Something to Be Desired

1

The moon lofted off the horizon to drift low over the prairie, white and imperious as a commodore. While the two walked, their shadows darted over the ground and through the sage. The boy went along, concentrating on the footing, which was secure and reliable except where the washes had undercut ledges that sloughed quickly beneath them. His father strode ahead in silence, his boots making a steady beat unmodified by the boy’s breathlessness. The boy still wore his baseball jersey and had a green sweater tied around his waist. The wind came out of the draws and breathed through them toward the lights of town.

“You out of breath?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep moving.” His father made forward in vengeance, then asked, “Do you feel like you’ve been stolen?”

“No, sir.”

His father had returned after hiding from his mother, hiding in, of all places, Arequipa, Peru, where he had cooked on sheep dung and drunk too much and mailed deranged letters to his son until his son flunked his courses and got kicked off the baseball team. Then on a morning when the boy spent still another Saturday at home, away from his beloved third base, the father walked in and said, “What’ll it be, Lucien? Where do we go?”

Lucien, a small-town boy buried in Ernest Thompson Seton, said, “Up in the hills.” He was baffled by his father’s dramatics but, more than anything, happy to see him again.

Now they were lost. They had been lost for two days. Not seriously lost, because they could see the lights of Deadrock; but they had lost their own camp on the rocky escarpment of the Crazy Mountains. And though they could have walked to the highway in a few hours, they still hadn’t had food in days. Their feet were blistered; twice the father had curled up on the ground before walking the great circle again with fury and self-pity. When he heard the boy’s hard breathing, he said, “You’re a baseball player and I’m fifty. Keep walking.” Lucien was silent. He thought of his books and wondered if they were still on the study-hall desk, in the nearly empty room with its clock, superintended by a history teacher one week, an English teacher another, some bored man with a paperback spending his time miserably. Lucien’s sudden fall to flunking seemed strangely permanent. One upperclassman called him a forceps baby. The light of detention fell through institutional windows upon Lucien and the books that had suddenly gone dead on him. He was homesick and there was no home, nothing to fill a caissonned heart, until the blazing satisfaction of his father’s arrival, descended from the inexplicable Arequipa, Peru, where Lucien pictured Indians and colonials circling his father through the divorce. It was the year of the vicuña scandal in Eisenhower’s administration. The profanity of his father’s departure seemed to the boy to infect national politics. Furthermore, his mother didn’t want to give the family another try. “It’s quits,” she said of the marriage.

Lucien began to think, If we cannot find the camp, we’ll have to go to Peru. Moreover, his last history lesson, possibly still open on the study-hall desk, concerned the Teapot Dome scandal. Lucien knew that Teapot Dome was out here somewhere, maybe between here and camp; and around it were the ghosts of crooks in vests and homburgs, crooks with money. He had already learned that in America the very good and the very bad had money to burn.

“If you want to give up,” said his father, “we can start toward the highway.” His face was charged with suffering and there was a slight whistle in his breath.

Lucien looked him over. “I don’t want to quit,” said Lucien. “I want to find our camp.”

“We did this sort of thing at fifteen thousand feet,” said his father shakily. “In the Andes.” Lucien knew his father’s companion in Peru, a Billings car dealer named Art Clancy, also on the run from divorce. Art weighed two hundred thirty pounds. Lucien had a harder time picturing him at fifteen thousand feet than he had picturing his father. Art was a famous lady-killer, even at his weight; he had a secret apartment and a Corvette. There was some connection between these things and the separation of Lucien’s parents. One hung-over morning, according to Lucien’s mother, Art Clancy and his father had joined the winter segment of a thing called the World Adventure Series. It was a tour that went to Peru, where the Indians wore stocking caps with earflaps and where Lucien’s father, deprived of his secretary, wrote Lucien the only handwritten letters Lucien had ever seen of his. The writing was strong and linear and spoke of romantic escape: sometimes Lucien’s father was alone the romantic escapist; sometimes Lucien and his father were depicted in the letters as escaping; sometimes there was anger and glory, sometimes just anger. In all cases it was the world that was against them, a world that no longer cared for the individual with his dread of homogeneity. Sometimes not one word of the letters could be read. It was like the night Lucien’s mother had made a tape recording of his father, and he went after her. Because of that, Lucien’s father went out the door with the police, and the next thing was the World Adventure Series to Peru with Art Clancy. Lucien’s mother called Lucien’s father a coward, a strong word.

