“Nature’s own hot tub,” Colbert says.
“Right,” Trane says, winking archly. It’s a conspiratorial wink that annoys Colbert. “Better than a hot tub, in fact,” Trane goes on. “The Indians claimed these waters had healing powers And not just for your usual aches and pains, but for your spirit. Water like this will put your body and soul back into alignment.”
Colbert can almost sense the thrill that Rhea is experiencing. It is the sort of thing she needs to believe in, having given up on all the conventional forms of belief.
“Is it safe?” she says. “I mean, can we go in without getting scalded?”
Trane leans into the backseat and puts his hand on Rhea’s knee. “A little scalding is just what the medicine man ordered,” he says, winking again. He shuts off the engine, and the silence moves in on them like a forbidding presence. For a while no one speaks; they even breathe cautiously. Finally, Trane opens his door, and the slight wheeze of dry hinges releases a worm of sound into the body of silence.
Rhea is first to speak. “My God but this is beautiful. Are we allowed to camp here?”
“Who’s going to tell us we can’t?” Trane says.
The cool, piney air, Colbert notices, has a slight sulfurous stink to it. The disk of blue sky above them seems unhappily far away, an optical illusion generated by the steep granite walls and the tall conifers that grow at the high rim. Trane opens the back doors of the Isuzu and pulls out the camping gear. “I’ll set up the tents,” he says. “Why don’t you ladies try the healing waters? Then we’ll have a good lunch.”
Colbert starts to undo the ties on one of the bundles, but Trane takes him by the elbow and pulls him aside. “Let me deal with this stuff, Davey,” he says. “I’ve done this a thousand times. You could be a big help by digging the slit trench, off a ways in the trees.”
“Slit trench?” Colbert asks, confused. Colbert is not a camper, has always felt uncomfortable in the woods. He prefers picnic grounds with tables and fire rings. He likes to know that convenience stores and telephones are not far away.
“You know—an outdoor crapper,” Trane says. “Dig it about a foot wide and about three feet long. Maybe a foot and a half deep.” He hands Colbert a short narrow-bladed shovel, then returns to the job of laying out the tents and other equipment.
Even a brief walk into the woods makes Colbert nervous. And these are real woods, the wilderness, not a neighborhood park. The ground is carpeted with pine needles, the scented air is thick and unmoving. Colbert feels that he is being observed by animals he cannot see. Behind a large, privacy-giving, lichen-covered boulder, he starts to dig. The ground is hard and his progress is slow. He has to remove stones of varying sizes from time to time, and the slit trench that gradually takes shape does not have the square dimensions Trane described. It’s more of an oblong hole, the size of a steamer trunk. It has taken Colbert an hour to dig it, and his arms and back are burning with fatigue. When he returns to the campsite, the tents are erected side by side with a fire ring made of stones set between them.
“David! David!” Rhea says. “Where have you been? Get in here, it’s wonderful!” Her voice has a haunting quality, as if it is coming from all directions at once, a voice in a dream.
All three of them are in the water. Colbert sees their heads floating together at the far side of the pool, partly screened by mist. He stares at them for a while, as if he doesn’t recognize what he’s looking at. “Rhea?” he says.
“Take your clothes off and get in here, honey!” Rhea calls again. Her voice is textured and amplified by the heated water and surrounding granite. He is momentarily transfixed by this vision of the floating heads and by the odd resonance of Rhea’s voice.
“Come on, Davey,” Trane says, “we’ll baptize you. Old Wakantanka lives here.” Trane’s voice, enlarged and timbered with authority, is doubly obnoxious to Colbert. He turns his back on them.
“Marv says Wakantanka is the Indian name for the Great Spirit, honey,” Rhea calls after him.
“Does he,” Colbert says under his breath as he pulls back the flap of a tent. His and Rhea’s suitcase is inside, and he rummages through it until he finds his swim trunks. He strips, then pulls on the trunks, a boxer-style pair he bought twenty years ago, imprinted with white sailboats against faded blue. The trunks no longer fit. His pale belly falls over the waistband. Colbert leaves the tent and his skin is immediately assaulted by the cool, humid air, as are his bare feet by the pine-needle loam. When he steps into the misting pool, he chokes back the urge to cry out in pain. The water is hot, well over one hundred degrees, but the apparent comfort of the others makes him wade bravely forward against the instinctive urge to recoil. The notion that he is wading not into water but into pure pain gives Colbert a moment of giddy panic. He grits his teeth and moves toward the smiling heads resting at the base of a granite boulder the size of a small house.
