by Tom McNeal
“You okay?”
“I am, yeah. Just feel a nap coming on.” He had his hand on the doorjamb. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll come back and beat the pants off you.” He waggled his eyebrows, but it seemed more a faded image of frisky implication than implication itself. From the window, Judith watched him take the trail up to the cabins. Twice he stopped and took in the view, or pretended to, before proceeding on. Finally he turned out of sight and Judith kept staring at the place he had last stood.
At Wind Cave, after sitting alone at its source, they had gone on a disappointing tour that began some distance away, with a ride down an elevator that gave onto a lighted concrete pathway through the cave. The tour’s only authentic moment occurred when the ranger turned off all the lights and the hand you held in front of your face could not be seen. When Judith had turned round to touch Willy, he wasn’t there—he’d moved away to look at something just before the lights had gone out. That was what she thought of now, with Willy out of sight: the strange panic she’d felt in the black darkness of that cave when she’d reached her hand to the spot where Willy had just been.
The next two or three days were uneventful and often pleasant. “So, Willy,” she said one afternoon while they floated on the lake, “you want to tell me what the C stands for?”
He gave her a questioning look and she said she was referring to his middle initial.
“Oh that. Well, I might want to, but I can’t.”
“I figured you’d say something like that.”
He gave her a wry, genial look. “Well, you know, I can’t help it.” He grinned. “It comes from a time when I believed honor twirled the planet.”
They were quiet for a few moments, and Judith became suddenly aware of the absence of bird chatter. She also couldn’t remember when she’d last seen ducks on the water. She began wondering what would happen to her and Willy if they just stayed into the winter.
Willy said, “What’s funny is two or three years must’ve gone by before Deena even thought to ask about the middle initial.”
Judith said she would’ve asked the first day. At the reception, in fact.
“Well, if it’s a comfort, when I did tell Deena, she wasn’t impressed.”
“So why don’t you just tell me and give me one less thing in the world to worry about.”
“I don’t think you’re that worried, to be honest about it.”
She laughed. “Okay, not that much. Curious would be more like it.”
He didn’t speak, and she looked up at the sky: pale blue with wide streaks of white. “I love this little lake,” she said, “and I love this kayak and I love the company I’m keeping.”
She hadn’t intended to say all this when she’d begun the sentence, but there it was, hanging in the still cool autumn air. He was quiet. She kept looking up at the sky.
Finally she said, “Sorry. I don’t know… something just came over me.”
“That’s okay,” he said, but his voice sounded oddly brittle.
She hadn’t been looking at him and now she did. His face was stiff, and his head was turned, his eyes squinting fixedly off, his jaws clamped, holding things in, willing the water brimming in his eyes not to slip free. And then a little bit did break free and he had to wipe it away. “God damn it,” he said between clenched teeth. He coughed. He didn’t seem to need to cough, but he coughed his wheezy cough, and then he threw the switch and had them moving through the water again.
The following day, or perhaps the next, Judith walked down to the shower. It had been a hazy but not discernibly cooler day, yet the water in the black tank was barely warm. It surprised her; for half a minute she extended her hand into the stream of water, hoping for it to warm up. She quickly washed her hair, but goose bumps kept her from shaving her legs. She toweled off quickly and was glad to get up to the summerhouse and stand by the fire. The next day’s shower was, if anything, colder. She became more and more aware of the camp’s strange quiet; she heard now only the occasional call of a bird, and imputed to it the worry of a creature abandoned. Nighttime temperatures slipped below pleasantly chilly, and Judith seemed to tighten with the cold. She wore more layers of clothes, and even sitting close to the fire at night, she needed to turn up the collar of the lined denim jacket. She didn’t mention the cold. Neither did he.
That night while she lay curled to Willy’s back, a wind came up, and then a strange persistent creaking. She expected it to stop, but it didn’t.
“Willy?” she whispered.
“Mmm.”
“What’s that creaking?”
