Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  The Master makes the rounds, walking the rows between the boys, gently waking the ones who have nodded off, lost in a half-trance of his own. He is balding, fortyish, with a pleasant and somewhat apologetic countenance. If he lived in the States you’d peg him as a junior high school basketball coach, or the only decent salesman on a car lot, the one you feel so lucky to have snagged. I picture him, momentarily, in a Craftsman in West Denver, a plump sweet-faced wife and two toddlers in the yard. I picture Ethan in a saffron robe, devoted to the brotherhood, having sworn what these monks have sworn, never to be touched by a woman.

  Concurrent with the Romanian in the glove compartment, it turns out, is a Costa Rican who picked Ethan up in a bar by asking, “Do you have the heart to go with those eyes?” Eventually revealed to be a line from a Dutch Top 40 pop song, it still got the Costa Rican—whose name is Fatimah—some slice of the last four years with Ethan, excepting the times he’s in Bucharest, avoiding his lover’s husband and his posse of trench coats, and the time he spends with me.

  Women have a surprisingly hard time getting over Ethan. The woman he broke up with sixteen years ago still keeps a room for him in her house. Once when he tried to call things off with Fatimah she made him promise he’d never bring another woman into her whole country. Even his high school girlfriend (Class of ’73) recently won Redbook’s “Rekindle Your Old Flame” contest by writing an essay about why he should fly across the country on the magazine’s bill to see her, to have drinks and then dinner, and see what might be left after thirty years.

  I asked him how many people entered the contest.

  “Thousands,” he said, humbly. “Actually, tens of thousands, I recall, the editor said.”

  14. Horseveldt Camp,

  Wrangell Mountains, Alaska

  Early morning in the cook cabin. Outfitter Frank sits in the dim glow of a kerosene lamp with a cup of coffee on the table next to him, The Collected Poems of Mary Oliver in his hand. The day I arrived, he introduced me to the horses.

  “I call this one Faggot,” he said, watching for my reaction. “Because he’s got beautiful gaits.”

  Later that day, after we had dismounted to walk our horses up a steep stretch of trail to a meadow and were getting ready to remount, Frank indicated a huge mound of the humped-up bunch grass that alternates with muskeg to make up the Alaskan tundra.

  “Come on over, Pam,” he said. “There’s a niggerhead here with your name on it.”

  Frank is a man who cares deeply for his animals and a man who cares deeply for the land. He bought Horseveldt three years ago from another hunting guide, and he’s got dreams of expanding the hunting operation, and also of keeping history alive. The lowest and greenest spot in the St. Elias ecosystem, Horseveldt has been a place where hunters, trappers, prospectors, and settlers have wintered their horses for more than a hundred years.

  The horse I have been assigned is named Flint.

  “Spirited,” Wrangler Luke called him.

  “Sometimes he sees boogers,” Frank said.

  Flint is the smallest horse at Horseveldt, and next to the ten others, big Morgan geldings with dinner-plate feet, I wonder how he holds his own. Frank brought Flint and two of his Arab-quarter horse cousins in two summers ago, and when winter came the Morgans took off over a ridge and left the three Arabs to fend for themselves against the twenty-foot drifts and the ice storms and the bears. Only Flint made it through that first winter, and Frank says he’s a whole lot spookier now.

  “You would be too,” he said, “if you saw your two best friends turn into a pile of bones while you sat there waiting to see if you’d ever get another meal or be one.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine how Flint gets by, even in summer, his tiny Arab feet poking deep suctiony holes into the tundra while the Morgans set their big flat paddles down on top. Flint goes belly deep into some of the bogs with me on top of him, and one day, when we have to cross a swift and icy river, I cling to his neck while he tries to find spaces between the rounded boulders to put his little feet. I can feel the water rise over the tops of my boots, over the tops of my knees, and then we are going over sideways into the heart-stopping cold. We get washed a couple hundred yards downstream before he finds his footing and drags himself—me clinging with one hand to the saddle, the other to his tail, flutter-kicking for all I am worth, into an eddy.

