All That Is Left Is All That Matters

by Mark Slouka

  “You all right?” he asked. “You want me to take that?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, flushed, smiling at him. He leaned under the straw hat and kissed her, then wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  THEY WATCHED IT coming across the flats, a big white car dragging a wall of dust.

  “Wonder where he’s goin’?” she said as the car braked hard on the gravel, then fishtailed out on the highway and roared by.

  “Wherever it is,” he said, taking a bottle out of the duffel, “you can bet your ass he’s not . . .”

  But the car had stopped, was even now waiting for them, its brake lights showing red through the settling dust.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said.

  It was a big car, an old Chevy Impala. As they ran up the shoulder the motor turned off and a thick-necked, sandy-haired man wearing brown office pants and a short-sleeved shirt stepped heavily out into the highway.

  “Thanks,” said Jack. “Gettin’ hot out here.”

  “Why don’t you kids put your stuff in here?” the man said, opening the trunk. “That way you can sit together in back.”

  He couldn’t say why he hesitated. He could feel her looking at him as he dropped the duffel in the trunk and piled her suitcase on top of it.

  “Mind if we bring the water?” he called out to the man, who was already climbing into the car.

  “Bring whatever you like.”

  She looked at him before they climbed in, reading his face, silently mouthing the question. He shrugged. “I think so,” he said, then got in before her, sliding over on the seat.

  As though suddenly aware of his responsibility, the man accelerated gently to sixty, then eased off on the gas.

  “Comfortable back there?” he said.

  “Fine. Thanks for the ride.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, I’m glad for the company.”

  “Works for us.”

  “Hard day.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  He watched the man’s face in the rearview: maybe fifty, soft, like a weightlifter going to fat. Hair the color of dust. A heavy arm lay over the back of the passenger seat like there was somebody sitting there.

  “Where you kids from?”

  “Tahoe. You?”

  “Little place about an hour back. You wouldn’t know it.”

  They rode in silence. Jack watched the man take a long breath, saw his eyes, staring at a spot on the dashboard, lose their focus, then wrench themselves back into the present.

  “So where you headed, anyway?” he said.

  “Bakersfield,” Janie said.

  “That so? What’s in Bakersfield?”

  “Don’t know. We’re hopin’ jobs, maybe a place of our own—”

  “Pretty much everything,” Jack said.

  A yellow jacket blown in through the window was beating itself against the glass, and taking the hat off Janie’s head, Jack shooed it out into the hot wind, then handed back the hat and leaning in gave her a quick kiss.

  “That’s nice,” the man said.

  “What’s that?” Jack said.

  “—two of you like that, everything figured out.”

  “You know how it is,” Jack said.

  “What would make you say that?”

  Though Jack’s thumb never stopped drawing little circles around the knuckle of her hand, something inside him suddenly crouched down.

  “I think all he meant was—” Janie started to say.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” the man said. Switching hands on the wheel, he took the unmarked turnoff for Lake Isabella. “I just meant, you know, not everybody’s so lucky. Some people’s horse never leaves the gate.”

  The weight of his arm on the seat had tattooed a grid into the soft skin.

  Feeling Janie squeeze his hand, Jack turned slowly, aware that the man could see him in the rearview, and nodded, looking past her so it would look like he was just nodding to some music in his head. Everything was fine. The double-wides were showing up along the road now. They passed a man bent under the hood of a truck, two little kids riding bicycles on a dirt driveway.

  “So . . . Bakersfield,” the man said suddenly, like he’d been thinking about it the whole time.

  “That’s the plan anyway,” Jack said.

  “It’s good to have a plan.”

  “I think so.”

  “And you’ve got each other—that’s the most important thing.”

  “Guess it is.”

  “Count on it.”

  They stopped at an intersection. A woman in a blue pickup pulled out of a gas station.

  The man tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “You hear about that woman in Tulare accidentally drove over her own kid?” he said.

