by Al Riske
ON THE SOFA in our living room, Maura was down to her black lace boy-cut briefs and strappy stiletto heels.
We heard footsteps on the stairs. My eyes opened wide. Maura sprang to her feet. I couldn’t believe this was happening. It was so stupid, so predictable really. It wasn’t as if Kate never came home on her lunch hour. She usually called first, but not that day.
Maura just had time to scamper into the bathroom. The clatter of her heels gave her away, though.
“What was that?” Kate wanted to know.
She went to investigate and found Maura behind the shower curtain, clutching her little lycra dress in front of her.
I’M LIVING IN a town called Twenty-Nine Palms, near Joshua Tree National Monument. Kate and I had come here once on a short vacation and had been tempted to stay on permanently. As we had been in the San Juan Islands the year before, and in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the year before that. I don’t think we ever had a vacation where one of us didn’t say, “Let’s just stay.” I guess neither one of us really liked our jobs.
Well, I’m here now and it’s not what I had imagined, but it’s okay, I guess. I went straight to the inn we stayed at before, and they gave me a job in the kitchen, assistant to the chef. It doesn’t pay much, but I eat all my meals there and they let me have a room in the main house. I do a lot of hiking in the desert.
ON THE TRAIL the only sounds you hear are the crunch of rocks under your boots and, if you’re lucky, the wind riffling through your hair. When you stop, and the air is still, the silence is like a ringing in your ears.
Two more things you can’t hold on to: silence and peace.
WE HAD BEEN married nine years, and in that time the worst thing I’d done was lock the door, forcing Kate to fumble with her keys and two bags of groceries. I don’t know why it bugged her so much, but she always gave me a dirty look, even if she wasn’t carrying anything. It got so I would run for the door whenever I heard her coming up the stairs because I couldn’t remember if I’d locked it or not. The funny thing was she had the same habit of locking the door behind her. The difference, she said, was that we were both inside.
I started leaving the door unlocked whenever I was home, even if I was going to be in the shower or whatever, and, ironically, it contributed to my downfall.
CALIFORNIA’S TWO DESERTS—the Mojave and the Colorado—come together here at Joshua Tree, 140 miles east of L.A. The trees that this place is named for look like overgrown cacti. Some of them are about 50 feet tall and have been around for hundreds of years, I’m told.
I don’t feel like hiking today, so I take a long drive, following a gently winding road through the 850-square-mile preserve, from high desert to low, and on up to Keys View—if not the highest point in Joshua Tree, at least the highest you can get to on a paved road. From here you can see snowcapped Mount San Gorgonio, Palm Springs, and the Salton Sea. And it’s clear enough today to make out Signal Mountain, just over the Mexican border, about ninety-five miles away according to the sign.
I’m sitting on the hood of my car, scribbling all this in my journal (I always wanted to be a travel writer) when Jamie, the dessert chef from the restaurant, pulls up next to me in a white VW Cabriolet. She wants to know what I’m going on about in my little book.
I tell her about the thread I’ve been toying with—how the desert is full of things you can’t hold on to—and she seems interested. Anyway, she doesn’t call it a load of pretentious crap, which is what I’ve been thinking.
“Of course, the desert is also full of things you wouldn’t want to hold on to,” she says. “Prickly pear cactus, whiptail lizards.”
“Good point,” I say. “Catclaw shrubs.”
“Mmm, and rattlesnakes.”
“They don’t like to be held, do they?”
“Don’t think so,” she says. “Very unusual creatures.”
I haven’t seen any rattlers yet, but I do carry a snakebite kit, just in case.
JAMIE IS VERY cute and very outgoing, but way too young for me, which doesn’t stop me from looking. I’ve always looked at other women. Kate knew that. She pointed them out to me. But I had never been unfaithful. I had a number of women friends who I had lunch with from time to time, women from the office, and I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to sleep with them. But not seriously. If one of them had suggested it, I would have blushed and stammered, I’m sure. Maura liked to make me blush.
REMEMBER WHEN YOU were young and everything you did seemed like it mattered? Every choice you made was a statement about who you were, who you wanted to be. It was like that when we were in college, where we met, Kate and I.
I was always aware that what I did determined whether I was a person who really believed what he said or was all talk. Maybe I was too serious. Over the years I tried not to be, and I was very successful. Too successful perhaps. It got to the point where I made light of everything and nothing seemed to matter much.
That’s when Maura moved into the apartment on the other side of the courtyard from ours.
MAURA IS SIX feet tall, slender, with long brown hair and green eyes. She has one of those faces that can be pretty but isn’t always. I hardly noticed her face at first. She had a habit of walking around her apartment in various states of undress. The first time I saw her she was wearing tiny white underpants and a red tank top. She noticed me and waved. I blushed and looked away.
I’M BACK AT the inn now, sitting on a chaise longue by the pool, a tall glass of iced tea on the table beside me. All kinds of thoughts are running through my head.
