Two-Gun & Sun (15 page)

Soon, the corrugated tin buildings were behind me. The outer road that would take me to the other side of the mountain rippled and curled like the ruffles on Meena's blouses. I saw no creature whatsoever, human or animal, just a brightness ahead, as though I were heading into a golden sand storm. I braked as I rounded a curve.

The sun burst like a red ball over the lip of land, flooding the path before me, the grass, the hills with molten light. A forest fire sunset. Blood-red sky shot with the streaks of charcoal. Was there news in that? I closed my eyes, felt its heat.

And then I burst into tears. Jesus.

It was just as well the figure had disappeared and I was alone. I didn't want anyone to see me like this. I wiped at my eyes with a sleeve and set the bicycle against a gnarled tree. Not a leaf on the branches, not a blade of green grass on the ground despite the benefit of sunlight. A parched flatland sprawling to the horizon, the one I had viewed from the top of Black Mountain. I groped around inside the basket until my hand closed around my silver cigarette case and then the matching flask. I pulled them out, one after the other. Then I sat on the ground, dress and all.

Lying back, smoking my cigarette, inhaling, exhaling, clouds rose to meet clouds. In no time a tickle teased my throat and I was bent double, coughing, again. I flicked the half-spent butt into the grey ground, unscrewed the flask. One sip. That helped. And another. I wiped my mouth with my tacked hem, dropped the flask and case into the basket, climbed back onto the bicycle and began pedalling in the direction of my shop.

A smell worse than fish wafted up and over the road. I couldn't place it, and pumped away from it, hurrying home, and then, intrigued, I braked slowly and swung the bike around. The wind had shifted. I stopped and let the handle bars nudge my hips while I scanned the horizon.

Right there.

A clump of something between two hills, obscured by a blot of dead trees. I righted the bike and rolled forward, small stones popping up around the tires. Up an incline and around a bend. Now it was crushed tin cans under the tires. The dump. I slowed and dropped the bike against an abandoned Dodge, perhaps as cantankerous as Will's Ford because it had been stripped of anything valuable. No wheels, no doors or engine hood, either, though what value the latter could provide eluded me.

The foul smell grew worse. With the tip of my black collar wrapped over my nose I toed at the garbage as I walked. Leavings from dinners at the hotel, piles too large to be booted out the door. Mostly tins but table scraps, too. No one was going to toss them onto a compost heap. It would be hard to grow anything with all that grey dust and grit landing on it.

There were old lamps, too, broken tables and chairs, mattresses with sprung springs and tufts of stuffing, but also furniture that must have been dropped off whole from residents in a rush to leave, now stained from sitting out in the weather, dusted grey, amongst the trash. Sofas, wing-backed chairs, china cabinets, some with a coffee table anchoring the conversation corner, a mad party set amongst the piles of moldering kitchen scraps. Photographs, too, and I found that puzzling. Even those departing in a hurry had the time and room for photographs. I crouched and clawed through them with my free hand. Family portraits, a cameo shot of a woman, the sort of likenesses you expect to see on a mantle or a dressing table, not tossed in a pile at the dump. Where were these people now? I could write a story about them for the paper. And then I dropped my collar. In one frame grinned the likeness of poor old Mr. George, only not so old here, and next to him the woman from the cameo shot, smiling as well. I didn't want to leave him in the dump. I slid the print out from the frame, slipped it into the back of my notebook.

That's when I heard a snuffling. Pigs. Not the little pink ones I've seen in town, but, as I reeled around to look, enormous black-splotched ones, red-eyed and putrid-smelling, with shreds of rotting food and paper hanging from their hairy chins and ears.

I straightened and took a step backward. Shoo, I called out.

Their mottled ears stood up. A snort or two.

Go. I slapped a hand at the air.

Mistake.

One lifted a foot, put it down again as if reconsidering, then lifted it again and stepped forward, two little trots. That was it. The others charged, snorting and barking.

I ran for my bicycle and slid on something wet, jerking myself upright to avoid falling. A leg and half-face of a pig under my feet. One of their own. An earlier meal, too, by the look of the bites. I lurched forward, feet flying under me.

