The Meaning of Isolated Objects

by Billie Hinton

  Sometime later it rained and lightning streaked the sky. He took this to be a sign of something and slept well with that thought beneath his pillow.

  He woke with his mind as muddy as the roads outside. The snow-covered mountains in the distance calmed him and he breathed in the Afghan air. The drive ahead would be an endless journey over bad roads. His destination a village just beyond Jalalabad.

  Not far outside Kabul the mountain pass followed the river, and he clicked automatically into high alert. The road a few miles further became treacherous. It hugged the mountain with no guard rails, no walls between his vehicle and the river a thousand feet below.

  His mind cleared and the real reason he was there began to surface.

  He shook it off and focused ahead. Just like at home in the Virginia mountains, only here there was dust and danger. The surge of adrenaline, his drug of choice.

  Once the adrenaline kicked in he could let go a little. Breathed in and out, resolved himself to the rough ride. Not like his truck back home. This piece of junk with its assortment of rattles and whines could break down at any moment. He couldn’t track the noises it made. Didn’t have the music he loved. Jess had played music for him, a woman singing, Celtic, maybe.

  He smelled something that jerked him back to why he was here. Couldn’t ID the scent, but it set off a chain of thoughts that led to his mantra, that one time thing. If he adhered to that where would he be now, with Jess?

  He’d lied to himself. The rule about one time, nothing he couldn’t give up. That was bullshit. It had been three times, long ago, back in Kabul.

  A young woman he’d met while Lynnie was pregnant and he was many months working. Out of touch. Needing touch. He fell for the woman through the screen of a blue burqa. Eyes he’d mostly imagined seeing. She was not a whore. The first time in a dirt-floored room she’d cried and he’d allowed himself to pretend it meant something. The second time he’d nearly been killed two hours before and they had talked through the night in whispers. He had told all his secrets in a language she didn’t understand. The third time he’d ripped the condom and neglected to put on a new one.

  Looking back, he had no true sense of what he’d been thinking, why he’d not gone to a whore instead. There would have been no complications. Or if there were, they’d have been taken care of.

  She hid the pregnancy beneath the burqa. Nine months later he’d buried Lynnie and left his newborn daughter with his sister-in-law. Jess. He went back to find the Afghani woman. He’d feared it would repeat, that she would die in childbirth like Lynnie had and he’d have to take the child home with him. What would he have done with two infants?

  He’d been ashamed at his thought - if the Afghani woman and the child both died it would be easier.

  Now he realized he had killed them off in his head, those years ago. Not the guilt but the connection. Made the images, the way he stayed in touch with Wendell, impossible.

  The rough lurch of the truck over rocks forced his attention back to the present and the battered road. He was letting his mind wander. The river turned from brown to aqua as he descended the pass on the other side. The landscape here was unlike that in Kabul. Well-tended fields were reminiscent of the Mediterranean. People worked the crops. It was almost normal.

  As he drove through tiny villages he smelled marijuana being smoked. He went faster toward Jalalabad.

  Driving from Kabul to J-bad, you descended a mile in elevation. The descent was not the stereotypical downward journey but instead a lowering into a more fertile place. J-bad was green, with trees and intact buildings. He had sent the woman here for that reason. The child. He wanted them to know trees and flora. He wanted them to have something approximating what Wendell had in Virginia.

  Imagined himself traveling back and forth between the two families, two women taking care of his two girls. The lush mountains of Virginia. The barren mountains of Afghanistan. Places he knew the taste of, the feel of dirt and grit.

  In Afghanistan when a birth was imminent men with guns gathered outside to fire bursts of gunshot. Five or seven for a girl. Fourteen or more for a boy.

  When his second child was born, no shots were fired because it was both a sin and a secret.

  He had paid for the woman’s new life in a village where her indiscretion would be easier to conceal. Where there would be no retribution. After she’d gone with the baby he took his gun and fired it seven times.

  He had seen the girl once, when she was four years old. The meeting had been easy to arrange through his contacts. He was simply a visitor in the small room behind the tiny home’s rubble, invited for tea and bread. They sat in a circle around a brightly colored cloth. Her eyes had been curious but she recoiled when he reached for her. He didn’t know why and couldn’t bring himself to consider the reasons. He had looked for something of himself in her face but saw nothing he recognized. It wasn’t difficult to leave a child who wouldn’t come close, who looked nothing like him.

  Her mother had married and aged more than he would have thought possible in that few years’ time. She lifted her head scarf once before he left. He imagined he saw tears but it was probably the smoky room. Her teeth were brown and broken. He had no memory of how she’d looked as the younger woman she had been, could find no part of himself that recalled a desire for her, or affection. There were no photographs. It had all been so easily erased.

  Since then he’d tracked the girl’s age in his head. Tried to stay clear of women as young as she would be, though it was hard in Afghanistan. They all looked so much older than they were. He had a nightmare of finding her in a whorehouse. That he’d paid her for sex without knowing.

  He drove faster, pushed the truck harder than he should in his haste to get somewhere. To find something and bend it to his will. A happier ending.

