Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

by Boris Fishman

  She laughed without joy. “Well, you know—within reason.”

  “What is reason?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s too many things, honey,” she said. “Not now.”

  “Fine, ginger ale,” he said.

  “That’s easy,” she said.

  “Easier than reason?” he said, knowing he was being funny.

  “Max, do you know the way you help Mama chop vegetables in the kitchen?”

  “Sure. I’m good at it.”

  “You’re very good at it. The lady downstairs who checked us in? There’s a restaurant on the other side of the hotel. But one of her cooks didn’t come in. And she’s got a hundred potatoes that need peeling. You will be paid in ginger ale.”

  “What is this?” Alex stirred.

  “Mama and Papa have to go somewhere for an hour,” Maya said. “And when you’re finished with your one hundredth potato, we will come pick you up.”

  “Are you leaving me?” Max said, the humor gone from his face.

  “Leaving you?” Maya exclaimed. “For about one hour, silly goose.” She wrapped him in her arms and rolled with him on the bed, her face pressed into his cardigan. He looked so grown-up in that cardigan—like a grandfather in a boy’s body. “Why don’t we go downstairs and I’ll show you what I mean. You don’t like it, we’ll figure out something else.”

  Max didn’t answer—he seemed placated.

  “Max, wait for us in the hallway outside?” Alex said. “We have to lock up.”

  Max looked between them, rolled off the bed, and walked out of the room.

  “What are you doing?” Alex said after the door closed.

  “You want to go and get it done with, so let’s go. We can’t take him with us.”

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  “I went to the supermarket and bought five bags of potatoes. And then I gave fifty dollars to Wilma. And all of a sudden she developed a need for a hundred peeled potatoes, in exchange for watching an eight-year-old boy. Free potato with everyone’s steak for dinner tonight.”

  “You’re going to leave Max with a woman who had to be bribed,” he said. “A woman we met an hour ago.” Alex was right, but in Maya’s mind, Wilma’s avarice was mitigated by her attachment to a kitchen. She would save on old carpeting, but she would not let a boy come to harm. Kitchen code. “Why not just leave him in the room?” Alex said.

  “Because then he would not be distracted. Then he would be worried and sad. Then he would want to escape. As would I.”

  “Then I’ll stay with him, and you go.”

  “I can’t drive, remember?” she taunted him. She taunted again: “Want to go by yourself?”

  They took the steps down in a file. By the time they reached the restaurant, Max had forgotten about being left behind and bounded into the kitchen, the air thick with the aroma of browning meat and herb-scented steam rising from a pot larger than him. A man in a spattered apron with tattoos up and down his arms reached down for a low-five from his apprentice, which the apprentice supplied. Max walked through the kitchen like a cat—like someone who had been in a kitchen before. Maya was proud of him.

  “I got you a bucket to sit on,” Wilma Gund appeared in the kitchen. “You mind sitting on a bucket?” Max shook his head no. “I’ve got a large Canadian party, so I’ve got to shoo. You’ll tell Derek here how things go?” Max got the joke, smiled.

  “He looks like a street urchin,” Alex said to Maya.

  “Eugene and Raisa don’t have to know,” Maya said. “Max, honey, we’re going. We’ll be back in an hour.” Max shouted bye.

  “An hour,” Alex said when they had bundled into the Escape. The antique clock attached to the Valley First National Bank said six o’clock. He watched one of the arms slide: 6:01. Both nothing and too much had happened already on this day, and it was still light outside. The Rubins were in Adelaide, Montana. He was about to call on Max’s birth parents. In mere days, he had traveled definitively away from life as he knew it. How little it took to unravel things, compared to what it had taken to make them cohere. It was masochistic, this behavior—because voluntary. Yes, he had remembered the license plate. He could have pretended he hadn’t, though he had called it out before he could think to suppress it. Either way, he could not—he was not in the habit of hiding things from his wife. But he regretted being here. He regretted it—that was the only word for it. He was filled with the foreboding that accompanies gratuitous risk. And wondered in mystification at the person in the passenger seat.

