Shaking out the Dead by K M Cholewa Page A

it now seemed a bold move. Were she instead in prison, her assessment would no doubt be different. At the time, though, it seemed neither bold nor stupid. Had it seemed either, she wouldn’t have done it. It had felt nothing more than practical. She still had a few ancient buds from Vincent, but Vincent didn’t come around much anymore since he and Tatum had split up, not even to see Geneva. He had been her only connection. Packing her Kotex in her hotel room in Amsterdam, Geneva hadn’t felt any risk of anyone being interested in the contents of her underpants.
    Geneva nicked off a small chunk from the smaller of the two hunks of hash. She stabbed it onto the end of her sewing needle. She pulled a pack of matches from the nightstand’s drawer and lit the speared morsel. When it started to smoke, she placed it on her nightstand, covering it with the inverted glass.
    â€œEva’s medicine,” Geneva had said, as the glass filled with smoke. That’s what Vincent’s mother used to call pot. Geneva crouched on the floor beside her nightstand and slid the glass to the edge letting the lip hang just over the side. She sucked the blue curling ribbons of smoke from beneath the glass and slid it back to fill again. Sitting on the bed holding the smoke in her lungs, her thoughts of Vincent turned to thoughts of Tatum. She thought of Tatum’s sister getting cut down in the prime of life while Ralph lingered. She exhaled slowly. She remembered a conversation she had with Tatum following Tatum’s mastectomy. Tatum had been sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat while Geneva emptied the plastic drains that caught the blood and fluid from the wound that was once a breast. Tatum hadn’t told Geneva that she and Vincent had split up, but it was obvious that he wasn’t around.
    â€œWhat’s become of our boy, Vincent?” she had asked Tatum.
    Tatum was drugged up pretty good, but not too impaired.
    â€œI bugged him. He left,” she said. “Plain and simple.”
    â€œBugged him how?”
    â€œIt was a naturally occurring phenomenon,” she said. “I don’t blame him. I could’ve shut up more. Reached out more.”
    â€œMaybe the talking was the reaching,” Geneva said.
    Tatum crossed her hands over her collarbone and looked toward the ceiling as Geneva reattached the drains.
    â€œCan a person shut up and still be who they are?” Tatum had asked her. “I mean, if you shut up because you think you’re bugging someone, are you being a good person for shutting up, or are you not you anymore?”
    Geneva considered her own silence in her marriage as she secured the drains. It had not been a practice she had undertaken unconsciously. She had considered it at length. Had chosen it as a higher path. If talking leads to pain and frustration, is it not a kindness, to oneself at least, to shut one’s pie hole?
    â€œAll shutting up is not created equal,” she finally said. “Women waste a lot of creative energy talking. Maybe we’d be wiser to pursue the intimacy of the apes.”
    â€œWould that be the enlightened relationship?” Tatum asked. “Grooming each other and listening to the wind?”
    Geneva offered Tatum a steady arm, and Tatum rose slowly from the toilet.
    â€œFor me,” Geneva told her, “the enlightened relationship would run along the lines of a Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday kind of bond. But with steamy sex. Friends. Comrades. Equals. Hot sex.”
    Geneva recalled the conversation as she blew past an ancient pickup truck doing its damnedest to go fifty. The peaks of the Sawtooth Range rose ragged against the western sky. Hot sex. It was the last thing she needed to be thinking about then, and it was the last thing she needed to be thinking about now. She had exacerbated the feeling that morning. Buzzed and turned on by notions of sex between equals, she had gone to the living room, flipping