Lamb (16 page)

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. And I want you to know there are ways we can keep our hearts safe. There are ways we can keep your heart from breaking, and mine.”

“There are?”

He laughed a little in the dark. “Of course there are. And that’s exactly what we’re doing by talking about this. And that’s exactly what we’ll continue to do. Do you understand?” He looked down at her.

“You will. I promise. When you’re twenty and I’m dead and gone and you look back on this night, you are not going to feel heartbroken. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to put your head in my lap and just sit here a little while?”

“Okay.”

“Here you go. Let’s just sit here a minute like this. And look down at your face and see if you look like you have a fever. We’re not going to sleep on this hard floor. We’re just resting together.”

“I’m comfortable.”

“You’re comfortable. No you are not.” He moved his fingers in small circles in her hair, in her scalp.

“That feels good.”

“I know it does. Was it a pretty night out there?”

“I was too sad.”

“Was it even more sad because the night was pretty?”

“Yes.”

“My heart is just like yours. Did you know that?”

“It is?”

“It is.”

“That’s how we knew to go back to the parking lot.”

“That’s right.” He laughed. “That’s right.” They lay still. “Em?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to rest on the bottom bunk awhile? And I can check you for a fever until morning? This floor is killing my old bones.”

She pressed the back of her head against his blue jeans, looking at him, and he lifted her onto his knee and pulled her up. She leaned her head against
his shoulder. He kissed the cheek, and kissed the jaw, and kissed her mouth. “Okay?”

She nodded.

He stood up, still holding her, supporting her bottom on his hip and arm. She draped her arms around his neck like a child. He took her into the little bunk room. “Do you want some cool water?” He felt her shrug. “Are you just going to shrug now all the time?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Stubborn girl.”

She shrugged again. And our guy told her it would be his understanding, from here on out, that whenever she shrugged, it would mean she was saying how much she liked him. It would be her way of saying yes.

He set her down. “Are you too warm in those clothes?”

She looked down at her blue jeans and shirt. “Not too.”

“We should at least take off our socks. So we don’t inadvertently plant a grasslands in the sheets. Careful. Those little seeds are sharp.”

They sat beside each other on the bottom bunk and removed their socks. He laid them neatly over the back of the metal chair. “Good,” he said. “Can you stand a minute? I’d like to turn down the bed for you, dear.” He pulled back the blanket and sheet, folding the wool blanket into quarters at the
end of the bed, unzipped his sleeping bag wide and laid it over the top, then held it all open for her. “Go on,” he said. “Climb in.”

When they were both in, he pulled her up so her head was on his shoulder, her tiny arm over the great barrel of his chest, and he turned his head down a little to see her face.

“Em. Does this remind you of anything? A movie? A TV show?”

“What?”

“This. Now. This little house, and the shop, and you and me in it, and nothing else around. The things we’re sharing. Did you ever see a TV show like this or a movie or something?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Think hard.”

“I am.”

“Think of all the movies and songs and books you know. Are any of them like this?”

“No.”

“You’re sure? Double sure?”

“Double sure.”

“Isn’t that good news?”

“I guess.”

“Remember when we said if we went back far enough in time, the planet would be flooded with seawater, and we’d have to reinvent the world from scratch?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember we said this time, we’d get it right?”

“I remember.”

“That was just pretend, right? But Em”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“I think we’re really doing it. Because no one’s ever had this before. Do you understand? No one gets to have this, what we’re having. No one ever has. We’re inventing it.”

“Gary.”

“Yeah.”

“What day is it?”

“A Thursday.”

“What day in October?”

“Do you want to say two more days? We’ll stay two more days?”

“Okay.”

“We can revise as we go.”

“Okay.”

“You’re such an empathetic little body.”

She looked up at him.

“It means you’re good at imagining how other people are feeling.”

“Oh.”

“I wish I could give you this and home with your mother at the same time.”

“Me too.”

“I’ll try to think of a way.”

“For both?”

“You trust me, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I know you do.”

