Something to Be Desired

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “How about you, Father Alerion?” Lucien asked.

  “It’s in the Book,” said Alerion. “I didn’t imagine a word or two on Our Lord’s behalf would do any harm.”

  “I was under strict orders.”

  “From an apostate?”

  “Nope.” Lucien speared a slice of rare duck. “His wife.” He turned to one hippie waiter. “Clean your plate.”

  “I have, thanks.”

  “Attaboy. Now run get Lucifer and bring him to the hitching rack with the plantation saddle. His is the cavalry bridle. ‘US’ on the cheekbuttons.” The waiter got up, a little put out at being removed from the company. “No charge for the meal,” Lucien said as the hippie left the room. “Henchcliff, it amazes me how well you cook even when you’re in a bad mood. I salute your carry-on-regardless approach to your craft.”

  “Thank you.”

  Garby, the horseshoer, grinned through everything with a fixed grateful expression. Lucien thought that if one had nothing to say, it was a successful stance. Experience had shown him, though, that people like this are quick to blow up, and to pummel people around them.

  Then it was quiet. It was the middle of the night. Lucien was still toying with the idea, quite genuinely, that Kelsey might as well have been him. When my time comes, I want some ceremony. This was just terrible.

  Lucien said goodnight and went out from the front of the main lodge, where Lucifer stood almost imperceptible in the darkness. He threw the reins up over the horse’s neck, mounted and rode off.

  He took the long way home. His cigar made a ruby light that arced as he held it away from his body and tapped the ash. Suzanne and James would be curled up now. The reins hung in Lucien’s fingers like a small plumb weight. Every now and then a bright spark flew from a steel horseshoe and it seemed wonderful how bright and emotionless country air could be. Was Suzanne afraid of him?

  Lucien put his horse away and got into bed, into clean sheets and a wool blanket taut across his body. He lay on his back and crossed his arms on his chest. As he drifted into sleep, he pretended he was slipping away from the dock into the next life.

  13

  Lucien got up at daybreak. When he went outside, the moisture was still in the ground and the ground itself seemed to be beginning a day-long respiration as the smell of grass and open dirt and evergreens hung on the unmoving air. He walked down to the corral and opened the gate to the upper pasture. The horses crowded each other in the passage, then ran and bucked onto the new ground. There were flatiron clouds over the far ranges, and they were the color of wet slate. Lucien put his cup of coffee on top of a post and threw some hay up into the metal feeder. He reached through with his jackknife and cut the binder twine, pulled the strings out, looped them and hung them on a plank. The salt was all cupped out from the working of tongues, but more than half the block was left. He could hear the whine of a cold-starting tractor down at the neighbor’s ranch. He’ll do that until the battery is dead, thought Lucien, then go in and watch the soaps. An old-timer.

  He went back up to the house and got a few things. He had a notion. He got a camouflage net and some welder’s gloves. He got the little box of bird bands and some pliers, and the long-handled net. He got his wire pigeon cage out of the basement and two pairs of goggles that were hanging on a nail next to the airyway window. He ignored the phone and turned off the low flame under the coffeepot. On the wall was a picture of his father being presented with a spit of roasted meat in a restaurant in Arequipa, Peru. The phone rang again and Lucien did not pick it up. He had come to know when the calls were not urgent, just as he could count heads at the hot spring right through the wall.

  He got everything loaded into the car and went over to the White Cottage. He knew it was early. He knew Suzanne would be wandering around in her robe trying to wake up, keeping sleepy responsible eyes on the waking day. As he reached the door in the gate, a cloud of warblers lifted out of the yellow-flowered caragana. He could hear James singing, and when he knocked on the door the singing stopped. “It’s Pop!” Lucien called into the quiet. The gate opened and there was Suzanne. Lucien was happy to see her. She smiled with faint embarrassment and murmured something about not coming through at dinner. “Not to worry,” said Lucien. “There’ll be another time.” There was a plate of pastries on the outdoor table, and a pitcher of juice. Lucien recognized every pattern and whorl of the pastry: Suzanne had learned to get what she needed from the kitchen. He took a couple of sweet rolls.

  James came out of the cottage, quickly waved, then turned to look at his mother. “Can’t you say good morning to Pop?” she said.

  “Good morning.”

  Lucien ate a sweet roll and watched him for a moment. That made James nervous. “James, I’m going to band some hawks today. I want you to help me. We’re trying to figure what all we’ve got on this place. It’s pretty exciting.”

  “Weren’t we going into town today?” James asked his mother.

  “We can go anytime,” she said, trying to messenger some reassurance James’s way with a bright smile.

  “But I need gym socks,” James said in a panicky voice. “Remember?”

  “I can pick those up.”

  “Last time they didn’t fit,” he said in a desperate whisper.

  “You go band hawks with Pop,” she said firmly. “I’ve got to get dressed.” She went back up to the house, hiking the terrycloth robe around her angular hips. Lucien and James were alone. Lucien quickly made to open the door.

  “Do I need a coat?”

  “You’re fine. Let’s go.”

  They went out through the gate to the car with the net-handle sticking out of the back window. “We didn’t bring enough socks,” James explained. “And I only got these one pair of glasses. Me and Mom didn’t plan so good, I don’t think.”

