by Rick Bass
There was a pay phone back at the KOA. The woman and her dog got in the back seat. Lilly turned and smiled at both of them, hoping not to betray her revulsion at the stench.
The day was warming and not in their favor. Her father drove fast, and he and Lilly each experimented with the windows. It was hard to tell which was more unbearable: to have them rolled down and the foul aromas swirling around their heads, or rolled up, with the noxious odors heavy and still. They finally settled on a combination that left each window cracked several inches.
Their passenger was becoming more talkative, even in that short distance, telling them about—surprise—an unhappy relationship, a disappointing man, and now Lilly’s father was pressing the accelerator so hard that the woman, none too steady to begin with, was pinned against the back seat, though still she kept talking, an occasional curse spilling from her lips followed by a surprised look in Lilly’s direction—how did this child get here?—and an overwrought apology.
They skidded into the gravel parking lot of the KOA—a plume of white dust announcing their arrival—and the old couple, who were out watering their roses, looked up with mild curiosity, prepared for some level of disapproval. Lilly’s father got out and opened the door for the woman, who was having difficulty with the task.
Lilly heard her father offer the woman twenty-five cents for the phone, but the woman declined, insisting with great protest that she had more than enough money for a phone call.
“Do you need anything else?” Lilly’s father asked. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
The woman held the Chihuahua under one arm like a purse and the vodka bottle in her other hand. Unobserved by the woman, the icy breath of the Beartooths mingled with the rising lovely warmth of the day. The sound of the Yellowstone River, full runoff, in the distance.
“I’ll be fine,” she slurred. “Right as rain.”
Hostility now rushed into her, and she all but snarled at Lilly’s father, with a scornful glance in Lilly’s direction, and said, “Y’all go on with your little vacation, don’t you worry about me at all. I’ll be just hunky-dory.” The last two words took stupendous effort to pronounce, and she turned and weaved her way toward the pay phone, stopping now and again as if to ascertain whether it was retreating from her and seeming surprised that she had not already reached it.
The old man and woman turned their hoses off and came walking over to see what the problem was.
“She’s in a bad relationship,” Lilly’s father said—the truth, certainly, though also the closest Lilly would ever hear him come to telling a lie. He opened his billfold and handed the old man six twenty-dollar bills—enough for four nights’ lodging in one of the cabins, and some modest amount of groceries, assuming she didn’t spend it all on booze. Lilly was surprised—flabbergasted—for they were not in the least bit rich, and it was a huge outlay for them.
“I don’t know her,” Lilly’s father said to the old man and woman, and nothing more. They saw that the woman was not making a phone call—who really would she call and what was there to say?—but was instead just resting, leaning against the inside of the Plexiglas shell framing the phone, seemingly satisfied, momentarily, for having achieved some destination; and Lilly and her father left before she emerged from her reverie, fearing she might hail them, might seek to lay claim with some nebulous moral obligation, or fearing, perhaps, that they might simply have to witness more humiliation, more desperation.
Lilly for one didn’t feel at all bad about leaving her behind. The woman could stay and hear Martha Scanlan, could go to the barbecue. She might not get to see Yellowstone but she would be close; one never knew, it might work out somehow. And Lilly remained astounded by her father’s generosity.
They started back in the direction they had already traveled. They didn’t say anything about what had happened, and it amazes Lilly now to consider that her father had the restraint and discipline not to try to put too fine a point on what they had seen. She knew—and knows—it would have been well within his rights to look over at Lilly and say, Don’t drink, ever.
They drove with the windows down, the clean valley winds scouring the green fields and washing through the car, blasting away the scent of their previous occupant. They drove past the woman’s car, which was still smoldering, and then, not much farther on, her father got excited and pulled off the road.
