Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  Then it came to me: Like Jack, this man’s both here with me and not.

  But Jack is in the Middle East doing brave things for this country, I reminded myself. Of course he’s not here. It’s his mission to defend—

  Face it, quick, before you stuff it out of sight again! whispered a voice deep within me.

  Face what?

  The room seemed to tip, as if I were wrapped in tissue in a box that someone was dumping out onto the floor. I grabbed for the wall to steady myself.

  I had managed these long months of separation from Jack by keeping my feelings where they couldn’t hurt me, but in jagged instants like this, I missed him so terribly that an almost physical pain shot through me. To say that I was worried about him was a gross understatement. He was not a young man anymore, and even young men got killed when they put on uniforms and carried guns, and he had gone right to the place where the newspapers told me that men were dying.

  I did not know when I’d see Jack next. But that was the way it had always been with him, because he flew even higher than this guy did. Jack was a creature of the heavens, a comet so fierce that the night sky had shone with his intensity, if only for a short while.

  As if reading my thoughts, the gray-eyed man turned and looked at me again.

  I decided that it was time to leave. I hurried through the gallery and the lobby, and out the front door.

  Outside, the cool, crisp air mercifully slapped me awake, and I sucked in great lungfuls, congratulating myself on slipping through the cracks of my loneliness one more time.

  3

  I STARTED BACK DOWN THE STREET. IT WAS TIME TO WAKE FAYE anyway.

  I was within a half-block of the Pawnee Hotel when I saw her hurrying from its entrance. She closed on us quickly, her long legs cutting the distance with staccato strides. “Em, good,” she said. “The client just called on the cell phone. It seems he’s already at the gallery. Shit, I didn’t expect him until later. I guess you can come along … um, if you like.”

  The only thing I wanted less just then than to return to the gallery was to explain this to Faye. Trying to sound casual, I said, “No, I’ll just take the baby back to the hotel. I think she’s getting fussy. You know, hungry …”

  On cue, Sloane leaned toward Faye and made one of those insistent Feed me! noises that can simultaneously motivate a mother and piss her off.

  Faye’s forehead crumpled in frustration. She was trying to be diligent about the breast-feeding, but life was beginning to get in the way. She reached out a hand to touch her daughter, but then dropped it to her side, defeated. Pain danced across her face. “Give her some cereal,” she said. “Do you have your cell phone?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Take mine, so you can reach me. He’s carrying one, and I’ve got his number punched into it already.” She leaned forward and whispered, “It’s under K for Krehbeil.” She pulled the instrument out of her pocket and handed it to me. “I’ll be an hour, maybe two. I’ll—We could get together at dinner …”

  I said, “Gotcha covered, Faye. You go have dinner with your client. You can’t be Mom and Amelia Earhart simultaneously.”

  “Thanks,” she said nervously, then shook her head, turned, and hurried off down the sidewalk toward the museum.

  “Take the car,” I said. “The museum is almost a mile from here.”

  Faye pivoted and headed in the other direction, toward where the battered sedan she had inherited from her late husband waited.

  I went back to the room and fed the baby, then gave her a bath and laid her out on the bed and tickled her. She flailed her arms happily and giggled, then twisted around onto her hands and knees and spent several minutes trying to dodge past me so that she could experiment with gravity by making a kamikaze dive off the bed. I lay back and scooped her up in my arms and sang to her awhile, then bundled her up with a fresh diaper and jammies and began the long process of walking her to sleep. I did not have the magic spell that only Faye could weave on her: a nice drink of breast milk.

  The evening proved very long. The baby simply would not take a nap, even when I put her back in the backpack and walked her down the street in search of a pizza, my PB&J ingredients having gone to the museum in

  Faye’s car. At long last, at eight P.M., I had just gotten her to sleep when Faye’s cell phone rang, waking Sloane right back up. The only thing worse than a baby who won’t go to sleep is a baby who’s had a five-minute nap and won’t go to sleep again. I knew that at least another half-hour of walking the little girl up and down inside the tight confines of the room lay ahead of me, so when I grabbed the phone and answered it, I was unable to keep the irritation out of my voice. “What?” I snarled.

