She left things in the house where they were.
Ahead of him a Pepsi truck had driven off the airport road and blundered onto its side. All the Pepsi bottles had spilled on the ground and two Mexicans without shirts were standing in the field drinking Pepsis, other bottles already stuck in their pockets and down their pants. They were drinking fast, turning the bottles straight up in the air, though the truck was on fire and there was a chance it might explode. In the rearview he saw back toward town the red flasher on a police bus. Both Mexicans seemed to see the flasher at the same time and started running suddenly out into the muddy field that ended on the dry Atoyac riverbed. They ran like children, their arms thrown out wildly, disappearing abruptly into the chase of the river. He made a wide turnout to avoid the truck, a brand new cab-over Mercedes with PEPSI stenciled backward in red script across the blunt nose. When he got beyond the cab he could see in the mirror the driver inside, his face sprouting blood and jammed up into the windshield as if he had been trying to escape through the front of the truck when something came from behind full force and smacked him. Rae didn’t need to see that. It would make her think the wrong thing, like the American girls gone out of the van in the morning. Everything got harder.
The airport terminal was cheap tinted glass and concrete, and enclosed too little space. It gave you the feeling of having been half built, then abandoned, so that one end had needed to be blocked off.
Rae stood in the middle of the lobby, watching the soldiers. The other passengers had maneuvered themselves close to the baggage gate and were keeping their eyes on their business. The soldiers were holdovers from the interception, and were left around as cautions for new arrivals. They were combat-readies, and had done some shooting and looked serene.
“Does the army meet all the flights?” Rae said. The soldiers had begun leering at her.
“They think you’re hot stuff,” Quinn said, keeping his eye on the steel baggage doors. “Forty of them would be happy to show you a good time.”
She took his arm and hugged it, ignoring him. She had on a green leotard, black jeans, and tinted glasses. She looked like a low-budget tourist. “Are you still protecting the deer, Harry?” She smiled at him.
“I gave it up,” he said.
“You still let the marines cut your hair, though, don’t you?” She intended to be friendly now.
“I wanted you to recognize me,” he said.
“I’d always know you, Harry,” she said and looked back at the soldiers, holding his arm tighter. “Big smile. Ecstasy on your face.”
“Where’ve you got the money?” he said.
She pulled a strand of red hair away from her cheek. “In my Varig bag. I didn’t think to tape it to my thighs.”
A lot of money meant dope, and he wanted it brought in inconspicuous. No one checked luggage coming in. Coming in was easy. Getting out was the bitch.
He kept watching the gate. “My father died,” Rae said matter-of-factly.
“Did he know about this?” Quinn said.
She had stared at the soldiers a long time. “He thought it was droll. He thought the maladroit ought to be punished.” She looked up at him and smiled. “I’m a little stoned,” she said, “but I’m glad you quit wardening. It didn’t really suit you.”
Soldiers could smell dope in a shit house, and no one could stop them if they decided to search you, like the college girls out on the highway. It wasn’t smart. But she was freaked. “Are you holding?” he said, and took a look at the soldiers lining the exits.
She kept smiling. “I smoked a number on the plane,” she said. “My last. I’m quitting in your honor. It just didn’t seem right. Why don’t you tell me how Sonny is?”
He didn’t want to think about Sonny now. Sonny seemed a long way away. “He’s alive,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means he’s in el slammer. It’s not a hotel.”
“Is he getting out?” she asked calmly and looked at him. Her eyes were afraid.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said.
“I see,” she said and looked away.
Taxi drivers had begun combing the passengers for fares back to town. “Downtown” was all they could say, and it was making the passengers nervous. Anxiety was your usual accompaniment. You flowed down it or you flowed against it, but you didn’t float out of it. It was like the war, and you acclimated the same way, by never being out of it long enough to expect anything better. He felt like he’d made a good adjustment.
