Something to Be Desired (7 page)

Lucien stole some glances attempting to see storm clouds on her brow as she ate. There weren’t too many storm clouds. She still had the serenity of the class beauty transported through years of tribulation like a vase that has survived a revolution. It seemed a handsome contrast to his infuriating jauntiness, the air of boyish resilience that had probably cost him Emily in the first place. An eighteen-year-old boy with the air of a tired salesman thirty years his senior will get all the girls every time.

When they started out of the kitchen, Austinberry appeared and asked, “Where’s everybody going?”

“Hunting,” said Emily.

Austinberry stared at them for a long time, a gaze that was meant to be burning, and said, “Oh goody.”

They stopped the truck at an old homestead. Lucien let Sadie out to tear around the buildings while they looked through the broken windows; all the glass was on the floor. There were worn-out irrigator boots and a Scotch cap hanging on a nail. The place had been empty a long time. There was a tin of bag balm on the sill that was heavy enough to be full, but the lid was rusted shut. The gray outbuildings surrounded a common space, and the sense of their being huddled against terrific and frightening outside forces was enough to make Lucien glad he had never faced the frontier. That was no spot for a guy who trips over his own feet.

The first field had been in years past a great one for birds. It was level and uniform, and the scent of fowl had lingered in its invisible air currents. A dog like Sadie would make a strong race and lock on point in the first two minutes. A wheel-line sprinkler lay across it like a monster.

“Emily,” he said as they went along down the furrows, “how is it you’re so calm?”

“I’m not calm. I’m fatalistic.”

Lucien took this in. “You know I had a drink with your attorney.”

“Oh, I wish that you hadn’t done that.”

“Well, I did, and
I
wish he were more optimistic.”

“There’s nothing for him to be optimistic about. He knows I’d do it again.”

They hit a good stubble field. There was still frost on
it, and it looked like some huge glassy thing had tipped over and shattered. As Lucien looked across it to the Crazies, he wanted to shield his eyes. It was a beautifully farmed field that used all the flat ground; but it was wonderful to see the sage-covered remains of buttes and old wild prairie that wouldn’t submit to plowing. Lucien released Sadie and she cracked off on her first cast, ignoring the showering meadowlarks that broke into song exactly as his bird book described it: “
Boys, three cheers
!” To Sadie these were mere decoration, furniture. The undertow of game was stronger.

For a moment Lucien didn’t care whether Emily shot her husband, pissed up a rope or went blind. He had the sublime freedom of the hunt.

Presently they rode down among the thin, pale, jerky trunks of an aspen grove following a small stream toward its source. It must have been a spring because the stream’s stable mossy banks were obviously undisturbed by runoff. When they reached the spring, it was just a swamp, a small and beautiful swamp, though, from which snipe bolted in that down-angled hurtling flight that makes them seem so bold. The wet ground supported an even, refined stand of cattails, some brown and velvety, some wound with streamers of windy cotton.

“These moments, these long looks,” she said.

“How am I going to find any grouse without long looks?”

They had to go across some of the boggy ground. Sadie danced over the surface while they hunted dry spots and moldering logs. Once clear of the cattails and sedges, they could make out the shining granitic roof of the Crazies.

One of the miracles of the land was the isolation of water: as soon as they came out of the boggy ground they
were once more on the juniper and sage uplands, where the circulation of prairie air bore the feeling of distance and dryness and great shapes, quite different from the intimacy of spring bogs; it hardly seemed the two could exist side by side.

They followed a steep wash and, just below the line of wild roses at the crest, Sadie went on point. Lucien hoped the birds would hold, because it was almost a vertical climb. He started up, carrying the little L. C. Smith in one hand and looking for things to grab hold of as he went. He had to stop and blow like an old pack horse about halfway up; but she held the point, a brilliant mark on that ocher ridge.

Lucien arranged to come up on flat ground behind her and could see then that she was pointed staunch into ideal berry-filled cover. He was already anticipating the roaring flush. He glanced down to see Emily below him, watching with a slightly opened mouth. Lucien concentrated himself to shoot well, walked past Sadie to make the flush; but when the grouse went up he just watched them go, brown and mottled against the open sky.

