Big Bend

by Bill Roorbach

  So up through the woods until we came to a lawn, a huge lawn with no house to be seen. We left foot trails on the nice wet grass, walked into the fog. Blindly we found a little shack—some summer people’s beach hut—a fancy little place for when they didn’t want to be in their house, like the lean-to on the Appalachian Trail under Piazza Rock, only with glass sides and no one hanging around and no lock on the door and a little fireplace with a fire set to go and two lounge chairs with thick cushions. No towels or blankets or anything else, just a thing of extra-long wooden matches on the hearth. So Cara lit the fire and in a minute we were not cold. I thought someone would come if they saw the smoke, though these castle houses on these great castle lawns do stand empty.

  “Kill us,” she kept saying, like her father was crazy or something, which he was not.

  I don’t know, we sat on one of the lounge chairs each. After a minute Cara got up and played with the fire, then sat back down, but now right on my chair with her leg along mine like the side of a cold fish yet nice. And she said she was fifteen already. I didn’t say but was fourteen. And then she said to give her a massage. I did. She lay down on the chair with her neck bent against the back of it and I rubbed her shoulders in front of the warm fire. She said she liked to get backrubs. Her friend Marcy was best at it because she did it hard but it didn’t hurt, you know?

  So I rubbed hard at her neck (but not too hard) and skipped her suit strap and rubbed her back a little. She said it was my turn. I lay down as she had and she sat right on top of me and squeezed all my back muscles hard so it hurt (but I didn’t say anything). I felt her wet bathing suit and a drop or two from her fog-wet hair, but her skin was warm and I got embarrassed that I would get a hard-on. And I did get one. Suddenly she was done and it was time for me to turn around, but I made a joke, pretended I was paralyzed with pleasure and couldn’t move and we laughed and I kept kidding like that till my misbehaving dick went down. Then we sat again side by side together and she asked if I had ever kissed anybody.

  I said, “Yes, I kissed Weezie Warren when we were going steady last year.”

  “How far did you go?”

  I put my hands out a little, like, This far, like measuring a small fish, one to throw back.

  And Cara laughed and kissed me and we got our noses lined up and I waited for air and we pressed our lips together. Her tongue touched my teeth. We rested.

  “I hate my father,” she said.

  And we talked about this man humorously while I waited to kiss her again. Then we did kiss again and lay back on the chair, but the thing was, I wore only cutoffs. I tried to turn so she wouldn’t see, but she hugged me and there was nothing I could do. And she said, “You can if you want.”

  And she said that again. So I touched her chest, which was wet still from fog and swimming and all, and she stretched and made a fake yawn and her suit popped up and left her chest bare and she was all goosebumps, that’s exactly what she was, and I just lay my hand over her chest and made a bridge between her nipples thumb to pinkie. Then she rolled around and lay on top of me and we joked and kidded. I couldn’t even laugh right. That serious feeling was upon me. I couldn’t breathe either, rolled her off me and we laughed.

  As a joke I said, “You can, too,” meaning to touch my chest if she wanted.

  But she said she couldn’t, then put her hand right on my pants. And it was like, like. Like what I don’t know.

  We kissed until my lips hurt like I’d been punched. And I tasted her mouth, a little like sweat and a little like candy, sweet. And she said, “You now.”

  I couldn’t reach her nipple again, because she’d turned against my chest, so I touched her stomach and she said, “Go ahead.”

  Go ahead what? But I put my fingers under that tight stuff of her suit, the bottom part, and felt her hair there and she said, “Go ahead.” More than the bathing suit and fog she was wet, hot wet like her mouth, like that, and splash wet and hot and I just carefully put my fingertips there. She said, “Go ahead,” in a breath, so I felt very softly in that wet hot silky skin just a finger.

  She said, “Wow,” so I stopped, and she said, “Go ahead,” and so I made circles with my three fingers and she said, “Okay” and “Okay” again, and I did this till my wrist was numb. She said, “Okay” and “Wow,” then kicked my hand up and—I don’t know—made a kind of sneeze with her hips—no, really—and said, “Wow” and “Okay” and “Now stop” and giggled like fast breathing and rolled so I had to take my hand out quick.

