The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  Ward gave me a sideways hug. Standing that close to him after a sleepless night grounded me, like leaning against a sun-warmed tree trunk. He removed his hand from my shoulder and lifted another map from the stack we’d made. Close to where we met on the Little Beaver, I spotted a north-south dotted line. “The Ladder of Rivers!” I said.

  Tribe after tribe had climbed the ladder across the High Plains, going from one watering hole to the next as they hunted bison. Some had settled beside the springs long enough to grow corn and squash—all thanks to the gift of surface water. Even my modest Little Beaver had been a rung on the ladder. Along with Ward’s Smoky Hill and the mightier Platte and Arkansas, it had made High Plains trade and travel possible all the way back to the Paleo-Indian Clovis culture.

  “The Ladder of Rivers,” Ward mused. “That phrase sounds familiar. I think I ran across it in that book I sent you about Dull Knife’s escape from Oklahoma.”

  He was referring to the epic flight, in 1878, of the Northern Cheyenne from Oklahoma. The military had coerced them to move there, onto the Southern Cheyenne reservation. But the northerners escaped, fighting their way through Kansas and Nebraska, fending off the attacks of better-armed, more numerous cavalry. Some of the tribe had made it to their home in the Black Hills, but many had died in Nebraska, gunned down as they huddled in the freezing hills.

  “It was terrible what we did to the Indians,” I said.

  “I know just what you mean, even if I did always root for the cowboys in the shoot ’em ups.”

  “I rooted for the Indians,” I said.

  “I never would have guessed.” He softened the sarcasm with an affectionate smile.

  “I want to go to all these streams,” I said. “I want to find the springs where the Indians camped and the pioneers settled. I’m drawn to those places.”

  “I would be honored to join you in that. Dull Knife’s band crossed the Smoky not far from my place. I’ll take you there.”

  “That would be great!” I stifled a yawn.

  Ward studied me for a second. “You know, I can see I’ve worn you out. Let’s go back to the hotel and rest.”

  • • •

  I SANK INTO THE LEATHER PASSENGER SEAT of his vintage Continental, the kind of car you’d expect to see a cigar-chewing, country real estate agent driving. Except for its color: powder blue. “My buddies rib me about it,” he said, “but at least it’s not pink.”

  At the stoplight, I closed my eyes. “Make yourself at home. Lean back,” he said, pushing a button on the console to tilt the seat.

  I trusted him to bear me along on this cushion, then up the elevator to his room. I would sleep, or we would make love. Both sounded equally appealing. We could linger the rest of the day. I didn’t care if I missed my plane. There’d be another one in the evening. I could call my friend Diane and ask her to stay another night at my house. After Jake had skipped work when I was away in August, I’d resolved not to leave him home alone again until he’d proven he was responsible.

  Behind thick curtains in his darkened room, Ward kissed me deeply and deliciously, as he had the night before. But much sooner than I expected, he began undoing my buttons. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, then guided me onto the bed and took off my jeans and underpants, tossing them aside like weeds. Quickly, he took off his own jeans and lay down beside me.

  Here was the reality of him. The wiry, gray-blond chest hair, shoulders broad as a truck making his belly irrelevant. A thrilling shock, this sudden nakedness. The reality of both of us. A little embarrassed to be making love in daylight, I reached for an embrace. He rolled on top of me.

  I tried to slow him down through body language—a hand on his forearm, messaging, “We have time,” but he was oblivious to my signals. Even his kisses were hurried and incomplete.

  How to convey the shock of this suddenness? It was like being invited to dinner and having the food thrown at me, or finding that I was the dinner and my own appetite was not even secondary but inconsequential. I hadn’t experienced such selfishness in a male since I was sixteen. His hotel room might have been my first boyfriend’s Chevy Impala on a gray road between square wheat fields. I might have been lying on a cold vinyl seat, trying to feel what I wanted to feel—passionate, in love—while my boyfriend had sex.

