My guts were gripped. She kept sweeping.
If you want, she murmured. Swept.
Cima?
Sweep. The harsh twiggy scrape.
I caught her arm. She went rigid.
Ow!
I dropped it like a hot grill. She stared at me.
That’s gonna bruise, she said. No modulation.
Cima. Jesus. I’m sorry.
I stood rooted to the dirt. Sheer panic. Couldn’t even see straight. Against all will my chest began to heave and then I felt tears running off my chin. Completely paralyzed. She stared at me. A mask. Like a death mask but the eyes alive or gathering life. Her dark eyes still as coins, then somehow gathering light as eyes do and registering, softening. She stood there trembling and studying my face and then I saw the tears well in her eyes and they were hers again, the dark pools. We stood like two trees. Swaying. What was left of the fire’s smoke puffed and wisped.
Last night she said. After we fell asleep. I dreamt of Tomas. Dreamt and dreamt of him.
Her lips shivered and her mask crumbled.
He was calling me. He was dying on his cot and calling me, bleating just like an animal that knows it’s going to slaughter. Just like an animal, Hig! And I stood against the wall unwilling to help him. My husband. My best friend.
She was sobbing with a hypoxic violence.
My love was frozen. Like a winter pond. I must have dreamt that for hours. In the end I couldn’t take it and I picked up my skinning knife and walked over and slit his throat. Oh god!
She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.
I don’t know if I can do this, she said. I thought I could.
Pops reported that the highway was good and straight for at least a thousand feet. Good enough, no big holes. He had left a bandana tied to a mile marker for a wind sock. Cima was warm enough, but more withdrawn. She came out to the hammock but not every night nor every other night. We didn’t make love again for days. Five. Can’t pretend I didn’t count. And when we did, when we were about to—I mean we lay on the blanket naked, holding each other, not kissing, not talking, but just our noses exploring ears and necks, and hands reconnoitering a territory made brand new by these new reckonings of loss—when it seemed to be time to consummate or at least somehow celebrate this new vulnerability, I pulled her on top of me and she was not wet and I had trouble entering and I could feel that it hurt her, and for some reason I thought of Tomas—the dream Tomas, bleeding—and a wave of panic overcame me and I lost my erection.
Damn the dream world. His ghost was wading through it and ruining what only a few days ago had been as euphoric as any love affair I’d known.
She gave my wanger a consolatory double squeeze which made me feel worse. Sighed heavily—I read Disappointment—and rolled off to the side. Her arms came around me gently. Lying on the blanket, arm in arm, in an unconsummated paralysis. I felt lonelier then than I had felt before the canyon. The hearts thudded and ricocheted against each other, but the spirit did not. I could not stroke her more than absently, or kiss her, or even talk with authenticity. As if failing in consummating love had robbed me of all legitimacy as a lover. Had stripped my license to love or even express affection. It was awful.
It occurred to me as I lay next to her on my side and tried to catalogue this new dread—the dread of separateness when love was so near—it occurred to me that what may have been transmitted at the critical moment the moment of truth, of penetration, was her own memory of the dream. I mean we communicate without speech of course. I thought that in all likelihood that blood curdling image of the dead had passed through her at the same instant or just before. Which meant that none of us was ready. Okay, Hig, I thought. Reason it any way you want. Make yourself feel better any way you can, but you can’t rewrite it. It sucks. Can’t make it better. I can’t, I can’t move. Can hardly breathe.
Hig.
She whispered the word, a wind eddying in my ear.
Huh?
Will you give me oral pleasure?
She said it in a French accent and I knew she was referencing that old classic,
I chuffed, a soundless laugh without mirth.
Really? You don’t want that.
She nodded, her head against my chest.
Okay. Big exhale. Duty calls.
I did. I kissed down between her breasts, her little innie belly button, the shallow horns of her pelvis, the lower plain of her concave belly, the patch of tight curls, the little lips, the smooth kernel, inhaled her, and then I went to work. Like a job. What works? What works best?
For a little while it was like that. And then she was lifting her hips and rolling herself under my lips and tongue and whimpering. And then she moaned, and then I was encouraging, then cheerleading with teeth, lips, tongue. Then tugging and releasing. I was flying her like a kite, that’s what it felt like, and then I forgot all my bullshit self and the kite was very very high and tugging harder and the blood reasserted and she was coming. She was arched and coming and I was inside her and she was clutching and clawing my back. I realized I must be hurting her with my weight. I hastily rolled off and spewed in the air and we lay and breathed without thought and we were almost happy again. Almost without reserve.
Go figure.
And then it was three more nights because she was so bruised up. But the mood around camp was better. And I could feel a gathering of momentum toward departure.
II
Pops left before full light. Without ceremony or sentiment. Took one look around the canyon, the last pairs of cows and calves, the sheep and lambs, hefted a light pack, his rifle, and without a word walked downstream and out the brush fence.
Left the only life he had ever given himself to. The life of his own lineage, his father and mother, his father’s father. It was in his blood truly and he latched the gate and walked out of the canyon.
I weighed everything again. Made a balance scale with a liter bottle, a five gallon pail, a stick and a rope. Hung it from a low limb by the stream. Five gallons is forty pounds half of it twenty, the liter bottle about two. I weighed the AR-15 rifle, Cima’s pack, mine, the hose and hand pump.
How much does a lamb weigh?
The little mixed herd moved in the tall grass heads down. Three lambs shook their heads, their ears, went back to feeding. One butted his mother in the ribs to nurse. Their lives were about to change. If any survived the winter it would be a miracle.
I dunno, maybe twenty?
Let’s see. You have a girl and a boy?
She smiled. A ram and a ewe? Yes.
Like the Ark. Here we go.
We wrapped one of the little guys in a sling made of a shirt and weighed him against the bucket. He swung under the branch his ears flopping, his legs splayed extended his tiny perfect shining black hooves, a look of sheer bewilderment on his little face. I emptied the pail until they balanced. About seventeen pounds.
Okay, we can take them. Without your dad on takeoff we should be okay.
