Jarms won two more hands in the next half an hour. Matt watched him shuffle the cards lengthwise then the other way, the cards intertwining like fingers, one over the other. He passed the cards across the apron and listened to the bets, calling without much regard to his own hand and asked no cards to draw. He bet fifty dollars and was upped and in return bumped the bet two hundred and the table folded. This time, before hooking in his winnings, he lay his cards face up. He had not even a pair. The next fellow shuffled the cards, but the play insulted everyone at the table. A man with the wind behind him ought to travel quiet, but Jarms was not the kind to permit a successful bluff to go unappreciated, no matter what it cost him. It was less arrogance than the emptiness in a joke absent the punch line.
The next hand Jarms lost with a low pair and the next with one shy of a flush. Two later, he check-raised into a ten-high straight, smiling all the while. He was not playing like a man bored or one with no ken for the game. He apprehended the cards and each player’s nature as well as anyone at the table. Matt realized it wasn’t money or entertainment he pursued, it was self-annihilation. It came to him that the man had been bent on such a course since they’d encountered one another and was too generous to be humane about it. Maybe with Roland’s health declining, Jarms was free to take broader strokes in drawing his own blood.
He pondered it for what seemed like an hour, until he smelled smoke and saw an orange flick bounce in the window glass. Outside, he rounded a corner to Main Street. Flames piled from the Chinese restaurant. A Chinese boy outside clanged two pans together. Two women lugged water buckets from a trough. The fire had overrun the parlor and kitchen. The tables glimmered, cloths curling over them. The Chinese spoke their rattle. They’d bailed the trough nearly dry.
In a top window where bedrooms were, a shadow passed and passed again. The fire had left the back stairs heaped on the ground. In a shed, a bucket of sixteen penny nails and a hammer hung on a nail. Around front was a porch column and Matt pounded a nail into it as a step and drove another for a handhold. He grasped the eave. Heat had slickened the shingles, but he pulled himself up and steadied his feet. Something thumped him from behind. It was Jarms.
“What’re you doing?” Matt asked him.
“Putting you out.”
They flattened Jarms’s coat over the window and cleared the glass. Smoke boiled out the opening. Matt broke the way, Jarms, behind. They knocked through two rooms before discovering an old man huddled in a closet, holding a boxload of photographs and letters.
Matt piled the man’s keepsakes into a pillowcase. He headed them all the same direction as the flames. They would be drawing to the broken window. Matt could smell his jacket burn. He shoved Jarms through the broken glass, then the Chinese. He and the memorabilia tumbled across the edge and disappeared. Outside, the cool darkness looked like good water, and Matt wanted to soak himself in it. Faces stared up at him. Matt stepped onto the shingles. They were slick as melting ice and he tumbled off the roof and ended up on the ground on all fours. Burning scraps rained upon him. His back smoldered; his hands had lost their hair.
A fire engine had arrived and soaked Matt with a hose. The water both hurt and soothed him. He bent and began peeling his smoldering boot leather. The pictures lay in the children’s laps. They examined the grain images and letters that looked like smaller pictures. Their grandfather coughed and spat and the Chinese women attempted to slake his thirst by ladling water into his mouth.
Later the town’s doctor arrived. He covered Matt with bag balm and wrapped gauze around his bare feet.
“Change it every day for two weeks or it’ll infect. He’ll howl like an Indian,” the doctor warned.
“I don’t guess he will,” Jarms told him. “He never complained while it was happening.”
Jarms managed a whiskey bottle and made Matt swallow some before he got into the car. They passed the smoldering fire and the firemen letting it. Matt lay in the seat as they climbed out of the ravine that held the town. Above, the hills stretched and rose and fell and the road was just a gravel line dividing them.
Matt drank and drank again when Jarms failed to retrieve the bottle. He broke a sweat and shivered until he couldn’t stop himself.
“Garrett, he was there,” Matt said.
