75 Salvo / Leah and Ian were hunting for garbage.Leah was getting bored. “Show a little skin!” she shouted at the men loading onto buses in the outdoor plaza of Tucson’s Greyhound station.The men had wily, rash-red faces, and shuffled forward in jerks as if pursued by the jabbing handle of a rake.Heads turned in her direction .A man carrying a wooden dowel with a newspaper draped over it didn’t look away. He mounted the bus steps backward. Leah imagined he thought he was staring down a wild animal. Ian took a Polaroid of a condom package sitting in a square of dust on the dashboard of a car. It didn’t have to be strictly garbage, odds and ends worked too, little hopeless dashes. When he went home and made a painting of this picture, he would use only the most flattering colors. He was incredibly respectful of the gauche ornaments of the world. A woman came out of a tobacco store. “That’s my little girl’s Pulsar!” she called. Ian straightened.“I’m just—” “It doesn’t matter. I’ll sell it to you.” He stepped back from the curb waving the Polaroid in the air, then extended it to her.“Would you like this?” Salvo 76 / “No.” Her hair looked run through repeatedly by fingers. “I’ll sell it to you for two hundred dollars.There’s some good shit in that car if you know what I mean and where to look and how to let it hit you. Some people don’t know how. Have to open yourself along your extremities.” They began to walk away.The woman called, “What’d I say?” It wasn’t what she’d said, it was the spots of need—like perfectly round Band-aids—where her eyes should have been. Leah felt close to Ian, moving down the sidewalk. He was wearing sandals whose soles were made from Goodyear tires, he was putting one salvaged sole in front of the other with that long, loose-hipped strut of his, and for once she was part of where he was going. “Two hundred bucks,” he mused.“Maybe I should have.” “But you’re anti-car.” “But I’m pro-helping people.” “These things collide every day,” Leah said. Her shoes were Mary Jane–style Doc Martens. Her ankles were barely buried bones.They walked back to Ian’s apartment and leaned into the kitchen counter, gulping water. Ian drank a fantastic amount of water.His skin was extremely well-hydrated,a taut liquid cover that showed no damage from the sun. On the counter, there was a lidless plastic container filled with apple cores, squash and onion skins,Yerba mate leaves, the crouching white heart of a pepper. It stank. Ian claimed he couldn’t smell anything.When he emptied it onto the larger compost heap outside, brown rivulets splattering down after the clumpy,partially decomposed stuff,Leah would ask him,“Now [44.215.110.142] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:16 GMT) Salvo / 77 can you smell it?” and he would shade his eyes from the sun to look sadly at her.The question was wrong, the question was wasteful. Leah didn’t want him to stop composting, she just wanted an acknowledgment of the underside of his golden sense of purpose. They were to be married in a week. They’d met at the funeral of a mutual friend who had been killed in a traffic accident. Ruben had been riding his motorcycle without a helmet.The accident occurred late at night, three or four a.m., later than was fun to be out, and he was speeding south toward home. He had been marching against a proposed dog track near Phoenix, and must have then joined some of the other marchers for drinks, because there was alcohol in his system. But how did they know? Leah kept wondering.Can a person be dead and drunk? Can a body accommodate all that nothingness? She imagined the hands of paramedics raking over Ruben, lifting him, prodding him for sobriety and vital signs. Propping open one of his eyelids with his swept-feather lashes and shining a penlight into his eye. She had never told him how much she liked him.At the funeral, she kept thinking, Now you’ve lost your chance. She was distraught for him, of course, but somewhere inside that was a pin-drop of sadness for herself...