Something to Be Desired

8

A great blue norther made up and came down off the High Line. Lucien went into town and bought some duck loads for his sixteen-gauge. He admired the town for its symmetry in the bend of the big river, for its smoky cheer in the face of this raid of arctic weather. Then he went off and hunted ducks in a place where a spring creek, having arisen in one small eye of a swamp, wound out in a long ribbon of steam toward the river a couple of miles away. He walked along while the deep cold made a bas-relief map of his own skull, exposing bone through flesh and reminding him that cold, not heat, is the natural order. Suddenly his small white frame house seemed a pale, brave island in eternity. A more analytical person might have concluded that this solitary regimen was a good and happy one for him. But he was old enough to know that loneliness, like some disturbance, would begin to form.

The ducks jumped straight up through the steam with a hard electrical wing-beat, and Lucien shot a pair of drakes. Green-headed and orange-footed, they were northern birds so heavy as to seem like small geese. Lucien broke open the gun, and the empties jumped smoking onto the ground. His overworked tear ducts made his eyes blur from the warmth around the spring. He sat and plucked the birds, an easy job with their still-hot bodies. Down drifted and caught in the russet brush, and in a short time he had a pair of oblate units of food, the meat shining pinkish through a layer of creamy fat and pale dimpled skin. Lying next to them in the snow were the matched green severed heads. High above Lucien, one flight after another, long stringy Vs seemingly in the stratosphere, headed south. Lucien looked forward to his dinner and could not avoid realizing that these two weren’t going.

He put his ducks in the front hall and stood the shotgun in the corner, all without taking off his coat. Then he went back outside and started trudging toward the curl of smoke a couple of miles away that marked the neighbor’s house. He had to make some friends. Maybe the neighbor liked ducks. The movement of his legs in the light snow reminded him of a mild ocean breaking on a gradual sand shore. He remembered bobbing in the ocean at his uncle’s Oregon house, rising to view the beach, then dropping again to let his boy’s mind run wild with the sense of being lost at sea; a few strokes and he would come breaking out of the surf onto the warm beach where his beloved cousins played.

Instead of his cousins and the sea, thirty years were gone, and he made his way to the bitter stone-and-clapboard home of his neighbor. The neighbor was working on a front-end loader next to a Quonset shop. At all its moving junctures grease and debris had frozen; they were frozen to the consistency of taffy now, and the neighbor was chunking the stuff away with the end of his screwdriver. He didn’t look toward Lucien as he walked up. Lucien gave him his name and he nodded. In the silence a colossal ranch wife moved past the Thermopane window of the grim house and vanished.

“What’s wrong with the loader?” Lucien tried.

“Don’t work.”

“I see.”

Lucien looked over toward the corrals. There were small bunches of cattle spotted around here and there, and outside the corrals an unwound round bale that the neighbor could pitchfork feed from. The fork was stuck straight up in the center of the bale. Lucien was unable to think what he might say to administer some routine welcome.

“Anyway,” he said. “I just decided to stop down and, y’know, say hello. My name is Lucien Taylor.” The neighbor, Jerrold Carpenter, said absolutely nothing. “I’m your new neighbor.” This time Lucien could make out the slight shrug under the brown coveralls. It meant “So?” A fine heat rose about Lucien’s neck. He decided not to bring him any ducks.

“I noticed your half of the fence is in considerable bad repair,” said Lucien. “That’s going to change.”

The man stopped prying sludge and looked at Lucien. “You’re going to fix your share of the fence this year. If your cows get on my place, I’m going to move them on down to the highway and let them go. I also understand you’ve been greedy with the water. This year I’ll see to it there’s a ditch rider in June to teach you to stop stealing. I’ve got two hundred miner’s inches and I’m going to get them. The last thing is, don’t ever set foot on my place without permission. Pleasure meeting you. Goodbye.”

Lucien trudged down the drive and started back to his place. He felt awful. He began remembering in amazingly vivid detail how he had come up with his dream of a life of foreign service so many years ago now. In the dream there had been the flow of words and ideas; there had been itchy feet and rambling fever. Much of this had evaporated against a background of dysentery and human rights violations, a background of vacant government pamphleteering on his own part; and the dribbling on-again, off-again attempt to make a family within an overpowering feeling of disconnection. Growing up in a small town, he didn’t quite belong in land he knew and loved, and he no longer belonged in town. On the radio a young woman offered a broken refrigerator for sale. “Suitable for a smoker.” A baby wept in the background.

Belong. What a word. Drives everyone fucking nuts, thought Lucien. You look at children and they belong where you drop them, while time only makes them lost. What a system. Cross that River Jordan, hoss, leave it all behind.

