Russ awoke in a strange house. Wind was banging on the windows, repulverizing the snow on the branches outside them, and Marion’s side of their bed had not been slept in. Frightened that she hadn’t softened toward him, frightened by the permission she’d given him, frightened also by the problem of Perry’s drug use, he could feel how very reliant he’d become on her support. Turning instead to God, he prayed in bed until he was able to put on a robe and venture into the hallway. Behind closed doors, his three younger children were still asleep. The door and the curtains of Clem’s room were open wide, his absence stark in the morning light. Downstairs, in the kitchen, a pot of coffee was on the stove. He took a mug of it up to his office, and there he found Marion. She was kneeling amid gifts and ribbons and didn’t even glance at him. The sight of her, in the same dress she’d worn the night before, recalled the shock of desiring her, the shame of being rejected. From the doorway, without preamble, he told her that Perry had sold or given marijuana to Larry Cottrell.
“It’s interesting,” she said, “that that’s the first thing you have to say to me today.”
“I meant to bring it up last night. We need to deal with this immediately.”
“I’ve already dealt with it. He told me he’d sold pot.”
“He what? When?”
She calmly ran scissors through a sheet of wrapping paper. Whatever Russ might do or say, she seemed to be a step ahead of him.
“Last night,” she said. “He’s been struggling, and I think the fact that he was open with me—he’s doing better now. As far as I’m concerned, it’s ancient history.”
“He broke the law. He needs to understand that there are consequences.”
“You want to punish him.”
“Yes.”
“I think that’s a mistake.”
“I don’t care what you think. We will present a united front.”
“A united front? Is that a joke?”
Her coolness was worse than coldness. He had an urge to break into it, grab hold of her, impose his will. Their fight the night before had tapped into an unguessed reservoir of rage.
She folded the wrapping paper around a shirt box. “Was there anything else, dear?”
Hatred silenced him. Returning to the second floor, he heard Perry’s and Judson’s voices behind their door. It was only seven thirty, strangely early for Perry to be awake. Russ was disturbed to think that his nine-year-old son, with whom he had semiformal but cordial relations, as if they were longtime next-door neighbors, had been sharing a room with a trafficker in drugs. It didn’t reflect well on the nine-year-old’s father. But when, an hour later, while channeling his rage into shoveling the driveway, he saw Perry and Judson heading out with their sleds, Perry was in such boyishly eager spirits that Russ didn’t have the heart to confront him. It was Christmas Eve, after all.
That night, at dinner—by tradition, spaghetti and meatballs—Perry was in charming form, and his manner with Becky had changed. Gone was his condescension, gone her defensiveness. Marion wouldn’t look at Russ, and all she ate was salad and a few strands of spaghetti. When she teased Becky about Tanner Evans, it fell to Judson to explain to Russ that Becky had a boyfriend, and Russ didn’t know which was more incriminating, that he was the last to learn this news or that he didn’t much care. He’d been living in a world consisting of Frances, God, Rick Ambrose, and the negative blot of Marion. Of his children, the only one he felt at all connected to was Clem, and it grieved him that Clem was with his girlfriend for the holiday; it deprived him of a chance to atone for embarrassing him. For relief from his isolation, he let his thoughts turn to Frances. He imagined smoking marijuana with her, imagined its lowering of their inhibitions. Then he wondered what it said about God’s intentions that the marijuana in question had passed through Perry’s hands.
Rising abruptly from the table, he said he’d forgotten an important call to a parishioner. As he left the room, Marion’s amused voice followed him. “Tell her I said Merry Christmas.”
The third floor smelled of her disturbance. On the sill of the storage-room window, an ashtray brimmed with cigarette ends, and this was fine with him. It somehow ratified the permission she’d given him. Using the permission, he picked up the phone in his office.
Frances, answering, brushed aside his apology for calling on a holiday—he was her pastor! He’d intended to let her wonder if he’d made peace with Ambrose and was going to Arizona, but he couldn’t help telling her immediately.
“Hooray, hooray,” she said. “I knew I was right.”
“You were right about Perry, too. He did sell marijuana.”
“Of course I was right. Aren’t I always?”
“Well, so, I could use your advice there. Are you, ah, private?”
“Sort of. My folks are here for dinner.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“I was just clearing the table. Tell me how I can help.”
From two floors below came a burst of family laughter in which Perry’s arpeggio of hilarity was uppermost. Russ wondered if, a year from now, he wouldn’t have to call Frances; if he might be sitting down to dinner with her and her folks.
“Well, apparently,” he said, “Perry’s cleaned up his act. At this point, I could just let it drop, but I feel some sort of punishment is in order.”
“You’re asking the wrong gal. You may remember what’s in my sock drawer.”
“I do. And the fact—well, the experiment we talked about. It complicates things for me. I can’t punish Perry and then—you know. It would be hypocritical.”
“That’s an easy one. Just don’t do the second thing.”
“But I want to. I want to do it with you.”
“Okay, wow. I should probably get off the phone.”
“Just quickly tell me if you’re still interested in doing this.”
“Definitely getting off the phone.”
“Frances—”
“I’m not saying no. I’m saying I need to think about it.”
“You were the one who suggested it!”
“Mm, not quite. The just-you-and-me part was your idea.”
He couldn’t have asked for a clearer indication that his desires were known to her. To be engaged in sexual implication, in his church-provided house, on a family holiday, was shameful and thrilling.
“Anyway,” she said, “Merry Christmas. I’ll see you in church on Sunday.”
“You’re not coming to the midnight service?”
“No. But your eagerness is noted, Reverend Hildebrandt.”
In the manner of the early Christians, who’d believed that the Messiah who’d walked the earth within living memory would soon return—that the Day of Judgment was just around the corner—Russ imagined that his situation with Frances, already so fraught with implication, so poised to blossom into rapture, would resolve itself in a matter of days. While he awaited her judgment, which seemed imminent, he postponed a confrontation with his son, and by the time he understood how long he might have to wait, Perry’s transgressions had become, as Marion had said, ancient history. Perry really did seem to be doing better. No longer an evasive, late-sleeping boy, he seemed slimmer and perhaps a little taller, and he was always in good spirits. Because Marion had taken to sleeping on the third floor and keeping odd hours, it sometimes happened that Perry, who now rose even earlier than Russ, made breakfast for him and Judson.
Beginning with old Mrs. O’Dwyer, who’d succumbed to pneumonia, the new year brought a string of funerals for which Russ did all the counseling and officiating, while the Haefles vacationed in Florida. He still had the extra duties Dwight had given him when he left Crossroads, and now that he’d been reinstated in the group he felt obliged to attend Sunday-night meetings. To show Ambrose the sincerity of his repentance, while avoiding the hazard of counseling troubled teenagers, he volunteered to handle all the logistics for the Arizona trip—hiring the buses, reviewing the church’s liability policy, procuring project supplies, coordinating with the Navajos.
Mired in work, he watched Marion race ahead of him. She was visibly losing weight, abetted by smoking and a regimen of punishing walks. He was included in the dinners she continued to put on the table, but she now sorted through the laundry hamper and set aside his clothes while she washed everyone else’s. He attended church functions without her, poured hours he couldn’t spare into sermons that refused to come into focus without her help, while she went out to the library, to lectures at the Ethical Culture Society, and to the decaying clapboard theater that was home to the New Prospect Players. Her new independence smacked of women’s liberation, which he approved of at the societal level, and he might have approved of it in his wife if he’d been getting anywhere with Frances.
But the day of judgment kept receding. On the Tuesday circle’s first outing to the inner city after Christmas, Frances attached herself so tightly to Kitty Reynolds that he couldn’t get a single private word with her. When he called her house, a few days later, in the guise of routine pastoral concern, she said she was late to class and would stop by his office later in the week. He waited, in vain, for eight days. Feeling unfairly at her mercy, casting about for leverage, he was inspired to invite an unmarried seminarian, Carolyn Polley, to come along on the next Tuesday outing. Carolyn was a friend of Ambrose and an adviser in Crossroads, and Russ hoped that by insisting that she ride with him, by making a fuss of introducing her to Theo Crenshaw, and by keeping her at his side throughout the day, he might provoke some jealousy in Frances. Instead he provoked a statement from Carolyn, in the awkwardly explicit style of Crossroads, that she had a boyfriend in Minneapolis. Frances herself was so chummy with Kitty Reynolds, so intimately murmuring, that Russ, in his jealousy, wondered if her hunger for new experiences might extend as far as lesbianism. Not once did she look at him directly. It was as if none of the tensy-tension between them, none of the innuendo on Christmas Eve, had ever happened.
When the Tuesday circle returned to First Reformed, in the last light of day, he caught up with her before she could escape in her car. He chided her, gently, for not having stopped by his office. “I hope you’re not,” he said, “avoiding me for some reason?”
She edged away from him. She was wearing a puffy parka and a stocking cap, not her fetching hunter’s ensemble. “Actually I am, a little bit.”
“Will you—tell me why?”
“It’s terrible. You’re going to hate me.”
The twilight in January, the way it lingered in the western sky, partook of early spring, but the air was still bitterly dry and tasted of road salt.
“I was feeling bad,” she said, “that I hadn’t listened to your records. I didn’t want to talk to you until I did, and so finally, last week, I had them all spread out in the living room, and then the phone rang, and I had to make dinner, and I forgot about them. When I went to turn a light on, I didn’t see them on the floor.”
She sounded vaguely annoyed, as if it were the records’ fault.
“I already talked to the record store,” she said. “They’re going to try to find replacements. I only stepped on two of them, but apparently one of them is very hard to find.”
Russ’s heart felt stepped on.
“You don’t have to replace them,” he managed to say. “They’re just worldly things.”
“No, I’m absolutely going to.”
“As you wish.”
“See? You do hate me.”
“No, I—just think I might have misread something. I thought that you and I were going to—I thought I could help you on your journey.”
“I know. I was supposed to give you an answer about that.”
“It’s all right. Perry’s doing much better—I’m not going to punish him.”
“But I stepped on your records. The least I can do is give you an answer.”
“As you wish.”
“Except here’s another confession. I already sort of did the experiment, by myself. I can’t say it was life-altering. It was more like an hour-long head cold.”
Russ turned away, to hide his disappointment.
“I want to try again, though,” she said, touching his arm. “I’ve—there’s been a lot going on with me. But let’s you and me find a time. Okay?”
“It sounds like you’re doing fine without me.”
“No, let’s do it. Just the two of us. Unless you want to ask Kitty.”
“I don’t want to ask Kitty.”
“This’ll be fun,” Frances said.
Her enthusiasm sounded effortful, and when he called her that night, calendar in hand, their search for a mutually workable date had a flavor of dreary obligation. The experiment could only be done on a weekday, while her kids were at school, and his regular church duties fell precisely on the days that Frances had open. With some foreboding, he agreed to meet her on Ash Wednesday.
There was a foretaste of ash in his days of waiting for their date. The hope that Clem would reconsider his decision to quit school had already been dashed on Christmas Day, when he called to report that he hadn’t gone to his girlfriend in Urbana. He was alone in New Orleans—would rather spend Christmas in a squalid hotel room than with his family. Russ knew that the fault was his, and he wanted to write to Clem, to apologize and try to set things right, but he didn’t have a mailing address. In January, Clem called home periodically to ask Marion if a letter from the draft board had arrived. In February came the news that he’d spoken to the board and learned that it didn’t intend to call him up. The news ought to have been a pure relief for Russ, as it was for Marion, but he was hurt that he had to hear the news from Becky, hurt that Clem still hadn’t given them his address, hurt that he had no plans to come home. According to Becky, he was working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
One of the few bright spots in Russ’s life—that Becky, against all expectations, had found her way to Christian faith and shared her inheritance with her brothers—was dimmed when she stopped attending services at First Reformed. She’d already spurned his invitation to join his confirmation class, and it now transpired that she and Tanner Evans were exploring other churches in New Prospect. When Russ asked why, she said she was looking for something more inspiring than Dwight Haefle’s sermons. “Does he even believe in God?” she said. “It’s like listening to Rod McKuen.” Russ, who had his own doubts about Dwight’s faith, replied that he, Russ, did believe in God. “Then maybe,” Becky said, “you should talk more about your relationship with Him and less about the evening news.” Her point was debatable, but he sensed that theology was just a pretext anyway; that her rejection of him was deeper and more personal; that Clem had done a thorough job of turning her against him. And perhaps rightly so. The bathroom sink into which he now regularly spent his seed, picturing Frances Cottrell and blocking from his mind all thought of God, was three steps from his daughter’s bedroom door.
Even Arizona had become a clouded prospect. Enough kids had signed up for the spring trip to fill three buses, and his plan was to leave two of them at the base of the Black Mesa while he led a third group up to the school at Kitsillie. The Black Mesa was in the heart of Diné Bikéyah. Nowhere more than up in its thin air, in the mind- and landscape-bending midday sun, beneath night skies pressing down with the weight of a million stars, had he felt more connected to the Navajo spirit world. Kitsillie’s primitive conditions would also be an opportunity to show Frances how capable he was of handling them, and they would test her appetite for new experiences. If, unlike Marion, she turned out to have a taste for roughing it, the possibilities for further joint adventures would be limitless. But when, after much trying, he reached Keith Durochie on the telephone, Keith bluntly told him, “Don’t go there.”
“To Kitsillie?”
“Don’t go there. The energy is bad. You won’t be welcome.”
“That’s nothing new,” Russ said lightly. “I wasn’t so welcome in the forties, either. You remember how you wouldn’t even shake my hand?”
He expected Keith to laugh at the memory, as he had in the past, but Keith didn’t.
“You’ll be safer in Many Farms,” he said. “We have plenty of work here. The people on the mesa are unhappy with the bilagáana.”
“Well, and I know a thing or two about building bridges. Why don’t we see how things look when I get there.”
Keith, after a silence, said, “You and I are old, Russ. Things aren’t the same.”
“I’m not so old, and neither are you.”
“No, I’m old. I saw my death the other day. It was on the ridge behind my house—not far.”
“I don’t know about that,” Russ said, “but I’m happy to think I’ll be seeing you again.”
On the morning of Ash Wednesday, he left his car in the First Reformed parking lot, so as not to let it be seen too suspiciously long at Frances’s, and walked uphill on sidewalks wet with the melting of dismal, clumpy snowflakes. The hour, nine o’clock, felt more suitable for a doctor’s appointment. Frances’s house was freshly painted and rather stately, a reminder of how much money she’d received from General Dynamics, and he rang her doorbell with a foreboding which he could only pray that marijuana would dispel.
“So much for my idea,” she said, leading him into her kitchen, “that you wouldn’t show up.”
“Do you not want me here?”
“I just hope we’re not making a big mistake.”
She was wearing a wide-necked brown sweaterdress and thick gray socks. Seeing her as she was at home, not in one of her smart Sunday outfits, not in her Tuesday-circle tomboy attire, he had an unsettling strong hit of her reality—her independence as a woman, her thinking of thoughts and making of choices wholly unrelated to him. To glimpse how it must feel to be her, inhabiting her own life, round the clock, was exciting but also daunting. On the counter by the kitchen stove, she’d already set out an ashtray and a crudely fashioned marijuana cigarette.
“Shall we get right to it,” she said, “or do we need to discuss it to death first?”
“No. Just assure me you’re really okay with doing this.”
“I’ve already done it—sort of. I don’t think I had enough.”
She reached and turned on the stove fan, and he wondered if there was underwear beneath her sweaterdress. The dress had slipped down her shoulder without exposing a bra strap. The skin of her upper back, which he’d never seen before, was smooth and lightly freckled. It, too, was real, and it gave him a pang of nostalgia for the safety of his fantasies. He’d been managing all right with fantasies; he could probably keep managing indefinitely. And yet to shy from the reality of Frances would confirm Marion’s belittling assessment of him. She’d given him permission because she didn’t believe he was man enough to use it.
“Let’s see what happens,” he said.
They hunched forward, side by side, under the exhaust fan. The marijuana smoke was scalding, and he might have stopped at one lungful if Frances hadn’t insisted that one wasn’t enough. She took sip after sip of smoke, holding the little cigarette like a dart, and he followed her lead. They didn’t stop until the remainder was too small to be handed back and forth. She went to the sink, dropped the “roach” in the garbage disposal, and opened a window. The snowflakes outside struck Russ as peculiar, artificial, as though strewn by someone standing on the roof. Frances stretched her arms above her head, raising the hem of her dress and with it, again, the question of underwear.
“Wow,” she said, splaying her raised hands. “This is much better. I wonder if you have to do it twice before you get the full effect.”
Though this was Russ’s first time, he was definitely getting an effect. The realization had hit him, like an anvil, that February was flu season—one of her kids could easily come home sick and discover him with their mother. The possibility seemed far from minimal, indeed quite strong, and he was appalled that he hadn’t considered it until now. The hour also suddenly felt not at all like morning. It felt closer to the hour when school let out—he could almost hear the final bell, the tumult of liberated kids, Frances’s among them. In the glare of the kitchen lights, he further realized, he was highly visible to her next-door neighbors. Looking around for a switch, he noticed that she’d left the room.
From the front of the house, at a sickeningly high volume, easily loud enough to attract the attention of neighbors, if not the police, came the sound of Robert Johnson singing “Cross Road Blues.” Russ discovered that he’d turned out most of the kitchen lights, but the one overhead was still burning. In the midst of searching for the switch, he understood that he could simply leave the kitchen.
The living room was blessedly dusky. Frances had thrown herself onto a sofa and bunched up her dress in the process. Russ glimpsed a sliver of white panty and searingly wished he hadn’t. His interest in the question of underwear was obscene. The loudness of Robert Johnson was an emergency.
“What do you think?” she called to him happily. “Are you feeling anything?”
“I’m thinking,” he said, but this wasn’t true, because, whatever he’d been thinking, he’d now forgotten it. Then, surprisingly, he remembered. “I’m thinking we should turn the music down.”
Even as he said it, he knew it was hideously square. He braced himself for shaming.
“You have to tell me everything you’re feeling,” she said. “That was the agreement. Actually, there was no agreement, but what’s the point of an experiment if we don’t compare results?”
He went to the stereo console and turned down the volume—too far. He therefore raised it again—too far. He lowered it again—too far.
“Come sit with me,” Frances called from the sofa. “I’m so aware of my skin—you know what I mean? It’s like the Beatles, I want to hold your hand. I’m just so—it’s like I’m here but my thoughts are in every corner of the room. Like I’m blowing up a gigantic balloon and the air is my thoughts. You know what I mean?”
I went down to the cross road, babe, I looked both east and west
Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, babe, in my distress
Standing at the console, Russ was plunged into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he. To have loaned Frances his records, imagining that some particle of authenticity might adhere to him and redeem him, was the pinnacle of fraudulence.
“Oh Reverend Hildebrandt,” she called in a singsong voice. “A penny for your thoughts.”
The record label rotating below him was not Vocalion. The record was an LP, not a 78. Dimly, through his confusion, came the fear that she’d replaced his valuable antique with a cheap modern compilation, but instead of being angered he experienced a kind of menace. The revolving vinyl was like a vortex, a dark drain down which he was being sucked toward darker death. There had to be a special place in hell for him. If indeed hell, its sulfurous fires, existed. If hell weren’t exactly where he was standing, in his detestable fraudulence, right this minute. He felt his back go warm with a body’s proximity.
“You seem,” Frances said from close behind him, “more interested in the music than in me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You can feel anything you want. I just want to hear about it.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lacerated by her reproach, convinced of its justice.
“But maybe we don’t need the music.”
The haste with which he took her suggestion and raised the tone arm screamed of a too-eager accession to another person’s wishes, a lack of authentic wishes of his own. As the record slowed to a halt, Frances put her arms around him from behind. She rested her head between his shoulder blades.
“This is okay, right?” she said. “A friendly hug?”
Her warmth entered his body and funneled straight into his loins.
“It’s so much better this time. I wonder if it’s a social thing, like you need to be with someone else to get the full experience. What do you think?”
He thought his head might burst with terror. He heard himself issue a chuckle, prefatory to some kind of speech act. The chuckle was reekingly phony, a creaking contraption of sinew and muscle, involuntarily activated by a craven wish to please and to fit in—to pass as an authentic person. It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored. All his life, people had concealed their true opinion of him—only Clem had been honest. Into his chest, like a giant air bubble, unreleasable through lungs or stomach, came the agony of having hurt his son. He leaned forward and opened his mouth, trying somehow to release the bubble. He perceived his resemblance to the parishioners whose final moment he’d witnessed, his jaw lowered with agonal breathing, his facial skin stretched over an emerging death’s-head. It wasn’t clear how he could survive another moment of the agony.
When Frances withdrew from him, he felt no relief, only reproach. She was having a joyful experience and he an abominable one. This fact, the humiliation of it, seemed to brighten the living room in a disagreeable way.
“There’s something weird about the light,” she said. “It seems different from one moment to the next—I wonder if it’s always doing that. Maybe the pot makes my eyes more sensitive?”
Her friendly tone compounded his torture. That she wasn’t recoiling from his ugliness and failure seemed impossibly merciful. He alone, of all the people in the world, was phony, he alone a wraith-person.
“It does seem brighter,” he found himself saying, only to be stricken by the revolting wetness of his mouth’s creation of the words.
“Are you all right?” Frances said. “I read that pot makes some people paranoid.”
Before he could stop himself, he admitted that he was feeling paranoid. Instantly ashamed, he added, with croaking falsity, “Just a little—not a lot.”
“Come sit with me—I’ll hold your hand. Maybe you just need to feel safe.”
Going anywhere near her was unthinkable. His dread of discovery by her children had struck him with renewed force, and the kitchen! Even with the fan on, the kitchen surely stank of marijuana. It was imperative to get away before he was discovered. In his mind, he formed the words I’m sorry, trying to gauge what more they might reveal about his native excrescence. Whether he actually uttered them, as he left the room and snatched his coat from the newel post, he never knew.
Walking back to the church, unable to find a facial expression that didn’t broadcast culpability, he might have been a spider crawling across a white wall. It was a miracle that no one stared at him. When he reached his car, he locked himself inside it and lay down on the front seat, out of sight. Eventually he noticed that he was no longer psychotic, but the emotional truth of his paranoia persisted. When he returned to the parsonage, intending to hide in his office and pray, he was moved to stop first in the storage room and empty Marion’s ashtray into his hands. He smeared the ashes into his face, opened his mouth to them.
The season of Lent had begun, and it wasn’t all bad. Shame and self-abasement were still his portals to God’s mercy. The old paradox—that weakness, honestly owned, made a man stronger in his faith—still obtained. Accepting his failure with Frances, he asked Kitty Reynolds to lead the next Tuesday circle without him. At home, he humbled himself with Marion, told her she looked nice, took an interest. When she said, with cool amusement, “I gather you’ve had a setback with your little friend,” he turned the other cheek. He said, “Go ahead and mock me. I deserve it.” The days were getting longer, and when he sat in his twilit study and labored to express a sermon-worthy thought, he could hear her clearing her throat in the adjacent room, applying her language skills to the at-home proofreading work she was doing to pay for new clothes, a better hairdresser. Now that she was looking trimmer, more like the intense young woman he’d fallen for, he wondered if there might be hope for their marriage after all—if they might yet find their way to a new arrangement.
But she still slept on the third floor and made him do his own laundry, and despite his renewed engagement with God he couldn’t rid his mind of Frances. As he wore out the shame of his behavior in her living room, through incessant revisiting of it, he remembered more clearly her own behavior: that she’d asked him, more than once, to hold her hand; that she’d put her arms around him from behind, in a supposedly friendly hug (weren’t friendly hugs frontal?); and that, moreover, she’d dressed for their date in a garment begging to be raised above her hips. With terrible hindsight, he saw that she’d offered him the very chance he’d dreamed of. And even if he’d had her only once, even if he was only a passing itch she’d felt like scratching, while high on drugs, it would have meant the world to him.
He was mourning his lost chance when God’s providence intervened. Although he sensed its awkwardness for Becky and Perry, he’d attended every Crossroads meeting in the new year. He was technically an adviser, but he’d embraced his inferiority to Rick Ambrose and comported himself like a newcomer, there to participate in exercises and explore his emotions, not to enable young people’s growth in Christ. On the last Sunday night in February, after Ambrose had parted the crowd in the function hall, as if it were the Red Sea, and instructed one half of it to write their names on slips of paper from which the other half would draw partners, Russ unfolded the slip he’d drawn and saw whom God had given him. The name on the slip was Larry Cottrell.
“The instruction here is simple,” Ambrose told the group. “Each of us tells our partner a thing that’s really troubling us—at school, at home, in a relationship. The idea is to be honest, and for our partner to think honestly about how to be helpful. Remember that sometimes the most helpful thing is just to be present and listen without judging.”
Russ had thus far avoided Larry Cottrell, to the point of never looking at him, and Larry seemed neither pleased nor displeased to be his partner—it was just another exercise. As the other dyads dispersed around the church, Russ led him upstairs to his office and asked what was troubling him.
Larry touched his nostrils. “So you know,” he said, “my dad was killed two years ago. We had a picture of him, in his air-force uniform, it was in our upstairs hallway, and then last week it wasn’t there anymore. I asked my mom why she took it down, and she told me … She told me she was tired of looking at it.”
The pimpled half-maturity of Larry’s face, the coarsening of his mother’s features by male hormones, corrected Russ’s notion that her looks were boyish. No boy looked like Frances.
“And then,” he said, “this guy she’s been dating, I mean, she’s probably lonely, but she gets all fluttery when she’s going out with him, and it’s like my dad never existed. He was one of the youngest colonels in the history of the air force … he was my dad—and now she doesn’t even want to see a picture of him?”
Russ was alarmed by the ambiguity of has been dating—whether the verb tense encompassed the present or referred to a period now past.
“So,” he said, “your mother has been, or was, at some point…”
“Yeah, I finally met the guy. She made me and Amy go to lunch with him.”
Russ cleared a sudden dryness from his throat. “When was this?”
“Saturday.”
Ten days after the marijuana experiment.
“It was horrible,” Larry said. “I mean, obviously I’m not going to like him, because he’s not my dad, but he’s so full of himself, he’s bragging about doing surgery for sixteen hours, he’s showing off to the waiter, and he talked to Amy like she was three years old. He’s so full of shit, and my mom’s all fluttery and fake with him.”
Russ cleared his throat again. “And you think this might—be a serious relationship? Your mother and the—surgeon? Is that what’s troubling you?”
“I thought he was out of the picture, and now suddenly everything is ‘Philip’ this and ‘Philip’ that.”
“Since—how long?”
“I don’t know. The last few weeks.”
“And—does your mother know how you feel about him?”
“I said I thought he was a pompous jerk.”
“And—how did she react?”
“She got mad. She said I was being selfish and hadn’t given ‘Philip’ a chance. Which, like—I’m selfish? She was supposed to be an adviser on Spring Trip. She acted all hurt that I didn’t want to be in the same group with her, and now she tells me she isn’t sure she even wants to go. ‘Philip’ wants to take her to some bogus medical conference in Acapulco, that same week.”
Russ’s face was ashen; he could feel it.
“Sometimes I’m almost, like, why did it have to be my dad who died? He was always yelling, but at least he paid attention. My mom doesn’t even care. She only cares about herself.”
There was recognizably a truth in this, but it didn’t bother Russ. He’d had enough of being married to a self-hating caretaker.
“Maybe you should tell her,” he said, “that you want her to come on Spring Trip. Tell her how much it would mean to you.”
“I don’t know which would be worse, having to be around her, or her being with that creep. It’s like I hate everyone.”
“Well, it’s good that you’re honest about your feelings. That’s what Crossroads is about. I hope you’ll consider me someone you can open up to.”
For the first time, Larry looked at Russ as if he were more than just a generic dyad partner. “Can I say something weird?”
“Ah?”
“She’s always talking about you. She keeps asking me what I think of you.”
“Yes—well. She and I have the circle together. We’ve gotten to be—friendly.”
“I’m going, Mom, he’s the minister. He’s married.”
“Yes.”
“Sorry—was that weird of me?”
For a moment, Russ considered leveling with Larry, perhaps trying to enlist his aid, but the memory of leveling with Sally Perkins scared him off. The terms of the exercise now obliged him to offer a story of his own, but everything that troubled him pertained somehow to Larry. He obviously couldn’t talk about his marriage, or about Perry’s drug use. Clem’s crazy attempt to join the army was also off-limits, because Larry was proud of his father’s service. On Russ’s desk was a copy of an engineering report on the church sanctuary’s south wall, which was in danger of collapsing. It could be argued that this troubled him.
When their allotted time expired, he sent Larry downstairs and stayed in his office to call Frances; he no longer had anything to lose. As soon as she heard his voice, the line went silent. Sensing that he’d overstepped, he rushed to apologize, but she cut him off. “I’m the one who should apologize.”
“Not at all,” he said. “For whatever reason, I had a bad reaction to the, ah—”
“I know. It was funny how paranoid you got. But it’s not like you could help it, and I totally understand why you ran away. You did the right thing—I was very, very out of line. That’s why I didn’t go to Tuesday circle last week. I was too ashamed of myself.”
“But that’s—why were you ashamed?”
“Um, because I basically tried to jump you? I can blame it on the you-know-what, but it was still completely inappropriate. I’m sorry I put you in that position. I’m in a much clearer place now. I did an honest reckoning, and, well, you don’t have to worry about me. If you can manage to forgive me, I promise it will never happen again.”
Whether the good news here outweighed the bad was hard to judge. His chance with her had been even better than he’d surmised, his blowing of it even more conclusive than he’d feared.
“I hope we can still be friends,” Frances said.
A week later, she called to invite him to an evening with Buckminster Fuller at the Illinois Institute of Technology. No sooner had he accepted, in his capacity as a friend, than she added that this was the kind of evening that Philip hated. “Did I mention I’m seeing him again? I’m trying to be a good girl, but it’s no fun being in an audience with him. He gets all fidgety, like he can’t stand it that people are paying attention to someone else.” Russ was discouraged that she imagined he cared to hear about Philip, encouraged that she complained about him. Reminding himself that she’d been attracted to him enough to try to “jump” him, despite his being married, he dressed for their date in his most flattering shirt and applied, for the first time, some of the cologne that Becky had given him for Christmas, only to find, when Frances picked him up at the parsonage, that Kitty Reynolds was in her car. Frances hadn’t mentioned that Kitty was coming, and Russ, being merely her friend, had no basis for objecting. Nor did he have any great interest in Buckminster Fuller, though he was careful not to fidget in his seat.
A consolation for losing Frances to the surgeon was that she didn’t avoid Russ on their next Tuesday in the city. She now evidently felt safe to ride in his Fury again, to prefer his company to Kitty’s and volunteer to work with him in an old woman’s Morgan Street kitchen, rolling onto its walls a paint color known as Ballerina Pink (wildly overproduced by its maker, now available for pennies) while he painted the edges. It was sad to be considered safe, but he was happy that she still wanted to be with him, happy to see her huddling companionably with Theo Crenshaw, happy to have helped her mend that fence.
The shock was therefore brutal when, on a gray March morning, she came to his church office and announced that she was quitting the Tuesday circle. It might have been the gray light, but she seemed older, more brittle. He invited her to sit down.
“No,” she said. “I wanted to tell you in person, but I can’t stay.”
“Frances. You can’t just drop a bomb like that. Did something happen?”
She looked close to tears. He stood up, closed the door, and managed to seat her in his visitor chair. Her hair, too, seemed older—darker, less silky.
“I’m just not a good enough person,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous. You’re a wonderful person.”
“No. My children don’t respect me, and you—I know you like me, but you shouldn’t. I don’t believe in God—I don’t believe in anything.”
He crouched at her feet. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“There’s no point in explaining—you won’t understand.”
“Try me.”
She shut her eyes. “Philip says I can’t go with you anymore. I know that sounds stupid, and if that’s all it was I wouldn’t—I might still go. But with everything else it’s just easier not to.”
The thought that the surgeon might be jealous of him—had reason to be jealous—only deepened Russ’s sense of defeat.
“He knew,” Frances said, “that I did volunteer work in the city. But when he found out where the church is, he said it was too dangerous. I tried to explain that it’s not so bad, but he wouldn’t listen, and—I hate being submissive. It’s not who I want to be, but in this case it’s just easier, because that really is who I am: I’m the person who does whatever’s easiest.”
“That’s not true at all. Have you talked to Kitty about this?”
“I can’t. Kitty won’t respect me, either. I mean—I know, I know, I know. I’m with another jerk—I know. Larry’s already barely speaking to me. I made him go to lunch with Philip, and Larry could see it—everyone can see it. I’m with a jerk again. A worse jerk, actually. Bobby at least wasn’t a racist.”
“No one should be allowed to tell you what you can and can’t do.”
“I know, and, like I said, if it was just Philip I might stand up to him. But the thing is, inside, I’m just like him. I still think I’m going to get raped or murdered every time I go down there.”
“These are deep patterns,” Russ said. “It takes time to develop new patterns.”
“I know, and I’ve been trying. I apologized to Theo, the way you told me to, and you were right—it made a difference. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Ronnie, how to help him, and so I talked to Theo again. According to him, the problem is that Ronnie’s mother is a heroin addict. I asked if he could get her into a treatment program—I offered to pay for it myself and let him say the money came from his congregation.”
“That is not the action of a person who isn’t good.”
“But he basically said it was impossible. He thinks Clarice would start using drugs again as soon as she gets out. I told Theo there has to be some okay foster family that would take a sweet little boy. I offered to talk to a social worker myself and make sure everything checked out. But Theo said, if I did that, the social worker would never let Clarice near Ronnie again. I said I thought that might be for the best. But Theo said Ronnie’s the only thing keeping Clarice alive, and that a social worker wouldn’t see that, because the state only cares about the boy’s welfare, not the mother’s. I tried to remember what you told me and not argue with him, but I pointed out that he’s okay with a situation no social worker would be okay with. I said that sooner or later something terrible is going to happen. And Theo just shrugs. He says, ‘That’s in God’s hands.’ And that shut me up. I didn’t argue with him.”
“None of this,” Russ said, “makes me think less of you. Quite the opposite.”
Frances didn’t seem to hear him. “I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t accept that God creates a situation so terrible there’s no getting out of it. To me, it’s like there’s a door, and behind the door is the inner city, and everywhere you turn there’s a situation so terrible that no one can fix it, and I’ve reached the point where I just can’t open the door again. I just want to shut it and forget what’s behind it. When Philip said I couldn’t go with you again, I had this horrid sense of relief.”
“I wish you’d told me sooner,” Russ said. “No situation is so hopeless that nothing can be done. Maybe, next time we’re down there, you and Theo and I can do some brainstorming.”
“No. I’m not going there again—it’s just not for me. I wanted it to be for me. I looked at you and I said to myself, that’s the person I want to be like. It was exciting to be with you, but I think I mistook being with you for being like you. The reality is I’m a crap human being.”
“No, no, no.”
“Apparently I’m turned on by jerks. I’m turned on by money, by trips to Acapulco, nobody judging me, nobody forcing me to open doors I don’t feel like opening. The idea that I could be a different kind of person was just a fantasy.”
“There’s a difference between fantasy and aspiration.”
“You don’t know my fantasies. Actually, you did see one of them—I’m still ashamed of that.”
Russ sensed that she’d come to him wanting to be saved but not knowing how; was edging toward a breakthrough and needed a push. But saved from what? From loss of faith, or from the surgeon?
“What exactly—was it?” he said. “The fantasy.”
She blushed. “I imagined you were somebody who didn’t let being married get in the way of—I imagined you could be a jerk.” She shuddered at herself. “Do you see the kind of person I am? It’s like I needed to drag you down to my level. If you were at my level, I wouldn’t have to keep looking up to you and feeling like I was falling short.”
His dilemma had never been plainer. She liked him for his goodness, it was the best thing he had going for him, and by definition goodness meant not having her.
“I’m not so good,” he said. “I’m like you—I did the easy thing. I married, I had kids, I took a job in the suburbs, and it’s made me nothing but unhappy. My marriage is a disaster. Marion sleeps in a different room—we barely speak—and my children don’t respect me. I’m a failure as a father, worse than a failure as a husband. I’m more of a jerk than you may think.”
Frances shook her head. “That only makes me feel worse.”
“How so?”
She stood up and stepped around him. “I never should have flirted with you.”
“Just give me a chance,” he said, jumping to his feet. “At least come to Arizona. There’s a spirituality in the air, in the people. It changed my life—it could change yours, too.”
“Yeah, that was another mistake. Trying to make you go there with me.”
“Not at all. If it weren’t for you, I might never have patched things up with Rick. You did a great thing for me. You’ve been such a bright star in my life—I don’t know what’s happened to you.”
“Nothing’s happened. It was only dreading this conversation—having to disappoint you. I’ll be fine as soon as I can close the door again.”
By way of illustration, she moved toward the door, and Russ couldn’t stop her. He was utterly impotent. All at once, he was seized by a hatred so intense he could have strangled her. She was insensitive and self-adoring, a careless trampler of records, a casual crusher of hearts.
“That’s bullshit,” he said. “Everything you say is bullshit. You’re only running away because you’re too chicken to face the goodness in your heart, too chicken to take responsibility. I don’t believe that disengaging from the world is going to make you happy. But if that’s the miserable life you want, we don’t need you in the circle. We don’t need you in Arizona. If you don’t have the guts to honor your commitments, I say good riddance.”
His emotion was authentic, but to express it so directly was a Crossroads thing. He sounded like Rick Ambrose in confrontation mode.
“I mean it,” he said. “Get the hell out of here. I don’t want to see you again.”
“I guess I deserve that.”
“Fuck deserving. You’re a mess of phony self-reproach. It makes me sick.”
“Wow. Ouch.”
“Just leave. You really are a disappointment.”
He hardly knew what he was saying, but in sounding like Ambrose he felt some of the power that Ambrose must have felt all the time. As if, however momentarily, the Lord was with him. Frances looked at him with a new kind of interest.
“I like your honesty,” she said.
“I don’t give a damn what you like. Just, on your way out, tell Rick you’re not going to Arizona.”
“Unless I decide to go. Wouldn’t that be a surprise?”
“This isn’t a game. Either you’re going or you’re not.”
“Well, in that case…” She made a little slide-step dance move. “Maybe I will. How about that?”
In his anger, he didn’t care. Her maybes were like needles to his brain. He dropped into his desk chair and turned away from her. “Suit yourself.”
Only after she was gone did he reconnect with his desire. All in all, he thought, their meeting could hardly have gone better. The revelation was how positively she’d responded to his anger, how negatively to his begging. He’d stumbled upon the key to her. If he kept away from her, let her think he’d lost his patience with her, she might yet defy the surgeon and go to Arizona.
But it was a torment not to know what she was thinking. The following Sunday, at the last Crossroads meeting before Spring Trip, he searched the teenaged throng for Larry, intending to ask him what his mother’s plans were. When he discovered that Larry, unaccountably, had skipped the meeting, his torment became acute. The next morning, first thing, he went to Ambrose’s office and asked if he’d heard anything from Mrs. Cottrell.
Ambrose was reading the sports section of the Trib. “No,” he said. “Why?”
“When I saw her last week, I had the sense she might bail out.”
Ambrose shrugged. “No great loss. We already have Jim and Linda Stratton for Many Farms. Two parents there is plenty.”
Russ was bewildered. A month earlier, when he and Ambrose had worked out the adviser assignments, he’d made sure that Frances was in his group.
“I thought—” he said. “That’s not right. We had Mrs. Cottrell down for Kitsillie.”
“Yeah, I switched her out and gave you Ted Jernigan. If she wants to wear blue jeans and hang out with the kids, she can do that in Many Farms. I’m not even sure why she’s coming—she kind of pulled a fast one on me.”
“You underestimate her. She’s in my Tuesday women’s circle. She really gets it.”
“Then we’ll see how she does in Many Farms.”
“No. She needs to be in Kitsillie.”
The eyes that flicked up from the sports pages were unpleasantly shrewd. “Why?”
“Because I’ve worked with her. I want her in my group.”
Ambrose nodded as if something made sense to him. “You know, I did wonder. Back in December, I wondered what moved you to come and see me. It was only because she’d been in my office the same day. She was hell-bent on going to Arizona, and then there you were, wanting to go to Arizona. I’m not taking anything away from the courage of what you did—I just had a little glimmer of wondering. I wouldn’t have thought of it if it weren’t for the business with you and Sally Perkins.”
“Mrs. Cottrell is thirty-seven years old.”
“I’m not judging you, Russ. Only saying I know you.”
“Then tell me this. Why did you swap her and Ted Jernigan? To spite me?”
“Cool your jets. I don’t care what you do on your own time. Just keep it out of Crossroads.”
“You need to put her back in Kitsillie.”
“Nope.”
“Please, Rick. I’m not demanding—I’m asking. Please do me this favor.”
Ambrose shook his head. “I’m not running a dating service.”
It seemed to Russ, as it had all winter, that every piece of good news—in this case, that Frances was evidently still on for Arizona—came paired with news more than bad enough to negate it. Ambrose had seen through him, and there was nothing he could do. He had no grounds for appeal beyond his having imagined a long walk alone with Frances, a hike up into the pinyon forest, a first kiss on a wind-scoured hilltop; and this was no argument at all. The Lord was with Ambrose.
When Russ went home that night, Becky informed him that she wasn’t coming on Spring Trip. A day earlier, he would have been relieved to hear it—she and her friends had signed up for Kitsillie, where she would have observed his attentions to Frances—but now it only seemed like another sign of their estrangement. Under the influence of Tanner Evans, Becky was becoming ever more hippieish and defiant, and she’d been staying out to all hours, even during the week. When Russ had tried to impose a weeknight curfew, she’d run to Marion, which had led to an impasse, resolved in Becky’s favor.
“I thought you were looking forward to the trip,” he said.
She was sprawled on the living-room sofa with her Bible. In her hands, in the militancy of her rejection of him, the Bible was oddly distasteful.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m not into it.”
The hippieish locution into it was also distasteful. “Into the trip? Or Crossroads generally?”
“Both. It’s like Ambrose said—it’s more of a psychological experiment than Christianity. It’s teenybopper relationship dramas.”
“I seem to recall that you’re still a teenager yourself.”
“Ha ha good point.”
“I’d looked forward to some time with you in Arizona. Is the idea that you’ll be alone here?”
“That is the idea, yes.”
“I hope you won’t burn the house down with some party.”
She gave him an insulted look and reopened her Bible. He no longer understood her at all, but it was true that her social life now seemed to consist of Tanner Evans. Because she and Russ and Perry had planned to go to Arizona, Marion was taking Judson to Los Angeles for spring vacation, treating him to Disneyland and visiting her uncle Jimmy, who was in a nursing home there. The trip was an extravagance, but Russ had known better than to argue, and Marion’s absence was a problem only now that Becky had decided to stay home. Very probably, Becky intended to use the empty parsonage to sleep with Tanner, which was another distasteful thought, mitigated only by Russ’s fondness for Tanner. Despite her new religiosity, Becky dressed and carried herself like someone sexually active—he really didn’t understand her. He only knew she’d never be his little girl again.
Early the next morning, he awakened with an idea so obvious he was amazed he hadn’t seen it sooner: Keith Durochie had told him not to go to Kitsillie. Keith had said that there was plenty of work in Many Farms, and who was Russ to argue with a Navajo elder? More to the point: Who was Ambrose?
A path to a week with Frances clear ahead of him, he went to his church office and waited until the hour was late enough to call Keith’s house. The woman who answered, on the fifteenth or twentieth ring, was not Keith’s wife.
