by Terry Davis
“Thanks for the applesauce,” I say. “It was good.”
“You’re welcome,” Carla says.
I tug clumsily at Carla’s nightgown. She pulls it off and flings it. The kitten squeaks. I always get a rush at the sight of Carla naked, even when it’s dark and I can’t really see her. I tremble.
We make slow love, lying on our sides, tummy to tummy, like old people probably do.
We touch and kiss lightly, practicing our tenderness. I hold her bottom so she doesn’t fall away. It’s just a handful.
Once, when we’d only made love a few times, just after I’d come Carla asked me what I was thinking. I didn’t want to lie, so I said I was thinking of the salmon on the Columbia when it was a river and how they’d leap the falls to swim upstream. She didn’t say anything. One of the next times we made love, by some miracle we came together. Recovering, we looked into each other’s eyes. “There they go,” Carla said, smiling. At first I didn’t get it—salmon and the Columbia were far from my mind. But in a second or two I did, and smiled back. “There they go,” I said. The phrase has since become ritual when our love is at its best.
Half lost in reverie of the loves we’ve made and the love we’re making and just too tired to control myself, I come too soon.
“I’m sorry.” I breathe.
Carla’s hands pace softly the back of my neck. “There they go.” She sighs.
XIV
We had a guest for breakfast, all right. And for the rest of Saturday and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
And she is decent. I put her to the test right away, sprinting upstairs in my boxer shorts and whipping off a hundred quick pushups on the kitchen floor as she scrambled eggs.
“You must be Louden,” she said, unperturbed.
“I’m Carla,” I replied. “Louden’s a lot prettier and can do pushups to infinity.”
“My name is Cindy,” she said. She’s built like a middle-distance runner. She says she skis a little, but I bet she skis a lot. She’s tan as a football. And she sure seems awful young for Dad.
“Howdy, Cindy,” I said, puffing a bit somewhere in the nineties. I was bearing down hard on one hundred when she turned from the stove and hooked my arm with her foot. I fell square on my nose.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Cindy, gathering plates from the cupboard. She was definitely insincere.
I laughed, figuring it a good move and a greeting commensurate with mine. I whipped off my last pushups as the blood dripped slow and steady.
Turning, Cindy saw the blood. “Bloody nose?” she inquired.
“Soaking up through the floor from the laundry room,” I replied. “I beat hell out of Dad’s girlfriends and stash ’em down there. They make quite a pile.”
“I bet they do. How might one avoid such a fate?” she asked, dropping a paper towel to the floor.
“Can’t be sure,” I said, wiping my nose and then the floor.
“Perhaps time will tell.”
“I imagine so. It tells everything else.”
“Larry tells me you won’t be joining us for breakfast,” Cindy said, beginning to set the table. Larry is my dad. Lawrence Swain. No middle initial.
“Dazz right, honey! Dazzz right!” I was imitating Elmo, smiling big and bright. “I don’t eat no regula’ foods. I just eats a few old raza blades and chews da concrete ofen da basement walls.”
“I hope the house doesn’t fall down!” she yelled after me.
“Me, too!” I yelled over my shoulder from the stairs.
I had to stuff some toilet paper in my nose and get dressed. Coach gave me a bunch of little gauze nose stoppers. But I’m all out. My nose has been cauterized twice. That seals the vessels for a while, but as the nose continues to get whacked with forearms and be ground into wrestling mats, the vessels break again in new places. Blood runs so close to the surface of the inside of my nose a rapid rise in temperature can turn it loose.
Carla was tired from waxing the DeSoto, so I let her sleep till time for work. Besides babysitting, she still sells health foods on weekends at the New Pioneer and she’s going to work full-time over the Christmas vacation. Little Katzenburger idled steadily from her nest in Carla’s nightgown at the foot of the bed.
Carla likes it that Cindy’s hair is soft and not lacquered and stacked like spun glass. Women beyond twenty-five have this tendency to look like Christmas decorations. I see them all the time at the hotel, looking like they had their hair done in the bakery.