At first Lilly had no idea why, thinking—fearing—he had spied another stranded motorist, another pilgrim. But instead he grabbed the binoculars from the back seat and pointed out a yellow-headed blackbird in a clump of cattails not far from the road—a sunken little wetland in which a few dairy cattle stood and beside which old metal barrels and an abandoned tractor rusted back down into squalor, while just upslope, a dingy mobile home perched crookedly on an irregular stacking of cinder blocks, the trailer tilting toward the black-water pond below.
Two white PVC pipes jutted from the earthen bank above the pond—overflow, no doubt, for various effluents—but it was the shocking beauty of the bird, its boisterous, exuberant singing, incredible yellow head thrown back and trilling to the blue sky, having survived the storm, that fixed their attention.
“Would you look at that,” her father kept exclaiming, handing her the binoculars so she could see the bird’s beauty close up, and then, moments later, asking for them back, wanting to see it again, then growing more excited and passing them back to her, while the bird sang on and on.
A grizzled middle-aged man, probably no older than her father but much worse for the wear, came out onto the porch, unnerved by their scrutiny, and Lilly began to imagine all the days that might have been that led him to this place—this downward slide, this rendezvous with failure.
What would it be like to be him, Lilly wondered—the man in the stained T-shirt, staggering onto the porch and blinking at the bright sunlight? Only her own victory of being loved deeply allowed her the luxury of such indulgent imaginings.
They waved to the man—he did not wave back—and drove on. They began to see other travelers streaming toward Yellowstone: a landscape all the travelers had surely heard described as mythical, beautiful, otherworldly. She could sense her father’s excitement as well as mild confusion. He told her they were going into an old and vast caldera that long ago had been a fountain of gurgling, uncontrollable fire but had since cooled to stone, and where—across the many millions of years—every kind of beauty had crept in, reborn and flourishing.
He told her he couldn’t wait for her to see it. That it was a fantastic land of geysers and bears, ocher cliffs and cascading waterfalls, burbling mud pots and hot springs: a fantastic land, he said, something she would remember always.
There was only one main road leading into Yellowstone, but her father seemed tentative, kept looking at side roads as if lost, as though unsure whether memories attached to those branching little roads or not. He was wondering, she thinks now, if there were important or interesting stories at the end of some of those side roads, and that he had been trying—bluffing—to remember them, there on the main road.
The blackbird had been good. She leaned her head out the open window and breathed in deeply.
There was no way for him to tell her then in words the truth that he must have been discovering each day: that to be increasingly isolate is better than being numb, if it comes down to a choice. That even forgetting might be all right, eventually, after a long enough time, if the first-burning is hot enough.
She remembers stopping at the stone archway outside the park so they could take a picture, her father setting the camera up on the hood, pressing the timer, then running quickly to join her. Huffing, when he got there, having sprinted into the wind, as if into the past. His arm tight around her. How vast our brains must be, she thinks now, to remember even such tiny and essentially useless and fleeting things. How dare anyone sleep through even a moment of it?
The Blue Tree
Wilson, a logger, lives in the forest with his wife, B
elinda, and their two daughters. He’s old to be felling trees—forty-five—but he’s always been able to recover from his mistakes, as if he carries within him a sphere of grace. A dozen broken ribs, three broken vertebrae, and innumerable sprains and fractures. Bones snapping like branches. But anything that breaks has always mended.
Wilson saws six days a week; the seventh he spends in the forest with his family. In the summer he, Belinda, and the girls—Lucy now nine, Stephanie twelve—carry a picnic hamper down the trail to the lake in the woods below their cabin, where they eat and swim. Fried grouse and black-pepper biscuits with cream gravy is their favorite. They lie on towels and look up at the clouds and at the canopy of towering trees—larch, fir, spruce, hemlock—while Wilson reads them stories, all of which they’ve heard before and never grow tired of.
As the day warms, he and Belinda watch the girls wade back into the gleaming lake. They plunge forward, their bodies glinting like fish, like mercury. They’re good swimmers: fluid, easy in the world, adept at navigating its currents, its seasons. They’re comfortable with change, Wilson thinks, because they have such a base of constancy.
