by Jeff Hull
“Promises, promises,” he said. His attempt at a hungry grin made him look goofy and sad.
“Go on home tonight and rest, and start thinking about what you want to do on Thursday …”
He reached up and cupped her left breast, but she pushed his hand away slowly.
“Come on,” he said. “Just a little taste.”
“Save it. It’ll be worth the wait.”
She won the reprieve and within minutes had struggled through a few long sloppy tongue kisses and some more half-hearted fondling, an indication of how truly exhausted he was. And then Matt was gone, a full hour before she thought she could realistically get him to leave. She waited until the twin red dots of his rig taillights winked out in the darkness, knowing he’d be far down the road and not turning back, then she snatched her car keys from the key rack and slipped out the back door, letting herself feel lost in the night. She was alone enough in the house, but too surrounded by other lives.
When Josie felt this way, she wanted to be off by herself, wanted the possibilities of space, that sense she had driving the grain truck during harvest. Her first order of business was music. She scrolled through her playlists until she found Big and Rich and clicked on “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” which she played at inadvisable volume as she drove down the quarter mile of driveway to the county road. A low moonrise pressed an edge of yellow onto a hanging line of soft clouds and, beneath it, silhouetted the crenellations of the Bear Paw mountain range to the southwest. She felt the wind jostle her truck when she got up to speed on the county road.
When the Big and Rich song was over, she switched to Dave Matthews’s “Where Are You Going?” and sang as loud as the music. She wanted the noise, because soon she would be quiet. She wanted stimulation—her brain burbling with the music, her body rocking the beat—because next she would be blank. She spotted the two-track where it met the gravel road and turned onto it. She could hear the tall, dead grass stems whisking against the undercarriage of her truck.
The two-track was rutted and crawled over rocks. Her truck lunged and swayed over a low rise and then the reservoir spread out before her, a pan of dark water streaked by moonlight. The wind, the dark water, the mountains beneath the moonlight—here she had found a place to be with just herself. Except tonight she saw another vehicle, a car. As she drew closer, she recognized the torn vinyl roof of the dark sedan. She could see him sitting on the hood of the vehicle, the glowing coal of a cigarette red on his inhalation. She pulled up beside him and stopped.
He didn’t acknowledge that she was there. She couldn’t see much more of his face, itself inhaled by the black Quicksilver hoodie. There was something bad and wrong about this boy. Maybe it was the things she knew she was not supposed to like about him that made her want to find out more. He was not traditionally good looking—more like a fortress comprised of unexpected angles—but there was some surprising strength to that, and she could not deny that she just liked looking at him. Josie pulled up beside his car, turned off her engine, sat for a moment, thinking, What in the hell is he doing here?
Then, Well, just trying to help. Though she knew there was a lie in there. She got out of the truck, feeling the wind rush into her legs, and walked around the front of her pickup, stood a few feet from him.
He had one hip up on the hood of the car, one foot on the ground.
Across the reservoir moonlight reflected off the water on the cliffs in wobbling rectangles. Mikie LaValle lifted his head so just the prominent points of his face, his long nose and sharp chin, pierced the silhouette of his hoodie. He flicked the cigarette into the grass and turned to look at her.
“Thought that might be you when I saw the truck on the county road,” he said. “Wasn’t sure.”
“You can tell my truck from that far away?”
“Moon’s bright. I know trucks.”
“I didn’t know you came here,” she said.
“I go lots of places.”
“I come here,” she said.
“Just here?”
“When I want to be alone.”
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Josie’s mood felt fluid. She was still disappointed to not be alone. But there was something nice in the surprise of finding a friend here. “Do you come here … I mean, I’ve never seen you here before.”
He shrugged. “Why here? What for?”
“When I want to think about things,” she said. “Get away from stuff.”
“What stuff do you have to get away from, Golden Girl?”
“Golden Girl?” Josie said, not peeved. More like, Is that the best you’ve got? “What are you trying to get away from, Indian Boy?”
She could see his eyes in the moonlight snap to her face and glare. Then his long mouth split a dull white slit in the darkness, a smile. He said, “Blackfeet Boy.”
Josie nodded. She been afraid, after she said that, of how he might take it.
“Everything,” he said.
“Everything what?”
“I come here to get away from everything. My mom. My history. My life.” A pause. “Your boyfriend.”
“Your mom seems nice to me,” Josie said.
“Cuz she’s not your mom. You don’t live with her.”
“Nobody’s mom is easy to live with,” Josie said.
“Family’s like the horizon, man,” Mikie said. “It looks pretty much the same to everyone, but there’s a lot of shit between here and there.”
“Deep thoughts,” Josie said.
Mikie turned his hands palms up, like he’d been caught at something. “I don’t know. When I’m outside like this I feel more like myself. More like who I’m supposed to be.”
He turned and stared out over the water again. Josie felt a wave of wind push against her face, work through her hair. She was out of things to say. She peeked at his face, dark beneath the hoodie. The moon, the cool colors of night, shaded all his angles. Softened, he could be a handsome kid. Unwound, he was different looking, not for everyone, but there was something exotic about the way his eyes tilted toward each other, something a little thrilling in the edges of his nose and cheekbones. A wildness around his mouth.
