Something to Be Desired (9 page)

“I have already. On advice.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m out at my ranch.”

“What time did you say it was?”

“Almost nine.”

“Huh. Must’ve dozed off.”

“Where am I?”

“What?”

“Where am I?”

“Lucien, I’m sure if
you
don’t know—”

“Remember years ago, New Blue Cheer?”

“Yes—”

“They still make that stuff.”

“All right, pal. That’s enough.”

“I was playing our old tune, Suzanne.”

“What was our old tune?”

“ ‘My Girl.’ ”

“This is news to me.”

“Anyway, I listened to it and it was good. It was clear and it was good.”

“Okay.”

“I demand to see James.”

“You will have to demonstrate to a neutral party that you are worthy.”

“I ought to brain you.”

“See what I mean? Besides, you’re in a completely other time zone. So that is a sick fantasy. It would be ill enough if you said it to my face, but this is ill-on-ill. And every time you light into my attorney, you look slightly less good to neutral parties.”

“Am I to understand that I have to get a gold star from every pot-licker who cares to evaluate me or I don’t see him?”

“That’s probably the best way for you to view it. James is not something that you picked out of a litter. He is a little person entitled to the usual assortment of human rights. It’s my job on earth to see that he gets them. It’s also my job to be at work in about seven hours. It’s not nine o’clock. Not here, not there. Not anywhere. I’m going before you get your tail into a worse crack than it’s already in. Goodbye.”

She hung up. There was no smack of black plastic, just the buttons going off, a regular hangup. Lucien could tell he had not particularly gotten under her skin. Then suddenly he was clear. What he had done had made it a
little harder for him to see his child. It had been a long day and now it was over.

He called back.

“Sorry.”

“Okay, I accept, goodbye.”

Lucien put on his coat, went outside and felt for the porch rocker.

He sat in the dark with his hands in his sleeves and looked at the grayish silhouettes of cattle along the creek. He startled some bird when he first moved in the rocker, and the papery awkward rush of wings near his head made him nervous. All of him seemed out of the moonlight except his shoes, which shone disconnected before the rocker. He moved his eyes from the knuckles of his left hand to the knuckles of his right hand. There was a little light on them. I’m still here, he thought.

Before his father had died and he had asked everyone to refrain from keening, in fact many years ago, Lucien had gone on a fishing trip to the Bear Trap on the Madison River with his father, a man named Ben Rush and a man named Andrew McCourtney. Each night his father and Ben Rush would go to the bar and tell fish stories, then come home and pass out till halfway through the next morning. They’d wake up and tell fish stories right through their hangovers, which they would cure with bourbon chilled in the icebox. Andrew McCourtney was a fragile Irishman who had been shell-shocked, and his face had sudden unwilled movements. McCourtney seldom drank because it threw him into the Second World War, and he’d screech about booby-trapped German cameras, snipers in bombed châteaus, and law school: he’d flunked his bar examination and become a salesman, working for Lucien’s father and Ben Rush, a former prizefighter from Chicago.

So McCourtney got up early while the other two slept, and awoke young Lucien to take him out for the morning mayfly hatch; and Lucien would be completely and unquestionably happy.

Lucien’s father and Ben Rush liked to play tricks on McCourtney, and one night they took Lucien aside. Here’s a good one, they breathed on him: when McCourtney comes round in the morning, tell him you’re not in the mood to fish; tell him to find somebody else. Lucien lay up long after the two came crashing in, worrying about the joke. He assumed at least that his father knew what he was doing. So when McCourtney came to the door, he piped, “I’m not in the mood to fish. Find someone else.” And McCourtney was gone.

He waited around the camp until his father and Ben Rush woke up and told them he had delivered his speech to McCourtney. Neither of the men could remember how it began. When McCourtney came back to camp with his rod and a full creel, Lucien hurried to explain the joke. “That’s all right, Lucien. We leave tonight.” But McCourtney was no longer there, not in his bright twitching expectant face of the early morning, or in any other way. His remoteness lasted Lucien indefinitely.

Tonight on the windy porch, features of the darkness began to emerge to his adjusting eyes. He thought, I wonder if this is it. He considered his child’s decent circumstances. I couldn’t do as good a job, he thought, and went inside for a drink. Find somebody else.

When he awoke, he could hear car engines starting just past the curtains. He didn’t know where he was. He went to the window and looked out upon a parking lot and beyond to the jerky movement of early traffic. He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the phone and dialed the desk.

“What’s the name of this place?” he asked.

“It’s the El Western,” said the voice. “This is the El Western. May I help you?”

