Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “We could trade,” Rachel said. “Trade vehicles. I’m in the Audi with Danica. It just feels so comfortable I don’t think I’m in the wilderness.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Hilary looked at me.

  I hoped she could see that I was begging her to turn down the offer. I didn’t want to make an issue of it by inserting myself into the discussion.

  “Danica is in your section anyway, Professor Gill, and I know she’d like to get to know you better,” Rachel said. She was sounding pushy, if not desperate.

  Hilary caught my eye for a second and then said, “I need to stay in the Jeep. Professor Wells and I have to discuss our lectures.”

  “Oh, okay.” Rachel left us.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Someone has an admirer.”

  “You think?”

  “So, how do you handle something like that?”

  I looked out the window at Rachel leaning against the Audi, chatting with her classmates. I was afraid to imagine what she might be saying.

  “Does it worry you?”

  “It happens. You just ignore it and it goes away. I can’t imagine what’s going on in that brain of hers. I realize that I’m a beautiful specimen of a man with a dazzling intellect, but I’m twice her age.”

  “Exactly,” Hilary said.

  “Now, see, I just don’t get that. Are you talking about daddy issues?”

  “Some call it that.”

  “In six years my daughter will be that student. Six years. What do you think I should do?” I asked.

  “You could kiss her and scare the hell out of her.”

  “You’re joking, right? Yeah, you’re fucking with me. Can you imagine what would happen if I let her kiss me? What would you do?”

  Hilary looked at the tray of candy bars on the counter, handed one to Man Pat. “I’ll take this,” she said. Then to me, “I’d do what you’re doing, pretend it’s not happening. But sooner or later you’re going to have to say something.”

  “Well, let’s get these people moving.” I thanked the Pats.

  Everyone paid up and we were on the road again, this time as a convoy, moving slowly behind the bus on the gravel road. Thirty minutes later we were standing in the harsh midafternoon sun erecting the awnings for shade.

  Hilary called for everyone to “get hydrated” before the afternoon’s short hike under the sun and before her lecture. As I watched her, I appreciated her youth and thought she was, in fact, pretty good with the students, better with them than I was in many respects. So she wasn’t going to shake up the world with her research and scholarship. I’d published many articles and hadn’t shaken much of anything. Rachel was near my Jeep talking to one of the football players in the class, leaning close to him in a flirtatious way. For a moment I felt a bit of relief, and then I caught her stealing glances at me, and when she caught my eye she leaned closer to the kid. The athlete was taken in. It was quite sad.

  I shook the trouble out of my head and called for everyone to get ready for the hike. “It’s not a long walk, but bring your water. Professor Gill will lead the way and I will be at the rear. Let’s move quickly so that we can be back well before dark. Okay, Professor Gill, take us out of here.”

  We walked beneath the old washed-out highway bridge and along the ragged ridge that led south. The sun was intense as the sun was always intense out there, and I watched the students closely from behind. It was the athletic men who seemed to complain most. At first I thought it was ironic, until I understood how much attention their complaining attracted from the women in the group.

  We stopped and I lectured. “These are the oldest rock bodies found in the area. These metasediments date back to the early Paleozoic era. Who can tell me what a metasediment is?”

  Of course it was Rachel Charles who offered the simple answer to my simple question. She had read her homework, of course. She smiled at me, and I told her she was correct while looking away.

  “This is an alluvial fan deposit that is made up of red sandstone and boulder conglomerate from the middle Miocene, more than twelve million years old. There are several layers, but all I want you to do right now is find some examples of the youngest rocks. Remember your lab work and find sandstone and marine turbidite. And also see if you can locate oyster shells, mollusk, and coral.”

  “This will go faster if you work in groups,” Hilary said.

  The students managed to work out teams of three, and somehow Rachel managed to be the odd person out. “I don’t have a group,” she said to me.

  Hilary stepped in. “I’ll work with you. What’s your name?”

  “Rachel Charles.” This was offered flatly. Rachel’s sullen face only served to underscore her youth, and for a flash of a second I saw my Sarah, and her approach felt even worse.

  The hike and lectures went their tedious and boring ways. The students, despite their complaints, didn’t seem to suffer greatly in the heat and they paid relatively close attention, with the normal jockeying to stand next to whatever creature attracted them. Again, Hilary was completely at ease, a natural with them. I wanted to be able to tell her with some confidence that the research would fall into place, but I honestly did not believe that to be in any way true. She was also admirably comfortable maintaining her boundaries with the male students who found her attractive, desirable. She never showed any panic, as I am certain I did. The young men merely wandered off, confused but unhurt, yet clear on their standing.

  Back at the campsite we put up tents, laid out sleeping bags, and ate food that didn’t need to be cooked. The sun fell and then the temperature. The students split up into little groups, laughed, drank beer and other things. It was nearly cute how they attempted to hide the booze from me. They paused at the occasional howl of a coyote.

  “Professor Wells,” a male voice called to me.

  “Yo!”

  “Is it true there are lions out here?”

