He retrieved a phrasebook and quickly guided her through several pages. Thank you, but I am not hungry now.
I will rest now.
Tomorrow will be another beautiful day.
She gave him back the phrasebook and grinned. Every bit as beautiful as today I’m sure, she said.
They did not light a fire but sat outside on the concrete pad before the RV. She had found a webbed folding chair and she sat spooning cold cheese tortellini from an MRE pouch and watching Chay organize tools on a sheet spread out before him, the nearer edge weighted down by the length of copper pipe. He picked up a hacksaw and cut two feet off the length at a sharp angle without a vice or any kind of clamp apart from his hand. He sawed a wedge into this angle cut to make two points one above the other like a gaping shark and then began to sharpen the whole of that end with rattail and barrel files.
Avy asked him the words for file and for copper and for saw. Then she asked if he would let her have the bottle of Stoli. He stopped filing and looked at her.
Affy need fuh wounds?
She tapped her forehead. For wounds. Definitely.
He turned the copper pipe before him and then set it down. He got out his bait box and handed her the Stoli pint. The bottle a third full. She thanked him and did not open it but set it aside.
Chay ran a long thumb along a tapering edge and took a file to the edge again.
Avy nodded at the forming spear. The spear’s alive, right? You breathe life into it.
Breeve yeh.
But you throw em away and make new ones like they’re waterbottles.
Yeh. Easy make.
But how can it be both? I mean, it’s either a piece of pipe and you throw it away like it’s nothing or it’s alive and you take care of it and hate to see it get broken.
He patted his flat chest. Liff from heeyah, yeh? Breeve inta here. He patted the shaping weapon. Chay liff. Chay liff in heeyah. Yeh?
You put part of your life into the spear. Oh—that’s why you play em, yeh? You’re breathing life into them.
Yeh. Affy unnastan good yeh. Be like Chay peepah soon.
Did you just make a joke?
Choke yeh.
She laughed and then put a hand to her chest. Then she picked up the Stoli bottle and opened it and drank. It tasted as bad as it had the first time. She drank again.
He filed and tested edges and filed more. He put his lipless mouth to the blunt end and blew and the copper weapon thrummed. He puffed and the weapon tooted. He brought his mouth away and looked at it and patted it. Then he laid it on the sheet and opened up his paint box. Identical to his first aid box but for the color. He withdrew several yellow-labeled pint cans. 1 Shot lettering enamel. Brushes. A small flatbladed screwdriver. A pair of wooden chopsticks in a finegrained wooden slide-lid case patterned with darker woods. A particolored rag. A fitness magazine with half the pages torn out.
He pried off a can lid with the screwdriver and began stirring with a chopstick. He tore a page from the magazine and folded it and poured a circle of white paint on it and dipped his brush there and picked up the spear with the point near his face.
Avy took one more swallow from the Stoli bottle and recapped it and set it down near Chay. Then she picked up her bowie and her food wrappers and went down the street and threw the wrappers in a car and stood looking at it. Drunk and unaccountably disquieted.
When she got back Chay held up the spear for her to see the eyes he’d painted just before the main point taper.
That so it can see where it’s going?
He nodded. See? he said. Affy unnastan.
Something woke her in the night. She lay listening and heard nothing that did not fit the night. She sat up and put a hand to her chest and felt the bandages and breathed a moment. The pale squares of shaded windows. The large soft bed. Sheets and a bedspread and pillows. Walls and roof. Comfortable and warm and so mistrusted by her.
She drew down the sheets and their rustle seemed loud. She eased out of bed and into her shoes. Socks already on. She picked up the bowie from where it leaned against the nightstand. The houselike vehicle creaking as she went to the door and opened it.
Chay was waiting there and he nodded at the moonlit road where wolves were nosing in the bed of the Toyota truck. They were northern gray wolves come down from the nearby hills to hunt and they had smelled her blood and vodka-soaked shirt from half a mile away. Their numbers flourished and their species no longer fragmented. These were quiet and curious and not at all tentative. They did not even look at Chay who stood armed ten yards from them. There were three of them and one picked up