by Kent Meyers
In his room he carefully pulled aside the drapes. There was no city—only a closing veil and a far-off suggestion of lights, and on his window ledge a bird of snow. In the morning the falcon would wake as if shattering itself and leap from its own brittle form and raise warm wings and fall off the building and rise. The privacy of the bird was so intense it almost hurt to see it. Stanley closed the drapes.
He stripped to a T-shirt and underwear and crawled into bed. He dreamed of buffalo jumps. There was one on the Valen ranch, a pile of bones under a steep drop from a bluff. In his dream he saw the carnage of it, a kind of hideous flying, the immense beasts tipping in the air, splayed in all manner of wrongness, falling on top of each other, their bones shattering and ripping through their hides with awful cracking sounds, like white and bloody sticks, tree limbs twisted out of flesh, fertilized in blood. When he woke he didn’t know he’d left the dream. The sharp cracking of bones continued, until he realized it was a knocking on his door. He panicked, thinking there was a fire, and threw back the covers. The red numbers on the clock said 11:47. He looked around wildly, trying to remember where he’d left his pants.
Hey, Stan. It’s me.
The voice froze him. He stared. Then he saw his pants on the back of a chair. Still drunk, he stumbled to them and, holding them in front of him, went to the door. Through the peephole he could see Trace in the hallway, so close one of the alligators swung up and grew immense, its jeweled eye flashing light, before falling back again.
I know you’re looking at me. You gonna open up?
Her voice was very low, her forehead probably touching the door.
He turned. The movement sent him reeling. He looked at the window.
What are you doing here? he asked.
You don’t know, Stan?
His mind cleared. The tip: of course. She thought he’d made a mistake, and she had his name, so she’d gotten his room number and was returning the money. He pulled on his pants, then fumbled with the chain, freed it, and snapped the bolt open. Just as he turned the knob he realized his naivete. What if she was out there with a tattooed boyfriend tucked against the wall? But it was too late. He could only raise his elbow against the door being kicked against his face. But it swung slowly open, and there she was, alone.
Hi, Stan. Told you I’d see you.
Just like that she was past him. He watched her recede into the room, toward her own reflection in the mirror on the far wall. Her eyes in that mirror met his, then flicked around the room: his unzipped suitcase, his reading glasses with one bow folded on the nightstand, his copy of the convention’s program lying on the second bed. She reached the space between the two beds and turned.
So, Stan, she said.
Stanley. Really. Everybody calls me Stanley.
Guess I’m not everybody.
She brought the smells of the restaurant into the room—smoke and grease and spices, and her own smell, the perfume he’d noticed earlier, shampoo and perspiration—various and alive, and it made the room feel cramped, as if she’d brought a multitude with her.
You were a great waitress, he said. I mean, if you’re here—the tip wasn’t a mistake.
The tip? she said. One-thirty-four-fifty plus twenty percent? A mistake? That extra fifty cents was good, Stan.
He was disappointed to hear the actual figure: that it had a number at all, which made it something that could be restored instead of something purely gone.
Trace walked to the window. Panic seized him. He didn’t want her frightening the falcon. He didn’t want her even seeing it. He thought she might open the drapes, and to stop her, he said, too loudly: Why are you here, then?
She turned from the window, her eyebrows raised, then sat down in a chair and crossed her legs. The black skirt stretched tight over her thighs.
God, it feels good to sit down, she said. That damn restaurant, Stan. You wouldn’t believe what it does to a girl’s legs. And they sure make it hard to get to the rooms. If they knew I was up here—whew.
He looked at her legs and the dark triangle of shadow they formed.
Cowboys make that kind of money, huh? she asked.
It took him a moment to realize he was the cowboy, and she was referring to the tip.
I’m a rancher, he said.
She reached up and fiddled with the drape cord. His hand involuntarily rose from his side, to restrain her from pulling it. But she merely rolled it between her thumb and finger.
Right, she said. A rancher wouldn’t want a tip like that to show up on a credit card.
She shifted her legs. The black skirt rode higher, the little cave of shadow lightened.
Raising buffalo, she said. Hundred-fifty-dollar tips. You like doing good, don’t you?
He’d started out raising buffalo believing in a natural order, but after Hayley Jo’s murder, he just needed them, to know they were there, in all kinds of weather, living in their patient, impervious way.
I just wanted my wallet empty, he said.
It was the closest thing to the deep truth he’d said all evening. Her hand quit rolling the cord. She clearly hadn’t expected the answer. She stared at him, and a doorway opened, a chance to tell the whole story. The desire to do so overwhelmed him: to unburden himself of it. But he would break down if he so much as spoke his daughter’s name. He jerked his head downward, away from Trace’s eyes, and slapped his palm against the wall to steady himself. He was watching the floor heave when she spoke:
You’re out of money, Stan?
No. I’ve got. I meant I wanted—
I didn’t think so. You want to be empty, you got a ways to go yet. A hundred-fifty more, say—that get you closer? It’d sure do me some good.
