The Ram (18 page)

The front door opens and sun along with a blast of fresh air hits Peach’s face. She breathes it quickly in before the door shuts and they’re enveloped by dark and neon once more. She wonders how strong Nell is, how her body would feel pressed up against her own.

“You like my girl?” Sev asks and then winks. One of his earrings jangles when he tilts his head at Peach. “I don’t mind girls liking my Nell. That’s different. Sapphic, even. You know, enchantress, you’re more transparent than you think.”

Peach is speechless and not just metaphorically. She tries to talk and no sound issues from her throat. The poet’s instincts are right. But she wishes, pleads with the stars hidden overhead—the ceiling and the power of sunlight keeping them from her—that she’s not too transparent.

“And if you like a bit of cock with your ladies,” Sev goes on, his fingertips brushing one of Peach’s knees, “then we can make something work.”

She shuffles off her stool, nearly twisting her ankle when she hits the floor. She does her best not to look out of sorts or embarrassed. She tosses her purse on the bar top and smiles at the man she thinks of as a giant, aggressive snake.

“Excuse me. I’ve got to hit the bathroom.”

And to solidify her self-assurance, to make it seem as though she is calm and secure, she leaves her bag on the bar with Sev. As she retreats to the washroom, she passes through the nearly empty room. Just outside the hallway leading to the restrooms, a man sits alone in a chair not far from the table she typically frequents. He’s older, perhaps in his fifties or sixties, with skin the color of stained wood and a braid of flawless white hair running down his neck. When she passes him, he lifts his index finger and shakes it at her. It’s a motion half-wave, half-admonishment and she looks again briefly at the man and finds him suave and sexually stunning. She has the sharp feeling in her gut of wanting his finger to beckon, not reprimand, but she nudges away the desire for the man and enters the ladies restroom.

She locks the door and takes in the space. There’s one toilet without a stall and a small cabinet to the side of a freestanding sink. A plug-in freshener has the room smelling of syrupy, artificial mango and a decal over the mirror reminds all employees and patrons to wash their hands.

Gripping the sides of the sink, Peach talks to herself, tells herself Sev is correct about a few things, and first among them is her enchanting nature. Peach repeats the name over and over in her mind, willing it to be true. Enchantress. She forces herself to believe it; she feels more engaging, charming and attractive. She imagines shape shifting into the man sitting at the table she just passed, full to bursting with sensual energy and confidence. These are traits she must possess if she plans on becoming what Michel would call Perfect Peach. She thinks then of her client with the lacy eyelashes and solitary cigarette, with his misplaced amour toward Peach and smiles to the mirror over the sink.

She got him, even though his admiration is wildly inappropriate. She can get others.

The skin on her scalp comes to life, as if a hundred black ants are meandering about under her wig. She slips a hand under the hair and tickles away the itch in the same spot as always, the place where neck meets skull.

“Focus,” she says out loud to the mirror and then looks over at the door, making sure it’s locked. “You can do this. You can get Nell away from him. You’re running out of time, Peach. Use your skills. You’re the enchantress.”

Suddenly the itch that was subdued by her fingers becomes a sharp pain and shots of agony lace her neck, back and forehead. She hasn’t had a migraine in some time, but the signs are there, unforgettable from her college years and adolescence when she frequently felt their debilitating effects.

Except this time there’s something different. Her peripheral vision contracts in both eyes, until the bathroom grows dark and she stands, blinded, clutching the sink. A second later, bursts of jagged flame and white zips of lightning explode into her field of vision. She watches the lights tremble and dance, a display of fire, until her sight recovers, an aperture opening once again to let in the shadows which slowly transform into the pedestal sink, toilet, peeling wallpaper.

“That’s next,” she says, her hands placed at the nape of her neck and forehead, trying to press away the pounding in her head. “Of course. Thank you.”

51 Riley

On his way back home from visiting his workplace, Riley spots a transient at the corner of one of the approaching intersections. He says a little prayer to God or that bitch, life, that he won’t be the one to stop next to the man, that the light will turn green and he won’t be left idling in his Nissan, doing his best to avoid the stares of the weak and forgotten.

