Problems with People (2 page)

It rained in earnest. There were no cute towns, just trailers and blight, mini-marts and badly named burger joints. They entered Mount Rainier National Park and, on the road to Paradise, walked to Narada Falls beneath umbrellas. Now she, too, had little to say. They were both silent, watching the waterfall in the rain. Driving again, she set her teeth against her lower
lip. The rain-pelted slopes of the mountain came into view, and the last of the blue September gentians, wind-whipped. The lodge was as advertised—grand and hand-crafted, rustic and Gothic, simple but complicated, well appointed but crude. It seemed to him a massive mistake, everything too big, too lodgelike in earnest. He kept this to himself, though. He felt scattered, apprehensive. They checked in on two credit cards and went to their room—a standard with a queen bed, no television, no phone—at the end of the hall on the fourth floor of the annex, with a view of the Tatoosh Range, weather permitting. But right now, the weather didn’t permit.

I might as well be open, he said, taking the room’s one chair, a wooden desk chair. I’m nervous.

Me, too.

I’m losing my cool. Could we pull the shades? It’s me I don’t want to see, not you. I don’t want to look at myself right now. No, I’m not going to whine the whole time, I promise, but—

Sure.

It’s time, he said. Thank you.

He stooped to unzip the bag he’d brought, reached in, and told her, I thought I might—you know—need this. He showed her a bottle of pills.

Okay.

Excuse me. Just for a minute.

He went into the bathroom and took the pill with water. Privacy allowed him to agitate his doubts and shore himself up simultaneously. Who if not her? But this was a mistake. His wife was gone, but this was too sudden. Quietly, he brushed
his teeth, then came back to find her in the chair with her handbag settled and open in her lap. While he’d been in the bathroom, she’d drawn the shades; there was no more view of mountain meadows. Yet it still wasn’t particularly dark. Everything was plain and gray in this light. Let’s just get on the bed, he said, and lie there for a while. Not that I want to dictate to you. But that’s what I need to do. Is that pathetic?

She closed her bag, set it on the floor, and unbuckled her sandals, with her silver hair hanging. It unfurled, he thought, like a Möbius strip. What do you think? she asked.

New territory.

Maybe I should tell you something. Because love and death—I’ve been there, too.

Sure, he said. Break the ice.

Barefoot, she got on the bed. She sat up next to him with her back against the headboard and her hands pressed palm to palm against her skirt. While she talked, he lay with his forearms across his eyes, as if by negating the room he might see better, but actually this was a habit of his, something he did to live inside himself—lie down, cover his face—for hours at a time, at home, in the evenings, instead of watching TV or reading.

I grew up in farm country, she said, but that doesn’t really describe it. Do you know where Odessa is? In eastern Washington? I grew up thirteen miles from Odessa, in what they call the Channeled Scablands. We grew wheat. It was really pretty simple. But let me back up a little. Do you know the Spokane Floods? I’m terrible on eras, but a long time ago there were the Spokane Floods. They took the country down
to black rock—basalt. Except for these islands of good soil: the hills. So what got farmed were the fingers, the islands of soil—the benches and the feet of benches. Flying in from Minneapolis, you see it. The dark channels are the rock, and the yellow is soil, because our soil was loess, and loess looks yellow. Wind brings it. It’s like dust, but it grows wheat. Dryland wheat, no irrigating. My mother spent a lot of time battling with loess, and my father had farmer’s lung, probably because of it. He coughed all the time. At night especially. We had seven thousand acres and a pile of combine parts. My dad was always worrying about weather. Everything was always touch and go, marginal, at the mercy—one more bad season and we’d have to go, but where? That was a topic of ongoing conversation. It’s the bleakest of the bleak kind of farming, what you grow when nothing else will grow. Odessa—Odessa is Russian Mennonite. Actually German. Or, rather, German Russian—Germans who migrated to Russia but then came here. Isolationists. They want to do their own thing. They go in for the hardscrabble places like Odessa. We weren’t Mennonite or Russian or German. We actually lived closer to a place called Lamona, but Lamona had nothing, so we went to Odessa. Lamona was a siding, a railroad siding. So I went to school in Odessa on a yellow bus. And the grocery store, but not the doctor. You needed a doctor, you drove to Spokane. When you were really going big, you went to Spokane. An hour and a half. We drove up to Davenport and went that way. Do you remember Expo? World’s fair in Spokane? I worked at Expo in ’74. I was twenty-two. But I’m ahead of myself. What year was it when I was sixteen? It was …’68. But I had
no idea what was going on in the world. We were so out there, the only connection was
Time
magazine. At the little library in town, which was open two days a week and about the size of this room. Plus television, except we pulled in only one channel at our house, KREM, which was CBS. People say ’68 was seminal, but Odessa? I remember hearing about a boy from Wilson Creek, not far from where I grew up, who got killed in Vietnam.… Sixty-eight, that was Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. I mean, I heard about it.… Okay—you get my point.

