The Ram (19 page)

A trio of women are coming from the opposite direction of the men, and Double Al stops a bit short to move behind Riley and share the sidewalk with the other pedestrians. Riley sees her then. She’s still slight, her small torso enveloped in an oversized cardigan. Her brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail and she chats quickly and loudly with her walking companions.

He does his best to move like he used to when he had ten toes instead of five, with a clean stride, his chin high and his eyes looking ahead. But the newness of his wounded foot keeps him slow and ungainly.

They pass the women and the one he notices takes notice of him, turning her head just in time to murmur a quiet hello. He lifts his fingers in recognition, never bringing them higher than his hip. She leaves him with the scent of her tuberose perfume.

Double Al takes back up his position at Riley’s side and nudges him in the ribs with an elbow.

“She was a cute one, son. How you know her?”

“She’s a girl I used to screw. Her name’s Nicole,” he says and fights the desire to crane his neck around and get a look at her walking away.

Double Al keeps at him. “So what went wrong?”

“Nothing,” Riley says.

He’s feeling better with each step away from the woman. He thinks if he’s really lucky and Life—the uppercase L kind with its grudge against Riley—gets back on his side, he might be able to run again someday. He’s sure of it. With the Hacky Sac in his shoe and a completely healed stub of a foot, he’ll be a gazelle once again.

“She couldn’t stop being my girlfriend’s best friend. So that put a damper on things.”

Double Al laughs so loudly he draws the attention of another approaching group of revelers. They flash grins in response to his merriment. There is an underlying wheeze to Double Al’s chuckling and the man stops for a moment to cough up something into a handkerchief that has seen hundreds of washes over the years. He wipes at his lips and then unveils the smile still plastered there.

“Good thing that anvil landed on your toes, son. Could have taken out something else on your body you use a lot more.”

“Thankfully women don’t think much of a man’s toes,” Riley quips.

His stride smoothes out once the pressure to perform disappears. Channeling a gazelle may be a possibility much sooner than he predicted. He can imagine the sandy soil of the Serengeti under his feet, his muscles warm from giving some massive feline the slip, the pupils of his eyes deep black and shiny with life.

54 Peach

It’s her third outing with the dark green duffel bag. The first was the night she went out for a “run.” The second was the evening before the flock of sheep invaded the Basque Block. She is beginning to get used to the feel of the textured straps in her palm. But the weight of the thing is always changing, depending on its contents. And this evening, as she wanders around downtown, the bag is light and easy to carry.

Peach is a planner and she knows what her movements and actions are about well before setting her intentions into motion. So tonight she feels mentally foggy, because instead of her head being in charge, it’s her gut. Or rather it’s the center of power just below her belly button. She had found herself compelled to head downtown, to ask Linx once again to watch the lamb, knowing she would have to placate him with promises of intimacy, perhaps even a solid night together in the same bed. She hopes her instincts are right to see her wandering the streets with the contents of the bag, her torso covered in her well-worn, dark woolen hoodie. She has no idea what it is she needs to look for or where she will end up. For now, she feels intrepid, an adventurer on home soil, and reminds herself this is what she wants to be. So she lets it be and keeps moving.

The sun hides behind a tall bank building and Peach drifts about in the dusky dim of the night, absently letting her feet choose where she treads. She avoids people, has a desirous craving for a cup of coffee but talks herself out of going into a restaurant or a café.

And then she sees a thing of such beauty and opportunity she shakes her head at the sight of it. She almost misses it, keeping her head down and watching the indents in the sidewalk slip by as she racks up footfalls. But she looks up just in time to take in the sparkle of gold to her right.

Hanging from the rearview mirror of a gray Dodge Ram decades old and well-used, is a chunky bit of what looks to be gold. She stops briefly and presses her face to the window causing the plane of glass to fog over with her breath. What appears to be gold is really fool’s gold, iron pyrite. And this is what makes her shake her head. This piece of metal dangling inside the old truck is a thing of righteous and rare luck.