“He’s at the hospital,” she said. “He’s sick.”
Russ asked what had happened, but apparently the woman had said all she could. Distressed, he called the offices of the tribal council, which Keith was a longtime member of, and learned from a secretary that Keith had suffered a stroke. How bad a stroke Russ couldn’t ascertain—the Navajos had taboos regarding illness. Setting aside his distress about Keith, he said he was arriving with three busloads of teenagers on Saturday night and needed to know where to go. The secretary connected him, through a loudly buzzing internal line, to a council administrator whose first name was Wanda and whose family name he didn’t catch. Perhaps because of the buzzing, she spoke with plangent enunciation.
“Russ,” she said, “you do not have to worry. We know that you are coming. You do not have to worry that we are not expecting you.”
Over the buzzing, Russ explained that Keith had suggested he avoid the mesa and go to Many Farms instead. To this, there was no response from Wanda, only buzzing.
“Wanda? Can you hear me?”
“Let me be completely honest and straightforward with you,” she said plangently. “Keith has had trouble on the mesa, but we have a federal mandate. There is work to be done at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. We have delivered cement and lumber to the school, and we will be very grateful for your help.”
“Ah—mandate?”
“It is a federal mandate and we have supplies for you. One of the women from the chapter has agreed to cook for you, as you requested in your letter. Her name is Daisy Benally.”
“Yes, I know Daisy. But Keith seemed to feel we’d be better off in Many Farms.”
“We know that a group is coming to Many Farms. All of the arrangements are in place.”
“Well, then, maybe, if you could accommodate two groups there, instead of one—”
“Russ, I am speaking to you in all respect. We are not expecting two groups in Many Farms. I will personally meet you here on Saturday and explain the work that we are hoping you will do at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. I will look forward to meeting you.”
Russ felt powerless against Wanda’s plangency, all the more so as a bilagáana. He hoped she might be easier to talk to in person, or that Keith would be well enough recovered to overrule her.
On Thursday night, after a long effort to fall asleep, he dreamed he was alone and lost on the Black Mesa, trying to get down from a trackless mountain. Far below him, he saw sheep and horses in a rock-strewn paddock, but to reach the trail leading down he had to climb higher, on ever stonier and steeper slopes. The terrain was unexpectedly vast, and the direction he was climbing seemed wrong, but he had to keep going to make sure. Finally he reached a cliff impossible to scale. Looking back, he saw that he was on a slope too nearly vertical to be descended. He saw sheer rock and yawning space and understood that he was going to die. Coming awake, in the barrenness of his marital bed, he recognized his situation. No path with joy at the end of it could be as arduous and convoluted as attaining Frances had become.
But this was a wee-hour recognition. By the time the buses rolled into the First Reformed parking lot, twelve hours later, his path seemed clear again. If Frances would only show up, he could sort things out in Many Farms. A cold March breeze was blowing, daffodils blooming along the church’s limestone flanks, the sun bright, the air chilly. In his old sheepskin coat, a clipboard in hand, Russ directed seminarians and alumni advisers in their toting of Crossroads tool chests, cans of Ballerina Pink and Sunshine Yellow, crates of rollers and brushes, Coleman lanterns. A parent adviser, Ted Jernigan, pulled up beside Russ in a late-model Lincoln and suggested that he load the buses closer to the church doors. Ted nodded at the seminarian Carolyn Polley, who was struggling with a tool chest. “That little girl is going to get hurt.”
Russ held up his clipboard, to indicate his supervisory role. “Feel free to pitch in.”
Ted seemed disinclined. He was a real-estate lawyer, a soloist in the church choir, a beefy former U.S. Marine, and thought very well of himself.
“I’m concerned about drinking water,” he said. “Do we have drinking water?”
“No.”
“Why don’t I run down to Bev-Mart and buy us a bunch of five-gallon bottles. Darra said some of the kids last year had diarrhea.”
“I doubt it was from the water.”
“Simple enough to bring some.”
“A hundred and twenty kids, eight days—that’s a lot of bottles.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“The water on the reservation comes from wells. It’s not a problem.”
Ted made the face of a man unused to deferring. It was a mistake, Russ thought, to bring a male parishioner on a trip where he would be subordinate to a junior minister. Russ could well imagine Ted’s opinion of him and his pastoral impracticality, his feeble salary, his indetectable contribution to the general good. The opinion was subtly implicit in Ted’s offer to buy water—to open his fee-fattened wallet, to effortlessly exercise his spending power. Putting him in Russ’s group had been selfish of Ambrose, if not deliberately cruel.
As the family cars streamed in, releasing kids in their paint-smeared jeans and their dirtiest coats, with their Frisbees and their sleeping bags, Russ had eyes for only one car. From within the misery of his suspense he glimpsed the relief of being free of Frances, of receiving a definitive no and moving on, of being anywhere else but where he was. When he finally spied her car on Pirsig Avenue, his misery made the moment of reckoning—whether she was joining him or simply dropping off Larry—feel curiously weightless. Thy will be done. As if for the first time, he appreciated the peace these words afforded.
The peace lasted until she stepped out of her car, wearing her hunting cap. When he saw Larry open the trunk and remove not only a fancy backpack, suitable for alpine trekking, but a large and feminine fabric suitcase, he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. It swept away his equanimity, exposed its falseness, stopped his breath. He was going to have her.
Secure in his presentiment, he busied himself with his clipboard, checking off the names of Crossroads members in the Kitsillie group. Unlike three years ago, bus assignments were now determined by destination, not by clique. Someone, presumably Ambrose, had drawn a heavy line through Becky’s name. Russ still half hoped and half feared that Becky would change her mind, but when he saw her and Perry pull up in the family Fury, without Marion along to drive it home, he knew she wasn’t coming. She didn’t even get out of the car while Perry retrieved his duffel bag.
As the Fury left the parking lot, Frances marched up to Russ. He pretended to consult his clipboard. “Oh hey,” he said.
Her eyes were glittering with drama. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you. You didn’t think I had the guts. It looks like you’re stuck with me and my phony self-reproach after all.”
He struggled not to smile. “That remains to be seen.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to Kitsillie. Rick wants you in the Many Farms group.”
She drew her head back. “In Larry’s group? Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“Larry doesn’t want me anywhere near him. Why did Rick do that?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Does he think I can’t hack it on the mesa?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“That is extremely annoying. I hope you didn’t make him do that.”
Russ had won the fight against smiling. “No. Why would I?”
“Because you’re mad at me.”
“It was Rick’s decision, not mine. Take it up with him if you’re not happy.”
“The only reason I came was to be with you on the mesa. Well, not the only reason. But I am very, very annoyed.”
In her face was the disappointment of a spoiled child, a slighted VIP. Maybe she was thinking of the Acapulco trip that she’d forgone.
“Who took my place?” she said. “Who’s going with you?”
“Ted Jernigan, Judy Pinella. Craig Dilkes, Biff Allard. Carolyn Polley.”
“Oh great.” She rolled her eyes. Russ wondered if his jealousy-provoking gambit might actually have worked. As he watched her stalk away, the arduousness of the long path behind him felt like nothing. She wanted to be with him, and he’d managed to conceal his delight.
Echoes of Biff Allard’s bongo drums were bouncing off the bank across the street, cigarette smoke and Frisbees in the air, a black dog in a bandanna hurdling guitar cases and hand luggage, kids dashing in and out of the church on missions of adolescent urgency, mothers lingering to embarrass long-haired sons with loving injunctions, the three bus drivers and the swing driver conferring over a road atlas, Rick Ambrose standing in his army jacket beside Dwight Haefle, who’d come outside to behold the glory of it all. As Frances walked up to the two men, Russ averted his eyes (Thy will be done) and went looking for the Kitsillie kids whose names were still unchecked. They were due to leave in ten minutes, at five o’clock, and the buses were still empty. There were last-minute runs to the drugstore, tragic partings of friends on different buses, the suitcase in need of late excavation from a luggage bay, the forgotten sack dinner, and, as always, in Russ’s experience, the one or two kids who were late.
“David Goya?” he shouted. “Kim Perkins? Anybody seen them?”
“I think they’re upstairs,” someone said.
Inside the church, as he climbed the upper stairs, he heard voices go silent at his approach. Sitting in the Crossroads meeting room, on a pair of legless couches, were David Goya, Kim Perkins, Keith Stratton, and Bobby Jett. Cool kids all; friends of Becky and Perry. Russ sensed that he’d caught them doing something wrong, but he didn’t see or smell anything forbidden.
“Guys, come on,” he said from the doorway. “We need you downstairs.”
Glances were exchanged. Kim, in stiffly new blue overalls, jumped up and gestured to the others. “We’re going, okay? Let’s just go.”
Keith and Bobby looked to David as if the decision was his.
“You guys go,” he said.
“What’s going on?” Russ said. “Do you have something to tell me?”
“No, no, no,” Kim said.
She pushed past him, out the door. Keith and Bobby followed, and Russ waited for David to explain. The agedness of David’s face and hair was so peculiar, it might have been endocrine.
“Seen Perry?” he said.
“Yes. Why?”
“Let me put it differently. Does Perry seem okay to you?”
Before the question was even out of David’s mouth, Russ intuited its pertinence. The scenario that came to him was complete and convincing: Perry would contrive to mess things up at the last minute, and all would be lost with Frances.
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said to David. “You and I can talk on the bus.”
“You haven’t noticed anything. He hasn’t seemed at all strange to you.”
It was true that Perry had been notably scarce in recent weeks, more like his former furtive self, no longer rising so early, but Russ said nothing. He needed to keep the bad scenario at bay.
“I saw him last night,” David said, “and he wasn’t making any sense. He can be that way sometimes—his brain works too fast to keep up with. But this seemed different. More like a problem with the entire circuit board. The reason I mention it is I’m concerned he might be violating the rules.”
Time was passing. Things of interest to Russ were happening in the parking lot. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “So, you think—has he been smoking pot again?”
“Not to my knowledge. Laudably or regrettably, that appears to be a thing of the past—I gather he made some kind of promise to you. My concern here is that I violate the rules myself if I fail to report a rules violation. My concern is that even now, as we speak, he isn’t unimpaired.”
God damn Perry. The scenario now included a call to Marion, explaining that she couldn’t go to Los Angeles because her son was messing up again, to which she might object that she’d already bought her plane tickets, to which Russ would reply that his job obliged him to lead a group in Arizona, whereas she and Judson were going to Los Angeles purely for pleasure, and that, moreover, she was the one who’d insisted that Perry was doing better.
David looked down at his long, bony hands. “I’m not just covering my ass, by the way. Something is definitely not right with him.”
“I appreciate your honesty.”
“Although, having taken the step of mentioning it, I’d be grateful if Kim and Keith and Bobby could be included under the umbrella of immunity.”
“I’ll speak to him,” Russ said. “You get yourself on the bus.”
His fear, as he went downstairs, was both new and familiar. His primary feeling about Perry had always been fear. At first it was fear of his operatic tantrums, later fear of his intellectual acuity, its application to mockeries too subtle to be called out and punished, its implicit piercing of Russ’s every fault and weakness. Now the fear was more existentially parental. He and Marion had brought into the world a being of uncontrollable volition, for whom he was nonetheless responsible.
In the parking lot, kids were mobbing the buses, rushing to claim seats. Looking around for Perry, Russ saw the most wonderful thing. The woman he wanted was standing by the Kitsillie bus. The driver was stowing her suitcase below. With a more delicious kind of fear, Russ hurried over to her.
“Here I am,” she said aggressively. “Like it or not.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged. “Dwight saved the day. I asked Rick why I wasn’t going to the mesa, and you know what he said? That you could use another man up there. I told him that was incredibly demeaning to me. I told him Larry’s at an age where the last thing he wants is his mother in his hair. I said maybe Rick should tell Larry he’d ruined his whole trip. And you know Dwight, always the diplomat. He asks Rick if there’s anyone I can trade places with. Which it turns out Judy Pinella is perfectly happy to do. I don’t know what Rick was thinking, but if he thinks I don’t care if I get the full experience, up on the mesa, he doesn’t know me.”
She was full of self-regard, full of entitlement, and Russ was smitten with every bit of it.
“Plus,” he suggested, “you and I get to be together.”
She made a coy face. “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”
“It’s a good thing.”
“Maybe you don’t hate me so much after all?”
This time, there was no suppressing a smile, but it didn’t matter—she obviously knew very well how he felt. It was inconceivable to her that anyone could resist her. And this, more than anything else, had set the hook in him. He couldn’t get enough of her self-love.
Flush with the likelihood of possessing it, of carnally penetrating it, commingling with it, he went to look for Perry. As he passed the Rough Rock bus, he saw Ambrose staring at him. His lip was curled with impotent disgust. There was no more pretending that the two of them weren’t enemies. It was frightening but also thrilling, because this time Russ had won.
Inside the Many Farms bus, kids were piling onto seats already taken, clambering over backrests. At the door stood Kevin Anderson, a second-year seminarian with a deep-pile mustache and the soft brown eyes of a seal pup. Before Russ could ask him if he’d seen Perry, Kevin asked him the same question. Apparently Perry had not been seen since he checked in.
Russ’s intuition of warning signs ignored, of necessary actions not taken, returned in force. The sun had sunk behind the church’s roofline but was still shining on the bank clock, which showed eight minutes past five. Except for Perry, the buses appeared to be fully loaded. Car engines were starting up, a few determined parents lingering to wave good-bye. It occurred to Russ that they could simply leave without Perry—let Marion deal with the fallout. But Kevin, whose heart was as soft as his eyes, insisted that they look inside the church.
Spring-smelling air followed them in through doors still propped open. Kevin ran upstairs, calling Perry’s name, while Russ checked the ground floor. Not just the air but the emptiness of the hallway, which minutes ago had teemed with activity, had a flavor of Easter. In the middle chapters of the Gospels, crowds of people followed Jesus everywhere, gathering around him on the Mount, receiving fishes and loaves by the five thousand and the four thousand, welcoming him with palm fronds on the road into Jerusalem, but in the late chapters the focus narrowed to scenes of individual departure, private pain. The Last Supper: clandestine and death-haunted. Peter alone with his betrayals. Judas going away to hang himself. Jesus feeling forsaken on the cross. Mary Magdalene weeping at the sepulcher. The crowds had dispersed and everything was over. The worst thing in human history had happened sickeningly fast, and now it was another Sunday morning in Judea, the first day of the Jewish week, a particular spring morning with a particular spring smell to the air. Even the truth revealed that morning—the truth of Christ’s divinity and resurrection—was austere in its transcendence of human particularity, in its own way no less melancholy. Spring to Russ was a season more of loss than of joy.
In the first-floor men’s room, even before he saw Perry’s feet in the farther stall, he sensed an airless stickiness, a male adolescent anxious to be left alone.
“Perry?”
The voice in the stall was muffled. “Yeah, Dad. One second.”
“Are you not feeling well?”
“Coming coming coming.”
“A hundred and forty people are waiting for you.”
On the rim of the sink were Perry’s wire-framed eyeglasses, newly prescribed for astigmatism. The frames weren’t the least expensive or most rugged that Marion could have let him choose, and indeed he’d already broken them. Finer wire was tightly wound around the damaged bridge.
The toilet roared, and Perry banged out of the stall, went to the sink, and splashed water on his face. His corduroys, though belted, were halfway down his hips. He no longer had any bottom to speak of; had altogether lost a lot of weight.
“What’s going on?” Russ said.
Perry violently pumped the paper-towel dispenser and tore off a yard-long sheet. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Everything is A-OK.”
“You don’t seem right to me.”
“Just pre-road nerves. A little episode of you-know-what.”
But there was no smell of diarrhea in the air.
“Are you on drugs?”
“Nope.” Perry put on his glasses and snagged his knapsack from the stall. “All set.”
Russ gripped him by his scrawny shoulder. “If you’re on drugs, I can’t let you on the bus.”
“Drugs, drugs, what kind of drugs.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there you go. I’m not on drugs.”
“Look me in the eye.”
Perry did so. His face was blotched with crimson, clear mucus seeping from his nose. “I swear to God, Dad. I’m clean as a whistle.”
“You don’t seem clean to me.”
“Clean as a whistle and frankly wondering why you’re asking.”
“David Goya is worried about you.”
“David should worry about his own pot dependency. As a matter of fact, I wonder what a search of his luggage might turn up.” Perry held up his knapsack. “You’re free to search mine. Go ahead and pat me down. I’ll even drop my pants, if you can stand the embarrassment.”
He was giving off a very sour mildew smell. Russ had never felt more repelled by him, but he didn’t have hard enough evidence to send him home to Marion. Time was passing, and the responsibility was his. He made himself take it.
“I want you in Kitsillie with me. You can have Becky’s place.”
A laugh burst from Perry like a sneeze.
“What?” Russ said.
“Could there be anything that either of us wants less than that?”
“I’m concerned that you don’t seem well.”
“I’m trying to help you, Dad. Don’t you want me to help you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll stay out of your business if you’ll stay out of mine.”
“My business is your welfare.”
“Then you must be—” Perry snickered. “Very busy.” He shouldered his knapsack and wiped his nose.
“Perry, listen to me.”
“I’m not going to Kitsillie. You’ve got your business, I’ve got mine.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Really? You think I don’t know why you’re going on this trip? It would be too hilarious if I knew it and you didn’t. Do you need me to spell it out for you? She’s a total F-O-X. And I don’t mean some esoteric oxyfluoride salt of xenon, although, interestingly, they’ve synthesized some salts like that, in spite of the supposed completeness of xenon’s outermost electron shell, which you’d think couldn’t happen, and, yes, I realize I digress. My point in mentioning chemistry was that it’s not the point, but you must admit it’s pretty incredible. Everyone assumed that xenon was inert, I mean it’s such a credit to the fluorine atom—its oxidizing powers. Wouldn’t you agree that it’s incredible?”
Perry smiled at Russ as if he believed he was following his nonsense and enjoying it.
“You need to calm down,” Russ said. “I’m not at all sure you should be coming with us.”
“I’m talking about a valence of zero, Dad. If we’re comparing your qualifications with mine, do you even know what a chemical valence is?”
Russ made a helpless gesture.
“I didn’t think so.”
Outside the bathroom, in the hallway, Kevin Anderson was calling Perry’s name.
“Coming,” Perry shouted cheerfully.
Before Russ could stop him, he was out the door.
Glancing at the mirror above the sink, he was dismayed to see a father with responsibilities. What he wanted more than anything was to have nothing to do with his son. At the thought of letting Perry’s disturbance and his mildew stink be Kevin’s problem, he felt a melting warmth in his loins. The warmth, which also related to Frances, plainly told him that the thought was evil. But every other scenario—getting Ambrose involved, locating Marion and making her deal with Perry, forcibly removing Perry from the bus, forgoing the trip himself or dragging Perry to Kitsillie—seemed worse than the next. Each of them would grossly delay the group’s departure, and Frances was waiting on the bus. To have her even once seemed worth whatever price God might later make him pay.
After Jesus had returned to his friends, eaten breakfast with them, let them touch him, he ascended to heaven and was never on earth again in body. What followed, as recounted in Acts, was a radical insurgency. The earliest Christians had all things in common—sold their possessions, shared whatever they had—and were militant in their counterculture. They never passed up a chance to remind the Pharisees of their hand in nailing the Christ to a tree. Their leaders were persecuted and forever on the run, but their ranks kept growing. It no doubt helped that Peter and Paul could perform miracles, but more crucial was Peter’s inspiration to extend his ministry to the Gentiles. From a fire that had started within the Jewish community and might have been safely contained there, sparks flew into the greater Roman Empire. Paul, who’d begun his career as the most zealous of persecutors, holding the cloaks of the mob that stoned Stephen to death, was the most tireless of the fire spreaders. When last seen, in Acts, he’d made it all the way to Rome and was living, unmolested, in a rented house. Unmolested but still an outsider, still an insurgent.
What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Roman Church and did their own persecuting, fell into their own complacency and corruption, and betrayed the spirit of Christ. Antithetical to power, the spirit took refuge and expressed itself in opposition—in the gentle renunciations of Saint Francis, the violent rebellion of the Reformation. True Christian faith always burned from the edge.
And no one understood this better than the Anabaptists. They began as a rebuke to the Reformation in northern Europe, which had retained the practice of universal infant baptism. For the Anabaptists, the voluntary choice of baptism, as an adult, was decisive. The book of Acts, an account of Christians so original that some of them had known Jesus personally, abounded with stories of adults seeing the light and requesting baptism. The Anabaptists were radical in the strict sense, returning to the earliest roots of their faith. They were correspondingly feared by Reformation authorities, such as Zwingli, and cruelly persecuted—banished, tortured, burned at the stake—in the first half of the sixteenth century. The effect was to confirm the radicalism of the Anabaptists who survived. In the Bible, after all, to be Christian was to suffer persecution.
Four centuries later, when Russ was a boy, memories of Anabaptist martyrdom were still vivid. The stories of Felix Manz and Michael Sattler, and of others killed for their beliefs, were part of the group identity of his parents’ Mennonite community, part of its apartness, in the farm country around Lesser Hebron, Indiana. The kingdom of heaven would never encircle the earth, but it could be approached on a small scale in rural communities that practiced self-sufficiency, lived in strict accordance with the Word, and pointedly removed themselves from the present age. The Mennonites chose to be “the quiet in the land.” To aspire to more was to risk losing all.
The Anabaptists of Lesser Hebron weren’t Old Order—they used machines; the men wore ordinary clothes—and they weren’t as communist as the Hutterites, but Russ as a boy heard little of the wider world and saw little of money. When he was twelve, he worked a long unpaid summer for a couple who’d lost their son to influenza, Fritz and Susanna Niedermayer, milking their cows and shoveling their manure in the assurance that they’d have done the same for the Hildebrandts had their situations been reversed. His older sisters disappeared for months at a time, helping families with new babies and leaving Russ with extra duties on the small farm his mother owned. They had a few cows, a large garden and a larger orchard, and ten acres for row crops that must have earned a bit of cash.
Like his own father before him, Russ’s father was the pastor of the church in Lesser Hebron. Unlike other men in the community, he wore a long, collarless coat that buttoned at the neck. In the parlor of the family’s house in town was a cabinet containing birth and marriage records, minutes of Anabaptist councils from more disputatious eras, and genealogies stretching back to Europe. Small groups of men could be found in the parlor at all hours of the day, conferring with his father and courteously accepting slices of his mother’s pies. There seemed to be no limit to their patience in maintaining their apartness, their nonconforming obedience to the Word. A dispute between neighbors or a fine point of worship could occupy them for weeks before his father effected a reconciliation.
Blessed are the peacemakers: Russ was proud of his father but afraid of his seriousness, his forbidding coat, the sober male voices in the parlor. He preferred the kitchen and felt closer to God there. His mother worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day, placid in her plain dress and her hair covering. According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her. In the time it took her to listen, actively, with clear-hearted questions, to one story he had to tell from school or the farm, she could make dough for a pie crust and roll it out, core and slice apples, and assemble a pie. And then, neither pausing nor rushing, she was on to the next chore. She made emulating Christ seem effortlessly rewarding. It horrified Russ to think that, four hundred years earlier, a person so quietly devout might have been put to death; it filled him with pity for the martyrs.
His other favorite place was the blacksmith shop of his mother’s father, his Opa Clement, whose work included the repair of automobiles and tractors. Clement showed Russ how to hold a glowing horseshoe with tongs, how to use tin snips to fashion cookie cutters (a Christmas present for Russ’s mother in 1936), how to rebuild a carburetor, how to hammer out a dented wheel and check its roundness with calipers. Clement’s wife had died before Russ was born, and although he had his daughter’s meditative way of working, her limpid rightness with the things around him, he’d become eccentric in his solitude. He subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, neglected his shaving and bathing, and sometimes omitted to worship with his brethren. At the end of an afternoon when Russ had helped him, he reached into the pocket of his pinstripe overalls, removed a fistful of money, and invited Russ to choose, from his blackened hand, any coin that had silver in it. Even as a teenager, Russ was too innocently devout to spend the money only on himself. It was unthinkable not to get his mother something, a package of gingersnaps, a bottle of peppermint extract.
Except for rendering taxes unto the government, as Jesus had sensibly advised, the community was quietly but firmly anti-state. They schooled their children separately, avoided polling places and courts of law, and declined to swear on the Bible if called as witnesses. Most central to their identity was their pacifism. On few points was the Gospel clearer than on the incompatibility of violence with love. As the community’s pastor, in 1917, Russ’s paternal grandfather had contended, on the one hand, with the anger and prejudice of non-Mennonite farmers—rocks thrown through windows of the Kaiser-lovers, a barn defaced with ugly words—and, on the other, with families in his congregation who’d permitted their sons to go to war. Two of the families eventually quit the community.
Russ was seventeen when the country entered the Second World War. He would have been obliged to lodge an objection of conscience sooner if the president of the local draft board hadn’t grown up on a farm adjoining the Niedermayers’. Cal Sanborn liked and admired the Mennonites and did everything he could to protect their sons. Russ was among the last to be called up, in 1944, and by then he’d completed five semesters at Goshen College. He’d also had his first crisis of faith, not in Jesus Christ but in his parents.
He’d enjoyed his classes at Goshen, but his only close friend was likewise the son of a pastor. In his ungainly tallness, as in the seriousness he’d inherited from his father, he felt uncomfortable with the earthier and more athletic boys, especially when their talk turned to girls. His father had told him that there would be girls at the college, and that he shouldn’t shy from fellowship with them, but Russ couldn’t look at a girl without thinking of his mother. Even to return a girl’s friendly smile was somehow to offend against the person he most loved and revered; it made him queasy. The cure was to take a walk of five or ten miles, in the country around the college, until his body was exhausted and his soul open to grace.
In his third semester he studied European history, and he was keen to hear what Clement, who paid attention to the world, had to say about the war. The blacksmith shop, with its bellows and its potbellied stove, was especially congenial at Christmastime. Each tool in it was known to Russ, each evoked memories of afternoons slowed and deepened by unspoken love. Each year at Christmas there was also a new tool, for Russ to keep as a gift, a hammer or a coping saw, an auger drill, a set of chisels. He felt bad about how little he’d used the gifts, but Clement assured him that someday they would come in handy. Russ’s experiences of grace seemed to presage a future as a pastor, like his father, and the only tool his father had any skill with was his letter opener, but he imagined that when he was settled, with a wife and family, he might take up woodworking as a hobby, a little eccentricity of his own.
Lesser Hebron was buried in snow when he got home. His father took him into the parlor, shut the door, and told him that Opa Clement wasn’t coming for Christmas and that Russ was not to visit him. “Clement is a drunkard and an adulterer,” his father explained. “We’re resolved to avoid him in the hope that he’ll repent.”
Greatly upset, Russ went to his mother for a fuller explanation and permission to see her father. He got the explanation—Opa Clement had taken up with an unmarried schoolteacher, a woman scarcely older than thirty, and had been drinking whiskey when his brethren went to reason with him—but not the permission. Although their community didn’t practice strict shunning, his mother said, a higher standard applied to a pastor’s family, and this included Russ.
“But it’s Opa. I can’t be home for Christmas and not see Opa.”
“We’re praying that he’ll repent,” his mother said placidly. “Then we can all be together again.”
Her equanimity was consonant with the primacy of Christ in her life, the secondary nature of everything else. The commandment to honor one’s parents came from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, although the rejoicing at a sinner’s reclamation was hundredfold, the sinner was first required to repent. Never mind an offending parent—you were supposed to pluck your own offending eye out. His mother was only as radical as the Gospel itself.
On Christmas morning, on the snow-dusted porch of their house, Russ found a small chest of white oak, the size of a child’s coffin. The wood was smoothly planed and fragrant, the brass fittings stippled with hand manufacture. Inside it was a note. For Russell on Christmas, I reckon you have enough tools to fill this, Love from your Opa.
Russ, weeping, carried the chest inside. He wept again later in the morning, when his father instructed him to get an ax and chop it up for kindling.
“No,” he said, “that’s a waste. Someone else can use it.”
“You will do as I say,” his father said. “I want you to look into the fire and watch it burn.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” his mother said mildly. “Let’s just put it away for now. My father may yet repent.”
“He won’t,” his father said. “Nothing in this world is certain, but I know his mind better than you do. Russell will do as I say.”
“No,” Russ said.
“You will obey me. Go and get an ax.”
Russ put on his overcoat, took the chest outside, as if he intended to obey, and carried it through the streets of Lesser Hebron. Because he loved his grandfather and love was the essence of the Gospel, he didn’t even feel defiant. He felt, instead, that his parents were somehow mistaken.
The blacksmith shop was shuttered, chimney smoke rising from the low rooms in back. Russ was less afraid of his father’s wrath than of finding his grandfather with a harlot, but Clement was alone in his little kitchen, boiling coffee on the woodstove. He looked like a new man—closely shaved and freshly barbered, his fingernails clean. Russ explained what had happened.
“I’ve made my peace with it,” Clement said. “I already lost your mother when she married, and that’s as it should be. No more than what the Scripture asks.”
“She’s praying for you. She wants you to—repent.”
“I don’t hold it against her. Your father, yes, but not her. She’s godlier than any of us. If Estelle were baptized again and married me, I don’t doubt that your mother would accept her. But I’ll be a sick old man soon enough. I don’t want Estelle feeling she has to take care of me. It’s blessing enough to have her now.”
The verb to have, the very name Estelle, the carnality they evoked, made Russ queasy.
“If God can’t forgive me,” Clement said, “so be it. But who’s to say if your father knows what God forgives? I’ve been to the Lutheran church, over to Dobbsville, with Estelle. Good people, plenty Christian—there are many ways to skin a cat. I can’t say as I’ve tried any of them, but I’ve skinned a raccoon, and the adage has it right. There are different ways of doing it.”
Leaving the beautiful chest safe with Clement, Russ went home and confessed to his mother what he’d done. She kissed him and forgave him, but his father never really did, because Russ had made his choice. When he went to Arizona and discovered for himself the different ways a cat could be skinned, the only disclosive letters he wrote were to his grandfather.
The alternative service camp was in the national forest outside Flagstaff, on the site of a former CCC camp. It was administered by the American Friends Service Committee, but a good third of the workers shared Russ’s faith. After he’d shoveled dirt for some months, painted picnic tables, planted trees, the camp director asked him if he could use a typewriter. Though still only twenty, Russ was among the older workers, and he’d had five semesters of college. The director, George Ginchy, set him up with a foot-tall Remington, its keys yellowed to the color of custard, in the antechamber of his office. Although Ginchy was a Quaker, from Pennsylvania, he was also a longtime college football coach and Boy Scout leader. His camp had a bugler who began the day with reveille and ended it with taps, a cook whose job title was quartermaster, and now, in Russ, an aide-de-camp. Ginchy liked everything about military life except the killing part.
One morning in the spring of 1945, the sun rose on a dusty black relic of a truck parked outside headquarters. Inside it, upright and silent, since sometime in the night, had been sitting four Navajo men in black felt hats. They were elders from Tuba City and had come to petition the camp director. George Ginchy welcomed them, widened his eyes at Russ, and asked him to bring coffee. Taking a pot into the office, Russ found three of the Navajo men standing against a wall with their arms crossed, the fourth studying a framed topo map in the corner, all of them silent.
Russ had never seen an Indian before, and he had so little worldly experience that he didn’t recognize the sensation in his heart as love at first sight. He thought the Navajos’ faces moved him because they were old. And yet, if he’d been asked to describe their leader, who wore a turquoise-clasped string tie beneath a fleece-collared coat, stiff with dirt, he might have used the word beautiful.
Ginchy uncomfortably said, “How can I help you gentlemen?”
One of them murmured in a strange tongue. The leader addressed Ginchy. “What are you doing here?”
“We, ah—this is a service camp for men with a conscientious objection to war.”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
“Specifically? It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. We’re improving the national forest.”
This seemed to amuse the Navajos. There were chuckles, an exchange of glances. The leader nodded at the pine trees outside and explained, “It’s a forest.”
“Land of many uses,” Ginchy said. “I believe that is the Forest Service motto. You’ve got your logging, your hunting, your fishing, your watershed protection. We’re improving the basis for all that. My guess is, somebody knew the right people in Washington.”
A silence fell. Russ offered a mug of coffee to the leader, who wore a wide silver ring on his thumb, and asked if he wanted sugar.
“Yes. Five spoons.”
When Russ returned from the antechamber, the leader was explaining to Ginchy what he wanted. The federal government, through its agents, had impoverished the Navajos by requiring severe reductions of their stock of cattle, sheep, and horses, and by unfairly siding with the Hopis in their land disputes. Now the country was fighting a war in which the Navajos sent their young men to fight, and conditions were bad on the reservation—fertile land eroding, the remaining stock fenced out of good pasture, too few able hands available for restoration work.
“War is bad for everyone,” Ginchy agreed.
“You are the federal government. You have strong young men who won’t fight. Why help a forest that doesn’t need helping?”
“I’m sympathetic, but I’m not actually the federal government.”
“Send us fifty men. You feed them, we’ll shelter them.”
“Yeah, that’s … We have procedures here, roll calls and so forth. If I sent people to your reservation, they’d be off my reservation, if you take my meaning.”
“Then you come, too. Move your camp. There isn’t any work to do here.”
“I don’t have authority for that. If I asked for authority, the government would remember I’m here. I’d rather they not remember.”
“They’ll forget again,” the leader said.
Already, in his first minutes of acquaintance, because he instinctively loved them, Russ grasped that the Navajos weren’t lesser than white men but simply very different. In his later experience, they were unfailingly blunt about what they wanted. They didn’t say please, didn’t bow to convention or authority. Disqualifications self-evident to white men were meaningless to them. White men chalked up the frustrations of dealing with them to orneriness and stupidity, but Russ, that morning, saw nothing stupid in them. It hurt to think that they’d come all the way from Tuba City, a drive of several hours, and sat for further hours in a freezing truck, with an idea that made sense to them. It hurt to think of them returning empty-handed, in some unguessable state of mind—disappointment? Anger at the government? Embarrassment for having been naïve? Or just mute perplexity? Russ had been thirteen when his beloved farm dog, Skipper, fell sick with what his mother said was cancer. The dog’s pain and infirmity soon reached the point where she made Russ ask a neighbor to shoot him and bury him. For Russ the hardest part of saying good-bye had been that Skipper couldn’t understand what he was doing to him, or why. The Navajo elders were the opposite of dumb beasts, but this only made imagining their perplexity more painful.
When the sugared coffee had been drunk, Ginchy took down the elders’ names and offered to send them a truckload of food and clothes. The leader, whose name was Charlie Durochie, was unmoved and didn’t thank him.
“That was a strange one,” Ginchy said when they were gone.
“They’re right, though,” Russ said. “The work here seems like make-work.”
“That’s some other fellow’s decision. I have to tread carefully, you know. Roosevelt wanted the army in charge of these camps.”
“But we’re supposed to be here serving, not building picnic tables.”
“The service I perform is keeping men out of the war. If that means building picnic tables…”
Russ asked him for permission to deliver the supplies to Tuba City.
“They didn’t seem much interested in charity,” Ginchy said.
“They didn’t say no.”
“You have a tender heart.”
“You do, too, sir.”
The next morning, in a truck driven by the quartermaster’s assistant and loaded with flour, rice, beans, and some work clothes left behind in the Depression, Russ rode north to Tuba City. In his innocence, he’d pictured tepees or log cabins in Indian country, tall trees with horses tied to them, clear streams running past mossy stones; he’d actually pictured mossy stones. The arid bleakness of the landscape he entered, after crossing Route 66, had not been imaginable. Dust hung in the air and coated every rock along the road. Lifeless buttes shimmered in the distance. Out on the parched plain were hogans more like piles of refuse than dwellings. In the settlements were houses of unpainted gray wood, roofless adobe ruins with holes in their walls, expanses of ash-darkened sand littered with rusted cans and broken roof tiles. Some of the smaller children, black-haired and round-faced, waved tentatively at the truck. Everyone else—old women wearing leggings beneath their skirts, old men with caved-in mouths, younger women who looked like they’d been born brokenhearted—averted their eyes.
Tuba City was a proper town, better shaded by cottonwoods, but scarcely less bleak. Russ now saw how comparatively much like Lesser Hebron the high forest was; how comparatively paradisal. The streams there were full, the forest double-carpeted with snow and pine needles, everything wet and white and fresh-smelling, and the men there, too—every last one of them—were white. To enter the reservation was to become aware of whiteness. Until he took a train to Arizona, Russ had never been more than sixty miles from Lesser Hebron, and although some of the non-Mennonite farmers had been ruined by the Depression, he’d never seen true privation. The Navajos had been stuck with barren land, seldom rained on. Witnessing their endurance of it, he had a curious sense of inferiority. The Navajos seemed closer to something he hadn’t known he was so far from. He felt, from his white height, like a Pharisee.
“Jesus Christ, this place is depressing,” the assistant quartermaster said.
The house to which they were directed seemed unfittingly tiny for a tribal leader, but a familiar black truck was parked in the dirt outside it, its front end elevated on stacks of earthen bricks. Charlie Durochie was watching a younger man hammer on a wrench connected to the truck’s undercarriage. One of the tires lay next to an emaciated dog licking its penis. From the doorway of the house, which stood open to the cold, a little girl in a frilly, faded dress stared at the white men in their better truck. Russ hopped out and reintroduced himself to Durochie, who was dressed exactly as he’d been the day before.
“What do you have,” Durochie said.
“What Mr. Ginchy promised. Some food, some clothes.”
Durochie nodded as if the delivery were more burden than relief. From beneath the old truck came a thud, a strong oath, a wrench skittering out into the dirt. In Russ’s grandfather’s shop, it was a sin against a wrench to hammer on it. Always better, Clement said, to use leverage.
“Do you have a longer wrench?” Russ couldn’t help asking.
“If I had a longer wrench,” the younger man said coldly, “would I be using this one?”
He reached for the wrench, and Russ extended a hand to shake. “Russ Hildebrandt.”
The man ignored the hand and picked up the wrench. His shoulders were broad in a chamois shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail that had no gray in it. He might have been fifteen years older than Russ, but it was hard to tell with Indian faces.
“Keith is my brother’s son,” Durochie remarked.
In a canvas bag in the cab of the camp truck, Russ found a longer wrench. Keith took it from him as if he expected no less. Russ asked Charlie where they should put the supplies.
“Here,” Charlie said.
“Just on the ground?”
Apparently yes. By the time Russ and his partner had unloaded the sacks of food and two bales of clothing, Charlie had disappeared. The little girl now sat in the dirt watching Keith hammer on a steering arm. “What’s your name?” Russ asked her.
She looked uncertainly at Keith, who stopped hammering. “Her name is Stella.”
“Nice to meet you, Stella.” To Keith, Russ added, “You can keep the wrench.”
“Okay.”
“I wish there were more we could do.”
Keith sighted along the steering arm, checking its shape. Already then, he had a presence that later served him as a tribal politician, a charisma that invited touch and trust. Russ just wanted to keep looking at him. The assistant quartermaster was in the camp truck, tapping his fingers on the wheel. The thing about a Navajo silence was the sense that it could last indefinitely—all day.
“Say we sent a crew up here,” Russ said. “What would we do?”
“I told my uncle not to bother with you. All he got was a broken truck.”
“I’d like to help, though.”
“My uncle thinks from a different time. I try to tell him the new lesson, but he won’t learn.”
“What is the lesson?”
“Your help is worse than no help.”
“But if I came back with a crew? What would be entailed, exactly?”
“Go home, Long Wrench. We don’t want your help.”
When Russ returned to the reservation, two months later, Keith Durochie continued to call him Long Wrench, possibly a reference to his height, more probably to his thinking he knew better. Being given a nickname was traditional, but he didn’t know this when he left that day. He felt disliked by someone he wished had liked him. In the weeks that followed, whenever he had hours of leave in Flagstaff, he went to the library and read what he could find about the Navajos. Despite being intransigent and thieving—to the point where they were rounded up and marched, en masse, to a prison camp in New Mexico—they’d been granted an immense piece of territory, which, according to various authors, and in contrast to the peace-loving, farm-tending Hopis, they’d proceeded to overgraze with herds of horses too numerous to be of practical use. To the U.S. government, the Navajos were a problem to be solved by force. To Russ, who was haunted by their faces, what needed solving was the mystery of them. He later had the same feeling about Marion.
In June, after Germany’s unconditional surrender, when the mood in camp was festive, he again raised the question of the Navajos with Ginchy. “We should be there, not here,” he said. “If I could show you the reservation, you’d see what I mean.”
“You want to go back there,” Ginchy said.
“Yes, sir. Very much.”
“You’re a strange one.”
“How so?”
“A lot of men would kill for what you’ve got. People used to come here and vacation.”
“It doesn’t seem right to be on vacation when other men are dying.”
“You don’t feel fortunate. You’re not happy to be my aide-de-camp.”
“No, sir. I feel very fortunate. But I’d rather serve people in real need.”
“That speaks well of you. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another twenty months, though.”
Russ’s disappointment must have been obvious. An hour later, when he was typing a report on camp hygiene, Ginchy came out to his desk with a roughly scrawled letter and asked him to do it up on letterhead. Reading the scrawl, Russ felt as though warm syrup were being poured over his head. It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.
To whom it may concern: I am the director of etc. etc. My assistant R.H. wishes to inquire into work needing performance on the N reservation. Please give him any assistance he may require. Yours etc. etc.
“Nobody cares what I do anymore,” Ginchy said. “My only concern is your safety. You can take the old Willys if you can get it running, but you’ll need to bring a partner.”
Though Russ was friendly with the men in his cabin, Ginchy’s favoritism hadn’t endeared him to them, and neither had Russ’s seriousness. The camp was like college that way.
“I’d rather go alone, sir.”
“That’s very Indian of you, but I’m the one in hot water if something happens to you.”
“Things can happen to two people, too.”
“Not as often.”
“I don’t need a partner. You can trust me.”
“That also is Indian. I offer you an apple, and you want the whole basket. Speaking of which—‘Thank you’?”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I will, of course, expect a full formal report.”
For his mission, after he’d repaired the Willys, Russ packed a bedroll, a change of clothes, his Bible, a notebook, twenty dollars of saved allowance, a canteen, toilet paper, and a box of food. He was still so dazzled by his luck that he was halfway down the forest road, on the morning of June 20, before it occurred to him to be afraid. He could be robbed or beaten up. The truck could wind up in a ditch. By the time he reached Tuba City, he ached from the work of keeping the Willys on the road. His shirt was soaked in the June heat.
Neither Charlie Durochie nor his truck was at the little house in town. When Russ found a woman down the street who spoke English, she said that Charlie was gone for the summer and Keith was with his wife’s people, up on the mesa. She nodded in a direction where there was only glare and dusty vacancy, no mesa.
Russ was now additionally afraid that his mission would be a bust, because, in all the vast reservation, he knew only two men to speak to. Inside the baking Willys, he shut his eyes and prayed for strength and guidance. Then he drove in the direction the woman had indicated.
The road up to the mesa was in places barely passable, the country relentlessly deserted but nevertheless dotted with bleached, shriveled cow patties. The Navajo men Russ encountered, one whittling a stick in the shade of an outcropping, two others watering horses at a tank beneath a rusted windmill, seemed to assume that a twenty-one-year-old white man looking for the Fallen Rocks people, as Keith Durochie’s in-laws were evidently known, must have had some reason. The men stressed, in their crude English, that the distance wasn’t short.
