White Horse (13 page)

A
crack
whips through the night.

Lisa leaps from her invisible prayer rug. Hugs the fire.

Another
crack
.

I know the sound. I’ve heard it on television and in the streets after the war and disease struck. Gunshots.

The soldier must have a gun. That’s not unreasonable. It’s a tool of his trade, just like a mop was mine. At least, I hope it’s him and not some unnamed foe.

What if he is the enemy?

“We should hide,” I say. If that’s not them, we’re sitting here with a beacon, announcing our position. My cheeks flush hotter as my ire rises. We’re two little sitting ducks, Lisa and I, rendered helpless because two men told me what to do and I followed orders as though their will was more substantial than my own.

Lisa won’t come. “He’ll come back for us.”

“We have to rescue ourselves.”

“Go, then. I’m staying.”

“If there’s something out there, it’ll come straight for us. The fire has made sure of that.”

“I don’t care.”

We stay, Lisa hugging her knees by the fire and me staring into the dark, keeping the monsters at bay with the sheer force of my will. The minutes slouch by. The night settles into its easy chair for the duration. I lean against the tree’s stiff bark.

“If you want to sleep, I’ll keep watch.”

Lisa stares blindly at me through the flames. The fire is a thin mask concealing her emotions. I never noticed before, but fire is not constant. It’s a shifting landscape of peaks and valleys. Mountains rise and fall only to soar again before sinking. When one flame dies, another surges and takes its place. This topographical dance takes place on Lisa’s face. From here she appears to be melting upwards, rivulets of
her
pouring into the gradient. A possible future has slipped through some crack in time to taunt me. I see Lisa’s skin shrivel away like celluloid, what little fat she has bubbling until it’s nothing more than a residue in the air, in my lungs, on my skin.

A memory chooses that moment to step forward, as though it’s been
waiting a lifetime for this. The voice belongs to Derek Keen, back row, ninth-grade science.

If you can smell a fart, it means you’re breathing in molecules of the farter’s shit
.

That one earned him a detention, but more important it won him a grudging
Technically you’re correct, Mr. Keen
from a teacher rarely pleased. Mr. Crane. I wonder if he died from White Horse. Surely not. He was an artifact from antiquity even then. James, in later years, used to joke about how he wished he could carbon-date Mr. Crane’s face.

I don’t want Lisa to burn. Not in the future and not now. I don’t want to suck molecules of her into my lungs, where they’ll mingle with
me
.

The crunch of boots on grass drags me from my morbid fantasy. The soldier emerges first.

“We bring food,” he declares. When he grins it transforms him. This man is proud to provide. He’s a trained protector, although from the victory in his eyes it’s clear this is not simply a learned skill but part of his fabric. For this I must thank him in his own tongue.

“Grazie.”

He laughs, hugs me, slaps my back. “Good, good.”

The Swiss melts into the golden aura wearing a dead goat across his shoulders like a biblical portent of evil. The beast’s head hangs at an unnatural angle, its throat a gaping second mouth. When he drops it at the fire’s edge, I see where the bullets have punched through its hide.

“You already shot it. Did you have to cut its throat, too?” I ask.

“How else do you expect the blood to drain? Cook it.”

Lisa leaps up, stumbles from the circle. The sound of her retching drowns out the insect cries.

“My experience with meat is limited to what’s in the supermarket in neat packets,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to learn.” From my backpack, I draw out the cleaver with its honed edge. My hands shake.

The soldier takes the Swiss’s rope. “I will help.”

Though there is abundant light, the Swiss’s eyes remain hard and dark. He crouches by the fire. “It is women’s work.”

We do what we must
. The president’s words, just before anarchy
squeezed the government from its fortresses of power.
We do what we must
. I’ve done that. I’m doing that. Because if I don’t, I’ll topple into the remnants of my life where I’ll languish and turn to dust.

We do what we must
. The words give me no comfort as I peel the goat’s skin like it’s a bloody banana. The guts spill at my feet; I tell myself it’s just Grandma’s sausage stew heaped upon the grass. When the goat no longer looks like an animal but like a random slab of meat hanging in a butcher’s window, I wipe my eyes with my sleeve and find it wet.

