by Marvin Shackelford
Gowan sat behind the wheel of his pickup, watching his boss’s wife’s ass work up the sidewalk to a plain-brick house. She dragged her seven-year-old son along by the wrist. An hour earlier he’d been sitting with the boy in the Vanderpools’ living room, a sprawling, remodeled house sitting within sight of the Alabama line and hung with portraits of Confederate soldiers of no relation to the family. Billy was a serious kid. He asked Gowan how the cattle reacted to cold, how production was holding up, whether snow would bother them. He wouldn’t be swayed to cartoons and video games, wanted to know about hay bales and feed troughs. A little businessman, too smart for his own good. They’d waited on the stiff sofa until Maisie came down the steps, hair pinned high and asking to be zipped.
Gowan lit a cigarette and cracked the window. Everyone was saying snow, a lot. It was cold enough. He watched Maisie sway smartly in her long wool coat. Gowan wondered sometimes, following the lady of the house around, what he was doing wrong with his life. She knocked at the front door, and a moment later an old woman opened up. They spoke, and the lady looked to the truck. Billy disappeared inside and Maisie came back, slid into the cab with chattering teeth and a frown.
“Old bitch,” she said. “Piece of advice, Steve. Meet the family before you get married.”
Gowan pushed the truck into gear and backed out of the drive. He rolled slowly across the gravel back to the highway. He was taking her to a meeting, some cattle thing. Presentation for breeders at the fairgrounds, and he wasn’t too thrilled. There was plenty better to be doing.
“Why so slow?” Maisie said.
Gowan frowned and pressed on the accelerator. Dust billowed, he went the mile and a half down the road, looked and hit the pavement without slowing for the stop sign. Maisie giggled and slid across the seat, pressed against him and pulled his arm around her shoulders. She plucked at his ear with her lips, hot breath wrapping up the inside of his skull.
“I’ve been waiting so hard for this,” she told him.
#
Gowan had been around long enough to know he wasn’t the first. He drove Pulaski’s outskirts with his arm draped over Maisie Vanderpool, feeling thin at the edges or maybe knotted up, too tight in the middle. He’d been around for the end of the first, a guy named Crosby who’d drifted in from South Dakota. They were at it when Gowan started renting the house from her husband and working in the dairy. He’d skipped town in the middle of the night, though, with warrants out on him and hadn’t been seen since. She started after Gowan soon after, and he’d let her. She showed up at the barn saying she had to check on things, called him into the house to hang pictures or move furniture. Stupid stuff, always him. She’d brush against him, get him into painting the trim around a doorframe, talk about how good he looked in a pair of jeans. Morris, she said, never wore jeans and never helped with nothing and just never nothing.
“I’m so clumsy,” she said the last time she called him in, holding a hammer and a nail up to the wall in her upstairs bathroom. “Show me how to do it.”
Gowan had crossed the short space and wrapped his hand over hers. She kissed him on the mouth and stripped him naked. And they’d kept on. He felt certain everyone in the dairy knew—they’d known about her before. They kept quiet, though. It hadn’t gotten off the farm, best he knew, and Morris Vanderpool didn’t know anything about anything. He was twenty years older than Maisie, had scooped her from some small Nashville beauty pageant for a trophy wife. He worked at the capitol, lawyering for judges and senators, kept an apartment and didn’t come home often as not. Said his son needed to grow up rural, though, and left them in the country.
Morris was a horse’s ass, and Gowan didn’t feel guilty for him in the least. What bothered him was where things went, running around with the boss’s wife. He didn’t know if going head-on in love was the thing to do, job aside, but he was headed that way.
“Let’s skip this thing,” he said. “Just go dancing.”
“I promised Morris I’d do it.” She shrugged and stretched out a hand. “Smoke.”
He settled a little harder on the gas. He handed her his cigarettes—she’d more or less given up smoking long ago. Only did it around him. There was a lot just for around him, he figured, and a good bit for everywhere else, too.
