Part 12 (1/2)

Quiet in the field. Gloria's heart. Barking dog far away.

'It was one of ours. A Humvee. I watched it pull into the lot. First I thought they were lookin' for me, so I was s.h.i.+ttin' my pants, keepin' real still. But when they got out I saw they had a girl in the back. A hadji. They pulled her out by her hair and threw her on the ground. I knew these guys. Three of them. Drunk as skunks. I could tell by the way they talked to her they thought she was hidin' somebody, a sniper prob'ly, prob'ly the hadji f.u.c.ker who got House of Blues. So I guess they figured she had it comin' to her. And man did they give it. I watched 'em give it. Like a pack of dogs. Couldn't look away,' says Black Jesus. 'Couldn't even look away.'

Gloria watches his mouth as he talks. Any boyishness or innocence she might have marveled at there these past months is gone. Nowhere in sight. The thin dry lips like a whitewashed tire somebody left in the sun after the car it belonged to killed a kid in a hit-and-run somewhere in the American desert.

'Then everything happened so quick. They were done with her and they picked her up and two of 'em held her against the Burger King wall while the other one picked up a nail gun somebody left and nailed her hands to the wood. She didn't even cry, just hung there with her arms out and stared at them. One of 'em went to the Humvee and came back with a gas can and soaked her up till she s.h.i.+ned in the headlights. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked on it once and pitched it at her and it hit her hair and lit her up like a Christmas tree.'

'Oh no,' she says. 'Oh no. Come here,' she says and pulls him close, his head against her chest, her arms around him like a hypothermic child. Child who shakes. Child who knows exactly how to kill. Who was a very good shot in his time. Who's bottled up a billion tears in the black interim.

'It's okay to cry,' says Gloria, looking out at the pond. 'I won't tell anybody,' she says, and soon his tears are hot on her sweats.h.i.+rt.

'I didn't help her,' he wheezes. 'Even after they left. She was screaming. And crackling. And I didn't help her.'

Cattails knock. And colored leaves spin down. And by some reflex Gloria moves and touches her lips to the back of his neck. 'You were afraid.'

He can smell her. The shampoo she used days ago, faint, hypnotic. Her nice sweat. Some kind of faded rose, tangerine. Then his mouth is on hers. His warm wet face. Then her palms are to his temples. And her spine is to the cool gra.s.s, her wild dark hair falling all around. Her hand up his s.h.i.+rt, his pounding ribcage hot to the touch.

'Take your gla.s.ses off.'

'No.'

'Can I?'

'If you really want.'

'Thank you.'

Black plastic falling to the earth. Her damp kiss on the bridge of his nose like a morphine shot. Her hand in his jeans. He cannot see the wilderness in her green eyes as they gleam and stare but he knows they are beautiful beyond all description. Then her lips again. Then the buckle on her belt. The warmth and smell of her belly. Tangerine. The sound of her tight pants rustling down in the dead leaves.

He did this once before. Drunk with a Chinese hooker near the base where he trained. But that's a dead world. Gloria's breath at his ear now, the delicate drum inside. Drum to go to war. Drum to shake the night away. Drum to dance down a rain so real it'll scour all this history.

Days without limit. Pale sinners in the painted leaves. Each of them nineteen years on this earth. Where anything can happen. Where cattails knock by a pond as still as gla.s.s.

'Your favorite disk jockey Mike London checking in with the midday weather summary. There's a low-pressure system moving through carrying cloudy skies for the whole Hudson River Valley and into the Southern Catskills. Eighty percent chance of rain this afternoon, skies clearing up around dark. Highs in the mid to low fifties. I tell you what, I've been suffering severe Eurythmics withdrawal ever since my wife's cat peed on every ”E” in my CD library. I was just about to spin ”Here Comes the Rain Again” but then I had second thoughts, didn't wanna jinx us. So here they are, Annie Lennox and that other guy, with their 1983 smash ”Sweet Dreams”.'

'Turn it up!' yells Debbie in a wool hat with a multicolored pom-pom on top. 'I love that crazy redhead b.i.t.c.h.'

