It was cool for that time of year, tolerable.  The night was hidden by a hazy mist that clung to the van’s windshield.  Larry almost didn’t see the kid until he was upon him—a ghost on the side of the road, neither coming nor going.  Larry passed him—no hitchhikers, ever.  Too dangerous these days.  Maybe once, when he himself was a kid, but not now, not after Nixon, after Oklahoma City and Osama bin Laden.  He’d spent over a decade on the road, one of the last hardy traveling salesmen, a dying breed he called himself, and he’d survived as long as he had because he didn’t pick up hitchhikers.  Common sense kept you alive.

But a habitual glance in the rearview mirror caused him to pull over.  Something about the slump of the figure’s shoulders suggested youth.  Which wasn’t enough these days—the young could kill, all you had to do was turn on your television and some six-year-old was putting a bullet hole into his classmate.  Maybe that stuff didn’t exist until you changed the channel or logged online—if you avoided the news, none of it would happen, the world would be at peace.  You made the news by wanting the news, by seeking it out.

What made Larry stop, before he even recognized it, was a suggestion of innocence.  Maybe it was the rain, the way the figure parted it, passing through an early June baptism.  Calm, uncomplaining, methodical.  Larry thought the mysterious shadow was going to pass the van by, keep on walking.  He wasn’t certain he would have a passenger until the door opened and the boy climbed in.

Funny, how the night can mask age.  If the boy had been extremely young, ten or eleven, or much older, eighteen or nineteen, Larry would’ve known.  But there is something about adolescence, that nether realm between childhood and maturity, that can only be determined up-close.  The kid had to be at the lower end of the spectrum—maybe fourteen or fifteen.  His lanky blond hair clung to his forehead; he wiped it out of the way, gave Larry a hesitant smile, waited for words to be exchanged.  Slim, too, but not in the gangly malnourished way.  Probably a soccer player, maybe lacrosse, if any of the schools in the area had a lacrosse team.

“Hey,” Larry said.  He pulled back onto the highway.  No other traffic.  According to the radio clock, it was just after ten-thirty.

“Thanks,” the kid said.  “I been walkin’ a long time.”

“It gets quiet out here,” Larry said.  “You’re miles from the nearest town.  Arcola, I think.  One of those Amish places.”

“I saw a horse and buggy yesterday.”  The kid laughed.  “They waved.  The girl’s kinda cute.”

“Well.”  Larry cleared his throat, glanced at the speedometer.  He could go faster.

He stuck out his hand, sideways, gave the kid a smile.  “I’m Larry.”

The kid shook the hand.  His palm was greasy with rain.  “Kyle.”

“Kyle the Kid,” Larry said.  “That’s a good gunslinger name.”

“Yeah.”

Fields gave way to more fields.  Larry couldn’t see them, but he could feel them—an openness during the day, an emptiness at night.  Dead and unattractive at this time of the year; not as bad as in the winter, layered in muddy snow, but bad.  Except where the ragweed grew, yellow patterned quilts that drifted in the humid breeze.  But seeing them always made Larry’s nostrils constrict, his temple throb.  You could smell them through the vents, a thick encompassing smell that clung to you long after the flowers gave way to wilderness.  Ragweed didn’t cause allergies—it merely beat the body into submission, like a dark horse boxer.

“I’m reading a western,” Larry said.  “That’s why I made the cowboy reference.  You know, there’s a kid in the book, kind of like Billy the Kid, except he’s bad.  Or maybe Billy the Kid was bad too, but this kid, he’s really bad.  Kills a lot of people.”

“What’s his name?”

“Uh.  I can’t remember.”

Kyle wrapped his knuckles on the window, leaving small smudges on the glass.  Larry noticed them, frowned.  The kid saw and used his wet t-shirt to wipe them off.  It made a bigger mess.

“Sorry,” Kyle said.

Larry laughed.  “It’s okay.  You just reminded me of something, that’s all.  Really, this car’s a mess.  I don’t mind a few smudges.  Better than what my kids have done, believe me.”

“What’d I remind you of?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe one of my kids?”

Kyle shifted in his seat.  Graceful, youthful.  Larry remembered his own childhood—overweight but inconspicuous.  No one made fun of him because no one knew he was there, which was how it should be.  He could feel his paunch now; the seatbelt made him feel heavier than he was, like he’d just eaten a big meal.

“You have kids?”

“Huh?”  Larry took his eyes from the road.  The van swerved slightly.  “Oh.  Yes, two.  Morgan and Lindsey.  About your age I guess.  Lindsey just started high school.  Morgan will graduate next year.  She’s an Honor’s Student.”

“Cool.”

“Lindsey’s thinking of trying out for golf.  They have a very good girl’s golf team.  She’s pretty good, too.  I taught her everything she knows, and then she went and learned some new stuff on me.”

“I played a couple times,” Kyle said.  He was looking out the window.  There was nothing to see but his reflection.  “I ain’t very good.  What do you call it when you keep hitting the ball to the right?”

“That’s a slice.”

“Yeah, that’s what I did.”

“You have to keep your club face closed, and make sure you hit the ball in the center of the club.”

“Really.”

“You bet.”  Larry started to say more, realized he’d reached the end of his advice.  There was no more to give—that was it.  “You want some music?  I normally listen to the radio, but not when it’s bad out like this.  You can turn it on though if you want.  Listen to whatever you like.  It’s clearing up, I think.”

The kid reached for the knob, stopped.  “You got satellite?”

“Satellite?”

“Radio.  Sirius?”

“Serious?”

“Yeah.  Bob Dylan’s got his own show, plays his favorite songs, talks about ‘em.  It’s pretty cool.”

Larry nodded.  After a few seconds, he said, “Oh.  No, I don’t.  Just, you know, normal radio.  Sorry.”

“That’s cool.”  Kyle turned the radio on.  George Strait came out, low volume.  Kyle winced and changed the station.  He flipped through, not bothering to let the commercials finish to see what type of music the station played.  He stopped at a sports recast, listened to what sounded like a baseball play-by-play.  He nodded and moved on.  After a minute or so he turned the radio off and sat back in his seat.

“Guess there’s nothing on,” Larry said.  The George Strait song had been one of his favorites.

“Yeah, that’s why I like satellite.  They got everything you ever want.  No commercials, too.  You should check it out.”

“I think my wife said something about it the other day,” Larry said.  He wasn’t sure why he lied—it just came out.

“You married?”

He nodded, smiled.  “Twenty-six years last March.”

“Damn.  That’s something, I guess.”

“It’s not easy.  You have to compromise.  And, remember, no matter what—the woman’s always right.”

Kyle nodded, said nothing.

“And I mean always,” Larry said.  “She named our kids, she picked the color of our drapes, she decided to go vegan, then to go back to meat.  She chose this van.  She’s always right, and you’re always right because you always agree with her.”

“My last girlfriend thought she was always right,” Kyle said.  “That’s why I ditched her.  I’m the man, you know?  I mean, she can be right some of the time, that’s fair, but I gotta be right too.”

Something about the kid’s voice made Larry think he was lying.  That word “ditch.”  The way his shoulders swelled slightly, like a lizard puffing up in the face of a rattlesnake.  It was typical to bluster at that age, wasn’t it?  It had been when Larry was young.  Some things didn’t change—some things were biological.  That was a comforting thought, and Larry lingered on it.

They drove in silence for a while, until Larry remembered what he’d wanted to ask the kid in the first place. “Where are you heading, Kyle?”

“St. Louis.  There’s a Cards/Cubs game on Sunday.  They won today.  I think they’re gonna sweep.”

“Cards/Cubs.”  Larry made acknowledging noises in the back of his throat.  “You have tickets?  I would imagine those are hard to get around here.”

“Nope,” Kyle said.

A bird flew by outside.  Rare, to see a bird at night, and in the rain.  Something momentous about it, in a way.  Larry opened his mouth, started to ask, but didn’t get past the first word.  Kyle was looking out the passenger window again.  He hadn’t seen it, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you could describe—like a black rag fluttering through the night, except nothing like the way that sounded.

“Where are you from, Kyle?”

“Decatur.”  Kyle jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, grinned at Larry.

“You’re hitchhiking all the way to St. Louis?”

“Yeah.  My friend Michael did it.”

“At least it’s not hot.”

“It was yesterday.”

“The cold front cools thing out pretty well.  It’s supposed to be cool until Monday, when another warm front comes in.  It’s supposed to get up into the nineties, I heard.”

“Yeah.”

Another set of headlights ahead.  Larry thought what he always thought when he encountered a pair of headlights on a deserted road at night—that the driver would suddenly change lanes, that some instinctive suicidal impulse would overtake the stranger at the last second, and Larry would be unable to avoid it.  You can fight your own insanity, but you can’t fight that of others.  Not random encounters like this, the coincidental moments that slip into existence without provocation.

The car passed without incident.  Larry sighed, loosened his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Why are you hitchhiking?” he asked, when the cramp in his fingers had passed.  “I mean, don’t you have somebody to drive you?”

“No one knows I’m going,” Kyle said.  “It’s my birthday next month.  I’m treating myself.”

“Well, happy birthday.  In advance.”

“Thanks.”

Larry coughed.  There was a lump inside of him.  It felt similar to the lump that had taken his mother’s life, the malignant presence that made her life, and the lives of everyone around her, hell for three months.  You feel a lump, and whether it’s physical or metaphorical, it doesn’t just go away.  Larry tried.  He swallowed.  He coughed.  He made a guttural sound deep in his throat.  He even belched, softly.  But the lump didn’t go away.  His mother had tried remedies, herbal, medicinal.  She’d had her ten-year-old son rub lotions on her skin, waft scented smoke into her face, run errands into shadowy foreign neighborhoods tucked away in the back alleys of their small town.  It had all been in vain—a futile attempt to stave off the progress of time.

“You know,” Larry said, and then he said nothing.  Kyle glanced at him, face blank.  Maybe knowing what was going to be said, maybe unknowing or uncaring.

“You know,” Larry said again, “it’s pretty dangerous to hitchhike.  I guess you’ve heard that before.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you know, it’s true.  I mean, it gets pretty bad out here.  I don’t pick up hitchhikers myself, because it’s just not the same.  The world, I mean.  You’ve got those crazies who, you know, are perverts.  And you can’t really trust anyone to be respectful.  You can’t trust your own safety with people anymore.  Not like you used to.  And you’re young.  You know?  I mean, you’re pretty young, and well, there are people out there who might take advantage of that.  Especially on a deserted highway at night, with no one else around.”

Kyle stared out the windshield.  Larry followed his gaze.  Nothing but the road and headlights, receding until the rain and night took over.

“I’m not one of them,” Larry said.  “Really, I’m not.”  He laughed.  “I have kids of my own.  About your age.  Morgan and Lindsey.  And I would hate to think of them out here, without protection, not knowing who will pick them up.  It’s dangerous, especially for someone so young.  And you’re going such a long ways.”

The kid’s bangs had fallen back over his face.  Larry glanced at the clock.  Almost eleven-thirty.  An hour later, and the kid was still wet.

“Used to be you could trust people,” Larry said.  “But you can’t anymore.  You can’t trust anyone.  I could hurt you—I wouldn’t, of course, but I could.  And you could hurt me.  People aren’t people these days.  People are almost like monsters, like vampires or something.  Hitchhiking has to be the most dangerous thing a boy your age could do.  You don’t know if you’ll get a ride.  I almost didn’t pick you up.  And if you do, you don’t know if the person you’re sitting next to wants to hurt you.  You know?”

“I think you should let me out,” Kyle said.  His voice was measured, but there was a hitch in it.  Larry, who had two kids, could tell.  That hesitation, that lack of self-assurance.  Almost unconscious, but something was dawning inside the kid, a realization that the world was dangerous.

“I’ll tell you what,” Larry said.  “You’re safe with me, right?  I’m not one of those perverts.  How about I drive you to St. Louis?  Just straight through.  It’s a little out of my way, but I’ll do it.  I can’t drive you back, but you could call your parents and they could come and get you.  I’m sure they’re worried, aren’t they?”

“I want you to let me out,” Kyle said.  There was a moment of silence, filled by the hum of the air conditioner, the tires against the pavement, the slow streaky thump of the windshield wipers.  Then: “Please.”

“Really,” Larry said.  “I’ll do it.  It’s no trouble, Kyle, it really isn’t.  Promise.  I might have to call the wife, tell her I won’t make it home tonight, but she’ll understand.  A salesman, he can’t always make it home on time.  Occupational hazard.”

“Please.”

“Don’t you see, though?  You’re safe here.  You’re not out there.  I won’t hurt you, but someone out there will.  Might, I mean.  Someone out there might.”

Kyle reached for the door.  It inched open, fighting the rush of the wind.  “Jesus,” Larry said.  “Christ.  Jesus.”  Kyle lunged, tried to jump out.  He’d forgotten his seatbelt; it pulled taught against his chest.  Larry hit the brakes.  The van went sliding towards the side of the road.  He whipped the wheel around, against the turn, then into it.  The van spun horizontal, a crossbeam cutting the dotted centerline.

The kid’s hands flailed.  By accident he hit the seatbelt release button.  He fell out onto the road, began running the wrong way, back the way he’d come.  Or was it?  Larry was confused; his head spun, everything blurred.  Partly it was the rain.  Partly it was the speed, the sudden stop.  Kyle must’ve hit the radio button in his panic; some heavy metal song was playing, the bass thumping despite the low volume.  Wind blew rain in through the open door.  The moisture joined the cool air from the vents.  Larry shivered.

“Kyle!” he shouted.  The figure had already retreated into the night.  He called the kid’s name again.  He wanted to straighten the van out, but he didn’t know which way to drive.  The night looked the same in both directions.