In my pocket was one of my pieces of petrified pan-fried bread. I threw it behind me and it landed in a cloud of dust. The herd was momentarily distracted. But no, even the pigs wouldn't eat my bread.

I would have jumped into the Dodge except that the doors were gone. They'd get me in there.

So I grabbed the handlebars and dragged the bike onto a flat patch, tried to leap onto the seat, only the tight skirt bound my knees together. I let go of the bike, clutched the hem in both hands and pulled—pulled until I ripped it up the side seam—took the handlebars again, swung a leg over and began pedalling, the herd hot on my wheels, snorting and squealing as they slammed into each other in their rush to get at me, as though I was better than any meal they'd found in the dump today, old pig included. My thoughts raced. Flashes of their weight bearing down on me, the bristles of their snouts, their teeth, biting and tearing in a frenzy. Me, pulling free, swinging the bicycle at them, bashing their heads in with it. But then I'd lose my only means of escape.

I pumped until my thigh muscles burned. Even so, my horrific imaginings were replaced by headlines: Marauding hogs. Wild pigs. Cannibals. What a story, what a story. I pumped and pumped until I couldn't hear the pack anymore, and then I risked a look back. Gone. They'd gone back to the dump. Better pickings there than on the open road.

Before I could return my focus to the road, the front wheel caught the edge of a hole and sent me flying. I stifled a scream. Only the pigs would hear me and please oh god please let them not hear anything right now or sense my panic or smell my sweat on the wind. Mid-air, falling, I told myself, Get up as soon as you land. Get back on and keep pedalling.

But I landed tangled in the bike, the sharp edge of the fender deep in my calf. I saw the blood before I felt the pain and then I bent forward, trying to stop the blood with my hands. Jesus Goddamn Christ. They'll smell this. It pooled in my palms and leaked between my fingers.

I pulled myself up onto my knees, and the waves of pain brought waves of nausea. I crawled in my ruined funeral clothes to the basket and seized the flask. I sat and tipped the flask over the deep gash. The pain sang right into my eyeballs. But it would cleanse the wound and mask the smell of blood. Then I took a long swig for courage.

At the edge of the path, alone, I hauled up my skirts, plucked the needle from the hem, bit the thread once more, knotted it, then stabbed the sharp point into my skin and through to the other side of the gash. Quickly. The pain was up my legs and inside me, like waves of monthly cramps. I made wordless, animal sounds. I cried so hard I couldn't see and had to wipe my eyes and nose with my sleeves, though I allowed myself these tears. I deserved these ones. Pulled the thread through again, and felt it tug all the way through my womb, then another stab, then another upward pull. Just three stitches to close the wound, but equally as many swigs on the flask to do it. At least the bleeding had slowed.

A shadow appeared then and I snatched up the flask to throw it, my best weapon.

On a dead branch above, a crow spread its wings and tilted its head at me.

I tossed the flask back into the basket, grabbed onto the tree trunk, then a low-hanging branch, and pulled myself up on one leg, the other bent, like a balancing crane's. Below in the dirt, a dark, wet patch. Already, flies had gathered, a carpet of bluebottles.

On both sides of the ripped side seam my hem was dangling. I tore a strip and bound it around my stitches, lifted my bad leg over the seat and let it dangle on the other side, throbbing, while with my good leg I pushed along the dirt, and wobbled my way home.

Behind me I heard the crow land, cawing and pecking at the flies and the soaked dirt.

I arrived at the shop, dripping blood, the wound in my leg pounding.

Vincent saw me through the side window and met me at the back door, an arm around me to help me over the sill.

I bubbled an apology into his smock about my news blunder, about why I didn't return. I hadn't seen him since the day of the rescue drill, since he'd told me what I'd done. I don't know what I expected him to say. Maybe: It's all right. You've suffered enough. He'd already said it was his fault, not mine. Having endured such pain, now, perhaps I had redeemed myself and could truly be forgiven.

But he sat me down in the chair with less tenderness than I had hoped, and flew out the door. My gaze dragged itself to the gaping door. I saw him leap onto my bicycle.

I had dozed off but awakened when I heard voices and saw, once again, Vincent on the bicycle, this time with Mr. Bones balanced on the handlebars.

