Bear and His Daughter

BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER

IT WAS AN old Mafia lodge on the north shore of the lake that went back to the 1940s. During the years of its construction casino managements had not yet discovered the necessity of isolating their patrons from time and daylight, so the main bar had a huge picture window fronting on the lambent water and the towering sierra beyond it. The sun had already disappeared behind the mountains and the lake was purple with dusk. Smart, the bearded poet, stood with a double Scotch and water in his hand, his stool turned to the window.

“Wine-dark!” he exclaimed to the bartender.

The bartender, a foxy-faced young man, had a short, military-style haircut but his manner was slack in the extreme.

“Say again, señor?”

“Wine-dark,” Smart repeated, gesturing toward the lake.

The young bartender seemed virtually floored by the assault of sudden illumination.

“Wine-dark? The lake? You see it as like ‘wine-dark’?”

“Not really an original conceit,” Smart explained. “Actually…”

“Wine-fucking-dark.” He gave a little half-dazzled toss of his narrow head. “Whoa.” They had been alone at the bar but shortly a cocktail waitress with reddish-blond bangs arrived to collect an order.

“Señor here,” the bartender told her; “sees the lake as ‘wine-dark.’”

“Cool,” the young woman said. She looked at Smart not unkindly.

“Make you feel like another belt, señor?” asked the barkeep.

“Sure,” said Smart.

The barman poured Smart the mean measure prescribed by the house. Smart reminded him to make it a double.

“Then it’ll be Scotch-dark, right?” the youth asked.

“And then it’ll be just dark,” said the waitress. She put her order on a tray and sailed off to deliver it.

A few minutes into his third double Scotch, Smart asked the young man, “Think there are any salmon left in the lake?”

At first the bartender seemed unclear as to what such creatures might be. Then he said, “Hey, sure. All you want.” He studied Smart for a moment. “Salmon? That what you like?”

“Yes,” Smart said. “Salmon are what I like. Salmon are what I go for.”

“No shit?” asked the man.

For the past year; Smart had been trying to reconstruct a poem he had written about witnessing the salmon migration in the Tanana River in central Alaska thirty years before. It had been two-thirty or three on an early summer morning. The sun had been low on the horizon, and on the distant tundra a herd of bison were grazing the bitter subarctic bush. The fish working their way upstream had been plainly visible through the clear water. They were survivors, veterans of the Pacific, two hundred miles from the sea now, returned to die in the place they were spawned. Above them gulls, eagles, ospreys wheeled in numbers such as Smart had never encountered. It seemed to him that he had never witnessed a sight so moving and noble as the last progress of these salmon. So he had written a poem and left it somewhere and never seen it again:

Like elephants, swaying

Straining with the effort of each undulation,

They labor home…

“Check the dining room,” the bartender said. “You never can tell. Me, I don’t go for fish.” He lowered his voice. “If I did, man, I wouldn’t have it here. But the steak, hey, that’s another story. The steak is straight from Kansas City, you know what I’m saying?”

“The river is forever swift and young,” Smart remembered he had written, “forever renewed, beyond history.”

He looked out into the darkness, as though he might find the rest of the words there.

But these, elephant-eyed

Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls

And swoop of eagles,

Are creatures of time’s wheel.

“I bet they got trout,” the bartender said. “They always do. But I can’t like give you trout out here. You gotta go to the dining room. You see where the maitre d’ is standing?”

Smart, disoriented for a moment, looked toward a man in a dinner jacket far across the room. Now it all had to be paid for, he thought, every worthwhile moment, every line, good, bad, mediocre. And of all the poems, why had he to lose that one?

“Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night,” it had gone on, more or less:

I feel for them such love

And, for their cold struggle, such admiration

In my overheated heart.

Smart rose from his stool, dizzy with the Scotch and the altitude.

“You OK, señor?” asked the bartender.

He fixed the youth with a glittering eye, tossed a few singles on the bar and strolled out to the casino. On the way, he passed the young cocktail waitress.

“You got nice eyes,” she told him.

He felt so pleased he could only smile. A man had to keep settling for less. Patronizing compliments. You became a few scattered lines of your own poem.

What wisdom could be bound in a fish eye?

It must be an illusion.

For how could fish, these fish, under their long-lost ale-colored sky,

In the strange light, coming home, coming back after all these years,

Have something in their cold old eyes I need

Or think I need?

A magical experience it had been, that night, all poetry and light!

The casino had an Old West theme, with wagon-wheel chandeliers and fake Navajo rugs and buffalo skulls and elkhorn racks fixed to the log walls. It was a quiet weekday night on the lake and the action was slow. Half a dozen blackjack games were under way, dealt by fair young women with cavalier curls and sleeve garters. Three roulette wheels stood motionless beneath transparent plastic covers. At the craps table, two silent men, a pit boss and a stick man, stood side by side like mourners. Smart, who had carried his drink from the bar leaned against a polished pine stanchion to watch them.

The house uniform was country-and-western. The pit boss was a pale, yellowing man in a two-tone beige and tan jacket and a bolo tie with a turquoise ornament. The stick man wore a red bandanna knotted below his Adam’s apple. He was bald and red-faced. There were shiny scars on the taut skin over his cheekbones. Smart decided to play.

He was midway through a six-college tour of the mountain states, his first reading series in three years. For each reading, Smart was being paid two thousand dollars. He hitched up his chino trousers and advanced to the table.

“Right,” he declared. “A wager here.”

The men turned serpent gazes on him.

“Did you want to play, friend?” the stick man asked.

“Please,” said Smart. “Five-dollar chips.”

“Friend will play,” sang the stick man in a grifter’s croon. He pushed the big red dice toward Smart. Smart spread ten chips along the Pass line, took up the dice, shook them and rolled.

“Come-out roll,” the stick man intoned. The voice conveyed to Smart the romance of his own youth — carnivals, the society of car thieves and hustlers, the street.

“A seven-ah,” the man declared, for Smart had rolled four and tray. He pushed Smart’s winnings along the green baize. Smart rolled again. The dice read double fives.

“Ten the point,” declared the stick man. “Ten the hard way.”

On the very next roll Smart threw another ten. The stick man paid out his chips. Smart left his winnings in place and rolled eleven.

“An ee-leven,” the stick man called. Smart gave the man a humorous glance, as though his good fortune were somehow being appreciated. The man’s dead eyes offered neither help nor hope and not a grain of congratulation.

A pretty girl in a leotard, a different girl this time and not the one who admired his eyes, asked Smart if he would like a drink. She was olive-skinned but pale, with an unhappy smile. Drugs, he suspected.

“Oh,” said the poet, “double Scotch, I think.”

And about halfway through the next anemic double Scotch, a drink for which Smart could conceive scant respect, things started to go wrong. Looking at the table, he found he could not calculate the amount of money represented by the chips there. The stick man had changed some of his five-dollar chips to twenty-fives, yellow chips with metal centers. Uncertainly he drew back some of the chips and let some ride. He rolled boxcars, then a seven, and lost.

For a moment he hesitated. Sensing the house men’s impatience, entirely to please them, he spread the rest of his cash along the Pass line. Then he rolled and won again. Adrenaline made his heart swell but the exhilaration cast a queer shadow. Other players arrived, nasal tourists, men in baseball caps, owlish women, betting against him. He became more and more confused. There was some kind of quarrel. The pit boss called for Security. There was such violence, such hatred in the boss’s voice that Smart was briefly terrified. A woman laughed.

Suddenly he was being lifted off his feet. An enormous Chicano security guard in a tan uniform had gripped his arm. Smart was a large man but the guard was larger.

“Just a second,” Smart said. “Just a minute.” He had no choice but to move in the direction the guard impelled him. Otherwise, Smart felt, he would fall and be at the mercy of the whirling angry room. Looking up at the man holding him, Smart could focus on his face. It was brown and handsome, without expression.

“That’s hard on the arm,” he said, trying to laugh it off, sputtering too wetly. And then he saw that there was a second guard, a young woman with straight blond hair who was saying, “Are you not all right, sir? Because if you’re not all right, sir; we’ll have to put you in custody of the police and they can see you get whatever attention you might require, if you feel you require attention. That would just be a matter of your own protection, if you required custody. Do you think you require custody, sir? For your own protection?”

“All right,” Smart said.

Then they were on the steps of the casino, at the edge of the parking lot beside the highway. The big Mexican stood by while the blond woman guard recited.

“Now sir; the hotel and lounge and casino and the restaurant and the grounds are private property and you may not enter them without permission and you do not have that permission now. And you are barred from those places at any time. And you are very close — this close, sir — to violating our laws and you will go to jail if we have to engage you personally again. So are you hearing me, sir?”

As Smart made his way toward his car; he turned and saw her, half in the shadow of her giant companion, talking into a hand radio.

“My daughter;” he told the two guards, “is a park ranger. I’m on my way to see her.”

The big Mexican guard advanced on him.

“How’s that? How’s that, buddy? You got a problem?”

