“What’s wrong with Max?” Marion said.
She traced her own shapes on the hardpan. She liked hearing him say her son’s name; it came out differently. Unable to sleep in heavy shoes despite being outside, she was wearing flats on heavy wool socks. She was really going for elegance every chance that she got.
“I am filled with nervous energy,” she said. “I can’t focus. I feel like I’m going to make a mistake. Actually, I felt that long before coming here. In truth, I feel safer here. I should be more afraid, and then I realize I’m not.” She looked over at him. “I sound crazy, I know.”
“I don’t mind it,” he said.
“It’s different for you because you’ve been here many times. You’ve been here many times, haven’t you?”
He nodded.
“There’s more than one campground, isn’t there?”
“Guilty,” he said.
She laughed sharply into the night. “I don’t mind it.”
They sat silently for some time. “I’ll tell you about my son,” she said, “and you tell me about Wilfred and Carla.”
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re shivering. Take my shirt. There’s some hot tea in this thermos. With whiskey in it.” He spread his shirt over her shoulders—she smelled woodsmoke and a faint hint of dried sweat, but the dried sweat of activity rather than inactivity—unscrewed the cap of his thermos and poured. Maya inhaled something like grass bleached by the sun. “There’s some lemon balm over there,” he said, pointing. “Strained through the nicest sock that I’ve got. Nicest clean sock.” The seat of the thermos unscrewed to make a second cup, and he filled it with tea for himself. “A thermos for making friends,” he said.
“Is that what we are?” she said.
They drank silently. She liked the way that he sipped his, first worrying the liquid with his lips, then slurping it loudly, his brows gathered. It was a child’s way of doing something, unself-conscious and very serious all at once.
“Max is wild,” she said.
He looked over at her. “He looked normal to me,” he said.
“Here he’s normal,” she said. “I would say I cured him by bringing him back to where he was born, but I doubt that’s true. I don’t know what it is; I’m at the end of my understanding. At home, he’s wild. He runs away. Turns blue sitting in rivers. Eats grass. And then goes back to being a normal boy. Who can’t tell you a word about why he did what he did.”
“You don’t think it’s a phase?”
“That’s what my husband says.”
“I guess all men are alike.”
“Is that what Clarissa said?” Maya thought that she could corner the woman by speaking her name out loud, but the opposite happened. It killed the possibility that she was a marginal person in Marion’s life. “‘Don’t let my baby do rodeo,’ his mother said when she gave him to me,” Maya said. “What does that mean? I’d never heard of rodeo. I looked it up. You have to stay on the bull for eight seconds. But why?”
Marion smiled. “You have to think as a person from here, not there. What is there to do around here? The world looks everywhere but here. There’s money in rodeo. Glory. Your heart beats fast for a change.”
“You don’t seem like that.”
He shrugged.
Maya took Marion’s new cigarette out of his mouth and stuck it in her own. She took a long drag. “His dad—his original dad, I mean . . . I really don’t know what words to use.” She took her head in her hands. “Max doesn’t know he’s adopted—we call them ‘cowboys’ when Max is around, when the ‘cowboys’ brought the ‘little fish’ . . .”
“Easy now,” he said, and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Tell me about something else,” she said. “Tell me about Clarissa.”
Marion made a little noise of recollection. “Clarissa,” he said, and beat the thermos with his fingers. “It got to be we had nothing to say to each other. At first, we couldn’t get enough words in, always interrupting each other—‘Let me finish, let me finish.’ And then, little by little, it went to we had nothing to say. There’s a surreal aspect to when you realize that’s happening. Like swimming in a fishbowl. You’re moving, but slowly, you’re tired, and everything looks a little dead.”
“But why, Marion?” Maya said. “I don’t understand why.”
