Blue Field(35)
Some prize on the show. Some kind of skill required. Some kind of luck. Applause and smiles. Winner takes all. The shack door opened and Rand stepped out of the nimbus of light, trailing dust motes. Confidentially speaking, a little alcohol’ll help, Bowman told her, talking as low and fast as his drawl allowed. Then we’ll make room with the gear so you can lie down, and we’ll slap some O2 on you. Pump you with codeined aspirin back at the ranch.
Rand seated himself. She avoided his gaze. Hey *, Bowman said. Not that I want to break the ice or anything, but a certain little issue has reared its ugly head.
Rand viewed Bowman groggily. What? Rand mimed. So? Bowman plucked her injured limb up and held it aloft. Then with exaggerated care returned it to her. Rand jammed the heel of his hand to his eye. Fuck, he said.
The bartender brought beer and oysters and she stalked to the damp closet-sized bathroom where she tried to relieve herself. Nothing came. She returned to the table, picking and drinking as wordless as Bowman and Rand. All three of them were still under the influence—residual narcosis and adrenaline’s wasting dopamine aftermath. Rand looked shrunken, old before his time. Some old geezer too worn to ask how she was doing, if she was okay. Finished with his dozen, Bowman cleared his throat. What’s the point, string bean? he said. Maybe you don’t care about your own safety. But you might want to think about his.
For a moment she and Bowman observed Rand, who was engrossed in opening a package of crackers. His? she said, pick-picking again at a shell—she could maneuver with difficulty but still get the job done. He can’t speak for himself?
Rand and Bowman both stared straight ahead. More silent treatment! she thought. Was that really such a good idea? She slathered an oyster into her mouth then lobbed the shell onto the plate piled high with empties in the middle of the table. A few shells leapt and skittered onto the floor. Then Rand picked up his fork again and Bowman drank and the bartender removed his shucking glove and mopped his brow with a dishtowel. Soon she let the door slam behind her and, with her good hand, rattled the handle to the truck and scootched in. Sweat ran off her face and sucked between her breasts and soaked her shirt. Hot sharp spikes jabbed her gut. Stomach flu was all she had. Three days of snivelling and god knows and meanwhile her f*cked arm would right itself. Deserve or didn’t had nothing to do with it. It was just her luck, her f*ckhead told her, hammering tight.
Part Five
34
No sign of Bowman by the time they hit it northbound. She and Rand stopped only for fuel, fries, other shit he killed on the go while she nursed vitamin waters. Nineteen hours in, a hundred clicks from home, an early snow sparked the night fields beyond a gas station. She managed herself from the truck, Rand sullen at the pump, shoulders hunched to his ears. The thick hose stirred between them. Wind fired their hair. Flakes drifted down.
Pitiful sleep. Now she squinted, stunned by weak sunlight. She parsed the rows of towering red-bricks, their rotting pumpkins on paved paths and polyester ghosts espaliered over shrubs. Orange leaf-stuffed bags. Her home-sweet dime-sized lawn scaly with waste. She shuffled to her front gate holding her arms from her sides as if walking a gangplank, breath in white parachutes. From the mailbox she scooped envelopes and flyers, other peoples’ ideas of things, and canted her face skyward. Cumuli, starling drift. The cold planed her skin at the jawline and cheekbones. In the hallway again she felt cleansed, de-cored like an apple. Not bad. Her wrist barely ached as she retied the drawstring on her sweatpants. The fabric bunched and she billowed the hem of her shirt over her concave stomach, pelvic bones thrusting like tusks. Last night in bed he’d strummed her ribs—first close contact in a week. You’re disappearing, he’d said.
Three more recovery days later, smoke jetted from her bony crotch, her ears twirled like whatzits. She hunched over a workbench in the garage and squeezed a tube of silicon, wanding the applicator over crushed neoprene. Never mind the slices in her drysuit’s kneepads, her mind eeled along—never mind a week ago she’d rocketed from Cleargate terrified beyond her skull and before that crawled a thousand feet through Milford’s mandibles of flooded rock, mask a bedazzle of tears, claustrophobia banging her brain. Never mind—here was the situation. On those dives she’d silently begged for mercy, but she’d done a fair job calculating her gas usage, a more than fair job embracing the biochemical curtsies and swoons and soaring exchanges in the bloodstream that had her at addict, at more—she whistled a mechanical seesaw while she worked now, just thinking. Next dive—deeper, if she planned it right. If all went according to plan. And when the inner garage door slung open—her husband just home from the office, wincing, last night’s congress evidently forgotten—she stored her suit on a hanger and recalled how much the custom fit cost back in the day. Now she’d have to get it taken in. Restore the dark shape to her own newer, trimmer one. How much that would cost her.
As if he were thinking the same thing, the pinched face on him. As if he should care! She let fly and cornered him by the tanks. Shirt wilted and trousers creased around the groin. He puffed his cheeks and extended his neck at an angle usually seen on men too old to fix. Where were his glorious blue tats now? Gone, erased like stubborn but not invincible water marks. Do not threaten me, he said. He said, Everything is different now. Game changed. You’re different now.