by Tim Sandlin
"We're almost there," Odette said.
I said, "Where?" and we came around a corner to what in a sane world would have been a hallucination.
The walls were dead people. Hundreds of thousands of dead people. Femurs and tibias, joint-forward, stacked five feet high with skulls, face-out, lined up on top. More skulls were placed in the tibia walls, like a bricklayer will set a darker brick here and there to make a pattern. Odette played her flashlight beam behind the tibia berm to show a pasture of piled-together bones as far as her light would reach.
"It is spiritual, no?"
The cowboy code says I should have repeated "spiritual" with a degree of sarcasm, but I couldn't get it out. There were too many dead people for me to maintain distance.
"I come here for perspective," Odette said.
"Do they know how many are here?"
"Some guidebooks say five million individuals. Some, six. It does not matter."
She started walking on up the tunnel, flicking her light from side to side, casting bone shadows. There was nothing for me to do but follow. The bones were terrible and overwhelming and grand, all at the same time. I'd never been anywhere with this many people and here they were all piled up dead. Whoever brought them down hadn't bothered with keeping each person together. They used the legs and arms to build and the skulls to decorate and dumped the rest out back. It was as if the only reason for being born was to create bricks in a wall.
Odette paused at a side tunnel that went off without the string of lights. "No one alive knows the names of these men and women, or what they were like or who they loved, whether they died old or young or had talent or murdered each other. Every human here is insignificant. Does it not make you happy?"
Happy wasn't the word I had been thinking of, but the bones did do something for my fear of mines. Not that I was suddenly comfortable. I wouldn't go that far, but I was no longer terrified.
We walked a long ways, past scads of skulls. In one stretch, they'd been placed in the wall to make hearts. In another, diamonds. None of the skulls had teeth or lower jaws. That seemed odd. Every now and then we passed clots of tourists who were peering over the piles, as if trying to see the limits of the bone yards. I heard people talking English, saying what you would expect of cool Americans. "This one looks like your mother," and "I swear to God, June, that bone way back in there is moving."
The Cub Scouts were clustered around an altar thing, next to a plaque.
"What's it say?" I asked.
"It says, 'Man, like a flower of the field, flourishes while the breath is in him, and does not remain nor know longer his own place.' More or less."
Odette led me into a tunnel where fewer people went in and out. Her hand was dewy-warm in mine. Her face was flushed.
She said, "Two hundred years from now, we will not even be a memory."
"What was that about Nazis on the sign out front?"
"During the occupation the Germans were afraid to come into this part of the tunnels, so it's where members of the Paris underground lived. That's why they were called underground."
"People lived with this?"
"Through the war."
Odette stopped to shine her flashlight on a random skull. "I create stories about them," she said. "This was a woman. She wrote poetry and had a lover who went to sea and perished at the hands of buccaneers. In her grief, she drank poison and died in agony."
"From the cranium there, it was more likely a guy got kicked in the head by a horse."
"That is exactly what I mean. It does not matter if she was a man or woman, or rich or poor. Do you not see? Not one moment matters, except this one. Right now. Here."
"And how is that supposed to help me understand you?"
"We must recall that these are actual people. Not Euro Disney plastic, or computer generated for a Hollywood tent pole. These humans ate food and drank wine and had babies. They loved and were loved. This is truth and it is where you and I are going to be."
A real cowboy would have said, "Take it to Oprah." Treating her seriously went against my raising, but, somehow, I could not stay casual. Maybe I'm not the man I thought I was.
We came to a side tunnel blocked by a knee-high chain. Odette stepped over the chain and looked back at me with her hand out.
"Come."
"I don't think they want us down there." "They don't."
"Maybe we should stay here, near the light."
"We won't go far."
I flipped on my flashlight and stepped over the chain, on the theory that it's better to regret the things you did rather than the things you didn't do. It is better to regret saying yes than it is to regret saying no.