Behind them, emerging one by one in the fog, the two children, who pushed themselves along on scooters made from roller skate wheels and a metal platform, salvaged grillwork, perhaps, I couldn't quite see, but the handles were scrap metal, including cogs and wheels that flashed even in the gloom. Vincent must have built them. Children liked such gadgets, brought them to school when they weren't supposed to, the regular children, that is, not the ones who were never allowed such things, the ones for whom education alone was a luxury that could be withdrawn, they were the real concerns, though it wasn't them, just the problems around them, the adults, John's people, letters to the government that found their way into the newspapers, the board of education, threatening fires and nude protests if their children were forced to go to school. Ridiculous, we all agreed.

The door burst open and Mr. Bones stood on the sill for a moment, surveying me bleeding there before him, half-conscious, delirious. Behind him was Vincent.

Not a doctor, I said, rolling my head to direct my concern to Vincent.

Mr. Bones simply made a clicking sound against his teeth. Accident-prone, he said at last. Aren't we?

*

They must have carried me upstairs. Whatever concoction Doctor had given me knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I awoke I ate a simple meal, then stripped off the ruined black dress, washed, pulled on a thin shift, and climbed back to bed under a single sheet.

Fall weather would be welcomed, now, but the sun had smouldered for days behind the banks of grey. Heat from it and from the boiler had built all day and night, collected upstairs and pressed down on me like a damp palm. I had the windows open, too, but I soon kicked off the sheet, bare legs and arms welcoming the air. It was still warm. Hot. My stitches burned and itched. I tossed and turned until the twisted sheet bound around me like a rope. I kicked free, first one leg, then the other, the stitched one throbbing, then arms, too, swimming for freedom as they did in the lake, only the achingly cold water had turned unbearably hot.

I grabbed my pillow and limped down the stairs to the shop where the air was cooler, and slept on the spartan boards next to the press.

Sometime later, the shop door slammed and my eyes opened.

Vincent rounded the corner, stopped abruptly, and his arm shot out, palm up.

Sorry, he said. Please, don't get up.

I gathered myself up anyway, but he backed out of the shop, hitting his elbows and knees on jutting pieces of machinery, blackening his shins in his hurry to leave, much as I had that first time in his shop.

A cool tongue of air slid over my shoulder and I tugged up the strap that had fallen.

As I limped past the metal mirror I saw a strange, young woman in a shift, an ordinary cotton garment every other morning until this one, when its thin fabric revealed shadow and shape, and, out of range of the mirror but visible all the same, everything between neck and knees, giving rise to the musk of my own thoughts as I climbed the stairs.

*

Did I love the Poznikoff boy? Bess asked me that once, though I'm not sure I answered. I described how he looked. He had hair like the sun, I said, on a white-hot day. Or something like that. We were interrupted. One of the babies, probably.

For the rest of the morning and then the afternoon I sat in the window, stitched leg propped up, looking down on the greyness of Black Mountain, notebook in hand but unable to focus on the notes written there, unable to focus on writing more. I was agitated by the morning's events, and my thoughts drifted back to a simpler time, one I could examine from the safety of now, as though I were finally having the talk with Bess that we never did have.

I loved having a boy to think about. There were others besides him who hadn't joined up, some too old, true, and some infirm, but some who were all right and had stayed behind to run family businesses. None of my brothers had stayed, trusting instead that father and I could manage on our own. I drove the fruit runs, and those runs took me back to the jam factory where John worked. It was as simple as that.

I loved the flash of sunlight through the trees along the wagon road and the perfumed steam rising from the kettles of boiling fruit, the colours inside the factory walls, reds, golds and purples, the feel of a blackberry on my tongue, fuzzy and dry until it burst, bittersweet. He'd popped the berry into my mouth, then grabbed me around the waist and kissed me. Who wouldn't fall in love with a moment like that, one that promised so much more?

I suppose I loved his pacifism, too, although it came from his upbringing and not from his own thinking. Politics didn't interest him. He didn't read books or newspapers. He was an infant when he arrived in this country, and yet he spoke with a Russian accent. He was hard-working, practical, would never build something for the joy of invention. And I couldn't imagine him striking out to see the world. He wouldn't stray far from his community, not for more than a summer. I must have known that from the start. Maybe that was all I had wanted too.