Celine

by Peter Heller

  So Celine knew what it was to be abandoned by a father. And to what lengths a child—even an adult child—might go to bring him back. After years of turning her great capacity for empathy toward Harry Watkins, she understood, too, the despair that might be visited on some fathers who had made the choice to leave.

  THIRTEEN

  North of Jackson Hole, the Toyota pickup jounced over a root and stopped. The campsite they chose was right on the shore of Jackson Lake. Dusk was moving over the water with a stillness that turned half the world to glass. The wall of mountains had gone to shadow as had the reflections at their feet. In the stillness the rings of rising trout appeared like raindrops. Slowly, in silence, the dark water tilted away from the remaining daylight. Celine stepped down from the truck and stretched and walked to the water, smelling its coldness and the scent of someone’s cooking fire. She saw an older man casting a bobber on the closest point and a younger man shaking a tent out of a stuff sack three campsites down. She thought that peace reigned in the world—might reign. But only where love had no ferocity. Where there was the love between mothers and fathers and children there would be no peace.

  Pete came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders and was wise enough not to say a word. Maybe it wasn’t wisdom: The thought of saying anything after arriving at camp after a long drive probably never occurred to him.

  After a while Celine said, “It reminds me of Lake Como.”

  “When you were proposed to by an earl? The year in college you went back to France?”

  “He was a duke.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to be simply retired?” she asked. “Like that couple there? And over there? We could come down to the water tomorrow morning and throw out a bobber and hook with a marshmallow on it and sit in a beach chair.”

  “Hmm. I’m not sure they use marshmallows.”

  “We could tell that young man who’s following us that the game is up, we’re not playing anymore, he can go home to his own family where there is probably a house with a little girl inside who misses him terribly.”

  “That man there?”

  “Yes that one. The one next to the pickup who is studiously unrolling his tent under that big pine.”

  The second night in the camper was more peaceful than the first. They made a pot of Lapsang souchong and drank it slowly at the little table and flipped through the National Geographics in the imperfect light from the little bulb on the wall. Celine turned the pages of a long feature on Chile shot by Lamont, and now she was struck by the sensitivity that had impressed Pete. The susceptibility to wonder was clearly not confined to impressions of his wife. There was one picture of a Chilean huaso in furry goatskin chaps and a flat-brimmed hat, riding a gray roan in the rain. He was riding in green woods along a whitewater river, and he had a chain saw tied behind the saddle and was holding an infant in one arm. Something about the ease of the scene, the rightness, the green hardwoods and the rushing river and the man and the horse, spoke to her like a poem. Maybe it was simply the attitude of the man: his bearing balanced to the rhythm of the horse’s gait; his hat tilted to the trail, to all the work to be done. But it was more than that: There was something wholly protective in his posture. No matter what happened, now or ever, he would cradle this child. Nothing could be more clear. Celine huffed out a breath, turned the page.

  On the next was a spread of the presidential palace and the National Gallery, which she skimmed, but at the bottom was a photograph that stopped her again. It was of a painting: It seemed to be a scrim of rain over mountains. Storm in late spring, maybe, greens and a black sky riven by a jag of light. If it were a sky. She wasn’t sure, but she felt a rhythm in this too, a music, and a kinship with the elements, and realized the same sensibility that had loved the cowboy now loved the abstract. The painting reminded her of Clyfford Still, the same surprise and mystery. Fernanda de Santos Muños was the name of the artist, and according to the caption she was one of Chile’s national treasures. Celine could see why.

  “Pete,” Celine said.

  “Yes, love.”

  “Look at this painting. It must have been strange shooting in Chile in the seventies. Chile, Argentina, Peru. Those were dark times. I had a cousin who was an economic attaché at our embassy in Buenos Aires and he used to talk about it. He was not a reactionary at all and he said it was awful.”

  “Mmm,” Pete said.

