Lamb

by Bonnie Nadzam

  “There. Now tomorrow your fire will be even better.”

  She pulled her lips into her mouth and lifted her little face up at him. “It’s working, though.”

  “You won’t forget how to do it, will you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Should I send you little reminder notes? With directions and diagrams?”

  She made a face.

  “It’ll give you dreams of the next man you’re going to build a trapper fire with. Only this guy, you’ll have to teach him how to do it.” He lifted his chin and turned his face away. “It hurts my feelings to say that, Tom. But we have to say it.”

  She stirred the beans. “Nope,” she said. “Only building a fire with you. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Don’t say that, Em. Someday you’ll get married and you’ll go camping with your husband, and he won’t know how to build a fire. You’ll have to show him what I taught you.”

  “I won’t get married.”

  “Won’t you work for the forest service when you’re out of college? And tell me how to find you so I can come visit you in your tent? I’ll be that old camper who’s always haunting the high plains, right? I’ll wear an orange cap so you’ll know me. Even from far away.” He bent over and kissed the crown of her head. “I want you to always remember that I never let you eat a meal out here that was something we added hot water to.”

  “Like oatmeal, puke.”

  “Or dehydrated vegetables. I want you to remember all the meals we made together, and how every one of them had whole beans it. What’s happening underneath that toast?”

  She tipped her head sideways and checked the smoke, checked the flames, and looked up at him.

  “Go ahead. Let me see you fix that.”

  With a white branch she rearranged the logs to keep the natural windbreak from burning it up too quickly, then turned to the little pile of sticks and tree punk and pine needles and twigs and pushed a handful in beneath the lowermost level of burning wood.

  “If you’re ever alone in the woods waiting for me,” he said, “you’d be okay. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’d know how to make it through the night.”

  “Yep.”

  She placed the white branch behind her in the cold grass.

  “You’ve learned a thing or two about being an outdoorswoman.”

  “I know.”

  After eating and rinsing the pans, Lamb would drink his second cup of coffee and they’d walk up the hill across the spans of sagebrush and sumac and along a deep empty draw. Rust-bitten iron and steel lay in broken pieces in the weeds—comb of a hay rake, the axle and wheels of a mowing machine. They’d pass it on their way to the same grassy promontory each morning from where Lamb would point to the distant foothills, the innermost point, he told her, of a spiral of mountain and rock, like a granite wall corkscrewed around the little mountain lair she’d inherit—he promised—when he died.

  If we were going to stay out here, he told her, we’d set up this little coal-burning stove, polish it till it turned black again, and we’d bring a little life back to this place. Then we’d build a new stable of blond wood, and I’d buy you a string of ponies. You could learn all the old ways. Boiling pudding in a bag. Decorating caraway seed cakes with burnt sugar. Trapping and roasting prairie chickens. We’d get some hired help, nice young guys from Idaho or Oregon who could put up a new rail fence around front and keep all the fences mended.

  We’d bring it all back. You’d pack us lunches in metal lard buckets we’d hang from our saddles, and you’d sneak the best things into my pail, wouldn’t you? A thick layer of butter on my ham sandwich. By day you’d boil my shirts and hang them to dry outside. And when we got back at the end of the day and scrubbed our faces and hands with gritty soap, we’d line up at our long wooden kitchen table, you at the head in a flowered dress, passing down all the warm dishes of food. When it’s all set out upon the table, we’ll all bow our heads, and I’ll say the blessing, right? In the winter when it’s just you and me by the fire, we’ll commit whole chapters of the Bible to memory, so I’ll really be prepared. And do you know who will be the first person I pray for? Your mother.

  And Christ he wanted to freeze her in time on the mountain, her tangled hair the color of pale tree bark, her burnt skin peeling off her face in bluish flakes, and he’d lie down with her there in the magnificently bright light, beside her on the bittercress and weeds, the old rusted hay rake beside them, angry red-winged blackbirds wheeling in great dark hoops above them.

