Something to Be Desired

3

Later he would think it was early in the morning. He was going back some, but it would have had to have been before breakfast. He remembered he could smell someone cleaning a cat box at the hired man’s, and there was an empty barbecue-chip bag, the big size, flapping away in the sage that grew to the door. Toward the house, a cat was curved over the wheel of the manure-spreader, staring for mice in the shadows under the box. And there was a sprinkler whirling on a yellow stool out in the garden; he supposed it must have run all night. It had taken Lucien nearly a month to make it from the county courthouse to here, an hour’s drive. Lucien’s unexpected appearance at Emily’s hearing had been their longest and most intimate time together in all those years.

Lucien pressed the door shut on the sedan. There were willows alongside the garden, and birds continually speared down from them into the berries. There were numerous signs she was taking care of the place. He had put all he could borrow into making her bail; so these small sedentary indications were important. Still, it would take more than that to assure her being around on trial date.

The heat wave had gone overnight into the first edge of fall; the Crazies had come out of the shimmer and stood clear and separate above the foothills. Lucien was going to be there until the trial in late fall. He had an assortment of sporting trifles and equipage: rod, rifle, shotgun and a small pointer bitch curled in the sedan, a dog perfectly trained for the silence of the high plains hotels he had frequented. Such hotels exclude the barking, ill-mannered dog, some any at all. For the latter, Lucien had prepared the dog, Sadie, by teaching her to travel short distances, silently, in the bottom of his duffel. Her reward was silent dancing behind the locked door of the room, for high-protein baby snacks from the grocer. Watching her soar amiably past the television and the cheap furniture for midair interceptions of miniature sausages always prepared Lucien for the long sleeps he required to stalk the plains by day. It consoled him as his solitude deepened.

Lucien realized the hired man was looking at him. He must have been thereabouts all along, as he came up past the log chicken house with a border collie close at heel and silent. He was a tall man in his thirties with a mustache waxed off to points, and severely undershot boots. He was what they called around there “punchy”-looking — from cow-puncher, not punch-drunk. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to say anything. So Lucien told him who he was there to see, and he said about what. And Lucien told him that he had made Emily’s bail. The man indicated the house.

Lucien must not have been comfortable, because instead of going directly to the house, he began to pile his belongings next to the sedan, as though he were going to move things indoors by installments. Then that was done and he put one foot in front of the other, clumped across the plank porch, thankful that the slant of morning light made the windows blank, and knocked. No one came, but Sadie appeared from the sedan and burned around the porch as though it were the lobby of a crazily permissive hotel.

He decided to look in a window. He put his fingers to the glass on either side of his face. It was not so much being able to see a little into the darkness, finally, as it was the sense of her eyes coalescing somewhere in that interior. He lifted a hand to wave and the eyes moved away. He knew she was at the door. When it opened, she said, “My old flame,” in that deep voice from which laughter was never absent, even, apparently, in very hard times. At that moment Lucien was once again her suitor of all those years ago, probably as out of the question now as he was then, but as gripped as ever.

Her great dark looks had perhaps improved, especially to someone like Lucien, who liked crow’s-feet in women almost above all other features. She was wearing house-painter’s pants and a cowboy shirt with the tails out, and she was barefoot: she’d just gotten up. And how was Lucien different? He guessed he was losing a certain unreplenishable moisture. He went squirrelly after drink number 3 and resorted, in public places, to making a mark on his hand for each one; he never went out without a ballpoint pen. His craving for sport had become less a sign of buoyant youth than of crankiness and approaching middle age. In the nature documentaries that appeared on TV, he identified with the solitary and knowledgeable male, whether baboon or penguin; and this foolishness represented the same gap of wishful thinking that had plagued him all his life.

Emily’s greatest change, obviously, was that she was under indictment for murder. As she opened the door for Lucien, he had the extraordinary sense that her eyes were somehow focused on his entrance while her thoughts were entirely elsewhere. Then she stared down at the dog, who backed about looking for a spot to sit: nothing seemed quite right to her, and she stood crookedly next to the luggage. The luggage consisted of two tan bags from a broken set of smart luggage. When he’d been in foreign service, Lucien felt that luggage better identified the traveler than his own body.