  Oh, we lay there like that, and the fire went down, but no one moved. Then she did and we kissed more. And Cara put her hand on my stomach, which jumped, and then tried to put it in my cut offs, too tight on her wrist and she just fought her way in there and kissed me at the same time and touched me right on the top of my cock and I was like pop. Everybody laughed at this, but eyes serious. Then she wanted to know how it felt and I wanted to know how she felt and we said tingling and bursting, the same for both of us, almost hurtful, and she said, “Love you.” Which I tried to say, too, but it came out like just the vowel sounds in English class.

  And the sun was back. We could see where the big lawn went—nowhere. Just a big lawn as big as a golf course. Her father would kill her so we went back down to the sea and got the canoe. Cara changed into her one-piece right on the rock there, no towel to hide in. I didn’t look except for the briefest second and saw her thin bottom and long back and colt legs and hair wet on her strong shoulders, a fraction of a blink of a second, but a sight I will see forever and can see right now.

  Paddling was easy this time with the tide slack and the fog gone and we headed off the island (Foster Island, as it turned out) and paddled like hell to the breakwater and gut where a seal picked us up and played us to the landing. Cara’s dad was there, all right, in his captain’s hat, with Mr. Witherspoon, and the two of them were almost done getting Mr. Witherspoon’s Zodiac pontoon motorboat off its trailer. They were going to come look for us.

  He said just what you’d expect. “Where the blue blazes have you been!” and “Do you know how long I’ve been …” and “Lucky Mr. Witherspoon was in the shop!” But you could see he was only relieved, kind of happy. “It’s 2:30! I’ve been beside myself!” And so forth. And Mr. Witherspoon just looking blank as a cloud, putting the Zodiac back up on its trailer. Another day, another fudgie, his face said.

  Cara stood up tall and crossed her arms and glared and her father didn’t even notice that the top of her illegal bathing suit fell out of her towel. She said: “For your information we were lost in the fog and had to wait on the breakwater two hours!”

  I thought, Jesum, what if the fog never came in that far? He’ll know.

  But Cara just kept going: “You don’t trust me,” and “I can’t believe this after we just had a crisis!” and so forth on her part.

  I just stood quietly by, very nervous. I thought we looked like kids who’d just had a lot of sex, the most they’d ever had.

  Mr. Witherspoon nodded to me the way he does and the two of us put the canoe on top of Cara’s family van while Cara and her dad talked a very long time. Mr. Witherspoon (I know him, of course, from hockey) did not say one word or raise one eyebrow at me—nothing either way.

  Then Cara and her dad hugged and the two of them came hiking over, and her tennis was forgotten, and that I should leave was forgotten, that we were late, all of it, forgotten. And Cara’s father even gave us twenty dollars in town because we were starving (she said), and we got to have lunch alone at the Sandwich Shanty. After that we walked all the way back to her place on Cousin’s Point, holding hands. No one came close to killing her, or us, and Cara and I, we had a whole three days and didn’t get caught making out once, not even the time middle of the night by her parents’ pool. And right in front of her father she’d hold her hands out like measuring the biggest fish possible: This far! And we’d laugh and laugh and her mother would smile and her father would shake his head. What did he know? A litt
le farther would be all of it.

  Cara and I, we both cried when she left and I cried after for an hour, like I never have cried ever, standing in my back yard, even with my father watching. Cara wrote me (signed Kit on thick paper embossed with her full name). I wrote back (Mom bought me Hallmarks). No phone calls allowed by Captain Fudgie. Cara and I, we had a kind of plan if her family came up for Christmas. But then she stopped writing. And out of pride, I guess, I did the same. School gets busy and not that much to say in letter after letter when nothing comes back. Still. “Get over it,” my father says.

  With Peter Pearson, being lost was just a quick thing, not as thick fog, and we were on a pond anyway, but that’s the same day I told him the story about Cara, and that’s the same day Pete and I started being true friends, back about the middle of September, and now here it’s almost summer again.

