With that gallantry it was time to redress and so I did, and as I did, Haw asked me did I want to keep walking after all and I said sure but after a while I said maybe I was a little tired and a little hungry and a little cold so we turned and went back the way we’d come.
On the way back, into our silence, Haw inserted the following riddle: “Two moms and two daughters walk into a store and each get one thing. When they leave the store, they got three items. How do you explain that?”
I watched a flock of birds v’ing themselves across the sky, sighed, and said: “It’s a grandmother, a mother, and her kid.”
With that Haw stopped walking and turned to face me. “Wow you just didn’t even hesitate, did you?”
“It was clear, I feel.” And shrugged.
“Well you may feel that way but it ain’t that clear to most folks.” Then, can you believe it, he hugged me. His arms pressed my head to his chest. I hated it, let it happen, then went on walking wordlessly. I wondered what else was clear to me that wasn’t clear to others. Then I stopped wondering.
I LET LIFE go on like this, days and nights in and near the cabin with the Thing and Haw. Days and days like this. The land dried out. So did I. Often you find a punishment when you’re in need of one.
On a day I’d been doing nothing at all but organizing and folding my meager, dirty possessions into neat piles, Haw came in shirtless with a full trash bag dangling from his fist. “Trash day,” he said. “We have to burn it.”
“I know,” I said, though by that time I’d forgotten Earl John’s direction.
“Come on.” He gestured me out front to the fire circle in which there were a few logs. They were scaly with burn scars and I stood there until I realized he was staring at me. I was in my regular mountain clothes, fully covered in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, but, well, a hunter knows what an animal looks like under its fur. He asked me to fetch some logs from inside and I did, the end of that dry pile I had moved what, years ago. No. Weeks.
“These are the last two,” I called toward Haw’s crashing in the near thicket. I let the new logs crash onto the old logs. They craned there, then found their seat.
Haw came back with kindling, and was holding a small bottle. “Gasoline,” he said when he saw I was looking at it. He shook out some of the gasoline on the kindling and it smelled like civilization. Did I remember what it was like to drive? He took a match from a little tin in his pocket and walked toward me. Taking one hand, he slid it down to my groin, and pulled back the flap of my jeans. I thought he might try and fuck me right there, but he didn’t. Instead he swiped the match across my fly. It lit. I giggled, much to my own button-mouthed chagrin. “I’ve got tricks,” he said, “you haven’t even seen yet.”
“Don’t doubt it.” I pursed my lips. The match went out.
“Here, you try it.” He held out a match and peeled back his own fly.
With a tentative grace I flipped my wrist across his zipper and it caught.
“Like a pro,” he said. “Like a goddamn pro.” He smiled with his crooked teeth and watched the match go out again. He snatched another from the tin. “One more time.”
This time I moved forward carefully and as I did he pressed his pelvis forward. I looked up with my pursed mouth. “Just having a little fun.”
I struck it again and cupped the flame and stepped gingerly over to the fire circle and dropped the flame in. The fire belched and bloomed. “Thatta girl.”
“I feel like you’re making fun of me half the time, when you’re not making a come on.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said, and dumped the trash piece by piece—food wrappers and TP tubes, packaging and paper. I still can’t say what we were doing to each other, there. Except fucking, and using each other as poor mirrors.
“Shouldn’t we be doing this in a can or drum or something?” I sat back on the porch and watched him work.
“This works well enough.” He looked at me. “You don’t.”
I stuck out my tongue and was fine with my throne. “You come up here a lot?”
“A couple times when I was younger, when my mom was trying to make me like EJ.”
“You don’t like him?” I found it difficult to believe that anyone would find Earl John hard to like. Though I imagined most hated Haw.
“Course I do.”
“So what do you mean?”
“I guess I didn’t like Lorne—that’s his kid—but that wasn’t Lorne’s fault. Kid’s weird.”
“What do you mean?” I felt meaning coming.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, and kept working. The meaning dissolved into the trash smoke and I began to cough.
“Go on inside. I’ll see you there in a while.”
