At the Jim Bridger: Stories (3 page)

Edison was a light at the parties, sharing recipes and inside information on the children. There was always someone at his right hand talking, a man or a woman; he was open now yet still exotic. His difference was clear: he was the only man still not settled, the only man still
becoming
, unknown, and it gave him an allure that Leslie felt, and she watched him the way you watch the beast in a fairy tale, to see if it is really something very good in other clothing. Certainly, the parties were less of a strain for her now, not having to worry about Edison’s oddness, his potential for gaffs, but his new state strained everything else.

By August the women’s familiarity with Edison was apparent. At the cookouts, they spoke in a kind of shorthand, and others had to ask them to back up, explain, if they were to understand at all. Janny Hanover let her hand drift to Edison’s shoulder as they talked. Paula Plum began using certain words she’d learned from him:
vector,, valence, viable.
Melissa Reed returned from a week-long trip (supposedly to see her parents in Boulder) with four new swimsuits and a remarkable bustline.

Then suddenly it was Labor Day, an afternoon no different from the hundred before it, but as Edison swept the pool patio and washed the deck chairs and cleaned the grill, he knew summer was, in some way, over. But he wanted the exercise there in his yard, the broom, the hose, the bucket of suds, the sun a steady pressure, and as he wiped the tables and squared the furniture, he thought, No wonder Scott and Dan and Allen like this. The pool was clean, a diamond blue, and there wasn’t a crumb on the deck. Edison wandered around another half hour and then he put his tools away with great care.

That evening the women did a slow dance around him. He felt it as confused push and pull; he watched the children in the pool, their groupings and regroupings, and then he’d have a new cold beer in his hand, talking again to Scott Plum about chlorine. He sat in the circle of his friends on folding chairs in the reflected swimming pool light, with Paula or Janny right behind him, hip against his shoulder, and he held everyone’s attention now, describing with his hands out in the air a game he’d designed to let the children choose who got to ride in the front seat. “It’s called First Thumb,” he said, lifting his thumbs from each fist; one, then the other. Edison named the different children and how they played the game, and who had gotten to sit in the front seat today and how. His hands worked liked two puppets. The women laughed, the men smiled, and Janny pulled Edison’s empty beer bottle out of his hands and replaced it with a full one.

“You’re too much,” Dan Hanover said. “This is a hell of a summer for you. I’ll be glad when you get this spec project done and get over and give us a hand in applications.” He leaned forward and made his hands into a ring, fingertip to fingertip. “We’ve got engine housings—”

“Not just the housings, the whole acceptor,” Allen Reed interrupted. “And the radial displacement and timing has a huge window, anything we want. We’ve got carte blanche, Ed.”

“Fund
ing! You’d be good on this team,” Dan Hanover said.

“Solve,” Allen Reed said, tapping Edison’s beer bottle with his own, “for X.”

Wrapped in a towel like a little chieftan, Toby waddled up and leaned between his father’s legs for a moment, his wet hair sweet on Edison’s face. Then he called his sister’s name suddenly and ran back in to play.

“Right.” Edison did not know what to say. He picked up Toby’s wet towel in both hands and looked at the men.

Later, as the party was breaking up and the friends clustered at the gate, Dan Hanover said, “It’s a relief to have you joining the real world,” and Allen Reed clamped his arm around Edison and said, “It’s been a good run. You’re a hell of a guy.”

Melissa Reed took his upper arm against her new bosom and said, “Don’t listen to him, Edison. He says that because you remind him of what he was like ten years ago.” She squeezed Edison’s arm and kissed him on the lips, but his face had fallen.

That night after everyone had left, Edison was agitated and distracted while they cleaned up. He shadowed Leslie around the deck and through the house and at some point he dumped a load of towels in the laundry room and continued on into his study. After Leslie had cleared the patio, blown out all the candle-lanterns, and squared the kitchen away, she found Edison at his desk. She stood m the doorway for a minute, but he was rapt on his calculations.

He was there through the night, working, as he was in the morning and all the long afternoon. He accepted a tuna sandwich about midday. She found him asleep at five
P.M
., his face on the large sheet of paper surrounded by his animated figurings and the nubs of six pencils.

