We used to play a game here, she told him, when they were finished. I forget what it was called. But the premise was this: Marco Polo without the calls. Someone was It and the rest of them would say nothing. The pool was small, but it hadn’t seemed so then. Back then it seemed extravagant. Of course, visiting with Carter she saw that it was the least the town could do.
In the game, the It would have to feel where they were. No talking. No calling. Just old friends in the too-warm water. There were times when the It would be right in front of you, and you would be holding your breath, and It would reach out and touch the lip of the pool instead of you. To get away you had to slip down into that silky chlorinated dream. How inadequate that felt, to It. To be so sure you were reaching for a friend. Someone who knew you. And to touch only concrete. The lip of a swimming pool. It ought to mean something.
She has to get back. She finds a firelight in the night and makes her way to it, hoping it is theirs.
Jake is there, alone. She sits beside him. Hey, she says.
Hey, he says.
Carter go to bed?
Jake nods to the RV. Baby was crying, he said. You didn’t hear?
I never do.
Well. Jake stands. He laughs a little, to himself.
What? she says, standing and stepping toward him.
Remember when you pushed Miles into the fishpond? he says. At Corinne’s parents’. Remember?
Marin nods. She remembers everything. She moves closer to Jake. She can smell cigar on him. She can see miniature reflections of the fire in his eyes. She can see herself underneath him.
He provoked me, she says, and hooks her fingers in the waist of his shorts.
Jake smiles and tilts his head to the right slightly, the way a curious bird might. Then he steps back, allowing her hands to fall from his waistband, shaking his head. He tosses something—a twig? a pine needle?—into the fire. My God, he says, kindly. What a nightmare you must be.
Jake goes to bed and Marin sits in his chair and props her feet on the warm rocks near the fire. She puts her face in her hands. She lived alone once, for a year and a half, in the building where Tarv fell through the roof. Sometimes, in that aloneness, she did weird things. She walked around her apartment wearing a piece from a Halloween costume—a pair of white silk gloves, usually, or an eye patch—or as many pieces of jewelry as she could, or a bathing suit under her regular clothes. She took pieces of metal into her mouth to get a feel for them. A coin, a pin, an earring. In her bathroom mirror she flicked her eyeliner pencil twice on her upper lip to make the two tines of a dashing, charcoal-colored mustache. She would say words that she liked out loud. Pith. Coalesce. Dirigible. She wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t that. She was the opposite of lonely.
It has gotten late, somehow. Marin kicks dirt inadequately over the coals of the fire and goes to bed.
In the RV she wedges herself on one side of the bed. Carter is on the other. Between them, the child. Eleven weeks old tomorrow. As long as Carter’s forearm. What does the child do? Lift his head. Reach. Speak in a tonguey language of all ls and os. Lie between them. On the drive to the airport this morning, the sun still not risen from the horizon, Carter said, quietly, This is not how I pictured things.
There is so little room on this arrow of bed. She can feel the bundle of child beside her. She is light with youth, with once-love, and also heavy with the disintegration of these. In this specific gravity she slides into sleep.
She dreams she is wrestling with the copper retriever, groping in its mouth for the tennis ball. Grappling with Dingus on a rockless beach. Rolling through reeds. Green-gray follicles succumbing in the wind. They tumble. She is up to her elbows in the warm, wet lining of Dingus’s dog cheeks. She is laughing, rolling over mounds of perfect hot white sand. In her sleep she says, What does your baby like? In her sleep she says, This is not how I pictured things. In her sleep she rolls on top of the child and suffocates him.
She wakes, too terrified to scream, and begins to dig at the blankets. There are so many of them—hundreds. The soft, papery blankets of babies, the substantial bulky blankets of adults. They all smell of wet dog. Carter is there. Right there. He moans. Between them—somewhere—is the mass of her child. Their child.
Then her hands touch skin. A very small body. She feels it in the dark.
Breathing. Alive. Yes, alive.
She lifts the baby, not gently, and presses him to her. The child begins to cry.
Carter sits up in the darkness. Where? he says, thick-tongued and sleepstruck. Not what. Not who. Where? Where are you?
MAN-O-WAR
The fifth of July. Milo slunk out and sniffed around the dry lake bed while Harris loaded his find into the truck. The bitch was a pound mutt—mostly Lab, was the old man’s guess—and the abandoned stash was a good one, like last night’s festivities never got to it. At least fifteen Pyro Pulverizer thirty-three-shot repeaters, a load of Black Cat artilleries and Screamin’ Meamies, some Fortress of Fire and Molten Core mortars, probably three dozen Wizard of Ahhhs and one Man-O-War, a hard-to-find professional-grade shell pack, banned even on Paiute land after an Indian boy blew his brother’s face off in ’99. It was a couple grand worth of artillery, all told. The largest pile Harris had ever found.
Every Fourth of July kids from Gerlach, Nixon, Lovelock, and Indian kids from the Paiute res came out to the Black Rock with their lawn chairs, coolers of Miller, bottles of carnival-colored Boone’s Farm for the girls. They built themselves a bonfire, got thoroughly loaded, and shot off fireworks. The lake bed had no trees, no brush, no weeds to catch fire, just the bald bottom of an ancient inland sea. They dumped their Roman candles and Missile Heads and Comet Cluster shells and Komodo 3000 fountains in a heap away from their encampments, out of range of the fires, then trotted out there whenever they wanted to light them off.
Except out here the night got so dark and the kids got so loaded they’d forget where they stowed their fireworks. They’d forget they even had fireworks. They’d drink like men, like their fathers and uncles, like George fucking Washington, take off their shirts and thump their chests and scream into the wide black space. Pass out in their truck beds and let their tipsy girlfriends drive them home all in a line. Leave their stash for an old man to scavenge come sunup.
Harris moved quickly now, working up a sweat as the sun burned the haze from the valley. He unbuttoned his shirt. Finished loading and ready to leave, he called Milo. He slapped his thigh. He whistled. But Milo didn’t come.
Scanning, Harris could barely make out a shape in the distance, warped by the heat waves already rising from the ground. He drove to it, keeping an eye on Ruby Peak so he’d know his way home. Out here a person could get turned around and lose his own trail, each stretch of nothing looking like the next, east looking like south looking like west, not knowing where he came on the lake bed, and not knowing how to get home.
The shape in the distance was Milo, as Harris thought it would be, bent over and sniffing at a heap of something. The truck rolled closer and stopped. Harris got out, softly shutting the door behind him.
“Come here, dog,” he said. But Milo stayed, nosing the pile.
It was a girl—a young girl, Mexican—lying on her side, unconscious. Maybe dead. Harris circled her. She wore cutoffs, the white flaps of pockets sticking out the frayed bottoms. She was missing a shoe, a thick-soled flip-flop. A white button-up man’s shirt tied in a knot exposed her pouchy belly. Her navel was pierced, had one of those dangly pink jewels nestled inside. Rising below the jewel was a bruise, inky purple, the size of a baseball. Or a fist.