Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  The women were covered in heavy canvas clothing, multiple skirts and overtops, identical except for the fact that the one on the far side had chosen mostly greens and turquoise, and the one nearer to Jefferson wore light reds and oranges. On their backs they carried matching messes of rope and twine, wrapped in a tangle around a few short wooden posts. And now that they were so close, he realized exactly who they would have been if they had been in the story: these were the gypsies.

  At a distance of ten feet he saw their beauty, a beauty that proved what good works God and the angels could do when they worked together. They were identical twins, their bronze skin glistening under the heat of the sun and their chocolate eyes bespeaking a frank calm. The women were by now nearly close enough to touch, but looked as if they might walk right past without seeing Jefferson. He knew that they might be unsightly on the inside, but the outer loveliness of these two women was enough to make him forgive all possible insufficiencies, abandon his defensive position among the tree roots, and rise eagerly to meet them.

  “Hello there, ladies,” he said, waggling the fingers on his right hand in what he had always thought to be a reflection of his good humor and kindness. “I do believe you are the first humans I have seen on this road in half a day. How do you do?”

  The women stopped to look at him from under their velvety camel’s eyelashes. Dark wisps of close-cropped, wavy black hair escaped their headscarves, and beads of sweat sparkled at their temples and behind their ears and at the napes of their long necks. Though the mirage-like shimmer around them had long disappeared, the richness of their lovely brown skin glistened all the more at close range. They were of medium height, and though they appeared to be identical in the genetic sense, Jefferson quickly began to notice differences between them. The one in greens and turquoise, who had been walking half a pace ahead, was slightly more wiry and athletic, with a taut quickness in her gestures and a sharper face, with keen, expressive features and a thinner nose.

  The woman dressed in light reds and oranges was more rounded, with grace in her slower, more methodical movements. Her mouth quirked to one side in a near-query. She struck Jefferson as having a better sense of humor than her sister, though he knew that he might be projecting his personal history onto her; the quick, skinny girls he’d observed in high school had never appealed to him, while the one girl he thought he’d ever love, Josephina, was round. Jefferson, a skin-and-bones guy who’d always had to work at keeping the weight on, thought it was basic algebra. You had to keep the two sides of the equation equal, like balancing a seesaw: skinny guys and round girls on one side, big guys and skinny girls on the other.

  He had a theory about the difference between round girls and skinny girls that he now applied to these two. The rounded one in reds and oranges would run late for her appointments. Rounded women were like that—they enjoyed themselves too much to be prompt. He loved that. Skinny girls, on the other hand, were skinny in large part because they rushed everywhere they went, their whole lives through. Skinny girls were always worried about being late or getting into trouble. He did not want to be judgmental, and he was sure that some skinny girl out there existed to prove him wrong, but so far in his life, Jefferson had found that skinny girls made him nervous and round girls made him breathe deeply and smile.

  He broke off this train of thought, noticing that they were still striding forward, and soon would have passed him.

  He smiled and waved again. Remedios had woken up now, and she yipped in their direction too. “Hey, don’t you two wanna rest a bit?”

  They exchanged glances of near comprehension, followed by a few quick Spanish responses, too fast for his brain, before stepping from the road toward him. They swung their bundles down from their backs, whispering and giggling as they approached. The rounded one asked a question, but Jefferson didn’t understand her, and shrugged. “No sé, no sé.”

  He had begun to feel a sense of ownership over the space under the oak, as if it were his living room. As the women made their way toward him, he shifted his arms off his hips and into an outspread and beckoning posture, like the host at a party, coming to the door. Come in, come in, you must be tired, he said in his mind.

  The tangled bundles of rope and wood on their backs, he could now see, were hammocks, and the women laid them on the ground only long enough to scope out good hanging spots in the branches. They greeted him with preliminary smiles, but hurried right to work, as if it were understood that the visiting, the getting to know each other, would come after the hammocks were in place.

  “Can I help you?” Jefferson asked from behind. “Would you like some water?”

