Wild Blues

by Beth Kephart

  “Stilled,” Uncle Davy said.

  “That’s how Mr. Genzler puts it.”

  “Oh, the euphemisms,” Uncle Davy said.

  “Life is life,” I said. “Until it’s not.”

  Right about then was when I remembered the present I’d brought for Uncle Davy. “Close your eyes,” I said, and he did. I walked to the backpack, unzipped, and dug in. I found what I wanted in no time. Shook it out. Smelled it for smoke. It had a stink, but not too bad.

  “Guess,” I said.

  “Turquoise?” he said, thinking, I guess, of that swatter.

  “Close,” I said. “But not exactly.”

  I laid the gift on his lap. He opened his eyes. It was a brand-new, phenom Day-Glo apron. I’d made one each year in my home science class. This was the fourth in his collection.

  “Lime green!” he said. “Close cousin to turquoise.”

  “My most spectacular creation as of right yet,” I said. Because on a list of best and most important hobbies, home science was nowhere. Not a best. Not anything close. My Day-Glos, with their big-stitch hems and stringy strings, were my form of protest.

  Uncle Davy rubbed his knee and then stood up. I tied his apron on. He looked terrific, with the lime green dangling crooked over his navy trousers, and his purple tie swinging above it.

  “All right,” Uncle Davy said. “Now one for you.” He limped across the room, dug into an antique hutch, then limped back with a rectangular crush of tissue paper, no bow. I remembered, while I waited, the gifts of Uncle Davy’s past. A Victorian shoehorn. A pearl-crusted frame. A sewing bird. A shaving mug. “Rare things for a rare bird,” he’d always say, and now he was placing this new thing in my lap, and now we were back on track, as if there had never been a fire.

  “A book?” I said.

  “I’m not ruining the surprise.”

  I tore the tissue paper off and I was right: a sweet book with a pine-tree-green cover, its pages thin as Bible pages. Its illustrations were old-fashiony. Its lessons included “Getting Lost,” “Pathfinding,” “Nature’s Guide Posts,” and “Accidents and Emergencies.” I closed the book again, stared down at its title. Camping and Woodcraft. Author: Horace Kephart.

  “Found two copies at an estate sale. One for each of us,” Uncle Davy said.

  “For me?”

  “For us.”

  “You’re going to start camping now?”

  “This is history, Lizzie. This is culture. Kephart was the Dean of American Campers. He was a mayor. He was the guy who helped create Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Fame, Lizzie. Fame. They even named a mountain after him. This is a find so fine it keeps its value on the shelf.” He spoke like this kind of luck just never happened.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Courage,” my uncle Davy said. “And biology. Like Kephart had you in mind when he wrote it.”

  “Me and Mr. Genzler,” I said, imagining my uncle in a basement somewhere, finding the book in a cardboard box. Imagining Mr. Genzler, green with envy.

  “I hereby christen you The Art of Keppy,” I said to the book. The Art of Keppy, which trumps the real title anytime and sounds a bit more modern.

  “The Art of Keppy,” Uncle Davy said. “I think the writer would approve.”

  We’d eaten our eggs down to yellow smears. Uncle Davy still had his lime-green apron on. He dragged himself across the room again, got his own Keppy copy, came back to sit with me, and together we were turning pages, reading bits of things out loud, comparing notes, giving ourselves little quizzes.

  “Four things you’ll need if you’re lost and stranded,” Uncle Davy said.

  “Water, a fire that won’t go out, a windbreak, and a bed,” I answered. “Too easy.”

  “Best bedding if you’re betting on the trees,” Uncle Davy said.

  “Balsam, hemlock, spruce,” I said. “And cedar, if you have to.”

  “You a speed-reader, Lizzie?”

  “I get along.”

  “Don’t get too smart,” he said, “for your own britches.”

  “Nobody says ‘britches,’ Uncle Davy. Not anymore.”

  “Sad,” Uncle Davy said. “Things used to be so interesting.”

  “You know what would be more interesting? The Art of Keppy, but with better pictures.”