I remember driving home from Oregon one November and running into a little trouble. Ice. The trouble with ice is that you can’t really see it. There was some slush on the road as we came over the pass, but it didn’t seem bad. I was surprised to see an eighteen-wheeler nosed into the ditch, and then a pickup on the shoulder facing the wrong way. I stepped on the brake just to see if the road was really all that slippery. It was.
Just a light touch on the brake and we started to slide to the left. I turned the wheel to the right thinking we would come out of it, but we just kept sliding. There was nothing I could do. We were going off the road. It was all happening so fast and yet it seemed like I had plenty of time.
I knew we were off the road because I could hear rocks under our tires. (Kate tells me she was screaming through all this, but I don’t remember that at all.) Everything was a blur, and then we slammed into the ditch. I thought: We won’t die, but we may be hurt. Relax, there’s nothing you can do now. I hope Kate will forgive me. I hope I haven’t hurt her too bad.
And then it was over. We had gone through the ditch and up the bank a little ways before coming to a stop. I was surprised to see the car was still facing forward. With all the fishtailing we did, I had the impression somehow that we had spun around. Maybe we had come full circle. I don’t know.
I wasn’t hurt. Not at all. I asked Kate if she was okay. She was, except for a bump on the head. I was so glad.
MAURA FLIRTED WITH me in passing, dropping a letter by the mailboxes or a pair of underpants in the laundry room. I’d pick them up and flirt back, I guess, but it didn’t mean anything. Then she showed up at the door wanting to borrow a cup of sugar. I laughed.
“I’m baking cookies,” she said.
I got the sugar out of the cupboard and when I turned around she was so close I nearly ran into her. She smiled sweetly, took the sugar from me, and set it on the counter.
“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m married.”
“I know that, silly.”
“Happily,” I said.
She smiled again. “Then why do I find you looking through my window every day?”
I had no answer.
I PICK OUT a postcard from the wire rack on the reception desk and send Kate a sort of free-verse poem, something I haven’t done since our college days:
I’m wearing t
he shirt you gave me
In the color you like
It’s fresh from the dryer
Warm and soft against my skin
Smaller now, it holds me snugly
As you would if you were here.
I call the poem “Wishful Thinking.”
I DIDN’T SUCCUMB right away. Maura tried to undress me and I wouldn’t let her.
“Then I’ll just have to make you come in your underpants,” she said.
Even then, none of what followed was by any means a foregone conclusion. In fact, I fully expected it to end there—a freak occurrence, pleasurable enough but embarrassing and not repeatable.
I did my best to avoid Maura after that, and I tried (not always successfully) to keep from watching her parade around in the skimpiest outfits I had ever seen. Then she discovered that I never locked the door.
TRY THIS SOMETIME: Stand in the shade of a boulder and put your hand on its pebbled surface. Even in the noonday heat, it still feels cool. Now you know there’s at least one thing in the desert you can hold on to, and want to hold on to. Big rock, small consolation, I know. But I’m glad to have it.
THERE ARE NO telephones in any of the rooms here, and the one in the lobby isn’t very private, so I always walk down the road to the Chevron station to use the phone booth.
I call home and get my own voice again. Still can’t think of anything to say.
I decide to try Maura’s number. She picks up on the first ring.
“It’s me,” I say.
“Where are you?”
“Far away. Listen, can you tell me if Kate is home?”
“I don’t think so. The apartment is dark. I’ve missed you, Jim. Can we get together?”
“Mmm, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw what I was wearing.”
“I have to hang up now.”
“Wait.”
“Yes?”
“I see Kate is at home,” she says. “But she’s not alone.”
The next thing I hear is the dial tone.
EVERY DAY I wake up early, and I can’t stay in my room. It’s too depressing. I’m tired, but I get up and go out into the desert looking for that sense of permanence I was telling you about. I don’t feel it. Even holding on to the big, cold boulders, I don’t feel connected. At all.
I GO OUT to the pool, after hours, and dive in—clothes and all. It’s dark. There’s no one around. I tread water in the deep end, then let all the air out of my lungs and sink to the bottom. I stay there as long as I can before pushing up to the surface for air, then I let myself sink again.
When I was a kid, I almost drowned in an empty pool like this. I didn’t know how to swim but had ventured into the deep end with the aid of a snorkel. It filled with water and I panicked. There was actually a life guard on duty, but he must have thought I was clowning because he didn’t respond for a long time.
The really stupid part is that I was fully capable of holding my breath long enough to swim the length of the pool—and back—underwater. But I had swallowed a bunch of the stuff and was not thinking clearly. At one point I remember giving up and letting myself sink. My eyes were open and I thought, This is the last thing I’m going to see.
Right now I’d like to drown, but the deep end here isn’t that deep and it’s far too easy to reach the surface.
THE ROAD TO the Chevron station is paved, but the wind often adds a layer of sand. Which means it’s murder to walk along when there are cars. I see one up ahead trailing a thick cloud of dust. Fortunately, the driver is considerate enough to slow down. I smile and wave. To my surprise, the car stops and the driver steps out.
“Where you headed?” she says.
It’s Kate.