“Don’t you like my company?” I flirted. But I was also starting to chart my safety in and out of his presence.
He snuffed guttural, and straightened, tilting his chin. “Too much, most likely.”
“Oh, brother,” I said. And went inside to continue with my piles.
Later Haw came in, smelling like woodsmoke. “Gonna get this shit off me,” he said, and disappeared into the back. I got up and filled a pot of water and stoked the stove and began to make soup. I could hear the splatter of the shower, such a companionable noise. I had questions in my head with no need to answer them. In this way, I was the same as I’d always been: I understood the world was more powerful than my little flesh-push self.
In a little while Haw came out naked and shining wetly. I surveyed him: his long body and the small hairs I could see, backlit with the stove’s glow. His dick was a shellfish on the pillow of his balls. He had a pimple on his ass, whitish yellow with a head, ringed with pink. My first intimate impulse was to walk over there to him and pop it, but I didn’t. What I said was, “You hungry?”
“Not for soup,” he smiled.
“I’m not interested right now,” I said, and went and got some mugs and spoons.
SOON BOREDOM BEGAN to set in. Days were mammoth and endless; one day felt like five; four days and we’d discovered a rancid brand of domestic partnership. We ate silently and spoke only in bursts. I felt that through my choice in questions—wanting to know about his jobs, his family, what he’d been like as a kid—I’d either be exposing myself or giving him the impression that I cared in a manner I did not. So I continued to refrain from asking questions. He did not kill time with his mouth either. We lived in an orderly manner, thriving in minor urgencies of intimacy. I swept and fed the cat and sat on the sofa with one wilderness book or another in my lap, unreading. I began to wonder when he would leave. When Thingy and I could resume our romantic procession into uncomplicated decay.
One day Haw was out in the yard splitting firewood and I was washing dishes with Thing beside me on the counter batting at bugs. I had been thinking of nothing but dishes, and the gunk on them, using my fingernails to chip what the water could not. I was not thinking of Ma, the large wet spot on her front, standing in the kitchen back home. Was not wondering where she was, and in what condition.
A great holler cut through the cabin. I dropped the dish I had been washing and rushed out front.
“Fuck!” Haw was standing by the stump with a long torn hole in the thigh of his dungarees.
“What happened?” I jogged closer.
“I was moving the logs and I guess something got caught—”
I was close now, and could see a long blade of a splinter breaking the skin of his pale thigh. It was seven inches, eight: a real whopper. “Here, sit down,” I ordered, and led him, hopping, to the porch steps. With a ginger shimmy he removed his jeans.
I could see he was setting his jaw against any further expression of pain. I recognized this close-mouthed desire like a brother. His breath was fast and even.
I told him to stay put and I went in and got the self-same needle with which I had sewn up the cat. I sanitized it in the stove fire and when I came back out crouched over him.
The wound was beading blood a
long its margins. I saw the wood under a few layers of translucent skin. Dipping my head to its level I saw it there as if submerged under a surface of water, a puddle, a pond. The skin above it was sprouted with long fine hair. “This isn’t going to be comfortable,” I said. “You want a pain reliever?”
“Not unless you’ve got some whiskey.”
I shook my head. “Wanna bullet to bite?”
“Is that even a real thing?” Haw said through his closed teeth.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to work the needle around the perimeter and try and pry the thing loose.”
“Enough foreplay.” He was a miserable animal.
I got on with it, working the needle along the first edge of the splinter, into the skin at a low angle. Haw’s breaths grew snarly, notched, forced. I remembered the prone old man in the mall, his arms moving like combines. The cushion the color of a stormy sea. More blood beaded to the surface. Ma crying in the car. A slow rise to the surface. Haw yelped. “You need me to stop a moment?”
“Yeah,” he said, shaking out his arms. A black bird with a greasy head alighted on the porch railing, and he addressed it, choked: “Get!” It flew off.
“You ready?” I asked after a moment.
“Do it. And don’t stop even if I ask you to.”
