Another Place You've Never Been

by Rebecca Kauffman

  Charlie said, “Can you move out of his line of sight?”

  Tracy stepped to her left.

  Charlie became very still and caught the bird’s gaze. He shushed the bird. Simon hopped over to the edge of the cage on his perch. Dust swirled around a single exposed lightbulb at the top of his cage and in this spotlight, he was electric blue. Charlie murmured, “Sleepy, sleepy,” to the bird.

  Simon said, “Sleepy, sleepy,” back to Charlie, and snapped his beak a little bit.

  Charlie said, “Sleepy, sleepy,” again, in a very low and calm whisper. He raised his hand to wave very slowly, extending his fingers one at a time in a relaxed and mesmerizing pattern. Simon followed the hand with his eyes. He blinked once and cocked his head, then blinked again, very slowly. “Sleepy, sleepy,” Charlie said. Simon’s body teetered and swayed to the left.

  “Sleepy,” said Charlie again. “Shhhh.”

  Tracy watched in amazement as the bird toppled left off his perch, like dead weight, his body stiff. Simon wakened when he thunked to the floor of the cage. He quickly stood and ruffled his wings and opened his beak in what looked like a yawn.

  “That was incredible,” Tracy said. She couldn’t take her eyes off the bird.

  “Not bad, eh?” Charlie looked very pleased.

  They returned to the television, where the healing segment had ended and it now showed a woman reading scripture and talking directly to the camera, a hotline number sweeping across the bottom of the screen. Charlie picked up the remote and changed the channel to ESPN.

  Tracy nodded down toward the stack of cork Buffalo Bills coasters. “You like the Bills?”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “You?”

  Tracy nodded. “Lived here all my life. My granddad played for them until he injured his knee.”

  “Cool,” said Charlie. “You get to lots of games?”

  “Nah,” Tracy said, “I’ve actually never been. But I’m saving up to go this fall. The Bills-Patriots game. I’m saving up for a really good seat, gonna sit sideline.”

  She and Greenie had often talked about going to a game together but it had never worked out—he always complained about the price or had a scheduling conflict. She wondered now if the Buffalo Jill would be able to get him free tickets.

  Charlie made an indifferent little frown. “It’s not that cool,” he said. “I’ve sat in the lower-level seats a couple times with Kevin. It’s hard to follow what’s going on. I’d rather just watch on TV.” He picked at a thread in the bottom seam of his T-shirt. “So where do you live?” he asked.

  “Southtowns. It’s the pits compared to here.”

  “I know the Southtowns,” Charlie said. “It’s where we lived til my dad and mom split up. Our old house is right next to that boarded-up Blockbuster on Eleven.”

  “Sure,” said Tracy. “I know right where that is.”

  Charlie made an ugly face. “You live close to there?”

  “Not too far,” Tracy said. “I’m on the lake side.”

  Charlie polished off the rest of his drink, and stood. “You want some food?”

  “Sure,” said Tracy.

  Charlie returned a moment later with a bag of chips and two milkshakes.

  The bird whistled at Charlie when he passed the cage.

  Charlie said, “Shut up, Simon.”

  Tracy drank her milkshake. The pregame show broke for commercials and Tracy rose to clean their glasses. Charlie followed her into the kitchen and gazed out the kitchen window before them while Tracy started to rinse the glasses.

  “What position did your granddad play?” he said.

  “Running back,” Tracy said. “Banged up his knee real bad in his first season though. Never played again.”

  Their sink had one of those fancy mobile faucet heads, and Tracy grasped and drew it back from the sink on its metallic cord, which flexed generously. She turned on the water, and it shot out in a violent stream, hitting the base of the sink with such surprising force that it flew from her hand. It wiggled for a second in the base of the sink, righting itself into its back so the water sprayed out straight and true, into the air, onto her, onto Charlie, before she could reach the handle to turn it off. She wiped her face with her forearm.

  Charlie was scowling. His bangs were wet and shaped differently. He looked younger.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never use this kind of faucet. I’m sorry.”

  Charlie stuck an index finger directly into his right eyeball.