'Sure thing,' says Bea Two-Feathers, rocking away in Lionel's old wicker chair, all bundled up in a big puffy coat and scarf, a mittened hand already on the boom box, jacking the volume.

Sweet dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree? Travel the world and the seven seas, everybody's lookin' for something.

'I know what I'm lookin' for,' says Joe, grabbing Deb by the waist and doing his best Patrick Swayze. 'I got everything I want right here in Gay Paris, right here at the old DQ.' Now he spins the big woman around. 'Woo-weee. Ain't that right, baby doll? One man's junk is another's delight!'

's.h.i.+t, you better believe it, I already sold a ski jacket and a dartboard and that lady who died's exercise bike, all before noon! I'm so hot I'm sweatin' like a wh.o.r.e in church.'

'I second that emotion,' howls Joe the Deputy, and a prefab modular home wrapped in plastic strapped to a flatbed truck lumbers past on its way to answer other dreams.

Now here come Lionel and Gloria right behind, easing the battered moped into Dairy Queen's parking lot with their helmets gleaming in the cold sun.

'You two came home just in time,' yells a dancing Deb. 'Radio just said it's supposed to rain.' Then she looks Joe in his dark Mohawk eyes and sings along, 'Hold your head up, movin' on. Keep your head up, movin' on.'

'Hi kids,' says Bea with a mitten in the air.

'Hi Bea,' says Gloria, come among them.

'How you feelin', Bea?' says Black Jesus.

'Can't complain. I saw on the TV yesterday a thing about a man who put a toaster oven in his mother's bubble bath 'cause he couldn't afford her medicine.'

'Don't be such a b.u.mmer, Ma,' yells Joe.

'How's your breathing?' asks Gloria.

'Just fine,' lies Bea. 'I feel like Raquel Welch. The Big Medicine's on my side. It's gonna take more than a doomsday verdict from some Albany quack to get rid of me.' Then quietly to Gloria, 'You got a light?'

'I heard that, Ma,' says Joe.

Glancing over at the tall cop, Gloria meets his eyes and tilts her head and shrugs her shoulders and fishes in her pocket and pulls out the Trade Center Memorial lighter she stole in another world and hands it lovingly to Bea.

'Thank you, dear,' says the old woman, holding the soft pack of smokes in her mitten and shaking one loose into her mouth.

'Keep it,' says the stripper.

At Debbie's urging they took an umbrella from an old pickle barrel filled with such things for sale and crossed the highway and picked up the trail behind the stone church and followed it haltingly down to the creek. Stones underfoot, worn roots that lace the way, laid bare by time.

With the closed umbrella flung over her shoulder like some punk-rock Mary Poppins, Gloria stops and steps lightly up and helps her soldier onto the rotting planks of the Swinging Bridge.

Halfway across, his hand in hers, any danger tempered by the way they feel, he marvels, 'Listen to the water.'

The hard autumn rains have turned the Kaaterskill into a violent thing. Cool and clear in the summer months, it goes brick-red this time of year, kicking up earth as it twists down the mountain, brick-red as the faces of the half-naked race that fished its banks in the long ago, wild paint on cheek and brow, rough jewelry and furs, dance-fires waiting as night fell, songs to the rich earth, songs of birth and blood. All before the Marlboro Man drew his gun.

'That's the first time I heard it that way.'

'The Creek?' she says.

'Yeah, it's like music,' says the boy.

Dusk finds them on the edge of town. There's an abandoned nuns' camp here where, in the years between the world wars, troubled street kids from New York City would come spend their summers in these woods under the hard, loving eyes of the Gay Paris Sisters. Upon the wide sweep of camp ground a few ruins remain. The long screened-in cafeteria with its slab foundation and failing roof. The little bygone chapel/playhouse where they all would sing. The olde world pump house. The swings.

And here they swing, their charged legs working double time in the falling light, November's sun lost in the woods behind their backs to birth a rough pink seam where the mountain meets the sky.