Red Lightning (22 page)
Authors: Laura Pritchett
The highway has me thinking. A new theory sweeps into my mind as
we pull off the pavement and park the cars and trucks at the farmhouse, and the simplicity of it makes me laugh out loud, randomly, startling everyone as we gather and hunch together in the chill of a clouded day. My theory is simply this: Here, at my mother's funeral, at the moment we are honoring her departure from her body, I understand something about bodies in general. That a good-feeling body clarifies the brain in wondrous and elemental ways. Who knew? That one was so dependent upon the other?
Oh!
I keep thinking over and over.
Of course! This is what it feels like to be in a body that doesn't hurt, this is what it feels like to have the brain clear, of course!
Medicines and rest have taken away the blur and roars and stings that lived in my tooth, in my crotch, in my stomach, in my bones. The nerves have calmed. Weight has lifted. Such a strange, radiant surprise. There is more sweeping that needs to be done in my body, yes, more to be released or attended to, but it keeps surprising me. I forgot what it feels like to be in a body that has been cleaned. For too long, I have lived in a cluttered, messy home, full of too many pangs and aches.
When I laugh, everyone turns to me: Libby, Amber, Ed, Charlene from the grocery, a few of the ranchers from nearby, and Miguel, who had overlooked the fact that Libby had whispered to him about the others involved, people who had disappeared into the night. Who knows what the law will discover, but our story is a solid one, the truth except for the existence of Alejandra and Lupe and the others. The wind has taken away their footprints, the stories have taken away their presence. Funny, how so much can remain invisible.
As Libby and I walk away from the others for this last final gesture, out into the pasture with the urn, I wonder if Planet Earth ever feels the same as my body does. Lousy, but then, at some moments, a little clearer and calmer. For example, how the winds brought in a snowstorm that hit in the mountains that very night, and the wildfire is now contained. Not out, but contained, and with new snowstorms on the way. I wonder if the earth feels how, for at least a while, some elemental order has been established.
Perhaps the people of the mountains are feeling better, too. It's true there have been great sorrows: The remains of the homeowner have been found. She had received a reverse 911 call but had refused to leave. The body of Oscar will be returned to his family in Mexico. A small group of people near Alamosa have made new signs,
No más cruces en la frontera
, to acknowledge and mark the problem, to say,
We notice
. Ranchers are in the process of finding their animals, people are starting the process of rebuilding their homes. The grief is alive and burbling, I am sure, but at least things have calmed enough to allow
for
the grief.
Libby and I walk over sage and grass and cottonwood leaves that are dusted in a light small-flaked snow. As soon as we're out of earshot, I say, “Libby, I'm sorry. Thank you for not abandoning me completely.”
Libby releases a strange sad laugh and keeps her eyes on the blue urn she is carrying. “Well, Tess. It's gonna take a while. You nearly
got my daughter killed. Let's just get through this funeral. Let's just get through today. We can at least do this together.”
I watch shoes, mine red, hers white, step over sage, cactus, yucca. “Well, there's one thing I know how to say: I love you. And I ask to be forgiven. I know such a thing won't come now, or easily, or maybe ever, but I still need to ask. I never thought Lobo would comeâ”
“I know.” Her voice has the edge of bitterness in its quiet murmur.
“I'm going to try harder. If it's any consolation.”
Ringo has darted from the group behind us and is now circling our legs, tail wagging. He trots ahead, his pads leaving sweet marks on the frost. He looks back, grows impatient, and comes back for us.
Libby holds Kay's urn up a little, as if raising it for a toast. “Remember that time when we jumped off a tractor and landed on some old metal? And we both had deep cuts on our legs? Blood all over the place. We tried to hide it, to rub it off with our socks, but it kept going. We needed stitches. So finally we ran back to the house, to Kay, and we were so scared. She was standing on the porch, smoking a cigarette, and even though I was the older one, you approached her first and said, âYou can get mad at us later, but help us now.'”
