Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  Darrell Sablonski and his little sister were still sitting together on a log waiting for us at our campsite; perhaps they’d never left. They watched me get a fire going and the macaroni started and slice up the tomato onto a platter on the tailgate of Old Blue. I had five ears of sweet corn left from Blue Earth, Minnesota, and shucked that, too. I overheard Maggie explain to our visitors that we were mostly vegetarians who enjoyed a nice steak now and again, then she asked if Darrell and Kelly could stay for supper. I thought about it and said, “I guess so, but they better go ask permission,” and she explained that they’d already done that while we were off taking showers.

  The Sablonski clan was having S.O.S., for dinner, which Darrell explained he “really hated.” I liked S.O.S., or creamed chipped beef on toast, which only a culinary philistine or veteran of WWII would dare call “shit on a shingle,” and was sorely tempted to go ask the Sheboygan sausage baron if I could break bread, if not wind, with his people. Darrell insisted on cooking the steak he and Kelly would share, which he did, treating us to a detailed plot description of Forrest Gump, his views on Dennis Rodman and the recent National Hockey League draft, and how his grandpa had waited thirty years to finally get Packers season tickets and had a lot of gray hair growing in his ears. As he was lifting the steak off the fire with a fork, he dropped it on the ground. “Whoa. I’m not gonna eat that,” he snorted, backing up. Both girls giggled. Darrell was such a riot.

  My daughter and her dinner guests ate my steak split three ways and most of the macaroni and cheese, while I ate the tomato and five ears of sweet corn. Amos gratefully supped on the filet au dirt while Darrell filled us in on his new twenty-one-speed mountain bike back home, his Star Wars poster collection, and his views on space aliens. He believed people from other worlds were not only among us but sometimes abducted smart kids for all kinds of horrible tests. I couldn’t be that lucky, I thought, smiling at him as I crunched my corn.

  I suggested they all take Amos for an après-dinner stroll while I cleaned up the dishes and prepared the marshmallow skewers, and the happy trio hadn’t been gone two minutes when the other two-spirited lady—the Large One, as I would fondly come to think of her—marched over and smartly informed me to “please keep your children from walking through other people’s campsites.”

  I apologized once again, vaguely wondering if there might be a nice Hyatt Hotel with air-conditioning and room service somewhere in the vicinity. The Large One left me to scrub my pots in reproached silence and I gamely tried, as Opti no doubt would have, to look on the positive side of the situation. At least it wasn’t pouring rain and, hey, there didn’t seem to be any mimes wandering around. As a man ages, he should probably face up to his prejudices. The truth is, I loathe mimes. They give me the willies. I always feel an urge to punch them and make them recite the Gettysburg Address or something. Pantomime drama began in sixteenth-century Italy and I happen to wish it had stayed there.

  The children came back a little while later, just as I was building up the fire and arranging the camp stools for a communal marshmallow roast. “Dad,” Maggie said. “Can Darrell and Kelly sleep over?”

  “You don’t have sleepovers on camping trips,” I explained, perhaps a bit more testily than I intended, as I speared the first marshmallow with a stick and presented it to little Kelly. “Besides, I don’t think their grandfather would approve.”

  “He doesn’t mind,” the ever-helpful Darrell announced. “We asked him already. He said it’s okay with him.”

  I wondered if I might be a decent candidate for alien abduction.

  “Watch this, everybody!” Darrell suddenly barked, holding up a flaming marshmallow. “A meteorite!” He flicked his wrist, sending a flaming fireball soaring out of our campsite and down the hill toward the tent of our two-spirited neighbors, who mercifully had gotten in their car and left a short while after the Large One chewed me out.

  This was the good news. The bad news was that the flaming ball quickly set a small patch of brush on fire mere feet from their tent. I sprang to my feet with surprising agility for an aging canoeist, filled a pot with water, and rushed down the slope to slosh it on the ground and perform a little jig on the flames. Then I walked slowly back up the hill wondering how I was going to explain the big burned spot on the ground next to their tent. Perhaps I could say I’d discovered another ant colony and wiped this one out with a flamethrower.

