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I asked if we could please change the topic of conversation to something a little more pleasant.
Ivan gave me his angry smile. “Such as what? Relationships?”
Slick and Annette were in rare form that night, but Ivan was pretty much of a poop until Slick gave him a number. Ivan bogarted the joint and Slick rolled up another, and by the time Annette and I got the dishes into the sink, the men were swap- ping a roach on the living-room floor and tooling Gina's playthings around. Annette opened the newspaper to the place that showed which dopey program was on the TV that evening. Slick asked if Ivan planted the marijuana seeds he gave us and Ivan shrugged. Which meant no. Slick commenced tickling Annette. She scooched back against the sofa and fought him off, slapping at his paws and pleading for help. She screamed, “Slick! You're gonna make me pee on myself !”
Ivan clicked through the channels but he was so stoned all he could say was, “What is that?”
Annette giggled but got out, "Creature from the Black Lagoon!"
I plopped Gina on top of her daddy's stomach and passed around a roach that was pinched with a hairpin. I asked Ivan, “Are you really ripped?” and Ivan shrugged. Which meant yes.
The movie was a real shot in the arm for our crew. My husband rested his pestered head in my lap and I rearranged his long hair. There was a close-up of the creature and I got such a case of the stares from looking at it you'd think I was making a photograph.
Ivan shifted to frown at me. “How come you're not saying anything?”
And I could only reply, “I'm just really ripped.”
Days passed without event, and I could persuade myself that the creature had gone off to greener pastures. However, one evening when Ivan was attending a meeting of the parish council, my consternation only grew stronger. Gina and I got home from the grocery store and I parked the pickup close by the feed lot so I could hear if she squalled as I was forking out silage. Hunger was making the cattle ornery. They straggled over and jostled each other, resting their long jaws on each other's shoul- ders, bawling mom in the night. The calves lurched and stared as I closed the gate behind me. I collared my face from the cold and as I was getting into the truck, a cry like you hear at a slaughterhouse flew up from the lagoon.
I thought, I ought to ignore it, or I ought to go to the phone, but I figured what I really ought to do is make certain that I was seeing everything right, that I wasn't making things up.
Famous last words!
I snuggled Gina in the baby crib and went out along the pasture road, looking at the eight-o'clock night that was closing in all around me. I glided down over a hill and a stray calf flung its tail in my headlights as its tiny mind chugged through its options. A yard away its mother was on her side and swollen up big as two hay bales. I got out into the spring cold and inspected the cow even though I knew she was a goner, and then I looked at the woods and the moonlighted lagoon and I could make out just enough of a blacker image to put two and two together and see that it was the creature dragging cow guts through the grass.
The gun rack only carried fishing rods on it, but there was an angel-food-cake knife wedged behind the pickup's toolbox, and that was what I took with me on my quest, my scalp prickling with fright and goosebumps on every inch of me. The chill was mean, like you'd slapped your hand against gravel. The wind seemed to gnaw at the trees. You're making it up, I kept praying, and when I approached the lagoon and saw
nothing, I was pleased and full of hope.
The phone rang many times the next day, but I wouldn't get up to answer it. I stayed in the room upstairs, hugging a pillow like a body, aching for the beginning of some other life, like a girl in a Rosemary Rogers book. Once again Annette provided an escape from my doldrums by speeding over in the orange Trans Am—her concern for me and her eternal spunk are always a great boost for my spirits.
I washed up and went outside with Gina, and Annette said, “What on earth is wrong with your phone?”
I only said, “I was hoping you'd come over,” and Annette slammed the car door. She hugged me like a girlfriend and the plastic over the porch screens popped. The wind was making mincemeat of the open garbage can. And yet we sat outside on the porch steps with some of Slick's dope rolled in Zig-Zag papers. I zipped Gina into a parka with the wind so blustery. She was trying to walk. She'd throw her arms out and buck ahead a step or two and then plump down hard on her butt. The marijuana wasn't rolled tight enough and the paper was sticking all the time to my lip. I looked at the barn, the silo, the road, seeing nothing of the creature, seeing only my husband urging the tractor up out of a ditch with Slick straddling the gangplow's hookups and hoses. Slick's a master at hydraulics. The plow swung wide and banged as Ivan established his right to the road, then he shifted the throttle up and mud flew from the tires. One gloved hand rested on a fender lamp and he looked past me to our daughter, scowling and acting put out, then they turned into the yard and Annette waved. Ivan lifted his right index finger just a tad, his greeting, then turned the steering wheel hand over hand, bouncing high in the spring seat as Slick clung on for dear life.
Annette said, “My baby isn't Ivan's, you know.”
I guess I sighed with the remembering of those painful times.
Annette said, “I'm glad we were able to stay friends.”
“Me too,” I said, and I scooched out to see my little girl with an angel-food-cake knife in her hands, waddling over to me. “Gina!” I yelled. “You little snot! Where'd you get that?”
She gave it to me and wiped her hands on her coat. “Dut,” Gina said, and though my husband would probably have reprimanded her, I knelt down and told her how she mustn't play with knives and what a good girl she was to bring it right to me. She didn't listen for very long, and I put the knife in my sweater pocket for the time being.
Annette was looking peculiar, and I could tell she wanted an explanation, but then there was a commotion in the cattle pen and we looked to where Ivan and Slick were pushing cow rumps aside in order to get close to the trough. They glared at something on the ground out there, and I glanced at the cake knife again, seeing the unmistakable signs of blood.
“I'm going out to the cattle pen,” I imparted. “You keep Gina with you.”
Annette said, “1 hope your stock is okay.”
The day was on the wane as I proceeded across the yard and onto the cow path inside the pen, the cake knife gripped in my right hand within my sweater pocket. The cattle were rubbing against the fence and ignorantly surging toward the silage in the feed trough. Slick was saying, “You oughta get a photograph, Ivan.” My husband kept his eyes on one spot, his gloved hands on his hips, his left boot experimenting by moving something I couldn't see.
I got the cattle to part by tilting against them with all my weight. They were heavy as Cadillacs. And I made my toilsome way to my husband's side only to be greeted with a look of ill tidings and with an inquiry that was to justify all my grim forebodings. He asked, “Do you know how it happened, Riva?”
I regarded ground that was soggy with blood and saw the green creature that I'd so fervently prayed was long gone. He was lying on his scaly back and his yellow eyes were glowering as if the being were still enraged over the many stabbings into his heart. Death had been good for his general attractiveness, gloss- ing over his many physical flaws and giving him a childlike quality that tugged at my sympathy.
Again Ivan nudged the being with his boot, acting like it was no more than a cow, and asking me with great dismay, “How'd the dang thing get killed, do ya think?”