Coming off the ice at the lonely end of the Rapid Tucker’s Pond, his feet starting to numb in earnest, the new snow like razor blades on his face, Bannock “Brace” Bannon was compelled to look behind him, across the pond closing down fast in white fury. Earlier he had seen the girl in the comely figure swing around the edge of the pond, admiring her ease, her grace on the blades, her hair at times flying out as straight as a windy pennant.

One impulse hit him that she was a stranger, not because he hadn’t seen her before, but because she was perilously close to the channel between the two islands of Rapid Tucker’s Pond. In the ten years he had been here at the far end of the pond, a loner in an old cabin that took an endless amount of maintenance, the channel had been frozen only once, and that back in his first year, the worst year of all. Was all that decision time and tempest here again, coming down on top of him anew? The raw intelligence of his place in life was coming with its onerous beat.  Was this girl sent to test him again, give him another chance? Make amends?

Was it worth it? He had, with all his conviction, tried to help that other girl. Blew it all to Hell he did. To Hell and back!

Now that knowledge jumped at him, and it had a fire to it. A buzz. A bell ringer. All this time, away from the harsh reality of the world, he had been reclusive and somewhat happy; free of much of the duress and torment he had gone through after the other incident. God, he marveled, how could he reduce it after all this time to an incident? He had made up a whole history, had invented Brace Bannon to take the place in this world of Halvor Gustafson, M.D., stripped of his rights because of that one abortion mishap. On many occasions he had called himself a “runaway,” so often that the tag no longer hurt. It went along with “incident,” it seemed. He could ignore all its attachments most of the time. It was only in darkness that it kept the pain alive, below the surface, in the stream of his life.

But now he could not ignore this girl, test or no test, chance or no chance. Better go back out there and at least advise her of the dangers, he said to himself, even as the numbness came into his toes dull as forgotten chilblains. Slight of build, little body fat because of his routine and regimen, but a skater for ten years, he started out across the pond, staring feebly through the blinding snow. The responsibility fell to him and only him, the nearest house at least five hundred yards away down the far shore, all obliterated by the squall. If he did nothing, his conscience, in the dark hours, would haunt him.

Leaning into the storm, he raked his eyes against the low clouds of snow, swirling, the barriers shifting. Nothing formulated or contoured came to his eyes. No edges. No shadow line. No being. Perhaps, he thought, that was a single sound he had just heard, but one he could not identify. Heading to the point where he had last seen the girl, he guessed her to be about twenty-four or -five. When the wind died momentarily, the ice looking like a linen sheet on a huge bed, he saw nothing. Thinking she had obeyed the threat of the elements, he turned to go home. Again he thought about the channel, about his dark and lonely hours, the girl from long ago still making an impact deep inside. Sometimes the worst terror was not remembering her name. I’m it, he said, thinking again of this new girl skating alone. One look won’t hurt.

An acute awareness hit him that he was being commandeered, impelled, magnetized; it was a scrutable sensation gnawing within him. It was assuming shape.

The ice was broken and it was getting dark. A darker shadow floated in the dread water of the channel. She had been wearing dark blue. This was a deeper blue. Getting closer, hearing the ice crack underneath him and the thunder of its plate-shifting danger, he stumbled on a discarded hockey stick and instinctively grabbed it. Another look and he was positive the girl was in the water, face down and motionless.

My god, he thought, it’s only been a few minutes. The ice roared again, the platelets shifted again, the rolling crack near thunder ran under his feet one more time. Not being the best swimmer, the skates would certainly drag him down. He was mouthing words to himself: Do not rush this. We both must stay alive. Be careful. Lie down. Inch your way out. Get hold of her. There’s only you. Nobody knows we are here. We are alone. We are all alone. The words were ratcheted in his head, coming back, coming back.

The pain in his feet had disappeared, but he could feel the weight of each skate. Suddenly he was cold. Was it fear? Was he wet? Could he get them both back to his cabin? Would the fire be warm enough? Was she still alive? It had been mere minutes.

The ice held up. His hand, icy and freezing, a numbness beginning to be a pain in its own right, caught at her hood. Lying across the broken hockey stick (bless the boy who had left it) he pulled her onto the ice with considerable difficulty. She had to be maneuvered onto a safer, thicker surface. She was heavy, wet, probably not breathing well, if at all. Into her mouth he breathed, into that cold but luscious mouth, upon that beautiful face now creased and plagued by the freezing water, her eye sockets like pearls of ice. Again and again he breathed and pushed into her stomach and breathed and jostled the soggy and inert body, until the sudden flush of water gushed from her mouth and a breath of shattering cold air was called down into her lungs.

Oh, he was thankful for his long hours of skating, the hours he chopped wood and stacked it and carried it into the cabin and was warmed by it half a dozen times, and the long and demanding walks he took into the deeper part of the forest, away from the prying eyes. His body, with the girl now an adjunct to it, now an extension, made serious demands on his energy and determination. Somehow, he must get her to the cabin, get her warm, minister to her. The idea of ministering to a needy soul overwhelmed him; he had been there before, and it had all been too clumsy.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to get her to the small porch of the cabin, newly formed thin ice coming on her like lace. Walking the last thirty feet on his blades, hitting rocks along the way, he knew they’d be no good for skating for a while. The picture of hidden sparks came to him, flint being struck by the good steel down in the snow. Near exhaustion, feet loaded with chilblains, hands so fiery yet numb, he finally got her inside the rude and clumsy cabin, and onto the bed.

First he stripped off his parka, then worked on her clothing, cutting her out of her jacket and pants, getting the skates off her feet, using a razor blade to cut her laces. It was the blade edge that triggered him, invasive and yet so superficial. That other and older terror came back again; that young girl, also lovely, so young, who had come to him for help, cut off from her family, alone, at the edge of hysterics he had not known, only to be buried under them in one quick pass over his soul.

He pulled her sweater over her head, ripped off the wet blouse, unsnapped her bra, and pulled her underpants off. In her near deadly state he was suddenly aware of how lovely she was. Before he tucked a woolen blanket about her he took one look along the length of her body. She was a most marvelous young woman; her breasts were lovely and full and the aureoles, surely and naturally almost a burnt orange, closed now on a purple flush. He thought he should rub them, but he refrained. Not in ten years had he seen a woman nude, or touched one. No patients. No lovers. No nightly visitor from the nearby town. There was a moment of exhilaration when he swore a perfume was loose in the cabin. The shock of hair at her midsection grasped at his eyes. In spite of the cold and the snow and the sweat now rising about him, his mouth had gone dry. His throat was dry with a sudden need, a strange and forgotten yielding coming at him out of his past.

There it was, the saline lovely aroma of the Rumney Marsh where the tide moved its moon madness. That’s what came to him now, in the middle of a winter storm. Saline, salty marsh, old territories. Musk of ever. The girl exuding self, the essence of such being long unknown to him.

The folds of the blanket went around her almost sensually. If he wanted to he knew he could assess her curves, her loveliness, and the soft and disparate masses of her graces. A beautiful range to her hips showed itself. It made the back of his throat hurt. Chilblains at last had left his hands. Moments later the single bulb overhead went out and he knew the electric line had gone down again and might be hours before it was restored. He had no phone. They would be alone for the duration of the storm at least.

The fire in the old wood stove was small but alive and he added two logs after a quick feed of kindling. The flames leaped in moments, and she breathed slowly but evenly. He stripped his own wet clothes off. The kettle of water on the back of the wood stove began to simmer when he moved it to the middle of the stovetop.

From one shelf of the cabinet he took a can of soup, opened it and placed it on the stove, adding a can of water. Only later did he know it was celery soup, the room filling with the odor, sharing it with the smell of the young woman collapsed under his blanket, her breathing even at last, as if she were asleep. Celery and the odor of the young woman came on him, the rich saline spread of the Rumneys, full and pungent, making him take a deep breath so that he could recognize all the ingredients; all his hungers came on him; all his past came on him. He remembered the girl who had died from the perilous abortion. Whole scenes, ten years in the past, came looping out of dark corners, bringing his life back into the room.

For three hours he watched her, leaving once to get wood off the porch pile, going once to the makeshift john off the end of the porch, the snow still coming down, somewhere along the edge of the pond the power lines down under a fallen limb or a blow-down too tired to hang on through another storm. In the midst of the whiteness the darkness of the storm threatened its severity, and made for a long promise.

When she woke, stirred uneasily, realizing she was naked beneath the blanket, looking about for her clothes, seeing a strange man across a strange room, it appeared her mishap came back to her in a rush. She began to tremble, inhaled excitedly, almost hyperventilated. The blanket was pulled tightly around her throat. Her eyes scanned the rudeness of the room, saw the flicker of the fire through an open grating of the stove, seemed to assess her whole situation, and then nodded at Brace Bannon. “You pulled me out?” she said, her voice soft, firm, not filled with anxiety, fear, or too much surprise. “I could hear the ice creaking underneath me. I tried to get away, but I broke through. My clothes and skates pulled at me. I remember seeing you, how smoothly you skated. I wondered if you were alone.” A shiver ran through her. “I don’t know what happened next.”

“I’m a doctor, young lady, so don’t worry. I had to get you out of the water and off the ice and out of those clothes.” The flush was on his face. He could feel it; and knew she could see it, even with the lights out and a single candle burning on a shelf.  “Are you hungry? I have some hot soup. There’s coffee on the stove. I can make something heavier for you, decent, more nourishing.” He managed to keep up a pattern of chatter, his face still flushed, her eyes still on him. “But I’m afraid we’re here for a spell. The power lines are obviously down again. Happens all the time. I’m the only one at this end of the pond. Almost half a mile out in the lonely.” His head shook as if punctuating the last sentence. “Not worth a whole lot to the power company.” He stood up and put his hand out. “My name is Brace Bannon. I used to be a doctor. I messed up once and I’ve been here, out of action, out of the limelight, for about ten years now. It suits me, here. I have been fairly comfortable. It’s pleasant most of the time in spite of all this.”  He fanned his hand out as if to introduce her to crudeness, bare necessities, solitude, and the storm beating at the small cabin. His nod said he believed she understood his feelings. No assurance came to him that she could possibly understand the pain and suffering that had overpowered him. He had long believed few people could ever know; his whole belief system had been corrupted. This day, even minimally, had brought some kind of amends. There was, however, a great lingering fear that he would screw it up before the day was over.

The girl sat up on the bed, the soft blanket at her throat, under her chin. Part of one leg, one thigh, showed its whiteness in elegance, a graceful curve to the width of it, a most lovely thickness.  Brace Bannon’s eyes caught the flash of white, the full curve, the inveterate promise. She caught his eyes and it was as if she was saying, “Did you look at me when you took my clothes off?” No other message on her face or in her voice. “My name is Devahn Nesting. I think my mother was trying to play some kind of game between me and my father. I don’t like him very much. My mother doesn’t either. I think he had several girlfriends, probably right in his office. I’m their only common ground. He’s filthy rich; she’s a lonely middle-age witch bent on some kind of retribution, hassling, or evil. I’m not sure which, but I got tired of it, the whole mess. I was running away from it all.”

“Are you warm enough?” Brace Bannon said. The top of the stove had passed from dull red back to a cooler black. The wind humped at the door. Her legs hung below the bottom of the blanket. A light redness touched at her toenails, as pink as it was red, and he wondered if it might have matched the lipstick she must have been wearing earlier.

“Would you have any pajamas? I can’t sleep without pajamas.” She looked down on the bed, as if the dye was already cast. The toes on one foot wiggled slightly, as if it were an expression of something she had forgotten.

Once, long ago, he recalled, there had been body music and body language. “I have extra long johns, tops and bottoms, plenty of sweaters, a couple of sweat shirts I’ve never worn.” A shrug crossed his shoulders. “I don’t have any pajamas.”

“I’ll take long john bottoms, a pair of socks and a sweat shirt, if you can spare them. If I’m to be here for a while I might as well be warmer than I am right now.” She looked at the pan of soup on the stove.

Brace poured a small bowl for her and pulled a box of saltines out of a breadbox hung on the wall. “I think it’s celery soup. I’m not sure. I lost the label. It’s hot.” The soup and crackers were set on a small end table. “I’ll get you the clothes.”

He could hear her at the soup and the crackers, eating as if she relished every swallow. “God, this is good. I don’t know if I ever had celery soup.”  He blushed again, knowing instantly that she was not naïve or innocent. He turned around, away from her, so she could dress, and he heard the rustle of clothes.

At the closure of sound, Brace Bannon turned to see the naked loveliness of Devahn Nesting. The bubble of breath caught itself in his throat. She was about the loveliest thing he had ever seen. It had been lifetime-long since he had seen such a vision. The legs were fantastic, the full and shapely breasts were eyefuls, the span of hips demanded attention, her eyes wide and strangely warm had separate speech in them.

“You might as well look again. I want to see what’s on your face when you look at me. I’m not a virgin; I’ve done it with boys I liked, who knew what they were up to. I don’t like malingerers or pawers who don’t know what they’re supposed to do for a woman. I don’t want to get pregnant right now. Not for a couple of years.”

She sat down and slipped the elegant legs into the long john bottoms and pulled them up when she stood. The sweatshirt, with a bit of hassle, fell over her gorgeous breasts. The socks she put on last. The vision of her remained in place. Above the celery soup aroma, something from her rode the air, came across the small room in an absolute hurry to get to him. Earlier, on a summer eve he had slipped into Rumney marsh and went looking for Little Sandy, a swimming hole he had heard about. There’d been talk of horseshoe crabs with spiked horns, but what still lingered was the smell of the marsh, the saline-rich warmth as the tide eased out through the many small canals that laced the grid-work of a marsh. It was warmly potent even now.

“Oh,” she added, “I’m in no rush to get home. They don’t know where I am anyway.” Back to the soup she went, and the last of the saltines. Her eyes were wide and warmer yet, her voice almost a riddle in itself, when she said, “Would you have a beer?”

