Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER EIGHT





They discussed and conferred and argued and flat-out fought and then they broke down and bought him a motorbike. He was thirteen. A kid up at the college in Arcata was selling a 250 Enduro, good on gas, not licensed for the road but then neither was Wrecker. It could get him up and down the mountain. It could get him to the grange hall where the other kids hung out on weekends. It might get him to school on time. Wrecker exulted. The bike was his ticket out. He lay in bed and planned trips to Tierra del Fuego. Okay, he would wear a helmet. They made him. Ruthie made it plain. She would disassemble the bike bolt by bolt and throw all the pieces into the river if he didn’t. Did he understand this? Sure, he understood. Helmet. Okay.

He would mount a coon tail on the handlebars and tear up every trail between here and Fort Bragg.

But he damaged the front fork going over a rugged jump the day he got it and the bike was holed up all that winter in the shed, catching dust, and he was back to riding to school with Melody, who only sometimes let him drive. It rained all winter, anyway. When spring came the rain slowed and Melody said, Kid? Why don’t you see if Len could help you fix that bike? She said maybe Wrecker could work for Len in trade. Like maybe he could—she flicked her hands in that funny way she had—stack firewood or something.

Wrecker found Len in the tool shed. He was swapping out the crankcase oil in the big splitter. Wrecker hovered in the doorway until Len looked up.

“You’re blocking the light,” the man said. His voice was softer than gravel but stiffer than wood chips. “Either come in or go out, but get clear of the sun.”

Wrecker slipped inside. “Listen. You got any work for me?”

Len wiped his oily hands on a rag. “What kind of work?”

“Any kind.” Wrecker rolled his shoulder in a shrug that looked like he was working a kink in the muscle at the same time. “I got to get the fork fixed on the bike and I can’t pay you to do it.”

“What’d you do to the fork?”

“Broke it on a jump last fall.”

“You ought not to be jumping that cycle,” Len said.

“Jumping wasn’t the problem. It was the landing that whacked it.”

Len flashed him a look and fiddled with the oil plug. “I’ve got plenty of work,” he said, lifting his chin and meaning more than Wrecker could figure. “Bring it by. I’ll give it a look. It wheel okay?”

“Wheels fine. I’ll bring it.”

Len nodded and looked down and tried to keep the wobble off his face until the boy disappeared.

Len had him sweep, first. Wrecker was thorough. He didn’t let dust build up in the corners and he hefted the heavy sacks of trash like they were filled with cotton fluff. He was strong for his age.

The next Saturday Len had him move the cement sacks out of the root cellar where they’d hardened and lay them along the cut bank of the ditch for flood control. Thirteen? He was very strong for his age.

Then Len showed him how to cut and nail the wood siding for the tractor shed he was finishing up. “Whoa,” Len said, running the sleeve of his shirt across his sweaty face. The boy stopped the handsaw mid-stroke and looked over at him. Len paused to take it in. His stance, his level of concentration, the strength he exhibited, the way his hands seemed to fall naturally to the task—the boy was a goddamned dynamo. He kept his face turned to Len. It was open and direct.

“Yes?”

Len stumbled. “You don’t want to cut too many boards,” he said. “Might go over what we need. Be a waste.”

Wrecker nodded slightly. “I measured and counted. Six more and I’ll start nailing them up.”

“Oh,” Len said, and Wrecker grinned and went back to the final strokes.

Len shook his head. He thought, God help us when he discovers power tools.

There was nothing for Len to complain about, in how they raised the boy. He was grateful to them for rising to the task, and over the years he offered what he could: money sometimes, all the firewood they could burn, he brought meat and kept the road passable and repaired the gates and ran errands if they asked him to, though they rarely did. He was in a kind of permanent and thus forgotten debt to them. Melody had gone along to the courthouse to finalize the boy’s papers and sat beside him in solidarity when he’d signed his name. She’d trembled all the drive up, but they’d had to wait so damn long in the courthouse hallway that by the time they actually saw the judge they were both exhausted and dulled into terminal boredom. But it was simple and it was done and from then on Melody and the others did the rest. And a good thing. Meg was steering down a steady decline, and it was all he could do to set the brake and lean his weight against the inevitable. Willow was a help. Len blushed. She was more than a help. She was an inspiration.

The boy had his hair pulled back and the face shield covered to beneath his chin. He gestured to a section of the beam they were sawing. He’d been working with Len for six months now. Wrecker had paid off the bike fix in the first few days but kept coming to work, and Len found he liked his quiet company. Still, Len could not get past the hair. When he turned thirteen Wrecker quit letting Ruthie buzz his head and now, a year later, he resembled the Breck Girl with a dirty lip in a lumberjack’s plaid CPO. Why didn’t they say something to him about that? And this whole messy business with school: they should just make him go and close the door on backtalk. Len didn’t go in for this declaration-of-independence modern method of child rearing. Fourteen years old? You didn’t get to make up your own mind. Your father made it up for you.

