Ike and Bobby.
Of an afternoon, a Sunday, when Guthrie was out for a drive riding in the pickup with Maggie Jones along the empty country roads, they wandered about the house, room to room, thinking what they wanted to do. They went into Guthrie’s and their mother’s bedroom upstairs at the front of the house and inspected the things that belonged to their parents, the minute examination of the various items that had been accumulated over the years, most of them bought and collected before the boys’ own time—pictures, clothes, drawers of underwear, a box containing necktie pins and old pocket watches and an obsidian arrowhead and rattles cut from a snake and a track medal—and put the box back and drifted out of the room down the hall to the guest room where some of their mother’s possessions were still located and picked them up and smelled and felt of them and tried on one of her silver bracelets, and lastly they went into their own room at the back of the house and looked out and saw the old man’s house next door and the abandoned place to the west at the end of Railroad Street and all the land open beyond, with the fairgrounds to the north across the pasture behind the barn, the grandstands white-painted and empty, and then they left and went downstairs to the outside and mounted their bikes.
They went up once more to the apartment above Main Street, passing along the dim corridor and stopping at the last door. She had taken in the Denver News they’d dropped off on the mat early that morning, but when they knocked there was no answer. They used the key she’d given them months ago when they’d gone to the grocery store, when she’d said: I am going to trust you with that. They used the key now and went in. She, the old woman, Iva Stearns, was sitting across the room in the stuffed chair against the wall. Her head was lapsed sideways onto the shoulder of her blue housedress. As usual the room was too hot, as stifling as a sickroom, and as always it was crowded with the stores of her accumulation.
From the doorway Ike said, Mrs. Stearns.
She didn’t respond. They approached, moving closer. A cigarette had burned out in the ashtray placed on the wide arm of the chair. It was a long white cold ash.
Mrs. Stearns. It’s us.
They stood still in front of her. Ike reached forward to touch her thin arm to wake her and then he drew his hand back as suddenly as if he’d been struck or burnt. Her arm was cold and rigid. It was as though the chill skin of her arm had been drawn over sticks of wood or some manner of iron rods in a winter basement, to make her feel so hard and cold.
Feel her, Ike said.
Why?
Go ahead.
Bobby reached forward and touched her arm. Immediately he put his hand in his pants pocket.
The two boys looked at Iva Stearns for a long time, standing before her slumped and silent motionless figure in the quiet overheated room, the smell of smoke and dust still present in the close air, with the faint vague muffled noise of the street coming up to the room as if from a great distance. In the hours since she had stopped breathing, before they found her, the old woman’s face had collapsed and now her nose seemed to have risen, thin and high-ridged, shiny and waxy in the middle of her face, while her eyes seemed to have fallen away altogether behind her glasses. In her lap the old blue-veined freckled hands still clasped each other fiercely in a kind of mute and terrific stasis, as hard and silent as dug-up tree roots.
I want to touch her again, Ike said.
He did so. He felt her arm, touching her longer this time. Then Bobby touched her again.
All right, Ike said. You ready?
Bobby nodded.
They went out of her apartment and locked the door, then pedaled home and left their bikes at the house and went on to the barn, where they saddled Easter.
And so, in the middle of the afternoon in the spring of the year, mounted up like sojourners in the great world, Bobby in the saddle, Ike behind, they rode out.