Hell's Bottom, Colorado Read online

  She’s sitting in a lawn chair, watching the knife in her hand as it slices through the white meat of an apple. These are the tart and bruised apples from the tree beside her, the ones with worms, the ones partly rotted. She refuses to let them waste. Instead she slices them, scatters the thin pieces across baking sheets, lets them dry in the sun. This winter she’ll feed them to the horses as a treat. She promises herself this: in a few months, when she walks out to break the ice on the stock tank and greets the horses, she’ll hold out a handful of withered apple slices in the palm of her gloved hand and remember this day and what it is to be warm, and remember this ache pulsing through her body.

  She hopes that by then, the dreams will be gone, along with the heat of summer. The dreams are only a phase, after all, simple enough to dissect and understand. She stops to look up at the mountains and asks herself, quite gently, to quit these dreams. Then she grows a little angry and scolds herself for this self-made torment night after night, these visions that make no sense.

  She picks up another apple from the pile beside her lawn chair and slices it into a big bowl that’s balanced on her tanned knees. At the same time her son, Jack, and his girlfriend, Winnie, gallop up to the edge of the fence that separates the lawn from the field.

  “Watch us,” Jack shouts at her. He and Winnie look flushed and bright from riding, and the horses are lathered slick with sweat.

  “Go help your father,” she says, pretending to ignore them.

  “Ah,” Jack says, waving her comment away with his hand. “Watch us first.”

  “Hey, Carolyn,” says Winnie. “You’re getting burnt.”

  “I know it,” she says, looking down at her arms. They feel tight with the sunburn of yesterday, and today will only add to it. The heat is pouring down and seeping into her skin. She pulls her shirt away from her damp skin and holds it out, hoping for a breeze to waft in and touch her belly. The shirt is her daughter’s black tank top, pulled from the laundry this morning. The day is too hot for a shirt, too hot for black. If the kids weren’t around, she’d think about pulling the shirt off and working topless, and this makes her smile, the image of herself in this lawn chair, slicing apples, wearing no top.

  “Are you watching?” Jack demands. “Are you going to watch?”

  She stabs the knife into the apple and sets it on the wooden armrest of the lawn chair. “I’m watching,” she says.

  “Stand up so you can see better,” he says.

  She stands and shades her eyes with her hand. Jack, satisfied, leans toward Winnie and whispers something. They turn the horses toward the pasture, pause, and then urge the animals into a gallop. Winnie and Jack ride side by side, hunkered down as they fly across the field. Suddenly, they arc away from one another, then towards each other, one horse passing just in front of the other as they cross. It makes Carolyn’s heart leap, the two heading toward each other at such a speed. They do it again and again, galloping away from each other and then turning the horses toward one another, back and forth until they are stopped by the fence a half a mile away.

  Carolyn rubs her hand across the middle of her chest and then raises it to wave as they turn their horses back around. They wave back before heading toward Del, whom she can barely see if she squints. He’s fixing fence along the road that runs through their place. All day he’ll be working—walking for miles, tightening the barbed wire here, replacing a strand there.

  What she tells people when she speaks of her love for him is this: That she fell in love with him because he can fix fence and because he plays the piano. That she met him in a classical music class in college, that he tilts his head toward particular pieces of music, even if he’s in a restaurant, even if he’s in the old truck—that he does this and still knows how to break a horse, snap a chicken’s neck, fix a fence. That when his hands rest on the piano keyboard, they are scraped, callused, dirty.

  She loves that he will smile when Jack and Winnie ride up and offer to help, knowing, as she does, they’re happy enough to work just to be in each other’s company, just to have the chance to recover quietly from the tumult that is rising within them. She remembers the sensation perfectly, and she’s sure Del does, too.

  She needs to see Lex for just a moment, she tells herself, and then the dreams will stop. In a flash, she’ll see his failings, the reasons he was not the right one. That’s why she sets down the apples and walks inside the rambling old farmhouse, through the porch with its collection of cowboy boots and work boots and muddy shoes, to her bedroom. In the mirror that hangs against the closet door, she considers the smudge of dirt on her cheek, probably from her work in the garden this morning. She leaves it there. She likes the look of it, the touch of carefree childishness it gives her face. There are wrinkles around her green eyes, though, the result of the Colorado sun. She runs her finger across the wrinkles and considers that some love is sturdy with deep roots, and some love is fresh and young, and that she should not kid herself about the truer of the two.

  As she pulls out of the drive, she looks in the rearview mirror at her home, at the old white farmhouse with red trim. Next to it is the barn, shed, well house, chicken house—her little circle of red-and-white security. This is the life she wanted, and where she wanted to be, and so she should be at peace.

  Twenty miles she’s driving. She makes herself crazy. Despite her good judgment in leaving Lex and the others behind and marrying Del, she is driving twenty miles to drown a young and focused first love.

  It’s been a dry summer and the grasses have settled into a brittle, bleached green. The bushes that line the curving stream bed are darker, though—a fertile web zigzagging across the prairie. She turns off the air conditioner and unrolls the window. She wants the sound of the wind to fill the truck, to have the hot air whip itself away.

