When she dismounted, tight red muscles of buttocks tapered down to legs streaked with fat and sinew. He was transfixed by her Achilles tendon, with its own pulse like that at the nape of her neck. He wanted to reach out and nick it, to hobble her and taste her and sink his teeth into something unyielding. She turned as if sensing his thoughts and grinned at him. They were all meat under the skin, animal and human alike. Stroking his mane, she reached her arms over her head, stretching along the length of herself like a bloody piece of taffy, reaching for the door of the draft board office, long and attenuated, coiling like a spring, stretching thin as a hair. She pierced the keyhole, twisting into darkness, feeding herself through until she was nothing but a pinprick of blood on the latch and was gone, swallowed up between inside and outside, in some interminable, intermediate place. Vanished. Then she was whole and laughing on the other side. He snorted with his muzzle against the glass, watching her pick her bloody way through the darkened room. Around the standard-issue metal chairs, around the metal desk, past the metal scale and cabinet of medical equipment, stethoscope, ophthalmoscope, reflex hammer, blood pressure cuff. She made her way to the battered file cabinet and rifled through it, smearing blood on the neat manila folders. What was she doing? He wanted to scream, but had no voice, could do nothing but pace the length of the building wildly, searching for a way in. He watched as she found a single white card, and held it up for him to see. His draft card, the document that identified him as having registered with the board and assigned him to his induction center. He saw the spark at the instant he saw the flame and the match between her bony red fingers and her touching it to the edge, he saw the whole thing go up and collapse into ash in her palm where before the sugar had rested, and he couldn’t believe he was here, and he couldn’t believe he was seeing this and he cried out in his mind, this is not real this is not real this is not real, but the bloody footprints on the linoleum of the draft office looked real enough and the blood on the keyhole as she wormed her way back through, less gracefully now, more like a grub, and the ash on her palm—how had she held it?—which she blew in his face and he coughed against it and his sneeze felt real and her breath as she leaned in with her hand still gentle on his mane and whispered in his twitching beastly ear, Now you are free. Now you are free.
“Mr. Hayes, please wake up.” Eddie is kneeling over him, shaking him by the arm. It takes Tucker a moment to understand that he is still tangled in the sheets of his pallet on the parlor floor. Eddie is out of bed and dressed in stiff blue jeans, his red-checked shirt buttoned tightly at the cuffs and throat. His hair is wet and combed slick across his forehead. Tucker closes his eyes. Leave me alone to die.
“It’s nearly lunchtime,” the boy pleads. “Please don’t go back to sleep.”
His head is pounding, he feels worse than he did as a boy in the grip of the Spanish flu. The light is too bright and the morning heat makes Tucker feel like a specimen in a jar. He has no strength in his arms or legs, and he struggles to sit, leaning his weight against the back of the couch. He nearly falls over again but catches himself.
“Where’s Sonia?” he croaks.
“She’s outside. Mama asked her to take our picture. Something nice she could hang on the wall.”
“You seem to be feeling better,” Tucker says.
“If you were a bird,” Eddie says, worriedly, “you’d get left behind. Mama says birds won’t show their weakness even up to dying so that their flock won’t fly off without them. You can never tell a bird is really sick till he drops out of the sky.”
Tucker tries to piece together time. Two days ago he struck this boy with his car. Yesterday he walked into the woods and hunted ginseng. Last night, they came home tired but laughing. Mr. Hayes found a root, Cora Alley announced. A four-prong. Tucker had shown it off to Eddie and Sonia, counting the stress rings. Beginner’s luck, he’d said, but didn’t believe it. Cora had invited them to stay another night and, because it was late, he ignored Sonia’s scowl and agreed. Touching her lips to Eddie’s forehead, Cora felt for fever, but it seemed to Tucker her lips just needed to be pressed against something, anything at all.
“Well, I cannot be shown up by a bird,” Tucker says. He pulls himself up and staggers to the window that overlooks the front yard. Wearing an apron over her black bombazine dress, Cora Alley is scattering feed to her hens. She has washed her face and legs and exchanged her braid for a soft bun at the nape of her neck. She sways as she walks, plump and juicy as one of her blue-black Silkies.
“Your mama seems different today,” Tucker says.
Eddie follows his gaze. “She wants to look pretty for her picture.”
Tucker tugs on his clothes, feeling some strength return the further he gets from the dream. He is not a man given to superstition and he is angered by the second night’s ride, which can’t help but suggest something more to him. Which is absurd. Eddie watches him, still nervous, and he doesn’t want to scare the boy. He steps out onto the porch and, in the backyard, Sonia is fixing her box camera to its tripod. She must have been down to the car and back. They have all been awake for hours, while he suffered in his sleep.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asks.
“I tried,” she says. “You were a million miles away.”
Sonia looks like she spent a rough night as well. She has pressed her cheeks with powder and put on some lipstick but the makeup can’t disguise her pallor. Though she has set up her box camera for a long exposure, she still wears her Rolleiflex like a crucifix around her neck. Tucker thinks of that old story he heard as a child about a beautiful woman who always wore a crimson choker. One day her husband untied it and her head rolled off.
