Some, If We're Lucky

“Una Pz Intranquila 13” by Anisley Lago

As the river carried them home, Martin sat at the canoe’s stern while Cristo leaned over the bow and watched for stones. The dead buck crowded them to the outermost limits of the boat, which was much too small for them and for it, and its hoof periodically fell overboard and dragged through the water. Flies clouded the sky, filled the air with the sound of static, and touched down on Martin’s arms, his hands, on Cristo’s hair and his neck. Martin leaned over the buck to shoo a fly away from Cristo. And as he admired Cristo’s back and the thick, curly hair vanishing into the waistband of his jeans, a familiar heat blossomed in Martin’s face. He felt it so often that it didn’t embarrass him, but it never turned off when it was supposed to and came only when it wasn’t welcome—like now when the river was becoming rough and the sky threatened rain.

Martin coughed and Cristo turned to him. His face was thin, dark, adorned with several days of stubble turning blonde around his muzzle. When he looked at Cristo, Martin became gentle, less panicked, and the narrow canoe, with the animal spilling across it and the stench it gave off, felt to him as wide as his farm.

—How much do you think? Cristo said.

Martin disliked this question. Of late, he’d made his living by guessing the weight and the quality of meat, but he was a farmer—the owner of one hundred acres of scorched and unusable ground, of charred crops and of animals that couldn’t reproduce. It was too late in the growing season to plant new crop, so they’d have to stretch out what little corn and barley they’d sold. It was enough until December, but they’d run out when the Vermont winter turned coldest and standing outside to smoke a cigarette filled Cristo’s eyelashes with ice.

—If we’d killed it ourselves, Martin said, we’d make at least a month’s worth from its meat, maybe more for the hide.

But they hadn’t. They’d stumbled across it in a clearing after days without luck and no other bounty. Flies had left it alone and rigor mortis had not started, so they took it with them. Now the meat’s stench was strong, and Martin doubted they’d get anything for it, even if they could sell it to the butcher for bait. Nothing save the fire that took the barn, the fields, and all their crops would make enough smoke to mask the scent of bad meat.

When he remembered that night—that night when he lost his livelihood to the fire—he thought of freshly baked bread; of how he and Cristo had lied with their backs against the ground and were unafraid to hold hands in the midst of the wreckage because anyone who saw would accept grief as explanation for their closeness. That night, even the noise from the stars overwhelmed him.

Another fly bit his arm, and Martin wished for smoke.

He said, One evil to keep away another....

And, as his wife, Lulu, did whenever she spoke it, Martin let the phrase sail away and stretch out into nothing. Lulu’s odd expressions had charmed him after he’d seen her picking flowers outside the church, and they’d kept him charmed for a while. More often than not, those phrases did not end neatly, but he felt the rhythm—a singsong carrying the distinct feel of resignation—throughout all of them.

He didn’t know which evil he preferred: the smoke or the stench or the insects. He focused on Cristo, on his thinning patch of light brown hair.

The buck’s hoof slipped into the water and turned the canoe too fast for Martin to manage. He had to reach out, to pull the leg onto the boat. Touching it, the wet fur, the cold, limp tendons, made him feel as if his hand would never again be clean. One of them had to do the ugly things to protect them, and Martin told himself he was glad to prove to Cristo that he regretted nothing—not their sticking with their hunting plans, not coming back to empty traps after too much diversion. That’s what he’d been calling it in his mind—diversion: a pretty word that took a long trip around his mouth.

He slapped his own arm to shoo away a fly and was unsure how they could go back to being farmer and farmhand, how they could go back at all. But they did it every time, and Lulu was none the wiser.

***

Two years ago, Lulu found Cristo leaning against the liquor store’s brick wall. She arranged the paper bag under her arm, tapped him on the shoulder, and after a long conversation invited him to the farm. When they arrived, Martin was tying the hen’s wing.

—She’s been bit and the fox escaped, Martin said. But she’ll survive.

Martin was glad for this, for not needing to feel the delicate bones snap in his palms because he wouldn’t waste a bullet or dull a knife.

He brushed the feathers from his hand and rose to meet them, keeping an eye on the man who looked like he’d crawled out of a mud pit, except for the flash of a yellow daffodil sprouting from his shirt pocket. He assumed the flower was her doing—an effort to make the man look like she thought he should: clean, whether he wanted to be or not.

