But the Badlands didn’t drive Austin away, and that was welcome enough. He and Gabrielle rented a cabin on their border and did what they always did whenever they put civilization behind them: divided their attentions between earth and sky.
He’d been gone a full day when she came looking for him on one of the trails they’d explored together. In the years to follow Austin imagined what it must’ve been like for her, picking her way along the runnels of erosion.
She spotted him on the wide, flat top of a rocky outcropping, kneeling and stripped to the waist. He imagined how he must’ve looked to her as she drew nearer and saw first the braided rawhide whip doubled together in his fist, then the mass of bleeding welts draped over each bare shoulder, all the way down his back to his waist.
He imagined her revulsion on seeing the coyote, the condition of its tawny pelt. Surely she understood that it was dead.
A storm had threatened earlier. The evening sky was a dense blue-gray, sawn at by jagged ridges of stone. The wind blew from the northwest and sliced itself apart to get to them.
“They’re coming,” he told her. “You can’t believe how hard they’re trying to get through here.”
And if she understood that the coyote was dead already, he could imagine her grasping for some rational explanation why it would still be moving, but just its throat and lower jaw, like the victim of a stroke trying to form sensible words. All through that night, he never could make out what they were.
But he could imagine how Gabrielle must’ve felt, turning her back on the sight and running for the cabin. He found it empty the next morning, and the van was gone. She’d left a note, at least.
That he didn’t blame her, he regarded as a sign of growth.
Only every day, he told the note.
Only every day.
*
She went back to town after Memuneh’s seizure — he didn’t know what else to call it — and did not return all that next day. Or the day after that. The Kyyth was gone as well, but his disappearances were common enough, and never lengthy.
Her headlights woke him late the next night but he pretended they hadn’t as she eased open the shack door and crossed to where he lay on the mattress on the floor. On his side, Austin feigned sleep the way most people never thought to, breathing slowly and deeply instead of falling deathly silent. She bought it. He could feel her go to her knees on the mattress, then slowly draw the sheet down to his waist and leave it there. She was looking at his back in the moonlight, at its mat of old scars. He thought she might’ve touched one, very lightly, but the feeling there was nearly gone.
Soon she retreated but never left, and maybe he’d slept for a moment, because when he began to wonder if she was still watching him in the dark, and turned over to peek through slitted eyes, he saw that Memuneh had come back without his even realizing it.
Near the door, Gabrielle was sitting with both legs tucked beneath her, sagging back against Memuneh. He held her from behind as a parent might hold a child stricken with sorrows, arms wrapped protectively around her, rocking her so gently she might’ve been made of crystal. Now and again his arm would rise, and his fingers dab beneath her eyes.
They were both at such peace Austin dared not move. For all the mystery of his origins, Memuneh seemed a simple creature. He aspired only to be a comforter, as if unsure of what he was, and in lieu of that certainty had looked to paintings for the gentlest reflections of how his kind was seen by those who professed to need them most. He was the creation of dead men and pigments.
Gabrielle was still there in the morning when Austin awoke for good, but not the Kyyth — granting them privacy, maybe. He saw that she was looking through his journals. That he didn’t mind and that she didn’t look sheepish when he spotted her … there could be no greater evidence than this to their having reached back toward their old familiarity.
“‘Let me tell you about loss,’” she read aloud. “‘Let me tell you about lies. Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.’” She closed the notebook. “Feeling a little maudlin that day, were we?”
“Or that year,” he said.
“Did you write that about anybody
He decided to say nothing of the previous night, simply see where the day led. After he slipped on his pants she followed him outside, and he used the tiny outhouse and washed from the bucket at the pump, then shaved. She combed out the snarls in his braid and rewove it, and ran her fingers through the streak of silver on the other side.
“What brought you out of it?” she asked. “Your maudlin era.”
“Evolution?” he guessed. “I just got sick of the sound of my own gloom. I was so full of shit. I really missed laughter. So I started by laughing at myself. You can’t imagine how liberating that was.”
“I’d like to try,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard.
She levered water from the pump and let it cascade over her bare feet. She was wearing a dress, full and flimsy and very free about her hips and ankles, and as the day advanced the heat didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as it had before.
She was still there at dusk, so they watched the evening redness in the west while eating the eggs and beans he cooked over an open fire. The night was clean and cool and cloudless, perfect for stargazing. They spread two layers of blankets on the shack’s roof — ground level was risky; sidewinders might be drawn to their body heat. They lay on their backs, side by side, above them the light and dust of the galaxy, one of billions. For an hour she said nothing, and he wondered how long it had been since she’d seen this panorama, the man-made luster of New York stealing it from her sky.
“Do you remember when we used to do this before, and what we used to say the stars were?” she said. “Sure you do, you remember everything.”
“I remember,” he said. “Your idea, though, wasn’t it?”