When he got to the house, Lucien went inside and called the neighbor. “Start ordering your materials,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of fence to build in the spring.” He sat at the kitchen table and blew power calls on a duck call he’d carved out of bois d’arc in shop class. He blew highballs and greeting calls and feeding calls. Sadie tilted her head and listened.

There was snow drifted low around the meter bases; and at the end of Main Street, the Absaroka Range, which seems to keep its distance in warmer weather, looked aggressively close. A woman shouldered her way out of a secondhand store with a table lamp; its shade angled suddenly into the prevailing wind and she backed all the way to her sedan with it in her arms. Her rayon scarf waved crazily.

Lucien wore overalls and a camouflage duck-hunting coat. He tried saying to himself, There but for the grace of God go I, as each person passed him; but soon he detected that the gap was less clear than he hoped. He soon imagined they might have a better place to go than he did. Some of these people he knew had huge video dishes next to their homes and knew a lot more about Shiites and Druze militiamen than he ever would. I am absolutely lost, thought Lucien, I mean absolutely.

Winter came as a series of color extractions; Lucien dutifully painted the shrinking values. By March, one thing had become fairly clear: Lucien had no talent. Drinking and womanizing seemed the only solution. So, quite abruptly, he went from being the mysterious loner out on his ranch to a virtual town fixture and barfly. He learned to sleep on the jukebox. Frequently he took his lady companions back to the blue hole, where they played and soaked and crawled out onto the heated mud for drunken intercourse. It wasn’t that pretty at all. Any attempt at a gay thrust only shoved your partner deeper into the mud. Grunting and floundering while all one’s own limbs made sucking noises was, Lucien felt, a real icebreaker with the more timid gals. Lucien hoped to one day develop this spring into a spa. In April he had a close call when a brunette passed out in the mud and sank from sight. He had to probe for her with a stout pole to make the rescue, then load her to town with only her eyes showing: he had been afraid to let her rinse in the bottomless hot spring, for fear of not seeing her again. Though it would have been hard to notice then, she really had a great personality. Her father was Lucien’s age; he met them at the door and beat Lucien to a pulp. That night Lucien slept at the hobo cave down by the river. He stared up at the dozens of red elk the Indians had made and remembered wanting to paint.

During the night it had turned off bitter cold; the anchor ice rolled down along the formerly blue channels and stacked up on the gravel bars, where they made glittering midday heaps. Lucien parked his sedan and let the motor and heater run. He looked down below the highway riprap into a deep pool where ice was actually growing from the cold bottom in low shining subaqueous domes. He remembered fishing near Boca Chica Key in Florida when the Navy was fueling its jets beyond the mangroves. There was considerable heat on the shallow water, and through the guano-covered vegetation one could smell hot jet fuel and asphalt. He pretended the noisy fanned heater of the sedan was the Southeast Trades and lit a cigar. When James was a very small boy, he and Suzanne had gone to Green Turtle Cay. Lucien remembered the three of them riding the ferry across Abaco Sound next to a stack of weatherproofed Last Suppers consigned among the island provisions for the Christmas trade. They walked along the main street of the town of New Plymouth beneath the string of domestic light bulbs that illuminated the street at night and listened to the singing of the choirs in the minute churches of the town. Lucien took James into the one-room abandoned jail, then took him climbing on the ancient, burst coral tombs with their decorative conch shells. The ladies went by in the winter heat holding tiny black Bibles and wearing lavish headgear indicative of a cherished life on earth where the warm sea makes man contented and stupid. Later, when all the gentle coasts had drawn the feel-good elements of society to their fragrant shores, Lucien would return to the frozen north for a bit of self-immolation, sacrifice and malfeasance. Still, the best thing of that year had been teaching James to open coconuts with a screwdriver, that in a year of great professional advancement and policy impact. He wasn’t wondering how to get out. He wasn’t thinking of rising above foreign service with a spy novel or a well-publicized dispute with Congress or the President. The coconut, the screwdriver and his son stood out above all other concerns, great and small. But his wife had come to seem kindly; and everyone knows how well that one does against the other woman. When Emily was indicted, Lucien was gone before he knew what had hit him. Later he would seem to go mad as his unconscious dealt him most of the blows he so richly deserved. Often a man displaying signs of seemingly crude suffering — drooling, crazy laughter, embarrassing public drunkenness — is actually, under the surface, suffering from something intricate; in Lucien’s case, all those gossamer horrors that stole his happy home from him made of him something whose chain one pulled at one’s peril. But he was growing calm; calm at first in defeat and in the drifting lethargy that defeat produces. With Wick Tompkins’s help, though, there had come to be a stirring within. Maybe a big one to make a lie of all one’s past errors.

