Memoir From Antproof Case (25 page)

In middle age, I did not understand that I was still young. I was seasoned by loss, war, the simple passage of time, and the new and vexing qualities of a body grown imperfect. But I had never had terrible pains in my legs. I had never worn an appliance of any sort—I thought appliances were things such as dishwashers and refrigerators, and only later did I discover that these were
major
appliances. I had never collapsed in a public place. I had never had a catheterization, and, what is more to the point, I had never had a Brazilian catheterization. I had a wife with the grace and physique of a professional dancer, the perpetual youth of a koala bear, naturally blazing blond hair, a doctorate in economics, and the wonderfully entrancing qualities that flowed from having several billion dollars. Life had a gravityless air. I was able still to stay up all night in sexual enthusiasm and not pay for it with a visit to the Mayo Clinic. I had not experienced the period in my fifties when, despite all my efforts, I began to resemble Konrad Adenauer, and I did not yet envy things like bats, squirrels, and rabbits for their youth and physical vitality.

In the midst of what I did not realize was a hot hardwood blaze with nary a sign of white ash, Constance left me. She just walked away. That wasn't very constant, was it, but what's in a name?

Now I have Marlise. Marlise is beautiful, she always was. And as she has aged, her beauty has not fled: unlike so many women in her cohort, she doesn't look like a turtle or a lichee nut. Her way of speaking is ever fascinating, in English and even in Portuguese. Still, Constance left me, and there is a hole in the air where she once used to be. She's gone.

Miss Mayevska is also gone, but though I still grieve for her and for the children she must have loved beyond all measure, especially in the last moments when they were taken from her, she and they are either clasped passionately to the heart of God, or there is no God.

As my union with Constance was broken by mortal will, thinking about her is possible without tears or theology, two things that I'm often too weak to endure, and for which I am saving all my real strengths for the last, when I hope to exit like a fighter pilot.

In May of 1950, Constance and I flew to Denver and then to Jackson Hole. There we bought two quarter horses, two pack horses, saddlery, harnesses, camping equipment, down jackets, oilskin coats, and Stetsons that saved us in the days of rain. We had a compass, maps, two lever-action rifles and a few boxes of ammunition, some wire, and a fence tool.

On the route we followed, most of the range was open, which is not to say that we did not have to cross fences, for we certainly did. The horses we rode at home could have taken three-strand wire fences in their sleep, but even had we had them and they were able to survive the rough, the pack horses would never have been able to follow.

The way to cross fences was to cut the two upper wires and step the horses over the one that remained. Then you used six inches to a foot of the wire you carried (depending on the tension of the wire you cut) to mend the damage, and you went on. You did it as carefully as you could, out of respect and courtesy, and as the toll for crossing land not your own. We took a little lesson in how to do it properly, and the cuts we left behind were put back together with many more than the required twists, which is more or less what I wanted to do with my life and what I have not been able to do, but what I may do yet.

We followed the Continental Divide as much as we could, though it is often only a chain of impassable ridges and summits. Still, plateaux flank either side of it and run sometimes even at the crest, and along their many miles you can ride at the top of the world, just about as far from cities and settlements as you can get, your only encounter being a few sheepmen and their startled flocks.

From the shepherds, with whom we spoke—not knowing Basque—in a mixture of French, Spanish, and Italian, we bought mutton. I have always had a taste for mutton, preferring it to lamb for many reasons, and up there it was cooked until nearly all the fat was gone, and smoked very heavily to preserve it without refrigeration, which is just the way I like it. It was our staple protein, which we used sparingly with several kinds of lentils, and rice. Other than that, we had a few bags of dried fruit, flour, sugar, dried soups, and a bottle of lime juice from which, like British seamen, we took daily sips.

I didn't think at the beginning of the trip or in planning it that I would shoot game. I have killed men, but in almost every case they were heavily armed and about to kill me. And although to me it appears to be morally reprehensible, I bow to the necessity of eating animals. Nonetheless, I don't like killing them. The evisceration, skinning, and removal of head and extremities, all of which can leave you covered with blood in nightmarish fashion, is not my cup of, well, tea.

