Free The Sky Below by Stacey D'Erasmo Page B

trade.
    Praise the Lord.
    You’re on the air. Can you turn your radio down?
    Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch.
    I assiduously collected interesting junk, filling my pockets with pebbles and wire and old nails: the stuff of transformation. I didn’t care if I ended up living in a tin shed, or if no one discovered what I’d done until after I was dead; I didn’t care if I became a hermit who never shaved. I toyed with the idea of dropping out of school to go live way out in the desert and do my art all day, and I almost did it. Professor Bauman said it was a great idea; he knew some great people who lived in the desert. But ultimately I decided that I liked the dome too much. No one was ever in there, and anyway, my mother was happy enough to pay my tuition. I thought of her as my first patron.
    I bent to my boxes. Calluses grew and toughened on my hands in the tender junctures where I gripped my tools. Looking at myself in the mirror one day, I realized that I now bore more than a passing resemblance to the smart boy with shaggy black hair whom I had once imagined as I lay on the floor of the ratty girl’s rec room next to the pinball machine. I was elated. That boy, I realized, must have been my vision of my own future.
    One afternoon in the rainy season of junior year, the door of the geodesic dome opened and a girl in green wellies blew in on a gust of rain. She was carrying a small paint-stained leather suitcase with silver buckles, which she set on the floor. Her face was a long, pale oval; she had a high forehead. Her wavy hair, damp from the rain, reached to her waist; it made her look like a pioneer. Her skirt was long and shapeless. Her sweater was strange. I wondered if she had it on backward.
    â€œYo,” she said. “Who are you?”
    â€œGabe.”
    â€œAre you in here a lot?”
    â€œYes,” I said proprietarily. “All the time.” I put the dried cicada I’d been moving from spot to spot in a new box all morning in my pocket. “It’s not locked.”
    â€œGood,” she said. “I’m a transfer. Sarah.” She looked around. “Jesus Christ. Look at this place. It’s like a church. Can we open that?”
    I turned the crank on the triangular window. I turned it patiently, as if I were humoring her. Sarah sniffed, held out her pale, thin hands in the wet air. “Cattle. Love it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCan’t you smell it? There must have been a ranch here.”
    â€œHere?” I took a deep breath. Sage. Gasoline. Glue. “Cattle?”
    â€œYes. A lot of them, I think.” She tilted her head. “Maybe there was a fire.”
    I sniffed again. “I don’t know.”
    â€œYou’ve felt it,” she said. She heaved the suitcase onto one of the immaculate tables and unbuckled the silver buckles. “They know you’re here.” Inside the suitcase were myriad crumpled tubes of paint, brushes, rags, pencils. “I like cows.” She began taking everything out and busily spreading it across the table as if it were some sort of puzzle, or maybe the parts of a car that could be put back together. “Let’s bring them some sugar tomorrow.”
    â€œCows like sugar?”
    For the next two years, we piled sugar cubes for the phantom cattle on every surface in the room, listened to the radio, and watched the sun and the moon pass back and forth over the oval-shaped skylight. The accreting walls of sugar made me think of the bus station and how happy I’d been there on those long, humid afternoons. Though the guys I had been with generally didn’t say much; there was often a wink, a shared smile, a sense of affinity. Being inside the geodesic dome with Sarah was a little like that, an echo of that kind of being together and not being together at the same time, working away in silence. I dreamed about the cattle. They jostled me, they lowed, and