Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  He’s running a finger along the nape of my neck. “Yes, I was gone on my own run. I didn’t understand why you suddenly up and left. Plus, I had work to do. I didn’t know you needed help. I showed up at the trailer, and there was all my stuff. I couldn’t figure out why. You should have been in Denver by then, dropping them off. I was worried that they would have made you carry the coca, which is something I told you never to do. The other guy was supposed to come get that.”

  “Well, no one came, Slade. Not one of Lobo’s men. No pollos. No one at all. I was just so alone . . . it was so quiet . . . and I walked and hummed and waited and slept in the van . . . and my tooth felt like a motherfucker . . . and I just kept getting more and more . . .”

  “Fragmented?”

  “Yeah.” Then, “I couldn’t even call to tell you that they didn’t show.”

  “I know, sweetheart. Listen, Tess. I gotta tell you something.” He pushes me away from him so that I have to look him in the eye. “That’s why I came all the way out here. Even if you don’t want to see me again, even if you said your goodbye. I gotta tell you something, and then I gotta disappear. As you should too. Although—” and here, he laughs a sad laugh, “I’m pretty sure it’s going to break you for good.” He stares into the fire. “Too painful. Too painful even for me.”

  I look up at him and snort. What possibly could be worse now? Nothing. No-thing.

  He pulls the sleeping bag over us, then a green wool army blanket that’s been sitting out. “First, of course, we’ve got law all over the fucking place. I don’t know about Lobo. He’s a wildcard. Those pollos were carrying a lot of product. I’m trying to piece it together. There they are, bunch of drugs with them, and no one picks them up. They’re at the wrong location or whatever. So they start to get serious hungry and thirsty and so they start a signal fire.” There’s something mesmerizing about his voice. “You wanna drink, baby?”

  “What’s this thing you need to tell me?”

  He hands me a beer, but I drink from the whiskey bottle instead. “I’m surprised you’d come here. I thought you were never going to see any of them again,” he says. “Although, no. That’s not true. I knew to come here, didn’t I? As a last resort, everyone heads home. Oh, baby. We fucked up. Or no, maybe it’s just that it got fucked up.” He pokes right below his chest, at his sternum, where he thinks his intuition lies. His best brain, he calls it. His true sense. “I knew to come here. Didn’t know what the fuck to do, actually. But I had to get out of there, and I had nowhere to go, and my instinct, man, it just drove me here. To this little eastern Colorado town. Same as your instinct.”

  “Tell me, Slade.”

  “No, wait. First. Tell me. What’s going on here, at your home?”

  I drink and close my eyes so I can appreciate the moment when my cells relax. There’s nothing he can tell me that will kill me any faster. There’s nothing he can say, and so I oblige. “Kay’s dying. Libby and Ed welcomed me, reluctantly. Amber is beautiful. It’s good you came here, and not by Ed and Libby’s. Thank you. They walk around too much. The very least I could do is protect them from all this. Kay, on the other hand, is not going to be snooping around. You’re safe here.”

  He takes my hand and holds it, cupped, in his two. “Tess, everyone needs to see their mama once. Instinct. This is gonna be hard.” He pauses, moves his jaw in a circle, looks above my head, back at me. “It wasn’t just any group of pollos, Tess.”

  “What?”

  He looks at me with a sick feeling on his face, his eyes lowered. “It was a surprise for you, baby. I had it all planned. Then you broke up with me.”

  I blink at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “Your girl. And her mama. Plus their cousins and brothers—”

  I blink again, first at him, and then at the stars.

  “Listen. This was my surprise for you. My gift. I knew you liked them. Loved Alejandra, in fact. They had contacted Lobo to get them across. I even paid half their way. You were going to go up there, and see them, and transport them one last time. It was supposed to be beautiful.” He laughs a sad, bitter moan. “A coyote’s version of a gift, I guess. A couple of people you actually want to see.”

  “You liar. They’re in Mexico.”