At first Carla was a little dubious about Cindy leaving her little girl with her grandparents. She thought it might not be too wise of Cindy at such an important time for kids as Christmas. I thought the kid maybe suffered from some hideous deformity or childhood disease. Carla called me a maniac and punched me hard in the stomach when I told her that.
Cindy spoiled our speculations, however, by bringing the kid over on Christmas Eve to open presents with us. Her name is Willa. The little creature looked okay to me. A pain in the ass, as most toddler types are—giggly and drooly and sporadically weepy—but healthy enough. We kept Katzenburger downstairs. Kids can get pretty physical with baby animals, and we want Katzen to develop strength and sharpen her instincts for survival before we let her out in the world. Besides, she’s about half stuck to that bear.
After Cindy brought Willa over, Carla began to think Cindy’s leaving her with her grandparents had just been a courteous gesture in case we might not dig little kids, and probably part of a plan to go slow and easy on Dad.
It certainly was courteous. I can stand about fifteen seconds of those cookie-crumbling rug rats. But Carla enjoyed it. She took Willa down to see “the baby Katzen.” She showed her how to get her doll to talk and helped her warm its bottle. She bundled her up and took her out to play in the snow awhile, then pulled her on a short sled ride. I watched them out the window.
It wasn’t that bad a time. Carla helped her make a little bed out of wrapping paper and one of my new flannel shirts and Willa went to sleep in it under the Christmas tree.
Cindy talked some about skiing and her job with an ad agency and about the movies and books she likes. She likes Jesus Christ Superstar, too, but she said she couldn’t understand why I’d seen it eleven times, especially since I’m not even a believer. I told her it was food for my soul.
“Your soul?” she said.
“It can’t live on the promise of milk and honey alone,” I said and gave her a hungry-cherub grin as my stomach growled mightily, interrupting Miracle on 34th Street, which we’d been half watching.
“That’s not your soul,” Cindy said, smiling.
The ad agency Cindy works for has done business with Dad for a long time. I remembered that the name on the inside covers of those books on Dad’s nightstand is C. Callus—Cindy. And I wondered how long Dad’d been seeing her.
And then as we sat in the soft candlelight with the snow shining in through the window and the Christmas-tree smell fresh in the air and a miracle having only shortly transpired on TV, I got to thinking about Mom and being lonesome for her and wondering what new dishes she got herself for Christmas. But later, just as I was about to call her, she called me. And though she said she missed me, she sounded real happy, too. Her stepkids were yelling and screaming and having a good time in the background. I thanked her for the heavy-duty suspenders and she thanked me for the new tapes for her fat-assed Buick.
It continues to amaze me that Carla doesn’t get homesick for her parents. She contends they’re assholes, and they must be if she doesn’t miss them at Christmas. Maybe she’s just made up her mind not to.
I let my spirits get a little low on the way up to the park to meet Kuch and run our three. I guess I haven’t really gotten over feeling a little weird about Mom and Dad. Stupid as it is, I kind of wish marriages would last forever. Actually, I sometimes wish everything would last forever. This is a wish I fight hard but am not always able to defeat. Really, I’m proud of Mom and Dad for having the strength to fight for big-time happiness af
ter twenty years of something that must not have been enough. Christ, it must take guts to break up at the age of fifty, then go right out and find somebody new to love better. I get about half choked up just throwing away my sweat clothes at the end of the season. I’ve poured out so much of my life in them. I’d probably save them if they weren’t so smelly and disintegrated.
The end of the year is just a bad time for me anyway. I get used to thinking about Time moving and I have to fight hard not to be depressed. In a few years, no matter how healthy I am, my brain cells will begin to die. I could be the most heavy-duty stud in the northern hemisphere, the ace exobiologist or space physicist in the world, and I’d still really be nothing but a candidate for motehood in the sweep of Time’s great dustcloth. If Time can take the Columbia River and turn it into a big fucking lake, there’s no limit to what it can do to me.
