Women & Other Animals (11 page)

Gwen awoke shivering to barking and pale sunlight. King was licking her face. She pushed her fingers into the dog's fur, but when she saw a man standing over her, she jumped up and threw one foot into the boat. The Jeep driver looked into her face.

"I'm sorry," said Gwen. Her clothes were caked with mud.

"Sorry for what?"

"For taking your dog."

"Don't worry," he said. "Dogs are loyal. You feed them and they come back to you." He nodded toward her cabin. ''If you're hiding from this guy, you can come to my house. He's going to see you if you stay here."

She checked the knot holding her boat to the fallen maple, then, unsure what else to do, followed the man along the river path. The dew that coated the weeds and grass would be slow to burn off. Where the poison ivy had climbed to the tops of trees, the triple leaves had already turned autumn red.

The side door opened into a kitchen with whitepainted walls,

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yellow countertops, and a glossy wooden floor. But the baseboards were pulled away, revealing the uneven gap where the wallboards met the floorboards, and the table was piled with newspapers and books. "Do you want coffee?" the man asked. "Bathroom's through there if you need it."

She ventured onto a raw plywood floor, into what should have been a living room but contained a rumpled, queensized bed. Through the sliding glass door Gwen saw her dilapidated cabin on stilts, stained cottage green, Dan's boat still parked at its dock. The top drawer of a dresser was open a few inches, exposing a cache of pure white bras and underwear. Gwen hadn't seen a woman here since she'd been watching, since Jake had disappeared. She traced her finger along the scalloped lace edge of a bra. When the man appeared in the doorway, Gwen hurriedly shut the drawer.

"Oh, don't worry. She's long gone. I guess she left those for my next girlfriend."

"I'm sorry." A woman who wore those things was probably a great loss.

The man handed Gwen a mug of coffee almost white with cream. Jake had insisted she learn to drink coffee instant and black. She inhaled the aroma so deeply that she had to touch the dresser to steady herself. She had eaten French fries in Confluence yesterday, but nothing else.

"Do you want to take a shower?" he asked.

"No."

"You can't wear those clothes. Take something of Danielle's."

Gwen looked at the dresser and back at him.

"Why the hell not?" He laughed. "I was going to throw all her clothes in the river, anyway, let them float away with the current. Go ahead and take anything you want."

She took a long draw of the coffee, which tasted so good she didn't want to swallow. It didn't surprise Gwen that the man would want to take care of her; after Daddy, Jake had taken care of her, and Dan would now if she let him. She looked for a place to rest her cup, but the dresser top looked too clean, and she didn't want to leave a ring. In fact she didn't want to leave any trace that she had been here. In a lower dresser drawer she found and rejected the neatly folded Page 71

blouses in pink, white, and mint green. The other dresser contained a tangle of the man's blue jeans, Tshirts, and sweatshirts. She put on one of each, and even the jeans weren't a bad fit when she cinched them at the waist with the most worn of three leather belts. She draped her muddy clothes over the side of the bathtub and wondered if this guy was accustomed to women who dressed as though every day was their wedding day and who never got smeared with creosote or fish guts.

She managed to retrieve her coffee from the plywood floor without spilling it. Another room opened off the living room and was probably supposed to be the bedroom, when it wasn't torn down to wall studs. In the middle of the room, balanced on sawhorses, was the curved wooden skeleton of what looked like a boat.

Back in the kitchen, she found the man cooking. He placed items on the newspapercovered table one at a time, and each thing glowed as it passed through a shaft of sunlight: plates, forks, two glistening jars of jelly, a stick of yellowwhite butter on a creamcolored plate.

"You've got to be hungry." He held out his hand and shook hers. "I'm Michael. Mike Appel. I've lived here for a year, and other than the guy next door, you're the first person from the neighborhood who's been in my house. You'd think on a river, people'd always be socializing." He gestured with the spatula. ''But look at you—you get house guests, you run off."

"I'm Gwen. Gwendolyn."

"That's a pretty name." He repeated it wistfully. "Gwendolyn."