“Suzanne, this is strictly a professional call. I need your help in a very specific way.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Lucien,” said Lucien with an unnecessary air of patience.

“What can I do for you, Lucien?”

“What are you wearing right now?”

She hung up and he had to redial and apologize, explaining that it was just a joke.

“I want to start a business with my hot spring,” he said. “Nobody would believe in my idea. But you would. The others would take me for a crackbrain.”

“You’re right,” said Suzanne, the kind of woman healthy men dream of. “I’d probably buy it.”

“Suzanne! I want you to come back. I want you and James back! I’ll do anything!” There was no hint of insincerity in Lucien’s voice. “I can see clearly now!”

“Absolutely not.”

He knew she’d say that, but he was distracted with sudden wild and sourceless yearning that rode right over the predicted rejection.

“Can we just try?”

“Lucien, I really don’t think so. My famous optimism is gone. And let’s face it, you haven’t achieved a thing since you went back to Montana.”

“That I don’t believe.”

“Besides, I’m no longer optimistic enough to feel lonely.”

“You don’t have to feel lonely. We can try again.”

“What I’m saying is I don’t feel lonely.”

Lucien’s heart and groin ached, all the right signs. He’d done well to take to the phone. But even Lucien riding the long swell of revelation could see this one had gone nowhere fast.

“It’s still snowing!” he cried.

Another call yielded little more.

“You and me and James can have a beautiful life here. James could grow up on the ranch—”

“That ranch?”

“Yes …”

“Oh, Lucien.”

Upon thought, it seemed a little early for issuing invitations even to Suzanne and his boy. Suzanne was right, he didn’t have much of a record. But he went on feeling he could change that. He knew he had to.

Finally spring began to come, and with it, new merriness. New merriness sent Lucien down the road of vintage tequila; and that resulted in a hiatal hernia from throwing up. Sometimes now even well-chewed food seemed to get stuck before heading toward his stomach, a disconcerting thing. He’d read about well-off citizens choking on big steaks and dying in front of maître d’s, and he didn’t want to go that way. With his new merriness, he didn’t want to go at all.

He was so excited and, really, agitated that he ended up with his former companion Dee. They took a cooler filled with ice and drinks and snacks, wonderful things that she had made with her own hands, and went to the drive-in movie, a fine old concrete thing that stood in front of the great mountains of the wilderness, playing to an amazingly small parking area on a spring night. It was such an early-day drive-in that it should have been one of the primary artifacts, alongside the buffalo jumps and Calamity Jane’s favorite bar, of this good little town. When Lucien was learning to smoke, now among his most demeaning habits, he used to go up to the projectionist’s chamber. The projectionist, a woman in her sixties, would draw out the glowing carbon rods from the projector and light Lucien’s cigarette.

Now many years later he was parked again in this lonely spot in a row of less than twenty cars. We’ve put a bad hurt on this cooler, thought Lucien, and now it’s mostly gone. The car had become a very private place where Lucien went in and out of focus. He had long since quit trying to understand what Fred MacMurray was doing up on that screen, squinting down through his pipe smoke at a freckled redhead with a newsboy’s sack.

The engine was running to keep their naked bodies warm, and Lucien could feel its RPMs registering through the seat cover. “It’s too early to open a drive-in,” he said. The reason why they were sitting at opposite ends of the seat was that Lucien had learned that Dee was having her period, and he was discouraged. Now and again he would tear his eyes from Fred MacMurray and look quizzically at the small trailing white string, trying to think what to do. She was not a little disgusted by his squeamishness. He felt like a touchy town kid confronted by his first lusty country maiden. And it didn’t help when she indicated for him to come to her side, with the same gesture used by zoo bears asking for a peanut. Still, it was already clear he would have to come through.

He leaned over and cupped the heated weight of one breast. Then he kind of bounced over to her and got the string between his thumb and forefinger. At first it wouldn’t come loose; then it came all at once and hung between them like a rodent. She wrinkled her nose and pointed sharply at the window. Lucien gave it a toss, but somehow the string and the thing’s actual weight were such that it flew way too far and landed on the windshield of one of the other cars. Lucien stared over there in real fright. It was stuck right in the middle of the windshield. As Lucien watched, the wiper blade moved up and bumped it without moving it very much; the blade retreated and then moved upon it again, this time sliding it to the top of the windshield where, anyone could see, it was going to stay.

