Seven
GRIFF ROLLED to the edge of the bed and sat blinking. She was gummy with sweat, logy, and it took a moment before she could straighten up into the half dark and reel through the clothing they’d left scattered across the floor and finally into the bathroom. She ran water in the sink until it turned icy, drawn up from the bottom of the well shaft, and held the insides of her wrists under the faucet. And then she drank.
She returned to the bedroom toweling her neck, beneath her arms and breasts, and threw the towel back into the bathroom. She’d been angry when they’d made love, grasping, careless, crying out as someone drowning might, and afterward, when she was still upset, they’d made love again. Now he slept turned on his side, his knees drawn up, with a panel of moonlight on his back, the headboard and the night table.
She slipped into a robe, knotting the sash loosely, and pulled the sheet from under his legs. She covered him, set the portable fan up on the chest at the foot of the bed and turned it on. He shivered and drew the sheet over his shoulder.
In the front room she found a cup of yogurt in the refrigerator and sat at the table next to the open windows that looked out over the porch. She bent a leg underneath to sit up higher in the chair, scooping the yogurt into her mouth with a forefinger. She hadn’t turned on a light, and in this darkened room the memories of Ansel Magnuson here in the evenings with his zwieback and herring and schnapps were unavoidable. And then she thought of Mitch Bradley in the bunkhouse at Einar’s. Two honest bachelors hired by these separate families, consigning their lifetimes’ work as though this were part of the adoption process, finally dying with the achievement of being remembered not as trusted strangers but as blood.
She mopped her forehead with the hem of the robe, the smell of her heated body rising into her face, and she couldn’t think of a single thing left in this world that held the good animal scent of Ansel or Mitch.
She’d never been comfortable in the summer’s heat and wondered how people managed in Mississippi or Louisiana or Latin America, and maybe it was the heat that had sparked their argument, but it still was a variation of the same fight they’d been having for the last year, this episode peculiar only because of the application she’d found in his printer. She was sitting at the kitchen table reading through the paperwork when Paul came in from his run. She held up the top sheet.
“Uganda? You’re applying for a year in Uganda?”
She looked back at the form, trying to find an exact date, and he peeled his T-shirt over his head.
“It’s just an application.”
“Were you going to mention it, or just send me a postcard?”
He took the pitcher of ice water out of the refrigerator and poured a glass, drinking it down all at once, squeezing his eyes shut against the sharp pain that spiked between his brows, then pressed the heel of his free hand against his forehead.
“Are you going to answer me?”
He nodded, dropping the hand and leaning back against the counter. “They want me to do a statistical analysis of rural HIV patients. If I get it.” He poured another glass full. “My thesis advisor suggested it. He said there’s no problem in finishing my master’s when I get back.” He wiped his mouth with the T-shirt. “Anyway, I don’t see what difference it makes where I go. You weren’t going to come to Chicago, so now you won’t come to Africa.”
“F*ck you.” She stood out of the chair. “I could visit you in Chicago.”
“So visit me in Africa.”
“For what, a weekend? How long do you think I can leave Einar?”
He sat down at the table and she walked out onto the porch. She screamed, and again even louder, then slammed the screen door when she came back in. “Did you even stop to wonder how I might feel about it?”
“It’s a chance to do something I think’s important.”
“And when I want to take care of my grandfather, that’s what? A waste of my life?”
“Now you’re just being mean.”
The application was spread across the table and she snatched a page, wadded it up and pitched it hard against his chest, at the same time suffering that peculiar dislocation of having been standing to the side and watching herself react like a child. She placed her hands on the table, leaning toward him. Her voice came out choked. “I don’t give a shit where you go.”
He reached across the table, taking her hands, holding on to them. He was smiling. “Not even the tiniest little pinch of shit?”
Unlike her, he couldn’t stay mad, and that’s why arguing rarely got them anywhere.
She shifted on the chair in the darkness. Beyond the porch, McEban’s house stood unlighted and vague in the distance, but a light was on in Rita’s Airstream, parked along the south side of the house, and the moonlight was sparkling in sweeps across the irrigated pastures, glowing on the stones spaced along the drive.
She tried to envision her father’s face because she found it comforting to imagine that the dead might care for her. She pictured them waiting—thousands of years’ worth of souls—with their arms outstretched, welcoming.
When she drives the two-lanes that wind through the Bighorns she often stops to sit beside the descansos erected in the borrow ditches. Simple crosses, some hung with wreaths of plastic flowers, once a teddy bear, once a baseball glove, almost always a message of loss: Look homeward, Angel. If tears could build a stairway to Heaven. Your memory is my treasure. She wonders what she might write to mark the place where her father died. Something to let him know she does not mourn.
She stood and started toward the kitchen, stopping abruptly when she heard the porchboards grind, and when a dark figure rose at the window her heart spiked and her legs jerked her backward.
“Did I scare you?” Just a whisper through the screening.
She leaned into the table, her right leg still pumping, cocked up on the ball of her foot. She’d nearly fallen.
“Hell yes, you scared me.” She bent the leg up, digging at a cramp in her calf. “What are you doing out there?”
“Nothing.” He bobbed up higher, spreading his arms and moaning like a cartoon ghost.
“Goddamnit, Kenneth, get in here.”
The front door screeched on its hinges when he stepped into the room. “Were you thinking about something scary?” He was giggling.
“I was thinking about my dad.”
She opened the refrigerator, and they squinted against the light.
“You want to go riding?”
“I’ll bet you sneak down here all the time, don’t you?”
“Sometimes I do.” He looked toward the bedroom. “Uncle Paul never notices. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She set the yogurt back in the refrigerator and closed the door.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Do I what?”
“Want to go riding?”
