“He was a U.S. marshal,” she says, and her words work. Something turns in Ted. He doesn’t care for U.S. marshals either. He doesn’t care for the entire U.S. government.
“Do I know you?” he asks her with his arm across the doorjamb, blocking her entrance.
“Don’t you want to know me?” She cocks her elbow out to the side and places her hand on her hip, accentuating its curve. She winks and then stomps, a racehorse waiting to run from the starting gate. Her feet are shod in a small pair of steel-toed work boots. The boots look bulky and cut a strange angle to her skin-tight jeans. The boots are a klutzy, confused cousin to her gorgeous hips. He stares. He’s never seen a woman like this. Her message becomes vibrantly clear. Everybody needs somebody.
“So can I come in?” she asks.
He steps back. He lets her inside.
“Well.” She dusts her hands off on her thighs, stepping through the door and taking a look around the small room. “That’s much better.”
There’s something strange about the way she speaks. It’s both startling and attractive. “Are you from Florida?” Ted asks. Something about her seems brand-new.
“Florida?” she asks. “Nope!” The tips of her lips curve into a smile.
Her lips are perfect. Her skin is perfect. Or at least the skin Ted can see underneath her flannel top and jeans. The skin glows, like a waxworks he once saw of Brigham Young and the early pioneers in a Utah rest area. Her skin is so smooth it looks as though it had once been liquid and then, when it found the place that was just right, it hardened up into skin, a pond in winter that freezes before the first snow. Or maybe it’s just been a while since Ted has seen a beautiful woman.
“Listen, I don’t need any trouble. I’ve got enough,” he says.
“I won’t give you any. I just need a place to hide out for a few days.”
Ted considers his cabin. No one would find her here and he does like the way she speaks plainly. He trusts her.
“And in the meantime,” she says. “Vroom. Vrooom. Maybe I can get your engine started.”
This comment makes Ted blush until, in a moment of confusion, he starts to wonder whether she means the broken-down generator he keeps outside the door.
She makes herself comfortable, puts some water on the cookstove for coffee. She knows how to use a cookstove and he likes that about her. He likes the way she sets right to work, fussing in the kitchen. Once she’s got the kettle on, she looks at him again. “Vroom. Vrooom,” she repeats, and walks toward him, slowly twisting each hip. She wraps her finger around his forearm.
“Oh. Oh,” he says. “My.” Ted is surprised at being touched. Normally the most suspicious man in Montana, he thinks that she is cute with her steel-toed boots. Still, he ducks away from her, because just at that moment he notices his box of fuses and wires plus an empty container of ammonium nitrate have been left out in the open on his worktable. The kettle whistle blows. She turns her back for a moment to brew the coffee, and Ted takes that brief window of opportunity to lift a grungy serape that had been draped across the back of an old bench. He throws the serape over the table where he often sits to think and sometimes sits to build mail bombs he addresses to poisonous technologists.
“Coffee?” she asks. She didn’t notice a thing.
“I’d love a cup. Thank you.” Ted hardly knows the words to say, it has been so long since he has had a conversation.
She winks at him again. “Why don’t you and I get to know one another in the old-fashioned way,” she proposes. “Over a cup of coffee.”
“Good idea.”
“Let’s talk. You first.” She sits down on the old bench and pats the spot beside her.
“Me?” He takes the cup of coffee from her outstretched hand. She nods. “Okay. Me.” He has to think before he starts. “There’s not much to tell. I grew up in a house that wasn’t too big or too small. It was just right. Son of a sausage maker. Perfectly plain.”
“Go on,” she says, and bats her eyes, which he notes have lashes nearly as long as the kicker on a stick of dynamite. “I’m enchanted,” she says. “Enthralled.”
“In junior high I nearly won a Scrabble tournament.”
“Fascinating.” She leans back, stretching her arm out along the top of the bench, creeping a hair closer to him.
“It’s hard to remember much else,” he says and looks up to the window, surprised and a bit winded by really how few details it can take to make a life and how difficult it is for him, at this minute, to recall how he’s spent his years so far.
“I do remember one thing that was special. I was a kid. I was sitting on the curb outside our house and the macadam road was hot. I remember the heat rising off that blacktop felt like…” Ted stops and smiles at her, doing his best Kris Kristofferson. “Felt like a religious experience. I sat there staring straight ahead, perfectly pleased with life on earth, wanting and needing nothing. I lay back.” Ted sips his coffee and continues.
“Then two kids from across the street came out and started to lob tiny stones, tiny kernels of asphalt at my stomach. I didn’t move a muscle. They laughed. I think they called me names, but after a few minutes they walked on. I still didn’t move. I stared straight up at the sun and I felt like if I concentrated hard enough I could sink down into the street, become something solid and hard, like the blacktop road. I lay there all day and when I finally sat up, I saw how I’d gotten burned, a sunburn that left a perfect white silhouette of my hand and fingers on the skin of my thigh just below the fringe of my cutoff shorts. Burned by the sun.”
“You’re a wonderful storyteller,” she says, and blinks her eyes languidly like an engine slowing down.
Ted considers her comment. He’s never seen it that way because he’s never really had someone to tell stories to, but now that she mentioned it he thinks that his work building bombs, rigging wires in a pattern, constructing paths as tangled and perfect as the trail left by a worm in wood—it all makes a narrative. The red wires lead to the blue wires lead to the trigger, which leads to the black powder. His bombs are masterpieces of storytelling. Sadly, no one ever gets to actually read these stories—that is, except, perhaps, for the scientist who might catch one glimpse before the story blows a hole right through his brain. Worm-eaten.
*
In the van Wayne taps his fingernail against the plastic casing of his surveillance headphones. He could listen to her talk all day. Her awkward, unknowing way with language. How she accents the wrong syllable. It’s adorable.