To the Bone by Neil McMahon Page A

had stumbled back to this house, singed, shocked, and exhausted, and made love right here on the deck.
    They had moved into a tacit arrangement of living together, here, most of the time. But she had kept her house in Burlingame, south of San Francisco, and although Monks wasn’t keeping count, he knew that he was alone more now. He stayed with her there sometimes, but he was rooted here, in his place, and he got restless when he was away for long. He loved solitude. The advantages of suburbia—shopping, movies, people—did not interest him. For her, the isolation of the country wore just as thin.
    There were other practicalities that came into play. She was an internist and had spent several years as the in-house physician for that same computer corporation. She had come out of last year’s emotional wrenching not ready to get back into the mainstream of medicine. But inactivity was wearing thin, too.
    He heard the door open, felt her come to stand beside him.
    â€œThis isn’t fair,” she said. “You’re making me the bad guy. Kicking you when you’re down.” He noted that she had refilled her own glass, with a fine Carmenet sauvignon blanc, and she seemed a little unsteady.
    â€œThat’s not what I’m doing,” he said. “And it’s not what you’re doing. What’s happening at the hospital and what’s happening here, they’re two different things.”
    â€œBut that’s why you’re doing it. Isn’t it.”
    The term that came into Monks’s mind was one that Emil Zukich used—the legendary mechanic who lived up the road, and who had built and rebuilt the Bronco. Metal on metal: the point where bushings and bearings and all the other buffers had ground down to dust, and the machine crashed along tearing up its own bones. It was true that external circumstances might precipitate such a thing.
    But between Martine and him, it had built on its own, unseen and unnoticed except in tiny increments—the unhappy expression in a passing glance, the slight reluctance to touch. The sense that there was something going on in the background that was never brought forth.
    â€œYou’re changing the subject,” he said.
    â€œI don’t want to be away from you, Carroll. I just don’t think I can keep on making it here.”
    â€œI understand that, Martine. I really do.”
    But he knew in his guts, even if she did not, that that was not the entire truth.
    â€œWe can do it half and half,” she said. “Your place and mine.”
    â€œYou bet.”
    â€œI’ve talked to some people about work. That’s all, just talking, feeling around. I think I could move into a practice without too much trouble.”
    â€œI’m sure you could,” he said.
    â€œI didn’t tell you about it because—goddammit, quit giving me that stoic act.”
    â€œIt’s not an act.”
    â€œI know it’s not,” she said. “Fuck you.”
    They both drank.
    â€œLet’s take a walk,” Monks said.
    â€œThe food will get cold.”
    â€œJust around the place.”
    â€œOkay,” she said doubtfully.
    He offered his hand. She took it. They walked down the deck’s steps onto a hard red dirt path that skirted the perimeter of the property’s three acres.
    Thirty yards or so farther on, Monks paused, pointing at a tire-sized flat rock. “I killed a rattlesnake right there once.”
    Martine pulled her hand away and turned quickly in a circle, her gaze darting around the nearby earth, littered with twisted snakelike madrone twigs.
    â€œQuit it,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”
    â€œI didn’t want to. But the kids were still little. I couldn’t take the chance.”
    â€œDid you face it hand-to-fang? Like those guys on TV?”
    â€œAre you kidding? I snuck up behind it and whacked it with a garden hoe.”
    She shivered.