Back to the Garden

by Clara Hume

  She and I had been sleeping together since Jimmy came down from the mountain, only had not really done much than sleep and cuddle. I knew she wasn't going to do more either, not until she knew more about me. And possibly not even then. The day Caine left, Fran seemed to be a little sad. I asked her about it when we were cleaning out the stables.

  "He needed a family but felt like an intruder. We should have made him feel more welcome. He wasn't a bad sort."

  "Maybe he'll come back, babe. Don't worry too much. Plus you never know who people really are. He came from the road one day and went back out another day."

  We both knew she didn't know about my past either. Fran was silent after that but shot me a somewhat moody glance. I lowered my eyes. I couldn't carry on my charade anymore. I should have told her about myself upfront. I said, "Okay." I leaned a rake up against the barn, outside Casey's stall, and said, "C'mon. Let's get this out right now. My real name is Leo. Leonardo Joy Callahan."

  A little grin spread across her face. She sat on a bale of hay in the stables. I didn't want to sit. "I was an actor," I continued. "You ever heard of Clark Winters?"

  It's like time decided to fold. I am not sure Fran moved or flinched. I know she didn't say anything. Her eyes fixated on me, mesmerizing me unknowingly. How could she be such a siren?

  "Everyone knew me as Clark. It was my stage name from the time I was a teenager through my mid-twenties. I had my own private life in Montana as Leo when I decided to go home. Well, those days ended years ago. I grew a beard and didn't want to be a celebrity anymore, not that I had a choice. It, like most other things back then, ended by itself."

  Fran had an uncanny way of exhibiting a thought process that took several moments, whereas the types of women I'd known before would retort with whatever knee-jerk reaction they could summon. "Yes, of course. I saw you in that one movie...something about nights...in Colorado?"

  I was surprised that's how she would know me, especially considering that she was years younger than me. It was during my cowboy picture days. "Colorado Nights," I said. I would've been better known for more serious drama, like the time I played Gabo—I'd gotten an Oscar for the movie Macondo's Solitude based on Márquez's book 100 Years of Solitude.

  "I never saw Macondo," she said.

  Was she reading my mind?

  "I wanted to," she continued, "but by that time, in the small towns up here, the theaters were shut down. It seemed like it would be good. I loved the book. I just had horses to tend to and didn't want to go all the way to Boise to see it."

  Her voice trailed off a little. She was still looking at me head-on. "I didn't recognize you at all, but now can see it's you," she added.

  I walked closer to her. "I'm sorry, Fran. I wasn't in the mood to give you my whole life history when we first met. I was mourning my brother. I had left my house without even getting my stuff. I feel even now that as I've returned we haven't had a big chance to really talk about our pasts. I don't know much about you either."

  "It's okay, Leo," she told me. I had so much trouble reading her. Maybe it's because her big eyes were so nice to look at that I failed to see anything else. "I know we've met in the strangest of conditions. But I can assure you that my life has been spent on this mountain, and not much else is surprising," she continued.

  I said, "Down in the jeep are my papers from my movie days, but something about the here-and-now makes that life seem meaningless."

  "I know," she said.

  "How so?"

  "I know because I was out hiking the day you went looking for the bear, and I saw your jeep. I looked inside and saw some of your stuff. I suggest we go get that truck and haul it up here soon, maybe fit it into the barn."

  She was so matter-of-fact that I simply shrugged and agreed. We finished cleaning the horse stalls, and when I attempted to hug her later, she smiled and wrapped her arms around me. "I am glad I know this about you. I can tease you about your affair with...what's her name...Ingrid Fisher?"

  Oh that, I thought. Ingrid had been a beautiful model from Sweden. She was my longest-lasting flame, an affair that was full of headline drama when it turned out she'd also been sleeping with a famous musician. I had politely bowed out of the relationship, and then she went crazy, stalking me, calling me, gossiping about me. That felt like a lifetime ago. And it was.