“David,” Rhea says, “those trunks are ridiculous.”
“The trunks are fine,” Colbert says. “It’s the body in them that’s gotten ridiculous.”
“Don’t knock yourself, Davey,” Trane says, pulling himself strongly out of the water and onto a shelf in the stone. Colbert tries to hide his dismay at seeing that Trane is naked. He looks quickly at the women, still up to their necks in the opaque water. Their faces, red and finely beaded with sweat, betray no sense of shock or uneasiness.
“Get all the way in, David,” Rhea says. “It’s more therapeutic that way. It feels fantastic.”
Freddi climbs up next to her husband, and Colbert sees that she is also naked. She is even more fragile-looking without clothes. Her small, chalky breasts, webbed with networks of fine blue veins, seem as breakable as china in the early-afternoon sunlight. The Tranes, on the gray rock, look like a posed tableau—Marv, the muscular Roman god; Freddi, the water nymph.
“This place is magical!” Rhea says, apparently unaffected by the casual nudity of the Tranes. She submerges herself suddenly, then springs up pink and laughing, and Colbert—as he has begun to suspect—sees that Rhea is naked, too.
“You’ll smooth the kinks out of your system here, Davey,” Trane says lazily. He’s lying back now, taking the sun, his genitals lolling on his thigh, while Freddi, on her haunches beside him, looks dreamily content, as if water, sun, and the passivity of her husband have conspired to put her into a happy, self-satisfied rapture.
Rhea’s large breasts, buoyant and flushed pink in the hot, silty water, embarrass Colbert. Colbert is a private and shy man who has always shunned openness in public. Rhea, early in their marriage, would sometimes hug him impulsively, no matter where they were. She’d kiss his cheek or ear, comb loose strands of his hair with her fingers, but Colbert put a stop to it. “I’m sorry, honey,” he’d said, on more than one occasion, “but I can’t be intimate in public. It’s like exposing my private life to an audience of strangers.” Rhea said she understood, but often forgot herself, drawing sharp rebukes from Colbert. After their marriage crystallized into routine, the subject never came up again. But now, what the years solidified has become, in one afternoon, loose and undefined, and Colbert feels sick with humiliation; he feels betrayed.
“Take those outrageous trunks off, honey,” Rhea laughs, climbing out of the water and stretching out on a rock slab of her own, without any apparent self-consciousness. Colbert regards his large-breasted, wide-hipped wife gleaming in the sun and is suddenly moved to the brink of tears at the mindless generosity of her ample body. The body is so helpless, he thinks—a poor pack animal bent under the crushing weight of a confused, unteachable ghost. This thought depresses Colbert further, and he turns his back on the three glistening bathers. “The trunks stay on,” Colbert says, wading away. His heart is pounding hard enough to hear. He is sure the others can hear it, too. He crawls into his tent and puts his clothes back on. Then he goes out and gathers dry sticks for the fire ring, taking Trane’s hatchet with him.
Trane, using a high-tech two-burner prop
ane stove, fixes a late-afternoon lunch of wild rice with mushrooms and chicken breasts in wine sauce. He takes a container of prepared asparagus vinaigrette out of an ice chest, and there is a good Sonoma white zinfandel to drink. They sit on folding chairs at a card table draped with a linen tablecloth, and they eat off real china.
“God, I expected to eat Beefaroni off paper plates,” Rhea says, delighted. “Whose idea was this?”
“Mea culpa,” Trane says. “But I’m glad Davey collected all those twigs anyway. Later on we can make us a little fire and have a sing-along. I brought my twelve-string. How about it, Dave? You remember Dylan? I do passable Dylan.”
“David’s being a poop,” Rhea says. “He’s a world-class sulker.”
