“We all need to listen.”
“What is this crap?”
“It’s not crap. My mom read it in a book.”
“What?”
“My mom got a book a few years ago and it told her that the way to talk to guys was to trap them in the car. It’s called car therapy. So I expect it now, the talk.”
“Talk? Talk about what?”
“Well, with my mom it was mostly about me controlling my impulses and how my dad is an asshole and how she doesn’t want me to be an asshole like him.”
“And you want me to tell you what? That you are an asshole? OK. You are an asshole. Are you happy now?”
“This isn’t about me. It’s about you. You need the emotional release of talking. Talking prevents assholishness.”
“And now I’m an asshole?”
“Yeah. Although most of the time people say bitch when they are talking about a girl, but yeah, you’re an asshole. ”
“I’m an asshole because?”
“We are all assholes.”
“Talking assholes . . .”
“That’s progress,” says Odd and he turns the radio on again.
“This guy has something a lot of the young guys don’t,” says the radio, “He knows where he is at. Now the question is ‘Can he make all the pieces stick?’”
What guy? What pieces? If Bridger were in the car, I’d try to pay attention. I’d try to be ready to say something that proved I was listening along with him, that we were together. But Bridger isn’t here. We aren’t together. I don’t need to make the effort to be nice. I don’t need to pretend I care about football.
There aren’t any bleachers at this game. There is only the field with the lines drawn out in lime and a trailer with a bank of giant sodium lights making the night stark and bright with shadows. The crowd is three or four deep at the fifty.
I’m mostly just here because it is the place to be. More importantly, it’s the place to be with Bridger. I’m pretty indifferent to the game. Sometimes, when someone runs like a rabbit—“He. . .Could. . .Go. . .All. . .The. . . Way . . .”—I pay attention, but mostly it’s all “That’ll move the chains” kind of crap. The game doesn’t matter as much as the way Bridger looks down at me snuggled against his shoulder and tugs me closer.
On the field they crash together, some fast shuffling, then the whistle. Number 36 is down, not down flat-onthe-back down. He’s down on his knees like he’s waiting for the executioner’s ax. People move like ants when you flip over a rock, organized but frantic.
Bridger says, “Don’t worry. He’s OK.”
They are cutting Number 36’s jersey off with a ragged, tugging blade. Then they unbuckle the shoulder pads. The steam is rising off his back in a boiling cloud, bright in the yellow lights. The others stand around him, breathing around their mouth guards in little puffs. There is heat and there is cold. Number 36’s back is hunched, his head is tucked down, and his arm swings a little with his breathing. Every little tick of the second hand is measured in pain. I can see that; the clench of the body after each ragged breath, that’s the tell.
The others stand around him like bison, massive in the front quarters thanks to the shoulder pads, but narrow in the ass for speed. You can see the calculation written in evaporating sweat. A broken collarbone means . . . and what they can do about it is . . . and what they can do without Number 36 is. . . .
What can we do without Number 36?
A person could never tell from this moment, frozen in the yellow light, that he has a sense of humor. He wrote funny things on the whiteboards in empty classrooms and everyone, teachers and students, pretended we didn’t know who was making us smile. In this moment, he is just a hurt animal, and that’s how I remember him.
But none of it matters now, because that game is totally over and Number 36 is totally dead. His broken bone healed. It healed stronger than before. He got faster and bigger and stronger, but none of that matters. Number 36 became Case One. Broken bones mend stronger, but once the bone saw hits you, it doesn’t matter how strong the bone is. There might have been jokes inside that carcass once, but now Number 36 has been lowered into the ground. All the blood and jokes are gone out of him, replaced with embalming fluid and silence.
There’s a long line of cars waiting to pay the fee and enter the park. Once we get past that, there’s another long line of cars stopped to look at a single bison on the naked, scabby hillside. This is somebody’s first bison, I guess, and they don’t know that there will be milling herds of them a little further down the road. In a few hours, that person will be sick of bison. Bison will seem less interesting than a brown couch in a dentist’s office. Bison will be so close to the car it will be possible to hear the poop plopping on the pavement.
