Blackbird Page 17

  The heater clicked three times, slowly.

  “So anyway,” Eric said. “We were with Celia.”

  “With her—”

  “We were fucking her, yes.” He bit his fingernail, caught himself in the act, shoved his hand under his thigh. “We were home from Vegas for a few days. To see our families, supposedly, but really to see her. We always come home together.”

  “Why is that?”

  Eric shrugged. “More fun that way. Rory likes to watch. Celia likes to be watched.”

  Dr. Paul waited, letting the silence ask the question.

  “Me, I like it all. I’m the conduit.”

  “The conduit.”

  “Yeah. They’re a little shy, passive. I’m not shy at all. I’ll say anything. I make it happen.”

  From a distance he heard his own voice, felt the warm curve of Celia’s ear at his lips: Open up, baby. There you go...

  “Rory wants to do the right thing. He feels like Celia’s real brother—it fucks him up.” Eric bounced his heels on the floor. He saw the shrink’s eyes glance down but thought, Fuck it. At least he wasn’t biting his nails. “He’s not her brother, obviously, but they grew up together, used to share a bathtub when they were little, all that. And they still introduce each other that way. ‘This is my brother.’ ‘This is my sister.’ But they’re not, so in theory it shouldn’t be that creepy.”

  “Do you think it’s creepy?”

  “Me? God, no. I’m just explaining how they see it, why they need me.”

  The heater kicked back on.

  “Can you turn that thing off?”

  Dr. Paul got up and clicked off the heater. He went back to his chair, pulled the pages into his lap.

  Eric smirked, pointing with his chin.

  “I don’t blame you. We three are smoking hot.”

  The doctor looked at him impassively. Not even pink.

  “Why don’t you tell me a little more about the night you came in,” he said.

  Eric sighed, puffing out his cheeks. He wedged his hand more tightly under his thigh. “Why don’t you tell me? What did Rory say?”

  “He said he was worried about you. He asked a lot of questions about the hospital. He seemed very concerned that you would be treated well.”

  “There you go. His brother’s keeper.”

  “I’d still like to know what you remember.”

  Eric ran his hand through his hair, over his jaw. He must have shaved yesterday, maybe even this morning, though he couldn’t remember doing so. Odd the way that kept happening. He laid his arm over the back of the couch, propped his head on two fingers.

  “We were with Celia.”

  “Do you remember where you were?”

  “In this old hotel, a place we’ve been visiting since we were kids. It’s abandoned, really run-down, but Celia loves it.” He raised his head to look across the coffee table at the doctor. “We didn’t go there to have sex, by the way. We were just looking around. But we’re combustible—any spark will do it.”

  He could see her, spinning through a wedge of sunlight, Rory holding up her hand like they were dancing. Her hair was so light, not even like hair but like feathers, floating through the light and the sparkling dust motes.

  “So you were in the hotel. What was that like?”

  “Dark, kind of murky. Spooky, you know. Quiet. You could hear your own heartbeat, if you stopped to listen.”

  Footfalls, the brush of Celia’s shoe on the floor as she spun. He remembered hearing the whisper of her hair, like meadow grass in the wind.

  “When we were kids, we used to try to get Celia to take off her clothes. Just to give us a peek. I can’t even tell you what a fucking thrill that was. I used to plan for days, thinking what I’d say to her, whether I’d get up the nerve to say it. She hardly ever went along, but when she did...oh, Jesus, I’d go home and spank it like I was dying. Something about that girl, I don’t even know... Anyway, someone, Rory or me, we were playing again, talking really soft. ‘Lift your shirt, Cee, pull down your underwear...’ Just to see if she’d do it. Only now she does. Really docile, too, and she just looks at you...”

  He shifted a little in his seat.

  “So, you know, two guys are never going to be short of ideas. But something about the place got to me. I started to feel...”

  “Feel what, Eric?”

  “We were getting her dirty. She had cobwebs in her hair, scrapes on her knees and the palms of her hands. I started to feel disconnected. My brain was churning, you know?”

