“Doesn’t become you,” I said bitterly. “Since when do you talk like that?”
“Since when are you such a bastard?”
The droning wheels, the big trucks passing, the sense of diverse histories girding themselves for war.
“I found a great shortcut,” she said, tapping the map with two fingers. “We’re having a stupid damned fight about a shortcut.”
“Fine, tell me the shortcut, I’ll take it. We’ll save fifty cents worth of gas and you’ll feel like you outsmarted the rest of the world, like you always do.”
“God,” she said. “You can be an ass.”
A silence like the gloom of New York in February fell over us, filling the small car—a Datsun, I think it was—and pressing against our ears. We took the shortcut. It led us into a small town where we became completely lost. Neither of us could bring ourselves to stop and ask for help, so we turned left and right on the streets of Maltby for twenty minutes until I finally spotted a sign for Route 2 east and we climbed up onto that road, the same road our son was leading me along now, twenty-three years later, putting on a blinker and turning carefully left into the parking lot of a place that advertised itself with two signs: DEADLIEST SNAKES and ALBINO ALLIGATOR. In front of the main building stood a miniature red house. When Anthony pulled up and stopped beside it I saw another sign: REPTILE ZOO AND ESPRESSO.
Jasper stirred, sidled over and stood, slapping Rinpoche’s face once with a wagging tail. My brother-in-law laughed and took hold of the tail and gently shook it. “What is?” he asked.
“Espresso? It’s coffee. Concentrated. Very strong. Gives you energy.”
“Dogs drink it?”
“No, they shouldn’t.”
“Kids?”
“Shelsa’s too young.”
“Me and you?”
“I’m up for an Italian soda, if they have them. You almost never drink even regular coffee. You’ll be bouncing around like a superball.”
“I’ll have a trying,” he said.
“Sure. Whatever you want. On me.” I got out of the car and felt glad: for a moment it seemed the memories from the earlier trip had stayed behind on the torn-up leather seat.
The air in that part of the world, between the northern Pacific and Washington’s mountains, was luscious and cool, touched with the scent of the sea and fir trees and moving against our skin like a lover’s fingertip. The memories circled. I ducked and dodged. At the little red house they offered Italian sodas in a dozen flavors. Two vanilla and two almond for the Ringlings, large, please; a chocolate milk for Shelsa, a cup of water for Jasper. For whatever reason, try as we might to convince him to go the sweet soda route, Rinpoche had his mind set on an espresso. I’d left money with the pierced young clerk behind the window, but at the moment of Rinpoche’s purchase I was following Jasper Jr. a little ways into the trees at the edge of the parking lot. He was an obedient sort, but I knew from what Celia had said that if he happened to see an animal of any kind—turkey, bear, deer, hedgehog, squirrel, chipmunk, it didn’t matter, as long as it breathed and moved and wasn’t human—he’d be off on a chase and no amount of frantic calling or yelling could get him to return.
So, making sure Jasper didn’t run off, I missed Rinpoche’s maiden voyage with espresso. Anthony did not. He would tell me, months later, that the clerk had run out of small cups, and so she’d put the high-test caffeine into a larger cup, and when Rinpoche received it he assumed she hadn’t filled it up all the way. He asked her, politely, if she would do that. “Oh, a double?” the girl said. Rinpoche smiled, nodded, handed over more of my money, took the cup from her a second time and glanced into it, sniffed, let a small sip pass between his lips and then, apparently pleased, downed the whole thing at once, the way vodka drinkers do at home in Russia.
Aside from the satisfied smacking of his lips and a small burp, there was no immediate reaction. By the time Jasper and I rejoined the group, the espresso had been consumed. Jasper lapped loudly at his water dish. We loitered for a while in the parking lot, linked by a morbid anticipation, peering in the window to catch a glimpse of the albino alligator. And then we were back in our vehicles and heading into the big hills.
