INTIMACY
WE’LL TAKE CARE of him here,” I said. “No need to move him again.”
My eyes went to the large, useful knife in the soldier’s scabbard. “Can you build a shelter here?” I read his name on his shirt: “F. Riley.”
“First a splint for his foot,” Adam said.
We both took inventory of what we had acquired: yards and yards of orange fabric, cords, a knife, and a badly injured soldier. I leaned forward and very gently touched the askew jaw. “Dislocated,” I said. “Likely broken, too.”
“First we pop it back in place,” Adam answered. “Then we try to squeeze closed any fractures and bind his jaw shut.” Adam sat on the ground and took Riley’s head between his spread legs in order to begin the work.
Placing his thumbs behind the corners of the lower jaw, Adam pushed down and forward. “Sorry,” he said as he then pushed laterally. Riley’s eyes flew open in the horror of pain, then rolled back into his head as he passed into unconsciousness. I remembered my own pain when I had arrived in this place.
“Cut strips, several inches wide,” Adam instructed, “long as your arm and half again.”
With the tips of his fingers, Adam felt the jawbone for fractures and shoved the fragments toward what seemed to promise a smooth contour. I could sense Adam’s immense fatigue like an aroma, but his hands were deft and sure. His sweat fell like beads and then splattered onto Riley’s blanched face. Riley’s eyes were closed. Adam and I passed orange strips under the jaw and tied their ends over the top of Riley’s head.
“He has red hair,” I said. I passed my hand over the ends of the red stubble.
Adam glanced at me curiously, then looked more closely at the face of the unconscious man.
The pilot breathed evenly.
“Now his foot,” Adam said quietly, and I rose to find long sticks for splints. Then we cut and tore more strips from the chute to pad the splints before binding them to Riley’s foot. Throughout our work, F. Riley remained unconscious. We said very little, and we avoided each other’s eyes until the last binding knot was tied.
“The primal work has come to us,” I remarked.
“Primal?” Now he looked into my eyes as though to clear his own confusion.
“The work of taking care of one another.”
For a moment Adam looked at me as though he were well. “Didn’t I take care of you, Lucy?”
I thought of our night under the rock shelter. I had wanted him. In that new location, enclosed in rock behind a curtain of rain, in his castle, I could not deny to myself that I had wanted him. I extended my hand to Adam, and he took it. There was nothing particular about the gesture, but it was the beginning of our intimacy, only now, because Riley was with us, we had lost both simplicity and privacy.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you took splendid care of me when I needed it most. But … but—” I hesitated.
“But what?” He watched me, how I searched for words that might be true, clear, and significant.
“What I said was, ‘The primal work has come to us.’ To us, together, Adam. For us to do. For us to take care of somebody besides ourselves.”
When we finished binding up the injuries of the pilot, Adam turned his attention to our need for shelter. As he went away to cut saplings, I admired his straight, strong back. Because of the rain, the grass beyond the redwood groves had turned a deeper, brighter green. The sunshine blessed the conjunction of flesh and verdure.
Over the framework of sticks for our lean-to, we layered elephant-ear leaves and the broad leaves of banana trees to ward off hard-pelting rain when it would come. The shelter would need sides, too. From the distance, we heard growling, lions but not lions—thunder. Perhaps the interlacing redwood branches high above would sieve the raindrops and diffuse them into mere mist.
In his sleep, F. Riley moved his hand to grasp his dog tags. I closed my own hand around Thom’s memory stick. My knuckles bumped against one of my breasts. I had almost forgotten the nakedness of my breasts and the titanium-clad pendant that hung between them.
“You’ll be all right,” I crooned to Riley, but nothing in his face changed.
Still and hot, the perfumed air among the tall trees made breathing difficult. Sometimes I stirred the air above F. Riley’s nose by waving my hand like a fan. While Adam came and went, bringing the materials for the lean-to, I whispered encouragement to Riley.