Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  “Exactly,” I murmur.

  “This is the PICC line.” Libby holds up the plastic tubing. “It cannot get infected. It’s an opening right into Kay’s core. And if it gets infected, Kay gets sepsis, and she dies. Okay? Kay, you cannot open the drop to be too fast.”

  Kay looks at her. “Libby, ask us if we’ve been drinking.” Then, “We sipped whiskey all night! I fess up. I’m drunk from exhaustion, and drunk from whiskey, and drunk from this dying business.”

  Libby looks above Kay, as if examining the walls for patience and love. “I’m going to work,” she says. “Tess, there are bedrooms upstairs. Sheets might be dusty, but they’re clean enough. We’ll see you tonight? Perhaps we could bring over some food and all eat here. Together.”

  “No!” Kay’s voice startles us both. She moves herself in her chair, grunting. “Tess, I think you owe your sister an apology. I want to hear it.”

  I look at her. Bite my tongue. I look up at Libby, tilt my head. “She’ll never change, will she? But you did. And that’s what I came for. To see it. Also, to come home and say something real. We used to care for each other, didn’t we, Libby? When we were kids? Because each other is all we had? You were a good sister. You protected me. And Kay, you were a lousy mother, and I turned into a thickskinned fuck.” I look at the ceiling. “And Libby kept taking care of me, because you didn’t. Then she took care of my kid. And the kid turned out great. I look like shit, and Kay looks like shit, and Libby looks like a happy woman stuck with a bunch of responsibility but with a real genuine life. Ed is good, and Amber is good. Thank god for that. I thank you, Libby, for your courage. That’s the core of what I want to say.”

  Libby keeps her eyes on the wall behind me, turns, and leaves. Kay mumbles some quick farewell, and Libby lets the screen door shut gently. I let out a whistle that will carry to her as she walks away. I love you, it means, although she doesn’t know that. I see her pause, hear it, and keep going, toward her truck and toward the mountains, which are blurred with haze from fire.

  PART III

  * * *

  Fire

  Chapter Ten

  What would be the relief in redemption if it were a simple sorry, forgive me? Grace is not achieved so easily. Redemption is to purchase back something previously sold, the recovery of something pawned or mortgaged, the effort it takes to make things right. Bless me, self, for trying to reacquire some of what I sold somewhere along the line.

  *

  I wait for Slade’s whistle to strike my eardrums. I listen while I do Kay’s dishes, laundry, bring her tea, sweep the gray blooms. My ears ache with the seeking, with standing to attention, like an alert deer in a road, holding her position, large ears tipped, knowing there’s danger coming, exhausted by the stillness required to catch the very first moment of sound, the one that will tell her which way to go.

  Enough time has now passed, hasn’t it? His realization I was gone, him finding the empty van in Alamosa, his figuring out where I’d be. Wouldn’t something guide him here? The fire in his loins? The fire in his heart? The fire in the mountains? But no: I had spoken my goodbyes. Told him we were over. That I was doing this last run and then was gone. This last kiss and then was gone. I had made my list of people to say goodbye to and in which order—Slade, Libby, Amber—and he was the first to get the news.

  I listen but hear only Kay’s soft moans. She drifts in and out. Speaks and stares off into silence. Says a few words, kind and unkind. Directs me to do this, to do that. My feet pad across old carpeting, across linoleum, across wood floors, and I listen. I hear the wind, the flies buzzing, a siren far away on the highway. I hear the radio speaking of the fire, of the raging, uncontainable fire, the new lightning-started fires, how the people and animals of Colorado are fleeing down, away, trucks and trailers, helicopters and buses, Greyhound and schoolbus alike, donated, offered, given. Ranchers’ phone numbers spray-painted on horses and cattle, fences cut so those animals can make their way down, there no longer being time to round them up and haul them out. Everything, everyone, moving away from the crackling storming whooshing, from the choking air, from the bloom of red.

  He’s not coming. You need to say your goodbyes. Hold yourself together. Don’t fragment. I say it again and again to myself as I watch my hands move in their chores, as I watch my feet cross the floors.

