Border Songs (24 page)

McAfferty waved silent any further commentary, and Brandon remembered to breathe. Mercifully, Dionne asked him to keep her company while she had a cigarette outside. She hooked his arm with hers while she smoked and talked about her daughter. Brandon was too rattled to follow the story, but her voice was soothing. “You’re still juiced,” she said finally, stepping toward her car and tugging on his elbow. “Let me show you my place, then I’ll run you back out here for your truck.”

She was so concerned about being quiet that Brandon felt like they were breaking into the single-story, vinyl-sided house on a corner lot in one of those new cul-de-sacs that looked so alike that he wondered how anybody could remember which one was theirs.

Dionne gave him a quick, whispering tour of a small, bland house that smelled of new carpet, then pulled him into a tidy room with stuffed animals and a framed eight-by-ten of a cross-eyed girl in a Girl Scout uniform. He was relieved to not be alone but felt dazed, then cornered.

“What if Dallas wakes up?” he whispered.

“She won’t.”

“What if the chief or somebody—”

“I’m not your trainer anymore, remember? And we’re way off duty, okay? So this isn’t sexual harassment, if that’s what you’re jabbering about. Believe me, I know what that is.”

“What if—”

“Brandon, I haven’t had sex in twenty-seven months. We are gonna have sex, understand?”

He studied the carpet art on the wall, a landscape like you’d see at Denny’s. It had always puzzled him how people seemed to fill their
homes with random art. In Dionne’s case, it was apparently all about matching colors with her bedspread.

When she started unbuttoning, he wanted to say he was having lunch on Wednesday with Madeline Rousseau. “I’m sort of a virgin,” he whispered instead.

“Shhh.” Two more buttons to go. “We all are.”

“What I mean is I’m not very good for this.”

She snickered. “You’re a piece of work, is what you are.”

“Really, in bed, I’m not coordinated.”

“You’re getting me going with all this hot talk, Brandon.” She unclipped her bra and groaned as her breasts swung free like pale sacks of bird feed. He’d never even seen her in civilian clothes before. He couldn’t have been more startled if an owl had flown out of her shirt.

As she reached for him, he scanned the room for hidden ledges, reading lights, ceiling fans, bedposts and other threats. He’d never heard about anyone else hurting themselves during sex. Who else bit through their lip or pulled their groin or cracked their cheekbone on a bedside table? Of the three women he’d had sex with, two of them were animal-rescue types, including the caramel-skinned veterinarian’s assistant who seduced him in the single-wide she shared with eleven cats, two cockatiels and a beagle named Gandhi. That romance lasted only slightly longer than the other two, but he missed her the most, in part because her face was so expressive that he had a better chance of knowing what she was thinking.

Dionne’s lips felt rubbery against his, her ringlets of hair fascinating his fingertips. She tasted like cigarettes and smelled like teriyaki and cotton candy. She simultaneously kissed him and finished undressing—not as quickly as she wanted, apparently, because she was groaning with exertion. He tried to focus on her face because the rest of her was science fiction. In fact, even her head didn’t look the same this close, either, so he shut his eyes and told himself to go real slow.

She stepped away, ripped back the sheets and exposed her marsh-mallow-white body diagonally across a double bed no more than six
feet long and unfortunately outfitted with head- and footboards. He stepped out of his pants and leaned across the bed to kiss her, his feet still on the floor. She scooted to the far side of the bed and patted the open space beside her. He did his best, climbing in on his side and bending at the knees so his feet hung off the bed behind him.

She kissed him again. Her tongue bullied past his teeth to explore his mouth. Though trying not to panic, he felt the familiar loss of pacing and control. And his legs were tightening. He wanted to explain that he needed to be on the bottom, with his knees up, but she was pulling his right arm to coax him to roll on top of her. So he swung his right knee across, careful to keep his weight off her as he rose up and straddled her hips with his knees. He bowed his back and neck enough to kiss her, slowly, feeling his body respond, enjoying the softness of her skin, the resistance of her lips.

Keep it slow, he told himself. Make her happy. Slow and happy. But her hips were too wide to straddle for much longer and his thighs started to ache. He tried to lower himself gently, but it all happened at once.

