DECEMBER 19, 2011
It’s late—ten or eleven. Danny climbs into the passenger seat, and they drive the few short minutes to Neko’s. He is, by some miracle, awake, and Vale takes his hand and leads him to the door. Slips a hat on his head. Says, “Shhh.”
Neko puts on his coat, grins, follows her to the car.
Neither of them knows where she’s driving. She puts on Leonard Cohen’s Best Of in honor of Danny’s hayloft serenades. Danny turns to her. “You remember.”
“Of course,” Vale says, smiling. They drive the back roads, covered in a slim sheet of snow, the moon full or nearly so, the barns and fields near fluorescent in the night light, the landscape lunar.
Cohen sings about lonesome and quarrelsome heroes, and Danny sings along at the top of his lungs, and Vale and Neko join in. Shouting. Singing out of key. Vale driving too fast. Intoxicated by recklessness and moonlight.
He sings about turning into gold, and they all do, too, their voices awful, all rage and laughter.
“This song,” Danny says, slamming his fist on the dashboard. “Too damn good.”
“Cohen salvation,” Neko says quietly, leaning in from the backseat and kissing Vale’s neck.
Vale accelerates. Gives the finger to the full moon.
SHE DOESN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHERE SHE’S HEADED UNTIL she finds herself passing the driveway to Ginny’s Farther Heaven. Of course. She puts the car into reverse. Backs up and turns up the driveway.
She has to gun it with the snow; at the last hill the tires spin out and the car slides into the ditch.
“Shit,” Vale whispers. “I guess we walk.”
They climb out and scramble up the rest of the driveway in the dark. There are no lights on in the farmhouse. Vale hasn’t thought this through entirely, but she has a hunch that if Ginny wakes, she won’t mind.
She leads them to the backside of the house, to the attached barn converted to living room, slides open a window, and they all climb inside. It’s cold in there—the wood stove unlit—but the purple trapeze silk is still hanging, a streak of dark in the center of the moonlit room.
Peacock feathers litter the floor. “The promised land,” Danny says, picking one up, smiling.
Neko is quiet. Eyes the trapeze silk and then Vale.
Vale throws off her hat and coat. She pulls off her boots and socks and goes to the fabric. She slips her sweater over her head. Steps out of her jeans so that she’s wearing just her black lace bra and her gray long underwear. She lifts herself up—climbing—animal, creature-esque there in that moonlight, to the very top. She ties a knot below her foot and finds her balance—holds her left arm and left leg out, swivels her hips and neck until the fabric begins to spin. Slow. Then faster.
She doesn’t look down at the faces she knows are there, looking up. This isn’t about being seen. Or is it? She closes her eyes and imagines Shante’s voice floating up from below—the syncopated strum of her ukulele, her voice, thick and beautiful, twining up through the air. There’s a skylight amid the rafters, the moon bright in it, and every time Vale spins, that moonlight flickers across her face. A strobe light in that old barn.
The radiance falls on all of us, Bonnie, Vale thinks, spinning. Those men she loves below her, looking up. Those men who love her, looking up. Ginny’s wild spirit, asleep in the next room, eyeing her through the walls. The peacocks, asleep in their corners. On every one of us, Vale thinks, spinning, feeling every muscle in her body work. Every fucking one.