The rain poured gently but steadily on Henry’s head.
What’s your date of birth, Henry? the driver asked. He told them. Where do you live, Henry? Moab, Utah. Says here your address is P.O. Box 69, Moab, Utah; you live in a mailbox? No sir; I get my mail there. Where’s your car, Henry? He explained. All right, you came by bus. The driver returned his license. What are you doing here? Henry hesitated. I’m waiting to see a friend. Waiting to see a friend. Why here? Kind of wet, wouldn’t you say? She was gonna meet me here. She a little late? Again he hesitated. Henry Lightcap wore no wristwatch. Neither wristwatch nor underwear. I’m not sure, he said; I guess so. You guess so. Funny place to meet. Where’s she live? Sir? Your lady friend; where’s her house? Henry made a vague gesture up the street, pointing with thumb and chin. His hair and shirt were now soaked with rain. He shivered. The police sergeant opened his door, getting out. Turn around, he said to Henry. Sir? Turn your back to me; lean against the car; spread your legs. Henry did as ordered. The policeman searched him quickly, running his hands up and down Henry’s body from armpits to boots. He removed the jackknife from Henry’s pocket. You always carry a knife, Henry? Yes sir. Doesn’t everybody? But that was the wrong remark. He felt steel cuffs clamped on his wrists. Get in the car. What? Get in the car. The driver opened the rear door. Henry crouched low and eased himself into the back seat. At least he was out of the rain. The driver slammed the door shut. The door lacked an inside handle, as did the opposite door. Henry found himself separated from the two men in front by a black mesh of heavy-duty steel. He could hardly see their faces.
Now Henry, the driver said, where’s this lady friend live?
He hesitated again. Both of the cops looked like reasonable, intelligent men. Surely he could explain everything easily enough—but how?—maybe even get a free ride back to the bus station. Well, he said, she lives up the block. I think.
Up the block you think. The driver twisted in his seat, looking back at Henry. Both men watched him. Maybe I’d better explain your situation, Henry. There’s been a dozen rapes and robberies in this part of town in the last six months. The driver paused.
Henry said nothing.
That mean anything to you, Henry? Henry said, I never heard of a woman getting raped in broad daylight. On a public street. I have, the driver said. He looked at Henry. I’d like to believe your story, Henry. But it’s not a good one. Now show us where this friend lives or we’re taking you to city hall. What’s the charge? Oh we’ll hold you for a while, put you in the lineup, see what the victims have to say. We’ll think of something. Henry shivered. Guilt rose up to match the sick dread in his stomach. All right, the driver said, putting the car into drive and moving forward, I didn’t believe you anyhow.
Straight ahead, Henry said. What? Straight ahead. She lives in that place on the corner. Right or left? On the right. The car stopped before the Mellon residence. Light rain pattered on the roof of the car, on the sidewalk, on the trees. This it, Henry? He looked down at his lap, his groin—source of his troubles—shook his wet, shaggy hair, tried to raise his hands. He groaned. What’s that? Yes, he moaned. But for godsake…Both policemen got out of the car. The one with the shotgun opened the door by the sidewalk. Out of the car, he muttered. Move.
Henry bent low, crawled out, straightened up. He shuffled between the two policemen as they advanced through the open gate and up the flagstone walk toward the house—a gaunt soaked scare-crow between a pair of uniformed gladiators. As the three tramped up the steps of the porch he heard the music from inside the house—K. 376 still, andante movement—come to a sudden stop. A murmur of voices. Before the police sergeant could push the doorbell button the front door was opened from within. Opened wide.
Mrs. Mellon stood in the doorway. Behind her, near a baby grand piano, stood Claire with her violin and bow. At her side—chin on her shoulder—stood a fair young man of medium height (short) with pink cheeks and a blond mustache; he wore a blue blazer, a tie, a white shirt with button-down collar. His left arm lay about Claire’s slender waist, his small white graceful hand resting lightly but protectively, with possessive assurance, on the warm curve of her hip. He smiled, affecting disdainful amusement but staring all the same. Claire looked pale, beautiful, alarmed, amazed.
Politely the sergeant tipped his black-visored cap to the lady of the house. He tightened his grip on Henry Lightcap’s upper arm. Madame, he said, we found this—this fellow here—lurking under a tree down the street. He looked at Henry, then back at Mrs. Mellon. He claims he knows you. Care to identify him?