  Before I left the town of McCarthy to take the four-seater plane into Horseveldt, I called Ethan and asked if he wanted me to come home from Alaska two days early to make the drive with him from Sacramento to Tampa and he said, Absolutely not.

  After Flint and I don’t drown in the river I make a list, on the back of the tag that is against the law to remove from my sleeping bag, of all the people I’m pretty sure would be happy to have my company on a drive from Sacramento to Tampa and come up with twenty-four.

  Now, in the quiet of the predawn, Outfitter Frank says, “Have you read these poems about her father?” and I say that I have. He says, “Don’t they just want to break your heart?”

  Part of me wants to tell Frank that Mary Oliver is gay. Part of me wants to ask Frank about his own father, or tell him about mine. Instead I back out the door into the mist-soaked morning, leaving him with his coffee and the poetry. I can hear the hobbled Morgans hopping along in the river gravel, making their way toward camp.

  15. Ichetucknee Springs, Florida

  Easter Sunday, our butts stuck down in inner tubes, floating seven miles of crystal-clear spring-fed waters, under live oaks, between mangroves. How this place has survived the concretization of Florida is beyond my understanding, but here we are, floating, the only other people in our line of sight a dad and his son in a sit-on-top kayak.

  Giant turtles sun themselves on fallen logs, their shells a mosaic of oranges and greens. They lift one back foot at a time and stretch it as far out of their shells and into the sunlight as it will go. A banded kingfisher darts from tree to tree in front of us.

  Ethan likes floating more than anything. In the bathtub, in Exuma, and here, in the inner tube, the hours of another holiday ticking safely away. Ethan and I don’t have a relative left alive between us, which makes holidays easy, except when it makes them impossible. Easter at Ichetucknee is a no-brainer. No rabbit, no chocolate, no Christ on a Cross.

  Last night, in the hotel room in Gainesville, Ethan, still asleep, raised his hand and said Bingo! He woke himself up just enough to tell me he’d dreamed he won the bingo game at the gay fundraiser, that the guy next to him only needed one more number for the longest time, but Ethan had filled his card first.

  Ethan has the sweetest dreams of anyone I have ever known, which I would like to think is the sign of a clear conscience. One night, in Lubbock, he said, from sleep, “You pretend to be an elephant, and I’ll pretend to be an elephant.”

  Another night he woke me to tell me he had had a terrible nightmare. He had gone to the Pyramids, he said, and they wouldn’t let him in.

  16. Negro Bill Canyon, Utah

  Change of season in the desert after a good wet winter. The piñions are full of gray berries, the claret cup is brilliant red, the paintbrush, globe mallow, and skyrocket gilia are all full and bright. In the late afternoon, the light softens, and the rugged, grass- and cacti-covered hillside looks as inviting as a clover field.

  Such great pleasure setting up my old VE-24. The snap of the shock-corded poles, the feel of slickrock under my boots. Lizards doing push-ups in the sand.

  I’ve brought Ethan’s pictures here with me. In one he’s wearing my Avalanche jersey and in the other my Broncos sweatshirt, as if I can make him a Coloradoan by some kind of voodoo. Also, a book of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, all servants and garden parties, strange pairing with these orange canyon walls.

  Only yesterday, Willow and Nora and I woke up in Calistoga at 6 a.m. and hit the mineral pool, which is Olympic-size and gives off great clouds of steam into the early, chilly air. We swam laps and floated until the pool felt too w
arm and more than a little clammy, and then we put on our white robes and stood in front of the funhouse mirror, which gave us short short legs and elongated torsos, and hands like dwarves or Thai dancers, depending on where we held them in the frame.

  One plane flight, a seven-hour van ride, and six miles of backpacking later—because this is how I roll—my therm-a-rest is self-inflating in the tent and the writing students from the Women’s Wilderness Institute are scattered across the slickrock in their bright fuzzy clothes like pieces of ribbon candy.

  The U.S. Government changed the name of this canyon to Negro Bill in 1967, over the protests of the locals, stopping at least one tick short of a real fix. Bill Granstaff grazed sheep and cattle here from 1877 to 1881, when he was run out of the area for selling whiskey to the Indians. In the eighties a change to African-American Bill’s Canyon proved too heavy to fly, and in the nineties a simpler Bill’s Canyon got voted down on the grounds that it denied Bill his heritage, which makes the recent suggestion of Brother Bill Canyon seem like a winner all the way around.

