His armpits and groin broke out in sweat. He pushed her forward and she kept looking back at him and finally they twisted and stumbled into the cabin and he got the closet door open. The white car turned into the dirt drive and he put Tommie into the closet. Just lifted her by the shoulders and set her in the closet. “This is it, Tom. This is our first big test. Foster was nothing compared to this okay? You good for it?”
“Who is it?”
“Do you understand the kind of trouble we’ll be in if this person sees you even once?” He held the closet door open two inches and talked into it. “Don’t make a sound. Oh, Em, I’m so sorry. It might be awhile in there.” Outside, the engine of the car stopped. Tommie sat down on a pile of old boots and a fishing net and a big white cement bucket. “Who is it, Gary?”
“I think it’s an old friend, Tom. You have to give me your word. Are you good for this?” She stared up at him from the floor. “This is a gift to us. If she comes and goes without seeing you, I will never get in trouble, right?”
“How did she know you were here?”
“I made a mistake, Tom. I made a miscalculation. You might hear some hard things. Tell me you love me and you’ll be patient and breathe like I taught you.” Last thing he saw were her eyes, rounder than ever, her little head nodding in the dark. He shut the closet, heard it latch, and went to the front door, and here she comes across the dying, splintery lawn and through the October morning calling out his name: David.
He met her in the cold sunlight and quieted her mouth with his. Took her around the waist, took a long drink of her hair pouring like liquid night down the back of her smooth green jacket, took her bag.
“You came all the way out here for me, didn’t you?” He spoke into her mouth.
She pressed her smile against his.
“You drove through the night?”
“Mm-hm.” She looked up at him. “Hey. What’s the matter?” She looked behind him to the cabin door. She put a hand to his forehead, to his cheek. “Are you okay?”
“I saw you.” He pointed up at the ridge where he and the girl had been headed. “I ran all the way down.”
She just smiled at that.
“You must be exhausted.” He opened the cabin door. “Here,” he said, put his hand on her bottom as she stepped inside.
“Oh, David. I didn’t think I was going to see this place again.”
He quieted her mouth with his. “Know something? Neither did I,” he whispered. She looked up at him, her face blank. “I thought I was through with you. I thought I’d gotten all the good out of you a man could get.”
“You’re panting.”
“Well, I’m old. What,” he said. “You smile. But you ought to know by now how much I actually despise you.” He turned her around, guided her to the couch. “I mean really loathe you.” He sat her down. “I would bet,” he whispered, pressing her lengthwise into the dusty plaid upholstery, “that you want me to show you how much I hate you.”
“You’re not going to have a heart attack on me, are you?”
“Oh, shut up.” She moved to respond and he put his finger to her lips. “No talking now,” he said and drove his hand up into her hair. “I said shut up.”
When the sound of tap water rushing through the pipes filled the walls, Lamb opened the closet door. The girl was hugging herself in the dark, her face wet with tears, the end of her sleeve wet and snotty. He held it open just a crack and whispered when he spoke. “Good girl,” he said. “It’s okay. We were just talking out here. Did you hear us talking?”
She shook her head.
“You’re not the kind of girl who would say that and keep everything she’d heard to herself, are you?”
She shook her head.
They looked each other in the eye, and for one long moment neither spoke.
“It’s an old friend,” he said. “An old girlfriend, right? I’m going to get you out of here, okay? I’m going to open the door one more time in five minutes. You need to be good for this. Are you good for this?” She nodded. “That’s my girl. I’ll explain when she goes, okay? I love you. You and you alone, Emily Tom. She is not staying long, right?” The toilet flushed. “When I open the door again, count to twenty. After twenty seconds, run straight to the shop. Quiet as a mouse.”
Nod.
“You sit tight in there till I come out. You’re angry with me right now. You’re confused. But you trust me. You’re going to be cool, calm, and collected until we talk, right? And then you can give me another black eye if you want to.”
“Okay.”
“Am I making the wrong decision trusting you out there? That’s my girl. Good.” He kissed his fingers and bent and touched them to her uplifted mouth and closed the door.
In the shop she stood still hugging herself in the dark. She looked around, then walked uncertainly into the bunk room, looking back as she stepped forward. She undressed, pulled on her nightgown and long johns, and put herself in the top bunk. In a minute she sat up, climbed back down, picked up her toothbrush, and put her feet into her slippers. She lifted her fleece off the little metal chair beside the beds, pulled it over her head, and slipped out the back door and ran across the dead broken grass to the dirt road. The Fosters. She could go there. She stood out on the road and looked west toward the hook where Foster’s little white house blinked in the cold. Then hugging herself again, she turned back to the shop and returned to her little bunk.
• • • • •
In the cabin, Lamb shut and locked the door and said a silent prayer to his old luck and took Linnie back to the couch.
“David.” She took a plaid-covered end pillow and stuffed it between them. He looked at it. “Can we talk now?”
“I want to talk first. Did you want to talk first?”
“What’s with you?”
“What’s with me?”
“Can you relax? Is something wrong?”
