by Molly Gloss
In a moment he loomed over Joyce in the recliner. He was broad-faced, dark-skinned, there were crow’s feet around his eyes and his mouth but his dark hair had not yet gone to gray. He might have been Indian. Mexican Indian? It occurred to Joyce that he was perhaps named Benecio or Benedicto, not Benjamin as she had always thought. Could Benjamin also be a Spanish name? Ben-ha-meen.
He said, “Hola, honey,” to Raylene, and then, looking down on Joyce, “You gotta be Joyce? I gotta be Benny. Raylene don’t care a thing about introductions so I gotta do it myself. And now we been introduced. Perdón, but I’m gonna put my hands on your head. I always do what my wife tells me.” He cupped his cold hands around her skull as Raylene lifted hers away. His hands, or it might have been his clothes, smelled strongly of horses. His cold touch, after Raylene’s warmth, was in some way soothing. “What am I feeling for?” he asked his wife. Joyce imagined him holding a horse’s foot in his hands in the same way he now held her head, cradling it tenderly, appraisingly.
“Just see if you can feel it. I want to know what you can feel.”
Joyce wondered again, as she had all of her life, how could anyone who touched her not feel it? Jimmy had felt it a few times; he was the only one. She didn’t know what she hoped for.
A minute went by and then he said, “Nope. Nada. Sorry, Joyce.” And she knew then what she had hoped for. He gently released her head and disappeared from her field of vision. She heard his sock-feet scuffing toward the kitchen.
“There’s soup in the fridge,” Raylene called after him. “It’s Mama Leona’s. Joyce brought it.” Then, to Joyce, “We gotta give your chi some time to find its path, honey. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Joyce breathed slowly from her belly. She was finished with crying. A strong quake anywhere in the world would ring in her body for weeks, but her head, her mind, had by now begun to calm—this was the needles doing their work, redirecting her chi. Or a placebo effect, she didn’t much care which it was. People had died in Brazil, but if she stayed off the internet as Jimmy always urged her, she would not learn how many. This, too, was a placebo effect.
She could hear Raylene and Benny talking softly in the kitchen, asking and answering in half-finished sentences the way they must always talk when it was just the two of them. Something about a woman whose lame horse had had to be put down, and something about a man named Josh, who must have been a patient of Raylene’s. He had landed back in the Tillamook County jail, Raylene said, and Benny answered softly, “You did what you could, Ray. It’s all you can do.”
She imagined they must talk like this every night. It was what she missed most, now that she was alone, not being able to tell Jimmy every little thing, every big thing, that had happened in her day. It had always felt to her as if none of it was real until she had reported it to him.
Raylene returned and silently gathered in all the needles with the raining sound of pins landing on plastic, and swept the palm of her hand over Joyce’s scalp and neck and collarbones to be sure she had found them all. When she stepped away, Joyce reached for the handle to straighten the recliner, and she would have stood up to make her escape—she was afraid of what Raylene might ask, or say; she didn’t know what kind of answer she could make—but Raylene had already brought over one of the Mexican chairs and parked it right in front of the recliner. She sat in it, facing Joyce, leaning in with her elbows resting on her knees. The bathrobe fell open slightly, so that Joyce could see she was wearing a man’s boxer shorts, bright yellow, printed all over with little brown horses.
“So here’s what I think,” Raylene said. She tapped her fingertips lightly on Joyce’s knees. “What you’ve got going on is a kind of tinnitus. Anyway it’s like tinnitus, like a ringing in your ears, but it’s your whole body, not just your ears. Never seen it before, but if it’s like tinnitus, I’ve had some luck with tinnitus. We’ll try something different next time, I’ve got some ideas. But it’s no wonder this thing drives you crazy. It would drive anybody crazy.”
She didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t expected tinnitus.
She thought of saying something that Jimmy had once said, about the everlasting humming of the earth. But then Raylene slapped her own knees and got to her feet and put a hand down to help Joyce out of the recliner, and the moment for it passed.
