“I’d be more worried about your own name.”
“Why’s that?” Patrick asked.
The girl considered the question for a time, as if weighing the outcome of her answer. “Your name is Pat,” she said, smiling at him and putting a hand across his thigh. “Isn’t it a woman’s name?”
“It’s short for Patrick,” he said. He tried to move away on the couch, but felt the girl’s nails tuck in under the inseam of his jeans and pull him closer.
“Pat, Patty, Patricia,” the girl said.
“How old are you?” Patrick asked.
“Old enough.” The girl grinned, keeping her eyes on his. She had one leg up and over him before he thought to move. Straddling him like some beast she meant to ride. “Maury says you just got out.”
“That’s right,” Patrick said. He was looking up at her where she sat. His nerves going berserk beneath his skin and the warmth from the undersides of her thighs now pressed on his lap.
“Maury is a good guy,” the girl said. “He’s a friend of ours.” She pushed in beneath his chin and he felt her nuzzle up under his jaw and begin to kiss his neck. His eyes not seeming to focus anymore, and an anxiety for the thing that he couldn’t explain, but, at the same time, elated him.
He found his hands wrapped up behind her, reaching up the skin of her back beneath the clasp of her bra, moving one way against her skin and then retreating. Something pleasurable and animal about it all, the catch and pull of his palms against her bare skin, the dig of his fingertips as they moved over her ribs. He brought his hands around and clutched her sides, pulling her into him.
All of it feeling like something beyond his control, an act of God, a storm approaching, something there was no defense for.
He ran his hands over her back and sides, tight skin everywhere on her body that he didn’t know what to do with, but at the same time felt bound up within and committed to—a man fallen into a river, fighting against the coming falls.
He’d been with only one woman since his wife died. A woman ten years younger than him and a teacher at the local school, someone who had worked with his wife, and who, at the time, taught his son. The whole experience rushed and awkward, something sudden in the backseat of a car after a night of drinking. No words spoken or heard, just the act in its barest form. Performed and then quickly pushed away, never to be spoken of at parent-teacher meetings or when their paths crossed on the street or in the grocery store.
It had been a mistake, and Patrick had thought about it often when he’d been away in Monroe. Dreaming up other outcomes and conclusions for that night, but never truly being able to put it behind in any better light.
The girl slid off him onto the floor, her two hands gripped on his belt and pulling him lower against the couch. The cool press of her fingernails inside his waistband.
He felt bubbled inside the room, like there was no outside world, and it was only here alone that he existed. The girl between his legs as her hands worked on his belt. He heard her laugh and he felt momentary fear as she pulled his pants from his thighs and over his knees. “Guess you are a Patrick,” she said, laughing still, and then standing to take her pants down and then step out of them, one foot after the other.
In that brief second he tried to think of something to say, something he thought she might enjoy. But nothing came and he looked at her body there before him, two skinny legs, her body marked red in places by the pass of his own hands against her flesh. He sat forward and helped her with her shirt until she took it in one hand and pulled it off. So much bare skin, he thought.
“How old are you?” he asked again.
“Old enough to be your daughter, or your granddaughter,” the girl said, watching Patrick, a cruel little smile on her lips. “Whatever you like. Whatever you’re into.”
His mind suddenly wanted to be anyplace but here. A desperation fighting inside of him to just get up and walk out of the house. Though he knew he never would, and that he was already committed to how things would turn out.
He closed his eyes and he felt her legs again on top of him. Different now, as she put her hands to his shoulders and eased him back.
SHE RAN UNTIL she couldn’t feel her legs anymore. Cold as stone with the pale skin slashed red with blood from the blades of wheat. She slowed, crouching with her hands bound in front of her, fingers splayed into the earth for balance. The night air on her immediately and her own heat rising from her in a pale blue tangle of mist. Not a sound behind her but the wind working through the wheat.
The road was only fifty yards on but her thighs felt heavy on her legs already. She dropped to a knee, listening to the wheat move. No John Wesley; his footsteps faded away behind her as she ran, fading away until he wasn’t there at all. Now she didn’t know where he had gone. Whether he was behind her still or ahead of her, moving around on her as she rested.
For a full minute she waited. The cold of the night everywhere now. She looked to the road, just a matter of yards away and up a small rise. She knew it would be the easiest thing to follow.
She ran her eyes over the field one more time, left to right, watching the wheat bend in the breeze. Her heart beating in her chest and an elevated awareness to everything around. Turning, she went on, slowing four or five times as she went to look behind and listen to the wheat. In the night there was nothing to tell her which way to go, no mountains to show her the way home and the moon high overhead, fixed in the sky at its midpoint.
She came to the road almost by accident, stumbling out of the wheat into a small drainage ditch. The road raised slightly in front of her. With her two hands out in front she scrambled up the loose gravel onto the pavement. Keeping low she started to move down the road in the direction she thought they had come from.
She didn’t have any way to tell if she was going the right way and for a second she turned to study the road behind. Nothing but the lightless night behind her, going on and on, her breath curling away in front of her face before it thinned into the air. The cold felt now where the sweat had begun to show and cool her skin.
She went on, the cuts on her legs tearing at her thighs and the sweat stinging her eyes. Her only hope was to find a farmhouse or town. Anything that would offer the least bit of protection.
Up ahead she saw a pair of headlights break over a low rise in the wheat and move toward her. Sheri slowed, jogging and looking behind her at the open road. She raised both hands in the hope she would be seen. The light from the car headlights now everywhere around her.
She watched the car draw to a stop twenty feet before her and the man inside get up out of the driver’s-side door. His silhouette just visible behind the glare of the headlights. His head turned toward where Sheri stood, her arms still raised into the air.
“Thank God,” she said, trying to catch her breath. The man moving out from behind the headlights toward her as she kept speaking. “I’m—” And then she stopped short.
“Good run?” Bean asked. He was almost to her now, the gun in one hand while the other reached for her arm.
She put a foot behind her, pivoting, her head half turned, and then something heavy hit her full in the face and the last thing she remembered was the numbing heat of her own skull hitting the pavement.
MORGAN CAME IN out of the cold carrying a pail of stream water in his hand. His right side burdened with the weight as he closed the door, then set the pail near the stove. At the window Drake was watching the road leading away up the hill. Morgan could see also that the boy had found the old double-barrel. The shotgun and a weathered box of bird shot there on the table behind Drake.
Morgan sat and rested on one of the dining room chairs. He picked up the box of shells and examined the cardboard. He hadn’t used the things in a while. No reason to. Not enough time or energy left in his life to sit and wait for something to chance in front of him. And no one to give the meat to if he did. The rabbits and prairie dogs enough for him in the spring and summer. In the colder months his hands had begun to hurt. His fingers not as steady and the joints often aching, making the Arctic birds fat from their summer feeding harder and harder for Morgan to shoot.