Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  “The Great Bear,” you said, and pulled my hand along with yours as you traced the shape in the sky, a wide, faltering oblong. “She’s monstrous, bigger than any bear you’ve ever seen. And those four stars—” punctuating each one with the tip of your finger, as though they were mere yards away “—those are pissed-off mother coyotes chasing her across the sky. My mom told me that. She said that in those days, food was scarce, and the bear had grown so hungry that she would dig up coyote dens to eat the pups. And even though the coyotes were weak and hungry and scared to death of that bear, they vowed that they would fight to protect their babies. So when the Great Bear came sniffing around, they joined together, these four fierce coyote mothers, and they chased her. They chased her for so long and so far that when they stopped to catch their breath, they realised they’d run right up into the sky.”

  “I’ve never heard it told like that before.”

  “It was my mom’s version.” You drew your hands to your chest, long fingers forming a lattice across your heart. “My dumbass sisters never listened to her stories.”

  “You don’t get on with your family?”

  “My mom died. My sisters … we don’t see eye to eye. I guess I don’t like the way they live.”

  I let out a snort of bitter laughter. “I know how that feels.”

  “I listened to all my mom’s stories. I liked that we saw the stars differently to everyone else. And I guess now … ” you were dazzling in the dark, eyes like Baltic amber set into the pale bronze of your skin; you were a small and perfect sun, and I was willingly subsumed by your gravity. “I guess you do too, don’t you?”

  I smiled. I felt like you’d given me something of yourself then, a small gift by which I might begin know you. I looked up at the Great Bear, at the four coyote mothers chasing her in perpetuity through the heavens, and wondered who you were, where you’d been all this time, why you kept coming back to me.

  The men came a few days later. They arrived in a rust-coloured station wagon, kicking up plumes of dust behind them like the tail of a comet. I stood out on the porch as they pulled up, piling out of the car in a tangle of identical plaid limbs and khaki vests.

  I straightened my back, set my shoulders square. I didn’t know any of them, though I had a vague sense that I’d seen one or two before—perhaps out at Wildrose, working the gas pumps or the campsite. Three of them, each with a rifle at their hip. Men on the hunt.

  A tall, thin man stepped forward. “Afternoon ma’am.” He tipped his cap, an antiquated notion of politeness. Beneath it, a sparse rim of sandy hair traced an oasis of sun-pink skin. “You live out here by yourself?”

  “Yes, I do.” None of them were the man who’d shot you, but I was wary all the same. Men like that, they travelled in packs, associated closely with one another; they wore their guns like membership badges. I didn’t like the nature of his question, the way all three of them ran their eyes the length of my body, assessing me as though I were a prize sow. “Can I ask what it is you want?”

  “Sorry to disturb you, miss,” the second man said, with a wide-eyed humbleness I knew was feigned. My palms itched. I wished I’d brought my gun out with me. I wished I’d never have to touch the damn thing again. “Only there’s been a situation down at the campsite. Some sort of animal going round hurting folk. Rabid, maybe. Killed a couple kids…”

  “A couple?”

  “Yes miss. Little girl got killed yesterday afternoon. Wandered out a little ways into the desert. Her momma never even knew she was gone ‘til it was too late. Anyway, Bryson at the store said there was someone lived on her own out in the desert. He asked us to check on you, make sure you’re able to protect yourself.”

  “I’m able,” I said.

  “We’ve seen coyotes heading out in this direction,” the thin man said. “Could be there’s a pack of them somewhere nearby. You’d best take care…”

  “They say it’s an animal,” the third man said suddenly. “But nobody’s got a lick of proof. Nobody’s seen an animal do anything.” His companions stared at him for a moment, uncertain how they ought to proceed; clearly, this was not the agreed story. “There’s a lot of transients round here, is all I’m saying. It’s damn near impossible to keep track of who’s coming and going. You could do anything and nobody’d know so much as your name. You want my advice, ma’am, you’d be best off watching out for strangers.”

