/ Scrubland

In the morning, I woke and she kissed my shoulder, said, 'I want you to know that if you need anything, I am here for you.' The moment came between dreaming, and I was uncertain in asking about it later.

If you cannot tell how much I love this place by listening to me, then I am no good for words. But I can't believe you can't see it. I tape the top of the styrofoam cooler and carry it with me into the water, where it rises until my feet lose contact with the lake bed. She doesn't answer, because she is remembering a near drowning as a child, and concentrates on staying afloat. When her chin dips, she involuntarily reaches for the cooler, but we are nearly to the other side, where the beach is protected from livestock, and the occasional passing truck.

She turns her back, takes off her shirt, wrings out tea-colored water. I found this spot working in college, pushing irrigation wheels through the ruddy fields. I carried an old .223, because they would pay me for every coyote shot, more than what I was making in an entire day. I only ever shot one time, hitting the dirt in front of it by a good 15 feet. I walked up over the hill, saw it disappear again into a grove of trees.

I don't know if it was an abandoned tank or a part of the creek cut off years ago, but it was the size of a small park lake, and way out in the middle was a little island. He told me it was technically state forest land, but no one ever came out because it was so hard to get to, surrounded mostly by private farmland. Even when the county put a summer road in, I never saw anyone out there.

Anyway, one day at school, there was this accident in shop, some kid got waylaid by a broken drill bit. It was no one's fault but shoddy equipment, and the shard that got him had to travel through safety glasses to even get to the meat of the poor guy, but good christ it was all over. And it was too much, the yelling and the panic of the adults, the sirens and kids coming out of language arts and home ec. alike, mindless of the commands to get back to their seats, because they were the half-hearted orders of teachers who had filled these halls with small town sons and daughters, nieces and nephews of their own. I slipped away to civics and caught her by the elbow as she came out the door. We drove off to go swimming.

It's only recently I got to thinking about this, probably because I was out past that park running not long ago. It got discovered by some reporter at the Times. They have a section just on hiking public lands. You see a few cars out there now. More so now that some of that private farmland was developed into residential neighborhoods, pieces of paradise before gas prices got so high. You hear a few complaints about farm kids shooting their guns. That's what they do.

It was with one of those shots that I started remembering that coyote. I dreamed for a week that the roof in our house was full of water and leaking through every fixture, god knows why.

I am not sure where she went after college.

You have got me mixed up again. I never suggested you leave. I know how much you like it here.

She will stay for as long as I ask, and it's the kind of information you try to keep hidden from yourself, so as not to either take it for granted or take it for a long walk through the winding woods, right after emptying your pockets of bread crumbs.

I hide my own secrets so poorly from myself, though, it's a constant issue. I have a file marked Names, it's passwords and old addresses, mostly, but occasionally I will find something even more vital, like, 'She can't stand coriander,' or 'L-shaped scar, left shoulder blade, gentle.'

She puts her shirt back on and ties her hair up behind her head, doesn't let me see the least bit of her face, save a hint of her nose and chin, like that old drawing of the young lady and the old woman, but her shoulders make the whole illusion impossible to hold.

When you are this young, you rarely say anything you'd want to remember, so the memories are mostly images, maybe a random sensation, especially pain, rolling over onto a sharp blade of slate, but we were luckier than most. I wonder if I knew going in it was temporary.

It's the vividness of my memories, not some nostalgic longing, that disorients me into the suspicion that out the backdoor it's 80 degrees and 800 miles away. There's a lot to hate about that seeming clarity, when the words from those exchanges no longer match up so well with current sentiment.

She kissed me when I needed it, in the evening when she came in, other shoulder this time, true to her word.