  She drives through town, past the stores on Main Street, then flips a U-turn and drives by again. She pulls into the grocery store parking lot and considers her options. She could go home—this is what she ought to do. She could also drive ten miles more and visit Lex’s parents’ ranch, where he is no doubt staying, and think of some excuse for her presence.

  Instead she just sits, listens to the country radio station and watches the cars on Main pass by. Nineteen years ago she moved back here with Del. Bought the ranch next to her parents’ place, gave birth to Jack two years later, Leanne two years after that. She was too young to have married Del, probably, but he was the right one. Anyone who could play the “Moonlight Sonata” but wanted to herd cattle had to be the one.

  She’s thirty-nine now, though everyone is always surprised to learn this. She is tan, athletic, muscled. She is a bit more than good-looking; she knows it. Something about her youth, her looks, has filled her. Only recently has she felt an empty, hurt-filled space inside her. These dreams, of course, are her way of trying to fill back up.

  Over the years, Carolyn has learned to trust her instincts. Things usually fall into place for her, as they do now, when she sees Lex’s truck with his out-of-state license plates pull into the alley beside the cafe. He’s with Al, an old friend and classmate who lives on a ranch near hers. They step out of the truck and head toward the cafe. Al blocks her view of Lex, but she can still glimpse his tall figure, his Wranglers and T-shirt, the way he rubs the back of his neck as he ducks his head and laughs about something.

  She waits several moments before stepping out of the truck. She straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin, and walks quickly across Main, toward the cafe. Once in the door, she sees them sitting in a booth across from each other, each hanging on to the coffee cups resting on the table between them.

  Lex has changed very little—still handsome, perhaps even more so, with gray at his temples and creases around his brown eyes. There is an old scar across his temple, a fine white line that she used to trace with her finger when she nestled beside him.

  She nods at Al, then turns to meet Lex’s eyes. “I saw an out-of-state license plate and figured that was your
truck,” she says. “I just wanted to pop in and say hi.”

  Lex is thrown off guard; she can see that. They’ve been careful to avoid each other all these years. But he nods, moves over, and motions for her to sit beside him. She tries to shake off a shiver of nervousness as she slides in beside him.

  There is a silence, a brief moment in which some sort of charge passes around the table. Then they are all talking, an effort to smooth over that charge, and she leans back and smiles. She hears about Al’s horse that sliced its leg on a crazy contraption some idiot built for target practice on Al’s land without Al’s permission, a story she has already heard, and then listens to Lex talk about his place east of Des Moines. He’s a farmer now, not a rancher, he says, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to make money with soybeans and corn instead of cows. As he speaks, she watches him closely, as closely as she can without peering at him.

  He says it’s good to be back in town, and that it’s not coffee they need, but a drink. They move toward the back, to the bar, and Lex orders a round. As he talks to the waitress, Carolyn’s eyes meet Al’s, and there is some sort of silent acknowledgment that this is an odd time of day to be drinking, odd but necessary, because this is indeed quite a situation to find themselves in. A drink, perhaps, will settle this buzz in the air and in their spines.

  Carolyn drinks her beer and listens to Lex complain about the Midwest—reserved personalities, conservative religion, muggy air. But then, too, he says, it’s not full of yuppies in spandex shorts, wanna-be cowboys, California snobs ruining it all. He speaks of genetically modified crops, and the fact that Europeans won’t buy them, and the fact that Americans don’t give a damn. How the grain elevators all have two sets of bins, one for the crops Americans will eat, one for shipping overseas. “Did you know,” he asks, “that one Iowa farmer feeds 130 people?” He wonders where we got the idea, anyway, that America should ruin its soil feeding the world. “Every year America loses two billion tons of topsoil. Did you know,” he asks her, “that we all stand on a thin layer of sustenance, we’re just a few inches from desolation?”

  She is surprised. She recalls leaving him for the fear that he would never see other choices, other possibilities than those immediately before him. Now she is living back at home, and he has moved on. But there was more to it, too, wasn’t there? He lacked depth, empathy, the ability to hold inside himself the pain and joy of what is real. Or maybe it was just instinct, telling her to let him go.

  She crosses her arms around her body. She’s cold now—the air-conditioning has pulled the heat from her skin, and the sunburn makes her feel chilled. She wishes she could lean toward Lex and absorb some of his heat, either that or be out in the sun. It almost doesn’t matter which—she just needs something, anything, to release her from the tight confines of cold.

  They’re on their third round before the past comes up. Al is laughing about a party they’d all gone to, one where everyone ended up drunk and naked and swimming in the irrigation canal.

  Lex lets out a genuine laugh. He’s agreeing with Al about how young they were then, how brave to go home to their parents, past curfew, dripping wet. But she knows that Lex is talking around the real thing. She feels what he does, the memory of the two of them, of his hands gliding along her thighs underwater, her wrapping her legs around his waist.

  She looks up and his eyes are on her, serious and clear. Not only full of the memory but wondering, as she is, if there is more, a moment in the future in which they could curl their bodies around one another like that again.