  “Oh my God, that was terrible,” Janie said. “Said she looked away for, like, a second—that she was just backing up so she could put the lawnmower in the garage.”

  “Guess she’ll need a new plan,” the man said.

  The light changed.

  NONE OF THEM said anything as they drove out of Lake Isabella, then turned off on an unmarked dirt road that ran along a barbed-wire fence spotted with trash. The tires clanged over a cattle guard. A hundred feet ahead, the earth dropped away. Two dented signs leaning in the loose soil read, DANGER—NOT A MAINTAINED ROAD, and 10 MPH. A third, handwritten on a piece of board nailed to a fence post said: I LOVE YOU, JOHN.

  The man took off his sunglasses. “This next bit is a little tricky,” he said.

  Far above the canyon’s rim, a hawk circled the sun, hunting the shadows below.

  They drove out onto a road like the ledge on a skyscraper—no fence, no shoulder, nothing but air to the right—then edged around a corner so tight that from fifty feet away it looked like the road simply disappeared into the wall.

  “Oh my God,” she said, gripping his hand.

  “Yeah,” Jack said.

  “How long does this go for?”

  “Not that long. Don’t look.”

  “Oh Jesus,” she said. Two feet of dirt separated the tires and the canyon air.

  “I don’t like it either,” Jack said. “Don’t look.”

  “Sometimes things don’t work out,” the man said suddenly.

  “I’m wonderin’ if I could ask you to slow down a little,” Jack said.

  “Like when you’re young you think you can snap your fingers and the world’ll come runnin’ like a dog—”

  “I’m wonderin’ if you wouldn’t mind slowin’ down a little.”

  “—an’ then you realize you’re the dog, and everything you thought is different.”

  “Sir, could you—?

  “Like all you’re here for is to get beat on.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jack heard her whimper. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Please, I don’t know what you’re doin’ but—”

  The car scraped sickeningly against the rock wall of the cliff, lurched right. A little strip of white, far below, came out of the canyon wall, then went back.

  He turned to look at them, his face unreadable as Christ’s, his voice resigned yet curious: “I gotta be honest with you—I don’t know about this next one.” He smiled. “But hey, maybe you’re lucky.”

  He stomped on the brakes. As the car began to slide sideways toward the green light of the canyon, Janie started to scream.

  WHEN THE ROAD opened into the sun the man pulled over on the shoulder, took their things out of the trunk and drove away. Jack could barely stand. Janie clung to him, crying into his chest, her sobs somehow self-conscious in the silence.

  Unable to speak, soaked in sweat, Jack looked down the empty highway, then up into the sky. High above their heads, the hawk scored a circle around the sun. For just a second, as if remembering some foolish, drunken thought, he saw them, their pants rolled up to their knees, wading up the shoals in the moonlight.

  Crossing

  IT WAS RAINING WHEN THEY DROVE OUT OF
TACOMA that morning. When the first car appeared he could see it from a long way off, dragging a cloud of mist like a parachute, and when it passed them he touched the wipers to clear things up and his mind flashed to a scene of a black road, still wet, running toward mountains larded with snow like fatty meat. For some reason it made him happy, and he hadn’t been happy in a while. By seven the rain was over. The line of open sky in the east was razor sharp.

  He looked over at the miniature jeans, the sweatshirt bunched beneath the seat belt’s strap, the hiking boots dangling off the floor like weights. “You OK?” he said. “You have to pee?” He slowed and drove the car onto the shoulder and the boy got out to pee. He looked at him standing on that rise in the brome and the bunchgrass, his little hips pushed forward. When the boy walked back to the car he swung the door open for him, then reached over and pulled the door shut and bumped out on the empty road.

  Not much had changed, really. A half an hour out of Hoquiam he began to see the clear-cuts through the firs, a strange, white light, as if the world dropped away fifty feet out from the pavement. The two of them had been talking about what to do if you saw a mountain lion (don’t run, never run), and what they’d have for lunch. He hoped the boy wouldn’t notice. Twenty minutes later they were past it, and the light behind the trees had disappeared.