“No, no,” Smart implored. “No problem whatsoever.”

He breathed with difficulty. A few years before he had suffered a breakdown and been involved in an accident. Now his arm was completely numb where the guard had grabbed it. Its throbbing kept time with the beating in his chest.

He climbed into his car and waited for the pair of them to go back inside. The worst of it, he thought, was their rage at him. As though everyone had been waiting for him to make the slightest wrong move. He started his engine, shifted into gear and, without turning on his headlights, guided the car to the part of the parking lot that was farthest from the highway. Beside the lot, beyond a log fence, began the stand of fir trees that marked the edge of woods that bordered the lake. Turning off the ignition was the last thing he remembered.

He dreamed of being in trouble — trouble in boot camp, trouble at sea, trouble among the stacked books on college library shelves. He was forever doing things wrong. Wronging students, brother poets, women. The world was rotten with anger.

Once he half awakened to a kind of clarity. He was still trying to remember the poem about salmon. Never published. Lost.

And what they’ve seen!

The shimmer of the equatorial moon against still glass overhead

And leapt, breathless, headlong, a hair ahead of the needle jaws

Out into the breathing world under the blank blessing of the Southern Cross

Out under Cygnus, Hydra, Hercules,

Now close-hauled home.

It was red dawn when he came properly awake. He opened the car door and climbed out stiffly, shivering in the morning’s cold. He had to pop the trunk and pull out his old seabag from among the empty suitcases he kept there and rummage through it for a sweater warm enough. As he was pulling the sweater over his head, a few details of the previous night came back to him. He sat sideways in the driver’s seat with the car door open, feet on the ground, head in his hands. Then he looked up warily, wondering if he was still being stalked. But all that had happened concerned him less than the words of his lost poem.

It seemed a shame, he thought, to be denied the lake. He’ could feel its huge cold blue presence across the dark green zone beside the parking lot. There was no one in sight. Thirsty and sore, Smart climbed over the log fence into the gloom of the big trees. He found a trail at once and followed it. Only a few yards off the hotel lot the sense of deep forest closed around him. And the trail was so unlittered, it might have been backcountry. The hotel was not the sort whose guests took walks in the woods.

The trail led him to a granite ledge over the lake. In spite of the neatness of the trail, the lakeside was an untidy place, with spent Coors cans and pull-rings and a few crushed empty cigarette packs. Smart saw that a paved road led to the lake from the casino’s drive. Above the mists over the still water; an osprey circled like some omen in a shaman’s dream. The sun over the Washoes lit the white feathers beneath its wings.

He stood and watched the bird soar for a moment, then closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

Then he began to scramble down the granite ledge that led to the water. The lake was so still that there were barely wavelets against the rocky shore. In his morning thirst, Smart lay belly-down on the cold jagged stone and stretched out to drink. Pine needles floated in the shallows around him. He supposed it was inadvisable to drink the lake water but he was not in a mood to worry. It tasted sweet in his dry throat. Were there still landlocked salmon? There had been when he was a boy.

Their hulking gray bodies

Crisscrossed and creased with scars

Of hook and teeth, harpoon, gaff and winch and bullet—

They’ve survived the wolf shark’s circling, the bitch seal’s guile to feed her pups,

From the prison-yard frenzy in the ascending stifle of the net

These broke free.

Getting to his feet, he wiped his mouth with his woolen sleeve and looked about him like an outlaw. Anyone spotting him there, burly and furtive in the early morning light, might have been reminded of a bear prowling at the edge of human habitation. In a stiff-legged lope, favoring his sore back, he hurried to his car. For a while he sat in indecision, hands on the wheel, breathing hard. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was after six. No longer too early to call his daughter, who lived within the State Natural Monument area, five hundred miles to the east and north. He drove for several miles along the road that circled the lake until he found a strip mall with a pay phone. From it, he called his daughter Rowan, named for the rowan tree. In the very first ring of her phone he could sense the desolation and terrible magic of the place she lived, the trailer under the stars, the fields of lava.

“Hi,” said a man’s voice when Rowan’s line was answered. The casual response had a drawling near-insolence, somewhat mitigated by the softness of the speaker’s voice. Smart recognized his daughter’s friend and fellow ranger John Hears the Sun Come Up. John was a Shoshone from the reservation adjoining the monument who had gone east to college, at Beloit, and come home to work for the Park Service.

“John? Will Smart. What’s new, brother?”

“A little here, a little there,” said John Hears the Sun Come Up. “We been expecting you, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“I was surprised you were coming. Rowan, she says she always knew. Anyway, we got your phone message.”

“Is it all right?”

There was a hesitation, and Smart was surprised and a little offended by it.

“Sure. She’s real excited. Yeah,” John said in his unhurried manner. “Real excited. I hope you have got some poems to read us.”

“I would never come empty-handed,” Smart said. “Tonight all right? I should be able to cover five hundred miles.”

“Out here you should be able to cover a thousand. Just be careful.”

“Oh, I will be,” Smart said. “I’m sober again.”

By lying, he had sought to reassure John. But he had also been trying to find out if Rowan, who shared his difficulty with alcohol and drugs, was on or off the wagon.

John seemed to understand.

“That’s real good,” he said. “Rowan’s been sober a lot. But now she got a raw deal from the service. She got transferred to law enforcement and she’s real pissed off.”

“Law enforcement!” Smart exclaimed. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I know it,” said John, “especially considering her. But, you know, they’re short-handed. They’re putting everybody in law enforcement. Biologists and historians. Men and women both. So she’s pissed off. It’s not for her.”

“Right,” Smart said. He supposed all this must mean she was drinking again. Possibly doing the crank brought over from the Pacific coast or made in the desert by bikers. “The public’s getting out of line, I guess.”

“Oh,” John said, “the public’s apeshit. So the state’s bringing in Rowan.”

“That’s escalation all right,” Smart said. “When does she start enforcing?”

“She starts patrol tomorrow. This is her last day at the Temple.”

The Temple was a small cavern in which red and blue stalactites and stalagmites in fantastic shapes lined a volcanic tunnel that led to a platform of black lava that somehow resembled a table of sacrifice. Everyone from the Shoshone to the mountain men and early Mormons had regarded it with a certain dread. Standing as it did amid the three-square-mile tortured moonscape of black cinder lava, the tunnel, in its sacerdotal spookiness, seemed close to artificial. It was the centerpiece of the park and Rowan always concluded her ranger-guided walks there.

“I’ll be damned,” said the poet Smart. “Well, tell her I’m on my way, would you, John?”

“Sure will.”

Not long after starting his drive, he felt cheated of everything the morning might have provided. A little interior clarity and light. Hope.

He had taken the first drink in Flagstaff, his second stop, a margarita before dinner when they had all gone out for the famous, fabulous Mexican food — he and the professors and the attractive woman librarian who had attended what they had been pleased to fatuously call his “craft lecture.” He had taken the drink because he could see that the librarian was attracted to him, ready in fact to sleep with him that night if he should make the move. But he was afraid of not performing, of impotence.

He put the big lake behind him and took the interstate eastward, through Reno and into the desert. Trucks roared past him, the highway weariness oppressed. Brown peaks lurked on the edge of vision, a sad wind blew across the creosote plain. Smart tried to remember his poem. There was a part he could not recall, about predatoriness, the fish living in the sea as men do on land. At Winnemucca, he left the interstate and drove north.

Four hundred miles away, during her lunch break, Ranger Rowan Smart drove her khaki-colored state golf cart from the Temple to the trailer she shared with John Hears the Sun Come Up. John was at home doing a wash in the machine. Their trailer had no dryer; they used a clothesline, half concealed like the trailer itself behind a stand of lodgepole pines less than a mile from the monument headquarters. Rangers were paid minimum wage.

“Your father’s coming tonight,” John said when he heard Rowan come into the trailer. “He telephoned.”

“I knew it was today,” Rowan said. She was fair freckled and blond, with a long plain pretty face. She had bright blue wizard’s eyes as striking as her father’s and her face was flushed. “Why didn’t you call me at the Temple?”

“Figured you’d be home.”

She went into the sleeping compartment and began to change her clothes. She was taking off the gray work slacks she wore at the Temple and replacing them with her military gray-striped breeches and the expensive English riding boots she had bought herself years before in Alexandria, Virginia.

“What you want for lunch?” John asked. “I went to Yamoto’s. I got some pretty good tomatoes.”

“No lunch,” she said. She went to the mirror on the bathroom door in the sleeping room and inspected herself in the uniform of Smokey hat and ranger shirt and boots and trooper’s breeches.

“You didn’t eat breakfast. You on a fast or something?”

“I’m on a fast,” she said. “I require a vision.”

“I think you’re doing crank, Rowan.”

“What I need,” she said, “is a drink.” She came to the door of the sleeping compartment and they looked at each other. “Martinis, right? Look, John, I need you to go up to the state store and get us gin and vermouth. I need it for him.”

“I’m working the gate this afternoon. I already got wine. I got steaks in case you want to make him dinner. Anyway,” John said, “he says he’s sober.”

