At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  “You the bird woman?”

  “I am Officer Dubois, the citation person.” And she’d reach into her back pocket for her ticket book. “And who are you?” She lifted her pen. “Or were you leaving?”

  At such moments, Gary would watch Mark smile at the proceedings, and she could feel static across the top of her heart. He was slow to smile and a smile made his face a wonder.

  Juanita would stride back to their truck and say, “In the line of duty, from time to time, there is no better posture for a conservation officer than to be a hard-ass.” She’d salute Mark and move past him to get in the vehicle.

  “Where does he live?” Juanita asked that night. “Is he married?” But she didn’t wait for answers; she was building a solid theory on the evidence. “His lunches, in my opinion, are not made by a woman. I haven’t seen anything in those thick sandwiches except packaged cheese and salami. And he’s using that same brown paper bag four, five days in a row. I haven’t seen a napkin or a treat large or small.”

  Gary agreed with all of this and could have taken it a step further because she’d had half of one of Mark’s homemade sandwiches a day or so before, and it had sandwich spread inside, too, something made of Thousand Island dressing and pickles, which she had never tasted before in her life. Since he had handed her the sandwich, she had not been able to think to the end of a sentence. His fingerprints were in the bread, and when she put her teeth into the thing, she was changed and she knew it.

  “I figure his heart got broken when he was up in Missoula at school,” Juanita continued, “and he’s been out here for six years, living in a basement apartment in Brigham, oiling his boots and ironing his own shirts. He’s pretty good at it. He doesn’t go out much. He’s afraid of love. Hasn’t met the right woman.” Juanita was silent a moment. “Until now.”

  “You go on the count tomorrow,” Gary said to her friend. “I’ll lay in. I could use the sleep.”

  “Are you okay? Do you feel sick?”

  “Juanita,” she said. “I’ll sleep in tomorrow. Say hello to all my babies. And be nice to Mark.” But in the morning as soon as Juanita left, Gary dressed and sat in the chilly morning on a folding chair in the trailer yard and watched the light come. Her thoughts changed channels for hours.

  When she’d been out with Mark alone, they didn’t talk. He wasn’t a talker and she said nothing, afraid that if she ever started, she could not restrain any of the words, the feelings that rose in her. So they sat in one of the large barrel blinds and watched the geese. They were so close that every breath, every small movement and shift seemed like code. At one point she saw him tilt his head to look closer at something and his mouth opened, and when his lips parted, she heard the sound they made, they were that close. A group of a dozen Canadian geese came from the north and went behind them when suddenly Mark put his hand on Gary’s shoulder and nodded before making a sharp barking noise, two loud syllables she recognized as the honking of geese. His hand on her shoulder emptied her head and she focused, such a relief. He called again, honking, and then three more in succession. He nodded his head again, and she saw the flock turning toward them, calling. They circled past and then came back in a splashing assault on the pond where Mark and Gary hid in their barrel. A moment ago they had been at eight hundred feet, and now they swam and settled in the dusk, twenty feet away. When Mark lifted his hand from her, Gary felt dizzy.

  ‘The big deal of the fall was the Trustee Tour and Dinner. The annual event was key to fund-raising for the year, and it was held the week before Halloween, when the foothills of the Wasatch were patched with gold and maroon, every orchard gone orange and rust, and the giant yellow cotton-woods dotting the hillsides. The desperate world was magnified, and Gary Garrison couldn’t take a step without feeling the blue and the straw, the ivory and green burning in tiers up the graduated and massive slopes. The first snow had already cut triangles in the tops of the steely peaks. One noon two catering trucks came out into the refuge’s dooryard and set; up tables and lamps and portable heaters and a bar for cocktails.

  It was in this circus of color at the high center of the last season of the year that she met William Bloom, the head of the trustees, a young attorney from Laramie, and their meeting, by torchlight in the open air of Utah, led to all the rest.

