“What stone?
“To not insist upon a look at the evidence.”
“The evidence?”
“Sadly, I’ve become dimmer with age, like an old lamp whose genie has gone on to greener pastures.”
“I don’t believe that,” says Morris gallantly. “I find you most intelligent and—”
“Thank you,” she says, rising to her feet. “And now there’s someone and something I must pay a visit to. You’ve been most helpful, Mr. Morris. I certainly hope I haven’t bored you. Good luck in your butterfly hunting.” And she is gone.
He watches her until he can see her no more. He wishes he had a net large enough to capture her.
A Slow Walk Home
To her sister-in-law she tells a little white lie, but to Morris she says nothing at all because he hasn’t noticed: her wedding band is gone. She can’t remember when she last wore it, or where she put it when she took it off. Instead she wears the turquoise ring, the ring that brought Euell Wigglesworth to her door—though he was Hugh then, and she was Mrs. Merkle.
She still is, of course, though her name, Jane, feels like the essence of who she is. Jane. She likes the simple, regular sound of it, the single syllable that doesn’t tax the mouth. A month and a half have passed since she stepped off the train and breathed the western air and laughed at the snow high on the mountain above Flagstaff. She feels as if her life has passed from one country to another, one continent to another, and she has trailed along behind it. Dotty has begun to watch her more closely, which is why the subject of the wedding band arose. Jane was washing the dishes and Dotty, who was drying, suddenly said, “You’re not wearing your wedding ring.”
“Of course not. Not in soapy water.”
“But you wear that other ring.”
“Oh, it’s nothing! It cost me a dollar. It means nothing. And it’s tight. A bit tight. It won’t slip off and go down the drain. That happened to my friend Helena with her engagement ring. They called the plumber and he looked wherever plumbers look, but he never found it.”
“You can bet your bottom dollar he found it,” said Dotty knowingly. “You have to keep an eye on your plumber, as your friend should know.”
“Oh. Well, I never thought of theft.”
“Theft is one of the major contributors to society’s ills. In fact, you’ll never believe what I heard today. Babbitt Brothers was broken into.”
“Again?”
“But this time the culprit was apprehended.” After a pause, Dotty suggested, “Ask me who it was.”
“Who was it?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“I’m not trying to guess,” said Jane with annoyance.
“It wasn’t wild Indians after all. It was . . . it was someone you know, someone we all know. She didn’t have to pick the locks or break the windows because . . . ?”
“Because she came down the chimney.”
“What chimney?”
“I don’t know. Who was it, Dotty? I give up.”
“You can’t give up.”
“I most certainly can. I can and I do. Why is this sink not draining properly?”
“Probably a mouse pelt.”
“A mouse pelt?”
“One of Oliver’s projects. He skins them next to the sink and sometimes the pelt goes down. They’re slippery.”
“Goodness,” said Jane with a shiver, untying her apron. She longed to be in her room, lying on her bed, with a cool cloth over her eyes.
“Mrs. Jicama,” said Dotty.
“Mrs. Jicama?”
“Ramona Stark, at Babbitt Brothers. She’s the culprit. She’s been stealing from the store for years. It seems she’s a . . . Oh, what do you call it when someone takes things? All kinds of things. Things they don’t need—or even want.”
Jane was perplexed. “A carpetbagger?”
“No no. That’s not it. A something-maniac.”
“Pyromaniac?”
“No, the other one.”
“Nymphomaniac.”
Dotty shook her head. “We’ll ask Oliver. Anyway, they’ll be looking for a new cashier and I thought I . . . well, it does get lonely sometimes, now that Oliver’s retired. It seems I’m lone lier with him than without him. That’s terrible to say, isn’t it?”
“Not if it’s true.”
“I think a little time away from the home is what every woman needs.”
“Why not go on a trip? Go somewhere you’ve always wanted to go, somewhere nobody knows you, where you’re free, free to be any kind of Dotty you like.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t.” She gave a quick, breathless laugh. “I couldn’t leave Oliver. What would he eat?”
“He’ll eat what I cook,” said Jane firmly, “he and Morris both, whether they like it or not. All you have to do is decide where to go and go there.”