The soldier appears at my elbow. “Show me.” He holds out his hand and I give him the knife.

“Where you go?”

“Brindisi.”

“Ah. For the boats, yes?”

“Yes.” The blade gains confident speed in his hands. “Have you done this before?”

“Yes. My family, they have a farm with …”

He stops, pushes his nose flat.

“Pigs?”

“And chickens. I learn very young to cut meat for my family. My father he teach me.”

“Is your family still alive, do you know?”

“They are dead. My sister … maybe. She lives in Roma with her family. And you?”

“Gone.”

His eyes are soft with empathy. “But we are here, yes?”

“For now.”

“You must have the hope.”

“Sometimes it’s hard.”

“Yes, is hard. Maybe hardest the mans and the womans have seen. But we are here.” He holds up two goat’s legs. “And tonight we have food.”

Soon we are satiated in
a way none of us have known for weeks. The goat is tough, stringy, overcooked, but I don’t care. As each hot bite slides down my throat, I lose myself in a fantasy where I’m in a fine restaurant devouring a steak, and a wine waiter hovers nearby, eager to refill my glass.

The soldier tears into his portion, ripping away the fibrous tissue. “Sorry,” he says when he realizes I’m watching.

I stop chewing long enough to answer. “Don’t be. It’s good to enjoy food with friends.”

He toasts me with his canteen.

Friends. Is that what these people are to me? Lisa withdraws further daily, and the Swiss is incapable of anything warmer than a snarl. Only the soldier, the newest of our group, feels like someone in whom I could confide. Even now they remain in character. The Swiss gnaws at the meat, gaze darting around the group as though someone will wrestle him for his prize. Beside him, Lisa carves her meal into doll-sized pieces with my paring knife. Her hair is a limp greasy waterfall concealing her face as she chews and swallows.

Soon my belly swells with food, and I feel that now-familiar flutter.

Stabbing his knife into another chunk of meat, the soldier smiles and offers me the handle. “Eat, eat.”

“I can’t. Too much food.”

“You are too skinny.” He laughs. I laugh, too, because we are all too thin, and we’d need more than just this meal to regrow our padding.

“You’ll be fat soon enough,” the Swiss says abruptly. “If that monster inside you does not die.”

I chew, swallow, wonder if the Swiss ever had manners or if this world snatched them away. The soldier looks at me.

“I’m pregnant.”

Lisa stares through the fire with her one eye, her mouth no longer moving.

“You didn’t say,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because we’ve had other things to worry about.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

The Swiss laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “Women.”

Afterward, when we’ve buried the scraps and settled around the fire, the Italian inches closer to me.

“You have bambino? I will come with you to Brindisi, make sure you are safe. My country, my people are …” He makes a motion like snapping a twig in two.

“Thank you.”

He’s a hero. Streets all over the world are littered with people just like him.

I dream of mice and
broken men and all the promises I couldn’t keep. They hound me until I wake. The ground where the soldier had lain is empty. Beneath the tree’s rim of drooping branches, the Swiss stands watching the night. Although he’s not facing me, can’t know my eyes have opened, he speaks.

“The soldier left.”

“Where did he go?”

“I told you, he left.”

“Just like that? Without saying good-bye?”

“He said
ciao
.”

“In the dark.”

“The man changed his mind and said he wanted to find his sister, if she is still alive. I saw him back to the road and pointed the way.”

When he turns, I see he’s holding something in his hands. An icy glove grabs my heart, squeezes until I ache from the cold.

“That’s his gun.”

“He gave it to me. A gift.”

I don’t believe him. But suddenly he’s the one holding a gun and I’m holding nothing as a shield. So I say nothing. I curl up close to the fire’s humble flicker and watch as he polishes the weapon with the flap of his shirt.

I don’t say what I think. I don’t dare speak the words for fear that utterance will lend them the spark of life.

The soldier is dead. The soldier is dead. The soldier is dead
.

DATE: THEN

“Raoul is gone.”

