Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

* * *

  One day, in the Younts checkout line, the woman behind her said, “I know you.” Cress turned to see the fat, grouchy, middle-aged lodge waitress with her puff of almost colorless bleached hair. DeeDee. Cress had heard Jakey call her Princess, Blondie, and, in a hissy mood, DumDum. Of course, DeeDee called him Bossy, like a cow. Close up, Cress had a shock: DeeDee was her age.

  Here in the provinces, as in all provinces, something happened to women. Lovely in their smooth-skinned, shiny-haired bloom, they married, had a kid or two, and off went the starch bomb. Looks faded and the pounds rolled on, thirty, forty, fifty of them.

  “I’ve heard all about you,” DeeDee said. “Jakey goes on and on. Cressida this, Cressida that.”

  “All good, I hope.”

  “Let’s just say that you don’t bug him yet.”

  “Gee,” said Cress.

  “The others bug him pretty quick. Though you can’t blame him. They sit at the lodge, all moony. Cleavage hanging out. Hey, want a coffee?” Younts had a coffee shop attached.

  First, Cress took seven bags of groceries out to her car, lining them on the backseat like seven small brothers. The sun was warm; she shouldn’t stay long. And she had qualms: DeeDee was so brash. But Cress was curious to hear what she had to say.

  DeeDee had ordered coffee for both of them. “You’re the only one Jakey’s never called a bim,” she said.

  “Is that short for bimbo?”

  A peroxided eyebrow—with dark roots—arched.

  DeeDee was twenty-nine, divorced with three boys and, apparently, Jakey’s great confidante. A thin gold cross swung over her cup as she leaned forward. “That voice mail you left? He sure got a bang out of it! God knows how many times he made me listen. Don’t heat the oven if you’ve got nothing to bake!”

  “You heard that?”

  “Me and everyone else who came into the lodge—for weeks!”

  DeeDee wasn’t out to embarrass her—not exclusively, anyway. She wanted something more—a confidante of her own. A friend. Swearing Cress to secrecy, she confessed: she was in love with Jakey’s youngest son, Kevin, the nineteen-year-old. “Well, maybe not love love,” she went on in a rapid whisper, “but we are sleeping together. Uh, constantly. It’s like God’s little gift to me after the worst divorce in history; best sex ever. But it is a sin, so I’ll probably go to hell. I pray to stop. Every night I tell myself I’m going to stop. The mind is willing, but the flesh—”

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Cress. “About the God and hell stuff.”

  “No. No. Not at all.”

  DeeDee was a born again. “Bathed in the spirit, reborn in faith. Tulare First Presbo. Evangelical!” Her tone was so light as to seem self-mocking.

  “Does that mean you had a whole conversion deal?” Cress asked. “Blinding flash and all?”

  “Sure,” DeeDee said. “Only it was less a flash and more like a huge wave of relief. That I didn’t have to do it all anymore. That Jesus was driving the bus and I could sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.”

  The waitress poured more coffee. She wore a spongy white uniform just like Cress had worn at the Dinner Plate.

  “Jakey’s very proud of you,” DeeDee said. “Your intelligence and education. You really are the only one that hasn’t gotten on his nerves.”

  Five

  Her father came up alone and spent an afternoon at the jobsite, searching the ground and stooping to pick up nails that had been bent or simply dropped during framing. He summoned all the carpenters and spilled the collected nails onto a stack of plywood. “These represent real money,” he said. “That’s money just lying on the ground. Someone have a hammer I could use?” He banged the bent nails straight on a sawhorse and handed them around to the carpenters.

  The head carpenter, Don Darrington, later told Cress that he and the others had taken the nails and, laughing a little among themselves, gone on working.

  Her father’s purpose in coming was to discuss costs with Rick Garsh. Before construction began, Sam and Sylvia had paid an architect’s fee (for the plans) and a thousand-dollar contractor’s fee to get things under way. Now Rick’s first construction bill had come and he had charged, as agreed, the cost of time and materials plus 10 percent. Sam showed Cress the invoice: Rick had charged for the crew’s wages and all materials, plus 10 percent. He’d also charged for the services of a bookkeeper (Julie) plus 10 percent and a gofer (Cress) plus 10 percent. Those fill-ups at Jakey’s gas pumps Cress so liberally used? Sam was billed for a third of them, plus 10 percent. Rick also included five hours a week for “consulting,” plus 10 percent.