Dotty smiled a curious smile. “I wonder what you’ll think of me, Jane, when I tell you I’ve already decided. I have a friend in Los Angeles, someone I’ve known for years. I think I’ll take the train over and see him. Or rather her,” she said quickly.
Jane pressed her lips together and nodded. “Your secret is safe with me.”
Since then Jane has felt a physical impatience that keeps her moving restlessly about all day, and awake at night. Her limbs—especially her legs—tug at her, as if they’re on a journey of their own. Twice she has a dream of standing in front of her house in St. Louis, under a large golden halo that threatens to fall and crush her. After sending Dotty off, the impatience is replaced by a lassitude that keeps her in bed until noontime.
At night she makes Morris’s lunch and leaves it on the kitchen table for him. Breakfast and most dinners he takes at the hotel. Their exchanges are cordial, but empty, which adds to her lethargy. It seems without Dotty her marriage is a loose bundle of sticks, not a dwelling place. At meals Oliver tries to make conversation, but Jane is barely interested. Even books, one of her favorite subjects, fails to engage her. Her brother-in-law suggests she take a crack at the Russians, those bards of darkness and foul moods, but to her dismay she cannot read more than a few pages without feeling boredom well up in her. She buys Life magazine and plods through it as if it were a long, complicated novel.
Then one evening, after Morris drops in for a leathery little dinner of pork chops, says his good-byes, and goes back to the hotel, Oliver too excuses himself and Jane is left alone. She feels like a horse waiting to be saddled. She feels no direction, no compulsion to do anything or go anywhere. She doesn’t even have the yearning to read. She stands up. Standing, the kitchen looks different to her. Larger. More frank, as if the space could and would speak to her truthfully. She glances at her reflection in the window and what she sees saddens her. There, ghostly transparent, is Mrs. Jane Merkle, Mrs. Jane Yarborough Merkle, whose only error thus far in life is to have mistaken love for freedom and marriage for love. Flawless otherwise, there she stands, a female of good heart, willing to give it her best shot. She looks away, at the table full of dishes, wondering whose life it is she thinks she’s leading, as if life itself is a blind horse.
A sudden movement beyond the window startles her, and she looks up again. Out in the yard a man crosses behind her reflection, as if passing through her, and she opens her mouth to scream but sees it’s Euell. He waves at her. The gesture seems ludicrous and wonderful. She points toward the front of the house and mouths, “I’ll come out.”
She closes the door behind herself and steps out into a darkness deep and black. She doesn’t know where he is but hears him breathing—shallow, rapid breaths that tell her he’s scared and excited. She senses his body, the warmth of it nearby, then his smell. She has no compulsion to speak. She has never walked out into the dark this way. It’s wrong and right. His smell is strong and good. How does she know it’s his? Suddenly he says her name. Jane. The one word, and he pulls her to him. The scent of the pines. Butterscotch. Mixed with a rainlike sensation, the way he touches the bare skin of her arm above
the elbow, as if his fingers are smoothing a rhythm into her flesh. His dry hands, a little chapped but so welcome there on her arm, and then his face, closer than she’s ever been to it, and the sudden drop of his lips onto hers, startling and heavy at first, but soft, like the meat of an orange.
Hardly a word passes between them. Her name. His name. They move away from the house and she draws him down to sit beside her on the damp needles. His lips brush her ear, her neck, her collarbone. She turns away from him, lifts her blouse up over her head, feels the cool night on her skin. He sighs, inhales deeply. She feels him watching her, smells his smell, like barrels of gunpowder. Suddenly he reaches and catches her to him, pushes the cup of her bra aside and puts his mouth to her breast, groaning softly and pulling at her nipple. It startles her. He nudges her nipple with his tongue, rolls it between his teeth, and she almost cries out.
He lifts his head. His face is close to hers and she can see his half-closed eyes, his soft, childlike mouth. “Don’t ever let me do something that doesn’t make you happy, Jane. I would hate myself.”