A jeep growled behind the accordion gate, and the steel doors suddenly banged up and the crowd moved in. Two fat Mexican boys began hurling bags through the opening. Across the plain of the Atoyac, the wrecked Pepsi truck was clearly visible in the distance. A long blanket of grey smoke had been persuaded back toward the city on the breeze that trailed the rain. Police flashers were swirling on the road.
“What’s that?” Rae said curiously. She stepped forward and started out through the open gate toward the truck. She took his arm and kept him from moving up into the crowd for the Varig bag.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Sure you do,” she said and smiled. “That’s exactly what you see. Nothing’s innocent to you.”
“I’m trying to lose that knack,” he said. “It’s in your honor.”
She gripped his arm tighter. The soldiers were pointing out toward the smoke. “It’s out of your control,” she said, staring transfixed. “It’s your instinct.”
The other passengers were yelling in a confused English-Spanish and pushing bags back through the crowd. The taxi drivers had formed a line preventing anyone from getting to the exits. They stood holding white cards that said TAXI, and were smiling. The Pepsi truck exploded suddenly, a dark smoke puff followed by a bright orange swell. The noise took a second to arrive, and arrived diminished. “What’s the matter with this place?” Rae said.
“It’s full of Mexicans,” he said, easing her into the crowd toward the gate. “Don’t let it bother you.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I’m sorry I made you bankroll this. I didn’t know what else to do.” She glanced at the soldiers uncertainly. “I don’t know why I thought I had to do this.”
“Because you love me,” Quinn said, and put his arm around her.
“I guess that’s it,” she said. Her mouth was constricted. A short, fat Texas woman began giving her a deferential look. Rae pulled loose and let herself be pushed back through the pressing crowd, while Quinn moved toward the money.
Where the Pepsi truck was burning there were a lot of police. Three blue minibuses blocked one lane with flashers popping, and several plainclothesmen with machine guns were marshaling cars onto the muddy shoulder. Stray officers were stopping vehicles and making drivers show papers. There was no reason for it, but there was nothing else for them to do. The driver was lying on his side on the pavement away from his truck, his face frozen and messed with blood. Some of the police were guarding him as if they thought he might be of some use later on. One of them was taking the driver’s picture with a Polaroid. Quinn had his tourist card out, but when he passed by the policeman directing traffic, the policeman called “quickly, quickly,” and waved him on.
“What’s that about?” Rae said. She had the blue Varig bag on the seat under her arm. He had made her count the money in the parking lot, where he could see it. She turned and looked back at the Pepsi truck.
“An accident.” He kept his eyes on the road.
“The man was dead there,” she said. “His eyes were open.” She didn’t seem surprised. He glanced in the rearview. Some of the police had started drinking Pepsis. “All I’ve seen now are soldiers and police and dead people,” Rae said. “Do you like it here?” She wasn’t going to make an issue of the driver. It was a gift.
“It wasn’t my first choice,” he said.
She turned back and faced front. “Where’m I staying?”
“In the Centro. I’ve
got you a room.” It was a lie that didn’t matter.
“Where are you?” she said, precisely.
He pointed up the Reforma Hill above the brown low profile of town. The white soffits of the bungalows shone above the palms of the nicer district nearer down the hill. Where the rain had cleaned the air, the bungalows seemed not far away. Behind them the rain glowered in the hills. A trace of the truck’s smoke had begun stringing out into the green atmosphere. “Straight up,” he said.
She took off her glasses, closed her eyes, then opened them widely at the mountains. “Is it pricey?”
“Nothing’s pricey,” he said.
“Then I’ll stay there,” she said.
“That might be weird,” he said. He wanted her to stay as hard as he could imagine wanting, but he didn’t want it taken for granted, and he didn’t want her left there if Deats showed.
“Have you got company?” she said.
“Not just now.”
“But you did have, though, right?” She looked over at him smiling.
“They think we’re married,” he said. “It makes better sense.”
“Isn’t that rich,” she said. “Why would they care?”