Lucien began to know where they were. He could have said so right away. Instead, he took a very slight lead until they were around the bottom of the low cliff. His father didn’t know they were on the trail again. Above them, the rock was black and spilled stars in a bright path to the lighted clouds. It was the perfect trail to get jumped on from above, by a cougar or a gook: Lucien had no idea who lived around here. But he did know it was more than a backdrop for his father and himself, more than an illustrated letter. For some reason he didn’t tell his father they were on the trail once more. He could hear the whistle in his father’s breath as though some small rigid thing were stuck in his throat, some forceful thing.

A cloud of crows lifted from a depression between small hills, revealing the most remarkable hot spring imaginable, a deeply colored blue hole with pale steam blowing from its surface to tangle its streamers in the trunks of sage. For a brief time the two forgot their troubles as they floated in thermal blue. They saw the world through a gentle fog and they talked in the simplest statements.

Lucien’s father spotted some ranch buildings in the distance. “This must be private,” he said; and they left.

Then you could see their camp, a grim, improperly erected pup tent with canned food in a pile by its entrance. They had been gone nearly two days, and when his father saw the tent, he groaned and trotted toward it. He threw himself on the ground beside the cans; his curved and exhausted back heaved for a long time. Lucien wondered whether this was a heart attack. “Are you okay?” he asked but got no answer. He hated himself for not knowing appropriate first aid.

His father slung himself up. He said, “We better eat. We better eat now.”

Lucien began to build a fire. There was plenty of dry wood. There were matches and a patented product that he squirted into the wood. In a moment they had fire and heat.

“Our time in the desert is at an end,” said Lucien’s father. Lucien had not thought of it as desert. He thought the two days following the sun around a long corner had been beautiful. He wasn’t sure in what way his father had been present, but his father had been present in the minimum way a boy will accept.

The tent was an old one, bought by mail when Lucien was in the first grade, for a trip to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, a trip they were unable to make because of the recession, or something about middle management. The tent had been treated to waterproof it, a tar smell. The moon outside revealed the weave of the cloth. Lucien watched his father’s wonderfully peaceful sleep. He couldn’t make out if he was in worse trouble at school and would never be returned to the baseball team; or if his father’s terrific intervention canceled that world and its rules. In fact, he couldn’t exactly make out if his father was glad to be back. It was as if the same master stood over them with a stick and not only drove them but drove them in circles, around the mountains, around their camp, around their tin cans.

His father had brought a fancy Zenith radio for the trip, so that they would not be surprised by weather. Lucien got nine countries on it. He turned it as low as he could and dialed away at his sleeplessness. He got Mexico, an exciting thing in 1958. The speaker from Mexico spoke very rapidly, reminding Lucien that he was flunking Spanish. If he picked up muy once, he picked it up a hundred times. Then he ran the six-foot antenna out the tent flap and dialed some more: he got an English-language Baptist station right in the middle of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right where they have voodoo, talking about Our Lord Jesus Christ; not at all the way a radio Baptist would carry on stateside. You could tell the people of Haiti had put a civil tongue in his head. Then Lucien got rough northern voices he could not understand. Maybe they belonged to Russians.

He turned back to Haiti. Cold wind stirred the tent sides, a rocky wind that murmured through the imprecations of the stranded preacher in Haiti so anxious to make friends among the heathen that he pronounced their country “I.T.,” as the Haitians did; the wind murmured over the tired Peruvian traveler and a son still early in his journey.

The day broke blue and northern on the basin of gravel, a basin lined with thin glittering springs and the delicacies of vegetation that spilled their edges all the way to the brisk willows at the creek bottom. The creek turned south till it fell off the end. Someone’s lost saddle horse stood exactly where the creek fell into pure blue sky, alternately grazing and staring across the gravelly basin to their camp. Lucien’s first thought was to catch him, ride him back to school and get to play third base again.