“We don’t get a whole lot of nights like this,” he said. “Child-free and all.”
“It’s just a meeting.” Maisie opened up a small compact mirror that glowed softly from the inside. She went to work on her face, touching and patching. “A 4-H thing, maybe. It’s in their building. I don’t even know. You haven’t heard anything about it?”
“I just milk.”
“Honey.” She patted his face with her makeup brush, got a smile out of him. “Just an hour. The rest of the night it’s you and me. Whatever you wanna do. Okay?”
Gowan felt her hand work along his thigh. “Whatever we have to do.”
“You’re my guy.”
He sped into the city limits, passed the farmers’ co-op, and the fairgrounds spread dark across the valley ahead. He pulled into the narrow entrance and crept toward the cluster of buildings at the top of a rise. Behind them lay the open field where the traveling carnival set up every autumn, their rides and games. Other vehicles already waited, pressed tight in the gravel along the side of the 4-H barn where they judged livestock competitions. Gowan stared at the dead grass beyond as he edged to a stop. He put on the brake and killed the engine, and in the sudden, ringing silence Maisie scoot-hopped across the seat and started straightening herself.
“You’re my farmhand,” she said. “Here on account of the cold, being out at night. And in case I’m too dumb to understand it all. Okay?”
She put on a beauty-queen smile but he saw it there, something beautiful and sincere. He didn’t quite recognize it, knew it wasn’t for him. Running around secret was one thing, playing stupid another. But he nodded. They stepped out of the truck. The temperature was still dropping, and he shivered. He checked the sky. Maisie rushed in, but he stopped with a group of smokers by the entrance. One said something about the weather, and the others nodded. Three of them looked about like him—somebody’s foremen or farmers in their own right, and they made Gowan feel better being there. The fourth man stood a step away, chin up in a suit and tie. He reeked of the Morris Vanderpool type, and it made Gowan uneasy all over again. He took short drags and waited to toss his butt to the ground until the others had disappeared through the door.
Inside the building, low metal bleachers ran either side of its length. Everyone sat in a huddle to the right, twenty or thirty people, and their low conversations echoed. Kerosene heaters stood evenly spaced along the bottom row of seats, but jackets weren’t coming off. In the sandy dirt in front of the bleachers sat a projector and screen, blank light shining out and waiting for the film. Gowan spotted Maisie with an older couple who smiled and listened to her. She’d produced a pen and yellow legal pad from her purse. He walked to them and she looked up with a smile.
“This is our man Steve Gowan,” she said, then let out the fakest-sounding laugh he’d ever heard. “Had him bring me in case it gets too complicated.”
The woman said looked Gowan over, and the man reached out to shake. Maisie patted the seat beside her, but he climbed to the back row to get some space. He settled and waited, rubbing his hands and staring at the back of Maisie’s head as she laughed with her friends. Vanderpool friends, he thought. She was a Vanderpool. He was their man. He didn’t like the sound of it. Before long a big, bald man moved to the front of the crowd and waved for quiet. He picked up a stack of index cards and clicked a button on his projector, bringing into focus a sidelong view of a long, thick bull. The man stood a moment, face working into a smile before he finally spoke.
“Thanks for coming out,” he said, voice shallow in the barn. “My name is Hank Creedy. I know it’s cold and it’s Friday and you’re busy, so thank you. We’re here to talk about artificial insemination, AI technologies, in which the semen of a male is extracted and implanted in the female via outside assistance. The process has been going on most of this century, especially with cattle and swine, but also animals diverse as honeybees and humans.
“Uh,” he said, glancing at his notes. “We’re of course interested in the cattle.”
