He wound down the window and poked his head into the cold blue air. He made a blustery horse noise—a nickering, very convincing—and the horses raised their handsome heads. One took a couple of steps towards us and the boy in lamé stilled it with a sweet sleepy word.
Well. The once-drowned man wound the window back up, eyes brightened. Still got something.
The air became denser the farther north we got. I watched it growing viscous in the high beams. The smell of pine resin came in through the ventilation, and the little spruce quivered as if in response.
The early light seemed fruit-colored and well-meaning. We went by pasture in which there were no animals, only out-of-commission billboards. I could just make out the words on one of them, a passage quoted from Kings, about the remnant of the Sodomites being expelled from the land. The lettering had faded to sugary pastels, as of an invitation to an Easter picnic, or an advertisement for baby clothes. It brought the taste of stale marzipan.
The once-drowned man read aloud from the board.
God, they make it hard, do they not, Katherine?
Then the once-drowned man told me of how he had once drowned, in the Lower Niagara, a nineteen-year-old stunt rider from the Okanagan.
Maybe I would have pulled over, if there had been any place to pull over. There was no place. Instead I drove in silence with great shelves of understanding shearing away, as he rushed on to reassure me that it had not been his intent to drown the rider.
I had thought that I could swim, he pleaded, please know that. I had thought the kid could swim, growing up rural and all. But then the riverbed dropped away. And the current, as I have already mentioned. And it was late, very dark, after a long day on set, and we had both had some too many.
Canned, of course, he went on, in answer to my silence. That film was canned.
I let a mile or two slip past before I spoke up.
You told me it was yourself, I said. Yourself who drowned.
He seemed relieved, even grateful, to elaborate, straighten the record. Yes, me as well, he said. I clutched, if you will, the proverbial straw. And the stunt rider, the Okanagan, was in fact a little wick of a thing, though still, you’d have thought that swimming was crucial in the profession. We were down, we were both down, then I was on my own. Thrashing, who knows how long. Then someone fished me out. This Canadian fisherman, ex–mounted police, as I have mentioned. Jawline like so. (He drew a 110-degree angle in the air between us.) That’s all I remember.
It was my fear he was talking to, I understood. He spoke as if to chase fear from the cab, to exhaust it like a harmful gas. But he would not allow me a clear image of the rider.
Was there something between you? I tried, to no definite response. Then: Did you have some kind of falling-out?
Eventually he replied.
The manner between the rider and myself was nothing but companionable. However. There was the complicated misinterpretation of my wristwatch and favorite boots, my paycheck being discovered within the Okanagan’s trailer. Losing these things had seemed trivial at the time of losing them. Good riddance, boots, I thought. Good riddance, TAG Heuer. But my nonattachment in that regard was ultimately not to my advantage. In the minds of others, the loss of these things amounted to motive.
In the passenger seat the once-drowned man held his own slender wrist, as a brace or a manacle, or in memory of his TAG Heuer. Possibly as a measure of pulse. His heart, I wondered.
But I know this story, I told him. Something like it happened in a movie.
Did it? He looked pained. I never heard about that one.
It was recent, I said. A couple of years ago.
There you go, he said. Vampires, everywhere. But it’s still my story.
He continued telling it, a little speedier now, yanking his life back from the clutches of Hollywood bloodsuckers.
They say that I was in a true fugue state for a while, when they finally pumped the river out of me. Babbling around and around with remorse. Remorse: that was noted, remorse was on the record, all the way through. Whatever else might have remained in question. I was even happy to do the time. Or I thought it about right. Unavoidable. Only.
Here he petted the little spruce.
Only, I just didn’t think I’d do so much of it. I wrote the kid’s folks once or twice, from inside. To say how sorry. To explain. They wrote me back a few times. Sometimes they said they understood it was an accident, and that they hoped the Lord might grant me peace. Other times they said that they knew it was an accident, but even so they sometimes wished I’d been given the chair, or been injected with a terminal virus or slow-acting poison. I don’t think this was intended as malicious, to hurt the way it did. I think somebody professional had instructed them to say whatever was in their hearts.
Well, he said. It wasn’t a complete wash. I learned how to play scopa and ombre, and picked up a little Slovene from a very genial defrauder. I read half of Proust, and all of Baldwin, and the poems of Anna Akhmatova, only in a language she did not intend for them to rhyme in. Think I got the gist, though. He brought his fingers to his face to smell the pine sap.
My eyes ached with middle distance. Every time I relaxed them, a deer or a family of deer would appear at the verge, ready to spring. I remember the deer seemed especially orange that year. It might have been the vegetation, whatever they were eating, or else something in the water. It might have been some particulate matter in the atmosphere that accentuated their orangeness. It might of course have only been my mind, my eyes.
The once-drowned man went quiet awhile, after that. Spent of something. In periphery he seemed diminished, shrunk down inside his shabby jacket. When I turned and looked, I saw his eyes had closed, and his mouth hung slack. His heart, I wondered again, but his breathing sounded regular. I drove and he stayed that way. I switched on the radio; I swerved heroically to avoid a silver baroque sofa, filthy but miraculous, which must have fallen from a truck or been dragged out from the woods into the middle of the interstate.