  We’re all alone out here, he would say. Is the sky bright, or what? Listen to those mad birds. We’re reinventing the world, my dear. Here. Yes. Like that. Are you comfortable? Isn’t this nice? Do you know how lucky we are to have this?

  He stared at her little heart-shaped face and kissed her cheek and kissed her mouth and a thrilling horror spread like a stain through the hollow of his chest.

  “We can’t help it, can we?” he whispered hoarsely. He opened his hand over her heart and held her there. “This was too big for us. It was too big for us it swallowed us up didn’t it?”

  Shrug.

  “Oh, you sweet child. Do that again.”

  Shrug. She shut her eyes.

  “Just hold my hand, okay? And we’ll sleep. Just as we are, just like this. Just a nap out in the wind and light. Yes. We’re not taking this any farther. Just this. Thank you.”

  In a little while, he lifted her up out of the grass and carried her down the hill and back inside and tucked her into bed beside him.

  • • • • •

  The woodstove snapped and hissed and a thin wind sang again across the chimney pipe, racing high, chasing nothing. Tommie lay her head sideways upon David Lamb’s chest, her knees pressed against either side of his ribs, her ear against his heart, like a wet little chorus frog pressed against him for heat, and she asked him what he was like when he was a boy, when he was little, and then her age, and he told her to shush, to close her eyes.

  Imagine a whole canvas of pale greens waving and strung with bees and all about you the music of swallows and sparrows and shrikes. And there in the middle of it is our Lamb, a boy, big eyed with ironed Levi’s and clean short hair and he’s the only one of all four boys his mother kissed before he left the house in the morning. In his pocket, two dimes she gave him and only him and he’ll add them to his pile of dimes and steal the black taffy and Long Boys and Atomic FireBalls from Bonn Drugg’s and share them magnanimously with all the fellows. For now he is walking through this grass, skimming his open palms across their feathered and green-needled tops wondering what he will buy when he has a hundred dollars. And the answer is absolutely whatever he wants. What a joy to be alive in the world as the tallest boy with the broadest shoulders and a pile of dimes in your closet and as many candy bars as you can stuff in your pockets day after day after day.

  Somewhere behind him the boys are laughing, a dozen of them making a baseball diamond in the cinders on the street. A cork ball. A single wooden bat. He could play but then no one else would have a chance to make the best hit or the best catch or pitch and he is tearing up the Queen Anne’s lace because it looks like his mother’s stupid doilies she’s always needling with alone up in her room with the door shut. He tears them up, every single lacy white flower with his fists as he walks, and he throws them all shredded across the top of the stupid fucking grass because the last thing the world needs is another doily.

  The sound of a train lumbers and clanks over the metal tracks on the far side of the meadow. In his back pocket he carries a torn page from a Superman comic that wasn’t his, but should have been his, and a pocketknife of his father’s that he’s not supposed to touch, that he’d been belt-whipped once already for touching when he carved his name in the cedar mantelpiece. In the torn-out picture, Superman is diving and swooping over a train and all the women in the windows are looking up at him, the men just go on reading their newspapers—they don’t e
ven know what’s happening—and the train is called TRIUMPH in golden letters and Superman can fly above it in figure eights and lift the whole thing off the tracks and over his head, which he doesn’t do in the picture David stole, but which David Lamb knows he could do. Knows it.

  Mornings before Mom’s car wreck, Glenn comes over from next door knocking on the back door in the morning and singing out Ole Davy! Ole Davy! Lamb’s father curses and Glenn tells him good morning Mr. Lamb and Davy’s not allowed out till he’s finished his breakfast. Within ten minutes there is a chorus of boys outside the back door calling out with Glenn, everybody calling his name, everybody waiting for Davy in order to start the day, and his mother ushers him outside and tells him go save the day, Davy—a little song she sings every summer morning. And she gives him one of her paper-wrapped raisin biscuits she keeps just for herself in a tin above the stove and kisses the crown of his shining head. Neither Henry nor Mark leaves the table because there’s no one out there who even wants to see either of them. Nobody ever wants to see any of them except Davy.