He kinked out the tips of his boots and laid his hands on his knees. “You’re talking like her now. That’s all the why there is. I wish I had more—it would certainly make people understand better. She kept rising in her workplace. They started flying her here and there. She liked it—she wasn’t planning on it, but she liked it. Taking meetings in Washington, D.C., and the like. Getting a tour of the Capitol—she’s a lobbyist for the cattlemen. At first it just seemed like less time to talk—if the time was there, it’d be fine. But then we started to get a kick out of different things. And if you want to know the truth, we stopped going to bed in the same way. She got perfunctory with it—so much so I started thinking were all these business trips just a name for a man, holed up somewhere like Chicago; she was always flying through Chicago. One night I went for her credit card bills—and I stopped myself. I didn’t want to live that way. We talked. She said there was no one. I told her my problem—again. Again, she said we would fix it; she’d gotten real good at listening to problems and promising fixes. And again nothing changed. And I left. Staying together despite all that seemed like the wrong thing to do. Just the principle of it. I want my daughters to live by principle. Of course, Clarissa thinks there was a woman. She calls up and says, ‘How’s the whore?’ But there wasn’t—that’s not it at all. People like principle on a man, but not too much.”
“And on a woman?” Maya said.
“A woman lives a life of contradictions wrapped inside paradoxes wrapped inside a big candy wrapper.”
“You took vows,” Maya said. “You made promises.”
“I thought about that,” he said, giving her a hard look. “But kids are smart. They got the smell of a wolf. Alma said, ‘High time, Daddy.’ I gained respect with them.”
“When people say I did it for the children, they usually mean staying.”
He gave her another hard look, and for a second she could see what he looked like in an argument. “My mood changed and stayed changed,” he said. “For ten years it stayed that way before I let myself go. I waited until the girls were in college. For ten years I waited.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, wrapping herself up. “I shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Everything coming out of my mouth is wrong.”
“No, I’m grateful,” Marion said. “Most people don’t ask anything. They’ve got answers without needing to ask me the questions.”
“How long ago was it?” Maya said.
“A very long year. There’s been five years in this year. That part I underestimated. Even after ten years alone in a marriage, it’s still nothing like a year alone, period.”
“You’ve been leading a monk’s existence?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“The waitress at the diner,” she said.
Marion chuckled. “Just fooling around,” he said.
“What are you looking for?” Maya said. “Can it really be better than what you had with your wife?”
He didn’t answer. Maya watched him with the hanging desperation of someone who wanted one. Feeling her gaze, he turned to her.
“I want to talk like Clarissa and I used to talk. To roll around like we used to roll around. I want to be an old man and have that. I made my wager maybe I can find it again. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who looks while keeping one foot safely inside the house. No, that’s not true—you think I didn’t look with one eye those ten years? I looked. I’m no saint. But then I thought—it won’t come while you’re in this. You’ve got to go all the way.”
Maya nodded. “I am emotional, and my husband is stoic,” she said, as if to give him company in his history of divergence. “We live in a house
in the suburbs. The only thing about our lives that isn’t a cliché is our son, who eats grass.”
“And who is that, speaking now?” he said.
“Clarissa,” she said, and they laughed. The tea-whiskey was making things easier; there was padding around what she was feeling. Momentarily, she did not actually feel the despair she was describing. Because she was speaking to this man? She might feel the despair again soon, but until then she was out on a bail whose guarantor was neither clear nor important. Jeremiah the black Buddhist was always telling her to live in the moment. She never understood him—in what other moment was it possible to live? She understood a little now, however. She wondered fiercely after Jeremiah. In her recollection, he remained twenty, but he was also forty-two now, and where? She wished for news of him, for he knew her even before Alex did. In her heart, she sent him a powerful wish for well-being. Jeremiah, Dima, Anton, Soraya—where were they? Why had she allowed all these people to vanish?
She drank off the remainder of the tea, still warm in her fingers, and watered the hardpan with the last drops. Somewhere out there, her mountain was resting. Was it a mountain? Was there a more accurate term? A bluff, a butte, a ridge? She felt the old desperation for the right names. Out here, one had to learn English all over again. Earlier in the day, Maya had tried to hold on to the words Ranger Holliver had called out. Washes, canyons, mesas, eskers, and fells: she gave up. It had used to make her feel unsafe, this encirclement by the unknown—but known to everyone else. It had occurred to her on the naturalist walk that this sense of endangerment was discretionary. If one does not know things, one also does not know one can be harmed by them.