The suggested idea of a full-fledged cheeseburger brought her back to other needs. Brace put a couple of them together, as the stove kept the room warm, as the storm continued to beat on outside, and her heady aromas were at last suffused by cheese overlapping the hamburger patties, getting cooked in a bit of fat. They finished off the three beers he had been saving.

Later, after hours of talking, a new candle lit, the stove fed a few times and set up for the night, Devahn Nesting said, “I am getting tired now. I know we have to share the bed. Don’t worry, it’s okay by me. You did me a great service today. I am very grateful, but I am very tired. You are a marvelous skater. I was watching you, in case you didn’t know, that long easy stride you have.” She slipped under the blanket and rolled over. She went to sleep quickly.

The candle flickered a kind of angelic light across her face. Lashes, about as long as they can get, flared from her lids. Her lips, he thought, were perfect. Even in sleep, they were perfect; slight pout, curved miraculously, yet ready for speech. He was not sure if they were red or redder, but they were perfect, and he thought of old signs of red lips, how they advertised status and condition, sent off signals. The thought told him he was still able to measure impact, that he was still a man, that his genes were still in place, that capability was still here. Then, as the candle itself began to show signs of failing, he slipped in beside her, inhaled the same aroma that had crossed the room to him all night, thought of lost successes, remembered a girl once in a car outside a package store on the way to the outdoor theater, who had taken off her girdle while he was in the store.  He remembered the light in her eyes, the sound of her voice when she said, “You would have gotten it off soon enough.” When he last closed his eyes he remembered how her skirt rode up on the glory of her thighs as he purchased their tickets at the ticket booth, the ticket seller looking down into the car, wide-eyed, nodding.

Some hours later he woke. Devahn Nesting was stroking him lightly, her head resting on his chest. “Has it really been ten years?” He could not see her eyes. Her hand was full of fire, yet was almost a phantom touch. From under the blanket she assailed him again, the essence of her being wafting up under his chin, finding knowledge in him, bringing knowledge. In his chest his breath caught at itself, and old knowledge, old territories, came back in a rush. At first the girl at the outdoor theater flooded him with memories and odors and a touch he suddenly realized had not ever gone away.  Then this nearly drowned girl, this girl who drank his beer, this girl who suffused this old cabin as it had never been suffused, said, “It’s going to be my treat.”

Those magnificent and lovely lips encircled him. He began to cry softly. She said, “Cry all you want. I’m here all night. And I’ll stay as long as you want me to.”

The girl in the car at the outdoor theater finally drove away in the storm, down the shore of the pond, out of sight forever. The frightened girl of the abortion fled with her. Once more he heard the sound of the ice cracking under his feet out on the pond, out where the channel always made noises. Part of his life seemed to move the way the pond ice moved, immense, lethargic but so powerful, like glaciers, like ice sleds out of the millennium. Where he had been summoned again to do good, he knew with certainty that he was now being awakened from a long sense of pretense.

Then there was silence and darkness and a sweet aroma hanging folds about his head, the warmth of Rumney Marsh thick with life and growth and an essence of life where it all began, at the edge of the immutable and eternal sea.

“We lived under this same roof but your mom was raised by wolves.  We always knew that door from opposite sides.”  Aunt Rosie performed a dual role regarding my mom, as both chief celebrant and royal accuser.  Thanksgivings came more frequently every year, so it seemed, and it was with particular relish that my aunt served the prom night story.  It was a tradition she made new each November, her eyes flashing, her voice rising and falling along a musical scale only she knew.  Even her hands and arms played their parts, their instincts honed by well-orchestrated stage directions.

Aunt Rosie, Dr. Rosaline DeNatale in her professional life, was just fourteen months older than Mama and one class ahead in school.  As kids they were jerked up and down the valley, following my grandfather’s endless and fruitless climb-up-the-ladder-of-success schemes until they finally settled in this very house on Mama’s fifteenth birthday, May 6, 1963, which coincided with the 32^nd birthday of Willie Mays.  Mama loved baseball, batted and threw left-handed, played it in schoolyards and streets in all those thirsty towns:  pick-up games, work-ups, five-hundred and fly-up, so sharing her birthday with the Say Hey Kid was icing on the cake.  In fact, when she took up knitting, in a forced term of inactivity that fortuitously eased my arrival in 1964, she emblazoned a blue baby blanket with the Tallulah Bankhead line:

There have been only two geniuses in the world:

Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.

One can do worse than to be tucked in nightly with Will, Willie and Tallulah.  Adding to that, my own birthday is April 23^rd, making Shakespeare exactly 400 years older than me.  So I have some catching up to do.  And yes, that is why I am a Juliet, and I’ve been forever grateful that I’m neither Ophelia nor Cordelia.  Or Tallulah.

My mother came and went.  She was the distant older cousin who dropped in without warning, hugged me and praised me and stared at me, and just as quickly disappeared again, often as I slept.  I saw her once or twice a year, no more, but she always sent something in April.  Or May. When I turned eight it was a needle-point splayed with red roses and what turned out to be lyrics written by John Phillips, but sung over and over by the Grateful Dead:

And I’m as honest as a Denver man can be

My grandmother tacked it over my bed, cooed over the lettering, kissed my cheek and told me for the millionth time “your mother loves you.”  She added:  “She is so artistic.”  And finally:  “Maybe she’s in Denver.”

But Denver, if that’s where she had been, was a long time ago, and I was almost two decades beyond that 8^th birthday.  Aunt Rosie had paused in her telling, respecting the ceremonial slicing of the gingerbread and the pumpkin pie, but once the whipped cream had made the rounds, she returned to her theme.

“Your mother claimed to be above such bourgeois trifles as the Junior Prom.   It was my very first formal dance, and I was going with my chemistry lab partner’s boyfriend’s cousin’s best friend, if you can follow that.  It wasn’t anything I did, or he did, for that matter, because Eleanor and her boyfriend arranged it all.  And Ronnie, my shining prince, I hoped, was already a freshman in college. We’d only actually met once in the flesh and never gone on a date, but when he called I jumped out of my socks, and when I found out why he was calling, you’ll excuse me for saying I almost peed in my pedal-pushers.   Remember, we were new in town.

“It was the end of May, supposedly the hottest May in Stockton’s infernal history.  We didn’t have air conditioning and the fans we did have were flat-out pooped, the poor things. We were supposed to meet Eleanor and her boyfriend for dinner at Valentino’s, on the river, and then go on to the dance.   Valentino’s must have closed twenty years ago.  The prom was at a hotel downtown that’s long gone, too.”  Here she paused, gazing across the years, blinking in wonderment at the passage of time.  Here, always, she caught herself, took a breath, and continued.

“I was upstairs with Grandma ripping out most of my hair trying to keep it in place.  It was suffocating and I was sweating like a barnyard animal.  I’d like to tell you I was glowing, but I was pouring the real stuff.  Then I heard it.  I heard a rumble, like sound effects from a Saturday afternoon movie, and I looked out the dormer window and saw it, his black Corvette.  A 1962 Chevrolet Corvette.  I’d been told about that car but this was the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes.

“My heart still thumps when I see one of those beauties.  Mother  – your grandmother — went down first, mostly to make sure Grandpa didn’t scare him away, and also to stall for me so I could get my breath back.  I know Grandpa was always a pussycat for you, but he had a bark in his day.  I was the bride in the tower who’s not supposed to see the groom before the wedding, but I refused to back away from that window.  He sauntered up the walk like he was in a magazine, tall and broad-shouldered with his mess of black hair slicked just so, scrubbed and proud in his baby blue tuxedo, and the car behind him was right off one of those billboards.  I was going to ride in that car!  I perched upstairs on my little chair and inhaled like a yogi.  I wasn’t sure where your mother was, I thought maybe she’d gone to the park, but it turned out she was sitting on the porch steps as Ronnie arrived.  And you know she was the dark one even then, always with the golden tan, while I was stuck with long sleeve shirts and floppy hats if I ever dared venture into the sun.  She was wearing the shortest and tightest cut-offs imaginable, and one of Daddy’s raggedy old shirts, missing a button or two on top, and tied in a knot above her navel.  No shoes.  No make-up.  And, no doubt, no brassiere.  If anyone could glow in 94 degree heat, she was the one.

“Ronnie took forever to get past her.  I was dying.  I died and died and died.  My tinny alarm clock kept ticking and I kept dying.  Daddy paced the hardwood floor:  living room to kitchen, kitchen to living room.  At the foot of the stairs my mother steamed and glared at the door, praying, as I was, for the deliverance of the doorbell.  Five minutes, maybe more, I don’t know.  Did you ever see those photos of Sue Lyon, the girl who played Lolita in that movie?  No, that was way before your time, but when I think about your mother that day, that’s what I think about.  Or Raquel Welch in anything.

“Finally, my mother yanked the door open and hauled him in.  I can only imagine the look she gave your mother before she slammed the door shut between them.  The echo exploded up the stairs and I couldn’t wait another second.  I rushed down as gracefully as I could in my ridiculous high heels, hanging onto the rail with both hands.  Years later, when I first heard someone say ‘looking like a deer caught in the headlights,’ I knew exactly what they meant.  Even in the photograph Daddy took, Ronnie’s an alien on the wrong planet.  Without a map.  With a broken space ship. He was transfixed by whatever he’d experienced on the porch.   He was sweating so much I probably seemed cool as a cucumber next to him, and I promise you, I was anything but that.  He shifted from foot to foot, kept his eyes to the floor, couldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even look at me.  I’m sure he didn’t want to look at me, in my silly frou-frou prom dress that I’d slaved over for ten sweltering nights.  After your mother arching her back and God knows what else outside, I’m sure he thought there was nothing worth spit on this side of the door.  And that’s where we were, right in this room.  Your mother could throw like a boy, but her body was all-girl.  Woman.

“He squeezed his wilting bouquet like a life-rope, but he finally released it, and I traded him a corsage.  He was so pale my mother ordered him to sit while she ran for the pitcher of water.  He barely exhaled, still wasn’t speaking, didn’t even say ‘thank you,’ just gulped a twelve ounce glass of weak lemon water.  I desperately wanted to leave except I knew he’d start drooling when he saw her again. Still, the front porch was the only way to his car, and the car was the only way to the prom, so what was I to do?  Daddy reminded him to drive carefully, and that prompted him to reach into his pocket for his keys, I guess to assure everyone, without a word, since he was incapable of that, that he knew what he was doing, that he was reliable, but he came up empty.  He gaped at his open right hand as if it were a traitor. He tried all his pockets.  Nothing but a vinyl wallet.  He started looking around as if he could spot the keys on the newspaper-strewn table by my father’s chair, or on the mantel of the fireplace that mocked us each torrid day.  Nothing.  ‘Must be in the car,’ he muttered, his first sound, and out we rushed to an empty porch, for which I passionately praised God, until Ronnie screamed:  ‘She took my ‘Vette!’”

***

California cops, and I am one, refer to car theft as a “ten-eight-five-one.”  All the judges, the lawyers, and the perps call it the same thing.  For Mama, her 10851 was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with the criminal codes of California, Arizona, and Nevada.  For Aunt Rosie, it was the first of 10,000 nights with Ronald DeNatale.

Holton had come a long way from the city. He hadn’t seen another person for three days. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt at ease in his surroundings. He sat down on a riverbank underneath a tree and looked at the sky. The clouds had lifted and the sunlight glinted in gold on the water. There was still beauty in the world.

He took a tiny sip of water from the canteen. He didn’t have much left and he knew he was going to have to get more, and soon. He could go for a long time without food but water was a different matter. He would never get thirsty enough to drink from the river. If drinking from the river didn’t kill him, it could make him sick enough that he might never recover.

He took a tiny bundle from his pack and unwrapped it carefully; it contained the last of his food—a carrot, a piece of bread, a chunk of dried meat, and some candy. He wrapped the bread around the meat and began taking tiny bites. He chewed slowly to make it last longer.

Would building a fire and boiling some water from the river make the water safe for drinking, he wondered? If he was going to build a fire, he might as well stay the night. He was weighing these considerations in his mind when a sound startled him. He looked up to see a man walking toward him and he realized the sound he heard was the man singing. He grabbed for his pack and thrust his hand inside to where his gun rested on the bottom.

“I don’t have anything you want,” he said, when the man was close enough to speak to.

“Don’t worry,” said the man, who went by the name of Clement. “I’m not going to bother you. I only want to rest here for a while.”

“I’d like it better if you were to move along. There’s nothing here for you.”

“No doubt,” Clement said with a little laugh. He took off his boots and lay on the ground with his feet toward the river, just to the right of Holton. He was wearing clean white socks.

“I have a gun here and I know how to use it,” Holton said. “Just in case you have any ideas about trying to steal what I have.”

“I’m not going to steal anything. You have nothing I want.”

“What do you want then?”

He looked at Holton as if studying him. “I don’t want anything from you,” he said. “I’m not going to do you any harm.”

“What’s your game, then?”

“I don’t have one. Maybe I just want to hear the sound of a voice other than my own. Is that too much to ask?”

“I’m not much for talking. I really ought to be on my way.”

“Where exactly is it you’re headed?”

Holton relaxed a little and forgot about drawing the gun. He didn’t have bullets anyway. “I got out of the city and just kept going,” he said. “This is where I ended up. I don’t know where I am. I don’t even know if I’m in the same state or in another one.”

“Geographical boundaries don’t seem to matter much now.”

“Everybody in the city was dying. I knew I would die, too, if I stayed there. Once I left the city, I just kept going until I ended up here.”

“How long ago was that?” Clement asked.

“A week. Maybe longer. I seem to have lost some time and I don’t know how much.”

“Are you sure you don’t have the sickness?”

