Legends of the Fall (19 page)

"You are a fucking lunatic," Slats insisted.

"Righto. I wanted your complete attention."

"Oh, man, you are in real trouble," Slats nodded.

"Yes, you are . . ." Sarah began to chime in but noted Nordstrom's crazed stare and paused. He stared at both of them with his head strangely atilt.

"You both have to cut this jive shit or I'm going to tear out somebody's heart. There's only so much shit I can take, you know? You sent that numb-nuts wop to my room and I proved he couldn't fly, not even a little bit. Now I got this confession . . ."

"This man would never talk," Slats interrupted, for the first time fully getting into what was happening at the table.

"That's how much you know, fuckface." Nordstrom was enjoying the purity of his acting performance, unexampled until now in his life. "I interrogated for Special Forces in Da Nang in sixty-seven. Sometimes we pitched them out of Hueys, and sometimes I strangled them. They had thin necks." Nordstrom made a strangling motion with his hands. "Your friend was a hard case. I sapped him and when he woke he wouldn't be nice so I knotted a wet towel and got it in his mouth so he wouldn't bite. Then I put four fingers in and jerked up and got the front teeth. The confession with a gold tooth is in a safety deposit box at Chase Manhattan." Nordstrom remembered the gold tooth from the restaurant. "Then I pitched the cocksucker out the window. And then I called you and went to bed."

The sashimi arrived and Nordstrom advised that they use the horseradish mustard sparingly. Slats gazed at him feeling a bit trapped. It had been a little stupid all along and the angles were disappearing. "This is raw fish isn't it?" Nordstrom nodded. Slats was tentative, and then, liking the fish, he began to eat quickly.

"Maybe it's a draw. Shit, Berto had a grand of mine on him. Some detective is at the track today with my money. You need any toot?"

Slats signaled to the waitress and pointed at his place. "More," he said.

"No thanks. I don't think so. Or maybe I could buy some for a friend." The tempura arrived and Nordstrom served.

"Here I am gobbling this shit and my dad died on Iwo Jima," Slats laughed. "For you it's five hundred bucks for a quarter. I can see this detective feeding his old lady lobster on my money."

"I'm actually sorry I hit you. I don't usually think that fast but I had some coke in the toilet and I forgot you were married."

Sarah explained it was only a way of making money, a gig, and that they weren't married. Rich men sympathized with her mistreatment and advanced her money to get out of Slats' clutches. With Nordstrom they decided to escalate because they were convinced he was simpleminded. Slats was curious about the itinerary of the trip he had forgotten. The idea of foreign travel suddenly reminded Nordstrom of the pictures of vigorous men shearing sheep in the
National Geographic
in faraway places. They talked on for another half hour and Sarah suggested a cooking school on Waverly Place for when he returned. Slats insisted on paying for the meal. Nordstrom counted out fifteen hundred bucks from Sonia's BMW money on his lap. Sarah slid him a small sack of coke under the table.

"I added the grand for what you lost on Berto. I wanted us to be even up. Now everyone is even except Berto."

They walked out of the restaurant into a hall off the Waldorf lobby. Slats patted Nordstrom on the shoulder. "Don't sweat it. He was an asshole."

At midnight Nordstrom was sitting in the dark in his hotel bedroom looking at the moon and thinking about lily pads. Sonia had insisted he go to the Museum of Modern Art to see these huge paintings of lily pads by Monet and he had gone after lunch, staring at them utterly blankminded for an hour. Now in the moonlight all of the lily pads on the lakes of northern Wisconsin revolved before him. Sometimes they had small buttery-yellow flowers and sometimes they had large white flowers, strong with an eerie perfume he could smell twenty-five years later in a hotel room. He didn't know if in the morning he would leave on his trip or go to Wisconsin for a few weeks. Bass hid under the lily pads and he used to swim under them and look upward so that the pads looked like small green islands in the air refracting the light. He had given the cocaine to the Sephard over dinner. The Sephard had been relieved but puzzled when Nordstrom insisted that Slats and Sarah were "nice people." There was a neurotic English girl with a perfect fanny with the Sephard. She wanted to call a friend for Nordstrom but he said no. He was really quite tired. Just breathing on the bed in the moonlight seemed quite enough for the moment. First you breathed in, then out, and so on. It was easy if you tried to keep calm.

