Everything (2 page)

This is the last time for me, June said. I’m not coming back next year. Taylor was a beautiful man but he’s dead.

I know that, RL said. Don’t you think I know that?

Well, I didn’t. Not till a little while ago. Like you were saying before, Robert, I would turn a corner and expect him to be there, you know? I’d go to bed at night and half expect to find him lying there. Wake up in the middle of the night, hugging my pillow and dreaming it was him. I’m done with that.

He couldn’t read her face in the gathering dark but he saw the way she put her hand up to her throat, a thing she did when she was sad or troubled. He said, You can’t just be done.

I can, she said. I am.

Like turning off a faucet.

No, she said. No, it’s not like that at all. It’s just, you know, like water on rock. It takes a while but … You just wake up one morning and it’s not there anymore. I mean, I’m not going to stop remembering him. I’m not going to stop loving him.

No.

* * *

But I am going to stop acting like he’s still here. Like he’s going to walk through the door and everything’s going to be OK.

You haven’t been like that, RL said. He could feel something slipping away between them and he didn’t want it to. He said, You’ve got your work, your friends.

Oh, crap, she said. I’ve been practicing this in my head for a week and I know it isn’t going to come out right. Anyway. You’re a good man and you’ve been a good friend to me and I’ve needed you, you know that. You’ve always been around when I needed you. But, Christ, Robert, you’ve got Layla and Dawn and what’s her name; you’ve got your business; you’ve got your friends and your trips to New Orleans and wherever else—you’re a busy man. I sleep alone, Robert, almost every night. More than you want to know, I know that, but still. I’m going to die and I know it, not too long from now, maybe, and I’m going to die alone because everybody does. But I don’t want to live alone.

I’m sorry, RL said.

No, see that’s not it! You’ve got nothing to be sorry about—you’re a good man, Robert! I know I’m not saying this right. It’s all mixed up in my mind.

They relapsed into silence then, water over rocks, a breeze in the leaves of the cottonwoods.

Cigarette, she said.

He lit one off the ash of his cigar and handed it to her.

* * *

RL felt like this was not happening, an unreal moment. Anger was rising in him but he didn’t know why or at who. Not June. Maybe himself, who had failed again somehow. He didn’t see how. He had never meant to be enough to her, but now he saw that he was not. He had put his shoulder to the wheel but it was not enough.

Whiskey, RL said, and she passed him the bottle.

June said, People die from not seeing the night sky, don’t you think?

They don’t die from it.

They die inside, and they don’t even know it.

But they don’t die from it. They just get numb.

Not me, she said. She reached over and took the bottle from his hand, then stood up from the rock and waded out into the water. RL flinched as he saw the cold water lap against her bare thighs, feeling a little sympathetic testicular cringe of his own. He didn’t know what she was doing. She was being dramatic, and she was not a dramatic woman.

Here you are, said June. I am officially letting it go. All of it. I’m nobody’s widow anymore.

She unstoppered the bottle and poured the whiskey that was left into the river, where it disappeared into the water, easily half a bottle. She held it over the water until the last drop was gone. RL felt like he was the one being left behind. She was saying good-bye
to him. He didn’t know if he was right or wrong, but his heart balled up in his chest and he wanted to stop her.
Don’t go
, he wanted to say.
Stay here with me. It’ll be all right
.

But he didn’t say anything. When the last of the whiskey was gone, she put the stopper back in the bottle and for a moment she wanted to throw it, he could see that. In the end she didn’t. She was not a dramatic person at heart and would not want to scatter broken glass around the riverside just to make a point. Somebody could get hurt. She held onto the bottle instead and came up dripping out of the water and kissed RL, which surprised him. Usually she didn’t. He stood into her embrace and felt her shiver in the night air.

It’s going to be all right, she said softly, like he was a baby, like RL was the one who needed comforting. She said, It’s going to be fine.

But inside his mind, RL just didn’t know.

Layla left her fly rod
on the porch of June’s house and went inside. The front door was unlocked as ever. The house was a ten-minute walk from the river across a hayfield that smelled of sweet grass, and outside was the last fading edge of twilight. She could see fine to follow the path, under the last blush of day and the emerging stars. But when she went inside and turned on the lights, it turned into solid black night outside the windows.

