Return to Oakpin(109)

            “It’s true,” she said, her face victorious. It was like using walkie-talkies; she speaking in his ear, he in hers.

            “Say it,” he said.

            “You’re with someone,” she said, and smiled ridiculously.

            He looked into her eyes.

            She tapped his chest. “I put you in a story.”

            He looked around at the people near them by the wall, every face in the room focused on the amazing singer in her stunning white shirt. The room was shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, packed.

            “Is that a good idea?”

            She nodded—it was easier than yelling.

            “Want to hear something?” he said. It was intoxicating for him, because whatever he was going to say, he wanted to hear it too.

            “I can hear everything,” she said.

            “I want to kiss you,” he said. “I’m trying to get real.”

            “Here I am.”

            He pulled her past a group stamping their boots in the side doorway and out the tracked entryway into the sudden silence of the cascading snow. It was so quiet it hurt, and even in the new dark the world glowed as an underwater scene. Every three seconds the entire snowfield flashed blue and then white in the pulsing neon profile of the huge pronghorn antelope that was the bar’s sign. The dark sky was layers of fat flakes now floating in unending echelons, tons as ounces, an ocean of it all, and they were snowy in a minute. “Have you felt like this before?” he asked her.

            “You haven’t and I haven’t.”

            “You haven’t and I haven’t,” he said. His ears were ringing. He put his hand on her elbow and leaned and watched her face in the snowfall. “Snowy people,” he said, and they were both briefly dizzy as if the planet had shifted or become some other cold place rich with falling snow. “Stand still,” he said. “Watch me closely. Study my resolve.” Then he said, “Resolve,” again and put a finger up between them as if it were the key to the lesson. “Watch me not kiss you.” And then his lesson disappeared as she grinned and pushed his finger aside, and their faces fused, and they kissed standing in that parking lot until they were capped with snow.

            “I watched you,” she said. “I studied your resolve.”

            “Good, because I forgot. But come on, who am I in the story? I hope I’m a detective. Shy but brilliant, right?”

            “You’re the young man who dances with the girl and scolds her all the while.”

            “What does she do?”

            “He’s a character who runs everywhere, and he’s a scolder. But she can’t hear him because her ability to hear has been canceled out by his hand on her back. She can feel his hand on her back, right where it’s supposed to be from dancing class. She can only feel his hand.” She reached and brushed the snow off his hair. “I love the snow,” she said.

            “It’s snowing,” he said. “But the snow has nothing whatsoever to do with what just happened.”

            • • •

            In Oakpine it was snowing hard. There was a thing with Jimmy’s eyes now every time he woke up, and it was that the light hurt them in a way that he almost felt as pleasure. He could feel the muscles in his eyelids working, and then the patterns struck his eye like a cold wind, burning in a blurred focus for a few seconds into the resolution of the room. The shimmering plastic that formed the ceiling and covered the large door was always moving like water, and Jimmy turned his head when he was lying down so he could see the hard outline of the chair or the table or the sill of the pretty little window. He was amused by the illusive beauty his eyes brought, and he was patient with their weariness.