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It was early in the day but brutal hot outside by the time he was done. The sun a burning white eye in the field of blue. Hart’s truck blended in pretty well around here, being as it was a rusting pickup so old the red color had been sunbleached to a kind of dark salmon, but regardless he had parked about a half mile down the road from the abandoned grain elevator so as not to draw attention to the place. The truck like a toy against the great flatness. He must have been watching because when Rye came out he could hear the truck starting. The sound was carried to him on the wind and then Hart pulled a U in the silent empty road and in a minute he was there. He had his big cowboy hat on with the sweatstained brim and he might as well have been chewing a hayseed. The sun was so strong that even his dark skin seemed burnt. The radio played some loud static in which faintly could be heard a distant hymn. “How did it go,” Hart said, he after all being the one who had told Rye about the traveling doctor.
Rye clamored in. “As well as could be expected,” he said. “She said they — ” He paused, being sure neither who they was nor if Hart wanted to hear any of this so that he might still claim plausible deniability. “She said they could do it.”
Hart was unbothered. “Did she give you the number?”
“She said to call on Friday.”
“Yeah. We can do it from the payphone at the rest area on 84. I don't think you can trust any of the ones in town.”
He had pulled back out onto the highway. The wind through the window stirring the fine hair around his ear. A locust or something hit the windshield with suicidal velocity. Rye’s brain was feeling like that locust at the fact that Hart had said we. “How do you know all this,” Rye asked him.
“Well.” The ghost of a smile creased the corner of Hart’s mouth. “What I usually do is only a little less illegal than what you're doing.”
--
Hart was the only other person he knew who had gotten away from the Clears, so he had gone straight there. Everybody knew Hart sold drugs, but somehow he had never been arrested. He lived in a trailer on a scrubby lot on the edge of town. Rye hadn’t known this before he’d gone there, but there were two raised beds in the dust out back in which Hart was trying to grow vegetables, and, over the past three summers, had had middling success. That was where he was when Rye walked over on the fateful day, banged on the front door for a while in increasing despair, nearly given up, wondered if he could get into the Clears’ grain elevator to jump off the top of it or perhaps more hilariously and certainly more pointedly drown himself in the wheat inside, eventually heard music from the backyard. Hart was back there with a portable radio gently putting seedlings in the ground. He stood up when he saw Rye in a sort of stilted and suspicious but still courtly manner which might have better befit persons in their position hundreds of years ago: the lord’s disgraced ex-lieutenant greets the bearer of the lord’s five sons. Neither of them said anything until Rye said, “He's not coming.”
“He’s not?”
“No. He told me to get lost.”
“Why?”
Perhaps the reason why everything felt so incredibly dire was the recent blood loss, Rye reasoned. “Can I sit down?”
“How about — it’s cooler inside.”
“I don’t want to take you away from your plants.”
Hart looked stricken. “There’s lemonade in the fridge,” he said. “And the cups are in the cupboard left of the stove.”
Inside it was cleaner and smelled better than Rye had been expecting. Faint smell of weed. Orange tabby cat with a docked ear in a sunbeam under the living room window. He drank an entire glass of lemonade in two gulps, leaning over the sink, then he poured the cup full again and one for Hart, and then went outside again into the waning of his most consequential day on earth since the last one.
Hart was absently tamping the soil flat but not too flat around a few tomato plants. He watched very closely as Rye sat down in the dust as though there would be some clue in his movement as to what the fuck was going on. Perhaps there was. Evidently not enough, because Hart whispered, “What happened?”
The trick about surviving was that you had to put everything into a box and lock it up tight. When you were just surviving you didn't worry about anything like how you were going to have to justify this to another person later. Sometimes you could not even imagine that there might be a hypothetical later person. But here there was. “That lemonade’s really good,” Rye said inanely.
“My mom used to make it that way. You have to let the lemon peels sit in sugar for a whole day.”
