THE FERAL STRUT

Chapter 64

She woke to the barest hint of dawn. Slim had turned away from her, in sleep, and she nestled close to him, fitting herself to his flesh.

He murmured and then slept again, but she couldn't. She kept thinking of how it would be to have a bear take you apart, piece by piece. To cry out My God, again and again. With no answer.

Or maybe the bear was the answer. She shivered and clung tighter to Slim.

"Are you okay?" he whispered.

"Yes. No."

"Dreams? Wanna talk?"

"I'll be alright." Maybe someday, she thought. Deep in my heart, where it counts. But not now.

She was always a little tense. Maybe that came with an early awareness of hazard, of the unpredictability of the world. He hadn't been bad at first: the man, Paget. But evil had sought him out. What had he gotten for his inventiveness, his enterprise, but trouble? He'd been brought low by greed and craft and murder, then locked away for crimes that weren't his own. How could that be borne?

It couldn't. That's what had ruined him, as a man. How many times had he cried out, before that final cry? Had God ever once looked with mercy on his misfortune?

She could feel it coming, despair. The urge to fall apart.

She went through the drill she'd learned, tightening her muscles then letting go. First the toes, feet. Then calves, thighs. Belly. Arms, shoulders, neck, face. Last the hands, the right still stabbing as she clenched, then flexed, then gave herself up. Her body lay at ease. But not her mind.

Slim's breathing was slow and deep. Gris moaned and gnawed at an itch, then subsided. The light was growing. The canvas top of the yurt showed a faint unearthly blue, that came through the windows. She could see her books ranked on the ramshackle shelf, but not read the titles.

In a way, she was lucky. The knockout drug in the dart had kept her from moving, which had saved her life. It had also kept her from seeing what the bear did to him: Paget. It was bad enough, just imagining that. Maybe he deserved it; people said that he did. Yet she could still hear his cries in the grip of the bear, and the sounds of his coming apart, all confused with the crazy movies that played on her eyelids, the flashbacks and nightmares, that made it seem less than real.

Until she saw the blood, still bright in morning sun, splashed on the bark of pines and the stripped poles of the fence, clotted in the rusty needles and scales of the duff, pooled in the scrapes of mineral dirt. Closing her eyes, she could see it still.

Her mouth was dry and tasted of iron. She closed her lips and tried to slow her breathing, matching it to Slim's. She wished she could match him in other ways: his kindness, his instinct for what was right, his cheerful carnality, his unscarred heart. This love of my life: may no torment touch him.

If she reached over his sleeping form and stretched out her hand, she might touch her books on their shelf. Now she could see the colors of the jackets and bindings, read the titles. The Odyssey. Man and His Symbols. The Inferno. Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass. A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Arctic Dreams. Far Tortuga. Desert Solitaire. Art and Revolution. There was the Holy Bible that the Ybarras had given her when she graduated, in its thick cream-colored binding, the size of two bricks. And next to it, tarnished white, the Saint Joseph Daily Missal that she'd not opened in years. Why pray to an uncaring god?

Why not worship the things you knew, and loved?

She loved this place, loved the way light came in through the cloth. All the rooms of her childhood were dark: a trailer's middle bedroom with one high, small window; the spare room tucked under the roof at the ranch in the shade of a cottonwood; her room at Saint Joseph's that faced the brick wall of the chapel.

The first sunbeam turned the scratches on the plexiglass window to streaks of pure gold. The conical top of the yurt showed blue, written with small figures: twigs, needles, aspen leaves like misshapen hearts.

Then she heard a rush, of wings, and the scratch of claws. A pair of raven feet, like backward arrows, alternately printed themselves into existence and disappeared, one by one by one, crossing the canvas.

They— it— the bird stopped at the edge, its feet like two arrows pointing back the way it had come. Then it gave a cry and the tailfeathers brushed the cloth as it leapt out into air and was gone, wingbeats strong, then fading.