  The male voice on the other end of the line was not familiar, nor was it sober. “Faye?” a man said, thoroughly drunk. “I’m sorry to call you li’ this, bu’ he’s got his phone switched off, and you’ve got to stop him!”

  “Who’s this?”

  “S’me. Oh, Faye, don’ let him do it!”

  “Who’s ‘me?’ And ‘do’ what? And who’s ‘him’?”

  “‘He’ is precious Willie, tha’s who! If he messes with tha’ painting, it’ll kill her, it’ll simply kill her! Jus’ like it killed Aun’ Winnie!”

  “Listen, mister,” I said. “You just woke the baby, and you sound like you’re about a quart into your cups. Why don’t you call back another time, okay?”

  The man’s bawling shifted to a different register. “Oh, Faye, I’m so sorry! I didn’ know! ’Course, it’s late there, innit! I forgot about the time zones. You’re two hours behind me, aren’t you? No, wait, tha’ would be two hours earlier than me, right? No, ahead …”

  I hate drunks. In fact, I detest them. “Whether you’re ahead or behind would depend on where you’re calling from, now, wouldn’t it?” I said nastily. “And if you drink any more, you’ll not only be behind, you’ll be late.”

  “Pennsylvania,” he replied, managing to make the word sound like a tire going flat. “I have a nice li’l apartment now in Moun’ Choy. You should come and visit. It’ll be like old times, back in college. And you bring that husband of yours. And ohh … you’re a mommy now! Bring the baby. I’d jus’ love to see the baby. You know I love the li’l babies.” He started to blubber. “Bu’ I’ll never have one of my own, will I, because they don’ let faggots adopt!”

  “Listen, this isn’t Faye. And Tom’s dead.”

  “Faye, honey? You didn’t tell me!”

  I was sorry I’d brought up the subject. “She’s not here right now, so call back—”

  “Oh, Faye, now you’re not even talking t’me? And I though’ we were friends.”

  “Okay,” I said, “we’re bosom buddies. Now, how about calling back tomorrow, okay?”

  “Really, Tom died? I never even met him! Everybody’s dying! Daddy, Aunt Winnie … Mother looks awful … God knows whether Cricket’s alive or dead … but you have the baby! The only one of us who’s produced an heir is Deirdre, you know that. The end of the ‘dynasty.’” He broke into mawkish sobs.

  Sloane Renee was now standing up in her Port-a-Crib, yanking on the upper rail like a prisoner planning a breakout. She was winding up to a good fuss, I could tell. “I’m going to switch this phone off now,” I said. “Whoever you are.”

  “No, wait!” the voice said, suddenly sounding almost sober. “I’m not shitting you, Faye, something’s really wrong with Mother. The doctor calls it pneumonia, but then why isn’t it clearing up? Answer me that! And she’s got lesions on her fingers, and she’s seeing things funny. I tried to get her to the hospital, but Deirdre wouldn’t let me move her!”

  I picked up the baby and began to walk her. “Give me your number, okay? I’ll have Faye call you. This is Em Hansen, her roommate, do you understand?”

  I heard the sound of a phone clattering into its cradle. The connection went dead.

  I stared at the illuminated screen at the top of the phone and considered throwing th
e instrument out the window, or flushing it down the toilet, but settled for switching it off. Then I began again the laborious task of getting the baby to sleep.

  IT WAS 9:06 p.m. when Faye showed her face again at the Pawnee Hotel, exactly eight minutes after Sloane Renee had finally drifted back to sleep. Still waiting for the twitching that would herald deep slumber, I had not yet even put her down in her crib.

  The Faye who returned was not the Faye who had left. This one was glowing with vitality and good humor. Quickly undressing and going about her evening tooth-brushing with a light dispatch, she hummed a jaunty tune.

  I asked, “What’s put the roses in your cheeks, Faye?”

