(no subject)
NOTE: This isn't the last completed chapter. There's a glitch on the next page that makes it display as "No Entry," but Chapter 21 is at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html and Chapter 22 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 20
The attic room was short and narrow, its sparse furnishings hinting that it hadn’t been lived in for awhile. David had left the promised sofa bed folded out, with rumpled sheets and blanket, and that plus a small bedside table with a lamp and a chest of drawers nearby were the only furniture. Though the closet space was generous enough and Ennis was surprised to find an adjoining bathroom with a shower stall, the room was directly under the roof, so the ceiling sloped down far enough that only a child could stand fully upright at the far ends. But the window faced east, toward a dazzling view of the Lake, with morning sunlight blazing through it at the moment, and the bare walls were painted a clear lemonade-yellow. The overall effect was rather like an austere but cheerful monk’s cell in a tower.
Ennis pulled the sheets and blanket up into place, not bothering to fold the bed back into a sofa, and unpacked what was now everything he owned. No problem finding room enough in the chest of drawers and closet for the sparse contents of his suitcase: a few changes of well-worn clothes, an extra jacket, an envelope with photographs, mostly of Alma Junior and Jenny; a folded paper sack containing a miscellany of small items he could not bring himself to leave behind. A toothbrush, soap, razor and the aspirin he sometimes needed now were the only items added to the bathroom. Having something practical to do relieved his current uneasy feeling of being in the middle of a hectic stream on a small boat with no paddle, being spun around randomly with only glimpses of the shoreline going by.
But the tote bag contained the items that would define the place he lived, wherever he went. He unrolled Jack’s quilt on the bed, the two shirts unfurling little by little, somewhat wrinkled. Seeing them, Ennis felt a brief moment of relief from his vague anxiety; and suddenly he was sitting on the narrow bed, just as he had after that first trip to Lightning Flat, his arms gathering the shirts and wrapping around his body wordlessly. Despite the brilliant sunlight streaming through the window, he shivered a little, and pulled Jack’s quilt up around his shoulders.
He hadn’t been unaware of the world that existed outside Wyoming. He’d spun out many winter evenings and Sundays watching the same television images that everyone else saw; attended a movie or looked at pictures in magazines on rarer occasions; and when people talked about far-off states and countries he’d usually been casually listening whether he’d said anything or not. But in the back of his mind it had all been unmoving, unpopulated, far removed from him and vanishing from his view at a moment’s notice. Now that seemed to have turned inside-out. He imagined the highway toward Signal that he’d driven so many times, the flat windswept road that led into Riverton, the main street and post office, library, church, the familiar route to Monroe’s house that he’d driven to pick up Junior or Jenny on so many weekends -- the world where he been physically present only a few days before. But it was those scenes that were now like very old photographs with images still clear but the people in them aged or gone and the settings changed beyond recognition. While he was a little ashamed at the irrational panic he felt, it was there all the same.
But the shirts still seemed alive in his arms, and he imagined he could feel even their threads, crossing over and under each other to form the fabric; the little hard cloth-covered nubs of the snaps, even the flecks of lint and dust on them here and there. It was only a few hours ago that he’d last seen Jack, and Ennis knew that Jack had meant what he said. He’d grown adept at catching those almost-inaudible whispers and touches that had begun just a year ago but so far away, hardly more than a breeze brushing against his skin; but there would be no more of that, at the very point that his exile was beginning in earnest. Ennis had no doubt that Jack would keep his promise to remain nearby and the thought made him quickly glance over his shoulder. Jack, Jack, you were wrong, I can’t do this but the panic attack was subsiding. He released the shirts to spread over his lap, checked the photo in Jack’s shirt pocket and reflected that when or if Jack contacted him again, he was no further away here than he’d been in Wyoming.