They went inside and the man stood by the screen door. Lulu played with the hem of her skirt as if she knew she owed him an explanation and it she might find it stitched into the fabric.

—It’s your decision, she said. But you said you needed help.

She looked down at her dress again. He thought she always managed to look pretty, even way out there with no one to see her except him.

—He needs work, she said. Cristo does.

Then, as if the conversation were over, she sat at the piano and played one of her favorite hymns.

Martin heard Cristo cough, smelled the cigarette smoke through the screen door. The man held up his hand to shield the sun so he could look into their house. Martin imagined the full shape of him underneath his filth—the narrow shoulders, the curved jawline, the small rough-looking hands, and the green almond eyes that betrayed his drunkenness. When the man smiled at him, Martin turned toward his wife. Lulu was impressionable, impulsive, and her own altruism distracted her from what she’d done. When he said he needed help, this was not what he had in mind. She had an eye for strangeness.

Martin had grown comfortable with his own strangeness. And if, for no other reason than that—that he had formed habits, techniques that he did not want challenged—he was raising his hand to send Cristo off his doorstep, when the man said, I’ll do anything you need, and Martin couldn’t think of a sensible reason to say no. Yet, as he opened the door to step outside and to show the man around the land, he found himself wondering where this man would sleep and if it were far enough away to keep Martin from trouble.

***

—I’m guessing eighty, Cristo said.

Martin looked at the buck. Not after the sun and the river, slow as it was, and not after the flies and the water splashing on its fur. There couldn’t be that many useable pounds. He thought again of Carla, the butcher, shaking her head, wiping her blade with a cloth, and telling him that there was nothing she could do with bad meat except give it as bear bait to one of the men who came early in the morning. When he looked at the water, though he knew they would have wasted an entire day getting back, he did not wish for it to flow faster.

—Less, Martin said. Twenty.

Maybe it was the ridiculousness of ferrying that rotting buck back home as if it were something they could show to make up for their other shortcomings. Maybe it was how fine Cristo looked with a little dirt rubbed into his cheeks and sunburn striking the tops of his ears where it turned the downy hairs white. Whatever it was that caused laughter to bubble under Martin’s tongue, he swallowed to force it down. Among the other dangerous things he did, he knew it would be a bad habit to display mirth over their empty wallets and stomachs, of their need to take another hunting trip. And there was the possibility that Lulu would suggest something else. After all, how many times could they return empty-handed before Lulu became suspicious that what made them terrible hunters was that, when they were alone like this, neither one of them was hungry? His hands hurt from handling the oar, and despite the calluses he’d developed from hoeing and raking and seeding, splinters buried themselves in the soft meat of his palm.

Calluses built quick, but there was still the potential for injury. Cristo hadn’t been on the farm for more than a week when he learned that lesson by stepping on a nail. It shoved itself deep into his heel.

Martin, who had been fixing the fence so that goats would stay near the barn, dropped a board and ran in the direction of Cristo’s howling, found him laying in the dirt. Martin picked up the injured foot, inspected it to see a nail so large that blood well up behind it but wouldn’t weep. So he put his mouth to it and sucked Cristo’s heel until he felt the metal on his tongue and a rush of warmth between his teeth.

—How much do you really think?

—Some, if we’re lucky.

—Hey, Cristo said.

He turned his whole body away from the bow. Then: —Don’t forget what I told you.

—I know.

Martin did know—that there was a feeling like an electric current buzzing between them. That they were magnetized to each other. He wondered if he looked lonely. Sometimes even a few feet between them caused him discomfort. The canoe rocked, the buck shifted, and Cristo turned forward again, reminded of the danger of the river. Again, the buck slid into the water, its hoof drafting and collecting ribbons of weeds and algae.

***

Martin found Cristo asleep in the shadow of the barn, nude from the waist up. A dirty shirt covered his face and blocked the sun. He made no sign of having noticed Martin who paused to stand nearby and to watch the delicate rise of Cristo’s stomach, his chest, and his hairs stirring in a faint breeze.