  “Not our best moment, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Terrible terrible dictatorships and we abetted them. So many murdered, tortured, gone missing. Ward said several of his Argentinean friends were disappeared. Poof.” She took off her reading glasses and polished them on the hem of her shirt and glanced at her husband who was particularly thoughtful and serious. Pete opened his mouth to speak, closed it. Sometimes when he was very upset or angry he did that—shut his mouth hard. As if the fury of what he was about to loose into the world would do more damage. He went back to reading. He, too, had been looking at Lamont’s photographs, but he soon got caught up in another article called “Bear Attacks!” It was in one of the magazines from the period that did not have a story shot by Gabriela’s father. He read that more than one person had been mauled because they had left food in their RV, which a hungry grizzly had opened like a sardine can. “Note to self,” he murmured. “Do not leave empty tuna tins in the camper.”

  Celine looked over her reading glasses. “What was that, Pete?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He didn’t want to give her any ideas. “Listen to this. I paraphrase: In the summer of ’74 a tourist from North Carolina was at Denali with her two small children. They saw a grizzly with two cubs at the edge of a meadow and pulled over and, of course, approached. Face off. The bear—of course—was not amused and made several false charges, building up to the main event. Thinking fast, the woman pulled out her brand-new can of pepper bear spray and sprayed it all over her kids. She thought it worked like Off! They had to go the emergency room.”

  “What did the bear do?”

  “She fled. Who would eat somebody that dumb?”

  They drank their tea. Celine said, “I notice that we have a pretty comprehensive catalogue of the years he was a shooter. Maybe we should make a list and see what months we’re missing.”

  “Good idea,” Pete said. He wasn’t sure if it was or if it wasn’t, but it couldn’t hurt to see every one of Lamont’s stories, and he was long past questioning her hunches. They pulled out his notebook and jotted down the months and years of the ones they had, and added the dates of the magazines they’d already checked at the library and left behind because they had no Lamont photographs. They found they were missing only five. “I’d like to find those,” Celine said.

  They finished their tea and climbed into the loft, and were lulled this time not by rain but by the gentle sipping of the lake water against the shore and the shirr of wind in the tall pines. They kept the door wide, latching only the screen, and left all the mesh windows around the upper bed open to the breeze. Celine got up to pee once and for a long time stood in her wrapper in the chilly dark—there would be frost in the morning, she thought—and marveled at the depth and texture of the stars. Like some infinite woven fabric. Which it was. The Milky Way ran through it like the unfurling and whimsical thought of the weaver. It was very still. She took a short walk, a sort of errand, and finally, her toes numb, she went back to bed. No truck woke them in the middle of the night because, of course, the truck was parked forty yards away. Celine kept the Glock 26 under the edge of her pillow.

  Pete was up before her and she woke to the smell of strong coffee and the first light through the screen making a luminous bowl of sky where three then two stars gleamed. It was cold, the cold edge of fall and she adored it. She breathed—her lungs felt clear today, despite the altitude. She was almost content. I am lucky, she thought. Very. I could die right now, under this warm flannel with the smell of French roast and a couple of ducks mut
tering on the lake and my husband puttering below. Die fulfilled.

  Maybe. There was a case to solve and something nagged her about her working theory on Paul Lamont. Which consisted of two alternative possibilities: 1) Lamont was eaten by a bear; or 2) he wanted out—of his marriage, of the fathering at which he was a failure, and maybe even from our own Great Game of undercover intelligence in the Americas—wanted out of all of it so badly that he had staged his own death and gone underground.

  But lying there, listening to the waking day, another possibility occurred to her: Lamont may not have abandoned Gabriela, after all. He may have been taken. She sat up.

  Pete was happy to see her up so early. She held the handle at the edge of the bed and her right foot found the storage cabinet and he gave her a hand down. He hummed and he poured her a cup of black coffee and opened the small electric fridge under the sink and pulled out a pint of milk and poured a generous slug into the cup.

  “Thank you, Pete,” she said. “Why do you think everybody who camps has to have blue enamel cups?”

  “Tradition.”

