Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 9

IT WAS MAY, the second Saturday in May.

Lafleur would be able to name it months later as a beginning of sorts, although he didn't really believe in beginnings any more than he believed in endings. Maybe he believed in intersections as if bodies in space appeared from the gloom and sank toward one another, incandescent, and in rare instances adhered together and thickened to make something massy like a nodule on a stalk. But how such an occurrence was caused he had no idea. Nor could he say how it should be marked except as an illusion, a “functional” beginning…by a signature on a piece of paper, a photograph in a wedding album, a tiny footprint on a birth certificate, or an old mudprint, some seed, or mineralized egg. And for him, what encounters marked the “beginnings” in his short life—mother, stepmother, estranged wife, daughter, son, dead second daughter, infirm father, work, war…. He glanced back over his shoulder as he thought this as if to see his entanglement, the strands that clung to him, heavy as rope, endless, twisting and snarling in his trail.

What he saw, truly, was the inside of the toolshed, grown dark and littered. He'd just returned from his father and Jewel's place. He'd made a pot of coffee, fed his dog, then hunkered down next to the doorway of the shed in a patch of sun. He straightened his head and arched his back, pressing his shoulders against the clapboard. The shed stood between the river and the house his parents had built when he was a boy. The dog, Jones, was a Labrador retriever, a road waif that had adopted him several months ago. His coffee, one of his few luxuries, he made strong from freshly ground beans. He held the mug before his nose, inhaling the pungent steam as he looked up from under his eyebrows at the old family house. It was a rental, now. It had an elevated deck and pale-blue window sills. The cedar siding had begun to gray. He should bleach and refinish it.

In the old days, the shed at his back had been a place of fragrance—wood shavings, solvent, oil, and the flinty odor from the honing wheel. It had been a place where plans were studied and modified and tools kept as the house was built. As a boy of nine or ten, he'd looked up at the emerging house from this very spot: concrete foundation, studwork, the skeleton of the roof, then the raiment, skirting and stairway, plywood, the deck, siding, windows, roofing, the stone chimney. For a time the shed had been the germinating cell from which everything emanated. When he was eleven he and his parents moved into the house. He had a bedroom window from which he should have been able to see the shed, but only a patch of the shed's metal roof could be picked out, and sometimes on overcast days even it took on the precise coloration of air. The rest of the shed, hidden by a screen of ferns and blackberry bushes or camouflaged by age and weather to match the surrounding foliage, was quite invisible. He had considered that a great mystery.

When he'd been troubled, night after night when he was fourteen, after his mother died, he sat at the window and looked with longing down toward the old nearly invisible place of calm. Now that window was dark in the shadows. Looking at it and remembering filled Lafleur with longing, and he thought this a mystery, too, the transduction of the boy's longing into the more complicated, less acute, more chronic, and more comical longing of a tangled-up man.

Lafleur lowered his eyes to the dog, Jones. She had a crippled leg and a congenital overbite so extreme that she could not eat out of a dish. Her way was to tip the dish and spill the contents, then eat the food off the ground. She grunted as she ate. She had a fixation on her dishes. She carried them around, buried them, and slept with them. She had a stash of the chewed-up remains of five or six plastic dishes in a small open pit at the base of a blackberry bush. Lafleur had chained an aluminum dish to a timber, but she'd mangled the light metal until it came loose from the clasp. Then he tried a ten-pound cast-iron pot he'd found, thinking it might be heavy enough to discourage her, but he caught her carting it off, her neck muscles bulging with the weight of it as she stumbled drunkenly through the weeds. Now he chained the dog so that he could retrieve the pot when she was finished. He had tried simply pouring the food on the ground, too, but Jones refused to eat it. Not only did she covet her dishes, but she also attached a ritual to them.