  Anthropology

  The Bar Double Zero was nothing Owen had dreamed. Dr. Clark was much more taciturn and plain unfriendly even than Owen’s uncle had warned. And Dr. Clark was short, with a homemade haircut and wild eyebrows like hedges untrimmed. And dressed in polyester head to toe, pants and shirt from Woolworth’s, no hat, knock-off boat shoes like some pretend yachtsman from home. Duct tape on his watchband.

  And the ranch was like the man: scruffy and scrappy and seat-of-the-pants, tasteless and ugly and dusty and rundown, nothing but brown buildings made of chinked logs and old planks, everything wired together, the yard just more nothing, weeds and bent spruce trees and plumes of dust in a steady wind, all of this conglomeration of nothingness alone at the end of a dirt driveway four miles long and connected to the world by nothing but a phone line the same four miles long strung on homemade poles beside drooping electric wires. Not a girl in sight, not a woman. Just barbed wire and dust and planks and wind. From the ranch door emerged another man—the ranch foreman, Owen was sure—to stand beside the doctor and look serious with him, the two of them just staring at Owen. Not so much as a wave hello from either. Owen took his time emerging from his junker station wagon, got to his feet slowly, and ambled over to the men like a cowboy, so he thought.

  First thing the doctor said was, “Can you ride horse?”

  The ranch foreman spat.

  Owen could ride a horse indeed, though not with great confidence. “I can ride horse,” he said, suppressing the long lists of excuses and explanations and apologies that leapt to the front of his mind and imitating the expression on the doctor’s face and his way of talking. Owen knew naturally to mirror whomever you met, not to give yourself away, but only give back about what you got, a trick of his character that had brought him a long way in high school and now college life, but that made it hard to be straight with people sometimes, hard to say when he didn’t know something, hard to say no when he wanted to, or to say anything he wanted to say, really.

  But for now he was only an eastern kid, no cowboy, twenty years old, just halfway through college. More than anything he wanted a shower and lunch. He’d ridden horses at Camp Monadnock in New Hampshire for two weeks at age twelve.

  “Would you mind at all if we sent you out today?” said the scruffy doctor. “We need you to count cattle.” And that was about it for their introduction, except what the doctor must know about him from Uncle Dick and except for what Owen knew of the doctor from Uncle Dick, which was this: the doctor needed a hand and would pay him ten dollars a day for a whole summer, ten dollars a day Owen wouldn’t have much chance to spend if he was smart, said Uncle Dick.

  Owen was smart. This he knew about himself and relied on. If he could “ride horse” halfway decently, he could figure out the rest. “I can go out today, sure,” he said, or really his idea of a cowboy said, speaking with Owen’s mouth and using Owen’s body to slouch like someone who knew what was what.

  The ranch foreman looked doubtful—that was about the extent of the drama. The doctor said, “Well, fine,” and they all just stood there in the wind. In the air the doctor said, “I’ve been called out to Townsend for a day or two. I’m the doctor here around, as you know. Your timing is just right. If you can go out, Enzio can stay back and keep the home fires burning.” Then, not another word, Dr. Clark limped into the house, limped back out with his satchel, in a hurry now, distracted. He stepped fast to his truck and got in and that was it: he drove off for Townsend, where he was the only doctor till Bozeman, Owen knew, the only one, and needed today: July 12, 1972.

  Owen’s heart sank as he watched the dusty pickup grow smaller for five full minutes and disappear into a great fold in the rolling land, miles away. Enzio said, “Come on,” and the two of them, ranch manager and green ranchhand, headed back to the old barn. Enzio led out two horses of two very different sizes and shapes. The little sassy one, snorting and flipping her tail and pawing, was called Maria or Merrier—Owen couldn’t hear it right coming out of Enzio’s mustache. The tall, thick-bodied, soft-eyed horse with the scars on his hips was called Flake, which name Owen got clearly. Only Flake had looked at him warmly that day, and that, he thought, might only be wish fulfillment and anthropomorphism, two concepts from the school year that weren’t going to help much here.

