Granta 122: Betrayal (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

by Неизвестный

  ‘OK. I look forward to it. Have you tried blowing smoke rings yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, practise.’

  ‘I will. I was going to make it a surprise. You know, you come home from your re-enactment and all of a sudden you have a smoking wife. A wife that smokes. That is something you’d probably never expect.’

  ‘Well, it’s still a surprise this way, I almost don’t believe it.’

  ‘Yeah, you know why I started?’

  ‘It is a question I had considered asking. Why?’

  ‘Because what’s the point of not smoking? I’ve been not smoking for thirty-three years. Look at where it has gotten me. Now I’m going to be smoking. Make sense?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘OK, I’m going to let you go, very tired.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Love.’

  ‘Love.’

  ‘Love.’

  Kat’s lips brushed his ear in her whisper. He hung up the phone. He was a scalped and bloody mess.

  Before dawn Perry woke to find Kat’s side of the bed empty. He turned and saw her standing over him in the dark, fully clothed in jeans and T-shirt. She brought her fingers to his face and smoothed his moustache. When she moved her head down to him, her hair folded like black wings around them.

  In the morning Perry crammed the uniform, now smelly and stained, into his suitcase and gave a final look around the room to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. He put the empty bottle of J&B in the trash can. When he went out to the parking lot he found a fluorescent-orange aluminium arrow shaft protruding from the rear passenger tyre of his Camry. Perry considered the arrow for a moment and then pulled it, with some difficulty, from the tyre. The fletches were glued-on pieces of hot-pink vinyl. The shaft had the word WHACKMASTER printed down the side, and black squiggly lines, which, coupled with the orange, were supposed to give the appearance of tiger stripes. The edges of the broad-head were chipped and rusty. Perry got the spare tyre from the trunk and switched out the flat. He put the arrow in the back seat and left the War Bonnet, driving slowly on the small spare.

  The only repair shop in Crow Agency was Robidoux’s Fix-It, a lean-to built off the back of a double-wide trailer. Perry pulled in and Ted Robidoux came down the trailer steps in his bathrobe. Ted occasionally rode in the re-enactment. Three years ago he had taken care of a clogged fuel line in Perry’s car.

  ‘Morning, Ted. It’s Perry. Remember me, the General?’

  ‘Hey, Perry. Of course. I didn’t make the re-enactment this year. How did it go?’

  ‘Well, it was a spectacle, as always.’

  ‘Good. Good. Looks like you got a bum wheel there. This country’s hard on tyres.’

  ‘And other things.’

  ‘Ha, well, I should be able to handle the tyre at least. Let me go put my pants on.’

  He went into the trailer and re-emerged fully clothed, with a mug of coffee that he handed to Perry. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘This could take a few.’ Perry sat on the porch and sipped at the hot coffee. It was still early and cool and the land seemed refreshed from yesterday’s rain. There was a stack of fresh-cut lodge poles leaning up against the trailer wall and after he had finished his coffee Perry went over to take a closer look. He was running his hand over their smooth peeled surfaces when Ted came from the lean-to. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you like my new poles? I just finished peeling those yesterday. Last time we went to the mountains and put up the lodge, I had two poles break in the middle of the night. You should have seen how pissed my old lady was when the whole thing came down on us and we had to sleep in the cab of the truck.’

  ‘Well, you did a good job with these,’ Perry said. ‘They’re smooth. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I can’t even peel a potato.’

  ‘The secret’s a sharp drawknife. And a light hand. And practice.’ Ted patted one of the lodge poles and laughed. ‘The good old tepee,’ he said. Then he patted the side of his trailer and laughed again. ‘And here’s the new tepee. I got a leaky roof. Fuck me. Well, anyway, we got her patched – the tyre. A good-sized hole.’

  ‘Thanks. It was the damndest thing. I had an arrow sticking out of it this morning.’

  ‘An arrow? Like a good old Indian arrow?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Perry got the arrow and handed it to Ted who held it between two fingers as if it were something particularly distasteful.

