Exigencies

by Richard Thomas

  It should’ve taken you, he had said of The Fire. Wrapped and trembling in an unfamiliar bed, she had agreed—agreed with a nod that their joined life died that night, died in the tongues that licked the color from her skin and the notion of Home from his heart. He’d closed his good eye and she wished he had taken her bandaged hand or touched the bedpost before he turned away, but he had not. Without hesitation or one false step the back of him disappeared and that was the way she pictured him, all the years after, his slick black head and flannel shirt with soot on the right shoulder blade, growing smaller.

  This night she raised her fist and the knuckles rapping at the door were bare bones in the dim light of the house, the skin so tight and shiny.

  He’s passed, the White Woman said with hardly a breath.

  She gazed for the first and only time at the love of her love, the creviced face and gnarled hands, the stricken blue eyes.

  Wait—the Other said, but she turned and shuffled back to the bridge, to the divide, away to the owl and the black tree and the spot she was meant to die.

  There were two cans in the outbuilding, one half-full of kerosene and the other half-full of gasoline. Her fingers slipped through the cobwebs in the handles and lifted them easily.

  The owl widened its eyes at what she meant to do and its wings as it took to the sky made the sound of a sweeping flame. The screen slammed behind her in a creak that was unfamiliar after two decades.

  The floors shone like her skin under the liquid; she dragged the furniture of the bedroom into the pattern of the old place. At the edge of the bed she spun a cigarette, lit it and placed it in the dish, all the same. Undressing in the light of the kerosene lamp, she put on her best nightdress and lowered herself into the pillow. Her fingers skittered to the other side of the bed where the groove of him should’ve been, and tears slid down her head and around her ears like the stems of eyeglasses. All the same, her eyes closed against the room and she fell back through the years to give The Fire another chance.

  The rushing sound came in her sleep but she willed her eyes stay closed this time, willed the flutter in her heart be still. But instead of warm came cold, the cold of rain through the open window and the crack of thunder. She sat up in time to see the lightning flick the tree with a finger white as her own, and it snapped with a sound loud as the squall, pitching itself onto the ugly little trailer.

  For the first time since the children had come years before, her voice escaped, a croak of surprise and joy. The roof split under the weight and the rain washed the fuel oil from her hands and feet, from the floor. She stood forever and a moment with her face to the sky until the daylight pushed the last of the storm aside.

  Across the field, the river spilled its banks. It whipped the two halves of the rope bridge and carried off pieces of the life she did not have.

  By and by the sun dried her, and she stood in the doorway, watching only the dragonflies that skimmed the puddles and the banks of the river.

  amanda gowin

  lives in the foothills of appalachia with her husband and son. her work can be found in magazines and anthologies including burnt tongues and warmed and bound. she co-edited cipher sisters and her first short story collection, radium girls (thunderdome press), is currently available. more information on her life and work can be found at lookatmissohio.wordpress.com.

  DESERT

  GHOSTS

  MARK JASKOWSKI

  In the space between her flicking the lighter to life and her touching the flame to what you won’t tell her is your second-to-last Pall Mall—a space so defined you could fall into it, through it, out the other side before you remember to breathe—you realize that this is about to be one of those moments where, most likely, one of you will politely edge away. Maybe she’ll hesitate, there’ll be a second of awkward hovering—the kind you’re no good at all at swinging your way. Then you’ll go back to your drink, smiling ruefully, making yourself not watch her walk away and telling yourself it’s for the best. Because the alternative is she doesn’t walk away, and that’s how things start. How, for instance, you might wind up on another front porch in north central Florida, drinking gin and tonic out of a Big Gulp cup while the mattress burns in the backyard.

  You know, hypothetically.