We’d gone only a short distance—with the river still running to our right and a line of freight cars sitting there—before Rinpoche burped again and began tapping his foot. This was unlike him; he was the stillest of men, a block of bone and muscle in gold-trimmed maroon. The radio wasn’t on, so the foot tapping had nothing to do with music. I heard him say “Ah,” and I thought it was in reference to the scenery, so I said, “Nice, isn’t it? Wait till you see what’s in front of us.”
“Nice, nice,” he said, quickly.
There were cherries by the pound and salmon jerky for sale in roadside stands, a small white chapel to the left, closed up. We passed another sign for espresso—they were everywhere in this state; perhaps people slept so deeply in the wonderful air that they needed help waking up—and then Bubba’s Road House, with a sign that read, EAT BIG FOOD.
Rinpoche had been stroking Jasper’s backbone in an absentminded way, but after a while I noticed that the strokes were shorter and quicker, almost in time with the foot tapping.
“How’d you like that espresso?” I asked him.
“Good good wery good.”
“How much of it did you have?”
“The cup,” he said.
“Big cup or small cup?”
He brought one hand around in front of Jasper’s face and put it above the other hand and I could see that the fingers were shaking. “Nice girl,” he said. “Give Rinpoche little some extra.”
“Little some extra, huh? That’s high-test you were drinking. That’s a day’s worth of caffeine, and you almost never touch the stuff.”
“Nice nice nice,” he said, the foot going, the hand going, the head nodding back and forth as if there were a rock-and-roll song in the air, or as if he were mouthing a prayer of thanks, muy rapido, to the Nicaraguan bean that had so pleased him.
I let him jive. Route 2 twisted this way and that between fir-coated hills that slanted up steeply from the road’s stony shoulders. There were glimpses of the taller peaks ahead, Three Fingers and Fifth of July Mountain, seven or eight thousand feet, I guessed, and then a sign for the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
Jasper settled down on Rinpoche’s lap, and I could no longer keep the past out of the cab of the old pickup. Our silence was a happier version of the silence that had fallen over Jeannie and me, in a car of about the same vintage as Uma, on a summer day very much like this one—the mountain sunlight and crisp air, the weather-beaten wooden houses and little shops selling antiques and carved stumps, the chain-up areas and the logging trucks roaring downhill. There are all kinds of silences, but the one in which Jeannie and I moved then was a silence in which all the evil flora grew, all the poison oak and poison ivy, all the noxious weeds of the emotional world. It is a vegetation watered with anger and regret—the other people you could have married, the other places you could be. All the good news we’d gotten at home, all the fine expectation with which we’d packed and set out, all of that seemed to have mutated in the ugliest of ways. It slithered through the roots and leaves of this ugly shrubbery, venomous, mocking, looking for something to bite.
We said not a word. The plan had been to find a wilderness campground somewhere near the crest of the Northern Cascades and spend the night there under the stars or in our tiny tent. We had insect repellent and water and a small cook set and meat and vegetables. Jeannie had her contraceptive equipment, as outdated now as this old pickup and something I won’t get into here. Sex for us in those days was an almost-nightly joy, as reliable as the morning coffee. And sometimes a morning joy, as well. We were well matched that way, in urge and style. Guiltless, selfless, half addicted. Outdoor lovemaking—an exotic idea for New Yorkers—sang background to the plans we’d made. Even after the small fight in the hotel it had been on my mind, and on her
s, too, I’m sure of it. Now, that idea was extinguished. What we had to look forward to wasn’t an hour of ecstasy under the Cascade stars but a night in the small tent with two inches of air between our bodies and separate hurricanes of bad thought swirling.
There were places we could have stopped, but we didn’t. Neither of us wanted to be the first to speak. We hoped to put off the idea of making camp for as long as possible, indefinitely perhaps.
Near the summit, in a town that went by the peculiar name of Baring, there was a cluster of houses and then a sign for a general store. “I have to pee,” Jeannie said. I pulled into the gravel lot and she got out and slammed the door and went into the little wooden place.