  He’d been at the house just after dawn, like he’d promised. He sat in the driveway for a while looking at the yard, the azaleas he’d planted, the grass in the yard beaten flat by the rain. For a long time he hadn’t wanted her back, hadn’t wanted much of anything, really. He went inside, wiping his shoes and ducking his head like a visitor and when the boy came running into the living room he threw him over his shoulder, careful not to hit his head on the corner of the TV, and at some point he saw her watching them, leaning against the kitchen counter in her bathrobe, and when he looked at her she shook her head and looked away and at that moment he thought, maybe. Maybe he could make this right. One step at a time.

  THE FOREST SERVICE road had grown over so much that only his memory of where it had been told him where to turn. The last nine miles would take them an hour. This is it, kid, his old man would say whenever they turned in. You excited? Every year. The car lurched and swayed, the grass hissing against the undercarriage. It’d thrown him when the old man had died, though he couldn’t say why, really. Tough bastard, he could give him that. He could see him, standing in the river hacking his lungs out, laying out an eighty-foot line. “Almost there,” he said to the little boy next to him. “You excited?”

  He slowed under the trees to let his eyes adjust and when he rolled down the window the air shoved in and he could hear the white noise of the river. God how he needed this place, the nests of vines like something scratched out, the furred trunks, soft with rot. He’d been waiting for this a long time. A low vine scraped against the roof. He smiled. Go ahead and scrape, you fucker, he thought, scrape it all.

  EIGHT YEARS. It didn’t seem that long. Where the valley widened out he could see what the winter had left behind: the gouged-out pools, the sixty-foot trunks rammed into the deadfalls, the circles of upturned roots like giant blossoms of Queen Anne’s lace . . . A gust of warmer air shoved in: vegetation, sunlight, the slow fire of decay. Sometimes it wasn’t so easy to know how to go, how to keep things alive. Sometimes the vise got so tight you could forget there was anything good left in the world. But this was good. He’d been talking about this place—the rivers, the elk, the steelhead in the pools—since the boy was old enough to understand. And now here it was. He looked at the water, rushing slowly like flowing glass over car-sized boulders nudged together like eggs.

  He explained it all as they lay out their things in the mossy parking place at the road’s end. The trail continued across the Quinault; they’d ford the river, then walk about three miles to an old settler’s barn where they could spend the night. They’d set up their tent anyway because the roof was pretty well gone. Of course they’d have a campfire—there was a fire ring right there—and sometimes, if you were quiet, herds of elk would come into the meadow at dusk.

  When they came out of the trees and onto the stony beach he felt a small shock, as if he were looking at a house he’d grown up in but now barely recognized. The river was bigger than he remembered it, stronger; it moved like a swiftly flowing field. He didn’t remember the opposite shore being so far off. He stood there, listening to it seething in its bed, to the inane chatter of the pebbles in the shallows, the hollow tock of the stones knocking against one another in the deeper water. Downstream, a branch caught in a deadfall reared up like something shot, then tore loose. For a moment he considered pulling out, explaining . . . but there was nowhere else to go. And he’d promised.

  “Well, there she is,” he said.

  They took off their packs and squatted down next to each other on the embankment. “You want to take your time, kiddo,” he said. “People in a hurry get in trouble.” The boy nodded, very serious. He’d bring their packs over and then come right back for him. It would take a little while, but he’d be able to see him the whole time. He’d wave when he got to the other side.

