Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  She’s on her way to Tahlequah. That must mean something. If everything was roses in Carolina, she wouldn’t be coming home for the summer. Olivia takes care of number one. Well, that’s what I like about her. And if I wasn’t supposed to go and meet her, why did I just happen to call her aunt Mary Lily the day she started driving? Tell me that. I don’t believe in all that extrasensory stuff Sherrill’s into, but I believe in luck. It’s time I had some luck with love. It’s time I had some luck with her. I could have left a message, but I sure wasn’t leaving love notes on a goddamn answering machine while she was off in Florida fucking some fraternity boy.

  He pulled the box out of the glove compartment and opened it and looked at the ring. It seemed too holy to touch. He closed the box and sat it beside him on the seat. I need a dog, Bobby decided. If I had a dog to ride shotgun in this truck, I wouldn’t be so lonely. He turned on the radio. “Oh, blame it on midnight,” a Colorado station was playing. “Shame, shame on the moon.” You can’t escape it, Bobby decided. Pussy is all anybody thinks about unless they’re waiting to see a game or be in one. Well, you think about it then, too. I’ve thought about her in the middle of a rodeo. I’ve thought about her teaching a stallion to back, on top of mountains, going down the Snake. Don’t rail at nature, Tom says. Well, okay, I’m not railing. I’m just keeping score.

  Chapter 8

  BOBBY spent the night in Billings, got up at dawn, and drove to Sheridan, Wyoming, then down to Casper, where the wildflowers were blooming, then to Cheyenne, then Fort Collins in Colorado. In Fort Collins he crashed for sixteen hours in a Holiday Inn that smelled like bug poison. It was the first time in twenty months he had smelled civilization. As soon as he woke up, he called Tom and Sherrill to tell them about it.

  “The whole place smells like poison,” he said. “I forgot how to breathe this stuff. I shouldn’t have left. Have you hired the twins yet? I’m coming back.”

  “I wish to hell you would,” Tom said. “Blanche Fleur foaled this morning. A little stallion with all her markings. You ought to see this colt. This might be the one to take us to the National.”

  “Is that the one we got off Sword Breaker?”

  “Yeah, but he looks just like his mother. Big neck and short legs. It’s the finest-looking foal I’ve seen in a year.”

  “Are you losing your nerve?” Sherrill put in from the other phone. “Don’t lose your nerve, Bobby. Go on down there and do the deed. You can come back here anytime.”

  “I’m going.”

  “I thought about it all night last night,” Tom said. “Fuck a lot of young women driving men crazy. Call her up from where you are. If she says yes, okay, if not . . .”

  “Tom, he doesn’t know where to call her. She’s driving, too. She’s on the road. He’s going to surprise her.”

  “Bobby, you call the minute you talk to her and tell us what’s going on. I want to know the minute you get an answer. I don’t want some friend of mine waiting for some little half-baked girl to seal his fate.”

  “Tom.”

  “Shut up, Sherrill. If I’d been here you wouldn’t have sent my right-hand man off to get his heart broken in Oklahoma. This goddamn colt’s got two front socks, golden white, just like Blanche Fleur. Did you ever see the stud?”

  “Sure I did. I was there when we bred her. Don’t you remember that?”

  “He forgets everything now,” Sherrill said. “And his chances of getting any breakfast today are getting slimmer.”

  “Call us collect, son,” Tom said. “Keep us posted.”

  “I got the good drive ahead of me now. I drove Olivia across Kansas once, in the middle of the night. I took her camping in Vail, Colorado, on her fifteenth birthday. She couldn’t forget a thing like that, could she?”

  “I bet not.”

  “None of those goddamn pussies she’s going out with in Carolina ever took her up to eleven thousand feet, did they?”

  “Bobby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Calm down. It’s going to be all right.”

  “Send me a picture of that colt as soon as you get one.”

  “We’ll name him for you,” Tom said. “Roberto the Ringbearer. Bobby of the Ring, once more into the Fool’s Paradise. Shakespeare coined that phrase, by the way. In Romeo and Juliet, the nurse warns Romeo not to lead her little charge into one.”

