At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  “I remember that chair.”

  “Don’t remember it,” she said. Again she touched the remote and we heard the group in the corner complain. Ted stood and reached up for the controls. He looked at something standing there in the corner of the dark brown room. Eve let him right the set and sit down before she did it again. Now several loud curses sounded, and Ted, of course, stood and tried to fix the problem. “Don’t remember my furniture.” The channels in the corner were spinning in a blur. “My furniture is not your concern, thank you, mister.”

  Then there was tumult in the corner, one guy yelling out “What!” and also standing. “This is not a good idea!” he called to the room in general.

  Eve looked at me. There were no tears there, and no gloating. “You think things happen and then they get to be good ideas later? Is that what we did? Dive in and then hope it was something even workable?” She stopped their television at a car commercial, some sleek vehicle on a winding wet country lane, an unreal place.

  I told her the truth: “I wouldn’t know an idea, Eve, let alone a good one. I wanted to sleep with you—anyone in this room would. Face it, you’re a prize. You don’t get to win. You get to be the prize.” I touched her face, the skin there, knowing I could.

  She stood up. It was an amazing thing, her standing next to me, so beautiful, her body in a green dress, her posture impeccable in the lost. light. She pointed the remote at Ted’s television now and held it like the beam that held the entire room hostage, and I felt it, like some cord that when it snapped would rock us all, and so I simply sat and let all my stupidity gather. Behind me in the big space, the pool balls nickered.

  The young man Ted looked over at us, turned, a handsome figure in the dim light. He moved toward us with a kind of bounce in his step, a young guy in a pin-striped shirt, and he was angry, the look on his face was exactly What the hell? I’d already made up my mind that if there was a fight I would fight, and I knew what I would say afterward in the short term and the long term, and I was gladdened to be wrong, sitting there so wrong, waiting for this fine young man. Where had he been? I’d been waiting to meet this guy for a long time.

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, except for the restaurant I call the Wild Chicken, which was a real place actually called the Blue Bird, a drive-in fast-food joint 1 always drove past on my way to Debbie Delucca’s house. 1 always liked the Blue Bird, all the lights on late at night, because I knew that I was going to get a cheeseburger and a vanilla shake, so many of which I enjoyed with Debbie Delucca herself, or alone if I was driving back late from her house wrecked from all the couch time with her. The couch time I put in this book was real, too, as was the couch itself, a kind of overstuffed deal with Debbie’s mother’s big red and blue afghan on the back, a blanket that wanted to get caught in the gears and dragged into the evening’s activities quietly and inextricably, a beautiful bold coverlet with a repeated pattern of red geese against a blue sky. Of course, the Blue Bird, which I have called the Wild Chicken, and where I stood so many midnights under the fluorescent lights picking red and blue threads out; of my hair waiting for a cheeseburger and a vanilla shake, is now a Custom Tile Outlet, a place you can go if you want your fireplace to look like the one in any Hilton.

  I also should add here that Debbie’s house is real, based on her real house, a green-sided thing on the corner of Concord and Eighth South that had a long shallow porch where I stood so many nights that year whispering with Debbie, giving Mrs. Eisenhour across the street a little show, I guess, as we would stand some nights for an hour saying good-bye and I love you and leant believe I’ve met someone like you and That was dreamy in there on the couch, I love you so much and other direct dialogue which I’ve used in the text absolutely verbatim, probably the easiest thing of all the things in this book to write because everything we said is alive within my head after all these years, things actually said on the chilly fall nights there on Concord as we twisted closer, so lost some nights that we’d wipe our moist noses on each other’s necks under the huge munificent blessing of the ancient poplar tree in her front yard, a real tree that held up the sky for a half a mile in every direction, a giant that dumped its leaves in unending ten-ton squadrons that fall like some kind of perfect setting for us, a backdrop, a movie; if it could give up its ten million golden secrets, a blizzard of leaves, then we could be in love, a tree as gone as the house in which Debbie Delucca lived, under the blades for the interstate years ago, a tree we’ll never any of us see again.

