Early Thaw (6 page)

She’d misread the entire thing. No Lifetime, no tears, no misty thoughts of dead idiot children.

This guy, the little puppy, was
having fun
.

And it fell on her at that moment that right there, underneath the mustard-yellow
Register Here
sign, three steps from the overpriced bundles of pine kindling, was the first time she’d ever seen Leslie smile—
really
smile, not that nervous little twitch of his mouth.

The gesture looked completely wrong on him.

***

A seeping cold gave her reason enough to stop thinking about the walking vag that was her roomie. She kicked the stove door open and tossed another log on the fire. Syncopated strikes sounded as microscopic rivulets of ice melted, turned to vapor, and shot from wooden capillaries.

Val dropped a piece of withered trout in the pot, watching it swell as it sopped up the olive oil she’d squirted in the bottom—they’d raided all the nearby restaurants and still had months of the little packets in storage, so she’d decided to try an experiment. Anything to make the jerky more bearable, because creamed corn certainly fucking wouldn’t.

The miniature piece of fish snapped and sizzled in the pot, a sad imitation of the fight it’d given when she’d caught it. A couple weeks back, Leslie said he’d seen the same thing— more or less— with a mumbler at the bottom of a thermal pool. Though the air temp was fifteen below, the thing was circling beneath the bright-blue water; a balmy 90° kept it from freezing, but the high walls of the pool prevented it from hot-pocketing anywhere else.

“Must’ve fallen in,” Leslie’d grumbled, his Hollywood-drenched attempt at machismo. “Popped him, but it was probably just wasting a bullet. Didn’t want him finding a way out, though.”

She’d nodded grimly then, nearly choking on the giggle in her throat. Such a little boy-man.

Bubbles of fat popped in the pan. Maybe it was just a trick of her decimated nasal passages, but the squiggling little strip of meat was actually beginning to smell
good
. Val grabbed a fork and stabbed at it experimentally, keeping her distance, as if the thing might jump to the floor and worm its way out the door. When she’d held it in the air long enough for its tails of steam to curl into nothingness, she slid the whole thing—an almost reptilian blur of motion—right into her mouth. It was nearly too much to chew. Transparent tendrils of oil followed the curve of her lips down to her chin as she began prodding at the chunk of meat with her tongue.

Propriety was never much of a concern when Leslie wasn’t kicking around, and eating like this—sloppily, ravenously—had become SOP. It was a luxury, one small thing that could be pushed happily to excess, and she reveled in it. After weeks of increasingly insular living, this…this was a vice that could still be savored. In fact, if not for their decidedly more disgusting choice of comestibles, she realized she couldn’t fault the mumblers for attacking
their
meals with similar gusto.

Garlic, oil, salt: the holy trifecta. She shot a greedy glance back at the bear box. Enough for two small meals…or one really decent feast. And, goddamn, this tasted great. Or
good
, at the very least. Leslie could have the corn—the thought of it congealing in the pot made her stomach twist. She’d clean the rest of the box out—really, there were only four or five more fillets in there, anyway. Besides, he could always go dig up more from the cache outside. And if he really wanted, she’d maybe even teach him the new frying technique.

On the counter, the light on the walkie-talkie was blinking out some indecipherable Morse code—judging by the low angle of the sun in the sky, Leslie was probably announcing his exact plans to return, down to the very last inconsequential nanosecond. He would be back, no doubt, within the half-hour—plenty of time to cook and eat, if she started right away. But how would she explain the lack of tasty, oil-drenched food when every mote of air promised just that? No doubt the little creep would whine and mope for a few minutes, at minimum, and she really didn’t want to deal with any bullshit.

Her jaws smacked and popped as, open-mouthed, she ground the last little bits of flesh between her back molars. Maybe she could make him forget all about a sub-par dinner—
and
, more importantly, have a little entertainment in the process.

Maybe a bath was in order.

***

He’d come up with the gate idea after wrenching open the cargo door to a Jeep they’d set out to scavenge. Gallons of liquefied nasty poured out onto his khakis—entrails, pus, and the like. It was still pretty early on, when dead bodies—the immobile variety—had just started to explode from gas buildup inside their abdomens.