“Brandon, I can’t breathe.”

Her weight shifted beneath him and the footboard dug into his shin. Once he realized where she wanted to roll him, he whipped his head in that direction to help and whacked his mouth and chin on the crescent moon cut into the top of the wooden headboard.

“Oh shit!” she whispered, her breasts shuddering with stifled laughter. “I’m sorry. I’m so … Y’all right?”

Brandon slid his tongue along his lip, unsure if he was bleeding.

“Mama?” The doorknob clicked.

“Just a minute, hon.”

Dionne pushed him toward the side of the bed, where he was lowering himself when a tiny snot-muffled voice said she loved Georgie but that he kept her awake when he ran on the wheel. (It was hard for Brandon not to interject that hamsters run up to seven miles a night.) So couldn’t they put Georgie in the living room, if she kept the cage so clean that Grams wouldn’t complain about the smell? Before there was
a chance to respond, the little girl started listing everything that had gone wrong that day until Dionne interrupted to tell her to save that talk for the morning. “Back to bed, now, sweetie. You need even more sleep when you’re sick, remember, so—”

“What’s wrong?” a much older voice asked. “What’s all the noise?”

Dionne groaned. “Jus’ me and Dallas, Mom.”

A pole lamp by the door flashed on.

“Jesus, Mom, what’re ya doing?”

Brandon recoiled his feet and wedged as much of himself beneath the bed as would fit.

“What am I doing?” the lady asked. “You’re the one waking everybody up.”

Brandon heard heavy shuffling toward the bed. He pushed up on a crossbeam to squeeze more of him beneath it, then eased it back down, compressing his ribs.

“Let’s go back to bed,” the lady said. Then, under her breath, “Smells like a bar in here.”

“Good night, Mom.”

When she whispered for Brandon to come out, he replied in a low muffle that he couldn’t move until she got off the bed, although the truth was he was more comfortable beneath it. But then he emerged, holding his mouth so he wouldn’t bleed on her sheets and started climbing back inside his clothes.

“I’m so sorry,” Dionne said, her cheeks purple with smothered laughter.

T
HE FARMER
was facedown, as instructed, his bald spot shimmering in the lamplight, gray hairs twisting across his shoulder blades, arms locked at his sides, a sheet covering his lower half.

She lit six candles and rubbed oil into her palms, which while pungent was no match for the deodorant and cologne diluting the dairy stench wafting off the pink-skinned sixty-two-year-old bracing for the first massage of his life. “Remember to relax,” she said gently. “That’s why you’re here.”

“What?” He grunted, his voice nasal.

“Breathe, Norm.”

“Can’t hear with my head in this thing.”

She lowered her lips to the face cradle. “Breathe nor-mal-ly”

She hadn’t told him what to wear or not wear, just to “undress in there.” So it was impossible to
not
look ridiculous. Leave his underpants on and he was a prude; take them off and he was a pervert.

To his disappointment, she started with his feet, her warm palms flat against his meaty arches, holding them. He was paying $45 an hour for this foot voodoo? Just thinking about it made his feet sweat, which made him self-conscious, and that made them perspire even more.

“Relax, Norm. Focus on nothing.”

Nothing?

He began talking when Sophie started rubbing his feet and ankles, because otherwise nothing could distract him from the sensation of her
hands moving on his skin; he knew where that would lead and wasn’t certain yet whether it was supposed to go there. He raved about his healthy new calf, though the optimism sounded hollow. What he felt was desperation and foolishness. He wished like hell he’d kept his boxers on.

She set his feet down beneath the sheet as if they were fragile. He heard her lubricate her hands again, the squishy sounds alone arousing him. Then she started kneading his shoulders and upper back like a cat clawing a couch, her lower stomach tapping rhythmically against his head brace with the effort.

“What’d you do before massage?” he asked, desperate for a distraction.

“All sorts of things.”

“Stewardess?”

“Pretty much everything, Norm.”

“Like?”

“Relax.”

“Just name one.”

“Ran an art gallery.”

“Paintings?”

“And sculpture.”

“What else?”

“Just relax.”

After an uncomfortable silence, he said, “Do you think it’s possible that Washington and Jefferson grew marijuana?”