“I’m making a salt print,” Sonia says with more enthusiasm, “like they did during the Civil War. Back then all you needed was a handful of chemicals and some sunlight. I hope it turns out.”
“Everything you touch turns out,” Tucker says. Sonia looks at him uncertainly, unsure if he’s complimenting or criticizing. He doesn’t know himself and he is too tired to care. Instead, he walks to the kitchen where a cold biscuit and a cup of ersatz coffee have been left for him. That’s his problem, he thinks. He hasn’t had a real cup of coffee in three damned days.
The coffee has no flavor and the biscuit tastes of sawdust. While he is choking it down, Cora comes in carrying the tin she used to feed her hens. The breakfast scraps had gone to them and now she taps out the smallest crumbs and runs it under the faucet. Tucker feels his stomach clench at her approach. He has to get control of himself, he thinks. It is ridiculous to be this afraid of a woman.
“I’m worried I tired you,” Cora says with some concern.
He studies her face for mockery, but there is none. And yet she looks nothing like the worn-out, dusty creature of their first meeting. Maybe it’s the novelty of having someone around besides a boy—a man to walk with and talk to. But how is he to know? He cannot ask any of the questions on his mind. Did you ride me into town last night? I have been dreaming of you, have you been dreaming of me?
“Mrs. Hayes asked if there was anything you all might do to help before you left,” she says, to break the silence. “I’m running low on supplies and I could use a ride to the store. Would you be willing to drive when we’re done?”
What he really wants to do is crawl back under the covers, but there’s no safety there. He can hardly refuse her this one favor. “Of course,” he says. “It would be a pleasure.”
Sonia sticks her head through the door, finding them alone together in the kitchen. Tucker is eating his biscuit, Cora is washing out a pan, and yet he colors as if he’s been caught at something.
“Are you ready, Mrs. Alley?” Sonia asks. Cora wipes her hands on her apron and hangs it over the back of a chair. She turns to Tucker.
“Do I look presentable?”
He pushes away the memory of her Achilles tendon quivering between his teeth.
“Very much so, Mrs. Alley,” he says.
On the back porch, Sonia positions her next to Eddie while Tucker walks out to the camera. Is there a country boy anywhere in the world whose ears don’t stick out? Tucker wonders. Mother and son stand stiffly together, shoulders just touching, both looking as if every crop failure and plague of locust must be represented in this one posed portrait. It has been his experience, traveling with Sonia, that women and children only smile when they are caught off guard.
“Hold very still,” Sonia directs.
Eddie holds his eyes open wide to keep from blinking. Cora glances over at Tucker, trying to see what he sees. Sonia burrows under her drop cloth and as her ass moves higher into the air, his tired body is suddenly hit by a surge of desire. He feels emptied after last night, now all he wants is to fill himself back up.
“Eddie helped me this morning,” Sonia is saying from under the cloth. “We brushed the paper with salt water, then some silver nitrate I had in my case—”
“When you’re done, let’s go,” he interrupts her, leaning in so only she can hear. “I have to get out of here.” Sonia surfaces briefly.
“I still need to develop the picture,” she says.
“Send it to Washington like everything else.”
“Then it will belong to the WPA. They’ll never get it back.”
His need to be away from this place, to be alone with Sonia is fresh and urgent. You don’t understand, he wants to say, I need us to leave. Something terrible is happening to me.
“I’m sorry,” she says indulgently, ducking back under the cloth. “It won’t take long, then we’ll go.”
Tucker returns his attention to the pair on the porch: Eddie with his staring eyes and hair drying crisp and roosterish, Cora smooth and impenetrable. The two look like a wager between God and the Devil, he thinks, with Eddie fair and Cora dark. He slots himself in the frame between them—husband to that woman, father to that son. He could sit on this mountaintop and scratch out enough food to fill a belly and grow a boy. But no, that’s not it, he thinks. He doesn’t want to be with Cora, he wants to be Cora, living up here, needing nothing from anyone, waking every morning with the freedom to disappear.
“Done,” says Sonia, releasing them. Cora and Eddie exhale, their shoulders and faces relax. Tucker turns to Sonia.
“Take a walk with me?”
She makes him wait while under the cloth she pulls out the piece of homemade salted paper and fits it against the negative. She slides the wood-and-glass plate out and sets it in the sun to expose. It will need to sit for ten minutes, so that’s what she offers Tucker.
They walk out past the barn toward the drop-off behind the house. It is hot in the sun but cool in the shade where an east wind bows the red-orange treetops. Tucker aches to put his arm around Sonia, but she is annoyed at being interrupted and is letting him know.
“The blue of this sky should be reserved for the robes of consecrated virgins,” he says. She nods. Yes, it should.
“Ansel Adams is out photographing the Sierra Nevadas, isn’t he?”
“I think so,” she says.
