Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

The spring here pours from a mossy nook in the hillside, and where it falls, it has carved a basin out of the living stone, a well of cold, clear, iron-tasting water, big as a room, thatched with logs worn feathery by age. Turtle sits on the logs, taking off all of her clothes and laying the shotgun among them and slipping feetfirst into the stone pool—because here she seeks her own peculiar solace, and here she feels it to be the solace of cold places, of a thing that is clear and cold and alive. She holds her breath and sinks to the bottom and, drawing her knees to her shoulders with her hair rising around her like weeds, she opens her eyes to the water and looks up and sees writ huge across the rain-dappled surface the basking shapes of newts with their fingers splayed and their golden-red bellies exposed to her, their tails churning lazily. They are bent and distorted, hazed the way things are under water, and the cold is good for her, it brings her back to herself. She breaks the surface and heaves out onto the logs and feels the warmth return and watches the forest around her.

She rises and climbs carefully back up the hillside and walks heel to toe across the joists of the back deck in the gathering rain and then into the kitchen, where the black-tailed weasel startles and looks up, one paw raised above a plate covered in old steak bones.

She sets the shotgun on the counter and goes to the fridge and opens it and stands wet, her hair slicked to her back and straggled around her face, racking the eggs on the counter’s edge and breaking them into her mouth and discarding them into the compost bucket. She hears Martin walk out of his bedroom and down the hallway. He comes into the kitchen and looks past her through the open kitchen door to the rain. She says nothing. She lowers her hands to the counter and lets them rest there. Water is beaded on the shotgun. It clings to the corrugated green hulls in the shotgun’s sidesaddle. “Well, kibble,” he says, looking past her. “Well, kibble.”

She puts the carton of eggs away. She takes out a beer and tosses it to him and he catches it.

“Time to take you down to the bus?”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to, Daddy.”

“I know that, kibble.”

She doesn’t say anything. She stands at the counter.

They walk down the road together in the gathering rain. The drive runs with water, laddering the ruts with pine needles. They stand at the bottom of their driveway. Along the tarmac’s crumbling edge, sweet vernal grass and wild oats nod in the downpour, bindweed twining up the stalks. They can hear Slaughterhouse Creek echoing in the culvert beneath the Shoreline Highway. On the nickel-gray ocean, whitecaps ship cream against the black sea stacks.

“Look at that motherfucker,” Martin says, and she looks, not knowing what he means—the cove, the ocean, the sea stacks, it isn’t clear. She hears the old bus shifting as it comes around the bend. “Take care of yourself, kibble,” Martin says darkly. The bus creaks to a stop, and with an exhausted gasp and the thwacking of rubber skirts, throws open its doors. Martin salutes the bus driver, holding the beer over his heart, somber in the face of her derision. Turtle climbs the stairs and walks down the corrugated rubber runner lit by panel lights in the floor, the corrugations now filled with rainwater, the other faces dim white smudges disordered in their dark green vinyl pews. The bus heaves, and with it, Turtle jars sideways and drops into her empty seat.

Each time the bus slows, the water drains forward beneath the seats and through the rubber corrugations of the walkway and the students pull their feet up, disgusted. Turtle sits watching the water pass beneath her, carrying with it a hull of pink nail polish, which has come off all of a piece and lies upturned on the tide. Rilke is across the aisle from her, knees pressed against the seat back, bent over her book, running a hank of hair between thumb and forefinger until she has only the fan of ends, her red London Fog coat still beading with water. Turtle wonders if Rilke wore it to school thinking, okay, but I have to take good care of this coat. The rain is unseasonable, but she’s heard no one say so. Turtle doesn’t think anyone else but her daddy worries about that. She wonders what Rilke would think if she could see Turtle up at night, sitting under the naked bulb in her redwood-paneled room with its bay window looking out on Buckhorn Hill, stooped over the disassembled gun, handling each piece with care, and she wonders, if Rilke could see that, would Rilke understand? She thinks, no, of course not. Of course she wouldn’t. No one understands anyone else.

Turtle is wearing old Levi’s over black Icebreaker wool tights, her T-shirt clinging to her stomach with damp, a flannel, an olive drab army coat much too big for her, and a mesh-back cap. She thinks, I would give anything in the world to be you. I would give anything. But it is not true, and Turtle knows that it is not true.

Rilke says, “I really like your coat.”

Turtle looks away.

Rilke says quickly, “No, like—I really do. I have nothing like that, you know? Like—cool and old?”

“Thanks,” Turtle says, pulling the coat up around her shoulders, drawing her hands back into its sleeves.

“It’s this whole, like, army surplus, Kurt Cobain chic you have.”

Turtle says, “Thanks.”

Rilke says, “So, Anna is, like— killing you on those vocab tests.”

“Fucking Anna, fucking whore,” Turtle says. The coat sits huge about her shoulders. Her hands, white-knuckled, wet with rain, are clenched between her thighs. Rilke barks out a startled laugh, looking forward down the aisle and then in the other direction, to the back of the bus, her neck very long, her hair falling about her in straight, black, glossy strands. Turtle does not know how it is so glossy, so straight, how it has that sheen, and then Rilke looks back to Turtle, eyes alight, putting a hand over her mouth.

“Oh my god,” Rilke says, “oh my god.”

Turtle watches her.

“Oh my god,” Rilke says again, leaning in conspiratorially. “Don’t say that!”

“Why?” Turtle says.

“Anna’s really very nice, you know,” Rilke says, still leaning in.

“She’s a cunt,” Turtle says.

Rilke says, “So you want to hang out sometime?”

“No,” Turtle says.

“Well,” Rilke says, after a pause, “good talk,” and returns to her book.

Turtle looks away from Rilke, at the seat ahead of her, and then out at the window, sheeted with water. A pair of girls tamp a bowl into a blown-glass pipe. The bus shudders and jars. I would just as soon, Turtle thinks, slit you from your asshole to your little slut throat as be your friend. She has a Kershaw Zero Tolerance knife with the pocket clip removed that she carries deep in her pocket. She thinks, you bitch, sitting there with your nail polish, running your hands through your hair. She does not even know why Rilke does this; why does she examine the ends of her hair; what is there to see? I hate everything about you, Turtle thinks. I hate the way you talk. I hate your little bitch voice. I can barely hear you, that high-pitched squeak. I hate you, and I hate that slick little clam lodged up between your legs. Turtle, watching Rilke, thinks, goddamn, but she is really looking at her hair as if there is something for her to see about the ends.

When the bell rings for lunch, Turtle walks down the hill to the field, her boots squelching. She wades out toward the soccer goal, hands in her pockets, and the rain sweeps across the flooded field in drifts. The field is enclosed by a forest black with rain, the trees withered and gnarled with their poor soil, thin as poles. A garter snake skates across the water, gloriously side to side, head up and forward, black with long green and copper runners, a thin yellow jaw, a black face, bright black eyes. It crosses the flooded ditch and is gone. She wants to go, to bolt. She wants to cover ground. To leave, to take to the woods, is to throw open the cylinder of her life and spin it and close it. She has promised Martin, promised, and promised, and promised. He cannot risk losing her, but, Turtle thinks, he will not. She doesn’t know everything about these woods, but she knows enough. She stands enclosed in the open field, looking out into the forest, and she thinks, the hell, the hell.