But this is exactly what does happen. Riley stares ahead, his hands firmly on the steering wheel. The timing on the light seems interminably long; the intersection is a busy one with four lanes of traffic converging from the cardinal directions.

And though he doesn’t really want to, he forces himself to turn his head and take in the man on the corner. He wears a brown trench coat, mud at its hem and a faux fur hat that looks like it came out of Russia or some other Slavic nation. He has a small wooden trailer attached to a mountain bike that was likely made in the eighties, its frame thick and unwieldy. He holds up a sign made from a flattened moving box. The letters are bold, written in dark blue marker:

Life’s gotten me. I’m showing my underbelly. Care to help me up?

Riley thinks of the way Harlequin, his chocolate lab, would flip onto her back and wriggle when she’d tipped over the trash or snatched a bit of food from the dining table. And he knows this man feels like he’s doing his best to show he’s vulnerable, that if life wants, life can tear open his throat and leave him to bleed out.

It’s an image Riley confronts as well on the silent nights, when the whisky and the OxyContin won’t quiet his foot or his mind. The thought was there before the accident, too. He feels he’s been submissive to the whims of a harsh mistress, to life, for over a year now. And now he just wants to get up, reclaim his feet and peel back his lips in a snarl.

The light turns green, but instead of moving, Riley rolls down his passenger window and the homeless man walks over, a discernable shamble in his step. Riley pulls open his glove compartment and roots around for a ten-dollar bill he keeps under his vehicle manual. The drivers behind him protest by honking. Someone lays a hand against their horn and leaves it there.

The bill is found and Riley shoves it at the man. But the homeless man misses it and the wind catches it, holds it on a wisp of air, and then spins it away from his hands. He shouts his thanks as he shuffles away after the bill, aloft like a green leaf first to fall in autumn.

Riley presses on the gas, gains speed and leaves the other drivers car lengths behind him. He needs to make a choice if he doesn’t want to be the man chasing potential as it flies away from him. It’s time for him to buck up, toughen up, make his dead father and his employer proud.

“I’m going back to work,” he says to the rearview mirror. “Fuck you, life.”

Thursday, the 9
^th
of April, 2015

52 Peach

She’d promised Linx sex. It was what she had to do to get him to watch the lamb for the evening while she took I-84 west out of Boise. Nothing else had placated him, but when she alluded to getting physical when she got back to the apartment after the drive, he stopped pressing to know where she was headed and went into the kitchen to heat up milk for the lamb. She was using raw goat’s milk now on the baby, mixing it with the small amount of colostrum-laden milk she had left in the fridge.

Peach experiences one of her least favorite things about driving west: driving into the garish flare of the setting sun. Its orange-red glare isn’t deflected by the visor and she forgot sunglasses. She keeps one hand on the wheel and the other, fingers tight, against her forehead to fight the light. When she sees the off-ramp to Parma, she takes it and then pulls a sharp right, parks her car in a gravel lot.

The building is yellow and white and a large, plastic tarp pinned to the understory of the roof advertizes two things: fireworks and furs.

Inside, she’s greeted with an abundance of both. The smell of gunpowder and tanned leather fight for dominance in her nose and she stops before looking at anything closely, spinning slightly to take in the heads of deer, fox, and ermine mounted high along the walls of the concrete block store. She runs her fingers between a pile of small, dark furs of indeterminate origin. The sign merely advertizes them as
fifteen a piece
but she doesn’t know which animal’s life is considered so cheap.

She thinks of her lamb at home, how he stands and walks solidly now, how she takes him out at night to roll in the grass of the common area and nuzzle his face in the dirt. Horns catch her eye and she can see a head of a bighorn sheep mounted near a display case of mortars. It must have been a magnificent ram when it hopped the rocks of some mountainous stronghold. Its real, previously-operable eyes have been replaced with black glass. But the two thick, tan horns which curl over twice upon themselves are the real thing.

