Eight

“Huh?”

“Crank her up. Let’s get there.”

“To Stantliner?”

“Yep.”

“All right,” Rick said and put his foot down. The hills they had been tacking through went away behind them and Rick said nothing as they neared the View (not Stantliner—they were an hour from the Stantliner trailhead). They started swerving downhill, while remaining at high altitude, winding down through a succession of little mogul hills. He hoped Boldt would like the View. At the same time he was prepared not to get agitated if, when they would round the turn, Boldt should say nothing—or worse.

“And you know this place?” Boldt was asking, referring to Stantliner, shifting in his seat with a constrained stretch. “You’ve been there?”

“Absolutely.”

“How long a drive is it?”

“An hour. Then two hours to hike up. We’ll be catching fish before lunch.”

“Two hours to hike up . . . what did you say the drop was?”

“Fifteen hundred. You don’t have, I mean like a condition . . . like your heart or anything . . .”

“No.” Boldt placed the word on the air with the reserve of a grandmaster looking forward, not to future moves in this game, but to a game with a better player.

“Ah,” Rick said, “right, well. Two hours to hike up. Two-and-a-half minimum.”

“What?”

“Maximum, sorry.”

Boldt eyed him, a thin, snakelike appraisal. There was a smile in Boldt’s look somewhere, but only at twenty-percent of strength.

“Sorry,” Rick said. “I’m nervous.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t get any sleep. And I want to catch you a fish.”

“All right,” Boldt said. He sat back. The cold smile was gone. “All right,” Boldt repeated, watching the swerving road. “And you know the way up?”

“I know the way up.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s an hour from here.”

“Right.”

“And you’re sure of that.”

Rick let a beat of silence pass.

“Yes.”

“And it takes, at maximum, two-and-a-half—”

“Hours.”

“To hike up.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“And you know what you’re doing.”

“Yes,” Rick said.

“We could have gotten to the other place—what’s its name?”

“Paynim’s.”

“In time for the Trico hatch,” Boldt pointed out.

“We still can. There’s time. We can turn around. It’s your call.”

“Don’t tell me it’s my call you little prick,” Boldt said, turning sweetly to smile Rick a smile that was all teeth. “I know it is. I know it’s my call. We’re going to your lake. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

They came through the pass, rounding the last rock. Out across the enormous wide flat of the valley below the far range of peaks where they were going stood in distant faint shadow under the state’s cloudless sky.

Rick could feel himself becoming invisibly angry. He did not answer Boldt. Boldt was his customer. That was why he did not answer the man, he hoped. They lost altitude. Boldt deigned to take in the View but did not comment.

Rick took the turn into the overlook area.

They walked in silence from the pickup, Rick a pace behind. They walked between other tourists’ vehicles parked on gravel and came to a scrap of lawn on which Boldt stood before the vista, Rick to one side and behind like an adjutant.

Because his anger was inner, Rick was in a mist.

Boldt did not notice.

They stood with the other gazing visitors among some picnic tables, waste bins, outdoor potties and publicly owned binoculars mounted on metal posts.

They looked at the View, as did the others. It was extravagant, thirty miles of grazing land. A river glinting. The far mountains. Rick saw well the illusion of shadow on the peaks, even though there was not a cloud in the sky. What would do that? A distant haze maybe . . .

Because he is angry and can never do anything about it, he sees the View but does not feel the usual thrill and pull and sense of universal belonging, so tangible is the field of force around Boldt, who, gazing, comes to a modified parade rest, lifting his chin.

If paper covers rock and rock smashes scissors and scissors cut paper, will defeats anger, freedom conquers will, and anger crushes freedom, so Rick just stood there.

He couldn’t bring himself to turn without a word and go back and unlock and get in and slam door and start engine.

Boldt stood his post, hands clasped tight against small of back, elbows out.

“In the first morning light,” he began, “at the end of the night, the mountains lay bright . . . in transcendent display,” he continued after a thoughtful pause.

A creative silence passed.

“In remote array,” Boldt went on, “the mountains ah, hm.”

Rick waited.

“The mountain range lay,” Boldt revised, “in display or array. Which?”

“Display.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah,” Boldt said sagely.

Rick waited, mentally edging his fee up.

“I could have been a poet. I’m proud of my poems.”

Boldt was struggling with something—Rick waited, fascinated. “I am told,” Boldt went on in a voice earnest and quietly polite, “that I should be proud of my poetry.”

In silence Rick was making the observation to himself that if the lines just heard were typical, whoever had told Boldt that Boldt should be proud of his poetry must be on the payroll.

“I have been told I should make a conscious effort,” Boldt explained, “to be proud of my poems. So I am.”

Rick looked at the View.

There was something not right about Boldt’s pride in his poetry. Boldt’s poetry was infantile.

“Proud,” the lifted chin insisted.

“Who’s telling you that?”

Rick was becoming annoyed.

Boldt cleared his throat. “My analyst,” he said.

He cleared it again, a size-17 rumbling the force of which turned the head of a pleasant little man standing nearby.

The pleasant little man came over.

“Should by some awful chance,” Boldt was devising, “an opponent advance, we would make him take flight . . .”

“By the seat,” Rick tried to offer, acting the opposite of how he felt.

“No,” Boldt scorned. “That’s doggerel. Wait a minute . . . the mountains . . . the range—no. Wait, I’ve got it. The mountain range lay in distant array.”

