by Walter Kirn
“Twenty-six.”
“Any sisters or brothers?”
“Two and one. Mimi, a nurse practitioner in Portland. Jenna, a paralegal in Santa Fe. Mark, who's gay, an electronic imaging specialist supposedly living in Washington, D.C., but probably in an AWACS over Syria. All three are married, Mark the longest. Parents divorced twelve years ago. Father a luxury-car dealer in Denver, and Mother a massage therapist here in Snowshoe. Everyone scattered, absorbed in their own lives, too busy to call each other except on holidays, and financially okay but panicked anyhow. The Decline of Civilization, chapter seventy. Look: your tires are black now. I feel better.”
“So what do you do?”
“Nothing. I don't work.”
“Where do you get money?”
“I made a little a few years back and saved it. Most of it's gone now, but I can get it back because I recycle. I recycle money.”
“How does that work?”
“I spend it on things that hold their value and don't really cost much in the first place. Vintage fashion items, mostly. When I'm broke, I sell off my collection, and then, when I'm bored, I start building it back up. But I hate myself for it today, so please don't ask. Admit it—clean black tires change everything.”
We drove to a trailhead in the national forest and hiked in the aspens for the next three hours. Betsy carried a pocket-size case of watercolors and a spiral-bound sketchbook whose plastic cover was decorated with a B, in glitter. Her painting style was wispy and suggestive. A bird in flight was two linked curves for the wings and a couple of swoosh marks for the wind behind it. A river was just its ripples. Because Betsy kept stopping to capture the essence of things, often very small things—a curled dry leaf, a beetle's molted husk, a shard of violet bottle glass—we never achieved much momentum on the hike. It was also hard to talk. I probed for information about the Effinghams, figuring that everyone in Snowshoe probably gossiped about them from time to time, but Betsy said only that she'd heard their wolves once during a camping trip with AlpenCross. Then she spotted an agate she wanted to paint. When she finished, I asked if her AlpenCross involvement had satisfied her spiritual longings. She told me no, it had extinguished them. Finally I tried to join her in her artistry by pointing out a cluster of purple berries swarming with infinitesimal fleas or aphids. “Wow,” she said. But she didn't bother to paint it.
By the time we returned to Betsy's car my calves ached and my hopes for us had dwindled. She struck me as a beautiful sealed envelope, stapled, glued, and double-wrapped in tape. Her life, or what little I knew of it, consisted of ironing wrinkles, masking blemishes, patching tears, and shining dullnesses. Our interactions on the Thonic plane were manifesting on the Matic as an empty dry sensation behind my tonsils and down into my throat. I suspected that Betsy was feeling something similar.
“Maybe,” she said as we drove the road toward town, “it's not so crucial to buy you shoes today.”
“No,” I said.
“Maybe some other time.”
“These shoes are fine.”
The aspens thinned and houses appeared. Maybe I'd read this evening, or call my family. Maybe Elder Stark would get back early and we could make peace and visit our first movie theater. The one east of town had seven different screens, and all the titles I'd read on the marquee seemed equally intriguing. I'd let him pick.
“Let's bag the mall. Let's just go home,” said Betsy.
I settled back into my seat, looked out my window. “Good idea,” I said. We passed the coffee shop. The bobsledder was standing in the front window. He raised one arm as if about to wave, then stopped himself, perhaps when he saw me. Betsy and he were probably quite well matched, a pair of accomplished winter sports enthusiasts, and time would reunite them, I had a feeling.
“Tired?” she said. “You look tired.”
I just shrugged. Was this a shortcut to the campground? I'd never been down this street before.
“I hope not too tired to rape me,” Betsy said.
Betsy lived in the basement of her mother's house, a triangular redwood structure with tall bay windows built against a brushy eroding hillside where the sidewalks of Snowshoe's downtown neighborhoods turned to narrow dirt paths, then petered out. Cars shared the driveways with boats and campers and motorcycles—thousands of dollars of gear for every household and most of it looking forgotten, barely used. I'd stopped wondering on my fourth or fifth day out where all the money came from in Terrestria—from nowhere, apparently; it simply was—but the ways people found to waste it still dazzled me.
