by Nancy Mauro
Her cheek twitches. She tells it, Shut up. Shut the hell up.
When she kicks her feet out from underneath her, it’s to slide down the same avalanched crest that took Duncan a few minutes ago. The smell of the loam is thick as old coffee. Duncan shifts the rake out from beneath and lets her squeeze in the gulch beside him. She can’t help but settle into the side of his body, careful to avoid his arm. At first, the mud that seeps through her collar feels as uncomfortable as a hand that’s been clutching a cold beer.
They stay like that, on their backs, looking up at their narrow slice of sky. A single bat flits past.
“It’s echolocating,” he says, his chest close enough to rest her head on. She could put her ear against it. Listen to the thoughts that never leave his lungs. She wants to reach her arm over him. Slide her hand into the curve of his elbow.
Lily turns her face toward his. Lips and teeth inches apart. Then she pushes up on one elbow, touches his shoulder through the muck. “Duncan?”
He turns, following her eyes behind him, and above. Lodged in the wall of slick roots and knobs, the familiar glint; a calabash of bone snared in roots and alluvium.
That night they unearth Tinker’s magnificent skull. A solid amalgamation of bone marred only by a shallow fracture across the parietal bone.
Duncan gets to his knees and, with one hand, eases the globe from the dirt wall. A string of living snot escapes his nose in the effort. There’s not enough room or light in the hole. Lily climbs to the rim to shine the flashlight down as he clears the root bundles from their treasure. They are both aware of the expectation, the ferocious desire to complete Tinker, to take ownership of her small body. He feels her slipping loose from the dirt, the ground finally giving up and delivering her into his hand. Tinker, 1902.
There’s nothing left, of course, nothing to recognize of the dark woman at the edge of the photograph, holding back sunshine with one hand. Her eye cavities are enormous, silent.
We owe her this, Duncan thinks, passing the head up to Lily and crouching back down to pull away the lower jaw. He ignores the pain that’s taking over his right hand. Above the earth, Lily puts the flashlight down and holds the skull up against the purple evening, rotating it in her hands, as if to give Tinker her first homecoming glance. Her first view of the grounds after a century of change.
“How did you end up in here?” she asks. “What happened to you?”
For the first time, Duncan is thankful for maggots, the sightless crawlers, thankful that they’ve left nothing on the bone. He’s beginning to understand the importance of worms and the role they play in distancing humans from history. Not a single tooth is left in the mouth, he notes, brushing off the detached arc of jaw. This makes it easier to handle the pieces, to walk across the lawn holding a woman’s mandible bone.
Lily follows him to the basement and unlocks the door. They trail mud inside. All that’s left now is to place the skull at the head of the table, topping off their collection with the navigation system, the antique eyes and ears and mouth.
He can’t seem to do it, though. Holding the two pieces, cradled in his sling, he turns to look at Lily. She is beautiful to him, covered in filth. When she wipes at her nose she leaves a trail of dirt across her cheek. He licks his good thumb and reaches out for her face. Just like that. As if he’s been wetting his fingers and rubbing them against Lily all along. As if there has never been a gap or hesitation in this act: lick, reach, and touch.
“Hi, Wife.” He just can’t let it end.
“You’ve got grass on your forehead.”
“Hi, Wife,” he says again.
Lily moves toward him. He looks down at her hands. They take Tinker away from him; gingerly, they remove the two pieces from his crooked arm and carry them to the table. Place them at the apex of the clavicles. Lily’s white arms are trembling too. And this he only notices when she moves back to him, reaches for him, connects their milky lengths around his shoulders. She’s liquid hum against his chest.
They drop against the cellar steps and she closes her mouth around his, takes what air he has left so that she can breathe awhile underwater. His hand moves between her spine and shirt, falls into the shallow groove of her hips. They work around the cast, their clothing comes away as if it’s been loosely stitched. Foliage with no fasteners, no buttons or lace. Lily is in his mouth again, between his toes, across every hooked and hairy inch of him. There she is, licking the fresh skin behind his knees.
