by Walter Kirn
“What kind of business?”
“I counsel. I don't pry. The Rocking F sets high standards for its guests.”
Elder Stark slid his belt off, hung it on a hook, stepped out of his pants, and unbuttoned his white shirt, proceeding backward, from the bottom up. Something had happened to his nervous system; his reflexes seemed scrambled, all crossed up. Things he used to do with his right hand, such as loosen his shoelaces or scratch his nose, he did with his left now, I'd noticed. He also blinked more, though never with both lids at the same time.
He sat on the edge of his mattress and combed his hair, which had finally grown out long enough to comb. His shorts had slipped low around his thickening waist and uncovered a track of pink welts from the tight waistband. “We're moving tomorrow,” he said. “I paid the campground. Eff Sr. offered his guesthouse. I accepted. Lauer approves. He told me we've been called. No more pestering strangers, no more tracting. The Effinghams are our one and only job now.”
“And he made this decision by whose authority?”
My partner settled his hands on his bare knees and looked up at the ceiling of the van. In its bubble-shaped amber skylight there were stars, blurred and enlarged by a film of greasy dirt. “You don't seem to understand the situation. The Seeress is about to pass,” he said. “My mother's shut away with the First Council. The co-op's run out of flour, oil, and sugar because everyone's rushing to use their Virtue Coupons. The succession looks cloudy. Everything looks cloudy. There is no authority, Mason. We're on our own.”
The guesthouse of the Rocking F, which wasn't much smaller than the main house, had two separate wings, and in the second wing, behind a locked door we didn't have a key to and hidden by curtains that stayed drawn all day, a man whom we'd been ordered not to speak to was writing a book we were not supposed to ask about. In the evenings he stood in the yard with a cigar and stretched his neck and mumbled to himself, but otherwise we never saw him. His meals were delivered by a Mexican maid who also did his laundry and handled his mail, which was dominated by large manila envelopes. In the mornings, before the sun rose, he played loud music and engaged in some kind of exercise routine that shook the floors and walls, but after that he was silent. I guessed his age to be about forty, maybe forty-five, but I'd never seen him up close or in full sunlight, only across the lawn, at dusk, so it was hard to tell. Elder Stark thought the man was famous but had no evidence, just a vague Hobo hunch. I thought so, too. Only a great one could bear such isolation.
The comforts of the guesthouse embarrassed me. The sheets and the bedding were cotton, their labels said, but they felt like satin against the skin, and the mattresses rested high up on their frames under fluffy domes of quilts and blankets. On the beds, the sofas, and the armchairs fancy pillows were heaped on fancy pillows—so many that some of them had to be removed before a person could sit or lie. In the tall bathroom mirrors my body looked leaner than usual, my face more symmetrical, my eyes much clearer. The soaps and shampoos came nestled in a basket lined with perfumed pink tissue, and over the sink, arranged on the shelves of a green enamel cabinet, were old-fashioned shaving brushes, safety razors, cotton balls, and bottles of spice cologne. Using these items, I felt strangely ladylike, as though my appearance mattered to the world and grooming was a job of consequence. I took up whitening my teeth again.
On our second day there, after grinding our coffee beans and spooning them into a gold mesh filter to brew, my partner looked around the kitchen and said, “Mason, this is what's possible in life.” He left it there, and I spent the next few minutes speculating on what he'd meant. Possible for us? For anyone? He couldn't have meant anyone. What bothered me was the finality of the remark, as though Elder Stark had beheld the end of history, the climax of all human striving, in a coffee machine.
We ate breakfast at the main house with Little Eff, who'd costumed himself for a movie about a day wrangling livestock on the open range. The red handkerchief knotted around his neck drew attention to his bony Adam's apple, whose contours when viewed from the side repeated in miniature the profile of his face. The thorn-scratched denim of his shirt contrasted oddly with his pampered skin, which was visibly saturated with lotion and reeked so strongly of vanilla that when I sat down beside him at the table I looked around for a tray of cream-filled pastries.
“I'll show you the lay of the place today,” he said. “That way you can go out alone, unsupervised. My father offers his apologies. He'd ride along, but he's closing at noon central time on a Mandan Sioux casino contract. Normally he'd do it on the phone, but these Natives, they like to touch flesh when they make deals. They still do the pipe thing, too. It's fun to see.”
“He's flying?” my partner asked.
“At nine, to Bismarck.”
