by John Updike
During this monologue Clark had been fascinated by the old man’s boots: they were cream-colored with a swirling wealth of stitching and leafy tooled relief, and heels higher than an inch, and inflexibly pointy toes: a young buck’s boots, with red-plaid polyester pants tucked into their raked, scallop-cut tops.
“Now, in case I croak tomorrow, to nobody’s great surprise,” Jared had said, “here’s a piece of wisdom I’m passing on: money gives, and pussy takes. You need to get your act together, son. You need a trade.” That had been the word from Great-Uncle Jared.
He and the girl—Hannah, Sissy, he struggled to remember—stepped out into the parking lot. The packed and rutted snow underfoot squeaked. The mounds plowed up around the lot were fifteen feet high, though spring was in the air and there had been considerable melt on the south slopes. She led him to her pickup, a Ford Ranger a couple of years old, with those square double headlights and plenty of slanted mud streaks on the underside. His own little ’84 Nissan Maxima V6 waited a few steps away, calling him back to his two rooms in the lodge near the lifts, back to his bed, his Michael Crichton paperback, his sleep. Up at six-thirty tomorrow. “Maybe we should put this off to another time,” he suggested. “You drive home, and I’ll get a burger down at the Wendy’s.”
“Don’t be so chicken,” she said, smiling and flaring her eyes wide, so the whites gleamed, there at the side of her muddy Ranger. “I won’t bite.”
Pussy takes. Clark actually nodded off for ten minutes when the heater warmed up the cramped little cab. The side of his skull bounced on the window frame; he folded his ski cap to make a pillow. There was a chill deep through him that was hard to shake but why would he be scared of this little freckled schoolteacher type? She drove mostly downhill from Bighorn, south from the lights, neon and otherwise, of the shops and restaurants and ski boutiques and sharp-gabled condos that had accumulated at the foot of the mountain, along the two-lane highway. The lights dwindled to a scattering of windows back from the road, tucked up in the forest like faint Christmas lights. There was a sudden lonely brightness around a shacky café advertising in fading letters TOPLESS ENTERTAINMENT NITELY. They passed on the left the huge cement-colored ghost of the Henderson copper-smelting plant, its steel-roofed sheds and diagonal feeder chutes and bucket belts crouched in an encirclement of slag heaps like some great crusty engine of war disabled during battle. The ruin was still owned by a company somewhere; the mineral war could be resumed. The cab radio murmured the news of early March 1987: bodies of those drowned and trapped were still being pulled from the British ferry Herald of Free Enterprise, which capsized on its way from Zeebrugge, Belgium. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, four teenagers were found dead in an exhaust-filled garage, apparent suicides; three were high-school dropouts and the fourth had been recently suspended from classes. In Rome, the Vatican condemned test-tube babies and artificial insemination, while in Washington, the reaction to President Reagan’s claim of “full responsibility” in the Iran-contra affair has remained mild. Japanese investors, it has been calculated, last year bought up to six billion dollars’ worth of American real estate.
After some miles this mysterious girl left the highway for a narrower road that went uphill for a while, through close masses of pines and firs, and then turned down again. Clark felt these motions in his leaden, dozing body. He was travelling miles, way out on a limb. Once, when his eyes fluttered open, he saw far below, as if he were in an airplane, a nameless vast lake, flat as a mirror, giving back to the moon its own cold light. The moon picked out the slender pale trunks of the aspens and birches at the edge of the sloping dark forests of featureless evergreens. Clark seldom came in this southwesterly direction; his trips when he took them were north to Route 70, which went to Denver one way and back to California, through Utah and Nevada, the other.
Hannah woke him by braking to a stop and taking a turn at a cluster of weathered signs one of which said LOWER BRANCH. The forest—a national park, perhaps—had fallen away; they were in high ranch country now, miles of rolling open grassland interspersed with wooded clumps, and not a light anywhere but the diffused, sickly moonlight. His stomach ached; he could taste all the salt from the margaritas and his septum stung from the two lines of coke he had done on a toilet seat in the Golddigger’s men’s room. The Ranger turned left onto a dirt road and bumped and rattled for a half-mile, at just the speed that made the most of the corrugations. This bitch had misled him: he thought from sizing her up that she had a rental, probably with a girlfriend or two, not far from Bighorn. Well, by the time they got to the sex he wouldn’t owe her much consideration. Except he needed to get back and she was his ride. They came to what looked like a fence of new barbed wire, its points glittering in the headlight beams. There was a gate she had to get out to unlatch, giving him time to study a sign that said in smallish grouted silver-filled letters, LOWER BRANCH—TEMPLE ENTRANCE.
“Temple?” he said, clearing the sleep from his throat. “What kind of place is this?”
“We call it a temple. It’s where I live,” Hannah said. Like Sissy Spacek, she did not have much of a profile, at least in the dark of the cab. Her voice had changed, dropping into a sort of purr that went with the flat cat’s nose.
“You own a ranch?”
“I share a ranch.”
“Who with?”
“Spiritual brothers and sisters,” she said. “We all contribute, work and money if we have it. You could say it’s a commune.”
