I was as eager as a child to be on the road, sun and wind in my face and the cold blue sea always to our left. I thought of the magical flight through the desert and expected more of that, but somehow it did not happen. The sea, from Santa Monica on up, was wild and beautiful, and the low, empty hills to our right were sharp and clear and still green with the spring rains, and often blanketed so thickly with wildflowers that they looked like a pointillistic landscape, but somehow they failed to call out the wings in my heart as the desert had done. We made the first three hours in a jittering miasma born of something I could not put a name to. Occasionally I thought I could catch the shape of it, out of the corner of my eye, but it always eluded me. Gradually we stopped our forced chatter and singing and Laura found a faltering classical station on the radio, and we sank into it, taking our demons with us. My thoughts were as circular as a hamster’s treadmill: Pregnant. Laura is pregnant. Pregnant and in love with a man who is not going to marry her; I don’t know how I know that, but I do. Pregnant. What are we going to do about the baby? What is going to happen to her? How can I help her? Glynn: How can I help her keep some of this new fire and surety and not fall into all that phony movie stuff? I know I should get her away from here now, but how can I take her home while Pom is…the way he is? While there’s still Mommee hovering over us?
Pom: What can I say to Pom? How can I get him to change his mind about all this? How can I tell him how I’ve changed? How have I changed?
What is going to happen to Pom and me?
I did not know precisely what treadmills Laura and Glynn rode, but they were sufficient to silence them for long stretches of time. When we hit the fog and stopped for lunch, Laura called the local television station and found that the fog was solid up to San Francisco and not apt to lift for another twenty-four hours. “Let’s cut over to 101 and blitz it up to San Jose and on over from there.” she said. “There’s no fog inland. We can make it tonight easily; it might be after dark, but Pring gave me a good map and we can ask if we need to. I don’t know about you all, but I just want to be there.”
Glynn and I cried, “Let’s do it,” almost in unison, and we all three laughed in something like relief. I realized then that the old trees were calling them, too, with a voice that was as strong as a beat in the blood. We finished our abalone salad in haste and got back into the car. Laura put the top up against the damp chill of the fog and we were off again. Oddly, bowling inland along the flat, empty Carmel valley behind the coast range, the giddiness and hilarity came back, and the singing began again.
But now, bumping along the minimal little mountain roads, with me trying to read Caleb’s map by the dash light and Laura tight-lipped with concentration and Glynn silent as a stone in the backseat, hilarity had long since fled.
Finally, after we had inched along Highway 9 through the blackness for so long that I could not remember when we had last made a turn or seen a light, I said, “Maybe we should go back and ask somebody. If we’ve missed Caleb’s road and we run out of gas or something, we could never walk back to civilization.”
Laura turned her head to answer me and from the back-seat Glynn said, “There it is.”
And there it was, the upended log with the battered mail-box atop it that said “Pringle.” If Glynn had not seen it I doubt if we would have; the road was merely a narrow dirt track snaking off into the thick undergrowth. It might have been an old logging road, or no road at all.
“Good girl,” I said, relief flooding me. “You get the first shower.”
“We can all take showers at the same time,” Laura laughed, too. “There are four baths and a hot tub. This ain’t Green Acres, I don’t think.”
For a long time the track bumped along through under-growth and fog, climbing and dropping, climbing and dropping. There was no break at all in the wall of green and gray on either side of us. Then we passed a clearing on the right, and I could just make out the base of some sort of rough tower, rearing itself up into the fog, with a clutter of small lean-tos and a rough veranda at its base. The shape of some sort of big vehicle emerged from the swirling whiteness and then was lost again, and it seemed to me that there was a lot of equipment of some sort littered about the tower’s base. Far up in the fog a lone light burned yellow, as if it might have been cast by a lantern.
“The lair of the hermit,” Laura said. “The lodge ought to be on down the trail here.”
“The hall of the Mountain King,” Glynn said dreamily from the backseat.
