Lamb (8 page)

He laughed. “Yes. That’s right. But outside on the street was even worse. Steel cars and concrete and noise and the girl leaned over the horse and she promised to get him home. You don’t belong here, she whispered to him. And neither do I. Are you awake?”

“Sort of.”

“She led him between the rows of black and blue cars and out of the city. They rested behind a gas station, slept on the flat, hard dirt glittering with bits of broken glass and shreds of gum wrappers and foil. By the time they reached Iowa, they were both sleepy and famished.”

“They were so tired.”

“Yes. They were.” He reached across the space between them and pinched her arm. She yelped. He was surprised by how much it quickened him to do it. “Stay awake,” he said. “We’re almost there. The sun was going down in Iowa. Everything looked so soft. Stems of tall weedy flowers bending this way and that, the grass was green and leaves on the bur oaks were green, all of it darkening, green to blue to black as the sun went down. Shadows of narrow tree trunks fell across the ground, and way, way off
the highway was a tiny house with square windows yellow in the growing dark. The girl slipped down off the horse’s soft damp back. Her yellow dress was dirty, her arms and cheeks sunburnt. The horse followed her through the high wet grass toward the house. She turned back to see that he was following, and he nuzzled her beneath the chin.”

“Hey.” The girl suddenly sat up a little. “What kind of messed-up story is this?”

“What? Messed up?” Lamb made a face like he’d been wounded and he held his hands over his heart. “Where would you get such an idea?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do. And out on the Old El Rancho Road there will be no TV. None.”

“I like TV.”

“No you don’t. You just think you do.”

“That’s not true.”

“Did you ever live in a house without one?”

“No.”

“Then what makes you think it wouldn’t be better?”

She was silent.

“Listen, Tommie. It’s a beautiful story, okay? It isn’t messed up at all. If you’re expecting it to be, I’ll just stop now. Maybe you don’t want to hear it.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good. Are you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to know what happens next?”

“Just tell it.”

“Our girl went up to the windows and looked into the dark kitchen. The horse helped her in over the sill. When she came out she was carrying a bag of soft white bread, and she and the horse crossed the field again, lumbering, crossed the highway, and settled beneath a maple tree all black and blue in the twilight. The girl leaned her body against the horse. He was warm. She opened the bag and one soft white pillow at a time fed herself, and then the horse, both of them chewing, happy because they’d escaped, but heavy and slow because they were so, so tired. The horse could hardly keep his beautiful red face up, and the girl could scarcely keep lifting the bread to his mouth. A breeze pulled the ends of her hair and all the trees turned into night trees. And there they slept, so soundly that the whole night passed in a single perfect moment.”

Tommie started out of sleep. “I still have both pillows.”

“I know.” He smiled. “You looked so good sleeping on them. You looked just like a sleepy freckled pig. I was watching you. I was watching your round belly rising under the blankets, and watching you hog all the pillows. You were snoring!”

“I wasn’t even asleep.”

“You were.”

“I’m sorry. Here.” She pushed one of the pillows at him, and the other. “Have both.”

“Uh-oh. She wanted to turn him into a pig too. But he wasn’t having any of that. Besides”—he pointed at the green curtains drawn across the little frame window—“it’ll be daylight soon. We got to get out and catch the morning. I’ll step outside while you get dressed.” He was up on his feet.

“Did we sleep?”

“What a question.”

“You slept with your boots on.”

“I guess I did.”

“What time is it?”

“Don’t you worry about the time. Don’t you worry about a thing, little miss piggy. I’ll watch the calendar for us both, okay? The Mondays and the Tuedays and the Wednesdays.” He looked at her bare arms and shoulders above the polyester edging on the wool blanket, then opened the door and stepped out into the dark.

Let’s say there were none of those truss towers of galvanized steel lining the highway this next day. No telephone poles. No wires. Say that Lamb’s truck
and the highway were the only relics of the actual world. The road was overcome with native grasses and aromatic flowers, with wild onion and pussytoes. Soft gaping mouths of beardtongue, and mountain lover, and buckbush and drowsy purple heads of virgin’s bower. Say it was like this that they crossed the Midwestern line beyond which the sky spreads itself open—suddenly boundless, suddenly an awful blue.

