Thief (12 page)

“If you like it, you should stay. You’d find a way. At least you have a place you want to be.”

“Why, where would you like to be? Where’s home for you?”

“Always the questions!” the cowboy said, laughing, leaning back in an old wooden chair until it tipped back on two legs. “I
haven’t had a home since I was thirteen. That’s when I went to work with my uncle. And that’s when I became ‘as one dead’
to my family. Did you ever hear of that?”

“Is it a religious thing?”

“It’s what you do to someone who doesn’t believe in Jehovah, even if it’s your own son.”

I was going to ask if it was like shunning, which I’d heard about, but then I looked at the cowboy’s face. He seemed deeply
troubled— angry and agitated. It happened in an instant, too, just the way it had seemed to happen the night before when his
mood went from teasing to impatient right before my eyes. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat, listening and watching. Picking
quietly at my eggs.

“My own mother and father,” he said after a while. “I’ve been on my own ever since. To them I don’t exist.”

“So that can’t be your home.”

“No can do.”

“Well, maybe the thing to do is pick a place where you’re happy,” I said. “Pick a place and say, ‘This is it.’ ”

“Do you think?” the cowboy asked.

At first I thought he was making fun of me for trying to make it all sound so simple. You know, that I thought he could just
pick a place and it would make everything all right. But I looked at his face and I saw he wasn’t making fun of me at all.
He was asking me, genuinely.

“Yes,” I said. “I think maybe the thing to do is decide to try to be happy.”

“Do you think I could make a living down where you live?”

“In the Cities? It depends what kind of work you do.”

“Heating and air-conditioning. I’ve been in it for fifteen years.” “I don’t see why not. There’s plenty of people down there.
Plenty of businesses.”

“Could I move in with you?”

“Do you want to move in with me?”

“Would you have me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. I’d love to have you.”

It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. But after I said it, I realized I meant it. Just as I had felt myself open
up to him the night before when he shuddered and howled, it now seemed like something inside of me was breaking open again.

He nodded then, but we didn’t talk about it anymore— we just went back to bed and he
ki-yi
yowled for me again.

When the cowboy said goodbye that afternoon— after we called out to the Silver Dollar in Cody to see if anyone had found Bud
Dog, after he took a shower and gave me a narration of his scars, after I marveled again at the smoothness of his skin and
the exact quality of softness and hardness I felt in his arms, after he let me help him with his leg brace— he told me he’d
call me the next day when he got back from his doctor’s appointment.

“We’ll make some plans,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “All right, then.” And I gave him the rest of the cookies for the trip back to Blackduck.

The rest of that day and the next morning, I thought of him, sketching out our life back in Minneapolis. I thought daydreamily
about the way things could be, but I also made myself think about what I’d be taking on with him, with his moodiness and seeming
destitution. They were warning signs, I knew— I knew that. But difficult people were capable and deserving of love— I knew
that, too. And none of it mattered anyway, because for what ever odd set of reasons or pheromones, I’d already fallen in love
with the cow-boy. I’d already decided to open my life to him.

BUT THE COWBOY NEVER CALLED
. Not the day he said he would, or the day after, or the day after that. When I finally broke down at the end of the week
and called the Blackduck number he’d left when he answered the ad, I only reached his friends.

“He’s gone back to Wyoming,” the wife told me. “He had some business to settle there.”

When she said that, I thought of the conversation Julian and I had had a long time ago, when we were just becoming friends.

“I always think it’s love,” I’d told him. “I always think sex will be a mainline to the heart.”

“You mean every time you screw, you think you’ll fall in love?” “I’m usually a bit in love already,” I said. “It’s stupid,
I know.” “It’s not stupid,” Julian said. “It’s just a fucking tragic flaw.”

It was impossible to explain to him in his world-weariness what I meant, what I believed in my heart, what I still believed.
It wasn’t that I thought every lay was love, and there was a part of me that doubted everything about the cowboy. Even as
I was bewitched by him, I’d wondered at some of the things he’d said, which seemed like lines from some Merle Haggard song.

