by T. C. Boyle
“Gas problems?”
The voice came from above and behind her and she jumped as if she’d been stung. Even before she whirled round she knew whose voice it was.
“Hey, hey: didn’t mean to startle you. Whoa. Sorry.” There he was, the happy camper, knife lashed to his thigh, standing right behind her, two steps up. This time his eyes were hidden behind a pair of reflecting sunglasses. The brim of the Stetson was pulled down low and he wore a sheepskin coat, the fleecy collar turned up in back.
She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t smile. Couldn’t humor him. He’d caught her out of her sanctuary, caught her out in the open, one hundred and fifty steep and unforgiving steps from the radio, the kitchen knife, the hard flat soaring bed. She was crouching. He towered above her, his shoulders cut out of the sky. Todd was in school. Mike—she didn’t want to think about Mike. She was all alone.
He stood there, the mustache the only thing alive in his face. It lifted from his teeth in a grin. “Those things can be a pain,” he said, the folksy tone creeping into his voice, “those tanks, I mean. Dangerous. I use electricity myself.”
She lifted herself cautiously from her crouch, the hard muscles swelling in her legs. She would have risked a dash up the stairs, all hundred and fifty of them, would have put her confidence in her legs, but he was blocking the stairway—almost as if he’d anticipated her. She hadn’t said a word yet. She looked scared, she knew it. “Still camping?” she said, fighting to open up her face and give him his smile back, insisting on banality, normalcy, the meaningless drift of meaningless conversation.
He looked away from her, light flashing from the slick convexity of the sunglasses, and kicked at the edge of the step with the silver-tipped toe of his boot. After a moment he turned back to her and removed the sunglasses. “Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “I guess.”
It wasn’t an answer she expected. He guessed? What was that supposed to mean? He hadn’t moved a muscle and he was watching her with that look in his eyes—she knew that look, knew that stance, that mustache and hat, but she didn’t know his name. He knew hers but she didn’t know his, not even his first name. “I’m sorry,” she said, and when she put a hand up to her eyes to shade them from the sun, it was trembling, “but what was your name again? I mean, I remember you, of course, not just from yesterday but from that time a month or so ago, but …” She trailed off.
He didn’t seem to have heard her. The wind sang in the trees. She just stood there, squinting into the sun—there was nothing else she could do. “I wasn’t camping, not really,” he said. “Not that I don’t love the wilderness—and I do camp, backpack and all that—but I just—I thought that’s what you’d want to hear.”
What she’d want to hear? What was he talking about? She stole a glance at the tower, sun flashing the windows, clouds pricked on the peak of the roof, and it seemed as distant as the stars at night. If only she were up there she’d put out an emergency, she would, she’d have them here in five minutes ….
“Actually,” and he looked away now, his shoulders slumping in that same hangdog way they had when she’d refused his help with the water carton, “actually I’ve got a cabin up on Cedar Slope. I just, I just thought you’d want to hear I was camping.” He’d been staring down at the toes of his boots, but suddenly he looked up at her and grinned till his back fillings glinted in the light. “I think Elaine’s a pretty name, did I tell you that?”
“Thank you,” she said, almost against her will, and softly, so softly she could barely hear it herself. He could rape her here, he could kill her, anything. Was that what he wanted? Was that it? “Listen,” she said, pushing it, she couldn’t help herself, “listen, I’ve got to get back to work—”
“I know, I know,” he said, holding up the big slab of his hand, “back to the nest, huh? I know I must be a pain in the—in the butt for you, and I’ll bet I’m not the first one to say it, but you’re just too good-looking a woman to be wasted out here on the squirrels and coyotes.” He stepped down, stepped toward her, and she thought in that instant of trying to dart past him, a wild thought, instinctual and desperate, a thought that clawed its way into her brain and froze there before she could move. “Jesus,” he said, and his voice was harsh with conviction, “don’t you get lonely?”