  “No, they’re not. They’ve been trying to get across for months. I was helping them . . . find the right people . . . well, you know. I didn’t want any chance of rape, which is pretty hard to—well, you know. It took all this extra effort.” He holds my hand tight, tighter still when I try to jerk away. “I got a letter at the trailer. Addressed to you, but I opened it because that was during the time you were gone, out wandering. They wanted to come back to the States. Mother and daughter. Start a life here. So I thought I’d surprise you. I contacted Lobo, and all the coca y mota was set up, and cousins to carry it, to help pay the way.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It wasn’t them in the mountains.”

  “They’re probably . . . Oh, sweetheart—” He stops and starts again. “Along with a lot of product. Not that that matters. Except it does, because that’s what Lobo is gonna come looking for. That was a lotta money, babe. A lot. And so that’s the other thing I came to tell you. You gotta go. We both gotta disappear.”

  I am up and hitting him on the head and face and chest.

  Slade tries to pull me to him, tries to gather in my fury, holds me to the point of pain until I still. “Oh, babe. It was supposed to be a good surprise.”

  I elbow him in the ribs, and his gasp sends me into a crawling lurch away from him, away from the fire. I stumble to the truck, heave myself through the little door into the back, scramble around. Where is it, where is it? My old Colt .38 that Libby gave me to protect myself? My alltime favorite. Gunmetal blue. I named it Salvador, Ed’s name.

  Slade is at the back of the truck, peering in. “It’s not loaded. Of course it’s not loaded.”

  My hands are flying around in the lockbox. My fingers close around the little rectangle, and at that moment, Slade reaches in the back of the truck, grabs my ankle, and pulls me out, hard. He holds me to him. “I’m sorry.” He says it over and over. “I’m sorry, Tess, I’m sorry.” Later, he says, “It’s possible they’re alive. Maybe they ran.” And later, when my knees give out, he catches my weight. He holds me like a baby, stumbling for a moment, and then pushes my limp body against the back of the truck as he struggles to lift me in. He puts a pillow under my head, a sleeping bag over me. Puts the gun back in the lockbox along with everything I tore out of it. He is meticulous, careful, and I watch him wrap the gun and ammo in a soft cloth, put it at the bottom, the flares and firstaid and nightgoggles and headlamps carefully above it. Finally he lies next to me, wraps his arms around me. “I’m sorry. I love you, Tess. Actually. I know you don’t believe it, but I do.” Later, he says, “I’m sorry.” Over and over. He keeps talking, and the planet spins. The universe expands. My heart beats. I snapped a wishbone without a wish.

  *

  I unzip my pants, push them down, and Slade holds me closer and says, “Go to sleep, Tess, you’re drunk.” I touch him through his jeans and murmur. “One more time before I die,” I say, and he says, “Shhhh, baby. Stop that. You’re not gonna die. Is that why you left me? To say goodbye? Well, I’m not going to let you do it.” He holds me so tight in his arms that I have to go limp. “You have no choice in the matter,” I say. “You know it, and I do too.”

  When I wake, I open my eyes to find him above me, inside me. His hips are bolted into mine, his deepfuck, when he pushes in and circles, not the backandforth of sex, but the quieter circling. I close my eyes and let my body take over, which is what he wants, which is what his body is doing, circling, our bones pressed so tight that we are nearly just that, bones touching. It’s the bones touching that brings my body back into itself, and this is why people have sex—it’s not for the orgasm, it’s to get this close to redemption. I feel him insid
e me, the pain it causes, I feel the inflamed tissues of my infection, I feel the inflamed tissue of him, I think of how the blood from my neverending period will be darkrust, like beetle-killed pine trees, now brown and eating up the mountains, and the only time I didn’t have a period was when I was carrying Amber, nine months of no blood. Nine months of life, and now it’s the end of my blood, it’s the full moon, and it’s time to go. One last glance at Amber, one note to explain, a last apology, a last request for forgiveness.

  Time rolls in on itself, and Slade rolls to the side and tries to hold me, but I turn away, and from the little window of the topper, I can see the nighttime sky.

  “Tess,” he says, pulling me back toward him. He traces my ear, then taps me on the head. “Mexico. Listen, I’ve thought this through—”

  “No, Slade.”

  He strokes my hair. “We can survive this. We can change our game plan. We can’t start up again here. We can’t stay on the run. We get to Mexico. Lord knows I’m set up there. I’ve got some savings. I’ve got connections. We live in a small town, in the mountains. We got the blood of people on our hands.”