  He took off his pants and socks and boots, stuffed the pants and socks into the top of the pack, then tied the boots back on over his bare feet. The boy’s weightless blue backpack, fat with his sleeping bag and teddy bear, he strapped to the top as well, then swung the whole thing on his back. No belt. He looked at the boy. “First rule of river crossing—never buckle your waist belt. If you go down, you have to be able to get your pack off as quickly as possible, OK?” The boy nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  It wasn’t too bad. He took it slow, carefully planting the stick downstream with his right arm, resisting the urge to look back. Ten yards out the water rose above his knees and he slowed even more, feeling for the edges of the rocks with his boots, moving from security to security. The heavier current swept the stick before it touched the bottom, making it harder to control, and he began drawing it out and stabbing it down ahead of himself and slightly upstream to make up for the drift, and then he was on the long, gravelly flat and across. He threw down the packs and looked back. The boy was just where he’d left him, sitting on the rocks, hugging his knees. He waved quickly and started back. You just had to be careful. So what do you do if you fall? he remembered asking once—how old could he have been, seventeen?—and the old man calling back over his shoulder, “Don’t fuckin’ fall.”

  The second crossing, with the boy on his back, was actually easier. They talked the whole time, and he made his way carefully, steadily, feeling the skinny legs bouncing against his thighs, leaning into the hands buckled across his collarbone, and halfway across, with the hot smell of the pines coming from the shore and the sun strong on his face, he knew he’d made it out the other side. Where had it come from—this slide into weakness, this vision of death like a tunnel at the end of the road and no way to get off or turn around? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was had passed. He’d rebuild it all—one step at a time. He and his son would be friends. Nothing mattered more.

  THE BARN WAS just where he remembered it, standing against the trees like a rib cage. What could they have been thinking, building a barn in a jungle with ninety inches of rain a year? Its roof was half gone and its floor rotted through but there was something about pitching a tent inside that skeleton that was pretty neat, they agreed, and snapping the compression poles together—always a good trick—he remembered the two of them working together, quietly, easily, then his father crawling into the tent to lay out the sleeping bags. Something about rooms in rooms.

  They set up the rain fly just in case, then shined the flashlight at the bats clustered under the peak of the roof, making them squeak like kittens, and went outside to the fire ring. It was a beautiful evening, still and perfect, the sky above the grass deepening to the blue of a butterfly wing he’d once found by the side of a trail in Guatemala, and they took turns eating the macaroni out of the pot (he l
et him pour in the orange cheese powder) and afterward they fenced with the marshmallow sticks and waved the torches they made against the darkness and when the marshmallows were black and sagging, pulled out their uncooked hearts and licked their fingers. At some point it started to rain, and standing in the double door of the barn, the boy on a pile of boards, they could see the shapes of the elk coming into the meadow and they watched, staring into the dark, until the only way you could tell the herd was still there was that every few seconds one would shiver the rain out of its hide, making a small white cloud like breath. He could hardly make out the boy next to him: now his hand against the dark wood, now the plane of his cheek. “Dad?” he heard him say. “Do the elk have to sleep in the rain?”

  “I think they’re used to it,” he said.

  “You think they’re cold?”

  “Hard to say. Wet, anyway.”

  He put his arm around him—that tiny shoulder, tight as a nest—but aware of the weight, didn’t let it rest completely. And they were quiet. Thank you, he thought, then mouthed the words to himself in the dark.

  The rain made sleep easy. The two of them lay side by side in their softly crackling sleeping bags like pods, identical but for size. When he crawled out of the tent in the middle of the night to pee, the rain had stopped and he could see stars through the missing places in the roof. Later he thought he heard the rain again, but he’d been dreaming something about rain, and with the boy’s rib cage under his arm, he slept.

  IN THE MORNING the ground was soaked but he managed to get up a fire anyway. There was a heavy mist on the meadow, and it rose and drifted across the sky in long smoky sweeps. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen something so beautiful. After breakfast they would leave their packs in the barn and explore. He’d promised his mother he’d have him back by ten. They didn’t have to leave till noon.

  The morning went too quickly, but he didn’t mind. Better not to overdo it the first time. There would be other trips. He wanted to leave things undone. They walked a mile up the trail to a tributary of the river, where they found a big track pressed into the mud that looked like it might have been a cat’s, and then it was time to go.