  No coincidence is going to bring that tree back, nor Debbie Delucca, who was my close associate all those years, the young person with whom I invented modern love, love as we know it. Love which so many people dabble in today, but do not study or understand or allow to course through their veins like some necessary thing. We were the last people to use love right. She’s now Debbie Delucca Peterson somewhere in St. Clare, where she does who knows what. I can’t imagine, though I’ve tried. And what am I going to do, go into the ShopMart down there and run into her at the little lunch counter they’ve got over by the children’s department as she sits quietly sipping some chicken noodle soup and reading this very book and nodding at how accurate every word is—the things she said, the things 1 said in return? And I’d sit down beside her and order a vanilla shake, not even wanting their fake version of one of the world’s great treats, not even real ice cream, nor real vanilla, but wanting to say the words the way I did so many nights under the bright lights of the Blue Bird Cafe, vanilla shake, to see if she might turn to see who’s talking like this, looking up from a book that I’m sorry now I even wrote, really sorry, because I see it for the first time: you can’t get anything back. No coincidence at some lunch counter and twenty minutes of conversation with a girl you once knew, some woman sitting there, and you know the exact location of every mole on her body, is going to make one thing in this real world different. If you want the coincidence where some character based on me gets the amazing girl back and has his heart start again after so many years, you’re going to have to look in a book.

  II

  THE ORDINARY SON

  THE STORY OF MY FAMOUS family is a story of genius and its consequences, I suppose, and I am uniquely and particularly suited to tell the story since genius avoided me—and I it—and I remain an ordinary man, if there is such a thing, calm in all weathers, aware of event, but uninterested and generally incapable of deciphering implication. As my genius brother Garrett used to say, “Reed, you’re not screwed too tight like the rest of us, but you’re still screwed.” Now, there’s a definition of the common man you can trust, and further, you can trust me. There’s no irony in that or deep inner meaning or Freudian slips, any kind of slips really, simply what it says. My mother told me many times I have a good heart, and of course, she was a genius, and that heart should help with this story, but a heart, as she said so often, good as it may be, is always trouble.

  Part of the reason this story hasn’t come together before, the story of my famous family, is that no one remembers they were related. They all had their own names. My father was Duncan Landers, the noted NASA physicist, the man responsible for every facet of the photography of the first moon landing. There is still camera gear on the moon inscribed with this name. That is, Landers. He was born Duncan Lrsdyksz, which was changed when NASA began their publicrelations campaigns in the mid-sixties; the space agency suggested that physicists who worked for NASA should have more vowels in their names. They didn’t want their press releases to seem full of typographical errors or foreigners. Congress was reading this stuff. So Lrsdyksz became Landers. (My father’s close associate Igor Oeuroi didn’t get just vowels; his name became LeRoy Rodgers. After le Cowboy Star, my mother quipped.)

  My mother was Gloria Rainstrap, the poet who spent twenty years fighting for workers’ rights from Texas to Alaska; in one string she gave four thousand
consecutive lectures in her travels, not missing a night as she drove from village to village throughout the country. It still stands as some kind of record.

  Wherever she went, she stirred up the best kind of trouble, reading her work and then spending hours in whatever guest house or spare bedroom she was given, reading the poems and essays of the people who had come to see her. She was tireless, driven by her overwhelming sense of fairness, and she was certainly the primary idealist to come out of twentieth-century Texas. When she started leaving home for months, years at a time, I was just a lad, but I remember her telling my father, Duncan, one night, “Texas is too small for what I have to do.”

  This was not around the dinner table. We were a family of geniuses and did not have a dinner table. In fact, the only table we did have was my father’s drafting table, which was in the entry so that you had to squeeze sideways to even get into our house. “It sets the tone,” Duncan used to say. “I want anyone coming into our home to see my work. That work is the reason we have a roof, anyway.” He said that one day after my friend Jeff Shreckenbah and I inched past him on the way to my room. “And who are these people coming in the door?”

