white ragged islands of paint that looked to be recent, but he lacked the squared hands of a manual laborer. His long fingers tapped lightly on the steering wheel as he kept a meticulous count against the music and the wild voice of the singer, a voice that summoned a kind of lonesome bluegrass wail. She could smell him, that stench of work on a body. It called back the stink of those men who had passed her money for a quarter of an hour. Used her like a tool for something they couldn’t do on their own. Maybe that was what he had in mind. Make her into something that submitted, something that didn’t matter.
“So, your wife approve of you picking up young girls on the side of the road. Hot little things to keep your motor tuned up?”
He released a smile so thin that she doubted whether she had actually seen it. He said nothing.
“Here, this is the exit,” she said a few miles later.
He slowed and coasted up to the crossroad.
“I can get out here.”
“No, this is my turn too. I can take you on a little further.”
And he turned then without waiting for her agreement. She sunk back into the seat as they cleared the nowhere of the rural road and climbed up toward the foothills, turned off the pavement and bounced over the gravel and dirt. He slowed and turned into the driveway of a farmhouse set back beyond a grove of mixed hardwoods. The vehicle settled into park.
“Hope this gets you pretty much where you’re headed.”
She couldn’t quite tell whether he was making a statement or posing another question.
“Yeah, we’re camped up the road just a little ways.”
“I see. Well, good luck.”
“Thanks.”
The hatch popped open and she went around to gather and bear the considerable heft of the pack.
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Could you spare another one of those beers? You know, for the taxi service?”
She made a face he couldn’t see in his rearview.
“Sure. Hold on a sec.”
She got another sweating can from the box and secured everything down before tossing the ruck on and coming around to the driver’s side.
“Thanks. You take care, okay?” he told her.
“Sure.”
He flipped the unopened can into the empty seat beside him and crunched up the driveway. She watched him swing behind the screen of trees, his flat hand stuck out the window in farewell.
She stood a moment staring there at where he’d gone, sipped the rest of her beer before she went around to his mailbox and stuck the can inside. Then she turned to the road and headed back toward family.
4
STRATTON SAT in the rocking chair on the front porch long enough to drink the second of the gifted beers. His mind hadn’t left the girl since he’d dropped her at the end of the drive. He knew the rest of the road up the way she had gone and there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen places she could have had in mind to go to ground. It had to be the old homeplace at the back end of his property. They were all farms up that way, owned by the kind of good country people who would have hated the sight of her blond dreadlocks, the stink of her patchouli. She didn’t belong to any of them, that was for sure. And even if she had, there would have been no reason to carry that pack filled with beer and whatever else she’d got in town.
He went out to the CR-V and hauled in the few buckets of paint he’d picked up in town to finish off the back rooms, shifted some furniture around, and worked until an afternoon shower moved in and cooled things off. Damn Cat came in and circled his shins, tacitly demanding attention. He scratched the old tom on the top of his head until his ears saucered around, his expression of momentary satisfaction.
“Run off, now. I’m done with you.”
The cat slowly shuttered his eyes and ignored him, sliced each of his cheekbones into his ankles.
When the sun was gone but there still remained good enough light to walk by, he slipped on a ratty pair of sneakers and stepped around the side of the yard, made for the back trail that ran past the untended garden. He paused there at the tree line a moment, considered the problem he might be making for himself before he breached the woods.
The path narrowed almost immediately until it petered out into a game trail so that he had to stoop and pinch back low-hanging branches to pass through. Almost at once there was the staccato of flushed birds and ground squirrels. Later though not much later, the occasional serious break of something larger, deer hide flashing like a patch of shade made suddenly animate. And then after a while the sounds and shapes of startlement began to diminish as the woodland absorbed his trespass into its larger confusion.
The ground gently rose and hardened into shoulders of granite, protruding at times where the natural goblet of rock held a stream. The water circled and spoke and he passed his hands through it to drink. It tasted faintly of a woman.
He had to place his hands on gritty knobs of overhanging stone as he raised himself above the bank, careful but untroubled by the concentration the movement compelled. He had to remind himself not to muscle himself up but to use his legs and patiently crawl forward until gravity swung back to his advantage. His eyes remained on the close purchase of ground.
Once he achieved the top he took a minute to rest and draw away the sweat from his hairline and eyes. He was having to breathe harder than he should and this caused a wave of vain anger. To contemplate getting older was bitter enough without having to fight the physical restraints his body seemed anxious to impose. He forced himself to his feet and drove on.
He heard the sounds of hammering long before he could see where the woods cleared. He moved along behind the deep border of scrub so that he would have the advantage of whomever he might find there. Progress was restricted by his desire for stealth and it took him half an hour to cover the distance.
At first it was only a pair, a woman a few years older than the girl he’d picked up on the roadside, hair dreaded like hers though a shade darker and perhaps a few inches longer. Her carriage too was more vertical, heron-like, as she pried nails from boards laid flat on the ground. As she worked, her slim biceps jumped like something nervous beneath her skin. Standing a few feet away was the man, darkly bearded and tattooed across his pale chest and down the length of both arms. He wore a blue bandanna tied around his head to catch his sweat as he nailed good pieces of siding into the house’s frame. Occasionally they would pause from this and speak quietly, intimately, and his hand would stray to her bare shoulder where it would rest for a while. She did not appear anxious to have him remove it.
Then the girl appeared, coming down from the interior of the house, said something to them that Stratton couldn’t hear, and it was then that he could smell something cooking. The woman and man put down their work and followed her around the side of the house, mounted the stairs and vanished from sight. For a long time he listened to the sounds from within, the creak of the floors, the laughter amid the vines and standing heat. Eventually, he withdrew.
HE HURRIED home in the dark, took the road the last half mile now that he didn’t have to be concerned about being seen. He passed no neighbors on this back end of the dirt road. Everyone was already locked up safe for the night in their family homes, electric lights burning behind shaded windows, the lives they lit contained within the larger fact of darkness. He recalled how he had once given himself to their common peace and how simple it had seemed at the time to behave that way.
Once home he showered and dressed in a pair of clean shorts and a T-shirt, poured a tumbler full of whiskey that he carried into his office. Tonight was suited to John Adams’s Christian Zeal and Activity, and he turned the small silver sun of the compact disc against the light to check for smudges and scratches before he