“I didn’t really think you’d come, Linnie.”
“You didn’t?”
“The truth is, I was so lonely I invited out ten or twelve women, and I’ve got one hidden in every room out here, and then you came along, and I’m now out of space.”
“You didn’t invite anyone else, did you?”
“My dear, we’ve never been operating on a basis of exclusivity.”
“I hate you.”
“And I hate you. Good. Glad we’ve got that all clearly drawn.”
“David.”
“Can we have a serious talk now?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I want to say this, Linnie, okay? Seeing you come across the grass for me—it’s the best thing this old guy’s seen in a lifetime.”
“David.”
“No. Let me say this. I know there’s a lot of stuff from my previous life that’s been crowding you out. I know that. My previous life isn’t even my previous life. Do you understand?”
“How long ago did you move out?”
“A long time. Two months. Three. I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked down at his hands.
“Was it because of me?”
“Linnie, you need to not think of it that way. Listen. I’m going to tell you something that is absolutely true, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Cathy knows nothing about you.”
“Okay.”
“People live together. They tolerate each other until they realize they’ve been tolerating each other, right? Sometimes it’s like sleepwalking.”
“She won’t tolerate you having affairs.”
“If there’s something you want to ask, Linnie, you’d better just ask it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“There isn’t anybody else out here. Do you see anybody out here other than you? Do you think I really called a bunch of women and invited them out, just hoping one of them would come?”
“I’m sorry.”
He looked out the window over the door at th
e empty road, the huge curtain of blue sky above it. “Do you have the sense I’m out here getting my kicks while I’m counting the empty columns of my life?”
“Please, David. I’m sorry, okay?”
“And it’s not that simple. There are things about her too. But understand it’s very difficult to speak ill of her.”
“I respect you the more for it.”
“I know you do.” He put his hands in his lap and turned to face her. “You know me, don’t you.”
“Sometimes.”
“Linnie. Look at me. Let’s have this. I want to try for it. But I’d feel like I was stealing you from the world. You’re so young. You have a life to live.”
“I could just wait for you. I’m willing to do that.”
“I think I knew you would say that.”
“Why does it make you look like you want to die? You need to not look at me like that.”
He looked down at his open hands. “I’m afraid I made you say it.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I’m afraid I make everybody say everything.”
“You’re not that powerful.”
He nodded and looked at his hands.
“What about Cathy?” she asked.
“What about her.”
“You make her say everything?”
“No.”
“What if I say I’m not going to see you again after this?”
“I’d worry that you were trying to convince me I hadn’t made you say everything up till then.”
“I see the problem.”
“I need a little of this space to do some soul searching, Linnie. I need to test myself. Or. Clean out my heart, you know? It’s like a crowded old garage. It needs emptying and sorting.”
“I don’t know if you can tidy a heart like you can clean a garage, David.”
“I need to try. I need to see if there’s anything there.”
“I used to find all this stuff in my parents’ garage. Horseshoes and old mitts and notepads and hammers of solid metal. Do you know the kind I mean?”
“I know the kind.”
“If you find something like that, don’t throw it away.”
“Aren’t you even a little angry with me, Linnie?”
“Do you want me to be?”
“I think I want someone to be.”
“Well, I don’t want to be angry. You can’t go around trying to make people angry just so you know where you stand.”
“You’re a smart girl.”
“Maybe.”
“I think I might be an awful person, Linnie.”
“David, you’re a decent man. Okay?”
His eyes filled. He took her face in his hands. “How do you know exactly what to say?” Linnie took his hands and he let go her face. “I’m afraid everyone’s in on something really wonderful, Linnie, and I don’t know what it is, and I can’t be in on it.”
“You’re okay.”
“I’m outside the window.”
“No you’re not.”
“You’ll be waiting for me, won’t you?”
“I will.”
“You can’t help it, can you?”
“Of course I can.”
“Oh, thank you for saying that.” She moved the pillow and he took her up in his arms. “Are you my girl?”
• • • • •
Glacial winds blasted the mountains all night and in the morning it was bright and bitter cold. Lamb filled the woodstove and set a pan of water to boil on top while outside he built the breakfast fire for Linnie. She was bundled up in Lamb’s extra clothes and wrapped in a rug, two rag-wooled hands around a tin cup of champagne. Lamb was back and forth in his sheepskin coat between the fire and the girl, the stove and the woman. He walked slowly through the wind in the space between the cabin door and the shop door and he no longer wanted to enter either room. He wanted again to lie down, this time in the snow, and see who came for him or where else they might put him.
“Why do you look so beaten up. Is it me?”
“I’m just tired, Lin. So tired.”
“This is because you’re feeding a dozen women breakfast, isn’t it?” She winked.
Lamb raised his eyes at her, his head lowered to his cup of hot tea and whiskey. “You have no idea.”
“Who’s your favorite?”
He sipped from the cup. “Emily.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“I took her from a swing set in her mother’s backyard.”
“Yuck, David.”
“She’s a sweet kid. That’s all. Maybe I wish I’d had a kid.”
