Lime Creek (10 page)

He sits on the bed and turns off the lamp and in the close darkness the flames in the grate seem bluer and almost golden as they play on his face and rise up the wall like the ghostly silhouettes of leaves flowing upward and then across the low ceiling too. He undresses slowly but his whole torso from just below his chest to his hips is bound in stiff white adhesive that feels under his hands as unsupple and precarious as an eggshell. When he finally turns to lie down, the shocking point of the blade that’s under the taping seems to jab even deeper into him, and so exasperated he places the pillows behind him and gradually inches lower and lower until he is almost all the way onto his back. He didn’t know when he fell asleep but Whitney hadn’t returned. He dreamt that for some reason he needed to move and was instantly struck awake as if a spear had wounded him in the side and then been withdrawn lessening and lessening until he could begin to breathe again.

Somehow he had come to be on the side that wasn’t hurt with a pillow propped under him. The heater had been turned down so the peaks of the flames were diminished along with the light that they produced although the phantom leaves still climbed slowly up the wall. And as if he were still dreaming but with his eyes open he sees her hand on the blanket and then feels her
arm under where his head lies with her face against his shoulder and her bare legs warm and wrapped around his. She didn’t say anything at all while he slowly tried to turn himself, but it was like moving something awkward and unwieldy because he had to constantly mind the axis of the knife-point that was fixed inside him so as not to disturb its precious balance.

Finally he had come far enough so he could see her eyes watching him, with his hand against her stomach under the grey team t-shirt that was all she wore. He didn’t say anything either and they lay like that with their mouths together. Quickening. And then his hand rose to her breasts so sharp and hard as to wound the soft flesh of his palm by the very magnitude of their delicacy, their hard risen nipples almost seeming to catch in his skin. And the shadowy leaves still rushing upward but pounding and pounding as if some heartlike furnace now drove them. Up. He lay against her risen against the flesh of her thigh a blind wishing yearning thing vulnerable and unprotected and for her to take or turn away.

And then when she would let him be or make him go with her bent knee upraised and inward leaning and steadfast enough in its closed posture so she needn’t say or do anything else to stay him, something all the way down in the well of the muscle or more truly in the
hunger of the soul something seemed to release and let go and so fearful and guarded no more and all yeasaying and without even a whisper all of her said come inside me where it is safe and warm come inside me where it is warm and safe inside me, and so scalding melting fusing he was all at once lost to the cold and lost to the dark and lost to the blade of pain the fear of grief, the i-am that stands alone and apart suddenly amazed become we-two we-too and then the be-in-me.

Because however the psyche would hide behind its almost unbearable fragility, the soul is like a flower opening inviting, the soul is like a sun freeing the tightly closed bud to finally blossom. And so the warmth would ultimately best the cold not in duration perhaps for only the cold is everlasting, but for having been. Because love however temporal however fleeting would scar forever the iron cosmos of ice and darkness and make it forever after vulnerable and so forever after wary too because however improbable however long it takes it still could come again. The light that for having been still is. The absence growing even more powerful than the presence. And so out of the cold the chance that the warmth could come again. And love. And so maybe even love.

He watched her face until she opened her eyes watching him while she touched the bright hard taping
that was wound about him as if it was a strange exotic skin that she sought to know. He rested his weight on his elbows and knees but with the core of him still up against her still yearning and for her to do with what she wished. As insistent and relentless as youth waiting and waiting and as certain as youth is too, unfolding evolving and so sloughing off childhood forever like that first skin one was born and then grew in until writhing free at last one finds oneself already clothed in a new skin, still marked with all those early scars and imperfections of course, but after that first one like a shell that had become too confining has already been cast aside. And even though the child lives on aged and maybe even hidden away all the way into death, one’s childhood is gone. Irretrievably.