  “It is your son and his friend,” I told him.

  “Good,” he said, his benediction, but he said it deeply into his drawing, which is where he spent his time at home. He wouldn’t have known if the Houston Oilers had arrived, because he was about to invent the modern gravity-free vacuum hinge that is still used today.

  Most of my father, Duncan Landers’s, work was classified, top-secret, eyes-only, but it didn’t matter. No one except Jeff Shreckenbah came to our house. People didn’t come over.

  We were geniuses. We had no television, and we had no telephone. “What should I do,” my father would say from where he sat in the entry, drawing, “answer some little buzzing device? Say hello to it?” NASA tried to install phones for us. Duncan took them out. It was a genius household and not to be diminished by primitive electronic foo-fahs.

  My older sister was named Christina by my father and given the last name Rossetti by my mother. When she finally fled from M.I.T. at nineteen, she gave herself a new surname: Isotope. There had been some trouble, she told me, personal trouble, and she needed the new name to remind herself she wouldn’t last long—and then she asked me how I liked my half-life. I was twelve then, and she laughed and said, “I’m kidding, Reed. You’re not a genius; you’re going to live forever.” I was talking to her on the “hot line,” the secret phone our housekeeper, Clovis Arrnandy, kept m a kitchen cupboard.

  “Where are you going?” I asked her.

  “West with Mother,” she said. Evidently, Gloria Rainstrap had driven up to Boston to rescue Christina from some sort of meltdown. “A juncture of some kind,” my father told me. “Not to worry”

  Christina said, “I’m through with theoretical chemistry, but chemistry isn’t through with me. Take care of Dad. See you later.”

  We three children were eight years apart; that’s how geniuses plan their families. Christina had been gone for years, it seemed, from our genius household; she barely knew our baby brother, Garrett.

  Garrett and I took everything in stride. We accepted that we were a family of geniuses and that we had no telephone or refrigerator or proper beds. We thought it was natural to eat crackers and sardines months on end. We thought the front yard was supposed to be a jungle of overgrown grass, weeds, and whatever reptiles would volunteer to live there. Twice a year the City of Houston street crew came by and mowed it all down, and daylight would pour in for a month or two. We had no cars. My father was always climbing into white Chevrolet station wagons, unmarked, and going off to the NASA Space Center south of town. My mother was always stepping up into orange VW buses driven by other people and driving off to tour. My sister had been the youngest student at M.I.T. My brother and I did our own laundry for years and walked to school, where by about seventh grade, we began to see the differences between the way ordinary people lived and the way geniuses lived. Other people’s lives, we learned, centered fundamentally on two things: television and soft foods rich with all the versions of sugar.

  By the time I entered junior high school, my mother’s travels had kicked into high gear, and she hired a woman we came to know well, Clovis Armandy, to live in and to assist with our corporeal care. Gloria Rainstrap’s parental theory and practice could be summed up by the verse I heard her say a thousand times before I reached the age of six: “Feed the soul, the body finds a way.” And she fed our souls with a groaning banquet of iron ethics at every opportunity. She wasn’t interested in sandwiches or casseroles. She was the kind of person who had a moral motive for her every move. We had no refrigerator because it was simply the wrong way to prolong the value of food, which had little value in the first place. We had no real furniture because furniture became the numbing insulation of drones for the economy, an evil in itself. If religion was the opiate of the masses, then home furnishings were the Novocain of the middle class. Any small surfeit of comfort undermined our moral fabric. We live for the work we can do, not for things, she told us. I’ve met and heard lots of folks who shared Gloria’s posture toward life on this earth, but I’ve never found anyone who put it so well, presented her ideas so convincingly, beautifully, and so insistently. They effectively seduced you into wanting to go without. I won’t put any of her poems in this story, but they were transcendent. The Times called her “Buddha’s angry daughter.” My mother’s response to people who were somewhat shocked at our empty house and its unkempt quality was, “We’re ego distant. These little things,” she’d say, waving her hand over the litter of the laundry, discarded draft paper, piles of top-secret documents in the hallway, various toys, the odd empty tin of sardines, “don’t bother us in the least. We aren’t even here for them.” I always loved that last and still use it when a nuisance arises: I’m not even here for it. “Ego distant,” my friend Jeff Shreckenbah used to say, standing in our empty house, “which means your ma doesn’t sweat the small stuff.”