“I know what the symptoms are,” Holton said, “and I don’t have them yet.”

“But you expect to have them?”

“We heard the enemy dropped bombs with the sickness in them on every city. The people in the city would die first and then the sickness would spread to the spaces between the cities and the people there would die too.”

“You had family in the city?” Clement asked.

“I was new to the city. I have a wife and child but they’re far away in another place.”

“Are they all right?”

“I don’t know. There’s no way for me to find out now. I had in my mind that if I just kept going as long as I could I might come to a place where the sickness hadn’t reached or couldn’t reach for some reason, and there would be people there like me.”

“People without the sickness?”

“Yes. Or maybe people who know how to keep from getting the sickness.”

“You’re witnessing the death of the human race,” Clement said. “Not just the decline but the end. God brought it into existence and now He’s ending it.”

“You believe in God?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I believe. If there’s a God, why is he doing this to us?”

“He’s not doing anything to us. It’s just something that happens. Do you know how many extinct species there are in the history of the world? There’s about to be another one, that’s all. Man is no more important than any of the other species that have become extinct. We’re important to ourselves but that’s all. This planet was here a long time before we came along, and it will be here long after we’re gone.”

“There might be places where people will survive the sickness. We don’t know yet.”

“They might survive for a while, but it will eventually catch them in the end.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Holton asked, suddenly suspicious.

“I don’t know any more about it than anybody else. I’m just repeating what somebody else has told me.”

“Maybe they’re wrong,” Holton said. “Maybe you’re wrong.”

“It sounds like you want to go on living,” Clement said.

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have left the city.”

“Maybe we’ve reached the end. Maybe there’s no point in going on. We could go on for another day or another month or even longer, but the end result is going to be the same. Why prolong it?”

“You haven’t told me yet where you’re going or where you’ve been,” Holton said.

Clement cleared his throat and looked out at the river. “I’m staying a couple of miles from here, over in those hills,” he said, as he pointed over his shoulder away from the river. “I stopped running shortly after the bombs fell. I figured there was no use trying to outrun the sickness. I wanted to spend my last days in relative comfort.”

“You have shelter?” Holton asked.

“Yes.”

“Food and water?”

“Food enough to last for as long as I need it and plenty of water. There’s a well there. It has the coldest, purest water you ever saw.”

“And there’s nobody else around?” Holton asked.

“It’s so far back in the hills nobody would ever find it.”

“How did you find it, then?”

“It’s a place I’ve known about since I was a child.”

The sun was going down behind the trees beyond the river and there was a sudden chill in the air. Holton thought about moving on but was too tired to even get up off the ground.

“I need clean water,” he said carefully. “I was just thinking about boiling some water from the river when you came along.”

“Don’t think about drinking that muck,” Clement said. “It has enough contaminants in it to kill the entire population.” He laughed at the irony of his remark. “I doubt if boiling would ever make it safe enough to drink.”

“I might have no other choice,” Holton said. “If I don’t get water soon, I’ll be dead from something other than the sickness.”

“You can come to the place where I’m staying,” Clement said, “if you don’t mind tramping a couple of miles through the woods. There’s as much water there as you could want.”

“I have nothing to trade for it.”

Clement snorted with amusement. “It’s not my water,” he said. “It was there when I came along and it will still be there after I’m gone. You might as well get yourself some of it while you can.”

Holton agreed to go with Clement, so, without another word, Clement put his books back on. When he had them laced up, he stood and motioned for Holton to follow him.

In a short time after they entered the dense forest, Holton was sure they were lost but Clement kept going without hesitation. The terrain was rough and rocky in places and they seemed to be going upward most of the way, as if they were climbing the side of a mountain. Finally, after what seemed two hours or more of very difficult walking, they came to a clearing with a little cabin in it.

Clement took Holton inside the cabin, which was two little rooms, and pointed to one of his two canvas chairs and told him to sit down and rest. While Holton was taking off his shoes and socks, Clement brought him a pitcher of water and a tin cup. Holton drank most of the water in the pitcher so Clement filled it again.

Clement had a little cook stove in one corner of the cabin that served as the kitchen. He told Holton to go out behind the cabin and get himself washed while he prepared the food. He gave Holton a shirt and pair of pants that were like new to put on after he had washed and told him to keep them because he had no use for them.

After Holton had made himself as clean as he could and put on the clean shirt and pants, he went back inside the cabin. Clement was just putting the food on the little table. He gestured for Holton to sit down.

They dined silently on canned soup, beans, spinach, and tomatoes. Holton ate his fill and leaned back in the chair with contentment. He was thinking that he should leave and not prevail too much on Clement’s hospitality, but he knew he would never find his way back down the mountain in the dark.

“You’ll want to stay the night now,” Clement said, as if he was reading Holton’s thoughts. “The forest is not safe at night if you’re not familiar with it.”

“Not safe,” Holton said. He thought about those words and then laughed.

After they were finished eating and Clement had cleared away the food and washed up the dishes, they went outside and sat on the step of the little cabin. It was so dark they couldn’t see more than five feet in front of them. Clement offered Holton a cigarette but he declined it, not liking himself in the role of the taker who had nothing to offer.

They talked about pleasant things that they knew before all the trouble came about. They talked about dogs and cats they had owned and books they had read and music they liked and trips abroad they had taken. Holton told Clement about his ten-year-old son and about how he and his wife planned to divorce, but if she was dead now, as he figured she was, there would be no need for the divorce. He said this with irony as if the thought amused him, but then he began to cry uncontrollably.

“It’s all right,” Clement said, unembarrassed, putting his arm around Holton’s shoulder. “I think you just need to let it out and then you’ll feel better.”

When they were back inside the cabin and Clement had rolled himself in his sleeping bag on the floor and Holton was lying on the cot, Clement started talking about the end that he knew was coming. He didn’t mind dying so much, he said; he had had a good life, what there was of it. He had seen the world and known true happiness. His greatest fear now was that there would be no one to bury him properly when he died. His body would be left lying out to rot in the open air where flies and other insects and starving animals would feast on it down to the bones. He could see himself, he said, one week after he was dead, one month, one year. It was too horrible to contemplate. He had seen and smelled rotting corpses in the war and he believed there was nothing worse. If he had a way to make himself evaporate in the air, to no longer exist, he would do it.

“I was hoping to find somebody I could rely on to bury me when the time comes,” he said.

“Maybe you won’t die,” Holton said. “As long as you’re alive, there’s hope you’ll go on living.”

“No, I’ve got the sickness in my bones. I can feel it. It won’t be long now.”

To humor him, and to repay Clement for his kindness and generosity, Holton agreed to stay for a few days and, if Clement died during that time, he would see that he was buried properly, in as deep a hole as Holton could dig. He would pile large rocks on the grave to make sure no animals could ever dig it up. He would even read some verses from the Bible if that’s what Clement wanted. In his heart, however, he was sure that things would not play out that way.

They slept soundly that night and the next day had a pleasant time relaxing in the sun-dappled shade outside the cabin, talking and laughing and forgetting the terrible state the world was in. By the evening, twenty-four hours after he had arrived at Clement’s cabin, Holton was starting to show symptoms of the sickness. His vision was blurred and his face wore a deathly pallor. He was vomiting blood and babbling incoherently.

Holton passed a very bad night on the cot in the little cabin. Clement tended him the best he could, but there wasn’t much he could do for him; he had no medicine. He gave him drinks of water, bathed his face in cold water, and tried to soothe his fears the best he could. Toward morning his body began turning black and he died just as the birds were waking up in the trees outside the cabin.

As soon as Clement realized Holton was dead, he went outside and began digging the grave under the trees in the clearing, in the spot he had set aside for his own grave. When he was satisfied the grave was the appropriate depth, he went back inside the cabin and put Holton’s body in the canvas bag that he had planned would contain his own body when the time came. Then he carried the bag outside and carefully arranged it on the floor of the grave so Holton was facing up. Gasping for air—realizing he was no longer as young as he once was—he said a silent prayer for Holton and, when he was finished, he filled in the grave.

All day long and during the night he expected to begin to see the symptoms of the sickness in himself, but the symptoms didn’t appear. When he awoke the next morning, he felt fine and was very hungry. He ate an enormous breakfast, washed himself at the pump and put on clean clothes.

Two days later he still felt well and healthy. He looked at his face in the mirror for any signs of change but saw none. He felt as well as he had ever felt in his life, in spite of the reduced circumstances in which he was living. He began to think that he was being spared the sickness for some reason or another.

That night a voice seemed to speak to him in a dream. He didn’t know if it was Holton’s voice or somebody else’s, but it was a voice he knew—maybe a voice from his distant past. The voice was telling him to go to the river and follow it south all the way to its end where it emptied into the sea—hundreds of miles. At the end of that journey he would find some kind of answer—perhaps not the answer he wished for—but an answer nonetheless.

He awoke in the morning with a resolve he hadn’t felt in a long while. The resolve had taken the place of the resignation he had felt since the bombs fell. He put as much food as he could carry into his pack, two canteens of water, and a change of clothes. He took one last look around the cabin and went out its door for the last time. With the slap of the screen door still in his ears, he looked toward the mound of dirt under the trees in the clearing and gave a little salute of farewell. Then he was gone, melding into the trees of the forest as if he had never existed.

Tacánecy tenses as she waits to begin her next count.  The lightning is closer now, and she readies herself for a silent and measured five.  She prays her sleeping husband will not hear the sound she is about to make.

Despite herself, she jumps when a piercing flash lances through the window in the opposite wall and, in a spasm of blue-white light, illuminates her husband’s Hawken rifle hanging on the wall beside her.  It flickers lethally for a moment before the room goes black again.

One. Two.  Three.  Four. Her grip tightens on the soft doeskin shroud on the floor at her feet.

Five. On cue, the thunderclap vibrates through the soles of her moccasins and rattles a china cup against its shelf-mate.  Its roar masks the whisper of leather against wood as she drags the bundle a few steps closer to the cabin door.

She pauses as the rumble rolls away into the black night’s silence.  There is a moment when her knees nearly buckle.  A moment when her mind rekindles the image of what lies inside the wraps of doeskin:  the death-white skin, the slightly open mouth, and the patches of red that mar the neck and face of her daughter’s lifeless body.

Was it only last night–another life ago–she had dragged Lena from the river?  Her throat still burns from the awful sounds she had made, strange animal sounds, as she pulled the dress over her daughter’s stiffening limbs, combed her hair for the last time, tried to close her resisting eyelids, wrapped her in the doeskin shroud.  A keening claws at her throat again, urgent, like a caged bear.  She chokes it back.  The wailing time must wait.  Now her heart must be stone.

A stirring from the bed in the next room propels her hand to the haft of the skinning knife under her beaded belt. Would she actually use it against him, Medina, her husband of twenty-eight snows?  She has no plan, no talking way, to explain her actions should he awake and confront her.  A week ago, battling him with a blade would have been unthinkable.  Now her white-knuckled grip betrays the depth of her new obsession.  Everything has changed.

When no further sound comes from the bed, her hand relaxes and returns to the bundle. Another flash invades the room.  She counts four beats this time.  Another crash and another stealthy drag, and she is at the door.  Her hand finds the cast iron latch and rests there.

The thunder noise is alarmingly loud.  Glancing toward the bed, she worries that the sound of the storm, rather than the click of the latch, will rouse him.  When the next thunderclap comes she eases the latch open with one hand and wrestles the corpse over the threshold with the other.  The rusty hinges, greased the day before with lard from the can she keeps by the wood stove, do not betray her.  Her shoulders relax.  She feels the stirring cool of the storm’s wind against the sweaty roots of her hair.

The wind!  She had not planned for wind.  Like scouts for an advancing army, chill drafts slip past her into the open doorway, lift the corner of the oilcloth on the eating table, and chase the warm, tobacco pipe air of the cabin into the next room and across the inert form on the bed.  The storm had answered her prayer to cover the sounds of her escape.  But she failed to consider its whispering outriders.

She swings the door closed.  It whumps against the door jam.  The latch falls into place with a metallic chunk.

“God be damned!”  Her hissing curse shocks her as much as the wind itself.  Never before has she uttered such words.  Her hand clutches for the rosary beads around her waist.  Then she remembers.  The black beads dot the floor where she flung them the night before.  Glistening reminders of Jésu’s betrayal.

She presses her ear against the keyhole and hears…what?  The straining creak of bed ropes in their sideboard moorings?  A footfall on the squeaky floorboard under the Hawken rifle?

With a stifled grunt she hefts the bundle into her arms and staggers off the porch.  Her hip joints creak with the strain of it.  With unsteady steps she gimps toward the barn.  Flashes light the way.  A single, giant raindrop splatters on her cheek and runs down into her open mouth.  It tastes of salt.  She is crying, she realizes.  She bites her tongue to make herself stop.

Her heaving nostrils draw in the unmistakable, welcoming smell of rain washing through the thirsty air in the foothills a mile or two to the west.  It will be here soon.

She eases the bundle to the packed earth inside the main barn door.  Memory guiding her, she grabs a handful of grain from a bucket inside the tack room and runs through the blackness to a side door into the corral.  Storm-spooked horses mill about, tails aloft, necks arched.   She holds the grain out to a big roan gelding.  He approaches her with wild eyes, the prospect of a treat temporarily overcoming his urge to bolt and run before the wind.  But before he can eat, her daughter’s black mare, the one called Shy Bird, shoulders the roan aside.  She entices the mare into the barn with the grain.

Inside, the familiar smell of hay, trampled horse droppings and sweaty leather overpowers the gathering storm smells outside.  She slips a rawhide chin rope into the tall mare’s mouth, slings the single rein over its neck and urges it toward the front door where the bundle lies.