I could never catch him, he thought. He remade the fire for breakfast, building it in a single blast with the patented fire-starter, a flame as tall as Lucien that wavered ominously toward the tent, then shrank into the firewood peaceably. His father woke to the smell of hash and eggs, and crawled forth with a bleak squint into broad daylight.

“You left the radio on, Lucien. The battery is dead.” His father doubled over to scrutinize a blister on his heel, displacing its liquid between opposing thumbs. “God-almighty,” he said.

They breakfasted and Lucien cleaned the aluminum plates in the spring. The cold water congealed the grease to the metal, and he had to scour them with sand to make them clean. Lucien was conscious of his father staring at the peaks, plain rock jumping out of ground that looked as soft as a stream bank. “No wonder nobody lives here, no wonder they stay back in town,” his father said. “There’s no reason to be here. You come here to get something and then out you go. Look at that poor damn horse. Can you feature that?”

This gave Lucien no feeling whatsoever, not unless that in itself was a feeling. It was like hitting a baseball and having it just not come down. You could hardly call it a fielding error.

His father circled the tent slowly, digging a finger into his disordered hair, inventorying the camp, the camp that a few days ago had been erected as a gateway to an improved world.

“We’re looking at under a hundred bucks,” said his father, standing at their camp. “Let’s walk away from it.” Lucien listened, awaiting some further information, but that was all: leave it.

They had nothing to carry, nor the struggle of climbing; Lucien’s father led the way with a jaunty step. Part of the mission was completed. The lights of Deadrock were reduced to the dimensional outlines of the little burg; and there were brief gusts of stink from the hot springs south of town. Lucien wondered why unpleasantness and healing were always connected.

“I’m afraid I feel a little guilty,” said Lucien’s father with a laugh. “A little guilty, a little hungry and a little thirsty.”

“Guilty for what?”

“Taking you away from school.”

Lucien walked on for a minute, scuffing along the dry, stony trail. “I wasn’t doing well,” he said. “You didn’t do any harm.”

“I’m sure I did a lot of harm,” said his father. Lucien wondered why he always made his father feel so guilty. They had had so very few adventures together, but each one of them made his father burn with guilt. Maybe they shouldn’t try to have adventures; the thought choked Lucien with sadness, but maybe it was true. Not if the adventures were just going to make his father burn with guilt. They had gone to Cabo San Lucas, and his father burned like a martyr because it was the first trip they had made that reflected the deterioration of Lucien’s parents’ marriage. That trip at least had been on a school vacation, so the sense of irresponsibility had not been so hard on his father as this time. Lucien knew that this time his father felt more like a kidnapper than an adventurer.

For the last half mile the trail was only a ledge in the granite. Beyond the ledge, soaring birds were seen from above, now and then diving feetfirst into the prairie. Their car could be discerned too: an almost vertical view, a rectangle of paint, like the toy car Lucien used to scuff one-handed on the carpet at home. That was back when his mother and father had had famous parties where they displayed their outstanding dancing and where Lucien, already dying to please, had trained himself to be a perfect bartender, silent and friendly, willing to overrule the jigger for family friends, later listening through the floor for the bellowed jokes and the Valkyrian laughs of the wives. It was when the census bureau harried Lucien’s father for declaring himself an entrepreneur; Lucien still wasn’t sure what that was, but all the adults banded together to throw parties to fight the census bureau, to pass the hat, to declare their faith in entrepreneurs, a category that the census bureau would not accept. It was exciting. Lucien was the pubescent speedy bartender, who bracketed new people in town, the probational ones, with his strict jigger. Then suddenly things got so exciting that his father tore off to Peru with the man who sold him his last car: a car different from the plain business model the trail wound toward; the car Art Clancy sold his father was a Thunderbird, and now his mother had it. She had the house and she had the assets. Plus she had done something Lucien couldn’t quite fathom — she had let the memberships go. And now they were gone, his father had said dolorously: the memberships are gone.

