At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  Late at night, my blood rich with wonder at the possibilities of such a vast material planet, I would return to our tumbledown genius ranch house, my sister off putting new legs on the periodic table at M.I.T., my mother away in Shreveport showing the seaport workers there the way to political and personal power, my brother in his room edging closer to new theories of rocket reaction and thrust, my father sitting by the entry, rapt in his schematics. As I came in and sidled by his table and the one real light in the whole front part of the house, his pencilings on the space station hinge looking as beautiful and inscrutable to me as a sheet of music, he’d say my name as simple greeting. “Reed.”

  “Duncan,” I’d say in return.

  “How goes the metropolis?” he’d add, not looking up. His breath was faintly reminiscent of sardines; in fact, I still associate that smell, which is not as unpleasant as it might seem, with brilliance. I know he said metropolis because he didn’t know for a moment which city we were in.

  “It teerns with industrious citizenry well into the night,” I’d answer.

  Then he’d say it, “Good,” his benediction, as he’d carefully trace his lead-holder and its steel-like wafer of 5H pencil-lead along a precise new line deep into the vast white space. “That’s good.”

  The San Jacinto Resort Motel along the Hempstead Highway was exactly what you might expect a twenty-unit motel to be in the year 1966. The many bright new interstates had come racing to Houston and collided downtown in a maze, and the old Hempstead Highway had been supplanted as a major artery into town. There was still a good deal of traffic on the four-lane, and the motel was always about half full, and as you would expect, never the same half. There were three permanent occupants, including a withered old man named Newcombe Shinetower, who was a hundred years old that summer and who had no car, just a room full of magazines with red and yellow covers, stacks of these things with titles like Too Young for Comfort and Treasure Chest. There were other titles. I was in Mr. Shinetower’s room only on two occasions. He wore the same flannel shirt every day of his life and was heavily gone to seed. Once or twice a day I would see him shuffling out toward Alfredo’s American Cafe, where Jeff told me he always ate the catfish. “You want to live to be a hundred,” Jeff said, “eat the catfish.” I told him I didn’t know about a hundred and that I generally preferred smaller fish. I was never sure if Mr. Shinetower saw me or not as I moved through his line of sight. He might have nodded; it was hard to tell. What I felt was that he might exist on another plane, the way rocks are said to; they’re in there but in a rhythm too slow for humans to perceive.

  It was in his room, rife with the flaking detritus of the ages, that Jeff tried to help me reckon with the new world. “You’re interested in sex, right?” he asked me one day as I took my break at the counter of Alfredo’s. I told him I was, but that wasn’t exactly the truth. I was indifferent. I understood how it was being packaged and sold to the American people, but it did not stir me, nor did any of the girls we went to school with, many of whom were outright beauties and not bashful about it. This was Texas in the sixties. Some of these buxom girls would grow up and try to assassinate their daughters’ rivals on the cheerleading squad. If sex was the game, some seemed to say, deal me in. And I guess I felt it was a game, too, one I could sit out. I had begun to look a little closer at the ways I was different from my peers, worrying about anything that might be a genius tendency. And I took great comfort in the unmistakable affection I felt for my Plymouth Fury III.

  “Good,” he said. “If you’re interested, then you’re safe; you’re not a genius. Geniuses"—here he leaned closer to me and squinted his eyes up to let me know this was a groundbreaking postulate-”have a little trouble in the sex department.”

  I liked Jeff; he was my first “buddy.” I sat on the round red Naugahyde stool at Alfredo’s long Formica counter and listened to his speech, including, “sex department,” and I don’t know, it kind of made sense to me. There must have been something on my face, which is a way of saying there must have been nothing on my face, absolutely nothing, a blank blank, because Jeff pulled his apron off his head and said, “Meet me out back in two minutes.” He looked down the counter to where old Mr. Shinetower sucked on his soup. “We got to get you some useful information.”

  Out back, of course, Jeff led me directly around to the motel and Mr. Shinetower’s room, which was not unlocked, but opened when Jeff gave the doorknob a healthy rattle. Inside in the sour dark, Jeff lit the lamp and picked up one of the old man’s periodicals.