“I’m telling you, Davey,” Trane says, “you should have adopted the right attitude out there in the water. A wicasa wakan—holy man to you—would have warned you about taking these waters with a bug up your ass. There’s probably not a lot of time to get yourself in tune.”
“What do you mean by that, Marv?” Rhea asks.
She sounds like a schoolgirl, Colbert thinks.
“I think I’m boring Davey,” Trane says.
“Well, you’re not boring me,” Rhea says.
“I just meant,” Trane continues, “that according to precepts found not only in Mahayana Buddhism but in nearly all of the nondualistic religions, including Native American animism—”
“Excuse me,” Colbert says, standing up abruptly. “I have to go to the slit trench.”
Trane releases a burst of hard laughter that puts Colbert on alert. “That’s funny!” Trane says. “Davey said something funny.” He cups his large hand on Freddi’s shoulder and rocks her. “Don’t you want to say something funny, too? Show these people that you can say something funny, too, Freddi.”
“I can’t think,” Freddi says, smiling self-consciously.
“Try,” Trane says. “Try to think. Who knows, you might get to liking it.”
Colbert is awakened out of a dream in which his bare feet are being snuffled by large rodentlike animals. Rising voices have pulled him out of his disturbed sleep, and he lies on his back staring into the close black air of the small tent.
“I don’t know why they have to fight,” Rhea says.
“I wouldn’t call it fighting,” Colbert says, yawning.
Trane is talking with the speed and intensity of a manic auctioneer. His rant is punctuated every half minute or so by a whimpering response from Freddi.
“These tents should be farther apart,” Colbert says, recalling, wistfully, their widely separated motel rooms of the night before.
“Listen to that,” Rhea says, sitting up.
The sound is unmistakable, but Colbert just shrugs.
“He’s striking her,” Rhea says. Freddi is crying softly, begging him to stop. Trane’s angry chant has become a barely articulate growl.
“We don’t know that,” Colbert reasons. “I think it’s just a performance for our benefit.”
“We’d better do something about this, David,” Rhea says.
Colbert lies back down and pulls the sleeping bag over his head. “I didn’t bring a revolver,” he says.
“I’m serious.”
“I know it’s hard, but try not to be,” Colbert says, rolling over into his sleeping position. The cold, unyielding ground under the tent floor makes his shoulder ache instantly.
Abruptly, the commotion in the Tranes’ tent stops. There is a canyon of silence into which Colbert has begun to fall, the dream of rodents nuzzling his feet returning, but before the fall is complete he is pulled back into consciousness by a string of urgent moans.
“They’re making love,” Rhea, who is still sitting up, says.
“No, it’s just sex,” Colbert mumbles. “Tarzan’s reward.”
Rhea sighs. “Everything is a great big joke to you.”
Colbert doesn’t respond to this. The remark strikes him as not only off the mark but, in light of what he has been going through the past few months, unfair.
Then Rhea’s searching hand is in his sleeping bag. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s.”
“Rhea, for Christ’s sakes.”
“It’s been a long time, David,” she says sternly.
“It’s been a week,” he says.
“I’m not taking no for answer,” she says. Her hoarse voice in the disembodying dark becomes a curiosity, as if it is the voice of a threatening stranger. Colbert imagines startled animals bolting through the forest at the sound of Freddie’s eerie vocalizations, as Rhea unzips his bag and presses herself down on top of him, vibrant with a fierce, uncompromising energy.
But Colbert pushes her away. He pulls on his shirt and pants and leaves the tent. He walks to the edge of the hot springs and squats down. A crescent moon suspended in the narrow disk of sky is reflected perfectly in the black water. Colbert takes his shirt and pants off and wades toward the moon, trying not to disturb it. He wades to the far side of the pool and leans back against a wall of granite. He is surprised that he feels comfortable and relaxed, and soon his thoughts drift south, away from the wilderness of Idaho.
