“Dammit, dammit. Don’t spoil it.”
I recognize that voice. “I’m sorry. You want to tell me about the beach?”
“No…no, it was afterwards. At night this flush came on me from so much sun, like a fever almost. And my head has been ringing slightly, not unpleasant at all. There are new sheets on the bed and it’s like I can pick out every thread against my skin. See, my skin is so dried out, when I touch my shoulders or my legs it’s coming off like little flakes of cellophane. But here’s a bottle of baby oil. Don’t you think I should rub some on?”
Like the sweet chromatic horns in a Joe Tex song. Violet gives the best phone in town.
12
THE SKY IS TURQUOISE and cloudless. I take Heidi out to White Tank Hot Springs for the day. There’s a little park there, sawbuck tables and cement barbecues, so we bring beer and a big steak from Opatowski’s kitchen. Heidi puts on clear nail polish as we drive and tells me a story about losing her kid at Sears, having to pick her up at the sheriff’s office.
“They questioned me for an hour, like I wasn’t a fit mother.”
We go past dark cinder hills the texture of macaroons and then the road begins to climb through piñon and juniper. The river runs in slow thin twists beside us and the car fills up with the smell of toluene.
Parked in the shade, we open a couple of beers. Not many cars here, so it shouldn’t be a mob scene. Heidi’s wearing a green leotard to take the waters in.
“Like a xylophone,” she says proudly, strumming her ribs.
The thing I like most about her is the feel of knotted bones.
She goes ahead of me down the path, carrying her strange necessities — magazines, aspirin, jumprope. Her legs are stalks that move smoothly but without give in landing and the musculature of her back surges like a horde of caterpillars on a wall. I begin to pick up voices and at the edge of the gravel, spoor: yellow foil packaging for a roll of film.
Heidi picks up speed. “Come on, potato pants.”
Ground water gathers heat from deep volcanic crust; it percolates down to the hot zone, then rises back up by convection. And that’s about the size of it. Only a few thousand years from start to finish.
Heidi gets out of her clothes like they were on fire. She does a handstand, a cartwheel, and some of the puckered seniors applaud. We inch down into a natural caldron, lean on one another. Silvery gumball bubbles break the surface of the water and steam disappears in the sunlight. My head tilts back on its own and behind clamped lids it is flat, blank, orange.
A finger touches me. “A perfect day,” Heidi says. “We’re together on a perfect day.” Then, a minute or two later, “You smell bad eggs?”
I take her by the chin and turn her, point out the string of mudpots behind us where health addicts dangle themselves in faintly sulfurous ooze.
“Natural gas.” I whisper it.
“Yes, professor.”
My finger curls around hers and we tug gently. Lately she wants more and more from me, I know. Her cautions are falling away. She calls me from her house during dinner, slides her arms around me in the street where her in-laws could be passing. Although the fantasies she harbors are never mentioned, I’m afraid of what they are. I open my eyes.
Fleetingly I consider explaining myself, warning Heidi not to begin undoing the tangle of husband and kid, but I see it’s impossible, part of the problem. A sort of language barrier: We can only talk of immediacies.
Her husband’s name is Wade. He works as an attendant at Cherry Ames Memorial Hospital. In a few more months he will be upgraded, allowed to administer injections.
“This sure is different,” Heidi says, splashing herself. “I never take baths, only showers. Don’t suppose I’ve been in a bath since I was maybe ten years old and still playing with boats.”
Her daughter’s name is Tasha. She spends a lot of time with the neighbor, a widow with failing eyesight. In another year or so she will start first grade and socialization.
I think it’s the predictability that’s so difficult to face. Hard to detect much volition out there. Still, we gather by the water hole thirsty for something, wary of predators.
The picnic area: matched poodles, a man in lederhosen who can’t keep his pipe lit. Heidi jumps rope deftly, clicking her tongue in rhythm. I make a fire, rub mustard into the meat, toss it on the grill. We squat in the grass to eat, one penknife between us, bread slices mushy with juice and fat. Heidi sucks her fingers after every mouthful. I watch her jutting teeth with wonder. More solid bone. Against all this geology she looks immovably elegant. I almost want to take back my thoughts and say, Let’s murder your husband.
Down by the trash barrels there’s a hunched old ratnose with rubber-tire sandals and his white hair in a ponytail. He’s a harvester, picking out cans and stuffing them into a burlap sack. All business, he comes over to ask if he can have our beer empties. Aluminum scrap’s bringing a nice price right now, he says, but you’ve got to know the right people. Heidi, with her automatic solicitude, says, Why don’t you sit down and empty one yourself?
There exist certain individuals who are born historians, detail men, nickname givers. They exude a kind of mental formalin in which unlikely remains are preserved. Adapted to such habitats as bus depots and cafeterias, they learn to move quickly and take advantage of the slightest opening. This E. L. Dobbs, age ninety-three, needs only a minute or two to surround us with rambling vines of talk.
Do we know that this place, here where we sit, belonged to winemakers in Prohibition times? Beautiful vineyards all around and Judge Naylor had claim to the first pressings. You made your own way then or shriveled up. Wild days and up along those crags hundreds and hundreds of eagles, with nests five feet deep. So many birds they took all the fish out of the river and a posse went out to mop them up. Eagle feathers in the hatband of every dude after that. Sure, sell feathers or snakeskins or quail eggs hardboiled. Through the windows when the train came through. You did what you had to, whatever it was.
“Now me, I had to quit pharmacy school when the diphtheria took my daddy off. And what could I do but jump up and take a job nobody wanted. About that time we had a woman killer, dropped her babies down a well. Tiny little thing and pretty as a saint, but the jury said do her. Had a hangman didn’t know his business and when the trap fell her head ripped right off her body. Helluva thing. I knew some anatomy and I said, Let me handle it. Fifteen years I was known up and down as the gentle hangman, and not one of my people experienced the slightest pain. Had a rope hand-woven out of soft bark fibers, kept her wrapped in special papers inside a moistureproof box. Hell, I did them all. Dr. Blount, Bill Tate, the Black Mesa Butcher, Joaquin Ramirez, and that anarchist…What was it? Greuber, yeah, and still singing when I put the hood over him. Tell you what, though. The job showed me something. Gave me the key to things early on.”
He stops, waiting to be prompted, but we look blank. I’m wondering what song the anarchist was singing.
“The whole thing is this: to go out of this world as late as possible.”
“That’s it?” Heidi says, like someone’s just taken her last dollar with a pair of loaded dice.
“Strive to survive and fight for every last day you can. That’s all there is, dearie.”
“This shit I don’t need.” Heidi gets up and heads for the car. She’s genuinely pissed.
No more than a mile since we passed a speed trap, but there’s her foot pressing down on mine and the gas pedal is to the floor.
“Lighten up, sugar. We’ve got plenty of time.”
“You always say that.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, it’s all so easy for you, isn’t it?”