He had to stop every half hour to shake his cramped hands. When the air cooled and the shadows grew long, he pulled over by a decrepit stock pen and a tank into which water trickled from a crusty pipe. Small birds, ghostly in the twilight, were drinking from the seepage. The water was bitter, but his canteen was empty. On the mesa road, in six hours, he’d seen two women on a motorbike, one boy with a dog herding sheep, one old man driving a truck with coils of wire strapped to its bed, various free-roaming horses, and nothing resembling a town. He ate pork and beans from a can still warm from the day’s heat. Then, fearing scorpions, he bedded down inside the Willys. He missed George Ginchy. Through the windshield, he could see a sky clotted with stars and nebulae, but he was too homesick for the camp to get out and admire it.
In the cool of early morning, he traveled through an upward-sloping basin forested with juniper and pinyon. Along the road, on flats too dry to be called meadow, sheep grazed among thorny shrubs. There was a magnificent desertion to the country, rutted tracks branching off with mysteries at the end of them, a sense of lives present but hidden. He drove fifteen miles before he saw another person, and then it wasn’t one but a hundred.
Close to the road, beside a corral, were cook fires, horses, some trucks. Older men and women of all ages stood or sat around a structure of tree boughs festooned with scraps of red cloth. When Russ stopped and asked the nearest man, who was saddling a horse, where he might find the Fallen Rocks people, a scent of fried mutton entered the Willys. The man nodded up the road.
“At the chapter house. Follow the wash.”
“What does the chapter house look like?”
The man cinched the saddle and didn’t answer.
A long way farther up the road, Russ came to a neat, unmarked structure of mud and split logs beside a wash. The track next to it looked passable, and he followed it up into a shallow canyon, past fallen rocks the size of haystacks, an encouraging sign. In a side canyon still shaded from the sun, he found a proper small house, a stock pen, a yard with chickens in it. Beyond the pen was a hogan outside which women were cooking on an open fire. In front of the house, a little girl, Stella, was watching her father chop wood. At the sight of Keith Durochie, the tension of Russ’s long drive drained out of him. He felt like he’d come home.
Keith approached the truck, trailed shyly by Stella. “What the hell?”
“I’m back,” Russ said.
“What for?”
“Forgot my wrench.”
There was a silence before Keith smiled. He led Russ into the house, which had two rooms, one with a bed in it, and gave him sweet coffee and a cold, unsweetened sort of doughnut. When Russ explained that he was on a fact-finding mission, Keith said it would have to wait—he was doing a sing. He left Russ alone, by no means for the last time. Life among the Navajos meant a lot of waiting and not much explanation.
What a sing was he learned later in the morning, when a dust cloud boiled up from the canyon. The people he’d passed on the road were now on horses adorned with brightly colored yarn, followed by trucks similarly adorned and tooting their horns. The entourage proceeded past the house to the hogan where the women had been cooking. Nervous but curious, Russ crossed the yard for a closer look.
The lead rider was a short-haired young man whose face was painted black and red; in his hand was a tasseled black stick. He waited in the saddle until others from his group could help him down. Moving with a bad limp, he took the black stick into the hogan. Children were piling from the trucks and running to a shed where the food was. Keith and his kinswomen quietly greeted the adults. No one paid any attention to Russ.
From inside the hogan, a male voice rose tremulously in off-key song. Russ didn’t understand the words, but they went to his heart. The voice was like his grandfather’s, singing hymns in Lesser Hebron; Clement, too, sang off-key. After the song had ended, the hogan erupted like a small volcano, boxes of Cracker Jack flying out through its smoke hole. While the children pounced on them, Keith’s people distributed blankets to the older guests, who’d taken up a different song.
he-ye ye ye ya ŋa
’ėėla do kwii-yi – na
kį gó di yá – ’e – hya ŋa
he ye ye ye ya
Though the language was foreign, the voices of a congregation, raised in bright morning sun, deepened Russ’s sense of having come home. As the singing continued, Keith invited him to join the group for mutton and corn bread.
Only the children, Stella in particular, looked at him, and for a long time Keith was busy hosting. Russ might have grown bored if he hadn’t been so fascinated by the faces. When the party finally broke up, the entourage returning to their horses and trucks, Keith sat down and asked him where he was going next. Russ again mentioned his charge from George Ginchy.
“I told you not to bother,” Keith said.
“You said you’d talk to me after the sing.”
“It just started. We still have three days.”
“Three days?”
“That’s the new way. We don’t do the long sings anymore.”
“The thing is, the only people I know here are you and your uncle.”
“You won’t get to my uncle in your truck.”
“Well, so.”
Keith turned and, for the first time, looked at Russ directly. “What are you doing here?”
“Honestly, I want to know more about your people. The work is just an excuse.”
Keith nodded and said, “That’s better.”
He went to help his kinspeople, and Russ fell asleep on the ground. He was awakened by the smell of gasoline. Keith was filling the tank of a small truck through a funnel with a muslin filter. Already seated on the cargo bed were Stella and a slender young woman with a bundled baby. “You ride in front with me,” Keith said.
Making the woman sit in back didn’t seem right to Russ, but to Keith the matter was already settled. The little truck had a suspension well suited to the rutted canyon road. After a long while, as Keith drove, his silence became so trying that Russ asked him what a sing was.
“We’re helping our friend,” Keith said. “He came back from the Pacific out of harmony. He walks bad, from shrapnel, and he doesn’t sleep—the enemy’s burned flesh is in his nose. The enemy looked like us, not like the bilagáana, and their spirits got inside him. He brought home an enemy shirt that he can smell the war in. It will be part of the sing.”
Though Russ didn’t understand every detail, the communal healing of a man brutalized by war made thrilling sense to him. He had many more questions, but he made himself parcel them out slowly as the truck retraced his morning drive. He learned that the woman in back was Keith’s wife, the baby his two-month-old son. Keith’s father-in-law, riding ahead of them on horseback, carrying the ceremonial black stick, was a medicine man and a friend of Charlie Durochie from a boarding school in Farmington, New Mexico. Keith had attended the same school and worked for some years on oil rigs before he married into the Fallen Rocks clan. He now managed his in-laws’ ranch on the mesa.
Each fact Keith offered seemed to Russ a precious stone. He felt hopelessly inferior to Keith, as lovers do, and was reluctant to take his eyes off him. What Keith thought about Russ was less clear. Russ had the sense of being more than just tolerated, of being at least amusing in his ignorance, but Keith showed little curiosity about him. The only question he asked on the drive was “You a Christian?”
“Yes,” Russ said eagerly. “I’m from the Mennonite faith.”
Keith nodded. “I knew their missionaries.”
“Here? On the reservation?”
“In Tuba City. They were all right.”
“So—are you—do you worship?”
Keith smiled at the road ahead of them. “Everyone drinks Arbuckle’s coffee. All over the world, Arbuckle’s coffee. Your religion is like that— I guess it must be pretty good coffee.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We don’t send our coffee around the world. You have to be born here to drink it.”
“But that’s what I love about the Bible. Anyone, anywhere, can receive the Word—it’s not exclusive.”
“Now you sound like a missionary.”
Russ was surprised to feel ashamed.
Many miles down the main mesa road, they reached an encampment where fires were being built, blankets shaken open, slabs of raw mutton handled, a flaccid basketball kicked around a grassless pasture by shouting boys. Several hundred people were at the camp. The sight of them created a pressure in Russ’s head, a sense of too much immersion too quickly. To relieve it, he set off down the road by himself, into the setting sun.
A raven was croaking, jackrabbits browsing in sagebrush shadows. A snake, both startling and startled, went airborne in its haste to leave the road. As soon as the sun dropped behind a ridge, a breeze came through the valley, carrying smells of warmed juniper and wildflower. Turning back, he saw smoke rising from a distant bonfire, the cliffs behind it pink with alpenglow. He saw that he’d been wrong about the Navajos’ land. The beauty of the national forest was friendly and obvious. The beauty of the mesa was harsher but cut deeper.
Feasting was in progress when he returned to the camp. He hadn’t known to bring anything but the clothes he was wearing, his pocket knife and wallet, so Keith gave him blankets from the truck. Even if Keith’s wife hadn’t been nursing, Russ would have been too shy to speak to her, because she was Keith’s wife. While he ate mutton and beans and bread, competing songs wafted over from other cook fires. Someone was beating on a drum.
The dancing started when the sky was fully black. Standing with Keith, Russ watched a young woman circle the bonfire, stepping in rhythm with the drum, while a crowd clapped and chanted. Other young women joined her, and soon some of the older men were dancing, too. The pressure in Russ’s head had given way to exhilaration and gratitude. He was a white man alone among the Indians, hearing the women sing and chant. Resinous knots of juniper exploded in orange sparks, the stars dimming and brightening in swirling smoke, and he remembered to thank God.
One of the younger girls peeled off from the fire and came over to him. She touched his shirt sleeve. “Dance,” she said.
Alarmed, he turned to Keith.
“She wants you to dance.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“Dance with me,” the girl insisted.
She wore a bulky shawl and a skirt with a Mexican ruffle, but her calves were bare and slim. Her forwardness was so alien to Russ’s experience, she was like a threatening animal, and he didn’t know how to dance; it had been verboten in Lesser Hebron. He waited for her to go away, but she stood patiently, her eyes on the ground. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and he was a tall, white, older stranger. He found himself touched by her courage.
“I’m not a dancer,” he said, taking a step toward the fire, “but I can try.”
The girl smiled at the ground.
“You need to give her a little money,” Keith said.
This bewildered Russ. But the girl, too, seemed confused. Her smile, in the firelight, was edged with disappointment. Not wanting to offend her, he took a greenback from his wallet. She snatched it and hid it in her skirt.
He had no idea what to do, but he joined the circle and stepped as well as he could, following the girl, who did know what to do. The slimness of her legs and the shimmy of her hips brought out the queasiness in him. But now, in the flickering orange light, amid the beating of the drum and the chanting of female voices, he understood that the queasiness had nothing to do with pity or revulsion. It was heart-quickening excitement. Beneath the girl’s shawl and skirt was a body that a man could want; that Russ himself could want. A suspense that had hitherto existed only in disturbing dreams, dreams that ballooned into apocalyptic heat and ruptured in the soiling of his pajamas, had invaded the world he was awake in. What made the dreams so disturbing was how painless it was, how ecstatically pleasurable, to be consumed in flame.
The girl’s interest in him seemed to have expired when he gave her money. After a politely long interval, he stepped out of the circle and retreated into the dark. As soon as the girl noticed, she ran over to him. Her expression was now closer to angry.
“Keep dancing or give her money,” someone, not Keith, called to him.
He couldn’t imagine what money had to do with healing a soldier’s psychic wounds, but he fumbled with his wallet and gave her another greenback. Satisfied, she left him alone.
He awoke in the morning, on the ground beside Keith’s truck, still excited, still prickling with his new awareness, and daunted by the prospect of further immersion. Feeling the need for a walking cure, he told Keith he was going back to the ranch and would wait for him there.
“Take a horse,” Keith said. “You could die in the sun.”
“I’d rather walk.”
The walk was brutal, seven hours under a sun ever hotter and whiter. Keith had given him a skin of water and some bread wrapped in a rag, and he’d exhausted both before he reached the turnoff at the chapter house. By then, in the white heat, the road had ceased to be a line leading rationally from an origin to a destination. It had become, in his mind, the defining engenderer of everything that wasn’t road—stony slopes boiling with grasshoppers, stands of conifers made blacker by the blazing light, seemingly proximate rock formations whose respective positions his progress refused to alter. Either his ears or the air rang so loudly that he couldn’t hear his footsteps. He mistook a hovering falcon for an angel, and then he saw that the falcon was an angel, unaffiliated with the God he’d always known; that Christ had no dominion on the mesa.
By the time he reached the ranch, he’d walked his way out of all certainty, and the cure hadn’t worked. The very thing he’d been fleeing awaited him in Keith’s little house. The spirit of the girl he’d danced with had preceded him, outrun him, to the bedroom. Parched and sunburned though he was, he lay down and opened his pants to see if the dreamed apocalypse could be achieved while he was awake. He discovered that, with a bit of chafing, it very quickly could. The pleasure that tore through him was the more glorious for being waking, and there wasn’t any punishment; he wasn’t struck blind. He wasn’t even ashamed of the splatter. No one could see him, not even God. For the rest of his life, he associated the mesa with the discovery of secret pleasure and permission.
When Keith came back with his family, two days later, he put Russ to work on the ranch. To the farming skills Russ already had he added new ones. He learned how to lasso a calf, how to catch a horse on a range without fences, how to compel a cow to walk backward in a narrow gully. He experienced the misery of sheep dip for all concerned, both the sheep and anyone who touched the vile liquid. Keith’s brother-in-law castrated a stallion and threw a bloody testicle at Russ, and Russ threw it back at him. He and Keith rode far up the canyon and camped beneath a milky host of stars, saw the silent silhouettes of gliding owls, heard spirits whistling in rock crevices, ate roasted pinyon nuts. When his worst fear was realized, in the form of a scorpion sting on his ankle, he learned that it merely hurt like the dickens.
The longer he stayed with the Diné, the more resemblance he saw with his own community in Indiana. The Diné, too, preferred to live apart and seek harmony, and their women were like his mother—sturdy and patient, permitted to own land. In the stories kept alive by medicine men, the original divine mother, Changing Woman, who was named for her seasons, had partnered with the Sun and given birth to twin sons. Like Russ’s mother, Changing Woman was associated with the fruit of the land. She’d raised the sons and instilled them with practical wisdom, while the solar father, though necessary for creating life, remained aloof. And just as Mennonites recalled their martyrs, so the Diné sang of their Long Walk to the prison camp in the 1860s, the years of disease and hunger inflicted on them there. The Diné, too, defined themselves by persecution, and their country, close to nothing, welcoming to no one, a desert, was even godlier than Indiana. It was in the desert, after all, that the Israelites had received the Word of God, the one God of all mankind, and that Jesus, while summoning clarity for his ministry, had prayed for forty days and forty nights.
During Russ’s forty days in Diné Bikéyah, Keith advised him not to point at shooting stars, not to whistle at night, not to look a stranger in the eye, and not to ask a man his name before it was offered. When a Diné man died in his hogan, his family had to burn it and destroy whatever had touched him. Out on the open mesa, Keith nodded at a sun-bleached horse skeleton, still saddled a decade after the horse’s rider had been struck by lightning, and told Russ to stay away from it. Keith said the man’s bad luck adhered to the spot, and Russ, in the shimmering heat, the rarefied air, found that this made sense to him. While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present. To God, the site of the lightning strike wasn’t just the spot where a man had died but the spot where he would later die and the spot where, in God’s perfect knowledge, he was forever dying. Being in the desert made a mystery like this accessible.
Because he was working hard, for people who could use the help, he didn’t feel guilty about his official mission, but George Ginchy had told him that if he wasn’t back by August he would send a search party. Accordingly, at first light on the thirty-first of July, he packed and fueled the Willys and took his leave of Keith and Stella, who were the only others awake. Stella ran up to him and wrapped her arms around his leg. He picked her up and stroked her head.
“I’ll come back,” he said. “I don’t know when, but I will.”
“Careful what you promise, Long Wrench.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. Was I, Stella?”
She squirmed bashfully. He set her down, and she went to her father. Ever unsentimental, Keith was already walking away.
Russ still knew hardly anything about the Diné, but at least he knew how much he didn’t know. The desert had only strengthened his belief in God, but he was no longer certain that his ancestral faith was the truest version of the one true faith. After he returned to the service camp, where Ginchy, not punitively, simply out of practicality, had found another worker to be his aide-de-camp, Russ began to investigate the many ways there were to skin a cat. He now worked for the quartermaster and could safely take an extra hour, on a Flagstaff supply run, to stop at the library and read books shelved in the Dewey decimal 290s, world religions. At the camp, on Sunday mornings, he tried worshiping with Ginchy and the Quakers. Their silences, though agreeable to him, seemed shallower than Navajo silences, less embedded in a comprehensive way of being. But he could never be a Navajo; their coffee wasn’t for him to drink.
One Sunday morning in November, continuing his investigation, he drove the old Willys to the Catholic church in Flagstaff. He’d detected, in a book about Saint Francis, an appealingly uncompromising spirit. From a pew at the rear of the church, amid the fragrance of burning tapers and the feeble light from colored windows, he could see the mantillas and gray braids of old Mexican women, the more modern American dress of middle-aged couples, and the pale nape of a woman whose head was deeply bowed. The priest, who was elderly, with a serious tremor, spoke a language as unintelligible as Navajo, and the service wasn’t short. Russ’s eyes kept returning to the pale neck in front of him. It aroused a sensation he’d formerly misapprehended as queasiness and now associated with pleasure in secrecy. The woman was small and delicate, her hair cut in a bob.
In Lesser Hebron, Communion was a major semiannual event taken in full fellowship, using bread that the women had communally kneaded and baked. Catholic Communion seemed almost as alien to Russ as a Navajo sing. The priest invited sacrilegious comparison to a doctor with a tongue depressor, the congregants to children queuing up for lunch. Only the woman with the pretty neck received her wafer with visible feeling. She kneeled with a quaking vulnerability, reminiscent of his mother’s intensity of faith. As she returned to her pew, he saw that she was full-mouthed and dark-eyed, possibly no older than he was.
After the service, he asked the priest if he could come again and receive Communion as a visitor. The priest explained why he couldn’t, but he said that Russ was welcome to observe and worship. Russ duly revisited Nativity the following Sunday, but this time he was defeated by the Latin of it all. The church’s thick walls, which a week earlier had felt sheltering, now struck him as a monument to a living faith gone dead, a once-molten spirit congealed into cold stone by the passing of centuries. The dark-eyed young woman was there again, alone again, but the fervor of her faith now seemed to exclude him.
Abandoning his experiment, he returned to worshiping with his fellow Mennonites in camp, but he felt no great fellowship with them. The truth was, he missed the mesa, the immanence of God in every rock, every bush, every insect. He took to hiking up the forest road, alone, on Sunday mornings. There he did sometimes sense God’s presence, but it was feeble, like sun hidden by winter clouds.
One afternoon in March, while he was at the library in Flagstaff, abusing his camp privileges, leafing through a book of photographs of Plains Indians, a young woman sat down across the table from him and opened a math textbook. She was wearing a plaid cowboy shirt and had her hair in a bandanna, but he still recognized her. In the library’s better light, she was easily the most handsome woman he’d seen since his eyes were opened by a Navajo dancer. Embarrassed to be looking at a picture book, as if he were illiterate, he stood up to fetch a different book.
“I know you,” she said. “I saw you at Nativity.”
He turned back. “Yes.”
“I only saw you twice. Why?”
“Do you mean why only twice, or why was I there at all?”
“Both.”
“I’m not Catholic. I was just—observing.”
“That explains it. Young Catholic gentlemen are few and far between. I notice you never came back.”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“So you just said. If you say it a third time, I’ll think you’re warding off some hex.”
Her sharpness surprised him, as did the directness with which she proceeded to question him. Having sensed a resemblance to his mother, he might have expected softness and modesty. While learning nothing more about her than her name, which was Marion, he told her where he came from, why he was in Flagstaff, and how the Navajos had led him to explore other faiths.
“So you just took a truck and disappeared for a month?”
“A month and a half. The camp director was very generous.”
“And you weren’t scared to go there by yourself?”
“I probably should have been more scared. Somehow it didn’t occur to me.”
“I would have been scared.”
“Well, you’re a woman.”
The noun was innocuous and everyday, but he blushed to have spoken it. He’d never engaged in conversation with a woman he consciously found attractive—wouldn’t have guessed how taxing it would be. That she seemed impressed with his story made it all the more taxing. He finally, awkwardly, said he ought to let her get on with her studying.
She regarded her textbook sadly. “The mind so drifts.”
“I know. I struggle with math myself.”
“It’s not a struggle, it’s just dry. I get hungry to be with God.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if God were a sandwich.
“I do, too,” Russ said. “That is—I know what you’re saying. I miss being with the Navajos. They get to be with God all day, every day.”
“You should come back to Nativity. You might find what you’re looking for. I didn’t even know I was looking till I went there.”
Another man might have been put off by her religiosity, but to Russ it was no more than a version of what he’d grown up with. Less placid, but familiar. It no longer disturbed him that a girl called his mother to mind. It had dawned on him that his mother wasn’t simply his mother, wasn’t merely a figure of sacred devotion. She was a flesh-and-blood woman who herself had once been young.
When he returned to the Catholic church, the next Sunday, Marion sat beside him and whispered brief explanations of the liturgy. He tried to connect to Christus, as the priest called him, but he was thwarted by the proximity of her little self. She wore a coat dyed bright green and collared with darker green velveteen. Some of her nails were chewed, the torn cuticles edged with dry blood. She knit her fingers together so tightly in prayer that her knuckles whitened, her breath faintly rasping from her open mouth. Because her passion was directed at the Almighty, Russ felt safe to be excited by it.
After the service, he offered her a lift in the Willys.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I have to walk.”
“I like walking, too. It’s my favorite thing.”
“I have to count the steps, though. I did it once, a couple of years ago, and now I can’t stop, because … Never mind.”
Two old, slow women had emerged from the church speaking Spanish. Cherry Avenue was so quiet that pigeons were camped out in the middle of it.
“What were you going to say?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I have to start at the door of the church and make sure it’s the exact same number of steps every time, because that’s how I know God is still with me. If I ever counted one step too many, or too few…” She shuddered, perhaps at the thought, perhaps with embarrassment.
“My number of steps wouldn’t be the same,” Russ offered, although she hadn’t invited him to join her.
“That’s right, you’re tall. You’d have your own number—except you shouldn’t have a number. I shouldn’t have a number. I’m too superstitious already.”
“The Navajos have all sorts of superstitions. I’m not sure they’re wrong.”
“It’s an insult to God to think that counting steps has any bearing.”
“I don’t see the harm in it. The Bible is full of signs from God.”
She raised her dark eyes to him. “You’re a kind person.”
“Oh—thank you.”
“Maybe you can walk with me and distract me. I think, if I could walk even once without counting, I wouldn’t have to count anymore. Unless”—she laughed—“I get struck dead because I wasn’t counting.”
She was a mysterious combination of sharp and odd. The delicacy of her neck, visible above her velveteen collar, continued to fascinate him. In Lesser Hebron, and at Goshen, too, female napes had been concealed by plaits or tresses. As he walked her home, he learned that she’d grown up in San Francisco and had dreamed, foolishly, of being a Hollywood actress. She’d worked in Los Angeles as a typist and stenographer before moving to Flagstaff to live with her uncle. For a short while, she’d considered entering a convent, but now she was studying to be an elementary-school teacher. Being small, she said, she’d found that children trusted her, as if she were one of them. She said she hadn’t been raised Catholic—her father had been a nonobservant Jew, her mother a “Whiskeypalian.”
Each disclosure widened the vista of what Russ didn’t know about America. Although, by his calculation, she was only twenty-five, the place-names she dropped so casually, San Francisco, Los Angeles, were totemic of experiences more various than a woman from Lesser Hebron could expect in her entire life. As with Keith Durochie, he felt ignorant and inferior, and again the feeling was indistinguishable from attraction. It never crossed his mind that Marion might be attracted to him, too; that in her narrow Flagstaff ambit, with most of the country’s young men overseas, his apparition at Nativity had been as singular to her as hers was to him. Even if she hadn’t been significantly older, he had no concept of himself as an object of desire.
Her uncle’s house, on the outskirts of town, was low and ramshackle, its yard overrun with prickly pear. In the driveway stood a Ford truck blasted paintless by Arizona sand. Marion ran up to the front door and stamped on the mat there, spread her arms, and raised her face to the blue, blue sky. “Here I am,” she called to it. “Strike me dead.”
She looked at Russ and laughed. Trying to keep up, he managed a smile, but now she was frowning. Part of her oddness was how suddenly her expressions changed.
“I’m terrible,” she said. “This could turn out to be the moment when my fatal cancer started.”
“I don’t know that God minds a joke. Not if you sincerely love Him.”
Still serious, she came back down the walk. “Thank you for that. I do believe you’ve cured me. Would you like to stay for lunch?”
When he demurred—he was already derelict, owing to the length of Catholic mass, and he still had to retrieve the Willys—Marion insisted on walking back to the church with him. The taxation of being with her grew heavier as they retraced their steps. She admired his pacifism, admired his impatience at the camp, admired his compassion for the Navajos. Every time he glanced down, her brown eyes were glowing up at him. He’d never felt a gaze so unconditionally approving, and he lacked the experience to recognize the willingness it signaled. By the time they reached the truck, the stress of it had given him an actual headache. He offered to run her back to her uncle’s, but her face had clouded again.
“What you said earlier—that it doesn’t matter what we do as long as we love God. Do you really think that’s true?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The Navajos don’t accept Christ, and I don’t know that they’re eternally damned. It doesn’t seem fair that they would be.”
She lowered her eyes. “I don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“You—really?”
“I think the only thing that matters is the state of your soul while you’re alive.”
“Is that—Catholic teaching?”
“Definitely not. Father Fergus and I discuss it all the time. To me, there’s nothing realer in the world than God, and Satan is no less real. Sin is real and God’s forgiveness is real. That’s the message of the Gospel. But there’s not much in the Gospel about the afterlife—John is the only one who talks about it. And doesn’t that seem strange? If the afterlife is so important? When the rich young man asks Jesus how he might have eternal life, Jesus doesn’t give him a straight answer. He seems to say that heaven is loving God and obeying the commandments, and hell is being lost in sin—forsaking God. Father Fergus says I have to believe that Jesus is talking about a literal heaven and hell, because that’s what the Church teaches. But I’ve read those verses a hundred times. The rich young man asks about eternity, and Jesus tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that’s right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn’t have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive. So I’m in quite a bit of trouble with Father Fergus.”
Russ stared at the little green-coated woman. He might have just fallen in love with her. It wasn’t only the depth of her engagement with a question of urgency to him. It was hearing, in her words, a thought that had been latent in him without his being able to articulate it. His sense of inferiority became acute. Paradoxically, instead of making him shy of her, it made him want to bury himself in her.
“I should go inside and pray,” she said. “It stinks to feel so close to God and not be a better Catholic. My progress has been stymied for quite some time.”
“Can I come again next week?”
She smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind my saying, you’re not the most promising candidate, Mr. God Doesn’t Mind a Joke.”
“But you’re struggling with the creed yourself.”
“I have good reason to.”
“What—reason?”
“I’d frankly rather—do you think you’ll ever go back to the reservation?”
“Sometime, yes, absolutely.”
“Maybe you can take me along with you. I’d like to see it for myself.”
The thought of taking her to the mesa was like a reward in heaven, amazing but remote. For now, it felt more like a brush-off. “I’d be very happy to show it to you.”
“Good,” she said. “Something to look forward to.” She turned away and added, “You know where to find me.”
Did she mean that he could find her whenever he pleased, or only when he was returning to the reservation? As the words of Jesus were ambiguous, so were hers. He was still struggling to parse the ambiguity, two days later, when an envelope bearing only a Flagstaff postmark, no return address, arrived for him in camp. He took it to his cabin and sat down on his bunk.
Dear Russell,
I was remiss not to thank you again for curing me of my superstition. You were so lovely to put up with me—I felt as if the sun had come out after a month of clouds. I hope you find everything you’re looking for and more.
Yours in God and friendship,
Marion
Here, too, in the farewell flavor of I hope you find, a doubting mind could see ambiguity. But his body knew better. The sensation that gripped it was familiar in its emanation from his nether parts, entirely novel in its suffusion with emotion—with hope and gratitude, the image of one particular person, her soulful eyes, her complicated mind. It was inconceivable that a person so fascinating might feel lesser, and yet there it was, in her own handwriting, unambiguously: put up with me. The words excited him so much, she might have been whispering them in his ear.
The next day, when he requested leave for the afternoon, the quartermaster didn’t even ask what for. George Ginchy still enjoyed his roll calls and assemblies, but since the war ended the camp had only been going through the motions; Ginchy’s quest of the moment was to procure equipment for the football squad he’d organized. The old Willys was somehow still operable, and Russ drove it first to the public library and then, not finding Marion, to her uncle’s house, which he identified by its prickly pears. He was curiously unafraid to knock on the front door. He knew that the marriage of men and women was in the natural course of things, ordained by God, but in his mind, already, the world wasn’t full of women he might potentially someday meet, there was only one woman. In retrospect, their chance encounter at the library had had God’s seal on it. To knock on her door was no more than what God had intended when He created man and woman; which was to say that Russ was now conscious of being a man.
She came to the door in dungarees and an oversize white shirt, knotted at her midriff. That she was wearing pants, like a man, was inordinately incredible to him.
“I knew it would be you,” she said. “I woke up this morning with the strongest feeling I would see you.”
Her lack of surprise reminded him again of his mother, her serenity. If Marion’s presentiment could be credited, it suggested that Russ’s coming to see her, which had felt to him like an act of personal agency, had merely been part of God’s design. She led him through a parlor hung with landscape paintings, all similar in style, and into a kitchen with a view of a mountain. At the rear of the back yard, which was strewn with rusty metal forms, perhaps sculptures, stood a tin-roofed structure.
“That’s Jimmy’s studio,” Marion said. “He won’t come out till dinnertime. Antonio’s at work, and I am—studying.” She indicated an open textbook on the table. “We also have two cats, who seem to have disappeared. They were just here.”
Jimmy was her uncle, but Russ wondered about the other man. An unpleasant new feeling, possessiveness, came over him. “Who is Antonio?”
“Jimmy’s companion. They’re—you know.” Marion looked up. “Or maybe you don’t.”
How was he supposed to know anything?
“They’re like husband and wife, except Antonio’s a man. It’s a terrible abomination.” She snickered. “Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”
There were, at camp, two Quaker boys whom Russ’s cabinmates referred to as fairies. Only now did he understand that the appellation might encompass more than just their manner. He felt a queasiness, not only at the abomination but at Marion’s snicker.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if sensing his discomfort. “I forgot where you come from. I’m so used to Antonio, it seems ridiculous that anyone could disapprove.”
“So, you, uh—what part of Catholic teaching do you actually accept?”
“Oh, lots of it. The Eucharist, Christ’s absolution of our sins, Father Fergus’s authority. Jimmy and Antonio would definitely have things to repent if they were Catholic, but I don’t see that it’s any of my business. Jesus says I shouldn’t cast stones.”
Russ’s empathy for homosexuals began with Marion. Once he was in love with her, it became axiomatic that every conviction of hers deserved strong consideration for adoption. Alongside his craving to bury himself in her was a wish to be filled up with her—to feel his heart pumping her essence, as if he were a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, into his unfurling, birth-damp wings. She’d spent three and a half more years on earth than he, had lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a deeper and more incisive thinker. Because she swore by Roosevelt, Russ registered to vote as a Democrat. Because she read secular literature—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck—he read it, too. The same thing with jazz, the same thing with modern art, the same thing with clothes, and the same thing, especially, with sex.
They passed his first visit at her kitchen table, talking about the soul and teachers’ college, about his grandfather and his doubts about his family’s faith. On his second visit, five days later, they hiked so far up the mountain behind Jimmy’s house they had to race the setting sun back down. Marion then sent him a letter in which there was little of substance, just a breezy account of her day, but he couldn’t stop rereading it. Each detail—that one of the cats had coughed up a hair ball on her bed, that her uncle had asked her to cook lamb chops for his birthday, that she might stop at the butcher on her way back from the post office, that she thought it might snow again—was more magically interesting than the next. He remembered hungrily rereading his mother’s early letters to him, which were likewise full of the quotidian. Now his mother’s letters so bored him that he barely skimmed them once. He couldn’t have cared less if she thought it might snow.
His mother had taken to mentioning that one girl or another in their community had “really grown up,” a short phrase that encoded a longer message: he was to finish his service, choose a wife from one of a score of acceptable families, and settle down in Lesser Hebron. What he could write back to his mother without revealing his doubts had dwindled to the point of his repeating, essentially verbatim, not just sentences but whole paragraphs. Of his time with the Navajos, he’d written little more than that they were a proud and generous people who had great respect for the Mennonites. Of Marion, he wrote nothing at all. His sense that he and she had been ordained to meet was growing stronger by the day, and his family’s community didn’t forbid marriage to outsiders, merely discouraged it, but Marion was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. The safe course was to conceal her existence and hope for the best.
Every second Friday night, most of the camp workers piled into trucks and went down to the movie house in Flagstaff, chaperoned by George Ginchy himself. The first time Russ had joined them, after losing his religion on the mesa, he’d been transfixed by the window movies opened on the larger world, and he’d been going ever since. On a Friday night in April, when he and the others trooped into the Orpheum, a small, green-coated figure was waiting for him, by secret prearrangement, in the last row of seats.
Very soon, almost as soon as the lights went down, four soft fingers slipped into his callused hand. To hold a woman’s hand was so absorbing and momentous that the shouts of the Three Stooges, in the first short subject, were unintelligible to him. While Marion, for her part, seemed perfectly at ease, laughing at the twisting of ears and the collapse of a stepladder, the spectacle of violence struck Russ as a profanement of his moment with her; it hurt his eyes.
When the feature started, a Sherlock Holmes picture, she lost interest in the screen and rested her head against his shoulder. She extended an arm across his chest, pulling herself closer. Basil Rathbone, meerschaum in hand, was speaking unintelligibly. Russ tried not to breathe, lest she let go of him, but she stirred again. Her hand was on his neck, turning his face toward hers. In the flickering light, a pair of lips surfaced. And, oh, their softness. The intimacy of kissing them was so intense it made him anxious, like a mortal in the presence of eternity. He turned his face away, but she immediately drew it back. By and by, he got the idea. He and she weren’t there to watch the movie, not one bit. They were there to kiss and kiss and kiss.
When the credits rolled, she wordlessly stood and left the theater. The house lights came up on a world comprehensively transformed, made more vivid and expansive, by the joining of two mouths. Feeling wildly conspicuous, hoping he wasn’t, he slipped into a group of workers exiting the theater. Marion wasn’t in the lobby, but George Ginchy was.
“You never cease to surprise me,” Ginchy said.
“Sir?”
“I took you for a God-fearing country boy. You almost squeaked with clean living.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Not with me.”
Marion led him, in the weeks that followed, up a long and twisting stairway, scary to climb but delightful to linger on each step of—the first I love you in a letter, the first I love you spoken, the first kiss in public daylight, the hours shortened to minutes by kissing in her uncle’s parlor, the more frenzied nighttime grappling on the seat of the Willys, the unbelievable opening of her blouse, the discovery that even infinite softness had gradations, softer yet, softest of all—which finally led, on a cloudy afternoon in May, to her locking her bedroom door, kicking off her shoes, and lying down on her little bed.
Through the sheer curtain on her window, Russ could see her uncle’s art studio.
“Should we be in here?” he said. “It would be awkward if someone…”
“Antonio’s in Phoenix, and Jimmy’s not my keeper. It’s not as if we have a better place.”
“It could be awkward, though.”
“Are you afraid of me, sweetie? You seem afraid of me.”
“No. I’m not afraid of you. But—”
“I woke up knowing today would be the day. You just have to trust me. I’m scared, too, but—I really think God intended this to be the day.”
It seemed to Russ that God was in the cloudy light outside but not inside her bedroom. Somewhere on the stairway to this moment, he’d lost hold of the importance of preserving his purity until they were married.
“Today’s good for other reasons, too,” she said. “It’s a good safe day.”
“Is Jimmy not home?”
“No, he’s in his studio. I mean I can’t get pregnant.”
He didn’t love feeling always slow, always behind, but he did love Marion. It wasn’t accurate to say he thought about her night and day, because it was less a matter of thinking than of feeling filled with her, filled in the unceasing way that he imagined a more truly religious person, a Navajo on the mesa, might be filled with God. And she was right: if not today, in her room, then when and where? He never wanted to stop touching her, but merely touching was never enough. His body had been telling him, albeit mutely, and yet so insistently that he got the message, that the pressure of her presence in him could only be relieved by releasing it inside her.
Which he now did. In the gray light, on the quilted coverlet of her bed. The release came very quickly and was disappointing in its suddenness, surprisingly less satisfactory than his solitary chafings. An act no less crucial in his life than being baptized had lasted scarcely longer. Ashamed of how unmomentous the act had felt in the event, he became more generally ashamed. His proportions were as ungainly as hers were ideal, his boniness an affront to her softness, his skin a dismal gray against the creamy white of hers. He couldn’t believe she was smiling up at him, couldn’t believe the approval in her gaze.
“Just rest there for a second,” she said, stroking his hair. “We’re only starting.”
He didn’t know how she knew this, but again she was right. As soon as she said starting, his body told him she was right. The word in itself reelectrified it. That the crucial act could be repeated, after the shortest of breathers, would never have occurred to him. That it could be done four times, before the light faded and he had to rush away, was a dazzlement from which, he could already feel, as he urged the Willys up the steep road to camp, there would be no recovering. The Mosaic commandment against adultery, the plain dress of the women in Lesser Hebron, the proscription against dancing, the concealment of women’s necks: it was as if he’d grown up inside an ancient fort whose parapets and cannons faced out on peaceful fields, toward an enemy he’d seen no trace of. Now he understood why the fortifications were so massive.
The next time they sinned, in her little room, on an unusually warm and muggy afternoon, with a cat thumping against her locked door, he fell from a height of carnality into an abyss of moral anxiety. He trusted Marion because of her unfeignable love of God, her self-blaming goodness. What she wanted was no more than what he wanted, and the spilling of seed wasn’t shameful per se. An arousal and emission that occurred in dreams, without his volition, could only be a natural function of the body. But to release his seed inside a woman he wasn’t married to, to lose himself in her flesh, to wallow in her private aromas, was manifestly different. He extricated himself and, despite the heat, pulled the coverlet over him.
“Aren’t you worried,” he said, “about committing a mortal sin?”
She scrambled to her knees. Her nakedness, blinding in its beauty, seemed of no consequence to her.
“I don’t need to be a Catholic,” she said. “I want to be whatever you are. If you want to be Navajo, I’ll be a Navajo with you.”
“That’s not a possibility.”
“Then whatever you like. I needed to be at Nativity because—it was something I needed to do. I needed to pray and be forgiven. I prayed and prayed, and then there you were—my reward. Am I allowed to say that? You’re like my gift from God. That’s how miraculous you are to me.”
“But then … don’t you think we should be married?”
“Yes! Good idea! We can do it next week. Or tomorrow—how about tomorrow?”
As if the blessing of matrimony had already descended, he pulled her onto him and kissed her. She threw aside the quilt and straddled him, handling him with an expertness he didn’t question; she was naturally expert at everything. Only in her whimpers, which she emitted in rhythm to their coupling, was any sense of lesserness detectable. She whimpered and spoke his name, whimpered and spoke his name. In his mind, she was already his darling little wife. But after the culminating pleasure had coursed through him, he returned to being a sinner in a sweat beneath another sinner.
Her mood, too, had changed. She was crying, voicelessly, miserably.
“Is something wrong? Did I hurt you?”
She shook her head.
“Marion, I’m sorry, my God—did I hurt you?”
“No.” She gasped through her tears. “You’re wonderful. You’re my—you’re perfect.”
“Then what? What is it?”
She rolled away and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t be a Catholic.”
“Why not?”
“Because it means I can’t marry you. I was—oh, Russ.” She sobbed. “I was already married!”
A sickening disclosure. Jealousy and uncleanliness, both bodily and moral, were compounded in the image of another man possessing her as he just had. A woman he’d believed to be pure and purehearted was previously used—befouled. He felt sick with disappointment. The depth of it revealed the height of the hope she’d given him.
“It happened in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was married for six months and then divorced. I should have told you right away. It was terrible of me not to. You’re so beautiful and I’m—oh—I’m so—I should have told you! Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
She thrashed in her misery. A cruel part of him thought she deserved any amount of emotional punishment, but the loving part of him was moved. He wanted to kill the man who’d polluted her.
“Who was it? Did he hurt you?”
“It was just a mistake. I was still a kid—I didn’t know anything. I thought I was supposed to—I didn’t know anything.”
The idea of an innocent girl’s mistake, for which she was now piteously remorseful, further softened his heart. But his anger and disgust had a life of their own. He’d thrown away his virginity on a woman who’d given hers to someone else, and now her nakedness was repellent, her smell appalling. He wished to God he’d never left Lesser Hebron. He swung his legs off the bed and roughly dressed himself.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said in a calmer voice.
He was too angry to speak.
“I made a mistake. I made lots of mistakes, but I’m not wrong about us. Please try, if you can, to forgive me. I want to marry you, Russ. I want to be yours forever.”
He’d wanted the very same thing. Disappointment welled up in him and erupted in a sob.
“Sweetie, please,” she said. “Sit down with me, let me hold you. I’m so very, very sorry.”
He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The self-pity in his tears was new to him—it was as if he’d never appreciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved God or pitied other people. Feeling compassion for this person, who was suffering and needed his care, he unlocked the bedroom door and ran out through the house, jumped into the Willys and drove a few blocks. He stopped beneath a cypress tree and wept for himself.
She sent him two letters, on consecutive days, and he opened neither of them. The woman he loved was still there but occluded from him, separated by her own doing. It was as if his Marion were imprisoned in a Marion he didn’t know at all. He could almost hear his dear one crying out to him from inside the prison. She needed him to come and rescue her, but he was afraid of the other Marion—afraid of finding that it was she who’d written the letters.
He’d done very little praying since he met her. Returning to it now, he laid his situation out to God and asked Him what His will was. The first insight to emerge was that God required him to forgive her. In trying to explain to God why he was angry, he saw that Marion’s offense—she’d been too embarrassed to mention her marriage sooner—was paltry; that, indeed, the greater offense was his own hard-heartedness. This led him to a second insight: for all his doubting, for all his liberation, he was still a Mennonite. At some level, he’d assumed that he would one day bring Marion home with him and there, although they might not settle in Lesser Hebron, receive his family’s blessing. Now the fact of her divorce had snuffed any chance of that. The extremity of his disappointment pertained not to her but to his parents, because he hadn’t yet fully broken with them. He was angry because her divorce compelled him to make a hard choice.
Unready to make it, still afraid to open her letters, he wrote to the only person who might understand his quandary. His grandfather must have replied to Russ’s letter immediately, because the reply arrived in camp just eight days later. The advice in it was unexpected.
You don’t have to marry her—I’m here to tell you the sun will still rise in the morning. Why not enjoy the moment and see how you feel when your term of service ends? You’ll have plenty of time for marrying if you still feel the same, but a young man doesn’t always know his heart. Your gal already made her own mistake, and it sounds like she knows how to look after herself. That’s pure gold—yours to enjoy if you’re careful. So long as she’s not in a family way, there’s no reason to be hasty.
A year earlier, Russ might have been alarmed by how tumorously his grandfather’s debauchery had consumed his moral principles. Now, instead, he felt a fraternity. It seemed to him that Clement was right in every respect but one—Russ already knew his heart, and it belonged to Marion. But there was more.
As to your parents, I don’t guess they’ll forgive you if you marry her. Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no man’s business. I know firsthand the vengeance in his heart. Your mother’s a good woman, but she lost her mind to Jesus. She’s so deep in her faith you can scream at the top of the lungs and she won’t hear you. She thinks she loves you when she prays for you, but she only loves her Jesus.
Russ didn’t need to reread Clement’s letter, then or ever. One reading was enough to burn every line of it into his memory.