There they are, fucking like two maniacs on the cellar steps.
After, when they’re good and splintered from the wooden staircase, when she’s tethered to his lap with her legs curled around him, she says, “I still do. Love you too.” Although he’s unaware of having said it first. He is unaware of having said anything poetic in the last twenty minutes. In the close distance, a cannon fires. Duncan covers Lily with everything in him that isn’t broken.
CHAPTER 35
Organs of Respiration
The digging commences soon after they rouse themselves from bed. It has to, it’s their only advantage over other creatures waiting for nightfall. Duncan looks around the backyard. There is some definite destruction of property, willful acts of violence, going on here. The lawn is both humps and holes against a curtain of barley. Beside each pit stands the guts, a whipped mound of dirt and grass frosting.
“Do you think we’ll stop? Once we find the weapon?” She stands beside him, faces the grave.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s not.”
The search for the weapon (something blunt may have caused that parietal crack) has turned careless. It was bound to. After all the diligent occupation, the reverence required to handle a stranger’s pieces—fiddling with her bits—sends them off the reservation. The pain in Duncan’s hand is barely contained by drugs, and his small envelope is nearly empty. They become slipshod in their vehemence. There’s a definite desensitization in pulling both rock and bone from the earth at random, not sure what they’ll get with each overturning. Treat a rock with respect, toss a bone aside in distraction; it’s bound to happen.
Lily lowers herself into a narrow trench. To loosen the dirt for his light sifting job, Duncan drills the spade into the ground and feels the ache of friction in his good palm. He’s lanced and drained the first rash of blisters. But already in these farmed patches he can make out the next cycle of swell, their foamy custard filling. His blisters are generational, deliberate, vengeful.
He can’t remember ever feeling so good.
He looks down at Lily, tunneling in an unexplored, southeasterly direction. Since she stopped wearing gloves, the alkaloids in the dirt have gnawed her nails down to the quick. Her hair’s a nest. Her knees are notched and dented from the stones she’s knelt on. What a method of resurrection, he thinks, watching her wriggle in the ditch.
And what of the splatter pattern he’s left behind in the city? What of Anne, who has—no doubt—already braced her shoulder like a battering ram and taken down their apartment door? Or across town in a studio loft, how long will Leetower wear his bloodstained T-shirt of devotion?
There’s also the man he’s put in a hospital bed. When will Duncan begin to feel anything resembling remorse?
Even if he hadn’t destroyed his campaign or Kooch’s jaw, he wouldn’t want to go back to the city, to the apartment, even back to last week. To that landscape of tissue and sponge. It’s not sturdy enough to live on. He’s afraid to leave and breathe that air again. Afraid to be left. When they find the weapon, what will they do? When will he know that he and Lily have gone deep enough? Will the hard surface make a sound underfoot, give them a solid place to start from?
There is no talk of what to do with Tinker. No ethical plan to share her with the universe or the town council. Duncan and Lily are it: sheriff, constable, and deputy. Because when you unearth your own private civilization, he thinks, you’ve got to do all the work yourself. You and your comrade, your lives undergoing the peculiar effect
s of phototropism together. Down there in that hole, scraping away, your ass, Lily, swinging with every lash of the rake.
Oh yes, this too. He has a desire for her that resembles the violence of adolescent lust. He considers jumping in the trench, kicking out a tree root for a toehold, and fucking her over a stone. Lily glances up at him during this thought, pauses, holds up her rake in prelude to a point she has yet to make.
“Don’t stop, Duncan.”
He knows, he feels it too.
In the cellar the woman reassembles. Spanning nearly five feet of table, she looks down through her hole-punched sacral bones, drawing legs together, arms akimbo, the graduated column of her spine missing several stories of vertebrae. The vault of her rib cage is collapsed, a frame flattened by the roof of one hundred years of dirt. At her side is a mound of bones too small to identify: various tips of fingers, delicacies of the inner ear, pivots and screws of the jaw, ankle charms.