My entire relationship with the world changes when I allow myself to get that low. I could actually feel the night go dull around me. I could feel strength leave my muscle tissue. I was beginning to feel the cold. The sparkle of the stars and the glow of the snow, the sharpness of my footsteps and the steady songs of my body—my pulse and my breathing—were pulling away from me. I knew I’d lose them for sure if my spirit couldn’t close the ground. I’d just been jogging, so I started to run. I kicked my knees up high and blew my breath out in sharp whacks against the cold. I spit into the shadows and sent my physical and spiritual warriors on the warpath.
I felt a lot better when I hit the park. The night was sharp again and my blood was rumbling. I had a strong buffer stoked up against the cold. Christmas carols wafted faintly from the Lutheran church. They have a tape that runs day and night. They play it real low and it creates a fairyland atmosphere. What can it hurt? I half expected to see Jesus crunching moodily through the park. Poor fucker with all those wasted dreams, all those deluded souls on his back. For a second I thought I did see him off across the track. But it was only Kuch, sneaking from tree to tree, fixing to surprise-attack me.
We gave Dad the word on Cindy this morning at breakfast. “A decent woman,” I said. “A good person,” Carla said. We left it at that, not wanting to overbear.
XV
To get to see the deer you take Indian Trail Road past the dump almost to Indian Painted Rocks, then turn off on a road the county keeps plowed so they can drive out and dump pelleted alfalfa for the deer. Unless you drive some kind of snow vehicle or a car like our 1941 DeSoto, it’s fairly easy to get stuck, even with the road plowed. The DeSoto is heavy as a mastodon, and with sixteen-inch wheels and a fluid-drive transmission, we cannot get stuck on level ground. Providing the snow isn’t unreasonably deep, that is. Just in case, I’ve got the trunk loaded with sandbags.
We brought our tape player and some appropriate deer-watching tapes, a few cold steamed vegetables, a thermos of tea with honey, a can of chicken-vegetable baby food for Katzen, and her blanket and her bear and her vitamins and pooping pan. We had a tank full of gas so we could keep the motor running and the heater going all night, and Dad and I triple-checked the exhaust system for leaks. Some snowshoed and industrious ax murderer might have gotten us, but carbon monoxide didn’t have a prayer. We wore our longies and our parkas and brought along two down sleeping bags and our pillows. We pulled up about thirty yards from a salt lick and turned off the headlights. We left the dash lights on low for the soft green glow they have.
It was plenty dark, but still early evening. There weren’t any deer around yet, so Carla figured it would be a good time to get out and put Katzen’s dinner to warming on the exhaust manifold. Way back last summer when Carla and I took our first camping trip together, about a half hour from the campground I pulled the pickup off the road and wired a can of beef stew to the exhaust manifold. After we pitched our tent we had hot stew ready for us without starting a fire or pumping a stove. Carla got sold on the idea and now keeps a can of hash or stew or meatballs and gravy in the trunk in case of emergency hunger, which is the only kind of hunger under which, she says, such canned crap should be consumed.
I learned cooking on the manifold from the cat skinners on the Trapper Peak fire. I spent two weeks on the fire line during the summer of my sophomore year, just before I found work at the hotel. Every day about an hour before lunch the manifolds of the big cats would be ringed with cans. From a distance they looked like Hawaiian leis strung around the big diesel engines. And it looked like a rowdy luau when a can would explode because somebody forgot to punch a hole in it so the heat could get out.
I could only take two weeks of firefighting. The money was great and the work was fun and exciting and good for me, but the life up there was just too dirty and uncomfortable. I may look like one rough country sonofabitch, but inside I’m all wall-to-wall carpet and big soft chairs. It could also get dangerous. A few days after I got home I heard on the news that a couple guys got killed up there. The fire started to run and a ranger went to see if anybody was left in its way. He must have misjudged the fire’s speed, because it got around him and cut him off. One of the dozer drivers got to the ranger, but the fire was burning so hard by then they couldn’t get out. So the dozer driver scooped out a hole and drove the cat over it, and he and the ranger crawled in. When the fire burned past and people could get to them, they found them without a burn on their bodies. They had suffocated because the fire burned all their air.