“Yes.”

“But not to get high, right?”

“Wrong. Jefferson got high on Sundays before he wrote letters. George and Martha made pot brownies every Easter.”

“Very funny.”

“Relax, Norm.
Please.”

He waited a couple beats. “So you suddenly decided to settle down on the border and rub people?”

“Heal
people.”

“Like faith healing?”

“No.”

“I heard you were an astrologist too.”

“Quiet, Norm. What does it matter to a Taurus like you, anyway? I’m your neighbor. Let me do my work here.”

She rubbed him harder, grunting lightly with the effort, focusing on points around his shoulders, then below and even beneath his shoulder blades, pressing to the brink of pain and holding it like some precise torture. Norm held his breath to avoid audible groaning. She found a particularly tender lump and wiggled it beneath her thumbs before flattening and spreading it elsewhere like rolling bubbles out of fiberglass. The strange smells, fake waterfall and primal flute music no longer seemed so hokey with what felt like more than two hands on his back, one pressing slow and flat like a trowel, another two or three coming up behind it with agile, probing fingers. It didn’t seem possible that Patera or the professor or anyone else could pay at the door and get this same treatment.

“Breathe,” she whispered. “When I press down you need to breathe.”

When the next whisper said it was time to roll over, he realized he’d slipped in-between dreams. How much time had blown by? Was it over already? He rolled clumsily, his knee barking. She held up the sheet to give him privacy, his self-consciousness returning like a fever. How long had he been out? Months of anticipation, then he falls asleep for most of it? He didn’t pay for a nap! She worked his neck from the underside, pawing at it, then held his chin and the back of his skull and tugged, as if trying to pop his head off. Again, the hands felt too powerful to belong to Sophie Winslow, so he finally peeked. Her lips were less than a foot above his. Thank God she started talking.

He tried to remember exactly what she’d just said, but before he could she asked what he thought about his son’s art.

Norm groaned. “Embarrasses me. Always has.”

“How’d you know he’d be so good on the Border Patrol?”

“I didn’t. I don’t.”

She lifted his left arm and stretched it slowly toward his ear, then held it there and massaged his left side in a way that made him want to kick his feet.

“You worry about him?” she asked, readjusting his ribs in slow motion.

“Since before he was born. Jeanette spoiled him, practically took his breaths for him. I don’t care what she says, there’s always been more than dyslexia going on there. And of course it didn’t help that he was immature and so much bigger than kids his age. It’s more than that, though. He’s always related better to animals. Humans are a mystery to him. He sees everything but doesn’t know what most of it means.”

“We’re animals too.”

“But most of us aren’t straightforward.”

“What else?”

“Well, he sees shooting stars nobody else sees and feels earthquakes nobody else feels. ‘Feel that?’ he used to say all the time, especially one summer when he was twelve or thirteen. Jeanette called the earthquake people, and they said that in fact there had been an odd flurry of quakes in the area they’d assumed were too small for humans to detect. They were curious enough to send this timid little intern out to talk to him. So what’s a father supposed to make of all that? By middle school he could read well enough to pass and could act fairly normal if he wasn’t too excited or overwhelmed. But yeah, he still caught hell, especially after Danny Crawford left and there was nobody to look out for him. That’s when Jeanette homeschooled him, which spared him the razzings but increased the isolation.”

“So what’s it like living with him now?”

“Like having a child who never grows out of the awkward stage. It’s also kind of like having a priest in the house. I’ve never caught him in a lie. Don’t know that he’s capable of one. And …”

“What?”

“I keep dreaming he gets shot, but I don’t do anything about it.”

She moved to his legs, gracefully folding and tucking the sheet high on his left thigh. Her slick hands rubbed his left calf so vigorously that
his entire body trembled, leaving Norm half-praying, half-dreading that her hands would climb above his knee.

“Cleve Erickson’s situation surprise you?”

“Yes,” Norm hissed.

“What about the Schifferlis?”

“No.”

“The math teacher, Pearson?”

“No. Heard he got fired because he partied with former students.”

“Has a young man who calls himself Michael visited you?”

“Yes,” he said, before digesting the delicate nature of the question.