Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [13]
He said nothing. He didn’t know what Claire knew.
There was blood all over him, Coop. All over his clothes. I thought he was the injured one.
She’d had no idea that Coop had remained in the cabin during the storm; her father had said he was somewhere else, before he drove off with Anna. Then Claire had heard what she thought was a car horn, and she opened the door to a thick curtain of sleet. But there was nothing out there. A short while later she heard it again, and went onto the porch once more and looked out. The storm had lessened and she saw a faint orange light, and as she peered into the blackness, it faded. A minute later she would have missed it altogether. An interior car light. Thunder broke loose above the house. She stood very still for a while, then unravelled a circle of rope, tied one end to the porch railing, the other around her waist, and went into the storm in the direction of the light she had seen.
When she saw him through the windshield, she thought he was dead. Then his hands twitched in the ochre of her flashlight. The thunder began again while she was under it. Claire could hardly lift him, but she managed to pull him down out of the car and then to drag him across the hard stubble of the yard to the house and then up the steps. She untied the lifeline of the rope and wrapped him in a blanket and stretched him out before the fire in the empty, dark house.
The next morning there was a faint sunlight. She woke and remembered everything, what had happened to them all. In the barn Claire held the bridle up, and the horse dipped his head and brought his ears through the upper straps. She placed the blanket and saddle high on the animal’s back and cinched the girth, keeping it loose for now. She leaned forward to smell his neck, there was always something about that smell.
The cypress trees along the driveway were still and she felt her senses fully alive riding out after the storm. The horse climbed the hill slowly while Claire’s eyes skimmed every ridge for any small bump of life that might look like burlap or rock that could be a calf or some other creature. Going after lost things was as uncertain as prayer. Branches and fence posts were scattered across the slopes. An oil drum had rolled in from another farm during the night. The landscape off-kilter. She rode past their river, black with a mud that had probably never surfaced before. From the first hilltop she looked back and saw that the water tower had buckled under its weak legs.
Coop had left. Already. And where Anna was, where her father was, she didn’t know. She was alone, sixteen years old, on a horse that bristled with nervousness and temper after his night in a barn full of crashing thunder. She talked quietly, constantly to him, the creature yearning to gallop, wanting to use the energy that Claire was containing.
A swath of buckeye trees had come down across from Coop’s cabin. She dismounted and walked onto the deck. It was littered with glass. Through the broken window she saw the cat, Alturas, stretched out on the bed. Claire had never witnessed the cat indoors before. Its head was actually on a pillow, not expecting a soul. Even this one had been changed by the chaos of the weather. She gathered the dozing creature into a pillowcase, before it was fully awake, leaving his head free, and stood in the coldness of Coop’s cabin. Years before, she loved camping here alone, when there had been just a pallet and a fireplace. It had been an eagle’s nest for her in those days. Before it had become Coop and Anna’s. Now, with the storm’s destruction, it looked humble again. She was imagining what she could do to it. She imagined herself riding back and turning to see the building on fire, the black plume of smoke in the air. But this cabin was all there was left of the past, their youth.
Coop would never come back. Claire knew that. She knew about the two of them. She had lived in mid-air all