They were both up in the night, the girl with a fever, her face burning, Lamb filling her canteen and holding her head and tipping it into her mouth and feeding her broken aspirin. Helping her up and opening the little metal side door so she could piss outside in the dirt. They did not sleep when she was burning up and her clothes hurt her skin and her bones were cold and then her bones were hot and it hurt to breathe. Her eyes were burnt, she said, and dirt was stuck to the insides of her eyelids.

“Sunglasses,” he said. “I should have bought you sunglasses.”

He laid the edge of his hand at the hip of her jeans, his head filled with fire. Dark early morning hour. No crickets, no coyotes, no sound but their breath, their whispering, as if even here they did not want to be overheard.

“Is it better or worse?”

“Better.”

“Should we fold back the blankets?”

“Please.”

He climbed out of bed and rolled everything back to the metal frame at the end.

“When’s the last time anyone held you like this? Or was beside you in bed like this?”

“That day.”

“What day?”

“That day you threw me in your truck.”

“Did I throw you?”

“I hit my head.”

“I’m sorry, Em. Do you forgive me?”

“I forgive you.”

“Who held you then?”

“Mom. When she got home from work.”

“Tell me how it was.”

“I was in bed already.”

“What time was it?”

Shrug.

“No, Em. You have to tell me exactly how it was.” He pushed her by the shoulders a little away from him and looked at her. “Look at my face and tell me the story.”

“It was six or something.”

“Still light out?”

“Yes.”

“You were upset. I’d upset you. Say it. Say: you upset me, Gary.”

“You did.”

“That’s good for me to hear. Tell me. Mom was worried about you? She thought you were sick?”

“I guess.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked if I was sick and I said a little.”

“And she sat on the edge of the bed with you?”

“She brought us a snack in bed.”

“What snack?”

“Milk and strawberry toast.”

“That’s a good snack.”

“I know.”

“And she gave you the snack and went off with Jessie?”

“She stayed with me.”

“For a little while?”

“For the whole night.”

“What did Jessie do?”

“TV I guess.”

“You were crying in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’d scared you.”

“And because my friends. They wouldn’t answer when I called. Their moms said they weren’t home. But I knew they were.”

“You were shaken up.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you came to find me the next day?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought things weren’t so good in that apartment.”

“Sometimes they were.”

Picture the black dawn. The spray of stars overhead. Alison Foster, poor old son of a bitch, limping back up the dirt drive of the old Calhoun place with his red Maglite, gray head trembling, eyes impossibly small and hard and squinting ahead as if he could see David Lamb and the child in the dark. As if he knew. As if he’d catch them at it. As if Lamb didn’t know Foster was out there prowling around and peering in the cabin windows. Thinking what?

Foster didn’t get it that when Lamb drives her in his truck off the paved roads and into a place bright and stark and sere, beyond the humid Midwestern acres of hog feed and furrowed till, the girl—his girl, Lamb’s girl—is perfectly okay. Foster didn’t get that it’s a favor, a gift, say, taking her beyond the miserable reaches of prairie restoration reeking of sewage processing plants and cornstarch factories. That she rode along in the passenger seat with her eyes half closed and fixed upon Lamb as though he were the handsomest, wisest, most beneficent man on planet Earth.

Besides, Foster wouldn’t have found them in the cabin. Runny moonlight cast long, bent shadows across the concrete floor of the bunk room, though Lamb had tried to cover the windows with squares of a stiff and mildewed drop cloth he found folded
beneath the workbench. Faint smell of woodsmoke, fire snapping in the iron stove. Outside the shop the north fork of the river running black past a stand of narrow-leafed cottonwoods just beyond the county road. A spectral mist hung rib-high among the water birch along its banks. A single box elder clenched its branches against the cold.