It made Rick angry. It made him angry that Boldt was domineering. It made him angry that Boldt was self-absorbed. It made him angry that Boldt was vulnerable. It made him angry that because it was mental health, he couldn’t tell Boldt how awful Boldt’s poetry was. It made him angry that he would probably not have done so anyway. It made him angry that Boldt took it for granted that Rick—anyone—would sit still for his poetry for as long as he should care to recite it. It made him angriest of all that he expressed none of this, and Boldt would be exactly in the right to assume that his poetry was fine with Rick.

The small man had a friendly face, saucer eyes, saucer glasses and a wide grin. He came up, cap tilted back, and was smiling at Boldt at close range.

“You can put a quarter in,” he offered. He had stepped—slowly, for he was no longer young—to the nearest pair of binoculars and with hands proportionally as big as his face was spryly pantomiming: see how? Your quarter slides in thus; the eyes go here, the mountains are there, see?

Boldt distractedly tried to goose his muse by gazing at the faroff range. It didn’t work. She was gone. The poetry door was closed. The aesthetic window had shut. The friendly little elder was oblivious. “In 1959,” he told Boldt, his nice hands working the air to illustrate, “my wife decided to take up skiing. She was not my wife at the time. She went to a resort where she got outfitted, and she happened to be standing out on a terrace. This was the morning she was due for her first time out on the slopes. On this terrace were binoculars similar to these. It was a dime at the time. She drops one in, and she has her look, and what do you think she sees? The first thing she sees is a magnified lady on a magnified powdery run completely losing control and smashing head-on into a tree. The dime’s time does not run out before she has watched the patrol arrive and get the body on the sled. My wife-to-be went up to her room. She packed, checked out and went home. She hasn’t been near a mountain since. See,” the outsized face and crafting hands adjure Boldt, “you don’t know. You can never know in this life. No one wants the truth. We like to think we’re getting at the truth, but all we’re doing is upgrading our illusions.”

Boldt smiled. Shut lips, wintry eyes.

“I’ll show you,” the little man said briskly. “Got a quarter?”

Boldt’s smile and darkened eyes were not fond, but you could see he liked the guy, so Boldt, who had a billion quarters, fished one out, locking his left leg to delve with his right hand, using left thumb and finger to hold right trousers pocket open, all the while looking at the friendly little intruder with qualified approval.

Boldt handed it over, unable to resist turning it in his bludgeon, rounded fingers before depositing it on the outstretched palm.

“Okay. Show us how it works.”

“Happy to.”

The little man dropped the quarter in. He stepped up, bending his knees and fitting his eyes to the matching reverse apertures as the quarter did its work. He gazed, saying no more.

He made one little cooing sound, over what Rick and Boldt would never know because that was how they left him.

On the flat they were going fast, speeding toward the distant peaks that drew closer even as they appeared to stay the same . . . it was slightly rolling land, which you could not see from back up where the savant, Rick liked to think, was still looking, on Boldt’s quarter . . . it was gentle, the rolls like seaswells, miles in frequency of cycle and nearly flat. Grasses, sage, sandy soil, far horizons—buffalos grazing, buffalos at a distance: just dots.

The straight-shot highway sped them through it.

A house flew by. They drove on. Another house: one-story, porch, no one home. That was all you could see at this speed, which wasn’t fast because they were coming into a community. Gas station. Pharmacy. Low inn. Restaurants, retail outlets with banners, shops, lots, activity, village—they stopped at a light. At the next light they turned left—motel, houses. They drove past the town limit and the structures were no more.

“What do you think might be the significance of that little guy telling us that story?” Rick wondered out loud, leaning back to drive.

Boldt’s look of disgust was as genuine as if somebody had farted. “Please,” he said. Something in Boldt’s tone rendered plaintiveness to Rick’s ear, which caught Rick off guard—was a disturbance to Rick’s orderly soul. The last thing Rick needed was further confusion. He was still trying to figure out why he had called Jane the second time.

They were going at a clip again.

“Slow down.”

Rick did.

Some water came up. It ran with them, paralleling the highway.

It flanked them, checking them out like fighters or outriders of cavalry, and Rick told himself the same thing Boldt had just told him, calm down.

Slow down. Same thing.

It was the river.

They’d seen it glinting.

The little intruder was seeing it still.

It raced them like dolphins.

“Now that has trout in it,” Boldt declared.

“Yes it does in places. It can be surprisingly hard to get to though.”

It peeled off, slanting away before they could study it, flying geometrically away like a railroad spur.

There was just brush the color of windowglass now, and some weak green fauna—flora actually, though Rick was getting carsick, which never happened. No more houses. They flew along. Rick was a pro so he drove as he felt, proud.

A flat body of jade, vivid and still, grass-banked and elevated, hurried by.

“Look!” Boldt exclaimed animatedly. “There was a rise. I saw a rise.”

“That’s a sewage treatment plant.”

Boldt did not say “oh” but did, without pause or chagrin, say “Mmm. Coulda’ sworn.”

“I may not be sure of much but I do know where there aren’t fish.”

Boldt (in good spirits, watching the impoundment vanish): “Hah. Well I will admit, I will confess. When I get like this I’d see a rise in a parking lot.”

Coming at last into the range they had seen from the other side of the enormous valley they curved with the road into shadow and out, under forested hills. Rick missed the trailhead. He drove past the parking area.

“Dang.”

“Why are you slowing?”

“We’re here, don’t worry, it’s back there. I merely overshot—”

“Do you know what in the bloody hell you are doing? Ever? Can you look me in the eye and tell me, promise me, that you know what in the HELL is going on? Can you?” Boldt ranted this at the glove compartment. Rick’s tires spat gravel. “Is it unreasonable to ask? Is it? Why’d you miss it? Why did you overshoot it? What was the exact reason you missed it?”

Day Two, Rick thought, slowing for the turn.