What the Bible meant by joy, and by the related words that recurred in it so frequently, joyful, joyous, rejoicing, he learned the following afternoon, when he went back to Marion’s uncle’s house. There was joy in his unconditional surrender to her—joy in his apology for the hardness of his heart, joy in her forgiveness, joy in his release from doubt and blame. How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant? There was joy in making love on a thunderstormy afternoon, and there was joy in not making love, joy in just lying and looking into her fathomless dark eyes. Joy in the first trip they made together to Diné Bikéyah, joy in the sight of Stella on Marion’s lap, joy in the sweetness of Marion’s way with children, joy in the thought of giving her a child of her own, joy in the desert sunset, joy in the star-choked sky, joy even in the mutton stew. And joy in George Ginchy’s invitation to a private dinner with him, joy in seeing her through Ginchy’s eyes. Joy when she first put her mouth on Russ’s penis, joy in her wantonness, joy in the abjectness of his gratitude, joy in its sealing of the certainty that he would never leave her. Joy in the corroborating pain of being apart from her, joy in their reunions, joy in making plans, joy in the prospect of finishing his education and catching up with her, joy in the mystery of what might happen after that.
The joy lasted until they were married, on the day his term of service ended, with George and Jimmy as their witnesses, at the courthouse in Flagstaff. They’d abandoned their respective religions and were seeking a new faith to share, but their slate was still clean and they didn’t have a church to marry in. Russ felt obliged to write to his parents the very same day, and he didn’t sugarcoat what he’d done. He explained that Marion had been previously married and that he had no interest in rejoining the community, but that he would like to bring his wife to Lesser Hebron and introduce her to the family.
His father’s reply was brief and bitter. It grieved him but didn’t entirely surprise him, he said, that Russ had been infected by a pestilence stemming from elsewhere in the family, and neither he nor Russ’s mother had any wish to meet Marion. Russ’s mother’s reply was longer and more anguished, more a descant on her own failures, but the point was the same: she’d lost her son. Not rejected him (as Marion, ever defensive of Russ, was quick to point out) but lost him.
The rejection confirmed the rightness of his choice—shame and blame on anyone who refused to meet the most wonderful woman in the world—and he adored being wedded to Marion, adored having her always at his side, on his side. And yet, in his innermost heart, a shadow fell when his parents disowned him. The shadow wasn’t quite doubt and it wasn’t quite guilt. It was more a sense of what he’d lost in gaining Marion. He no longer belonged in Lesser Hebron, but he was still haunted by it. He found himself missing his mother’s little farm, his grandfather’s shop, the eternity in the sameness of the days there, the rightness of a community radically organized around the Word. He understood that his father was a deeply flawed person, his stringency a compensation for an underlying weakness, and that his mother had indeed, in a way, lost her mind. But he couldn’t help secretly admiring them. Their faith had an edge that his own never would.
When he accepted a rural ministry in Indiana, four years later, he hoped he might regain a bit of what he’d lost. He was certainly glad to see more of his grandfather, who, in spite of himself, had married Estelle and now lived in her hometown, two hours to the north of Russ. But the sense of loss was spiritual, not geographical. It was portable and its name was Marion. As his reliance on her became routine, her capabilities merely useful to him, their lovemaking duly procreative, his misgivings about her first marriage returned in the form of grievance. He began to wonder why he’d been so determined to ignore Clement’s advice and marry the first woman he’d loved.
On his bad days, he saw a rube from Indiana who’d been pounced on by an older city girl—snared by the sexual cunning of a woman who’d developed it with a different man. On his worst days, he suspected that Marion had known very well that he could have done better. She must have known that as soon as he left the little world of Flagstaff he would encounter women younger than he was, taller than Marion, less odd, more awed by his own capabilities, and not previously married. She’d seduced him into a contract before he knew his value in the marketplace.
And still, even then, he might have made peace with having married her, if only she, too, had been a virgin when he met her. His grievance was no less gnawing for being trivial and godless. In the final, hard form it had taken, after his dream about Sally Perkins had opened his eyes to the multitude of desirable women, the grievance was that Marion had gotten to enjoy sex with a second person, he only with her. He could tolerate her superiority in every other regard, but not in this one.
Boarding the bus in New Prospect, he’d been unhappy to find Frances sitting with the other parent adviser, Ted Jernigan, in the seats behind the driver. Ted was a threat—every other man was a threat—but Russ had learned his lesson: it was better to withhold than to pester. Better to ensconce himself with the kids in back, bat around a Nerf ball, sing along with songs whose words he now mostly knew, take instruction in the playing of an E chord and a D chord, compete in an endless license-plate game, and let Frances feel left out. His acceptance by the cool kids, a result of his more laissez-faire approach to Crossroads, was such a gratifying contrast to his previous Arizona trip, he almost could have done without the complication of her.
Now they’d entered the Navajo Nation. Along the highway, in evening sunlight, were children hawking juniper-berry necklaces, billboards advertising HAND WOVEN BLANKETS and TURQUOISE JEWELRY, a souvenir shop overflowing with generic kitsch, behind it an AUTHENTIC NAVAJO HOGAN, a wooden Plains Indian in full headdress, and an enormous tepee. The last of the five guitars on the bus had gone quiet. Carolyn Polley, across the aisle from Russ, was reading Carlos Castaneda. Kim Perkins was teaching the cat’s cradle to David Goya, other girls were playing Spades, other boys openly hooting over a pornographic comic book that Keith Stratton had bought at a truck stop in Tucumcari. Russ could have confiscated it, with some words about its demeaning of women, but he was tired and the kids in his group were all basically harmless. Roger Hangartner had smoked pot on a Crossroads retreat the year before, Darcie Mandell needed to be watched for her diabetes, Alice Raymond was grieving the recent death of her mother, and Gerri Kohl was an irritating trumpeter of hackneyed phrases (“Feeding time at the zoo” “Velly stlange”), but there weren’t any real problem kids—Perry was on Kevin Anderson’s bus. In Tucumcari, when Russ asked Kevin how Perry was doing, Kevin had said he was overexcited, had talked nonstop all night, and didn’t feel like leaving the bus. Russ could have boarded it and spoken to Perry, but Perry was Kevin’s problem now, not his.
When the Many Farms water tower appeared on the horizon, he ventured forward and made Ted Jernigan trade places with him. Taking the Ted-warmed seat, he asked Frances if she’d gotten any sleep.
She leaned away from him and gave him a cold look. “You mean, between hearing how Ted would have handled the Viet Cong and how much I overpaid for my house?”
Russ laughed. He couldn’t have been happier. “I kept waiting for you to come and join us.”
“One of us knows every single person on this bus. The other one doesn’t know anyone.”
He lost his smile. “Sorry.”
“When you told me you could be a jerk, I didn’t believe you.”
“Very sorry.”
She turned to her window and didn’t look at him again.
The sun had dropped behind the Black Mesa, beginning the long dusk in Many Farms, the somber illumination of its overwide roads, its identical BIA-sponsored houses, its utilitarian school buildings and dusty warehouses. Russ directed the driver to the council office and hopped out while the other two buses pulled up behind him. The air had a wintry bite, a thinness that his heart immediately registered. As he approached the office door, a sturdy young woman in a red wool jacket came out. “You must be Russ.”
“Yes. Wanda?”
“Russ, if I may say so, we were expecting you earlier.” In person, too, her voice was plangent. “I would like to discuss your plan with you.”
“The, ah—mandate?”
Wanda’s emphatic nodding matched her voice. “We have the mandate and you can help us. However, because you prefer to stay in Many Farms, we are willing to accommodate a second group here. I have spoken to the director and he is okay with it.”
“What is the mandate?”
“To conform with the mandate, we need handicapped access ramps at Kitsillie. A ramp for the front and a ramp for the fire exit. The toilet also must be handicapped-accessible. But may I be completely open and honest with you? I feel you would be more comfortable in Many Farms.”
Over the idling of three buses came the crunch of boots on gravel, the growling voice of Ambrose, a murmur from Kevin Anderson. If Russ’s group stayed in Many Farms, he would have to be with Perry, and Frances with Larry. Quickly, before Ambrose could interfere, he told Wanda that he’d rather stick to the original plan. Her emphatic nod said one thing, her troubled expression another.
“You may go to Kitsillie,” she said, “but I would ask you, in all respect, to stay close to the school. No one should walk alone, and no one should be outside after dark.”
“That’s fine. We’ve had the same rule in the past.”
She stepped away to greet Ambrose and Kevin. Not for the first time, Russ was impressed by Ambrose’s way of forging a connection with a stranger, the compassionate scowl with which he conveyed that she was being seen as a person, taken seriously. Scowling as if nothing on earth mattered more to him, he asked Wanda how Keith Durochie was. It should have been Russ who’d asked the question.
“Keith is not good,” Wanda said, “but he is resting comfortably at home.”
“How bad is it?” Russ said.
“He is resting comfortably but I am told that he is very weak.”
Into Russ’s throat came the sadness of life’s brevity, the sadness of the sunless hour, the sadness of Easter. God was telling him very clearly what to do. He had to stay in Many Farms, where Keith had lived since 1960, so he could visit Keith and keep an eye on Perry. In light of Keith’s condition, his wish to enjoy sex with a person not Marion seemed even more trivial, and he’d been insane to imagine it happening in Arizona. He’d let himself forget how bleak the reservation was in late winter, how demanding it was to lead a work camp.
And yet, when he thought of doing God’s will, at the cost of his week with Frances on the mesa, he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.
The swing driver, a gaunt lung-cancer candidate named Ollie, had taken over the wheel of the Kitsillie bus. From the seat beside Frances, Russ directed him to Rough Rock and from there up the side of the mesa. The road was stony and narrow, and there was still enough light to see how close to the edge of it they were, how fatal a plunge would be. At a particularly harrowing bend, Frances gasped and said, “Oh Jesus, Jesus.” She clutched Russ’s hand, and, just like that, he was holding hers. She’d said it herself: jerks turned her on. Behind the bus, a horn began to honk.
“Yeah, where am I supposed to go?” Ollie said.
The honking persisted until they reached a straightaway. Ollie pulled over, inches from the edge of a chasm, and a pickup truck, still honking, gunned past them. One of its bumper stickers said CUSTER HAD IT COMING. Its driver stuck out his arm and gave the bus the middle finger.
“Charming,” Frances said.
“Are you okay?”
She let go of Russ’s hand. “I’m waiting to hear there’s a better road back down.”
As if from a different world, the gentler world of New Prospect, Biff Allard’s bongo drums started up, joined by one guitar and then another, and then by Biff’s reedy voice.
Bus driver Ollie, bus driver Ollie
Rollin’ through the hills, movin’ down the valley
Some folks like to drink, some folks like to cuss
Ollie gets high on a TWELVE-TON BUS
A cheer went up, and Ollie waved his thanks. He didn’t know that Biff had written the song for the earlier driver, Bill.
Up on the mesa, as the sky darkened, the moon highlighted patches of snow on the north-facing slopes. Russ struggled to integrate his memories of the mesa and the sadness of Keith with the new possibility embodied in the woman next to him. He felt warmed not only by her shoulder but by the triumph of having brought her, after so many complications, to a place that had formed him. He wondered if she could love the place herself—love him—and if he might yet grow old with her. Though the road had leveled out, he put his hand on hers again. She gave it a squeeze and didn’t let go until he stood up to address the group.
“Okay, listen up,” he said. “We’re going straight to the chapter house and see if we can get some dinner. I don’t want to hear any complaining about the food. You hear me? We’ll see a lot of mutton stew and frybread—if you don’t like it, you’ll eat it anyway. We need to remember, at all times, that we are guests of the Navajo Nation. Our attitude is gratitude. We come with our privilege, come with all our nice things, and we need to remember how we look to the Navajos. Do not ever leave your things unattended, except where we’ll be sleeping. Do not ever leave the school area by yourself. Are we clear on that? I want to see groups of four people or more, and no one ever leaves the school after dark. Understood?”
There was no electricity or telephone at Kitsillie—except for the chapter house and the school building, still unfinished after five years of work, there wasn’t much of anything—but, Wanda be praised, Daisy Benally and her sister were waiting for the bus. Daisy, an aunt of Keith’s by marriage, hadn’t been young when Russ met her in 1945; now she was stooped and shrunken. Her sister, Ruth, was nearly as fat as the average Hopi. The two of them had made a vat of stew in the chapter-house kitchen, which smelled of hot oil, and they now proceeded, by lantern light, while the Crossroads group settled into the common room, to cook the frybread. The room’s chill pervaded the concrete floor, the dented metal folding chairs, the particle-board tables. Russ asked Frances what she was thinking.
“I’m thinking, yikes. You told me it was primitive, but.”
“It’s not too late to go to Many Farms. Ollie can take you back.”
She bristled. “Is that how you think of me? The lady who can’t hack it?”
“Not at all.”
“I wouldn’t mind finding a bathroom, though.”
“Brace yourself.”
As he weighed whether to sit with Alice Raymond—whether it would make her self-conscious about her mother’s death, and whether his concern about making her self-conscious concealed a craven fear of her bereavement—he thought of Ambrose, whose instincts with teenagers were unerring. He was relieved when Carolyn Polley sat down with Alice. He didn’t have to be good at everything, he only had to be good at getting Frances. He ate his dinner with her and Ted Jernigan.
“Not to complain,” Ted said, “but there’s something not right about the bread.”
“The oil’s a little rancid, maybe. It’s only a taste—it won’t hurt you.”
“Where is the mutton?” Frances said, poking at her bowl. “All I have is turnips and potatoes.”
“You can ask Daisy for some meat.”
“I’m dreaming of the beer nuts in my suitcase.”
Outside the chapter house, a truck banged by in a roar of downshift. Russ didn’t give it a thought until he’d finished his dinner and stepped outside. The temperature had plunged but Ollie was in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and looking up the rough road to the school building. A hundred yards up, a pickup truck’s headlights were aimed down at the bus. The sound of its engine was distinct in the still, cold air. Wanda had promised to come up and check on the group, but Russ didn’t think the truck was Wanda’s. Hoping there might be some other benign explanation, a lost calf, a relative fetching Daisy and Ruth, he rounded up the group and got everyone on the bus.
In its headlights, as Ollie steered it up the road, Russ recognized the pickup from their encounter with it earlier. Ollie slowed down and tapped the horn, but the truck didn’t move. There was menace in its headlights. Frances again clutched Russ’s hand.
“Stay here,” he said.
As he got out and approached the truck, its doors opened and four figures jumped out. Four young men, three of them in hats. The fourth, in a jean jacket, his hair loose on his shoulders, stepped forward and looked directly, insolently, into Russ’s eyes. “Hey, white man.”
“Hello. Good evening.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“We are a Christian youth fellowship. We’re here to perform a week of service.”
The man, seeming amused, looked back at his companions. Something in his manner reminded Russ of Laura Dobrinsky. The younger Navajos don’t like you, either.
“Would you mind letting us through?”
“What are you doing here?”
“In Kitsillie? We will be working to finish the school building.”
“We don’t need you for that.”
Anger rose in Russ. He had an angry white thought—that, year after year, the tribe itself did little to finish the school—but he didn’t speak it. “We are here at the tribal council’s invitation. They’ve given us a job, and I intend to do it.”
The man laughed. “Fuck the council. They might as well be white.”
“The council is an elected body. If you have a problem with our being here, you can take it up with them. I have a busload of very tired kids who, if you wouldn’t mind, need to sleep.”
“Where you from?”
“We’re from Chicago.”
“Go back to Chicago.”
Russ’s blood rose further. “For your information,” he said, “I am not just another bilagáana. I’ve been a friend of the reservation for twenty-seven years. I’ve known Daisy Benally since 1945. Keith Durochie is an old friend of mine.”
“Fuck Keith Durochie.”
Russ took an anger-managing breath. “What exactly is your grievance?”
“Fuck Keith Durochie. That’s my grievance. Get the fuck out of here—that’s my grievance.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but this is council land, and we have an invitation to be here. We will stay at the school and be gone in a week.”
“You people are polluters. You can pollute Chicago, but this isn’t Chicago. I don’t want to see you here tomorrow.”
“Then you’ll just have to look the other way. We’re not leaving.”
The man spat on the ground, not directly at Russ, but close. “You had your warning.”
“Is that a threat?”
The man turned away and walked toward his companions.
“Hey, hey,” Russ shouted, “are you threatening me?”
Again, over the shoulder, the middle finger.
Russ hadn’t been so angry since he fought with Marion at Christmas. He stalked past the bus, back down to the chapter house, and found Daisy stooped in the light of a lantern, her expression unreadable. As the truck screamed past them, he asked her who the young man was.
“Clyde,” she said. “He has an angry spirit.”
“Do you know what his problem with Keith is?”
“He’s angry at Keith.”
“I can see that. But why?”
Daisy smiled at the ground. “It’s not our business.”
“Do you think it’s safe for us to be here?”
“Stay close to the school.”
“But do you think we’ll be safe?”
“Stay close to the school. We’ll have breakfast for you in the morning.”
The sensible thing to do was to concede defeat and retreat to Many Farms, but Russ’s blood was raging with testosterone. He felt wronged and misunderstood, and the progress he’d made with Frances had elevated his hormone levels. When he returned to the bus and saw the worry and the admiration in her face, the hormones urged him to stand his ground.
The following day, Palm Sunday, passed without a sign of Clyde. Russ established a perimeter comprising the table of land on which the school was set, a lower yard with a netless basketball hoop, and the arroyo behind it. Sunday was a rest day, and it was hard on the kids to be surrounded by interesting country and not be allowed to explore it, but they had their relationships and their suntans to work on, their books and their playing cards, their guitars. Russ was grateful to see Carolyn Polley, who was going to be a fine Christian minister, introducing Frances to the various girls. He was struck, as he’d been when he first took Frances to Theo Crenshaw’s church, by her hesitancy in an unfamiliar setting, and again it moved him.
Ted Jernigan had a problem with the mandate. While Russ and the other alumni adviser, Craig Dilkes, were inventorying the ramp-building supplies, which had been dumped in an otherwise empty classroom, Ted remarked that the money might better have been spent on central heating.
“Government money comes with mandates,” Russ said.
“And I’m saying it’s an idiotic mandate.”
Testosterone stirred in Russ. “I’ll remind you,” he said, “that we’re mainly here for ourselves. The point is personal growth, individually and as a group. If the Navajos want handicapped ramps, that’s good enough for me.”
“How does a kid in a wheelchair get up that road? How does he get across the ditch? Are they planning on landing him in a helicopter?”
“You can lead the bookcase-building crew. Would that meet your high standard of utility?”
The sarcasm drew a frown from Ted. “I don’t get you.”
“What don’t you get?”
“That was quite the welcoming committee last night. We might as well be under siege—I don’t get why you’re so hell-bent on staying.”
“I just explained the point of it.”
“But a place where the kids can’t even take a shower? When we’re obviously not wanted?”
“If you don’t like it here, I can find you a ride back to Many Farms.”
“You’re telling me you don’t think this is dangerous.”
“Kitsillie can be rough,” Craig Dilkes interposed. He’d been a sophomore on the fellowship’s first trip to Arizona. “It’s the roughness that really pulls the group together—people taking care of each other.”
“Maybe,” Ted said. “Provided no one gets hurt. If someone gets hurt, in a place we should know better than to be, the buck stops with the leader.”
He left the room, and Craig raised his eyebrows. They were blonder than his mop of red hair. “I’m not liking the vibe here.”
With Craig, Russ could be honest. “I agree,” he said. “Keith warned me about it.”
“There’s that, but I meant Ted.”
In the evening, the group gathered around a single flame in their dark room. The “candle” began with the singing of two songs and the giving of what Ambrose called strokes—a stroke to someone for having a great sense of humor, a stroke for trading potatoes for nasty turnips, a stroke for taking a risk in a new relationship, a stroke for being smart, a stroke for letting go of being smart and speaking from the heart, a stroke for sharing a candy bar, a stroke for teaching someone how to tie a bandanna. Frances herself spoke up and stroked the group for welcoming a middle-aged housewife. Kim Perkins, whom Russ had so far left alone, owing to his troubles with her sister, surprised him with a stroke for his courage in handling the four angry Navajos. His heart swelled with the contrast to the last Arizona candle he’d led. Here, unpoisoned by Laura Dobrinsky and Sally Perkins, were forty good kids in thick socks and thermal underwear, with sleeping bags draped over their shoulders, and his beloved boy-haired woman on the far side of the circle, holding the hands of two girls she’d only just met. How much better his life was now! How nearly joyful again!
And then Ted Jernigan raised the issue of security. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “but I don’t enjoy feeling threatened every time I step out for a meal. Do you mind if we have a show of hands? Does anyone else think we’d be better off closer to civilization?”
The memory of Russ’s expulsion three years earlier, the traumatic call for a show of hands, triggered a fight-or-flight response in him.
“Ted,” he said hormonally, “if you have an issue with my leadership, you should direct it to me personally.”
“I already did that,” Ted said. “What I’m looking for now is a sense of the group. Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?”
He raised his hand and looked around the circle. Russ glanced at Frances and found her smiling at him, perhaps conveying her opinion of Ted, her hand unraised. Among the kids, only Gerri Kohl, she of “velly stlange,” raised a hand. Russ, sensing victory, was all over it.
“Gerri, thank you for your honesty,” he said, sounding like Ambrose. “That is a brave thing to admit. That took real guts.”
Gerri lowered her hand. “It’s just one vote,” she said. “I can go with the flow.”
Though Russ felt bad for her, knowing she wasn’t well liked, her unpopularity was an advantage to be pressed. “Ted is right,” he said. “The energy up here is somewhat negative. I intend to find out why and see what we can do to repair it. But if anyone else feels the same way Gerri does, now is the time to say so. If you’d rather go back to Many Farms, we can still be together as a group there.”
“Is there hot water in Many Farms?” a girl asked.
The discussion devolved into bitching and laughter at the bitching, followed by a final song and a closing prayer, which Russ handed off to Carolyn Polley. He blew out the candle, relit the Coleman lanterns, and checked the kerosene heater. There was a rush for the bathroom, which he’d plumbed three years earlier, and squeals of mock horror, the nightly Crossroads silliness, a sophomore boy prancing in his BVDs and singing “Let Me Entertain You,” an ovation for Darcie Mandell when she took off her sweatshirt, a screaming discovery of a rubber scorpion, cries of dismay at a leak in an air mattress, a posse of ticklers bearing down on Kim Perkins, David Goya pissed off at them. Russ tried to have a private word with Gerri Kohl, but she was embarrassed by her vote and didn’t want to talk about it.
He was an old-school camper, eschewing a sleeping bag, preferring blankets. In dim moonlight, after the flashlights had gone out and the room had quieted, and after the comedy of breaking the silence with a loud random remark had been exhausted, he got up in his long johns and went down the hallway to take a late leak. Among his hundred worries was the bathroom water supply. The tank on the hill above the school was filled by a windmill, and he had no way to gauge if it was full enough to last them for a week in which he had to mix concrete and clean equipment. He’d asked the kids to flush only solid waste, but they were kids and forgot.
Leaving the toilet unflushed, he opened the door and was startled by a figure standing outside it. In her own thermal underwear, her hunting jacket. She backed him into the bathroom and put her arms around him. He could feel her shivering, presumably with cold.
“I made it through the first day,” she whispered.
He clasped her delicate head to his chest, and his testosterone manifested itself in his long johns. A possibility he’d been too obtuse to be aware of on his previous Arizona trip, before Sally Perkins had appeared to him in a dream, a possibility inherent in the nighttime mixing of sexes in close quarters, on the margins of civilization, was now being realized.
“I felt so lonely on the bus,” Frances whispered. “I was wishing I hadn’t come.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here. It only makes sense with you.”
In the intimacy of her you, he detected an invitation to kiss her. But she lowered her arms and turned away.
“Just please include me,” she said. “I need to know you’re there.”
The next morning, after a breakfast heavy on grits, he began work on the handicapped ramps. David Goya did the math on the ramp angles while Russ and Craig Dilkes sorted lumber for the pouring forms and the rest of the crew moved earth. In previous years, when Keith Durochie was involved, Russ had sent crews to nearby ranches. This year, with forty kids penned up at the school, where the only other work was building bookcases, he was at once overstaffed and worried that the ramp-building job was too large to finish in five days. Stripped down to a T-shirt, under a warming sun, he worked with the focus of his mother and his grandfather, and the long morning seemed gone in ten minutes. At lunchtime, he asked Daisy Benally again about Clyde’s grievance with Keith, but Daisy again declined to elaborate. He reproached himself for having been too scattered to get the story from Wanda when he had the chance. Now there was nothing to be done but wait for Wanda to come and explain.
In the evening, when the group was eating dinner and he heard a vehicle on the school road, he briefly hoped it might be Wanda, but he didn’t stop to wonder where the vehicle was going. Not until it came roaring back down the hill did he wonder. Stepping outside, he saw Clyde’s truck turning onto the main road.
Only he had seen it. The group’s merriment level was high; a piece of turnip had been flung. He had to pretend to be surprised when, after dinner, he led the group back up the hill and found the school door, which he’d been careful to padlock, standing open. The doorframe was splintered, the hasp dangling from the lock.
David Goya, speaking for everyone, said, “Uh-oh.”
Quietly, as a group, in wandering flashlight beams, they went inside and surveyed the room where they slept. Suitcases and duffel bags had been emptied on the floor, sleeping bags tossed around, a bottle of talcum powder thrown against a wall, but Bobby Jett’s expensive camera was sitting where he’d left it. Frances took Russ by the arm. He could feel her looking up at him, but he didn’t want to look at anyone. The fault was clearly his.
“Where’s my guitar?” Darcie Mandell said.
“You’re missing your guitar?” Russ said in a choked voice.
“Uh, yeah.”
“They took mine, too,” another girl called from across the room. “It’s definitely not here. They freaking stole my Martin!”
Catching a note of hysteria, Russ removed himself from Frances and found his voice. “All right, ah—listen up. This is obviously not good, but we need to stay calm. Let’s get the lanterns on and do a careful inventory. If anything’s broken, anything’s missing, I want to hear about it.”
“My guitar is missing,” Darcie Mandell reported dryly.
“So, yes, we seem to be missing two guitars, but let’s see if there’s anything else. We’re in a place of underprivilege, and sometimes these things happen. The important thing is that we’re together as a group. We’re safe as long as we stay together.”
“I’m not feeling especially safe,” Darcie said, “despite our being together.”
“Let’s straighten up the room and see what we’ve got.”
Still unable to look at Frances, he lit two lanterns and checked his own belongings. He wasn’t angry; he was struggling not to cry. The sorrow pertained to everything—the hardness of reservation life, the fears and hurt feelings of forty good kids, the cultural and economic gulf between New Prospect and Kitsillie—but especially to his own vanity. He’d imagined himself a friend of the Navajos and a bridger of divides, imagined he knew better than the people who’d warned him not to come here. He hated to think what God thought of him.
It emerged that only the two guitars had been stolen. The greater damage was in the violation of their space, the chill that Clyde’s aggression had put on their fellowship. When the group gathered again around the candle, the contrast to the previous night couldn’t have been starker. Unhappiness or fear was in almost every face.
“So we’ve encountered our first adversity,” Russ said. “Adversity can strengthen us as a group, but it’s important that I hear from every one of you tonight. We’ll go around the circle and hear what each of us is feeling. Speaking for myself, I’m very sad—sad for us and sad for whoever broke in. It could be that we’ll decide not to stay here, but my own inclination is to stick it out and deal with the issue, not walk away from it. In practical terms, at least one adviser will now stay in the building at all times, and tomorrow morning I will deal with this. I will try to get Darcie and Katie’s guitars back.”
“How about just calling the police?” Ted Jernigan said unpleasantly.
“We can report this to the tribal police, but I’d like to understand better why it happened. Let’s see what we can achieve with listening before we bring the law in.”
It took more than an hour to go around the circle, and Russ wasn’t Ambrose. He didn’t have limitless patience with the self-drama of adolescents, the Crossroads-encouraged inflation of emotional scrapes into ambulance-worthy traumas. He himself was upset, but his fault gave him the right to be, and although he’d asked to hear from everyone, because this was the Crossroads way, it tried his patience to sit in a world of real social injustice, real suffering, and make such an opera of the theft of two guitars, easily replaceable by their owners’ parents. The outpouring of support for Darcie and Katie was comparable to what Alice Raymond had received when her mother died. Of all the feelings voiced at the long candle, the only one Russ respected was the group’s frustration with being quarantined from interaction with the Navajos. He shared that frustration.
In the end, they voted to stay at least one more day. All the advisers except Ted Jernigan favored staying. Afterward, while the group bedded down, its spirits subdued, Russ went outside to look at the sky. He hoped to reconnect with God, but the door behind him opened. Frances had followed him.
“I thought you handled that well,” she said.
“I feel bad for the kids, especially the sophomores. This is their first experience here.”
“They respect you—I could see it. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t be a youth minister.”
His eyes filled with gratitude. “Now I’m the one who needs a hug.”
She gave it to him. The blessing of her touch, the palpable reality of the woman in his arms, was making a believer of him. It was as if he’d yearned to know God without actually believing that He existed. Now he could feel that, far from overhoping, he might have underestimated his chances—that Frances’s decision to come to Arizona had been, in fact, a decision about him.
“We’re having the full experience,” she said.
Behind them, the door creaked open again.
“Whoops,” a girl said.
As if excited to be discovered with him, Frances squeezed him harder, and again he thought of kissing her. To let himself be seen as the man she’d chosen, to cement his status with a public kiss, was worth the cost of what Becky would learn from her friends, what Ambrose would say. But to do it on a night when his group was in crisis could send a bad message. He contented himself with breathing his thanks into her hair.
The next morning, very early, after sleeping essentially not at all, he stole out of the school and walked down the road. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge, but a flock of mountain bluebirds was awake, foraging among bitten tussocks, perching on fence posts glaucous with frost. Daisy Benally was chopping onions in the chapter-house kitchen, her sister still asleep. When Russ told Daisy what had happened, she just shook her head. He asked where he could find Clyde.
“Don’t go there,” she said.
“But where is he?”
“You know the place. Up the canyon where Keith lived.”
“Are you saying Clyde is a Fallen Rocks?”
“No, he’s a Jackson. You shouldn’t go there.”
Russ explained why he had little choice but to go. Daisy, who’d reached an age where she greeted anything the world did with resignation, allowed that he could borrow Ruth’s truck. He would have liked to leave immediately, before he had time to be afraid, but he waited until the group came down for breakfast. Everyone’s hair was flat and dirty, every eye red from a night on a hard floor. By way of mending fences, Russ asked Ted Jernigan, who’d sat down with Frances, to take charge of the group for the morning.
Frances, too, looked dirty and poorly slept. “You’re not going alone,” she said.
“It’s fine. I can take care of myself.”
“She has a point,” Ted said. “Why don’t you and I go together?”
“Because I need you to stay here with the kids.”
“I’m going with you,” Frances said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Her eyes were on the table, her expression sullen. Russ wondered what he’d done to make her angry.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Yes I want to do that,” she said crossly.
He guessed she was embarrassed. Embarrassed by her fear for his safety, embarrassed by her need to stay close to him.
Ruth Benally’s truck was barely big enough for him to fit behind the wheel. If the fuel gauge could be trusted, there was half a tank of gas. As he followed the old road along the wash, he told Frances about the first time he’d driven it, the Enemy Way ceremony he’d blundered into. The road had since been widened, but the surface was no better. Negotiating the ruts and stones, he was slow to notice that Frances wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the windshield, her mouth tight. He asked what she was thinking.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “I’d rather just buy two guitars with my own money.”
“Do you want to go back?”
Not getting an answer, he stopped the truck. “I mean it,” he said. “I can easily take you back.”
She shut her eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Russ, but I’m a fearful person.”
“Someone else could have come with me. It didn’t have to be you.”
“Just drive.”
He reached for her, but she jerked away from him. “Just drive.”
He didn’t understand her. He couldn’t sort out the mixture of confidence and fear, self-love and self-reproach. In her own way, she was as odd as Marion. He wondered if all women were odd or only the ones he was attracted to.
The farther he drove up the valley, the less he recognized it. The land had always been dry, but he didn’t remember it being so utterly denuded. Gone were the sheep and cattle, gone every conceivably edible leaf and shoot, gone even the fence wire. All that remained were rough-hewn fence posts and erosion-scored slopes. Except that the rocks were white, not red, the landscape could have been Martian. Even the sky had a strange yellowish-gray pall. The haze was too pale and diffuse to be from a fire, and it wasn’t a dust storm—there wasn’t any wind. It was more like the pall over Gary, Indiana, on a clear Chicago day.
The alienation deepened when he passed the last of the fallen rocks and saw, in the distance, Keith’s old farmstead. He’d assumed he would find people here, maybe Clyde himself, but there was nothing. No grass, no garden, no animals, only gnarled junipers and dead cottonwoods, their broken limbs barkless and silvery. In his mind, the farmstead had remained unchanged, alive with Keith and his extended family, their chickens and goats. To see what time had done to it was to become aware of how old he was.
“Amazingly enough,” he said, “this is where I spent a summer.”
Frances wasn’t listening. Or was listening but was too tense to speak.
The little house, where he’d had his sexual revelation, had been stripped of its doors and its windows and its roof, leaving only the walls. The sunlight on it was bright but not as bright as it should have been. As Russ proceeded along the road, across the canyon and up the ridge opposite the farmstead, the yellowish pall became more pronounced.
Reaching the top of the ridge, he saw where it was coming from. In the middle of the wide plain below, the earth had been torn open—was being torn open. Dust was billowing from a gash that might have been a mile wide. Industrial trestles and a raw new road extended from the gash to the northern horizon. Russ had a sense of betrayal, born of his loyalty to the primitive mesa of his memories. Keith had mentioned that the tribal council permitted coal mining on the reservation, but Russ hadn’t had any reason to travel in this direction until now. He hadn’t imagined that the mining was so close to the Fallen Rocks land—so close, indeed, to Kitsillie itself—or that the scale of the operation was so immense.
Half a mile down the road, he saw Clyde’s pickup. In a clearing among sparse, stunted pine trees were two unhitched camper trailers, a structure of sticks and tarpaulin, a woodpile, and a larger, rusted truck with a water tank on its bed, everything filmed with road dust. Russ pulled over behind the pickup and cut the engine. A second sticker on its bumper said CRAZY HORSE WASN’T.
“So,” he said to Frances. “Maybe you should stay here.”
She was still staring at the windshield. “What did I ask you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“What was the one thing I asked you to do.”
It was interesting that her fear expressed itself as anger, as if it were his fault that she needed him to include her.
“Okay, then,” he said, opening his door.
As they approached the trailers, the flimsy rear door of one of them banged open. Clyde came out in his bare feet, dressed only in brown jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket, unbuttoned. His chest was bare and hairless. “Hey, white man.”
“Hello, good morning.”
“That your wife?”
Frances had stopped a step behind Russ.
“No,” he said. “She’s an adviser in our fellowship.”
“Hey, pretty lady.” Again the smiling insolence. “What brings you up here?”
“What do you think?” Russ said.
“I think you didn’t get the message.”
“I got the message, but I didn’t understand it.”
“Get the fuck out of here? Seems pretty clear to me.”
“But why? We’re not bothering you.”
Clyde smiled at the sky, as if his amusement were cosmic. He was handsome in a strong-browed way, handsome and fit. “If I walked into your house in Chicago and you said, ‘Hey, red man, get the fuck out, I don’t like you people’—I’d get the message.”
Russ could have objected that his group wasn’t in Clyde’s house. But the Navajos’ home was in the land, not in structures, and white people had certainly given them reasons to hate them. It was only by chance that Russ, until now, had dealt with Navajos who didn’t hate them. He glanced back at Frances. She seemed entirely occupied with managing her fear.
“You’re right,” he said. “If you don’t want us here, we shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s better.”
“But first I want you to hear me as a person. Not as a white man—as a person. I want to hear you, too. I didn’t come here to argue with you, I came to listen.”
Clyde laughed. “Like hell you did. I know why you’re here.”
“If you’re talking about the guitars, then, yes, we will need those back. We’re not leaving the mesa without them.”
“You people are all the same.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Your possessions, your money. You think you’re different, but you’re all the same.”
“You don’t know me,” Russ said angrily. “I don’t give a damn about possessions. I do care about the two young girls you hurt by stealing from them.”
“How many guitars do you need? I left you three of them.”
“How many do you need?”
“I already gave them to my buddies. That’s the difference between you and me.”
“That’s bullshit. The difference between you and me is you steal from teenaged girls.”
Clyde’s smile became pained. He looked around at the pine trees and then, shaking his head, walked over to the other trailer. From the dirtied sky came a faint sigh of industry, from the trees the chirring of a nutcracker. Frances’s eyes were fastened on Clyde as if she expected him to get a gun.
“We’re safe,” Russ said gently.
Her eyes moved to him without seeming to see him. Clyde emerged from the other trailer with the two guitar cases and set them on the ground. “Now get out of here,” he said.
“No.”
“Seriously, white man. You got what you came for.”
Clyde went inside his own trailer, and Frances gripped Russ’s arm. “We should go.”
“No.”
“Please. For God’s sake.”
Russ’s anger had turned to sorrow. There was beauty in a young man’s righteous anger and no joy in overpowering it—no satisfaction in bringing a white man’s legal rights to bear, asserting white ownership, reclaiming his possessions from a man who had nothing. The moral victory was Clyde’s. Thinking of what it cost him, Russ felt sorry for him.
He went and rapped on the door of the trailer. Rapped again.
“Listen to me,” he said to the door. “I want to invite you to come down to the school and talk to our group. Will you do that for me?”
“I’m not your performing Navajo,” came the voice from inside.
“Goddamn it, I’m showing you respect. I’m asking you to do the same.”
After a silence, the trailer shifted with movement inside it. The door opened a crack. “You’re a friend of Keith Durochie.”
“I am.”
“Then I have no respect for you.”
The door fell shut. Russ opened it again. Inside the trailer were the smells and disarray of solitary male living. “We came here to listen,” he said.
“Your lady looks at me like I’m a rattlesnake.”
“Can you blame her? You make threats, you break into the school.”
“But you’re not afraid of me.”
“No. I’m not.”
Clyde pursed his lips and nodded to himself. “All right. I’ll show you who your friend is.”
He stepped into a pair of boots, and Russ gave Frances a reassuring smile. She looked furious about what he was putting her through, but when Clyde came outside and led him down a sandy trail, through the pine trees, she followed them.
The trail was short and ended at an outcrop overlooking the devastated plain. Dust continued to billow from the strip mine, and the intervening slopes were treeless, lifeless—water-starved and grazed to death. Clyde stood so close to the cliff’s edge that Russ’s rectum tightened.
“Looking at this,” Clyde said, “is like watching you rape my mother.”
“It’s bad,” Russ agreed.
“It’s sacred land, but it’s full of coal. You see that smoke?” He gestured to the north. “That’s electricity for your cities. It’s not for us—there’s no electricity on the mesa.”
“Do you want electricity?”
Clyde looked over his shoulder at Russ. “I’m not a moron.”
“I’m just trying to understand. Is the problem the coal mine, or the fact that you don’t have electricity?”
“The problem is the tribal council. Your friend thinks this shithole is a good thing. Modern economy, man. Gotta deal with the bilagáana, fact of life, can’t live without ’em. That’s what your friend says.”
“Keith cares about his people. I don’t like what I’m seeing here any more than you do, and I don’t guess Keith likes it, either. But the money has to come from somewhere.”
“Keith doesn’t have to see it. He’s down in Many Farms.”
“He’s not well, you know. He had a stroke last week.”
Clyde shrugged. “Somebody else can cry over that. He fucked my family, and we’re not the only ones. The leases are shit and they last forever. We should be getting two or three times the money. And the jobs? My buddies are down there right now, eating coal dust. That’s the new Navajo—Peabody Fucking Coal Company.”
Frances was faintly shaking her head, her expression neither frightened nor angry, merely desolate, as if here were another door she was sorry to see opened.
“What did Keith do to your family?” Russ asked.
“This whole slope, he had the grazing permit for it. His wife had the permit on the back side, too. We knew the back side was no good—you probably saw it, coming in. But this side was still good. Keith cleared out and sold us the permit, and bang, a year later the council signed the deal with Peabody. He knew what was coming—we didn’t. We had healthy herds, the maximum allowed, and now look. You see any stock down there?”
There wasn’t an animal to be seen, not even a raven. From the direction of the mine came a muffled boom.
“The mine sucks water,” Clyde said. “Peabody could shut it down tomorrow, the water wouldn’t come back for twenty years. And you think Keith didn’t know that? He read the leases, and the leases came with water rights. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Russ didn’t want to believe it—there had to be another side of the story. And yet what did he really know about Keith Durochie? He remembered being smitten with him, remembered the delight of feeling accepted by him, the pride he’d taken in being friends with a full-blooded Navajo. What he couldn’t remember, now that he thought about it, under the dust plume from the strip mine, was any particular warmth from Keith’s side—any real curiosity or sentiment.
“That’s your friend,” Clyde said bitterly. “That’s your tribal council.”
“I feel for you,” Russ said.
“Oh yeah? You know the Sierra Club? They’re the crazy bilagáana that stopped the government from flooding the Grand Canyon. We went to them to try to stop the mine. We said we didn’t want a power plant on sacred land, and they were exactly like you. They said, ‘We feel for you.’ And they didn’t do shit for us. They only care about saving white places.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Frances said suddenly.
Clyde seemed startled that she had a voice.
“If we’re the bad guys,” she said, “if everything we do is automatically bad, if that’s the way you feel about us, why should we try to do anything?”
“Just stay the fuck away,” Clyde said. “That’s what you can do.”
“So you can go on hating us,” she said. “So you can go on thinking you’re superior to white people. If somebody like Russ comes along, somebody who actually cares, somebody who takes the time to hear you, somebody who’s good, it messes up your whole story.”
“Who’s Russ?”
“I’m Russ,” Russ said.
“I don’t hate your guy,” Clyde said to Frances. “At least he came up here—I respect that.”
“But we’re still supposed to get the fuck out,” she said. “Is that the idea?”
Talking to a woman appeared to discomfit Clyde. He kicked some gravel over the edge of the cliff. “I don’t care what you do. You can stay the week.”
“No,” Russ said. “That’s not enough. I want you to come down and talk to our group. You can do it tonight—bring your friends.”
“You’re telling me what to do?”
“It won’t change anything. You’ll still have this nightmare on your mesa—nothing’s going to change that. It makes me sick to see what’s happened. But if you’re angry enough to steal from us, we have a right to hear why you’re angry. I promise you the kids will listen to you.”
“Have their little Navajo experience.”
“Yes. I won’t deny it. But you’ll experience who we are, too.”
Clyde laughed. “The thing about your promises? There’s always something you didn’t tell us.”
“That’s bullshit,” Russ said. “That’s self-pitying bullshit. If you keep getting cheated, you need to be smarter. If you end up feeling like we’ve cheated you, you can go ahead and say so—we can take it. The question to me is whether you have the guts for an honest dialogue. From what I’ve seen, the only thing you’re any good at is saying ‘Fuck you’ and walking away. I’d hate to find out you’re nothing but a bully and a thief.”
Did words give expression to emotion, or did they actively create it? The act of speaking had uncovered a love in Russ’s heart, a love related to Clem, and he could tell, from the uncertainty in Clyde’s sneer, that his words had had an effect. But the fact of the effect was problematic. The very act of caring was a kind of privilege, another weapon in the white arsenal. There was no escaping the imbalance of power.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to us.”
