by Tim Sandlin
Although her line of reasoning twisted about and doubled back on itself, Hank was able to follow Lydia perfectly.
“So you had to destroy me on purpose before you destroyed me accidentally.”
“Yes.”
He turned his palms over and spread his hands. “It didn’t work. Look at me.”
Lydia looked at him.
“Do I look destroyed to you?”
Hank looked the same as he had when they sat down, before she dropped her bomb. “Hell, Hank, you’re so good at that wooden Indian face, no one can tell.”
“I can tell, and the way I care for you hasn’t changed.”
“How can that be? I fucked a kid named Warren. He got me off, eventually.”
“We’ve been together thirty years,” Hank said. “Don’t you figure I know who you are and what you are capable of, and more important, what you’re not capable of, by now. You’re God’s own woman, but remorse doesn’t become you.”
“Become?”
Hank nodded. “It’s missing from you like a blind colt missing its sight. The colt can’t comprehend what it would be like to see. When you try faking remorse because you think that’s what a normal person would feel, you get all screwed up inside.”
Lydia started to weep for the first time in Hank’s memory. He was so stunned he almost shut up. But she’d come this far to disillusion his heart, or whatever the hell she thought she was doing. He couldn’t very well stop short.
Hank said, “I love the mountain lion. Does that mean I want to pull the teeth from the mountain lion to make it safer?”
“If you married one, you might.”
“Then it would no longer be a mountain lion. If I demanded—or expected or even dreamed of—normal behavior from you, you would no longer be Lydia.”
Lydia didn’t try to stop the tears. She didn’t touch her face or sniffle or any of the gestures most women make when crying. Maybe she was so new to tears she didn’t know how to use them.
“So you don’t care who I sleep with.”
“Of course I care. But me loving you and you loving me loses every shred of truth if you are confined by duty.”
Lydia thought about this a long time, long enough to cry herself out. Finally, she said, “There’s a really good chance that you’re nuts.”
“Probably.”
Neither of them spoke for ten minutes. Lydia watched the man on the riding lawn mower pull up before a door, get off the mower, and scratching his belly, he went inside. He came back out with a bottle of what, from Lydia’s perspective, looked like Calistoga water, and stood staring at the mower, drinking.
Hank’s eyes were on a pair of hummingbirds fighting over a feeder. Even though the feeder had four fake flowers with holes leading to sugar water, neither hummingbird would allow the other to drink, so they battled like fiends and both went hungry. Hank didn’t see a lick of a life lesson in this. He wasn’t thinking in those terms.
Lydia said, “I’ve lost my power.”
Hank looked from the hummingbird feeder back to Lydia, whose lower lip puffed out like a child who’s been told No. He said, “I don’t think so.”
“No one pays any attention to me anymore. If I scream, they treat me like an elderly eccentric. ‘Oh, that’s just Lydia. Don’t bother about her. She’s harmless.’”
Lydia thought about the Mexican at the gas station the day before. She still couldn’t get over how he’d deflected her charm. He’d behaved as if they had no common ground, as if she were the enemy. Even gay men paid attention when she wanted them to. There wasn’t a man at that table in the Refried Boogie Bar who wouldn’t have gone with her. Why had the gas-station attendant been so mean-spirited?
Lydia said, “I’m hauling around this ninety-nine-year-old geezer. Nobody in their wildest imaginations would ever think he has deep emotions. People humor him. I humor him. I hear the story of his past, and it doesn’t matter who he loved and hated and lost, because all those people would be dead by now anyway. What does it matter if he lost them at thirty or eighty? They’re gone. It means nothing that the old fart once took up space.”
“He still does.”
“Not space anyone cares about.” Lydia frowned at the thought of Oly Pedersen. It offended her no end that he could stand what he’d become and the way people viewed him. He should be enraged, but he wasn’t. What was all that about?