He drove south in late October, one year after his father's death, in a sixty-seven Plymouth he had paid seven hundred dollars for. In no particular hurry and nothing to guide him but a Rand McNally, he stopped in Savannah, bought two new tires, and thought the town rather too pretty for his taste. He wanted to avoid a self-conscious location. In the trunk there was one suitcase, one box of books, and one box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with in his urge to travel light; he was neither happy nor unhappy as he rejected one place after another, just looking things over. Finally, in late November, he got a job in a small seafood restaurant in Islamorada, Florida, of good reputation at an abysmal wage. His fingers were soon sore from cleaning shrimp and picking crab. He got nailed rather painfully in the palm by a stone crab and learned to be careful. Within a month he was allowed to cook a daily specialty. His home was a one-room tourist cabin at the end of a lane of crushed shells lined by dank mangroves bordered by an unnavigable lagoon. There was a small gas stove, a double bed, Formica table, linoleum floor, black leopard lamp, rickety air conditioner, three rattan chairs. There were a lot of mosquitoes which he didn't mind, having been trained for them in Wisconsin. He kept his money in an upturned frozen orange juice can in the refrigerator freezer, not wanting to bother with the bank. He didn't kill the palmetto bugs that crawled around, having figured that they didn't eat much or sting. One day he was pleased to see a large rattler back in the bedraggled palm scrub. He bought a rowboat and nearly died when an oarlock broke and he was swept out to sea in a strong tide and a heavy sea and spent an entire day bailing with his hat and paddling with one oar. He was rescued by fishermen and spent two days in a hospital being treated for severe sunburn, feeling like a stupid shit. It paid to keep on your toes, he thought, in this new life where he was utterly unprotected. He unfolded a lot of ice-cold money and bought a Boston Whaler and a sixty-horse Evinrude, after determining it was the most stable boat available. With the help of a push pole he kept strapped to the boat's gunwhale he could skid it across the lagoon in a medium tide and keep it beside the cabin. He bought a spinning rod and some jigs, mask and flippers and a book on marine biology. He waded tidal flats looking at the bottom, fished channels, identified his catch in the book and released it. He worked six days a week but had mornings and Monday off for his explorations. When he felt more comfortable in these strange waters he bought charts and a boat trailer and went off to Big Pine on Mondays, an area richer in mangrove islets and tidal cuts. One warm still day in a deep tidal creek he hooked a tarpon and was shocked as it hurtled out of the water near the boat, twisting its big silver body and its gill plates rattling before it broke off. That day he thought he counted a thousand shades of turquoise in the water. He had become a water, wind and cloud watcher in addition to being a cook. Late at night he danced to a transistor radio. He was the source of respectful local amusement. He had a wonderful affair with a Cuban waitress his own age. She had a small portable stereo and taught him Latin dances. He got more local respect when he threw two burly drunks out of the restaurant one night, punching one senseless, but it reminded him unpleasantly of Berto and he wept a few minutes when he got home. He wrote and received chatty letters from his daughter in Florence, exchanging apercus with Phillip on the great author E.M. Cioran. After the Cuban waitress abandoned Islamorada for Miami he had a brief three-day fling with a college girl who was a bit sullen and really didn't like to fuck. His mother wrote that she had actually seen Jack Lord in Honolulu. She and Henry planned a two-week trip down in April when the tourist season slackened and Nordstrom would have more time. They would have to take the bus as Henry considered planes an insult to his life and the life of the sky. One day while driving Nordstrom saw a moray eel and a black-tipped shark and was thrilled to the core.

One evening while he was taking a cigarette break behind the restaurant, Nordstrom watched two waitresses approach, then pause while they whispered. It was his habit during the evening break to sit on a huge piece of dredged coral, hundreds of pounds of tiny antique, crushed marine invertebrates. He would drink a tall, cold piña colada, smoke a cigarette and watch the ocean. In his position of chef none of the other help usurped his sitting place. Now the waitresses came up to him, both a little plump and giggling but one with fine olive features. They offered a joint and he took a long, noncommittal puff. Their problem was that there was a dance tonight in a bar just down Route 1 and they had no one to go with and they didn't want to walk in the bar alone. Nordstrom was disturbed. He had never danced in public. Oh Jesus why not, he said to himself. At the bar he danced with the two girls and anyone else willing until four in the morning when the band stopped. Then he danced alone to the jukebox until four thirty in the morning when everyone had to leave.