  She looks down at her beer and begins to pull the red label from the bottle. She’s as buzzed now as she was back then. A rare occasion for her, but frequent enough in her lifetime to know that drunk is when she’s most honest, that what she thinks and feels are then true. She is willing to believe that other people, when drunk, do things they do not intend. For her, though, the opposite is true. So she orders another beer, ready to get drunk enough to locate the deepest-dwelling spot of truth, and once she finds it she will look around to see what’s there.

  Lex notices the goosebumps on her arms and suggests that they go outside, and maybe, even, walk over to the high school. He steadies her as she stumbles a bit on their way out, and laughs with her when she laughs. She walks between Al and Lex down Main and toward the football field that borders the red brick building. She ducks her head and smiles, listening to them swap stories of old games and rivalries.

  Out in the sun, her body melts into the warmth. She can again smell the flesh of apples mixed with the scent of her own salty sweat. She has always liked this salty smell—her summer skin, is what Del calls it.

  Often, as it does now, the salty warmth makes her body ache. Summer and sex, Del has teased, are never far apart for his wife. Yesterday when she and Del found themselves alone in the cool farmhouse—he coming in from fixing fence, she wandering in with a basket of tomatoes from the garden—she’d pulled him toward the bedroom. They ran hands over damp backs and thighs and breathed in salt and the smells of outdoors in the cool, dark house.

  She feels dizzy. The grass beneath her feet is cut short and she stares at it, hoping its preciseness will steady her. They are in the field, walking across the fifty-yard line, all three a bit wobbly and aware of the buzz that is not just inside them, but between Lex and Carolyn, and a little curious as to where it will lead.

  Lex is telling them of a new invention made by the company he sometimes works for: pellets to put in the top of grain silos that kill bugs and mice as they sift down to the bottom. A good idea, that’s what some farmer in Iowa thought, and he bought some. But when it rained, the rain seeped into his silo. There was a chemical reaction, a deadly gas was produced, and the gas drifted into the farmhouse. He tells them that the farmer’s wife was sleeping on the bottom floor because she was nine months pregnant, and that she called 911 when she realized she was dying. Her family survived because they had been sleeping upstairs, survived because she warned them before she fell over dead. No one had tested the pellets for a reaction to water. “Can you believe it?” he asks, and then asks it again. He asks it with an inflection that means, all those scientists are jerks. And also with a smile, meaning, isn’t life crazy and full of damn strange stories? Which it is, and she can see his point of view.

  But she knows how Del would have told the story. He would have drifted off in the middle and turned his eyes away and possibly never finished it at all. His thoughts would not be on his audience, because he would be thinking of the woman and the unborn baby, of the possibilities that could never be.

  The three of them are quiet, and she listens to the sound of their feet on grass. Al clears his throat, then, and says he needs to go back to the cafe, and there is an awkward moment as he tries to find a reason why. Then she is alone with Lex, and they turn back toward the cafe as well, but walk much slower. A silence drifts between them, one which she expects to be clumsy but is not. The tight nervousness in her body has given way to a warmer haze. She is very happy and so she closes her eyes, but still she cannot identify the source of the emotion.

  “And how is your husband?” Lex asks at last.

  “He’s fixing fence today,” she says. She tells him about her son and daughter, the dry summer, and their hay crop. The earth spins beneath her and her words are thick, and she tries to level out both, but mostly she is trying to clear up what she feels inside. The feeling is like trying to catch a handful of clear river water: she is only able to slow it for a moment in her hand. She feels enough, though, to know the water is good and that the river is Del. The truth of that comes charging at her, and the relief that comes with it causes her to let out a sudden laugh as she nearly loses her balance.

  Lex steadies her and smiles. She agrees she’s had one beer too many. But she is on the brink of tears. She is serious inside, trying to right herself and put the tumult back in order. As they near the center of the field again, she reaches out to take his hand. “Good-bye,” she says, when h
e turns to face her. “It was good to see you.”

  He is taken off guard by this sudden farewell, but the look of surprise turns quickly into something else, and he holds her gaze with a question. She hopes her own look sends back something of the mornings when she dreams of what could be, of missing her youth, of the newness they once shared. But also of certain summer days, the ones that reveal all that is right. How fortunate she is to have found herself here, turning from him in the middle of a sunlit field, so sure of her direction.

  AN EASY BIRTH

  THE HORSE BUCKED AND sent Carolyn into a forward-flung arc, right into the edge of the creep feeder. She knew, in that instant in the air, that she was going to hit it hard. Arms out, eyes closed, face turned—all this her body did on its own. The only conscious response she had time for was to realize the extent of it, to think Jesus-God-this-is-going-to-be-bad.

  She lies on her back in the snow. Turning her head, she opens her mouth so the blood will drain, then presses her lips together and tastes the salty tang. Her tongue feels the absence of a tooth in her lower jaw, and the gap startles her. Fear rushes up her spine and throat and pushes tears from her eyes.

  Good God, she thinks, calm down. But as she thinks this, a stream of warmth spreads between her legs as her bladder empties, and again there is a surge of fear, though part of her is a bit surprised and embarrassed too. The sudden wet reminds her of the exercises she did years ago, during each pregnancy. She clenches her insides and holds her muscles tight, remembering.