Conversation by a Burning Bed Ch. 02

Five years later.

The moonless night sky in the high desert was black as the finest pitch and sprinkled with tiny diamonds. The stars did not even blink this far above sea level. There was precious little atmosphere between him and them to interfere with their light.

The Milky Way presented as it must have been when the ancients, who did not have the veil of artificial light to mute it, gazed upon the swath of white and invented stories of gods to account for the wonder.

He tilted his head back and breathed out a plume of translucent pearl mist into the crisp air. It rose straight up, no wind at all to mix it. No wind to make twinkle twinkle little star.

He picked out Orion's Belt. Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, once hard points, were now fuzzy. He had a pair of cheap 2.25 readers in his pocket which would bring them back into focus, but putting them on would remind him that he was getting old.

A car turned from the highway into the drive. The headlights lit up the construction equipment and supplies in the field near the house. The car parked and the lights went out.

The door opened and shut.

**********

She had jerked with surprise when he sat down beside her. He didn't acknowledge her, just kept his eyes on his daughter and son-in-law holding the white bundle at the altar. When it was his time to go to the front he rose and waited for her to walk beside him. He spoke the words of promise and trust and commitment the parents had written for the ceremony and stood attentive and respectful as she spoke hers.

Then they sat down and watched.

He felt her glancing back and forth between their granddaughter's baptism and his face.

He did not look at her the whole time, but when the short ritual was done, he spoke, again without facing her.

"If you want to continue the conversation, you know where. Nine."

And he left.

**********

And here she was.

He heard her footsteps crunch in the hard coating of snow, like she was walking on fresh gravel. The light from the back porch was just enough to guide her past the house, through the garden beds, and into the field where he stood waiting.

There was a long skidmark in the snow where he had dragged a bale of hay. When she got close, he offered her the bale with an open hand.

She sat.

They regarded each other in the faint glow of a winter's evening. Their shadows went sideways from the distant manmade yellow light and straight down from the white starlight.

The last time they had been in these exact places. It had been a bright hot summer day. A mattress had been burning in the space between them, the flames snapping and the radiant heat making their faces hot.

She had been sobbing. He had been vibrating with barely contained rage.

This evening they both shivered.

"You look well," she said at last. Her voice was neutral.

"You look beautiful," he responded.

She made a slight movement of her shoulders. "Our granddaughter is beautiful."

"And cursed."

"What?" She was not neutral now. "Why would you say such a thing?"

"She's a Christmas baby," he said. "For the rest of her life people will give her one present and tell her it is for her birthday and for Christmas."

She laughed. It was the honest laugh he remembered.

"Wh--" She started and stopped and obviously rethought her question. He knew she wanted to say: Where have you been? How long will you be in town?

How many women have you fucked?

"What do you want?" She finally managed.

"I wanted to see my family. Old and new."

"Bullshit. You've been sneaking in ever since she found out she was pregnant. I thought I would run into you one of those times."

He had thought so too. It was a small town. In three days of normal life you met every other citizen at least once. But he had come straight in and gone straight out, visiting none of his old haunts, not stopping to shop or get gas or a drink. Like a ghost.

He knew his daughter had spilled it. He had requested that she not tell her mother, but it had not been an order. He realized the mother daughter thing was strong. But his daughter had not told her the dates beforehand. And he had not run into any bullshit ambush reconciliation attempts.

He knew the temptation for that trickery must have been strong for both his daughter and his son. The breakup of the family had been hard on them. Luckily, they had each married stable partners and had good jobs.

He and she had raised them right.

"How's work?" he asked.

Her head jerked up. "You fucking know how my work is. You have a goddamn army of spies in this valley."

He nodded. "We grew up here. You know how it is. Everybody knows everything. You could have moved."

"Away from the kids? No way. I have been looking forward to being a grandmother for a long time."

"So..." he ignored her anger. "Still at the high school."

She laughed bitterly. "That's right. The place we hated. Couldn't get away from it fast enough." Her gaze swept the horizon. "Couldn't wait to graduate and escape this claustrophobic isolated backwards little shithole. How did that work out for us?"