“Wrong,” said Rowan. “Because if he were sober he wouldn’t stop here. He’d give me a miss.” She went back into the compartment and took another look at herself in the mirror. “Just like in the old days. Back to college. If he thought I could get him pot or coke, I’d see him. But if he was being Professor Straight and Narrow it was like hello goodbye Rowan, my dear. All right,” she said, “wine’ll do. I hope it’s good, because he knows his wine.”

“It’s Georges Deboeuf red, the large size.”

“That’ll do,” she said. She opened an aluminum drawer and took an envelope out and dipped her forefinger inside the flap and licked it.

“Let him be,” John told her. “The past is past. I don’t think he always remembers what happens on his trips.”

“How can he not remember?” she asked.

“They’re gonna get you, Ro,” John said. “Peterson is gonna spring a random drug test on your ass. Anyone who knows you can tell when you’re on crank. You figure to do it on mounted patrol?”

“No,” Rowan said, chastened. “Never happen again.”

Once, loaded, not on enforcement but on what they called at the monument “riding fence,” she had ridden a cow pony half to death in a burst of romantic enthusiasm.

When she came out of the bedroom, John Hears the Sun Come Up looked at her in her boots and striped breeches.

“Put those on for him?”

“Who?” she asked. She was without any ability to conceal her intentions or schemes. “Who? Peterson?”

“Not Peterson,” John said. “You know who.”

“Yeah, I did,” she said after a moment. “I did, so what? He likes them. He likes me to wear them.”

“Well,” John said, “you’re thirty-one years old.”

“Aw, shit,” Rowan said sweetly, “you remembered.”

By afternoon, Smart had gone far northward, though he was still among the dry lakes, salt flats and badlands. Soon he began to see aspen groves and chamisa and smell the sage. Presently there were red rocks and buffalo grass, pinon and juniper. He began to think of Rowan. She was his wildflower outlaw, Girl of the Golden West. She had been born in Mendocino to a radical actually on the lam, a child of the old days. During the Patty Hearst affair the FBI had hassled him about the whereabouts of Rowan’s mother. But at that time he had not known where either of them were. He had been with his wife in Boston and his other legitimate children, whose day-to-day adventures were his life then.

The FBI had been interested in him too, back then. His work had been so popular in the Soviet Union in those days. As a young man he had worked as a lumberman in forests not far to the west of his present road; Soviet publishing houses had always loved his poems about saws whipping back and sweat freezing in your hair, the crust of a frozen marsh collapsing underfoot, the absurdities of religion. And of course, in that era, the anti-Vietnam War poems. He was one of the American poets to whom the Soviet Writers’ Union paid royalties, and he had often gone over there, and to Eastern Europe, to read. He had had many Russian women.

At last Smart crossed the first clear-running river, and he pulled off the road to go and stand beside it and listen to its tumbling run and smell the sage. Salmon?

With Moby-Dick himself, they shared the Japan Ground

And now under the sky of the Tanana, two thousand miles from there, two hundred from the salt, in this clear baptismal water, they’re home

To claim their lay, like the Nantucket whalers, their fishers’ portion.

They make me feel like cheering.

Hearing the roar of a truck somewhere back along the two-lane road, bearish Smart, weeping for his lost poem, hurried in embarrassment back to his car.

Back up at park headquarters, across a small parking lot from the rail to the Temple, Rowan found the county sheriff, Max Peterson, waiting beside the glass counter of the bookshop. Phyllis Stowe, the sales clerk, had been minding the store. She and Peterson had been gossiping. They both stopped talking to watch Rowan as she came in.

“Here’s my new police person,” Peterson said to Phyllis with a wink. In his right hand he was holding a gun belt with a holstered pistol on it. He wore a big.357 in a silver-decorated Mexican holster on his own belt. “She look tough enough to you?”

“She’s mighty tough,” Phyllis said, and seemed not to be joking.

“Come on, tiger,” Sheriff Peterson said to Ranger Smart. He motioned her toward a small office off the headquarters lobby that said PRIVATE on the door. When they were both inside he closed the door. He was a huge man, six five, with massive shoulders and a bald shaven head to which he affected to apply wax. He had fierce curling mustaches which he waxed as well.

“Here you go,” he said. He took the pistol from the belt he was holding and handed it to her barrel toward the ceiling. “You gotta sign for it. And for the bullets.”

Rowan took the pistol, swung it toward the closed window and sighted down the barrel, gripping it with both hands.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “A.357! Heavy shit. Who can I shoot?”

“I can see,” Peterson said, “where we got a lot of review ahead of us. I mean like a massive reorientation procedure has to accompany this assignment for you.”

“Nonsense,” Rowan said. “Absolutely not.” She set about inserting the cartridges in the revolver’s chambers. “I’ve done this before, Max, remember? I was an enforcement ranger for seven months in ‘94.” She pointed the weapon double-handed toward the window again, pivoting so that it could cover the arc of the visible park outside. Peterson gently took the weapon back, handed her the belt and watched her buckle it on.

“First off, Rowan,” Peterson said, “this here weapon is not a.357 Magnum.”

“It’s not?”

“Sorry about that. This here is a Colt Lawman. American-designed revolver parts made in Spain or somewheres. Double action. Four-inch barrel.”

“OK,” she said.

“Now, Colt does a.357-caliber version of this and they do a.45-caliber but what you have, what you will have here, is a plain old.38-caliber version. Six shots. Firing.38 slugs. With double action, you don’t have to squeeze the trigger hard to cock it. You use your thumb.”

“Well good for little me. But I can’t stop a damn bear with this, can I? I can’t stop a crack-crazed gangsta. So what good is it?”

“Very accurate weapon.” Peterson watched her sign the form for the revolver “You OK, Rowan? Everything all right?”

She gave him a quick affectionate glance with her striking blue eyes. He was at a disadvantage with Rowan Smart because, although he was a married Mormon and a bishop of the stake, he had been to bed with her.

“I mean, you attending your program? Everything like that?”

“What are you, Max, my parole officer? My confessor? My political commissar?”

“I hear your old man was a major Communist,” he said. “That’s what they say in town. Some ranchers say.”

“Damn right,” she said. “Mom was the same. Mom’s buried in the Kremlin wall. I’m gonna be buried there too.”

“The fact is, Rowan,” Peterson sighed, “I’m worried about you. I wouldn’t have put you on enforcement but it’s not up to me.”

“There you go,” she said. “I don’t work for you either.”

Peterson flushed. “Now that’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart. Every law enforcement officer in this county works for me. And you, pal, you work under my direct personal supervision. You’ll be subject to regular testing. I catch you stoned and armed, I swear I’ll put you in the penitentiary.”

“I’m clean, Max.”

“Things are perverse,” he said. “I got little Mormon farm boys giving each other hand signs like they’re Crips and Bloods. I’m up against it. I’m trying to protect the public. Do I have to protect them from you? Were you clean when you like to rode that quarter horse to death up by Sutler’s Bar? I heard about that.”

She frowned deeply, childishly.

“I told you, man, I’m clean.”

Peterson fidgeted.

“You’re the only officer we got around here with a Ph.D. That’s supposed to mean you’re smarter than the other guys. So don’t go all dumb on me.”

“I don’t have a Ph.D.,” she said. “I never finished my dissertation.”

“Goddamn it, Rowan,” Peterson said, “I don’t give a good blip what you got. I need some law and order. I need this park not to be a hangout and I need you to help me. You know I like you,” he told her. “I’m an easy guy to get on with. I just want you to be responsible.”

“You are an easy guy, Max,” she said. “When I first met you I thought you were one of the twelve Nephites who walk the earth.”

He flushed further at her invocation of the Mormon tradition and then laughed. He had been to college and taken a sociology degree at a state university down in Utah and done a few years as a social worker in prison. He was a member of the Mutual Improvement Society and a scoutmaster.

“Just don’t blow it, baby.”

“Don’t worry, Max.”

As she started out, her.38 buckled on, Peterson closed the door she had opened. She looked at him puzzled.

“I don’t know how to put this, Rowan. I mean, I don’t want to embarrass you. You gonna wear those boots and britches on patrol? With your weapon?”

“I got mounted patrol tomorrow,” she said. “Why not?”

He paused and then spoke slowly.

“I don’t know how to put this.”

“That’s what you just said. What don’t you know how to put, Max?”

“For … psychological reasons,” he said, looking at the floor, “I don’t think female law enforcement officers should wear provocative clothing. And I think you look good enough to … I think you look real nice in that rig. And with your gun belt, you know … you’re kind of provocative.”

“You mean I’m a leather trip, Max? Sort of S-and-M like.”

“I mean I know how bad guys think. How men think. Makes me wonder what you got in your own mind. So there it is. I don’t like you getting yourself up like that.”

“It’s standard service uniform.”

“Oblige me, Rowan.”

“Male bullshit,” she said.