  Both turned and smiled knowing smiles at him and then at each other, and then resumed their hoisting of ropes and their tying of knots. Jefferson did not understand why they might be putting up their hammocks but he didn’t think it could be dangerous. He’d recovered from his shock at his near-execution, and now was feeling somewhat entertained. He’d even begun thinking how he might relay this story to Nigel and Esco. Both of these, he felt, were good indications that he was not afraid.

  By then it was clear that the twins spoke no English. As they worked, Jefferson performed a panicked review of Spanish III from senior year—he had learned much more about writing Spanish than he had about speaking it, and even that was three years stale.

  “So . . . cómo está?” he blurted out, wanting to continue his impression that he was a harmless young guy who knew un poquito de español. “Muy bien?” he prompted, after almost a minute had passed with no response. “Sí, muy bien!” he said again, another thirty seconds later, laughing a bit to himself. Ever since he had left Santa Fe, with the brief exception of those few minutes on the ground with the bergamot woman and her bandits, his hands had been shaking less, and something told him that he would continue to fail to die, and that this plan to visit GGM had been, in fact, a good one.

  He was not afraid. He was certain of that now.

  The hammocks hung securely, the twins turned to look at him, standing still for the first time at close range. They were not as old as he’d first thought, probably in their late twenties, and their bodies reminded him of those of high school dancers. He saw skin for the first time as the one in greens and turquoise sat on the ground and began disrobing. She unwrapped what looked to be a long scarf from around her neck and shoulders—several complete circumnavigations of herself—and continued with what appeared to be a practiced shirring off of three layers of blouse and four layers of skirt until finally all that remained was a cotton lace camisole and loose cotton pants, both wild-egg blue. Her sister stripped down to her underlayers as well and began digging in a large duffel bag until she’d found a stainless steel cookset and several plastic bags of vegetables and grains.

  They smelled of cinnamon and almond extract, a scent Jefferson could taste many years later if he concentrated, and it caused him to question their existence Could they be angels? The one in greens and turquoise, the quick one, took a snake of gauzy fabric from yet another bag—ten or fifteen yards, it must have been—and began creating a breezy tent around her hammock. The action recalled in him a distant memory of a woman he could not remember, possibly a dream, and he found himself groping for a reference point for how to behave. A sexual beast was stirring in him, though he was shy about making this assumption. These were beautiful women. They were twins! And so he told himself he was mistaken about what that quick woman in greens and turquoise was preparing for in the hammock under the gauzy tent beneath the giant oak’s branches. Still, he felt a distinct tightening in his chest that he’d come to know as his heart, telling him, You are still alive. And so he smiled and reminded himself that he was not afraid.

  I am alive.

  The rounded twin was cooking what seemed to be a mole stew—lamb and chocolate and potatoes and cinnamon and chile. She paused to serve him a cool mint drink that began, almost immediately, to free him of his worries. Her loose cotton pants brushed his toes as she mo
ved from the low fire to her bag of supplies, and a few times she paused in her work, knelt, and touched the top of his head.

  He was alive.

  Jefferson became caught up in the whirlpool of miracles once again as he took swig after swig of his cool mint drink. He had survived near-death at the hands of the bergamot woman and her boys less than four hours previously. Before that, he had survived Iraq. (Though he had in truth survived many near-death experiences while in Iraq, Jefferson thought of it at this moment as one big near-death experience.) Before that, he’d survived childhood in Santa Fe, with his loving grandmother doing the best she could. By definition this meant he had survived, first of all, abandonment by his mother as a baby. He had known no father—that went without saying.

  He was alive! Jefferson closed his eyes and marveled at the miracle of miracles and smiled at the beauty of the mingling scents of cinnamon and chile and chocolate.

  Jefferson didn’t know when the pile of quilts had materialized below him, or how his shoes had been removed, but he was lying shoeless on a pile of lilac and coral-colored quilts, the sunlight filtered through the gauze dissolving any sense of time in its hazy radiance. The wild-blue-egg twin had taken a bottle of oil and, kneeling by his feet, begun to rub it into his parched ankles and cracked heels and tired toes.