Or—whoever.

He looked down at the knot the boy was pointing to. It wasn’t a knot. It was a shiny sliver of metal the saw had just exposed, a dark iris of tannin staining the pale wood. He caught Wrecker’s eye through the scratched plastic, and the boy nodded.

Len walked again to the front of the saw and shut off the motor. It faded to quiet. He’d heard of a man who went down like that, the spike spit backward when the blade caught it, pitched a neat fastball to the strike zone. His mate dug it out of his chest and his blood ran out before he got to the hospital. He watched the boy flip up his shield and look for his reaction. Len turned aside. He despised the activists—their righteousness, their cowardly methods. What kind of fool risks a man’s life to save a tree? But he forced himself to shrug and smile.

“Why don’t we call it a day,” Len said.

Wrecker raised his eyebrows. They were broad and wispy, an undisciplined smudge that softened his steady gaze. “Still light out.”

“What do you say we go to the river?”

Wrecker opened his mouth in a lopsided smile that Len had to look away from. He had a crazy grin. You had to watch out or it was catching.

“I’ll get Meg in the truck. You mind picking up here?” he asked the boy, and it was as good as done.

Len hadn’t even shut the engine when Wrecker was out of the truck bed and halfway to the water, his shirt wrenched off in one fluid motion and flung backward to catch in the blackberry thorns. He paused briefly to yank the boots from his feet and step out of his jeans, left his shorts on in deference to Meg, and used the giant boulder as a springboard into the fat dry August air. It held him suspended. Fourteen. Broad-shouldered. Stringy from sudden growth. And then he raised his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them and made himself a compact bullet, a musket ball swallowed with enormous splash and spray by the shining sheet of river below him—down, down, bubbles of zany laughter escaping—pushed off the soft muck of river bottom to twist and torpedo up and break the surface with a whoop, his sun-bleached hair water slicked and slung sideways with that quick flick of the neck—“Len!” he shouted, his voice lurching up the register, “Get on in here!”

Len finished helping Meg struggle out of the loose clothes she wore over her swimsuit and watched her waddle toward the water. He squatted on his heels at the riverbank. “Fine the way I am,” he called back. “I’ll stay dry.” He could see in his mind’s eye the look Meg wore on the faded palimpsest of her face. Her head was oddly shaped. Flat in the back, and her forehead a perfect reclining rectangle lined in creases almost straight across and crosshatched lightly: it had been written once and then erased. But she would be happy now, and shining the broad flat beam of her glee at the boy. She shrieked as her toes got wet. He watched Wrecker tread water, his arms extended to sit on the river surface, palms cupped like hydroplanes ready for takeoff and the water streaming from his hair and glistening on his shoulders. His skin was a darker gold than his mane and his chest was still smooth, hairless. He could work like a man—like the best of men—but he was still a boy. Melody’s boy. Ruthie’s boy. Even Meg’s boy. But not Willow’s. And somehow, through something that felt to Len like failure and loss, not his either. Len heard the sudden unencumbered peal of Meg’s clear laughter. And then Wrecker surfaced, smiled, and swam toward her.

Wrecker did his growing in bed. When he turned eleven and Johnny Appleseed went away—for good, it seemed, although they’d still receive reports from the tree huggers who came by (Johnny in Alaska, Johnny doing time for resisting arrest, Johnny Appleseed busted loose and living in the broad arms of the trees, vowing never to touch ground again)—Wrecker moved from the sunny space Melody had carved out for him in the barn back to the ramshackle cabin. To celebrate his independence Willow pieced him a quilt. It was navy blue and white, with sails and waves in alternating blocks, and he fell asleep under it to the soft snores of Sitka and her pups. Then Sitka died and the pups themselves got old and slow, and Wrecker stitched them up some fluffy pillows to ease their arthritic bones. Evenings Ruth cooked and Wrecker helped and the four of them—Ruth and Wrecker and Melody and Willow—gathered in the farmhouse to eat. Melody took up the oboe. Willow bought a TV. Wrecker studied algebra and Greek mythology and the comparative ecosystems of tundra and steppe through the flimsy pamphlets the home-school company provided. They all tried to help him learn to spell, and they failed miserably; still he passed eighth grade. He passed ninth. He studied with them and ate and laughed and told stories of his days with Len and argued over which programs to watch and suffered through Melody’s interminable practice sessions and washed dishes and did something that really fouled up the washing machine that Ruth had to fix. In the summers he grew cabbage and cauliflower in Ruth’s garden. He let the screen door slam every time and clattered like an elephant when he bounded down the porch stairs and plucked an armload of wildflowers, guiltily, the week after Mother’s Day and argued unsuccessfully for permission to ride his motorbike into town after dark. But he grew at night, alone, in his bed.

