Bear and His Daughter (26 page)

He watched her stand up and put a tape in her Sharp 4 recorder. It was Vivaldi,
L’Estro Armonico.
He saw that she was wearing a gun belt with a holstered pistol. The little space she stood in was piled from deck to overhead with books:
The Golden Age of American Anthropology,
Lewis Henry Morgan on the Iroquois longhouse, George Caitlin prints. There was also shelf after shelf on religion: the Gnostic Gospels, the works of Hans Jonas, kabbala, witchcraft, Wicca.

“Look at all your books, kid. You’re still beguiled by magic.”

“My books?” She laughed. Instead of sitting down, she stood beside his chair while the Vivaldi played. “You know when I was in high school the local cops flagged all the library books on witchcraft? They pulled me in. They thought my boyfriend was castrating cattle. Or I was. They told me I had to spy on the witches’ coven in the high school or they’d send me to juvenile jail.”

“Were you a witch?”

“I was a little bookworm. Writing my poetry. There wasn’t even a coven.” She laughed again. “You know, I tried to start one but I got bored.”

Now he laughed and put a hand on her hip and patted it.

“You like the way I look, Will?”

“You look very … constabulary. I mean, what with the gun.”

“They put me on enforcement. Can you imagine? I know more about the Temple, about the Paiute and Shoshone traditions, than any white-eyes in the state. So I’m supposed to chase over hill and dale after some dummy poaching ‘lope. A bitch, right?” She licked her lips and offered him a soiled envelope. There was a crystalline powder at the bottom of it. “Want some? It’s the famous ice. Crystal meth.”

“No thanks.”

“Go ahead,” she said, moving closer to him, pouting slightly. “Because you know we’ll get crocked and you’ll go to sleep on me and how often do I get to see you?”

“I know what you mean.”

“Go ahead.”

He dipped his finger into the stuff so there was a small mound on his fingertip and licked it off.

“Easy,” she said, “this is strong. You’ll get shot out of a cannon.”

“Right,” said Smart. The drug seemed to kick in almost immediately. “I guess I can tell you this,” he said. “I guess you’re a pal.”

“You can tell me everything, Will.”

His heart raced.

“You know, I came unstuck on my last reading tour. I have to get my act together.”

“How did you come unstuck?”

“I found myself in an office full of my poems. A professor’s office. He had every volume I ever published. So I filled my briefcase with them, all my books, and I swung the case against his window. His office was in this ghastly brick tower.” It seemed to Smart that he was speaking faster and faster. “I was trying to break the window, see. I wanted to break his window with my books.”

“Were you drunk?”

“Of course I was drunk.”

“Did you want to jump?”

“Yes, I suppose. But I could only shatter the inner layers of the window. I got his office full of glass and blood. It was after the harassment thing back east. And that was the end of my reading.”

He stood up, dizzy again. The altitude, the drug. He poured himself another glass of plonk.

“But you oughtn’t to die. You have work to do.”

“Maybe.”

“I think you’re a great poet. Even my mother does.”

“Does she?”

“She sure does. And all her friends.”

Rowan’s mother still lived on the commune in Mendocino. It was the place where, among flowers and flutes and midwifery, Rowan had been born. Rowan had spent a lot of her childhood there and Smart had seen very little of her.

“I had a poem for you, Rowan. I’ve been trying to remember it since I got west.” He took another sip of wine to slow the rush of his heart.

“Oh, you have to,” she said. “Take a little more crystal.”

“You minx!” he said. “You’ve poisoned me.”

“I’m not a minx. Or a mink or a weasel,” Rowan said. “I want my poem.”

“Once I spent years trying to remember a poem,” Smart told her. “Twenty years maybe.” He had seen the low range of mountains on the horizon through the little kitchen window and it was as though he were looking for his other lost poem out there. “It was a poem I wrote about a plane loaded with American salesmen breaking up over Mount Fuji. They’d won a selling contest, a free trip to the Orient. So they ended up falling down on Mount Fuji with their wives and their wallets and their Kodaks. Buddhist monks gathered up their bodies. I thought that was so amazing. But I lost the poem I wrote and I never could bring the sucker back.”

“Sure,” Rowan said. “Your Fall of Capitalism poem. I don’t want that one. I want the one you wrote for me.”

“God,” Smart said, “if I sit down I’ll never be able to stand up. How can you take that stuff?”

“Please,” she said, “try and remember. It’s important to me.”

“Rowan,” Smart said, “why don’t I cook for us? We’re letting good beef go to waste.”

“How can you be hungry?” she demanded. “I don’t want to eat.”

“Well,” he said, “maybe I’m not. But we should eat or we’ll get plastered.”

As though she were spiting him, Rowan finished the wine in her glass and poured more for both of them.

“I’ll make you remember,” she said. “I’ll make you remember me. Then you’ll remember my poem.”

She went up to him then and took his hand and kissed it. He put it against her flushed cheek and brushed her straight blond hair.

“My
fanciulla del west,
” he said. He looked away from her at the sad greasewood landscape outside. “My cowgirl. My Rowan tree.”

When he sat down breathless on the sofa she nestled beside him.

“I was in Alaska, Rowan. Must have been twenty-five years ago. You were little. I saw these salmon going up the Tanana to spawn. I thought it was so moving.”

“I can see you standing there. Like a big bear.”

He began to cry. “Sorry, kid. I’m coming apart again, I guess.”

She put her arm under his and put his hand on her thigh and stroked it for a moment.

“Don’t you see,” she asked, “how our eyes are just the same?”