  Jeff held the magazine and thumbed it like a deck of cards, stopping finally at a full-page photograph that he presented to me with an odd kind of certainty. “There,” he said. “This is what everybody is trying for. This is the goal.” It was a glossy color photograph, and I knew what it was right away, even in the poor light, a shiny shaved pubis, seven or eight times larger than life size. “This makes the world go round.”

  I was going along with Jeff all the way on this, but that comment begged for a remark, which I restrained. I could feel my father in me responding about the forces that actually caused and maintained the angular momentum of the earth. Instead I looked at the picture, which had its own lurid beauty. Of course, what it looked like was a landscape, a barren but promising promontory in ņot this but another world, the seam too perfect a fold for anything but ceremony. I imagined landing a small aircraft on the tawny slopes and approaching the entry, stepping lightly with a small party of explorers, alert for the meaning of such a place. The air would be devoid of the usual climatic markers (no clouds or air pressure), and in the stillness we would be silent and reverential. The light in the photograph captivated me in that it seemed to come from everywhere, a flat, even twilight that would indicate a world with one or maybe two distant polar suns. There was an alluring blue shadow that ran along the cleft the way a footprint in snow holds its own blue glow, and that aberration affected and intrigued me.

  Jeff had left my side and was at the window, on guard, pleased that I was involved in my studies. “So,” he said. “It’s really something, isn’t it?” He came to me, took the magazine and took one long look at the page the way a thirsty man drinks from a jug, and he set it back on the stack of Old Man Shinetower’s magazines.

  “Yes,” I said. “It certainly is.” Now that it was gone, I realized I had memorized the photograph, that place.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here before he gets back.” Jeff cracked the door and looked out, both ways. “Whoa,” he said, setting the door closed again. “He’s coming back. He’s on the walk down about three rooms.” Jeff then did an amazing thing: he dropped like a rock to all fours and then onto his stomach and slid under the bed. I’d never seen anyone do that; I’ve never seen it since. I heard him hiss: “Do something. Hide.”

  Again I saw myself arriving in the photograph. Now I was alone. I landed carefully and the entire venture was full of care, as if I didn’t want to wake something. I had a case of instruments and I wanted to know about that light, that shadow. I could feel my legs burn as I climbed toward it step by step.

  What I did in the room was take two steps back into the corner and stand behind the lamp. I put my hands at my side and my chin up. I stood still. At that moment we heard a key in the lock and daylight spilled across the ratty shag carpet. Mr. Shinetower came in. He was wearing the red-and-black plaid shirt that he wore every day. It was like a living thing; someday it would go to lunch at Alfredo’s without him.

  He walked by me and stopped for a moment in front of the television to drop a handful of change from his pocket into a mason jar on top, turn on the television until it lit and focused, and then he continued into the little green bathroom, and I saw the door swing halfway closed behind him.

  Jeff slid out from the bed, stood hastily, his eyes whirling, and opened the door and went out. He was closing it behind him when I caught the edge and followed him into the spinning daylight. When I pulled the door, he gasped, so I shut it
and we heard it register closed, and then we slipped quickly through the arbor to the alley behind the units and then ran along the overgrown trail back to the bayou and sat on the weedy slope. Jeff was covered with clots of dust and hairy white goo-gah. It was thick in his hair and I moved away from him while he swatted at it for a while. Here we could smell the sewer working at the bayou, an odd, rich industrial silage, and the sky was gray, but too bright to look at, and I went back to the other world for a moment, the cool perfect place I’d been touring in Mr. Shinetower’s magazine, quiet and still, and offering that light. Jeff was spitting and pulling feathers of dust from his collar and sleeves. I wanted so much to be stirred by what I had seen; I had stared at it and I wanted it to stir me, and it had done something. I felt something. I wanted to see that terrain, chart it, understand where the blue glow arose and how it lay along the juncture, and how that light, I was certain, interfered with the ordinary passage of time. Time? I had a faint headache.