  When I looked at Fran, I saw the mountains beyond and wondered who it was that I used to be. I let go of Fran's shoulders and exited the barn, while allowing myself to get lost in the vista before me. Heavy winds were picking up. The mountains were one of the few things left in the world that had not been destroyed. Except sure enough, and as strongly as they still stood white on blue, their ecological balances were thrown out of whack due to loss of habitats and forests.

  I could feel Fran as she sidled up behind me, embracing me from behind. Her hug meant everything right then. It held me up as I rued so much loss in the world. "I am sorry I brought it up," she said. "As silly as those tabloids sounded, maybe you were hurt. Maybe I hit a nerve?"

  "No, absolutely not. I liked Ingrid, as I had liked others. I never loved them though. I don't know. Maybe I'm getting old. But I'd rather forget I was ever that way." I turned to her and said, "What I feel for you is something else."

  She did understand. I could see it in her eyes. She kissed me deeply. I held her close.

  Her worst fault, as I would come to realize that winter, was that she was a careless dreamer. While I could have stayed on the mountain forever, Fran had it in her head that come springtime she would travel to South Carolina. She had recently felt life would be passing her by if she didn't establish some contact with her past. She said that her memories of childhood included a few recollections of how the South used to be, back when she was a kid, when her family had traveled there a few times. She liked the warm hospitality and accents of the people in South Carolina. But mainly she missed her mother and was having terrible dreams that she was not okay. And that it was her fault if her mother had died.

  "And now we have your jeep," she said.

  "I don't have enough fuel to get down there, Fran. Even if I could somehow materialize the money I made in my past, well, there's just no system anymore for reliably getting as much fuel as we'd need."

  Fran ventured into a whirlwind of thinking and planning. She insisted if we figured out a way to travel, we could return to the mountain after a year. Talking about the plan with Elena was good for both the women. Elena wanted to go too. Elena had grown depressed, and part of her downfall started when her father left with Fran's mother. Losing kids didn’t help. The two women began dreaming about the trip, and that lifted Elena up, but Daniel wasn't so sure.

  Fran didn't realize that our reluctance about her idea was not that we feared the ranch wouldn't run without her, but that we feared what would happen if any of us would travel. We feared we might never return.

  Fran had faith that we would.

  I thought about staying here at the ranch, with or without her, but she was part of my life now and I felt protective over her. If only the roads were improving, and if the diseases were going away. Maybe there was something to see. There was always something new to see, I told myself, trying to psyche myself up for a journey.

  By Christmas, we had endured the coldest of the winter, though Christmas day it snowed enough for us to feel nostalgic for old-time traditions for the first time since her mother left and my brother died.

  I awoke that morning to the smell of coffee. Fran was always awake at dawn, but usually lingered in bed with me. When I awoke it was already light out, but the night prior, Fran and I had enjoyed a bottle of bubbly with Daniel and Elena. I was feeling lethargic today.

  I closed my eyes to plan a gift for Fran. I had not thought of anything so far, but as I lay there, an idea evolved.

  When I opened my eyes, Fran stood at the doorway naked. I had not seen her fully bare like this before; she was the type to wear flannel pajamas to bed in the winter. There was a l
ook on her face that was a little frightened but resolute.

  When I saw her golden form, and her eyes, dark in the morning, I entered some other world. Her breasts caught the morning light coming in to the small room's window, and were high and firm—her waist tiny and brown, her legs shapely and thin. Everything about her, from her soft, olive-skinned feet to her tousled morning honey hair and crooked smile filled me with desire.

  I could feel her slip into bed with me, and all was lost in her warm skin, wet lips, and rigorous release. All morning I walked around in a daze. I believe she did too. We were shyer than ever that holiday, reeling in passion.

  We had planned some presents for Daniel and Elena. Fran had a bottle of their favorite wine in the basement that she had been keeping secret for a long time. For Kristy we had made pinecone ornaments. We gave them their presents and then hiked over to Jimmy's place. I had not been there yet. Last time we had seen him had been the day the guys and I went out to find the bear.

  Jimmy lived across the creek and about two miles down the plateau. There was enough snow that we could cross-country ski over there, and as we did, we were surprised that the world had become so awful, because in this little heaven up here, it was pristine like a new day.

