Battleborn: Stories (12 page)

Harris gripped the iron ore. Why not? he wanted to ask her. But he knew. What could this place give to anyone?

Magda returned to her father’s truck. Castaneda took her hand and helped her in. Before he shut the door he smiled at his daughter and rubbed his hand along the back of her neck. It was brief—an instant—but Harris saw everything in the way the man touched her. His hand on her bare neck, the tips of his stout fingers along the black baby hairs at her nape, then under the collar of her shirt. His shirt. From where he stood, he saw all this and more.

The truck pulled away and began its descent to the bald floor of the valley. Milo resumed her barking. Harris told her to shut up, but she went on. Rhythmic, piercing, incessant. The old man had never heard anything so clearly. He felt a steady holy pressure building in him, like a vein of water running down his middle was freezing and would split his body in two. He lunged at the dog. He wanted ore to skull. He wanted his shoulder burning, his hand numb. He wanted the holes that had been her ear and eye growing wider, becoming one, bone crumbling in on itself like the walls of a canyon carved by a river. He wanted wanted wanted.

He took hold of the scruff of the dog’s neck. He tried to pin her beneath his legs but she yelped and wormed free, and instead he fell back on his ass. He dropped the ore in the dirt. Milo scrambled behind the wheelbarrow where he’d been sorting. He reached up and grabbed the wheelbarrow’s rusted lip and tried to pull himself up. The wheelbarrow tilted toward him, then toppled, sending Harris to the dirt again. Rocks rained down on him. A flare of pain went off in his knee and in the fingers of his left hand, where a slab of schorl crushed them.

He sat breathing hard, surrounded by heavy, worthless minerals. He took his wrecked fingers into his mouth. Then he fished his Zippo from his pocket and lit a cigarette. He breathed in. Out. The Ram shrank to the blinding white of the lake bed. He stayed there for some time, smoking among the hot alluvial debris, the silt and clay and rocky loam. He watched a fire ant stitch through the gravel and into the shadow of the overturned wheelbarrow; then he watched the truck. A pale cloud of dust behind it swelled, then settled, then disappeared. She was gone. And all the while Milo’s unceasing yowl ricocheted through the valley, returning to him as the
boom
of the fireworks, the
levántate
Magda never whispered, the twin cackles of the Hastings brothers bounding over the cattle range, as every sound he’d ever heard.

THE ARCHIVIST

T
here was no salve for the space he left. If there had been—if science had developed an ointment for heartache or a pill for the lovelorn—I wouldn’t have used it. I wanted pain. I wanted cataclysmic anguish. For that, our old ritual.

So every night I’d get home from my job as a clerk at the public library and draw a bath with water as hot as I could stand. On the kitchen chair beside the tub I’d put a cheap bottle of cab, a book, a pack of cigarettes, a joint and a sleeve of peanut butter cups I’d bought at the Winner’s around the corner, where I bought the wine.

One night, especially plowed, I called my older sister, Carly. I told her Ezra and I were through. I said, “For real this time,” which I said every time. She said she’d be right over. “Bring the baby,” I said.

I waited for Carly in the bath, drinking wine from my blue-flecked enamel camping cup. Once, Ezra called the cup my cowboy mug, and with him gone I couldn’t stop seeing it that way. I felt insufferably rustic whenever I drank from it, and yet I didn’t stop drinking from it. That’s what he did to me: permeated, saturated, submerged me in him. Now, I submerged myself. I surfaced, took a cigarette, and breathed him into my foolish hungry lungs.

I started smoking the night we met, when Ezra stood up from the bar where we’d been playing video poker, said, “I’m gonna go outside” and put two fingers to his lips, that smoker’s sign language. It looked like he kissed them softly, the thick pads of his fingertips. I had a good man at home, waiting for me. I said, “Me too,” followed him outside and smoked the first cigarette of my life. I was twenty-six. The street was dark except for a Winner’s down the road, glowing like a beacon. Ezra leaned in and gave me a light. Then he pushed my hair back from my face. “I give this a week,” he said. “You?” “Two,” I said. “Tops.” He smiled this absolutely lethal smile and we smoked silently against the quaking of the freeway and the darkened machinery of the recycling plant across the street. I asked my boyfriend to move out the next day. I knew then that I would follow Ezra anywhere he’d let me.

•   •   •

C
arly let herself into the apartment and called for me. The baby squealed. Carly lost one of her fallopian tubes to an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age. Between that and her husband Alex’s reversed vasectomy, my niece is a regular miracle. I love her more than a person ought to love one thing.

My sister came into the bathroom and said, “Oh, honey,” her face creased with empathy. She set the Miracle on the floor beside the tub and surrounded her with pastel toys, which the baby ignored. The Miracle played exclusively with adult things. Keys. Eyeglasses. Cell phones. Just a year old and already she was a severe child.