  I glowered gently at our camp guest. “Darrell, that was pretty dumb. Please don’t do that again.”

  “Jeez. Sor-ree,” he said sullenly, as if I didn’t know a good time when I saw it.

  We roasted marshmallows in silence for a few minutes and, as things settled down a bit, I tried to think of what book I might whip out of the Medicine Bag and casually asked Darrell what his parents were doing while he and his sister were palely loitering out West. I pictured them having a wild party or perhaps quietly drinking Dom Pérignon and enjoying the blessed sounds of Darrell-free silence.

  “My dad lives with his new wife. My mom just died.”

  Maggie and I both stared at him. I was uncertain if I’d heard him correctly. His face, though, told me I had.

  “Really? I’m sorry. How long ago?”

  He shrugged, balancing his roasting stick between two fingers. “Three weeks ago. She’d been in the hospital in Sheboygan for a long time. I think it was her blood or something. Her kidneys were bleeding. They moved her down to the hospital in Madison and did some kind of operation. It was supposed to save her life but it didn’t. They told me to come and see her on Friday and she died on Sunday.”

  “I’m very sorry. You must feel really sad.”

  “Yeah. I cried about it for a couple days, I guess. I really miss her a lot. I didn’t even get to say good-bye or nothing. That’s why my grandpa brought us out here. I didn’t really want to come but it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I hope we see a wolf.”

  I nodded and decided not to tell him there was little chance he’d see a wolf. Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction program had recently been heralded as a success—there were believed to be dozens of breeding pairs now roaming the park—but wolves were possibly the most elusive mammals on earth. I glanced at Kelly. She was holding her marshmallow miles from the flame. It wasn’t even slightly brown. “May I?” I said, taking her stick. I moved it closer to the flame and it started to get brown and she rewarded me with a tiny bow-shaped smile. “Maggie,” I said, “why don’t you let Kelly and Darrell sleep on the cots and I’ll blow up the air mattress for you on the tent floor.”

  “That’s okay,” Darrell said, a small grin returning. “I’ll sleep on the floor. I kinda like sleeping on the floor.”

  —

  I watched them make shadow puppets on the tent wall for a while and then there was silence from the tent. I poked a couple more pieces of wood into the fire, opened another beer, and sat down on a log, turning on Maggie’s boom box, hoping to get classical music or the weather; as I say, I love the weather. Instead, I got the news. The news was the same. The media had all but named security guard Richard Jewell as the official Olympic bomber, while the alleged “Unabomber” wasn’t talking, even to his court-appointed lawyer. Meanwhile, Timothy McVeigh, the accused bomber of the federal building in Oklahoma City, was worried he couldn’t get a fair trial because of all the negative publicity, and mechanical hands were still seining the ocean floor off Long Island for bits of wreckage that might indicate a bomb had brought down TWA flight 800. Bombs were the blue plate special that night in America.

  I was starting to hate the news as much as I hated mimes. As I reached to turn it off, the news got a bit brighter: Mary Thompson of Orlando, America’s oldest person, had died in her sleep at the ripe old age of 120, having outlived eight of her ten children and her husband and attributing her long and productive life to good food, the Gospels, and lots of yard work. I found a public station playing an aria from Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and watched the headlights of a sma
ll car pull into the adjacent campsite. A flashlight bobbed and the two-spirited ladies went into their tent.

  The older I got, the more I fancied opera. Why was that? Perhaps it was because, as Mencken was supposed to have quipped, opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. Everything went wrong in opera on a lush and grandiose scale, rather like life itself. I’d recently started buying opera CDs and had even worked my way through most of a biography of Puccini. On his first visit to the United States in 1905, Giacomo Puccini saw a horse opera called The Girl of the Golden West and was so enamored with the cheap stage theatrics of a fake snowstorm and the simpleminded western melodrama that he went home to Italy and wrote his own opera about a saloon owner named Minnie and her outlaw boyfriend Dick. Dick is a villain with a good heart, as Minnie discovers, and after several barroom brawls and de rigueur shoot-outs with pursuing vigilantes, Minnie saves Dick’s skin from a ruthless gambler/bounty hunter by cleverly substituting aces from her garters in a poker match. The opera’s grand finale comes when Dick is about to be lynched by the mob and he sings the opera’s most famous piece, “Ch’ella mi creda libero” (“Let her believe me free”), hoping his beloved will never learn of his unhappy fate. Just in the nick of time, though, Minnie the barkeep, the girl of the Golden West, gallops in and pleads for Dick’s life. The vigilantes know true love when they see it and agree to let the lovers live in peace.