“The trees.”
“Why?”
Seconds passed. He seemed not to want to say it, but he did. “From the cold,” he said, and Judith, pulling herself tighter to his back, felt herself beginning to brace against a weight she couldn’t see.
The next morning the pine needles crackled with hoarfrost. The toilet seat in the privy was so cold she kept herself raised just above it to pee. Throughout the day, the wind blew, the trees swayed, and there were sudden shiftings of shade and light. The cold was piercing. The suddenness and thoroughness of the change was shocking to Judith. The sound through the trees, usually flutish, had turned deeper in timbre, more like that of an oboe.
They spent the day playing board games near the fire in the boathouse. They didn’t cook a noon meal, but instead ate venison salami and crackers and kept playing cards. Willy cracked almonds and tossed shells into the fire. Once, staring at his cards, he said, “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl.” He looked up. “Not much of a story, I guess.”
She said, “How about girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy and is happy she did.”
Willy gave a quick laugh. “Is that what we’ve got here?”
“I don’t know,” she said, laughing herself. “I thought so until you had to laugh at the idea.”
A while later, shuffling the cards, he said, “Here’s the thing, Judy. Here’s the thing we have to look at and accept. For you, I was a chapter—a good chapter, maybe, or even your favorite chapter, but still, just a chapter—and for me, you were the book.”
“No, no, Willy, what you’re saying about me—that’s just not true,” she said, but she didn’t say what she thought was the truer, darker truth: that, to use his metaphor, he had been most of the book, but she had been too careless or self-absorbed or oblivious to know it, and it was too late to change the ending.
After they finished their game of casino, Willy fetched two new logs and fed them into the fire. He went to the stack of board games and brought Monopoly back to the table. She’d never liked Monopoly—the game always felt like it went on forever—but that now seemed its very attraction. They set up a folding table for it, and each of them bought scattered properties here and there and never mentioned the idea of trading deeds to complete monopolies. Neither of them wanted to win. They wanted to keep talking and playing and looking at the fire. They left the game in place on the table when they went up to the summerhouse to huddle close to the fire and prepare their supper.
The trees creaked all through the night. Judith lay awake and felt as if she were going very slowly to a funeral. She curled tightly into his back, knowing that he, too, wasn’t sleeping and wouldn’t soon be. Finally she whispered his name. “Willy?”
He didn’t answer.
“I think it’s getting close to time.”
For a little while he didn’t answer. He didn’t move. Finally he said, “I know.” Then: “This wouldn’t be the place to get caught for the winter.”
“I could come back when it’s nice again. In May or June. When I’m not working.”
In a lower voice, as if from far away, he said, “Don’t, Judith. Don’t say things.”
“Okay. But still. I could.”
The next morning over breakfast, he gazed off toward the lake and said, “Day after tomorrow, then?”
She didn’t answer, but then he was looking at her. She made so small a nod she wondered whe
ther he’d see it, but he did. He must have. He seemed about to say something, but he didn’t. He slowly turned away his eyes.
He kept cooking but stopped eating. In the boathouse, they put away their game of Monopoly and began a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring a color-tinted postcard of Crow Butte, to the west of Rufus Sage. Without talking, they laid out the edges and worked their way inward. It was slow going—the pieces were minute and the colors muted. Once, straightening her back, Judith read aloud the insert provided by the Omaha Public Library. According to their account, the pictured butte was the site of a legendary battle between the Crow and Sioux Indians in the fall of 1849. The Crow, outnumbered and pursued by the Sioux, abandoned their mounts and scaled the butte, where they stayed for three days, building fires each night, singing and dancing in mockery of the Sioux on the ground below. At dawn on the fourth morning, the Sioux found rawhide ropes dangling from the tops of the butte, signaling the escape of the Crow by walking through the Sioux camp.
“Ha,” Willy said when Judith finished reading. “You can’t say those Injuns weren’t wily.”