“Maybe they don’t,” Quinn said. “Maybe I made it up.”
“Fine,” she said, and looked away. “Then I’ll stay with you. I don’t like to see failure in your face. I’m sure the Mexicans don’t either. It’s such an unusual expression.”
10
WHEN HE WAS FIVE his father caught a sleeve accidentally in the belt mouth of a John Deere husker on a dairy farm outside Manistee, Michigan. And when the man who owned the farm, a Dutchman named Van’t Hul, noticed him from a long way off, pulled flush against the husker’s shiny green cowling waving his free arm in the air, he came running to see what was exciting. The hand was pulled in pieces when he got there to help, and most of it was stripped loose of the arm and the bones had jammed in the husker and shut down the works as truly as a piece of hickory. But when his father got out of the hospital, he set about to quit working farms and quit saving money for farmland and quit laying up surplus machines, and moved out of Manistee County altogether and into a rented stucco house with birch trees on Menominee Street in Traverse City and went to work for John Deere selling huskers with metal features across their conveyor mouths, using his new red stump for a selling aid. His father began to seem happier right away and laughed all the time and made jokes, and smoked big cigars and told his customers he enjoyed selling huskers more than he enjoyed working them, and that if he hadn’t lost his hand to one he would never have gotten the chance to get smart. Though for years after the accident his mother would wake up in the night and scream “hand! hand!” as loud as she could because she had a phantom dream where she saw it all happening again, even though she hadn’t seen it the first time. He could remember being nine and waking up at night after the screaming had stopped, hearing his father talking in the next room in a soft consoling voice, calming his wife back into sleep. And when Quinn was thirteen, his father told him, sitting in an ice hut in the middle of Traverse Bay, that sometimes while he soothed her it was everything he could do to keep himself from breaking out laughing, because he thought that if he hadn’t lost his hand and given up the idea of a farm, he’d have gone crazy in no time at all, and his wife would’ve left him as a failure, and his whole life and Quinn’s too would’ve been nothing but a misery from then on out.
In November, Quinn had begun running the deer tag stations on the county roads between East Jordan and Mancelona, and working nights in the D.N.R. Scout, sitting alert in the trees with the door open to the frozen air, waiting to see a seal beam snap on in the five breaks or in the old white pine slashes, and hear a poacher’s .22 crack in the cold, and start idling toward where the noise was, lights out. He liked that, the high-density sensation of solo work at night. It made you feel out of time and out of real space and located closer to yourself, as if located was the illusion, the thing he’d missed since he’d come back, the ultimate good luck.
Rae hadn’t liked things from the beginning. Quinn had bought a mobile home in Traverse City and moved it up onto a finished basement at the top of the bay where the birches and the alder woods plugged the wind. She hadn’t liked the trailer and hadn’t liked where it sat at the edge of a cutover orchard, too near the timber for light to stay in the trailer all day. She didn’t like Michigan. She told him it was too glacial and ground down and too bleak and uncharming to be a place where people lived. She said she liked the West, liked the mountains, liked looking up and down at things instead of across at them. She didn’t like the flathead bars and the no-menu cafés he took her to in Mancelona and Torch Lake and down in Traverse, wherever he was working. Sometimes in the bar light he’d see a face he knew, somebody from school, somebody he might talk to but didn’t get around to talking to somehow, and it made Rae mad. And late at night they’d go home in the Scout and she’d be mad.
He began to come home mornings in the first December they were in the trailer and find Rae out of the bed, see her through the window, standing in her yellow parka at the farthest verge of the orchard where it swelled up into the alders, looking down at the trailer and at him when he drove up as if it was a sight that kept appearing to her in a dream, but that she couldn’t believe really existed in her life and had to go out and stand in the clear cold and verify for herself every day. In a little while she would come inside where he was cooking eggs, standing at the stove in his undershirt and suspenders with all the lights on and the heat up in the kitchen and the grease thick in the air.