And he dreamed.

Sometimes he dreamed of cutting the wood, just that, and the sweet intoxicating odor that rose up to greet him. His body added inches in length and girth, and muscles swelled onto his bones, and the texture of his skin changed as he grew hair places it had never grown before. He dreamed of speeding through the forest, his face whipped by twigs as he dodged trees and his body a forward hurtle faster than the bike could ever take him. He dreamed of dog faces and half-caught conversations; his fingers stretched along their callused lengths and the bones of his face asserted themselves more ardently, and he dreamed of the dark-haired girl who camped on the banks of the Mattole every summer. His body went looking for her in his sleep and found itself, and he woke laughing.

Also he dreamed that dark disorienting dream. He felt something inside himself shrink. He felt part of himself leaving and was afraid of that. Sometimes the future felt like something he could wrap his arms around and lift with ease and sometimes it was a shape he couldn’t quite make out that waited for him in burned-out buildings in distant cities he found himself lost in. The ropy muscles of his trunk felt puny then, and his hands reached to catch himself. Always the fall was faster than he could stop.

He grew a downy mustache, sparse but insistent. His skin rebelled. An Adam’s apple rose in the flatland of his throat. His voice was husky to begin with, and though it tumbled two notches, it held on to the sweet color that distinguished it.

Wrecker knew there were parts to himself he would never retrieve.

One night he lay awake and was still. He heard the door open and felt the draft of cool night air cross his face. He listened for the dogs to stir. Heard the thump of a tail and the sandpaper scratch of wet tongue on skin. He listened for footfall but heard none. The night was dark. He waited for the flare of a match. “Johnny Appleseed?”

“Sshhhh.”

He shifted onto his elbows. His shoulders and chest were clear of the quilt. “What are you doing here?”

“I forgot something.” Wrecker heard his friend rustle through the piles of dirty laundry and stacks of odds and ends that cluttered the floor. Johnny was a vague shape at the end of the bed. And then the squeak of wood being pried up, resisting a nail. Something down there caught the light and shone but was quickly covered. And then the dull thud of Johnny’s fist pressing the wood back into place. He turned to Wrecker and there was just enough light for the boy to make out the familiar face, those bright eyes and that beard, a dense mat that covered nearly all his skin. He was smiling. “Don’t ask,” Johnny Appleseed warned.

Wrecker sat up with the quilt clumped around his waist. He shifted his legs to make room on the edge of the bed. “Where you been all this time?”

“Ah, you know. Places to go, people to see.” He squinted at the boy. “You got big. What are they feeding you?”

Wrecker felt a sharp pang. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed him. “Stick around and find out,” he said. “Ruth’ll put meat on your bones. You’re looking kind of thin.”

“Got to travel light.” Johnny paused. “Hey, Wrecker?” The corner of his mouth turned down, and then up, and then down again. “Keep this a secret, will you?” He watched the boy to gauge his response. “Don’t tell anybody I was here.”

Wrecker nodded. “You a fugitive from justice?”

Johnny Appleseed laughed. “A fugitive for justice, better. But probably both.”

Wrecker hesitated, and then he reached over to lift his friend’s shirttail. The polished stock of a pistol stuck up from the waistband of his pants. So it was true. People whispered that Johnny had turned Guardian. Whatever it took to stop the logging, they’d do it. Crazy-ass fools, Len called them. The worst kind of outlaws. “Who you planning to shoot?”

Johnny met his gaze. “I might have to scare some people to keep them away from the places they shouldn’t go.”

“I’m working with Len,” Wrecker blurted.

Johnny Appleseed nodded. Even in the dark, Wrecker could see a wave of sadness cascade down his face. “I know that,” Johnny said. “Len’s not the worst. Just tell him to leave the wildest ones be.” He walked around to the dogs, knelt down to stroke each one. He turned to the boy. “Sitka?”

“Last year,” Wrecker said. He still got a lump in his throat.

Johnny Appleseed nodded. “Take good care of yourself, kid,” he said, and walked outside and left the door open.

There was a sliver of moon that barely lit the grass. Wrecker dropped his feet to the floor and stood in the doorway with his quilt wrapped around him like a toga. “Johnny Appleseed!”

Johnny looked over his shoulder and lifted his hand to still the boy. Wrecker stood frozen. He had the terrible, wrenching feeling that this was the last he’d see of Johnny and he wanted to run at him, bring him down, force him to stay. But he couldn’t move. Johnny was going and his hand, raised like that, meant Wrecker had to stay.