The dinner dishes sat on the table, corncobs and steak bones. Layla would do the dishes in a minute, would save the bones for Rosco, June’s old golden. In a minute she would let Rosco in from the pen out back.

First she went back into the bedroom, where June kept her computer, to see if there was any word from Russia. It was eight
thirty in the morning in St. Petersburg, tomorrow already. Daniel would be awake, unless he slept in. Alone, unless he wasn’t. Layla knew she shouldn’t worry but she did. There was no real reason, except that when she booted up her e-mail account, there was still nothing there and it had been two days. In a hotel room in Russia with a dozen other would-be poets. Daniel with his glossy brown hair and his deep, thoughtful eyes. What was it about her, that she couldn’t just relax and trust him? (But what if it wasn’t about her at all? What if it was something about him, something she knew and couldn’t admit?)

Nineteen years old, barely qualified. Daniel was in graduate school.

Fuck, she said out loud. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

The word reverberated around the prim walls of the bedroom. June kept her house neat. A little fluffy and flowery like a girl’s bedroom, lace on the bedside table, though there were books on the table, too, and a big practical light overhead. A surprising crowd of perfumes and powders on the dresser, a well-lit mirror above. June didn’t look like that kind of woman—green grass and fresh air was her look, short practical hair—but Layla understood that it was never that simple. This whole house seemed to make a little too much sense, a little too orderly, almost fearful. June wasn’t that way but she was almost that way, keeping the scary world away by cleanly magic. Layla realized while she was thinking this that she herself probably still had fish slime on her hands and she had touched the keyboard of June’s computer, which, if past experience held, could in a day or so start to smell really, really rank.

* * *

Daniel was seven years older than Layla and 100 percent of everybody who knew about it hated the idea. He might be making a fool out of her at that very moment. Do people fuck around at eight thirty in the morning? If they are the kind of people who fuck around.

Layla let the old dog in and pressed her face to his neck, the soft, dog-smelling fur. Half dog, half rug, Rosco was content to be held. But there was a spark in his eyes when she picked the steak bones off the table, a puppyish alertness and wag. She teased him with the bones, then gave in. Let the dog get what he wants, anyway. Layla stood at the sink, up to her elbows in hot soapy water, and thought that she deserved whatever she got. Learn to protect yourself. Don’t give yourself away like nothing, like a motel matchbook. Outside in the night, things were stirring, the bats and birds and owls. Once Layla saw five owls standing in the same dead tree, right down by the river, right by where June and her father were sitting. Field mice hunting for food, scampering for their lives. Talons first, the owl slashing down out of the night sky.

Me, the little field mouse, Layla thought.

Around her the house felt content, sleepy. Taylor and June had bought it derelict when they were first married, windows boarded up and mouse shit everywhere. Layla had seen the pictures: it was hard to believe. The bones of the house were good, is the way June said it: a stage station on the old Mullan Road, one of the first houses in the valley. It sat in a compound of long, pretty barns and beat-up houses for the hands, a tall cool willow tree in the yard. In the main barn, you could see the beams cut from the ponderosa
pines that used to grow in the valley, seventy-foot spans out of a single timber. Some of the tall trees still grew here, not many. The new crap houses were creeping up on all sides.

Doing the dishes, trying not to think about Russia, feeling the quiet all around her.

June and Taylor fixed this place up themselves, with their own hands. That was the story, anyway. Sometimes Layla felt like she didn’t have a childhood or a history but just a bunch of stories that she had to piece together for herself. She never knew what was true or at least what was the whole truth. The two of them on nights and weekends and vacations out here painting and plastering. RL and Taylor up on the roof, nailing cedar shakes on a summer evening. RL and Dawn, happy together on the porch. The house-wrecking party, when they decided to tear down one of the old tenant shacks to open up the yard. June and Taylor invited everybody they knew to come bring a wrecking bar or a sledgehammer, and they tore it down and lit it on fire, had chicken and beer and a live band. Was Layla there? She didn’t have any definite memory but she thought she remembered a big fire, shouts and laughter, the firemen standing by ….