Lydia’s hands formed into fists, thumbs inside fingers. “That empty bag doesn’t want to die. He’s got no one. He can’t do anything he used to do, and no one who remembers his youth is still alive, but he’s not ready to get out of the way.”
Hank touched her hand, and this time she didn’t flinch. He said, “I can make you a guarantee, Lydia. You will never be harmless.”
Her eyes flashed with a hint of the old flame. “I sure as hell wasn’t harmless last night. I hurt myself but good. It was like self-rape. It was filthy.”
“But you didn’t hurt me.”
The flame left Lydia’s eyes. Her shoulders slumped. “That’s the cruelest thing you could have said.”
24
Lydia left a note on the air-conditioner control box:
I’m taking two hours, maybe three. Make yourselves useful by recording the next round of the old man’s hogwash. Be prepared to leave before checkout. That is 11 a.m., Pacific Time.
***
The winter of 1923 to 1924, I went insane. It wasn’t pretty neither. People talk about craziness like it’s a vacation from responsibility, but in my case, anyway, it meant a horrid loss of perspective. I howled to the coyotes. My insides rebelled, and I vomited upon the earth. I tore flesh from my skin. And to make the situation worse, I did so in secrecy.
Here I was, in what should have been the happiest part of my life, and I was in the miserablest. Around Evangeline, I acted the proud husband and father-to-be. Always a smile. Never a whine. While away from her, my guts were being eaten alive, like in the dream of the bear. If Evangeline was keeping secrets from me, I was keeping just as many secrets from her. Try it sometime: try acting thrilled to the core when you’re about to die of doubt.
Rangering in Yellowstone in winter holds no correspondence to rangering in summer. November, I was stationed on and off at Buffalo Ranch in Lamar Valley, cutting hay and fixing fence knocked down by the tame herd. This was awful, as my imagination ran rampant wondering what Evangeline and Bill were up to in my absence, but at least there were people around. Keeping appearances up will get you through most hard times, simply because faked sanity is superior to insanity. When I worked, I could block out the pictures in my head. I could not block the pictures at night, although the cabin where I slept was shared with others, so I had to keep quiet—no screams at midnight. Some mornings I awoke to find I’d bitten my arms to alleviate the pain.
I spent Christmas home with Evangeline. Pregnancy suited her. A peace descended over my wife that was a marvel to behold. Her skin glowed. Her hair shone. She must have felt the nausea and discomfort inherent to her condition, but if so, she never complained. She showed complete satisfaction with the moment.
Only once did she ask how I was holding up. Our first anniversary, New Year’s Eve 1923, we were lying in bed, faced together, lost in one another’s eyes, and she said, “Are you content?”
And I said, “Of course, I’m content. Why do you ask?”
“You looked worried this afternoon, when you carried in the firewood.”
I hadn’t known she was looking at me then. “I was concerned I’d get enough cut for you and the baby before I go on patrol.”
She smiled, more to herself than me. “Crow women split wood till the day the baby is born. The next day they get up and split more. You shouldn’t spoil me with white ways.”
I said, “I’ll spoil you any ways I can.”
Then, while Evangeline slept I imagined
her naked in this very bed as Bill Cox mounted her and the both of them laughed at my innocence.
After New Year’s, the park put me on snowshoes and sent me back to border patrol south of Lewis Lake. I was alone. The temperature hovered between thirty and forty below zero, sometimes dropping to the point where it fell below the calibration line on the thermometer. At night, the trees cracked like gunshots.
Those were the weeks I crossed the line from overwrought to full-blown crazy. Ofttimes, I was so paralyzed by terror I was unable to rise from bed for thinking of Bill Cox and what he said he did and what I should of done to him for saying it. Luckily, I went to ground at a line shack up on the Thoroughfare, and I could have stayed in bed for weeks with none the wiser.
