by Peter Heller
It didn’t feel that way. Not really. It felt like what? A hollow bell. A bell that poured sound like water, the sound of our three lives together, but when you went to look in there was nothing.
Less than a year after Alce went and Cristine left, I remarried; trying to fill the bell, I guess. It didn’t last long.
I divorced Maggie just over a year and a half ago, part of the reason I moved up here. She was a wholesome Minnesota redhead who had once been a Playboy bunny, very by the book in all things. We got along, moved back to Taos together, and I wondered fifty times a week why I married her. Like when I came back from fishing and found my studio cleaned up, the canvases in progress set in order along one wall according to her estimate of their chronology, my paints, which tubes I leave scattered over a giant walnut table we inherited with the house, all laid in a row according to the Koala Paints color chart. The chart she left square on the table also in case I needed refreshing.
Coming to the Valley and living by myself for the first time in two decades, and letting the ache for a woman settle on my memories like a fine mist, greening them too, I realized that I hadn’t loved Maggie, not once.
Isn’t that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love. It seems cruel, almost monstrous. I mean I can love a bug. I have watched a spider weaving her web in the evening, in the young alder branches along the river, and I have loved her. Truly. Or a small moth trying to beat her way off the water of a dark pool, her soaked wings stuck to the surface as if by glue. And gently slid a leaf beneath her and lifted her to the ground, praying that her wings would dry without damage. I’ve done that. And yet I could not love my wife. Not that wife. As many knitted wool hats and back rubs later.
This is one of the things I ponder when I think about stuff, which I try not to do too much.
The other is how I could have loved Cristine so fiercely, who was such a world champion bitch, who even came after me once with a kitchen knife.
This was supposed to be a time of peace. Not a Holding Pattern—a Gathering Period.
Well, I pretty much fucked that up this afternoon.
It was supposed to be a time for having both feet on the ground and drawing breath. That’s what Irmina my fortune-teller–healer friend in Tesuque told me before I came up here. She said: “Jim, in every life there are seasons. You are a planet you know.”
“I am?”
She has black, almost violet eyes, not so serious, full of lights and humor. Of course I loved her. I really loved her. Anyone who looks like she does and puts her hand on your knee and heals it from a tweaky soreness you’ve had forever, that’s a person to adore.
She lived in a small adobe house shaded by one old willow and a few piñons in the middle of miles of rabbitbrush and mesquite. She had lost her husband to a car wreck very young. We had been lovers off and on for many years, before Cristine, and were both wise enough to know that our limit was a day and a half. Then she got breast cancer and had a mastectomy and I moved in with her for almost a year, to take care of her while she went through the treatments. We remained close, and after Alce died and Cristine left, we saw each other sporadically and it was always like coming home and we always kept it short. She was the one to teach me that this was not a bad thing, just a thing, something to honor that allowed a friendship to flower. It was a great lesson, one I have used in every kind of relationship since.
“You are a planet and you have a magnetic resonance,” she said, “and spin, and gravity. You have an atmosphere and a hot core. You do. I’ve told you that. Others have a core that is cooling. You have seasons and tides and one or two moons who will circle you for life.”
“I do?”
“Give me your hands.”
She held my big rough hands, hands I have always thought of as awkward—I’m missing half the right ring finger and the left hand is covered in scars—she held them in her round little ones, very warm, and squeezed them.
“You can’t run all the time. You can’t create all the time. You can’t always swim in an ocean of women.”
“I can’t?”
When she said that, my eyes got wet, I don’t know why. The way she was holding me and looking at me so steady and warm.
“You can breathe. Sometimes just breathe. Go ahead.”
I breathed.
“You are holding Alce so tight. That’s okay. How many years has it been?”
“I don’t know. Three.”
“It’s not possible to hold that much pain.”
Then there was a silence, and then she said, “Jim, even the earth rests. The moon swims up, thin as grass, and the stars, and you can see every one. It is a much quieter song.”
