Lamb (14 page)

Nod.

“If we dug it up, the roots would be scaly and black.”

“No way.”

“Like the hide of the devil himself.”

She curled her lip.

“It’s so poisonous that a single blossom would kill someone your size.”

“Whoa.”

“Put you right to sleep like a princess in a fairy tale.”

“How many would it take to kill you?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a big guy.”

“But how many?”

“More than someone like you could gather in a single day.”

“I wasn’t saying anything.”

“Neither was I.”

“What’s it called?”

“I can’t remember. Death something. Or deathly something. Do you want to keep one?”

“Is it poisonous to touch?”

He plucked the cluster and they held their breath, both of them eyes wide and tracing its arc through the air as he slowly lowered it between two pages of American elms in her new North American tree book. “You be careful with this.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious, Em. If anyone saw it they’d know you were out west.”

“Okay.”

The meadow between the house and the hem of the mountains was wider than Lamb had reckoned. By the time they had crossed halfway to the swell of hill and trees, it had been nearly two hours of steady hiking, and their pants were soaked to the knees and their boots caked with manure and mud.

“If we hadn’t got you those boots, we’d have had to go back an hour ago.”

“Why?”

“In tennis shoes your feet would be blistered all to hell from wet socks.”

“Oh.”

“This is the part where you say, Gee, Gary, where would I be without you?”

“Gee, Gary, where would I be without you?”

“Tommie. Don’t ever say anything like that to a man.”

The passing day was marked by ravens calling, by constant twittering of song sparrows in the trees and on the fence posts. Acres of dry grass banded by red and gold ribbons of fireweed and yellow gumweed. Sagebrush grew to the height of the girl’s throat, and after once lifting her over a wall of fallen alder he backed up and hurdled it.

“I can still get up there!” he said, panting on the other side, hands on his knees, grinning up into the light at her.

“You’re not that old.”

“Oh, say that again, you sweet child.”

“You’re not. You’re not that old.”

By noon they were climbing the ridge, the aspen groves sporadically shading the sun from their foreheads and arms.

“What are these things everywhere?”

“Cow patties.”

“Cow patties?”

“Cow shit.”

“There’s flowers growing out of them.”

“I know it. Come here. I want to put some more sunblock on your face.”

“Why are they flat?”

“Cow faucet.”

“Sick.”

“Come here.” He squeezed a white pasty worm of sunblock into his hand. “Give me your face.”

“It won’t help.”

“I’m beginning to see that. You’re a little fragile, aren’t you?” He slathered her bluish white with the stuff, her skin hot to the touch, covering her face and nose and cheeks and collarbones and neck.

“I should have bought you a hat.”

“Like your dad’s cap?”

“A forest ranger hat. Let’s get one. Let’s braid your hair and get you a forest ranger hat.”

“What’s a forest ranger hat?”

“It’s what you need. Trust me. Hey.” He kneeled. “What do you think that is?”

“Footprints.”

“I know that,” he said. “Of what?”

“A bear?”

“No. That’s from a coyote. Maybe a fox. Come here,” he said, lowering his voice. “Get down here and I’ll show you.”

On their knees in the weeds and dust he pointed at the paw print, its tiny dashes of claws in the dirt. “See that? That means it’s from a kind of dog, rather than a kind of cat.”

“Like a wolf?”

“Nah. No wolves up here. Just coyotes.”

“Don’t they bite?”

“They won’t bother us.”

“When is it a cat?”

“No claw marks.” He erased the claw marks with his thumb. “Like that. Got it?” And Tom. If you’re out on a hike and it’s a cat, like a mountain lion, you get out of town, okay?”

“Now someone behind us will think there’s a lion out here.”

“Is there someone behind us?”

“If there was, they’d be scared.”

“Aren’t we smart to make our trail safe like that?”

“Pretty smart.”

“Do you think it would work in Lombard, if you drew cat prints on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Maybe we could empty out the city that way,” he said, standing and wiping off his knees. “We could have the whole place to ourselves.”

