Sorry I couldn’t make it to the Springs last week. Had a fight with my mother that day—she still wants me to go to Smith, just because she went there. What kind of logic is that? Then I found out there was no return train on the same day. It seemed better to forget the whole thing. Maybe some other time. I trust that you received my phone message in time. Do write to me now and then, when you feel like it. I love your letters. You are the most desperately romantic man I have ever known, and if I believed half of what you write I’d be a little worried about your mental health. (Just kidding, Henry.) I appreciate your feelings about me but—you must try to remember that I don’t feel ready to enter into a serious relationship—let alone an “affair”—with any man as of yet. Maybe next year. But you are the funniest one I know and really I do like you a lot. Best regards from your friend,
Claire
He studied and analyzed that letter for days trying to find solace in, its careless text. “Do write to me…” He liked that. But “now and then”? What good was that? “…When you feel like it”? A casual dismissal. But then she writes “I love your letters.” I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well—about a mile. Two miles. Am I indeed “desperately romantic”? Perhaps I frighten her with my ardor. Must cultivate an attitude of ironic nonchalance. Worries about my mental health. That’s all right, so do I. Perfectly reasonable. Appreciates my feelings but not ready for a serious relationship? What kind of ship does she want? She “likes me a lot.” Jejune phrase. No nourishment there. “Your friend…” Friend? She dares call herself my friend? After this?
He waited as long as he could before writing to her again. Kept her dangling in agonized suspense for five days—nearly a week. Then wrote her a jaunty note eleven pages long, full of lies. The principal lie was one of omission: he said nothing of his trip to Glenwood Springs. He wrote about the red sands of the desert, the pattern of tracks a dung beetle makes on a dune, the arcs of the wild ricegrass in the wind. He related his more symbolic dreams, hinting of erotic splendors. Described a flash flood pouring like gravy down a chasm in the cliffs. Etc. Inquired politely after the health of Mrs. Mellon, wishing in his heart the woman would get herself flattened by a steamroller while crossing the street to buy a quart of milk, leaving behind only a caricature of the female form stamped on a patch of asphalt paving. Then perhaps, bereft, Claire would come to him in the night, tears streaming down her lovely cheeks, seeking in his arms the warmth of human love. Et cetera.
While waiting for a response to his letter, Ranger Henry journeyed after duty hours to the town of Moab, where he consorted with such old friends as Felicia Hastings, Bliss Quickly and Candy Cotten. Good sweet ladies fresh from the battlefields of divorce and ruptured rapture, ready for fresh adventures.
But his mind was fixed on Claire Mellon. He waited and after two weeks, his letter still unanswered, he decided to give her a ring on the national telephone system. He stacked quarters dimes nickels on the shelf of the public phone in Woody’s Bar, dialed the operator and waited.
Your number, sir? The number I’m calling? The number you’re calling from. He read the number. And the number you wish to call? He gave that number. A pause. That will be two dollars and eighty-five cents, please. He deposited the coins. Thank you.
He waited, heard the phone begin to ring in the Grace T. Mellon residence. The phone rang and waited, rang and waited, one phone ringing in an empty home. No one answers, sir. Okay operator, I’ll try later. Thank you.
He hung up. He waited for his money to come jingling into the return slot. Nothing happened. He pushed the coin-return button. Nothing happened. He hammered on the phone with his fist. Useless. He poked his little finger up the slot, feeling for a wad of cotton. The cotton was there but when he removed it no money followed. He dialed the operator and got a busy signal. Tried again. Still busy. He bought another glass of beer at the bar and returned to the phone booth. It was occupied. He sat down nearby, staring at the man inside the booth, pointedly waiting. The man ignored him. Henry went outside to a public phone on the street, one of the new economical installations shielded from rain and wind by nothing but a little plastic hood. Yelping teenagers in eight-cylinder Camaros with four-barrel jets and overhead cams, gigantic trailer trucks hauling uranium ore to the mill, bearded bandits on snarling Kawasaki motorcycles—all raced by on the street, six feet from where he crouched with his head inside the tiny quasi phone booth designed evidently for midgets and Filipinos. After a while he obtained an operator’s ear—one finger in his own—and explained his problem. The unrefunded two dollars and eighty-five cents. She needed to know both numbers again, the one called, the one called from. He asked her to hold on, dashed into the bar. The inside booth was still occupied. He tried to peer through the glass to read the number on the telephone. Could not be done. The man inside the booth scowled at Henry, revealing yellow fangs and molars full of lead. Henry backed off, ordered another beer, waited. Finally he got a second chance at the inside booth. He dialed the operator again and asked for the return of his two dollars and eighty-five cents. The operator asked for Henry’s name and address.