Then the door of the car opened up and a bruiser in a cowboy hat got out and began to look around. Lucien felt his organs shrink dramatically, an ancient prelude to flight. The big cowboy moved boldly from vehicle to vehicle staring into each one, quietly asking a few questions. When he was only one car away, Lucien felt he should engage the transmission. A moment later he shot away, spraying ancient drive-in gravel while the cowboy shouted, “I got my fiancée here! She don’t want to know about your little world!” And in a short time Lucien was tearing along, bare and alert, while the golden lights of his car lit up the canyon south. “This is the life!” he cried. “They can have that Fred MacMurray!” It was the first movie he’d seen in a year.

The next morning was another thing entirely, another day that began with the query, Where am I? This time it was the ranch. Immediately he began to remember the events of the previous night; now of course they were devoid of the verve that actually made them happen. Lucien felt the heat of shame start up the back of his neck and then consume his entire face with the burning, prickling agony of remorse. Back somewhere in Lucien was a residue of puritanism that surfaced on mornings like these which would convince some of his enemies that he did in fact pay in the end. Lying in bed, with late-morning light on him, he thought the veins in his hands were too prominent, and his scalp itched. His previously clever mouth was a cup of variegated scum; and his poor old dick was a grim souvenir of infamy and inconsideration. He shivered and pulled up the covers around his neck, a move which only revealed his bird dog and his feet. Now he hated his feet, which were white paddles. They were not the honest arched dusky feet of the world’s real people. They were the splayed white paddles of the superfluous. He staggered across the hall into the bathroom and sat down. His bowel movement was so shocking it sent his dog scurrying for cover as a blast of discolored water arced from his ass to the crockery. “What lucky girl will get me next?” he moaned aloud. When he made it to the sink and had an opportunity to stand before the mirror, he was not cheered. His face was colorless. His eyelashes seemed to be irregularly spaced. There were greenish-gray shadows in the bottom of every wrinkle and crease. When he pressed down on his teeth, one incisor seemed to send out a little red signal of meaningless pain. A guy ought to bag it, Lucien thought, right here. But who would feed Sadie? Who would rattle the vitamin-enriched kibble into the little sucker’s spun-metal bowl? Who would refill her water and run her in her roading harness off-season? Tears filled Lucien’s eyes. He knew she needed him, that no one else would remember her points and retrieves. They would take her for a brown and white cur with no master. It would be sadder and more sickening than Old Shep. How would Sadie watch me die? I suppose with a mixture of pride and dismay. At this thought, Lucien laughed miserably. More than anything, he wanted to grow up. But today he was going to do something about it.

Tompkins came down from the corner of Callender. He was wearing a herringbone topcoat with a velvet collar and a John B. Stetson hat. He used his cigarette to point out a streetside stairway to Lucien. They went up and opened the door at the top, going through a very ancient-looking brick wall. Inside was a simple dining room. Adjoined to it by a half door was a small kitchen, where a Chinese woman cooked. “I’ve got some fine sour-mash whiskey for us, Lucien.”

“I don’t care how it tastes so long as it kills brain cells and fucks up my memory.”

Wick made two strong drinks at a sideboard and silently held the glasses over the half door until the Chinese woman filled them with ice. He brought them to the table and sat down.

“What is this place?”

“This is the dining room. Shitalmighty, I can’t eat like those people out there. I don’t believe in the afterlife. You have to believe in the afterlife to eat like those sumbitches.”

Lucien stared around at the walls of the tall room. It was painted an ocher color and had a ceiling fitted roundabout with hard pine molding. Someone had painted the ceiling a thrilling azure, and plummeting through this blue were all the fine hawks of the northern Rockies, all the common ones, anyway; and from the light fixture which served as a noon sun in this conceit, a terrific prairie falcon hurtled, its feathers scaling its earthward dive with martial brightness.

The Chinese woman came and put down some leek soup, some delicious pot stickers and a bowl of dry fried beef. Most of the light in the room came from the top of the tall transom windows; it was light from a high part of the sky and seemed to filter any life that surrounded the building. In such isolation, Lucien thought, one must decide upon things, accept the aerial quality of one’s situation.

“I called my wife.”

“She’s not your wife anymore.”

“I called Suzanne. She seems to have no interest in coming out here. At this time.”

“What’s there to come to?”

“I know.”

“Are you going to do anything about it?” Wick asked in a challenging tone.

“I’m going to start something tremendous,” Lucien retorted.

“What?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll be very proud of it.” In Lucien’s face was the glow and pride of a diving catch. It was important to snap Wick back just a little. “I’m going to set the world on fire.”

“Lucien, it’s me, Wick.”

“People will come from miles around,” he continued, trying to fuel the mood.

Wick stood up and looked upon Lucien with a lowered brow that seemed to say, I know you’ve got it in you. It was an artificial look. “I have to leave,” he said. “Believe this or not, I’ve got a client. Finish your lunch and don’t fuck the cook.”