  Danika, the yoga instructor, is the only one of us who has been willing to say the name of the canyon out loud, and she says “Nay-gro,” giving the old moonshine maker a decidedly Spanish flare. I’m the teacher of record here, but Danika hasn’t stopped talking since we shouldered our backpacks, and for the rest of this day that suits me fine.

  At the last English department potluck, an eighteenth-century expert named Yolanda said, “I find it really disturbing, that you think of me as a human being.” Yolanda is tall, dark, and thin, utterly lovely. “It’s okay if my students think of me as a human being, but I don’t want my colleagues to think of me that way, especially not my senior colleagues.”

  “How should we think of you?” I asked her.

  “Gray matter,” she said, as if it were obvious, “gray matter producing text.”

  “I know what you are afraid of,” Ethan said, our last night in Wyoming. “You are afraid that I will sleep through all the good parts.”

  Once when I drove all night to San Diego just to see him he said, “I’m not displeased that you are here.” Another time when he said, “My feelings about you are in no way ambivalent,” I tried to put the very best spin on it possible.

  It is always the skinny girls who want to peel off their clothes and go swimming. It is called Morning Glory Arch, but the canyon below it is covered with poison ivy.

  The sun goes behind the wall of Negro Bill Canyon, and for the first time today the yoga instructor lowers her voice.

  17. Santa Cruz Province, Argentina

  Estancia La Oriental is a slice of paradise, set down neatly on the shore of Lago Belgrano, at the edge of a huge, green, bird-filled horse-heaven of a meadow behind rows of Lombardi poplars, planted fifty rows deep in a dedicated attempt to block the wind.

  This morning, after breakfast, I follow Areillo on horseback up to Lago Volcán, straight up a green moraine littered with hummocks, then across a broad flat swath of the Continental Divide, like God’s giant roadway, smooth rock with patches of moss, the peaks getting more and more backlit all the way to Chile. We walk along the beach of the lake, the turquoise of glacier water spun up in wind-created waves coming right at us like giant plates of sea glass. Making a circle above the lake are five condors. They are huge and playful, a little like our vultures, but like everything in Patagonia, much bigger, with wing feathers several feet long.

  When I ask Areillo if he has always been a gaucho he says yes, and when I ask him why he likes it he says, Es vida linda.

  In the 1900s Patagonia was an ocean of grass, ten fists high as far as the eye could see, but thousands of Europeans came in the twenties, and more in the forties. There were five fists, then two fists. Areillo’s generation is the last of the gauchos because now there is not even one fist left. “First the grass ran out,” he says, “eventually the women left. Now we eat what is left of the sheep and drink a lot of Kool-Aid.”

  I am here to do a story on the gauchos, who, as far as I can tell, put American cowboys to shame. They sleep out in the wild on only their sheepskins, bring no food or water but forage for both, and they gallop, barefoot and stirrupless, all day, sometimes barely taking a break. A gaucho can find his way, Areillo tells me, by the Southern Cross at night, and by the direction of the wind in the day. That’s how consistently it blows. Hot wind is always from the north, dusty winds are from the west, high winds are from the east, and cold winds are from the south.

  Areillo names the three things that are sacred to a gaucho in order: his horse, which is his freedom from the earth, his facón, which is his companion and protector in a fight, and his chiná, or woman, who seems to fall squarely into the honorable mention category.

  “In Spanish, when you get engaged,” he says, grinning, “the word is compromiso. Before you are solitario, after you are compromiso.” Being here without Ethan, I guess, means I am lonely, but not compromised.

  Areillo tells me that when he is training a colt, he will stroke him for hours each day for two months before he does anything else, and when the colt gets sweaty he will dry him off with his own shirt so the colt will grow to like the smell.

  On the way back down the mountain we take a shortcut that leaves us with a difficult river crossing, so Areillo sends me across on his horse, Blanco, first, and I send Blanco back across the raging water to Areillo with a single slap on his butt.

