The Stud Book (38 page)

Sarah leaned against the bars of the narrow window. Where was Ben? Her mate, her only mate, her legal love.

The door to the outside stairs opened. A cold breeze cut through. “Hey,” Dale called out. “I checked on our expectant mother. The baby still has a heartbeat. There’s signs of placenta previa, though—”

Sarah turned to him.

He said, “I want to apologize, for the other day, by the car. I was out of line.”

She put her clipboard on a folding chair, met Dale halfway as he walked over, and lifted his T-shirt over his head. He said, “Hey. What’re you doing?”

She tugged. He gave in, raising his arms. She had him trapped inside his own shirt; his head was hidden, his armpits said a big hello, his torso was that model of anatomy, pale and lightly marked with the curl of hair. He tugged an arm out of the shirt. Sarah sank into his skin. He smelled like Dial soap, clean and chemical, a man fighting off his own dripping secretions. She breathed his scent in until she found the real smell, human sweat trapped in the hair under his arms, the smell of an animal, new genetic material.

Sexual selection.

She unbuttoned his jeans, following the happy trail of curled hair down his belly. He said, “I don’t know—” His voice was gentle. His pants dropped to the floor. He stepped out of them. His cock tented his briefs. Sarah kissed him openmouthed, felt the warmth of his breath.

This was imperative.

She’d be doing Ben a favor. Not a biological favor so much, but a sociological assist. He’d be a father. She’d be a mom. Pressure off.

She’d be faithful to him ever after.

It wasn’t about love. It was about maximizing reproductive chances. They’d retain the marriage paradigm. She curled down to the straw-covered cement floor, in air heavy with mandrill secretions. Dale followed her down. He didn’t say anything, but let his body follow her lead. She took her clothes off in the cold. They could hear the hoots and hollers down below, the audience gathered for the mandrill porn show. Sarah pushed her clothes away, felt her skin rest against the near-frozen concrete, and against Dale’s heat. Those clothes had been a costume, hopeful and civilized, hiding and holding back her animal urge.

A
rena spanked a lump of red clay with her fist until it grew warm and soft under her knuckles.

“Paper!” the teacher, Barry Gibb, barked across the room, and shook out the tendrils of his honey-toned mullet. He wanted her to lay newspaper between the damp clay and the nicked tabletop—a table laced with cutout hearts and the etched curses of kids who’d already graduated or maybe just wandered away. There was a stack of
Oregonians
in the middle of the table. Arena took the Metro section and spread the sheets out.

She picked up her clay and the words
ekiM sevol aniT
were raised in the back of it, lifted off the table’s carved face along with half a broken heart. She poked a finger through the words.

Other kids were busy, their heads bowed over the fat strokes of tempera paintings or the crazy hatch marks of detailed ink cartoons. One guy seemed normal except for a crying problem; he charted whale migrations on big sheets of white paper tacked to the wall. His drawings were beautiful.

Who wouldn’t cry over that?

There were smart students in the special room, and others who
lagged. There were kids struggling with autism and Asperger’s and extreme hyperactivity. One tapped his pencil all day, the same rhythm,
tap, tap, tap-tap-tap
. There were kids with problems Arena didn’t understand, who managed well enough and then suddenly broke, and didn’t manage at all, like their little internal computers had been hit with a virus.

In that room they ate snacks, like in kindergarten. Granola bars and cut oranges! Snacks left them smelling like children.

She dropped her clay hard against the paper, and pushed her thumb into it.

“Hey, dealer!” A voice broke through the room. It came from a guy who leaned in the doorway. The pencil tapping stopped. All the kids looked, like maybe they were all secretly dealers.

They were all
dealing
—they were coping. Arena knew he meant her: drug dealer.

He said, “Seen your mom on the news.”

The pencil tapping started again.

Barry Gibb waved a hand and said, “Keep moving.”

The guy at the door flashed a peace sign, pointed at Arena, and said, “Righteous!”

Was that a good thing, or bad? She gave him a thumbs-up. It seemed expected. He disappeared.

She couldn’t read by herself in the cone zone anymore without smokers saying how awesome it was, her mom kicking butt like that. They’d say, “Awesome,” their heads bobbing.

She tried to pass it off as cool points.

The thing was, now her mom moved like she’d been the one beaten up—limped like she hurt her leg or her back but wouldn’t admit it. She mumbled broken sentences like, “God, I hope not,” or “Geez,” or sometimes “Holy mackerel”; she’d murmur to the toaster or the shower curtain or their potted plants.

She’d quit doing her workout DVDs. Instead she spent her afternoons fussing with a bread dough recipe, a baking project, the “mother starter,” she called it. Nyla said baking was wholesome. It was science. It was love. Arena saw it as food. They had plenty of food.

AKA was the face on the other side of the conversations in her head. She stored her thoughts to tell him later. He’d skipped work crew. She’d asked their group leader where AKA was, but he’d only
muttered, “Confidential,” and put a pair of gloves in her hand, then gestured for her to get going on litter patrol.

Maybe it actually was confidential or maybe that word was code, meaning their crew leader didn’t know squat.

She pummeled her clay, pulled off a piece, and rolled a clay snake. Her hands turned rusty brown. Making art kept students busy and gave the teacher and his assistant time to focus on kids who needed more help.

They didn’t focus on Arena. What help did she need?

