by Paul Pen
He hid it under his seat.
As he looked up, he found Iris climbing into the pickup. She closed the door, careful not to make noise.
“We don’t want Dad to catch us,” she whispered.
Rick thought of the shotgun.
Iris sat looking ahead, rubbing her hands together between her legs. She took a deep breath.
“It already smells like you.” Her eyes sought his. “The truck. It’s impregnated with your scent.”
He didn’t know how to respond. “Er, thanks?”
Iris slid along the seat, moving closer. She was wearing a nightgown the color of her name. She even smelled like the flower she was named after. Rick tried to make eye contact, but his attention was drawn to her exposed shoulders, her broad neckline, her cleavage. He realized she’d noticed his gaze because her cheeks flushed red. Rick pressed his back against the door, distancing himself as much as possible.
“You make me feel like the heroine in one of the best books.”
“Iris, I don’t . . .”
Their thighs brushed against each other. She rested a hand on his knee, under the steering wheel. It was light, as if a moth had flown into the truck and perched there. She seemed surprised by her own daring, because she looked at her hand, as stunned as he was.
“Till this moment, I never knew myself,” she whispered.
She said the words as if she already knew them, as if she’d wished for the moment to arrive when she could make them hers. Rick guessed she’d taken them from one of her books. The moth climbed from his knee to halfway up his thigh.
“Iris, please.”
Rick trapped the curious insect. Her fingers interlocked with his. Iris held both of their hands to her own lap. She used her free hand to stroke them where they met.
“Oh, I’m all nerves. I’ve never held a boy’s hand like this. I’ve dreamed endlessly about the day I’d finally have my chance, and suddenly it’s happening. Tonight. I haven’t known many boys, I haven’t even seen many boys. But look at me now, holding the hand of a guy who looks like a movie star.”
Iris’s eyes glistened. For an instant, Rick was touched by the purity of her smile, the innocence of her words, the simplicity of the feelings she described.
“We can ask the night to keep a secret for us,” she added.
Rick retrieved his hand from Iris’s lap, as if suddenly discovering it was there.
“I don’t think your father would be too happy.”
“Only the moon and the stars will be witnesses.”
She moved nearer. Iris’s face was so close to his that Rick was breathing the air she exhaled. It aroused a feeling in him that was like biting into a piece of fruit in summer.
“I’m ready.”
“I, this, I don’t—”
It may have been fatigue, or some mysterious nocturnal enchantment of the desert, or simply Iris’s beauty, but her lips rested on his without him doing anything to prevent it. They both stopped breathing.
Melissa’s laughter broke the spell.
“No, no, no.” Rick moved Iris away, pushing gently on her shoulders.
Still offering her lips, she was keeping her eyes closed. She opened them slowly and looked Rick in the eyes.
“I counted to ten, to give you time to disappear if you were a dream,” Iris said. “And you’re still here.”
He was unable to look away.
Until they heard footsteps outside the truck.
“Is Melissa talking to her cactuses?” Iris asked.
Rick nodded. She bent down to hide, and he pretended to be asleep. The crackle of the sand under Melissa’s slippers traced a route that skirted around the vehicle before moving off in the direction of the house. The two of them looked up when the porch boards creaked, the sound far away. Melissa was carrying a candle in a lantern.
“And how does she intend to get back in?” Iris whispered.
Her sister didn’t even approach the door. She headed to one side of the porch and climbed onto the handrail. Then she scaled one of the posts with ease.
Iris let out a little gasp. “I didn’t know that trick.”
Melissa walked along the roof to one of the three windows on the exterior wall, the one on the far left. When she was back in her bedroom, the candle went out.
“That Melissa’s full of secrets,” said Iris.
“It must be a family thing.”
Rick’s thought escaped as words. He regretted it immediately. When Iris frowned at him, he diverted her attention to the furtive nature of her visit to the truck, making her see that it also counted as a secret.
“What I feel isn’t a secret,” she said. “It’s forbidden.”
Rick didn’t know how to answer. He coughed without needing to, just to break the silence.
The kitchen light startled them when it came on.
They heard a key turning inside in the front door.
Iris looked at Rick with her eyes wide. “My dad?”
The bolt on the screen door was pulled across.
“I’m going,” she said.
“No, no, he’ll see you, don’t—”
Iris ducked out the door. She whispered to him to please stay another day, that it couldn’t end like this. Then she made off, bent over. Rather than going toward the porch, she went around the house to one side, heading for some back door.
When the porch light came on, Rick wiped his lips with his hand, as if Elmer might detect a trace of the kiss his daughter had given.
An arm poked out through the door.
Rick stopped breathing until, narrowing his eyes, he saw that it was Rose’s hand. She left a paper bag on a little table outside the front door. From the vehicle he could make out a pointed shape. The corner of a sandwich, maybe. He breathed with relief. He felt stupid. Just as Elmer had promised him, his wife was leaving out some food so he could have breakfast before he set off. She must have remembered in their bedroom, in bed perhaps, and she had taken the trouble to go down to the kitchen to make something and put it out on the porch for him.