Tinker props herself up on an elbow, fishes the small bones of her wrist from the unidentified pile, maybe a semilunar or a scaphoid. She flexes her hand, reaches up and touches the sore spot on her skull. Despite several missing fingers, she can slide and click her jaw into place. What do we do now, Duncan? she asks.
That night, under a rustler’s moon, they finally come under siege. They have not been able to find the weapon; the day has brought only a series of irregular bones. Now they step around the parlor with the delicacy of thieves. The first round of poundings on the door has left Lily unsteady. She tries not to twitch while she peers out between the heavy paneled curtains.
There are men and there is fire and both elements come together on the front lawn with conviction. It’s Skinner’s anathematic return. This time he’s come in the guise of peafowl flanked at the train feathers by a flock of torchbearers. They spread quickly through the yard, illuminating the shadows between boxwoods, between the house and the lean-to.
Once, Lily thought, if push came to shove, she could run for the trees. Into the woods to scale the largest pronged maple and roll its broad leaves up over her head. Now an entire clan stands between herself and the small forested patch out front. Duncan too must understand the impossible logistics of escape. He makes her come away from the window. Away from plate glass in slack casements, the double front doors that require only a well-angled kick to cave. He pulls her along the corridor, back into the belly of the house. Quickly now, through the kitchen to the cellar. Yes, the cellar, the buried warren that shelters the nanny. Lily is grateful at not having to make for the forest after all. She leans on Duncan’s good arm to let him know how much better the earth is than life in the trees. They descend in tandem, the passage cramped and shabby, the familiar steps furred from hard use. How would she have survived it anyhow, a life up there in the canopy of leaves? How could she flourish when everything she desires is here below the ground?
If Duncan had counted on some tumble and yaw this summer he would never have imagined it involving the fury of townsfolk and the death of a wild boar. He looks out the small basement window to the back of the house and adjusts his sling. The path leading from the cellar door to the garden is clear but he knows they’re not safe down here. That they can’t hold out for long. That dry oak splinters under force and torches even easier. The doorbell’s ringing. A continuous loop of “Windsor Chimes.” With his good hand wrapped in a T-shirt he’s knocked out the cellar light, leaving only some quarter moon to open up shadows and spatter over the arrangement of bones on the table. He watches Lily at Tinker’s side. The tragedy is this: once the nanny is discovered she’ll be carted off, a loose jumble of pieces to assemble like a mobile. Later, at someone’s leisure. This will be a disaster for Tinker. She’s only just been reconnected, has only just begun to enjoy the touch of her rejoined limbs. If only they could hold their barricade a little while longer. A few more days of digging themselves out of stasis. At least until the pills run out.
Lily comes and pushes herself against his arm, watches him with eyes like walnuts. There’s some kind of hope just past their luminous shells. Duncan leans against the cellar door, returning her touch, winding her hair around his fist. He was just beginning to remember so many things about her.
“What do we do now, Duncan?” she asks.
He doesn’t know. He’d like to suggest that they just hold their breath and wait. Let the moment pass over the way time has designed it to, a slow, two-foot shuffle into history. But there’s a crack of wood upstairs then. The thump of thigh and hip as ram. Brackets and hinges burst overhead, hardware is sent scurrying across floorboards with the propulsion of bullets. Then a stamp and rush. As Duncan’s heart becomes the most raucous of all percussive instruments, the clabber of feet spreads up in the foyer, tracks through the house, over the well-worn grooves of their summer missteps. Just like that, the house is taken.
He unbolts the cellar door.
And then they are running, the grain slicing, a razor’s nicking efficiency to all skin left visible, the underside of a chin, scored palms, inside each elbow. Sometimes he leads, sometimes they are side by side cutting a wide, ungroomed path through the crop.
They run across the fold of terrain, but no frontier awaits them. They are recusant, Duncan and Lily. Last thing he saw as they darted into the field was a rash of men boiling out of the house and into the backyard. Something followed. Something came after them through the field but now he doesn’t dare look behind them—their trail of damage is easy enough to follow, the heads of barley lopped down, trammeled—but he keeps Lily’s hand in his and does not look back.
