A bucket and a wooden crate had been left beside the garage, and she stacked them and climbed up, cupping her hands against the window. Inside was a car she’d seen in magazines but never in person, a gleaming black Pierce-Arrow brougham, long and low with wide running boards, swooping fenders, whitewall tires. A silver archer on the hood pointed its arrow at the oncoming world. All her confusion about Barclay was, for the moment, supplanted by a longing to lift that hood and look at the eight （eight!） cylinder engine underneath. A wild impulse seized her to go knock at the door again and ask if she could see the car. She knew Barclay would comply, would maybe, perhaps, even let her drive it, but then she would already have begun to owe him.
She was so enraptured that at first she didn’t notice the second automobile on the far side of the Pierce-Arrow, in the shadows, mostly covered except where the tarp had gotten hitched up in front, showing a bit of gray paint and a bumper she knew well.
* * *
—
“I don’t want to make deliveries to that house anymore,” she told Stanley. “Someone else can do it.”
Stanley looked weary, his hair white with flour dust, his big hands clasped over his apron. He’d been making money hand over fist since the Volstead Act passed, but Marian had no idea what he spent it on. He lived in the same house as before, worked every day in the bakery. His wife wore ordinary clothes. He must be stashing it all away. “You gotta,” he said. “He asked for you specially. He didn’t try anything funny, did he? Because if he didn’t, you gotta. Do it for me, all right? I’ve taken a lot of chances for you, put a lot of trust in you. He’d ruin me in a heartbeat if he wanted, and he asked for you specially. Okay?”
What could she say?
* * *
—
She could only remember one other night when she hadn’t been able to sleep. The night her father came home, she had lain awake on the porch while Jamie slumbered on the other cot. He’d been as anxious as she was, maybe more so, but somehow he’d managed to drop off, so only she had heard their father’s voice, low and indistinct. Only she had seen his shape in the cottage window when he closed the curtains. In the moonlight, the tall grass between the house and the cottage had looked tipped with silver, like the fur of a wolf.
For the almost five years since then she’d slept easily every single night—You’re a genius for sleep, Wallace said—but now she lay awake again, thinking about Barclay Macqueen, listening to Jamie’s breathing. An odd longing for her brother came into her. How was it possible to miss someone who was asleep just there, on a cot across a narrow gap, almost close enough to touch? But at the same time he seemed impervious, irretrievable, like something glimpsed from a moving train, already receding into the distance.
Barclay Macqueen. When she closed her eyes, she found herself looking through Gilda’s window at the beast, through the window of Barclay’s garage at that bit of gray hood. Why did he have the car? To worsen her lot? To take something from her? Or would he offer to return it as part of some future bargain? Jamie would say she should have nothing to do with Barclay. He would say he had a bad feeling, and she would struggle to explain that she had a bad feeling, too, like she was in a river being pulled toward a waterfall, panicked but also violently, recklessly curious. In her cot she pressed her heel against the bruise Barclay had left when he clutched her calf, felt a dull pain and sharper pleasure.
She threw off her blanket, pulled on her boots, slipped from the porch. There was a moon, nearly full. She walked surefooted in the dark to Gilda’s cabin. Nothing happened when she tapped on the window of the tiny closet where Caleb slept, only a ripple in the reflected moon. He must be in the mountains. No light at Gilda’s window, either, but when Marian turned to retreat home, she saw a shadow on the grass. Caleb was sleeping outside on a bedroll.
No fear in her, only a daring indistinguishable from necessity. She dropped beside him with the urgency of a soldier entering a foxhole. He startled awake, but she put her mouth on his before he could speak. He relaxed. He understood. She stripped off her pajamas, and he made himself naked in a single motion. He had always seemed like a person on the verge of nakedness. He rolled her onto her back. She felt his penis poking against her, nosing around, wayward, and then hard pressure, heat, a dull sawing. She observed the pain and strangeness with detachment, observed the way his black hair slid over his shoulders, the rise and fall of his hips between her knees. She imagined Barclay’s hips, Barclay’s shoulders, Barclay’s breath against her neck. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she pressed them to the grass.