  Kay and I watch one another, even when our eyes are not meeting. One full day with one another, which is not something I ever recall happening. She sees what she needs to see, perhaps: her daughter, too skinny and pale, able to move around a kitchen, able to sit and flip through a magazine, able to make light conversation. She does not ask about where I’ve been or where I’m going. She does not tell me where she’s been or where she’s going, in regard to her heart. Has it changed at all? I see what I need to see: a woman who is diminished, in pain, weakened. I cannot see inside her. I cannot know if, as I used to believe, she is still stuck in her belief that she was alone on the planet, and that she particularly got the shaft. If her me was ever replaced by other. If self was replaced by love or kindness or compassion. If, like me, she could see the lack and tried to fill it. If ever she has larger or grander ideas about others—her daughters, for example, and how they might be experiencing the world.

  She seems much the same but drugged, still like a bulldog, so ready to attack the world, so much energy put into crashing through life, and her old words roil around in my mind: I’m paying our bills, feeding you snotty kids, working my ass off, and for what? What joy do I get out of this?

  I watch her fiddle with her iPod, sigh, bored. She doesn’t enjoy the book she’s listening to. Doesn’t like NPR. Doesn’t like music. Her deathmap is the opposite of mine. She is resigning herself into it, slowly, like irrigation water seeping across a field. Me, I’ll be a sudden burst of fire.

  “Forgive her,” Baxter said to me once, when I was a teenager. “She’s so tired that she doesn’t have any energy for kindness, and kindness is actually a lot of work.” He was sweeping up our house, having just come from cleaning his, and he said, “Kindness actually takes an enormous amount of energy, Tess, but it’s always worth it. It’s like an elemental energy. Like wind, like fire, like water. And you know why we seek it? The same way we seek water and air? Because we get our butts kicked by life, and someone helps us out. And we realize we need people, and therefore they need us. Kindness is one of the basic elements. And we very quickly realize that it makes no sense to be selfish. No sense at all. It’s useless to be selfish. So we work hard to mitigate the ass-kicking-ness of life for other people. That’s why I’m here sweeping. You sweep things up too.”

  I listen to the birdsong, to the flies buzzing, and I think, Baxter, that coupla lines I will never forget. I didn’t live them, but I heard them.

  Slade was my one heartsweeper. He knew the dusty corners.

  But there’s no whistle, just one full day of Kay. One full day of letting Amber go to school, Libby and Ed attend to their life, of brief phone calls to confirm and chat through all this. One day of knowing the mountains burn. One full day of holding pattern. Trying to notice it all. Trying to be kind. Trying to outgrow my mother and her hold on my heart.

  At dusk I stop cleaning and stand at the doorway to watch the sky turn. In front of me is the driveway, the circle of outbuildings. Beyond that is the alfalfa field. To the right is the old corral where we used to run cattle through, me always a reluctant participant, and to the left is a longstretch of pasture of grasses and occasional yucca and brittlebush. All of it shifts color as the sky turns. Funny, this transformation of late. My heart turning in the same slow way. All this time, so tough. Five years since the skeleton. Five years of fading in and out of my body. I can’t make it much longer. I just don’t want to go on much longer. I’ll go out with a bang. Jutting out my chin. Giving the world a fuck you look. Like my mother. And then two weeks ago sitting in the dentist office, a toothache searing my sanity away, and I pick up a little book of wisdoms that
he had sitting in his waiting room, and I read, Use death as your advisor, and you’ll start making better decisions about your life, and I have the simple clear thought: I want to leave Amber some real money, I want to go see her, I want to tell Libby goodbye, I want to tie up loose ends, sweep up the clutter. I want to go home. I want to go home before I decide what to do next, being pretty sure what my next step will be, but first I want to go home. I can’t use the old Colt .38—I told Libby I wouldn’t ever use that on myself—but I’ll find another way. I know plenty of ways.

  But now these tears, these pangs of emotion in my heart. A full decade without them, and now they keep showing up, uninvited. I touch the tender bump on my forehead, run my fingers across my grated-up cheek: evidence of when I could only hurt on the outside. Now that I’m nearing the end, though, I feel hurt crashing around the inside and close my eyes to concentrate. Right then, the piercing note of a whistle cascades through the air.

