by Ron Carlson
Donner did not mention the gun when he told the story, and he did not tell the woman or anyone else what happened the night he met Rusty Patrick in the snow camp. As the snow continued, they had another cup of coffee with a lick of whiskey in it, and they decided to walk out in the morning. With two of them, they reasoned, they could take turns breaking trail. They were above eleven thousand feet, and they were still ten miles from the road. Donner had set his tent on the snow, not bothering to kick a clearing for it, and none of the tree wells were large enough for the little two-man spring tent.
He felt odd, wired and wasted, and he understood somewhere deeper than he could reach that when he had seen the dog, he had let go of all the prudence he’d garnered all day. He was tired. Rusty Patrick wanted to talk and did talk for the hour they lay in the tent. Donner felt the snow hardening under them as they settled, and he worried faintly about the cold, but he just lav back and listened.
Rusty Patrick had a resonant voice, so even his speaking voice scraped a hard bass note once or twice in every sentence. He was a roughneck driving truck since the oil work had dried up. Now he hauled road gravel all over Wyoming. “They’re still blading roads,” he said. “That’s why there isn’t an unbroken windshield in this whole state.” At thirty-three, he had never been married, never had a real girl until this last summer when he fell in love with the new dispatcher, a woman named Darlene Youngman, who had come west from Pennsylvania. It was the story of this girl that he told Donner.
Rusty Patrick talked in the icy tent, stopping every once in a while to post a question. Donner was awake but not enough to answer, and after a pause, Rusty Patrick would continue. His heart was broken, he said. He used to think that was all bullshit, a broken heart, before this deal. He fell in love with Darlene Youngman and she fell in love with him, and their dating closed in on them until they were spending weekends together at his place in Rawlins or hers in Rock Springs. “I mean, I see now that love is a kind of craziness, right? I was lit up like a refinery at night, blazing, nothing like it. It made everything make sense. My stupid life, the unending wind, the great state of Wyoming. You ever been in love?” Rusty cleaned himself up, his bachelor apartment, his clothing, his truck, and he trimmed his mustache and got out the old Western Wyoming College bulletins that had been in a drawer for six years. He was planning on a career in the Forest Service.
The dog came to the mouth of the tent and looked Donner in the eye. Donner nodded his head and the dog stepped carefully in onto the sleeping bags, finally curling at their knees.
The resonant cadence of Rusty Patrick’s voice changed then, or so Donner thought from where he drifted listening. He wanted to drop into sleep, and he could have, but there was something holding him back, some caution, some change in the air and the grip of the snowpack beneath him.
“My boss was a good guy—at least he had been good to me, keeping me on when a lot of men were laid off. His name was Bob Baxter. He took me aside years ago and told me privately to get my big-rig license, and I did what he said, and it saved me. But there was something else. He took an interest in Darlene.” The company owner felt fatherly toward the young woman, and in all their hours together in the office, the man talked against Rusty Patrick, warning the woman about a man of his caliber. It was a steady lesson, an onslaught, and she didn’t tell Rusty Patrick about it. right away. Then one weekend two weeks ago, he’d taken her over to the Western campus at Rock Springs, just driving around with a school map so he wouldn’t get lost when he came here next year. He was excited Their new life was diagrammed before them. He would move in with her and attend classes; he had nine thousand dollars in the bank and he could work part-time in town during the two-year forestry program. Then they’d go together down to Utah State or Colorado State and their lives would really begin. He was thinking about babies and had said as much. He was way in, far gone. That’s the way he had said it, ‘T was far gone. I mean, I’d brought up babies. I’d say anything and I meant it all.” They were walking across the windy campus when she stopped and told him quietly that he would never come here. He was surprised by this and asked her why. This is not something you’ll do, she told him. Her arms were folded and she went directly to his truck. It was early on Saturday, so many sweet hours ahead of them, but she sat stone still. When she didn’t talk, he didn’t talk, and he drove her home. When she walked to her door, he simply backed his rig up and drove home. His ears were ring ing. He hadn’t talked to her since, but he’d gone in to see his boss. “I went to the office on that Saturday,” Rusty whispered. “And Baxter was waiting for me.”
