by Rick Bass
He’d asked Belinda to go with them. She was living in Oregon. He asked not with any hope for reconciliation—there remained only the final legal and financial disentanglements—but wanting to believe she might, for old times’ sake, come on the trip, that they might re-create some semblance of a family, if only for a short while. But she’d refused. “It’s a farce,” she said. “There’s no money.”
Nothing Wilson didn’t already know. “I’ll make it back,” he told her, though his ribs, a year later, still hadn’t fully healed and he didn’t know when he’d be able to work again. “I know it’s been a little rough, but I can get us out of this.”
She refused to have anything to do with it. “Go ahead,” she told him, “burn it all. I don’t care anymore.”
He supposed he understood how she could think he was becoming a bum.
It didn’t used to be that way. The bars: Trixi’s in Ovando. The Murray in Livingston, and Gil’s. The Home Bar in Troy, site of an alarming number of shootings. Charlie B’s in Missoula. Wherever there were big trees and chain saws to cut them down with, there were good bars, where the real business was drinking, to numb sore muscles and still the vibrations of the big saws. Anyone who ran a saw knew where they were.
He was not an alcoholic back then. Each night he had walked home to his hotel from such places, weaving a bit, but possessed of an athleticism that allowed him to correct any imbalance. A tightrope walker of fallen logs. Stopping to look up at the stars and watch his breath leap in exultant clouds, like smoke billowing from a slash pile. Not a drunk. In a few hours he’d be booting up to go back into the woods and run the saw all day. Burning the days on the elixir of joy and adrenaline, living a life that had meaning. Under such rigor and focus, he had flourished.
The day he met Belinda he had not been drinking. He was hauling a load of pulp to the old paper mill in Frenchtown, coming up out of the Bitterroot with a trailer of burned logs. He’d been idling in Missoula traffic: Reserve Street, August, 104 degrees. He would have liked a beer, had six cans bright and shiny in the ice chest—back then, a six-pack might last him a couple of days—and her car was stalled in traffic right in front of him.
He pushed the gears into neutral, set the parking brake—five tons of burned lodgepole glinting and shimmering black in the haze of late summer. The hills beyond town were still burning from summer fires. He climbed down and walked over to her car. He could feel the soles of his boots softening against the heat of the pavement.
Her window was already down. “Who are you?” she asked. Her eyes were hidden behind the designer sunglasses she would always wear in the years to come, her smile warm and engaging.
“I was sent to rescue you,” Wilson said.
“You goddamned took long enough,” she said. She was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a yellow T-shirt. She’d just applied lipstick; he thought it might have been the first thing she’d done when her car overheated. He thought she might be an actress.
The traffic parted around them. Anyone driving by would have thought they were passing an accident.
Belinda got her purse and gym bag, locked the doors, and handed the bag to Wilson. She walked with him back to his truck and climbed up into the cab from the passenger’s side.
That night they went up to Rock Creek, drove way up the canyon to the swinging bridge, suspended far above the shimmering rapids. In the cold heart of the canyon they sat on the bridge’s old planks—the bridge slung low in its center with their weight, like a belly, so high above the rapids. They drank beer and watched the stars, with the scent of forest fires farther back in the mountains sweet-smelling in the cool of the canyon. Then they lay on the bridge and slept with their heads tucked together, no need for a blanket, the river low and loud far beneath them.
They got married and he stopped going to bars. Soon enough the girls were born. Everything got magnificent, everything was perfect.
Why Peru, why Chile? Like so much in his life of late, it was almost all about instinct, with little if any calculation or reason. A kind of falling, a kind of leaping. It was true he was fascinated by the rock work of the Andes—stone walls and churches that had withstood the diminishments of the centuries—and wanted the girls to see that. He wanted to lay his hands upon something that had endured, and would go on enduring. He wanted to see two stones, three stones, four stones fit so tightly together a dollar bill could not be squeezed between their seams.