But the horses forced me into a different frame of mind. They were very stupid about snakes, of which, in the seven hundred miles on our twisting backtracking route from Jackson to Denver, we encountered many. We surprised them sunning themselves on the far sides of rolling hillocks or coiled like buffalo offal baking on flat rocks Upon the snow.

The snakes, who had been sleeping at the switch, would make a big thing about being caught off guard—rattling, hissing, and posing like politicians. In a ceremony undoubtedly several million years old and inherited from their eohippine ancestors, the horses were never content with changing their path and leaving the danger behind. Instead, they went up on their hind legs, their flaming eyes riveted upon the disgusting adversary.

Physically, it made sense. A snake couldn't reach them if they were eight feet in the air, and dared not strike at their hind legs as long as the windmilling hooves and the head—shaking in negation, teeth exposed—remained cantilevered over the base. For the rider, however, it was hell.

I learned rather quickly to take my rifle from its scabbard, work the lever as I aimed, and blow the snake to oblivion. I could do this because the man at the store where we bought our equipment insisted that we take two boxes of bird shot. I had been fixed on long range, high velocity, Winchester loads, but he had directed my attention to snakes and birds.

The horses expected me to make the snakes as limp as an old couch in a dump, and as I did this it put me in the habit of killing. When eventually we ran out of mutton, I felled game birds. During our six weeks en route we ate sparingly and lost weight, but we ate well. Our hunger, primed sometimes for twenty hours or more, never fully satisfied, and driven by days of hard riding, was a far greater chef than any that Paris has ever produced.

In all that time, we never surfaced. It was a matter of honor. Never once did we sleep indoors or seek either town or restaurant. For a month and a half we had no newspapers, and it was quite a shock when we rode into Denver on the 26th of June, which was, I believe, a Monday, and saw huge headlines proclaiming that North Korea had invaded the South. We knew that some of our relatives and friends would be going to war, and that I would sit it out, being finally too old and not Wanting to push my geometrically extrapolated luck.

Depending upon trial and error as much as compass and map, heading for points that the eye found irresistibly beautiful rather than heeding the dangers and difficulties of rivers to be crossed and slopes too steep for horses, we went from Jackson through the Shoshone Forest and into the Wind Rivers, where we picked up the Continental Divide and tried to stay high in the cold. We left the Wind Rivers at South Pass and went into the Antelope Hills, which are not named that for nothing. Hundreds of racing antelope rocketed across the landscape like planes with wheels that barely touch the runway just before they are airborne.

We went shy of the Antelopes into the Red Desert, up to the Continental Divide again in the Sierra Madre Mountains, and then through an infinity of forests and meadows around Columbine, to the east of Steamboat Springs, through the Arapaho Forest, and down into Denver. Without knowing it, we had probably crossed and recrossed the Divide two dozen times.

We had become the readers of sun and shadow, content with watching the far-distant dappling of the plains below. With our sense of time elongated, our bodies hardened, our eyes sparkling, and our patience deepened, we lost ourselves and we were happy.

Constance said that the wind and sunburn were not good for her face, but never, never have I seen a woman as beautiful as she, with her hair sunbleached and disheveled, her cheeks reddened, and her eyes set from days of looking over great distances—to the horizon by day and the stars at night. This highlighted in her the quality that I love more than anything else in a woman: vision.

I have seen women play the role in films of the woman of the frontier, but although some with great gifts can do a passable job, none has ever held a candle to Constance after these weeks above ten thousand feet, in the sun and the wind, with not enough to eat. It was as if her womanhood had been polished by the sun.

Sometimes we rested for a few days by small lakes hidden in the mountains. Here, on the north side, in the middle of the day, on sun-warmed rocks sheltered from the wind, we made love in the open with no inhibition and the certainty that no one was within a hundred miles of us.

