She tried not to stare. From this distance she couldn't really see him well, but he looked hot, maybe even super-hot.
Galadriel remembered the binoculars in the living room.
She set down the hose and turned off the water. As she did, the phone rang in the house. Her mom picked up. By the time that Galadriel reached the front door, her mom was already opening it.
"Olivia Hernandez got a new son!" her mom said. Marie Mercer wasn't the town gossip—far from it—but news traveled fast in Pine Valley.
Galadriel went to the binoculars that her dad kept by the bookshelf. Usually he used them to look at the elk that often came down from the hills to graze in the fields, or to appreciate the bald eagles that nested nearby. For once, Galadriel found them useful for spotting her own quarry.
Galadriel didn't even have to move the focus rings. Bron's image popped right out at her. He had on a t-shirt, and she could see his six-pack right through it. His hair was stylishly cut, his jaw strong. But it was the sensuousness of his lips that left her weak—that combined with the sensitive expression in his eyes.
She studied him. He looked... frightened, shell-shocked, alone. She wondered how long he had known that he would be moving. She figured that this was all a big surprise for him.
His eyes seemed to say, "I've known pain, and I know your pain. Speak softly, and I will comfort you."
Marie trembled at Galadriel's side. It was unusual for Galadriel's mom to get so excited.
"Well?" Marie demanded.
"Yummy!" Galadriel said.
Her mom instantly went cold. Galadriel glanced to her left. Her mother's brow was pinched with worry, and the excited smile had fled.
Galadriel enjoyed the reaction. Anything to get a rise out of mom.
"I don't think," Marie said, "that one should discuss boys as if they were comestibles."
Where do you get those words? Galadriel wondered for the ten-thousandth time. Her mom was always so critical.
"Why not?" she asked.
Galadriel pulled up the binoculars again, heart pounding. The neighbors wouldn't see her, she knew, behind the glare of the window. The boy looked even better the second time around. She wanted to stand there forever, to really appreciate his beauty. I want to chew those lips.
Galadriel's mother waited for her to say something more.
"I think we should go welcome him to the neighborhood," Galadriel suggested.
"Not dressed like that, you won't!" Marie said.
Marie didn't approve of flirting, even among animals. Galadriel remembered a few months ago, her mother had been watching some elk out in the fields. Snow had been falling, and the young calves were loping about with their tongues out, trying to catch fat snowflakes. They were having so much fun. But then one young female had gone near a large bull, her tail up, and had nonchalantly begun to graze just a few feet in front of him. The bull's nostrils had flared, and he immediately took interest.
"See that," Marie had said angrily, as if she wanted to spank the elk. "She's such a flirt!"
It was just nature. At the time Galadriel had thought of her parents' daily motivational speeches. They were always telling her how, "If you want something in life, you have to go out and take it."
That's what the elk cow had done.
Now as Galadriel watched Bron head into the house, she knew what she was going to do.
"Yummy, yum-yum," she said.
The house was ranch style. The outside was covered with siding, but inside Bron could see that this was an old log cabin. The bare walls displayed varnished wood, bronzed with age, with calking between the logs. The house had a solid feel to it, but the walls were sagging. It was only a matter of time before the logs settled so far that it needed to be torn down. The ceiling was only slightly vaulted, and perhaps in its day the exposed pine rafters had seemed chic, but compared to the gleaming new extravagant cabins in town, the place looked antiquated. The ancient atmosphere was confirmed by a wood-burning stove in the living room, and a pair of muzzle-loaders with powder horns hanging above it.
The family sat down to a picnic table just off the kitchen. Mike took a bench all to himself, and Bron felt that he probably liked the picnic table just for that reason: he could fit on it.
Mike sat quietly, looking at the food. Bron couldn't have felt less welcome at the dinner table if he'd been a raccoon. No one acted as if they were hungry. Bron's stomach was still queasy from all the excitement, and Olivia seemed lost in thought.
Bron tried to break the silence with an innocent question. "So, Mike, you don't look much like a Hernandez?"
"I'm not," Mike said. "My great-grandfather was Navaho. When he left the reservation, he took the name Hernandez. He thought that trying to pass himself off as a Mexican would give him a leg up in the world."
"What made him leave the reservation?" Bron wondered. It seemed to him that a place that offered free land would have its attractions.
"Ah," Mike said, as if to say, "thereon hangs a tale." He took a deep breath and launched into the story in a voice both soft and deep, like distant thunder. "When he was nineteen, he became a brave, and a few weeks later, the tribal elders caught a skinwalker. Do you know what that is, a skinwalker?"
Bron shook his head. He'd heard of them, of course, but he wanted to draw Mike out, let him establish his expertise.
"It's a man who uses sorcery to change into monsters, creatures half animal and half human. This man kept the hide of a puma, along with its claws and teeth. The sorcerer used magic to turn himself into a cat, and he attacked a woman and tried to kill her, but some men in the camp heard her cries and stabbed the cat, and drove it off.
"Later, the sorcerer was found in a cave with a spear wound to the chest, and his animal furs lying on the ground beside him."
"So the elders of the village put him on trial, and executed him. According to the law, he was executed at dawn and his body was cut up into four pieces.
"When you kill a skinwalker, you have to be careful. You have to carry the pieces far away from each other, so that the skinwalker doesn't rise from the dead. The heart cannot be near the head, and liver cannot be near the gonads. My great-grandfather, being a young brave, was given the honor of taking one of the sorcerer's quarters, and he rode off on his horse. The village Medicine Man warned him to ride far that day, at least twenty miles, and then to bury the leg at sundown, covering it with rocks, so that no one would ever find a trace. The goal was to make the evil sorcerer disappear forever.
"So my grandfather rode up out of the Grand Canyon and into the desert. The sun was very hot, and often he was tempted to stop and take a nap, but he did as the Medicine Man told him."
Bron glanced over to Olivia, who sat with her hands folded, eyes half closed, with a knowing smile. She'd obviously heard this story before.
"At last, at sunset, he was more than thirty miles from the village, out in a lonesome wash. He spent an hour digging a hole, and would have kept digging longer, but the leg began to jerk and kick in its sack, so he tossed it into the hole and buried it quickly, weighing it down with stones."
Mike sat back in satisfaction for a moment, letting Bron think. Outside, the evening was utterly quiet. There was no road noise. Bron heard a clank on the window and looked out. A moth had batted against the window, and smaller bugs were covering it, drawn to the light.
Here in Pine Valley, nightfall did not come all at once. The sun had dropped behind the mountains half an hour ago, and the sky was tinged with a hazy smoke from California wildfires. The setting sun left a band of violet on the horizon, with a touch of rose overhead, filling this little bowl of land with cold shadows that shut out all sound, like a hand clasped over a mouth. Bron shivered.