Mastodonia

TWO

She had come out of the past — at least twenty years out of the past — only the evening before.

I had been sitting in front of the house, in a lawn chair under the big maple tree, when the car turned off the highway and came up the access road. It was a big, black car, and I wondered, just a little idly, who it might be. To tell the truth, I wasn’t particularly happy at the prospect of seeing anyone at all, for, in the last few months, I had gotten to the point where I appreciated being left alone and felt some mild resentment at any intrusion.

The car drew up to the gate and stopped, and she got out of it. I rose from my chair and started walking across the yard. She came through the gate and walked toward me. She was well up the path before I recognized her, saw in this svelte, well-dressed woman the girl of twenty years before. Even then, I could not be sure that it was she; the long years of remembering might have made me susceptible to seeing in any beautiful woman that girl of twenty years before.

I stopped when she was still some distance off.

“Rila?” I called, making it a question. “Are you Rila Elliot?”

She stopped as well and looked at me across the dozen feet that separated us, as if she, as well, could not be absolutely sure that I was Asa Steele.

“Asa,” she finally said, “it is really you. I can see it’s really you. I’d heard that you were here. I was talking with a friend just the other day and he told me you were here. I had thought you were still at that funny little college somewhere in the West. I had thought so often of you …”

She kept up her talk so that she would not have to do anything else, letting the talk cover whatever uncertainty she might still feel.

I crossed the space between us and we stood close together.

“Asa,” she said, “it’s been so damn long.”

Then she was in my arms and it seemed strange that she should be there: this woman who had stepped out of a long, black car in this Wisconsin evening across two decades of time. How hard it was to equate her with the gaily laughing girl of that Mideastern dig, where we had slaved together to uncover the secrets of an ancient tumulus that, finally, turned out to be of slight importance — I digging and sifting and uncovering, while she labeled and tried to somehow identify the shards and other prehistoric junk laid out on long tables. That hot and dusty season had been far too short. Laboring together during the day, we slept together on those nights when we could elude the notice of the others, although, toward the end, I remembered, we had ceased being careful of the others, who had not really seemed to care or to take notice of us.

“I had given up ever seeing you again,” I said. “Oh, I thought of it, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to break in on you. I told myself you had forgotten.

I told myself you wouldn’t care to see me. You’d be polite, of course, and we’d exchange some silly, stilted talk, and then it would be the end, and I didn’t want to end it that way. I wanted the memories to stay, you see. I had heard ten years or so ago that you’d gone into some sort of import-export business, then I lost all track of you….”

She tightened her arms around me and lifted her

face to be kissed, and I kissed her, perhaps not with the excitement I might once have felt, but with deep thankfulness that we were together once again.

“I am still in business,” she said. “Import-export business, if you want to call it that; but shortly, I think, I will be getting out of it.”

“It’s a little silly, standing here,” I said. “Let’s sit down underneath the tree. It’s a pleasant place. I spend a lot of evenings here. If you’d like, I could rustle up some drinks.”

“Later on,” she said. “It’s so peaceful here.”

“Quiet,” I said. “Restful. The campus, I suppose, could be called peaceful, too, but this is a different kind of peace. I’ve had almost a year of it.”

“You resigned your university post?”

“No, I’m on sabbatical. I’m supposed to be writing a book. I’ve not written a line, never intended to.

Once the sabbatical is over, it’s possible I’ll resign.”

“This place? Is this Willow Bend?”

“Willow Bend is the little town just up the road, the one you drove through getting here. I lived there once. My father ran a farm-implement business at the edge of town. This farm, this forty acres, was once owned by a family named Streeter. When I was a boy, I roamed the woods, hunting, fishing, exploring. This farm was one place that I roamed, usually with friends of mine. Streeter never minded. He had a son about my age — Hugh, I think his name was — and he was one of the gang.”

“Your parents?”

“My lather retired a number of years ago. Moved out to California. My father had a brother out there and my mother a couple of sisters up the coast. Five years or so ago, I came back and bought this farm.

I’m not returning, as you may think, to my roots, although this place, Willow Bend and the country hereabout, has some happy associations.”

“But if you’re not returning to your roots, why Willow Bend and why this farm?”

“There was something here I had to come back and find. I’ll tell you about it later, if you’re interested.

But about yourself — in business, you say.”

“You’ll be amused,” she told me. “I went into the artifact and fossil business. Started small and grew.

Mostly artifacts and fossils, although there was some gem material and some other stuff. If I couldn’t be an archaeologist or a paleontologist, at least I could turn my training to some use. The items that sold best were small dinosaur skulls, good trilobites and slabs of rock with fish imprints. You’d be surprised what you can get for really good material — and even some that is not so good. Couple of years ago, a breakfast cereal company came up with the idea that it would be good promotion to enclose little cubes of dinosaur bone in their packages as premiums. They came to me about it. Do you know how we got the dinosaur bone? There was a bed out in Arizona and we mined it with bulldozers and front-end loaders. Hundreds of tons of bones to be sawed up into little cubes. I don’t mind telling you I’m a bit ashamed of that. Not that it wasn’t legal. It was. We owned the land and we broke no laws, but no one can ever guess how many priceless fossils we may have ruined in the process.”

“That may be true,” I said, “but I gather you have little use for archaeologists or paleontologists.”

“On the contrary,” she said, “I have high regard for them. I would like to be one of them, but I never had a chance. I could have gone on for years, the way you and I went out into that godforsaken dig in Turkey. I could have spent all summer digging and classifying and cataloging, and when the dig closed down, I could have spent more months in classifying and cataloging. And in between times, I could have taught moronic sophomores. But did I ever get my name on a paper? You bet your life I didn’t. To amount to anything in that racket, you had to be at Yale or Harvard or Chicago or some such place as that and even then, you could spend years before anyone took any notice of you. There’s no room at the top, no matter how hard you work, or how you scratch and fight.

A few fat cats and glory-grabbers have it all nailed down and they hang on forever.”

“It worked out pretty much that way for me as well,” I told her. “Teaching in a small university.

Never a chance to do any research. No funds for even small-time digs. Now and then, a chance to get in on a big one if you applied early and were willing to do the donkey work of digging. Although I’m not really complaining. For a time, I didn’t really care too much. The campus was safe and comfortable and I felt secure. After Alice left me — you knew about Alice?”

“Yes,” she said, “I knew.”

“I don’t think I even minded that much,” I said.

“Her leaving me, I mean. But my pride was hurt and, for a time, I felt I had to hide away. Not here, I don’t mean that, and now I’m over it.”

“You had a son.”

“Yes, Robert. With his mother in Vienna, I believe.

At least, somewhere in Europe. The man she left me for is a diplomat — a professional diplomat, not a political appointee.”

“But the boy, Robert.”

“At first, he was with me. Then he wanted to be with his mother, so I let him go.”

“I never married,” she said. “At first, I was too busy, then, later, it didn’t seem important.”

We sat silently for a moment as the dusk crept across the land. There was the scent of lilacs from the misshapen, twisted clump of trees that sprawled in one corner of the yard. A self-important robin hopped sedately about, stopping every now and then to regard us fixedly with one beady eye.

I don’t know why I said it. I hadn’t meant to say it.

It just came out of me.

“Rila,” I said, “we were a pair of fools. We had something long ago and we didn’t know we had it.”

“That is why I’m here,” she said.

“You’ll stay a while? We have a lot to talk about.

I can phone the motel. It’s not a very good one, but…”

“No,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’m staying here with you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I can sleep on the davenport.”

“Asa,” she said, “quit being a gentleman. I don’t want you to be a gentleman. I said stay with you, remember.”