“Jeez, you called it. Not me.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

There was a stretch of road, a time of afternoon when he could see the great peaks to the west shining. As the sun declined toward them, they seemed to remove themselves from sight. As he drove, a sudden storm came out of the east. The pinon-dappled hills were higher now and fingers of lightning struck the taller trees and set them ablaze, blackening the trunks and the ground around them. But in a few minutes the storm was gone, except for the smell of ozone and pine smoke, and there was hardly any rain.

The road ascended by degrees, among ponderosa pine. A highway marker declared him to be entering Shoshone County, whose state university, still a hundred miles away, would be the site of his reading. The road approach to Shoshone County, which appeared to constitute a modest rise, was proclaimed by its marker to stand at seven thousand feet above sea level.

He swung round a turn and encountered an orange MEN WORKING sign. Just beyond it stood a young flagman, about college age. He had on a Day-Glo vest over a poncho and a yellow hard hat from which his long blond hair protruded.

“Five minutes,” the boy said when Smart rolled his window down a crack. He kept staring at Smart, holding up a red hand-sign that said STOP, shielding his eyes from the restored sunlight.

“Are you William Smart?” he asked the poet finally.

“Bless you, son,” said Smart. “Yes, that’s me.”

“They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday.” The young man kept on gawking stupidly. “I read your poem. We had to read one in class last year.”

“Good for you. Which one?”

“Umm,” said the young man. “Not sure.”

“You don’t remember it?”

“It went like … it had like fields in it. Like roads in it?”

“Right,” Smart said. “I have a few like that.” He was quite ready to see the funny side. “How appropriate, since we’re on a road at this very moment. And there are fields out there.” He cleared his throat to keep his temper. “Do you go to Shoshone?”

“They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday,” the youth said.

“Think it’s still there?” Smart asked.

“Huh?” A distant siren had sounded. The youth reversed his sign so that it read SLOW. He seemed to be pondering an answer as Smart rolled up his window and drove on, passing workmen along the shoulders, their rollers and asphalt trucks.

A poem with fucking roads in it, Smart thought, cackling. A field in it! Of course they were little morons at Shoshone State, he reflected. But pretty kids, grandchildren of Mormon ranchers and Basques and Cornish miners. The cafeteria sold pasties. It was adorned with his picture that week because he was on his way to read there.

He turned the radio on and found himself within range of the college transmitter. There was a nice flute piece by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. When it was finished the announce^ who had apparently struggled in speech course to overcome some palatal impediment, declared, “Together we can make cystic fibrosis history.” Smart turned it off.

But one couldn’t blame the kids. The faculty were incompetent and corrupt. Enraged ex-nuns, paroled terrorists of the left and right, senile former state legislators. But to whom, he wondered, did he owe his own inclusion in the sacred syllabus? So that the very yokels at the crossroads were provided the exultation of forgetting his field and road poems.

And what, Smart wondered, would they do with their lives up there once they’d duly read and forgotten? Manage Kmarts? Incinerate nuclear waste? Clerk for the Fish and Game? Ranching was for millionaires now, the mines and forests were objects of speculation. But how beautiful it had once been, he thought, the morning light, the trout rising at dusk. It was his land, he had worked it, his people had gone west with handcarts on the Oregon Trail, though they had settled farther along, closer to the ocean. In his day, a lumberman, a miner; worked his heart out, proud of his body’s strength, hating his bosses, loving his fellow workers, swearing by the union. The boys ten years older than Smart had gone into the war against Hitler. Smart had joined up, signed on with the navy when the judge required it, after he and his friends had been caught stealing Forest Service equipment. The alternative was the State School for Boys, an institution so dreaded and fearsome that only the meanest and craziest got themselves sent back. No Shoshone State to go to then, where regional poetry was learned and forgotten.

Passing an alder grove with his windows down, he was startled to catch for a moment the robotic bleating of a backhoe. The sound made him pull off the road.

The grove was deserted. The prairie wind carried a weight of silence and he realized suddenly that the sounds were those of a mockingbird. It must have listened for days to a road crew’s machines and incorporated the backhoe into its repertoire.

It was impossible for him then not to poetize. And it was impossible for him not to think: How the Russians would have loved such a poem once. Nature and machine in literal harmony, labor and wilderness under the broad sky. The fact was that, these days, Smart was not nearly as welcome over there as he had once been. Time was, his appearances had filled hockey rinks; he had gone drinking with Yevtushenko. Perhaps they thought, the new bunch, that he had been a little tight with the old crowd, a little too accommodating of the cultural command, the official poetasters and their masters. He had seen it as working against the Cold War He had never thought of his work as political; he had assumed people there had genuinely liked what he did and would continue to do so.

It even seemed that the end of the Cold War had undermined his status in the United States, his credentials as rebel. As though people were less interested as the dangers waned. Then he had had his campus problems. Harassment. Absurdity.

Back in the cat, he thought for a while of the Bird and the Backhoe. Of course there was a poem there. But so Russian, so Soviet, so much uplift and muscularity. Was it really worth doing? Someone somewhere had said of Rilke that if he had cut his chin shaving in the morning he would have bled poetry. Smart had once secretly thought that was equally true of himself.

They make me feel like cheering,

These fish, mere fish, at the cost of such voyaging, such heroism, such wild adventure

Fulfilling a purpose that was never their own.

The mighty merciless will that made Leviathan

Made them, sent them to sea, willed them unending strife.

He supposed that was hardly Rilke. He might have made a middle-level Soviet poet or the equivalent of one. Or else, he thought, he might after all be better than that. Starting out, his model had been Thomas McGrath, another poet from his part of the country. And as for the salmon poem — if he could only bring it back, it might be improved, honed into something worthy of its conception, the wonderful moment that had inspired it. In any case, he thought, except for fragments it seemed to be gone. But the excitement of the recollected poem, what seemed to him its possibilities, stirred a swelling of angina pain in his breast.

…in order that there be fish, that there be something rather than nothing

In the appointed place.

To serve that inscrutable disposition,

Welcome them home now, with carnivore cries

Life’s champions

Let them teem and die.

To survive and teem and die is glory.

God’s will be done.

It would probably, he thought, be well to take the God pan out.

There had not been that many visitors to the monument that afternoon. Fewer than a dozen in all, enough to constitute two groups. They would pass through the gate to park headquarters and tickets from Phyllis Stowe and, if they chose to, they might file into the little auditorium to watch a film on western North America during the early Cenozoic Era and the formation of volcanic structures. Watching it, Rowan had to muster all the goodwill of which she was capable — a thoroughly boring film and not even specific to that particular site. At least three other parks with volcanic configurations to display used it.

During the second showing of the film, Rowan went into the ladies’ room and took the envelope out of her breeches pocket and licked the icelike crystal from her fingers and put some on her gums. She made it to the auditorium just as the lights were coming on. She had a quick look around to see if there were any children in the house. She always liked to make sure that children saw the part about the fossil record, the Eocene plants that had been carbon dated back millions of years. Her readiness to point out the implications to youngsters occasionally involved her in controversies with God-fearing parents. Sometimes she found these disputations tiresome. At other times she could barely get enough of them. The park superintendent, Mr. Bondoc, the man who had just assigned her to enforcement, preferred her to overlook difficult points of science. Fundamentalists ought to enjoy the parks too, and often wrote letters to their legislators.

“Do you have any films emphasizing creationism?” a bearded paterfamilias with a beaten-down wife and half a dozen children had once asked her.

“At the moment, sir,” Rowan had replied, “we lack the documentation. We have folks in the field though.”

“And what are they doing?”

Taking a shit, she had dearly wanted to say, but she had been sober at the time.

“Many people believe that the Garden of Eden is where Reskoi, the sky spirit, created Rainbow Girl,” Rowan had told the man. “And where would we be without Rainbow Girl, kids?” she asked his children. “Without Rainbow Girl we wouldn’t have turkey every Thanksgiving. Or corn.”

“We don’t happen to believe in Rainbow Girl,” the man had said.

“C’mon,” she asked him, “on a day like this? Everybody believes in Rainbow Girl.”

Fortunately for Rowan, the man’s complaining letter to Mr. Bondoc, attempting to refute the doctrine of Rainbow Girl and containing sarcastic references to Her had made him sound like a lunatic to that unimaginative official.

Conducting the five tourists through the lava bed, Rowan was at her most enthusiastic. From time to time she was afraid there might be some spittle running down the side of her mouth, but that was just her imagination. The men appreciated her dashing uniform and the women seemed not to mind. Glimpsing herself in the reflective glass of the park headquarters on the way to the field, it seemed to her she looked like Ella Raines in Tall in the Saddle. Queen of the Cowgirls, the big iron on her hip.

As usual, she explained to her group that the field through which she conducted them was a composite lava field of fluid mafic formation. It was mainly cinder and ash which gave it its grim and witchy appearance, although there were also examples of lapilli and even some brachiated granite of volcanic origin, among which, in season, wildflowers grew. A few of the wildflowers, she pointed out, were still in evidence, withered and mummified: Indian paintbrush, lupine, death camas.

