Refiner's Fire (36 page)

“Well you don't look like Felipe. Where is he? Who's with you?”

“No ones with me. I don't know Felipe. I'm alone, no weapons.” He raised his arms and turned around and back. “See.”

“Where are the provisions?”

“Provisions? I don't know. I wish I did.”

“Aren't you one of the delivery boys?”

Marshall looked about at the uncompromising wilderness. For days he had seen neither a road nor a human habitation—not even a cable, a distant structure, or a fence. They were high in dreamlike mountains, and she was talking about delivery boys. Perhaps she was mad.

“Look,” he said, “I'm not a delivery boy. I don't even know exactly where I am. I mean you no harm, and, if you'd like, I'll just keep going, if you'll point to a place where there's food.” She softened, and leaned the rifle against a post. As Marshall breathed easy, she drew her pistol. She did not direct it at him, but held it pointing to the ground, her finger on the trigger.

“There are these delivery boys,” she said breathlessly, “these crazy craphead delivery boys that bring supplies up here every two weeks. The university has it contracted with a general store in Santa Fe. They cheat like hell. I get all the old vegetables and dented cans; and they come in the day, in the night, anytime they want; and they try to rape me. I shot
two
of them,” she said, holding out two fingers, “but they keep on coming back. They like to get shot. The last time, they were drunk as dogs and they returned my fire. It was a gunfight. I was afraid for the horses. The delivery boys loved it.” Marshall's mouth hung slightly open. “The dirty bastards open my mail. That's a federal offense! But they don't read it, because they can't read. They think that if a letter comes for me from, let's say, Berkeley, it'll have dirty pictures in it. They must imagine that the people there walk around naked. Actually, they do.” Marshall loved her breathless energetic speech. He wanted to tell her that he understood why the delivery boys were willing to die for the chance of touching her, but decided that she might overreact. “What university contracts for your provisions?”

“This is Pinnacle Mountain Biological Station,” she said, “of the University of Chicago. There's no sign because no one ever comes here. I'm the director, secretary, chief scientist, and support cadre. Who are you?”

“I'm Marshall Pearl, no titles. Except, perhaps, ex-student of Harvard College—didn't graduate.”

“We
know,” she said, like a six-year-old. “I'll bet you're just another goddamned delivery boy. I'll bet I'm going to get raped.”

“No.”

“What's the name of the big library there?”

“Widener.”

“Who was Rimbaud?”

“Rimbaud?”

“That's right, Rimbaud. Everyone I ever met from Harvard brings up Rimbaud, Gascoigne, and Goncharov within a minute and a half.” Marshall gave brief histories, and she approved.

“All right,” he said, “who was Cosmas Indicopleustes?” Her face went blank. They sensed an engaging tension, a playfulness irreverent and private, which had sprung up between them already. For the next hour they discussed Cosmas Indicopleustes and other things, and at the end they were sitting on the porch, leaning against two posts, facing one another, at ease. Her name was Nancy May Baker. She said that she was from Kentucky, and this seemed to be confirmed in her speech and stride. She offered to feed him, so he followed her into the cabin.

It was a single large and airy room with six or seven crossbeams from which all kinds of equipment were suspended; its floor was of shiny pine. Along two walls were shelves of reference works in the sciences, and probably every book ever written about eagles. In half a dozen languages and all colors and sizes, they filled one entire wall. The other wall held the more general books and about 250 looseleaf binders. These contained observation records. On a long heavy table a few feet out from the book walls were an IBM typewriter, a fluorescent lamp, office supplies, dictionaries, a slide projector, and bird magazines. Telescopes, tripods, 1,000-mm. lenses, cameras, folding blinds, and mountain climbing and camping gear hung from the rafters. In a corner stood several large jars of form aldehyde with unrecognizable shapes within. Against the back wall were an iron stove in which burned the last of the breakfast fire, supply cabinets, a counter, a sink, and a small refrigerator. Underneath a large window which gave out on distant ranges and a narrow valley disappearing into sidestepping infinity, was Nancy's bed. At its
foot
was a campers trunk and on a table beside it were books, a lamp, and a radio. “Only country music,” she said, “but it suits me fine up here. When someone dies they play Beethoven, and then I realize what I'm missing.” The bed and the dining table were covered with blue-and-white checked linens. On the walls were portraits of aged scientists, extraordinary telephotographs of eagles, and a picture of Nancy when she was a small girl, a ribbon on the top of her head, her chin resting on folded hands. “That's me when I was five.”