  When we got to Jimmy's though, it reminded me of shacks I'd seen in the movie Deliverance a long time ago. We knew he was still alive because we could see smoke from his chimney from a ways out. Fran said, "His place is looking better than it used to. Looks like he cleaned up his chicken coop after all."

  Jimmy's cabin lay in the midst of a grove of firs, and Fran explained that in the summer it was always cooler there because of the shade but stank to high-heaven, so she'd rarely ever visited.

  Jimmy wasn't expecting us, so we knocked on the door and it took a while for the old man to answer. He did so with his rifle in hand, and then let out a whoop.

  "Well, lookee here! Hey, Fran! It's mighty good to see ya, darlin'." He hugged her close, then shook my hand but still gave me that ever-judgmental eye because no man would ever be good enough for his best buddy's daughter.

  The cabin was dark and smoky, not from cigarettes but from roasting the old man was doing inside. As we entered from the bright but cold day, it took some adjusting to the dim insides.

  I saw another figure arise out of a chair, and he said, "Hey, Fran and Leo. Nice to see you again, mates."

  "Caine?" Fran said. Her voice was excited. "I've worried about you. Why did you leave us? You could have stayed. We wanted to you to stay. You were becoming like family." She hugged him and wrapped her free arm around Jimmy at the same time.

  Caine seemed surprised but said, "I figured I'd let the two couples have some privacy for a bit. I didn't mean to worry you."

  I felt bad he thought of himself as the odd man out and said, "You oughtta come back, anytime." But inside, I figured it was good he would come to stay with Jimmy. Jimmy could be tough and all, but he was getting up there in age.

  We gave Jimmy a bottle of whiskey and some hand-rolled cigarettes, and then Fran said if they wanted to come down for New Years, we would all have a big party. She would cook some of the boar from this past spring.

  We were not going to stay at Jimmy's all day. But we ate lunch with them and listened to Jimmy tell his story of how Caine came to live with him.

  "I went out ever' day to try to find that bear after we cleaned 'er up. Never did see the thing, so I'm hopin' for the best that she's okay. Well, hot damn, the third day out I run across Caine who is trekkin' down the road by my house. I had gone over that way lookin' for the bear too. Down in the way distance, I see a formation of a hobo in my rotten eye vision, and wouldn't you know it's Caine here, limping along on frozen toes, and I lectured him a good bit and told him to get inside and warm his feet up and stay for a bit. Well I ended up cutting one of his toes right off a few days later. Was full of gangrene, but we got it fixed up right after that."

  I looked at Caine, and he said, "There was a good deal of grog involved in that one."

  Fran said, "You both are terrible. That foot could've been saved."

  "Tain't the whole foot, woman. Just the big toe of one foot. And 'sides, who needs toes when you gotta pecker?"

  When the day came to a close, we told them about a plan to go to South Carolina when the winter ended. I thought we'd get a lecture from Jimmy, but in the end he wanted to go too as long as we would come back. He admitted he wanted to go because he thought Fran's Aunt Reece was hot—granted, he had not seen her in 20 years. Caine was interested too. But then we said if we all were going to go, we'd have to get Jimmy's animals over to Fran's barn for the old ranchers on the mountain to watch over while we would be gone.

  ***

  It was just a thought, but as the winter drug by it grew into a serious plan. It turned out that Caine started to warm to the idea too. He said he could help build up the wagon; he had been a construction worker all his adult life.

  That afternoon when we got back to Fran's, I went out to the old wagon in the yard. It had been there since Fran's grandfather had built the ranch up, and even then the thing had been an antique. It was the bottom bed of a Prairie Schooner, with the iron tires still in good shape but with some of the other parts needing to be fixed up. The brake block had come undone, and the axles needed to be oiled. One of the sideboards had come completely off, but we had enough wood to fix that. The wagon was meant to be pulled by horses or mules, but no way were we going to subject our animals to that, so we would have to take off the neck yoke and tongue. I envisioned a lightweight wagon we could hook a low-fuel motor up to. I had a bit of bio-fuel in my jeep to start getting that thing across country and back.