  His mind wandered back to the little girl Wendell. Standing by the pools at the edge of the river in autumn. Red and gold leaves were plastered to the gray river stones. They looked painted beneath the rippling water. Wendell’s copper hair had braided itself into coils at the nape of her neck and the rest of it floated out on the water’s clear surface as she leaned to grab a floating leaf.

  She had knelt there for half an hour patiently waiting for a crayfish to come out from beneath a rock.

  Looking back he didn’t know who had been the parent, him or Wendell. When he’d returned from Afghanistan after seeing his daughter something had changed. He had lost something. The knowledge that he was a father bore forward like bad weather. He had responsibilities. He had relied on Wendell to keep him straight. He hadn’t given much in return.

  But at least she knew safety. It made him sick now to think of the other one who hadn’t.

  He followed the graveled road, hyper-vigilant. To a certain degree he felt at home in this country but a bullet was a bullet. Ambushes were common and often fatal.

  The village where he’d seen the girl last was still some distance away. He thought back to that time. She had been dark and feral compared to Wendell, yet not as full of fire by any means. What he remembered most was the fact that she wouldn’t look him in the eye. He knew this country and its atrocities. Tortured himself as he drove with the thought of why a man reaching out to her caused such a reaction.

  When he found the place he’d last seen her he asked questions in Pashtun, and was told by a man with a broken tooth that the family had been killed in a skirmish some years back. Another man, who answered in English, recalled the daughter and shook his head when asked what he knew. She had fought, he remembered, and the men had done things to her before she died.

  “What did they do?” Scott lowered his voice and kept it measured.

  The man looked down and mumbled.

  A younger man disagreed in staccato Pashtun, saying he thought the father had been killed fighting for his family, but the mother and daughter escaped. He might know where they could be found. He rubbed the palm of his hand.

  Scott knew this story was likely
fabricated out of need. Not greed, because what did the young man have that more could equal too much?

  He watched the younger man pull at his beard and noted the way his eyes shifted when he spoke. He was lying, and yet Scott wanted to believe him. Wanted to peel bills off a roll and hand them over, to be led across this desperate landscape toward the hope of something.

  He accepted tea and sat with the men awhile before he drove away.

  Outside the village he stopped and walked some distance from the truck, into the dusty ground by the roadside. He knelt and took up some of the earth in his hand. When she was killed, they would have closed her eyes and placed a clean sheet over her body.

  The women in the village would have washed the body and wrapped it in a shroud. He thought it was called a kafan but wasn’t sure. The prayers were said by the iman, and the men in the village carried the body for burial, on her right side, facing Mecca. There were no grave markers, no flowers. Simply prayers to Allah.

  He didn’t know how to remember her. The grief he felt was not specific, he hadn’t known her. And yet his chest ached and he felt what he assumed was loss, a weight that represented what he had done and then not done.

  He let the dust and rock fall from his hand. Stood and waited for his knee to unlock, then walked back to the truck. As he drove back toward Kabul, he remembered something someone had told him once, here in this country, about the dead.

  Muhammad said there were three things that benefited a person after death: charity given during one’s lifetime, knowledge given that helped others, and a righteous child to pray for the deceased.

  He didn’t know about the charity, and wondered about the knowledge he’d gained and given, details that led to death and destruction, in the name of a higher good, often so convoluted it resembled the ridiculous.

  He had one child left. He didn’t know if she was righteous, or if she would pray for him when he died.

  From the back of Tag’s motorcycle the world flew by. Wendell knew next to nothing about this blue-eyed man, except for the little bit he’d shared by the pay phone. And that her left cheek tingled often when he was near.

  Her arms spanned the wide berth of his shoulders, as though measuring him against a past. It seemed she had known him, that they were bound by some remote familiarity. When they moved forward on the bike, she instinctively held tight. He smelled of soap and air. Ahead of them, on another bike, his friend Keller rode serpentines between yellow lines.

  As the morning sun warmed her shoulders she thought back to the campground: Grayson returning from the bathhouse to find her gone. His eyes roaming the perimeter of the campsite, noting the missing items. Wendell, her sleeping bag, her pack. She felt his sigh, the long easy exhalation of breath that marked his exasperation. And, she suspected, his relief.

  Tag stopped for gas and checked in with Keller, “better known as Killer.” She looked immediately to his hands, as if they might reveal the accuracy of his nickname. He saw her looking and held them up, fingers spread, and grinned.

  The bathroom was a tiny shack attached to the rear of the gas station. It tilted as though nailed together by a child, and streaks of white proved to be the sun sneaking through slender cracks in the walls. The little space was lit with a single transparent bulb, not more than forty watts when she pulled the chain.

  It wasn’t filthy but it was hot and smelled bad so she didn’t linger. When she opened the door to leave, Keller and Tag were at the corner, talking. For some reason she eased the door closed again and listened.

  “Does she know who you are? Can she do what he did?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Tag’s voice faded as they stepped back toward the front of the building. She stood, tensed, trying to think. After a minute, the streaks of light went black, and someone knocked on the door.