  “Tom.”

  “What, Sherrill?”

  “Don’t go writing about this. Tell him not to write about it, Bobby, or he might. You have to tell him every single thing you don’t want ending up in a book. He thinks every bit of life belongs to him. Once he wrote about my mother’s broken ankle. She didn’t speak to him for months. He put it on a homeless bag lady in San Francisco.”

  “Well, I guess I better hang up now. I got to get on my way.”

  “Travel safely, call again. Wear your seat belt.”

  “You can write about anything I do,” Bobby said. “As long as you don’t use my name.”

  As soon as Bobby had paid the hotel bill and packed up and started driving, the good mood talking to Sherrill and Tom had put him in began to fade. The old defense mechanisms clicked back into gear. Desire and fear, the poles that rule us. She wasn’t even that good a cheerleader, he told himself. She mostly just sat around on her ass while the rest of them did the acrobatics. She’s too chubby to really look good in the outfit. Susanne Hogan and Phyllis Buchanan looked a lot better. Well, she looks good on a horse. She was made for blue jeans and jodhpurs. Those beige jodhpurs her aunt sent her that time from New York and that big blue-and-gold scarf around her neck. It’s no use trying to knock her. She’s got my number. She’s the one I love. Well, I can be anything she wants me to be if she’ll give me a chance. Tom said he could get me in a college in Carolina. I want to fuck her so goddamn much. I want to hold her in my arms.

  Bobby leaned down over the steering wheel. He pushed the gas pedal to the floor.

  Chapter 9

  CHARLOTTE, North Carolina, May 27, 1991. Eleven o’clock in the morning. Clouds to the west. A fine, still day. Olivia had rolled in about twelve o’clock the night before. She had kissed her father, told him she was going to Tahlequah for the summer, then climbed the stairs and gone to bed. Since then she had been sleeping. Deep down underneath the beautiful blue sheets of her walnut bed she had been sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. As she slept, she dreamed. In her dream she was wearing a Cherokee wedding dress, a long fringed and beaded dress of the finest buckskin. She stood on a precipice overlooking fields and rivers and pastures. Lined up beside her were the members of her father’s family. They were talking and joking, gossiping and being charming. They cannot see my dress, Olivia said in her dream. They have forgotten I am Cherokee.

  But, of course, it was herself who had forgotten.

  Daniel had been up since dawn, planning his campaign to convince her to go to Switzerland. Since ten he had been out in the guest house talking to Spook while he waited for her to get up.

  “Can’t do nothing with them after they get grown,” Spook was saying. “If you can’t beat them, join them, that’s my motto. Go with her and see Oklahoma. Or let her run. She’s a good kid. I didn’t use to like her but now I do. She ain’t half as wild as Jessie, but you can’t see that. You favor Jessie over her so bad it’s a shame. Now Jessie’s run off and left you and you’re going to lose this one too if you ain’t careful. You ought to get you a new wife, boss. Get you a young one and start all over.”

  “I don’t want to start over. When did you start liking Olivia so much? You said you never liked her.”

  “I been liking her. I told you she was lying when she was lying to you, but now she ain’t lying anymore. Besides, I’ve come to see why she was lying. She had to get in with you some way and that was all she knew to do. That’s just nature. She was just trying to get by, like we all do. Now I think she’s turning out okay. She was the only one that didn’t act like a fool last summer when Jessie got knocked up. She kept o
n saying the truth even after you quit saying it. She said, Get down to the abortion clinic and get rid of it. Instead you caved in and let Jessie go through with it. Now she’s stuck, ain’t she? So now Olivia wants to go home and see her Indian kinfolks. Well, let her. You don’t know what she’s up to. Maybe she’s got a hankering for some boy back there. That’s all they think about at that age, Daniel. It was the same for me and the same for you, only you look like you have forgotten.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I still think about it.”

  “Well, you don’t do much about it, now do you? Where’s Margaret? You hadn’t had her over to spend the night in a couple of weeks.”

