The Meaning of Isolated Objects

by Billie Hinton

  “You see that girl checking us in yesterday?”

  “The one with the skirt?”

  “Damn.”

  “Right.”

  Few minutes of crackling fire, soft wind high up in the trees, a pine cone hit the ground, cushioned by the carpet of fallen needles lying beneath.

  “You know what they say. All’s fair in love and war.”

  Bingham laughed that time, low, not a ha-ha chuckle but a sardonic one. “Not when it’s your best bud in love with her.”

  “She in love with him?”

  “For now.”

  “You love her?”

  “She’s a bird with a broken wing. I’d like to be there when she flies again.”

  “If she inspires that kind of talk, go after her, man. Life’s too short.”

  They had both gone silent, stared like hypnotized fools into the fire. Let the awkward moment slip and fade. Bingham passed the whiskey. His only response.

  Not long after that Scott would have told him different. Run like hell. If you think you love her, man, get the hell out of dodge. She’ll break his heart and yours too.

  Knowing Bingham though, he waited, ever the patient man, and got her in the end. Scott hoped so, anyway.

  The town Bingham turned out to have two houses and a rock shop. He thought of stopping but drove on. He wanted to get to Socorro.

  Outside town he pulled off and leaned his head back in the truck. He had a sense of Wendell in Socorro. He wanted to find her but not reveal himself right away. He’d watch first and see what was going on.

  He drove in and scanned the parking lot of the first place he saw to stay. No bikes. He pulled in and got a room. It was good to get a shower and clean sheets. AC.

  He wished he had a rib-eye and a beer but there was no room service and he didn’t want to risk going out. He ate what he’d brought in the cooler. Drank soda from the machine.

  Channel-surfed until he found a good movie. Paris, Texas.

  When his cell phone rang he checked the number and answered. “Clear.”

  “He’s working something. RV. Had access to all your files.”

  Scott thanked her and snapped the phone shut. Closed his eyes and let the TV ramble on.

  A flash of greenish-yellow light hovered on the motel room window, blinking an unknown message in Morse code. A firefly, the familiar slender black insect with orange markings and an almost unnatural light emanating from its belly. She had caught a million of them growing up in Virginia, Her childhood friend Angelina used to pinch the lights off and stick them to her skin, glowing beads in the night. Lightning bug rings, she called them.

  All Wendell ever did was let them sit on her finger. What are you saying? Her chest was warm inside, as though someone was cradling her heart.

  Illumination.

  She moved across the bed to where Tag slept like a rock, heavy and unmoving, flat on his back. Vulnerable, perhaps, to talking in his sleep. Letting something slip. Beneath the sheet, tucked in a nest of fur, he was soft and malleable. She took him in her mouth, massaged with one hand. He lengthened and grew firm and then hard. There was nothing mysterious, no secrets, just her body manipulating his. He moaned a little and shifted but didn’t wake. He would if she continued, and she did.

  “God, Wendell,” he groaned, and she stopped. “Keep going.”

  He wanted pleasure and she needed answers.

  For the moment, she had power.

  In all the relationships she had known with men, it was reduced to nothing more than that, a game of power and pleasure and the trading back and forth of who played what role. The problem was it ended all too quickly. Love made it different. Insert love and you got the mystery, the alchemy. A too potent loyalty, devotion, the sort of worship that assumed frightening proportions if you submitted to it.

  She had watched people submit to love. Her father, Tristan, various girlfriends. She had seen them do crazy things, witnessed pain when their love was returned only to be taken away by events they were powerless to stop, Death, or a move across country. She had sat with girlfriends whose love was encouraged, only to be rejected. She had seen the look in Tristan’s eyes when she herself said no.

  She preferred power, but without the trappings, it was a short-lived shallow thing. All there was to do was recreate it over and over again.

  “Tag, there’s a firefly on the window.” Something about the firefly was almost overwhelming.

  He shoved his face into her neck. “No way, babe, they don’t have fireflies in New Mexico.”

  They hadn’t spoken of what it was Tag wanted from her. She felt like she was living inside a game of cards, where only one was played at a time, and there was no way to rush the game, no way to see who came out ahead in the end.

  In the little town of Socorro there was nothing much to do. They had come too close and what she already knew about herself, she discovered in Tag as well. He resumed his earlier distance.

  They drove out past Magdalena to Bosque del Apache to see the birds, they went to Sonic and watched the teenagers preen for one another. Tag enjoyed the brazen behavior of a dark-haired girl who wore cut-offs so short the flesh of her rounded ass was exposed. She flirted with him, shameless in her eagerness to pull his attention away from Wendell, to attract someone past the hormone-driven desperation of the boys her own age.

  The quiet boy two tables away, unlike his pals, did not grab or tease or otherwise express what was without question lurking inside. He seethed with it, but kept it disguised. Of all the boys he was the one who had indulged the ache. Shoved his innocence aside. None of the girls knew it yet, but he was the one to watch out for if they wanted to keep theirs. Or not.

  Wendell and Tag took to holding hands when they walked. After two days in Socorro the mystical sex metamorphosed into simple touches, glances – her hair across his shoulder, his foot against her calf. The smallest of things became erotic, charged with the reek of sadness and loss.