  Sam pointed to this item. “If Rick’s the contractor,” he said, “and the 10 percent is his fee, what is this consulting charge?”

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “And the bookkeeping! Do doctors, dry cleaners, and mechanics charge for bookkeeping? Let alone tack on 10 percent? Isn’t that just part of doing business?”

  “I don’t really know how cost-plus works in construction,” Cress said.

  “It doesn’t work like this, I’ll tell you that much. And your pay,” he said, pointing to another line item. “I’m charged for a third of your trips. Do our supplies constitute a fair third of your purchases?”

  The last trip was exclusively electrical supplies for the Streeters’ remodel. But she wouldn’t fan her father’s fury. “It all works out,” she said.

  “And look at the gasoline charge! At the lodge! The highest gas price in California, plus 10 percent. Rick should really gas up down below.”

  “He’s hardly incentivized to do that,” said Cress. “The way you two have set it up, the more he spends, the more he makes.”

  “That’s where trust comes in,” Sam said. “I trust him to keep costs low. As he promised to. And he probably gets a contractor’s discount on materials.”

  He did. Cress had signed invoices: 40 percent off on lumber, 30 on hardware. “So?” she said. “The cost is the same to you whether you buy from the retailers or through Rick.”

  “But that’s double-dipping!” said Sam. “He’s honorbound to pass at least some of those savings on to me.”

  “He’s not incentivized to do that, either. Given your arrangement.”

  Her father’s face twitched. “Is incentivize really a word?” he said.

  “To me it is.”

  He gazed at her typewriter, the stacked files, the thick ream of white paper. “Tell me, Cress—what would incentivize you?”

  * * *

  Her father had brought up a letter to her from her sister, Sharon. On the back of the envelope Sharon had written over the seal: SNOOPERS BEWARE!!!

  Dear Cress,

  Greetings from Hampstead! I hope Mom and Dad give you this. I didn’t know how to send it to the cabin, so I just enclosed it with their letter—(hahaha, Mom, you old snooper, I’m onto you). I have left Cairo (that HELLHOLE!!!) and am back living in London. You have to come visit! I’m hoping to buy a flat, but in the meantime, I’ve rented a tiny bedsit on a picturesque square—you can almost imagine horses and carriages parked on the street. I bought a not-too-lumpy old couch just for you and anyone else I can lure here.

  I couldn’t believe it when Mom said you were living at the cabin—I thought you hated it up there!!! I sure did. (Sorry, old snoop, but it’s the truth! Captives have few fond memories of prison, Frau Warden.) I remember how every Saturday I’d walk down to the lodge and buy the big package of Hydrox cookies, then walk out to the Crags or Globe Rock and sit under a tree and read Irving Stone novels, and eat each cookie in three stages, wafer-filling-wafer, until they were all gone. I’d stay out till the sun set. Nobody ever, ever asked me where I went. (No, Snoopy, you never did. Not once.) (Sorry for all the asides, Cressie. Mom used to read my diaries so I just assume she’ll read this.) Luckily, I wasn’t eaten by a mountain lion or raped by Big Foot. Anyway, good luck up there.

  Once you get your thesis written, you can celebrate with … a London vacation! So hu
rry up.

  Cheerio, old chap,

  Sharon

  Alone again, Cress drew trees, rocks, and dirt and thought in long, circular whorls. (Rocks were hard; the more she looked at them, the more specific and abstract they became.) The plaint of country music fed a thickening strand of yearning. Now that she saw him less often—and wondered if she’d ever see him again—Jakey looped constantly through her thoughts. She wanted, or thought she wanted, what any lover does: access on demand to that cozy furnace of a body and centrality in his life—unlike now, when she ranged, wineglass in hand, while 1.2 miles away he roared at strangers and knee-nudged his neighbors.

  “Call him,” said Tillie. “Better yet, go get him. How does he know you’re interested if you play it so cool?”

  How interested was she, really? More than their prospects merited. She’d never marry or even live with him, but the thought of him bearing down on her in his cheap white shirt, the whole hot juicy weight of him, stopped her breath.