  *

  Heartfade.

  Heartjump.

  I hear the air escape my body. An ohthankgodyes. I hear the follow-up string of notes. I take a step from the house. The sound comes from across the alfalfa field, over by the old house of childhood, a mile away at the small dark square I still barely see in the fading light.

  Libby, I scribble on a piece of paper, Out for a long walk because it was a long day. Plus I want to see this landscape and all the old haunts again. See you all tomorrow, dearheart?

  My dearheart sister, which is what I’ve been calling her since I was a child, probably as soon as she taught me such words. She won’t be surprised, my long nightwalks always being the sign of coping with the day. I pin the paper to the coffeetable with a cup and grab a coat and shove the nearly empty bottle of whiskey deep into the pocket. On my way out, I pull on a hat, gloves. I throw a last glance at Kay, who is sleeping in the same chair she has been in most of the day besides short trips to the bathroom or kitchen. In her sleep, she looks open, human.

  I slip out the screen door and take in the night. I whistle, listen. Walk, trip, walk again. Zigzag my way around Kay’s house, outbuildings, toward the alfalfa, toward the old house. I hug the jacket tighter around me. It’s true, what Slade taught me. The sound of the human voice can be hard to pinpoint, and land absorbs and changes and shifts around the sound waves, but a whistle travels straight.

  Bless Slade for being smart, bless him for being kind. Smart and kind enough to read my most obvious thoughts: Don’t bring the danger to where my kid and sister are; meet me at the old place. A small sweet coincidence that he knows where that is at all. We had been on a drive together, and we’d just left the pollos in Lamar. “Let’s stop and see your family, we’re right here anyway,” he’d said. No thanks, mister. “Well, let’s at least drive by your old place. Show me where you grew up?” Nope. He pulled over, regarded me calmly. Dark eyes raised. “I won’t move this car, honeyheart, until you tell me where your homeplace is. You need to learn to share yourself.” I was startled by that, enough to tell him the location, and we drove by, slowly, and he saw the old house of my childhood, saw that it was still junked up, although Libby, who was living there at the time, had painted the house purple, and had gotten a swing set too. Slade had said, “Really? Tess? No joke? You don’t want to see them? They’re right there,” and I said, Drive on, sir, get me out of this place, and he gave me a sad look and did what he was told.

  Even if he didn’t remember the road, he could put the puzzle pieces together. How it was across the alfalfa field from Baxter’s place, how he might have watched it, noticed it was abandoned now. How perhaps he might have been smart enough to locate Kay’s address. How he would have driven by Libby and Ed’s home and known not to stop. We could often read each other this way. He’s good at that sort of thing. A natural private detective, he used to say; it was a point of pride, it was good business. We are good together, kid.

  I whistle back, and he whistlereplies, until I’ve walked nearly a mile and see a small fire in a gully outside of the old house, at the very spot where Libby and I used to play, carving out caves in the dirt and playing house. Little Mesa Verde homes and peoples. I haven’t seen that old childhood house for ten years now, besides that drive-by with Slade, and it startles me, the shadowy outline of it in the moonlight, the sameness of it, the memories.

  I stop. Look all around me. Behind me, the moon is higher, no longer red. Slade sits in front of the fire in a lawn chair, a cooler to his left, and his black pickup truck is backed up into a little grove of trees nearby, concealed. He has the topper on it for sleeping. His headlamp is directed down at his feet. He’s waiting for me, perhaps even knowing that I’m looking at him. He’s in a peagreen wool coat and has a blanket wrapped around him, a bottle of beer in one hand, a joint in the other. Now he looks up, out into the darkness, waiting for me or my next whistle or acknowledging my presence. But I’m not yet ready to move. If I stare long enough in the silence, I can see past all those big brushstrokes of an image. I can see the particulars. I can see his face in the fireflashes. There is a real man, a strong and good man, a man who has seen realshit and who can still be tender. He wipes his nose, runs his hand over his cheek, down his sideburns that I know will be shaved at an angle. I think of the times I have held his head, have run my fingers through his air, against his soft-prickly jaw, his chin and upper lip emblazoned with a few days of scruffle, which makes my chin and nose red after kissing, and then the dark hair starting at his neck and blooming all over his chest. Of course, this is all hidden. Hat and coat and blanket. But underneath all that is his naked body, strong and broad-shouldered.

