“I’ve got family in Fresno,” I said.
“Everyone has family in Fresno. Clackamas is my Fresno.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Leave it for now, call me when you want to take it.”
“Do you have a card?”
Of course she did.
Iris was at the bar with an old fashioned. I asked if she was feeling poetic yet. She said she was always feeling poetic. After she wrote a check for the rotator bearings and arranged with the concierge to have them delivered to her car, if they would fit, she asked the bartender for a refill and led me out of the place with her full glass in her hand.
We didn’t talk as she led me to our room, but I could see what she was saying with her body. She leaned her back against the glass of the elevator, resting her ass on the handrail. She sipped from her drink and watched me so directly I had to look away. In our hallway up on the twelfth floor, there was a swing in her hips that wasn’t usually there. She was trying to make me imagine, I thought, ripping that dress off her and throwing her on the bed. I was imagining it. I felt I was being forced to imagine it.
The room, I was surprised to find, had two twin beds. She walked ahead of me and sat on the far one, the open-curtained window glittering behind her. “I wanted you to have a choice,” she said. “Didn’t want to feel I was forcing your hand.” The confident stare she’d used in the elevator was wavering now. I walked forward until I stood between the two beds. In trying to think, I blocked myself from thinking.
She should have forced my hand, I thought. Give me a space to retreat into, and I will retreat. Offer me an empty bed and I’ll sit on it. That’s exactly what I did. For a moment she lost control of her face. When she regained it, she waited, clenching her lips, before she spoke. “I’m going to have a rinse off, then.” She headed toward the bathroom with no swagger in her hips now, no request to be unzipped. I stayed on the edge of the bed, thinking about how either choice would have led to a lifetime of regret. They would be different regrets. Choosing her bed would have been the more interesting regret, and the lesser regret in general. It would not have added mass to the accumulating regrets about my inability to act. It could have had its own special drawer. Iris would have been the mathematical choice, and the artful one as well. But it was no longer a choice. The moment had passed, and now it was a fact.
I thought I heard her crying in the shower. As I listened, I realized she was making love to herself. It was an even sadder sound, not trying to be silent, not trying to be heard—just a series of small moans as regular as an old brake pad squeaking against its drum. The shower ran for a while even after they stopped, accompanied by the modulations of regular washing. Good thing hot water wasn’t charged to the room. I lay down on the bed, facing the pretty window.
Iris came out wrapped in two towels, one around her body and one around her hair. She lay on the other bed, looking across at me. The small hotel towel showed me more of her legs than I’d seen before, creating the moment that made me realize appeal and availability formed an equation much too complex to be measured by a revelation of skin. The invitation was gone from her eyes.
“If she offers you a job, you should take it. You’re not married to Fresno.”
“I’m not sure what I want.”
“Could be that you never will.”
We fell asleep like that, facing each other across four feet of empty space. I know because she fell asleep first, still in her towels. I stayed up thinking of what Cherise had said about all revolving restaurants being geometrically similar. They were close enough to the same thing that the only important difference was what they looked out on. Our languishing restaurant had once sat atop the skyline of Waikiki with a line of patrons snaking out the door. Suppose you could pick up the whole thing, with Iris and me in it, and put it down on any tower in any city. Put us in a different place, would it be enough to give us different lives? That’s where I drifted off, and fittingly, because such hypotheticals are already halfway to being dreams.
Sleep let go of her first as well, because when I woke in the morning she was back in her same dress. The magic trick, repeated, had no effect. The second morning it seemed tawdry, and I felt tawdry for witnessing it. It didn’t help that her hair was a wreck from sleeping with it wrapped, a mess of weird curves that seemed the product of distorted gravity. But then, looking down at the clothes I had slept in, I was only one day behind her. All we had to put on were our shoes. We had no bags to pack. We didn’t even need to see the front desk. We just left our key in the room and rode the elevator down to the garage. In her car big enough for two, we headed south again.
COYOTE
BATTLE CREEK COLLEGE
The premature clang of the morning bell had the young men half awake even before Eli and his crew burst into the bunkroom shouting that a cow had been murdered. Someone had led Columbia out of the barn during the night and slit her throat next to the well. Outside, it was the transparent black of empty and frozen air, not even the peaks of the Sierras yet lit to the west or a line of purple on the flat eastern horizon. The thermometers had the temperature at twenty-one. If they worked quickly, Eli said, she wouldn’t have to go to waste. The young men were already out of their bunks. Letting an animal spoil was something nobody wanted, especially with Columbia, who of the fifty head they kept was the most noble-featured, the most loved.
When they got the floodlights on and made it out to the well, she was a dark lump on the ground. They saw that a thirteen-foot stream of blood had frozen over where it ran from her neck into a wide low puddle. She’d taken several steps before collapsing, and her forelegs looked like they’d been dipped in chocolate.