The cast-iron pot lay on its side. Jones lunged at the heap of food, then lifted her head to chew with her back teeth. She wagged her tail and gazed at him with her golden eyes. Her shiny black coat rippled as she moved. Behind her stood his pickup truck. Its deep-blue hood hazily reflected the clear sky and the leaves and white limbs of the cottonwoods that lined the drive. A fly, trapped in a Coke bottle on the ground next to Lafleur, buzzed noisily. The cottonwoods rattled in the evening breeze. From the other side of the blackberry bushes he heard hoofbeats. There was a stable over there below the house, and a horse, a chestnut mare owned by the Goods, the people renting the house. For a moment the hoofbeats went fast enough to be two horses. Jones looked up, raising her ears and sniffing the air. The hoofbeats stopped. Lafleur could hear the river down below the shed, the soft, never-ending whisper of the water eating at the bank. His pickup's engine ticked as it cooled from the thirty-mile drive down from Portland.

He took a sip of coffee. Soon he would walk over to the Goods' place and use their telephone to call Ned Blaylock. For the moment he didn't move, but hunkered there and thought about Blaylock, whom he remembered even with some amusement now, and sardonically, as the perpetrator of his childhood nightmare: the hulking, forbidding man, a black welder's skullcap perpetually on his head, the hump of bone like a bolthead high under the inflamed skin of his nose, the sagging flesh of his face, and the whites of his eyes the color of rust. He thought about Jewel and his father, and about his mother, who back when he was fourteen had been brought home from the hospital because the doctors gave her no hope. She had brain cancer. The chemotherapy made her bones shatter. He remembered vividly how she had looked, skeletal and frail, her eyes and cheeks sunken, and he remembered the smell of her body rotting from the inside. It was as if she had already been buried, then unearthed to die again. In ten days she was gone. He remembered how, when he was younger, she never failed to kiss him goodnight, and how her dark hair fell across his face, how it smelled of the ground, and how that earthy darkness of her affection, her essence to him, seemed finally to merge with the shadow cast by her death. He thought about the house and his mother's happiness with it for three years. He thought about the shed at his back. He could almost feel the density and confusion in the narrow room, that darkness pressing against the root of his spine.

The shed was loaded with old things and his things—his cot and bedding, his hotplate and tiny black-and-white television, a small woodburner he had moved in, and what of his personal articles he'd brought down as the night or two he had originally planned to stay back in November stretched into months. He thought it astounding that it was May already. It was a patch of rare evening sun he was sitting in, and he supposed that the buzzing fly had hatched in the incubating May warmth of that Coke bottle, out of the mud and decayed bodies of last year's trapped flies at the bottom. Broken-down deck chairs were stored in the shed, and tools and supplies left over from thirty years ago when the house had been finished: nails, bolts, and screws placed in jars, bits of Sheetrock and plywood, excess plumbing and electrical parts, bundles of copper pipe, coils of wire. His old Huffy bicycle hung from the ceiling.

What was left in the shed had been neatly organized by his father several times, but gradually the layering-on of years' worth of things for which there was no better place, and of dust, bird, and rodent remains, had gained sway. Now Lafleur's things had stacked up on the benches and floor. Sometimes, when he dug down through the debris to the original layer, he found things that made time buckle back: the very lumber crayon he remembered drawing with as a boy, his mother's old hair dryer, a butane burner he remembered his father using to heat steel strapping, and his father's Thompson pistol with interchangeable .45 and .410 barrels, a combination heavy-duty persuader and light-duty snake gun. He'd completely forgotten about the pistol. There was a holster for it somewhere. He'd spent an evening rubbing off the dots of rust with steel wool and oiling the gun until it gleamed, then returned it to the molded cushions in the hardwood case. Illegal because of the short shotgun barrel, the gun was probably a collector's item. He guessed it had become his.