Does it hurt? she whispered. He shook his head watching her eyes. Waiting. And then her lips without meaning to and without warning suddenly parted and surprising even herself she laughed outright joyous, and clapping her hand over her mouth making him laugh too. But even before he could make a sound the dagger-blade under his bandaging made his eyes close and his lips part too but on clenched teeth that failed to contain his breath.

Don’t, she cried. Please. With her fingers straining against the walls of his forearms as if she would try to hold the thing back that tore at him. Until finally his
hands opened that had clutched both her shoulders with such a ferocity that it almost frightened her, his having grasped her as an animal might importuning only a release from its pain. And then it was gone, that pain. And as if her hands had a will of their own they drew him down again carefully drawing against the hard unfeeling adhesive that covered him. Don’t, she sobbed into his chest. Please. And then drawing him down even further he was inside her once again. He was safe inside her once again. And where she still held him even as they slept.

Something seemed to be scratching at the wall where the heater was and where the leaves still slowly rose up, as if something with metal claws was trying to find a way to get in from the outside. Something metallic scraping against a like surface metal on metal with quick repetitive strokes. And then whatever it was it thudded against that same wall which was opposite the bed but still only a few feet away, as if if the sharp determined scraping wouldn’t work then perhaps a more blunt assault would. Then the scratching resumed until it thudded against the wall once again. And then it was gone. But Luke had already fallen asleep again and so his dreaming mind had already made what had disturbed it a new part of his dream.

He was still asleep when she moved out from under
where he lay, careful not to wake him. She covered him anew with the blankets and then increased the setting on the heater so the flames grew brighter and gave off more warmth. And then she dressed. When she went outside she pulled the bottom of her wool cap into the high collar of her coat and then stepped around to where she thought she’d heard something scraping at the outer wall and then a heavy thud which she remembered is what had woken her, but she couldn’t see anything in the dark and the blowing snow swirled in her face so she had to bow her head. A single stroke from a tiny bell suddenly sounded once and then again, much too delicate a thing quavering and then silenced in the wind. She looked up to find its source but quickly had to look down again to shield her eyes.

There was a closed service-station across the road from the motel office with a great white disk with a dark star in its center on top of a tall stanchion, and in the midst of the storm it seemed a distant moonlike thing reflecting its pale light in all the ambient and nearly cohered snowfall. They had heard the bell before and Luke had finally decided that it was probably the air hose that hung against the outside wall, and that it must have blown off its holder. And so when the wind blew against it with enough force and at just the right angle the indicator
bell that tolled the pounds-per-inch of forced air would ring. Which it did once again.

There were several big prints in the drifted snow and as she went back along the line of ragged dark shapes that were other cabins, she tried to walk in what must have been someone’s nearly filled boot-holes but she also had to step between them so whoever made them took one step for every two of hers. But then they crossed over to the opposite line of cabins before she came to the one where she stayed. She heard the bell again muted and then crystal-clear and then suddenly cut off in the roar of the wind as she closed the door behind her. Her roommate lay in exactly the same position as when she had left, with her hands still clasped before her face as if she were trying to hide from something while she slept. The little travel-clock on the nightstand read five minutes past five. And nothing was the same. And yet everything was.

When Luke opened his eyes it was early in the morning. And she was gone. By the time Whitney returned, Luke was up and dressed and sitting in the chair reading. Whitney had a bag of breakfast food for both of them, and they were supposed to be back on the bus in a little more than an hour. The snow had stopped falling awhile
ago and the low sky is as white as all the rest of the earth and a great stillness envelops everything, as if the storm had worn itself out with the night and now morning waited breathlessly to see what would follow.

The cold feels good to him after the closeness of the cabin as Luke waits outside for Whitney to collect their belongings and repack their travelbags. And as he stands there marveling at the world and feeling at the same time as frail as a wounded bird under his parka, the touch of her that’s almost unbearable confined so to his thinking mind makes him remember almost forgetting where each of them ended in the dark and the other one began. And all of it mixed up with her hands and her lips and her hair and those phantom leaves flowing endlessly upward that he could still see if but only inside him.