So I went back to work, until I had moved the needle along the entire edge of the thing. I tried seesawing it, then, under the rim of the wood. It wouldn’t budge. I began to worry I would snap the needle in half. “You have pliers anywhere?”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
I could see tears pooling at the corners of his eyes. I reminded myself that this was not sadness, only a human reaction to pain stimulus. I had no interest in letting empathy pass my garden gate. I explained simply: “The needle will break if I force it more.”
“Yeah. It’s under my bed.”
I told him I’d be back. I’d forgotten Earl John’s cardboard box of tools, the ones Haw had used for the roof, and felt in his proprietary recall a sting. I wondered if coming Haw had known he’d find a young female renter, wondered if he did this a lot. There were more explanations—conspiratorial, cruel—regarding this scenario but I escorted them all out. Wide context was no longer noteworthy to me. I saw only the hands in front of my own face.
The back of the cabin smelled of the deep earth funk of a human living. Or it smelled like a place where people lived and didn’t care to clean. The tarp hung from the ceiling as a provisional divider, vestigial and filthy and blue. I remembered how I had fled this place. Haw’s shirts and underwear laid about in miniature topography. I kicked the box from under the bed, and in it, beside the hammer and the screwdrivers, a handsaw and a couple wrenches and nails and the pliers, I saw the gun. “Hello,” I said to it. “Long time no see.” I picked it up, and checked the clip, saw Haw had reloaded it. I thought about taking it back. Ideated Gene standing beside me, saying: “Girlie, a person’s got to protect herself! If she has any hope of a pleasant life on Earth.” This was just me: I was undesiring of any pleasantry. I was simmering.
The gun felt like I remembered: part toy, or the tail of a wild animal. A shiver went through my body, but I did not put it down. I picked up the pliers with my other hand and stood, kicked the box back under, left his hovel.
Back in the front room I put the gun on the table, next to the hummingbird knife, where it had sat that first day of my return. Salt and pepper, salt and pepper. I had a feeling of sinking, and then buoying. I stuck the head of the pliers in the stove flame and watched it glow hot, then put it under the sink faucet and let the water cool. It steamed, spat.
When I returned to the porch, Haw was hunched over his lap, his curls shuddering slightly back and forth. “This is a motherfucker,” he said.
I said I agreed, then set back to work. Once I had moved the tooth of the pliers along the needle’s path, I began to pry until there was space enough between the raw pink wound and wood, a quarter inch or so. Then I closed the pliers and began to pull in a smoothly confident motion. After a moment of stubbornness the wood gave up and Haw yawped open throated, cursing. Thingy strolled by like a rich man stepping over a wretch. I smirked.
“It’s done,” I said. We watched his thigh as blood rushed to the surface of the wound. “You need some bandages?”
“I’ll just use a T-shirt, tie it around.”
“Won’t it get infected?”
“It’ll be fine,” he said quickly. He looked eager to get his grubby hands back on the wheel. I wondered how quickly an infection could move. I wondered would I see it yellow and weep. His breathing returned to normal as we sat there and then Haw looked like he was going to say something, like “thank you,” like “I owe you one,” but I did not want him to say anything so I ended the moment by asking: “When do you think you’ll leave?”
“When do you?” Haw asked back.
“I’m paid up,” I said, standing. “I told you.” And left him sitting there with his long wound, so I could go and clean the back bunk as if wanting to remove not only the splinter but also his every trace.
IT WAS NOT until my body was otherwise occupied—by Haw and these related activities—that I started to grow suspicious of my circumstance on the mountain. I began a habit of holding the Thing like a baby, letting it pad at my face, smelling its rank paws. Haw wrinkled his nose when I held the cat like this. I allowed the man to dislike me however he wanted, and continued to have sex with him. I accepted that the mountain was not what it had been, did not feel as I’d hoped it would, would not again be a kooky if delusional setting of frolic and splash.
I did not believe I was doing—in any manner or decision—well. I was not on the mountain to find a true love or even any companion. I knew this. Yet we took to sleeping beside one another in the bunk, Haw and I. There were no tenderships, no extracurricular pets.