Jones sat facing him and swept her tail back and forth in the dirt. She'd finished eating. In a moment she would bark, demanding to be released from her chain. If Lafleur looked directly at her, she would certainly bark. He looked up toward the house through the ferns and blackberry bushes. The bushes had hard pale-green berries. Besides refurbishing the house for his father and Jewel, he should clean up the shed. At the least, he should trim the trees along the drive and repair the Goods' mailbox before it fell off its stand. He'd become a derelict, almost, disconnected from nearly everything but the rudiments of daily routine and living off the tailings of a previous, more opulent life. His mail went to his father and Jewel and he scarcely looked at it. Most of his meals came out of cans and were contemptuous of nutrition. He got his drinking water from a hose that ran from the stock hydrant at the Goods' stable. He showered at work once or twice a week. He smelled. His toilet here consisted of a canvas outhouse with a ten-gallon can behind the shed. He had to cart the can up to an R-V park to empty it. It was a scatological comedy he engaged in every two weeks, surreptitiously slopping his personal sewage into a public tank and driving around town all day with the stinking can in the back of his pickup.

A horse whinny broke the evening air. It sounded like brass, like a rooster measuring the distance between the tool shed and the Goods' place. Jones barked and whined in response, and curled back her upper lip, displaying her truncated lower jaw, and then let out a string of annoyed, high-pitched barks that rattled in Lafleur's ears. He tossed out his coffee dregs and stood. The dog quivered with excitement as he walked to her. She grabbed up her ten-pound pot and trotted in circles, limping heavily on her bad leg. One front foot twisted crazily sideways, but she could act lame or not as she chose, it seemed. Lafleur considered her a model of adaptation. Adroitly, she jumped her chain each time she went around.

When he reached her, she dropped the pot and nuzzled his crotch, leaving a smear of dog food. The horse whinnied again. Lafleur unclasped the dog's chain and she took off, not limping at all. She crashed through a small opening in the wall of blackberry bushes, heading for the stable. He heard horse hooves thudding rapidly. It was an evening ritual between the dog and mare. He heard a woman shout, which was another ritual: Mrs. Good shouting at his dog. In a moment he heard Jones thrashing in the shallows. He heard ducks quacking. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wings whistling. Lafleur admired the ducks, their missile-like bodies and deep-set wings, their acceleration. They disappeared into the trees, weaving magnificently.

He set the pot in the doorway of the shed, then moved to the bed of his pickup, where he had groceries—a loaf of bread, canned chili and ravioli, beer, toilet paper, cookies, a fresh sack of dog biscuits, and a two-pound box of dehydrated milk. He looked up the road toward Ned Blaylock's place. Through the trees he could pick out a dot of gray roof near the bend in the road, that was all, but he'd given the place another hard look as he passed this evening: the big pink house set back from the road, the metal roofs of the shops gleaming out back, around the yard a fence made of yellow poles and chain link, and equipment everywhere, in every corner and nearly engulfing the house. Machinery leaned against trees and had torn through the steel fabric to the ditch next to the county road. The disrepair of the equipment increased the farther it was from the house, so that what Lafleur saw best as he drove by was the leading edge of confusion: heaps of iron, wheels, booms, tangled cables, buckets, plows, disemboweled engines, and thrusting through it all the wild blackberry bushes that refused to be daunted by leaking fuel and oil, or even by the gouging at their immense, tangled root systems. For weeks Lafleur had been picking things out as he passed: the wheel hub of a Mack truck, the tracks of a Caterpillar crawler, the engine block of a Case, even the familiar blade of a grader on which he'd ridden with his father years ago; and today the disarray had played a trick with him. Despite his childhood experience with Blaylock, despite the outrage he shared with Jewel, he was also as old now himself as Blaylock had been in the days of the monkey wrench, haunted by a sense of his own error and of knowing too much about human frailty, and he had discovered in himself a curious, circumspect, wary, and sardonic affection for the old despised one. Maybe it was Gus's method with Blaylock, passing over to Lafleur now, or maybe the prospect of having to work with the man. Maybe it was just the junk.

He liked that junk. Occasionally over the last several months he had seen direct evidence of Blaylock's presence, but never the man himself—sometimes a curl of exhaust coming from a running engine out back, and once the tail section of a pink Continental vanishing behind a descending garage door. Blaylock was too old, maybe, or too busy reconnoitering the carcass of the partnership to keep close charge of his machinery, and too much a pack rat to ship the irreparable out for salvage. Lafleur understood. He had the pack rat in himself, the impulse to allow his nest to become complex. One never knew when one would find just the part one needed in a junkyard, or at least a part that could be used, or maybe a part one had not even thought of wanting but which one wanted in its being found. One might need those things: bolts and clamps, a bit of iron rail or a piece out of a track, a length of hosing, copper tubing, a bearing or seal, a carburetor needle, or maybe a whole transmission to mate to an engine.