  “Yes, there are cougars out here,” I said. “But you’ll never see one. You might see some coyotes and even a tortoise, but the lions knew we were here before we did.” I looked around at them. “If you do wander off, don’t go far. It’s easy to get disoriented out in the desert because every direction looks the same. We don’t need to spend any of our time searching for a lost one of you. If you’re by yourself out there, you might just see a lion. Worse, he might see you.”

  Later, when things were finally quiet, after Hilary had retired to her tent, I decided to take a walk around, to be alone, to enjoy the desert, and to be sure no one had wandered off and become lost. The full moon made it easy to see, placing doughnuts of shadows around the greasewoods. The light also made it easy to imagine that one knew where one was. The sky was black, deep, infinite, the very thing that scared the Greeks and all the other ancients.

  If I had heard their breathing, I would not have walked closer, but I had not heard them, and so I found myself observing, unobserved myself, two students fucking. I stopped dead, and as I turned to fade back into the darkness, I saw that the young woman was Rachel, and just as I recognized her, she saw me. She was sitting on the man but made no move to get up, offered no reaction that might have alerted her partner. I froze, watched as she watched me, watched as she pushed harder down onto the man. She would not look away from me. Actually, she stared right at me; turns out there is a qualitative difference. I stood there for more than a few seconds. I watched her eyes, her mouth, and worse, she saw me watching. I felt the beginning of an erection. We looked at each other for a few seconds, seconds that should have felt more awkward than they were. Then I escaped, turned away. I had a feeling of first jealousy, then anger. Neither feeling was appropriate, nor did either make any real sense to me, at least no sense that I wanted. I returned to the camp and crawled into my sleeping bag, set off some yards from the students’ cluster of tents. I drifted off to sleep looking up at Gemini, Orion, and imagined I could just make out the faint Monoceros. It struck me, as it always struck me, how little I
knew about the stars. No matter how much I read, I never knew more. I lay there with the stars and some shame.

  I found sleep or it found me. And in my sleep I dreamed, or perhaps I didn’t sleep at all and merely entertained anxious thoughts. My dreams or ruminations were disturbing, and I wondered during them whether my imaginings then would have been more disquieting, alterative, as thoughts or dreams. I dreamed or imagined Rachel Charles riding the man in the desert. She was naked, though she hadn’t been when I saw her, and there was light now that allowed me to clearly see her breast, the muscles of her flat stomach. In the dream, or whatever it was, I found her attractive, and I had an erection that I found embarrassing because I should not have had one. I was embarrassed in my bag to merely find the young woman attractive, and also because I thought my condition, if you will, might be visible from outside my sleeping bag. In my dream, or my thinking, I decided it didn’t matter what I was experiencing. Finally, it was sleep.

  I awoke to another kind of excitement, hushed screams, if such a thing is possible. I pulled on my boots and walked toward the commotion. “What is it?” I asked.

  “A snake,” a man said.

  Sure enough there was a good-sized rattlesnake coiled on the pink sleeping bag just inside the large dome tent of a young woman I knew to be a song girl with the marching band. The snake lay still between her raised and trembling knees. I was not so alarmed by the snake but by the thought that she might try to squirm out of her bag. Of course, the snake was not on top of me. The woman was beside herself, though appropriately frozen. What was alarming now was the sight of one of the muscly and overly confident athletes reaching for the head of the creature. Before I could tell him to back away, he had grabbed the snake’s head just as he had imagined it was done on nature television. Unfortunately, he pressed his thumb onto the top of the animal’s head, and the snake slowly coiled around his arm. The look on the kid’s face was almost comical and yet it was not. I had had some experience with rattlesnakes but was hardly an expert, but even I could see he was in trouble.

  “First of all, don’t let go of its head,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Calvin.”

  “What do you think we should do, Calvin?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Professor.”

  “Okay, Calvin. What sport do you play?”

  “Baseball.”

  “Good. Then you’ve got strong hands. Keep a firm grip for me. Mind if I tell you that was a stupid thing to do, grabbing this thing?”

  “I realize that now.”

  I grabbed the snake’s tail, the skin dry and rough against my fingers, and gently unwound it from his arm. I could tell it was still cold, cold enough not to rattle, and that was a good thing. “Hilary, would you grab a tent bag or something?” I could feel the snake coming around, aided by the heat in the air and our hands. Hilary returned with a sack. The snake was waking now, writhing.

  “What now?” Calvin asked.

  “Shove his head in the bag, but don’t let go.” Calvin did. “All right, I’m going to grab its head from the outside. Don’t let go until I tell you.” Calvin nodded and I grabbed his wrist from outside the bag and worked my way to his fingers, then grasped the rattler on either side of its head. “You can let go,” I said.

  “Thank God,” Calvin said.

  I pushed the rest of the snake into the bag and cinched it closed.

  The students applauded, rather weakly. I hated the attention and moved off with the snake. I stopped and turned back to them. “What Calvin did was reckless and stupid. No offense, Calvin. If you see a snake, just remain calm and call me or Professor Gill.” I turned and walked away.

  Hilary caught up to me. “I don’t want them calling me when they find snakes,” she said, almost laughing.

  “Hell, I don’t want them calling me either. At least you’ll be calm and not do something crazy like Calvin back there.”