  “Olivia’s not going to Oklahoma to see a boy. She’s worried about her grandfather. He’s old and she’s afraid he’ll die. How come you think you know so much about what went on up in Maine last summer when Jessie got pregnant? You weren’t even there.”

  “I got filled in.”

  “Olivia doesn’t care anything about boys. She’s interested in her education. She’s hardly gone out with the same boy twice since she came to stay with me. Where’d you get the idea of her wanting to go to Oklahoma to see some boy? Goddammit, Spook, you say the goddamnedest things. Did she say anything to you?”

  “I hadn’t even seen her. No, it’s just a hunch. Well, you go on, Daniel. Believe what you want to believe.” Spook went back to frying potatoes, which was what he had been doing when Daniel came out and disturbed his peace. He dug the spatula down under the potatoes and turned them slowly to the uncooked side. He sprinkled them liberally with salt. Daniel leaned on the kitchen counter, taking sips from his coffee. “She’s not going to Oklahoma to see a boy, Lucas. What a goddamn thing to say. She’s going to see her granddaddy because he’s old.”

  “Then let her rip. You can’t afford to be flying a bunch of folks to Switzerland anyway. You need to stay home and help me fix them fences at the farm. Either you got to mend the fences or you got to sell the stock. Your daddy was out at the place the other day. He said he can’t believe how you let it run down.”

  “If I hadn’t bought it, it wouldn’t even be there. It’d be turned into subdivisions. Dad was griping about it?”

  “No, he just said he was glad your granddaddy wasn’t alive to see how rundown it was.”

  “I saved the goddamn place. James wouldn’t buy it and Niall’s broke and Anna wasn’t even in the United States. I paid the taxes and I saved it. Goddamn, he was out there griping about it?”

  “Everybody knows you saved it, Daniel. Well, I see your little ole gal is up. She’s got her windows open, letting out all the air conditioning in the place.” Spook pointed through his kitchen window to the girls’ balcony. The windows were open, the lace curtains blowing in the air.

  “She hates air conditioning. What’s wrong with that? She’s a country girl. Well, I’ll see you later, Spook. Be sure and turn the pool cleaner on. The pool’s still a mess.” Daniel left the guest house and walked back across the flagstone patio to the curved stone stairs leading to the kitchen of the main house. He was going to be very unhappy if the bank really made him sell it. He shrugged off the thought, shook his head from side to side and went inside to deal with his daughter.

  “Is it because of Margaret going?” he asked. He walked over to his child and kissed her gingerly on the forehead. A hand on an elbow, a kiss on the forehead, a quick hug. These were the only signs of affection he allowed himself where his daughters were concerned. They seemed so holy to him, so mysterious and inviolate. He shook his head, remembering the last time he had seen Jessie. Nine months pregnant and swollen and ecstatic. He had been furious with her ever since, for putting herself in danger, for scaring him to death, for swelling up with a child, and, lately, for not getting on a plane and bringing the boy to see him.

  “Is the reason you won’t go to Switzerland because Margaret’s going? I only asked her so you’d have a woman along. I can tell her not to go. We can go alone.”

  “No, it’s because I need to go home. I’m lonesome for Tahlequah, Dad. I want to see my folks. Besides, there’s something there I want to do.”

  “You need to see Europe before you get any older. Big things are happening there this year. It’s the summer to be there.”

  “I want to go by New Orleans and see Jessie and the baby. We can go to Switzerland next year. Maybe by then Jessie can go with us.” Olivia surveyed her dad. His tall frame was bent across the counter. He was a graceful man, with the graceful moves of an old track man and basketball player. In the presence of women he would sometimes lose this grace, become awkward and bent and vulnerable. It was very disarming, and Olivia was disarmed now. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I mean that. And I really appreciate everything you do for me. I forget to tell you that, don’t I?” She had been spooning water over a poached egg. She laid down the spoon and put her arms around her father’s waist. Daniel straightened up, allowed his hands to rest on her shoulders. The touch of his children dazzled and terrified and tenderized him past all reason. The marvel, the physical reality of them.

