Gravity Box and Other Spaces (31 page)

The tall one had managed to get to his feet and now stood uncertainly, a heavy hunting knife in his hand. Peter stepped forward. The knife flashed up toward him, but Peter caught the wrist and twisted. He barked in pain and dropped the knife. Peter kicked him in the ribs, putting him on the ground again.

Neither tried to stand.

“You're trespassing,” Peter said.

“Who in hell're you?” the tall one wheezed.

“The owner.”

“Since when? This is open ground.”

“Since a month ago. Didn't you see the posted signs?”

Neither answered. Peter picked up the hunting knife.

“What were you going to do with this when you caught her?”

“Caught who?”

Peter squatted by the tall one and aimed the knife-tip at his face. The man went pale.

“Naturally you weren't chasing anyone,” Peter said. “Were you?”

“Nothin' human.”

Peter felt a sickly-hot worm of long-suppressed rage stir in the back of his brain. It must have shown a little in
his face, because the man on the ground looked suddenly afraid.

“You leave my property,” Peter said quietly. He stood, stepped back, and tapped the flat of the knife against his thigh. For a moment he imagined beating them, maybe cutting on them. The suddenness and violence of the thoughts frightened him a little, so he considered hauling them into town to Sheriff Edmunds and making a formal complaint. The logistics troubled him; he might, he decided, end up hurting them even worse if they resisted. Peter tamped down the anger, made himself think it through. He was vaguely pleased with his self-control. “Leave and don't come back.”

The man nodded and scooted away from Peter before getting to his feet.

“Can I have my knife?”

Peter shook his head. For a moment he thought the man would argue. Instead he glared and turned toward his companion who had finally stood. Together they returned the way they had come.

Peter followed them, unnoticed. When they reached the county blacktop, they climbed into a mud-caked RV parked along the roadside. Nearly a minute passed before the engine started up. They headed south toward Saletcroix. Peter listened until the sound of the engine and the rumble of tires had faded to nothing. His hands trembled and his breath came ragged. He blinked at the visions re-emerging in his head. The violence he had suppressed broke loose on him, but with nothing at hand on which to vent itself, all he could do was keep very still until it passed.

When it had, or mostly had, passed, he set about trying to find the girl they had been chasing. He followed what signs he could, the crushed grass and broken foliage where
she had run back into the thick forest, but within fifty feet the trail ended abruptly at the base of a young tree. Peter walked a wider and wider circle until he knew he had simply lost her. Baffled and still a bit upset, he went back to the clearing.

He packed the chainsaw, then loaded the three sycamore sections into the wheelbarrow he had brought along. He hung the case on the handles and headed west.

A little over half a mile through the forest, he emerged from beneath the canopy into the sickle-shaped swath of open land on which stood his house. The patch contoured around the base of a hill, atop which trees clustered. The house spread out in several directions, a cluster of rooms within a wooden skin that appeared to have grown over the years, like a nautilus shell, chamber by chamber, though with less elegance. It contrasted sharply with the newer aluminum building to its right that housed his workshop.

Parked alongside his own Toyota Land Cruiser was a smaller SUV, metallic sea-foam green, glinting in the late morning sun. Peter stopped, set down the barrow, and considered retreating back into the woods until she left. Before he could move, though, the front door of the house opened and his wife stepped out.

Seeing her, his gut seemed to shift to one side, a not-unpleasant jolt. Elyssa looked tall from a distance, but she was a head shorter than he and never weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds. She stood with an easy grace, legs bare beneath her khaki shorts. She wore a gauzy shirt over a dark tank-top. Peter picked up the handles of the barrow again and pushed forward, unable to look away from her face as it swiveled right to left until she saw him. Even from a distance he recognized the twitch across her face that signaled a barely-suppressed smile.

He rolled the wheelbarrow toward the workshop. Elyssa came over as he pushed back the sliding door.

“Hi,” he said. “Been waiting long?”

She opened her mouth. He expected something coy and endearing to come out, but she only smiled and shook her head.

“No. About twenty minutes. I hope you don't mind me letting myself in.”

“You let yourself in a long time ago.”

She seemed ready to say something. He maneuvered the wheelbarrow inside before she could.

Light filled the space from four large skylights. Workbenches lined one wall, a few free-standing steel tables dotted the concrete floor, and a row of bins opposite the workbenches contained piles of wood, each kind in its own container, the pieces ranging in size from wrist-thick branches to stumps and slices two feet across. The air smelled of musky forest, sawdust, and a chemical tinge of fixatives and resins. In the center stood a large wooden pillar already carved into human form. Off to its right was a plywood board. On it photographs and sketches hung by push-pins. Tools crowded a small table to the left.

Peter pushed his new wood toward the bins. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed Elyssa, arms folded, as she walked directly up to the new statue. He unloaded the wood, saying nothing, giving her a kind of privacy. Once the wood was in its bin, he went to her. She was still studying the piece, a rapt expression on her face.

“I thought you weren't going to do one of me,” she said.

“Busted. I—” He ground his teeth, feeling a stutter coming on. He ran a hand over his mouth to hide it, cleared his throat, and finished. “I missed you.”

“It's only been three weeks.”

“Felt like three months.”

The images cluttering the board were all of her. Snapshots up to eight-by-ten prints, with his own sketches for the shape of the sculpture interspersed. Many of them were nudes. He found he could not look at them with her there—annoying but amusing.

“These weren't enough?” she said, waving a hand at the images, smiling mischievously.

