Gallatin Canyon (19 page)

He went inside to check on Madeleine. Without removing her hand from over her eyes, she said, “I feel terrible for losing those horrible bottles,” and when he tried to speak, she waved him away. He went back outside and watched the tire kickers and the idly curious begin to drift away, leaving four who looked like real buyers. Out of the blue, he wanted to make a sale. Homer thought they were couples but, after considerable study, could not match them up. He became fixed on this task as a difficult crossword puzzle, but finally he sighed and gave up. He was wary of misreading anyone as he had the duck-lamp guy. He couldn’t believe the two redheads were together, because he’d never seen that before; which left the two short ones, and that pair seemed less unlikely. Their gazes crisscrossed like light beams, giving nothing away. Homer wondered whether they were like our ancestors, wary and footloose. The red-haired male took sudden notice of the American flag ripping away in the wind across the street, and Homer realized he was avoiding eye contact. No sale.

He returned to the house, where he found the children sitting on either side of Madeleine. “We’re discussing their Halloween costumes,” she said, her warmth restored. “Judy is going as a punk rocker and Jack is going as a traffic cone.”

Homer said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Cecile was still outside, cleaning up after the sale, tossing everything toward the garage. Madeleine and Homer paused on the sidewalk for a moment. It seemed not unreasonable that Cecile might say a word or two to them, but she didn’t. Homer wondered whether his daughter had developed this awful carapace on account of being raised by a helpless mother. Once inside his car, he said, “Can I take you to dinner?”

“We’re going to get those bottles,” said Madeleine.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there. That’s a real can of worms.”

“Bring it on.”

Imagining for a euphoric moment that Cecile’s ex-husband would see the light quickly, Homer reluctantly agreed to go to Dean’s house. Wait till she gets a load of this! was his uncharitable thought. It was getting dark as he started the car.

“I’ll buy the bottles,” Madeleine cried.

“That won’t solve it.”

She said, “I thought I’d seen everything.”

He stepped up onto Dean’s porch and rang the bell, nearly embedded in careless layers of house paint. He had a reassuring hand on Madeleine’s back. There was some sort of somber music coming from within. The door began to open. He wanted to help but knew that Dean liked doing this sort of thing himself. The door opened wide, revealing the interior of what was little more than a cottage, single story by necessity, with the kitchen and living room adjacent to the front door. Then Dean rolled around into view. He had a smile on his big soft face, and the weight of his head seemed to be sinking into the expanding circles of his neck. One hand poised birdlike over the controls of his wheelchair. None of the waywardness was gone from his sky blue eyes. On the television screen, an aircraft carrier was sinking with slow majesty. Homer was relieved to find that the dirge he’d heard at the door was not just something Dean was listening to.

Homer introduced Madeleine and Dean greeted her warmly, and they followed him into the house.

“That’s a new wheelchair,” commented Homer as he made his way past Dean. There was very little furniture but the gas fire log made a twinkling, habitable light, concealing the bareness of the room. “Brand-new,” said Dean. “Haven’t even knocked the paint off it.” There were some trophies on an old library table and milk crates filled with paperbacks, a cheesecake calendar on the far door, which led to the bathroom. The young model, naked on a white fur rug, was holding an automobile muffler.

“Front-wheel drive. Watch this.” Dean pivoted around the back side of the door and, with a graceful thrust of the chair’s motor, swung the door to and latched it. “Onboard battery charger,” he said, leading Homer into the living room. “Actually got to pick the color. That last chair wasn’t nearly enough for quads, more for limited-leg-use folks.”

Madeleine said, “I’ll bet you can go anywhere you want.” She seemed to like Dean. Maybe it was just for leaving Cecile. Homer was glad to see it. He knew Madeleine had had about all she could stand.

“Hell, I’m on the town again.”

He wheeled over in front of the television, on which the funeral of Princess Diana played: it was an anniversary on an odd year. “Madeleine, check this out: here she is again!” Homer didn’t know where this was headed but he was encouraged by the friendliness with which Dean addressed Madeleine.