“I need to stay here for a while,” Rye told him. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Hart sat back on his heels. “We can get you further away. I know some people.”
There was that dreaded pronoun. We. “I can’t — the kids. I can’t just leave the kids.”
“I guess that does complicate things a little,” Hart said optimistically. It was better than what anyone else would have said, which was, it's a moot point because he’ll never let you have them.
The sun went down incredibly slowly in that place. It draped changing color over and through the world. Hart finished with the plants and then he made a fire in an old oil barrel and brought out a leftover tuna casserole from the fridge which they shared in the growing darkness. They didn’t talk for a while because there wasn’t much to say. Rye did not remember ever in his life having such a restful and satisfying night. Perhaps this was what compelled him to say, “I lost another one.”
“What?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Another one?”
“It happened before — two years ago? I can’t — it all runs together.”
Hart reached into the fire to shift the unburning part of one log with the tip of his finger. “Is there going to be an investigation?”
“There was when it first happened. Not this time. Which is good, because.” Dimly he was aware that he was admitting brazenly to the second most grievous crime committable in society. “Because it was on purpose this time.”
Hart’s eyebrows leapt up his forehead. For a moment he seemed to be thinking. The fire lit his face in burnished gold. Then he said, “Right.” Then the ghost of a savage grin appeared at the corner of his narrow mouth. Then he said, “Good for you.”
--
On Friday as had become normal Rye got up first and made breakfast and coffee and watered the plants. When he went back inside Hart was up reading the paper at the kitchen table. He showered while Hart did dishes and then they climbed into the truck to head to the rest area down route 84 where Hart alleged there was a payphone. It didn’t take longer than a half hour to get there, but when they did they tooled around for a while on the ranch roads because there was a camper van parked in the rest area lot in which at least one person was sleeping. Once they were gone Hart pulled in, put the windows down, turned the engine off. He’d stationed the car so that it would block sight of the payphone if you were coming up from town. They pooled the change from their pockets in Rye's palm. It wouldn’t be enough for a very long call.
“If you hear me honk twice,” Hart said, “get off that damn phone fast as you can.”
“Alright.”
“And keep it quick. When, where, how much money. That's all you gotta know.”
Everything felt like walking out the door of the house for the last time. Elated terror. Everything was happening for the first time. Everything was both dreadfully liberating and extraordinarily dangerous. Everything could be taken from him and snuffed out any moment along with his own life. He went to the payphone and dialed the number.
On the third ring it was answered with silence.
“Olive sent me,” he said as he had been instructed. His voice did not shake.
--
“What do you want,” said Hart in the morning. Rye had slept on the couch. No dreams at all. (Hart had not slept at all, but Rye wouldn’t know this for another few years.) At dawn he had gotten up and tried to figure out how to make coffee. Watched through the petite window above the sink as the sun levered itself above the rim of the world, heart pounding; god knew why.
“What do I — what?”
“What do you want. Now that you can have what you want. What is it that you want?”
It had sounded like an easy question but it wasn’t.
“Besides your kids,” Hart qualified, waving a hand. “I know that already.”
He hadn't even thought of them. The low, burning guilt stung. “I guess most of all I want to never have to worry about it again,” he said.
“Worry about what?”
“Getting knocked up, obviously.”
Hart shrugged. “That can be arranged,” he said.
“Sterilization’s illegal.”
“So’s abortion.” Rye started, which made Hart grin even wider. Nobody ever really even said the word. “What else?”
“While we’re on the subject of capital crimes, I want John Clear’s head.”
“On a pike?”
“What about a silver platter.”
Hart shrugged again. For a second Rye thought he might say that can be arranged. “I thought about it for a long time,” he said. “He’s fucking hard to kill. Take it from me.”
“I’m willing to try.”
“Firing squad for killing an alpha,” Hart reminded him. But there was a glint in his eye.