  I’m a grown woman, I thought, staring at the three of them, the earnest way they presented themselves; guns respectfully lowered, pink-cheeked and sweating like pigs beneath their heavy khakis. They thought me soft, I realised. They thought it a fluke that I’d survived this long. “I’ll be careful,” I told them. There was no acid in my voice; I burned with the desire to tell them to get the hell off my land, but I resisted. Better not to upset three armed men. “Thank you. I appreciate your good intentions. But you don’t need to check up on me again. I’ve been looking after myself for a long time.”

  They scanned the distance as they piled back into the car, checking for motion, for shadows beneath the desert sun. I watched them leave, heading back the way they’d come, the car a bloodspot on the horizon. And I thought, better a pack of beasts than a pack of men with guns.

  I didn’t tell you about the men, but you knew anyway. You were quiet when you came back; you did not join me on the porch to smoke and stargaze, but curled up silent on the couch, blanket drawn over your head so that I could see only a vaguely human-shaped lump lying very still against the cushions.

  The cloud cover was thick that night, the air heavy, foretelling rain. A dry wind had picked up, casting fistfuls of sand like a spiteful child. And I didn’t feel safe out there on my own, staring into a distance whose edges I could not discern; in which anyone or anything might be hiding. I shucked off my shoes in the hallway, locked the door behind me. As I passed by the couch my fingers brushed the crest of the blanket, where I supposed your face might be.

  “I don’t know you very well, June, but for what it’s worth, I know you’ve got a good heart. I can feel that much.” I drew my hand away, honouring the privacy of your cocoon. “I know they have you mistaken. I just wanted you to know that.”

  Sometime in the night I felt you crawl into the bed beside me, slow but determined in your audacity. I lay perfectly still as you slipped beneath the sheet, each movement cautious; I sensed the breath held in your lungs as you curled a hand around my arm, your knees pressed gently behind my own. I felt the tension of your muscles: apprehensive, but bold enough to persevere. I turned to face you, pulling you closer with great care. I feared I might crush you with the slightest movement. Your ribcage was sharp against my abdomen, the planes and angles of you a stark contrast to my softness, my roundness.

  “Be careful out there tomorrow,” I said, as though this sudden easy intimacy were normal. “There’re men with guns sniffing around.”

  Your mouth pressed against mine. You had glass shards for teeth, wire for bones; your lips tasted like copper. My father’s voice distant in my mind: it is an abomination for a man to lay with another man. I traced the braille of your spine with the tips of my fingers. Joke’s on you, dad, I thought. Neither of us are men.

  “Sadie, Sadie,” you whispered, singsong. “Oh, Sadie, don’t you know? I was born careful. I’ve been careful all my life.”

  Every day I feared your absence less and less; you were like the tide, receding into the gloaming, returning again as the sun set. I had not planned for the eventuality that, someday, you might not come back; curiously, I had no desire to prepare for it. It was as though after a life spent preparing fastidiously for a future that might never come, I had finally learned to absorb the present; you had taught me, somehow, that the sum total of my existence could not be pared down to numbers on a spreadsheet: how many tins, how many bullets, how fast I could run, how many weeks I might survive.

  Sadie, you sang. I loved the way my name sounded in your mouth, the warm gravel of your voice lilting. I wa
s born careful. Born lucky too, perhaps, because those men never found you, though I saw them on the road once or twice. They would nod, in greeting or in solidarity, and I would nod back, though I would sooner have driven on without acknowledgement.

  “Can you run?” you asked me one night, perhaps a week after the men had stopped by. You were wrapped in a knitted blanket; a sharp breeze swept in from the mountains, a familiar whistling in the eaves, heralding the very beginnings of winter.

  A cigarette stub glowed between the tips of my fingers, heat licking at the calluses. “When I was ten,” I said, propping myself up against the headboard, “I was so physically fit I could do five hundred push-ups in one session. I could run a mile in six minutes. I’d even go to bed with my sneakers on in case the world went to shit in the middle of the night and I’d have to run for my life.”

  “That’s kind of fucked up.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it is.”

  “But how about now?” You indicated the dying cigarette at my lips; you glossed over the heaviness of my thighs, the thickness of my waist, though they must have crossed your mind. “Could you run now? If you had to, I mean?”