My partner frowned. “No travel. We discussed that. No changes in drinking water for a month.”
“Xavier filled a few thermoses. It's covered.” Little Eff uncapped a bottle of green hot sauce and shook some drops onto his pale gray omelet. He avoided yolks not for health reasons, he'd told us, but because of an incident at a Maine fishing lodge when he was twelve years old. The guide gave him a hard-boiled egg for lunch, and when he unpeeled it he found a big-eyed embryo complete with a tiny beak and stubby wings. Screaming and shaking, he flung it into the water, where it floated for a few moments before attracting a school of nibbling pickerel. Little Eff said the sight made him vomit into the lake and led to the guide's dismissal from the lodge. “My father raised hell. He overreacted, probably, but that's how this family works: we go balls out, especially for each other. It's called ‘love.'”
We set out for the ranch tour in a long-cab pickup so new that its right rear window still had tape marks where the price sticker had been removed. Little Eff drove and I sat in the back, having lost a coin toss with my partner that I hadn't even requested—I'd told him I understood his need for leg room. Still, he insisted on being fair. His gesture seemed meant to prove to Little Eff that Apostles, like Effinghams, stuck up for each other, prizing unity above all else, but it appeared to go unnoticed.
We drove beside a dry streambed through tall grass that powdered the hood and windshield with seed and pollen. I could feel fallen tree branches breaking under the tires. Little Eff called the ranch a “comprehensive ecosytem” and described how his father bought the place for him during a ski vacation nine years ago. Little Eff was living in San Diego then, running a family-owned network of AM radio stations and suffering through a marriage to a young woman who played professional beach volleyball and couldn't bear children, she'd told him on their honeymoon, because of a drug she'd taken to build her muscles. “My liver enzymes were screwy, I had a gut, I woke up with cluster headaches every morning, and my wife, I found out, was still on major steroids, so crazy and pumped that she lost her driver's license for going sixty through a school zone, twice. She slugged me a few times, too. Then Dad stepped in. He flew me out here on the Gulfstream to our condo, sold the radio stations behind my back, annulled my marriage in seventy-two hours—a six-figure sum changed hands, that's all I know; the woman's in Maui now, dating teenage surfers—and gave me the deed to all you see around us. ‘You're a gentleman now,' he said. ‘No more coat and tie. Just give me a grandchild someday, that's all I ask.'”
Little Eff slowed the truck and reached in front of my partner for a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment. He'd spotted something. Steering with one hand, he scanned a far-off ridge of scrubby cedars, then passed the field glasses over his shoulder to me. “They're on a kill,” he whispered. “Three of them. To the right of that big cleft rock, at two o'clock.”
I fingered a dial, focused. Nothing there.
“The alpha's the one in the middle. Silver fur. In a minute, he'll smell us and run. His name's Napoleon. He ran off old Nosferatu last December and mated with Nefertiti. Got him now?”
I kept trying but it was useless; my eyes had started to water, blurring everything. My partner twisted around and sco
wled at me. I was disappointing our host, our lord, our patron. “By the rock,” he hissed. “Two o'clock. What's wrong? You're blind?”
“Too late,” Little Eff said. “They got our scent. They're gone. The sighting of a lifetime. That's a shame.”
The mood in the truck cab flattened as we pressed on. Nothing else on the ranch could match the wolves, and though Little Eff continued pointing out various beauty spots and natural features—a steaming mineral spring, a herd of mule deer, an ancient tepee ring—he sounded bored, even depressed after a while. My partner asked questions designed to let him boast about the expense of his hand-built jackleg fences, the lushness of his summer pastures, and the abundance of eagles in his blue skies, but Little Eff declined to play his part, answering only “No kidding” or “You're right.” His pride in the place seemed thinner than he'd pretended and dependent on the excitement of his audience, which had to start out high and keep on rising. We'd failed him, though, and turned him from Person One to Person Two. As we drove past a hillside with dozens of grazing bison, he unhooked a radio mounted on the dashboard and said, “I'm at Cottonwood Meadow. We need lunch.” The hulking, snorting brown beasts went unacknowledged and carried on feeding, oblivious, prehistoric, turning their heads between ripping bites of grass to watch out for saber-toothed tigers and men with spears.