  He saw her right away when the assemblage disembarked from the four blue vans that had delivered them from Salt Lake City. Within a minute he had taken in her carriage, the elevation of her face, her easy confidence, and he was a goner. He was thirty-two and had never felt anything like his awe and yearning for the young woman. Mark Faberhand led them out the primary embankment just as the sun set, and the fifty important personages, casting shadows that stretched a quarter mile onto the shallow ponds, watched the birds cross and recross the sky, settling, seeking shelter, and calling. Mark answered questions, as did Juanita and Gary, all dressed in their refuge uniforms, pressed and perfect. Back at the openair dinner, William delivered remarks about the importance of the mission of the refuge, which made disciples of every one at the long table. It was the best speech of his career.

  Mr. Bloom was back the following afternoon in a plaid shirt and Levi’s. Gary Garrison had never been courted before. There had been some boyfriends, but they were just that, boys. Everyone assumed a person of her beauty and idiosyncratic demeanor had a complete life, chapter and verse, and she was let alone. When she had received flowers, they were from her mother. William Bloom drove her to the Old Mill, the fanciest restaurant in the county, where the waiters wore lederhosen and green felt hats and stepped heavily around the wooden-floored room. William Bloom called her Margaret, which she didn’t correct, because with all this new noise she felt like someone else.

  After dinner he drove above one of the apple orchards, the trees all bright wrecks in the moonlight, and he pointed out the deer moving through the scrub oak. Deer that should have undermined her ability to breathe, sit still, but she watched the small herd move through from a new distance. Her mind on Mark and now William in her face, the smell of this big new car, a night plucked and stolen from the continuity of her electric life. He talked, a man’s voice this close, about how much he loved the West, his life, the air, the dark, the mountains, etcetera, an unending inventory which she heard and after half an hour began to trust. His sincerity walled her in. He leaned to her and tried to kiss her and kissed her and still tried. A man’s lips on her own crushed the circuits, and she kissed him back. He professed his love for her, apologized for saying it, and said it again. He drove her back to the refuge, stopping every fourth mile to kiss her and apologize.

  In the trailer, Juanita waited until Gary sat on the bunk to say, “Mark came by to ask where you had gone to.”

  Gary was in hard flux and looked across the dark space to Juanita on an elbow on her cot. “And I told him, since he was so interested and has never asked you where I go when I drive to town to do the laundry and see a movie alone, that you were on a date with the king of this place.”

  “Don’t be upset, Juanita.”

  “I’m not. Or maybe I am, but it’s okay. Mark asks about you while you’re out with William. It’s strange for me. Envy rises from some deep pit. Oh well, I say, you get all the men, I get southern Utah this spring. It’s a tough call.”

  When Gary saw Mark a few days later, he had already closed himself up like a resort town in winter.

  William Bloom did not return to Laramie and his practice; he stayed on in Brigham City and pressed his suit with Gary. The days shortened, the sun like a weak flare rising and then the brief afternoons like an invitation to the brittle wind. The reeds along the ponds stiffened and there was lacy ice every morning. Walking back to the trailer in the broken light at day’s end, Gary was as confused as she’d ever been. William’s Land Cruiser idled in the yard.

  They ate at the Old Mill three more times, saw two movies, ate at his hotel, necked in his room until every time he sat up and stopped them, placing his forehead ag
ainst hers. He was in. He wanted something larger than sex in November in northern Utah. He said it to her that way and then asked her to marry him, come to Laramie. She told him she’d have to think. She needed a week.

  It was late in the year now and the census told the story; every day fewer birds, and a magnificent golden loneliness fell upon Gary Garrison as she walked the embankments of the sanctuary. And every evening the day dropped away sharper and the few birds still called.

  One afternoon at four o’clock, she sat on a levy with her notebook, her mind splintered. She wanted to sleep with William now, and she wanted to talk to Mark, who had shown her the power of this place, and she wanted no men at all, just a year of these creatures flying and calling. The sun rolled from east to west and the birds flew from north to south. It felt like the sky was being asked too much; it seemed that she was being asked too much.

