Everything (6 page)

I warned you, said Betsy, and sipped hers ladylike.

Well, yeah, but you could of
told
me, he said. So what’s going on?

He sat down again across from her and watched her face as she decided what to tell him and how. The fall’s cold rain fell into the bushes outside, hissed into the grass and ran down the sidewalks. It was a night to be inside and now that Betsy was here, RL was glad of the company. This was not a night to be alone. The burning in his throat became heat in his belly and slowly spread outward into his arms and thighs and head.

I don’t know, Betsy said. I don’t really want to talk about it.

* * *

You look good.

No, I feel fine. I get up every morning at quarter to five and I go out and I milk my goats and then I get the kids off to school and then I go for a run. I take care of myself. I feel great. I eat right off the bottom of the food chain.

RL tinked his shot glass against the jar of whiskey and said, I’m glad to hear this is good for you.

You know what I mean.

I do, he said. It’s not fair.

That’s not it, she said. I got over that idea last time. Nothing’s fair.

She stopped talking and looked so forlorn and blue that RL wanted to take care of her, to make her soup or tuck her in a comforter. He felt her weight, then, the way a body gets so suddenly heavy when it goes limp. Her weight was handed to him.

Are you hungry? RL asked.

You know what it is? Betsy said. I’m sorry, I should just be quiet. This is so much more than you need from me. It’s so nice of you to put me up. To put up with me.

Tell me, RL said. What’s going on?

* * *

She took a moment, took a sip of whiskey, shuddered at the taste and burn, pulled herself together again. The skin of her face was windblown and rough, a life in the open. Her face was pretty still, but her hands were like his hands, battered and wrinkled and spotted. Our hands give us away, he thought, always.

Everything I know, she said. Everything I believe about the universe tells me that intention is everything, you know? Eyes on the prize. You look at where you want to go and don’t worry about where you might end up if you screw up completely. And, you know, my goats, my kids, my place, I’ve been living
one hundred percent
like I was going to be around. I’ve been clear about this, Robert. I’ve been like one hundred percent single mind. I know what I want and I want it completely and I’m absolutely clear about it.

Stuff happens, RL said. That last time, you didn’t bring it on yourself. It wasn’t your fault.

No, it wasn’t my fault, Betsy said. But there was a lot of negative energy in my life at that point.

RL just looked at her with a fearful creepy feeling in his heart. Betsy was beautiful still and she had a good soul, but she believed in all these things that were not true and would say these things about herself that were absolutely wrong. She walked in her own thick cloud of negative energy that she generated herself, but she could not see this. She could not see herself. She was blind.

That’s the problem, Betsy said. I just thought that if my intention was right, if I was clear, right down the middle … Now I don’t know what to think. Where to put it.

* * *

You might get good news tomorrow. What’s on the schedule, anyway?

CAT scan, PET scan, puppy dog scan—I forget. Some kind of imaging.

Might be nothing.

Might be, Betsy said. They caught something up in Bigfork. I don’t even know what to think, Robert. I don’t know what to do.

She looked him squarely in the face as if she might find an answer there. RL found himself almost blushing. He could not solve this. He could not talk her down from here. Yet he wanted to save her.

I’m sorry, she said, and gave a bitter little laugh. The worst houseguest.

You know what’s weird. You walked right by my pickup truck on the way into the house and you haven’t given me a single word of shit about it yet.

She laughed again, and again it was not a cheerful sound.

I’m done with the earth, she said. Somebody else can save it. Somebody who’s going to be around. My kids can save the earth if they want to. Myself, I’m done. Let’s just go watch television.

You hate television.

* * *

Not lately, she said. Lately it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

And so they sat, side by side on the bachelor sofa, the big plush leather cool under them but gradually warming to their skin, and RL handed her the remote and got cold beer for both of them and the rain fell outside the windows as she flipped through sports, through models and model railroads and troubled faces, explosions in the sky and pictures of the very beer they were drinking, cars and chases, guns going off, earnest conversation about the flag, baseball, fighter jets shooting through the sky and always shopping shopping shopping, glossy pictures of more. She couldn’t settle on anything. RL thought she wanted all of it, the whole fake world, 120 channels of nothing and all of it inside her, a world without her, a world without end. Next to her and a thousand miles away. He had never felt this lonely. He wanted to make her happy. He wanted to make her safe. He wanted whatever he wanted, and he was going to get whatever he got.