Dormer could feel Rusty’s shoulder; he was crying, speaking sometimes through his teeth. “By then I was like a chunk of stone; it hurt so bad. There is nothing like it. It isn’t your heart; it’s your heart through every day of your goddamned life. I could understand why a woman like Darlene might want to leave a man like me alone, but I was sure that Bob Baxter. Would not. Have said anything. Against me.”
Rusty trembled for a while, breathing as if gathering steam for language. “He told me. He had told her. I was no good. For her. He told me hehadbeen talking. To her since. He had found out we were dating.”
Rusty’s voice was quieter and the words were spaced oddly, some run together and some repeated shakily and some falling at great intervals. The new cadence woke Donner a level. “It took everything. I had. Not to kill the man,” Rusty said. “AndIcouldhavekilledhim with my my my fists. My life was over. I bought the gun. Four hundred bucks. That was. Tuesday. We’ve been up above here. Since. Then. In this this this this snow.”
The last word had been coughed out and immediately Rusty’s breathing changed to a shallow chuffing. It was late but the hard chill pressed in with a new edge; it had stopped snowing. Donner opened his eyes and listened, and he knew that after four days it had stopped snowing. The cold came down now with all the force of the hollow sky. He could feel the frigid air sizing his face, and his feet were aching again.
The story had made him sick. He imagined the big boyish figure of Rusty Patrick confronting an older man he thought of as a father and hearing such news. And the surprise of the surcease of falling snow was like terror, a blank, fearful void that came at Dormer’s heart. He tried to calm himself, but for the first time in the mountains he was afraid. It was very simple: he wanted to be home. The image of his son in his band uniform took the air from Donner’s lungs, the brass buttons on his red wool tunic, his high, proud face under the black beret, his seriousness with the snare drum. He wouldn’t even accept any help loading the drums in the car, and when they arrived at school, he went wordlessly into the crowd. And then he disappeared. One night after practice, Donner waited with his wife, and after one A.M., they called the police.
Donner was bumped from sleep by Rusty Patrick shaking beside him. At first Donner thought the other man was sobbing, because he had heard it in his voice earlier, but it persisted, a rippling shudder that wasn’t crying. “Hey,” Donner had said, but even on an elbow shaking the man, Donner couldn’t wake Rusty Patrick. The dog held tight at the bottom of the sleeping bags, his eyes open. The cold was at Donner, blades of it against his exposed neck as he moved up and checked the other man. He ran a hand over Rusty’s face and it came away wet, and then cold or no, Donner sat up on his heels and shined the light on his tent mate. The face was gray and smeared with blood from a nosebleed. A delicate fringe of ice rimmed the hair and Rusty Patrick was shivering in cramping spasms. His chest was wet. Donner was saying, “Come on, come on,” as he unzipped their sleeping bags. The other man was damp, cold to the touch, dropping into hypothermia. Both of Donner’s hands were bloody and he was getting the blood everywhere as he cut away Rusty’s underwear using his sheath knife. Both of the sleeping bags were superior grade, though the zippers wouldn’t mesh. Donner was talking the whole time now, saying simply, “Oh now, come on now,” and he slipped in with Rusty and wrapped the shell of his own bag over them as tightly as he could. It was wha
t you did. There was no way to take the half hour to rekindle the fire and go that way. Patrick had gone to bed still wet and it had worked into him. Now Donner could feel the cold muscularity of the other man and he held him and moved slowly against him, his hands up and down, the tops of his feet up and down, his face against the side of Rusty Patrick’s head. He’d need to bring him up five degrees.
Even dozing, he developed a rhythm, covering the naked body of Rusty Patrick in this embrace, this massage. It wore him down and he felt useless. He woke and renewed his movements. Donner rolled on top of Rusty and in slow degrees as his strength left him, he let his weight descend. The dog moved up to them, and Donner could feel the dog’s breath against the side of his face. Rusty’s shivering had subsided somewhat, but Donner could still feel the blood warm against his neck.