Meant good-bye.

There was the barest shimmer in the shadows. There, again: a dark shape distinguished itself from the trees and approached the small man. From every direction, dark smudges resolved into men moving silently, stealthily, toward Wrecker’s friend and surrounding him. Guardians. If Johnny went with them he would never find his way back.

Johnny stood patiently in the moonlight. He made the men wait. They waited until, at last, Wrecker lifted his own hand, and waved good-bye. And then, once more, they were absorbed into the trees.

Meg loved the water. She loved it for hours in a pan she could sit beside and stir with a wooden spoon; she loved it coming down day after night after interminable winter day to flood the yard and sop Len’s canvas tarps left hanging on the line. She delighted in the river, in the sea, in the brackish standing swamp of a lagoon where Len mucked about in waders and collected tubers for a feast. Anyplace wet was where she wanted to be. Especially in the bath, with Len’s lean economical body a prop for her own soft flesh. “The water lapped over her belly,” he sang, stitching his own words to the tune of “My Bonnie.” “The water lapped over her thighs. The water lapped over her ninnies,” Len’s voice a scratch more satisfying than the loofah he coursed over Meg’s shoulders and back, “which grew to incredible size.”

Every night they followed the same routine. Len came in from the yard or from town or dragged his weary bones home from the forest after felling trees with Wrecker and he stood at the stove and put together some concoction that would satisfy their need to eat. He flicked the switch on the propane boiler to heat the water for their bath. He unscrewed the faucet clamps he’d had to install; Meg was safe at home, days, so long as he kept her from emptying the cistern and flooding the place while he was gone. He whistled and sometimes he played the radio. Meg rearranged the lumber scraps he brought her. Some evenings she liked to lie under the table and peer up at the rough side of the planks. They ate together and Len scrubbed the dishes while Meg stood beside him with her hands in the soapy water and chased bubbles. And then they took their bath.

That morning Wrecker had found the gas tank empty on the motorbike and had to hike over to work. He was fifteen, now, and starting to fill out. Taller than Len by an inch or two and wide in the shoulders, not too narrow in the hips but every ounce of it muscle and more under his control than it had been in his gangly days. He could shoulder a wet log and walk with it, his footfalls thunderous under the weight. He swung an ax—tick, tock—like it was the second hand on the clock of the world: Paul Bunyan with a sharp blade and Len’s aging International, winch-outfitted, for his Blue Ox. Len handled the chain saw. All it would take was for the chain to break and the kid would be ribbons. Len shuddered to think of it. Wrecker was too young to work the woods, his focus not fully honed and the dangers too profound, but he was too good already to turn down. And God knows too bullheaded to boss around. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d go ahead and find some straightforward way to do what he wanted.

Straightforward: that’s how he’d asked Len for a ride to the dance the high school in Fortuna was throwing that evening. Len gave him credit for that. The boy had worked through every detail. Melody couldn’t take him; the hatchback she’d bought to replace the VW when it finally expired was turning out to be no more reliable than the van it had supplanted, but she was happy to come sit with Meg for the evening. Meg took a keen interest in the oboe and would listen, mesmerized, as Melody practiced her simple pieces. And for Len’s time, Wrecker pledged in return as many hours of work as he took Len away from his place. He planned to leave that night at seven. A few hours at the dance, the good hour and a quarter ride home—Len could be home by midnight. That meant five hours’ labor exchange. Would Len consider?

“Sure, I’ll take you,” Len said gruffly. “Forget about the rest.” He owed the boy at least this. With Johnny Appleseed gone there was no other man around to guide Wrecker and he was changing so fast, giving off a man’s odor, building muscle mass and sure enough bulking up in other ways, too. He showed a keen interest in the girls his age who gathered in occasional gaggles at the post office and general store. A keen interest and dubious social skills, from what Len could tell. Not that Len was expert in the field. He’d been nearly thirty and a virgin to love, if not to sex, when he’d fallen hard for Meg. He was certain Wrecker was a virgin on both counts. Ruth would have squeezed the information out of him and passed it on to them in subtle ways, but instead Ruth gazed at the boy with an expression that joined mirth with intense pity and a sense of impending doom. Len grinned, thinking of it. Poor sod, he thought. Not one of them could soften the blow, when it came. But Len could give him a lift to where the girls were. He could kick in his share to give Wrecker half a chance. And then his expression sobered. He was fifty-seven, himself. Old enough to be through with that kind of foolishness. And deep in the throes of the worst kind of want.