“You think I’m afraid of you?”
“No. I think you’re angry and you have good reason to be. You’re under no obligation to spare us the discomfort of your anger.”
Now every word he said seemed to aggravate the imbalance. It was time to swallow his love and shut up.
“Thank you for giving us the guitars,” he said.
He beckoned to Frances to go ahead of him on the trail through the pines. Following her and looking back, he saw a complicated smile.
“Fuck you,” Clyde said.
Russ laughed and proceeded up the trail. Halfway up it, Frances stopped and threw her arms around him. “You’re amazing,” she said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“God, I admire you. Do you know that? Do you know how much I admire you?”
She held him tight, and there it was: the joy. After all the dark years, his joy was shining forth again.
Returning to the camp, they collected the two guitars and laid them on the bed of Ruth’s truck. The sun was now white, the glare intense on the road down the back side of the ridge. (To Russ, when he’d stayed with Keith, it had been the “front” side.) Dangling from the rearview mirror was a small plastic Snoopy, not necessarily an indication that Ruth liked Peanuts. All sorts of random trinkets turned up on the reservation.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” Frances said.
“Don’t be. It was brave of you to be here at all.”
“It’s like the feeling comes over me and I can’t control it. I wonder if it has to do with Bobby—the way he died. I don’t remember always being so afraid.”
“The important thing is that you did it. You were afraid, but you did it.”
“Can I say something else?”
Russ nodded, hoping for a stroke in return.
“I desperately need to pee.”
The canyon was devoid of shrubs to pee behind, but the old farmstead was close ahead. Russ increased his speed, Frances squirming at every bump. When he pulled into Keith’s old yard, she had the door open before he stopped. She hobbled behind the shell of the little house, and he took his own leak behind a cottonwood. Watching the wood go dark with his urine, he thought of the bare ground going dark with hers, her pants around her ankles. In the sun and the thin air, he felt dizzy.
Returning to the truck, he saw her inside the roofless house and joined her there. The bedroom wall was still extant, but the door and its frame were gone, the floor covered with drifted sand. Nearly thirty years had passed since he’d lain in the bedroom and pictured the Navajo dancer. Even now, when he was enlightened enough to deplore a white man’s lust for a Native American fifteen-year-old, the thought excited him.
“I don’t know what to think,” he said.
“About what?”
“About everything. About Keith. I hate to think he deliberately cheated Clyde’s family. But that’s the thing about other cultures—an outsider can never really understand what’s going on.”
“That’s why you have your own culture,” Frances said. “That’s why you have me. I’m easy to understand.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Want to bet?”
In two quick steps, she was pressing against him. Her hands were inside his sheepskin coat, her neck straining upward for a kiss. He gave it to her, tentatively.
She wasn’t tentative. She gave a little hop and he lifted her off the ground. She was a very determined kisser, harder of mouth than Marion, more aggressive, and it was entirely up to him to keep her aloft. How sharp the discontinuity between fantasy and reality! How disorienting the step from the generality of desire into the specificity of her kissing style, the hundred-odd pounds of dead weight he was holding. When he set her down, she backed against the wall and drew him after her. Her hips were as aggressive as her mouth, denim grinding against denim, and he thought of the heart surgeon. He thought of the lakefront high-rise apartment in which, he could now be certain, she’d done with the surgeon exactly what she was doing with him. Far from dismaying him, the thought helped him make sense of her. She was a widow who wanted sex; was good at it; had recent practice at it.
She paused and looked up at him. “Is this all right?” She seemed genuinely worried that it wasn’t. He loved her all the more for that.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said.
“It’s the nineteen seventies?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs. Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleepy. “There we are.”
It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life.
“We should get back, though,” she said. “Don’t you think? They’re probably wondering what happened to us.”
She was right. But now, being felt by her, he lost his mind. He covered her mouth with his, unbuttoned her jacket, pulled out her shirttails, reached underneath. The smallness of her breasts, in contrast to Marion’s, was extraordinary. Everything was extraordinary—he’d lost his mind, and she wasn’t saying no. She wasn’t saying they had to go back. The sun was warming his head and raising a smell of old smoke from the wall, but the place had lost its sound. Not a vehicle had passed on the road. No croak of a raven bore tidings of a reality larger than the two of them. In his madness, with the back of his hand scraping against her open zipper, he dared to part her private hair. She tensed and said, “Oh, Jesus.”
His madness made him bold. “Just let me.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just—hoo. Shouldn’t we go back?”
They definitely needed to go back, but he was touching Frances Cottrell’s vagina, a few steps from the spot where he’d entered the world of conscious pleasure, and there was no withstanding it. He’d come too far and waited too long. He opened his own pants.
“Oh, wow, okay.” She looked down at what was pressing against her belly, and then at the hole in the front wall where a window had been. “Maybe this isn’t the best time?”
His voice wasn’t his own; wasn’t under his control. “I can’t wait any more.”
“It’s true. I did make you wait.”
“You tortured me and tortured me.”
She nodded, as if conceding the point, and he tried to take her pants down. She looked around more nervously. “Really?”
“Yes, please.”
“I had no idea you were like this.”
“I am utterly in love with you. Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I guess I did wonder.”
When he tried again to get her pants down, she gently pushed him away. “Can we at least be less visible?”
In the time it took him to lead her into what had been the house’s bedroom, remove his coat, and spread it on the floor, the character of his madness changed—became less of the body and more of the head. Now everything centered on the deed and its attendant practicalities. She sat down on the coat and pulled off her shoes and pants. “I’m on the Pill,” she said, “in case you were wondering.”
He wanted to ask if she truly wanted what he wanted, but there was a chance that her assent would lack enthusiasm, a chance that it would start a conversation. The air was still cold enough that she left her hunting jacket on. At the sight of her lying back in it, naked below the waist, he thought he might throw up with excitement. Before she could change her mind—before he could lose the mad determination to do the deed, before he could consider how far from ideal the time and the setting for it were—he tore off his own pants and kneeled between her legs.
“My goodness, Reverend Hildebrandt. You’re rather large.”
If large meant comparatively large, it was a comparison that no one had ever made. The stroke (oh, what a suggestive term Ambrose had coined) made him even larger. To his surprise, he found the largeness to be a difficulty.
“Sorry,” she said. “You’re big, and I’m—tense.”
It couldn’t have been clearer that he was making a mistake. Each passing minute would only add to her tension. But he simply couldn’t wait any more. As if time were a thing he could grasp in his arms and bend to his will, he kissed her and touched her with soothing unhurry. Her responses were ambiguous, speaking possibly of arousal, possibly of tenseness. Gone, either way, was her aggressiveness.
“We can wait,” he admitted.
“No, try it again. Just go slow. I don’t know why I’m so tight.”
How quickly, once clothes had been shed, the wildly unmentionable became the casually discussable. It was like being whisked to a different planet. He felt as if he’d learned more about Frances in an hour than he’d learned in half a year. Thankfully, his heart still recognized her; his reservoir of compassion was still there to be tapped. He loved that a woman so confident of her desirability should have trouble relaxing for him. But alongside her specificity as a person, the sweetly imperfect person in whom he’d invested so much hope and so much longing, was the necessity to be, if only once, inside a woman who wasn’t Marion. How absurd the necessity, and how funny and human the constriction that impeded it, the quarter-inch out for every half-inch farther in, the lump in the sheepskin jacket that was murdering his elbow. In the end, he didn’t make it quite all the way in, and his satisfaction was pinched. But, God help him, he was keeping score, and this absolutely counted. Freed, at long last, from the weight of his inferiority, his heart returned to Frances. He shuddered with gratitude for the woman whose grace had saved him.
“So, number one,” she said, “I need to pee again. Number two, we should definitely go back.”
She gave him a sloppy kiss, the pleasure of it heightened by their union, their mouths like twins or proxies of other wet parts. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to feel that he’d had, by far, the better half of the experience. He wanted to satisfy her, too. But the desire he’d turned on with his taming of Clyde now seemed to be turned off. She scrambled to her feet and put her pants on. Two minutes later, they were in the truck again.
“So,” he said.
“Right, so.”
“I love you. That’s where I am.”
“I appreciate that.”
He started the truck and drove for a while in silence. There was no point in repeating that he loved her—he’d already said it twice.
“It’s strange,” she finally said. “The thing that makes you so attractive to me is the thing that makes it wrong of me to want you.”
“I’m not so good. I think I told you that.”
“But you are good. You’re a beautiful man. It’s all very confusing to me.”
“You’re regretting what we did.”
“No. At least not yet. It’s just confusing.”
“I’m fantastically happy,” he said. “I have no regrets at all.”
The hour was nearly noon, and he was driving as fast as he dared, too focused on road hazards to sustain a conversation, even if Frances had been inclined to say more. And so it happened that when he approached the chapter house and saw a big Chevy truck and a red-jacketed figure, Wanda, standing with Ted Jernigan and another man, Rick Ambrose, the latter glowering at Russ and Frances and registering their guilty lateness, waiting with the only kind of news that could have brought him to the mesa—bad news—the last words Russ had spoken were that he had no regrets at all.
In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.
On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.
Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequelae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities. His rationality was blazing and tireless and all-seeing, and the problem of Larry made him sensible of the cost of ceaseless blazing, the body’s need for a little boost. The emptier of his two aluminum film canisters was in his pants pocket. He could rub sustenance into his gums without a sound, but he was plagued by unknowns, such as whether his sleeping bag would sufficiently muffle the sound of a lid’s unscrewing. Whether he could open the canister blindly without spilling. (Even a microgram of spillage was unacceptable.) Whether it was wise to partake at all from a canister already so depleted. Whether he shouldn’t at least wait until he could give himself a superior boost nasally. Whether, on second thought, it wasn’t such a bad idea to strangle the person whose interminable throat clearings were standing between him and that boost …
Unh! The whether whether whether was of the body and its arrangement, its side deal, with the powder. Wholly apart from his body, lambent in his mind even now, was a key to millennia of fruitless speculation. It happened that, very recently, less than a week ago, he’d solved the puzzle of the world’s persistent talk of God. The solution was that he, Perry, was God. The realization had frightened him, but it was followed by a second realization: if a felonious and drug-addicted New Prospect Township High School sophomore was God, then anyone at all could be God. This was the amazing key. The amazement, indeed, was that he hadn’t seen it sooner. It had stared him in the face the previous summer, when he’d inked out the Gods in the Reverend’s clerical magazine and replaced them with Steves. How had he failed, that day, to grasp a key so exquisitely simple? The key was that Steve could be God. So could every other Tom, Dick, and Harry—all any of them had to do was open his eyes to his divinity. The instant a person experienced the mind’s truly limitless capacities, God’s existence became the opposite of preposterous. It became preposterously self-evident.
The revelation had occurred on Maple Avenue, minutes after he’d withdrawn $2,825.00 from his brother’s passbook account at Cook County Savings Bank. The teller had counted the bills and then counted them again out loud, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty, and five, and tucked them into a nifty brown envelope. The rush of success was so titanic, he imagined an ejaculation blotting out the heavens. Knowledge so perfect could only have been God’s, and if he, Perry, possessed it, then what did this make him? In his earlier lunch-hour casings of the bank, he’d ascertained that the older, gray-haired teller, with whom he’d had dealings, was nowhere to be seen at 12:15. Behind the window, instead, was a frizzy-haired mademoiselle still sporting orthodontia, thus undoubtedly (beyond all question!) too new at the bank to know Clem. The scarlet-nailed hand that had taken his passbook was marvelously inexpert.
“That’s a lot of cash. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a cashier’s check?”
“I’m buying a sailboat.”
“Wow. That’s exciting.”
“It’s a beauty. I’ve been saving for three years.”
“Do you have some ID?”
She couldn’t have asked a question more perfectly foreseen. Everything had been foreseen: withdrawing an innocently precise number of dollars; wearing a nerdy cardigan and the disguise of his new eyeglasses; not only replicating and laminating a University of Illinois student ID card but meticulously abrading and soiling it with an emery board and charcoal, labors performed within feet of his soundly sleeping little brother and underwritten by his powder, which was also a focuser of attention, an enhancer of manual precision. He’d invested rather a lot of little boosts in his project, but the investment would be dwarfed by the avalanche of dividends he perfectly foresaw. When the metal-mouthed teller returned the ID card, having scarcely glanced at it, the investment had already paid off handsomely. Counting time spent manufacturing the card and practicing Clem’s signature, minus incidental drug expenses, he’d made $236.25 an hour. Not bad. But still far less than he stood to make—even factoring in the additional hours of labor in Arizona and the return of Clem’s money—after his transactions had unfolded as foreseen.
There was no peyote, not one button, in Chicagoland.
Thousands of Chicagoland hippies were desperate to try it.
Only one person in the world had identified the demand and positioned himself to meet it.
He owed the development of this logic to an earlier realization: for three years, he’d been treating the wrong disorder. He’d believed his mind to be diseased, in want of chemical palliation, when in fact the problem was somatic. It was his body, its exhaustible muscles, its irritable nerves, not his mind, that needed support. As soon as his guy had introduced him to Dexedrine and he’d learned the proper function of a Quaalude, which was to let his body rest, he’d entered a phase unprecedented in its excellence and serenity. Each day, the world was like pinball played in slow motion. His timing with the flippers was precise to the millisecond; he could run up the score arbitrarily high. He also knew exactly when to stop, allow the ball to drain, and eat his ’ludes. Everything he did in early January had a rightness so complete that it controlled the world around him. Example: the very day he exhausted his Dexies, the very day, three thousand dollars appeared in his savings passbook, courtesy of his sister. Example: his bank did not require parental countersignatures. Example: his guy was not only at home and not only compos mentis, more or less, but willing to part with the entire remaining contents of his Planters Peanuts jar. The thought did cross Perry’s mind that he was overpaying, but the agreed-upon price was a minor fraction of three thousand dollars, and the guy fell upon his twenty-dollar bills with poignant greediness, suggestive of an individual who’d seriously hit the skids. As Perry fled down Felix Street, chewing pills, the world seemed even righter. His money had brought great happiness to both him and the guy. Their transaction, in theory zero-sum, had somehow doubled the money’s value.
For yet a while longer, all had been righter than right, but by the time Bear delivered his judgment of speed, Perry was ready to hear it. What had seemed in the moment of purchase an all but inexhaustible number of pills had dwindled unexpectedly fast, and although their function was somatic he was experiencing less than salubrious mental side effects. Jay in particular was intolerably impatient-making, their sharing of a room a misery. Likewise his mother’s tender touchings. Likewise any Crossroads activity requiring physical contact. The world’s slowness had become more infuriating than capacitating, and meanwhile his body kept saying, “More, please.” His body had created a problem. He hated it for its inroads on his dwindling supplies, hated its drag on the flight of his mind. In a state of towering crankiness, when he ran out of pills, he returned to the guy’s little house on Felix Street, and this time no dog was there to howl at him. The front stoop was littered with rain-eaten advertising folios. Pasted to the door was a bright-yellow sheriff’s notice that he didn’t dare step close enough to read.
“I’m not surprised,” Bear said. “That shit is pure evil.”
That Perry liked Bear was irrelevant. That Bear liked Perry, and allowed him to make house calls, was a blessing portending a new phase of rightness. Bear, who’d also sold to Ansel Roder, had zero personal attributes in common with the guy on Felix Street. He was burly and mellow, seemingly unafraid of the law, and reassuringly acquainted with several such Crossroads alumni as Laura Dobrinsky. His house, a trek of thirty minutes from the Crappier Parsonage, belonged to a grandmother who now dwelt in a nursing home. Perry had never had a grandmother, but he recognized the grandmaternal smell in the walls, the grandmaternal hand in the embroidered sheer curtains in the living room, where Bear, of an afternoon, drank Löwenbräu and read the many magazines he subscribed to. Clearly, the key to longevity as a dealer was to be like Bear. He dealt exclusively in naturally derived substances, mostly pot and hash but also, as Perry learned after explaining his energy requirements, the odd gram of cocaine, to oblige some of the musicians among his clientele.
On his first visit, Perry left with a forty-dollar sample. Did someone say love at first snort? He was back two days later. This time, Bear had company, a comely personage in a leather miniskirt, drinking her own Löwenbräu, and Perry feared that his arrival was unwelcome. But Bear was mellow, and his lady friend, on learning what Perry was about, brightened as though she’d remembered that today was a holiday. Already, after only two days, Perry wondered how a person even casually acquainted with cocaine could ever, for a moment, not be wondering if some of it might be close at hand; how the thought had managed to absent itself from her head. Further speeding his heart, as Bear convivially treated them, was the thrill of his singularity (if anyone else at New Prospect High had used the fabled drug of Casey Jones, Perry was unaware of it) and his inclusion by two sophisticated people in their twenties. Among their topics of lively discussion were the most interesting drug they’d ever taken, the drug they were keenest to try (“Peyote,” Bear declared), the lucky star that Perry could thank for not having been robbed by a needle-using freak, the contrasting benignancy of a plant-based alkaloid that didn’t turn its users into paranoid maniacs, the experiments of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the hypocritical distinction between prescription drugs and street drugs, and the rumors of the Beatles reuniting, the grating self-importance of Grand Funk Railroad. Perry was very merry, and his very merriness served the ends of his unsleeping rationality. His first-order need was that Bear like him and trust him. His second-order need was to deflect attention from a glaring difference between himself and Bear, namely, that Bear was mellow. One snort made Bear an even happier Bear and was enough. Perry, who was the nth degree of the opposite of mellow, struggled fiercely to control his eyeballs, which wanted only to follow the coke.
Bear’s mellowness, it emerged, concealed a stubborn will. His coke sales were a sideline, subject to constraints of availability at the wholesale level, and his other buyers, though few and irregular, were loyal to him. Perry, as a newcomer, was eligible for only half a gram. When he offered to pay a premium for more, Bear pretended not to hear him. Bear was being irrational—it was tiresome and risky to make Perry come a-scoring so often—but Perry, guided by rationality, gave their relationship some weeks to grow before he made his proposition.
Bear whistled. “That’s a shitload.”
“I’m more than happy to prepay you for your trouble.”
“Cost isn’t the issue.”
“As much as I enjoy our little chats, it might be better if we had them less frequently. Don’t you think?”
“Honestly? I think you’ll blow through whatever you get and be back here in a week.”
“Not true!”
“I’m not cool with where this is going.”
“But—you’ll see—that is—it’s cool. Just give me a chance.”
It might have been the sight of twenty fifty-dollar bills, crisp from the presses, satisfying to riffle, that turned the tide in Perry’s favor. Bear grumpily took the money and sent him away with his nearly weightless allowance. In the ensuing fortnight, Perry visited him twice more without getting his thousand dollars’ worth. Did there then come a night when he focused the full might of his mind on imagining into existence—on willing into being—a trace of the powder that had so lately and whitely existed but now, owing to a traitorous improvidence of the body, did not? There came more than one such night. And did there then come a day when Bear answered the doorbell and merely handed him a slip of paper?
“His name is Eddie. He’s got what you paid for.”
“May I come in?”
“No. Sorry. You’re a sweet kid, but I can’t see you anymore.”
The door closed. For various reasons, sheer physical exhaustion perhaps primary among them, Perry burst into tears. Was it then that the speck of dark matter first appeared? He felt that he loved Bear, admittedly on short acquaintance, more than he’d ever loved any other person. His forfeiture of Bear’s affection was a blow so devastating that it actually chased from his mind all thought of white powder. Only when he was home again, having blubbered himself out, did he recollect what the seven digits on the slip of paper represented. His mind exploded as if he’d inhaled the whole of it.
He did not love Eddie, and Eddie did not love him. Their first encounter had a flavor of Felix Street, and their one subsequent transaction, which more than completed the exhaustion of the funds that Becky had transferred to him, left him seething with hatred of Eddie, who he was absolutely sure had cheated him. Again, it was only afterward that he recalled how fucking much drug, even after being cheated, he’d come to possess. Three tightly lidded film canisters: that was something. Never again, or at least not for an extremely long while, would he find himself dying of empty-handedness.
And yet, if three canisters was excellent, how much more excellent six would have been. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. Was there a multiple of three of whiteness large enough to permanently set his mind at rest? The dark speck, the mental floater, was there again. It no longer seemed that money spent brought double benefit. Money spent was simply money gone. In his savings passbook, perilously exposed to prying parental eyes, stood the sorry figure of $188.85, and even genius had its limits. He didn’t see how one hundred and eighty-nine dollars could be compounded, quickly, into thirty-five hundred …
Larry was snoring. The sound accorded so closely with the platonic form of “snore sound” that Perry wondered if it might be fake. He lay still, and the snores grew louder. By and by, they terminated in a choking gasp, the rustle of Larry repositioning himself. There followed fainter snores, unquestionably authentic. Perry now dared—first things first; throw the nerves a bone—to open the canister and insert a moistened finger. He tapped the finger on the canister’s rim, very carefully, and introduced it to his mouth. He dipped again and pushed the finger deep into a nostril, removed it and breathed deeply, sucked the finger clean and used his tongue as a gum swab. The localized numbing was metonymic of a more general cessation of his nervous system’s hostilities against the mind. Although the rush had of late been feeble, he at least was no longer at odds with himself. He capped the canister and slowly sat upright. His boots were by the door, the money in the toe of one of them, everything perfectly foreseen. The now deafening beating of his heart served also to deafen Larry, because it had to; because the sound was God’s own. As maternal heartbeats were said to soothe prenatal babies, His own cosmic heartbeats lulled every one of His children. Oh, how He loved them! He felt He could have killed them all or saved them all, just by willing it, so loud were His coked-up heartbeats as He proceeded to ease open the dorm-room door.
An exit sign glowed in the dark hallway. At the far end, fluorescent light spilled weakly from the lounge. It was difficult to return to human chronology and make sense of his watch, but he grasped that he still had thirty-five minutes. He pocketed the money, put on his boots, and crept past other rooms commandeered by Crossroads. From one of them, he could hear the muted squeak of girl voices, distressingly awake. What needed to be done about them must have been self-evident, because he found himself, a seeming instant later, sitting in a bathroom stall and propelling into his sinuses, from the base of his thumb, a large and sloppy pour. It was very curious. How did an all-seeing Entity end up on a toilet seat without knowing how he’d gotten there? Casting his mind’s eye back over the preceding moments, he encountered an occlusion. The speck of dark matter now seemed larger; could, indeed, no longer be referred to as a speck; was perhaps better described as an uneasy semitransparency, a poorly demarcated blob. He couldn’t pin it down for examination, but he sensed its malignant saturation with knowledge contradicting his own. It was unbelievable! Unbelievable that God Himself should have a floater in His eye! God was very, very wrathful. His wrath, having nowhere else to vent itself, took the form of three further massive boosts in quick succession. If wild excess killed the body, then so be it.
He got his pants down just in time. The body, rather than dying, was defecating like an upside-down volcano. Into the stench, amid a flashing of alien lights, an apocalyptic pounding in his chest, came a blessedly rational insight: this was what happened when a person overindulged. To entertain this thought, however, was to perceive its irrelevance. Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit. Instead he shat again, and none of this had been foreseen. If foreknowledge of this supremely unpleasant lavatorial digression had resided anywhere, it had been in the hazy blob of dark matter, not in his mind.
Wiping his ass in a cramped Navajo bathroom stall, shackled by dropped trousers and distracted by the flashes of a thousand splinters, by the choking engorgement of his carotid, he forgot to be mindful of his canister’s whereabouts. As soon as he remembered, he confidently foresaw that he’d capped it and set it aside. But no. Oh, no no no no no. He’d knocked it over on the floor. Its scattered contents were thirstily absorbing a trickle from the toilet’s leaking seal. They’d formed a watery paste that he now had no choice but to urge, with the side of his finger, back into the canister, even at the cost of dampening the powder still inside it. Nothing made any sense. The embodied clairvoyance that had crept down the hallway toward the execution of its masterstroke was now wiping up, with bits of toilet paper, a whitish alkaloid smear contaminated with fecal and perhaps even tubercular bacteria, sullying itself with the question of whether the alkaloid had antiseptic properties, whether the toilet paper could later be applied to his gums without the swallowing of pathogens, and whether, although he still felt close to throwing up, it wouldn’t be better to lick the floor than let any milligrams go to waste.
A gag reflex dissuaded him from licking. He tamped the saturated toilet paper into the canister and screwed on the lid. And just like that—in an n-dimensioned wave of ecstasy, a rolling pan-cellular orgasm—he recalled that the object of his masterstroke was to secure an abundance of drug better measured in kilograms than in milligrams. Just like that, he emerged from life-threatening turbulence into the smoothest of highest-altitude flying, and everything made sense again. How had he questioned the rightness of his actions? How had he imagined that he’d overindulged? God didn’t err! He was superb! Superb! He’d pushed through the body’s limits to the highest realm of being. The speck of dark matter had shrunk to the point of disappearing, was again so tiny that God could love it, was dear and unthreatening and did not, after all, know anything, or maybe one small thing …
now you’ve seen hadn’t you better won’t take but a minute
Getting the speck’s message—that there might come, tonight, a moment when he felt a notch less superb, which couldn’t be allowed to happen—he stole back down the hallway and slipped into his room. His other canister, the full and fully dry one, was at the center of a sock ball in his duffel bag. He’d brought it along with no intention of dipping into it. He’d been motivated by a last-minute paranoia, a seemingly irrational fear of leaving his entire reserve in the parsonage basement, well hidden behind the oil burner but unguarded. Now he saw that it hadn’t been irrational at all. It had been perfect foresight.
“Perry?”
The voice, in the dark, sounded like Larry’s, but this didn’t mean that Larry was awake. Part of becoming God was hearing the voices of His children’s thoughts. So far, the voices had been too low to be intelligible. More like the random murmur in Union Station. He unballed the sock and put the wonderfully weighted canister in the leg pocket of his painter pants. Sweet-caustic alkaloid juices continued to drain behind his septum.
“What are you doing?”
If Perry’s vision had truly been perfect, unmarred by the dark speck, he might have succeeded in extinguishing Larry. The power to kill by thinking was divine. The flaw in his power was like a smudge on the lens of an infinitely powerful telescope.
“Perry?”
“Go to sleep.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to the lounge. Stick your nose in the bathroom if you don’t believe me.”
“I’m having the opposite problem. I’m totally constipated.”
Perry stood up and moved toward the door. Already he felt a notch less superb.
“Can we talk for a minute?”
“No,” Perry said.
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
“All I do is talk to you. We’re together all the time.”
“I know, but…” Larry sat up on his bunk. “I don’t really feel like I’m with you. It’s like you’re in some kind of … place. Do you know what I mean? You haven’t even had a shower since we got here.”
If Larry couldn’t see the absurdity of showering, didn’t have a deity’s intense distaste for it, there was no point in explaining.
“I’m trying to be honest,” Larry said. “I’m telling you how you seem to me. And one thing I think is you really need to take a shower.”
“Understood. Sleep tight.”
“It’s not just me, though. People think you’re being really weird.”
Perry now sensed an alliance between Larry and the speck of dark matter, a kindred possession of contradictory knowledge.
“I just wish you’d tell me what’s going on with you,” Larry said. “I’m your friend, we’re in Crossroads. You can tell me anything you want.”
“I think you’re evil,” Perry said. The rightness of this verdict was thrilling. “I think the powers of darkness are gathered in you.”
Larry produced an emotional sound. “That’s—a joke, right?”
“Far from it. I think you want to fuck your mother.”
“Jesus, Perry.”
“My dad’s the same way—I have it on good authority. You need to mind your own business. All you people, just stay the fuck out of my way. Can you do that for me?”
There was a silence made imperfect by a Navajo’s distant hot rod. Larry’s pale face, in the obscurity above, was like a death’s-head. The thought came to Perry that infinite power was infinitely terrible. How could God endure all the smiting He had to do? With infinite power came infinite pity.
Larry swung his legs off the bunk. “I’m getting Kevin.”
“Don’t do that. I was—my joke was in poor taste. I apologize.”
“You’re really scaring me.”
“Do not get Kevin. What we both need now is shut-eye. If I promise to take a shower, will you go back to sleep?”
“I can’t. I’m worried about you.”
However he might extinguish Larry, whether with blunt-object blows or strangling hands, there was bound to be an overhearable commotion.
“Just let me visit the facilities again. I’m having quite the roiling and boiling. Quite the industrial gas factory. Just stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Without waiting for a response, he darted from the room and flew down the hallway on wings of powder. As if he’d sailed off a cliff, he achieved fabulous velocity before hard ground, in the form of coronary limits made stricter by low atmospheric oxygen levels, stopped him dead. He turned, gasping, to see if the evil one had left their room. Not a sound!
The dormitory doors were locked at night, but from the lounge’s window to the pavement was a jump (or climb, as the case would later be) of only five feet. Outside, in freezing air, he paused to touch the money in his jacket, the canisters in his pants. One more quick boost: advisable? Though he was now perhaps two notches below the most sensational high he’d ever experienced, the cold was bitter. A metallic taste of blood was in his windpipe, and he still wasn’t far from throwing up. Press on, sir. Press on.
The young Navajos he’d befriended the night before were meeting him at the off-brand gas station up the road from the dormitory. He’d found the two of them shooting baskets beneath a billboard for the Best Western Canyon de Chelly whose lights indirectly illuminated a hoop and a crude backboard bolted to one of its stanchions. The younger Navajo had a deep, irregular scar from the bridge of his nose to his jaw. The older fellow was groovier and longer-haired, dressed in bell-bottom corduroys with a large silver belt buckle. At their urging, Perry had displayed his pathetic lack of ball skills, and by submitting to their derision, giggling along with it, he’d secured their trust. When he then broached the crucial subject, their laughter reached new heights.
“But seriously,” he said.
Their hilarity was ongoing. “You want to try peyote?”
“No,” he said. “That is—no offense intended—it’s not for my own use. I’m looking to obtain a large quantity. Perhaps a pound of it or more. I have the money.”
Of everything he’d said, this was apparently the most pants-wettingly funny. His foresight had allowed for the necessity of casting many a line before he got a bite, and he judged that it was time to try a different pond. He sidled away.
“Hey, wait, man, where you going?”
“It was nice to meet you both.”
“You said money. What’s your money?”
“Do you mean, is it legal tender?”
“How much you got? Twenty?”
Offended, he turned back to them. “A pound of peyote for twenty dollars? I have a hundred fifty times that much.”
This disclosure ended the hilarity. The groovier Navajo asked him, with a frown, what he knew about peyote.
“I know that it’s a powerful hallucinogen employed in Navajo ceremonies.”
“That’s wrong. Peyote isn’t Navajo.”
No word in the world hurt more than wrong. All his life, it had made Perry want to cry.
“That’s disappointing,” he said.
“Peyote’s not our thing,” the groovier fellow said. “It’s only for people in the church.”
“They take it and they sweat,” his friend said.
“It doesn’t even grow here. It comes from Texas.”
“I see,” Perry said.
Out of the now revealed imperfection of his knowledge rose a weariness compounded over many weeks of sleepless nights, a weariness so immense that he suspected no amount of boosting could overcome it. He shut his eyes and saw the überdark speck against the blackness of his lowered eyelids. The two Navajos were exchanging words that he was tantalizingly close to understanding. The gap between knowing no words of Navajo and knowing all words of Navajo seemed no wider than a micron. Were it not for the dark speck, the weariness, he could have crossed it effortlessly.
“So there’s a guy,” the groovier fellow said to Perry. “Guy named Flint.”
“Flint, right.” The younger fellow seemed excited to remember him. “Flint Stone.”
“He’s in New Mexico, just over the state line.”
“Just over the state line. I know the place.”
“Who is Flint?” Perry said.
“He’s the man. He’s got what you need. He brings peyote up from Texas.”
“He’s a Navajo?”
“Didn’t I just say that? He’s in the church and everything.” The groovier fellow turned to his scar-faced friend. “Remember that time we went out there?”
“Yeah! That time we went out there.”
“He had a bag of buttons in his shed. It was like a five-pound bag of coffee, pure peyote.”
“That wasn’t coffee?”
“No, man. I saw it. He opened the bag, he showed me. It was all peyote. He gets it for the church.”
Flint Stone was a name from a cartoon. Perry’s doubts about the story, which were substantial, all emanated from the speck. The speck’s essence was that everything was hopeless and he was deathly tired. For a moment, in the billboard’s reflected light, he sank deeper into weariness. But then—O ye of little faith!—his rationality blazed forth. His weariness was itself the proof that he could go no farther; didn’t have the strength to accost further Navajo strangers. By definition, if he could go no farther, he’d reached a logical terminus. In the light of perfect logic, the coffee sack overflowing with peyote became incontrovertibly real. The surety was the balance of $13.85 in his passbook account, the scarcely larger sum in Clem’s. The only way to replenish these accounts, while realizing a profit sufficient for his ancillary drug needs, was to buy peyote in bulk and resell it at a fivefold markup in Chicago. Ergo, there had to be a man by the unlikely name of Flint Stone, the man had to sell peyote at a depressed reservation price, and the first individuals Perry had accosted had to know it. Had to! It couldn’t have been otherwise, because God had only one plan.
Weightless with logic, ebullient, he’d arranged to return in twenty-four hours. In the small eternity of those hours, the sack of peyote had become even realer, so real that he could feel the heavy weight of it; he could smell its earthy fungal smell. The weight and the smell were a turn-on that persisted through a morning of scraping paint from the side of a tribal meetinghouse, an afternoon of holding forth to Larry on the atomic structure of matter, the creation of matter in a Big Bang that even now propelled the universe ever outward, the key role of Cepheid variable stars in the discovery of this expansion, the unbelievably providential circumstance (it had to be) that a Cepheid’s period of variation was proportional to its absolute luminosity, thus enabling precise measurement of intergalactic distances, across which an all-seeing mind could zip at will, zoom in for closer looks at the quasars and nebulae of its Creation, survey the dark outer limits of material existence …
Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage. The air had an acrid scent of burned heating oil, and the only glow of warmth was in his head. He considered the possibility that he’d erred in not wearing long johns and a second sweater before dismissing it as incompatible with perfect foresight. His nose and mouth were so numb that his snot ran onto his chin before he noticed it. He pushed it into his mouth and savored the everfreshness of the naturally derived substance dissolved in it. Conceivably he’d snorted more than half a gram …
The gas station was closed. Standing outside its dark office were the scar-faced fellow and, smoking a cigarette, a shaggy figure Perry didn’t recognize. Mr. Stone, I presume? The figure was much younger than he’d imagined Flint.
“This is my cousin,” the scar-faced fellow said. “He’s driving.”
The cousin had a thick neck and radiated stupidity. Types of this sort haunted the high-school locker room.
“Where is our other friend?” Perry said.
“He’s not coming.”
“That’s a pity.”
The cousin threw his cigarette toward the gas pumps, as though daring them to ignite (stupid), and walked over to a dusty station wagon parked in shadow. When Perry saw that the car was of the same make and model as the Reverend’s, and of similarly advanced decrepitude, he felt a pinprick on his scalp. Pure goodness and rightness coursed through him, washing away his last lingering speck-sponsored doubts. The cousin’s vehicle had to be a Plymouth Fury. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be!
He wouldn’t have guessed the speeds of which a Fury was capable. On the state highway, from the back seat, he saw the speedometer needle enter regions that recalled his overindulgence in the bathroom. But there had been no overindulgence, and the cousin wasn’t stupid. To the contrary, his driverly intelligence was profound. Lone lights flashed by like the galaxies God glimpsed in his zooming. Supernaturally invisible, slouched behind two Indian heads silhouetted like rock formations in a desert lit by headlights, he stickied his finger inside the tainted canister and applied it to his gums and nostrils. He took a deep, sweetened breath and sniffed repeatedly.
“You can totally trust me,” he said. “I couldn’t be more perfectly indifferent to the particulars of our buttons’ provenance. Whether every last link in the chain of possession was strictly legal is no concern of mine. Indeed, I might argue that larceny, being forbidden, entails a level of risk that could be considered hard labor, as deserving of reward as any other form of labor.”
He chuckled, divinely pleased with himself.
“The counterargument would be that larceny deprives a second party of the fruits of his own hard labor, and it becomes an interesting economic question—how value is created, how lost. If we had time and you had basic algebra, we could look into the mathematics of larceny—whether it really is zero-sum or whether there’s some x factor that we’re failing to account for, some hidden deficit in the party who’s been stolen from. Although, again, for the narrow purposes of our transaction, it’s no concern of mine. By the same token, if there’s one link in the chain that you don’t have to—”
“Man, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that however legitimate, or perhaps less than legitimate—”
“Why are you talking? Shut up.”
His scar-faced best of buddies! Perry giggled at how colossally he loved him. That God had chosen specially to favor a disfigured Navajo whose education had probably ended in eighth grade: all the angels in heaven were laughing with Him.
“What’s so funny? What are you laughing at?”
“Stop laughing,” the cousin said. “Shut up.”
He kept laughing, but at a wavelength deeper than hearing, a radio or telepathic wavelength that entered every heart, waking or sleeping, around the world, and brought a comfort that human understanding could not explain. Into his own hearing came a multitude of voices, a collective murmur of gratitude and gladness. One voice, rising above the murmur, distinctly said, “That’s a crock.”
The voice was insidiously close and stopped his silent laughter. The voice sounded like Rick Ambrose, and the sentiment was odd. Crock of what? Only shit and butter came in crocks.
“Not butter,” the voice clarified. And added—one was tempted to say snarled—something in a language (Navajo?) that would have been intelligible if spoken more slowly. Hearing an alien language in one’s head was nearly as frightening as recognizing one’s divinity, but it was likewise followed by a reassuring realization: the mind that could speak all human languages without having studied them could only be God’s. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Like overindulgence inverted, the Fury’s smooth sailing gave way to spine-crunching turbulence. On a narrow dirt road whose craters were inky in the headlights, the cousin maintained a speed inviting reassessment of his intelligence. One needed both hands to steady oneself, three further hands to ensure that the two film canisters and the folded envelope of cash weren’t falling from one’s pockets. A chalky-tasting powder filled the passenger compartment, and the road went on and on. One could only hope that they were rushing to meet an impatient seller at some appointed hour; that the return drive could be taken at lower velocity. Beneath the physical pain of being battered by armrest and door and one’s own flying limbs, a deeper kind of pain began to grow, but the accelerations and counteraccelerations were so unpredictable and violent that to open a canister was out of the question …
The Fury stopped.
No longer the best of buddies, the scar-faced fellow turned and put his elbow on the backrest. “Give me the money and wait here.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather go with you.”
“Wait here. He doesn’t know you.”
This made enough sense to be construed as foreordained necessity. The fellow took the envelope of money, and his cousin cut the engine and the lights. The sky must have clouded over the moon. After the door had opened and closed, the only light was from the fellow’s flashlight. Its beam, crisply defined by the dust the car had raised, caught barbed-wire fencing, a corroded cattle guard, pale weeds along a rocky driveway, before it receded into negligibility. The cousin lit a cigarette and inhaled like a gusting wind. There was much to say and nothing that could be said. The speck of dark matter was malignant, and yet its darkness was tempting. One became so very tired of the brightness of one’s mind …
The flashlight beam bobbed back into view. The back door opened.
“He’s got the peyote, but he wants to talk to you.”
As cold as the air in Many Farms had been, it was twice as cold in the dark of nowhere. The flashlight beam kindly pointed out stones and holes to be avoided on the driveway. Ahead, in its incident light, a stone structure became visible, a fence of bleached wood, the rear end of a skeletal truck. The fellow kicked open a sagging gate in the fence. “Go on,” he said.
It was difficult to speak with jaws clenched against the chattering of teeth. “Give me the money.”
“Cliff’s got it. He’s counting it.”
“Who’s Cliff?”
“Flint. He wants to talk to you.”
Deep pain and brutal cold, a shuddering of chest muscles. He’d still had his wits in the warmth of the car. The thing he’d always had was wits, but now they’d abandoned him. He was stone-cold stupid.
“Go on. Take the flashlight.”
He took the flashlight and proceeded through the gate. Stupidity had reduced him to hoping for the best. Hope was the refuge of the stupid. A paddle-limbed cactus loomed up, a nest of rust-eaten oblong cans, ragged sheets of unidentifiable building material, a charred tree stump. The signs of abandonment were unmistakable, but he went around to the back of the stone structure.
There was no back of it. Only the edges of a wall that had collapsed into rubble.
He heard a sound as familiar as his father’s voice, the whinny and rumble of a Fury wagon’s engine starting up. He heard wheels spinning, an automatic transmission shifting gears.
He was too cold to be angry, too shaky-limbed to run.
The speck of dark matter had been tiny only in spatial dimension. It was the negative image of the point of light that had given birth to the universe. Now, in its explosive expansion and consumption of the light, the speck’s hyperdensity became apparent: nothing was denser than death. And how tired he was of running from it. All he had to do was lie down on the ground and wait. He was so malnourished and exhausted, the cold would quickly do the rest—he knew this; could feel it. The dark negative that had replaced his rationality was equally rational, everything equally clear in its antithesis of light.
But the body wasn’t rational. What the body’s nervous system wanted, absurdly, at this moment, was more drug. His money had been stolen but not his canisters.
He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.
Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.
Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.
His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.
A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.
Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.
Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.
Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.
The moment he stopped to spit, his chest was gripped with chills. He was getting no warmer, and the flashlight’s batteries had failed to the point where he could see no worse by turning it off.
This was a thought and his last one. His mind went dark with the flashlight, and then there was only a frigid blackness, its only features a slightly less black sky, a matchingly less black passage forward. The passage seemed eternal, but by and by it developed an incline. At the top of the incline, the sky lightened to reveal a boxy shape in the distance, darker than the road, higher than the horizon.
He was still trudging toward this shape after flames had engulfed it.
He still wasn’t there when he’d been there for a while.
Even as he stood clear of the inferno and toasted himself, he was still on his way to it.
A thing that hadn’t happened yet had happened. A large wooden building with a metal roof and wide doors had been broken into. The frozen metal of the tractors it contained, the deep chill of its concrete floor, had made the inside even colder than the outside, but the totality of the darkness had made even a dim flashlight useful, and there had been a box of matches. There had been a tower of wooden pallets. Gasoline. A splash of gasoline, just enough to kindle one pallet for some warmth. And then a blue flame snaking with terrible speed.
A bird blazing yellow, an oriole, was singing in a palm tree. In the background, around the pool at the apartment complex, she could hear the cheeping of smaller birds, the clacking of hedge clippers, the sighing of the megalopolis. Somewhere in the night, her third in Los Angeles, she’d regained an acuity of hearing that she hadn’t noticed losing. A similar thing had happened toward the end of her confinement in Rancho Los Amigos. A return of ordinary presence.
Of the city she remembered, only the mild weather and the palm trees hadn’t changed. East of Santa Monica, where the streetcar had run, there was now a freeway ten lanes wide, an elevated immensity of automotive glare. Driving from the airport, she’d been tailgated, veered in front of, honked at. Formerly orienting mountains had vanished in a claustrophobic smog. The buildings that loomed up in it, mile after mile, were like players in some cancerous game of trying to be the largest. The city no longer invited her mind to be sky-wide. She was just a frazzled tourist from Chicago, an ordinary mother who was lucky that her boy could read a road map.
It wasn’t so bad, being ordinary. It was nice to be present with the birds again. Nice to be unembarrassed in a bathing suit, nearly at her target weight. How nice it would have been to spend the whole day in Pasadena, see Jimmy in the nursing home again, and let Antonio, who’d become quite a chef, make dinner. How unexpectedly unfortunate that she had to get into her rented car and navigate the freeways.