  It was then she heard the geese, a string of seven, calling in approach. She sat down in the dry reeds, and she put her head in her hands and sat still. She listened as their calling came louder and louder, her feet nearly in the icy water, and she wept without moving. When she peeked between her fingers again, the seven geese were settling at her feet. She could see the grain of the fine feathers on their necks and the glistening black center of each eye.

  The large birds looked at her without remark, and she knew what she was going to do, and that she would schedule the wedding at four o’clock, and like everything she had done so far, there would be an if in it. If the geese called, so be it until death do us part.

  Gary’s mother flew out a week early and in the hotel said, “I’m not surprised. I cannot be your mother and pretend to be surprised. It is sudden and strange, but he is a fine young man, and marriage might redirect the voltage in you. I’m an optimist.”

  Eighty-five people attended the little wedding north of Brigham City, two dozen of Gary’s friends from New York and a few from college, her parents and her aunts, and a handful of her parents’ friends. William Bloom’s family, friends, and many of his associates from the greater West came to Utah for the event, happy for him, and curious about what they’d read on the invitation. They almost filled the wooden pews in the old church as they sat in the dusk, many watching the candles struggle in the leaky window boxes.

  William Bloom looked like every young man looks when he gets married, serious and pretty., and those who knew him could see him breathing.

  Margaret Garrison came up the aisle on her father’s arm while one of her friends played “Segovia” on a big Gibson guitar, and the minister, a former state senator of Wyoming and a close family friend of the Blooms’, read the sheets that Gary and William had created. It was noted that this was an unusual ceremony, but that marriage sometimes required the unusual, and that there were forces beyond this room, beyond this moment, forces that understood the world perhaps better than we do. Geese mate for life and travel together, and that was the intention in this bonding. “And so we agree and know that if we hear now the call of the wild geese, then Margaret and William will be man and wife.” Then it grew quiet in the darkening church, and it stayed quiet as the candles worked against the larger night.

  Juanita Dubois had done what she was to do at the appointed hour, that is, drive the refuge truck out to the stubble field on the high end of the? wetland. But when she arrived there meaning to stir up the two dozen Canadian honkers who had been loitering for weeks, and who came and went with a casualness that made it seem they might try to stay all winter, they were gone. They were all gone. There were none, not a single goose.

  Juanita checked her watch. It was nine minutes after four. She had her red satin dress hitched up to her knees and she was wearing her work boots unlaced. Her pumps were in the truck. She went to the far ditch and shined her mighty flashlight through the field. There was a last ribbon of green light in the west.

  She found Mark Faberhand at the Clock Café on Main Street at 4:20 P.M. He had just ordered the hot roast beef sandwich and was folding the menu up when she came in. To her credit, she did not run in and grab him by the collar. “Juanita,” he said. “What is it?”

  The café light was bracing and full of hope, and she took a breath. “It’s Gary. Do you think you could help us out?”

  A quarter mile from the little church north of Brigham City, Utah, is a park that gives onto an open field that is sometimes winter wheat, sometimes alfalfa, many years simply volunteer growth of any kind, and Juanita parked the truck there as Mark had instructed her. The wind was at their back, blowing toward the building. They could see the candles in the windows.

  “They’ve got candles in the windows,” he said.

  “They do,” Juanita said.

  Mark had a bottle of George Dickel in the truck and he leaned against the grille of the vehicle for the engine warmth, and he took a slug of the whiskey and offered the bottle to Juanita.

  “I’ll have some,” she said, and she tipped the bottle back. She kept having to finger the hair away from her face. “You don’t have to do this,” Juanita said. “If you want me to just take you back, I’ll do it.”

  “No,” he said. “Season’s over. We’ll take in the dock and lower the water this week. It’s been a fall.”

  “You want me to put my arm around you?” she asked him.

  “I do,” he said. “I appreciate it.” They stood side by side in the dark. “How long they been waiting?”

  Juanita looked at her watch. “Thirty minutes.”