Judith, collecting and separating those pieces with pale green in them, kept thinking of the Crow on an autumn night, scaling silently down the sides of the butte, dispersing into the night, playing their little trick on death.
That night, and the next, Judith didn’t start in her own bed but waited until Willy had gone down to his, then turned off her lantern and walked down and crawled in beside him, letting him fold his arms around her and pull her toward his bulk. She had no interest in sexual relations, and neither, seemingly, did he. She wondered whether he slept, and if he did, how lightly, because every time she awakened or stirred, he was awake, whispering, “You okay?”
Yes. She always said yes.
The next day, they moved the puzzle closer to the fire. They had most of the foreground pines and clustered pieces of the rocky outcropping at the base of the butte. While turning a piece this way and that, she said, “You know, I could just stay on.”
He looked up at her. “Stay on and do what?”
“Help out.” She couldn’t keep her eyes on him then. “Be with you…”
“Like hospice, you mean.”
She looked back and saw his rigid expression. “No—”
“Because we’ve got hospice out here in the hinterlands. We’re real up-to-date.”
“I don’t know, Willy, I just meant…” Her voice trailed off. She had no idea what she just meant.
“Look, Judith,” he said, his voice gentler now, “this isn’t a winter camp. It’s a summer camp. That’s all it ever was.”
“I’ll come back next summer, then. We can meet here next summer. I don’t know how, but I will.”
He nodded, but his look was neutral. “Know what you could do this time, before you leave?”
“What?”
“Draw me a sign.”
He found a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood about the right size, and white primer. They put out a note for Batch asking for a small brush and pints of gray, yellow, and blue enamel. “Cobalt blue, tell him,” Judith said, and Willy said, “Instead of periwinkle?” which he pronounced perrywinkle, and turning she took him in and tried to save the image because there he was and he was smiling and he was Willy.
Willy painted the plywood with the primer, both sides, and she made layout sketches on paper. He wanted it to say Camp Blue Moon, and she decided on a bluish moon smiling over the buttes with the camp name off to one side in block letters that from a distance might suggest rough carving. Between coats of paint, they fiddled their way toward the center of their Crow Butte puzzle and played casino and ate and talked and waited.
She cooked a beef goulash that night, and afterward they had peach cobbler. Willy tasted everything, and commended it, and seemed genuinely pleased that her touch with the Dutch ovens had improved so much, but he consumed little. When they finished, he fed the fire and stared at the flames.
Finally he said, “Tomorrow, then.”
He explained the arrangements. Batch had confirmed her reservation with Frontier for an evening flight to Denver and then on to Los Angeles. Batch would be there to collect her in the late afternoon, which would leave plenty of time for the drive up to Rapid City.
“Okay,” she said. It was almost paralyzing, how little she wanted to leave. “What day is it?”
“Saturday.”
Which meant she would get back to Los Angeles late Sunday night, after everyone was asleep.
He said, “Does it feel to you like Saturday night?”
“No,” she said. “But it’s been a long time since Saturday night felt like Saturday night.” She looked at him through the dark and said in a fond voice, “I remember when Thursday afternoons felt like Saturday night.”
He exhaled deeply and said, “Me, too.” Then: “A long time ago.”
That night they sat up by the fire until at last a mist lay over the camp like a damp membrane. Moisture gathered and dripped from the trees. It felt good to settle deep into the flannel sheets of Willy’s bed, but for hours she could only lie still and pretend to sleep. She had the feeling he was doing the same; when he slept his wheeze was more pronounced, and tonight there was no pronounced wheezing. Still, far into the night, she felt herself finally giving way to sleep.
When she awakened she was aware first of Willy’s absence, then of the empty coldness of the cabin and the pale light filtering through the mist. Only then did she remember that this was the day she was to leave, and the effect was sudden, and puncturing. She put her head back onto the pillow until she heard a series of sharp rapping sounds. She went to the window. Willy was attaching their new sign to the side of her cabin, the first flat surface likely to be seen upon entering camp.