Address? he said. I’m in Woody’s Bar.
We’ll have to mail you the money, she explained.
He asked her, in that case, to give him credit and he would simply repeat the call to Denver. Do you have a Mountain Bell credit card? No I do not have a Mountain Bell credit card, that’s not what I meant, he explained, what I meant was that you give me credit for the money that this telephone—this goddamned telephone machine right here in Woody’s Bar—stole from me about fifteen minutes ago. Sorry, sir, she explained, no credit calls without a credit card. Then all right, mail me the fucking goddamned money. It’s a violation of federal law to use obscenities over the telephone, the operator said.
Listen, ma’am, Henry said, you take that two dollars and eighty-five cents and you go to the bank and get it changed for two hundred and eighty-five bright new copper pennies and you go home with them pennies and get a wooden mallet and you lie down on the floor and wrap your legs around your ears—are you listening to me, operator?
All he heard was a busy signal. The FBI would be flying into Moab within hours armed with arrest warrants and automatic shotguns. He dialed the operator, tied a bandana over his mouth and said that he wished to place a collect call. By and by the Mellon telephone began to ring. Presently he heard the drawling voice of Mother Mellon:
Ah yes…?
Collect call from Robert Redford for Claire Mullins, the operator said, will you accept?
The name is Mellon. Not Mullins.
For Claire Mellon. Will you accept?
From whom, please?
From Robert Redford.
I’m afraid we don’t know any Mr. Redford.
The actor, Henry burst in, Robert Redford the noted film actor. It’s about Miss Mellon’s audition. We have some good news for her. She—
Will you accept the call, please? the operator repeated.
No, said Mrs. Mellon. Decidedly not.
Henry brooded over his beer. He found a dime in his pocket and called Bliss Quickly. Later, near midnight, he drove the thirty miles of sand and stone, flushing nighthawks from the road, that led to his lonely hut among the erect and impotent phalli of the hoodoo desert.
He lit his Aladdin lamp and began a letter. “Dear darling Claire,” he wrote, “If I cannot see you again I will surely die….”
VII
Surely die? What a redundancy is death. He wrote that he would come to visit in early October, at the end of his working season at the park. She wrote back, after a time, that she was leaving for New England in early September. To a town called Northampton Mass. To a school named Smith, entering as a junior. Why? Because of its proximity to Boston, she said, and the world of music. She wished Henry the best of everything (except herself) and hoped that he would continue to “drop her a line” now and then when the “mood took him.” She planned to spend the following summer at Tanglewoo
d. Goodbye. Claire.
He patrolled his back roads and walked his foot trails. He searched for lost little boys, helped fear-frozen rock climbers down from cliffs and shepherded fat bull snakes and faded pygmy rattlesnakes out of the garbage dump. He listened to his old battery-powered Hallicrafter radio late at night, receiving strange signals from Quebec, Ciudad Juárez, Radio Havana, Lubbock Texas, and a police station in Ethel Oregon. Where the town-limit signs read ENTERING ETHEL.
Well then, he considered, if she was going to be that way he’d make a dash for Denver on his next two days off. Only 350 miles from Moab—an easy seven-hour drive. If his pickup would run. Since it was down he’d take the Greyhound, catch the eastbound at ten P.M., arrive in Denver at eight A.M., walk to Claire’s house, spend the day and evening with her, catch the two A.M. bus back to Junction, be home by suppertime. Simplicity enclosing felicitas. Embracing claritas. He hoped. He concluded, after further consideration, that his reentry into Denver had best be stealthy, unannounced. The surprise visit entailed severe risks but the more formal and courteous approach lent itself to a formal and courteous rejection. On one pretext or another she could make herself unavailable. The pattern was becoming plain, even to a fool as blinded by desire as Lightcap. As the moth is drawn to the candle he was determined to plunge into pain, to drown his anxiety, misery and uncertainty in despair. It seemed a reasonable, commonsensical solution.