She had this way of talking in pictures which I also loved.
“You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace. And don’t worry, compa, you will be rowdy and out of control again. You will throw off every kind of light. You can’t help yourself.”
She leaned forward and kissed me, warm and lingering, and my rowdy aurora borealis self was like Fuck the field of peace, I want to bed Irmina right now, and then she pushed her little hands against my big shoulders and said, “Go now.” Smile. “Next time.”
And I thought, How long do you need between times to make one Next? Like could I drive out to the county highway and turn around and come back?
That was just over six months ago. I had been trying really hard to do what she said, until today.
After Willy and I had gotten the mare settled earlier this afternoon I drove back down to town and stopped at Bob’s gas station. The time was beer-thirty, just after closing, and he was sitting on the torn couch on one side of the front office with a twelve-pack of Bud Light, what else. A fat old redneck in suspenders with three days of grizzled beard was on one of the metal chairs—the man stood when I pushed open the door, stretched, crumpled his can in a ham fist and tossed it perfectly into the corner trash can with a neat ring of steel, said to Bob,
“Keep the dirty side down.” Nodded to me once and went out the door.
“Do I look scary?” I said. “Scared him away?”
“You don’t look that good to tell you the truth.” Bob pried a can out of the torn box and held it out.
“No thanks.”
He cracked it, took a long swallow.
“I forget you’re on the wagon. I should do.” Smiled. “Never happen.”
I sat on the vacated metal chair, still warm from the man’s big butt.
“You see a ghost or just didn’t catch any fish? I saw you go by. You were driving a little too fast so I knew you were going fishing.”
Being in Bob’s front office always settles me. Something about—I don’t know what. Always having enough time for whatever needs doing. Taking it just as it comes: everything’s fucked up, might as well meet it halfway and see what happens, that was Bob’s approach. And laugh about it if possible.
I said, “I went up the Sulphur. You know the second pullout, by that flat where people camp?”
He nodded, drank. He was watching me and his face was serious, like it rarely is. Could see I was somehow shaken, I guess.
“Somebody was setting up some wall tents, had the road blocked with a horse trailer.”
Bob’s new beer was already done. He crumpled the can, set it in a fruit box to the side of the couch.
“You met Dellwood,” he said. “Big guy with a gut? That could ruin anybody’s day.”
“Dellwood?”
“That’s where Dell puts his bow camp every year. He’s an outfitter out of Delta. Camps there and rides his hunters up into the basin every morning on horseback. Ask me, it’s a back assward way to do it but that’s Dell. He gets a lot of return hunters so they must like it. Kinda like cowboy camp. For folks from Alabama.”
The compressor rattled.
Bob cracked another beer.
“He doesn’t do too bad on bulls neither. I think he’s got salt licks but I can’t prove it. I gather you traded words.”
“How—”
“You got blood on your shirt.”
“Huh.”
I told him. The whole thing. The horse, the fight, Willy.
“You knocked Stinky into the road? Opening the door? Well shit. Goddamn, Jim.” He couldn’t contain his laugh.
“Then you took Fats into the ditch? Pretty good for an artiste. Goddamn.” Shook his head. Pried a tin of Skoal out of his breast pocket with one finger, took a dip that would make me faint. Offered it. This time I took a pinch.
“He won’t forget you, Dell. He’s a mean SOB.”
“I won’t forget him.”
“Yeah, I can see.”
Spat. Handed me the cup.
“He’s a different cat. Last fall I found one of his horses lying down by the creek. Curled up like a dog. Whimpered like a baby when I came up. Like I was gonna hurt her. Saddest goddamn thing I ever saw.”
“Ouch.”
“His hunters think he’s John F. Wayne I guess. He can spin a story that’s one thing. And they get their elk. So.”
He spat.
“Are they poaching up there? Who knows? If they are, they get the animals out at night. And he sure as shit is not easy on his stock. Half his horses are so broke down at the end of the season he ships the whole bunch down to his brother in Arizona where he sells the used up ones to the killers, is what I heard. Guess they make more money that way than feeding them right and working them to what they can handle.”