  Jefferson had not realized his skin’s thirst until the oil touched his feet. He was aware of his muscles turning soft. His memory of the scene amongst the gigantic boulders, his face down and his knees in the hard-packed earth, floated before him, now miraculously tucked into a soft cloth basket of past-tense near-misses. He was in the process of living to tell that story.

  There was little talking between the twins, just a flow of singsong and humming and nostalgic clicking of tongues and soft laughter. Jefferson was not afraid. Jefferson was alive.

  He began to be aware of a loosening in his chest as his breath flowed into cavities within his chest that had been long closed. His breathing eased. In . . . and out. In . . . and out. There was nothing else he needed to do. The sky pulsed blue—an exceedingly blue blue—and nothing about any of this was frightening. He was fully awake. He was near to life. In fact, he was so near to life that he was, in fact, alive.

  The wild-blue-egg twin, after finishing with Jefferson’s feet, had moved up to his ankles and calves, and now she was working on his left knee. There was no doubt that she believed in the criticality of kneecaps. She kneaded in and out of the grooves for fifteen minutes before moving on to the right side, as if releasing toxin. Her sister refilled Jefferson’s cup, gave the pot a stir, and sat down next to him, motioning for him to lift his head and place it in her lap. She glared maternally when he hesitated, and so he obeyed. Faceup, his head resting in the junction of her two crossed legs, Jefferson caught speckled sunlight as it found its way through the oak’s leaves and branches, through the cotton of her camisole and the wisps of her hair.

  “Relax, my friend,” she said in near-perfect English, and began moving her fingertips in circular patterns in his scalp, along his hairline at first and then fully into the depth and breadth of his tired head, whispering as she rubbed, cooing like an evening bobwhite, reminding Jefferson of the way Esco had helped him overcome his fear of night as a child—tickling his shoulders and arms and back with her stubby-nailed fingertips, singing old lullabies.

  The fire smoldered.

  Jefferson’s mind wanted both to race and to rest.

  “Rest,” said the woman holding his head. And though it seemed a miracle that Jefferson could understand them, that somehow their words sounded like English to him, he relaxed his mind and thought of the story in the Bible in which this had happened. He did not need to understand everything.

  They wrapped him in heavy cotton blankets and left him hanging in the hammock, surrounded in gauze. A stone soup bowl steamed next to him on a stump.

  “Eat,” said the rounded one. She sat nearby on the ground, eating, feeding Remedios out of her hand. Jefferson had many questions, but he was overtaken by a sudden appetite, and so he propped himself up and he ate.

  He had lost his appetite for entire days since he’d returned, finding the sound of Esco’s earnest knife against cucumbers to be nauseating. He imagined that it was the sound of her trying to compensate for every deficiency, for all of him now missing, left behind across the ocean somewhere.

  Jefferson spooned more stew into his mouth, identifying the distinct flavors on his tongue. Beyond goodness and warmth, it embodied a creamy dark trustworthiness mixed with the pep of tomatoes and the anonymity of a woman who knew nothing about him. Not his name or that he was a soldier or that his mother had been sixteen when she left.

  After the first bowl he asked for more, and only into his second bowl did Jefferson’s stomach proclaim just how empty it had been all those months, its solitary yearnings all those neglected years. That much was now clear as Jefferson ate almost three full bowls before pausing. And then, as if he had removed the tiniest of pins in a very large dam, the words began to trickle out. The twins sat on either side of him on the ground next to the fire. They huddled under the blankets as the high desert chill fell upon the night.

  He was alive. He was warm. His pup was content.

  “I was almost executed this morning,” he told them, hoping the Pentecostal effect of the afternoon had lingered.

  The women looked at him with wide eyes. “Tell us the story,” said the rounded one.

