Lamb (3 page)

After he hung up he turned on the TV, then off, and sat up with his towel in his lap. It was dark outside the windows now and he watched his naked reflection in the glass as he dressed. He went alone into the mauve and beige bar downstairs, for a drink. He had three. He couldn’t get the kid out of his head. He hoped he hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t
exactly been thinking clearly. But he hadn’t meant to hurt her. He was not that kind of man.

In the middle of the workday at the small firm where he’d worked with Wilson for the last nineteen years, Lamb took his father’s ball cap from the empty chair by his office door and left. He drove through the city, through the warm and thickening haze, returning to the same dim parking lot where he had seen the girl twenty-four hours before. He set himself at the bus stop and was not surprised when he saw her coming down the gummy sidewalk minutes later, in long sleeves and pants despite the heat. Somehow—how?—he’d known she would come. He always knew everything. Nothing in the world ever surprised him anymore, ever. Imagine that. Feeling that.

“Did you come back for cigarettes?” he asked. “Because I’ve quit since yesterday. I’m on a new plan.”

No response. Arms crossed, mouth a thin puckered line.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“I left.”

“Was that a good idea?”

“None of them even called me,” she said. “To see if you’d killed me or what.” Her words made the air tight around them.

Lamb frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

She sat down on the bench, half an arm’s length away from him. “And after first period? Sid said hey, I heard about what you did with that guy yesterday. She said everybody was talking about it.” The girl looked over at him. “She meant you.”

“How do you know she meant me? Did she describe me?”

The girl rolled her eyes.

“No,” he said. “I mean it. Did she get a really good look at me? Because in case you didn’t notice”—he turned his head this way, then that, so the girl could see his profile on each side—“I’m really old.”

She almost smiled.

“Listen,” he said. He scanned her up and down. “I’m glad to see you’ve covered yourself up.”

She stared at him.

“What’s your name?”

“Tommie.”

“Tommie?”

“You want to make fun of my name too?”

“It’s a beautiful name.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Sure it is.”

She shrugged and hugged herself.

“Listen, Tommie. I’m sorry if your friends are being nasty. It feels like I’m to blame, doesn’t it?”

Nothing.

“But look. Here we both are, right?”

Nod.

“Why did you come back here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought about you yesterday,” he said. “I was worried I’d hurt you.”

She stared at the curb.

“Can I tell you something?”

“What.”

“I’ve never seen freckles like yours before. I apologize for staring.”

“They’re fugly.” She glanced up at him.

“Well. I don’t know what that means but I don’t like the sound of it. And I myself happen to think they’re striking. Stunning. And you know what else?”

“What.”

“I’m an expert on freckles.”

She smiled. “Sounds like the kind of dumb thing my mom would say.”

“Look at me. I might be a lot of things, but I’m not a liar, okay?”

“Okay.”

“There’s precious little truth in this world, and I am one of its most enthusiastic spokespeople. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He closed his eyes and tipped back his head. “I think,” he said, “there’s still some life running beneath these streets.” The girl said nothing. He looked at her. “Your friends are just scared, you know. Scared and stupid.”

She shrugged. “Not really my friends anymore.”

“Were they good friends?”

“I guess.”

“You’ve known them since you were kids? Little kids? You’ve lived here your whole life in this neighborhood?”

The girl nodded.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” He turned to her. “Look at that face,” he said. “Your face needs a line of broken-toothed mountains behind it. A girl like you needs a swimming hole. A river. Trees and clear skies. Ever go fishing? Or camping or hunting?”

“With who?”

“With anybody.”

“No.”

“Your mom buys you meat from the grocery store?”

“Yeah.”

“On little white Styrofoam trays?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t say yeah, say yes.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never wrestled an animal to the ground and cut out his heart and eaten him in the dark, by a fire?”

The girl half smiled.

“Did you ever go camping?”

“Like sleeping outside?”

“Like sleeping outside.”

“No.”

“What about Dad?”

“Good question.”

“Uncles?”

“Nope.”

“I’m thinking of taking a sort of camping trip.”

“Oh.”

“Did you tell your mother about yesterday?”

“No way.”