A great blue norther made up and came down off the High Line. Lucien went into town and bought some duck loads for his sixteen-gauge. He admired the town for its symmetry in the bend of the big river, for its smoky cheer in the face of this raid of arctic weather. Then he went off and hunted ducks in a place where a spring creek, having arisen in one small eye of a swamp, wound out in a long ribbon of steam toward the river a couple of miles away. He walked along while the deep cold made a bas-relief map of his own skull, exposing bone through flesh and reminding him that cold, not heat, is the natural order. Suddenly his small white frame house seemed a pale, brave island in eternity. A more analytical person might have concluded that this solitary regimen was a good and happy one for him. But he was old enough to know that loneliness, like some disturbance, would begin to form.

The ducks jumped straight up through the steam with a hard electrical wing-beat, and Lucien shot a pair of drakes. Green-headed and orange-footed, they were northern birds so heavy as to seem like small geese. Lucien broke open the gun, and the empties jumped smoking onto the ground. His overworked tear ducts made his eyes blur from the warmth around the spring. He sat and plucked the birds, an easy job with their
still-hot bodies. Down drifted and caught in the russet brush, and in a short time he had a pair of oblate units of food, the meat shining pinkish through a layer of creamy fat and pale dimpled skin. Lying next to them in the snow were the matched green severed heads. High above Lucien, one flight after another, long stringy Vs seemingly in the stratosphere, headed south. Lucien looked forward to his dinner and could not avoid realizing that these two weren’t going.

He put his ducks in the front hall and stood the shotgun in the corner, all without taking off his coat. Then he went back outside and started trudging toward the curl of smoke a couple of miles away that marked the neighbor’s house. He had to make some friends. Maybe the neighbor liked ducks. The movement of his legs in the light snow reminded him of a mild ocean breaking on a gradual sand shore. He remembered bobbing in the ocean at his uncle’s Oregon house, rising to view the beach, then dropping again to let his boy’s mind run wild with the sense of being lost at sea; a few strokes and he would come breaking out of the surf onto the warm beach where his beloved cousins played.

Instead of his cousins and the sea, thirty years were gone, and he made his way to the bitter stone-and-clapboard home of his neighbor. The neighbor was working on a front-end loader next to a Quonset shop. At all its moving junctures grease and debris had frozen; they were frozen to the consistency of taffy now, and the neighbor was chunking the stuff away with the end of his screwdriver. He didn’t look toward Lucien as he walked up. Lucien gave him his name and he nodded. In the silence a colossal ranch wife moved past the Thermopane window of the grim house and vanished.

“What’s wrong with the loader?” Lucien tried.

“Don’t work.”

“I see.”

Lucien looked over toward the corrals. There were small bunches of cattle spotted around here and there, and outside the corrals an unwound round bale that the neighbor could pitchfork feed from. The fork was stuck straight up in the center of the bale. Lucien was unable to think what he might say to administer some routine welcome.

“Anyway,” he said. “I just decided to stop down and, y’know, say hello. My name is Lucien Taylor.” The neighbor, Jerrold Carpenter, said absolutely nothing. “I’m your new neighbor.” This time Lucien could make out the slight shrug under the brown coveralls. It meant “So?” A fine heat rose about Lucien’s neck. He decided not to bring him any ducks.

“I noticed your half of the fence is in considerable bad repair,” said Lucien. “That’s going to change.”

The man stopped prying sludge and looked at Lucien. “You’re going to fix your share of the fence this year. If your cows get on my place, I’m going to move them on down to the highway and let them go. I also understand you’ve been greedy with the water. This year I’ll see to it there’s a ditch rider in June to teach you to stop stealing. I’ve got two hundred miner’s inches and I’m going to get them. The last thing is, don’t
ever
set foot on my place without permission. Pleasure meeting you. Goodbye.”

Lucien trudged down the drive and started back to his place. He felt awful. He began remembering in amazingly vivid detail how he had come up with his dream of a life of foreign service so many years ago now. In the
dream there had been the flow of words and ideas; there had been itchy feet and rambling fever. Much of this had evaporated against a background of dysentery and human rights violations, a background of vacant government pamphleteering on his own part; and the dribbling on-again, off-again attempt to make a family within an overpowering feeling of disconnection. Growing up in a small town, he didn’t quite belong in land he knew and loved, and he no longer belonged in town. On the radio a young woman offered a broken refrigerator for sale. “Suitable for a smoker.” A baby wept in the background.

Belong. What a word. Drives everyone fucking nuts, thought Lucien. You look at children and they belong where you drop them, while time only makes them lost. What a system. Cross that River Jordan, hoss, leave it all behind.

