Boyd shouts, “Maybe we could just live here. Join the brethren.”
We. She reaches the top of the stairs, pads to the end of the hallway. Two small framed things remain on the walls, quotations Ruth has embroidered: “David’s wives and concubines were given unto him of me…”
She goes to her room. The sagging queen under the denim quilt. The dresser and its grimy mirror, where she watched Ruth braid her hair for the wedding. Out the window she sees the occasional farm light, spread thinly toward the spiny desert mountains. Loretta opens the drawers, empty, empty, empty. Then, in the bottom drawer, she finds her shoebox. Her eyes have become hot. She lifts out the box, opens it. Her throat feels thick and her scalp prickles. She sits on the padded stool before the dresser, and looks through the box. Her grandmother’s Christmas ornaments. Her diary. “The man I will mary.” Earrings. Arrowheads. A hazy photograph of herself as an infant, her parents huddled around her. She looks up and is startled by her image in the mirror: grief stricken, gunshot. She feels dimmed with a sorrow for all that is bygone and impossible and flown away. For all that has to be the way it is simply because it is over now, it has happened, and is never to be gotten back.
• • •
Jason wakes to a shove from Baker. “It’s go time,” he says.
The Nova creeps with its lights off, down a dirt road lined in ditch grass. Forms take shape. Ahead is a barny, big-shouldered house. They’re in the country somewhere. The stars look tiny and still, as though racing away from the earth.
“You snore like a girl,” Baker says.
“What time is it?”
Baker chuckles.
“You’re a funny kid. It’s late.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re there, buddy. The Crick. We are there.”
They stop in front of the house. It is dark, but for thin light through curtains in the biggest window. Ahead, sharked crookedlyonto the border where the lawn peters out into dirt, sits the LeBaron. Baker leans on the steering wheel and works his chin against a knuckle, staring at the house. Jason can see now that it is cheap, simple — wood siding in dirty cream paint, asphalt shingles. Small, dark, gabled windows. One thick strip of paint has peeled loose and bowed to the ground. A tricycle lies on its side on the grass.
“I don’t know what to do here,” Baker says. “What do you think I should do?”
“Maybe we ought to just leave.”
“Good one. Okay.” He pops the steering wheel with both palms. “Let’s go see our friends.”
Frosty grass crackles underfoot. The concrete step has a worn mat with the words WELCOME TO OUR HOME. Scuff marks cover the bottom of the wooden door. Baker looks around, thinking. He seems unconcerned about Jason and what Jason might do, and Jason wonders why it is so obvious that he will do nothing. Baker takes the doorknob. When it turns, he gives Jason a look of happy surprise and pushes it open. Inside, a linoleum entryway opens onto a carpeted cavern of a living room, half empty, that opens onto a kitchen at the back, where a single light is on. A disassembled living space remains — a love seat and end table that suggest where the rest of the missing furniture used to be. A couple of lumps — duffel bags, piles of clothes, a pair of tennis shoes that he recognizes as Loretta’s — sit on the floor. Baker walks in. Yawns. He stares out the kitchen window. The refrigerator hums. Baker turns and steps back through the kitchen quietly, and as he is doing so a door along the side of the room opens, and Boyd walks out, looking down as he buttons his jeans.
Baker’s face opens brightly, delighted. Just as Boyd is noticing there is something amiss, Baker says, “Hello, shitbird,” and takes three rapid strides across the room and slaps Boyd against the side of his head with such force that Boyd stumbles, then sits on the ground. Baker strikes him again, a meaty clout on the ear, and Boyd topples over, covers his head with his hands. From upstairs comes a voice. “Boyd?” Loretta’s voice.
Baker looks toward the stairs and bellows in answer, wordlessly, a joyous animal roar that he seems to draw upward from somewhere deep and black and far below the earth.
Then he’s taking the stairs, two by two.
• • •
Bradshaw? What? Bradshaw? Loretta can’t put together an idea of why Bradshaw is here, but there he is, Bradshaw, barging in the door while she sits there, shoebox in her lap, and he is smiling and moving so forcefully that her body knows to be terrified even before her mind does: it drains and parches and trembles.
Bradshaw knocks the shoebox from her lap.
“Hey, baby. Surprise.”
She shakes her head. He stands over her. His fury fills the room.
“You’re not? You’re not surprised?”
“Brad,” she starts.
He leans down, puts his face so close she feels his nose tickling the hairs of her nose, and bellows: “SHUT UP!” A blast of liquor. He stands and inhales vigorously through his nostrils, and then says, almost dreamily, almost as if he were talking to himself, “Just shut up, Lori. Let that be your plan. Now get your lousy faithless ass downstairs.”
Out the door and down the hall and down the stairs, and there is the next surprise: Jason. He stands in the kitchen, with the aspect of a jackrabbit staying perfectly still to avoid the eye of the hawk. Boyd is curled on the ground, hands to his head.
Bradshaw says, “What a couple of chickenshits.”
• • •
Jason thinks he doesn’t recognize Loretta, though he does. She has lost control of her face. She called him Brad. Why is she calling him Brad, and why is she calling him Brad in that way?
“Thought you two might take off while you had the chance,” Baker says. “I guess you must like me.”
He takes Loretta by the arm and guides her to the love seat and shoves her into it.
“You two come on over and sit here, too,” he says.
When they are arrayed — Loretta in the love seat, Boyd and Jason sitting on the carpet in a kind of triangle — Baker makes a show of looking from Boyd to Loretta, from Loretta to Boyd. He makes a show of trying to think it through, sort it out.
Finally, he looks at Jason, waggles his thumb between Boyd and Loretta, and says, “Told ya, stupid.”
• • •
Bradshaw takes a deep breath. Pulls the flask from his back pocket and tips it up until it’s empty. He tilts his head back and forth, as though carrying on a debate within himself.
Loretta says, “I was getting ready to call you.”
“Yeah?”
He begins to pace. Heavy on the boot heels.
She says, “Yeah,” and he nods and stomps, and says, blearily, “Your plan was that you’d leave without telling me, take off with these jokers, come down and get it, and then call me?”
• • •
They are talking secrets and plans, Loretta and Baker are, and Jason feels yet another hot spear of jealousy. How wrong he has been, about everything.
Loretta says, “Yeah. Yes, Brad,” her voice a vibrato of fear. Brad again. What does it mean that she’s calling him that? Baker says, “Yeah?” like he’s genuinely, deeply curious. He steps to Boyd and kicks him in the ribs so hard Boyd lifts up and falls onto his side. He moans and says, “Goddammit,” and Baker adjusts his angle and kicks him again, and says, “No more from you, you red fucking nigger.” Boyd retches, a wet, beery mess pooling on the shag. “A kick for every single fucking word,” Baker says, and Boyd coughs and whispers, “Okay,” and Baker kicks him again. Boyd begins to quietly cry.