“For… for abortion too.” Rye felt insane. Maybe it was the coffee. He had only ever before been allowed to have very measured amounts; same with alcohol. “It was dying one way or the other,” he told Hart for some fucking reason. “The doctors told me.”
Hart digested this. He was trying his best not to look like every new horrific factoid which escaped Rye’s lips was driving some kind of blunt object deeper into his very soul. “You’re here now,” he said at last, “aren’t you?”
--
It was a long drive. Hart said they should hit the border checkpoint just before six in the morning, when the overnighters would be about to come off shift and half asleep. They left home just before midnight. Rye drove first, and then they switched off at a rest area around three in the morning. Hart was drinking coffee but Rye wasn't supposed to eat or drink anything. Acid was gnawing his stomach. Hart had the radio on — he said he wasn't religious, he just liked the music — but after a while it just played static.
“Are you nervous?”
“Kind of.”
“The border’s going to be fine,” said Hart. “I’ve done it a million times.”
“Not with…” He struggled with how to describe himself. A disgraced (abject? used-up?) omega in the process of committing a felony? “Not with me.”
“I’ve done it with a bale of pot in the bed of this truck,” said Hart reassuringly. “I’ve done it with two bales.”
“How have you never been arrested?”
Hart scanned through the radio looking for a signal but found nothing. Static cycling. He had that face on that meant he was thinking. They had been — whatever this was, friends maybe, for two weeks, and already Rye knew these things? How his face looked when he was thinking? “I’m convinced they don't really care about drugs at the end of the day,” Hart said finally. “They’re a decently effective means of social control.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not everybody can be an alpha from a landowning lineage, can they? You know as well as anyone.”
Rye came from a house — or former house — south of the Clears’ ranch and the town that had grown up around it like so many weeds. They hadn’t had the money to survive a few subsequent bad harvests when he was a young teenager. So they had sold the things they had to the Clears, starting with Rye. By that summer he was pregnant with his oldest and John’s father had had his work crew divert an irrigation canal that flowed south. By the following summer he was nursing and pregnant again and his parents had sold their land and with it their house. And just like that the family name was gone. It was difficult to summon any kind of feeling about it at the end of the day.
Hart was going on. “They have to convince you of the promise that this is the way it ought to be. You can never have what they have, can you? You can’t very well buy land out from under them with nothing and you certainly can’t change your secondary sex. You’d have to be out of your right mind to accept it. You’d have to.”
In the silence Rye could hear him breathing hard. The moonlight was vivid sharp upon the road. “You sound like a socialist,” he said eventually.
“Maybe I am. I was raised by socialists.”
“I didn’t think there were any anymore.”
“That’s because he kept you — ” For a moment he really thought Hart would say it and his entire body thrilled both horribly and deliciously for some reason he could not exactly identify. But Hart took a sharp breath, backpedaled, qualified. His face in the dim light from the dashboard and the moon seemed particularly sharp and cold. When he spoke again he had brought the volume of his voice down by an almost shocking degree. “It is in their best interest that we not know there are any other ways to think.”
Rye was not particularly shocked. He was only shocked to hear Hart saying so many words at once. “You’re not an alpha, are you?”
“I’m not anything.”
“Not — ”
“I’m not anything. I never expressed.”
Now this was shocking, but it explained a great deal. It was curious—some would say suspicious—for a man of Hart’s age to remain unpartnered. In the microcosm of the broader world which was the Clears’ ranch it was the subject of endless rumoring after Hart’s unceremonious departure. Some said he had to be an undercover omega who was masking his scent somehow and others said it was nothing like that he was just a socialist or a gender ideologue or some other antisocial political dissident and still others said he must have had sick and disturbing sexual appetites (necrophilia, cunnilingus) which even the Clears could not abide. This last was prevalent because the staff knew that Hart at one time had been John’s most feared enforcer.
“How is that possible?” Rye asked him.
“John would always say it was my mom’s fault. I don’t know.”
“Tell me about your mom?”