A teenage girl, the youngest person in the group, wanted to know why it was called death camas.

“Because some say it used to grow over graves, honey. Along the trail. And others say because the flower looks a little like a skull.”

The brachiated lava had other plants.

“Wintergreen,” Rowan told them. “And phlox. And I like this one because it’s called ranger’s buttons.” And, as always, that got her a titter as though it were amusing. “So when I die,” she said, “and they bury me here on the lone prairie, you’ll see some death camas over me and some ranger’s buttons.”

Another lesser polite titter.

“And maybe a mountain ash,” Rowan said. “Anyone guess why?”

No one did. Rowan showed them her name tag, on the side of her shirt opposite her gold badge, holding it out between her fingers.

“Because my name’s Rowan. And back in the old country that’s a tree with red berries you hear about in songs, and here in our country it’s a related tree that’s got red berries too and they call it the mountain ash.” She looked around at the lunar landscape. “Except I don’t think they can get one to grow out here. Even for me.”

Some of her colleagues unkindly called her lectures “The Smarty Rowan Show” because instead of being about mafic fluid and volcanic rock, they often had a lot to do with Rowan Smart.

Finally she led them all into the volcanic tunnel that led to the Temple, past the polychrome stalagmites to the table of ash and cinder. Rowan had them spread out around the black chamber while she mounted a rise behind the table. Phyllis Stowe had locked up the park headquarters and come to the Temple to oversee Rowan’s wrap-up. Things were running late and Phyllis was annoyed.

“Now this,” Rowan told her charges, “is what they call the Temple. Can you all see why?”

Everyone nodded.

“It does look like a temple, doesn’t it? In fact, some Latter-day Saints at first thought it might be a temple of the tribe of Zebulon come to America. But that proved not to be.”

“Who built it?” a middle-aged man asked. Someone always seemed to ask that question. The place was so fantastical in its range of color and light that people resisted the idea of its natural formation. It was as though they had lost their faith in nature.

Once she had had a European visitor on the tour who plainly refused to believe Rowan’s insistence that the cavern was natural. It was America and the visitor had required inauthenticity and illusion. But there were a thousand caves in the same colors within a few hundred miles, all quite natural.

“Do you think if we had made it,” Rowan had asked the visitor, “we’d only charge you a buck to get in?”

It had been back in the days when the Europeans had fallen in love with New York subway graffiti and brought spray-paint cans with them on rafting tours and harassed the Indians.

“No one built it,” Rowan said. “God built it.”

The crystal was catching up with Rowan. She remembered that her father was on the way and all it entailed. She began to think of the times he had left her weeping, of the stories he had started to tell her and then gone away, leaving them incomplete. Sometimes she would imagine endings for them, hoping one day to surprise him with his own tales, but he would never remember what she was talking about.

“Were there like human sacrifices here?” the teenager asked. Everyone murmured echoes to the question. Phyllis Stowe looked at her watch.

“Seems like that kind of place, doesn’t it?” Rowan asked. A certain type of kid always asked that question, and this girl, gawky, tomboyish, innocently flirting with Rowan, was the type. “There might have been. Someone used the cavern for ceremonies. Before the modern Indians lived around here there were Caddoan-speaking people who practiced a kind of human sacrifice.”

A special silence fell. Rowan held them with her bright eyes.

“They had a legend like the one about Abraham and Isaac. They believed that the sun couldn’t move unless blood was shed. Sun couldn’t move because he couldn’t see. Nothing would grow. Children would not grow up. So sometimes captive boys or orphan girls from the Bear Clan were put on the stone and killed. The girls were the ones who had a dream where they died. They were killed when a certain star appeared in the morning, and the people called the killing Morning Star Ceremony. We don’t know what the star was. Probably it was the planet Venus.”

“Were they like tortured?” the teenager asked.

“They were never tortured,” Rowan said. “They died very quickly with an arrow through the heart because they were important girls. They were the grandchildren of Sun through his sons and daughters the Bears, and Sun needed their eyes to see. When Sun saw their blood he ran through the sky. We cannot make our sun stand still,” Rowan declared, “yet we can make him run. This is where the girls might have been killed. Here in the Temple.”

“Whoa,” said the teenager.

The ones like her, Rowan thought, strange things would be going through their heads about now. Outrage about the orphan girls. Unfamiliar urges involving death and sacrifice. At least that was how it had been for her, and that was how she imagined certain kids felt. She would have liked to take this one aside.

“And the Bears,” Rowan said, “to conceal the blood, to fool the other animals and to fool the girls, spread black cornmeal all around. And that’s why the ash is here, and the cinders, all that black world, the mafic fluid. The world around here.” She raised a hand, checking the pulse in her forehead. Her face felt hot and dry. “Well,” she told her public, “that’s all we have time for. I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to Temple Cavern as much as we’ve enjoyed having you.”

And she had enjoyed having them. In her present frame of mind, she might have gone on for hours.

“Where the heck did you get that sacrifice bit?” Phyllis asked discreetly as the visitors filed out. “I sure never heard it before.”

“It came as a revelation,” Rowan told her. “I was reading Karl Bodmer. I mean spiritually it was pretty fucking sublime.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” said Phyllis. “Well, I guess you’re the expert.”

“Sure,” said Rowan. “I’d do it.”

“Well,” said Phyllis, “you certainly had them eating out of your hand.”

“Thanks. Sorry I kept you late.”

“I guess it’s all right,” Phyllis said. “Good luck on enforcement tomorrow.”

The turnoff for Temple State Monument was in a village called Deerdrum, thirty miles from the college town in which Smart was scheduled to read. Just before arriving in Deerdrum, the highway passed through the Shoshone reservation where Rowan’s friend John Hears the Sun Come Up had spent his childhood. The reservation was scattered over a vast plain of sage and greasewood that stretched toward distant mountains. Here and there over the plain were clusters of beige rectangular buildings and khaki trailers. These were the clinics, schools and meeting halls, some enclosed within chain-link fences. Each cluster was equipped with a few government-issue street lights of the sort found around prisons or military bases. The lights were automated, geared to daylight, so that as the weather changed in the enormous sky overhead they would flash on and off in reaction to passing banks of clouds. Near the road was a square white wooden church, freshly painted, with a little bell tower trimmed in green and a gold-colored cross.

Deerdrum itself had changed since Smart had last seen it. Once its fortunes waxed and waned with molybdenum production and the molybdenite mine outside of town. Now there was still some mining, but tourism was coming in. The hot springs along Antelope Creek had been dammed. Artists and soothsayers had moved out from the expanding university, and one of the town’s restored gingerbread brothels had become a bed-and-breakfast. There was a Days Inn and even a florist.

Smart would have much preferred to stay in town; it was a tight squeeze in the trailer with John and Rowan. On the other hand, she would be insulted and there would probably be drinking and it was a long dark way from the park back to Deerdrum. Just before the turnoff he stopped at a state store and bought two bottles of Rioja. Then he drove on and took the left that led west toward the lava beds.

He felt no excitement or anticipation as he approached the park, and this was a little surprising. On the way, in pursuit of his poem, he had managed to make himself forget the storms that raged about Rowan and the terrible energy between the two of them. Old regrets troubled him as he got farther from town and deeper into the volcanic desert around the Temple. A sense of excitement and dread. You do what you want in the end, he thought, forget what you need to forget. You follow your bliss, as the man said. More than anything he wanted another drink. One of the things he had almost forgotten was the pitiless loneliness of the place.

“Shit,” Rowan said when John met her in the yard of the trailer “he’s not here yet?”

John looked up the highway and shrugged. “Not yet.”

“I was really hoping he would be,” she said and began to pace back and forth in the yard. A faded striped sunshade protected part of the trailer yard, and even though the hot weather was over they had not yet taken it down.

“You were hoping but you were scared, right?” John asked.

“For God’s sake,” she said after she had paced outside for a few minutes, “I need a drink. How much wine did you buy?”

“Two of them big bottles. That’ll make one for each of you,” he said, “because I guess you know I’m not having any.”

“I’m gonna have some now.”

“You know,” John said, “could be hours before he gets here. You start drinking now, you’re like to be passed out by the time he shows up.”

“Ah,” she said, brushing past him toward the aluminum door “that’s where you’re wrong. I’m spinning my wheels. I sort of ate into that crank.”

In the kitchen, she took a bottle of the Georges Deboeuf out of a paper sack and commenced drawing the cork with a Swiss Army knife corkscrew. John watched from outside the open door.

“What did you do that for?”

“What did I do it for? Let’s see. Because Max was on my case because he thought my pants were too tight. Because I had a brace of pilgrims to instruct. Two braces actually.”

When she had opened the wine she took her guitar out of the broom closet, dusted it off with her uniform cuff and sat on a plastic kitchen chair to tune it.

“So you gave your park tours on crank?”

She put the instrument aside and poured some claret into a jaunty breakfast juice glass and sipped it delicately.