• • •
Jimmy knew she suffered from insomnia, he knew she suffered from a tremor that kept her from sleeping. For a while this was all he knew. And she was a bit neurotic, he must have thought in those first weeks they were together, without thinking it was a reason to throw her over. He was her first long-term boyfriend, her first lover. They had been together four or five months when one night, lying in bed in the darkness with his arm resting across her belly, his fingertips touching the side of her breast, he said, “Huh. Is that the tremor you’ve been saying keeps you awake? I feel it. Like you’re humming, kind of, or purring. Like this little vibration, only not. Weird.”
He moved his hand, cupping her breast, then moved it again, down to her ribs. She held utterly still, willing him to feel it. There had been a big quake just yesterday in the Philippines, it was still ringing in her body.
“Wow, that’s weird. What do you think that is? Did they ever check you for a heart murmur? Maybe you’ve got a leaky valve or something.”
After a silence, she said into the darkness, “I should tell you something, Jimmy. This is a true thing, don’t laugh”—Jimmy wasn’t laughing—“this isn’t woo-woo, well, it is a little bit woo-woo, but it’s science. Like acupuncture, it’s science.” She told him about the sound the earth made, kind of a hum, a sound nobody could hear. “You know about that, right? That the earth is kind of singing all the time? They’ve made recordings. There’s this droning, or purring, or swishing, it might be the oceans banging against the sea floor, always moving, or something else, maybe it’s just the sound of the globe turning on its axis, they aren’t sure, but it’s a sound that’s always going on under our feet, only nobody can hear it.”
Jimmy waited for her to say more, and then he said, “But you can hear it,” with a pleased-with-himself sort of flourish. “Is that what you’re saying? You can hear it? Damn, Joyce, no wonder you can’t sleep, who could sleep if they could hear the everlasting humming of the earth?” A laugh. “Like sleeping with the worst goddamn snorer in the history of the universe!”
• • •
Joyce was in the front hall putting on her coat and boots when Benny came back through the living room, trailed by a shepherd-looking dog with muddy legs and a muddy belly. “You heading out? Nope, nope, not before you meet the pony. Nobody comes all the way out here without meeting the pony.”
Raylene gave Joyce a small shrug. “He’s serious, honey. You’ll have to go out and meet the horse or he won’t let you leave. Here, you better take one of my hats, I expect you’ll be standing in the rain a while.” It was a damp, wide-brimmed hat, a little too big for Joyce’s head. A good rain hat and serious boots had already gone onto her mental shopping list for Wilco.
Benny shoved his feet into tall muddy boots, shrugged into a muddy coat, put on his own muddy hat. He and the dog led Joyce off the porch and around the side of the house to a fenced yard and a long, dark shed. Water ran off the slanted shed roof in a nearly solid sheet. The yard was deeply muddy, cratered with puddles and sloppy hoof prints. A dark shape moved in the open door of the shed and then an animal came out into the rain, crossing with slow, reaching strides through the mud to the fence. Not a pony, not anywhere near a pony, a huge black horse, its broad back and left side smeared with half-dried mud.
Benny opened a gate in the fence and stepped through, let the dog through, and lifted his eyebrows at Joyce. She was startled by the animal’s size. When she shook her head slightly, he clanged the gate shut behind him. The dog trotted across the deep mud and disappeared into the shed. The horse ignored the dog but took another long step to Benny and bumped the man’s shoulder with his enormous head
. Benny knuckled the animal’s muddy face and said, “Anciano.” Not a description but a greeting, “Old man.” The horse turned his head sidelong to move the knuckles around where he wanted them. Rain sluiced the dried mud in a brown stream off the horse’s back.
Benny looked over at Joyce. “You afraid of horses? You ever been around them? Come on in here, say hello. He won’t bite.”
