The Hotel Eden: Stories (20 page)

“Whoa!” Toby said.

“Watch your line, son,” I told him. “It’s the perfect time of night.”

But even as I worked the trout stubbornly forward in the river, I was thinking about Lily. I’d never grown up and now fishing wasn’t even the same.

T
HAT FISH WAS
a keeper, a twenty-inch brown, and so were the two Toby took around the next bend as we passed under a monstrous spruce that leaned over the water. Four hills later we drifted into the narrows of Red Canyon. It was the deep middle of the everlasting summer twilight, and I cranked us over to the bank, booting the old wooden oars hard on the shallow rocky bottom. We came ashore halfway down the gorge so we could make camp. The rocky cliffs had gone coral in the purple sky and the river glowed green behind us as we unloaded the raft.

Glenna finally grabbed another T-shirt and struggled into it, something about being on land, I suppose, and said, “Oh, I gotta pee!” stepping stiffly up the sage-grown shore.

By the time she returned, the darkness had thickened, and Toby and I had a small driftwood fire going and were clearing an area for the tents. Glenna hugged herself against the fresh air coming along the river. She was a little pie-faced, but opened another wine cooler anyway. I fetched a flannel shirt from my kit and gave it to Toby, and then I settled down to the business of frying those fish. Since we were having cocktails, Glenna already reclining before the fire, I decided to take the extra time and make trout chowder.

Here’s how: I retrieved my satchel of goodies, including a half pint of Old Kilroy, which is a good thing to sip if you’re going to be cooking trout over an open fire while the night cools right down. In there too was a small tin of lard. You use about a table-spoon of lard for each trout, melting it in the frying pan and placing the trout in when the pan is warm, not hot. If the pan is too hot the fish will curl up and make it tricky cooking. If you don’t have lard or butter, it’s okay. Usually you don’t. Without it you have to cook the trout slower, preventing it from sticking and burning in the pan by sprinkling in water and continuously prodding the fish around. Cut off the heads so the fish will fit into the pan. Then slice both onions you brought and let them start to cook around the fish. At the same time, fill your largest pot with water and put it on to boil. In Utah now you have to boil almost all your water. There is a good chance that someone has murdered his neighbor on instructions from god and thrown him in the creek just upstream from where you’re making soup. Regardless, with a river that goes up and down eight inches twice a day, you have a lot of general cooties streaming right along. This is a good time to reach into the pack and peel open a couple cans of sardines in mustard sauce as appetizers, passing them around in the tin along with your Forest Master pocketknife, so the diners can spear a few and pass it on.

Okay, by the time your water boils, you will have fried the trout. When they’ve cooled, it will be easy to bone them, starting at the tail and lifting the skeleton from each. This will leave you with a platter of trout pieces. Add a package of leek soup mix (or vegetable soup mix) to the boiling water and then a package of tomato soup mix (or mushroom soup mix) and then the fried onion and some garlic powder. Then slip the trout morsels into the hot soup and cook the whole thing for another twenty minutes while you drink whiskey and mind the fire. You want it to thicken up. Got any condensed milk? Add some powdered milk at least. Stir it occasionally. Pepper is good to add about now, too. When it reaches the consistency of gumbo, break out the bowls. Serve it with hunks of bread and maybe a slab of sharp cheddar cheese thrown across the top. It’s a good dinner, easier to eat in the dark than a fried trout, and it stays hot longer and contains the foods that real raftsmen need. Bitter women who have been half naked all day drinking alcoholic beverages will eat trout chowder with gusto, not talking, just sopping it up, cheese, bread, and all. Be prepared to serve seconds.

A
FTER HER SECOND
bowl, her mouth still full of bread, Glenna said, “So, quite a day, eh, Jack?”

“Five good fish,” I said, nodding at Toby. “Quite a day.”

“No, I mean…”

“I know what you mean.” I moved the pot of chowder off the hot ring of rocks around the fire and set it back on the sand, securing the lid. “We rescued a day from the jaws of the nudists.”

