knew she was looking, just not that she was looking for you, and you alone.
Can she even see me from there?
She’ll realize she has found you without knowing she’d wanted to after you back up for her and stop and she sees your face—where will that leave me?
Did you bring any pills at all?
She’s a hundred percent gal under that coat, and you like new ones best of any.
(The funk of their lives sometimes wilted Dalrymple, made his vision shrink, this funk mostly the result of having punted earthly ambition, trimmed the wants from life, accepting a kind of decay, a rotted reduction of who they’d been capable of becoming at the start. He and Janet didn’t mesh that well, always having petty dramas spring to life around them, but they couldn’t decide to part, either, or make most simple decisions at all. Where to live, what to eat today, tonight, tomorrow, when to get out of bed, when to get out of bed again, which toothbrush, which channel, which bills to pay—all decisions they couldn’t seem to make. Things just happened without selection or consensus. Even when they tried to pick dream vacations, a present to themselves, an exercise that ought to be purely sweet and silky smooth, they ended up frustrated with each other, devastated, really, by their inability as a couple to clearly prefer one dream spot over another—the Rockies?
My nose gets dry up there, bleeds on my pillow at night.
Texas?
I hate their costumes.
Los Angeles?
Sure, I’ll hold the gun while you do the driving.
Ireland?
We can drink at home.)
Christ, Janet, it’s been almost five years. I have been with you almost five years.
Almost five years coming to an end, judging by her eyes, such power in them, black, I think, with the future in there already up and walking around holding hands. She’s just about got the details for you and her all worked out. I expect you’ll live in Taos or one of those other places full of the holy heebie-jeebies, where crystals and chanting and such shit hold sway.
I’m not moving to Taos. I’m not learning a bunch of fucking chants. I don’t get dazzled by shiny fucking rocks.
She does. She does. You don’t have to like something if she does.
That sounds familiar.
The hitcher has bent and lifted the knapsack. She is watching the car from an angle, her face turned to the side, and there is a force about her, something sort of rumbling from her expression. She starts walking toward the car, sure of herself.
I can see it in her eyes!
She looks kind of cold, that’s all.
Ready already to betray me. Didn’t take long. She’s got her hooks in you good.
There’s no hooks.
Just exactly what you’d say if there were hooks in you good and deep.
Dalrymple shifted to reverse, removed his foot from the brake and floored the car toward the hitcher. She stood still, expecting him to stop, and as he neared she still expected him to stop, then she quit expecting him to stop and dove off the road and he swerved to hit her and missed. The car slid down the slope of the gully upright at first, arms inside raising to brace against the dash, the car slipping sideways, then picked up speed and rolled over, crushing saplings and shrubs, scrub oak and brambles, rolled twice more before slamming into a hickory tree. The wheels were in the air, spinning, all glass shattered, and the roof had lowered. Bone cracked in the meat of Dalrymple’s arm and made a reddening hump in his shirtsleeve. Both knees hurt and he couldn’t see well through the warm ooze, but he did see an arm wearing an overcoat come through the passenger window, move Janet’s head aside, and reach beneath it for her purse. The hitcher came around to his side, then, and pushed on him and poked among his many pains until she could reach his wallet. She smelled of woodsmoke and spilled soup but didn’t say anything, only grunted, then scrambled back uphill suddenly talking very happily in rhyme to somebody not present.
Janet was crumpled, mumbling, mushed badly inside her middle area. The skin was split on her forehead; her nose gurgled. Dalrymple and Janet hung upside down, hidden from the road and doomed together. Her face was topsy-turvy, lips torn and bleeding, moving weakly in the mess, slowly taking a shape that might’ve been a smile.
One United
The stories from my sleep bled into my morning chores and I kept trying to reclaim different ones, go back inside them, but they were slippery, hard to hold or even locate again. I had appeared in three or four movies over the night, and in daylight I hoped the better flicks might meld into one united story I could follow easy, live among for the day, but they couldn’t quite do it. All morning I felt uncertain as to where I was in this flesh, at this time, and just how is it I got here, or got over the ocean if that’s where I actually am. There was a shiny boy with yellow hair pedaling a bicycle, wearing wooden little shoes and britches that stopped under his knees, riding on fat tires in a foreign land of waving grain, but not one where bombs were dropping. Seems like he was in the one at the beach, too, when the nuns cleaning fish with pocket combs sang to Sleepy and me and Momma with her neck opened sideways while we floated toward the sun to burn away our faces. I had a paintbrush in hand, laying red over the walls already splashed that way in the movie that so often breaks into the middle of the others, takes over any of them, a movie of red, red, red I’d had explained to me so many times in group without getting it all the way ever. But then there he is still pedaling with a goose in the handlebar basket, his yellow hair boiling hard and making bubbles as he passes, and he knows me from someplace secret I don’t remember ever being and smiles lopsided and mysterious my way.
Wait!
In the dull dutiful movie that had morning chores in it I walked the pasture bringing feed to the cows, kicking dewdrops into flash splinters, but feeling like large parts of me were yet inside those other shows, chasing that bicycle toward mountains I couldn’t name and avoiding walls of redness and that smell. My thoughts chased after scenes occurring all over the world, scenes that fled faster than I could chase, and I sat on the grass feeling bereft, abandoned by my good dreams, surrounded by the others.
I reached about all over my memory for those better stories but couldn’t get a grip.
The cows had chewed their fill and started to scatter when Sleepy came driving south, down the meadow from the hay barn to the north, straight through the pasture, over humped ground and old fallen branches. Tools and various metal bits bucked in the truck bed and clanged until he halted beside me. Sleepy terrified everybody around for certain reasons but me, who knew him in a different way: the day in the kitchen with that shape spreading red on the floor he said kind of soft to me, “Drop a hammer or somethin’ in all that mess beside her, darlin’, and maybe they’ll think…” On this regular, slower day he hung his head from the window, a smoke pinched in his fingers, and said, “Run up and fix your hair, Rebecca. Run up and drag a brush through there, and put on a new polka-dot dress, why not? Somethin’ that looks decent to people.”
“Decent?”
“Now you’re well again I kind of want you standin’ behind me today. I want you with me.”
“New polka-dots?”
“There’s a dress in your closet now I left there for you.”
“I have to recognize my choices plainly and be honest and know that I always have choices before...”
“There’s only one dotted one.”
Sleepy’s eyes look like he’s napping all the time. It’s easy to think he’s drowsing even when he looks straight at you, as his eyelids have been lame and droopy since he was born missing a needed muscle or
