He went out without waiting for a reply.
When Rowan came out of the lavatory, they listened to his pickup roar to a start. He gunned the motor; braked hard backing out and took off explosively toward the highway.
“I’m glad he went.” Her face was brighter. She looked around for where she had left her wine glass. “He’s jealous.”
“Jealous.”
“Yes, he should be … I’d be if I was him.”
“Will he come back?”
She gave Smart a dark crazy smile and shook her head. “Not tonight.”
He watched her stand up and put a tape in her Sharp 4 recorder. It was Vivaldi, L’Estro Armonico. He saw that she was wearing a gun belt with a holstered pistol. The little space she stood in was piled from deck to overhead with books: The Golden Age of American Anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan on the Iroquois longhouse, George Caitlin prints. There was also shelf after shelf on religion: the Gnostic Gospels, the works of Hans Jonas, kabbala, witchcraft, Wicca.
“Look at all your books, kid. You’re still beguiled by magic.”
“My books?” She laughed. Instead of sitting down, she stood beside his chair while the Vivaldi played. “You know when I was in high school the local cops flagged all the library books on witchcraft? They pulled me in. They thought my boyfriend was castrating cattle. Or I was. They told me I had to spy on the witches’ coven in the high school or they’d send me to juvenile jail.”
“Were you a witch?”
“I was a little bookworm. Writing my poetry. There wasn’t even a coven.” She laughed again. “You know, I tried to start one but I got bored.”
Now he laughed and put a hand on her hip and patted it.
“You like the way I look, Will?”
“You look very … constabulary. I mean, what with the gun.”
“They put me on enforcement. Can you imagine? I know more about the Temple, about the Paiute and Shoshone traditions, than any white-eyes in the state. So I’m supposed to chase over hill and dale after some dummy poaching ‘lope. A bitch, right?” She licked her lips and offered him a soiled envelope. There was a crystalline powder at the bottom of it. “Want some? It’s the famous ice. Crystal meth.”
“No thanks.”
“Go ahead,” she said, moving closer to him, pouting slightly. “Because you know we’ll get crocked and you’ll go to sleep on me and how often do I get to see you?”
“I know what you mean.”
“Go ahead.”
He dipped his finger into the stuff so there was a small mound on his fingertip and licked it off.
“Easy,” she said, “this is strong. You’ll get shot out of a cannon.”
“Right,” said Smart. The drug seemed to kick in almost immediately. “I guess I can tell you this,” he said. “I guess you’re a pal.”
“You can tell me everything, Will.”
His heart raced.
“You know, I came unstuck on my last reading tour. I have to get my act together.”
“How did you come unstuck?”
“I found myself in an office full of my poems. A professor’s office. He had every volume I ever published. So I filled my briefcase with them, all my books, and I swung the case against his window. His office was in this ghastly brick tower.” It seemed to Smart that he was speaking faster and faster. “I was trying to break the window, see. I wanted to break his window with my books.”
“Were you drunk?”
“Of course I was drunk.”
“Did you want to jump?”
“Yes, I suppose. But I could only shatter the inner layers of the window. I got his office full of glass and blood. It was after the harassment thing back east. And that was the end of my reading.”
He stood up, dizzy again. The altitude, the drug. He poured himself another glass of plonk.
“But you oughtn’t to die. You have work to do.”
“Maybe.”
“I think you’re a great poet. Even my mother does.”
“Does she?”
“She sure does. And all her friends.”
Rowan’s mother still lived on the commune in Mendocino. It was the place where, among flowers and flutes and midwifery, Rowan had been born. Rowan had spent a lot of her childhood there and Smart had seen very little of her.
“I had a poem for you, Rowan. I’ve been trying to remember it since I got west.” He took another sip of wine to slow the rush of his heart.
“Oh, you have to,” she said. “Take a little more crystal.”
“You minx!” he said. “You’ve poisoned me.”
“I’m not a minx. Or a mink or a weasel,” Rowan said. “I want my poem.”
“Once I spent years trying to remember a poem,” Smart told her. “Twenty years maybe.” He had seen the low range of mountains on the horizon through the little kitchen window and it was as though he were looking for his other lost poem out there. “It was a poem I wrote about a plane loaded with American salesmen breaking up over Mount Fuji. They’d won a selling contest, a free trip to the Orient. So they ended up falling down on Mount Fuji with their wives and their wallets and their Kodaks. Buddhist monks gathered up their bodies. I thought that was so amazing. But I lost the poem I wrote and I never could bring the sucker back.”
“Sure,” Rowan said. “Your Fall of Capitalism poem. I don’t want that one. I want the one you wrote for me.”
“God,” Smart said, “if I sit down I’ll never be able to stand up. How can you take that stuff?”
“Please,” she said, “try and remember. It’s important to me.”
“Rowan,” Smart said, “why don’t I cook for us? We’re letting good beef go to waste.”
“How can you be hungry?” she demanded. “I don’t want to eat.”
“Well,” he said, “maybe I’m not. But we should eat or we’ll get plastered.”
As though she were spiting him, Rowan finished the wine in her glass and poured more for both of them.
“I’ll make you remember,” she said. “I’ll make you remember me. Then you’ll remember my poem.”
She went up to him then and took his hand and kissed it. He put it against her flushed cheek and brushed her straight blond hair.
“My fanciulla del west,” he said. He looked away from her at the sad greasewood landscape outside. “My cowgirl. My Rowan tree.”
When he sat down breathless on the sofa she nestled beside him.
“I was in Alaska, Rowan. Must have been twenty-five years ago. You were little. I saw these salmon going up the Tanana to spawn. I thought it was so moving.”
“I can see you standing there. Like a big bear.”
He began to cry. “Sorry, kid. I’m coming apart again, I guess.”
She put her arm under his and put his hand on her thigh and stroked it for a moment.
“Don’t you see,” she asked, “how our eyes are just the same?”
“Yeah. Well, see me standing there. In that white night.” With his hand still on her thigh, he leaned his head against the back edge of the sofa and looked at the fake wood panels on the trailer ceiling and tried to recite the poem:
Like elephants, swaying
Straining with the labor of each undulation,
They labor home.
The river is forever swift and young,
Forever renewed, beyond history…
He worked to catch his breath and had another swallow of wine.
But these, elephant-eyed
Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls
And swoop of eagles,
Are creatures of time’s wheel.
Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night
I feel for them such love
And, for their cold struggle, such admiration