  The question sat heavy on my tongue, forbidden but always present. A ghost between us. Your face was drawn, eyes wide and anxious and beautiful. “June,” I said, crushing the remnants of my cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Ash scattered the bedsheet, a thin grey snowfall. “What is it they think you’ve done?”

  There came a strangled cry from outside, the sound of an animal caught unaware; the back of my neck prickled. We both turned our heads, staring out of the window at the darkened scrub. “Not what I’ve done,” you murmured. “What I am.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Listen.” Your hands clasped my face, urgent. “I need you to know that what you see, right here—this is the truth. This is what’s real. Do you believe me?”

  You were so close I could see myself reflected in the black of your pupils. “June-”

  “Whatever else I may be. Whatever anyone says. This—” You drew my head gently towards you; your lips were velvet against my forehead, your teeth hard behind them. “—all of this. I swear, Sadie. I’d give everything away just to keep this.”

  Everything you were to me had been pieced together; you were a loose-stitched patchwork of intuition, of little stories and guesswork. And I loved you, somehow, despite your insubstantiality; you cast no shadow, left no footprints, but the warmth of your body and the salt taste of your skin mattered far more. I wrapped my arms around you, the curve of your skull delicate beneath my chin. Your hair smelled like gasoline. I wondered where you’d been. “I see you, June,” I said, after a time. “I believe you.”

  “It’s not their fault.” Barely audible. “My poor sisters. They’re so hungry.”

  I smoothed your hair back, glancing down at your face. “Your sisters?” I asked, but you said nothing more. Your eyes were closed, your mouth a slack, sleepy line. Perhaps you’d been dreaming aloud.

  The bed sagged a little under our combined weight; I lay quietly, listening to your breathing deepen; my beloved stranger, dreaming strange, sunlit dreams. I held your bones close and let my eyes slip shut.

  I will always remember the look on your face when I saw you standing there, neck stretched, pulse throbbing in that vital spot beneath your jaw; the edge of a knife pressed against your throat just hard enough to break the skin. The man’s grip tight on your arm, fingers buried deep in your flesh. I will always remember the spark in your eye: not fear but fury, acute as any knife-edge. It was barely dawn. I stood helpless, desperate to tear you from his grip but unarmed, unprepared.

  “I said you ought to be careful.” The .204 Ruger hung from his left shoulder; his right hand held the knife against your carotid. “Said there were vicious animals out there. Do you have the faintest clue what you’ve let into your home?”

  “What I know is none of your goddamn business.” I’d woken to the sound of shattering glass, a door being kicked in; your scream still echoed in my skull, ricocheting back and forth. I thought I’d lost you. I knew I still might. “I don’t know where you get off hurting women-”

  He spat. “She ain’t a woman. Ain’t even a person. What, she never told you?” Lips pulled back, a rictus sneer. His free hand yanked a clump of your hair, snapping your head sharply back; you let out a pained yelp. “Never even told your friend here the truth? What you and your bitch sisters have done?”

  “Let her alone—”

  “Watch,” he said, brow knotted in disgust. “You just watch.”

  I could do nothing else. I watched as he dragged you by the hair, pulled you towards the shattered window, your bare feet dancing over broken glass; you shrank away from the sunlight, writhing wildly in his grip, and for the briefest of moments his balance faltered. Barely a second, but it was enough. Your teeth tore into his thick white throat; your fingers anchored in his hair, pulling him down, dragging him through the open doorway and onto the porch. He fought, but you were terrible in your persistence; his fingers spasmed, clutching ineffectually at your hair, your face. The knife clattered to the floor. In the darkness you were a girl, a furious girl with blood spilling like water from your mouth; in the sunlight I saw the truth. You were a thin, ragged animal, a starving coyote tearing the throat of a grown man as easy as paper. As you moved through that sun-dappled room you were liquid: shadow-girl, sun-dog; your pelt shone russet in the warm light, your skin smooth in the shade. Hot blood streamed from crimson lips, glistened on sharp ivory teeth, changing and warping as the sun rose, illuminating the truth of you.

  At last, he slumped to the ground, and he did not move again.

