Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [83]
“Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I got some in the truck.”
“Here?” he said idiotically.
“In the glove compartment.” She leaned over as if to kiss him, bit his lips, and gave his wilted dick another efficient squeeze. “Better work on that. I’ll be right back.” She lifted herself off of him, revealing empty blue sky, weak autumnal sun. “You wait here.”
Lewis sat up, stunned. His matches had fallen out of his pocket. He gathered them, and Billie’s hat, and gazed stupidly at the hat’s tree-nursery logo. From the crushed pack, he extricated a cigarette. His hands were shaking. His knuckles were bleeding. Scratches cross-hatched his arms. He was fearful, exhilarated, jangled. This was not what he expected, and yet a certain gratification twanged: Billie Fitzgerald did want to fuck him. Could he go through with it? Her style wasn’t at all what he would’ve guessed. He took a deep breath. Sure, he told himself, I’ll fuck her hair straight. He tried to light his cigarette, match after match, as the truck started up back behind him somewhere. Smart, he thought, she’s moving it closer. Mozart flew through the air like beautiful laundry. His cigarette lit and nicotine entered his brain like a cloud of cleansing sparks. He turned to watch the truck’s approach. From this angle, he saw the grinning chrome grille, the wheel, the mighty armature under the front end. Billie drove up even with him, then past. He turned, looked over his other shoulder. The engine idled. She lowered her tinted window. She had a hat on. This confused him: he had her hat in his lap. She was also wearing sunglasses. He sprang to his feet.
“Hey!” he cried, and started up the embankment. Rocks and dirt slid away underfoot. He paused, used her hat to swat stickers off the bottom of one foot. She revved the engine. He looked up.
“Tell me something,” she said. “You really think you’re so much smarter than Libby?” Without waiting for an answer, she hit the gas, and took off.
HE BECAME a connoisseur of orchard floors: some, mulched with shredded prunings, were a pithy mat; others, pink clay imbedded with sharp granite shards; the best were recently irrigated, the moistened adobe plumped up, softened, astringent and cool on his burning feet.
Although he didn’t know where the highway was, he couldn’t get too lost. The valley floor slanted south, toward the river. If he kept walking he’d come to a road. He needed another cigarette, but his last two matches went out before he got it lit. Instead, he contemplated a month spent pulling an encyclopedia of burrs, stickers, and splinters from the bottoms of his feet. Eventually, at dusk, he came to the lake road—the oiled asphalt warm and silken underfoot. He stuck out his thumb and wasn’t surprised when the few cars sped past. After all, he was filthy, barefoot, and his hair, full of debris, stuck out in every direction. He looked precisely like something risen from the orchard floor.
He started down the road to Round Rock in deepening blue twilight, up and down a series of shallow dips. He heard a truck grinding closer; then the beams of its headlights crisscrossed above his head. Coming over the hill, he saw not only the truck but a whole house moving toward him. Clapboard siding, windows shuttered with plywood. He recognized it, of course: a Round Rock bungalow, his old girlfriend’s new home. Standing on the shoulder of the road, he watched this slow, twilight procession, regret filling his mouth with the taste of rusty window screens. As the house passed, he had an urge to hop inside. That way, when the house was set down and Libby walked across the porch to open the front door, he could step right up. “Hello, dear.”
BILLIE gave a dinner to celebrate the house-moving. Red arrived late, claiming a crisis at the farm. Oh, well, Libby told herself, I might as well get used to it.
Modeled after chapels in California missions, the Fitzgeralds’ dining room was a white hall with dark hewn beams overhead and stenciled geometric patterns on the walls. A chandelier held sixty-five candles, which Billie had