Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (32 page)

And she thought he would swallow that silly story about a cowboy and his dog!

They drove the jeep cross-country to inspect the wells, and Farley drove places where Sam would not have attempted to go. At one o’clock Farley stopped and they sat on the ground in the shade of an overhanging cliff to eat their lunch. There was a valley below them; on the other side were more cliffs. Suddenly Sam realized where they were: this was the same valley Victoria was talking about, viewed from the other side.

“See that fence?” Farley waved his beer can toward the opposite cliffs. “Three hundred acres fenced off. Tamale brought me out with him once, when I was five. I rode all the way, still remember. I asked him why this piece was fenced off and he told me about Ghost River. Said the cattle heard the water sometimes and went off the cliffs trying to get to it. I believed him. Never gave it another thought for years. Then I was home from school one summer and Dad had me come out here to fix one of the gates. I knew by then cattle don’t find water by sound, they smell it. I asked him about the three hundred acres. He said it always had been fenced because of the larkspurs that come up thick in there.” He looked at the other side of the valley thoughtfully. “They do, too,” he said after a moment. “Only thing is, they’re on both sides of the fence and always were.”

In the valley was a thick stand of bunchgrass, the sign of a well-managed range; no erosion scarred the land. No tracks flattened the grass, or made ruts in the earth. The valley was a cul-de-sac, a box canyon surrounded by cliffs. Where the valley narrowed, with a break in the cliffs, there was a dropoff of two hundred feet. The wire fence started at the gorge, crossed the ranch road, climbed the cliff, followed the jagged ridge around to the break. On the other side the fence resumed, still clinging to the crest, then turned, went down the cliffs again, recrossed the road, and ended at the gorge, several hundred yards from the other section. The area enclosed was an irregular ellipse. The irregularities were caused by the terrain. Where heaps of boulders, or abrupt rises or falls, made detours necessary, the fence always skirted around to the outside.

Farley got back in the jeep. “Might as well finish,” he said, and drove along the fence on the crest, then started the descent down a rocky incline, bumping and lurching to the two-track ranch road and the first gate. He drove fast, but with care and skill; turned around at the second gate and made his way forward, as Victoria had done.

“Probably stopped along in here,” he said. “First curve out of sight of the road.” The gorge was nearby, and there should have been a hill to the right, but the hill was nothing less than another steep cliff. Farley studied it a moment, motioned to Sam, and started to walk. Unerringly he turned and twisted and took them upward. They reached the top with little trouble.

“She could have done it,” Sam said, looking down at the valley again, across it to where they had been a short time before. He looked about until he saw the boulders she had mentioned, where she had sat down. They started toward them. They were on the ridge of an upthrust, picking their way over the weathered edges of crazily tilted basalt, which would remain when everything about it was turned to dust. In some places there was less than a foot of space between a sheer dropoff on one side and a slope almost that steep on the other.

“Her guardian angel sure was with her,” Farley said as they drew near the boulders. One of the mammoth rocks was balanced on the edge of the crest.

“I don’t believe any of this,” Sam said angrily. He stopped. Ahead of them, lodged in a crevice, something gleamed in the sunlight. Farley took several cautious steps and picked it up. He handed it to Sam, a single key. Without comparing it, Sam knew it was a key to his camper.

They made their way among the boulders, through the only possible passage, and came out on top of the ridge that now widened for several hundred feet. At the edge of it Sam could look down over the gorge; he could see the ranch road, and between him and the road there was a small sunken area, the sheltered spot where “Reuben” had taken Victoria. There was no sign of a campfire ever having been there. No sign of a horse, a dog, a camp of any sort. Silently the two men walked back to the road and the jeep.

Farley did not turn on the ignition immediately. “That was in April, months ago. Why are you checking on it now?”