“If there were a real mountain lion in the city,” the girl said, standing and copying him, brushing off her pants, “they’d just shoot it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s correct.” He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked out ahead. “Listen. Let’s make a deal about this hike. We’ll eat lunch in the lowest trees we find, then head back.”

“How far do you think that is?”

“Two more miles. Are you good for it?”

“This is the farthest I’ve ever gone.”

“It’s good for you. You have to get your heart rate up every day.”

Two hours past noon they reached the sudden tilt in the ground that eventually rose—still another mile before them—into the distant mountains socked in by clouds. The greasewood and sage gave way to taller brush, smaller trees braceleted with poison oak and ivy. It was dense. There was no trail.

It was hot. Everything bleached white and yellow in the punishing heat. When Lamb turned and saw the girl working her legs and sweating and squinting into the sun—Christ, what can a man say? It was like his bones had been wired tight all his life, and seeing her that way, everything suddenly went slack. His mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread. What a man she rendered him, simply by being a girl who could be picked up and moved: what he wanted to be, what he ought to be, what
was most unintelligible and unplanned and true in him when he carried her out of her fettered world to this. How powerful she was as long as she asserted no will of her own.

“You okay back there?” he called into the open blue before him.

“Yep.”

“Strong girl.”

“It’s from swimming,” she called up.

He stopped. “Jessie really took you swimming?”

She put her hand to her forehead. “Every morning at five in the goddamned morning. He makes me do a mile in his lane, then he does another one.”

He stared at her. “Did he take you swimming on the mornings I picked you up and took you for pancakes?”

She shrugged.

“Well.” He nodded. “Good for Jessie.”

“Yeah,” she snorted. “But not so good for me.”

He turned around and increased his pace. “I am not going to have any sympathy then,” he said, “knowing you can swim a mile.”

When they came into the trees they were surrounded by white legs of aspen, yellow leaves flashing like golden coins above them. Sweet clover and Queen Anne’s lace, cow parsnip and yarrow and stemless white flowers in pretty green-and-white whorls at their feet. Clouds came up above the
canopies of trees and the wind swept them across a sky so simultaneously bright and dark it stopped David Lamb’s heart and he thought, this is it, this is the limit of all of it, right here: me and this child and all the money and progress that’s brought us here. This is the limit. And he smelled the sunblock and his own sweat and knew that the end of the story had already begun.

They sat cross-legged on the earth. Lamb took off his father’s ball cap—because I’m sitting down to a meal, he said—and opened his pack and removed the potted ham and butter sandwiches and the girl took the apple juice out of her pack.

“Oops,” he said. “We forgot cups. You don’t mind sharing?”

“Nah.”

“What if I have cooties?”

She rolled her eyes.

“What, you don’t care?”

“I don’t believe in cooties.”

“That’s dangerous thinking if I’ve ever heard it.”

“Well, I’m thirsty.”

A big wind moved through the bunched tops of spruce and fir, and the long white aspen swayed like wooden pins. The girl’s hair blew across her bluish face.

“You look like a dead girl.”

“I do?”

“Your face is all white. It’s a little unsettling. Did you eat that flower?”

“No.”

“You look very, very strange. Your skin is iridescent.”

“I wish I could see.”

“Here. I have an idea.” Lamb set his half-eaten sandwich on the top of his pack and ran a fingerful of dark, greenish-black dirt in three stripes across each of her cheekbones.

“Was that a cow patty?”

“Probably at some point.”

“Sick, Gary.”

“But it looks beautiful, Em. You look beautiful. I wish you could see.”

“How does it look?”

“Like you’re some wild stray piece of earth that took the form of a girl.” He looked at her. “I’m going to tell you something very serious, but you have to promise not to take it the wrong way.”

“Okay.”

“Are you listening with all your ears?”

“Yes.”

“Just this, Tommie: you will never look so beautiful again in this lifetime.” He opened the apple juice and handed it to her. “Drink that.” He picked up his sandwich. “I don’t want you getting dehydrated. You’re a great little hiker. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks.” She lifted the bottle to her mouth.

“If you were in Lombard today, what would you be doing?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

She looked up into the tree branches. “Probably be going home from school.”

“All alone?”