“There, hell, he lit the damned place,” Jarms said. The dashlight made him green. They rode awhile in the quiet. “He knows I got a stake in the place, but that’s not the real reason. He’s like a dragon in old stories. He tears things up just by being.”
“How come you tolerate him?”
“I’m sentimental concerning dragons.”
Matt said nothing more, feeling mostly fear himself, more even than pain. Jarms saw it, Matt knew, and Matt was amazed that the man’s vision into the world had won him so little, aside from good cheer. Jarms opened his hand for the bottle. He drove into the night, letting Matt doze until they hit houselights.
Stopped, Jarms eased Matt from the car and led him toward the barn.
“This ain’t home?” Matt whispered.
“Stay still,” Jarms said. He undid Matt’s belt buckle and unbuttoned his drawers.
“Roll,” Jarms said. He pushed Matt to one side, then the other until he’d dragged his drawers to his knees. He retrieved the girl from the house. She bent to inspect Matt’s nakedness.
“I’m not using my hands,” she said.
“He’s hurt,” Jarms told her.
But the girl was steadfast. Jarms sighed. He grabbed Matt’s flaccid workings. He tugged him firm.
“Now just squat down,” he told the girl.
“I ain’t going face-to-face with him.”
“You don’t have to. Just look off somewhere.”
She straddled Matt and inched herself down. She blotted out the light from the doorway. Straw stuck to Matt’s doctored back. Each thrust brought a new pain, until finally, he was falling apart inside her and she was pulling the suffering from him.
“You finished?” Jarms asked.
“I think,” Matt said.
“Good.”
Jarms set his hand over the girl’s opening and hauled her off of him. He guided her to her back and held her legs over her head.
“Now get in there and cook,” he said.
Matt closed his eyes.
“You made us Roland’s baby,” Jarms told him. Matt nodded. He knew he had. He knew it like he knew his own name.
20
THEY DIDN’T BRUSH HIS HAIR, and, though cut, it was less a tangle, his head still appeared a tumbleweed, and his sloe-eyed gaze left him looking half-asleep well past noon. His clothes, aside from the hand-me-downs in which she had dressed him that first night, were thin as a veil where they had not been patched or let out to account for his growth. Beard peppered his chin. Lucky was sixteen, but so strange and uncultured that no number, outside height and weight, could accurately describe him. He followed her like a pup, nodded at what she told him, smiled in submission when it wasn’t appropriate, and performed tasks with such vigor he missed their intent then moped when she corrected him. He hummed, though the sound was hardly musical, more like bugs careening about a light. The boy seemed unaware sound emitted from him at all.
He was underfoot at first, but once she’d assigned him a routine of duties he could manage on his own, he proved productive enough. And he was, of course, young and tireless. Wendy realized she must have been strange country for the boy to come upon. Outside his mother, Wendy had witnessed him speak to no one until his first night on the ranch. Linda was not unneighborly when encountered but traveled wide circles to avoid such meetings. From birth, the boy knew little other than her voice. Wendy wondered if his mother’s presence was as oppressive as Wendy herself found God or the comfort believers knew.
On the skyline, a pair of riders appeared and disappeared throughout the day. She recognized them the next day and the one following. Drifters, she figured, sharing part-time work at another ranch or laying over before a push we
st across the desert and the pass between here and Seattle, or north and west to the dam in the coulee. Perhaps they weren’t paired at all, or only out of convenience or necessity, like she and the boy.
She broke from seeding the spring crop and studied the boy drive a nail in a post and twist and loop barbwire over the head, then hook the nail, and wire into the wood. Finished, he started another a foot higher. She wondered if cities were lonely, if a hundred people stacked into twenty apartment floors could remain separate. If distance and geography didn’t keep them apart, what was loneliness, what did she share on a hillock, gazing across livestock and grain and a great river, a hundred square miles of country with a thousand others whose vista most days did not extend past a flat’s walls or the streets piled with buildings? The boy looked up, found her, and grinned. She raised her hand to acknowledge him before returning to her planting.
