In my overheated heart.
“I can’t, baby,” he said finally. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s very good.”
“Such love,” she repeated.
“I don’t know what it was about,” he said. “I admired these fish. Being finished, coming home. They had done what they were meant to do. Whereas I never had.” He closed his eyes and put a hand on his chest, under which his heart was racing. “Or maybe it was just about the moment. I don’t know.”
“Such love,” she said.
“When whatever happened between you and me, Rowan … What shouldn’t have, what I shouldn’t have let happen. I was on that tour. I had come apart.”
“I see,” she said.
“And I wanted some comfort and love. I wanted it so much.” He was weeping. He wiped his nose, bearlike.
“And do you now?”
“Yes I do.”
She stood in front of him and took his hands and folded them behind her back. He withdrew them quickly. Rowan tensed and pursed her lips. Her anger frightened him.
“The poem is about us,” she said. When he tried to speak, she interrupted him. “Yes it is, it’s about us.”
He realized that she was trying to kiss him on the mouth.
“This is just drugs,” Smart said. He stood up, trying to escape. It was like a dream, suggesting something that had happened once before in another world. “John will be back. What will he think of you?”
She laughed and pushed herself against him, standing on tiptoes in her boots, pressing her face into his.
“John will not be back, Will. John is a Wind River Shoshone and his attitude is from that culture and believe me it’s peculiar to that culture. Besides, he’s a passive-aggressive.”
Smart collapsed back on the miniature sofa. She kept trying to kiss him, fondling him, at his belt, his clothes.
“Rowan,” he said, “my sweet. I’m lonely. I wanted to see you.”
“But you don’t want me.”
“Oh yes,” Smart said, “I want you. I want all the things we didn’t have. I do. But I can’t make them happen, can I?”
“But you don’t want me,” she said.
“Listen,” he said, “you were just a pretty girl.”
“Then we shouldn’t have done it before, should we?” Rowan said. She fixed him with the mirror of his eyes. “Then you never should have done it and I never should have gone for it. But I did. You’re the only one I want. Ever since then. All my life maybe.”
“I was drunk,” Smart pleaded. “I was on drugs. I was certifiable. I took some comfort. I was desperate.”
“Then,” she said, “what about me?”
“We fucked up, baby. It happens.”
She turned on him with such violence that he jumped. She was a big girl, strong as he had been, only an inch or so shorter than his six two. She resembled him so much.
“You like me like this. I know you do. I’ve been waiting for you all day.”
“God,” he said. “You’re still a child, aren’t you?”
He put out his hands and took her by hers and sat her down beside him.
“This is how it was, baby. I hardly knew you. It was as though you weren’t my daughter.” It was hard to face her grieving, crazy eyes. “You were the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen.” He laughed, against his will. “You were so adoring. I couldn’t help it.” He tried to embrace her but she avoided his embrace.
“I’m the only one of your children,” she said, “who has your eyes. We’re the same.”
“Just a beautiful young girl,” Smart was saying. And after a fashion he remembered or thought he remembered how it might have happened. As beautiful a young girl as he had ever seen. So young and gorgeous and besotted with him. What a fool he must have been, a weak, self-indulgent drunk. In those days, when he had let it happen, when he had done it, he had thought he could do no wrong. He had actually complained to friends of being made too much of. God knew what they had secretly thought of that, of him. As if no bills would ever be charged to his account.
The drug was driving the rhythms of his heart and brain to a pitch he could not manage.
“Your poem,” Rowan said, “it’s about me. It’s about you coming back to me. Us both coming back where we belong. Which is together. Always,” she said. “Always because we have the same flesh, we have the same mind, the same eyes.”
Smart caught his breath. “You’ve taken that drug,” he said.
“We see the same things at the same time. I know your poems as well as you do.”
He got to his feet and tried to shake off the tremors that assailed him.
“I’ll tell you what,” Smart said. “I’ve got through many a night on many a drug. I’ll sing to you like I used to. Sometimes, anyway. We can read poems to each other. Then it’ll be morning, see. We’ll hear the birds. The sun’ll be up. The drug will be over. We’ll have survived.”
Without looking at him, she walked into the darkness at the sleeping end of the trailer. Finding himself alone, he went back to the kitchen and drank more wine. He had made a mistake, another one. Another old bill presented. No end to it. He curled up on the sofa with the light on. There was only darkness and silence at the far end of the trailer where his daughter lay.
After a while, he began passing out, lapsing into a shallow sleep from which the methedrine kept waking him. In each space of sleep, a pool of uneasy dreams awaited him. From each he kept rising against his will, finding himself thirsty and breathless in the harshly lit trailer. Once he dreamed of the salmon. In the dream it seemed to him that he could remember it all, verse by verse, in Rowan’s voice:
Fighting their way on up the Tanana
Two hundred miles now from the sea
And when I try to see their eyes,
What I see, under the flow,
Are old elephants’ eyes
Appearing wise but still
No wiser than Creation.
Her warm cheek was against his temple and she was reciting:
All their long years they saw the predators fail,
All the same time their own predations fed them.
What a life, the life of the roving sea!
Where fish live, the poet said,
As men do on land.
Her voice was so sweet and he loved her so much. He was himself accounted a good reader. Then it occurred to him that he had never rendered those lines for her. It was a part of the poem he had forgotten. Before he could open his eyes to inquire, the bullet struck his brains out.
She did not holster the weapon but held it hot against her left hand. After the noise, the deaf-and-dumb horror the vitriol of her grief welled up to every part of her where it could curl and pool. Even through the wine and the drug she felt it burn. For nearly an hour until the crystal energy failed, she pressed her wine- and speed-stained maw against his red mouth, trying to breathe life back into the mess she had made of him.
“Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “Sorry, Bear.”
She had not been able to get him through the night. Nor he her.
Rage. But she had not wanted him dead, not at all. Only to have something. Something, anything, between childhood and death.
All night long she sat facing the ugliness she had worked. His pants were undone. Dreadful. Had she done that? Maybe, pursuing the salt of her own generation. Trying to get home. She must be in some confusion, she thought, about which coupling had created her.
Both, she thought. She was Rowan, the creature of both those lyings-down. Under the mountains, on sweet grass, among the musky ash and laurel. Name it and claim it. She could no longer remember the moment of killing. So he forgot he fucked me, she thought. And I forgot I shot him. Sorry about that, Bear.