He rested his elbows on the edge of the pickup bed and thought about wanting. He thought about wanting and not knowing what one wanted. He thought about need. He thought about yielding. He thought about giving in to the fibers of attachment made out of DNA and memory and time that bound him to his father. He thought about his life, which seemed like a junkyard. He thought about fishing, which was one of the few things he knew that gave the kind of pleasure looking for something in a junkyard could give, and forgetting what one was looking for and getting lost in the yard, just dreaming and looking for whatever one might feasibly want, and slowly finding what one needed that way.

He moved. He picked up his groceries, carried them into the shed, and set them on a bench. He went back for Jones's pot in the doorway. Bending for the pot, he heard the fly again. He wedged the Coke bottle loose from the mud and turned it upside down. The fly dropped out, took off, banged into the wall and staggered in midair, then flew out of sight over the shed. Lafleur went back in and set the pot on the bench, shoving other articles aside. He switched on his gooseneck lamp. Just behind it was a blackberry bush. The roots had cracked the concrete floor and driven up a stalk between the wall and bench. Its leaves clung to a small, dusty window. The lamp cast a pool of light on the filthy floor and seeped to the profound heaps under the benches: cartons and jars, bundles, all manner of things compressing under their own weight. Too much junk here. Or enough junk, maybe, for him to have enjoyed if he had not felt entrenched in it. His cot was piled with soiled clothes. In a corner his tools were scattered and next to them was the small woodburner he'd kept himself warm with during winter. The dangerously cockeyed stove pipe vanished through a hole he had cut in the wall.

Outside, the sun was about to set. Through the doorway he could see the earth blackened by long shadows. He heard another whinny, a long bloodcurdling shriek. Jones came in and looked up at him, puckering her snout, then she sat and dragged herself toward him by her front paws, wiping her rump on the floor. She probably had worms. He went out and strode across the clearing, then pushed through the blackberry bushes and ferns, following the route of his hose. Jones came after him. The house stood to his right. Below, a donkey was in the corral along with the Goods' chestnut mare. Lafleur paused, looking. Mrs. Good and her daughter stood watching the animals. The mare trotted around the corral along the inside of the fence, her flanks darkened with sweat. The donkey, a big one, was an obscure color, not black exactly and not quite gray. It followed the mare. The two came around Lafleur's side of the corral. It was too much for Jones, who charged, barking wildly. The mare shied. The donkey danced sideways. Mrs. Good wheeled to shout at the dog, but Lafleur, moving to the corral, beat her to it: “Jones!”

He stopped next to Mrs. Good and she looked at him out of the corners of her painted eyes. She was chewing on a matchstick. The donkey followed the mare across the corral, then the two began to circle again. The mare had a gash on her flank. The animals passed under the shade of the cottonwoods at the far side of the corral. Coming out of the shade and into the low slanting sunlight, the donkey changed from black to a steam color with russet in it. The donkey was the color of dark tea, deep and changeable according to the play of light. “A donkey?” Lafleur said.

Mrs. Good took her matchstick out of her mouth and stroked the side of her nose with its flattened end. “We're making a mule.”

“A mule,” Lafleur said. He looked from her to the animals, then back again, wondering—Why? “Mind if I use your phone?” he said. He disliked troubling the Goods for their telephone. He disliked the trouble Jones gave them. Actually, he rather disliked the Goods themselves, wife, daughter, and husband, a rug salesman who never seemed to be home. He especially disliked the way Mrs. Good seemed to regard him—as the landlord. It made him feel like a target.

“Feel free,” she said. She was a solid woman who looked as though she had been inflated inside her pants and white cowboy shirt. She had red hair and plucked black eyebrows. The daughter, who stood on the other side of Mrs. Good, leaned forward and peered at Lafleur.

