Blood Land (4 page)

Hanson nodded. “May I add that my evening seemed to be shaping up nicely until your impromptu visit?”

“Look, I didn’t come to continue the fight. I came over to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Hanson said.

“May I buy your next one?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I think I’m finished for the night.”

Wendy placed her hand on his.

“One drink. A peace offering.”

Hanson swallowed his whiskey and slid his hand out from under hers. A sting the color of roses climbed Steele’s cheek.

“I’ll see you in class,” he said.

He pushed through the mass of flesh to the loitering coolness of the Wyoming night.

In class, Hanson purposely skipped over the face of Wendy Steele as he lectured. It was two weeks later when she caught him on his way to the Law School office.

 “Could we talk?” she said. “Have a coffee maybe?”

“A coffee?”

“We’re adults. Coffee seems innocent.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I
did
apologize. And I wasn’t hitting on you.”

“Imagine my deflation.”

“I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish before. Seems I can’t get the words right with you.”

“Maybe,” Hanson said, sitting down on a short stone ledge, “there just isn’t much to say between us.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“Dinner tonight,” Wendy said. “Your place. I’m inviting myself over.”

Hanson smiled. “I don’t cook. Epitome of the savage bachelor.”

“Pizza, then. Use your bachelor skills to dial up a pie. I’ll bring cold beer.”

“Grinders,” Hanson said.

“What?”

“The Buckskin does these delicious meatball grinders. I’ll call down and you can pick them and the beer up before you come upstairs to the apartment.”

“You live on top of the
bar
?”

“Eight o’clock.”

 “Nice space,” Wendy said as she flopped down in Hanson’s reading chair. “Not as noisy as you’d think. Being above the bar, I mean.”

“We’re actually in the back. Over the storeroom. It works.”

Hanson felt uncomfortable in his own skin. Or apartment.

Wendy pointed to the wall, inside a nook where a piece of framed art hung in a remodeled space built for a flat-panel television.

“Great painting.”

Hanson said and put four of the six Railyard Ales into the fridge. “One of the only extravagances I allow myself.”

“That’s a Chardin?” Wendy said, kicking off her boots.

“
Glass of Water and Coffee Pot
.” He opened the beers and joined her, sitting across from her on the matching leather loveseat. “What exactly are we doing here, Ms. Steele? I don’t generally hang out with students.”

“I’ve never cared for you much,” she said.

“Not exactly fit for print, is it?” Hanson said, taking a long swallow from the sweating bottle. “Not newsworthy, I mean. You more than made that point in the classroom.”

“I’ve always been impressed by you, though. That is, of course, a different thing.”

“Consider me commensurately flattered. But impression is no reason to approach a man and invite yourself to his bedroom loft.”

“Is
that
what this is?” she said.

Hanson could not categorize her tone. It bothered him. He’d made a career reading people—facial expressions; nervous ticks; eye movements—
tone
was elementary. Prelude to the
coup de maître
. With this one he was stumbling amidst the planted fields of his own repertoire.

“Your last test score was abysmal,” Hanson said.

“Test score?”

A basic tripwire. Diversion.

Jurisprudence for Dummies.

“Your grade. Down to a C. Even in a state school, that’s not a good sign.”

“I, uh…right. I mean, I know.”

Hanson stood, walked to the kitchen.

“Grinder?”

“Yes.”

He brought the food back on paper plates, along with two more beers; the aroma of sweet marinara tantalized his hunger. When he sat this time, he leaned slightly forward, intentionally stealing a bit of the space between them. She was a strong woman, but still, unschooled.

“Why are you here, Ms. Steele?”

He felt better. Control was back within his grip, gelatinous and unwieldy as it was. He took a large bite of the sloppy sandwich—it was
delicious
.

Wendy did not answer him. She nibbled at the crust of the baguette.

“I am related to the McIntyres,” she said finally. “Ty is my uncle. So what you said in class, you were speaking of my family.”

 “I had no idea. I can see why I offended you, and I apologize.”