“What’s so sweet about her?”
“She has freckles.” He poured more whiskey into his own cup, raised to her, and she drained the champagne and held out her own cup.
“I have freckles.”
“Those? Those are not freckles. Those are beauty marks.”
“I thought that was supposed to be a good thing.”
“Beauty marks don’t need my love. Freckles need my love. Enough beans?”
“Enough for two of me.”
“Enough bacon?”
“Let’s go inside.”
“You go ahead. I’ll get these plates rinsed off so they’re clean for lunch. I have a Scrabble board in the cabin somewhere. Get it out for us?”
“Can’t I see the shop?”
He nodded and stood slowly. “Come on. Let’s be quick and get it over with. I want to get back in bed.”
The shop was warm and they carried the cold in on their coats and in their hair. Linnie had the champagne under her arm. She hopped up on the workbench and looked out the window to the road and the line of trees, blackened by the brightness of the morning sky behind them. “But it’s so warm in here.” She turned back to Lamb. “Why didn’t we eat in here? It’s cleaner than the cabin.”
“A workspace has to be clean.”
“Do you work out here?”
“I will. I haven’t but I will.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to fix up the cabin, for one. Gutter in the back is hanging off the roof. Some of the window frame needs mending.” He opened the stove door to turn the wood. “The whole thing needs a good cleaning.”
“That little window in the bathroom is cracked.”
“I know it.”
“It could clean up pretty well. You could rent it out. Like a summer cabin.”
“Or I could just live in it.”
“You’d get restless.”
He looked out the window behind her head. “You begin to feel a lot differently about a word like restless when you’re my age.”
“You talk like you’re infirm.” She lifted the bottle. “Want to make a nest by the woodstove?”
“Out here?”
“It’s great.”
He nodded. “Okay, Lin. I’ll get some more wood and build the fire. You go get the blankets off the couch. Let’s get that rug too. Get the Scrabble board.”
In the bunk room Tommie was wide awake, hands folded behind her head and just peeking out of a pile of sleeping bags.
“You’re eavesdropping,” he said as he closed the door behind him and approached the bed. She scrunched up her face. “We’re going to sit in here for a while, okay? Are you good for it?”
“Okay.”
“It’s just two days she’s here. Counting today.”
“Okay.”
“If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to be really really quiet, right?”
“I know.”
“I don’t have any books or anything for you. You’re not going to sneak out and go back to Foster’s, are you? Call Fox News and USA Today?”
“I’m scared.”
“You’ll hibernate, right? You’ll be my little mountain critter hibernating in her nest all day, won’t you? And when she leaves you’ll be full of energy.”
Hearing Linnie’s footsteps, Lamb moved toward the door. Linnie turned the knob and peeked
in.
“What a cool little room!”
“It’s the bunk room.”
“Why don’t we sleep in here?”
“It gets really cold in winter.”
“Can we use those blankets?”
“I was just checking them out. Smells like mice got into them.”
“Too bad. We could’ve used them for a mattress. Or even stayed in here. Do those beds come apart?”
“Too far from the fire. Besides”—he raised an eyebrow—“it’s haunted.”
She took his arm. “By who?”
“There’s an old man who lives up the road?”
She nodded.
“He’s seventy-something, eighty. His wife had a stroke some years ago and she’s there in a bed—like in-home care, right? Like a breathing corpse. It’s the awfullest heartbreakingest thing you ever saw.”
“Oh, God.”
“Well, years ago they had a daughter.” He took Linnie by the arm and led her out of the bunk room, toward the stove where she’d spread the blankets on top of the rug. He set her down on it like a picnic blanket in a grease-stained concrete meadow. “And Foster—it was his brother-in-law who owned this place. Name was Calhoun.”
“Spooky name.”
“I know it. His first name was Smiley and they … you want a pillow?”
“A pillow?”
“I think those pillows in there were okay.” Linnie watched him. Inside the bunk room he took a pillow out from beside Tommie and put his hand over where her head was. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. We’re okay. I’ll come back in to you as soon as I can.”
He came out with the pillow. “They were as close as close can be. It was Smiley who introduced Foster to his sister.
“He was best man at their wedding. He never married because he was … a little off. Not dumb—he was just one foot in his own world. Always half a smile, a wandering eye.”
“Hence the name.”
“Exactly. Foster, he was as sound a man as there is. And stern where Smiley was off-kilter. But the two of them, they cowboyed all over this place together in the fifties and sixties. They’d go out before daybreak, just the two of them, razors and combs in their pockets, jerk and crackers and baling wire in their bags and off they went for five, eight, ten days at a stretch. Sometimes working, sometimes just crisscrossing the tableland and nosing through the trees on horseback. Calhoun never married, so Foster’s wife—the sick lady—she was mom for everyone. She was something of a drinker. But nice. They were a kind of a weird family up here, helped each other out over the years. Anyway, two, three years into the marriage Foster and Calhoun’s sister finally have a baby girl.”
Lamb Page 15