Sam looked at the gorge wall, imagined a river roaring below. “Mimi, the girl who was going to drive up with Victoria, came to see me last week. She and Victoria were friends, but Victoria dropped her too. Mimi thought something happened out here between Victoria and me, that I raped her, or tortured her, or something. She told me Victoria is sick, really sick, in analysis, maybe even suicidal. Whatever is wrong with her is serious and it started here.”

“You
have
seen her?”

“Yeah. For half a minute maybe. She wanted to see me like a rabbit wants to see a bobcat. Wouldn’t talk, had to run, too busy to chat.” He scowled, remembering the pallor that had blanched her face when she saw him. “She looked like hell.”

“So you want to get her back out here to find out what she saw.

Sam grunted. After a moment he said, “I don’t know what I want to do. I have to do something. I just had to check for myself, see if there’s any way it could have been like she said.”

Farley put the key in the ignition. Without looking at Sam he said, “She could have gone back east, or to Texas, but she didn’t. She could have taken an overdose, slashed her wrists, gone off the bridge. She could have really hidden, but she kept in touch with the friend who could get to you. She wants you to help her. And you owe it to her for losing your temper because she had the vision you’ve spent so many years chasing.” He turned the key and started to drive before Sam could answer.

That night Sam said he would try to get Victoria to come back, and Farley said he would visit his parents in Bend to see if there was anything his father could or would tell him about the fenced-off acres.

Sam walked. If you really wanted to find a god, he thought, this was where to look. Such absolute emptiness could be relieved only by an absolute presence. Men always had gone to a mountaintop or to the desert, in search of God. Not God, he thought angrily, peace, acceptance, a reason, he did not know what it was he sought on the desert. He would be willing to settle for so little, no more than a clue or a hint that there was more than he had been able to find. After he had quit his job with GoMar, he had tried drugs for almost two years. Drugs and a personal teacher of the way, and both had failed. He had found only other pieces of himself. He had turned to asceticism and study, had become a jeweler. He had fasted, had lived a hermit’s life for a year, had read nothing, denied himself music, the radio, had worked, walked, waited. And waited still.

He was out of sight of the ranch buildings, the spacious house with old oaks and young poplars sheltering it; the big barns, the small bungalows some of the hands lived in, the bunk house, machine shops… You stepped over a rise and the desert swallowed it all, just as it swallowed all sound, and existed in a deep silence, broken only by the voices of those few animals that had accepted its terms and asked for nothing but life.

And just having life was not enough.

He waited across the street from her apartment until she entered and, after ten minutes, followed her inside. When she opened her door and saw him, she hesitated, then with obvious reluctance released the chain to admit him.

“Hello, Sam.” She walked away from him and stood at the window looking out.

He remained width of the room between them. He was by the door, the width of the room between them. He was three months too late. In those months she had turned into a stranger.

When they returned to San Francisco in the spring, he had taken her bags inside for her, and then left. She had not invited him to stay, and he had not sat down as he usually did. “I’ll call you,” he had said.

But he had let the days slide by, pretending to himself that he was too busy sorting the material they had brought back, too busy with an order from a small elite store in Palm Beach, too busy, too busy. Every time he thought of calling, he felt an uprush of guilt and anger. Finally, filled with a senseless indignation, as if she were forcing him to do something distasteful, he dialed her number, only to get a recording that said her number was no longer in service. Furiously he called her office; she had quit, and left no forwarding address.

Relief replaced the anger. He was free; he no longer had to think about her and whatever had happened to her out on the desert. He could get on with his own life, continue his own search. But he could not banish her from his mind, and worse, his thoughts of her were colored with a constant dull resentment that marred his memories of the good times they had had, that quieted his sexual desire for her, that distorted her honesty and humor and made her seem in retrospect scheming and even dull.

Over the months they had been separated the new image he constructed had gradually replaced the old, and this meeting was destroying that new image, leaving him nothing. He had to start over with her, falteringly, uncertainly, knowing that the real changes were not in her but in himself. There were intimate things to be said between them, but intimate things could not be said between strangers.

