Bear and His Daughter (25 page)

Deerdrum itself had changed since Smart had last seen it. Once its fortunes waxed and waned with molybdenum production and the molybdenite mine outside of town. Now there was still some mining, but tourism was coming in. The hot springs along Antelope Creek had been dammed. Artists and soothsayers had moved out from the expanding university, and one of the town’s restored gingerbread brothels had become a bed-and-breakfast. There was a Days Inn and even a florist.

Smart would have much preferred to stay in town; it was a tight squeeze in the trailer with John and Rowan. On the other hand, she would be insulted and there would probably be drinking and it was a long dark way from the park back to Deerdrum. Just before the turnoff he stopped at a state store and bought two bottles of Rioja. Then he drove on and took the left that led west toward the lava beds.

He felt no excitement or anticipation as he approached the park, and this was a little surprising. On the way, in pursuit of his poem, he had managed to make himself forget the storms that raged about Rowan and the terrible energy between the two of them. Old regrets troubled him as he got farther from town and deeper into the volcanic desert around the Temple. A sense of excitement and dread. You do what you want in the end, he thought, forget what you need to forget. You follow your bliss, as the man said. More than anything he wanted another drink. One of the things he had almost forgotten was the pitiless loneliness of the place.

“Shit,” Rowan said when John met her in the yard of the trailer “he’s not here yet?”

John looked up the highway and shrugged. “Not yet.”

“I was really hoping he would be,” she said and began to pace back and forth in the yard. A faded striped sunshade protected part of the trailer yard, and even though the hot weather was over they had not yet taken it down.

“You were hoping but you were scared, right?” John asked.

“For God’s sake,” she said after she had paced outside for a few minutes, “I need a drink. How much wine did you buy?”

“Two of them big bottles. That’ll make one for each of you,” he said, “because I guess you know I’m not having any.”

“I’m gonna have some now.”

“You know,” John said, “could be hours before he gets here. You start drinking now, you’re like to be passed out by the time he shows up.”

“Ah,” she said, brushing past him toward the aluminum door “that’s where you’re wrong. I’m spinning my wheels. I sort of ate into that crank.”

In the kitchen, she took a bottle of the Georges Deboeuf out of a paper sack and commenced drawing the cork with a Swiss Army knife corkscrew. John watched from outside the open door.

“What did you do that for?”

“What did I do it for? Let’s see. Because Max was on my case because he thought my pants were too tight. Because I had a brace of pilgrims to instruct. Two braces actually.”

When she had opened the wine she took her guitar out of the broom closet, dusted it off with her uniform cuff and sat on a plastic kitchen chair to tune it.

“So you gave your park tours on crank?”

She put the instrument aside and poured some claret into a jaunty breakfast juice glass and sipped it delicately.

“Not for the first time, old sport.”

“I know it,” John said. He stepped up into the trailer went past her to the sofa and sat down wearily. “I suppose you made up a lot of hoodoo about Indian people. The way you do.”

“I don’t make things up,” she said. “I never make things up.”

“I’ve heard you. I wonder your nose don’t get long as Pinocchio’s out there sometimes.” He looked her up and down, lazy-eyed. “And Max is right about your pants.”

“I haven’t heard any complaints from the public. You complaining?”

“Not me. I think you look good.”

” Good ? How about beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful regardless,” John said. “Don’t hurt to be more modest. Your face is all red from that shit. And how about removing your weapon? Or are you going to have your supper that way?”

Rowan took a deep drink of wine and grimaced.

“Christ, it feels good though,” she said. She turned to him on the sofa and put his hand on the buckle of her gun belt.

” You gonna give him speed ?”

“Are you kidding? He’s an old doper from the great age of dope. He could do half a kilo while other people were doing a gram.”

John looked at the trailer deck for a moment, his fingers interlaced.

“I’m not comfortable,” he said, “when you been drinking and doing drugs. You know that, don’t you? When we’re intimate and you been drinking…”

Rowan picked up the guitar and began to sing: “When we’re intimate, and I’ve been drinking, I get to thinking…”

“Oh shut up,” John said. “Don’t be so smart.”

“Smart’s my name, baby. Smart’s my nature.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” John said, “you’ve got in real trouble on that crank. I’ve seen you crazier than all get-out.”

Rowan nodded. “You can never tell how strong it is or what’s in it,” she agreed, and strummed a few chords. “I guess that’s because it’s made by the Hell’s Angels and not the Red Cross.”

John picked up the afternoon paper and leafed through it.

“I don’t know, kid. I ain’t gonna have a good time tonight. I should go see my mother.” He put the paper aside and stood up. His younger brother was making trouble for the old lady, hanging with a gang. John’s mother had a drinking problem of her own. “Anyway, I want to buy a lottery ticket in town.”

“Oh God,” Rowan said, sounding truly frightened, “he’s coming! I think I see his car.”

Her friend looked stoically straight ahead.

“You gotta forget, Rowan. You have to realize what drunks are like. He won’t remember you that way. If he does … it’s not good.”

“What do I care what citizens and pilgrims think?” she demanded of him. “You yourself told me you thought it was all right.”

“Some Indian people think it’s all right. If it’s what the spirit world wants.”

“Well, I happen to think it is.”

“Well, I happen to think it isn’t,” John Hears the Sun Come Up said. “I think that crank will take your life someday.”

“Jesus,” Rowan said, “it’s him.”

“I ought to stay,” he said. “But only if you let me.” When he looked at her she was licking the crystal from her fingertips.

“I hope God helps you. You should ask him.”

“I’ll ask him to stay too.”

“Rowan…”

She put her hands over her ears, still staring out at the road.