“It could be, couldn’t it?” I said. “I think I like the lair of the hermit even better than I’m going to like the lodge. Can you just imagine what you’d see from the top there?”
“Can you just imagine climbing up those steps with a load of groceries or every time you had to go to the bathroom?” Laura said.
“Why would you do that?” Glynn said curiously. “I’d just pee in the woods. Who’d know?”
“I’ve been in the city way too long,” Laura laughed. “I need to pee in the woods. We all do. We’ll pee in the woods every chance we get. Give the hermit a thrill or two.”
The road dropped rapidly from the crest where the tower stood, and made a sharp turn, and we saw the lodge ahead, clinging to the side of a hill so steep that it looked like a cliff. Lights blazed through the fog, and I could see that it was large and rambling and fell down the cliff as if it had spilled there, or grown. In front of it was only a sea of drifting gray-white, but I sensed, rather than saw, immense space.
“Oh, Lord,” I said. “I take it back about the tower.”
No one spoke when we opened the door and walked into Caleb Pringle’s lodge. But I felt my breath stop in my throat and my heart rise up in the kind of joy I remember feeling on Christmas mornings, in those good years before my mother died. All around us light leaped and poured and ran as if melted down log walls and off great beams high in the cathedral ceiling and spread over the stones of a hearth as large as many motel rooms I had seen. It seemed to have many sources: the fire that roared in the hearth with a whispering bellow like a great wind; the immense copper hanging lamps; the old, smoky gold of the wood and log walls themselves; outsized leather sofas and chairs the color of maple syrup; the glowing Indian rugs that hung from the railing of a gallery that ringed the top floor, leaving the entire bottom floor one vast, open space. More jeweled rugs lay on the wide burnished boards of the floor, and the walls were hung midway up with a forest of antlers and the massive bleached skeletons of who-knew-what. One side of the big room was lined with furniture and paintings and bookcases and doors obviously leading to other rooms. The other was one sweep of small-paned glass in which all the light swarmed and pooled and danced. Curtains were drawn back so that you would see the entire panorama of whatever lay outside, but tonight, beyond the light, only fog lay there.
Then Glynn said, in a small voice, “Cool,” and Laura gave a whoop of sheer delight, and I laughed aloud with the radiance and energy and sheer, joyous excess of it.
“Welcome to hard times,” I said, and we flopped down into the lustrous swamp of the leather sofas and laughed and laughed and laughed.
We were still laughing when a man came out of one of the doors on the opposite wall of the room. We all stopped laughing as one and drew in a great collective breath. I pulled Glynn against me reflexively and prepared to thrust her behind me if he made so much as a move toward us. Laura made a small sound deep in her throat.
He was an apparition, a grotesque, something out of a pagan legend older than the earth of this young mountain range. He seemed, in the flickering firelight and reflected radiance of the window wall, taller than any normal being could possibly be, and darker, and as impassively inhuman as if he had been carved out of basalt. His skin was the color of old rawhide and he had thick black hair hanging over heavy brows and an enormous bush of black beard, and features so attenuated they might have been done by a medieval limner: long chin, long nose, high-ridged cheekbones, sharp brows. He looked like an El
Greco painting of an American Indian, and he was literally covered in flowers.
Then he smiled, and white teeth split the black beard, and everything changed. I saw that he wore crooked wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, mended with what looked to be friction tape, and had small black coal-chips of eyes that danced with light when he smiled, and the beard was not a wild bush, after all, but a neatly trimmed felting that covered his jutting jaw like sleek fur. I smiled back, involuntarily. The white grin in all that darkness was utterly disarming.
“Hey,” he said.
“You must be Caleb’s hermit,” I said.
“You got it,” he said, and his voice had so much of the thick Mississippi River delta in it that my grin turned into a giggle. How could you not be safe in the presence of that voice? It was the very music of home.