  “Are you OK?” she said.

  “My contact came out.”

  “Really?”

  “Ow.” He rubbed at his face.

  “Here, let’s take a look around you,” Tracy said, crouching to the ground without repositioning her feet, so as not to step on the thing.

  “How do you think I’m gonna look for it?” Charlie snapped.

  “Here, if we just get down close to the ground like this maybe the light will catch it. I’ll look around my feet all the way to the baseboard, you look around yours.”

  “No, I mean how do you think I’m gonna look,” he said. “It’s my freakin’ contact. I’m totally blind without it. Practically legally blind.”

  Tracy knelt to her hands and knees now, her kneecaps grinding painfully into the hardwood floors. She scoured the floor with her eyes, moving them back and forth across the floor in broad, efficient patterns. She grazed the surface of the floor with her fingers.

  “I don’t see a thing,” Tracy said.

  “Maybe you need better light.” Charlie directed her toward a drawer where she retrieved a flashlight and used it to scan beneath the lip of the cabinets near them, then once again across the floorboards.

  “You’re sure it didn’t float up higher on your eyeball?” she said. “I don’t see it anywhere.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it’s not in there. I’d feel it.”

  Back and forth Tracy went with the sweeping beam of the flashlight, then again without it. She shuffled slowly from one end of the kitchen to the other. She examined the counter and the front edge of the cabinets. She placed her cheek on the ground to examine the floor at surface level.

  Charlie said, “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to get the best angle to look,” Tracy said.

  “Oh, OK,” Charlie said. “I thought you were resting. I don’t want you to stop until you find it.” Charlie was swaying mildly back and forth. She wondered if he was drunk.

  Tracy knelt back down and continued to scan the ground.

  After a minute or two she said, “Look, Charlie, I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m gonna find it. I’m sorry. Don’t you have glasses or something you can wear?”

  “No,” he said. “Keep looking.”

  Once again, Tracy swept gently across the slick hardwood, running her fingers along the grain and then against it. She examined Charlie’s shoes.

  “Is it one of the soft kind?” she said. “Big and cupped?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Well, where on earth . . .” Tracy returned to her hands and knees.

  When the sound of Simon’s shrill catcall whistle from the other room broke a chilly silence, Tracy suddenly realized she had completely lost track of the time she had been on the ground. She had no clue if she’d been looking for that contact for five minutes or three hours. Her lower back was screaming, as though she’d been in that position for days. She leaned back so her butt could rest on her heels for a moment.

  She looked up at Charlie. He was staring intensely at her.

  “My back’s killing me,” she said.

  Charlie’s posture softened and he blinked. He stepped back toward the sink, poured himself a glass of water, and took a sip from it. “It’s no big deal,” he said.

  Tracy sat uncomfortably in the loveseat and massaged her knees while Charlie arranged a throw blanket around his legs and hummed something cheerful. Simon was shuffling around in his cage. Tracy slid an Eddie Bauer catalogue out from the small wooden rack at h
er side and gazed for several minutes at pictures of smiling people in turtlenecks and shearling boots.

  A commercial for Ford Explorers played quietly on the television. It showed an SUV charging up a steep and snowy pass. Tracy thought of her truck and hoped it wouldn’t need any repairs once it had been dug out of the ditch. Charlie gazed at the digital clock on the cable box and said, “It’s a quarter to seven. The Bills game should start soon, right?”

  Tracy glanced over toward the cable box as well. She couldn’t quite make out the numbers on the clock to confirm the time—they were a blurred little streak of yellowy green.

  She tried to look back at the television nonchalantly, but couldn’t avoid Charlie’s gaze, which was now on her. His eyes glittered like clarified jewels and she understood now that he was seeing her perfectly, that his vision was fine, that he couldn’t possibly be “nearly blind,” as he’d said, without contacts. If he could read the time on that clock, he probably didn’t even wear contacts at all. There was an ominous feeling cradled in her stomach. Why had he tricked her?

  Charlie turned back toward the TV and said nonchalantly, “I’m gonna make another drink before the game starts. Do you want one?”

