Wyoming

by Jeffrey Anderson

Chapter 6

  The sun rose on fourteen hours of uninterrupted sunlight. Then again. Then again.

  They fell into a comfortable daily rhythm defined, as Nick had predicted, by the clockless diurnal cycle of the wilderness. They would wake shortly after dawn (nothing else to do, with sun pouring through the windows like a searchlight), stumble clumsily and still half-asleep through their waking hygiene (Zach brushing his teeth with water from a tin cup while seated in his boxers on the wagon steps, launching a thin iridescent arc of toothpaste froth into the crisp dawn; Allison scrubbing her face with astringent-soaked cotton balls in the van; both with quick trips to the brush-screened frigid latrine hole with its inverted plastic bucket with the bottom cut out as a toilet seat), then Zach would feed Gina while Allison put together a light breakfast of Cheerios (Allison’s swimming in evaporated milk from the can, Zach’s dry) and Tang mixed with spring water in color-coded plastic cups (Allison’s turquoise, Zach’s gold).They’d wash their few dishes together, Allison scrubbing them in soapy cold water in a plastic dish pan and handing each piece to Zach, who dried it and set it on the wood shelf opposite the stove inside the wagon.

  Breakfast completed, they’d head off into their mainly separate morning activities. Allison tended to stay near the van, sometimes dabbling in her water color paints, sometimes reading from her six-month reserve of teen magazines, sometimes writing letters to her school chums back home. Zach always went for a hike, sometimes with Gina for company, other times alone. His hikes always started in the direction of the river flowing shallow and fast a hundred yards or so beyond their camp, behind the screen of thick brush. Sometimes he’d head upstream, sometimes down. He could cross to the far side, where the underbrush was thinner and easier to navigate, by walking upstream to the wooden bridge they’d crossed on their way in, or by crossing the river at one of two shallow fords, taking off his boots and socks and shoving the socks deep into the boots and hanging the boots around his neck by the laces tied together and crossing with his pants rolled up and his bare feet and legs quickly turning blue and numb in the frigid clear water. Sometimes Zach would take the fishing pole Nick had left him and catch grasshoppers before the sun had warmed their wings and use them as bait to fish for the rainbow trout he could see pointed like darts into the current where the river curved and cut a deeper channel against the bank. He let most of the fish he caught go, but an especially big one swallowed the hook and after more than five minutes of a bloody struggle to remove it, he gave up and whacked the traumatized rainbow with a stick to put it out of its misery. He used the pocketknife Allison had given him last Christmas to slit open the fish’s white belly and gutted the fish by pressing two fingers tight to the underside of the spine and jerking downward toward the tail. He tossed the guts into the river and saw several fish lunge for the bloody remains. He brought the fish back to the camp to eat for lunch. He lit a small fire in the stove, heated the cast-iron pan, coated the fish in cornmeal, and fried it in bacon fat. At first Allison scrunched up her nose at the prospect of trout for lunch; but by the time Zach had finished frying it crisp and golden brown in the bacon fat, she’d changed her mind. The fish was a tasty treat after all these meals out of a can or a box.

  After lunch (where the fare, when not trout, included such delicacies as peanut-butter sandwiches or sliced corned beef—from a can—and mustard on bread turned to crisp toast by simply leaving it in the sun and bone-dry wind for two minutes), the two of them and Gina would do something together. This included hikes into the low hills away from the river. Out there they found narrow canyons cut by rivers from ages past, shallow caves hollowed out by those same bygone waters, caves with the bones and scat and other leavings of wild animals and half-wild humans. They discovered bits of jade and other possible semi-precious stones in a freshly opened cliff-side vein. They found the deep ruts of an old wagon trail, probably a spur from the original Oregon Trail, snaking along within sight of the river but not impeded by the river’s thickets and brush.

  Early in the afternoon of their fourth day in the wilderness, Nick dropped off a box of supplies—mostly more of the beloved canned meat and beans, along with a bag of fresh lemons. “Ruth said you could use the vitamin C,” he said. “Guess she doesn’t want you to get scurvy.” He also gave Allison three letters sent to her care of their Lander address. He paused before getting in the truck and stared at them, then nodded. “I wondered how you kids would fare out here. It’s a long way from New England. But looks like the desert agrees with you.” He paused then added, “But this place can turn on you. Don’t stay out here too long.” Then he smiled that big western smile—big as his barrel chest and broad-brimmed cowboy hat. “I’ll see you in another three days, if not before.” They waved from beside the wagon as his truck kicked up dust on its way back up the hill.

