Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (25 page)

“It was an accident that the campground was placed where the rattlesnakes come?” she pressed, hearing no answer. To this, too,
she received no reply. She lost her politeness. “My son is scared,” she blustered at Wilfred's back. To this, too, Wilfred said nothing, but paused and waited for the two of them to catch up, a gesture.

When they reached the campsite, Alex surprised Maya by nodding solemnly at the shotgun and taking several steps back. Though, due to work, Alex despised bureaucracy, he admired all displays of authority. Acrewood's relative affluence and isolation meant that its police was forced to channel most of its energy into traffic stops; Acrewood Police came at a pulled-over speeder guns drawn. The regional liberals were appalled but Alex applauded. His admiration passed the ultimate test when he was pulled over for going forty-seven miles in a forty-five zone. He nearly put his wrists together in ecstasy. He even paid the ticket enthusiastically, the rare time Maya saw Alex part calmly with money parting with which could have been avoided.

“Stand back, all,” Wilfred Shade said.

“I really don't think—” Maya started to say, clutching Max's hand and moving him behind her leg.

“Hold it, hold it,” a voice came from the shadows. She knew the voice. Its owner was vaulting through the shadows like a bear, little bits of gravel shooting out from his feet. Maya's brain was wet moss in the morning; of course, there was more than one campground; he had sent her to the one that was his also; he and the girls were on a camping trip. A smile escaped Maya's lips. She killed it.

“Wilfred,” Marion said, stooping to regain his breath. He gave Maya a quick look, the darkness giving them cover.

“Rattlesnake,” Wilfred said. His voice was less strident: Marion seemed to demand a greater solicitude.

“Wait now,” Marion said, holding up one hand tenderly as if reasoning with an assailant. He had the other down on his thigh, breathing heavily.

“It's Mama's friend from the diner,” Max said honestly.

Maya looked over at Alex and registered the change on his face even though it was too dark to actually see it. She knew the
expression: His forehead rode up; his brows furred; his eyes squinted. Confronted with unwelcome information, Alex declined to certify it as such, preferring to plead incomprehension.

“Carla?” Marion said. Maya watched Wilfred's shoulders slump in the shadows.

“One of these days,” Wilfred said, and brought the shotgun down to his side. He exhaled painfully. His drive gone, he scraped the gravel of the footpath. “I left my flashlight, Marion,” he said.

Marion dug in his jeans. Wilfred turned to Maya. “One of these days I'm gonna
leave
her,” he clarified. “I
might
shoot her, and then this conversation is going to show up in court. So I am clarifying for the record: I meant
leave
her.”

Marion shone a pocket light, and Wilfred swept aside the tent's entry panel with the shotgun.

“Run it around in there, Marion, for Christ's sake,” Wilfred said. “This your first tent rattler?”

“I am ignoring the way you are speaking to me on account of your domestic distress,” Marion said.

“A man with a shotgun is the most forgiven man in the world,” Wilfred said. He looked up at Maya. “Empty as the day you bought it. The boy saw it go in?”

“Not exactly,” Maya said.

“Good to be vigilant,” Wilfred said magnanimously. If nothing else, this ate up the final twenty minutes of his shift. He would have spent them pacing the tiny shed and biting his nails.

“You've been saying that for twenty years about Carla,” Marion said. “Do it already. You look like a fool.”

“I need a mercy killing,” Wilfred said. He bounced his heavy round head. “Who wants this sack of lard, Marion? I am holding on for dear life, and you cast it away.” Wilfred tamped the hardpan with the butt of the shotgun, setting off in Maya the momentary fear that after all that, the gun would go off by accident. Wilfred seemed indifferent to the rest of his audience, Alex, Maya, and Max turning their heads between him and Marion. “People laugh
at you, you know,” Wilfred said. “I would laugh at you, too, if I didn't know you my whole life.”

“Who else do I need besides Willy Shade in my corner?” Marion grinned abusively. His features were obscured by shadow, but there was a low-shouldered stoop to his posture that again made Maya think of leaves and the forest. He carried it with him.

