by Ron Carlson
The old Chevrolet was sparkling, but he polished the corner of the bumpers, under the brow of the headlights, the door handles. The limo driver ahead of him sauntered back smoking a cigarette. He held up his cell phone and said, “It was ten-thirty, then eleven-thirty, now twelve. It must be a good dance.”
“They call you from inside?” Cooper asked the man.
“It goes up to the satellite and then straight down to me, so the kid can do the tango right over there.” The driver waved his hand at Cooper’s car. “We had a ‘fifty-six, two-door. It was that black and white, remember that one?”
“I do. They had a red and white, a blue and white, and the two-tone green.”
“That was a weird one. Avocado and tan? I wish I still had ours. It could go. Has this got the 283?”
“Right,” Cooper said. “It wants to go.” He opened the hood and the limo driver marveled at how simple the setup was.
“You could work on a car like this.” The driver had taken his cap off and leaned over the red engine block, the shiny hoses. “My old man wasn’t happy unless he was under the hood every weekend. What was he doing?”
“Getting it right,” Cooper said.
Couples had begun to emerge from the country club, some of the girls carrying their shoes. “Here we go,” the driver said.
“Where you taking them now?” Cooper asked him.
“These six young people are going to the Hyatt for the night, after they pay me an hour and a half extra. You take care.” He snugged on his cap and went down to his vehicle and opened all the doors.
A minute later, Trevor appeared under the balloons, strolling as if on tour alone, and then Cooper saw a hand take his arm and Alison pulled herself into view. She was still smiling; that was a good sign. They accepted a gift from the table and stepped down into the parking lot. Behind them two or three couples came the duet of Deanie and Justin, wrapped together like fate itself.
After the kids had grazed Libby’s buffet, Cooper made himself a big sandwich on the fresh sourdough bread, putting a slice of everything in it. The girls were filling Libby in on what everyone wore. The gifts had turned out to be small silver frames with the prom picture already in there—a Polaroid, Cooper guessed: his son in a tuxedo under an arbor beside a beautiful young woman. This year Trevor’s eyebrows had grown together and Cooper had asked his wife if he (meaning she) should mention it. She had said, “No, as soon as they pluck that eyebrow, it’s all over.” lie looked carefully at the little picture. His son had two eyebrows.
Fie hauled his sandwich out into the backyard and washed it down with sips of warm champagne as he watched the two couples talk to his wife in the lighted kitchen. Evidently Justin could eat, talk, and still keep his eyes on Deanie’s cleavage, such as it was. Suddenly they all stood up and filled the room, such tall people, and they filed into the laundry room for the garage.
Cooper found them admiring the potato gun. Libby was offering the party line about Cooper finding out the legalities, when Cooper spoke. “Let s test it right now, Mrs. Cooper. Have you any potatoes?”
“Yes I do.”
“Well, Ire vor, get your gear and let’s go.”
They drove in the Chevrolet, Libby now with him in the front seat, out through the narrow piece of the reservation and across the canal at the Surplus Bridge. Cooper directed Justin to open the state land gate, and suddenly they were in the raw desert and the smell of creosote and juniper flooded the car. At twenty miles an hour, Cooper turned off his lights and drove another ten minutes on the dirt track, the young people quieted by the looming paloverdes and ocotillos reaching for the car.
“Looks good to me,” Cooper said.
There was no moon, but the desert floor glowed as they all stepped out of the car. “Are you sure, Dad?” Trevor said.
“Absolutely,” Cooper answered. “Justin, where do you shoot yours?”
“My dad won’t let me finish it,” Justin said. He had his arm around Deanie again. “We’re never going to shoot it.”
Cooper looked at the boy.
There was a noise down the road and Cooper reached in and pulled on the headlights. They all saw a pig step onto the road, unhurried, and then five more javelinas came out, picking at the sweetgrass along the rutted dirt path. “Wow,” whispered Alison, “look.” Libby came against Cooper and took his arm. More of the animals emerged, a dozen, then more, big and small, some babies trotting comically behind the pack. They were all starting and stopping, rooting and bumping, as they crossed the road. A midsize pig trotted up and mounted one of the females who had stopped to eat, and he humped on her casually amid the grouping. “Uh-oh,” Deanie said, and all four of the young people raised their hands and laughed. The laughter didn’t hurry the javelina troop at all, but Cooper pushed the lights off, saying, “They don’t need this,” and soon the pigs were gone.
“Are you all set?” he asked Trevor.
“When you are.”
Cooper had everyone stand behind Trevor, and the boy in his tuxedo trimmed a potato and rammed it into the barrel. He charged the chamber with a touch of butane and, holding it aloft, touched the end with the automatic match. The noise was a two-part wa-whump! and they all strained their eyes at the night sky. Trevor, careful to keep the barrel pointed away, turned to them and said, “Sweet.”
“Victory is ours,” Cooper said.
“How far did it go?” Justin asked.
Trevor fired it four more times and then Cooper drew a line in the sand with a stick. “I’ll go straight out the road,” Cooper said. “When I wave my arms, I’ll be at a hundred yards. Fire straight so I can measure.” He was ready to step it off when there was a hand at his sleeve: Alison.
