Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  * * *

  Dalia asked to speak to Cress one night after the Valley Growers Cooperative Spring Fling. They carried their shift drinks to a table in the bar. “You seem so faraway lately,” Dalia said. “I want to say, ‘Come back, Cress, come back!’” Dalia clapped her hands in front of Cress’s face. Dalia, who was quite tall and big-boned, had such calm authority and poise, she could clap her hands in your face and have it seem a generosity.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cress. “Am I screwing up?”

  “Your work is good. You seem distracted, is all.” In her pastel shirtdresses with belted waists and full skirts, Dalia looked like a mother from another generation. Her pale red hair was held off her face by a tortoiseshell band. Cress had heard bits: there had been a violent ex-husband, a protracted divorce, debt; Dalia and her eight-year-old daughter had a tiny, immaculate house in Sparkville.

  “Who’s the man with the marvelous voice who calls here?” Dalia asked.

  “This guy I know.”

  “The one you were with at the Coach ’n’ 4 the other night?”

  “I didn’t see you,” said Cress. “Why didn’t you say hi?”

  “His son’s in the same class as my Hannah.”

  Oh.

  “And I’m in the same boat.” Whispering, Dalia named the white-haired district court judge who sat reading briefs for hours in the Beech Creek lounge. The judge’s wife was bedridden with MS and had round-the-clock home care.

  “Unfortunately, Quinn’s wife is fully ambulatory,” said Cress. “But I’ll be gone soon enough.”

  “Just stay through June,” Dalia said. “I really need you in June.”

  Seventeen

  May brought the first hot days. Up at the Meadows, the temperature hit seventy-five. The Hapsaw promptly flooded, rising twenty feet: open Donna’s back gate and you could step right into roiling coffee-with-cream-colored water. They watched from the picnic table as bushes and tree limbs sailed past, and the occasional whole tree, its tangled roots clutching skull-white rocks, its crown sporting new leaves and bird nests. A water-darkened pink sofa bobbed by, as did a bloated, stiff-legged cow. A small white refrigerator bounced along, jauntily upright. The dark currents twisted, revealed a blear of colored fabric—curtains? Sheets? A drowned woman’s skirts?

  After five days, the waters receded and black mire plastered the formerly grassy banks like a layer of tar. In two days, new grass poked through, a million bleached yellow needles.

  * * *

  Quinn wanted to show her Noah Mountain. Not the property that his father almost gambled away, where his mother still lived: he didn’t dare take Cress there. His mother was always home, and she was an eagle-eyed old gal who knew him far too well. One look at the two of them, Quinn said, and his mother would know everything. He’d take Cress up the Hapsaw’s north fork to his favorite hunting and fishing grounds, and Wanderwood.

  The north fork was the Hapsaw’s smallest tributary, a steeply falling trout stream in a narrow canyon. The water was fast and wild. They had to yell directly into each other’s ears to be heard over its roar. They climbed through oaks and grassland into a belt of buckeyes—horse chestnuts—blooming early this year, their thick long white stamens upright in the trees like hundreds of candles. The valley below receded, became a series of rippling ridges. Mist erased all trace of human habitation; here was the primordial view.

  Quinn leaped rock to rock soundlessly, his balance thrilling. Cress scrambled after him, grateful that the river’s roar covered her stumbles. He’d told her to wear sneakers that could get wet, so she’d borrowed a pair of black Converse low-tops from Donna (“Take them, I never wear them, they’re the wrong size, anyway!”), but these provided little traction on dry smooth river rocks and none at all on wet ones.

  Startled doves flew off, chortling at their approach. They passed an abandoned apple orchard, the pink-edged blossoms tangled in the unpruned branches like clumps of lace. Quinn’s pace was exhausting; she, a daily hiker, grew winded and whimpered freely, unheard over the river. She would not complain. After twenty-odd years of school, she recognized a test.

  They stopped for lunch on a granite slab by a deep pool. On the sun-warmed rock, he tugged off her T-shirt, jeans, and under things, then his own, smoothing their clothes for a bed.