She dressed and put on the denim jacket and walked up.
“Looks pretty good,” she said.
His face when he turned to her seemed unnaturally bright. “It does, doesn’t it?” Then: “Hungry?”
He’d evidently been up a while. He’d prepared a big breakfast of baked eggs and bacon, and unlike on the past two days, he joined her in eating, finishing off his egg and toasting a second piece of bread, spreading it with his chokecherry jelly. Dew dripped from the trees and the beams of the summerhouse. Judith gazed toward the lake, where mist rose from the water.
“Don’t you worry,” Willy said with insistent good cheer. “Sun’s going to work his way through. It will. You’ll see.”
“That’d be nice,” Judith said.
All her life she had arranged to leave places in the early morning so she could avoid the strange ambivalence of being fixed somewhere she was ready to leave. But she found herself comforted by the small reprieve Willy’s arrangements afforded her, and his cheerful deportment was an odd surprise. When he began whistling as they laid in a few more pieces of their puzzle, she said, “My God, Willy. Are you happy to be getting rid of me?”
He’d been whistling that old song, the one he always used to whistle, but now he stopped. “No. I’m not. But in the night I vowed I’d be grateful that you came out here, to see me, when it wasn’t an easy thing to do. I didn’t think I should let my personal feelings overshadow that fact.”
They made the noon meal together in a Dutch oven—a beef, rice, and mushroom soup dish—and he ate a good portion of that, too. She wondered if he’d turned some kind of corner, might in fact be getting better, cheating death, stealing down from the surrounded butte in the dead of night—a preposterous hope, she knew, but she was able to nurse it along until, around 1 P.M., his movements began to slow, grow heavier, as if he could no longer avoid the weight of the day’s intentions.
“You want to take a little nap?” she said, and he actually laughed.
“On your last day?” he said. “With the sun shining?”
This wasn’t quite true. Its pale form could just be made out through the mist. But it seemed important to Willy that the weather be considered good enough for one
last spin around the lake, and Judith liked the idea, too, so she said nothing about the bleakness.
She walked down to the shower and retrieved her brush and shampoo, then began tucking clothes into her big leather bag. Willy tapped at the door and said, “Better get down to the lake if we’re going to do it.” He stepped into the room, carrying her watch. “Might need this back in civilization,” he said. He looked around. “Room’s going to miss you.”
“And vice versa,” she said, using his old line.
When she resumed pressing clothes into her bag, he took down the denim jacket from its horseshoe hook. He seemed to be doing something—going through the pockets—but when she looked up, the jacket was folded over his arm and he was extending it to her. “You should take this,” he said. “Seeing it on anybody else would just be a disappointment.”
She thought about declining it—where would she put it?—but said, “Thanks. I’ve gotten pretty used to it.”
She zippered her bag.
Willy untwisted a mint, popped it into his mouth, and managed one of his smiles. “We’re okay,” he said. “It’s okay.” He’d looked at her watch before laying it down, and now he checked it again—later she would remember how, for the first time since she’d arrived, he seemed actually concerned with the time—then headed down to the boathouse to fit out the PowerYak.
“Snacks?” Judith called after him. He didn’t seem to hear her. She’d thought they might sit bundled up on the boys’ dock for a bit and have a last talk of some kind.
By the time she carried snacks down to the dock, the planks were still wet but the mist had given way to an overlay of purple-gray clouds. Willy had made the kayak ready, as well as the snub-nosed dinghy, which was a surprise. He walked from the boathouse with his arms through two life vests, one old and one new. He handed the bright orange one to her, kept the dingy one for himself, and began fiddling with a knot, trying to loosen it, and as he stood there, he began to sway, and she was suddenly overcome. She didn’t say anything. She stepped forward and pressed into him. She’d grown to expect the faint scent of liquor, but the smells she detected now were of pine and wood smoke and peppermint.