“Look, if we’re fishing in the park, we need to stop at the store at Mammoth and buy permits. OK?”
“It’s your money, Polly. If it makes you feel better, buy permits.”
“And you have to use some of my flies. You understand. This is catch and release only. Those are the rules. Not my rules . . . the rules. OK?”
“Alrighty then, trout torturing for sadistic pleasure only. Check.”
The cars finally start moving.
“Feel like boiling? The turnout’s in a minute.”
I think about it. I used to love visiting Boiling River. Finding the perfect spot between the cold river and the hot springs, complaining about the rotten smell of the clouds of sulfur steam, taking sly looks at shy, almost naked strangers—what’s not to love? But now I imagine seeing Odd’s robot leg on top of his stack of clothes, like it’s normal to remove body parts to go swimming.
“No, it’s bound to be too crowded, don’t you think?” I say. It’s a reasonable answer.
Yellowstone is pretty much living up to my expectations. It’s a people zoo. The parking lots at the store are full. We have to drive past to park at the base of the terraces, which isn’t that far, except now I worry about Odd walking. I mean, he made it to the bottom of the falls and back up afterward, but he has to be hurting after that effort. I know I am. At least this little walk is fairly short and level, but Odd doesn’t head the right direction. He starts up the boardwalk to the thermal features like that was the plan. It was not the plan. I made the plan, and climbing up hundreds of steps in the company of hundreds of people was not part of it.
Water sparkles in the sunlight while it trickles down stone steps. Pretty, pretty, pretty.
A bride in a frothy white dress is having her picture taken with the Opal Terrace in the background. She is a little toy bride standing by sugared shiny tiers of cake. Delicious. Good enough to eat. The breeze shifts and a cloud of sulfur steam surrounds her like a veil. She laughs and buries her nose in the bright bouquet in her hand. Then she grins and sticks out her tongue. She is beyond beautiful. She is adorable. People clap and take pictures. They share her happiness. The world has come to her wedding. They are all her honored guests.
I have three hope chests at home, waiting for when I get married. It’s bizarre. It was even bizarre before I was a monster. Nobody does hope chests anymore. People just register for what they want. But I have three hope chests because they are part of my mom’s plan for my happy future. One hope chest belonged to my grandmother. It is full of family albums and baby clothes I wore and things that belonged to my grandmother—even her wedding band. She took it off before she died and said it wasn’t right to bury a promise. That’s the legend: “It isn’t right to bury a promise.”
The second box holds a kitchen-full of five-ingredientcook-from-fresh cookbooks and heart-shaped muffin pans. I have a whisk and a ricer and pepper mill. I have an entire set of everyday dishes. I have a stand mixer and an espresso maker. I have lots of things my mother never uses when she cooks, but I have them because my happy future might require that sort of thing.
The third box is the oldest one. My mom looked for the right chest for years before she settled on an antique with hand-sawed dove
tail joints and cheerful painted hearts and joined hands and flowers in an emblem on the front. This one is mine, although it probably used to belong to some other pioneer bride who is deader than dust and doesn’t need it anymore. It holds bedding mostly. Star quilts made on the reservation, a down comforter from France, pillowcases with hand-tatted lace. Only the best. Because that’s what my happy future is all about: only the best.
My mom keeps the keys to the hope chests in her jewelry box. I can get them anytime I want, but she wants to make sure they don’t get lost, and I might lose them. What would happen to my happy future then? What?
I see Odd high above me, climbing the stairs to the top of the terrace. He’s waving his arms around. It’s some sort of performance for a knot of Asian tourists. I doubt they asked for it. I doubt that matters to Odd. I jam my hat on my head and put on the disgusting glasses. My plan is to buy a fishing permit. My plan is good. It’s the right thing to do. I turn toward the store and go to do the right thing.