  But then, there she is, handing your lighter back, smoke snaking out from the corners of her mouth, and neither of you have turned away, but instead lean in closer, smiling at each other and the situation, in a what-have-we-here sort of way. You get the feeling that you fell right through that moment back there, rather than letting it pass. Your smile only widens. You lean in closer so she can hear you when you drawl, “What’s yours?” in the right tone to feel like a cowboy, nodding at the bottles behind the bar to avoid explaining if she doesn’t get it.

  But she does.

  She flashes you that wicked little smile you’re already thinking of appropriate metaphors for—glass, knives, mostly sharp things now that you’re catching yourself at it—and you know before it even happens that when you walk out of the bar with this woman you didn’t exactly just meet, but it’s been long enough to feel like it, you won’t think twice about how she’s looking over her shoulder for you, as though you don’t know well enough to be nervous, or about her out-of-state plates. You’ll just register how perfect it is that you caught a bus down here as she opens the door to her car, and once you start thinking that, man, you’re as good as miles down the road.

  Eventually, of course, you get nervous about how she’d already thought you should be nervous, about the Texas plates that disappeared from her car by the next time you saw it—after that first night, leaving the bar. Inevitably this happens after you’ve settled, against any reasonable expectations, into a sort of normalcy. You eventually wonder, too, about how she’s paying for that house while only working part-time at the diner she staffed in high school. It’s work, sure, but you know well enough that it’s not the sort of work that secures you two and a half bedrooms plus car insurance. Okay, so she’s very likely uninsured. Gas, though, and food. It’s not like you were real reluctant to ease yourself into one of those increasingly rare adult-feeling nine-to-fives, and you remember all these little bills she seems to wave away with a dull ache.

  So, she comes home this afternoon maybe an hour earlier than usual, which doesn’t send up any red flags at first; restaurant work is a messy business, and though usually running longer rather than shorter, the latter could happen. When you meet her eyes, though, the expression there, over a face held rigid, apparently by neck and jaw clenching, is the dilated darting manner of a person hunted, and the ground gives way on the last few months of your life, leaving you floating in this interminable pause.

  So you’re on the road the next morning. The vacation you take is abrupt and open-ended; you pretend the two weeks’ leave you secured from your boss via hitherto unknown reserves of charm gives the trip a concrete limit, but the suspicion that they don’t is unrelenting, clicking its tongue at you from the back of your mind. She has yet to give you the story in full, but over the course of conversation, fragmented by the rhythm of travel, a vague picture pulls itself together in the background.

  Look:

  A man. A woman. A trailer in the desert. A plan that culminated in a couple duffel bags full of money strapped to the boards of the crawlspace under the trailer. Some time passes and they almost make good on their plan to skip town. Almost.

  Here the details get a bit fuzzy and you’re too far out of your element to press it. She eventually left, obviously, and bounced around the country, solo, for a while, carrying the stash they’d put sweat and blood into like an old wedding ring. She could go anywhere within reason, but the whole works had lost its luster when she’d lost the partner in the venture, just fading off into vague language and long looks at the sunset, the way these stories seem to go.

  And so she drifted about for who knows how long, skirting big cities for reasons she clearly thinks ought to be self-explanato
ry to you, until she wound up sitting in a bar on the slowest night of the week in the Florida humidity, borrowing a lighter from a face half-remembered from her past to light his second-to-last Pall Mall.

  You’re double-checking that the car’s doors are locked in the parking lot of a motel in the wrong suburb of Louisville, Kentucky when you finally start to wonder why she wound up with you. You had been focusing on how, up to now, trying to pin down the shifting haze of how relationships start. It’s an exercise in frustration. Hunting down, in retrospect, what happens to make two people drift together the way they do leads you back from the end result, through a whole host of promising moments, perhaps, but always to an indistinct dead end of more of the vagueness, the haze, full of suggestion and general implications, but nothing much concrete or satisfying.

