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Patience had a chipped tooth from when he was a child and shot a rabbit. The recoil fattened, bloodied his lips. Belle kissed them lightly when she tucked him in at night. He cut his tongue for months after each time he spoke up for himself, specified. “That flavor, This color not that one, The sea, They said I could.” He grew frustrated. The mouth heals quick. He said little to nothing at all. Belle gave and did the best she could guess.
The rabbit every night removed him from consciousness and took him through sleep. The hole in its small body grew until he was mostly wound. Until you could only see what had been done to him. Patience bore his witness. Eventually and inside out, it disappeared, waltzed out past where they usually went, beyond. It brushed through tall grass, the sound of footsteps on the kitchen floor after heavy rain. He woke up every morning, slick from dreams and a high heartbeat, and looked inside the shoebox he kept the rabbit in. It began to attract flies. The room, then the house, became a bottle for its fragrance. Belle quietly removed it one afternoon and Patience’s dreams returned to him unmoored. Instead, all through the day, he saw the question of the rabbit, ran through what might have happened to it.
The sun began to lay itself out, shone through the sieve of leaved trees. His shoulders moved like a boat in thrashing water, melodically, violently. It was like spreading butter. It was all a bit like a game. I followed him along the path, a hand in mine, another on the gun. It was early morning. I walked close to him, imagined my breath fogging his skin like hot glass. Blades moved. We stopped and he flicked off the safety, cocked and held the gun to his eye like a telescope. I held him with both arms around his waist. Blades swayed and he shot. The force unsteadied us only briefly, so in tandem. The shock traveled through to me.
He seemed to take up the whole bed. His legs hung off the side and met the floor. The heat stretched its limbs. It trained the air. He took a sip of something and stretched his own and said “I wanna see you in some green place,” and from where I was standing, leaning at the threshold of his room, I saw him as he supposed he was, kept, stunted. The walls and ceiling seemed to turn in against him. He lay wearing nothing but a small, gold watch. He pried open the window with his fingers and stared out of it at the street, returning his hand to where it had been resting on his stomach. Desire rushed up through me from the middle and fell back down, honey in a lamp. I went to him. It was terribly hot all through the city and his apartment was the beating heart. Through the walls a television murmured. I grabbed his hand and tried to pull him up.
“He hates me,” Belle said. I sat across from her at the small kitchen table. I knew he didn’t hate his mother, whether guilt kept him from it or his heart. She dipped a finger in her coffee and made a figure eight. A door, tinny and distant, opened and closed. Then another, louder. Patience walked past the window outside. His footsteps fell quick and light. He was pulling on his shirt. I watched him as far as I could before he turned up the avenue. Belle kept her eyes in front of her.
“He doesn’t hate anyone,” I said. She took a sip. She gathered up her hair in both hands and sighed, turned towards the blowing fan. Sweat like dew crept down her temples, her shoulders. She breathed through her nose, chest rising. There was no wind.
Patience once said my name and stopped. When he started again, he said, “There’s nothing I think of more than you.” It fell out unsteadily like jumping between mossy rocks, like pepper through the blades of a mill. He grabbed my right hand with both of his, made me a pearl. I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew he meant it.
We walked towards where he shot. Pennies and bullets in his pocket fell against each other and the sound shone from him as if he were made of metal. He pulled. Everything about him sent a chill through me. I wore a pair of denim shorts, sneakers and socks. I tried to see what he got. His head bobbed up and down like bait on a hook, like a buoy. He hooked the gun around his back and put his hand in his pocket. He fingered the coppers and made them sing. The cowlick on his head stood up like silvergrass. I spit in my free hand and pat it down and with his metal hand he raked his hair. The sound of our footsteps and his shoulder bones rubbing against each other. Early onset warmth from late summer’s morning. It shook the cold like a bully.
“There’s a line of faith,” Patience spoke into my ear, “on your back. By your spine.” He spat and moved around the front of the car to me and lifted my shirt over my head. “Bend over.” We had made it all the way to South Carolina. I put my cheek to the hot hood. He’d pulled off the road to fill up the gas tank. Patience came behind me and undid my belt buckle, slipping his hands around. He pulled down the waist of my pants a few inches, then my underwear, exposing all of my back. My spine shone in the sun like a new fossil. I felt him against me. He worked his hands up the left side of my spine, kneading like dough, pushing into my skin and everything beneath it. Between his hands, a kind of tendon, or muscle, that ran up my length, some amount of tissue. When he found it, I saw hot white pain and buckled, cried out. “There,” he said, “it runs long.” Like a river it thrashed. Touch into some devotion. He pressed into it, pushed it around from one hand to another like clay. He molded it in his favor.
