by Rick Bass
Willis trots out to the runway to meet him when the plane lands, and the two men exchange high fives, bump asses, twirl and dance the way they did fifteen years earlier, with no sadness or parody whatsoever. All the people in the small airport, even the pilots, look down and watch the two bulky men — one tall, one short — bump and shimmy on the runway.
It’s windy, gusting up to fifty miles an hour: it’s still winter in northern Michigan. The wind catches the Wolverine’s hat, lifts it from his head, and tumbles it down the runway. Spirited away, it’s moving fifty, sixty yards at a clip, farther and farther out of reach, gone so fast that they don’t even consider chasing it. The two men just observe it for a second, and then laugh and head for the terminal with their arms around each other’s shoulders, Harley limping slightly from the day’s cramped travels.
They drive the last fifteen miles to the campus in Willis’s rusted-out Toyota. Harley can see the road rushing beneath them through holes in the floorboard, can hear the wind whistling up into the car. It looks like winter: pearl-gray sky, bare trees, and patches of dirty snow.
Fifteen hundred dollars, Harley thinks. He feels like he shouldn’t have gone off and left Shaw. It’s green already down low in their valley, in southern Alberta and northern Montana. He tries to think of something else.
“How’re you doing?” Willis asks. “The trip — you look rough”
“It’s good to be here” Harley says. “It’s real good to see you. But I feel like I’m slumming. I feel like they just want to gawk. I mean, none of them will even have heard of me, I feel like they just want to say, ‘We touched an ex-football player, We had a hunk of meat speaking on our little campus this week. We’re different, we’re out there. Other art schools bring in fey poets and piano tuners, but we bring in meat, to broaden our horizons.’” Harley picks at his fingernails. “I feel like they just want to gawk” he says again,
Willis nods, then shrugs. “Some of them will” he says, “But they’re good kids. Give them a break”
They turn off the main road and drive down a hard dirt road that runs through a forest of bare-limbed birches. They come out of the bottom and drive up into pines. Harley can see a lake through the trees.
“Just talk about football” Willis says, “Talk about what you know. These kids are insatiable, They want to know about everything — I mean everything, Give them the Nietzsche stuff, the van Gogh, about how one must be one’s own horse, Or that one that Coach Shea used to give us”
Harley smiles. “Hit, hit, hit,” he says, looking out the window, The lake is whitecapping. Trees line it all around the shore. It’s a large lake,
“We’ll go fishing tonight, if that’s okay with you” Willis says. “Me and you and a couple of the other teachers. They’re good guys and want to meet you.”
The wind’s rocking the little car. Harley looks over at Willis, the Wolverine, and it’s not like they’re kids anymore, or even young men. They can see the age in each other. But it’s still a good feeling, an exciting one, a new one — as if there’s still much country to be covered and plenty of strength left with which to cover it.
“Steelhead,” Willis says. “We’ll have some burgers and some pie and coffee over at my house. I want you to meet my wife and little girl. Then we’ll go out to the Platte River and catch some steelhead. I’ve got all the gear you’ll need.”
“Super,” says Harley, delighted to have something to take his mind off things. He imagines Shaw filling one more box, even at that moment: arranging it neatly, packing it and repacking it, getting it just right. “Wonderful,” Harley says.
They come to the guest cottage where Harley will be staying. It’s yellow with fading green trim, and is set back on a hill among the pines, looking out at the lake, which is visible as a glint of blue through the trees. Willis gives Harley the key to the cottage and lets him out at the bottom of the hill.
“This place is great,” Harley says.
“God, it’s great to see you,” Willis says, grabbing Harley’s hand and squeezing it.
Harley remembers all the enemy tacklers he cut down trying to protect Willis, trying to keep them away, and grins back. “It’s great to be here.”
“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Willis says. “I’ll go get you a license and get everything rounded up — that’ll give you time to freshen up. We’ll wade where the river goes into the lake. Shit, it’s great that you’re here,” he says, shaking Harley’s hand once more.
Harley climbs out of the car, shoulders his overnight bag, waves goodbye, then walks up the steps of the cottage. Harley can hear the wind slapping the water against the rocky shore; even when he’s inside, he can hear that sound.
