooked a breakfast of eggs and buttered toast, cut up a bowl of fruit. By the time she was awake, he’d laid it all out on the kitchen table with coffee and juice. She had showered and wore his plaid robe from the closet. Her wet hair was combed back in neat decisive strokes so that it looked like it had been primitively painted.
“I like the service in this hotel,” she said, sat down.
He sat next to her, rested his hand on her thigh as he poured cream in his coffee and stirred it.
“I’d like to show you something today. If you’ve got the time, that is.”
“Yeah? I was kind of hoping you might,” she said, leaned forward to be kissed.
“Well, that too. But I want to take you somewhere.”
“I’d like that. I hope jeans and a short-sleeve shirt are okay. I didn’t pack for the opera, you know.”
“That’s perfect. Go on and eat now. You’ll need your strength.”
“That sounds promising.”
He went outside to get things ready while she finished up. The weather was warm but crisp. A little bit of wind in the trees that relieved the midsummer listlessness. A good morning to be on the water. He turned the combination lock on the shed and unslotted the clasp. The aluminum door swung open on a sheen of old cobwebs that spun in the early light. He went over to the rack, lifted the canoe and squared the yoke across his shoulders. Once it was balanced, he walked it out to the truck. It wasn’t that far to the water, but he decided it would be easier to drive everything down. He picked a pair of paddles out of the pile, placed those in the truck as well.
Laura met him on the porch in a few minutes, her hair tied up under his Braves ball cap.
“Hope you don’t mind me stealing a hat. I didn’t want to get sunburned.”
“No, I like it. Hop in.”
They drove down off the mountain and took the first dirt road that split from the hardtop. The truck pitched over the deep ruts and bottomed once in a dried wallow, but it wasn’t long before they’d come through the thick boundary of mixed hardwoods and could see the gently rounded banks of the Doe River. He parked up under a big black walnut tree and cracked the windows before he killed the engine and got out.
“It’ll be hot before long. It’s good to get as much shade as we can.”
She helped him unload the canoe, the life vests, and the paddles, walked the boat down to the sandy put-in. The water was low but swift, white creases of current shredding itself in a cream against the humped black stones. She sat at the river’s edge and turned up the cuffs of her jeans, waded in calf deep to get a sense of what she had agreed to.
“I’m not much of a swimmer, you know.”
“Well, that’s alright, I guess. If you’re swimming I imagine I’m not doing a very good job of driving this thing. Why don’t you get in?”
She carefully stepped over the gunwale and dropped into the front seat. Kyle edged the boat a few feet into a pool until it ground softly past a sandbar and floated free. He came up easily in the stern and then they were moved along by the current. He dipped the paddle in, straightened them as they came into a riffle that thumped and slapped the bow. As they rocked through Laura began to paddle and the water gurgled and swirled where she planted in and pushed as naturally as if she had done it her entire life.
They entered another run close to the bank and angled toward the center of the river. Kyle steered and corrected their movement without thinking. He had traveled this stretch of water so often that he carried the map of it inside his head. No danger of missing a V or forgetting a shoal. His mind could settle somewhere else while the water took them, and now he dwelled on Laura, watched how she met the river. She paddled when they moved through rapids but when the water was calm and slow she watched the banks for plants and birds, called out the names of those she recognized and wondered at those she didn’t.
“You make a pretty natural hand at this,” Kyle observed.
She smiled over her shoulder.
“My daddy used to take me on his sea kayak down in Tybee Island. We’d paddle out to the sandbar and he’d fish all day. Sometimes he’d send me back into the sound to get a bucket of iced beers from the waterfront seafood place. They weren’t supposed to sell them to me but they knew who we were. Used to call me his Budweiser taxi.”
“You sound close.”
“We were for a long time. He died nearly five years ago, but we didn’t really see much of each other once I was out of the house and on my own. He and Peter never did get along, and that made things hard.”
Kyle braced, surprised at how the mention of her husband’s name bothered him. She must have felt it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be. We’ve got to be honest about things, don’t we?”
She said nothing, knew she didn’t need to. He pushed down and twisted on the T handle of the paddle, kept them running the deepest water he could find.
“He’s not a bad man,” she said after a while.
“I never suggested he was.”