“Come on, now,” he said, whispering, and when that litany lulled him to sleep, he started talking quietly to his son. “You can come home now,” he started. “It’s not a problem to cross through Indiana and then Nebraska…” and Donner listed the states one at a time in a prayer to his son. He spoke slowly, trying to lay out the fair terms of their rapprochement, so he might again be some part of his life, and in his recitation, he uttered their history, telling at length episodes they’d shared, especially the time they went onto the roof to retrieve the basketball. He’d gone up the ladder and Andrew had followed him onto the flat white surface the shape of Utah. It was littered with odd broken toys and an old volleyball as well as the ball he’d just heaved from the driveway. Each element of this scattered inventory brought a wave of revelation and nostalgia. The blue plastic elephant with three legs was five or six years old, sun-polished on one side, and Donner and Andrew sat on the short rear wall of the roof, looking down at the neighbors’ dog, who was swimming in the pool, and they talked about all the toys the elephant had been kindred to, and he asked Donner in real wonder how such a lost thing could get onto the roof. In the late-day shade, they laughed and speculated like two friends for an hour until his wife called them from below.
Donner hugged the freezing man. He trapped Rusty’s hands in the warmth between their legs. Their center was warm and Donner moved against it until he felt himself stirred, a reflex he gave in to. Rusty Patrick’s breathing had steadied into a rhythmic easy stride cut from time to time with a short shudder. Donner was calling his name now, “Rusty, hey, Rusty.” The man beneath him groaned in what might have been acknowledgment and moved, his eyes still shut, and then Donner knew that Rusty had taken him into his hands and they were together that way in the mountain tent.
In the morning Donner saw what he hadn’t seen for five days: shadows on the tent, the shocking sunprint of tree limbs on the gray canvas. It warmed to twenty five and then thirty degrees. They took a long time with their morning, boiling water for coffee and oatmeal and then another pan for washing. There was dried blood in their hair and on their faces and necks. The world was a blinding white, the sky blue in tiers to the horizon. They didn’t speak, both men packing up carefully and wearing sunglasses against the crushing light. The muted concussions of snow bundles falling from the thawing limbs sounded all around them, and the dog Scout circled in the snow-packed camp space ready to go.
Donner told the woman the rest of the story: the warming, brilliant day in mid-September, and walking out of the mountains with Rusty Patrick and his dog. The dog disappeared right away and then five minutes later came along working two cattle before him like an expert in snow herding. The men stopped to watch this display. Donner took off his jacket and tucked it into his pack. They would walk ten miles downhill on a snow-packed path behind an ever-increasing line of cows which the dog urged and instructed, a kind of rare pleasure that comes once in a lifetime.
In that larger well-lit world with a clear promise of tomorrow and home and hope, Donner thought it might be possible to speak to Rusty Patrick about what had happened, but at each juncture, as they stopped for water or granola bars or just to look the hundred miles east across the snow-patched plains, neither man spoke up except to say, “Some dog,” or the like. When they shook hands that evening at the bus station in a town that Donner would never visit again, he thought, I’ll never know any of this again, any of it, and I’ll never see Rusty Patrick again.
Now in the Jim Bridger, Donner and the woman who was not his wife had thrown their paper plates and steak bones into the fireplace and moved their table to the periphery of the dining room, stacking it upside down on those already there. It was after eleven and people, many wearing gold and silver paper party hats, danced. It was fun for the woman and she held on to Donner’s arm happily, pretending every so often to have something to whisper to him and kissing his neck instead. This was all better than he’d described it.
At one point she’d bought an embroidered Jim Bridger cap from the little glass case, a turquoise cap with a moose underneath the name, and she announced it was for Andrew, a present.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said.
“He likes me; this is a good cap for him,” the woman had said. He didn’t like her using Andrew’s name. His wife’s name had come up from time to time in the last days, but it was just a fact, one he was steeled against. When she said his son’s name, it just confused him.
