Rowan nodded. “You can never tell how strong it is or what’s in it,” she agreed, and strummed a few chords. “I guess that’s because it’s made by the Hell’s Angels and not the Red Cross.”
John picked up the afternoon paper and leafed through it.
“I don’t know, kid. I ain’t gonna have a good time tonight. I should go see my mother.” He put the paper aside and stood up. His younger brother was making trouble for the old lady, hanging with a gang. John’s mother had a drinking problem of her own. “Anyway, I want to buy a lottery ticket in town.”
“Oh God,” Rowan said, sounding truly frightened, “he’s coming! I think I see his car.”
Her friend looked stoically straight ahead.
“You gotta forget, Rowan. You have to realize what drunks are like. He won’t remember you that way. If he does … it’s not good.”
“What do I care what citizens and pilgrims think?” she demanded of him. “You yourself told me you thought it was all right.”
“Some Indian people think it’s all right. If it’s what the spirit world wants.”
“Well, I happen to think it is.”
“Well, I happen to think it isn’t,” John Hears the Sun Come Up said. “I think that crank will take your life someday.”
“Jesus,” Rowan said, “it’s him.”
“I ought to stay,” he said. “But only if you let me.” When he looked at her she was licking the crystal from her fingertips.
“I hope God helps you. You should ask him.”
“I’ll ask him to stay too.”
“Rowan…”
She put her hands over her ears, still staring out at the road.
“I’m not hearing you.”
“Yes you are,” he said. “You are.”
Smart parked beside their cars at the end of the dirt road that led to the trailer. Hers was a Volvo from the mid-eighties. John’s was a Dodge pickup, suggesting commercials from vanished Super Bowl Sundays, the Spirit of America. They had the Park Service cart parked there too.
There were sprouts and carrots still growing in their garden. The carrots, he remembered, sometimes came round as medallions, from the shallow layer of soil above the igneous rock, flattened out against it.
He walked up to the trailer and knocked on the door. He had promised John Hears the Sun Come Up a new poem. Maybe he would magically remember the salmon poem. He might remember it word for word, he thought. Suddenly he found himself wondering what exactly he had been feeling that night beside the Tanana. Whatever it was, that was the subject of the poem. If he could bring that back, the words might follow.
Rowan stood in the doorway looking down at him. When he’d last seen her she had been flabby with drink but now her face was lean and tanned, although of course she was older now and there were wrinkles radiating from the corners of her eyes. She was in her uniform, slim and sleek. Her face was red and her blue eyes looked a little unsound. Along with mounting excitement in his chest he felt a quickening of caution.
Their kiss was brief and distant and they avoided each other’s eyes. John stood and shook hands with Smart. Then they sat in the center compartment of the trailer. Smart, as guest of honor, took the small gray sofa. Rowan and John sat in plastic armchairs. The rest of the space was occupied by cases full of Rowan’s books. There were more books in an adjoining stage closet. She had even jammed a tiny desk into the space. Looking around the small room, he saw a couple of yellow pads with what looked like verse in his daughter’s handwriting.
“Writing poetry?”
She laughed self-consciously without answering.
“I’ll have to read it,” he said, “or get you to read it to me.”
“She’s a good poet,” John said. He was drinking Sprite, staying with the program. Smart and his daughter drank the red wine. “Not as good as you,” he said to Smart, “but pretty good.”
“John’s a connoisseur of poetry,” Rowan said. “He’s real diplomatic too.”
“I know she’s a good poet,” Smart said. “She always has been. Since she was a little girl.”
“We see the world through the same eyes,” Rowan said. “That’s literally true. Our eyes are the same. I mean look at them.”
Both the men in the room found somewhere else to look.
“Do you remember any of my poems?” Rowan asked her father. “Do you remember the ones I used to send you from California? Maybe you never got them.”
Smart had a recollection of his daughter sending him poems she had written. He had inscribed a book of his poems to her and she had made a folder of her poems and sent them to him. Then later in college, she had published some poems in university literary magazines and sent them to him. He had never, as far as he could remember, responded.
“I do remember some of them,” he said.
“Do you remember the one I wrote about the wind in the desert?”
“The one where you held the wind in your hands?”
Rowan put her glass down and raised both hands to her face.
“Oh God! You remembered it!”
It was the one single poem of hers he remembered. She had written it after her mother had moved her to the women’s collective in New Mexico. It was about ending up with nothing, with no one.
“Sure I remember it,” Smart said, draining his glass. “I think I used it.”
“Oh God,” Rowan said. “I’m glad you did.”
“How about playing for me?” Smart said. “Still got your pawnshop guitar?”
“Hey, I thought you’d never ask.”
She played him an old Scottishy song he liked about the Rose and the Linsey-O and then a song she had written, from one of her poems. But he seemed not to notice it was her poem.
“Hey, what about that steak?” John said. “We gonna eat or what?”
“Sure,” Rowan said without enthusiasm. Her eyes were fixed on her father. “I’ll do it.”
“No, no,” Smart declared. He struggled up from the sofa and poured another juice glass of wine for Rowan and himself. “I’m cooking. I see mushrooms and your homegrown jalapeños. I’m the steakmaster.
“You know,” he told them as he blundered about the kitchen, “I got thrown out of one of the casinos down on the lake. For being drunk, I guess.”
“‘Cause you look like a rodeo clown,” Rowan said. She plunked a chord on the guitar and put it aside. “That’s why.”
John gave her a disapproving look.
“They seemed so goddamn angry,” Smart said. “Like they hated me.”
“Probably did,” she said. She got up and went to the trailer lavatory. While she was in it John came up to Smart, one eye on the door. His voice was naturally so soft that it was always hard for Smart to hear him, and he was keeping it low.
“She’s doing crank, Will. She’s been doing it all day and I thought I better tell you.”
“She seems in good spirits.”
“That can change real fast. And she won’t sleep and she won’t shut up. So I hope you’re ready.”
“Actually,” Smart said, “I’m really not.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come.”
“You mean because I’m drinking?”
“You know what I mean,” John said. He had been speaking with his eyes closed, as some Northwest Indians do when they are moved to show respect. “I love hearing your poetry, Will. But I’m not gonna stay and protect either of you. Not with the two of you like this.”
With John’s eyes closed to him, Smart drank the glass of wine down. His third.
“Your poetry’s all you have,” John Hears the Sun Come Up told Smart. This time he looked him in the eye. His own eyes looked flat, utterly unfeeling. “It’s your soul, a good soul.”
“Thanks,” said Smart, touched.
“But you shouldn’t go near her. Not now.”