“Is Al up there?” he said.

Mrs. Good grinned at him, holding the matchstick between two front teeth. “Hell, no.”

The mare and donkey came around again and the donkey pushed the mare against the fence and bit at her head. The fence creaked and Lafleur instinctively stepped back. The mare snorted and spun, bent her head down. The donkey slipped behind and tried to mount her, but the mare broke free and pranced along the fence again. Jones leaned against Lafleur's leg. Puffs of clouds had begun to drift in. The earth in the corral was churned up and black, and the leaves on the cottonwoods and bushes and the rocks down near the river gleamed in the light. Over the river, visible through a clear space beyond the corral, an evening mist had begun to gather. A narrow, cocoon-like cloud floated above the river. Near the bank a sand spit extended into the water and a blue heron stood at the far edge, waiting for fish.

Nicole!

This was another reason he disliked troubling the Goods. The shed, so long as he stuck to the beaten path between it and his pickup, protected him from this view. Nicole had been playing on that spit with Andy. Tricia had been there, watching the two younger ones. They had a bucket and were dipping it into the water, catching minnows. Lafleur and Penny had been down at the back of the toolshed, barbecuing chicken. They'd come out from Portland for a weekend picnic, as they often used to do. The children had been schooled against the river, which in its heart had tremendous force. He remembered checking on the young ones there. Nicole was squatting with the bucket, her brown limbs dark against a yellow bathing suit. He saw her there now and felt a wrenching, and tried to force out the image. He gazed at the heron, then turned when Mrs. Good spoke: “That mare's a twitch.”

He glanced past Mrs. Good at her daughter, who was watching the animals intently. The girl was about seventeen and built not unlike her mother, but more tightly, closer to the bud, a distillation of the mother. He caught himself running his eyes down the girl's body. “That's a big donkey,” he said.

“He's a mean damn Abyssinian jack,” Mrs. Good said.

Lafleur smiled. This procedure didn't seem right. It seemed there should be a cage or a smaller corral, at least, or straps, or some such rigging to keep things under control. He wondered if Mrs. Good had any idea what she was doing. “Kind of rough,” he said.

“We had him shipped up from Redding, California,” Mrs. Good said. She leaned toward him and thrust out her chin and tongued her matchstick to the corner of her mouth. “Got here yesterday. If this takes, the mule's going to be worth a bundle, you bet.”

As she spoke, the donkey went for the mare's neck, but the mare came back, rearing and pawing at the donkey's head. Lafleur and the two women stared. The donkey went up with the mare and bounced a hoof off her head, but the mare went under him, biting at his chest, and nearly toppled him. He came down on her sideways. His leg muscles bulged and he bit at her neck and tried to work around to her hindquarters. Lafleur felt his leg muscles tightening. The mare jumped out and whinnied. The hair on Lafleur's neck prickled. The mare had cuts on her head now. The donkey spun and kicked her in the flank. The thud of it resounded and echoed back from the house. The donkey kicked her again and she bounced against the fence. The fence creaked and sagged. Jones nuzzled Lafleur's leg and he pushed her away. He found himself breathing heavily. The mare and donkey began to circle more quickly, blowing and kicking up chunks of mud. Their hooves thocked. Lafleur felt their warmth as they passed. Their sweat smelled pungent.

He looked down at the heron. It had its toes in the water, its neck outstretched, and its bill tilted downward, as is the way of herons in waiting. For as long as he could remember that sand spit had been there, though it changed its shape annually, and its elevation, and sometimes its position because of the flux of the changing banks and big river that surrounded it. Herons had fished from the spit, too, for as long as he could remember. He had played on the spit as a boy, and had fished from it, just as his children played on it when the family came down. He remembered what he wished not to remember, what came at him whenever it wanted to, and came with the force of a dream: himself bending over chicken pieces on the grill, and hearing cries, the voices of the girls, Tricia near them and Nicole's remote-sounding voice, and hearing Penny next to him suddenly gasping, then screaming—“Nicole!”—and himself straightening up, turning, knowing instantly that something was terribly wrong, and looking and seeing her out in the water, out in the current, and himself not moving, freezing, disbelieving, trying to get himself to move, then moving at last, finding himself right on Penny's heels. He remembered Penny's skirt and hair, askew and wildly fluttering, and her shrieking as she ran—“The tree! The tree!”—pointing at a dead cedar that had fallen into the far side of the river at a bend Nicole was headed for.