  Dr. Paul nodded.

  “I wanted to fuck her. I think I was fucking her, or maybe not. Maybe that was Rory. But I felt way outside of it, like I was watching us on TV. I remember feeling sad.”

  “What were you sad about?”

  Eric blinked.

  “I don’t know. She looked so small, between us like that. I felt like we weren’t giving her what she needed. A family. A brother. She doesn’t have that anymore. We took her family away. It upset me, thinking of that. I remember fucking her...maybe it was Rory...but I thought, what she needs is a brother, I’ll be her brother...”

  He closed his eyes and felt the heat and silence expand around him. His throat ached. When he spoke again, the words sounded garbled and heavy.

  “We took her family away.”

  June 2002

  THEY WOULD JOKE afterward that no one should be allowed to see a Quentin Tarantino film while under the influence of anything but air.

  It had to be the Tarantino, they decided. After all, they each had been to the Nugget Theatre a hundred times, on dates and in straggling groups. There was little else to do in Telluride and still less in Jawbone Ridge. In the winter they could ski up and over the mountain to take in a matinee, but summertime meant a long ride around to the 145, up through the mouth of the canyon. It seemed like a hassle most of the time, and anyway they had outgrown it. Most of their friends watched movies now in dimly lighted living rooms and bedrooms, out of the public eye.

  But teenage nostalgia had crept up on them over the long, sweet summer after Rory and Eric graduated. They spent all their time in the places they knew best: the park at Telluride, with their skateboards and bikes, or lazing around the pool where Eric’s friend Joss Mathers worked as a lifeguard; hiking up the Wasatch Trail, so familiar now that even the deer they encountered failed to startle; lunches at Patsy’s, where they had worked their way through every condiment and combination of condiments to find the perfect dip for fries, a pastime that sparked an ongoing debate between the three of them over the proper ratio of ketchup to mayonnaise. In truth, by the last day of summer they were getting bored. So when Eric said, “Let’s see the Tarantino. I’ve got some good shit to put us right,” Celia had right away found her sandals, loaded her string bag with bite-size Hershey bars and hopped into Rory’s old Ford pickup, sliding to the middle of the bench seat with the gearshift against her knee and a masterful position at the radio. As it turned out, she only needed the volume control. The station was playing an old-old Elton John, which she and Eric sang to each other, nose to nose, coming in strong where they knew the lyrics.

  “Just like you, Cee,” Rory said.

  “Mohair would be itchy,” she said. “But I’d take the electric boots.”

  He rolled down the window. The warm breeze poured over their faces. Celia’s hair flew about and tangled around Rory’s arm, so she braided it over her shoulder, found a piece of twine in her bag and tied a bow around the end. The sunlight streamed through the window, lighting the hairs on Rory’s forearm so that his skin seemed bristled with fine gold wire. Eric’s fingers, adjusting the volume, were pale and nimble, the inside of his forearm tattooed with a long black feather.

  Celia had gone with him the day he got that tattoo, perching
beside the bench as the ink puddled around the droning needles. Then a rub of the cloth and the puddle was gone, leaving a new bit of pattern behind. The artist had drawn the design from the crow’s feather Celia was wearing at the end of her braid.

  “I didn’t know you liked feathers, too,” she said to Eric. She’d been collecting them forever, and usually had one or more tucked into her macramé belt or dangling from a string around her wrist. In her room, she gathered bouquets of them into vases, strung them like beads around the window.

  Eric tugged at her braid and said he liked them by association.

  He had six tattoos, all in black-and-white. The biggest was also his first: a demented jack-in-the-box with a girl-doll springing out of its head. It covered the upper-right quarter of his back, draped over the rigid architecture of his shoulder blade and spine. He had his fingers done next, in bold letters meant to be read across, from one fist to the other: dark love. Later he got the Chinese symbol for “brother” on his calf and the reference to ezekiel 25:17 in black all caps, horizontally across his forearm like a stamp. On the other forearm was the feather, and at his wrist the letter C with four more letters in a squared-off pattern next to it: e-l-i-a.

