The Ram (8 page)

“How about this one? You’re just not my type.” She softens her delivery with a smile.

“You don’t like your men crazy?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Peach hedges, “but you aren’t crazy, Michel. We all need a little help sometimes.”

Michel tilts his head and digs in his front pocket for his cigarette. She looks at the thing: Camel, filterless. He puts it in his mouth.

“You never light it, do you?” Peach asks.

“Course not. Then what? I’d just have to find another.”

Peach can’t fault his logic. And she finally decides to chance a look into his eyes. He has short lashes, but they’re thick and dark and his right cheek is punctuated with a sole dimple. She feels blood rising to her face and she breathes deeply. He’s cute, but no matter what she says to Michel’s face, he is certainly crazy.

And there is the other matter which complicates things.

He keeps his dark eyes on hers and she knows she’ll have to turn away from him soon.

“I just don’t think dating you would be appropriate,” she quips. She settles into his stare just a bit. She takes it as a challenge to keep breathing under stressful conditions.

“Because of the therapist and patient relationship?”

“What?” Peach is thrown for a moment. She hadn’t been thinking of their professional arrangement, but of course it would be the obvious reason not to engage in a romantic relationship with Michel. It was the most obvious reason to him and so Peach needed to go with it. He could never know the most obvious reason for her. At least, not yet.

“Yes, right. The completely wrong thing to do.”

And then she finally turns around and unlocks her door. She’s not afraid to have her back to him. She instinctively knows he’ll never attack her, grab her, and overpower her. And Peach is grateful for this feeling of safety with Michel. It makes her desire to change herself that much easier. Because she’ll have one less worry in the future

“I’ll see you next week,” Peach says as she slips into her car and shuts the door. She does not lock it, afraid it would hurt his feelings.

Michel removes the cigarette from his mouth. He wipes the end of it on his purple cardigan and puts it back in his shirt pocket. His answer is muffled by the metal and glass between them.

“I’ll see you tonight in my bed,
ma chérie
. Dreams and dreams and dreams of a ripened Peach.”

21 Riley

“I think my dick got harder when I noticed her flabby wall of a boyfriend watching us from the bar.”

Walker shifts his Miata down a gear and pulls into Riley’s driveway. Little solar lights dot the walkway up to his front door, put in by the landscapers he’d hired when he first bought the house. A tall shock of yellow forsythia flowers shines in the dark against the stone façade of his house’s entryway.

“You’re drunk as hell, Rye. And I’m going to be late for my date if I don’t get you out of this car in ten minutes.”

Riley drops his head back against the bucket seat and whines. “Why’d you make a date tonight? It’s not even ten o’clock yet. I could have had more to drink and another dance or three.”

“You could have gotten your nose broken by the poet. You’ve just had major surgery, brother. You don’t have ten toes anymore. Can you just have a night in to heal up and chill out?”

“Says the guy who took me to Blaze Lounge. I’m fine,” Riley says. “Stay here and we’ll play darts.”

“Go to bed,” Walker says and gets out of the car. He walks around to Riley’s door and tries to open it. But Riley makes a game out of locking and unlocking the door, laughing as Walker tries to time his pulling on the handle with Riley’s slowed movements. He wins out and flings back the metal, the hinges squeaking in protest.

“You’re lame when you get this drunk. Up and out.”

Riley steadies himself with hands on the dashboard. The world spins but his foot is limp and numb. “I’m thirty-one, Walker. And I have nothing.”

Walker pulls Riley out by his elbows and gets him propped up on his crutches. Riley can smell his own body odor as he lifts his arms and promises himself a shower if he can shake off his drunk and get a plastic bag over his foot.

“Nothing. Right. Not this huge house behind me. Not a nice financial cushion when your parents died even though you’ve systematically blown most of it. Not enough strange to keep you visiting the free clinic until you’ve retired. Okay, Rye.”

The crutches wobble underneath him, but Riley manages to keep upright. His mouth is devoid of moisture and his fingers feel swollen.

“But only five toes. And failures.”