But without some belief on my part, without some spirit of
generosity, there was no point in bothering with any of it. No point in stripping down, in spreading my legs, in opening myself.
At the moment I picked a man, he was not troubled, not rough traffic, not just the embodiment of animal magnetism and sexual
attraction. At the moment I picked a man, he held all possibility, all eloquent potential. And if only he could turn out to
be what he promised to be at the outset, he would be— could be— a great love. That was the river I kept going to, drinking
from. It didn’t matter if the cowboy was what he said he was or not. Something in me liked something in him. If he had frightened
me the first time he fucked me, he had also opened me up. I don’t know how else to say it.

“Tell Brill I asked about him,” I said to the wife. “When you speak to him again, tell him I wish him the best.”

And I hung up the phone.

I DIDN’T WANT TO CALL JULIAN
with the story of my latest failure in love— as appropriate as his lecture would have been, I still didn’t want to hear it.
But I felt fragile and distracted, so I started a letter to Breville. He was someone faithful to return to, if only on paper.

“Sometimes it seems my life has been shaped by my rape— the entire last seventeen years,” I wrote to Breville. “If I had to
say one thing that has been the most damaging, it has been constantly seeing myself in the light of that night. Constantly
wondering what I might have been like if it hadn’t happened. Would I be able to be friends with men instead of just fucking
them? Would I see them and myself differently? Would I see my vagina differently? My pussy? My cunt?”

I threw the letter away. It made me seem like too much of a victim. And instead of writing to Breville at all, I got in the
car and drove down to Stillwater to see him. I told myself the drive would do me good, get me out of the space I was in, but
of course it wasn’t just that. I wanted to see Breville just like I would any friend.

I’d never shown up like that, unannounced, and I waited a long time before the guards called, “Visit for Breville.” And when
I got
into the visiting room, to the taped-off square, I could see the concern on Breville’s face before he embraced me.

“What’s wrong?” he said as he held me. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened,” I said.

When we got to a couple of chairs— not our usual spot, because it was late in the day, and the visiting room was crowded—
Breville asked me again if something was wrong.

“Really, nothing’s wrong,” I said. “It’s just been a hard week. I needed to get away.”

I could see I’d alarmed him, so I made myself sit back. He kept watching me, and I let him. I watched him, too. He looked
different than he had other days. His hair was neat, but I could see he hadn’t showered or shaved that day, and he was wearing
a dark green T-shirt, jogging pants, and prison-issue canvas shoes.

“You caught me off guard,” he said when he saw me looking. “I was actually cooking dinner.”

“You get to cook?”

“We make things on our wing,” he said. “We have a micro wave and put together stuff from the commissary. Prison cuisine.”

“I probably shouldn’t have dropped in on you.” “Don’t say that,” Breville told me. “I’m glad to see you. But what happened?”

“Life,” I said. “Just life.”

He seemed to relax a little the longer I sat there, but I could see he still wondered what it was all about. And I think on
some level he must have known, because after about fifteen minutes of small talk he said to me, “You don’t have to do my time
with me, Suzanne.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t need to do my time with me. You need to live your life.”

“I am living my life.”

“Are you?”

“I am,” I said. “Living my life. Believe me.”

He looked at me for a long time when I said that. Neither one of us said anything then.

In a little while a voice came over the loudspeaker, saying, “Breville, five minutes.”

I’d been there for less than an hour, not my usual two.

“They limit it sometimes,” Breville said. “When the room’s crowded. Can I call you? Are you staying down here to night with
your friend?”

“I didn’t make any plans.”

“So you’re driving back up there?”

“It stays light late.”

“Do me a favor, then,” Breville said. “I want you to call my mother. Call her and talk to her.”

“Why should I call your mother?”

“She’s good to talk to. You can talk to her about anything.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I have friends to talk to. I just needed to go for a drive and I came down here. There’s nothing to worry
about.”