  ‘Whackmaster?’ he said.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Well, you know what we need to do, Perry?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Back in the old days if a warrior got hit by an arrow he had to break the shaft to make sure the guy who shot him didn’t still have power over him. So his wound would heal.’ Ted handed the arrow back to Perry.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. I’m an Indian. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to situations like this.’

  ‘OK. How should I do it? Is there, like, a certain way it should be done?’

  ‘I think just over the knee, like a piece of kindling for the fire.’

  Perry brought the shaft down over his knee. The aluminium didn’t break, but bent sharply. He looked up at Ted, who shrugged. Perry bent it back and forth a few times and eventually the shaft broke cleanly, like a paper clip.

  ‘There,’ said Ted. ‘Now you keep that forever.’

  GRANTA

  * * *

  A BRIEF

  HISTORY OF FIRE

  Jennifer Vanderbes

  * * *

  My name is Sarah. I live in the Gila Wilderness, in the mountains of south-western New Mexico, and I map fires. From the nearest road, by horse or mule, it’s a day’s journey here; few people pass through, only botanists and geologists, the occasional tree counter. In the rare event that one of these men is sent to discuss my data, they are surprised when I open my cabin door. I have neither the heft nor years to fit their image of a solitary outdoorswoman. I wear lipgloss. I French-braid my hair. Even in the late autumn, when I am in gloves all day, I still paint my fingernails. These men glance at my pyramid of firewood, the axe pitched in the stump; they study the fly rod leaning against the door frame, the line of trout drying in the sun.

  ‘You’re the lookout?’ they ask, their heads shaking in disbelief.

  They unload their bags in the small room provided for guests of the forest service and, through the open door, shout formalities: studied forest patterns with Albert Popperly, concerned about mesquite and cottonwood regrowth. Finally unpacked, they emerge with a fresh shirt and combed hair to share what wine or whiskey they have brought. I grill a trout and over dinner we discuss the land, the fires, the Indians who once roamed these mountains. As the sun sets, I light a fire, and, when the fire dies, we shimmy closer on the lumpy couch to share the large wool blanket that has borne witness to all of my wilderness couplings. The discussion continues, punctuated by probing silences, pauses that anticipate a kiss or a toppling of torsos, but I am, as always, unable to turn away from the embers. As I fight a yawn, the man declares that he loves his work but that all the travel has come at the expense of meeting the right woman. Don’t I get lonely out here? I say that the spruce-firs and the ponderosa keep me company. In semi-surrender he smiles, and I stand to rake the ashes. But later, while I am showing him how to release the water valve on the sink so he can brush his teeth, I bury my face in the thick scent between his neck and shoulder, breathing him in, this stranger, as though it is the last scent in the world.

  He lifts my chin. ‘What on earth are you doing out here?’ he whispers, kissing me before I can answer.

  The next morning, he sets off up the mountain to get cell reception, and by sunset clomps breathlessly up the cabin steps, cheeks flushed. ‘I lied to all of my superiors,’ he boasts.

  ‘Flu? Sprained ankle?’

  ‘Snake bite.’

  ‘And you’re being tended by a nice forest ranger until you can resume your survey?’

&nb
sp; ‘I think my recovery will take at least a week, don’t you?’

  ‘Well then. Would you like the grilled trout or the grilled trout tonight?’

  For days we play house. We are honeymooners; we are an old couple reading side by side, wrapped snugly in our silence. In the morning, we drink coffee in our underwear. In the afternoon, sweaty from sex, he steps outside in Tevas only to retrieve firewood for the night. I try on his slippers, grow dizzy behind his reading glasses.

  I harbour no illusion that I, in particular, have drawn him into this exchange. It is the wind rustling the ponderosa, the wingspread of a falcon traversing the evening sun, the scratch of bobcats on ancient rocks. We are a man and woman alone in the wilderness. We are Adam and Eve, or so he believes.

  Splayed across the blanket on the floor, spooning condensed milk into my mouth, he asks, ‘So you don’t miss television?’

  ‘Gah.’