  “Hmm.” She sat in the chair at the side dinette. The smallness of it, and the little table, reminded her of a school desk, one of the ones the kids got in first and second grade. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. She leaned forward and looked out the open window. The pleasant-looking young man was already up. He was stripping the tent fly from its poles. He wore his baseball cap and a green Carhartt canvas coat. “That man is bothering me. He’s starting to feel like a horsefly.” She left the cup on the table and stood. “Pete, where did you stash the shoulder holster?”

  Celine slipped on the shoulder rig with practiced ease, and snugged the Glock into the holster and shrugged on her plaid wrapper. Bell tartan, the pattern of her family, the Scottish branch. She wore sheepskin slippers. She smoothed down and patted her silver hair into some semblance of shape and took up her enamel mug. No, this wouldn’t do. She put the cup back down and reached for her purse, which dangled from a hook. She took out a compact and lipstick and carefully applied the makeup, compressing her lips and glancing at both sides of her face in the tiny mirror. She found a stick and applied eyeliner. She took…as long as it took. That was the wonderful thing about applying her face in the morning: time vanished; it was a kind of meditation. Pete watched her without comment. What could he say? You look great in Glock, dear?

  “Back in a minute,” she said finally.

  She strolled down the dirt track in her robe, carrying her coffee easily, at home in the world, and with the luxuriant pace of someone who isn’t quite awake and is strolling over to the house of a familiar neighbor. On the way she stopped to pick up a brilliant blue feather. She had never seen anything like it—it was small and delicate and shimmered from gray to blue to green. Perfect. She’d use it to adorn the top of a turtle-shell mask she was making at home. She tucked it into the pocket of her robe.

  The young man focused on folding his orange nylon tent lengthwise on the rough ground, but he was aware of her, she could tell. He had great peripheral vision. Like a basketball player, she thought.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  The man stood. He was tall, maybe six one, slender but broad-shouldered. His short black beard was trimmed but not too neatly.

  “Ma’am.” He did not smile. She saw for the first time that his eyes were gray, nearly blue but not. Like slate. Eloquent, in that they registered keen intelligence but no warmth. Like a husky. No, like a wolf. Celine studied them for a long moment, unflinching.

  “Would you like some coffee? We’ve just made a pot. It’s very good, French roast, much better than the stuff we’ve all been drinking in the diners.”

  His eyes did not flicker. “Ma’am, no thank you. I’ve got the makings started.” He glanced at the tailgate of his truck. She noticed the hissing of the camp stove and the Pyrex French press beside it. A bag of Peet’s ground beans. I’ll be damned. Probably stationed in a cosmopolitan city somewhere and grown used to the finer things. But his accent had a touch of country south of Pennsylvania. And he had said “makings.” And the irritating use of “ma’am” suggested ex-military.

  “Okay. You probably have oatmeal or eggs or something, too?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, I see now, that insipid old Quaker on the box. I’m guessing that you make a very fine oatmeal, but prefer ham and eggs. Like the poor man in that Hemingway story, I can’t remember the title.”

  “ ‘The Battler.’ ”

  Celine raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t say ma’am.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  He held a small stuff sack filled with what must be tent stakes. He was wearing a wedding ring, a simple gold band, scuffed and dulled to brass. There was that. She tried to imagine those eyes looking into the eyes of his beloved. She could not imagine their mineral gray ever holding any real warmth, but of course they might change color in her arms. Celine was now genuinely intrigued. Not only was he erudite but he had wit, if not humor. Probably both. Clearly these people, whoever they were, had a very deep bench.

  “I bet you know that I am carrying more than a cup of coffee,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And that if you keep saying ma’am I might pull it out. I will turn into a complete lunatic.” She coughed. It rose in her chest and spasmed her throat. She lifted her arm to cover it, but it gathered force and shook her so violently it spilled her half-full cup. Damn. Her lungs had been so quiet since they’d landed in Denver. The dry air had been good. When the convulsion was over she collected herself and just breathed, pursing her lips. She had great class: She did not apologize to the man or even acknowledge his presence. This was a private matter. She collected herself and gave herself time to return to her normal state of elegance. Then she swallowed a sip of coffee from the bottom of the mug.