On my better days, I was certain Bill was lying—hell, he lied all the time in France—and on my worse days, I was just as certain he spoke true. Worse days outnumbered better ones. I thought of asking Shad since a big part of diddling women for Bill was going back to brag to Shad. I think he enjoyed the bragging more than the diddling. Only I wasn’t sure I could believe whatever answer Shad gave me, and if I did believe it and it confirmed my fears, I was fairly sure to die. Some nights, death felt preferable to uncertainty, and I might have chosen the coward’s way had that not meant leaving Evangeline and the baby to fend for themselves. I could never go that route, whether the child was from my seed or not.
***
Full moon, early May, I came to myself barefoot and drooling along the ridge that looks down on the Old Faithful Geyser. My rangering shirt was tatters, although still on my back. The pockets of my trousers were inside out. Needless to say, on top of madness, I had broken my sacred vow to Evangeline—the only vow she’d ever asked for—and reverted to drink. I’d found a bottle of white hooch the man before me hid in the Upper Basin Station.
The reason I came to was I’d walked into a lodgepole pine and knocked myself over. I lay there in the needles and melted snow puddles, staring up at the night sky. I had no excuse for walking into a tree. The moon was so bright it threw shadows. Stars twinkled off toward the horizon, but only the brightest of planets shone through the immediate moon glow.
From my back, flat on the earth, the realization arrived that I had a choice between death and action. Not knowing the true father of my wife’s oncoming child had become worse than the pain of knowing—or even worse, letting Evangeline know I doubted her. I had to ask Evangeline, and I had to try my gut best to believe whatever answer she gave. The alternative was no longer bearable.
So I walked home. We were in the midst of a warm snap. Often May is as much winter as January in those parts. The temperature breaks freezing, but the snow falls deep as ever. But in 1924, some of the roads were so clear you could get through in an automobile, and I walked mostly on gravel. My brain was a blank slate, which was a far cry better than what it had been. Now I’d committed to asking Evangeline for the truth, I’d settled into not peace so much as a vacuum. The boiling tar was out of my head, only nothing had come along to replace it. It was like in the War, the night before a battle. No feelings. No thoughts. No nothing.
Hours went by while I walked, until I passed into a mist by the old Fountain Hotel, that wasn’t in use anymore. Due to hot runoff, the Firehole River is warmer than other high mountain streams and the fog is thicker. Tree stumps hovered ghostly. I could barely see the ranger station as I trudged by in the light of dawn and only made out our cabin along the basin edge when I was right up on it.
A four-door Model T Ford touring car was parked in front of my doorstep. My nightmare had come to pass.
***
I sucked a deep breath, yanked open the door, and crossed the threshold. My eyes went straight to the bed, but they weren’t in it. Bill sat at the table before a steaming coffee mug, while Evangeline stood at the stove, feeding a stick into the drum. They both looked at me, amazed by my sudden appearance.
Bill recovered first. He boomed, “Come on in, hoss. Have some coffee,” like it was his home and not my own.
I could see Evangeline was surprised, but not so much overpowered by shame as I expected. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress and moccasins. Her belly had expanded since I last saw her. Her hair hung down to her elbows. It had been washed recently.
She said, “What happened to your feet?”
I looked down at the blood clots between my toes. My feet were torn up and I was tracking the floor, but to my mind, we had more important matters to hand.
Evangeline’s eyes traveled from my feet to my face, and what she saw there gave her cause for concern. “Oly, what happened? Why are you here?”
I stepped forward into the room, hoping to menace Bill. He grinned and drank coffee. I figure he was glad to have me catch them out. He couldn’t have plotted it better.
“I came to ask you a question,” I said. “I guess I got the answer.”
Evangeline caught up with the train of my suspicion. I don’t think she’d realized till that moment the conclusions I had jumped to. What was I supposed to think at 6 a.m. with them together while they knew I would be gone?
“You have chosen the wrong answer,” she said. “Mr. Cox was driving by and his radiator boiled over, so he stopped while it cools.”
Bill winked. The jerk. He must have been the first that spring to drive over the road from Gardiner. No way could this be a social drop-by. He knew her words for a lie, and he knew I knew. The bastard was enjoying himself no end.