  ‘Newspapers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Baseball games? Telephones?’

  ‘I miss draught beer,’ I say. ‘And oysters.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Come on, you’re too young to be living out here like a hermit.’

  I am thirty-two.

  ‘I’m a hermit prodigy,’ I say. ‘I exhibited hermiting skills at age five so my parents entered me in a special programme.’

  He reels in mock dismay, then growls and playfully smacks my thigh. ‘God, look at that curve. Look at that delicious flesh.’ He runs his hand along my side. ‘Those are childbearing hips.’

  He leans in to kiss me.

  ‘Leave,’ I say.

  The Earth once existed without fire. Until 400 million years ago, primordial peat and reeds emerged from the sea, plants to feed the ravenous flames. Across the continents fire flashed and faded, sputtered and raged, a wild beast of heat and light roaming the forest until one day man tamed it.

  Fire opened the night. Fire rendered animals edible. Brought together by their shared fire, early humans formed tribes, clans, families. For fire must be conceived, fed, disciplined, watched, put to bed, awakened. Fire is like a baby.

  Here in the Gila Wilderness, walk a half-mile in any direction and you will come across a lightning-scarred tree. When a tree is struck, if the current runs just beneath the surface, the pressure blasts off a strip of bark.

  If the current runs down the centre – kaboom.

  Few fires in the world begin with lightning. Only one bolt in four reaches the ground, and most strike rock or water. There is hot lightning and cold lightning. Cold lightning will blast without burning. But hot lightning has the high amperage and low voltage to spark combustion.

  Hot lightning loves these woods, and, at any given time of year, a half-dozen wild fires are burning here.

  Apache, Aspen, Meason, Grouse . . .

  Every fire is named, and mapped. From my lookout tower I mark the hourly and daily changes in a fire’s perimeters: one acre, seventy-five acres. I note the wind speeds and air temperatures. In the cabin lay seventy-five years’ worth of fire maps, maps made by my predecessors. These are used to overlay subsequent forest growth maps. Sometimes, a tree counter will arrive and ask for a fire map from 1962. A botanist will set up camp in my living room and for days examine every fire map from the 1980s. Because present growth, or lack thereof, means little without the record of destruction. I make copies of these maps to send to the district office, indicating the basic fire-data points so that it can all be computerized. But the originals remain on site, and many are quite beautiful. The first man in this cabin was named Everett Hodges, and he signed all of his maps with a calligraphic drawing of bighorn sheep, though the bighorns had already vanished from the landscape when he arrived. Perhaps he spotted one, the last of its kind. Perhaps he imagined he did. These woods are ancient; the past lingers. Everett Hodges also lived in this wilderness alone. I am the only woman to have lived here. I have made seventy maps. I have been here five years.

  I once lived in another house, on another hillside, in northern Arkansas. The house was a lofted wood cabin fronted by a wraparound porch with two rocking chairs from which you could see the Ozark Mountains to the south and east. Sitting in those chairs as the sun rose, you could watch the morning mail truck turn off the old highway and slowly tackle the quarter-mile gravel road snaking up to the house. Conversely – and this is important – from the bottom of the same road, you could see the entirety of the front porch, even the main door, above which hung the red wooden letters I had carved and painted myself, spelling: The Lamberts.

  The man who built this house was my husband, Luke.

  Luke and I met in college. We ended up in the same corner of a boring party together my sophomore year. I thought he was sexy (a word I wasn’t accustomed to applying to nineteen-year-olds), but as for what I said to him or what he said to me I can’t recall. We were too young to think such details important. When, after too many tequila shots and a shared Marlboro Red, we made out on the hood of a car, we had no idea a significant era of our lives had begun.

  Luke was the bass player in a band called the Skornflakes. He tried to teach me to play bass; in the name of higher education, he cracked my Indigo Girls cassettes in half and replaced them with Rage Against the Machine. He wore T-shirts, faded and ripped, hiking boots and dirt-smeared sneakers. The only time I ever saw Luke in a suit was at our lakeside wedding, a suit he peeled off at the night’s end to dive from the dock and race his band’s drummer across the lake.

