36
BRANDON PAINTED from memory. He started out realistically, then veered toward the abstract until only what had to be there remained, a green-black face with domineering eyebrows and a long mustache. He painted fast, a productive frenzy coming on.
His mind shuffled images from the night: the mallards’ hysterics, the smuggler’s heaving wheeze, the chief’s giddiness afterward, bursting disheveled into the bullpen, wearing jeans and his wife’s reading glasses, brainstorming on a catchy nickname for the smuggler and settling on Swamp Man.
The gentle knock was enough to trip the three-dog alarm, Leo’s yip followed by Maggie’s yap and Clyde’s startled half-bark. Brandon thought it was a false alarm until he saw Madeline standing on the other side of the glass door, her arms and ankles crossed, as if she’d been watching for some time. She looked wrung out, but it was her!
He quieted the dogs with a toothy whistle, then slid the door open. “You okay?”
“Me?” She looked at him, barefoot and shirtless in paint-smothered jeans, green and black smudges winding up his muscled torso, his eyes blurry. She smelled paint, sour laundry, damp dogs and basement mildew. A monotone behind him said, “Blue grouse,” and after a few seconds there was a hollow sound, like someone blowing into a beer bottle.
“Half of your hair’s wet,” he said. “You look …”
Her smile tightened as she squatted to pet the wagging mutts. “Drunk? Hope I didn’t set off any sensors.”
“Where’d you cross?” Brandon sent the dogs to their pads with a finger snap.
She told him. He bunched his lips and shook his head.
The monotone spoke again—“red-breasted nuthatch”—followed by evenly spaced beeps, like a truck backing up.
“What’re we listening to?”
“Bird Songs of the Puget …” He stepped toward the stereo. “I’ll turn it off.”
“Leave it,” she said.
He started to speak but just stared at her with a half smile, as if he’d lost an amusing thought on the way to his lips.
She followed his eyes to one of his Rorschachs—complete or in progress, she had no idea. Two cold eyes above a familiar mustache. “Wow! Whatcha got there?”
“The guy I found tonight in the swamp.”
She cut her laugh off. “You paint the people you—”
“All of them.” He made a circular motion with his finger. “Every last one.”
She took in the entire room for the first time. An extra-long, king-sized bed with neither foot- nor headboards. Bedside books stacked vertically. A desk and easels that came up to her shoulders. Gallon jugs of water. Three dogs curled on individual flying-saucer pads of ascending size. Canvases stacked a half dozen deep against every wall. A lamp in the middle with a moose silhouette on its shade.
“Double-crested cormorant,” said the robotic voice before a screech like nails being wrenched from wood.
Brandon showed her more canvases stacked near the bathroom, talking in gusts about whom he caught where and what they did or said.
“These’re amazing,” Madeline said, squatting on her haunches to get closer.
“Yeah?”
“Not just for you, for anybody. But if you can make people look so real, why make them seem so weird most of the time?”
He hesitated. “I’m not trying to be a camera.”
“How’d you catch that guy tonight, Brandon?” His cockeyed expression made her worry he was onto her. “I mean, did a sensor go off, or did you catch him on camera or something?”
“No.”
“Somebody tip you? Some homeowner? Or a Canadian?”
Again he studied her, as if straining to translate a language he almost understood. “No.”
“Well,” she pressed, her mouth drying out, “so why are you always in the right spot at the right time?”
“I was looking for owls.”
“Owls?” She smiled. “That’s the reason you were there?”
“Yep.” How drunk was she? Some of her words dragged, and she had a boneless quality to her. He was determined not to miss any body language this time.
“There wasn’t any tip or anything?”
“Just the heron and the ducks,” he said. “The mallards were going crazy. Wack-wack-wack-wack-wack!”
She lingered on a painting that looked like kids with psychedelic skin holding hands and rising off an invisible trampoline. She moved to the next one, then returned to the bouncing children: a huge boy and a slender, dark-haired girl. “You believe in heaven, Brandon?” She suddenly felt like she might start bawling.
“I believe in reincarnation.”