“I’m, in effect, all alone here,” said Emily by way of laying down her requirements. “There is the hired fellow. He’s very nice and I don’t treat him as a servant. Beyond that, he knows his limits. However, the feeling that I am living by myself is something I absolutely have to have right now.” She was staring into Lucien’s face and he was getting uncomfortable. He’d gone unchallenged for too long.

“Are you sure it’s all right if I stay?”

“I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise. Besides, I obviously owe you one.”

“Not at all, I—”

“Of course I owe you one. Let’s not begin with baby talk.”

Emily showed Lucien his room upstairs, and with mutual awkwardness they ferried his belongings there. He was briefed on the food, water and towel supply, and left to his own devices. Before going to the window, Lucien transferred his clothes into the dresser, stuck his Dopp kit on top and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Then he went to the window, where the feeling of cold mountain was in the light.

Lucien could see the trail and the gate the hired man had used from up here. There was an abbreviated bench of pastureland through which a creek threaded incandescent against wild grass. Then beyond were the Crazy Mountains.

Emily was moving around downstairs. Lucien kind of tracked her at that as he tried to figure how the curiously separated range of mountains was attached to the earth. The heights of snow and light-relaying stone tied the range to sky as much as to ground. Anyway, he couldn’t see how it was done, and he set his easel up without much hope, still hearing Emily’s footfalls. At a certain age, seeing something is quite enough; breaking down those mysteries on another surface can be tiresome. Still, it seemed that trifling with paint was important.

Possibly Lucien’s eyes would open to the stony hills, the sage flats that sparkled in the morning, the thousand skies of a fall in the Crazies, once he learned why she had killed her husband. Lucien knew that he had to take a broader view than that she was single again.

He went down to the garden. It was a well-tended spot with leggy, hopeless corn and the broad leaves of squash making a tremendous effort to yield a few miserable babies. It was too far north.

Lucien didn’t see anyone moving around the yard, and there was no one on the porch or in the downstairs of the house. He was able to get his dog up to his room without using the suitcase technique he used at the hotels. She curled up under the bed and flattened her soft flews upon crossed paws. She understood this gambit instinctively. Lucien knew that in a pinch, she could handle the hunchback stunt with the overcoat.

Lucien got back upstairs just in time, because once again Emily called him from the bottom of the stairs. When he jogged down, she said, “Come outside.” Lucien went. Tied to the big cottonwood was a buckskin horse. “That’s for you to use. His name is Buck and he needs shoes.” The yard darkened in passing clouds, and Lucien saw the old buildings for the first time.

“The tack is in the partitioned half of the chicken house. Use my husband’s saddle.”

“I’m not going to try to paint today,” Lucien said.

“Nobody expects you to!” A cruel, merry laugh followed her words, cause for thought.

Immediately Lucien began seeing the surface of the ground and the ranch buildings. Then the Crazies seemed to ignite upon the gloomy sky, something he had set off with his own fuse. But it wasn’t quite enough. It had been only a month since he left Suzanne and James. He was still immobilized. He really wanted to paint because since boyhood he had associated it with peace and wholeness. In the Crazies the land stuck out in every possible way, and there was not much water visible. And rock. Lucien was really up against it; but Emily needed his help. It was all-important to preserve this sense of mission.

Lucien used to shoe his own saddle horses when he was a kid and could do it all day. Now he was merely neat, though the horse ended up standing square to the world and Lucien didn’t swallow the nails. Buck’s hoofs were the same color as the bottom of the draw Lucien could see from the bedroom and had transverse grooves under the coronal band that looked like the watercourses just below the snow line on the mountains. He had a good light source to shoe by and he was out of the wind. There were no flies.

Lucien saddled Buck and let him stand because he was cinchy and humped his back up. Then he climbed on and jogged him down the road, picked up the newspaper and came straight back up the creek bottom, right in the water, kind of floundering on the slippery rocks, approaching pools where trout fed on the projectile-clumsy grasshoppers. It was an old publicity stunt of the dude ranches to fly-fish on horseback for gullible mountain trout, a trick that had not lost its savor for Lucien; and he decided to bring some tackle for his next ride. Now he could look out through the tall wild prairie grasses on the stream bank and start to lose his sense of irony.

The telescope was on the kitchen table, secure in its tripod. It was early evening, and Emily and Lucien had their heads close together as they took turns looking at the wild goats crossing the granite ledge in the trembling mystery of magnification. There were five of them, and they moved in cautious flickers, dining on lichen and moss that only they could see. Their white was the purest opulent white, a yield from the surrounding mountains more absolute than an ounce of gold from a half million tons of gravel. One of the males stopped and looked into the deep vitreous lens, and his horns were fine and black as thorns.

