21
The boy awoke with a start, disoriented, lying in a narrow bed in a small room. It was the sound of animals that woke him, a high ungodly yipping nearby, and the distant baying of hounds. His heart pumping and his T-shirt soaked, staring in utter confusion at these ceiling poles, these blank walls.
He smelled the smoke and then he saw the ember arcing and lastly he saw the girl, sitting not far from the bed on the only other piece of furniture in the room, which was a rickety wooden chair. She sat with one bare knee drawn up to her chest, one thin arm roped around the knee.
“Christ,” he said, getting onto his elbows. “What is that?”
“What’s what.”
“That sound.”
“Coyotes. Fucking coyotes. Or, perhaps, coyotes fucking.”
He looked away from her, listening to them. She was watching him.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Three a.m. I couldn’t sleep with all of this.” She drew on the cigarette and exhaled. The chair creaked. “Do you want me to go?”
He stared at her, the milky shapes of her arms, her legs. She seemed to be wearing almost nothing.
He shook his head to clear it but it would not clear.
“Is that a no?” she said.
After a moment, he said, “—What?”
The girl watched him. If he moved just a little, toward the wall, she would take the space next to him, the way his little dog used to. The warm little body against his stomach.
She peered at him in the poor light. “Are you all right? You don’t look
so hot.”
The animal sounds abruptly stopped, and the girl cocked her head, listening. Then she lowered her leg and leaned toward him. “Who’s Caitlin?”
“What?”
“You said Caitlin in your sleep. Is that your girlfriend?”
Before he could answer, the door swung open and they turned to see it fill with the shape of Tom Carl.
The ember flew like a firefly to the stone floor.
“Hello, Thomas,” said the girl.
Tom Carl stood there. The brindle dog panting just beyond his legs. With surprising grace he stepped forward and took the girl by the arm and hoisted her to her feet and pushed her toward the door.
“Having a conversation here, Thomas!”
“Conversation over. Go into the house. Now.”
She stood at the threshold rubbing her arm. They glared at each other, their kinship undoubtable, until at last she sighed and turned and strode away, her white legs scissoring at the dark. Tom Carl turned to the boy.
“Did you touch her?” His tone was not accusatory, nor hostile; no question in it as to what the boy had wanted to do—and no judgment about that either. There was only the wish to know if he had done it.
“No, sir.”
Tom Carl shook his head. He ran a hand through his hair. “I gave you work. I gave you a bed to sleep in. She’s fifteen, did you know that?”
The boy sat up and reached for his socks. His boots. “Nothing happened.”
Tom Carl watched him work his feet into the socks. He sniffed the air, looked about him, and stepped forward and brought his sandal down on the cigarette. He left without another word, and the dog, putting a last look on the boy, swung its square head and followed.
Outside, the moon was high and a weird spectrum of light lay over
everything—the trucks and the ruins of trucks, the looming mesas and the juniper and pi?on that grew from their walls. All of it saturate, phantasmal.
The boy drew on his cigarette and looked to the north, to the place in the sky where he thought the mountains of Colorado must be, the white backbone of the Rockies, and there was nothing there, only the black, star-blown heavens on and on. A falling star put a scratch across Cancer and was consumed again, and with that signal the coyotes resumed their crying, their yelping and keening, very close.
He walked around the casita, but when he reached the opposite side he was sure the animals must be on the side he’d just left. He went back around and experienced the same certainty. There were things in the world that would not be explained. Entities were birthed from moonlight or from their own uncanny wills to be, to howl and to run and to mate and to hunt.
Andromeda on her rock watches the sea for the thing it hides, the black scales and the black mindless eyes, the hungry smile. Not far away, in mountains to the north, in the highest ranges, she knew these beings well. She fought and wounded and escaped them but more came on to snatch at her and carry her back, and Don’t go, she was about to say in the dream, Don’t leave me, and she fought and she ran, and the moon looked down from its bed of stars and did nothing.