Standing in their “yard” days later, his biceps quivering under the weight of a dented white passenger door, she’d asked him if he planned to start a junk collection. “If they work for blood and guts, they gotta work for water, too,” he’d said, a quick, darting smirk indicating that he’d intended the comment as a joke.”

And though engineering soon became the biggest challenge to building the bath—the water diversion was straightforward enough, but designing an ever-deepening culvert was something they would accomplish purely by trial and error—the sheer physicality of the project was pretty formidable, too. The finished aqueduct would be nearly twenty-five feet long and terminate in a sizable 5’x5’x3’ pool. She had questioned the necessity of so large a bath, but Leslie had been insistent on the dimensions—he stammered something about exponential rates of cooling—and she didn’t really care enough to press him on the issue. But she couldn’t help notice that the square he’d roped off was definitely big enough to accommodate more than one person.

They’d started digging one day in late October, when the pockmarks of aspens around the cabin still blazed bright yellow. The wind periodically slashed at them with icy gusts, but their proximity to the sun, the inescapable brightness of life at 8,000 feet, had them both dripping. Val could feel her face burning under the heat lamp that, except for the occasional snow flurry, always seemed to be switched on. She was gross, no doubt—her long-sleeve was soaked through with oil and sweat—but she figured she could endure a few more days of Rasta hair if the pool idea actually worked.

Leslie, for his part, had stripped to track pants and a wifebeater, a thoroughly ridiculous sight that he nonetheless seemed oblivious to. Hopping on the curved lip of the shovel for leverage, he looked like some giddy seven-year-old making a fort. Despite all his enthusiasm, though, he wasn’t getting a whole lot done: she figured that for every three shovelfuls of dirt she heaved into the air, he managed to loosen one.

Wordless hours passed as the culvert crawled along, its rigid geometry slowly taking shape in the gravel-flecked Yellowstone clay. As Leslie began angling his trajectory toward the pool-to-be, though, his blade suddenly clanged against rock, and he pogo-sticked on the shovel in a moronic attempt to pry the buried boulder loose.
Ah yes
, she thought, remembering her Bikram classes at Lifetree Yoga,
the I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-I’m-doing pose. Classic.
Anger-spiked frustration seeping into her mind—as it did whenever she thought of him for anything longer than a couple seconds—she wondered how a full-grown adult could manage to make it through life never having learned something so basic as
operating a fucking shovel
. He sort of humped the shaft for a few more furious moments, until, as if the universe were confirming her assessment, the blade slid sideways and he began to topple over, arms flailing frantically as if attempting to take flight. He crashed to the ground in a pile of bony redneck Adidas.

She doubled over in laughter so thick it hurt. Howls and snorts spooled out of her in breathless bursts.

“Jeesus,” she cackled, nearly falling backwards. “If it weren’t for me, little man, you’d probably have impaled yourself on a spoon by now.”

He lay on the ground, too exhausted, for the moment, to push himself up. For a while, in fact, he didn’t do anything except stare blankly at the grass, the ground, the sky beyond. If he was hurt, though, it didn’t register with her.

“Seriously, is there—” she had to take a breath “—is there, like,
one thing
you’ve ever done well?”

His tiny form barely moved. Just a small pouting face, a twitch of the lips as if readying them for words. Two long and silent inhalations. Then, in a voice almost too small to matter, “I saved you.”

Her laughter came to a decidedly abrupt stop. “What the hell did you just say?”

He propped himself on a withered forearm and turned to meet her glare. “At the store. I saved you.” Louder now. Firmer.

The remnants of a smile were still crumbling from her face, the look anything but congenial. She was surprised to find herself fully prepared for the argument.

“Yes,
Lesbo
, you managed to get the fucking car door open in time to keep me from getting slowly gummed to death by some retirees. What a pickle! Never could’ve gotten out of that one by myself. Nice work, cowboy.”