“God, you scared us to death,” Laura snapped. “Couldn’t you have called out? Do you always just let yourself into Pring’s house whenever you want to? For all we knew you might be a murderer or a rapist or something—”
“I’m both flattered and sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know when you all would be getting in, and these posies came for you by way of the pissedest FedEx driver I have ever seen, and I thought I’d bring ’em on down here and put ’em in water for you, and then I heard your car and thought, well, I’ll light the fire and turn on the lights for them, welcome them, you know. I really am sorry. Caleb told me to take especially good care of you, too.”
“Well…okay. Thanks. That was nice of you,” Laura said, and walked toward him, holding out her arms for the flowers. Before she reached them she gave a short, sharp scream and backed up hastily.
“Jesus Christ, is that a rat on your shoulder?” she squeaked.
I looked, harder. It was. From a perch on his shoulder, leering foolishly from among the masses of larkspur and stock and baby’s breath, was…
“Rattus rattus!” I yelled. “I’d know that face anywhere! Excuse me, Mr.…whoever you are, but did you know you had a European black rat on your shoulder?”
He reached up and felt, and the rat ran up to his neck and nestled there, peering now from directly under his ear. It was not a small rat, either; this Rattus rattus had, as my beloved Felicia back in Baton Rouge used to say, undoubtedly, seen the elephant and heard the owl. He was big, fat, sleek, and obviously as comfortably at home on this man’s shoulder as he would have been in my woods at home.
“Goddamn, Forrest, I thought you were bedded down for the night,” the man said mildly, and shrugged his shoulder, and the rat disappeared from his shoulder. Through the flowers I saw it wriggle into his shirt pocket and settle there.
“Pardon us both, ladies. Again,” he said. “I’m used to him, but I know most people don’t like them. It’s not like they were cute little mice or ground squirrels. He’ll stay put now, and I’ve got to get on back. I’ll see he stays home from now on. I’m T.C. Bridgewater, by the way, Caleb’s hermit, as this lady has already noted.”
His smile widened, and I gave way to the laughter that was tickling at my mouth.
“Rattus rattus,” I gasped. “I feel absolutely at home. Do you know, I go swimming with them almost every day of my life? I live in a house by the river back home, and I’m supposed to take them down there and drown them, but instead I let them go, and they make for the water like Labrador retrievers, and there we all are, skinny-dipping in the Chattahoochee.”
I stopped laughing and blushed. Glynn and Laura and T. C. Bridgewater were all staring at me.
“Mom, do you really? I never knew that,” breathed Glynn. Laura said nothing, just stared from me to T. C. Bridgewater, who began to laugh. It was an infectious sound, deep and flat-out and young. It sounded younger than I thought he was: He looked, in the firelight, to be about Laura’s age. Maybe forty.
“Swim with the rats,” he said. “Forget the goddamn dolphins; go South and swim with the rats.”
All of a sudden he and I both were laughing so hard that we could not get our breath, gasping and bending at the waist, holding ourselves. Stopping and wiping our eyes and starting again. The sloped, distinctly untrustworthy head of Rattus rattus appeared over the flowers, nose quivering, and bobbed back down again. His pocket nest must be bouncing uncontrollably. I dissolved into a fresh gust of laughter.
When we finally stopped, Laura said sourly, “Well, now that the floor show is over, perhaps we can collect our flowers and let you and your rat be on your way, Mr.…Bridgewater, I think you said? We’ve had a long, long day.”
“Of course. Are you Ms. Mason? Laura Mason? There’s a package for you in the kitchen, too, and one for Miss Glynn Fowler.”
“I am,” Laura said. “The young, beautiful one is my niece, Glynn, and this crazy woman is my big sister, Merritt Fowler. The ratwoman of Atlanta. Thank you for the delivery and the fire and the welcome, and good night.”
He handed her the flowers and nodded to all of us and said, “I brought you down a pot of chili in case you didn’t stop for groceries. I can pick up whatever you need in the morning; I’ve got to go into town. Just bring me up a list before nine. And you know there’s a phone up at my place, too. Good night and once again, we apologize, Forrest and I. If you hear a dog barking don’t worry, it’s my Lab, Curtis. Good watchdog…”
“Good night, Mr. Bridgewater,” Laura said.