With a chain come-along they were able to pull her into the front loader of the backhoe without scooping up a mess of dirt, but its cab was too high to get them more than a few feet inside the barn door, and they had to fashion a sled on the top frame of the tractor’s disc attachment. Eli commanded the whole thing, so that while five of the young men were getting Columbia into the front loader, five were wheeling the disc into position, five were gathering lead ropes from the tack room and tying them onto the disc, and the other thirteen were set to haul tables from the workshop into the barn, cover them with plastic sheeting, sterilize them, and prepare for the other requirements of butchery. The disc sank and cut grooves in the clay as fifteen of them strained to pull it, but there was no question of using the horses, which smelled Columbia’s blood and were stamping and whinnying. The biggest challenge was lifting her carcass onto the table. A half-ton heifer divided among thirty people was fewer than fifty pounds each, but it was impossible for even half of them to get a clean purchase, so they looped furniture straps, tie downs, ropes, halters, and anything else at hand to allow those in the outer circle to shoulder a few pounds of the load. In one great heave, they got her up and onto the flat surface.
They worked in quiet concert. Eli said a few names, and those he called joined him in the tasks of skinning and gutting Columbia, of separating her into primal cuts, but none of the others went back to bed or to breakfast or milled about watching. Those not called to help Eli threw blankets over the horses and cows, since the barn door had been left open to bring down the temperature. When they ran out of horse blankets they brought blankets from their own beds. They broke up ice and transferred it to coolers to carry the meat, what would fit of it, to the deep freeze. Others set about washing and soaking the hide once Eli and his helpers had finished cutting it off. The work was serious and perhaps sad, but it was why most of them had come, for the power of a community in accord, doing the work that needed to be done, doing work that was apparent and abundant. There was a rhythm to it, a muscle memory, and none of the dwelling on past or future that came with idle time.
Only when the butchery was done, along with all the associated cleaning, did the eeriness of the situation start to settle in. They’d sprung into action togeth
er, and done it well, and had left out of their minds that what started the process was the murder of a favored cow. A killing that served no purpose, that seemed too far afield even for random malice. Especially after what had happened to the dog. They all sat together around the well, still warm from their labor. Sunlight put a shine on the snowcaps to the west now, and a damp peach light was in the air. The diorama of cow’s blood was still frozen in the dirt, but the top was starting to shimmer and bead with droplets.
Who could have done such a thing? The first hypothesis was bored townie punks. Home-cooked meth had come to nearby Bishop recently, if in a small way, and unpredictable behavior had stopped being unfamiliar. But several of the students pointed out that it was a bit hard to imagine someone getting freaked out on meth, driving thirty miles on country roads in the dark, finding a cow—and not just any cow—in the barn, getting her out to center of campus, and slicing her throat, not to mention doing so without making enough noise to wake anyone up.
The quiet that followed was uncomfortable.
“Anybody got a crazy ex?” Neil asked with a stillborn chuckle.
It was Wesley Denniston who spoke up, a wiry second-year with the haircut of an orphan, which always made a surprise out of the clarity, the beauty, of his voice, even though he was never shy about using it. In every seminar, his voice was the first raised, and it was absent the upward lilt of a question mark. Everyone’s eyes went to him. Eli stared him into the dust, but Eli was behind the rest of the group where they couldn’t see him, and Wesley went on anyway.
“We all do,” he said. “Hugo.”
“That seems a pretty wild speculation,” Eli said.
“Just how wild?” Wesley said, staring right back.
WESLEY
I know Paul tells us our salvation is not by works but by faith. When James argues for the importance of works, however, he is not contradicting Paul. He says that a faith apart from works is dead, that a living faith will produce works. The point is that acts are not irrelevant. What draws most of us, and certainly me, to Battle Creek College is the idea not just that faith affects works, but that works affect faith. So when we are lugging sandbags or harvesting vegetables by hand or working all together to drive cattle through the corral to tag, horn, brand, and vaccinate them, that is its own kind of prayer. By adding it to traditional prayer, we enrich our faith. Many know the motto Simple Work, Complex Faith, but few understand it. Still, the school works well as a magnet: the ones who seek it are the ones who belong. Those who don’t believe in work don’t come.
Hugo was the exception. From the moment he arrived I sensed something off about him. He lacked a certain gravity. He was not serious enough. During work hours, students’ faces displayed the turning over and sorting out of the day’s lectures; you could see the smelting of ore into iron through the furnace of labor. But not with Hugo. He would look off at the mountains, or get lost in the sunset, and his pace would slow. If it was line work, he would throw off the rhythm of the whole crew. And his quiet in the seminar was unlike those who waited, listened, and processed thoughtfully before speaking, like Eli. Hugo’s silence was simply disengaged from the high life of the mind this place is designed to serve.
Eli, on the other hand, looked like a healthy thirty-year-old man even though he was only twenty-two. He was the type who had looked full-grown at thirteen. He looked like a cowboy, like a man who knew the land through a communion with the One who made it. He had finished his degree two years earlier and was in the second year of his ranch steward fellowship. He guided us not just in the upkeep of our crops and livestock, but in the classroom, where he was a sort of graduate assistant, and he let the students air their first thoughts and prejudices before diving in with a comment, or more often a question, that made clear the issue, or would rattle around in thirty skulls during our duty hours. Both the professors and Pastor Dale shifted their tone when talking to Eli, conversing with him as with an equal.
