“It sounded just like you said ‘squirrel.’ Or more like you said, ‘squuuiirrelll—” I couldn’t finish. I convulsed in the joy of her humanity.
“Stop it, Cowpie. You keep this up and I’ll call up a whole mess of squirrels—an out-and-out scurry.”
Scurry of squirrels. Essie was always teaching me new words—most of which she likely found on the shelves of 447. My favorite word though, of all the fancy, sophisticated, high-falutin’ words, was Cowpie.
I know it sounds strange that I would want an attractive girl like Essie calling me a pile of cow manure; but even cowpies attract beautiful butterflies—delicate and indifferent to the stench of refuse.
When I returned to the inn on the last Sunday that home had anything to offer me, I practically ran to find Essie and tell her that I had returned to the waterfall I promised to show her. I wanted to report where the fire had been contained and where a new outbreak had begun—and who was rumored to be the culprit. Whose home was in more imminent danger and that ours was safe for the time being. After parking, I weaved between the guests taking their morning strolls, headed straight for the dormitory, flung my bag onto my bed, and raced back out toward the main building.
Or at least I would have, had Sol not blocked the doorway of the dorm. He leaned his right shoulder against the wall, diagonally filling the frame, and took a long draw of his hand-rolled cigarette. The tobacco, sweet and stale, filled my overcharged lungs. Even in the dimness of the fading day, I noticed the reddened rims of his eyes. Only three things typically cause a man’s eyes to be bloodshot, and I was relatively certain that Sol had never shed a tear in his life, or that a weekend off had caused loss of sleep. I bit my lower lip, a tip I had learned from handling Bud. It kept me from saying anything until I had at least weighed the risks.
“Letcha back off the rez, huh?” he smirked.
“Yeah, got a week off for good behavior.” My lip slipped free quite easily despite the metallic aftertaste my willpower drew from it. I wanted to get to Essie and didn’t have time to waste on his bullshit.
“Mmm. Looks like you brought back a set of balls with you.” Sol righted himself, dropped his cigarette, and extinguished the embers beneath his heavy boot.
I refused him eye contact and clenched my jaw. I don’t have time for this shit.
“Hey. Look me in the eye, boy.” He craned his neck like a strutting rooster. “What? You gonna cry? Where you going in such a hurry, anyway?” He pushed my right shoulder so hard he almost lost his balance.
“Dinner,” I managed to force out, without looking up.
“Too late for dinner. You know that. Gonna go find that pretty little squaw of yours? Essie, right?”
How’d he know about Essie? Had he catcalled her like the soldiers she spoke of? Her name sounded ugly on his lips. I shrugged.
“I’m talking to you, boy!” Sol’s voice rose like an incoming thundercloud. He stepped toward me, grabbing my chin and raising it level with his. Amid the tobacco, a stale malt stench gurgled forward. The smell was so familiar it was oddly comforting. His tone had soured in the same fermentation as Bud’s had early in my life. I didn’t want to look, and yet at the same time I desperately wanted to stare into those hollow eyes, to show him that I wasn’t scared. I was mad. Annoyed. Tired. But I was not scared. The realization of that absence of fear felt so foreign that it angered me even further.
I also knew, though I don’t think I realized it until much later, that the moment two pairs of eyes meet is the very moment when each decides if those eyes are human, animal, or something entirely devoid of a pulse. If the other’s eyes are not human, the fear will surely return.
Drawing in his rancid stench, I prepared my lungs to burst forth with every conceivable damnation I could muster, followed shortly by my best defensive, protective stance. For obvious reasons, I was never a runner, so I had become uniquely adept at blocking shots until my opponent tired.
“Sol …” I exhaled and, lifting my head, I grasped both his shoulders opposite me and pushed hard, knocking him back until he fell down the steps and onto the ground. For a brief moment it was as if I was watching a movie, that I was not the cause of his fall; but the release felt so good I allowed myself to be pulled back into the moment, responsible. There was no returning, no apologizing, and I was more than ready to keep moving forward regardless of what Sol might return with.