And his girl was sleeping beside him, her wonderful blue-and-white flowered nightgown twisted up around her bare, freckled waist. Soft belly rising a little with each breath, her warm damp head resting on Lamb’s outstretched arm, sweat shining at her temples, her mouth open, her little lips open—Christ, she was small—and he was swearing mutely into the space above him that this was good for her. That as long as he was honest and approached this thing from every possible angle, everything would line up and fall into place of its own accord, like atoms helixed and pleated tight within the seeds of cheatgrass needling the hems of her tiny blue jeans: fragile, inevitable, life-giving, and bigger than he. Such was his faith in the forces that had given rise to the girl herself, to the rapid trills of violet green swallows up the mountain, to the spoon-shaped leaves of prairie buttercups they’d seen blanketing the roadside in eastern Wyoming.

Lamb was just a man in the world. He’d fed her well and told her stories and loved her up all the
way through the dim-lit outskirts of Rockford, Iowa City, Omaha; across the national grasslands, stiff and pale in the increasing cold; over the continental divide as the sky shed itself in falling snow, and up to where there were no trees, no birds, no life but the slow force of rock rising up from a thin and frozen crust of ground. Say this was all in hopes of glimpsing something beautiful. And is there anything wrong with that?

The next morning was just like all of their mornings: three little silver pans going at the tapered end of Tommie’s trapper fire. Coffee and canned meat and beans and toast with jam and four eggs.

“There. Now tomorrow your fire will be even better.”

She pulled her lips into her mouth and lifted her little face up at him. “It’s working, though.”

“You won’t forget how to do it, will you?”

“Nope.”

“Should I send you little reminder notes? With directions and diagrams?”

She made a face.

“It’ll give you dreams of the next man you’re going to build a trapper fire with. Only this guy, you’ll have to teach
him
how to do it.” He lifted his
chin and turned his face away. “It hurts my feelings to say that, Tom. But we have to say it.”

She stirred the beans. “Nope,” she said. “Only building a fire with you. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Don’t say that, Em. Someday you’ll get married and you’ll go camping with your husband, and he won’t know how to build a fire. You’ll have to show him what I taught you.”

“I won’t get married.”

“Won’t you work for the forest service when you’re out of college? And tell me how to find you so I can come visit you in your tent? I’ll be that old camper who’s always haunting the high plains, right? I’ll wear an orange cap so you’ll know me. Even from far away.” He bent over and kissed the crown of her head. “I want you to always remember that I never let you eat a meal out here that was something we added hot water to.”

“Like oatmeal, puke.”

“Or dehydrated vegetables. I want you to remember all the meals we made together, and how every one of them had whole beans it. What’s happening underneath that toast?”

She tipped her head sideways and checked the smoke, checked the flames, and looked up at him.

“Go ahead. Let me see you fix that.”

With a white branch she rearranged the logs to keep the natural windbreak from burning it up too quickly, then turned to the little pile of sticks and tree punk and pine needles and twigs and pushed a handful in beneath the lowermost level of burning wood.

“If you’re ever alone in the woods waiting for me,” he said, “you’d be okay. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“You’d know how to make it through the night.”

“Yep.”

She placed the white branch behind her in the cold grass.

“You’ve learned a thing or two about being an outdoorswoman.”

“I know.”

After eating and rinsing the pans, Lamb would drink his second cup of coffee and they’d walk up the hill across the spans of sagebrush and sumac and along a deep empty draw. Rust-bitten iron and steel lay in broken pieces in the weeds—comb of a hay rake, the axle and wheels of a mowing machine. They’d pass it on their way to the same grassy promontory each morning from where Lamb would point to the distant foothills, the innermost point, he told her, of a spiral of mountain and rock, like a granite wall corkscrewed around the little mountain lair she’d inherit—he promised—when he died.

If we were going to stay out here, he told her, we’d set up this little coal-burning stove, polish it till it turned black again, and we’d bring a little life back to this place. Then we’d build a new stable of blond wood, and I’d buy you a string of ponies. You could learn all the old ways. Boiling pudding in a bag. Decorating caraway seed cakes with burnt sugar. Trapping and roasting prairie chickens. We’d get some hired help, nice young guys from Idaho or Oregon who could put up a new rail fence around front and keep all the fences mended.