  “Anything you need, you tell me,” said Lucien. James was embarrassed.

  By the time they had wound out past the buildings and started across the ranch, James had his small face angled unmovingly at the side window of the car. Lucien didn’t know what to do. “James, have I said something wrong?” The land here was flat and brushy and there was an absolutely horizontal butte a few miles ahead.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucien thought for a long, hard moment. “Then why are you treating me like this?”

  “Because you’re never going to let me go,” James said bitterly. “You’re going to keep me and never let me go.” He began to cry, silently heaving in the huge space of his seat. Lucien shook his head as if to say that weren’t true, but he didn’t actually say anything. He just kept on driving until James finally sighed.

  By that time they reached the old homestead, and Lucien stopped and got out. “Reach me the net, James. We’ve got to get us a pigeon for bait.”

  The two of them carried the net into the old barn and were momentarily blinded by the sudden near darkness. Immediately a number of pigeons went out the old haymow; the remainder cycled back and forth overhead, making a hollow, woody racket in the closed space. Lucien gave James the net and the little boy walked around swiping and missing pigeons. Soon he was running after them, and in a minute he brought his net down with the thrashing lump of a pigeon tangled in its mesh. As they put the pigeon into the wire carrying cage, the others assembled cooing on the whitened log joists. Lucien praised him and they took everything back out to the car.

  Lucien drove on the zigzag dirt road toward the butte. James carried the cage in his lap and stared in at the now apparently tame pigeon that walked red-eyed back and forth on the wooden floor cooing in an inquiring and flutey voice. “I wonder what that bird is thinking about!” said James.

  The road came up under the butte, so close that the rock wall was just outside the window of the car. They drove around to where the end of the butte melted back into the surrounding hills and drove partway out onto the butte itself and stopped. Here the wind had a warm westerly s
weep from the valley floor, and they could see the small dust devils from a great distance. The cars on the river road didn’t seem to be moving at all.

  “I can see some hawks now,” said Lucien. “They’re in the thermals.”

  “What’s thermals?”

  “Warm rising air. Easy for the hawks to fly in. You get the pigeon. I’ll get the camouflage net and the rest of it.”

  Lucien watched James trying to carry the pigeon’s cage and look into its side at the same time and thought, as the little boy stumbled along, I can see a beginning.

  They carried the gear a half mile out onto the warm top of the butte. Lucien watched James until the boy began to see the hawks. Sometimes the heated gusts would come through the deep grass in cat’s paws and they would have to lean into the wind as they walked. Suddenly James looked straight at Lucien and grinned, put down the cage and said, “Gotta rest up.”

  “I shot a big pronghorn out here when I was a kid,” said Lucien.

  “With your dad?”

  “Nope. By myself. Then I couldn’t haul it home. An old cowboy came along with a dog and a pair of binoculars looking for his cattle and we packed it on his horse and we walked out together even though he had real bad knees, real bad. I always thought that was something special. I told the kids at school it was my dad that packed it out, but actually it was this old cowboy and I didn’t really even get his name. We gave his dog some antelope. When I was bigger I had some horses of my own, just crow bait—”

  “What’s ‘crow bait’?”

  “Used up. I lived with my mother and we didn’t have money, not much of it anyway. But even with those old horses, I could go. I could go clear over the top. I could go anywhere.” Why am I rambling on like this, Lucien wondered.

  James looked all over the top of the butte. “How did we end up in the State Department?”

  “I don’t know. College. I used to make pictures of all this stuff. I got sick of pictures of this butte. But I never got sick of the butte. I came up here a while ago when there’d been a chinook and there were these wild old patches of snow and I came that close to making one more picture of the place. But I felt like I’d covered that. I just wonder if you have a clue about what I’m saying.” James was smiling nervously, one lens of his glasses glinting shut, trying so to please.

  They kept on until they came to an oval of rocks on the flattened ground. “I’m ninety-nine percent certain that this is where the Indians caught their birds.” Lucien like so many had always felt the great echoes from the terminated history of the Indians—foot, dog and horse Indians. How could a country produce orators for thousands of years, then a hundred years of yep and nope? It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that the glory days of the Old South were forever mourned while this went unmentioned. Maybe the yeps and nopes represented shell-shock, a land forever strange, strange as it was today to a man and a boy with a caged bird and makeshift camouflage. Well, thought Lucien, it’s not a bad spot for coyotes, schemers and venture capitalists.

  Lucien laid out the trap carefully. He put on the heavy gauntlets, and they each put on their goggles. He removed the pigeon from the carrying cage and seized its feet in his fingers. The wings beat hard and scared James. The two of them got under the camouflage and Lucien held the bird outside the netting atop their reclined bodies.

  The camouflage consisted of numerous yellow and olive strips sewn to a piece of netting. From underneath it, the wind seemed diminished and the sky behind the mesh harsh and clear, vast as a cathedral. The longer they stayed under the net, the more it seemed to curve high over them, as though its sides were somehow not far away and its center absolutely vertical overhead.

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “We hope a hawk will come to us.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll see what he is and we’ll put one of those bands on his leg and turn him loose.”