“Now?”
“It’s too hot to sleep,” he said.
He waited while she dressed, and they walked through the dappled shadows the moon cast through the cottonwoods along the creek bottom, then over a plank footbridge to the barn, the chirring of crickets and the rush of water loud in the darkness, their footfalls muffled in the duff.
He had a brown-and-white pinto bridled, the reins looped over a corral pole, and as they approached he chanted, “There now, there now,” so the horse wouldn’t shy, but his voice was so childishly shrill it sounded like the call of a night bird.
“We can both ride Spencer,” he told her.
The horse nuzzled his broad forehead into the boy’s chest, pushing him back a step, and he turned the animal against the side of the corral.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“McEban says our dog could ride Spencer.”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“He meant if we did.”
She stepped to the horse’s flank, resting an arm across his hips. “It’ll just take a minute to saddle him.”
“He’s good to go the way he is,” he said, and the horse nickered softly, as if to vouch for him.
She stood up onto the second rail, sidestepping to the horse’s withers and swinging a leg over. Kenneth still stood on the ground, reaching out to her, and she gripped his wrist, pulling him up behind her. He was light as a cat, all bone and sinew and eagerness, and the horse hadn’t even raised his head, standing like he’d gone to sleep.
“I told you he was okay,” the boy said.
They wove through the trees on the north side of the creek, the old horse plodding, occasionally grunting in complaint, and Kenneth sat pressed against her, his arms encircling her waist.
“How far do you want to go?” she asked, but he was right, she felt refreshed, contented, her arms and face cooling, as though her body’s heat was wicking out into the mottled night. She felt him shift, looking past her to get his bearings.
“Not much farther.” He pressed a cheek against her shoulder blade. “I’m a little bit afraid of the dark,” he admitted, and then: “Do you think my mom’s crazy?”
The horse snorted at a downfall and balked before stepping over. They gripped tighter with their knees.
“What do you think?”
“If she is crazy it’s probably okay.”
“Then I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s what I think.” He looked around her again. “Once, in a book I read, it said a kid would be okay if there was just one person to watch out for him.” He was whispering. “The book was in the counselor’s office at school.”
“What were you doing there?” She raked her heels along the horse’s ribs, and he quickened his pace.
“It was because I hit Ricky Wheeler in the neck. He’s the one who said my mom was crazy, but I didn’t tell the counselor that was why and Ricky didn’t either. I had to apologize to the whole class.” He unclasped his hands, pointing ahead to a clearing. “Up there,” he said.
Then they were out of the trees and the air grew warmer, their shadows falling away to the right, lumped together and following them through the tall meadow grass.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Sure I can.” She felt him leaning into her.
“Rodney isn’t just my mom’s friend. He’s my real dad.”
He’d made the statement as plainly as if reading from a book in a counselor’s office. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody did. I figured it out by myself, but I don’t want you to tell McEban.”
“I won’t tell anybody.”
There was the hollow drumming of a sage grouse beating its wings against a downed cottonwood.
“I know there’s you and Uncle Paul and my mom, but if I’m going to turn out okay it’s mostly because McEban’s watching out for me.” He dropped his hands away from her. “Right here’s perfect.”
She reined the horse in and he slid to the ground, pulling his T-shirt over his head, stumbling, waving an arm to right his balance, still gripping the white shirt as though it were the limp body of something he’d snatched out of the dark.
“You truly are a little shithead,” she said.
“It’ll be fun.”
His smile flashed in the moonlight, and he sat down in the graveled apron at the edge of the creek, tugging at his boots.
“You told me we were just going riding.”
“And it’s not a secret.” He was peeling his socks off. “You can tell anybody you know how much fun it is.”
She looked at the creek, where it deepened into a long pool of flat water, edging the southern crescent of the meadow. “Who do you think I’m going to tell I went swimming in the middle of the night?”
He was on his feet again, unbuckling his belt. “Spencer likes it too,” he said. “Uncle Paul and I swam him last summer.”
“At night?”
He nodded. “You can ask him.”
She looked to the water once more and then slid down beside him and they piled their clothes on the smooth stones, and when all he said about her nakedness was, “You’re really, really white” she swung back onto the horse, pulling him up after her.
He was wriggling, twisting left and right to look past her, his knees thumping the backs of her thighs. “Put him in there.” He pointed at the headwater of the pool.
“You’re sure about this?”
“It’s easy.” He turned, shaking his hand toward the broad flash of rapids where the pool emptied. “That’s where we come out. It’s only cold the first time.”
By the third trip through she felt as if she were shining, lit from within, and Kenneth hung on tight as the horse fell from under them, swimming, and they floated behind and above him in the sound of churning water and their laughter, his arms encircling her, their legs paddling away.
“Can we go again?” he asked.
The horse was standing in the tailwaters, blowing hard, water streaming into the shallows, and the pull of gravity had fallen upon them both again, feeling newly invented.
“Just once?” she asked. He was slippery against her. “How about as many times as you want?”
His smile went wild and he dropped his hands to her hips as she reined the old horse around toward the head of the pool.
She was cool and relaxed as she slipped into bed, and Paul woke, smiling as the boy had smiled. He swept his hair away from his eyes, listening while she told him where she’d been.
“You’re still an a*shole,” she said.
He lay back against the pillow. “I know I am.” He yawned. “Did he get a little boner?”
“Yeah, he did.” She turned and settled back in against him.
“He got one with me too.” She could feel his breath on her shoulder, on the back of her neck. “He’s too little for it to mean anything,” he said. “It just feels good.”
“I know,” she whispered, and pulled his arm around her and held his hand open against her belly, her eyes shut, slipping away into sleep as though adrift in clear water.