“I’m not hearing you.”

“Yes you are,” he said. “You are.”

Smart parked beside their cars at the end of the dirt road that led to the trailer. Hers was a Volvo from the mid-eighties. John’s was a Dodge pickup, suggesting commercials from vanished Super Bowl Sundays, the Spirit of America. They had the Park Service cart parked there too.

There were sprouts and carrots still growing in their garden. The carrots, he remembered, sometimes came round as medallions, from the shallow layer of soil above the igneous rock, flattened out against it.

He walked up to the trailer and knocked on the door. He had promised John Hears the Sun Come Up a new poem. Maybe he would magically remember the salmon poem. He might remember it word for word, he thought. Suddenly he found himself wondering what exactly he had been feeling that night beside the Tanana. Whatever it was, that was the subject of the poem. If he could bring that back, the words might follow.

Rowan stood in the doorway looking down at him. When he’d last seen her she had been flabby with drink but now her face was lean and tanned, although of course she was older now and there were wrinkles radiating from the corners of her eyes. She was in her uniform, slim and sleek. Her face was red and her blue eyes looked a little unsound. Along with mounting excitement in his chest he felt a quickening of caution.

Their kiss was brief and distant and they avoided each other’s eyes. John stood and shook hands with Smart. Then they sat in the center compartment of the trailer. Smart, as guest of honor, took the small gray sofa. Rowan and John sat in plastic armchairs. The rest of the space was occupied by cases full of Rowan’s books. There were more books in an adjoining stage closet. She had even jammed a tiny desk into the space. Looking around the small room, he saw a couple of yellow pads with what looked like verse in his daughter’s handwriting.

“Writing poetry?”

She laughed self-consciously without answering.

“I’ll have to read it,” he said, “or get you to read it to me.”

“She’s a good poet,” John said. He was drinking Sprite, staying with the program. Smart and his daughter drank the red wine. “Not as good as you,” he said to Smart, “but pretty good.”

“John’s a connoisseur of poetry,” Rowan said. “He’s real diplomatic too.”

“I know she’s a good poet,” Smart said. “She always has been. Since she was a little girl.”

“We see the world through the same eyes,” Rowan said. “That’s literally true. Our eyes are the same. I mean look at them.”

Both the men in the room found somewhere else to look.

“Do you remember any of my poems?” Rowan asked her father. “Do you remember the ones I used to send you from California? Maybe you never got them.”

Smart had a recollection of his daughter sending him poems she had written. He had inscribed a book of his poems to her and she had made a folder of her poems and sent them to him. Then later in college, she had published some poems in university literary magazines and sent them to him. He had never, as far as he could remember, responded.

“I do remember some of them,” he said.

“Do you remember the one I wrote about the wind in the desert?”

“The one where you held the wind in your hands?”

Rowan put her glass down and raised both hands to her face.

“Oh God! You remembered it!”

It was the one single poem of hers he remembered. She had written it after her mother had moved her to the women’s collective in New Mexico. It was about ending up with nothing, with no one.

“Sure I remember it,” Smart said, draining his glass. “I think I used it.”

“Oh God,” Rowan said. “I’m glad you did.”

“How about playing for me?” Smart said. “Still got your pawnshop guitar?”

“Hey, I thought you’d never ask.”

She played him an old Scottishy song he liked about the Rose and the Linsey-O and then a song she had written, from one of her poems. But he seemed not to notice it was her poem.

“Hey, what about that steak?” John said. “We gonna eat or what?”

“Sure,” Rowan said without enthusiasm. Her eyes were fixed on her father. “I’ll do it.”

“No, no,” Smart declared. He struggled up from the sofa and poured another juice glass of wine for Rowan and himself. “I’m cooking. I see mushrooms and your homegrown jalapeños. I’m the steakmaster.

“You know,” he told them as he blundered about the kitchen, “I got thrown out of one of the casinos down on the lake. For being drunk, I guess.”

“‘Cause you look like a rodeo clown,” Rowan said. She plunked a chord on the guitar and put it aside. “That’s why.”

John gave her a disapproving look.

“They seemed so goddamn angry,” Smart said. “Like they hated me.”

“Probably did,” she said. She got up and went to the trailer lavatory. While she was in it John came up to Smart, one eye on the door. His voice was naturally so soft that it was always hard for Smart to hear him, and he was keeping it low.

“She’s doing crank, Will. She’s been doing it all day and I thought I better tell you.”

“She seems in good spirits.”

“That can change real fast. And she won’t sleep and she won’t shut up. So I hope you’re ready.”

“Actually,” Smart said, “I’m really not.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come.”

“You mean because I’m drinking?”

“You know what I mean,” John said. He had been speaking with his eyes closed, as some Northwest Indians do when they are moved to show respect. “I love hearing your poetry, Will. But I’m not gonna stay and protect either of you. Not with the two of you like this.”

With John’s eyes closed to him, Smart drank the glass of wine down. His third.

“Your poetry’s all you have,” John Hears the Sun Come Up told Smart. This time he looked him in the eye. His own eyes looked flat, utterly unfeeling. “It’s your soul, a good soul.”

“Thanks,” said Smart, touched.

“But you shouldn’t go near her. Not now.”

He went out without waiting for a reply.

When Rowan came out of the lavatory, they listened to his pickup roar to a start. He gunned the motor; braked hard backing out and took off explosively toward the highway.

“I’m glad he went.” Her face was brighter. She looked around for where she had left her wine glass. “He’s jealous.”

“Jealous.”

“Yes, he should be … I’d be if I was him.”

“Will he come back?”

She gave Smart a dark crazy smile and shook her head. “Not tonight.”