At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  Some days there’d be a tan face suddenly at his study door, Paula Plum or Melissa Reed, saying, “So this is where the genius does it,” and placing two or three folded towels on the chair. The incursion was always more than Edison could process. He looked up at the woman, a hot-pink tank top, sunglasses in her hair, and felt as if he’d been struck. The calculation bled, toppled. Edison felt involved in some accident, his hands collapsed, his heartbeat in his face. Then she was gone, whoever she had been, singing something about tonight or tomorrow night at the Plums’ or the Reeds’, and Edison found himself dislocated, wrecked. His children knew not to barge in that way, because it meant his day’s work vanished, and he’d spend hours looking out the front window or walking the neighborhood in the summer heat. The chasm between his pencil figurings and the figures of the real world was that, a chasm, and there was no bridge.

  At the Reeds’ and the Plums’ while the kids splashed in the pool and Scott flirted with Melissa and Allen with Paula, silhouettes passing in and out of the house as summer darkness finally fell while everyone was fed grilled meat of all kinds and Paula Plum’s tart potato salad, word got out that Edison was brusque, at least not hospitable, and Janny Hanover lifted her wine to him, saying, Why, darling, you looked absolutely like I was going to steal your trigonometry!” Edison smiled at her, feeling Leslie’s gaze; he promised he’d try to do better. Holding this smile was pure effort.

  “And you looked at me like you didn’t even know who I was,” Paula added.

  Edison didn’t know what to say, held the smile, tried to chuckle, might have, and then it became painfully clear that he should say something. He couldn’t say what he thought: I don’t know who you are. The faces glowed in a circle around him, the healthy skin, all those white teeth. “Well, my heavens,” and there was a pause which they all knew they would fall into, and people knew they would have to do something—cough, get up for more beer, make a joke. He’d done this to this group a dozen times already this summer, what an oddball. Then he spoke: “Do you ladies go through the neighborhood surprising every geek who’s double-checking his lottery numbers?”

  And the pause sparked and Dan Hanover laughed, roared, and the laughter carried all of them across, and it was filled with gratitude and something else that Edison saw in Leslie’s eyes, something about him: he’d scored a point. There was a new conviviality through the night, more laughter, the men brought Edison another beer, Leslie suddenly at ease. Children drifted in and out of the pool, docking between their parents’ legs for a moment, then floated away, dropping towels here and there. Edison, the new center of the group, felt strange: warm and doomed.

  The following days were different than any he’d known. People treated him, how? Cordially, warmly, more than that. This new fellowship confused him. He’d obviously broken the code and was inside now. His research crashed and vanished. At the butcher paper with his pencils he was like a man in the silent woods at night, reaching awkwardly for things he could not see. “I’m going in circles.”

  “Is any of it familiar? Is there a moon?” Leslie asked. “Shall I honk the horn of the silver bus? Start a bonfire?”

  “There’s no light, no wind. I’m stalled.”

  “Go uphill. You’ll see the horizon.”

  But he didn’t. The work he’d done, all the linkages had been delicate, and after two days the numbers paled and dried and the adhesive dissipated, and while he stared at the sheet, the ragged edge of the last figures, it all ran away. He was going to have to turn around, follow the abstruse calculations back until he could gather it all again. Edison left the room. He walked the long blocks of his neighborhood in the heat, lost and stewing.

  Days, he began to ferry the kids around and was surprised to start learning the names of their friends, the young Plums, the Hanover girl, the Reed twins. He was surprised by everything, the pieces of a day, the way they fit and then fled. He’d wait in the van at the right hour, and the children would wander out of the movie theater and climb in. It was a wonder. He started cooking, which he’d always enjoyed, but now he started cooking all the time. Permutations on grilled cheese sandwiches, variations on spaghetti.