They drove toward Deadrock, where they had rented the car. They weren’t going to turn the rental in today; his father promised over and over that they wouldn’t turn it in today, as though Lucien cared. “We’ve had this car for nearly half a week,” his father crowed, “and it’s got less than fifty miles on it!” As they drove, Lucien listened to stories of the living descendants of the Incas, how they hid gold in lakes, cut out hearts, sacrificed virgins. He heard of the astonishment of these small people, with their great Andean chests and earflaps, at the sight of Art Clancy’s Corvette. Peru had been quite a deal. The Indians tried to put their hands all over the car. Art Clancy spoke to them in a kind of imitation Khrushchev. “Hands off,” he told the little Incas. “Gives a shot in the head.” The year of Cabo San Lucas there had been a long aftermath of Mexican. “Eees good!” stood for approval. When Lucien hooked a trout in the ditch back of the house, his mother cried out, “Feesh! Eees good!”

Lucien suspected that his mother was as much on his father’s mind as she was on his own. It was his father’s quietness as he made his way across the river bridge, then the railroad tracks. Maybe Lucien’s mother should have thrown his father out; but when she did, she threw everything out and maybe she shouldn’t have done that. Who would ever know? Nobody. It infected everything from daybreak to baseball. It infected all things. It was a pestilence.

They drove into Deadrock. They were traveling light. The town crouched in front of the terrific mountains to the south, great wildly irregular peaks that seemed to say to the little town, Don’t try anything. No one strolled the streets as Lucien and his father sat in the parked rental car. There were plenty of people visible but they just emerged from one store or bar and darted into another, short sudden arcs, escaping the same general gaze. This irresolute air suited Lucien and his father perfectly. The day felt too early and too late. Before the divorce, this had been his father’s hometown too.

“We better get a room,” his father said.

He restarted the car and began to hunt for a place. There were a couple of satisfactory hotels which they cruised past at very low speed. His father looked at them critically, then leaned out into the warm air to crane up at their higher stories either to evaluate their height and substance or to hope for an anomalous penthouse, more satisfactory than the lower rooms, rooms to which Lucien was sure his father referred when he uttered the single word “dandruff.”

Then impatiently he gunned out onto Parkway and found Deadrock’s only motel, a new place. In 1958 a motel was a pretty exciting thing, comfort and life alongside your car. Now Lucien saw that his father was okay once again, that there was volition and not a mind wandering through things spoilt. And the reproachful presence of your own child. Yes, Lucien felt that now.

Lucien’s father went inside to get them a room. He came out with a ballpoint, wrote down the license number and went back inside. Then he came back and jumped in the car heartily. “Fifteen B, I love it! ‘B’! They only have one floor! You ought to see the owner. Get the feeling you don’t take a room and the bank pounces on him.” His father smiled wide with charity. Lucien glanced over and saw the motel lady, drawing back the venetian blinds, caught. He waved a little.

The room was another world: up-to-date, lightless. There were little things on the bedspread you could pick at. Lucien’s father made his way sideways to each reproduction on the wall, thrummed his fingers on top of the TV, counted out ten dollars and weighted them with an ashtray. “I’m going out for a belt. I’m late and you get hungry, here’s ten bucks.” He was gone in a shudder of daylight.

Lucien read the welcome to Big Sky and thumbed the motel Bible. Kukla, Fran and Ollie wouldn’t be on television for a while. He pulled the curtain and saw their car was gone: he’d never heard it start up. He wondered if anyone would get some use out of their tent; maybe the owner of that horse — it would make a good combination for a man wanting to travel out in all those hills and mountains. He lay down for a moment trying to get control of himself. Very soon he wasn’t moving.

He woke up in the middle of the night. His father was standing bolt upright in his shorts, arm outstretched, finger pointing, a dynamo of rejection, a god casting someone out. “Go!” he roared.

Indeed, someone was being cast out; but she felt very strongly that she had not been given time to dress. She complained with acid bitterness as she crawled through her own clothing, holding individual articles up toward the bathroom light for rough identification.

“Go!” roared his father.

“I’m gone,” she whined. “But not like this.”

She struggled a bit more, stood and slanted through the small opening Lucien’s father made for her into the night.

Lucien listened to his father walking around, stopping only for long sighs. Finally:

“Lucien?”