Upon scenting the body, Shy Bird snorts and side-steps, eyes rimming white.  “Do not be afraid,” Tacánecy says, to herself as much as the horse.  She strokes the animal’s quivering shoulder and croons a sleep song remembered from her childhood.   The song had always quieted Lena when she was a wide-eyed baby.  With her other hand she reaches into her waist pouch, fingers feeling yet again the beaded bumps on the small leather bag she had removed from her daughter’s neck the day before, the amulet she had given to Lena to bind them together.

Shy Bird, you will carry Lena one last time.  She pins the mare’s chin rope against the ground with her foot.  The bundle resists as she strains to heft it high against the horse’s side and wrestle it up and over the tall withers.  Its ghastly stiffness unnerves her.  She ties a rope on either end and pulls down hard to bend it in the middle and snub it down.  Another cry swells in her throat.  She bites her hand to quell it.

From the tack room she grabs two large blankets she had rolled up the day before.  She leaves the saddles and bridles where they rest on wood rails.  Tonight I ride in the style of my people, she thinks. And for this, of all rides, it is a good thing to have Lena’s horse.

From the open barn doorway she peers back the way she came.  In the next lightning flash, the log house jumps out at her from the blackness, its dark logs and white chinking both momentarily reduced to a uniform, silvery gray.  Nothing moves in the shadowy doorway.

She leads the mare to the pole corral fence, climbs onto the first rail, hoists her right leg over the mare’s back and settles stiffly into place behind her daughter’s body.  It is the first time she has been on the back of a horse since her vow, taken in the long ago in atonement for her sins, to never ride again.

She takes up the single rein in one hand and the blanket roll in the other.  With her knees she urges the big mare forward.  Fused by the gloom into a single, shadowy shape, they move toward the compound’s northern side, the one nearest the river.  Two more big drops splat on her rein-holding hand.  Ahead of her waits the wooden toll bridge.

She takes one last look at the log house as another lightning flash ushers her out of the compound.  Still no sign of life.  Maybe she will make it.  Then Medina can rave at her all he wants, beat her, even.  He will never find Lena’s body.  She will make sure of it.

In the early days, she could never have gotten away undetected.  He would have heard the door closing, or even the soft brushing of the leather against the floor.  His years as a trapper and scout had taught him to sleep on the edge of consciousness, to come fully awake at any unusual sound, his Hawken rifle within easy reach.  But during their time at the Crossing he had grown less cautious, and at sixty-three snows, less keen of ear.  Besides, he had drunk several cups of whisky that night, unusual for him, but understandable considering his shock.

“Taos Lightening” the whisky was called.  A grim smile pulls at her mouth.  Two kinds of lightning are helping her this night.  She wishes it’s magic could somehow bring Lena back to life.

At the bridge she reins in, waiting for the next roll of thunder.  When it comes, she digs in her heels.  The mare clatters across in a burst of storm-sparked energy.

Barely visible on the opposite side stands the fort.  Square and squat, its whitewashed stone walls are slitted with black gun holes.  Built by her husband after a Ute raid years ago, the fort has never been used for its intended purpose.  Just like the fancy schooling her husband had tried to cram into Lena.  At the thought of her daughter’s unhappiness at the nun’s school, bitter bile rises in her throat.

Tacánecy turns left in front of the fort and lopes westward along the riverbank trail, heading upstream directly into the storm.  The splatters of rain are laced with tiny needles of ice that sting her hands and face.  The drops are more frequent now, formed in the tumult of the great looming thunderhead that blots out most of the night sky.  Windy gusts snarl through low willows, chasing the dank scent of moss-coated river rocks away from the onrushing rain.  Its growing roar overpowers the river’s steady rush.

In a flash of lightening she sees ahead a wall of rain so dense that nothing can be seen beyond it.  Then it swallows them, drenching them in seconds, blotting out all other sound.  Behind them, the hoof prints in the silty clay of the river trail melt away without a trace.

They arrive at the spot where a small stream enters from the South.  Dry Creek, the settlers call it.  After tonight it will have to be called Wet Creek.  Like my eyes.

Her plan was to follow this rivulet a while before returning to the main channel across a rocky sandstone ridge.  This maneuver would have slowed her husband’s pursuit long enough to complete her work.  But the storm makes this bit of cunning unnecessary.  She sends another prayer of thanks for the storm.

Despite the chill and wet, she relaxes now that they are safely enveloped in the storm’s center.  The mare slows, picking her way along the trail through the liquid mud.  Shy Bird feels warm beneath her legs.  Steam rises from the mare’s back into the rain-soaked air.  Despite her long absence from the back of a horse, she molds herself to its rocking rhythm, marveling at the body’s memory of things past.

An image of Lena astride the mare forms in her mind.  Long black hair blowing in the wind like a second horse’s tail.  Face alight with smile.  Lithe body glued to the mare’s back.  Like me when I was her age.  Back when I still had dreams.  She banishes the image with a kick in Shy Bird’s side.

After an hour, the rain dribbles to a stop.  A nearly full moon emerges from under the western edge of the storm cloud, bathing the landscape in startlingly bright silver light.   Cottonwoods stretch their dripping arms skyward.  Pine needles glisten.  Bushes on the nearby slopes make dark silhouettes against the buffalo grass waving in the fresh washed breeze.  A dismal beauty, considering what is now revealed in the river trail behind her:  Shy Bird’s hoof prints, stark as signposts, outlined in moon shadow.

She glances back over her left shoulder and sees the tipi-shaped butte named after her husband.  Beside her on the right, perpendicular to the river, rises the rocky spine they call the Devil’s Backbone.  Hair prickles on her neck.  What if he has managed to follow her? She urges Shy Bird into a trot.  Not too far ahead lies her destination, the beautiful hidden valley atop the imposing sandstone ridge that stretches up before her to meet the moon.  It was to have been their escape route, her and Lena’s trail to the north land.  Now it would become her daughter’s final home in this world.

When she reaches the ridge’s base about half an hour later, the place where the river cuts through, she pauses to push the bundle back into place over the horse’s withers.  The coldness of what’s inside nearly unnerves her.  Then she urges Shy Bird a few steps forward into the river as if she were going to wade upstream through the narrow rock cut and continue along the river trail.  Instead, she dismounts onto a huge flat sandstone slab that slopes gently down from the rocky bank into the water beside her.  She unrolls the two blankets and spreads them next to each other over the stone.  With a tug on the chin rope, she coaxes Shy Bird to step onto the blankets.  When all four hooves are on the second blanket, she retrieves the first and places it in front of the horse, urging it forward once again.  In this fashion, blanket by blanket, they depart the river trail without leaving a trace on the sandstone or the slope above.  After nearly twenty such blanket changes, she stops behind a bush, ties the blankets back on the horse, remounts and moves up toward the saddle in the rimrock that allows her passage into the shallow, hidden valley that lies between the double crested ridge.  From the summit she looks back and is startled by a blanket of white that begins about half way between her and their home and extends well past it onto the plains.  Hail, shimming in the moonlight, fallen there, but not here.  Awestruck, she murmurs her gratitude for the storm’s gift.

Turning from the summit, she crosses the valley, moonstruck into visibility, and reaches the even higher crest on the west.  She turns north and rides parallel to the cliff but well back from its edge.  Juniper trees and stunted pines rise darkly among a wild jumble of sandstone rock formations.  Her eyes cast about for the one she is seeking.  The rock spirits gather around her.  Their whispering voices fail to bring calm.  She feels lost.

At last she sees it.  The entrance to the cave-like hideaway.  Two huge sandstone slabs leaning together to form a tipi-shaped cave guarded by a thick juniper bush cover over the entry.  Lena’s resting place.  The secret spot Otter Woman, in the form of a gray jay, had led her to the month after Lena’s ride in Denver City.  Its purpose had only come to her during yesterday’s death watch, the day that seemed never to end, the day she sat beside Lena’s leather-wrapped body keening a death song until her voice gave out.  In this cave she will do for Lena in death what she failed to do for Lena in life:  protect her from her husband’s reach.

* * *

To the east over the vast plains, where a hint of dawn outlines the horizon, the storm sparks and crashes.  It is well past their home now.  She imagines Medina sleeping there, and bitterness seizes her heart.  Medina, her proud, stubborn, husband.  If only he had not insisted on sending Lena back to that accursed school, Lena would be alive today.  If only…

But as she dismounts and leans against the leather shroud, feeling the shape of Lena’s stiff legs against her body, something unwelcome sprouts and spreads:  a guilt so profound she must grab Shy Bird’s mane to keep from falling to the rocky ground.

A man goes to the doctor. He says, Doctor, my memory is bad. Every morning I wake up and I can barely remember what I did the day before. I try to make resolutions to be a better person, to travel, to learn things, to lose weight, to stop bad habits, but then I forget and nothing changes. I make plans for the weekend, but then I forget, and I just sit there on my couch, not knowing what to do. I forget what I like and what I don’t like. I can’t remember why I have the job that I do. I can barely remember my childhood. My whole life is a blur, it passes faster every day and I don’t even know who I am anymore.

The doctor looks him over, looks in his eyes, his ears, his throat. He weighs him, measures him, listens to his heart. He asks questions. Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do drugs? Any medication? Work with chemicals? Family history? Then he stands up, leans against the counter at a crooked angle, as if he’s stretching. He has a strange look on his face. Then he stares at the man, waiting.

Do you smell that? says the doctor.

Smell what? says the man.

I think I know what the problem is.

What?

You have no sense of smell.

What?

Smell is deeply connected to memory. People don’t realize this, but they remember things largely because of their sense of smell. Sometimes they pick up a scent somewhere and memories come flooding back. You don’t remember anything because you have no sense of smell.

The doctor reaches into a drawer and pulls out a small vial. He opens it and sniffs it, then quickly pulls his face away. He waves it under the man’s nose.

Here, smell this.

Nothing.

See? No sense of smell. Most likely due to severe allergies. I’ll write you a prescription.

So the man starts taking pills, little white pills, every morning with breakfast. He sniffs everything, testing it out. He sniffs the inside of the fridge, his armpits, the toilet after he’s gone. Nothing. He can’t believe how long he’s gone without noticing his defect. If he’d gone blind, or deaf, or numb, he’d have noticed, surely, but smell had eluded him. He’d simply thought that nothing around him had smelled enough to notice. He grows embarrassed suddenly, wondering if he’s had B.O. all this time and his friends and coworkers have been repulsed by him but didn’t say anything. Has he even been using deodorant? What about gas? he wonders, with horror. Has he been offending everyone in the office, thinking he was getting away with it?

He thought he could taste food fairly well, but he knows, how everyone knows, that smell is a big part of taste, and surely he’s been missing out on food as well. He eats some cereal, chewing slowly, feeling the mush with his tongue. Is this taste that I’m feeling, he wonders, or is it just texture? He thinks about all the money he’s wasted on expensive dinners when he could have just eaten frozen broccoli at home.

He begins to smell things. He steps out of his house one morning on his way to work and his neighbor is mowing the lawn next door. He smells the grass being cut. Grass becomes a different thing to him at that moment, not just the green leafy things sticking out of the ground, but a flavor, something he can taste in his mouth, and a time and place. He remembers the smell from long ago. He remembers a day when he sat on the grass with friends after school. It was a sunny day, and warm, and they were looking forward to something, something that was coming up soon. The school year was almost over. It was almost summer vacation.

At work there are flowers on the receptionist’s desk, roses, lilies, and baby’s breath. He can smell these. Their scent wraps around his face as he walks past and grabs him, pulls him back so that he can sniff them deeply. He remembers the corsage he bought for his girlfriend in high school for senior prom. He remembers the smell of her make-up and perfume, how her skin had felt against his as they slow danced in the dim gymnasium. He can feel her touch on his arms, his neck, and they tingle. He smiles at the receptionist and goes to his cubicle with a smile still on his face.

After work he goes to an Indian restaurant on the way home. He is swimming in smells. The waiter uses a sandalwood soap that reminds the man of college, when he went to the meditation seminars with the Indian guru, with the incense always burning on the bookshelf in the corner. He orders a sag paneer and remembers graduation dinner, when his father had given him the keys to a used, red, four-door sedan with power windows and a CD player. He remembers listening to Paul Simon in that car on the drive down to Philly to start his first job, the address written on a crinkled yellow paper in his leather wallet. He orders a cabernet sauvignon and he can smell it in the waiter’s hand even before he reaches the table. He sniffs it, sips it, sloshes it around in his mouth, and he is suddenly back in Rome with his best friend on their backpacking trip before college, tasting, really tasting wine for the first time, thinking of the new credit card in his back pocket, relishing all the wines and fish and bread and pasta he knows he can look forward to.

At home he sniffs everything he owns, every condiment in the fridge, the oil and vinegar in the cabinet, the chemical sprays under the sink, the spices on the spice rack, the candles on the windowsill. He smells the paper in his printer, the litter box, the laundry basket, the carpet, his shoes, his shirts and coats hanging in the closet. He sees his apartment for the first time, although he’s lived there for years. He touches the walls and smells the paint. He flicks on every light switch and smells the electricity humming through the walls. He goes into the bathroom, urinates and smells the scent of his own body. He smells his armpits and is overcome by his own pheremones, the blood rushes to his extremities and he masturbates right there in the bathroom, then smells his ejaculate, remembers the first time, the second time, the hundredth time, remembers the harem of imaginary women he kept locked up secret in his mind for those times alone, how he used to thirst to make them real, how he planned to search them out in the world. He washes his hands and face and smells the soap, looks into the mirror and remembers himself. He weeps for all the days that he’s lost.

One day the man sees an ad in the paper. The ad says, “Aromatherapy.” He doesn’t know exactly what this means, but he makes an appointment over the phone for an evening later that week. He arrives at the address, a small storefront place with satin curtains in the windows. The place is dim and there is soft music coming from speakers in the ceiling. The woman greets him and takes him to an even dimmer back room and sits him in a soft recliner. She sits in a nearby office chair on wheels. On the wall there is a rack, like the spice rack he has at home in his kitchen, only much larger and filled with tiny amber vials with colored labels.

