by Leslie North
For now, she put pencil to flapping paper in a world she could control, and the truck’s cab slipped again into a quiet vacancy.
* * *
“It’s perfect.” Olive stood at the barn’s epicenter, the lens of her eyeglasses reflecting the rafters. “All but the junky truck.”
She couldn’t have cut Wes to the quick more had she requested a strip-down then compared his manhood to the broken crankshaft she swiped on her way in.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re sharing my barn, remember?”
He had just about had enough sharing for one morning. After a normal weekday breakfast evolved into something of an event upon their arrival on the ranch, with Willie squeezing fresh orange juice and January whipping up banana pancakes and practically squealing like their guest was some long-lost sister, further delaying already-late ranch chores, Wes itched to set things back on schedule and establish some territory. Six months would be an eternity if he let Olive run amok, the way her curiosity got loose in the truck.
Wes had been certain she would ask his underwear preference, his greatest fear, and how many women he’d bedded before his truck tires peeled off onto Meier land.
“You realize how large this bronze statue will be?”
“’Bout the same size as your entitlement.” He snatched the part from her hands and laid it back on the old saddle blanket where he’d carefully staged the parts to rebuild the engine. “Truck stays.”
“I’ll need space to extract the statue—in pieces, of course—when it goes to the foundry.”
“Back wall opens up.”
“And I can’t work where others would see the progress.”
She fiddled with a few other parts on her moving inspection in an absent, irreverent way. He was sure she could catalog a hundred different chisels, but the engineering marvel that was the Ford flathead V8 in the days of his grandfather’s youth was clearly lost on her. If she didn’t look so absolutely fitting in the space, in her baggy overalls and long hair blown every which way from the ride in his truck, he might have backed out of the agreement, mayor or not.
“It stifles me—creatively,” she said. “I don’t know of any other artist who works on display.”
“What about performance art?”
She leveled a stare at him. “Someone belching the alphabet at the local fair is an underwhelming medium at best.”
God help him, but her dry wit flirting with pretentiousness drew him to her all the more and reminded him of Daniel. Guy had a sophisticated humor that, every now and again, when you most needed a laugh, something positive in a day otherwise gone to hell, reached down to the most common denominator between people and surprised.
“Fine. We’ll use the extra hay bales to make a partition.”
“And the noise?”
“You have to have quiet, too? It’s a wonder you’ve managed to create anything at all without the planets being in alignment.”
“We can work out a schedule.”
“So long as it involves me being in here whenever I want.”
“Not much for sharing, are you?”
He wanted to give her the rundown of exactly what it was like inside a unit, deployed to the middle of nowhere, where the only thing you had to call yours was what could fit within the walls of a six-by-six shipping container when your sleeping body took up half the room. Or better yet, on patrol in the hills, where you slept body-to-body for protection. He had done enough sharing for one lifetime, and when he came home, he wanted space—more than a decent meal, a comfortable bed, and a willing woman. Space. But explaining all that would involve a subject he was determined to keep off the table between them. Her being there already brought Daniel too close, too often, in his mind.
“Look, I know you didn’t ask for it, but no more special meal times. We’re a business, not a guest ranch. And you don’t have to help with chores, but it’d sure go over well around here if you didn’t make more work for others. My music in here, low. And absolutely no talking. My time here with my grandfather’s truck is mine.” Wes heaved three bales atop each other then peered around them.
Her frown was aggressively sexy.
“Agree to all that, and I’ll configure the barn however you like,” he said.
“And if I need to get your attention?”
Wes wanted to tell her it was far too late for that—that his body tightened at her presence and his imagination tangled in a mindless play of tongues and limbs, merely to suppose what unexpected thing she might do next. He lacked the courage to do anything but reach for her scarf, barely more than a dyed length of wispy, woven cotton. He tugged it free of her neck and reached for the clip hooked to a length of cable and a pully at the barn’s highest pitch. The russet fibers telegraphed the warmth from her neck through his palms and up his arm. He clipped the scarf and raised it like a flag.
Olive’s expression softened, almost to a smile. “I’m sorry if I’ve been difficult. It’s just that I’m used to working under certain conditions. Namely, isolation.”
“We’ll leave you alone. As much as possible.”
She nodded. Her gaze drizzled to the ground, retreated like it so often did behind the veil of her glasses and a curtain of dark, tousled hair. The distance was just as well. Her mental game of evasiveness and plundering tempted him too much, and the flush of her cheeks every time he stared at her with any insistence nearly drove him to put his mouth on hers and taste how her barely-there accent whispered his name. She represented everything he needed to put behind him to be okay, to move forward as he always did.
“I should get out to pasture. Help Nat.” Wes’s voice came out as a whisper in the secluded barn, almost intimate. To his ears, hesitant.
Olive nodded. She pressed lips that looked like a perfectly flattened, perfectly pink heart into a half-smile that reminded him of infinite sadness.
Immediately, he wanted to kiss it away. Instead, he turned. He made it clear to the bumper of Clem’s truck before she spoke again.
“Wes?”