“The emptiness of landscape is so powerful.”
Sonia studies him, wondering what he’s driving at. “I never thought of landscape as empty.”
“Not empty,” he clarifies. “I guess I meant open to interpretation.”
“I prefer faces,” she replies.
“I’m sick of faces,” he says.
“Rocks and trees aren’t complicated,” Sonia answers. “That’s why you like them.”
“Don’t go to Europe, darling,” Tucker says abruptly, taking her hands in his. “Why wallow in gore when we could wait out the war up here? I could do a little farming, you could photograph the mountains. You’re twice as talented as Ansel Adams.”
Sonia is surprised by his urgency. “Have you forgotten you’ve been drafted?”
“A person could vanish up here. Look around.”
She casts her eyes over the bright autumn color of the hollow and beyond to identical, roadless ridges stretching on for days.
“Tucker, this isn’t a game. If you don’t show up for induction, they’ll put you in jail.”
“Not if they can’t find me.”
Before he dreamed it, he didn’t even know he was thinking it. Now he’s said it aloud and it’s become possible. He continues, desperate for her to understand.
“So many points on the damned map, Sonia. We could keep going forever and ever and never find anything truer than right here. Why not stay? I could write a masterpiece up here. Where there’s no Rise and Sing agitprop bullshit or Noël Coward faggots swilling champagne. I could write about real freedom.”
Sonia interrupts. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Something is happening to me here. I’ve been dreaming I can fly,” he says, calming his voice because he can hear how crazy he’s starting to sound. “That Cora took me—”
“You’ve been dreaming that Cora Alley can make you fly?”
“She tells these stories—”
“So you’ve said. The lovers and the panther. Why do you think she told you that story?”
“Because I asked her to.”
“Tucker, there is no magic here,” Sonia says. “Cora Alley is trying to seduce you. She shares just enough of herself to give you something to hang your desires on, and then she lets your imagination fill in the blanks. Look at her life—it’s the only power she has. Cora Alley is no mystery to me. Where do you think I come from?”
“I have no idea where you come from,” he says.
“Exactly,” Sonia answers.
His head is pounding from lack of sleep and lack of coffee. He shouldn’t have told her. He knew she wouldn’t understand.
“I think this says more about you than it does about Cora Alley,” Tucker replies coldly. “She asked me to take her to the store. I suppose we should get going.” He turns back to the cabin and Sonia puts her hand on his arm, as she always does, wanting to stop him.
“We can talk about after. After you serve, after I get back—”
He turns, longing to stay. “Sonia, I wanted you from the minute you first slid into the front seat with that damn camera. But I don’t want you to become one of those women who spend their lives chasing depravity and ruin. Life is about more than war and work. You don’t have to dwell on human misery. It’s not you.”
“If you’ve already decided who I am,” she throws at him, “what do you need me for?”
“Am I wrong?” he asks vehemently.
Sonia is staring over his shoulder and he turns to follow her gaze. Eddie has gone back into the house to change but Cora is still standing in her best dress, watching them. She doesn’t look happy but she doesn’t look concerned, either, as if she were expecting the scene before her. Could Sonia be right? Tucker has the swift and certain feeling they’ve been set up. It was Cora’s plan all along to get Sonia excited about making this portrait, to provoke a fight, to have Tucker to herself. She is trying to divide them. Stop. He gives himself a shake.
“Cora is waiting for you,” Sonia says.
“Are you coming with us?” he asks. But he knows her answer. She has already exposed the negative, she still has to develop the print, fix it and wash it and hang it up to dry. There’s no stopping the process now that it has begun.
“Enjoy yourself,” she says.
He leans in to kiss her. “Please, let’s not fight. We have so little time left.”
She looks as if she wants to say something more, her eyes are searching his face but he doesn’t know what she wants from him.
“That’s right,” she says at last. “We have so little time.”
Seeing the argument is over, Cora slowly advances toward them. She looks very proper in her bombazine and as Tucker joins her, he feels they could be any country couple walking to a Sunday meeting. There is nothing nefarious about him driving her to the store for chrissakes, yet he wishes Sonia would change her mind. He finds himself afraid to be alone with Cora Alley.
“Hey, wait up! Can I come?” Eddie calls. He has changed back into his work clothes and his shirt is unbuttoned and flapping as he races after them.
“Of course—” Tucker begins.
“We can’t rightly leave our guest alone,” Cora interrupts. She speaks carefully, like a lady from the city, in a voice he hasn’t heard before. “Why don’t you see if you can be of help since Mrs. Hayes so kindly took your picture?”
Sonia lifts the Rolleiflex around her neck and points it at them. Tucker feels caught in the crosshairs. But no, she thinks better of it, and swings the camera back to the hollow, turning her lens to the rocks and trees.
“Cora,” he says, making bold use of her first name. “Which way?”
“Stay straight on this road,” she answers.
“Do they sell coffee beans at this store?”
“They’re expensive.”
“Please,” he says. “I want to get them for you. Let it be my treat.”