Lamb (21 page)

“I know.”

“Do you forgive me?”

“I wanted to stay.”

“It wasn’t my idea?”

“It was our idea.”

“Equal partners?”

“Equal partners.”

“Good. Sweetheart, listen. She’ll be gone within the hour. You stay put and I’ll get dressed.”

When Lamb was loading up Linnie’s rental, checking the air pressure in the tires and the oil for her, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, she went into the shop, rooted around in the cooler for a snack for the road, put a Little Debbie cake and a can of pineapple juice into her purse, walked over to the bunk room door, stood before it. Just a moment. Then she walked over to the woodstove and rubbed her hands before rejoining Lamb on the
driveway, where she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind and kissed his neck.

“Let’s move out here to live.”

“How about we try a single week in the middle of winter and see how much you still like it?” He turned around to face her.

“I can’t wait to see you in Chicago.”

“You tell Wilson I’m doing good by you.”

“You think he knows?”

“You’re just a dumb kid sometimes.” He grinned, and they loaded her up. “The whole reason I invited you out here was so I’d be able to keep my job.” She started the engine and rolled down the window.

“I’ll call you from the airport and leave you messages.”

“I love your messages.”

“I might have to whisper them, so turn up the volume on your phone.”

He turned a dial near the side of his head. “All my ears are on.”

“Mine too.”

“Kiss me.”

“See you in six days.”

“Six days. Put your seat belt on.”

The girl was savage inside the bunk room.

“And she’ll tell, and you’ll go to jail, and everyone will know, and I’ll get in so much trouble.”

“Listen, listen. Tommie. Please.”

“You didn’t keep us secret.”

“Tommie,” he raised his voice. “Now I don’t want to yell but you’re not listening to me. I know Linnie better than you do, right? Please take your hands from your face.”

“She’s going to tell.”

“Please take your hands from your face, Tommie, I can’t understand you.”

And she said something, and something, something, and took her hands from her face.

“Look, Tommie, if she thought anything she would have told me. She would have probably been very upset. But I just sent her back into the world with plans to see her the day after I drop you at your mother’s.”

“You did?”

“I did. She went off smiling to the airport. She loves me.”

“Oh.”

“Do you believe me?”

“If you don’t like her, why are you going to see her?”

“For us, Tom. For you and me. To keep us safe.”

“Oh.”

“Sometimes you just know a person, Tom. Linnie isn’t strong like us. She doesn’t always see the kinds of things we see. Do you understand? You want a little taste of whiskey from my mouth? Here. Come on. Let me scoop you up and carry you to the couch. We’ll hang out and catch up. You can tell me all the dreams you had while I was busy.”

“Okay.”

“This is the beginning of the part where we take you back home,” he said, kicking the shop door open with his boot and carrying the girl outside and into the cabin. “In light of all the promises we made to keep each other safe. The part where we take you back to Lombard and your mother who loves you, and I’ll come back here, and if Linnie ever says anything, or realizes she saw you, there’ll be no girl out here, right? No one for anybody to find. And you’ll be home safe.” He laid her down on the couch and put a pillow beneath her head.

“But they’ll ask me where I was.”

Lamb gave the girl a look of alarm. “But you won’t tell them?”

She shook her head.

He made like he was wiping sweat from his forehead. “I thought for a minute you’d just been setting me up this whole time.”

They set up a dinner camp on the river and the girl opened two cans of sliced potatoes and a can of corned beef hash. It hissed and snapped in the hot metal pan, and Lamb watched the girl turn it until all the pan was greased.

“Watch the heat,” he said.

“I am.”

“Not too high.”

“I know.”

“Here. Move it here.”

“I can do it.”

They sat hip to hip in the dirt, the scrappy river trees hunching over them.

“You’re turning into a fine little camping woman.”

“Thanks.”

“Ready for eggs?” He handed them to her, one at a time. “Don’t break those yolks.”

“I won’t.”

He sat very still to record the moment in his blood, to fill up his lungs, drink up the cold air and the smell of water and melting snow. Beside him the lines of her hands and skinny arms moving skillfully in the twilight.