  My mother’s quirk, and one she fostered, was writing on the bottom of things. She started it because she was always gone, away for months at a time, and she wanted us to get her messages throughout her absence and thereby be reminded again of making correct decisions and ethical choices. It was not unusual to find ballpoint-pen lettering on the bottom of our shoes, and little marker messages on the bottom of plates (where she wrote in a tiny script), and anywhere that you could lift up and look under, she would have left her mark. These notes primarily confused us. There I’d be in math class and cross my legs and see something on the edge of my sneaker and read, “Your troubles, if you stay alert, will pass very quickly away.”

  I’m not complaining. I never, except once or twice, felt deprived. I like sardines, still. It was a bit of a pinch when we got to high school, and I noted with new poignancy that I didn’t quite have the wardrobe to keep up. Geniuses dress plain but clean, and not always as clean as their ordinary counterparts, who have nothing better to do with their lives than buy and sort and wash clothes.

  Things were fine. I turned seventeen. I was hanging out sitting around my bare room, reading books, the History of This, the History of That, dry stuff, waiting for my genius to kick in. This is what had happened to Christina. One day when she was ten, she was having a tea party with her dolls, which were two rolled pink towels, the next day she cataloged and diagrammed the amino acids, laying the groundwork for two artificial sweeteners and a mood elevator. By the time my mother, Gloria Rainstrap, returned from the Northwest and my father looked up from his table, the State Department “mentors” had been by and my sister, Christina, was on her way to the inner sanctums of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I remember my mother standing against my father’s drafting table, her hands along the top. Her jaw was set and she said, “This is meaningful work for Christina, her special doorway.”

  My father dragged his eyes up from his drawings and said, “Where’s Christi
na now?”

  So the day I went into Garrett’s room and found him writing equations on a huge scroll of butcher paper, which he had used until that day to draw battle re-creations of the French and Indian War, was a big day for me. I stood there in the gloom, watching him crawl along the paper, reeling out figures of which very few were numbers I recognized, most of the symbols being X’s and Y’s and the little twisted members of the Greek alphabet, and I knew that it had skipped me. Genius had cast its powerful, clear eye on me and said, “No thanks.” At least I was that smart. I realized that I was not going to get to be a genius.

  The message took my body a piece at a time, loosening each joint and muscle on the way up and then filling my face with a strange warmth, which I knew immediately was relief.

  I was free.

  I immediately took a job doing landscaping and general cleanup and maintenance at the San Jacinto Resort Motel on the old Hempstead Highway. My friend Jeff Shreckenbah worked next door at Alfredo’s American Cafe, and he had told me that the last guy doing handiwork at the motel had been fired for making a holy mess of the parking lot with a paintbrush, and when I applied, Mr. Rakkerts, the short little guy who owned the place, took me on. These were the days of big changes for me. I bought a car, an act that would have at one time been as alien for me as intergalactic travel or applying to barber college. I bought a car. It was a four door limegreen Plymouth Fury III, low miles. I bought a pair of chinos. These things gave me exquisite pleasure. I was seventeen and I had not known the tangible pleasure of having things. I bought three new shirts and a wristwatch with a leather strap, and I went driving in the evenings, alone south from our subdivision of Spring Woods with my arm on the green sill of my lime-green Plymouth Fury III through the vast spaghetti bowl of freeways and into the mysterious network of towers that was downtown Houston. It was my dawning.