  Allison trotted off to the van with her letters, closing the door gently behind her.

  Zach unhooked Gina and grabbed the long forked cottonwood branch he’d found by the river, that he was slowly carving into a walking stick. They headed toward a dense thicket where Zach knew sharp-tailed grouse rested during the noonday heat. Sure enough, they weren’t twenty yards into the thicket when Gina’s tail started twitching rapidly as she kept her nose close to the ground and started running back and forth in ever shortening arcs before coming to a sudden stop, her whole body stone-still though quivering, her nose and head thrust forward, just a few inches from the ground. Zach slowly approached from behind. “That’s it, girl,” he cooed, barely a whisper. “That’s my girl,” he said as he drew alongside her frozen crouch. He could see her nostrils flaring out, then in; out, then in. Suddenly the whole thicket—sand, bush, sky—was awash in motion and noise. The nine birds that flushed were crowing in alarm, their furious wingbeats striking branches and each other as they fled this paired intrusion. Zach instantly raised the walking stick like an imaginary shotgun, picked out the two birds that were making the mistake of flying straight and high, above the brush, then clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he pulled the imaginary trigger, then, leaving that bird for dead, swung the stick on the other and clicked his tongue again. He exhaled slowly as he lowered the stick. By that time, all nine birds were well out of shotgun range. Three of them were out of sight below the brush line; the others were in their silent glide, no doubt following the line of the river to some safer hiding place. They’d each find a dense thicket and hunker down for twenty minutes or so, before tentatively rising and moving back toward a central meeting place, directed there by the low, nearly inaudible clucks of the rest of the flock as it slowly reconvened. Zach saw and heard all this in his mind, and nodded at the universal order implicit in this group behavior—fear and scatter, get back together when it’s safe. He looked down at Gina. She’d not moved since locking on point, but her whole body was relaxed and she was looking up to him for instruction. She seemed a different animal from the taut coil of muscle and sinew she’d been a minute earlier. Zach set his stick on the ground and knelt beside her. “It’d be nice to be here in the fall, wouldn’t it, girl?” He gently caressed her nose and scratched under her chin, in the triangular hollow framed by her jaw. “There’d be some good hunting.” Gina’s stub tail twitched from side to side. Zach stood slowly and turned back toward the camp.

  He saw Allison through the van’s window, lying on her side with her head buried in the pillow. He could tell she was pretending to be asleep. He opened one rear door and reached in and grabbed her nearest bare foot lying atop the covers. She groaned and rolled over slowly, looking at him but not rising from the pillow. He could see her eyes were red.

  “Everything O.K. back home?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Everything’s fine at home.”

  Zach nodded. “You miss your mom?”

  She shook her head. “I miss people, Zach.”

  Zach gazed down at her from the doorway.

  She rolled her head back into the pillow.

  He turned sud
denly and scurried around the camp gathering various items from their meager holdings. He got a bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap from the front seat of the truck, a bath towel from the bed in the wagon and a plastic cup off the dish shelf; and he grabbed Nick’s lawn chair and folded it up. He wrapped the soap, shampoo, and cup in the towel, then slid the rolled towel into the fold of the chair. He leaned the chair and its contents against the van, then opened both rear doors. He grabbed Allison’s clogs from beside the mattress, slid them on her feet, then reached down and lifted her into a seated position.

  She flopped around like a ragdoll, groaning. “Zach, what are you doing?”

  He put one finger to her lips and said, “Trust me.” He reached under her arms and lifted her out of the van. She feigned collapse, but he wouldn’t let her fall—not even a fake one. When he saw she was steady, he let her go. “Now close your eyes,” he said.

  “Zach, please.”

  “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Sure, but—.”

  “No buts—yes or no?”

  She nodded. “O.K. Yes.”

  “Then close your eyes and keep them closed till I say so.”

  She nodded slowly. “O.K. But if you drop me off a cliff, my mother will hunt you down.”

  “I don’t doubt that, but don’t worry—no cliffs in your future.”

  He grabbed the folded chair and its supplies in one hand, and ringed her wrist with his other. Then he paused. “Don’t move.” He ran into the wagon and emerged with Ruth’s mesh bag of lemons. He hooked the bag’s string closer over one arm of the folded chair, then again took the chair in one hand and Allison’s wrist in the other. He led her away from the camp. “Eyes closed?”

  “Tight as a drum.”

  “Good.”