  14

  The stunted emptiness of eastern Montana had been so demanding—it was a negative demand; the demand was for stillness, to bear it—that, in some way, Maya’s confidence that they would make it through was not final. When she had seen Adelaide rise from the road as abruptly as the shower that shook them a half hour outside town, she blinked twice, just like her son, wanting full confirmation. Now the Rubins were reciprocating the unannounced visitation of the other side eight years before, only, incredibly, even more unannounced. Maya had tried other ways. They didn’t have a phone. Who didn’t have a phone in the twenty-first century?

  Alex turned on the ignition and the car came to humming, obedient life. It was colder here than in the prairie, also later in the day, and he switched on the heat. Despite the drop in temperature, the sky was clear, stingingly clear.

  “What if they’re not there?” Alex said. Maya looked over at him and saw that he was holding down half a dozen unanswered questions. If they’re not there, do we wait for them? Leave a note? But what if the note spooks them? But we can’t very well stake out the place, can we? And then what if they’re not there in a more permanent way? That is, if the whole thing is an error and there is no Laurel and Tim at 2207 New Missouri Trail South? Or no 2207 New Missouri Trail South? And what if they say they want to meet Max? Or they can’t tell us why he behaves the way that he does? Or that they don’t remember saying not to let their child do rodeo?

  “I don’t know, Alex,” she whispered.

  “Can we go home tomorrow?”

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow.”

  “You want to spend it here?” he said.

  “Better than in the car, driving all day.”

  “We are so far from home,” he sighed. “We are on the other side of the continent. I wish we could fly home.”

  She wished to tell him to take Max and fly home—and leave her behind. “Okay, we’ll leave tomorrow,” she said, so quietly that Alex gave her his straining look. “Let’s drive. Max is a genius at peeling potatoes. He’s probably halfway done.”

  The GPS said nine miles from Adelaide proper to New Missouri Trail South. The first bit of sunset, pink as a dog’s ears, was creeping into the sky; the Rubins would return the favor of a visit at dinnertime. As they slicked along the new tar of U.S. 89, Maya stared at the mountains blurring in an unbroken line outside her window. At first, they were so vast and eye-filling that Maya could not manage to do anything but stare senselessly or look away to the dashboard, so reassuringly minor and there. But now, some invisible thing having happened inside her—she was checking into the hotel, arguing with Alex, buying potatoes, but somewhere offstage some wheel was turning without her awareness—she wanted to look at the mountains. The mountains were large enough to blot out Laurel and Tim, and even Alex and Max. She had nine whole miles to spend on them—fifteen minutes according to the especially careful way Alex drove here, even though there were few cars compared to New Jersey. She, a non-driver inept at measuring distances between vehicles, was always grateful for his care at the wheel, but she was especially grateful now. When she was young, by some miracle awoken fifteen minutes before the alarm, they appeared endless from the vantage point of a matted head on the pillow. For fifteen minutes, the world was hers. They lasted forever. She wanted the same now.

  The mountains looked indistinguishable, one wrinkled silver pyramid after the next. She wondered if someone raised on them could tell them apart. Surely th
ey could, though by now the ubiquitous peaks would have become invisible, the way the homes on Sylvan Gate Drive were invisible to Maya, though she could say with a moment’s readiness who lived where if only somebody asked. But nobody asked.

  Compared to these peaks, the Badlands were scratches in the ground, turned-up earth. But despite her certainty that she would vanish without trace if she dared venture into these mountains—how did one venture into the mountains, as people said? they looked like sheer walls of stone—she could not persuade herself that they were a hostile force. It was so clean up there.

  Maya had sooner expected to find Max’s biological parents than to encounter the reaction that she had got from her son to the place he was born: nothing. Max became animated when the Rubins came closest to the rituals of home: oatmeal at the campground, the hotel room, the potatoes. But when she looked at the mountains, it made her believe that some kind of solution was possible to the impasse Max and his family had come into, life before which Maya recalled with difficulty, as if the situation compressed their first eight years together and pitilessly expanded the previous six months. The smallness she felt next to the mountains was the smallness of a young person, a ward, not the smallness of insignificance.