He wanted to say It had been working out pretty well, once upon a time.

But that was the past. He had made himself a promise. He would try to avoid pushing on those splinters.

"I was devastated when I lost--" She nodded at the barn, meaning it all. The house they had built, the horses they had bred. The herd. The equipment sheds, the combines, balers, loaders, the whole operation.

"And you knew it was going to happen, you son of a bitch." Her words were angry but her tone was flat, like the emotions had been faded by being unpacked and examined in bright sunlight too often.

He nodded. "I could tell you wouldn't let him go."

"My lawyer said the restrictions and covenants your lawyer put in the settlement were invalid and unenforceable. He said he could break the trust it set up." She was back to neutral now, an observer only.

Her lawyer had been wrong.

She had initially gotten the ranch and 90% of the monetary assets on the condition that she have no contact with her young lover. One week after the divorce decree, the kid showed up at the house. One day after that, a photo of him on the porch with his arms around her was delivered to court and she was evicted.

The ranch went up for sale and brought a good price, of which she got half. Cash-wise it was probably a wash, but she lost the home where they had raised their children.

"I bought the Mahoney house over on Utah Street." She pretended that he did not know.

"I dated Connie Mahoney in ninth grade," he said. "That's a good location. You can walk to Main Street and the high school."

She stared off into the distance for a long time.

"He stayed until the end of the semester," she said. "Stuck it out to prove he wasn't afraid of you or your threats."

He said nothing. He made no movement.

"But he was," she said quietly. "You terrified him. The longer nothing happened the more paranoid he got. Finally-- he would hear a noise outside and... he wouldn't be able to... perform."

"Not my finest hour," he said.

The mist of her breath became quicker, smaller.

"Nor mine," she said, and let that thought hang between them.

"He transferred," she continued. "Haven't heard from him since."

She had admitted in one of the therapy sessions they thought might save them that her attraction to the kid was irrational, fiery, magical, addictive. Sexual on a primal, inexplicable level she had never felt before.

She had not been able to keep the longing from showing on her face when she said that, and it punished him so deeply he had thought his body might shut down right there.

Their marriage had effectively ended the second she spoke those words.

Now, he heard in her voice that those passions had cooled to darkness. As he suspected they would.

But way too late to save what they once had.

"I learned a new word," she said. "Which is always handy for an English teacher. Limerence. It's an obsession with another person that involves an all-consuming passion."

She smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Generally regarded as unhealthy."

She paused. It was very dark out here, but she could see his eyes. He was somewhere else. Sometime else.

"You still hate me," she said. Didn't even make it a question.

"I have thought on it a bit," he said after some minutes. "Remember the cheap carnivals that used to come through every summer? Most of them had that horserace game, where you shot a jet of water into a funnel to make your horse slide along the track against the other player's horses?"

She nodded. She remembered running into him at one of those carnivals, must have been seventh grade or so, and feeling an unfamiliar excitement in her gut.

"There are three horses in my game. One is love, one is hate, and one is don't give a shit. They trade places when I am distracted, but I try to focus on aiming my water straight into the target so that don't give a shit stays way ahead."

She pondered that for a while, recalling the garish plastic horses, the wavy track, the harsh organ music playing all around the collection of food stands and noisy mechanical rides.

"Why aren't you married?" he said suddenly.

She thought about standing up and just walking off, the way he had done five years ago. But she didn't move.

"And who the hell would I marry?" she said angrily. "You know these people. They still think of us as a couple. Nobody who knew us before would dare to ask me out. I had dates with new teachers, but after they had lived here for a while and heard the way it was.... They lost interest."

"Those were the times I thought seriously about moving out of the valley." She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, but made no protest.

He took off his knit cap, walked over to her, and held it out. She shook her head, but he dropped it into her lap and raised the hood of his jacket over his head.

She picked up the hat and pulled it over her hair and ears. Ruining what he knew was an expensive hairdo. A church baptism hairdo.