  He delivered towels, returning stacks of cartoon characters to the Hanovers, Denver Bronco logo towels to the Plums, who had moved here from Colorado, and huge striped things to the Reeds, always trading for his family’s mongrel assemblage. He became familiar with the women, dropping in on them at all daytime hours, calling in the front doors, “Man in the house,” and hearing after a beat, Janny or Melissa or Paula call, “Thank heaven for that, come on in.” If the kids were in the car, he’d drop the towels and greetings and hurry out; if not, sometimes it was coffee. Melissa Reed put a dollop of Jägermeister in hers; Janny Hanover drank directly out of a liter Evian bottle, offering him any of her husband’s ales (Dan was a member of Ale of the Month); Paula made him help her make lemonade from scratch. All of the women were grateful for the company. These visits and the weekend parties made Edison in his new life feel as if he were part of a new, larger family, with women and children everywhere; he was with people more than he’d ever been in his life.

  In bed he didn’t want to talk; his hands ran over Leslie in his approach. She held him firmly, adjusted, asked, “What is it like now, the project?” Edison put his head against her neck, stopped still for a beat, and then began again working along her throat. “Ed, should I worry about you? Where are you with the research?” He lifted away from her in the dark, and then his hand descended and she caught it. She turned toward him now and he pulled to free his hand, but she held it. It was an odd moment for them. “Edison,” she said. “What is going on?” They were lying still, not moving. “Are you okay? Have you stumbled on a log and hit your head on a sharp outcropping? Has a mighty bear chased you up a nasty tree? Did he bite you? Should I call that helicopter they use in the mountains?” He could hear the smile in her voice. “What do you need me to do? Where are the little people?” It was clear he was not going to answer. “They’re waiting for you. Go get them. And I’m waiting, too, remember? By the silver bus. You’ll make it, Ed.” But when she let go of his hand and kissed him, he held still one second and then simply turned away.

  The project needed to be done this season; it couldn’t smolder for another year. They’d take him off it, and have him counting beans in the group cubicles. They put you out on the frontier like this once, and when you came back beaten, you joined one of the teams, your career in close orbit, the adventure gone.

  Meanwhile, he fled the house. He’d stand close to Paula at the counter while they squeezed the lemons, their arms touching; he began having a drop of Jäger with Melissa, and when Janny Hanover would see him to the door, they’d hug for five seconds, which is one second over the line. He could feel her water bottle against his back.

  Some afternoons Leslie would stand in the doorway of his little study and see the spill of pencils where they’d been for days. She kept the hallway clear of laundry, but he never went to that corner of the house anymore. They circled each other through the days. In bed he was silent. She tried to open him. “Okay, mister, should I try to drive the bus closer, honk the horn? You want me to bring in some of those allterrain vehicles? Some kind of signal? We’re running low on crackers.”

  After a moment, he said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Can you see any landmarks, stars?”

  “Not really,” he answered. “I can’t.” His voice was flat, exhausted, as he tried to imagine it all. “It’s steep. It’s too dark. I’m having some trouble with my footing.”

  “I know you are. Everybody does,” Leslie said, opening her eyes and looking at his serious face. “Keep your own path. Dig your feet in. Try.”

  Paula wanted to know if he really worked for the CIA; Janny wanted to know if his I.Q. was really two hundred; Melissa asked him if she should get implants. She was drinking her green coffee at the kitchen table and she simply lifted her shirt. The fresh folded towels stood on
the corner of the table. The afternoons he was home between errands were the worst. Now his calculations seemed a cruel puzzle, someone else’s work, dead, forgotten, useless.

  Edison was a light at the parties, sharing recipes and inside information on the children. There was always someone at his right hand talking, a man or a woman; he was open now yet still exotic. His difference was clear: he was the only man still not settled, the only man still becoming, unknown, and it gave him an allure that Leslie felt, and she watched him the way you watch the beast in a fairy tale, to see if it is really something very good in other clothing. Certainly, the parties were less of a strain for her now, not having to worry about Edison’s oddness, his potential for gaffs, but his new state strained everything else.

  By August the women’s familiarity with Edison was apparent. At the cookouts, they spoke in a kind of shorthand, and others had to ask them to back up, explain, if they were to understand at all. Janny Hanover let her hand drift to Edison’s shoulder as they talked. Paula Plum began using certain words she’d learned from him: vector,, valence, viable. Melissa Reed returned from a week-long trip (supposedly to see her parents in Boulder) with four new swimsuits and a remarkable bustline.

