Hick - Andrea Portes [70]
That’s a good one.
THIRTY–EIGHT
You would think that death is something that makes you feel fearful and numb. You would think that it’s something that makes you want to curl up into a ball in the corner, twisted up and hanging on for dear life.
But that’s not what death makes you want to do. Death makes you want to be reckless. Death makes you amazed you were even alive in the first place. Death jolts you up out of that passing through, that getting by, you’ve been doing all your life.
I wake up in the middle of the night on a lumpy bed, under a window, moonlight streaming in, cutting a square of light onto the floor.
There is something in me, something in me like a drum beating, below my heart and well below my head, something that wants to take the day’s events, the death and the blood-soaked denim, and tear it up into some animal thing, some freedom from the grave and close-call lust. I cling to the bed and wait for dawn.
THIRTY–NINE
In the morning the room is sun-drenched gold by the day coming up outside the window.
Beau stands across the room making eggs on an old-fashioned white stove. He doesn’t notice me wake and I stay quiet, watching his profile shaking the pan. There’s a looming to him, a dull gloom that pushes his head forward into the task at hand, his place and the day. The years behind him pressing into his shoulders, weighing down on his triangle back, through his spine and into the floor.
The rugs on the floor are deep burgundy, with intricate designs, from faraway places with names with too many letters and not enough vowels. And if you’re looking to hang a painting, you better think twice cause nothing doing. it’s covered from floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves and books stacked top to bottom, left to right, with magazines in between. it’s like Beau kicked out all the little kids and moved into the library.
He’s got furniture that looks like you just got out of your space-pod and landed two hundred years in the past with dark wood, swivels and birds’ claws for legs. it’s like he stole a room out the East Coast, drove it west down I-80 and planted it here in the middle of the piney woods just to make you wonder. He’s got crystal glass animals that catch the light and break it in two, an old wooden globe with a ring around it and wing-back chairs fit for Sherlock Holmes, pipe in hand. He’s got a dark-wood, straight-back piano with little candleholders coming out, mother-of-pearl inlays making flowers on the front. There’s a fireplace at the other end of the room with a mantel made of stone and, on top, a giant oil painting of a pale, pretty lady in a puffy dress you need a hoop for.
He catches me turning the room over.
“Do you read much, kid?”
“Yup. I got a yard-sale World Book.”
“Hm. that’s it?”
“Yeah, I practically got it memorized.”
“Well, how about the library?”
“Looks like you stole it.”
He waits there for a second and then laughs, soft.
“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t suit me, huh?”
“Not really.”
“Well, my mom left it.”
“Oh . . . I’m sorry.”
“No,” he says, cracking the eggs. “She’s not dead or anything . . . she just moved, you know, went down to Los Angeles or someplace weird.”
“Oh. that’s nice. Nice that she left you all this stuff.”
“I guess. . . . she’d like you. She always wanted a little girl.”
This stops the air cause we both know she already had one. She had one with a heart born on the wrong side and what do you say to that?
“You could go visit her. she’d like that.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“She teaches at some weird place where they have huts for the little kids, little hobbit huts and everyone speaks French.”
“Well, I don’t speak French.”
“Well, I reckon that’s why they teach it.”
He stands by the stove, sizing me up. “How bout I give you her number and maybe—”
“Look, it’s okay. I’ll be okay.”
He stops