  I had, in fact, been falling in love with Ward just moments before, but the feeling evaporated under this onslaught. After he rolled off me, I got up just as perfunctorily. Glimpsing confusion on his face, I feigned cheerful regret. “Got a plane to catch.” My hands shook as I buttoned my blouse. “I’ll go pack.”

  In my room, I threw all visible items into my suitcase and didn’t bother to look behind the shower curtain or under the bed. I wanted to get out of the hotel before he caught up with me—if he was planning to do that, if there was any pretense of love left in him at all. If so, I thought, Let him wonder. Let him rot. I flagged a cab, paying thirty dollars for a ride to the airport that would have cost five on the bus, and went through security—again, before he could catch up with me. Beyond the checkpoint, I did feel more secure than I had before, on his terroristic side of that line. How dare he! Bastard! my mind shouted as I rode the train to the gate.

  I sat in the empty waiting area, two hours early for my flight, sorrow welling up like slow poison. It was truth rising in me, time for a reckoning. I’d lowered myself for a man who didn’t warrant a second glance, and now I would have to go through the recovery period and return to a reality that looked grim after entertaining fantasies of transformative love. With a Kansas guy, no less. Had I forgotten why I’d left, at eighteen, and again at thirty-seven? Going back would retrace every step of my evolution, erasing each gain. But this reasoning didn’t prevent me from hugging myself and folding double. I sat up only as I realized that the waiting area was beginning to fill. A child sitting in the bank of molded-plastic chairs opposite me grabbed his mother’s sleeve, then pointed at me as if to say, “What’s wrong with that lady?”

  How had Ward become so important to me so quickly? Now it was as if I’d never been disappointed before, as if he were the first cad I’d ever met. What a fool I’d been!

  • • •

  AT THE TINY AIRPORT IN LARAMIE, THE sky was spitting snow bullets sideways. Why today? Why couldn’t the sun shine, as the state boasted it did more than three hundred days of the year? I wanted to see the luminous peaks of the Snowy Range rising above a panorama of soft-green, short-grass prairie. I needed to breathe the high valley’s sunny clear air to forget Ward and all he stood for—that ancient history of mine that I’d rejected long ago. Instead, I felt his absence as bitterly as I might an extinguished fire in the dead of a winter.

  On the way to the house, I spotted Jake’s pickup pulling into a convenience-store gas station. I glanced at the clock. He was supposed to be in school. We’d named his beagle Regina, Latin for “queen,” with good reason. She rode in the queenly way she always did, her paws on the passenger windowsill, long beagle ears framing big beagle eyes, but she fell back as the truck bounced into the lot. He’d been driving too fast. Hell-bent on having fun, Dad would have said. What a sudden return to reality this was, being reminded, immediately after an absence that I thought was going to change my life, where my love really lay, and what the problems of that love were.

  My yard looked untended, buried in a week’s worth of leaves, and the house seemed cold and dingy. A plastic cup lay on its side on the coffee table, oozing Coke glue. McDonald’s wrappers littered the floor, licked clean by Regina. I leaned over the couch to open the drapes that Jake was always closing so he could watch TV in the daytime.

  To my surprise, a powder-blue car was pulling up to the curb. I’d been so convinced all was over between Ward and me that I hadn’t even considered the possibility he would follow me. Now I felt like a child in a movie, seeing a dead hero return to life.

  I ran to the bathroom
to comb my hair. Calm down, I told myself. Even if he was gallant, driving 120 miles from Denver to Laramie to make things right, he was still clueless. And how could that be? Had relations between men and women really not changed one iota in Kansas since the 1960s? Didn’t the world leak in through television and films?

  I opened the door. He wore a long-sleeved, blue Levi’s shirt, and his belt buckle sat squarely in place again. “You left without saying good-bye.”

  “If Jake comes home, you’ll have to sneak out. I’m not ready to introduce you.”

  In my bedroom, I chose the wingback chair I’d bought recently at a used furniture store, thinking of weekends when Ward would be visiting me, if things had kept going the way I thought they were then.

  This put him on the corner of my bed. “I was afraid you wouldn’t let me in.”