“I’m awake.”

“I’m sorry …?”

“I’m awake, sir.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“Not long,” Lucien said.

“Lucien, when you were a small boy, I let you have lots of pets, hamsters, rabbits and so on. Do you remember I allowed that?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“That was so you could learn about animals, about how we are all animals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now I want to call Momma.”

He got the night operator or the morning operator, whichever, and revealed to Lucien’s mother that they were no longer out in the mountains. “Momma,” he said. “I’m with Lucien. We want to come home to you, Momma.” Lucien could not devise an attitude toward this. His father suddenly fell to listening. He repeated “uh huh” a number of times in a deeper and flatter voice. He waved Lucien into the bathroom, then waved the door shut behind him. Lucien leaned on the faucet, turning it microscopically until a drop of water came out, shut it off, and did it again. Then he heard his father call for him.

When he went into the bedroom the reading lamp was on and his father sat right next to it, weeping, silently with heaving shoulders.

“What’s the matter, Pop, can’t we go home?” Lucien was scared.

“It’s not that—” He sobbed for a few more minutes and composed himself carefully. “Art Clancy was shot and killed by his girlfriend,” he sobbed. “In Arequipa, Peru.”

Lucien’s father had coached him carefully as they walked across town from the motel. They stood in front of their house while his father ran a finger around the inside of his collar, then gave Lucien a quick, conspiratorial nod. He knocked. In a moment the door opened and there was his mother, all dressed up.

“When’s lunch!” Lucien and his father cried together.

She looked from one to the other. “That hungry gang of mine,” she said with a warm smile and turned into the house for her men to follow.

Chili was gone. He knew very well that his mother might have disposed of the small, blue, merry bird; or at least given the bird away, purely on the basic of its Hispanic name. Lucien was sure she pictured Clancy of Peru in his shantung suits, his Corvette and his bad Spanish in a way that made a parakeet named Chili look bad. He already suspected that her greeting was camouflage, so the crack of his mother’s hand against his father’s face came as not much of a surprise. His father just took it. There was little else he could do. Raising his hands in self-defense would have made him a pantywaist in the eyes of his own son.

“I’ll go,” said Lucien’s father.

“Where? Peru?” Her long patrician face always looked surprised when she was angry. What many took for astonishment was in fact a prelude to hysterical fury. “You and your Peru!”

Then Lucien’s father did something very strange and yet wholly characteristic of him: he waved to an imaginary person in the window behind her; when she turned to look, he flattened her with a tremendous blow.

His father left the room, straight through the French doors into the side yard, where the dog hid in its Tudor house, the chain making an abrupt circuit back into the little doorway as it always did in a family dispute. He sauntered over the high ground beside the lilacs and took a final glance into the living room before retiring to the guest room over the garage.

Lucien’s mother still lay on the floor, lightly fingering the discoloration around her left eye. “I’m a chump if I don’t call a cop,” she said, using a diction she seldom used unless she was trying to reveal the actual sordid texture she saw in her life. If this had all happened to an acquaintance, she would have said, “She’s deluded if she doesn’t call a policeman.” She slung herself upright, got to her feet and headed for the stairs. “You had better find something to eat, Lucien. I’m in no shape to help you men. Not today. Perhaps not ever.” Lucien felt the excitement return at these last words. He still felt the raw electricity in the air. He made a sandwich.

When he had finished it, he went over to the guest room. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed like a man on his first night at boot camp. “I couldn’t let her go on like that, kiddo,” he said. “Not with you there.” He looked up to see if Lucien was buying it. Lucien let no expression cross his face. “I don’t even know whose side you’re on.” He flung himself on the bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “Out in those wide open spaces … now, that was another thing entirely. Out where they don’t hamstring a man for standing a little tall.”

Lucien took a pitcher of ice water up to his mother. She drank hungrily, as though she had come in from a long journey only moments before. “I wonder who the real ringleader on that Peru trip was. Now Clancy is dead. I guess I’ll never know, will I? Clancy would have told me because Clancy knew better than to cross swords with me. Do you follow, Lucien? Of course you don’t, you little angel with silver wings, you.… Brandy.”