She’d misplaced the urgency of seeing Bradley. For three months, consumed by the urgency, focused on losing weight and getting to Los Angeles, she’d given little concrete thought to what would happen when she got there. It had been enough to imagine a wordless locking of gazes, a delirious reblossoming of passion. When Bradley, in his second letter to her, had offered to come to her in Pasadena, she hadn’t foreseen the terrors of freeway driving. She’d insisted on going to his house, because Antonio’s apartment in Pasadena, with Judson underfoot, was obviously not a place for passion.
“Mom, look at me.”
Judson, on the neighboring recliner, in baggy new swim trunks, was aiming his camera at her. The camera briefly whirred.
“Sweetie, why aren’t you in the water?”
“I’m busy.”
“You have the whole pool to yourself.”
“I don’t feel like getting wet.”
Something moved in her, a flutter of fear or guilt—a memory. The girl she’d been in Rancho Los Amigos had had a phobia of water on her skin.
“I want to see you dive in the water. Can you show me your dive?”
“No.”
He hunched over the camera and adjusted a dial. The camera seemed too complicated for a nine-year-old, and she’d tried to discourage him from bringing it on the trip. On the flight from Chicago, instead of reading a book, he’d fiddled with the thing incessantly, clicking and turning every clickable or turnable part. He’d done the same thing at Disneyland. He had only three minutes of film, and he was anxious, visibly stressed, about misusing it—kept raising the camera and hesitating, fiddling with it, frowning. She was anxious herself, about the freeway, and needed more cigarettes than she felt she could smoke in front of him. It was only three thirty when he ran out of film. Money had been spent, Frontierland not yet visited, but he said he’d had enough. In the Disney parking lot, before returning to Pasadena, she’d smoked two Luckies.
“Put the camera down,” she said. “You’ve played with it enough.”
He set it aside with a theatrical sigh.
“Are you unhappy about something?”
He shook his head.
“Is it me? Is it my smoking? I apologize for smoking.”
The oriole was singing again, so very yellow. He glanced at it, reached for the camera, and caught himself.
“Sweetie, what is it? You haven’t seemed like yourself.”
His expression became morose. With the return of ordinary hearing came a more general sharpening of her senses.
“Will you tell me what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing. Just … nothing.”
“What is it?”
“Perry hates me.”
She had another flutter of guilt, more pronounced.
“That’s not true at all. There’s no one Perry loves more than you. You’re his special favorite.”
Judson’s mouth curled inward as if he might cry. She moved over to his recliner and pressed his face to her chest. He was so skinny and unhormonal, she could have gobbled him up, but she could feel his resistance. Her old bathing suit now gaped at the top and gave her breasts a wanton latitude. She let him pull away.
“Perry’s sixteen now,” she said. “Teenagers say all sorts of things they don’t really mean. It has nothing to do with how much your brother loves you. I’m sure of that.”
Judson’s expression didn’t change.
“Did something happen? Did he say something that upset you?”
“He told me to leave him alone. He used a bad word.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“He said he was sick of me. He used a really bad word.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”
She embraced him again, this time positioning his head on her shoulder. “I don’t have to see my friend today. I can stay here with you and Antonio. Would you like that?”
He squirmed out of her grasp. “It’s okay. I hate him, too.”
“No, you don’t. Never say that.”
He picked up the camera and clicked something. Clicked it. Clicked it. She’d never had to worry about Judson, but his absorption in the camera recalled her own unhealthy absorptions. Out of nowhere, she was seized by an image so vivid that she quaked with it, an image of her soul mate on top of her, rampant in her utter openness to him. Her bathing suit was loose on her—she’d lost thirty pounds—for him—it was crazy. Oh, the relief of being obsessed, the blessed banishing of guilt. The switch in her was still there to be flipped.
“Judson,” she said, her heart beating hard, “I’m sorry if I haven’t been myself. I’m sorry Perry hurt you. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay here with you?”
“Antonio said he’d play Monopoly with me.”
“You don’t want me to stay?”
He gave a shrug, a child’s exaggerated shrug. The right thing was to stay with him, but an afternoon of Monopoly would pass quickly enough, and Antonio had promised to make crispy tacos. Nothing she could do today was so urgent that it couldn’t be done tomorrow, except seeing Bradley.
“Let’s go inside, then. Maybe Antonio will make you a smoothie.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Did you not see the sign? No unaccompanied children under twelve.”
Antonio had introduced Judson to the concept of a “smoothie,” a sort of milkshake blended with banana. Antonio had retired from the job that had brought him and Jimmy to Los Angeles, but he was still vigorous, his hair splendidly white, his face handsomer than ever. He could easily have found a new lover, but instead, every morning and every evening, he visited the nursing home where Jimmy was bedridden. She saw that in her youthful prejudice, because Antonio was Mexican, she’d misread his relationship with her uncle. Antonio, not Jimmy, had always been the man of the house. Jimmy’s art had never really found a market, and now he was just a sack of bones, his vertebrae so badly crumbled that even a wheelchair was uncomfortable. All he had left were his wits. When she’d inquired about his brother, Roy, he’d mentioned that Roy’s first great-grandchild had been born on the day Nixon was elected. “I’ll let you guess,” he’d said, “which of those two events made him happier.”
It wasn’t easy to apply eyeliner with a shaking hand. The face in the guest-room mirror again had prominent cheekbones, but her skin was finely scored with wrinkles previously hidden by fat; poor light was required to see her as the girl she meant to be. At least her new dress fit this girl. She’d asked the dressmaker on Pirsig Avenue for something summery, something of the sort that Sophie Serafimides said lifted a man’s spirits, and she’d delayed the final fitting as an incentive to keep shedding pounds. The dressmaker, declaring that she looked darling, had taken the money she’d earned by proofreading a reader’s guide to Sophocles.
When she’d exhausted the money embezzled from her sister’s estate, and had charged as much as she dared on the family BankAmericard, she’d asked around the church for leads on work suitable for a literate person with no employment history, and a parishioner had connected her to a woman on maternity leave from the Great Books Foundation. The proofreading work was tedious but doable with frequent cigarettes. It kept her mind off food and further limited her interactions with Russ and the kids. In four weeks, she’d made nearly four hundred dollars, enough to pay the credit-card bill, cover the cost of a rental car and Disneyland, and buy sundries like the rolls of film that Judson wanted for their trip. Bradley had once said it himself, in a sonnet: she was capable.
Before going to say good-bye to Judson, she stepped onto the guest-room patio with her purse. It took her a while, after she’d smoked, to notice that she was crossing the lawn toward the parking lot, rather than going back inside. Apparently it wasn’t necessary to say good-bye?
She was too terrified to judge. Her brain felt like a banana in a blender. It was unclear if the source of the terror was the prospect of the freeway or simply the arrival of the moment—the moment when past and present would connect and thirty intervening years would disappear. Obsessed though she’d been with creating this moment, its arrival had caught her by surprise.
She wasn’t capable. She’d memorized the directions that Bradley had sent her, she’d tested herself by reciting them verbatim, and now she couldn’t remember a word of them. She had his last letter in her purse, but she couldn’t read and drive at the same time.
She started the car, which was baking in the sun, and turned the air-conditioning on full blast. The fabric of her dress had sparse green paisleys on a background of ecru that would show her sweating, which was already considerable. She would have to talk to Mr. Shen, the dry cleaner in New Prospect. Mr. Shen was ever pessimistic when she showed him a bad stain, ever able to perform the miracle of removing it. The thought of Mr. Shen returned her to ordinariness. The worst case—that she’d be back in Pasadena in four hours, able to swim in the pool, unphobic, ordinary—wasn’t such a bad case. Tiny treats, an air-conditioned car, a drink by the pool, an after-dinner cigarette, could get a person through her life. Looking forward to treats was a coping skill for which Sophie Serafimides had praised her. It was strange that she’d felt compelled to inflict such terrors on herself.
Another adage of the dumpling: It’s better to function than not function. Once she was on the freeway, she found that she remembered the directions perfectly. The freeway experience was itself a helpful obsession, a state of mind so consuming that the world outside it barely registered. All she had to do was stick to the rightmost lane and attend to road signs. Of the millions of people who drove in Los Angeles every day, very few were killed. When she’d made it past the San Diego Freeway without dying, she had the thought that, if she ended up moving here, she might even come to enjoy driving.
It was a mistake to think this. Only by luck did she emerge from her fantasies in time to take the exit for Palos Verdes. Pushed relentlessly by cars behind her, she drove all the way to Crenshaw Boulevard before she could pull over and collect herself. She angled a cold-air louver at her face, which felt red, and patted her underarms with a tissue from her purse. The haze outside the car had a marine quality, cooler in color than smog, merely dimming, not effacing. A sign on a nearby awning said PERRY SUMMONS REALITY.
The words swam in her vision.
Their reemergence as PERRY SIMMONS REALTY didn’t lessen her fear. Not wanting her dress to stink of smoke, she got out of the car. The air was ocean-cool and sharply scented with asphalt from a repaving job across the street. The words on the awning were too strange, too apt, to be anything but a sign from God. But what did it mean?
She hadn’t had a real talk with Perry since the night of his sixteenth birthday, three weeks ago. She’d detained him in the kitchen, after dinner, and privately handed him two hundred dollars, the same amount she’d given Clem at Christmas. After Perry had thanked her, she’d noticed that someone’s slice of cake had hardly been touched, and he’d admitted it was his. Did he not like chocolate cake anymore? “No, it’s delicious.” Then why wasn’t he eating it? “My butt is fat.” His butt wasn’t fat in the slightest! “You’re the one with the crazy weight-loss program.” She was just trying to get back to her proper weight. “I’m doing the same thing. You don’t have to worry about me.” Was he sleeping? “Sleeping fine, thanks.” And he wasn’t still … “Selling weed? I told you I wouldn’t.” Did he still smoke it? “Nope.” And—did he remember what else he’d promised her? “Trust me, Mother. If I notice anything amiss, you’ll be the first to know.” But he seemed a little—agitated. “Said the pot to the kettle.” What did that mean? “Your own mental health doesn’t strike me as the finest.” She was—it was only some trouble between her and his father. The point here was that a growing boy needed to eat. “What sort of ‘trouble’?” Just—nothing. The sort of trouble that married couples sometimes had. “Does it have a name? Is it Mrs. Cottrell?” What made him—why did he ask that? “Things I’ve heard. Things I’ve seen.” Well—yes. Since he was nosy enough to ask—yes. And, well, yes—it was very upsetting. If she hadn’t seemed like herself lately, that was why. But the point—“The point, Mother, is that you should worry about yourself, not me.”
With the help of two Luckies, by the side of the road, she understood that the building with the awning was just an ordinary realtor’s office. Looking around, she saw ordinary asphalt, ordinary streetlights, a hillside covered prettily with coastal heather. She unwrapped a stick of Trident and got back in the car.
Palos Verdes was one of countless neighborhoods she’d had no reason to visit in her youth. The streets were empty of pedestrians, and the houses were blander, more homogenous, than the ones in West Los Angeles. In the dimming marine mist, the place seemed abandoned and melancholy. Reaching the street called Via Rivera, she found that she was ten minutes early.
Bradley’s house was less than grand, and it didn’t have the ocean view that she’d imagined; a burgundy Cadillac was in the driveway. She stopped her own car well short of it and took the gum from her mouth. Would her smoking repel him? Or would the smell of her Luckies take him back, as it took her, to the Murphy bed in Westlake?
His first letter, which had arrived a week after she’d written to him, contained sentences of inexhaustible interest—I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you, how often I’ve wondered where you were, how worried I was that something terrible had happened to you—and many smaller items of interest, such as the fact that he wasn’t married. He’d been divorced from Isabelle after their younger boy finished high school, and divorced a second time, more recently, from a woman I should have known better than to marry. Also of interest were the excellence of his health and certain suggestions of wealth. He was now in the vitamin business, not as a salesman but as the owner of a company, based in Torrance, that employed more than forty people. Although his report on his sons was not of interest, she’d studied the details and filed them in a mental drawer that also held the name of every member of First Reformed. She was a pastor’s wife, skilled at politely remembering, no longer scary, and she wanted Bradley to know it.
At one minute past twelve thirty, she rang his doorbell.
The man who answered was somewhat like Bradley but jowlier, sparser of hair, wider in the hips. He was wearing loose linen pants and an oversize sort of toreador blouse, pale blue and halfway unbuttoned. Also a frightful pair of sandals.
“My God,” he said. “It really is you.”
She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. If she’d daydreamed for a hundred years, she couldn’t have imagined him in sandals. This led to a third and very unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find me,” he said, beckoning her inside. “How was the freeway? It’s usually not bad at this time of day.”
He shut the door and made a move to hug her. She stepped sideways. The house was a split-level and smelled faintly of old person. The art and the furnishings were tamely Far Eastern.
“What a lovely house.”
“Yeah, I have the vitamin craze to thank for that. Come in, come in, I’ll show you around. I was thinking we could eat on the patio, but it’s a little too cool, don’t you think?”
“It was nice of you to make lunch.”
“God, Marion. Marion! I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I can’t either.”
“You look—you look like yourself. A little older, a little grayer, but—great.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
Broad in the beam, favoring an apparently sore hip, he led her down into the living room, from which a tall hedge and a flower garden were visible. The clamminess of her dress, a vestige of her terror, seemed sad to her now. On a wall lined with bookshelves, she noticed recent Mailer, recent Updike.
“I see you still read.”
“God, yes. More than ever. I’m still working, but the company kind of runs itself. A fair number of days, I don’t even go down to the office.”
“I don’t read the way I used to.”
“With a house full of kids, that’s not surprising.”
Her fourth thought was terrible: she’d killed the baby he’d fathered. Not once in three months had it occurred to her that she might have to mention this to him. She wondered if she should do it right away. Their entire history was coiled up tightly in her head. If she let it out, it might obliterate the reality of how he looked to her, the sad smell in his house. But was this a favor she felt like doing? It was confounding to recognize how much she had, compared to him. Not only many more years to live but full knowledge of their history. The story resided in her head, not his, and she felt a curious reluctance to share it, because she was its sole author. He’d merely been the reader.
He was staring at her, his smile almost goofy. In her evident fascination to him, she felt a stirring of the role she’d once played, the role of dangerous-crazy, the role of bluntly saying whatever came to mind.
“Did you live here with your second wife?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I cannot believe I’m seeing you. How many years has it been?”
“More than thirty.”
“God!”
He came at her again, and she slipped away to the rear windows. He hastened to open a French door. “I’ll show you the garden. I love the privacy of it.”
In other words, he didn’t have an ocean view.
“I’ve got the gardening bug,” he said, following her outside. “It comes on like clockwork when you’re sixty. I always hated yard work, and now I can’t get enough of it.”
There was a large bed of roses. The sky was gray-blue in the haze, the shadows of the patio furniture indistinct. A bird was buzzing in the hedge, perhaps a wren. She could hear it very clearly.
“Your second wife,” she said. “Did she live here with you?”
He laughed. “I’d forgotten how direct you are.”
“Really? You forgot?”
It was an unfair thing to say. She’d forgotten, too, for many years.
“I want to hear about everything,” he said. “I want to hear about your kids, I want to hear about—your husband. Your life in Chicago. I want to hear about everything.”
“I’m just curious about your second wife. What was she like?”
His face soured. “It was painful. A mistake.”
“She left you?”
“Marion, it’s been thirty years. Can’t we just…” He gestured limply.
“All right. Show me your garden.”
The wren buzzed again in the bushes, as uninterested as she in Bradley’s gardening. While he held forth about aphids and pruning cycles, morning sun versus afternoon sun, the mysterious death of a lemon tree, her idealization of him entirely disintegrated. The stiffness of his joints, when he crouched to show her a virginal hydrangea blossom, foretokened a near future in which, unlike Jimmy, he wouldn’t have a loyal mate devoted to his care—not unless he married a third time. And why should she, who already had a husband, even younger than herself, do a blowsy old man such a favor? Why, indeed, if she wasn’t going to marry him, had she come to his house at all?
It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.
The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.
“Oh, Bradley,” she said. “Do you have any idea how much you meant to me?”
She meant something definitively past. In the present, he was holding some weeds that he’d pulled, perhaps unconsciously.
“You were good to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I put you through.”
He looked at the weeds in his hand, let them fall to the gravel path, and took her in his arms. The two of them fit together as they once had. His chest, against her cheek, exposed by his half-open blouse, was still nearly hairless. Her eyes moist with pity for him, pity that he’d gotten older, she held him tight. When he tried to raise her chin, she averted her face. “Just hold me.”
“You’re every bit as beautiful to me.”
“I haven’t eaten in three months.”
“Marion—Marion—”
He tried to kiss her.
“What I’m saying,” she said, extricating herself, “is I’m extremely hungry.”
“You want lunch.”
“Yes, please.”
The tacky Oriental screen in his dining room saddened her. The disclosure that he’d become a vegetarian and a teetotaler saddened her. The vitamin pills he swallowed with his iced tea saddened her. The hemisphere of egg salad, on a bed of lettuce, saddened her so much she couldn’t touch it. Her chest was obstructed with the wrongness of her being there at all. That she’d imagined fucking—because this was what it was, this was the truth, this was why she’d starved herself and invented a pretext for going to Los Angeles—seemed so senseless to her, she wished she’d never done it with Bradley. She wished she’d never done it with anyone. To be fifty years old in a convent, to rise every morning and hear the sweet birds, to devote herself to loving God, to have that have been her life, instead of this one …
“I thought you were hungry,” Bradley said.
“I’m sorry. The salad looks delicious. I’m just—do you mind if I have a cigarette first?”
His expression told her that he minded. He’d really become quite the health nut.
“I can step out on the patio.”
“No, it’s fine. I have an ashtray somewhere.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I’m still the same mess. I was hoping I could fool you.”
A suspicion appeared to dawn on him. “Do you—you do have a family?”
“Oh, God, yes. That’s all real. I’ve got pictures I was going to show you. Here—”
She jumped up and went to the front hallway. There, uppermost in her purse, were her Lucky Strikes. It wasn’t as if one cigarette would ruin his curtains. As she returned to the dining room, smoking it, she saw that there was no telling what else she might do. The intention to be fucked, her pesky little obsession with it, was, however senseless, persistent.
Dropping a stack of snapshots on the table returned her to her senses. Invisible among the smiling faces of her children was the fetus she’d aborted. Bradley, too, no longer seemed sure he wanted her in his house. He went so far as to wave her smoke away from his nose. The pictures lay on the table unexamined. She asked him if he believed in God.
“God?” He winced. “No. Why do you ask?”
“God saved my life.”
“That’s right. You married a minister. It’s funny it didn’t occur to me.”
“That I have a relationship with God?”
“No, it makes sense. You were always…”
“Crazy?”
He stood up, with a sigh, and went to the kitchen. She had no reason to keep starving herself, but cigarettes had become part of her autonomy. Bradley returned with a yellow ceramic ashtray. On its side were the words LERNER MOTORS.
She smiled. “What ever happened to Lerner?”
“He sold out after the war. The dealerships were moving farther out, and nobody wanted custom bodywork. That was always where Harry’s margin was.”
She tapped the ashtray with her cigarette. “To Harry’s memory I dedicate this ash.”
Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.
She put out the cigarette and took a bite of salad. Bradley picked up his own fork.
Only when she was leaving, an hour and a half later, might something have happened. She’d showed him her few photos, noting how he lingered on a recent school picture of Becky, and suffered through an interminable showing of his own. She would happily have spent another hour in his garden to spare herself a minute of his grandson pictures; her boredom was so aggressive, it verged on loathing. But she played the role of pastor’s wife, fascinated by Bradley’s offspring, and said nothing further to provoke him.
At the front door, as she was leaving, he tried to revive her interest. To her loose farewell hug, he responded by gripping her fanny and pulling her into him.
“Bradley.”
“Please kiss me.”
She gave him a brisk peck, and his hands were all over her. There was a blindness to his pawing, his nuzzling of her throat, his squeezing of her breasts, and this was how she knew for certain. She felt invisible, not excited. She patted his head and said she needed to get back to Judson.
“You can’t stay another hour?”
“No.”
This wasn’t true. She’d told Antonio she might be out all evening. Bradley gripped her head and tried to make her look at him.
“I never got over you,” he said. “Even when you were crazy, I didn’t get over you.”
“Well. Maybe now is a good time.”
“Why did you write to me? Why did you come here?”
“I guess—” She laughed. Everything was light. The world was full of light. “I guess I wanted to finally get over it. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was God’s plan, not mine.”
At the naming of God, Bradley let go of her. He ran a hand through what was left of his hair.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not—I have a perfectly nice lady friend from work. Better than I deserve.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just—she isn’t you.”
“Well. I suppose no one is, except me.”
“Her family’s Japanese. She does our books.”
“And I’m so grateful that you mentioned that.” She picked up her purse and clicked it shut. “I’d hate to think of you alone.”
To walk away from his house without having surrendered herself—to be bathed in God’s approval; to know, for once, that she deserved it—was immeasurably better than to surrender. She felt so elated, she almost floated to her car. And she recognized this elation. A similar feeling had filled her thirty years ago, after Bradley, at a Carpenter’s drive-in, had ended their affair. It was true that the earlier elation had only intensified her obsession, had unspooled into madness, the making and unmaking of a baby. But this time it was she who’d done the ending. This time, the elation was of God, and she was sure that He would keep her safe.
To survive the grandkids, she’d promised herself a cigarette, but now she saw that she didn’t have to smoke. God took and took, but He also gave and gave. Freed of the ghost of Bradley, freed of the morbid urgency of dieting, she could be free of cigarettes, too. Her elation held until, north of downtown, the freeway traffic came to a dead halt. She wanted to get back to Pasadena in time to swim before dinner, to be enveloped by water, and the traffic jam infuriated her. It turned out that she needed to smoke after all. And there was something else, a nasty little itch. With a glance at the car to her left, she felt herself between her legs. It was shocking how Bradley’s assault, which had left her unmoved in the moment, now aroused her. Would it really have been so bad to give him what he wanted? For the sake of her private parts, which three months of longing had tantalized and primed, she was sorry that she hadn’t. Smoke was drifting from the driver’s side of the car in front of her. She unrolled her own window and punched the lighter on the dashboard.
Antonio’s apartment, when she finally got back, smelled of fried onions. The Monopoly box was on the living-room coffee table, evidence of an afternoon of fun. As soon as Antonio heard her, he came hurrying from the kitchen.
“Russ called. You need to call him back.”
She wondered if Russ had somehow sensed, via God, the choice she’d made; if he missed her, too. But a foreboding told her otherwise. God gave and God took. There was no phone service in Kitsillie.
“Did he say what it was about?”
“Just to call him right away. He left three different numbers.”
“Where’s Judson?”
“He’s grating cheese. I left the numbers by the bedroom phone.”
And so began the remainder of her life. In the glass doors of the master bedroom was a lovely honey-toned light, in the garden the cheeping of birds, from the swimming pool the shouts of children, from the kitchen a smell of fried onions and beef, above Jimmy’s bare dresser his painting of the old Flagstaff post office, atop the other dresser a sepia photograph of Antonio’s mother in a filigreed silver frame: the first impressions were the ones that stayed with you forever.
Russ’s voice was piteously pinched. He was at a hospital in Farmington, New Mexico, and Perry was—sleeping. They had him heavily sedated. The attempt—he’d tried to—dear God, he’d tried to harm himself. They’d brought him to the hospital, his head was bandaged, he was heavily sedated. Thank God, thank God, the juvenile hall hadn’t wanted him—at least the police knew enough to take away his shoelaces. All he could do to himself—all he had was an ugly bump on his forehead. But the reason—what had happened was—he’d burned down a farm building on the reservation. And then felony drug possession. Felony—two felonies. The lawyer—it was a mess—the crimes were federal but Perry was not of sound mind. They were taking him to Albuquerque in the morning because nobody in Farmington wanted the responsibility. The cops didn’t want him, the sheriff didn’t want him, the hospital didn’t want him, the juvenile hall absolutely didn’t want him—there was a place for mentally ill minors in Albuquerque. If she could get a flight to Albuquerque, he could meet her at the airport.
Each fact that Russ conveyed fell into place as if it had been meant to be there all along. Without noticing how, she’d come to be holding a burning cigarette on the patio outside the bedroom. The base of the telephone was at her feet, its cord stretched to its limit. Although the sun was still golden in the west, its light seemed dark in a deeper dimension, but this didn’t mean that God had left her. With the new darkness came a feeling of peace. To bask in His light, to experience the elation of that, was a privilege to be earned, a privilege to feel anxious about forfeiting. Now that her long-deferred punishment had commenced, she didn’t have to struggle or be anxious. Secure in God’s judgment, she could simply welcome Him into her heart.
“Marion? Are you there?”
“Yes, Russ. I’m here.”
“This is terrible. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened.”
“I know. It’s my fault.”
“No, it’s my fault. I’m the—”
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s not your fault. I want you to make sure Perry’s being looked after. If you think he’ll be all right, I want you to get some sleep. See if one of the nurses will give you a sleeping pill.”
A wet, choking sound came through the long-distance hiss.
“Russ. Sweetie. Try to get some sleep. Will you do that for me?”
“Marion, I can’t—”
“Hush now. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Her calmness was like nothing she’d ever experienced. It seemed to reach to the very bottom of her soul. In everything she proceeded to do—carrying the phone back inside, finding her plane ticket and calling the airline, speaking to Russ again briefly, calling Becky and then explaining the change of plan to Judson, assuring him that Becky would be waiting at the airport in Chicago, and finally sitting down and eating, with leisurely relish, three crispy tacos dripping with warm beef fat—she could feel her feet securely grounded. She wasn’t afraid of what was still to come, wasn’t afraid of seeing Perry and dealing with the consequences, because her feet had found the bottom and beneath them was God. In coming to an end, her life had also started. Within you a calm capability—how funny that Bradley, in his sonnet, had been the one to notice. She wished the calmness had descended a day sooner, before she’d gone to his house. She could have said everything to him, instead of hardly anything, although maybe, not knowing God, he wouldn’t have cared to hear it.
In the morning, at the airport, after meeting a gate agent and a stewardess, Judson asked why he couldn’t have stayed on with Antonio through the week. He was pouchy-eyed and grumpy from a short night of sleep. She, for her part, had slept astonishingly well, not waking once. The worst had happened—she didn’t have to fear it anymore.
“You’ll have fun with Becky,” she said. “I bet she’ll take you out for pizza.”
“Becky isn’t interested in me.”
“Of course she’s interested in you. This is a chance to spend some time alone with her.”
He looked down at his camera. “When is Perry coming home?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. He had a kind of breakdown. It could be a while before you see him.”
“I don’t know what ‘breakdown’ means.”
“It means something went very wrong in his head. It’s frightening, but there is a bright side. Whatever bad things he said to you, he wasn’t himself. Now that you know that he wasn’t himself, you don’t have to feel hurt.”
“That’s not a bright side.”
“Maybe consolation is a better word.”
“I don’t want consolation. I want Perry to come back.”
Outward the ripples of harm expanded: Judson would henceforth be a boy with a mentally ill brother. His own first impressions, the sound of her phone calls the night before, the morning smog on the freeway, the airplane he had to board by himself, would always stay with him. But God had made Judson healthy and strong. She could sense it in his love of Perry and in the contrast between them: Perry had never, in her hearing, expressed anxiety on his siblings’ behalf. The harm her sins had caused was immense, but only with Perry was it potentially irreparable. Judson bristled when she offered to go on the plane with him and get him settled. He said he wasn’t a baby.
Before she boarded her own flight, she bought a paperback, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She didn’t expect that she could focus on a novel—it was several years since she’d been calm enough to read one—but she was sucked right in. She read all the way to Phoenix and then, on a second plane, all the way to Albuquerque. She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.
Her reading had turned morning in California into late afternoon in Albuquerque. Russ was waiting just inside the gate, in his sheepskin coat. He looked ashen and unslept. When she put her arms around him, she felt him shudder. As a kindness, she let go.
“So,” he said. “They did transfer him.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No. You and I can go together in the morning.”
In her homesickness, she’d lost sight of the trouble in their marriage. To see Russ in the flesh, so tall, so youthful, was to recall her cruelty to him and his pursuit of the Cottrell woman. Although she gathered that Cottrell had opted out, plenty of other women were available to distract him from the awfulness of a mentally ill son. In the wake of the calamity, it seemed all the likelier that he would end up leaving her. And she deserved to be left; she felt as capable of accepting divorce as she was capable of everything else. But the prospect did remind her that she hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving Pasadena.
When she lit up, in the baggage-claim area, he sighed with displeasure.
“I’m sorry.”
“Do as you please.”
“I’m going to quit. Just not … today.”
“It’s fine with me. I’m tempted to take it up myself.”
She extended the pack to him. “Want one?”
He made a face. “No, I don’t want one.”
“You just said you were tempted.”
“It was a figure of speech, for God’s sake.”
Even his sharpness was sweet to her. She and Bradley had never come close to being sharp with each other. It required long years of togetherness.
“We need to rent a car,” he said. “Kevin Anderson drove me down here—he’s on his way back to Many Farms. Do you have the credit card?”
“I do.”
“You didn’t wear it out in Los Angeles?”
“No, Russ. I did not wear it out.”
In the rental car, which conveniently already stank of smoke, he acquainted her with the financial dimension of the calamity. A tribal council administrator, Wanda, had recommended a lawyer from Aztec, oddly named Clark Lawless, whom Russ had met the day before and been impressed with. Because Lawless was the best, he was expensive, and Perry had committed two felonies in the state of New Mexico. As a mentally incapacitated juvenile, he would be charged with the crime of “delinquency,” for which the sentence would typically be confinement in a mental-health facility, followed by at least two years in a reformatory. But Perry was an Illinois resident. Provided that his parents agreed to have his mental illness treated, at their own expense, Lawless was optimistic that a judge would grant them custody. Lawless was well liked at the district courthouse.
“That’s a blessing,” she said.
“You haven’t seen Perry. He hasn’t said a coherent word since they picked him up. He just moans and covers his face. I give a lot of credit to the Farmington police. They put him in the cell that was closest to the desk. If they hadn’t been on top of it, he might have broken his skull open. My guess is that he’s—I mean, based on my counseling experience— I suspect he’s manic-depressive.”
She gasped, in spite of herself, at the evil hyphenated word. Outside the car, a blighted part of Albuquerque was passing by. Warped plywood on storefronts, broken bottles in the gutter. Her father in the evil state, playing ragtime at three in the morning, before the crash.
“Are we sure it wasn’t the drugs? What drugs did he have?”
“Cocaine.”
“Cocaine? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Neither have I. Neither has Ambrose. Where he got it, why he had so much of it—no idea.”
“Well, could that be why he crashed? If he was withdrawing—”
“No,” Russ said. “I’m sorry, but no. It’s my fault, Marion—I knew he wasn’t right. David Goya told me he wasn’t right. He was obviously not right, and now—there was another thing, last night. Early this morning. When he came out of sedation, they had to restrain him again. He’s psychotically depressed.”
A pair of hands was moving randomly in front of her. She directed them toward the cigarettes in her purse. It was good to give them a task.
“Anyway,” Russ said, “we’re looking at a long recovery. I don’t know if they’ll bill us for his time in the facility here, but Lawless is going to cost at least five hundred dollars, probably a lot more. Then however many weeks or months in a private hospital, and further treatment after that. Are you sure you want to be hearing this now?”
She’d got a cigarette lit. It helped a little. “Yes. I want to know everything.”
“We also need to pay for the barn he burned. It was on tribal land, and I’d be shocked if the owners had insurance. I gather there were tractors, other equipment, plus the building itself. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars, but it’s thousands. I called the church office while I was waiting for you, and Phyllis checked the liability policy—it won’t help us. We do have the three thousand that Becky gave Perry. We can also borrow some of the money she gave Clem and Judson. But we’re going to need a lot more.”
“I’ll get a full-time job.”
“No. This is my responsibility. The question is whether I can get a big enough loan.”
“I’ll work until I’m eighty, if that’s what it takes.”
Russ veered over and braked to a hard stop, so he could look at her directly. “We need to get something straight. This is entirely my responsibility. Do you understand?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“I didn’t listen to you,” he said. “A year ago. You wanted to send him to a psychiatrist, and I didn’t listen. Five days ago—again, I didn’t listen. He was as good as telling me he’d lost his mind. And—God! I didn’t listen.”
She sucked on the cigarette. “It’s not your fault.”
“And I’m telling you it is. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Through the windshield, she watched an emaciated kid, not much older than Perry, shamble out of a liquor store. His shirt was untucked, his pants barely clinging to his hips. He had a bottle in a paper bag.
“Where are we going? I’m already sick of this car.”
“It is entirely my fault, and that’s the end of it.”
“I don’t care whose fault it is. Just get me out of this car. I’m having a panic attack.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t smoke.”
“Where are we going? Why are we stopped here?”
With a heavy sigh, Russ put the car back into gear.
The next thing she knew, they were in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn, and her desperation to leave the car had passed. The car now seemed relatively secure to her. She closed her eyes while Russ went inside to register.
It was strange, considering God’s everpresence in her, how rarely she felt moved to pray. In her guilt, in Arizona, she’d prayed incessantly, but she’d stopped when she married Russ, just as she’d stopped keeping a diary. Only after the births of her children, for which thanks were manifestly due, could she remember really praying. The weekly prayers she said in church were more lateral than vertical, more about belonging to a congregation. God already knew what she was thinking, so she didn’t need to tell Him, and it seemed silly to trouble an infinite Being for minor favors. But the favor she needed now was large.
Dear God, I accept your will, and you’ve given me no more than what I deserve. But please let it be your will that Perry gets better, the same way you once let me get better. Please also let it be your will that I don’t go crazy again. I want to be myself, I want to be fully present for Russ, and you know how I love you. If you would keep my mind clear enough to recognize your will, I would be so very grateful. Whatever your will requires of me, I will gladly do.
She opened her eyes and saw two sparrows, one more boldly patterned than the other, picking through detritus at the base of a concrete parking strip. She felt calmer for having asked. It was the asking that mattered, not the answer. She decided that, for the remainder of her life, she would pray every day. In a world suffused with God, prayer ought to be as regular as drawing breaths.
Cheered by this insight, she got out of the car with her purse. Russ was crossing the parking lot with the room key. She ran up to him and said, “Have you prayed?”
“Uh, no.”
“Let’s go do it. We can get the luggage later.”
He seemed worried about her, but she didn’t feel like stopping to explain. Their room was at the very end of the first floor. She hurried ahead while he followed with the key.
The room was stuffy, the late sun beating on the curtains. She immediately kneeled on the floor. “Here, anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Will you kneel with me?”
“Um.”
“We’ll pray, and then we can talk.”
He still seemed worried, but he kneeled by her and knit his fingers together.
Oh, God, she prayed. Please be merciful to him. Please let him know you’re there.
This was all she had to say, but Russ apparently had more. It might have been five minutes before he stood up and turned on the air conditioner.
“I know it’s private,” she said, “but—did you find Him?”
“I don’t know.”
“If we’re going to get through this, we need to stay connected.”
“I’m not like you. You were always so—it was always easy with you and God. It’s not so easy for me.”
He made her access to God sound slutty, like her talent for quick orgasms. She joined him in the air conditioner’s coolish outflow. It was a very long time since the two of them had been alone in a hotel room, almost as long as since Bradley had taken her to one. Had she ever been alone with a man in a hotel room without having sex? Possibly not.
“Usually it helps to be in a bad place,” Russ said. “But the place I’m in now is so bad…”
His shoulders began to shake, and he covered his face. When she tried to comfort him, he shuddered.
“Russ. Honey. Listen to me. I ignored things, too. I could see Perry wasn’t right, and I ignored it. This isn’t your fault.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I believe I do.”
“You have no idea what I’ve done! No idea!” He looked around wildly. “I’m going to get the luggage.”
She took her purse to the bathroom and unwrapped a drinking glass. The thinness of the woman in the mirror was a continuing surprise. Russ would now be stuck with this woman indefinitely, and she wondered if he might want her again. However deserving she was of God’s punishment, she was surely still allowed some pleasure. She wondered, indeed, if priming herself for Bradley but returning to Russ, excited and unsatisfied, had been part of God’s plan. She freshened her lipstick.
Russ was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, as if replicating Perry’s condition. She sat down by him and touched him. When he shuddered, yet again, a suspicion crept into her.
“So,” she said. “What is it that you think you did?”
He rocked himself and didn’t answer.
“You said I had no idea. Maybe you’ll feel better if you tell me.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“So you keep insisting.”
“I—oh. What to say. God told me what to do, and I didn’t listen. And then Ambrose…”
“Ambrose?”
“He was waiting for me. Kevin reported Perry missing, and the sheriff had already put out a bulletin, so Kevin went straight to Farmington, but Wanda and Ambrose had to wait for me in Kitsillie. They waited an hour. An hour.” He shuddered. “I don’t think I mentioned to you— I didn’t mention that one of the parent advisers in Kitsillie was … So, Larry Cottrell was down in Many Farms, and his mother was on the mesa, and we’d had some trouble. The group, I mean. One of the Navajos broke into the school, and I had to … we had to … that is, I and, uh…”
“Larry’s mother.”
“Yes.”
“Frances Cottrell was with you in Kitsillie.”
“Yes.”
Now, at last, she saw the totality of the punishment God intended. Since her fight with Russ at Christmas, he’d made any number of overtures to her, and she’d spurned every one of them. From the overtures, and from his generally low spirits, she’d inferred that the Cottrell woman had opted out of an affair; Marion had gone so far as to make fun of him. Now, in a flash, she saw why he’d returned to Crossroads. Once upon a time, he’d beguiled her with his talk of the Navajos, and it had worked, and so he’d tried it again with the Cottrell woman, and again it had worked. The Cottrell woman was a fool. She herself was a fool. She had no one but herself to blame.
“And now you’re here with me,” she said. “It must be very strange for you. That we have to deal with this together. That we still happen to be married.”
He gave no sign of hearing her.
“I want you to leave me here alone,” she said. “Let me take responsibility. I want you to go and be as happy as you can. This isn’t your problem to deal with.”
He was hitting himself in the head with the heels of his hands. He was lost in his misery, like a little boy, and she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. He was her big little boy, entrusted to her care by God, and she’d driven him away. She grabbed one of his hands, but he kept hitting himself with the other.
“Honey, stop. I don’t care what you did.”
“I committed adultery.”
“So I gather. Please stop hitting yourself.”
“I was committing adultery while our son tried to kill himself!”
“Oh dear. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? What is wrong with you?”
The ground beneath her was firm. She was secure in God’s punishment.
“I’m just thinking how terrible that must feel. If the two things really did happen at the same time—that’s terrible luck. No one deserves that.”
“Terrible?” He staggered to his feet. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s beyond redemption. There’s no use in praying—I’m a fraud.”
“Russ, Russ. I’m the one who gave you permission. Don’t you remember?”
“Stop looking at me! I can’t stand you looking at me!”
She wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be saying that he still cared what she thought of him, still in some way loved her. To spare him from her gaze, she went outside with her purse.
The sun was low, the distant mountains furrowed with deep shadows. At the edge of the parking lot, in the dry residue of a puddle, a sparrow was giving itself a dust bath. The air smelled like Flagstaff and was cooling off rapidly, as it had in the years when she’d walked home at this hour from the Church of the Nativity, counting her steps. She lit a cigarette and watched the sparrow. It was groveling on its belly, prostrating itself, raising its little face to the sky, flicking up dust with its wings, cleansing itself in dirt. She saw what she had to do.
She put out the cigarette and returned to the room. Russ was slumped on the edge of the bed.
“Are you in love with her? You can tell me the truth—it won’t kill me.”
“The truth,” he said bitterly. “What is the truth? When a person is utterly fraudulent, what does love even mean? How can he judge?”
“I’ll take that as a qualified yes. And what about her? Do you think she loves you?”
“I made a mistake.”
“We all make mistakes. I’m just trying to think practically. If you love her and you think she might love you, I don’t want to stand in your way. You can let Perry be my responsibility.”
“I never want to lay eyes on her again.”
“I’m saying I release you. This is your chance to walk away, and I’m warning you. Right this minute is the time to take it.”
“Even if she loved me, which I doubt, the whole thing is too vile.”
“That’s only because you’re feeling guilty. The minute you see her again, you’ll remember that you love her.”
“No. It’s poisoned. Having to sit in that truck with Ambrose for three hours…”
“What does Rick have to do with it?”
Russ shuddered in his sheepskin coat. She’d bought it for him in Flagstaff.
“Do you know what I did to you?” he said. “Three years ago? Marion, do you know what I did? I told a seventeen-year-old girl that I’d lost interest in you sexually.”
Suddenly cold, she went to her suitcase for a sweater. The summer dress was uppermost. She couldn’t bring herself to handle it.
“And you know what else? I never told you the real reason the group kicked me out. It was because I was drooling all over that girl. I didn’t even know I was doing it, but she could see it. And Rick—Rick was there, too. He knows who I am, and—God, God.”
A low voice spoke, her own. “Did you touch her?”
“Sally? No! Absolutely—no. Never. I was just lost in my vanity.”
She had her own vanity. She no longer felt like reciprocating his confession.
“It wasn’t even true,” he said. “When I saw you coming off the plane—what I said to that girl simply wasn’t true. You are very, very attractive to me.”
“Yeah, wait until I’m fat again.”
“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. I just want you to know—”
“That you’ve humiliated me?”
“That I need you. That I would be completely lost without you.”
“Nice. Maybe you should fuck me while you’re at it. It seems to be your thing.”
This shut him up.
“Better do it while you can. I’ve started eating again.” She moved into his field of vision and ran her hands down her flanks. “These hips aren’t going to last.”
“I know you’re hurt. I know you’re angry.”
“What does that have to do with fucking?”
“I mean, yes, if you could forgive me—if we could find our way back—then, yes, I would very much like to … find our way back. But right now—”
“Right now,” she pointed out, “we’re alone in a hotel room.”
“And our son is in a ward three blocks away.”
“I’m not the one going on and on about what I’ve fucked. Or couldn’t fuck but really, really wanted to.”
He covered his ears. Her chest was heaving, but not only with anger. In taunting him with the dirtiest of words, in a hotel room, she’d accidentally turned herself on. There was an itch to be scratched, and it really did seem as if everything else could wait. She pushed his knees apart and dropped to her own.
“Marion—”
“Shut up,” she said, unbuckling his belt. “You have no rights here.”
She unzipped him, and there it was. The beautiful and hateful thing. Interested in seventeen-year-olds, interested in home-wrecking forty-year-olds, apparently even somewhat interested in his wife. She lowered her face to it, and—good Lord. He hadn’t showered.
A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable. It was as if, instead of repulsing the assault she’d provoked from Bradley, she’d surrendered to it and were catching a whiff of the aftermath. Though the matter of the seventeen-year-old still had to be dealt with, the Cottrell matter seemed settled. Withholding her mouth would suffice as punishment. She pushed him onto his back and stretched out on top of him.
“With a kiss,” she said, “I forgive thee.”
“You don’t seem right.”
“I suggest taking the kiss while you can.”
“Marion?”
