I was a little distressed by my new found solitude and found an NPR station, then quickly turned it off when I heard the phrase “car bomb.” I looked over at the corner of the seat, now Marybelle’s empty nest and felt a sweet relief mixed with the sweat caused by the chilies in Sara’s tortilla and beans. Sara had looked wonderful leaning over the pool table with her butt arched up like a cat’s. Stop, I said to myself. Sara had spent half her junior year in Mexico and said she intended to return there after graduate school. When I asked “why?” she said you couldn’t extrapolate Mexico over a pool game in Malta, Montana, and that I should drive down there when I was in Arizona. She thought my project “insane” but “appealing” with the jigsaw puzzle as good a guide as any for a life.
My recriminations over my behavior with Marybelle weren’t quite strong enough to maintain. When some ethical node in my brain would say, “Shame on you” in my mom’s voice I would also hear my dad talking about his boyhood dog he referred to as Ralph the Brave. When his own father had shot a mid-sized bear caught in the act of eating a piglet Ralph dove into action and lost an ear which made him always look out of balance. Ralph would retrieve duck and grouse and keep raccoons out of the garden, find wounded deer, and by the time he died at fourteen, most of the dogs in the township looked like him. Ralph was pretty big but was too cagey to act big. He thought things over before he made his moves. I was never sure if dad was honest when he said Ralph climbed apple trees because he liked the best apples. He wouldn’t eat windfalls. Ralph had also caught a big spawning brown trout and saved my father from starvation when he was lost overnight in the woods. I was not one to doubt my father but I questioned how you could starve in one night. He said, “I don’t go by what’s supposed to be true but how I feel and I felt so hungry I could have eaten the ass out of a sow. I cooked that big fish and split it with Ralph who was proud to provide dinner. He fathered a litter by a little stray female that hid in a hole under the granary. One morning Ralph brought in a fawn he had killed and you should have seen the pups tear into it. Their cute little faces were red with blood.”
When I stopped for lunch in Browning on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation I recalled how much more jauntier and happier railroad workers seemed than farmers. On the way into town I had seen an Indian boy chasing a girl on a fat pony. He was a fast runner but he couldn’t keep up. I ate a delicious round piece of fry bread with beans for lunch. My eyes begun to tear up and I couldn’t quite place a reason for it. I’d like to cook a pot of beans but now I didn’t have a kitchen or a dog or a wife or a farm, for that matter. I suddenly felt like I had as a boy on my first descending elevator down in Grand Rapids. Who and where was the driver.
I was trying to corner my last few beans on the plate when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket.
“I need you,” she said.
“I’m a long walk to the west.” My tears had given me a frog in the throat.
“That’s not funny, Cliff. You can’t just abandon me in Malta.”
I turned the phone off so that its tiny screen went to sleep. I looked up at the round, brown waitress who was quizzical about my tears.
“My dog died,” I said.
“When my dog got shot for killing chickens I was about floored.” She gave me my check and patted my head. I was clearly just another American fool on the loose. I turned the cell phone back on. Marybelle might have invisible snakes in her hair but she was my only human contact in the great Northwest. The phone rang immediately.
“Never, never, never turn your phone off.”
“I must have pressed the wrong button.”
“You lying sack of shit. I need you. You get me off. Maybe it’s because I have unresolved issues with my dad and he’s not that much older than you.”
“Marybelle, is there nothing you won’t say?” My face was full of the blood of embarrassment.
“You never tried to cornhole me. Everyone else tries it and they get their faces slapped. You’re all in all pretty nice. A bit slow, but nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Later.”
She hung up and I pressed on West though in direct contrast to the improbable beauty of the south end of Glacier Park I entered a “woe is me” attitude. That’s what dad would say if he stubbed his toe, tangled his line while fly fishing, or come up short on beer money and mom wouldn’t give him any. “Woe is me.” He wasn’t much of a reader but his favorite character in all fiction was Eeyore in A.E. Milne. Once when I was a child and we were in the saloon for hamburgers after fishing dad had a pretty woman on each knee and said, “All I ever get is thistles.”