Lucien went downstairs and brought back the brandy and a snifter. His mother had a candle going in her room by now and swirled and heated her glass as she sipped. “No, Lucien, between your father and Art Clancy there wasn’t a stick of decency.” She held her glass so the candle danced on the other side of it. She squinted and continued. “Clancy? I hope he fries in hell.” Lucien shuddered at this, to him, wholly realistic idea. “Your father is not man enough to deserve such spectacular punishment.” She spat. “Did you have a lovely time out in the country?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“What did you see?”

“Just this horse.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a trip.”

“It’s hard to describe.”

“Well,” she said, “at least you’re not old enough to have gotten into any trouble. Though that too, I suppose, is just around the corner.”

His mother’s search for the combination that would tie them in an awful knot had begun to strike Lucien right in the stomach. His mother fished a mirror out of her purse and sized up the swelling on her face. Then she patted it with a powder puff, as though she wished it could not be seen. She drew out a picture and held it close to her face. “Clancy,” she said. “Who would have ever thought?”

There was something in the air that Lucien didn’t like, didn’t like at all. After this kind of talk, no one in the family would know to turn up the heat in the winter or close the windows when it rained or put antifreeze in the Thunderbird in November. No one would remember to send crazy Aunt Marie a thank-you note when she forgot to send a Christmas present, and Aunt Marie’s Christmas would be ruined.

The long night got longer. First Lucien’s father stole down for a late snack and nearly collided with his mother. Lucien watched from the couch. The French bread under his arm, the six-pack of imported beer, the cheese and the fruit all fell to the floor. “It takes quite a bit to spoil your appetite, doesn’t it, Gene?”

“Hunger and grief are absolutely compatible, you goddamned whore,” replied his father. “Lucien,” he added, “get your mother a sweater. It’s cold down here.”

Lucien ran his hand up the long, cool banister and watched the candlelight from his mother’s room flicker on the carpet. First he got the sweater, the cableknit cardigan she wore when sick, then he rifled the purse for Clancy’s picture. He cut that up with his jackknife and flushed it down the toilet. He read a quick couple of pages from the Kinsey Report lying by the bed, and went downstairs, where he found his parents hugging and cooing. Tex Benecke’s band was playing “Maria Elena” on the record player, a sure sign of new weather. “I love you, you bugger,” said his father, “you know I do.” This last was slightly crooned to the big-band sound in the air.

Lucien went out and sat in the rock garden and thought about the hills and the tent they had left and the old rock sheepherder’s monument that looked out over the valley of Bangtail Creek. He thought of the rental car, the freedom vehicle that had almost succeeded, and his father banishing devils in the motel. The laughter and toasts that came from the house now seemed like a home team faithfully cheered for a bad loss. His father’s occasional riggish chuckle made Lucien uncomfortable.

The next thing he knew, Father Moore’s big car came pouring up the driveway. The minister, not knowing he was observed by Lucien, climbed angrily out of the car, knocked and went in. Father Moore always bought season tickets with Lucien’s father. In years past they had gotten into lots of trouble together. By the time Lucien went inside, Father Moore, in his sweatshirt and khakis, had a big drink of his own and was joining in on the spirit of things. Lucien’s mother hung slightly forward from the waist in her cableknit cardigan and did not quite seem to know what was going on. The stars that had illuminated the rock garden were invisible through the brightly lit living-room windows.

Lucien’s parents stood shoulder to shoulder. His father was hugely animated and shouted everything he said. Lucien was given a small pillow for the ring. Father Moore—“Dicky” Moore — had his limp Bible splashed open on one hand while the other held his drink. He rattled through the marriage ceremony, stopping once for a refill; and at the end, when Lucien’s mother was to say “I do,” she instead screamed, “The man I love died in Peru!” and threw herself to the floor.

Lucien’s father went out the door, never to return. Lucien sat once more on the starry lawn listening to Father “Dicky” Moore move through the vegetation, nervously murmuring his name.

When Lucien was an adult, when rain whirled up through the hayfield and scattered birds with its force, he heard his own name in the rock garden and knew he was free, as the saying once went, to dispose himself as he pleased.