Carla putting the baby food on the manifold reminded me of Trapper Peak. You’d lie in camp in your paper sleeping bag that the forest service gives you, with ashes and soot and fire retardant in your hair, just wishing you could get a hot shower somewhere. And you’d be looking off at the little burning spots on the hill when all of a sudden a tree would just explode. The fire would be burning in the humus and roots, and when the trees reached their kindling temperature they’d go up in a big swoosh and a flame a couple hundred feet high. The sky would get like dawn for a few seconds, then go black again.
Katzen had taken her vitamins, eaten some chicken and veggies, and shit way out of her league in terms of both volume and stench before the first deer appeared. We were parked near some trees where the feed and salt are protected from heavy snow. The deer come down from the mountains and across an open field to get their dinner. I was out cleaning Katzen’s pan when I saw five or six whitetails strung out across the field. Carla had to open a window because of Katzen’s bad smell and so an odor of kitty shit and strains of Johann Pachelbel floated from the car into the night. The deer weren’t sure what was going down at their favorite nightspot. The owls and night hawks had been replaced by a more classical, less hygienic group.
When I got back in, Carla had things straightened around. Katzen was in the front seat nested in her blanket, sucking away at the leg of her bear. I set her pooping pan on the floor in front of her. In back Carla had set the plastic box of veggies and the tape player on the rear window deck and spread one sleeping bag over the backseat. The other bag was partly over her and partly left for me. I took off my boots and set them on the floor next to Carla’s and climbed carefully over the high old front seat.
“Here they come,” I said as Carla handed me a cup of steamy tea. The good smell of the tea and honey was driving out the smell of Katzen’s foul and precocious clinker. I stuck my nose almost in the tea and inhaled the rich soft fragrance. I licked the tea dew off my mustache and pointed so Carla could see the deer. She had to twist around to get a good view, so we changed places. We grunted and tugged and stretched and tunneled and held cups of tea carefully. We fluffed pillows and retucked each other a little and snuggled our feet. When we were all comfortable and ready to watch deer, Carla looked out the window and smiled and her eyes got big because the deer had come up to the feed while we were rearranging ourselves and stood around the car, none of them more than twenty yards away. We could hear them chewing.
I believe in preparing for things. Even little things like seeing the deer can be more fun if you cut down the number of potentia
lly unpleasant variables. For example, we had a full tank of gas and a good heater and a perfect exhaust system. We had lots of warm clothes and warm and comfortable coverings and some good stuff to eat and drink. We had music we liked, and some baby food and a reliable bear to pacify Katzen if she got colicky or whatever baby animals get that might make them raise a racket. We had the trunk filled with sandbags to keep us from getting stuck, but just in case I’d brought along a couple shovels. And I had a few flares.
Carla goes along with this, especially the music and vegetables, but she is only lukewarm about my last variable limiter, the 9mm Luger that I stow under the seat and sleep with on almost all camping trips. I admit I am not completely sold on the idea of having a gun along, but I am committed to it for now because I just believe our lives are too important to leave even relatively unprotected. I mean, I’m pretty strong and probably fairly up to fighting for our lives, but I can’t punch out a bullet or turn knife steel to rubber. Also, there are guys around who could beat me to death in a very few minutes with nothing but their fists and feet. I mean, we’re vulnerable enough just in relation to things like disease and bad moods, without leaving ourselves open to attacks by other human beings. Animals don’t worry me.
The problem, of course—and this is another variable—is that someone trying to hurt us might get to the gun first. I mean there are some arch motherfucking weirdos running around—even in the Northwest. Last summer, a social worker in a Triumph Spitfire picked up two hitchhikers near Missoula, and they killed him and cut off his fingers and ears for jewelry and ate his heart. This fall, some poor crazy asshole strapped a dozen sticks of dynamite around his middle and walked into a schoolhouse up on the reservation and hugged his estranged wife, who was substitute teaching, and blew the whole fucking place into the happy hunting ground. And that was three or four miles from our cabin on Loon Lake. But you can’t let stuff like that worry you into a preoccupation. It would diminish all the neat stuff about being alive. I just try to forget about it but still be ready.