“Maybe. I mean, no. You were just talking about it in the way anyone would. But the way it affected me, the way it stung me. Well, it caught me off-guard. I’ve never been close to them. To any of my family, really. My father and I haven’t spoken in years, and uncle Ty…well, like my father, we were nothing alike. I let my emotions get the better of the situation.”

“We’re all vulnerable to a moment.”

Wendy Steele looked away, back to the painting.

Hanson stood and retrieved the last two Railyard Ales.

 “He went against the style of his era,” Wendy said.

“Sorry?”

“Chardin. When most of the others were painting grand masterpieces of ornate, asymmetrical complexity, Chardin did his best to capture the simple, beautiful truth at the core of existence.”

“‘One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions
,” Hanson said, quoting the painter.

Wendy turned from the painting. Tears brimmed on the edges of her exquisite bottomless eyes. A singular drop crossed the barrier of her control, running a true line down her flushed cheekbone and into the darkness of shadow below.

“Family is the damndest thing,” she said.   

“That it is,” Hanson said. “My father died when I was in my thirties, already deep into my law practice.”

“I’m sorry.”

Hanson waved her off politely.

“He was a good man. Moral. Just a baker, actually, but his turpitude is what caused me to take up law. I saw how honest and unyielding he was. Law-abiding, I remember always thinking. Then he got sick. Stomach cancer. Really one of the worst ways to go. Painful.

So my father, this man of principle and morals, he lies. Lies about the severity of the pain early on so that he can hoard enough opiates under his mattress so that, when the pain becomes very real, he has more than enough to end it.”

“Oh my God,” Wendy said.

“He didn’t want it to look like an overdose. That’s why he hoarded the pills. He planned the whole thing out. Just increased his dosage each day. Pill by pill he put himself to sleep.”

Wendy crossed the small space between them and knelt, putting her arms around him. Hanson’s eyes, though, were dry; his voice was steady.

“It’s not that I blamed him. He did what he had to do. No one suspected. It was me who found his stash—the pills he still had stockpiled. I never told anyone, not until now.”

“He must have been in tremendous pain.”

“No, he planned for that too. The doses he was taking would have assuaged his suffering. He was a smart man. He knew what he would need to kill the pain and he knew what he would need to kill himself. It was then I decided to devote my talents to defending the accused. You see, I realized at that moment that any man or woman can be driven to something they would ordinarily never consider. Those people need someone on their side.”

Her face moved close in, eyes locked momentarily with him. Lips moved together, his mouth opened in surprise, hers with confident passion.

She kissed him. She tasted of beer and smelled of vanilla cream. She reminded him of all things in the world he believed to be sensual. Hanson was a little drunk. He pulled her close. Unable to deny himself. They stayed like that, entwined, exploring each other with hands and tongues. They stood as one and moved to the bed.

The last sex Hanson had was three years prior, with one of the mousy librarians from the Special Collections branch at Coe Library. Liza Dexter, he remembered suddenly. It had been perfunctory lovemaking and had done nothing to assuage his fears of having gotten too old to be any good in bed.

With Wendy, Hanson rediscovered his youth. Because they’d been drinking, they were less restrained; they wrestled passionately, discovering each other’s’ shapes, needs, and desires. He was easily twenty years her elder. Probably more like thirty. Yet she cleaved to him as if he were the only man in the world. She made him feel not only younger but relevant. As if he’d not spent the better years of his life alone.

They made love for over an hour. Fell asleep in each other’s arms. The heat of her lithe body infused him with hope.

In the morning, Hanson did not want to move. He woke first. Wendy lay there, delicate as a bird, still pressed unobtrusively against him. He was relieved. The last thing he wanted was for her to awake and realize her horrible misjudgment—relegate him to the purgatory of bad drunken choices.

She did awake. And as soon as she did, she squeezed him harder. Kissed him deeply. They made love again. Slower. More intimate than the night before. Hanson allowed his newfound confidence to guide him. Still she intimidated him, and he strove to show her that he was worthy.