Canvas satchel in hand, he boarded the bus. Old women with anxious eyes, grim faces, prim knees, filled the supervisory seats in front, assisting the driver in his duties. Henry stumbled to the rear, found adjoining vacant seats, staked his claim to both. He sat in the dark sipping from a square bottle of Jim Beam bourbon, eating peanuts from a sack.
The whiskey purled in his brain. The bus rolled softly eastward into the dark. He tried not to think of Claire by focusing his thoughts on Joy, on Jill, on Loralee, on Whatshername, on Candy, on Bliss. Useless.
He switched on the little overhead reading light, opened a book and began to read the Navajo Creation Myth, a guaranteed soporific.
The First World, Ni’hodilqil, was black as black wool. It had four corners and over these appeared four clouds. These four clouds contained within themselves the elements of the First World. They were a black cloud, a white cloud, a blue cloud and a red cloud….
He dozed. He read. He read and dozed. He dreamed a dream that meandered on in various directions but mostly four and involved a man disguised as a badger, a badger disguised as a woman, a woman disguised as a man and an ear of corn on the cob, actually White Shell Girl who becomes the Moon and Yellow Corn Boy who becomes the Sun but the entire scheme is wrecked when Coyote-Who-Was-Formed-In-Water steals a blue turquoise charm that belongs to Water Buffalo’s Babies which makes the Great Yei, Hasjelti, very angry….
He was awakened by lights in the bus station at Grand Junction, Colorado, and the hiss and grunt of air brakes. He got off the bus to pee, entered the men’s pissoir and read the wisdom on the wall:
Why dont Jesus walk on water anymore?
Because his feet leak.
(We need more Jews like Jesus.)
If all college girls was laid end to end—
I wouldn’t be surprized.
(All Honkies must die.)
The blue-and-silver bus rolled eastward into night. Henry drank his bourbon, emptied the bottle and slept. Uneasily. In fits. Dreaming bad, lengthy and complex dreams that faded, when he woke, back into the addled cells from which they’d come. Buses roused his latent claustrophobia. But he was a poor boy, couldn’t afford air flights or even Amtrak. He rode the bus and dreamed his suffocating dreams.
The red dawn found them grinding over Shrine Pass east of Vail, 11,050 feet above sea level. Blue snowfields on either side. Sick from the booze but too stubborn to puke it up, Henry steeled his stomach for grim gray grimy hours ahead. The bus rumbled down the grade, pistons braking against gravity, as they headed on for Dillon, Silver Plume, Lawson, Golden and Denver City. Henry sank into a queasy coma, one dead soldier upright between his thighs, and floated forth onto another lake of complicated nightmares.
He dreamed. He endured. He hoped. He groped toward consciousness out of the anesthesia of alcohol and discovered himself, Henry Lightcap, sitting on a stool in a steel stall with his pants down around his ankles. Canvas satchel on the cement deck. He read the writing on the inside of the stall door.
Here I sit all brokenhearted
Paid a nickel to shit and only farted
He washed his hangover face at the washbasin, shaved the blue stubble from his jaws, shampooed and combed his hair and put on once again his best and cleanest shirt. Feeling slightly better, roughly human, he found the bus station coffee shop and treated himself to a mug of steaming, translucent-black coffee and one stale but greasy doughnut.
Where are we? he asked the waitress.
God only knows, she said. More coffee?
Thanks.
You look awful, she added. She was a bigboned middleaged squareshouldered woman with plucked eyebrows and purple lips. A chin mole with bristles added the only decorative touch to her square and honest face. What’s wrong with you?
I’m in love, Henry explained. That explains it; you look like I do. I’m in love with you. You are sick. What’s your name? Read my tag; see?—June. What’s yours? Henry. Well Henry, if I was you I’d go find a nice park bench and get some sleep. Looks that bad, huh? You’ll get over it.