“I had two. They were part of this — the police called it a cult. They tried to raise us without gender roles.”
“They can do that?”
Hart shrugged. “They tried.”
“What happened?”
“There was a raid when I was six. The police killed most of them. They put me and all the other kids in a foundling home. And that’s where I met John.”
“John was in a foundling home?”
“You didn't know this? He was late to express. They thought he was an omega or worse. They pulled him out when he did.”
“And you?”
“I was in there until they put me out. And I had nowhere else to go. John — well, when I was younger, I wasn’t — I suppose I was a more… violent person…”
“I can’t blame you.”
“Sort of wanted to burn the whole world. What happened to your family and everybody else around here… I wanted all the fiefs to burn. Like my family fucking burned. But they didn’t burn, they just went to the Clears. And — like I say — the Clears are hard to kill.”
“I remember seeing you that day.”
“What day?”
“The day my parents brought me up to the ranch. I don't know if you remember.” Black hat, snakeskin boots, standing at John’s quarter like a shadow with a gun in his belt and another slung across his back. He looked like a cowboy villain from a movie but his face was like a skull and his eyes were so far away they might as well have been scanning the landscape of the moon. Beside him John looked quite handsome and put-together as he always did in public. There was the corner of a soft smile which he spared for Rye; this was a little opiate, a little milk. “You were so high,” Rye remembered, “I could tell. They did some sort of ceremony… the matriarch loves a ceremony.”
“I remember that day,” Hart said. “I thought you’d be dead in a month. I thought I was already dead.”
“I thought so too. I was more scared of you than John.”
Hart chewed a sore spot in his lower lip. “Do you ever think about it this way: I was the source of his power before you.”
“I never really had… time, energy, whatever, to think about it at all.”
“A long time ago I killed people for him. Salted fields for him. Burned warehouses full of grain for him. And the power he had was because people knew that. They knew that he would sic me on them if they crossed him. But then he got you. The beautiful omega from a landed family who gave him five sons. He dressed you up and trotted you out whenever it suited him. Everybody in this town knows — knew — what he could do, what he was doing, to you. Half of them wanted to do it too, and the other half were afraid he would do it to them or their children. And that was where his power came from. He gave none of it to you even though he got it on your back. By brutalizing you.”
Some animal piece of Rye's brain was stuck on beautiful. “You don’t have to get so angry on my account.”
“Yes I do.”
“Why?”
Sometimes he remembered that many years ago, perhaps he was eighteen, Hart had come in to his room while he was asleep. It was one of those very blurry times where recovery from birth had intersected with heat and his brain felt like a sleeping passenger on a train steaming full speed ahead into the night… He had woken up because there was a hand at his shoulder; he’d thought at first it was John’s, but John wouldn’t have woken him up before doing whatever it was he wanted to do. Of course it was Hart instead. He was too out of it to react very much at all, even though he was lying there naked like a dead fish in the clean light of dawn. And Hart had said, “I’m leaving. Do you want to come?”
“I’ve been in love with you since I first saw you,” said Hart for some fucking incredible reason. “You don’t have to do anything about it. I just thought you probably had the right to know.”
Dawn brewing — a deep, bloody blue stirred up from the bottom of a pot of midnight — in a high corner of the sky. The desert smelled like rain.
“I don’t know what to say,” Rye admitted finally.
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I don’t have anything to give you.”
“You don’t have to give me anything.”
“He took — basically all of it.”
Hart’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “No he didn’t,” he said. “No, he didn’t.”
--
It was embarrassing how afraid he was, even though he knew logically that it was going to be okay. “I know this is kind of janky,” the doctor said as he followed her into the trailer of former offices at the foot of the abandoned grain elevator at the edge of town. He had never met a woman doctor before, but logically they had to have existed all along. Outside, in the tall, scraggly cornfield, she had patted him down, white coattails brushing the dust, in search of a recording device. “It’s just — you know.”