  We hadn’t originally planned on getting married. After graduation, Luke went to work on a fishing boat in Alaska, and, for lack of a better idea, I had moved back to Boston where I worked as a receptionist at a law firm and in the evenings draped my floor with an old bed sheet and set up my easel. I had a few brief, disappointing flings, which always left me with the strange urge to confide in Luke. But I had no way of calling him. From the fishing boat, Luke wrote long letters that sometimes took weeks to arrive, the envelopes covered with ballpoint-pen drawings of king crabs, nautical knots, the crests of Pacific waves. He loved the ocean but did not like his job. The boat was a floating dictatorship, he wrote, and signed his letters Fletcher Christian, HMS Bounty Mutineer. He said he wanted to get home, to see me and to never look at another salmon again.

  When Luke finally returned to the mainland, he learned his grandfather had died; he called to say that he was clearing out the house in Oregon and would drive his grandfather’s truck across the country with some furniture, stopping along the way in Arkansas to see a plot of land his grandfather had left him, but that he would be at my doorstep in two weeks.

  I told him I’d fly out and meet him in Arkansas, and we could drive the rest of the way back east together.

  We never made it back east.

  It was a spectacular piece of land. Situated on a hill near the town of Eureka Springs, the Ozarks rose above us, and below snaked the Buffalo River. That night, we pitched a tent, heated canned ravioli over an old camping stove, shared a warm beer and confessed that in our year apart we had each had some meaningless ‘encounters’. Then we put on headlamps, lay side by side on our stomachs, and Luke showed me the photographs he’d taken in Alaska. He narrated each one, then laid out a row of six, edge to edge, that composed a full image of the horizon.

  ‘Muy artsy,’ I said, injecting Spanish into our conversation as we always did when we were alone, though we could never recall how this started.

  ‘De nada, señorita,’ he answered, collecting the photos. ‘Now tell me about your paintings.’

  I explained that I’d stopped painting landscapes because I could only work at night. I was painting still lifes instead, and to save money on canvases I’d buy old paintings from flea markets – some ten inches wide, some five feet wide.

  ‘But you’ve got to have fresh canvases, Sarah. Won’t your parents help?’

  ‘I’m twenty-one. That’s too old to live at home or ask for money. Besid
es, it’s kind of interesting. Always painting over something else.’

  He pushed the hair from my eyes and kissed me gently, almost nervously, and then slowly it eased into something more insistent, more urgent. Even though for weeks I’d imagined our passionate reunion, when we’d met at the airport it had felt strange to be near him again. For a year Luke had been jagged handwriting on worn paper; he’d been the perfect memory of young love, of sheet-tangled conversations about our parents and religion, talks that spiralled into dawn beside overflowing ashtrays. We’d shared every thought, every memory; I thought I knew him inside out. But he looked different now. His hair was longer and fastened in a ponytail. His left arm was sunburned from the drive and he looked – although I may only have imagined it – salted, or aged, from the sea. Before touching him I found myself needing to study every inch of him, and could sense him doing the same. So even though we’d never been shy around each other, it seemed proper to talk, to reacquaint ourselves before tossing aside our headlamps and kicking off our boots, then jeans, as we finally did then, toppling the pots from dinner.

  ‘Do you still respect me?’ I asked afterwards.

  ‘Good God. I respect you even more.’

  ‘Smart-ass.’

  ‘I could live like this,’ he said, pulling me close. ‘This night sky, this air, that moon.’

  My heart was still beating strongly. ‘Me too.’

  ‘I thought about you a lot when I was at sea.’

  ‘You were on a boat full of men. Of course you thought about me.’

  ‘Seriously.’ Luke propped himself up on one elbow. ‘Putting aside your shitty taste in music, you’re the person I admire most in the world. You’ve got integrity. You’ll eat beef jerky for dinner without complaint. You can drink me under the table. And, oh yeah, you’re smokin’ hot.’