They drifted with it. He lost all touch with earth and existed in a primal sphere and she bit his shoulder and thrust at him with her hips and he kissed her neck and her nipples and they rolled into the straw beside the bed. She laughed in his ear. She turned over and knelt on all fours in front of him and he felt wild with the churn of desire and he put his hands on her hips and sank into her and let his body loom over her and she leaned forward and put her head on her forearms. He put his head back, closed his eyes, and thrust slowly and he could hear her moan. There was no space that they did not fill. He knew he would never relinquish this feeling until the light of a lamp edged the shadow away and they heard the older man gasp and say, “What the hell?” and the spell was broken.
THEY SAT IN THE HARD LIGHT OF THE KITCHEN
. None of them could speak. Bunky sat with his unlit pipe in his mouth, glowering. His eyes were shining. He kept thumping the table with the side of his fist and the two of them could only look at it, both of them snared in the beat of it. He
slammed it down a final time and stood, leaning on the table and shaking. She moved toward him and he glared and she stopped, one hand extended toward him, and she withdrew it slowly and let it fall to her side. Bunky stepped around the table and stood over him in his chair. His fist was clenched hard, red and splotched with white from the grip. It shook in the air and Eldon looked at it and lowered his head, waiting for the crush of it against his skull. But the older man cursed once and stepped away into the corner. The two of them looked at each other, faces fallen and empty of words.
“This is how you repay me?” Bunky asked. “The both of you?”
He turned from the wall. His face was etched deep with pain and anger and the wildness of despair.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. Pointlessly. “I’m sorry.”
Bunky shook his head. “Ya can’t be sorry for this. Not this. Neither of ya.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said.
He stared at her. He tried to laugh but it came out as a dry huff and he stalked to the door and turned and looked at them again. His leg quivered. “I loved you,” he said. “I give ya the whole deal. Trusted ya. Love ya best I could.”
“I know,” she said.
“Do ya? Do ya? If ya did how come this then? How come!”
“I don’t know.”
“You?” Bunky said, pointing a finger at him.
“It just happened,” he said. “Weren’t no plan.”
“No plan. Well, maybe ya got a plan now then. What’re ya gonna do now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We never talked on it.”
“Fuck and run? Is that it?” Bunky said. “That why you
took the walk tonight? Figure out how ya were gonna get outta here?”
“No,” he said. “Try’n figure out where to go my own self.”
“Why, if this was what ya were gonna do anyhow?”
“Thought she loved you. Didn’t wanna get in the waya that.”
Bunky laughed then, hard and bitter. “Sure didn’t look ya had me much in mind up in the barn there.”
“I did. Well, not there. Not then.”
“No. I wouldn’t suspect ya did. Ya love her?”
He looked at the floor under the table. “Yes,” he said. He raised his face and looked at her where she stood leaning against the counter with her arms folded across her chest. She was staring at the floor too but lifted her head at the sudden quiet and met his eyes. “Yes,” he said again.
“And you?” Bunky asked.
Her face was soft and limned with the light. “Yes,” she said.
It broke him. Bunky fell against the jamb. He put a hand to his face and when he opened his eyes they were sorrowful. He heaved a breath into him and walked back to the table and sat and put his head in his arms as he began to weep openly now. They could only watch. When it subsided he raised his head and wiped at his face with a sleeve. “Ya come like hope to me,” he said. “All of a sudden and strong and I come to believe in it. Believe in you.”
“I know,” she said.
“Thought this place might turn out to be a home. Wanted that with all my might. I love ya too. Even if you don’t hold it for me.”
“I know.” She said it to herself.
“Know a lot, don’t ya?” There was bitterness in his voice.
“Sometimes, things come along of their own accord,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do to prepare for it. Nothing we can do when it drops into our world unannounced. None of us meant to hurt you. None of us knew this was coming,” she said.
“I’m s’posed to draw comfort from that?”
“No. I’m just saying how it was.”
“What do you want to do then? He ain’t what ya might call a real goin’ concern.”
“I know that too,” she said. “But I also know I gotta live this through.”
He looked across the table. “Whatta
you
say?” he asked.
