Ride Around Shining by Chris Leslie-Hynan Read Free Book Online Page B

his driving cap. It seemed a praiseworthy venture but I wasn’t about to be pushed out by some humanitarian cause.
    Finishing with the site, I got up again to wander. A cloud shoal was rolling in, and a little mist was crawling across the lawn. Behind glass there was no way to tell it wasn’t already fall. Out in Illinois, the bright, discouraging gate with “23” on it must still be baking beneath the sun and the satellites, but all across western Oregon the mists were gathering, limbering up for their six-month stay.
    Turning from the window, the room seemed charged with the changing of seasons, and I wondered how Calyph and Antonia’s life had flowed through it. They must not have always avoided the formal living room as a stiff and superfluous place—there must have been a time when, twenty-one and trying to own all these things for the first time, they’d put their feet up on all the ottomans and turned all the throw pillows around slowly in their hands and thought, what a lot of underfoot shit comes with an adult house, and how incredible that we’ll come to find it all crucial.
    I’d expected the fireplace to be gas, but it held four pieces of quartered, fragrant birch. I knelt down in front of it, on a throw. I let my fingers sink into the weave and couldn’t but think of them there, in front of the fire together at a long day’s end. I saw one of the logs popping in the tentative southerner’s fire he would’ve made, and the ash thrown up against the glass. He covers her, instinctively; the back of his young neck gleams in the golden light. Her startled toes curl into the rich fibers.
    I felt the urge to lie down, and then from nowhere I heard a human voice meowing. It was a lithe, expressive sound—neither embarrassing nor embarrassed. I heard the stairs taking weight and crouched low against the couch. She meowed again, searchingly. The sound fell and then rose, just as if she were calling his name.
    I heard her walk behind me into the hall. There she paused, and meowed again, twice. This time her meows seemed to have a serious, French sound. “Miau, miau,” they rang, assertive and frustrated. It wasn’t cutesy; she was too fluent. She went down into the basement.
    I rose in a rush and lightfooted it back to the kitchen. So that was the language that gave expression to her elusive heart. When left alone, looking up the river at the distant city lights, did she yowl? Did she purr when she felt her underwear being pulled down across the backs of her calves? Pulling out my pen, I began to wildly circle things in the classifieds.
    After about five minutes, I heard them come back up the stairs. His voice lashed out deeply with a strong, playful sound, and in his pauses I could hear a murmured response.
    She was first up the stairs. I thought I’d turned my face away, but somehow I saw her. She was wearing baby-blue pajamas, and there was a sheen of sweat on her face as though she’d been exercising. She seemed to take in my presence, lower her eyes, lift them back up again defiantly, and walk around the corner all in one unbroken motion. Calyph merely glanced at me, in skeletal exasperation, and one of his hands flashed up as he followed her out into the rest of the house. I couldn’t tell if the flash was a You think you supposed to look at this , a Now we got to have a lady problem , or just a Yeah, she meow .
    I heard her on the stairs again, and then Calyph’s voice. “What? Just ’cause you—? Aw, he don’t matter!”
    Of course she didn’t answer him, and I tried to picture the aggrieved expression on her face.
    Then he was coming at me down the hall. His eyes were almost closed, so I could only see a glimmer between the lashes, and he had Antonia by the wrist as she slid along behind him. I waited, my heart beating up. I thought if my shirt stuck to me they’d see it beating.
    â€œHow you doin’