  The one thing I can’t see is the look in his eyes. He taught me that: If you can catch a person’s eyes before they register your presence, before they can firm up, you’ll see their true emotion, what they really think of you. But you have to get them in that split second.

  I almost step into view but pause. Consider. Always, always assess the situation before walking in. Never assume a thing. I look and listen for evidence of others. Mark the distance between human and vehicle. Decide where the keys are likely to be. Decide where the guns are likely to be. Decide where I’d run if I had to, decide how I’d attack if I had to.

  But Slade is alone, and so I step forward. As soon as I step into the light, he stands up and comes toward me, arms raised in a hug. “You had the GPS wrong.” His voice is calm, measured, as it always is. Always with confidence, always within his own custody.

  I breathe out a long sigh. “Please tell me that’s not true.” I press myself into his chest.

  He holds me, rocks me back and forth. Then he opens up another camping chair that he has sitting out and gestures to sit, but before I can, he bearhugs me again, rocks me again. “Oh, Tess,” he says into the top of my hair. “Oh, Tess, it’s really bad.”

  I look up into his face, and he guides me to the chair, gently forces me to sit. Sits in his, leans over, takes my hand. “I honestly don’t know, Tess. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know where it went wrong.” His voice is low and steady. “If I transposed a number, or if you did, or if Lobo did. It was either you, me, or Lobo. Or the pollos wandered off, I guess. I don’t know. They got hungry. They were desperate.” His eyes seem to focus only on my hand. “They were one valley to the west. They lit a signal fire to be found.” He squeezes my fingers, swings my arm, and we look like two schoolkids sitting and holding hands and swinging arms, a sad and strange swing.

  I feel as calm and worn-out as these windblown rocks around us. “I heard on the radio. But how do the police know that? Did they survive?”

  He scratches his jaw. “They’re missing.”

  “But that means they’re dead—”

  “No, it means they’re missing.”

  “But how did someone know?”

  He shrugs and for a long time sits in silence. Then he gestures to his lap. It’s his invitation, firm and yet tender, and so I respond, put my butt in his lap, fold my legs over the armres
t of his chair. He holds my body, so small against his. “They got a call. A woman. Saying that she admitted they had come over the border, that they were a group of seven, that they were starving, that they’d started a signal fire so that they could be found, that they were sorry, to please come help.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, I guess the law headed up there and found a fire raging.”

  I press my cheek into his chest, and his fingers find the scratch on my other one.

  “Slade, I’m so sorry. I was a little drunk the first coupla hours, I admit. But I felt alert. I had that sheet of paper from the little notebook. I was there, Slade, I was there.” Then, “How angry are you?”

  “I’m not angry.” He says it quietly, his finger now tracing the edge of the scratch, my own finger tracing the edge of his goatee. “But, Tess—”

  “Oh, Slade. I was there. I’d been at that spot before. Right next to an old adobe house in ruins, right where the airplanes do the dope drops. Right on Devil’s Road, Camino del Diablo. Isn’t that where I was supposed to be? I waited. I waited and I waited. For three days. Why didn’t you come up? Were you still on that other run?” I had left him his stuff—his .40-caliber Glock, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vest, GPS—at his trailer outside of Alamosa. The immigrants had never shown up, and so I’d taken everything back, dumped it on his living room floor, so that he could never accuse me of taking anything. I could tell he hadn’t been home in a while, I knew he was on a run of his own, and besides, I had told him that this would be my last, and that we were over, and that I never wanted to see him again. Which is something I’d told him a coupla times over the years, but this time I knew I was on my lastchance trip home, so perhaps I sounded firmer and surer. Then I’d hitchhiked to the bus station and slept with the first guy I met so I could steal his wallet and use that money for a ticket home. While on the bus, well, that’s when I told myself: three days of sweeping up. And if there is no home to go to, then play your last card.