What do you want? she asks.

I want to remember, he says.

What do you want to remember?

Everything.

She tells him to sit back and close his eyes. He can hear her shift in the room, the tinkle of tiny glass.

Lilac, she whispers, and the scent creeps up under his chin, wraps itself around him. He’s back at the senior prom, dancing with his date. The DJ is playing a Peter Gabriel ballad, a song he knows well, has sung along to many times alone in his room. He knows all the words. He feels an urge to sing along, to whisper the words in her ear and mean them, to make her know the trembling he feels in his chest, how her touch gives him chills, how he would give her everything if she’d let him. Her perfume guides his hand around to the small of her back, and suddenly he’s scared, scared because he knows what he wants to ask her later that night, he has no idea what she’ll say, has no idea what he’ll do if she says yes, no idea how he’ll live if she says no.

Lavender, the woman whispers, and the man grows sleepy. He’s younger, he’s in his bed and it’s early morning. He’s been up all night to the sound of his parents fighting and only wishes he could fall asleep, but his stomach and hands hurt and it won’t go away. He knows that his father will leave soon, that things won’t ever be the same. He’s afraid to leave his room, so he stays in bed all morning, watching the square of sunlight move across his wall. The birds start to chirp outside his window. He shifts around and lies on his stomach, pressing his face under the pillow and squeezing it around his ears, wishing it all away. The blanket falls off his body. He feels something light and sharp grab onto the heel of his foot, but he doesn’t move. It twitches a few times, and still he doesn’t move. Then, it’s gone. He looks up, sees the window and screen open, realizes that it was a bird, a bird in his bedroom.
Saffron, she whispers. He is in the woods, it is night and it is cold. He has run away from home after a fight with his parents. They have discovered the pot he had hidden in his room, screamed at him, furious. His father had grabbed his shirt, yelled in his face until he began to cry. He had yelled back, told them that he had heard what it was that they were fighting about all the time. He called them horrible names, that he hated them, that he would never be like them, that he wished he wasn’t their son. He sat in the woods all night shivering and hungry, profoundly alone, scared to go back home, not knowing where else to go.

Cardamom, she whispers and he is alone on the bleachers behind the school after everyone has left. His heart is aching with the knowledge that the girl he loves is now with someone else, so soon, only two weeks after she’d kissed him at the football game. He has so much to say, yearns for someone to talk to, someone to listen, but there is no one. He gets out his notebook and writes some lines of verse, some rhyming, some not, and draws small pictures in the margins. He writes, knowing that no one will ever read it, and it comforts him. He begins to feel warm. The pen moves by itself and he can’t stop writing. The sun is setting, there is a pinkish glow in the sky and he knows that what he is doing means something, that there on the page is a part of him that is truer than what everyone else sees. He is terrified of growing up, of leaving home, going to college, of getting a job in an office, marrying someone he doesn’t love who doesn’t love him, of being like his parents. He knows that what he writes is true and that he mustn’t ever stop writing, mustn’t ever give up feeling this way.

Lemongrass, she whispers, and he is in Italy again, standing with his friend at the top of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as it pounds against the shore below them. Home is so far away it couldn’t possibly exist. If only they could see him now. The hillside behind them is ripe with lemon trees and grapevines. Their legs ache from the hike so they stop to rest. They take off their bags and sit in the grass, watching the sky grow dimmer in shades of opal and turquoise. His friend takes out of his bag a small glass bottle of limoncello, bought from an old woman in the village down below, with the foreign currency they have in their pockets. They pass the bottle back and forth, taking sips. It’s a strange, strong, intoxicating flavor, unlike anything he’s ever tasted, and it melds with the smells in the air of the sea and the lemons growing all around them. He looks around, at the sky and the sea, the crops on the cliffside, at the ancient village in the distance, so much older and wiser than where he came from. He suddenly knows what they all mean when they talk about this place, how it can change you. He feels how young he is, how much there is out there that he hasn’t yet seen, how much there is to learn, to taste, to touch, to smell, to live. Remember this moment, he says to himself. Remember this one moment, and everything will be okay.

“Floor ‘Z,’ please.” The school elevator was packed, but no one spoke. I noticed several kids glancing at me in the reflection from the brass doors. RING! “Excuse me,” I said, squeezing out into the hall. I was the only one. The doors closed and the elevator resumed its journey. I heard conversation as it sped away. They didn’t trust me. I threw my gym bag up over my shoulder and began down a short hall toward a set of very large double doors. “Whatever. They just don’t know you yet,” I told myself. A shiny plaque on the wall read: Acuity and Physiology. I paused for a second and took a deep breath, mustering strength. “You got this!” I said as I pushed one of the big doors aside and walked nervously to a large desk in a well-lit, modern-looking waiting room. “Hi.”

“Good Morning, Mr. Stone. We’ve been expecting you. Please fill this form out.” A robust woman was sitting at a computer. She was blue and had four arms. She handed me a clipboard.

“Thanks,” I said as I turned and took a survey of the waiting room. My eyes fell instantly upon a great mass. The room was empty save twenty chairs and one person, one very, very, very big boy. He had the face of a young teen, zits and all, but the body of a goliath. He took up four chairs and was sitting there rather awkwardly thumbing through a Sports Illustrated. It looked silly in his great big hands. I sniffed quietly. He was nervous too.

“Hey,” I said, trying to imagine how he fit on the elevator.

“Hi,” he said back as he flicked some shaggy brown hair from in front of his eyes. I expected to hear a deep growly voice, but his was not. It actually sounded pretty average, which was a little freakish coming out of his great big face. “I’m Sam,” he said. I sat down across from him and smiled.

“I’m Michael.”

“I know,” he said, smiling back. “Everyone knows.” He looked back down at his magazine.

“Really?” I sat back and looked up at him. The angle was so great it hurt my neck. “How?”

“Dude, you’re Frankenstein.” He grinned. He had big shiny braces on his teeth. They looked like fences.

“No, no, that’s just a nickname the idiot jocks gave me. My name’s Michael, not Frank.”

“What’s your middle name?” he said as he glanced down at the form on my clipboard, still grinning. He raised his eyebrows up high on his greasy forehead and waited for a response.

I didn’t want to answer. I pursed my lips and pulled the form to my chest. “My middle name is…Francis.” Oh come on, I thought. I hadn’t put that little piece in the puzzle yet. I was gonna kill Uncle Ivan.

The giant laughed. “Francis, France…Frank! And Stein means Stone, dude…Francis-Stone…Franken-Stein.” He overly emphasized it to make his point. He was a little obnoxious, but had me and knew it.

“Alright, alright I get it!” I said. “Son of a…” I mumbled. I forced a smile and looked down at the form on my lap as Sam chuckled, quietly repeating it again.

“So, did the townspeople chase you out of France with pitchforks and torches?” The giant giggled. He wasn’t gonna let it go.

I smiled up at him. “And I suppose you fell down the beanstalk,” I replied. He furled his thick eyebrows and then suddenly burst out laughing. He actually thought it was funny.

He put his hand out for a five and barked “Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum, dude.” I smiled and slapped the big catcher’s mitt.

“Alright,” I laughed.

“Sam, Michael, we’re ready for ya.” A middle-aged man in a white lab-coat came into the room through a set of double doors. He had thinning brown hair and a large gray moustache that covered his lips. “Come on. Let’s have some fun. My name is Doctor J. I’m going to need to perform a few tests on you guys today to get some baseline data, something to compare to.” We gave him the clipboards and followed him into a gymnasium. A variety of different machines and apparatuses were set up in stations, around which was an oval track and a couple of b-ball hoops. The room was tall and had some bleachers set up against one of the walls. He described some of the tests we were going to do and gave us a few minutes to get dressed.

Sam was pretty funny. I was glad to have someone else in there with me. I’d have been pretty scared all by myself. We stretched a little and met Dr. J back at the first station, a big steel machine with a computer station and a variety of bars and cables hanging off it. “Okay, let’s start with a strength test. Either of you two weightlifters?” We both shook our heads. I was pretty excited to see what Sam could lift. His arms were about as big around as my entire body. “This machine measures the pressure you put on it, so we don’t need to put weights on a bar. We’ll start with biceps curls. “Sam, go ahead, kneel here and pull the bar up to your chest as hard as you can.” Dr. J demonstrated. Sam smirked at me and took position.

The bar disappeared between his enormous hands. He stuck his bottom lip out, got a serious look on his face and then groaned like a determined bull. “Hrrrrgggg!” he exclaimed, pulling the bar up with all of his might. I imagined a front-end loader yanking up a bucket of dirt. The area instantly filled with the aromatic odor of giant sweat.

“O—kay! Nice pull, Sam. I think…yup, that’s a new student record! Alright!” Dr J nodded his head as he studied a monitor and then recorded a number onto Sam’s chart. “Wasn’t sure how this was gonna go, today.” The doctor looked at me. “Good luck, Mike.”

“I hope this isn’t a competition?” I joked nervously as Sam and I changed positions. The big boy slapped me on the shoulder and grinned.

“No, of course not.” Dr. J glanced from me up to Sam and back. “Just do your best, son.”

I’d never lifted weights before and so grabbed the bar awkwardly. Dr. J had to correct my position. It was wet from Sam’s sweaty hands, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to embarrass him. I took a deep breath, planted my feet, and pulled up on the bar with everything I had. Suddenly it made a strange noise and then bent at both handgrips.

“WO! What the heck happened there?” Dr. J trotted over and examined the machine. The display was flashing. “Well, I’ll be. Sorry, Michael. I think Sam may have exceeded the max on this thing,” he said as he reefed on the bar. He couldn’t bend it back. “Interesting,” he said, glancing back over at me.

“Oops,” Sam bragged and shrugged his shoulders.

“Wow,” I said. “You must have weakened the steel.” Sam assumed a WWE pose and flexed out like a pro wrestler. I laughed.

“That’s titanium actually. Let’s try bench press,” Doctor J said. “Michael, how ‘bout you go first on this one.” His moustache wiggled excitedly. “Take it nice and slow.” He showed me how to operate it. It was simple. I had only to lie on my back, put both hands on the bar, and push straight up. I glanced over at Sam who smirked. “Here goes,” I said and gave a hard push. Again, the machine groaned just as both ends of the bar bent up at forty-fives. “WOW!” Dr. J exclaimed while punching a few numbers into the keyboard on the machine. He pulled his calculator out and clicked feverishly, occasionally stopping for a second to scratch his head and count out loud.

I sat up and grimaced. Sam scratched his head. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t even touch it!” We both laughed.

“Okay, carry the one, eh…Michael,” Dr. J said, “I’m not 100% sure, but I think you just bench pressed thirty-two hundred pounds.” He said that with a big question mark on his face. “Is that possible?” He was now asking me.

“ I don’t know, Doc. I’ve never lifted weights before. Is that good?”

“That’s awesome!” Sam laughed. “See, I told you that you were fricken’ Frankenstein!”

I was suddenly embarrassed and began scuffing my shoe against the mat. “Michael, you’re not in trouble. That’s fantastic! This is what we’re here for. Wait just a sec. I have an idea,” the doctor said as he ran off like an excited child toward the exit. “I’ll be right back!”

Sam sat down on the ground and pulled a candy bar out of his pocket. “Want half?”

“Sure,” I replied. He pinched a King Sized Baby Ruth in the middle and tossed part of it over. I smiled and squeezed a pulverized bite out of the wrapper. “So you’re a giant, huh?” I said in between chews.

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” I said. “How bout your family?”

“Yeah, They’re Giants too. So are my grandparents and, heck my whole home town’s full of Giants.”

“Really? Sweet. How do you…hide?” I asked. “I mean from…people.”

“We really don’t. It’s way high up in the mountains. We get hikers that stumble into town every once in a while though.” He laughed.

“What do ya do?”

“Rip their arms and legs off,” he said with a straight face. I stared at him for a few seconds until he cracked a smile. We both laughed. “Actually, we fit in just fine. My parents both work for Gateway. They field a lot of helpline stuff.”

“Wait just a minute! Let me get this straight. So people think they’ve reached India, but their actually talkin’ to Giants in a remote mountain village somewhere?”

“Oh yeah. We’ve got a lot a telemarketers, web designers, that sort of thing,” he said.

I stared at him closely for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg. He didn’t crack. “That’s awesome!” I exclaimed. The image was very funny to me. I thought it was great. I suddenly wanted so bad to see that town. “Hey, I’d love to it some time.”

“Sure, dude. Cool.”

“Michael, I have an idea!” Dr. J shouted from the entrance. He had returned and with him was Coach.

“Hey,” I said.

“Good Morning, Mr. Stone. Dr. Jekyll tells me you’re not just a good basketball player,” he said as he slid his big varsity jacket off and draped it over the bench. He started rolling his sleeves up like he was getting ready for a fight. I looked around nervously, but he was staring right at me.

“What?” I asked putting my hands up in the air.

“Michael, since the machine is broken, I thought we could do this a different way.” In the doctor’s hand was a very thick, knotted rope. “Ever play tug-of-war?” He waved at me as he walked.

“No.”

I followed him over to an open area on the gym floor. “Here. All you do is pull. Coach Atlas, take the other end please.” He handed opposite ends of the rope to each of us.

I was suddenly nervous. Coach Atlas wasn’t as big as Sam, but he was far scarier…besides, if he was the real mythological Atlas, it meant he was an actual Titan and could hold the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. “I’m not sure about this,” I said through a nervous laugh as the heavy rope went taught. My armpits started to sweat. I bit the inside corner of my lip. “This is crazy,” I said.