  Without a word more, Enzio packed Maria or whatever it was the Italian had said her name was and saddled her with two modestly packed canvas bags showing much wear. “Bedroll,” Enzio said patting the load. “You borrow mine. Food for your week, what I was going to eat. They get a handful oats each morning. Sure you water ’em. Love this Flake, boy. Do not gallop him, never. Topo is right here. Better show you a few things.” And Enzio dug in the first saddlebag, found what he was after: two geographical-survey topographical maps, taped together to make one map, much folded and abused. He flattened the mess over Flake’s willing flank, pointed to a pencilled X that was the ranch, said, “Pay ‘tention,” then, without letting his finger linger anywhere long enough for Owen to get his bearings, pointed out this spring and that draw, this canyon and that service pond, the federal fence line, logging roads, an old homesteader’s cabin. “You’ll find the ladies here and herded under here and maybe a few calved right here,” pointing and naming quickly and speaking inwardly, no teacher he, no coach.

  Enzio folded the map roughly and shoved it back in its place in the load. “Anything of yours you want you better get,” he said.

  Owen breathed for calm and tried to look calm swaggering to his car. There, he just pulled his backpack out, this bright blue and shiny bit of leisure gear. Clean clothes in the backpack, and a fat bag of pot, and three books he meant to read, and his map of Montana, and he couldn’t think what else. Little camera. Pack of gum. Cigarettes—shit, only two packs. What did Enzio say about a week? Owen couldn’t think of the questions he should be asking.

  “Be prepared to sleep out under the stars,” Uncle Dick had said. “And don’t expect any luxuries.” Packs of matches. He found seven on the seat and floor and in the glove compartment, shoved them in the pocket of the pack. His guitar would have to stay, though he certainly wouldn’t mind having it—too embarrassing to march back to the horse barn with enough stuff for a Hawaiian vacation. Baseball cap, sweatshirt, work gloves, thank God (“Aw, Mom,” he’d said when she handed them over, brand-new), pair of pliers from under the seat. He tucked everything he could fit into the blue pack fast and trotted back with the whole lumpy mess to Enzio and the horses. Enzio gave the pack a long, unreadable gaze, took it from Owen brusquely, tied it on Maria or Mah-real, about where a man might sit, between the saddlebags.

  Enzio said, “Nothing else?”

  “What’s missing?” Owen said, raising the question from the painful very bottom of his existence. He thought he saw some ripple in Enzio’s expression.

  “What kind of saddle you like?”

  “The most comfortable,” Owen said, trying to make his fondest wish out to be a knowledgeable joke.

  Another cryptic gaze and Enzio tramped into the barn, gesturing Owen to follow. In the dark tack room there were three saddles heaved over the w
all of an empty stall. Owen pointed to the thickest and fanciest among them, but Enzio shook his head.

  “No, really,” Owen said.

  “That is the Doc’s,” said Enzio.

  That left two dusty and well-used saddles.

  Owen breathed some more. “Which is best?”

  “Neither one,” said Enzio. He took up the closer, took up the blanket under it, nodded his head back at some leather-and-buckles tack left hanging on the boards there.

  Owen took all that up and followed the ranch manager back out into the sun and together they blanketed and saddled and bridled Flake, who took it all stoically. Mare-Rhea twitched, but took her bridle, too, and a long tether.

  “You will count cattle, right?”

  “Right.”

  And Enzio walked away. Owen watched him, breathing purposefully, watched him stamp across the dry yard and into the house. Then there was nothing but a strong wind on a hot day. Flake gave him that warm look, and Owen patted the horse’s big nose. And waited. Maybe he was just supposed to get going, which of course he could not do, as he had no idea what it meant to count cattle. He’d have to ask, should already have asked. Only a dope tried to seem like a pro when he knew nothing.

  But then the house door slammed open and Enzio was stamping back, carrying a little rifle and a long fishing rod. Owen had never shot, and he’d never fly-fished. “These you better have.” Enzio held up the fly rod. “Get sick of rice and bean.” He held up the rifle. “See a coyote, phht.” And tied them to Mare-Rhea’s load, the rod broken down into two pieces like antennae sticking up from the saddlebags, the rifle just tied in like any old walking stick. He handed Owen two boxes, one of .22 cartridges, one of fishing flies that looked like so many brown bugs.