He spat. “One way of doing it, I guess. Not the right way.”
The compressor rattled, hissed. A truck rolled through the pumps, dinged the loud bell, a driver in a baseball cap leaned forward in his seat, waved, rolled on through.
“Alright,” I said. Stood. “I’ll let you go.”
“You don’t gotta run off. Soon as you do I gotta go move cows.”
I grinned. Bob had about four jobs when I stopped counting. In another week he’d start driving a school bus.
“Bob?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s his last name?”
“Dell? Siminoe.”
“Thanks.”
“Be good.”
Bob probably reading my mind. Be good. Be good.
I stood on the ramada and tried to shake off the pressure of Dell’s body pressing me into the cold wet of the ditch, the sound of his grunt. I smoked the cigar down to the root, crushed it on a flagstone, lit another. The smell of rain.
What I’d noticed was that here, in the windshadow of the mountain, it often smelled like rain. It might be raining up on the ridge, I might see the veils and rags of rain hanging down out of the scudding clouds, I might see shrouds of rain hauled over the country the way a fishing boat might drag a net, but—no rain here. A spatter, maybe, then nothing. Willy told me when I first moved in that it was like living in a strip bar. So close, looks so good and you never get laid.
Virga. That’s what it was called. Alce told me that once. Came home from school one day and told me. Rain that falls and never hits the ground.
“C’mon I’ll show you,” she said.
I told her we might as well go fishing while we were at it. It was the first afternoon she ever caught a fish, I don’t know how old she was. Little. She was small for her age. She pointed up at the veils over the west rim, the water in the pool smooth, without a drop.
“Virga!”
I gave her a thumbs-up and threw a caddis for her and let it drift and gave her the rod and as soon as she touched it the trout hit and almost pulled it out of her small hands. Oh God! Oh God, I yelled. Way to go! Keep the tip up! Like that! Yeah! She was holding the rod straight up with all her strength and it was all she could do and she was in hysterics, laughing, as much from shock as anything. Her hair was blowing across her face and the jerking rod was shaking the counterweight of her body and the fish was whizzing out the line. I wanted her to catch it herself, I was almost as panicked as she was, I had an idea. Run backwards! I yelled. Try and hold around the line, yeah like that, slow it down, go! Run up the bank! I was awed that she could even shift her grip. She ran. Half backwards, half sideways, trying to hold the rod high like a broadsword. Ran up into the dried stalks of mullein the willows and the fish came with her up onto the rocks and was flopping, thwacking the stones, a big brown, God, big. She dropped the rod and ran like a puma down over the stones and pounced. Both hands. The trout got away from her and she chased it, bent double, trying to wrangle it, landing on it again with both hands, it squirted out like a watermelon seed, slipped over the rocks, she was after it, I was laughing. Yelling and laughing. She got to it and grasped it and then fell on it, covering it with her whole body like a punt returner covering the ball, screaming with glee, laughing and crying too. I reached under her, and I picked up the heavy fish and thwacked it on a rock and it was finally still and the colors dulled the way they do and then she burst into tears. Her print dress stained with fish slime and algae and blood. She was inconsolable. Not for her clothes, for the fish. All the way home I held her in one arm as I drove and told her about the spirit of the trout, how he was probably swimming now among the stars and would be happy to feed her and her mother and father tonight and how proud I was of her, and I was surprised when a few days later she wanted to go out with me again, and that’s when I bought her a seven-and-a-half-foot four weight and began to teach her to cast.
After she died I moved from Taos to Pilar, closer to the Rio Grande. Cristine wasn’t coming. She had her own history there and she was no way going back. She had a bodywork business going, massage and pressure point, a good trade among rich steady clients who appreciated her strong capable technique and her no bullshit attitude. One Silicon Valley transplant tried to paw her breasts once and she told him politely that was not part of the service so he tried again and she squeezed his balls so hard through the towel he screamed. She was laughing when she told me. If I could get Cristine laughing I was probably good for at least twenty-four hours.