She knows seeing this particular truck with this particular piece of metal hanging inside of it is not a play of coincidence. It is fate, meaningful in its synchronicity. Peach does not believe in coincidence anyway. Her world is one of omens and relationships, energy and connections. Causes will always have effects, but those two things can be separated by vast amounts of time and space.

Peach looks up to the pale blue of the sky. The sun will be put to bed soon and the stars will do their best to shine through the smog and the lit windows of the little city surrounding her. It’s no matter, really. She can speak to the stars without seeing them. She directs her whisper to Mars as well, spinning its red body around in the heavens unseen.

“I trust and I am rewarded. I am led and so I follow. Thank you. All of you.”

She sets down her duffel bag on the sidewalk and looks up and down the street to see how secluded she is. There are groups of people wandering around and she realizes she’ll have to be patient. But she won’t let the opportunity escape her. She runs her gloved hands along the side of the truck. It’s remarkably well preserved for its age, absent of large dents and long scratches.

She sees the growth of the junipers in their pocket of earth against the length of the sidewalk and she paces next to them until a scraggly bush with only one branch flush with green, the others bare, white bark flaking, creates a gap for her to swing a leg over the hedge. She hunches down behind the bushes and takes in their sharp, pungent scent and slips her hood over her head, knotting the drawstrings at her throat. Her wig shifts slightly and that itch is back at the base of her skull.

Pulling at the bottom of her hooded sweater, she finds a little snag in the stitching at the hem. She takes off her gloves and picks at the thread with her fingernails until it comes away from the rest of the wool. At the weakened seam, she grips the fabric in her fingers and holds the hem steady with her left hand while yanking with her right. A strip of wool comes away in her palm. Peach holds the dyed fabric up to her face then looks down to her ruined sweater.

Then she strips away another swatch and another, until her sweater is a midriff thing, riding high, just above her belly button, uncovering the pulsing, radiating point of energy hidden away inside of her.

55 Riley

“You could have bought me a corsage,” Riley jokes. “I feel like we’re on a date.”

The waiter sets two rib eye steaks in front of the men and asks if they need anything else before backing away. The restaurant is the nicest steakhouse in Boise. The tables are covered in white linens and tea lights illuminate the cozy, dark ambiance with a subtle glow.

Double Al smiles and Riley can tell he’s in the rare mood to play along with his jests. “I didn’t know what you were going to wear. I was worried orchids wouldn’t match. And then I’d be kicking myself about not getting something simple like carnations.”

“So I’m impressed,” Riley says, slicing into his meat. A trickle of blood seeps out of the rare cut. “Because you want me to be impressed. So I’ll come back to work, right?”

“Something like that,” the man says and picks the parsley garnish off his plate and sets it to the side of his salad fork.

“I’ve been wondering why you think I won’t come back to work, Double Al. As if a bit of amputation will keep me away?” Riley puts on a good show of making it seem he never considered staying in his pajamas for the next five years.

“I’ve seen others get hurt. And when they do, that fear about work, and then a fear of life gets in them and starts to take over. They become paralyzed and unable to do more than drink on a sofa all day.”

Riley thinks of his fondness for whisky. He picks up the glass of tawny liquid in front of him now, smells its sweet bite before taking a sip. He agrees with Double Al more than he’d like to admit, but he also believes his downward slide came long before his toes getting smashed.

“When your dad died, your mom, too, I promised myself that I would check in on you. And after your finances,” Double Al pauses, looking for the right wording, “dwindled, I thought a new line of work would do you some good. I didn’t just put you in my shop because your dad and I were friends. I thought making something powerful and crafted with your own hands could do you some good. I still think it to be true.”

Riley can remember Double Al’s visits to their home and the presents he would bring of interesting or beautiful rocks. The man would give Riley agates, granite, pale jaspers and quartz crystals. They all came from his mining sites in the Owyhees and the Boise Basin and from his explorations near the base of the Sawtooths. Riley doesn’t know what happened to all the rocks. For years he kept them tucked in a white sock yellowed with age, its partner long since missing. He’d take them out of the sock often, run their jagged or smooth weight over his fingers. He thinks he even gave them names at one point. Now, they were lost to him.