  Tracy nodded quickly and tried to maintain a relaxed posture as he left the room. She absently leaned forward, this time reaching for the sketchpad that sat on the lower level of the coffee table in front of her.

  The sketchpad fell open before her, and now she felt something like a cold blast whoosh through her. She was overcome by the sudden and unshakable knowledge that something very bad was at work.

  She stared down at a detailed drawing of her own face, and her mind flew, processing information in harsh and senseless thunderclaps. The drawing was chillingly, remarkably accurate. Eraser marks indicated edits, a long time spent on the piece to perfect it. The shading was just right. Her hair messy and large, as it was now. How had he done this without her noticing? She considered that strange, gray period of time that had elapsed as she knelt helplessly on the kitchen floor, taking orders from him. That black hole of time wherein she simply could not recall what had passed, though she’d had the distinct impression that many minutes had been lost. In the picture, her eyes stared directly into the eyes of the artist. The expression on her face in the drawing was empty, trusting, and vaguely childlike; an expression she’d never before seen upon her own face, and this made her tremble as though she’d been horribly violated. She realized that she had absolutely no idea what this boy was capable of.

  Tracy leapt up from the couch, the sketchpad falling to her feet. Her heart was slamming in her ears. She crept soundlessly to the front door, her legs too small and weak to support the rest of her. She couldn’t tell if the cold wet on her face was from tears or perspiration. She grabbed her winter coat and stuffed her arms through the damp sleeves. She was reaching for her shoes when Simon’s shrill whistle cut through the room. “You’re something else!” the bird called.

  “Shit, Simon!” Tracy hissed, bolting back to the living room and to the birdcage, where she unlatched the door with trembling fingers and pulled it open. She stuck her hand inside.

  “Come on,” she whispered to the bird, and she realized now that these were hot tears pulsing on her face. She held out an index finger, which trembled violently at the bird’s feet. She patted her forearm. “Come on, Simon,” she whispered again to the bird. He blinked and cocked his head for a second before reluctantly stepping onto her arm one foot at a time. His talons were cold and sharp on her skin. He nipped at her wrist a little bit.

  She couldn’t hear anything over the blood in her head. She secured him to her chest, inside her winter coat, with her left hand, and raced back toward the front door. The bird struggled against her chest and Tracy felt his talons ripping at her shirt. She wanted to scream but it was like she had swallowed a perfectly sized stopper.

  Tracy didn’t worry about the noise she made as she unlocked the deadbolt—she was too close to waste time being quiet now. Her heart was beating painfully. She didn’t bother with her heels either—she knew she would get farther faster without them. The deadbolt unlatched internally with a heavy clunk, and below it, the lock on the knob itself disengaged and opened smoothly.

  She flung the door open and was met by a mighty rush of delicious cold oxygen, which surged into her lungs and tickled them. She ran through snow, not taking any care to stay on the walkway, just running wildly in the wool socks, which quickly soaked through, leaving her toes numb and hard. Simon was tucked close to her chest inside her winter coat, only his little blue head exposed. He picked at her collar with his beak. She thought she heard him whistle at her. It occurred to her that Simon might freeze to death before they reached the next house, and that she might too for that matter, yet still this seemed somehow better than what might eventually happen to them at Charlie’s. Were his parents coming home tonight? Did he even have parents?

  She stumbled over a bank of snow and righted herself just as she could make out a soft yellowy smudge in dark horizon, which she knew to be the street light at the corner Shell station. She wondered who she might find there. She wondered if Simon would still be alive. She wondered what Charlie would do with his drawing of her, what else was in that sketchbook, and what Charlie’s mother would make of the clothing that was hung neatly over the shower curtain in her downstairs restroom: a collared shirt from Target with fake pearl buttons, a pair of black stockings with a dime-sized hole in the toe, and a handmade black chiffon skirt with vertical citrine stripes.