I stood outside for a time, looking up at the high slopes where patches of snow still clung in the shadier valleys. She was in there a long time. I pictured her on the pay phone, calling her older museum friend and asking if he could come and rescue her from the spoiled vacation, the erroneous marriage. I thought of other women I’d slept with. I twirled the ring on my finger. Eventually I went inside and found my wife in conversation, not by phone with a Manhattan sophisticate, but face-to-face with a tough-looking young woman behind the counter. The woman had a blurry tattoo on one bare shoulder—decades before tattoos were in style—and a face that looked like the wind gods had hacked at it with scythes. You could see from her body and the way she moved that she was young, certainly thirty or less. But stuck on top, like a mask, was the face of a middle-aged grandmother with two divorces and eight fistfights behind her. Her eyes were fixed on Jeannie in a way I will never forget, as if the two of them were soul-cousins who’d traveled very different paths and just been reunited.
“Yeah, I know,” the woman was saying when I came in.
Jeannie turned her eyes to me for one second. I knew I’d interrupted something, so I raised a hand and pointed “Bathroom in back?”
A terse nod, a perusal.
Just as I was squeezing past the little post office window there and opening the narrow door I heard, “But you know, you hang in and maybe—”
The second I came back out through that door I could feel the woman’s eyes on me. She knew men, knew them inside and out, their fickleness and wide-scattered lusts, their need to boss, their hard shell and pride and stubborn attitudes, and then also the something else that made you stay or return or want them in the world in spite of their boorishness. I could feel every bit of that. She was studying me as I made the short trip across the creaky old floor, appraising, ready, it seemed, to go back outside and tell Jeannie to get rid of the bum, or tell her maybe he’d turn out okay with another decade or so of seasoning. I wanted another man there for support. I wanted to give evidence, as if before some invisible court of gender dispute: But she insists on knowing everything! It would drive you nuts. It’s a competition, an Olympics of shortcuts and gas saving. It’s spoiling what was supposed to be a special trip, can’t you see?
Instead, I stopped in front of her and looked at the candy offerings. I selected a Mounds bar—my comfort, in those days and now—and paid her, and she gave me change and then, with the chapped corners of her thin lips, what might have been the tiniest sign of encouragement. She was, after all, soul-cousin to my wife.
Jeannie was already in the car, facing forward. I got in and started it and opened up the candy bar and took out the first piece and held it toward her. “Other half?”
She looked down and shook her head. I opened the window as we drove and threw the other half of the Mounds out the window, from spite, because I knew she hated littering, because I didn’t want to lose, because I wasn’t inconsiderate or unfaithful or mean and didn’t want to be put in that drawer, no matter what the woman behind the counter had been through.
There was a ski area at the summit. STEVENS PASS, the sign read. ELEVATION 4061 FEET. “Want to stop and look around? Take a picture or something?”
Another shake of the head.
It was probably four o’clock by then. I suspected that the land on the far side of the Cascade Range would be dry and unpeopled, not exactly prime camping territory. So, without asking her, when we came to a left turn a mile or so down the east slope of the mountain—SMITH BROOK TRAILHEAD said the sign—I took the car off the paved road and onto gravel, and drove along for a ways. We saw a small river there, to our left, amid stately firs. Rock slides to our right. Flat spots in the trees that looked suitable for a campsite.
“Looks like a good place,” I said. Jeannie said nothing.
Naturally enough—isn’t this the way the universe works?— even though we’d all made a stop only half an hour back, as we came into Baring in our Lincoln-and-pickup caravan, twenty-three years post-argument, I saw the blinker go on. Anthony pulled into the lot of the little store. It had hardly changed. Not eager to be battered by any more memories just then, I muttered something under my breath, inaudible to the world and the present day, and decided to stay in the pickup. But Rinpoche jumped out almost before we came to a stop. “Shelsa has to pee!” my sister sang out over the mountains. Julie Andrews on the Austrian slopes.
In another second, with my sister and her daughter entering the store and my children following out of curiosity, Rinpoche was beside the truck hopping up and down as if on a pogo stick. The robe flattened around him as he jumped and fluttered as he descended. Jasper looked at him, his head out the truck window. It was Skovorodian aerobics, Buddhist jumping jacks. The sound of no hands clapping.
