His Scent on My Skin

The defense went fine. Better than fine. Dr. Hallowell shook my hand afterward and said the word "rigorous" out loud, which for him was basically a standing ovation.

I told everybody it was the data. Nine months of soil samples from four grazing paddocks, three hundred pages of analysis, two committee members who fought like cats over my methodology chapter. That's what got me through.

That was about forty percent true.

The other sixty percent was a dirty work shirt hanging in my closet.

I have never told anybody this. (Well, I'm telling it now, obviously, but nobody at the party knew.) Somewhere in the ugly stretch of February, when the thesis was eating me alive and I was sleeping four hours a night in the lab shed, I stole a shirt off the clothesline at the main house.

Not just any shirt. Vladek's shirt. The old blue chambray one, faded soft, sweat-stained at the collar and under the arms. He'd worn it four days straight during the February kidding sweep. I know because I kept track, which is its own kind of embarrassing.

Vladek is the foreman here at Fisher Ranch. Forty-eight years old, built like the fence posts he sets, been arguing with me about stocking density since the day I showed up with sampling augers and a university parking pass. Five years of rivalry. He thinks my grazing models are "book math." I think his rotation schedule is "cowboy folklore." We've said worse to each other across the fence line.

I don't like him. Let me be plain about that part. I've never once looked at the man and thought anything warm.

But his shirt.

The smell of it does something to me that I can't explain neatly. Dust and sweat and horse and a little bit of diesel, all worked into the cotton. I'd unfold it from the pillowcase I kept it zipped inside, press my face into the collar, and breathe. Then I could go back to chapter four. It got me through the worst six weeks of my life, that shirt. Nobody's business how, really. A woman who lives alone in a shed on a goat ranch is allowed one weird habit.

* * *

By seven that evening the party in my lab shed was thinning out. Two committee members, gone. My one friend in the program, Annie, gone, after hugging me three times. I'd bought two cases of cheap beer and a sheet cake from the grocery in Kerrville that said CONGRATS DR. TERI, which was premature, since the diploma comes later, but I figured I'd earned the arrogance.

The shed smells like what it is. Soil bags, a drying oven, faint ammonia from the sample fridge. Not party-central. Everybody had been polite about it anyway.

Now it was just me. Beer number four. Bare feet on the plywood floor.

And the shirt.

I'd worn it to my own party, which was a choice I made on purpose. My defense clothes were a nice blouse and slacks, and I'd changed back into cutoffs and the shirt the second I got home, like shedding one skin for the real one. Blue chambray, sleeves rolled, tail hanging past my shorts. His collar stain dark against my collarbone. It's a big shirt on me. I'm forty-three, five-six, built more like a fence post myself than most women I know. He's got about four inches and sixty pounds on me, so it swallows my shoulders.

I sat on the folding chair by the sample table, tipped the bottle back, and then did the thing I do. Pulled the collar up against my nose and breathed in.

Still there. Faint now, months of my washing machine had thinned it, but the ghost of him was in the weave. Sweat and dust and animal. I closed my eyes.

God. Okay. Confession number two: I've done more with that shirt than smell it. A lot more. Not tonight's story, mostly. But a woman alone in a shed learns things about herself at two in the morning, and one of mine is that the smell of a working man, his actual working man smell, hits me somewhere below thinking. It's the only fetish I've got and I've had it exactly once in my life, at twenty-four, with a grad student named Gary who worked a summer on a combine crew. That affair lasted three months and ruined me for every polite, clean-smelling date since. Twenty years of nothing that stuck. Draw your own conclusions.

I had my face buried in the collar, breathing slow, when somebody knocked on the shed door. Three raps. No hello first.

"Open," I said, figuring it was Annie back for her sunglasses.

The door swung and it was not Annie.

* * *

Vladek filled the doorframe the way he fills everything. Work boots, jeans, a green t-shirt, forearms like rope. He looked around the shed, at the cake, at the empty bottles, and then his eyes found me. Stopped. Dropped to my chest. Back up to my face.