They way he laughed as he talked made Gwen want to say more, to add, "It was my mother's name too," but then she might end up trying to explain to a stranger that her mother left a husband and daughters, six and eight, and never even wrote. Michael pushed aside several books that lay open on top of each other and set a glass of orange juice and half an omelet in front of her. Gwen was careful not to put her glass down on the pages or the covers. One book with a library sticker was called
Building Bookshelves
. A paperback was called
More Greek Mythology
.

"What do you do over there at that little house?"

She shrugged. "I fish." Gwen thought the omelet, with mushrooms, onions, and peppers, was the best thing she'd ever tasted.

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Next time she was in Confluence, if she had money, she'd buy eggs. She had only six dollars and some change left.

"I've never fished," he said. "Don't even know how to fish, but I'm building a boat."

"Fishing is easy," said Gwen.

"Maybe you can give me a lesson, tell me what tastes good out of this river. Hell, I don't even know how to bait a hook."

Gwen shrugged and lifted the edge of the omelet to look inside at tiny cubes of green pepper. There wasn't anything to teach, really.

"I should have put tomatoes in this," he said, "but I forgot to buy them. I work for the power company, so I know you've got no power over there. Have you got a generator? A phone?"

She shook her head no. The fishing dog lay under the table so Gwen worked her bare feet beneath him. She had left her shoes in the boat.

"It's incredible you live like that." He chewed, swallowed. "And you don't have a job?"

Gwen shook her head. A halfsheet of paper on the table read "Overdue book notice."

"Your house looks like a hideout, you know, like a place in a movie where criminals get away from the cops. Would you be the gangster's girlfriend?" He lifted his eyebrows. "Or his daughter maybe? You could be completely innocent, after all."

Did he know something? A sickly knot began to form in Gwen's stomach.

"You don't talk much. Now, Danielle, she could talk." He pointed a fork at Gwen. "And yet, she never thought to mention she was sleeping with my best friend.

Funny. Of course, he didn't mention it either. But they're in love now, so everything's swell."

Gwen clung to silence. Why was he telling her this?

"I moved up here from Kalamazoo a year ago for my job. Where're you from?"

When she saw he was going to wait for an answer, she said, "Snow Pigeon."

"That's forty, fifty miles up the river. Did you grow up right on the water?"

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She nodded yes and watched out the window. Dan was messing around on the dock.

"When Danielle was here, I hardly noticed the river. Now it's all I think about."

As Gwen finished her toast, Dan got into his boat and pulled away, and Gwen watched him grow smaller as he headed upstream. When he was out of sight, she took the last bite of her omelet and let her fork drop onto her plate. The clank startled her. "I've got to go," she said.

"Can't you stay a few minutes longer? I promise to stop complaining about women. Here, I'll make you another piece of toast."

She sat back down but kept her weight on the balls of her feet. She felt she was stretched across the river like a shock cord, ready to snap back.

"You act like a girl who was raised by wolves." He smiled. "They don't like to be in enclosed spaces."

"Thank you for the food." Gwen stood and hurried out the kitchen door, leaving the toast to pop up behind her. She broke into a run across the yard, and by the time she reached her boat she was panting. Out in the middle of the river, she felt a momentary sense of freedom, but upon reaching her dock the first thing she noticed were rotting catfish heads still nailed to the big oak. Then she remembered she had meant to buy matches. With her second to last match she started a fire in the wood burner, but she dozed off on the floor before it really got going. When she woke up, the sky was fully lit, so she moved to the dock for the sun's warmth. She looked down and was surprised to be wearing Michael's clothes. After his Jeep rolled away across the river, she pressed her face into the clean sweat shirt.

When darkness muscled in again, she used her last match to light the kerosene lamp, but it only seemed to intensify the darkness outside. She heard a sampling of rain, and it occurred to her, as if for the first time, that Jake really wouldn't be coming back. She thought of her dad's trailer in Snow Pigeon and the shoulderhigh stacks of wood her father must have already cut and split, which

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Paula must have stacked by herself against the trailer for the winter. Her own winter supply was about two armloads of broken branches, and once the river iced up Gwen would have no transportation. She ought to cross while she could, walk to the road, and hitchhike someplace warm, Florida maybe. All evening she watched the lights in Michael's house: the kitchen, the hall, the bedroom that was supposed to be a living room. His silhouette sat hunched over the table where they'd eaten.

