Is this the way it comes? I thought. With nothing dramatic, no three-day bender, no delirium tremens in a drunk tank, no cloth straps and Thorazine or a concerned psychiatrist to look anxiously into your face. You simply stare at the yellow handkerchief of flame in a fireplace and fear your own thoughts, as a disturbed child would. I shut my eyes and folded the blanket across my face. I could feel my whiskers against the wool, the sweat running down inside my shirt; could smell my own odor. The wind blew against the house, and a wet maple branch raked against the window.
Later, I heard a car stop outside in the rain and someone run up the walk onto the porch. I heard the knock on the door and saw a woman's face through the steamed glass, but I didn't get up from my chair. She wore a flat-brim black cowboy hat with a domed crown, and her hair and face were spotted with rain. She knocked more loudly, straining to see me through the glass, then she opened the door and put her head inside.
"Is something wrong?" she asked.
"Everything's copacetic. Excuse me for not getting up."
"Something's burning."
"I've got a fire. I built one this morning. Is Clete out there?"
"No. Something's burning in your house."
"That's what I was saying. Somebody left some firewood on the back porch. The furnace doesn't work right or something."
Her turquoise eyes looked at me strangely. She walked past me into the kitchen, and I heard metal rattle on the stove and' then ring in the sink. She turned on the faucet, and steam hissed off something hot. She walked back into the living room, her eyes still fixed on me in a strange way. She wore rubber boots, a man's wide belt through the loops of her Levi's, and an army field jacket with a First Cav patch over her red flannel shirt.
"The pot was burned through the center," she said.
"I put it in the sink so it wouldn't smell up the place."
"Thank you."
She took off her hat and sat down across from me. The three moles at the corner of her mouth looked dark in the firelight.
"Are you all right?" she said.
"Yes. I have malaria. It comes and goes. They just buzz around in the bloodstream for a little while. It's not so bad. Not anymore, anyway."
"I think you shouldn't be here alone."
"I'm not. A little girl lives with me. Where'd you get the First Cav jacket?"
"It was my brother's." She leaned out of her chair and put her hand on my forehead. Then she picked up one of my hands and held it momentarily.
"I can't tell. You're sitting too close to the fire. But you should be in bed. Get up."
"I appreciate what you're doing, but this is going to pass."
"Yeah, I can tell you're really on top of it. Do you know a pot holder was burning on your stove, too?"
She helped me up by one arm and walked me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked numbly out the window at the wet trees and the rain on the river. When I closed my eyes my head spun and I could see gray worms swimming behind my lids. She took the blanket off my shoulders and pulled off my shirt, pushed my head down on the pillow and covered me with the sheet and bedspread. I heard her run water in the bathroom and open my dresser drawers, then she sat on the side of the mattress and wiped my face and chest and shoulders with a warm, damp towel and pulled a clean T-shirt over my head.
She felt my forehead again and looked down in my face.
"I don't think you take very good care of yourself," she said.
"I don't think you're a wise man, either."
"Why have you come here?"
"Leave Sally Dee and his father alone. It's bad for you, it's bad for Clete."
"Clete got in bed with that bunch on his own." I blew out my breath and opened and closed my eyes. I could feel the room spinning, the same way it used to spin when I would try to go to sleep drunk and I'd have to hang my head off the side of the mattress or couch to put the blood back in my brain.
"He's done some bad things, but he's not a bad man," she said.
"He looks up to you. He still wants you to be his friend."
"He betrayed me when I needed him."
"Maybe he's paid for it, too. You sleep. I'll stay here and fix lunch for you when you wake up."
She spread the blanket on top of me and pulled it up to my chin. Her hand touched mine, and involuntarily I cupped her palm in my fingers. Her hand was wide across the back and callused on the edges, and her knuckles were as hard as dimes under the skin. I could not remember when I had last touched a woman's hand. I closed her fingers in my palm, felt the grainy coarseness of her skin with my thumb, let both our hands rest on my chest as though the moment had given me a right that was in reality not mine. But she didn't take her hand away. Her face was kind, and she wiped the wetness out of my hair with the towel and remained on the edge of the bed while the rain swept across the yard and the roof and I felt myself slipping down to the bottom of my own vertigo, down inside a cool, clean, and safe place where no fires burned, where the gray morning was as harmless as the touch of my forehead against her thigh.
It was early afternoon when I woke again, and the sun was out, the sky blue, the yard a deeper green. I felt weak all over, but whatever had invaded my metabolism had gone away like a bored visitor. I opened the front door in my bare feet, and the air was cool and full of sunlight, and in the south the ragged peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains were white with new snow. Out on the river the rooted end of an enormous tree bounced wet and shining through the current. I heard her in the kitchen behind me, then remembered my earlier behavior the way a shard of memory comes back from a drunken dream.
She saw it in my face, too.
"I called Clete. He knows where I am. He doesn't mind," she said.
"I want to thank you for your kindness."
Her eyes softened and moved over my face. I felt uncomfortable.
"I have strange moments in my life. I can't explain them," I said.
"So I tell people it's malaria. Maybe it's true, but I don't know that. Maybe it's something else, too. Sometimes people at AA call it a dry drunk. It's nothing to wear on your chest."
I took a bottle of milk out of the icebox and sat down at the kitchen table. Through the back screen I could see an elderly woman hoeing in her vegetable garden. Next door somebody was cutting his grass with a hand mower. Darlene's eyes had never left my face.
"Clete said you lost your wife," she said.
"Yes."
"He said two men murdered her."
"That's right."
"How did it happen?" Her hand turned off the burner under a soup pot.
"I messed with some people I should have let alone."
"I see." She took two soup bowls out of the cabinet and set them on the table with spoons.
"It bothers you a lot?"
"Sometimes."
"I blamed myself when my husband got killed. I'd locked him out of the house the night before. I'd found out he was cheating with a white girl who worked in the truck stop. He had to stay all night in the car in zero weather. He went to work like that in the morning and a bulldozer backed over him. He was like a little boy. Always in the wrong place. He always got caught. He spent a year in Deer Lodge for stealing game meat out of some rental lockers at a grocery. He used to lie about it and tell people he went to jail for armed robbery."
"Why do you tell me this?"
"You shouldn't hurt yourself because of what happened to your wife. You don't realize what you did yesterday. Sally Dee's crazy."
"No, he's not. He just likes people to think he is. His kind come by the box carload."
She filled our bowls and sat down across from me.
"You don't know Sal. Clete said you made Sal look bad in front of his friends. He came down to the house after you left and they went out on the veranda. I could hear Sal yelling through the glass. I didn't think Clete would let anyone talk to him like that."