by Toby Olson
She was in the car in the parking lot at the foot of the thick shaft of the lighthouse, where he had told her to wait for him. She was neither silver nor gold, and there were no spaces on her body that he could think of as virginal, nothing for him to touch into that way; it was scars over scar tissue, a surfeit of a kind of knowledge. He did not bring her with him, and when he reached near the cliff edge, he turned away from it and watched the shadows darken and cut cavities into the fairways and the slopes of rough as the sun left them. Clear across the course, before the sun finished, he saw a hard glinting off large white objects, three of them in a cluster on the far side. Turning back, it was the feminine moon he woke to, half axed away and the color of tarnished brass, to see it moving into a black cloud, and the stars that looked to him like pulsing tattoo needles, puncturing through the skin of the dark sky. He stood erect and singular, totally unaware of the limiting romance of his perceptions and the melodrama of his visions. If there were things going on at the lighthouse or down the beach below him where a small fire flickered, he was apart from it. If the action of the moon had been a slow camera shutter, closing, he was not the one involved in the activity photographed but was standing to the side, looking into the lens. He wore a Western leather vest, tight Levi’s, and black leather tennis shoes. His pendant was a thick gold chain with a large coinlike object at the end of it. On the face of the object was an etched figure of small wires and rods that formed a rough circle, a complex matrix. His shoulder brushed the wood of the barricade that kept him back from the cliff ’s lip, an erosion-control device. He kicked the wood firmly, and bits of sand fell away at the edge.
IN THE MORNING AFTER THE MINIATURE GOLF GAME, THEY had packed up and headed north. Melinda had thought of the small bird freed from the snake’s jaws and its possible whereabouts and fortunes for over a hundred miles of travel, but in the end she came to suspect that Bob White was correct. Regardless of what final mystery might remain, it had most probably come to its end, and that was now over, and the way was no longer important. Wherever it was it was at peace now. And so she turned her thoughts to the traveling, and in turning from the bird, she turned from the way of her own ending. She knew the place of it, was fairly certain about the timing. The passage of the car now stirred up grasses symmetrically along the roadside, and she watched these waves for a while, dozing at times and awakening in a kind of sureness of comfort to find them continuing and unchanged. They put on considerable mileage that day, steadily working their way north, and they were up early the next morning and on the road again. In the late afternoon, after passing Niagara Falls, they moved through the outskirts of Lockport and pulled into a motel near Albion. After loading their gear into the adjoining rooms, Bob White excused himself, said he would be back shortly.
“Got to phone some boys back in Niagara.”
When he returned, Allen had some ice waiting in a plastic bucket, a quart of J & B on the table beside it. They filled up motel glasses with Scotch and water for two. Melinda took hers neat, and she and Bob White talked quietly over their drinks, while Allen took a look at the lay of the land in his Golf Digest encyclopedia. After they had had their drinks, and Allen and Bob White had gotten them some sandwiches, they sat on bed and chair eating. Allen suggested they might want to stay there for the next day and rest up, and maybe Melinda and Bob White would like to look around a bit. Bob White agreed, and Melinda smiled and nodded.
“You found a good possibility, huh?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “I think I did. Pretty good-sized private club. Looks quite tight: a lot of water, Scottish-type rough and fairways. Do you mind?”
“No, no,” she said, “why rush it? I’m tired too. And I could go for a little rest and maybe some sightseeing.”
“Fine. You can drop me off in the morning. I’ll find a way back,” Allen said.
They dropped him off in the morning and went about their business. There was a farmer’s market fair nearby in Medina. Melinda and Bob White drove there and took pleasure in seeing the prize vegetables and smelling them. They bought some peaches and a couple of good-looking apples, a bunch of red cherries, three nectarines, and a stalk of sweet grapes and found a nice park in the heart of the town, near the city hall, and made a picnic. When they were finished eating, they drove out of town to a winery they had learned of from a brochure in the motel room. Melinda did the driving, and Bob White sat over by the door, a little half turned toward her, watching her hands on the wheel.
The winery had an odd, heavily stained wooden building for a tasting room. It looked like some kind of cathedral, and they stood at the counter in the high-vaulted central room inside of it, tasting various wines. The wines were just okay, nowhere near as good as what Allen and Melinda had gotten in California while they were there. These were fruitier, closer to the land, and a little raw. There was a meadow and a lot of hilly land behind the cathedral, and there were a couple of picnic benches out there and a stand of thick trees. They sat in the sun, and Bob White showed her how he could make a pennywhistle out of a twig he had found at the foot of one of the trees. They handed the whistle back and forth between them, playing and testing each other with the identification of simple tunes. Melinda pointed out the way the sunlight hit among the trees, the way of the shadows there, and how she would go about doing them in charcoal. As she spoke her fingers moved in the remembered gestures. She itched a little for it, but not much. She knew she now saw better than when she had tried hard to see while drawing and doing pastels, and she felt it was the seeing that had been the point all along; she didn’t need to render it anymore.