They’d worked hard all day and when the sun tilted toward four o’clock Len had quit early, run the boy home to get cleaned up for his evening out. Len had a parcel Willow had asked him to pick up at the p.o. in town and he wanted to deliver that, too. He drove in as far as the road would allow. Wrecker mumbled his thanks and slipped away. Len found Willow gathering her laundry from the line and he opened his mouth to shout across the meadow to her—but his mouth shut of its own accord. He stood and watched her free and fold the billowing sheets. All at once his insides lurched as though they had tired of him and decided to make a sudden break for freedom. He turned abruptly and hurried to the main house. He left the parcel with Ruthie. He got back in the truck and drove swiftly home.

In the tub, Meg splashed water onto her face. She chortled tunelessly. Len scrubbed a dirt spot above her elbow. He scrubbed harder and she slapped the water with the flat of her palm and moaned and he eased off. He looked closer. It was a mole he was trying to scrub off. The same mole that had always lived in that spot. He leaned against the tub back and slipped lower in the water.

His eyes shut, the water warm around him, Len’s mind lit with his memory of the afternoon. The line was strung high and Willow had reached above her head to unpin the sheet and carry its edge down to join the other. She’d stretched her arms wide to flatten the fold and then brought them together and halved the rectangle and smoothed the sheet against her body with her spread hand and then halved it again. And smoothed again. And folded again.

Len had never seen anything as breathtaking. It terrified him. He terrified him. He sat straight in the bath and he forced himself to forget what he’d seen. His hand found the plastic cup they kept on the tub edge. He gently touched Meg’s chin to persuade her to tilt back, and poured the water in a stream over her long hair. He kept one hand cupped at her hairline to protect her eyes. When her hair was fully wet he poured the shampoo into his hands and softly kneaded her scalp. He combed the suds tenderly through the long strands. He ran a delicate finger inside her ear and around its fleshy lobes to soap it clean and she giggled. He rinsed her hair and soaped her skin and rinsed that too and hurriedly scrubbed himself and stood for a towel and eased Meg from the tub and into the looped cotton. She hummed in his arms as he dried her, and he helped her into her flannel nightgown and robe to be ready for bed before dressing himself.

There was a knock at the front door and Len shouted from the bedroom for Wrecker to come in. The boy entered. Behind him sauntered Melody, her arms wrapped around the oblong leatherette case that housed her oboe. And behind her Willow.

Len glimpsed her through the half-open door to the bedroom and felt his heart jump. His cheeks flushed. He yanked his right arm from the sleeve of the threadbare chambray shirt he’d thoughtlessly chosen. The striped dress shirt was still folded in the bottom of the drawer; he shook that one free of its creases and awkwardly pulled it on. He stuffed the shirttails into the waistband of his jeans and forced his feet into his boots. He glanced at Meg. And then Len combed his hair.

“Hello,” he said, stepping into the room.

Willow wore the faintest curl of a smile. “I need to get out for an evening. Mind some company?”

“A bit tight in the cab,” Len said, to his instant regret. He coughed into his hand.

Wrecker came to the rescue. “We’ll fit,” he said briskly. It was October and the air was cool but he was stepping out in threadbare jeans and a T-shirt with a Black Sabbath graphic on its front and a couple of quarter-sized holes gaping in the side seam. “Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”

Meg had opened Melody’s oboe case and was reverently stroking the polished instrument. “We’ll be fine, here,” Melody assured Len. She turned to her son. “Behave yourself,” she said fiercely. The boy blushed and she reached up and tucked the tag of his T-shirt under the collar. He was taller than her by a head. “Have fun.” Her eyebrows knit together as she reconsidered. “Not too much fun.” She glanced at Willow. “You’ll be sure he gets home fine?”

“I’ll tuck him in and turn out the light.”

“Good.” She tossed her sleeping bag onto the couch. “I’m no good at staying up late. Try not to wake me when you come in, Len.”

Wrecker gave a short huff like a bear rooting in downed timber for grubs. He tilted toward Melody and suffered a kiss, and then crossed to Meg and planted one on the crown of her head. “Let’s go, already,” he growled, and they did.

Wrecker, usually quiet, chattered endlessly on the ride to Fortuna. About football, which he followed only sporadically, and television shows—reception at the farm still subject to the vagaries of the weather, in spite of the antenna he had rigged on the roof of the farmhouse—and about the weather itself, which had held steady all month but about which the farmer’s almanac (but could you really trust that? they were wrong as often as they were right) predicted a severe season of storms, so Len had best clear out the bar ditch that was supposed to carry the water off his road but which had clogged the year before. He was thinking of learning to play electric guitar. There was this guy who had tried to jump his motorcycle all the way across the Snake River Gorge and dang but he wished he had seen that. When they got to the high school and Wrecker slouched off, Len nearly fell out of the truck, frazzled by the unexpected onslaught of language. He turned to Willow. “Is he on drugs?”

