Bonnie Nadzam - Lamb

“Cow patties?”

“Cow shit.”

“There’s flowers growing out of them.”

“I know it. Come here. I want to put some more sunblock on your face.”

“Why are they flat?”

“Cow faucet.”

“Sick.”

“Come here.” He squeezed a white pasty worm of sunblock into his hand. “Give me your face.”

“It won’t help.”

“I’m beginning to see that. You’re a little fragile, aren’t you?” He slathered her bluish white with the stuff, her skin hot to the touch, covering her face and nose and cheeks and collarbones and neck.

“I should have bought you a hat.”

“Like your dad’s cap?”

“A forest ranger hat. Let’s get one. Let’s braid your hair and get you a forest ranger hat.”

“What’s a forest ranger hat?”

“It’s what you need. Trust me. Hey.” He kneeled. “What do you think that is?”

“Footprints.”

“I know that,” he said. “Of what?”

“A bear?”

“No. That’s from a coyote. Maybe a fox. Come here,” he said, lowering his voice. “Get down here and I’ll show you.”

On their knees in the weeds and dust he pointed at the paw print, its tiny dashes of claws in the dirt. “See that? That means it’s from a kind of dog, rather than a kind of cat.”

“Like a wolf?”

“Nah. No wolves up here. Just coyotes.”

“Don’t they bite?”

“They won’t bother us.”

“When is it a cat?”

“No claw marks.” He erased the claw marks with his thumb. “Like that. Got it?” And Tom. If you’re out on a hike and it’s a cat, like a mountain lion, you get out of town, okay?”

“Now someone behind us will think there’s a lion out here.”

“Is there someone behind us?”

“If there was, they’d be scared.”

“Aren’t we smart to make our trail safe like that?”

“Pretty smart.”

“Do you think it would work in Lombard, if you drew cat prints on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Maybe we could empty out the city that way,” he said, standing and wiping off his knees. “We could have the whole place to ourselves.”

“If there were a real mountain lion in the city,” the girl said, standing and copying him, brushing off her pants, “they’d just shoot it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s correct.” He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked out ahead. “Listen. Let’s make a deal about this hike. We’ll eat lunch in the lowest trees we find, then head back.”

“How far do you think that is?”

“Two more miles. Are you good for it?”

“This is the farthest I’ve ever gone.”

“It’s good for you. You have to get your heart rate up every day.”

Two hours past noon they reached the sudden tilt in the ground that eventually rose—still another mile before them—into the distant mountains socked in by clouds. The greasewood and sage gave way to taller brush, smaller trees braceleted with poison oak and ivy. It was dense. There was no trail.

It was hot. Everything bleached white and yellow in the punishing heat. When Lamb turned and saw the girl working her legs and sweating and squinting into the sun—Christ, what can a man say? It was like his bones had been wired tight all his life, and seeing her that way, everything suddenly went slack. His mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread. What a man she rendered him, simply by being a girl who could be picked up and moved: what he wanted to be, what he ought to be, what was most unintelligible and unplanned and true in him when he carried her out of her fettered world to this. How powerful she was as long as she asserted no will of her own.

“You okay back there?” he called into the open blue before him.

“Yep.”

“Strong girl.”

“It’s from swimming,” she called up.

He stopped. “Jessie really took you swimming?”

She put her hand to her forehead. “Every morning at five in the goddamned morning. He makes me do a mile in his lane, then he does another one.”

He stared at her. “Did he take you swimming on the mornings I picked you up and took you for pancakes?”

She shrugged.

“Well.” He nodded. “Good for Jessie.”

“Yeah,” she snorted. “But not so good for me.”

He turned around and increased his pace. “I am not going to have any sympathy then,” he said, “knowing you can swim a mile.”

When they came into the trees they were surrounded by white legs of aspen, yellow leaves flashing like golden coins above them. Sweet clover and Queen Anne’s lace, cow parsnip and yarrow and stemless white flowers in pretty green-and-white whorls at their feet. Clouds came up above the canopies of trees and the wind swept them across a sky so simultaneously bright and dark it stopped David Lamb’s heart and he thought, this is it, this is the limit of all of it, right here: me and this child and all the money and progress that’s brought us here. This is the limit. And he smelled the sunblock and his own sweat and knew that the end of the story had already begun.

They sat cross-legged on the earth. Lamb took off his father’s ball cap—because I’m sitting down to a meal, he said—and opened his pack and removed the potted ham and butter sandwiches and the girl took the apple juice out of her pack.

“Oops,” he said. “We forgot cups. You don’t mind sharing?”

“Nah.”

“What if I have cooties?”

She rolled her eyes.

“What, you don’t care?”

“I don’t believe in cooties.”

“That’s dangerous thinking if I’ve ever heard it.”

“Well, I’m thirsty.”

A big wind moved through the bunched tops of spruce and fir, and the long white aspen swayed like wooden pins. The girl’s hair blew across her bluish face.

“You look like a dead girl.”

“I do?”

“Your face is all white. It’s a little unsettling. Did you eat that flower?”

“No.”

“You look very, very strange. Your skin is iridescent.”

“I wish I could see.”

“Here. I have an idea.” Lamb set his half-eaten sandwich on the top of his pack and ran a fingerful of dark, greenish-black dirt in three stripes across each of her cheekbones.

“Was that a cow patty?”

“Probably at some point.”

“Sick, Gary.”

“But it looks beautiful, Em. You look beautiful. I wish you could see.”

“How does it look?”

“Like you’re some wild stray piece of earth that took the form of a girl.” He looked at her. “I’m going to tell you something very serious, but you have to promise not to take it the wrong way.”

“Okay.”

“Are you listening with all your ears?”

“Yes.”

“Just this, Tommie: you will never look so beautiful again in this lifetime.” He opened the apple juice and handed it to her. “Drink that.” He picked up his sandwich. “I don’t want you getting dehydrated. You’re a great little hiker. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks.” She lifted the bottle to her mouth.

“If you were in Lombard today, what would you be doing?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

She looked up into the tree branches. “Probably be going home from school.”

“All alone?”

“I’d check my computer. Or watch TV.”

“When you get back home, will you make yourself potted ham and butter sandwiches and think of me?”

“Sure.” She leaned back on one hand and took a bite. “If you can get this stuff.”

“You can find it at the 7-Eleven.”

“I’m not supposed to go in those.”

“The 7-Eleven?”

“Mom says weird people hang out there.”

“That’s a good mom.”

“I guess.”

“So I’ll send you boxes of potted ham. No return address. It will be very mysterious. And when you open a can you can pretend it’s a love letter.”