Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam Page B

were.” He got out of the Ford and pointed at the house. He pointed to the water tank off beside the shop. It was all just as he’d said. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
    She followed him through a brown metal door into a huge shop. He pointed to the woodstove, at the pickle jar on the workbench. She took it all in, looked at him with a huge open-mouthed smile on her little face.
    “I know,” he said. He crossed the room and opened the box beside the pickle jar and took out a soft pack of Marlboros and shook one out. He put it in his mouth, held it with his teeth, and led the girl across the shop to a green-painted door. “Go on,” he said, “open it.”
    She turned the handle and there it was: the bunk beds, the old, soft sleeping bags, the nightstand.
    “I think there might be something up there,” he said, lifting his chin toward the top bunk. He took a matchbook out of his back pocket and lit the cigarette. She went into the small room and climbed up the bunk. On the pillow there was a brown paper package.
    “What does it say?”
    She kneeled on the mattress, staring. “It says my name.”
    “Open it.”
    “But Gary.”
    “The fewer questions you ask, the more fun this is going to be. Open it.”
    She lifted the package. It was a bag folded under, and out slid a blue-and-white striped nightgown. The stripes were strings of blue roses.
    She made a crooked smile and climbed down with it.
    “Isn’t that pretty,” he said.
    “I’ve never had one like this.”
    “I didn’t think you had.”
    She stood there holding it, then let it unfold and pressed it to her shoulders. “I think it’s a little big.”
    “You’ll grow into it.”
    She fingered the blue satin ribbon woven around the collar.
    “I thought we’d go see the river.”
    “Can I wear this?”
    He stared at her. “If you want to,” he said. “It’s your week.”
    She crossed the tiny room with the nightgown on her arm and put her hand on the door. “Go,” she said. “I’ll change.”
    She stepped out of the shop in the blue-and-white flannel nightgown lifting the hem: bare feet.
    “Come on,” he said. “Race you to the river.”
    The unpaved county road curved northwest in a pale dirt hook, so when Lamb led the girl across toward the river, he could see the white of another house ahead. Just under a mile up the road.
    “Gary,” Tommie whispered and stopped. She pointed to the other side of the river, beyond which lay a field of yellow-green and gray grass into which several does and a four-point buck dipped their heads. Lamb nodded as if he knew they’d be there, as if he’d planned the whole thing, the deer, the bend of flyaway grass, the red-branched willow striping the blue sky. He smiled down at her as if to say: didn’t I tell you so? They walked on, stepping over saltbush, their footsteps crackling through the dry grass, scaring up field mice and finally alertingthe mule deer, which went tearing off toward the low distant line of foothills.
    Our girl stood and looked into the water, the tapering branches of water birch quaking behind her. “Can we swim?” Her belly stuck out a little beneath the clean and bright white flannel, freckles multiplying by the trillion on her cheeks and on the backs of her hands, and he wanted to reach out and freeze her, stop her just as she was. Seize her from the woman who would steal her away a day at a time. The river water was as low and as clear as it would be all year but still broke white over small piles of rocks. Yellow grass blew slowly in the bright shallows. He could see her cracking her head, could imagine too poignantly the turn in the story that would leave him with a dead girl on his hands.
    “It’s not deep enough. Look at those rocks.”
    “Oh.”
    “We can fish, though.”
    “Oh.”
    “That doesn’t interest you?”
    “I don’t like fish.”
    “Well, you’ve never had it right out of the river. When you eat it like that, it turns