The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (4 page)

He accepted that invitation with a devouring kiss. Stunned, I returned it. My body was rising to him like a vine lacing itself around a post. How is this happening? I thought. He’s from
there.
I’m kissing a man from
there
.

I swiped my key and held the door open for him.

“Not tonight, sweetheart. I don’t want to rush this.”

“Rushing’s good when you’re in a hurry,” I said.

“Let’s have breakfast at nine, then go over to the library, look at those maps.”

“Are you forgetting I have a son? I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you next.”

He grinned. “Tomorrow is also a whole new day. Let’s see what it brings.”

The room was freezing, and I couldn’t find a thermostat. After vainly searching the closets and drawers for an extra blanket, I lay awake and alone on the giant bed, less certain than I’d been since we met.

It had happened twice now. He’d offered then withheld himself, promising to meet by the fountain and waiting instead on the mezzanine, now tantalizing me with the greatest kiss of my life, then leaving. I had feared I wouldn’t want him. I now knew that I did. But how much did he want me? What had he said about courtship? It was a “fine institution.” If this was a game to him, he’d won the first round.

4

I
N THE LIBRARY’S RARE-MAP ROOM, WE OPENED THE LONG, FLAT DRAWERS AND LIFTED OUT THE TREASURES ONE BY ONE.
Most of the old maps showed nothing at all in our remote region—no roads or rivers or topographical marks. “I kind of like living in a part of this sad old world so empty they use it to print the legend,” Ward said.

“Those are the best places,” I agreed. Finally, we seemed to be getting back in sync. In the mirror that morning, after a sleepless night
in my freezing room, my face had looked drawn, and my eyes had dark circles under them. I’d never done well on little or no sleep. Talking over breakfast, I’d felt like I was tiptoeing through broken glass. Each word I uttered seemed to shatter on impact with his. We hadn’t connected well, but now the bad spell his refusal had cast over us seemed to be lifting. Perhaps he’s just old-fashioned when it comes to sex, I thought.

“Look how big we once were,” Ward said, pointing at a map of Kansas Territory. Until 1861, Kansas had reached from the Missouri River all the way to the Rockies. Our eyes were drawn to the Smoky Hill River, where Ward lived, and to the Middle and Little Beavers, whose dry beds had both wound through the countryside where I grew up. The Smoky appeared much more often on the maps because it had always had reliable water in it. In the late 1850s, when gold was discovered in Colorado, the Smoky Hill Trail had been the most direct route to Denver. It had also been the most dangerous. The Cheyenne, who camped and hunted on the plains, were understandably threatened by the incursion. They were prone to burning stage stations and torturing and killing the passengers.

Despite these dangers, instead of crossing Nebraska on the Oregon Trail, some travelers headed for the far West came through Kansas, then turned north onto the Overland Trail, which ran along the eastern face of the Rockies.

I traced my finger from Laramie south along the Overland to Denver. “Our paths join.”

Ward gave me a sideways hug. Standing that close to him after a sleepless night grounded me, like leaning against a sun-warmed tree trunk. He removed his hand from my shoulder and lifted another map from the stack we’d made. Close to where we met on the Little Beaver, I spotted a north-south dotted line. “The Ladder of Rivers!” I said.

Tribe after tribe had climbed the ladder across the High Plains, going from one watering hole to the next as they hunted bison. Some had settled beside the springs long enough to grow corn and squash—all thanks to the gift of surface water. Even my modest Little Beaver had been a rung on the ladder. Along with Ward’s Smoky Hill and the
mightier Platte and Arkansas, it had made High Plains trade and travel possible all the way back to the Paleo-Indian Clovis culture.

“The Ladder of Rivers,” Ward mused. “That phrase sounds familiar. I think I ran across it in that book I sent you about Dull Knife’s escape from Oklahoma.”

He was referring to the epic flight, in 1878, of the Northern Cheyenne from Oklahoma. The military had coerced them to move there, onto the Southern Cheyenne reservation. But the northerners escaped, fighting their way through Kansas and Nebraska, fending off the attacks of better-armed, more numerous cavalry. Some of the tribe had made it to their home in the Black Hills, but many had died in Nebraska, gunned down as they huddled in the freezing hills.

