“I demand to see James.”
“You will have to demonstrate to a neutral party that you are worthy.”
“I ought to brain you.”
“See what I mean? Besides, you’re in a completely other time zone. So that is a sick fantasy. It would be ill enough if you said it to my face, but this is ill-on-ill. And every time you light into my attorney, you look slightly less good to neutral parties.”
“Am I to understand that I have to get a gold star from every pot-licker who cares to evaluate me or I don’t see him?”
“That’s probably the best way for you to view it. James is not something that you picked out of a litter. He is a little person entitled to the usual assortment of human rights. It’s my job on earth to see that he gets them. It’s also my job to be at work in about seven hours. It’s not nine o’clock. Not here, not there. Not anywhere. I’m going before you get your tail into a worse crack than it’s already in. Goodbye.”
She hung up. There was no smack of black plastic, just the buttons going off, a regular hangup. Lucien could tell he had not particularly gotten under her skin. Then suddenly he was clear. What he had done had made it a little harder for him to see his child. It had been a long day and now it was over.
He called back.
“Sorry.”
“Okay, I accept, goodbye.”
Lucien put on his coat, went outside and felt for the porch rocker.
He sat in the dark with his hands in his sleeves and looked at the grayish silhouettes of cattle along the creek. He startled some bird when he first moved in the rocker, and the papery awkward rush of wings near his head made him nervous. All of him seemed out of the moonlight except his shoes, which shone disconnected before the rocker. He moved his eyes from the knuckles of his left hand to the knuckles of his right hand. There was a little light on them. I’m still here, he thought.
Before his father had died and he had asked everyone to refrain from keening, in fact many years ago, Lucien had gone on a fishing trip to the Bear Trap on the Madison River with his father, a man named Ben Rush and a man named Andrew McCourtney. Each night his father and Ben Rush would go to the bar and tell fish stories, then come home and pass out till halfway through the next morning. They’d wake up and tell fish stories right through their hangovers, which they would cure with bourbon chilled in the icebox. Andrew McCourtney was a fragile Irishman who had been shell-shocked, and his face had sudden unwilled movements. McCourtney seldom drank because it threw him into the Second World War, and he’d screech about booby-trapped German cameras, snipers in bombed châteaus, and law schooclass="underline" he’d flunked his bar examination and become a salesman, working for Lucien’s father and Ben Rush, a former prizefighter from Chicago.
So McCourtney got up early while the other two slept, and awoke young Lucien to take him out for the morning mayfly hatch; and Lucien would be completely and unquestionably happy.
Lucien’s father and Ben Rush liked to play tricks on McCourtney, and one night they took Lucien aside. Here’s a good one, they breathed on him: when McCourtney comes round in the morning, tell him you’re not in the mood to fish; tell him to find somebody else. Lucien lay up long after the two came crashing in, worrying about the joke. He assumed at least that his father knew what he was doing. So when McCourtney came to the door, he piped, “I’m not in the mood to fish. Find someone else.” And McCourtney was gone.
He waited around the camp until his father and Ben Rush woke up and told them he had delivered his speech to McCourtney. Neither of the men could remember how it began. When McCourtney came back to camp with his rod and a full creel, Lucien hurried to explain the joke. “That’s all right, Lucien. We leave tonight.” But McCourtney was no longer there, not in his bright twitching expectant face of the early morning, or in any other way. His remoteness lasted Lucien indefinitely.
Tonight on the windy porch, features of the darkness began to emerge to his adjusting eyes. He thought, I wonder if this is it. He considered his child’s decent circumstances. I couldn’t do as good a job, he thought, and went inside for a drink. Find somebody else.
When he awoke, he could hear car engines starting just past the curtains. He didn’t know where he was. He went to the window and looked out upon a parking lot and beyond to the jerky movement of early traffic. He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the phone and dialed the desk.
“What’s the name of this place?” he asked.
“It’s the El Western,” said the voice. “This is the El Western. May I help you?”
8
A great blue norther made up and came down off the High Line. Lucien went into town and bought some duck loads for his sixteen-gauge. He admired the town for its symmetry in the bend of the big river, for its smoky cheer in the face of this raid of arctic weather. Then he went off and hunted ducks in a place where a spring creek, having arisen in one small eye of a swamp, wound out in a long ribbon of steam toward the river a couple of miles away. He walked along while the deep cold made a bas-relief map of his own skull, exposing bone through flesh and reminding him that cold, not heat, is the natural order. Suddenly his small white frame house seemed a pale, brave island in eternity. A more analytical person might have concluded that this solitary regimen was a good and happy one for him. But he was old enough to know that loneliness, like some disturbance, would begin to form.
The ducks jumped straight up through the steam with a hard electrical wing-beat, and Lucien shot a pair of drakes. Green-headed and orange-footed, they were northern birds so heavy as to seem like small geese. Lucien broke open the gun, and the empties jumped smoking onto the ground. His overworked tear ducts made his eyes blur from the warmth around the spring. He sat and plucked the birds, an easy job with their still-hot bodies. Down drifted and caught in the russet brush, and in a short time he had a pair of oblate units of food, the meat shining pinkish through a layer of creamy fat and pale dimpled skin. Lying next to them in the snow were the matched green severed heads. High above Lucien, one flight after another, long stringy Vs seemingly in the stratosphere, headed south. Lucien looked forward to his dinner and could not avoid realizing that these two weren’t going.
He put his ducks in the front hall and stood the shotgun in the corner, all without taking off his coat. Then he went back outside and started trudging toward the curl of smoke a couple of miles away that marked the neighbor’s house. He had to make some friends. Maybe the neighbor liked ducks. The movement of his legs in the light snow reminded him of a mild ocean breaking on a gradual sand shore. He remembered bobbing in the ocean at his uncle’s Oregon house, rising to view the beach, then dropping again to let his boy’s mind run wild with the sense of being lost at sea; a few strokes and he would come breaking out of the surf onto the warm beach where his beloved cousins played.
Instead of his cousins and the sea, thirty years were gone, and he made his way to the bitter stone-and-clapboard home of his neighbor. The neighbor was working on a front-end loader next to a Quonset shop. At all its moving junctures grease and debris had frozen; they were frozen to the consistency of taffy now, and the neighbor was chunking the stuff away with the end of his screwdriver. He didn’t look toward Lucien as he walked up. Lucien gave him his name and he nodded. In the silence a colossal ranch wife moved past the Thermopane window of the grim house and vanished.
“What’s wrong with the loader?” Lucien tried.
“Don’t work.”
“I see.”
Lucien looked over toward the corrals. There were small bunches of cattle spotted around here and there, and outside the corrals an unwound round bale that the neighbor could pitchfork feed from. The fork was stuck straight up in the center of the bale. Lucien was unable to think what he might say to administer some routine welcome.