He opened the door and disappeared into the swirling fog. I heard him laughing all the way up to where, I thought, the trail turned. Then night and fog swallowed the sound.
“I hope he isn’t going to be the man who came to dinner,” Laura said. “God, these are gorgeous. Look, they’re to all of us, from Pring. What a darling.”
She smiled and buried her face in the blossoms.
“I never got any flowers before,” Glynn said. “They’re neat. So is the rat. And a dog…I’m glad there’s a dog.”
“Me, too. Maybe he’ll come sleep with you,” I said, hugging her, delight at nothing at all bubbling along my veins like champagne. The joy I had missed on the trip had lain up here all along, waiting for me.
Laura went into the kitchen and came back with two parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with silver stretch cord. She was still smiling, a misty, tender smile. She looked very young. She handed one of the packages to Glynn and began to open the other.
“Pring does it in style when he does it,” she said.
“It’s not from Caleb,” Glynn said. She had ripped her package open and stood staring at the contents of the flat box. “It’s from Mr. Margolies. Mom; oh, Mom, look!”
I looked into her box. The cross that she had worn that morning in the screen test lay nested in cotton, with a card that said, “For the only Joan who should ever wear it. I hope she will. Regards, Leonard Margolies.”
“Mom, does he mean…” she lifted a radiant face to me.
“He only means that he thought you were very good,” I said. “But what a nice thing to do. It looked just right with your tunic. You can wear it with that.”
“Mama—”
“I’m not going to discuss this movie business anymore, now or ever, Glynn,” I said, and she saw in my face that I was not. She walked over and sank down into the sofa, fingering the cross, her eyes faraway. But she did not pursue it.
Damn that man, I thought fervently. Damn him and Caleb Pringle, too. I should take her home.
I looked over at Laura. “So what did he give you, Pie?” I said.
She did not answer. She sat holding something in her hands, her face still and blank. Then she looked up.
“He thinks I’m playing the Dauphine,” she said in a low, stricken voice. “He’s sent me this silver crown pin from Cartier, and a note that says ‘Vive la’dauphine and vive Arc!’ He’s got it all wrong; I’m sure Pring’s told him I’m doing the adult Joan. Oh, I’ve got to set this straight right now! I can’t let him think I’m playing that monster; not even for one more night.”
She scrambled to her feet.
“Where are
you going?” I said. “It doesn’t matter, Pie; you know it’s just a misunderstanding. It can wait until morning. You can call him then or call Caleb. I don’t want you scrambling up that trail in this fog and dark, and climbing all the way to the top of that tower, it’s not safe—”
“I’m going,” she said in a tight, thin voice, and she grabbed up a leather jacket that hung on a peg beside the great front door and went out into the fog, the door banging behind her. Glynn and I sat and stared at each other, listening until her sliding, scrambling footsteps faded away completely. She still wore the soft, soleless driving moccasins she had slipped on that morning. I was afraid that she would fall on the treacherous path.
I was afraid of something else, too, but I would not let it into my mind, or put a name to it. I got up and helped Glynn bring our bags in, and stowed them into the bedrooms we chose off the main room—low-ceilinged, beamed, dark, intimate, places to nest in all the wilderness…and then we went into the kitchen and I heated up the chili and made coffee and cocoa for Glynn. We waited and waited, and finally we ate, sitting at the huge, scrubbed trestle table. Food, I thought mindlessly, and then a long, hot shower, and then bed.
I did not hear the front door open, and only when she stood there did I look up suddenly and notice Laura. She was misted all over with droplets of fog; they stood in her hair and on the scarred, buttery old leather of the jacket she wore. Her feet were wet with black mud and there were smears on both hands and the knee of her jeans, as if she had slipped on the path and caught herself on her palms. There was a thin scratch across her cheek, shockingly red against the pallor. I knew that a branch had whipped her face. Her eyes looked like the eyes of someone who had just been taken from deep, cold water after a long time: black-pupiled, blind.
Fault Lines Page 23
