“Oh? My father was there? I bet the Hockney print confused him.”
She was quick, his wife, as quick as she was warm, and as tough as she was quick. Lila loved him, but she never stopped bumping him off his mark. Clint thought he probably needed that. Probably most men did.
“Ha-ha,” Clint had said. “Listen, though: that opening you mentioned at the prison. Who did you hear about that from?”
There was a second or two of silence while his wife thought over the question’s implications. She responded with a question of her own: “Clint, is there something you need to tell me?”
Clint had not even considered that she might be disappointed by his decision to dump the private practice for the government one. He was sure she wouldn’t be.
Thank God for Lila.
To apply the electric shaver to the gray stubble under his nose, Clint had to twist his face up so he looked like Quasimodo. A snow-white wire poked out from his left nostril. Anton could juggle barbells all he wanted, but white nostril hairs waited for every man, as did those that appeared in the ears. Clint managed to buzz this one away.
He had never been built like Anton, not even his last year in high school when the court granted him his independence and he lived on his own and ran track. Clint had been rangier, skinnier, stomach toneless but flat, like his son Jared. In his memory, Paul Montpelier was pudgier than the version of himself that Clint saw this morning. But he looked more like one than the other. Where was he now, Paul Montpelier? Had the crisis been resolved? Probably. Time healed all wounds. Of course, as some wag had pointed out, it also wounds all heels.
Clint had no more than the normal—i.e., healthy, totally conscious, and fantasy-based—longing to screw outside of his marriage. His situation wasn’t, contra Paul Montpelier, a crisis of any kind. It was normal life as he understood it: a second look on the street at a pretty girl; an instinctive peek at a woman in a short skirt exiting a car; an almost subconscious lunging of lust for one of the models decorating The Price Is Right. It was a doleful thing, he supposed, doleful and perhaps a bit comic, the way age dragged you farther and farther from the body you liked the best and left those old instincts (not ambitions, thank God) behind, like the smell of cooking long after dinner has been consumed. And was he judging all men by himself? No. He was a member of the tribe, that was all. It was women who were the real riddles.
Clint smiled at himself in the mirror. He was clean-shaven. He was alive. He was about the same age as Paul Montpelier had been in 1999.
To the mirror he said, “Hey, Anton: go fuck yourself.” The bravado was false, but at least he made the effort.
From the bedroom beyond the bathroom door he heard a lock click, a drawer open, a thump as Lila deposited her gunbelt in the drawer, shut it, and clicked it locked again. He heard her sigh and yawn.
In case she was already asleep, he dressed without speaking, and instead of sitting on the bed to put on his shoes, Clint picked them up to carry downstairs.
Lila cleared her throat. “It’s okay. I’m still awake.”
Clint wasn’t sure that was entirely true: Lila had gotten as far as unsnapping the top button of her uniform pants before flopping on the bed. She hadn’t even climbed under the blankets.
“You must be exhausted. I’ll be right out. Everyone all right on Mountain?”
The previous night she’d texted that there was a crack-up on the Mountain Rest Road—Don’t stay up. While this wasn’t unheard of, it was unusual. He and Jared had grilled steaks and polished off a couple of Anchor Steams on the deck.
“Trailer came unhitched. From Pet-Whatever. The chain store? Went over on its side, blocked the whole road. Cat litter and dog food all over. We ended up having to bulldoze it out of the way.”
“That sounds like a shit-show.” He bent down and put a kiss on her cheek. “Hey. You want to start jogging together?” The idea had just occurred to him and he was immediately cheered. You couldn’t stop your body from breaking down and thickening, but you could fight back.
Lila opened her right eye, pale green in the dimness of the room with the curtains pulled. “Not this morning.”
“Of course not,” Clint said. He hung over her, thinking she was going to kiss him back, but she just told him to have a good day, and make sure Jared took out the trash. The eye rolled closed. A flash of green… and gone.
The smell in the shed was almost too much to bear.
Evie’s bare skin pebbled up and she had to fight not to retch. The stench was a mingling of scorched chemicals, old leaf smoke, and food that had spoiled.
One of the moths was in her hair, nestled and pulsing reassurance against her scalp. She breathed as shallowly as she could and scanned around.
The prefab shed was set up for cooking drugs. In the center of the space was a gas stove attached by yellowish tubes to a pair of white canisters. On a counter against the wall there were trays, jugs of water, an open package of Ziploc bags, test tubes, pieces of cork, countless dead matches, a one-hitter with a charred bowl, and a utility sink connected to a hose that ran away and out under the netting that Evie had pulled back to enter. Empty bottles and dented cans on the floor. A wobbly-looking lawn chair with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. logo stamped on the back. Balled up in the corner, a gray checked shirt.
Evie shook the stiffness and at least some of the filth from the shirt, then drew it on. The tails hung down over her bottom and thighs. Until recently, this garment had belonged to someone disgusting. A California-shaped stain running down the chest area reported that the disgusting person liked mayonnaise.
She squatted down by the tanks and yanked the yellowing tubes loose. Then she turned the knobs on the propane tanks a quarter inch each.
Outside the shed again, netting drawn closed behind her, Evie paused to take deep breaths of the fresher air.
Three hundred feet or so down the wooded embankment stood a trailer fronted by a gravel apron with a truck and two cars parked on it. Three gutted rabbits, one of which was still dripping, hung from a clothesline alongside a few faded pairs of panties and a jean jacket. Puffs of woodsmoke rose from the trailer’s chimney.
Back the way she came, through the thin forest and across the field, the Tree was no longer visible. She wasn’t alone, though: moths furred the roof of the shed, fluttering and shifting.
Evie started down the embankment. Deadwood branches stabbed her feet, and a rock cut her heel. She didn’t break stride. She was a fast healer. By the clothesline, she paused to listen. She heard a man laughing, a television playing, and ten thousand worms in the little patch of ground around her, sweetening the soil.
The rabbit that was still bleeding rolled its foggy eyes at her. She asked it what the deal was.
“Three men, one woman,” the rabbit said. A single fly flew from its tattered black lips, buzzed around, and zoomed into the cavity of a limp ear. Evie heard the fly pinging around in there. She didn’t blame the fly—it was doing what a fly was made to do—but she mourned the rabbit, who did not deserve such a dirty fate. While Evie loved all animals, she was especially fond of the smaller ones, those creepers of meadow and leapers of deadfall, the fragile-winged and the scuttling.
She cupped her hand behind the dying rabbit’s head, and gently brought its crusted black mouth to hers. “Thank you,” Evie whispered, and let it be quiet.
One benefit of living in this particular corner of Appalachia was that you could afford a decent-sized home on two government salaries. The Norcross home was a three-bedroom contemporary in a development of similar houses. The houses were handsome, spacious without being grotesque, had lawns adequate for playing catch, and views that, in the green seasons, were lush, hilly, and leafy. What was a little depressing about the development was that even at reduced prices almost half of its rather attractive houses were empty. The demonstrator home at the top of the hill was the one exception; that one was kept clean and shiny and furnished. Lila said it was just a matter of time before a meth-head broke into it and tried to set up shop. Clint had told her not to worry, he knew the sheriff. In fact, they had a semi-regular thing.