  Then suddenly it was Labor Day, an afternoon no different from the hundred before it, but as Edison swept the pool patio and washed the deck chairs and cleaned the grill, he knew summer was, in some way, over. But he wanted the exercise there in his yard, the broom, the hose, the bucket of suds, the sun a steady pressure, and as he wiped the tables and squared the furniture, he thought, No wonder Scott and Dan and Allen like this. The pool was clean, a diamond blue, and there wasn’t a crumb on the deck. Edison wandered around another half hour and then he put his tools away with great care.

  That evening the women did a slow dance around him. He felt it as confused push and pull; he watched the children in the pool, their groupings and regroupings, and then he’d have a new cold beer in his hand, talking again to Scott Plum about chlorine. He sat in the circle of his friends on folding chairs in the reflected swimming pool light, with Paula or Janny right behind him, hip against his shoulder, and he held everyone’s attention now, describing with his hands out in the air a game he’d designed to let the children choose who got to ride in the front seat. “It’s called First Thumb,” he said, lifting his thumbs from each fist; one, then the other. Edison named the different children and how they played the game, and who had gotten to sit in the front seat today and how. His hands worked liked two puppets. The women laughed, the men smiled, and Janny pulled Edison’s empty beer bottle out of his hands and replaced it with a full one.

  “You’re too much,” Dan Hanover said. “This is a hell of a summer for you. I’ll be glad when you get this spec project done and get over and give us a hand in applications.” He leaned forward and made his hands into a ring, fingertip to fingertip. “We’ve got engine housings—”

  “Not just the housings, the whole acceptor,” Allen Reed interrupted. “And the radial displacement and timing has a huge window, anything we want. We’ve got carte blanche, Ed.”

  “Funding! You’d be good on this team,” Dan Hanover said.

  “Solve,” Allen Reed said, tapping Edison’s beer bottle with his own, “for X.”

  Wrapped in a towel like a little chieftan, Toby waddled up and leaned between his father’s legs for a moment, his wet hair sweet on Edison’s face. Then he called his sister’s name suddenly and ran back in to play.

  “Right.” Edison did not know what to say. He picked up Toby’s wet towel in both hands and looked at the men.

  Later, as the party was breaking up and the friends clustered at the gate, Dan Hanover said, “It’s a relief to have you joining the real world,” and Allen Reed clamped his arm around Edison and said, “It’s been a good run. You’re a hell of a guy.”

  Melissa Reed took his upper arm against her new bosom and said, “Don’t listen to him, Edison. He says that because you remind him of what he was like ten years ago.” She squeezed Edison’s arm and kissed him on the lips, but his face had fallen.

  That night after everyone had left, Edison was agitated and distracted while they cleaned up. He shadowed Leslie around the deck and through the house and at some point he dumped a load of towels in the laundry room and continued on into his study. After Leslie had cleared the patio, blown out all the candle-lanterns, and squared the kitchen away, she found Edison at his desk. She stood m the doorway for a minute, but he was rapt on his calculations.

  He was there through the night, working, as he was in the morning and all the long afternoon. He accepted a tuna sandwich about midday. She found him asleep at five P.M., his face on the large sheet of paper surrounded by his animated figurings and the nubs of six pencils.

  She helped him into bed, where he woke at midnight with a tiny start that opened Leslie’s eyes. “Greetings,” she said.

  His voice was rocky and uneven. “I went back in. I walked all the way over the low hills, and I climbed up and back over and into the woods—I found the same woods—and I gathered most of the little people. They’re like children, I mean, sometimes they follow, and so now I think I’m headed the right way.” He sighed heavily and she could hear the fatigue in his chest.

  “Get some sleep.”

  He was whispering. “I don’t have them all, and I see now that’s part of it; I’m not sure you ever get them all. There are mountains beyond these I didn’t even know about.”

  Leslie lay still. He knew she was awake.

  “But that’s another time. Now I can keep these guys together and come down. Do you see? I can wrap this up.” She was silent, so he added, “There weren’t any bears.”

