tannin black, windless, serene, contained, waiting. Lovely. Waiting to reflect a cloud, to be swept by rain. I couldn’t breathe.
The openness, the simple being-ness of those eyes struck me as brave and terrifying. I must have recoiled. She smiled inward and went back to shucking peas. I suppose as an internist you see all kinds of raw symptoms, nothing much surprises you.
We had enough venison, no reason to eat mutton or beef so we didn’t. Pops thought some of the animals might survive here on their own if it rained later on, if the winter was as mild as last. When things get better we can come back, he said. Nobody else said a word. Pops was not in the habit of bullshitting himself but there it was, every man has his imaginary refuge.
Another week, two. Some inner wires began to loosen. Never know how tight we are until then. Pops was off cutting wood. I started a dinner fire for her in the outside pit and we sat on stumps and just watched it build. It swayed and whispered with the rhythm of the breeze. This time of day the wind came upstream as it did in all this country but something about the shape of the canyon made it eddy and blow around so there was never a safe spot by the fire away from smoke. We had already moved our seats twice. I was crying with smoke.
Smoke makes you cry and then you grieve, I said. Like cutting onions. Always made me sad.
She smiled.
I never been to New York. Did you like it?
I loved it. Just loved it. You know how some people say they wish they had two lives so they could be a cowboy in one and an actor in another? Or whatever? I wanted two lives so I could live in the Heights—Brooklyn Heights—in one and in the East Village say in another. I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to go to Yankees games—Yanks not Mets—and to Off Off Broadway and poetry slams and get lost at the Met. Again. I went to every artist’s retrospective there was. I could eat Sabrett’s until I was sick.
Sabrett’s?
Hot dogs. With kraut, grilled onions, mustard, no relish. Some evenings I walked Court Street down to Carroll Gardens and back. I got to know all the hawkers at all the folding tables selling scarves and children’s books and phony watches. I thought, When we have kids we’ll get their first books here. For two dollars! Probably stolen off trucks by the mob, huh?
Probably.
A world with a mob. That seemed quaint. The good old days. I said, What about the end? Did you see any of it?
She shook her head. She leaned down and pushed the butt of a stick into the fire and when she did her loose shirt swung away from her collarbones and I saw her breasts again fuller than they should have been, deep tanned and freckled on the top and milky below. I couldn’t get away from them today. I guess that part of me just woke up. Probably been there all the time, Hig, and you were in the Fog.
The Fog of Being, I said.
What?
Sorry. I talk to myself sometimes.
I noticed.
Really?
She nodded. Do I?
Not that I’ve heard.
Silence.
I didn’t see the collapse, the mass death. But I felt it coming. Like a pressure drop. The kind that is worse than bad weather. We had it a few times growing up at the ranch. A pressure shift you could feel in your pulse, your lungs. A darkening of the sky, a weird green tinged blackness. The cattle restless and upset beyond the usual omens of thunderstorm. That’s the way it felt. Why I think I should have known.
Should have. This to myself. So many of those. I could build houses out of them, burn them for fuel, fertilize the garden.
Do you know how it began? New Delhi?
She shook her head.
That’s what the press reported. Mutation of a superbug, one of the ones they’d been watching for two decades. In the water supply etc. Combined with a bird flu. We called it the Africanized bird flu, after the killer bees. First cases in London and blamed on New Delhi. But that’s probably not where it originated. We heard rumors that it originated at Livermore.
The national weapons lab?
She nodded. The rumor was that it was a simple trans-shipment. A courier on a military flight with a sample taking it to our friends in England. Supposedly the plane crashed in Brampton. Nobody will ever know—she looked around the box canyon and let the absurdity of those words trail off in the wind with the smoke.
I was wide awake now. She inhaled deeply and I could see—Hig! Her nipples against the thin fabric of her shirt. My god. Hig. You haven’t heard any news, real news in almost a decade. It’s making you horny!
Genetically modifying flu is an old business.
Right, I said.
Look me in the eyes when you say hello to me.
I shook myself. She was grinning at me through smoke.
Never learned Spanish, I murmured.
We ate dinner I don’t know what time, but sometime in the late evening when the sky was that luminescent blue that might hold a single star and the nighthawks flitted in the meadow and over the creek feasting on the latest hatch. They wintered in Mexico or somewhere and seemed to be doing alright. Shear winged and acrobatic as swallows. White wingbars blinking on a sudden shift in direction. Small peeps. A joy in watching the birds in their single hour of feeding.
I guess they ate then because the bugs were out. It was not cold as it would be later when truly dark and the ropy stars skeined together and you could feel the heat of the day radiating off the rock wall.
I took the few dishes to the creek and washed them with sand. They cooked outside most of the time in a firepit lined with river stones. On those nights father and daughter sat on two stumps and watched the wind rashed embers like TV. I set the wet dishes on the table and lay in the hammock and tried to see how long I could go without thinking about anything. I think my record was six Mississippi.
One night I fell asleep naked before I could crawl into my bag and I woke in the dark with the weight of the cover settling over me.
Not alarmed, it seemed right. I made to sit up and a hand pushed me back. Shhh, she said. I came out to pee and thought you’d get cold that way.
I lay back.
Thanks.
She leaned over me I felt her hair brush my face, a touch of her breath, then she was lifting the quilt, stretching her length alongside, and she wriggled in her hips, her ribs in the margin of hammock tight against me and she said into my neck
There.
That’s all. Then she fell asleep.
She was wearing the man’s shirt. Nothing else. I could feel her mound against my leg. Mons pubis, right? The cradle of her pelvic bones. I lay there, heart hammering. I traced her body in my mind from her toes where they touched mine, kind of bony and cold, up her calves, thighs, to the inside of her knees, the kneecap where it burrowed into the crook of my own leg—you get the idea. My brain all on its own took the trip, followed the map, lingered at every place of interest, every scenic view. It was the novelty. My heart pounded and my dick uncurled and straightened and lengthened, and then it was almost pain. It throbbed, and my mind continued to travel. Up and down her length, every point of contact. At some point I must have exhausted myself, run out of gas, I slept.
The next morning I realized that it was the weight of another cramping your space in sleep, that it was