  In a pool of shade you stood up, all torn feet and trembling legs. You wiped your mouth with the back of your hand, streaking gore down your face, into your hair. I imagined I could hear the railroad clatter of your heart.

  “Do you see me, Sadie?”

  You were wild-eyed and trembling, but you were not afraid. You were a world away from the frightened, wounded girl I’d met outside Wildrose. You held your palms out to me. This is what’s real: you, sleeping in my arms; your legs wrapped around mine, skin slick with sweat, your lips grazing my jaw. The sound of my name in your mouth. I swallowed, thick-throated. “I see you,” I said.

  There came the low hum of a car engine approaching. I turned. The rust-red station wagon was coming up the dirt road.

  “Run with me,” you said.

  And we ran. You weaved through the shadows, into the light; you were a girl on torn feet, a swift coyote with the wind in your pelt. The hardpan stung my bare soles, the sun hot already at my back; my lungs burned with the effort and still there was such a long way to go. We had no plan, no destination, and perhaps we would fail, but for now we would run, and it seemed to me—breathless, exhilarated—that nothing in my life had been as pure, as perfect as this singular moment of freedom.

  ROOT-LIGHT

  Michael Wehunt

  1. APPROACHING PRAYER

  In a sudden breeze the poet watches three dandelion spores break their tethers. They drift out for a moment like trivial monoliths. He is sick and must die somewhere, so he has chosen a place that might be sick with poetry. But he holds back the moment of arrival, watching these dying small things. The air cold and thin as the edge of a butter knife, too toothless to carry the spores over the remnants of black rainwater, so they fall and drink there. The poet has come much farther, four hours down the beige highways into the dim flat country, away from his mountains, into weary forest, to Furlough House.

  This is how he begins things, by plucking and seeking, pulling the obvious metaphors from nature. This is why he stopped his car before the bend that will likely show him the house. Got out and watched the trees deepening further into their winter motif down the gravel drive, let the dandelion catch his eye as it lost its young. What hair he has left stands briefly in the wind. Pain twists low in his gut. His legs ache. The bones
he has been wrapped around for so long feel heavy enough to simply lower them down here in the same dirty puddle as the drowning seeds.

  Instead the poet turns in a slow circle, the bare fading pines and oaks scratching the purpled sky, a spearmint tang in the air, and thinks—But. He admits, You’re only thinking of other poets, of Mary Oliver, next you’ll look for rain, a yellow thread, and God. You did not come here for tree bark and prayer and the scalloped edges of cloudbanks. The house is where the new words are. The last words, please let them be.

  Still he admires the trees, whose shadows lurch softening across the gravel, the failing sunlight confetti caught lower and lower in their branches as he stands gazing, procrastinator, woolgatherer. A weighted and vast stillness out here. The first grains of dark sift down and he enjoys this, too, the slow curtain. He cannot escape it.

  James Dickey, now, would have turned this grim wild into a feather that cut through the meat of what this all means, the choice, the way the poet has at last turned to embrace the cancer. Dickey’s voice would reek of vegetation and gun oil and flash a final sun-glare into his swollen tired eyes, and Lord it would have heft.

  But he is neither Oliver nor Dickey. He is not half of one. He is Corddry Smith, only that, and after seventy-three years it must be enough. Death has paid him notice, and now comes clawing, crawling from his intestines, metastasizing whatever sacs its fingers grasp inside of him. Death is not an idea but a presence now, pinned to him more certainly than a spore. Which is to say, which is to prod himself, the house is the whole point, and he returns to his creaking Volvo and eases it toward the curve in the trees.

  Furlough House rises into view—or it seems to rise, somehow, cupped in a bowl as it is. The poet lets the gravel drag his car to a stop and for a handful of moments tries to picture the house in a bell of spring riot, because the place might simply burst in the green throat of May. Picturing it is a difficult effort. In November, this November, it’s just an atrophied thing uprooted from some other ideal and laid into this Carolina nook. A long colonial house, the color of old blood, with twelve large windows in the front, lidless eyes without the dignity of shutters. Drab shingles. The whole of it held inside a shallow valley ringed with spruce sentinels, every one dead, everything gray but for the walls of the house and the great oak shading its right side.