He got some chuckles, but his face suggested he’d been completely serious. He went on, saying many still were unfamiliar with the process, and then he launched full-swing into a history of insemination, natural and otherwise. Gowan saw it was spanning thousands of years and tuned out. He fed the cows, milked the cows, did just what there was to do. Someone else could breed if a bull wasn’t enough. He saw Maisie scribbling, staring intently at the screen and then jotting notes. Hank Creedy worked up to the Russians, slides of all sorts of animals until the commies were the first to extensively impregnate cows artificially. Then he came back to America and technical details. Gowan watched Maisie write. She dragged him out to work for her husband when they could have a whole night together. He was jealous and a little surprised by it. He felt betrayed by each stupid fact she put to paper. He couldn’t stop himself thinking it.
She said all the time what a fool Morris was. Didn’t treat her right, anybody could see that, and all he did was show, aside from paychecks. And Gowan worked his ass off for it before paying part back to Vanderpool for rent on his rundown house. Maisie was as much a piece in it all, married to it. Gowan wondered what he was—maybe some artificial thing running between the two Vanderpools. He was cow spunk, frozen and thawed and used to keep things running. Hank Creedy got into slides of a red Angus bull mounting a fake set of cow hips and explained what he called the extraction process. Some murmurs went around the room. Everyone wanted to see it, Gowan figured, about as much as he did. Creedy finally flashed off that to a picture of himself, shiny with sweat and waving to the camera with his arm inside a big rubber glove.
“The impregnation process,” he said before shifting to a shot of a gun capped by a long needle, “is messy. We insert the needle through the heifer’s vagina and thread it through the cervix to reach the uterus.”
“That’s the womb?” an old man asked.
“That’s another, less scientific word for it,” Creedy said. “The cervix, however, is extremely difficult to navigate as it’s not a straight passage. The needle must be guided, which requires entering the rectum to grasp the cervix through the lining of the intestine.”
The crowd stayed quiet. The slides progressed to show their presenter in a vague room the dull-white color of a laboratory, approaching a harnessed cow, lifting her tail. He had the glove on one hand and held the injection gun in the other. Gowan watched the slides click along, showing the cow straight on from the side and Hank Creedy’s gloved arm disappearing by segments into the heifer’s rear end, his face going from smile to something tighter as he got deeper and felt around. He kept talking, explaining. Creedy’s face tightened and loosened, got tight again. Then he brightened and up came the gun.
Gowan stood and pinged his way down the bleachers and went out the door. This wasn’t something he signed up for. He wasn’t paid for it, and he didn’t see the point sitting through it. He blew out a long breath that hung visible for a long moment, dug out his cigarettes. Men near enough to fucking a cow. He didn’t need it. He’d wait on Maisie and they’d get the hell out. He settled against a lamppost and then saw it. Everything was going solid white.
He looked up. It was snowing, really snowing. Fat, wet flakes already turning the cars in the lot, the nighttime fields, everything blank and smooth. He hadn’t seen snow in years, was surprised by it, and wondered if it’d drop all they’d talked about.
#
Gowan watched the landscape chalk over for half an hour before people filtered from the show barn, all stopping, startled, to look back and forth between the sky and ground. A good inch already lay at their feet. Maisie stepped out and he waited before drove to her, saw her stare up and smile and spin in a white flurry. She laughed with her friends, the old couple, before they walked to their car and she began looking for him. He pulled forward and sat with his foot on the clutch as she climbed into the cab.
“This is amazing,” she said, panting. He pulled forward, fell into the short line of cars headed for the gate. “Where’d you disappear to?”
“Needed some air.”
“And you got snow. So lovely.” Her compact flared to life, and she smacked her lips. “You didn’t miss much. Turned into a sales pitch right after the demonstration stuff.”