Mrs. Mellon looked at Henry, at the police sergeant, at the manacled prisoner and his keepers. A glitter appeared in her distinguished eyes. Her mouth formed a small satisfied smile, revealing in the chink between her lips the firm set of her whitened whetted central incisors, the points of her canines.
Claire took a deep breath.
VIII
They were married ten months later. The modest ceremony took place at Point Imperial on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, on a peninsula of limestone overlooking Marble Gorge, Saddle Mountain, Cape Solitude, the mouth of the Little Colorado River, the Vermillion Cliffs, the Echo Cliffs, Coconino County, the Navajo Reservation, the Painted Desert, Navajo Mountain, the San Francisco Peaks, one-sixth of Arizona and various other features of geological, historical, morphological and ethnographic interest. Eight thousand eight hundred and three feet above sea level. At evening, under the new moon.
Claire’s idea.
Presiding was an Episcopalian priest flown all the way from Denver, along with Mrs. Mellon and friend and friends of the bride, in a chartered Learjet. A solemn comely bearded man, Father Cheswick spoke with a slight lisp, concluding his every other sentence with the phrase et thetera or alternately and soo [sic] forth. He liked cigars with his champagne.
He was Mrs. Mellon’s idea.
The bride and groom were attended by two uniformed park rangers (one a female), three big ugly river guides from Lee’s Ferry and six members of the North Rim fire-fighting crew wearing their yellow hard hats and orange fire-resistant shirts. (Two females.) A pumper unit mounted on a government Dodge three-quarter-ton four-by-four stood by, available for action in case, as the boys said, the nuptial embraces became overheated.
Music for the occasion was supplied by Slim Randles and The Dusty Chaps, an amateur jug band of cooks, dishwashers and mule wranglers from the North Rim Lodge. The band performed a honky-tonk version of Wagner’s “Wedding March,” a medley of tunes by Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs, Johnny Paycheck, Marty Robbins, Willie Nelson, Ernest Tubb, Kinky Friedman, Hank Williams, Bob Wills (“still the King”) and Claude “Curly” Debussy (Claire de Lune).
Henry’s idea.
The groom wore formal attire, a traditional gangster suit of blue serge with mighty padded shoulders, rented for the occasion from McCabe’s Funeral Home, Kanab, Utah. Since the pants were six inches too short for his legs he tucked the cuffs into the top of his machine-tooled dude boots and looked fairly presentable.
The bride wore virgin white, a filmy diaphanous ankle-length multilayered froth of lace, gauze, vapor, satin and soo forth, with a coronet of silverleaf lupine, scarlet gilia and white campion at rest on the crown of her yellow hair. Like the groom (but as only he knew) she wore no undies. Excepting, in her case, the requested black lace garter high on the left thigh. She carried a bouquet of mountain wild flowers matching the coronet. When she tossed the bouquet to her maids an errant gust of wind carried it over the edge of the cliff. One of the river guides leaped after it, caught it in midair and disappeared. The band played on—Ernie Ford’s “Tennessee Waltz”—without missing a beat. Mrs. Mellon’s sister fainted. Father Cheswick looked concerned, hiked up his gown and pulled a sterling-silver flask from his hip pocket. The firefighters danced with the ladies from Denver. One of the rangers tossed a coil of purple Perlon line over the rimrock and hoisted up the gnarly, scratched but grinning river guide, the bride’s bouquet still clutched in
his bloody right hand.
The bride’s mother smiled at Henry when they danced but the glint in her eyes was not the light of love. Nor of charity.
The sun went down. The music got louder. Violet-green swallows jetted through the air. The music got faster. The bride and groom slipped off through the dusk to Henry’s pickup truck, fell into the cab and sank from view. Henry sat up a minute later with a moist nose and the torn garter clenched in his teeth. The bride rearranged her skirts, Henry stepped on the starter and nothing happened. Laughter burst from the nearby shrubbery. Henry rolled out cursing, waddled awkwardly to the front of his truck, uncinched the hood and looked inside. He reattached a battery cable, got back in the cab, started the engine, geared down and engaged clutch. Nothing happened. He gunned the motor to a furious roar—wheels spinning—but the truck did not move. He slid out, found the rear axle chained to a tree. More laughter. He unhooked the chain, returned to the wheel, shifted into low, raced the engine and popped the clutch. The rear wheels spun and fishtailed in the dirt, blasting the nearby scrub oak with a spray of heavy shot. Somebody yelled. The wheels dug in, found hard ground, the truck leaped forward like a prod-stung bull and vanished into the timber, dragging a ten-foot tail of beer cans.