He left her a dollar tip and wandered outside into the gray and concrete boulevards of Denver. The brown air reeked with exhaust gases. Didn’t really know where he was. Went back into the bus depot, found a phonebook and looked for a map of the city.
The clock on the wall said nine-thirty. He checked his satchel in a locker and headed north past the U.S. mint and the state capitol, then east along Colfax Avenue toward the city park, the museums, the opera house, the prep schools, the elm-shaded streets of her neighborhood.
What exactly would he do when he arrived? How would she receive this unexpected pleasure? And suppose—suppose she were not even at home?
He stepped up the pace.
Mountain clouds hung above the Mile-Hi City, casting transient shadows across the glassy façades of The Bank of Denver, The Federal Savings & Trust, The All-America Building, The Brown Palace, The Hilton Tower. A light rain began to fall but that was all right with Henry, it added drama to his pain and cooled the air.
He stopped for a few minutes in the park to recomb his wet hair—he wore no hat today—and to rebrush his teeth at a drinking fountain. He was feeling better. The brisk walk had restored his confidence. He glanced at his visage in the window of a parked automobile and it seemed presentable. Well, passable. The rain stopped. He marched north again, the last mile beyond the music hall, and came to the wall on the corner, the gate, the handsome square and bourgeois house. Lilacs and hollyhocks in bloom.
Now what, Lightcap?
He tried the gate. It was unlocked. He opened it and followed the curving flagstone walk to the portico, climbed two broad stone steps and found himself standing before the door. He hesitated. He listened. He heard music within, the duet of piano and violin, a phrase broken off and repeated and broken again, followed by sweet laughter, the tenor tones of a man’s voice and more laughter. Unwelcome sounds to Henry’s ear. One hand on the bronze knocker, he still hesitated. He heard the music resume, violin and piano in sibilant concord and he recognized the piece: filthy Mozart, the Sonata in F Major, Köchel 376. Parlor music.
Rain began to fall again.
Who was the scoundrel in there with her? A lover—or only a friend? A friend or only a teacher? Or both? All three? He waited, stiff with anxiety, heart chilled with fear. Rainwater trickled from his hair, down his face and neck. He realized more fully than before the depth of his folly in coming here uninvited, unannounced. He was a fool. He was a lunatic. A pathetic fool, a pitiable lunatic.
The music continued, halted, repeated itself, we
nt on. Henry lowered the heavy knocker silently and stole away on tippytoe, down the walk, out the gate and around the corner before any eye detected him.
One block away he halted once more. In painful thought. He had to see her. That much was clear. He would not travel seven hundred miles by stinking Greyhound without even a glimpse of the girl he loved.
He returned to a point from which he could see the front of Claire’s home, the wall, the gate. Perhaps the man inside would soon leave. There were a number of cars parked along the street, all new, enamel gleaming under the renewed descent of rain. Perhaps one of them belonged to Claire’s visitor. No doubt he’d soon be departing.
Henry leaned against the trunk of an elm, turned up the collar of his shirt and lit a cigar, assuming a pose of casual and innocent introspection. An automobile passed, tires hissing on the wet asphalt. And then another. But no pedestrians, not one, appeared on the sidewalks. Henry began to feel conspicuous. He longed for the relative anonymity of hat and umbrella. He noticed curtains stirring in a front window of a nearby square three-storied house of brick, important-looking. He left his post under the leaky shelter of the tree and walked up the sidewalk past Claire’s house, on the opposite side of the street. He walked two blocks, glancing back from time to time, then returned and resumed his place under the dripping tree. He waited.
After a while a police car came around the corner and stopped beside the tree. The two men in blue stared at Henry; he stared at them. Neither got out of the car. The driver beckoned Henry close with two significant twitches of a thick forefinger. He wore three chevrons on his sleeve.
Yessir?
Let’s see some I.D. The policemen stared intently at Henry as he pulled out his wallet and fished his Utah driver’s license—illustrated—from its once-clear now-grizzled plastic case. He gave it to the driver. The driver studied it. His partner watched Henry, a short-barreled riot gun held upright between his knees.