With his forearms still across his eyes, he said, The tulies.

Anyway, there was this boy. He was just this boy I thought was handsome, nobody special, just one of the boys I went to school with, but he was older. Most of the boys there, they were farm boys, like this boy. Billy, Tommy, names like that. This boy was named Clifton Rider, and he was eighteen, and he lived closer to Harrington. Two years older. The bus I took to school would start picking up kids toward Harrington, and then it would come our way. So I would always see this Clifton Rider, and he would always be sitting way at the back with his brothers—he had two brothers. And their friends. Boys. We didn’t—I mean, my sister and I—we didn’t go back there, we sat toward the front with a group of girls. Our whole school was eighty, ninety kids. Everybody knew everybody. There weren’t really cliques. The kids on the sports team were the kids in the school play; otherwise, there’s no school play.

What about Clifton?

Clifton, too. He was okay. Not the star of anything, just … average, except for his looks. At least, I thought so.
Not a tall guy, not a boy like a lot of high-school boys, with a lot of body language—pretty quiet guy. Very down-to-earth. They grew wheat like we did, the Riders, but they had potatoes and hay, too, or at least they did in ’68. Sometimes we went for groceries to Harrington, because my parents knew the store owners there—my dad was in their Lions for some reason, the Harrington Lions instead of Odessa, probably because of something petty—that area was petty. So we would see the Rider kids around there in Harrington. Clifton, the oldest. My sister and I never talked to them, but we knew who they were, and we knew their reputation, which is that they were Pentecostals, whereas just about everyone else around there was Lutheran. I shouldn’t say that. There were also Congregationalists. And Seventh-day Adventists. But my family was Lutheran, pretty seriously Lutheran. We went to church every Sunday. Our pastor didn’t push hard. The Pentecostals—people thought they were extremists. Just rumors, the things you’d think of—speaking in tongues, laying on of hands. So the Riders, they were associated with that. One thing they did do, they had the dress code in their family. The Riders looked neat. Short haircuts, and they always had their shirts buttoned up and tucked in. All three of the boys were sort of bullish in appearance. Like their dad. Thick neck, wide face, heavy brow, even when they were just kids. Which can be, actually, more expressive than you think. I mean, when Clifton was up or down, you knew it.

She stopped. The lodge had recently been girded to earthquake standards, but the windows still creaked when the wind blew. He heard that, and when she moved a little, he
heard the bedsprings. The noise and the movement of the bed were considerable, so he peeped out from under his forearm. She was trying to get more support from the pillow at her back by pumping it like an accordion. Take mine, he said. I’m not using it.

No. This is fine. I’ll just fluff it up a little.

She got settled again and went back to her story. Where was I? she asked. Probably on a tangent. All I’m really trying to say is that Clifton went out on a limb and talked to me. When we were getting off the bus at school. He was behind me in the aisle, and he said … I don’t know. I could lie and say he said something great, but the truth is, I can’t remember. But he said something. Then we got off the bus and walked together for, seriously, a fraction of a second. After that he said hi all the time. On the bus or elsewhere. Just hi. I said hi back, trying not to flush. I would turn red and sweat, though. This went on for a couple of weeks, during which I thought about Clifton obsessively. I was in love with Clifton Rider. It was really hard for me on the bus. Same thing at school. I couldn’t concentrate. I told my sister I had a crush on Clifton, and she told everybody, and then a rumor came back that Clifton had a crush on me, too.

One day when he said hi to me at school, he caught me in a braver-than-usual mood, and I was able to say, “Hey, Clifton, hold up for a second. I want to ask you something. You’ve been hearing rumors. I’ve been hearing them, too. What have you heard? Rumors are always flying around here.” He beat around the bush on that. He didn’t want to answer straight on, directly. But the upside was, we’d gotten past hi, so now
when we passed each other in the halls we would both roll our eyes to indict the lack of privacy at Odessa High School. We were locked in by it. We had something to share. The “This place is just too small” conversation kids have in small towns. You could go on from there. You could take it from there. We were at the friend stage now, but the whole time, I was in love. I wanted Clifton to … just … take me in his arms and kiss me or something. So far we’re not even sitting together on the bus. Remember that? I couldn’t decide if he was nervous or if he just didn’t like me the way I liked him. Two years older was a different category. Maybe he liked me, maybe he didn’t. Remember “Both Sides Now”? Sixty-eight? I just had to hear that song and—bang—even though it had nothing to do with me or Clifton. But that’s music for you.