Inside, Betsy turned on a yellowed ceiling light, revealing dozens of stacked-up plastic grocery sacks knotted shut and containing what looked like clothing. “My thrift-store addiction,” she explained. The piles left little space for furniture other than a queen-size mattress and box spring resting without a frame on the bare floor. Betsy asked me to excuse the clutter but there wasn't any clutter; the bags appeared to have been placed by a trained mason.
She crossed to a little half bathroom, shut the door, and a moment later I heard water running, followed by the high annoying whine of what I supposed, though I'd never heard or seen one, was an electric toothbrush. It sounded painful.
We sat on her mattress and ventured a first kiss that began with such force it had nowhere left to go and had to be abandoned and restarted. Her front teeth, which had looked smooth and glassy at the restaurant, had two tiny chips that kept rasping against my tongue tip. Her mouth and her breath were absolutely odorless and her saliva reminded me of mineral oil—slippery, tasteless, and neither warm nor cold. I suspected that she was the cleanest human being I'd ever touch, and this scared me for some reason. I feared it might spoil me for anyone else.
We stopped to rest after ten or fifteen minutes and regarded each other's faces from inches away, our chins rubbed raw, our lips all gnawed and puffy, and in her eyes (I could only guess how mine appeared) was a misty, vague, anesthetized detachment that convinced me she was seeing a composite of all the men she'd ever done this with.
“I want you to be mean to me,” she said.
“How? In what way?”
“Whatever way you feel like.”
“Mean like cruel?”
“Like my feelings don't matter. Only yours do.”
I translated this into Casper Wiccan terms. The doe was asking the stag to romp unchecked.
I tried to satisfy Betsy's wish, aware the whole time that meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far. I squeezed her left arm above the elbow until all I could feel was the pulse in my own thumb. I turned her face to one side by pushing her cheek and dragged my teeth down her neck from ear to collarbone. Still, I sensed she was frustrated with me. I hadn't uncoiled, I hadn't blasted through. To want this, she must have had it before, I realized, and I wondered from whom, and how recently. This froze me.
She pulled away and said, “I want to play now. I want to play dress up with you.”
“I wasn't mean enough.”
“That's okay. It's hard when you still don't know someone,” she said.
She started untying and picking through the sacks. “There's a shirt somewhere here I want you to try on. I found it last year at a Santa Fe Goodwill and thought it might suit this man who I was seeing, but he said it was too ‘cowboy,' too ‘Roy Rogers.' It's vintage. It's funky. Me, I think it's manly.”
“This is the collection you were talking about.”
“The idea is to make it a business in a year or two, maybe a storefront or maybe through the Web. I only buy classic stuff in top condition. Those slippery seventies rayon disco shirts. Those wild old bell-bottoms with high tight waists. It's crazy, the prices people pay for those, but it also makes sense because they're hard to find; you have to hit every thrift store, every yard sale. Last year I went from Arizona to Oregon—I put twenty-three thousand miles on my car. The problem is when the stuff is gone it's gone, though, so I really can't take the time to sell it off unt
il I've got most of what's out there.”
“You think that's possible?”
“I can feel it—you're about to preach,” she said. “Yes, I know, it's no substitute for God. It's stuff. It's only stuff.”
“That's what the All-in-One is made of, actually.”
“Not spirit?”
“That, and everything else.”
She found the shirt and held it by the shoulders, her thumbs and forefingers pinched together like clothespins. I reached for it with insensitive cold hands. All the kissing had driven the blood from my extremities into my lower middle region, causing a pressurized, tense, unsure sensation that felt like it might lead to diarrhea unless I managed to discharge it by luring Betsy back to bed. The two urges felt so similar sometimes, like one fundamental urge divided.
The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.
