Klickitat by Peter Rock Page A

things, I could tell who you are, I could see that we needed you to come with us.”
    â€œDid you show Audra?”
    â€œNo. She was doing other things, I didn’t tell her. Not yet. She can be jealous.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œListen. I need Audra, we need Audra. And you—it’s like that man who talked to people no one could see, who I told you about. Not exactly, but something like that. You’re a special person. You pick up on things that other people don’t. We need a person like you. We will.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    There was a sound—footsteps, above—and he paused.
    â€œWe can’t,” he said. “This is too much talking.”
    He pulled the wool blanket across, and I could hear by his breathing that he’d gone back to his yoga exercises. I tried to read
The Foxfire Book
, to focus, but my mind was imagining how it must have been that night in my bedroom: Henry reading all the messages with me asleep in my bed, so close, and Audra sitting at my desk and taking that cell phone apart, to show me that I hadn’t been forgotten.
    A little later, the lattice slid aside, and Audra crawled in, under the house. She looked at Henry, then at me—she could tell something was happening, had happened. She’d brought a loaf of bread, some carrots that we chewed quietly; things settled a little, in the air between us.
    Henry lugged the plastic bucket out through the opening, into the alleyway, when it was time to go out walking. He dumped the bucket out in a porta potty at a construction site, a couple of blocks away, then left theempty bucket with the lid snapped on hidden where we could find it, where we could get it on our way back.
    As he walked he was checking out all the cars and trucks he passed. What he was looking for, Audra told me, were older ones, ones where the hood could be opened from the outside, ones that had no latch inside the car or truck. Old cars and trucks, those were the ones he could steal the batteries from. He’d take them out quickly and stash them and we’d pick them up later, to use for electricity, beneath the house. She said you had to be careful, carrying them, since the acid inside could spill out and eat through your clothes, burn your skin. That made me think of my dad’s old ski jacket, the one he kept in the basement, its stuffing showing through.
    Out in the night the windows were lit, it was like a show, in the neighborhoods. I saw an old woman watching TV who scratched her head and then took her hair, her wig, right off. Families playing, kids wearing pajamas, running up stairs where I couldn’t see them anymore. A fat man with black hair who seemed to be looking out but was only looking at his own reflection, his mouthmoving like he was talking to himself or practicing saying something he wanted to say to someone. It was a little sad to see, I don’t know why.
    The light was on inside a car, and I could see a woman’s head sliding through the night. Another woman fixing her lipstick in the rearview mirror, parked at a stoplight. A man with long hair in the car behind her, trying to read something on a strip of paper he held up in front of his face. If any of these people saw us, they would never know that we were together, the three of us, walking so spread out across the neighborhoods.
    Audra drifted back and walked alongside me, Henry out ahead of us, a dark shape under the streetlights.
    â€œWhy don’t I ever walk with him?” I said.
    â€œYou wouldn’t have much to say to each other, anyway.”
    â€œBecause he’s your boyfriend?” I said. “Is that why?”
    Audra laughed. “That’s such a high school word! We’re together, but I wouldn’t call it that. He came to find me, because I was the one, and now we’re together.”
    We crossed a shadowy park, stopping for a moment to sit on the swings. Henry waited for us,