When Bob White moved closer to her on the bench and put his arm around her, first putting his large hand on the side of her face and pressing it down to his shoulder, then holding her shoulder firm in his palm, she was not startled, nor did she feel uncomfortable in the embrace. His lips were a little sticky with wine, and when he kissed the top of her head and withdrew his mouth, a few hairs came away, and he used his free hand to remove them from his mouth. He didn’t feel like a father or a brother to her, but he was not embracing her as a priest might or a lover either. She couldn’t give a name to the quality of the touch. She realized that she could make love with him and that he would be wise about her illness and how weak she was. It would not be exactly passionate, but it would be as if passion were a kind of guarding prevention against intimacy. What they would do together would be much deeper than passion; it would not take physical stamina but would take a kind of effort that she was incapable of because of her weakness. He seemed to know something like this too, and though neither of them did anything with their bodies in contact that was translatable into an understanding, there was a kind of knowledge between them. When, after a few long moments, he did speak to her, she realized how much she needed the very fact of speaking and the words as well. She needed very little quantity anymore when it came to the larger scheme of things, but what Allen could not quite bring himself to say had started to become an absence to her in her self-involved state.
There was a family at one of the other benches, about fifty yards away, and some birds and a dog had put their song and motion into evidence. There was the occasional sound of tires on gravel in the parking lot on the other side of the cathedral and a steady, almost subliminal hum from the distant highway. It was as if a previously hidden empty space in her had revealed itself, begun to ache, and then been salved to fullness and closure all at the same time in the quick process in which he slowly touched and moved her and began to speak.
THERE’S A PLACE IN DOWNTOWN JEROME, ARIZONA, UP above the post office on the main street there. It’s open there, a kind of upper-level courtyard, with pillars and six benches, where you can sit and watch the traffic, and if you look up and across and up a little more you can see parts of the sky from those sitting places. I used to sit there when I was a boy. I lived over there for a little bit. The old, retired miners from Jerome copper mine used to sit there also. They waited for their
checks there.
The checks would come down below in the post office, and from up above there they could see the truck coming with the mail and their checks. When the trucks would go out of sight up close to the building under them, they would wait a while, and then they would go down to their boxes and get their checks. And so I would sit there with them, usually five or more of them at a time, though sometimes less. They would cough and spit a lot. There were spittoons up there to the sides of the benches. These old men had that lung disease, and I think that they sat up there because they found it hard to get used to being inside a structure and still being able to see pieces of the sky and the other things outside. There were no windows in the mine to speak of. Maybe they liked to sit there and thought they would get used to what happened for them when they did it if they did it long enough.
It’s maybe six months that I did that, and the old men would come and go. When they didn’t come on the right dates, I guess I kind of figured that something must have come up. When they didn’t come for quite a while, I guess I figured that they wouldn’t be coming there again. I guess I was right about that. One time there was a period of time when an old Chinese-type fellow was coming there. He was very old, and he had a braid down the middle of his back. The braid was very thin, and he didn’t have too much hair in it. He did about the same amount of coughing and spitting as all the others. His coughs, however, used to really rattle a lot in his throat, and when there were other old men up there with us, they didn’t seem to like to look his way too much.
That old man looked at me a lot those times, and he looked at other things a lot too. There was a cat that came up there sometimes, and he looked at that cat a lot. He looked a lot and closely at people who came up there who were not old men, and when people stood in a window across the street from the benches, on the second floor, he would look closely at them also. He didn’t spend much time looking at the sky above. One day his looking got to me in some way. He was on the same bench I was on, and I spoke to him.
Now I was young and somewhat arrogant in that time, and I spoke to people who I did not fear somewhat sharply at times. That way of speaking I guess had become a habit, and though I didn’t mean to do so, my speaking came out sharply when I spoke to that old Chinese man. What are you looking at, old man? I said. He had been looking past me at a young woman who had come up there to get some air and was leaning against the railing that surrounded the courtyard, her face and chest pushed out, watching in the windows across the street. He could see the side of her body and the side of her face from the way she was standing. I thought this was so, since I had looked over at her myself, and she had been standing that way for quite a while, and I thought she was still like she had been. He looked away from her when I spoke and looked at my face. From the way we were, he didn’t have to move his head. He only had to shift his eyes a bit. He coughed a little and swallowed. His rattle was rather quiet that time. It was like hollow sticks hitting each other if you hung them in a tree in the breeze by fishline. That’s a thing to do to keep certain birds away.
Well, I was looking at the face of that woman, young man, and the way she puts her body when she stands there, he said. Now I’m looking at your face. Lookie here, he said. And he reached into his baggy trousers and took out a brown envelope with a window in it. I thought it was one of the envelopes that they delivered the old men’s checks in. From inside of the envelope he took out about a couple of old pictures. Two were photographs of a kind they used to take a while ago, and one was a new kind of color one. Lookie here, he said, and he handed the pictures to me. The two older ones were not as old as I thought they were. They were pictures of him taken maybe ten years before that time.
He was standing with a couple of other men, in his mine gear, in front of the dark mouth of a mine shaft. The other one was more recent. He was alone in that one. Behind him were trees with sky above them; he was wearing Sunday clothes.