I slipped off my dress shirt and changed into the new one, confused about why Betsy found it so extraordinary. I'd grown up wearing shirts exactly like it: pearl snaps, colored piping, pointed pocket flaps, and a design of braided thorns and roses embroidered across the chest and upper back. I fastened the cuffs and smoothed out some of the wrinkles and imagined that I was sixteen and back in Bluff, strolling in the evening with my pals, aware that off over the hills and down the highway there was a world that didn't even know us, or knew of us vaguely and didn't care about us. We knew we were missing something by living there, but they, the outsiders, were missing something, too.
“You look like yourself now,” Betsy said. “Stand up.”
I showed myself off.
“I want the back view.”
She adjusted the collar, fiddled with the yoke, and picked off a couple of lint balls from one sleeve. I still regretted my failure to harshly use her, but it seemed that we were getting along much better now. She picked out a belt from a snaky tangled bunch of them and gave it to me with a pair of western pants whose legs were flared to fit over big boots. The bronze buckle was star shaped, like a sheriff's badge, and it weighed as much as a can of Coca-Cola. I snugged it tight and hooked it through a hole and posed like a gunfighter, legs apart, knees bent.
“Bang,” I said.
“Bang is right. Bang, bang.”
I felt it now. A sternness came over me. I motioned for her and displayed my antlered head. She stroked it with her hands, and then in other ways, and then I pushed her down onto the sheets and used it to toss her around and bash and batter her. It was more than a romp. It was closer to a stampede. My hooves came into play as well. All of my staggish parts did, at various times.
Afterward, when she got up to brush her teeth again, Betsy said, “Interesting—you're good at that. That was really just your second time?”
I rose up on my side, with a fist against my jaw. As I closed one eye to clear a stinging sweat drop that had rolled down from my hairline across my temple, I reached between my legs to readjust things. There was still some potential there, though it didn't look that way. In a voice that I couldn't have managed an hour earlier—resonant, full, from the sweet spot of my diaphragm—I asked her to bring me back a glass of water. When she returned and gently passed it to me, and then watched as I drank it, seemingly concerned about whether it pleased me and whether I wanted more, I knew that, at least for the moment, I owned this girl.
“Cold enough?” she asked. She meant the water.
“Yes.”
She seemed happy.
I'd made a person happy.
The day the Seeress predicted her own death, I was impersonating an average customer at the Boulder, Colorado, WorkMart, a store so vast that the people who stocked its shelves had to travel in electric carts equipped with steadily beeping warning horns. Its parking lot was half the size of Bluff, with two or three times as many vehicles, and after we parked there, I lingered in Betsy's Explorer and prayed to the All-in-One for comprehension. The dimensions of the rectangular beige edifice looming before me, its endless rows of doors sending out a stream of puny hunchbacks monstrously overburdened with crated dishwashers, cartons of tile, toilets, poplar saplings, unassembled bunk beds, hoops of hose, and inflatable vinyl swimming pools tested my sense of spiritual symmetry. I'd always assumed that a balance was intended between human beings and their things, but at WorkMart it seemed that our purpose on this earth was to lift, transport, and set back down stupendous loads of metal, wood, and plastic. This felt backward to me, but backward in terms of what? I had to remember: no False Comparisons.
Betsy had dressed me for the outing in a short-sleeved blue shirt with a penguin on the breast pocket, off-white corduroy trousers, and canvas tennis shoes. She picked my hair into points and froze it that way with a waxy white cream. The costume made me conspicuous to myself and invisible, it seemed, to everyone else. Just inside the store, a middle-aged worker with the low, globed forehead of what my grandmother called a “simple soul” detached a shopping cart from a nested line of them and pushed it my way without a glance of welcome. He didn't seem to register my “Thank you,” he just repeated the favor for someone else.
“That's kind of them, to hire a man like that.”
“All the stores do it nowadays,” said Betsy. “I think it might be a federal law. McDonald's is especially big on it.”
“I think it's very thoughtful.”
“Pay attention here.”
