Fine Just the Way It Is Page 13

  “It’s a miracle,” he said. “Thank you, god.” Babbling prayers, he began to kick his way to land.

  On that shore Argos was peering into the distance hoping to see the pterodactyl return. He wished badly he had brought a camera. He had to record what he was seeing. He owed it to science. He vowed to upgrade to a cell phone with a camera as soon as possible. With anxious hands he searched his pockets, found his folded paycheck and a ballpoint pen that skipped, began to sketch a clumsy impression of what he had seen. Or thought he had seen.

  The superintendent was on the phone again.

  “Security, cancel that helicopter. Our man is extricating himself. Here they come again!” The PR man took a few steps back.

  All four pterodactyls, flying in formation, came quickly from the far end of the dissolving swamp. The park personnel clustered together.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Argos. “This is not happening. This can’t happen.”

  “Liebe Gott, our Heavenly Father save us now,” muttered the bear biologist squelching along the shore. He could see the others in the distance, the PR man slipping away into the dead trees where, a few moments later, a column of steam indicated a hot spring.

  Abruptly everything changed. There was a shower of shark teeth. Four sparrows flew over the lake. The bear man looked at the sky and wept. Argos the ornithologist stared at the paycheck he held in his hand, the outline of a winged lobster scrawled on the back, the paper severely punctured by the point of the bad pen.

  “I never believed it,” he said. But it was Warwick, the bear biologist, who had grappled with the searing truth when he understood in his marrow that demons were sprinkled throughout the world like croutons in a salad.

  Back at his desk, Old Scratch tossed a metal token, a token such as those once used in whorehouses by customers with credit, into a drawer. Inscribed on it was Argos’s name and a date.

  “Illusions are a real bastard to hold steady,” he said. “I’m beat.” He tapped idly with his long fingernails for a minute, then took out a pack of cards and began dealing himself poker hands.

  “You got to know when to fold them,” he said. He shuffled the cards, producing a sound of whirring insect wings.

  “The cicadas threw me off,” he said.

  “Yes sir,” answered Duane Fork.

  Testimony of the Donkey

  Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.

  —Antonio Machado (1875–1939)

  Marc was fourteen years older than Catlin, could speak three languages, was something of a self-declared epicure, a rock climber, an expert skier, a not-bad cellist, a man more at home in Europe than the American west, he said, but Catlin thought these differences were inconsequential although she had only been out of the state twice, spoke only American and played no instrument. They met and fell for each other in Idaho, where Marc was working as a volunteer on the fire line and Catlin was dishing up lasagna in the fire center cafeteria. After a few months they began to live together.

  He had noticed her muscular legs as she strode along the counter snatching up pans empty of macaroni and cheese and asked her later if she would like to go hiking sometime. For the last two summers Catlin, against her parents’ disapproval, had worked on an all-girl hay-stacking crew, and she had hiked Idaho’s mountains since she was a child. She was strong and experienced. He knew an excellent trail, he said. She said yes but doubted he could show her any trail she had not hiked.

  He picked her up at four on Sunday morning and drove north. By sunrise she had figured it out: “Seven Devils?” He nodded. And he was right. She had never been on the Dice Roll trail. It had a reputation for attracting tourists and she had always imagined it crowded by day-trippers tossing candy wrappers.

  As they walked into the fragrant quietude of the pines she was suffused with euphoria, the old mountain trail excitement. Her earliest memory was of trying to clasp pollen-thick sunbeams streaming through stiff needles as she rode in the child carrier on her father’s back. She associated the deep green canopy, the rough red bark with well-being. Marc smirked at her; he’d known she would like this trail. They moved in harmony. In midafternoon, her stomach growling with hunger, they reached a spectacular overlook into the chaos of Hell’s Canyon. Marc’s idea of lunch was two carrots, some string cheese and some fishy paste they scooped out of the container with the carrots. It didn’t matter. They had shown each other their lapsarian atavistic tastes, their need for the forest, for the difficult and solitary, for what her father had called “the eternal verities,” but which she secretly thought might be ephemeral verities. Yet Catlin’s sensibilities tingled with a faint apprehension. She had never expected to meet such a person. Where was the catch?