Now the shirts had to have a new home. The door to the closet, currently holding only the wedding suit he hadn’t thought to get rid of, had sturdy coat hooks on both the inside and outside; and he hung the two shirts on the outside hook experimentally, somehow not liking their being shut in darkness in the midst of this light-filled room. But a feeling of vague but grating dissatisfaction stirred, an offense at something unsuitably casual, like sacred objects displayed in a store window; and he shifted them to the familiar territory behind the door, the postcard secured with one of a few stray thumbtacks left in the wood.
An extra hat had taken up much of the suitcase; and after inspecting the room for a moment he hung it on a nail left in the wall near the door, then looked at it with satisfaction for a few moments. After he smoothed out Jack’s quilt to cover the rest of the bed, the room was no longer a strange or anonymous place to him. It, and by extension the house, were now the place of safety in his life.
David had forgotten to leave any towels in the bathroom, and Ennis headed back downstairs to the office next to David’s bedroom, remembering the clothes hamper and tiny linen closet in the dimly-lit recess. Scooping up a few towels and closing the linen closet door, he glanced to his left and spotted two small framed paintings on the short, dimly-lit wall. They were smaller than the pictures and photos he’d half-noticed that morning, most obviously chosen for interesting scenery or for decorative value; and he stood gazing at these half-hidden canvases for several minutes.
One was a watercolor picture, somewhat crudely done but his color-sensitive eyes were drawn to it first. It showed a bird taking flight: a large one with the smooth domed head, massive hooked beak and stern expression of an eagle or a kite, not ramping up at an angle from the ground as birds usually do but flying straight up, muscular wings half-extended and the head slightly inclined, somehow suggesting an enormous effort and determination. Ennis could almost feel the bird’s muscles straining frantically against gravity, but it was the background that made the image mysterious and disturbing. The bird was flying up in the exact middle of a geyser of fire.
Orange-red toward the top of the canvas, amber and flaxen at the base, it rose in a pent-up torrent, droplets and sheets spattering and showering down; with an infernal vapor swirling around the bird and half-obscuring it in a few places. If the background Ennis was looking at was the sky, it was no sky he had ever seen: two crescent moons faced each other from the opposite top corners.
The other framed piece, less startling but no less baffling, looked more restrained to Ennis, who didn’t have the inner vocabulary to identify it as a more mature style with more subtle coloring. It looked at first like a corner of a park or someone’s carefully landscaped back yard: a small but generously spreading tree, covered with a veil of white blossoms, growing next to a retaining wall. The earth-red colors of the brick threw the flowers, a few drawn with four large, identical petals, into sharp relief; and the snowy treetop formed a sloping canopy just above the top of the wall. Only a tall stone obelisk in the background, and a stone slab closer to the foreground, told Ennis that this was no park or secluded corner of a formal garden. It was a drawing of a cemetery.
But the overall effect was neither funereal nor foreboding. This drawing, too, had a moon in one corner and its light illuminated a patch of brick in the wall here, a tiny clump of white blossoms there. The tree, wall and obelisk cast long dark shadows that contrasted with the light slanting through the white treetop, giving the viewer a glimpse of a delicate latticework of spindly branches supporting it. Looking at it, Ennis could almost feel the coarse nubbiness of the brick, the smells of earth and rock and burgeoning vegetation, and a warm, sensual night breeze.
Both pictures seemed to glow with an ambient light that reached a few inches outside the frames; and Ennis felt a prickling in his scalp and an edgy chill; not unlike the sensation in the far-off Riverton church when he’d felt Jack’s unseen hand in his. He knew he was looking at something significant in his new home, an enigmatic glimpse behind the doors that David had left half-closed during their telephone conversations. He thought of the two shirts and postcard upstairs, hanging in darkness at the moment but in a pinpoint of light in his imagining; and knew that what he was looking at matched in both substance and significance. He didn’t know how long he’d stood in the dim recess, staring at the two images that David had obviously intended to be not quite hidden but out of public view, and the knock on the kitchen’s staircase door startled him.
Author's note: This is a transitional chapter, with Ennis still getting acquainted with his new home. He will be getting out of the house in the next chapter!
Index to previous chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html