It’s a tiny cottage: no television, no electricity, just a bed, a desk, and a bathroom. He sits down on the bed and looks out the brightly washed window at the lake and listens to it. The room is lonely in its smallness. There’s nothing to do but watch the lake. It’s Shaw who should be here, not him, he thinks. These kids don’t want to know about football.
There’s no one out. Harley imagines that they are all in a cafeteria somewhere, talking about flutes and poetry and vases — olden shit. He gazes at the water for a long time. The sun through the window and the sound of the waves is making him sleepier than he’s ever been, but as an exercise in discipline he tries to stay awake, refuses to lie down, not even for a minute or two. Finally, as if it is the thing he has been watching for, he sees another person. It’s a young woman walking her yellow Labrador on a leash. She’s walking slowly with her head down — a sad woman, Harley thinks. He watches her until she disappears into the trees.
He’s napping hard when he hears a knock on the door. In his dream Harley was hitting his head against the cabin wall again, faster and faster, after Shaw had left again, but then he hears Willis’s voice — “Hey, Harley, it’s me” — and Willis is poking his head in the door, saying, “Wake up, Heine Man.” It’s one of Harley’s nicknames from college, due to the wideness of his girth. Harley sits up slowly, wondering how long Shaw’s been gone and wondering where he is. For a moment it seems that his life with Shaw and the dream of banging his head against the wall are what’s real, and that Willis, with his head halfway through the door, grinning, and the afterlife-lulling washes of the waves, the heavy forest right outside the window, are what the dream is. The sun is down behind the trees, the light is leaving the room — the forest is becoming dark — and Harley’s chilled. He wants to be home, but fifteen hundred dollars is fifteen hundred dollars, and he rises from the bed, lumbers into the bathroom. He splashes water on his face and they’re off, out of the cottage and into Willis’s car.
·
The Wolverine seems to be a little more fidgety, a little more restless, than Harley remembered from school, but he decides that’s to be expected: it’s late in the winter, and spring’s long overdue. Maybe Willis is unhappy, too, being a jock among the effetes.
“It’s my tenth anniversary, man,” Willis says, grinning almost maniacally, holding the steering wheel with both hands. Harley notices how tense Willis’s shoulders are, how his trapezius muscles seem to be riding a little higher than usual, and remembers the masseuse who used to come to their dorm after games at their small Ohio college, and how, in the pros, there had not been such a masseuse, and how he’d been disappointed by that fact. Dixie, he thinks, trying to remember. Harley feels like a fossil. This was all so long ago. He gets the feeling that “Congratulations” isn’t the thing Willis wants him to say, but he says it anyway. It’s all there is to say.
“She won’t be at your talk tomorrow,” Willis says apologetically. “She’s got that winter depression thing.” He holds his hand out, making it flutter like a crippled bird. Willis says it with concern, but the way he’s making his hand dip and dive strikes Harley as funny, and he laughs but then is mortified to see Willis scowl — it’s no laughing matter for him — and the subject is dropped. Harley stares out the window, his face crimson, and in t
he late-day light watches for deer running through the forest, the way they do back home.
“This teaching,” Willis says after a while. “I’ve been doing it fifteen years.” Harley looks over at him and thinks that Willis still looks to be in okay shape — nothing like he was in college, but still probably stronger and faster than ninety-eight percent of the rest of the world, and wasn’t that enough after fifteen years? You’re either there on the peak of perfection, the peak of strength, Harley thinks, or you’re not.
“I just feel like driving,” Willis says. “I just feel like letting you out at the house and going somewhere — anywhere. Just driving for days.”
Harley nods and looks at the woods race past. They’re almost at Willis’s house, which is at the other end of the lake. They ride the rest of the way in silence. Willis is wrapped up in the idea of a long flight, his eyes luminous with the thought of it, and Harley, picking at his thumbnail, is trying to think of what he’ll say tomorrow, trying to figure out a way to take home the fifteen hundred with pride rather than guilt. Trying to figure out why Shaw’s unhappy, why she wants to leave when she doesn’t seem to have anything to run to — trying to figure out what’s wrong with him that makes her want to run away. Harley’s read and heard about the biological clock, but to him sometimes it’s more like a fuse. He wonders, could it be that?
