His father had brought a fancy Zenith radio for the trip, so that they would not be surprised by weather. Lucien got nine countries on it. He turned it as low as he could and dialed away at his sleeplessness. He got Mexico, an exciting thing in 1958. The speaker from Mexico spoke very rapidly, reminding Lucien that he was flunking Spanish. If he picked up muy once, he picked it up a hundred times. Then he ran the six-foot antenna out the tent flap and dialed some more: he got an English-language Baptist station right in the middle of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right where they have voodoo, talking about Our Lord Jesus Christ; not at all the way a radio Baptist would carry on stateside. You could tell the people of Haiti had put a civil tongue in his head. Then Lucien got rough northern voices he could not understand. Maybe they belonged to Russians.
He turned back to Haiti. Cold wind stirred the tent sides, a rocky wind that murmured through the imprecations of the stranded preacher in Haiti so anxious to make friends among the heathen that he pronounced their country “I.T.,” as the Haitians did; the wind murmured over the tired Peruvian traveler and a son still early in his journey.
The day broke blue and northern on the basin of gravel, a basin lined with thin glittering springs and the delicacies of vegetation that spilled their edges all the way to the brisk willows at the creek bottom. The creek turned south till it fell off the end. Someone’s lost saddle horse stood exactly where the creek fell into pure blue sky, alternately grazing and staring across the gravelly basin to their camp. Lucien’s first thought was to catch him, ride him back to school and get to play third base again.
I could never catch him, he thought. He remade the fire for breakfast, building it in a single blast with the patented fire-starter, a flame as tall as Lucien that wavered ominously toward the tent, then shrank into the firewood peaceably. His father woke to the smell of hash and eggs, and crawled forth with a bleak squint into broad daylight.
“You left the radio on, Lucien. The battery is dead.” His father doubled over to scrutinize a blister on his heel, displacing its liquid between opposing thumbs. “God-almighty,” he said.
They breakfasted and Lucien cleaned the aluminum plates in the spring. The cold water congealed the grease to the metal, and he had to scour them with sand to make them clean. Lucien was conscious of his father staring at the peaks, plain rock jumping out of ground that looked as soft as a stream bank. “No wonder nobody lives here, no wonder they stay back in town,” his father said. “There’s no reason to be here. You come here to get something and then out you go. Look at that poor damn horse. Can you feature that?”
This gave Lucien no feeling whatsoever, not unless that in itself was a feeling. It was like hitting a baseball and having it just not come down. You could hardly call it a fielding error.
His father circled the tent slowly, digging a finger into his disordered hair, inventorying the camp, the camp that a few days ago had been erected as a gateway to an improved world.
“We’re looking at under a hundred bucks,” said his father, standing at their camp. “Let’s walk away from it.” Lucien listened, awaiting some further information, but that was alclass="underline" leave it.
They had nothing to carry, nor the struggle of climbing; Lucien’s father led the way with a jaunty step. Part of the mission was completed. The lights of Deadrock were reduced to the dimensional outlines of the little burg; and there were brief gusts of stink from the hot springs south of town. Lucien wondered why unpleasantness and healing were always connected.
“I’m afraid I feel a little guilty,” said Lucien’s father with a laugh. “A little guilty, a little hungry and a little thirsty.”
“Guilty for what?”
“Taking you away from school.”
Lucien walked on for a minute, scuffing along the dry, stony trail. “I wasn’t doing well,” he said. “You didn’t do any harm.”
“I’m sure I did a lot of harm,” said his father. Lucien wondered why he always made his father feel so guilty. They had had so very few adventures together, but each one of them made his father burn with guilt. Maybe they shouldn’t try to have adventures; the thought choked Lucien with sadness, but maybe it was true. Not if the adventures were just going to make his father burn with guilt. They had gone to Cabo San Lucas, and his father burned like a martyr because it was the first trip they had made that reflected the deterioration of Lucien’s parents’ marriage. That trip at least had been on a school vacation, so the sense of irresponsibility had not been so hard on his father as this time. Lucien knew that this time his father felt more like a kidnapper than an adventurer.
For the last half mile the trail was only a ledge in the granite. Beyond the ledge, soaring birds were seen from above, now and then diving feetfirst into the prairie. Their car could be discerned too: an almost vertical view, a rectangle of paint, like the toy car Lucien used to scuff one-handed on the carpet at home. That was back when his mother and father had had famous parties where they displayed their outstanding dancing and where Lucien, already dying to please, had trained himself to be a perfect bartender, silent and friendly, willing to overrule the jigger for family friends, later listening through the floor for the bellowed jokes and the Valkyrian laughs of the wives. It was when the census bureau harried Lucien’s father for declaring himself an entrepreneur; Lucien still wasn’t sure what that was, but all the adults banded together to throw parties to fight the census bureau, to pass the hat, to declare their faith in entrepreneurs, a category that the census bureau would not accept. It was exciting. Lucien was the pubescent speedy bartender, who bracketed new people in town, the probational ones, with his strict jigger. Then suddenly things got so exciting that his father tore off to Peru with the man who sold him his last car: a car different from the plain business model the trail wound toward; the car Art Clancy sold his father was a Thunderbird, and now his mother had it. She had the house and she had the assets. Plus she had done something Lucien couldn’t quite fathom — she had let the memberships go. And now they were gone, his father had said dolorously: the memberships are gone.
They drove toward Deadrock, where they had rented the car. They weren’t going to turn the rental in today; his father promised over and over that they wouldn’t turn it in today, as though Lucien cared. “We’ve had this car for nearly half a week,” his father crowed, “and it’s got less than fifty miles on it!” As they drove, Lucien listened to stories of the living descendants of the Incas, how they hid gold in lakes, cut out hearts, sacrificed virgins. He heard of the astonishment of these small people, with their great Andean chests and earflaps, at the sight of Art Clancy’s Corvette. Peru had been quite a deal. The Indians tried to put their hands all over the car. Art Clancy spoke to them in a kind of imitation Khrushchev. “Hands off,” he told the little Incas. “Gives a shot in the head.” The year of Cabo San Lucas there had been a long aftermath of Mexican. “Eees good!” stood for approval. When Lucien hooked a trout in the ditch back of the house, his mother cried out, “Feesh! Eees good!”