Gowan pulled onto the highway and headed downtown, taking it easy. He didn’t like driving on it. Everything felt grounded, but he didn’t want to risk it. The streets were busy, people plowing around to see the snow better. Slushy tire tracks split each lane, and he stuck to them, hoping for more traction. Maisie pressed to the window to watch everything whiten. They crossed downtown, looked over the dirty post office, blunt jail, the greenish courthouse. A few kids stood by their cars, pushing each other and trying to catch snowflakes in their mouths. Gowan circled around, eased off a hill to the little steakhouse in the creek bottom below downtown. They took big, careful steps through the lot and walked inside to find it nearly empty, a couple waitresses and a cook sitting at the window with cigarettes, watching out.
“Hey,” one of the women said over her shoulder. “Just sit wherever.”
They took a booth in back, looked silently through the blinds. They ordered and ate, Gowan glancing constantly from the white outside to the tabletop, saw the snow collecting along the walls and bleachers and press box of the baseball field across the street and then turned back to the salt and pepper shakers. Then his food. He picked at it, stomach uneasy and head full.
“What,” Maisie said after a while. She watched him, eyes narrow. “You’re acting funny.”
“Just a little jumpy with it.” Gowan waved a hand in the air. “Snow. Cattle. Husbands.”
“Men and cows.” Maisie nodded, lifted the napkin from her lap and laid it over her plate. “So you’re mad.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Because we went to a meeting. Took an hour. You didn’t even sit it through.”
“Because I’m y’all’s man,” Gowan said. “I’m riding backseat to everything, and you don’t care, you don’t nothing.”
“You know I love you.”
“I’m tired of being a stud you hire out.”
“You can’t help that. Being a stud comes natural to you, honey.”
He didn’t laugh, and she stared at her hands. When she looked up her eyes were wet.
“Just tell me what you want me to do.”
Gowan shook his head. He wanted to tell her something good, a perfect I-love-you that made things okay, but he wasn’t sure what it would be. He had ideas. Thoughts of getting a state or two away and doing things right. The notion scared him, though. They watched each other a minute, and then she slid out and walked to the restroom. He lit a cigarette, left a tip and paid the bill. He stepped outside to wait. While they’d eaten the truck had been buried in snow. It stuck solid to the ground and buildings, everything in sight. Piling up, already a couple inches. Maisie came out, buttoning her jacket, and gave him a smile.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” she said. “Ready for the bar?”
“Snow’s worrying me. It’s getting deep.”
“Do we have to go home? Can you drive it?”
“Think so.”
Gowan opened the door for Maisie and then crawled behind the wheel. He left the lot, tires slipping, and climbed the hill to the slightly-better highway. They drove away from town, passing the last red light and then the high school before creeping up on a plow truck. They followed it past the emptied fairgrounds, into the start of the countryside. Gowan slowed at the dirt road leading to the aunt’s house, came to a stop and watched as the plow went on without them. He stared up the blanketed road before turning in.
“Is it that bad?” Maisie asked.
He didn’t answer. He drove with one hand gripping the wheel and the other the gearshift, mesmerized by the falling and fallen snow. They cut fresh tracks—no one had been through since it started. Maisie scooted close and took hold of his arm, squeezing tight. Gowan felt himself loosen, knew they were fighting but he didn’t want to be. He leaned over long enough to brush her lips, taste their coat of sweet gloss. He told her they were all right, unsure it was true. But they made the woman’s driveway, and Maisie slid over again and looked out.
“Will you get him?” she asked. “I don’t want in this.”
Gowan climbed out and crunched to the porch. He rang the bell and waited, snow flinging into his face and collecting on his jacket. He tried to remember all the snow he’d seen over the years but could only recall dustings, an inch or two here and there. He pressed the doorbell once more and immediately heard the locks come undone, and then the door swung in. Morris Vanderpool’s aunt, eighty if she was a day, stood in the foyer dressed in flannel and blue jeans. Like she aimed to head out any minute. She looked him up and down.
“Ms. Vanderpool? I’m Steve Gowan. Maisie’s in the truck, wanted me to grab Billy.”
“Wrong family. I’m a Mitchell,” she said, looking past Gowan to the dusty-white headlights of his truck. “Guess it’s too cold for the princess. Come on. I have to wake him up.”
