Dalva (41 page)

“Where you going next?” It was the most innocent question I could think of.

“I got a good offer in Texas but if I see another oilman I might shoot the son of a bitch. I got a brother with a cow-calf operation over near Hardin, Montana, and I might go over there.”

I asked enough right questions to get rid of his anger for
the time being. Since I had never grown up with an angry father it was one thing I didn't know how to handle or react to in men. He had started three different horse operations for rich people after he quit the rodeo circuit: the first two took four years apiece, and the last five. They all had ended up with a loss of interest, auctions, and a general, inconclusive mess that he was expected to stay behind and clean up before collecting the doubtful severance pay. I suspected he knew more about tax problems, depreciation schedules, and the decline in oil prices than he allowed to, but then those weren't subjects that bore speaking about along a lovely creek bottom on a June afternoon. The situation eased when we talked of breeding lines, and he told me the story of his trip to Lexington, Kentucky, where his last boss had taken him to investigate the thoroughbred business. By now he was stretched out beside me, leaning on an elbow and chewing on a piece of grass. I asked him about his expensive Questar telescope and he said the owner's wife had given it to him but with no directions. I said I would show him how to operate it which pleased him. Just before he got up he put his hand on mine for a moment.

“Let's ride back and work on that bottle of whiskey,” he said. “‘Course you don't have to help but I'm in a five-drink mood.”

Early the next afternoon, when I drove out the gate, I said to the pup who was chewing on a piece of harness, “Well, I think I've got myself a boyfriend.” I had a bourbon headache and was bone tired but otherwise relaxed and happy. The dirty joke about being “rode hard and put away wet” came to mind. When we got back from the ride the trailer was very hot and we both were quite nervous and overly polite. While he made drinks I rinsed my hands and face in the sink and the flies against the window seemed to be buzzing in my ears. We were standing at the counter and I began to explain the telescope in a jittery voice, saying that after dark we could put it on the car hood for stability and look at the stars. I blushed and looked
away because that meant I was offering to stay the night before he asked. He understood this and tried to get me off the hook with a joke.

“Sounds good to me. I'm not real up-to-date on the universe. It's a long ways from feed bills.”

We clicked our overfull glasses and I drank as deeply as possible. “Here's to horses and dogs,” I said, then traced a finger along two zigzag scars on his hand. “You're supposed to turn a hay-baler off before you fix it,” he said. We stared out the window at the horses as if they were something new and we hadn't just been riding them. His face shone with sweat and I felt sweat trickling down between my breasts. The obvious thing was to go outside and catch the breeze. He put a hand on my waist and that was finally all it took. We embraced as if to bruise our ribs, then kissed, and I dropped my drink on the floor. We banged against the table getting our clothes off and making our way to the sofa. The pup was disturbed from its sleep and began yiping and howling, but that didn't slow us down one bit. The lovemaking on the sofa was awkward and quick, and then we lay there with our hearts pounding hard trying to catch our breath, listening to the pup. “That dog music's a real mood swinger,” he said. He got up naked, fetched the pup and took it outside where I heard the horse-trailer door close. When he came back in he looked at me on the couch, smiled, and we started laughing as he tried to draw a picture on the sweat on his chest. Then we walked down to the pond and had a cooling swim, talked for a while and made love on our small towels, and went swimming again. Sam remembered the pup and ran up the hill to let it go. We sat on the dock and watched it hunt frogs with its parents. The Lab ate the frogs the Airedale caught. Now it was late afternoon so we dressed and went off to a roadhouse twenty miles down the road. It was blessedly air-conditioned, and we danced to the jukebox, played pool, ate dinner, and danced again. When we got back we simply fell asleep with a fan moaning at the window and made love with hangovers in the first light, then slept again until midmorning.

It was at breakfast that I became quite upset. He was frying bacon at the stove in jeans with no shirt and I was
admiring all the muscles in his back which were functional rather than those got from exercise. There was a pale half-moon scar on his shoulder that he said carne from an operation when he was thrown against a fence at the rodeo in Big Timber. My breath shortened and I looked around the trailer thinking, My God, am I with Duane? The similarity might have dawned on me by then but perhaps I didn't want it to. I walked outside feeling nude in my bra and jeans trying to catch my breath. I thought, I'll be goddamned if I'll let this stop me. I won't let this stop me because I like this man. I deserve this man for however long. I don't give a good goddamn if he is like Duane and lives in a fucking trailer and smells like a horse. I heard him come outside and turned to where he stood on the porch.

“You OK, darling?” he asked softly.

“I'm fine. I just thought of something, that's all.” I walked up the porch steps and he gave me a hug. He tried to tease me into a smile.

“You know it's funny but way back there at the fair when you were dancing in that short dress I was up front and thought about doing this. And now here I am.”

“I saw all you assholes from Ainsworth standing over there but I must say I didn't plan this.”

So driving home was pleasant, though the pup was a problem until I stopped by a big, unfenced field and chased him around, and then we were both tired. Then he slept and I sorted out my plans, which was simple, because we had agreed that we would meet in a week. Despite our ages there had been the usual uneasiness of new lovers about what to do next, if anything. You can sit there and let time sort it out but time can do a bad job. I had convinced him without too much effort to spend some time at the cabin in Buffalo Gap while he figured out whether to take a job in Texas or go to Montana. I frankly hoped for neither, but I cautioned myself not to look that far ahead. At forty-five we all fear death by suffocation. I tried to remember without success a line by Rilke that I had read in college: how lovers try to swallow each other until there is nothing left of either of them except a peculiar kind of emotional disease.