“Is there anything you want from town?”

“No, but why do you want to go there?” he asked.

“I’m not embarrassed, if that’s what you mean.”

She took the truck, and when she was safely down the road, Lucien shot into her room for a bit of inventory. Stuck up in the edge of her dressing mirror was a photograph of Eric, her husband. He was wearing his surgical gown and hat, and smiled with blind triumph into the flashbulbs. Lucien thought of him undoing the strings of the cap and flinging forth the dramatic curls.

He’s dead. Soon she’ll love me again.

“Get your slicker and help me gather up some yearlings,” said the hired man. Lucien borrowed a pair of spurs from a hook behind the door, and got a yellow slicker and a sweater. He got a pint of sour-mash and a hopeless little sketch pad. He got sunglasses and peanut butter. He didn’t bring Sadie because he didn’t want her hunting unless he was going to shoot, and he didn’t want to get her kicked by a cow.

The hired man’s name was W. T. Austinberry. He knew his job. The two rode for a few miles without speaking. Lucien happily remembered the ranch work of his school years. Though the sky was blue, Lucien kept expecting a storm because he could hear raindrops knocking upon the crown of his hat. Lucien mentioned the rain to W. T. Austinberry, who looked at Lucien like he’d been locoed. They rode on, and Lucien listened to the kind of heavy drops that portend a cloudburst, the sun beating down all the while. It wasn’t until he removed his straw hat that he realized he had inadvertently trapped a few grasshoppers inside.

The two men ascended to the flat top of the first bench. They could look down from here and see the broad plan of the ranch with clarity, as well as the ascent of the agrarian valley floor to the imperial rock of the Crazies. The whole thing was forged together by glacial buttresses and wedges of forested soil that climbed until stone or altitude discouraged the vegetation. In springtime the high wooded passes exhaled huge clouds of pollen like smoke from hidden fires, which in a sense they were. These sights seemed to draw Lucien’s life together.

W. T. Austinberry dogtrotted along with one elbow held out from his body like the old-timers one saw when Lucien was a boy. He had jinglebobs on his spurs, which tinkled merrily as he went. How Lucien loved this vaguely ersatz air of the old days! Or better yet, that the frontier lingered in these draws where Indian spirits were as smoky and redolent as the pollen exhalations of the forest!

They rode on and crossed a creek where W. T. Austinberry said that he had poured Clorox to kill a couple of hundred pounds of trout for his freezer.

“What was Emily’s husband like?” Lucien asked nervously.

“He was a doctor.”

“I know he was a doctor. I mean, what kind of a fellow was he?”

“Is it any of your business?” asked W. T. Austinberry.

They rode a little bit farther.

“I guess I take it to be my business, or I wouldn’t have asked.” W. T. Austinberry stopped and stared at him like an owl. Lucien rode past him up the trail. “The husband, W.T., what was the husband like?” Lucien heard him click back into formation and come along.

“He had it coming,” said W. T. Austinberry. He cut around in front of Lucien and pulled down a passing twig to pick his teeth with.

“Would a jury understand that?”

“Not necessarily.”

The first bunch of yearlings jumped off the trail into a ravine and crashed through the underbrush like game animals. Lucien rode in pursuit, setting a suicidal course for W. T. Austinberry, who was obliged to follow Lucien through clouds of offended magpies, snapping branches and descending leaves until they turned the cattle against a wren-filled cliff and started their small herd on its proper course. Buck was a good horse who leapt off the rowel. He pinned his ears at laggard cattle and stole in for a nip. Lucien was excited to feel the horse’s knowledge.

They were in a damp woods supplied by springs that stained the rocks and nurtured ferns, then brush, then trees. They found some cattle in there. The cattle stood with their legs sheathed in mud from the spring and watched their approach with the little gather they already had. The cows had mouths full of long grass but did not chew. W.T. and Lucien whooped them out onto hard ground and added them to the herd, and kept on moving. Lucien felt the distance of Emily’s house, the height of the mountains, her endangerment from insult among the townies, and the strong autumn light that fell upon them and upon their horses.