The line to get into the store is so long that Odd catches up with me before I get to the counter to buy our fishing licenses. I ought to feel good that he’s going to have a permit, but I just feel irritated that he will spend no time waiting. I did all the waiting. I’m scowling, but it is pretty ineffective. Even if I took off the hat and glasses, the change in expression would be pretty subtle. And then there is the fact that Odd, who ought to get the message, is as sensitive to the rights of others as a rockslide. He’s just going where he’s going, doing what he’s doing, and a scowl isn’t going to put the brakes on that.
When we get out of the store, there’s a circle of people with cameras hovering like a respectful bubble around a badger waddling across the grass. The badger seems unconcerned. He is used to life in the people zoo.
“You sing, Polly?”
“No.”
“Never? Not even in church?”
“Never. Unless you count ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’ or ‘Clean-Up Time’ or ‘Washing Hands Is Fun To Do’ at the Kid-O-Korral. Did you know small children respond better to singing than raising your voice? It’s a nice thing to know.”
“Great. So you’re used to an audience. Check. So, now, let’s hear you sing.”
“Sing what?”
“Whatever you want. But not ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’— something a little more interesting.”
“Couldn’t you just turn the radio back on?”
“Do you want to do it karaoke sing-along? OK. That could work.”
“No. I meant, why not just listen to the radio? The people singing on the radio are fine, right?” I’m more than happy to lie about my opinion of Odd’s musical taste, if it means I don’t have to talk—or sing.
“No. I want you to audition for the band,” says Odd.
“What band?”
“The band that will be our new job.”
He is certifiable. I am also trapped in a motionless car while we wait for some yahoo to get tired of seeing real live bison. OK. He asked for it.
“Come away, human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in . . .”
“OK,” says Odd, “not so much of that. Do you think you could cover some Chainsaw Percussion? ‘Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer!’” Odd’s growling scream just might spook the bison and get traffic moving again. Despite that upside, it’s not what a person might call singing. He sounds like the soundtrack for a movie about a pissed-off mutant alcoholic bear.
“That’s a song?” It’s a legitimate question. I’m not just being a bitch.
“Well, Polly, the genre’s gotta fit the look, and the look ain’t changing.” The words drive Odd’s point right through the numb scar tissue to the me underneath. It hurts.
“So maybe no vocals for you,” he goes on, “You play an instrument?”
“Clarinet in middle school,” I say.
“Clarinet. You, me, and everybody else. There will be no band,” Odd crumples up that idea like an empty beer can. Conversation over, he clicks on the radio. It’s a relief—a horrible, twangfest relief—to listen to some bighat from Alabama crow about how cool it is to be him. Country music is all about how great it is to be country. It’s like a nonstop party—which might be true, I guess, for people who get paid to sing about how great it is to get paid to sing. According to Odd, I’m unlikely to find out how cool that is for myself.
People think being nice is easy, and maybe it is for some people. But for me it took effort. It was work. It meant doing a lot of things I didn’t want to do. Smiling and asking Mrs. Morehead if she wanted more cookies during the Ladies Day Tea when she was a mean old biddy who pretended being rude was encouragement—that was hard work. And when my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Carver, said my letter a’s looked like little, shriveled-up peas, I worked on my penmanship until the pencil put a groove in my finger. People still ask me to address their wedding invitations so they don’t have to expose their own sloppy true selves. But I think this whole being nice thing started with Mom.
Now that I’ve got an actual brain in my head, I know Mom was probably going to love me no matter what. She went to a lot of trouble to get me in the first place, what with the in vitro and the fertility treatments and all the money I cost. And she actually gave birth to me. But there’s more. When she was shopping for donor eggs, she went out of her way to match my dad’s genotype. It’s like she was shopping for one of those just-like-me dolls, only, for whatever reason—because she loves him? because she hates the way she looks?—the “me” she matched was my dad. I am the result: pale eyelashes like a bald-face cow, red hair, pale eyes, pale skin that sunburns during a TV commercial for a Hawaii vacation. My mom went out of her way, as far as medically possible, to design me so she would find me adorable.