  She had given up on loving him, not anxiously or urgently, but simply, in the way in which two people who disavow love mark time, counting down the days until they say goodbye.

  Late afternoon in the lobby of the little motel, taking advantage of the free coffee and tourist brochure rack, she learned that Socorro was the Spanish word for succor. Aid, assistance, military reinforcements, a place of shelter and refuge.

  Tag and Keller came around the corner outside, visible through the wall of windows. Their shoulders bent inward as they talked, intent and focused, just like her father.

  Like my father.

  That was it. The missing piece in all this, what she hadn’t even thought to consider. They were CIA, or some funky branch of Army, special ops. For all she knew, her fucking father had sent them to find her and keep tabs until he got there himself.

  She slammed down the brochures on the table and cursed out loud.

  They didn’t see her in the office, and once they had time to get up the stairs and out of sight, she walked out the lobby door and down the driveway in the opposite direction. Thank god she had her bag. There were a few items up in the room, but she had what she needed.

  The side street she’d cut onto was quieter than the main road, but she wanted to get downtown before Tag and Keller started looking. There wasn’t much going on traffic-wise, but hopefully she could get a ride. Someone heading west, or anywhere. It didn’t matter. She just wanted to get away.

  Ahead on the corner she spotted a church, and a side door was unlocked. She ducked inside and sat on the wooden bench for a moment to figure out what to do next. Someone walked by but she bowed her head and they disappeared.

  She wished she hadn’t left her cell phone back home in Virginia.

  By the front entrance there was a schedule. If she was willing to stick around until 6, she could hear the Mass of Anticipation. Which actually sounded intriguing, but she hoped to be well out of town by then.

  She remembered that further down the street there was a bar, a likely sto
p for tourists who might be heading out of town after a meal. A good place to strike up a conversation and maybe get a ride.

  She sat at the bar and ordered a beer. Glanced around to see if there were likely candidates. If it were earlier in the day she’d have a better shot. She thought back over everything Tag had said since she’d met him. There had been no clues, nothing specific to corroborate her suspicions. If they were true, it had started up in Austin, and he’d watched her not out of interest but per orders, maybe a favor being repaid to her father.

  The most salient piece of evidence was her gut feeling. Seeing the two of them, Tag and Keller, when they’d been away from her and didn’t know she was watching, she’d seen it. The way they walked. Their communication. Her father was the same way with a few of his friends, men he worked with but that was all she ever knew.

  The beer was cold and she decided to order something next time the bartender came by. She leaned on the bar and flagged him.

  “Hey, we were looking for you.” Tag took her arm from behind and when she saw his face, the grin, she wondered if she had overblown things. His face was so familiar. She wanted him close by. He and Keller took barstools and ordered beers and burgers, and she said yes when the bartender asked if she wanted one too. No harm in a meal. Maybe she’d get more information.

  “We’re heading to Whizmer day after tomorrow,” Keller announced, then explained. Whizmer was short for White Sands Missile Range.

  “I knew it. You’re military.”

  “Not the way you think.” Tag interrupted. “I’ll explain more later.”

  So now he was letting her in on things. She wondered at the timing.

  They turned the conversation to White Sands. Keller said it had archaeological sites. Tag talked about a cavern and a huge gypsum dune field. She couldn’t tell if their chatter was an invitation or just small talk. They finished one another’s sentences, shorthand that carried a subtext she wasn’t privy to.

  An hour and several more beers apiece later, they all walked back to the hotel and sprawled on one of the king beds in the room she’d shared with Tag. Paris, Texas was on some movie channel. Wendell was simultaneously reading the White Sands literature Keller had fished out of a bag.

  “There’s a sacred mountain in White Sands?” She remembered the dream she’d had when she’d first slept with him.

  “Salinas.” Tag rolled onto his side and looked at her instead of the TV screen. “The Apaches haven’t gotten in there for years. It’s a big deal to them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Military says no.”

  “But you can go up there.”

  “If I want to, sure.”

  Keller got up to go to his room. “You got this covered, T?”

  “Yeah.” Tag turned back to her. “You’ll come along, right?”

  “What are you doing at White Sands?”

  He didn’t even blink. “Training.”

  “Training is what you say when you don’t want anyone to know what it is you’re really doing. My father said that all the time.”

  Tag didn’t look away and his face didn’t change at all. “So you’re a military brat, huh?”

  “Not the way you think.”

  “Then you’ll be right at home at White Sands. Come on. I can show you the mountain. I studied Apache rituals. Vision quests, that kind of thing.”

  He couldn’t possibly know about the dream she’d had. That mountain, the feeling she had up there, with him.

  He pulled her closer. “The mountains are the focus of their prayers. They form the intentions, let their language shape the intent, speak the words into the air. The mountains catch the prayers and then release them through the cloud cover. Rain, life-giving water.” He paused. “It’s powerful stuff.”

  “I just have one question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did my father send you to find me?”

  “Are you on the run?”

  “Let’s just say I’m taking a break from a few things.”