“Trevor told me about his grandmother. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I appreciate that,” he told the girl. Then Cooper marched down the white-sand road in the desert night counting his steps. At one hundred he dragged a line across the road with his heel. He turned and could see Trevor’s tuxedo shirt glowing near the shiny top of the car. Everything else was dark forms. Around him, Cooper could hear rustling in the ditches.
He heard the two-part concussion and saw the potato tumbling over his head at the same time. It hit the road and exploded. He stepped it off: seventeen more yards. He waved the rag again. This time the potato veered left and crashed into the trees. Cooper waved again. For a while that was what they did late in the night and into the early hours after the junior prom. Cooper was laughing as his son shot potatoes into the desert. The longest straight measure was 123 yards. When he finally put his rag in his pocket, Cooper could hear the pigs working hard through the brush for these succulent wonders.
GARY GARRISON’S WEDDING VOWS
GARY GARRISON GAVE RADCLIFFE a second try, but when she came home to New York having completed her sophomore spring, she announced that her academic career was over. “It isn’t a good idea for me to be up there cutting classes to sit around my room having feelings,” she told her mother. The classes were excellent, if large, but all they inspired in her were feelings. She took differential calculus and got feelings. She took philosophy and got feelings. She took Advanced French and The American Renaissance and they gave her feelings. She walked the campus and through the town at odd hours, driven by emotions she could not control, an urgent sense of the size and magnitude of all knowledge. She would sit in her room and feel her emotions surge in her like an uproarious tide anxious on a steep rocky shore. Gary made the actual decision to let go of college while perched in a tree on the quad. She entered the thick umbrella of an ancient pine and then climbed the puzzling and ready ladder of limbs around its trunk until she was two hundred feet from the ground and could see the lights of Boston. She was twenty years old.
“I am destined to go through life as an exposed nerve,” she said. “That’s what I learned at college. I hope you don’t feel I wasted your fifty thousand dollars. The food was good.”
“You’re going to be fine, Margaret,�
�� her mother told her. “You’re the kind of girl who will look out the window while you talk to people. You are high strung, but you won’t perish. It will make you a good listener. Your life is going to be lovely if you can find the right company”
Gary was looking out the window now and she turned to her mother, defiant and understood. She sat with the fingertips of her left hand touching the fingertips of her right hand, a posture of power and fragility at once. “I’m going to get a job,” she said. “And try to grow some insulation.” She didn’t know what to do about being the kind of person who was driven by emotion, who climbed trees, whose eyes watered three or four times a day from a feeling she could only take as happiness. She saw meaning everywhere but couldn’t interpret it, and this made her alert, constantly, for signals from the world. Some people viewed her as superstitious and overly sensitive, but everyone saw her as charming, for she represented a stage they’d all known but could not sustain, a dear wakefulness that had in them subsided.
For these reasons no one was surprised a year later to hear of the shape of the nuptials she had fashioned, the conditions, how the whole wedding would work. She was a lifetime away, in Utah, and was marrying, if all things came to pass, a successful lawyer who chaired the board of the bird sanctuary where she’d taken work. The ceremony was being held in a little church north of the village of Brigham City, a building that looked like a child’s drawing of a church, and it stood among cornfields there. The wedding would commence at the moment of sunset on December 10, and the only light would be the twelve candles, one on each windowsill of the plain building, and there would be no spoken “I do’s.” In her time west, Gary Garrison had learned to love geese, and had had moments when she felt she understood what they were saying, was sure of it, not as something she could translate but as something she could feel. The large wild birds affected her. The wedding vows would be read in the candlelit church, and then Gary Garrison and her husband-to-be, William Brookes, would stand with the minister until they heard the call of geese. The call of the geese would seal the deal. In the invitation it said it this way: “When the wild geese call, we will be married heart and soul, and only IF they call.”
Her mother smiled to read the invitation, imagining Gary s new life in the larger world, seeing a hundred wedding guests in the dark room listening for the winging birds.
After leaving college, Gary Garrison went west to wear out her feelings, but it didn’t happen that way. She traveled by car and all the new places gave her feelings, fresh electricity every morning, noon, and night. Times, many times, she pulled off the interstate onto some back road and stood, arms folded, against her car, breathing deeply and trying not to cry. Traveling this way, by fits and starts, she arrived in Utah and took the job a friend of her father’s had arranged at the Brigham Bird Refuge.
“She wants out of doors,” her father had said. “We’ll arrange it.”
There her story began, for she fell under the spell of the sky and a man. It was September, which offered up a crazy fragile blue, a season of crumbling summer and its crushing light, light about to fall off a polished table like a crystal vase, light that filled Margaret Garrison like fire in a bowl, and in her September days, she walked upon her toes to get her head up into the air as far as possible.
