“Is it better or worse?”
“Better.”
“Should we fold back the blankets?”
“Please.”
He climbed out of bed and rolled everything back to the metal frame at the end.
“When’s the last time anyone held you like this? Or was beside you in bed like this?”
“That day.”
“What day?”
“That day you threw me in your truck.”
“Did I throw you?”
“I hit my head.”
“I’m sorry, Em. Do you forgive me?”
“I forgive you.”
“Who held you then?”
“Mom. When she got home from work.”
“Tell me how it was.”
“I was in bed already.”
“What time was it?”
Shrug.
“No, Em. You have to tell me exactly how it was.” He pushed her by the shoulders a little away from him and looked at her. “Look at my face and tell me the story.”
“It was six or something.”
“Still light out?”
“Yes.”
“You were upset. I’d upset you. Say it. Say: you upset me, Gary.”
“You did.”
“That’s good for me to hear. Tell me. Mom was worried about you? She thought you were sick?”
“I guess.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked if I was sick and I said a little.”
“And she sat on the edge of the bed with you?”
“She brought us a snack in bed.”
“What snack?”
“Milk and strawberry toast.”
“That’s a good snack.”
“I know.”
“And she gave you the snack and went off with Jessie?”
“She stayed with me.”
“For a little while?”
“For the whole night.”
“What did Jessie do?”
“TV I guess.”
“You were crying in bed?”
“Yes.”
“Because I’d scared you.”
“And because my friends. They wouldn’t answer when I called. Their moms said they weren’t home. But I knew they were.”
“You were shaken up.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you came to find me the next day?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought things weren’t so good in that apartment.”
“Sometimes they were.”
Picture the black dawn. The spray of stars overhead. Alison Foster, poor old son of a bitch, limping back up the dirt drive of the old Calhoun place with his red Maglite, gray head trembling, eyes impossibly small and hard and squinting ahead as if he could see David Lamb and the child in the dark. As if he knew. As if he’d catch them at it. As if Lamb didn’t know Foster was out there prowling around and peering in the cabin windows. Thinking what?
Foster didn’t get it that when Lamb drives her in his truck off the paved roads and into a place bright and stark and sere, beyond the humid Midwestern acres of hog feed and furrowed till, the girl—his girl, Lamb’s girl—is perfectly okay. Foster didn’t get that it’s a favor, a gift, say, taking her beyond the miserable reaches of prairie restoration reeking of sewage processing plants and cornstarch factories. That she rode along in the passenger seat with her eyes half closed and fixed upon Lamb as though he were the handsomest, wisest, most beneficent man on planet Earth.
Besides, Foster wouldn’t have found them in the cabin. Runny moonlight cast long, bent shadows across the concrete floor of the bunk room, though Lamb had tried to cover the windows with squares of a stiff and mildewed drop cloth he found folded beneath the workbench. Faint smell of woodsmoke, fire snapping in the iron stove. Outside the shop the north fork of the river running black past a stand of narrow-leafed cottonwoods just beyond the county road. A spectral mist hung rib-high among the water birch along its banks. A single box elder clenched its branches against the cold.
And his girl was sleeping beside him, her wonderful blue-and-white flowered nightgown twisted up around her bare, freckled waist. Soft belly rising a little with each breath, her warm damp head resting on Lamb’s outstretched arm, sweat shining at her temples, her mouth open, her little lips open—Christ, she was small—and he was swearing mutely into the space above him that this was good for her. That as long as he was honest and approached this thing from every possible angle, everything would line up and fall into place of its own accord, like atoms helixed and pleated tight within the seeds of cheatgrass needling the hems of her tiny blue jeans: fragile, inevitable, life-giving, and bigger than he. Such was his faith in the forces that had given rise to the girl herself, to the rapid trills of violet green swallows up the mountain, to the spoon-shaped leaves of prairie buttercups they’d seen blanketing the roadside in eastern Wyoming.
Lamb was just a man in the world. He’d fed her well and told her stories and loved her up all the way through the dim-lit outskirts of Rockford, Iowa City, Omaha; across the national grasslands, stiff and pale in the increasing cold; over the continental divide as the sky shed itself in falling snow, and up to where there were no trees, no birds, no life but the slow force of rock rising up from a thin and frozen crust of ground. Say this was all in hopes of glimpsing something beautiful. And is there anything wrong with that?
The next morning was just like all of their mornings: three little silver pans going at the tapered end of Tommie’s trapper fire. Coffee and canned meat and beans and toast with jam and four eggs.
“There. Now tomorrow your fire will be even better.”
She pulled her lips into her mouth and lifted her little face up at him. “It’s working, though.”
“You won’t forget how to do it, will you?”
“Nope.”
“Should I send you little reminder notes? With directions and diagrams?”
She made a face.
“It’ll give you dreams of the next man you’re going to build a trapper fire with. Only this guy, you’ll have to teach him how to do it.” He lifted his chin and turned his face away. “It hurts my feelings to say that, Tom. But we have to say it.”
She stirred the beans. “Nope,” she said. “Only building a fire with you. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Don’t say that, Em. Someday you’ll get married and you’ll go camping with your husband, and he won’t know how to build a fire. You’ll have to show him what I taught you.”
“I won’t get married.”
“Won’t you work for the forest service when you’re out of college? And tell me how to find you so I can come visit you in your tent? I’ll be that old camper who’s always haunting the high plains, right? I’ll wear an orange cap so you’ll know me. Even from far away.” He bent over and kissed the crown of her head. “I want you to always remember that I never let you eat a meal out here that was something we added hot water to.”
“Like oatmeal, puke.”
“Or dehydrated vegetables. I want you to remember all the meals we made together, and how every one of them had whole beans it. What’s happening underneath that toast?”
She tipped her head sideways and checked the smoke, checked the flames, and looked up at him.
“Go ahead. Let me see you fix that.”
With a white branch she rearranged the logs to keep the natural windbreak from burning it up too quickly, then turned to the little pile of sticks and tree punk and pine needles and twigs and pushed a handful in beneath the lowermost level of burning wood.
“If you’re ever alone in the woods waiting for me,” he said, “you’d be okay. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“You’d know how to make it through the night.”