Rose closed the doors again, locking both. Rick thought of the notebook under the seat. The map. The fifteen circles marked on the route. Suddenly, seeing the breakfast Rose had prepared for him in the middle of the night, he was sure he would also end up crossing out the circle that marked this house on the map.
A light came on two windows from Melissa’s, on the far right of the exterior. Iris’s form appeared behind the glass. Though she wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the darkness outside, she blew a kiss in the direction of the truck.
The window went dark as if the house had closed an eye.
Rick waited another half hour before climbing out of the cab.
He left the property following the path the pickup’s wheels had marked among the cacti. His first footsteps along the parallel furrows in the sand were slow, stealthy. He held his backpack so that nothing inside it would make noise. He carried the flashlight in his hand, but didn’t turn it on until he was sure that nobody would see the light from the house. When the crunch of the grit couldn’t give him away either, Rick ran.
He ran along the edge of the dirt track, raising dust as he went, concentrating hard on the circle of light the flashlight projected, expecting to find the marker. Tiredness forced him to slow his pace. After catching his breath for a minute, he picked up speed. When a stitch jabbed him in the abdomen, he worried that he’d left the marker behind. He’d been running for longer than he’d estimated it would take. His uncertainty grew until the only rational option was to turn around, but it was at the precise moment when he decided to that the mound of stones appeared to one side of the road. Positioned on top of one another, they resembled a circular pyramid, a formation that wouldn’t occur naturally. Rick stopped. He breathed violently through his mouth. His throat burned, his ears were ringing, his chest hurt. The saliva in his mouth was like glue. He dried the sweat on his forehead with the hair on his forearms.
The m
ound of stones marked the place where he had to leave the road and head into the desert. He walked among cacti and rocks, guided by the flashlight beam. A scorpion passed through the luminous circle on the ground, coming out of the darkness before taking refuge in it again. It crossed with its sting coiled over its back, its pincers high. After five minutes of walking perpendicularly to the dirt track, Rick reached the ridge. He sat on the edge with his feet hanging down and let himself fall. He quickly touched the ground. It was a short drop.
The flashlight illuminated his car’s Colorado license plate, and a warm feeling filled him with peace. In the middle of the night, lost in that desert, his house seemed as unreachable as the moon that shone in the sky, but his 1959 Lincoln was there, and in some way it was like being home.
Rick opened the trunk with the keys he’d hidden in the exhaust pipe. He took out the thick brown folder he had concealed under a toolbox. A red pen was secured under one of the elastic bands. The seat of his car received him as if hugging him, the opposite of how he had felt in Elmer’s pickup. His heart, which had finally recovered its normal pace after the run, accelerated again when he stood the folder on his knees, resting it against the steering wheel. He kept the flashlight on, positioning it on the dashboard.
He opened the folder with trembling hands.
It contained dozens of cuttings, original documents, and copies of newspaper articles. Rick had read them all, but there was too much information, too many dates, too many names to commit to memory. He hadn’t retained every detail, but studying the collection of papers so many times, he’d ended up classifying it all in some way in his head, and he knew roughly where to start searching. When he wanted to find a document, his fingers would take him directly to the top or the bottom of the pile. He also usually knew in advance whether the information he needed to find was in one of the copies or one of the original documents, whether the article he thought he remembered was accompanied by a photograph, and even what part of the page the information was on, once he found it.
He dipped his hand into his backpack in search of his notebook. His fingers felt the objects inside three times before it dawned on him that he’d hidden it under the seat when Iris got into the truck, and he’d left it there.
“Goddamn it . . .”
He strained to remember his notes. With pen in hand, he navigated the documents in the folder. He compared papers. He selected some, bringing them to the top of the pile. He discarded the ones he didn’t think were relevant. He unfolded papers, then folded them back up again. He clicked his tongue several times, whenever he feared his search would come to nothing. As it always had. He began to believe that the document he was looking for didn’t exist, that he’d fabricated it in his imagination while he ate shrimp tacos with the family. He shook his head as he read many of the articles. His hands and eyes coordinated to perfection, checking the information. Emotion began to stir in his stomach as some of the documents passed various tests. The smile on his face widened with each red cross he used to mark a document.
Until the one he was really searching for appeared.
The one he’d thought of as soon as he saw the uninjured arm of a little girl passing herself off as her twin sister.
It wasn’t a product of his imagination.
It was real.
Rick shut the folder. He pulled on the elastic band with such force that it snapped. The elastic whipped him, stinging like a small burn. He returned the file to the trunk. When he moved the toolbox, a bottle of Coca-Cola rolled toward him. He opened it on the bumper and drank it without caring that it was as hot as coffee. Sticky. He needed fluid so he could run again. A bird sang to the dying night. The horizon was no longer black but dark blue, and he had to be back at the house, lying in the pickup, before the sun came up. He slammed the trunk shut with such violence that some unseen creature fled in fright, slithering through the bushes.
Elmer came out of the upstairs bathroom, adjusting his work coveralls. The twins received him by wrapping their arms around his waist. His neck still burned from his aftershave. From the kitchen, the smells of breakfast and the sound of the pans reached them upstairs. Rose had gone down when he was getting into the shower. Elmer opened the door to Melissa’s room.