"Why aren't you married?" she returned. Then a thought came to her. "Or are you?"

He shook his head. "You know me."

He stopped. She didn't know him. She hadn't known him. Not well enough to have prevented--

He started over. "I found out long ago. Long before us. When I trust someone enough to finally take them to bed, I end up handing over my heart to them. It might be a weakness. I probably should be able to fuck and not care. But that's not me."

She was suddenly warm. It might have been the hat. Or it might have been her realization that he was describing something she had experienced with him, something that she knew to be true about him.

He would never be a victim of limerence.

"I've handed over my heart a few times since--." He licked his lips. "And gotten it handed back. It's been worked over like an old pillow the dog sleeps on. Tugged hard and milked like an udder."

She smiled, visualizing these.

"Now the old thing is creased. Battered and worn. The huge part that belonged to you for so many years seems to have gotten squeezed out in the process."

Her head went down. She wanted to cry, but she would not cry.

"I look at you and I don't see the horses anymore. No hate, no love. Even don't give a shit has spit the bit and fled the course."

Her face tilted up to him, questions in her eyes.

He spoke softly. "Now all I see is a stunning woman I used to know."

Her eyes narrowed. She asked again. "What do you want?"

He turned his face to the stars. "I went to a funeral a few weeks ago. I didn't know the fellow very well. Met him outside a hardware store where he was collecting for the VFW. Stopped to talk, found out he had been a pilot. Fighter jets. Invited him for a beer once or twice. He told me a story that made me think hard. About us."

He had her full attention.

"In the first years of the Vietnam conflict, our pilots were getting shot down way more than had been expected. The new generation of jet fighters were delivered with missiles instead of guns. To shoot down an enemy with a missile, you just hit a button. Like a video game. In the old days, to shoot down an enemy you had to be a good enough pilot to maneuver your plane behind him. They had stopped teaching pilots how to do that. And stopped teaching how to avoid some other fellow trying to do it to you. Thought it was out of date. Nobody told the North Vietnamese that it was out of date. Got a lot of our guys killed."

"The military started up a school to teach pilots how to dogfight again. They called it Topgun. He was called to be an instructor, after two tours in combat. He flew an old Skyhawk. Underpowered, slow, should have been scrapped. The new pilots would come to the school flying brand new fighters. Fast as rockets, modern radar, state of the art everything. And the youngsters would get their asses kicked by the old guys flying the equivalent of rusted out junkers. Pissed the hot shot kids off something fierce."

"He said it was because the old guys were comfortable with their planes. They knew them intimately. Treated them like lovers. They knew what they could do and what they could not do. He told me there was a combination of attack angle and speed where the Skyhawk just could not be trusted. So he made sure not to let her go there."

She laughed. Again it was sincere. "I just spent five years showing students how to tease out allegories. You should come in one day and I will turn them loose on you."

He passed on a response. "The old place is pretty much the same, isn't it."

"They are remodeling the house," she said. "Hey-- we're trespassing. Aren't we?" It was unreal to think of not belonging here.

"Don't worry," he said. "I know the owner."

"Figures. You know everybody. Who is it, anyway? I never found out."

He did not say that she had been too otherwise occupied at the time. "Some corporation. Hired caretakers."

"What are they doing to o--." She had started to say our house. "The house?"

"They are putting a new master suite on the side," he said. "Gutted the old master bedroom. Don't know what they have planned for it." He paused. "They ripped out all the tiles from the bathroom."

They considered each other, unblinking. The hidden subtext was too big to ignore, too painful to voice.

"You know them better than you are letting on." She said it as a matter of fact.

He nodded. He had once loved her for many things. That she was smart was one. That she was perceptive was another.

"I--" Suddenly he lost his nerve. He swallowed and searched for it. "Before I left I formed a corporation."

She stared at him as if he were a stranger.

"Some of my friends bought in. I told them then the place would be on the market soon."

Her shoulders slumped. He could tell she was angry at herself for having ever been so predictable.