Maybe it was just a dream—sometimes her thoughts came alive while she was sleeping, and something she was told, or something she read in a book, would live in her mind as a memory after the dream had come and gone. A real memory, one she could touch. The heat of the fire on her face, the smoke and beer. She asked her mother once, and two of the three first things from her life that she thought she remembered never happened at all. Or maybe Dawn just forgot. Or maybe Layla made it all up. There was no place real,
nothing she could touch, just dreams and memories and wanting things. Just now she wanted Daniel.

She would ask her father, when he came back from the river, if the house-wrecking party had been real. She was almost sure it was. Almost.

When they were gone
, June sat alone in her kitchen. She had certainly fucked things up. She had hurt him. From somewhere, some safe place, she felt a desire to hurt herself in recompense. She wouldn’t do it. But she could picture it: getting the knife out of the knife block where it slept, scalpel sharp, the feel of the cool steel on her skin and the surprising ease of a sharp blade … She wouldn’t. She sat at the table half drunk and all smoked out and sick of herself. Why couldn’t she just be easy? Take the love she was given.

Her old dog slept at her feet. She poured a glass of white wine from the box in the fridge. It was eleven thirty and she had to be up at seven for work, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep. Her clothes didn’t fit her and her hair was somebody else’s, somebody old and tired. This old house fit over her like a shell, like a snake’s skin,
something she needed to split, to crack, to grow out of. To smash, to vomit, to cut, to tear. June was stuck.

Rosco looked up at her. Then he laid his threadbare head to rest on the kitchen floor again and heaved a long pleasurable sigh.

When he was gone, June would sell the place. She’d do it now except that the move would kill him. He’d never lived anywhere else, didn’t know a thing about cars or mean dogs. He’d gotten into a tussle or two when the neighbors had a border collie, but he was big enough to hold his own. Never anything bad except the time he got into the chickens. Chasing deer a few times. It was strange to think that Rosco was a killer at heart, a pack animal, chasing baby deer, circling, killing. One time, she was almost sure. Maybe two. Out killing in the night.

When Rosco was gone she’d move into town, someplace with some life to it, someplace with human noise. Here it was the refrigerator clicking on and off, the wind in the eaves, her own soft footsteps on the painted fir floor. She finished her wine in one long sip and started for bed. Then June realized that she still had no chance of sleep, not yet. She stood in her kitchen, between her seat at the table and the refrigerator, trying to decide whether to pour herself another glass of wine. She stood nearly paralyzed. It was not a decision that mattered at all, but still she could not make it. All alone and paralyzed in the middle of everything: the night, her life, her kitchen.

After a minute she poured herself another glass of wine after all and sat back down at the kitchen table. June thought to herself, I am just sitting here waiting for the dog to die.

In August RL and Edgar floated
a stretch of the Bitterroot to see if it could be done. It hadn’t rained in six weeks and the irrigators had been sucking the life out of the thing to keep the hayfields green. The river braided through banks of gravel, river bottom when there was water to cover them but desert now. The sight of it made RL angry. He loved this river despite all its treachery and deceit and now it had been insulted, shrunken.

Edgar was a guide from RL’s shop, twenty years younger and just out of graduate school in art. He was a painter, thin and sharp-featured, quick hands. His instincts were impeccably sharp for fish. Next to him, RL felt fat and old and slow, all of which he was—Oliver Hardy to Edgar’s Stan Laurel. Edgar was supposed to take a couple of clients down on the next morning, and so him and RL went on an evening float just to take a look. They brought a half
case of beer on ice in RL’s oldest and worst raft, a no-name Taiwanese special that had already been patched in twelve places. If they had to drag a boat, this was the one to drag. They started drinking beer as soon as the boat pushed off from the ramp, about four o’clock on a hot, sunny, smoky afternoon. Big forest fires were burning down by Darby and back in the Selway, and the valley was filling up with smoke like a cup full of dirty milk. The far mountains were gone in a gray-brown haze.