And then she saw it, below and to the right, movement, two bobbing pink hunter’s caps, coming up the trail. It was over. Just like that. She could walk away from him, mount the stairs, lock herself in the tower. But why was her heart still going, why did she feel as if it hadn’t even begun? “Damn,” she said, directing her gaze, “more visitors. Now I really have to get back.”
He followed her eyes and looked down to where the hunters sank out of view and then bobbed back up again, working their way up the path. She could see their faces now—two men, middle-aged, wispy hair sticking out from beneath the fluorescent caps. No guns. Cameras. He studied them a moment and then looked into her eyes, looked deep, as if he’d lost something. Then he shrugged, turned his back and started down the path toward them.
She was in good shape, the best shape of her life. She’d been up the steps a thousand times, two thousand, but she’d never climbed them quicker than she did now. She flew up the stairs like something blown by the wind and she felt a kind of panic beating against her ribs and she smelled the storm coming and felt the cold to the marrow of her bones. And then she reached the door and slammed it shut behind her, fumbling for the latch. It was then, only then, that she noticed the flowers. They were in the center of the table, in a cut-glass vase, lupine, groundsel, forget-me-not.
It snowed in the night, monstrous swirling oversized flakes that clawed at the windows and filled her with despair. The lights would only have made her feel vulnerable and exposed, and for the second night running she did without them, sitting there in the dark, cradling the kitchen knife and listening for his footfall on the steps while the sky fell to pieces around her. But he wouldn’t come, not in this weather, not at night—she was being foolish, childish, there was nothing to worry about. Except the snow. It meant that her season was over. And if her season was over, she had to go back down the mountain and into the real world, real time, into the smog and roar and clutter.
She thought of the four walls that awaited her, the hopeless job—waitressing or fast food or some such slow crucifixion of the spirit—and she thought of Mike before she left him, saw him there in the black glass of the window, sexless, pale, the little butterfly-wing bifocals perched on the tip of his nose, pecking at the typewriter, pecking, pecking, in love with Dryden, Swift, Pope, in love with dead poets, in love with death itself. She’d met a man at a party a month after she’d left him and he was just like Mike, only he was in love with arthropods. Arthropods. And then she came up to the tower.
She woke late again and the first thing she felt was relief. The sun was out and the snow—it was only a dusting, nothing really—had already begun to recede from the naked high crown of the rock. She put on the kettle and went to the radio. “Zack,” she called, “Needle Rock. Do you copy?”
He was there, right at her fingertips. “Copy. Over.”
“We had some snow up here—nothing much, just a dusting really. It’s clear now.”
“You’re a little late—Lewis already checked in from Mule Peak with that information. Oversleep again?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” She was watching the distant treetops shake off the patina of snow. A hawk sailed across the window. She held the microphone so close to her lips it could have been a part of her. “Zack—” She wanted to tell him about the crazy, about the man in the Stetson, about his hands, wanted to alert him just in case, but she hesitated. Her voice was tiny, detached, lost in the electronic crackle of time and space.
“Lainie?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m here.”
“There’s a cold front coming through, another storm behind it. They’re saying it could drop some snow. The season’s still on—Reichert says it will be until we get apprecia
ble precipitation—but this one could be it. It’s up to you. You want to come out or wait and see?”
Reichert was the boss, fifty, bald, soft as a clam. The mountains were parched—six inches of powdery duff covered the forest floor and half the creeks had run dry. The season could last till November. “Wait and see,” she said.
“Okay, it’s your choice. Lewis is staying too, if it makes you feel better. I’ll keep in touch if anything develops on this end.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Over and out.”
“Over and out.”
It clouded up late in the afternoon and the sky closed in on her again. The temperature began to drop. It looked bad. It was early for snow yet, but they could get snow any time of the year at this altitude. The average was twenty-five feet annually, and she’d seen storms drop four and five feet at a time. She talked to Zack at four and he told her it looked pretty grim—they were calling for a seventy-percent chance of snow, with the snow level dropping to three thousand feet. “I’ll take my chances,” she told him. There was a pair of snowshoes in the storage room if it came to that.