  Why, though. Maybe that’s a little simpler. In this case, at least, you think it almost must be. The windswept woman in that bar, the smell of highway dust and car exhaust still drifting around her, sees a face familiar enough to be friendly and distant enough to maybe not have caught wind of certain things. Maybe she decides to flirt a bit, see whether that guy could become somebody she could rely on. Somebody she could be sheltered by. A familiar face after that long drifting, man, that must have felt like finding a stuffed wallet on the sidewalk.

  You slow to a stop with your fingers on the knob of the motel room door and run them over badly painted wood to trace the faux-brass number bolted there. You hadn’t really ever thought about it like that before. It certainly doesn’t speak much to the romantic notions you keep chained up in there somewhere, and it makes this whole deal markedly less about you. The idea that you might not be at the center of this relationship, or even the center of its origin, sends a feeling much like vertigo flushing your face and unfocusing your eyes. You swallow and decide you could use a minute more of fresh air. You interpret fresh air as another cigarette, as you’re wont to do, and pace up and down on the motel sidewalk. The security guard in his office annex shoots glances at you over the top of his newspaper and you remind yourself just what kind of neighborhood you’re in, here, how the rooms can go for twenty-five bucks a night, and try to adjust your demeanor to definitely non-suspicious. This only seems to raise the guard’s attention. You suck down the last of the smoke and turn on your heel for the door, braced to start a big discussion.

  She’s sitting there, paper cup of rum in her hand, and another poured for you, in Jay Leno’s castoff light. You swallow a couple times. Your smile comes easy enough. You sit next to her on the bed, but just as you’re drawing in that steel-yourself, dredging-up-the-past breath, she leans her head on your shoulder and wraps her arm around yours and Jay Leno delivers a poor joke poorly and you both fall backwards onto the bed, spilling spiced rum everywhere, and staring at the ceiling with her head on your shoulder, you let that loaded breath out in a long wordless sigh.

  After you check out of the hotel and realize Kentucky’s creeping toward ice already, decide with minimal discussion that heading southwest feels better, you sit in the passenger seat and watch red cliffs rise up around you like the corners of her mouth and turn off the radio and slip into a silence that you don’t spoil by thinking, planning, or wondering at her angle. The red clay glows in the sunlight. By the time the land melts into the hopelessly deep wheat of the Great Plains, you’ve put your finger on what’s different. The present has settled into itself, and you don’t much feel like looking behind you.

  She pulls off the freeway into a gas station that looms on a ghost street like a sleeping sentry. The road sign says Kansas. One tired pickup in the parking lot. She goes inside while you fill up the tank and returns with two frightening cups full of Dr. Pepper and a dash of milk. You eye the mixture warily. She leans against the car and pulls hard on her straw, wistfully murmuring that the drink reminds her of growing up, of Ohio. The cup tastes like the dregs of an ice cream float, pleasant enough, you suppose, but you don’t taste the significance no matter how long you let the muted carbonation sit on your tongue. It’s only when you’ve taken over driving, settled back into the long straight asphalt strip through nothing, that it hits you that she’s acknowledged, out loud and explicitly, that she came from a place, that this is something.

  The freeway-exit strip mall where you stop for lunch boasts a taco stand, a discount clothing store, and a sporting goods store, bookended by chain family diners with the kind of façade designed with the suburbs in mind. You stroll around the parking lot, paper trays of tacos in hand, making a production of window-shopping like a nice couple out on the town, killing a Friday evening. She’s licked the last of the salsa from her fingers and turned to head back toward the car, but you’re stalled in front of the sporting goods store, eyeing a matching pair of bowie knives with leather cases. She turns to look at you, smiling absently, and you hold up one finger, disappear into the store. Through the window, you see her shrug and shake her head and lean against a streetlight.

  The clerk rings you up and asks if you want a bag for those. You shake your head, an echo. Outside, you toss her one of the knives with a daffy grin and say that you always were a sucker for the romantic gesture. His-and-hers knife sets. Beautiful. She raises her eyebrows as you strap your knife to your calf, sliding the leg of your jeans down over it. She insists that this might well qualify as asking for trouble, trying to keep her tone stern and cautionary, but she’s grinning too hard and eventually slips the other knife into her jacket pocket.