She wondered, had girls really been raised by wolves?

Even though it was late, she had to get out of the cottage for a while. She pulled one of Jake's stretched wool sweaters over Michael's sweatshirt and carried her quilt to the boat in case it got really cold. Past Willow Island, almost to Confluence, her engine sputtered out of gas and died. She didn't protest, but let herself be pulled back down river. If she fell asleep out here, and slept long enough, she would wake up in Lake Michigan. The river was quiet and dark. The herons were asleep in their trees. Nobody danced on lawns, no stars shone, and cold rain began to pour down on the river. By the time her quilt became soaked through, she realized she should have kept rowing to reach Confluence to buy matches and boat gas for her next trip. And some food too, a burger and fries for starters. Instead she'd be stuck in a dark cabin with cans of beans and oily sardines. She reached into her pants pocket to feel her money and found nothing—she had left it in her jeans on Michael's bathtub. She drifted with a numbing sense of her own stupidity. Rainwater collected in the boat and pooled around her feet. Instead of going to her own side of the river when she rounded the last bend, she pulled up at Michael's oilbarrel float. Surely he'd loan her matches, and maybe he even had gasoline in his shed. She tied her boat and tucked the oars inside but found the shed locked. With the blanket around her, she approached the house and looked in through the sliding glass door.

At first she could see only the glowing numbers on a digital clock. As her eyes adjusted, she saw King lift his head from the floor at the foot of the bed.

As quickly as King began to bark, Michael was standing on the other side of the glass in shorts. His chest was as hairless as the chests of schoolboys she had known before Jake. She had fooled

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around with boys back home and had always been afraid of her father finding out.

Michael switched on a blinding light and slid the door open. "Gwendolyn? Don't you ever sleep in a bed?"

"I'm sorry."

"Well, come on in. Be sorry inside."

She stepped up and puddles formed on the plywood.

"Damn, I've got to finish this floor. I'm going to put down oak like in the kitchen."

Gwen hadn't realized how cold she was until she stepped into the warm house.

"This blanket's soaked—let me put it in the dryer. I'll put your other clothes in there from this morning—I washed them. Talk to me, Gwen."

He looked at her until finally she said, "That omelet was good."

Michael laughed. "Take a shower now, and you can thank me for that tomorrow." Gwen closed her ears to his babbling and followed him to the bathroom. He started running the water, and she remembered only after she had peeled off her shirts that she shouldn't undress in front of a stranger. Michael looked away and abruptly left the room. Gwen hardly recognized the thin, dirty creature in the mirror. Her once dark, soft curls were matted, and her complexion was ruined with scratches and poison ivy scars. Three times she shampooed her hair before the water rinsed clean. She put on the dark terry cloth robe which hung on the back of the door, then padded across the hall to the room with the boat skeleton. It looked too big to fit through the doorway. The room didn't even have a view of the water, so it was no wonder he didn't sleep in there. She returned to the living room and lay with King on his rug. Michael came in and sat on the foot of the bed and looked amused.

"Maybe you really are a wolf girl."

"I watch King fish from my house."

"Why do you call her King?"

"Her?"

"I never had a dog before Renegade." He stroked the dog's head. "It was the craziest thing. When I closed on this house the old owner asked if I'd keep her, because she loved the river." Mike tugged on

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the dog's ear and her mouth opened as if in a smile. "You sleep in my bed, and I'll sleep on the floor. I haven't got a couch."

"We can both sleep on the bed," said Gwen. "It's big." Still wearing the bathrobe, she climbed in on the river side. Michael got in the other.

"What's that mysterious light at your house?" he asked.

"A kerosene lamp. I used my last match so I had to leave it burning."

"Did you come here to teach me how to fish?"

"I need to borrow matches. And I ran out of gas on the way to Confluence."

"Did you see my boat in there?" Michael waited for her to nod. "When Danielle left, I decided to redo that room, but then I figured I'd rather have a boat. Then I could go to that island with the black willows. I'd like to live on that island."