Late in October in 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana, to Calgary in Alberta to enlist in the Great War (the U.S. did not enter until 1917). An old Cheyenne named One Stab rode with them to return with the horses in tow because the horses were blooded and their father did not think it fitting for his sons to ride off to war on nags. One Stab knew all the shortcuts in the northern Rockies so their ride traversed wild country, much of it far from roads and settlements. They left before dawn with their father holding an oil lamp in the stable dressed in his buffalo robe, all of them silent, and the farewell breath he embraced them with rose in a small white cloud to the rafters.

By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks.

They paused to watch a bald eagle, forced down by the first snow in the mountains, fruitlessly chase a flock of mallards in the brakes. Even in this valley they could hear the high clean roar of wind against cold rock above the timberline.

By noon they crossed a divide, a cordillera, and turned to take a last view of the ranch. That is, the brothers took in the view not the less breathtaking in the raw wind which blew the air so clean the ranch looked impossibly close and beautiful though already twenty miles distant. Not One Stab, though, who feared sentiment and who stared straight up in disdain when they crossed the railroad tracks of the Northern Pacific. And a little further on when they all heard the doleful cry of a wolf at midday, they pretended that they had not heard it for the cry at midday was the worst of omens. They took lunch as they rode as if to escape the mournful sound and not wanting to sit at the edge of a glade where the sound might descend on them again. Alfred, the oldest brother, said a prayer while Tristan, the middle brother, cursed and spurred his mount past Alfred and One Stab. Samuel, the youngest, dallied along with his eyes sharp on the flora and fauna. He was the apple of the family's eye, and at eighteen already had one year in at Harvard studying in the tradition of Agassiz at the Peabody Museum. When One Stab paused at the far edge of a great meadow to wait for Samuel to catch up, his heart froze on seeing the roan horse emerge from the woods with its rider carrying half a bleached buffalo skull against his face and his laughter carrying across the meadow to the old Indian.

On the third day of their trip the wind let up and the air warmed, the sun dulled by an autumnal haze. Tristan shot a deer to the disgust of Samuel who only ate the deer out of instinctive politeness. Alfred, as usual, was ruminative and noncommittal, wondering how One Stab and Tristan could eat so much meat. He preferred beef. When Tristan and One Stab ate the liver first Samuel laughed and said he himself was an omnivore who would end up as a herbivore, but Tristan was a true carnivore who could store up and either ride or sleep or drink and whore for days. Tristan gave the rest of the carcass to a honyocker, a homesteader, whose pitiful barn they slept in that night preferring the barn to the dense ammoniac smell of the cabin full of children. Typically the honyocker did not know there was a war going on in Europe, much less owning any firm notion where Europe was. Untypically Samuel took a liking at dinner to the oldest daughter and quoted a verse of Heinrich Heine to her in German, her native language. The father laughed, the mother and daughter left the table in embarrassment. At dawn when they left the daughter gave Samuel a scarf she had spent the night knitting. Samuel kissed her hand, said he would write, and gave her a gold pocket watch for safekeeping. One Stab watched this from the corral when he saddled the horses. He picked up Samuel's saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty? They rode the rest of the way into Calgary in the full flower of a brief Indian summer. There was a bad incident at a roadside tavern where they tethered their horses to have a beer to cut their dusty mouths. The owner refused to let One Stab inside. Samuel and Alfred reasoned with the owner, then Tristan entered after watering the horses, sized up the situation and pummeled the beefy tavern owner senseless. He flipped a gold piece to the porter who nervously held a pistol, took a bottle of whiskey and a pail of beer and they had a picnic under a tree outside. Alfred and Samuel shrugged, long accustomed to their brother's behavior. One Stab liked the taste of beer and whiskey but would only rinse his mouth with it before spitting it on the ground. He was a Cheyenne, but had spent his last thirty years in Cree and Blackfoot territory and had decided he would only get drunk if he ever returned to Lame Deer before he died. His spitting brought laughter from Samuel and Alfred but not Tristan who understood and had been close to One Stab since the age of three while Samuel and Alfred tended to ignore the Cheyenne.