The Ram (21 page)

She moves to the bedroom and Linx follows her, watching as she leans back and lets her body fall onto the bed. She keeps her hands on her head as she falls and then shimmies toward the black headboard, smiling. Linx climbs in next to her and they fuck, hard and lovely over the white sheepskin throw.

Later, Peach decides Linx can stay the night and he pokes at her for some sort of meaning in the allowance. “So you cooked for me. We had sex and now you’re actually letting me stay in your bed. I think we’re in a relationship.”

She picks up her copy of
The Gods of Mars
and uses it to slap Linx on the back. It’s her only response and then she stands up, leaves the room and comes back with a transparent orange bottle of pills.

“They’re technically yours, so do you want one?” Peach holds the bottle of Ambien out to Linx and then crawls under the sheets.

“You’d think I’d be tired after that, but I guess you just keep me awake,” Linx says and runs his tongue over his teeth. He takes a pill from the container, dodging the paperback Peach swats at him with yet again. He puts the pill in the back of his mouth and swallows.

He hands the bottle to Peach and moves a bit of hair out of her eyes. She reacts quickly, grabbing his hand and moving it down to rest on her waist. She pulls a pill, white and oblong from the bottle, and puts it on her tongue.

“My mouth is dry,” she says, hopping up to walk to her master bathroom. “Need water.”

Shutting the door behind her, she squats on the toilet and spreads her legs. Peach lets the pill fall from her mouth and it hits the rim of the bowl, almost zipping off across the floor. She pees and then flushes the toilet, washes her hands and strolls back to bed.

The sleeping pill goes to work quickly on Linx. He’s already yawning. She picks back up her book about one of John Carter’s adventures on Mars. He’s a man who doesn’t belong on Earth and finds a home in the stars. In this, she relates to the protagonist of the book. She reads for hours, looking over periodically to see Linx asleep, his chest raising lightly, his lips slightly parted.

61 Riley

The three cards are heavy in his hand: a belated birthday card, one with artwork of a sad-looking panda, the last with a pictorial meadow of spring flowers. The bourbon in his stomach tells him to burn the cards, to get out a book of matches, go into his backyard, sit next to his fire pit and give the bizarre messages to the flames. Just like Hamal may have done to Double Al’s Dodge Ram. Even if Riley sees no real correlation between the cards and the truck. The false confidence of the alcohol makes Riley think he can do it, too. Set fire to things. Sacrifice things.

With the cards in one hand and the bottle of Maker’s Mark in the other, he stumbles to his wallet he left on the shoe bench in his foyer. He puts down the booze and it sloshes around in the clear glass. Digging around in his wallet, he comes away with the business card for Detective Dauchaun. He flips the cream-colored rectangle printed with phone numbers and email addresses between his fingers and then tosses it onto the cushioned bench. It’s nearly eleven at night. There are a dozen reasons for Riley not to call the officer and share the contents of his strange cards with the man’s answering machine. But none of them seem good enough to stay his hand.

Riley is mad at this Hamal and needs to tell someone other than Walker about the cards. Even if Hamal is not a firebug.

He removes his phone from his jeans and blinks, trying hard to clearly see the numbers on the keypad. He looks at the officer’s primary number on the card and punches it into the phone. After seven rings, the voicemail kicks on and Riley tries to pull his thoughts into one cohesive statement. The buzz of the tone passes. His mind grinds to stillness and then he hangs up, never getting a word out.

The smell of the truck fire is so fresh in his mind Riley can call it forth at will. He tips back and lands on the bench, the tang of burning synthetics in his nose. He picks up his phone again and dials a number at random, using three of the numbers from his high school locker combination.

“Hello?” A sleepy, elderly woman answers the phone and Riley is on the cusp of finding words. His voice is tremulous.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Who are you?” she echoes.

Riley yells into the phone. “A man! I’m a man!”

The woman yawns, then speaks. “It sounds like it, dear. You should get some sleep.” Then she hangs up and Riley lets the phone fall from his hand to the hardwood floor of his foyer. He looks around his body, snatches up the three cards and throws them into the air, the cardboard folds opening slightly in the shape of Vs, faraway birds in flight, before falling to the earth, too.