“Okay, on GO.” Dr. J’s eyebrows were now dancing with his moustache. He was very excited. I suddenly noticed some background noise. In the hub-hub, I hadn’t seen that some kids and teachers were filing in to see the show. The Doctor told. That’s all I needed…an audience.

My palms were sweaty. I took turns drying them on my pants. I was fully convinced, at that moment that the broken machine had nothing to do with me. It had to have been Sam. I hadn’t noticed that I was super strong. Seems like I would have if it were true. I looked down the rope to the monstrous Titan. His normally squinty eyes were mere slits and his lip was curled up in a snarl revealing several yellowed matchbox-sized teeth. The expression was terrifying. It was his game face. I didn’t have one myself and so grimaced with fear as the countdown began. “Three, Two, One…GO!”

With a mighty heave it happened, exactly what I knew was going to. Coach Atlas yanked me, and not just across the gym but clean out of my high-tops too. I hit the ground with a screech and a thud, and rolled almost all the way to his feet. It was humiliating. The audience burst into laughter all at once. Coach too as he reached down and pulled me up to my feet. I looked up at him. “This wasn’t my idea,” I said.

“I think I jumped the gun. Let’s try that again,” he said.

“No, no, you win,” I conceded, putting my hands in the air.

“One more time, Michael,” he commanded.

I nodded obligingly and walked back over to my shoes. I slipped them back on and tied them extra tight. Again we took up the slack, and Dr. J counted down. “Three, Two, One, GO!” Again I was slow to pull, but this time Coach waited for me, matching my strength as I leaned back and into it. The large room fell silent. You could have heard a pin drop. I was planted like a tree and watched with surprise as the big man started to shake. His game face was gone. The rope became as tight as a guitar string. I breathed slowly and steadily and felt as if I’d somehow shifted gears. I leaned back even farther. I had more strength in me and so pulled even harder, but the titan matched it. From below me came a funny smell. I didn’t look down but could feel heat on my feet. The rubber soles of my Pumas were melting. My toes began to rip through the fronts. Coach adjusted his grip and pulled back even harder, but I matched him. Drops of perspiration glistened on his head. He gritted his teeth as his eyes widened, his mouth turning up in a determined frown. We stayed that way for nearly three entire minutes…an eternity, until suddenly the rope stretched, started to smoke, and then…SNAP! It broke! Both of us stumbled backward. Coach Atlas recovered, but my narrow heels shattered the wooden floor. I stumbled backward, crunching through the planks awkwardly until I fell on my butt.

“HOLY HYDE!” Dr. J erupted. Coach laughed excitedly and slapped his hands together. The audience applauded and cheered. I laughed too, looking down at the smoking black rubber splotches that marked my footprints. “No one has ever matched Atlas in a feat of strength…ever!” Dr. J congratulated me, patting my back.

Sam pulled me up to my feet. “Wow, dude. SWEET! You okay?”

I looked down at the palms of my hands. They were smoking. I hadn’t felt the pain during the competition. I flipped them over and noticed my skin had flushed, but not red…avocado green! I nodded. “It’s okay. That’s normal…I think.”

Coach Atlas walked up and patted my back. “You’re full of surprises, Stone. Maybe instead of Frankenstein we’ll call you Hercules.” He winked and smiled as the kids poured down from the bleachers to congratulate me. I was one of them now, no longer a boy trapped between worlds. It seemed with misfits and monsters, differences were measured as similarities. And I was sure measuring up as different.

Until then I hadn’t thought I needed to belong to anything, but I was wrong. Despite a pair of melted Pumas and a couple third degree burns, nothing had ever felt better. I grinned and reveled in that shining moment, a glimmer of what could be.

Energy flowed through Michael’s hand, through the torch, into the metal. He didn’t plan in advance what he formed.  There was no plan.  It was only the desire to begin.   Once he did, the forms took a shape of their own.  The metal twisted, burned, and bent.  Smoke rose, steam settled.

His income wasn’t consistent, but at least there was income.  He might have said the same thing about women.  They came and went but he knew, at some point, they would be there.  His unspoken philosophy aggravated some of them.  He thought of one particular ex-girlfriend, flinched, then smiled.  Michael picked up his torch again, ready to shape the next fold of metal into place.

He liked the moment of the curve.  The process of heating before it all solidified.  He didn’t like the ending.  The next day, he’d begin a new project or revise an old one.  Much like the women, he saw his work, from one project to the next, as a continuing stream.

The torch snapped and sizzled.  The flame was dangerous, and he wore a special mask for protection.  One stray spark into his eye and his budding career as an artist would have ended.  He listened to the hiss of fire on metal.  It was a thrill, he realized, like a drug.  It was the act of beginning, of not knowing what would come next.

***

Melissa sat on a solitary barstool. She stirred hot chocolate fluffed with the barista’s magic.  A happy man, she thought when the bearded stranger breezed past her, a jaunt in his step. He wore jeans so faded they were almost white.  Very different from her boyfriend of three years, Jason, who walked as if in a military parade.

Still, Charlene’s comment this morning on the bus bothered her.

“Everyone at the bank thinks Jason is great,” her friend had said.  They all worked together at the bank.

Really?  Jason? It wasn’t jealousy that sparked her bad mood.  It was something else, undefined.

Melissa glanced over her shoulder at the man in line, the one with the nice fitting Levi’s.

She turned back to her chocolate and glanced at her silent BlackBerry.  10 p.m. Jason hadn’t called to ask where she was. She wished she hadn’t dropped out of art school. It was a regret that occasionally took her over to the funky café on the south side of town. She soaked up the atmosphere, drank in the creativity. Her hands ached for the touch of clay upon the wheel, the cool formation of earth.

“I might sign up for a night class next semester,” she had mentioned to Jason the previous night.

“In what? Marketing?”

“No.” The thought of it made her skin crawl. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you’re the assistant manager of the customer service division? Generally, people go back to school to further their careers.”

“I was thinking of taking something fun. A pottery class. Maybe drawing.”

“Hmmm.” He had turned his gaze back to the television.

She was startled by a tap on the metal stool next to her

“This seat taken?”

***

Michael pushed through the café as if underwater. Visions of the sculpture dominated his mind; the next bend, the next shape. Light and dark played shadow games – the fluorescent above the cash register, the green glare of the digital numbers blurred against the darkness of a corner booth.  Voices mingled into a single song, pitches and timbres moved low and high through a scale of sound.

He meandered around tables and chairs, college students with laptops, art students with charcoal and sketchpads. The scent of warm chocolate and coffee enveloped him, pushed him to the depths, only to be jolted to the bright surface by a bitter stab of green tea. A gleam of silver attracted him; a lone metal barstool against the window.

“Can I sit here?”

The blonde woman who sat in the neighboring chair ignored him or didn’t hear him. He cleared his throat, conscious of not having spoken to another for days. “This seat taken?”

She drummed her fingers on the top of her cell phone sitting on the counter next to her before she glanced up. “No, go ahead.”

The stool scraped against the wood floor as he moved it. He cringed at the abrasive sound, a donkey braying through the low hum. He sipped at his espresso and tilted his cup toward the woman. “I’m taking a break from a project I’ve been working on.”

She lifted her cell phone, pressed buttons. The glow reflected in her eyes. She tapped at it again and then suddenly shoved the thing into her purse – a brush stroke of silver before him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you say something about a project?”

“I did. I’m a sculptor. Welding.”

Her multi-looped earrings glittered, caught in the headlight of a car passing outside their window seat. They sat in silence. The pattern of her earring put an idea in his head, elliptical, with a point. The contour of a dove.

“I used to be into pottery,” she said suddenly.

“Used to?”

“Well, I mess around with it sometimes.” She smiled and twisted the paper napkin she held. “Clay didn’t seem practical as a college major, though.”

He tapped his own fingers against his espresso cup, a ceramic impracticality. “I heard that a lot from my folks when I started school.”

“What made you stick with it?”

“I love what I do. I can’t imagine not doing it. It’s not easy, sometimes, but I’m starting to sell pieces.”

“That’s great.” She coiled the napkin into a spiral. “I guess I never felt like I could make a living with pottery.”

“Is that why you gave it up?”

“One of many reasons.”

“Or excuses.”

Her eyebrows shot up at the bluntness of his words. He returned her look, silently asking: which is it?

“You know what made me drop art classes? The professors always wanted to know my meaning, the message. Why did everything have to mean something?” Her voice rose with emotion. “Why couldn’t they let it be? Appreciate beauty for beauty’s sake?”  She stirred a spoon in her cup and shook her head. “I like the shape of things, a blend of color. There’s a certain moment in art where I want to leave it in that exact place.”

Michael pondered her words. He knew what she meant, about that moment – but for him, it never lasted. “I wish I could get to that point. I always want to redo whatever I’ve done. Maybe I listened to the professors too much. I’m never satisfied with it.” That wasn’t exactly it either. He couldn’t explain the feeling of purposelessness when he turned off his torch.

He noticed the purple scarf, the forest green of her sweater.  She did have a propensity for color.  “So now you live a …practical…life?”

“Sure do. Share an apartment with my boyfriend, steady paychecks, and health insurance.” Her tone was sarcastic.

“401k?”

“That too.”

He liked her smile. She balled up the paper napkin she’d been winding. He could see her hands moving around a mound of clay, forming, shaping.

“But you’d rather be an artist?”

The cell phone buzzed from inside her purse.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “See you.”

Michael realized he hadn’t asked her name.

***

Melissa slammed the alarm clock with the palm of her hand. Her blow sent the clock crashing off the nightstand, onto the floor.  She curled her throbbing hand back under her pillow.

“Jesus.” Jason left the bed and strode toward the shower. “Just turn off the switch.”

She remained still, eyes closed.  Mornings weren’t her best time, although she didn’t know this about herself until she lived with someone who bounded out of bed as if his ass was spring-loaded.

After a few minutes, she lurched to the kitchen where she fumbled desperately with the coffee pot.  She couldn’t think or speak until she had one cup of measurable caffeine in her system.   She dumped in a spoonful of sugar and wrapped her hands around the heat of the thick, earthenware coffee mug, one she had made.  She debated whether to shower before work.  Who cares, she thought.  It was time to find something new.

“Bye babe.” Jason brushed past, jostling her shoulder. Her coffee spilled on the counter.  Unlike Jason, Melissa took her time getting to the bank. She preferred to watch the sun rise over the mountains that loomed above town. Today, though…maybe she’d call in sick, stop by the university and pick up a catalog…maybe.

Dissatisfaction nagged at her. What was it that guy had said? He couldn’t imagine not doing art. That was the problem; she could envision her life without art.  It terrified her.

***

Michael draped the metal sheet over its post, as a wing rests upon a bird.  The hot steel would soon set into the shape he wanted.  He flicked the switches off on his torch and stepped back to analyze the sculpture again. The silver fold curved as he had envisioned.

His fingers drummed the top of his workbench. Inside his leather work gloves, his hands grew hot, needing either to work or be set free. He turned on oxygen and acetylene switches.  Thin blue flame jetted out from the cutting tip. He held the torch at an angle, ready to turn the metal back into lumps of steel. Each time, this happened. He wasn’t ready to be done.

“There’s a certain moment in art where I want to leave it in that exact place.” He heard her voice, the girl from the café. The sculpture was there, in that place, if he didn’t ruin it first.

He switched off the torch again, set it down, tapped his restless hands on the workbench again. Abruptly, he pulled of his work gloves, kicked off his heavy boots. In a manic rush, he shoved on old tennis shoes, and grabbed his road bike. He had to get out before the impulse overtook him again. He walked out of his garage studio, and, with a backward glance, he saw a thing a beauty.  He paused, breathless in that glorious moment between heat and cool, before the artwork was stationed into its final performance.

***

The colors on the desert horizon reminded him of flames.  He rode past park signs to one of the pueblo remains that dotted the landscape. Pink hazed in quietly, softening the whole sky into a gentle cushion of light.  This isn’t the heat of fire, he thought to himself as he leaned against the side of a pueblo to watch.  This is something else.  Something magic.

The rising sun tinted the bricks a golden-pink, highlighting every shadow and crevice.  The roof had gone missing a century before, the pinewood and juniper carried off for some cowboy’s fire.  What remained was a rectangular adobe structure, deserted by its inhabitants a thousand years before.

Small openings within the brick created windows that allowed beams of sunlight to slice across an empty room. Michael heard movement in the dry dust.  He peeked through a window and saw her in the doorway. Gold beams, as though sent from the gods, barred her entrance.  She touched the rough surface of the wall. Dust floated in the light as if the thousand-year-old clay breathed beneath her fingertips in communion.  She ducked under the sun beam, while her fingers traced the coarse bricks. She sank to the ground and grasped a handful of dust, clutching it.

He debated whether to leave her alone.  Of course, he was never one to leave a woman alone.

“Hey, are you OK?” he whispered.

She started. The dirt from her hands left orange streaks across her face.  “I’m fine.”

“Hey, you’re the girl from the café.”

She blinked away tears. “Oh yeah.  Hey.”

“So. What brings you here?”  Stupid question, he thought.  Save that one for the girls at the bars.  Michael walked around the pueblo to the doorway.

She answered when he appeared on the other side. “Decided to take the day off, figure a few things out.”

He sat next to her in the sand and looked up to the sky, through the roofless building. He allowed his eyes to play with the orange brick on the background of blue. Piercingly blue.

“I finished that last sculpture; the one I told you about.”

“Finished it? Like it’s complete? You’re not going back to rework it again?”

“No. Not this time.” He leaned back with her against the pueblo wall.  “This time, I decided to…let it be.”

Michael pointed to the clash of colors he found so enticing. “Look.”

***

Melissa followed his gaze, and sighed.  The dried orange of the clay gave way to pink, then gold.