Wendy’s physical labor piled muscle and sinew upon her like a man’s, and she perspired far beyond the restraint implied by femininity. The latter forced her to break her work into two-hour pieces with fifteen minutes between in which she undressed and dried the cold sweat with a bathing towel. When she glanced up and recognized the boy staring, she thought he might bolt, but instead he walked closer, his blinking eyes taking her in. Her chest was beaded with sweat. She told herself it was good practice, her nakedness; there was knowledge in it he required. She put the towel in her fist and dragged it underneath each breast. Her nipples rose with the gesture.
The boy’s eyes took her in. Her feet started blunt as quartered wood and her ankles thick, then muscled legs and thighs and boxy hips, and thin again at the waist. Above, she turned blocky geometry that only her breasts’ arcs argued.
The boy undid his belt and opened his fly, fingers scrambling.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
He looked down at his pants and the disturbance there. “It’s misbehaving,” he said. The horses’ necks bent, their mouths pulling at the grass. She could hear the roots give way.
She turned her back to him. “Pull on it,” she said. A few tugs and she heard his zipper close and his belt buckle cinch and hasp.
•
EACH DAY, SHE DRIED HERSELF and he spied on her from behind the sagebrush, and though she never condoned it, neither did she forbid it. The knowledge made her head light. The boy rustled in the high grass like a pheasant or a grouse and soon every wind or insect clatter, any time a rabbit broke brush distracted her. She suffered a broken hunger, persistent and impersonal; she wanted it to be the boy, though any resolution would multiply their loneliness. People’s loins could not remain locked forever, ecstasy or not. At some point, sleep and food and drink turned necessary, and then where would they be?
She was ordinary, yet the boy’s eyes had lifted her to more. It was she who clipped his hair and shuddered his manhood that first night. A part of her had hoped as much, but now her certainty of it left her uneasy. She knew nothing of the machinations of a body, she realized, nothing of what one’s flesh might do to another. It was smoke to her. Once, when she took to rest, he gathered the horse and seed and spelled her. She watched him clear the hill and kept her disappointment to herself.
•
SOON, HE WAS SEEDING MORE than she and putting up the horses at night to boot. When she rested under a lone pine, waiting for her turn—she would have to halt the boy, he’d never surrender a chore on his own—she would watch him and wonder if the boy was using these few days to make of her a rumor to be reheard throughout his life as she’d done with Matt these past years. She and the boy were bound for the same end, she decided. Oblivion. It should satisfy her, and she was surprised to find it did not.
The riders remained, silhouettes atop of the rocky breaks. The boy measured them as they reappeared. They paralleled the road. He said nothing, just tapped the sheathed knife in his belt. The dry weather left the air smelling dusty and full of something. Over the hill, Wendy heard him make water.
The boy killed a pheasant and an early duck, and Mrs. Lawson and his mother plucked and boiled them in a kettle and served the birds with a jar of pickled cabbage. The boy finished before them and left to check on the animals. Wendy was tempted to give him some company. She heard Linda offer her something. More tea or a stale cookie from a box, but she was suddenly too exhausted to jar herself to pay attention. Mrs. Jefferson took Wendy’s hand. It was hot and clammy and Wendy would have guessed not very agreeable to the touch. She studied her palm against the woman’s, both rough like two pieces of earth colliding.
“Would you like a child?” Mrs. Jefferson asked.
“I don’t see much in the way of children in my future.”
“If you did, would you want it? Or would it be just another crop to plant?”
Wendy stared at her. “I’d want to want it,” she said finally.
Linda said. “I want my child. I always have. It’s unfair, wanting your babies. They’re much better off chores. I’ll bet your parents loved you very much.”
“They did, I think.” Wendy said. She closed her eyes and felt sleep coming for her, like her father slipping into her room, standing, watching, a thing he had done every night of her life with him. She wondered if he lingered by her empty bed now and dreamed her in it. She worried she was splintering his heart.
“Yet you left them?”
“I am selfish,” she said. “My guilt trumped their affection.”
“Still?” Linda Jefferson asked.