We went fifteen steps or so before Odette turned and pressed herself up close to my chest. She breathed into my Adam's apple.
"William James said death is the strongest of aphrodisiacs."
"That's why bunnies are so set on sleeping with bull riders, 'cause we flirt with death."
She brushed her nose up against my unshaven chin. "In this place, death is more than flirtation. Death is life."
Odette kissed me. This kiss was unlike others I'd had with her, less foreplay and more something that counted in itself. Her lips mixed want with need and I started kissing back and in no time at all we were desperate. Odette was kissing and I was kissing and we were forcing our way into each other's skin, as if here where people had no skin or flesh we could connect as no one had connected before, or at least as I'd never connected before.
Her breath came fast and in me. I touched her face and breasts and everywhere at once. At first, it was passion, not sex. It went beyond sex and into a place I'd never been or known possible with a woman. It was more the oneness I feel on a bull when it kicks out of the gate and goes into its spin. I've had sex before, but I don't guess I'd had passion, not with a person.
She mumbled in French as her fingers tugged at my zipper. I looked across her shoulder to where my flashlight threw a spot on a tibia with a spiral fracture. I've had a spiral fracture and it was a mother. That bone in my light could not have been broken knee-to-ankle in a curl after death. Somebody, hundreds of years ago, had been in a world of pain.
Odette had my dick out and her panties down on one foot and she pushed me hard into the wall. I'd hoped to get out without touching the bones, but now it didn't matter. Nothing mattered except us and what we were doing. The past disappeared, taking the future with it. The battle was to touch, as if we might kill death and each other and glue shut the spaces between us. I never in my life thought a woman could be a bull.
I held her butt in both hands while she balanced her feet on skulls. She threw her head back. A line of sweat ran down her neck over a pulsing vein. Her eyes were animal, like a gut-shot elk running for the trees. She went into a French moan with syllables in it, the eye sockets of a hundred skulls strobed in the flashlight light, then Odette came like a banshee scream. A moment later, everything inside me let go. Thirty years of ache and shame, sadness over Tyson, rage at Dad, helplessness at the cheat life is flowed out of me and into Odette. I was no longer outside myself.
Odette fell off me onto the floor, where she knelt on her knees, balanced by a hand on somebody's dead face, sucking air. From out past our side tunnel, I heard an American say, "Let's go. We haven't checked the Eiffel Tower off our list yet." Far away, the Cub Scouts took up Odette's howl, causing it to echo up and down the tunnels.
Bent over, hands on my thighs, I said, "Jesus Christ."
Odette said, "Yes."
"What was that?"
She picked herself up and stepped back into her panties. "That was not the worst fuck you've ever been involved in."
I held myself up by leaning my forehead against the forehead of a dead person and repeated what I'd said before. "Jesus Christ."
26.
Odette and I wound back up and out into Paris, blinking against the light like moviegoers coming out of a matinee. I can't talk for Odette, but personally, I was shell-
shocked. Rocket sex when you least expect it in a foreign country is a lot like getting gored. Directions were scrambled. Nothing seemed to be where I expected it to be and it was hard to see how people going by didn't know I was twisted up inside.
Odette adjusted various under and outer garments. "In France, one of our words for the climax is la petite mort. Little death. But of course we have many ways to describe the climax."
"Like Eskimos and snow," I said.
"Pardon?"
"Eskimos have thirty words for snow."
"You only have two terms in English — come and get off. And only men are permitted to use them." She made her voice low and gruff, a European take on the Dixie cracker. "Did you get off, babe?" She went back to her regular voice. "If you have to ask, the answer is no."
"You forgot squirt and shoot the wad."
"Those are male words and males do not have actual climaxes. They have squirts."
"That last one felt fairly actual."
"Yours are but a pale imitation." Odette looked to both ends of the street. "The exit is two kilometers from the entrance. No matter how often I go down, it takes a moment to orient."