There were slow panning shots of Diana’s cortege interspersed with scenes from happier times, including those with paramour Dodi Fayed at the beach; then the mayhem with the paparazzi and the fatal limousine chase with the drugged chauffeur ending in underground calamity.

Moving to the side, Homer determined that the shaking he saw in Dean’s body was caused not by grief but by laughter. Madeleine noticed and said sharply, “She died young!”

Dean said, “It’s a start.”

“What?”

Dean turned it off with his channel changer, and as the picture sank to a blue dot he said to Madeleine, “None of that would have happened if she’d been fat.”

Two years earlier, Dean had attended an after-game Cats-Griz party at the Nez Perce Inn, a dependably rowdy annual uproar, and fallen from a second-floor balcony into the parking lot with a freshly opened beer in his hand. He woke up the next morning, hungover and paralyzed. He had been out of work, but now he was running for mayor.

The commemorative bottles were lined up on the floor next to the north wall, receiving the last light of the day. Dean said, “There they are.”

“Let me take them back to Cecile,” Madeleine said reasonably.

“Over my dead body.” His lips were drawn flat across his teeth. He was quite menacing.

“Ohhkay.”

Homer could see that Madeleine was not happy. She would bolt at the first opportunity. All the mean people, all the open space, seemed to be closing in upon him at once.

“I don’t like disappointing you, Madeleine. Or Homer neither. But those bottles are mine.”

“No doubt they are, but I’m the one who let you take them, and now it seems I’m in trouble. You ought not to have done that to a lady. Besides which, you have two beautiful children and you continue to poison your relationship with them over your bottle collection. I’m an out-of-towner and I don’t get it. Cecile has quite a job with those children. She could probably use some help as opposed to battling over a collection of whiskey bottles.” Homer was impressed at the practical way Madeleine swallowed what must have been her distaste for Cecile.

“I’m lucky she isn’t feeding them sardines with the mother-seagull glove to make them think they can fly. Do tears embarrass you, Madeleine?”

“Not at all.”

“Homer’s seen all this before. I blubber, and he just goes with it.” He swept his hand down his face, but it continued to glisten. “The bottles don’t belong to Cecile. I bought those bottles full and I emptied them in my own home. They’re a monument to better days. So, here’s what you tell Cecile: no dice. Also, where’s the phone decanter?”

“Yakima,” Homer said, rather pleased he could supply this fact.

“I emptied that phone last New Year’s Eve. Cecile was upstairs watching the ball come down on Times Square. When she showed up, do you think she wished me happy New Year? No. She said, ‘Shit-faced in a wheelchair is a look whose time will never come.’ ”

Madeleine gazed at Dean for a long moment, with wonder or compassion Homer couldn’t say, though he struggled to understand. He seemed to expect that she would say something wise, should she finally speak, but all she said was, “I give up. Perhaps the bottles are happier with you.”

Madeleine couldn’t make it all the way that night, but Salt Lake City was a hub and gave her several options for the morning, and there were shuttles to the hotels near the airport. She assured Homer that she had loved visiting the West and learning firsthand that it was, as all had promised, breathtaking. And just think: once in Salt Lake, you could go direct or change in Memphis, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati— all those cities!—and still get home. Homer seemed downcast at these prospects, but she assured him it had been a treat catching up.

The Refugee

Errol Healy was going sailing to evade custody in one of the several institutions recommended for his care. He believed the modest voyage from his berth in Cortez across the Gulf of Mexico to Key West was something he could handle. All therapeutic routes in which he was described as having a labile affect and deficient insight had proved ineffective, and friends and professionals alike felt the trip might help him reconstruct events in a way positive to his well-being. In particular, his boss at the orange groves urged him to pull himself together or else, and he realized with a panic that losing his job would, under current circumstances, not be endurable. In contrast to the skepticism he directed at mental health professionals, he ascribed almost supernatural powers of healing to an old woman in Key West, Florence Ewing, whom he’d not seen for so many years that it was questionable whether she still lived in Key West or lived at all. In many of his plans these days, he was reduced to superstition, and the mestizos he managed in the groves, who had won his friendship and peculiar loyalty, were superstitious about all things, hanging their charms everywhere, from their old cars to the branches of orange trees. Errol, quite sensibly, thought it was absurd to describe someone who was drunk all the time as having “a labile affect and deficient insight.” Better to note that a do-or-die crisis seemed at hand and something had to be tried if body and spirit were to be kept together. His body was fine.