  Two glasses of burgundy and what the hell, she phoned the lodge, ready to leave a message. Jakey picked up. The background music and laughter were loud for a weeknight. “It’s me,” she said. “Feel like coming up?”

  “You bet!” he barked. “Soon as I can get away.”

  She put away her pastels. She drank another glass of wine. She fed the fire and walked outside onto the front deck. The Milky Way, that big galactic smudge, hogged the black sky. The wind gathered, heaved, and ceased; gathered, heaved, and ceased. Headlights flashed through the trees and did not turn up her driveway. It was fall, the world was dusty, pinched, dying back. She was not really writing or drawing, or even steeping herself in the beauty of the natural world. She was waiting for Jakey. She was waiting all the time now, suspended in the hours, poised, nose quivering in the air. Another car rounded the curve and relief rushed in. But that car, and all the others passing by that night, never turned her way.

  * * *

  She went a little frantic then and fought an almost constant urge to go to the lodge, to call Jakey, to locate him. So this is what he did to the bims. She held off, for pride’s sake. She used the back way into the Meadows—a narrow road half a mile west of the lodge—so he wouldn’t see her come and go. She avoided walking or driving past his house. She avoided the phone, and the A-frame itself, so that she wouldn’t know if he called or came by—or didn’t. Avoidance was her only power. She carried a falling-apart copy of David Copperfield to her old spot, the bench on the porch of the Bauer cabin, and read it belly down while woodpeckers bored into the trees all around her.

  * * *

  The A-frame’s sliding glass door shuddered on its tracks after nine on a Sunday night. “Hullo, hullo?” He came in steaming and stamping. “I miss you something fierce. Where have I been? Goddamn, it’s good to bite your gorgeous white neck.” The next Thursday, she was walking by the pond when he drove up alongside. He sweet-talked her over to his house, then hurried her back into his truck post-sex. A week after that, he found her by the back entrance and unlocked a nearby cabin. They used a bed, helped themselves to a brandy bottle.

  This intermittency generated a nervous, involuntary hope.

  “Just talk to him,” said Tillie. “Ask him what he wants from you!”

  But she couldn’t ask, because she knew: the slightest pressure, the least demand, and Jakey would vanish for good.

  * * *

  Julie Garsh said, “He’s acting out. Which is perfectly predictable. After a long, failed marriage, he’s in a lot of pain and grief. Then he meets someone he adores, and it scares him to death. Loss and love are equivalent to him.”

  “Where does that leave me?” Cress asked.

  “Just be there for him. He’ll see that you’re steady and come around.”

  No reasonable future contained him, Cress knew. But how to relinquish the great crush of his body, the tidal pleasure when he roared her name?

  * * *

  She walked farther now, one day even made it to Globe Rock, a vast granite dome with its own three-hundred-degree view of the Spearmint watershed and the northern Sierra range. The only vehicle in the small parking area was the white Toyota pickup belonging to Don Darrington—Don Dare, he was called, the lead carpenter on her parents’ new place. Cress recognized his bumper sticker: SUPPORT SEARCH & RESCUE / GET LOST.

  She climbed onto the broad bald rock. The sun sat low on Shale Mountain and the thick sideways light glinted with dust, buzzed with gnats. The forested hills were sunk in shadow. Her family had picnicked here on the rare occasions when it occurred to them to do something together. The brown wooden sign with white grooved letters still said:

  DANGER

  STAY BACK FROM EDGE

  DO NOT THROW OR ROLL ROCKS—HIKERS BELOW

  Once, a little boy had run too far out on the rock and, unable to stop, tumbled to his death—but this might have been an apocryphal story to frighten children, and make them cautious. Still, the lure of the edge was strong; visitors invariably inched as far down the rock face as they dared, often going farther than Cress could ever stomach. Today, she sat on the warm granite facing northwest, where the four white humps of Camel Crags quavered in the late light. The tiny glass lookout Jakey had once commandeered for their pleasure flashed red and blue like a diamond. All that—that frolic and dance—was over, but when and how it had ended, she could not say. The night she didn’t go to Jakey, when her mother had called out as she’d been leaving the A-frame: that seemed a turning point. He had receded ever since.