Once she said to him: “I never thought I’d live in a trailer in the woods with a game warden. You know that? It wasn’t what I had in mind for myself when I was twelve.”
He stooped and stared out the cold kitchen window at the fog running off the snow crust, swarming back through the bare white birch trunks into the denser timber. He liked the plain, compacted loneliness, the low almost pleasing pain of knowing nothing of any consequence was going bad for once. “I never thought I’d fly helicopters and pour shit on Chinamen either, but I did.”
“You wanted that, though, didn’t you?” she said.
“Sure.” He watched the eggs casually where they broke up in the grease, turning pale.
“Do you have bad dreams about that now?”
“No, I never do.” He thumbed down the heat and let the eggs rubber up and go hard.
“I just think, you know,” she said calmly, and waited a moment. “I mean, I just kick around in here.” She looked at him. She still had on her yellow parka, her hair tied back. “I thought you’d ease up. I thought it was because of the war, but that’s not right, is it?”
He slid the eggs onto his plate, carried the plate to the table, and set it down. “I could’ve told you that,” he said.
“Why didn’t you?” She smiled at him in wonderment.
“It didn’t occur to me, I guess,” he said.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Anything.” He began to eat his eggs.
“But can you please just tell me what it is you don’t like or do like. I feel by myself even when you are here anymore.”
He looked up at her across the table. “I don’t know what I can do about that,” he said. “You can be by yourself with me.”
“And is that good enough for you?” she said.
“I guess so,” he said.
“But what?”
“But nothing.” He put his fork down and wiped his mouth.
“Is that all?” she said.
“I’m alone most of the time,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Does that make you feel powerful? That’s what the Indians think. They think it protects them. Except you don’t need protecting, do you, Harry?”
“Everybody needs protecting,” he said.
“From what?”
“From everything they don’t know about.”
/> “But why do you want to call that being in love?” she said.
“I don’t know what else you call it.”
She stood up from the table. “We make a hell of a couple,” she said.
“Maybe I’m not a very nice person. You know?” He tried to catch her eye. “Maybe something ruined me.”
“I don’t know,” Rae said. “I don’t know what you are. But God knows I wouldn’t want to violate you.” She walked out of the room.
In the spring, Rae drove up to St. Ignace and came back with two registered Airedales she said she was going to breed because she’d always wanted a dog and now seemed like a good time. She hired a mason from town to lay a concrete slab twenty yards from the trailer. She had a chain-link fence built and a wood shelter put up and moved the dogs out of the basement where she had kept them and into the cage to wait for the female to come into heat while she read books about it.
In September, the female hadn’t come in, and Rae began sleeping late and driving nights up to Petoskey taking any kind of J.C. classes she could get. In October, he caught his first two months working days, but Rae wouldn’t come back from Petoskey sometimes until after two. The dogs would wake him up barking, and he could see the lights go on out in the enclosure, hear the gates clank, and hear her talking to the dogs in a sweet, coaxing voice. He would lie in the bed and sing a song, trying to stay awake until she came in, feeling like he missed her but that she was a long distance away, almost out of reach, so that when she came inside from the dogs he would always be asleep.
In late November, he went back working nights, and Rae began staying over in Petoskey, driving up on Tuesday and coming back Wednesday night, staying, she said, with a woman she met in her economic history class. They had stopped making love in the summer, after she got the dogs, and he had begun to feel as far back as then like he was running a skein out, but that he could stand it. He thought, sitting out in the frozen night in the Scout, drinking coffee and whisky out of a hot-flask and watching the empty ice huts speckling the bay in the winter moonlight, that the only dangerous lie to being in love was that it was permanent. And once you knew that, love didn’t make you miserable, and you were safe from falling off too deep. In the best world it was a losing proposition, but even that could be satisfactory if you didn’t insist on making up the loss, since you could erase yourself by mistake in the process. And he wanted to avoid that. He knew love’s limits, and that was the key to everything.