“I don’t have any great ideas,” she said. “About Matt. I don’t like what happens. What he does sometimes.”
“He’s a douche.”
“Well …” Josie said, by way of bookmarking a protest to be named later.
“Guys like him get everything they want but it’s never enough,” Mikie said. “They take things other people don’t have.”
“It’s not like that. You don’t really know him. Things are hard for him, too.”
“He’s a douche.”
“You’re definitely going to want to keep that opinion to yourself.”
“Yeah?” he took a long drag from his cigarette, then flicked it, a twirling red coal into the night. Smoke poured from his nose and mouth. “You think I couldn’t hurt your big boyfriend?”
Josie toed the dirt beneath the windblown dead grass. They had been having a nice conversation and then suddenly they weren’t. Just as quickly, she wasn’t sure she was happy to be here anymore. Mikie seemed so quick to shift moods. She wondered if he could be dangerous to her at a time like this. But when she looked at him, she saw this … boy.
“Come,” she said. Because Josie knew a thing or two about boys. She held an arm behind her and crooked a finger and said, “Come.”
She sat on a large rock at the water’s edge, knowing he would sit beside her, and in a few moments he did. She looked at his face. “Look, I don’t know if you have Asperger’s or some serious socializing problems, but I’m just trying to be a friend and defuse a situation that could get someone hurt. And by someone I mean you.”
Mikie made a noise that sounded like a long lead into the word “shit.”
Josie let her head drift left and right. “I’m trying to help, Mike. I’m trying to be a friend.”
“Help away,” Miki
e said.
“The thing about Matt …” Josie tried.
“Maybe he’s just stupid,” Mikie said.
“He’s not stupid. He’s actually pretty smart. You can’t really be a stupid and be a quarterback. Ignorant on purpose maybe, but not stupid.”
“How come every time I talk to you we talk about your boyfriend?”
“Okay,” she said. “Try talking about something else. What’s Wyatt saying about what happened?”
His eyes flashed to her. “You thought I’d tell you something you don’t know?”
“Never mind,” Josie said. But that’s exactly what she’d wanted. “Talk about something else.”
“Okay,” he said.
And then they didn’t. They sat on the rock and watched the wind ripple the reservoir, spangled with moonlight. What seemed like a long time ensued, during which Josie thought about things she could talk to him about. He seemed to need someone to talk to, but she was shy on appropriate subjects. Sports was clearly a non-starter. Nobody talked about wheat except in terms of readiness or lack of readiness or money or lack of money. Wildlife? She could talk about the hawks in the summer. At some point, Josie knew, she was going to have to deal with the question of just what she was doing out here in the night, trying to think of things to talk to this boy about.
Mikie sat on the edge of the same rock she sat on. When he looked over the water, she could only see his nose, pale and sharp, jutting from the profile of the black hood. When she leaned back she could see his boxers protruding from the waistband of his jeans, blousing over his butt. He was nearly sitting on the jeans’ belt loops.
“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” Mikie asked.
“Who would I be going with?” Josie asked.
“By yourself,” he said. His emphasis told her he’d never considered another possibility.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Seattle, maybe. Depends on who I went with.”
“Why?”
“If I went with friends I might want to go to someplace like Seattle. If I went with my family, I’d like to go to California.”
“What about if you went with your boyfriend?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “We’ve never gone anywhere together. Not like that.”
“So that’s it? Seattle?”
“Maybe Korea,” she said. “I’d go with my dad to Korea so we could see where all the wheat goes. They make it into these buns. I’d like to take my dad, and eat some of those buns.”
“You like your dad?”
“I love my dad,” she said.
“What do you like about him?”
“He’s always there,” she said. “He always encourages me. And he’s a hard worker, and he’s fair and nice to people.”
Mikie rubbed his chin as if contemplating the validity of those criteria for successful father figures.
“You talk to him a lot?”
“Yeah. We don’t, like, talk talk. I mean, he’s my dad. We just talk about stuff. But not, like, personal stuff. We talk about things we see on the farm, or basketball.”
“Hm,” Mikie said. And then he didn’t say anything, and the moon burned in the sky and the wind puffed and gusted and fingered through Josie’s hair.
“What about you?” she said. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”
“I’d go to Iceland,” Mikie said, his voice slow and a little dreamy, as if describing some long-held vision. “Or New Guinea.” Josie had never imagined either Iceland or New Guinea. She couldn’t imagine what they might have in common beyond their sheer foreignness. “Or maybe Croatia. I think I have some ancestors from Croatia. Mom’s ancestors.”
Josie had no idea where Croatia really was. New Guinea sounded like Africa. Iceland must have been in the north. Croatia was in that mess of countries that clotted the map between Europe and Asia. But she didn’t understand where these lands lay in her own imagination. They seemed to occupy a rich and vital niche in his. What filled that part of her mind?