“Well, hello, gents. Didn’t mean to break up social hour.” A guard stared up at me, standing inches from where Sol lay.
I immediately recognized him as the soldier from the front gate, the very one who had greeted Essie and me on our first day.
“Not interrupting anything, am I?” The soldier smiled half-heartedly. I have never heard a rhetorical question so pointed. The guard, Lieutenant Franks, according to his badge, stepped up toward the doorway and lit a cigarette he pulled from his shirt pocket.
“Can we help you with something?” Sol slurred, propping himself up. His face reddened, out of both rage and embarrassment.
“Nah, just making my rounds. Didn’t even expect to find anyone here. Turning in early?”
I shook my head and took the opportunity to leave the barracks without a word, before Franks could leave me alone again with Sol.
I headed straight for the main building, entered the lobby without noticing who was or who was not there, ducked into the stairwell, and climbed my way to room 447. I was completely unaware if anyone saw or followed me. All I knew was that I had been diverted long enough from Essie and I desperately needed her honeyed perfume to drown Sol’s lingering scent from my clothes, my hair, and especially from my boiling blood.
Weeks ago, Essie and I had devised a plan to hide the key in the closest wall sconce so that either of us could come and go as we pleased. When I reached the fourth floor, I turned the corner quickly and jammed my hand so hastily into the sconce that I nearly broke the bulb. My fingers fumbled around the fixture, but turned up empty. Essie had to be inside the room already. I moved to the door and jiggled the handle.
Locked.
I knocked softly twice.
Nothing.
My stomach knotted. What if she wasn’t inside? What if the key was lost or stolen? What if someone else was inside? I knocked again, three times and this time louder. The door gave way so quickly I nearly fell inside.
“Geez! Give me a sec, will you?” Essie shook her head, hands on hips.
“Oh, thank God.” I rubbed my face. “You like to have scared the—”
“Ah, settle down, Cowpie.” Essie turned and flopped down on the couch, pulling a leather-bound book from the coffee table onto her lap. She folded that piece of stationery, the one I had seen her reading many times before, and tucked it in the middle of the book. “How was Cherokee? Still there?” Essie had long ago told me that home didn’t hold much for her and she wasn’t the least bit interested in returning if she didn’t have to.
“Yeah.” I settled myself, falling into the chair across from her. “Still there. But I have some stories for you.”
“Oh?” She looked up from the book. “Do tell.” Contriving sweetness, she cradled her chin in her palms.
For the next hour I spun my weekend visit home into such an engineered, fantastic tale it made Odysseus look like a joyrider. I resurrected earlier visits, fitting their joints so haphazardly my epic grew beyond anything of this world, ancient or otherwise. Essie lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling, and silently listened. Periodically, she would turn her face toward me, waiting on the next line, especially in the suspenseful moments. And, because it meant her looking into my eyes, I added a few suspenseful moments. I couldn’t help myself.
“ … stood on two legs just like a man, or I guess a woman since the cubs were there.”
“‘Cause she was a woman,” Essie shrugged. “Bear clan for sure.” Essie was reminding me of one of the original Cherokee clans and the Bearmen of our mountains. “Did you talk to her?”
“Well, hell
, no, I didn’t talk to her! She’s lucky I didn’t hit her or her cubs.”
“I’d say you are lucky you didn’t hit her or her cubs.”
I smiled. “You know, I don’t believe all those stories, but after seeing that yona and how mad she was at me, damn. I’ve only seen a look like that from Lishie. Don’t know many animals that can strike fear like that.” Essie laughed with me.
Despite her ever-changing analysis of the bear encounter, I was surprised to find that ultimately Essie was far less interested in the bears and the possible latest sighting of Edgar than she was the waterfall. She always asked about the waterfall.
“How tall? Could you drink the water? Where did you say it was again? Deep enough to swim? Any greens?” The questions trailed one after another. What I didn’t know I made up so that she would not stop talking.