  Their time together stretched into four years. Catlin regaled him with family stories—her sleepwalking grandmother, the alcoholic cousin who fell off a Ferris wheel, her father’s steady withdrawal from the family, her mother’s generous humor. She told him about her only previous lover, a rapscallion type studying meteorology but now in Iraq. Their affair had been nothing, she said; they had slept together only twice before admitting a growing dislike for each other. Marc was quiet about his past and Catlin took him on lover’s faith. His fine black hair rose in a Mephistophelian aura around his head when the wind blew—it was longer than the locals liked it—and his face bore an arched Iberian nose and narrow eyes with black irises and heavy brows. But in contrast to his darkly handsome face, he was rather short, with thick arms and small hands. He looked a little vicious, like an old artist whose eye is offended by contemporary daubs.

  Catlin had been a plump baby with a face like a small pancake. Her adult face was still baby-round with fleshy cheeks and acne scars that gave her a slightly tough streetwise look. The hay-stacking job had made her muscular, an inch taller and ten pounds heavier than Marc. She had man-size feet that had never known high heels. Beauty salon visits lightened and permed her limp blond hair into platinum waves that contrasted with her rough skin. She favored a blue-eyed, parted-lips look popularized by 1930s movie stars. She could hardly know that she resembled his mother.

  At the end of the fire season they left Idaho for Lander, Wyoming, where Marc had the promise of a job with an outdoor climbing school. Housing was tight and they finally ended up in a drab single-wide trailer which Catlin said needed more color. She painted the walls cherry red, purple, orange. At a thrift store she found an old round table and sprayed it cobalt blue. A 1960s television set discovered in the shed behind the trailer became one of several shrines to her invented juju gods and fetishes—the Shrine of Never Falling, and the Shrine of Adventure.

  “Very oriental,” said Marc in a tone that meant nothing. He was thinking of Tibet. After a few months he quit the job at the climbing school, saying only that he couldn’t deal with so many flaming egos, didn’t like the career life, the business of climbing. Still, he continued to climb with Ed Glide, his only local friend. He switched back to what he had done before firefighting—freelance work updating information on African countries for travelers’ guidebooks, keeping track of insurrections, changing tastes in music and clothing, the whims of dictators. As a child he had lived in Ivory Coast and Zaire, then, as near as Catlin could make out, had spent his adult years in four or five Mediterranean countries. When she asked about that time he talked about plantains in fufu and other dishes. She changed the Shrine of Never Falling to a Shrine of Information for Travelers.

  Their landlord was Biff, an elongated, chain-smoking old cowboy with a sweat stain on his hat that resembled the battlements of Jericho. Biff thought he’d discovered the secret of wealth by renting out his dead ex-wife’s trailer. He did not like Catlin’s color scheme.

  “How in hell can I rent this place now? Looks like a carnival.” He was so thin he had to buy youth jeans. They were always too short. He stuffed the high-water ends into his run-down work boots.

  “Well, you are renting it—to us.”

  “When you’re g
one,” he said, rolling a fresh cigarette with maimed yellow fingers, squinting his triangular eyes against the smoke.

  There was nothing to say to that. Only the day before she had asked Marc what he thought about building a cabin. She didn’t want to say “house.” It sounded too permanent. He only shrugged. That could mean anything. He had that evasive streak and it worried her. She asked once why he had come to Idaho and he answered that he had always wanted to be a cowboy. She had never seen him near a horse or a ranch. Was it a joke?

  Catlin had been born and raised in Boise, the great-granddaughter of a Basque shepherd from the Pyrenees, and she sometimes told Marc that that made her European, although she had never been farther away from Idaho than Salt Lake City and Yellowstone Park.