Carly had lately taken to gathering the Miracle’s feathery blond hair into a ponytail at the top of her head, a hairdo which resembled nothing more than the sprout of a cartoon turnip. The Miracle seemed not only aware of this resemblance but appropriately suspicious of it. She eyeballed me where I sat in the tub.

Carly discreetly removed the wine and pot from the chair. She left my cigarettes, the peanut butter cups, a
National Geographic
and the cowboy mug, which I discovered was inexplicably, disappointingly empty.

I listened to her in the kitchen, recorking the near-gone bottle and placing it on top of my refrigerator. “Red wine contains resveratrol and antioxidants,” I called to her. “It’s good for the heart.”

Carly returned to the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. She crossed her legs and unwrapped a peanut butter cup. She looked like our mother, sitting that way. She had our mother’s legs, her long fingers. She touched her mouth the same way our mother did in pictures. Our mother was a beauty and an alcoholic. She died when I was ten and Carly was fifteen. She drove drunk into a power pole near Reno High at ten o’clock in the morning. For as long as I can remember, my sister has wanted to be the good mother we never had.

Carly folded the peanut butter cup in two and offered half to the Miracle. “Don’t tell Daddy,” she said.

“Thank you!” said the Miracle.

Carly said, “You’re welcome!” Then, “I know you miss him, Nat. But you can’t stay in the bath smoking pot for the rest of your life. You’ve got to keep moving. Get a hobby. They’re starting a volunteer docent program at the museum. That would be
perfect
for you.” She nibbled the edge of her peanut butter cup. Carly had never met Ezra.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Do,” she said. “Meet me for lunch. I’ll introduce you to Liam.” Her boss. Single, she’d mentioned more than once. She gave my foot a chipper little pat. She was happy to have a project.

•   •   •

E
zra and I lasted a year, barely. Every night, I would unlock my back door and get into the bath. I’d drink, read and wait for him. Some nights he never came. Those nights I would stay in the bath until the water got cold and there was no more hot water to warm it. On nights he did come—often from somewhere that left his pupils big and his hands trembling—he’d let himself in through the back door, come into the bathroom, touch the top of my head and sit on the lid of the toilet. I’d prop my foot on the faucet and he’d silently loop his index finger around my big toe. We’d read—me
National Geographic
and histories and remarkable true stories of people surviving plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche; him the local newspaper and slim volumes of plays. We’d talk and he’d roll us cigarettes. In flush times he would roll me joints too, with little strips of paper rolled up in the end so that I wouldn’t burn my fingertips when I smoked them. Ezra was mostly into booze and coke. He didn’t smoke pot unless he was already especially fucked up. This was also the only time he ever said he loved me.

•   •   •

W
eeks passed, and I moved though the world perpetually bewildered, in the way of the shell-shocked and the heartbroken. Some days I did my best. Eventually I even met Carly for lunch, as promised. I waited for her in the gallery, where I was reminded why I disliked art museums in general and the Nevada Museum of Art in particular. The rooms were too well lit, and I didn’t care for the way sound behaved in the place. There was a rooftop terrace where Carly hosted cocktail parties for members and prospective members. It was bloodless. My high school friends had their wedding receptions up there.

Car and I walked to a deli and ordered Reubens. At one point, and out of absolutely nowhere, she said, “Liam went to Yale.”

“Cool,” I said, through a mouthful of dressing-sogged rye. Carly looked at me for a moment, pained, then plucked a translucent shred of sauerkraut off my chin.

On the way back through the courtyard, we passed a sculpture I’d never seen before. It seemed to be made from a hundred arcing pieces of soft gray driftwood, all delicately fitted together and balanced in the perfect form of a horse. It looked as though I could push it over. I loved this about it. “Touch it,” said Carly. I did, and immediately realized that it wasn’t made of wood, but of bronze patinaed to look like wood. The branches I’d thought were carefully interlocked were welded together. Just then, Carly called across the courtyard.

Liam was good-looking in a way that indeed suggested Connecticut. He was lean and jaunty, though he’d obviously made some effort to coax his hair into a state of semi-unruliness. Carly introduced us, then said, “Well,” and retreated swiftly inside.

Liam smiled and removed his hands from his pockets as if just remembering some childhood reprimand about having them there. I struck the sculpture with the heel of my hand, and the blow made the hollow sound of a bottomless well.

“Carly says you have an art degree,” Liam ventured.

“I thought this was wood.”

“It was,” he said, in a consoling tone that brought to my attention the fact that I had arrived at a state of needing consolation. He went on hurriedly. “Or, she molded the wood, anyway. Molded the wood and then burnt it out.” He gestured sheepishly to a placard set into a boulder nearby, by way of citation perhaps.

“That’s terrible,” I said, suddenly feeling nauseous. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” Liam started to speak again, nobly, but I interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”

Liam, maintaining his East Coast dignity, said only, “Right.”