There had been that little frisson of fear when the big horse first came into the yard, but it was gone now. “No. I mean, no I haven’t been around them at all.” She had never been this close to a horse in her life. Benny opened the gate for her and she stepped through. The horse was enormous. His huge head towered over her. He stretched out his neck and smelled her coat, nuzzled her pockets and then the brim of the hat Raylene had loaned her. Joyce reached up to keep the hat on, and he touched the back of her hand with his soft nose, a brief, warm, wet touch. She petted his massive wet neck, and when he brought his head around to her she scratched under his whiskery chin.
“Bueno, good on you, not scared no more,” Benny said. “Now you oughta let him smell your breath, that’s how horses get acquainted. That’s how they figure who you are.”
This made a kind of sense to her. She put her face close to his liquid brown eyes, leaned in, blew a breath into his big wet nostrils. The velvety muzzle twitched, and the horse breathed her in, then breathed out, a smell that was warm and grassy. Her hand was resting on his neck, and after a moment she became aware of the slight tremble, the purring in his body, not his heartbeat but his essential being, his aliveness. She took off Raylene’s brimmed hat so she could rest the side of her head against his wet shoulder. The calm, steady hum against her scalp overrode the humming of the earth. His hide smelled of hay and mud and rain and his own sweet manure and something else, something she understood to be uniquely horse. He brought his head around to nuzzle her ear, her soaked hair. Breathed into her. She whispered against his muddy hide, “There was a big earthquake in Brazil this morning.”
Benny came up on the horse’s other side and draped his arm over the horse’s withers. “Maybe you oughta get yourself a horse, eh, chica? Calm you right down. Better’n getting poked with needles, maybe, but don’t tell Ray I said so.”
There were certain animals, she remembered, who seemed to know, as she did, when the earth under their feet was making ready to shift its weight. Horses were among them. She laughed without lifting her head from the horse, and the sound reverberated through them both.
Joining
FROM WHERE I WAS LYING I could see the hole in Sevin’s chest, the edges of his shirt still smoking, and I stared at that, I didn’t look at his face. I focused on the hole. And the pain. There was a wide scald of it under my breastbone so I couldn’t quite breathe, just these little sucks of air burning in and out. It felt like I’d lost a lung. I mean, it felt like Sevin had lost a lung. The robomed could come up with an artificial lung, I was pretty sure artificial lungs were in its programming. But the robomed was in the Osprey. And the Osprey was at the bottom of the hill.
I could see the farmer, too, crouching beside Sevin. There was a lot of buzz in my head, so I could just hear the peaks of her voice when she turned her face toward me—“can’t . . . don’t . . . won’t . . .”—all the negative sounds bumping high and pointed through the static. But I could feel her brown tones of soundless anguish and I could see she was dropping some real tears over Sevin, as if she mourned him, as if she’d known him more than half a day—and I couldn’t even think of her damn name.
I didn’t see her come to me. I was so focused on the Joining that I lost track of her, and then she leaned over me, touching my chest, my arms, she was trying to find my wound, I guess, but it damn near killed Sevin. I broke thought a little when she startled me, so the pain slid away and down, slick as mercury, and I was so bone-tired and it was so good to be rid of it I almost let it go without thinking. Then Sevin—unresisting, sliding too—made this small sound that wasn’t pain, only a sigh, but it cut me like a razor. I scrambled for him, and in about half a minute we were okay again, balanced again, teetering together.
“Si-Rad,” I said, when I remembered the farmer’s name, when the Joining grew smooth and seamless and there was room in my head to remember.
She said a word I didn’t know, or maybe it wasn’t a word, quite, just the sound you’d make if you stepped on your cat, surprise-grief-soothing-apology, and she touched my wrist. “Sevin’s not dead,” she said to me, or asked me. There were tears hanging fat and clear in her eyelashes.
“Not yet,” I said. I had wanted to put it stronger than that, with more hopefulness, and I don’t know why it came out straight and honest instead. I’d rather have lied a little and made myself feel better. He’s not hurt too bad. I can fix it. Instead, like the farmer, I began to cry. I couldn’t get enough air to do it right, but I lay on my back in the dry leaves with Si-Rad holding me by the wrist and I managed to squeeze out a few sticky tears that ran down through my beard into the corners of my open mouth.