“Not for the first time, old sport.”

“I know it,” John said. He stepped up into the trailer went past her to the sofa and sat down wearily. “I suppose you made up a lot of hoodoo about Indian people. The way you do.”

“I don’t make things up,” she said. “I never make things up.”

“I’ve heard you. I wonder your nose don’t get long as Pinocchio’s out there sometimes.” He looked her up and down, lazy-eyed. “And Max is right about your pants.”

“I haven’t heard any complaints from the public. You complaining?”

“Not me. I think you look good.”

” Good? How about beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful regardless,” John said. “Don’t hurt to be more modest. Your face is all red from that shit. And how about removing your weapon? Or are you going to have your supper that way?”

Rowan took a deep drink of wine and grimaced.

“Christ, it feels good though,” she said. She turned to him on the sofa and put his hand on the buckle of her gun belt.

” You gonna give him speed?”

“Are you kidding? He’s an old doper from the great age of dope. He could do half a kilo while other people were doing a gram.”

John looked at the trailer deck for a moment, his fingers interlaced.

“I’m not comfortable,” he said, “when you been drinking and doing drugs. You know that, don’t you? When we’re intimate and you been drinking…”

Rowan picked up the guitar and began to sing: “When we’re intimate, and I’ve been drinking, I get to thinking…”

“Oh shut up,” John said. “Don’t be so smart.”

“Smart’s my name, baby. Smart’s my nature.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” John said, “you’ve got in real trouble on that crank. I’ve seen you crazier than all get-out.”

Rowan nodded. “You can never tell how strong it is or what’s in it,” she agreed, and strummed a few chords. “I guess that’s because it’s made by the Hell’s Angels and not the Red Cross.”

John picked up the afternoon paper and leafed through it.

“I don’t know, kid. I ain’t gonna have a good time tonight. I should go see my mother.” He put the paper aside and stood up. His younger brother was making trouble for the old lady, hanging with a gang. John’s mother had a drinking problem of her own. “Anyway, I want to buy a lottery ticket in town.”

“Oh God,” Rowan said, sounding truly frightened, “he’s coming! I think I see his car.”

Her friend looked stoically straight ahead.

“You gotta forget, Rowan. You have to realize what drunks are like. He won’t remember you that way. If he does … it’s not good.”

“What do I care what citizens and pilgrims think?” she demanded of him. “You yourself told me you thought it was all right.”

“Some Indian people think it’s all right. If it’s what the spirit world wants.”

“Well, I happen to think it is.”

“Well, I happen to think it isn’t,” John Hears the Sun Come Up said. “I think that crank will take your life someday.”

“Jesus,” Rowan said, “it’s him.”

“I ought to stay,” he said. “But only if you let me.” When he looked at her she was licking the crystal from her fingertips.

“I hope God helps you. You should ask him.”

“I’ll ask him to stay too.”

“Rowan…”

She put her hands over her ears, still staring out at the road.

“I’m not hearing you.”

“Yes you are,” he said. “You are.”

Smart parked beside their cars at the end of the dirt road that led to the trailer. Hers was a Volvo from the mid-eighties. John’s was a Dodge pickup, suggesting commercials from vanished Super Bowl Sundays, the Spirit of America. They had the Park Service cart parked there too.

There were sprouts and carrots still growing in their garden. The carrots, he remembered, sometimes came round as medallions, from the shallow layer of soil above the igneous rock, flattened out against it.

He walked up to the trailer and knocked on the door. He had promised John Hears the Sun Come Up a new poem. Maybe he would magically remember the salmon poem. He might remember it word for word, he thought. Suddenly he found himself wondering what exactly he had been feeling that night beside the Tanana. Whatever it was, that was the subject of the poem. If he could bring that back, the words might follow.

Rowan stood in the doorway looking down at him. When he’d last seen her she had been flabby with drink but now her face was lean and tanned, although of course she was older now and there were wrinkles radiating from the corners of her eyes. She was in her uniform, slim and sleek. Her face was red and her blue eyes looked a little unsound. Along with mounting excitement in his chest he felt a quickening of caution.

Their kiss was brief and distant and they avoided each other’s eyes. John stood and shook hands with Smart. Then they sat in the center compartment of the trailer. Smart, as guest of honor, took the small gray sofa. Rowan and John sat in plastic armchairs. The rest of the space was occupied by cases full of Rowan’s books. There were more books in an adjoining stage closet. She had even jammed a tiny desk into the space. Looking around the small room, he saw a couple of yellow pads with what looked like verse in his daughter’s handwriting.

“Writing poetry?”

She laughed self-consciously without answering.

“I’ll have to read it,” he said, “or get you to read it to me.”

“She’s a good poet,” John said. He was drinking Sprite, staying with the program. Smart and his daughter drank the red wine. “Not as good as you,” he said to Smart, “but pretty good.”

“John’s a connoisseur of poetry,” Rowan said. “He’s real diplomatic too.”

“I know she’s a good poet,” Smart said. “She always has been. Since she was a little girl.”

“We see the world through the same eyes,” Rowan said. “That’s literally true. Our eyes are the same. I mean look at them.”

Both the men in the room found somewhere else to look.

“Do you remember any of my poems?” Rowan asked her father. “Do you remember the ones I used to send you from California? Maybe you never got them.”

Smart had a recollection of his daughter sending him poems she had written. He had inscribed a book of his poems to her and she had made a folder of her poems and sent them to him. Then later in college, she had published some poems in university literary magazines and sent them to him. He had never, as far as he could remember, responded.

“I do remember some of them,” he said.

“Do you remember the one I wrote about the wind in the desert?”

“The one where you held the wind in your hands?”

Rowan put her glass down and raised both hands to her face.

“Oh God! You remembered it!”

It was the one single poem of hers he remembered. She had written it after her mother had moved her to the women’s collective in New Mexico. It was about ending up with nothing, with no one.

“Sure I remember it,” Smart said, draining his glass. “I think I used it.”

“Oh God,” Rowan said. “I’m glad you did.”

“How about playing for me?” Smart said. “Still got your pawnshop guitar?”

“Hey, I thought you’d never ask.”

She played him an old Scottishy song he liked about the Rose and the Linsey-O and then a song she had written, from one of her poems. But he seemed not to notice it was her poem.

“Hey, what about that steak?” John said. “We gonna eat or what?”

“Sure,” Rowan said without enthusiasm. Her eyes were fixed on her father. “I’ll do it.”

“No, no,” Smart declared. He struggled up from the sofa and poured another juice glass of wine for Rowan and himself. “I’m cooking. I see mushrooms and your homegrown jalapeños. I’m the steakmaster.

“You know,” he told them as he blundered about the kitchen, “I got thrown out of one of the casinos down on the lake. For being drunk, I guess.”

“‘Cause you look like a rodeo clown,” Rowan said. She plunked a chord on the guitar and put it aside. “That’s why.”

John gave her a disapproving look.

“They seemed so goddamn angry,” Smart said. “Like they hated me.”

“Probably did,” she said. She got up and went to the trailer lavatory. While she was in it John came up to Smart, one eye on the door. His voice was naturally so soft that it was always hard for Smart to hear him, and he was keeping it low.

“She’s doing crank, Will. She’s been doing it all day and I thought I better tell you.”

“She seems in good spirits.”

“That can change real fast. And she won’t sleep and she won’t shut up. So I hope you’re ready.”

“Actually,” Smart said, “I’m really not.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come.”

“You mean because I’m drinking?”

“You know what I mean,” John said. He had been speaking with his eyes closed, as some Northwest Indians do when they are moved to show respect. “I love hearing your poetry, Will. But I’m not gonna stay and protect either of you. Not with the two of you like this.”

With John’s eyes closed to him, Smart drank the glass of wine down. His third.

“Your poetry’s all you have,” John Hears the Sun Come Up told Smart. This time he looked him in the eye. His own eyes looked flat, utterly unfeeling. “It’s your soul, a good soul.”

“Thanks,” said Smart, touched.

“But you shouldn’t go near her. Not now.”

He went out without waiting for a reply.

When Rowan came out of the lavatory, they listened to his pickup roar to a start. He gunned the motor; braked hard backing out and took off explosively toward the highway.

“I’m glad he went.” Her face was brighter. She looked around for where she had left her wine glass. “He’s jealous.”

“Jealous.”

“Yes, he should be … I’d be if I was him.”

“Will he come back?”

She gave Smart a dark crazy smile and shook her head. “Not tonight.”

He watched her stand up and put a tape in her Sharp 4 recorder. It was Vivaldi, L’Estro Armonico. He saw that she was wearing a gun belt with a holstered pistol. The little space she stood in was piled from deck to overhead with books: The Golden Age of American Anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan on the Iroquois longhouse, George Caitlin prints. There was also shelf after shelf on religion: the Gnostic Gospels, the works of Hans Jonas, kabbala, witchcraft, Wicca.

“Look at all your books, kid. You’re still beguiled by magic.”

