Chapter 6
Tank
I asked her to drive me out to the grade on a Sunday, which is the only day the road is empty.
I'd been building up to it for three weeks and hadn't told a soul, including myself, in so many words. What I told myself was that I needed to check the guardrail situation. That's the phrase I used, in my own head, like a man filing a county complaint.
She didn't ask why. She just said, "What time," and showed up at four with a thermos and two blankets in the bed of my own truck, which she'd loaded herself out of my own hall closet, because apparently she'd known before I did.
"You packed blankets."
"It's November and you get cold when you're upset."
"I don't get—"
"You get cold when you're upset," she said, and got in the passenger side.
Eleven miles. I drove them. That was the other part I hadn't said out loud — I'd been driving around the grade since July, adding nine minutes to every trip to Elko, going the long way like a man avoiding a house on a street.
Mile eight, my hands started.
Mile ten, I said, "It's about a half mile past the sign," and my voice came out of somebody else's throat.
Then the sign. Yellow diamond, leaping deer, bolted up in 1988 and rusted at the bottom corner. Nobody in this county has read that sign in thirty years. It's furniture.
I pulled off past it onto the gravel and shut the truck down and the engine ticked and there was no other sound in the world.
"That's it," I said.
It's not dramatic. That's the thing I wasn't prepared for.
There's a bend, and a shoulder, and forty yards of guardrail that stops sixty yards early, and past the end of it a slope of shale and greasewood going down about eleven feet to a wash.
There is no mark on the road. Six months and a monsoon season and the whole thing has closed over like water.
I'd expected — I don't know what. Something. A scar. Some acknowledgment from the physical world that a man's entire life had been taken apart at this specific coordinate on an April evening.
There was nothing. Just a place. Just eleven feet of shale that had gone about its business.
I got out. I don't remember deciding to.
I got about four steps and then the leg went — not gave out, went. The whole thing locked up and my hands started properly, both of them, and my breath came up short and useless like I'd been running, and I stood in the gravel on the shoulder of Route 6 shaking like a dog in a storm.
She didn't say a word.
She came around the truck and she got in front of me and she put both arms around my ribs and she held on.
That's all. No it's okay, no breathe, none of the words people put on this.
She's a foot and change shorter than me and she got her face into the middle of my chest and locked her hands behind my back and she just did not let go, and she stayed there for what I later worked out was somewhere near ten minutes.
Somewhere in there I got my arms around her too.
Somewhere after that I stopped shaking.
And then — this is the part I don't have good language for — the shaking stopped and the holding on didn't, and there's a moment where the reason for a thing runs out and the thing keeps going, and both people notice it in the same second.
I felt her go still against me. Not pulling back. Still.
"Tank," she said, into my shirt.
"Yeah."
"Is this still the crash?"
"No," I said. "No, that's about over with."
She lifted her head.
Six months I'd been keeping an accounting of everything my body couldn't do.
Six months of it as a ledger of debts — can't ride, can't lift, can't cross a kitchen, can't stand at a bar without three-quarters of my mind doing engineering.
I hadn't had a single thought about my body that wasn't a subtraction since the fourteenth of April.
She got up on her toes and got a fistful of my collar and pulled me down and kissed me, and every one of those numbers went straight out of my head.
The blankets were already in the bed of the truck. I have thought about that a great deal since.
The tailgate takes a hand and a hip and a certain amount of planning and she never once looked at how I did it.
She was already up, kneeling on the ribbed metal, laying the blankets out with the brisk competence of a woman making a bed in a place that was never intended for one, and the high desert cold came down off the ridge the way it does out there — all at once, like somebody opening a door.
"Come here," she said.
"Junie—"
"If the next word is a number I'm going to be very put out with you."
"It was going to be seventeen."
"It's always going to be seventeen. It's seventeen next year and it's seventeen in thirty years and I already know it, Tank, I've known it since October." She got her hands in my collar again. "Come here."
So I came here.
So I got up in that truck bed, and she got both hands flat on the middle of my chest and pushed, and I went down onto my back on a folded wool blanket over ribbed steel.
She did that on purpose. It took me about four seconds to understand it and I have never in my life been so undone by an act of planning — because down on my back there was no weight anywhere.
No leg to trust. No hip doing arithmetic.
Nothing in the world to hold up. She'd taken the entire problem off the table before I'd noticed it was on it.
Then she got her hands under my shirt and pushed it up, and I caught her wrist.
"It's not — there's a lot of hardware under there. It's not pretty."
"Beckett." She didn't move her hand. "I have looked at that leg four days a week since October."
"That's different."
"It's the exact same leg," she said, and waited, and when I let go of her wrist she pulled the shirt off over my head and dropped it somewhere behind her and put her mouth on my collarbone.
Cold air, hot mouth. That's the thing I couldn't have prepared for — thirty-eight degrees coming off that ridge and her going down my chest an inch at a time, and every place she left was freezing and every place she was next was not, and my whole body got confused about which way to chase.