He just sat there and looked at me while I looked at the pictures, and after a while I started to feel a little fidgety, and I said to him, I don’t understand this business. Well, it’s this way, he said. You see the way I’m standing in that one, kind of leaning forward, pushing my face out at the camera? Now look at that young woman over there. You see what I mean? Now you can’t see it, but in this other one I’ve got a face on that’s somewhat like your face is when you sit up here and look around. Now we don’t look alike, you know, and I don’t look like that young woman. But we’ve all got these ways of standing and looking around inside of us somewhere.
I thought he was going to continue on there, but he didn’t. He just stopped talking and looked at my face. I began to get it then. I looked back at the pictures and at the young woman, and I could see it. And I could remember seeing my own face in a mirror, and when I looked up at him, he put his face to the side, so that I could see his cheek and the curve of his nose, and he squinted out a bit. This last move of his was a little funny, but it was not really so. I could really see what he meant. He was copying me looking around, but I got it that he couldn’t have done that if he hadn’t had the way of doing it inside of him when he did it.
Now look around, Melinda dear. You can find a gesture of yours, or a way of setting your head, or a hand manner while talking. Maybe in that man over there or those two kids playing around there. Maybe that dog does something familiar to you that you might have done, that can give you a laugh or two. When dogs run in packs sometimes in summer evenings, sniffing around and going into yards and gathering, inquisitive beyond their good reason, they might do what you did as a child way back and maybe you can see something in it. And though it might seem farfetched to say it, it may be there are things to find that are going to stay here a while after you are no longer staying here even in these trees around here and the way maybe some of the stones here have been made as they are over time by the same kinds of things that contacted you during this time that you’ve been here: sun, wind, cold weather, saltwater. That is a long thing to say, and it winds me, but maybe now you could look up here and into my face some.
She did look into his face then, lifting hers from his shoulder. She had been looking where he suggested by his words that she look as he spoke to her. She turned some in her seat, facing him, and he released her but kept his hand on her shoulder, his forearm touching her neck. When her eyes got to where his face was, he smiled slightly, and then he slowly turned his head to the side, into profile. He kept his eyes in her eyes as he moved his head, making sure that she was watching, only releasing them when his head was almost fully turned. Then he pursed his lips and raised his chin a little. It was a thing she did often, she realized, when she saw him do it, when she was looking at things she felt some mild disapproval about, and as he did it she laughed lightly in a warbling way, pressing back against his forearm with her neck. Then, without turning his head back, he lifted his other hand from his lap and placed a finger beside his nose and slowly traced an age line that ran from it down to the corner of his pursed mouth. She lifted her own hand and felt a similar line in her own cheek, shallower and less mature, but running the same way. Then he turned back to her.
This time he lifted his brows slightly, causing small furrows to appear on his forehead. He sucked his nostrils in a little and raised the left eyebrow slightly higher than the right: things that she did, she realized, in moments before she broke into laughter. His left hand came up, and she saw that he was touching the tip of his thumb against the tip of his middle finger, moving them slightly together and apart. She knew she did this thing also on some occasions, but she was startled to find that they had not always been in private. He disengaged himself from her and got up and stood very straight in front of her. Then he let his shoulders slump and become rounded, his back slightly bowed, and he put one foot in front of the other, resting his weight on the straight stiff leg.
“It is the way you stand waiting,” he whispered, and then he turned to the side to give her her posture in profile
. “It is some possible way to stand, and I will continue it for you,” he said. “Look over now at the way that little girl is standing. It is not so different either.” Then he sat down beside her, and he leaned over close to her and looked in her face. “Do you see it, now?” he said. The sides of her mouth came up in a smile, and she nodded. She did see it, and she felt a welling up, but not of tears this time. There had been no tears since the miniature golf game, and she knew that tears had ended there with the thoughts of the fortunes of the little bird.
There was a welling up from the core itself. Something had broken, had opened like a stone object containing a geode. A kind of impacted air had left the core, and she could feel it pushing a few of her alveoli open again. The air left her in a silent rush, and when she breathed inward it was with some force now, because there was a place for the incoming breath to reside, and she felt in a way strong again, though she knew at the same time that the strength, though not illusory, was temporary in her body, even if it be permanent in her mind. It was strength, simply and almost embarrassingly in its melodrama, in the real knowledge of immortality and what that was about, that he had just brought to her—that she would continue on in him in that way and in the little girl and in the dog and in the stones and in the trees. She could now be both more and less than she was. Less, in that what had left her had been ego, but only that, and it was exhilarating to discover that it was only a kind of air, defined only as place and otherwise insubstantial. Its going disoriented her a little, and she had to put her hand under the seat of the bench to stay where she was. The more she would be now was obvious and unspeakable, and she knew it was not something that would be fruitful to discuss with Allen. Her remaining course was to let it just be in her and be her. Looking up from Bob White’s eyes to his familiar brow and on over to the close-gathered family at the other bench, she saw how the bench itself, though processed, had its cuts and lines, its places of weathering, and how it was momentary center to the family, the occasion for lunch out under the sun this midweek outing.