“Better than that,” she laughed. “Endorphins. They’re free.”

Len shook his head. Most of the time the boy was calm, levelheaded, and immensely competent. “He sounded like a—”

“A teenager?” Willow offered.

Len had been thinking more along the lines of used car salesman.

It was remarkable, really, she said. Teenagers, observed in the wild, had been known to sustain that level of acoustic barrage for hours at a time. They’d been observed sleeping past noon and had the documented ability to consume in a single sitting the accumulated caloric stores of an entire social group for a week.

“Oh, really.” Len chuckled. She was mocking him, now. He liked the way it made him feel. “Wasn’t there that special on them? Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. They talk, they sleep, they eat.”

“My boys did.”

Len glanced sharply at her. A streetlamp spilled its light into the dark cab and limned her profile. She was gazing dreamily down. Then she lifted her eyes and looked frankly at him. “I could stand something to drink right now.”

Len nodded and shifted into gear. He stared straight ahead. Something had just changed between them. There was a little bar he knew—it was a workingman’s bar but women went there, too; not her kind of woman maybe, but it was all he could think of, on the spot like this—and he piloted the truck to its lot. His mouth was dry. “Think this’ll do?”

“It’s perfect.” As Willow slid across the bench seat to reach the far door her dress gave static sparks that made Len look away, dizzy. Lovestruck. There. He might as well admit it. He stole a glance at her as he held the heavy door to the bar. Something had changed in her, and the crazy buoyant feeling he had fought for so long—the one that started lower than the pit of his stomach and left him breathless and ready to rise—was set loose. His shoulders lifted. He didn’t know where he was going and he made himself believe he didn’t care.

The theme of the dance was Fall Harvest and the Fortuna High School gym was decorated with pumpkins—real pumpkins as well as some leaf-stuffed orange trash bags made to look like giant, malicious jack-o-lanterns—and a motley assortment of party streamers and hangings and a mirror ball that cast its little pebbles of light in a dizzying stream across the faces of the teenagers. Wrecker stood among them, paralyzed. He’d spent hours anticipating this evening and had finally decided that if he could just get himself here there was a reasonable chance he could fake the rest. But something had gone wrong. He’d been shuffled by the small crowd into a corner of the gym with other gawky, singular boys. Their defects were relatively apparent. Were his?

Len had taught him: identify, then remedy. Name the problem and then solve it. The problem was that he was trapped in hell and there was no way out. He’d been thrust into freakdom before he even had a chance to— Whoa there, now. Wrecker struggled to keep the terror from creeping into his expression. Steady, boy. That was the kiss of death, that look that told the world you’d piss your pants if you got close to a girl. And a few yards away a girl stood, for a brief moment, alone. Wrecker recognized the look that flitted across her face. He wasn’t the only one suffering. His shoulders cranked down a quarter of a notch and he forced himself to move closer to her.

“Hey,” he said.

She could have glanced at him and turned her back. For a second he thought she would. Then she tipped her head a little to the side and considered him. She was halfway pretty. He had his hands jammed in his pockets but if he were to extract one and extend it she was actually close enough to touch. The music was loud and Wrecker felt a sudden surge of possibility.

“What,” she said.

It was a start.

Len and Willow sat in a booth in the dark bar with a broad table between them and what looked like instruments of torture—Willow identified them as nautical objects—decorating the wall adjacent. They were talking. Mainly Willow was talking. Whatever had infected Wrecker on the drive over seemed to have been contagious. Willow noticed Len’s stifled surprise and apologized. It was just, she said, that if she stopped—if she didn’t get it all out—she was afraid that what was left unsaid would knot itself around her windpipe and squeeze it shut.

Len had the opposite problem. He was sure that if he said what he was resisting saying he would be finished in thirty seconds and his world would implode. If he told her, if she knew, there’d be no turning back. Either she felt the same way or she didn’t, and either option charted a future he couldn’t live with.

It was her work, partly, Willow explained. The carpet restoration had tapered down to a trickle. Of her best clients, three had died of old age and another two had largely curtailed their collecting. She’d tried to drum up new business, but her heart wasn’t in it and her close eyesight had grown blurred, making the work harder. Besides, now all she could focus on was stories.

“Stories?”

Len wrinkled his forehead and Willow took another stiff swallow of scotch. She drank it neat and Len noticed she was drinking it fast. Stories, she repeated. Epics, adventures, folktales. Why did people do the things they do? The—she sputtered a little as the scotch burned her throat—stupid things they do? She was obsessed with stories. She’d always loved them. Had told her children stories every night, half of them drawn from the borders of the rugs she handled.

There, again.