Looking like a defeated baby, Willy Shade waved away his friend and slowly started up the drive. It had a slight incline, harder to take on the way back. Marion was left with the Rubins. The four of them stood in the gathering cold watching Wilfred labor up the path. He gave them a gift; it took him forever. “I didn't say anything to Mama and Papa about the rattlesnake,” Alex broke the silence, reminding the intruder of what he was intruding on. He held the flap of the tent open for Max. His son moved hesitantly. “Don't worry, son, I'll go first,” Alex said and disappeared from view, Max following. Their sudden aloneness unacceptable, the two friends from the diner said good night to each other, loudly enough for Maya's husband to hear.

On her back, staring at the vanishing peak of the tent, Maya's rib cage felt corseted. She switched to her stomach; the corset switched with her. Careful to avoid noise, she sat up, but there was no way to get support in a tent without right angles. Who chose to sleep on the ground in gathering cold? Well, she did. She expelled a mirthless laugh into the frostbitten air of the tent. On either side of her, Alex and Max slept without suspicion, Max's knees at his chest. She felt a vague irritation with her son, and a less vague irritation with herself for feeling it. She looked over at her husband and felt sympathy for him, laid out on the cold ground of a campsite in the middle of nowhere.

She tried to lie down on the thin nylon of the tent, but every pebble on earth was congregated under her. Jeremiah the black Buddhist had tried to teach her that nothing was unwelcome. He ate only macrobiotic foods, which meant that she rarely had the pleasure of feeding him, but he was smarter than anyone she had met. She had loved his name—so epic, so biblical. And the transgression of dating a black, something that would have started a long silence on the other end of the line in Kiev. So she tried very hard to understand him—to understand how nothing could be unwelcome. How would Jeremiah welcome these pebbles? Was she supposed to try to imagine the pebbles as smooth as her mattress at home, or give in in some way to their discomfort? She felt dense and laughed at herself, at the pebbles (like small animals listening to her madness), at the insane line of her thought. Shivering, she climbed out of her blanket and, wanting to do an undebatable good, positioned it around Max.

She wanted to go outside but was terrified of what she would find there. She sat in place, the time blurred by the soft gallop of her thoughts and the steady, shallow report of her breathing. Through a mesh panel in the tent flap, she could see a complete darkness save for the firelight of the cold stars, the only way to tell up. They seemed to hang by invisible thread. She shuddered at their raw cosmic terror: how resplendently indifferent they looked, how implacable. But was placation required? A star asked for nothing. Her rib cage loosed slightly before seizing again. She snorted at her absurd meditations. She wondered whether some subtly toxic element in the atmosphere was actually affecting her thinking. The altitude hadn't bothered her as much in the afternoon—maybe she was deteriorating.
Patient suffers from euphoria mixed with despair. Cardinal manifestation: mild hysteria followed by disorientation. Refers primarily in the chest. Restrain.

She ordered herself to declare, at least, what it was that frightened her on the other side of the flap. Was there a congress of rattlesnakes at the foot of her tent? A boar hooving the dust in anticipation of sinking a tusk into her flank? No, she couldn't say what exactly she feared in the vacated blackness. Did she fear the vacated blackness? She thought of Uncle Misha. Misha would not be afraid. He would be out under the heavenly firelight, pulling shyly on his rolled cigarette, stamping one foot against the other and back. It startled her to remember that Uncle Misha was alive—declining, her mother said, but alive and cursing away offers of help. He was as remote as the firelight in the sky, Uncle Misha—how could Maya have allowed that to transpire?
Her
uncle Misha. Was it simply the ocean between them, or had she abandoned them all? Why? Did she want America so badly; the Rubins? Was there any reason she couldn't have both—that was the sole advantage of Ukraine becoming a free country, she could. Or was her tether to the Rubins so frail that it risked breaking with every departure?

The Rubins rarely asked about her family, though they never expressed negative feelings. Her adopted family was not at fault, even as she loved to hold it responsible. For some reason, Maya had decided that the old family could only come at the expense of the new—and allowed it to drift away in ways easily justified by the distance and time. She still spoke to her mother once a week, but it had been years since she had returned to Kiev, and years since Galina had come to New Jersey to visit her grandson, whose adoption she had greeted with more equanimity than the Rubins. Maya felt a sinking regret. The parched moonscape outside was a solace by comparison: to the regret it added butterflies, as if she were a teenager about to be kissed. It was easier to fear than regret. Fear held out the possibility of being unwarranted, regret meant it was too late. She envied the barrenness outdoors; it struck her now as streamlined purpose rather than desolation. She wished to be equally whittled, to carry not one extra grain.