When I finished answering and exaggerating, rising to peruse the bookshelves as if I actually cared what was on them, she sat up and leaned over the couch’s armrest. “So we’re going, right? Maybe next weekend?”
“Where? Cherokee?”
“No … well, sort of. I mean to the waterfall.”
“Oh, sure. I guess. I mean, if I can pull you away from this place,” I mocked.
Essie sat back. It was as if she had abruptly awoken from a daydream. “Well, maybe not next weekend. I just want to go sometime.” She hugged the leather-bound book to her chest.
“You have plans?” I turned to read her face.
“I don’t know. I mean … Maybe.” She looked away.
“Is it homecoming already?”
“No, not in Cherokee. I might have things to do here, though.” I gave her a disgusted look. “You do know they don’t pay extra for weekend work, right?”
“I know. Not work. Just—”
“Just what?” Was this a secret? An unspoken secret in 447? My body cramped. I could still smell Sol on my clothes.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Have time for a game?” Essie moved to the shelf, brought out the box of dominos, and filled the empty shelf space with the book.
“Essie!”
“What?”
“You really aren’t going to tell me what you’re doing?”
Essie dropped the box onto the coffee table. “Cowney, you’re not my father.”
“But I thought I was your—”
“Friend?” Tiny wrinkles spread across her forehead.
I must have looked pathetic. Her face fell and she seemed to blink away the desire to respond cruelly, honestly. “It’s nothing. Really not a big deal,” she almost whispered.
Arguing, prodding her further on the issue was not a right I felt I had earned. I couldn’t afford to give a girl like Essie any reason to avoid me. “Go ahead, set ’em up,” I conceded, pushing the box of dominoes toward her.
We played until the awkwardness and early silence turned to excitement over smart moves and then to chiding each other’s efforts. We played until the sun’s light bled into the room en route to its evening resting place behind the mountains.
“Getting late, Cowpie. I will have to finish you off another time.” Essie grinned. She stood and stretched, raising her arms to the ceiling and exhaling loudly. “I’ll go first this time, but should be pretty quiet downstairs.”
I moved toward the lamp, as if I intended to turn the switch and follow after her shortly. Of course I did not. “Okay,” I agreed. “Be careful. See you at breakfast.”
I waited until she closed the heavy door behind her and I could hear her footsteps progress down the hall and fade. I quickly located the leather-bound book, afraid that my mental image of where she had placed it among the others on the shelf would disappear before I could recover it. I pulled the book from the shelf and ran my hand across the cover before frantically exposing each of the pages until the piece of stationery fell to the floor. Its sudden fall momentarily gave me pause. In my hands was a piece of Essie that I was not entirely comfortable discovering. This was her secret and I had no right to touch it, expose it—let it drop to the floor carelessly. I placed the book back into its waiting holster, allowing it to edge out past the others just a bit so that I could locate it again quickly. Carefully, I unfolded the sheet and held it beneath the still-illuminated lamp. I wanted desperately to read faster than I was able.
“Loveliest Essie.” The words framed the page. My body constricted.
I immediately located the signature. I needed to name my emerging enemy.
“Yours, Andrea.”
Yours? Andrea? The name was familiar. I searched my memory—guests calling to other guests, guards reading off checklists. Was this the son of one of the Italian diplomats? I rushed back to the top of the letter for clues.
“I caught a glimpse of your amber eyes as you turned the corner and felt as if I might never recover from the heat that coursed through my body.”
How could it be that a man—a boy, more accurately—from Italy wrote English so much more eloquently than I could even attempt to contemplate it silently? Even now, I’m not sure I have such words.
“Go with me to make cool this fire with a swim? I know of a place. The perfect cure.”
His thinly veiled sexual references were embarrassing. His arrogance that the two could slip off was ignorant! How could Essie believe in such a fool? She wasn’t any smarter than Bud, who thought I could build my own relationships with these foreigners. How could they not consider the risk? I wanted to tear the letter into pieces. I would have done it if I had known Essie would not find the evidence.