She has never heard an utterance like this before, and quickly, before she can turn away, she starts to cry in front of him. He takes her blouse and drapes it across her shoulders, and takes her hand and pats it. She puts her head against his arm and says, “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so.” It’s a strange thing to say. But he says, “I know, I know,” and she believes he does know. She closes her eyes to drink in the feeling, which is shaped like a large white sail. The air is cool, even cold. She slips on her blouse and whispers that it’s time for her to go in, and he asks if he may walk her home. “But home is only a few steps away,” she laughs.
He puts his finger to her lips and she can taste him, a salty, bitter taste. “We’ll walk slowly.”
The Week’s Mail
Ellsworth Kolb is the proud owner of a Zenith television whose eerie glow causes his neighbors to believe he is visited nightly by the Holy Ghost. He has little use for the Holy Ghost, though being a free thinker he doesn’t begrudge the family next door their supernatural beliefs. Still, it puzzles him, how a septuagenarian bachelor like himself can inspire such fantasies. Obviously his neighbors, like most people in the world, have never been dragged to the bottom of a muddy river and left to wonder which way is up.
The television lives at the foot of his bed in his house in Los Angeles. After brushing his teeth and putting on his pajamas, he settles in to watch it. Tonight it’s a cowboy movie, a shoot ’em-up filmed in Hollywood against a backdrop painted to look like the Arizona desert. The cacti are too tall, and the Indians are poorly disguised gringos, but Ellsworth Kolb enjoys it. It reminds him of the old days at Grand Canyon, and some of his adventures there with his brother, Emery. There’s a lovely girl in it who reminds him of Edith Chase, though she’s a good deal prettier than Edith, and more forgiving. It rekindles his desire to see her, though regrettably, if his math is accurate, she’s no longer a girl in her twenties.
The sudden desire for a glass of milk propels him from his bed. Milk and gingersnaps are what he’s after. He stands at the kitchen sink, eating the cookies, slowly drinking the milk, dreamily recalling Edith Chase’s form, in particular her soft, bouncy breasts. He erases from his mind her prominent chin and sharply pointed nose, her tendency toward tweed and tightly laced shoes. He brings his concentration to bear on her fluffy, cloudlike bosom. Is it possible time and gravity have changed that particular area of her body? He is suddenly curious, though familiarity with the cruelty of aging tells him yes, of course, those little pillows are gone. He finds this overwhelmingly sad. He’s missed his chance, hasn’t he? And she’s missed hers. She was a ripe plum of a girl back then and now . . . now . . . ?
To distract himself from grim thoughts, he sits down at the kitchen table and shuffles a pile of the week’s mail. There, by extraordinary coincidence, he comes across a postcard, one of his own photographs of the winter canyon: Zoroaster Temple, like a great head hooded with snow. He holds the card for a moment, regarding the scene as if he’s standing on the rim, looking out over the canyon itself. Turning it over he reads the short message from Elzada Clover: “Have tried to reach you by telephone. Call me. Lois and I are lodged at El Tovar.”
It’s all he needs. He’s never liked telephones. The South Rim is only a short journey away. The thought of standing on the edge again, marveling at the towering buttes clothed in yellowing summer light, and in the evening watching the crimson blush rising from the river like a ruddy tide running before the shadows . . . His heart beats too fast, suddenly. He puts his hand to his chest to hold it back. Then without giving himself a chance for second thoughts, he gets in the car, backs into the road, and drives east in his pajamas.
By the time he crosses the Colorado River at Needles, California, just upstream from the ruins of the great port of La Paz (which once connected the Grand Canyon State to the sea—to the world!), the night is over and the desert sun beats down ferociously on the roof of the car, creating within him a vegetable-like quality of thought. A certain insubstantial woolli ness overcomes him. It’s time to pull off the highway and sleep. And sleep he does, for an hour or two, with dreams refreshing as dank cellars.
On his way again, he considers the fact that he’s an old man who’s set out across the desert in heavy pajamas, and at some point soon he must enter the public realm and fill the car with gas. From there his mind moves on to transportation, the building of highways, engineering in general, and the building of dams. Upstream the mighty Boulder Dam and its reservoir, Lake Mead, are just the beginning of it. Now the damn bureaucrats are determined to put a great big chunk of Grand Canyon underwater. And other sinuous recesses as well. The Glen, Marble, Dinosaur—all soon to sink beneath the surface of a man-made sea, where pikeminnows and humpback chub nibble the bones of boatmen, and skin divers gawk at canyons, arches, monuments (to nature’s folly!) that never will see the light of day again, never will sing again. Rainbow Bridge. Music Temple.