She flung herself through the flap in the tent. In her boldness, she had forgotten that the flap was zipped—it had been virtually duct-taped by Alex against the encroachment of further intruders, reptilian or human—and she nearly sank the entire contraption. But Alex and Max continued to snooze. With a compensatory guiltiness, Maya unzipped the flap an inch at a time.

Outside awaited a brilliant cold. The corset around her rib cage was replaced by a knife blade. No, something blunter: a dull stone wedged where no stone should go. The hospital had rid her of hypochondria, but the hospital was in New Jersey, and if someone told her that health issues worked differently here—at three thousand feet, zero population, and walls of Oligocene rock—she wouldn't have argued.

The air drizzled her arms with invisible needles. Was that not a symptom of strokes? She lifted her hands imploringly—there was only so much she could be asked to lose her mind about. If she needed to be felled by a heart attack, two days shy of forty-three, amid this splendor and squalor, so be it. If health issues worked
differently here, accountability could work differently also. As in: she abdicated it.

She gulped the air—an unfamiliar taste—and sent it back out in swirling white gusts, the silence roaring in her ears like a hard wind. It was more than a person could take in all at once: the black mirror of the sky shaking with stars, the charging air, the din of the silence. Maya's head swam, a black rose unfurling under her forehead, but she didn't want to return to the tent. The raw air was doing work on her dread. It had been working through her since well before sleep—since she had watched the sun sink behind the warped landscape like a mother driving away. The fear was greater inside the tent than outside, the thing finally faced. She was surprised to discover the darkness less complete out here: the dull fluorescent green of an overhead lamp pointing the way to the bathrooms cut into the icy black gleam. She squinted into the darkness, wondering if it would reveal the shape of a man, but there was nothing. Belatedly, it occurred to her that a camper other than Marion might be out for fresh air. Her thinking was holed in critical ways that would not have eluded her attention at home. It was an exhausting, hopeless feeling.

She sank to the ground, crossing her legs under her knees, and closed her eyes. It was hard to do for more than a second—the dread closed in once again. She popped them open. A graveyard stillness, just the handful of tents scattered across the campground, squatters on the infertile plain of an alien planet. But she tried once more, for a second longer. Then again, for a second more still. Her eyes were becoming used to the darkness, which was changing to a bruised violet. After her next try, she saw the orange point of a cigarette hanging in the murk like a miniature fruit. She made out Marion's faint outline by a picnic table twenty feet away. Her heart leaped, and she lifted a weak hand. It really was as if she had conjured him.

He wore a heavy plaid shirt that looked warm, properly warm for the weather. A gust of wind cuffed her shoulders; she wished
she had brought her shawl, but she couldn't return now. He waved at her and moved from his place. They walked toward each other until they met at two old juniper stumps that belonged to no tent. Even now, probably years after being sawed down, they gave off a faint hint of cedar.

They said hello and stood shyly by the stumps until Marion pointed at them with the tip of his cigarette and they sat. They watched the rock beyond the edge of the campground, the cigarette's orange point circling the air like a moth. He said nothing, only moved the cigarette in a line from his mouth to his side and then back. After a minute, it fell to the ground, where his boot ground it.

“I don't think I've spent so much time outside in my life,” Maya said. “I have a headache,” she added cautiously, wanting to know was there something to worry about, but unwilling to tempt truly bad news by revealing the extent of her discomfort.

“Oxygen headache,” Marion said. “I couldn't wait to get back here when we'd go see Clarissa's family out east.”

She was stung to have been offered his wife's name so cavalierly. Well, Marion had got the picture when she had told him she and Max weren't alone. Again, she saw that he was older. A good ten years older than her; in his early fifties.

“You speak about it as if she left you,” Maya said. “But Alma said you left.”