“You can’t keep them here forever,” Belinda has said more than once. Lately, it seems to Wilson, she has become more irritable and, perhaps, a bit restless. She’s been driving Lucy to dance lessons over an hour away once a week, and has also been talking about hiring a math tutor for the girls—not that they can easily afford either tutors or dance lessons. “They have potential,” Belinda says, “they should have opportunities.”
Stephanie’s the scientist—little glass-jar terrariums line the shelves in her room, everything neat and in its place—and Lucy is the dreamer, and rescuer of things. Crooked-winged butterflies, frogs, salamanders, fledglings. One year, an injured baby flying squirrel. What does Belinda mean, potential and opportunity? Isn’t heaven here and now enough?
She’s been teasing him—or is she serious?—that he shouldn’t expect the girls to become lumberjacks. Wilson has never really thought they would. Making a living by hard physical work can be a wonderful thing, he’s told them, but it’s a dead-end road. Better to do something involving their minds. And yet he wants them to know everything about logging, and the forest, and living off the land. Both girls can start a fire with a bow drill, can distill drinking water from the dew. They know the names and calls of birds, and understand what is meant with each song. There are different kinds of learning, he tells Belinda.
On windy days on their picnics, all of them lying on their backs, Wilson points out the skyborne etchings of the tips of each of the trees surrounding them. He shows them how the healthiest trees act in a high wind, their tops waving in a graceful circle, while the trees with weaker roots pitch back and forth like metronomes, the bulge of earth at their trunks lifting, ever so slightly, from the movement above.
Wilson and his family live off the grid, and for this, their blue tree is all the more miraculous. It’s a giant outdoor Christmas tree, an immense spruce, wreathed top to bottom in blue hand-painted bulbs, which are powered by solar panels on the back of their cabin. Wilson dug a trench and laid an electrical line out to the tree, which stands a hundred feet from their house. The girls, who share the loft, can look out their window and see the tree, glowing, at any hour of the night, in the holiday season.
The night Wilson strung the tree, five years ago, was the first time he’d climbed that far up in many years. His balance isn’t quite what it used to be—his hearing damaged by years of sawing—and since the girls were born he’s tried to stay out of the tops of trees. Still, climbing it was the only way to get the lights up there.
He enjoyed being up high again, looking down on things, and he stayed for a while, aware of the sheaves of colder and warmer air resting in the boughs and of how his movements caused them to spill and slide around him, as if he were in the embrace of the tree, as if it had the pulse and breath of an animal.
Given his compromised hearing, he was surprised how much he noticed—the sounds of almost everything. The pop of a log in his fireplace, the crunch of a deer’s hoof in the snow. It seemed he could even hear conversations among the stars, between the electronic tracings of the constellations. He felt like a pine marten or a bear cub up there, and he remained a long while, a child again. But then it was time to get to sleep so he could rise in a few hours, in darkness, and go back to work.
He starts work early each day, is out in the woods before first light so he can be done in time to pick the girls up from school, a one-room log cabin with but a single teacher, grades kindergarten through eighth. Enrollment rises and falls: four students one year, eight or ten the next.
Some days Wilson arrives before school’s out. In winter he beholds the scene as one might a snow globe. A curl of gray twists from the chimney. A glow in the squares of the windows, even in midafternoon. Each day, each hour, is so much like the one before it, compressed as if to ice beneath the blue weight of winter. When it is not snowing, it is about to snow.
The door pushes open then and Lucy runs out, flying to his truck like a prisoner released, while Stephanie stays inside to socialize with the few older students, the cool kids. Lately Stephanie has been asking her parents—“elk hippies,” she’s taken to calling them—why they live in the middle of nowhere, hiding in the woods. It’s a fair question, Wilson supposes, though he knows they love their life in the forest.