She gestured expansively at a desk upon which had been spread what looked like a gingham tablecloth. It took him a moment to realize he was supposed to sit on it. “What can I do you for,” she said once he had.
Everything about my body is an entire nightmare. Can you wake me up please?
Knowing it was illegal to even ask this he said, “Are you allowed to talk to me about birth control?”
She smirked. “Depends on what kind.”
His heart was in his throat. “The permanent kind.”
“I’m required by law to tell you that it’ll all give you cancer and depression,” she said. “Especially the permanent kind. Which, of course, is a felony if you’re of reproductive age and capacity. Which you are.”
“Everything is fucked because — my… ex. That feels reductive. I don’t get regular — anything, regular cycles of anything, not bleeding, not heat.” He’d never spoken about it all like this before — so matter-of-factly. He had hardly spoken at all to the Clear family doctor, who, in turn, had hardly spoken to him. Hovering over him, making observations to John and the matriarch. “The hormones… they explained it once. They also explained it would kill me to have another kid. So it’s cancer and depression or death I guess.”
“I’m also required by law to tell you that if you're interested in controlling pregnancy you could just stop having sex.”
Rye wondered if this was a joke. “Isn’t that also a felony?”
The doctor shrugged. “Well, in some jurisdictions, if you were withholding sex from a specific person, yes, a very motivated or perhaps well-paid-off district attorney could make an argument for it as a misdemeanor.”
“I can’t let him destroy that too. He destroyed everything else. I want… I don’t know. I want to be able to have a body that belongs to me.”
“Don’t we all.” The doctor sighed. “I’m going to go scrub up. Take off your pants and underwear — you can leave your shirt and socks on. Put this — ” She handed him a piece of thin fabric — “over your lap. I’m going to take a look at you and see if they could do a tubal ligation.”
“They?”
“Doctors I know. North of here, across the state line where these procedures are less criminalized. A lot of… people in your circumstances have so much scarring and damage that surgery wouldn’t be safe or effective. I want you to be prepared for that.”
“I’m very prepared to hear that I'm extremely damaged.”
John had always accused him of humor at inappropriate times, Rye remembered as the doctor laughed.
She went in the other room while he undressed. He didn't hear water running and when she came back, slipping her hands into rubber gloves, he smelled rubbing alcohol. “You saw doctors before,” she said.
“My — his family doctors.”
Of course, around here, it could only be the Clears. He wondered if naming them would further incriminate him somehow. If that would be the spark that would send the SWAT team in from the cornfields.
“So you know what to do?”
“Very well.” Down to the elbows, scoot to the edge of the table, on your back, close your eyes. This being a fucking desk in the offices of an abandoned grain elevator it was somewhat less plush than where he had previously done this, which was his own bed usually. Once, memorably, John’s.
He closed his eyes. A squeaky chair wheeled on the tiles. The doctor said, “Ready?” and the sound of yes escaped from somewhere out of mind. She touched him very carefully, with warm gloved hands, but still she was only the third person in his life, besides John and the Clear family doctor, to touch him there this way. His whole body froze. Deer in headlights; rabbit at the smell of dogs. Not for the first time he wished he had gotten a fight instinct instead of the other.
“Breathe,” said the doctor. She sounded like she had to say something like this to just about every other person who came to see her. “Don’t close your eyes. Remind yourself that you’re here and not anywhere else. Count the tiles on the ceiling and listen to my voice.”
“Okay.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“How many pregnancies?”
“Seven.”
“Live births?”
“Five. But there was a pair of twins in the middle and one of them was born dead.”
He was dimly aware that she had opened him up with something and was looking, feeling.
“When did you express?”
“Thirteen.”
“And when did you first get pregnant?“
“Seventeen.”
“Traditional births?”
“They had to cut one out. The last one.”
“How was the recovery?”
What recovery? “I was nursing right away and pregnant again in six months.”