He'd seen Nicole's face coming up and going down, and her hands thrashing. She knew how to swim, but not in that fast, roiling water, not strongly enough for that. Her yellow bathing suit bobbed. At the spit he looked down into Tricia and Andy's stunned, wide eyes, and into Penny's face, sharp and agonized, then back down the river at Nicole. She bobbed past the tree. Penny waded into the water, and he broke into a run along the bank, crashing through the shrubs and stumbling on the rocks. He stopped to strip off his shirt, then ran again, then stopped and pulled off his trousers and shoes, and went in, swimming, though he was not a strong swimmer. He hoped to swim strongly enough to ride the current and catch her, but moving into the current, feeling its pull, he marveled at it and despaired, and heard Penny's voice behind him, from the bank, he thought, a thin wailing whipped around by the breeze—“Nicole! Nicole!” He'd seen her in front of him, the yellow spot bobbing crazily up and down and rolling in the mud-colored river, grown small, going around a bend, and he rushed around the bend, driven by the wild, inexorable current, turning head over heels in the water, then he glimpsed her again, the yellow dot still precisely the same distance ahead of him, small and lightweight. His limbs were going dead, and without thinking to do this, or willing it, he'd moved out of the heart of the current nearer the shore where the water had less force. He flailed and raised his head to look. She was gone.

He barely got back to the bank himself, half-drowned and vomiting, and racked with guilt—for letting the children play on the spit, for his inattention, for not acting faster, for not being a better swimmer, and—knowing this now—for not staying in the center of the river. And Penny, who'd been fighting her way along the bank with Andy and Tricia, when she reached him stopped in her tracks and her face wrenched with horror at the truth. Nicole was gone, snatched away from her. Her one hand twisted in Tricia's hair. She sank to her knees and clutched at Tricia, and moaned, “Not in that cold.”

Tricia looked up at her father. Andy, standing to one side, looked up. The children's eyes grew huge in their faces until it seemed they would blow out into the sky. Lafleur's knees buckled and he went down, sobbing uncontrollably. “Alone,” Penny wept. “So lonely for a child. It's no way,” and that night, a mother still, clinging to a mother's sense of a child's welfare even in death, she would say, “Not that way, it's no way for a young one to die, not Nicole, not taken like that in the cold, alone. Not without me!” She sat up straight in the bed and tore at her hair.

They'd called the fire department. The river was searched, but the body was never recovered. Nicole was utterly gone. She'd been sucked down to Portland, maybe, or was tangled in the locks, or dragged out to sea, or devoured, or atomized into water. That death was what Lafleur and Penny had always between them. Together they were gripped by that cold.

The mare and donkey circled the corral. He felt them and heard them blow air as they passed. He gazed at the heron. It was as if it were the same heron he had seen as a boy on the spit, an unchanged element in all the years, an intaglio, something as permanent as death incised through the skin of time, a masquerade of death dressed in baby blue, the exact and strange essence of time. The heron's long neck folded toward its body and unfolded again and swayed gracefully. It tipped its head to the side and froze, watching. Lafleur watched it. It was just the blue heron he was watching. He instructed himself in that: to watch, to be unafraid.

If one watched a heron closely when it caught a fish, one could sometimes see the head come up with the fish sideways in the beak, and then see the heron flip the fish acrobatically in the air, then swallow it headfirst. It was a good trick. Lafleur watched, thinking the bird was about to stab for a fish. The heron did not move. If he looked away for an instant, he knew, the heron might catch a fish. Or it might vanish altogether.

“She's about to accept him,” Mrs. Good said.