  But every morning before his mother’s wreck, David’s littlest brother run outs behind him calling Davy, Davy wait. Davy wait. Crying out. Running, tripping, falling, every morning a fucking embarrassment. Broken tooth one day, scraped-up face the next day, blood and snot and crying all over the place yelling wait wait Davy. But he won’t ever catch up and won’t ever get a raisin biscuit or two dimes or know a thing about Superman. How could he? He’s Nel.

  Ten years later and it seems everywhere in town is the smell of soft tar and petrol and the distant crash of breaking glass and screaming tires and Les Brown and Doris Day singing out the bedroom window of his skirt-chasing father.

  Every day as a young man David wears a clean, starched button-down shirt. When he drives he keeps his hands at ten and two, and he’ll take the car straight across the fallow fields, off the road, a cold beer or two or three on the floor of the passenger seat. He is the only one his mother bought a car for, and now that she is gone he takes it wherever he wants. And why shouldn’t he? He’ll never get a dime from his father, no matter that Henry and Mark left them all to rot there, including Dad. No matter that Dad wouldn’t eat if it weren’t for David, wouldn’t have clean clothes, would probably be arrested because Nel never goes to school, instead he mopes and reads books alone and sleeps behind the Texaco. Won’t even sleep in the house anymore.

  When she buys him the car it is almost new and now the chassis is already half eaten with rust from driving over creeks and down creeks and the rotors are warping, he can hear it.

  Next thing, Nel disappears. One night like every night he goes to sleep behind the Texaco and in the morning he is gone. No one knows where he’s gone and no one is looking and no one cares. Wherever he goes that night, he disappears, fifteen years old, and no Lamb ever sees him or hears from again.

  Cathy comes to David and pulls him out of the empty house and she sets him down at her own kitchen table with a beer and a pot roast sandwich and in all the world she has chosen him.

  Someone’s hand between his shoulder blades. A pressed suit. A garden rake. A metal desk before him. Phones are ringing and he is looking for his little brother. Something bites every vertebra in his spine and forces his eyes down and fixes his gaze on what has suddenly become fat white concrete at his feet.

  No voices. No birds. No Glenn or group of boys or even Nel. Asphalt rising up in a fixed plane in every direction. He’s in a parking lot. Chicago. In a Mercedes. With his father, now dead. And every stranger’s face is his own face: empty, haggard, sick of driving, sick of eating. And he will witness everything good and decent in this world humiliated and destroyed and that is just how it is. If anybody knows it, David Lamb knows it.

  There is a small person inside of him wishing to tell Tommie all about it and then another person inside of him crushing the wishes like empty beer cans against a cinder-block wall. Lamb isn’t stupid. He knows how the story ends. He knows that he’ll keep his promise—it’s the only thing he gets to keep. He’ll return her to the parking lot after Linnie’s come and gone. Bring her right back to where he found her. And when she walks away and looks back in his direction in a year, or two years, or three years, if she looks back at all, she will hate him. But he will have saved her. He will seal her up in silver light and deliver her back to her mother. Back into the arms of her mother.

  And he will sit there in his truck, both hands on the wheel, smiling with all of his teeth, watching her go. And the wind will be dirty in his hair, and there will be no decent place left in his heart because in all this chasing nothing he will have scrubbed it out, scrubbed it hollow, and nothing can fill it back up but words he makes as beautiful as he can. A sentence that will carry, he hopes, as if it were the wind, as if there were seeds of rush and blue-eyed grass upon it. As if the alphabet could reset his bones, or restart his life.

  He ran his big hands up into her thin tangled hair, careful not to pull any knots. He kissed the top of her pale head again.

  “You know exactly what it’s like to be me,” he said. “Don’t you? Don’t you see me?”

  She nodded into his chest.

