Kickdown by Rebecca Clarren

Author:Rebecca Clarren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628729689
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

In the dead quiet of the house, he calls Dunbars’.

“Sue, I’ll do it. I’ll set you up some interviews.”

“You will? You’re sure?”

“I’m sorry about what I said before. I’m glad you’re writing again. I think you’ll do good, better than that.”

“You have no idea how much that means to me.”

“I’m real glad, Sue. See you tomorrow.”

Camila stands in the doorway, watching him, even her eyes listening.

20

ON THE FIRST EVENING Jackie feels good enough to move hand-line, a day that smells of sage and loam, the smell of every spring, she sends Ray and Sue to move pipe in the field below, eager to test her capacity for working alone.

She drags the first pipe sixty feet. Slowly. Chicken does what he can to help, which is to bark at imaginary coyotes and to sniff his own ass. The aluminum is cold to the touch, the sprinkler heads tricky to keep upright. Every muscle in her body appears to have atrophied. Her heart pounds. Sweat beads. But one pipe becomes four, and then seven. She can do the work. She celebrates by keeping at it. She moves across the field, feeling the soft give of the land beneath her feet. She breathes in the smell of wet soil and the promise that the work will create something bigger and more important than herself. It isn’t the first time in the past few weeks that she has considered how this ambition is not so different from the ambition of being a doctor. It is a dangerous thought, and she pushes it away.

Dad and Uncle Ellis used to sit in the evening, drinks in hand, and watch the sprinklers. She used to tease them about that, said they should buy a VCR, but she wouldn’t say that now. The light does make the water sparkle and the water does make, eventually, a bright blanket of green grass. She wonders if Tim would think this was beautiful. She wonders at herself thinking about Tim. In the field below, Ray and Susan work in tandem, their voices rising and falling in a duet of muted conversation.

The night before, Susan got off the phone with Ray and danced around the room in her sock feet. Then she made a pot of coffee and stayed up for hours making lists of questions and sources, reading through things she’d printed earlier at the library. Jackie sat awake in bed, listening to her sister. Cold reached her under the covers, worry beating away sleep, remembering those mornings before school in Ray’s old Ford.

The Ford was a 1969 and Ray called her Big Blue. He would work for his granddad at sunrise and then swing by their place. Susan always slid into the truck first, so she could sit next to Ray and make him laugh, and on those days Susan always wore her hair down and curled. On those days, Susan shed her need to be cool, and softened into her old self, the one who was goofy and curious and even shy.

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