Later, they sat on the sofa in his apartment and she sat so close to him that her knee pressed against his own, the feeling of it a faint heat running into him. She told him that both her parents were dead, that her father had worked for the telephone company, that her mother had been an office clerk of some kind, and that both were alcoholics. She told him that when she was fifteen her father had tried to drive the three of them into the grave at the wheel of a funeral-black Oldsmobile. Both mother and father had been killed in the accident. She had survived. Her only living relative was an uncle but he was in prison in Carson City and for this reason they put her in foster care and she walked away from that house in the middle of the night and came to Reno.
The strawberry wine seemed to slosh back and forth inside his chest. He wanted to ask her more about those blank years but he also did not want to know what she had done to survive. As it turned out he could not have asked her anyway because in the next moment she had pushed him back onto the sofa and had slid her tongue into his mouth.
He thought that he should stop but his body was moving of its own accord now, moving with a ferocious and unstoppable need. He might have been saying something too but if so he could not stop that either. The words were like a colored ribbon pulling out of him.
What’re you sorry about? she said into his ear.
What?
You keep saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” What are you sorry about?
Shouldn’t we—, he began but there were no words beyond those two and when she pulled his hands to her breasts he could not even think of what question he was trying to ask.
HE AWOKE to the pain of his throbbing finger, opening his crusted eyes into his dingy bedroom, the contents illuminated by an angle of light that seemed incongruous with the morning. He did not know what time it was and at first could not remember what had happened but then it all came flooding back to him and when he pulled his hand up in front of his face he could see the tattered white tissues wrapping his broken finger. He pulled the clock from where it lay on the dirty carpet below him and set it upon his chest: 12:05. Then the lit window high up on the wall and then back to the clock again. It was past noon.
He managed to stand and to stumble forward out of the bedroom and into the hall and then into the bathroom, his head throbbing in concert with his hand. He was able to unzip his pants and to urinate one-handed but then could not further operate the zipper and finally gave up and came into the living room holding his pants up with his only functional hand, the other held tight to his chest.
There he is, Rick said from the couch as he entered the room.
I can’t zip up my pants.
Shit. Rick stood and grabbed Nat’s pants and snapped them closed and then pulled the zipper up. The things I do for you, he said.
No kidding.
How you feeling?
Pretty miserable, he said. And I missed work.
Susan called us both in sick.
Oh thank god, Nat said. I thought I was screwed.
You still might be. You look awful.
He was still sweating and had begun shivering now. She went home? he said.
To work, Rick said. Jesus, man, I can hear your teeth chattering. I think I should take you to see a doctor.
I can’t afford that.
So don’t pay the bill when it comes. What’s your finger feel like?
A little better. Hurts but it’s also kinda numb.
I think I’d better unwrap it.
No way, Nat said.
Yes way, Rick said.
He stood there for what seemed a long time, his balance seeming to shift in all directions at once. Then he slid down next to Rick on the sofa. A rerun of M*A*S*H on Channel 2. Hawkeye speaking in a dim quiet slur. Canned laughter following the punch lines.
Rick unwrapped the toilet paper slowly and while Nat had been sure it would drive him into an agony of pain there was almost no sensation at all. When the last piece came off, the broken pencil stub that Susan had used as a brace fell into his lap and they both sat looking at the finger: a pale, bent, swollen thing that looked more like a ruined sausage than any part of his hand. Through its center, where the break was, a dark bruise mottled his tight swollen skin.
That doesn’t look good, Rick said.
Dang, Nat said. It made him sick to look at it.
We’re definitely going to the doctor, Rick said. Maybe you’ll get lucky and they’ll give you some Percocet or something.
He nodded but did not move. Neither of them did. I don’t know what I’m gonna to do, he said after a time. He was still looking at his swollen and discolored finger. What am I gonna do?
We’ll figure something out, Rick said. We always do.
It’s serious, Nat said.
I know it is, buddy. I’ve got some weed to sell. That oughta help some.
What about your mom?
Well, like I said, we’ll figure something out.
From the television came Milt Wells’s voice and they both looked toward it in unison. Milt stood in his characteristic Western shirt and bolo tie before a row of gleaming cars and trucks. That’s right, he called out to them. Five hundred dollars cash back on any new car or truck. Five hundred dollars cash back. The man on the screen fanned a stack of bills in his hands as if they were playing cards.
And there’s all the money we need, Nat said wistfully.
Yeah maybe we should start a car dealership, Rick said.
Nat did not respond now, only sitting there, staring as the commercial ended and the next began.
I tell you one thing, Rick said. If I see that motherfucker Mike or Johnny fucking Aguirre I’ll knock his fucking head in.
Don’t do that, Nat said. That’ll make it really bad.
We’ll see, Rick said.
Nat could feel a sharp twisting inside him, like a short thin blade was rotating through his intestines. The geography of the continent seemed to stretch out under his feet, the desert elongating so that the arrowed points between where he was and everywhere he was not fled from each other across that vast and unending plain of sage and cheatgrass and dry dead earth.
11
HE TOLD HER EVERYTHING, BEGINNING WITH THE NIGHT AT the car dealership and then trying to explain the gambling and Johnny Aguirre and fumbling through what had happened when Rick had been in prison for those thirteen months and he had been left alone in Reno, knowing that none of it really made any sense, not to him and certainly not to Grace, listening to his own story and knowing it was true but feeling, all the while, as if it were the story of a stranger, something he had overheard somewhere and was repeating, like the plot of a movie. When she told him to start over he began in Battle Mountain, his brother with the disassembled bicycle, and the new kid who rented the trailer next to the one he shared with his brother and mother, the sagebrush rolling out in all directions and the flat top of the Sheep Creek Range looming above the bridge under which he would find frogs in the summer and where the teenagers would swim and smoke stolen cigarettes, the two of them — he and Rick — wandering everywhere across that landscape, and, when they were teenagers, stealing into silent empty homes in the midafternoon, taking souvenirs and sometimes selling them at the pawnshop in Winnemucca. How they would talk about taking care of your people. How that had been a kind of credo, something to live by.