She let Gowan inside, walked him into the front room and pointed at the couch before disappearing down the hall. The room wasn’t what he expected from a Vanderpool, or Mitchell, whatever she was. Framed pictures of astronauts hung on the walls, sat on shelves. They wore big smiles, posed in NASA or military uniforms before a half-furled flag. She had photos of shuttles and test sites, moon rocks and black-and-white aerospace pioneers. A cluster of photos sat on the coffee table, a small shrine to the Challenger disaster. He recognized the woman teacher, the fiery explosion photographed from a distance. He felt he’d walked into an obsession, the weird corner of someone’s brain. If Morris Vanderpool had an astronaut in the family, Gowan felt sure he’d have heard it. There was no explaining the room that he could think of.
On a corner bookcase were the signature pieces—replicas of the Apollo 11 shuttle, its lander, figurines of the men in spacesuits holding a stiff little flag resting on the top shelves. Below were commemorations of subsequent flights, the rover and a spacesuited golfer. It thrilled Gowan a little, like he’d stumbled into a temple erected to a childhood dream. Everyone, twenty or thirty years ago, wanted to be an astronaut. They were men who knew what was what in life, cut their path and lived in glory.
He paused at the TV stand and lifted a frame from atop the set. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—and the third mab whose name he couldn’t recall—behind the glass of a quarantine room, speaking with Dick Nixon through a microphone. They looked happy as hell, contained or not. A message was scribbled on the photograph, Couldn’t have done it without you, Stella, and Gowan thought it was signed by Armstrong. He held it, thinking about space and how cold it must get. But it must be wonderful, too, for men to throw themselves out into it, over and over. Otherwise they’d stay planet-side and work on farms, run around with women, carry on like anybody else.
“That’s a good one.” Ms. Mitchell’s voice made Gowan jump. “Found it at a yard sale in Arkansas fifteen years ago. Never have figured out who Stella is.”
“It’s incredible.” He handed her the picture, and she replaced it. “Like history in here.”
“Well. Those who cannot remember.”
“Are doomed, right?”
“Condemned.” She pushed her thick glasses up the bridge of her nose and let out a long breath. “Billy’s getting ready. I’d offer you something, but.”
She waved her hand in the air. Gowan stood, hands in his pockets, and the old lady eyed him. She seemed to expect him to say something. She looked like an owl, and that made him think she should speak. Give him something to work with. He was about to comment on the weather, say it would be a rough drive home, but she cleared her throat.
“You can’t possible think you’re the first,” she said. “Do you?”
Gowan didn’t open his mouth. His shoulders half went up in a shrug, but he stopped them. He knew what he was, but that wasn’t her business. He suddenly didn’t want it to be. Ms. Mitchell watched him, eyes beady and sharp but maybe a little sad, too. He couldn’t tell.
“Watch yourself. You’ll go nowhere. And there’s Billy. Take care.” She turned and rearranged some figurines on one of her shelves. “Take care going home.”
Billy walked in sleepy-eyed and rumpled. He shook Gowan’s hand and asked how the meeting was, if he learned anything. He promised the boy he’d tell him all about it, though he knew he’d edit the inside parts. Ms. Mitchell bent at the waist, held her arms out for her great-nephew, and he hugged her neck fiercely. They giggled together, each saying they’d miss the other, and she shuffled them to the door, into the snow. Billy gasped and leapt into the yard, kicking his feet and scooping handfuls for tiny snowballs. Gowan eyed the road, felt an urge to hurry. He looked at the old woman as she shut the door, neither smiling nor frowning but watching closely until she’d locked him out. Sealed herself in, ready for some unknown takeoff.