He stepped into the shade and wiped the sweat from his forehead. In the morning, when he was alone, there seemed to be a constant wind that cooled him, but when the day began and Cristo started kicking around, the air stalled and refused to start again and was thick with stillness. The heat followed him everywhere, made him wild. Watching Cristo’s body in that space, seeing the veins running through his lithe forearms and the stubble under his chin, Martin became the monster he thought his habits could keep tamed. He would berate himself all through the evening—telling himself he should feel ashamed. He had a wife. This was a man. Yet nothing he told himself stopped the heat, made it cool.

Martin looked at his home—a few hundred feet away—separated from him with a field of corn that, he knew, didn’t block the view of the barn entirely. What were the chances Lulu would be looking out while Martin’s hand slithered into his own pants? He heard the piano playing and believed in grace. If it stopped, so would he. But until then, he agitated himself in the shade of the barn while Cristo slept. It was the curve of Cristo’s jaw, the trapezoids of his taught torso, the smell of his body, which filled the air even from a few feet away.

Martin indulged in a small moan, which sounded feminine and jarring, and wished he hadn’t, for all at once Cristo was awake, had peeled the shirt off his face and was looking at Martin with a smile that dissolved into confusion then anger. Martin removed his hand, made as if he were adjusting his pants, but he could feel himself obviously straining against the fabric. He could not stop himself. The release came. Martin shuddered.

—What’s the idea? Cristo said.

Martin felt that he stood on a crumbling platform—that if he didn’t keep still and silent it would fall out from under him and he would fall and fall and fall.

Cristo’s eyes flitted to the house, back to Martin, trailing down his face, his shirt, to the place where all the heat of the day had collected into a damp wad.

Cristo looked again at the house, scrambled up from the dirt, put his shirt on, and disappeared into the cornfield.

***

Later that evening, Lulu made fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and Martin kept eating so his mouth wasn’t free to say anything, so his eyes focused on the food and didn’t travel up to Cristo. The house had refused to give up the heat of the day, and they were all flushed, dewy with sweat. If Lulu felt the tension between the men, then she staved it off with her talk about a television program that she had kept on while she painted the living-room a new shade of green. The house smelled of fry and fresh paint.

—Do you believe that James Dean led a secret life? she said. Martin grunted and took another piece of chicken.

—Lots of men do it. These rich businessmen, she said. They go on work trips, but they’re really going to their other families.

—I was a businessman once, Cristo said. Tie and all.

Cristo leaned back, sucked his teeth. Martin could feel the man’s eyes shifting between him and his wife. If he was going to say something, let him say it, Martin thought. He felt the need for someone to fill the space Cristo’s comments left. He raised his eyes, saw the corners of Cristo’s mouth curling into a smile.

—I’m sure you made pots of money, Lulu said.

She looked at Cristo with a dreamy expression.

—Sure did, Cristo said.

He took a spoonful of mashed potatoes. Then:

—And I gave it all up for the wide, wide arms of gin.

—You know, Lulu said. I’m sure those women live their own secret lives, too. Like Marilyn Monroe. What else would they do when their husbands are gone all day? There’s only so much to do in a house before you get bored and—

—I’ve met those women, Cristo said. I think they’re better at it than the men.

They laughed. He turned to Martin and winked. From her faraway look, Martin saw that Lulu was still dreaming about businessmen with pots of money and hadn’t noticed the gesture.

—How could they not want something different from what they had? Martin said.

A foot bashed his shin under the table. He could not tell if it had been Cristo or Lulu, and dared not lift his gaze from his plate. He imagined Cristo as a businessman. Fine suited, tied up, shoes shined with a walk that doormen on wide avenues acknowledged with a smirk.

—We all want things we’re not supposed to, Cristo said.

Martin interpreted this as reciprocation, and, despite having eaten too much, he felt light. He leaned back in his chair.

—Lulu, Martin said. Thank you for dinner.

She dabbed the corners of her mouth to receive the praise properly, to be polite and clean and to remind them both that their marriage was just like anyone else’s.

***

The river turned and Martin struggled to control the canoe. They moved too quickly now for the flies to follow them—it was a momentary blessing replaced with the curse of the downpour that had threatened them all day. The rain made the gunwales slick, and the buck slid, again and again, into the water. Cristo turned around and tried to bring the animal back aboard, eventually keeping one hand wrapped in the fur around its neck.

Martin guided them, but the river thrashed and the weight of the rain made the boat sluggish.