He remembers attacking the smug ignorance of his bored honors class shortly before he began to lose interest in them. “Your feelings and ideas, limited and confused as they are, have been handed down to you,” he told them. “You don’t know it, but you’re wearing old, mismatched clothes. You think you’re wearing originals, you’re proud of the ridiculous costume you’re wearing. But it’s old, old, and stinks of the thousand dead bodies who wore it before you!” (“Gross, Mr. Colbert,” offered Betty Vukovich, a cheerleader, sticking her finger into her mouth as if to induce nausea.) He began to tremble. He had to blink away a shock of burning tears. But the kids just stared at him with drooping interest, like sheep momentarily distracted from their browsing by the irrelevant natterings of a possessed shepherd.
A splash breaks his reverie. Something has entered the water, and Colbert feels his neck hairs bristle. He starts wading stealthily back toward the tents, but he is sure that whatever it was that made the splash is aware of him. A catalogue of wild animals races through his mind, from otters to mountain lions to grizzly bears, and when he reaches the opposite shore, he is breathless with terror. He looks back at the water expecting to see a dark presence leaving a heavy wake, but sees only the rippled moon.
“Hidden in every shaman is a hunter,” Trane pontificates. He’s been in the water for over an hour and his skin is dangerously pink as he lies on the rock slab, recovering.
“That’s it,” Colbert says. “I’ve had it up to here. We’re going home. Drive us to Spokane and we’ll take the next flight to San Jose.”
“Whoa, bud,” Trane says, easing himself off his rock with the grace of a sea lion.
Colbert wades away from the group, suddenly fearful. He hears, behind him the water parting furiously before Trane’s churning thighs.
“You’re acting like a spoiled child, David,” Rhea says. Her voice is languid, almost disinterested, and this makes Colbert doubly fearful. Something has changed, but he can’t decide what it is that has made today different from yesterday. He is aware of his poor physical condition more than ever, how his pale, shapeless legs cannot move with strength and speed through the dense, sulfuric waters.
“Wait up, Davey,” Trane says, his voice cajoling now, seductive.
Then Trane’s hand is on Colbert’s shoulder, stopping his retreat. Colbert turns to face Trane and realizes, for the first time, the true difference in their sizes. His eyes are level with Trane’s chin; to meet Trane’s gray gaze, he has to look up. Trane’s eyes are benevolent and manically intense at the same time, and Colbert tries to turn away, but Trane has tightened his grip, making escape impossible.
“What do you think you’re running away from, Davey?” Trane says. “Remember: Wherever you go, there you are."
“Take your hand off me, you fucking creep,” Colbert says, his voice trembling.
But Trane throws his arm around Colbert in a brotherly embrace that makes the stiff bones in his shoulder crackle. Then, with Colbert in tow, Trane starts wading back toward the stones where the naked women lie easy in the sun.
“Let me go, you crazy son of a bitch!” Colbert says, close to tears.
“I’ve told you, Davey,” Trane says, unmoved by Colbert’s rage, “you’ve got to show the right attitude in these waters. This isn’t your backyard pool, this is a holy place.”
“You goddamn phony,” Colbert sobs. “Everything you say...”
But suddenly Colbert finds himself underwater, held there, unable to wrench himself away from the arm that has him in a headlock, keeping him submerged. The water makes his nose and eyes feel on fire, but the arm will not release him. It occurs to him that Trane intends to drown him, and he begins to fight for his life, but he has no leverage and poor footing, even if he could match Trane’s strength.
Then, just as suddenly as he was submerged, he is hauled up out of the water, gasping. He tries to work free of the headlock, but Trane tightens his grip. Colbert’s face is crushed into Trane’s rib cage. He tries to look to the women for help but is unable to lift his eyes to them.
“Baptism, you realize,” Trane says blandly, “did not originate with the early Christians. It’s a rite as old as mankind itself. Man, very early in his history, realized that he was vulnerable to all sorts of false systems springing from values rooted in the survival instinct—you believe what you need to believe—and false systems invariably deny the heart’s desire to transcend the mundane. Man wants to feel exalted. And so, baptism was seen as the symbolic washing away of the things that clog one’s ability to experience straightforward truth.”
“Then it’s meaningless to baptize infants,” Colbert hears Rhea say. He is astonished that she has maintained her bright and banal sophomoric tone.
Borrowed Hearts Page 30