Couldn’t she invent her own name for the mountain? Just as Laurel and Tim were “the cowboys.” Only that was a lie. How to be truthful about the mountain? Because a mountain was always truthful, she felt. The mountain did not make mistakes. (She remembered Uncle Misha: “A snowflake never falls in the wrong place.”) It would never work, her union with the bluff-butte-ridge-mountain. She resented its unapproachable splendor.
“I wanted to open a café once,” she said for no reason. “Café Gogol. Isn’t it something to open a café named after someone you haven’t read?” Somewhere far away, an animal howled at the night. She made a slight noise and recoiled.
“Just a coyote,” he said. “Mile away.”
“It feels like a short mile,” she said.
He smiled. “Don’t think about it. Keep telling me about the café.”
“I wanted it to have a library. I would be strict—you would have to read the book there. But you could pay with books. One day a week, for example, you would not be allowed to pay with money, only books. And I would be the cook. At the diner today, I looked at the man in the cooking window, with sweat and grease on his face, and I imagined myself in his position. In this small town, forgotten by everyone, everything.”
“I’m sure it looks like the desert to you,” Marion said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if a million people come here each year. Man who owns that diner’s a millionaire. I’d pay money to see you take him on to put in a library, though.”
“I never thought it could be cold in the desert,” Maya said.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I clean my brain here.”
They sat on their stumps, looking ahead. The silence was split by an occasional call, something that sounded like loneliness to Maya and to the caller probably like a basic self-affirmation. Her first night on Misha’s farm, Maya was awoken by a donkey shrieking like a sheep caught in barbed wire. She rushed to wake up her uncle. “Oh, little daughter, he’s just checking himself,” Misha said, smiling sleepily. By the end of the summer, the call had merged with the other sounds of the night. Now, the howl having receded, there was full silence, not even cicadas, the usual custodians of the darknesses Maya had known.
“You’re trying to find the parents, aren’t you,” Marion broke the silence.
“I’ve spent eight years thinking about it,” she said. She told him the town. “Sometimes, I think it isn’t an actual place, Montana. It exists but not in the way other places exist.”
“Are you nervous?” he said.
“I envy Alex,” she said. “He thinks this is a mistake. Today, I think it’s a mistake, tomorrow I think it’s not a mistake.” She felt the ground with her fingers. “It’s my birthday in two days. But I want to fast-forward to the day after. Isn’t that sad?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care about my birthday. You can’t assign good things.” He slapped his knees as if this was a concluding statement and he was about to rise, but he stayed put and a little nerve seemed to go out of him. He shook his thermos. “My flawless feel says there are two capfuls of this whiskey-tea left. Let’s finish, and then I’ll show you something. A birthday present.” He pointed into the gloom.
“You want to go—there?” she said.
“It’s not bad.”
“Are you sure? I’ll need to hold your arm.”
“I won’t object.”
After finishing the tea, they walked past the edge of the campground, the hardpan murmuring under their feet, Maya’s head filling with rattlesnakes. Every step resolved amicably was a small deliverance—she got sixty a minute. But you couldn’t feel those attacks of relief—safe, safe, safe—without striding around darkness where rattlesnakes roamed.
“They don’t really come out at night,” Marion said, guessing her thoughts. They weren’t hard to guess: She was stepping through the gloom like a horse, her legs kicking out before cautiously meeting the ground. “They like sunshine. Just like you.”
The campground was far behind now, though Marion walked steadily without the aid of a flashlight. She asked if he still had it, and he shone it in front of her. “But it only makes it darker, in a way,” he said. She nodded and he flicked it off.
