“Hey, wait!” Tommy grabbed me and twirled me around. “I came all this way, your dad likes me, for fuck’s sake, he invited me to stay here, so why aren’t you talkin’ to me?”
I turned my face up, thinking to spit at him, and found myself swallowing the bitter taste because of the look in his eyes. Because somewhere along the way, between the time I had escaped him back east and now, he had changed, he had taken a turn for the worse.
He pressed his lips so hard against my mouth I could feel his teeth under the skin, hard and sharp and barely contained. “I love you, Mary,” he growled from way down in his throat, “I really do.”
I struggled, but I was too scared to struggle much. He held me tighter, firmer, and I couldn’t breathe. He growled some more, from somewhere deeper than his throat, and inside the anger I could hear him crying. And I still don’t quite understand why, but I kissed him back, even as I tried to push him away.
Before I left him that night, after showing him how to turn on the lantern, how to pump the water with the rusted old handle, where the extra blankets were, where my father stored the reading materials he’d have no use for, he called me from the ratty old bunk where we’d been lying together and said, “Your bedroom’s out on the end, other end of the house from ‘Daddy’s.’” It wasn’t a question.
Something about the languid, self-satisfied way he said it chilled me. “How did you know?”
“Oh, I wasn’t gonna just waltz right in. That wouldn’t be too smart, now would it? I’ve been here, three, almost four days.”
“How?”
“He ain’t that smart. Out here by yourself, you forget how to take care. I got a sleeproll, tucked over behind that little hill. Some food, some dusty old binoculars, that’s all I needed. Didn’t I tell you I used to be a Boy Scout? Merit badges and everything? I know how to handle myself in places like this.”
“Oh. Right. I forgot.”
“Point is, I don’t have to stay out here all night. You leave your window open, I’ll be there. That old man’ll never know.”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea, Tommy.”
“Let me worry about that, babe.”
I walked a few more steps in silence, my eyes on the saguaro raising their arms in pain or surrender. In the dark they always gave me the creeps. “My window will be closed. And I’ve got a double lock.”
“But I love yoooou,” he crooned behind me, and laughed.
We didn’t eat breakfast together out here on my father’s ranch, we never had. He was usually in the studio before he was even all the way awake. He said he wanted “a brush in my hand before the last dream wears off.” I’d learned to respect that, even though it sometimes annoyed me. Why were artists exempt from everyday human interaction? I remember thinking that if I ever became a successful artist I’d expect no special considerations. It’s only been recently that I’ve been able to see the arrogance in my holier-than-thou attitude.
I heard a “thocking” sound coming from somewhere behind the house, followed by laughter, a soft, sick squeal. I didn’t know what it was at first, but it made me scared and anxious almost immediately. I ran out the back screen door into the morning glare, shading my eyes until they adjusted, hearing the “thock” again, the squeal.
The first thing I saw when my eyes calmed down was Tommy in a stained T-shirt, ball cap, and torn cutoff jeans whacking at stones with an old croquet mallet, the remains of a set I’d seen lying out there in the sand (Like many artists I knew, my father had accumulated a massive amount of junk which he permitted to rust and rot wherever he left it. It seemed to be another one of those habits permitted artists, but which made you a slob if you were in any other occupation.) The mallet cracked and flew apart, Tommy cackled, grabbed another old mallet off the ground, and continued swinging at stones. I didn’t realize what his target was until it squealed again.
I gazed out toward the collapsing bunkhouse, and there by the corner of the porch I saw the poor thing: an old Javelina, its eyes wide, with something wrong with its legs. It struggled to get off its side, but kept falling back down. Then another rock hit it, and it squealed again. I felt sick. “Tommy! Stop it!”
“Hey, Babe. Just trying to put it out of its misery. I didn’t cripple it—I swear! Nasty old thing—I stepped off the porch this morning and it damned near took my foot off. What the hell is it, anyway?”
“Javelina. A feral pig, you asshole! Stop that—you don’t put animals out of their misery by making them suffer!”
Tommy lifted the mallet menacingly with his thin, spindly arm. He’d always been embarrassed by how thin his arms were, no matter how much he worked out. I’m ashamed to say I laughed, seeing him waving the mallet like that. He was furious. “Don’t talk to me like that, you bitch! I didn’t know—you’re the one lives in the fuckin’ desert!”
Then I heard a series of overlapping, coughing barks from somewhere beyond the bunkhouse. The rest of the herd. I turned to run back into the house. I didn’t much care what happened to Tommy after that.
The first rifle crack made me turn around. The old Javelina lay still, its head in ruins. The second shot went over the heads of the two Javelina coming around the bunkhouse, sending them scrambling back, barking furiously. Belatedly, Tommy hit the ground, the mallet waving over his head as if to protect himself.
My father strode over, rifle in one hand, reached down and grabbed Tommy by the long hair down his neck, pulled him straight up to his feet. He shook him furiously. Tommy’s eyes were wide with shock. Then he scowled, opened his mouth, looked at the gun, snarled, “Off of me!”
“I’m giving you five minutes,” my dad said, waving the rifle. “No discussion.” Then he looked over his shoulder at me, the gun still pointed in Tommy’s direction. For a second I thought he was going to kill Tommy, and I was somewhat surprised to find it was the idea of my father getting into trouble that frightened me—Tommy could, well, whatever happened to Tommy was very much his own doing. “Do you want to go with him?” Dad asked me.
“Daddy! Of course not!” I wailed, shocked, furious with his misjudgment, heart-broken that he had no idea who I really was.
Later that day my father lightly tapped on my bedroom door, and in a voice that might have been sad, although I wasn’t really sure because I didn’t know sad when it came contained in my father, he invited me to come out and help him bury the Javelina. I recognized it for what it was. My father almost never apologized, but when he did this was the form it took, an invitation to participate as in his own way he made his small attempt to right the world. We stood together quietly, lifting the heavy, foul-smelling creature onto one of the extra blankets from the bunkhouse, wrapped it, then transferred it into the grave he’d spent a couple of hours digging, because he wanted the dimensions just so, according to some inner school of spiritual geometry. Then we alternated scraping the dirt in, and on, and although no words had been spoken, he finished this funeral with a small bit of twisted wire welded to unidentifiable, cast-off bits, which he pushed into the ground where the hole had been.
Nothing more was said about the event, and nothing more was said of Tommy, as my father went back to his art and his regular routine, and I struggled during my time alone to find my own art and work out my own rhythm within the world.
Weeks passed as they did so often in the desert, as if they didn’t pass at all, but lay around under that heavy burden of heat, unable to move. Food was eaten, the usual minimum number of maintenance chores were done, artwork accumulated, both in my father’s studio and in the confines of my own room, where my father never came.