Lucien slept, and during the night he dreamed or overheard—he’d never know—incessant activity, activity which must have gone on long into the night: the dragging of objects over the wood floors, the random opening and closing of doors, the shunting about of vehicles in the dark, the long cry of a horse
left in the wrong corral, then silence. When Lucien woke up, he found Emily awaiting him with breakfast on a tray. He was not warmed by this treatment and just leaned up on one elbow waiting for her to speak.

“It’s all yours,” she said, “but I’ll always be able to come back, now, won’t I?”

Lucien didn’t speak. He guessed his accepting the knowledge she was leaving made him an accomplice. “I’d like a picture of you,” Lucien said. “Portrait-style, with a good frame.”

He watched the light and clouds make changes in his window; he saw the revolving shadows in the peaks of the Crazies, and night arriving not simultaneously but in different places and at different times. He began to wonder what screwballs lived here in other days who had hidden whiskey bottles under the porch or made the dog graves by the creek. Then having rested most of the day, he lay awake through the night and looked out the window at the cold moonlight on neglected meadows. He was just wondering how you’d care for a piece of ground like that. All that grass; all that timothy and brome and foxtail and oat and fescue and rye and orchard grass and bluegrass and panic grass and river grass and six-weeks grass and brook grass! All those rocks! All that running water!

That night, aircraft lights wheeled around the flat across the creek and Emily was gone, a fading drone behind the clouds. Lucien wept at his loss. In these tears flowed the venom of a jilted schoolboy facing magic that wouldn’t die at the right time and be good remembered magic.

The day broke on Lucien’s ranch. He fed all the saddle horses because there seemed to be no sign of W. T.
Austinberry. He found himself unconsciously counting bales in the shed, dividing rations into the number of winter months. He stared at the shallow creek streaming through the corral and wondered where the best place to spud a hole in the ice would be. He also wondered if all those horses were indeed saddle horses or if there might not be a bronc mixed in there, disguising man-killer traits with good fellowship among the horses at the feed bunk. Then it came to him clearly: Austinberry had departed with Emily. For some reason it magnified Lucien’s humiliation.

In W.T. he thought he saw a ridiculous version of himself tottering off down the trail. And yet he peered with avaricious eyes at his own new land. He could only have seemed more preposterous to himself if he had been wearing a tie. He was spared that.

Well, Lucien thought, the sun goes down and the blues come around. He sat in the old chicken coop to get out of the wind and smoked and felt alone. He sat on a row of brooder boxes and watched the white and final streamers of cloud on the good sky. He had read somewhere that those are ice crystals, and at that time and place he felt they were. His whole past didn’t shoot by, but some of the big items, the big wins and losses, did. By the time the harvest moon crossed the chicken wire, Lucien had looked at his life and was ready for a new one.

Lucien went inside; he filled the tub with deep hot water and soaked and watched the morning light cross the old linoleum flowers on the kitchen floor. He had benign thoughts for the man, now doubtlessly gone, who had dreamed up those appalling flowers for the linoleum factory. Could he have known what a half century’s muddy boots and all that domestic abrasion would do to his bright flowers?

By the time early day in all its effulgence had penetrated to the bottom of the smallest gullies and sent the dullest prairie chicken into hiding with a departing hawk-warning cry, Lucien had climbed two thousand feet above his ranch in an attempt to find out where he was. He was beginning to understand what he had paid to be here alone.