Now I wondered how he managed to think so many awful things were actually funny like the death of my brother in the ironical sea. Naturally he wept but insisted that those who love water should have the privilege of death in water. Myself, I was high and dry. Farmers always have a future which is their farmwork. In winter you’ve got to pitch hay to your cattle. You have to shake your cherry trees, you can’t let the fruit just rot. I saw the present vacuum of my future with more dread than living in a wind tunnel with Marybelle.
Still on Route 2 I entered the stretched chicken neck of northern Idaho. I dropped the Montana puzzle piece in the Kootenai River. Idaho herself (states are female) was red, it’s known as the Gem State, it’s motto is “Esta Perpetua,” her flower is the “Syringa” and the bird the mountain bluebird which I saw in a bush not ten feet away when I stopped to fish. I thought if I caught a fish I would enter a higher plane of existence. Fishing has always given me a dose of serenity and appears to work for me far better than the Valium and Zoloft Vivian takes for non-specific torments.
I tied on a fly known as the wooly bugger and caught an undersized rainbow. I anyway no longer owned a frying pan having sent my beloved old Wagner skillet to Robert who wanted it badly. I forgot my waders and couldn’t reach a riffle corner where I knew the bigger fish would be. A year ago one day I fished for fourteen hours to get over a quarrel Vivian and the visiting Robert were having over the book, The DaVinci Code. Robert loathed the book for aesthetic reasons and Vivian loved it because it showed Jesus was up to no good with Mary Magdalene just like other guys. Vivian was one of those women who think that men never stop silently howling for a piece of her tail. She even called Robert “a bitch.” I fled the house at dawn and went trout fishing.
I headed south near Bonner’s Ferry for Spokane, Washington. Idaho had started poorly and I didn’t have the wit or energy to improve it. A music announcer on NPR was introducing a French song and translated an expression, “All the mornings in the world leave without returning.” This gave me the sniffles, and I said to myself, “Cliff, you have to take a firm hold of yourself. Take a ten mile hike, something sensible. All your life now is new like a warm rain after a movie.”
WASHINGTON, NOT D.C.
In my love trance I have dropped the ball on renaming many of the states and birds. I’m diverted again by memories of teaching and how one student, the dimwitted son of a vicious social worker, was especially belligerent about there being a state of Washington and also Washington D.C. The father was uniquely a right wing social worker bent on denying the most impoverished applicants more than pennies for their diet of fried potatoes. In college when I looked at a book of Van Gogh reproductions his drawing “The Potato Eaters,” reminded me of our poorer neighborhoods when I was growing up. Their kids would go to school without socks in winter and ate bread and catsup sandwiches for lunch.
When I stopped for gas in Spokane I called my son Bob in San Francisco. I also noted that I had a message from Marybelle.
“Bob, you might want to know that Washington is known as the Evergreen State, and its state bird is the willow goldfinch, its flower the coast rhododendron, and the motto is ‘alki’ which means ‘By and By.’ I don’t get this part.”
“Dad, it’s eight in the MORNING.”
“You always were a pro sleeper, son.”
“You could try it. You’re not FEEDING
stock at dawn anymore.”
“I really miss the cattle but not as much as Lola.”
“Dad, whatever you WERE you aren’t anymore. I thought your road trip might help tell you that.”
“I was thrown off balance by this young woman. I mean she’s forty-three but that’s maybe too young for me.”
“Dad, even in my world you can’t SKIP two generations. I mean I’ve never been a chicken hawk.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind. Anyway, your Marybelle called me. She made a good case that you NEED professional help. When you get here in San Francisco you’re going to sit still and talk to an analyst friend of mine every single day.”
“How did she get your number?”
“Off your cell phone or you wrote it down and she saw it. What’s important is that she said that your free-floating anxiety is leaking out your pores. She said you often cry and refuse affection.”
“She wore my pecker to a frazzle. I had to buy steroid ointment.”
“Dad, there are dozens of effective lubricants on the market. Just BUY some old fashioned Cornhuskers.”
