The Ram (10 page)

Linx reaches over and presses the bone and her hand back down to the plate. The waiter lifts an eyebrow at Peach as he sets the white custard on the table and backs away. She eyes the cherry sauce and notes that it looks like coagulated blood. Yet it gives off a scent of deep, summertime sweetness.

“Then fill yourself up,” Linx says.

“I’m trying,” Peach replies.

Monday, the 30
^th
of March, 2015

27 Riley

It’s strange not to head into work on a Monday morning. Riley tosses around in bed until his room is completely swamped with light from the midmorning sun. He normally would be at work by now, putting an hour or two of sweat into sanding down sharp edges on grating to place on machines meant for separating the gold out of worthless soil.

Now, he had nothing to keep him occupied. Except his foot. And his conquest of Nell. He hadn’t forgotten what he’d sworn to do last Friday night. The more he thought about it, the more intensely he wanted her. Claiming her would be a victory for Riley. A chest pounding, testosterone-fueled self-esteem boost. And he thought if he could name it what it was, it was okay to want it.

He wanted to feel like a whole, American man again. After all he’d been through in the past few years. And now, after the anvil, he wanted it even more.

Nell would be a means to his selfish end.

His crutches carry him down the stairs to his kitchen where his cell phone is plugged in, battery charging since last night. He pulls the cord out of the phone and eyes the screen. He’s had three calls, all from Double Al, no voicemails. He smiles, thinks of all the blue-collar assholes who he works with,
worked
with, missing their whipping boy on Monday morning. Because no matter how hard he strove to learn the job and fit in, he was always a pretty boy lawyer to them. And no loss of limbs would likely give him more credibility. It might actually take the small respect they had for his abilities completely away.

He taps Double Al’s name when he calls it up on the phone screen and after two rings the man picks up.

“Son,” he says for a greeting, “how’s the foot?”

“I’m sure the toes will grow back in no time. That’s how it works right? I failed basic anatomy and biology a few times.”

Double Al doesn’t humor him with a laugh. His voice is strong, true.

“I’ve been calling because I’ve been thinking about what happened to you last week. I haven’t been sleeping much. I keep thinking about doing a safety check on all the shop tools. And for some reason I think it needs to be done at 3am.”

“Accidents,” Riley says and then ventures a guess at what’s really bothering Double Al. “I’m not suing you. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

The line goes quiet for a moment and then Double Al speaks, a hint of incredulous defensiveness in his voice. “No. I’m not worried about that at all. I’m actually worried about you, son. I want you to come back to work.”

“I just lost the toes a week ago. I wouldn’t be of any use to the work soccer team.” Riley laughs at his own joke and tucks the phone tight against his ear and his shoulder. He hobbles his way over to the refrigerator and pulls out a loaf of wheat bread and sets it next to his toaster.

“I don’t mean today,” Double Al replies, all business. “But I do mean for you to come back. In whatever capacity you choose.”

Riley smiles and drops a piece of bread in the toaster. He knows Double Al doesn’t expect him to be capable of manual labor immediately after the accident. He’ll probably want to tuck him away in an office somewhere, making cold calls to recreational miners and sending emails to gold websites to garner cross promotion of products.

He starts to speak but Double Al cuts him off.

“Don’t answer me now. Just know that I’ll demand you back eventually. I want you to rest up and heal. And when you’re up for getting out I’m going to take you to dinner and I’ll convince you to come back. By my word, I will.”

“Okay,” Riley says, nearly losing his grip on the phone between his cheek and shoulder. “I’ll let you woo me when I can look my best.”

“No joke,” his boss pushes and then hangs up without a mention of farewell.

Riley puts the phone down and watches as the metal coils in the toaster glow cherry red. The bread turns from brown to black as he stares into the appliance. He thinks it’s strange one can watch something transform, but not be able to point out when the change actually occurs. When the bread moves from soft to hard, light to dark.