  “You want anything from inside?” Tag opened the door, silhouetted in the blinding sun, and ran the side of his hand down her cheek and neck, all the way down to the tips of her fingers. As if he were erasing her suspicion. Transforming it into intrigue.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, then. Time to ride.”

  Roswell was a murky black and white photograph next to the three-dimensional technicolor Tag, whose face was rosy from the sun. His pale blue eyes seemed out of place against the sable bristled hair. In his rust-colored T-shirt and indigo jeans it was hard to look past him. She kept waiting for him to reveal that he knew her, but he remained elusive.

  They had been in Roswell for an hour and so far what that entailed was Wendell walking in Tag’s wide wake. Keller took off as soon as they pulled into town, one hand trailing behind as he kicked the bike into gear and sped away.

  First they went to a car wash and rinsed the road dust off Tag’s motorcycle. Gassed it up. Then ate in a café Tag chose without her input. He talked of superficial things, the heat, the texture of the strawberry milkshake he’d ordered, that they made good time from Pine Springs. All the while he managed to evade her questions. She watched while he chewed his burrito, his eyes met hers squarely but there was nothing more she could decipher.

  They spent the afternoon exploring. She rubbed his shoulders while they stood in line at the alien museum, leaned against him in the dark while they watched the museum video. Undid two buttons on her blouse and gave him a glimpse of the lacy thing beneath. All she got was a nod.

  A light dinner and three margaritas each and as they left the bar he asked, “Motel or tent?”

  She was thinking motel but shrugged. She wanted him to choose, as if in the succession of choices she might discover a pattern and meaning. He got her pack and his and headed across the street to the mom and pop joint they’d walked past several times that day. Maybe his reserve was nothing more than shyness, or nonchalance. There was nothing to do but follow him and see.

  In the dark, unclothed, Tag’s body became a map she had traveled before. They touched without bumping, no tangled limbs. He paused. She was close to tears without knowing why. He buried his face in her neck and hair. The tenderness between them was terrifying.

  With unspoken agreement, they took a different path. Quick and hard, exhausting sex. When they were done, they rolled away from one another and fell asleep.

  He woke her in the night with the soft kneading of shoulders and his mouth pressing against her neck. In the fog of early morning, their bodies still tired, he returned to a slow and tender exploration, what Tristan had once called archaeological sex. A familiar fan of desire spread from one area of her body to another, a rolling band of warmth that drew her out to full length, lazy cat stretch, like being stroked.

  She was with him and then she floated off to some other place, the top of a mountain. Tag was there waiting. And then he beckoned.

  On the top of the mountain inside her waking dream, he kissed the tears on the corners of her eyes. She responded to the offering of a little piece of his heart.

  In the dusty, dry heat on that imagined mountain, they experimented with hearts and lovemaking. Buoyed by the safety of knowing they wouldn’t lose themselves to the other, ministered to the empty places they shared.

  There were no words, just the soft touch of his mouth to her skin, her fingers to his. Holding and moving and the whisper of long unmet needs. She wasn’t sure whose. He stayed close, neither left nor pulled away. For an hour or so she remained wide open that way, all soft and exposed and maybe for the first time, not afraid.

  His breathing remained steady as she expertly crawled out of bed without shifting the mattress. Her clothes were in one neat pile by the door. She pulled the T-shirt over her head.

  “You have to get up pretty early in the morning to sneak out on me.” He sounded amused. “Come back.”

  She popped her head out to look at him. In the light of a new day he seemed transformed. Or maybe it was her. The feeling from the dream was still strong. He came a little closer.

  “Let’s see if we can track Keller down.”

  On the motorcycle
, she wrapped her arms around him and forgot to notice if he leaned into her or away. The sun was bright and he went fast. This time they each knew more than nothing about the other.

  They coasted slowly through parking lots for an hour and then stopped at a café for eggs and coffee. Keller seemed to have disappeared. Tag pulled two dog-eared paperbacks from the saddlebag on the bike and handed one to her. A Cormac McCarthy novel he had obviously read many times. They sat at a table in the shade and turned pages across from one another, sipping iced coffee and keeping an eye out for Keller.

  When she looked up one time Tag was staring. He didn’t smile or change his expression. It seemed impossible to read him so she returned to the book.

  Later in the day he ordered lunch. She had begun to take an odd comfort in not making minor decisions, like what to eat or do, when to stop or how long to stay. He picked up his book again. She took a pen from her bag and made tiny sketches on napkins. When they left he slid them into his pocket when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  It was near dusk when they drove outside the city limits and unrolled sleeping bags alongside the bike. Once again she was stargazing but there was no painting of faces with her hair.

  “Kairos. You know what that is?”

  She stretched. “God time. As opposed to clock time.”

  “Good way to put it.”

  “It feels like that out here. No time at all.”

  “Time is a construct we invented and measure. Stop measuring and it disappears.”

  “It’s like that riding on the back of your bike. Everything else falls away.”

  “You’ve left a lot behind.” Tag touched her arm. “Are you looking for something out here?”

  “I don’t know. Mostly I’m terrified I won’t find it.”

  He pulled her hand to his mouth and touched his lips to her palm. “You make damned sure you don’t let that happen.”