  Puccini believed, upon the opera’s debut, that his Girl of the Golden West was one of his finest efforts, reflecting, he insisted, not only the values of the American people but the vigorous spirit of the West. The opera was initially a smashing success but coincided with the arrival of a wagonload of personal woe when, during the production, Puccini’s wife became hysterically jealous of a housemaid and publicly accused the girl of being her husband’s mistress. The housemaid committed suicide and a sensational trial followed, proving life really does resemble a disordered cathedral or at least a cheap horse drama.

  As the famous aria played itself out, I snapped off the boom box and glanced around the camp to see if Amos was ready to have his evening aspirins. He wasn’t lying anywhere within the ring of firelight so I got up and walked around the camp, but failed to see him. I called his name, realizing how pointless that was. I walked around behind the tent, checked out Old Blue. No dog. He was gone.

  “Jesus Christ,” I heard myself say softly, not exactly prayerfully.

  I wondered, for a moment, if perhaps he’d taken himself off to sleep with the sausage baron of Sheboygan or maybe just for an evening stroll in the woods. He often did that back home, disappearing for an hour at a time. Recently I’d followed him on one of these sorties and he’d led me to a perfectly shaped rock bowl in the side of a hill, a secret place filled with ferns. He’d immediately flopped down and wallowed shamelessly, growling with delight and even barking with sensual pleasure. Watching him roll in private ecstasy had reminded me of the secret place the elephants go to die in King Solomon’s Mines. Then he’d looked up from his fern bowl, seen me, and struggled to his feet, appearing almost embarrassed.

  But wandering around our cozy six-hundred-acre wood and this twenty-thousand-acre preserve primeval were entirely different matters. If Ranger Karl and the reverential guidebooks could be believed, Yellowstone was full of grizzly bears—which once fed off tourist garbage but had now reverted to their natural predatory ways—and other dangerous critters an old amiable retriever from Maine had never seen the likes of. I mentally kicked myself for not heeding Karl’s warning to keep the old fella on a lead.

  I walked down the road and said his name louder, and a bossy voice I recognized came floating back at me from you-know-where, sternly advising me to please pipe down and be considerate of others. I stood in the darkness trying to think what to do. I honestly felt my heart racing, my blood pumping, my panic rising. The thought of losing Amos was simply unimaginable. He’d always been with me and I’d always been with him. We were best friends, old allies, lifelong partners in crime. I half considered marching up to the Tent of the Two Spirits and shouting through cupped hands that people who were so politically sensitive about other people’s minding their own business really should mind their own fucking business!

  But that would be no solution—just me confirming their view that men like me were really hysterical intolerant jerks. I wasn’t a hysterical jerk and I had nothing against two-spirited people and I walked down the campground road a way feeling really at loose ends, walked as far from our camp as I felt I could go, then turned around and walked back. I tried to kill time doing normal prebed chores, hoping against hope for the sudden sound of a dog walking up. I boxed up the rest of the foodstuffs and stowed them in Old Blue, closed the rear hatch, picked up a few things in camp.

  We were getting the hell out of Dodge in the morning, I told myself—me, my girl of the Golden West, and my dog. I turned on the radio again and tuned it to another station where a country music singer, yet another Lonesome Shorty, was moaning that his wife had it all—good looks, great personality, and, thanks to her lawyer, most of his weekly paycheck, the house, and his bass boat. I was reminded of a joke Silent Sam had once told me: If you played a country music record backward, your wife, job, and dog all came back.