Summer, 2003

62 Peach

Patti tosses the bouquet of yellow yarrow and orange roses on the bedspread and then pinches the tip of her nose until it flushes maroon. Peach picks up the bouquet and twirls the stems around in her palms. She waits for the explosion.

“You’re too young for marriage, Peach,” she begins, the loose skin of her triceps jiggling as she shakes her arm gripping her snub nose. “You don’t even know yourself. How do you think you can know another person well enough to marry them? At nineteen? Are you just doing this to spite me? You are, aren’t you?”

Peach brings the flowers up to her nose and breathes deeply. The musty smell of the yarrow causes her to cough. She keeps her head bowed as she sits on the bed with one of the potential flower combinations for her wedding bouquet. This set of autumnal colors she had liked the most.

She thinks her adoptive mother might be right about her not knowing herself well enough. But she feels like marrying Adam is better than the alternative. Being alone. She’s been lonely for nineteen years, surrounded by a never-ending cavalcade of new foster parents, schools, houses. She’s never lacked for quantity of souls, just quality. At least Adam wants her to marry him. He’s insistent, in fact. And him wanting her is better than no one wanting her at all.

And she knows one of the reasons Patti objects so adamantly to the union has nothing to do with Peach. It has to do with the fact that Patti has never been married, has never found a partner to share her life with. It must sting to see Peach engaged and planning a wedding before her twentieth birthday. But Patti doesn’t bring up this fact. It’s something Peach understands about Patti’s perception of the world. That all events and experiences, good or bad in Peach’s life, are directly related to Patti. The good ones are due to her excellent mothering. The bad ones are Peach’s attempts to cause Patti suffering and disappointment.

Patti lets go of her nostrils and the rest of her face deepens in color. She fans herself with her hands and takes a sip of a tepid Diet Coke. “Is this your way of tricking me to let you move back home? Because you know how I feel about that. When you’re eighteen, you’re an adult and can tend to yourself. I don’t respond well to manipulation, Peach. But you always try to change my rules. This marriage is just another act. Just another way of manipulating me, right?”

Peach wants to say she’s been tending to herself for years, before leaving Patti’s house, but she knows it’s best to keep silent when Patti has her emotional tirades. Peach thinks of Adam’s dark hair, the thickness of it. It might be thick enough to bend the prongs of combs. He has dark circles under his eyes, not from illness or age, but from lack of sleep combined with his Basque heritage. She doesn’t care he’s an older man by eleven years. What he offers her is stability, something she’s never truly had in her life.

Peach bears witness as Patti, the woman who never truly wanted Peach, tries to think of new tactics to keep Peach hers alone. She takes another drink of Diet Coke and then pulls a cigarette case engraved with the image of a lake out of her handbag.

“I know who I am,” Peach says, but her statement isn’t exemplified by her quiet tone.

Patti freezes, setting down the little silver box. “Excuse me? Wise to the entire world, are we Peach? No one has a real identity at nineteen. I’m fifty-one years old and I still wonder who I am. Don’t be stupid, Peach. You have no clue. This is just you getting in your jabs, trying to show me up. I understand your game and I won’t play it. Won’t play it at all!”

Peach buries her face in the flowers, the satiny petals of the roses cup her chin and she swallows to keep from coughing again at the scent of the yarrow. She whispers into the blooms a wish for something better.

She whispers, “I am Peach Barrow. I will own my life. I am special, powerful, and full of energy. This life of mine
is
mine.”

But she can’t help herself from hedging her bets, just like she plans to do with Adam and how she has for years with Patti.

“Someday.”