On the walk home, I stopped occasionally to brace myself against the bigtooth maples lining the street. I pressed my hands to my breasts where they’d begun to bloom up from my bra, and longed for a museum that didn’t feel like a museum. I preferred the preserved homes of historic figures. I liked a quill ready to be dipped in a pot of ink, a bonnet tossed onto a rocker, firewood half stacked by a stove. A house waiting for people who would never come. This made sense to me.

Outside my front door sat a pair of tennis shoes, the heels trampled down, the canvas cracking in the sun. A plaque mounted on the brick above them might have read:

The End
(1 of 3). The day was warm for fall. They had their feet in the Truckee River. They’d been drinking wine since lunch. She was drunk and he was getting there. She was telling him where the phrase
Indian summer
came from. He didn’t believe her. They were laughing about this when all at once he stopped laughing and said, “A part of me wants this. More than anything.” He was always saying this. She had long since begun to wonder how many parts he had. She knew she’d fallen for a puzzle of a man, all parts and pieces and fractions, but was only now seeing how few of those would ever be hers.

He took her hand. “I want you seventy percent of the time,” he said. “No. Seventy-five.”

Fucker
, she thought, wanting badly to bite him in all sorts of places, all sorts of contexts. On the apple of his cheek. Through a cutlet of skin gathered from the back of his hand. There was nothing to say. In the silence it occurred to her that they were within walking distance of her apartment, and that they had been all day. She saw the route home the way a bird would.

He said, “I’m sorry. I hate that I said that.”

“Then stop,” she said.

“I can’t.”

She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home. She told him he was making things too hard on her. She told him she was afraid she’d let him do this forever. The saying of these things had been a long time coming—these and many others—and as she walked home, her feet riverwet inside these tennis shoes, she knew they meant the end of them.

A second placard, buffed shiny and mounted at chest height just inside the front door:

The End
(2 of 3). Two days later a storm rolled in from the west and Ezra came, for the first time, to the front door. When she opened it he said, “Hey,” and took her by the jaw and kissed her. She tried to find some sign in the way he worked his mouth against hers. But it was his same kiss—as brutal, as consuming. It did to her what it always had. He turned her around and pushed her up against the cool wall of this hallway. He put one hand in her hair roughly and kissed her neck, more teeth than tongue. He worked his other hand up then down her, shucking her clothes to the floor. The front door was still open, a wet autumn smell slipping inside. He pinned his knees into hers and spread her legs apart. She made uncontrollable gasping sounds, muffled by her mouth pressed to the plaster. He pushed harder against her and she tilted her hips into him. Then, as if he felt the fight go out of her, he turned her around so she faced him. He bent and kissed her once on the bridge of her nose. She managed to say, “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

“Why are you here? What do you want?”

He smiled and kissed her fondly on the mouth and through the kiss he is to have said, “I want you to be quiet and let me fuck you.”

And she was grateful, so she did. He slipped both his hands under her ass and lifted her, mounting her bare back against this very spot. Her legs bowed around him. She braced herself against his thick shoulders and he rocked into her. She let herself believe that this could be a beginning rather than an end. That this was them. Then she stopped thinking altogether. When he came he made the same quick half breaths he always did. He slackened and they slid slowly down the wall, their limbs loosely threaded together. They were unmoving and sweat-slick, his head resting on her chest. A car drove by, its tires sluicing cleanly through the rainwater. By then it felt natural not to say the thing that needed saying.

A third, positioned unobtrusively near the unmade bed:

The End
(3 of 3). Afterward, he carried her to bed. Before they slept, she got up and nodded toward the fire escape. “I think I’ll have a cigarette,” she said. Without looking at her he said, “I quit, actually.”

Just before dawn she woke to the sound of Ezra gathering his clothes from the hallway. Already she could feel two sore spots like crab apples above her ass where he’d worked her hips against the wall. (See placard two.)

She said nothing. Once he was dressed he sat on the edge of the bed beside her. “I know you’re awake,” he said. She did not move. He rubbed the soft place behind her ear with his thumb. “I love you,” he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, “Don’t say that.” She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met.

That afternoon—after I’d abandoned poor Liam—Carly called me four times. I ignored her. I walked around my apartment, lightly touching the artifacts Ezra left behind in the year we were together. They were pathetic and few: a bag of white tea gone stale, a screwdriver we meant to use to fix a window screen but never did, some books, a toothbrush I bought him. I decided I would preserve these just as he’d left them, convert my apartment into the Museum of Love Lost. I envisioned other exhibits. An installation of all the clever, evasive text messages he ever sent me, a replica of the bar where we met, handmade dioramas of our finest outings. That night I woke to the sensation of the bedsheets against my nipples. In the dark I saw our happiest moments in miniature.