  He led her along his favorite path to the river. It was a little longer than other paths but didn’t involve plowing through brush or ducking under branches. Once on the sandy banks of the river, he let Allison’s wrist go. “Don’t move, and don’t open your eyes.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  He quickly took off his boots and socks, then peeled away his T-shirt, leaving only his jean shorts. He set the rolled towel and its contents on the sandy ground, then unfolded the chair and set it in a bubbling pool of water separated from the flowing river by ten feet of bank. The pool came to just below the seat of the chair, and was as warm as bath water—one of the numerous mineral springs in this part of Wyoming. He’d discovered it the day before.

  He went back to Allison and took her hand. “Still closed?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Follow me.” He led her to the edge of the pool. “Slide off your clogs.”

  She slid them off.

  He then slowly led her into the pool.

  “Oh—that feels nice,” she said as her feet touched the warm water. “Where’d you get the water heater?”

  “God’s own,” he said as he led her around to the front of the chair. “Have a seat.”

  She slowly sat down, her legs and thighs now in the warm water.

  “You can open your eyes.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to; it might all disappear.”

  “Suit yourself. But can I take your shirt off?”

  A brief frown crossed her face.

  He laughed. “No peeping Toms for a hundred miles. Just you and me and that horny bull across the river.”

  “Zach!”

  “Just kidding. But I think you’d like it better if I took your shirt off.”

  “O.K. But the bra stays on.”

  He laughed. “The bra stays on.”

  He lifted her pink T-shirt over her head. He tossed the shirt on the bank, retrieved the soap and the cup, and started to gently bathe his wife. He poured water on her shoulders and down over her back and chest, then took the bar of soap and rubbed it along her spine. He spread the sudsy water across her back and down over her arms and along the sides of her chest and reached around to her front and massaged along her waist and across her stomach and up to the line of her bra, then over her sides and across her shoulder blades to her neck. She leaned forward in the chair to give him full access to her back and neck. He massaged her shoulders, pressed his fingers and thumbs up under her long brown hair to where her neck merged into her head and behind the ears and up along the sides of her head. He massaged her temples, her forehead, her closed eyes and upper cheeks and the sides of her nose and gently across her lips and chin. He then took the bar of soap and moved around in front of her and soaped up her left leg then raised it and massaged slowly between her toes, across her arch and heel and ankle, massaging her calf, the back of her knee, her kneecap and thigh and hamstring. Then he set that leg in the water and soaped her right leg and massaged it with the same slow care as the left. By then her head was hanging limply, her hair covering her face—a happy ragdoll this time—and she was uttering a sound very much like a cat’s purr. He then stepped out of the pool, opened the bag of lemons with his pocket knife, and cut four of them in half. He returned to the pool and squeezed the lemons’ juice onto her shoulders and hair. The tangy scent, catalyzed by the sun and the water and the gentle breeze, seemed to fill the whole world. He massaged the juice into her scalp and neck and shoulders and cheeks, rubbing it gently into her pores. He then poured some water from the cup over her hair, squeezed shampoo along the line of her part, and washed her thick curls from behind, then moved around and washed her hair from in front, working the lather up between his fingers and the strands of hair, then slowly squeezing the lather out by squeezing her hair between his palms brought together as in prayer, the suds falling across her knees and down over his shorts and thighs. The mix of odors from the soap and lemons and shampoo and sage prairie in the warm pool and warm sun was just about heavenly. He poured cup after cup of water over her hair and scalp till the suds finally dissipated.

  He sat down in the pool before her, pushed her wet hair back away from her face, tucked it behind her ears, dropped his hands to the water at his sides, and waited for her to open her eyes.

  She finally did, maybe seconds, maybe minutes later, her eyes at first like one in a trance, but then focusing on his.

  “Happy anniversary,” he said.

  She looked confused.

  “One week.”

  She smiled. “What a week.”

  He nodded.

  She leaned slowly forward till she fell out of the chair and into his arms. He in turn fell backward and they both were sprawled out and splashing in the pool. Their racket scared off two ducks that had been watching cautiously from the far bank of the river. They flew off with much loud quacking.

  Zach sat up in the pool and Allison turned around and leaned back into his lap. “Disturbing the neighbors,” he said.

  She grinned, “Probably throw us out.”

  “Any day now.”

  They sat in new silence in the pool—Zach’s arms draped over her shoulders, Allison’s hands cradling his in her lap—for the longest time.

  Finally rising, they collected their things from the bank and headed back to the camp. On the path in the lengthening shadows of the brush, Allison said over her shoulder, “Seven plus one.” Her wet bra left a dark stripe across the middle of her shirt.

  “What?”

  “Since we were married. This is the eighth day.”

  Zach laughed. “A new creation.”