“I need help.” His eyes avoided her, and she added, “You left me.”
“Not you.”
“Anna? You mean Anna?” “Let’s not talk here.”
She followed him up the grade of the riverbank, up to the place where the trestle leaped across the water. Travis sat on a concrete abutment, gazing wearily off at the horizon.
“Travis,” she said, making herself brave. “I know there’s something wrong. I asked Anna about it. She wouldn’t explain, but she says it was a mistake—you saw something you shouldn’t have seen. You weren’t ready.” She licked her lips. “It was a mistake. Travis, please come back.”
He was a long time answering. The wind was brisk, and Nancy hugged her coat around herself.
“Maybe it’s true,” he said slowly, “what Aunt Liza believes about Anna. She’s not human.” For the first time he looked at her. “You understand that?”
“No! How could she not be human? She—”
“You’ve been with her. You know.”
Well. Of course there was so much she didn’t understand. Obviously, what was happening was not normal. Normal people didn’t need to be sequestered in ruined buildings for months at a time. But—not human? How could that be?
Travis’s fists were clenched.
“I gave it up for her,” he said. “I had it in my hand. A life. An ordinary life. She seduced me out of it.”
“She’s lost, Travis. I talked to her about it. She’s just lost, is all. I don’t know where she’s lost from, or how she plans to get back… but lost is lost. This town won’t help. We have to.”
She reached for his hand. But he drew it away, and the gesture was so quick and so instinctive that it shocked her. “Don’t,” he said.
“My God. It’s me. It’s me, isn’t it? It’s something I did.”
Travis shook his head no. His eyes, however, were blank.
“I trusted you!”
He turned back toward the bridge. “Travis! Travis Fisher, you son of a bitch! I trusted you!”
The wind tore at her.
He watched from the bridge as Nancy stalked away through the prairie grass. Part of him wanted to follow her. To apologize.
But he could not forget what had happened in the switchman’s shack. The thing Anna had become. The experience defied comprehension. He knew only that it was real, and that the Anna-thing was not human, and that she had seduced him into betraying any hope he might have had of a future here in Haute Montagne.
To the west, workmen were erecting a tent for the traveling revival. A clanking and the cry of muted voices came across the prairie. The tent revivals always came to Haute Montagne in the autumn, Nancy had said. It was a signal of impending winter, as unmistakable as the racing of the dark clouds across the sky.
There was nothing left for him but to move on … to move on the way these other men did, riding the boxcars and the flatcars. Racing the snow, looking for work. Travis had resigned himself to it.
But not yet, he thought, though he could not explain even to himself why he felt that way: not just yet.
He would stay here a while. Off west, the fluttering banners of the tent revival rose on their guy wires to the gray sky.
He thought: There is unfinished business here.
Chapter Nine
Creath Burack, dressing for the tent revival, regarded himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, she is gone.
The mirror was cracked where Travis Fisher had broken it in their scuffle. Weeks had passed, but Creath had not been able to summon the energy to make repairs. A sliver of glass, stiletto-shaped, had fallen away from the backing; a black fissure divided his reflection.
She was gone. He could not erase that single terrible thought from his mind.
It should not matter. He had told himself so. If anything, things had improved. Liza was bustling in the bedroom, singing to herself… and when had he last heard her sing? A year ago, two, three? And he knew—it was impossible not to know—that it was Anna’s absence that had lifted the cloud from her. That was good—wasn’t it?
But he thought, She is gone. Sweating, he moved the shaving brush in its cup and methodically lathered his jaw.
Well, he told himself firmly, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Not Anna Blaise and not his humiliation at the hands of Travis Fisher. Flesh is flesh, he thought; she was a woman, she was gone. It happened.
But in some strange way it was not the sex he missed. Pausing, his eyes on his own eyes in the broken mirror, he allowed himself to remember.
With her, everything had been different.
There was a sweetness in her, Creath thought, remembering the touch of her body impossibly smooth against his own. It had made him cry out against his will, sobbing with the sweetness of it. It was a pleasure that cut deep, that stirred him in secret places and made him aware of all the things he had lost. Not just the failing of the ice business or the disappointments of his marriage, but a broader loss: in her arms he felt, too keenly, the narrowing of life itself. You start out, Creath thought, you are a river in full flood; but life meets you with its dams and deadfalls and all its interminable arid places. You lose speed, depth, urgency, desire. You become a trickle in a desert.
He had been borrowing against the wellspring of her, he realized now: stealing back a facsimile of his youth; reveling, in those clumsy bedroom moments, in all the things he might have been and wasn’t.
Now there was nothing left in him but the loss. Only that painful awareness.
He loved her. He hated her. He—but it was a thought he suppressed, grinding his teeth together— God forgive him, he wanted her back.
Liza tapped at the door. “Don’t want to be late!” she called out.
He had allowed Liza to talk him into driving her to the tent revival. There was not the strength in him to resist her anymore. And, in truth, he was not strongly opposed to the idea. These last few weeks memories had seemed to shake loose like autumn leaves inside him, and one memory that came often was of the revivals he had ridden to as a child in his father’s horse-drawn wagon, excited at first by the bustle of it and then, in the hot cavern of the tent, caught up in some itinerant preacher’s evocation of the afterlife, intoxicated by the choral voices, until he imagined he could see that golden city glittering in front of him, until it shone in his dreams, benevolent and full of solace. But the solace, like the dreams, faded,- and then there had been only real life, grindingly ordinary, powerful and familiar. The dreams were a cheat, and he had taught himself to despise them.
Now, in some essential way alone, he longed for that consolation.
“In a minute,” Creath called through the door. “I’m shaving.”
“I’ll wait in the truck,” Liza said.
He made his mind blank, shaved himself thoroughly and rinsed his face, and then turned away from the fractured mirror with an unspeakable sense of relief.
They parked in the meadow and walked to the tent at dusk, Liza beaming and nodding hellos. Tent revivals always made her think of heaven.
Everything was just the way she imagined heaven would be: the glad greetings, the tremor of excitement, the sweet voices raised in song. Lantern light suffused the high spaces of the tent, and the mingled smell of canvas and naphtha rose up like incense. She arranged herself on a bench with Creath beside her in his red-checked coat.
She was still astonished that he had agreed to come. Ordinarily, he displayed a vulgar disdain for spiritual matters. He was religious, she had observed, only among the Rotarians, and that only perfunctorily: the Christ-the-businessman school of doctrine. And even that had lapsed with the demoralization of the ice business. For years Liza had tried to lead him into something deeper, but until now she had not succeeded.