  “That’s a long time to stand there. This is going to be the last singleton of the season, coming in late from somewhere.” The he stood and cupped the side of his mouth with one hand and made the call, the two-part song of the Canadian goose in a rhythm he’d learned from the geese: one, four, then two, repeating one, four, and two. Then he did two and took a sharp sip from the bottle. “They’re married now,” he said. “That’s got to serve.”

  All Gary Garrison heard was the first call, because by the second everyone was applauding and gasping and crying out, but it was all she needed to hear. She knew all about it, and she raised her finger for the ring.

  AT THE EL SOL

  I WAS STAYING AT THE El Sol on Durrant Street in Globe, Arizona, all of October, and it never cooled down. Mornings, when I was done with my assignment, I’d walk down to the Blue Door and have coffee and two poached eggs. This would have me walking back just before eleven, and most days Mr. Cuppertino would wave me into the little office, and we’d watch The Price Is Right. Mr. Cuppertino, whose wife had died that summer, loved The Price Is Right and he loved Bob Barker, the longtime host, who was exactly his age to the week, and he loved Roberta Gilstrand, who was one of the prize girls on the show, the brunette. We’d prop the door open and watch the color Zenith as the day heated up.

  Afternoons I sat out in the metal lawn chair on the walkway in the shade and watched as the El Sol filled for the night. The folks who stopped at this motel were not on vacation; they were on other missions. As was I. If you left Los Angeles at six A.M. and you didn’t boil over or ruin a tire up and over the Mohave, then you’d run through Phoenix in the midafternoon and be more than ready to shut it all down in Globe. And if you were on a bare budget like the ranchers and the roughnecks and the runaways who parked their dirty vehicles in the little paved courtyard as I sat and watched, the El Sol was a welcome oasis. It was a welcome oasis for me.

  I was the only permanent resident, so to speak. I’d paid Mr. Cuppertino three hundred dollars for the month, and I told him there might be a chance I’d be staying longer. I had almost nine hundred dollars of my own money, my personal gear, and the $5,100 from the casino scam. I had that money in a bag stuffed into my old watchman’s jacket sleeve, hung with my stuff in the closet of Unit 7 of the El Sol.

  Some afternoons Mr. Cuppertino would come out between arrivals and sit by me, and he told me about the various changes the place had seen under his hand. There had been an old swimming pool in the center of the courtyard which was n
ow a patch of grass. It had been nothing but trouble. He told me the years and the colors he’d painted the place, red, turquoise, and the tan it was now. He showed me places on the old metal chairs in which we sat where those layers could be seen in the scratches. He’d been at the El Sol forty-five years and now his wife was dead and he wondered why even bother. A car would pull under the metal shade canopy off the office and Mr. Cuppertino would push himself out of the chair and say, “I’ll go over and get my thirty-two bucks from these folks and be right back.”

  He had asked me what I was between, was I married, where was I headed, but I’d ducked most of it saying I was taking some time before heading home to Montana. I made the Montana part up; I just wanted someplace cold that would be understandable to avoid. But I also realized I made the home part up, too, because sitting there at the El Sol was pretty much it for me. My bridges were burned and reburned, and I was fairly sure in my scared little heart that those fires would eventually come for me, too.

  What I was really doing was handwriting one complete chronological record of the five-week scam by which my associates and I had stolen $5,100 from the River of Gold Casino outside Incon, New Mexico. I was working on this project from early in the morning dark until about nine or so; I could only stand to work on the thing in the morning. I had a packet of notes I’d made on envelopes before I even knew what I was going to do with them, and my leaky memory, warped as it was by my love for that woman. I’d sit in the morning dark and write down in my new green spiral notebook everything that happened on September 5 and then everything that was said or done on September 6 and then where we were and how the plan evolved on each of the days, which were still so alive in my mind. So alive that it upset me to write them, yet I had to write them. I could never do a complete day in a morning. I kept thinking that I was working too slow, but it was the only way I could continue. Every time I mentioned someone, I wrote out the full name, such as Leo Rosemont or Baby Grayson, and when I came to my name I wrote it out full, too. I quoted what they said and what they were wearing. By the end of October at the El Sol I was halfway through September.