They spent their wedding night in a grove of aspens a quarter mile from Henry’s fire lookout cabin. He had left his truck parked at the door. They made love immediately and then lay awake for a time, still connected, still one flesh, smiling up at the stars and listening to the uproar of gunfire, bongo drums, bugles, coyote howls and drunken song from the clearing around the cabin. Still in situ he felt himself swelling within her. She felt it too.
Henry—what’re you doing? Who, me? No, him. That hain’t me, Honeydew, that’s Gawd Hisself entering into you: all ten inches of sacred cock. Ten inches my foot, you blasphemer. It’s all I got, but there’s more to come; it’s the thought that counts. It’s the diameter that fulfills. You mean the circumference. Don’t be a pedant; if you’re the Holy Ghost I’m the Virgin Mary. Not now you’re not. Oh Henry, Henry, oh my God Henry I love you….
The leaves of the quaking aspens twinkled above them. A golden meteor soared eastward across the Pleiades. The new moon went down in the western sky and the sounds of the shivaree began to fade.
Nine thousand five hundred feet and ten inches above sea level.
IX
They spent the remainder of that summer at the fire lookout on North Rim. The regulation ninety days of passion came and passed and even so he continued to marvel in her, to dote upon her, to adore each detail of her flesh and hair and mind and character. They quarreled about nothing, now and then, when the isolation of the place cast a pall of melancholy over her spirit but resolved each quarrel in a warm solution of sexual salts, weeping, laughter, plenty of wine and long walks through the woods.
Mornings she worked on her Mozart sonatas and Bach partitas, sawing away on her fiddle inside the board-and batten-shack, sitting on a rickety chair before her music stand, turning pages. While Henry in his open-aired lookout ninety feet above closed his book or put down his binoculars and listened, found himself leaking tears over the perfection of Mozart and struck into awe by the vast echoing unanswerable vision of the grand Bach chaconne.
In the afternoon Claire straddled her ten-speed Peugeot and bicycled fourteen miles in a couple of hours to her evening job at the lodge, where she worked as hostess in the restaurant. Henry would meet her at the end of her shift, spend half her tips on drinks at the bar with buddies from the fire crew and their girlfriends. Half tipsy then they loaded her bike in his pickup—their bike, their pickup—and motored easily, idly through the woods and past the open meadows where deer grazed in the moonlight and up the dirt lane under the aspens to their cabin and tower on the highest point of the entire Kaibab Plateau. The air would be chill by then but a fire was set in the stove: Henry lit the fire and by its light undressed her (tired poor working girl) inch by inch and rolled her on her belly and putting his large hairy hands to practical use massaged her neck and ears, her shoulders, her shoulder blades and back, the small of the back above the twin dimples at the base of her spine, her rounded, full and lightly suntanned rump, her thighs calves ankles feet toes—and then, and then he made the return journey up her legs but always hesitated, paused near the midpoint of his pilgrimage to bite each plump buttock once, not too gently, and to roll her over again or perhaps to simply slide upon her as she was, belly down, and spread her legs with his knees, take the nape of her neck in his teeth, grasp her breasts in each hand, whisper sweet vile proposals in her ear before inserting himself to perform his duly obligated lawfully approved formally licensed divinely consecrated conjugal duty. She murmured in reaction, half asleep, then less asleep began to whimper like a child, like a girl, like a roused and dangerous woman until she had squeezed from that curious inner-space probe of his the last full measure of devotion. After which, sprawled and tangled limb on limb, they slept and snored innocent as babes in the wood. This sort of thing went on and on for weeks, months, years, shocking the great horned owls of the forest, the star-nosed moles beneath the cabin floor, the giant fur-winged Luna moths that gathered outside the window screens.
On rainy days he came down from his tower. If the air was cold and she wanted to continue practice he built a fire for her. This often led to the usual collusion:
Come on. I can’t. Come on; two more times; you can do it. Henry, I can’t. We’ll set a new world’s record. Most multiple multiple-orgasm by WASP wench in lookout cabin in Southwest USA since Frieda Von Richthofen Lawrence diddled Mabel Dodge Luhan in the men’s room in the Taos Inn. I’m tired; you’re disgusting. Think about what we’re doing; feel that? I feel it. Then come again. I can’t. You can.
She could. Afterward, in the rain, they wandered through the spruce and fir picking morels, puffballs, chanterelles, wild onions, wild currants and strawberries, lamb’s quarter, pokeweed greens. She believed in a diet of fruit and raw vegetables. He preferred pigmeat, poached venison, potatoes, gravy and beer. They compromised by trying everything, culinary and sexual, that seemed mutually appealing.