“You think she’d freak out.”

“I don’t know what she’d do.”

“You didn’t say anything because you were embarrassed. Is that it?”

The girl shrugged. A bus sped up to the curb, brakes hissing and screeching. She leaned back from it. The tall paneled doors folded open. No one stepped on or off. The doors shut and the bus drove away. “What’s your name anyway?”

He looked at her. “Gary.”

“I’m glad it’s not Tom.”

“That would be too weird.”

“We couldn’t be friends.”

He checked his watch. “Listen. I need to make an appearance at work again. You want some lunch and I’ll take you home?”

“Yesterday you said I shouldn’t go up to strangers.”

“But you just did.”

“Oh.”

“You’re a little stubborn, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yes.”

“You know something, you’re practically the only living person I know.”

She scrunched up her nose. “What are you talking about?”

“Come on,” he said “I won’t drag you this time. Your own free will. Let me get you lunch. It’s my way of apologizing if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

“Yes I did.”

“It was pretty stupid.”

“You or me?”

“Both.”

“Smart girl.”

“You’re not going to take me back to school?”

“Not if you don’t want to go.”

“Just lunch and home?”

“Lunch and home. We’ll do a drive-through. Your choice.”

“Really?”

“Come on.” The girl stood. “We’re sort of getting to know each other, aren’t we?”

At the drive-through he felt worse. It was the cheapness of the food, the unwholesomeness of it. He wondered how long the meat in her sandwich had been dead, or if someone behind the counter had spit in it, or not washed their hands before assembling it, and where the chicken had been raised and killed and by whom and for what recompense. The kid couldn’t know what she was missing, the depths to which she was being duped by a world she had no hand in making. She needed something else to steer by. Something other than this. A person who—as it turned out—had both the inclination and resources to do so. It wasn’t anything noble, or grand. He just wanted to do the little things for her, promise her a decent a meal someday soon. “With a glass of milk,” he said. “And grilled cheese and a fresh sliced pear,” he said. “How about that?”

“My grandma used to make those. She called it toasted cheese. Cut them in triangles.”

“Oh, that’s good. And did she ever grill it for you outside? Like on a little camping stove by a river?”

“My grandma? Who never even wore pants?”

“Someday we’ll do that. You and me.”

“Good luck finding a river.”

“I know some rivers.”

He brought her back to the apartment building, pulled into the lot, and took his sandwich and carton of fries out of the paper sack. “Here,” he said. “You take the bag.” He nodded at the security guard through the windshield, a dumpy-looking kid with a smear of facial hair beneath his nose.

“If you want,” Tommie said, “I could give you my e-mail or something.”

“Why? Are we meeting again?”

Her face went blank. She had the most vacant, stupid expression when she wasn’t angry. Extraordinary skin, speckled little piglet skin, but no lights on behind it. He had a sudden impulse to strike her, print her with a bruise in the shape of his hand. Put something behind her face. Make her shriek. Hear something wild and untempered come out of her. Hadn’t there been some little rage in her an hour ago? And was there no way to rouse it again?

“Want to know something?” He looked at her dim eyes. “I don’t exactly have any friends in this town.”

“That makes two of us.”

They met ten times in the next week, before school and after. He fed her a little something every time: sliced her an apple with his pocketknife, drove her all the way into the city for a street dog and a pretzel. He brought her little things from the boxes of precious junk from his father’s house: a silver can opener for soda bottles, a little book of hand-drawn North American birds. He brought her a white paper bag of cut licorice to put under her pillow to sneak after midnight and a heavy pocket-sized pencil sharpener made of solid silver—something she could reach into her pocket and hold on to when Sid or Jenny or anyone else was nearby or whispering across the room. She made it early to the bus stop every morning and he picked her up and brought her to a pancake house and still delivered her on time to first period, her belly full of blueberries and sausage.

Eventually, when it seemed time, he took her for a whole day. “We don’t want any trouble, we don’t want any worry. So we have to plan carefully,” he’d said. “Right?”