“Give me a hand,” I said to the farmer. I thought she might object, might make useless you-shouldn’t-be-moving noises, so I quickly tacked on a little disclaimer—“I’m not hurt”—which wasn’t strictly true and must’ve made me look a damn fool, since I was weeping, lying scrunched up and panting in the weeds. I don’t know what she thought, whether she believed it, but she swiped at her wet face with the sleeve of her tunic and then took hold of me by the shoulders and helped me scrabble across the slope to where Sevin was. There was less pain than I was braced for, I just couldn’t get enough air.
I touched him right away, took hold of his hand to feel he was still warm, which was a stupid, irrational thing, I guess, but I was better after I touched him, like after the crying. He looked at me sidelong. He didn’t want to move his head. I could feel it, fragile as glass, knew like him that it would shatter if he was careless. So he looked at me sideways and tested out a smile, a stiff one showing a thin white rim of teeth, and then squeezed his eyes shut. Myles, he sent, as if my name were a string and he was drawing a bow across it, playing a dark chord, resonating inside my head. Don’t let me kill you.
The hell with that, I thought, but I don’t know if he heard me.
“Unsnap this,” I said to Si-Rad. I couldn’t get the damn storm belt undone, couldn’t see the fastener or make my fingers work, and I had to wait for her to work it loose and snake it off my hips. I dumped everything out of it onto the ground and roamed through the emergency-med stuff.
“Get that open,” I said, and then I scissored Sevin’s shirt away from the hole while the farmer bit the nipple off my plastic tube of aseptic. It was gluey, the color of shit—tasted shitty, too, if you went by her face. I had her squeeze every last drop of it onto Sevin’s chest. Then I ripped open the biggest seal I had and centered it over the hole and touched it in place. It made a small hissing sound when it pressurized. It was white and square with the corners rounded off, had a very sanitary look covering up that charred crater. It didn’t do a whole hell of a lot of good, but as with the crying and the touching, I felt better seeing it done. Then she helped me spread the plastex sheet over him. He was breathing shallowly, carefully, this thin rheumy wheeze, but I could feel him hanging on to me a little, all the effort wasn’t mine anymore, and the Joining felt smooth. Now that I wasn’t working so hard, I was mainly tired because he was. I let myself down on my back beside him and closed my eyes. The lids scratched across the lenses as if there were sand between.
“Myles?” the farmer said, and managed with the one word to squeeze in a lot more, something along the lines of What the hell is going on with you? At least that’s what I thought at the time.
“I need a minute. I’ll be okay in a minute.”
With my eyes closed, the ground moved a lot, as if I were in a boat and the sea was high. Rocking, awash, I didn’t sleep but I dreamed a little, playing it over again against the back of my eyelids, the big shape of the cadmium mi
ner standing out from the rocks along the escarpment, tangle-maned, thick-chested, giving off deep red ripples of enmity.
“That’s the one,” the farmer had said, and then wiped her palms on her trouser legs. I remember feeling the dim blue of her fearfulness.
Sevin spread his hands innocently. “My name is Sevin,” he yelled to the rocks, to the big man standing among them. “This is Myles. We’re with OS. You can see the ID from there?”
The man’s chin lifted a little but he did not speak. There were streaks of black now, in the red that came from him.
Sevin kept his hands apart and open. “OS records show the land here registered for farming.” He shaped the words so they were smooth and matter-of-fact and benign, and I stood behind him and painted a canvas of sympathy, patience, calmness, stroking those cooler colors over the man’s reds, brushing out his clotted passion while Sevin spoke him down.
“Si-Rad here has filed a complaint with OS. She says you’ve cut off access to her summer graze, polluted a stream, butchered some of her goats. That’s for the courts, we don’t accuse you. But the fact is, this quadrant isn’t designated for cadmium mining.”
He would have said something more, something about filing with Ministry for a proper permit, a waiver to mine in this place. We had arbitrated these kinds of disputes a couple of hundred times before.