“Willow,” Len said gently. He set his beer down and tenderly reached across the table to cup his hand around hers. “That’s twice.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, a flush rising in her face. Len couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or the warm air in the bar or something else. The something else he was bringing up or the something else he was trying not to. “Am I repeating myself?”

“That’s twice you mentioned your children. Do you …” He cleared his throat. “Did you …” He didn’t know how to phrase the question. “I’m listening,” he settled on.

He watched her face. He wished he could commit it to memory, each fold and crease and stretch of luminous skin, each freckle, the way her lips parted slightly and quivered, the few stray hairs she tamed against her temples, the way her gaze dropped and darkened and resisted, calling a kind of interior light, and then darkened further; the way her neck bent like a swan’s to bring her lovely head forward, first, and then down close to the table.

“Ah,” she said, her voice softly upbeat and only slightly ironic. “Look at that. I guess I’ve had too much to drink.” She raised her head again and looked directly at Len. “You and Meg. You didn’t want children?”

Len opened his hand in a small, helpless gesture. “They never came.” He smiled weakly. “Meg got the goose.”

“And you got Wrecker.”

It surprised Len, the quick flush of emotion that flooded him. He had to look away quickly. He opened his mouth but said nothing.

“You’ve done fine, Len.” Willow kept her gaze on his face. “Come on.” She slid out of the booth and reached for his hand. “It’s time. Let’s get the boy.”

It was still early when they arrived again at the parking lot outside the high school gym. A few other vehicles sat scattered across the asphalt. Some were occupied. Len tried not to look. There was a fair amount of activity evident in two or three of them and it was hard to ignore. Willow had scooted to the middle of the bench seat to make room for Wrecker and she was close enough to Len that when he turned his head to face her he could breathe in the scent of her shampoo. Delicate, complex. Some kind of flower he had no name for. He leaned past her to switch on the radio for distraction but his upper arm inadvertently brushed the side of her breast. He froze. Then he retreated stiffly to the far edge of the seat.

“Len.”

Some kind of flower—he reached again to turn the music up and this time she shifted with him. Opening, somehow. Widening in a way that made him gasp.

Willow took Len’s hand from the radio knob and placed it so the callused tips of his fingers straddled the arching dome of her knee. The heel of his hand slumped into the warm hollow between that knee and the other.

Len made an involuntary sound—a deep sound, almost a moan—that appalled him. He held his breath to try to wrestle back control. He couldn’t retrieve his hand from its home between Willow’s thighs but he kept an iron grip on the door handle with the other. If he held tight he couldn’t reach over and lay it on Willow’s breast. He couldn’t shift closer to her on the seat or—

“Oh, Len, no,” Willow exhaled.

Len’s head jerked up and he yanked his hand clear, his knuckles rapping hard against the dash. The sudden pain pierced him. He looked around wildly. “There,” Willow said, tipping her head toward the gymnasium door while she smoothed her skirt. “The children,” Willow clarified. They were both breathing rapidly and some moisture had condensed on the windshield. Through the foggy glass Len could make out the shapes of hulking boys exiting the gym and heading for trucks. The girls could be identified by their smaller size and the snug fit to their jeans. Both Len and Willow scanned anxiously for Wrecker. They didn’t dare look at each other.

His eyes trained on the windshield and his voice no higher than a whisper, Len said, “It’s no, then?”

Willow cast a furtive glance his way. Her eyebrows lifted. A small hiccup of laughter slid out from under her control, and then one more.

Len felt surprise and relief spread like a mantle of warmth throughout his chest and arms. He let his head fall back against the seat back. His own laughter escaped to join hers. They laughed tentatively at first but their joined laughter grew bolder, more full-throated, edged toward giddy. Len didn’t know why he was laughing. He wondered briefly if they would be able to stop. He reached over and gave her a quick hug, a hug of comfort and collusion, and Willow returned it. And as they sat apart recovering, making little gasps and sighs and exclamations, Len realized that he had been deeply mistaken. Everything was suddenly so clear.

Willow tapped his wrist. “There he is,” she said, and pointed.

Wrecker was dressed like all the other boys. The shoulder-length hair that fell in his eyes, the torn T-shirt, the ragged jeans—it could have been a uniform. But something distinguished their boy from the others. Something—

He was happy.

“Oh,” Willow said.

It was palpable. His happiness was a shine that transformed the darkness about him. He was alone but the glow he gave off suggested he hadn’t been alone recently. They saw him catch sight of the truck and tip his chin toward them, head their way.

“He’s beautiful,” Willow murmured.

Len glanced at her. It was funny to hear her say it, but it was true.