You can see why I could not have predicted or even believed that Hugo’s bad spirit could worm its way into this man. And yet the Book tells us that Adam and Eve fell, that the great David fell, that Saul fell, that even the Apostles denied and doubted their Lord. So it was some speck in my own eye, a naiveté or a boyish lack of confidence, that kept me from seeing the corruption of Eli sooner. How I wish that I had seen it sooner. But once I saw it I could not simply let it go. A living faith sometimes requires action.
ELI
I’d worried about Hugo from the start. Most kids came to the college with a drawer of secret anger, which the ranch work helped them burn off safely. You could see their fathers perched on their shoulders, doubting them. Others came with good-boy haircuts and a missionary good cheer. Hugo had a look I hadn’t seen before here. He was soft in the middle and had a mooning look in his eyes that the other students didn’t care for. I assigned him to my own work detail so I could look out for him and make sure he adjusted okay. Our main duty that fall was irrigation, and we’d ride out along the canals kicking the taps on and off, checking levels, and mucking out any debris we happened to find. September in Battle Creek meant sweltering afternoons with cold evenings, and as the sun got low one of those first days, Hugo, who was still an unsure rider, had to dismount to put on his coat. I rode up next to him and said:
“Don’t you know how to grip a horse with your legs?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“There’s no getting around learning.”
“People say I’m a slow learner. If that’s true, I never minded it.”
He seemed to realize that he was being standoffish, and that my attempt at ribbing him was simply my trying to be sensitive without giving the impression that he needed sensitivity. We were out by a field of leeks, and their green stalks were reaching up out of the soil like a thousand lizard paws, and looking out over them, he said, “They’re happy to have company tonight.” I didn’t know yet that this was one of his mannerisms, making these odd qualitative statements. Columbia was the most beautiful cow, he said, which agreed with the consensus, and Galahad was the most beautiful horse, which diverged from it. One day he pointed up at the Sierras, at a peak just separate from three others linked in a ridge, and told me it was the saddest mountain. I didn’t know if his strange pronouncements were sincere or an affectation, and I didn’t really want to know. I came to love them. But the first time I heard one, I didn’t know how to respond. I just told him what I knew: we’d be pulling up those leeks soon, and planting turnips.
WESLEY
I saw Hugo pulling up handfuls of early carrots on an afternoon at the end of September, when the ground was still tender and clumpy from the late summer rains and clung in dark walnuts to the pale orange icicles. He stacked them in the basket of his t-shirt, which distended into a lumpy mass. As he shuffled from the garden to the barn like that, a few carrots would sluice out the side of his bundle, and he’d have to stoop down and grope with his hand to retrieve them.
In the barn he walked back and forth between Columbia and Galahad, feeding them each a carrot at a time and rubbing their ears, their faces, so intent, almost in a trance, that he took no notice of me standing in the doorway until I confronted him about what he was doing.
“It’s from the vegetable garden,” he said, “not the crops.”
“So rather than stealing money from the college, you’re stealing food from its students.”
“I could never appreciate this carrot,” he said, holding one aloft next to Galahad, “the way she appreciates it.” He smiled at me. The Bible makes no distinction between a smiling sinner and a sneaking one, but I felt then and I still feel after searching and prayer the conviction that it is a meaningful one.
“You don’t understand—”
“That’s not a very Christian welcome.” Eli spoke from the doorway, where I’d been standing before I’d advanced on Hugo. Eli nodded me out of the barn, and as I went he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. It won’t hap
pen again.” Remember that at the time I had not learned to distrust him.
The next day Columbia’s milk turned pink, and we called the vet, thinking she had an infection. The vet smelled the milk, and then tasted it, surprising all of us there in the barn who thought it harbored deadly bacteria. He said he’d seen it before, mostly with gentle old timers and farm dowagers. The color was from the carotene and was perfectly harmless. If we stopped feeding her carrots, he said, it would return to normal in a few days. But the milk never went back to white.
ELI
Irrigation amounts to making sure the right dirt is wet, and thus it’s muddy work. But it was even muddier than usual the day in October when we found a dog struggling to swim in the canal out by the nut trees. I kid you not, it was a corgi, scratching with its stub legs at the bank but unable to claw its way out and about dead with exhaustion. I leapt in with my boots on and grabbed the poor thing, which was like a soaked and wriggling roll of carpet, and leaned against the wall of the ditch to hand it off to Hugo and Claude. We rode back to the main campus with me coated in mud all down my front side and with my boots, which had about turned into pitchers of slop, in my saddlebags. Hugo led his horse with one hand and the surprisingly obedient corgi with the other, by a lead rope he’d tied around her belly. Claude jabbered the whole way back about how corgis were supposed to be a smart breed so he didn’t know why one would jump into an irrigation ditch with the body type of a hot dog.
Warnings from the Future Page 12