  Water bashed against the rocks. Ferns unfurled with prehistoric vigor; mist sparkled the air. Quinn’s darkening skin took on a glow. His hair had been growing in thicker than ever; it was shaggy now, like a wolf’s fur, she thought, and, in this light, silvery. He kissed her collarbones, her breasts, spoke into her low belly words that sped her blood. He rose over her again, and by some trick in the radiant, moist air, his eyes grew darker and greener, until the green’s intensity alarmed her: it was grass green, mint-jelly green, transparent and glowing like backlit stained glass. Encircling his irises were blazing amber-gold rings. She closed her eyes, and the gold rings floated like a photographic afterimage, pairs of them clustering in velvety darkness. The altitude and its pranks! They had to be at 5,000 feet. She kept her eyes shut as they made love, the rings floating in that blackness, her skin oversensitized, so that sexual pleasure intensified to terror.

  “We really shouldn’t…,” she said into his neck.

  His low, unintelligible murmur reverberated in her bones.

  Afterward, as they sucked in lungfuls of air, she checked: his eyes still glowed that beautiful, insane green, and the gold rings burned into her vision again, then jerked across the ground and bushes when she blinked and looked away. Heightened visuals usually heralded a headache—the one coming promised to be a doozy. She tried to focus on a dogwood blossom, but it took on a strange, moonlike luminosity. An ordinary bush, a rotting tree trunk simmered and seethed, with gold circles lurching in clusters over everything.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

  She could not say. Light sensitivity could be a problem for her at any altitude, but nothing had ever been this vivid or persistent, not when she’d been stoned, or the two times she’d tried mescaline. Sexual intoxication, exhaustion, sunstroke—surely an explanation existed. Unless—and she suddenly knew this to be true—her own shameful need was manifesting in hallucination.

  “You’re very pale,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  She hoped speaking would break the spell. “It’s so beautiful here. With you.” Idiotic, paltry, but all she could manage. She curled on his chest, closed her eyes, ground a bare foot into granite for pain’s clarifying sting. Long minutes passed. He dozed, and a green-gold glow seeped out under his lashes. She wondered if she should rouse him to scramble downstream, get her to an emergency room for a syringe of Thorazine—isn’t that how they tranque hallucinators?

  Quinn snored softly. His heart thumped beneath her ear, and the world pulsed in its beat. She dreaded the long, slippery stumble back to the car. Clouds massed overhead, sealed off the sun. Restless and chilled, she moved off his chest and, tugging her clothes out from under him, woke him. In this more muted light, his eyes had dimmed to a bluer alfalfa green—which meant at least some of her problem was atmospheric.

  Dressed and shod, she expected them to turn back, but he led her farther upstream. Rocks clinked under her slipping feet with a weird, internal sound, like bones shifting in her head. The trees grew taller, the air colder and sharp. Winded, she breathed in gasps, and stayed far enough behind so he could not hear her. An ache thudded in the base of her skull. He paused on a sandbank, squinted into the woods, then took her inland on two faint wheel tracks with shin-high weeds in between. The river’s thunder receded, eclipsed by birdsong and the angry chuttering of squirrels. The understory thinned, and they came alongside a small, clear, musical creek—Lizzy Creek, he said—and soon entered a roomy grove of giant sequoias.

  He said, “My favorite place on earth.”

  Cinnamon-red, the columnar trees stood singly and in fraternal clumps, the branches began high up and were short, like pudgy, cartoonish arm
s, their greenery scant and feathery, and tipped in bright new growth. Among the living trees sat many stumps, twelve to twenty feet high and ten, twelve, fifteen feet in diameter; they seemed human-sized, habitable, like so many small hermitages—some, where lightning had burned out the core, were already hollow; you could move in, install a Dutch door, deep-silled windows, flower boxes.

  He’d wanted to show her this: Wanderwood, the only privately owned sequoia grove left. Once, over a thousand giant sequoias had grown here, but there had been waves of logging, in the beginning of the twentieth century and again mid-century. The mountain had swarmed with men and oxen, saws, axes, log-moving chutes; a long, sturdy flume had floated rough-cut lumber to the sawmill near Sawyer. All was still now, the buildings torn down, the machinery dismantled and hauled off. Nature had crept back and all that devastation was now a sparseness in the canopy, a few yards of cart track, an empty flume, those stumps and the lingering, stunned silence of an old battlefield where a massacre had taken place.