“My books?” She laughed. Instead of sitting down, she stood beside his chair while the Vivaldi played. “You know when I was in high school the local cops flagged all the library books on witchcraft? They pulled me in. They thought my boyfriend was castrating cattle. Or I was. They told me I had to spy on the witches’ coven in the high school or they’d send me to juvenile jail.”

“Were you a witch?”

“I was a little bookworm. Writing my poetry. There wasn’t even a coven.” She laughed again. “You know, I tried to start one but I got bored.”

Now he laughed and put a hand on her hip and patted it.

“You like the way I look, Will?”

“You look very … constabulary. I mean, what with the gun.”

“They put me on enforcement. Can you imagine? I know more about the Temple, about the Paiute and Shoshone traditions, than any white-eyes in the state. So I’m supposed to chase over hill and dale after some dummy poaching ‘lope. A bitch, right?” She licked her lips and offered him a soiled envelope. There was a crystalline powder at the bottom of it. “Want some? It’s the famous ice. Crystal meth.”

“No thanks.”

“Go ahead,” she said, moving closer to him, pouting slightly. “Because you know we’ll get crocked and you’ll go to sleep on me and how often do I get to see you?”

“I know what you mean.”

“Go ahead.”

He dipped his finger into the stuff so there was a small mound on his fingertip and licked it off.

“Easy,” she said, “this is strong. You’ll get shot out of a cannon.”

“Right,” said Smart. The drug seemed to kick in almost immediately. “I guess I can tell you this,” he said. “I guess you’re a pal.”

“You can tell me everything, Will.”

His heart raced.

“You know, I came unstuck on my last reading tour. I have to get my act together.”

“How did you come unstuck?”

“I found myself in an office full of my poems. A professor’s office. He had every volume I ever published. So I filled my briefcase with them, all my books, and I swung the case against his window. His office was in this ghastly brick tower.” It seemed to Smart that he was speaking faster and faster. “I was trying to break the window, see. I wanted to break his window with my books.”

“Were you drunk?”

“Of course I was drunk.”

“Did you want to jump?”

“Yes, I suppose. But I could only shatter the inner layers of the window. I got his office full of glass and blood. It was after the harassment thing back east. And that was the end of my reading.”

He stood up, dizzy again. The altitude, the drug. He poured himself another glass of plonk.

“But you oughtn’t to die. You have work to do.”

“Maybe.”

“I think you’re a great poet. Even my mother does.”

“Does she?”

“She sure does. And all her friends.”

Rowan’s mother still lived on the commune in Mendocino. It was the place where, among flowers and flutes and midwifery, Rowan had been born. Rowan had spent a lot of her childhood there and Smart had seen very little of her.

“I had a poem for you, Rowan. I’ve been trying to remember it since I got west.” He took another sip of wine to slow the rush of his heart.

“Oh, you have to,” she said. “Take a little more crystal.”

“You minx!” he said. “You’ve poisoned me.”

“I’m not a minx. Or a mink or a weasel,” Rowan said. “I want my poem.”

“Once I spent years trying to remember a poem,” Smart told her. “Twenty years maybe.” He had seen the low range of mountains on the horizon through the little kitchen window and it was as though he were looking for his other lost poem out there. “It was a poem I wrote about a plane loaded with American salesmen breaking up over Mount Fuji. They’d won a selling contest, a free trip to the Orient. So they ended up falling down on Mount Fuji with their wives and their wallets and their Kodaks. Buddhist monks gathered up their bodies. I thought that was so amazing. But I lost the poem I wrote and I never could bring the sucker back.”

“Sure,” Rowan said. “Your Fall of Capitalism poem. I don’t want that one. I want the one you wrote for me.”

“God,” Smart said, “if I sit down I’ll never be able to stand up. How can you take that stuff?”

“Please,” she said, “try and remember. It’s important to me.”

“Rowan,” Smart said, “why don’t I cook for us? We’re letting good beef go to waste.”

“How can you be hungry?” she demanded. “I don’t want to eat.”

“Well,” he said, “maybe I’m not. But we should eat or we’ll get plastered.”

As though she were spiting him, Rowan finished the wine in her glass and poured more for both of them.

“I’ll make you remember,” she said. “I’ll make you remember me. Then you’ll remember my poem.”

She went up to him then and took his hand and kissed it. He put it against her flushed cheek and brushed her straight blond hair.

“My fanciulla del west,” he said. He looked away from her at the sad greasewood landscape outside. “My cowgirl. My Rowan tree.”

When he sat down breathless on the sofa she nestled beside him.

“I was in Alaska, Rowan. Must have been twenty-five years ago. You were little. I saw these salmon going up the Tanana to spawn. I thought it was so moving.”

“I can see you standing there. Like a big bear.”

He began to cry. “Sorry, kid. I’m coming apart again, I guess.”

She put her arm under his and put his hand on her thigh and stroked it for a moment.

“Don’t you see,” she asked, “how our eyes are just the same?”

“Yeah. Well, see me standing there. In that white night.” With his hand still on her thigh, he leaned his head against the back edge of the sofa and looked at the fake wood panels on the trailer ceiling and tried to recite the poem:

Like elephants, swaying

Straining with the labor of each undulation,

They labor home.

The river is forever swift and young,

Forever renewed, beyond history…

He worked to catch his breath and had another swallow of wine.

But these, elephant-eyed

Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls

And swoop of eagles,

Are creatures of time’s wheel.

Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night

I feel for them such love

And, for their cold struggle, such admiration

In my overheated heart.

“I can’t, baby,” he said finally. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s very good.”

“Such love,” she repeated.

“I don’t know what it was about,” he said. “I admired these fish. Being finished, coming home. They had done what they were meant to do. Whereas I never had.” He closed his eyes and put a hand on his chest, under which his heart was racing. “Or maybe it was just about the moment. I don’t know.”

“Such love,” she said.

“When whatever happened between you and me, Rowan … What shouldn’t have, what I shouldn’t have let happen. I was on that tour. I had come apart.”

“I see,” she said.

“And I wanted some comfort and love. I wanted it so much.” He was weeping. He wiped his nose, bearlike.

“And do you now?”

“Yes I do.”

She stood in front of him and took his hands and folded them behind her back. He withdrew them quickly. Rowan tensed and pursed her lips. Her anger frightened him.

“The poem is about us,” she said. When he tried to speak, she interrupted him. “Yes it is, it’s about us.”

He realized that she was trying to kiss him on the mouth.

“This is just drugs,” Smart said. He stood up, trying to escape. It was like a dream, suggesting something that had happened once before in another world. “John will be back. What will he think of you?”

She laughed and pushed herself against him, standing on tiptoes in her boots, pressing her face into his.

“John will not be back, Will. John is a Wind River Shoshone and his attitude is from that culture and believe me it’s peculiar to that culture. Besides, he’s a passive-aggressive.”

Smart collapsed back on the miniature sofa. She kept trying to kiss him, fondling him, at his belt, his clothes.

“Rowan,” he said, “my sweet. I’m lonely. I wanted to see you.”

“But you don’t want me.”

“Oh yes,” Smart said, “I want you. I want all the things we didn’t have. I do. But I can’t make them happen, can I?”

“But you don’t want me,” she said.

“Listen,” he said, “you were just a pretty girl.”

“Then we shouldn’t have done it before, should we?” Rowan said. She fixed him with the mirror of his eyes. “Then you never should have done it and I never should have gone for it. But I did. You’re the only one I want. Ever since then. All my life maybe.”

“I was drunk,” Smart pleaded. “I was on drugs. I was certifiable. I took some comfort. I was desperate.”

“Then,” she said, “what about me?”

“We fucked up, baby. It happens.”

She turned on him with such violence that he jumped. She was a big girl, strong as he had been, only an inch or so shorter than his six two. She resembled him so much.

“You like me like this. I know you do. I’ve been waiting for you all day.”

“God,” he said. “You’re still a child, aren’t you?”

He put out his hands and took her by hers and sat her down beside him.

“This is how it was, baby. I hardly knew you. It was as though you weren’t my daughter.” It was hard to face her grieving, crazy eyes. “You were the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen.” He laughed, against his will. “You were so adoring. I couldn’t help it.” He tried to embrace her but she avoided his embrace.

“I’m the only one of your children,” she said, “who has your eyes. We’re the same.”

“Just a beautiful young girl,” Smart was saying. And after a fashion he remembered or thought he remembered how it might have happened. As beautiful a young girl as he had ever seen. So young and gorgeous and besotted with him. What a fool he must have been, a weak, self-indulgent drunk. In those days, when he had let it happen, when he had done it, he had thought he could do no wrong. He had actually complained to friends of being made too much of. God knew what they had secretly thought of that, of him. As if no bills would ever be charged to his account.

The drug was driving the rhythms of his heart and brain to a pitch he could not manage.

“Your poem,” Rowan said, “it’s about me. It’s about you coming back to me. Us both coming back where we belong. Which is together. Always,” she said. “Always because we have the same flesh, we have the same mind, the same eyes.”