When he got to the house, Lucien went inside and called the neighbor. “Start ordering your materials,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of fence to build in the spring.” He sat at the kitchen table and blew power calls on a duck call he’d carved out of bois d’arc in shop class. He blew highballs and greeting calls and feeding calls. Sadie tilted her head and listened.

There was snow drifted low around the meter bases; and at the end of Main Street, the Absaroka Range, which seems to keep its distance in warmer weather, looked aggressively close. A woman shouldered her way out of a secondhand store with a table lamp; its shade angled suddenly into the prevailing wind and she backed all the way to her sedan with it in her arms. Her rayon scarf waved crazily.

Lucien wore overalls and a camouflage duck-hunting
coat. He tried saying to himself, There but for the grace of God go I, as each person passed him; but soon he detected that the gap was less clear than he hoped. He soon imagined they might have a better place to go than he did. Some of these people he knew had huge video dishes next to their homes and knew a lot more about Shiites and Druze militiamen than he ever would. I am absolutely lost, thought Lucien, I mean absolutely.

Winter came as a series of color extractions; Lucien dutifully painted the shrinking values. By March, one thing had become fairly clear: Lucien had no talent. Drinking and womanizing seemed the only solution. So, quite abruptly, he went from being the mysterious loner out on his ranch to a virtual town fixture and barfly. He learned to sleep on the jukebox. Frequently he took his lady companions back to the blue hole, where they played and soaked and crawled out onto the heated mud for drunken intercourse. It wasn’t that pretty at all. Any attempt at a gay thrust only shoved your partner deeper into the mud. Grunting and floundering while all one’s own limbs made sucking noises was, Lucien felt, a real icebreaker with the more timid gals. Lucien hoped to one day develop this spring into a spa. In April he had a close call when a brunette passed out in the mud and sank from sight. He had to probe for her with a stout pole to make the rescue, then load her to town with only her eyes showing: he had been afraid to let her rinse in the bottomless hot spring, for fear of not seeing her again. Though it would have been hard to notice then, she really had a great personality. Her father was Lucien’s age; he met them at the door and beat Lucien to a pulp. That night Lucien slept at the hobo cave down by the
river. He stared up at the dozens of red elk the Indians had made and remembered wanting to paint.

During the night it had turned off bitter cold; the anchor ice rolled down along the formerly blue channels and stacked up on the gravel bars, where they made glittering midday heaps. Lucien parked his sedan and let the motor and heater run. He looked down below the highway riprap into a deep pool where ice was actually growing from the cold bottom in low shining subaqueous domes. He remembered fishing near Boca Chica Key in Florida when the Navy was fueling its jets beyond the mangroves. There was considerable heat on the shallow water, and through the guano-covered vegetation one could smell hot jet fuel and asphalt. He pretended the noisy fanned heater of the sedan was the Southeast Trades and lit a cigar. When James was a very small boy, he and Suzanne had gone to Green Turtle Cay. Lucien remembered the three of them riding the ferry across Abaco Sound next to a stack of weatherproofed Last Suppers consigned among the island provisions for the Christmas trade. They walked along the main street of the town of New Plymouth beneath the string of domestic light bulbs that illuminated the street at night and listened to the singing of the choirs in the minute churches of the town. Lucien took James into the one-room abandoned jail, then took him climbing on the ancient, burst coral tombs with their decorative conch shells. The ladies went by in the winter heat holding tiny black Bibles and wearing lavish headgear indicative of a cherished life on earth where the warm sea makes man contented and stupid. Later, when all the gentle coasts had drawn the feel-good elements of society to their
fragrant shores, Lucien would return to the frozen north for a bit of self-immolation, sacrifice and malfeasance. Still, the best thing of that year had been teaching James to open coconuts with a screwdriver, that in a year of great professional advancement and policy impact. He wasn’t wondering how to get out. He wasn’t thinking of rising above foreign service with a spy novel or a well-publicized dispute with Congress or the President. The coconut, the screwdriver and his son stood out above all other concerns, great and small. But his wife had come to seem kindly; and everyone knows how well that one does against the other woman. When Emily was indicted, Lucien was gone before he knew what had hit him. Later he would seem to go mad as his unconscious dealt him most of the blows he so richly deserved. Often a man displaying signs of seemingly crude suffering—drooling, crazy laughter, embarrassing public drunkenness—is actually, under the surface, suffering from something intricate; in Lucien’s case, all those gossamer horrors that stole his happy home from him made of him something whose chain one pulled at one’s peril. But he was growing calm; calm at first in defeat and in the drifting lethargy that defeat produces. With Wick Tompkins’s help, though, there had come to be a stirring within. Maybe a big one to make a lie of all one’s past errors.