“So you’re human,” Walker says and pushes Riley to start walking.

“But not a real man,” Riley says and plants his right foot solidly on the brick pavers that line his driveway. “Real men have sex with whomever they want, when they want. So I’m going to bypass dickface Sev and fuck Nell. That’s my goal. Screw going back to work or succeeding in life. I’m going to plow that stripper.”

Walker nudges Riley on his back to get him started for his door, but he doesn’t budge. His best friend tosses his hands in the air and shakes out the light brown hair shellacked to his head.

“So you’re going to devote your energy to pursuing sex with a woman who openly detests you? And it will be your life’s focus? Really?”

Riley doesn’t speak but nods his head yes.

Walker gets back in his car, turns the ignition and rolls down the window. He rubs a stick of lip balm against his lips and returns the small tube to his pocket. “Get inside, idiot. Sober up and get a better goal.”

He pulls away, off to his date and Riley stands, shaky from exhaustion and too much booze, no desire to make it inside his empty house even though the night is cool enough to make him shiver. One of the solar-powered lights at his feet blinks off, all the energy it’d harnessed from the sun spent, used to illuminate nothing.

22 Peach

Another man is waiting for her when she gets home to her apartment. She puts on a forced smile when she sees Linx loitering on her little porch. He has a six-pack of a microbrew at his feet and a white bag in his hands. Grease soaks through the paper.

“Thought fried chicken sounded good,” he says and leans in for a little peck on Peach’s cheek.

She wants to tell him to leave. They didn’t have plans to hang out, but she can’t bring herself to say no to him, the task made harder by his gentle, earnest nature. And it isn’t special treatment for Linx. All her denials and refusals are polite and malleable. If anyone tries hard enough to reverse her decisions, she’ll likely cave. And this is a part of herself she plans on killing off. No more yielding Peach.

“You’re a vegetarian.”

“Good for you,” Linx says and follows her inside after she unlocks her door. “All the chicken goes on your dish. I’d be the best boyfriend. I’m considerate. And I even share my beer.”

She wrinkles her nose at his offer to share his alcohol and watches as he puts the grease-soaked bag down in the kitchen and pulls a plate from the cupboard over the stovetop. Linx looks at Peach. She holds her cheeks in her palms, just briefly, trying to cradle away the exhaustion she feels.

“Are you okay? I should have offered to take you out to a nice dinner. Somewhere they don’t let kids in. Or if they do, they can’t color on the tablecloths.”

“I’m okay, Linx. Just tired. I wasn’t expecting company tonight.”

He doesn’t bite at her insinuation. Instead, he rambles off a list of Boise’s nicest restaurants and promises to take her to one next weekend. He always knows what’s hottest on the dining scene, working in the food service industry himself.

She lifts her face away from her hands and swallows. “I can’t next weekend. I’ll be busy.” She tries her best to calm the quiver she thinks she hears in her voice. She wants to act nonchalant.

“Then tomorrow night. No excuses.”

“But it’s not a date, Linx. Right?”

He flicks his flat chest with his thumbs and index fingers, his way of playing coy. “No, not a date.”

Popping a top off one of his IPAs, Linx heads into the living room. He flips on the television and spends several minutes perusing channels until he settles on something with ballroom dancing and commentators.

She’s glad he’s distracted himself. Peach isn’t up to playing invested friend for the evening. She snatches a heavier coat hanging off a chair at her kitchen table and puts it on.

“I’m going outside for a minute. Then I’ll be back for the chicken.”

Linx waves a dismissal at her, engaged with a couple in matching attire swinging across the screen. Both dancers are bedazzled in copper sequins and feathered headdresses.

She hopes to hear another frog when she closes the door behind her, but there are never the sounds of croaks near her apartment. Too much concrete. So she walks behind her apartment to a grassy common area between three separate buildings which house six apartments each.

Using her hand, she tests the cold grass for dampness before sitting down and pulling her knees up to her chin. Peach stares at the sky. The moon has yet to rise, but the light pollution from her neighborhood kills the brilliance of the stars overhead.

