Bow Saw Matinee

The rain had been coming down for two days straight and the gravel behind the bar had turned into this gray soup that pooled around the table legs like the whole patio was sinking. I sat there with a beer I wasn't drinking and watched a puddle do nothing for about ten minutes. That's the kind of man I'd become at twenty-four. A guy who watches puddles.

Here's how I got there. I'm Deepak Schultz, I work at the farmacia in Choroní, and my job is basically being a human dispenser. Man comes in with a slip, I count pills, I hand pills over, man leaves. Woman comes in with a slip, I count pills, hand pills over, woman leaves. Eleven months of that and I started to feel like the counter itself, this flat surface where transactions happen. I'd go home to my apartment above the hardware store and sit in the dark because turning on lights felt like effort, and I'd think, well, this is it, this is the shape of a life, a machine that counts pills and then sits in the dark.

I'd dated Yvette for fourteen months after meeting her at a bar in Maracay, which is a fact I mention because it's the last time anything surprised me. We broke up in March, nothing ugly, she just said she needed a kind of noise I couldn't make, and I said okay, because arguing requires a kind of energy I also didn't have. Before Yvette there was a girl in college who dumped me at twenty-two via a text message that said "good luck out there," which is either the coldest or funniest breakup line ever typed.

So when Yvette walked onto the back patio that Thursday, I did the thing where you sit up too fast and pretend you didn't.

"Deepak." She pulled out the chair across from me without asking, which was very her. She was twenty-three, still doing the exit music at the theater, still the kind of pretty that makes you annoyed because you can't think straight around it. "I need to show you something."

"It's hailing," I said. And it was. The fields past the bar had started going white, hail bouncing off the corrugated tin roof over our heads so loud we had to half shout. "You walked through a hailstorm to show me something."

"I did. Watch." She reached into the canvas bag she carried everywhere and set it on the wet table between us.

It was a bow saw. An actual rusty bow saw, the kind with the twisted frame and the narrow blade you'd use on a tree branch, orange with old rust except where the blade was still silver. Water beaded on it. It sat there on the table doing the most threatening thing a saw has ever done, which is nothing.

"Yvette. That's a saw."

"It's the game," she said. "It's called the saw game. I invented it Tuesday night when the power was out and I couldn't sleep, which is when all my best terrible ideas happen." She leaned forward, forearms on the wet wood, totally serious. "The rules are simple. Tonight, we're only allowed to touch each other using the saw. No hands. No elbows, no lips, nothing. The saw has to initiate every single touch. Once the saw is in play, then hands can come back, but you can't even start without it."

I laughed. I laughed hard enough that a guy at the other table looked over. "That's insane."

"Yes," she said, not smiling.

"You want me to. What. Poke you with a rusty saw."

"Tap. Not poke, tap. And I'll tap you. We take turns. It's like chess but stupid and we're the pieces." She pushed the saw an inch toward me. "You're allowed to say no. I need to say that part out loud. This is a dumb idea and you can walk away and I'll still think you're fine."

And there it was, the out, offered free of charge. I should have taken it. I should have said something normal like "you've lost it" and finished my beer and gone home to my dark apartment and my puddle-watching future.

But the loneliness in my chest had gotten heavy that month. Not dramatic heavy, just this dumb dull weight, a wet coat I couldn't take off. And the absurdity of the saw game, the sheer stupid *strangeness* of it, was the first thing in weeks that made me feel human instead of a counter. Being part of a weird experiment felt closer to alive than anything the pharmacy had offered me since winter.

"Okay," I heard myself say. "Okay, fine. I'm in. I clearly have lost my mind, but I'm in."

"Yes!" She actually smacked the table and the saw jumped. "Okay, rule book. One: saw touches only to start. Two: if somebody says stop or wait, everything stops, saw included, no arguments, that rule is essential and I mean it. Three: nobody gets hurt. It's a tap, not a cut, the blade stays flat. Four: the game ends when one of us says the game ends and not before. Five, and this is important, no laughing at rule four."

"Who would laugh at rule four?"

"Past boyfriends would laugh at rule four. Keep up." She stood, grabbed the saw, and held it out like a bouquet. "You first. It's your turn because you accepted last, that's how turns work."

I took it. It was heavier than it looked and cold from the rain and I felt like an idiot holding it, standing in the mud behind a dive bar while hail turned the fields white and the tin roof hammered overhead, a drum solo. Yvette stood across from me with her arms out a little, daring me.

"Go on," she said. "Tap my shoulder. Gentle. It's a shoulder, not a log."

I stepped forward and swung the saw in this wide careful arc, way too much ceremony for a shoulder tap, and she saw it coming and ducked. Not a small duck, a full duck, and the saw sailed right over her head, out of my hands, and clattered into the gray mud at her feet, splattering her jeans up both shins and bouncing once before it settled.

There was a silence. Hail on tin. The whole white field.

"Wow," Yvette said, looking down at her mud-splattered jeans, then at the saw, then at me. "Wow. You lost the saw. That was your one move and you lost the saw into the mud."

"You ducked!"

"Of course I ducked, you swung it at me like you were chopping firewood. Rule three, Deepak. Nobody gets hurt. That includes getting brained by a bow saw on the patio of the Foca Bar."

"It wasn't going to hit you."

"It was airborne, that's all hitting is, technically." She picked the saw up out of the mud and wiped it down her thigh, which just made the mud streak worse. Her jeans were done for. She didn't seem to care even a little, which is one of about four hundred things I'd forgotten I liked about her. She looked at the muddy blade and then back up at me and something in her face changed, some decision getting made in real time. "Okay. New ruling. The mud counts as still in play. The saw touched the ground, the ground is part of the patio, the patio is part of the game, so technically your turn is still happening."

"That's not a rule. We agreed on five rules."

"I'm the rules committee," she said, and she stepped closer to me, close enough that I could see the hail melting in her hair, and she turned the saw around in her hands so the flat of the blade faced me, and she held it there, an inch from my chest, not touching, just waiting. Rain or hail or whatever it was kept coming down on the tin and neither of us moved. "Your turn is still happening. Do you want to finish it?"

I looked at the flat rusty blade hovering over my shirt and thought about my dark apartment and my pill counting and my puddle, and I said yes, and I meant it, because it was my own yes.

She let me take the saw from her then, and for a while we just stood there like two people in a staring contest nobody had started. The hail got louder. I remember thinking my ears would ring tomorrow and not caring much.

Then Yvette laughed, this short bark of a laugh, and said the game needed chairs. Chairs, she said, because a game without chairs is just standing, and standing is for funerals. I didn't follow the logic but I followed her. We dragged two plastic stools over near the wall where the tin roof stretched out over the patio, and sat down, and the mud around us was already turning to gray soup from all the water running off the fields. Two days of rain had turned the gravel into something between gravel and pudding, and now the hail was adding a fresh layer of cold on top.

So there we were, sitting on stools behind the Foca Bar, holding a rusty bow saw between us like it was a chess piece. I could say it felt normal, but it didn't. It felt like the opposite of my whole month.

* * *

"Okay," Yvette said, standing up. "Ruling. New ruling. The committee has decided your turn ended and mine started while you were sitting down. Don't argue, the minutes are confidential."

"You don't have minutes."

"I have them in my head. They're very detailed."

She walked behind my stool, and I heard her boots squelch in the mud, and then I felt the twisted