Evangeline said, “Bill was about to leave.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Bill said. “I wouldn’t miss this for a hundred dollars.”
Bill was too rotten to waste time on, but Evangeline was my wife. I ignored him and addressed her. “You took advantage of my absence to wallow with this sleazy excuse for an animal.”
“Watch your mouth,” Bill said.
“You cannot believe that,” Evangeline said.
“What else am I to believe?”
There followed a long silence. I hadn’t expected her to deny the evidence, and it brought my righteousness up short. Against all that I could see, what if she was innocent? Her stare bored into me. She was almost, but not quite, angry. I didn’t know what to do next. Outside the open door, a spring robin went into that trill of theirs. The coffee that was already made started to boil again. You have to watch that with a woodstove.
Bill stood up and said the last words I expected. “I’m in love with Evangeline.”
Evangeline swung her attention to Bill. She said, “That is stupid. You cannot love anyone, and even if you told yourself you love me, it wouldn’t matter. Oly is my husband.”
Bill sniggered. “Not for long.”
I nodded towards Evangeline’s belly. “Which of us is the father of that child?”
She covered her womb with both hands, palms in, toward the baby. “How could you ask such a thing?”
“Bill’s been telling everyone who’ll listen that he’s the true father. I need to know.”
She stared at me like I’d grown a snake’s head and rattle. “You would dream truth could come from such a mouth as his, while I lie? Haven’t you grown to know me by now?”
I looked from her to him and back. I was spent. It’d been too long a winter, and I was exhausted, confused, and lost. I wanted to believe her, but how could I, with him standing there? Someone was playing me for a fool, only I didn’t know who.
I said, “I’m starting to think I have no idea who you are.”
Bill turned sidewise to face my wife. He stared at her while using his fingers to pull points into that mustache of his. “Tell Oly who you are, Evangeline.”
Her face went stricken. All the dread she could muster leaped suddenly into her eyes. Beyond stricken, she flashed panic.
She held a hand out to me and took a step forward. I took a step back, away from her. We were in a tunnel with only us on bot
h ends and no one else anywhere near.
Bill’s voice came from outside the tunnel of us. “Remember that prostitute lived up on Burnt Wagon Draw. The one gave you the dose.”
I was so wrapped in Evangeline it took a moment to catch what he meant. I said, “The fat whore who made us all pee broken glass.”
Evangeline exhaled. “Oly.”
Bill’s voice was happy. “This is the whore’s daughter.”
I stared at Evangeline, not believing at first. Swamp Fox’s child had been a little girl. Bone thin, malnourished, much younger than me. How much? It’d been ten years ago. Maybe eleven.
Evangeline watched as I did the arithmetic. Her mouth looked torn. She clutched her belly like holding a lifeline.
Bill didn’t let up. “Syphilis killed the mother. Little Evie’s been on her own ever since, living by her wits and”—he paused—“whatever.”
I asked, “Is this true?”
She didn’t speak. Didn’t even nod. I saw, anyway. Before me stood the daughter of the biggest mistake of my life, the mistake that cost me Agatha. This woman used me to escape Paris. She was the lover of my enemy.
I said, “Evangeline.”
I’d never seen fear in Evangeline. It took a few moments to realize that’s what she was—afraid. When I didn’t say anything more, her eyes flickered with hope. She must have thought I would behave with honor.
I didn’t. “I guess you had to follow Mama’s moccasins. Once a whore, always a whore.”
Evangeline gasped. Wet slickness sprung to her eyes. She advanced quickly, and I thought she might strike me, but instead she pushed past and rushed out the door.
***
Bill said, “You handled that well.”
What I’d done hit me like a maul to the chest, and I turned and took off after her.
Evangeline was headed toward the basin at a good clip. I made her out through the fog, walking fast, holding her belly, her shoulders twitching up and down from the weeping. Even seven months pregnant, she had the posture of a dancer.