That accent around his name. His balance nearly toppled from the sound of it. Though it wasn’t in the throes of intimacy as he had imagined, it was quiet and personal, all the same. He stopped and turned, thought she might make another request in that subtly guarded way of hers. When she didn’t speak, he prompted. “Yeah?”
“I don’t understand this place, the people, in the same way Daniel did.”
Wes smiled. He knew next to nothing about her—that she was a prodigy from a young age, that people believed her to be a definitive artist of her generation, all that could be gleaned with a social media search, but he knew, somehow, that she had come here, not to create something, but to uncover it. About this, Wes could speak with certainty.
“You will, Olive. Give it time.”
5
Livie had been at the Meier ranch long enough to see two sunsets, both of which surpassed her ultimate sunset memory from Casablanca. In Morocco, she had found a purity to the day’s end: few clouds to fracture the light, enough particles in the atmosphere to shape the sun into a glowing, tiger-orange sphere, and enough water to reflect thousands of replications on the sea. Here, in the shallow patch of land in an otherwise massive place known as Texas, the heavens spared nothing at the day’s final curtain—patches of absolute clarity, a distant electrical display, shards of light fractured at so many angles from the storm clouds the effect had to have been a directive from a greater artist. Perhaps it was the humidity against her bare arms that replicated closeness, perhaps it was the unconditional acceptance and far-reaching warmth she had found on the ranch in the short span of time, perhaps a foreign sense of family—not entirely blood but also choice—informed the place’s rustic, bucolic beauty.
Accustomed to being alone, Livie had retreated often—taking long walks to sketch, organizing the delivered supplies that would provide first-stage structure to her art, sitting in the barn because there were no well-meaning questions, no curiosity about her unusual life and pursuit,
no family stories that didn’t remind her of the joy she had bypassed in childhood. Often, the energy was simply too much.
She was no closer to concept, so she sought inspiration in the grand and the mundane. Stiff bubbles around the dinner dishes she volunteered to wash provided her an abstract outlet—and an eyeful of amusing cartoon milkmaids with alter egos—but brought her no closer to her goal of understanding the chasm between duty and off-topic, light and dark, and the distant and isolated things about which Daniel and Wes knew that few others ever could. The closest she had come to a pure emotional moment of inspiration was a ditch in the German countryside.
And the back-porch steps of a ranch house on a hill, dish towel in hand.
Behind her, the screen-door hinges creaked.
The man she knew only as Willie poked his head through the opening. “Do you mind the company?”
She found she didn’t mind. Already, she had discovered that Willie had the ordinary superpower to see things others missed. “Not at all. May I help you?”
“Only in describing the sunset.”
“A little like a volcano flowing against gravity.”
Willie closed his eyes as if savoring a forbidden sweet or vice. His cheeks rounded. “I think we may have to keep you around permanently.”
The word—permanently—flowed up through her chest, a little against gravity.
The porch was cluttered, one piece of furniture bumped up against another in a half-circle, so as to funnel Willie’s movements in a protected way. By his unflinching navigation of his surroundings, she suspected he’d known the space well before his eyesight left. When he neared her, she reached for his hand.
His palm was calloused and dry. She guessed his age to be in his seventies from the proliferation of spots in his dark skin. He sat beside her, but did not release her touch right away. Perhaps he sensed she craved touch more than most. His nostrils flared, taking in the evening air.
“Thank you for all you did in the barn. Wes told me you arranged for that plywood stage and oiled the doors in the back.”
“Least I could do. You need anything else, ask.”
“Actually…”
“Name it.”
“The barn is dark. Especially at night after Wes finishes working on the truck. I found one of those caged task-lights on a cord, but it’s flexible and doesn’t stay in place.”
“Got just the thing. Old rodeo lights on a stand from Chase’s early days. I’ll have Randy check the bulbs and set ’em up ’fore dark.”
“Wes won’t mind?”
“Pushin’ back the darkness? Nah. He’s been trying to do that since he got back. Reminds him of somethin’ he’d rather forget over there. Started sleepwalking again a few nights ago, just like he did the first night he came home, after his second deployment. Sometimes he makes it back to bed. Most times, he’ll wake up, pitch black out. Then he’ll just stay put until the sunrise. Makes for a funny story at breakfast, to hear where he wakes up, but he doesn’t much see the humor in it.”
“He won’t talk about it.”
“I ’spect he never will. You bein’ Daniel’s kin and all. It’s sacred. Can’t say as I understand it. Never served, myself. Wes’s grandfather was the same way. Found it easier to open up to those who had the same experiences. Don’t want to burden the rest of us, I s’pose.”
She recalled Wes piss-drunk, wondered how often that happened. “It seems he might be carrying too much of the burden by himself.”
“Wes don’t always know what’s good for him. Boy can lead an entire unit into a firestorm but can’t lead himself away from trouble. The homegrown kind. Been that way since he was the little end of nothin’. Always stirring up his brothers. An impulsive streak. Only Hell his momma ever raised.”
“They must have been proud when he went into the service.”
“You’d have thought he was the Second Coming, they carried on so. Clem was so proud, he cleared a space right in the center of his memorabilia to hang Wes’s photo. ’Fore long, Marine stuff was everywhere.”