  When Fran asked me what I was doing, I said, "Well, I figure we should to fix this thing up for spring. Merry Christmas, babe."

  I thought she was going to cry at the prospect of seeing her mother again, but instead she just looked stunned and happy. I knew she carried the weight of her mom’s abandonment but also didn’t understand it. People these days did crazy things, I kept telling her, and it wasn’t her fault.

  My other present for us all were the notebooks I had dug out of Fran's basement not long ago. I gave everyone a notebook, even Jimmy and Caine, who jaunted down the mountain for New Year's.

  "What the hell is this fer?" Jimmy asked.

  "To write about your life," I said.

  They weren't used to me being too serious or nostalgic, so everyone got a good laugh out of that.

  The party was a somber affair, for the skies were gray and the ground cold and unpromising. Jimmy got so drunk that night he slipped on some ice and fudged up his foot again.

  Later he sat in Fran's rocking chair. Caine, Daniel, and Elena were drinking wine and eating bread at the wooden table in the kitchen. Kristy was asleep on the sofa, wrapped in plenty of blankets, for the wind seemed to gust right through the house. Fran was tending to Jimmy's ankle. He was sobering up and pissy about it.

  "I cain't believe this mofo shit," he said. "How in the hell am I going to get back home tomorrow?"

  Even Fran, the most pleasant and balanced person I'd ever met, was getting impatient with him. "You gotta watch your whiskey, old man," she said.

  He scowled at her, and then we heard the wolves start singing.

  "Those wolves. How can they be so healthy when the whole world's gone to shit?" Elena asked.

  The old man was sulking now because he knew he'd made his best mate's daughter upset with his drunken episodes, but he said in a matter-of-fact voice, "Well, I guarantee that pack of wolves ain't representative of wolves everywhere, most of who're probably gone and died by now. I think they're social critters, and they know we humans are nearby and they stick close to us. I ain't seen any of them looking scrawny. They ain't here for our food. I think they're here for our company. Cause the rest of their kind is few and far between. They come down the mountain to see what else kinda life is kicking around."

  Fran got up from wrapping his foot up in a
tight bandage, and she picked up a mug of spiced wine and stood at her front window, looking out but not seeing anything in the black night. "I think I will write about those wolves in my notebook. Mama might like that when we see each other in the spring."

  Elena toasted to that.

  ***

  That winter, my gift to Fran and the others took shape: we'd go find Fran's mother and Elena's father come spring. They had gone to Beaufort, South Carolina. Jimmy said he wanted to go down to Silver City first to find an old friend, and I figured if we went the California route, I could look up an old agent on the coast. But Caine said he'd been there and mudslides and storms and sea rise had eaten away the coast, and I put it out of my mind.

  Elena said, "Shit." She had a thing for the sea.

  "There's no way I'd swim in that water," Caine said. "Full of whatever buildings and waste fell into it. I'm talking about debris and chemicals from who know what when the seas began swallowing up cities and towns."

  "If the Atlantic is that way, I'm going to cry," Elena said.

  When Elena's and Fran's surviving parents had taken off across the country, road travel in autos was rare, more so even now. They had hoarded enough gas to think they could make it. I personally doubted they'd gotten to South Carolina, but didn't say a word to Fran. Nowadays, that kind of plan wouldn't fly. Even coming over from Montana a few months prior on broken roads and through death had been iffy.

  We had the jeep, but no way would it hold all of us, and we'd have to put more fuel in it than in the wagon.

  Anyway, we had the solvent with the gas in my truck. We had a good deal of straight vegetable oil but would have to stock it in the wagon too. Then there was the methanol—used to be sold everywhere; maybe we could still find it. Also a lye catalyst. We figured out how much fuel we would need to get there and back. The weight on those iron tires was questionable, even if we could somehow fit that many gallons of liquid on the wagon. Plus all of us: me, Fran, Daniel, Elena, Kristy, Jimmy, Caine.