He turned. “Oh?”

Mrs. Good grinned. “You bet.”

He looked into the corral. The donkey appeared almost small next to the mare. He was wiry, long in the legs, high in the withers and straight in the back. He moved like silk, like a killer, and his tea color rippled as he moved in and out of the deepening shadows. Lafleur glanced at the heron. It hadn't moved. Its long legs, blue body, and extended head were poised against the silver cocoon of mist. It looked like a picture on a coin. The sky was turning pink. He looked back at the donkey. The donkey held his head low, his ears flat, and had an almost disconsolate expression. He looked sullen like a Spanish dancer, straight and tensed like one who is about to handle his partner brutally. The mare playfully bumped her hindquarters up against the donkey, then she slowed. The donkey slowed. There was a moment in which they were moving but seemed to have stopped, a lucid moment like a long inhalation of air in which their strength visibly gathered. Suddenly, the donkey lunged and bit into the mare's neck. The mare whinnied and stopped. Mrs. Good made a rattling sound in her throat. Standing there with the two women became too much for Lafleur's sense of propriety.

“I should just let myself in?” he said.

“Huh?” Mrs. Good said without looking at him. “In?”

“To use the phone,” he said.

“Oh, that,” Mrs. Good said. She chuckled. “I guess you know the way.” The donkey pawed at the mare's back and moved adroitly around her on his hind legs. Lafleur turned away. The daughter glanced up at him as he passed. Her eyes were wide and glassy. He walked up to the house and climbed the steps to the deck. Jones followed. He went inside to the kitchen. The black telephone hung on the wall near the sink, where his mother had wanted it to be. He located the phone book and searched for Blaylock's number. When he found it he put his finger on the name and paused. Jones sat on the deck, peering in the window at him. Mrs. Good was no longer at the corral, but her daughter stood there. He leaned over the counter and looked down and to one side of the house for Mrs. Good. She was nowhere to be seen. The girl looked small, and the mare and donkey looked small at the extreme end of the corral. They stood facing each other. Their heads overlapped. The coitus had stilled them. The heron had vanished from the spit. The twilight air had turned pink. The cocoon of mist above the river was pink. The trunks and limbs of trees on the opposite bank were faintly visible through the mist and made it look crenelated like a sheepskin. The surface of the river was like smoked glass. A dark beam floated into sight from behind the trees, cruised by, then vanished.

During the winter floods, it was not uncommon to see entire trees hurtle down. If they caught on the bank or on rock, they heaved like matchsticks. He had seen shattered boats, stoves, and parts of car bodies kept off the bottom by the speed of the water, and turkeys, pigs, and sheep, bloated cow carcasses dancing on the surface like balloons. Once, he'd seen a herd of Holsteins, one black-and-white cow after another, bouncing by. Exquisite, chaotic, and horrifying, the river was full of its trade with the earth. It was a sometimes macabre telemetry of everything upstream. It brought things by and sometimes it snatched them away.

He looked over in the direction of his toolshed, which was now utterly invisible. He looked back down at the phone book. The number was right there. He caught sight of a figure in the corner of his eye, and turned. Mrs. Good stood in the doorway to the living room. She looked directly back at him. Her hands hung at her sides and her red lips, without the matchstick now, were parted. Her abdomen swelled as she inhaled. Lafleur's breath jumped. He sank into the pit of his late, protracted abstinence. He was suddenly filled with desire, but he caught himself, thinking: No, no, not with you. He passed his eyes down her body, then turned away. His hand shook as he dialed the number.

The telephone rang at the other end. He looked down at the churned-up, blackened earth inside the corral, at the motionless animals, at the girl. A gust of wind made the girl's hair flutter and flipped up her shirt, baring the hollow of her back. He heard Mrs. Good's footsteps going away. He considered himself an idiot for having allowed himself to step into that situation, and an idiot for not capitalizing on it, and also an idiot for being tempted to do so. He made himself think about this other thing—the desert, and what he still assumed was a government project.

A voice came on and snarled at him: “Yeah?”