On Riley’s refrigerator is the drawing Tate sent him on his last birthday. He looks it over again, noting the careful attention the young boy had put into scribbling chartreuse on the paper to approximate grass under the feet of five and six-legged bovines. The large, human-sized golden eagle is where the kid must have put in the hours. Brown feathers are outlined in black marker and the bird’s eyes stare out of the picture, circles of gold glitter glue ringing nearly perfect dots of black. He wonders what Tate does now, at his home in Weiser, Idaho with Riley’s ex-girlfriend, Kristin. He wonders if Tate does more drawings, sends them out to other men having birthdays, men who could also potentially be Tate’s biological father.

His finger is moving again like it did the night he passed out in his guest room, tracing the same pattern over and over on the countertop as he waits for his toast. When it pops free of the toaster, Riley picks back up his phone and thumbs through his contacts until he finds one labeled
Crucible
. He hits the send button and decides if he should dress his toast in butter or Nutella.

Tuesday, the 31
^st
of March, 2015

28 Peach

Peach wonders if creepers like their sex at the beginning of the week. Though it’s a Tuesday, Blaze Lounge is alive with men looking for succor or company in the shadow of tan, cosmetically-enhanced strippers.

She instantly regrets wearing the mauve lambswool sweater and bringing in a fleece jacket tucked under her arm. While the air is still chill outside, inside the strip club the atmosphere is stuffy and hot and smells of sweat and drugstore cologne. She makes her way through the large front room with the stage, weaving around tables to the back of the room. The eyes of the clientele rake across her body as she moves. As far as she can tell, she’s the only female in the place who isn’t dressed in pasties and a thong, gyrating to bad music on stage or tending bar.

She claims a small table in the darkest corner of the place and takes a seat. The legs of the table are uneven and the wobble makes her feel antsy. She swipes a small stack of drink coasters off a neighboring table and tucks them under the short leg. Then she tries to calm herself. She takes deep breaths. Occasionally one of the men glances back her way, but she doesn’t make eye contact with any of them. She keeps her face forward, focuses on one dancer who does a shabby job dancing in cowboy boots and a small cowboy hat made of floppy leather, a black string running under her chin, keeping it on her head. Her costume is fringed suede concealing all the parts of her form Idaho law says she can’t show to the public. Peach can’t tell what color the dark leather is in the low light of the room, but the pieces of choppy fabric sway when she dips, spins, shakes. Peach imagines the woman having to ride a Palomino, cook sliced potatoes over a campfire, and rustle cattle all while donning those skimpy bits of cowhide.

The hair of the stripper peeks out from under the cowboy hat. It’s the kind of purple red that only comes from a tube of chemicals and the front of her hair hangs in long panels at the sides of her face, growing shorter toward the back of her head. It transitions to neatly shorn, shorter than the hair of most traditionally-minded men, when it reaches the spot where neck meets skull.

A waitress comes to Peach’s table, her body’s curves hugged by a tight satin jumpsuit.

“Can I get you something, honey?”

“Just water,” Peach says and then remembers her manners before the woman walks away. “For now. Thank you.”

The truth is Peach won’t order alcohol. She’s never gotten past the way all booze, upon hitting her tongue, makes her think of the rubbing alcohol that had been blotted on her knees. The time both of them were pulpy, bloody, strips of skin hanging off her kneecaps and bits of broken shale rock and sand embedded in the wounds. That zippy smell of isopropyl alcohol that shot through her nose to her mouth would always be associated with fear and confusion and the shattering of morals.

And she hates the way it dulls her senses.

The stripper with the fake red hair and large, buoyant breasts continues her shuffle across the stage. A man stands and wanders to the edge of the runway. His mouth is turned up in a sneer as he tucks a solitary dollar into the waist of her panties.

“Baby.”

Peach hears another man’s voice but doesn’t realize he’s talking to her until he takes a seat at her table. He’s a short man, middling years, with a large gut that hangs over his belt and tight Wranglers. She wonders if Tuesday night is a theme night, Rodeo or Cowboy, and she didn’t get the memo.

She doesn’t respond to him, even when he sits. She crosses her arms in front of her body, looks to the entrance, the way out.

