The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  “A little Mozart for Sunday morning,” I said, then beat the hell out of the keys. Everyone left right away except Shelley. On the way out the lawyer picked his gold pen out of my pocket and gave me the envelope of money which I didn’t stop to count.

  That was that. We checked out of the hotel without saying much of anything. While she warmed up her car I cleaned all the wet snow off her windows, looking at her as she sat there shivering. She wasn’t built for winter. She almost ruined it by saying maybe we’d see each other again someday, but I said “I doubt it,” and off she drove.

  So there I stood in the Sunday snow with my toothbrush in my pocket wrapped up by Shelley in Kleenex. I felt the toothbrush and envelope of money and it was then I remembered my van was parked at the Ramada Inn up in Marquette. Worse things have happened, I thought. I’d just have to hitchhike up there. Just then a taxicab dropped off a lady at the hotel and I walked over. I asked the driver who was an old man how much was the eighty miles to Marquette, and he said things were slow so he’d make the drive for fifty bucks. I got in but before he’d start he wanted to see the color of my money just like Beatrice when I ordered a steak back in Chicago. I drew a hundred-dollar bill from the envelope and off we went. It was quite the shock when he asked me if I wasn’t B.D. who he saw fight a pulp cutter over in Iron Mountain twenty-five years ago. It wasn’t the biggest thing on earth but it made me feel life was holding together somehow.

  We were out on the edge of town when I had the idea to stop at the supermarket and pick up a bunch of chickens, also a six-pack for my trip, to drop off at Rose’s. Maybe she and her mom would cook Sunday dinner. I’d see if her boy Red might want to ride up to Marquette since he probably had never been in a taxi before. And that’s what I did. A pinch and a “suit yourself” wasn’t much to go on but it didn’t hurt to try.

  Sunset Limited

  I

  IN THE AFTERLIGHT of the moonset, at the time of false dawn, you could see two silhouettes standing there facing east, waiting for the train. They were a mother and a daughter, and the mother paced and shivered while the daughter stood still. It was mid-May but in the high desert of eastern Arizona such dawns can be coolish.

  “I don’t see why you’re wearing that coat. Who’s going to look at you in that coat?”

  “I don’t want anyone to look at me,” said the mother.

  “You should want someone to look at you. You said so yourself. You said so Tuesday when we did chores after dinner.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘I’m only forty-one. I wouldn’t mind going out with someone again.’ Or something like that.”

  “I must have been drinking.”

  “You only had two glasses of wine. Let’s sit in the truck and warm up.”

  “Okay, but no music. I can’t listen to music when I’m trying to think.”

  The silhouettes moved to a pickup, pausing to listen to the staccato yelping of a group of coyotes chasing a jackrabbit.

  “The rabbit’s getting away,” the daughter said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Granddad told me that when the yelping declines in frequency the rabbit is getting away. The coyotes are losing interest.”

  They got in the cab and for a brief moment we see their features, the daughter handsome Oriental and the mother fair-featured, dark blonde, if a bit weathered in an English tweed shooting jacket and jeans. The doors close and the interior lights go out. The daughter turns the key and for a few seconds we hear a snatch of “Brown-eyed Women and Red Grenadine” before the tape deck is clicked off and the heater comes on.

  “You like my music better than I did,” the mother says as if almost amused.

  “I’m tired of my own. You’re crazy to take the train. I could have driven you to Tucson.”

  “The train lets me think and I didn’t want you to miss school. How’s your friend Bob?”

  “He’s just another dickhead cowboy who’ll never make it out of eleventh grade.”

  “Such colorful language. You were in love with him last week.”

  Out the windshield the world was beginning to reveal itself, as if the darkness were sinking slowly into the desert floor, a landscape of cholla, saguaro, barrel cactus and greasewood out beyond the tiny wood-frame building that was the train station. You called ahead and the New Orleans-Los Angeles Sunset Limited would stop for you, and the twelve-hour ride was far more pleasant than a long drive to Tucson, than a flight to which was added the nightmare of LAX.

  “You think I made love to him?” the daughter teased.

  “You’d tell me if you wanted to,” the mother answered, refusing the bait.

  “It wasn’t pleasant enough to talk about. I should have saved myself for a Cambodian cook.”

  “Did you really?” The mother turns and puts her hand on her daughter’s on the steering wheel.

  “Of course not.” The daughter laughs. “He never says a thing he doesn’t rehearse. He’s a rerun.”

  Now they were silent, watching the distant headlight of the train, still miles away, bobbling like a mechanical Polyphemus. They get out of the truck and lean against the hood, an arm around each other. Now the daughter’s eyes are misty with anxiety as the train draws near. The mother kisses her cheek in concern.

  “I’ll only be gone a few days.” She tries to hold her daughter who struggles to withdraw.

  “I think you should let the son-of-a-bitch rot in prison. He’s not even better than nothing.”

  The daughter runs to the pickup, refusing to turn as her mother boards the train. The mother calls out from the platform but her voice is drowned and the train accelerates, looking somehow puny and despondent as it disappears into the immensity of the desert landscape.