  “Stop,” she said quietly. “You don’t want that game.”

  “It took all night, but I was able to find them because I knew you were waiting.” Leslie could hear the ghost of the old exhilaration in his voice.

  “Edison,” she said, taking his hand. “I’m not there. You need to understand that I’m not at the silver bus anymore. I waited. I saw you give up. Why would I wait?”

  “Where’d you go?” There were seconds between all the sentences. “Where are you?”

  She spoke slowly. “I don’t know. I’m…It’s way north. I’m in town, living in a small town above the hardware store in an apartment.”

  He rose to an elbow and she could feel him above her as he spoke. “What’s it like there? How far is it?”

  “I just got here. No one knows me. It’s getting colder. I wear a coat when I walk to the library in the afternoons. I’ve got to get the kids in school.”

  Edison lay back down and she heard the breath go out of him. “In town,” he said. “Are the leaves turning?”

  “Listen.” Now she rolled and covered him, a knee over, her arm across his chest. “My landlord asked about you.”

  “Who? He asked about me?”

  “Where my husband was.” Leslie put her hand on his shoulder and pulled herself up to kiss him. Held it. “How long I’d be in town.”

  “And you told him I was lost? He likes you.”

  “He’s a nice man.” Leslie shifted up again and now spoke looking down into his eyes. “He said no one could survive in those hills. Winter comes early. He admired you, your effort.” She kissed him. “But you weren’t the first person lost to the snow.”

  “He’s been to your place?” Edison’s arms were up around her now, and she moved in concert with him.

  “He’s the landlord.” She kissed him deeply, and her hands were moving. “He likes my coffee.”

  “I always liked your coffee.” Edison shifted and pulled her nightshirt over her head, her sudden skin quickening the dark.

  “Edison,” Leslie whispered. “You’re not a hell of a guy; you’re not like any of them. Don’t join the team.” She had been still while she spoke, and now she ran her hand up, finally stopping with her first finger on his nose. “Don’t solve for X. Just get all your little people to the bus and drive
to town.” She pressed her forehead against his. “I left the keys.”

  “I know where they are,” he said. His hand was at her face now, too, and then along her hip, the signal, and he turned them, rolled so that he looked down into her familiar eyes.

  “Were you scared?” she said. “What was it like when it started to snow and you were still lost?”

  “Everything went white. I wanted to see you again.” Every word was sounded against her skin, her hair. “It didn’t seem particularly cold, but the snowflakes, when they started, there were trillions.”

  AT THE JIM BRIDGER

  HE PARKED HIS TRUCK IN the gravel in front of the Jim Bridger Lodge, and when he stepped out. into the chilly dark, the dog m the back of the rig next to his was a dog who knew him. A lot of the roughnecks had dogs; you saw them standing in the bed of the four-wheel-drive Fords. It was kind of an outfit: the mud-spattered vehicle, the gear in back, a dog. This was a brown and white Australian shepherd who stood and tagged Donner on the arm with his nose, and when the man turned, the dog eyed him and nodded, or so it seemed. What the dog had done is step up on the wheel well and put his head out to be stroked.

  “Scout,” Donner said, and with a hand on the dog, he scanned the truck. Donner was four hundred miles from home. He knew the truck, too.

  Donner had just come out of the mountains after a week fishing with a woman who was not his wife, and that woman now came around the front of Donner’s vehicle. He stopped her. She smiled and came into his arms thinking this was another of his little moments. He’d been talking about a cocktail and a steak at the Jim Bridger for days, building it up, playing the expert the way he did with everything. She was on his turf, and he tried to make each moment a ritual with all of his talking. He had more words than anyone she knew. Around the campfires at night, which he built with too much care, he’d make soup and fry fish and offer her a little of the special brandy in a special glass, measured exactly, and he would talk about what night means and what this food before them would allow them to do and how odd it would be to sit in a chair in the Jim Bridger the night of their wacky end-of-season New Year’s Eve party and order the big T-bone steak and eat it with a baked potato, which he would also describe in detail.