  “That was close,” Jeff said finally. He was still cloaked with flotsam from under Mr. Shinetower’s bed. “But it was worth it. Did you get a good look? See what I’m talking about?”

  “It was a remarkable photograph,” I said.

  “Now you know. You’ve seen it, you know. I’ve got to get back to work. Let’s go fishing this weekend, eh?” He rose and, still whacking soot and ashes and wicked whatevers from his person, ran off toward Alfredo’s.

  “I’ve seen it,” I said, and I sat there as the sadness bled through me. Duncan would have appreciated the moment and corrected Jeff the way he corrected me all those years. “Seeing isn’t knowing,” he would say. “To see something is only to establish the first terms of your misunderstanding.” That I remembered him at such a time above the rife bayou moments after my flight over the naked photograph made me sad. I was not a genius, but I would be advised by one forevermore.

  Happily, my work at the motel was straightforward and I enjoyed it very much. I could do most of it with my shirt off, cutting away the tenacious vines from behind each of the rooms so that the air-conditioning units would not get strangled, and I sweated profusely in the sweet humid air. I painted the pool fence and enameled the three metal tables a kind of turquoise blue, a fifties turquoise that has become tony again just this year, a color that calls to the passerby: Holiday! We’re on holiday!

  Once a week I poured a pernicious quantity of lime into the two manholes above the storm sewer, and it fell like snow on the teeming backs of thousands of albino waterbugs and roaches that lived there. This did not daunt them in the least. I am no expert on any of the insect tribes nor do I fully understand their customs, but my association with those subterranean multitudes showed me that they looked forward to this weekly toxic snowfall.

  Twice a week I pressed the enormous push broom from one end of the driveway to the other until I had a wheelbarrow full of gravel and the million crushed tickets of litter people threw from their moving vehicles along the Hempstead Highway It was wonderful work. The broom alone weighed twenty pounds. The sweeping, the painting, the trimming braced me; work that required simply my back, both my arms and both my legs, but neither side of my brain.

  Mr. Leeland Rakkerts lived in a small apartment behind the office and could be summoned by a bell during the night hours. He was just sixty that June. His wife had passed away years before and he’d become a reclusive little gun nut, and had a growing gallery of hardware on a pegboard in his apartment featuring long-barreled automatic weaponry and at least two dozen huge handguns. But he was fine to me, and he paid me cash every Friday afternoon. When he opened the cash drawer, he always made sure that be you friend or foe, you saw the .45 pistol that rested there, too. My mother would have abhorred me working for him, a man she would have considered the enemy, and she would have said as much, but I wasn’t taking the high road, nor the low road, just a road. That summer, the upkeep of the motel was my job, and I did it as well as I could. I’d taken a summer job and was making money. I didn’t weigh things on my scale of ethics every ten minutes, because I wasn’t entirely sure I had such a scale. I certainly didn’t have one as fully evolved as my mother’s.

  It was a bit like being in the army: when in doubt, paint something. I remeasured and overpainted the parking lot where the last guy had drunkenly painted a wacky series of parentheses where people were supposed to park, and I did a good job with a big brush and five gallons of high mustard yellow, and when I fimshed I took the feeling of satisfaction in my chest to be simply that: satisfaction. Even if I was working for the devil, the people who put their cars in his parking lot would be squared away.

  Getting in my Plymouth Fury III those days with a sweaty back and a pocketful of cash, I knew I was no genius, but I felt-—is this close?—like a great guy, a person of some command.

  That fall my brother, Garrett Lrsdyksz (he’d changed his name back with a legal kit that Baxter, our Secret Service guy, had got him through the mail), became the youngest student to matriculate at Rice University. He was almost eleven. And he didn’t enter as a freshman; he entered as a junior. In physics, of course. There was a little article about it on the wire services, noting that he had, without any assistance, set forward the complete set of equations explaining the relationship between the rotation of the earth and “special atmospheric aberrations most hospitable to exit trajectories of ground-fired propulsion devices.” You can look it up and all you’ll find is the title because the rest, like all the work he did his cataclysmic year at Rice, is classified, top-secret, eyes-only. Later he explained his research this way to me: “There are storms and then there are storms, Reed. A high-pressure area is only a high-pressure area down here on earth; it has a different pressure on the other side.”