Tommie sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and Lamb glanced sideways thinking that if she were in fact to break away from the truck, somehow, he would let her go.

“What’re you thinking about over there?”

“Nothing.” Outside her window was the roofless shell of a pine board homestead. She had her shoulders hiked up, her little mouth open, a crease between her brows.

“Sort of beautiful the way it’s all destroyed.”

“I know.”

“You sound smarter every time you agree with me.” He winked, stopping the car on the shoulder. “We’re in Wyoming now. Were you wondering? You can always just ask and I’ll tell you exactly where we are.”

“Okay.”

“That out there.” He pointed to the little ruin of sloping, black-mouthed house. “That could have been the first homestead in the Wyoming Territory.
Maybe eighteen fifty. That little broken home could be Cheyenne. First mark on a fresh and hairy green plain.”

“It’s yellow.”

“You can imagine it green.”

She looked out the window.

“You want to go see?”

She shrugged.

“I know,” he said. “It’s farther than it looks and you’re tired.” He raised his voice a bit. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime journey back in time. But our girl was sleepy.”

“Okay. Let’s get out.”

He raised his fingertips to his ear.

“Yes!” she said. “Open the door!”

“That’s exactly how I want to hear it. I’m just your guide, right? This is your trip. This is your week. I’ll have this cabin for the rest of my life. I’ll have this highway. But this is the only time you’ll get to see it. So come on. Let me hear it: It’s my week, Gary.”

“It’s my week, Gary.”

“Good. I want you to be greedy about it.” He unlocked the doors.

They went over the gravel shoulder and down the irrigation ditch and up again onto hard dry ground. To the north, scores of slanted wooden snow fences set in the grass like empty easels. The wind was loud and the sagebrush shook like knotted
gray fists. As far east and as far west as the eye could see, wood posts and a three-wire fence. A blue plastic bag turned over itself in the grass.

“Oh,” she said. “We can’t.”

“Oh, you sweet little thing.” He lifted one of the wires between its barbs and held it open. “That’s just a fence.”

She stepped through and he followed.

“Ready?” he said, brushing his hands on the thighs of his blue jeans. “Set. Go!” He took off running, his black-and-silver head flashing in the dazzle. “Try to keep up, you lazy pillow pig!” She ran after him and he grinned back at her puffing and bobbing over the uneven ground, stopping her with an arm across her belly when she approached the house. The tops of her cheeks were pink behind her freckles, and her hair stuck in sweat to her temples.

“Careful,” he said. Rusted orange nails pointed up from the overturned boards.

Glassless windows, all the house wood gray. A rocking chair the color of dirt sat oddly intact and perfectly still on the wood-slab porch.

“Someone must have brought it out,” he said, looking at it. “You see any beer cans, you’ll know for sure.”

“Kids come here?”

“I bet some guy dragged a mattress out here in his old man’s truck and hauled out a bunch of flashlights
and cheap wine and paper cups and cigarettes, and brings out a different girl every Saturday night.”

“Gary!”

He put his hands up in the wind. “Hey, I’m just a guy telling you how it is. It’s better if you know. Consider yourself warned.”

“Sick.”

“Do you want to go inside and see?”

“No. It gives me a spooky feeling.”

“I know,” he said.

“Do you think they died here?”

“Who? The girlfriends?”

“No, dummy.” She punched him lightly in the arm and pulled down on her T-shirt, lifted by the wind like a thin yellow flag off her belly. “The people who lived here.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Indians. Snow. Fever. Smallpox. Any number of things. But there’s no graveyard, is there? Which makes me think they probably just moved on.”

“That’s not as fun to think about.”

“Don’t get melodramatic on me, Tom. We’ll never survive the week.”

She made a visor with her hand and looked across the empty grass and around behind the house to a single section of standing rail fence.

“That’s where they tie up the ghost horses at night,” he told her.

“Is this what your cabin is like?”

“I’ve told you what it’s like.”

“Will we have horses?”

“Look, Tom. I know I’m a handsome guy and all, but you’re not invited to stay that long.”

