Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

Since Skinner, she looked at men and thought: Has he ever killed anyone? Been shot at?

She walked or hitchhiked to whatever work she was able to find, travelling on the shoulder of the long rolling roads while the golden sunrise, an event of galactic stillness, spilled across the desert still cold and blue from the night. Every half minute a Ford F-Series truck would blast by her, a kinetic storm and a rebuke to anyone walking. For a period, she took the bus through the downtown area to a plant that fabricated Styrofoam for use in construction, the bitter industrial burning smell of polystyrene in her clothes, lungs.

She would be seen on foot in the lots in front of the giant clean spacious stores, which were polite and hostile at the same time. There was an edge to everything in the west.

She bought a lifter’s magazine at the Fry’s Supermarket.

At a horse ranch where she performed day labor, cleaning stalls, she met a different kind of American, a cowboy from North Dakota who had come to Arizona to date a lady rancher whom he had met online. He wore a Stetson hat, a silver-tipped cowboy string tie, and a black silk kerchief at the throat of his denim shirt.

I’ve seen you work, he said. Are you Mexican or Indian?

All of the above. I’m Uighur.

You’ll have to tell me what that means.

And when she had explained it to him, he said he found that fascinating. His own people had come a long way too. Us Grissoms showed up in the Dakotas in 1890. Henry Grissom fought in the Civil War. He brought everyone out here from Tennessee. They made their own whiskey. That was one of the things they did, and they did it pretty well. And then they came west and started ranching. They built their spread in the Black Hills, which is where it is to this day. I worked it all my life. My sons mostly run it now.

Do you have any woman or girl working there?

We do have one. She does very well and we appreciate her very much.

He added, after he had heard why Zou Lei had been fired from her last job, that he didn’t think the government needed to be involved in everything it was involved in.

It’s not all bad, he said, but there’s a lot of red tape now that does more harm than good.

He gave her the ranch’s web address — yes, they had email — and told her to contact his son. Or just go up there anytime you want. If you work out there like you do here, they’ll take you on. There’s a lot of work. It’s hard work. And it’s pretty cold. But some people really like it.

She shook his hand and he tipped his hat.

The style of a man who is both decent and independent, who knows what he must do.

She caught a ride home with a party of Mexican laborers in a pickup truck.

She ate carne asada, refried beans, yellow rice and picante, now speaking Spanish more frequently than Chinese. Con todo, she told the Mexican women at the roadhouse. A small coffee was a chico.

Naranja fresco ha muchas vitaminas.

Down the road, the Circle K sold a paper called the Pinal County Slammer, carrying color mugshots of everyone who was currently locked up. Sullen American Indian women with unwashed hair, manic skinheads, long-faced cowboys, drifters who had worked across America from the Alaskan fish canneries, to Californian logging camps, to hog farms in South Carolina and been arrested in every state in between.

She kept to a strict schedule, early to bed, early to rise. Not out like others, hunting love.

Late one Saturday night in her trailer court after she had been asleep in her bed for several hours she was awakened by a truck outside her window playing a love song. She picked up her head and as soon as she heard the harmony, that aching sweet pain hit her and she clutched her own mouth and cried out.

In the day, she told him she didn’t forgive him for anything — for leaving her in this world without him. Oh sure, she said, when he talked back to her. You had your reasons. So I’ve heard.

Skinner, she said, I’m eating well. And look at this: you see this sun? This heat? Here I am. I look out over the factory roof and see the Superstition Mountains. Aren’t I doing well? Look in my pocket: you see that? It’s cash. I’m piss-poor, get paid like shit out here. Your money’s keeping me in steak for now. When it runs out, it’ll be rice and beans from then on. But aren’t I happy, Skinner? Don’t I look good?

In the evening, she walked to the strip mall carrying an Adidas bag over her shoulder and went into the green glass-fronted gym. It was air-conditioned and there were complimentary freshly laundered white towels, which she had been stealing since she arrived. Athletes from ASU, bodybuilders and military personnel worked out here, along with a smattering of senior citizens, moms, eccentrics and regular guys mainly involved in the construction trades, retail management or telemarketing. The gym had a fleet of treadmills and a mirrored cathedral of Olympic weights.

She went into the locker room and kicked off her dusty boots and jeans and whipped off her shirt, which smelled like the horses, and threw them in a locker. A lifetime of hard work had given her thick rough hands and since coming out west, her forearms and face had tanned dark red. She had a wild-looking face. She looked older, had gained weight in the bones of her jaws and the muscles of her temples. But when she stood before the mirror wearing nothing, she looked like the frieze of Diana on a temple wall.

She unzipped her gym bag and took out her spandex and her Asics, old bloody footprints on the insoles, and got dressed.

She put her headphones in, locked her locker, went out on the weight room floor, bypassing the smoothie counter and the drink case that contained bottled Isopure in green, orange, purple, and red, like liquid jewels — forty grams of protein, zero carbs, the color and succulence of apples, melons, grapes and plums, the entire bounty that poor people had carried out of orchards. All the protein a weightlifter needed, quicker and cleaner than lamb. You dropped the glass bottle in the recycling barrel and let someone else worry about the refund. You’d just swallowed your feast. The rug in this valley was spread with everything you could ever want as long as you didn’t mind the chemical aftertaste.

She spoke to no one as she went to the squat rack, her iPod on in her ears as if she were getting instructions from the leader of a sniper team; she moved with concentration. Even if any of the lone men working out had wanted to speak to her, they would have been reluctant to disturb the focused woman. She loaded the bar carefully, hoisting the rubber-coated plates and sliding them onto the fat cylinders at either side of the bar.

From beneath her hat brim, she surveyed the weight. It was a lot for her.

But you never know if she was leaving town tonight. She punched one hand into the other. This might be your last chance.

A hawk flew over the gym’s tarry roof, sailed across the Phoenix valley and alighted on a promontory in the mountains and waited for her to catch up. When she got there, the bird would spring off its perch and into the air again, leading out past the canyons into the open desert towards the faint but growing sound of voices.

She put her shoulders under the bar, said a prayer to him and prepared to lift.