“I don’t need it anymore. I dropped her off in Malta, Montana, to be with her daughter and husband. I didn’t bother telling you that Marybelle was a world class fibber.”
“She didn’t mention she was married but that’s beside the point. And by the way mom wants you to talk to her. She’s on the outs with Fred. She says he’s a gold digger.”
“Your mother divorced me in February. I’m not about to talk to her. She took my home and my livelihood. I don’t care if that bitch drops dead.”
“Let it all out, dad. Give your feelings some OXYGEN.”
I turned off the phone so he couldn’t call back. I looked around the pumps at the gas station and wondered if I could work in one. My friend up near Pelston had offered me seven bucks an hour to work in his even though he owed us five grand but then maybe he had paid Vivian and she had pocketed the money without telling me.
I was headed west on 90 toward Seattle trying to figure out why there were these big round lumps out in the pastures. There were so many for so many miles that they had to be from geologic upheavals. This called to mind the idea that to live was to spend all day everyday walking across a freshly ploughed field. In short, lumpy. The trouble is that every single day you have to take your whole person along for the ride. There aren’t too many clear victories that I can remember. A few weeks before Vivian’s fateful meeting with Fred at the high school reunion on Mullet Lake I sat on the sofa with her trying to console another big butt depression. I made the obvious point that her butt wasn’t even in the top fifty percent up in our area. I had recently run a bull I had sold over near Gaylord and when I stopped at Burger King there was a long table of a dozen middle aged ladies all eating the same thing: two Whoppers, fries and a chocolate shake. The counter girl told me that they met every Tuesday to discuss our many “moral fiber issues.” Anyway, I tried to tell Vivian that scarcely anyone looks like the women in magazines, movies and television. Sitting there on the sofa, however, I realized my cause was lost. Vivian comes home all played out from her real estate profession saying her “guts are in a knot” from her work which isn’t helped by Pepsis and powdered do-nuts. At dinner she says it isn’t fair that I can eat like a “hog” and not gain weight because of farm work. I remind her that when Robert was young and we worked in our vegetable and flower gardens a couple of hours a day she didn’t gain any weight. She says, “Fuck you.” Tears fall. My special fried chicken gravy curdles. I recognize that I can’t compete with her magazines and her television, not to speak of the excitement of her job, and the conspiracy novels she reads. I’m too ordinary and slow in her speedy world. When I said about her favorite novels that there didn’t need to be a conspiracy, they own it all anyway, she said, what do you know of the world? Maybe she was right, but then on the evening news they talk faster and faster hoping that they’ll find something to say while I’m trapped back there inside Emerson’s “Essays.”
I was plumb tired by five in the afternoon, patting the seat beside me as if Lola or Marybelle were there. I stopped at Moose Lake Motel and they were all booked up except for a “Junior Suite” which had a balcony overlooking the lake. I stood there at the desk, my innards feeling quaky at the idea of spending a hundred twenty bucks for a night’s lodging but then doubted that my parents in the land of the dead would be aware of the transaction. I sat on the balcony with a medium-sized drink watching boats with trolling fishermen putt-putt back and forth across the lake. I was thinking that Viv would have enjoyed my luxury accommodations. There was even a small refrigerator, a comforting idea though I had nothing to put in it. I checked the cell phone and there were seven messages from Marybelle, the last three from Billings from which I decided she was flying back to Minneapolis to see her friend in distress.
I wanted the whiskey to settle me down before I actually listened to the messages. On the balcony I felt like a missile or rocket without ground control. Up to this point I hadn’t questioned the rightness of my trip but suddenly I wondered if I were truly suited for travel. Reality seemed to be crumbling and I was wise enough to understand that reality stayed the same so it was my mind that was crumbling. I wondered if I was coming down with one of those nervous breakdowns that seemed to hit Viv in the brainpan once a year. It was network news time but I stayed out on the balcony while thoughts putt-putted through my brain like the boats out on the lake. Early in our marriage we used to hold hands on the sofa while watching Walter Cronkite. Viv would sip at her butterscotch schnapps and say, “I wish Walter was my dad.” Viv’s real dad was all in all a complete asshole. When he died she didn’t shed a lot of tears. He was what you call a “blowhard,” a real Senator Snort.