Trapped. This was beginning to sound freaky. He didn’t like the hypnotized sound of her voice or the institutional look of this place. Onto an old-fashioned clapboarded two-story farmhouse, with a front veranda and gingerbread trim along the eaves and porch pillars, had been added wings of utilitarian wooden boxes, some shingled and some finished in vertical boards and two-inch battens, like chicken sheds. As the Ranger parked and its headlights wheeled, more additions and outbuildings than Clark could mentally organize were pulled from the darkness. His first thought was that this would go up like bales of hay if it ever started to burn. Perhaps the thought was suggested by the live glow at the windows, the secretive orange illumination of kerosene lamps rather than electricity.
The air outside the heated pickup cab had a different scent from Bighorn, whose aroma to him was of engine grease and stale beer and the boot-battered redwood decks baking in the lunchtime sun. Here there was, layered into the night, woodsmoke, and animal dung, and hay. Somewhere in the wilderness of buildings a sheep bleated, and several others blindly answered with their stammering maa-aa. The wide porch was stacked with split wood. An unpainted storm shelter boxed in the front door, which seemed unusually narrow; its faded blue paint was webbed with crackle and its two gaunt windows were frosted in one of those swirling leafy patterns, like uncoiling ferns, that were tooled onto Western boots. An old-fashioned bell on a rusty spiral spring jangled as they pushed the door open. A narrow country staircase faced them across a small entrance hall; beside the blunt-tipped newel post a small cherrywood sewing table held a pewter vase holding a dozen or so stalks of last summer’s wheat beneath a cross of two sticks tied together with whippings of coarse brown string. The cross gave Clark the creeps but at least the symbol suggested that no outright harm would come to him. In a long parlor to the right, a fieldstone fireplace threw out heat and a dancing ruddy light into a ring of chairs and shadows. Some of the shadows rose up and came toward them. More or less his and Hannah’s age, with names like Tom and Jim and Polly and Mercy and Luke, they shamblingly stood and said “Welcome” or “Howdy” or “Peace, brother.” Depending on where they stood, they had pinpricks of flame in their eyes. They had hard hands and by and large gave a country person’s rather lame handshake. Some seemed weathered and stringy ranchers, and others as professionally amorphous as Clark himself. “And this is Jesse,” Hannah said, in that same smug betranced voice in which she had mentioned spiritual brothers and sisters.
“Well now isn’t this a treat,” Jesse said, g
iving Clark a firm handshake with one hand and gripping his elbow with the other as if to steer him somewhere. He had been talking to the little circle around the fireplace; these others went so quiet at the sound of Jesse’s voice that it sounded louder than it was. He was a few inches taller than Clark and maybe ten years older, with a wide mountain-man’s chest and a level, challenging gaze. His hair on the top of his head had gone the way Rex Brudnoy’s was going nearly twenty years ago. What hair Jesse did have fell in a dirty-looking grayish fringe to the back of his collar. He wore a camel-colored flannel shirt over a black turtleneck, tucked into stovepipe blue jeans baggy at the knees but tight as spandex at the hips. He had forgotten to shave about three days ago; his eyes looked rubbed red and pink, perhaps from staring at the fire. He spoke carefully, as if reading a blurred text, in a voice husky from overuse but deep and confident and gently onrolling. “Sister Hannah always brings us congenial visitors. She has a fine eye for those to whom our company might prove a blessing.”
“He’s starving,” Hannah said at Clark’s side. Her ordinary female voice sounded light and nimble, after the echo-chamber intonations of the other. “He wanted to go to a restaurant but I promised him food here.”
“Food and fellowship are among the Lord’s weapons. ‘Thou preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies.’ Dear wife, you go see what meal you can scrounge up in the kitchen, while I sit here a moment with our new friend.”
If Clark had had a car of his own he would have bolted for the door. He got very restive when people appeared to be taking him over. Still, this seemed a setup he could outsmart, if necessary. The others had resumed their seats by the fire, those who were not saying good night and leaving the room. There were children among them, two or three little ones fast asleep and carried on a parent’s shoulder, their faces flushed and heads helplessly lolling. The frame farmhouse, with its porcelain doorknobs and cracking plaster walls, dated from somewhere around the turn of the century. The furniture in its long low-ceilinged parlor was either homemade or bought cheap; plastic bucket chairs as if from an airport waiting room were mixed with the bentwood and cane lightweight stuff fashionable in the Seventies. The old velvet sofa in front of the fire looked as if a family of dogs had used it for years as a bed; striped Indian blankets covered the most worn spots. To Clark it all suggested some neighborhood drop-in center or halfway house, held together by charity and grudging civic grants. Bright crude acrylics of a staring Jesus and his crowd of stick-stiff disciples and torturers on the plaster walls repelled his glance. With that gentle steering touch on his elbow, his host tugged him toward a corner where two old green-painted kitchen chairs stood near a half-empty bookcase holding a few rows of black-backed books—Bibles, hymnals—and several stacks of photocopied pamphlets, the covers busy with hand-drawn insignia: flames, eyes, rays, pyramids, stairs, stars. His host took the chair in sounder condition, leaving Clark with one whose broken spindles did not permit him to lean his weight back. “Wife?” Clark said.