  She snorted, a quick dismissal of my question. “Give that girl to me,” she told me. “It’s late. I got some nursing to do, and it’s sacktime for all of us.” She took the baby, checked her diaper although I always kept it clean, lay down on her bed, swathed the child in the folds of her arms and the blankets, presented her a milk-swollen breast, closed her eyes, and smiled a private smile.

  How I missed the days when Faye shared her heart with me. I watched her Mona Lisa smile, wondering not for the first time what had turned the tide between us. Was it the stresses of motherhood, or losing Tom? Was she so tightly bonded to her child that there was no room for me? Or was I forever cursed for having been with her husband at his death when she was not?

  I turned out the reading lamp over my bed and stared up into the darkness, listening as Faye’s breathing deepened and grew slower. I thought she was long asleep when she murmured, “There might be a job for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Time to be getting back into the working world, don’t you think?”

  “Yes …”

  “Nice little mystery, just your kind of puzzle. It involves a missing painting.”

  I said, “Tell me more.”

  I listened for an answer, but it was lost to sleep, or perhaps hidden behind a charade.

  THE PLAN, WHEN we had left Salt Lake City, had been to drive up to Cody starting early on one day, arriving as we had done by midafternoon, and, if Faye’s business could be concluded quickly, driving home the afternoon following. Aside from the fact that I needed to get back to my classes, this would save the cost of a second night’s stay, part of my campaign to teach Faye to live frugally. Food, apart from that glorious cinnamon roll, the not-so-glorious pizza, and whatever Faye could mooch off her client, was to be something we got out of paper sacks stored in the trunk of the car. So the next morning, having taken a quick trip out to the car, I sat on the edge of my bed eating that peanut butter and jelly sandwich, wondering how soon Faye might be ready to leave.

  She opened one eye. “What time is it?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  She closed her eyes again. The baby stirred. She drew Sloane to her breast.

  I said, “Everything go okay yesterday?”

  She smiled without opening her eyes. “Yes. Very well.”

  I waited. When she said nothing more, I said, “So you got the job?”

  “Well, not yet. We’re sort of discussing terms.”

  Sort of. “Oh. Good.” But that wasn’t good. It meant that she was being encouraged to persist with the airplane game. And it meant we would be staying longer. “Well, um, you know I have things to do back in Salt Lake City.”

  Faye didn’t answer. I watched her and the baby in the dim early light. If we did stay another night, she might lend me her pass, and I might get an uninterrupted visit to the Whitney Gallery, even a glimpse of the Natural History Museum. I reminded myself also that mine was the easier part of the job. All I had to do was hang out with the baby and tour interesting exhibits while Faye jollied the client. I imagined some arrogant, retired captain of industry with clicking teeth and presumptions regarding Faye’s availability. I shivered. I wanted out of here for all our sakes. Then I remembered the strange phone call and said, “I forgot to tell you: Someone phoned last night while you were out.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Some drunk who wanted you to keep somebody named Willie from messing with a painting. He told me all about his family. He said he was a ‘faggot’ and he lives someplace in Pennsylvania.”

  “Mount Joy?”

  “I think that’s what he said.”

  “Oh. That would be Hector.”

  “That would fit,” I said. “Perfect name. Typecasting.”

  “Right. He’s an actor.”

  “A bad one,” I said. “Hector the actor. What a name. Was the painting the same one you mentioned when you came in last night?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “I quit trying to keep up with Hector’s hallucinations years ago. He sees a lot of pink elephants.”

  “In college. That’s where he said he knew you from.”

  “Right. In college.”

  “He said he made you a connection. Is this how you know the Krehbeils?”

  “Sure. We had a class together.”

  “And who’s Willie?”

  Faye glanced at me sharply for a moment and then closed her eyes again. The baby’s lips relaxed as she fell back asleep. Faye disconnected and rolled over, putting her back toward me. “Wake me again at eight, will you?”

  I gritted my teeth. That meant she wanted me to watch the baby while she slept. I took a breath and said, “No, Faye. I want to take a walk.”

