“Just a second,” Smart said. “Just a minute.” He had no choice but to move in the direction the guard impelled him. Otherwise, Smart felt, he would fall and be at the mercy of the whirling angry room. Looking up at the man holding him, Smart could focus on his face. It was brown and handsome, without expression.
“That’s hard on the arm,” he said, trying to laugh it off, sputtering too wetly. And then he saw that there was a second guard, a young woman with straight blond hair who was saying, “Are you not all right, sir? Because if you’re not all right, sir; we’ll have to put you in custody of the police and they can see you get whatever attention you might require, if you feel you require attention. That would just be a matter of your own protection, if you required custody. Do you think you require custody, sir? For your own protection?”
“All right,” Smart said.
Then they were on the steps of the casino, at the edge of the parking lot beside the highway. The big Mexican stood by while the blond woman guard recited.
“Now sir; the hotel and lounge and casino and the restaurant and the grounds are private property and you may not enter them without permission and you do not have that permission now. And you are barred from those places at any time. And you are very close — this close, sir — to violating our laws and you will go to jail if we have to engage you personally again. So are you hearing me, sir?”
As Smart made his way toward his car; he turned and saw her, half in the shadow of her giant companion, talking into a hand radio.
“My daughter;” he told the two guards, “is a park ranger. I’m on my way to see her.”
The big Mexican guard advanced on him.
“How’s that? How’s that, buddy? You got a problem?”
“No, no,” Smart implored. “No problem whatsoever.”
He breathed with difficulty. A few years before he had suffered a breakdown and been involved in an accident. Now his arm was completely numb where the guard had grabbed it. Its throbbing kept time with the beating in his chest.
He climbed into his car and waited for the pair of them to go back inside. The worst of it, he thought, was their rage at him. As though everyone had been waiting for him to make the slightest wrong move. He started his engine, shifted into gear and, without turning on his headlights, guided the car to the part of the parking lot that was farthest from the highway. Beside the lot, beyond a log fence, began the stand of fir trees that marked the edge of woods that bordered the lake. Turning off the ignition was the last thing he remembered.
He dreamed of being in trouble — trouble in boot camp, trouble at sea, trouble among the stacked books on college library shelves. He was forever doing things wrong. Wronging students, brother poets, women. The world was rotten with anger.
Once he half awakened to a kind of clarity. He was still trying to remember the poem about salmon. Never published. Lost.
And what they’ve seen!
The shimmer of the equatorial moon against still glass overhead
And leapt, breathless, headlong, a hair ahead of the needle jaws
Out into the breathing world under the blank blessing of the Southern Cross
Out under Cygnus, Hydra, Hercules,
Now close-hauled home.
It was red dawn when he came properly awake. He opened the car door and climbed out stiffly, shivering in the morning’s cold. He had to pop the trunk and pull out his old seabag from among the empty suitcases he kept there and rummage through it for a sweater warm enough. As he was pulling the sweater over his head, a few details of the previous night came back to him. He sat sideways in the driver’s seat with the car door open, feet on the ground, head in his hands. Then he looked up warily, wondering if he was still being stalked. But all that had happened concerned him less than the words of his lost poem.
It seemed a shame, he thought, to be denied the lake. He’ could feel its huge cold blue presence across the dark green zone beside the parking lot. There was no one in sight. Thirsty and sore, Smart climbed over the log fence into the gloom of the big trees. He found a trail at once and followed it. Only a few yards off the hotel lot the sense of deep forest closed around him. And the trail was so unlittered, it might have been backcountry. The hotel was not the sort whose guests took walks in the woods.
The trail led him to a granite ledge over the lake. In spite of the neatness of the trail, the lakeside was an untidy place, with spent Coors cans and pull-rings and a few crushed empty cigarette packs. Smart saw that a paved road led to the lake from the casino’s drive. Above the mists over the still water; an osprey circled like some omen in a shaman’s dream. The sun over the Washoes lit the white feathers beneath its wings.
He stood and watched the bird soar for a moment, then closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
Then he began to scramble down the granite ledge that led to the water. The lake was so still that there were barely wavelets against the rocky shore. In his morning thirst, Smart lay belly-down on the cold jagged stone and stretched out to drink. Pine needles floated in the shallows around him. He supposed it was inadvisable to drink the lake water but he was not in a mood to worry. It tasted sweet in his dry throat. Were there still landlocked salmon? There had been when he was a boy.
Their hulking gray bodies
Crisscrossed and creased with scars
Of hook and teeth, harpoon, gaff and winch and bullet—
They’ve survived the wolf shark’s circling, the bitch seal’s guile to feed her pups,
From the prison-yard frenzy in the ascending stifle of the net
These broke free.
Getting to his feet, he wiped his mouth with his woolen sleeve and looked about him like an outlaw. Anyone spotting him there, burly and furtive in the early morning light, might have been reminded of a bear prowling at the edge of human habitation. In a stiff-legged lope, favoring his sore back, he hurried to his car. For a while he sat in indecision, hands on the wheel, breathing hard. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was after six. No longer too early to call his daughter, who lived within the State Natural Monument area, five hundred miles to the east and north. He drove for several miles along the road that circled the lake until he found a strip mall with a pay phone. From it, he called his daughter Rowan, named for the rowan tree. In the very first ring of her phone he could sense the desolation and terrible magic of the place she lived, the trailer under the stars, the fields of lava.
“Hi,” said a man’s voice when Rowan’s line was answered. The casual response had a drawling near-insolence, somewhat mitigated by the softness of the speaker’s voice. Smart recognized his daughter’s friend and fellow ranger John Hears the Sun Come Up. John was a Shoshone from the reservation adjoining the monument who had gone east to college, at Beloit, and come home to work for the Park Service.
“John? Will Smart. What’s new, brother?”
“A little here, a little there,” said John Hears the Sun Come Up. “We been expecting you, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I was surprised you were coming. Rowan, she says she always knew. Anyway, we got your phone message.”
“Is it all right?”
There was a hesitation, and Smart was surprised and a little offended by it.
“Sure. She’s real excited. Yeah,” John said in his unhurried manner. “Real excited. I hope you have got some poems to read us.”
“I would never come empty-handed,” Smart said. “Tonight all right? I should be able to cover five hundred miles.”
“Out here you should be able to cover a thousand. Just be careful.”