“I’m here. I was waiting for you to finish. The best thing to do is to come out and try it once, then decide if you want lessons,” he said.
Later that week, they stood in Hill’s backyard in Brunswick.
Rocky asked him about his name. “Hill? You mean Hillary? That must have been a tough one in junior high.”
“Nothing tough about it. It’s a family name and Hill is what I’ve always been called. Only my grandmother called me Hillary and she’s no longer with us,” he said.
His archery shop took up half of his garage, right on the apex of a cul-de-sac street. Hill looked younger than she was by more than a few years and taller than she had expected. She was startled by his features, the combination of dark, rich eyebrows highlighting his face in contrast to an adolescent rosiness in his cheeks. And his eyes did not exactly match; one eye was blue-green and the other was green-blue. An unexpected nudge from her lungs forced her to take in more air and her torso shifted forward toward Hill’s slightly oversized chest men can get, offering a preview of future expansion. She pulled back instantly.
If Rocky had seen him in Stop n Shop, she was pretty sure he’d be cruising the meat department, followed by the bread aisle. They hadn’t gone into his house, instead they had skirted around his garage to his backyard.
Rocky assumed the lessons would begin immediately. His backyard extended at least an acre and bumped up against a railroad track. Two paper targets were tacked to hay bails. He handed Rocky a bow. “My wife started on this one,” he said. “This is a good size for you.”
She was relieved there was a wife. Now they could be all business without an undercurrent of sexual tension. She hefted the bow in her hands and attempted to look knowledgeable but quickly decided to drop the pretense. “I don’t even know where to start and I’m not sure what I’ll do with this.”
Anyone who had watched her miniature performance, the relief when he said wife, the defensive posture when he handed her the bow, the decision to drop her defenses, and the admission of her novice standing, would have thought that she was a complicated woman. Hill chose to attend to archery.
“Today, you’ll start with breathing and flexing your knees. If you can become still enough, you’ll move up to pulling the bowstring.”
“I notice you didn’t include arrows. No arrows?”
“No. Too breezy anyhow.” There had not been one hint of breeze until that moment and suddenly the treetops began to dance.
“Good call,” she said.
Rocky discovered that she had become gradually inaccurate at judging ages, but as she watched him more closely, she guessed that he was late twenties, early thirties, even though his dark hair sprouted an early scattering of white near his temples. Something about him said military. Way too young for the Gulf War. Maybe just ROTC and a tour of duty. Maybe back from Iraq. National Guard. What was it that looked so military about him? No, not military. He was a hunter.
“I just watched the weather channel,” he said and let her have a loose, slightly crooked smile. “I’m one eighth Lakota, but I don’t think one eighth of anything counts for much. I’m half Irish, and then some Austrians got into the mix. Then there’s the English part. That’s where Hillary came from. I bet the Indians even watch the weather channel.” Rocky noticed that the only people who said “Indian” anymore usually were Native Americans.
“OK, stand sideways with your left side closest to the target. Turn your head to face the target. No, just your head, not your shoulders; they’re like the arrow. Your arms and shoulders are going to become part of the whole arrow. You’re holding a lot of energy between your shoulder blades, let it drop down until you can feel your feet touching the earth.”
The wind picked up, carrying messages from the south. Rocky’s tightly curled hair flipped up, exposing her forehead, making her feel naked. She shook her head around to get the hair to come back down. They practiced soft knees, turning heads, shoulders going still. They practiced finding her center, dropping energy down, pulling energy up, breathing from the belly, letting all the breath out, and then the deeper stillness.
“Everyone wants to pull the arrow back and let her rip. That’s like saying to a mathematician, ‘What’s the final answer?’ The arrow is the least of it. What did you eat before you came here? Your energy is too high up in your body.”
“I can’t remember. Let’s see, I had a juice and coffee. I haven’t had lunch yet.”
“That’s part of it,” he said getting into the stance himself. “Watch me. Tell me what you see.”