  “Bandits of some sort,” Jefferson said. “They came out of the hills. They surrounded me.” His voice began to shake, but he continued.

  “You were scared, but you survived!” said the angular one.

  “You were brave,” said her twin.

  “I was lucky,” Jefferson said.

  He felt the need to go on. It seemed they were willing, and his gut told him this was what he needed, to tell his story. It was of course a miracle that they understood each other. Thinking back on it, Jefferson could not say whether he was speaking their Spanish or they, his English, or whether instead all three of them were speaking some third and unknown hybrid.

  “Why did the woman—that bergamot woman—why did she spare your life?” the one on his left asked finally, locking his eyes into the grip of hers as if she had reached the end of her expansiveness and now wanted to know, simply and truthfully, the answer.

  Jefferson shook his head. He closed his eyes and shook his head. His index finger and thumb pinched the bridge of his nose, a ragged breath escaped his mouth, and suddenly he was crying, his upper lip bloated, his shoulders quaking, his chest heaving.

  He could not explain what had happened.

  He knew what he thought the answer was, but it made no sense.

  The twins beheld his tearful silence. They did not touch him or invade the space around him. They began a soft cooing, a wordless chant of nostalgia.

  “The woman didn’t kill me because I am meant to go on living. My life is not over because there are things I still need to do.” These last words settled around him, as close to the truth as Jefferson could imagine.

  Excluding the several times his young mother had tried to breast-feed him, the once or twice his grandmother had held back his longish hair when he’d been sick in the toilet, and the time in sixth grade when Josephina had grabbed his hand on the walk home from school, Jefferson’s physical experience of the opposite sex was confined to a handful of events inside a storage container with a woman he hardly knew and would never see again. Esco had told him many times, always, it seemed, as a sort of apology, that his mom had attempted to feed him with her tiny breasts. He remembered his grandmother holding him while he vomited. He remembered the thrill of Josephina’s warm hand in his, even all those years later. He remembered those hurried encounters between stacks of canned tomatoes and processed cheeses. These formed his small collection. Memories of female touch.

  Jefferson had not realized it at the time, but when he began reading One Hundred Years he’d been hungry for th
e aura of sex. What was it to be with a woman? He’d never realized the degree to which a classic piece of literature—a book not even available at the grocery store—could be doused in sex. In One Hundred Years, sex was everywhere, slathered across the pages like so many adjectives describing the weather. It was straightforward, it was unapologetic, and though none of it was pretty, all of it was inspirational. A prostitute teaching her own son the secrets of the flesh. A wrinkled auntie who caressed her virgin nephew in the bath. Men and women making love in cisterns and hammocks and sheds. It did not match any of Jefferson’s preconceived notions of love, and yet he found it all strangely comforting; when he read these scenes he felt less like a lonely soldier lost in the Middle Eastern landscape, and more like a man journeying to find his real home.

  Naturally, the novel became his sexual primer. He liked the idea of having gotten his ideas from literature rather than from anything he’d seen on TV or the Internet, but more importantly he thought the famous writer’s ideas made sense. Nothing about sex had ever seemed sweet or sentimental to Jefferson; rather, it seemed like an animalistic urge to drive away loneliness. This honesty, Jefferson could live with.

  And here was the best part. In García Márquez’s novel, no man or woman was excluded. GGM didn’t mention anything about good looks or money as prerequisites to sex. In fact, it seemed the only ones who didn’t get love quite right in the novel were the truly beautiful women. Men who had left their families for world adventure, fat men covered in tattoos, men who fixed pianos, who could be mislead by gypsy tricks, who were chained to trees, who worked all day in their laboratories, who murdered other men for no good reason—even the least of these found sexual comfort in GGM’s story. Even the lowest of the low found a lover to hold him. For Jefferson this was a secret message of good tidings: Jefferson Long Soldier, despite being left by his mother, despite never having known his father or either of his grandfathers, despite being poor, despite having seen what he had seen out there, would one day feel the comfort of a real woman’s embrace.