“In a manner of speaking. We are all spouses in Christ here at the Temple. Tell me about you, son.”
“There isn’t an awful lot to say about me.”
“Now, if that were really true, and not just a way to fend me off, you’d be the first, the first soul in the history of the universe without a powerful story to tell, the first soul that God left totally empty of eternal possibilities.” His rubbed-looking eyes in the flickering half-light had yellow glints; he had a way of staring for a frozen second, as if what he was seeing had to be translated out of a foreign language. For all the unearthly confidence of his husky, practiced voice, Jesse had the air of a man who had suffered, with more to come.
Clark told him, “My mother was—is, she would want me to say—a movie star. I’m sure you’ve heard of her—Alma DeMott.” As he said it he realized the name didn’t have the ring it used to, as it had sounded all through his childhood, deafening him in a certain way.
Jesse smiled, but smiling didn’t come naturally to him. A reluctant slant slit revealed gray glimmers of rather ragged teeth, one of them capped in gold. “My friend, I fear I come up empty on that particular name. I was never much of one for movies. My mother and my stepdad were old-fashioned pious people, Seventh-Day Adventists, and they regarded such entertainments as issuing straight from the pit of Hell. We moved around from one ranch to another, back up there”—his thumb jerked over his shoulder, toward what Clark took to be the mountains—“hiring out to whoever would have us. My stepdad was right handy. He could mend most anything with his hands, and wasn’t slow to use his fists, either. Before you knew what you’d done wrong you’d see sparks and be lying stretched out on the dirt. At the age of sixteen, however, I strayed from the rigor of parental discipline, and lived apart, like a young wild dog, until King Gog, as I call our United States government, drafted me into military service, which was still obligatory at that time, since we were fighting the Communist foe overseas in Vietnam. Now, the point of my story is that King Gog, no doubt to distract us poor boy-sinners from the dreadful deeds we were being asked to perpetrate, made motion pictures mightily available to us, right there on the base as well as in the pleasure-district of the city nearby. One of those motion pictures, if I recall exactly, portrayed the seduction of an innocent college graduate by a whorish friend of his mother’s, in a variety of luxurious hotel rooms. Another, I do believe, bodied forth the violent crime rampage of a pair of young lovers, the young man of whom was impotent except when he had just committed murder. Did your blessed mother perform in either of these?”
“No. They sound like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. Terrific pictures, actually.”
“These patterns of damnation, I was astounded to behold, were set forth with every sign of endorsement by the filmmakers. The color was overwhelmingly glorious, and such a wealth of attention was paid to every detail that you thought you were looking upon reality itself. The Devil’s work is lovingly done—give Satan his due. The harlots paraded in shining raiment, purple and scarlet decked with gold and pearls, and it all went down as smooth as ice cream, right down to almighty death itself. That couple up there on the screen died in a hail of bullets but you could get up and leave your seat a whole man. The ways of damnation are glamorous. Lucifer was the fairest of the angels. But God scraped him off the edge of Heaven like a little piece of goat shit.”
Clark said, to keep the talk impersonal, “Sixty-seven was a real turnaround year for movies, actually. They got back greatness. Did you happen to see Blow-Up? Or In the Heat of the Night? I was eight or so, but Mom took me all the time; it was the one thing we did together. The picture that wowed me most, I guess, was You Only Live Twice—the best James Bond picture ever made, in my opinion.”
“See now, Clark, there is something to say about you—you have gorged yourself on ephemeral trash. As far as garbage goes, you remember every empty can, every orange peel.”
“Please, don’t call it trash. We lived and breathed movies around the house. If she was between projects we’d go out to a matinee and pig out on popcorn and Raisinets. Some afternoons we saw two in a row. You would have thought, it being her business, she would have been critical, but she wasn’t—she liked most anything.”
“Your mother was a good mother?”
“Like I tell people, she tried. She had a lot of natural fun in her. But she was usually working, or else worrying about why she wasn’t working, poring over these crappy scripts Shirley kept bringing her. Shirley—that’s her agent, Shirley Frugosi—would have had her doing guest spots on Laugh-In, or a dumb television series like Doris Day got talked into, anything to generate Shirley’s twenty percent. Yeah, I guess you could say her career took the best part of her energy. Being a star makes you very narcissistic.”
He looked at the high-ranch messiah, to see if he understood. Jesse nodded. In 1987 everybody knew about narcissism.
Yet something urged Clark to make himself very clear to this man. He became, in part
, his mother. “You know, like, ‘Should I get another facelift?’ The more you get, you know, the faster they wear out. The skin stops moving like real skin does.” He pushed his own skin back toward the points of his jaw, to dramatize. “Or ‘Should I get another husband? Would a young stud juice me up enough to keep me in romantic leads for a couple more years?’ She used to complain, without the studios the way they used to be, nobody took care of you, and always there were these kids coming on, out of college film studies and all the film-acting schools. There didn’t use to be such things. To these movie brats, you were already history.” He wondered if it was the two lines of coke making him talk so much.