  The sheepherder ancestor had been ambitious. He became interested in the criminal physiognomy work of Bertillon and Galton and thought it was possible to make a composite photograph of the Universal Upright Man by overlaying photographs of respected men from every race. The project fell short when he could not find an Inuit, a Papuan, a Bushman or other Idaho rarities to photograph and coalesce. He became cynical about doing good in the world and turned his attention to money, opening a clothing store in Boise, a store that burgeoned into three, enough to provide the family with modest wealth.

  Catlin had an allowance from her parents and could have scraped by without working, but she thought it would demoralize Marc. In Wyoming she found a part-time job with the local tourism office and they set her to puzzling out scenic motor tours for massive campers and RVs. That brought about the Shrine of Wide Roads with No Traffic and No Hills.

  They maintained the fiction of independence because each owned a vehicle. The real focus of their lives was neither work nor clutching love, but wilderness travel. As many days and weeks as they could manage they spent hiking the Big Horns, the Wind Rivers, exploring old logging roads, digging around ancient mining claims. Marc had a hundred plans. He wanted to canoe the Boundary Waters, to kayak down the Labrador coast, to fish in Peru. They snowboarded the Wasatch, followed wolf packs in Yellowstone’s backcountry. They spent long weekends in Utah’s Canyonlands, in Wyoming’s Red Desert Haystacks looking for fossils. The rough country was their emotional center.

  But it wasn’t all joy; sometimes the adventures went to vinegar—once when the snow came in mid-October, four feet of dry powder on bare ground, snow so insubstantial they sank through it until their skis grated on rock.

  “Neige poudreuse. Give it a few days to settle and make a base,” he said. But it stayed cold and didn’t pack, didn’t settle, and that was it. The wind blew it around, wore it out. No more came in November, December, half of January. They were crazy with cabin fever, longing for snow. When Biff stopped by for the rent, he predicted, through a mouthful of chewing tobacco, a thousand-year drought.

  “Happened before,” he said. “Ask any Anasazi.”

  Then a line of storms moved in from the Pacific. Heavy snow and torrents of wind piled up seven-foot drifts. When they ran outside to load the skis and test the snow they could feel the tension, deep smothered sounds below indicating basal shifts.

  “Today, no off piste,” said Marc. “And we won’t even try the trails. The old skid road is probably safe enough.”

  On the drive up the mountain it began to snow again, and they passed men straining to push a truck out of the ditch. They crawled along in whiteout conditions.

  They started skiing up the old logging road but in less than twenty minutes found it blocked by an ocean of broken snow. Looking up the east slope of the hill they could see the avalanche track, sack-shaped like the gut of a deer.

  “Not good,” said Marc. “No point going any farther. There’s that terrain trap past the bridge.” They went home, Marc saying it was likely they could be called for avalanche rescue.

  A violent wind battered the trailer half the night, the electric lights flickering. But the next morning the sky was milky blue. Marc squinted at it and sighed. They waited. By eleven the skin of cloud thickened. The left hand of the storm fell on them like a dropped rock. Marc’s cell phone uttered an incongruous meadowlark call.

  “Yes. Yes. Leaving now,” he said. Search and Rescue needed them. He reminded Catlin to put her radio transceiver in her jacket zip pocket.

  “So we won’t be part of the problem.” On the way he said that Ed Glide had remarked that the storm had brought out hundreds of people, who knew why? Well, because it had been a dry winter.

  Catlin knew why. It was more than a dry winter. There was something about skiing in storms that thrilled certain people—climbers of dangerous rock at night, kayakers in ice-choked rivers, hikers who could not resist battering wind and hail.

  At the trailhead excited people rushed around in the falling snow, shouting teenage snowboarders with huge packs on their backs, parents bellowing “Get back here” at their children, skiers slipping through the trees, all disappearing into the bludgeoning white.

  Ed Glide, beard as coarse as the stuffing in antique chair seats, dark nostrils reminding one of the open doors of a two-car garage, was standing in front of the billboard trail map using a ski pole as a pointer. The fresh rescue group listened, stamped around to keep their feet warm. Ed was talking about the lost snowmobiler rescued at dawn, naked and curled up under a tree.