Peach wanders toward the stacks of ground blooms, tables laden with fountains and hollow cardboard tubes meant to shoot mortars of chemical powder and ground metal into the sky. She fingers some of the fireworks, turns over their packaging. The instructions are written in nonsensical English. A box of sparklers promises to
okay fire from stick tops.

Moving past the illegal explosives, Peach finds an area with cones, mid-sized fountains and a few giant boxes pushed to the center of the flammable display. She picks through them, looking for fireworks with specific characteristics: red sparks, globular flame that looks like lava, ones that make no sound. And then from all she finds she culls to a handful with names that speak to her: Volcano Eruption, Fire of Olympus, Flames 5X and Maximum Magma. At least the Chinese get someone creative with decent English vocabulary to come up with the monikers if not the firework descriptions.

A mustached man in a denim vest wanders over to Peach and tips his head at the small arsenal piled on the table in front of her.

“Not going to have much of a celebration without a finale piece. Let me show you one like these but longer. It’ll shoot red and white into the sky for a full minute.”

“Let’s take a look,” she says, tucks her cache into a basket the man pulls from underneath the table. “I’m sold if it’s got a good name and no whistles or loud booms.”

“Souls of Hades,” he says, not missing a beat. Peach figures he knows every firework in the store by name.

“That will likely work,” she says and follows him between the rows of contained power waiting to be set alight and the preserved hides of dead animals ready to be engulfed in flame and put to rest if the opportunity ever allows.

Friday, the 10
^th
of April, 2015

53 Riley

The old Dodge Ram drives in the direction of downtown, but Double Al refuses to tell Riley where they’re going to dinner. He insists on it being a surprise and Riley lets his boss have his fun. The wheels run over one of the red symbols, one of the strange Vs still painted at the intersection of Broadway and Front. The color is starting to fade and Riley wonders out loud when they’ll get around to cleaning the graffiti off the asphalt.

“They’re still all around the city,” Double Al says, “and they haven’t hurt anyone yet. Just a deviant messing around, I suspect.”

When they get close to the city center, Double Al hangs a left on a one-way street near the Connector that runs a circuit through the city and out to the interstate. He pulls his truck alongside a sidewalk and throws it in park. He tells Riley to hold on and then he jumps down from the truck cab to the sidewalk, passing a row of fragrant junipers as he moves around to Riley’s door.

Riley looks around to see whom might be watching the coming scene, slightly embarrassed about being helped out of the vehicle by an overweight man with more decades behind him than in front of him. But he lets his boss take him by the forearms until his feet are safely on the ground.

“See, no need for physical therapy,” he says to Double Al. The man responds with a sigh and a stretching of his fingertips tight against one another to pop his knuckles.

Double Al doesn’t bother to lock up the truck and tugs up on his pants. He’s dressed in jeans, as usual, but he wears a nice sweater and a shirt with a collar underneath it.

“Someone wants the old thing, they can take her.”

Then he switches topics, true to form. “You okay with walking just a bit. I’ve never been to this place, but I don’t think it’s far off.”

“I’m good,” Riley says and takes a tentative step after exiting his seat in the truck. He’s sans crutches again. He feels strong tonight and after he puts his feet down a few times, he relaxes into the cadence of his slightly unbalanced steps.

They walk a few blocks, moving further into downtown. Riley lets himself enjoy the early evening, the air still a bit warm from the setting sun and the concrete releasing the pent up heat of the day, no matter how fleeting and weak. They pass groups of people out enjoying the longer days and the beginning of the weekend. He catches snippets of birdsong: an orchestra of sparrow twitters and the deeper caws of crows.

Riley thinks back to last weekend and the strange scene of the barricades and the sheep. He hasn’t said anything to Double Al about being downtown during the fiasco which ended up making national news. Nor has he mentioned Hamal to anyone but Walker. He doesn’t want to bring any of it up now, his thoughts about the letters or his thoughts about his role in society, as a man, and ruin the dinner they stroll toward.