Divisadero Read Online Free PDF Page B

began to crush her windpipe. Then
everything began darkening and she dropped to her knees and went limp. She was
near to Coop, she brought her face beside him and listened for the sound of his
breath beneath that of her own frantic breathing, and finally heard a whisper
of it. But he was so still. She nudged him and there was nothing. One eye badly
closed, covered in blood. She stayed beside him, her arms around her chest, as
if protecting Coop’s heart safe within her.
    Her father stared down at
them. Then he walked slowly over to the bed, picked up a sheepskin, and came
back and covered her with it. He ignored Coop’s body. He carried his daughter
over the broken glass until they were away from the cabin and he could put her
down, back on the earth. Then he took her by the hand, and never let go of her
on the twenty-minute walk down the hill to the farmhouse, the quarter horse
nodding beside them, and Anna screaming his name.
    He could see nothing, he sat up and could see no frontier between land
and sky. Storms had fi lled the valley. Rain and then sleet. Hail
clattering on the corrugated roof. He found himself in the very centre of the
room, as far as he could get from the smashed window that sucked in the gale.
Outside, the fi ve bannered fl ags that Anna had strung up a few weeks earlier fl ew parallel to the ground. Blue, red, green, the hint of yellow, and the now unseen white.
    Only the cuts on his face
felt sharp and alive. The rest of his body was numb and cold. He was going to
die here. He would die here, or walking down the hill.
Who was at the farmhouse now? He stood up slowly. The noise around him was so
loud he could not hear his own footsteps when he walked across the room, as if
he did not exist. He sat at the half-painted table and picked up a book of
Anna’s. It felt cold.
    When he woke he realized
he had been asleep at the table. There seemed to be a momentary clearing, but
the wind swivelled back and the cabin was again cut off by the storm. Just the flags snapping. He put his hand through the broken
window, to test the weather. Was Anna at the farmhouse? All those times she had
risen from the deck, laughing nervously, so that at fi rst he believed she was laughing against
him, or worse, at both of them. But she was frailer than he knew. She had
pointed twenty yards away and said, ‘ That ’ s what I want. A bathtub out there someday. ’ As if denying all that was happening between them.
    An hour later he was on
his knees, on the bare hill, scared he might veer from the path and be fully
lost in the unseen landscape. He was keeping to the narrow path by holding on
to its texture, brushing away snow to fi nd gravel or mud rather than grass. After leaving the cabin, he had
walked into a clutch of barbed wire, cutting open his cheek and tearing his
thin coat. He had turned back. When he reached the cabin, banging his arm
against its corrugated walls and moving alongside it to fi nd the steps, his face brushed the fl ags, and he grasped them, wound them
around his wrist, and pulled them loose. Come with me, Anna. And
turned back down the hill.
    The sky was darkening with
sleet and he could sense leaves circling in the wind all around him. But nearly
everything was invisible. The dead eye just ached. If you were a Buddhist,
you would rise above this. It would be a good thing, no? He kept moving
forward. A heavy push of water flung him sideways. He must have got onto the
footbridge and the sluice water had risen over it, and he was tumbling within
it down the hill, his clothes suddenly full of water and stones. His back
slammed across a tree, and that held him. He had a fury in his head, and he
didn’t allow himself to lose it. Not letting go of the tree trunk, he stood up
until he was touching the lowest horizontal branch, and moved along under it.
His face was unprotected from the sleet, but he kept holding the branch, moving
further; then his fingers touched the pesticide bag hanging from the tree.