  “There’s a shitload of snow in the backcountry,” he said. “And there’s six damn kids on the Miner’s trail. Snowshoes. They headed out this morning with one of the daddies to have a winter cookout at Horse Lake. There’s that big cornice over the open slope along there. I doubt any of them’s got enough sense to—” He had not finished the sentence when they all heard the heavy roar to the southwest. Even through the light snow they could see a vast cloud rising.

  “Fuck!” shouted Ed. “That’s it. Let’s go! Go!”

  A mile along the trail they met two of the boys on snowshoes, stumbling along and repeatedly falling, red faces clotted with snow and frozen tears. The gasping boys said the group had almost reached Horse Lake when Mr. Shelman said the snow was too deep for a cookout and they turned back. They had barely recrossed the bottom of the open slope when the avalanche came. The others were under the snow.

  The search crew spent the rest of the day looking for signs of survivors, probing, shoveling. None of the boys or Mr. Shelman had carried a transceiver. Distraught parents came postholing to the site and some of them brought the family dog. Someone found a mitten. The search went on through the night. It took two days to dig out the bodies, and forever to get over the sense of failure and loss.

  “Cookout! What a fiasco,” said Marc. “Poor little kids.” He meant the two survivors, already stained with guilt at being alive.

  Their best times were always their explorations into the remnants of the vanishing wild. They treasured discovering new country. She thought sometimes that they were seeing the end of the old world. She knew Marc felt it too. They were in such harmony that they had never had an argument until the lettuce fight.

  They were leaving the next morning on a ten-day hike in the Old Bison range. The Jade trail had been closed for years but Marc relished the plan for an end run around the Forest Service. It was their practice to have a big dinner the night before they started an adventure, and then to eat sparingly in the wild, the feast a kind of Carnival before Lent. A little hunger, said Marc, makes the mind sharp. Catlin bought tomatoes, a head of lettuce, fillets of halibut at the local market. It was Marc’s turn to make dinner. He was making aloko, an African dish of bananas cooked in palm oil with chile to accompany the fried halibut. And, of course, her salad.

  Before he started cooking he took off his shirt, more efficient, he said, than putting on an apron. She knew it was because he didn’t like the only apron in the house, a fire-engine red thing her mother had given her for a silly present. She said he would be burned by spattering grease. She said she didn’t want to find chest hairs clinging to the lettuce.

  “You worry too much,�
�� he said. The oily smell of frying banana spread through the trailer.

  She sorted gear for the trip. Why did he still prefer those antique primitivo boots studded with hobnails? “Do you want a beer while you make the salad?”

  “Isn’t there any of that white wine left? Whatever it was.” He was cutting a red onion—the slices too thick. If he was so continental why couldn’t he cut an onion properly? She found an opened bottle of the wine in the refrigerator, poured him a glass and stood watching as he finished slicing, waved the knife with a flourish and began hacking the lettuce.

  “You didn’t wash it,” she said. “And you’re supposed to tear the leaves, not cut them.”

  “Babes, it’s a clean lettuce, no dirt. Why wash it? Of course I would prefer a nice little endive, some mesclun, but what we’ve got is a big, tasteless, hard head of lettuce like a green cannonball. It deserves to be cut.” There was no doubt that he despised iceberg lettuce.

  “Well, that’s all they had. It came from California. Who knows if they sprayed it, or whether the one who picked it had a disease or TB or peed on it?” Her voice spiraled upward. Catlin was inclined to an organic, vegetarian diet, a taste first professed when she was in her teens and designed to annoy her meat-and-potatoes parents, a diet even more difficult to uphold in beef-more-beef-and-potatoes Wyoming. She had considered herself sophisticated in food preferences until Marc. And although she usually gave in to him on whatever main dish he proposed, she insisted on the salad.

  “Does everything have to be antiseptic? Does everything have to be done your way? It’s only a salad, agreed, it is not a very good salad as we have only the most wretched of ingredients, but I’m making it, and you’re eating it.” He, of course, would sniffily ignore the salad, gobble the bananas and chile heaped on the fish.