I said, "I'm hungry. Let's go eat."
She smiled at me. Her smile was different now, more a secret between the two of us and less like I was a sideshow. "Death intensifies the appetite — hunger the same as passion."
She put her hand under my arm and over my biceps and guided me up the street. No woman has walked with me that way since junior year, when Mica and I went to the prom. We didn't go senior year because I had a rodeo in Dillon, Montana. Mica still throws that one in my face.
"What would you enjoy?" Odette asked. "In Paris, food is religion. We are home to the finest restaurants anywhere in the world."
"That's a strong statement."
"I think our cuisine will inspire you as much as our loving."
By loving, she meant sex, which is a leap of language you won't hear back in the Rocky Mountains. "I saw a T.G.I. Friday's yesterday, down by a river. Let's eat there."
She tucked her chin and looked up at me. "You are making the joke."
"It would be a change. Mostly I run with a Pizza Hut lunch buffet gang."
Odette leaned into a moving hip bump. "If that is what the cowboy wants."
"You'll like it. They have fried mozzarella."
There's a saying on the rodeo circuit that goes — Self-evident Truth #9 — If you sleep with enough people, sooner or later, you'll fall for one of them. Usually, it's repeated by wives and girlfriends whose husbands and boyfriends claim that banging bunnies doesn't matter. Males say outside humping is only a release of tension, no more emotional than a shot and a beer, but women rarely buy the logic. For one, shots and beers don't get preggers.
But what I'm wondering is why Odette Clavel became so important to me so quickly. Why now? We were both sexually active with backgrounds steeped in copulation without consequences. I had the background anyway, and I'm assuming she did, too. It's like with a movie star or a bouncer in a cowboy bar, let's say Warren Beatty. He gets laid by a new woman every couple of days for decades, and then one time, on the surface a time like hundreds of others, his emotions kick his ass and he's suddenly half of a couple. How does that work? It can't be all timing, and I know it's not the quality of the lay. I've had white-hot sex with girls I didn't like one bit. Could hardly stand being in the same room with them if we weren't in bed, and they felt the same about me. Then along comes Odette and eight seconds later I can't think of tomorrow without her in it.
We stepped over a double-sized pile of dog doo, new-on-old. I said, "That thing we did down there, in that place — "
"The catacombs."
"You do that often?"
"I go to the bones whenever I have a break in my studies. They give me peace."
That wasn't what I was fishing for. "Do you have relations down there, on a regular basis?" For some reason, I couldn't say fuck all of a sudden. Don't ask me why.
Odette laughed. "Only when I dream."
"You haven't done what we did with guys in the bone pile before?"
We crossed a street and separated to walk around this outdoor john that looked like a spaceship and cost forty-five cents exact change to use. There was a sign in English that said children under ten might drown if they were inside the john when it flushed. Figuring how that worked was way beyond my ability to picture concepts. When we came back together, Odette took my arm again. "Once. I found a Danish marine standing in the Gilbert's Tomb section, weeping. I thought he understood what I felt there. I gave him oral gratification."
Why is it men ask women these questions when they hate hearing the answer? We want women to be honest, except for when they are. I didn't need to know the details of her blowing a sailor. That's what a marine is, right? Why would she say marine when she meant sailor?
Odette sighed. "He didn't understand me at all. I found out afterward he had been crying over a rugby score."
"So it was a wasted blow job." I must have been in love. I was already saying mean things to her.
Odette didn't catch my tacky tone. "No, not at all. I would not say that. He had an enormous member."
I acted the way any American male would. I sulked until someone gave me food.
We got a window table, which was nice because outside was more interesting to look at than inside. Inside had all the uniqueness of a T.G.I. Friday's in Colorado Springs. Same uniforms on the waitresses, same dessert specials on laminated cards next to the ketchup-mustard holster. The mustard was French's, which means it wasn't French. We were surrounded by girls who read Harper's Bazaar and eat 1,200-calorie Cobb salads, guys who read Maxim for the pictures and exercise indoors. Junior executives lying to one another in English about the vitality of their existence, except in Colorado Springs there'd be less smoke.