  One last piece he would get years later. A raven, flying across his heart. Noted and photographed by the young coroner’s assistant as the site of the entrance wound. “Got him right through the eye. Freaky!”

  Eric wasn’t eager to go straight back to school that fall. He’d lobbied hard for a year off, but his dad said no, that Eric would get his ass into college now, before he got lazy and stuck in Jawbone Ridge. And though he hated to admit it, Eric thought he was probably right. There was nothing in this tiny village for him. Nothing but Celia, who didn’t want him—at least, not the way he wanted her. She would let him get so far but no further, was up for anything he wanted to do except the one thing he wanted most.

  Now, with the afternoon shadows advancing across the canyon, Rory pulled off the road and parked at the edge of town, three blocks from the theater, where a trailhead was marked with a wooden sign and two rough-hewn fence posts pointing the way up and out of Telluride. He rolled the windows halfway and killed the engine.

  Eric dug a pipe out of his pocket and rummaged through the glove box.

  “Whatcha got there?” Rory said.

  “Some sexy, sexy dope, man,” Eric said, twitching his eyebrows like a pantomime villain. “Not like that skunk weed Joss throws around. This is the chronic. I’ve been saving it.”

  “One last Rocky Mountain high?”

  “You know it.”

  “Stop bragging and light me up,” Celia said.

  “Bossy chick,” Eric said.

  But he held the flame to the pipe and the pipe to her lips. The box canyon crowded around them in towering bands of green and gold, filling the windshield with color.

  “I’m gonna miss this,” Rory said.

  “You don’t have to go,” Celia said.

  “Hell yes, he does,” Eric said. “You trying to pirate my roommate, Cee?”

  “Neither of you,” she said. “You, plural.”

  “Yeah, but what then? We sit around toking and skiing and tramping around the same trails we’ve been down a hundred forty-seven times—”

  “Awful,” Rory said. “That would be awful.”

  “Me, fighting with my dad. You stocking oranges in the produce aisle. That’s what we’ve been doing all summer.”

  “I could get promoted to the checkout stand.” Rory grinned.

  “There are other options,” Celia said.

  “What options?” Eric waved the pipe, leaving a vapor trail through the cab. “What’s here for us that’s new? What would be the point?”

  “Why does it matter where you are,” Celia said, “or what you’re doing? Shouldn’t it be about who...who you...”

  Eric turned to look at her, tipping his chin to blow smoke at the ceiling. “What matters is that we get on with things. The problem is that you hate change. Shh, yes, you do. You’re gonna be one of these old mountain biddies serving coffee to the city boys, trying to convince them to buy the souvenir mug and another slice of pie.”

  This was uncomfortably close to what Celia’s job at the Java Hut actually entailed. Though the challenge in his eyes was unmistakable, Celia didn’t rise to meet it. Maybe he was right. Maybe she was living in the past, too timid to step into the future the way he and Rory were doing. But when she tried to imagine something more ambitious for herself, the vision wouldn’t come, or seemed puny if it did. What she wanted was exactly what he said: more of the same.

  Eric’s challenge evaporated in the balmy air. They laid their heads back against the bench seat and closed their eyes, letting the heavy buzz fill their limbs.

  “Oh,” Celia said, to no one in particular.

  “Which one of us is me?” Rory said.

  “You’re the big one,” Eric said. “I’m the smart one.”

  Eric took a deep pull as he turned to Celia. He put his lips over hers and exhaled slowly into her mouth. The smoke was smoother and sweeter than it had been straight out of the pipe, like burned anise, and his lips were firm and damp.

  He drew away, smiling. “And you’re the girl.”

  “That’s not very exciting,” she said.

  “The hell you say. I’m excited just looking at you.”

