“Oh, I will be,” Smart said. “I’m sober again.”
By lying, he had sought to reassure John. But he had also been trying to find out if Rowan, who shared his difficulty with alcohol and drugs, was on or off the wagon.
John seemed to understand.
“That’s real good,” he said. “Rowan’s been sober a lot. But now she got a raw deal from the service. She got transferred to law enforcement and she’s real pissed off.”
“Law enforcement!” Smart exclaimed. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I know it,” said John, “especially considering her. But, you know, they’re short-handed. They’re putting everybody in law enforcement. Biologists and historians. Men and women both. So she’s pissed off. It’s not for her.”
“Right,” Smart said. He supposed all this must mean she was drinking again. Possibly doing the crank brought over from the Pacific coast or made in the desert by bikers. “The public’s getting out of line, I guess.”
“Oh,” John said, “the public’s apeshit. So the state’s bringing in Rowan.”
“That’s escalation all right,” Smart said. “When does she start enforcing?”
“She starts patrol tomorrow. This is her last day at the Temple.”
The Temple was a small cavern in which red and blue stalactites and stalagmites in fantastic shapes lined a volcanic tunnel that led to a platform of black lava that somehow resembled a table of sacrifice. Everyone from the Shoshone to the mountain men and early Mormons had regarded it with a certain dread. Standing as it did amid the three-square-mile tortured moonscape of black cinder lava, the tunnel, in its sacerdotal spookiness, seemed close to artificial. It was the centerpiece of the park and Rowan always concluded her ranger-guided walks there.
“I’ll be damned,” said the poet Smart. “Well, tell her I’m on my way, would you, John?”
“Sure will.”
Not long after starting his drive, he felt cheated of everything the morning might have provided. A little interior clarity and light. Hope.
He had taken the first drink in Flagstaff, his second stop, a margarita before dinner when they had all gone out for the famous, fabulous Mexican food — he and the professors and the attractive woman librarian who had attended what they had been pleased to fatuously call his “craft lecture.” He had taken the drink because he could see that the librarian was attracted to him, ready in fact to sleep with him that night if he should make the move. But he was afraid of not performing, of impotence.
He put the big lake behind him and took the interstate eastward, through Reno and into the desert. Trucks roared past him, the highway weariness oppressed. Brown peaks lurked on the edge of vision, a sad wind blew across the creosote plain. Smart tried to remember his poem. There was a part he could not recall, about predatoriness, the fish living in the sea as men do on land. At Winnemucca, he left the interstate and drove north.
Four hundred miles away, during her lunch break, Ranger Rowan Smart drove her khaki-colored state golf cart from the Temple to the trailer she shared with John Hears the Sun Come Up. John was at home doing a wash in the machine. Their trailer had no dryer; they used a clothesline, half concealed like the trailer itself behind a stand of lodgepole pines less than a mile from the monument headquarters. Rangers were paid minimum wage.
“Your father’s coming tonight,” John said when he heard Rowan come into the trailer. “He telephoned.”
“I knew it was today,” Rowan said. She was fair freckled and blond, with a long plain pretty face. She had bright blue wizard’s eyes as striking as her father’s and her face was flushed. “Why didn’t you call me at the Temple?”
“Figured you’d be home.”
She went into the sleeping compartment and began to change her clothes. She was taking off the gray work slacks she wore at the Temple and replacing them with her military gray-striped breeches and the expensive English riding boots she had bought herself years before in Alexandria, Virginia.
“What you want for lunch?” John asked. “I went to Yamoto’s. I got some pretty good tomatoes.”
“No lunch,” she said. She went to the mirror on the bathroom door in the sleeping room and inspected herself in the uniform of Smokey hat and ranger shirt and boots and trooper’s breeches.
“You didn’t eat breakfast. You on a fast or something?”
“I’m on a fast,” she said. “I require a vision.”
“I think you’re doing crank, Rowan.”
“What I need,” she said, “is a drink.” She came to the door of the sleeping compartment and they looked at each other. “Martinis, right? Look, John, I need you to go up to the state store and get us gin and vermouth. I need it for him.”
“I’m working the gate this afternoon. I already got wine. I got steaks in case you want to make him dinner. Anyway,” John said, “he says he’s sober.”
“Wrong,” said Rowan. “Because if he were sober he wouldn’t stop here. He’d give me a miss.” She went back into the compartment and took another look at herself in the mirror. “Just like in the old days. Back to college. If he thought I could get him pot or coke, I’d see him. But if he was being Professor Straight and Narrow it was like hello goodbye Rowan, my dear. All right,” she said, “wine’ll do. I hope it’s good, because he knows his wine.”
“It’s Georges Deboeuf red, the large size.”
“That’ll do,” she said. She opened an aluminum drawer and took an envelope out and dipped her forefinger inside the flap and licked it.
“Let him be,” John told her. “The past is past. I don’t think he always remembers what happens on his trips.”
“How can he not remember?” she asked.
“They’re gonna get you, Ro,” John said. “Peterson is gonna spring a random drug test on your ass. Anyone who knows you can tell when you’re on crank. You figure to do it on mounted patrol?”
“No,” Rowan said, chastened. “Never happen again.”
Once, loaded, not on enforcement but on what they called at the monument “riding fence,” she had ridden a cow pony half to death in a burst of romantic enthusiasm.
When she came out of the bedroom, John Hears the Sun Come Up looked at her in her boots and striped breeches.
“Put those on for him?”
“Who?” she asked. She was without any ability to conceal her intentions or schemes. “Who? Peterson?”
“Not Peterson,” John said. “You know who.”
“Yeah, I did,” she said after a moment. “I did, so what? He likes them. He likes me to wear them.”
“Well,” John said, “you’re thirty-one years old.”
“Aw, shit,” Rowan said sweetly, “you remembered.”
By afternoon, Smart had gone far northward, though he was still among the dry lakes, salt flats and badlands. Soon he began to see aspen groves and chamisa and smell the sage. Presently there were red rocks and buffalo grass, pinon and juniper. He began to think of Rowan. She was his wildflower outlaw, Girl of the Golden West. She had been born in Mendocino to a radical actually on the lam, a child of the old days. During the Patty Hearst affair the FBI had hassled him about the whereabouts of Rowan’s mother. But at that time he had not known where either of them were. He had been with his wife in Boston and his other legitimate children, whose day-to-day adventures were his life then.
The FBI had been interested in him too, back then. His work had been so popular in the Soviet Union in those days. As a young man he had worked as a lumberman in forests not far to the west of his present road; Soviet publishing houses had always loved his poems about saws whipping back and sweat freezing in your hair, the crust of a frozen marsh collapsing underfoot, the absurdities of religion. And of course, in that era, the anti-Vietnam War poems. He was one of the American poets to whom the Soviet Writers’ Union paid royalties, and he had often gone over there, and to Eastern Europe, to read. He had had many Russian women.