The cooking had calmed me down, and I didn’t want to get started with Glenna, especially since she was full of fructose and wine. Cooking, they say, uses a different part of your brain and I know which part, the good part, the part that’s not wired all screwy with your twelve sorry versions of your personal history and the four jillion second guesses, backward glances, forehead-slapping embarrassments. The cooking part is clean as a cutting board and fitted accurately with close measurements and easy-to-follow instructions, which, you always know, are going to result in something edible and nourishing, over which you could make real conversation with someone, maybe someone you’ve known since college.

I ran the crust of my bread around the rim of my bowl and ate the last bite of chowder. It was good to be out of the raft, sitting on the ground by the fire, but I could feel there was going to be something before everybody hit the hay.

“Did you have fun, honey?” Glenna said to Toby. “Are you glad you came?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like old Jack here?”

“Aw, he’s okay,” I said and smiled at Toby.

“I’ve known Jack a long time.”

“I know,” Toby said.

“When did we meet, Jack?”

I broke some of the driftwood smaller in my hands and fed the fire back up. Toby had already filled the other kettle with water and I balanced it over the flames on three rocks.

“You want some coffee?” I said. I did not want to get started on the old world. We had met in the lobby of Wasatch Dorm my junior year. Glenna had come up to take my picture for the
Chronicle
. It was the Christmas of the White Album and Warren had decided I should run for class president. That afternoon she introduced me to her roommate, Lily Westerman.

“I don’t think so,” she said, showing me her bottle of Cabernet Lemon-Lime.

“Get your cup, Toby,” I said. When I heard the boiling water cracking against the side of the kettle, I poured him a cup of hot chocolate. I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee and poured in a good lick of whiskey. Toby was standing to one side, a bright silhouette in the firelight.

“I think I’ll go to bed,” he said. “You guys are going to talk ancient history for a while. Dad was a big man on campus. This was during the war and he ran the paper, and Mom was the head photographer. You were all students, sort of, and Jack was going with Lily, who was Mom’s roommate, and their house was like a club in the days when things mattered.” He sipped his chocolate and toasted us. He knew how smart he was. “This was years ago.”

“He’s older than I am.”

“Oh Jack,” Glenna said, suddenly looking at me with eyes as cool and sober as the night. “Everybody’s older than you are. That’s always been your thing. It’s kind of cute—about half.” She must have seen me listening too hard, because she immediately waved her hand in front of her face and said, “Jack, ignore me. I’m drunk. That’s what I do now: the drunk housewife.”

“I don’t believe her,” I told Toby.

“I don’t either,” he said.

“Are you mad at your mother for embarrassing you today?” Glenna said. She was slumped against a rock opposite me. Her voice was now husky from too much sun, too much wine, too much lemon-lime.

“Mom,” Toby said. “I’m tired. It was a pretty wild day. Good night.” And he stepped down through the sage to his tent.

Halfway in the dark, he turned. “But Mom, you know what you said to that guy today, the naked guy?”

“Yeah?”

“It wasn’t right. We weren’t fishing with worms. The Green River is artificial flies and lures only.”

“Okay, honey.”

“But it was pretty funny, given the situation.” He nodded once at us. “Good night.” Toby disappeared in the dark.

“He’s a good kid,” I said.

She nodded the way people nod when their eyes are full and to speak would be to cry.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It was a good day.” I looked at her slumped on her suitcase, her hideous and beautiful suitcase, which seemed now simply something else trying to break my heart.

“Oh, Jack, I’m sorry. I’m so surprised by what I do, what anybody does. I guess I’m surprised any of it gets to me. If we’d just met, this would be a fun trip. If we were strangers. We’re two people who know too much.”

It was the worst kind of talk I’d ever heard around a campfire, and I wanted it to go away. “You’re all right,” I said. “You’ve got Toby.” That, evidently, of course, was exactly the wrong thing to say and I sensed this from what I could hear in Glenna’s breath. She was going to cry. The whole night seemed wrong.

I could hear a high wind in the junipers, but it was quiet in our camp. The campfire fluttered and sucked, settling down. I stared into the pink coals and watched them pulse white. I could see the bright edge of light on the cliff tip that meant in an hour the moon would break over the canyon. The other noise that came along sure as sure was the soft broken sucking of Glenna crying. She had her hand over her face in a gesture of real grief. I watched her for a moment, holding myself still. I was going to cry too, but I was going to try to wait for the moon. Finally, I went around the dying fire and sat by her.