“Jack and Lois’ll be there,” Willis says. “Jack teaches with me. They’re great. Jack’s funny, a nice guy.” He clears his throat. “And Nick and Shellie will be there. Nick Bozaine. He’s a poet. Jack and Nick and you and me are going fishing. Jack’s a poet too, but he’s normal. Nick’s, well, Nick is …” Willis flutters his hand again and looks at Harley with what almost seems to be warning, or apology.
“Nick’s a sweet guy, a prince of a guy, the rarest man there is — but he gets sad,’ Willis says. “He’s manic-depressive, and he’s in the middle of a big one right now.’ Willis shakes his head. “He tried to kill himself once.’
“How,’ says Harley, dully.
“Garage,’ says Willis. “Left the car running in the garage one winter and lay down in the front seat. Wrapped up in a blanket and went to sleep. His ex-wife — his first one — came home and got him to the hospital.’ Willis sighs as he pulls into the driveway. “Maybe my best friend here on campus. Sweetest man who ever walked the face of the earth. Been married four times and he’s only thirty-five years old.’
Willis’s house, which he is renting from the academy, is beautiful, charming. It’s nestled in the trees, off by itself with toys strewn around it. When they get out of the car — bats flitting through the trees in the heavy dusk — a golden retriever leaps across the yard and rolls itself, in a crude cross-body block, at Harley’s feet. He bends down to pat it. There’s a Hula-Hoop in the yard, and some little girls’ bicycles and a deflated soccer ball. The porch light is on. A few mayflies bruise themselves against its glow. Willis pauses, going up the steps, and watches the hatch with a fisherman’s eyes, still imagining himself traveling — somewhere in the West, perhaps.
When Harley steps into the house, he’s frightened for a second because all he can see is a great wall of water, gunmetal gray, rolling toward him. It’s like he’s stepped off the edge of the world, but then he realizes it’s just a huge bay window, the largest he’s ever seen — the entire back wall of the house is one immense sheet of glass, jutting over the lake. Seated on couches in the foreground, as if before a big movie screen, are all the people he will meet: Jack and Lois, Nick and Shellie, and Claudia — Willis’s wife — and their little girl, Jamie.
Harley looks at them, his pulse still racing, as Claudia turns and rises, comes forward to greet him, to shake his hand. She’s smiling weakly but genuinely, and Harley feels guilty, intruding upon her personal illness at the end of the long winter, forcing her to be cheerful. Jamie comes flying across the room, launches herself at Harley’s bulk as if trying to tackle him, and gives him a thigh hug.
“You’re Daddy’s friend,” she cries, swinging around Harley’s tree legs. “I am Jamie!”
Then Harley meets Jack, who is sturdy (but not as sturdy as Willis or, Harley thinks, himself), bearded, and red-faced, as if from having drunk a bottle of schnapps. Jack’s as cheerful and yet quiet as a drugstore Santa Claus, and Lois, who is a fashion model, one-quarter Cherokee, is as cheerful and honest and straight as Jack. Another model, Harley thinks. Then he meets Nick, who’s ghost-white pale, a kind of after-long-winter pale, tall, and gaunt. He offers a faint, friendly smile as he rises to shake Harley’s hand. Nick’s vivacious wife, Shellie, who’s perhaps an inch or two over five feet, looks strong, furious with energy and ideas, as she shakes Harley’s hand, too.
Claudia has made cherry pie, and she cuts into it and serves it to the men and to Lois. Shellie’s dieting, though she’s as tiny as a fairy already. Everyone stands eating the pie while night falls over the lake. They are all within a few years of being forty, and Willis can’t go wrong with the music he puts on the CD player: the Stones, Dylan, the Eagles. Their tastes in music are the most predictable thing about them.