His head knocked sickly against the window glass, but he never stirred. I suspected he might be pretending, as a test of my good faith. I let him sleep or pretend to sleep, well past his collateral. All the way up to four hundred, where whatever there was of my good faith ran out. I took the exit for a grim skyline, and coasted the town until I found a bank. There was the first snow I saw that year, already dead and plowed into greasy heaps in the gutters. I pulled into the bank’s empty lot, unsure whether the institution mattered. Trading hours hadn’t started yet, but there was movement behind the dark windows.
I cut the ignition and the radio died. He woke with a start, like a child after a long drive home from Grandma’s.
And where are we?
I told him.
And what’re we at? He waved at the ticker. My eyes haven’t started.
I told him. I was including the way back, and the tip.
Allora, he said glumly.
Inside the bank someone flipped the OPEN sign.
Let’s see how this plays, he said, and got out with a sheaf of papers. I could see him thinking about taking the suitcase, saw him see me see him thinking it. Instead he repositioned it on the passenger seat, gave it another busted look, and closed the door very gently.
He shuffled across the parking lot towards the bank, his suit looking exactly like he’d slept in it, and went inside. From where I was sitting I could only see the cab reflected in the dark tint of the windows, and me or the shade of me behind another layer of tint, so I can’t tell you what I looked like in this moment. I sat out there waiting. Longer than I should have, it’s true. Telling myself, I won’t belittle myself by going in, I won’t belittle myself by going in, as other cars crept through the slush into the lot.
My mother had given me a little shove in the direction of that trapeze woman, after the show, telling me she’d wait. But I was either too shy or too wary of leaving her side.
She’d raked her hand through her hair, curls h
eld stiff with sugar water.
Well, maybe you’re too young anyway. Twelve? I don’t know, when I was twelve I was riding alone out to … well. She went quiet and looked at me. It doesn’t matter, she said. I’m sorry. I’m just not very good at this shit.
Not long after that she was gone again. My father and I spent a couple more years looking over the table at each other. Sometimes our eyes met and I imagined the conversation our eyes were having, things we would never say out loud:
She loved me first, you know.
Yes, but she loved me best.
To be honest I don’t think either of us would have hesitated to throw the other under the bus, if it meant pleasing her for half a minute. But we were what we had, he and I, and all told we were both gentle, careful people who could not help being mostly gentle and careful with each other.
Still, I moved away at fifteen, as far as I could get.
The bank’s parking lot filled steadily with cars. I reached over to the suitcase and flipped its yellowed luggage tag. The address side was blank and the airline had, if I recalled correctly, been bankrupted years before. I got out of the cab to stretch my legs. I stretched my legs past the windows of the bank several times before I finally saw him through the dark glass, waving his hands and his documents in front of a clerk. I went back to the cab.
I knew he was not coming out of there with any money. Even so, it felt shabby, looking through that suitcase. I found nothing of any value in it. Another change of clothes, and several years of a subscription to a movie magazine. Something soft wrapped in yellow tissue, that I thought better of opening. A Greyhound bus ticket from the day before, that had brought him all the way upstate, presumably to meet the friend who had not shown. Addresses for houses of charity several hundred miles behind us.
I zipped it all back and stood the case in the next empty parking space, where he could easily notice it once he came back out. It looked very vulnerable standing there alone. Vulnerable and suspicious at the same time. I worried over someone else getting to it first. Overall I felt better when it was settled back in the passenger side.
In the rearview mirror I watched him picking his way back between cars.
I’m sorry, he said, approaching my window. My accounts, they’re still thawing. I’ll understand if you … He lifted his chin, showing sincere razor burn. If the sky holds I could maybe even walk the rest of the way.
Just get in, I said.
I can send you the rest, he offered. When my checkbooks are ready. You can write down your address …
I told him we could sort it out later, though later I would neglect to do this. I don’t remember if I was spooked by the possibility of him calling by in person—turning up on the doorstep with a cage of canaries or a salt lamp or who knows what—or whether I already knew that the address would be short-lived, that by the time he sent the money, I wouldn’t be the one opening the envelope.
Just get in, I said again, with a disgust I did not really feel, having half-expected all along, I realized now, to be wrung in one way or another.
He got in and closed the door very quietly, as though trying not to wake something. Again he made himself small in the passenger seat, shrugged deep into his jacket, as if taking up less space might compensate for the shortfall. But he proved unwilling or unable to abide by the common laws of contrition.
You’ve seen the Falls before, he said. We had barely reentered the interstate.
Once, I told him, nudging the cab into the traffic.
Good. So you know it’s fake.
Fake. Fake as in how?
Fake as in it doesn’t naturally look how it looks. They got these big stone pillars upriver, and they raise them up and down to orchestrate the waterflow, so that it falls in a nicer curtain. (He made a smooth show with his hands.) Looks prettier, more dramatic for the spectators. Nature shouldn’t be like that, nature shouldn’t have spectators. It isn’t the sports.
Who controls these pillars? I could not help myself from asking. The Canadians or the Americans?