One afternoon I was coming back from the purple outhouse when I found Haw standing on the porch with a question mark face. He held an old rope in his hands. A T-shirt was tied around his leg wound and he looked more like Mick than before, accessorized with his own vain folly. When I got closer he laughed as if at a private joke. “What do you want?” I asked. I knew.
“Come here,” he said.
I stood where I was, digging a rut in the dirt with the toe of my shoe.
“Come here,” he said again.
The air was dry and thickened by leaf mold. We stood staring at each other. I had no current intention of rope play. I stood where I was. Haw was made to condescend from the porch and grab me. Once he was close I could smell his stewed breath. It did not make me run.
“Do I have to take what I want?” he asked. I giggled and he slapped my cheek. “I guess so,” he said, in a theatrical manner, and pushed me down—first I was crouching, then on my knees, then flat on my butt, until at last I was just lying faceup in the dirt, all so he could straddle me and then hold my hands above my head. The plans men have. My breath was constricted by his weight. I was not being trespassed upon. He was merely performing on my stage.
As Haw began to wind the rope around my wrists I attempted to make of the moment some levity. “You do this a lot?” I asked. He didn’t answer me, was focused on his task. The rope was tight but not painful. “How’s your thigh?” Again he didn’t answer. His clothes smelled of woodsmoke, and beneath, a pickled odor from his pits. The veins in his arms erected firm pulsing ridges, riled.
“What will you do to me next?” I asked blankly. I was wondering if Gene might show up in this, my hour of embarrassing not-need. That would teach me. “Denise,” I imagined him saying. “It’s time to skedaddle!” I admit this daydream proposition lightened me, made me glow.
“Don’t be such a brat,” Haw said. I began laughing again and couldn’t stop. Haw’s determination brittled. I could tell by the way his hands relinquished their grip, the way his posture straightened. “Dude,” he said sociably. “I thought you said you liked ropes. Are you not into this?”
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You’re a jester, and not a villain, is what I thought then.
Before I could negotiate, or even say a word, there was a fomenting in the brush: a scratching and snapping of branches and the intimate puffs of flora rubbed against flora. Immediately Haw stood. I rolled to my side and used my elbow to sit up, hands still bound.
“What is it?” I asked. “Can you see?”
Haw shook his head without looking back. The crashing seemed to follow a pattern of crash, crash, wisp, wisp, crash. It was not scary sounding, though I knew: any question posed by wildness could be answered by some new bodily harm. When I had at last gotten vertical, I stared where Haw stared: at a knotty bush, naked of leaves, from which emerged a toddling skunk.
We stayed in place. I don’t know if I had ever seen a skunk prior. Their spray had been on the wind sometimes, while Ken and I drove late in the more rural parts of the county. But here are the skunks I had put my eyes on, up until this point: cartoons. See: Pepé Le Pew, the long-suffering, fuzzy-on-consent Looney Tunes lothario. Full stop.
This animal was the traditional black-and-white, with a plume of a tail, a diamond-shaped skull, a small perturbed snout. I could have hugged it, for its lack of menace. Though my hands were bound and my judgment sharper than dull.
As we watched, the Thing emerged from the brush behind, low to the ground in a gorgeous stalking pose, shoulder blades peaked and moving tidally under its fur. I had never seen Thingy look so wild. The skunk seemed uninterested in the cat, who continued to switchback just beyond the swipe of that plumed tail. I was aware that the cat was about to be sprayed; I was aware that in remaining inactive I was allowing something I loved to be in some manner harmed or driven to discomfort; I blamed the rope binding my hands, and I blamed Haw too, but blandly.
We watched a pattern emerge: the Thing would rustle up its strength to pounce. Then the skunk would turn to greet it. With this confrontation, the Thing would sweep backward, play it cool. Then the skunk would continue its amble, its tail bobbing hello, hello. The Thing would resume its liquid stalk, its green eyes professional in their attention. The two animals progressed across the width of the clearing this way; what were they doing but waltzing; what were they but about-to-crash cars.
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