  In the coach Gwen did not look directly at any of the dozen or so other people who were a mixture of tourists, day passengers on a shopping trip to Tucson and a few of the growing number of eccentrics who refuse to fly. She took the first available seat and put her garment bag beside her, closing her eyes and struggling to breathe deeply. She turned to the window so that no one could see and wept about what she could not change. Gwen was extraordinarily intelligent but today she felt she was growing older without quite knowing why. It seemed to her that she had learned about everything except actual life processes, and the fact that someone she had once loved was in prison and might very well die was a quantum leap into a world as uncontrollable as aging.

  Within an hour she had gathered herself back together enough to go to the dining car for breakfast. She was not by nature a self-doubter and she wondered at the mixture of mental and purely physiological causes that might occasion these steps into empty elevator shafts, uncapped wells, the quicksand near the most beautiful of burbling springs.

  At breakfast she was, due to crowding, seated across from another single, an elderly man who turned out to be a retired game biologist from Louisiana on his way to visit his married daughter in Oxnard, north of Los Angeles. He reminded Gwen of her father, who was very much an outdoor man, in that his three-piece traveling suit did not fit his character. He was thin, preternaturally weathered, and his neck arose out of a shirt at least two sizes too large. He stood and bowed slightly when Gwen was seated, introduced himself, then rather shyly stared down at his plate. Soon enough, as travelers will do, she lost her resolve toward silence and they began to talk, and their talk continued through breakfast and a gin rummy game that lasted until lunch.

  His name was Norbert Stuart but he preferred to be addressed by his last name. He was a kindly though expert interlocutor and his curiosity about the natural world extended, as it rarely does, into human affairs. He was traveling alone because his wife back in Shreveport raised bird dogs and there were three new litters to take care of, and besides, his wife didn’t care for his daughter’s husband who was part Mexican (“Mezcan” he pronounced it). The fact was his wife disapproved of the very idea of California and settled for his daughter’s annual Christmas tri
p back home. Gwen was a little startled to discover that Stuart knew her college friend Sam who studied coyotes in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. Gwen hadn’t seen Sam since college, almost twenty years now, but had read about him in the Sunday magazine section of the Denver Post.

  Gwen told Stuart everything important except why she was on the train. She was voluble in a way she couldn’t remember, and in a manner she couldn’t have been with someone her own age. She told him about the small family ranch between Mule Junction and Guthrie to which she had retreated after a brief, unhappy marriage to a university mathematician who now owned a computer business in Albuquerque; about the Cambodian girl they had adopted and she had raised to the current age of sixteen; about her love of flying and the old Cessna 172 she owned that was temporarily grounded in need of a valve job; of the Simmental-Charolais stud bull that was the ranch’s bread and butter; of her arthritic father who lived seventy miles away in Silver City because he needed dialysis twice a week, but always came to dinner on Sundays. She told him that her daughter, Sun by name, was precocious and had been recruited by colleges for early admission but had chosen to spend another year at home and graduate with her own class. Sun’s hobbies were botany, livestock and Indian history.

  “Maybe that’s because she’s Oriental and the Navajo and Apache are Athabascans who supposedly crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, then came on down here a thousand or so years ago,” Stuart suggested.

  “She’s too perverse for that. She prefers the Anasazi, Hopi, the Isletas and Pueblo people who came up from Mexico.”

  They broke off their card game after lunch so Stuart could have a nap. When Gwen returned to her seat she realized how much she wanted her life to be what she told Stuart it was. It was as if she had described the daytime but not the night. The small ranch was indeed lovely but the mortgage had been paid off by her mother who had moved back to Kansas City and remarried while Gwen was in college. There also was a modest annuity from Kansas City Power Company that, along with overgenerous child support payments from her ex-husband, allowed Gwen to stay on the ranch, though she did earn a third of their living by her wits, despite the ragged performance of the beef market. She didn’t tell Stuart that her father had always been a somewhat worthless, near parody of a cowboy, and that she herself had advised her mother to leave him well before Gwen went away to the University of Colorado. Not that Gwen didn’t love her father, and Sun very much loved her grandfather, just that he was never more than a dreamy affectionate cowboy with an emphasis on the “boy” who now lived in a rooming house in Silver City with his cronies, and saw some of the same girlfriends he had had during his marriage.

  And this wasn’t even the true heart of the night games she neglected to describe to her new friend. They had adopted Sun when Gwen discovered she was barren due to a neglected ovarian infection she’d picked up during her year in prison. Her college lover Ted, whose nickname was Zip, had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the world’s injustices, and the nearest one at hand in Boulder at the time was the Vietnam War. So Zip and Gwen and the three others, Billy, Patricia and Sam—together they felt they comprised a pacifist Wild Bunch—gathered up a gallon of blood from a slaughterhouse, and a gallon of glue from a hardware store, and vandalized the local draft board office. The town was fairly liberal but the Circuit Court judge was a western conservative. Everyone’s heart was broken at the sentencing, especially the parents who missed the drama and footed the legal bills.

