Notable American Women by Ben Marcus Read Free Book Online

not seen her with Pal for some time. Much was different from the words she had used. If Pal was a bomb, he was now defused. You killed my man, I thought. He died alone. You should die by thunder. You should be killed in a loud sky. Let your house break in half and the people inside it be pulled into the sky. Let you faint at night. Let your feelings drown you. Let my father return from the earth to hurt you with sound. She flipped down the goggles from her helmet and crouched in my direction, but if she guessed what I had in my bag, she showed no interest at all. Let you drive off in your truck. Let you never have come.
    I left the compound, tracking through dried grass until there was no more growth on the earth at all, just water, me, and Pal.
    The pond was long and clean that day. Water ran in patchy sheets occasionally scored by wind. I could see just enough of my house in the distance, a shelter looking more like a sharp hole someone had torn in the horizon, pulsing with light, as if it might break open. For a moment, I forgot what was in the bag. It could have been anything, and I could simply have been a man that day visiting a thin stretch of water visible from his house. I had come a distance to do a job. That almost seemed to be enough. I had a bag of something, and would be returning home without it. But when I touched the hard bones, and felt the flat, plain face that once fit perfectly against the curve in my back, I knew whom I carried and what I had come to do.
    No ceremony was necessary, no small words. I stepped up to the waterline and set the bag twirling over my head until its speed was sufficient to launch it well away from me over the pond. But I did not release it. The bag hummed in my hands until my arms were pulled taut, and I clutched it harder as the speed increased, feeling it drag my weight off the ground. I was not ready to let it go. I wanted true flight for this bag, not just an adequate throw, enough to send Pal deep into the water, plunging past the easy top layers into the true deepness, where a bolt of cold ocean water feeds the pond from below, where even a dead person might have his bones sucked through the backwash and out into the great wide ocean beyond, little bullets sent to sea. Pal deserved something more, even if I wasn’t the person to give it to him. But I would try for him as if it were me in the bag, looking out through the mesh holes at the spinning world, cycling through trees and sand and water and sky as I flew, until the water hit me like a wall and I could take a final break from the labor of breathing.
    I twirled yet harder, until my arms ached, and then finally let my hands go, listening to the wind rip against the bag as it flew over the learning pond, where I had never buried anyone before. Pal could have been anybody up in the air, launched over the pond. My first body. My first throwing of a dead friend. I wished I were at my own window watching it all so I could remember it better, so that I could instantly faint it deep into my body. I would try to breathe less on my return home. I would try to swallow the feeling in my chest until it glowed in my bones.
    The bag did not fly for long, considering what some birds do. But by the time the short, harsh splash had sounded, as plain as an old man coughing, I had turned my back on the pond and was already setting out for home.
    My father would not be there. No one resembling a mother would be there. And now Pal would not be there. There would be people answering to names they did not deserve. It would hurt to say their names. I would head upstairs and crack the seal on a jar of tomorrow’s water, next week’s water, next year’s thin, sweet water—going as far ahead into the future as I could, until the water was barely there, clear and weak and airy—and I would commence a fine, hard drinking spell, until this whole day, and the days before it, and then the people in those days and myself