A ranch hand on a Honda ATV delivered a cooler of tuna-salad sandwiches, canned lemonade, and thawing Fudgsicles, which we consumed while sitting on the ground. Little Eff spread out his handkerchief for a place mat and Elder Stark quoted a sentence from Little Red Elk's journals that I couldn't believe he'd managed to memorize. “As food sustains our bodies, yielding up its vital elements as it wends its way through us to the soil, so do we sustain the All-in-One, into whose belly we pass and are dissolved, only to be reconstituted as the creative Etheric Understrata.”
“You never use ‘amen,'” said Little Eff. It seemed he was used to my partner's verbal unfurlings.
“‘Amen' means a prayer has ended,” my partner said. “Our prayers never end.”
“Who wrote that passage, anyway?”
My partner told him.
Little Eff said, “Bullshit. He had help. That's not their kind of vocabulary or grammar.”
“It's an inspired pronouncement,” my partner said.
“Inspired by whites?”
“Inspired every which way,” my partner said.
I felt proud of him for once, both for his snappy answer and for his courage in planting our message in such unlikely surroundings, among people whose lives it could only complicate. He'd always been the one with vision, and who was to say that his dream of bringing home some fantastic bequest that might secure Bluff's future didn't contain a vast compassion, too. I watched Little Eff peel the wrapper from his soft Fudgsicle, hold it sideways, and lick away the drips. It hit me that he and his father and all their kind, the bosses, the rulers, the powers of Terrestria, deserved true knowledge as much as anyone.
“I'll be in town tonight,” said Little Eff, “so you're on your own as far as dinner. Call the main house at four and make requests, they'll see what's on hand and cook it if they can. I think we got in some fresh king salmon yesterday. Edward's a fish eater.”
Edward—the writer's name. I'd seen it on an envelope left for him on his doorstep by the maid.
“Will your father be back to join us?” Elder Stark said.
“Can I be frank? The man is searching. He's in a long-term state of mind. For decades he's been all business. It took a toll. Obviously. And not just on his organs. Since Mom died”—he sent a glance north, in the direction of the woman's mountain memorial—“he's had two marriages of ten months apiece, a dinner date with the president's first cousin that ended in a huge quarrel about Israel, and a night with a lady I met at the Bellagio back when I wasn't thinking very straight and hired to console him on his sixty-fifth birthday. He's lonely, he wants answers, and he wants peace. He wants to enjoy a Thanksgiving without cramps. And after all he's done for me, I owe him. I owe him whatever he wants. So I'm indulging you. Maybe you can feel it: my forbearance. It's not my custom to open the Rocking F to crude gypsy mystics angling for a windfall.”
I set my half-eaten sandwich on my lap. Tension had caused me to squeeze it and mash the bread. My partner tightened his crossed legs and sucked his lips into his mouth. Off behind him the bison had gathered at a watering hole and were shoving and jostling for position as small nervous birds pecked their necks and backs for insects.
“So let's put it all on the table,” Little Eff said. “It's almost July, a busy season here. We entertain friends. We throw functions. We host a gathering. I didn't expect you two fellows, but here you are, and as long as my father's amused, that's cool. A generous check for your cause? You might just get one. It's nothing to us, and we live to starve the tax man. You can do a few chores if you want to show good manners—it's in your best interest; Dad loves men who sweat—but otherwise I have just one favor to ask. Or is that one favor too many?”
We didn't answer him, or feel expected to.
Little Eff snapped the tab off his can of lemonade and drank it down in one long freezing swallow that he'd regret when he grew older, because such digestive shocks add up. “This favor I'm asking, Mason, would come from you; your friend here has his hands full with my father. It relates to a woman who's flying in next week—one I'm fairly serious about and plan to ask to stay the summer here.”
I nodded my head.
“You're sweet on someone, too, I hear. Seen the girl but never spoken to her. Very pretty. And controversial. But that's just Snowshoe Springs. You'll probably hear yours truly slandered, too.”
“My partner says you're friendly with her father.”
“Former Olympic freestyle skiing god, Audi and Jaguar dealer, killer poker player, and someone who used to be able to get you anything as long as you swore not to ask him where he got it. We used to meet up in Las Vegas, at the fights. He taught me to how to lose money and keep my sense of humor.”
“You're still in touch, though.”
“I'm a Jaguar prospect. Rob makes his pitch, we do our little dance, he calls again six month later, someday I'll buy. Here's the favor, though. My lady friend doesn't know a soul here. She needs company. You know how women are. A pal. To shop with. She's the same age as your girl, so what I'm thinking is: a couple of double dates, a picnic maybe, and then, if I'm lucky, those two will hit it off and I'll have some time to myself this summer. Yes? Otherwise she'll get bored and she'll scoot off and I'll be forty-one and even balder. Richer, too, but that only goes so far now. This new generation, they want the hair. The package.”