  Her next thought was: One day, and perhaps soon, her mother would die. And so would she, and Alex. Even Max. She held these facts placidly; she felt collected and ready. Until it happened, however, she wanted very badly to go at something in a way she had never gone at it before. But what? She could not say. She clucked her tongue. She began flight down so many paths she had not traveled before, and then: dead end.

  “Alex, darling, would you pull over?” she said. “Just for a minute.”

  “You wanted to get there,” he said, but she knew he would indulge her because she had used the endearment.

  Alex clicked the blinker and with a protracted glide came to a halt. Out of town, the roadway had become provisional once again—a bright dotted line bisected the middle, but the lanes were barely wide enough for an SUV and were not marked at the edge of the road, sloping into patchy grass and loose rock below, as if this was as far as the road makers could push out because the landscape couldn’t wait to take over. She knew why Alex disliked pulling over. It drew attention, signified extraordinary circumstances, the machine of their lives in sudden, panicked disarray. He disliked disarray, therefore lived with certainty that it waited at all turns. Or perhaps not: Perhaps he was able to shut his mind of its possibility until Maya forced him into contact with it.

  In the few minutes since they’d left the hotel, the temperature had lost ten degrees. She dug in the backseat until she found the blanket Max had used to cover himself two nights before—was it only two nights? The night that preceded her meeting with Marion felt as if it had occurred weeks before, and Marion himself dipped in and out of reality, though she had only to think of lemon balm or cedar or fat Wilfred Shade. Already, those things were taking on the sheen of lost history, foreign experience, nostalgia. For years, she would have the privilege of nostalgia about something she’d savored for twenty-four hours.

  Outside, shivering slightly, she leaned against the warm, ticking vehicle and gazed out before her. She breathed deeply—her shortness of breath had gone at some point. The air rushed in with a cold sharp scoring sting, already cold enough that what she breathed out was visible, ghostly and white. She was trying to take in the enormity grandstanding before her; she wanted something that she could take with her. Or were a mountain’s powers unborrowable, lost unless one lived within constant sight of it, some kind of refill occurring with every morning’s first gaze? She laughed at herself. She was the local lunatic. She was the one at whom people would point.

  The wind picked up and tugged away the edge of the blanket. She would have let it fly off but that would have brought Alex out of the car to point out the obvious. She felt the slightly hysterical wish to undress, shiver with the wind, rash all over with goose bumps. She wanted to be skinned like a hide, reduced to parts, cut open to the hot glowing center. Or was the soothing blankness she was experiencing the blankness of barrenness, her hot glowing center glowing with nothing? She was forty-two. Forty-three. It was too late, in any case.

  She climbed back into the vehicle. Alex said there were tears in her eyes. She snorted. Alex would not ask why she was crying, but also could not go on without alerting her that she was—something that needed her attention, like a spill on the floor. She had always thought that, in a moment like this, this was because he wasn’t interested in the real story. But perhaps it was because he didn’t know how to speak about it, and the observation was as far as he knew how to go.

  +

  Was the sight of an ’80s-model coffee-and-milk Datsun with the license plate MTRODEO1 in the yard of 2207 New Missouri Trail South Maya’s reward for all her difficult thoughts? All these years, the Datsun had chuffed along somewhere out there. Well, here. It was mounted on a rough-hewn wooden platform, the way you saw sometimes at the car dealership, an unnatural situation for a car, like an animal trapped in a tree. Clearly, it wasn’t being used any longer.

  Seeing it, Maya grabbed Alex’s wrist and he squeezed back as he could from the wheel. The long driveway off a rutted side road off 89 gave onto an old country farmhouse with a gouge in one of the walls, as if the place had been bombed, though the garden had a neat fence and the driveway looked freshly graveled. Two dogs stormed out of the house, a runt leaping and barking hysterically and a lean, triangle-headed hound that observed the scene with brambled indifference. Then they gave up and gnawed on pebbles of gravel. The screen door slammed open: a short man with a full belly. He rattled a soda can filled with coins and the dogs trotted back inside, the small one fitting neatly under the legs of the large. They had known each other for some time.