He’d checked out a few travel guides from the library, not quite the most current editions, and had printed out a map and made some reservations on the Internet.
In Peru, the first temple on their loose itinerary was in a small town with a long name that Wilson didn’t even try to remember. They’d driven the rental car up a long unmarked road of crushed white limestone. They passed wicker stalls, thatched-roof huts where vendors sold leather goods: purses, bags, hats. Tiny burros stood in the shade, swishing their tails, their backs loaded with what seemed impossible burdens.
Wilson used to pay close attention to things—back when he’d gone into the woods every day—but now there were times when he seemed to see almost nothing. In these fugues, the world’s sights and sounds came to him as if he were underwater.
At one point he noticed the girls clutching bags; they must have passed through a market. He couldn’t recall. He looked at their bags—full of trinkets for their friends back home, he imagined. Such thoughtful young women, so fully engaged in everything. And they were definitely watching him. How badly he wanted a glass of wine at lunch, and a beer in the evening. A once-in-a-lifetime journey. He deserved it! But he would wait. At least until they were more settled into the trip.
Worse than their watching him to see if he was going to drink, his daughters appeared to want from him some kind of guidance—not where to go or what to do, but the deeper kind—and when he noticed this, all he could think to do was try to keep them from seeing quite how bad a spot he and they were in. He could think of nothing witty or charming or courageous or even intelligent to say.
For Stephanie, the questioner, he knew it was harder to ignore the various intimations of trouble; she tended to believe the worst of a situation—a defense mechanism, he understood, a way to prepare herself for when things went sour, as they had all too often in the past few years—while Lucy preferred to see the best in everything, whether it deserved it or not.
Their guide at the temple, a short elderly man with skin the color of a dried fig and large silver glasses—like a little owl—had been talking for some time. He was telling them about the Dominicans, who, Wilson gathered, had painted all the lurid murals after stripping the walls of the gold with which they were lined. They had razed much of the structure with halfhearted malice, a kind of bored destruction. But they had gotten tired before they finished the task and so built their church upon the ruins. And then one day they, too, vanished.
“This way,” the little man was saying, and at first Wilson had the thought the man was trying to take care of him. But the guide turned his back on Wilson and was bending the herd down one hallway and then another. “Follow me,” he said, leading several tourists by the elbow. He was beginning to work the softies—the old ladies, young professional couples—for tips, sizing up his marks.
“We are walking through the corridors of what was once the richest place on earth,” the guide said. “The most beautiful place.” In his fervor, the guide had developed the trace of a lisp, and whether it was affected or evidence of true emotion, Wilson could not be sure.
It was excruciating, watching the other tourists—German, British, Japanese—lean forward, made rapturous by these whispers of wealth. All Wilson wanted was a drink. A nice cold beer in a frosted glass with a lime perched on top of it. A pale golden lager with the South American sunlight strafing through it, a cyclone of bubbles rising through that light with their vortex of promise. His hand, reaching slowly for it.
The guide unclipped from his shoulder strap the case he’d been carr
ying and set it down on a nearby table, then flipped the locks open. Wilson had thought it was a camera bag, but the guide lifted the lid and stared down as if gazing at an artifact—a great treasure he had been saving for the point in the tour when the travelers became worthy of it.
The case held a series of wires, a small black box with red LED digits, and a tiny gray plastic cup, which the guide placed on the tip of his left index finger. He turned the machine on and watched as the digits melted, then reestablished: 96, 97, 98, 99, 100.
The guide smiled. “My blood oxygen,” he said, “is good. I notice that some of you are looking pale. We are at a great elevation here. You are not used to it. I must take your oh-two counts. I am responsible for you.” He took the cup and placed it on the tip of the finger of the eldest woman, slipping it on as he might a wedding ring.
“Ninety-four, ninety-five…Oh, lady, I think you had better sit down for a minute.” He rested his hand on her back and led her to an ornate emperor’s chair made of dark carved wood. The guide patted the old lady’s hand and moved on to the rest of his marks.