None of that matters to a little kid—at least it didn’t to the little kid that was me.
All that mattered was that I wanted my mom to love me, and being nice made her happy. It’s very hard to tell the difference between a happy parent and a loving parent. So I had good manners and smiled at the people in the grocery store. I said thank you. I said excuse me. I was always happy to help—even if I really wasn’t. I was nice.
And then there was Bridger. Bridger loved me because I was nice. I’m not talking about purity-ring, madeup-swear-words–nice. Bridger was fine with sex, for one thing. But he was a nice guy himself. He volunteered, he got good grades, he had plans for the future. And that’s the kind of nice I was, too, when I believed it was worth it, because it was all part of The Plan. I was part of the plan, he was part of the plan, and it was a nice plan.
Then something happened that was not so nice.
No matter how hard I try, I’ll never, ever be nice enough to be part of the plan now. I’ll never, ever be nice enough for Bridger to love me. I used to be a very nice thing, but now I’m ruined. This is my new condition.
We are stopped again, waiting for giant cows to decide to get off the road. If I reach out the window I could touch a bison with short, straight horns. It was a little red calf last year. It survived its first winter when a lot of others didn’t. Now it’s all grass and sunshine, baby. Life is good. It is jogging along past D’Elegance, and there is nothing graceful about it. Jolt. Jolt. Jolt. Then it turns. For one minute I’m staring right at it. I see the black, wet nostrils. I see the string of clear slobber spinning out of its mouth. I see the eye that was hidden from my sight, the eye that has been gouged out. The place is still bloody. If that bison weren’t running, there would be flies all over that raw meat. One way or another, this animal will be dead. One way or another, all of these animals will be dead.
The Firehole River cuts a deep channel. There is no pussyfooting with a gradual bank at this spot. The grassy mud curls over in a slumping lip and then there’s nothing but river, pure and urgent as melted glass. The bison tracks all run parallel to the water, because crossing here would be dumb, and the big, boneheaded hairballs know it.
I actually have a lit
tle stretch of water to myself, which is never guaranteed here in the people zoo. This is the piece of river nobody else wanted. There is no good place to park near here, so I had to hike for a ways. The water’s gone a little warm, which is a matter of degree considering that this river absorbs trickling streams of steaming thermal runoff every day of the year. There are fish in the water at my feet, and they want to stay there. Lips have been ripped. Photos have been taken. A free lunch is greeted with suspicion.
Suspicious fish, warm water, a place that gets whipped into a froth most days when there isn’t snow three feet deep: that’s the situation, and it makes me happy. My one advantage is the overcast sky full of clouds that blunt the light. The silhouette cast by bright sun behind a fly can ruin the illusion. The key will be setting that drift to exactly match the current, no drag on the line, no telltale twitch. I can give a little flick that mends the line. I can use tippet fine as a unicorn’s whisker, just this side of unethical. I’m the girl who knows how to do that.
Assuming I can get my Bead Head Prince on the line, that is. Bead Head Prince nymph, size 12, be steady, I’m your princess. I hold my breath, and it’s on and it’s knotted. I’m still not taking chances with my crappy vision, though. I add a bright pink water balloon as a strike indicator. If I get a fish on, I’m going to know it fast as the speed of light, way faster than the time it takes a tug to actually reach my fingers.
And so, you, there under the water, let’s dance.
I put this moment, I put this moment, I put this moment—here.
The river teaches me to have a smooth and moving surface, and the air teaches me how to breathe when I cast so my arm doesn’t get heavy, and that’s pretty much all there is to life until twilight starts to shut down the day and I need to walk back along the blacktop’s edge to meet up with Odd where D’Elegance is parked beside a picnic table.
Catch & Release Page 5