  “Slade, no.”

  “Listen, Tess. You should stay here for a bit. See your daughter and mother and sister and all that. Make your peace. Make amends. Offer them something. I get that. But then, Tess, we leave. Maybe Lobo is gonna let this drop. We don’t have the pot or coke, we don’t have the money, we don’t have the people, we don’t have nothing. So I am guessing he’ll leave us alone. But on the other hand, that guy is a maniac.”

  I roll deeper into the sleeping bag, so that I’m buried down deep, but I can’t stop the trembling.

  “Maybe he’ll let it drop. But you can’t stay here. What if he thinks you started the fire? You have the drugs? You have the pollos?”

  “It’s funny,” I hear myself murmur. “You ever think of all the people we crossed? How they must have spent their last days with their family, then saying goodbye, maybe for the last time? They were leaving home to find a new one. They wanted to find a new place to belong. But it’s harder to find than they think.”

  Alejandra. Lupe. Impossible that such beautiful people are dead. “Oh, those poor people, Slade. Poor Alejandra . . .”

  (Find a friend, kill it. Grow a friendship, it dies.)

  (Seek love, it gets twisted down into earth.)

  He pulls me to him, rocks me back and forth in his arms, rests his hand on my hip. “Baby, there’s nothing you can do. Going to jail sure as fuck isn’t going to help them. It just . . . happened.” He holds me even tighter, then puts his nose into my hair. “We both feel like shit right now. We get to Mexico, we adopt some kids. To make up for it. Maybe not adopt them in the formal sense, but you know, take them under our wing. To make up for it.” Later, “I’m not a bad man, Tess. We just got messed up in the wrong life.”

  But the dark details have already bloomed. Humans cowering as the fire sweeps toward them, the heat, the smell, the fear. The screams. But not just any people. Alejandra. The kid who once sat next to me, all skinny with big knees, crooked eyeteeth, yammering away. Skinny legs, bony knees.

  The tremors passing through me are earthquakes, the nerves lightning. Slade puts his hand on my shoulder blade and shakes my body, hard. “Don’t do it, Tess. Don’t do what you’re doing. Every time those images come into your mind, picture the face of a kid that you’re going to help. Train your brain to go there. Stay calm and go slow.” Then, “Say goodbye to your family, Tess. Do it right. Do it well. You were right to come here. Now, you can leave. You can really be free.”

  The earthquakes and thunder and lightning speak for me: Yes, I know it.

  The wind has dropped. The wind has shhhhhsed, the airtemperature is dropping. The smell of soil and of wheat nearby. The Milky Way, the Pleiades. He turns me toward him, hard. “Promise me. Swear to me. Don’t do anything for the next few days. See your daughter, your sister, and just pretend the rest of this hasn’t happened. And then we’ll figure it out.”

  I nod, but he squeezes, and so I offer him a manysplendored lie. Yes.

  Later, much later, when I hear his first snores, I slide out of Slade’s arms and the sleeping bag—oh it’s cold, so cold—and it takes a sheer force of will to climb out of the back of the truck and to put my clothes on and move. One last look: his eyelashes, his scruffly cheeks, his soul.

  Chapter Eleven

  The stars with their tiny teeth are biting the sky, shining as bright as they can when I make it back to the farmhouse. When I find the keys in the ignition of Kay’s truck, a melancholy laugh flutters out of me: Kay’s theory on life being that you shouldn’t own anything worth stealing, and you never put shit anywhere else than where you use it. The little details of knowing a person.

  The door at Libby and Ed’s home is unlocked per the same theory. I close it quietly. Ringo darts out at me, but I’m able to say, Hey now, hey, before he gets his bark off, and he rings my legs, tail wagging. I orient myself in the house and tiptoe down the hall to Amber’s room. Ringo follows me, lifting his head into my hand, jabbing his nose into my crotch to smell.

  Amber. It’s a cliché thing to do. So be it. I want to see this kid sleep, in the inout of breath, eyes closed, tender.