“It was terrible what we did to the Indians,” I said.

“I know just what you mean, even if I did always root for the cowboys in the shoot ’em ups.”

“I rooted for the Indians,” I said.

“I never would have guessed.” He softened the sarcasm with an affectionate smile.

“I want to go to all these streams,” I said. “I want to find the springs where the Indians camped and the pioneers settled. I’m drawn to those places.”

“I would be honored to join you in that. Dull Knife’s band crossed the Smoky not far from my place. I’ll take you there.”

“That would be great!” I stifled a yawn.

Ward studied me for a second. “You know, I can see I’ve worn you out. Let’s go back to the hotel and rest.”

•   •   •

I
SANK INTO THE LEATHER PASSENGER SEAT
of his vintage Continental, the kind of car you’d expect to see a cigar-chewing, country real estate agent driving. Except for its color: powder blue. “My buddies rib me about it,” he said, “but at least it’s not pink.”

At the stoplight, I closed my eyes. “Make yourself at home. Lean back,” he said, pushing a button on the console to tilt the seat.

I trusted him to bear me along on this cushion, then up the elevator to his room. I would sleep, or we would make love. Both sounded equally appealing. We could linger the rest of the day. I didn’t care if I missed my plane. There’d be another one in the evening. I could call my friend Diane and ask her to stay another night at my house. After Jake had skipped work when I was away in August, I’d resolved not to leave him home alone again until he’d proven he was responsible.

Behind thick curtains in his darkened room, Ward kissed me deeply and deliciously, as he had the night before. But much sooner than I expected, he began undoing my buttons. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, then guided me onto the bed and took off my jeans and underpants, tossing them aside like weeds. Quickly, he took off his own jeans and lay down beside me.

Here was the reality of him. The wiry, gray-blond chest hair, shoulders broad as a truck making his belly irrelevant. A thrilling shock, this sudden nakedness. The reality of both of us. A little embarrassed to be making love in daylight, I reached for an embrace. He rolled on top of me.

I tried to slow him down through body language—a hand on his forearm, messaging, “We have time,” but he was oblivious to my signals. Even his kisses were hurried and incomplete.

How to convey the shock of this suddenness? It was like being invited to dinner and having the food thrown at me, or finding that I was the dinner and my own appetite was not even secondary but inconsequential. I hadn’t experienced such selfishness in a male since I was sixteen. His hotel room might have been my first boyfriend’s Chevy Impala on a gray road between square wheat fields. I might have been lying on a cold vinyl seat, trying to feel what I wanted to feel—passionate, in love—while my boyfriend had sex.

I had, in fact, been falling in love with Ward just moments before, but the feeling evaporated under this onslaught. After he rolled off me, I got up just as perfunctorily. Glimpsing confusion on his face, I feigned cheerful regret. “Got a plane to catch.” My hands shook as I buttoned my blouse. “I’ll go pack.”

In my room, I threw all visible items into my suitcase and didn’t
bother to look behind the shower curtain or under the bed. I wanted to get out of the hotel before he caught up with me—if he was planning to do that, if there was any pretense of love left in him at all. If so, I thought, Let him wonder. Let him rot. I flagged a cab, paying thirty dollars for a ride to the airport that would have cost five on the bus, and went through security—again, before he could catch up with me. Beyond the checkpoint, I did feel more secure than I had before, on his terroristic side of that line. How dare he!
Bastard!
my mind shouted as I rode the train to the gate.

I sat in the empty waiting area, two hours early for my flight, sorrow welling up like slow poison. It was truth rising in me, time for a reckoning. I’d lowered myself for a man who didn’t warrant a second glance, and now I would have to go through the recovery period and return to a reality that looked grim after entertaining fantasies of transformative love. With a Kansas guy, no less. Had I forgotten why I’d left, at eighteen, and again at thirty-seven? Going back would retrace every step of my evolution, erasing each gain. But this reasoning didn’t prevent me from hugging myself and folding double. I sat up only as I realized that the waiting area was beginning to fill. A child sitting in the bank of molded-plastic chairs opposite me grabbed his mother’s sleeve, then pointed at me as if to say, “What’s wrong with that lady?”