  Some yards below her, on the curving edge of rock, a whitened human hand clawed into view, followed by an arm, backlit blond hair, an entire, crawling man. Still twenty feet below her, he stood up, trailing bright yellow ropes: Don Dare. He raised a chalky hand to her, then whistled shrilly.

  His fluffy Australian shepherd mix, white with black spots, bounded up from the side, almost colliding with Cress. “Easy there, Shim,” Don said.

  Cress walked with him and the gamboling dog back over the hump of the rock to the parking lot. Don had a narrow, pitted, handsome face and a slight limp. His carabiners clanked. He climbed rocks after work every day, he said. Globe Rock. The Crags. “Ever try climbing? Ever want to?”

  “I don’t really get the appeal,” she said. “But I’d try it, just to see.”

  “Anytime,” he said. “I’ll give you lessons.”

  “I like your bumper sticker,” she said at his truck. “Have you ever rescued anyone?”

  “A few hikers lost near Sargent Grove. A girl with a twisted ankle.” He slung his ropes into the truck bed. “Last week, we got a call here about an Irish setter. He was off leash, and you know how hyper they are. He ran too far down and gravity took over. I had to circumnavigate the base till I found him.”

  “Dead?”

  “Fell about a hundred feet. Such a beautiful dog, but uncontrollable. The owners were a mess. You walked? Let me give you a lift.”

  She also let him buy her a beer at the lodge. DeeDee, all business, drew their drafts. “Oh come on, DeeDee,” said Don. “Life ain’t that bad.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Bossy calls from town to say he forgot a hunting party of twelve coming in tonight. And major bimbology all day long.”

  Cress understood this to mean that one (or more) of Jakey’s old girlfriends had lingered at the bar or hogged a booth in hopes of seeing him—and they probably ran DeeDee ragged the whole time.

  Don Dare said, “Anything we can do?”

  “Watch the bar while I set up for the hunters?”

  “No problem,” said Don. “I’ve done my time tending bar.”

  He and Cress were the only ones in the lounge area, except for Ondine Streeter, who was at a table by the fireplace studying blueprints for her new kitchen and not even drinking.

  He’d worked at the Rip Curl Tavern in Carlsbad after college, Don said. He’d been headed to law school, but took a year off to surf. He surfed all day and poured drinks at night until
he broke his leg in a freak collision with his board. He kicked out his right shin. “Went through a tough little interlude with heroin then,” he said. “Had a real hard time coming back from it. Lost a couple years. Then I found climbing. Climbing saved my life. When Rick hired me, I told him I needed a couple hours of light every day to climb, just to stay sane.”

  Cress hummed sympathetically and thought, First a murderer, now a heroin addict; the Meadows apparently was full of criminals walking around like ordinary people. Don’s pitted face now brought to mind the word ravaged.

  That face came in close, so close that she assumed he was going to kiss her. “I have to tell you…” His voice was husky, confiding. “I’m with someone. We’re in love, and we’ve made a decision not to see other people.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Was her white flash of shame for thinking otherwise?

  “She’s Donna, the singer? I know, I know,” he went on. “Don and Donna … But you’ve seen her here at Family Night? Jerry calls her onstage.”

  “Not the Sawyer Songbird?”

  “That’s her! I met her last November, the first time I came to climb the Crags. She had a gig at the Sawyer Inn. It was love at first set. Anyway, Jakey’s thinking of hiring her on a regular basis and giving ole embraceable Jer a break. She really needs it. As a teacher’s aide in Sparkville, she makes, like, twenty cents more than minimum wage.”

  “That’s nothing!”

  “So maybe you’ll put in a good word for her.”

  “Me? To Jakey? What makes you think he’d listen to me?”

  “It’s a tiny community, Cressida. Everybody knows you and Jakey…” Don clasped his hands and wagged them back and forth.

  “It doesn’t mean I have any sway,” she said. “I’m not even sure if Jakey and I are still—” She imitated the wagging handclasp.

  “Oh God, love.” Don came in close and husky again. Why was it never easy? he said. Donna wouldn’t even talk about moving in with him till they’d been together a year. She’d made him rent his own place in Sawyer, though every night he was there, he spent at her house. She constantly accused him of seeing other women—which was why he’d told Cress right off the bat that he was involved, unavailable. “So you know, if I’m flirty, it doesn’t mean jack.”