She took her time. That's what got me. She went over me the way she'd gone over that first chart — thorough, unhurried, entirely unembarrassed, with the specific attention of a woman who does not consider any part of a human being to be an unfortunate topic.
Down the sternum. The ribs, one at a time, which I did not know was a thing that could be done to a man.
The line under the belt where I'd gone soft in six months of sitting, and she put her mouth there too, and when I flinched she stopped and said, "No," very quietly, and did it again.
Then the belt. Then the jeans, worked down over the bad leg with both hands and a care she did not comment on, and there it was in the starlight — the whole long seam of the scar, eleven inches of it, purple and ridged and about as far from pretty as a thing can get.
She looked at it. Then she looked up the length of me to make sure I was watching.
Then she put her mouth on it.
Not near it. On it. She started at the knee end and went all the way up that scar with her lips and the flat of her tongue, slow, and I got a fistful of that blanket in one hand and made a sound I'm not going to write down, and it had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with six months of a body I'd been carrying around like a repossessed truck.
"Junie—"
"Say it if you want me to stop."
I didn't want her to stop. What I said instead came out as her name, twice, and then not much of anything at all, because she'd moved four inches and taken me in her mouth and the entire high desert went quiet.
I have thought about the next while a great deal since and I still don't have it in the right order.
I know she was patient in a way that was frankly ruinous.
I know that every time I got close she knew it before I did — she had a hand flat on my hip and she could feel it, and she'd ease off and start again from further back, three times, four, until I was saying things into thirty-degree air that I have no memory of choosing.
I know I got my hand in her hair and she made a sound around me that I felt in my spine.
And I know that when I finally got a coherent sentence together it was, "Come up here, I want—" and she was already coming up, already getting out of the fleece and the shirt and everything under it, and the cold took her skin and she gasped and I got both arms around her and pulled her down onto my chest to get her out of it.
"God, you're warm," she said, into my throat.
"Come here."
"I'm here."
"Come here," I said, and got a hand between us, and found her, and she stopped talking.
She was already wet. She went absolutely rigid for a second and then dropped her forehead onto my shoulder and just breathed, and I worked her slow with two fingers and my thumb where she moved into it, learning it off what her hips did, and she said "there" against my neck in a voice I hadn't heard out of her in eleven weeks of an examination room.
I kept it slow on purpose. I had six months of somebody else deciding the pace of everything in my life and I wanted, one time, to be the one taking my time.
She let me for about two minutes. Then she got a hand around my wrist and moved it, and got up on her knees over me with her hands braced on my chest, and the whole black bowl of the sky came up behind her with about nine thousand stars in it.
"Now," she said.
And she took me. Slow, all the way down, watching my face the entire time, and I felt my own hands come off the blanket and land on her hips like they'd been sent for.
That's where it turned over. Every bit of the arithmetic I'd been running since April — twelve feet, eleven feet, forty-one, four minutes, all of it — just stopped being the subject.
She set the pace and it was not gentle for long.
She rode me under that sky with her hair coming loose and her hands flat on my chest and my hands going up her ribs to hold her, and she was certain about every single thing that happened in that truck bed, and I was not certain of anything, and the seventeen years I'd been holding up in front of my chest like a sign turned out to have been pointing the other direction the entire time.
"Look at me," she said.
I looked at her.
"Say the number now."
I couldn't have said my own name. I got a hand between us instead, thumb where she'd put my hand before, and she broke about nine seconds later — went down onto me with her mouth open against my jaw, saying nothing at all, tightening around me in waves, and that took the last of me with it.
I came with both arms locked around a woman a foot shorter than me in the bed of my own truck, in the cold, half a mile from the place I'd nearly died, and I have never in forty-four years felt less like a man with a bad leg.
Afterward we got the blankets around us both and the cold came in at every edge and we didn't care. She had her head on my shoulder and her hand flat over my sternum, and the sky did what it does out there when there's no town in any direction.
And I told her.
The whole thing. The eleven seconds. The doe standing in the westbound lane with her ears out sideways.
Forty feet a second and gravel on the right and the guardrail sixty yards short.
Thinking about Connie's face. Being annoyed, about a beer cooler, about a Sunday.
That I'd had eleven whole seconds with my eyes open and my hands on the bars and there was not one thing in the world I could do, and that's the part I've never been able to say to anybody, because everybody wants the crash and nobody wants the eleven seconds.
She listened the whole way through and didn't say one word.
When I finished she was quiet a while.
"That's why nine appointments," she said.
"What?"
"You weren't hiding from the leg." Her hand hadn't moved off my chest. "You were hiding from anybody putting you back in a room where somebody else knows what happens next and you don't."
The wind came up the wash and went through the greasewood and out again.
"Huh," I said.
"That's a whole paragraph, out of you," she said, and I felt her smile against my shoulder, and about a half mile down the road, in the dark, the deer sign kept right on saying what it had said since 1988 to nobody at all.