Mrs. Lightcap had no desire to return to Smith College in September. One year in that place, she explained, was enough. Henry felt grateful. The prospect of eight months in a town named Northampton in a state of New England had filled him with claustrophobic angst, though he’d kept mostly silent about it.
Thoreau liked it there, she said. Thoreau was a creepy little pederast. That’s a lie. He liked to take young boys on huckleberry parties; and I mean take. You have the lowest, filthiest mind; you’re worse than any pederast; Thoreau was a flutist and a wilderness lover; he should be a hero of yours. He did have an elegant prose style. He still does. But his poems are mediocre even for a Harvard man. That’s true; get out your flute, Henry. This one? That one.
He uncased his old beaten secondhand Haines. Claire placed on the music stand some Bach gigues, gavottes and bourrées which she had transcribed for him. He attempted the first.
Too many flats, he complained. I made it as simple as I could; anyhow the notes are not your problem. What’s my problem? You have a good tone; you have clear phrasing, decent timbre, adequate fingering; but—. Yes? This is Bach, not some Irish folk tune; not a cowboy song. What do you mean? I mean that it has to be played with metrical precision; you’re not counting, Henry; you don’t seem to have any sense of measure; how could you ever play with other musicians? Well, I never tried; I’m a soloist. But this is J. S. Bach, soloist or not. Well, I’m Henry H. Lightcap and I don’t care who knows it. Sweetheart, we’re aware of that. But you don’t have to be so aggressive about it. It suggests a certain quality about you which, well, is not your best.
Claire was smiling at him as she said it, her hand on his knee. He looked away, out the open doorway of the cabin, and felt, for a moment, a sickly sadness trickle through his nerves. He waited for his inward anger to subside and said, I know what you mean.
Of
course you do.
I’ve suffered from it all my life.
We all do. She watched him with her gray-blue eyes, her gaze level and sympathetic, her lips parted in a tentative smile.
What the French call ressentiment, he said. Is there such a word? A kind of sick resentment of anything—excellent. Beyond my reach. Superior. Incomprehensible. Like quadratic fucking equations. Fucking symbolic logic. Like fucking Benedict Spinoza. Like—many things.
Oh Henry….
But: I accept my limitations, he proclaimed. Proudly.
She smiled at that. By God you’d better.
And they collapsed together in a fit of laughter. To merge in heat.
Instead of New England they squandered the autumn in a tour of the hidden Southwest. He showed her his secret places, his treasured canyons, holy rivers, sacred mountains. Sleeping on a mattress in the bed of the pickup truck, they camped for a week by a cold bright creek in the San Miguel Mountains eating brook trout for breakfast, Claire’s stir-fried rice and vegetables for supper, each other for lunch. When the sun was shining. When a second motor vehicle came groaning up the dirt track and parked only half a mile below, Henry loaded his backpack with tent, fly rod, grub, sleepingbag etc.—“and soo forth,” as she said—and led her by deer path five miles farther and three thousand feet higher to a nameless small lake at timberline. He set up the tent and caught a mess of native browns. They stayed there for five days and on the fifth climbed the craggy peak above the lake, embraced in the wind at 14,211 feet above sea level, glissaded down a snowfield, inspected the ruins of an abandoned gold mine and returned to camp. Next morning they descended to the truck through the first blizzard of the mountain fall.
He took her next to the high desert, to the canyonlands of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Down in the canyons at the side of pools the leaves of the cottonwoods were beginning to change from acid-green to pale yellow. The shade beneath the trees had a greengold tone, reflected by the water. The canyon walls appeared rosy red at dawn, buff brown at noon, pink and lavender and purple through the continuum of evening and twilight. He parked the truck under the trees by a waterfall with plunge pool big enough for swimming. They played in the water nude as fish and made love in the hot sun on a limestone ledge slick as marble. He pointed out the ancient pictographs and petroglyphs on the rock wall above; she found new ones that he had overlooked. They filled their pockets with raisins and venison jerky and hiked for five miles up the canyon, wading the water and found more pictures on the canyon walls, a dwelling of mud and stone in an inaccessible alcove in the cliff and a natural arch sculptured by erosion through a sandstone fin. The fin was twenty feet wide, a hundred high. The moon of evening floated on the ellipsoid patch of sky inside the arch: like a blue eye with white iris and pupil mounted in the socket of a rose-colored skull. One mourning dove chanted in the distance.