One of the band members had a full beard and every third song he’d hoist his accordion and announce, “The New Year’s Polka,” to which they’d already danced twice. Their waitress, Kay, danced every dance now in the warm wooden-floored room, each with a different young man. The employees were all going home and back to college, and she was dancing with them one by one. Donner heard, through all the talking and the music and the dinner noise, the regular bass beat of Rusty Patrick’s deep voice as he spoke to his mates in the other room. After a week of knowing what he was doing or pretending to know, Donner was dislocated and floating, his brave face paper thin.
At a few minutes before the hour, all the men from the bar were herded into the dining room by Kay’s husband, the bartender, and Kay herself went around and filled everybody’s glass with the champagne they’d been pouring all night. “Kay,” her husband said, emerging through the group of men, “evidently the clock in the bar has been five minutes fast for the entire year! Thank God we’ve made it for the toast.”
He was hooted down, and in the ringing laughter, Donner saw Rusty Patrick turn and look into his face. Rusty’s expression opened in strange surprise and he came immediately over to where Donner and the woman stood by the stone fireplace.
“No way,” he said, shaking Donner’s hand. Then he said it again and clapped Donner in an embrace. He opened his mouth again to say something, which would have been, What are you doing here? or Is it really you? but with his mouth open, he just hugged Donner hard again.
They were spilling champagne, and Donner could sense the woman at his arm also against him, but he could not speak. The room seemed to be glowing. Donner could only put his arm around Rusty and hug him again, feeling the whiskers against the bones in his face. When they stood back, Rusty asked the woman, “So, you must be his wife?”
She took his arm in their close circle and said no, she was his friend.
“I’m Rusty,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve heard about you.” Now she had her hands on both of his forearms. “I’ve heard the wonderful story.”
“One minute!” the bartender called. “Make amends or wait a year! Who needs champagne! Where’s my sweetheart!” His wife, Kay, appeared at his back and they kissed. The room was full, everyone shoulder to shoulder.
Rusty Patrick opened his face to Donner in a profound look, plaintive and deep. A basket full of noisemakers suddenly appeared between them, and the men took one each and started blowing the honking whistles until the accordion sounded the countdown: ten…nine…eight. The men’s look held. Donner felt a smooth hand on his face and the woman pulled him down, and she kissed him tenderly, keeping her hand there as the minute and the h
our and the year lapsed for the people in the Jim Bridger. A shotgun sounded from out on the highway, and paper dots fell into everyone’s hair.
Immediately the band fired up and the room sorted itself out, alcoves of people widening until the dancers had some space. It was another version of “The New Year’s Polka.”
Rusty’s buddies all slipped back into the bar, but Rusty Patrick came to Donner, speaking in his ear. “How’s your son?” the man said, his voice full of real concern. “Did he make it home? Did you talk to him?”
Donner could only nod at Rusty then and drop his eyes and step back. The young woman who was not his wife had snugged the turquoise cap onto her head and threaded her hair out the back in a ponytail. “Let’s dance!” she called in the thrumming noise. “I haven’t danced all year!”
Donner was watching what his body did, and what it did now was push Rusty and the woman together and smile at them. “Go to it!” he said. “This runs a thousand dollars a day in Sun Valley. I’m going to get some air.”
The night was ripped, filled, upended with stars sizzling in the deep chill. Donner felt his scalp tighten against the gathering cold, and he blew great plumes into the air. He retrieved his binoculars from his car kit, and when he shut the door, the dog stood in Rusty’s truck to be stroked.
“Come on, Scout,” Donner said, patting his leg. “Let’s go see the moose.”
Scout stood two feet on the tailgate and Donner lifted the animal to the ground rather than have him jump. They walked around the side of the old Jim Bridger to the wooden deck over Long Pond. There were two people finishing an argument as he arrived and the woman said to the man, “That’s four strikes, Artie, and you damn well know it.” They went in, releasing a quick rush of noise.