She’d called AKA’s phone and gotten his voice mail, his own voice saying, “Sorry. Not here! Ha! Leave a message or whatever. I’ll call you back.”

“What about our trip to the country?” she said, into his machine. They’d made a plan the last time they talked to see his house in Boring. Maybe it was about meeting his parents. The way he talked about it, it was like the trip mattered to him. Besides, he’d end up back in the Donald E. Long Home if he didn’t finish work screw.

Mostly, Arena needed him. He was her only friend.

She’d gone back to the Temple Everlasting once, since bringing AKA there, but Mack treated her like a customer, like she needed a reason to be there, like she’d come looking for something.

Like he had anything to offer?

She coiled her clay snake into a low bowl. The class was working toward an art show. Her project was the installation. She had a roll of gauze. She had Anchee Min’s mosquito net. She had an ache like she was meant to be somebody else and was trapped in this body, this place, this school.

The thought of putting her art up in the school gym for people to see made her queasy and have to pee, but it was better than picking up used condoms on the side of the highway. Dulcet showed her work. Arena aimed to be brave, like Dulcet.

She noticed a grainy photo in the Metro section of the
Oregonian
, the paper under her clay. It was a close-up of her mom’s face looking older and anxious. Her mom’s hair was wispy. She needed to put whatever people put in their hair to make it lie flat, product, something her mom would call toxic chemicals.

This was different from the earlier stories she’d seen about her mom and the attempted robbery.

There was a picture of AKA. There he was! Arena’s heart picked
up. Her only friend! It looked like him, but more sulky. Wait—was that him? She started to doubt it. She’d already seen him a few times in strangers on the street—the slouch of his back, his shaggy hair—the way it happens when you’re looking for somebody, the way it happened when she thought about her dad. She’d see men on the street who could’ve been her dad, if he were alive.

She looked closer. This was her mother’s attacker, the man who’d left her mom limping like an old lady. The guy who wouldn’t leave the store. Alvin Kelvin Aldrich.

Arena couldn’t breathe. The air was thick with the dust of tempera paint and dry clay. She folded up the paper. Her stomach was a knot. In the back of the room, Barry Gibb helped a student into a smock.

She took the paper and slipped out into the empty hall.

Her mom had beaten up AKA. Her mom beat up her boyfriend, the only eyes she could look back into and not squint and skitter.

An alarm went off, blaring loud, like a fire drill, only this time it wasn’t a drill. It beat against the inside of her skull. She couldn’t hear anything else. It was in her head, in her brain, in her heart.

She couldn’t breathe until she got out the front door. In the school parking lot, she took out her phone and called, clay dusting the phone’s tiny buttons.

There was his voice—“Not here! Ha!”—and it was all a big joke except he really wasn’t there and he could even be dead because that voice had been his message for as long as she’d known him and now for all she knew he was nothing but energy in the cosmos and his voice was sound trapped in time and all of physics couldn’t explain why her heart hurt and her gut hurt and outside she wanted to see the city bus round the hill.

She wanted that bus like it was her breath.

She crushed the newspaper in her hand, then smoothed it out. She looked at AKA’s face, glowering and worried, and he was lost, and she was empty and he was hers, and her mother had done this, and no way was it AKA’s fault, and Arena was in love.

T
he partnering side of mating is a bodyguard arrangement, about sticking around to protect new babies and the mother while she’s vulnerable. Was that still so relevant, in the modern world? Sarah, on the couch, was a snow leopard on a rock ledge, patient and edgy. She wore an invitingly short T-shirt dress with a pair of high-heeled mules and called it good.

She ran a hand over Shadow’s knobby back, and watched the clock. She had strong coffee ready to make those spermy sperm race. Go, little soldiers! All she needed was Ben.

A footstep landed on the front porch. Sarah got up and Shadow got up fast, too, underfoot. Together they scrambled for the door. Sarah lost a shoe, and then she wasn’t a snow leopard at all but a stray and starved dog—not the plan! She stopped and tugged at her dress. She told Shadow to sit. She slid her foot back into her shoe and did her best to walk calmly.

She heard Ben make his way to the door. She poured the coffee. He’d have his hands full, his big satchel, and his crumpled, oft-reused paper lunch bag.

She flung the door open and threw out an eager thigh:
Hello, Sugar!

A rusted wheelbarrow sat in the front yard, tipped to one side like a drunk trying to remember the way home. A man came from across the street carrying a shovel and hoe. He had dark curls and big shoulders. Ah! She’d forgotten: her latest date with lawn care, a day laborer.

Shadow made his way to the door slowly and started to bark an aging dog’s bark, deep and weak and slow.

Bags of mulch were stacked against the side of the house. They’d booked ahead—this guy was in demand. His teeth were white; his arms were strong. He was, he said himself, the day she met him in a parking lot, “good and fast and clean.”

He was kind of a young Orson Welles, if Orson Welles had worked out. He was beautiful genetic material.

“Coffee?” she offered, and held out the cup.

“Hey! Looks good!” Ben’s voice was sudden and booming as he came up the walk from the other way.

Oof! He’d seen her, offering coffee.

Sarah turned fast. Her hands shook, the coffee spilled, and the cup fell to the front steps and smashed. “You’re home.”

His medium beige foundation was broken by a five o’clock shadow. That was why men didn’t wear makeup: Their facial hair ruined it. The shadow was manly! He was half in drag. His nose looked better, really, or maybe she’d just grown used to it.