“Those are our last eggs.”

“I know.”

“Next time,” he said, “it’ll be potatoes, fried eggs, and fresh trout.”

“When will that be?”

“Your eighteenth birthday.”

“Deal.”

“But maybe you won’t want to leave your life to come and see me. I’ll be really, really old. What if I’m dying in a small, stale hospital room all alone?”

“I’ll sneak you out.”

They ate with forks, huffing the eggs and hash around in their mouths and lifting their chins and laughing at each other. Balancing the hash and a bit of yellow-soaked egg in each bite. Competing between them for the perfect forkful. By the time they’d finished their hands were sticky and the mess kits gritty with dirt and blackened by fire. The girl had her legs and feet tucked beneath her in the grass. He patted her little belly.

“All those boys are going to be crowding you when you get back and they see how you’ve changed.” He put the tin plates and cups inside the metal pan and fitted all the mess kit together and tightened the red canvas strap. The sky was luminous behind his head. “I don’t think I could stand seeing you in Chicago again, Tom. You’ll lose interest in your old friend and I couldn’t bear that. I don’t think I could stand even being in the same city as you. If you know what I mean.”

Tommie lay back and looked up at cold white stars caught up in the tree branches, corn-colored leaves caught up in her hair, her white teeth blue in the new dark, while he set everything in his pack and carried river water in his hands to the fire to put it out. When they were back at the cabin he took a pen and piece of paper from the glove compartment of the truck and leaned over the hood. She watched him write. “Forget I’m doing this, okay?” Then he walked her, holding her hand, down among the rotted fence posts. “Watch your feet. We’ll just be a minute.” He took her hand and put it on the jagged splintered top of a fence post as if she were blind. “Feel that? Memorize that. It’s the fourteenth one from the house. Fourteenth fence post on the fourteenth day. Can you remember that?”

“Why?”

“I’m going to leave this fence post up, right? No matter how rotted it gets. No matter how much home improvement happens around it. The fourteenth fencepost will always stand here for you.” He drove the tiny folded piece of paper deep into the split wood of the post. “Turn around,” he said. “Turn around and look at our little house. And the waving grass, and the silver moon. You see? It’s ours, right?” He put his finger beneath her chin and turned her head up to his. “I will it to you, Tommie. It’s yours. It is maybe more yours than it was ever
mine. You’ll come back here after I’m gone, won’t you? And move right in. I’ll have written you letters. I’ll write you half a dozen letters every day for the rest of my life, and I’ll hide them everywhere. In the mugs and in old socks. You’ll have to go through everything and piece them all together in a line. You can hang each one with a clothespin out in the sun and they’ll tell the story of my love for you. If you have a husband, you’ll have to leave him behind until you’ve sorted through it all, right? All these messages from me. Messages from the dead.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Ssh. Feel that?” He pressed his thumb between her breasts. “That pressure right there? That’s the world calling you.” He picked her up like a child, up on his hip, and carried her to the bottom bunk. She breathed into the cloth of his shirt. He knew she was picturing his love notes out on a clothesline in the bright wind. He knew she was picturing him dead.

It’s the kind of thing a guy like David Lamb might tell himself again and again, how she’d lifted her head, the little crinkles and puckers in her chin and neck as she looked down at him and that absolutely
terrified and wide-open face, white in the dark, and shadows from the oil lamp shrinking and stretching like live arms. And him telling her God, God, you’re sweet, you have freckles everywhere. And how he’d choked up telling her he was so honored to see so many of them, and were they his? Could they say they were his? Such an expensive gift. So dear. And listen to me: he knew it.

Watching her load up the truck the next morning in her miniature parka, he saw her in her purple tube top, pushed around by those stupid girls. All her body and inner world had come awake by his hand. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were bright pink in the cold. She sniffled and ran her sleeve above her lip.

“Emily Tom. Before we go. Will you lie with me in the deer beds by the water?”

“Okay.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What.”

“Will you …” He looked down at his hands, and into her face, and down again. “Will you wear your nightgown?”

