Tompkins came down from the corner of Callender. He was wearing a herringbone topcoat with a velvet collar and a John B. Stetson hat. He used his cigarette to point out a streetside stairway to Lucien. They went up and opened the door at the top, going through a very ancient-looking brick wall. Inside was a simple dining room. Adjoined to it by a half door was a small kitchen, where a Chinese woman cooked. “I’ve got some fine sour-mash whiskey for us, Lucien.”
“I don’t care how it tastes so long as it kills brain cells and fucks up my memory.”
Wick made two strong drinks at a sideboard and silently held the glasses over the half door until the Chinese woman filled them with ice. He brought them to the table and sat down.
“What is this place?”
“This is the dining room. Shitalmighty, I can’t eat like those people out there. I don’t believe in the afterlife. You have to believe in the afterlife to eat like those sumbitches.”
Lucien stared around at the walls of the tall room. It was painted an ocher color and had a ceiling fitted roundabout with hard pine molding. Someone had painted the ceiling a thrilling azure, and plummeting through this blue were all the fine hawks of the northern Rockies, all the common ones, anyway; and from the light fixture which served as a noon sun in this conceit, a terrific prairie falcon hurtled, its feathers scaling its earthward dive with martial brightness.
The Chinese woman came and put down some leek soup, some delicious pot stickers and a bowl of dry fried beef. Most of the light in the room came from the top of the tall transom windows; it was light from a high part of the sky and seemed to filter any life that surrounded the building. In such isolation, Lucien thought, one must decide upon things, accept the aerial quality of one’s situation.
“I called my wife.”
“She’s not your wife anymore.”
“I called Suzanne. She seems to have no interest in coming out here. At this time.”
“What’s there to come to?”
“I know.”
“Are you going to do anything about it?” Wick asked in a challenging tone.
“I’m going to start something tremendous,” Lucien retorted.
“What?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll be very proud of it.” In Lucien’s face was the glow and pride of a diving catch. It was important to snap Wick back just a little. “I’m going to set the world on fire.”
“Lucien, it’s me, Wick.”
“People will come from miles around,” he continued, trying to fuel the mood.
Wick stood up and looked upon Lucien with a lowered brow that seemed to say, I know you’ve got it in you. It was an artificial look. “I have to leave,” he said. “Believe this or not, I’ve got a client. Finish your lunch and don’t fuck the cook.”
9
It began to soak in. It soaked in faster than the Chinese food. Lucien headed for the bank, where he was strangely unspecific with a vice-president, who agreed that the ranch was valuable and the loan Lucien wanted would be well secured. Yet when Lucien said, “I just feel lost. I’m hoping heavy borrowing will create a useful crisis,” he saw the banker was lost too but unwilling to consider embezzlement or any of the other things that would restore the oxygen to his atmosphere. Even with his blow-dry shag haircut, the banker retained a hangdog face; and nothing on its surface really changed when Lucien said the following. “I know this is all based on you throwing me into the briar patch of usurious interest rates. But I just don’t see the thrill from your point of view, however it turns out. Not that I don’t appreciate it!” He waved the big check in gratitude and went back outside, where yet another unique sedan suddenly seemed to hold the absolute promise of a rocket ship or a bomb.
Before he started, he wanted to take another good look at the spring. He drove out on a highway interrupted by the tongues of old wheel-packed snow; he went up through his outbuildings, past the house, where Sadie leapt behind the front window. He made his way over the unnerving shalerock jeep road until he reached the spring. He didn’t get out. He just sat in the car and listened to the livestock report on the radio and viewed the rolling steam climbing from the great blue eye that had watched him from days gone by. Around the spring, the steam had mineralized the landscape, the branches of trees. Minerals, Lucien knew, were a big item. The spring was a deep penetration of warm moving water as full of goodness as amniotic fluid is to a developing infant. All I’ve got to do, he thought, the big check burning a hole in his pocket, is deliver the goods. He felt better already, monstrous almost.
They brought the buildings from near and far: a cavalry stable from the Missouri River housed the main pool. Evocative bentwood dude-ranch furniture from the twenties was arranged around the slate perimeters of the spring, concealing the old mud banks where Lucien had floundered away many a sorrow. Adjoined by a fragrant, carpentered cedar passage was an ancient way station found at Silver Star, Montana; here Lucien’s friend and chef Henchcliff prepared the meals that made him a regional legend. Then line shacks from the slopes of Kid Royal Mountain and the high pastures of Froze-to-Death were dismantled, moved and restored as the evocative cottages that housed chiefs of state, high-spirited young professionals, screaming mimis and the assorted preposterously well-off who drifted around the good places on a seasonal basis.
Mary Celeste had set up her enema therapy center in an old-time blacksmith’s shop, also connected to the spring; on its walls were loops and loops of glass tubing where the gastrointestinal burden of her clients flew by; she could tell booze from water, beets from a bleeding ulcer and bacterial diarrhea from bad cocaine. She had the mind of a native healer, and no sense of humor.
The landscaping was the original sage and juniper, divided by gravel walks. The parking lot was hidden in a draw and the airfield was on the low flat mesa where, as a boy, Lucien had seen the lost saddle horse with his father.
Old man McCourtney was the doorman, the shell-shocked Irishman with a mottled face. He wore English suits and indicated the front desk with a shaking hand. Since he looked too old and weak to fight, he made a perfect bouncer in the late evenings, preying on the remorse of drunks. Lucien had renewed their friendship at his father’s funeral, where he had requested no keening; McCourtney stood well off among the casual acquaintances, twitching. Lucien had had little to say at the time, as he gripped his mother just above the elbow and hoped for the best. At the funeral, Lucien said, “If you ever need me, call.” She never called.
Much trouble came to Lucien through his living in an area his friends wished to visit without their wives. When Lucien got the hot spring, friendships that had fallen into rueful desuetude came back to life. They loved him and they loved his healing waters! They parked on the white gravel, soaked and appealed for discounts on their bills. On the radio, a song spoke of one of sixteen vestal virgins heading for the coast. This is life, thought Lucien, this is the long tunnel. Down in my hot spring the women are buoyant with reproductive glee. It draws customers like flies. Cash discounts for the criminally insane.
Among Lucien’s customers were many who bore his study: a luckless parvenu, girl cowboys, environmental guides, a geothermal engineer who told Lucien what was wrong with his hot spring, how it would dry up, etc., a Hindu, a jockey named “Mincemeat,” and so on. There was a gangster retired to his Madonna collection and prayer. On Saturday night in the bathrooms next to the bar, urine’s vitreous ring was a carillon of high spirits from the happy toilets.