  He emptied the pipe and shoved it in the glove box. The movie would be starting in a few minutes. Rory patted himself down, Celia said “oh” again and they rolled out of the car and drifted down the street to buy their tickets.

  Celia put the three stubs in her string bag. She would use them for years afterward, a neat little perforated chain, as a bookmark in her diary.

  * * *

  Celia half closed her eyes. The screen was awash with a series of disconnected images set to a soundtrack of twangy rock ballads, whining guitar overlaid with thin lyrics from bands she didn’t know. She’d given up trying to follow the plot and had turned her thoughts to the boys, one on either side of her, smelling sweetly of weed and Hershey’s chocolate.

  No, not boys. Men. Much bigger than she was now. Years ago she could hold her hand flat to Rory’s and their fingers would match up perfectly. Now when she pressed his hand open and laid hers over the top, there was a good half inch of space all around where she couldn’t cover him.

  Rory turned to look. At their hands together, at her face. His eyes gleamed in the darkness, dark blue from the movie screen, then flickering yellow. He laced his fingers through hers and didn’t let go.

  Tomorrow Rory and Eric would be leaving: Eric for UNLV, Rory to work in their uncle’s construction business in Vegas. They planned to share an apartment in the city. They would be gone and she’d be here alone, unsure even about how to miss them.

  Gone. The word clanged in her mind like a struck bell.

  As if he could read her thoughts, Eric reached over and laid his hand on her knee. Just a pat at first, as if for comfort. He leaned over to whisper in her ear.

  “Your skin is so soft. I can barely feel you.”

  His breath tickled her cheek. He ran his fingertips back and forth along the hem of her skirt.

  The room grew black and distant for a moment, then came swimming back. Celia sat frozen, staring at the images on the screen, the solitary heads of the people in the theater around them. She felt Rory’s attention turn from the movie. They were waiting, both of them, for her to make Eric stop, to catch his wrist and push it away, to redirect his attention to the screen. The fabric brushed her thigh as he plucked at the edge of her skirt, easing it higher.

  Always before—during the tedious encounters with other boys, in the parking lot behind the school, and once in her own room, where she lay flat and stiff under Darrell Connors with her knees clenched tight together, l
istening to Rory’s footsteps pause at the bottom of the steps—Celia had maintained a conscientious virtue. Not for herself, exactly, but because she sensed it was necessary. She felt herself the guardian of a precarious order that might change in frightening and unpredictable ways if she wavered.

  “A boy will do whatever he can,” Darlene had said. “You’ve got to be the gatekeeper, Celia. Same as it ever was.”

  Her tone was cheerful but left no room for argument. And the truth of it was borne out in time. Boys came hardwired with the need to touch.

  Darlene had said nothing about the way it might feel to be touched. As if that part didn’t matter.

  Under the narcotic buzz of the weed, Celia felt an undercurrent of panic, a wire of erotic tension coiled around her heart. Eric’s fingers burned her skin, but they made her body so shivery-cold that she had to clench her teeth to keep them from rattling. She gripped the armrests as he pushed his hand under her skirt. The side of his fingers brushed the fabric between her legs.

  Celia glanced around the theater. A scattering of single men occupied the seats around them, and she knew there was someone in the back row where she couldn’t see him. Eric’s caress was hesitant, as if he had chosen this moment because he assumed she would stop him—because he wanted her to, maybe.

  Same as it ever was.

  Only it wasn’t the same. The clock had run out, and tomorrow she’d be alone. For nights now she’d lain awake, her chest aching, imagining the absence that was coming. The heat of them, their big sheltering presence, the exotic, exciting maleness of them would be gone. All gone. She often dreamed that she was chasing them on foot, sobbing mutely, her arms swimming up and down as they drove away in the back of a yellow school bus. Look at me, she wanted to scream. But the sound was smothered by the underwater dampness of the dream, and they never turned around.

  Eric turned his hand to stroke her with his fingertips. She heard a sharp hiss of surprise as she let him nudge her thighs apart.