He closed his eyes for a few seconds and turned to the side. His thick eyelashes rested on his cheeks. His chest and belly filled up with air. He opened his eyes. On the release of breath, he turned his head with hydraulic fluidity. His shoulders were back and down. He looked like a tree trunk swaying with imperceptible movement. And then he entered stillness. He pantomimed pulling back an arrow with his right hand, which glided smoothly from a spot an arm’s length in front of his back to his ear. Finally he released the imaginary arrow. Rocky thought she could hear the thwack of it hitting the target. Her eyes darted to the target despite what her brain knew. She looked back at Hill, who remained in his still posture. She knew he had noticed that she looked at the target. Tiny muscles around his lips struggled to keep from smiling.
“In this posture, nothing should be able to knock me over. It’s like being anchored to the ground, but the upper body can stay flexible. Push me,” he said. “Hard.”
“This demonstration is not going to be very effective, if you’re trying to show how powerful you are against equal strength. I don’t have a lot of brute strength these days. I must have left it somewhere else,” said Rocky, feeling strangely hypnotized by his movements.
“Well, give a really big push, then.”
What was the point of this, that a woman would ricochet off him in an attempt to tackle him? She was suddenly irritated at the predictability of the exercise. There was something about the hint of childhood taunting that motivated her in the moment. She impulsively put her head down and dove into him with her shoulder, the way she had seen football players do. She imagined the man as firmly planted as a tree, so the point of this demonstration was to show what little impact she could have on him, and she simply did not care. She wanted to hit someone hard. She plowed into him with a force that welled up from dank, unused places. She knocked him over. Or more exactly, he seemed to collapse like a bridge that had rusted out.
“Damn,” he said from the ground. “I never know when that knee will go out. Football is a surgeon’s favorite sport, a real moneymaker. All this from playing football at a state college, division-three ball.” He rubbed his knee from his flat-back position. “You sure you want to learn archery? You have potential in the more aggressive sports, like hockey.”
Hill stood up, rubbed his knee some more and said, “Practice breathing, practice everything you did today, except the part where you tackled me. I’ve got space for one more student. I lost a student a few months ago. Oh wait, I’m assuming you want the lessons. Do you?”
Rocky had not tackled anyone with such satisfaction since sixth grade when she could still overpower Caleb. And she had not touched another man, other than griever’s hugs, since Bob had died.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt? Yeah, I want to sign up for lessons. I’m not a hunter. But there’s something about archery. I want to learn how to do this.”
Hill grabbed his jacket from the picnic table and put it on. “Lots of people will start something like archery, but when it gets hard, they quit. How about you, what do you do when things get hard?”
What did she do? She shoved her hands into her pants pockets. “I don’t quit,” she said.
They scheduled lesson two for the following Wednesday afternoon at three. Hill offered to give her some of his paper targets, complete with his special stamp in the lower right corner, but Rocky declined; she had bought her own at the Sports Equipment Store. Hill t
aught English at Brunswick High School and Wednesday was the only day he didn’t stay late. Rocky tried to picture an English teacher grading papers after a day of shooting deer.
Chapter 10
Lesson two was harder.
“The first thing we have to do is test for eye dominance. That will tell us which hand will hold the bow and which will pull the bowstring,” said Hill.
“I’m right-handed,” said Rocky.
“That may be, but we don’t know if you’re right-eyed or left-eyed. Hold both hands out at arm’s length, put your hands loosely together like this so there’s a hole to look through. Keep both eyes open and look at the center of the target. Keep it in focus and slowly move your hands toward your face. Keep going, slow and steady.”
This was already more personal than she imagined, she just wanted to shoot the arrow. Aim and shoot. This felt like going to the doctor. She pulled her hands toward her slowly.
“Your hands are pulling over to the left eye. Center the hole over your left eye and focus on the target. Now do the same thing over the right eye. Which one is it?”
Hill stood with his legs spread wide, his arms rested lightly at his sides. He waited for Rocky to figure out what he already saw.
“It’s my left eye. How can that be?”