“I was just pretending.”

“Long as we’re both clear on that.” He turned over his wrist and read his watch. “Five days from now we’ll be driving back the other way, delivering you to your loving mother, and—”

“—none of this ever happened.” She rolled her eyes. “I know.”

He dropped his hand and gaped at her. “That’s not what I was going to say. Never happened! Tommie. Of course it will have happened. It’s happening now. Isn’t it?”

“Duh.”

“That’s right. And eventually—maybe not right away, but eventually—you’ll tell everyone about it. Right?”

She snorted. “Yeah, right. I’d be dead meat.”

“So you wait till you’re eighteen. Or twenty-six. Right now you’re just eleven.”

“Don’t remind me.”

He lifted her chin with his hand. “Eleven is the most perfect age to be a girl. And you’ll know it the minute you turn twelve.”

He took her arm and they circled the falling house, stepping carefully through the high grass, lifting their knees as though walking through deep snow.

They came to the ragged edge of dry weeds and he opened the fence and she stepped through.

The truck was straight ahead, tilted on the shoulder. He nodded at it. “Race you back?”

He beat her to the highway by twenty yards and stood at the truck with his hands on his thighs, watching her come as if she hadn’t already lost, her little white fists pumping high at the sides of her flat, narrow chest.

“That’s a sign of a real athlete,” he said when she reached him. “That’s what you call running through the line.”

She leaned on her knees, breathing hard. “It’s hard to run.”

“We’re higher up. Even though it looks flat here,” he said, “there’s less oxygen. It makes it harder for your body to maintain itself.”

“Like you can hardly run?”

“Like you can hardly run.”

He ran his sleeve across his forehead and leaned on his thighs, looking at her. “When you’re a mom you can tell your kids the story about passing through Cheyenne when it was a ghost town of rotted wood
and wind, a fox den taken hostage by lonely teenagers, and they’ll think you’re ancient and wise, and you know what?”

“What.”

“They’ll be right.”

That got him a big gap-toothed smile. He loved to see it.

“You ready?”

“Ready.”

“You awake now?”

“Yep.”

But in ten minutes and even with the windows down and the radio up she was asleep again, so Lamb pulled off the side of the road to wake her and stepped into the weeds to piss and back in the truck told her far to the north along the same line of longitude was a palace made of corn.

“I thought we already passed that.”

“You’re kind of a dreamy kid, aren’t you?”

He made up a story about barrel racing in the town of Gillette when he was a boy and he told her he was a great ballplayer, second base, and a track star.

“Hurdles,” he told her. “I won all the medals.”

“I bet you were one of the cool kids.” She had
her head leaned back against the long strap of the seat belt.

“Ever heard the term road weary?”

“No.”

“Well. That’s what you are. Or no. I’ll tell you what it is. The gods getting back at you for being such a pig last night. Stealing both pillows and keeping me up with your snoring.”

“I do not snore.”

“How do you know? Ever share a room with someone before?”

“No.”

“Well then.”

“Last night was like a thousand years ago.”

“Well we’ve entered mountain time. Happened in Nebraska.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s mysterious.”

They reached the next filling station by early afternoon, a mile north of the highway at the edge of a small town encroached upon in all directions by a shimmering flood of weeds. It was an old 76. The concrete foundation was tilted ten degrees, and once bright letters on a placard for soft-serve ice cream were drained of color. Inside he bought the
girl a coffee and told her she was grown up enough for a full cup. Told her that the dire circumstances of her weak brain and laziness required it. They both laughed and she filled the cup with sugar and half a dozen little plastic cups of vanilla creamer.

Lamb went into the men’s room to order a round-trip plane ticket from Chicago to Denver—for Linnie—and when he came outside he found the girl crying quietly beside a greasy trash can spotted with rust. Snot glistening on her upper lip. On the far side of the parking lot a woman was helping a tiny girl into a bright blue windbreaker. Lamb stood beside Tommie and together they watched the mother buckle the child into the backseat of a white minivan. In a moment they were gone, a speck disappearing up the frontage road and turning onto the eastbound highway.