Nick’s eating anything he can get his hands on — to keep from talking, Harley can tell — loading up on chips, olives, pie, cookies. The women are talking among themselves. Willis stands by the stereo and looks exhausted, but pleased, and Jack’s eyes are shiny as he talks to Nick and Willis about the year’s luck thus far in steelhead fishing, and about how frigid and windy it’ll be, and about how late they’ll be out, all night, and how he hopes they’ll catch fish tonight.
Harley tries to listen, grinning, but Jamie’s pulling on his arm, wanting to show him her room: her hamster, her aquarium, pictures of her friends. Imperceptibly, he feels Shaw slipping off the side of an iceberg, two thousand miles away — calving, he remembers it’s called — feels their lives together cleaving and sloughing away, falling over the cliff, landing with a giant splash in the night, sinking. He would have given ten years of his life for her to be with him tonight, to have seen the lake rolling toward that bay window, and to meet all these people, these friends of the Wolverine.
Jamie’s selling raffle tickets in conjunction with her school circus. Harley asks if he’ll win an elephant, and Jamie squeals, falls over on her bed laughing and shrieking. Her eyes are rolling back with hyperactivity, and Harley knows enough about children to realize he’s not making Claudia’s job any easier, that Jamie’s got to start calming down for the end of the day rather than getting wound up. But he can’t help it, he wants to see how much energy this child has, and he sits down on the bed beside her and says, “A gorilla. I want to win a gorilla to take back on the plane with me.” Jamie shrieks even louder and sits up, pummeling her legs against the side of the bed. Her face is red with laughter, and tears are in her eyes. She’s clapping her hands, she’s so delighted to have a new friend, and Claudia calmly sticks her head in the door and gives Jamie a nice mother look, and whispers, “Ssshh. Calm down. Ssshhh.”
Harley wonders how long Claudia’s had the winter sickness. He wonders if it will go away quickly, with the first sunny warm day, or gradually, and he wonders if there are ever cases of it where, one year, it doesn’t go away at all.
“The pie was delicious,” Harley says, which is the truth. He wants to tell her something else, something significant (he thinks of his lecture tomorrow, and gropes — this is a woman, a beautiful woman, and he does not think she would appreciate the old words of his and Willis’s coach, Hit, hit, hit), but the pie is all he can come up with. The pie, and Jamie’s thrilled happiness — Jamie’s happiness, if not Claudia’s. Claudia smiles (that strong-but-weak, heartbreaking, polite, for-guests-only smile) and tells her daughter to sshh again. When Jamie gets down one of her books, Harley thinks at first she wants him to read to her, but Jamie wants to read to him.
They sit quietly as Jamie reads to Harley. He can hear the adults talking in the next room, speaking among themselves with a tired, day’s-end relief, like outlaws holed up
in a cave after a hard day’s ride, having given the posse the slip.
Jack comes in and listens to the end of Jamie’s story and strokes the top of her head. “My Uncle Jack,” Jamie explains, pointing a thumb to yet another of her friends. Jack smiles and says to Harley, “Do you do much hunting up in Canada?”
“A little,” Harley says, glancing worriedly at Jamie, not wanting to upset her. He’s still not sure of his footing in this new land, not sure if he’s among brutes or effetes, or in some transition place where the two overlap and coexist. Jack grins and says, “I started bowhunting last year.”
Jack had previously been almost silent, speaking only when spoken to, but now he’s off and running. He begins to talk so fervently about deer hunting that everyone in the next room begins to listen and drift toward Jamie’s room. Jack doesn’t notice, and he keeps on, about how he got eight deer last season, how he was out in the woods every day, about camouflage, about scent.
It’s as if Jack is rising from a dream or a great depth when he looks up and sees that everyone’s gathered around him and is listening, and smiling.
“What,” he says, stopping his story. “What’s the big deal? What?”
“You,” says Lois, laughing. “Doing all that talking.”
Jack shrugs and says to Harley, “Don’t listen to them. I talk plenty.”
“I thought this was a la-de-da school,” Harley says. “You guys are talking about hunting and fishing like you’re the last of the Mohicans. This is not what I expected,” he says, and Jamie giggles for no reason, and the women smile.