Where she walked upon her toes was along the causeways that formed a large grid through the wetlands well north of the giant Great Salt Lake. These were little more than gravel dikes grown with reeds and marked by the single trail where the manager of the refuge and his minions marched. On such a narrow path, with water on both sides in great blue-sky sheets, she felt herself drift away more than once. What she had in her hand was a notebook with a green canvas cover, and inside the cover on the lined pages of the thing were two types of entry. One was the bird count at each station, along with the time and the date and one-line descriptions of any birds she did not recognize, exotic ducks or the like. The other entry in Margaret’s official book was her poetry. The back of her book began to thicken with blue pages of her free verse, written, like so many things she did, because she could not not do it. If she did not write the poetry when she sat alone in the barrel blinds and on the platforms watching ducks settle and feed, she would not have burst or had a breakdown, but some small gasket in her would have surely cracked.
It was as if she were born for the task of learning birds, for their names came to her immediately, and she could distinguish them by their profiles in the sky at some distance and by the way they sat on the water or landed, and she knew the various geese and ducks by their calls of succor and distress, and her notebook thickened with her fall census.
The manager of this private wetland was a trained wildlife ranger named Mark Faberhand, who was thirty-one years old and had become at that age a flinty expert in the western fly-ways and in all birds, even exotics. He was tall and permanently tanned and taciturn, and he struck people on first meeting as being furry, for he shaved once a week on Sunday. His role had evolved on the thousand acres of the refuge to that of policeman really, and he had grown into that part reluctantly, even though it was what he did. He’d pull up to the pickups full of scouting hunters or young lovers or older lovers who were off from their lawful spouses, and he’d step to their vehicles in his green refuge uniform with his flashlight and he’d ask them to move on. The hunters would kid with him, pleading, Come on, you’ve got so many Canadian honkers, share a few, scare some over this way.
The skies were busy all September and that doubled in October, the steady migration of waterfowl loading the morning and evening with sublime traffic. No day or part of a day was lost to Gary Garrison. She was out early, five A.M., walking the reedy pathways in the chilly dark to count the incoming ducks and outgoing ducks, and she learned to tell by the way some took off that they were actually going off to feed and would stay another day. The first thing she heard every day in the sky was the whistling wings of the low-flying, fast-flying ducks, and the last thing she heard at the sharp edge of the short fall twilight was the honking of the Canadian geese as they settled.
The geese became her favorite, and their cries felt personal to her and at the same time part of some larger fate, tied to the vastness of the sheeted waterlands and the mountains as they flared and faded. The geese in their afternoon squadrons, arriving or departing or crossing high overhead, seemed part of a force that she longed for, and that is why they figured later in her wedding plans. When the time came, they would perform the ceremony.
The other intern in the wetland sanctuary that fall was Juanita Dubois, a young woman who had recently graduated from Utah State University with a degree in wildlife management. Juanita already had been hired by the State of Utah, and she would be working the Central Wildlife District starting in the spring. The two women roomed together in a new trailer across the gravel yard from the one permanent structure on the grounds, the administration cabin. Three days a week the women went together in the refuge truck to six ponds in rotation, and their census involved a check sheet of time of day, water temperature, bird count, etcetera. Every Friday, they met with Mark Faberhand in the little cabin, entered data, and planned the coming week. It was a regulated pattern that fall, but in her heart as always Gary Garrison felt as if she had a secret that was ineffable, unspeakable, that it filled her and emptied her like a bellows. Mornings when the first wings would whistle overhead in the starry black, she’d gasp and sit down and feel the water burn to the surface of her eyes.
She wrote to her mother: “I will not climb a tree and quit this place! There are no trees, and simply this has claimed me, incurably. Not curable. Incurably incurable! There’s no cure for this love, if that is what it is. I love the sun, the mud, the traveling birds too much!”
Juanita Dubois was a level-headed, steady friend for Gary. She was smart and energetic and plainspoken. She was annoyed to have done so well in her classes at Utah State that she’d scared away possible boyfriends, and in the evenings while Gary lay in her
bunk and listened to every living thing moving in the sky, Juanita listed each man she’d almost dated. Her admiration for Mark Faberhand was immediate and complete, and over the weeks of the fall, it crossed over to affection, which she also reported to Gary Garrison in their night quarters.
With Mark, on their forays in the field and at their weekly meetings, Gary kept quiet. She also admired many things about him, but she didn’t think about them, because she saw they would never end. The list would start with his speaking voice and move from the hair on his wrists to his walk in his heavy brown lace-up boots and to his general ethic, and she didn’t know how to control such a list or the feelings it engendered. He was a good man, and she hadn’t known any. Being around him vexed her because it was like interference; she could feel him there more clearly than the outer world. The only time she was surprised by incoming flights or ducks in the reeds was when she was out with him. She also understood her feelings because she could never face him full on, turn to him openly, even to stand and talk. She kept to one side, nodded his way, and spoke looking past his shoulder the way she’d seen baseball coaches talk to pitchers on the mound.
When she was out alone that fall, she thought she might die of the beauty or whatever it was about this wild world. And then she thought that double because each day was shorter than the one before and each day there were fewer birds, as the thousands of wildfowl rested and then went on toward Mexico.
Some days the three of them came across trespassers and had to intervene. Mark would stand out of the truck with Juanita behind him while whoever had camped on the property packed up their gear and drove off. A couple of times Mark had Juanita walk up to a pickup on one of the dirt access roads and say, “Listen, boys, you’re going to have to move on. The property line is a half mile back.”