He was good-looking, about twenty-five, with thick dark brown hair he had let grow long without affectation. He was a good pilot and soft-spoken and considerate. When they first met at a Sierra Club function in West Hollywood, she thought he was gay. When she decided he was heterosexual, she wondered why he didn’t try to put moves on her, since most men did. Then she decided he was like two or three boys she had known in Miami who were shy and private and respectful toward women and nothing like their peers, most of whom were visceral and loud and, when they got her in the backseat, had a way of moving her hand down to their nether regions.
What a drag, she thought, realizing she had been guilty of falling into the national obsession of classifying human beings in terms of their sexual behavior. Do Europeans and Brits do that? Nice to meet you, gay guy. Thank you, but I’m trans. How about you? You look like you might be hetero. Actually, I’m more of an across-the-board premature ejaculator, thank you very much.
At five thousand feet, they hit turbulence that shook the plane and caused Percy to look at her in a protective and reassuring way, and in that moment, in the gentleness of his expression, she knew that her great concern was not about bigotry and obsession and the limited thinking of others; it was her fear that her friend Percy would be horrified if he knew the history of Gretchen Horowitz, that his kind validation of her would be withdrawn.
In junior college she had read an autobiographical account written by a white man who was kidnapped as a child from a sod house in Oklahoma and raised among Comanche Indians. He grew up in the shadow of Quanah Parker and participated in atrocities that were the worst she had ever seen described on a printed page. The lines she remembered in particular were the elderly frontiersman’s depiction of himself as a white teenage boy, smeared with war paint and sweat and the dust of battle, a boy who, in the old man’s words, “thirsted to kill” and did things that were depraved and cruel beyond comprehension. When she read the descriptions, she realized she had found a kindred spirit, one who lived with thoughts and desires that might forever separate her from the rest of the human family.
Bill Pepper had robbed her in every way possible. He had lied to her and turned her charity into a sword he drove into her breast. He had drugged her and bound her and systematically degraded her and mocked her while he did it. Then he escaped into the Great Shade at the hands of another and now lay safe in a stainless steel drawer inside a refrigerated room that smelled of formaldehyde. Where do you put your bloodlust now? she asked herself.
Why did people give so much importance to drug and alcohol addiction? The day you gave up dope and booze was the day you got better. The day you gave up bloodlust was the day you allowed a succubus to devour the remnants of your self-respect.
“There’s coffee in a thermos and an egg sandwich in the canvas bag behind your seat,” Percy said.
“I’m fine,” she replied.
“I can get us into Canada today if you want,” he said.
“I’ve got too much footage on the shale operation. In some ways, it’s not effective.”
He glanced sideways at her, not understanding.
“The areas that are most damaged up there are already totally destroyed,” she said. “People don’t see what the area used to look like. They only see it after it’s been turned into a gravel pit. They’re also depressed by the fact they can’t do anything about it, so they don’t want to look at it or think about it anymore.”
“I bet you’re going to be famous one day,” he said.
“Why would I be famous?”
“Because you’re the real thing.”
“What’s the real thing?”
“You think the work you do is more important than you are,” he said. “Hang on. There’s some weather up ahead. Once we’re over Rogers Pass, we’ll be in the clear.”
She drifted off to sleep as the plane bounced under her, the rain spidering and flattening on the glass. When she awoke, they had just popped out of the clouds, and she saw the sharp gray peaks of mountains directly below her. They made her think of sharks clustered inside a giant saltwater pool with no bottom. “Who was that guy this morning?” Percy said.
“Which guy?”
“The one who dropped you at the airport.”
“There wasn’t any guy. I drove myself. My pickup is parked in the lot.”
“There was an older man in the waiting room. I thought maybe he was your father, the way he was looking at you.”
“No,” she said. “My father is probably still asleep at Albert Hollister’s ranch. What did he look like?”
“Long face, high forehead. I don’t remember. Can you get the thermos for me?”
“Think hard, Percy.”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember. Just a guy, about fifty-five or so. Older guys never look at you?”
“I scare them away.”
“You? That’s a laugh.”
“You said I was the real thing. That’s kind of you, but you’re assigning me a virtue I don’t have. I love movies. I’ve loved them all my life. I never knew why until I read an interview with Dennis Hopper. He grew up poor in a little place outside Dodge City, Kansas. All he remembered of Dodge City was the heat and the smell of the feeder lots. Every Saturday he went to town with his grandmother and sold eggs. She gave him part of the egg money to go to a cowboy movie. Hopper said the movie theater became the real world and Dodge City became the imaginary one. When he was in his teens, he went out to Hollywood. His first role was in Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean. His second movie was Giant, with James Dean again. Not bad, huh?”
“People like you.”
“What?”
“The Sierra Club people like you.” Percy leaned forward, seeming to stare at a point beyond the starboard wing. “Check out the Cessna at three o’clock.”
“What about it?”
“He’s been with us awhile. Is anybody following you around?” His eyes crinkled.
“Maybe I upset a few people in Florida and Louisiana.”
“You’ll never make the cut as a villain, Gretchen. Here comes the Cessna. I didn’t tell you I used to drop fire retardant for the United States Forest Service. Let’s go down on the deck and see if he wants to stay with us.”
They had just flown through clouds above a mountain peak into sunlight and wide vistas of patchwork wheat and cattle land. Percy took the twin-engine down the mountain’s slope like a solitary leaf gliding on the wind, the plane’s shadow racing across the tips of the trees. Gretchen felt as though she were dropping through an elevator shaft. Percy leveled out at the base of the mountain and began to gain altitude again, the engines straining, a barn and a white ranch house couched inside poplar trees miniaturizing as Gretchen looked out the window. “Where’d that red Cessna go?” Percy said.
“I don’t know. Just don’t do that again,” she said.
“Everything’s cool,” he replied. He touched a religious medal that hung from a chain on his instrument panel. “What can go wrong when you have Saint Christopher with you?”