“I want her,” he said. “Don’t got it figgered how I’m gonna work it but I know I want her.”
The older man shook his head sadly. “Can’t be no booze-hound. Not now. Not with her. Can ya keep sober?”
“I can try.”
“Better do more’n that. You hurt her with drinkin’ I’ll come find ya.”
“We’ll take care of each other,” she said. “We can both work.”
He shook his head again. “Like that’s all of it.”
“I know what the state of it is,” she said. She stood taller now and there was a resolute set to her. Her shoulders squared and she looked directly at him. “I love him. I feel like there’s a big part of him I recognize and know even if he doesn’t. That’s enough for me.”
“It better be,” Bunky said. “I don’t see a whole lot more comin’.”
“You said I was a good man.”
The older man stared hard at him. “Gonna take some convincing now. Where’ll ya go?”
“Follow the work,” he said. “I know how to do that.”
“I don’t want her walkin’ or takin’ no bus.”
“What’re ya sayin’?”
“I’m sayin’ if yer hell bent on goin’ I can’t say nothin’ or do nothin’ to stop neither of ya. That’s just the set of things. But I don’t want her walkin’ nowhere. I’da never done that. So I’m givin’ her the stake truck.” He reached into his pocket and laid the keys on the table. “Got me the old pickup anyhow. She’s reliable. Loyal even, ya might say.”
He looked at her when he said this and she broke a little too. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
“All’s I ask is that ya leave now. Don’t dilly-dally. It plum hurts me terrible to have to look at ya both. Can’t be wakin’ up to see ya leave. Go now.” He slid the keys across the table and stood. “Now it’s my turn to walk. Don’t be here when I’m done.”
Bunky turned toward the door and took a step, but she moved to block his way and they stood and looked at each other. His face quivered. His shoulders began to shake and when she reached out to him he broke wide open and bawled into her shoulder. She cried too and hugged him hard. They stood like that for long moments then he peeled himself out of her embrace and strode to the door, wiping at his face. He turned at the doorway. “You take care of her,” he said, pointing a finger. “I ever learn she’s been disrespected, I’m coming to find you.”
“I hear that.”
“Ya stole my love,” he said. “Ya broke my damn heart. But I can learn to live with that. Got to, least ways. But you be a man about this. Or else.”
Then he turned and strode out the door and they stood in the silence he left behind, staring at the black space of the doorway until she moved finally and went to gather her things. He walked to the barn and gathered his own few belongings.
When he got back to the house she was standing beside the truck, looking out into the dark of the fields. There was a thick roll of bills in her hand. “He left this on the seat,” she said.
“Don’t know that I can take it,” he said.
“It’s a lot of money.”
“Don’t figure it covers any of what we done.”
“It’s a good stake. We can get set up with this.”
“Blood money,” he said.
She nodded. “It’s his way of still wanting to take care of me. He can’t let me go without knowing I’m okay.”
“Are ya okay?”
She stared out into the darkness of the field. Then she turned and put a hand on his arm and looked at him. “I want to be able to explain this to him one day. Right now I can’t even explain it to myself. But that’s all right.”
He had nothing to say to that. He laid his bag of belongings behind the seat of the truck. When he looked at her there were tears on her face. He wiped one away with the curl of a knuckle, and she smiled and got behind the wheel while he strode to the other side and got in beside her. They drove away into the black canyon of the night.
“
WHERE DID YOU GO
?” the kid asked.
“Followed the work like I said.” His voice was hollow, empty. He could barely hear him.
“Did ya drink?”
“Not for the longest time. I made a promise.”
“You could hold to that?”
“Had to,” he said. There was a long silence and the kid could hear the snap of the wood as it died down to embers. “She was a wonder, Frank. You gotta know that.”
He coughed then, a long, racking cough that made his shoulders shake, and the kid looked at him but all he could feel was a wave of rage in him. He stood up and strode over to a pine tree and broke off a couple of the lower branches. He whacked at the ground with them and snapped one with his boot and tossed it deeper into the trees. He walked back to the fire and hunkered down and poked at it with the end of the one remaining branch. Then he broke it over his knee and tossed the lengths into the fire without speaking or looking across at his father. They both watched while the wood took and flamed upward. “I
shoulda
known all that way before now. I shoulda been able to have an idea about her instead of a head full of nothin’,” the kid said. “I had a fuckin’ right.”