“It did do me good. I did pick up some of the pieces of my life when you hired me on. But I don’t know,” Riley looks at Double Al tucking into a spread of red potatoes, “it’s not my dream to make mining equipment. I’m not even sure I have a dream. Other than to become a man again.”

Double Al wipes at his mouth with a fabric napkin and frowns. “What does that mean, son? Become a man again? You are one. Just need to believe it and live it.”

A swig of alcohol burns its way down Riley’s throat. He can see the image of Nell in front of him, the swing of her hips and the way she can vibrate the muscles in her ass. “I’m starting to believe it again,” he says.

56 Peach

With the sun finally gone, the street turns quiet and empties of other souls. Peach opens her duffel bag and lines up the cardboard boxes and cones on the edge of the sidewalk. Using a long-handled lighter, she ignites each fuse on the fireworks and backs away. They spit skyward: displays of silver crackles, golden drops of fire and red blobs of liquefied metal. All of them are silent excepting the pop of new powder chambers catching fire and a low hiss of the heat escaping the confines of the fireworks, the chemical reactions within a thing of spectacular power.

“You did it,” she tells herself as she zips up her bag and looks around her, doing what’s necessary to clean up her space. She can’t leave a trace of herself behind. Not even a trace of Old Peach. The slight hiss of the pyrotechnics is background music to her tidying.

She smiles to herself and whispers. “It’s a wonderful gesture. There is no doubt. Fire for Fire!”

It’s not long before flames and minute flecks of burning chemical compounds lick the wool strips she’s placed strategically. The material singes at the edges first, the thick fabric smoldering like the embers of a campfire. Peach looks up at the stars and grins, blows them all a giant kiss with her fingers flinging high to the firmament.

There had been no control on her part. She’d come downtown with her purchases and then trusted she’d receive guidance. Peach feels the reward of having faith, of paying respect to those powers more awesome and awful than she. Her work here is finished. What the event will contribute to her change, she cannot guess at.

One more kiss from her lips and then she runs. She hates running. But she’ll run when she must, when she has all the right reasons to make herself fly.

57 Riley

The men have moved on to brownies coated in rich fudge sauce. Riley licks the black stickiness from the back of his spoon and can feel the grit of sugar on his teeth.

Riley has played hard to get the entire meal at the nice steakhouse with Double Al. He’s nearly done finishing up on his diatribe of all the reasons he’d be a bad fit back on the machine shop floor. “My balance is horrible with my toes gone. Not sure I could plant myself well enough to swing a sledge.”

Double Al pushes his plate away. “You can work the front office for awhile. Just until you feel ready to get back in the shop. Talk to customers and do a little paper pushing. Maybe you can help me update my files and get them all on a computer. Newt told me it wasn’t 1991 anymore.”

“Newt’s a choad. I’d be your assistant?” Riley asks. He’s okay with the idea. It would be good to do some desk work, keep himself busy until he can get back in to bending metal.

“You’d be whatever you want. It’s work, son. You need it.”

And then the restaurant is enveloped in a deafening boom.

Nothing physically is damaged; the only thing which moves is the small tea light on their table, inching a bit to the right. But the patrons of the steakhouse cover their mouths, some stand up from tables, napkins stuck to their pants. A baby screams out then its voice slides into sobs of terror.

“What the hell?” Riley says, unable to keep his seat either. Double Al scoots out his chair and the two of them, along with half of the restaurant, funnel outside to see what’s happening.

A whirl of black smoke billows into the sky, hard to see with the arrival of night. But the white tinges of smoke in the dark funnel shimmer under the lights of the businesses still open during the evening. Double Al sets out for the explosion a few blocks away, Riley doing his best to keep up with him.

“Near the truck,” is all the man says as he picks up walking speed.