How had Ward become so important to me so quickly? Now it was as if I’d never been disappointed before, as if he were the first cad I’d ever met. What a fool I’d been!

•   •   •

A
T THE TINY AIRPORT IN
L
ARAMIE, THE
sky was spitting snow bullets sideways. Why today? Why couldn’t the sun shine, as the state boasted it did more than three hundred days of the year? I wanted to see the luminous peaks of the Snowy Range rising above a panorama of soft-green, short-grass prairie. I needed to breathe the high valley’s sunny clear air to forget Ward and all he stood for—that ancient history of mine that I’d rejected long ago. Instead, I felt his absence as bitterly as I might an extinguished fire in the dead of a winter.

On the way to the house, I spotted Jake’s pickup pulling into a convenience-store gas station. I glanced at the clock. He was supposed to be in school. We’d named his beagle Regina, Latin for “queen,” with good reason. She rode in the queenly way she always did, her paws on the passenger windowsill, long beagle ears framing big beagle eyes, but she fell back as the truck bounced into the lot. He’d been driving too fast.
Hell-bent on having fun
, Dad would have said. What a sudden return to reality this was, being reminded, immediately after an absence that I thought was going to change my life, where my love really lay, and what the problems of that love were.

My yard looked untended, buried in a week’s worth of leaves, and the house seemed cold and dingy. A plastic cup lay on its side on the coffee table, oozing Coke glue. McDonald’s wrappers littered the floor, licked clean by Regina. I leaned over the couch to open the drapes that Jake was always closing so he could watch TV in the daytime.

To my surprise, a powder-blue car was pulling up to the curb. I’d been so convinced all was over between Ward and me that I hadn’t even considered the possibility he would follow me. Now I felt like a child in a movie, seeing a dead hero return to life.

I ran to the bathroom to comb my hair. Calm down, I told myself. Even if he was gallant, driving 120 miles from Denver to Laramie to make things right, he was still clueless. And how could that be? Had relations between men and women really not changed one iota in Kansas since the 1960s? Didn’t the world leak in through television and films?

I opened the door. He wore a long-sleeved, blue Levi’s shirt, and his belt buckle sat squarely in place again. “You left without saying good-bye.”

“If Jake comes home, you’ll have to sneak out. I’m not ready to introduce you.”

In my bedroom, I chose the wingback chair I’d bought recently at a used furniture store, thinking of weekends when Ward would be visiting me, if things had kept going the way I thought they were then.

This put him on the corner of my bed. “I was afraid you wouldn’t let me in.”

I probably shouldn’t have, I thought.

“What did I do wrong?” He looked sad, his lips curved down under his mustache, his eyes still sexy in their extraordinary greenness.

“You really don’t know?”

“No.”

That he didn’t think my sexuality was as important as his didn’t just infuriate me, I realized. It threatened me. It had taken years after leaving Kansas for me to develop the courage to accept that I had my own needs and to assert them. The repression was a prison I didn’t want to reenter. No way was I going back to that darkness. But I also remembered how I’d felt an hour ago, getting off the plane into thin, stinging snow. I remembered Jake careening into that parking lot and worry descending over me along with the gray light. If I wanted love, and if I wanted a man’s love for Jake before he was completely grown, this was my chance. But how I must look! Anguished, fragmented by tension, exhaustion, and indecision, I imagined myself as one of Picasso’s cubist women, my face pasted together at sharp angles.

“I know I should apologize, but I don’t know for what,” Ward said.

“It’s not what you did.” My voice was squeaky, which I hated. I motioned for a pause, gathered myself and began again in a more even tone. “It’s what you didn’t do. You don’t know how hard this is to say, Ward. But what about me? As soon as we started, I could see it was all going to be about you. That was like—” I closed my eyes to find the right words and blurted out what I saw—“a door slammed shut in my face.” That was it exactly. The door that had stood open the night before, when I first glimpsed him in that suit, had closed in the exact moment I’d begun to walk through it.