  “You got any money left?” he asked. He took his hands from her shoulders and moved away. He didn’t push her away, he just slightly distanced himself from her.

  “I’ve got about two hundred left in the bank.”

  “You came home with money? Isn’t that against the law at college?”

  “You give me too much. I don’t know what to do with all that money.”

  “It’s what Helen said to give you. You don’t need to stay all summer down there, do you? Why do you need to go for the whole summer? Hell, we could go to Switzerland in July. I’ll call the travel agent.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to go to summer school there. I want to study Navajo. To learn how to write it.”

  “What for?”

  “Because they’re coding scientific information into computers in Navajo. My biology teacher told me about it. The government is giving scientific grants based on the security of the computer systems. So a lot of universities are starting coding things in Navajo. If I can learn it, I’ll be able to get a really good job anywhere I want. They teach it at Northeastern, this little college in Tahlequah, well, it’s a branch of the university, it’s not that little. Besides, there’s an old Navajo there who’s a friend of my aunt’s. He married a Cherokee girl in the Second World War and came home with her. He’ll talk it with me in the afternoons. I really want to do this, Dad. I’ve got it all figured out. I told Aunt Lily to get it fixed up for me.”

  “You got everything you need for breakfast? You want me to call Jade? She’s around here somewhere. She could fix that for you.”

  “I’ve got everything I want. Sit down with me. Talk to me while I eat. You want some toast?”

  “No. Well, I got to think about all this. I wish you’d told me sooner.” He sat back, furrowed his brow, looked off into a corner of the room. “We got to go by and see your grandparents this afternoon. And Uncle Niall. He said to call the minute you came in.”

  “I want to see them, Dad. I love my family here. But I need to go home now. I’m all they have in Oklahoma. All of you have each other here.”

  “Well, I might go with you then. I might drive you there. At least I’ll drive you to New Orleans. I got to go and see that boy. Since it looks like Jessie isn’t going to bring him here. Here, let me have that plate. Put some salt and pepper on those eggs. That’s all you’re going to eat? Goddamn, no wonder all you girls stay so scrawny. You need some milk, honey. Let me get you some milk. I got some fresh milk yesterday at the store.” Daniel busied around, getting out milk and a glass, putting honey and jelly on the table. The phone began to ring. It was Jessie calling from New Orleans. It was Daniel’s parents wanting them to come right over. It was Daniel’s brother Niall, saying he was on his way. It was Helen calling from Boston to ask about her children. It was the Hand family of Charlotte, North Carolina, getting started on the day. “D
evotion is knowing how rich we are,” it said on a Buddhist calendar Margaret had given Daniel for his kitchen. He leaned his elbow against the calendar as he listened to his daughter talking to his mother on the phone. His elbow dug into the solar plexus of the Buddha of Infinite Compassion as he watched Olivia and worried about how he was going to make his June house payment and how he was going to tell Margaret they weren’t going to Switzerland after all.

  Outside the windows of the kitchen the Bradford pear trees were in full leaf. The clouds had passed by the city. A brilliant June sun was almost directly overhead. Summer was beginning in the Northern Hemisphere.

  Chapter 10

  BY the time the sun set, Daniel had decided to give Olivia his Mercedes for the summer and drive with her as far as New Orleans. “Hell,” he said. “Maybe I’ll drive you to Tahlequah. I can fly home from Tulsa, can’t I?”

  “I can do it by myself. You don’t need to take me.”

  “But why should you?” Daniel laughed his wildest, most generous laugh. He was a generous man. Nothing made him happier than giving something big away, a car or a house or a horse. The day had turned out fine all around. Margaret had been placated by the promise of a weekend at Sea Island and Spook had disappeared out to the farm to actually get some work done and the bank had called and given in on the extension of his loan for another six months.

  “You’re giving her your car?” Niall asked, when he heard the news. Niall was Daniel’s closest brother, a lapsed Jesuit who was the family conscience. Niall had come over with two of Helen’s children to have dinner with Daniel and Olivia. “You gave her the Mercedes?”