He was still fighting off the nearness of what he’d almost tried to say and couldn’t comprehend what she meant. A hundred-fifty more? he mumbled. For a tip?
He lifted his head and tried to come back to the present. She was smiling at him, and the alligators danced and swayed asynchronously.
Call it a tip, it’s a tip.
He couldn’t shake off the swaddling of memory. Something about her smell filling the room confused him. Then he knew: it wasn’t grief. She smelled like someone just living, going through life, collecting its scents.
Under his stare, her smile faded. Her mouth closed and tightened, and the confidence that had been there dissolved into doubt. She dropped her hand from the cord.
Ah, hell, she said softly. Guess I misjudged.
She rose and adjusted her skirt. She’d loosened one of her shoes when she sat down, and she worked her foot back into it. Then she started toward him, her eyes on the door.
Wait, he said.
If she walked out she’d pull her smell with her, and he’d be alone with his memories so almost-voiced. He knew what was going on, but he was dulled enough by drink and memory to believe he wasn’t sure.
If you need money, he said. A hundred-fifty dollars. I give that much to charities all the time. At least I know you.
She burst into laughter.
Right, Stan, she said. She reached out and touched his chest with her fingertips. You know me. It’s not like I’m some starving Somalian you never get to see eating your rice.
Her smell was like a drug. He brushed past her to the bed. An alligator, calm against her neck, winked at him as he went by. He rummaged in his suitcase for his cash, found three fifties, and turned to her. She reached out, took the bills, fanned them in the air, pushing a hundred scents or a single one against his face, then lifted her skirt and put the bills into a little pocket sewn inside. He caught a glimpse of black silk.
Can I ask? he said. The money? What you need it for?
We can do that. You like education?
You’re going to college? That’s good.
Jesus, Stan. I don’t mind playing your game. But I don’t have all night. You want me to say a poem or something?
A poem?
I don’t know if I know any poems. I could say you a
song.
Her hands lifted her skirt again, and then black silk slid down her legs like shining skin. She lifted one knee, then the other. Black silk hung for a moment off the end of her index finger, before she dropped it.
How’s that for a poem?
He looked at the window, the closed drapes. She touched his chest and lightly pushed. He gave way and fell backwards onto the bed.
He was in Washington, DC, the next year when Kris called to tell him she had talked to a lawyer.
Who? he asked.
What do you mean, who?
Orley Morgan?
Not Orley Morgan. My God, Stanley, I don’t want Orley involved. I went to Rapid City.
Good. Good, then.
I can’t live here anymore, she said.
I know.
He did know. They’d been through it so many times, but her announcement finally freed him to understand, because he could do nothing to keep them together.
The divorce wasn’t because of Trace. Kris didn’t even suspect. That was just part of everything else: the way Kris ate her meals without seeming to taste them; the way they never had sex because he couldn’t bear the small humiliation of asking; the way, in spite of himself, that he felt she was right, that food should never taste and sex should not delight. It was the way she couldn’t understand his devotion to the buffalo herd, and the way he couldn’t speak his daughter’s name and the way she spoke it every day, and the way he couldn’t attend the trial, and the way she had to.
The day after Kris called, Stanley skipped his meetings and went to the Mall. He sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for a long time, watching people form clusters and patterns. When he finally rose, he found himself behind a couple holding hands. He crossed the street behind them, not paying attention to where he was going. Then he looked to his left and saw the black wedge of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial rising from the ground right next to him, the names of the dead already growing up around him. Shocked that he hadn’t noticed, he thought: That’s how it is. You’re into things before you even know it. And people are dying already.
He walked forward under the rising names until he felt buried in them. He saw himself reflected in the black stone, behind those names. His daughter was there, too, but in such a different way. He touched a name. His hand within the stone came forward to touch the obverse name. It was cool, but the next name so hot he withdrew his hand. Within the black granite his mirrored self wept. Then he saw how, where the monument angled, it reflected itself and the reflections it contained, so that the future hazed away. Within the double reflection, everything was fuzzy and of a peculiar beauty, and shapes could be other shapes. It could be his green shirt up there in those trees that floated in the stone, or it could be someone else’s.
People moved slowly past him, and in front of him, doubled and hazy, they massed, moving too. He thought of his herd grown to immense proportions, swelling through the fence he’d built, trampling to dust the old Valen house, stampeding over the cemetery where Hayley Jo lay buried, knocking down gravestones, planing irregularities, their hooves cutting into the earth, erasing all marks but the marks of their own passing, and then allowing even those marks to be gone with rain and wind and the flow of time. He had a vision of the world returned to a time before his daughter stepped into that car, before the possibility of his daughter stepping into that car, before Joseph Valen ever saw land he thought was good, before cavalry and cannon had made possible that goodness. Stanley stood in the black mirrors, looking out and in, ahead and back, and saw it all erased.