  “Why’s a hawk going to come to us?”

  “He’s going to try to get our pigeon.” The pigeon was murmuring faintly. It had shortened its neck and flared its feathers in peace. Lucien could feel that the clenching of its feet in his hands had stopped. He could sense the heat of the pigeon’s body on his own chest and thought he could let go of it without losing the bird.

  “I think he’s sleepy,” said James.

  “Don’t you get sleepy.”

  “I won’t.”

  Time passed slowly. Lucien’s arm was cramping and James was quietly knocking the sides of his tennis shoes together. Then James fell asleep. So Lucien, not concerned about their talk, was able to drift off in a fashion himself. Oddly, he thought about Dee; she’d been with him when he thought he was going to crack, or maybe had cracked. He wondered if she could really be as brutal a floozy as she seemed, always clambering onto all fours to receive her sacrament stern-on. Wonderful how that kind of cartooning took the heat off, made time fly. When he was young he used to shadowbox for the same reason, dancing around, throwing punches, going fifteen rounds in his own world. Then came drinking. Then came Emily and the Lost Sweetheart and the spring, the Lost Sweetheart Spring. Why couldn’t he stand success? Suzanne was success. Suzanne was whole. Why was he just beginning to see that?

  The pigeon moved. Lucien remained still but noted his head was erect once more, his limpid eyes unmoving. Lucien looked on up to the sky. There was the hawk. The falconers called it waiting-on: the hawk made no motion in the circle of sky but hovered with a blurred wing-beat straight overhead, taking the pigeon’s position. The pigeon felt this happening to him. Lucien knew that if he nudged James it would spook the hawk and they’d lose him. Instead he regulated his own breathing and watched until the distant wing-beat stopped, the hawk tightened its size and fell.

  When the impact came, James jumped up screaming and began to crawl off. Lucien sat up, holding the hawk by the feet in one gauntleted hand. There were feathers everywhere, and the hawk beat in a blur of cold fury, striking at Lucien with his downcurving knife of a beak and superimposing his own screech over the noise of James. “We’ve got him, James!” James, quiet now, looked ready to run. The hawk had stopped all motion but kept his beak marginally parted so that the small, hard black tongue could be seen advancing and retreating slightly within his mouth. “It’s a prairie falcon. It’s the most beautiful bird in the world. I want to come back as a prairie falcon.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere very soon. Reach me a band and the pliers.” James handed these things to him gingerly. It fascinated Lucien that he was such a timid boy. Lucien hadn’t been particularly timid and he rather liked having a boy who was. But James was shaking.

  Each time the bird’s wings beat, Lucien could actually feel the lift in his forearm, could feel the actual pull of the falcon’s world in the sky. He had seen hawks on the ground, graceless as extremely aged people, and he knew their world was sky. He’d seen old cowboys limp to their horses, then fly over the land, and he knew what their world was too. He wanted his own life to be as plain.

  By concentration and by ignoring the prospects of a bite, Lucien managed to get the band on. “We’re married at last,” he said to the hawk. James raised his eyebrows. Lucien held the terrifying bird out before him and released his grip. The falcon pulled vertically from his glove and with hard wing-beats made straight into deep sky, swept straight off and was gone.

  When Lucien looked over at James, he was holding the pigeon in his hands. Its eyes were closed. Its head was angled harshly onto its back. Blood ran from the nostrils down the domestic blue feathers of its narrow shoulders. Lucien said nothing.

  “We both fell asleep at the same time,” said James in an unsteady voice.

  14

  Today was not going to be a day to be scattered and worried. Today he would indulge a few small preferences like keeping the house temperature low and wearing a sweater. He would read Lord Byron’s letters. Evidence indicates that alcohol’s irritating effects on Byron’s
urogenital tract forced him to seek relief in blind liaisons of the sex type, producing children, which Byron called hostages to oblivion. He got that one right. From a burning sensation to a dynasty in three steps. Byron and his poor old dick.

  He boiled two eggs. He had a porcelain eggcup that he’d had for thirty years. He had a set of silver military brushes given to him as a baby. He had his first fishing license from back in the days when you could buy worms along the road and get angling tips from the barber. A bit of moving water then was an exaltation of riches; the eggcup and the military brushes connected him to a time he intended to return to. And with each passing year he failed more miserably. As he sliced the tops of the eggs off and checked their doneness with the curve of spoon, he thought, Perhaps a little country with slaves in it would be better, for my very own. His mind drifted away to possible chancelleries, the Archbishop’s study connected by tunnel to the back of his fireplace, a thundering speedboat to move over territorial tidewaters with President Lucien at the helm, cher, all alertness for counterrevolutionary elements attempting a landing. That’s what the eggcup did to him, took him back to when all was possible.

  Then the phone rang.

  “Where did you put Kelsey?”

  “Well, we finally got him out of the station wagon,” Lucien laughed. “Who’s this?”

  “This is his wife.”

  “Oh, God, are you serious?”

  “I am indeed. Your secretary gave me your number after I’d threatened her good.”

  “Well, we buried him, actually, uh, ma’am. At Valleyview. Here in Deadrock.”