“I know. I just didn’t want you to think that I was going to try to turn him into something else, something that would make this easier on us. I can stop talking if you want.”
“We can talk about it. That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”
It was midday before they came around the bend and the forested bank thinned, marking the natural takeout. A few tall pines and a flood of golden daylight, the sight of Orlynne’s camper and truck. She and Gerald were sitting outside together at her rough-hewn picnic table eating lunch. Kyle took the canoe into the shallow water until they ground against the shoal. He got out and pulled the boat up so that Laura had water no deeper than her calves when she stepped over the side. By the time they’d carried the canoe up to the bank Orlynne had spotted them and come along to offer a hand, though there was no need for it.
“The river bears strange gifts,” she said, smiled. “If you would have called ahead I would have saved something to eat for you.”
“That’s alright. I didn’t know exactly when we’d be along,” Kyle said, tugging the boat up into a soft bed of pine needles before lowering it.
“I have a hard time believing that, as many times as you’ve made that run.”
“Water’s low. Can’t remember ever seeing it so bad. I don’t even remember what rain feels like anymore.”
“Well, at least you can introduce me to your friend.”
“Laura Carson,” Laura said and stuck her hand out before Kyle had the chance to answer.
“Nice to meet you, Laura Carson. I guess you enjoyed the river even if it has gotten lower than a trickle in a teapot?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s still pretty out there even if it’s not what it’s supposed to be.”
“Well, why don’t you have some iced tea up here with Gerald and me? I’m sure you’re both plenty thirsty.”
They stripped out of their life vests and followed her across the clearing to where Gerald sat sucking on the bony dregs of fried chicken.
“Can’t seem to get away from you, Pettus. Even out here in God’s country.”
“Good to see you too, Gerald. Have you met Laura?”
“I believe I have. The librarian, is that right?”
“Yessir,” she said, nodded hello.
They sat across from him and thanked Orlynne when she poured them each a tea from a glass pitcher.
“Have you asked her?” Gerald said to Kyle, motioning toward Laura.
“Asked her what?”
“About that business yesterday.” He folded his arms and leaned on the table, addressing her directly. “What do you think, ma’am? How would you say all this Nazi nonsense is playing to the general public?”
She shrugged.
“We haven’t really talked about it, but it doesn’t look good for anyone, does it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean those men look like what they are—racists, hate-filled racists. But loo
k at what it does to the town. It makes us into cartoons. Especially now that it’s on television. I’m sure that video’s all over the internet by now.”
“Indeed,” Gerald smiled brightly. “I believe there were 78,000 views on YouTube this morning.”
“82,000,” Orlynne said, glancing down at the black mirror of her cell. “And climbing.”
“It makes me wonder how spontaneous any of it actually was,” Gerald continued. “I’ve already made the mistake once of underestimating this man Noon. It’s easy to do because he comes here looking like something we know from the inside out, but we don’t. He’s part of something new, something one step evolved from its source. Not all evolution is necessarily positive, you know? Humans in general are proof of that if you ask me. But he’s shrewd. He understands how important it is to craft appearance, to tell artful lies. That’s why he’s so dangerous. He has all the traits of a gifted politician.”
After that the talk turned in an easier direction. Orlynne took them around back and showed them where they had Gerald’s goats staked down until they had time to build an enclosure. Both creatures regarded them with unblinking lunatic eyes. Laura laughed when she tried to pet Malone and Molly cut in between them and baaed like a spurned rival. Gerald told her to hush, which caused the goat to holler even louder.
Once they had visited for a while, Kyle asked Orlynne if she could give them a ride back to the put-in. On the way back Laura rode shotgun talking with Orlynne about some of the gardening books she had at the library that Orlynne might be interested in seeing if she ever had the time to come down and browse. Kyle liked listening to them talk. It made him feel like he was sitting with family. Once they got back to his truck he started to transfer the canoe but Orlynne told him not to bother, that he could drive his vehicle back and she’d haul the canoe the rest of the way. Laura told him she’d just go ahead and ride with Orlynne so they could keep talking.
Once back, Laura told him she had to go, that she had plenty she needed to get straightened out.
“All right,” he said, bent forward to kiss her. His hands felt like they belonged there at her waist, and she seemed to agree, not trying to move as he encircled her in his arms. Finally, he let her go.
How Fire Runs Page 13