“I know it,” his father said. “Been times I tried to speak of her but the words would never come. I never had the sand to open up to it. I was scared that if I did I’d fall right back into the hurt of it and keep right on fallin’ way beyond any bottom I ever landed in and not know how to find my way back up again.”
“I hope that ain’t supposed to be a comfort,” the kid said.
“I don’t know what it is.”
“You
should
know,” the kid said and stood up suddenly. The motion made his father startle and he groaned at the pain it caused and gripped at his belly and gritted his teeth. The kid just looked at him balefully. “You don’t get to say things like that and just die. You don’t get to get off that easy.”
It took his father some time to regain composure. He wiped at his face that was glazed with sweat and his hand shook. “I know what’s owed,” he said. “I know that there’s no way in hell I’m gonna be able to make up to ya what I took by not bein’ around. But I can’t give ya years, Frank.”
“I don’t want years. I wanna be able to quit lookin’ at women I see and wonderin’ if that’s how she looked.” The kid punched both fists against his thighs and turned around and back again. “But you can’t give me that neither. Can ya?”
He waited. His father’s breathing was shallower now and he laid there with his eyes closed so that the kid stepped around the fire to lean close enough to see if he was still there. He poked him and his father opened one eye and stared. “Can ya move me to the rock, Frank?”
“You’re damn poorly.”
“I wanna sit and watch the light break over the valley when it comes.”
“That’ll be a while,” the kid said.
“Even so.”
The kid rose and retrieved the last bottle of Becka’s concoction and he held it to his father’s lips. He could only manage a small sip. The kid set a few more pieces of wood on the fire and then helped his father struggle to his feet. They shuffled across the open space to where the rock sat near the rim of the ridge. The valley below them was an open yaw of dark. Nothing was distinguishable. The sky was a dazzle of stars. The kid helped his father to a seat on the rock and he felt him shiver. It was more of a spasm and his father shuddered with the force of it. The kid wound the blanket tight around him. “She’da been proud to know ya as her son.”
The words hung in the air and the kid slumped to the
ground beside him. They both gazed out across the open valley. His belly felt raw and he rubbed at it and had nothing to say in reply so he sat there mutely and looked up at his father, who rocked slowly back and forth with his hands clutched at his own gut. “I want years,” his father said. “I want all of ’em. Every single wasted, drunken one. But I can’t get ’em back. I know it ain’t no, whattaya call it, legacy or nothin’, but all’s I got left is the story of her now.” He looked up into the sky and began talking again.
“She got on as a camp cook and me, I landed work at a sawmill. She didn’t wanna stay at the camp so we found us a cabin by a lake with a thin, unmarked road leading down to it. It was a trapper’s cabin. Hadn’t been used in a long time. She come to love it right off. But me, all I could see was a mess.
“But she got me goin’ on fixin’ it. We got to it every day after work. That girl could use some tools and it surprised me. She taught me to chink walls with mud and newspaper and moss and strips of cedar bark. She showed me how to mix mortar for the chimney stones and how to split cedar shakes for the roof. We even lifted the floorboards and insulated the space down there. Then we done the same with the walls and she helped me tote gyp board from the truck. Took three months to get it ready to take a winter.
“We dug us a couple flowerbeds and a garden plot for the next spring. She even had me dig out a root cellar for the turnips and potatoes and onions she was gonna grow. She taught me to make chairs outta willow wands and we set them on the porch we built so we could look out over the lake come evening.
“Funny thing is that in all that time I never thoughta drink. I had pocketfuls of cash from the job but it all went to her and she spent it on makin’ that rat hole of a cabin into a home. Never seemed like work neither. Seemed natural. Like breathing. Even the shitty jobs never got me down like they usedta. Never had me no trade but I worked hard an’ my reputation got good and after a time I was seldom out of work for more’n a day or two. The jobs were never no hell but it was cash money an’ meant we could be okay.”