  “That’s right. You do. You’re my twin. Your heart is hewn to mine. Isn’t it. Don’t you see?”

  In the night she woke to the sound of his crying. It was big crying. His face ugly and pink with it and one hand on the top of her head and the other on her hip, his chest bare, wrinkled, and finely furred, faintly gray, and the skin beginning to loosen from the bone just beneath the arms and on his forearms and the backs of his hands. She turned to face him. I’ve hurt you, he was saying, I have I have. Am I ruining your life? Tell me I’m not ruining your life.

  She touched the back of his head, his coarse hair, and he caught it in his own and pressed it to his mouth. That such kindness should be in this world, and he its recipient.

  But she said nothing, and he had never been so sorry for anything in his life. By force of will he turned his gross crying into laughing. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Big ugly man crying. I must be scaring you.” Outside the window, he knew, behind the towels and drop cloth, Alison Foster stood shivering in a thin blue veil of falling snow. Taking notes.

  “It’s okay,” the girl said. “I’m okay. See?”

  He lifted his head and looked at her, looked at her from hairline to the dirty ends of her fingers. “You are, aren’t you? You’re perfectly whole.” He took her in his arms and held her, rushing his hands up and down her legs and arms and shoulders and head.

  When she was asleep again, he went out after Foster. He circled the shop, the cabin. Brought his own Maglite to the ruined outbuildings and checked inside. Walked to the river and looked among the trees. Up the road with his light looking for footprints in the world’s thinnest gauze of snow. Up to the Fosters’ house again, as he had every night, and he saw the old woman breathing mechanically in her hospital bed in the orange lamplight, and he circled the house and looked in the window of the empty bedroom, and around to the back and into the room where Foster slept in the flashing blue TV light.

  • • • • •

  In the morning the sky was bright as polished silver. Snow covered Lamb’s boots and piled up to his ankles. To the north the clouds ended, a bright blue line of daylight searing as if just beneath the cloud cover—a trick of distance.

  He stooped in his boots at the end of the drive, near the fence, and checked around him. There was no one watching, was there? No one who could see and remember this or report any of it, and he vomited into the snow. When he stood he kicked snow over it and went out to the street.

  He checked the snow for Foster’s footprints, but most of the snow had fallen after midnight. Alone in his heavy sheepskin jacket he shaved at the river, rinsed his mouth with the ice-cold water, then moved inside where he tidied the cabin and the shop, cleared it of her dirty socks, a hair rubberband, the little yellow sweater. He brought everything from the car that would not be his and
stacked it all in the bunk room and stood and watched her sleeping. He returned to the cabin and brought out ratty towels and set them with the duct tape in the bunk room for extra window insulation.

  “Are you packing?” The girl sat, cheeks flushed with sleep.

  “No, dear. I’m just tidying up for the guests.”

  “What guests?”

  “Shouldn’t we have some? A dinner party around the fire?”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Ssh.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled a hat over her head. “I haven’t built a fire yet. It’s cold. You look beautiful all drowsy and with your faced mushed with sleep.”

  “Did it snow?”

  “Did it ever. It’ll be gone by lunch.”

  “Oh.”

  “You want to go out and see?” He put his face into her hair. It smelled the way it does when it’s cold outside—when there’s snow. Metallic, fibrous. “Are you warm?” He held her face in his hands. “You see me now, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know me, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m not embarrassed.”

  She shook her head. “Me either.”

  “I really like you.”

  “I like you too.”

  “We’re lucky aren’t we?”

  Nod.

  “Equal partners, right?”

  • • • • •

  Tommie and Lamb were out behind the cabin halfway to the hay rake and investigating a giant bear shit covered with fur when the white car came slowly rolling over the pockmarked road. She saw it first.

  “Hey,” she said and pointed. “The dinner guests.”

  Lamb looked up, squinted across the distance. He turned back to the girl. “Inside.” He took her under the arm and started down the slope to the cabin door.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.” He opened the door and took a moment to look out to the road as he shoved the girl inside.