“You’re making this up just to touch me,” I said. He pinched it with one hand and let the other trail down towards my lower back, slipping it out of sight. “I don’t need to make things up to touch you,” he said, leaning down to me. I saw heat rise from the pavement and water slip down juicy, green leaves. He took his hand out from me, spit into his palm, then returned. Cars drove past. Trucks, emergency vehicles. Speed shook the car. An airplane flew above and left its second body hanging in a white stream behind it. I trailed the line with my fingers and pinched the plane out of sight once I caught up to it. Patience stepped back. I turned around and crept backwards atop the hood of the car with my pants around my knees. He crouched and spit again, stood up and came near again.
“I knew you’d love it.” The night rolled in with a storm. It was blue and solid, a great, stark structure building itself around everything, unraveling along the bank of the lakelike sky hanging over us. I blew out the candles. I felt I had to get around it. The cake was dark and filled with halved cherries, blackberries and cinnamon. I felt I couldn’t. Crickets and frogs wasted their time above. I put a finger to the icing then to my mouth. I kissed him long. He put his hand to the small nest of my back. And cool, it warmed. The letter he wrote darkened in the falling light. I held it in my hand on the way back to the house. It was membranous, crisp with sound and when I held it to the light, soft stars poked through and revealed faint veins, as if it were written in tattoos on skin. I could feel what he made changing inside of me. He kept looking back at me. At first, I thought, expectantly, before recognizing his fear, a kind of uncertainty, a friend of a friend sitting quietly in the train seat across from you.
The gun was a bone. It looked like something that should be inside of him, not the extension it was, not metal and wood. He wore it particularly. He’d taken a job around Cape Sable. He’d taken me. A few nights ago I’d packed a small suitcase with our things. Patience silently handed articles of clothing to me, small bags and bottles, a notebook, a new cellphone. In every room he seemed comfortable, capable, like he had a map of each thing in it, the knowledge of what would become of them handled. The way he passed his things to me like that scared me.
I don’t know if I thought of control much before as a thing to be searched for, not unless you used to have it, meaning, unless it had been given. Loss, then, was a hole through the center of the Earth. Now, I thought, we must be passing through the core. You fall not until you land but until you find yourself returning the way you came. It was a meter full of mercury. A level shifting in a hand braced against a pre-constructed wall. His fingers were slick against mine as he handed me a belt and the buckle rattled like it was alive. He’d drawn the window shades and white light moved through the room, tried to make brighter things in the corners, buried beneath others. It directed my attention like a cat. Blinded sheer existence, I watched headlight draw itself across the room and disintegrate, fuzzing the room to my adjusting eyesight, looked a lot like cicada trills. In front of me in the glade, Patience stopped, slung the gun back to his eye and took another shot, swiveling hard to 10 o’clock. He wielded it like a limb and something screamed like it came from the dirt- stifled, powdery, dirty- and he shot again and the dirt was rained on, became a puddle, all of a sudden wet and from a throat.
Belle had Patience young on purpose. Her house was big and lonely and rarely existed for her parents. Donna was a flight attendant, small and caked in wax and talcum and peppermint. She was a vaguely familiar bird in a tree visible from a bedroom window. Roger disappeared for months on end and returned, sending his articles and stories back home for Belle to categorize and store in the office filing cabinets. He popped in and out like sun in March. Belle sometimes found him asleep in the dining room, paper things and paints and pens mapped out before and beneath him on the rug, like they leaked from within. He kept a tin box in the pantry and filled it with cash, blank checks, important documents. It never depleted. It re-filled like magic at his hand and he’d be gone again. He kissed Belle on the forehead and both cheeks and she drew him in to hold him and he folded over her like a blanket. Donna sent postcards from Honolulu, Anchorage, Helsinki. She sent a green headscarf, a pouch of rose candy, a silver letter opener tucked inside the lower bout of a viola.
Belle,
Pry it apart in the corner. If you can’t, take it in to Madge. She’ll show you. Tell her I said “Hello”. Maybe bring this note so she believes you. I love you. This is the last time you’ll open a letter with your fingers. Tell dad I said “Hello”. Tell Pat.
- Mom
By the time Belle was sixteen, her baby was fourteen months old. She at last settled on the name, Patience. He was first Laurence, then Jeremiah, briefly Samuel. He put his little hand on hers and pushed it gently to the table, brought it to rest and she understood. She said he named himself. Her leg bounced rapidly in anxiety. They were too close. Crawled under each other’s nails and into skin that wasn’t theirs. She bought him a gun when he was five and took him shooting. He made sandwiches kneeling on a chair in the kitchen. She stopped going to school. She read to him every night. In the winters, they left the house once a week to go shopping. Her parents treated him like a little king.