In the darkness, Maya felt uneasy down to her bowels. She made herself think of an evening at Uncle Misha’s. Her uncle had not brought her to the farm to stand in the crystalline sun, finally revealed after nine months of winter, and admire fresh soil. She was given a spade and pickaxe and sent to ruffle up plots for corn, squash, and beans in the garden Misha had decided to get going. By two P.M., the sun, looking to make up for time lost in winter, had reached the spot in the sky from which it could shine most directly on Maya’s pigtails, and she felt that her stomach would tear in half if she lifted the pickaxe once more. But she refused to reveal herself as unequal to the task, buried her face in a trough Misha had just refilled with icy well water for the pigs, and went back at it. At the dinner table, as Misha stuffed behind his cheeks bread smeared with sour cream and sunflower oil, he glowered at his niece pridefully. The niece fell asleep at the dinner table.
The night that Misha had asked Maya to go out to the garden and snip off some zucchini for his farmhouse stir-fry—eggplant, old bread crusts, blistered tomatoes—was well into the summer. (She observed with pride the copper of her skin, dried out by the sun; her forearms, which, she imagined, showed new lines and veins; only her breasts refused to grow.) The garden had lost its mind. The leaves of the squash, pitted by some infestation Misha had explained but Maya had forgotten, hung about like giant elephant ears; the squashes themselves trampled underfoot like Buddhas; the cucumbers and zucchinis swung at every step like—well, it was impolite to say what she gathered they resembled; and the tomato vines had wrapped themselves around every fencepost or slithered down the loam like reptiles. Snakes lived in the garden, and gophers, and rabbits. The entire animal world approved of the garden she’d made.
It was dusk when she walked into the garden for Misha’s dinner zucchini, violet bands of light on the horizon, the grass exhaling after being released by the sun. Pushing aside the cratered squash leaves, which regathered above her, she felt as if she was disappearing into an unfriendly wood; she imagined the pest that had riddled the leaves crawling around her ankles and snakes coiling around her feet. She got hopelessly tangled, but when she tried to free
herself, she found an even denser clump, and then something pricked her skin. She screamed and tried to fight her way out of the patch, trampling the harvest. Stalks banged her shins, sandpapery leaves rubbed her thighs, thorns pecked her cheeks. She fought with the thicket until she ran out and collided with Misha, who had come running out of the house.
“What is it, dochen’ka?” he huffed out. His smoking made him short of breath. “What is it?”
She could not bring herself to say; she was too embarrassed. She only pointed at the garden.
“Are the boys stealing?”
Her face was so dusty that her tears left gray marks on Misha’s white dinner shirt. Fifteen years later, she would look into the mirror after an argument with Alex, her tears streaking her mascara, and think back to crying through dirt onto Misha’s shoulder. Maya forced herself to pull away—she hadn’t come this far for Misha to see her crying. “It’s nothing, Uncle Misha,” she said. “I’ll prune tomorrow.”
He took her shoulders and they watched the violet light, now with pink threads. “It’s different every time,” he said. “One season, half the seeds don’t make it, and it’s three feet between every plant. Another summer, every goddamn seed sprouts and it’s like a train terminal in there, everyone pushing and shoving. You’re good luck, dochen’ka: everything you sowed came up. Come, let’s look.”
She hesitated for a moment but followed him. He held her hand as they walked back into the garden. She flushed with embarrassment—it was the same old garden. But she became frightened again when Misha led her to the spot where the squash leaves clumped the hardest; inside his, her hand became clammy.
“You made this garden, little one,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Every single thing here was grown by your hand. It won’t hurt you.” With that Misha lowered himself in his dinner shirt to the dusty topsoil, turned gray by the daily violence of the sun, and marveled again because the tomato vines ran so thick there really was no place for a man to lie down in his own garden. Maya had to lie down in the next row, though Misha said twice, “I’m right here, I’m right here.” And they lay like that, the fear receding from her chest, until Misha said he wished he could remember if he had turned off the gas, and she giggled. But he had remembered his horilka—the flask was always in his back pocket, dinner wear or not—and he let Maya have a sip, which melted the sky into a star-spangled fleece, and at first blunted but then sharpened her hunger.
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