“Yeah. Well, see me standing there. In that white night.” With his hand still on her thigh, he leaned his head against the back edge of the sofa and looked at the fake wood panels on the trailer ceiling and tried to recite the poem:

Like elephants, swaying
Straining with the labor of each undulation,
They labor home.
The river is forever swift and young,
Forever renewed, beyond history…

He worked to catch his breath and had another swallow of wine.

But these, elephant-eyed
Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls
And swoop of eagles,
Are creatures of time’s wheel.
Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night
I feel for them such love
And, for their cold struggle, such admiration
In my overheated heart.

“I can’t, baby,” he said finally. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s very good.”

“Such love,” she repeated.

“I don’t know what it was about,” he said. “I admired these fish. Being finished, coming home. They had done what they were meant to do. Whereas I never had.” He closed his eyes and put a hand on his chest, under which his heart was racing. “Or maybe it was just about the moment. I don’t know.”

“Such love,” she said.

“When whatever happened between you and me, Rowan … What shouldn’t have, what I shouldn’t have let happen. I was on that tour. I had come apart.”

“I see,” she said.

“And I wanted some comfort and love. I wanted it so much.” He was weeping. He wiped his nose, bearlike.

“And do you now?”

“Yes I do.”

She stood in front of him and took his hands and folded them behind her back. He withdrew them quickly. Rowan tensed and pursed her lips. Her anger frightened him.

“The poem is about us,” she said. When he tried to speak, she interrupted him. “Yes it is, it’s about us.”

He realized that she was trying to kiss him on the mouth.

“This is just drugs,” Smart said. He stood up, trying to escape. It was like a dream, suggesting something that had happened once before in another world. “John will be back. What will he think of you?”

She laughed and pushed herself against him, standing on tiptoes in her boots, pressing her face into his.

“John will not be back, Will. John is a Wind River Shoshone and his attitude is from that culture and believe me it’s peculiar to that culture. Besides, he’s a passive-aggressive.”

Smart collapsed back on the miniature sofa. She kept trying to kiss him, fondling him, at his belt, his clothes.

“Rowan,” he said, “my sweet. I’m lonely. I wanted to see you.”

“But you don’t want me.”

“Oh yes,” Smart said, “I want you. I want all the things we didn’t have. I do. But I can’t make them happen, can I?”

“But you don’t want me,” she said.

“Listen,” he said, “you were just a pretty girl.”

“Then we shouldn’t have done it before, should we?” Rowan said. She fixed him with the mirror of his eyes. “Then you never should have done it and I never should have gone for it. But I did. You’re the only one I want. Ever since then. All my life maybe.”

“I was drunk,” Smart pleaded. “I was on drugs. I was certifiable. I took some comfort. I was desperate.”

“Then,” she said, “what about me?”

“We fucked up, baby. It happens.”

She turned on him with such violence that he jumped. She was a big girl, strong as he had been, only an inch or so shorter than his six two. She resembled him so much.

“You like me like this. I know you do. I’ve been waiting for you all day.”

“God,” he said. “You’re still a child, aren’t you?”

He put out his hands and took her by hers and sat her down beside him.

“This is how it was, baby. I hardly knew you. It was as though you weren’t my daughter.” It was hard to face her grieving, crazy eyes. “You were the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen.” He laughed, against his will. “You were so adoring. I couldn’t help it.” He tried to embrace her but she avoided his embrace.

“I’m the only one of your children,” she said, “who has your eyes. We’re the same.”

“Just a beautiful young girl,” Smart was saying. And after a fashion he remembered or thought he remembered how it might have happened. As beautiful a young girl as he had ever seen. So young and gorgeous and besotted with him. What a fool he must have been, a weak, self-indulgent drunk. In those days, when he had let it happen, when he had done it, he had thought he could do no wrong. He had actually complained to friends of being made too much of. God knew what they had secretly thought of that, of him. As if no bills would ever be charged to his account.

The drug was driving the rhythms of his heart and brain to a pitch he could not manage.

“Your poem,” Rowan said, “it’s about me. It’s about you coming back to me. Us both coming back where we belong. Which is together. Always,” she said. “Always because we have the same flesh, we have the same mind, the same eyes.”

Smart caught his breath. “You’ve taken that drug,” he said.

“We see the same things at the same time. I know your poems as well as you do.”

He got to his feet and tried to shake off the tremors that assailed him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Smart said. “I’ve got through many a night on many a drug. I’ll sing to you like I used to. Sometimes, anyway. We can read poems to each other. Then it’ll be morning, see. We’ll hear the birds. The sun’ll be up. The drug will be over. We’ll have survived.”

Without looking at him, she walked into the darkness at the sleeping end of the trailer. Finding himself alone, he went back to the kitchen and drank more wine. He had made a mistake, another one. Another old bill presented. No end to it. He curled up on the sofa with the light on. There was only darkness and silence at the far end of the trailer where his daughter lay.

After a while, he began passing out, lapsing into a shallow sleep from which the methedrine kept waking him. In each space of sleep, a pool of uneasy dreams awaited him. From each he kept rising against his will, finding himself thirsty and breathless in the harshly lit trailer. Once he dreamed of the salmon. In the dream it seemed to him that he could remember it all, verse by verse, in Rowan’s voice:

Fighting their way on up the Tanana
Two hundred miles now from the sea
And when I try to see their eyes,
What I see, under the flow,
Are old elephants’ eyes
Appearing wise but still
No wiser than Creation.

Her warm cheek was against his temple and she was reciting:

All their long years they saw the predators fail,
All the same time their own predations fed them.
What a life, the life of the roving sea!
Where fish live, the poet said,
As men do on land.