I laugh quietly. “That's kind of how I felt, coming back here,” I say after a pause. “Get mad later, but help me first. Must be the call of those in true distress.” Then I nudge her gently with my elbow and nod to the red thrust of a rock outcrop. “Is here where she wanted?” Here, near a small creek, a cluster of cottonwoods gather, and the last yellowed leaves flutter like a pirate flag on an old ship.
“Yes, here.” Libby looks at me; we both nod. “Ready?”
“Hang on a second.” I stand and do a slowmotion spin to look at the pasturelands and cluster of outbuildings and the earth around me and then settle on looking west. There is the blur of mountains, now dusted in white and hard to distinguish from the white sky. Up above them, I know, are stars, even though they are obscured by light,
and above them, the universe, spiraling in a galaxy full of spirals and sequences, of lost and found blooms of red stars and possibility.
I tap my chestbone. Inside is something just as vast. Inside is a galaxy, and it accounts for the emotions that make a mother scream, that make a child cry, the yearning for connection, the rise of lust, the ache of lonely, and, yes, the constant-burn energy of whatever it is that heals, whatever it is that makes us laugh in joy.
I nod to Libby, and we both put our hands on the urn. When we fling the ashes up and away from us, a gust of wind picks up the ash and takes it right back into our faces. I gasp, duck. The grit slaps me across my cheek, flies into my eyes. I stand there stunned: Kay's bone dust in my mouth, in my eyes, in my nostrils, and I circle around, pawing at my face and tongue. Ringo runs over to me, bounding around my legs in my own confusion, jumps up hard enough to claw me through my jeans, and then I am doubled over with the pain of that. I rub my face, my scalp, my hair. But then I look over at Libby, and she is bent over, her body heaving, so I stumble over to her and pull her to me to help. That's when I see she is laughing.
“That's so Kay,” she's gasping. “That's so Kay.”
I blink, and we stand there, holding each other and rocking back and forth, me muttering
Fuck
, and her laughing, and the both of us spitting dust from our mouths. Our faces are streaked with whitegray, her eyelashes especially. We back up, eventually, and brush off each other's shoulders and hair. She tilts her head at me, holds her palm to my face. “Tess, this will be hard to work through. It's not going to be easy. Amber can't turn out like you. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“You need to help her. Don't go running off on me now. You need to stay and be a warm presence, a steady influence, a good person. If you leave, I want you to know, you'd no longer have a home here. You'd no longer be welcome.”
I hold her hand that is holding my cheek, look her in the eye. “Yes. I feel that too. I got my feet pointed in the damn right direction, and that involves staying put.”
Then we hold hands and look back at the others. We pause for a moment to watch the rest of Kay blow off of us and out of the urn and off the sage and grass at our feet, mixing into the white dust of the frost. The larger bits settle in among the dirt and rocks, a beetle scuttles away, a cottonwood leaf drips from a tree. The temperature is just rising enough that the frost is starting to bead into moisture. The ancient impatience of water, right next to the ancient impatience of the human heart.
Alejandra pulls up the sleeves of her yellow fleece jacket so that she
can show me her wrists. They're rubbed raw, bruised, in places welted and in other places scratched like my cheek. I wince, run my finger alongside the wounds. “And inside? Your heart?”
We're sitting under the same cottonwood outside the old Earthship, settling ourselves down among the roots. The clouds have rambled on, and the sun's afternoon gold is rolling out across the land. I look at the curve of our knees, our shoes on the yellow leaves. Her moccasins and my red tennis shoes make me think of all the traveling we have done.
She leans her head against my shoulder, holds my hand. “That will take some time. I miss Oscar.”
“Yes.” My voice feels as worn and soft as a wasp nest. “I'm so sorry.”
“We were going to make a home together. I'm tired of looking for a home.”
“Well, there's here. There's me.”
She laces her fingers with mine. “Yes, perhaps. For a while.” Then she adds, “I can't stop thinking of the fire. I believe I'll feel guilty for the rest of my life.”