Spring, 2014

63 Riley

Not only does he try to use the same condom twice, he tries to use it with two different girls. It’s not exactly a threesome Riley engages in; the women are separated by a piece of free-standing bamboo screen that folds in at sharp angles, cutouts in the wood covered in rice paper. The ladies are roommates, college girls at Boise State, and Riley doesn’t remember which one he came home with because he’d been deep in the bottle when he made his play. Once he was in the small apartment with the Jimi Hendrix poster on the inside front door and not only a blue-glassed bong on the dresser, but a makeshift apple pipe in the kitchen, he went for both of them. The girls had been fighting, however, and were adamant they not engage one another physically. Hence the barrier.

He does his best to juggle fucking the two women, zipping around the room partition to lick a nipple before jumping up to get his balls squeezed. The girls find the entire fiasco entertaining, and when he leaves one woman for the next, each breaks out into a fit of giggles fueled by pot and youth. Having spent himself in the brunette, he tries to keep the condom on for another go in the raven-haired roomie with the tiny breasts.

She catches him as he tries to force in the semen-filled tip and slaps him hard on the upper arm. He shrugs and rips off the condom before sticking his naked dick in her and choking her out until she comes.

“You on the pill?” he asks.

She leans back, languorously touching her chest. Her friend walks past the screen and scowls before picking her underwear out of her butt crack and taking long swigs of orange juice from a jug left out on the coffee table.

“I think so?” she says and stares at a string of green Christmas lights tacked to the popcorn-textured ceiling.

“Well if not,” Riley laughs, “I have the money to take care of it.” He slaps her hard on the belly and she winces and smiles.

He really does. Riley coming into a lot of cash was the sole benefit to his pillars of the community, well-to-do parents dying suddenly.

He stands up, cracks his back and walks naked to the one window overlooking a grassy area on the BSU campus.

“What are we wanting to eat tonight, ladies? Mushrooms or cocaine?”

The brunette wipes her mouth clean of the citrus juice and stares vacantly at Riley.

“I could do some coke. We could hit a club and all screw in a bathroom stall. I sort of even like Casey again.”

The raven-haired woman keeps her eyes on the lights. “I’m down for it. Blow and sex. But this time in the ass.”

Riley watches a group of boys toss a small yellow Frisbee around the common area outside. They have Nalgene water bottles hanging from carabineers on their belt loops. They take long drinks of what is likely vodka instead of water.

He turns and scratches himself. He’s in love with zero responsibility, smitten with his days without work, lustful about his windfall of cash. He feels free from the expectations of society, released when his parents were killed. He’s burning like wildfire.

“Put on nice dresses. No rayon or spandex, ladies. Let’s get some lobster first and then get fucked up.”

Friday, the 17
^th
of April, 2015

64 Peach

“You might actually need to see a counselor. Like one who doesn’t consider you a friend. Someone you can talk to about the changes you’re going through. Because I don’t think I’m doing enough.”

Camille, sits back in her ergonomic office chair, a box of takeout sweet and sour pork in her lap. She lifts a piece of meat to her lips with chopsticks and licks it clean of sauce before plunking it in her mouth.

Peach is jittery, bites at her cuticles on her fingers. She’s running out of time to commit to her plan. And she needs a pep talk from Camille. They’re becoming regular things, these mini-sessions when Peach has a lull between her own clients. But Camille keeps pressing for more specific information from Peach, and Peach is stubborn in her refusal to give it. They’re at a stalemate and Peach considers yielding a little to Camille’s questions, if only so she can get some insight into what might be keeping her from embracing her path to her new self completely and resolutely.

“No, Camille, really, you help so much,” Peach says and hands her coworker a napkin from the plastic bag the meal was delivered in.

“Then let me really help you. Tell me what it is you’re afraid of when it comes to changing your life? Change in general? A specific fear? Something has you frozen. I can tell by your body language, how you’ve been coming into work either exhausted or slightly maniac. You’re wrestling with a decision. Standing at a crossroads, right?”

Camille ignores her meal for a moment. “Look in my eyes, Peach. Dead on into them. Right now.”

Peach tilts her head back and exhales sharply, but then she does what Camille asks of her. She’s shocked at the tears that prick up and slip out of her lids when she engages the woman fully. Camille doesn’t respond to the crying and maintains her hard stare.