difference, though. I don’t feel like I know this place anymore. I don’t feel like I belong.”
She tried for a long time to say something to quiet him, but instead they remained like that until his eyes closed with undesired sleep.
GERALD WAS stove up the next morning and had to take three ibuprofens before he could put himself in motion. She asked where everything was to make coffee, though all he had in the pantry was some Folger’s instant, so she needed only a pan of water and a mixing spoon. Still, after she’d poured it out in a pair of mugs, he told her it was the best coffee he’d had.
She sampled her own and winced.
“Lord, honey. That’s something a Confederate cavalryman would have drunk in the winter of ’64.”
“Well, I guess I need to be a little bit more particular in my shopping in the near future.”
“You sure do if you plan on keeping me around.”
Despite what had woken her in the night, the morning seemed expansive with promise. While Gerald piddled with his record collection Orlynne said she was going to do some yard work, something to tidy up the immediate environment of the house. He told her not to bother but she wouldn’t listen, claimed it gave her pleasure to work the ground while she could.
“Time to get the rules straight. Don’t try to tell me not to do what I mean to do. I could use some music, though. Why don’t you occupy yourself as deejay?”
He smiled, went back inside and began playing some Pete Seeger, and later, one of her favorites, Bob Dylan.
After she had hunted through the work shed and found an old pair of canvas gloves she started tearing out the long runners of English ivy that had grown down the back slope of the property. She worked with method, winding the vine around the crook of her arm and using the entire leverage of her upper body to rip the rooted systems from the dusty ground. The growth gave way in small cloudy bursts and soon she was covered in a fine powder of earth. She couldn’t remember a spring like this. Days that grew hot but failed to yield afternoon thunderstorms. It was as though the country had forgotten its own established cycles, refuted all laws that ensured balance. She had spent her life close to the natural world, learned to decode its messages, but this was a new confusion. Everything gone dangerously dry, as if prepared for some necessary eradication.
When she was finished she went around the side to wash herself at the spigot. She saw it then in the soft and sandy soil and her heart dropped in her chest. Just within the wedge of corner shade pressed into the otherwise undisturbed and talc-like ground. A pair of boot tracks that led to the bedroom window before straying away into the surrounding brush.
8
HARRISON PAID THE MAN AT THE MARINA FORTY DOLLARS TO RENT the jon boat for the day. Said he didn’t need rods or reels because he’d brought his own, though he loaded up only two small coolers and a backpack before he and Delilah climbed aboard and cast off from the dock.
He piloted slowly around a few pontoon boats and a small sailboat riding at anchor before he opened up the throttle and bounced over Watauga Lake, headed away from the swimming area and toward the distant shore with its pines, deadfall, and steep banks. The wind was strong on his face and it dried the sweat as soon as it rose to his skin. He turned his head to see Delilah leaned back in her chair, elbows struck out wide so that her chest rolled forward under the thin wedge of her black bikini top. She saw him looking and smiled.
The first time they’d met in person she smiled like that. Like she withheld something of value beyond estimation. It had worried him then as much as now. Six weeks before they met her brother had been killed after he’d gotten Jesus and decided he didn’t need the other whites inside prison. And then she had turned up to see him, to meet the man who had been nothing more than a signature on a piece of paper. It scared Harrison to think what kind of woman did that. But he realized even then that the things that scared him were exactly what he would need once he was free.
They swung around the back of a scorched-looking island with a line of footprints and a burnt campfire circle and slowed as the lake narrowed into little more than a dark stream, coins of light slotting through the breaks of overarching evergreens. The wind was blocked by the land and now there was a new and immediate world surrounding them. Something spooked from the near bank and Harrison turned to see a beaver slipping from its perch, the water closing over its totemic head. He slowed the engine further so that they made as little noise as possible. He wanted the music of what belonged here, wanted to study it as you would a foreign language.
“You sure you remember how to get where we’re going, baby?” Delilah asked. She trailed one languid hand in the water, carved a slender second wake.
“Yeah, just on a bit further.”
They passed out of the narrow cut and the sun caught them as if they’d been struck. He throttled up and they cleared the next broad opening, passed only a rowboat with a pair of old men fishing and a young woman sitting on a paddleboard watching them. They then entered a second narrowing where the water began to shoal and clouds of minnows attacked their passage. Once he had to push off a bar with the end of a paddle before the water deepened into a clear pool that continued to the backside of the island with its small but empty beach.
Delilah splashed over the side as soon as he cut the engine and ran the bow up on the shore. When she stood near him he could feel the metallic coolness of the lake.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“No. Pretty thirsty though.”
He slid one of the coolers open and handed her a can of Coors Light. He got a bottle of water for himself and laid out two beach towels a few feet up from where the waterline lapped. They stretched out alongside one another on their stomachs, their ears pressed to the warm ground.
“Why’s it taken you this long to bring me out here? You know how much I like sitting in the sun,” she said.
“It hasn’t been long.”
“Seems like it to me. Just sitting around that creepy place all the time.”
“There’s no reason you can’t get out if you want to.”
“There’s plenty of reasons. A couple of them even got names.”
He didn’t like the way she was tending, knew it shaped toward no good end.
“Hey, you’re getting pink around the shoulders,” he told her. “I’m going to put some sunscreen on you.”
He got the tube from the cooler and warmed the cream in his hands before straddling her. She relaxed somewhat under his hands. Behaved in that animal way he knew she thought was attractive. And even now as she gently flexed her tan legs beneath him he could feel the muscles of her ass ride into his pelvis and he began to harden. He rolled off and washed his hands in the chill lake.
“Why you stopping? It was just starting to get interesting.”
“We haven’t got time for that. This is a business trip, remember?”
“Hell, we got half an hour, don’t we? That’s plenty of time for what I’ve got in mind.”
He didn’t let her catch his eye. Instead, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from the backpack and lit one. He didn’t like to smoke anything
