I didn’t argue, though I didn’t know what there was to see. My picture was long gone, covered and forgotten. So was Molly. Long gone. Covered and forgotten. But Tag hadn’t forgotten.
I turned around and found the dirt road that shimmied through the field, came out behind the overpass, and continued up into the hills. There were still broken beer bottles and fast food wrappers. A broken CD player that had probably been there for a while, considering the make and model, lay abandoned on its side, wires protruding from the missing speaker. I didn’t want glass in my tires and pulled off in the barrow pit a little ways off, just like I’d done that night so long ago. It was the same time of year and everything. It was the same kind of October—unseasonably warm, but predictably beautiful. The leaves were a hot riot on the lower hills and the sky was so blue I wanted to reach up and capture the color with my paint brush. But that night it had been dark. That night Georgia had followed me. That night I’d lost my head and maybe something else too.
Tag picked his way through the debris and just kept walking out into the field where the dogs must have canvased, noses to the ground. He stopped once and looked around, eyeing the hills, judging the distance to the freeway, measuring the length between the overpass and the back of the businesses that crowded the on and off ramps, trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all.
I turned away and walked to the cement walls that held the freeway on her shoulders. There were two sides, one slanting right, one slanting left, and I leaned back against the side still exposed to the sun, closed my eyes, and felt the warmth seep into my skin.
Wait! Please, please, please don’t keep walking away from me!” she cried in frustration. I could hear the tears in her voice and the fear too. She was afraid of me, but she still came after me. She still came after me. The thought made me stumble, it made me stop. And I turned, letting her catch me. And I caught her too, wrapping my arms around her so tight that the space between us became space around us, space above us, but not space inside us. I felt the drumming, the pounding beneath the softness of her breasts, and my heart raced to match it. I opened her mouth under mine, needing to see the colors, to feel them lick and climb up my throat and behind my eyes like flames from a signal flare. I kissed her lips over and over, until there were no secrets. Not hers, not mine. Not Molly’s. There was just heat and light and color. And I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. Her skin was like silk and her sighs like satin, and I couldn’t look away from the pleasure on her face or the pleas in her hands that urged me onward.
Georgia’s hair, Georgia’s mouth, Georgia’s skin, Georgia’s eyes, Georgia’s long, long legs.
Georgia’s love, Georgia’s trust, Georgia’s faith, Georgia’s cries, Georgia’s long, long wait.
And then the cries of passion became something else. There was sorrow in the sound. And there were tears. Georgia was bent over with them, doubled over. And her hair streamed around her like the water falling from her eyes and wailing from her mouth, and her long, long legs were no longer around me but beneath her, kneeling, supplicating, and she cried, and cried, and cried…
I opened my eyes and sat upright, unsure of what had been my own memory or something else entirely. I felt sick and disoriented, almost like I’d dozed too long and gotten a touch of heat stroke. I rubbed at my neck with clammy hands. But it couldn’t have been that long. Tag still wandered around in the field, looking for a sign that led to absolution or a road to reasons why. I winced at the setting sun and turned back toward the concrete wall to give him time to discover there was no such thing as either one.
Eli sat against the opposite wall, his stubby legs in Batman pajamas pulled up into his chest as if he too had settled in for a long, long wait. His hood covered his dark curls, and the small fabric points crafted to resemble bat ears gave him a devilish air totally at odds with his angel boy face.
I cursed loudly, louder than I’d intended, the sound echoing off the concrete walls and beckoning Tag to turn around. He did and raised his arms in question.
“Time to go, Tag. I can’t be here anymore,” I called, walking away from the little boy who was busily sharing images of the same galloping white horse with colors on her hind quarters. Then a fat rope spun in the air, making a perfect loop that dropped around the horse’s neck and was pulled tight by some unknown hand. The horse tossed her pale mane, whinnied softly, and trotted around in my head unhappily. I didn’t know how to set her free.
“He keeps showing me a white horse,” I muttered, as Tag and I climbed back into my truck and pulled out onto the highway leading from one heartbreak and dropping us off at another. I didn’t want to be here. I couldn’t imagine Tag did either. “He keeps showing me a white horse with splotches of color on her rump. The same horse, over and over. Like the one in the picture I painted.”
“A Paint.”
“What?”
“It’s called a Paint. That kind of horse. Her coloring. They call that a Paint.”
“A Paint.” I wondered suddenly if the horse was just symbolic. Maybe all the kid wanted me to do was paint. Maybe I just hadn’t gotten it right.
Moses
TAG WALKED BEHIND ME, trailing me through the front door and into a house that had been laid bare. There was no furniture, no dishes, no rugs on the floor. Nothing remained of my grandmother in the house. It didn’t feel like her. It definitely didn’t smell like her. It was dusty and dank and it needed a good airing out. It was just an empty house. I hesitated in the entryway, looking up the stairs, turning right and then left, testing the waters, until finally moving through the dining area into the kitchen, where nothing remained but the red-striped curtains that hung on the small window over the sink. The curtains in the family room remained as well. Nobody wanted those either. But I was guessing it had more to do with the fact that they were stiff with paint than with their outdated pattern.