  You stop at a motel in Denver, thinking to make Santa Fe the next afternoon. She pops the trunk and tells you she wants to show you something, opens the compartment where the spare tire should be and pats a fat duffel bag, the kind you’d check at the airport for a two-day trip, and smiles. The contents are not a mystery. You think back on the scraps of her history you’ve gathered together and something visceral tightens, the past week fluttering in the wind like tissue paper and the fear you saw in her eyes that afternoon in her house settling in where your throat used to be. You try to swallow it down. The bag of cash is nothing more than an abstraction made concrete, but seeing it, with all its associations of blood and terror, whatever cold scheming brought it here in the first place, is a very different experience indeed.

  The Rubicon is so close. You hover a moment on the edge of flight, but gather yourself, composing your face. She’s watching you with the tilted-head expression of a curious hound, waiting to see which way this goes, and you realize that this is not a casual gesture. There’s a definitiveness to her that you’ve only seen a couple times. The important thing is that you know—that you know in a concrete way why if you go back to Florida she won’t be coming with you, that you know what it is you’re doing out here, on the foreign side of the country.You’ve already held her eyes long enough to connote indecision, fear, trepidation, so you shrug and smile, brushing away any misgivings, and retire to another motel bed.

  A nearly identical motel room in Corrales, New Mexico. Same carpet, same chairs you’ve propped against the wall to put your feet up on the table, but with the parched smell of dust and colorless shrubbery outside. You go down the hall for ice, and on coming back see three men in secondhand Army jackets knock on the door once, twice, and then force their way in. The last man to go in pauses outside and smooths down the front of his jacket, parts his hair with the edge of his hand. The ice bucket makes a sound like breaking bones on the concrete.

  Ice cubes scattered and already melting at your feet, you run. The door gapes only strides away, closing slowly, deliberately, and you push to make it before it clicks shut, thinking, if at all, of how they aren’t expecting you to be with her or they’d have left someone watching the door, how the closing door and your own footsteps move slowly, take forever, far too long.

  You get one foot between the door and its frame and pause. Remember the knife on your leg. Sounds of a scuffle from inside. Reach down, slowly, pull out the blade. Crash through the door, shoulder-first.

  They’ve got h
er in the bathroom. One of them turns as you enter but too slowly. You don’t so much tackle as run flat into him. A pure hovering moment of confusion as the two of you hang in the air, crash to the floor. The blade of your knife kissing cleanly into his neck, hot spray on your face, your hands.

  The second man comes toward you, and you’re not going to be able to get the knife up again in time. He’s raising a gun from his hip and stops, falls. She’s got to him from behind. He twists and twitches on the floor and you’re thinking there’s one left, that this might work.

  Roar of a gunshot, ringing in your ears. The third man, from the bathroom. You can’t look, look anyway, and sure enough he’s hit her. Turn and scramble out the motel room door.

  Crossing the border into Arizona, you’ve got a duffel bag full of cash and a battered once-blue Buick. You’ve got bloodstains on the cuffs of your shirt, rolled up to the elbow in a primal moment of precaution, and on your jeans. You’ve got an empty passenger seat and a layer of dust in your throat, in your eyes. The highway blurs as the sun goes down. You can’t see properly and claw at your eyes to clear them. You’ve got a rubbed-raw face, because there’s so much blood packed in a body and gas station paper towels are a poor means to clean it. You’ve got a half-tank of gas and no reason, no reason to stop driving.

  The desert stretches forever and then it doesn’t. You turn north and lose yourself in a winding stretch of highway carved through the space left between ancient redwoods. You pull into towns and cities as they come, but every shadowy alley, every shape out of the corner of your eye twists into three lean figures, bracing themselves against imaginary wind, following that scent of yours they picked up in the desert and haunting you sure as ghosts. Keep moving.