The snow started an hour later. She was cooking dinner—brown rice and vegetables—and she’d opened the bottle of wine she’d brought up to commemorate the last day of the season. The flakes were tiny, pellets that sifted down with a hiss, the sort of configuration that meant serious snow. The season was over. She could drink her wine and then think about packing up and cleaning the stove and refrigerator. She put another log on the woodstove and buttoned up her jacket.
The wine was half gone and she’d sat down to eat when she noticed the smoke. At first she thought it must be a trick of the wind, the smoke from her own stove twisting back on her. But no. Below her, no more than five hundred feet, just about where the trail would be, she could see the flames. The wind blew a screen of snow across the window. There hadn’t been any lightning—but there was a fire down there, she was sure of it. She got up from the table, snatched her binoculars from the hook by the door and went out on the catwalk to investigate.
The wind took her breath away. All the universe had gone pale, white above and white beneath: she was perched on the clouds, living in them, diaphanous and ghostly. She could smell the smoke on the wind now. She lifted the binoculars to her eyes and the snow screened them; she tried again and her hair beat at the lenses. It took her a moment, but there, there it was: a fire leaping up out of the swirling grip of the snow. A campfire. But no, this was bigger, fallen trees stacked up in a pyramid—this was a bonfire, deliberate, this was a sign. The snow took it away from her. Her fingers were numb. When the fire came into focus again she saw movement there, a shadow leaping round the flames, feeding them, reveling in them, and she caught her breath. And then she saw the black stabbing peak of the Stetson and she understood.
He was camping.
Camping. He could die out there—he was crazy, he was—this thing could turn into a blizzard, it could snow for days. But he was camping. And then the thought came to her: he was camping for her.
Later, when the tower floated out over the storm and the coals glowed in the stove and the darkness settled in around her like a blanket, she disconnected the radio and put the knife away in the drawer where it belonged. Then she propped herself in the corner of the bed, way out over the edge of the abyss, and watched his fire raging in the cold heart of the night. He would be back, she knew that now, and she would be ready for him.
(1989)
IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY
The water was a heartbeat, a pulse, it stole the heat from his body and pumped it to his brain. Beneath the surface, magnified through the shimmering lens of his face mask, were silver shoals of fish, forests of weed, a silence broken only by the distant throbbing hum of an outboard. Above, there was the sun, the white flash of a faraway sailboat, the weatherbeaten dock with its weatherbeaten row-boat, his mother in her deck chair, and the vast depthless green of the world beyond.
He surfaced like a dolphin, spewing water from the vent of his snorkel, and sliced back to the dock. The lake came with him, two bony arms and the wedge of a foot, the great heaving splash of himself flat out on the dock like something thrown up in a storm. And then, without pausing even to snatch up a towel, he had the spinning rod in hand and the silver lure was sizzling out over the water, breaking the surface just above the shadowy arena he’d fixed in his mind. His mother looked up at the splash. “Tiller,” she called, “come get a towel.”
His shoulders quaked. He huddled and stamped his feet, but he never took his eyes off the tip of the rod. Twitching it suggestively, he reeled with the jerky, hesitant motion that would drive lunker fish to a frenzy. Or so he’d read, anyway.
“Tilden, do you hear me?”
“I saw a Northern,” he said. “A big one. Two feet maybe.” The lure was in. A flick of his wrist sent it back. Still reeling, he ducked his head to wipe his nose on his wet shoulder. He could feel the sun on his back now and he envisioned the skirted lure in the water, sinuous, sensual, irresistible, and he waited for the line to quicken with the strike.
The porch smelled of pine—old pine, dried up and dead—and it depressed him. In fact, everything depressed him—especially this vacation. Vacation. It was a joke. Vacation from what?
He poured himself a drink—vodka and soda, tall, from the plastic half-gallon jug. It wasn’t noon yet, the breakfast dishes were in the sink, and Tiller and Caroline were down at the lake. He couldn’t see them through the screen of trees, but he heard the murmur of their voices against the soughing of the branches and the sadness of the birds. He sat heavily in the creaking wicker chair and looked out on nothing. He didn’t feel too hot. In fact, he felt as if he’d been cored and dried, as if somebody had taken a pipe cleaner and run it through his veins. His head ached too, but the vodka would take care of that. When he finished it, he’d have another, and then maybe a grilled swiss on rye. Then he’d start to feel good again.