What Duncan knows is that the land will provide. He tells himself, even the Cu Chi tunnels led somewhere. Into the steep embankment of the Saigon, where a comrade could be quietly washed to safety. And they’re not the first to come this way. Hadn’t Tinker set the course when she fled with her boy? The earth seems to remember the routing and helps to guide. They feel it tilting away from their feet; the running becomes easier, the sloping land giving momentum to their limbs.
Behind them, everything they’ve ever known. Ahead of them the grain breaks like a sudden relief and the threshing sound of their feet falls away and they cross into the flat slap of stubble before the river. They are cut and sore and there is the loss of Tinker’s bones but behind them are fire and men.
He can hear Lily’s breath, its stuttering delivery, and he goes ahead of her, tearing apart the curtain of saplings on the embankment. Tonight the river laps high, the rock table sucking up water as if quenching itself on the brackish offering. Duncan is mindful of illusion—the dark, humping hills of Ulster Landing appear to be within swimmable proximity and not the entire mile across he knows them to be. He steps on the shins of runtish trees, snapping down a path for Lily.
The sway of the current is impossible to measure in darkness. He loses the sling and enters the river, wading through the cattails and sleeping marsh wrens. The high level could mean an incoming tide and upstream flow. To the north, he knows, is Tivoli Bays, marshlands stocked with red-tailed hawks and kingfishers. The kayak routes he never got around to. Pastoral when observed from a fiberglass shell, gliding through the reeds in daylight. As the water sucks around his legs, he knows the river is conscious of him, his entrance. Is waiting to see what desperate plan he may have to swim across. Duncan steps up on a submerged rock ledge, then turns back for his wife.
Lily on the bank, sloughing off her shoes, toeing through the poke-weed and sumac. Looking for a place to start.
“Hurry, Lily.” Duncan holds out his good hand to her. He sees her face quiver, but she comes to him, making a careful entry into the river that runs both ways. Her legs scissor through water until she reaches him and takes his arm.
“Here I am,” she says. And there she is.
They stand to the waist in the unknown current and, in a language without words, make the decision. They agree to the one thing that is everything. Nothing else will exist after this—the house and the car and the bones—all o
f it gone. After tonight they will only have each other. The thought is enormous. But the warm grip of river and the smell of oily dirt calm him. Lily’s hand in his, it calms him too.
The voices that rise up over the field are vaporous and distant at first, but swell as they drift down over the embankment toward them. Without speaking, they lower their bodies into the river, push off from the rocky shoals. Their quiet submersion wakes a community of waterfowl, sending it alight. Duncan and Lily paddle a clumsy ten feet from the shore, her left hand tucked under his injured arm so that they appear to move out of the reeds and into the moonlight with the pulsing locomotion of one swimming animal.
The fetch is unclear but he understands their best chance is to keep hold of one another. To stay close to the bank and go with the direction of the current, give up all thoughts of destination, of swimming with purpose. Hasn’t enough time been wasted with the awkward motion of kick and stroke? The knowledge grows wide, breaks across his chest; in engineering this escape they’ve agreed to be carried together. As they skim out past the overhang of branches the sky is revealed, thickly seeded with stars. He signals to Lily to follow his example, to roll onto her back, as if enjoying a night dip. She flips over gently, buoys up against his left side the way he once taught her to and places her fingers in his grip.
It’s possible that they’ll be swept up to the mouth of the Sawkill Creek, arriving together on those estuarine banks. Or ferried downstream to the piers of the Kingston-Rhinebeck Bridge. Or beyond. All the downhill miles still to Manhattan, to the pulsing Atlantic, to the edge of the continental shelf and the vast Hudson Canyon.
But all of this comes later, he thinks. Right now they’ll do well not to worry themselves with direction. Tonight their only concern is to stay afloat together, with hands joined and bones connected. Let the nautical miles bear them out. Let the river decide.