A loud crack, then a jolt from the underside of the canoe. Water collected around their feet.

—Let go of it, Martin said. Let it go.

—What are we going to do?

—Cristo! Let the damn thing go.

It was impossible for Martin to direct the canoe, which sped down the river nearly on its side, a large crack in the bottom letting in river water and branches. Cristo looked from Martin to the buck to the river. Rain tumbled down his face, clung to the end of his nose. He leaned back and used his weight to kick the thing over. It went most of the way, but he couldn’t send it off completely. The oar was useless now, so Martin set it aside and placed his hands on the animal. He pushed. It sank farther into the water, disappeared, and stopped again with its antler clipped to the side of the boat like a grappling hook. Then, all at once, the connection between antler and boat gave a jerk, and Martin found himself underwater, fighting with a fur covered leg, a sharp hoof, and the weight of the canoe above him as he tried to surface.

I am going to drown, he thought. And it pained him that the last thing he would feel was the buck’s antler, its wet, cold fur. He opened his eyes. All around him were shining pinpricks of light, some floating, some entering the water’s atmosphere like shooting stars that didn’t burn out, but decided where they landed was good enough. He was relieved—that he would not have to explain these trips Cristo, or anything else, to anyone. His death would be like stepping into sleep, like that night when he laid next to Cristo and the humming of the stars was too loud for him. But there was an odd pressure on his shoulder, the tiny lights became harder to see as he felt he was being pulled upward, and soon there was air, sun, wind on his face. And Cristo stood in the river with water no deeper than his waist, laughing—laughing as the overturned canoe drove itself downriver and onto the shore with a gentle thud.

***

The night the cow started lowing, it became clear that she’d give birth two weeks earlier than expected. She was already sick with something, and Lulu asked Martin every day about her health. He was nervous when Cristo brought kerosene lanterns into the barn to light the work Martin needed to do—of donning a glove to sheath his arm, of inserting it inside her to feel the progress of the calf.

—Just give her some time, Martin said then nodded.

He removed the glove and washed his hands at the spigot on the side of the barn. The evening sky was bright, and the clouds floated over his house where his bedroom light was illuminated. A wave of tenderness swept over him like a cold breeze—for the calf that may not survive, for his wife. He knew her worry for the small animal would keep her up—that she’d try to lay it aside by skimming a classic she told herself she should read so that she’d be able to talk to her sister about something sophisticated. Lulu worried so much about these animals—all of which she thought were helpless on their own. She didn’t know what they were capable of or what they did when no one was watching. The lowing from the barn grew quiet, calling Martin back inside where he saw new life—a calf hiccuping, covered in all manner of fluid.

—Came out breathing, Cristo said as if to explain why he wasn’t rubbing its back.

The little thing was already trying to walk. It stumbled over its weak limbs. Cristo smiled at him in the half-light cast by the lamp, his eyes were shimmering with tears. This look made Martin aware of his own body, of his wet, cold hands which felt so empty in that moment that it was no surprise when they reached out for Cristo and found his shoulders, then the soft slope of his neck.

—Thank you, Martin said.

Martin looked at the house, and, when he turned back to Cristo, saw the man’s mouth forming a word that Martin asked him to repeat three times before he understood:

—Please.

Martin thought Cristo wanted him to remove his hands, so Martin lifted them.

—No, Cristo said and drew Martin closer.

Martin felt Cristo’s cold fingers undoing his belt, felt them slip between his waistband and his skin. Felt them until they were warm and soft, exploring the valleys of his body.

Together, they laid in the dirt while the cow licked her calf clean.

***

Martin pieced it together after the barn was engulfed in flames. The calf was clumsy, and they should have paid attention to it—and to the kerosene lamp Cristo had left on the ground instead of on the post as Martin told him to do.

There had been no time to enjoy the fatigue that came with their release, or for Martin to marvel in this coarse new friendship that made him feel expansive and kind. The cinders and smoke, the creak of the weakening wood, and the smacking of the screen door against the house, followed by wailing—first of a voice, then of sirens that came too late. Flames reached far out into the fields so that it looked like there was a vast field of floating fire.

—Never seen a fire like that, one of the firemen said and shook his head. Don’t know what we can do about it.