  THE SNOWY TREE CRICKET

  Jim had just finished a twelve-hour shift, starting at 6:00 a.m. The sky was charcoal to the east and magenta to the west. Jim had grown fonder of Butte over time, and now he admired the mountains of the Anaconda-Pintler range, still snow-covered, that rose far beyond the city, and out in the other direction, the ninety-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary, which sat atop the Continental Divide. Our Lady of the Rockies, they called her, and she was illuminated so that she could be seen from any point in Butte at any time of day or night. Jim had hiked out to her lonely perch to see her up close once, and was most impressed with the indifference of her. From the city, her arms were warmly outstretched and inviting, all of her angles gentle and motherly, but up close, she was as cool and expressionless as any old chunk of concrete.

  Jim had decided to forego an invitation to an orientation dinner tonight, for some of the new hires. He was usually up for a free meal, but tonight he was beat. He thought back to his own orientation dinner, when he had met another transplant from the Buffalo area. The guy was very tall, strong-shouldered and soft-spoken. “Small world,” Jim remarked to the guy upon finding out where he was from, and the guy agreed. The guy’s last job, before working for the food plant, had been in construction, on the expansion of the Seneca Casino. “No kidding,” Jim said. “I was there the night they reopened the casino. You probably were too, huh? We coulda sat at the same table and everything. You a blackjack guy?”

  The guy introduced himself as Cole, but Jim noticed, a moment later when he retrieved a single from his wallet to tip the bar, that his driver’s license said something different. The guy had ordered an O’Doul’s, and Jim commented that he ought to do the same, if he knew what was good for himself. They talked Buffalo for a minute, then Butte. The guy was living outside of town, in a duplex that overlooked the massive Berkley pit. The pit hadn’t been mined since the eighties, but it was a real sight, with its variegated stone walls and blue-gold water. Jim said, “Creepy-lookin’ water, if you ask me. I reckon if there’s any such thing as the Loch Ness, it’s livin’ in a place like that.”

  Later that night, they sat next to one another at the High Horse.

  Jim drank too much, and couldn’t remember a word of their conversation, but he woke the next morning feeling very strange. Different. He desperately tried to assemble a memory of the evening. What had been said? He could not recall. He clapped his hands over the pockets of his khakis, wh
ich he’d neglected to change out of. His pockets were empty—no clues.

  He didn’t cross paths with Cole once at the plant that week, and wondered if perhaps Cole worked the night shift. Jim tried to look him up in the company directory, but there was no one listed by that name. He asked the bartender at the High Horse if Cole had been back since that night, and the bartender thought not.

  The following week, Jim attended his first-ever AA meeting, hoping to find Cole there.

  Cole was not at the meeting, but Jim liked the other guys who were. Good guys, plainspoken, and Jim started to attend meetings regularly. He also started to cook for himself so that he could avoid the temptation of a whiskey with dinner at the High Horse. He became quite good at cooking. He started to sleep better too. The physical demands of the job were such that by the end of the day, Jim was satisfied by an hour of television, a good meal, and an early bedtime.

  Although he initially didn’t care much for Butte, over time Jim came to like the town a lot. Downtown was hilly and historic with beautiful three-story, falling-apart homes and cracked sidewalks. The faraway mountains were unlike any he’d seen in the east. One night, he bypassed a barbed-wire fence and numerous “No Trespassing” signs to access one of the nearby head frames above an old mine shaft. He climbed the head frame, and the shabby little steps groaned and threatened to crumble beneath him. His heart raced. Ten stories up he climbed, to reach the platform at the top. From here, he admired the lights of Butte while sucking in cold altitude and adrenaline.

  This place was not so bad, Jim thought. Not so bad at all. Folks here were friendly. Diner coffee was served in plain white Styrofoam cups. Outside the city of Butte were massive ranch properties with red horses and longhorn cattle. It felt to Jim very much like he was living in the Wild West. He mentioned this in an email to Charlie, and offered to pay for Charlie to make a trip out. Money wasn’t an issue, Charlie had said, but he never got back with any dates.

  After six months in Butte, Jim had some trouble with his shoulder and needed surgery. He’d no longer be able to do the loading and heavy lifting required by his current position. So, the company offered him a job driving trucks and paid for his CDL training and certification. The money was better, and Jim got sent all up and down the West Coast and into the Rockies.