Hill shrugged. “Happens all the time. People think that their eyes work the same way on each side. We are not symmetrical. Let’s see how strong your left arm is. That’s where the trouble lies; we have to balance out strength with accuracy.”
He put a bow in Rocky’s hands. “This is the long bow, the only kind of traditional bow that I use. It’s not fancy like the recurve bow, but I prefer it. Take a wide stance, right side to the target. Hold the bow with your right hand and pull the bowstring with your left. Point your elbow higher, pull your hand right up near your jawline. We’ll work on finesse later.”
Rocky struggled to pull back the bowstring. Her arm shook with the effort. Soon the entire bow was wobbling as she grimaced and finally pulled back the string. Then she did the same on the opposite side; left side facing the target, left hand holding the bow, right arm pulling the bowstring. Her arm pulled the string back in a nearly steady effort. Rocky felt her face pull into a smile.
“There’s our answer. Your right-handed dominance is going to be more important than your left-eyed dominance. You pulled the bowstring back in a smooth line with your right hand. That’s the good news. The bad news for you is, that’s a child’s bow. You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Rocky’s shoulders slumped. “That’s a kid’s bow? What the hell does a real one feel like?”
“You’re about to find out.” Hill flipped a tarp off the wood picnic table and an array of bows appeared.
When it seemed to Rocky that Hill had found her lacking in the archery department, the competitive spirit in her flamed to life. When had she last really wanted something, wanted to get better at something? She was horrified when Hill gave her a child’s bow after her quivering inability to pull back a bowstring with even a thirty-pound draw weight. And then the final insult still left her reeling.
“You don’t have enough mass, and what you have is not muscle mass. Let me say this in another way; you don’t have enough weight in the right places in the right density. Your ability to knock me over had to do with a combination of my bad knee and lucky physics, and I think you were also pissed off at something, but that’s your business. I’m trying to say this with some degree of sensitivity because I’ve heard of men being murdered for even mentioning weight in reference to a woman. But plainly speaking, you just don’t have enough mass.”
Rocky pondered this on the drive back to the ferry. She put her hand to her thigh and wondered if this leg was hers. Wasn’t hers bigger, ready to spring? Standing at the dock, waiting for the ferry, she opened her coat and put her hand on her waist, inched upward and connected with a set of newly exposed ribs that had not been there six months ago. She put her thumbs into her waistband and pulled out. Pants that had once been snug now gapped by inches. Rocky carried the child’s bow under her arm, zippered in its canvas case. Like everyone else, Rocky headed for the enclosed room on the ferry. The wind was too cold for even the hardiest passenger.
What worried her most was not that she had lost weight, but that she had not noticed it happening. Were other things happening as well?
Bob would have noticed right away if she had lost this much weight. First, his hands would have noticed, a hand on her breasts or her hips. His hands would have paused, retracted from passion to medical analysis. He would have said, “Don’t go skinny on me. I need something to hang on to.” Then later, his eyes would have followed her, tracing her face, and with economical accuracy, her glutes. As she walked by his chair, he would have grabbed her, wrestled her into a playful struggle.
“Rocky, we need healthy mares in this pasture, the kind that eat and whose ribs don’t show from across the road and their rumps are firm and happy, winking at all the studs.” And she would have punched him hard on the arm and said, “You’re starting to worry me with all your horse talk.” But that’s what would have happened if Bob were there. Bob was dead.
The next day was shrill with sunshine and cold wind. She had no place that she had to be; no animal calls had come in, and even Isaiah was gone today so that an impromptu visit at his office was not possible. Then she remembered her body. This was the first day that Rocky truly remembered she had a body. “If I was not in my body, where have I been?” she wondered.
Bob was seven months dead. Her dreams were laden with the exhaustion of searching for him, but as much as she longed to see him again, she feared recrimination for not saving him. When she did find a wisp of him, an echo, or feather touch, she could not bear to wake with the renewed grief of knowing him only in her dreams. Since banishing Bob from her dreams, she could recall no dreams at all.