  “Baby, you don’t want to be found, I’ll make sure you’re so far under the radar no one will find you. Really.”

  The last day before Whizmer Keller wanted to go hiking. Tag wanted to look at birds. She refused to be the deciding vote.

  They ended up doing both. She walked ahead of them on the boardwalk at Bosque del Apache. Interconnecting canals cut through meadows of tall grass that swayed in the evening breeze. It was quiet. Her mind cascaded forward. One of them came up behind her and without seeing which she knew it was Tag. All her chemicals fired faster when he got close.

  The afternoon advanced into early evening. They stood in a line, three abreast, looking for something unusual. It was the wrong time of year though, there weren’t many birds. Tag said it was phenomenal in November, that the sandhill cranes mated for life and flew in pairs, male and female side by side.

  “They take off together, each mated pair. If one of them takes off without the other by mistake, they circle back. The one on the ground waits.” He looked at her when he told this and she looked away.

  Keller watched, face unmoving, as though he knew already how it ended.

  At the motel she sat outside the room, on the balcony, imagining the cranes, two paired in flight. The one left behind. The one who waited.

  Tag came out; he didn’t do anything until she started to cry. His motions were small, nearly invisible. He squatted in front of her and placed his fingers on her thighs.

  “You’re not running away from your father. What you really want is for him to come after you. Am I right?”

  “In a way.”

  “I bet we can make that happen. In fact, it’s already happening.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ll tell you more when we get to White Sands. I swear.”

  He led her into the room and put his arms around her. After all the distance, the idea that they were counting down time to an ending, it felt like he was back. That some new decision had been made.

  As easy as that. When Keller and Tag loaded their bags for White Sands, Tag put hers on top of his. They said goodbye to Socorro.

  Scott sensed Wendell leaving town. The air was suddenly bereft around him. He found the hotel she’d stayed in, other side of Socorro from where he was. The clerk remembered them well. Two men on bikes, seemed to know their way around. Men left for one night, the young woman stayed behind. Seemed fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing rowdy. No idea where they went.

  He sat by the brochure rack and sipped a cup of coffee while he figured what to do next. A pamphlet had been opened and left on the table. He picked it up. Wendell’s handwriting.

  Socorro = succor, military (ha!) reinforcements, a place of shelter, refuge.

  Below that she had sketched a mountaintop, two stick figures standing side by side. At the base of the mountain she’d drawn in a bike.

  Off near the edge of the brochure, blocked by the columns of text, there was a missile pointing straight up.

  Whizmer.

  They’d finally done it. Decided to go after his daughter. God help him, he’d kick their asses all over New Mexico if they did anything to her. His thoughts went haywire for a moment. He slowed his breathing, closed his eyes. Hoped for a clue.

  The first place his mind went was back in time. Wendell had been in college, a freshman, maybe. Somehow she’d been at the house in Culpeper when he was out of the country, and this younger guy, new in the company, had asked Scott if he could crash there for a week.

  Roger Ray. Blond brute of a man, cocky as hell. He’d let it slip to the wrong guy that he’d balled Scott’s daughter every which way he wanted to, in Scott’s house, with Scott’s implied consent.

  Roger suddenly got assigned to one-on-one covert training with Scott, middle of fucking nowhere in the Sandhills of North Carolina. Showed up with his tail between his legs, ready to get his horny ass kicked. Which Scott did, after making him tell every detail of the night in question. />
  Worst part was near the end, when he’d lost enough blood to get a little too careless with his tongue. “I swear to God I didn’t hurt her. Matter of fact, sir, I think she enjoyed it.”

  Just about killed him then. Drove Roger fucking Ray to the ranch himself, let two medics sew him up.

  Then went and puked his guts out at the thought of that asshat with Wendell. Never breathed a word to her that he knew. Never would.

  This was not what he wanted. Bad memories informing the present. He needed a read on what was happening now. What these guys were thinking. He suddenly imagined they were like him, old enough to be her father. Jaded cynical men who would use her up and spit out the remains.

  They were on the way to White Sands, he knew that much. He thought maybe he’d head there fast. See if he couldn’t beat them there.

  He found nothing at White Sands. No one would tell him if someone named Tag was there, and he aroused too much suspicion to be found loitering anywhere nearby. He couldn’t risk anyone looking him up. They wouldn’t find anything if they did, which would arouse even more suspicion. He’d dealt with this before. The army and the agency scrabbling over turf. He had no authority here.

  He used up two days playing at being a tourist. Took the tours, went to the museum. Ate at the restaurants. He drove through the housing on site as much as he could without drawing attention. There was no sign of her.

  He sat in his motel room and tried to get behind the scenes. Best he could tell she wasn’t there. Maybe they hadn’t come straight to White Sands. He couldn’t get an image, couldn’t get any intel on where she might be. His head was foggy.

  It was possible he needed distance, physical distance, to get clear again. It was counterintuitive, but he’d experienced this before. The distance helped him tune out the noise. There was a lot of noise here, most of it his own feelings and perceptions about this place. He had to get away, but not so far he couldn’t get back quick if he needed to.