Facing the bed was a rifle and pistol rack with a shelf along which were stacked boxes of ammunition. “I took all the cameras and optical stuff and hung them from the rafters,” she said. “They used to hang on the wall, but those nuts line up four and five abreast and run against the door to try and break it down. The first time, I was at the table eating, looking at the wall, thinking about
Buteo buteo
(that's a hawk), when all the equipment suddenly jumped into the center of the room. I thought it was an earthquake, but then I heard drunken laughter. The moon was up, so I grabbed my pistol and ran outside. That's when I got one of them, in the leg.”

“When was the other time?”

“The other time,” she gasped. “The other time I woke up and they were standing by my bed, with idiotic smiles. Felipe had his pants off. They grabbed my arms and held me down while the animal climbed on the bed and began to grope around. I laughed and said, ‘Don't you fellas want me to put on my tikla?' ‘What's a tikla?' they asked. ‘I'll show you.' So I got up, went to the rifle rack, took out the pistol, and sprayed them with bullets. They left hurriedly, but I got Felipe in the chest.”

“How long do you stay here?”

“From the end of April to the first of November, at least during this year. That's six months.”

“And no one else is ever here?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Denis drives out from Chicago every month or so and stays for a few days.”

“Denis?”

“Denis Frog, the head of the department. He's English, and next year he'll be eighty-five, a little too old to make it up the mountain. Last time, he climbed so slowly that he had to spend four nights on the trail. But he rests and takes notes in the process.”

“Forgive me,” said Marshall, “but what month is this?”

“This is July. How come?”

He slapped his head and began to count on his fingers. “January, February, March, April, May, June, July,” he reeled. “I was in that place for seven months. It seemed like a few days, a long, long night. Seven months.” He told her about the factory, and between that and her stories of her solitary life up there, they talked until they looked out the big window and saw the stars. Marshall was very dizzy. She said that she would make him a special dinner. They had steaks, corn and radishes from the garden, and blueberry pie for dessert, for the mountains were covered with early blueberries. At the end of dinner Marshall ran to the edge of the woods and was sick. Deathly sorry, he washed his face and brushed his teeth in the numbing waters of the sluice, and, feeling better, looked up to see Nancy Baker bent over him. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“That's all right,” she answered. “It's hard to eat after four days without food. That's all right.”

In the noise of the sluice they walked back to the cabin over a slope of pine needles. She looked about, checking the horses and the black perimeter. “Everything's okay,” she said. “You can rest tomorrow. Maybe you'll read a little about eagles. We can talk. I've been thinking about some things and I want to tell someone. Then the next day or maybe the day after that, we'll hike up to the observation chimney and stay for a while. Up there you can get the most beautiful classical station. I'm glad you came.”

That night he slept on the porch. He was already bedded down and nearly asleep when the lights went off in the operations section of the cabin. She had been typing the last of the previous observation reports. He watched as she walked to her bed. The little lamp went on, casting a warm light. He could just see her against the white and beige of dried grasses she had arranged above her bed, and against the black sky through her window. She took off her blouse by lifting it over her head in a quick motion, and put on a cotton nightgown almost as quickly. She had a beautiful body, and she was as brown as the brown penny of which Marshall had been thinking several days before when he had looked at his reflection in a still pool. She was so beautiful that he wanted to hold her, without moving, throughout the night. She was slim, graceful, a dancer. Then he was amazed, because she fell to her knees and leaned against the bed to pray. And she prayed for a long time. He could see only the sweep of her black hair against her long smooth neck and the pale blue gown. When she finished, she rose, she turned out the light, and he saw stars burning through the cool swirling glass of the cabin windows. “If you come in here,” she said, “I'll have to shoot you.” He smiled.