Smart caught his breath. “You’ve taken that drug,” he said.

“We see the same things at the same time. I know your poems as well as you do.”

He got to his feet and tried to shake off the tremors that assailed him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Smart said. “I’ve got through many a night on many a drug. I’ll sing to you like I used to. Sometimes, anyway. We can read poems to each other. Then it’ll be morning, see. We’ll hear the birds. The sun’ll be up. The drug will be over. We’ll have survived.”

Without looking at him, she walked into the darkness at the sleeping end of the trailer. Finding himself alone, he went back to the kitchen and drank more wine. He had made a mistake, another one. Another old bill presented. No end to it. He curled up on the sofa with the light on. There was only darkness and silence at the far end of the trailer where his daughter lay.

After a while, he began passing out, lapsing into a shallow sleep from which the methedrine kept waking him. In each space of sleep, a pool of uneasy dreams awaited him. From each he kept rising against his will, finding himself thirsty and breathless in the harshly lit trailer. Once he dreamed of the salmon. In the dream it seemed to him that he could remember it all, verse by verse, in Rowan’s voice:

Fighting their way on up the Tanana

Two hundred miles now from the sea

And when I try to see their eyes,

What I see, under the flow,

Are old elephants’ eyes

Appearing wise but still

No wiser than Creation.

Her warm cheek was against his temple and she was reciting:

All their long years they saw the predators fail,

All the same time their own predations fed them.

What a life, the life of the roving sea!

Where fish live, the poet said,

As men do on land.

Her voice was so sweet and he loved her so much. He was himself accounted a good reader. Then it occurred to him that he had never rendered those lines for her. It was a part of the poem he had forgotten. Before he could open his eyes to inquire, the bullet struck his brains out.

She did not holster the weapon but held it hot against her left hand. After the noise, the deaf-and-dumb horror the vitriol of her grief welled up to every part of her where it could curl and pool. Even through the wine and the drug she felt it burn. For nearly an hour until the crystal energy failed, she pressed her wine- and speed-stained maw against his red mouth, trying to breathe life back into the mess she had made of him.

“Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “Sorry, Bear.”

She had not been able to get him through the night. Nor he her.

Rage. But she had not wanted him dead, not at all. Only to have something. Something, anything, between childhood and death.

All night long she sat facing the ugliness she had worked. His pants were undone. Dreadful. Had she done that? Maybe, pursuing the salt of her own generation. Trying to get home. She must be in some confusion, she thought, about which coupling had created her.

Both, she thought. She was Rowan, the creature of both those lyings-down. Under the mountains, on sweet grass, among the musky ash and laurel. Name it and claim it. She could no longer remember the moment of killing. So he forgot he fucked me, she thought. And I forgot I shot him. Sorry about that, Bear.

She had destroyed his eyes. She must not do it twice. She owed him that.

There seemed some necessity to wait for dawn, out of love or respect or fear of the dark. When she could no longer drink, she kept plastering her face with crystal. That way her mind might become entombed in it, like one of those captives of the plains they candied with honey and earth and roasted, and there remained hardly a man but only a bear-shaped thing, eyeless, mouthless, blazing away, blackening like pottery, burning alive in a glazed silence. Crystal could do it.

When she went out of the trailer; the sky was growing light. Somewhere out on the flats she heard the cough of a coyote. And overhead Venus was at its western elongation. Phosphorus, Lucifer, the Morning Star.

On her way to the Temple, she holstered the revolver she had cradled all night long. She carried the wine bottle in her left hand; the envelope of crystal was in her uniform breast pocket. At the door of the Temple she paused to look at the pure early morning. Moment by moment, it was beautiful. Things could only be beautiful that way.

She let herself into the Temple and walked past the columns, licking the last of the speed from the envelope, washing it down with wine. It made her impatient to be gone. When she came to the stone of sacrifice she stood beside it. She had brought the Caddoans, the Pawnee maidens, clear across the plains from Nebraska to die on it. All in her imagination, and that of the pilgrim children to whom she told the story. But real Pawnee maidens had died under the Morning Star, as she would. For a while she thought of lying down on the stone and doing it and being found that way.

But I’m only the dead poet’s speed freak bastard daughter; she thought. She went into the little utility room beside the cavern entrance and pulled free the yellow felt marker that was held fast to the door by a piece of string. There was a public bathroom next door and she went in and relieved herself so that things would be as clean as they could be. Then she washed her hands and dropped the wine and her empty envelope of speed into the trash can along with the paper towel.

She sat down beside the trash can with the revolver beside her on the tile floor and felt along her chest for her heartbeat. She was EMS-qualified. If she stretched her arms up and leaned her head back, it would part her ribs a little, which might make it easier. When she was satisfied she had found her heart, she held the cloth of her uniform shirt taut and marked a cross over it with the marker.

Let them anatomize Rowan, she thought. Not on the stone of sacrifice, thanks, just up against the shithouse wall. But she wouldn’t hurt his eyes again, not blind the bear again.

Sitting propped up against the cold wall, she leaned her head back and raised her left arm in the air as far as it would stretch, fingers extended. She put the barrel of the Lawman against the X on her chest and said her own name and her father’s and pulled the trigger.

Max Peterson came out around six-thirty, alone, as soon as John Hears the Sun Come Up called him. John had called him at home instead of through the dispatcher. Together they walked over the grounds, from the trailer to the Temple.

“I don’t suppose you killed them, did you, John?”

“Nope,” John said.

They were standing in the ladies’ room where dead Rowan sat, her father’s eyes preserved in blank surprise, slowly losing their luster. Peterson punched the swinging hinge of the covered trash can, where they had found the envelope.

“That fucking pervert Communist son of a bitch. It was his fault. He fucking killed her. That’s the way it really went.” “Fuck” was a word Peterson rarely used.

“It was the speed,” John said. “It always made her crazy. She was a little crazy anyway.”

“He probably brought it.”

“No, she had it.”

“Well, what the hell did you let her have it for?”

“If I’d’ve found it,” John said, “I’d have got rid of it. She had it at work. Then I couldn’t take it off her; short of tying her up.”

“You should have tried.”

“Maybe,” John said.

They walked back to the trailer and stood over Smart’s body and Peterson looked down at what was left of him.

“Goddamn him, the filthy bastard,” Peterson said.

“Well,” John said, “she loved him.”

Peterson stared at John Hears the Sun Come Up as though he had taken leave of his senses.

“He was her father, for Christ’s sake. The scumbag.”

“He wasn’t a bad guy,” John said. “He was a good poet.”

“What the hell is your problem?” Peterson shouted. “Every goddamn thing I say you gotta contradict it? The fucking man was her father, John. The relationship was perverted. Who the hell cares about good poet or such shit?”

“He wrote a poem about salmon I liked,” John said.

Peterson sighed. “You’re a crazy Indian son of a bitch, John. I’m truly impatient with you.” He looked around the trailer a last time. “Jeez, she had every kind of queer satanic book. He bring her up that way?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “I guess.” There was no point in making Peterson angrier.

Peterson went out to his car to call the dispatcher’s office. Presently the park people would be coining out and the photographers and twelve kinds of cop and probably the press and even television.

Smart’s poem about the salmon had been folded away in Rowan’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology, and a few pages beyond it was another poem, about a bunch of American tourists falling out of the sky on a Japanese mountain. John Hears the Sun Come Up particularly liked the one about the salmon. It made him able to see very clearly the fish and the buffalo and the place Smart was writing about. It reminded him a little of Robert Frost, his favorite white poet.

He went outside and watched the dawn swell over the low mountains to the east. He thought he would sell the trailer but keep her books. It was not that he needed them for her memory — he could take care of that — but they were good books and interesting. As for the rest, there was no point in keeping any of it. People disappeared. There, in the country of the Ghost Dance, people disappeared and their songs with them. They became ghosts and their songs ghost songs. Teenagers in the Indian high school got drunk and died, disappeared forever knowing hardly anything to sustain them in the ghost world.

The powder the crystal, was death; as soon as he had seen it shining on her finger glistening with that death glow it had, under her nose, bringing the heart’s blood to her cheeks, he had known the two of them would die. Smart the poet would go to the place he had seen the salmon; people passing through might find his ghost there and hear his songs.

“Will?” he asked the silence. “Mr. Smart?” He had Smart’s manuscript in front of him. He read the first line of Smart’s salmon song.

“Like elephants, swaying.”

He might try singing it one day. Singing it in the Shoshone-Paiute language. No word for elephant, just say “elephant.”

“Rowan?”

Her, she would be out in the greasewood with the thousand poems she knew, her songs and all the stories she made up. Well set up out there in the ghost world. People alone would hear her songs and be afraid. Her eyes would, like her father’s, look out from lost blue places. High lakes at certain times of afternoon, the evening sky, the cornflower; the shad violet. Easy to bring her ghost back — burn a little sweet grass, fix her guitar maybe and play it, she would come. Her and her father; called Smart, all their songs, two poets.