The firefighters stayed until they were sure the flames wouldn’t spread to the house. Martin sat at the edge of the cornfield with his head in his hands. Lulu stood far from him, near the house, wrapped in her own arms and glaring at the fire. Cristo took a flask from his pocket.

Later, when they surveyed the damage, the cow emerged from the barn’s wreckage, lowing so deep and mournful that Martin knew the calf was dead before Lulu had even found it. She stooped to gather it in her arms, and Martin pulled her away from it.

—Let it go, he said. You’ve got to let that little thing be. Cristo?

Cristo nodded. He didn’t take care to hide the flask he was suckling.

It was buried by morning, which was about the same time Lulu told him there was no hope out there anymore and let him see her suitcase as she carried it to the cab. At least she did not ask him to carry it, he thought, to pretend any longer. At least she knew.

He and Cristo went inside and slept together in the bed, waking together after nightfall when they heard the squeal of brakes, the soft closing of the car door.

She did not know after all, Martin thought, as he went to the door and saw Lulu collapse onto the floor in tears and frantic apologies.

—It’s alright, Martin said. We’ll take care of one another.

Cristo left the room as if he were already on his way somewhere else. And Martin had to push away his own dread in order to bring her sweaty, tear-stained face to his chest, which he was sure smelled of Cristo and gin. He held her there as if she were the last bushel of corn he’d found in the field, hopeful to sell it but afraid that it would mean the end to his livelihood.

***

Martin and Cristo sought shelter underneath the broken canoe. Rain dripped through the cracked hull. The light under the canoe tinted the world red.

The pressure to return strengthened Martin’s desire to stay despite the canoe, despite how, every few breaths, the scent of the animal gathered in his nostrils. He imagined Cristo and himself foraging and building a home out of branches and leaves and mud, and it filled him with a quick happiness—one that he knew would last until they became bored and fearful and hungry. He wanted to be with Cristo, but he did not want to hide.

Martin pulled Cristo tighter, kissed his neck, his shoulder. Now there was no room for anything else, no room to justify or explain the deceit. And he was still concerned for Lulu, had promised her that he would care for her, which he did—in his way, which was not the way she wanted. But Cristo was impossible to ignore, and if they were to make love there—that buck not twenty feet away, its antlers sticking out of the water like branches stuck between stones—then, he told himself, there was not much more he could want. What was the difference? Hiding or not.

When Martin was a boy, his father spoke only Portuguese and his mother translated most of what he said into English to sell their carrots and kale and sausage to merchants who never paid what they should. Martin would hold bushels of carrots in his arms—understanding both languages, but speaking each poorly—while she doctored his father’s phrases, making them sound pleasant and kind. They were hiding in a different way, and now that Martin was older, now that both parents were dead, this was what he credited for their long-lasting marriage; that, when they walked home together, each of them empty-handed but with pockets full of coins, she did not tell him that they owed her anything.

Cristo looked at him and said: We should get back before she starts to worry.

Martin pushed the canoe over and packed the crack tight with leaves and sand. When they placed it on the water, it floated well enough. With Cristo’s help, Martin pushed the canoe into the river, and they watched it slither far enough to disappear from sight. They would take their time, walk for days maybe, until they made it back to the house and the ruins of the barn and the light in the bedroom window that Lulu kept on whenever they left. He knew that she would figure them out eventually if she hadn’t already. They would let the rain pummel them and hold onto one another for as long as they could until the town came into view. He would get Lulu a calf, and he would not let it die. He would let her pretend—that they were rich, that they could live lives other than the one they shared.

About the author

Sam Simas is a queer fiction writer. His work has recently appeared Copper Nickel, Carve, F(r)iction, and other literary magazines. His writing has won the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize for prose, and he has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize. He works as a research librarian and lives in Providence with his husband.

about the artist

The artist Anisley Lago was born on October 23, 1987, in Habana, Cuba. She studied Fine Arts at the "National Academy of Art of San Alejandro" graduated in 2012. She participated in a workshop with artist Rocio Garcia called "Nuevo Fieras", in 2010, where presentations were made in different provinces of the Island. She participated in different collective and personal exhibitions.After finishing her studies she moved to the United States of America in 2012, where she maintains her career as an artist. Her work depicts the vision of creating inner worlds, where physical and spiritual journeys emanate from the conscious and subconscious desire for freedom.