The Americans, of course. Doesn’t it sound like American meddling to you? The Canadians are satisfied with nature being nature. But it’s supposed to look better from the Canadian side in the first place, so maybe the Americans are just leveling the playing field.
We were passing an amusement park. I glimpsed the snaking coaster-track in the rearview, rising above the cyclone and razor wire, internment camp fencing. It was a disgraced amusement park. A couple of years beforehand a kid had died when his seat dropped from the Ferris wheel.
What if you were to curl up in back, he proposed, and I were to drive us across?
And even if that works, I said. How would I get back?
Back, he repeated, as if it were an unsavory word. But why would any of us want to get back?
Much later I would look up the movie titles he had mentioned, as I remembered them, to find that they were real but not well known, and none had survived the leap to digital.
On the road ahead of us, vehicles began dancing between lanes in anxious choreography. I pulled off before we got within sight of the border boxes, behind a silver station wagon. The wagon was packed to the roof rack, five seats to the family of seven. North Carolina plates. The mother and oldest girl were fishing their passports and jackets out from the chaos, preparing to walk across on foot.
Looks like my party, the once-drowned man said. He opened the passenger door and set his suitcase on the blacktop. Reaching in for the spruce tree, he hesitated.
I expect they won’t let it across, will they?
I told him that probably it came from Canada in the first place. From those French Canadian woodsmen who drive down to Manhattan in their Christmas tree vans and get laid like carpet.
But maybe you should keep it, he said. As a token.
I don’t have a garden where I live.
These never tend to grow very tall, he promised. These potted ones. Like goldfish you win at the fair. For some reason they always seem to stay runted. Will probably only reach to about five and a half feet.
Tall enough, I said. I’m five and a half feet.
There you go, he said. Kismet.
He thanked and thanked and thanked, then trundled the suitcase in the wake of the mother and daughter, towards the line of guard boxes. At one point he looked back and gave a little flop of a wave. It seemed bad luck to watch him cross. Or I told myself it would be bad luck to watch him cross. In truth I suspect I only wanted to escape responsibility for him if they bounced him back.
It would be fair and easy to say that I was made anxious by the possibility of questions, by the real possibility of requests for various corresponding documents I would not be able to produce, of untold hours in uncomfortable plastic chairs alongside nervous families trying to keep their tired bored children from expressing their tired boredom.
And I was. Made anxious of these things.
But there was something else running underneath. A queasy complicity in whatever he’d done or was yet to do.
I sped back across Grand Island, past the disgraced amusement park, window down to let the cold keep me awake and to scour away some of my sense of wrongdoing. Down on the floor of the passenger side, the little spruce tree hushed softly again in the draft. Susurrus, susurrus, it would say if it did happen to grow tall, but for now it could only manage sus.
By the time I passed the circus lot, the sun was high, or high for December, there throbbing at my temple like a thought demanding entry.
I pulled up to where the horses stood shimmying a little way from the fence, flanks brilliant in the winter glare, the very dust in their coats winking like mica.
Pequeños caballos, I tried, then made a kissing noise from the window. The horses tilted their rowboat ears but wouldn’t come.
The smell of chaff baking in sunlight remained faithful to my mother, would always be faithful to my mother: surely too hot in her rabbit coat, luminous green eyes burning like a chemical fire fed by
smeary wicks of kohl. The trapeze woman’s smile had grown savage as she’d twirled—was twirled—faster and faster, unfurling her billowing sleeves and letting sequins rain down like sparks. The sequins had seemed to spill straight from her veins, biblical, falling right into our hands, into our own untortured hair, glinting onto the parched pine boards beneath our feet. There must have been no net. For the sake of seventy-five people in a small village I promise you’ll never hear about, there was no net, and the trapeze woman had smiled in spite of us, or because of us, or to damn us all to eternity exactly where we stood.
There might’ve been a thousand things my mother had wished for me to learn, waiting outside with her gold stilettos planted in the straw. But probably there was just the one. I still hoped I might recover it.
A Small Cleared Space
She’d set out later than she’d planned to, the four o’clock sun already sinking at her shoulder, threatening to drop behind the mountains and plunge the world into gloaming. For now the surrounding woods were lit gold, and frost bloomed inside her visor. Snow was banked up on both sides of the trail like a luge run, and she raced the ATV over other people’s tracks, trying to beat the coming dark. On either side the pines stood solemn, branches clotted, cradling snow.
The hourglass pond was nicotine at its edges, ice all the way to the opposite bank. Strange for this time of year, but the freeze had come early, following a string of freak lows and silver thaws, and Uncle Wish had assured her it was solid at the narrows and fine for driving on.
On the far bank his and Iona’s cabin crouched cowed in a small cleared space. It wasn’t an especially pretty thing to look at, just a boxy one-room with a single-pitch roof, built of whatever Wish and her father could salvage and haul out here in the seventies. Its beauty was in its remoteness, its inaccessibility. There were two months of the year when it was entirely cut off, when the ice was either breaking up or still too thin to risk putting a foot on, let alone a bike. Even in the warmer months, the cabin had a solitude that had to be earned; a boat would have to be towed in behind an ATV along the ten kilometers of half-strangled trail.
Here Until August Page 12