  I probably shouldn’t have, I thought.

  “What did I do wrong?” He looked sad, his lips curved down under his mustache, his eyes still sexy in their extraordinary greenness.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No.”

  That he didn’t think my sexuality was as important as his didn’t just infuriate me, I realized. It threatened me. It had taken years after leaving Kansas for me to develop the courage to accept that I had my own needs and to assert them. The repression was a prison I didn’t want to reenter. No way was I going back to that darkness. But I also remembered how I’d felt an hour ago, getting off the plane into thin, stinging snow. I remembered Jake careening into that parking lot and worry descending over me along with the gray light. If I wanted love, and if I wanted a man’s love for Jake before he was completely grown, this was my chance. But how I must look! Anguished, fragmented by tension, exhaustion, and indecision, I imagined myself as one of Picasso’s cubist women, my face pasted together at sharp angles.

  “I know I should apologize, but I don’t know for what,” Ward said.

  “It’s not what you did.” My voice was squeaky, which I hated. I motioned for a pause, gathered myself and began again in a more even tone. “It’s what you didn’t do. You don’t know how hard this is to say, Ward. But what about me? As soon as we started, I could see it was all going to be about you. That was like—” I closed my eyes to find the right words and blurted out what I saw—“a door slammed shut in my face.” That was it exactly. The door that had stood open the night before, when I first glimpsed him in that suit, had closed in the exact moment I’d begun to walk through it.

  As much as I’d tried to hold back tears, my eyes weren’t cooperating. Ward leaned forward. “I know you don’t want to be held, but will you please scoot a little closer?”

  I wriggled my chair toward the bed but not close enough for him to touch me.

  He dropped his hands onto his lap. “Okay. Jesus. I really hurt you, didn’t I?”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m so sorry. But I thought you wanted it to go fast.”

  I looked at him in disbelief.

  “You know, last night, when you said it was good to rush? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  I felt my anger begin to fade. Could it be he’d really taken that literally? “I didn’t mean wham bam. I meant why not go for it? When you’re feeling passionate, why wait?”

  “You see, Julene, I totally misunderstood that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to sidestep this, but you could have said something. You could have slowed things down or stopped them altogether.”

  But I had tried! At least I thought I had, with my body language. Apparently, my signals had been too subtle for Ward. What did a man like him need? I expected nuance in lovemaking. It was supposed to be mutual, intuitive, a communion. Yet why hadn’t I asserted myself more? Insisted even? Maybe that’s what threatened me—my own failure to stand up for myself.

  “Will you come here, please? Lie down with me, let me hold you?”

  I looked into his contrite eyes. “I don’t want any kisses.”

  “That’s not what I want right now either.”

  I lay down with my back to him, but there was no way to hide the emotion coursing through me. It was pouring out of my eyes. He put his arm around me. “Will you ever run out of tears?”

  “I don’t know where they’re coming from. I hate that I’m acting like this.” Clearly, my heart believed that the lonely years were behind us, that finally we could open again, but it was too soon and too dangerous to act this way.

  “Without your tears, I’d be on my way home by now. I never would have known how you felt. And this is the only place I want to be.”

  “Me too,” I admitted, amazed at the truth of it. I thought, I am lying here with a man who isn’t shaped right, for me. He doesn’t think right, as far as I believe. He lives in a place I can’t return to. And yet I don’t want him to leave.

  I sighed. “There’s too much against us. We live too far apart. I’m not going to work on sex with you. And I’m not going back to Kansas. I left all that ten thousand years ago.”

  “This may be a corny thing to say, but I don’t really think we have a choice. This is bigger than us.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, as if unconvinced. But what else could explain my inability to get up from the bed?

  “Besides,” Ward added. “My place might be different from what you think.”

  “I already know what your house looks like. I bet it’s full of knotty pine and pictures of cowboys on horses and that you use horseshoes for coat hooks.”

  “Okay. I guess you do know.”

  “I’m a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club.”

  “So?”

  “I have friends who are gay.”

  For a second, he didn’t move or breathe. “Am I supposed to be shocked at that?”