“I’m not hitting on you, blondie. I’m the owner.” The man says this with his chin lifted, his eyes wide.

Peach lets her down her guard a bit. While she doesn’t want attention from the owner, at least it’s not a member of a bachelor party or a drunken lout certain his chances of nailing her are high.

“Okay,” she says. “Hello.”

“You look a bit like my mother, when she was young,” he says and Peach nods her head in acknowledgement.

The owner of Blaze Lounge talks directly to her breasts, not even trying to hide where his gaze is locked. Peach considers he’s probably used to looking at chests, in a professional and salacious manner, all day long. Why should her chest be any different?

“You want a job?” he asks.

“What?” Peach stutters a bit. “No, thank you.”

“Well you should think on it, on account of those big titties you have,” he says, eyes never leaving the product he covets. “You’d make good money here.”

Peach shifts a bit in her seat, brings her arms up higher to cover more of her body from his heavy stare.

“No, not interested,” she repeats and tries to focus on the stripper.

“Right,” the man laughs and pushes his belly out as he rocks around on his buttocks. The chair scrapes on the floor, makes a sound like a kettle of water at full boil.

“Just thought I’d ask. You’re in here so much, I figured you wanted something. I see you a few times a week. Though I don’t mind if you just wanna watch. You’re allowed to be a regular, now. Welcome. Feel free to rub one out in the pisser.”

Peach smirks, anxious he’ll begin to study her face after his assessment of her breasts. She puts up a hand, leans on her palm, turns away her chin. The man keeps his place next to her, attention turned to the stage, eyes on the stripper’s body draped in leather. His shin thwacks against the leg of the table she just stabilized and when the redheaded stripper ends her dance, he puts two short fingers in his mouth and salutes her with a piercing whistle.

29 Riley

“I can’t believe you won’t give me a ride,” Riley yells into the phone. He’s sure a speck of saliva has landed on his screen but he’s too annoyed to wipe it off on his shirt.

“It’s a Tuesday. And it’s late afternoon. I’m still at work, Rye. I have a meeting at six tonight. There’s no way I can take you to the strip club today. Get over it.” Walker’s voice is tight and clipped.

Riley holds the phone away from his mouth and hits the speaker button. “I need to get going on this thing with the stripper, Walker. It’s what I’m doing right now. I’ve got to get to work on bagging her. And I can’t really do that from my house, now can I?”

“It was a good thing you never had to argue a case in court. I’m going to hang up on you. Seriously.”

Riley closes his eyes and grits his teeth. He only wants one thing to go his way. And he believes this one thing is Nell. Whether Walker helps him is his choice. But he won’t beg his friend.

“Fine. Go to your boring meeting. I’m going to lie down and watch tennis or something.”

He can hear the way Walker’s voice lightens. “Good choice. Stay off your feet so you can heal, brother. I’ll check up with you later.”

But when Riley tosses his phone on the couch, he doesn’t let his body go with it. He doesn’t want to rest. He’s restless.

He makes his way sans crutches to a storage closet near the door to his garage. He uses his hands against the plastered walls to hop his way there and pulls a small plastic tote down from a shelf inside the closet. He makes sure his feet are out of the way and then he lets the bin drop to the floor instead of gently placing it down. Riley steadies himself with one arm on his taupe-colored wall and flips the lid off with his other hand.

The bin is full of old track trophies, yearbooks from high school, pictures paper-clipped together in small stacks. He rummages around until he produces a well-used footbag, actual Hacky Sack brand. It’s red, yellow and green, the colors he associates with Rastafarians, but scuffed with dirt and its pigmentation muted from use and years. The weaving is hemp and the inside is full of little beans. It gives a bit in his clenched fist.

He leaves the tote open, memorabilia scattered around on the floor and jumps his way to his living room and the couch where he tossed his phone. He looks at his abandoned crutches pitched against his entertainment center and can’t stand the thought of watching tennis players volley and sprint around a court while he’s bereft of half his toes. He hops over to his coat closet and pulls a right running shoe and a left snow boot out from a shoe rack.