“It’s beautiful.” She wanted to grab the vibrant, stark colors with her hands, and meld them together into something permanent.

“You could do that…” His voice trailed off as light etched out a new corner in the shadows of the pueblo.  “My neighbor is moving, selling her wheel, kiln, what’s left of her clay. You should take it.”

“Maybe I will.” She pressed her fingertips together, and felt the mixture of damp dust and sand.  He knew.  Knew what her hands were desperate to take hold of. Knew what she was desperate to find.

“Roll them,” Asha said, setting down a round ball of flour she had kneaded into shape on the smooth marble slab. “Let’s make a circle, like this,” she gently massaged the dough with a rolling pin, Peter’s eyes growing more rounded as the ball of flour spread to the slab’s perimeter. The top of Peter’s blonde head came up to Asha’s waist. He had turned four a fortnight ago.

“I wanna make a parantha” Peter whined, tugging at her dupatta. “I wanna make one, too.”

Asha knew she couldn’t give in to Peter’s whim. She had to get dinner ready and give Peter a bath before Madam got home. Dinner was at nine, Madam would be back any minute, and so would Saheb. Friday nights, Saheb returned late. On other weekdays, he came home directly from work, usually around seven, just as twilight deepened into night. Madam was not far away from the house. She was at the market next door, giving instructions to Tina (boutique owner cum tailor) about a sari blouse she was getting stitched for a wedding reception. Asha didn’t know who was marrying whom, but she had heard Madam and Saheb talking about the wedding at the dining table – the reception was going to be a grand affair, the dress code was Indian and Madam would wear a sari to blend in with the rest of the guests.

Madam worked hard at blending in. In the six months that Asha had worked for the Mills household, Madam had hosted three dinner parties at home with an exclusively Indian menu – paranthas and korma, kebabs, mattar-paneer for vegetarians – Asha had cooked mountains of food for the visitors. Madam’s guests were mostly Indian friends and acquaintances, except for Melissa and Simon, the American couple who had moved in next door recently. Saheb worked with Simon – no, that wasn’t how it was – Simon worked for Saheb and even at the dinner table, the young man had been acutely aware of their positions in the hierarchy of the American Consulate. He answered Saheb’s questions breathlessly, he laughed too loudly at Saheb’s jokes, almost choking on a bite of aloo parantha once when he burst into laughter. Asha had felt sorry for him. She could hear his thin, nervous voice from the kitchen, the forced laughter laced with panic, the halting tone, too eager to please.

“Ulloo” Peter yelled, running around Asha in circles. “Ulloo, ulloo, ulloo,” he shrieked, grabbing her waist with his bony arms.

Ulloo was the latest addition to Peter’s limited Hindi vocabulary. Not happy with Asha’s resolve to keep him away from the paranthas, he had christened her an owl, a night bird he dreaded. Asha bent down and scooped him up in her arms. He was all bone and no fat, a feather weight for a child of his age. “Ulloooooo…” he let out a mighty scream, ran out of breath and buried his face in her neck.

“Time for your bath,” Asha whispered in his ear. “Mummy’s going to be home soon.”

Madam walked in precisely at that moment. She had let herself into the house without bothering to ring the door bell, unlocking the front door with her spare key. She looked like a ghost – her skin was paper-white, the blood had drained away from her face. She was panting as if she had run all the way home.

“Aap theek ho, Madam?” Asha slipped into Hindi because she was worried, then remembered to rephrase the question in English. “Are you alright, Madam?”

Madam walked up to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of iced water. She gulped it down before opening her mouth to speak. “No, I’m not,” she said, holding on to her sides. “I most definitely am not alright”
Asha thought she was in pain. Oh my god, we’ll have to rush to the hospital and Saheb is not even home. I’ll carry Peter, she decided. Mani from next door will give us a ride to the hospital and he can call Saheb to let him know – Asha quickly chalked out the plan in spite of the panic welling up inside her.

“Should I call a doctor?” she asked, stepping closer to Madam.

“No,” Madam sank down into a chair and held her head with both hands. Peter slipped out of Asha’s hold and ran to her side. “I need a bloody drink,” Madam was talking to herself, not to Asha. Her head was buried in her hands, her blue eyes were staring at the rug on the kitchen floor. “What good’s a doctor going to do?”

Madam was angry, not ill. Asha felt like an idiot for misreading the signs. “Sorry,” Asha said. “I thought you were not feeling well”

Madam looked up and gave her a weak smile. She had a lean, sculpted face, high cheekbones and a sharp jaw line, a full-lipped, generous mouth. “Please, Asha,” she said, letting Peter climb on to her lap. “I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

Asha brushed aside the apology and offered Madam another glass of iced water. “What happened?” she asked, handing Madam the glass. “You look tired.”

“Delhi is not a pleasant place to live,” Madam groaned, sipping the water. “It may be alive and vibrant and colorful, all the things your Saheb says it is…But it’s just not a nice place to live. It’s not,” she said, shaking her head violently.

“What happened?” Asha repeated the question gently.

“I got mugged on my way back from the market,” Madam said, her voice shaky, her eyes glinting with tears. “You know the stretch of road where the streetlights never work? Right there, two boys jumped out of the shadows and blocked my way. One of them pointed a knife at me. I handed over my wallet and they let me walk away. It was over in a second. One minute they were leering at me, the next, they were gone. I ran all the way back home. My heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to explode.”

Asha stared at her open mouthed. She had never imagined that such danger lurked on the streets of Defence Colony, a posh residential area where house rents ran to lakhs of rupees. Back in her village in Chattisgarh, violence was a given. If you stepped out on the streets after sundown, you expected to be roughed up – either by the cops or the Maoists who had sworn to wipe out the cops. The police suspected you were a Maoist, even if you swore you had stepped out of your house to buy fish or fresh vegetables to cook dinner. A man could protest all he wanted. But if the cops were itching for a fight, they would find a reason to suspect you of plotting against them. If they were drunk, they beat you up and dragged you off to the station. If the Maoists had launched an attack on a police station recently or blown up a police convoy, then the cops were filled with an animal rage, gone mad with the thirst for revenge that made them reckless, trigger happy, hungry for a kill.

You had to gauge the level of their anger before stepping out on the street. Or else, or else, you ended up with a bullet in the back of your head like her brother. He had been shot and killed a day after his twentieth birthday. Tired of being cooped up indoors on a summer night, he had walked out of the house without saying goodbye to her or her grandmother. Off for a walk, a smoke, an hour or so spent loitering with his friends at the market. Asha and her grandmother had hardly noticed he was gone. They ate dinner at the usual time and Asha tucked her grandmother into bed. Her grandmother was a deep sleeper, never troubled by dreams or nightmares. Asha stayed up, finishing her reading for her English classes next day. She began to worry much later, after the clock struck midnight and reminded her that her brother had been gone for hours.

“Did I scare you?” Madam patted her arm lightly. “Don’t run away even if you are frightened…You’re such a help. I don’t know how I’d get by without you.”

For a moment, Asha considered giving in to the urge of unburdening her history onto Madam – her parents were gone before she was a teenager, they had both died of a fever – jungle fever, as her village knew it – probably malaria or typhoid, Asha had no way of finding out. Her brother wiped out by a stray bullet, her grandmother’s heart too weak to withstand the horror. She had no family left, nowhere to run to. A neighbour had helped her contact an employment agency in Delhi, bought her a ticket and bundled her into a train bound for the capital. Asha had said goodbye to her kindly neighbour and to her village on a chilly December night. She had felt nothing as the train pulled out of the station. Her tears had dried up; her heart was on ice.

She shrugged off the urge for confession and called out to Peter. “Time for your bath,” she said, dislodging him from his mother’s lap. He stuck his tongue out at her and kept slithering out of her grasp like a slippery fish.

***

That summer, Madam went away for a holiday. She was off for a cruise with her friends, all of them women – or ‘the girls’, as Saheb liked to call them. The cruise would take them to beautiful destinations scattered on Asia’s coastline. Madam showed Asha the brochures filled with pictures of blue skies, palm-fringed beaches and the ocean glittering like a sapphire in the sun. Asha leafed through the brochures so often that the pictures started flashing before her eyes when she fell asleep. She heard the murmur of the waves, the palms rustling in the breeze, the shrill cries of the gulls circling the water. She walked barefoot on a beach, next to the water’s edge, her feet sinking into a soft bed of sand. She felt the wetness of sea spray on her skin and woke up wondering what the sea smelt like.

Peter was packed off to his grandmother’s. With him and Madam gone, Asha found it hard to fill the hours. Her day dragged on. Housework took up very little of her time. Saheb was at work all day. He was not interested in carrying a packed lunch with him, nor did he come home in time for dinner. Breakfast was the only meal he demanded. He left for work early and came home very late. She was not expected to stay up and wait for his return. He said it was a busy time at work for him and that he couldn’t keep fixed hours. Asha wondered how people could get any work done in his office past midnight, but she kept her doubts to herself.

That night, Saheb came home later than usual. Asha was jolted out of sleep by the sound of a glass crashing on the kitchen floor. She sat up in bed and listened to the noises drifting in from the kitchen – Saheb’s footsteps, the sound of running water, dishes clattering in the sink, the whistle of the kettle. The clock on her bedside table showed quarter past three. Was he cooking dinner or brewing tea? Why the hell wasn’t he in bed? She stiffened when she heard a knock on her door: a gentle tap, once, twice, then a more insistent third one. She wrapped a dupatta around her shoulders and unlocked the door.

“Hi Asha,” Saheb smiled at her. “Some tea for you?”

His face was flushed and Asha could smell alcohol on his breath. He was looking at her with Peter’s eyes – the same shade of blue, the same startled expression in their depths. But Peter was a child, not a drunken man. A boy without guile, a child who never wished her harm.

“I don’t want tea,” Asha said, her hand reaching for the door handle. “I’m sleepy.”

Saheb stepped closer to her and laid his palm against her cheek. She shivered at his touch.

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” he asked.

She stepped away from him. Saheb didn’t stop her.

“I’ve been thinking about moving. Getting away from home, from work. Running away to a happy place,” he laughed a bitter laugh. “Where do we go? Paris? The Bahamas? Mauritius? Tahiti?” He was laughing hysterically, like a mad man, a drunk.

Asha stared at him without blinking. She was angry, and all her rage was contained in her balled up fists. She wanted to punch him right in the face, give him a black eye, watch him bleed. She wanted to explode and burn him to ashes in the flames.

“Just a thought,” he said, filling the silence with a sheepish laugh. The kettle on the stove shrieked. Saheb walked away from her side on unsteady feet and switched off the stove.

Asha went back into her room and slammed the door shut. She didn’t get any sleep for the rest of the night. She dragged out her battered travel bag from under the bed and went through the contents: two salwar-kameez sets Madam had gifted her, one green and the other turquoise blue, both of which she had never worn because she had been saving them for special occasions. Buried under the salwars was the picture Peter had given her a few weeks back – a full length portrait of her kneading a ball of dough, leaning over the kitchen counter, her dupatta flying in the wind like a kite. Peter was in the sketch too, a taller, more muscular version of himself. He was standing by her side, watching her, eyes rounded with excitement. She put the picture back under the clothes and stuffed all her belongings into the bag. Her clothes and sweaters went in first. Then she emptied the shelf in the bathroom and dumped her toothbrush, a half-empty tube of toothpaste and a bar of bathing soap into the bag. That was it. She was packed and ready to go. The pale light of dawn trickled in through the windows. The world outside was a blur to her.

She wanted to leave a letter for Madam, a note to tell her that she was sorry for disappearing without waiting for her return, sorry for not saying goodbye. In the end, she scribbled a note to Peter and left it in her bedroom, hoping Madam would find it. It was just a short letter, a string of words to let him know he was a good boy and that she was glad he had drawn a picture of the two of them together, a keepsake she would carry with her wherever she went.

The knock on his cabin door broke the mountain silence. He rose from his chair and answered. Four young women stood on the porch.

“Our truck broke down,” the tallest one said. “Do you have a phone we could use?”

He shook his head. “No phones up here.”

“Oh.” The woman frowned and shifted, looked at her friends. “Okay. Thanks anyway.” They turned to leave.

Years ago he never saw the humans this far out. Now they came in larger and louder groups invading from the lowlands. The cabin hardly felt remote anymore. It was harder to hide.

From what? He didn’t know.

He no longer hiked to town to re-supply because each time there were more humans and each time he returned to the mountain a little more depressed. Now he only lived off what he could grow, forage, or kill.

He watched the women walk away.

“Wait,” he called.

They stopped and glanced back.

“Where’s your truck?”

***

He fixed the truck in five minutes. The women thanked him profusely. He nodded and returned to his cabin.

The sun set over the ridgeline. He sat on his patio sipping pine-needle tea and watching twilight bleed over the mountains. Clouds thickened from the north. Some hard weather coming down. It grew crazier every year.

Things were changing. He’d lived here fifty years and could see it in the wildlife, forest, snow pack. He could smell it in the air blowing up the valley on warm summer afternoons. These changes would not benefit the humans. He was no genius but knew about exponential growth and knew it ended badly. He’d seen it happen to wildlife and sensed it happening to the humans the way he sensed changing weather in his knee.

This invoked neither joy nor sadness. Just the same grim acceptance he felt while killing a deer and cutting meat from the carcass. He considered the humans increasingly strange and with each passing day he grew less like them and more like the deer.

He felt a twinge of nostalgia. For the way things used to be. For the house he grew up in and the forests he’d roamed as a boy. When he was one of them.

But there was no going back. A threshold had been passed. He knew something with certainty. Things would end badly for the humans.

And nothing could stop it.

He sipped his tea and watched darkness overtake the mountains and clouds blot out the starlight and felt in his knee the first blast of weather coming down cold and hard from the north.