Everything (8 page)

I’d forgotten about Liquid Louie’s, RL said. El dumpo magnifico. Does that insane bitch still tend bar there?

* * *

Carol-Ann? She’s my neighbor.

I don’t care if she’s the pope, said RL. Threw me out of there one night in the middle of a snowstorm. I said something bad about the Green Bay Packers.

She does love the Packers, Betsy said. Then they both fell silent. It was early, the hour before happy hour, and they had the place to themselves, almost, and the soft gray daylight filtering through the glass made her face look pretty and soft, almost young. RL could remember the shape of her body, long and tall, her vivid giddy sudden smile, like a break in the clouds on a windy day, the sunlight racing through …. It was a mistake, he guessed, if you had to decide one way or the other. Back then, it didn’t seem like you had to decide, right or wrong, it was just something that happened. An experience, at a time when he was hungry for experience, when they all were. Where did it come from, RL wondered, this wish to make each day identical to the one before? He made his coffee the same way every morning, read the paper back to front, wore the same brand of blue jeans for the last twenty years at least. The pre-death, maybe, RL thought.

Betsy looked at him and smiled. She knew what he was thinking, exactly. It went without saying.

Did I tell you about the water festival? she asked.

If you did, I don’t remember.

Right when I got out of college, she said. The first time I went traveling anywhere by myself, I went to Thailand. Before I met you.
Susan Cohen was supposed to come with me but she got mono, or she said she did. Really, I think she just got into her boyfriend and didn’t want to come. Anyway, I either had to not go or go by myself, which I really didn’t want to. Is this boring?

No.

All this old-time stuff. It just seems like a long time ago. Like another life almost.

But you did go.

I did, she said. I didn’t want to but I had a passport and a ticket and I just thought, Fuck it, I can come home early if I need to. It was a weird time, too, because my parents had just died. I had all this money, but it was all the money I was ever going to have. I never knew what to feel.

I remember, RL said—and he did, remembered holding her as she wept. He drove her to the airport for the trip home, for the funeral, but the plane was iced down in Spokane and hours late. They wound up tearful drunk in the airport bar, watching the occasional small flakes of snow drift down through the white ice fog. Even at the time, he thought it was strange that she didn’t have anyone closer, some girl to drive her to the airport and hold her hand. He didn’t mind doing it—he liked it, it made him feel useful—but their moment had come and gone a year or more before and now he was just a friend, with a sad drunk girl in an airport.

I went down to Phuket first, Betsy said. Sex and drugs and rock and roll, party time all the time. I hated it. You know me—I’m such a sourpuss! But I did love the ocean, the feel of the water and the
blue sky and the clouds. And the sand was just so soft and white. I ended up on an island south of there, back before, when it was almost all Thai people. I rented this little, really awful concrete bungalow and there was a bookstore on Phuket and all I did was read and lie in the sun, even through the hot parts of the day. I can still remember it when I close my eyes, the feel of the sun and the sand under me. Part of it was about being in my body and just feeling it, and part of it was about not wanting to exist, you know, just obliterating myself. Erasing. I’d go down to the bars at night and drink Scotch whiskey. Then sit in the sun and read
Anna Karenina
. Little lizards all around. That’s where all this came from.

All this what?

The melanoma. From the sun on Phi Phi Don. Even then I knew it wasn’t good for me but it was, it felt good. Just to burn something out of me.

You believe that?

Yes, I do. I believe in intention. I wanted to erase myself and look: it’s working.

She grinned at him and sipped her beer. A cold creepy feeling along his spine. She really had no hope at all. Again he felt the Galahad urge to save her, to fetch her back into the world, among the living. He knew he couldn’t, knew he might have to try.

Betsy said, I met a Thai boy, my age. He was the only one drunker than I was. Everybody else was smoking Thai pot back then and I wish I had some now but then we both just liked to get messed up on Scotch. So we just woke up hungover one morning
and decided we had to get out of there, I thought we were just killing ourselves and Ray thought we needed to find a spiritual place. You know, he was a really nice person, Ray was. He could have done anything with me. Nobody was keeping track, and I was just giving myself away to anybody who wanted it. Fucked-up things happened all the time there.