“Still,” Wendy replied. She excused herself and found the boy in the horse corral. He sat a fence post, watching them eat. She could see his eyes shining in the house lights. The river and the house eaves gleamed, as well, like polished glass in the darkness. The full moon glowed and the stars. It reminded her of being drunk on the porch. Everything carrying its own light. She’d cloaked herself in an afghan but was still chilly. She’d counted herself good before, but a good that was only dry country, watching the river course past, going its one way. She shook her head at her thinking. It amused her being so high and mighty once. It saddened her, too.
According to all accounts the coming dam would make the river turn backward until it had filled the broad new reservoir like a washing tub, and no current remained, just flat water stirred only by the wind or a fish swimming through it.
Long ago, she’d daydreamed time backed up that same way. Evenings, she’d undo the rifle shot and watch Matt rise past her window glass and take each gift from her porch to his house like she was the one giving. There, he met her on the hill and put all their awkwardness behind them, drinking from the jug until they were sober and enjoying a long walk. Later, he and Linda journeyed into a snowstorm and found his father and brother, held captive there so long, and delivered them home where they, like two halves, were joined, but she was alone. Feeling good turned as hard a prospect to manage backward as it did traveling ahead. The knowledge left her not wanting anything.
So she quit her daydreaming, stopped any thinking, except what was needed to run the ranch. Winters, she attempted Emily Dickinson a few times, but the cool leather binding felt like saying words behind someone’s back and she shifted her attentions to dime westerns and histories, where the doing mattered more than the feeling.
The boy beside her knew none of this. To him she was just the woman who permitted him to watch her undress. She had nothing but rancor for their indiscretions, but it was what he wanted, to know what he hadn’t before. She was not thinking of him for those mean purposes, however. It was herself she was readying. The dam would come and she would have to learn to stand in front of a man naked. It was only time that separated her from the boy.
•
WENDY AND THE BOY HAD seen neither person nor beast in the fields for two days when the riders met them on the road. They raised their hands to hail them, and the boy halted the horses.
“Would you have any water?” one asked. He wore a ball cap and looked dirty, as he hadn’t shaved. The other was cle
an-cut and short. Wendy rustled through their gear for a water jug and passed it to the men. They drank their fill though the day’s heat was unremarkable.
The small one returned the jug. His face was wet and smooth. Wendy had watched the boy studying the short man’s throat as he drank; his Adam’s apple bobbing was somehow obscene. Now the man met the boy’s stare, glaring him into boyness.
“You strong enough to break earth with that?” the dirty-faced one nodded at the plow.
“He manages fine,” Wendy replied.
The man dismounted and inspected the tines. “Looks like it could use a whetstone.”
“Time permits we will get to it,” Wendy told the man.
“Man would make time.”
The boy fidgeted. He stared at the back of the horses, his ears red.
The man dismounted and took the reins from the boy. “Maybe we could bunk at your ranch. Look after things.”
Wendy unlooped the rifle from the seatpost.
“All right,” the man said. He returned the reins to the boy but slowly at his leisure. “So much for the Good Samaritan, eh?”
Wendy reported the details to the women upon her return. The boy ate in silence, then posted himself as sentry on the porch. That night, Linda didn’t sleep. Instead she propped herself in the rocker and watched the boy outside. The others fell to slumber quickly and she was glad for that. It was cumbersome loving someone and an exercise that required privacy. In the darkness, she did what she imagined every mother did: she listened to the sound of the boy’s breaths and watched his calm face. Perhaps it was because she was older and tired and in need of stillness or perhaps it was that she’d relinquished all people except the boy. He was dressed and groomed and productively laboring and looking at Wendy like she was a star fallen from the heavens. Linda recognized that moment in boys’ lives. She once fanned it aglow for spelling, poems, or arithmetic. When she taught, she could never comprehend a mother’s doting, but she understood that vigilance now. You steered a child through the day safe, and it gave you permission to watch it sleep. It was the sleeping children that still loved you.
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