And then thankfully he remarks to himself a big hole in the snow, a large bootprint on the other side of the door. And then he sees two smaller ones as narrow as a deer’s going off in the opposite direction. And then another of those larger ones along the side wall where the snow is all stomped down. And up above just the outlet to the vent from the gas space-heater inside, a little metal plate set high up in the wall with a small round orifice. And so he fails to see the shiny new scars inside its collar which have been recently scored by a knife-blade.

Whitney doesn’t ask him about anything except how he’s feeling, but on the bus later as they’re flying along the highway and homeward bound at last, Luke says that he heard something strange in the middle of the night like maybe something metal scraping against something else that was metal too. And then whatever it was it seemed to thud against the wall until it must have gone away or else he just went back to sleep again. Or both. And then this morning there’re all these bootprints in the snow next to that same wall. Big ones.

Whitney looks up from his reading with some interest and then looks down again without saying anything. They both have schoolwork to do and they’re both quiet until finally Luke shuts his book on his knees and closes his eyes. Moments pass in the constant humming of the wheels and then Whitney turns to him and says, You remember that old man in East Lewiston? In the paper? When they found him in his trailer? Luke opens his eyes and halfway turns his head and says, What? And Whitney says, In that big storm. When they found him they said the snow had filled in the opening to the outside vent for his space-heater was how he died. The exhaust had gotten all caked over with snow they said, and he just never woke up. He never even knew it. He just never woke up. And Luke says, Yeah I remember that.

Well, that heater in our cabin it just reminded me, Whitney says. I’s sleeping on the floor in Percy and Lewis’s cabin and I musta dreamed about it or somethin. And Luke is looking at him. It musta woke me up. What? Luke says. That dream. And it kept bothering me so I couldn’t go back to sleep. Until finally I just had to get up. And when I come back her bootprints that remind me of a doe’s somehow that go up to the door that I saw before when they were fresh are near filled in, but there aren’t any new ones going the other way and so I figure she’s still there. Which made me kinda glad, I have to say. And Whitney gives him that big Whitney-smile of his that never fails to make Luke feel good, even when it just comes to his mind sometimes.

Anyway, I got my knife out. The ones Lonny gave us when we were little? Luke says. And Whitney nods his head. I got mine too, Luke says. Anyway, I know it’s crazy, Whitney says. I mean the odds of something like that happening again are probably a million to one. But I keep thinking, what if? What if? It was still snowing real good and I could just reach that little hole up in the wall, that little orifice from the heater, when I get all the way up on my toes. I couldn’t see up that high but I could still get the blade of my pocketknife into it.

Anyway, my foot went out from under me when I
fell into the wall with my shoulder, but then I got my knife up there again just to be sure. Until I slipped again, which was when I give that wall another good shot just for good measure. And by then the side of my face that catches the wind makes me feel like I’m a damn snowman or somethin because my ear’s all filled up with snow too. And I remember thinking, just like that little hole in the wall coulda been.

Whitney twists around to get his bandanna out of his back pocket and blows his nose. With gusto. Neither of them says anything. Luke looks out the window and watches the highway go by as Whitney resumes his reading. Luke rubs his eye and then shakes his head and mumbles something to himself but just barely out loud. And Whitney looks up and turns and says, What? Luke shakes his head again and says, Nothing. And then he turns and looks down at Whitney’s open book that rests on his knees and says, I just said “Brothers.” Whitney nods and then as a little smile starts he says, Right to the end. And then he says it too, Brothers. And turns the page. And Luke nods to himself and goes back to looking out the window.

And the snow that had begun again earlier has finally stopped altogether and he can see where the sun which is still hidden behind the overcast is almost getting
ready to break through. But before it does his eyes close again and this time his chin drops on his chest and his shoulder slumps into the sidewall. Whitney turns and smiles again and then goes back to his reading.