Sometimes Stephanie will meander out on her own; other times Wilson will send Lucy in for her. There’s no rush; his work is done for the day. There are always chores around the house, never-ending. It’s a lot of effort to keep the dream aloft. Snow has to be shoveled and machinery cared for. Water pipes freeze and must be thawed with great caution; as they swell and bulge in their subtle readjustment, they are at risk of bursting. But his work in the woods is finished until the next day. The felled trees lie sleeping on their sides, with the sweet-scented boughs and limbs piled in tent-shaped mounds waiting to be burned.
No one gets as tired physically as Wilson does, but each night, overnight, a phenomenon occurs: he curls up against Belinda, wraps his arms around her, and wakes up strong again. Never mind that she is growing crosser with him. Who is to say, when he’s lying entwined with her, who is the twist, and who is the core? He doesn’t take Belinda’s irritability personally. He is not religious but knows well how perfection requires the inspiriting breath from a few strands of imperfection to give it strength and durability.
Way before daylight, Wilson eases downstairs, fixes his coffee, makes his oatmeal. He washes his dishes, careful not to clank. Lucy’s various art projects lie scattered across the big dining-room table. Stephanie’s books are stacked neatly beside her reading chair, next to the wood stove; like Belinda, she gets cold easily. He builds the fire up, surveys the scene of his sleeping household. He loves being the first one up.
In good weather he parks his logging truck away from the house, up the driveway, so its rumble doesn’t wake Belinda and the girls. He likes the ritual of walking up the dark lane. He likes protecting their sleep, the faraway sound of the truck’s idle perhaps entering their subconscious, their dreams, as a distant gurgle of assurance.
In the sweet dream of Wilson’s life, Christmas is the best time of year, each day melting into the next in the quickening dusk. Riding their toboggans down the driveway, in the last seam of light, after school and before dinnertime. The howl of wolves, down by the river.
The four of them settling in afterward, cooking. The delicious odors of the holiday: ginger, cardamom, peppermint. Hanging the stockings and raising the fragrant Christmas tree in their living room, decorating it with familiar and beloved ornaments, each one with a different provenance, recalling a certain story.
The family feast, a candlelit dinner in their warm home, just the four of them, with snow coming down outside—the elegant dessert, a chocolate chess pie or flaky rhubarb—and then the reading aloud of “The Night Before Christmas” (never mind that Stephanie no
longer believes, and that Lucy is hovering on the edge; this may be her last year for even partial belief: and all the sweeter, Wilson thinks, for that going-away-ness), until at last the opening of one gift each from beneath the tree.
Stoking the wood stove before going upstairs to their beds. Leaving on the table by the hearth the half cup of milk in the ancient Santa mug, the plate heaped with cookies, the carrots and celery stalks for the reindeer.
Wilson’s work is seasonal, and most years he is laid off by late fall. But with more housing starts this year, he has worked right up until the week before Christmas, and time has gotten away from him; it’s already the day before Christmas Eve. He wants them to decorate their tree first thing tomorrow morning, Christmas Eve Day, as is their tradition, so they need to get it tonight.
“Just wait,” Belinda says, “you can get the tree tomorrow. What’s the difference?”
“We won’t be too late,” he promises. “I know where some good ones are.” He’s already prepared their old beater Subaru for the journey—thermos of hot chocolate, ax and matches, flashlight. “Come on, girls,” he says. “Dress warm.”
“You’ll get stuck,” she says. “At least take the truck.”
He laughs. “I’ll be careful,” he says.
She gives him a look.
“The truck’s too loud,” he says, “and I don’t want us to smell like exhaust. This is fun, not work. We’re not going far.”
The girls run upstairs, grab their coats, fly back down, and hug Belinda goodbye. Wilson tries to remember how many years it’s been since Belinda went with them to get the tree: two, maybe three now?
When he kisses her, a complicated look of war-and-peace flickers on her face. He whispers, “Don’t forget to turn the tree on, please, after we’re gone.”