  “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  I stared at Uncle Davy, who refused to laugh. “What does that even mean?”

  “ ‘No man out to looke a geuen hors in the mouth,’ ” he recited, from what I guessed was the twelfth-century version, but he said sixteenth and left it at that, because now Uncle Davy had flipped to the back of Keppy and was getting a little too excited about an acorn mush. “Edible!” he said, pointing to a page. I flipped. He read out loud:

  The dough is cooked in two ways: first, by boiling it in water as we do corn-meal mush, the resulting porridge being not unlike yellow corn-meal mush in appearance and taste; it is sweet and wholesome, but rather insipid.

  “Insipid,” I said. “That sounds delicious.”

  He touched the basket on the table, raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t even try it,” I said. “Not when I’m your guest.”

  “All right,” he said. “But doesn’t all this make you hungry?”

  “For bear meat?” I said. “For crayfish? For grasshoppers?” I was skipping around now too, deep in the heart of “Living off the Country.” I was thinking of all the things I’d tell Mr. Genzler when I got back home, when I found him after school, doing cool, smoky things with Bunsen burners. I’d have quotes stored up in the back of my head. I’d give him one every time he doled one out, an even exchange, scientist to scientist, naturalist to learner:

  One of the best natural baits for bass, when the water is clear, is that fierce-looking creature called the hellgrammite, dobson, or grampus. This is the larva of a large winged insect, the horned corydalis.

  “Horned corydalis!” Mr. Genzler would say. “Where on earth did you unearth that?”

  “Seriously, Lizzie,” Uncle Davy said again. “I’m still hungry. Are you?”

  “If you insist,” I said.

  I decided on waffles. I told him not to bother himself; I had everything handled. I got the box from the freezer. I fired up the toaster. We melted ice-cream-scoop-size butter over the top. We poured a gallon of brown syrup on.

  We ate then had a good long nap—Uncle Davy upstairs and me on the couch and the flutters of the outside world high and mighty.

  When I woke up and looked outside, I saw that the stars were starting to pop. I just lay there on the couch and watched. Then I tiptoed across the floor and opened the door and set up camp on the stoop and imagined myself building a browse out of spruce, staying warm by a fire I’d built with gunpowder and a looking glass. The air was cool, the kind of mountain cool that happens at night, even in summer. The stars were putting on a show. I watched for a long time before Uncle Davy came along and sat down, easing down because of his hurt, because of his old age, he said. He had his hands on his knees, on the lime of his apron, which he’d never taken off. I had The Art of Keppy on my lap. I thought of those deer back in the woods and the smoke up in the clouds and my mom four hours down the road. I thought about Matias, who I’d be seeing soon. I thought about that big word, “choose.”

  “This is one very fine apron,” Uncle Davy said.

  “That is one very fine book,” I said, and I meant it, and in that minute I was happy, and if you think books by dead people are just something to move with the furniture, to dust with a feather, to stack your plate of someday pie upon, you don’t know this story yet.

  Sitting there, looking up, I thought we’d gotten the worst behind us—that Mom was where she had to be, that we’d tamed the fire, that every part of the adventure going forward would be a happy one.

  Victim impact.

  6

  BE CLEAR, THEY TOLD ME. Be accurate. Value precision. But the truth is in development. The truth is
slow. What happened first, what happened next, what the order is, and what the meaning is, and sometimes the memories are gone. Sometimes they blow in too fast and sometimes they knock me staggered, and look. Up there. Through the window in the roof.

  There flies a firefly.

  There flies another firefly.

  I’m in charge.

  The clock has tocked.

  Time to call this session off.

  7

  I HEARD YOUR CAR DOOR slam. I heard the front door open. I heard your shoes rushing up the first flight of worn-down steps and then coming up the second. I heard the rub of each leg of your jeans against the other, and the flutter in your shirt, and now you come in and you are sitting here and you are waiting.

  Your hair full of the wet heat of August.

  Your eyes full of something I can’t tell.