I took a detour down toward Elsmere and Purdum where the road would cross the North Loup. It wasn't far from this juncture that Northridge and Aase had spent her last days. I had visited the site that summer after Duane died when the location and the thought of Aase meant a good deal to me. I read and reread the journal passages concerning her and her unimaginable will toward life, or so it seemed to me at the time:

She is so thin now that deep in the night with my arms around her it is as if I feel her retreating into the little girl she once was. Her energies in the early morning are cheerful and if the weather is coolish we sit by the fire with our cups of tea and the dictionary, though it now seems doubtful we shall proceed beyond the “a's”. Yesterday out on her cot she discovered my ruse as I wished to pass over “agony” and she said in her slight, bell-clear voice, “Agony is the struggle before death. I read it when you fetched the water.” Her faith & belief in God & His Son are so direct as to embarrass the theologian in me. To Aase, God is tangible as the sky above & the earth below, the full red moon we saw rising as if burnt by a prairie fire. She is similar to devout Sioux who speak so directly to the Spirits they are doubtless heard. This morning before daylight she was delirious & vomited forth blood & when I lit a candle she touched the blood with a forefinger and held it to the light as if she were studying life itself. I gave her opium, stirred the fire & added wood, then rocked her in my lap before the fire until dawn. She always wakes when the birds begin their singing though it is probable that one morning soon she will not awake. Her favorite is the flutelike sound of the meadowlark & she was quite enthused when I told her these birds are said to migrate to South America with the coming of fall. She fancies that at death her spirit will be allowed to migrate over all the earth so that she may see those places to which her curiosity has become attached. I have assured her that God is just & this will be so. In the trunk she has brought along with our marriage there is a doll she has kept from her childhood & for which she embroidered many small & beautiful dresses. She wishes me to marry again and give this doll to my child as her greatest pain has been not to bear us children. When light entered the cabin & the birds
began her pale-blue eyes opened and looked into mine saying all that remains voiceless within us & she touched the tear on my cheek with the finger with the dried blood upon it.

Within an hour of my arrival Lundquist had rigged a gate between the kitchen and the dining room so I could toilet-train the pup in the kitchen with newspapers. Frieda sat across the table from me as I read my mail, more than a little disgusted at the idea of a puppy “pooping” all over her kitchen. I told her to take a few days off by which time she would be taking care of Michael over at Naomi's. The core of her gossip was that this morning a “Jap” photographer and a big tall woman in a purple dress had shown up and taken about a thousand “pitchers” of Karen Olafson and the whole town was “abuzz.”

“Poor Professor Michael, getting his head broke trying to help that slut. She gets famous and he gets a headache. He ought to sue her for a cold million. Maybe she'll be a bunny for God's sake.”

While she prattled I sorted out the bills from letters from Michael, Paul, and a postcard from Naomi postmarked Chadron. I was waiting to call Andrew until Frieda and Lundquist left—he was sitting in the corner on the floor,
admiring his gate with the pup on his lap, while Roscoe watched through the porch window. Roscoe had decided the pup was his and didn't want the rest of us near his new possession. When I didn't rise to the Karen bait Frieda began to talk about the Cornhuskers, the University of Nebraska football team, which is the state's central passion. One of her Christmas presents from our family had always been two season tickets for prime seats secured by the Omaha law firm. Only God knows what she and her girlfriend Marge did on these football weekends in Lincoln. I was never around in the fall but Naomi said that Frieda and Marge would return on Sunday much the worse for wear. Frieda felt that nature's worst joke was that most men were shrimps and not like the “big ole Cornhuskers.”

The phone rang and Frieda answered it with the usual “I'll just see if she wants to talk to you.” It was Sam so I took the
call upstairs. I could immediately sense the cold feet in his voice but overrode it by pretending I didn't. He felt he couldn't stay at my cabin unless he did something for his keep, so I said I would get some lumber delivered and he could expand and repair the corral. That satisfied him and his voice warmed to say “I miss you.” Late at night when we had had far too much to drink he had said he always wanted to go to New York City because when he was a kid his parents had taken him to see
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
over in O'Neill. I had thought this funny but he was terribly serious, admitting that he had never been east of Lexington, Kentucky. He didn't care for hot dogs and his mother had told him that according to the
Readers Digest
they eat three million hot dogs a day in New York. I assured him that they were a better quality than those red-dyed ones at rodeos, which seemed to bring a boozy relief.

Naomi had added two more birds to her life list and N else had taken photos to prove it. They would return in ten days or so. Paul wrote to ask if mid-July was an appropriate time for a visit from him and Luiz since they would be looking at two schools in Colorado. Included was a thank-you note from Luiz for “saving” him from a life which he detailed briefly. I was embarrassed by his thanks, partly because I knew he was one out of a thousand to be retrieved, and I had spent too many years just beyond the edge of sadness—barely, in fact—to equate retrieval with cure.