  All the other redwood groves in the area had been incorporated into National Forest, Quinn said, but this one had not. The preservationists had run out of steam, or money, for a final fight. Luckily, the present owner was a man Cress’s age, a liberal hippie sort, said Quinn, and he’d vowed to preserve the hundred or so remaining trees.

  (In a few years, though, the owner’s three children would be in private schools, with college looming. He’d begin by lumbering the stumps. The first two trees he’d fell would shatter when hitting the ground. Even then, each tree provided a year’s extra salary, easy to get used to. But that day in May 1982, the stumps stood as they had for decades among trees older than Christendom.)

  A cold gust brought a swirl of sharp, splintery snow. Suddenly snow hissed all around them. Quinn drew her inside a burned-out stump, the inner walls a quilted carbon blackness. She sat between his legs, against his chest; he produced a thermos of brandied coffee; they passed the thermal cup—the hot bitter liquid dulled the thudding in her skull. Snow collected in patches of bright green new grass like a great spill of sugar.

  Warmed by their body heat, the stump’s inside began to reek of urine. “Ready?” he said, and led her downhill on a passable dirt road through the trees. (They could’ve driven here!) Within minutes, they were out of the redwoods, back in the pines. The snow stopped, the temperature rose; clouds slid off the sun. Light bounced off droplets and puddles, reigniting her headache. For an hour, they trotted down the road. When wet, blue, slag-faced Noah Mountain loomed close on their right, Quinn drew her to the shoulder and pointed to the wide grassy saddle below where his mother’s small white clapboard house sat across from the terrible barn and perpendicular to the double-wide trailer where he and his family lived before the war over heirlooms. By the barn, the small travel trailer tipped toward its tongue, its tiny, useless wings pointing up.

  His eyes were almost normal now, the pale, soft blue-gray of sage.

  It had taken them four hours to clamber upstream to the redwoods. By the road, they were back at Quinn’s truck in an hour and ten minutes. “Sylvia never made it up that canyon,” Quinn said. “She gets maybe a quarter of the way, sits, and refuses to take another step.”

  His admiration, so far as Cress could tell, went both ways: to Cress, for hiking all the way, and to Sylvia, for her flat refusal to proceed.

  She went home and crawled into her bed. Pain swirled and crackled through her head, accompanied by sprays of small, whirling prisms and blue sparks, and the occasional reprise of rings, now ghostly white. Her feet were swollen and blistered, her calves and thighs sore to the touch. She spotted a bottle of aspirin in Donna’s bathroom and helped herself.

  * * *

  After a golf lady luncheon—twenty-two women, eight dollars and seventy-five cents in tips—Cress drove into Sparkville for groceries: her turn had come to buy coffee, milk, and bread for the household. She called Donna from the wall-mounted pay phone outside the Younts coffee shop: “Do we need anything else?”

  “Quinn called,” Donna said. “He says it’s urgent, call him back.”

  Cress didn’t recognize the number. Then again, she’d never called Quinn at any number. Wanting more privacy than this public wall phone afforded, she crossed the parking lot to a dusty glass booth. A woman with a gruff, low voice answered, and when Cress asked for Quinn, the woman set down the phone without another word.

  “Where are you?” Cress said.

  “My mom’s,” said Quinn. “Look, Cress, I’ve made a decision.”

  “Okay,” she said, and wondered what decision needed to be made.

  “I’m going to get a divorce.” This was the first time he’d used the word to her. He said it the way DeeDee had. DEE. Dee-vorce.

  In that instant, a new landscape unfurled in all directions: the very fields and precincts they’d vowed never to enter, where innocents would be hurt and she’d be implicated. Terror was her first reaction. Terror, then intense interest.

  She echoed him, with her own pronunciation. “Divorce, Quinn? Really?” Who knew he’d ever consider it! But good. Maybe they could spend the night together again. Be together out in the open. Take trips. Santa Barbara, Mexico.

  “It’s been a long time coming,” he said.