His father was talking to the man and his mother was talking to the woman. They’d met at the bar about twenty drinks ago and his father was into his could-have-been, should-have-been, way-back-when mode, and the man, bald on top and with a ratty beard and long greasy hair like his father’s, was trying to steer the conversation back to building supplies. The woman had whole galaxies of freckles on her chest, and she leaned forward in her sundress and told his mother scandalous stories about people she’d never heard of. Tiller had drunk all the Coke and eaten all the beer nuts he could hold. He watched the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign flash on and off above the bar and he watched the woman’s freckles move in and out of the gap between her breasts. Outside it was dark and a cool clean scent came in off the lake.
“Uh huh, yeah,” his father was saying, “the To the Bone Band. I played rhythm and switched off vocals with Dillie Richards….”
The man had never heard of Dillie Richards.
“Black dude, used to play with Taj Mahal?”
The man had never heard of Taj Mahal.
“Anyway,” his father said, “we used to do all this really outrageous stuff by people like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Luther Allison—”
“She didn’t,” his mother said.
The woman threw down her drink and nodded and the front of her dress went crazy. Tiller watched her and felt the skin go tight across his shoulders and the back of his neck, where he’d been burned the first day. He wasn’t wearing any underwear, just shorts. He looked away. “Three abortions, two kids,” the woman said. “And she never knew who the father of the second one was.”
“Drywall isn’t worth a damn,” the man said. “But what’re you going to do?”
“Paneling?” his father offered.
The man cut the air with the flat of his hand. He looked angry. “Don’t talk to me about paneling,” he said.
Mornings, when his parents were asleep and the lake was still, he would take the rowboat to the reedy cove on the far side of the lake where the big pike lurked. He didn’
t actually know if they lurked there, but if they lurked anywhere, this would be the place. It looked fishy, mysterious, sunken logs looming up dark from the shadows beneath the boat, mist rising like steam, as if the bottom were boiling with ravenous, cold-eyed, killer pike that could slice through monofilament with a snap of their jaws and bolt ducklings in a gulp. Besides, Joe Matochik, the old man who lived in the cabin next door and could charm frogs by stroking their bellies, had told him that this was where he’d find them.
It was cold at dawh and he’d wear a thick homeknit sweater over his T-shirt and shorts, sometimes pulling the stretched-out hem of it down like a skirt to warm his thighs. He’d take an apple with him or a slice of brown bread and peanut butter. And of course the orange lifejacket his mother insisted on.
When he left the dock he was always wearing the lifejacket—for form’s sake and for the extra warmth it gave him against the raw morning air. But when he got there, when he stood in the swaying basin of the boat to cast his Hula Popper or Abu Reflex, it got in the way and he took it off. Later, when the sun ran through him and he didn’t need the sweater, he balled it up on the seat beside him, and sometimes, if it was good and hot, he shrugged out of his T-shirt and shorts too. No one could see him in the cove, and it made his breath come quick to be naked like that under the morning sun.
“I heard you,” he shouted, and he could feel the veins stand out in his neck, the rage come up in him like something killed and dead and brought back to life. “What kind of thing is that to tell a kid, huh? About his own father?”
She wasn’t answering. She’d backed up in a comer of the kitchen and she wasn’t answering. And what could she say, the bitch? He’d heard her. Dozing on the trundle bed under the stairs, wanting a drink but too weak to get up and make one, he’d heard voices from the kitchen, her voice and Tiller’s. “Get used to it,” she said, “he’s a drunk, your father’s a drunk,” and then he was up off the bed as if something had exploded inside of him and he had her by the shoulders—always the shoulders and never the face, that much she’d taught him—and Tiller was gone, out the door and gone. Now, her voice low in her throat, a sick and guilty little smile on her lips, she whispered, “It’s true.”