"I have triggered my option to take the property back and repay the corporation over 20 years. With the current interest rates, I should just be able to make it work."

She suddenly started to sob. Wracking cries of loss and abandonment.

"I can't--" She tried to get her panting under control. "I'll leave. I can't think of living in my little house... and seeing you here. It's too much. I couldn't stand it."

"What about our granddaughter? What about the next grandkids?"

She wavered, then composed herself and sat up straight. "I just cannot do it. I have to move."

He slipped the hood backwards to fully expose his face.

"There is another option," he said so softly that she was afraid she had misheard him.

"The addition has three bedrooms," he continued. "Come and live in one. Sell the Mahoney place. Pay me rent."

She laughed and he could not tell if it was sincere or mocking.

"What the fuck makes you think I would want to do that?"

"Because" he said. "I suck at bookkeeping. That was always your job. Plus, I hate cooking for one. Don't you?"

He hoped he had kept the apprehension out of his tone.

They regarded one another for a long bitterly cold time.

"I can never trust you again," he said. That unadulterated pristine virgin trust had been ripped to shreds. What would replace it he did not yet know.

She nodded that he was right not to trust her.

"And I," she said. Her voice trembled, but he could not tell if it was not the cold. "Will always be afraid of you."

She had once known him only as her kind and gentle husband. Loving and forgiving. Warm and cuddly. No -- he was too solid to cuddle. But huggable. Never a hard word to anyone.

Until that day she had seen the truth in his eyes. He would kill to protect his family. To protect her.

One of her students posted a quote on the classroom bulletin board sometime after she had begun teaching.

"Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart."

She had read that, and time slowed. She only made it through the day by habit, and that night sat on her sofa until well after her bedtime drinking wine and staring at the wall.

She had seen that thin veneer. The memory of the sight terrified her.

It was what had held her ex-husband back. It was the reason he had not let his passions free to try and save his family.

If she had known that about him before she... things might have gone differently.

She shook from the memory and from the cold and it brought her mind back.

He stood near.

"I hear the owner can make a cozy fire and decent hot chocolate."

She carefully contemplated his extended hand, then took it and stood up.

They walked slowly, still holding hands, across the protesting crust of snow.

**********

Epilogue

He stood in the kitchen, not knowing what to do with his hands, feeling out of place and a little uncomfortable and trying not to let it show. It was his first visit to his fiancées' home town. He had met her mother and father several times and liked them a lot. Which was good, because he loved their daughter with all his heart and could not wait to be her husband.

Her mother was mixing a pasta salad and would ask him to taste it for salt or to pass her a larger spatula. He knew she was trying to keep him involved to put him at ease. She knew that he knew. It made him like her even more.

She moved about the kitchen with familiarity. She had grown up here, in this house, on this ranch.

But the grandparents. He could not figure them out.

He looked out the kitchen window. The two were sitting side by side in rocking chairs, talking and looking out at the hills. Holding hands.

His fiancée's grandmother was an attractive woman. Her curly auburn hair and green eyes showed up in her granddaughter. He would count himself lucky if his fiancée looked that good when they were that old.

Her grandfather seemed simple enough. His hair was grey stubble. He had an easy smile in a face tanned by outdoor work. They were an attractive couple.

But when they stood together there was something about the couple that-- he could not put words to it. They kissed like teens when they thought no one was looking. He had caught them in his peripheral vision and tried to ignore it.

His fiancée breezed in and hugged him.

"Here," her mother said, filling two tumblers from an iced pitcher. "You guys take some sweet tea out to your grans."

His fiancée giggled.

"What?" he asked. There was some kind of inside joke here, and he hoped it was not on him.

"She's remembering what other boyfriends could not resist asking when they talk to her grans."

"Other boyfriends?"

His fiancée pulled him down close and kissed him. "There has never been anyone else but you, hon."

"But if there had been," her mother said pointedly, "they would eventually ask the grans the classic question: What is the secret to your long marriage?"