“Nice, nice, nice,” he was saying.
I stood nearby until he’d done forty or fifty jumps and tired himself out.
“Rinpoche,” I said.
“Otto, my friend.”
“This is caffeine.”
“What is caffeine?”
“What you’re feeling now. That weird energy, that high. That’s what caffeine does to you. The espresso was loaded with it.”
“I like what it feels.”
“Sure. So do four billion other people. Wait an hour or so.”
He didn’t respond, but walked around the gravel in fast circles. “A good place,” he said, raising his arms sideways in a gesture that seemed to encompass both the store and the tree-covered slopes. “Good energy here.”
“Sure,” I said. But I was remembering the tough woman’s eyes on me. I was feeling like a grumpy old man. I had a run going, an interior run, bitter as coffee grounds. Here was my sister singing out happily over the mountains. Here was her husband, clowning around. They hadn’t lost a spouse.
I thought I’d grown beyond that kind of pettiness. But no, I was back in my twenty-seven-year-old self, throwing Mounds bars out the window.
“Dad,” Anthony called. “You have to come in. This place is incredible! They have this little post office here. It’s, like, a hundred years old! You have to see it.”
I didn’t want to see it. The thing about self-pity is that it feeds on itself. It’s akin to depression in that way and almost as painful. It hides from the world in a black-walled closet, urging you toward a masturbatory negativity.
“Dad, come on!”
I shook my head, popped the hood of the pickup, and pretended to be checking the oil or the distributor cap or the brake fluid. Rinpoche went inside. I stayed out there alone, a dog, greasy battery cables and self-sorrow for company. I had the sense—I could not know why—that the woman behind the counter had never left. She’d been there for the past twenty-three years, selling candy to young bastards and offering counsel to their wives. I didn’t want to see it, to remember, to acknowledge, again, what I was missing. Jeannie and I had talked about making a return trip to this place and never done it.
But then something changed. A cool breeze of good sense blew through the mood. The woman, after all, had never said a bad word to me, and what she’d said to Jeannie, it would later turn out, was in the spirit of reconciliation not disdain. She’d probably done us a huge favor, maybe even changed our whole future, who knew? A cool breeze blew—through a door that yea
rs of meditation had opened, a door to the room that held my worst mental patterns—and I said, “Mister J., be right back,” and made myself walk across the gravel and up the worn wooden treads and through the door where someone had hung a sign that read BATHROOMS FOR THE USE OF POLITE PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY!
Our family was spread out along the two packed aisles, admiring this or that novelty. Behind the glass counter, just as I’d guessed, stood a twice-as-old version of the woman who’d been there the last time I walked through the front door of Baring’s general store. The face was cut even more deeply with lines. The hair ribboned with gray. The eyes carried that same load of hardened attention. I nodded at her and she nodded back, but of course she didn’t remember me. I was one of thousands in her life, and she was one of one. “You won’t remember me,” I wanted to say. “I was here with my wife. Twenty-three years ago. We’d been having a fight. She stopped to talk with you and I came in and went to the toilet and then bought a Mounds bar on the way out. We made up later. It had something to do with you, I think. . . .”
But of course I said no such thing. Shelsa called out “Uncle Ott” and came up and leaned against my leg, and I hugged her. Natasha and Anthony pointed out the old logging tools and the deer head, long embalmed. Celia thanked the woman for letting them use the bathroom and bought some trail mix to be polite. And Rinpoche, still buzzing, was slapping his hands gently on the fronts of his thighs and swinging his head back and forth as he took in a rack of postcards. I bought three of them, eighty cents apiece, and set them on the glass counter. The others left. I could hear Shelsa singing in the parking lot. The woman made change and at last I said, “I was here once. Long time ago. With my wife. We were on a camping trip.”
She raised one eyebrow—a scar ran through it—and said, “Lot of people come back.”
Reptile Zoo and Espresso
On Route 2 East of Seattle, Washington
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Lunch with Buddha Page 5