The winter sun had come in hard and low and touched her arms. The thin hairs on her forearms, invisible at other times, were now backlit and harsh. The winter air was cold and deep. Angry cells from her skin stood up and caught the rake of the sun’s light. “I’m falling apart, I want to be back in my body again. How did I fall out of my body?”
If she were back home, she could get a massage, or cranialsacral something, Reiki, acupressure, deep Swedish massage, anything to put herself back together again before her bones flew apart, before her ears fell off and her skin unzipped. But on the island, there was no one who did any of those things. Well, Tess could but Rocky feared coming undone under her expertise and she wasn’t ready to fall apart in front of Tess. She would have to do the putting together herself.
She stepped out of her clothes and they fell around her like petals. The rental house had a long mirror, but she had taken it down when she first moved in and slid it behind the couch. She pulled it out again, pounded a nail into the living room wall and hung it. She stared a long time at her face, at her torso, her legs, at the uneven trouble of hair in the middle of her body. The first place she could bear to touch was her knees, and she ran her thumb over and around her kneecaps, owning first one and then the other, wondering how to reconstruct herself. The cat and dog watched her from a pool of sunlit floor. Peterson the cat had recently agreed to sit in the same room with Lloyd.
Maybe she had lost weight, so what? It’s not unusual after a death. A spouse might lose weight, gain weight, come down with an autoimmune disease or crash their car in a late-night one-car accident. What truly astounded Rocky was that she had not noticed. Hadn’t she always had broad shoulders? Now they just looked angular. The swimmer’s build, Bob had called it. When they first married, he introduced her as the one with the shoulders. Somehow, he had made her more real, gave her definition, without her ever noticing how it happened.
She thought she had been real enough before they met, before she had seen him swimming laboriously in the town pool, his dense bones dragging him down, paddling like a large poodle, straining to keep his head ab
ove water. Surely she had been the one to be in the physical realm, to know her body. She had been the one with the whistle around her neck, the SPF 30 on her nose, pausing to ask him, “Do you need assistance?” And he, barely able to ask one more thing of his body such as turning his head, had eyed her with one eye, the way a whale might, and with the same effect. If a whale ever looks right at you, with its one-sided watery vision, you are never the same.
With much sputtering, Bob had dog-paddled his ultra dense bones to the side of the pool and said, “I’ve been working on this all summer. If you think this is bad, you should have seen me in June.”
She didn’t know where he’d been practicing his tortuous swimming program, but it had not been here at the town pool because she had been life guarding all summer each afternoon.
He had pulled himself out of the pool with all the grace of an unfortunate elk that had fallen in, and he grappled and slipped and finally pulled himself to a seated position. Rocky was fascinated by his determination. She squatted down and extended a muscled arm and said, “That was a most extraordinary pool exit.”
Maybe that was it, that first touch, culminating in the combination of her well-defined body and his determined body, undefined but denser than a black hole, coming together in a way she had not imagined.
“I can show you how to make more efficient use of your strokes,” she said.
He later told her that was the best line he had ever heard. He had just graduated from veterinary school. She had one more year of grad school before completing her doctoral degree in psychology.
She lifeguarded right through graduate school at Iowa State University and had been the target of no little teasing among her psychology classmates. “Complexes about saving people should be more subtle. Don’t you think lifeguarding at the town pool is too dramatic?” asked Glen, her study partner in statistical research. “I only want to save myself.”
They started swimming lessons and dating simultaneously; a one-hour lesson after Rocky was off duty followed by sandwiches at the bagel place across from the university. Each lesson was more fascinating to Rocky than the one before. Bob’s body was unlike anyone else’s she had ever encountered. He was a stone, filled with granite instead of blood and bone marrow. She had always been able to teach even the most water-phobic person to swim, teaching them about their breath, relaxing their spine to float, eventually rejoicing at seeing the newly found freedom when a first-time swimmer skimmed across the pool like a water spider.
Lost & Found Page 9
