Lewis says, “You meet me up the road I’ll take you for a ride someday.” She says she can’t, and he laughs but it’s mean. He says, “I thought you liked me.”
She thinks of Max in jail, Max blaming her all these years, dangerous eleven-year-old Dora getting him drunk.
She says, “It’s not what you think.”
Lewis is sliding his long body into the gold Impala; he’s closing the door slowly, a deliberate softness, he’s whispering his words so she has to lean close; he’s saying, Tell me what I think.
“Tomorrow,” she says. And though she’s afraid of what she’ll do to him, she can’t stop what they’ve begun.
They make love in her grandfather’s car parked in the dark garage. They make love in the gold Impala at the end of a deserted road. They can’t be seen together. They know this but never speak of it. They find a refrigerator in a field, a white box, a home, and they lie down but it’s much too small. They remember childhood paths through woods and swamp, under barbed wire, over walls. Lewis knows how to come at night into the huge dark house, which door she’s left unlocked; he knows how to be a shadow among shadows moving through the long halls, how to breathe as the house breathes, how to find Dora in the blue room in the soft bed, how to slip his hand over her mouth so she won’t cry out, how to move like water through her and out of her, how to flow down the dark stairs into the dark yard before gathering himself into the hard shape of a man. Go get the gun. There’s nobody here to say it now, nobody but the old man with half a face, the old man who can’t get out of bed alone, who lies like a bug on his back till morning when Estrelle comes. There’s nobody here but the mother fallen across the couch, snoring in wine-thick sleep. Nobody here but little Dora in the damp bed.
Tonight he lifted his grandmother, carried her from the chair where she sits all day to the couch where she sleeps. Even without her legs she’s a big woman, heavy. She never leaves this house, but she sees far beyond these walls. She feels the heat of the boy’s skin where he touches. She knows. She says, You watch yourself, Lewis. She says, Your mama’s had all the sorrow she can bear.
He would never tell Dora, would never name his mother’s grief, would never describe the three rooms where he lives with her and her mother and two sisters, the kitchen table where he and his sisters and brother were born, would never try to explain what it means to be the youngest child of seven and the only man in the house.
But somehow she knows. She imagines the old woman in his arms, knows that despite her losses she weighs more than Dora ever will, that this weight is a thing he carries every time he climbs the stairs of her house.
He does not find her pretty in any way. She has a flat butt, barely swollen breasts. The thick blue veins roping her thin arms seem unnatural on a girl so small. Her blond hair is clipped short, dyed black, but comes in yellow at the roots. In any light she looks too naked, not just stripped but skinned.
He’s had girls before. Women, he calls them. They knew what to do. They had red mouths, quick hands. They were never this naked. They were wet and open, their bodies full and safe and soft. They had rubbers in their purses. He could meet them anywhere, anytime. No one had to lie.
He and Dora never talk. They know everything and nothing; they’re bound: his mother combs her grandfather’s hair, clips his nails, wipes his bum. She’s more than wife or daughter ever was. What the old man feels for Estrelle is his secret but will never be as fragile or forgettable as love.
The blue car.
The stifling heat of the garage.
He says, “Does it scare you?”
She knows he means his body, how long it is, how dark, and she thinks of her mother climbing out of the tub, all that flesh rushing toward her, loose breasts flapping, dimpled thighs whispering where they rub — she thinks of her grandfather grabbing with his one good hand, the thumbprint of bruise he leaves — she thinks of the cheek she’s supposed to kiss, the rough white-whiskered skin — she imagines these familiar bodies, how they make her forget what’s her and not her, how she’s terrified of the place they blur.
Where Lewis touches, he defines — dark hand on white rib. So she’s not afraid. But he is — afraid of these frail ribs. He can rest his long fingers in the spaces between them — she’s that thin, and her skin too, so fine he feels he might put his hand through her. He would not say he loves her or even likes her. If he could explain it at all, he might say it is this fear that makes him tender, this fear that brings him to the house again and again — he sees her brittle ribs as the rigging of a tiny boat rocking on black water; it is this sound, waves lapping wood, that calls him. Small and breakable as the girl is, the body he enters is a way out.
Tonight Dora’s grandfather could not be comforted. He rolled around and around the room, using his cane to move the chair with his strong left hand. He dumped the drawers, looking for something that can’t be found. He refused to understand who Lily was, and finally she left him, locked him in the room so he wouldn’t propel himself down the hall, so he wouldn’t fly down the stairs. He banged the wheels of his chair against the door. He rattled the knob. When his yell broke to a whimper, it was Estrelle’s name he called.
Dora tells Lewis none of this. She wants to be her body only, her body in the car, in the rain, out here on the black road. But her body is a map. Her body is a history. His fingers find every scar and bruise. What happened here, and here? He doesn’t ask, but where he touches she remembers. She cries, and he holds her. He expects no explanation. He isn’t scared of sorrow. It doesn’t surprise him. When he’s calmed her, he touches her again.
She imagines her grandfather upstairs in the house far from this road. He’s rolled his chair close to the window. He’s trying to see through the rain, trying to remember his right shoulder, how the raised rifle kicked as he fired. He’s trying to count the ducks falling from the sky, but there are too many, they always come too fast, and then he sees, he understands this one thing: it’s only the rain.
She imagines Lewis’s grandmother — one stump, one wooden leg; Lewis is touching her legs — and she sees her own future, her body coming apart, how she’ll lose it piece by piece. She doesn’t know how he does this to her, why he won’t stop. They make love so many times, so long, her fingers and feet and lips go numb.
They will be caught. It’s necessary. They know this as they know each other: without words. They are waiting in their silence to see how it will happen.
The gold Impala, empty.
A dirt road.
Tonight they saw the pretty little horses, the setting sun.
Four ponies, lean and glowing in the gold light. One deep ginger with hair like velvet. One the bleached white of bone. Two bays nuzzling. They heard the hum of insect wings, saw the ginger pony brace his legs to piss hard.
Later they stood on a bridge, watching gulls swoop high, then dive toward water, saw them vanish at the surface as if a blue hole opened between air and river.
Tonight when they lay down in the woods where palm and pine grow together, they touched each other’s bones: hips, cheeks, spine. Tonight, for the first time, they closed their eyes and almost slept, the man enfolding the child, one bird fallen — her body the white belly, his the dark wings — and it is in this way they wake to the sound of glass shattering on the road.
It’s only boys, three of them, nine or ten years old.
They beat the car with sticks and rocks. Lewis knows that if he closes his eyes the bare-chested boys with sticks will become men with guns. He lies naked, watching children destroy the car. His hand clamps Dora’s mouth, and she wonders, Does he think I’m fool enough to yell? It’s not that simple, his fear. What he wants is for the body beneath his body to be gone. But her body insists. Still as it is, it is too many sharp bones. It will not soften, will not be hidden, will not sink into this ground. The boys jab their little knives into tires; the air escaping hisses off the road. His body hot on top of hers has a smell of something smoldering, about to burn, and then the match is struck, the first one, and the vinyl seats are split open with the sharp knives and the stuffing spills out — the first match is thrown and the second match is struck and the smell in the night is melting plastic. Together, two boys stand on the hood to drop a rock onto the windshield, and the glass is a shattered web caved in that does not break apart. Black smoke billows from open doors. The man in the woods has pressed the air from the girl’s lungs, and the boys, who are thrilled with their miraculous destruction, are mounting their bikes and peddling home.