Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“Pitch me the soap?” he said. I had to look at him after all. He’d been going without his shirt intermittently, it seemed; he was lightly browned, and freckled across the shoulders. It still made me uncomfortable, I decided. I threw him the soap jar, and he traded me his glasses for it. He cranked up the pump, stuck his head under the water, and let out a reverberating, gurgling shriek.

“I think,” said Frances, strolling around the corner of the house, “the water’s cold.”

“You wonder why he’d do a thing like that,” I said.

“No, you don’t. If he’s in the same condition you are, there’s no mystery at all. What were you doing, building an oil tanker?”

“He was worse, actually. We were wrestling a Honda generator.”

“It won?”

“Probably a moral victory. But it runs now.”

She sat on the step below mine. “So,” she said, watching Theo douse his head again, “what are we going to do next?”

I stared at her, keeping my mouth closed with an effort. Then I wrapped my arms around my knees. “I’ve had this conversation twice already in the last twenty-four hours. You people ought to coordinate better.”

“Did they mean the same thing I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know you’ve had this conversation? I mean,” she added, before I had time to object, “that I want to know how you think my future ought to influence yours, and vice versa. I like it here, but eventually, being in striking distance of the City would rot my mind. I’d have to take another shot at him, and there’s no point. As you pointed out, shortening the running time on my life story would be ungrateful. So I’ll leave, sooner or later, and sooner is probably not a bad idea.

“Given all that, are you staying, or going?” She pulled her own knees up to her chest and looked at me.

“If I go, do I have to go with you?”

“Christ, no, but you’re welcome to. This is my Byzantine way of telling you so.”

It was one solution. It was a good one, in fact: guaranteed to remove me both from Tom’s reach, and from the thorn-hedge maze of reminders of my past mistakes. It didn’t help Theo, but maybe I could come up with a way to do that, too. “Can I think about it for a while?” I asked.

“No,” said Frances, “I expect you to fling yourself onto the back of my horse without so much as a clean handkerchief. Of course you may. Please do.”

“Oh, shit !” Theo wailed. “No towel!”

“No, no towel,” I agreed.

Frances shook her head at me. “You’re not a very nice person. I’ll get you a towel, Theo. In the meantime, pretend you’re a drip irrigation system.”

Theo pushed the streaming hair back from his face as Frances went in the back door. Wet-headed, without his glasses, he looked like a stranger. “She’s doing better, I think,” he said.

“Frances? Better at what?”

“That’s right, you were busy not noticing everything. She’d rattle off the speeches, but they were all bitter. And she wouldn’t fight back.”

“Wouldn’t fight back?”

“I don’t know how else to put it. I think she felt responsible for what had happened to you.”

I frowned.

“Well,” said Theo, “ I know you can be stupid without anybody else’s help, but maybe she didn’t. Anyway, you were pretty much wired in series. You got better, she got better.”

I didn’t say anything, and it was just as well, because Frances came out with a towel and sailed it at Theo.

“LeRoy wants to know if you’d mind having corn fritters again,” she said to him.

Theo looked at Frances in disbelief. “Mind? I mean, do you?”

“That’s what I told him. But he wanted me to ask. Saints and angels, if there’s one thing people around here seem to know about, it’s food. The place must have been founded by an exiled cooking school.”

“You’re staying here, too?” I asked, surprised. “At LeRoy’s?”

“Attic. Why,” Frances said, aggrieved, “does everyone put me on the top floor, as if I were likely to have a nasty accident with a chemistry set?”

“Maybe they’re hoping the stair-climbing will cut into your natural vivacity.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Have you been listening to me for too long?”

“Sparrow, is that you?” LeRoy’s voice preceded him to the screen door. He opened it and poked his long amber-brown face out. There was a streak of flour in the cropped black fleece of his hair. “Mags asked me if I’d dig out some old schoolbooks of mine for Paulo. If I can find ‘em, will you take ‘em back with you?”

“If you don’t mind them a little seasoned with machine lube.”

“Nah. Someone threw the physics book in a vat of Coca-Cola once, from the looks of it. Frances, is it okay if I look around in the attic?”

“It’s your attic. Can we help look?”

“I don’t know,” LeRoy said, a little desperately.

When we’d all tramped up to the attic, I could see why. Frances occupied one end of the floor space: a camp cot, a crate with a few books ranked neatly inside and a candle lamp on top, another crate used an open-fronted dresser and filled with folded clothes. It was spare and obsessively neat.

The rest of the attic contained what looked like the pasts of the last three generations of every family in town, in boxes, in overflowing trunks, in storage cabinets made from the crawl space under the rafters, and a two-door closet built into the end wall. “I thought this was a new building,” I said, rather faintly.

“I moved it all from the old one,” said LeRoy. “There wasn’t time to sort it.”

“Yes, there was,” Sherrea said as her head appeared on the landing. “If you hadn’t put it off until the day before we needed to tear the old place down. Santos , what are you all doing, up here?”

“Looking for a needle,” Frances said.

“Huh. I was going to invite myself to dinner.”

“Great!” said LeRoy. “As soon as we find these books.”

“We’ll starve,” Theo sighed.

The possibility seemed to send Sherrea into action. She pointed each of us at a box or cupboard, and took one for herself. I got the two-door closet.

The floor was stacked with magazines, and if they were sorted, it was into an organization that I didn’t understand. Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, Wigwag, The Utne Reader, Air and Space, Convolution Quarterly, something called Dirty Linen…

I felt as if I’d fallen, with a bad toothache, headfirst into a candy box. The urge to sit and read was unbearable.

Not that the magazines were the only things there. I pulled out a smelly wool quilt, three fluorescent tubes, an electric fan with a blade missing, a fat-bellied painted reed basket, a stack of stamped-tin ashtrays bearing the legend “Reynolds Radiator: A Good Place to Take a Leak,” and an enormous framed brown photograph of a beaming blond woman, from around the mid-19408. I sneezed and raised my eyes, daunted, to the closet shelf.

There were some books there, the bindings disguised by a barely arrested cascade of newspapers and an inverted pyramid of cardboard boxes that, if anything in that closet had seemed to be arranged by intent, I would have called a booby trap. I recognized that. I pointed it out to myself, almost in so many words, in mingled amusement and dismay. And still my hands went out to ruffle under the heap of newspapers, to try to draw the books from the very bottom of the stack.

Newsprint slid, one fold, then two. The boxes trembled and rocked. At last, inexorably, in the same style as avalanches filmed for documentaries, the boxes tipped forward and poured their contents and themselves over my head and shoulders. I think I yelled.