I sat down on the limp couch and folded the letter until it rested in the palm of my hand. Or was I the fool? I wondered. Had I missed my chance long ago to woo her simply by reciting trite, empty lines from forgotten film stars? Could it have been that easy? The tarnished mirror, askew, just above the fireplace, answered for me. I looked into the reflection, saw my workman’s clothes and tired eyes, my out-turned foot that refused to align even while sitting.
My accent was not foreign to Essie. It must have sounded sickeningly the same as every other voice she’d ever heard in her young life. It didn’t matter what Andrea said. It didn’t matter in what language, tone, or context. Even as she read, she must have heard his difference, his exoticness, his uniqueness. Those were qualities of sound that Essie needed to carry her future away on singsong notes to some other place. My voice was nothing more than an echo.
Perhaps I could have forgotten the devastation of the note after a good night’s sleep. Perhaps I never would have thought of it again after I tucked it back into its book and resolved never to ask Essie another question about her weekend plans. Perhaps it could become nothing more than another page of literature on shelves lined with fanciful stories, never to meet our reality. And still, had she told me about Andrea in her own words, in the sacredness of room 447, in the room where secrets are absorbed into the oak and dissolve into the plaster ceiling, had she told me after two “borrowed” cans of beer, through the cigar smoke we fanned out of an open window, I would not have believed her. And I believed everything we shared in 447. Words baptized in that room were the only words I had come to believe—believe in. But she had not told me. And I had not asked. And I tucked the letter back carelessly. I left 447 perhaps too early that evening, or too late. Or she had. And it didn’t matter because all that seemed important in the whole world was that I rounded the bottom staircase at the very moment that truth was no longer optional.
His large, callous-free hands held her demure face and he kissed her in a way I do in only the deepest sleeps on the warmest nights. No man and woman in my world ever explored such forceful passion—unless, of course, it was made of fear and anger disguised as passion. And yet, neither had even reached the age of twenty.
“Essie?” Her name spilled from my lips. I immediately covered my mouth, but it was too late. The two separated quickly, both relieved I was not a soldier or supervisor and angry that I, insignificant I, had interrupted them.
“I’
m—I’m sorry,” I stammered. I started to walk away, but stopped myself. “Essie. Are you okay?” I still don’t know why I asked that question. Of course she was okay. From the way their bodies were pressed against one another, she was better than okay. I was the one in crisis.
I looked desperately to Essie. She turned into his shoulder. I have never felt so much hate as I did in that moment. Years of suffering Bud’s abuse, the glare of Sol’s cold eyes, nothing, no one person had managed to dredge up the anger Essie’s subtle refusal to witness had.
I shook my head and pushed the large wooden door to the main hall open hard.
“Whoa!” a muffled voice warned on the other side. “Easy,” it continued.
Andrea kissed Essie’s cheek and leapt up the stairwell, taking two steps at a time before the person on the other side of the entry released his grip of the door, allowing it to swing wide open. “You again?” It was Lieutenant Franks. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” He smiled.
“I … I’m sorry, sir. I … I was in a hurry.”
“Yeah, I can see that. You seem to always be in a hurry.” Franks craned his neck to look beyond me at Essie, who had been frozen by his entrance and Andrea’s exit.
“Listen, you kids need to get on back to the dorms. Doesn’t look real good to find you both in the stairwells this late in the evening, understand?”
“Yes, sir.” I nodded. “We were just headed out.” Though I could not slow the pounding of my heart, his calm response helped me release the deep breath I had swallowed from shock.
Franks looked at us both as if he was trying to understand the relationship between and Essie and me just as much as I was. “Peter.”
“What?” I raised my eyes to meet his. “Excuse me, sir?”
“My name is Peter. Lieutenant Peter Franks, but just call me Peter if no one else is around.”
“Yes. Okay. Peter.” I was eager to leave but felt as if I owed him more. “I’m Cowney Sequoyah and—” I turned to Essie, immediately disgusted again by the sight of her. “That is Essie Stamper.”
Even As We Breathe Page 11