When he returned home, Kris had already gone to stay with her sister in Rapid City. Stanley walked through the empty house. He came to his daughter’s room and paused, then pushed open the door. Kris had cleaned it out: the posters, the bedspread, the knickknacks, the jewelry, the books, the bridle. Even the championship rodeo belt, Hayley Jo’s proudest possession, was gone. It was just a bare and ugly mattress inside four bare walls. He couldn’t believe it. He knew it wasn’t cruel, and that’s what made it awful. Kris didn’t believe he’d want any of it. He sank to the floor inside the doorjamb. He had no idea how to ask for any of it back.
When he rose he went in a great numbness to his pickup and drove out to the herd. They were at some far end of the old Valen ranch, and he stood before the house alone. Those empty rooms there, too. He walked inside. Dust and dung. Tracks of trespassing boots. A cleared space on the floor. An old rocking chair. A closed door, and behind it an empty bed, in an empty room, strangely free of dust. A hairbrush on a nightstand. Voices: the whisper of wind, the crackle of lumber.
He struck a match, held it, let it drop.
Everywhere he went he visited memorials and monuments: the Custer battlefield, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Gettysburg. From them all he came away unsatisfied, though he had no idea what he sought. A few years after Kris left, he was in New York City for another convention and took the subway to the World Trade Center. He emerged onto the street turned around and wandered in the wrong direction until, at a street crossing, as he stared at his map, a young black man with fierce tattoos asked him where he was going and pointed him in the right direction.
He walked until he realized that the hollow square to his right, where nothing shaped a space, was what he was looking for, an architectural negative formed against the surrounding towers. At Liberty Street he was finally able to look into the hole. Gray concrete. Orange flags. A gull flying through. That’s all. It had a prison camp look.
At the interpretive center he rented an audio tour. The tape instructed him to imagine the size of the towers by doubling the height of the skyscraper across the way, and for a moment he had a vision of what was gone. But he couldn’t sustain it. A woman spoke of running down the stairs and, twenty stories from the ground, meeting firemen running up and knowing for the first time that the ground was attainable. Stanley thought of the firemen going up until up came down with them in its fierce grip. The scene played in his head: hope passing hopelessness on a particular step, a single moment, and each life going on to its future. And which future was better? He stared out the window. An immense machine drilled holes for foundation casings.
He returned the tape and entered the exhibits at the interpretive center but felt no connection to any of it. When he came up the steps from the basement, he entered a room with walls papered with photographs. A square of metal benches in the middle of the room allowed people to sit. It was all just jumbled faces, and Stanley almost walked on. But he felt some duty of reverence to the place and sat.
When he lifted his head, he was gazing directly at the photograph of a young girl, joyous in the camera’s lens, luminous and delighted to be seen, in some moment of her life when delight and attention were so clearly called for. She seemed to stare back at him, yet in her face there was no knowledge of the future, including this wall or the aluminized light on these benches, or strangers’ eyes gazing at her.
Stanley jerked his head away but couldn’t get the image from his mind. He stumbled out the door, blinded, to the subway and the refuge of his motel room. But even there he kept seeing those dark eyes staring from the wall, seeming to look back at him—and yet not: not at all. For some reason he thought of Trace. The moment he remembered her, he knew there was something she could tell him. He called and rearranged his flight back home so that he had a four-hour layover in Chicago.
At O’Hare the next day he left the secure area and walked outside into a heat wave. The taxi driver ran the air conditioner full blast and, intent on traffic, delivered Stanley wordlessly to the motel. It was early afternoon, the restaurant nearly empty.
One? the hostess asked.
He drew his breath in a staccato stutter.
I’m looking for a waitress who works here, he said. Her name is Trace.
Tracie? I’m pretty new. I can ask the manager.
She walked across the restaurant and in a few minutes returned with a thin, unsmiling man who had a look of permanent irritat
ion on his face.
You’re looking for a waitress named Tracie?
Yes. I—
Don’t recall her.
It was a few years ago.
Waitresses don’t stay long. His tone suggested injury. Spend all my time training them, and then they leave.
His voice turned hopeful: She in trouble?
No. Nothing like that.
Just looking for her, huh?
Stanley had prepared reasons for asking after Trace: she was his niece, or he was a teacher and she a former student. But he couldn’t say them.
It’s not important.
You sure you got the right restaurant?
Stanley suddenly remembered that Trace wasn’t her real name, and his heart raced.
I was stuck here in a snowstorm a few years ago, he said, controlling his voice. She said if I was ever back to stop and say hi. But I don’t know her real name. Trace was her nametag name.
They think that’s so cute, the manager said.
She spelled it like trace. Like copying?
Stanley moved his finger as if holding a pencil.
T-R-A-C-E? he said.
Wait, the manager said. Yeah. I remember. Good-looking one? Might’ve fired her. Always getting sick and leaving in the middle of a shift.