She stopped, remembering. Then said, A girl ended up, they found her chained to a bed. Canadian girl. But, no, Ray got us on a bus and found some Coca-Cola and aspirin with codeine for the hangovers and we drove all the way two days north to Chiang Mai. I was like, shaking the whole time.

Ray? RL asked.

His real name was about a block long, Betsy said. Everybody just called him Ray. He knew people everywhere. We got to Chiang Mai and right away, he had us staying with his cousin in this, like, I don’t know, a garage or something behind his house. I had money, we could have stayed in a hotel, except this seemed like more of an adventure. Also, I don’t know, maybe there weren’t any hotels. People came from everywhere for the water festival. There were elephants in the streets. Just the clothes and colors and everybody smiling and the little kids—you know, they were the first ones who started off throwing water at each other and then it was just water everywhere. I was so stupid, I was wearing a white T-shirt and after five minutes it was like, what do
you
think of my bra? but nobody cared. I don’t even know if they noticed.

You look pretty.

What?

* * *

Just talking about it, it makes you happy, makes you pretty, RL said.

Well, I was, she said. I was happy. I was
cool
, Robert. Once in a lifetime, I was in the right place at the right time. But just, I don’t know, being in the crowd with everybody laughing and singing and water everywhere, it was like for just one moment I just kind of dissolved, just an atom with a bunch of other atoms, you know? Instead of
my
problems and my little life, it was like being part of something bigger, like a cell in a body—I don’t know how to explain it. It was beautiful. It was really beautiful.

It sounds like it.

But I wonder, now, if I let something into my life that I shouldn’t have. Some little pill that took this long to dissolve.

You didn’t.

You don’t know.

No, RL said. I don’t.

Then came the glory days of fall
. The larch turned gold in the high country, gold on green, and the cottonwood leaves drifted down the river in all their colors. Edgar couldn’t stand it anymore, went up to Rock Creek with his cast wrapped in plastic and fished one-handed into a brilliant afternoon, wading from the bank into the cold clean river. He was fine with the fishing part except that when he caught a fish it was a clusterfuck completely, and there was a moth hatch going on and a fish lying hungry and heedless in every bank. He took a fifteen-inch rainbow from under a willow tree and lost the fly and tippet trying to release it. The fly would work its way out of the rainbow’s lip in a few days but still it bothered him. Not the fly—a nickel’s worth of feathers and the five minutes of work that went into it—but the fish wearing it, the extra bit of junk on the streambed, for the few months before it rusted to
nothing …. It wasn’t anything, really, anything of consequence, but it bothered him. A fish wearing a yellow stimulator.

He caught another little brown and this time lost his sunglasses in the water, trying to unhook him. This was not going to work.

He set the handle of the rod in his teeth and this time managed—with the forceps in his broken hand—to release the little brown and then felt around underwater for his glasses until his arm went numb from the cold. He couldn’t move his feet so as not to break the glasses. When he could move his fingers again, he put the rod back in his mouth and raised the cast above him and felt the bottom again. This time he found them. The glasses seemed to be fine, unscratched, But his fishing day was over.

A burst of baby rage. It wasn’t fair. He had so nothing to himself, with the child and the job, so few hours to call his own and he had driven all this way … and then the anger was gone. He still had the afternoon and no one expecting him till suppertime.

Edgar sat down at the edge of the gravel bank and watched the stream go by. He lit a cigarette from the illicit pack he had bought in Clinton. On the way home, he would toss whatever was left of the pack and buy some mints and hope that Amy didn’t smell it on him under the smell of sunblock, sweat and river water. The water in front of him tailed out of a riffle, a little way upstream, into a broad and deceptively deep pool at the base of a cliff. Something Japanese and pretty about the dark circling water under the rock wall. The moths, little white ones, were landing in the water out of the evergreen trees upstream and the tongue of the tailout was carrying them down the dead middle of the river, where dozens of fat trout lay in wait for them. Easy pickings for a two-armed man.