He nodded appreciatively. “Most people take a while to recall which one is Alma and which one is Celia. They don't help—they wear nearly the same thing. They're only a year apart. I think they're shoring each other up.”

“It was difficult for them,” Maya ventured.

He shrugged—with uncertainty, not indifference. “They seemed fine. They approved. At least Alma did. Because they know something's wrong before you do. It took a while to understand there was more going on. Little things, like Celia's pig was so hot last summer, but Celia didn't see it. I had to tell her to hose
her down. And she just said, ‘Oh.'” Marion saw Maya's face and smiled. “She's in the animal husbandry program at the school. She was going to be a rancher. Maybe not the first female ranch head in Fall River County, but close to it. At six years old, she would have had a hose on that pig in a second.”

“She changed her mind?” Maya said.

“She's up in the air, she says,” Marion said. “That's what she says, ‘up in the air.' It makes me think of her as a kid, I'm throwing her up in the air, and she's squealing. But this is a different ‘up in the air.' I wonder if I did that. If I messed with my kid's certainty.”

“Have you spoken about it?”

“She doesn't want to. They're quiet, the girls, actually—I know you wouldn't think so. Celia more so. Because they heard their mother and me splashing it out year after year and now they are going to keep it zipped at all costs? Some other reason they themselves don't know? And if they don't know, I'm supposed to know because I'm the parent? The books don't say anything, and I don't have the spleen to go see a therapist.” He kicked the heels of his boots against the ground one by one, the hardpan giving out a dull echo.

“Maybe I want to go just to get my exoneration,” he said. “‘It wasn't you, Mr. Hostetler. Your daughters are not going to spend their lives closed up because they don't want to turn out self-indulgent like Daddy.' There's a fellow in Spearfish they say is a miracle worker. Retiree from New York. The East Coast gets them when they're young and unproven, and we get them when they've been stocking professional wisdom for fifty years. I'd say you have the losing end of the bargain.”

“I used to think psychologists worked with mentally sick people,” Maya said. “But then we went to someone to help Max, and even though he didn't help Max—even though he proved Alex's point, I guess—for some reason I became more open to it.”

“What's wrong with Max?” Marion said.

She traced her own shapes on the hardpan. She liked hearing
him say her son's name; it came out differently. Unable to sleep in heavy shoes despite being outside, she was wearing flats on heavy wool socks. She was really going for elegance every chance that she got.

“I am filled with nervous energy,” she said. “I can't focus. I feel like I'm going to make a mistake. Actually, I felt that long before coming here. In truth, I feel safer here. I should be more afraid, and then I realize I'm not.” She looked over at him. “I sound crazy, I know.”

“I don't mind it,” he said.

“It's different for you because you've been here many times. You've been here many times, haven't you?”

He nodded.

“There's more than one campground, isn't there?”

“Guilty,” he said.

She laughed sharply into the night. “I don't mind it.”

They sat silently for some time. “I'll tell you about my son,” she said, “and you tell me about Wilfred and Carla.”

“Look at you,” he said. “You're shivering. Take my shirt. There's some hot tea in this thermos. With whiskey in it.” He spread his shirt over her shoulders—she smelled woodsmoke and a faint hint of dried sweat, but the dried sweat of activity rather than inactivity—unscrewed the cap of his thermos and poured. Maya inhaled something like grass bleached by the sun. “There's some lemon balm over there,” he said, pointing. “Strained through the nicest sock that I've got. Nicest
clean
sock.” The seat of the thermos unscrewed to make a second cup, and he filled it with tea for himself. “A thermos for making friends,” he said.

“Is that what we are?” she said.

They drank silently. She liked the way that he sipped his, first worrying the liquid with his lips, then slurping it loudly, his brows gathered. It was a child's way of doing something, unself-conscious and very serious all at once.

“Max is wild,” she said.

He looked over at her. “He looked normal to me,” he said.

“Here he's normal,” she said. “I would say I cured him by bringing him back to where he was born, but I doubt that's true. I don't know what it is; I'm at the end of my understanding. At home, he's wild. He runs away. Turns blue sitting in rivers. Eats grass. And then goes back to being a normal boy. Who can't tell you a word about why he did what he did.”