“If you could meet anybody in the world—alive or dead—who would it be?” Josie tried.
“My dad,” Mikie said.
And that stopped her. Mikie shifted on the rock and as he twisted toward her she watched to see if he would reach out and place a hand on her knee. The surprising thing was she understood that part of her wanted him to. His hand was coming around. Wavelets slapped at the rocks below them in a dissonant, rhythmless chop. Up where they sat, the rocks were dry, but the dense smell of muddy water permeated the air.
The moon shone weakly, and a cold breeze made Josie want to pull her own hoodie over her head. She wanted this strange boy to put his hand on her knee because she wanted to find out how she felt about it. She wondered how long she would leave it there before she made him take it off.
“If you caught terrorists, would you kill them?” Mikie was asking as he twisted. She watched his hand still coming around. She felt like it hovered over her knee, and she could feel the place where it would touch her, the weight of it sealing the denim of her jeans onto her skin. The hand dropped, kept dropping, fell to the side and planted on the rock beside her. For a moment she stared at it, in disbelief.
He missed. Should she have scooted her leg to catch it? And now she was staring at his hand, but she couldn’t keep doing that without drawing attention to the fact that she was staring at it, which might alert him to something on her mind, which she absolutely didn’t want him to find out about from her. She re-heard the question.
“Don’t they kill themselves?”
“What if you caught the guys who planned 9/11?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
It hung between them while Josie glanced at the fingers that had so narrowly missed her knee. Even with only moonlight, she could see nicotine stains thick on the nail of his thumb, spread like iodine on the skin around it. His nails were ruins chewed to their bed rims. His cuticles featured scythes of salmon-colored skin, exposed flesh and tiny puckered scabs. She could get him to stop that.
That would be an early priority. As if he’d forgotten he’d asked her the question, he asked another one. “What makes people want to blow up the world?” He wasn’t expecting her to answer. It was like a question from a song.
“They hate us,” she said, though.
“Ever wonder why?”
“I don’t know. They don’t like our religion, I guess,” Josie said.
“Your religion,” he said.
“They don’t like the way we live,” she said.
“And the way we jam it down everybody’s throat. That’s why I want to go to, like, New Guinea and Iceland some day. We don’t have any power there. They’ve probably never even heard of us.”
“They’re crazy,” she said. “You can’t rationalize with them.”
“That sounds like something parents say,” Mikie said.
Which stung her. It was something she’d heard from her parents—her dad—which didn’t make it wrong. Which was also not what stung. Josie had the distinct sense that Mikie disdained secondhand opinions, particularly when they were handed down from adults.
“You wanna get high?” he asked then, and Josie felt the careful little bridge they’d been building start collapsing between them, starting with the footings at her end.
“I don’t get high,” she said. That came out more harshly than she intended. “Totally cool if you do. I’m not, like, a prude or anything. It’s just … not my thing.”
“Ever try it?”
“Nope,” she said. She’d worked this one through and knew where she stood on it. Fine for anybody else; not her bag.
“I’m gonna get you so folded,” he said, and his mouth opened in a shiny grin. His teeth were not fangs at all, she could not help but see now, but instead looked a bit too small for a mouth wearing this wide of a smile.
“No you’re not,” she said. This felt less like statement-making than it did teasing. A little bit of teasing.
“That sounds sooo appealing,” she said, able to laugh at him. But what she was thinking was: Before what’s all over?
* * *
Tom had driven home feeling battered by the day—not side-swiped or body-blocked, but rather as if he’d endured a thousand slaps since he’d awakened that morning, and had never known when the next one was coming. And that email from the day before: I feel bad about so many things. He was going to have a worse tomorrow, wondering what had gone on in Sophie’s head to make her type that and click “send” as a function of how he should reply.
The past, he’d learned, was nothing like it used to be. He paid little attention to where he was driving, having done so for so many years, until he noticed a clump on the side of the road. Dead pheasants, skunks, coyotes, antelope—the roads around Dumont were littered with the collisions between a human society racing into the future and an animal world firmly rooted in travelogues divorced from time.
Tom braked, pulled over, stepped from the truck. The air felt chilly, and the end of the day sat in a powdery purple band along the horizon, pink on top of that. There was no high light, so everything felt close at hand. He walked around the truck. It was the white fur that threw him. A fox, belly up, its red coat down on the pavement, as dead as a fox could get. Tom went on home.
Sitting in his house later, Scout fed and walked, Tom had three or four beers. He was, he felt, entering a moment of weakness, or at least that’s what he told himself when he picked up the phone to call Jenny Calhoun. He had no idea what he wanted to talk to her about. She was still up.
“It’s a little late,” she said, “but if you really need an ear.”
Tom held onto enough of his sense of remove to try to talk her into eating out with him. But she said, “The only place that’s still serving is pizza at Pep’s. I can’t leave the kids. Why don’t you come over here?”
He proposed picking up a pizza at Pep’s on the way over, then added, “We can just eat it and then I’ll go.” Which sounded stupid as soon as he’d said it. She offered to “whip something up” for him.