He laughed. “No. Needed something closer to the real thing.”

She looked past him, to the sculpture. “It's good,” she said. “When will you finish?”

Peter looked up at the work-in-progress. He had posed her as if leaning against a door or a tree or a pole, one arm raised for support, left leg crossed in front of the right, an almost-step, her head turned to the right in profile. The proportions were exact, the nuances a distillation of bits from every image tacked on the board, informed throughout by his own memory and feelings.

“Not sure,” he said. “I've been working on it in between.”

Elyssa glanced at the work on tables near the benches, commissions and a couple of new pieces for the exhibit she had told him she was arranging.

“I should have those done in a couple of weeks,” he said. “This one, though—” He reached toward the statue of Elyssa, hand aimed at its waist. At the last instant he stopped and let his arm fall.

“Pete—”

“I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't see you anymore. Your face—” He let the sentence die, uncertain how to end it.

The air between them seemed to thicken, grow warm. Elyssa's mouth flexed as she stepped toward him. His free hand went automatically across her back. Elyssa leaned in
and Peter buried his face in her mahogany hair. He felt absorbed into her like water into earth. The last three weeks collapsed into an instant of recognition.

“Pete—”

His hands framed her face and he kissed her. She opened her mouth, extending the moment.

Then she drew back. “Pete.”

“What?”

She looked wary, glancing toward the door. Peter saw a flash of movement. He listened for a moment. When he heard nothing but the distant rustle of leaves in branches, he stepped outside—

—and the girl jumped back from him, arms splayed, alarm in her face.

The same girl whose pursuit he had interrupted. Still naked.

“It's all right,” he said, holding his hands away from his sides, palms toward her. “I won't hurt you.”

She frowned and then laughed, her entire body relaxing. She seemed completely unselfconscious about her nudity.

“Who—?” Elyssa came alongside him. “Oh.”

The girl studied Elyssa intently, then moved past them both and entered the studio. She hesitated just inside the threshold before walking up to the statue. Peter and Elyssa followed. Neither of them spoke and when Peter caught Elyssa's eye she shrugged. It occurred to Peter that they were behaving as if this girl was a potential buyer or a critic, and they did not want to disturb her while she took in the piece.

“Anything you want to tell me about?” Elyssa whispered.

“Um—later.”

For a few moments Peter forgot the girl was naked, so intense was her concentration on the sculpture.

“Excuse me,” Elyssa said finally, “but can I get you some clothes?”

The girl spun around, startled, as if she had forgotten about them. Abruptly, she bolted between them and ran outside. By the time Peter reached the door she was gone.

“Who was that?”

“I don't know. Earlier she was being chased by two of the locals.”

“You want to explain that?”

Peter related the events of the morning. He went to the wheelbarrow and brought the knife back. “I took this from one of them.”

“So you stopped them.”

“Well—yeah.”

She laughed, shaking her head. She indicated the knife. “What were they going to do with that?”

Peter studied the knife, turning it over. At first it had seemed military, but now he realized that it was different, possibly custom-made. There were no manufacturer's markings on it; the handle was very slightly curved so it fit easily in the hand to accommodate a slashing motion. It was at least eight centimeters wide at the shaft, the blue-tinted blade about twenty-five centimeters long. “I don't think I want to know.” He looked back toward the forest. “One of them said what he was chasing was ‘nothing human.'”

“Oh, that sounds delightfully misogynistic. So, what? You saved her from assault and she followed you home? And you have no idea who she is?”

“That pretty much sums it up.”

“And I thought your life would be dull without me. What are you going to do with that?”

He hefted the knife. “I thought I'd take it to the sheriff. Want to come?”

Elyssa looked surprised. “Sure.”

“I'll wash up and drive us into town. Buy you lunch?”

“I have to admit,” Elyssa said as they rolled down the county blacktop, “your work has gotten even better since you moved down here. But moving down here permanently? Pete, please. I'm a city girl.” She laughed, but Peter heard a desperate edge to it. “This place is barely on the map.”

“It's quiet.”

“Sure, until some of the local Neanderthals decide to chase a naked girl through our property.”

“Same thing could happen in Chicago.”

“Mmm.”

She had a good point, though it did nothing to cause him to reconsider. That they were both right on their own way was both annoying and frustrating.

“Most of the time here, though—”

She waited, watching him. Finally she sighed in exasperation. “I understand.”

Meaning, he knew, she understood that he could not explain it.

“Why you had to go and buy the place,” she said. “It's not like the owner—Higgins?—was pressuring you to do that. He seemed content with the lease arrangement.”

“We talked about that. He's getting old, wanted to make sure the property passed to someone who'd care for it.”

“He doesn't have any family?”

Peter's grip on the steering wheel tightened. This was old ground, already crossed too many times. He hated
fighting with Elyssa, but she did this when discouraged, retracing steps to see if there was a fork in the path she had overlooked. She wanted him back with her in Chicago, where she seemed to thrive. For him, it was suffocating, especially after his return from Iraq. She kept hoping whatever impulse had driven him out of Chicago, “to the back of beyond” as she called it, would fade and he would come home with her, back to the life they had before.

“I'm worried about the cost, Pete,” she said finally. That surprised him. She rarely ever spoke of money. “This isn't a cheap move.”

“But you like my new work.”

“Oh, yes! It's never been better, especially your abstracts. But we're going to have to sell a lot of them to make this pay off, and that's hard to do when the artist isn't around to talk to the buyers. That's one reason I came down, to talk to you about the new exhibit.”