She dug her spade into fresh earth, letting the sting settle. Long minutes passed, filled with nothing but the sound of metal biting into dirt; as he lay there, she could almost imagine the weight of her words pinning him to the earth. Delighting in the obvious victory, it was with some disbelief, then, that she watched from the corner of her eye as he pushed himself to his knees, reached again for the handle, and rose on two thin legs with a sort of resolve that suddenly made him seem much less small. The hand holding his shovel trembled, but this time his words were steady enough.

“I waited.”

A cold breeze blasted from the valley, and the aspen leaves exploded like spooked schools of fish.

“I’m sorry,” she barked, carefully enunciating every syllable. “I didn’t quite hear that.” It was fury, now, that flushed her cheeks.

He looked close to tears. “At the trailhead,” he whispered. “I waited for you.”

This time she
willed
the laughter, exploded in sharp, manufactured snickering. “Uh huh, you did. The trailhead that was clearly marked—the one I found myself. Yep, you were there waiting for me, ready to…what was it you did for me, exactly?”

He turned his face to the ground, wobbling on the wooden handle as he returned to tearing up undersized chunks of earth.

“Lead us through the forest? No, wait—that was me. Figure out a way to catch fish from the lake? Nope—me, too. Oh, I got it—you knew which stores would have fresh stocks of food and suppl—no, no, I did
that
, too.”

He looked at her through squinted eyes—hurt, animal eyes. For a tiny moment, she wasn’t entirely sure whether the mind behind them was deciding to run, or to
pounce
. Not that she cared much. She was enjoying the opportunity to rage.

“I know there was something—had to be
something
, right? I mean, it’s not like you’re a pathetic kotex expert who survived because of sheer dumb luck! That sure as
fuck
couldn’t be true!”

For a second, his grip on the shovel tightened, his shoulders seemed to draw together behind his head. A foot skidded towards her across the dry ground. Then he blinked—hard—and his body slackened, drooped, around the handle.

“Nevermind,” he mumbled.

But she was white hot.

“No—no, you little fucker. I’m tired of your bullshit—you’d be dead a hundred times over without me. Say it—say it right now. You glad I stuck around, or not?”

***

Arms crossed, Valerie tugged the frayed ends of her T-shirt up and over her head. She’d never stood like this, naked against the sky, with nothing but the promise of warm water keeping her from racing back to the cabin. She savored the feeling—the needle pricks, the stippled skin, the rawness of the cold world grating against her. The wind, ever present and much icier now that the sun was drowning in oranges and purples, slid through her legs and whipped the end of her ponytail against her neck.

Already she could feel an insidious numbness stretching across her front, but she willed herself still, anyway—made herself admire the smooth curves and manicured patches she’d lately taken more interest in maintaining. Her skin was pulling tight, setting the tiny spears of hair on her stomach against the chill of the coming night.

He had to be within sight of the house now; she imagined what the view might be from 100 yards, how the fading light might be playing across her body.
Who knows?
she thought.
Maybe he’s even watching me right now.
Something like an electric jolt sparked up her spine at the wicked thought of it. Consciously, theatrically, she let a fingertip trace the curve of her breast before dipping a toe into the steaming pool. The water was searing—it ate her toes greedily, swallowed her feet, her calves, her thighs and waist. Billions of tiny pins plunged through her skin as one extreme burned away to another. She exhaled deeply, letting a ragged curtain of steam close around her chest.

For a moment, peace—the peace of oblivion, of giving over. No thoughts, just a tingling so uniform and pervasive that it began to feel like the lack of feeling.

And then, quite suddenly, heat. Heat that was all but unbearable. The culvert continued gushing into the pool behind her; glimpsed through the liquefied light, her body appeared to swell and collapse in its artificial stream. Pearls of sweat tumbled across her forehead, and she imagined herself the bellows of some great fire, pumping and stoking the fluid flame that engulfed her. Arms propped against the clay sidewall behind, she arced her legs out in a wide V and let both feet bubble up through the roiling water. They split the surface, floating like blanched white buoys in the freezing air.