She kissed him, and everything was interchangeable. Not just he and the other man, not just she and the other woman, but past and present. They hadn’t made love in so long, it might as well have been twenty-five years. She in her younger body, he pulling off the coat she’d bought, the air as dry and thin as Arizona’s, the fading light a mountain light. And how easy it had been in Arizona. Along with a faulty mind and a believing heart, God had given her an oversexedness so scratchable that she could relieve it in a public library without attracting notice. And how easy it was again. Seizing on some incidental contact and running with it, she promptly convulsed. She opened her eyes and saw gleaming, in Russ’s eyes, a memory of that orgasmic girl. He’d liked that girl, oh, yes, he had. The gift she’d been given had made him feel powerful. Although she’d misplaced it in the swamp of motherhood, lost it altogether in the wasteland of anxious depression, her refinding of it made him powerful again. His thrusting abandon hurt around the edges, and she would pay for it later, but his excitement excited her. She urged him on, urged herself on. She heard an almost barking sound, an ongoing laugh of surprise, until further convulsing silenced her. He redoubled his efforts, but here, too, the past recurred. As in Arizona, once sated, she remembered her guilt.
When he’d finished, he rested his full weight on her, his scratchy cheek against her neck.
“Not so bad,” she said. “Right?”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Well. No rush.”
The only light remaining was from the bedside alarm clock, the only sound the passing of cars in the distance. He kissed her neck.
“To be with you like this—I’d forgotten.”
“I know,” she said.
“It’s such a simple gift.”
“Shh.”
The sound of a car passing was like a breaking wave of water. Guilt fluttered in her again.
“Turning and turning,” he said. “‘Till by turning and turning, we come round right.’ That’s how this feels. Like I’ve been turning and turning…”
The song was devotional, but she knew what he meant. To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed. In the plain words of the song was a joy so deep that its roots were inextricable from sorrow’s, and the release of sorrow was even sweeter than the other kind of release. Sorrow was of the heart, and she gave herself to it. As she wept, she felt him hardening inside her. It made her cry harder. She was his again.
He brushed at her tears with his fingertips. “I never want to leave you.”
“That’s nice,” she said, sniffing. “But I should probably use the bathroom.”
“I’m no good for this world. We never should have left Indiana. We should have spent our whole life there, just the two of us and the kids, a community of believers…”
She moved beneath him, hinting at the bathroom, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“All I want is a family to provide for. A Lord to worship. And a wife who … Marion, I swear. If you’ll forgive me, simple gifts will be enough.”
“Shh.”
“You always know the right thing to do. How you knew we should—this is the last thing I would have imagined happening, but you were right. You’re always right. You were right about—”
“Shh. Just let me pee.”
Careful not to stub a toe, she felt her way to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. There was a magician’s trick to be performed, a snap of the fingers that would make Russ’s remorse disappear. His confessions had been piteously sincere, like a little boy’s, and it was time to make her own confession. The sparrow had told her it was time.
And yet: what if she didn’t? What exactly would be gained by dragging him through Bradley Grant, through Santa, through the abortion, through Rancho Los Amigos? She could clear her conscience by groveling in the dirt, but was it really a kindness to her husband? Now that Perry’s calamity had brought Russ back to her, might it not be better to simply love him and serve him? He was like a boy, and a boy needed structure in his life, and wasn’t remorse a kind of structure? She would never be simple, but she could give him the gift of thinking he’d wronged her more than she’d wronged him. Might this not be kinder than dumping her complexities on him?
It could have been Satan asking, but she didn’t think it was, because the temptation didn’t feel evil. It felt more like punishment. To not confess her sins to Russ—to renounce her chance to be chastised, maybe pitied, maybe even forgiven—would be to carry the burden for the remainder of her life. The unending burden of being alone with what she knew.
I need help here. Any kind of sign would be welcome.
She waited, shivering, on the toilet seat. If God was listening, He gave no indication of it, and while she waited something shifted in her. Although she could always ask Him again later, she’d made her decision.
Russ had peeled back the bedspread and pulled a sheet over himself. She joined him beneath it. “I have something to say to you, and I want you to listen.”
He put a hand on her breast. She gently removed it.
“So you know,” she said, “my father was manic-depressive—”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you knew he was a suicide. But I never told you about my own troubles. I never told you how disturbed I was when I was Perry’s age. I was afraid of scaring you away, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. Russ, honey, I couldn’t bear it. I loved you so much, I couldn’t bear it.”
“I knew you were a little crazy.”
“But it was more than a little. You had a right to know before you married me. I knew what the danger was, and I didn’t tell you. So I don’t want to hear about this being your fault.”
“It is my fault. I was the—”
“Shh. Just listen. You’re mixing up two different things. You feel bad about your … indiscretion. And even that, you shouldn’t feel bad about. I gave you my permission.”
“That doesn’t mean I had to use it.”
“You were hurt. I hurt you because you’d hurt me—these things happen in a marriage. My point is that you had bad luck. You’re embarrassed by what happened in Kitsillie, you feel guilty about it, and I understand that. But it’s enough. You don’t have to feel guilty about Perry, too. His troubles all come from me.”
“I knew very well what God wanted me to do.”
“Sweetie, I didn’t listen to Him, either. From now on, we’ll have to try to do better. That’s why I want us to pray together every day. I want us to change. I want us to be closer. I want us to experience the joy of God together.”
He shuddered.
“A terrible thing happened, but there can still be joy. I was looking at the birds outside—can’t we still take joy in Creation? Can’t we take joy in each other?”
He gave a cry of pain.
“Shh, shh.”
“I don’t deserve you!”
“Shh. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t deserve joy!”
“No one does. It’s a gift from God.”
And Becky had been so happy. Finally a spring-semester senior, walking among underclassmen but feeling a new commonality with the Class of ’72, she’d made a point, every day, of being friendly to at least one classmate she’d never spoken to before, a boy taking metal shop, a girl from the Baptist church where she and Tanner had worshiped. It was a kind of daily Christian service, and then, on the weekend, if she and Tanner had time, they stopped by a party approved by Jeannie Cross and stayed for half an hour, not drinking, just putting a seal on the proceedings, before slipping away to a realm beyond high-school reckoning.
By late March, she had an acceptance letter from Lake Forest College and realistic hopes for Lawrence and Beloit. The anticipation of sweater weather in Wisconsin, a dorm room looking out on a quadrangle dappled with fallen leaves, new school spirit to be developed, new social heights to be scaled, was almost one blessing too many, because she already had a summer in Europe to look forward to. Earlier in the month, at a gig in Chicago not attended by her, Tanner had met a young couple from Denmark who’d loved his show and happened to be the organizers of a folk-music festival in Aarhus. American folk was huge in Europe, a whole circuit of summer festivals had slots to be filled by American performers, and a solo billing in Aarhus, which the Danish couple had offered Tanner, could open doors to all of them. Tanner had returned from the gig more excited than Becky had ever seen him. Wouldn’t it be amazing, he said, to experience Europe together, be part of the scene, and meet the likes of Donovan, if not Richie Havens?
Becky hadn’t been thinking of Europe at all. After Christmas, to abide by her promises to Jesus, she’d shared her inheritance with her brothers. She could no longer afford a big European trip with her mother, and given how her mother had been acting, smoking her cigarettes, paying little attention to anyone but herself, she’d quietly decided to stay home with Tanner. But to be in Europe with him? To whirl in his arms on the Champs-Élyseés? Cross the Alps together in a sleeper car? Toss coins into the Trevi Fountain and make wishes for each other? All she needed to do was save up money and disinvite her mother.
Owing to some marital strife about which Becky had learned only enough to be revolted by her father, her mother had moved into their house’s third-floor storage room, fashioned a bed for herself in a low-ceilinged corner of it, and positioned an old escritoire beneath its window. When Becky ventured up to the third floor, after a school day rendered useless by visions of Europe, her mother was sitting at her desk in a haze of stale smoke. In lieu of smoking, she twisted a mechanical pencil while Becky laid out her plan.
“I don’t need to go to Europe,” her mother said. “But I’m not sure your going with Tanner is a good idea.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“I’m not questioning your good sense. I was impressed by the decision you made about your money—it was a very loving thing to do. But my understanding was that you were saving your share of it for college.”
“I hardly have to pay for anything but the plane ticket. If Tanner gets into other festivals, they’ll cover our expenses.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“I’ll still have enough for two years of school. After that, I’ll be working summers, and I can get financial aid.”
Her mother continued to twist the pencil. She’d lost so much weight that a resemblance to Aunt Shirley had emerged. It couldn’t have been healthy to lose that much weight so quickly.
“I haven’t wanted to ask,” she said, “because I know it’s uncomfortable for you. But—have you and Tanner had sex?”
Becky felt her face burn.
“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” her mother said. “A simple yes or no will do.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Okay.”
“That is—no. We haven’t.”
“That’s fine, honey. It’s more than fine—it’s lovely. I’m proud of you. But if you want to go to Europe with your boyfriend, I’ll need to know you have good protection.”
Becky blushed again. Her friends all assumed that she and Tanner were having intercourse, and she’d done nothing to disabuse them. She’d enjoyed the secret that she and Tanner shared, the secret of her chastity, and the feeling of power and goodness it brought her. But to hear the same assumption from her mother was weirdly awful.
“Do you have protection?” her mother said.
“Do you want me to be having sex?”
“Dear God, no. Why would you think that?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Honey, I know you can. It’s just—I also know how things can happen.”
“What are you doing up here, anyway?”
Her mother sighed. “I am proofreading for the Great Books Foundation.”
“I mean sleeping up here. Hiding up here.”
“Your father and I are unhappy with each other.”
“Yeah, who would have guessed.”
“I know. I know it’s been uncomfortable for you. I apologize for that.”
“It’s your life. I just don’t feel like listening to your advice.”
Her mother set down the pencil. “It’s not advice. If you want to go to Europe with Tanner, it’s a requirement. In fact, I think you should see a doctor right away. Will you let me make you an appointment?”
“I can make my own appointment.”
“Whatever you prefer.”
“I’ll go do it right now. Do you want to listen on Dad’s phone? Make sure I get my appointment?”
“Becky—”
There were three doors to slam on the way to her bedroom, and she slammed all three. The world seemed upside down to her. Premarital sex was supposed to be wrong, but Tanner had already had it with someone else, her friends expected her to have it, Clem expected her to have it, even her mother expected her to have it. Probably Judson, too, if anyone had asked him!
She wasn’t a prude. She liked necking and petting and—coming. There had been moments when she was carried away into wanting Tanner inside her, moments when sex seemed like a blessing that God intended her to crave. What had saved her, each time, was Tanner’s own hesitation. By firmly defining her limits from the outset, she’d made her virginity a thing for which the two of them shared responsibility, a jewel they participated equally in guarding, so that, when she forgot herself, Tanner was there to catch her. If this wasn’t how real love worked, she didn’t know what real love was.
Resentfully, as though forced to do chores while her friends were at the swimming pool, she went to her mother’s gynecologist and submitted to being “fitted” for a diaphragm and tested on her ability to properly insert it. She was given a tube of jelly like the one that Laura Dobrinsky had once thrown at her face. The gear she brought home reduced love to something medical. It connected her, sordidly, to all the other girls in New Prospect with similar gear in their drawers.
And yet: wasn’t it wrong to feel superior to those girls? Despite much prayer and reading of the Gospels, she had yet to recapture the spiritual ecstasy she’d experienced after smoking pot, the bodily yearning to be Christ’s servant, but the essence of her revelation had stayed with her: she was sinfully proud and needed to repent. Ever since that revelation, and beginning with the sharing of her inheritance, she’d endeavored to be a good Christian, but the paradox of doing good was that she felt even prouder of herself. It was as if, although the terms had changed, she was still pursuing superiority. In the Gospels, Jesus paid more attention to the poor and the sick, to the iniquitous and the despised, than to the righteous and the privileged. Now that she’d taken the step of obtaining contraception, she wondered if withholding herself from the man she loved might constitute, in itself, a kind of vanity. Hadn’t God revealed Himself to her precisely at her lowest moment? Might it not paradoxically be more Christian to humble herself, accept that she was one of those girls, and yield up her jewel?
As soon as she had the thought, she knew what she wanted. She wanted to fall, and by falling to deepen her relationship with Tanner and Jesus. And she knew exactly how it would happen.
Her fervor for Crossroads had cooled when her father returned to the group, and she’d been too busy with Tanner to earn the “hours” she needed to be eligible for Arizona. Kim Perkins and David Goya had pressured her to do some marathon last-minute hours-earning, so she could join them in Kitsillie, but when the trip roster for Kitsillie was posted she saw the name not only of her father but of Frances Cottrell. Kim and David still expected Becky to come along with them, but now she had a better plan for Easter vacation. She wouldn’t give herself to Tanner in his van. She would do it with proper ceremony, in the privacy of her otherwise empty house.
Her only misgivings were related to her family. She was disgusted with her father, because she had reason to believe that he was trespassing against her mother, committing adultery with Mrs. Cottrell. Although Becky wouldn’t trespass against anyone by giving herself to Tanner, she would still, in a sense, be sinking to her father’s level. Worse yet, she’d be sinking to Clem’s, and she was very sorry to give him that satisfaction.
She hadn’t missed Clem at Christmas, not one bit. His insult of Tanner, his uttering of the word passive, continued to rankle in her heart, and she was sure he would ridicule her discovery of God as well. The mere sight of his empty bedroom, the reminder of the many late nights when she’d lain down on his bed and confided in him, was upsetting to her, vaguely sickening. Her aversion was so strong that it extended to Tanner’s room at his parents’ house. When Tanner showed it to her, during Christmas vacation, she gave it a once-over from the doorway without going in. The room reeked of Laura, who’d been a kind of foster sister to him, a sister he had sex with, and Becky wanted nothing to do with it.
When her parents, at Christmas dinner, in a rare moment of unity, lamented Clem’s betrayal of the family’s pacifism, she didn’t say a word in his defense. When Tanner, to her surprise, declared that he was blown away by the courage of Clem’s moral convictions, she insisted that Clem was just being an asshole. When Clem proceeded to send her a letter, apologizing for missing the holidays and laying out his rationale for quitting school, she crumpled it and tossed it in her wastebasket, because he hadn’t apologized for insulting Tanner, and when he began to leave phone messages with her mother, asking Becky to call him at such-and-such time on such-and-such day, she ignored them.
The night before he caught up with her, in February, she’d accompanied the Bleu Notes to a cocktail lounge surprisingly more crowded than it had been in January. Parties of older women had claimed the tables nearest the band, and they were obviously there—drinking away, spending money—because of Tanner. Halfway through the second set, Gig Benedetti himself showed up and joined her at a table in the rear. Gig did the booking for a great many bands, and it pleased her to think that by letting him admire her looks and touch her elbow, by letting him believe they had a private understanding, she’d increased his attention to Tanner. “It hurts me to say it,” Gig said, “but you were right. He’s better off without what’s-her-name. He’s packing in the ladies, and that’s dynamite.” To be complimented on her intelligence, and to see the adoring expressions of Tanner’s fans, to hear their tipsy hooting when he strapped on his twelve-string and played a solo number, and to know that she was the girl who got to be alone with him: she was almost too happy with her life to breathe.
She came home, well kissed and well petted, at two in the morning. Not many hours later, she was awakened by a ringing phone, her mother knocking on her door. The light in her window was still gray. “Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m sleeping.”
“Your brother wants to talk to you.”
“Tell him I’ll call back after church.”
“Tell him yourself. I’ve had enough of taking messages.”
The intensity of Becky’s irritation cleared the sleep from her head. She threw on her Japanese robe and stamped past the doors of her sleeping father and younger brothers. In the kitchen, she fumbled with the phone, pressed its cold plastic to her ear, and heard her mother hang up on the third floor.
“Sorry to wake you,” Clem said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“How about calling at a decent hour?”
“I already tried that. Like, eight times.”
“Give me your number. I’ll call you back after church.”
“I have a job, Becky. I can’t just talk when it’s convenient for you. Which apparently is never.”
“I’ve been really busy.”
“Right. Although somehow you’re free every night for your boyfriend.”
“So what?”
“I just don’t get why you’re avoiding me.”
He seemed to think he owned her. She seethed with silent irritation.
“Is it that thing I said about Tanner? I’m sorry I said that. Tanner’s fine. He’s a perfectly decent guy.”
“Shut up!”
“I can’t even apologize?”
“I’m sick of you poking around in my life.”
“I’m not poking around in your life.”
“Then why did you call me? What did you wake me up for?”
Over the phone lines, from some unpicturable room in New Orleans, came a heavy sigh. “I’m calling,” Clem said, “because everything’s gone to shit and I thought you might sympathize. I’m calling because I’m fucked. The draft board fucked me over.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they don’t want me. Their quota was tiny, and they’d already filled it. I could still theoretically get called up, but not for Vietnam. Everybody there is coming home.”
Far from sympathizing, she was wickedly pleased his plan had failed. “You’re probably the only person in America who’s sorry we’re getting out of Vietnam.”
“I’m not sorry, I’m just frustrated. I thought I’d be in basic training by now.”
“Then maybe you should volunteer. If killing people is so important to you.”
Another sigh in New Orleans, more patronizing. “Did you even read my letter? It’s not about wanting to fight. It’s a question of social justice.”
“I’m saying, if that’s so important to you, why not volunteer? Or do you just passively do whatever the draft board tells you?”
“I took an action, Becky.”
“Yeah, you scored your point. Too bad it didn’t count.”
Stretching the phone cord, she filled a glass with water at the sink.
“I made a mistake,” Clem said. “I should have quit school a year ago. Do you think I’m happy about it?”
The water was deliciously cold, February cold.
“No,” she said, “I’m sure it’s very frustrating. When do you ever make a mistake?”
“I called you because I was thinking of coming home for a while. You’re not exactly making me want to.”
“What did you expect at seven in the morning?”
“How else was I supposed to reach you?”
“I’m really busy. Okay? I don’t care if you come home, but don’t do it for my sake.”
“Becky.”
“What.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on with you.”
“Nothing’s going on. I’m really happy. At least I was until you woke me up.”
“I turn my back for one minute, and it’s like you’re a different person. I mean—the Baptist church? Seriously? You’re going to the Baptist church? You’re giving away your inheritance?”
Now she saw why he’d been trying to reach her: he had no other way to control her from a different city. She additionally resented her mother, for telling tales to him.
“I’m not your baby sister anymore,” she said. “I can do my own thinking.”
“You don’t remember talking about this? You don’t remember me fighting with Dad about it? You said you were keeping the money. You said you wanted to go to a great school.”
“That’s what you wanted for me.”
“And you don’t?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I still have enough money for two years at Lawrence or Beloit. I can do the rest with financial aid.”
“But I don’t want your money.”
“If you don’t understand Christian charity, there’s no explaining it.”
“Oh, there we go. Is this something Tanner talked you into?”
“You mean, because I’m too stupid to think for myself?”
“I mean the Holy Roller thing. He was always kind of a Jesus freak.”
She was flooded with pure hatred. Clem had managed, in a single breath, to insult her intelligence, her boyfriend, and her faith.
“For your information,” she said coldly, “Tanner loves First Reformed. I’m the one who doesn’t.”
“And he goes along with it? ‘That’s cool, babe, whatever you say’?”
So much for his being sorry he’d called Tanner passive.
“Tanner accepts who I am,” she said. “That’s more than I can say for you.”
“Accept what? That you believe in angels and devils and Holy Spirits? That I’m bound for hell because I don’t believe in fairy tales? Forgive me for thinking you were smarter than that.”
“Do you have any idea how sick I am of hearing that?”
“Hearing what?”
“‘You’re too smart for this, you’re too smart for that.’ You’ve been saying it all my life, and you know what? Maybe I’m sick of being made to feel stupid.”
“Yeah, well. I guess you don’t have to worry about that with Tanner.”
She was too offended to speak.
“Maybe you should go ahead and marry him. Pop out a kid, forget about college, join the Baptist church. Nobody will expect you to be smart there. I’ll be roasting in hell, so you won’t have to worry about me.”
“This is why you woke me up? You needed to insult me?”
Something rustled at Clem’s end of the line. “I was pissed off,” he said, “that you never call me back. But you’re right—I get it. If I were you, I’d rather be out boning a rock star myself. He has such a cool van.”
“Jesus. Are you drunk?”
“You think I give a shit who’s boning who? You’ve got your rock star, Dad’s got his little parishioner—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about penis and vagina. Do I really have to explain it to you?”
She was appalled that she’d ever confided in him, appalled that she’d admired him.
“What parishioner?” she said.
“You didn’t know about that? Him and Mrs. Cottrell? Why do you think Mom is on strike?”
Becky shuddered with disgust. “I don’t know anything about that. But I would appreciate you not making false assumptions about me.”
“Whoa. Really? False assumptions?”
“Yes, really.”
“You’re, what—too Baptist to go all the way? Or do you just like controlling him?”
“Fuck you!”
“I’m sorry, but it’s kind of pathetic. If you’re not even having sex, I honestly don’t see the point. The least you could do is learn something about yourself.”
Her hatred had entered a new dimension—Clem seemed outright evil to her. His antipathy to God, his contempt for every prohibition, had destroyed his soul. Her hand was shaking so badly, she could hardly hold the phone.
“You’re the pathetic one,” she said, shaking. “You think you’re so superior and rational, but your soul is dead.”
“My soul? That’s another fairy tale.”
“I don’t know what happened to you, I don’t know what your girlfriend did to you, but I don’t even recognize you.”
“I’m the same person I always was, Becky.”
“Then maybe I’m the one who’s changed. Maybe I’m finally old enough to see how totally different we are.”
“We’re not so different.”
“How totally different! You make me sick!”
She slammed the receiver into its holster. Then she lifted it again and set it on the floor, to forestall his calling back, and wandered out of the kitchen, sick with hatred. She tried going back to bed, but her hatred wouldn’t let her sleep. When Tanner picked her up for church, two hours later, she was reluctant to look at him, for fear of polluting him with Clem. At the Baptist church, she sang hymns and sat through the sermon with hatred in her heart.
Only at the end of the service, during the final prayer, did she reconnect with Jesus. Picturing the face of her Lord, the infinite wisdom and sadness of his gaze, she was seized with pity for her brother. She would never understand why he’d tried to go to Vietnam, but going to Vietnam was what he’d set his heart on, it was what he’d proclaimed to everyone that he was doing. Beyond his disappointment, he must have felt embarrassed when his plan fell through. Unhappy in New Orleans, presumably friendless, working the deep-fry station at Kentucky Fried Chicken, he’d repeatedly left messages for his sister, who in the past had always been there for him, and when he’d finally reached her on the phone she’d rejected him. In her sinful pride, her offended vanity, she’d lashed out at a person who’d loved and protected her all her life. If he’d lashed out at her, too, it was only because he was hurt and embarrassed.
She returned to the parsonage intending to call him and apologize, but when she went upstairs and saw his empty bedroom the sickness boiled up in her again. A visceral loathing, compounded by his contempt for everything that mattered to her, overwhelmed her sentimentality. Clem had actively attacked her, she’d merely defended herself. It seemed to her that he, not she, should be the first to apologize. For the rest of the day, and for several days afterward, she expected him to call her again. Even a small gesture of regret and respect, if he’d offered it sincerely, might have opened the door to her better self. But apparently he had his own pride.
In her abundance of happiness, as February turned to March, their fight receded in her mind. Tanner had sent letters to a dozen festivals in Europe, along with copies of a solo tape he’d recorded in his basement and clippings of a newspaper review of the Bleu Notes. Becky had helped him with the letter, rewording it more assertively, and the two of them now dwelt in states of parallel anticipation, he waiting to hear from Europe, she from Lawrence and Beloit. After a thorough, Crossroads-flavored discussion of her readiness to give herself to him, they also shared the anticipation of a week alone together in the parsonage.
Whatever Clem might think, she wasn’t stupid. Though it had warmed her heart and deepened her faith to share her inheritance with her brothers, she’d kept enough money to attend an expensive private college, surrounded by people as ambitious as her aunt Shirley had encouraged her to be. She’d encouraged Tanner to be similarly ambitious, and if he happened to get a record contract, and started touring nationally, she could see herself taking time away from college to be part of that. But going along with him to gigs had made her aware of how many other musicians had the same ambitions, how much competition even a brilliant talent faced. She didn’t like to think of Tanner languishing in New Prospect while she moved into new social spheres in Wisconsin; it didn’t bode well for their future as a couple. But her own personal future held two equally luminous possibilities, either the glamour of the music world or the privileges of college, and she was very happy.
On the Friday before Palm Sunday, as she walked home from school, her heart began to race. Easter vacation had commenced; her moment of falling was suddenly at hand. She and Tanner had chosen Monday as the night. She’d wanted to make him something special and European for dinner, possibly a cheese soufflé, but after consulting with her mother, who actually knew how to cook, she’d settled on beef bourguignon. She’d already bought two long candles for the table and, boldly, at the liquor store, a bottle of Mouton Cadet red wine. For the night to be perfect, it had to be about more than just sex.
She came home to a house in the process of emptying for her and Tanner. Her father had left for First Reformed, and Perry’s duffel bag was packed and waiting by the door. The only sign of her mother was a note asking Becky to drive Perry to the church. Upstairs, she found Judson neatly packing his own suitcase for his Disneyland trip. He didn’t know where Perry was. Returning to the kitchen, she heard a dull clank from the basement. She opened the door and peered into its gloom. “Perry?”
No answer. She turned on a light and ventured down the stairs. From the far corner of the basement, where the oil burner was, came an odd huffing, another clank of metal.
“Hey, Perry, you ready?”
“Yes, I’m ready, can’t a person be alone?”
“If you want a ride to church, now is when I’m offering it.”
He came sauntering out from behind the oil burner. “Ready.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“The question seems more apposite to you. You’re supposed to be a creature of the light. Why aren’t you shining in the world where you belong?”
He skipped past her and up the stairs. She didn’t smell pot, but she wondered if he might be doing drugs again. For a short while, at Christmas, she’d enjoyed the novelty of hanging out with him, but their “friendship” hadn’t taken off. Since she’d added a shift to her schedule at the Grove, to earn money for Europe, she’d barely spoken to him.
Emerging from the basement, she saw him lugging his duffel bag into the bathroom.
“What are you doing?”
“A moment of privacy, sister, if you would be so kind. Would do me that gentle favor.”
He locked the bathroom door behind him.
“Hey, listen,” she said, through the door. “You seem weird. Are you okay?”
She heard him huffing, heard the rasp of a heavy-duty zipper.
“If you’re doing drugs again,” she said, “you need to be open with me. Remember what we said about walking away? I’m not the enemy.”
No confession was forthcoming. Behind her, in the kitchen, the telephone rang.
She expected the caller to be Jeannie Cross, but it was Gig Benedetti, asking for Becky. She hadn’t known Gig even had her number.
“This is Becky speaking.”
“Ha, didn’t recognize your voice. How is our beautiful girl today?”
“She’s fine, thank you.”
“Do you have a second?”
“Actually, it’s better if you call me back a little later.”
“Reason I’m calling is—Tanner tells me he’s going to Europe with you. Were you aware of this plan? Did you know about this plan and not tell me?”
Her heart clutched. Apparently she’d betrayed their special understanding.
“I talked to him this morning,” Gig said. “I’ve been working my butt off, booking him into the Holiday Inn circuit, and what do I find out? He’s ditching the band and taking you to Denmark!”
“Well—yes.”
“Do you realize what a toilet Europe is, professionally? Do you know why his Danish pals are so happy he’s coming to Aarfuck? It’s because any act with half a brain can see it’s a freaking waste of time! I thought you and I were on the same wavelength!”
He was yelling, and she wanted to tell him not to. She couldn’t stand being yelled at.
“We are on the same wavelength,” she said. “This is only for one summer.”
“Only one summer—I like that. Only one summer. And Quincy and Mike? While the lovebirds are off on their honeymoon, Quincy and Mike are supposed to do what? Twiddle their thumbs and hope you send a postcard? It’ll take Tanner four months, minimum, to put together new backup and break them in. Suddenly we’re in 1973 and nobody remembers him. Does that sound like a plan to you? I thought you were smart.”
“There’s a huge folk scene in Europe,” she said stiffly.
“Pfff. If we were talking about the UK, it sort of halfway might make sense—the labels still scout London. But the Continent? Are you kidding me? Can you name one Top Forty hit that ever came out of France or Germany?”
“It’s not just about the labels, though, right? It’s about developing an audience.”
“Damn straight it is. And how do you do that? You play the Holiday Inn Rockford and then you move on to Rock Island. Hit enough big little cities, you start to get a name, and that’s what the A&R guys are looking for. You’ve got to trust me on this, Becky. Your guy is literally better off playing Decatur, Illinois, than Paris, France. There’s an act I booked into Decatur eight months ago that just signed a major-label deal. I’m not lying to you.”
“But he can still do that—I mean, the Holiday Inns. He’ll come back even better, with new contacts.”
“Listen. Baby. Sweetheart, listen. Your guy’s okay. I admit I kind of signed him as a favor, because I like your style, but I’m not keeping him on as a favor. He’s a pro, he takes direction, he’s a hit with the ladies, everybody’s making money. But my honest opinion? I’m not in love with his original material, and neither are the audiences. Time will tell if he’s got better songs in him, but there’s a million and one acts at his level. The best thing he’s got going is he’s young and super easy on the eyes, and you know what they say about the record business—the vampire thirsts for youth and beauty. The last thing your guy needs is to sit on the shelf for a year.”
“Okay,” she said in a very small voice.
“I told him, if he wants me to represent him, he’s got to flush this Europe thing where it belongs. He didn’t want to hear me, but he’ll hear it from you. You need to take him in hand and lay down the law. Will you promise to do that for me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the brains of the outfit. He’ll do whatever you say.”
When she hung up the phone, the sun was still strong in the windows, but the kitchen seemed dusky, as if what had brightened it weren’t the sun but the dream of Europe. She felt punished and guilty and disappointed; sorry for Tanner, sorrier for herself. Tuning out Perry’s weird patter, she mechanically drove him to the church and mechanically drove home again. Never had she felt less like working her Friday-night shift.
To ignore Gig’s advice, at the cost of his firing Tanner, would obviously be the height of selfishness. But Shirley had died imagining her niece on a Grand Tour of Europe, Becky had already given away nine thousand dollars of her money, and the alternatives to Europe were dismal: either another summer with her parents, waitressing at the Grove, or a succession of cornfields and depressing small cities, the steambath of July in the Midwest. She understood that this was the reality of the music business, but the vision of going to Europe and advancing Tanner’s career was too perfect to be defeated by reality. She didn’t see how she could give it up.
Her problem was still there in the morning, when she took her mother and Judson to O’Hare. She’d expected to feel liberated by her family’s absence, but Gig’s judgment of Tanner, its echoing of Clem’s, had deflated the romance of the coming week. As she watched Judson run ahead of their mother with his little suitcase, the two of them bound for a city of palm trees and movie stars, she felt desolated.
From the airport, she went straight to the Grove. Gig’s first move as Tanner’s agent had been to pull the plug on his Friday-night shows there, and Becky, having now seen better places in the city, understood why. The Grove’s earth-tone decor and potted trees were tired, not trendy, its lounge acoustics lousy, its patrons tightfisted and Nixonite. By the time her shift ended, she felt so worn down that she called Tanner’s house and left a message with his mother, excusing herself from his gig in Winnetka. Interestingly, Tanner didn’t call her back.
The next morning, however, his van rolled into the parsonage driveway at the usual Sunday hour. For reasons she didn’t immediately understand, she’d not only put on her best spring dress but applied a lot of makeup. The face in the bathroom mirror was not at all a girl’s, and maybe that was it. Maybe she wanted to place herself in a future from which she could look back at herself.
Tanner had dressed up, too. In the misty morning light, wearing the suit he’d bought for his grandmother’s funeral, his hair thick and glistening on his shoulders, his eyelashes batting at the sight of Becky in her finest, he was absurdly gorgeous. Whatever else might be the case, she could never get enough of looking at him, and she was the woman whose mouth he then kissed. The kiss, exciting her nerves in the usual places, made her problem seem less consequential.
“I was thinking,” he said, “do you want to go to First Reformed?”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know—it’s Palm Sunday. It might be nice to be someplace familiar.”
“I would love that.” She kissed him again. “It’s a great idea. Thank you for suggesting it.”
She was happy that he’d made a definite wish explicit. And happy, after all, to return to First Reformed, on a Sunday when her father wasn’t there. Happy to see faces of surprise when she and Tanner made their entrance, happy to accept a palm twig from the greeters, Tom and Betsy Devereaux, happy to claim the pew she’d shared with Tanner at the first service she’d attended with him. It was strange to recall how she’d imagined, at that service, that they were there as a couple; strange how wishing for a future life and then actually inhabiting it made time feel unreal. As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.
And so it happened. Near the end of the service, when she stood with Tanner to sing the Doxology and heard his tenor voice ringing forth, heard her own voice quavering to stay in tune with him, the golden light entered her again. This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over—the goodness of God, the simplicity of the answer to her question—and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away. The answer was her Savior, Jesus Christ.
She hadn’t found the answer in the other churches where she’d been looking. She’d found it where she’d started. This seemed to her a crucial fact.
The spring morning into which she and Tanner emerged, after being cooed over in the parlor, admired by dewy-eyed matrons, was the warmest of the year so far. In the wake of her paroxysm, her senses were alive to the caressing breeze, to the fragrance of flowers and spring earth, to the blazing of the dogwoods by the bank building, to the song of unseen birds, and to her body’s own springtime urges. Because a visitation from God had stirred them up, they didn’t seem the least bit wrong to her. They were simply part of being His creature.
“Let’s take a walk,” she said.
“Your feet are going to hurt in those shoes.”
“It’s so beautiful, I’ll go barefoot.”
The sidewalk on Maple Avenue still had winter beneath it, a thrilling contrast to the warmth of the sun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone walking barefoot. The eight-year-old girl she’d once been was now eighteen and someday might be eighty. Her sense-memories of spring were confirming her insight from the sanctuary: time was an illusion.
“It just happened again,” she told Tanner. “What happened at Christmas—it happened again while we were singing the Doxology. I saw God.”
“You—really? That’s far-out.”
“What’s strange is that yesterday was the total opposite. Yesterday I felt so dead, and now I’m so alive. Yesterday I had no idea what to do, and today the answer is so clear to me.”
“What do you mean?”
In a few words, she recounted her conversation with Gig. To spare Tanner’s feelings, she omitted Gig’s judgments, but Tanner was angry even so. Although she gathered that Laura had been quite the screaming bandmate, Becky had only once seen him really angry, when Quincy made the band late for a gig in the city.
“What the fuck? He called your house? Behind my back?”
“You didn’t give him my number?”
“That guy? No way. If he has something to say to me, I’m the one to say it to. Did you tell him that? Tell him he should be talking to me, not you?”
“All I did was answer the phone.”
“God, I am sick of this. He’s a good booker but a total sleaze. He’s been all over you since day one. I can’t believe he called you behind my back!”
Tanner’s outburst, its assertiveness, was extremely pleasing to her.
“I guess he thought,” she said, “that I was making you go to Europe.”
“I already told him why I’m going. I told him I’ll find another agent if he can’t deal with it.”
“Yeah, but, here’s the thing. Tanner, here’s the thing. Maybe we shouldn’t go.”
He stopped dead on the sidewalk. “You don’t want to go?”
“No, I do, but—that’s just vanity. I couldn’t see it yesterday, but now I do. I want what’s best for you, not me. And Gig says it’s better not to go.”
“Of course he says that. He’s all about the money—if I’m in Europe, he’s not taking his cut.”
“But what if he’s right? What if it’s a career mistake?”
“He knows zilch about the scene there. He said it himself—‘I know zilch.’”
“He knows about the business here, though. If you want a record contract and you want to really break out, don’t you think you should listen to him?”
Tanner stared at her. “What did he say to you?”
“Just what I told you.”
“I thought Europe was a thing we were doing together. That it wasn’t just about the music—I thought we wanted to have an experience together.”
“That’s what I want, too. But … maybe it doesn’t have to be this summer.”
“Becky. Do you not want to be with me?”
There were tears in his eyes. They made her want to be with him.
“Of course I do. I’m in love with you.”
“Then fuck it. Let’s go to Europe.”
“But, sweetie—”
“Who cares if it’s a ‘career mistake’? The only things I care about are being with you and celebrating life with music. As long as I’m with you—Becky. As long as I’m with you, there’s no such thing as a mistake.”
Across the street, in a yard dotted with eruptions of shaggy green grass, a man started up a lawn mower. It coughed and backfired in a cloud of blue smoke. The day was getting warmer by the minute, and the parsonage was just around the corner. Seeing the tears in Tanner’s eyes, and hearing him express, spontaneously, the exact same thought she’d had in the sanctuary—that only love and worship mattered—she felt as if her body might float into the sky. She took his hand and pressed it flat on her hip.
“Let’s go to my house.”
He knew right away what she was saying. “Now?”
“Yes, now. I’m so ready.”
“I’ve got practice at one thirty.”
“You’re the front man,” she said. “You can tell them it’s canceled.”
In Rome, in early September, in the apartment where they were crashing, they met a German couple in their twenties who were heading to a farmhouse in Tuscany that the woman’s father owned, and Becky had jumped on their invitation to come along with them, although technically it was Tanner, not she, whom the Germans had invited, after hearing him play. Her own fishings for an invitation, her feigning of a lifelong desire to see the Tuscan countryside, her unfeigned rapture at the description of the farmhouse, had gone unnoticed, and this was ironic, because Tanner cared more about people than places and had no gripe with Rome. Becky was the one who couldn’t wait to get away. The heat in Rome was suffocating, and the crash pad, though huge and well situated, within sight of the Campo de’ Fiori, was essentially unfurnished—room after room with sun-damaged parquet floors and nary a table, nary a chair. She and Tanner were camped out in the corner of what might once have been a ballroom, beneath a window open to a smell of rotting vegetables. In the far corner was an unfriendly young couple, purportedly from behind the Iron Curtain, who traipsed around naked and coupled, unquietly, on the room’s only piece of furniture, a gilded sofa twelve feet long. Half a dozen other long-haired travelers were accepting hospitality from a man named Edoardo, a spritelike Italian who wore tight white pants and thin-soled loafers, without socks, and lived in two properly furnished rooms behind the kitchen. Becky and Tanner had met Edoardo on a side street where Tanner was busking and Becky was sitting on the pavement, writing in her travel diary. When Edoardo had dropped a five-thousand-lire note in Tanner’s guitar case and invited them to crash with him, they hadn’t needed to be asked twice. The night before, under a pillow in their tiny hotel room, near the train station, they’d discovered a balled-up, crusty tissue that hadn’t been there in the morning.
The folk festival in Rome took place in the last days of August, and the organizers, while rejecting Tanner’s application, had allowed that performance slots sometimes opened up at the last minute. On the strength of that hope, and because Aunt Shirley had especially loved Rome, and because their Eurail passes were about to expire, they’d come down from Heidelberg four days early. In Heidelberg, where Tanner had played as an official invitee, albeit at eleven in the morning and to a disappointing crowd, they’d eaten free food, slept on cleanly sheeted German beds, and avoided cashing any of their remaining traveler’s checks.
In Rome, they subsisted on tavola calda and agonized about buying a gelato. There were a thousand sights to see, but the only safe place Becky could be while Tanner busked was either right beside him or in the baking, furnitureless apartment; she couldn’t walk alone without being hassled by Italian men. Although Edoardo had urged them to stay for as long as they liked, they were camping on a parquet floor with only sleeping bags for padding. The image of a Tuscan farmhouse, shared with a pair of privacy-respecting Germans, was like a dream of respite. The Roman heat had frayed her nerves, no performance slot had opened up for Tanner, and they had a week to kill before they hitchhiked to Paris for an outdoor concert, headlined by the Who and Country Joe McDonald, that people had been talking about all summer. There was also the matter of Becky’s period being overdue. She was only a few days late, but she worried that the exhaustion of her tube of jelly, which she’d understood to be redundant and hadn’t replaced yet, had been a bigger deal than she’d supposed.
The overnight flight from Chicago to Amsterdam, the cool rainstorms in Denmark, the warmth of Tanner’s reception in Aarhus, were now memories so distant that they might have been a different person’s. According to the little check marks in her travel diary, she and Tanner had made love three times in Aarhus and forty-six times since. Every day, whether she was seeing the sunflowers of van Gogh or just hanging out with American musicians, whether picnicking on the green flank of an Alp or being confounded by a shower that sprayed all over the bathroom floor, without a curtain or a sill, she’d felt delighted afresh to be in Europe, but every night she’d returned to a bitterness from which being loved and possessed by Tanner was her only escape.
Tanner’s kindness, to her and to everyone they met, was basically a miracle. Even when she was bleeding and bitchy, he didn’t get cross with her. When they sprinted to catch a train, only to watch it pull out of the station, he just shrugged and said it wasn’t meant to be. When she had the stomach flu in Utrecht and begged him to go alone to the mainstage event, he not only refused to leave her, he said that even the sound of her throwing up was dear to him. When she caught herself wishing he were more assertive, she had only to think of his openhearted curiosity, his readiness to be amazed, his honest praise of singers farther along in their careers, his head-shaking bemusement when someone insisted on being a jerk, and his beautiful way of slipping into a jam session—how he followed along unobtrusively, observing the other players, and then, when the moment was right, cut loose and really jammed, displaying his superior musicianship, and was always happy to explain, if someone asked, how he’d played some difficult lick. The back pages of her travel diary were filled with addresses of Europeans who hoped to see him again and had offered him and Becky lodging. The Continental music scene, with its ethic of sharing, could sustain them long after their traveler’s checks ran out. Though Rome and its heat, all the assholes on their scooters, weren’t to her taste, and though Tanner would eventually need to restart his career in the States, she was in no hurry at all to go home.
With the exception of Judson, who was too young to be relevant, her family had abandoned her. She hadn’t heard from Clem since their fight in February, Perry had spent four months in residential psychiatric treatment, at ghastly expense, and her parents had done their best to ruin her life. Not only had her father dispossessed her, with scarcely an apology, but her mother, instead of siding with her or sympathizing, had deferred to him without a murmur of resistance. Never in her life had her parents been so united against her or so cloyingly into each other. They’d returned from Albuquerque, after Easter, like a pair of newlyweds—little pats on the fanny, wet smooches, treacly endearments, her father mooning at her mother, her mother breathy and submissive. Equally obnoxious was their new religiosity. Her father now began every meal with a lengthy prayer, applauded by her mother with tremulous amens. Although Becky had her own faith, she knew better than to inflict it on people waiting to eat. Although she herself had been guilty of public smooching, she had the very good excuse of not being a parent with grown children.
Again, as when she received her inheritance, there had been a summons to her father’s home office. The third floor smelled of cigarettes—her mother had returned to her proper bed, but she hadn’t quit smoking—when Becky climbed the stairs to it. Her father’s desk was strewn with bills and legal documents. He kept glancing at them, repositioning them, while he explained his financial predicament and her mother gazed at him supportively. The upshot was that, to pay reparations to the Navajos whose barn Perry had burned, he wanted to “borrow” Becky’s college money.
“It seems to me,” she said, “that Perry should be the one to pay for that.”
“Unfortunately, there’s no money left in Perry’s account.”
“I’m talking about the money I gave him.”
“It’s gone, honey,” her mother said. “He spent it all on drugs.”
“It was three thousand dollars!”
“I know. It’s a terrible thing, but it’s gone.”
The news was both sickening and vindicating. Becky had long suspected that Perry was soulless and amoral. At least she could stop pretending she wanted a relationship with him.
“What about Jay, though? What about Clem?”