“How far along were you when you miscarried?”
“Around eight weeks both times.”
“And were they investigated?”
“The first one was. I passed with flying colors. The second one, they said — ”
“— they can’t usually get abortion charges to stick if you've had a confirmed authentic miscarriage before. I know. What about your last heat?”
“Three months ago.”
“How long do those usually last?”
“Couple days.”
“What about bleeding?”
“Well, you know, recently — ”
The doctor laughed. “Before that.”
“Right before the last heat. Sometimes they come together.”
“That’s not uncommon. When did you leave your — the father of your children?”
“Last month. But I hate thinking of him that way; they’re mostly nothing like him.”
“What about… the sperm donor for your children?”
Rye laughed. It was too loud and it made his chest hurt, but the doctor laughed too. “That works.”
“How often was he in heat?”
The extent to which he dreaded any more questions in this vein could not even be fully captured within the notion of dread. “Jesus, it seemed like every other fucking week.”
“A very motivated district attorney could also get you on a misdemeanor for taking the Lord’s name in vain,” said the doctor. In her voice was a note of impossible bemusement. He heard her chair scoot back across the floor — thank god. “You can sit up,” she said, turning away.
He did, arranging the thin cotton blanket back over his lap. His heart was beyond racing. It was just one uninterrupted slamming rhythm. The doctor was carefully taking off the gloves she had worn. “We can do the procedure,” she said. “The scarring is pretty bad, but not bad enough to preclude surgery. It’s probably just as well because those doctors were right that if you were to get pregnant again it probably wouldn’t end very well for you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m doing this.”
The doctor studied him. The examining expression had not fully faded from her face, as though she were observing his mettle or the fiber of his soul and the very different but still extant scarring and damage there. “I’m going to give you a number to call,” she said. “Make sure you do it from a public phone on a Friday. When someone answers the phone, tell them Olive sent you. They’ll tell you where to go and when. Do you have someone to bring you across the state line and take you home?”
“Yes.”
“And that person knows that assisting you or any other omega in the effort of sterilization is a felony by state and federal law?”
“Yes.”
“As long as you’re certain you can trust them.”
“I am.”
She handed him a plain white card from her pocket upon which written in blue pen was a telephone number. And then she said, “What else?”
“Is there something else?”
“There’s a question on your face.”
“There is?”
“If you do this for long enough you learn to see them.”
He hadn't necessarily known he was thinking it, but it came out. “How do I stop being… I don’t know. Afraid of everything.”
“You don’t seem very afraid to me.”
“Really?”
“You wouldn’t be doing any of this if you were afraid. I think you’re an incredibly brave person, to still be alive after what happened to you.”
“Maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s — how do I stop letting him control my life?”
“He doesn’t own you anymore,” said the doctor. “Now he only has the power that you give him.”
For the first time since he had left the Clears' ranch he felt near the verge of tears. “Then how do I stop giving it to him?”
She gave him a very sad smile. He wondered with a sick sinking feeling how many people she had said this to. How may of them were alive today. What their lives had been like after they had heard it. “That’s the catch,” she said. “You have to stop being afraid. And the longer you’re away from him — the more you have your own life — the more you know your own self — the less afraid you’ll be. It takes time. You need to give yourself time. And now you have time.”
--
Eight fifty-six in the morning. Low sun in a haze of distant smoke. It was an unmarked warehouse building on the quietest edge of a small city. At nine sharp a person in olive-green overalls appeared from a hidden door and turned a light on. And then they went inside again.
Rye felt almost no fear. It had gone away as soon as they were waved through the border checkpoint and Hart was stepping on the gas. Now there was only a still and quiet clarity. Like he imagined the ocean might be, having never seen it. “What are you gonna do?”
“Go to the diner and get a burger and read the paper and wait for you.” Hart shook his head. “Look at the mountains. I can entertain myself for three hours. I haven’t been here since I was a kid.”