And so they had. He drove her in his Ford past the Fox River and into the prairie reserves and green and muddy ponds beyond. It was a day suddenly hot and clear. The weather like summer again—a lie of
lies when the first of autumn’s cool rainy mornings had already begun. The day itself drowsy in the honeyed light, as if space itself were drained of the energy it took to sustain such falsehood.

“Do you want me to tell you about it? How it will be on the other side of Nebraska?” He handed her a cold orange-and-silver can of soda and she leaned her head against the inside of the rear window frame, skinny bare legs stretched out along the tailgate behind him. His blue shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows and he stood leaning against the truck, his new boots crossed in the dirt. It was hot. Nothing moved. Where he’d parked, the narrow road was split with a high stripe of needlegrass and thistles. I-80 hummed behind them. He took off his father’s baseball cap and wiped his forehead on his forearm.

The girl snorted and opened her soda, a fine spray of mist.

“I can take you home if you’re just going to snort at me, miss piggy.”

“No no. I’m listening.”

“Are you going to interrupt?”

“No.”

He reached over and, without touching her, ran his palm close before her face. “You have to close your eyes. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“Keep your eyes closed.”

“I am.”

He sat opposite her on the tailgate, his legs stretched out alongside hers, his boots at her hip. He cracked open his own soda; it hissed. “This is out in a high, wide valley,” he said. “Okay? Really high. Thousands of feet.”

“Okay.”

“Can you see it?” He paused, drinking. “Acres of pale grass. Almost gray. Big knots of silver brush. We call that sage.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Picture that. And one house. A little one, whitewashed. A slash of dark green half a mile off where the cottonwoods and tamarack grow by the river. Can you see all of that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why it’s half a mile off?”

“Why?”

“In case it floods.”

“Oh.”

“There’s only this one road, the Old El Rancho Road, and it’s still unpaved. It’s locked behind a cattle gate you have to open with a little black key.”

“I like that.”

“I know you do. Beside the little triangle house there’s a shop, with a woodstove, and an old AM radio, and all my father’s old tools, and his old arc
welder, and the table saw. A freezer full of hot dogs and a cooler full of Mexican beer. On the workbench is a giant glass pickle jar filled with old nails. Beside that, a little tin box where I’ll keep half a pack of cigarettes. But you’re not allowed to have any.”

The girl smiled, eyes closed, the cold can sweating between her bare thighs. He looked at her short blue cotton shorts. Doll clothes. He measured her up with his eyes as he talked, her arms and shoulders and wrist bones. God, she was small.

“Just off the back of the shop, there’ll be a smaller room, with a bright rug of braided rags on the concrete floor. You know the kind? Kind of a country rug, right?”

“Yes.”

“This room stays real cool in the summertime. Inside there’s a set of bunk beds. Soft old sleeping bags open on them. A metal nightstand beside the lower bunk with a couple of books on it, right? Your bird book. And a water glass. In the spring, when it’s warm enough, we’ll move out to this little room. And I’ll sleep on the bottom bunk, and you’ll sleep on the top, next to the small sliding window that looks out over the water tank for the old ragged brown horse we keep. And Tommie, let me tell you something: this is a horse you really love. Beyond that, just road and high grass and more high grass, and shadows of low clouds racing over the ground,
and far out there will be the range, purple and blue, a long jagged bruise across the palest stripe of sky. And sometimes, if from the bottom bunk I call up to you, will you lean over the edge of the bed with your round shoulders, and let your hair hang down, and say oh hello, you.”

“Sure.”

“I know you will. You’ll be so good to me. I’ll be all old and gray and all the sturdy young men on the plain will be in love with you. They’ll come by on their motorcycles or in their fast cars and they’ll have dark shining hair and straight white teeth and they’ll be tall and beautiful. You have to promise me you’ll go with them.”

The girl snorted.

“And I’ll fry you eggs early in the morning, and butter you a thick piece of cold bread, and I’ll slice the bacon myself, and bring you hot chocolate, and you’ll sit on the wood rail fence in your nightgown, and I’ll put my jacket over your shoulders, and we’ll balance our plates on our knees and watch the sun come up while we eat. And when I have to leave the house to go to work you’ll wait for me, won’t you? You’ll sit on the fence and watch the dirt road till you see me coming back home to you.”