“I’d check my computer. Or watch TV.”

“When you get back home, will you make yourself potted ham and butter sandwiches and think of me?”

“Sure.” She leaned back on one hand and took a bite. “If you can get this stuff.”

“You can find it at the 7-Eleven.”

“I’m not supposed to go in those.”

“The 7-Eleven?”

“Mom says weird people hang out there.”

“That’s a good mom.”

“I guess.”

“So I’ll send you boxes of potted ham. No return address. It will be very mysterious. And when you open a can you can pretend it’s a love letter.”

“Gary!”

“Oh, ignore me. You should ignore everything I say.”

She made like bearing her fangs when she noticed him staring at her. They finished their sandwiches
and juice, and Lamb took a chocolate bar out of his pack and broke it in half.

“Know what we need to really make this perfect?”

She took half the chocolate.

“Binoculars.” He nodded up toward the north end of the plain. “I bet we could see all kinds of mule deer and pronghorn.”

“Those dots?”

“If we go back into town, we’ll get you a pair. They’re expensive.”

“Like how much?”

“Hundreds. Tell you what. We get a pair, they’re yours to keep.”

“Okay.”

“We’re going to need a moving truck to get all your new stuff back to Illinois.”

She laughed.

“Where are you going to hide all of your presents when you get home?”

“My closet.”

“You’ve already figured it out.”

“Yep.”

“Doesn’t anybody go in your closet?”

“Nope.”

“Not even your mom on Saturday mornings when she’s gathering the laundry.”

“I do my own laundry.”

“Do you really?”

“Yep.”

“No, really?”

“For serious.”

“Do you separate the whites and the colors?”

“Whites get hot, colors get cold.”

“You’re a resourceful girl, you know that?”

When they finished and packed up their things, he stood. “I’m going to see a man about a horse. You stay put.” The girl waited and Lamb watched her from a distance, zipping up. When she looked up, he held up his thumbs and index fingers in a rectangle as if he were holing her in the frame of a photograph. He could see the little white flash of her smile, and when he reached her, he went into his pack and handed her a little tuft of toilet tissue. “Your turn. That man wants to know what you think of a red pony.”

“Huh?”

“After you wipe, put this under a rock or use a stick to put some dirt over it.”

“Gary!”

“Don’t get squeamish on me. This is just our bodies, right? Don’t you know how a male body works?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. And I know how a female body works. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. I’m glad we got that out of the way. Now go on and take care of business.”

They hiked in through the valley side by side, two dark figures tracing the grassy inside slope of a pale green parabola, their shadows lengthening before them, the girl in a wreck of sweat and dirt and dust and sunblock and cow shit.

They reached the shop again in late afternoon, the girl carrying the empty canteens, one over each shoulder, canvas straps marking her chest. Lamb was bare chested, his blue work shirt tied into a turban over the girl’s head. He hadn’t known about skin like hers. Even sunblock couldn’t help. He should have spread cow shit all over her face.

“We’ll help you rinse off with cool water and soap you off before it hurts to the touch.”

“It doesn’t feel bad.”

“It will.” He ran his hands under the hose faucet and back through his hair. “If we were out working we’d rinse our hats and shirts in the river and put them back on.”

“Can I get a root beer?”

“Good idea. Get me one of those other beers will you?”

“Do I get a sip?”

“One sip. Take it right off the top and bring me the rest. I’ll get the soap.”

Lamb went into the cabin for towels and bath soap and on his way out saw a flash of Alison Foster’s white hair in the doorway of the shop. In two steps Lamb was through the door, filthy, old ratty towels rolled up beneath his arm, and just in time to see Tommie—her face a terrific ruin—turning around from the workbench and lowering the open beer from her lips, her little mouth pursed in a conspiratorial grin pointed mistakenly at Foster, whose presence she’d taken for Lamb’s.

Lamb stepped past the old man, took the beer from her hand, and slapped her full across the face. His hand stung and for a moment he was afraid she was going over. It was too much. He’d never hit anyone so small. She looked up at no one, stunned. She raised her hand to her face. She made no sound. He loved her for it.