The weather was with us, clear skies and the stars unimpeded, an aerial traffic jam of pinwheels, flashes, and the apparent fluorescence of the Milky Way, perhaps the most mysterious and yet the most comforting thing that one can see. We became expert at navigation by the stars, at finding water by the complexion of the grasses, at sleeping on snowbanks, tending to injured horses, mending fences, and shooting birds as beautiful as startled angels.

I learned once again exactly what I loved, and I was happy. One night, in the south part of the Wind Rivers, on a rocky slab fifty times the size of Madison Square, when we were deep in the finest days of our lives, I proposed to Constance that we have a child, and she cried. That cold and hungry night of almost blinding stars, with the sound of white water never ceasing, was the highest that I had ever reached, and except for escaping my own death as my plane exploded, and except for the birth of Funio many years later, it was, I think, the moment for which I had been born.

Even though I did not know it at first, and suffered the illusion that all was perfect, from that night forward, I fell. Now, with some detachment, I do not regret it. One cannot stay very long in the holiest precincts, and should not expect to. And, upon reflection, my fall appears to me to have been not merely swift, but beautiful.

 

We left Denver for Chicago on the 28th of June at ten in the morning on one of the great transcontinental trains, which was full of children who had been born just before the war or during the fighting and were on their way to the summer camps of the East. The girls wore summer hats, dresses, and, sometimes, gloves. The boys were no less inconvenienced in dress shirts and, sometimes, ties, even though the air on the plains of Kansas was simple and hot. Despite their uncomfortable clothing and automatic politeness to adults (they treated anyone over five feet tall like a policeman), these children may have been the last generation with a life of its own—the last to know America as an infinity of regions and refuges hard to reach and safe to the touch, the last to understand the United States in the plural.

My heart swelled at the sight of these children, the girls in their white summer hats and the boys in bow-ties. It was an achingly pleasant feeling—paternal, maternal, parental—that I am afraid Constance did not share. I know this now, after having seen during the past thirty years various newspaper and magazine accounts of her marriages and misadventures, but I did not know it then, for I had read everything into her that I deeply wanted. Even she did not know at the time, enough to say or even to think privately, that she did not want children. She had yet to say to me, as she did in one of the last of her sentences that I was to hear, "The truth is, I prefer jazz to children," and she was not that fond of jazz.

All this began to find expression that morning when we boarded the train and I was still harvesting vast amounts of strength from the landscape. I was looking at the wheat, still green, outside the window, and at Constance. She was so lovely when her eyes fastened upon the horizon, and, having come down from the mountains and the thin air, we were elated by all the extra oxygen on the plain. I knew that this would carry us for a week, and that the month and a half in the saddle and in the wind could, if we let it, carry us for the rest of our lives.

It was the heart of the country, at the height of summer, in an age of innocence. I knew almost everything I know now, but it was pure and uncorrupted. If innocence sometimes has a bad name, it is only among those who do not or cannot remember purity.

I was deeply in love with Constance and taken up with the greater rhythms of life—the slow oscillations that make themselves felt through generations or longer and that you must have a span of some years even to comprehend. It was hot and bright, and the sound of wheels and rails stitched together the heat and the light. I was about to make love to Constance as I had never made love to anyone before, all the way from Kansas to Chicago and at the risk of twenty heart attacks.

Reaching across the gap of facing seats in our compartment, I took both her hands. She was surprised, but she lifted her arms. As she did so her neck and shoulders became irresistibly defined. I drew her to me and she made the beautiful adjustments that a woman makes, usually drawing in a breath, before you kiss her, speaking with her eyes and moving her lips almost as if to speak. Her hair was golden all about her neck. Her teeth were white as I have never seen since. She closed her eyes. I kissed her, and, as I began to go under, I thought that the next thing I would know as a mortal man would be the sudden change of sound as the train rolled into Union Station in Chicago and we rushed to pull on our dishevelled clothes.