  I’ve been lying here all night watching the window in the roof, the blinky fireflies, the rising moon, the dark parts. I’ve been lying here remembering—thinking how to tell this story—and then the sun came up and then I heard your door and now you are sitting here, and here’s what I’ve decided:

  I’ll keep talking.

  It was the next day. The newest Day-Glo hung on the brass owl of the coatrack. I was reading Keppy, waiting for Uncle Davy to finish something he had started.

  There is the dash of the gipsy in every one of us who is worth his salt.

  wrote Keppy.

  I read the line again. I liked it. But then I remembered Mr. Genzler, and I thought of what he’d say, how he’d read the line if he were reading: “Every one of us who is worth her salt.” Mr. Genzler, whose wife used to work for NASA, is pretty much a radical when it comes to “Girls are science-worthy.”

  My uncle filmed his TV show early on Tuesday mornings. He shopped at Timber on Wednesdays, wrote his syndicated columns on Thursdays, went to the library every Friday morning to computerize and send his stories—five miles down the road was the library. They had Internet service there that wasn’t so spotty.

  So this was Wednesday, a Timber day, and I was losing myself inside the Keppy pages, not smelling the smoke from yesterday’s fire, telepathically sending my mom the I love you message until finally Uncle Davy announced that it was time for the Deviled Eggs Express.

  I grabbed my stuff. We went.

  Timber sits down the road beside a store called Herbalish. It sells tire chains, flexi-straws, magazines, and snacks. There are four leatherette stools and a split-oak bar in the back, and you don’t have to wait for your eggs.

  The Dart was a one-seat-across kind of car, no buckets. It had a perforated leather steering wheel, tape on the upholstery, the smell of cardboard and old newspapers, a mini Judy Garland hanging from the mirror, her red shoes sparkling in the sun. My uncle drove it sweet, with its windows down.

  “Mountain air,” Uncle Davy said as he drove. “Immaculate blessing.”

  I breathed in. I swallowed. I thought again of Mom at home, taking her first pill, swallowing down. Mom and the nuclear—I hated the thought; I shouldn’t have read so much about it. Short-term side effects of radioactive iodine treatment may include: neck tenderness and swelling, nausea and vomiting, swelling and tenderness of salivary glands, dry mouth, taste changes.

  I watched the mountain curves. I heard the trailer clatter. I sent Mom my thoughts. I kept my promise.

  “Tell me,” my uncle said, “a story.”

  I talked cafeteria food and recess, Field Day victories and Kelly Gardner, who decorated her arm with fake tattoos. She pressed them on and washed them off. She was a walking, faded cartoon. I reported the names of Pennsylvania butterflies: the red-spotted purple admiral, the hackberry emperor, the common buckeye. Words I’d put in my bio book.

  “Thinking of looking for specimens this summer,” I said. “To add to the collection.”

  Wearing his fabulous shades, Uncle Davy nodded.

  The earth rolled by. The trees to our left, the crinkled valley below, the moose-crossing signs. I stole a glance at Uncle Davy’s driving hand, the big ring that he wore on his little finger.

  We turned into the Timber and Herbalish strip. Two vehicles in the lot. Now three. The Dart. A Chevy. The Bullet 500 Fox that belonged to Luke, who’d inked his arms for real and had owned Timber since he bought it from his father.

  The door chimes chimed. Luke scratched his ear and made a fuss. “Lizzie,” he said, eyeing me up and down. “You’ve grown four inches. At least.”

  “Family inheritance,” Uncle Davy said.

  I tugged at my tick-fooling socks. There are some things you don’t want in your blood.

  Timber was dark inside, noisy with flies. We took our place on the leatherette stools, Uncle Davy and me, got three eggs each, extra paprika. We were on our second round of Sprites before Uncle Davy asked again about Mom. This is how estrangement works when there’s one person stuck between two others. When the only way for two others to talk is to talk through someone else and when sometimes you make promises you know you’re going to break.

  “Probably waking up right about now,” I said.

  “What are the doctors saying, Lizzie?”

  “Mom says she’s going to be fine.”

  He let it sit. We polished off our Sprites, spun off our stools, picked up our bag of provisions. The bell rang. We drove back in silence.