When Lucien was very young, he had read all of the sporting magazines; and one of these, he now remembered, had a feature called “This Happened to Me,” in which awful things happened to sportsmen because of ice and cliffs and wild animals, terrible things that the sportsmen survived by coming up with something fast and at just the right moment. Or they were saved by the inexplicable. For instance, the polar bear sees his mate float past on an iceberg and therefore releases your skull. This was very much like divine intervention and was meant to leave you thinking that it is the sportsman who is most directly exposed to feeling the big flywheel, the eternal gear. What gave “This Happened to Me” its special brimstone quality, apart from the illustrations of sportsmen dangling, sliding or being pursued, was that each segment was signed by the survivor. For a long time Lucien identified himself with these nearly anonymous men and began seeking out ways of living that would produce civilian versions of “This Happened to Me,” combining the episodic, the anecdotal yield and, best of all, the deep and abiding
smell of brimstone. When he tried to get away from that, he sensed nothing was going on; when he gave in to it, he found he required a steadily deepening effort in the episodes to produce a real “This Happened to Me” effect of sportsmen against the flywheel with a genuinely sulfuric atmosphere.

Now, sunk in consequences, he no longer wished that more would happen to him. Familiar remedies were not at hand. So he spent all his time out at the ranch, whose high pastures were shattered by ancient earthquake faults and brush canyons that turned upon themselves like seashells. Inside these canyons the sun or moon rose and fell inside an hour’s time; a shadow would race at you like a guillotine. Insects were magnified in the angular light, and the rock walls seemed to have been cleaned with vinegar. Coyotes stole through the sequestered Byzantium, not knowing Lucien was there eating cold fried trout in these one-hour days which let him emerge into a larger day, feeling he had stolen time.

Lucien saw the sun move up toward him on the surface of the river. The river edged up in the bend as a cresting glare. His sedan was a luminous tear of terrific paint parked on the bank. If he rowed long enough, he would be tired.

He folded the oars within the gunwales and stepped out onto the bank with the bow line in hand. The drift boat ran off a bit on the eye of the current, then came to shore. He dragged the bow up on the cold pebbles and lit a cigar.

Lucien had taken the position that he was growing to meet himself, that he was ascending to a kind of rendezvous. He had placed himself on trial but would make
the odd exception, because he had seen what little things break our parole from eternity. Last night’s paper revealed that a man had been badly beaten, then shot to death guarding a Royal Doulton Toby jug collection. A quiet type met his end in a welter of porcelain and lead. Everything that meant anything was being sold to guitarists and pants designers. He was going to fish quietly and sweat it out.

Lucien and a new friend were finishing a long night together; they didn’t quite know how. The road was warm. Birds had dusted in its course and disappeared once again into the brush along the creek. Aquatic insects drifted from the creek and speckled the windshield of the sedan moving between alternating panels of light, vegetation and sky. The sedan’s luster was magnificent with nature’s passing show.

“I’m going to shut it down here,” Lucien said. The woman sat across the front seat just staring at him with a slightly swollen look about her lips. It was sunup, and her name was Dee.

Lucien lit a cigar and sighted around himself before directing its smoke toward the leafy staggered shadow from which the movement of cold water could be heard. He felt himself speeding up.

“Maybe I can catch a fish,” he told Dee and got out. He strung the line through the guides of the rod and stared at the brushy enclosure through which the moving water announced itself.

“There’s bugs,” she said from inside, her head displayed on the wiper arcs. “Now they’re on the dash. Can I play the radio while you do that?”

“Go ahead. Try and pick up the news.”

Blue duns drifted over the tops of the willows. By the time he waded to the spring, he could no longer hear the radio. He caught four small cutthroats before turning his attention to the end of this small escape. He thought, I have only myself to blame. He closed the lid to the compartmented English fly box with its hundred treasures, and the escape was over.

“Did you get a fish?”

“I got three fish. Can you turn that thing down?”

“Three fish. That’s nice. You got three fish. There, it’s down. Happy?”

“Yes, very.”

“That was a Top Ten crossover.”

“You see, it gives me no special feeling. It’s like being rolled around in a barrel.”

“Uh huh. Y’know, I just imagine my old man’s alarm went off about an hour ago.” To Lucien daybreak had made her look like one of the monuments on Easter Island. “But here’s the deal,” Dee said, opening her compact, then throwing it back into her purse hopelessly. “Let’s find a way to get this over with. My aunt will let me in through the garage. Nobody’ll be the wiser.”