* * *

Did Amy really not know? She must smell the smoke on him. Was she just pretending not to? It didn’t seem like her at all, and yet … This whole business of marriage felt baffling to him, a game without rules, especially since the baby had come along. Edgar loved the baby, loved the afternoons when it was just the two of them, loved the smell of the baby’s head and her tiny, blunt hands. But things between them were different with the baby around.

Insoluble, he thought. Then wished he had brought pad and paper with him. Then he was glad he had not. Edgar did not often get to enjoy the luxury of idleness. He didn’t approve of idleness, or like it, but it was good for him sometimes to stop all the usual doing and going and just look at what was in front of his eyes. The sky was a high clear blue that shimmered blue on the water. Edgar looked at the line where the shadow of the cliff met the sunlight on the water, the way the rock reflected black, deep brown and gray next to the sky blue. Downstream the river opened up into a wider valley, an old homestead, the cabin and barns long abandoned and tumbledown. In the near bend stood the overgrown remains of an orchard, the trees half dead and untended but the branches weighted down with apples still. Edgar wondered if the apples were any good. He was half in love with these old trees, their perseverance.

In a minute he’d go over to the orchard and pick one of those apples. As soon as he was done with this cigarette.

He lay back in the soft green grass and looked up into the clear sky. The way the color was so light, almost washed-out and intense at the same time. The things he didn’t understand about light.

* * *

This unexpected empty time. It was like putting your foot down in the dark and finding no stair there, the tangible lack of presence.

She came through the sunlight and the tall grass, a translucent cloud of dry pollen before her and around her, tall and quick, confident in the step. A white skirt swinging around her long legs. Why did he know her? Dark hair tied back. It felt like he had been expecting her all along, like this was what he had been waiting for without knowing it. Then she came closer, and stopped a couple of feet away, facing him, long-limbed, serious. He felt—what? He didn’t know what he felt. Excitement, fear.

I saw your truck, Layla said.

What were you doing up here?

I just got restless, I wanted to go for a drive.

It’s a long drive.

I was really restless, she said.

She turned her back on him then, went down to the edge of the water, a few feet away. She wore a green blouse with no sleeves and he admired the length of her, the color of her skin, the tiny downy hairs on her arms that shone in the sunlight. Her feet in sandals were slim and pretty on the river rocks.

They’re rising out of there like motherfuckers, she said. How come you’re not fishing?

* * *

He raised the cast for her to see, wrapped in a plastic whole-wheat-bread bag.

I tried, he said.

They were deep in the wilderness, forty miles in either direction to a gas pump. They were almost alone except for the few other cars and pickups in the turnouts along the road, and these were fishermen who wanted to be alone themselves, alone with the water. Past the old orchard, the valley opened up, and he could see the hillside above, green forest giving way to rock to sky. Bighorn sheep lived up in those rocks. Something clarifying and clean about the way the sky drew your eye up, lifted you out of yourself.

When he looked back down again, she was still there.

I could hook ’em fine, he said. I just couldn’t land them.

I haven’t been up here since last spring, she said. I don’t know why. It’s the prettiest place.

I haven’t either. Now it’s almost closing time.

I go back to Seattle tomorrow.

Then they were kissing. Then after some small comedy, fumbling with the pants and fishing apparatus, then they were naked in the tall green grass with the last sun of the year falling down on them, the touch of her, the length of her, the inevitability. This was written somewhere, it felt to Edgar. This was always going to happen. And then it did.

You’re here awfully early
in the morning, Betsy said. I didn’t know you were such an early riser.

RL looked at the clock on the wall of the hospital room. It was six thirty in the evening.

I need to tell my mother, she said.

The thing about it was her eyes, he thought. Her eyes were clear and lucid and it seemed like she was right there in the room with you. Then she opened her mouth and there was no telling what would come out. Her mother had been dead since college.