Maybe we were just another couple who faded late in the game. I didn’t offer her a lot in my back to nature binge after I quit teaching. We English majors of a serious bent are susceptible to high ideals we paste on our lives like decals. When we got married she pretended as a farm girl she loved nature but in fact she couldn’t handle mosquitoes, horseflies, blackflies, spiders and snakes. The only thing she really liked about Lola was that Lola would kill and eat garter snakes in the yard. Lola asked for my attentive affection a half dozen times a day, especially to have her spine rubbed, also under her chin. Now on the balcony it occurred to me that perhaps people should also smooch that often. Was I designed to fly solo? Time would tell. Right now I felt like a defunct species, an old Studebaker sitting in the weeds.
I went down to the motel restaurant and ate two full orders of delicious halibut the motel owner had recently caught in Alaska. That brought up the problem of my terminal fear of flying and how on my so called tour of the states I’d have to leave out Alaska and Hawaii. When I reached San Francisco maybe I’d ask Robert to write up those states since he had been to both in his movie location work.
Having finished my second order of halibut I felt tears welling in my eyes at the memory of how much Lola loved the skin of fried fish. And like the Indian waitress the serving woman was concerned about my tears. And again I said that my dog died. She said that she had been married three times and wished that her dogs lived longer than her husbands. I began to wonder what a sixty year old lost dog would be like. The waitress patted my head and I felt drawn to her though she was heftier than Viv. It was doubtless her human touch.
I returned to my balcony perch with a small glass of whiskey which I finally decided not to drink. Liquor doesn’t work when you’re feeling more than a bit flighty. All of these assaults on my sense of reality seemed to be coming home to roost. I always thought I’d be married to Viv until I died and in the last seven months I hadn’t quite been able to rid myself of this thought.
To change my mental tune I played Marybelle’s messages which varied from the first, “Keep your phone handy you wicked asshole,” to the plaintive, “I need you” from the Billings airport, to the final one from Minneapolis when she said th
at after she helped her friend she expected me to prepay a ticket for her to San Francisco when I was visiting my son Robert. This latter bit boggled me. I didn’t think I wanted to see her again but then I didn’t exactly want to be alone either. Farming had been pretty much a solo act and in decades of solitary thinking I can’t say I came to any worthy conclusions.
I went to bed by ten and sure enough was wide awake at 4 a.m., early for chores if I had a barn. I headed west after figuring out my room coffee maker, the pouch for which was on the short end for coffee. Crossing the Columbia River at dawn made me feel grand as the imponderable landscape, reason enough for this long drive. While at breakfast in Kittitas I studied the map, then headed south toward Yakima. After the soul scorching traffic of Minneapolis I wanted to bypass both Seattle, and also Portland, Oregon.
OREGON
I was somewhat irked for unknown reasons to discover that the jigsaw map color for Oregon was purple. Why? Perhaps it was in the mind of the creator of the puzzle and forever lost to the rest of us. Finally it dawned on me that the color of the material in Martin’s casket was purple satin. I had been to the funerals of two friends about my age in the past year which certainly destroys your equilibrium. Martin taught history and hung in there until he had enough time in to retire two years ago. The kids always referred to him as Martin the Dork though he was somewhat revered as a tough teacher. He always wore brown, smoked rum soaked Crook cigars, and when we went fishing I had to bait his hook because he was squeamish about worms and minnows. He couldn’t stand our history after the Eisenhower presidency and refused to teach it. He was a resolute bachelor though he had an affair with a widow from Charlevoix, Patsy. That was my other funeral. Patsy died of ovarian cancer in January and Martin gassed himself in his garage on April Fool’s Day. I had thought he might choose suicide after Patsy died because he couldn’t function without her. Martin was from a working class family down in Flint and when he inherited a little money a few years back he and Patsy had toured battlefields in Europe. He took hundreds of photos that weren’t too interesting to me though I indulged him. It’s hard to stay interested in snapshots of Verdun and the Somme.