  Alex and Maya exchanged looks and stepped out of the vehicle. They were surveyed by the man at the door, his mouth working. It was working them over. He had a copper-colored face as round as a melon, the left eye turned unnaturally in its orbit, the lid half-shut over the eye. Around the mouth was a pelt of goatee neatly clipped and gone white. The blasted eye squinted at them. He looked like a giant bird, grounded.

  “Mnyah,” he said to no one in particular.

  Alex stepped ahead of Maya. “Excuse me,” he said. “We’re looking for Laurel and Tim. There’s no phone. We tried to call.”

  The man whistled. “Who’s asking?”

  “We only want to talk to them,” Alex said.

  “Please,” Maya said. “It’s a family emergency. Are they inside?”

  “You’re their family?” the man said. The good eye rolled up and down.

  “We are, in a way,” Maya said.

  “We are the parents of the child they gave up,” Alex said. Maya eyed him with gratitude.

  The man whistled again. “And they gave you this as their forwarding?”

  “It was a closed adoption,” Maya said. “It was the best we could find. We know this isn’t right—but we came anyway.”

  The good eye flickered, and he swiveled to regard them with it. “Why?”

  “But you know them,” Maya insisted. She half turned toward the old Datsun. “That’s their car. That’s the car in which—” She broke off. “It was registered here. Without a phone number. We would have called.”

  “I see,” the man said. “Come in—I’m interrogating you at the door.”

  He vanished inside the house. Maya and Alex looked helplessly at each other. Maya stepped forward and held the screen door for Alex. He shivered in the cold air and followed her.

  The house had a Mediterranean feeling, with stone walls and earthenware jugs peering from decorative shelves. The dogs were laid out in the middle of the hallway, snout to snout. Maya and Alex stopped, afraid of rousing them.

  “Step over,” the man said from the doorway to the kitchen. “They’re novelty junkies, they don’t care about you now.” Maya and Alex hurdled over the dogs, who answered with low s
impering moans. The man waddled back into the hallway—one of his legs was as good as his eye. “Harris Sprague,” he extended a hand. Maya shook it, Alex shook it.

  “It’s a beautiful home,” Maya said, trying to placate him.

  Harry flicked on the lights and said “Mnyah.” He was an author. The Harris Sprague oeuvre stared at them from bookshelves running the length of the hallway. There were so many titles, and then each had as many translations. They were reading him in Bulgaria and Norway and even China—if that was Mandarin and not some other fantastical tongue. An entire hallway filled with books by the same man saying the same things in different languages—it was dizzying. The dead eye evaluated their impressions.

  Maya expectorated a sound that she hoped sounded like marvel. She raked her mind for something to say. “What do you write about?” she said finally.

  “And what do you do?” Harry Sprague said with a whimper. His breathing was labored, like a smoker’s. The silences were kept festive by the loud rise and fall of his breathing.

  “Mammograms,” Maya said.

  “And what do you mammogram about?” he said, a naughty smile on his face.

  Maya felt shame at her mistake, but it was distant and muffled.

  “That’s Dreamer,” Harry nodded at the larger dog. “Named for a writing teacher I had. He said, ‘You’re a dreamer, Harry, if you think this’ll be published.’ So I’d send him every one of my books with a big middle finger for an inscription. Then he died on me. We’re all going. When I got him, Dreamer ran faster than a horse. He’s a lurcher. He could tear the soul out of a deer.”

  Harry twitched, the dead eye rolling toward the kitchen. “Get out of the hallway and come in here,” he said. “Sangu would put me in the corner if she were at home; I’m not being hospitable.” The Rubins were instructed to sit at a wide-planked kitchen table. They were surrounded by two walls of glass cabinets behind which sat mounds of elaborately painted china. “There’s no one for linens and service sets like Sangu,” Harry said. “No British woman is devoted to service sets like an Indian woman. I’m a savage to her. She thinks I brought her to Mars.” On the long wooden table, Harry deposited an unlabeled bottle of red wine. “Mnyah,” he said. “She’s out for poker. Harry’s on parole.”