My partner sucked his Fudgsicle and eyed me. I gathered he was in on this. He'd already assured Little Eff that I'd cooperate.
“I'll call and ask her.”
“I'm paying, of course. You realize that. My treat.”
“Thank you. I'll ask her. When next week?”
“Next Friday. We can drive down to Aspen, if she'd like. Whatever tickles her.”
“I'll ask,” I said.
Little Eff picked up his handkerchief, shook out the crumbs, and tucked it in his shirt pocket, flaring out one of the corners for effect. He looked restored, revived. My partner did, too. We collected the Fudgsicle sticks, the cans, the sandwich bags, and dumped them into the cooler and put the lid on. When I saw that no one else was going to do it, I lifted the cooler into the truck bed, and Little Eff thanked me with a wink. He insisted I ride up front with him this time, and as we pulled out he patted my left knee and tilted his head toward the bison, which were resting now. I apologized to him for failing to see the wolves and he forgave me with a shrug. We were buddies suddenly, it seemed. I gave myself license to ask a question that had been welling up in me all morning.
“I realize Edward needs his privacy, but has he written any other books? I'd like to read one. I'm curious,” I said.
My partner reached over the seat and s
queezed my shoulder as Little Eff said, “I thought we made this clear. Edward's project is no concern of yours. As a matter of fact, it's no concern of mine. It's purely my father's affair.”
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“There are boundaries here. Respect them.”
I said that I would.
“Good enough. Just arrange things with your girl,” he said. A few minutes later he used the rearview mirror to address my partner in the back. “I'm sorry about insulting your Indian. We actually revere the red man on the Rocking F—my father especially. I was making a point about language, not intelligence. I'm really sincerely apologetic. Cool? Are we cool or not on this?”
“We're cool.”
My partner nudged me from behind and I said it, too, though not as smoothly and naturally. I practiced the phrase in my head all afternoon, and when I used it at breakfast the next day to answer Eff Sr. when he asked me if I found the guesthouse satisfactory, he didn't correct me or give me a strange look, which meant I must have learned to use it right.
Little Eff's black Suburban, driven by a ranch hand and looking like a cross between a hearse and one of the armored military vehicles that I'd been seeing on the news, arrived at Betsy's mother's house at six, an hour earlier than we'd expected and before either one of us was ready to go. Betsy was still in her bedroom in the basement altering a tiny pink children's T-shirt she'd bought at a Red Cross thrift shop for fifty cents. The shirt showed an elephant standing on its back feet, balancing a beach ball on its trunk. Though it barely covered her stomach, she wanted it shorter. She also wanted to trim the sleeves. When she'd told me she planned to wear it on our night out, I'd held my tongue. The beach ball, drawn with sequins, was positioned precisely over Betsy's right breast and stretched by the fullness there into an oval.
I was upstairs with Betsy's mother, Helen, whom I'd met for the first time that afternoon and had taken an instant liking to because her strong voice, quick opinions, and springy manner reminded me of the ladies back in Bluff. For an hour we'd been discussing Helen's massage work—a vocation she said she'd taken up twelve years ago after her divorce from Betsy's father, whom she referred to as “the Huckster.” She said she refused to speak ill of the poor man, and then went on to tell me that since their breakup he hadn't managed to keep a steady girlfriend and often resorted to prostitutes for company. She'd heard he'd caught a disease from one of them and been blackmailed by another, citing as her source the senior salesman at his Audi and Jaguar dealership, which, she said, he'd embezzled from to the point of bankruptcy. She sounded boastful telling me these things, as though her ex-husband's ill fortune was the result of a successful curse she'd placed on him, but something told me she still loved the man and awaited the day when he'd come to her for help. I asked her if Betsy still saw him and she said no, not that she knew of, but that she couldn't be sure because her daughter was so private. Did I know, for example, that she cuddled with stuffed bears? I admitted I didn't. “In her sleep,” said Helen. “I creep down and watch her sometimes. She looks so cozy. Once in a while I snuggle in next to her and lie there for a while, to feel the heat. I miss her baby years. I miss the odors. Even the bad ones. The diapers. The sour-milk breath.”