But she’s patient. And as she looks up, her eyes focus on the points of white beginning to pierce the ambient light and make their own light known to the woman sitting on the chilly earth. The stars come out like wary survivors of a war, passing through haze and obscurations to state their existence to someone, anyone. Peach is that someone. She thinks of it as a blessing.

She presses her fingertips to her lips and blows kisses to the universe, picking out the stars she knows by name and flinging them her love and devotion. But the faraway sun she cherishes most isn’t in the night sky right now. She’ll have to wait until long after the heat of summer leaves Boise to see it hang in the black expanse overhead for longer than an hour after sunset. By then, the star will be poised high, parallel to the North Star, but Peach will be enamored with another star. But this is how it will work. Heavenly, burning bodies taking turns at having importance to Peach.

“I want to be different. Give me strength, give me the courage to make the transformation. I want to be the true Peach. As Michel says, Perfect Peach. I want to take what’s owed me. I want to shine!”

She talks to the one star she desires to see shining, speaking to it in its absence, until Linx comes out to find her, a plate of lukewarm chicken in his hand. The stars tell her he’s coming long before she sees his shadow walking across the hilly ground to where she sits. They give her enough time to be silent and act as if they’d not been conversing.

The stars tell her many things. Except whether or not she’ll be able to get what she wants out of life. That’s the mystery they keep from her. But she understands the game.

“I’m famished,” she tells Linx. He offers her a hand up and they walk in silence back to her home. She thinks, while they walk over the grass awakening from its winter respite, there could be all manner of living creatures slumbering underneath her feet. They would not know of her or her ability to shine.

Regardless, she still beams.

23 Riley

He notes the way his house smells when he’s been away from it for a few days. When everything is closed up and fresh air isn’t allowed inside, the place gets musty thanks to a broken air conditioner line that spewed water into his crawlspace last summer. He sneezes, hobbles around on his crutches to open up windows. With each pane of glass he slides up, a frigid cascade of air pours into the room. He stands in front of the window in his guest bedroom, having half-skipped his way upstairs, and lets the cold night breeze smack him in the chest.

He has a retro style rotary phone on the bedside table in the guest room. Riley takes a step toward the bed and when he’s a few feet away, he leans the crutches against the side of the mattress and pitches forward, throwing himself face down on the fluffy comforter. He turns his head, blows his shaggy, blond hair out of his eyes and thinks about picking up the phone.

It’s midnight. And while one of the people he wants to call might still be awake, the other certainly isn’t. Besides Double Al and Walker, there are only two others who mean a thing to him. And he reasons he should tell them about his amputation and the falling anvil. But he knows it can wait until morning, or another day when he’s not tipsy from too many fingers of Maker’s Mark.

Toes and fingers, fingers and toes.

He clenches his fists tight and relaxes them. Over and over. Blood rushes to his hands and they heat up, solid, warm flesh rebelling against the chilly air of the room. The bedspread is soft from years of use. It’s made of gray and black fabric, with a faded pattern of geometric shapes along the sides. His dad went with him to pick out the comforter before he went away for his freshman year of college. Riley had liked the somber colors and the design. He thought it was suited to Stanford, whatever that thought had meant to his eighteen-year-old brain.

Design, construction and art push away his thoughts of calling anyone at all. He runs his fingers over the bedspread and then, with his right index finger, his hand begins to trace out a set of shapes. He traces it five, six times without knowing what it is he doodles with his finger as a stylus. He can keep his nail on the fabric and only pick it up once and put it back down once to get the entire design down. He cranes his neck up and over to his right to try and watch what it is his body is doing without conscious effort on his part, but the only light that comes from the open window is weak, a street lamp down the road from his cul-de-sac.

If only he had a pen and some paper, he could get the doodle down and make sense of it when he was less inebriated. But his body is leaden, his foot tingling with promises of elevated pain, because the alcohol and OxyContin are wearing off. He pushes his face into the worn bedspread and lets his finger drawn lines on the old cotton without giving it further attention.