“We are borrowing the money you gave Judson,” her father said. “I’ve also obtained a loan from the church, which will help with the legal and medical expenses. But we still have a large shortfall.”
“And Clem? It’s not like he even wanted my money.”
Her father sighed and looked at her mother.
“Your younger brother is very seriously mentally ill,” her mother said. “At some point, in the course of his illness, he emptied Clem’s account as well.”
Becky stared at her. She was the victim, and her mother didn’t even have the guts to look at her.
“Emptied,” she said. “Don’t you mean stole?”
“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” her mother said, her eyes on the floor, “but Perry was too disturbed to know what he was doing.”
“How do you steal without knowing what you’re doing?”
Her father gave her a look of warning. “Our family has a very pressing need for money. I know it’s hard for you, but you’re part of this family. If the situation were reversed—”
“You mean, if I were a thief and a drug addict?”
“If you had a serious illness—and, make no mistake, Perry has a very serious illness—then, yes, I think your brothers would make any sacrifice we asked of them.”
“But it’s not even for his treatment. It’s just for the Navajos.”
“The loss of the farm equipment was devastating. It’s not the Navajos’ fault that your brother destroyed it.”
“Right. And it’s not his fault either, because he’s so seriously ill. Apparently it’s my fault.”
“Obviously,” her father said, “it’s not your fault, and I know how unfair it must seem to you. But we’re only asking for a loan, not a gift. Your mother will be looking for work, and I will be looking for a better-paid position. By this time next year, we might be able to repay some of what we’ve borrowed. We’ll also be more eligible for college financial aid.”
“It’s only for a little while, honey,” her mother said. “We’re only asking to borrow what Shirley gave you.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, Shirley gave me thirteen thousand dollars.”
“You’ll still have your own savings. If you want to start college in the fall, you can go to U of I for a year or two. Then you can transfer anywhere you like.”
Becky had received her acceptance letter from Beloit three days earlier. The idea of being a transfer student there, missing the freshman experience, entering a class whose social order had long since coalesced, seemed worse to her than not going at all. Of the thirteen thousand dollars she’d inherited, she’d given away nine with the assurance that the remaining four were hers alone to spend; that she still had special things coming to her. But her parents had disapproved of the inheritance from the start. They’d disapproved of Shirley, and now they’d gotten what they’d wanted all along, which was for Becky to have nothing. It was as if they were in league with God Himself, who, knowing everything, knew that beneath her Christian charity was a tough little core of selfishness. Her cheeks burned with hatred of her parents for exposing it.
“Fine,” she said. “You can have all of it. It’s fifty-two hundred dollars—take all of it.”
“Honey,” her mother said. “We don’t want to take your own savings.”
“Why not? It’s not like they’re enough to do me any good.”
“That’s not true. You can still go to U of I.”
“As long as I don’t go to Europe. Right?”
Her mother, knowing what Europe meant to her, might at least have expressed some sympathy. Instead, she deferred to her husband.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “If you go to U of I, you’ll need money for room and board. I know you were looking forward to Europe, but we think it’s better if you postpone that plan.”
“The two of you. That’s what the two of you together have decided.”
“This is hard for all of us,” her mother said. “We’re all having to give up things we might have wanted.”
There was nothing more to say. When Becky returned to her bedroom, she didn’t even feel like crying. A bitterness had entered her soul, and there it stayed. She could forgive the injury of being dispossessed, because Jesus promised a reward to those who gave away everything and followed him, but the insult of it only grew deeper: her parents cared more about her amoral brother, more about each other, more even about the blessed Navajos, than they did about her. When, at dinner, on the day she’d transferred four thousand dollars, her father raised thanks to the Lord for the gift of family and the gift of his daughter, Rebecca, her bitterness was so intense she couldn’t taste her food. Although her mother was courteous enough to thank her directly, she failed to say, as she’d said so often in the past, that she was proud of her. She knew very well what she’d taken from her daughter, the injustice she’d been party to; it would have been obscene to speak of pride. Only in Tanner was there relief from the bitterness. He was too kindhearted to join Becky in hating her family, but he understood her as no one else did, understood both the goodness and the selfishness in her. She’d surrendered the last of her inheritance, she’d lost Beloit and the future it stood for, she was looking at a year of full-time waitressing or a shitty high-rise dorm room in Champaign, and Tanner had understood why she had to go to Europe.
Like all of Edoardo’s guests (it was evidently a requirement), the German couple, Renata and Volker, were notably good-looking. Volker, who resembled a blond Charles Manson, had lived in Morocco and traveled as far east as India, exploring non-Western ways of being. Renata had amazing blue eyes and a style that Becky envied. Nowhere in America were there pants and tops like Renata’s, cut simply and practically without being masculine, their fabrics faded but durable, or leather sandals so elegant and obviously comfortable. Becky had grown very sick of her own sneakers and Dr. Scholl’s.
The night before they left for Tuscany, Tanner stayed up late with Edoardo and the Germans while she retired to the stifling ballroom. Worse than the smell of rot were the voices coming through the window, young men yelling in Italian perhaps the very same vulgarities they yelled at her in English. Even the fainter sound of Tanner in the kitchen, singing “Cross Road Blues,” was oppressive to her in her condition. Stopping her ears with her fingers, she lay sweating on her sleeping bag and focused her entire will on bleeding.
It was like trying to will a heat wave to break. She awoke to an even hotter day, a sensation of menstrual operations firmly shut down, which was to say an absence of encouraging sensations. Her body had always performed its duties without being asked, and the flip side of this, now, was its perfect indifference to her entreaties. After she and Tanner had helped themselves to stale cornetti from the kitchen, they gathered their luggage and found the Germans in a room darker than theirs, perceptibly less hot. They were rolling up air mattresses, another thing to envy.
Down on the steaming street, around the corner from Edoardo’s building, Volker led them to a large, low-slung Mercedes, parked halfway up on the sidewalk, and opened the trunk.
“This is your car?” Becky said.
Volker extended a hand for her backpack. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know, a van or something. I thought you guys were more— I don’t know. Poor.”
“We love Edoardo,” Renata said. “He brings together such interesting people—like you.”
“You don’t mind that there’s no furniture?”
“We visit with him three times now,” Volker said. “He is a really great guy.”
“I wonder why he doesn’t have any furniture.”
“Because he’s Edoardo!”
The back seat of the Mercedes was so roomy that she could stretch out her legs and Tanner could open his guitar case. He immediately began to play, because playing was what he did, day and night. Becky was so used to the sound of his Guild that she only paid attention when other people were listening, as Renata was doing now, from the front seat, her body angled toward him, her blue eyes more fervent than Becky cared to see. Where the harassment she’d endured in Rome was strictly about her as a sex object, Tanner’s fascination to women seemed more romantic, and she’d come to resent that other women felt free to imagine romance with her boyfriend. It occurred to her that Renata had invited Tanner to Tuscany because she was very into him.
Hanging on a string from the car’s rearview mirror, lurching and spinning with Volker’s brakings for rude Italian drivers, was a painted plastic Buddha. Along the narrow streets were tiny trattorias, inviting but unaffordable, and bars with colorful bottles doubled by the mirrors behind them, and long, unpainted walls gouged by trucks and plastered with posters for a circus, for an automobile show, for FOLKAROMA, 29–31 Agosto. Wider avenues offered glimpses of churches and ruins and monuments, pastel in the haze, that Becky might have visited with Shirley, or with her mother, but hadn’t with Tanner, because theirs was not that kind of trip.
There ensued an uglier Rome, more sprawling than the pretty Rome. They passed scooters in buzzing packs of twenty, apartment blocks bedecked with drying laundry, pyramids of car tires, gas station after gas station. Tanner was improvising and the Germans speaking German, Renata consulting a map, while Becky monitored her condition. For four and a half years, her period had arrived as reliably as the thunderstorms that ended a sweltering Midwestern day. Now she felt nothing in her belly, no change at all, an ominous stasis. Even before the last of ugly Rome fell away and they reached the autostrada, a dread had taken root in her.
Volker’s acceleration pressed her back into her leather seat. He was driving so fast that the trucks they passed looked stationary. She saw the speedometer needle trembling at two hundred kilometers an hour, climbing higher. The sky was white hot and the windows were down, the roar of air so loud that she could hear only Tanner’s high notes. He was still immersed in his music, Renata gazing at him again, Volker serene at the wheel. The Buddha’s string tightened and tilted as he braked for a car going only recklessly fast, not insanely fast.
Stiff with dread, barely able to raise her arm, Becky touched Tanner’s shoulder. He smiled and nodded in time with his strumming. She was too frightened to move again or speak. Beyond the dangling plastic Buddha, another nearly stationary car rushed up to meet them. Volker flashed his headlights, the Buddha smiled, and her dread branched out in all directions. What did she know about Volker, except that he looked like Charles Manson? Did he believe in Buddhist reincarnation? Was he trying to crash them to a higher plane, beyond the whiteness of the sky? And the weirdness of Edoardo, his thing for pretty houseguests, the vacancy of his apartment—was everyone perverted? Was this why Volker and Renata stayed there? Did they pay Edoardo to cruise the streets and find fresh meat? Was the farmhouse in Tuscany just a lure for unsuspecting Americans? She’d placed herself and Tanner in the hands of people she knew absolutely nothing about. She wanted to ask Volker to slow down, but her jaw was locked, her chest muscles petrified. The Mercedes was flying at airplane speed, meteor speed. It telescoped the passing trees and road signs, smashed them together in a blur of violence. Was this how she would die? She could see her death as clearly as if it had already happened. It filled her with sadness, but at least she’d had a chance to live in the world, at least she’d experienced real love and beheld the light of God. The unborn soul in her had never even seen the light.
Dear God, she prayed, if this is the final test, I accept the test. If my time has come, I’ll die rejoicing in you. But please let it be your will that I live. If it’s your will that I live, I promise I will always serve you. If it’s your will that I be pregnant, I promise I will never harm my baby. I will love her and cherish her and teach her to love you, I promise, I promise, I promise, if you would only let me live. Please, God. Let me live.
Clem met Felipe Cuéllar at a construction site where the work consisted of shoveling sand, under a sand-colored Lima sky, and pushing it up narrow planks in a wheelbarrow. For a month, they shared a corrugated metal lean-to near the water treatment plant, shared food and beer, awakened to the smell of each other’s farts. Like other young men from the highlands, Felipe had come to the city in the winter to earn some cash. When it was time for him to go home, in November, Clem offered to join him and work for his family in exchange for food and shelter. The nonweather of Lima, the identically beige-skied days, was oppressing him, and throughout his months in Peru he’d seen the Andes in the east, the sun reflected on their heights, without getting any closer. He knew so little of farming, it didn’t occur to him that planting season coincided with the arrival of the rains.
He’d thought he knew what labor was. He’d carried tons of tar paper up six flights of stairs, a hundred-pound roll at a time, at a building site in Guayaquil, he’d stood in raw sewage outside Chiclayo and shoveled for ten hours, he’d raked hot asphalt under midday sun, but not until he was slipping and crawling in the mud of the Andes, in freezing fog and pelting hail, pulling out stones with cracked and swollen fingers, hacking at the earth with a dull-bladed implement, the altitude sharp-bladed in his brain, the blood from broken capillaries in his throat, did he put to rest the question of his strength.
When he’d left New Orleans, a year and a half earlier, his only plan had been to have no plan. With a few hundred dollars and the Spanish he’d taught himself while waiting for a passport, he’d crossed the Mexican border at Matamoros and headed farther south, intending to be gone for two years, the same term he would have served in the army. When he’d exhausted his money, on a boat passage to Guayaquil, he’d become an itinerant day laborer, motiveless in every respect except the need to work. If he saw a bus packed with other workers, he squeezed onto it without caring where it was going, not because he wished to understand the underprivileged but simply because, if he didn’t work, he didn’t eat.
Neither having nor seeking a larger motive, he’d been surprised to find one in the highlands. The fundamental equation of human existence—soil + water + plants + labor = food—was the most applied of sciences, nothing philosophical about it, but the Andean farmers’ way with their seedlings and their tubers, their wresting of sustenance from the harshest margins of arability, was a fulfillment of the plant physiology and genetics, the physical and atmospheric chemistry, the nitrogen cycles, the molecular jujitsu of chlorophyll, that he’d studied in school without appreciating their existential crux; and it had given him a plan. He would stay on through the potato harvest, complete his two-year term, and return to Illinois to study the impure science of agronomy.
The Cuéllars lived in a hamlet an hour’s walk from the town of Tres Fuentes. Once a week, after the crops had been planted, Clem descended on a boggy track through the puna, past pockets of hardwood forest whose recession upslope made the gathering of firewood arduous, to a post office conceivably colonial in age. Unlike the Cuéllars, whose first language was Quechua, the postal clerk spoke perfect Spanish. He was Clem’s sole connection to the world beyond the highlands, his fútbol-themed calendar the only marker of that world’s chronology. Every week, Clem returned to find another line of days x-ed out.
One afternoon, when x’s had consumed half of February, the clerk had a small package for him. He took it outside and sat down on the rim of a dry, ruined fountain. The air was scented with the smoke of kitchen fires, the sun hidden by a ceiling of pale cloud through which he could feel its warmth. In the package were three pairs of wool socks and a letter from his mother.
There were two kinds of letters, the ones you eagerly tore open and the ones you had to force yourself to read, and his mother’s were of the latter kind. Others she’d sent him, in Guayaquil and Lima, had made him angry, especially at Becky. If Becky hadn’t been so bent on her religious do-goodery, Perry couldn’t have pissed away six thousand dollars and she could have gone to college, instead of getting herself pregnant and married, at nineteen, to an affable lightweight. But there was nothing he could do from South America, and his anger had passed in the daily struggle for bread, the dysentery he was prone to, the repeated theft of his spare clothes, the bother of acquiring new ones without resorting, himself, to stealing. Experience had taught him to live with nothing of value except his passport, and so it was with the news of Perry’s collapse and Becky’s disastrous choices, his mother’s sorrows: it was better to travel light.
January 26, 1974
Dear Clem,
Your father and I were blessed to receive your letter from Tres Fuentes and learn that you are safe and well there. Even if you’re working hard, it must be a relief to be in the beautiful High Andes after all your time in cities, and I’m so glad to have an address where I know a letter is sure to reach you. (You didn’t mention the second letter I sent to the post office in Lima—I assume you didn’t get it?) It must be difficult to summarize so many interesting experiences in a short letter home, so many thoughts and impressions, and I understand you can’t write every week, but please know that every word you write to us is precious.
We enjoyed your thoughts about agricultural science but of course I’m especially curious about the people you’re with. It warms my heart to hear of the interest you’ve taken in Felipe’s family and your willingness to share in their hardships, and I think your father is more than a little envious. If our lives had gone a different way, he would have liked to be a missionary—he has such deep empathy for people whose existence is a struggle. We miss you more and more with every day that passes, but it’s a comfort to know that you’re developing that empathy yourself. I can’t imagine a better reward for your two years of “service.”
The big news here is that your father has accepted a new position, and we’re moving to—Indiana! The town is Hadleysburg, about an hour outside Indianapolis, and the U.C.C. there has a very engaged congregation. The interim pastor is leaving at the end of June, and we’ll relocate as soon as Judson finishes the school year. Hadleysburg is attractive for many reasons. The cost of living is lower, your father will finally have his own church again, and his pastoral duties will be lighter, so he can do other work for pay. Perry’s second stint at Cedar Hill was a terrible financial blow, and we haven’t been able to repay the money we borrowed from your sister, let alone the money of yours that was lost. Your father had talked about going back to Lesser Hebron (!) and petitioning the brethren for reacceptance in their community, because he wants a simpler life, but financially that’s no longer an option and Hadleysburg is plenty simple for me. Judson can go to a regular school and I can have a glass of wine without being excommunicated, but it’s a small and close-knit community, with fewer temptations for Perry. He swears he doesn’t have more drugs hidden away, but after his relapse I don’t know that I can ever trust him, and I won’t be sorry to leave this house—all I can see is places where he might have hidden drugs.
Perry is polite to us and seems to appreciate our help, but he has no energy and very little “affect.” He says the electroshock harmed his powers of recall, and he hates the side effects of his new medication. Even if he could finish high school (he hasn’t completed a course in almost two years), I don’t yet see how he could go away to college. For the moment, I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done but watch over him and pray that he gets better on his new medication. Dear Clem, I know your feelings about the efficacy of prayer, but if you could ever find it in your heart to say a little prayer for your brother, even if you don’t think it will change anything, it would mean a lot to your mother, and to your father too.
Judson remains a joy. He’s starring in the sixth-grade “musical” and reading at tenth-grade level. He feels for Perry and he understands how burdened your father and I are, but he never seems to brood about it. When Perry had his calamity, I worried it would take away Judson’s childhood and he would lose that innocent capacity to enjoy things. I can’t tell you what a blessing it is, when I’m having a bad day (I won’t bore you with that), to see him playing outside with the Erickson girls or watching the news with your father (he’s tape-recording all the Watergate news for a social-studies report) or just eating his dinner with so much gusto. Perry says the medication makes everything taste the same to him, and if there’s something Judson is especially enjoying, Perry passes his plate and lets him take more of it. Since he came back from Cedar Hill, the only real glimmers I’ve seen of his old self are when he’s with Judson. David Goya stopped by twice at Christmas (he’s a sophomore at Rice now), and Larry Cottrell, God bless him, comes over every week (his mother left the church, but he’s still in Crossroads), but Perry doesn’t seem to care much either way. The fear that he’ll try to harm himself again is with me night and day, and I’m afraid it always will be.
We continue to see your sister and Tanner in church. They sit at the back in case Gracie starts crying and Becky needs to step out. I make an effort to talk to her after the service, but it’s like talking to a locked door—she will not take her eyes off Gracie. I think I told you they have their own apartment now, above the record store, and I offered to come by with some things, some old linens and baby blankets and toys, because I know money is tight. Becky didn’t get her back up, she just smiled and said no thank you, they didn’t need anything. Everything is done with a smile—declining my invitations to dinner, excusing herself from the holidays, refusing to let me hold her baby (and then I turn around and see a parishioner holding her). Lord knows, she has reason to be angry with me, but her coldness just breaks my heart. Tanner is as nice as ever but gets nervous when Becky sees us talking to him—she pretends to be immersed in Gracie, but she’s obviously watching him. She says she’s very happy, and maybe she is. I imagine she’ll be even happier when we leave for Indiana.
There’s a search committee for the new associate minister, and we hear that Ambrose is at the top of the list. I think, if he takes the job, it will help your father close the door on New Prospect. He’s been so changed since the calamity, so chastened and humbled, I honestly think he could have wished Rick all the best, if only Rick hadn’t officiated at Becky’s wedding. (It was her choice, but, really, what was Rick thinking?) My hope is that having his own church, with no Rick in the picture, will give your father a fresh start, because he still has so much to give. I’m enclosing a sermon he wrote about coal mining on the Navajo reservation, after Keith Durochie died. It was so good, I sent it in to “The Other Side,” and now your father is a published author. He wasn’t happy I submitted it without telling him, but I don’t think he’ll mind me sending it to you.
Dear Clem, you mustn’t think your father doesn’t write to you because he isn’t thinking of you. He thinks about you all the time, and you should see the way he talks about you—the way he shakes his head with admiration. I’ve begged him to write and let you know how proud he is, but he’s convinced that he let you down as a father, and he’s afraid a letter would be unwelcome. I don’t want to burden you with a second request, but, if you’re ever inclined, you might let him know that you’d be happy for a word from him.
It’s cold and late here, and I want to put this in the mail in the morning. Your father just went upstairs to bed and asked me to send you his love. You needn’t worry about us—God never asks for more than we can give. Just know that nothing in the world could bring us more joy than to see you again. Please take very, very good care in the mountains.
All my love,
Mom
P.S. Now that I have a good safe address for you, I’m sending a very belated little Christmas present and the last of the money from your savings account, which might help with your trip home. (Do you know when that will be?)
Maybe it was the twenty-dollar bills in the envelope, the impending return they represented, or maybe the image of his father broken and remorseful, his weakness merely pitiable, not embarrassing, but the letter didn’t anger Clem. It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.
Whatever else Becky was, happy or unhappy, she’d always been straightforward—sincere to the point of naïveté. It was hard to imagine a person so clearhearted giving phony smiles to her mother, a person so naturally guileless calculating how to stab her parents without leaving prints on the knife. Ever since he’d learned of her marriage to the lightweight, Clem had done his best not to think about her; a baby was a baby, and there was nothing to be done. He’d been disappointed in her, but he’d lacked the empathy to imagine her own disappointment. How miserable she must have become, to be cruel to a person as harmless as their mother. And this, yes, was the source of his anxiety, this was the thing he was late for, this was the vital matter he’d forgotten: he loved Becky.
He went back to the postal clerk and parted with some coins. Standing at the end of the counter, with a pen borrowed from the clerk, he covered an aerogram with tiny handwriting. He apologized to Becky for having criticized her, he described his daily life in the hamlet, and then he paused. He was in the same position as his father, afraid that an avowal of love would be unwelcome. It might seem inflated to Becky after such a long silence, and so he went at it sideways. Using terms in which he hoped love would be implicit—she was a person of strength, clear of heart, a shining star—he asked her to consider the trouble their parents were in, consider her many advantages, and try to be a little kinder. Without rereading the letter, he wrote his parents’ address and PLEASE FORWARD on the aerogram and gave it to the clerk. Then he put on a pair of new socks (much needed) and walked back up the valley.
It was generous of his mother to suppose he’d developed greater empathy in South America. Empathy was a luxury a day laborer couldn’t afford. When a truck pulled up at dawn and fifty men fought for space on it, empathizing with the man trying to yank you off the tailgate could result in having nothing to eat that day. If Clem had developed anything in Tres Fuentes, it was simply admiration for the men who tilled the unforgiving puna, the women who rose at the night’s coldest hour to boil their mote and their mate. He didn’t have to empathize with Felipe Cuéllar. It was enough to know that he was durable and trustworthy.
Having taken action against the anxiety, Clem returned to his elemental existence. He woke and worked, drank chicha and slept in a shed with the Cuéllars’ donkey. The month of March brought finer weather, dense nitrogen-fixing growth on the bean slopes, alpacas fattening themselves with ceaseless chewing. Lacking the finer skills of farming, he earned his keep by rebuilding a pen for the hamlet’s livestock, repairing stone walls, and gathering firewood. The donkey was old and tolerant, and he did it the favor of leading it up to the forest, rather than riding it. He was amazed that hardwoods could survive at all at such an altitude, far higher than a temperate tree line, and he felt bad about hacking at them with a machete. They had small, silvery leaves, twigs encrusted with lichen, branches hairy with epiphytes and tortured in their angles, as though they’d been thwarted at every turn by the harshness of their environment. He suspected they grew too slowly to keep up with the demand for firewood, but the hamlet had no other source of fuel. He tried to cut judiciously, taking only dead limbs, but every branch seemed half dead and half alive. Even as the bark peeled away, exposing xylem to the weather, it managed to convey nutrients to an outpost or two of fresh leaves. Each tree, indeed, was like a miniature of the highlands. The branches resembled the ancient, gnarled pathways that led to the patches of arable land, leaf-green, that were scattered among stony fields and bogs of tannic standing water. The half-dead trees recalled the human settlements as well: for every dwelling in good repair were several in a state of ruin, some no more than heaps of rock, possibly dating from the Incas; the birds he flushed from the trees were like the ponchos of the women of the hamlet, gold and blue, black and crimson. When he’d cut as much wood as he and the donkey could carry on their backs, they made their way down a slope already cleared of trees. He noticed that its soil was badly eroded, less water-retentive, than the loam in the forest, but the nights here were frigid and the almuerzo waiting for him at the Cuéllars’, a thick soup he never tired of, could not have been cooked without firewood.
In hindsight, he wished he’d come to the Andes a year earlier, instead of wasting his time in cities. And yet maybe it was for the best. Maybe he’d needed to serve a term of hard labor, to work off the shame of his mistake with the draft board, to punish himself for the pain he’d pointlessly inflicted on Sharon and his parents, in order to earn his reward in the highlands. The labor here was even harder, but he felt restored to a self he’d misplaced for so long that he’d forgotten it, restored to a world of earth and plants and animals, restored to his curiosity and his ambition to do something with it. The excitement of returning to school and pursuing a career in science propelled him through his days and kept him awake at night. It was a very long time since he’d wanted something larger than his next meal.
The afternoon he got Becky’s letter in Tres Fuentes, the page of the postal clerk’s calendar was gravid with x’s. It was the twenty-seventh of March. Clem went out to the dry fountain and tore open the envelope eagerly.
Dear Clem,
Thank you for your apology, thank you for bringing me “up to speed” on your travels (it all sounds very interesting), but please don’t tell me what to do. You made a choice not to be here, and it’s pretty late in the day to suddenly play the peacemaker. You were off on your adventure, you don’t know what M & D did to me, you don’t know how obsessed they are with Perry (I know he’s sick but he’s unbelievably selfish and deceitful and has cost them well over ten thousand dollars, no end in sight), you have no idea how unbearable they are, you haven’t had your stomach turned. I’ve forgiven their financial debt to me, I don’t want or expect anything from them, and whatever Mom tells you, I’m always friendly to them. I don’t wish them ill, I just don’t enjoy being around them. The Bible doesn’t tell us to like our neighbor, because a person can’t control who she likes. I do struggle with honoring one’s parents, but in fairness they don’t give me much to work with. Dad is more grotesquely insecure than ever, the whole church knows about his affair with a church member (did Mom happen to mention he nearly got fired for that?), he’s grown a goatee that looks like pubic hair, and Mom acts like he’s God’s special gift to the world. Try honoring that. I’m perfectly cordial to them, but no, I don’t invite them over and no, I don’t go there for holidays, because A, I’m part of Tanner’s family too, and B, I want Grace to grow up in a house of peace and harmony and I’m afraid of what would happen if I spent more than fifteen minutes with them. I’m married to a wonderful, talented, generous man and I have the most beautiful baby, I’m really overwhelmed with what God has given me, I wake up every morning with a song in my heart, and I would ask you not to blame me for trying to keep it that way. Some people are lucky enough to like their parents, but I’m not one of them.
I owe you an apology in turn for saying hateful things when you couldn’t go to Vietnam. It was wrong, and I apologize, but there was something weird about the way we used to be together and maybe we needed to grow apart and become our own people with separate identities. I used to love talking to you about everything under the sun, and I do sometimes miss having a brother to look up to and tell things to. If you ever come home, maybe we can give it a try again. The second you meet Gracie, you’ll understand why I’m so crazy about her, and I want you to get to know Tanner as he really is. You never gave him a chance, but if you care about me you should care about the person in my life who’s best to me, best for me, best everything. I don’t mean to make rules, but if you want to be in my life again I guess there are some rules. Number one is respect my feelings about M & D. That one is nonnegotiable. But also, when you see the situation with Perry and what the two of them are like these days, you might understand better why I feel the way I do. I’m sorry they’re unhappy, but I can’t make it better, even if I wanted to, because I don’t matter to them enough. They made their choices, you made yours, I made mine. At least one of us is happy with her choices.
Love, Becky
The letter was like a match struck in the dark. In the light of it, he saw his old bedroom at the parsonage. It was there that Becky had come to him late at night, offered up stories, and, more than once, in her straightforwardness, fallen asleep on his bed. Why hadn’t he woken her up? Told her to sleep in her own room? It was because she’d meant too much to him. To know that she preferred his room, preferred him to anyone else in the family, was worth the discomfort of sleeping on the floor. And if she’d been embarrassed to wake up and see him on the rug, had apologized for appropriating his bed, or if it had happened only once, it wouldn’t have been weird. But when she’d done it again, and again—let him sleep on the floor without embarrassment or apology—the terms of their arrangement had been clear: he would do anything for her, and she would let him. To anyone else, it might have looked like she was being selfish. Only he understood the love in her consenting to be so loved.
Then he’d gone to college and met Sharon, who’d wanted nothing more than to be so loved, and in his wretched honesty he’d admitted that he didn’t love her to the degree he knew his heart was capable of. In the light of the match the letter had struck, he saw that his heart had still belonged to Becky; that this was the real reason he hadn’t stayed with Sharon. But while he’d been sleeping with Sharon the terms had changed, Becky no longer needed him, and in trying to hold on to her, trying to recall her to their arrangement, trying to interfere with her decisions, he’d lost her love entirely. She’d been so angry with him, her hatred so unbearable, that he’d boarded a bus for Mexico without a plan. In the light of the match, he saw that he’d tried to displace one pain with another, the pain of losing her with the pain of hard labor, and this was the terrible thing about her letter: nothing had changed.
Striding along the track to the hamlet, the incendiary letter in his pocket, he overtook Felipe Cuéllar, who was carrying a stout-handled hoe on his shoulder. Felipe was slight of build and a head shorter than Clem, but there was no physical task he couldn’t perform with less effort. Following him up the track, keeping clear of the hoe, Clem asked him when the potatoes would be harvested.
When they’re ready, Felipe said.
Yes, Clem said, but how soon?
Always in May. It’s very hard work.
Not harder than planting in the rain.
Yes, harder. You’ll see.
They walked in silence for a while. Clouds were building behind the mountain at the upper end of the valley, Amazonian moisture, but lately the rains hadn’t come down as far west as the hamlet. The track through the puna was drying out.
I have a question, Clem said. If I had to leave now—soon—could I come here again? I meant to stay through the harvest, but I think I need to see my family.
Felipe stopped on the path and swung around with the hoe. He was frowning.
Did you get bad news? Is someone sick?
Yes. Well—yes.
Then go right away, Felipe said. Nothing is more important than family.
His last ride, from Bloomington to Aurora, early on the Saturday morning before Easter, was a twice-divorced fertilizer salesman, named Morton, who drove a sleek Buick Riviera and wanted to talk about God. Morton had pulled over on a ramp outside the truck stop where Clem had casually lifted and eaten the leavings from a table in the restaurant, taken a shower, and caught a few hours of sleep behind the parking lot. The money his mother had sent had got him by plane to Panama City and by bus to Mexico, but from there he’d had to hitchhike, mostly with long-haul truckers. When Morton learned that he hadn’t had a proper meal in five days, he took an exit for a Stuckey’s and bought him a stack of pancakes with fried eggs and bacon. Morton had the sunken face, the stained skin, the reassembled-looking body, of a man with hard drinking in his past. It seemed to give him pleasure to watch Clem eat.
“You know why I stopped for you?” he said. “When I saw you with your thumb out—the reason I stopped was I thought you might be an angel.”
Clem had wondered about that. He was the antithesis of a hippie, but in his hooded Peruvian sweater, his beard and long hair, he looked like one. He’d been surprised when the Riviera pulled over.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Morton said, “but they exist. Angels. They look like ordinary people, but after they’re gone you realize they were angels of the Lord.”
Clem was still getting used to speaking English, the remarkable fact that he could do it. “I’m pretty sure I’m not an angel.”
“But that’s the way God works. That’s how He takes care of us—by having us care for each other. When you refuse a stranger in need, you might be refusing an angel. You know the day I got the message? It was the twenty-seventh of June, four years ago. I was a mess, my second wife had just left me, I’d lost my job at the high school, and my car broke down in a thunderstorm. Not far from here, actually. It was a county road, rain coming down in sheets, and the alternator shorted out. I was as low as I ever was in my life. I sat there in the car feeling sorry for myself, soaking wet, and right behind me, in the mirror, I see this figure walking towards me. You’ll think I’m making this up, but he’s a young man about your age, dressed in white. I roll down the window, and he asks me what the problem is. He’s as wet as I am, but he looks under the hood and tells me to try the ignition. And damned if the car doesn’t start right up. I let it run for a second and then I get out to thank him, maybe give him some money, and he’s gone. We’re in the middle of the cornfields, flat as can be, and, poof—he’s nowhere. Gone. And just like that, the rain stops, and you’ll think I’m making this up, but there’s writing all across the sky, and I can see that it’s numbers. Numbers horizon to horizon. I realize there’s a number for every day of my life—the angel is showing me my entire life, past and future. And then, for a split second, the numbers line up in perfect formation, and I see it. I see eternal life in Jesus Christ. I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, but I got down on my knees, right there on the road, and poured out my heart to Jesus. That was the day my new life started.”
There was no denying Morton’s Christian kindness, no arguing with flapjacks and syrup and whipped butter, and he’d told his story with impressive conviction, but the story couldn’t begin to withstand objective scrutiny. In Peru, Clem had worked alongside men with all manner of superstitions. There was a crucifix in the Cuéllars’ hut, and he’d seen Felipe cross himself outside the church and the cemetery in Tres Fuentes. But those had been simple working folk. Morton was an educated American, by his own account the top seller in his territory, the owner of a Buick built on scientifically verified principles. Stranger yet, the other adults in Clem’s own family, his mother and his father and now Becky, modern people of high intelligence, spoke of God as though the word referred to something real. Being the nonbeliever among believers was even lonelier than being the gringo in Tres Fuentes. A gringo was different only on the surface and could look for common ground. Science and delusion had no ground in common.
Morton would have taken him all the way to New Prospect if he hadn’t been collecting his daughter in Aurora at ten o’clock. He dropped Clem at the train station and gave him a five-dollar bill. Leaning across to the glove compartment, he produced a card densely printed with devotional matter.
“You’ve been incredibly generous,” Clem said, taking the card. On the front side was a halftone Jesus, on the obverse a halftone Paradise.
“I hope you have a blessed Easter with your family.”
Alone on the train platform, Clem dropped the card in a trash can. While he was at it, he ditched his filthy knit shoulder bag and the filthy clothes in it, keeping only his passport. Today was the day his own new life was starting. An inbound train was waiting with open doors.
That he recognized New Prospect and had a claim to it, knew every building and street name, seemed as remarkable as his command of English. He could have called his parents from the road, to let them know he was coming, but the discomforts of hitchhiking were best survived by not looking ahead, and his parents weren’t the reason he’d left Tres Fuentes anyway.
The air on Pirsig Avenue was heavy with spring, its smell unlike anything in Peru. In the window of Aeolian Records were sun-damaged jazz and symphonic albums, seemingly untouched since he’d last been in town. Inside the store, under the owner’s untrusting eye, two long-haired boys were flipping through the Rock bins. Clem went around to the alley behind the store. At the bottom of the stairs to the second-floor apartment, he hesitated. He remembered similarly hesitating on the landing below Sharon’s room in the hippie house.
Tacked to the apartment door, at the top of the stairs, was a file card on which someone, surely Becky, had written Tanner and Becky Evans ornately, in cursive, and drawn little flowers to either side. Eyes filling, Clem knocked on the door. He couldn’t remember Becky ever playing house as a girl. In Indiana, where he’d had her all to himself, she’d followed him wherever he went. He’d taught her to throw a baseball, taught her to watch it into the glove (his glove, their only glove) when he threw it back. She’d chased him with a dried-out piece of dog crap, screaming, “Petrified poo! Petrified poo!” And the gleeful savagery of the tortures she’d devised for a toy rabbit that had fallen out of favor, the giggling wickedness with which she’d enumerated its transgressions: since when had that girl wanted to play house?
He knocked again. Nobody home.
Overcome, all at once, by the miles he’d traveled, he returned to the street. He’d wanted to see Becky before he saw his parents, to make clear that she was the reason he’d come home, but all he could think of now was his bed at the parsonage. The day was warm, the sun near the zenith. A nap on a real bed would be delicious. Already half asleep, he bent his steps homeward past the bookstore, the drugstore, the insurance broker.
He was jolted awake when he came to Treble Clef. Behind the front window, Tanner Evans was showing an electric guitar to a middle-aged customer, someone’s mother. Clem stopped on the sidewalk uncertainly. Tanner glanced at him and returned his attention to the woman. Then he looked again, eyes widening, and came running out of the store. “What the hell?”
“I’m back,” Clem said.
“I’m thinking, do I know this person?”
Tanner, for his part, seemed perfectly unchanged. Perhaps would always be unchanged. He spread his arms, as he’d done so readily in Crossroads, and Clem stepped in for the embrace.
“This is fantastic,” Tanner said. “Becky will be so happy.”
“Really?”
Tanner’s face clouded to the extent his native sunniness allowed. “I mean—yeah. Definitely. She missed you.”
“Congratulations on everything. Marriage, fatherhood. Congratulations.”
“Thanks, it’s been amazing.”
“I want to hear about it, but—where is she?”
“Probably at Scofield, with Gracie. Jeannie Cross is in town.”
After a second hug, from the man who was now his brother-in-law, Clem headed up toward Scofield Park. The trees of New Prospect were a hundred percent alive, gripped jealously by their unblemished bark, and every house looked like a palace. The wet, emerald grass that a man was removing from a lawn-mower bag, discarding as waste, would have been the sweetest meal for an alpaca. Clem stopped to take off his sweater and knot it above his hips, and the man looked up from his mower suspiciously. Maybe he sensed the comparisons Clem was making, the implicit critique, or maybe he just hated hippies.
Becky wasn’t among the mothers at the Scofield playground, and she wasn’t at the picnic tables. Farther back in the park was a ball field with a backstop. Fully grown young men, several of them shirtless, were playing softball. The guy at the plate, connecting with a pitch and sending it high over the head of the left fielder, was a detestable jock Clem recognized from high school, Kent Carducci. He pumped his fist and gave a brute roar as he rounded first base.
The girls—where there were boys like this, there had to be girls—were grouped along the first-base line, around a set of aluminum bleachers. Becky was seated on the lowest bleacher with Jeannie Cross. Taller than the others, her old aura intact, she might have been a queen holding court. Lesser girls sat cross-legged on the grass below her, one of them holding up the arms of a little child who’d achieved a standing position.
Jeannie Cross spotted Clem first. She grabbed Becky’s shoulder, and now Becky saw him, too. For a moment, her expression was uncomprehending. Then she ran up behind the first-base line to meet him. He spread his arms, but she stopped short of hugging distance. She was wearing a corduroy jacket that had once been his. Her smile was perhaps more incredulous than joyful.
“What are you doing here?”
“Came to see you.”
“Wow.”
“Is it okay if I give you a hug?”
She didn’t seem to remember the joke, but she stepped up and put one arm around him, briefly, and pulled back. “Everybody’s home for Easter,” she said. “I guess you are, too.”
“I wasn’t thinking about Easter. I only came to see you.”
Kent Carducci shouted something abusive on the ball field.
“So come and meet Gracie,” Becky said. She ran ahead of Clem and scooped up the little child. “Gracie, I want you to meet your uncle Clem.”
The child hid her face in Becky’s neck. Clem probably looked to her like a hairy monster. He realized that, until this moment, he hadn’t quite believed that his sister had procreated. The child was perfectly formed, her hair fine and thin on top, thicker on the sides: a new little person, ex nihilo, with a mother scarcely past childhood herself. He could almost remember Becky as a one-year-old. His eyes filled again.
“Here, you can hold her,” Becky said. “She won’t break.”
Watched by Becky’s friends, he took Gracie in his arms. She was radiantly warm in her cotton sweater, squirming with vital energy, reaching back for her mother. He didn’t think he’d held a baby since Judson had outgrown being portable. He gently bounced his niece, trying to postpone the inevitable crying, but Becky’s gaze and smile were fixed on her, as if to remind her of where she’d rather be. She let out a wail, and Becky took her back.
The physics of their reunion were nothing like what he’d imagined: a ball field populated with guys whose muscles had been developed by athletics, not hard labor, eight flavors of pretty girl arrayed by the bleachers, some of them from Crossroads (Carol Pinella, Sally Perkins’s younger sister), others from the cheerleading squad, most of them home from college, at least one of them still local, and none of them remotely capable of imagining the world in which he’d lived for two years. His shirt stank, his dungarees were stained with Andean mud, and his affinities were with the Cuéllars’ hamlet. New Prospect was still New Prospect, and Becky was evidently still at the social center of it, while he, who’d always been far from the center, had moved radically much farther. He would have liked to talk to Jeannie Cross, who was more sensationally desirable than ever, but his alienation was so extreme that he could only stand behind the backstop, watching people he disliked play softball, and wait for Becky to find a moment for him.
Gracie had fallen asleep in the flimsy stroller that Becky wheeled over to the backstop. “Somebody needs her diaper changed,” she said. “Do you want to walk home with us?”
“What do you think I want?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the reason I’m here. I came back as soon as I got your letter.”
“Yeah, okay.”
She pushed the stroller toward the nearest pavement, and he followed her. “I’m glad to see you’re still wearing that jacket.”
“That’s right,” she said, “it was yours. I’ve had it so long, I forgot.”
Reaching the pavement, she crouched and inspected her baby.
“She’s beautiful,” he offered.
“Thank you. I love her like you wouldn’t believe.”
She was right in front of him, the person he loved best, still matching his mental image of her, but his own sudden apparition was apparently unremarkable to her. As she proceeded out of the park with the stroller, peering down at her baby, he feared that he’d made another bad mistake; that he should have stayed in Tres Fuentes for the potato harvest.
“Becky,” he said finally.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry I tried to tell you what to do.”
“It’s okay. I forgive you.”
“I don’t want to interfere in your life. I’m just asking for a chance to be a part of it again.”
She didn’t seem to hear him, didn’t speak again until they were crossing Highland Street. He could see the taller of the parsonage oak trees in the distance. He didn’t feel especially forgiven.
“Have you been home yet?” she said.
“No. I wanted to see you first.”
She acknowledged this tribute with a nod. “Mom showed up at my door the other day. She didn’t call, she just showed up. She wanted us to come to dinner tomorrow. She tried to lay a guilt trip on me, how it’s Dad’s last Easter in New Prospect.”
“Well. She’s right about that.”
“I already invited Tanner’s parents to our place. It’s Gracie’s first Easter. I bought a ham.”
Clem could feel that he was being tested—being dared to point out that, unlike his parents, a one-year-old couldn’t tell Easter Sunday from Guy Fawkes Day.
“So, uh. Why not invite Mom and Dad?”
“Because that means bringing Perry, which doesn’t sound like a holiday to me. He uses up all the air in the room, even when he’s just sitting there. If you start talking about something that isn’t him, he’ll make some remark about how shitty he feels, or something completely random, whatever it takes to get the attention back on him, and they fall for it every time.”
“He’s sick, Becky.”
“Yeah, obviously. I get why they have to take care of him. But it isn’t fair to Tanner’s parents to have his sickness be their whole evening.”
“Mom and Dad have to live with it every night of the week.”
“I know. I’m sure it’s really hard for them. But he’s their son, not mine, and I already made my contribution as a sibling. I think I’m entitled to not deal with it on a holiday.”
Clem suppressed an impulse to say more. Obeying her first rule, respecting her feelings about their parents, was going to be a struggle. At least there was no rule against being kind to them himself.
As if she’d sensed his thought, she stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him.
“So,” she said. “Will you have dinner with us?”
“Tonight?”
“No, tomorrow. Easter. I’m inviting you.”
His heart leaped at the invitation; it couldn’t help itself. But it had leaped into a trap. He’d been away for so long, it would be cruel to leave his parents alone on Easter, and Becky knew it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She looked away with an expression of not caring. All he’d asked for was a chance with her, and she was offering him that chance. Whether she genuinely wanted him in her life or was simply testing his loyalties, he couldn’t yet tell. But it was clear that, in his absence, far from having diminished herself, as he’d supposed, she’d become a dominating force. She had the grandchild, she had the absolutely loyal husband, she had her charisma and her popularity, and she needed nothing from him or their parents. The terms were hers to set.
“Let me think about it,” he said, although he already knew what he would do.