  I move quietly in. She’s sprawled on her stomach with a quiet breath coming from her, one arm flung up above her head, hair spread out across her pillow. I want to see what I can feel, to see this child of mine alive and well. Her hand moves a bit, she rolls to the side, makes a noise with her lips, sinks deep again. Her lips are slightly parted. Air. Fire. Wind. Water.

  The sky behind her is starting to turn from black to a strange gray. “Back then, I didn’t think you’d be enough to fill my heart. Now you would be, I think, but it’s too late.” I whisper this to Amber in a voice so quiet that not even I can hear. “You are beautiful, though. I’m so sorry I’ve disappointed you. That’s a secret I hadn’t told you. There is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.” I reach out, touch her hair like a mother might, let my hand rest there and close my eyes and beg myself to remember this moment at my last. I watch her breathe. In, out. Her hair is a dark cascade on white sheet. In, out.

  *

  I sit on the couch and pull the cushions over me—so soft—and I stare out the window, at the moon thus framed. Ringo flops on the floor, graceless. I feel the pull and sway and dance of it all. Emotion comes and goes like the moon, like the immigrants crossing the border, like the coyotes that transport them, like the rotation of the earth itself.

  Ringo looks up at me, thumps his tail, watches me as I reach over to find a pen, a slip of Amber’s notebook paper.

  *

  The rosy-fingered dawn. Amber has the book sitting out on the kitchen table, the same Lattimore translation I borrowed off of Libby with some of my handwriting on the inside. Nothing changes that much, not from Greeks to now, not from my childhood to Amber’s.

  I look out the window. It is, in fact, a rosy-fingered dawn, the curve of earth lighting under a pink glow. I regard the kitchen table, put a Saltine cracker in my mouth, make coffee, take a handful of aspirin, rummage through the fridge. Just this one last day of effort.

  Ed wanders down the stairs first, frowsyheaded and handsome from sleep. I have to look away from his tender openness. Libby comes right after, equally as foggy. Ringo stands up from where he’s been lying at my feet to greet them. Gives them a hello nudge in the crotch.

  “Okay,” I hear myself saying. “Fried potatoes. Omelets.”

  Libby looks at me suspiciously, shoots Ed a look that says something. “Morning,” she says. “I thought you were at Kay’s.”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Plus, you know, I thought you should eat before you went to work.”

  “I took off work today.”

  “To see me?”

  She pauses, looks down to pull up her pajama bottoms. “Yes.”

  Ed pulls on his shoes but looks up from his hunched-over position. “Any word on the fire?”r />
  “It’s growing. It’s just . . . never going to stop.”

  “It’ll stop.” But he looks miserable, and then, without a word, goes outside.

  Libby watches him go. “He’ll do chores first.” Then, as she pours herself coffee, she says, “So, hey, about a month ago, Kay and I went through all her old stuff, to sort it, you know. Pare down. She’d been bugging me for months. I’ve got two plastic containers. Of yours.”

  “There’s nothing I care about, Libby.”

  She walks up and tousles my hair. “You look cute this way, with short hair. Some of that old stuff is funny to see again. Old school projects. Artwork. Clay pots and bad clunky things that say ‘I love mom’ and stuff.” She sits down at the table and sips her coffee. “Tess, I think you should see a doctor while you’re in town. You’re so pale, so thin . . . Just run some blood tests, get a checkup. I’ll pay for it.”

  I give her some line about how as soon as I go to a doctor, it puts all kind of shit into motion, names and social security number, and I’ve never paid taxes, and I want to be disappeared, so give me a day, and I’ll be better. When she objects, I finally agree. It doesn’t matter. There will be no test. To distract her, I ask, “Hey, Libby? Are you happy?”

  She looks over to see what I’m cooking to hide her surprise. “I’m glad I’ve taken Amber. If that’s what you’re asking. Is that what you’re really asking? It’s been tough, especially those baby years—I didn’t particularly like those—but now it’s just fun. Actually fun. It’s fun to hang around a person who is one of the most intelligent, curious, wonderful humans on earth. Plus, it’s fun to do everything the exact opposite of Kay. To realize that you can change the pattern.”

  “So, all in all, it hasn’t been a mistake? Wish we’d given her to some other family?”

  “No, I’ve never been sad. Even when it was tough.”