Patience felt the woozy lacquer of childhood reality as if it were memory already. Sensation swarmed him like a warm bath, like hovering flies, submerged. He wrote down each moment he felt he had reached new height. First at Belle’s knees, then her waist, at which point she stopped bending down to meet him, then her navel, then ribs then breasts, neck, jaw, eyes. Then they were the same. He made a star in pencil and continued to grow, his shoulders at her top lip. It seemed he’d never stop and then he did. For years he remained like this. At twenty, he rose again. Belle bought him another gun. She sent him off to Augusta and when he returned, she washed his clothes. The sink to the right of the washer filled with water and blood.
The body fallen looked like it was still falling. Patience crouched and with a knife cut at the sleeve and ripped a swatch of it like pulling off a price tag. He put it in his pocket. I leaned against a cypress. My heart beat irreparably. I became nauseous. He dragged the body to a tree and from his pack removed a small, stained bag. From it, he withdrew raw, red slabs of meat. They dripped onto the grassland floor. He sprinkled them in handfuls over the corpse. He then let free a plastic water bottle of thick, fatty blood over the head. It marred him like oil. Birds chirped and sang. He walked to me and I tried to give him back the gun. “Hold it,” he said and I did. He grabbed my hand and we started back. The car radio shrieked on as he started the engine.
“Do we think we could do it?” The car rolled silently and fast North. My ankles crossed on the dash. “Yeah,” he said. “I wanna, eventually.” Patience looked at the road in front of him like it lead the way to more than just home. His profile lit up like an embryo in the red sunlight. He focused forward and thought back.
“I do, too.” I counted on my one hand how many children I wanted. I imagined them in the backseat. “Three, I think.” He held up three fingers and lifted his eyebrows, feigning surprise. He smiled. “Yeah,” I said and kissed the corner of his mouth. He swerved the car into the opposite lane and back and back and back and again. The sunset rode us like we were a wave, cut across skins in languid, lambent motion. Laughing, he kept his hands on the wheel and kissed me on the mouth. There weren’t any cars coming. His breath was sugared, his skin salted, my back ached. Direction was nothing next to me, where he thought I could lead. Patience opened his eyes and watched the receding road. I watched what was coming, put a hand on his hand on the wheel, made him turn right.
Donna came to the house. I was there alone. She looked like she was playing herself in a play, the uniform saturated and perfectly hemmed, her skin gray beneath a layer of color and she made big eyes when she saw me. I put on a pot of coffee and she set down her suitcase.
“Where’s Belle, dear,” she asked, settling in at the kitchen table. I said I didn’t know. She nodded. “Maybe with Pat,” she wondered out loud.
“Maybe,” I said. I was uneasy. “I don’t know. Where have you just gotten back from?” She maybe seemed a little hot and tanned. Her mouth opened and started to form and then she stopped, restarting.
“Nevada,” she took a sip of coffee, “Reno.” I hadn’t seen her in over a year. The clock ticked to 4:15. She heeled the tile with her shoe in a kind of tap dance. I didn’t know where Patience was. Donna licked the corner of her mouth. Her pores were huge. She seemed like someone incapable of being hurt. Patience left a small gun at the other end of the table, cleaning tools and bullets and a small ash tray. She arched her back, put a hand to it and rubbed. I put a finger in my coffee and stirred. Donna stared at me. She had strong gray hair slicked behind her. She lit a cigarette, reached to other end of the table and pulled over the ash tray. Patience told me she’d quit, that Belle wouldn’t let smoke around her baby. She smelled a bit like a rose.
Patience told me she used to perform at a club downtown. She made sense to me on a stage under lights, covered in eyes and ears. Her voice made sense to me swaying husbands, women in jewels and black dresses. Donna whispered into their necks at night when they tried to fall asleep. She made them act out, take another way home, spritz perfume on the skin of their thighs. She crooned and they sharp clawed fruit at the market to feel juice slip down their hands, to feel the pressure of pulpy flesh beneath their nails. I thought about turning on the radio to see if she’d sing along. All that time away. What is it to love things and not have them? I thought of the marks she’d made in every place she flew to, what she left, what she took, if she was someone who even impressed herself into the landscape or who stole from it. Maybe, I thought, she couldn’t. Either out of lack or will. She took a drag and a sip. Her fingers wrapped around the porcelain, the paper, like roots. Smoke left her like vapor from steeping tea.
There was a small gun wrapped in a box at home. We swung the first one of three between us at the park. The warm day was coming to a close. He’d come from him. Patience held his hand and I, the other. I grew old overnight. He looked like Patience and me. He was three years old. He made him a cake and his friends and their parents were coming over in the evening. We tied a balloon to his wrist that we joked would carry him away and his eyes welled up with tears and we hugged and said, “No, no,” that we had him. I gave him the scissors and he cut the string. He held on to my leg and Patience took the scissors from his hand and tried not to laugh. He bent down and hugged him and buried his smile into him. He had one hand on me and one on Patience and he smiled a babytoothed smile. Later after everything I stood in the yard and watched the two of them in the kitchen. The light from the window made a box in the dark grass that I passed through on the way back inside.