The mountains had appeared to the northwest with the earliest light of day, hulking blue shapes in the grey-brown miasma of wildfire dawn. He had never seen anything like them before, though — like the woman doctor — he supposed he had known that they had to have hypothetically existed. His family’s land had been so flat you could see where it ended — where heirloom corn changed to the Clears’ soy and wheat, rising out of the cottonwoods which would soon be dead, along the creek which would soon run dry.
“Are you afraid,” said Hart.
“No.”
“It’s okay to be afraid.”
“I know it is. But I’m not afraid.”
“Because you're stupid brave, Rye,” Hart said, as though this were a thing that were true or obvious.
“Thank you. Thank you for helping me. I know you think you had to but you didn’t.”
Hart ducked his head. Under the brim of his hat his cheeks were red.
“Your mom would be really proud of you,” Rye said. “Both of them, I guess. You’re a decent man.”
Hart’s eyes were wet, Rye realized. Something behind the wall of his chest twinged. He thought about taking Hart’s hand. “You ought to go in there,” Hart said. His voice was kind of a torn whisper.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Rye told him.
Hart sniffled. “Shouldn’t I be telling you that?”
He did take Hart’s hand after all. His palm was rough and warm. He looked up with the initial shock and their eyes met. Hart's were red in the corners and his eyelashes were clumped and dark. Sweet bitter brown like burnt caramel.
He could have said any number of things. Some of them would have been lies and some of them would have been true. Some were fears. Some were deep, deep dreams. Something that bridged the reality of all four was maybe something good will come of all of this.
Instead he squeezed Hart’s hand. “See you in three hours,” he said.
“See you in three hours.”
He climbed out of the truck into the cool smoky morning. And he stepped through the door.
--
He woke up alone in the narrow rumpled bed. Dawn spilling gold light over the blankets. Coffee on the bedside table, sitting on a dog-eared book. Out in the yard the little one came running up to him. Hart was holding a basket full of red tomatoes. There was a smudge of dirt on his nose and the watering can was empty in the dust.
Rye scooped up his youngest son. He had eyes like John’s but on him they weren’t John’s eyes. “What’s up?”
“He had a nightmare,” said Hart. “He said he wanted to pick strawberries.”
“There aren’t any yet,” said the little one sadly into Rye’s ear. That was how he knew it was a dream. When he had left the little one wasn't talking yet. “There are only little hard green ones and Hart said they weren't good to eat yet.”
“Why don't you go check the lemon tree?”
“Did it really happen?”
“What, the dream? Yes and no. You know dreams. Can you go find some lemons?”
He knew this without seeing: the Clear family grain elevator at the edge of town was a burned-out husk which still smelled of char sometimes in high summer or after a long rain. Afterward some people had gone so far as to haul all the gravestones out of the family plot under the big oak tree on the rise and plant fruit trees there. They themselves hadn't done much in the way of celebration. They had hauled Hart’s trailer south to Rye’s family land to sleep in while they made the house livable again and on a Sunday they had gathered everybody strong and willing in town to undivert the irrigation stream that flowed south from the Clear ranch.
It was a near thing that they had gotten the kids. (The court proceedings had not been going very well before the Events; something about living in an interracial partnership of sin with a person outside his “breeding designation” had complicated Rye’s already-impossible case to be a solo parent.) They had adjusted fairly well considering, except for the oldest: Walter, after John’s father. Hart would take him on long walks where they shot quail and repaired fences. Hart said they didn’t talk about politics and they didn’t talk about John and in fact they barely talked at all. Walter was eight years old by then and sometimes prone to slamming doors. Come wash the dishes with me, Rye said after dinner one night, and Walter told him, “Why should I? I’m going to be an alpha like my father.”