“Then call her for me.”

“For you?”

“I mean, call her for me. Do it for me. I want her to know you.”

“Can I think about it?” I said. “Can you let me think about it?”

“Sure you can think about it. Of course you can.”

Still, he said her number several times and asked me to repeat it twice.

“Just in case,” he said.

In the taped-off square that day, Breville held me as long as he could. He ran his hands down my sides and over the small
of my back and pressed me to him. I thought I could feel his cock through
his pants. Maybe that was what I had driven four hours for, to feel that.

Before Breville let me go, he said into my hair, “You are sweet, you are so sweet to me.”

“You are sweet to me, too,” I said.

When we walked away from each other that day, we both turned and we both made the pass through the air with our hands.
Steady as she goes
, we said with our palms, pushing away the air.
Smooth. Until next time
, we said with our hands.

Until then.

I made the drive home in under four hours, stopping only once in Motley for gas. When I got back to the cabin, even though
it was past ten, there was still some light in the sky. I couldn’t really see it when I walked down to the lake, but once
I was out in the water, I could make out the glow in the west. Dark blue, a paring of moon. The water was black, and fragrant—
from what, I didn’t know. Maybe it was the smell of the wildflowers and shrubs on the bank, mixing in the moist night air,
but to me it seemed like the water itself was perfumed. It was like water in a dream. That’s what I swam in.

I didn’t go far out into the lake— a boat would never see me in that darkness— but I couldn’t stand to stay close to the dock,
either. I didn’t want to feel anything beneath my feet. When I was out a hundred feet or so, I just stayed in place, treading
water, pushing it away with my hands. It was the easiest thing. The water felt like silk on my hands. No— it felt like water.

I didn’t know what to think about Breville, about how I felt about him, about how I felt more kindness from him in the taped-off
square in front of the guard than I had in bed with the cowboy.
I thought about the way the cowboy’s skin had felt then, and what it had been like to kiss him. Like swimming in deep water.
I didn’t know how a kiss could be like that, unless it was everything in the cowboy coming out, because it was clear he was
dark water. There was the moodiness that kept surfacing even in the short time we’d spent together, the barroom dares and
fights, the talk about his rigid parents who had disowned him when he was still a boy. And then there was the seizuring and
howling he’d done when he came. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but he’d sounded like the wolves I’d heard in the distance
one night at the cabin.

But then I thought about lying between his legs, right before I took his cock in my mouth. I thought of the moment right before,
and then when I touched him and sucked on him, finding a way to take more of him into my mouth. When I liked a man, really
liked him, there was something so sweet, so lollipop-good, about sucking his cock, and that was how I’d felt about the cowboy.
I kept hearing him say,
No one ever done me like that
, and I kept seeing the way his face looked when he said it.

Not that it mattered, since he was gone, but I’d felt both fear and the lollipop-good feeling with the cowboy. I couldn’t
make sense of the two things together, so I just turned and floated on my back and let myself think about it all. The cowboy
with his smooth skin and Breville with his burning hands. I couldn’t touch Breville, couldn’t know him, and I’d touched the
cowboy, but I didn’t know him, either. They were both ciphers. That’s what I lay thinking about, floating, cradled in the
fragrant water of the dark lake.

FOR MY NEXT VISIT
to Breville, I wore a black blazer with no blouse underneath. It buttoned just above my bra, and on my breastbone I wore
a necklace of onyx and marcasite. Its triangular pendant pointed to the skin between my breasts that was shiny with perfume.

Breville took it all in as he was supposed to. “Nice jacket,” he told me when we were seated in our plastic chairs.

“Thank you.”

“Nice necklace. Wish I could wear it.”

I didn’t understand his words or tone, but it made me think back to the day he assured me that he didn’t have a homosexual
bone in his body, that no one “messed” with him. It all made me wonder about Breville, about who he really was in prison,
and what details of his life he edited out for me.