She grinned up at him. “So what did someone do to come back as you?”
He paused. “Doubt it was a person,” he said, then started listing the animals he felt closest to—Jersey cows, snowy owls, Australian shepherds, blue herons and so on—until he noticed her flexing forehead and wandering eyes. When he heard the western meadowlark’s insecure melody, he wished like hell he’d turned off that CD.
“Why do you keep calling me?” she asked, her eyes fixed on another startling painting, a flock of birds with Asian faces. “Haven’t I scared you off by now?”
“I like you, Maddy”
“In what way?”
“Every way.”
She focused again on the paintings, specifically a canvas of tiny but remarkably vivid faces, mostly gaping mouths, crammed inside what appeared to be the interior of a van. She caught his crooked smile on her. “Even after I tell you to get lost?”
“I shouldn’t have sung ‘Blackbird’ at the restaurant,” he said. “That was really stupid.”
She felt ready to cry again. “No, that was fine. A little weird, but sweet. I need to lay down, Brandon.”
She reclined on the bed and then, after a long moment during which he just watched her, she sat up, crossed her arms at her hips and started to pull her shirt off.
“I’m not good with—”
“Should I stop?” She froze midway, just above the pink birthmark next to her belly button.
“I’m good not—”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t think—”
“No?”
“I’m not in bed good, Maddy. I mean, I—”
“You prefer the floor?”
“No, it’s just—”
She pulled off her shirt and dropped it on the floor.
“Fox sparrow,” said the stereo, followed by a lewd whistle.
Brandon lay as still as he could as she pulled his pants and underpants over his long legs and enormous flat feet. She giggled when she saw he was too shy or scared to look below her chin. She climbed up beside his head and whispered, “Simon says kiss me.”
He mimicked her every move. When her lips pressed harder, he returned the pressure, careful to keep his teeth covered. He tried to remember everything: the smell of her smoky hair and peppermint mouth; the rash on her arched neck that reminded him of a red-throated loon; the bulb of her chin; her oval nostrils; the white slits of her almost closed eyes; the yamlike shape of her right breast, slightly larger than its partner and leaning outward, as if pointing to something across the room.
He slowly raised a hand to align that breast with the other, astonished by its luxurious smoothness. There weren’t any surprise ledges, headboards or bedside tables to worry about. Everything felt suspended in this safe slow motion.
Ten minutes later—or maybe twenty or thirty, while he concentrated on not moving, on not hurting her or himself, on not missing any sensation—she was suddenly, amazingly on him. Weightlessly, half-suspended, almost nonchalantly, as if it weren’t some tricky, anatomical safecracking or awkward skirmish of elbows, knees and teeth. He marveled at the simplicity of it if he just let her do all the moving, her slender left arm with the mole near the elbow flung out to the side for balance. He watched her concentration escalate as it had when as a child she’d tried to convince him and Danny that she could do things with her mind like turn up the stereo. And the sounds! Her sounds! Madeline Rousseau’s sounds! Her light growl got the dogs yipping, first Leo and then Maggie before Brandon snapped his fingers. She leaned forward and whispered that in a moment she would let him move just a little bit. No Simon says now, just a slight pleading for him to move—but not yet. When she finally, breathlessly, told him precisely how to move and he obeyed, her shudder reminded him of those old rockets that shook like they wouldn’t make it out of the atmosphere without ripping into a billion pieces before they popped through effortlessly to float freely above the blue earth.
“Maddy?” he said, once he couldn’t bear the quiet any longer. “Are you floating?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you remember in school when they’d show videos of those old Apollos, back when they—”
“Brandon?” Her thoughts flopped between thinking it was the sanest, gentlest sex she’d ever had and sensing she’d hit a shameful new low.
“Yes?” he replied.
“Please just be real, real quiet.”
He didn’t notice the catch in her voice or the tears rolling into her ears. “Astronauts,” he whispered.
“Please.”
“It’s just a sentence. You’ll like it.”
“Okay.”
“Astronauts’ footprints stay on the moon forever,” he whispered, “because there’s no wind to blow them away.”