The boy reached the truck and opened the door and swung himself in, and in a moment the air in the cab changed from the charged intimacy Len and Willow had created to a wild, swirling, circus brew of hot breath and pheromones.

“Wow,” Willow remarked.

“Huh?” Wrecker settled himself on the bench. He was all thigh and shoulder spread and strong deodorant and Len could detect, mixed in with the boy’s own personal aroma, a distinctly girl smell. “Okay,” Wrecker said. “Let’s go.”

Len fired the engine and shifted the truck into gear. The driving gave him something to do, an action to steady his legs and focus his mind. Willow’s body was pressed close to his and she was trembling slightly. Every breath she took vibrated against him. Len reached for a blanket he kept stored behind the seat. His hand trailed against the nape of Willow’s neck as he drew it forward. “Are you cold?”

Willow opened the spread across her legs and his. “Just a little.” She straightened the blanket from beneath and let her hand linger in his lap.

Len swerved into the opposite lane.

“Easy!” Wrecker’s eyes widened. “Len! I can drive if you’re tired.”

“Sorry,” Len muttered.

“Good dance?” Willow ventured. With her head turned toward the boy, Len glimpsed the long line of her neck. He wanted to follow it deep into her blouse.

“It was okay.”

“Anybody you knew?”

“Not many.” He gazed dreamily out the window. “A few.”

Len drove with an acute concentration. He kept the truck steadily in its lane as the road wove up the narrow mountain pass. The headlights splashed over the broad leaves of shrubs and shone in brief flashes on fir trunks. Streaks of moonlight stuttered briefly through the canopy, but when Len climbed out of the trees and crested the ridge the moon suddenly appeared, swollen and luminous, before them, spilling its milky shine into the cab.

“Pull off, Len.” Wrecker looked entranced. “You ever seen it like this, before?”

Len parked the truck by the roadside and the three of them piled out. The fog had moved off the ocean and the moonlight spread across the waves. Out in the distance, the rest of the world waited.

“Pretty decent day,” Wrecker declared softly.

He dozed the rest of the way, his big head leaning first against the window glass and then shifting to fall to Willow’s shoulder. Len and Willow stayed silent and solemn for the steep descent to the water. One sharp turn after another swayed them back and forth against each other. They rode without speaking as the road hugged the beach and turned inland at the river’s mouth, and when they turned at last onto the dirt road they woke Wrecker to open the gates. Len stopped above the farmhouse and Wrecker spilled out of the cab. He shook himself like a newborn colt. “No work tomorrow?”

“No work, buddy.”

“See you later, then.” He trotted off into the darkness toward his cabin.

They watched his dark back disappear. The moonlight flooded in and lit Willow’s face. She kept it slanted slightly from him. Len’s throat was tight. “Willow?”

“Drive up a little farther, Len.”

He released the brake and backed the truck onto the road again.

“Just ahead. On the edge of the meadow.”

Len eased the truck to a stop and shut the engine. Willow slid away from him and opened the door and got down.

Len pushed his way out and walked around to stand in front of her. He draped the blanket over her shoulders and rested his hands on her waist. Her chin tilted toward him now and he paused because he wanted to remember all of this: the shine of her eyes, the thrum of his body, the softness of her skin, and that first day, too, how fragile she’d seemed, cracked in half from whatever she’d come from but gorgeous, terribly and irresistibly and unreachably beautiful. It clobbered him. It drove him out to the privacy of his woodlot for solace. He was in love with his wife and still every cell in his body had turned toward Willow with a kind of magnetic conviction that had never let up. Len dipped toward her now and let his lips brush lightly from her forehead down the line of her profile to her lips. If she wanted him to, he would stop there. He would let that be enough. That single, tentative kiss.

Willow reached a hand behind Len’s head and brought him close and kissed him hard. He felt her lips open to him and her body tremble against his own. “Come with me,” she said hoarsely, breaking for air. “I can’t wait anymore.”

She led him across the moonlit meadow to her yurt. He was barely in the door when she was rushing through the buttons of his shirt, fighting his belt buckle, running her hands wherever they would reach. He kicked off his boots and struggled out of his jeans. “Hey!” He laughed a little. “Whoa!” He’d wanted this for so long and he was afraid for it to be over before he registered what was happening.

“I know, Len.” He couldn’t tell if Willow was laughing or crying as she dragged him toward the bed. Somehow she had slid out of her clothes and her naked body stunned him. “I know.” She reached for him and he didn’t resist and he heard her gasp, saw her eyes widen and shift focus as they moved together. Len let his head sink to her neck, felt her lips move lightly along his ear. “We’ll slow down later.” Small, delicate cries finding their way into words. “Next time, Len.” He felt himself fall into his body as he listened. “Next time,” she whispered. Softly, in his ear. “I promise.”