  Yes, and the divorces she knew about—of her friends’ parents and her parents’ friends—took a long time to happen, too. Lawyers were involved, and hard-to-get signatures, court appearances, shouting and sobbing. Her mother spent hours with Francine Davis listening, soothing, advising. Francine’s daughter Jennie was Cress’s good friend, and the two had crouched in the hall to hear Francine weep in her bedroom. Cress recalled, too, a sleepover at the father’s new apartment, the empty beige rooms and mothball smell.

  Even if Quinn passed through all that tumult, who’s to say that he and she would care for each other on the far side?

  “Are you there, Cress?” said Quinn. “I tried being home. I was out of my mind. I drove up here today and talked to my mom. I told her everything.”

  His mother, who’d clonked the phone on some table just now? The bear-killing librarian? “That’s good, Quinn, that you talked—”

  “I’m going to dee-vorce Sylvia,” he said, “and marry you.”

  “Oh now,” she said. “I mean, one thing at a time. Let’s not—”

  “Even before I left the mountain, Cress, I knew.”

  She stood up straight, nose level with the punch pad on the pay phone. She had been disciplined. She had not allowed her affections to range so far afield. She’d held herself in check. Marry? She never let herself imagine it. Where would they live? And what about her friends—her Pasadena friends from childhood: What would they think of him, or he of them?

  “If you will have me. Cress? Are you there?”

  If you will have me. The tremble in his voice hit low, like sex. “If it ever comes to that,” she said quickly, “yes, yes, of course,” because it was urgent to reassure him. And to keep the matter open so she could think it over at leisure, in private, because the slightest hesitation here might frighten him off. She wanted, at the very least, to prolong the incredible flattery of his offer, for it was an offer, wasn’t it? And who had ever wanted her so much? Saying yes to him, yes of course, in an easy, offhand, contingent way, bought her time. Also, she was stunned, perhaps even in shock, the way people are when they win a lottery; they have to sit down, and sometimes they keel right over. She sagged against the booth’s scratched graffited glass wall, the greasy receiver pressed against her ear. “But so much has to happen before we can even really … I mean, you might change your mind a hundred—”

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” His beautiful low voice coursed directly into her blood. “Or I never would of spoke of it.”

  “Okay.” She was breathless. “Okay, Quinn.” He would have to be sure for both of them then.

  “And even if you won’t have me, I can’t stay married to Sylvia. That’s over. I’m done.”
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  The sun had dunked behind the industrial buildings across the street. Long shadows stretched over the asphalt. The sky was pale yellow. “What did your mom say?”

  “That I have to do what I have to do. Whatever makes me happy.”

  “You told her about me?”

  “She knows there’s someone.”

  “And Sylvia? Have you talked to her?”

  “I won’t till Annette graduates,” he said. “I won’t take away from Annette’s big day.”

  Oh. So nothing irrevocable had happened after all.

  Except that he had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes.

  She’d told him yes when he wasn’t in any real position to ask. Look me up after you’ve done all the hard stuff—that’s what she should’ve said. But it was too late. She’d already answered.

  He was still talking. He was dying to see her. He wished they could meet right now. He wanted to hold her, to lay her down. His term: lay her down. It came from a country song, and his use of it embarrassed her, especially now. She didn’t like to talk about sex. She preferred to be more oblique and private about it. But he couldn’t see her, he was saying. Not tonight. He was tied up. There was a big family dinner at Caleb’s house, Sylvia and the kids would be there, and he was taking his mother. He’d see Cress tomorrow, he’d phone her at work. They’d figure everything out. He loved her. She knew that, didn’t she? He loved her more than anything else on earth. They’d have a long, happy life together.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, Quinn.”

  Walking back across the parking lot, exuberance, and something like triumph, welled in her chest. So much still had to happen, but who knew he’d come this far? He’d told his mother! Of course, telling Sylvia would make it real in a way he probably didn’t anticipate. Even Cress knew this. Sylvia would not say, Whatever makes you happy. He really should not have proposed till he’d talked to Sylvia. And not over the phone. Cress had made a mistake, too, she thought, in answering him so quickly. She should have put him off. Or said something even more equivocal: Let’s talk about it when the time comes. Or: Let’s not talk about it over the phone. But what she’d said wasn’t so terrible. If it ever comes to that.