Everything Sam had planned to say was gone from his mind, and almost helplessly he started, “I treated you very badly. I’m sorry.” His words sounded stiff and phony, even to him. She didn’t move, and slowly Sam repeated his conversation with Farley, all of it, including Farley’s explanation of his rage. “It’s possible,” Sam said, then shook his head hard. “It’s true I
was
sore because you saw something I didn’t. I can’t explain that part. We both, Farley and I, want to find out what happened.”

“It’s true then!” Victoria said, facing him finally. She was shockingly pale.

Sam started to deny it, said instead, “I don’t know.”

“We have to go back there to find out, don’t we?” She crossed the room to him.

“You don’t have to now,” Sam said quickly. “I think it would be a mistake. Wait until you’re well.”

“Thursday,” she said. When Sam shook his head she added, “You know I won’t get well until this is over.”

Color had returned to her cheeks and she looked almost normal again, as she had always looked: quick, alert, handsome. And there was something else, he thought. Something unfamiliar, an intensity, or determination she had not shown before.

“Thursday,” Sam said reluctantly.

She had never been so talkative or said so little. Her new job, the people in the office, the changing landscape, a grade school teacher, sleeping in the parking lot, how easy driving the camper was…

“Mimi says you’re in analysis,” Sam interrupted her.

“Not now,” Victoria said easily. “She was more Freudian than the master. Treated my experience like a dream and gave sexual connotations to every bit of it. The thing in the valley became phallic, of course, so naturally I had to dread—it. Reuben was my father firmly forbidding my incestuous advances, and so on. I took it for several weeks and gave up on her. She needs help.”

Too easy, Sam realized. She was too deep inside; all this was a glib overlay she was hiding behind. After dinner, she took two pills.

“Something new?” Sam asked.

“Not really. I used them when Stuart and I were breaking up. They got me through then.”

“Bad dreams?”

“Not when I take these,” she said too gaily, holding up the bottle of pills. She had, changed into short pajamas; now she pulled a book from her bag and sat on her bed. “My system,” she said cheerfully, “is to take two, read, and in an hour if I’m still reading, take two more.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“At home I keep them in the bathroom. If I’m too sleepy to get up and get them, I don’t need them. Foolproof. Hasn’t failed me yet. Have you read this?” She handed him the book.

“Stop it, Victoria. What are you doing?”

She retrieved the book and opened it. “It’s pretty good. There’s a secondhand book store near the office…”

“Victoria, let me make love to you.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“We used to be good together.”

“Another time. I’m getting drowsy, floating almost. It’s like a nice not-too-high once it starts.”

“And you don’t dream? How about nightmares? You were having three or four a night last time I saw you. So bad you wouldn’t even wake up from them.”

She had become rigid as he spoke. She closed the book and let it drop to the floor, then swung her legs off the bed.

“What are you doing?” He felt the beginnings of a headache: guilt and shame for doing that to her, he knew.

“Water. More pills. Sometimes I don’t have to wait an hour to know.”

Presently she slept, deeply, like a person in a coma. She looked like a sick child with her brown hair neatly arranged, the covers straight, as if her mother or a nurse had only then finished preparing her for a visitor. He no longer desired her. That rush of passion had been so sudden and unexpected, he had been as surprised as she. He had not thought of her as a sexual partner for months. Their sex had been good, but only because each had known the other would make no further demands. It had been fun with her, he thought, again with surprise because he had forgotten. It had been clean with her, no hidden nuances to decipher; no flirtatious advance and retreat; no other boyfriends to parade before him hoping for a show of jealousy. If they existed she was reticent about them, as she was about everything personal. No involvement at all, that had been the secret of their success.

He had planned to surrender the camper to Mimi and Diego, and share his tent with Victoria, out of sight and sound of the others, with only the desert and the brilliant moon growing fatter each night. Even that, showing her the world he loved so much, would have been something freely given, freely taken, with no ties afterward. They both had understood that, had wanted it that way.

He turned off the lights but was a long time in failing asleep.