  “Take the baby?” She made it sound pitiful.

  I thought of all the times I had nearly fallen asleep in my classes from being up too late or too early with the baby.

  A soft gray light was filtering in through the window blinds. It had been at about this time in the morning that Sloane Renee had been born, though closer to the fall equinox than the spring. I had been with them both, holding Faye’s hand, and had watched her little treasure, her little life-changer, slide out into the world. How much more could I do for her?

  I gazed at Sloane, who was doing her cherub impersonation, and decided, one more time, that it wouldn’t hurt me to show kindness to this little person and that big person. I said, “Deal, long as you give me an hour in the museum without her later on.”

  “Deal.”

  So I finished my sandwich and took a shower and dressed, shifted the sleeping baby into the carrier that doubled as a car seat, bundled her up with extra blankets, then hoisted her, the car keys and the backpack, and headed out into the cold.

  It was a clear, crisp morning, the kind of air that freezes the hairs inside your nostrils. Just a few high clouds traced the sky. Watching the ghosts of my breath, I loaded the baby into the car and headed up Sheridan Avenue the opposite way, toward the road to Greybull. Soon I had left behind the tourist traps and strip malls and was rising onto the mesa that stood above Cody to the east.

  The road swung eastward then started its climb onto the vast, desert outcropping of the Willwood Formation, a soft, striped shale that fills the middle of the Big Horn basin. The Willwood had been laid down by the events of the Eocene Epoch: Fifty million years ago, as the earth began to heave the Rocky Mountains upward and wind and water and ice began simultaneously to wear them back down, the rivers carried away the eroded muck and dumped it here. Then, the climate was cool and humid, and the clays that settled in the lakes and on floodplains oxidized into vibrant hues.

  In their labor of birth, the mountains had rested awhile, and then had heaved higher again, and the climate had shifted as well, becoming arid, with cold winters and hot summers. With the further uplift, the great-granddaughters of the earlier watercourses had ceased depositing mud and grit and had instead begun to erode channels forming broad bottom lands that were now dotted with ranches. Most of the Willwood Formation now sat like a custard in the center of the basin, surrounded by a ring of mountains that stood high like a knuckly old pie crust: Starting from the northwest and continuing counterclockwise to the northeast rose the Absarokas, the Owl Creeks, and the Big Horns, a great circle of ranges raised high by the titanic
forces of the earth. Only to the north did the ground lie lower, and through this portal flowed the waters of six counties.

  Thus, as was Nature’s whim, the bones of ancient lakes had become a desert sculpture. Time and water and wind had eroded the Willwood into an array of hoodoos and pagodas and pyramids and temples, a badlands in bold horizontal stripes, a desert paint-box of purple and gray and red. It was a no-man’s-land, good for nothing but hunting fossils and rattlesnakes, searching for oil, and taking long walks to clear the mind.

  I was driving along the upper edge of the valley cut by the Shoshone River—the aptly named “Stinking Water,” as it smelled of sulfur. My intention was to search for cobbles, a miscellaneous passion of mine. The rivers had occasionally been so vigorous that they had carried not just mud and grit, but also cobbles, and it was their whim to leave them here and there, laced through the shales. In places, these cobbles formed great boulevards, like Parisian streets run wild, a pirate’s sampling of every kind of rock that had stuck its nose to the air as the mountains shoved their ways skyward. The Shoshone flowed east from the Yellowstone Plateau, and thus carried volcanic rocks from the Yellowstone eruptions.

  I pulled the car over on the first bench in the badlands and got out to look around. I got the baby into the backpack and began to walk, turning over gray and black volcanic cobbles; dark, smooth orbs speckled randomly by angular feldspar laths. Farther afield, if I could remember where to look, waited lovely pearl-white quartzites—metamorphosed sandstones—carried clear from Idaho, that would display the interlocking circles of percussion fractures, a mute record of the violence of their turbulent ride downriver, rings within rings within rings. To anyone else these oddities might be less interesting than hockey pucks, but to me they were beautiful, a fascination of form and parentage.