T. Boyle - Without a Hero

He was still watching her. The bed was big, a double, one of the few creature comforts the Forestry Service provided up here. There was no headboard, of course — just a big flat hard slab of mattress attached to the wall at window level, so you could be lying in bed and still do your job. Presumably, it was designed for couples. When he spoke again, she knew what he was going to say before the words were out of his mouth. “Nice bed,” he said.

What did she expect? He was no different from the rest — why would he be? All of a sudden he’d begun to get on her nerves, and when she turned her face to him her voice was cold. “Have you seen the telescope,” she said, indicating the Bushnell Televar mounted on the rail of the catwalk — beyond the window and out the door.

He ignored her. He rose to his feet. Thirteen by thirteen: two’s a crowd. “You must get awfully lonely up here,” he said, and his voice was different now too, no attempt at folksiness or jocularity, “a pretty woman like you. A beautiful woman. You’ve got sexy legs, you know that?”

She flushed — he could see that, she was sure of it — and the flush made her angry. She was about to tell him off, to tell him to get the hell out of her house and stay out, when Todd came rumbling up the steps, wild-eyed and excited. “Mom!” he shouted, and he was out of breath, his voice high-pitched and hoarse, “there’s water leaking all over the place out there!”

Water. It took a moment to register. The water was precious up here, irreplaceable. Once a month two bearded men with Forestry Service patches on their sleeves brought her six twenty-gallon containers of it — in the old way, on the backs of mules. She husbanded that water as if she were in the middle of the Negev, every drop of it, rarely allowing herself the luxury of a quick shampoo and rinse, as she had that morning. In the next instant she was out the door and jolting down the steps behind her son. Down below, outside the storage room where the cartons were lined up in a straight standing row, she saw that the rock face was slick with a finely spread sheen of water. She bent to the near carton. It was leaking from a thin milky stress fracture in the plastic, an inch from the bottom. “Take hold of it, Todd,” she said. “We’ve got to turn it over so the leak’s on top.”

Full, the carton weighed better than a hundred and sixty pounds, and this one was nearly full. She put her weight behind it, the power of her honed and muscular legs, but the best she could do, even with Todd’s help, was to push the thing over on its side. She was breathing hard, sweating, she’d scraped her knee and there was a stipple of blood on the skin over the kneecap. It was then that she became aware of the stranger standing there behind her. She looked up at him framed against the vastness of the sky, the sun in his face, his big hands on his hips. “Need a hand there?” he asked.

Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she’d refused — maybe it was the way Todd gaped at him in awe, maybe it was the old pretty-woman/lonely-up-here routine or the helpless-female syndrome — but before she could think she was saying “I don’t need your help: I can do it myself.”

And then his hands fell from his hips and he backed away a step, and suddenly he was apologetic, he was smooth and funny and winning and he was sorry for bothering her and he just wanted to help and he knew she was capable, he wasn’t implying anything — and just as suddenly he caught himself, dropped his shoulders and slunk off down the steps without another word.

For a long moment she watched him receding down the trail, and then she turned back to the water container. By the time she and Todd got it upended it was half empty.

Yes. And now he was here when he had no right to be, now he was intruding and he knew it, now he was a crazy defining new levels of the affliction. She’d call in an emergency in a second — she wouldn’t hesitate — and they’d have a helicopter here in less than five minutes, that’s how quick these firefighters were, she’d seen them in action. Five minutes. She wouldn’t hesitate. She kept her head down. She cut and chewed each piece of meat with slow deliberation and she read and reread the same paragraph until it lost all sense. When she looked up, he was gone.

After that, the day dragged on as if it would never end. He couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes, slouching around with his mercenary grin and his pathetic flowers, but he’d managed to ruin her day. He’d upset her equilibrium and she found that she couldn’t read, couldn’t sketch or work on the sweater she was knitting for Todd. She caught herself staring at a fixed point on the horizon, drifting, her mind a blank. She ate too much. Lunch was a ceremony, dinner a ritual. There were no visitors, though for once she longed for them. Dusk lingered in the western sky and when night fell she didn’t bother with her propane lantern but merely sat there on the corner of the bed, caught up in the wheeling immensity of the constellations and the dream of the Milky Way.

And then she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of him, the stranger with the big hands and secretive eyes, kept scanning the catwalk for the sudden black shadow of him. If he came at seven in the morning, why not at three? What was to prevent him? There was no sound, nothing — the wind had died down and the night was clear and moonless. For the first time since she’d been here, for the first time in three long seasons, she felt naked and vulnerable, exposed in her glass house like a fish in a tank. The night was everything and it held her in its grip.

She thought about Mike then, about the house they’d had when he’d finished his degree and started as an assistant professor at a little state school out in the lost lush hills of Oregon. The house was an A-frame, a cabin with a loft, set down amidst the trees like a cottage in a fairy tale. It was all windows and everywhere you looked the trees bowed down and stepped into the house. The previous owner, an old widower with watery eyes and yellow hair climbing out of his ears, hadn’t bothered with blinds or curtains, and Mike didn’t like that — he was always after her to measure the windows and order blinds or buy the material for drapes. She’d balked. The openness, the light, the sense of connection and belonging: these were the things that had attracted her in the first place. They made love in the dark — Mike insisted on it — as if it were something to be ashamed of. After a while, it was.

Then she was thinking of a time before that, a time before Todd and graduate school, when Mike sat with her in the dormitory lounge, books spread out on the coffee table before them, the heat and murmur of a dozen other couples locking their mouths and bodies together. A study date. For hours she clung to him, the sofa like a boat pitching in a heavy sea, the tease of it, the fumbling innocence, the interminable foreplay that left her wet and itching while the wind screamed beyond the iced-over windows. That was something. The R.A. would flash the lights and it was quarter of one and they would fling themselves at each other, each step to the door drenched in hormones, sticky with them, desperate, until finally he was gone and she felt the loss like a war bride. Until the next night.

Finally — and it must have been two, three in the morning, the Big Dipper tugged down below the horizon, Orion looming overhead — she thought of the stranger who’d spoiled her breakfast. He’d sat there on the corner of the bed; he’d stood beyond the window with his sad bundle of flowers, devouring the sky. As she thought of him, in that very moment, there was a dull light thump on the steps, a faint rustle, movement, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The seconds pounded in her head and the rustling — it was like the sweep of a broom — was gone, something in the night, a pack rat, the fleeting touch of an owl’s wing. She thought of those hands, the eyes, the square of those shoulders, and she felt herself being drawn down into the night in relief, and finally, in gratitude.