  That night Uncle Davy, wearing his Day-Glo lime apron over his perfectly pressed khakis with his tie stuck into his shirt, made us thick French toast. It was, to use his favorite word, divine. We ice-cream-scooped the butter on, we poured the syrup thick, we ate until we hurt. Then we listened to the cicada songs through the crescent-moon windows we’d left open, and then Uncle Davy started telling me his stories, about the miser who’d died and left an attic full of jewels, and about the kid who’d found an antique chamber pot, and about the girl at the TV studio having a pair of twins. Sometimes when he laughed, he covered his smile—that turn in his tooth made him self-conscious. Sometimes he forgot, and either way he was so handsome.

  When he was finished talking, it was quiet.

  “You can call your mom,” he said. “If you’d like.”

  “Thinking she needs some rest,” I said.

  “You could take it outside.”

  “It’s all right, Uncle Davy,” I said. “I’ll call her when it’s right.”

  He put his hand with the big ring on my head, let it sit for a bit. Then he rubbed his bad knee and stood up and climbed the ladder to his loft, to his golds and raspberry fade. I heard the water run in the bathroom up there. I heard him call down to me, “Good night.”

  “Good night, Uncle D.,” I said, and I felt the burn from the smell of that smoke in my eyes.

  After that it was stillness, infinite stillness, except for the songs in the streams we couldn’t see and the sound of Uncle Davy breathing and the rustlings in the houses in the far-off of the road.

  The next day would be Thursday.

  The next day would be Matias.

  We’d planned the day for weeks by now. Rendezvous by way of watercolors.

  Matias?

  He—

  I guess. All right.

  But I’m only telling you some things.

  8

  MATIAS BONDANZA. LIKE I STARTED to say, early on. Only child of two New York University profs, living his summers in that whitewash of a house that was built to look like the country they had come from. Built to last, two years new.

  The first time I saw him was the year before this one at Herbalish. He was ordering a round of biscotti after a cup of steamed milk. Unusual, like my uncle said. Unusual, the way we liked it.

  The second time was in the back of the four-door Wrangler that his mother drove. His metal stool was tied to the Wrangler’s top. Its four legs were pointing up. The whole thing looked like a silver bug that had been flipped on its back.

  The third time I saw him was at Timber. Up high on one of those leatherette stools, which could make you dizzy i
f you spun. He was halfway through his Deviled Eggs Express. He had his watercolors with him and a bright-white empty book and a little jar of water and a furry watercolor brush, and down at the foot of the leatherette was the step stool that I’d seen before, tied to the top of his Jeep.

  He was painting. He had left his unfinished egg on his plate.

  Uncle Davy sat on stool number one. I sat on stool number two. Stool number three was where Matias’s mother had been, but she had walked away, was doing her provisions shopping, buying eggs. Asking for spelt flour and Tabasco sauce, nothing I’d ever seen at Timber. So there was space between me and this kid who was painting something fiercely, who didn’t look up so he wouldn’t lose his thought or maybe so he wouldn’t have to say hello. Corner of my eye I could see him working, painting very green and very steep, like the painting itself was a painting of perspective.

  “You like eggs?” I asked after I couldn’t stand it.

  He nodded. Didn’t look up.

  “You a fan of paprika?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is that a masterpiece you’re working on?”

  “Of course,” he said. “What else?”

  This accent that he put on the words. I liked it.

  Uncle Davy was wearing his tortoiseshell shades and his pink Ralph Lauren shirt and his orange jeans and his shiny loafers. Uncle Davy was being his TV self.

  “A little impromptu on the word ‘masterpiece,’ ” Uncle Davy said, leaning over me, so as to direct his words to Matias. “As translated from the Dutch meesterstuk. As when a craftsman is transformed into a verified master. As when—”

  “Really?” Matias said, not looking up, and I couldn’t tell what kind of “really” he meant.

  “Matias?” his mother called. Right then and just like that. “You almost finished with that egg?” Her words full of Spanish sounds and extra letters.