He went quiet. Vladek has never once in five years gone quiet.

"You're wearing my shirt," he said.

I looked down at it, like there was some chance I'd forgotten. "Am I."

"That's mine. The blue one. Been gone off the line since February." He stepped inside and let the door fall shut behind him. "I figured the wind took it. Wind don't fold things over a hanger, though, does it."

"It was on the ground," I said. "By the fence. I picked it up to be neighborly."

"On the ground." He said it flat, the way he says "book math."

"Near the ground."

He walked closer. Three steps. He stopped about four feet from me, close enough that I caught his actual smell over the beer and the drying oven, which was the same smell, the real one, live and fresh, and my brain did a little static burst that I very much hoped my face did not show.

"Defense went well," he said.

"It did. I'm officially Dr. Teri as soon as the paperwork clears."

"Congratulations." He didn't sound like he meant it. He was still looking at the shirt. At the collar. At me wearing it.

"Thanks. Do you want some cake?"

"Teri." He rubbed his jaw. "I want my shirt back."

Something dropped through my stomach. "Now?"

"Now."

I looked at the shirt I was wearing. I looked at him. "It's been through my wash about nine times. It's mine now. Finders law. Adverse possession. I could cite you a case."

"You stole it off my line."

"Picked it up off the ground," I said, "near the line."

"Then you kept it for four months and wore it to your own party." He had that blunt half-grin he gets when he's got somebody dead to rights in an argument, the one I've wanted to knock off his face about two hundred times. "That's not adverse possession, that's just stealing."

I took a drink of beer because I needed my hands to do something. "It's a rag. It's got holes."

"It's my favorite rag."

"Fine." I stood up, went to the hamper in the corner, and pulled out a gray Fisher Ranch work shirt that he'd also lost to the wind, last summer. "Here. Trade you. Take that one and we're square."

"That's not the one."

"They're identical."

"They are not." He looked at the gray one the way I'd look at a soil sample labeled wrong. "That one's poly blend. Mine was cotton."

I will admit, here in the privacy of my own narration, that the cotton detail made my face go hot. He knew his shirts. He knew which one was gone. He was standing four feet away from me holding a grudge about it, and I was standing there in the evidence.

"So take it off me," I said.

Bad line. Wrong line. It came out before the smarter part of my brain could file it, and the second it was in the air we both heard what it sounded like. His eyebrows moved. Mine probably did too.

"You know what I mean," I said quickly.

"I think I do."

"You don't. I meant hand it over. Like a hostage exchange."

He set the gray shirt down on the sample table. Deliberate. Then he looked at me the way he looks at my grazing data right before he tells me it doesn't account for rainfall variance.

"Four months," he said. "You've been walking around my ranch in my shirt for four months. For four months I've been short one shirt, thinking the wind's gotten clever, and the whole time it's the doctor." He shook his head slowly. "Why."

"Why what."

"Why that one. Why keep it." He wasn't grinning anymore. "People don't steal laundry for four months, Teri. So why."

I had beer number four in one hand and no good answer in the other. The collar of his shirt was resting against my neck, right where I'd had my nose not ten minutes ago. The shed was very quiet. Somewhere outside, a goat was being an idiot about something.

"I like the way it smells," I said.

* * *

Okay. So I said it. Out loud. To Vladek.

"I like the way it smells."

He didn't laugh. That was the bad part. A laugh I could've handled. A laugh would've made it a joke, a thing I could've taken back at dawn.

He just stood there. Four feet of him, not moving.

"Well," he said finally. "Huh."

"Huh. Great response. Very rigorous."

"Don't get cute." He took one step. "That shirt smells like me. Four days of kidding sweep in February. Sweat, goat pen, diesel. That's what you're telling me you like."

"I'm telling you I like the shirt."

"You're telling me more than that." Another step. Two feet now. "Why'd you steal it?"

"I told you. Ground. Fence. Neighborly."

"Teri."

"Why does it matter?"

"Because I been wondering about you for five years and I'd kinda like the answer."