He found her talking to her rocks.
“Can’t you smell the eggs? Don’t keep Mom waiting.”
“I’m coming.” She turned to the stones. “So whose turn is it to come down today? No, Clark, not you. And Natalie came down yesterday. It’s . . . Gregory’s turn.”
She picked up her chosen rock and walked out with it, dodging around him and the twins at the door. At that time of morning, the sun’s rays lit up the wall in Melissa’s room where she hung her family portraits. Elmer ran his eyes over them, allowing himself a few seconds to revisit all the good memories he had shared with his wife, with his daughters.
Next he opened Iris’s bedroom door.
“Can’t you knock?” she asked, covering herself up to her head with the sheet.
“We’re all downstairs having breakfast already.”
“No, we’re not, we’re here, Daddy,” the twins said.
“She knows what I mean. Come on.”
Iris took a while to get up. When she did, she dragged the sheet with her, using it as a dressing gown to cover herself.
“Do you sleep in the nude or what?”
Iris let out a sigh of irritation. “Can I get dressed in peace, or do I have to do it in front of all of you?”
Elmer ushered away the twins, who went down the stairs ahead of him holding hands, their steps synchronized. When they reached the bottom, Mom yelled to them from the kitchen that there was only enough cocoa for one of them, and they sped forward to squabble over it. Rose gave him a wink, making him complicit in the trick that never failed to get the twins to come to her.
“Open up over there, will you?” she asked. “Let some air in.”
Elmer unlocked the front door. Through the screen’s green mesh, he saw the breakfast bag on the little table outside. He recognized the way his wife rolled up the top of the paper. He was so annoyed by the kid’s rudeness, the bad manners he showed by rejecting the food Rose had made for him in the middle of the night, that he thought about hiding the bag so his wife wouldn’t see it. But she appeared beside him before he could do anything.
“What’re you looking at?” she asked, a slotted spoon in her hand. Seeing the bag, she came to a different conclusion. “He hasn’t left yet?”
His wife’s words contained just a hint of alarm.
“How can he still be in there?” Elmer gestured at the Dodge, its cab fully in the sun. “It must be two hundred degrees in that truck.”
A frenetic clatter broke out above them. It came down the stairs until it reached the door. Iris tried to look over Elmer’s shoulders.
“Is he still there?” she asked. “He hasn’t gone?”
Melissa joined them, carrying her rock.
“Take one of the twins away,” Elmer said to Rose.
She went back into the kitchen and left it pulling on Dahlia, who advanced without taking her eye from the glass of chocolate milk she carried in her other hand. Before reaching the stairs, Rose gave the slotted spoon to Iris, telling her to watch the stove.
Elmer went out, closing the screen door in his daughters’ faces.
“He stayed for me,” Iris whispered behind him.
Elmer picked up the paper bag and looked up and down the porch. It seemed more logical that Rick would have sought refuge somewhere in the shade. As he went down the steps, his suspicions about the kid, the ones he’d finally dismissed overnight, returned with intensity. Of course the kid wouldn’t be sitting in the shade chewing on a blade of grass, resting before continuing his hike. The kid would have used the confusion to slip in through the back door, and he would already be upstairs jumping on his wife’s back. Attacking his girls. Elmer turned toward the front of the house. For an instant, he imagined the young man in the twins
’ window, threatening Rose with a knife at her throat. Asking them if they hadn’t known, deep down, that sooner or later they would receive the punishment that . . . he shook his head to expel the vision. In the window there was only his wife, anxious like him.
Elmer walked on toward the truck. The two windows were open. He remembered the conversation he’d had with the kid the night before, leaning against the mirror. It suddenly struck him as ridiculous that the youngster who couldn’t even drink a shot of mescal without coughing like a child should harbor dark intentions.
“Hey, kid, are you in there?”
Elmer took another couple of steps forward. Before peering into the vehicle, he knocked on the door with his knuckles.
There was no response.
He knocked again.
Rick’s head suddenly appeared. The kid looked from side to side, disoriented. His face was lined, his hair tangled. He blinked behind hair that had collapsed over his eyes. A swirl of it made him look like a child. If there was one inoffensive young man anywhere in the immensity of that desert, this was him. Elmer felt relieved. And angry with himself for letting fear fabricate bad omens after all this time.
“Did I wake you?”
“Wake me?” Rick asked. “What time is it?”
Elmer had to let go of the handle several times before he could open the door. It burned. The youngster came out of the truck enveloped in an asphyxiating swell of air that smelled of hot metal. His T-shirt was stuck to his body.
“Man, don’t tell me you’ve slept till now. In this heat.”
“All night. Like a log.” Drips of sweat slid down the kid’s sideburns, yet he grunted with pleasure as he stretched. “I hope you don’t mind me staying so late. I’d spent so many nights sleeping on the ground, lying in there was like heaven.”
Rick noticed the paper bag. “What’s that?”
“My wife left you some breakfast on the porch, like I said she would. In case you went before the sun came up.” He pressed the bag against the young man’s chest. “It’s yours. You can take it with you or eat it in the truck you’re so fond of. That way the bread will toast a little.”