He got Billy in the truck. He held his hands to the vents, trying to thaw them, and Gowan backed out, turned and headed for home. He thought they might be in trouble. The road was lost, a vague rise between the ditches already near filled. He navigated by mailboxes and tree lines and fencerows and, when he could find it, stretches of gravel swept clear by the wind. Those bare spots felt like patches of sureness in a blank-white sea of doubt. But there wasn’t enough. He made the highway, looked both ways. Couldn’t tell the plow he followed from town had been past. It was a dozen miles to the house, back road through the hills. They wouldn’t make it.
“We won’t make it,” he told Maisie. “You want to go back to your aunt’s?”
“Hell, no,” she said. “I mean, we couldn’t put her out. Really don’t think we can?”
“It’s thick.” He watched the wipers, icing and troubled. Billy turned his head back and forth between them, excited. Maisie reached an arm around the boy’s shoulders and squeezed Gowan’s arm with her hand, but it didn’t reassure him. “I don’t think we should.”
“We can’t go back there.”
“Motel’s all I know, then.”
“Oh, the Skyline,” she said. “Just past the fairground. You know it.”
Gowan knew it, the kind of place bad things happened so well, but figured it was their best shot if Maisie wouldn’t go to Ms. Mitchell’s. He turned back for Pulaski’s lights, barely visible for the snow. His tires slipped but he pushed it on. The truck fought him over staying in the road, trying the wrong direction or stalling in spots. They wouldn’t make it far, but there wasn’t much left to go, either.
They rode silently, and wrapped up in the slow pace he thought maybe they’d come out somewhere new and different, that they’d be new and different people. Like they were just on a journey to scour clean. He felt a little magic. They made the co-op, then the dark and enveloped fairgrounds. If it came to it they could walk the rest, even with Billy, even with Maisie in her heels. Gowan staggered the truck onward until he saw the neon of the Skyline Motel’s sign. They topped the hill and he pressed the gas a little harder on the flat, set the tires to spinning and fishtailed. Maisie and Billy screamed and he laughed, straightened them up and into the motel lot. The long, low building was nearly whited out, a few cars buried in front, but the office light was on. They were safe for a while.
“We’re all right,” he said.
#
To Gowan it felt like something from TV, a sitcom. They took rooms joined by double doors, each dim and musty with twin beds, a black-and-white television and tight bathroom. The woman at the desk, who owned the Skyline with her husband, came sleepily to the lobby to let them inside. She was nice, though, saying how glad she was they made it in. She took their money, Maisie paying from a wad of bills in her purse. She loaned Maisie a change of clothes, too, baggy shorts and one of her husband’s t-shirts. She looked ridiculous but got out of the evening dress. They’d be comfortable enough, could wait on the plows and thaw.
Billy bounced on the beds in Gowan’s room like they were trampolines. He wanted to go out, play in the snow, but Maisie told him not in the dark. He pouted but settled, turned on the television. They had cable, and the variety kept his attention. Gowan stepped out and found the vending and ice machines, in a nook beside the office. He dug out enough change for colas and chips. In a pinch he could hunt and gather. The snow drifted over the sidewalk and he stepped high to pass. His truck lay buried. There was no sign of anyone on the highway. He stopped to smoke, clear his head, before walking back in. They were stuck good.
Gowan gave Billy a soda and some of the chips, set the rest on the dresser and stretched out on the other bed. He watched the back of the boy’s head as he settled on a local Nashville station, sat back and ate. The late news was covering the snow in-depth, videoing it on the ground and drifting from the dark through their parking lot floodlights. He heard Maisie in the next room on the phone. Letting Morris know where she was, where Billy was. They were all right. Gowan would get them home. Morris was holed up in his apartment. He was fine. She was calm and reassuring, told her husband she loved him before hanging up. A few minutes later she came to them, gave him a smile and looked at her son.
“Bedtime,” she finally said. “Go wash up. Let Steve get some rest.”
Billy turned the TV off and went. Maisie saw him out and rushed to Gowan in her baggy, borrowed clothes and bent to kiss him. She lingered a second and then pulled away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You’re not still mad, are you?” she asked, and he shrugged. “I’ll be back for you.”