  Someone got up in the tent, I heard the zipper door open, and Maggie came out, sleepily rubbing her eyes. She walked over to where I’d resumed my existence as a knot on a log, this time with a tin tumbler of Scotch in hand. She bent and kissed me on the cheek. “I forgot to kiss you good night,” she said sleepily. “Thank you for letting them sleep over.”

  “Thank you for the kiss. I really needed it.”

  She yawned. “Where will you sleep?”

  “In the truck. No problem. Scoot back to bed.”

  “Okay.” She paused. “Dad, I heard you calling Amos. Where is he?”

  I explained that Amos had taken himself for a walk but would probably be back any moment, that I wasn’t worried and she shouldn’t be. Liar, Liar. Neighbors’ tent on fire…

  “He’s real smart,” she assured me. “He’ll come back.”

  “I know. You’re right.” How nice to have her faith, I thought.

  “Dad, don’t worry.”

  “It’s my job, remember?” I reminded her.

  “Then get a new job,” she said, and smiled.

  She went back to bed and I poked more wood into the fire and turned off the radio and slipped down to rest my head on the log and finished the Scotch and pulled a small wool blanket over my legs and lay there thinking that maybe I should say a prayer. I tried to avoid praying for things because I didn’t think of God as some kind of QVC operator in the sky who would send you swell items if you were prepared to pay the price and your spiritual credit rating was good enough. Someone once said praying doesn’t do a thing for God—it just works wonders for the person praying.

  I lay there and reminded God, though he probably didn’t need it, that “dog” was his own name spelled backward and said that if he saw fit to help this man’s best friend find his way back through the darkness I would be profoundly grateful and would try extra hard to avoid saying mean things about mimes or thinking bad thoughts about the way life often really does resemble a sorry horse opera.

  I don’t know how long I lay there talking to God, wherever he was, but I began to feel a bit better and soon dozed off and must have been asleep at least a couple hours when I suddenly awoke, imagining that I heard the snap of a twig. I opened my eyes and sat up and was a little confused by how dark it had become and how stiff and cold I was. I shoved a couple smaller pieces of wood in the fire’s embers and tugged the blanket back over my bare legs and sat blinking at the darkness for a few minutes until what appeared to be a shape began to come slowly toward me out of the night, a large white shaggy face that became more familiar as it approached. Amos slowly ambled into the camp, circled twice, and flopped down beside me. I reached over and touched his head.

  He’d been out for an
evening walk, perhaps a nice wallow in a fern bowl somewhere. He’d known where he was all along even if I hadn’t, and he knew he would be back even if I didn’t. See? Here I am. Relax. Have faith. I told him he was a smart dog and I was glad he’d come home but he shouldn’t feel too smug because, let’s face it, only one of us thought it was okay to drink from the toilet.

  Amos inhaled and exhaled calmly, as if he’d heard it all before.

  —

  In the morning, on the road to Old Faithful, we saw a wolf.

  She was standing in the middle of the road, having paused as we suddenly rounded a corner in Old Blue. We’d gotten an early jump on Old Faithful. It was Sunday morning just after seven. Maggie saw her first.

  “Dad, look. A wolf…”

  At first, I thought it was a dog. But the closer we got, the more I realized Maggie was right. It was a female wolf, a she wolf—silvery gray, rather thin in the haunch, but unmistakably a wolf. I came to a complete halt on the road and we sat there staring at each other for a few seconds before she turned and loped into the woods, disappearing like a shadow.

  “Wow,” Maggie said. “I wish Darrell could have seen him.” Darrell’s grandfather had come to fetch him and his little sister just after sunup. He was a nice big rosy-cheeked midwesterner who had, as reported, impressive tufts of gray hair growing from his ears and a soiled Packers cap on his head and homemade sausage links already sizzling on the griddle, which he invited us over to sample. We took him up on it and went over for the full Yellowstone camp breakfast experience, including a full rundown on the Packers’ rookies and free agents and some excellent hotcakes. Nobody, so far as I know, broke wind, and on the walk back to break down our camp, the smaller two-spirited lady asked me if I’d found my dog and seemed pleased when I explained that he had come home. I thanked her for asking after him. The world was back on its axis.