The Triggerman Dance

The yard was overgrown, in shambles. Luckily, it was hidden from the neighbors by the ivy-covered fence. The lawn furniture seemed to have sunk into an abyss of weeds. The vegetable garden was profuse with zucchini, and pocked by gopher mounds. A ground squirrel, squash in mouth, hurried away toward the woodpile by the side of the house. The needles of a bristlecone pine lay deep beneath the tree, lashed loosely together by a silk skein of spiderwebs and funnels that shone dustily in the afternoon sun.

John sees Rebecca there, under that tree, sitting in a bead chair with a book open on her lap and her long pale legs stretched into a patch of late December sun.

"Wine?" he asks.

"You," she answers.

John worked the key in a lock gone stubborn with disuse. Finally it turned. Then the familiar clunk of the heavy door sucking inward, and the ambience—aged by absence but intact— reaching out to greet him as he stepped inside. Dust. Heavy air. The smell of loss. Shapes of things still firm in their places, matching perfectly the shapes and places in his memory. Sunlight diffused through the dirt of windowpanes. A potent silence. Home.

"Oh," he muttered.

He gathered up the sheets he'd placed over the couch and chairs, the television and stereo, the coffee table and hearth. The covers were heavy with dust, and so were the things beneath them. John had not known until now that motes were smaller than the weave of cotton. He took the sheets outside and tossed them into the weeds.

He walked back inside, leaving the door open, then went into the kitchen. He opened the blinds and windows. The refrigerator still hummed quietly and John was pleased that he had kept the utilities on. Five months, he thought. In the dining alcove off the kitchen he removed the sheets from the table and chairs, then slid open the glass door that faced the canyon drainage creek and dropped them to the patio. The bricks were buried by the bright orange bracts of an enormous bougainvillea growing beside the house. When the sheets hit, some of the bracts lifted up, then floated down in alternating sideways dips, like tiny magic carpets. And he sees her again on that patio, wrapped in a heavy blue robe he has bought for her visits here, with the rain pouring off the roof shingles on three sides of her, and she smiles at him over a cup of coffee as the steam issues up past her eyes and John thinks, yes, those are the eyes I've waited a lifetime to know.

He straightened the downstairs bathroom a little. The toilet bowl was stained, so he brushed it out with some liquid bleach, flushing twice. For Sharon, he thought.

Then he approached the bedroom. He didn't walk right in, but rather hesitated at the threshold and, leaning over it like an inquiring butler, scanned the room for its familiarities, its memories and heartaches. They were dense in there, too packed and coiled and alive for John Menden to confront just now. He kept seeing Rebecca by the planter in the rain.

"Oh," he muttered again. "Oh."

He sat alone on the upstairs deck and looked over the canyon. Vultures and redtail hawks cruised in the updrafts. From isolated stands of scrub oak, heat waves shimmered up again: the dry hills.

He thought about when he had hiked and camped in this arroyos as a boy, when he had found shards of Gabrieleno pottery, arrowheads and a revolver made in 1844. He still clear!y remembered the mountain lion he had seen in 1960. He recalled with minor pride the tiny night snake he had captured, which local biologists assured him was not found in the region. He wondered if his boxes of 35mm slides down in the garage were still good.

John stared off toward the hills, but in his mind's eye he saw only Rebecca. It was important to be here now, he thought, to touch the same places she had touched, to breathe the air she had once shared.

Just before sunset John uncovered the barbecue, arranged it out by the railing overlooking the street, and lit the charcoal.

Joshua came up with his second gin and tonic, watching closely as John started up the fire. "Want that bottle of tequila now?" he asked.

"Later," said John.

"You almost sunk us with that crack to Evan about hating Wayfarer's guts."

"It worked out okay, Joshua. At least they were my word not something you put in my mouth."

"True. My words would have been about the same."

Joshua pulled deeply on his drink.

Downstairs, Sharon boiled water for rice and made a salad. John could hear her knife strokes on the cutting board. He had always liked the sounds of a woman in his house, and he remembered the ones he had been with in his thirty-four years. It was odd, he thought, that you could love someone but not be able imagine yourself with her for very long. The harder you look ahead, the more your vision blurs.