  Thank God, she thought, he had the tact to keep his mouth shut. He held the bag of stakes.

  “Would you like help folding the tent?” she said.

  “I think I’ve got it.”

  “You know,” she said, “you have an almost perfect cooking setup. Except. Just a sec, I had an idea—” She wrinkled her nose, turned on the heel of her slipper, shook the dregs of her cup onto the ground, and was gone. He blinked. She didn’t take long. Four minutes later she was back.

  “You need one of these,” she said. “My son’s camper came with one, so we have an extra. Go ahead, take it. I’d say the coffee gets twice as good.” She held out her hand. He hesitated, took the thing, rolled it over in his rough palm. It was a battery-powered coffee-bean grinder.

  “Fuckin’ A,” he whispered.

  “I didn’t get that,” she chimed.

  His eyes flicked up, a fleeting light—of amusement, or gratitude, or wariness, she wasn’t sure. Maybe all three. He nodded once, in thanks, she supposed, and his eyes found their old level, the one that looked a little like granite. Well, she had years of experience dealing with taciturn men.

  “If you know where we’re going, why not just meet us there?” she said.

  He didn’t say anything. His expression didn’t change. He was looking at her with the same neutral steadiness. She understood that this was a man who could quiet his heartbeat and would not easily tire at the flat distances seen through a rifle scope.

  “I mean if you are not trying to intimidate us. Clearly you want us to know you are here, but you don’t seem that intimidating.” Celine smiled at him. “I mean that in the best way.” She sighed. “Well, I suppose. I should probably be polite and ask you if you prefer camp breakfast or a road café. But that would be letting the tail wag the dog, truly.” She turned to go and turned back.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Arrgh.” She smiled again, this time her brightest, true smile. “What am I carrying?”

  “Glock 26.”

  Celine was in a state as they drove up the shore to the Jackson Lake
Lodge. They would eat breakfast there, in deference to their travel companion.

  “He’s too skinny,” Celine had said. “He can’t survive on oatmeal boiled on the back of his truck. Don’t look at me like that.”

  Pete had not been aware that he was looking at her like anything. “Anyway, he’s clearly on expenses,” she said. “He can order the Lumberjack Breakfast. When we all get there, I think I’ll just have one sent over.”

  She did not have one sent over. But she did scribble a note on the back of a pink dry-cleaning ticket and ask their waitress to give it to him. It said, “I couldn’t bear, after all, to think of you eating nothing but oatmeal.” She nodded at the man as he took his table in the corner—the gunfighter’s table, she thought, the one with a clear view of the room and no angles of fire from behind; must be habit—and he read the note and touched the brim of his cap. She and Pete drank their coffee and ate their eggs and pancakes under a massive bull moose who looked out longingly at the young willows at the edge of the shore. Celine just couldn’t get over that the man had known her gun, make and model, through her bathrobe.

  “I mean it wasn’t a negligee,” she objected. Either his people had bugged Hank’s house in Denver when she had asked for his gun, which seemed very far-fetched, or he had guessed. “I suppose he knew that a Glock is what I have at home and of all the guns it’s the one I’m most comfortable with. And of course if it had been a 19 it would have been more bulky. So: a 26. He’s not clairvoyant.”

  “Hmm.”

  “He’s a cocky SOB. He knew The Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.”

  They made to leave and stood at the table and Celine waited courteously until their chaperone took his last sip of coffee and plucked up his own bill before proceeding to the cashier at the front. They paid their check and they were half out the door into the lobby and she waited again until she saw the man hand his own ticket to the cashier. Then she said to Pete, “You go ahead, I’ve got to make one last stop.” Which was a euphemism. She headed for the heavy wooden door of the ladies’ room and waved at the young man as he followed Pete out the glass front doors, and then she doubled back and went straight to the waitress. She held her digital camera in one hand.