The Cold Spot

somewhere inside her she resented how their first meeting had gone-if he hadn’t gotten the drop on her, she would’ve kicked his ass. He sputtered and gasped. “You really think I’m only adequate?”

“But with a touch of potential in some areas,” she said, and left him cuffed on the mat while she yanked down his sweatpants and took degenerate advantage of him.

After a year of trying, they drove up to St. Louis to see a specialist. The tests included a lot of unholy acts against him, Chase thought, including the forced and unnatural congress with a Dixie cup, but when he complained about these misdeeds against his flesh Lila got the giggles so bad she nearly flopped off the chair.

Easy for her to dismiss. But getting your prostate checked at twenty-one was bound to make any guy a little distressed. He was hoping to hold off that particularly disconcerting and downright unflattering situation until he was at least fifty, and maybe even then he’d balk.

“There’s going to be an accounting for this,” he said. “If not in this life, then the next.”

“You never got this edgy being the wheelman for a diamond heist.”

“You’ve got to draw your lines somewhere.”

“You don’t know what true invasion is,” she said. “Until your ankles are locked in stirrups and a geezer with a flashlight and a speculum has crawled eight inches up into your belly.”

“Jesus Christ, this I need to hear?” He didn’t even want to know what a speculum was.

“It’ll help you to appreciate the life you lead.”

“I appreciate it plenty,” he said, and he meant it.

After a second visit, the specialist with the fucking frigid fingers narrowed down the problem to Lila. Chase tried to follow the biology behind it, but for a guy who’d never made it past the sixth grade, he was having trouble visualizing things, and the doctor wasn’t using a pointer to tap on the chart on his wall the way Chase had been hoping.

The doc said it wasn’t impossible, but the odds were significantly narrower for Lila than the “average young female” to become pregnant and carry a child full-term.

She said, “Well, I was raised to believe in miracles.”

When they got home she unloaded two hundred rounds into the woods, trying to snuff ghosts.

Chase tried to keep Lila laughing because he knew it was starting to get to her, the fact that what came naturally to everyone else wasn’t happening for them. All day long they’d see pregnant teenagers heading to Mrs. Haskins’s Home for Wayward Unwed Girls & Peanut Farm. Lila had something like nineteen uncles and aunts, thirty-seven cousins, her parents, and both sets of grandparents living less than five miles away. At every family function they all let her have it. Asking when she was going to have a kid.

It worked her nerves. Chase knew they all figured he must have bad genes, being a Yankee and now this, and he let them keep on believing it. Lila cared and he didn’t.

She hung in there, but on certain nights the fact rattled her and a black mood would hit. She’d hold him tightly as if he might be running out on her, really putting her weight into it and using some cop holds on him, twisting him down. With her mascara running she’d say, “I’m so sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“There is.”

No matter what he said he couldn’t snap her out of it. She had to bounce back on her own. They’d lie there drinking wine or whiskey, the heavy breeze coming down out of the hills washing the curtains back.

She only brought up his parents or Jonah when the idea of motherhood started to drift away from her. “You think he ever loved you? Your granddaddy?”

“Yes,” Chase said, surprising both of them.

“You loved him?”

“Yes.”

“But you were afraid of him.”

“Everybody was afraid of him.”

“And you just couldn’t trust him anymore after that last card game.”

“Even before that. He would’ve thrown me over if he had to. I just thought I’d be the last one he threw over.” Chase sipped the whiskey. “It’s part of the way the pros do things.”

“Leaving their friends behind?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “If there’s no other way around it.”

“But you didn’t. Not the night we met. You hung around. You never ran.”

“No, I don’t run.”

“A’ course, you did wind up shooting your own string.”

“Only in their legs. And only for you.”

“Wasn’t much of a getaway.”

“It was for you.”

“So warm, sweetness,” she said and rolled to him.

“I bet the other girls just got flowers and chocolates.”

5

C hase began dreaming of his mother and the dead little sibling, the one who hadn’t had a chance to be born. He’d spent years trying to forget her face, tamping those memories down inside him, but now she appeared before him quite clearly, her voice almost breezy as she spoke his name.

He was back in the house he grew up in. The lawn had been mowed, the edging along the grass done with precision, the hedges perfectly trimmed, the tops as straight as if they’d been laid out with a ruler. Either it was high aesthetic or his father had a touch of OCD.

At the kitchen table, his mother sat calling to him, as if he was in another room. He stepped closer but she couldn’t seem to see him. He noted the way she wore her hair in looping ringlets, a slight reddish tint to it, the same as he got in his beard when he let it grow out. Her lips were full, almost as full as Lila’s. Her belly just a tiny bulge.

He waited to see himself, as a boy, come running by, but it didn’t happen. The dead little kid was in a chair at the other end of the table. Weird to see it and still not know if it was a boy or a girl. It stared at him with its mouth moving, indecipherable sounds emerging and growing louder until he thought he could almost make them out. He moved closer and closer, and the kid leaned forward and spit in his face.

“I dreamed of my mother again last night,” Chase told her.

“I thought you might be,” Lila said. “The way you twisted in your sleep. I held you and rubbed your chest lightly and you quieted down some after a time.”

She’d been raised on mountain folklore, backwoods myths, and gospel tent revivals. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never be able to lose the superstitious streak that had been spiked into her from childhood. When he spoke of his dreams her face grew very intense and she spooked him a little with how seriously she took them.

“What did your mama tell you?” she asked.

“Nothing. She just kept saying my name.”

Lila nodded, like spirits did this on occasion. He wondered if he should go fire a few rounds into the woods, maybe it would ease his mind a bit. Lila studied him for a moment, her features folding along all the contours of worry. It made his guts tighten, and she laid a hand against the side of his face.

“The dead will find a way to you. They’ll make you listen.”