My task was to record and quantify, using a checklist that was folded in my pocket, my reactions to the WorkMart “shopping experience.” Dale had given me a list of items to buy and a number of questions to ask the staff. As I hunted for the lighting department, the right front caster of my shopping cart kept sticking and skidding, turning the whole thing cockeyed and forcing me to wrestle it straight again. “First demerit,” Betsy said. We stopped beneath an array of chandeliers, many fitted with brass or wooden fan blades, and a gleaming profusion of ceiling fixtures. Unable to see what kept them suspended there, I pictured a disastrous, shredding rain of slivered frosted glass and knife-edged metal. For a building so high inside, so wide across, and so overcrowded with tier on tier of inventory—table saws stored thirty feet above the ground!—its construction seemed ominously feeble: an airy grid of beams and cables that barely looked capable of securing a circus tent against a summer storm.
“It's like a gigantic shell,” I said to Betsy. “Should I put down for Dale that I don't feel physically safe in here?”
“That's you. That's not an everyday response.”
“I bet if you asked people, the feeling's shared.”
“Just try,” Betsy said, “to imagine you're an American.”
This stung. I was more American than she was. I'd grown up so deeply buried in this continent, so thoroughly landlocked, surrounded, and enveloped, that I still couldn't clearly envision its coasts; to me the oceans were pure poetic conjecture, no more tangible than asteroid belts. Before the autumn of my fifteenth year, when an elderly Mexican couple passed through Bluff peddling hand-tooled leather belts and boots, I'd never heard a foreign language spoken. My childhood pizzas weren't even true pizzas. As for the Church, its doctrines and its founders—Little Red Elk, most of all—owed virtually nothing to sinister old Europe, with its monks and crusaders, its relics and inquisitions. Ours was a fresh revelation of the New World, as native to this land as pronghorn antelope. The aliens here were the Terrestrians, confusing their transient, preening little empire with the mineral essence of the place itself.
Was Mason LaVerle an American? Nothing but.
Still, as I pushed farther into lighting, searching for a yellow-aproned worker to pester with my scripted questions, I found myself partly conceding Betsy's point. For the purposes of the job at hand, which I hoped to be paid for and to keep, I had to step out of myself, to wear new skin.
“Excuse me, ma'am. I'm wondering how to light a basement workshop. It doesn't have any windows to the outside, it's twelve by fifteen feet in area, and, because I work with dang
erous power tools, it requires full, bright, even illumination.”
The woman set her hands on her broad hips and scanned the man-made heaven of dangling fixtures. “Fluorescent?”
“I was hoping you'd advise me.”
“These right up here ones are more your fancy deals that go off your dimmers and such to make a mood, like say if there's wine and your lady friend comes over. You're more wanting plain. For sawing under.”
My brain churned and labored. Betsy said, “Exactly.”
“If this wasn't break, and it's only two a shift now, I'd go along with you myself, but maybe Dan can. If I'd seen the man any. He's not on station, is he?” The woman's head went back and forth, more to establish Dan's absence, it appeared, than to locate him. “Wall treatments, try. Named Dan. Or else he quit.” The woman flapped an exasperated hand at us, or maybe at the entire operation, and headed off toward the store's mysterious rear, where I sensed most of its suffering was hidden. Betsy watched her go, rubbing a fingertip against one temple. I had a tiny headache of my own.
“I have to include all that under ‘Service,' don't I?”
Betsy sighed for both of us.
“With her name attached, don't I? Her tag said Marna B.”
“If that's the procedure, I suppose you do.”
“They'll fire her, won't they? I don't think I can do it.”
Betsy kissed me on the cheek.
“I'm a terrible mystery shopper.”
“Thank God,” she said.
We abandoned the shopping cart midway through our trek to the far-off lawn-care aisle, where Dale had ordered me to choose a riding mower, arrange for its purchase with a salesman, and then, at the last moment, to feign cold feet and closely observe the salesman's behavior as he tried to salvage the transaction. Was he calm and persuasive? Angry and aggressive? Resigned and passive? I'd dreaded this assignment, mostly because of the acting skills it called for. Now, though, having decided back in lighting to dispense with strict honesty today, I looked forward to a revised version of the drama in which I'd pretend to discover I'd lost my wallet and would promise the salesman I'd return tomorrow. I'd award him the same score no matter how he dealt with me: ninety-one points out of one hundred.
