Claire Watkins - Battleborn

Eventually, the pipes squealed closed and the bathroom door opened. Harris turned to see Magda standing in the doorway, one of his thin maroon bath towels tucked around her like a cocktail dress, her hair wet-black, curling at her shoulders, her bare collarbones. She held her dirty clothes in a wad under her arm. Milo limped to her. The girl bent and scratched the dog under the chin. Without looking up, she said, “Mind if I borrow some clothes?”

Harris was uneasy at the idea of her pilfering his drawers, her fingers running over the flecks of mica among his graying underwear. But better that than him choosing clothes for the girl. “Go ahead,” he said. “Bedroom’s on the left.”

“Bud.” She turned, smiling, strands of wet hair clinging to her skin. “This house’s got four rooms. I been in three of them.”

When Magda emerged from the bedroom she wore a black T-shirt, a pair of tall white socks pulled to her knees with the heels bulging above her ankles, and Bud’s royal blue swim trunks. They were old, like everything in this place—except Magda herself—with yellow and white stripes running up the sides. They were short, even on her small frame. She must have hiked them up.

She stood in the doorway dipping the pad of her middle finger into one of his dented pots of Carmex and running the finger over her lips until they glistened.

“What are we doing today?” she said.

“Doing?”

“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “Bet you know all the hot springs.”

“Swimming? Sweetheart, this ain’t sleepaway camp.”

She sat cross-legged in the recliner, setting it rocking and squeaking. “You’re too busy?”

The only thing he’d been busy with in two years was her. “Somebody’s bound to be looking for you.”

“Nobody’s gonna come looking for me,” she said. She got up and walked out the door.

Harris wished something painful she was right. He wiped his hands dry on a dishrag and followed her out to the porch.

“Come on now. We have to get you home.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Why not? Because you did something dumb? Because your novio ’s a son of a bitch? That don’t mean nothing. Plenty of girls your age get into this situation.”

“Bud,” she said, turning to him and squinting in the sun.

“What about your parents? They’re probably scared out of their minds.”

“Bud,” she said again.

But he went on, partly because she needed to hear it and partly because he didn’t at all mind the sound of someone else’s voice saying his name over and over again. “Shit, kid, if I was your dad—”

“You’re not.”

“I’m just trying to say—”

“Bud, you’re a fucking idiot,” she said, laughing that mean laugh into the open expanse of valley. “You think I’m worried about my boyfriend ? The Mormon virgin ?” She laughed again. “I told Ronnie we got pregnant by taking a fucking bath together. Want to know what he said? ‘I heard that happens sometimes.’” She lifted the T-shirt and swept her hand across her belly, her bruise, the way a person might brush the dirt from a fossil to expose the mineralized bones underneath.

Harris said, “Who, then?”

“Don’t ask me that.” She put her middle finger into her mouth and scraped some of the black polish off with her bottom teeth. “Please don’t.”

They stood staring a long while, her at the valley and him at her. He watched her come right up against crying, then not, instead saying, “Fuck,” which was what he wanted to say but his mouth had gone dry.

“It’s all right,” he said, finally. “Let’s go for a swim.”

She looked to him. “Really?”

“I’ll get you some shoes.”

They left Milo behind and took Route 40 in the direction of town for fifteen miles, and even though Harris kept saying, “It’s all right,” he could tell Magda didn’t trust him. She sat stiff, with her right hand on the door handle, and wouldn’t look him in the eye until he took the Burro Creek turnoff and Gerlach began to shrink behind them.

Some heifers were grazing on the long swaths of bluegrass and toadflax that had sprung up on either side of the spring, bright plastic tags dangling from their ears. The truck rolled to a stop at the edge of the alkali field, and a few of them lifted their heads to notice, but most kept their mouths pressed to the ground, chewing the dry grasses. Harris shut off the truck. “Here we are.”

“It’s beautiful, Bud. I didn’t even know this was out here.” Magda got out of the truck and shuffled through the tall grass in Harris’s bed slippers. Harris followed her to where the water ran downhill from the spring to a clear, rock-bottomed pool.

“It’s Indian land,” he said. “Technically.”

She pulled the slippers and socks from her feet. “Those Indians have all the luck.”

He sat and watched her dip herself into the water, clothes and all. Wet to her waist, she turned to him. “You coming?”

“Nah.”

She stumbled on a loose rock and slipped farther down into the water. “Come on. Aren’t you hot?”

Harris shook his head, though he was burning up.

Magda pinched her nose and dipped her head under, pushing her hair from her face with her free hand. When she came up she said, “That feels good.” She paddled a weak breaststroke over to a half-submerged boulder and hoisted herself onto it. She lay there on her back, the wet clothes pasted to her body.

Harris looked away. He dug his fingers into the dirt around him—a habit—looking absently for something to catch the glint of the sun. Magda sat up and said, “What were you like as a kid, Bud?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Come on. It’s just us. What kind of stuff did you do?”

“Regular kid shit, I guess.” He sifted a handful of dirt through his fingers.

“Like?”

“I used to sleep outside. With my friends. My best friends were these brothers. Lucas and Jimmy Hastings. Their folks had a cattle ranch, out by where the fairgrounds are now. We’d go out on their land.”

“But what did you do ?”

“We just talked, I guess. Shot the shit.”

“About what?”

He pinched a dirt clod between his fingers. “About moving away. We were just kids.”

“To where?”

“Reno, mostly. Or Salt Lake. Sacramento. San Francisco. New York. They were all the same to us back then. The big city.” Harris laughed at himself a little, recalling. “We used to stay up all night, just listing the places you could take a girl in a city. One of us guys would say, ‘To the park.’ And another would say, ‘A museum.’ And another would say, ‘The movies.’ That was our favorite, the movies. Whenever somebody said the movies, we’d all together say, ‘The movies,’ all slow. Like a goddamn prayer.”

Magda slipped from the rock into the water and went slowly under. Harris let himself watch this time, watched her belly submerge, her small breasts with his T-shirt clinging to them, then her shoulders, her jaw and lips. She arched her back under the water and pushed herself to the surface again, leading with her sternum, the ruts of her ribs visible beneath the soaked cloth, her nipples tight and buttonish. Drops dripped from her brows, her eyelashes, the tip of her nose, the outcropping of her bottom lip. She gathered her hair in her hand and wrung the water from it.

“What?” she said, like she didn’t know.

Looking again to his fingers buried in the earth, he said, “I haven’t thought of the Hastings brothers in thirty years. Sounds stupid, to say that’s what we did around here.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “That’s what we do now.”