Ditto.

“Both Sides Now”?

It’s possible to go there if your mood’s right.

Her assenting murmur was not entirely firm, and made him think that covering his face while he spoke had gotten rude. He uncovered it and sat up. Did with his pillow what she’d done with hers. I like his name, he said. Clifton Rider.

Clifton, she answered. I thought it was great. And his last name, too. Super-cowboy!

You had a cowboy thing.

No. But I had a Clifton thing, so that smoothed the way for a cowboy thing—singular. Clifton was sort of cowboy in a neatnik way.

He rode a horse?

Actually, a dirt bike. Or a farm bike. They had a thing
in Odessa called Deutschesfest, and it included a motorcycle run. People screamed out of town and came back a couple hours later covered with dust. I don’t know what it was all about. That’s just what we did then. I was down there with my friends, probably just hanging around, doing nothing, laughing at the polka music outside the beer garden, and Clifton rolls up on his bike and says, Hey! Hop on! I didn’t think. I just saddled up, figuring my friends would sort of chalk it up to the Deutschesfest spirit. A farm bike, that was how you got around—kids took these farm bikes into the Scablands. All the epic teen-ager stories were about bikes in the Scablands. People went for parties. There were places we knew about. You could get down over the base of a bench and be out of the wind where a lot of old fencing had been dumped and build a bonfire, and drink whatever. We used to pool our money and send someone to this place in Spokane, a little store that didn’t card. But me and Clifton—we didn’t do it, but we came close. Oh boy, Clifton! By a fencepost fire. Then we went back, because we had to. People would miss us. They’d all be talking. It was a huge concern. What if people knew? So we went back to Deutschesfest, and he let me off. I found my friends and said, “Yeah, great ride, we went out toward Duck Lake or something.” I found my parents in the food tent and did, you know, sausage and strudel, but it was one of those “Aren’t you hungry, somethin’ wrong?” kind of dinners, because I was on Cloud Nine. Blissed out. Couldn’t eat. Because of Clifton.

How do I explain this? I lost my virginity. But it was really tough for me and Clifton to get together, because my parents were not going to go for this guy. I had to hide him. Not that
they paid attention. They thought exclusively about wheat, is what I thought then. They weren’t human to me. Wheat on the brain. The farming game. But I told my sister, and she was good about things. We were close—still close. She lives in Denver. You know what? You always have to have an accomplice. When she fed the dogs at night, she muzzled them for me. That way, after my parents went to bed I could climb out the window and not set off barking. And get with Clifton. He’d be waiting by the shed with condoms in his pocket. He brought blankets, and he’d be standing there with the blankets, and, you know, we’d go into the shed. We’d go into a corner of the shed and wrap up in blankets. For hours. Sometimes until it was almost morning. Then Clifton would creep off into this little ravine where he’d stashed his bike out of earshot. I pulled the dog muzzles before I climbed back in. You have to wonder how many kids are doing this. Sneaking around. A lot, but only a few of them are having a great time, if they’re honest, and those are the ones who are madly in love.

Maybe you’ve been there. Have you been there, Odessa? It’s like Spokane. You look at the weather report for Spokane, it’s at least low twenties just about every night after Thanksgiving. Inside the shed, maybe it’s thirty-two. With the blankets and us, better than that. We whispered all the time, because we were scared. Whispered conversation. The natural subject when someone’s eighteen is, What are you going to do with your life? Clifton didn’t know. If he didn’t get drafted, he was hoping to work on farm equipment. Or for a seed company. But he didn’t want to farm, and he didn’t want to leave the county. He didn’t want to leave because of me, he said. If he
left he couldn’t see me, and that would kill him. Me! Year before, I’m no one to anyone; then I turn sixteen, go through physical changes, and now Clifton Rider can’t live without me. I’m aware of that. But, still, it’s genuine. Puppy love is real to the puppies—completely real. Hey—I went to Spokane with my parents and my sister every year to go Christmas shopping, and that year, I bought Clifton an album by The Doors. It was snowing, and there were cars off the road near the air-force base—Fairchild Air Force Base. I say this because it was a bad snow year. It piled up. Hard to say how much. Three feet, maybe? Never got warm enough to melt, either. Just kept adding, usually at night. A lot of mornings, we had fresh snow on the ground. When was this pattern going to stop? That kind of weather, notable weather—they had the roads plowed and sanded, but they couldn’t keep up. People liked talking about the wipe-outs and near misses. Small town, no real news. The lights went on at our house—my mom liked Christmas lights. Snow’s downtime for wheat farmers. My dad played with lights.