19

The edge was not keen but the cottonwood logs were dry and they split well, the halves leaping away as the blade sunk into the face of the block, which was the trunk of the cottonwood itself. The boy split each log in half and then split the halves in half, family of four, over and over, pausing only to carry the pieces to the corner of the house and add them to the stack, turning each piece for fit. The house was stucco of some defeated color, with vigas stumps jutting from the face. About it lay a graveyard of trucks and farm equipment and other wreckages, all of it wallowing in tall yellow grass. In the shade of the narrow portico at the front of the house sat a muscular brindle dog, tracking the boy’s movements. It seemed to be waiting for an excuse to attack him.

Around noon, with the sun roaring down, he walked to the hand pump near the smaller house, the casita, and struggled with it until at last the water retched up and ran in a cold stream that tasted of stones and iron. He bowed his head under the stream, and then lifted his T-shirt to towel his face. When he dropped it again a girl was sitting in a chair in the shade with the dog. A thin-armed girl in a black bikini top and enormous round sunglasses, her insteps gripping the wooden railing.

The boy lit a cigarette and stood smoking it in the shade of the casita.

Later the man came out with two bottles of beer and a ham sandwich on a plastic plate. He was a large red-faced man in a black T-shirt tight across his gut, his feet stuffed into a kind of sandal. He had a bad back and moved like a man in ankle chains. His name was Tom Carl but the boy didn’t know if Carl was his last name or the second part of his first.

He took the sandwich and one of the beers and said, “I don’t think I can do much with these right now. But thank you.”

Tom Carl looked at the stack of cordwood near the house. “I can see you know how to work. You don’t have to try to impress me.”

The boy looked around for a place to set the sandwich and the beer other than the face of the trunk.

“We came out here to work too,” Tom Carl said, surveying the ruined machinery of his kingdom. “Spend more time together, fix the place up. A family project. Angela lasted five months and high-tailed it back to Phoenix, and now my daughter is counting the days. One day, that dog will go too.”

“Angela,” said the boy.

“Angela. My wife,” said Tom Carl.

“That’s my mother’s name.”

The older man looked at him, and then took a long swallow on his beer.

The boy stood holding the sandwich and the beer.

“Give ’em here,” said Tom Carl, and when his hands were full again he turned and took two steps toward the house and pulled up short. “How long you been sitting there?” he said.

The girl’s painted toenails made a ruby necklace in the sun. She did not look up from the magazine in her lap. She turned a page. “Since the dawn of time,” she said.

THE BOY WAS AT the corner of the house stacking cordwood when the girl rose from the chair and reached in a stretch for the portico ceiling, showing her dimpled stomach, ladder of ribs, and he thought of Caitlin and her friends in their track shorts and their tight tops—barefoot empresses of summer days, conspiring in voices that made no effort not to be overheard by the male in the house, the plain, meaningless lump of boy who burned at their periphery.

That boy older now than those girls were then. Older than this one before him.

“Come on,” said the girl, and she made a kind of dash past the dog. She bent and slapped her thigh. “Come on,” she urged. She waved a hollow length of bone. “You want this? You want this?” The dog rose to all fours and sluggishly followed. The girl waggled the bone before the dog and said, “Go get it!” and flung the bone into the high blazing grass. The dog took a step toward the thrown bone, swung its head to watch the boy returning to the tree trunk, and then slunk back to the shade and to its dirty square of carpet. The girl stood with her back to him, drenched in the reddening light, young and hip-cocked, preposterous, beautiful.

“CAN I BUM A smoke?” she said.

She stood to his left, hand to her forehead, shielding the big sunglasses from the sun. White well of armpit giving off faint scent.

“Sorry?”

“A cigarette?”

He saw himself reflected in the dark glasses. He looked at her bare feet, the dusty ruby toenails. He pulled the flattened pack from his pocket and held it to her. She pinched up a cigarette and tucked it under an edge of her bikini top and then offered these same fingers.

“Victoria,” she said.

He wiped his hand on his thigh and took hers, small and warm, and he said his name.

“What’s the matter with your leg, Sean?”

“It was in an accident.”

“A car accident?”

“Yes.”

“Are there scars?”

“You better step back,” he said.

She stood by as he swung the ax down on another log, retrieved one of the halves and set it up. Swung again. He thought about every movement, every pause.

“So, Sean,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Here?”

“Out here.” She glanced about the arid world.

“Making gas money.”

“To get to someplace else.”

“Yes.”

“Someplace in particular?”

“No.”

“So, pretty much you just drive around in that truck.”

“Pretty much.”

She nodded. She watched him. He passed a forearm over his brow. Far above in the sky a threesome of large birds turned a slow wheel. He stood another log on the block.

“What about company?” she said.

“What about it?”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

He brought the ax down on the log and the two halves leapt. He picked up one of the halves and stood looking at it as if the new yellow face of it would tell him something. Then he placed it on the block and split it in two.

“Well,” said the girl. “Everybody needs some company sometime.” And without waiting for his reply she turned and walked back to the house, and knowing she knew he watched, he watched just the same.

Why not her? he thought. Why not this girl instead of Caitlin? The idea of such carelessness, such arbitrary selections in the world, made him almost sick.

By sundown there were only a few logs left and he quartered these and stacked the cordwood. On the horizon a yellow moon rose from the mesas. Tom Carl returned carrying two sweating bottles of beer.

“You hungry now?”

“No, but thirsty.”

They stood in the song of insects. Tom Carl looked at the Chevy and said the boy was a long way from Wisconsin, and the boy said he didn’t live there anymore, and Tom Carl asked where did he live and the boy looked at the moon and said the last place he lived under a regular roof was up in Colorado with his father.

“How long ago was that?”

“February,” he said.

“And you’ve just been driving around since then? Job to job?”

“Yes.”

Tom Carl sipped his beer.

“Is there more of you up there in Colorado, with your father?”

The boy looked at him.

“More of your people. Your family.”

The boy shifted his weight to his bad leg and Tom Carl said, “It’s none of my business. I’m just curious if your dad’s alone up there or not.”

“There’s an old man on the ranch where he’s living.”

Tom Carl raised his drinking arm and slapped at it with his free hand, killing a mosquito.

“How come you left? If you don’t mind me asking.”

The boy was silent a long time. A hard, bitter morning, he remembered, Perseus, the slayer of Cetus, setting in the west, and the old green truck wouldn’t start, so he took the good truck, the blue Chevy. He’d been living with his father in the ranch house for five months and he hadn’t thought, until he was miles away, how it would be when his father woke to find another child gone.