T
HE NEXT
morning he awoke to the sound of splashing. It came from within the cabin, where Nancy May Baker was bent over a large tin basin, washing her hair. For this operation she was clothed in a slip which had once been rose-colored and had become nearly white, and she had the pistol on the table beside her. As she leaned forward a chain swung out from inside the silk and a locket dangled over the water. Vaguely embarrassed, she looked up at Marshall and said, “Hi, I'm washing my hair.”

"I see."

“I lather it up and stuff in here and then I dump the dirty water in the latrine. But I rinse in the pool.”

“The pool?”

“Didn't you see?” She pointed to the woods. “There's a natural pool up there, so cold that if you stay in for more than a few minutes you'll faint. It's painful to put your head under. Luckily, Felipe and his friends don't know about it, so I can swim anytime I want, without a bathing suit.” She hesitated. “But now I guess I'll have to wear one.”

They went before breakfast. The water was as clear as the mountain sunlight, and in the glade the temperature was perfect. Where the sun did not strike there were dark brown and black shadows, in which the air was cool and dense. The pool was within a rock kettle about fifty feet across. “It's twenty-five feet deep,” said Nancy, as they stared at a few alabaster-colored trout hovering in slow eddies. “You can see right to the bottom.” She brought him to a high ledge overlooking the water, which was still except where it came in over a fall. “Just jump in.”

Together they jumped. When he hit the water Marshall thought that his nervous system would freeze and shatter. They gasped and shrieked in their rush for the bank. Even as the water was falling from them in glinting pearls, Marshall looked at her. Her arms were long and brown, her expression sweet—he leaned over and kissed her lips. She kissed hard, and then withdrew quickly. “Too soon,” she said. “Jump in again.” He did, watching the empty sky as he was suspended in flight before a dashing penetration of the icy pool. Fish shot to and fro in brown spangles. When he was more used to the cold, he dived under and tried to catch them. Their sides were flecked with trout colors and caramel. He said, “Trout,” underwater, and glasslike bubbles passed to the surface. He stretched a numb hand in their direction, as if they would volunteer to be clutched, and deep in the cold water he had a perfect picture of them in an iron frying pan with butter and the mushrooms that Nancy could safely gather because, she had said, she was a scientist.

When again they climbed out onto the rocks they felt completely fit, like just-matured raptors trembling in air for their own perceived delight. They understood the perfect bodies sketched by Leonardo, and the interface of aerodynamic force and a lean muscled wing. Their eyes and faces were clean and ready enough to sense pulses in the sunbeams striking them. Almost as if by numbers and seconds the light was divided into beats striking off time, and Nancy knew by intuition (admittedly skewed to the laws of science) that the biological clocks about which everyone spoke were calibrated by light, even if invisibly. She sensed the exact division of the sunlight louder than their heartbeats as they watched it divide and diffuse on the tan rocks and in the water. It hung in the air in its split state, like mist from a fall. And then it reverberated warm and cloudy, but with an edge so fine that the veins of the stream glittered with sharpness and definition. They stared at the views across the cliffs.

“I remember,” she said, “an August day in Illinois. It was flat and hot. Henry and I were in a car, and had pulled into a gas station by an access ramp. A high concrete wall had been built at an angle from the ramp, for no reason that I could see except perhaps to shut out the cicadas and the cornfields which flanked the road. A man began to clean our windshield. ‘I'm giving your car some treatment,' he said, ‘treatment.' It was murderously hot, and a train was roaring past, and other cars were lined up. He opened the hood and began to work on the engine. I looked at him. He was absorbed in the running of it, and when he put his thick oil-stained hands inside he lost hesitancy, as if he were cleaning a fish and did not fear the entrails. The engine moved silver; it made sounds like popping corks, and the clickings seemed to spread over the prairie. I thought that the engine's sounds would eventually be snared in some high oak on a riverbank. Henry wanted to speed onto the turnpike and head west. But I was fully satisfied watching the man with his hands thrust into the silver and black engine. It was alive, hot, in time, moving, and I felt as if the world were a circle around us. I felt the heat rising from the coarse concrete. I smelled the fields. It was as if I had tacked down everything I knew and it lay sturdily battened in the full blast of a light storm.”