  The full moon rises in the blue blue sky over the blue-gray mountains, and Areillo tries to teach me all the colors of the Criollo horses by singing a little song: “Blanco, Bayo, Gateado, Cebrino,” he sings, “Rosillo, Overo, Pagare, Tostado.”

  18. Stone Harbor, New Jersey

  Cinder and I arrive on the island close to midnight and all we see are No Vacancy signs. We would have been here sooner if we hadn’t stopped in Seaside Heights, the town my Aunt Martha took me to for a week each summer from when I was two till I was seventeen.

  Seaside hadn’t changed much, maybe gotten a little seedier, but there is still Khor Brothers’ Frozen Custard and Jimmy’s Cheesesteak Hoagies on the boardwalk, which was what we were ordering when the lady who took our money told us about the Springsteen cover band that was playing, starting at 7, at the end of Funtown Pier.

  On the way down from Boston I had told Cinder all about Art Stock’s Playpen in Wildwood Crest, in 1978, and the band called Backstreets that played there Wednesday nights. How I used to get off from my job as a beach inspector in Stone Harbor and hit the Wendy’s in North Wildwood where the other beach inspectors and I learned to balance carrots and cucumber slices just so around the edge of the paper bowl to make a small salad ($1.49) hold as much as a large salad ($4.99). Then we’d head down to the Crest and pay the $1.00 ladies’ cover charge and dance to Springsteen covers, and only Springsteen covers, till they threw us out at 4:45 a.m.

  Cinder and I got close enough to the end of the pier to hear the first fifteen notes of “Thunder Road,” to see the passel of groupies—mostly young men—holding their twinkling lighters above the glistening twilit sea, and I got goose bumps all over. This band calls themselves B-Streets, but even after Cinder said, “I guess they had to change their name after the rise to power of the Backstreet Boys,” it still took a few minutes for me to register that these were the very same six guys—a little older, but still sounding damn good—whose show I danced to in 1978.

  But as a result of all of that fun, only one entirely generic motel a couple of blocks off the beach in Stone Harbor says Vacancy, so we pull into the parking lot. In the tiny lobby the owners have set up what can only be described as a shrine to George W. Bush. A photo of him, above a photo of him and Laura, with little red, white, and blue sparkle sticks poking out from behind them, and a red, white, and blue candle, on a red, white, and blue doily, and behind all of it a giant American flag.

  “Where are we? Thailand?” I say, and the manager looks at me sharply.

  “I only have one room. It has one bed,” h
e says, sizing up Cinder and me for the obvious reason. “You can have it for two hundred dollars.”

  Back at the car I say to Cinder, “Do we want to give two hundred dollars to sleep in one bed at the George Bush Motel?”

  “If it is the only way we are going to get horizontal tonight,” she says, “I think we do.”

  The room, it turns out, is not really a room at all, but a space wedged underneath the stairs and next to the laundry room they have converted into a room for high-season nights just like this, and suckers just like us. There are no windows, and the bed smells like roach poison and dryer exhaust.

  “Early Abu Ghraib,” Cinder says.

  There are little signs crammed with words posted all over the room. One says, This is a nonsmoking room. If the manager finds evidence that you have smoked your credit card will be charged $250. Another says, Anyone who takes room towels to the pool will be charged $50 per towel. Another says, No guests allowed. Anyone entertaining guests in their room will be charged $50 per guest even if the guest does not stay overnight. Another says, Checkout time is 11 a.m. If you are not out of your room by 11 a.m., we reserve the right to remove your things and you will be charged $50 for every fifteen-minute period past 11 a.m. until you vacate the premises entirely.

  When I first found out Henry had decided to die without me I was pretty mad, but too numbed out to trust it. By the time I trusted it, it had already given way to the missing, which we all know is both better and worse. A decade later Henry feels like a really good dream I was awakened in the middle of, but no matter how many times I try to go back to sleep I can’t get back there. On the night Bill Clinton was elected Henry said, “It will be so refreshing to have somebody in the White House who can actually get it up.”