The last bunch advanced out atop a thousand-yard avalanche of slide rock, innumerable pieces of shale that looked like they had just paused in violent flow, though their next move might have been a hundred years away. These cattle seemed to challenge them to come their way.

“Maybe we ought to look further on,” said W. T. Austinberry. “We only need six more to make a pot.” Lucien suspected W.T. had run out of guts; so he rode Buck out, floundering in pursuit onto the dangerous slide, and he soon turned the cattle back into the band. In a way, he was auditioning for Emily.

Buck was tired as they made their way down. He hung his head and they descended into thermals that held red-tailed hawks like kites on rigid strings. He flung his big forefeet in lazy quarter circles and skidded slightly with his rear as they made their way through the changing air, and Lucien viewed the uniform backs of the flowing cattle with satisfaction. The old cows led the way like oxen on immigrant wagons. W. T. Austinberry dashed about returning the herd quitters, but they were on easy ground now and he must have known Lucien suspected him for a fool.

Emily came in with armloads of groceries, buoyant as a bride. Lucien had manure sprayed up to his shins from driving yearlings the last quarter mile down an alleyway alongside the pens. To him, unpacking the bags, the bright cans and bottles seemed in the old kitchen to be savage and modern and kind of exciting. The housewife on the laundry-soap box would have been taken for a prostitute at the time the kitchen was built. In Emily’s cheer at these fresh supplies, she appeared dauntless; her indictment seemed to apply to someone neither of them knew.

“And now if you would—” she motioned him to the table, fanning contracts from a broad envelope onto its surface. She had already signed them and there was a dotted line just for Lucien. He scanned through and got the drift: Lucien owned the ranch if she jumped bail.

“For some reason,” said Lucien, “I don’t like the feeling this is giving me.”

“The feeling this is giving you isn’t the point at all. You had to borrow that money.”

“Tell me what the point is, Emily.”

“A fair arrangement between adults.”

“I don’t want a fair arrangement between adults,” said Lucien. “I want a heartfelt gesture.” He tapped his fingers on the tabletop without letting the nails hit.

“You won’t get one from me,” she said. “You’ll get an arrangement.”

“Where do I sign?” Lucien said with a flagging spirit. He was losing his self-sufficiency by leaps and bounds. Once in college when Lucien’s roommate had kept a picture of his sweetheart on the drawer, Lucien had proudly displayed a framed photograph of his own hand. But now he had an uncomfortable sense that he was circling downwind of his best instincts. He sort of didn’t like that. Lucien’s nicest side was ruining his life. He signed the papers, and the distance from him to his wife and son was suddenly greater. It seemed he was never quite under control unless he was angry.

“There,” she said, “I feel much better.” She had her off-center smile, and the distant cast of her eyes which was not romantic or faraway but otherwise occupied. The smile brightened and the eyes focused on Lucien with a sexual glaze.

“You’re still carrying that old torch for me, aren’t you?” she asked with some pride.

“Yes.”

“Why, how nice for you,” she said. “To have a life’s theme. An old flame. An old flame that never dies is like those overbuilt goddamn English shoes rich ladies used to wear. The illusion of everlasting life. That’s what came with them. You buy a pair of those beauties when you get out of Miss Whozit’s, and forty years later they haul you to the boneyard in the same brown shoes with the shiny eyelets. That’s about how much the old-flame number is doing for me.”

“May I have a blow job?”

“Pure poetry, Lucien.… I met a couple at Alabama Jack’s restaurant in Florida who said they ran into you in South America. They said you had a wonderful wife, a beautiful girl, but you were inattentive to her and looked like you wanted to join the space program.”

“I joined the USIA. Wasn’t that enough for them?”

“Apparently not. They were absolutely sober.”

Lucien scratched at the dial of his watch with a fingernail. “Look,” he said, “is it all that terrible that I’ve gone on having these feelings? Not everyone has such a happy view of his own past.”

“Was I the first girl you ever slept with?” she asked with terrific glee.

“Pretty darn close.”

“ ‘Pretty darn close’!” She was put out. “How far did I miss by?”

“There was a real sweet Assiniboin girl at Plentywood when I was on the baseball team.”

“It seems you have an array of genuinely happy memories,” Emily said with unconcealed indignation.

Lucien raised a cautioning finger. “Remember, now, you were sleeping with the doctor. My dear.”

“That guy,” said Emily. “Don’t worry about that bastard. I shot him dead.”