  We laughed together. He said, “Before you list any more of your faults, would you let me hold you for a while longer?”

  “My faults?”

  “Or mine. Which have you.”

  I rolled over and laid my head on his shoulder. “I think that door that slammed shut this morning is opening.”

  His chin moved up and down against my forehead. “And for once in my life, I have the sense to go through it.”

  “What would you have done in the past?”

  “I would have run.”

  I nodded in self-recognition. Wasn’t that what I’d spent the morning doing? At the first indication of a problem, I had turned tail. But a strange miracle had taken place on this bed. It had been like Alice’s precipitous fall down the rabbit hole. On landing, we’d both found ourselves in an alternate universe, and now it was as if we’d inhaled some secondary smoke from the caterpillar’s hookah. I’d lain down of one heart and now I was of another, willing to work on anything.

  When Ward took my hand and led me down the stairs, it was as if every cell in my body aligned itself in his direction. It had been so long since a man had taken my hand with confidence and led me anywhere, so long since, if one had tried, I would have been willing to follow.

  The sun was setting and he had five hours to drive, cows to check on and horses to feed. Jake might come home any minute. We said our good-byes on the porch, and I watched the taillights of his Continental until he turned onto the bridge that would lead him to I-80, the old Oregon Trail. He would travel east into Nebraska, then drop down the Ladder of Rivers, to his home on the Smoky.

  5

  ON THANKSGIVING MORNING, JAKE SLEPT AS HE ALWAYS DID ON OUR TRIPS TO KANSAS, A PILLOW WEDGED BETWEEN HIS HEAD AND THE WINDOW GLASS AND THE QUILT THAT HIS GRANDMOTHER HAD STITCHED FOR HIM WHEN HE WAS IN KINDERGARTEN WRAPPED AROUND HIM. It barely covered his upper half anymore. His dirty ball cap had fallen off, revealing his patchy Mohawk.

  As I drove, I snatched glimpses of the dawn-gilded Never Summer range. The mountains had all the luster I’d wished for that g
rim afternoon the month before when, unloved and unsaved, I’d returned to Laramie and my imperfect life after rushing out of the Denver hotel. But Ward had followed me, then left me caressed and transformed. Ever since, I’d taken a new lover’s delight in beauty. The gray-green rabbit brush against a gentle pink sky and the ponderosa pines and boulders dusted in snow made me downright nirvanic. I could hardly resist waking Jake. “Behold!” I wanted to say.

  For the last several years, especially since my father died, I had dreaded holidays in Kansas. They never delivered all I wanted for Jake, all I thought he needed. But for the last two weeks, I’d been giddy about this approaching trip home because I would finally get to see Ward again. It had been difficult not to share my excitement with Jake over the past month. So far I’d told him little. He knew only that I’d met Ward when I went home alone in August and that he was coming to dinner.

  Jake finally unfolded from his cocoon as we dropped into Fort Collins, the town north of Denver. “Morning, sleepyhead,” I said.

  “Morning.” His tone was still laced with grumpiness from having to get up so early.

  “Your grandfather went to ag school here when it was a little college town. Now look at it, all condos and McMansions.”

  “I like our house better,” Jake said.

  “Man, me too.”

  “Can I drive?”

  “After Denver. Let’s wait until—”

  “Whatever,” he said, before I could remind him of the tricky interchange coming up. He turned toward the window and a new sleeping position. He was wearing one of the white undershirts he’d stenciled with the day of the week. This one said Sunday, even though it was Thursday. It had brown stains and a tear where he’d ripped out the label. Only by pleading had I gotten him to wear plain jeans, not the pair he’d drawn psychedelic designs on and refused to let me wash.

  What would Ward think? I hoped that he had enough wisdom to see past Jake’s clothes. I hoped that he could read his eyes. Jake had the kindest, brownest brown eyes. He hadn’t been very kind to me lately, but that was to be expected at this age, wasn’t it? It comforted me that his teachers still praised his compassion, saying it was surprising in a boy.