Years ago, he’d had a sailing accident. As a result, his closest friend, Raymond, was lost at sea, and the meaning of Raymond’s death, nagging and irresolute, continued to consume him. The customary remedies were unavailing, and he intended to resort to this soothsayer of his past. His employer, the owner of numerous large orange groves, had agreed to this final shot: after that, he was on his own. This ultimatum was not offered lightly: Errol, a fluent speaker of Spanish, had a loyal crew who would disperse in the event of his firing. The employer, a patrician cracker who also owned a large juice plant in Arcadia, Florida, said something that really caught Errol and made him see his plight more clearly. “I just can’t have someone like this. Not around here.”

It was evening before Errol boarded
Czarina,
unfurling her jib to gain enough headway to sail the few yards to her mooring. Not far away, a big ketch with the steering vane and ratlines of a long-range cruiser tugged politely at her rode. Otherwise the tideway, lit by stars, was empty. He went below to the galley, turned on a lamp, and made a drink, then carried it to the cockpit, where he sipped and watched the clouds make their way in a moon-brightened sky. He brought the bottle with him and refreshed his iceless drink from time to time, feeling the deep motion of the boat as the incoming tide lifted her against the weight of her keel.

Errol awoke as the sun crossed the side of the cockpit. As usual, he was sick and disgusted but with the rare luxury of not being guilty over something he’d done the night before. He declined to throw the empty bottle overboard and sentenced himself to live with it a few hours more. He had wisely provisioned the galley already—wisely because he hardly had the strength for a shopping trip now—but was in no mood for food. He remained stretched out, waiting for his mind to clear.

Errol made his way around the yawl, raising the mizzen first so that she swung on the mooring facing upwind. Raising the main seemed to take all his strength, the hard stretched halyard in his aching hands, but the sail went up and the halyard somehow found its way to a cleat and
Czarina
trembled under the steady luffing of the mainsail. Errol went forward and cast off the mooring, and
Czarina
began to drift backward toward the dock. Errol released the mizzen sheet and drew in the mainsail;
Czarina
bore off into the tideway. He trimmed the mizzen and the yawl sank down onto her lines and beat across the harbor, tacking here and there to avoid anchored boats. Errol was glad she had no engine: an oily bilge would have been disastrous in his current state.

He sailed south in shallow water past islands covered with winter homes and islands which had been declared wildlife refuges. There was occasional traffic on the Intracoastal Water-way and to the east, towering from the mangroves, a baseball stadium. Cumbersome brown pelicans sailed on air currents, suddenly becoming arrows as they dove into schools of fish.
Czarina
was moving well, rail down and tracking her course insistently. A northwest wind was building, and Errol planned to evaluate the seas once he reached the pass. He would venture out into the Gulf and make a decision. The leeward side of the foredeck had begun to darken with spray as the wind increased, and he could hear the telltales on the leech fluttering. Exultation at the little ship’s movement cheered Errol at last, and he went below to examine his larder. He cut up an apple into a bowl of dry cereal, then poured Eagle Brand condensed milk over it.
Czarina
had sailed herself contentedly in his absence, and he sat down to eat with an inkling of happiness.

The tide was falling through the pass, building up steep seas. A big new-moon tide, it sucked channel markers under and left streaming wakes behind them. Errol was anxious to begin his voyage and, nearly certain he would be turned back, he beat out toward the Gulf of Mexico and the dark sky to the west.