Anyway by then it was just the two of us and we needed a lot of space, from each other.
Back then I went fishing. Every day. Alce was suddenly gone and I didn’t know what else to do. I fished the dawn and I fished the evening. Down in the canyon of the Lower Box. Down under the rushing drop where Pueblo Creek comes in. Down in the yellowing leaves of the cottonwoods, the box elders. Yellowing then falling leaves. Then the nights when my fingers got numb, and toes. The October cold numbing more than my hands. I cast way across the river and let the fly tumble down the edges of the far pools, pulling line off the clicking reel as fast as I could. So much line out, so much current it’s heavy against the rod, my arm, stop the line, let the fly swing across the current to the middle of the river. And—Bang! They hit.
They were twenty, thirty yards downstream and mad and full of autumn vigor, sleek and fat with summer bugs, with crawdads, frogs, with colder water, and then I had to fight them against the current all the way back up, thigh deep in the dark water, sucking on the stub of cigar, not sure if it’s even lit, three stars, sweet smell of fallen leaves, raising the rod tip against all the weight trying to feel the limit, the limit of the tippet and the knots, the breaking point, then dropping the rod fast and stripping in the sudden slack, foot by foot, and the trout, if he was big, suddenly deciding too that that’s enough and putting on the jets, get the hell away from here and running zing, every foot I’d just fought for gone in a flash in the willed charge of a fast-tiring trout. Running with my line. The song of the reel. I loved this.
I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.
The only time I could forget myself, forget Alce. Lost to anything but fighting the fish. And if I got him in finally and he had fought and fought and if he was beautiful which he al
ways was I reached down and cradled him in the current with one hand and with one twist of the other slipped the hook out of his lip and cradled him some more. Cradled and watched him idling there, tail slowly finning while he caught his breath and strength. Like me, I thought. Idling, barely able to breathe. And then a wriggle and slip against my palm and he was gone, lost among the green shadows of the stones and I said Thanks. Thanks for letting me live another evening.
I drank sometimes. I had quit maybe two years, pretty much, off and on, but sometimes I went to the Boxcar and sat at the bar, sometimes the same stool where I had turned and shot Lauder Simms, maybe wishing the bastard was there again, insinuating the unspeakable things he wanted to do to my daughter. Wishing that I could shoot him again and relive a year in Santa Fe State, so Alce would still be here. I drank, drank steady like it was a job and Johnny nodded to Nacho and Nacho drove me home. More than once he carried me inside and laid me down on the couch and I remember him whispering Dios, Jim, He is looking over you, you don’t need to join your daughter, not yet compa. This from a cousin of Cristine’s who had spent more time inside Santa Fe than he had out, who ran the cell block when he was there and saved my life just by being incarcerated same time as me. God is looking over you. I remember it like it was whispered by an angel. And it didn’t feel like that, not one bit. Like anything else was looking over me, like some kind of bad weather.
That engine. Grief is an engine. Feels like that. It does not fade, what they say, with time. Sometimes it accelerates. I was accelerating. I could feel it, the g-force pressing my chest. I wrecked my truck. Definitely a one car accident, nobody else to blame. Me and a rock. But somehow I was up to date on the insurance—because I had paid it all in a lump sum that spring, sometimes I did that after I sold a painting—didn’t even know if I had insurance but I did, and the adjuster knew my work, had seen it in an airline magazine, a story about the art scene in Taos, and it turned out he had lost a son at four to a heart defect and he rigged it so the truck was covered, total loss, and I got a new one, and I knew that I would wreck that too, knew it like I knew winter would come and I didn’t care, and I drank and then one morning the door shoved open and in walked Irmina carrying an overnight bag and a string of habaneras and an unplucked chicken carcass I shit you not and it was the only time since I’d left her house that we ever stayed together more than a few days.