  “What are you going to do with the snake?” Rachel asked. She had trotted over after Hilary.

  “I’m going to let him go.”

  “May I come?”

  I looked at Hilary. She smiled and walked away.

  “Okay,” I said to Rachel. “Come on.”

  She walked with me into the desert. The sounds and voices of the campsite faded away, though I imagined I could feel some of them watching us.

  “That was really amazing,” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “I’m sorry about last night.”

  “At least this isn’t a big snake,” I said.

  “I hope it didn’t make you too uncomfortable.”

  “Just uncomfortable enough,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing.”

  We walked farther perhaps than needed and rather unceremoniously set the animal free in a wash. It didn’t move away but did raise its head, smelled the air, ignored us. I did not take this personally. I looked at the anhydrous hills and was overcome by sudden formless, unshaped worry. I needed the snake to move before I left that spot. I grabbed an ocotillo branch and touched the rattler. It slithered off without rattling.

  “Wow,” Rachel said, squeezing my arm.

  I pulled away. “Back to camp,” I said.

  Branta canadensis. The five bones from pack rat nests are from at least three different individuals. One femur and an ulna might be Branta canadensis parvipes, known to winter in the state.

  Late that afternoon, after the hikes and lectures and the oppressive heat, many of the students decided to make the longish drive back to Los Angeles. A few wanted to camp one more night, it being a long weekend, something about Columbus. If any were staying, I was staying. Hilary chose to remain as well. The smaller group did not sort themselves into clutches but remained together sitting around a fire. Of course Rachel remained. I didn’t know if her sexual partner from the previous night was there or not, as I never saw his face. Regardless, she unfortunately seemed unattached to anyone there and kept a conspicuous eye on me through the flames. We did the cliché thing of roasting marshmallows and hot dogs and actually listened to one another. Hilary got them talking by asking if anyone had ever been lost. A couple had stories of being lost as children.

  “What about you, Professor Wells?” from Rachel.

  “I’ve been lost more times than I can count,” I said. “Being lost is a good thing. Generally, a good thing. It’s a good thing if you get found. I was lost not too far from here about twenty years ago. I was part of a search party looking for a lost girl. She was ten, if my memory is correct, and had gotten separated from her parents. I wandered into what I thought was a box canyon that turned out not to be a box canyon, and I got turned around. At first I couldn’t believe I was lost, but I caught on pretty quickly. No one had cell phones back then, and they wouldn’t have worked out here anyway.”

  “What did you do?” This from a woman who looked alarmingly like Rachel Charles.

  “I found the highest ground I could and looked around. I was certain I would see other members of the search team, but there was no one. I considered panicking for a couple of minutes, realizing that no one would think to look for one of the searchers. I had some water and I found myself measuring it, thinking about rationing. I stayed there on that ridge and night came. I thought I was going to freeze to death, it was so cold.”

  “Then?” a young man asked.

  “I shined my flashlight out into the darkness, but nobody saw me. Morning came and I decided to walk back in the general direction from which I had come. I walked for miles. The sun beat down on me. I could feel my tongue swelling slightly. I was dragging my feet. I tried to get water out of a prickly pear, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “What happened?” Rachel asked.

  “Oh, they never found me. I died out here.”

  They laughed not because I was funny but because I had caught them. We sat around a little longer. A girl with a guitar sang a song that I didn’t know and didn�
�t much like, but it was sweet, old fashioned, her doing that.

  It was suddenly late, and as I looked at their faces, it dawned on me that they were afraid of turning in because of the snake incident. “I think I’m going to turn in,” I told them. And I left them there.

  I grabbed my canteen and wandered far off so I could brush my teeth and pee in peace, then returned to my bag. I was tired and my legs ached, though I’d done very little. This made me feel old. I removed my shirt, boots, and belt and slipped in. I was nearly asleep when the crunch of footfalls came close. I looked up to see Rachel.

  “What do you want, Rachel?”

  “I’m afraid of snakes,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about snakes. The snakes don’t want you. You’re too skinny to keep them warm.”

  “I can’t get them out of my head.”

  I sighed, studied her ever so briefly, and grew slightly irritated. “You do understand that I’m your professor, your married-with-child professor?”

  “It’s the snakes.”

  I wanted to say that she should have left for Los Angeles with the others, but I didn’t. It didn’t make sense to comment on something that was done and over. “It’s hardly likely that that will happen again, a snake showing up in camp,” I said. “Get in your tent and zip it up. If by some incredible magic a snake shows up, it can’t get inside your zipped-up tent.”

  “Really?”

  “They don’t have hands, Rachel.”

  She laughed.

  “Good night, Rachel.”

  “I’m scared. Can’t I just sit here and we talk for a while?” Before I could scream for help, she was seated on the ground.

  I sat up in my bag. “There’s not much for us to talk about.”

  She said nothing but looked at the quiet campsite.

  “What are we supposed to talk about?” I asked. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Anything.”

  “Where are you from, Rachel?”

  “The Seattle area.”

  I nodded. “Siblings.”

  “Nope. My mother had a miscarriage before I came along. She says she was lucky to have me.”