She lifted her t-shirt to flash her breasts at him, and ducked out with a giggle. She closed their door with a small click of the latch. Gowan listened to them talk and laugh. He turned his lamp off, plunged into darkness edged only by light creeping past the window curtains. He stared at the ridged ceiling and let Maisie and Billy’s winding down take him away while he waited for her to return. They were the noise of family, easiness. He wondered if they could carry it away when they left the motel. It could be a simple rearranging. No more running or pretending, no separate rooms and making do, love in the open.
#
Billy woke him in the morning pulling at his shirtsleeve, yammering about snow and snowmen. His face was lit. He prodded until Gowan flailed his arms, let out a roar, and then he took off running. Gowan didn’t remember nodding off, had slept well, straight through the night. Maisie hadn’t come back. He felt refreshed and relaxed. He went to the bathroom, came out and washed at the sink. He went to the window and pulled back the curtain to see every bit of the snow still there, deep and unbroken and stretching across the Skyline’s lot, the road, the fields and trees beyond. He walked through the double doors, found Maisie watching TV and wrapped in her coat, stirring a paper cup of coffee. She pointed to the dresser, had another waiting for him.
“More in the office,” she said. “Thirteen inches, they’re saying on here.”
“Called anyone at home? They milking?”
“Cows’ll be all right a while. Take it easy.”
Maisie stayed glued to the set. Billy wanted to go out, so Gowan got his coat and went with him. He found a couple pairs of gloves behind the seat of the truck to keep their hands from burning in the cold. Billy jumped through the drift and ran as fast and wild as he could manage. He wanted to make a snowman. After he circled the lot, leaving deep and ragged footsteps behind, they went to work rolling three giant snowballs. Gowan mostly supervised, helped place them one atop another. Billy snapped some frozen branches off a bush to use as arms. He went inside for parts to make its face, came back with paper cups for eyes and an empty toilet paper roll for the nose. He lined up pretzels for its mouth, wound up with something resembling an avalanche that crashed through a dumpster. Gowan stuck his stocking cap on its head, just to make Billy happy, and let him admire his work a moment before taking it back.
“What are we gonna do for breakfast?” Billy wanted to know.
“Chocolate,” Gowan said. “If we get out later maybe we’ll get McDonald’s.”
“Cool. I wish we could do this every day.”
“Yeah,” Gowan said. “Me, too.”
A couple kids walked out of a room a few down from theirs. They looked older than Billy but ran to him, friendly and wanting to play. Billy seemed game so Gowan left them to it. He stepped inside, got his coat off and stood in front of the heater. He peeked out the window, made sure they were all right. Billy needed a brother, a sister, someone to play with. He looked good with company, active and engaged. A body could only spend so much time alone before clamming up, getting serious. He watched until he heard a throat clear. Maisie stepped through the door, shut it behind her. She wore her coat and was smiling.
“Lock that door,” she said. Gowan dropped the curtain and did as she said. “Come on.”
Maisie led him past the beds to the sink. She leaned back on the counter and undid the belt of her coat, let it slide open on her naked body. She pulled him close and kissed him.
“This is nice. You know?”
“You know what it feels like?” Gowan asked. She cocked her head. “Like a family.”
“I guess. Billy’s having fun. Y’all looked good out there. I meant us, though. I like this.”
“We don’t have to leave it.”
“They’ll have it cleared tomorrow morning.” Maisie kissed him. “We’ll be fine.”
“You know what I mean.” Gowan watched his own face in the mirror while she buried hers into his chest, unbuttoned his shirt. “What we were talking about last night.”
“No,” she said, going still a moment. “Not that.”
“I don’t want to work for you, anymore. I don’t want to be a hand. You don’t, either.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Leave,” he said. He grabbed hold of her hands. “Run off with me.
“It’s snow. We can’t go.”
