She pulled the slippers and socks from her feet. “Those Indians have all the luck.”
He sat and watched her dip herself into the water, clothes and all. Wet to her waist, she turned to him. “You coming?”
“Nah.”
She stumbled on a loose rock and slipped farther down into the water. “Come on. Aren’t you hot?”
Harris shook his head, though he was burning up.
Magda pinched her nose and dipped her head under, pushing her hair from her face with her free hand. When she came up she said, “That feels good.” She paddled a weak breaststroke over to a half-submerged boulder and hoisted herself onto it. She lay there on her back, the wet clothes pasted to her body.
Harris looked away. He dug his fingers into the dirt around him—a habit—looking absently for something to catch the glint of the sun. Magda sat up and said, “What were you like as a kid, Bud?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Come on. It’s just us. What kind of stuff did you do?”
“Regular kid shit, I guess.” He sifted a handful of dirt through his fingers.
“Like?”
“I used to sleep outside. With my friends. My best friends were these brothers. Lucas and Jimmy Hastings. Their folks had a cattle ranch, out by where the fairgrounds are now. We’d go out on their land.”
“But what did you do?”
“We just talked, I guess. Shot the shit.”
“About what?”
He pinched a dirt clod between his fingers. “About moving away. We were just kids.”
“To where?”
“Reno, mostly. Or Salt Lake. Sacramento. San Francisco. New York. They were all the same to us back then. The big city.” Harris laughed at himself a little, recalling. “We used to stay up all night, just listing the places you could take a girl in a city. One of us guys would say, ‘To the park.’ And another would say, ‘A museum.’ And another would say, ‘The movies.’ That was our favorite, the movies. Whenever somebody said the movies, we’d all together say, ‘The movies,’ all slow. Like a goddamn prayer.”
Magda slipped from the rock into the water and went slowly under. Harris let himself watch this time, watched her belly submerge, her small breasts with his T-shirt clinging to them, then her shoulders, her jaw and lips. She arched her back under the water and pushed herself to the surface again, leading with her sternum, the ruts of her ribs visible beneath the soaked cloth, her nipples tight and buttonish. Drops dripped from her brows, her eyelashes, the tip of her nose, the outcropping of her bottom lip. She gathered her hair in her hand and wrung the water from it.
“What?” she said, like she didn’t know.
Looking again to his fingers buried in the earth, he said, “I haven’t thought of the Hastings brothers in thirty years. Sounds stupid, to say that’s what we did around here.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “That’s what we do now.”
On the drive back, Magda unbuckled her seat belt and took off the slippers. She leaned against her door and stretched her bare legs across the seat between them. Soon she was asleep with her head against the window, one long line from her stretched neck down to the bottom of her bare feet. A damp mineral smell filled the cab. Their bodies bounced lightly from the washboard road, and her raisined toes sometimes touched his thigh. He went hard again. Good Lord, he thought, sixty-seven years old and behaving like an adolescent.
After a dinner of boiled hot dogs, Harris smoked his evening cigarette on the porch and watched the sunset burning in the distance. The sky settled into strata of pale blue atop gold and flame orange and a swath of clouds colored lavender and coral and an indigo so dark they seemed hunks of coal hovering above the range. Nearest the sun the sky was the wild red of a wound, like the thing had to be forced below the horizon. A single sandhill crane moved soundlessly across the sky. A sunset was nothing, Harris knew, dust particles, pollution, sunlight prismed by the slant of the world. Still, it was pretty.
Magda was trying with no luck to teach Milo to fetch a stick, oblivious to the dazzle going on behind her. When they’d dismounted from the truck that afternoon, Milo was sulking under the porch. It was Magda who finally coaxed her out. She’d used his Leatherman to cut the thorns off the mesquite branch she was now hurling into the rocky yard. But Milo only ambled over to the stick, lay down beside it and soothed her bloody gums by gnawing on it for a while. Magda was stubborn. She slapped her thighs and said, “Come, Milo. Milo, come!” over and over again. When the dog finally did come, she came slow and stickless. Finally, Magda lost hope. She sat beside Harris and looked out on the lake bed. “What were you doing out there?” she said.
“I live out here.”
“You live here. What were you doing out there?”
He thought a while. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move.”
He went around the back of the truck and muscled the old tailgate down, an action that seemed to get more difficult each year. Harris had been coming out to the lake bed every July fifth, searching for fireworks near the burnt remains of plywood and grocer’s pallets, since 1968, when he was one of those wild jackasses. Since he woke up with an ache behind his eyes and realized he’d left a paycheck’s worth of Roman candles out on the lake bed and called his future ex-wife, Carrie Ann, and whispered into the phone so his mother wouldn’t hear, “Morning, Honeybee. Where’d you stash my keys?” He told Magda all this, more or less.
“You had a wife?” she said. “Where is she now?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. Then, “Sacramento.”
“City girl.”
“I guess.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” He turned to the girl, gripping a shell pack as big as his torso. The Man-O-War.
For the next forty minutes, Harris scrambled up and down the adjacent hill setting the fireworks, sometimes returning to the shed for a tube of PVC pipe, sandpaper or duct tape. His back flared as he bent to wedge a stub of pipe into the ground or twist two fuses together. His sinuses stung with the brackish smell of sulfur. He glanced down the hill at Magda. She sat on the first porch step, leaning back, her arms propped behind her. He saw Carrie Ann sitting in that same spot, waiting for him to get home, passing her time knitting or shucking corn. Harris pressed the image below the horizon of his mind. They were fine now, him and Carrie. She’d gotten her baby. Harris sent the child birthday cards with fifty-dollar savings bonds inside. Love, Uncle Bud, they read. He couldn’t complain, not in good conscience. They’d been given a second chance, Carrie and he, and were free to do with it what they pleased.
With the fuse hissing behind him, he hurried down the hill and sat beside Magda. She had her T- shirt lifted up under her breasts and one palm pressed to her bare stomach. She was bent, examining her midsection, looking for something.
“Watch,” he said, nodding to his handiwork on the hill.
But she kept her face turned down to her abdomen. “It’s probably dead, don’t you think?”
“Come on, now,” he said, too late to be of comfort. “Don’t think like that.”
“It is,” she said. “I know it.” He began to speak, but the first shell ignited then and shot into the air above them, sparks streaming behind it. They both started at the sound and Harris, with the quickness of a gasp, put his arm around Magda. The little comet went dark for a moment, then exploded—boom—into a sizzle so big it seemed to light the whole sky. The sound ricocheted around the valley and returned to them—boom.