  But the heart of the darker side was that Zip had turned up on the ranch a few months ago in February looking for sanctuary. They had spent an unhappy month together in Denver after the year in prison and his appearance that blustery winter night was their first contact in twenty years. Sun had answered the door followed by their Labrador retriever who never barked because no one ever came down the road who wasn’t welcome. That night the dog barked and Sun called out “Mom.” Later, Sun, who was an aficionado of horror movies, said she was sure Zip was one of the “living dead.” When Gwen had reached the door Zip asked if he was welcome and she nodded, then he turned and waved to a black car which drove away, fishtailing at top speed out the snowy driveway.

  It took a full six weeks into early spring to make Zip well enough to leave, and then only with the considerable aid of a leftist general practitioner from Silver City, a divorced ex-boyfriend of Gwen’s. Zip would only say that he had spent the past few years in Central America and any additional information might incriminate her for harboring a fugitive. He had two kinds of malaria, amoebic dysentery, the remnants of bilharzia (from Africa) and several hopeless blood parasites. He never stopped eating, using the phone behind closed doors and lecturing in general until only the Labrador would listen. When he became ambulatory he was worthless at chores.

  Sun was fascinated with Zip until an angry exchange over dinner on the matter of Native Americans whom Zip described somewhat pompously as “arch-traditional religionists beyond help.” Sun said, “Oh, fuck you,” and went outside to ride her sorrel mare. Finally Gwen sold two steers and bought Zip an old Chevy. He left on an early April dawn for Mexico. Within a few days Gwen received a phone bill for over a thousand dollars and a visit from three men who said they were from the FBI, though she never asked to see the identification. She let them search Zip’s empty room and answered their questions because she simply didn’t care. She jokingly suggested that they pay the phone bill and they said they had a copy, which seemed to be missing the point as far as she was concerned.

  Another week later she received a letter (which had been previously opened) from Zip who was in a Mexican prison in Nogales, Sonora, down across the border. He had been “framed” and needed help. When Sun returned home from school that day she busied herself cleaning the remaining fingerprint powder from the walls and furniture in the guest room. Gwen announced she was flying down to Nogales the next day with their harmless smalltown family lawyer.

  “Mom, that guy’s the biggest asshole in the history of mankind. He doesn’t love you. You guys didn’t even sleep together.”

  “How do you know?” Gwen answered lamely.

  The day in Nogales had gone as badly as a day can go. The charges against Zip included the vague “inciting to riot” and the not so vague attempted murder of a Federale, the probable final sentence being in the range of fifty years. They were not allowed to see Zip himself, having insufficient money for a proper “gift.” The American consul was insulting, saying that it would have been a blessing to the world had Zip never been released from prison twenty years before. Gwen did not misunderstand the coldness in the consul’s eyes when he looked at her across the desk, shuffling a folder she knew held information on her past transgression.

  For a few days then, through her efforts, Zip’s arrest became a minor cause célèbre, with newspaper articles and a spot on NPR’s All Things Considered called “The Last Radical.” Then nothing. Gwen sat on the ranch within reach of the phone, waiting for a call from Billy, Patricia or Sam who must certainly have heard the news, but no call came. She waited a week, then called Amtrak.

  After his nap Stuart sought her out with his deck of cards. Sensing her change in mood he suggested they go up to the club car for a drink. As they made their way through two passenger cars Gwen shuddered thinking of her attempt to convince Sun that Zip wasn’t really all that bad but that his passion for justice made him a bit rough around the edges. Gwen had said that he was kind and quite sensitive, and had given his life and health to correct social and political ills throughout the world.

  “If he’s so sensitive why did he lecture me about a war that finally led to the death of my parents? I bet he never even asked who I was,” Sun had said.

  “Of course he did.” But he hadn’t, and he had also refused Gwen when she had lain down beside him, saying that he had given up sex. She wanted to say that she hadn’t but his utter coldness made her timid.

  “I can tell you’re a young lady on a mission. I wish I was your age
instead of seventy-three. Then I might be better at helping.” Stuart pretended to watch her stir her whiskey and water. He took his card out of a wallet and handed it to her. “I’m still not worthless. I used to be a game warden too, and that’s a rough business down in Louisiana. Call if you need me, you hear?”

  She cut the cards on the table and revealed an ace of spades. There was a small consolation in this absurdity and they both smiled. She was suddenly very happy she was spending time with this old man, and reflected that the final item that put her on the train had occurred barely twenty-four hours before. She was in a butcher shop in Silver City when a thin, dark young man she remembered seeing earlier on the street entered. He said “Gwen Simpson?” and she nodded. He handed her an envelope and hastily walked out. The note read, “I’ve discovered I’m not getting out of here alive and will be murdered at a time convenient to the U.S. and Mexican governments. My people are unwilling or unable to help me. I still have work to do. Please contact the bunch and see if they’ll help. Yrs., Zip.”

  As the afternoon waned Stuart and Gwen talked about mountain lions and friendship. Gwen and Sun had seen a mountain lion while riding their horses a half-dozen miles into the mountains up behind the ranch. She invited Stuart to stop by on his way home from Oxnard. He accepted with delight. He had graduated from Auburn, the class of 1935, and still went duck hunting with three of his remaining classmates who were friends.

  “You are capable of making and being friends at that time in a way that you never are again,” he said.