Friday, September 8, 1911. He remembers the day like it was yesterday—or the day before. He and his brother Emery stood on the banks of the Green River and christened their boats Edith and Defiance. They were Galloway boats, shallow hulled, with a covered deck and lapstrake sides, built in Racine, Wisconsin, far from the sea. But seaworthy they were, and the sister boats brought the brothers Kolb down the Green River to the confluence where the Colorado was born, and on through Cataract, Glen, Marble, and Grand—canyons with their own personalities, their living natures. One, with its drops and falls, would tear you to pieces, while the next rocked you in a sweet cradle of easy water, smooth sandstone beauty. Days without time, when mortal danger lay only an arm’s length away, followed by lazy drying-out days ashore when every bone in the body cursed water’s hardness (as hard as iron it was). Mud, silt, sand everywhere: in their cameras, bedrolls, in the food at night. As he lay down to sleep, Ellsworth never failed to thank the river for another day alive.
Now days have passed—about forty years’ worth—and the rain begins to fall in loud rat-a-tat-tats on the windshield. The tires soon kick up plumes of water and the road’s a river. He knows what he ought to do: row ashore, tie to a willow, and wait out the storm. But where in Sam Hill is he? Ash Fork? A dazzling cow town. Fella on the porch of the one-hole saloon gives a two-finger wave and hauls back to spit in a pail. A dozen horses stream across the road, their soggy manes plastered against their necks, ears flattened, eyes blinded by rain. Through an open gate, into a pasture they run. They stare at him, a man in a machine, sliding down a paved river in the rain.
Billy Bones
For forty-five years he has lived suspended in air, the great chasm below the floorboards so familiar he could tell you how the shadows lie on any given day at any given hour. A man who looks through a porthole and sees not sea but land, for that is where his camera points—at ancient monuments, sky islands dusted with snow or draped with cloud, a line of terrified riders astride their balky mules
, descending steeply into what seems like nothingness. Or Harvey Girls arriving by train, and notable figures—Theodore Roosevelt among them—posing on the porch of El Tovar. His brother Ellsworth lining the Edith and Defiance through furious rapids, patching the boats, breaking up river ice, cooking up grub or that intolerable brew he called coffee.
Most days Emery Kolb feels like a sane man living on the edge of a miracle. He clings to it, his nails dug in. Below is the realm of raptors and Anasazi ghosts, disenchanted prospectors and dead conquistadores. Foolhardy, he knows, to come to the canyon to wring something from her, drag something out of her, sell her downriver, but thousands have tried and failed, and his failure too will come. As it is, the perfect photograph eludes him, like a fleet-footed muse. He cannot fully capture the essence of what he sees, and he lives with this the way a man lives with a high-spirited wife.
Recently, the messy business of the body has made it impossible for him to work, and he wishes he had done what his good sense begged him to do: leave that bundle of bones right where he found it, in the belly of his old boat. But the Edith wasn’t built to be a coffin. She was made to run the river, to feel the waves along her lapstrake sides. She’d been living too long in a garage, with a stowaway aboard—some Noah or Jonah or a modern Moses. Emery knew his Bible well enough to be mis led, for hadn’t pharaoh’s daughter found the bulrush babe and got herself a place in history? Yes, while he, Idiot Kolb, came across a human skeleton and suffered threats of arrest! He feels crabby and cantankerous. Let them send an alligator in after him, he’ll wrestle it to the floor. But meanwhile no one, no one will set foot on his premises. He sits up day and night in the cave of his garage, with its familiar smells, each board, each nail known to him, in a lawn chair with a comfortable pillow, a shotgun on his lap. It is in this position, and because of his long sabbatical from the actual shooting of the gun, that he finally almost commits murder.
The Butterflies of Grand Canyon Page 20