She helped him into bed, where he woke at midnight with a tiny start that opened Leslie’s eyes. “Greetings,” she said.

His voice was rocky and uneven. “I went back in. I walked all the way over the low hills, and I climbed up and back over and into the woods—I found the same woods—and I gathered most of the little people. They’re like children, I mean, sometimes they follow, and so now I think I’m headed the right way.” He sighed heavily and she could hear the fatigue in his chest.

“Get some sleep.”

He was whispering. “I don’t have them all, and I see now that’s part of it; I’m not sure you ever get them all. There are mountains beyond these I didn’t even know about.”

Leslie lay still. He knew she was awake.

“But that’s another time. Now I can keep these guys together and come down. Do you see? I can wrap this up.” She was silent, so he added, “There weren’t any bears.”

“Stop,” she said quietly. “You don’t want that game.”

“It took all night, but I was able to find them because I knew you were waiting.” Leslie could hear the ghost of the old exhilaration in his voice.

“Edison,” she said, taking his hand. “I’m not there. You need to understand that I’m not at the silver bus anymore. I waited. I saw you give up. Why would I wait?”

“Where’d you go?” There were seconds between all the sentences. “Where are you?”

She spoke slowly. “I don’t know. I’m…It’s way north. I’m in town, living in a small town above the hardware store in an apartment.”

He rose to an elbow and she could feel him above her as he spoke. “What’s it like there? How far is it?”

“I just got here. No one knows me. It’s getting colder. I wear a coat when I walk to the library in the afternoons. I’ve got to get the kids in school.”

Edison lay back down and she heard the breath go out of him. “In town,” he said. “Are the leaves turning?”

“Listen.” Now she rolled and covered him, a knee over, her arm across his chest. “My landlord asked about you.”

“Who? He asked about me?”

“Where my husband was.” Leslie put her hand on his shoulder and pulled herself up to kiss him. Held it. “How long I’d be in town.”

“And you told him I was lost? He likes you.”

“He’s a nice man.” Leslie shifted up again and now spoke
looking down into his eyes. “He said no one could survive in those hills. Winter comes early. He admired you, your effort.” She kissed him. “But you weren’t the first person lost to the snow.”

“He’s been to your place?” Edison’s arms were up around her now, and she moved in concert with him.

“He’s the landlord.” She kissed him deeply, and her hands were moving. “He likes my coffee.”

“I always liked your coffee.” Edison shifted and pulled her nightshirt over her head, her sudden skin quickening the dark.

“Edison,” Leslie whispered. “You’re not a hell of a guy; you’re not like any of them. Don’t join the team.” She had been still while she spoke, and now she ran her hand up, finally stopping with her first finger on his nose. “Don’t solve for X. Just get all your little people to the bus and drive to town.” She pressed her forehead against his. “I left the keys.”

“I know where they are,” he said. His hand was at her face now, too, and then along her hip, the signal, and he turned them, rolled so that he looked down into her familiar eyes.

“Were you scared?” she said. “What was it like when it started to snow and you were still lost?”

“Everything went white. I wanted to see you again.” Every word was sounded against her skin, her hair. “It didn’t seem particularly cold, but the snowflakes, when they started, there were trillions.”

AT THE JIM BRIDGER

HE PARKED HIS TRUCK IN
the gravel in front of the Jim Bridger Lodge, and when he stepped out. into the chilly dark, the dog m the back of the rig next to his was a dog who knew him. A lot of the roughnecks had dogs; you saw them standing in the bed of the four-wheel-drive Fords. It was kind of an outfit: the mud-spattered vehicle, the gear in back, a dog. This was a brown and white Australian shepherd who stood and tagged Donner on the arm with his nose, and when the man turned, the dog eyed him and nodded, or so it seemed. What the dog had done is step up on the wheel well and put his head out to be stroked.

“Scout,” Donner said, and with a hand on the dog, he scanned the truck. Donner was four hundred miles from home. He knew the truck, too.