Only the one girl
, Daniel said, and only twice. It was a drunk thing, that was all. It was really more like an accident than anything else. The fact that he was telling her was proof that she could trust him.

Layla was down in the Angler keeping Edgar company, a slow Tuesday. The rain had stopped but the water was high and dirty still and nobody much came in. She was either going to Seattle in a couple of days or she was not. There was nobody to talk to, nobody to tell. She had made her bed and now she would have to lie in it.

Hold still, Edgar said. Just like that.

The lights were on in the store part, but there were no customers this late in the afternoon. They were in the office part with
the lights turned off and Edgar was making a sketch of her face. Lucky thing it was his left arm in the cast so he could still draw. Layla couldn’t see the light on her own face, of course, but she could see it on his and it was pretty light, soft and gray. Anybody would look good in a light like that, soft through clouds, big unlit windows.

Tell me something, Layla said.

Anything.

Oh, never mind.

What’s going on? he said. You look like you’re going to cry.

Nothing
, she said. Everything is one hundred percent fine.

Glad to hear it, Edgar said. He went on sketching. Sometimes Layla imagined herself in a larger life, a Russian life, a life that glittered and sparkled. In Seattle she was often reminded that she was just a girl from Montana, a hick from the sticks. She knew how to drink and she knew how to fish, but everybody else knew everything. Other times, she thought that Edgar might be discovered—he really was that good—and then he would be a famous painter and there would be pictures of her! Some connection to the glittery sparkly world. A rock band had already used one of Edgar’s paintings on the cover of its CD, though the band never went anywhere. An elemental sadness inside her that she thought champagne might cure. The wind shifted and fat raindrops spattered across the glass. Do this, do that, stand that way, stand still. A kind of furtive pleasure in being told what to do. Since the accident Edgar seemed half angry all the time, the cast constantly in his way. He was home too much and the
rest of the time in the shop and not out on the water, which he loved. RL loved the water, too, but not the clients so much. Edgar didn’t seem to mind the clients. Something animal and likable. Layla had seen the muscles of his back as he pulled at the oars, the way a body needs to be worked. He was easy on the water, easy at the oars, his long arms elegant. The boat moved without effort, it seemed without intention, when he was on the water. But now, cooped up, there was something fussy about him, something gangly and tense. He frowned at the sketchbook, tried to fix something with the heel of his hand, but gave up then and turned the page.

Can I see?

No, he said.

Because it sucks, is why, he said, before Layla could even ask.

She went over behind him and turned the page herself. It was her face but not her face—somebody who knew more than she did, who had seen more sadness. Layla felt herself turning into that person, which was not what she wanted. All that world out there waiting for her. Times she felt like she could outrun it, if she was only fast enough, but she understood now that she would never be fast enough.

I look old, she said.

You’re just tired.

She almost told him, then—Daniel the fucker. His face came to her in a rush of fresh sorrow, a sticky deep-blue liquid. Nobody loved her.

* * *

I am old today, she said.

Are you OK?

No, she said. Yeah. I’m all right. I’m just tired is all. You’re right.

I’m going to make a cup of tea, Edgar said. Would you like a cup of tea?

No, she said. No, yeah. I’d like a cup, thanks.

The kettle was on the far side of the empty store and he left her there in that delicate light. She listened to all the small sounds, the rain on the window glass, the buzz of the neon lights, the swish of tires on wet pavement and the splash of the downspouts. After a minute, the water in the kettle getting ready to boil. Come back, come back, she thought. She wanted Edgar there again, anybody to tell her where to put her hands, how to hold her face, anybody to tell her what to do.

He had slept with Betsy before
, a long time before.

It wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t a key. But it wasn’t anything RL liked to think about much. Like a lot of his life at the time, this experience just seemed painful and inconclusive, painful because it was inconclusive.

He remembered the shape of her body, naked, the slippery seal length of her in that hot springs in Idaho, out in the woods in the snow, snowflakes landing on their knees and hair while they watched them, stoned. Was that the time they saw the moose? Once they were lying naked in the gravel pool when a cow moose and two calves drifted into the far end of the clearing, quietly appearing out of the cedar trees and ferns and fog, and stood there grazing for an hour, paying them no mind. Once they had strange submerged sex in the water and then she rolled him out into the snow and then followed
and they rolled around in the snow like seal pups, tickling and teasing. Did that even happen? It seems like another life, somebody else’s.

This was a time between Dawn and Dawn, a moment when they were broken up or she was interested in somebody else or moved to California for the winter or something. She really was a terrible girlfriend. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he married her.

So: a few months, a winter through a long cold spring, a strange mix of virtue and vice, herb tea and cigarettes, brown rice and cocaine. RL used to love the hippie girls—yes, he did—before they all turned thirty and became strict and sour. Back when everybody smoked. It was a different world, looking back. He was never one of them, he kept on eating meat and drinking brown liquor and rising out of their paisley-and-perfume beds at five to drive over to Wolf Creek and fish the Missouri.

The world had seemed like a more interesting and various place then. RL wondered if it really was, or if it only seemed that way because it was all so new to him.

But they needed something from him, and he wanted something from them. Not just attention, not just sex. What? He never really knew.

That one time he woke up in a girl’s bed and he could swear he’d never seen her before, left her sleeping, never saw her again … It was a different time. Everything felt different.

The thing with Betsy was two things: first, she stuck around—not here but with her horrible hippie husband up in the Swan but in
and out of town enough to be a part of things, to turn into the person that was inside her, waiting to come out. She was still here. They were all still here.

The other thing was the way it ended. It wasn’t supposed to be a lifelong deal, a marriage. They liked each other, they slept together. He brought her smoked whitefish; he brought her red wine; he took her up to the top of Snowbowl in his ’65 three-quarter-ton GMC pickup and then up the ski lift itself to watch the solar eclipse. All that long spring, while the rotten snow melted outside and then froze again every evening, they drank herbal tea and whiskey and pored over maps of the Bob Marshall and the Scapegoat Wilderness, making plans about where they would go in August, up on Scapegoat Mountain and then over to the Chinese Wall, or maybe over to the White River, which was supposed to be full of big fat cutthroat, dumb as nails. In March they went to Seattle, to drink coffee and visit some friends of hers. In April they drove to Utah for the desert sun.

It was good, he thought. They were partners, traveling companions. But then she went off tree planting when the snow cleared out of the back country that spring, a crew from Oregon, working out of Avery, Idaho. She used to ride the locomotives back and forth to the bars of Missoula, weekends when they got paid and at first the other weekends, too. She would come to see him. The Milwaukee was going out of business, nobody cared anymore and they knew this good-looking lesbian girl, Denise, who was an honest-to-God brakeman on the line. A couple of times RL went to visit her by rail—it was hours less time than driving, sitting up in the lead locomotive as they crawled across the Bitterroot Divide, miles of green nothing and granite in front of them, the wilderness closing behind.

And then that was it. Over. One payday weekend in July, he waited for her all Friday night and not a peep. Nothing all weekend or the week after that or after that.

He heard from friends through other friends that she was all right, just not coming into town—something was going on, nobody knew exactly what. Just gone. Left him with his candles ready to light and a bottle of gin in the freezer. That summer was the first one he worked for Saul Pohler and that old bastard kept him busier than shit ferrying trailers and packing lunches and tying flies and even guiding a couple of times when things got desperate—though Saul didn’t think he knew enough to guide, told him so—and the summer passed and then, in September, came Betsy’s wedding invitation. Elizabeth Ann Broughton. He never knew her middle name till then.