“Hey, Glenna. Glenna,” I whispered. “Did you bring any sunburn stuff?”

She shook her head no.

“Here,” I said, handing her my tube of aloe. “Use this tonight. Okay? Use plenty. You surely scorched yourself.” I could feel the heat from her sunburn as I sat by her.

“He’s a good kid,” she said.

“He’s a great kid.”

She shuddered and drew up in a series of short serious sobs. When that wave passed, I said, “What’s the matter?” We were both speaking quietly.

She shook her head again, this time as if shaking something off. She said, “You’re bright and young and you get married and you kind of always have money and then, bang-o, a thousand people later you’re sunburned and eating fish in the big woods with an old friend and only the smallest part of it seems like the center of your life anymore. What’s that about?”

I was beyond speaking now, lost in a widening orbit miles from our little fire. I knew she was going to go on. “There is a message, you know. From Lily. We saw her at the wedding.” It had taken her all day but she had finally said Lily’s name. “It’s terrible, of course. We were eating cake and she came over to our table and said to tell Jack hello. So,
hello
.”

Now I had to hold her. Someone offers you that kind of last hello and whether you’re camped by the river or not, you’ll probably hug her, feeling her pulsing sunburn, and sit there thinking it all over for a little while. I had forever turned some corner in my life this month (twenty-two days), but I hadn’t known it until Glenna said hello. Like it or not I was through being a boy.

So be it.

We sat there quietly and soon—over the steady low flash of the river—I could hear Toby, down in his tent, humming. It was something familiar, a sad ballad involving the devil’s cattle and a long ride.

I
N
1967,
THE
year before the year that finally cracked the twentieth century once and for all, I had as my summer job delivering medical oxygen in Phoenix, Arizona. I was a sophomore at the University of Montana in Missoula, but my parents lived in Phoenix, and my father, as a welding engineer, used his contacts to get me a job at Ayr Oxygen Company. I started there doing what I called dumbbell maintenance, the kind of make-work assigned to college kids. I cleared debris from the back lot, mainly crushed packing crates that had been discarded. That took a week, and on the last day, as I was raking, I put a nail through the bottom of my foot and had to go for a tetanus shot. Next, I whitewashed the front of the supply store and did such a good job that I began a month of painting my way around the ten-acre plant.

These were good days for me. I was nineteen years old and this was the hardest work I had ever done. The days were stunning, starting hot and growing insistently hotter. My first week two of the days had been 116. The heat was a pure physical thing, magnified by the steel and pavement of the plant, and in that first week, I learned what not to touch, where not to stand, and I found the powerhouse heat simply bracing. I lost some of the winter dormitory fat and could feel myself browning and getting into shape. It felt good to pull on my Levi’s and work-shoes every morning (I’d tossed my tennies after the nail incident), and not to have any papers due for any class.

Of course, during this time I was living at home, that is arriving home from work sometime after six and then leaving for work sometime before seven the next morning. My parents and I had little use for each other. They were in their mid-forties then, an age I’ve since found out that can be oddly taxing, and besides they were in the middle of a huge career decision which would make their fortune and allow them to live the way they live now. I was nineteen, as I said, which in this country is not a real age at all, and effectively disqualifies a person for one year from meaningful relationship with any other human being.

I was having a hard ride through the one relationship I had begun during the school year. Her name was Linda Enright, a classmate, and we had made the mistake of sleeping together that spring, just once, but it wrecked absolutely everything. We were dreamy beforehand, the kind of couple who walked real close, bumping foreheads. We read each other’s papers. I’m not making this up: we read poetry on the library lawn under a tree. I had met her in a huge section of Western Civilization taught by a young firebrand named Whisner, whose credo was “Western civilization is what you personally are doing.” He’d defined it that way the first day of class and some wit had called out, “Then Western Civ is watching television.” But Linda and I had taken it seriously, the way we took all things I guess, and we joined the Democratic Student Alliance and worked on a grape boycott, though it didn’t seem that there were that many grapes to begin with in Montana that chilly spring.