  I looked at my little brother, a person forever in need of a haircut, and I thought: He’s mastered the other side, and I can just barely cope with this one.

  That wasn’t exactly true, of course, because my Plymouth Fury III and my weekly wages from the San Jacinto Resort Motel allowed me to start having a little life, earthbound as it may have been. I started hanging out a little at Jeff Shreckenbah’s place, a rambling hacienda out of town with two outbuildings where his dad worked on stock cars. Jeff’s mother called me ladykiller, which I liked, but which I couldn’t hear without imagining my mother’s response; my mother who told me a million times, “Morality commences in the words we use to speak of our next act.”

  “Hey, Ladykiller,” Mrs. Shreckenbah would say to me as we pried open the fridge looking for whatever we could find. Mr. Shreckenbah made me call him Jake, saying we’d save the last names for the use of the law-enforcement officials and members of the Supreme Court. They’d let us have Lone Star long-necks if we were staying, or Coca-Cola if we were hitting the road. Some nights we’d go out with Jake and hand him wrenches while he worked on his cars. He was always asking me, “What’s the plan?” an opening my mother would have approved of.

  “We’re going fishing,” I told him, because that’s what Jeff and I started doing. I’d greet his parents, pick him up, and then Jeff and I would cruise hard down Interstate 45 fifty miles to Galveston and the coast of the warm Gulf of Mexico, where we’d drink Lone Star and surf-cast all night long, hauling in all sorts of mysteries of the deep. I loved it.

  Jeff would bring along a pack of Dutch Masters cigars and I’d stand waist deep in the warm water, puffing on the cheap cigar, throwing a live shrimp on a hook as far as I could toward the equator, the only light being the stars above us, the gapped two-story skyline of Galveston behind us, and our bonfire on the beach, tearing a bright hole in the world.

  When fish struck, they struck hard, waking me from vivid daydreams of Mr. Leeland Rakkerts giving me a bonus for sweeping the driveway so thoroughly, a twenty so crisp it hurt to fold it into my pocket. My dreams were full of crisp twenties. I could see Jeff over there, fifty yards from me, the little orange tip of his cigar glowing, starlight on the flash of his line as he cast. I liked having my fee
t firmly on the bottom of the ocean standing m the night. My brother and sister and my mother and father could shine their lights into the elemental mysteries of the world; I could stand in the dark and fish. I could feel the muscles in my arm as I cast again; I was stronger than I’d been two months ago, and then I felt the fish strike arid begin to run south.

  Having relinquished the cerebral, not that I ever had it in my grasp, 1 was immersing myself in the real world the same way 1 was stepping deeper and deeper into the Gulf, following the frenzied fish as he tried to take my line. I worked him back, gave him some, worked him back. Though I had no idea what I would do with it, I had decided to make a lot of money, and as the fish drew me up to my armpits and the bottom grew irregular, I thought about the ways it might be achieved. Being no genius, I had few ideas.

  I spit out my cigar after the first wavelet broke over my face, and I called to Jeff, “I got one.”

  He was behind me now, backing toward the fire, and he called, “Bring him up here and let s see.”

  The top half of my head, including my nose, and my two hands and the fishing pole were all that were above sea level when the fish relented and I began to haul him back. He broke the surface several times as I backed out of the ocean, reeling as 1 went. Knee deep, I stopped and lifted the line until a dark form lifted into the air. I ran him up to Jeff by the fire and showed him there, a two-pound catfish. When I held him, I felt the sudden shock of his gaffs going into my finger and palm.

  “Ow!” Jeff said. “Who has got whom?” He took the fish from me on a gill stick.

  I shook my stinging hand.

  “It s all right,” he assured me, throwing another elbow of driftwood onto the fire and handing me an icy Lone Star. “Let’s fry this guy up and eat him right now. I’m serious. This is going to be worth it. We’re going to live to be one hundred years old, guaranteed.”