“You and me and Billy. Let’s leave. Leave him. Go off with me.”
“Steve, stop. You know we can’t.”
“Why not? Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m married.” Maisie’s fingers went back to his shirt. “Now stop it.”
“What is all this?” Gowan felt the night before rising back up, knew one hard trip and a good morning wouldn’t do away with the trouble hung over them. “What are we doing?”
“It’s an affair,” she said. She looked him in the eye and gave a smile too sexy for her words. “I love you. You know that, but I can’t just go throwing everything away.”
He shook his head.
“You love me, too, don’t you? Come on. You’re my guy.”
She shrugged her coat off. She worked at his belt, but he just shook his head.
“That’s me,” he said. “I’m your man.”
He slapped her across the face, tired of getting nowhere. Her head jerked and her mouth dropped open, jaw working like she was searching for just the right word. Gowan slapped her back the other way and she let out a short, angry yip. She was mad, upset, beside herself. Maisie lurched against him, slapped at his face over and over until he grabbed hold of her wrists and twisted her arms behind her back. He bent her over the counter, her face pressed against the top as she gasped and tried to jerk loose. Gowan held her tight. He was used to manhandling cattle, and she was easy. He leaned against her, pressed his lips to her ear.
“Tell me one more time,” he said, “that I’m your man.
“Tell me I’m your man,” he said again. He kept her pinned, refused to let go. She hollered and squirmed but had no leverage, couldn’t buck him. He started to hit her again but realized he didn’t need to. He was making her feel, making her look, even, what he felt like. He had control for once. “Tell me I’m your man. Say it.”
“Stop,” she screamed. She jerked and wailed but he just held her until she finally groaned and let it out, “You’re my man, you’re my man, stop, stop.”
Gowan slapped her once and left a bright red, hand-shaped strip between her shoulder blades. He let go. She wrenched up and against him, tripped over his legs and spun around. She crashed through the bathroom door, tore down the shower curtain and trapped it beneath her as she landed in the tub. He watched her sob and squirm, mouthing the words over and over. He was her man. He was her man. Maisie lay there, and he decided it was enough. He’d wanted her and that was the only way he could get her. He grabbed his coat, made sure he had his things. He pushed out the door and slammed it shut behind him. He was done.
Billy still played with the other kids. They’d nearly assembled a second snowman, this one bigger and smoother. A small carrot nose and big, black eyes of something. Gowan’s sat misshapen and dumpy to the side. He opened the door of his truck and cranked the engine to let it warm. He scraped snow off the windshield and hood with his hands, cleared the windows and peeked underneath to make sure the chassis was clear. If he got free of the lot he felt sure he could make it on the highway, drive out of the storm. He felt for Billy, wanted to say goodbye but didn’t know how. Billy wasn’t his and hadn’t paid attention, didn’t realize anything was wrong. Nothing had changed for the boy in the snow.
Gowan climbed in the truck. He half expected Maisie to lunge out, try to stop him, but she didn’t. It relieved him—he might have hesitated. He backed out, spun around, and pushed for the highway. It was thirty yards, shouldn’t have taken much, but the tires slipped and spun, the truck fishtailed. He rammed the gas and twisted the wheel, fought over the drifts until he hit the road. A scraper had been through, maybe a salt truck, but the pavement still only showed in spots along tracks left by the morning’s slim traffic. It was plenty to get him going, though. Gowan came off the hill and pushed the Skyline into the rearview. Ahead the valley opened, fields and fairgrounds, houses and trees all glazed white. The sun reflected hard enough from them to make his eyes water, but he drove on against the glare, determined to go until the landscape cleared.
Marvin Shackelford is author of a poetry collection, Endless Building (Urban Farmhouse Press). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Epiphany, Hobart, Southern Humanities Review, FiveChapters, Folio, and elsewhere. He resides in the Texas Panhandle with his wife, Shea, and earns a living in agriculture.