James is leaning against my apartment door, his skin on loan from Madame Tussaud’s, his breathing labored as though he’s trying to inhale soup.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

We’ve been here before, one or both of us heartbroken. The evening usually ends with too many drinks and morbid tales of other past loves, but not tonight. On this night James looks as though he’s clawed his way out of a coffin. “What happened? I thought you guys really hit it off.”

“He didn’t
leave
.” James spits out the words like olive pits. “He’s dead. Dead. Dead.” His lanky frame folds up on itself as he sinks to the floor. “Dead.”

“Dead?”

I can’t believe it, and yet, I’m not surprised, but I can’t explain why. Only that somewhere deep, I know something I wish I didn’t.

“That’s what I said,” he cries. “I was going to fall in love with him. Maybe I already was in love and that’s why this hurts so bad. We’d already talked about getting a place out of the city eventually. Having a family.”

“What happened, baby?”

“He just died. He got sick and then he stopped breathing. Then he got cold like his fucking potsherds.”

“I’m so sorry, James. So sorry.”

“That’s not the worst of it.”

I crouch beside him, encircle his shoulders, pull him close until his head tucks into my neck’s curve. “Tell me.”

He looks up, the fine threads in his eyes blazing red. “I think I’ve got what he’s had. I think I’m going to die.”

My mouth opens but the words don’t come. And then I find them hidden in that place where you store the lies you tell the people you love so you can protect them from the world’s hard truths.

“You’re not going to die, James. I’m taking you to the emergency room, okay?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I am, I promise. Let me get my keys.”

“I mean I don’t believe I’m not going to die. I can feel it, Zoe, waiting for me. When I fell asleep last night, Raoul was there. Only, it wasn’t my Raoul. It was Death wearing his face, same as in that new exhibit we’ve got from Africa. He loved that exhibit. He said it made him feel good
to know that there was a time and place where it was socially acceptable to wear a mask.”

“I want you to show me the exhibit when you’re feeling better.” His head sags, sinks to his chest. “James?”

Eyes closed, he smiles at the ground. “Still here. You haven’t got rid of me yet.”

My shoulders sag. “You scared me.”

“Ha-ha.”

Then he slumps over. Shudders wrack his body. He claws at his throat, body flopping on the ground. He’s having a seizure and I can’t remember what to do. Put something between his teeth so he doesn’t swallow his tongue? Or is that something they only do on TV, something completely useless in real life? I roll him onto his side and hold him as steady as I can in the recovery position while he shakes like the earth’s plates are colliding inside him. Everything scatters when I upend my purse on the floor. I scramble for my cell phone and dial 911.

The line rings out. Rings out again. I redial just in case I messed up those three easy digits. Nothing. Just the huff of frustration that escapes my lungs.

James falls still. I wait for the aftershocks, but there is nothing but the sound of the operator picking up.

“What is the emergency?”

My fingers search for his pulse, but there’s nothing beneath the clammy wax that just a few moments ago was his skin. I must be wrong. There’s a pulse. There has to be.

“Hello?”

I’m looking in the wrong place, that’s it.

“James, wake up,” I say.

I press a hand to his chest and feel for the bump-bump, bump-bump. And wait while my lips give out my address by rote.

“What is your emergency?” repeats the tin woman.

“Just hurry. Please.” The phone flies across the room, gently persuaded by my fist.

“James? Get up now.” I slap his chest. Slap his face so hard it jerks to the right. “James?” Louder now, like’s he’s old and deaf and not—

Don’t say it. If you don’t say it, it isn’t true
.

—dead.

Don’t. Just don’t
.

I need to will him back to life. I throw my weight into pumping his heart, force my breath into his mouth, and … nothing. His heart rejects my touch, his lungs my breath. His soul cares nothing for my will. But I keep going until I realize there’s a thin noise coming from his throat.

No, not his throat exactly. Further back, a direct drop from his ears.

It looks like my mother’s roast lamb when she cuts deep slits into the meat and forces a garlic clove into each gash. Only, his neck’s covered with paper-thin flaps—

I breathe into James, press his chest with both hands.