I bring her fingers to my mouth and kiss her knuckles. “We need to fix this. This running back and forth, these countries that make a person do such a thing. There needs to be a better way.”
We both nod, quiet in the thoughts of our small selves within this large canvas. Finally, I sigh. “Will you be okay? Amber and I are going into Lamar for therapy. Together and separately. It will be important. I worry that she'll become hard, like me, and so will you.”
She looks up at me, smiles. “We have Libby's trained hand, Ed's wisdom, your streetsmarts. We were going to drive off, you know. Go to Minnesota or Montana or who knows! Just go and go. But then we realized, I think, that no one would know. We were
still
a secret. Even after all this. And driving that van might be more dangerous than sticking close. I think you taught us that, once. How sometimes the safest place to be is right near the danger.”
I gaze off across the land. Amber's 4-H cows have wandered from the pasture near the house and into this one, and one is close up, knees folded under hulking body. She stops chewing her cud long enough to reach her tongue up and lick out her nose. “They're investigating, of course. But we are all on one page on how the story goes, and it does not involve you. The truth except for the part that involves all of you.” I hold her hand. “You could stay, you know. Help with Kay's house. Because, you know, Kay wanted to use the house and acreage for something good. Perhaps it can become another secret safe house, for example. For the lost and found among us. It's perfect. So remote.”
We talk of the future, then. They plan on staying, she tells me, for at least a while. But given that every human wants to do something of value, and that simply sitting and waiting and hiding will never be enough, their departure might come soon. “Perhaps
mi madre
will stay and raise chickens and help with the bees. But the rest of us. I think we want to move on into our lives. Kay's will be a good place for all the
broken things that need to heal. But we'll see. Something else is calling to me. I need to listen. I just don't know what I'm hearing quite yet.”
My lips open, and I want to say something to her. Something I have always wanted to say but could not find or invent the right words. Something about the vacuum of a realization that fell into my heart the moment I saw her. Something about how if we listen harder, stare harder, focus harder, use our imaginations harder, the people at the other end of our sight, well, they morph from blurs on the horizon, something barely discernible at a distance, and become very clear, very detailed. How all of us, each of us, are waving our arms, trying to attract attention. Our hands are cupped around our mouths in a whistle. Our faces are red from the effort. We are wanting to tell our story, be specific, to share a language. We only need someone to see and to listen and to feel, and our shapes take form.
I pull her toward me and finger her black hair, twisting it and then letting it spiral out, and then, as she used to say as a child, repeatifying it. She curls against me and naps, and the earth beneath us seems solid and firm and unchanging. The land is enough to hold us. All the land, it seems, is here to hold us.
Slade's hospital room smells like lemon and sage, and he's in the
wheelchair with a dufflebag on his lap and a nurse holding up medicine bottles, one by one, and explaining. Underneath his flannel shirt are broken ribs and a gunshot wound that turned out to be a bad scrape and tissue damage. The wound looks like a crack in the dirt, the lines on a map, and as I gingerly touched the area yesterday, I thought,
Yet another example of how so much depends on such a small fraction of a moment
.
I lean against the wall and watch him while he signs papers and gets instructions. He runs his hand along the edge of his beard every time he looks overwhelmed or confused. He wants out, the big baby. Terrified he'll get a staph infection there, having heard about Kay's trauma. Terrified because he's never been good at being in closed spaces and small rooms.
He couldn't believe it, he told me when I first visited him, he just couldn't believe it when Lobo showed up with Lupe and Alejandra and the others. He was fishing at the dam, having a beer and sitting in a lawn chair, when all of a sudden he got clocked over the head with
a rock. While he was falling, in that fraction of a moment, he looked up and saw Lobo, and Lobo said, “I put a sticker GPS locator on your truck, you fool. I'd never trust you. You're too good to be trusted,” and Slade thought,
I need to prepare to die
.