Mostly ninety-eights. “No one ever has one hundred,” the guide said. “I am the only one.” He did not place the cup on the children’s fingers because, he said, “Children are immune to the changes in elevation.”
Wilson knew this to be untrue but did not protest. He looked over at Stephanie and Lucy and saw that they were all right, they did not appear weak or afflicted with malaise in any way. Sturdy. Then, without knowing what devilment seized him, he held out his own hand for the guide, who glowered—time was wasting—but came over and fitted him nonetheless. No tip money here, Wilson’s eyes said, illumined with brief mirth, and he and the guide watched as the meter pegged 97, but no higher.
“Perhaps you should sit down,” the guide said, not kindly, “and have a cup of coca tea.” Wilson’s eyes hardened. He knows, he thought, how can he know?
The guide was already turning away, packing up his apparatus.
“Come on,” Wilson said to Stephanie and Lucy. “We need to go.”
“Wait,” Stephanie said, “I have a question.” At first Wilson thought she too wanted to have her oxygen tested, and was surprised to hear her ask the guide, “Those Dominicans—did they ever bury their victims alive?”
The guide was taken aback. His mouth, as though instinctively, began to form itself into a no, but then—perhaps because Stephanie, with her straw-blond hair, freckles, small nose, and pale blue eyes like a saint, was so unthreatening—he admitted he didn’t know.
Now everyone looked around as if seeing the temple anew, with empathy not only for the way the great temple had been reduced to rubble, but also for the way its inhabitants had been forced to swallow the dirt heaped upon them by their destroyers as their voices and very breath, shovelful by shovelful, had been taken from them, until finally they were gone.
Lucy—looking much like a younger version of her sister, but slighter, almost delicate—raised her hand.
“Of course they did,” she said: as if she had been reading about it for months, years, beforehand.
Her voice has changed, Wilson thought. When did that happen?
Back at the hotel in Lima that night—the fourth night of their journey—Wilson tripped over one of their suitcases in the room and, as he was falling, hit his head against the wall. His shoulder was dinged, and his head scraped, but he was otherwise okay. Nevertheless he saw in the girls’ eyes the fear that he had been drinking, which annoyed him, as he had assiduously avoided a drop since arriving in Peru.
He tried to think of a way to reassure them he was in control. But to say I’m not drunk would be to acknowledge that it was sometimes a problem. All he could do was dust himself off, and make a to-do about placing the suitcase in a corner, where it should have been in the first place, rather than where anyone could trip over it.
He didn’t like seeing fear or even discomfort in the girls. He remembered, randomly, a line from a children’s book he had read to them when they were little: She was not raised in the jungle to be frightened of a lion. If they wanted to be worried about something, he thought, the more understandable concern would be money. When he thought about their finances, he couldn’t breathe—what use was there for a logger who could no longer run a saw? The thought was burying him, and he tried to avoid it.
And yet Stephanie, with her typical intuition and prescience—as though she were wired directly to his heart—asked later, while Lucy was in the bathroom, “How bad off are we?”
He flinched at her use of “we.” He still wanted to believe it was all his burden.
But Stephanie had noticed he wasn’t buying food for himself when they went out to eat. He’d been gathering fruit from hotel-lobby baskets and eating flat breads and grapes—whatever was free on restaurant tables.
“It’s a tight spot,” he admitted, “but it’ll be okay. It’s the eye of the needle, is all. We’ll get through it, and then we’ll be on the other side.”
“How?” she persisted. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll cut more trees,” he said. He looked around at their brown-carpeted room. It could have been a hotel room in Billings, or Havre, or Stevensville: anonymous, soul-sucking. The real life, the real world, was on the outside. Oh, how he wanted a drink. For his ribs, if nothing else.
“Dad,” she said, “you can barely tie your boots some mornings.”
He paused, wondering when she had seen that. “I’m healing up,” he said. “I’m recovering.”