Outside the window was your ongoing Paris scene. Drippy rain. Six multilane avenues converged in an intersection big as a basketball court where old men with curvature of the spine carried unwrapped loaves of bread and women layered in scarves walked dogs the size of the old men's bread. Another Segway shot by. A green machine looked like a Zamboni swept feces off the sidewalk. Motor scooters putt-putted in and out of traffic. In Wyoming we call fat women Vespas on account of they're both fun to ride but it's embarrassing as hell if your friends catch you on one.
I ordered buffalo wings because the menu said they came with bleu cheese dressing and I wanted to try something local. While they were good, I'd have to say they didn't use spices as hot as back in Buffalo.
As we ate, I explained the uniqueness of the American cowboy. "Being a cowboy is the only profession with its own art forms. You got your cowboy painting and sculpture, cowboy music, cowboy dance, and cowboy poetry."
Odette paused, a spoonful of hot fudge poised at her lips. A dark drop hung off her lower lip, lickable as hell. "I always saw cowboys as a mythological construct of the redneck. Like pirates and motorcycle gangs."
Her tongue flicked over the fudge drop and brought it in before I got the chance. For the best, I suppose. I was caught up in buffalo wings and a bit too greasy for public romanticism. I've never been adept at licking loose food off women anyway. I come across more cocker spaniel than hot lover.
"Cowboys spend so much time alone outdoors, it leads to deep thought and contemplation. Rednecks are too busy proving their manhood to contemplate. Cowboys are secure in their gender, so they don't have anything to prove. They can write poetry." I sucked oil off my fingers and washed it down with a house red they sold by the glass and wondered how I got started on this "cowboys are better than you think" junk. If my point was that I had nothing to prove, why was I proving it? "You think it would be bad manners to sweeten this a tad?" I popped two of those sugar cube things in my wine and stirred till they dissolved.
Odette's eyes widened in wonder as she watched the sugar swirl away. Still, she didn't criticize. I liked that. Mica was quick with the criticism when my
eating and drinking habits went against her version of normal.
I stripped chicken meat off the bone. "I'm going to be a poet when I grow up."
Her eyes went from my wine to me. "Grow up? What do you call yourself now?"
"Rodeo riders don't grow up until they break so many bones they can't compete anymore. I'm fairly near the edge of that one."
"If cowboy poetry is so magnificent, why do we not study it in university?"
"I never said it was good. Not in the intellectual feel-with-your-head-instead-of-your-body literature. For one thing, it's mostly written on a horse, so the rhythm is clip clop, clip clop."
"We call that iambic."
"Yeah, well, in French it's iambic. In American, it's clip clop, and since a cowboy on a horse can't write things down, the lines and rhymes have to be easy to memorize. That way he can remember the poem later in the bunkhouse."
"It sounds like doggerel to me."
"Is that a put-down?"
"It's a term for poetry." Odette licked her spoon dry, then dropped it with a tinkle into the sundae glass. "Here is what I want to know." Her eyes bored into mine. I was beginning to look forward to the electric jolt that came with sudden eye contact. "How does one feel, on the bull?"
"Seriously?"
"We are not having a trivial conversation."
"I could have sworn we were."
She stole a wing. "No metaphors. No comparisons. What is the bull like? Why is it worth the risk when obviously you will not be a champion?"
"Who told you that?"
"You did. Rowdy, you are thirty years old and you have won only one competition. If you were a champion, the buckle would not be an obsession."
"I can't stand perceptive women."
When she laughed, I saw fudge between the incisor and canine teeth. "That is a lie. You love me, yes?"
"Yes, I love you," which struck me as a bizarre thing for me to have said. The only way to deal with saying it was to pretend I hadn't.