Donner had just come out of the mountains after a week fishing with a woman who was not his wife, and that woman now came around the front of Donner’s vehicle. He stopped her. She smiled and came into his arms thinking this was another of his little moments. He’d been talking about a cocktail and a steak at the Jim Bridger for days, building it up, playing the expert the way he did with everything. She was on his turf, and he tried to make each moment a ritual with all of his talking. He had more words than anyone she knew. Around the campfires at night, which he built with too much
care, he’d make soup and fry fish and offer her a little of the special brandy in a special glass, measured exactly, and he would talk about what night means and what this food before them would allow them to do and how odd it would be to sit in a chair in the Jim Bridger the night of their wacky end-of-season New Year’s Eve party and order the big T-bone steak and eat it with a baked potato, which he would also describe in detail.

It was September and they’d gone in twelve miles, backpacking from the trailhead at Valentine Lake. A quarter mile from his truck, he’d stopped and put a burlap bag of Pacifico bottles in the stream that fed Valentine. “We’ll be glad to see those on Friday,” he told her. “That is my favorite bag in the world; I’ve pulled it out of twenty creeks, and every time it was full of cold beer.”

And that is what they had done today in the late afternoon, their legs sore. They’d walked through the sunny pines for two hours, no speaking, and then he’d stopped and when she caught him, he knelt and pulled the dripping bag and its treasure into the sunlight. They sat on the bank and he opened the bottles with his knife. The cold brown bottles were slippery in their hands, the labels washed off, and they were like two people having their first beer on earth. She put her hand on the wet burlap. It was all as good as he’d said it would be.

They were both changed from the trip in ways they didn’t understand. He was fighting a kind of terror that had grown, and now as he ran his hand under Scout’s collar and scratched the animal, the feeling rose and tightened his throat.

“I know somebody in here,” he said to her.

“I know you do,” she said. “Happy New Year.” She kissed him. She had given herself over to him sometime at midweek and was not even fighting the love that had taken her.

“No,” he said, “really. I know this guy.” He indicated the big truck. “I know this dog, Scout.”

“Scout?” She’d heard about this dog.

“Right,” he said. “The dog from the story.”

She put both arms around him and asked, “Does this mean we don’t get our steak?”

With the euphoric bravado that had infected the whole adventure, he put his cold hand under her sweatshirt and pulled her up and kissed her in front of the dog. Then he took her hand and led her into the big log tavern he’d been talking about for five days. The two windows in front were lined with tiny celebration lights and foil letters read
Happy New Year!
The season always ended this weekend at the Jim Bridger: they pulled the dock up onto the shore of Long Pond behind the place and packed all the patio tables and chairs in a barn off to one side, and celebrated New Year’s Eve a hundred and twenty days early.

Inside there were two little rooms, the small barroom with eight stools and, past a kind of narrow passage, the dining room, which held a scattering of tables, each with a red checked tablecloth, just as he had told her. A dozen trophy heads protruded from the walls, twelve- and fourteen-point deer and over the fireplace a bull elk that would have gone a thousand pounds. There was no one in the bar, though there were oil-field and hunting jackets on every stool, and bottles and glasses standing all along the wooden surface, as if everyone had left suddenly mid-drink. Brenda Lee sang from the jukebox, “Fool Number One.” It was full of scratch friction as if coming across the decades to find the room. The dining hall, too, was empty, though there were steak dinners on two of the tables and coats on some of the chairs. Donner sat the woman at a table, and then he saw something through the big back windows. They were flocked
with white and gold spray and razored with a loopy script that read
Happy New Year!
Through the words Donner could see a group of people out on the wooden deck looking into Long Pond. “They’re all out back,” he said. “Some deal out back.”

Dormer had told the woman the second day of the trip that he had memorized her, her back, the backs of her knees, the scar on her shoulder, her navel, her nipples, how her hair grew, the way she looked immediately after stepping out of her clothes, the way she looked an hour later. But as they opened the plastic menus in the dark little room and he looked across at her beneficent smile, he didn’t even know who she was. This had all been accomplished on a rushing wave of what, adrenaline? Lust? Ego? Now that had collapsed and Donner felt ruined and hollow. He felt as if he’d used every gesture, every smile, and he knew that everything he did now was something borrowed.