“Where is it all now?”
“Right around the same time Wes started sleepwalking, he packed it all away. Clem’s too. Burial honor flag. All of it. Rough time for Wes, adjustin’ back. Took a good while longer than all the other times he returned.”
“When was that?”
She suspected she already knew.
Willie scratched at his head. “Quite a few years back, now.”
Livie knew exactly. “The time after Daniel came here?”
“Now that you mention it, I’d say that’s about right.”
“Daniel was killed that January. Along with four others.”
She knew little beyond the highlights the Marines packaged up and sold to the family. Part of coming here was a quest for truth. She hadn’t imagined that truth might come at a cost to someone else.
“Wes didn’t come home. Must have been that next Christmas,” Willie said.
“Maybe coming here was a mistake,” she confessed.
“Maybe you bein’ here is exactly what the boy needs. Pain like that, powerful enough to knock a man from his aim. He’s so busy trying not to feel that he’s lost himself in the numbness of it all. What art does, right? Makes you feel.”
“If it’s done right.”
“I have no doubt about that.”
Livie couldn’t say what came over her—she simply wanted to kiss his cheek. The connection she felt to Willie defied explanation.
At the peck, his ample lips stretched wide.
“Speaking of done right,” she said, “I could use your help. The bronze will need a plinth, and I hear you’re pretty good with your hands.”
“Tell me what I need to do. I’d be honored.” He shuffled his feet and stood. “Time for an old man to catch some shut-eye.”
“What can I do?”
“Enjoy the sunset. For us both.” He said goodnight to her with a wave. By the time the screen door tapped closed behind him, the sun had slipped clear of the horizon.
Livie picked up her sketchbook. The glow from the amber porch light expanded enough to illuminate the page. She fleshed out Willie’s hands, the unique markings, the rough surfaces, then turned her attention to the barn’s opening. In a space no wider than an embrace, at a time of day when she had promised herself she would respect Wes’s boundaries, she lifted fragments of his image for her vision of the bronze.
And tears rimmed her vision.
It felt right—this direction, this inspiration, this man whom Daniel loved. It felt only right he should be part of her sculpture, something to swear off the dark days of Mildred and Augusta and usher in something close to hope. It felt right, but she knew it could not be.
For if he was ever to gift her such a pain, she would be a most unworthy sycophant to use it.
Livie crumbled the page from the book and tossed it aside.
* * *
Wes wasn’t entirely sure how Olive ended up in the passenger side of Clem’s truck. Served her right that it had no seat, but she didn’t seem to mind perching on the rusted gas tank that spanned the length of the cab. One minute, at nearly midnight, she had appeared at the barn door and stole glances at him. The next, her slim, floor-length skirt swept his workspace. Now her hands skimmed the old Ford’s interior surfaces reverently, as if the old V8 were her creation. She had asked, of course. He said sure for reasons he couldn’t figure. The decision went beyond manners. Quite possibly wasn’t a decision at all. They hadn’t spoken in two days, but that hadn’t stopped her from intruding on his world.
When delivery trucks had backed up to the barn, Wes had spent a good twenty distracted minutes puzzling together the supplies—spools of wire, hardware screws and brackets, Styrofoam—and realized he knew very little about what went into creating a bronze sculpture. When Mona strung wire between the lights and attached S-clips to Olive’s hook and rake and rubber and kidney tools—terms he learned from the collective gab over the hay wall—so that
Olive would always have what she needed within reach, the women of the ranch had a grand unveiling of her aesthetic workspace, complete with hoots and music-less dancing, as if they had found a way to stretch a day into twenty-five hours. And once, when the temperature plummeted in a late-autumn chill and Olive peeked around the wall of hay, she had only to wrap her fuzzy, cream-colored sweater like a shroud around her body to communicate her wish. He fetched his space heater without a word, but the damage was done. Wes had spent the better part of the next few hours negotiating a very different kind of heat in his imagination.
Olive’s fingertips smoothed the dashboard’s prominent brow, the pointed ridge that delineated the driver’s side of the cab from the passenger’s side, then walked the metal vein that bisected the windshield. “How long until repairs are finished?”
Her voice was a bit like a song breaking into a conversation in his head. He found it a struggle to work through how to turn a C-clamp into a door pin remover while the muted notes drifted toward him, so he took a shop rag to his already-clean socket wrench instead.
“At the rate I’m going? Twenty years.”
“Nat could help you. Make it go faster.”
“Nat couldn’t tell a rear gasket from a rear fender.”
“How did you learn how to do all this?” She mimed unfastening a glove box door that wasn’t there then closing it again.
Wes found it odd and endearing all at once.
“I was never one for the kind of learning that came from books. I’m more hands-on. Friend in high school taught me some. His dad had a repair shop outside of town. Rest I learned in the service, more out of necessity than anything.” He shrugged. “You probably think it’s a waste of time.”
“Actually, it’s as much art as what I do.”
She kicked back and propped her feet against the door frame as if she planned to snooze after a lazy Sunday drive. That they were bare, that it did something to him to see her stripped down, in any way, seemed an inroad on a challenge where she already had the upper hand.