WE HIKE OUT to Lost Palms Oasis, as we did years earlier when I had a job—a real one that I could complain about and dream of leaving behind.
We sit in the sand, our backs against a sloping chunk of granite, and enjoy the lunch I threw together—salami, bread, bananas, and grapes—in the shade of the palms. It’s still hard for us to talk.
“Nice shirt,” she says.
A breeze rustles through the ravine. We decide to let the desert hold on to us for a while.
Pray for Rain
IT WAS DRY that summer, as it had been for several years in California. Dry and hot. I remember sitting in church the first Sunday after I returned from college. The air was still, and though it was an evening service, you never would have known it the way the sun was gleaming through the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. The pastor wasn’t there, because the congregation was going to vote on whether or not to keep him.
This was in Big Valley, near Clear Lake. The church was Conservative Baptist—a white clapboard building with a bell tower and a cross on top. A local radio station carried the morning service each Sunday. Not that I ever heard the broadcast. I was always there. At least I was until I went off to college. But I always came back in the summer, and now I was back for, well, whatever.
I knew the guy who led the attack against Pastor Kimball. Or I did at one time. His name was Maynard and, years earlier, we had been friends of a sort. That is, I was part of a group of kids who hung out with Maynard because he had a car and the rest of us were all too young to drive. He was a pale, doughy redhead whose clothes and hairstyle were at least ten years out of date. He looked exactly the same, standing and quoting scripture on that hot summer evening, as he had all those years before.
“It says right here … First Timothy, chapter 3, verse 4,” he said, his gilt-edged Bible laying open in his left hand. “He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control…”
A small, curly-haired woman named Arlene Gillis spoke in Pastor Kimball’s defense, but Maynard stood up again and read the next verse: “But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?”
Arlene said, “You and Patty don’t have children, do you?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, when you do, maybe you won’t be so quick to judge.”
It was hard to tell whether Maynard was flushed with anger or embarrassment, but he sputtered something about broader concerns and skipped down a couple of verses, reading in a louder voice than before, “And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he may not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.”
Through the whole discussion, no one mentioned the Kimballs’ sixteen-year-old daughter, Shana, or what she had done.
THE LAKE WAS lower than I’d ever seen it, riverbeds were dry, and the morning newspaper carried photos of empty reservoirs in nearby counties.
About ten o’clock, I walked down to the post office to buy some stamps because I fully intended to send out a couple dozen resumes as soon as I figured out what to put on them.
Along the way, I saw Brad Page and a couple of his friends standing outside Wilson’s drug store. For some reason—habit, I guess—he tried to hide his cigarette when he saw me. Like I was going to tell his parents.
I just nodded as I walked past and I think I may have smiled without realizing it. I was amused by his punk posturing and how he had no idea what a cliché it was. But then he smiled and winked—a cocky wink that said, “Yeah, we both know I fucked Shana Kimball. Plenty of times.”
Suddenly I no longer felt like a worldly-wise college man. I felt like a boy.
THE FIRST TIME I ran into Paul Kimball after the church voted him out, I thought it might be awkward. There was even an instant when I thought it might be easier if I pretended not to see him. But I wanted him to know I didn’t think any less of him just because his daughter had an abortion.
“Keith! How are you? Good to see you.”
“Good to see you,” I said.
When he was our pastor, I hardly ever saw him outside the church. I must have, but I couldn’t remember it. It seemed strange to see him without a suit and tie, tho
ugh I must say he looked more relaxed. I even called him Paul, which I’d never done before.
“What are you going to be doing now?” I asked.
“I’ll probably go back to painting houses,” he said. “That’s what I used to do, you know, before I entered the ministry.”
“No, I never knew that.”
“Actually, I’m looking forward to it.”
THE CHURCH BROUGHT in a retired minister, a white-haired guy in his mid-seventies, to fill in until a permanent replacement could be found. He seemed confused most of the time and tended to digress. All I remember from his first sermon was the title: “Pray for Rain.”
THAT SUNDAY, I was approached by one of the deacons, a short bald man named Rudolf Brandt, who asked me if I’d be willing to teach the high school class that summer.
“You should put your knowledge to use,” he said.
I never should have told anyone I had a majored in both journalism and religious studies.
“The thing is,” I said, “the more you know, the less certain you are.”
“Na so was,” he said, lapsing into German, his native tongue. “Don’t talk foolishness now. Does a man with a light hide it under a bushel?”
“Let me think about it,” I said.
ON TV THERE were images from all over the state of docks that no longer reached the water. The set I was watching was one of many in the local Sears store. I wasn’t going to buy one, so I’m not sure why I was there, but I stopped to look for a minute. Then something else caught my eye: a pale, thin-limbed girl in a green tank top, cutoffs, and sandals.
She was walking right toward me, looked at me, then looked away.
“Hello, Shana,” I said as she passed.
She said hello without turning around.
My eyes followed the former pastor’s daughter and I was lost in thought when, three steps later, she turned. I looked up too late; she was turning away again, her straight blond hair swinging.