“He must feel like the world has been stolen from him,” Rye told Hart. Sometimes at night they would sit up together on the stoop, watching the moon, sipping the white dog whiskey the neighbors brewed from corn in their basement. If he himself drank too much more often than not so that he wouldn’t dream, that was his business. He was tired of the humiliation of waking Hart up with screaming and with the kids living with them it was untenable. Hart had suggested that he write things down in a book but he was petrified that if he did the kids would find it. “Maybe they deserve to know,” Hart said. They were lying in bed together under the fine silty moon. Or they were sitting by the creek with their feet in the cold water and occasionally Hart’s heel would bump against his. His pale foot and Hart's brown foot like two little fish. Rye kept saying not yet, not yet, not yet. What would he have said? John was their father. They didn't stop reminding him of that every day, through no fault of their own. Mostly.
Hart kissed him. His mouth like a sun-warm peach just before ripeness. A little tart, bitter. One of his canine teeth was quite sharp. They had figured things out very slowly and mostly by feeling. Things were easy when you trusted the person you were with and knew as well as you knew your own heartbeat that they would not hurt you. Can I do this, Hart would say. Or he wouldn’t necessarily say it, he would breathe it out, like it was just a sound, and in the dark his eyes were huge. Can I do that. Will you let me touch you here. Will you trust me for a second —
In the fine white moonlight he slotted a kiss into the hollow of Rye’s hip. His hair was very soft. He acted like some kind of penitent in the act of praise or at least in the act of apologizing for every sin of every man, at least when he did this. There was a sweet pause in which they breathed together fast and high in unmusical harmony. And then the fact of Hart’s open mouth pressed against the place where he had borne his children and where John had raped him almost every night for seven years. Each time they both made in tandem almost the same surprised sound of shock and awe which made Rye’s heart feel like it was going to explode.
He knew this without seeing: In the window above there were very many stars. Keep your eyes open and remember you are here and not anywhere else. You are here and this is now. This is real.
“Dad?”
“Hmm?”
“You can put me down.”
Rye did. The little bare feet in the dust. One big toenail bruised purple (stubbed on the banister, eternity of tears) and the other lacquered green. He ran in the discombobulated and helter-skelter way kids do toward the lemon tree where perhaps — shadow of yellow shapes amidst the thick, dark leaves — perhaps there would be fruit enough for lemonade.
“You alright?” Hart said under his breath. He balanced the basket of tomatoes against one hip so that his free hand brushed the back of Rye’s wrist.
“Fine. No coffee yet. It’s just that sometimes I can’t believe this is really happening.”
Hart wrapped a gentle hand around his forearm. “You know dreams,” he said.
--
Woozy. Nothing hurt yet except his brain felt like it had been picked up out of his skull and gently shaken around. Sun going down, gold butter turning pink at the edges of the world. Ghostly mountains in the blue haze westerly. “She made lemonade,” Rye remembered, “your mom.”
The road passed one long white line at a time. Hart was listening to the static on the radio. The smoky light made his face look long, young. Something about it softened when he heard Rye’s voice. “There you are,” he said.
“I’m here.”
“I don't know if you remember this, you were sort of awake, but they said there were no complications.”
“Did you mean what you said before?”
Hart’s face was red again, or otherwise it was the grapefruit-pink effect of the sun through the smoke. Rye was possessed of a sudden urge to touch his cheek with the back of his hand. “Which of what I said before?”
“You know what I mean.” Everything was slowly turning back on. His throat felt like something had built a nest in it. “I had a dream about you, back there.”
“About me?”
“I want to help you in the garden,” Rye said. “We could get a lemon tree for your mom.”
He watched Hart's face twist in something which was not pain. “I don’t know if it would grow,” he said. Rough voice measured but not unshaking.
“We could make it grow.”
“How?”
“We’ll figure it out. Won’t we?”
The road swallowed up time. Soon he knew they would have to do it all again in reverse. And there was no telling now if they would get through. There was no telling what the dusk would bring. Where the fire would move. What would grow in the garden. If the creek would rise. There was only the certainty of a dream. Was that enough?
---
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