She wanted to believe him, and yet wanted not to be fooled. He saw this in her—the way she existed perfectly, and with some effort, in the middle: sharp-eyed, vigilant—and he felt a flicker of guilt for it. He was the one who existed at the edges and extremes, he thought, forcing others to hold on to the middle.
Sometimes it seemed to him there was a chapter missing from his life. A part he had neglected to live, something he had left undone, and that all of this tension and unease was solely his burden and responsibility. That he possessed in his essence something unlovable that communicated itself to the world, making him then even more so.
Still, the idea lingered that he could always saw his way through the forest and into the light; that if only he had worked harder at controlling the journey, everything would have been better, and he would have been loved more. Somehow the world had gotten the upper hand on him when he looked away.
He remembered crossing the Missouri River once, on the old ferry near Virgelle, when he and Belinda and the girls had gone on a rare vacation. A two-day drive from northwest Montana out to the prairie, up and over the mountains and into the forever flatlands. Summertime. They’d followed country roads. Grasshoppers clicked up in front of them and gravel tinkled against the undercarriage of the car. Mourning doves, feeding on sunflowers, sprang up from both sides of the road before the car’s approach, the doves’ wings fanning as if spreading alms. The girls were nine and six.
Wilson had it in mind to go see the White Cliffs near Geraldine, and the sandstone rock where William Clark had carved his name, two hundred years earlier.
By the time they reached the crossing at Virgelle it was dusk, with the last of the day’s light sinking into the chalky soil like an animal bedding down for a nap. In the tall grass at the edge of the broad river a tilting hand-lettered sign, its red paint sun-faded, directed them to push a buzzer mounted on a pole, as if ringing a doorbell. The ferryman would come over and pick them up.
The river, the color of chocolate milk, made deep gurgling sounds and ran with great force, carrying an occasional cottonwood trunk, but the girls trusted everything. Across the river a deer stepped out of the grass and lowered her head to drink from an eddy. She lifted her head and watched them.
Behind the deer, in that dimming light, stood a big white house within a grove of wind-bent cottonwoods, their leaves summer-thick. A deep porch encircled the house, and Wilson imagined the shade of the trees kept the house cool, as did the high ce
ilings. A tire swing hung from a branch of one of the largest trees. He wondered briefly about the family who lived there. He pictured their lives filled with an almost unbearable happiness.
Even as they were looking at the house it was vanishing, as the onrushing darkness rolled over it like a surf and the night covered the house. A light flared inside and moments later a figure emerged, accompanied by all manner and sizes of children, as if in a controlled evacuation. The silhouettes made their way to the river, where the barge lay canted on the shore like some wreck from a distant war.
A lone cable of frayed steel, anchored to concrete blocks, spanned the distance to the far shore. A motor started, and the barge began laboring toward them, low in the water, battling the current. Only now that the barge was broadside to the current could they see how truly strong the river was—quick, deep, relentless.
Midway across, the motor faltered, then stopped, and the ferryman lit a lantern and went into the engine room. A few moments later, the engine coughed back to a start and the journey resumed, and Wilson’s heart flooded with the sweet sensation of being rescued, an emotion no less pleasurable for the fact that he and his family were in no actual danger.
The barge—still straining, but resolute—breached their shore, sending up wavelets of fish-smelling water, and they saw now that the ferryman was a woman. Wilson counted ten children with her. Some stayed on the barge, while others leapt off even as she was releasing the winch that lowered the gangplank.
The barge was not much wider than their narrow car, and Wilson realized it had been built back in a day when all cars were small: Model As, Model Ts. If it had lasted this long, surely it had one more run in it; and with the ferrywoman motioning them aboard, he and Belinda and the girls got back in the car and eased forward onto the ferry, which bobbed under their weight. As if running late, the ferrywoman pulled the gate up behind them quickly. Before they knew they had started, they looked down and saw that they had reversed direction and were plowing the Missouri.