She looked at her blue jeans and jacket. “You’ll have to keep me warm.”

“I will.”

Eventually our old guy would look to her like a fluke, a mistake, a weird time she survived when she
was eleven. In his memory she would become more beautiful, more dear. In hers, he’d be a monster.

All of eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska were hammered by ice and driving wind. The girl shivered in the passenger seat, her lips white, with Lamb sweating beside her, a giant bright orange bottle of cough medicine between them and Styrofoam cups of hot tea from gas stations. Every half hour or so Lamb reached sideways to touch her face and she’d open her eyes and try to smile.

“You look awful,” she’d say.

“You look worse.”

In Grand Island he reached into the back and retrieved the filthy Cubs hat and put it on her head. They stopped for egg drop soup in Omaha and slept twelve hours in a Holiday Inn with the TV on where they were sick and feverish and both their bodies aching. Back in the truck he fed her Nyquil and ginger ale and she slept or spoke brokenly and deliriously until Council Bluffs. By the time they made Des Moines they were both coming out of the fog of medicine and sore throats and splitting temples. Lamb drove them back to the little green motel now bleak with dark wet leaves.

“Did you like me when we stayed here the first time? I think you did.”

“I think I did,” she said.

“How did you know?”

“Just knew.”

“Do you still, Tom?”

“Yes.”

“Even though I’m a liar and a thief?”

She reached out and punched him forcelessly in the shoulder.

“Boy,” he said, “you were a lot stronger on the way out. We need to get you some spinach.”

She grinned.

“Your body has changed since September,” he said. “That part is true.”

“I know.”

He whispered. “Did I change it?”

She whispered back. “I think it was going to happen anyway.”

His eyes filled with tears, the world went all smeary on the other side of the windshield. “You know just what to say.” And suddenly he began sobbing. Really crying, really huffing tears. His whole chest seizing and his face twisted like a little boy’s. What would be left him when she was gone: a hole that she’d once filled with these consoling words. His doubt and his demons, the ones he’d taught her to keep at bay, they’d get him by the throat. And he knew it.

“Promise me something, dear,” he said. Say she’d gotten used to these bursts of crying—say he’d had a few of them. Say even that he’d been having them for a while, in the afternoons and a little bit in the mornings by the fire. “If you discover one day that you hate me.”

“I won’t.”

“Please don’t say that. You might. I have to say this, okay.”

She waited. His voice was scratchy and high.

“If you discover you hate me, that you’re angry with me, that I’ve ruined your life. When I’m ninety. Anytime.” He stopped. She nodded for him to go on. She’d become such a little woman. “You’ll come tell me, won’t you? You’ll buy a pair of steel-toed boots and come and find me all alone and dried up and sick in a nursing home and kick my fucking teeth in. Or whisper to me on my deathbed that I was d—”

“Stop it!” Now she was crying.

“Oh,” he said and wiped his nose with his sleeve then hers and turned her crying face to his. “It’s not true,” he said. “I’m sorry. Nothing I said was true. I’ve had too much medicine. Too much driving.” He took her hands and held them to his chest, to his neck, then his mouth. “Please forget everything I just said. Please promise me you will forget it. Tell me you promise, okay?”

“I promise.”

It was the fever that’d cracked him open. Lamb had wanted to return her to her mother shipshape, twelve on a ten scale. The plan had been to bring her home fast, three days on the road and no time for this kind of slippage, but there it was. Everything was off. He felt ash filling up his chest and throat from the inside, blocking his mouth and thickening his heart and filling up his head, he hoped, blocking it out like the heavy gray ceiling of winter settling in over the plains, so that he would not be able to see into it. Not after this day. Not after this.

By the time they made Rockford he could see they needed to hold out there a day, maybe two days. Until she got well, until he was ready. He pulled into the registration parking space at a Red Roof off of I-90, just across the street from a shopping outlet. He held the steering wheel with both hands and stared hard through the windshield. “Do you want to know what it is? It’s that I can’t let you go.” The girl did not speak. “Does that make you sorry? Like some part of you is anxious to get home?”